Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (6 page)

Back in his car, Luke had one more call to make. He had put it off for long enough. When the phone rang in the Stratford Gallery, just off Piccadilly, they were busier than usual. The gallery had just taken on a promising young artist, George someone. Back from the Middle East with some impressive watercolours.

‘Stratford Gallery. Elise Mayhew speaking.’ Her tone was polite but brisk. The exhibition was less than two weeks away.

‘Lise. It’s me. I’ve got to go away for a spell. Might be a week, might be longer. Sorry, wish I knew.’

There was a pause and he pursed his lips. How many of his mates’ marriages and relationships had he watched wither and die while they disappeared for weeks and months on end, serving with Special Forces? The endless uncertainty of always being on call, bracing yourself for the bleeper, then coming home with the dreaded thousand-yard stare, having seen and done things you could never talk about outside the unit. A few had fallen completely by the wayside: he had seen one-time supermen with greying stubble and expanding waistlines, now spending their days on a park bench in Hereford, nursing cans of Special Brew.
It wasn’t a pretty sight. He hadn’t wanted to end up like that so he had left the forces. But with this new job came the problem of secrecy. You were supposed to tell only your nearest and dearest what you really did for a living. He and Elise were not married and there were times when he thought she must be close to giving him the boot and moving on. So he told her the bare minimum. Elise knew where he worked, that was all, and he was grateful that she never asked any questions about what he did.

‘You’re doing that thing again, aren’t you?’ she said finally.

‘What thing?’

‘You’re chewing the inside of your cheek.’ He knew it bugged her. ‘I can hear it. So. You’re off again. Will you be back in time for the exhibition?’ He could hear the hurt in her voice and it cut him to the core. He hated abandoning her like this. ‘I’m so sorry, Lise. You know I can’t tell you where I’m going but . . . if I was to say it was somewhere hot and tropical, what could I bring you back?’

‘You. Wrapped in banana leaves.’

‘That is
so
cheesy!’

‘I know. That’s why you love me. Be safe.’

Luke wasn’t fooled by her breezy farewell. She worried about him when he was away. It was something of an issue between them. The truth was, he thought, she probably had good reason to worry this time.

THE MORNING AFTER
they had found the Englishman’s body Major Humberto Elerzon was in a truly foul mood. Short of sleep, and troubled by an inexplicable rash in a sensitive place, he swore at anyone who got close to him. All night long those sons of bitches at Headquarters in Bogotá had been ringing his mobile, asking their dumb questions. How had he let this happen? Why hadn’t he caught the culprits yet? Where was his report? Now they were sending someone down from Internal Investigations and some overpaid suit from his country’s intelligence service, ANIC, was coming with him on the morning flight. Major Elerzon made a quick calculation. His promotion might have stalled for now but he could still play their games. If he was smart he could even come out of this on top. And if that failed? Well, there was always Plan B.

He picked up the phone and issued arrest orders left, right and centre. Names came into his head and flew out of his mouth. ‘Gutierrez! Ramierrez! Almieda!’ The list went on and on.

‘But, Chief,’ protested the sergeant, ‘the last two are informants. They work for us!’

‘I don’t care!’ shouted Elerzon. ‘Lock them up! And tell them I want more names!’

By mid-morning he was feeling better. Dressed in his pressed uniform, despite the heat, he stood beside the runway as the
turboprop from Bogotá taxied to a halt. When the men from the capital alighted, squinting at the sun already directly overhead, he gave them his best, most unctuous smile. Their questions came thick and fast, even as they climbed into the jeep, but he held up a calming hand. The situation was well under control, he assured them. ‘I have good news,’ he said soothingly. ‘We have made many arrests and, yes, they are talking. Soon this will all be resolved and you can return home.’ The men from Bogotá looked unimpressed, but the major continued brightly, ‘First, some breakfast. We have mango, papaya—’

‘We have eaten already,’ interrupted the man from ANIC. ‘Just take us to our hotel, then show us what you’ve come up with.’

‘As you wish,’ replied Major Elerzon, tapping the driver on the shoulder, and they lurched forward over the rutted, potholed road and on into town. He checked his guests into the Paradiso, the hotel next to the police base, making a great play of telling the clerk to give them the best rooms in the house. But his mind was telling him one thing alone, over and over again. You need to get these bastards off your patch and back to Bogotá before they go digging where they shouldn’t.

Checking in at Heathrow for the direct 22.40 Avianca flight to Bogotá, Luke spotted him immediately at the departure gate. The lawyer. It had to be him. Who else would carry a briefcase, these days? Luke held out his hand and introduced himself. The man looked up, startled, and dropped his boarding pass. ‘Oh! Yes. Hello. I’m John Friend, from Legal Affairs. They told you I was coming, I hope?’ A nervous laugh.

This, Luke thought, was going to test him in new ways. Friend was wearing a beige fishing jacket with pockets all over the place, the sort of item worn by actors in American films about city men losing their bearings in the wilderness, and a pair of black-rimmed, functional spectacles.

‘So how does this work?’ asked Luke, as they waited for their flight to be called. ‘Are you a career intelligence officer who happens to have a legal brain?’

‘Oh, nothing like that. I’m from DoJ, the Department of Justice. Part of the whole cross-government drive to bring us all into line. My job is to make sure the law is followed, that operations are cleared as legal. I’ll be looking into whether Benton took the right precautions and got his actions cleared at the appropriate level. And, um, I suppose keeping an eye on what you’re up to. You know,
Laborare pugnare parati sumus
!’ Friend chuckled knowingly, expecting him to share the joke.

Luke stared at him as if he’d been speaking fluent Martian. ‘Sorry. What?’

‘It’s Latin for “To work or to fight, we are ready!” Just a little saying we lawyers have.’

After that, they sat in silence.

Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic Luke jolted awake as the Airbus A330 bucked its way through an air pocket. A glass of Rioja just after take-off, a reheated meal, and he had packed in a few good hours’ kip. He could see Friend was fast asleep next to him, his spectacles halfway down his face, an open copy of the
Cambridge Law Journal
lying on his lap. He was snoring gently.

Luke rubbed his eyes, shifted in his seat and stared at his reflection in the window. Quite a journey his life had been so far: from orphan to bleak, lonely adolescence on his uncle’s sheep farm in Northumberland, to the comparative fleshpots of Edinburgh to read politics, a first-class degree with honours. Then throwing himself full tilt into the assault courses and mud beaches of south Devon as a potential Royal Marines officer, every inch of his body screaming with exertion. It had been worth it to pass the commando tests and be rewarded with the treasured ‘green lid’, the distinctive green beret of the Royal Marines, then get assigned to his first operational tour with 45 Commando in Afghanistan. Eight years in the Corps, then through gruelling, bone-breaking Selection into the elite Special Boat Service, and finally to where he was now: on contract to MI6 and serving his probation to become a fully paid-up intelligence officer.

There was an unopened packet of peanuts on his armrest, left
there by the flight attendant as he slept and Luke opened it now, shovelling the contents into his mouth and savouring the sudden hit of salt. If someone had said to him two years ago he would end up working for the spooks he would have laughed in their face. Desk jockeys, he would have called them. A bunch of Johnny English fantasists. Joining the Corps, becoming a bootneck, then the SBS, that was all he had ever dreamed of. Sweating his bollocks off in the jungles of Brunei, shivering rigid on some windswept Scottish island with a half-cooked rabbit for supper, living on the edge behind the lines in Afghanistan: that was the life he had chosen. He was a bootneck through and through. He told people he would only leave if they carried him out in a box. And that was very nearly what had happened.

On his third tour in Afghanistan, helicoptering in one night with a Special Forces task force for the discreet snatch of an HVT, a known Taliban player and his crew just west of Kandahar, the patrol was ambushed well before reaching its objective. Pinned down in open farmland, with concentrated machine-gun fire raking over their heads from a nearby mud-walled compound, Luke had radioed for air support. No mission was supposed to set off without a stack of escort aircraft ready to race to their rescue if they hit trouble. Sometimes the response would be a pair of Warthogs: squat, ugly US Airforce A10 Thunderbolt jets that came screaming out of nowhere, spitting 30mm shells from a rotating Gatling cannon in their nose, a rate of fire so fast it made a noise like an angry chainsaw. Sometimes it would be a pair of Apache helicopter gunships, under-slung with cannon and Hellfire missiles that could lock onto a target eight kilometres away, and sometimes it would be ‘fast air’: RAF Tornados or NATO F16 fighter jets or the like, dropping their 500-pound bombs, then disappearing over the horizon. And sometimes it would be a Reaper drone, a UAV, hovering unseen and unheard, controlled and directed by a pair of ‘pilots’ in a windowless cabin on a base in Nevada. But drones can’t see well through a low cloud base and tonight was just one of those nights; there was nothing else available.
Not poss. Poor vis. Civcas risk unacc
, came the response. Shit, thought
Luke. Someone in a distant ops room had decided they couldn’t have air support because there was an unacceptably high risk of causing civilian casualties. He felt like screaming into the radio, ‘There aren’t any bloody civilians here, you twats! We’re getting outmanoeuvred by the Taliban!’ But it was no use: they were on their own.

Luke never saw himself as any kind of hero but at that moment, as the mission commander, he didn’t hesitate. With his Diemaco C8 assault rifle in one hand and a high-explosive grenade in the other, he jumped up and zigzagged at a sprint towards the compound. Hard targeting, they called it. But at ten metres from his enemy, at the exact moment when he threw his grenade, Luke was not as hard a target as he would have liked. The first Taliban bullet had hit him just below the shoulder, spinning him around; the next removed a finger at the knuckle.

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat on the plane at the thought of that moment and the white-hot pain that had shot through him. He was not the squeamish type but even the memory of losing his finger caused him instinctively to rub the remaining bare knuckle with the thumb of his other hand. He remembered the instant his grenade had exploded, with him already on the ground, reeling and bleeding. Inside the Taliban compound the half-kilo of RDX high explosive had detonated with lethal force and the firing had ceased abruptly. His team had radioed in for a MERT, a Medical Emergency Response Team, bringing a twin-engined Chinook helicopter thundering in from Kandahar airfield. He remembered looking up at the medics, who told him cheerfully, ‘You’ll live,’ as the morphine kicked in and someone pressed a field dressing on his wound to staunch the bleeding.

Forty-four minutes after being shot, Captain Luke Carlton was under the surgeon’s knife; forty-eight hours after that he was sitting up in bed at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, taking visitors. ‘I’m threaders,’ he told them. It was bootneck slang for a really, really bad day. Yet six months later, fully recovered, he was marching up to the dais at Buckingham Palace for a
lady in her eighties to pin the Queen’s Conspicuous Gallantry Cross to his chest.

By the age of thirty-two he had already watched too many of his mates loaded onto helicopters in body bags, the dust and grit of southern Afghanistan following them up into the air in a departing spiral. If he carried on in this game, at this pace, his luck was going to run out, he was in no doubt about that. He needed to find a second career, something that kept him on his toes but with rather less chance of getting slotted. It was the ad in the
Globe & Laurel
, the Corps journal of the Royal Marines, both serving and retired, that caught his attention.

‘Missing the action?’ it read. ‘Bored but fit? Fancy a challenge? Call this number.’ So he did, encouraged by Elise, who quietly yearned for him to hang up his boots and hand in his uniform.

It had begun with the interviews. Two days of face-to-face evaluations with unremarkable people in an assessment centre somewhere in the Home Counties. Then there had been psychometric aptitude tests, the developed vetting, which probed into every aspect of his past, searching for weaknesses, anything that could be exploited by a hostile adversary. Then finally the induction course down at the Base on the south coast, where the Service trained all its recruits. Surveillance, counter-surveillance, dead-letter drops, agent handling, how to deal with friendly and not-so-friendly foreign intelligence liaison officers, and personal security, both digital and physical. Days and nights spent treading the rain-splashed streets of some coastal town, learning the tradecraft, meeting supposed ‘contacts’, coming up with a convincing cover story when challenged to explain what exactly he was doing driving down a dark alleyway at two o’clock in the morning with a bunch of blueprints of the local power station in his glove compartment. Luke had loved it. In Afghanistan he had had only the briefest glimpse of intelligence work, meeting Taliban informants cultivated by the brigade intelligence cell. But this was different: this was close to home; it felt real; he wanted in.

‘
SEÑORES Y SEÑORAS
. . .’
The cabin announcement cut short Luke’s reflections. They were coming in to land. He glanced across at Friend, this unwanted chaperone from Legal Affairs. A flight attendant was trying to wake him and get him to put his seat into the upright position. Friend, still submerged in his dream, was waving her away and muttering something about tennis on Saturday being out of the question.