In the Company of Ghosts

by Stephen A Hunt

  Mrs Witchley was kneeling in the vacant parking space, and picked up the Nova’s broken aerial lying on the tarmac. ‘The old aerial trick. Snapped away and used to dive your door lock. I did warn you about the security on last century models.’ She indicated the cars on either side. ‘Biometric identification, you see? They would take at least half an hour to hotwire.’

  Doyle kicked the pavement’s oak tree in fury. ‘Little hoodie scumbags, I’m going to kill them. My Chevy Nova. What’s the wife going to say?’

  Standing in the street, Mrs Witchley had the phone to her ear. ‘Hello, I would like to report the theft of a car, registration details are—’ She halted as the thud of an explosion echoed through the streets, a distant chorus of car alarms set off, muffled screams and panic marked by a column of black smoke spearing up above the houses and shops a few roads away. Doyle had watched Bomb Disposal trigger a suspect package in a car in Westminster five years ago. The resulting havoc had sounded a lot like that.

  ‘The thieves knew the aerial trick,’ said Mrs Witchley, sadly, spearing something in the street with the snapped-off length of metal. She raised an acorn in front of Doyle’s face, the metal poking through a neat triangular hole punched straight through it. ‘But they didn’t know the old acorn trick… that this fallen into the street meant the bonnet had been opened and the engine tampered with.’

  Doyle looked dumbly at the acorn, as if it was a tooth abandoned by a fairy.

  ‘Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’

  ‘My bloody Nova!’ There were faces peering through the tall glass panes of the Plato Club. One of them looked like McCarley, and it might have been the silver distortion of the windows’ mirroring, but there was more disappointment than curiosity on his face as to what was happening outside.

  ‘We’re on the right trail, Mister Doyle. When they slip a bomb in your car, you know someone is getting anxious.’

  Too shaken to feel the full fury of the fate that had so nearly befallen them, Doyle had his own phone out, trying to get through to Curtis Werks’ mansion. He switched the mobile to speakerphone for Witchley’s benefit. At the other end a faint automated voice was repeating: ‘This number is out of service. This number is out of service.’ He killed the call and tried the office, Mrs Rogers answering the call on passport control’s switchboard. ‘Doyle. Put me through to Spads.’ The hacker picked up, his slightly nasal voice sounding hesitantly at the other end. ‘Section seven.’

  ‘Spads, get me a communications bypass to the Curtis Werks’ mansion in Surrey, any bloody way you can.’

  Give the boy his due, he didn’t argue or question. A literal order had been issued and he obeyed it literally. Doyle began running towards the sound of the car alarms, the old biddy following by his side, surprisingly sprightly on her legs for her age. The line went quiet for a couple of minutes until Spads returned at the other end. ‘Engineer’s logs show the local telephone exchange down due to their fibre-optic trunk being accidentally severed by the water company, and all four cell towers in range have failed, too. At the same time!’ Yeah, like that’s going to happen. I’ve stopped believing in coincidences today. ‘I can’t patch you through, not with it like that.’

  ‘What about the army people out there?’ puffed Doyle as he rounded the corner of the street. There was chaos ahead. The traffic in the road halted, the burning wreckage of his Nova rolled over by the force of the explosion, little more than a chassis with a couple of melted wheels. Nothing left of the people who had been driving it. Black smoke was billowing over the scene. Wounded shoppers and pedestrians were sitting bleeding nearby, some crying, others shouting for help. They would make it, though. Doyle could see the car bomb had been professional, a directed backward blast to decapitate the driver and passengers. Continuity IRA would have filled the car with ball bearings, a multi-directional blast front that would have shredded the whole street. Someone feels the same way about me that I feel about hoodies. He regretted the thought almost as soon as he thought it. Car theft wasn’t a capital offence in Britain. It wasn’t even a capital offence is Saudi. But blowing up a Chevy Nova should be!

  ‘Short range radios only,’ said Spads. Doyle had to maximise the volume of the call to hear the hacker’s voice over the commotion around him, even on speakerphone. There was a strange tapping noise and he realized it was Spads striking the keyboard at the other end.

  ‘The SAS are operating under MI5 control on a purely domestic operation,’ called Mrs Witchley. She had leaned her umbrella against the broken glass panes of one of the stores, dropped her handbag and was ripping the shirt off the chest of a blood-covered shopper, making a tourniquet of it for the man’s leg. She sounded enraged, but not at the victim she was helping. ‘All our people at the house and grounds will be on the civilian circuit for communications.’

  ‘We need to get Curtis Werks to safety, Spads. Werks is going to be targeted, killed like his brother. Give Hereford a shout,’ ordered Doyle. ‘See if the Who Dares Wins boys have got an off-protocol satellite phone hidden on the grounds. Then you telephone every police station outside the range of the communications dark hole, get them to send plod around to the house, fast and armed.’

  He flipped his phone shut. Mrs Witchley murmured something to the man she was helping, and then left him to talk to Doyle. The walls of the street were echoing to the doppler shift of approaching ambulance sirens. That was London, all right. One thing the city could still do right, after centuries of bombs left by paddies, religious death cultists and anyone else with a serious grudge and a bomb-making manual downloaded from the internet. Nobody could you to hospital quicker with all the surgery and blood bags in place to stitch you back together again.

  ‘The police won’t be able to get there fast enough, Mister Doyle. If they’ve cut the phones, they’re moving in now.’

  ‘Unless you can summon angels to bleeding fly us there, Gypsy Jen, as well as your poltergeist mates, we’re royally pooch-screwed.’

  The old biddy lifted her umbrella towards the rooftops, a pair of red twin-engined helicopters from the London Air Ambulance service dipping down towards the nearest crossroad. It had been sealed off by first responders holding the space clear for the choppers to land, more of their colleagues roaring out of side streets on motorbikes, rotating lights behind their seats flashing off the paused traffic.

  ‘Here come your angels. In for a penny, in for a pound?’

  ‘Pounded,’ growled Doyle, bunching his fingers into a fist and watching the helicopters grow larger. ‘Just pounded after this. You’ve taught me Moscow rules, love. Well, Gary Doyle’s got his own set. Let’s see how the bastards enjoy Hong Kong rules.’

  Mrs Witchley looked at the carnage around them, her brown check Trilby hat nearly lifting off in the choppers’ downdraft. Doyle always thought he had detected a gleam of lunacy in her eyes, but this was the first time he had seen her properly mad, almost shaking with suppressed rage. ‘This is not done. Collateral damage. It is entirely unnecessary. No one will ever be allowed to do this again.’

  Again. Doyle recalled what little the office had of her in their files and in that brief moment, he realised that she didn’t just commune with ghosts. She was capable of making them too.

  ***

  Helen Thorson watched the second storey office from the alleyway. The clientele of the Highgate kebab shop seemed resolutely upmarket… smartly dressed office workers wandering along towards Archway tube station and picking up their lunch on the way back to their desks. Dirty windows upstairs and peeling paint, a nondescript sign falling down behind the glass – they’re not really doing their part in keeping up with the neighbourhood, are they? It might look like a failing estate agency upstairs, but according to Helen’s sources, this particular sole trader offered an interesting line in surveillance cameras. Everything the aspiring private detective needed to catch errant husbands cheating. Or the aspiring security manager would find essential in black
mailing his boss. Her phone vibrated on silent and she checked the caller. Spads, from his Firehall extension.

  ‘I’m outside the address,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve been surveilling it and nothing’s moving inside. The postman just called with a package to sign for, and nobody came down to answer the door. Time to test their locks.’

  ‘Are you sure you need to break in?’

  ‘Only if you’re sure that’s where the feed from Werks’ office has been ending up.’ Helen was certain enough without further confirmation from the hacker. Screw the IP addresses and multiple servers playing their elaborate hidden game of pass the parcel. The feed from the secret camera ends up in a shop supplying hidden cameras. How much more evidence do you need? ‘Get off the line. You’re only meant to be ringing me in emergencies.’

  ‘This is an emergency. Doyle says Curtis Werk’s life is in danger, and I can’t raise anyone at the mansion. It sounds as though whoever killed the first twin is going after the second twin. You shouldn’t break in there without me.’

  ‘And what are you going to do, slap the firm’s owner with a computer manual? I’m not burgling the Louvre, here. This is what I do. If Curtis Werks is in danger, then Surrey is where the trouble is. All I’m hopefully going to find is a lead on where Werks’ old head of security is hiding.’

  ‘Be careful in there,’ said Spads. ‘Expressing care is question number five.’

  ‘No. Looking after number one is always the first question.’ She shut the phone and slipped across the road, covering the lock with her handbag, pretending to rummage around inside it for her key while taking her favourite mortice deadlock pick to the outside door. It didn’t take longer than a minute. There was a second door inside a narrow shabby corridor, the firm’s name on the door: I-See Solutions. This door had a shiny nickel security cylinder lock with anti-bump and pre-snap protection, an expensive German marque that advertised a very healthy sense of defensive awareness. Perhaps the show of grime on the windows upstairs is actually camouflage? She experienced a brief flicker of disquiet about going in alone. Come on Helen. You’ve been hanging around Mrs W. for too long. Her distrust is starting to rub off on you. Maybe this is just for the insurance in Highgate. The German engineering didn’t last long against the tools of Helen’s trade concealed in her handbag. Helen left the light off in the corridor in the stairs, feeling her way up in the half-light. It got lighter nearer the top. Someone had left a half-eaten noodle container on the treads, the sauce set as hard as concrete but not even beginning to put off the flies crawling over it. They were more interested in the abandoned meal than the pool of blood spread out from the corpse lying face down in the middle of the floor. Helen groaned. Mr I-See, or our missing security guard? It looked as if he was clutching a soldering iron in his right hand. He had probably been using it on whatever electronics were inside the shiny steel case on the workbench. If he had been trying to use the gas torch tip as a weapon, it hadn’t proved nearly as effective as the gun that had shot him twice. From the dark patch of blood on the spine of his coat and the exit wound on the rear of the skull, this had been a professional job, too. One in the heart, one in the head. Nothing like belt and braces when you wanted to remove all doubt of the state of your victim before you walked out.

  Helen felt the hard prod of the metal cylinder in her back just as she noticed the distorted reflection of the postman’s uniform in the steel case in front of her. Her eyes’ flicked down to the Beretta BU-9 Nano sub-compact winking from the bottom of the handbag. It might as well have been back in Italy on the firearm manufacturer’s production line for all the good it was going to do her in there.

  Helen sighed heavily. ‘Not a postman after all, then.’

  ‘Good of you to open the doors for me.’

  ‘Wasn’t it.’

  As the gun fired, more of a spit than an explosion, Helen just had time to register that the pistol was silenced. Subsonic ammunition to reduce the sound… a suppresser of superior calibre.

  ***

  When the doors on the back of the three Transport for London vans opened, it wasn’t track maintenance workers who jumped out, but large men with blackened faces, assault rifles and dark kevlar flak jackets. On the face of it the small-enclosed courtyard off King William Street didn’t contain much of value for twenty mercenaries. Only one of the shed-sized ventilation units that went down to the tube tunnels below. Among other things. Pulling out a shock-protected PDA, the team’s leader used the opportunity of the daylight to finger through a carousel of faces on the screen. Faces that Mrs Witchley would have instantly recognised, even though some of the photos were many years old… Spads, Mrs Rogers, Frank Ludington. ‘Key targets again. There are no friendlies down below and nobody will hear your guns.’

  ‘We don’t have a map of the kill zone,’ ventured one of the men in a South African accent, fiddling with the night vision goggles sitting on his head like an insect’s mandibles. ‘No details.’

  ‘Chambers are too ancient for that. Too secret. There is no armour. This is not assaulting a missile silo. No doors that need welding torches to cut open. More like open cellars. Just finish everybody you come across. Only the ones on the reception desk will be armed as matter of course. Mostly civilians you will come across.’

  ‘Easy work,’ said another soldier, his accent closer to Serbian.

  ‘Easy work,’ agreed the leader.

  With the ventilation unit opened and the shaft exposed, they began to throw down their grappling lines and descend into the darkness.

  >>>

  And the story continues…

  … in the next in Stephen A. Hunt’s In The Company of Ghosts series, Book 2: The Plato Club. Due to be released April 2011. To receive an automatic notification by e-mail when this book is available for download, use the free sign-up form at http://www.StephenHunt.net/alerts.php

  >>>

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