Gone Cold (21 page)

Once I was sure she had some life in her, I inspected the icons. Telephone, camera, messages, browser. Excitement, I realized, was swelling inside my chest. My thumb moved toward the camera icon. Soon as I touched it, the phone went black. I slid my finger up the screen and located the saved photos.

Christ.
Dozens of thoughts flooded my head at once. The first image was of Shauna with Angus Quigg in front of a pub in Springburn. Not only had I seen the picture before, it was tattooed on my mind. I’d studied it for five and a half hours as Ashdown drove me and Zoey from Dublin to Glasgow a couple of days ago. I slid right. Another photo I instantly recognized. Now, there was no question; in my hands I held Eli Welker’s phone.

Which meant that Shauna
had
taken it off Welker the night she’d killed him.

It also meant she’d returned to Liverpool sometime in the past few days. Which meant Lennox Sterling had lied to me. Or that Shauna hadn’t told him she was back.

Both scenarios seemed plausible.

Overriding all of that was the fact that I now had possession of Welker’s phone. In my hands, I held a record of his e-mails and text messages and phone calls from his last days on earth.

Which meant I probably held in my hand the answer to my most vital question—
Who was Welker’s final client?

I opened the folder marked
CONTACTS
.

As I did, a sound emanated from the hallway.

For a moment, I froze and listened.

Seconds later there was no mistaking it.

Someone was at Lennox Sterling’s door.

Hailey?

I pocketed the phone and reached into my jacket for the Heckler & Koch.

I doused the bedroom lamp and crept into the hallway, perhaps only half believing I was about to see my daughter for the first time since she was taken.

Chapter 42

Nearly shooting Ashdown in the hallway of the Tucker Bed and Breakfast in Edinburgh remained fresh in my mind. Which was why I returned the Heckler & Koch .45 to my waistband. If Hailey Fisk was about to step through that door and see her true father for the first time in twelve years, she damn sure wasn’t going to find him training a gun on her.

Only it wasn’t Hailey.

When the door swung wide, a hooded figure stepped inside, wheeled around to his left, and I suddenly found myself staring into the barrel of a .45 for the second time this week.

The hood fell from his head and the acned face of Duncan MacBride stared back at me.

My thoughts swirled like a twister. The only explanation was that MacBride had patiently followed the Grand Cherokee all the way from Glasgow. First to Kensington then to Croxteth.

I judged the distance. This time I stood no chance of reaching the gun by charging at him.

In another flash of déjà vu I raised my arms in the air.

“Well, if it ain’t the fecking frog,” Duncan said with a crooked smile. “The cheese-eating surrender monkey.”

“I take it Tavis Maxwell sent you,” I said as calmly as possible. “Whatever he’s paying you, I’ll double it if you turn around and head back to Glasgow right now and put a bullet through the back of his skull.”

Duncan’s brother, Todd MacBride, stepped in behind him, a great big grin on his face. “Show us the two million pounds then, Fisk.”

Since I was a little short, I needed to devise a plan B. And fast.

I said, “How about instead, I lend each of you boys a thousand pounds. This way you can both go back to Glasgow and have that dermabrasion procedure performed. Clear up those ugly fucking faces of yours. It’s torture just looking at the two of you.”

The four corners of their lips fell in unison. No one was left smiling except me.

And I really had nothing to smile about.

Because Duncan immediately raised his .45 and leveled it at my heart.

He said something as he fired. But, whatever it was, I sure as hell didn’t hear it.

*   *   *

“Don’t forget to snap the photos, mate,” Duncan said to his brother. “Without them, we won’t collect on the contract.”

“No worries,” Todd said. “That bastart ain’t going nowhere. First I want to have a look round this flat, see if there’s anything we can nick.”

“A million pounds naw enough for you?”

“’Course not,” Todd said. “First of all, it’s half a million, innit? Because I gotta split it with your junkie ass. Half a million pounds ain’t retirement money, brother.”

Duncan took a few steps toward the body. “Should I put one in the frog’s face for good measure?”

“He ain’t no frog. He’s a bloody Yank.”

“All right. Should I put one in the Yank’s face, then?”

“No. At least naw until I snap the photos, right? If the old man can’t identify the body, we’re going to wind up with fuck-all.”

“Good point.” Duncan pocketed the pistol and pulled out a blade. “How about I cut an ear off, then? Like that nutter Mr. Blonde from
Reservoir Dogs
? The King will fancy that, won’t he?”

“Have at it, brother. I’m gonna have a look round the bedroom.”

As Todd’s footsteps faded, Duncan leaned over the corpse. Grabbed hold of its left ear.

That’s when I opened my eyes.

With my bandaged left I snatched him by the throat so that he couldn’t make a sound. With my right I swiftly guided his knife hand away from me.

With all my strength, manipulated it.

Redirected it.

And helped him plunge the blade deep into his own chest.

He struggled for a solid fifteen seconds, which was ten more than I’d expected.

“Hey, you should see this bird’s knickers,” Todd MacBride called out from the bedroom.

Slowly I turned his brother over.

I felt for a pulse, but he was gone.

Leaving his eyes open, I took the .45 from his pocket and started toward the bedroom.

“She’s into dildos, she is,” Todd said with an ugly cackle.

I stood in the door frame of the bedroom, watching him tear through Shauna’s underwear drawer.

I raised the weapon, leveled it at the back of his head.

“Dunc, you’ve gotta see this, mate. Nearly as big as mine, innit?”

After a few seconds, I lowered the gun and walked back the way I’d come.

Because I’d decided the worst thing I could do to Todd MacBride was leave him alive to mourn for his brother.

Chapter 43

I stepped into the hallway, quietly closing Sterling’s front door behind me. Todd MacBride was still in the bedroom rifling through the couple’s closet and drawers. He hadn’t yet discovered his brother’s body. I tucked away Duncan MacBride’s gun and started down the stairs.

As soon as I stepped outside, back into the darkness, I unzipped the jacket that had saved my life. Opening it allowed me to fully breathe again. As I inhaled the cold night air, I placed a finger on the bullet that would otherwise have ended my life and sighed deeply. Made a mental note that if I ever returned to Bogota, I’d thank Miguel Caballero personally.

Meanwhile, I removed Eli Welker’s smartphone from my pocket. First I returned to the photos. Swiped through the pictures of Shauna and Angus Quigg in Glasgow. As far as Shauna went, the ones Ostermann had sent me were the only ones on the phone.

I tapped Welker’s
CONTACTS
icon and scrolled quickly through the names and numbers. Kurt Ostermann’s number was in his phone, as was my friend Wendy Isles’s, another investigator based in London. There were dozens of phone numbers listed only by code, each a combination of two letters and five numbers. File numbers, I assumed. No doubt correlating with thick folders locked away in Welker’s office. Clearly he went to extraordinary lengths to protect the privacy of his clients. As frustrating as it was for me, I admired his fastidiousness.

Next I opened his e-mail. Within a few seconds I’d found the e-mail Welker sent to himself the day before he died. The photos of Shauna and Angus Quigg in Glasgow. In the text of the e-mail, there was a file number. MP-61371.

MP, I assumed, stood for Missing Persons.

I returned to Welker’s contact list. Searched for MP-61371.

There it was, halfway down the list. Attached to an exchange in the United States.

I swallowed hard. Steadied myself because I suddenly felt dizzy. Then I tapped on the number, initiating the call.

It rang once, then a recording:

“Welcome to Verizon Wireless. The number you have dialed has been changed, disconnected, or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please check the number and try your call again.”

I cursed inwardly then placed Welker’s phone into my pocket and pulled out my BlackBerry. I dialed Kurt Ostermann.

“I’ve received a few e-mails from Welker’s clients,” he said as soon as he answered. “I have arranged meetings here in London with three of them and I’m trying to convince a fourth that I’m legit.”

“Where are these clients located?” I asked.

“Two of them—and the one I’m still trying to convince—are located right here in England. One in Manchester, the others in London. The third is coming in from the States. Which state, he wouldn’t say. Nor would he give me his name. But he said he’d get on a flight as soon as he could and e-mail me again once he arrived at Heathrow.”

From the building behind me I heard Todd MacBride howl in grief.

In the darkness, I started walking across the street toward the Grand Cherokee, the hard wind now at my back.

“First thing,” I said, “I need you to phone the Merseyside Police.” I gave him Lennox Sterling’s address. “Tell them there’s a body. Two brothers entered the apartment to burglarize the place. One killed the other.”

Ostermann took down the information.

“And you, Simon? What’s your next move?”

“I’m on my way to London,” I told him. “I guess you could say, I’m coming home.”

Part Four

THE SONS OF LONDON

Chapter 44

There are nearly six million CCTV cameras in Britain, more than a half million in London alone. One for every dozen people or so. Meaning once you enter the largest city in Europe—the capital of England and the United Kingdom—you
are
under surveillance regardless of age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or criminal history.

Advocates for mass surveillance argue it’s necessary to fight terrorism, to protect national security, to prevent social unrest. Critics say such measures violate privacy, infringe on civil rights, limit political freedoms. But there’s precious little public debate. Because on September 11, 2001, many of these legal and constitutional questions flew out the window. Now it seems unlikely that they’ll ever flutter back in.

Regardless of where we stand on the issue, most of us concede that mass surveillance doesn’t necessarily create a totalitarian state like those that existed in the former Soviet Union and East Germany. But it seems at least equally as clear to many historians that such intrusions on privacy sure as hell can pave the way for one.

“If you asked me a few days ago,” I told Ostermann, “I’d have said the more cameras the better. But right now I’m biased. Because those half-million surveillance cameras put us at a distinct disadvantage. Facing those kinds of resources, how the hell can we expect to find Shauna in a city of more than eight million before Scotland Yard does?”

We were seated in a pub called the Sherlock Holmes on Northumberland Street a few steps from the Charing Cross railway station. We’d walked over from Ostermann’s hotel, the Corinthia, after he made a deal with the concierge to hide the illicit Dodge Tomahawk I’d driven down from Liverpool after returning Gilchrist’s Grand Cherokee to Ashdown and Zoey in Kensington.

Ostermann folded his hands beneath his chin. Although he must have been approaching fifty, he appeared much as he had when I first met him over a decade ago. And he actually looked
younger
than he did the last time I saw him in Berlin while I was searching for Lindsay Sorkin, the six-year-old American girl abducted from her parents’ hotel room in Paris.

“The question, Watson,” he said, staring over my shoulder, “is how do we turn that disadvantage into an advantage?”

I sipped my espresso. “Is that a Sherlock Holmes quote?”

“I’ve no idea,” he said, turning his ice-blue eyes on me. “I’ve never read Arthur Conan Doyle.”

I leaned back in my chair, gazed out the window at three bright red double-decker buses belching out dense black smoke as they sat in traffic.

“Why are we here, then?” I said, motioning toward Holmes’s study.

“I enjoy Moriarty’s Beef Burger,” he said. “Robert Downey, Jr.’s Baked Camembert isn’t bad either. Want to split an order?”

I shook my head, said, “Back to our disadvantage. I can’t exactly walk into the Met and ask for their help. I’m still wanted for questioning in the death of Ewan Maxwell in Scotland. To say nothing of the body I left at Lennox Sterling’s apartment back in Liverpool.”

“British police are none too fond of German private investigators either,” Ostermann said. “But that does leave us with at least one friend I believe we can count on. If you don’t mind calling her, that is. She’s a tad peeved with me at the moment.”

Before I could ask why, the answer came to me. “You slept with her?”

“I did. But that’s not what she’s peeved about. I’d told her I had separated from Magda, which wasn’t entirely true.”

“Or true at all, was it?”

“Technically true. Magda was in Berlin, I was in London. We were separated by over a thousand kilometers, geographically speaking.
Including
the English Channel.”

“I’ll make the call, then.” I finished my espresso. “No word yet from Eli Welker’s final client, I take it?”

“Not yet. But soon, I’d expect.”

“In the meantime, any chance his widow will cave on giving us a look at his physical files?”

“None. And now the NCA has locked off all access to his offices. Maybe your brother-in-law can get us in, but I certainly can’t.”