The Baker Street Translation

by Michael Robertson

  Hendricks, standing just a bit unsteadily at the other side of Nigel’s assailant, pressed forward with his Taser, his thin white hair in disarray and his face showing absolutely no fear and only a slight uncertainty in what he was doing.

  Nigel, still on the floor, kicked the American’s legs out from underneath him, and the man fell.

  Nigel scrambled to his feet. He reached to take the Taser from Hendricks, who was having some difficulty bending his knees enough to get down and keep the weapon on the American.

  “I can do it, sir!” said Hendricks, not giving up his weapon. With Nigel’s assistance, he pressed forward again.

  “Enough!” cried the man on the floor. “God Almighty, stop!

  29

  Laura was making quick work of the stairs, despite her lack of sleep; one always had to stay in shape for the occasional half-naked tabloid photo ambush, and these stairs were nothing compared to her frequent sprints up the Covent Garden tube station.

  Moments earlier, Mr. Hendricks had rung her on Nigel’s phone. “Nigel asked me to shout out if Mr. Rafferty returns,” he’d said, “but not for anyone else.”

  “Yes. And has Mr. Rafferty returned?”

  “No, not that I’m aware.”

  “Oh.”

  “But there is an American on his way up. It’s just my opinion, of course, but I regard him as much scarier than Mr. Rafferty. Rather large fellow.”

  “With a Texas accent?”

  “I’m not sure I would know, miss.”

  “Do you remember the American show Dallas? On the telly?”

  “Ah. Quite well. That’s exactly how he sounded to me.”

  There were other possibilities, of course. But this sounded to Laura like the nasty cousin Stillman had warned them about.

  “Hendricks, I’m sorry to ask this, but—are you armed?”

  “Certainly. Fifty thousand volts, and I completed a full two-hour training course. Shall I bring it with me?”

  “Bring what you can.”

  Laura hadn’t bothered with the lift; she knew Hendricks would need it. Instead, she’d borrowed a letter opener from Lois’s desk and headed for the stairs.

  Now she had four flights done and just one to go. She heard the stairwell door open from the floor above; someone’s voice in a quick curse—quite possibly Nigel’s—and then the thumps and groans of a bruising struggle.

  Now her adrenaline was up. She powered up the final flight three steps at a time.

  She yanked the door open and burst onto the floor, with the letter opener in thrusting position.

  “No more!” screamed the American. “No more!”

  The man was on the floor, his back against the wall, shouting his desperate pleas.

  Nigel was standing over him, but most significantly, Hendricks was standing alongside, his well-trained Taser extended, about to administer the treatment again.

  Laura stepped forward, so that now she was standing on one side of the American with her letter opener, and Hendricks was standing on the other side with his Taser. Nigel was in the center.

  “Enough,” said Nigel to Hendricks. “For the moment.”

  The green file folder containing the letters was on the floor, just by Nigel’s feet. Laura reached down and, saying nothing to anyone, picked it up.

  She kept it out of sight behind her back as she turned toward Nigel.

  “Here,” she said, giving him the letter opener. “Stick him if you need to.”

  Nigel nodded. Then he looked down at the American’s feet, and coat pocket, and he saw that the folder was not there.

  He looked down at his own feet, and then behind them. The folder was not there.

  He looked to his side. The folder wasn’t there, either.

  And neither was Laura.

  Now Nigel heard the lift doors ping, and he turned and shouted in that direction, “Wait!”

  But too late. He saw a fleeting glimpse of the green folder in Laura’s freckled hand as the lift doors closed, and then the lift was on its way down.

  For a moment, Nigel considered chasing after. But he looked down at Hendricks, bravely but unsteadily holding the Taser in the direction of the brawny American, and he knew he couldn’t leave.

  Besides, Laura would reach the street well before he could, and from there she would be too fast to catch if she didn’t want to be caught.

  And clearly she didn’t.

  Nigel could do nothing but mutter under his breath.

  “Bloody hell. Reggie won’t like this.”

  30

  Laura exited Dorset House and walked quickly down Baker Street until she found a cab.

  As she got in, her mobile rang.

  “It’s a quarter till,” said the voice, still muffled, as before.

  The voice did not sound American. But neither had the one on the lake. And given what had just happened, she was no longer ruling the Texas heirs out. The muffling could be an attempt to disguise an accent. And it also occurred to her that one of the two American cousins might have engaged an English accomplice to help negotiate with the locals.

  “I know what bloody time it is,” said Laura. Immediately after she said that, she worried that perhaps she was supposed to be polite with kidnappers, and not let her annoyance show.

  And then she rejected that notion. The kidnappers had an agenda and they would pursue that agenda, regardless of whether she was rude to them.

  “Do you have the letters?”

  “Yes,” said Laura. “As a matter of fact, I do still have the letters. Despite your efforts to the contrary.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Explain what you mean,” said the voice.

  “Your American accomplice just tried to steal them, did he not?” It was still just a guess. She wasn’t at all certain.

  Dead silence at the other end for a long moment; then the voice said again, “Do you have the letters?”

  “I have them. When do I see Robert?”

  “Take a cab to Piccadilly Circus. You have twenty minutes.”

  “Will he be there? When do I see Lord Buxton?”

  “If you do as you’re told, you will see him alive at noon. If you do not, you will hear of his death. Catch your cab.”

  Now the line went dead.

  Laura caught a cab.

  She reached Piccadilly Circus in eighteen minutes, by her watch.

  The voice had not been sufficiently specific beyond that, so she waited by the statue of winged Eros in the center plaza.

  It was cold, with the wind channeling down from the four intersecting boulevards. But it was also morning rush hour, and the milling crowd of tourists and commuters was as thick as always.

  Laura’s mobile rang; she picked up.

  “Now what?” she said.

  “Go to the British Emporium.”

  “The British—”

  “The bloody big souvenir store at the corner. Go to the first cashier and buy something.”

  “Buy what?”

  “Any bloody thing, but large enough for a shopping bag. Do it now. Be out in seven minutes.”

  Laura walked quickly across the street to the British Emporium. She guessed she might possibly be out of sight of the kidnappers for a moment, but she couldn’t think of how to take advantage of that; there was too little time.

  She went directly to the cashier station, and she bought the first thing she could find—a large gray plush toy, some sort of British bear, from a bin right in front of the cashier.

  She carried it out of the store in a shopping bag.

  Her phone rang.

  “Show us the letters.”

  “What?”

  “Hold the letters up high.”

  Laura stretched her arm out and held the folder of letters up high, so that anyone presumably watching from a nearby building could see it.”

  “Put them in the shopping bag,” said the voice.

  Laura did so.

  “Now you’re done with cabs,” sai
d the voice. “You’re taking the tube next. Too bad if you regard it as beneath your status.”

  That was an odd remark, and more than a little annoying. “You overestimate me,” she said.

  “Shut up. Go across to the underground entrance on Haymarket. Buy an all-day pass for all zones at the automated server.”

  “I have my own monthly,” said Laura.

  “Good for you. Buy the pass anyway. Then go through the turnstiles on the left, and take the stairs down to the Northern Line, east platform.”

  “And then where am I going?” I asked Laura. “I’m an excellent traveler, it would help so much if you would just tell me the destination.”

  But the line went dead.

  With her shopping bag in a tight grip, Laura joined the throng moving across Shaftesbury Avenue, past the statue at the center of the circus again, and then to the Piccadilly tube station on Haymarket.

  She entered the tube station. She bought a day pass at one of the automated dispensers, as instructed. That took a couple of minutes, as there was a queue in the crowded station, but she managed to get through the turnstile and join the mad rush down the stairs for the Northern Line.

  At the juncture between the passageway for the east platform and the west, a musician had set up against the tiled wall with his violin, its case open for contributions; he was playing fairly well, and Laura had been known on occasion to stop and toss in a few pounds, though it was not commonly considered acceptable in the fast-moving commuter rush to actually stop and listen.

  In any case, not today. She pushed on down the stairs, at a pace fast enough, she hoped, to prevent anyone from charging up on her unseen from behind, but taking care not to knock over the elderly woman with the cane in front of her. Two thick-shouldered louts who should have known better came charging up the wrong way on the stairs and bumped her in their progress; but she saw them in time and pulled the shopping bag close in front of her.

  Now she was on the platform. On a quiet day, at a quiet station, you could walk from one end to the other of the platform tunnel and actually be alone with your thoughts for a moment or two if you wanted, but not so here—not this station, at this hour. The entire length of the platform was shoulder-to-shoulder with commuters who had not been able to squeeze onto the previous train and were waiting for the next.

  The tunnel public-address system crackled something about closures on connecting lines and a couple of stops that were no longer in service.

  Now there was a single light and a rumbling and a disturbance in the air of the tunnel; a train was arriving. As it pulled in, Laura could see through the windows of the train that it was absolutely standing room only.

  She was on the east platform. But was this the train she was to take? The voice hadn’t said. Trains for different ultimate destinations arrived every two minutes or so when things were running properly. Was this the one? Was she exactly on time, or could it have been the one before, or the one after?

  “Mind the gap,” said the recorded announcement from the train. The doors opened. The standing passengers who wanted to be at Piccadilly Circus pushed outward at the same time that the passengers on the platform who wanted to get away from Piccadilly Circus pushed inward. It was the usual thing, and manageable if you knew where you going and had nothing exposed to the crowd that you had to protect while getting there.

  But Laura was at a disadvantage, not knowing where she was going. She was caught firmly in a squeeze, she was being pressed on all sides, and suddenly she realized that this ransom delivery was probably not about getting to the destination at all. That’s why it didn’t matter which train: The delivery was supposed to take place along the way.

  Now she was bumped again from the left side. It was all right, though; she still had the bag gripped in her hands. She could still feel the weight of it—and then she looked down.

  Yes, she still had the bag and the damned plush toy. But the folder of letters was gone.

  She looked around. In front of her, people were pushing onto the train; in back of her, people were rushing into the tunnel for the stairs directly behind her.

  Only one person was moving in neither of those directions; adroitly dodging his way through the throng, toward the exit at the far end.

  Laura was about to cry out for help and point toward the thief. But from behind her, somewhere in the crowd, someone else cried out first, “Look! That’s Laura Rankin! Right there!”

  Many people didn’t hear or didn’t care, but a few did. A woman with two small children getting off the train saw Laura and stepped right up to her with a camera; a couple of others turned just casually to look, and in an instant the pedestrian traffic congealed, even more than it had been, and she was completely boxed in.

  No one was cursing or shouting “Move along”; it was a mostly British queue, after all, and there was a polite custom to be observed.

  But that couldn’t last forever. And Laura had lost sight of the letter thief. “So sorry,” she said, edging back from the train as it now departed the station. She smiled and pushed through the platform crowd. “I’m very sorry. Thank you so very much.”

  And finally she was able to join the throng moving back up the stairs.

  She rushed up the stairs, into the main station, and then out onto Haymarket Avenue.

  She looked about, though she already knew: She was far too late.

  The sky was filled with the flashing display adverts and the lovely buildings that surrounded Piccadilly Circus. The streets were filled with chattering tourists, giddy teenagers, and intent commuters, and Laura Rankin had failed utterly in the one thing that she absolutely had to do.

  For a moment she stood there, blinking in the morning sun, and trying to fight back tears.

  She hoped this wasn’t becoming a habit.

  31

  The bank employees in the Dorset House lobby who knew Reggie Heath at all knew enough when they saw his face this morning to stay out of his way.

  And, in fact, Reggie had never been as angry with anyone as he was right now with himself.

  Instinct had told him early on that something was wrong. Instinct had told him to get out of the car and go to Laura’s door and demand again to know that everything was all right.

  Instead, he had just waited and watched. Waited and watched, as if everything was normal, just because Laura had turned out the lights in the way she always did. Waited and watched, just because the security team was still in place and everything still seemed all right when he returned from the warehouse.

  Waited and watched—until suddenly he was jolted awake in the early morning by a sound that was familiar but out of place. It came from directly outside the door on his side of the car.

  He’d lowered the window and looked down, and there was Laura’s cat—her indoor cat—at the break of dawn, meowing at his car door.

  He had immediately gotten out of the car, gone to Laura’s front step, rung the bell, got no answer, and then let himself in with his key. He ran up the stairs, and found the bed still made and Laura’s usual windbreaker missing; ran back down the stairs, and found the tea unfinished on the kitchen sink; opened the kitchen side door—and then Robert Buxton’s imbecilic security team had come barreling in through the front door.

  That standoff—and the ensuing chaos and cacophony of accusations about who was watching whom and why—had lasted about ten minutes before the two more thuggish of Buxton’s team finally backed down. They had personalities uncannily similar to that of their employer, but without even Buxton’s modest intelligence.

  The team leader—the one named Alex, whom Reggie had spoken to before—finally herded the others back out through the front. Alex said something then, not too loudly, about leaving these things to the professionals, and before Reggie could respond to that, the entire team had gotten back in their Range Rover and roared away, out of Laura’s quiet little Chelsea nook and onto King’s Road.

  Then Reggie’s mobile had rung. It was Lois. Ther
e’d been a bit of a ruckus. Lois was very sorry about it; it had all happened earlier, before she arrived. Apparently, an American had gotten bruised in a discussion with Nigel. And then Laura had run off without a word, and now she’d come back, but she was not happy.

  And now Mr. Rafferty was there, and he had said that perhaps it would be good if Reggie dropped in.

  Now Reggie was back at Dorset House. He entered the lobby, noticed that Hendricks was not at his guard station, and then took the lift up to his chambers.

  When the lift doors opened, Reggie saw Lois standing at her desk at the other end of the corridor, keeping lookout. She called out when she saw Reggie, and she hurried toward him.

  “They’re all in the conference room,” said Lois. “They just went in.”

  “Who did?”

  “Nigel. Laura. Mr. Hendricks. Two Americans. And Mr. Rafferty. I think it was Mr. Rafferty called the meeting.”

  “These are my chambers. Rafferty can’t call a meeting in my chambers.”

  “Well,” said Lois. “They all went in the conference room anyway.”

  “To do what?”

  “To conference, I think. All the fighting stopped hours ago.”

  “Is Laura all right?”

  “Yes. A little frazzled, I think.”

  Reggie started toward the conference room.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, Lois?”

  “Do you still want me to find that thing that Mr. Liu bought in Piccadilly? I’ve called all around, and I think I’ve located one.”

  “Yes, fine, thank you,” said Reggie without much thought, and he went on to the conference room.

  Reggie opened the conference room door and looked in.

  He saw Nigel and Laura seated together at the middle on one side of the oblong table.

  Seated at the head of the table—Reggie’s usual position—was Rafferty. Next to him was a worried-looking Hendricks.

  At the middle on the other side of the table was Stillman, the lawyer from Texas. Next to him was a slightly larger gentleman, highly tanned and sunburned about the nose and neck, but not so much that two red welts on his neck and a bruise on his throat did not stand out considerably.