by Tom Barber
Up top, McGuinness was out of shells for the shotgun, but saw the officer below go down from the blast. He dropped the weapon, turned and ran for the door, the apartment burning behind him, the fire alarm going.
Knowing cops would be arriving any second, he re-emerged onto the street, and caught sight of a blonde girl running for the corner. He sprinted after her, but as he drew closer, realised it wasn’t Isabel Vargas but one of the children who’d been kicking a soccer ball around less than a minute ago instead.
‘Move, kid!’ a voice shouted, and McGuinness turned to see the police officer who’d been protecting the girl and who’d given him so much trouble at the theater in New York, Daniel White. The man was back on his feet, bleeding from the knife embedded in his arm, raising his Glock but not able to shoot with the child in the line of fire.
‘Everything matches up,’ Ruiz told Bellefonte and Archer over speakerphone. The two men were walking back towards the dark parking lot at Six Flags, totally unaware of the drama unfolding in Oxford. ‘Gerald Dwindel. He started working at the park in 2002. Contract was terminated after the storm, along with everyone else’s. Six foot seven, two hundred and ten pounds, junior stage manager at the kid’s theater.’
‘Dwindel was the name of the knife-thrower who used to work with McGuinness and his mother,’ Archer said. ‘Explains where he got the alias from.’
‘Maybe he was the father.’
‘Possibly. But I’ll bet even his mother didn’t know.’
As they talked, Archer heard his own cell start to ring. ‘Chalk?’ he said, seeing the number and answering. ‘Good news, mate. We’ve fou-’
‘He’s here!’ Isabel replied.
‘Issy? What’s wrong?’
‘He’s here, Archer! The tall man came here. He’s chasing me. He just attacked our place in Summertown!’
‘Where’s Chalky?’
‘He stayed to fight him!’ she replied between breaths. ‘He told me to run!’
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m on the main street in Summertown. Chalky’s hurt. I saw him with a knife in his shoulder.’ He heard her start crying. ‘I don’t know what to do!’
‘Listen to me,’ Archer said quickly, Bellefonte hushing Ruiz as he picked up on Archer’s urgency in his instant change of tone. ‘Do you have any money on you?
‘Yeah, Chalky gave the bag to me. I’ve got his phone, our passports, cash… his credit card and I-Pad.’
Archer thought fast. He’s found them there, how? They’ve been compromised.
How could he stop McGuinness getting to her?
Could he trust anyone else to protect her? Not until they knew how he’d found them.
Those pools of urine in the room under the theater. The door with the knives jutting out of it.
Wyzyck pinned to the wall in his own living room.
‘Get a cab and go straight to the train station, then get on a train to London,’ he told her quickly. ‘It’ll take about an hour. Can you do that?’
‘Yeah. Then what?’
‘When you’re on the train, you’ll have internet. You need to go to the British Airways or American Airlines site and book a plane ticket with Chalky’s credit card. Use your phone or I-Pad. OK?’
‘To New York?’
‘No. New Orleans.’
‘Why not home?’
‘Because I’m here in Louisiana. I’ll be waiting for you. You can’t go back to New York, not yet. He’ll assume that’s where you’d go, and there might be other people waiting too. Get here and I can keep you safe.’
‘What about Chalky? I can’t leave him.’
‘Chalky can look after himself. You need to get as far away from there as fast as you can.’
‘I’ll get stopped at the airport. I’m too young.’
‘Your passport says Olivia is fifteen and you can fly unaccompanied on American or British Airways at that age. Just keep the cover story. You can do this. Hurry, now, and keep watching your back!’
FORTY
When they’d been trapped in the building in Harlem a few years ago, less than a month after her family had been killed, Isabel had had Vargas, Archer and other good people protecting her. Now, she was in a foreign country and someone was trying to kill her again, but this time, she was all alone and in her overwrought state of mind, felt as if the guy pursuing her had some sort of superpower. He always seemed to know where she was, even though this time they’d gone to so much trouble to hide her thousands of miles from home.
If the police pick me up, they don’t know what he’s like, he thought. He’ll still find a way to get to me. I need to get to Archer. She’d spotted a passing taxi in Summertown as she ran down the street, and to her relief, it stopped for her when she flagged it down.
Ten minutes later, she got out at the train station and looked around fearfully, but couldn’t see any sign of the tall man. Then she thought about Chalky and almost started to cry from fear and worry, wondering how badly he was hurt. She’d seen him make it out through the window as she reached the end of the street and saw the knife in his shoulder; she was ashamed that she’d then done as he told her and ran, hearing gunshots behind her. Maybe I shoulda stayed.
But she knew he’d have been furious with her if she had. He’d risked his life to give her a chance to get away, and she couldn’t let him down now. She moved towards the station, praying a train to London would leave as soon as possible. As she walked quickly, she looked at Chalky’s cell which she’d been holding and recalled seeing a movie where they tracked the lead character using the GPS. Maybe his police friends would track her down.
But what if McGuinness got to her first?
You wanted more independence, girl, she reminded herself nervously.
Now you’ve got it.
In Summertown, McGuinness had taken cover from the ARU cop firing the pistol, and using the protection of several parked cars, got close enough to cock his arm and throw another knife. Chalky saw it coming and ducked as he felt it whisper through his hair, but the blood loss from the blade in his shoulder and the shotgun pellets to the leg finally caught up with him as even adrenaline couldn’t keep him going, and the world slipped into black.
McGuinness caught sight of him collapsing, but before he could finish him off, a police car screeched to a halt on the street. An officer got out of his car and immediately drew a deployable prong taser, the red dot going onto McGuinness’ chest. ‘Taser, taser! Put your hands up!’ the officer shouted.
‘Officer, I’m trying to help that man!’ McGuinness said in his best English accent, pointing down the street. It was a voice he’d used at Bilodeau for a bullshit Punch and Judy show he’d been made to do for a while, punishment for stealing money from one of the midway stalls. He slipped right back into it like that show had been yesterday. ‘Someone fired a gun and ran off that way!’
‘Keep them up!’ the officer ordered, walking forward.
‘I’m telling you, they’re getting away!’
The officer called it into his radio as he approached McGuinness. He glanced down the street at Chalky, who was slumped behind a car, now lying completely still.
It was a fatal mistake.
Issy entered the station and to her relief, saw the lines for ticket machines weren’t long. She joined one, looking up at the Departures board after glancing back behind her again quickly. She saw a train to London Paddington was leaving in six minutes, only stopping at two places called Reading and Slough. There seemed to be a lot of services heading to the London capital, so she intended to catch the first one if she could buy a ticket in time. Leaving Oxford would further isolate her, but she needed to get out of here, if only because Archer and Chalky had told her to.
She swallowed back tears, knowing that neither of them or Vargas were going to magically reappear and rescue her again.
This time, it was down to her.
Her turn came and she pressed the keys carefully, reading the instructions on the screen but
faltering when it came to payment. She withdrew Chalky’s credit card, and recalled the four digit pin he’d made her memorise, just in case. She’d thought he was being typically old and fussy at the time, but didn’t now.
She carefully tapped in the sequence. To her relief, the machine accepted it, spitting out a ticket and receipt.
But then she had an idea. She slipped the London ticket into her pocket before heading towards one of the manned ticket booths.
‘Explosion reported and gunshots fired on Lonsdale Road in Summertown,’ the Oxford police dispatcher repeated, two cars with firearms officers roaring down the main parade towards the upmarket area of the city. A minute later, they screeched to a halt and snapped out, shouting for a gathering crowd to get out of the way, each officer with a Heckler and Koch rifle jammed in his shoulder.
They saw two bodies on the ground. A pair of officers drew closer as four of their colleagues covered them in well-rehearsed moves. One of the bodies was a colleague, who’d been stabbed in the neck and had bled out over the road. The lead armed officer dropped to administer first aid, shocked at the sight of such a violent death in this usually quiet and peaceful area of the city, but he quickly realised his fellow PC was dead.
The other man laid out on the concrete was slumped between two parked cars, with a Glock pistol clutched in his hand, a knife in his shoulder with another lying on the road behind him. Two officers approached him with rifles up while their colleagues shouted ‘Get back!’ to members of the public who were gathering to see what had happened.
The police were too busy to notice that behind them on the main road, a tall man stepped onto a bus, the vehicle pulling away from its stop moments later.
‘The girl wasn’t killed on July 4th, was she?’ Bellefonte said to Archer in the Six Flags New Orleans parking lot. ‘You faked it.’
The NYPD detective nodded worriedly, scrolling for Vargas’ number.
‘How’d you pull that off?’
‘Squibs from Kaufman Studios, better acting then we could have hoped for and TV cameras taking the bait. But he was on a rooftop with a rifle and almost got her for real. She was transported out in a body-bag; made citywide news.’
‘It made national. I saw that shit on TV.’
‘She got out of the city that night on a fake passport,’ Archer told him. ‘She’s been hiding in the UK with a friend of mine guarding her.’
‘Can you call your people and get them to intercept her in London?’
‘I don’t trust anyone but myself and my team on this, anymore. Someone let slip where she was. My best friend almost just got killed because of it.’
‘Who knows she’s still alive?’
‘My immediate teammates and some of my old unit in London. We hoped McGuinness would think another hit had been ordered on her. But he didn’t take the bait.’
Bellefonte cursed. ‘Hard to con a carny. He’ll know all the tricks. And he’s found her?’
Archer nodded and called Vargas, picturing Isabel all alone in a foreign country, McGuinness stalking her, and Chalky badly injured.
She wasn’t picking up and he swore in frustration as he tried again.
Police were now swarming all over Summertown in force, blocking off the streets, two helicopters flying overhead to provide aerial visual support. More firearms officers had arrived, and witnesses were being questioned.
‘How’s the guy who got stabbed in the shoulder?’ an armed officer asked quickly, as the street was closed off. ‘Any ID on him?’
‘No, and he’s in and out of consciousness,’ his colleague replied. ‘Saying he’s a cop from London and something about a little girl he was protecting. A neighbour said she saw a tall man kill the PC who’d drawn the taser. Threw a knife at him and hit the guy right in the throat. Told us he took off towards the main road.’
‘We sent out an alert to the taxi companies,’ another officer said, joining his colleagues. ‘A driver came back saying he took a kid from just down the road to the train station by herself, twenty minutes ago. We also got confirmation from the ARU in London that a guy matching the description of the man with the knife in his shoulder is one of theirs.’
‘She bought a ticket for Nottingham,’ the woman at the desk told two police officers less than two minutes later, another searching the crowds, the closest officers to the station once the alert had been radioed through.
‘When does it leave?’
‘Left five minutes ago.’
‘Stop the train at the next station and instruct the driver to keep the doors locked. Cameras?’
‘They’re all operational.’
Why would she go to Nottingham, McGuinness thought, having gotten off the bus in the city centre after taking it to get out of Summertown, and now listening in on the radio he’d lifted from the police officer he’d killed.
He took out his cell phone and checked the current departures from the station on the National Rail website. His eyes scanned them.
A double bluff?
She’s eleven, so not likely.
But she’s smart. And she’ll have been coached on pulling tricks; just like she did on the boardwalk at Coney Island.
The police would be expecting her to show up in Nottingham. They’re looking the wrong way, he decided as he put the phone away and looked around for a taxi, wanting to get to the station as soon as possible.
He was pretty sure he knew where the girl was running.
And who she was running to.
‘I’m gonna find you first,’ he muttered, a black cab pulling up for him before he opened the door and stepped inside.
FORTY ONE
‘How did he locate her?’ Vargas asked Archer in a panic, as she left the FBI main office in D.C. The Bureau was interested in co-operating with providing protection for Vincent Castelione and his family, similar to what had been set up for Natalie Cortese in New York with the Marshals’ cooperation, but wanted some guarantees first in case he was wasting their time. They’d been after Bianca Stefani for years, not giving up even after they discovered her mob boss husband had been killed in Europe four years ago. She’d been calling the shots from somewhere for the Baltimore mob, but there’d been no sighting of her in almost half a decade and her file had been buried under more paperwork. Until now.
After finally making it through the late night D.C. traffic, Vargas had been in a hastily convened meeting with several agents for over two hours, and had come out to find eleven missed calls on her cell. It was almost dawn, and she was exhausted, having been up all night, but the case couldn’t sleep and that meant neither could she.
‘I don’t know. Someone leaked it, which means I don’t want to let anyone know where she’s running to. But I just checked departures from Heathrow and there’s a BA flight to New Orleans at 3:40pm. If she doesn’t get lost or panic, I think she can make it.’
‘I’m coming down there right now,’ she said, getting into her car and starting the engine. D.C.’s roads were much emptier than when she’d arrived here earlier and it meant she made quick progress towards her hotel, where she could gather her few belongings and check out for the airport. ‘My poor girl, Sam. She’s so young. And she’s all on her own over there.’
‘She’ll make it,’ he said. ‘She can do this. You know how smart she is’
Once the call ended, she went straight to Vincent’s number. It rang through, and she swore.
‘Pick up, asshole,’ she said to herself, trying him again as she got closer to her hotel. ‘Call your man off.’
‘No sign of her on the Nottingham train,’ Porter told Fox, who was driving down the motorway from London to Oxford with their lights flashing, clearing three figures on the speedometer. ‘They stopped it at the next station and each carriage was cleared. Rail personnel and police who boarded searched everywhere.’
‘Could she have jumped out when they got to the station?’
‘Highly unlikely. They had officers all over the platform looking for her. T
hey’re confident she couldn’t have slipped through without them seeing her.’
‘I helped Oxford police locate Chalky’s phone,’ the lead analyst from the ARU called Nikki told them over the car’s intercom. ‘It was tossed in a rubbish bin not far from the station.’
‘Bright kid. She knew we could trace it. But why would she throw it?’
‘Because now she doesn’t trust anyone,’ Fox said, the speedometer going north of 100mph. ‘She knows someone gave away where they were so she won’t be taking any chances.’
‘Who has the phone? Can we get into it?’
‘They’re speaking to Chalky. He’s at the hospital.’
‘It’s passcode locked,’ an officer at the hospital said to Chalky, who was being tended to by two doctors, having regained consciousness with an IV already jabbed into his arm. ‘Can you give us your password?’
’55..88..33,’ he said through gritted teeth.
The officer repeated the numbers into his radio.
They waited.
‘Home screen,’ a voice of his colleague replied. ‘No apps opened, or emails. She made one call to a number in America. Sam Mobile.’
‘You couldn’t find her…on the trains?’ Chalky asked.
‘No. No trace of her. She’s disappeared.’
*
Having bought the Nottingham ticket at the station as a ruse, Issy had hidden herself in a crowd of people on the platform until the train arrived two minutes later. She got off at London Paddington an hour and ten minutes later, the train slightly delayed, her baseball cap pulled low over her head with the leather bag slung over her shoulder.
She’d logged onto the train’s Wi-Fi on Chalky’s I-Pad to try and book a flight, but was dismayed to see all the American Airlines departures to New Orleans involved a change at another US airport. She didn’t feel confident enough to do that; all she wanted to do was get to Archer as soon and as simply as possible. Trying not to cry, she searched the British Airways flight schedule, and to her intense relief found one direct flight to NOLA, leaving from Terminal 5 in just under five hours at 3:40pm. She tried to book it, but the Wi-Fi on the train kept cutting out and the order wouldn’t process, even after several attempts. Her anxiety increased again, and she knew she had to find somewhere with better internet the moment she got to London.
