Assassin (34 page)

‘I know you do,’ said Dame Agatha Bewley in a conciliatory tone that was almost maternal, as if she were settling a fight between argumentative children. ‘But I must say I’m surprised Bahr refused to pay any attention to what Mr Carver told him. After all, it doesn’t hurt to take precautions, no matter how implausible a threat might be.’

‘It’s a personal thing,’ said Carver. ‘We had a run-in recently. I made him look stupid in front of his boss. He’ll never admit I could be right again.’

‘His boss … really?’ asked Dame Agatha, her eyebrows arching as she leaned forward on her desk and looked at Carver over the top of her reading glasses. ‘Might one ask … ?’

‘Afraid not,’ said Carver. ‘Confidential. But you can take it that I’m personally familiar with the President’s security arrangements. And I want to keep him alive. That’s also personal.’

‘I try not to get personal myself,’ said Manners. ‘I look at this professionally, and I’d ask a simple question: suppose Bahr believed you, Carver, how would that change anything? He’s already done everything he can. Unless he has specific information to go on, what else is there?’

‘He could keep an eye out for Damon Tyzack.’

‘Don’t worry, we’ll be doing that. Crowd control and observation is a police responsibility and I’ve already entered every available picture of Tyzack into the facial-recognition software we’ll be using for the event. If he’s there, we’ll spot him. You seem amused, Carver, why’s that?’

‘I’m not a big believer in facial-recognition programs. They’re too unreliable, too many ways to throw them off, particularly when you’re working in real time. In the lab, after the event, yes, then you might get something you can use. But live, well, I’d back myself to get past any system that I know of, and Tyzack will too.’

‘Maybe we have systems you don’t know about.’

‘Try me.’

‘That’s enough!’ Dame Agatha’s voice cut through the verbal wrist-wrestling match. Mother was losing her patience. ‘I find this pointless male need to compete deeply, deeply tedious. It is my judgement, which is shared by the Home Secretary, that we need to consider Mr Carver’s information seriously. And I would add that both I and Mr Grantham have reason to respect Mr Carver’s professional abilities, if not always his tact. Let us assume, for now, that we are facing a threat from a former member of the special forces whose personality is amoral, cunning and utterly ruthless. Let us also suppose that he may be making some form of airborne attack. So, Assistant Commissioner, perhaps you would be good enough to talk us through the existing precautions, before we move on to anything else?’

‘Certainly,’ said Manners, getting to his feet. A 50-inch screen was fixed to the wall at one end of the room, linked to a laptop. Manners bent over the keyboard and aerial images of south-west England, followed by central Bristol, appeared on the screen. Just as Tyzack had done when talking to Arjan Visar, he described the journey that would bring Lincoln Roberts on Air Force One to RAF Fairford and then on by helicopter to College Green. Then he turned his attention to the presidential motorcade.

‘Basically it’s a combination of British and US vehicles and personnel,’ he began. ‘In the lead we have armed motorcycle outriders from the Royalty and Diplomatic Protection Department. They’re followed by three cars containing our officers from S015, running in front of and to either side of Cadillac Two, which is one of the presidential limousines. The Chief of Staff will ride in that, along with the Emergency Satchel. Inside the satchel is everything the President needs to order the launch of a nuclear war, so we try to keep it safe.’

‘So I should hope,’ muttered Jack Grantham, who had remained silent during Manners’s argument with Carver, preferring to enjoy it as a form of spectator sport.

Manners chose to take the remark as a joke and gave a forced chuckle. ‘Absolutely! Wouldn’t want to lose that. So … There then follow several more escort vehicles, split between SO15 and the US Secret Service. Their occupants are very heavily armed, and trained in close-quarters combat. With the greatest of respect to Mr Carver and Mr Tyzack, they are capable of taking down any conceivable ground-attack short of a full-scale military assault. Anyway, these escorts drive fore and aft of Cadillac One, in which Mr Roberts will be riding. There will also be a number of minibuses filled with White House staff and members of the press, all vetted in advance, of course.

‘I have to say that the only form of attack that I can envisage having any sort of success against this motorcade would be some kind of guided missile, though it would have to be very powerful indeed. Cadillac One is as well armoured as a Challenger battle tank. Serious question, Carver: does Tyzack have access to that kind of ordnance?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Carver. ‘And I don’t see him going for a missile, even if he could get one. Whatever he does, he’ll want to be there. This is about him as much as the President.’ Carver gave a wry chuckle. ‘With Damon Tyzack it’s always personal.’

This time Manners’s smile was genuine. ‘Well, in that case, he’ll be looking for an opportunity at the speech itself.’

He put another image up on the screen. ‘This is Broad Quay. They’re putting the stage at the waterside, here, facing inland, with the President’s back to the water. As you can see, there are a number of newly completed or renovated towers along the right-hand, eastern side of the quay. These contain offices, hotels or residential properties. All will be repeatedly searched in the run-up to the speech. All rooms with windows giving a clear line of sight to the stage will be emptied and secured. All roofs will be occupied by our people and/or US Secret Service. Aside from that, the site comprises an open expanse where the crowd will gather, with wide roads on either side, running back several hundred metres, wider by the stage, but narrowing the further it gets inland. On the west side of the quay, that’s the left as you look at it, there’s nothing but low buildings all the way back, very few of which have flat roofs. So there are virtually no potential shooting positions, even if any would-be assassin could get in those buildings in the first place. And we will be making sure that he can’t.’

‘How about underground access to the site?’ asked Carver.

‘All checked, rechecked, guarded and sealed,’ said Manners. ‘Every sewer, every drain. The rats must be wondering what hit them. So, to continue … Once the President arrives, all the close guarding work will be handled by his Secret Service personnel. Our efforts will be concentrated on the crowd. We’re planning body, bag and shoe searches, very much like airport security, with walk-through scanners, explosives dogs and extensive video monitoring of the crowd. And don’t worry, Mr Carver. We’ll be relying on good old-fashioned human observation as well as fancy technology, and we’ll be watching out for troublemakers, known terrorists, anyone who even scratches their arse in a suspicious manner. And just in case anyone does get a gun past security, and makes it somewhere near the stage, the President’s autocue will be a reinforced, bullet-proof shield. As I say, we’re taking this very seriously indeed.’

Damon Tyzack was a man for whom the phrase, ‘I know where you live,’ was more than a figure of speech. He had long known exactly where Bill Selsey went at the end of a working day. Now he was also certain that Selsey had been blown. All the more reason, then, to dispose of him as soon as possible.

One of Tyzack’s men, Ron Geary, had trailed Selsey from the moment he stepped on to the street outside the MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross, obeyed the signals that took him across several lanes of rush-hour traffic and stepped up to the platform at Vauxhall railway station, where he took a train to the terminus at Waterloo. There he made the five-minute walk across to the suburban services at Waterloo East, spent ten minutes browsing magazines at a WHSmith bookstall and buying a cup of Earl Grey tea before getting on his regular evening train to Lee in the south-east suburbs of London.

Like most of Tyzack’s more reliable employees, Geary was a Special Forces veteran. He was therefore well able to spot the tail that MI6 had put on Selsey and make sure that he was not spotted himself. Along the way, he sent pictures of both MI6 officers from his phone to Tyzack, who was being driven south in the back of a white Ford Transit van, as anonymous a form of transport as the roads of Britain provide.

Geary stayed on the train, handing over the surveillance to another one of Tyzack’s people, who picked up Selsey as he came out of Lee station and turned right on to Burnt Ash Road. Neither Selsey nor his MI6 tail noticed the harassed-looking woman smoking a cigarette and pushing a baby-carriage who followed them along the busy commuter route, still laden with the last dregs of evening traffic trying to get on to the South Circular.

Her name was Raifa Ademovic. She had arrived in Britain five years earlier as an illegal immigrant, imported by Tyzack just as he was establishing his own trafficking network. With her greasy hair, prominent nose and almost permanent scowl, Raifa was never going to be of much value in the brothel to which she was first shipped. But the remarkable number of credit cards, banknotes, driving licences and wallets that she managed to lift from her paltry clients suggested that she might have other, exploitable talents. When she reacted to a john who tried to give her a playful smack by punching, clawing and biting him into the nearest A&E department that impression was confirmed. Tyzack had been making good use of her bad attitude ever since.

Raifa turned into the side road on which Selsey lived and watched as he approached and entered his semi-detached home. With a sullen defiance typical of her character, she stopped directly opposite the house, in full view of anyone inside it, or standing guard outside. She walked round to the front of the baby-carriage and briefly made encouraging noises at the small child - borrowed from a friend - who sat there, doped to the gills with motion-sickness tablets. Then she lit another cigarette, turned her back on the captive toddler and dialled a number on her mobile phone. In the genteel, middle-class area where Selsey lived, plenty of respectable citizens might disapprove of such blatantly bad mothering, but none would suspect her true purpose.

‘He is in house now,’ she told Tyzack. ‘I see three other men. One following Selsey, he go inside house with him. Another man, he meet them at door, stay in house also. Final man in car outside. He watch Selsey go by, raise hand to say hello to man following, then make call. I guess he tell boss, OK, they get here.’

‘Are they armed?’ Tyzack asked.

‘Man following Selsey, he carrying gun for sure. Other two, I could not see. But if they trying to protect him, why not carry gun?’

‘Why not, indeed. Thank you, my dear. I really don’t know what I would do without you, even though you really are quite remarkably unattractive.’

Raifa spat on the ground, loud enough for Tyzack to hear the hawk. ‘Hey, fuck you too!’ she said, and then hung up.

In his Transit van, now circling London on the M25, Tyzack laughed. There were very few people in the world he would ever allow to be so rude to him. But there was something so relentlessly unpleasant about Raifa Ademovic that he found himself admiring her more than any other woman he knew. There was none of that cringing desire to please that oozed from so many females, not the remotest attempt at seduction, just an unbending hostility. That, thought Damon Tyzack, is my kind of woman.

‘Thank you, Assistant Commissioner,’ said Dame Agatha, who was both the host and chairperson of the meeting called to discuss the appropriate response to Tyzack and the potential threat he posed to the President’s life. ‘I think we can all agree that every possible precaution is being taken. Rear-Admiral Johnstone?’

Manners stepped back from the screen and his place was taken by a short, stocky man in naval uniform, his rank denoted by the thick golden band around the wrist of his dark blue uniform jacket, topped by a thinner, looped band. He stood with his feet apart, as if Dame Agatha’s office on the top floor of Thames House, an office building on the north bank of the river Thames, might at any moment be hit by a rogue wave or sudden squall.

‘I’ll be dealing with the joint Navy-RAF response to this new threat of air attack,’ he said in a calm, reassuring Scots accent. ‘Essentially, we will be stepping up the level of protection that was already in place. Eurofighter Typhoon jets from 3 (Fighter) Squadron, based at Coningsby in Lincolnshire, are ready at all times to scramble within three minutes as part of their Quick Reaction Alert capability. The original plan was thus to keep them on the ground, awaiting the order to scramble. Three Typhoons will now be patrolling the airspace above and around Bristol before, during and immediately after the President’s speech.’

A soft smile crossed his ruddy, square-jawed face. ‘We have assured the Americans that the Typhoons will be close enough to protect Mr Roberts, but not so close as to drown out his voice.’

As a gentle murmur of amusement rippled around the room, Johnstone continued, ‘We will be telling the media about the RAF presence over Bristol. We think it will make for a good wee story. It will also distract them from the Navy’s contribution. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the Type 45 destroyer. This is the first of them, HMS
Daring
. She’s a very rare lassie. We originally ordered twelve Type 45s. That order was cut to six, for financial reasons. And now, in the current climate, we’ll be lucky to see three. But she’s a very splendid lassie, too, for all that.’

A picture appeared of a long, low hull topped by a series of huge triangular towers.