by A P Bateman
King led the way and the boy followed. He had no idea why the boy did not run, but as he stepped out into the light upon leaving the alleyway, he wondered if the boy had any choice in the work he did.
Thankfully the car had been left alone, and King opened the door, let the boy slide gingerly into the front seat.
“Who are those men?” King asked.
The boy shrugged again. “Just men,” he said. “My mother died, my father went to work in the Ukraine last year, picking flowers. He hasn’t been in touch since…”
King nodded. He should have been back between the growing season. He knew that tulips, poppies, orchids and roses were grown in the Ukraine. It was seasonal work relying on migrant workers. He doubted the boy would see him again.
“Those men, they pay you?”
“Some.”
King drove quickly, threaded his way through the streets until he found himself on the seafront. He passed the lighthouse, then followed the road around to the left, away from the seafront and towards the new town. He fished out the wad of banknotes, around a thousand Lari worth approximately three-hundred pounds. He tossed it into the boy’s lap. “Take this,” he said. “Maybe it will be enough to get away from here. You have relatives?”
“An aunt and cousins in Tbilisi.”
“Go there. Don’t go back to those men. They’re using you and no good will come from it. I know. I started dealing drugs for people like that, pretty soon I was handing out beatings and in and out of prison.” He pulled up in front of the medical centre and took out his wallet, retrieved a stack of Lari, around fifty-pounds Stirling. “Get yourself patched up. Get the wound cleaned, stitched and ask for anti-biotics. And get a cold pack on that head bump.”
The boy opened the door, went to thank him, but King pulled away and the door shut of its own accord once he got up to about thirty-miles-per-hour. He checked his watch. He had made good time. He had a gun and ammunition, and he had an hour’s drive ahead of him before he had to use it.
59
King had stopped at a builder’s merchants, having been unable to find an extensive DIY store. He had found most of the things he needed, paying in cash, but had also stopped at a pharmacy, a supermarket and a service station for the rest of the things he would need. A military surplus store located on the side of the road which had been advertised by a Soviet T-62 tank, provided him with the last of his purchases. Although the store did not sell firearms, it still provided King with a sturdy combat knife, a gas stove, some mess-tins and a dozen aluminium water bottles in canvas sleeves. He picked out some olive cargo trousers to go with his grey T-shirt and tan leather jacket, and a pair of surplus boots to help him blend into the landscape and provide solid foot-ware for the rocky terrain. He wore a balanced combination that would afford him cover, but not have him dressed like a soldier if he found himself in a different situation that required him to blend into a crowd.
The mountain road took him higher, winding through woodland and pastures, affording glimpses of the Black Sea. King could see how the sea got its name. Not land-locked, but separated by the narrow Bosporus straight, the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean Sea from the sparkling blue waters of the Mediterranean. The Black Sea was dark and slick, with choppy waves rather than small rollers, and the waters looked deep and black on all but the brightest and clearest of skies, or calmest of seas.
King found a track and pulled off the road, checking his mobile phone signal and sending a short text, before making his way cautiously down the track, the Dacia coping with the ruts and potholes without grounding. The track led to nothing more than a turning point, where King switched off the engine and typed a text, he checked for mistakes forced by the auto-correct before sending.
The silence as King got out of the car was blissful. The air was warm, but clean. He felt the sun on his face and was buoyed by the promise of getting ahead of Helena. He would soon be in control, and he relished turning the tables on his enemy. He received a message back, checked it and smiled. He had felt so alone until now. He had spent his entire career working alone and even when he had assistance or joined forces with another intelligence service, or agency from another country, he knew he would ultimately be alone. He had been a deniable asset. Nobody would trade for him, negotiate his release. He should have been used to it, but in his short-time working with MI5 and partnering Caroline on various cases, he had grown used to being a part of a team. But it wasn’t only that. King had felt from the outset, that the price of Caroline being held for ransom was too high, as was the risk of failure on his part. The pressure was insurmountable.
King opened the hatch of the car and started to take out the equipment and items he had bought. He set up the gas stove and arranged the mess-tins around it. Next, he took out the aluminium water bottles and set about puncturing the lids with his knife. He then arranged them in the boot of the car where it was a decidedly smoother surface than the ground. He opened a bottle of thick bleach and poured it into a mess-tin. Then he scooped out petroleum jelly from a large tub and placed it in the bleach, along with just the right amount of borax and potassium nitrate, also known as salt-peter. King placed the mess-tin on the gas stove and watched it melt the petroleum jelly. He sprinkled in the iron filings - to aid as an electrical conductor rather than shrapnel - and stirred the mix together with a stick. As the mix boiled and licked the edges of the mess-tin, King took it off the heat and stirred gently, the mix thinning further and gradually darkening in colour. He placed the tin in the boot of the car, then opened the bag of two-inch screws into his hand and fed them into two of the bottles, each about half-full. He then poured the mix into the bottles right up to the top and threw the mess-tin onto the ground. He took out a length of electrical wire, East-European spec, with just a negative and a positive. He used a pair of snips to cut the length, then fed the wires through the lid until approximately four-inches of wire protruded. Next, he coiled the wires separately around his finger so that both lengths of negative and positive resembled a spring. King eased the lengths into the warm liquid and fastened the lids in place. He then took two battery power units and a pin-timer delay out of the boot and wired the connections, leaving the batteries out until he was ready. He set the timers for five-minutes and taped the consumer units to the side of the bottles with duct-tape. King repeated the process twice more, imperative he use clean mess-tins and did not change the order in which he made the mixes, and finally stood back to admire his handiwork. Six time-delay Improvised Explosive Devices – or IED’s - each one capable of blowing a car into the air into pieces, or he estimated enough to take down two average-sized houses if set correctly.
King then set about cutting lengths of string and soaking them in sugar and liquid paraffin. He left them for twenty-minutes while he made four more bottles of the mix. He checked that the holes in the lids were made larger, to allow for air, then took the string out of the paraffin and allowed them to dry in the warm air. Once they were dry enough to the touch, he folded them in half, and pushed both ends through the lid and deep into the liquid compound, which was already starting to thicken. He tightened up the lids, leaving a ten-inch loop protruding. He tested a spare length of the string with his lighter, watched as it burned fiercely, counting the whole time. The length of string burned away, and King dropped the ember to the ground. He then adjusted the lengths of string in the bottles and taped them in place. He figured they would burn for ten-seconds before heating the mix enough to initiate and cause detonation. The initiation would use a third of the mix, making detonation around two-thirds as powerful as the electrically-detonated devices. Enough to disable a car, breach a door or take down a group of men effectively.
King took out a bottle of water, drank down half a litre or so and washed his hands thoroughly. He dried them on his shirt then took out the 9mm Makarov pistol and checked it over. He unloaded the magazine, inspected the bullets. They looked like factory loads as far as he could tell, and the shell cases were in good condit
ion. He never fired anything he hadn’t re-loaded himself, or that wasn’t factory-loaded if he could help it. But beggars couldn’t be choosers. He unloaded the second magazine, checked the bullets, then stripped the pistol down. An easy weapon to take apart – he simply pulled down the trigger guard, slipped it sideways onto its internal holding lug, then pulled back the slide all the way, lifted and dropped it forward and off the barrel. He sprayed the weapon well with what he guessed was Georgia or Russia’s equivalent of WD40 and rubbed it all over with a dry cloth. He oiled the spring, inspected the barrel, squirted a little oil down it and allowed it to drain. Drug dealers tended to pose and threaten with their firearms, but there was no telling whether this weapon had been fired in forty-years. King suspected it had started off life as a well-used military piece but would have been stolen and sold on many times over since then. It looked in ok condition. He oiled and checked the magazines, reloaded them checking the spring tension. He put them down, put the pistol back together, checked the action, then loaded one of the magazines, chambered a round and applied the safety, which dropped the hammer onto the safe bar. He tucked the pistol into his right trouser pocket and put the spare magazine into the other.
“Well, you managed to get a piece, more than I could do.”
King spun around, but he had already figured out who it was and refrained from grabbing the pistol. “You made decent time,” he said lightly, but he was mad with himself for being crept up on. Fatigue and circumstance was putting him at a disadvantage.
Rashid walked up, held out his hand. King took it, shook it warmly. It was relief to have help, to see a friendly face.
“How is it on the outside?”
“Flying blind,” King replied. He told him about Sweden, what he had been about to do, and the idea that Simon Grant had unwittingly given him about using leverage. He told him about Anna and the way she had played both sides. The two men that he had killed, the unknown number of men in the burned-out Mercedes. He hadn’t seen the need to check.
“You’ve been busy,” Rashid commented as he looked inside the boot of the car. He saw the IEDs. “Blast radius?”
“A hundred feet for the electrical charges, fifty-feet for the taper fuse ones,” King said with a shrug. “Or thereabouts.”
“Shrapnel?”
“About two-hundred grams of screws in each. The taper fuse ones will be less powerful, but still enough to wreck a vehicle.”
“I’ll be sure to duck, then,” Rashid said. He updated King on what he, Ramsay and Marnie had found. He told them about South Africa, working with Ryan Beard from MI6 and what had happened at Botha’s property. And then he told him about the IP address and that Marnie and Ramsay were heading there to investigate.
King listened intently. This last piece could lead them directly to Caroline. He wondered whether he should pack up and go, but he was so close, and they could find themselves at another dead end. He needed to hold his nerve.
“I’ll stick to what I’m doing here. I just want a hand with a diversion,” King said. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m getting Catherine Milankovitch out. Romanovitch is Helena’s problem. With Catherine, I have a bargaining chip, a fair trade for Caroline. Anna Sergeyev told me that Romanovitch snatched Catherine and has kept her ever since Helena funded some mercenaries to move in on the Bratva’s assets. He covered his arse, even taunted Pyotr Sergeyev about it, telling him to hide.”
Rashid nodded. “So, what do we know about Romanovitch’s place?”
“I’ve found it with Google Earth, worked out the borders, which way is north, seen the gates. Nothing more.”
“So, flying blind,” Rashid said flatly. “I haven’t got a weapon,” he said.
“If all goes well, I just want some big bangs. There are outbuildings, cars, and of course, a huge gate. If some of those things go skywards, I plan on slipping in through the back and finding Catherine.”
“And if she’s being held in one of those outbuildings and gets blown to kingdom-come?” Rashid shook his head decisively. “No, we need to do a thorough recce. You’ve come so far, buying time, getting Helena to trust you, discovering both the existence and whereabouts of Catherine. Now you have an edge. We can’t risk harming the one person who can get Caroline back unharmed.”
King nodded. He was not only fatigued, he wasn’t thinking straight. “Agreed,” he paused. “I bought some binoculars. There is plenty of high ground above his property. If we can work our way up there, it will be worth it.”
“What about a recce, then hitting him in the middle of the night? We can be stealthy, use the demolition stuff to aid our escape instead of storming the castle, so to speak. Could keep the body count down too.”
“We’ll see,” King said. The end was in sight. He was so close to transferring the power between Helena and himself, so eager with anticipation, that he felt like a child at the end of term. He was glad that Rashid was here to play devil’s advocate, lend a sense of perspective. He looked at Rashid and nodded. “I guess you’re right,” he admitted.
Rashid patted him on the shoulder. “We’ll get her back,” he said. “It isn’t over till it’s over.”
60
She had waited two-hours and twenty minutes and it had felt like a day. Parked on the road overlooking the seafront, the doors to the car locked, the windows wound up and the keys in the ignition. She had positioned the mirrors to watch the road behind her, affording little in the way of blind-spots and had spent the entire time studying all who came near. She kept the tiny pistol with its three rounds under her thigh. An easy reach.
Her nerve was gone. She was frightened, now that she was away from that place of hell, terrified she would be caught and bound and returned. Or taken someplace new and equally as hideous. She was hungry and thirsty, tired and desperately in need of a shower. The clothes Michael had given her were muddy, torn and blood-splattered. Her hair was tangled and lank, and as she caught sight of herself in the mirror, she would acknowledge that she looked hollow and worn. She was a beautiful woman, although she would never allude to thinking that, but she could see some light had left her eyes, some sparkle was gone, and she doubted it would ever return. She had been through much in her life – the killing of colleagues in both the army and MI5, as well as the death her fiancé in a terrorist attack – but she knew that these past weeks had extracted more from her than bereavement ever would. She thought of those poor women, their bastard children – innocent and compromised by fate, and whether they would ever know freedom again. She vowed, as she sat and stared at the stranger in the mirror, that she would help them. She would make it her life’s work if she had to.
Caroline watched Ramsay’s Skoda saloon pull up and park. He got out and looked around, then walk towards the lighthouse. There was a woman in the passenger seat. Her hair was dark and shoulder-length, her shoulders slender. Caroline felt a pang of familiarity. The same profile and build as Helena. Caroline continued to watch, noticed the woman looking around uneasily. She could see it was not Helena. While attractive, she wasn’t in the same league of beauty, and she wore a pair of small, rectangular glasses set in trendy designer frames.
She realised that she was being paranoid, but her ordeal had infected her, changed her. She doubted she’d ever feel truly free again.
Trust nobody, rely on nobody.
She unlocked the car, took the keys out of the ignition and slipped them into her pocket. She did not lock the car door behind her, preferring to know she could save an extra second getting back in if she had to. Why was she dubious? She should have trusted Ramsay, thrown herself at him as he arrived. But she didn’t feel she could let down her guard, put her safety into someone else’s hands. No rescue had come for her. She worried about Alex. Had he come to harm going through who knew what for Helena’s agenda? She had faith in him, but she couldn’t worry unduly. She needed to think about herself. But she knew that safety was an illusion. She wanted to flee back to London, but London was where she was abducted
from. She knew she wouldn’t be any safer there than right here, right now. Leaving Georgia was putting the place behind her, but not the threat. The threat lay with Helena. And until she was dead or imprisoned for her crimes, then Caroline knew she would never truly be safe.
She glanced at the woman inside the car. She did not recognise her, but much of MI5’s work was compartmentalised and many people from various departments never met until they were pulled in to work on something specific. Support staff, analysts and technical departments would work together regularly, but field agents like Caroline and King rarely rubbed shoulders with them. In fact, since the attack on Thames House by Russian terrorists last year, most of her briefings had taken place in temporary offices in Whitehall or the MOD.
The woman was working on a laptop, balancing it on her lap and checking a smartphone at the same time. Caroline walked onwards, watched all around Ramsay and behind her, feigning interest in the giant Ferris wheel. Nobody seemed to be watching him, which was Caroline’s fear. She had come too far to be led unwittingly into an ambush. There were only a small number of places where it would have made sense for Caroline to go, it wouldn’t be too difficult for Helena with her resources to have people looking out for her. After all, Caroline could link her with a number of major crimes and would be a witness to her sex trafficking and baby farming schemes. Both of which would be crimes where sentences would be handed out in decades rather than years.
Ramsay turned and saw her. He strode over, stopped short of hugging her and hesitated. Caroline hugged him, relief catching up with her. She pulled away, looked at him. There were tears in her eyes.
“God, I’m glad to see you,” he said.
“Ditto,” she replied, a little croak in her voice. She coughed, took a breath and said, “Where’s Alex?”
Ramsay sighed. He glanced around and said, “Let’s talk in the car. We’ll get a hotel room, you can have a shower.”
