Ghosts - 05 (2 page)

None of his agents knew that. He had deceived them.

“Control, One. Report.”

“Target is waiting at the junction at Blackfriars Bridge.”

Control knew their itinerary for the rest of the day. Semenko and Shcherbatov were going to a meeting.

As far as they knew, the meeting was with him.

It was an appointment that Control had no intention of keeping.

THE MERCEDES PICKED UP speed as it turned onto Blackfriars Bridge. It found a small gap in the traffic. Beatrix opened the throttle in response, keeping the Mercedes a few car lengths ahead of them. Their intelligence suggested that the woman she knew as DOLLAR had an appointment with a contact on Victoria Embankment; it looked as if the intelligence would prove to be accurate.

Beatrix stayed between fifty and a hundred yards behind the car; Milton was another twenty yards behind her. She kept up a running commentary as they gradually worked their way south east, towards the river. “North end of the Bridge, turning off … onto the Embankment, heading west … passing Blackfriars Pier … coming up to Waterloo Bridge, following the river to the south.”

The traffic started to queue as they reached Victoria Embankment Gardens. Beatrix bled away almost all the speed, ducking in behind a bus that was idling opposite Cleopatra’s Needle. She could see the Mercedes through the windows of the bus and, beyond it, the Houses of Parliament.

“One, Control. Waiting at the lights at Embankment Pier.”

“Acknowledged,” said Control. “They’ll continue south.”

“Copy that.” The lights changed, the traffic started to move, the last pedestrians broke into self-conscious trots as they hurried out of the way. “He’s accelerating towards Hungerford Bridge.”

She gunned the engine and sped forwards, not about to get stuck should the lights turn against her.

Control’s voice crackled again. “Control, Group. This is as good a spot as any. Five?”

“In position,” reported Number Five. “Five, One and Twelve. Get ready. Here we come.”

Beatrix watched: a white van, not dissimilar to the one in which Control was watching, had been running parallel to them on Whitehall. Now though, it jerked out into the traffic from Richmond Terrace and blocked the road in front of the Mercedes. Number Eight—Oliver Spenser—was at the wheel. Number Five—Lydia Chisolm—was alongside him. Both agents were armed with SA-80 machine guns but the plan did not anticipate that they would need to use them.

Beatrix braked to thirty and then twenty. “One, Control. They’re stopping.”

“Control, One and Twelve. You have authorisation. Take them out.”

Beatrix rolled the bike carefully between the waiting cars: a red Peugeot, a dirty grey Volvo, an open double decker bus that had been fitted out for guided tours. The Mercedes was ahead of the bus, blocked in between it and the delivery van in front. Beatrix reached the car, coming to a halt and bracing the heavy weight of the bike with her right leg. Milton rolled up behind her. Neither of them spoke; they didn’t need to, they were operating purely on instinct by this stage, implementing the plan. Beatrix quickly scoped the immediate location: the inside lane was temporarily clear to the immediate left of the Mercedes, the pavement beyond that was empty and then it was the wide open stretch of the Thames.

No need to concern themselves with catching civilians in the crossfire.

Beatrix released her grip on the handlebars and unzipped her leather jacket. She was wearing a strap around her shoulder and a Heckler & Koch UMP was attached to it

She raised the machine pistol, steadied it with her left hand around the foregrip, aimed at the Mercedes, and squeezed the trigger.

The window shattered, shards spilling out onto the road like handfuls of diamonds.

Milton was supposed to be doing the same but he had stopped.

Beatrix noticed but didn’t have time to direct him. She was completely professional. Even as the machine pistol jerked and spat in her hand, her aim was such that every round passed into the cabin of the car. The gun chewed through all thirty rounds in the detachable magazine, spraying lead through the window.

The driver somehow managed to get the Mercedes into gear and it jerked forwards. He must have been hit because he couldn’t control the car, slaloming it against the delivery van, bouncing across the road, slicing through the inside lane and then fishtailing. It slid through one hundred and eighty degrees and then wedged itself between a tree and a streetlamp. The horn sounded, a long and uninterrupted note. The car had only travelled twenty feet but Beatrix couldn’t see into it any longer.

“Milton!”

She was fresh out of ammunition and he was the nearest.

“Milton! Move!”

He was still on the bike, frozen.

The passenger side door opened and SNOW fell out. The car’s wild manoeuvre meant that the body of the car was now between Beatrix and him; he ducked down beneath the wing, out of sight.

“Milton! SNOW is running.”

“I’ve got it,” Milton said, but she could hear the uncertainty in his voice. He was corpsing; Beatrix had not anticipated that. She ejected the dry magazine and slapped in another, watching through the corner of her eye as he got off the Kawasaki and drew his own UMP.

Beatrix put the kickstand down. There was a terrific clamour all about: the Mercedes’s horn was still sounding, tourists on the bus—with a clear view of what had just happened—were screaming in fright as they clambered to the back of the deck, and, in the distance, there came the ululation of a siren. Too soon, surely? Perhaps, but it was a timely reminder; the plan only allowed them a few seconds before they needed to effect their escapes.

She approached the car, her gun extended and unwavering.

It was carnage. The driver was slumped forwards, blood splashed against the jagged shards of windshield that were still held within the frame. The full weight of his chest was pressed up against the wheel, sounding the horn. DOLLAR was leaning against the side of the car, a track of entry wounds stitching up from her shoulder into her neck and then into the side of her head. Her hair was matted with blood and brain. Beatrix strode up to the car and fired two short bursts: one for the driver and one for DOLLAR. She kept moving forward, the machine pistol smoking as she held it ahead of her, zoning out the noise behind her but acutely aware of the timer counting down in her head. The man and the woman were unmoving. She looked through the driver’s side window and saw a briefcase on the passenger seat. They were not tasked with recovering intelligence but it was hard-wired into her from a hundred similar missions and so she quickly ran around to the passenger door, opened it, and collected it.

“Control, One,” came the barked voice in her earpiece. “Report.”

“The driver and DOLLAR are down.”

“What about SNOW?”

“He’s running.”

There was panic in his reply: “What?”

“I repeat, SNOW is on foot. Twelve is pursuing.”

MILTON LEFT the bike behind him and sprinted. SNOW was already fifty feet ahead, adjacent to the Battle of Britain memorial. The great wheel of the London Eye was on the other side of the river and, ahead, a line of touring coaches had been slotted into the bays next to the pavement.

SNOW dodged through the line of stalled traffic; nothing was able to move with the shot up Mercedes blocking the road ahead. He turned his head, stumbling a little as he did, saw Milton in pursuit and sprinted harder. He was older than Milton but he had obviously kept himself in good shape; he maintained a steady pace, driven on by fear. Milton’s motorcycle leathers were not made for speedy running and the helmet he was wearing—he dared not remove it for fear of identifying himself—limited his field of vision.

He took out his Sig and fired a shot. It was wild, high and wide, and shattered the windscreen of one of the big parked coaches. It inspired SNOW to find another burst of pace, cutting between two of the parked busses. Milton lost sight of him. He ran between a truck and the car in front of it, passed between the two busses behind the ones that SNOW had used, and saw him again. A second shot was prevented by a red telephone box and then a tall ash tree.

Milton heard the up-and-down wail of a police siren. It sounded as if it was on the Embankment, behind him, closing the distance.

Milton stopped, dropped to one knee and brought up the Sig. He breathed in and out, trying to steady his aim, and, for a moment, he had a clear shot. He used his left hand to swipe up his visor, breathed again, deep and easy, and started to squeeze the trigger.

SNOW ploughed into the middle of a group of tourists.

Shit.

He dropped his arm; there was no shot. He closed the visor and ran onwards, just as he saw the man again: he had clambered onto the wall that separated the pavement from the river and, with a final defiant look back in his direction, he leapt into space and plunged into the water. Milton zig-zagged through the panicking tourists until he was at the wall and looked down into the greeny-black waters. There was nothing for a moment and then, already thirty feet distant, he saw SNOW bob to the surface. The currents were notoriously strong at this part of the river. The riptides were powerful enough to swallow even the strongest swimmer but SNOW was not fighting and the water swept him away, quickly out of range.

The siren was louder now, and, as he turned to face it, he saw that the patrol car was less than a hundred feet away, working its way around the stalled queue.

Milton paused, caught between running and standing still. He froze. He didn’t know what to do.

“Milton,” came Number One’s voice in his ear.

He turned to his left.

Beatrix was on the pavement, between the river and the row of busses, gunning her Kawasaki hard. Milton pushed the Sig back into its holster and zipped up his jacket. Beatrix braked, the rear wheel bouncing up a few inches, then slamming back down again. Milton got onto the back; Beatrix had a slight figure and he looped his left arm around her waist and fixed his right hand to grip the rear of the pillion seat. Milton cleared six foot and was heavy with muscle but the bike had a 998cc four-cylinder engine and his extra weight was nothing. It jerked forward hungrily as Beatrix revved it and released her grip on the brakes.

BEATRIX LOOKED out of the window of Control’s office. It was the evening, two hours after the operation. It was a habit to debrief as soon as possible after the work had been done and, usually, those were not difficult meetings. Normally, the operations passed off exactly as they were planned. They were not botched like this one had been botched. Control was busying himself with the tray that his assistant, Captain Tanner, had brought in; it held a tea pot, two cups, a jug of milk and a bowl of sugar cubes. He poured out two cups. Beatrix could see that he was angry. His face was drawn and pale, the muscles in his cheeks twitching. He had said very little to her but she knew him well enough to know that the recriminations were coming. The crockery chimed as he rattled the spoon against it, stirring in his sugar. He brought the cups across the room, depositing one on her side of his desk and taking the other one around to sip at it as he stood at the window.

“So?” he began.

“Sir?”

“What happened?”

Beatrix had known, of course, that the question was coming. The mission had been an unmitigated failure. The watchword of the Group was discretion, and the shooting had been the first item on all of yesterday’s news broadcasts and the papers were leading with a variation of the same picture: Milton, in black leathers and a helmet with a mirrored visor, his arm extended as he aimed at the fleeing SNOW, his abandoned motorcycle in the background. The headline in the
Times
was typical: MURDER ON THE STREETS OF LONDON.

“It was just bad luck,” she said.

“Luck? We plan so that luck isn’t a factor, Number One. Luck has nothing to do with it.”

“The driver managed to get the car away from us. That was just bad luck.”

“It was Twelve’s responsibility to neutralise the driver. Are you saying it was his fault?”

She had given thought to what she should say. The honest thing to do would be to throw Milton under the bus. This had been his first examination and he had flunked it. He had frozen at the critical moment. They had the targets cold, helpless, and it had been his corpsing that had given SNOW the opportunity to make a run for it. And even then, she knew Milton was a good enough shot to have taken him down.

She could have said all of that and it would have been true. She could have burned him but it wouldn’t have been the right thing to do.

She had some empathy. She remembered her own introduction to the Group. The operation when she had lost her own cherry had been a fuck-up, too; not quite like this, but then she had been in Iraq and not on the streets of London, far from prying eyes and the possibility of your mistakes being amplified by a media that couldn’t get enough of something so audacious and dramatic. Her own wobble had been between her, the female agent who had been Number Six in those days and her victim, an Iraqi official who was passing information to the insurgency; she had paused at the moment of truth and that meant that the man she had just stabbed in the gut had been able to punch her in the face, freeing himself for long enough to hobble into the busy street outside. Number Six had pursued him outside and fired two shots into his head and then, keeping bystanders away with the threat of the gun, she had hijacked a car and driven them both away. Their Control had been the predecessor to this one and yet he was still just as daunting, and Beatrix had baulked when he had asked her how it had gone. Number Six had covered for her, telling him that it the operation had passed off without incident and that it had all been straightforward. Beatrix would have been cashiered without hesitation if Number Six had told Control the truth. So she understood what had happened to Milton. It did not diminish her opinion of him. It did not make her question her decision to recommend him.

“It wasn’t his fault,” she told him, looking him straight in the eye. “He did his job, just as we planned it.”