“Well, to be fair I’ve been guarding a valuable asset; keeping him fed, watered and alive and let me remind you, emptying his bag which smells like a cross between cooked ham and hot urine. So if you are in the mood to have a go I’d be very careful or you’ll find yourself playing nursie. How did the raids go?”
Roberts stared at Cade with a blank look, then looked at the screen in the car which replicated his own cell phone. Twelve missed calls from Bridie McGee.
“I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, are you safe? Got everything you need John?”
“Everything and more besides. Apart from the glass of Dark Storm.”
“First one is on me tonight. Jack and I are off to hunt some bear.”
“Grizzly or Polar?”
“Diplomatic. The teams are preparing to strike. They’ve held back as there was some activity nearby.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
Kensington, London
“I want to know what just happened downstairs and why?”
She pointed at a male actively trying to avoid her gaze.
“You! You go first. Any mistakes and he will shoot you and so on until I am the only one left in this awful place. Now speak!”
She yelled the words, almost spat them. She was pacing.
A caged tiger, no cage.
“Speak!”
“Boss, it happened so quickly, we tried our best.” The youngest of the men offered, hoping to get some credit in the bank of Doto.
“Your best. You tried your best? You were almost hiding up here whilst we were being attacked downstairs in the car park. Can you hear what he is saying? This young boy has more courage than any of you so-called men. Look at him, barely shaving, but he tried his best. You are my bed mate for tonight and I hope you like it rough?”
The man was indeed just a boy. Well developed, but only nineteen. He’d never experienced anything like this. Jesus, it was only months ago he was living in Africa. Now he was in London, his eyes and trousers bulging at the thought of sleeping with his boss, an Amazonian woman with impressive legs that would wrap around him like a python. He tried to disguise the fact that he was so looking forward to it. The speed at which she had claimed him was a shock.
“The rest of you, get back down there and help your brother, the one you ran away from like cowards. Go! Or leave and never come back. Now you boy, come here and let me see what a treat I am in for later.”
Seizing the chance to get into her good books he spoke again.
“You know miss you are so beautiful. I always dreamed of being with a real woman.”
“Shut up and come here.” She pushed her hand down the front of his trousers and held him there. His eyes were fixed on hers as he tried to control himself.
“A lion hunts for zebra when it needs to eat. It prefers fresh meat, but if that isn’t available it will settle for something older, as long as it is well hung. And what are you?”
He gulped audibly. “Fresh.”
“Just how I like my zebra. And the thought of everything happening downstairs in the basement whilst you entertain me just excites me more. I have an escape plan. Do you?”
“No. But we should help you escape. Those people, they are coming to get you.”
“We are safe here. No one can get through those doors. And if they do, we scream diplomatic immunity.” She feigned a scream, holding her hands up at the side of her head, mocking her attackers.
“Now, come and make me scream something else.”
She led him towards her room. “We do it now. A starter. That way you will be ready for the main course later. And if you are lucky, half-way through I will treat you to an amuse-bouche.”
He had no idea what she was talking about. He lived on ready meals and Coca Cola. This was hedonistic beyond his wildest boyhood dreams.
She walked behind him, pushing him gently, playfully, laughing.
The young Springbok into the lion’s den.
“You will talk about this with your grandchildren.” She ran her tongue across her lips, as somewhere down in the basement of the Kensington apartments all hell was about to break loose and she cared, this much…
She had a reputation of stampeding over anyone she chose to, to get ahead, or get away.
“All units. Stand by. Stand by….” Her voice was steady. Years in the job did that to you. You became knowingly detached.
McGee held the microphone tightly. Her gut feeling had never once let her down until the night Nick Fisher was killed. The love of her life, but one that was never allowed to blossom instead she watched it drift away as he lay in her arms in the back of a cramped surveillance van.
She had the same feeling now.
She’d tried to ring the boss ten or eleven times, but realised he was probably busy too.
Time to earn that extra two pounds an hour Bridie, she had said to herself. Make the call.
“Strike! Strike! Strike!”
Susan Reddington heard the screaming engine before Kate. It was either a friend or a foe, and at that moment, trapped in a basement with an armed target to the left, a questionably sadistic consular member upstairs somewhere and now an inbound vehicle, containing God knows who, she had a decision to make.
Plenty of rounds. Loads of experience. Limited time.
She pointed to the door, mouthed the words ‘Go upstairs’.
She was doing it for two reasons. The first to save her daughter, at least for the time being. Worst case she could lie her way out of any situation, secondly, she operated better alone. Third, that she’d thought of off the cuff; the moment her daughter moved, the currently silent target, hiding somewhere in the car park, might just show himself.
She needed three seconds. One to identify the target – arguably the most important aspect of any armed situation. Two, shoot it. Three start moving away from the inbound threat.
“Go!”
Briton broke from her cover and ran as the male presented himself over the boot of a grey Mercedes. He was firing ad hoc, spraying rounds from the extended magazine and to hell with the costs. Typical amateur. All gangster and no idea. His field of view was limited and all he cared about was hitting the girl that ran from his left to his right. She was making for the door. In that moment she presented a huge target to anyone that was prepared to take their time and deliberately fire at it.
But he was lost in the moment. Red mist they called it.
He lost his head in the moment too – presenting an even greater target than Kate Briton had.
The first round hit him in the right cheekbone. He heard it strike. A heavy, incredibly focused sense of pain as the nine millimetre copper round screwed itself into his face and drove bone and facial muscles backwards, destroying his sinuses and the main bone below his eye – the post mortem would allude to massive damage to the zygomaticus muscle and the infraorbital foramen, one of fourteen bones in the human face.
It was the sort of injury that got Dex Hodgkinson out of bed in the morning.
The Guinean gunman opened his mouth to scream. The second and third rounds saw their chance to momentarily upset his entire day as they entered the gaping hole and exited through the back of his neck, shattering the first and second cervical vertebrae and severing his spinal cord. There was nothing romantic about bullet wounds and there was no love lost between Reddington and her target.
Seven rounds left. Check for spare magazine. Decide to swap now whilst she held the advantage. She dropped the current magazine into her left hand and pocketed it. Placed the new one into the weapon and racked it positively. Time to move on.
Noise to her left. Seek cover. Scan. Wait. Breathe.
She had survived a wild and unplanned escapade in Afghanistan and another at an un-named compound somewhere in Indonesia. She was bloody well sure she could survive a brief interlude in an underground garage.
She heard the commotion. Rapid entry team, better get ready to start shouting her innocence.
Kate was running up the concrete stai
rcase trying to decide what to do when she got there. She needed Doto alive for she held the key to her one main question. Or at least she hoped she did.
She got to the door. The same impenetrable entrance to the consular apartment that the woman they called the Black Mamba so often boasted about.
Twenty feet from the main entrance and behind her bedroom door she was astride the young male who was busy trying to calm himself down, eyes wide, staring up at his bosses incredible dark brown body and her own intense eyes. This was incredible. Not his first time. But like nothing he had ever experienced before. She held him just where she needed to, took control from the beginning, set the pace, knew the signs, listened for the breathing to change so she could turn around and face away from him – she preferred it that way.
She stopped, leaned forward and put her large hand over his mouth. It wasn’t a game anymore; she needed to stop him talking. She held it there. Placed a finger to her own mouth. In seconds she had clambered off of the boy, leaving him lying on his back, still so intensely proud.
Briton had pushed the door with her left hand, pistol up in the ready position. She entered the room, scanned, waited for the inevitable response but all she had heard was visceral moaning from a door across the huge lounge area.
‘Here? Now?’ She was stunned. ‘Some people had no respect.’ She said internally, now gripping the pistol with both hands, index finger resting on the trigger.
It was the last thing she had expected to hear. She edged forward, then heard a commotion. A window opening, shouting, furniture being knocked out of the way.
She ran at the door and hit it hard. It opened. The boy on the bed tried to react, he was as naked as the day he was born and still completely aroused. If she had had a flag, she would have given it to him.
Briton wondered who held the moral high ground as she watched a woman exiting through the window, wrapped in a black silk robe and the boy reaching for a firearm – a monstrous handgun that was very visible on the bedside cabinet.
She fired twice on the move, then again. The first round at the window. There was no way she could let her escape. The next two hit the boy in the left side of his chest stopping his heart and ending his day badly.
Kate didn’t have time to admire the diminishing view as she sprinted past the Californian super king bed, avoiding the abandoned clothes and towards the window. There was no fire escape, just a sheer wall down into the garden below and all that existed to break her fall was a privet hedge.
How did some people escape injury and others die a horrible death in such banal circumstances? Life wasn’t fair at times.
She was running, faster than any woman outside of a stadium ever had. Towards a car. The same car that was always on hand to prevent her from coming to harm it seemed.
Briton steadied the pistol on the window frame, checked for collateral damage and fired. Three rounds hit the Bentley. Two into the over-sized passenger door, the third striking the mirror. She was about to fire again when she saw two men in body armour and baseball caps running for cover and arcing their short weapons up towards the threat. A hundred metres away a BMW was approaching at speed. Blue lights, sirens, an engine being thrashed.
It stopped and performed a high-speed three-point-turn.
The cavalry had arrived and was already leaving.
“Down this way!” Doto screamed at the female driver. “You know what to do. We must not get caught. Drive. Faster!”
The Bentley accelerated ferociously and was creating distance already between it and its German-built rival. Behind the wheel Jacqui Clarke did as she was told, let the car do the main work, all she had to do was steer and stay calm.
“We need to get away from the embassy.” Doto shouted over the roar of the engine.
“What do you think? Are they doing a runner out of the city or somewhere else? Perhaps the embassy?” Roberts asked Cade.
“I’ll ring Carrie.”
“No time for bloody romantic chatter mate I need an answer.”
Cade dialled. She answered. “Go.”
“You still got tabs on the Bentley?”
“Yep.”
“Good work.”
“That was down to Dave. I just came up with the idea Jack.”
“Either way, it’s teamwork. Right keep tracking it and get an armed unit ahead to shadow, we are backing off. Let her run. I have a feeling she’ll be heading east, towards Kent.”
“Any reason?”
“Just a hunch. Call it old-fashioned policing. Get us an air support chopper ready. There’s a few places not far from here where we can board. Tell them to be ready to pick us up. Land in the street if they have to, or one of the royal parks, I’m sure Ma’am would approve if she knew the reasons.”
“Will do. And Jack…”
“Carrie.”
“Be careful. I can’t keep doing this, it’s terribly aging.”
“I’ll buy you some of that unpronounceable face cream at Heathrow duty-free.”
“When? I need to get out of this place and soon.”
“As soon as this is sorted. A few loose ends yet.”
“A few! A bloody few? Christ Jack there’s enough to create a sweater.”
“Then get knitting. Bye.” Cade hung up and dialled again.
“JD, how’s Tom?”
“He’s doing remarkably well. We are in the cab and heading in a large and ever-increasing circle around London hoping it might trip his memory, all the while keeping an eye on his catheter and wondering why I didn’t retire the second time when I had the chance instead of becoming a nursing auxiliary.”
Cade smiled. “I need you to do something John.” He outlined his plan.
“Consider it done.” Daniel looked at Hewett who turned the cab around on a sixpence and headed south east towards the A2.
Cade turned to Roberts. “Back off. Let her run.”
“No, Jack I want that bitch’s wrists in my handcuffs. She can’t run riot around my city, diplomat or not.”
“She is and we need to let her think she can.”
“I’d like to say you’re the boss. But you see Jack you’re not.”
“I agree Jason. But do you trust me?”
“You know the answer to that.”
“Then back off.”
McGee’s armed team came to a halt. Balaclavas on under ballistic helmets and black body armour strapped in place they exited their vehicles and hit the main car park shutters hard. The hydraulic spreader went to work on the door.
The site intel was what they called C3 – Fairly Reliable, Possibly True.
They trusted the source, not with their lives, but enough to action the information. The strength of the intelligence was woefully wrong. The door was staying put and as time was of the essence, another member initiated a flash bang on the adjacent pedestrian doorway, hoping to cause a distraction for anyone inside.
The car park shutter was refusing to give in without a fight, so the team re-grouped and approached another smaller pedestrian door on the side of the building. Each side of building normally had a colour to describe it. This one had three sides. Two were the imposing front and side elevations, the third at the rear – which was colloquially known as the tradesman’s entrance.
Front – White, right Red, rear Black.
It’s how tactical teams worked. No mistake that way. Clear, concise, clinical.
McGee watched on from her vehicle. She had shot someone last time she was in this position. Fired and forgot. Fired again. She cared not for Standard Operating Procedures; they’d just killed the one man she thought she could spend the rest of her life with. She’d have emptied the magazine if a colleague hadn’t stopped her.
This time she stayed in the car rather than give her temper a reason to vent.
The team were ready. Hand signals from here on in.
Check door. Locked. Opens inwards. Good.
Combat shotgun. Two rounds fired at the door latch in quick succession – the nea
rest operator checked the door.
Open. Clock ticking. Go.
The four-man team filed in quickly, adopting a time-served and much-practiced entry technique that meant they could enter the building quickly and safely – avoiding each other and any cross fire.
The door was wide enough to allow a wheelchair through which meant in turn that the first two armed staff could get through the gap at once, forming a V with a ballistic shield each and carrying a pistol.
Peering through the small visor they could see what they needed to see in a basement that had some natural light, and once they had entered an immediate sunburst of fluorescent strip lighting would cause them to blink away the spectral haze – the trick of light, the photographers called a chromatic aberration.
The second unit, carrying G36s followed quickly.
One to the left, one to the right. The button hook some called it.
A fast method of entry and one which lessened the time spent in the fatal funnel. The death zone. All methods were potentially hazardous and unless you practiced to the point of tedium, there was always risk.
Risk. Risk. Risk.
Train, train and train again. Then when you were exhausted and ready to make mistakes, you did it again.
The second two-man team followed the same line, and they were in, moving quickly. No need for stealth, they’d just blasted a bloody great hole in the welcome mat of the consular address of the Embassy of Guinea. McGee didn’t like the idea of writing that one up for the bosses.
The team were quick and thorough. Moving swiftly through the basement and onto the ground floor. Clear. They were quick and decisive but not reckless. Like a carpenter measures twice and cuts once, so they checked, checked again and then moved on.
They called down on the back-to-back channel that they had found the body of a young black male. Shot twice. Naked and alone and definitely no longer a threat.
They cleared the rest of the rooms and made their way back down to the basement where the one remaining officer was stood with his short weapon pointing at Reddington’s centre mass.
The Angel of Whitehall Page 45
