“I was surprised to learn that she is a friend.”
“Friend. She whacked me around the head with a church collection plate. Left me for dead. Some service that turned out to be. They say the Lord moves in mysterious ways.”
“It wasn’t quite that bad, was it? I think if she had wanted to kill you, she would. Let’s just say she slightly altered you…”
“That hurt more than the cruel blow itself. Need I remind you that dad jokes Carrie are for the male of the species?”
“Are they? Sorry. Anyway, I’m told by her boss that she is one hundred percent trustworthy. Hated her grandfather for what he did, wants to right the wrongs and restore the family name to something other than darkly dappled. So it seems you were right all along, smug bastard.”
“Call me amazing by all means, but you know there’s still something I can’t work out. Why is she so obviously close to the one they lovingly call the Black Mamba? There’s more to that relationship than female-based lust or undercover work.”
O’Shea smiled, drew the phone set closer.
“They are sisters. On paper, at least. And all the intelligence they hold indicates that they despise each other behind closed doors – but they need each other to find their version of the Ark of the Covenant. For now, they tolerate each other. And the defence intelligence people watch on.”
“Go on, I’m all ears.”
“Cat and mouse. Doto has a few of the clues, Reddington has some more. I suspect they’d kill for the remainder. Which leaves…”
“Our dear man Denby with the rest.” Cade could see the situation unfolding before him as he carefully stripped the magazine from his weapon and checked the remaining rounds.
“Bingo, Jack. The problem is JD reckons he’s worsening. Says the chance of him remembering the vital stuff is diminishing by the day.”
“Then we turn the screw. I think we’ve only got a few weeks left, days possibly. Let’s get Reddington on our side too.”
“Already ahead of you. Turns out our double agent has a penchant for both sexes. Might be her weak point.”
“Then in that case, Carrie I have just the job for you.”
“Oh, no. No way. I am not playing that particular parlour game.”
“Not even for your country, Catherine?”
“Not even for you.”
“Then so be it. I’ll have to encourage her interest in the male of the species instead.”
He cleared down and got into a marked car where he found Roberts busy relaying the incident to the operations room manager at the Metropolitan Police HQ, a recently appointed superintendent who he despised more than weak tea and the boyhood Scottish mosquitos that had feverishly plagued his frequent camping trips.
“Yep, yep…we’ve done that…statements will be written as soon as we can get back…yep. No, of course, absolutely. Consider it done.”
He hung up.
“Right, him and his wish list can bloody wait. He’s worse than Payne, he is, and he’s a right cockshaft. What right-thinking boss decided to promote those two idiots higher than cleaner is beyond me. I need to purge. Let’s go and kick in a door in the posh end of town, shall we?”
“Will that help?”
“Abso-fuckin-lutely.”
“Then let’s go.” Cade dialled McGee, who in turn rang her team.
“The bosses want to reconvene in Kensington. Turns out we are bypassing the lower-hanging mouldy fruit and going straight for the juiciest peaches.”
“Nothing wrong with juicy boss. We all love a juicy one.”
“I’d quit while you are ahead if I were you,” she said, smiling into the phone. “And do not even think of using the M word.”
“You mean moist boss?”
She disconnected and made a mental note to humiliate him at the next briefing. She speed dialled her counterpart.
“Dave, it’s me. We are moving onto the main piece on the chessboard. Your team ready?”
Dave Williams was born ready and always expected his team to follow. He’d done well for a boy from the wrong side of the street.
“The black queen herself? Sounds like a plan, Bridie. See you in the next street over. Busy round there, you know, a lot of eyes on…”
Williams was right. As the area that housed many of the more interesting embassies and consulate buildings, it was awash with surveillance systems and human source intelligence. If a fly farted in a foreign language, it would appear on the next morning’s bulletin or discussed over strong coffee and a cheap cigarette or two.
In a one-bedroomed flat three young women sat around a cheap table on cheaper chairs eating a quickly prepared and forgettable noodle snack. It was the last of their food. Sooner or later they had to make their move.
“But what if we get caught?” The woman was actually only just eighteen. Fit, healthy, considering her lifestyle, and willing to work hard for the rest of her life, she had made the same mistake as the other members of her cohort. She should have adopted the lesser of two evils and stayed in Africa.
All three women bore the two scars on their left cheek. All had lost their freedom and childhood at the hands of the evil priests that practised Trokosi.
“What if the authorities are worse than the priests?”
“Do you really think they will be?” asked a much older woman, twenty-two and already with ten years’ experience of abuse behind her.
“But they might…”
“And they might not. Death is preferable to going back there!” She answered defiantly in her own language.
“From now on we speak English. We act English and we stay apart, but we stay together.”
They understood. Three girls together would attract the attention of the one person they feared most – Baki Maciji. They dreaded her more than the priests, more than the authorities, more than death itself.
They cleaned up after themselves, wrapped every sign of their being in a black rubbish bag and pulled the door to behind them. There was no mail to forward, for they received none. No bills to pay for they had squatted in an abandoned building primed for demolition. No one knew their names, no one cared. On the face of it, they didn’t exist.
Their new life started from here. Their great white grandfather had helped so many of them in the past. Why would today be any different? All they had to do was get to the bridge, find the lock, memorise the code, then disappear into a United Kingdom already flooded with immigrants. Three more might not make a difference.
A few hours north three hundred were waiting; queuing for food, hands held out like a scene from a charity video. In line, obedient, marked with countless scars and mental wounds.
They too came to work and live a better life.
Lined up like animals waiting to be slaughtered, eyes wide and hopeful.
An hour east from the old anonymous warehouse, two hundred more. And a further seventy an hour from there. And more were coming.
The migration north had started, from the Pride Lands to the Land of the Unknown, they waited for weeks, some sat for months, some never made it at all, dying of starvation as they sheltered and prepared to run to the ships that left port for a far better life, often ready to fight for a place, much to the delight of the men in suits who even placed bets on who might and might not make it. The weak that did clamber aboard and later failed the basic medical checks could be quietly tipped overboard, at night in a black sea, under a blacker sky.
Yet still they came. And the rich became richer. Their shiny suits just a little shinier. Smiling, handshaking, cigars aplenty. And embroiled at the heart of the whole operation were three groups. The British government. A group of wealthy African business people, sheltering beneath a cloak of immunity and fear and a team that were tasked to resolve the whole bloody mess.
In London, right in its very heart, two teams waited to carry out their orders.
One was small, could act in isolation, gave no consideration to the law and could disappear fast.
The o
ther was far larger, less agile and bound by the rules. At its helm was a man many people quietly respected, but hated in equal measure.
Chapter Forty-Two
Westminster Bridge, London
The first girl walked quickly towards the northern end of the iconic bridge, a stone’s throw away from the Houses of Parliament. On any other day she would have stopped and looked, admired a slice of British history, for it was there, beyond her current view, a mere breath away almost within reach. Even the stones on the bridge and the steps down to the pier were worn by history. Countless feet leaving their mark on a walkway that rarely rested.
History was everywhere; up, down and sideways and that was why most people gravitated towards the city. Most.
She walked by, then turned back with the crowd; black people, white people, people of all races and creeds going about their daily routines, some tourists, some adopted Brits or true-blue Londoners fighting to retain and maintain their heritage.
Nearby, a protest singer was singing a protest song.
On a make-shift wooden box, another screamed to anyone that would listen to stop buying animal products. Another just stood on her box in silence, hour after lonely hour.
It took all sorts to make a world.
On the second run-by she stopped, crouched down and began an act. As if she were attaching a padlock to the ones already present. A moment of true love. She wouldn’t be the last.
A message from one lover to another, immortal – at least as long as the authorities left them alone, and so far, here on the landmark bridge they had. Simple messages, romantic hashtags, secret messages, code, all of them born out of the most fundamental of human needs.
There were small ones, large ones, of brass and steel and pink and blue and even orange.
Hers was cheap, almost throwaway, Chinese-made with a lock that would withstand only the persistent attempts of a small child. But it did its job. Now she had to be quick. Attach hers and pretend to be admiring the rest, fingering each lock, smiling as naturally as she could from beneath her hooded top.
One, two, twenty. There were too many. She began to panic. Then she looked across the road. Among the throng of people were her two friends, willing her onwards. She looked again and they were gone.
Stay calm, sister. Stay calm.
She took a deep breath and smiled, fishing through the metalwork that clung to the green-coloured columns next to a wooden stall that sold replica T-shirts of London; the buses, the buildings, the best bits. Beneath the bronze statue of Boadicea and her bare-breasted daughters, she worked away. The Queen of the Iceni would have been most proud.
Next to a glistening red metal heart-shaped lock, she saw it.
Simple. Aged and non-descript. Just like Farin Mala’Ika had instructed all those years ago. He said he would leave a sign before he forgot everything; his name, his age, his very reason for living. And there it was. A simple thing with a basic engraving of a dove and then underneath by the lock itself a set of numbers. Comparable to the fabled Holy Grail – the least attractive, the most important.
Five. One…
She lifted it up to look on the reverse, then felt the strong hand on her shoulder. Strength like she had never felt before. Then another hand on her left triceps, guiding her up and into the flow of pedestrians that streamed across the bridge in what seemed like an endless ant-like river of people that crossed the Thames.
She felt the blade in her back. The tip pressing into her flesh with each enforced stride. She was too afraid to cry. She knew her time was over; she was out of the most prized race of all. Life.
She looked right, then left, trying to throw them off the scent of her two companions. She nodded to them, hoping they would see her sign. It was over. She had knowingly sacrificed herself to allow her two younger sisters to live.
The van that pulled into the side of the road swallowed her up in front of countless witnesses, not one of whom bothered to ring the authorities. Why would they? It was clear the men in suits had locked up the girl for some transgression. Job done.
The locks continued to grow in number. Each day somebody new would add something important, and each day the ones that the old man had attached became buried. Each had a message, if you knew how to read them, a set of numbers and a few letters.
The silver van with Velcro’d late model registration plates headed east towards the old East India docks where it pulled into an old and latterly derelict late-Victorian building that was once a ship’s chandlers and sail makers. It had the number 777 emblazoned on the right front entrance, which was covered in graffiti; some good, some awful, some indifferent.
On the left side of the main doors one of the numbers had dropped awkwardly, waiting to plummet to the pavement and be kicked into the gutter. Plants grew haphazardly from window ledges and in gutters. Downpipes leaked, and the red-brown brickwork was blackened with a hundred years of grime.
The local security guard had been taken care of. Money talked, and the chance to earn a month’s salary for a few hours drinking tea in a nearby café, reading the newspaper whilst the team carried out a ‘tasteful photography session’ seemed reward enough. He had grown to hate the bloody place, all damp walls and creaking roofs that scared him witless as he tried to sleep among the crawling shadows of maritime history.
He hated one more than any other. Harriett, the ghost of a dockyard prostitute, used to wake him up time and time again.
‘’Ows about a fine time with me then squire. I would make a young man such as yourself rather happy. Just a few of your pretty pennies…is all it takes…all it takes…just a few of your pretty pennies…’
He covered his ears. Closed his eyes. Hated ghosts, or rather his people did, despised them with their late night laughing and eerie sounds.
He sat up night after night trying to keep his Irish green eyes open, watching. He couldn’t do it night after bloody night so he came up with a solution and that was to leave as soon as he could.
A length of old rope that had once had a more salubrious heritage was now rubbing her shins raw.
She had given up trying to cover herself with her hands, now leaving them to dangle down, like her black-beaded glossy hair pointing down to the old stone floor that had seen two hundred years of activity.
The whole place was waiting to be converted to office space and flats, but the developer had stumbled across a problem. History. So he waited for the day that he could knock it all down. Bare walls bore the marks of local kids who had dared to enter, spraying their thoughts in blue and red and yellow.
‘Punk is dead’ and ‘Ginger is a slapper’ graced one wall. On another, a simple red painted number seven with the horizontal strikethrough crying scarlet tears onto the dark stone floor below.
Light shone into the building through what was left of the old roof. In front of the three sharply suited black men was a series of ornate iron-framed windows with perfectly curved tops, each remarkably still complete with unbroken panes of Victorian glass, many frosted by time and brittle.
Two large doors on a once-elaborate roller mechanism that had enabled the previous occupants to load and unload from small ships that used the Limehouse Cut to reach the Thames were now closed. Mounted to the outside, nestled into the brickwork and built to last was a winch which still and somewhat defiantly housed its original handmade hemp ropes.
Opposite the factory were more derelict buildings. Within a year, maybe two, they would house swanky apartments each sold for an obscene amount to up-and-coming city dwellers who would only pretend to care about the history of the place.
The oldest of the three men was on his phone whilst the other two lit a fire. No one would see the smoke, least of all the security guard who was long entrenched in his second mug of tea, another plate of food and a borrowed ‘paper. They said there would be ‘special effects’ so he ignored the small column of grey that had escaped through the glass roof.
“You have my word, boss. I will see to it mysel
f that we get what we need and yes, of course I will take care to be professional. That is what you pay me for. Thank you. Goodbye.”
He turned to see the fire had taken hold and some impressive orangey blue flames were looking for more fuel to consume. If nothing else, they provided heat to the otherwise miserable room.
“Lower her down.”
The basic rope they had draped over the beam did its job, lowering her upside down in line with his face which took on a bizarre appearance. His lips were in his forehead and his misplaced eyes staring out from his jet-black face.
Her eyes were the size of the moon and brighter. Her mouth covered with a broad strip of aluminium tape. Her hands now back and up over her chest, trying to maintain what was left of her dignity.
He pulled her hands down and the tape off.
“Little girl, you are playing with the big boys now. And we get what we want.” She pulled her hands back up, so he slapped them down again. And again, until she relented. Then he slapped her face until she began to cry. Her tears pitter-pattering onto the floor. Her naked stomach rose and fell as she tried to control her breathing and somehow stop the blood from pooling in her head.
“I am going to ask you three questions. And for each there will be an answer.” He asked in French. Then her local dialect, then finally English.
“Do you understand?”
She nodded, causing her upper body to sway. He took hold of her hair and steadied her.
“You are very cold, my dear.” He traced a hand across her neck and upwards, outlining her stone-cold breasts, feeling her writhe to rid his hands from her skin. Suddenly the Trokosi priests of Kamsar seemed a welcome distraction.
He drew a finger across her scars. “I have them too. We all do. We are one people. Now, as I say, three questions. To which there are only three answers. Answer them all correctly and…”
“You will let me go?” she asked, almost pleading, her head pounding from the swarming blood that filled her mind, made her eyes bulge and her heart initially beat faster.
The Angel of Whitehall Page 37
