Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (42 page)

IN THE PLANTER’S
villa in the hills of Antioquia there was a bustle of impending departure. Only the tight inner circle around El Pobrecito knew either the reason behind it or his real destination. But everyone who worked for him was aware that the big man was moving out. Something major was going down and he obviously had no intention of being around when it happened. The rumours were rife, especially among his more junior employees, like the men who washed his fleet of jeeps, maintained his extensive armoury or brought in the pineapples he so enjoyed. Some said he was planning a hit on Señor Margoles, the mayor of Medellín, or on one of the rival cartels to the north. There was even some wild gossip that he was retiring. But the word on everyone’s lips was that Nelson García was moving his base up to Panama and taking only a handful of his most trusted people with him.

Amid the packing cases and the designer suitcases, El Pobrecito was focused on the task in hand. With just days to go, he wanted nothing left to chance. He called Suarez to join him on the balcony, gesturing for him to take a seat on one of the flimsy cane chairs that had seen better days.

‘That Englishman, Carlton, the soldier spy,’ began García, ‘the one those idiots in Buenaventura let escape. Where is he now?’

‘Back in London, Patrón
.
One of our people at El Dorado airport saw him board the flight.’

‘I think it’s time we made life uncomfortable for him, don’t you? Is Ana María ready?’

‘She is,’ replied Suarez, brushing a mould stain from the chair off his linen trousers. ‘She’s had a little matter to take care of, but that’s done now.’

‘Then it’s time to put the pressure on. Tell her to go ahead. Hide the Englishwoman somewhere safe and start sending demands to keep him guessing. I want him to lose his mind.’

‘Of course, Patrón. Right away.’

In London, the evening was already drawing in when Elise left work for the day. She could feel and see the difference now, the shorter, darker days as the impending British winter announced itself with lights coming on at 3.30 p.m. and squalls of fallen leaves swirling up from the pavements. Leaving the Stratford Gallery and the well-lit streets of Piccadilly behind her, she caught the bus south of the river, as she often did when the wind was turning the Thames choppy and she didn’t fancy commuting home by river taxi.

Deep in thought, she walked the last few hundred yards to their flat in Battersea. Except that Luke would not be home tonight, or the next night, or the one after that. He was off on yet another of his bloody assignments. And just when she thought they were making progress, that second meeting with Jackson all set up, the prospect of a more stable life for them both so tantalizingly close.

It was as she was passing beneath the arch of the railway bridge that it happened. A blind spot where, if there was no other traffic on the road, no one would see what was taking place. The white van sped past her, then slammed on its brakes, slewing to a stop just ahead. It happened so incredibly fast she had no time to react. The doors flew open and before she knew it she was being dragged into the back, a cloth was crammed into her mouth and a
black hood pulled over her head. In less than thirty seconds the van had moved off.

Jolting around in the back of the windowless vehicle, her arms tied roughly behind her back, Elise’s mind was in turmoil. Who were these people? Why her? It must be a case of mistaken identity. But as the shock of capture began to wear off and she took stock of her situation, she realized she knew exactly who was behind it. And if they were the same people who had happily drilled a hole in her boyfriend’s foot, she was in deep trouble.

ANA MARÍA ACOSTA
had thought hard about what she would do with Elise when they brought her in. Should she keep her in comfort, or deprive her of sleep and starve her? Have her bound hand and foot and chained to a radiator, or let her pace around, scared and confused, in a locked room? Maybe she could even have a bit of fun with her, play with her, like an orca tossing a seal into the air before the kill. After all, the bosses seemed indifferent to what she did to her, whether she lived or died, just as long as her continued captivity proved a distraction to the interfering Englishman Luke Carlton.

But Ana María was nothing if not thorough when it came to preparation. She was not a woman who left anything to chance, a quality that had marked her out for great responsibility within the cartel. By the time Elise was being snatched that evening, Ana María had already chosen a succession of different hiding places where they would hold her. Some were cartel safe houses, secure addresses all over London with well-established covers where the rent was always paid on time, in cash, and nobody asked awkward questions. Just one aspect of the massive, multi-billion-dollar global cocaine trade that had oiled and corrupted its way into so many hidden corners of the economy. Others were out in the Home Counties, a discreet rural garage or a disused stables on a farm tucked well away from the road and prying
eyes. It was vital that they kept moving the girl around, never let her stay in one place for too long.

Which was why Ana María was so apoplectically angry when they phoned her to tell her where they had initially taken Elise. ‘How stupid can you people be?’ she shouted. Unbelievable! The idiots had driven her to a garage in a Twickenham cul-de-sac just two streets away from the lock-up containing the device. Apparently the van was sitting in there now, engine off, with Elise in the back. Ana María heaved a sigh of exasperation. She made a snap decision.

‘Move her,’ she told them. ‘I’ll text you the address. And don’t ever take her back there, do you understand?’ Then a thought occurred to her. No, surely they couldn’t have overlooked that. It was in the instructions. But she’d better make sure.

‘
Y muchachos
,’ she added. ‘And, guys, please tell me you took her phone off her straight away?’

There was a long pause before the reply came.

‘The phone is not with her.’

‘You mean she has no phone?’ pressed Ana María. ‘Or you took it off her?’

‘We took it off her.’

‘When?’

‘A while back.’

‘And you’ve thrown it away?’

Again, a pause before the answer.

‘It’s thrown away.’

It was like dealing with primary-school children. Ana María was far from happy with the responses she was getting: it was blindingly obvious that they had forgotten to take Elise’s phone. But she knew she would never get a straight answer out of the people the cartel had sent for this job. She would have to work with what they had given her. At least the phone was gone; now they needed to move the prisoner to a new location.

Inside the van the air was thick with tobacco smoke and expletives. The men who had snatched Elise were an eclectic bunch:
two Colombians, two Spaniards and a Bolivian, a taciturn South American Indian the others rudely called Indigeno – ‘Native’. As they waited for the address to come through, they had some colourful names for the bossy woman from Madrid with her
elegante
language and her condescending tone. They grumbled about her and the fuss she was making.

None of them paused to wonder whether their prisoner might understand Spanish. Silent and motionless beneath her black hood, Elise was tuning in to every word, learning to recognize each separate voice, noting their disapproval of Ana María and running through the possibilities of how she could exploit this. Curiously, she was not scared. She felt alive and alert, poised like a predatory cat. She would wait for her moment.

A few kilometres away and in another borough of Greater London, the woman they cursed was working on the message to be delivered that night. Over the past few weeks, Ana María had tried gently to argue against the kidnapping. It was not that she felt compassion for Elise, far from it, more that she had a fine sense of operational security. Why jeopardize the main event? she had asked. Why risk leading the
inglés
to where the device was hidden? Or to the arrest of a main team member? She had a strong sense that Suarez shared her misgivings. But El Pobrecito was adamant: he wanted to taunt Carlton and his government. That was his vindictive nature. And he was the boss, the
patrón
, so Ana María did as she was told and drafted the message she would give them. She read it back. ‘We have your Elise Mayhew. We know about her. She is your spy’s girlfriend. So you have forty-eight hours. Send home all of your spies from our country. Or she disappears. For ever.’

No, that didn’t sound right. She crossed out the last four words and replaced them with something more cryptic. ‘Or you will see the consequences.’ Now, how best to communicate it? It was a choice between a cyber café or a phone box. Ana María decided to go for the traditional approach. Just why, she wondered, as she pulled on her coat and hunched her shoulders
against the damp night breeze, does anyone use phone boxes any more when everyone has a mobile? Call girls and criminals, she decided, glad that a few phone boxes had survived. Ideally, of course, she would have sent someone else to deliver the message over the phone – she had not kept her name off every criminal database for so long without being extremely cautious. But Ana María had had enough of others making crass mistakes and she remembered the advice her mother had given her all those years ago in their kitchen in Madrid. ‘You want a job done properly? You do it yourself.’ How very true.

She heaved open the heavy door of the red public phone box, ignoring the gaudy calling cards of the prostitutes and the rank smell of urine that wafted up from the stone floor. She took a small black box, about the size of a cigarette packet, from her bag. The VC-300 portable voice changer had been Suarez’s idea and she was glad of it now. A length of wire extended from the box to an ‘acoustic coupler’, which resembled a single cushioned headphone and had to be placed next to the phone’s receiver. Then she dialled 999. When the call connected she asked to be put through to the police. Ana María spoke clearly and without fear, delivering her scripted message in exactly ten seconds, then hung up. Precisely forty-seven seconds later she was in a car heading west, putting some distance between her and the phone box. She had kept her mobile switched off.

SID KHAN WAS
working late in his Vauxhall Cross office when he took the call from the Met. It was from Central Communications Command in Lambeth and a phone call from them at nearly ten o’clock at night was unlikely to be good news.

The Metropolitan Police receive an average of twenty-one thousand 999 calls every day. Some are genuine emergencies, most are not. The one they had received at 2012 hours that night had sounded like another prank, but the call handler wasn’t so sure. She logged the call, recorded its contents, mapped its source on the geolocator – a phone box in Shepherd’s Bush – and alerted her supervisor, pointing out that the caller had hung up after just ten seconds. The supervisor had wasted no time. She had rung SCO19, Specialist and Crime Ops, in Cobalt Square, just south of Vauxhall station. She relayed the message that a man with a thick Glaswegian accent had rung in from a phone box, claiming to be holding hostage one Elise Mayhew. In Cobalt Square they had run a quick data check on the name and ‘Luke Carlton’ had flashed up alongside it, with instructions to alert the switchboard at SIS in case of any suspicious incident.

‘Sorry to bother you so late,’ said the voice in Sid Khan’s ear, as he took the call in his office, nursing a cup of Tetley’s tea, one of the few comforts left to him during all the extra hours he had put
in, night after night, since the crisis had erupted. ‘It’s Superintendent Chris Worlock here. I’m the senior investigating officer on a potential hostage case, which might involve one of your people . . .’

When the call ended Khan put down the phone and held his head in his hands. This could not be happening. But it was, and while the police would do their thing, acting on what little they had to go on, he needed to take certain measures at his end. They had a duty of care towards Luke, who would expect to be told at once, but Khan also had a live operation running. He reached for the phone and started to punch in Angela’s number, then stopped, his finger poised over the buttons. Slowly he put down the receiver. Quietly, Khan tidied his desk, turned out the lights and left for the night.

THE COLOMBIAN CITY
of Medellín is served by a large and busy airport, José María Córdova International, the second biggest in the country. But the flight coming in from MacDill Airforce Base in Tampa, Florida, did not land there. Instead, under a discreet agreement between Washington and Bogotá, clearance was given by the Colombian government for the grey-painted US Commando II transport plane to touch down at the lesser-known regional airport of Olaya Herrera. Out of sight of anyone passing through the passenger terminal, the military flight from MacDill taxied to a stop inside one of the large hangars to the south. Onboard, Luke stretched, yawned and unbuckled his seatbelt. Anticipating a long night ahead, when he would need to stay fully alert, he had slept for most of the four-hour flight. The operatives from Langley were checking the signals on their mobile phones while the Special Ops guys were knocking gloved fists together, a silent gesture of good luck before a mission.

When the ramp went down, the team filed out to a waiting fleet of three mud-spattered civilian minivans. All three, Luke noted, had little curtains pulled across the back windows, ostensibly against the sun. A man was standing in front of them, with his hands on his hips and a cigar clamped in his mouth. He seemed vaguely familiar to Luke, yet at first he couldn’t place him. He knew he didn’t particularly like him, but he couldn’t
recall why. As soon as the man opened his mouth he remembered. It was Sergio Ramirez, the laconic CIA officer he had encountered in Tumaco, the one he had initially mistaken for an OAP playing draughts. So much had happened since then, but Luke remembered two things about Ramirez: that he had refused to give him anything useful on El Pobrecito, and that he had warned him to stay well away from the drug lord. This could be awkward.