In front of the cards was a black delta wing known to Z5 as the Falcon. This had been developed after meeting Yves Rossy, the Jet Man. An Airbus A320 pilot for Swiss International Airlines, Rossy flew across the English Channel with a jet-powered, fixed-wing strapped to his back. Later in the same year, 2008, he flew over the Alps at 189 miles per hour.
Lack of fuel inhibited longer flights, which prompted Sofia to realize that a redesign of Doc’s prosthetic leg could turn it into a fuel tank.
Lateral thoughts like these gave Z5 its edge. Sofia worked with government defence departments and private security firms throughout the world, which dictated that the hangar was as secure as a fort.
Tucked away in another corner was Sofia’s own pride and joy, Z5’s gleaming white D-Jet.
Flying this single-engine jet was her favourite way of clearing the cobwebs. And she did so in zero-time because Sofia flew as most people drive, to get from A to B. But every now and then a driver just wants a spin, for the joie de vivre, and that’s just what Sofia wanted now.
Now she knew Max was safe.
Just a half-hour flight, she thought. And she sprang down the glass staircase knowing the jet would be fuelled and ready to go.
It always was.
And then her mobile sang out — Gemma’s and Alda’s adorable but tuneless voices — her five-year-old twins’ personalised ring tone. Sofia answered immediately.
“Hi Gemma, what is it?”
“I’m Alda, Mum. Gemma’s right beside me.” Gemma giggled in the background. “Can we watch 101 Dalmatians?”
“Alda, that’s Granny’s decision, I’ve told you, only phone me at work when it’s urgent.”
“Told you so,” Gemma’s voice was giggling clearly; the twins were obviously on the speaker.
“But Granny’s got toothache and told us to let her sleep.”
Then ask Nanny.”
“Oh Mummy, you know Nanny can’t make that kind of decision.”
“She can make the decision to say no. It’s gone bedtime. Have you seen the time?”
“But Mummy.”
“I’m coming home. You can watch it until I get there.”
“Thank you Mummy,” the twins piped together and hung up before Sofia changed her mind.
Sofia patted her D-Jet. What a sensational plane. Dubbed as a ‘Personal Time Machine’, Diamond Aircraft designed their D-Jet to be piloted by amateurs, not professionals, bringing the plane closer to the car.
The Maserati of the air — smile-inspiring style, racing-quality performance, with a spacious, luxurious interior.
Sofia had clocked up 200 hours in the D-Jet this year.
“Not going up?” asked Pierro Di Guelfo, former Italian Special Forces, now the balding, eccentrically stubborn, manager of this Z5 outpost.
“Not tonight. I’ll catch the sunrise for London tomorrow.”
“I’ll file a flight plan to Northolt. Want me to come along?”
“You stay here. Max is going to need some support.” Pierro felt a twang of disappointment. “I’ve got to get going. The twins.” Sofia had mentally left work and was back in Mummy mode.
His mobile rang just as Sofia was climbing into her jet black Tesla Roadster, the first, electric sports car that went a tiny way towards managing her carbon conscience — as did the hangar roof which was covered in solar panels. Her house would go green next.
The twins need a world where high-tech rules, not one where we go back to basics, she was thinking as she pushed the start button. The blissful silence of the electric motor never failed to excite her.
Pierro broke it. “I’ve got Northern Avionics, the business jet sales department, remember how helpful they were? They want to know if you’ve got room for a passenger, a potential D-Jet buyer.”
“No problem,” said Sofia, happy to help Northern Avionics land a sale. “Did you him check out?”
“Jean-Pierre Durand, former Capitaine de Vaisseau in the French Navy. Nuclear Submarines. Should be an interesting guy.”
“I hope so.” Sofia eased the Tesla out through the hangar’s high security doors and thought no more about tomorrow’s flight.
That was a pity because Durand was not only the man spotted by Max pocketing Lucille’s Rolex in Siberia, he was also the pilot of the stolen burnt out R22 helicopter, and who had mercilessly dispatched a colleague with three assassin’s bullets.
Twelve hours later Durand was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat beside Sofia, in her glorious D-Jet, biding his time as they flew at 20,000 feet from Bourgogne into the Ile-de France.
Durand’s stern-faced, horseshoe-moustached, cropped-hair exterior seemed to belie his charm. He’d proved to be a fascinating companion telling Sofia about his earliest memories, that his father was a priest, which stuck in Sofia’s mind, and how he’d joined the French Navy. All of that was true, but certainly not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth...
Durand never forgot the first time he’d been asked “And what do you want to be when you grow up?”
The red, painted lips protruding from a fat, ruby-tinted face, caked with too much make-up, topped with wiry eyebrows, enshrouded with grey hair, posed the question.
At the tender age of seven he’d struggled for an honest yet acceptable answer.
“Engine driver?” Aunt Red Lips asked as her aging brain wished the question had never been asked, after all it was irrelevant — his aunt didn’t care about the answer.
But it wasn’t an irrelevant question for Jean Pierre Durand. Not at all.
“I want to be powerful. Like God.”
Aunt Red Lips laughed nervously at the unexpected response.
Durand had answered the same way ever since.
An insatiable appetite for power was what propelled Durand into the French Foreign Legion at the age of seventeen. Parental permission, needed for one so young, given freely.
His father had been a priest who, in the face of fierce opposition, left the church to marry Durand’s mother after he’d made her pregnant. In their humble view, their son was a monster.
“Good riddance” was mutual.
Having no belief in his father’s god, no fear of death, a rare gift for survival, a fiendishly high IQ and evident leadership abilities saw Durand make Corporal at nineteen and Sergeant at twenty-one. At the end of his five-year contract Durand surprised everyone but himself and quit the French Foreign Legion to join the Marine Nationale as an Aspirant in the Forces Sous-marines.
His ambition was to be in sole command of a French nuclear submarine.
He made it in ten years.
No one had any doubt that if called upon to press the nuclear button Durand would have seen it as an honour.
He would in that minute have been the most powerful man in the world.
But politicians would never allow him that privilege. So as soon as he’d reached the top of that ladder. Durand jumped off it. It was time to put together the plan inspired by his hatred of his father. And kidnapping a Z5 agent was part of that plan.
“I’ve got my navy compass in my bag. Do you want to have a look?”
“Yes,” responded Sofia out of politeness, just as Durand had expected. “Give me a moment to contact Paris Air Traffic Control first.”
“I’ll leave that to you while I dig it out.”
“Okay.” Sofia just needed to concentrate for a while thinking to herself, if only this guy knew flying wasn’t as easy as it looks.
Durand knew full well.
While Sofia’s mind was elsewhere, he slipped out of his cockpit seat, moved to his camera bag, searched for and pulled out an innocent-looking first aid bag.
Inside, a filled syringe — prepared and ready.
Durand jabbed the syringe into Sofia’s bare neck.
He slipped quickly back into the right hand co-pilot’s seat and took control of the D-Jet. He clicked onto Air Traffic Control and changed the flight plan from Northolt to Deauville’s Saint-Gatien Airport.
&n
bsp; “You know these business types!” he joked as an excuse for the surprise change.
Everyone in the air traffic system was too busy to do more than note it, but Sofia’s colleagues at Z5 were already on the alert.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Doc’s encrypted iPhone woke him. It took him a split second to work out where he was — London. Another to slide off unlock. A third to see it was Benadir — on his phone, sadly not in his bed. His eyes darted a double check to be sure.
“Doc, you need to get down here.”
“When did you get up?”
“Ages ago; you were fast asleep.“
“Be there in five.”
“Four.” The iPhone clicked off.
Doc rolled out of bed, hopped to the shower room for a timed, ninety seconds, strapped on his left leg, jeans, right trainer and Farhi T-shirt. He rushed through from his flat at 5 Digby Mews to 6-9 Digby Mews, Z5’s London headquarters, via a connecting door — there was one on each floor.
No 5, a charming Georgian three-storey house backed onto the splendid Elgin Garden, whereas houses 6-9 looked as if each had just missed out on one of Notting Hill Gate’s beautiful, communal gardens.
Inside they were all discretely connected. The second and third floors hummed with computers manned twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Most of the interior walls had been removed allowing space for eight workstations and a range of screens, similar to those at Brett Hall’s Fish Tank and Sofia’s Milan Aquarium.
The architecture a constant throughout.
This modern, functional interior contrasted strangely with the traditional, elegant Georgian exterior. The ground floors, with the garage doors intact, camouflaged the workshops of Z5’s throbbing London heart.
Doc didn’t notice any of this as he hurried toward Benadir, Digby Mews Z5 Chief.
Benadir Abhilasha, her wide dark eyes glowing from a bright, vivacious face, topped by dark hair with a boyish cut, greeted Doc with that private momentary glance that shimmers between couples.
Benadir was entangled in a childless, arranged marriage to a billionaire maharaja. Her Digby Mews colleagues counselled her to get divorced and marry Doc. But she wouldn’t. Outwardly because of the upset it would cause in the maharaja world. In truth because Benadir couldn’t have children — she’d had lymphoblastic leukaemia as a child and the chemotherapy led to infertility. Her maharaja in-laws knew this before they arranged the marriage. Subsequently her husband had a child with his mistress of the time.
As a childless wife, Benadir cared far too much about Doc to make him a childless husband.
On her desk were two cups of steaming black coffee.
“Yours.” Benadir, pointed at one without a smile.
Doc grabbed the coffee. “Thanks, I need it. Is that Sofia diverting?”
“No, it’s Sofia on a changed flight plan — to Deauville.”
“Deauville?”
“Paris Air Traffic assures me it was changed by a ‘pilot with a male voice’. Pierro sent us this photo of her passenger.”
“Passenger?”
“Jean-Pierre Durand, former French Navy Captain. Pierro checked him out — so have I. He seems clean.”
Doc stared at the photo and his eyes narrowed as he registered the horseshoe moustache. “Have you checked him out against the CCTV images from Micheldever Railway Station?”
“Micheldever?”
“Near Popham Airfield.”
“The helicopter pilot? It couldn’t be.”
As Benadir swiped her screen, bringing up hundreds of CCTV images, Doc looked round the room and called, “Chris, do you have a moment?” Christina looked up, tearing herself away from her screen where a Photoshop palette was in full tilt. “Of course.”
“Can you layer a Zamp S-2 half helmet and dark motorcycle goggles onto this face.”
“Sure.”
It took Christina just moments.
Benadir pointed to a grainy CCTV image of Durand on the screen. “Is that him?”
“Ninety-nine percent sure it is.” Doc pointed at Durand’s moustache on all three photos. “How far is it to Deauville, from Northolt?”
Benadir clicked back to Google Earth, clicked ruler, clicked RAF Northolt the airfield on the west side of London that was older than the RAF itself, clicked Deauville on France’s Brittany Coast.
“About one hundred and twenty five miles.”
Doc pecked a kiss on the nape of Benadir’s neck, and then another before whispering. “How long would it take Pierro Di Guelfo to get the Falcon ready?”
Benadir’s swivelled round, to see Doc already on his mobile. “Pierro? Yes, bad news. Listen, Sofia’s job is to hang in there and our job is to get her out. How fast could you get the Falcon to Northolt? Two hours? I’ll meet you there. Benadir will arrange for the Sea King to be ready. You take care too.” Doc clicked off his iPhone, his face alive with excitement.
Benadir’s expression was a huge worried question mark. “The Falcon? I’ll need to get clearance from Marion. It’s just a prototype”
Doc shook his head. “Mother will say no. We don’t have time for that. Sofia needs us.” Doc held Benadir’s eyes before going on.
Benadir, too married to be Doc’s partner and too attracted by him to resist his need for action, let out a short, reluctant sigh.
Doc thanked her with a hug that was studiously ignored by everyone else in the office. As he turned to leave his leg stabbed a ‘you-sure-about-this’ message into his subconscious.
Little steps don’t cross a chasm. Doc was sure.
*
Jean-Pierre Durand was good at crossing chasms; indeed he would often create them to test the strengths of his adversaries. Z5 was shaping up to be a formidable opponent.
He took no risks landing the D-Jet at Deauville, no risks parking by the dozen or so private planes on the western end of the apron, no risks unloading his unconscious passenger onto a stretcher and into a white Renault van, and he left nothing behind.
Everything that Sofia had brought onto the plane was taken off it.
She was woken from her drug-induced sleep by the rasping noise of a van door being slid open.
“Let’s see her face.” A hand landed on her right cheek and pushed her left towards the voice.
“Leave the hood on.” Durand’s voice was no longer that of the son of a preacher, but of a man used to giving orders and being obeyed.
The vehicle door slammed shut.
She opened her eyes.
She couldn’t see beyond the pitch dark of a tied-down hood. She tried to raise her hand to tear it off. She couldn’t move at all. Her hands, waist and feet were strapped down.
‘Don’t panic’ she thought calmly. If there was someone, they’d be enjoying her fear — don’t let them. If there was no one there, there was no point in shouting.
The noise of wheels on gravel sounded loud and clear. Hooded, sound quadrupled in importance, heightened by the haunting echo. The shivering vibration of the van rippled through her body. Sensation quadrupled in importance too.
Sofia’s mind sped back to her last memory, normality.
A busy flight under the sunlit sky with a layer of light grey clouds below. Durand had gone to the back. After that — nothing.
“Anyone there?” Sofia had to ask.
Silence.
Long minutes later, how many Sofia couldn’t tell, the engine slowed and the van shuddered to a halt. The door clanked open. Sofia’s body tensed as the stretcher she was strapped onto was clumsily dragged and lifted out of the van.
‘Stay calm,’ Sofia insisted to herself as her stretcher bearers clanked up one, two, three, four, five, six, seven outside steps. Sofia, relieved for the first time that she was strapped in, sensed there was someone accompanying them.
A heavy-sounding door opened and they entered a hall that echoed to their hard breathing and heavy footsteps.
“Merde. Pourquoi êtes-vous entré par la porte principale?” So they should ha
ve entered at the back, at the servant’s entrance, an angry voice declared. The boss or the butler?
“Who’s that?” The cultured voice called from afar. Sofia knew the voice but couldn’t recall it.
“Jean-Pierre and a visitor, hooded so she can’t identify you.”
“At least you’ve done one thing right. Get her away from the chateau.”
Sofia’s stretcher-bearers started down some stairs.
“Where’s her laptop?” Sofia heard the man, whose identity lay locked in the back of her mind, bark the question. It struck her with fear. She had brought everything onto the plane.
“You’ll need passwords...”
“I’ll decide what I need.” Durand cut short the butler. “And you’ll do what I decide.” Sofia heard a door slam.
Was that a metaphor for her future?
If they broke the encryption, Z5 would be uncovered. The voice was right, they’d get nowhere without the multiple passwords and Sofia had no doubt Durand would soon attempt to prise them out of her.
CHAPTER NINE
Doc Palfrey’s Ducati motorcycle roared past the Polish Airman’s World War II Memorial, which sits proudly on the side of A40, and hurtled through the opening gates of the Northolt RAF Station.
Northolt, founded in the First World War as a base for BE2c biplanes to defend London from Zeppelin raids, was less than fifteen miles, as the crow flies, from Buckingham Palace.
The Kingdom was threatened then and would be again. Defeating those threats was Z5’s raison d’être. And that thought jumped Doc back to the present.
What was the link between the murder in Brett Hall yesterday and Sofia?
What was clear, very clear, was that there was a lot of organizational weight and money around. Getting from Wiltshire to Milan in that short time almost certainly involved a private jet.
But there was also a lot of organizational weight at Z5.
Pierro Di Guelfo, Sofia’s loyal deputy and veteran of the Italian Special Forces, was already on board the waiting Sea King Air Rescue helicopter — a giant of a machine, which beat its way into the air as soon as Doc had clambered inside.
Eternity's Sunrise (A New Doc Palfrey Thriller) Page 5
