by James Becker
Fulton paused for a moment, trying to check whether or not he was looking at a dead body or at a person who could offer a threat to him, perhaps lying in wait to attack him as soon as he stepped onto the balcony. But almost immediately he could see that the man was lying in an awkward position, facedown and with his arms pulled behind his back, the wrists together. He could also see that the man was not moving, though in the darkness he had no idea of his condition.
Fulton cautiously climbed up the last few steps and crouched down to examine the figure. What he discovered didn’t make sense, but there was enough light for him to clearly see the man.
“This is Fulton,” he murmured quietly into his radio. “One male lying on the balcony, his wrists and ankles secured with plastic cable ties, and he’s been shot through the head, clearly dead. Proceeding inside the apartment.”
“Copied,” Inspector Wilson said.
“I’m coming up after you,” Chambers murmured. “I’ll wait on the balcony until you’ve cleared the apartment.”
The door was not open quite wide enough for Fulton to slide through the gap, so he cautiously eased it open a little farther, then stepped into the tiny hall, checking all around him as he did so. Most of the apartment was in darkness, but the internal door directly in front of him was standing open and clearly that room was the source of the light that had been visible from the ground below.
Taking extreme care to make as little noise as possible, Fulton eased forward until he could see inside the room, the submachine gun held ready to fire throughout, his right forefinger resting lightly on the trigger. But what he saw inside the room made as little sense to him as the condition of the man lying on the balcony. Two heavily built men, both clearly dead, shot execution-style through the head, and who had clearly been restrained by the almost unbreakable plastic cable ties wrapped around their wrists and ankles, lay on the floor of the room. The amount of blood on the floor and their visible head injuries showed him that checking for a pulse or any other sign of life would be completely futile.
“Two more males inside the office, both dead with shots to their heads. That’s the room with the lights burning just down the corridor from the apartment door,” he reported in a quiet voice. “Both of them incapacitated, wrists and ankles tied, just like the man outside. No threat. I’m clearing the rest of the apartment.”
20
Dartmouth, Devon
Mallory reacted instantly.
Shooting their way past simply wasn’t an option, not against two armed men in a stationary car. Their only option was to outrun them somehow. On the open road, it would have been no contest—the Porsche would simply leave the Range Rover in the dust—but in town, especially a town as constricted as Dartmouth, sheer speed was unimportant. They would have to outthink their pursuers, as well as outdrive them.
As both of the men fired their weapons, one bullet carving chucks out of the tarmac right beside the Porsche, Mallory hit the brakes, swung the steering wheel hard over to the right, and at the same time pulled on the hand brake, hard. The rear of the Cayman swung out to the left, tires howling in protest, and as it did so Mallory stamped on the power again, swinging the car round to head back the way they’d come.
“A J-turn,” Robin said, sounding unexpectedly calm. “I am impressed.”
“Don’t be,” Mallory snapped. “Just tell me how the hell we get out of this town.”
In his rearview mirror he could see the SUV swinging around to follow him down the hill. They had a lead of over a hundred yards at that moment, but Mallory was certain that would quickly evaporate once they found themselves back in Dartmouth’s narrow streets. And then a couple of well-placed bullets to shoot out the Porsche’s tires, and it would all be over.
“Keep going straight,” Robin ordered. She pointed at the dashboard clock and asked, “Is that accurate?”
Mallory looked where she was indicating and nodded. “Yes, pretty much. Why?”
“Just a thought. Keep going.”
The Porsche swept down the hill, its speed well over the limit because now Mallory’s priorities had changed. The street forked at the bottom into the one-way system that ran around Coronation Park, and Mallory suddenly saw a possible escape route. He slowed up slightly to steer round the bend and glanced across at Robin. “We can do a U-turn round this park thing, then go straight back up the hill and out of town. They won’t catch us on the open road.”
“You can’t guarantee that, not on the kind of roads we have around here. We need a lot more space between us and them.”
“Have you got a better idea?” Mallory asked, his voice clouded with irritation.
“As a matter of fact, I have,” she replied, glancing to her left as Mallory made the turn by the Floating Bridge Pub and swung the car south onto the road running between Coronation Park and the river Dart.
“Now what?”
“Timing is everything,” Robin said enigmatically. “Go round the park again, quick as you can.”
Mallory saw two cars in front as he straightened up, a couple of slow-moving sedans, and weaved and accelerated hard to get past them before they reached the sharp bend ahead. Both drivers hooted in irritation, probably because they simply hadn’t seen him coming, but then Mallory was past, steering the car to the right, rear tires smoking and leaving black streaks of rubber on the street, and heading back toward College Way. As he made the turn, he saw the Range Rover almost two hundred yards behind them, heading down the stretch of road that ran beside the river.
“Now what?” he asked again.
“Go round again, but slow down when you get near that pub.”
“What are you trying to do? Get behind them?”
“Not exactly. I’m trying to get us out of here,” Robin said.
Mallory powered the Porsche around the corner at the junction with College Way, tires squealing and the lateral g-force pushing Robin against the passenger door. He headed back toward the river, retracing the route he’d followed less than a minute earlier.
“Now,” Robin said, sitting forward in her seat and staring straight ahead. “Slow down. More. Slower. Now. Go straight on, there,” she finished, pointing slightly to her left.
Mallory braked harder, turning the car off the main street and down a short section of street that led directly to the river.
And then he saw exactly what she had planned.
Right in front of the car, a man was just closing the barrier at the stern of a ferry that was clearly preparing to leave on the short crossing over to the other side of the river Dart.
Robin leaned over in front of Mallory and gave an imperious toot on the Porsche’s horn. The man glanced toward them, opened the barrier again, and waved them onto the vessel, closing the gate behind them. Seconds later, the ferry began to move, easing slowly away from the bank.
“Clever,” Mallory acknowledged, switching off the Cayman’s engine. “That’s why you wanted to know if the clock was accurate.”
Robin nodded. “Yes. I use the ferry quite a lot, so I know the timetable. I looked at the ferry when we passed the pub the first time—the fact that it’s called the Floating Bridge is a bit of a clue—and I could see they were just getting the last couple of cars on board. If we’d joined the queue then, the bad guys would have been right behind us, and that would probably have been it, but by going round the park one more time, it worked out just right.”
As if motivated by a single thought, they turned simultaneously and stared through the rear window of the car. The black Range Rover had just pulled to a stop on the short stretch of road leading to the ferry dock, and as they watched, two dark-haired men wearing black suits got out and stared impassively at the stern of the departing vessel. Then they climbed back into the SUV and the driver reversed it away from the dock.
“They’ll probably go round by road and try to intercept us on the other side,” Mallor
y said.
Robin nodded. “Yes, well, that’s the point, you see. They’d stand more chance of catching us if they simply stayed in Dartmouth and caught the next ferry over, because going by road is a hell of a long way round. Their fastest route would be to go all the way west to Halwell, then north to Totnes and east toward Paignton, because all the minor roads are really narrow. That route’s like three sides of a square. If we were heading to Paignton, we’d only be doing one side of the same square, driving seven or eight miles instead of over twenty. More important, by the time these men reached Paignton, we could be halfway to Exeter, and then they’d never catch us.”
“Okay. So, two obvious questions. First of all, where are we going? Second, who the hell are these people? And what the hell have you dragged me into?”
“That’s three questions, actually,” Robin said sweetly, “but oddly enough the answer to each of them is exactly the same: I don’t have the slightest idea.”
* * *
Marco Toscanelli was extremely unhappy, and whenever he was unhappy everybody around him knew all about it.
In one fell swoop he had lost half of his team, which was pretty much a disaster. Granted they’d been executed by his own hand, though he still couldn’t see what else he could have done, because if any of his men had been interrogated by the British police, Toscanelli knew he himself would probably have been the next occupant of the scarred wooden chair in Vitale’s office.
That was bad enough, but if he’d recovered the relic, that would have been written off as collateral damage. Unfortunately he still had not the slightest idea where the lost parchment was, but he thought it was a reasonable assumption that the man Jessop probably had it with him. But what was really puzzling him was what had happened in that small apartment. How had an unarmed bookseller and his girlfriend managed to overpower and knock out three of his men, all of whom were carrying pistols, and all of whom were trained and experienced assassins?
That was a question he obviously couldn’t answer, or at least not now. And it was a distraction from the business at hand, which was finding Jessop and his girlfriend again and beating the information about the parchment out of them. That was something Toscanelli was really looking forward to doing.
In the meantime, although he knew exactly where his quarry was—in fact, if they were on the dock he would still be able to see them on the river—there was no way he could get to them. Or not right then, anyway.
“Head back into the town,” Toscanelli ordered, taking out his mobile and dialing a number. “We’ll pick up Mario and then decide what to do next.”
The man beside him nodded and steered the Range Rover along the road that ran beside the river.
Toscanelli finished the call, telling Mario where they would meet him, then opened a road atlas to work out their options. When he saw the circuitous route they would have to take to drive to the other side of the river Dart, he cursed fluently in Italian because the situation was far worse than he had expected.
There was no possible way they could get to the other bank of the river in time to intercept their quarry. No matter how fast they drove, the Porsche would be long gone. In fact, their best option, Toscanelli realized, was to wait in Dartmouth and take the next ferry across to the Kingswear side of the river. He didn’t know how long the actual crossing would take, but he guessed about five minutes. Add another five minutes at either side of the river to unload the vehicles and pedestrians, and then repeat the process, and that would put them a minimum of twenty minutes behind their targets, a lifetime in terms of an active pursuit, but still a better and faster option than going by road.
“Back to the ferry dock,” Toscanelli ordered as soon as Mario climbed into the backseat.
The driver looked at him quizzically.
“The road isn’t going to work,” Toscanelli told him through gritted teeth. “The ferry is the fastest way over there.”
In fact, the crossing took rather longer than he had expected, and by the time the Range Rover rumbled off the floating bridge ferry on the opposite bank of the Dart, by Toscanelli’s estimate they were at least half an hour behind the Porsche, and in reality had not the slightest chance of even following it, far less catching it, not with the network of roads on that side of the river, any one of which their quarry could have taken.
They would need some help, and quickly.
As the SUV headed in the general direction of Paignton, working on the assumption that Jessop would want to get out of the area as quickly as possible, Toscanelli took a smartphone from his jacket pocket, opened up the contacts section, and scanned down the list until he found a name and dialed a British mobile number.
“Keep following the main road,” he ordered the driver.
When the call was answered, he switched languages, but the first words he said were in Latin, not English.
“Laudare, Benedicere, Praedicare,” he said clearly, paused for a moment, repeated the phrase, and then continued in fluent English: “In the name of the Spaniard from Guzman, my name is Toscanelli, and I need your help.”
“My brother in Christ,” the man at the other end replied, a few moments later. “I am a tertiary of the Ordo Praedicatorum. Tell me how I may assist you.”
21
Dartmouth, Devon
Clearing the building didn’t take long. Less than a minute later, Fulton reported that nobody else was in there and stepped back into the office while he waited for his colleagues to appear. Outside on the balcony, Chambers was also waiting.
Fifteen minutes later, with the crime scene secured, Fulton and Chambers, their weapons made safe, were standing in one corner of the office, talking to the inspector.
“This really doesn’t make any sense,” Wilson said.
He pointed at the bulky man lying on the floor of the small office. Two paramedics from the ambulance were looking at the unexplained injuries to both his hands with puzzled expressions on their faces.
“That man was carrying an unloaded Beretta pistol and a suppressor in his jacket pocket, but without a magazine or any cartridges. The other one had no pistol, but he did have a magazine that fitted that Beretta and three loose rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition. But the other pistol you found at the bottom of the staircase was fully loaded. The man outside had a mobile phone in his pocket, one that’s identical to these two other mobiles we found sitting here on the desk, and all of them have the name of an Italian service provider on them, so they’re probably either pay-as-you-go or prepaid phones. What the criminal fraternity here call ‘burners.’ Those facts are bizarre enough, but the bigger question is even more puzzling.”
Fulton nodded. “Who incapacitated three heavily built armed men—according to the medics, the man outside the apartment has a dislocated shoulder—and then used cable ties to immobilize them? And then shot them in the head with a gun that we can’t find? And what the hell did they do to that man’s hands? It looks like they drove nails through the palm of his left hand and then more into the knuckles of his right. It must have hurt like crazy, and there’s no way any man would have sat still while they did it. And why was it done? To make him talk or what?”
“I have no idea,” Wilson agreed, “but there obviously has to have been more than one other person involved. The other thing is what these men look like. All three of them have black hair and swarthy complexions. To me they don’t look English, and the suits they’re wearing are definitely Italian—I’ve looked at the labels. So if these three guys are Italian, like their phones and their pistols and what they’re wearing, that obviously adds an international component, and that makes me wonder if what we’re seeing is gang related, perhaps a punishment for something that one man did. Either that or maybe there’s some kind of terrorist connection that we can’t see at the moment. And I’ve also done a bit more checking on the owner of this apartment, and it turns out that ‘Robin Jessop’ is a wo
man, not a man. This doesn’t look to me like a woman’s work.”
“And none of them are carrying any identification,” Chambers added, and pointed at the desk. “There are two identical wallets right there, next to the two identical mobile phones, both of them empty, and the man outside had no wallet in his jacket, but he was carrying the mobile phone, a suppressor that fits the pistol we found at the bottom of the staircase, and a set of car keys. It looks to me as if these three men had been sent out on a deniable operation, and each of them had been given exactly the same equipment, because otherwise surely at least one of them would be carrying something that would identify them, even if it was only a driving license or a credit card.”
“That makes sense,” Wilson agreed. “But whatever happened and whoever these three are—or were—the first thing we need to do is track down this Robin Jessop as a matter of urgency. Have you done anything with the car keys yet?”
Fulton shook his head.
“Not yet,” he replied, holding up an evidence bag containing a key with a plastic fob attached. “It looks to me like a hire car, and probably a Range Rover. If it’s okay with you, sir, I’ll go down and see if it’s parked anywhere nearby. Perhaps there’s something in it that will help identify these three.”
“Good idea,” Wilson replied. “Go and do it now.”
Fulton walked down the spiral staircase and crossed first to the BMW Armed Response Vehicle, opened the tailgate, and locked his Heckler & Koch MP5 away securely. Then he depressed the remote locking button on the car key and looked around expectantly. A short distance up the street, the hazard warning lights on a dark-colored Range Rover began to flash.
“Bingo.”
Fulton nodded in satisfaction and walked over to it, pulling on a pair of blue latex gloves as he did so, to avoid contaminating any possible fingerprint evidence that might be found in the vehicle. He stopped beside it and for a minute or so simply peered in, the interior illuminated by the courtesy light, but saw nothing suspicious.
