Deadly States (Seaforth Files by Nicholas P Clark Book 2) (23 page)

“It looks like there was more than one way to sort this wee mess
out after all. Old friend.”
Jack
put
his foot
down
on the accelerator and the Range Rover
growled contentedly as it headed in the direction
of his
office building. He hoped like hell that the police had concluded their investigation
of the explosion in the building before he arrived; if not, he had
no idea where he would go to next. The one thing that he was certain
of was that he could not drive around all night with an unconscious
Irishman in his car. A car, which in a very short space of time, once the
police had reviewed the CCTV footage back at the garage; they would
be looking for, with a view to stopping it, at all costs.

Jack pulled into the small staff car park of his office building, at street
level, with Barry still dead to the world. Barry had not made a single
voluntary
movement since Jack hit him with the gas. His body was
dead weight and it rocked around with each manoeuvre Jack made—
had it not been for the seat belt, then Barry would have landed on the
floor after a very short space of time.

The staff car park was really a small annex off the main car park,
where the bomb had exploded earlier that
day. It was not part
of the
main crime scene, yet it offered Jack a clear view of the main cark
park
through the security railings between the two.
As he parked up in the
almost
empty lot, he studied the main car park very carefully. There
wasn’t a
single
policeman to
be seen. That was
highly
unusual.
It
could take days for a scene to be thoroughly
examined; and even the
highly ineffective South
African cops normally took that long. What
they lacked in results and arrest rates, they
more than made up for
through their amateur dramatics. They had many years practice playing to the world’s media as they tried to present a
modern force that

took the rule of law very seriously. That historic legacy
of putting on
a show without actually doing much about solving crime was a hard
habit to break, and the new black recruits that were joining the force
in their thousands quickly fell into the same habits as those who had
once oppressed them with such tactics.
After all, no one in the old
force was going to risk life and limb to find the killer of some teenager in
one
of
the
shanties;
or
investigate
claims
that a crime had been carried out against a member of the public by a police officer.

When he was confident that the coast was well and truly clear, Jack
got
out
of the Range Rover, stowed Barry’s weapons in the boot, and
then he headed for the nearby lift. He pressed the up button but the
orange light which indicated that the lift
had
been summoned,
did
not
come
on. He pressed the button again. There was still nothing.
Through frustration he pressed the button several more times. It was
no use. The lifts had been disabled shortly after the bomb went
off,
in case there was a fire, and the all clear to switch them back on again
had not been given. Feeling a little sore and embarrassed, Jack turned
and walked away.

The stairs were at the other side of the small car park. As he crossed
to the door that led to the stairwell, he took another look across to the
main car park. What seemed like miles
of police tape fluttered on the
breeze, and it looked as if there wasn’t a wall or ceiling tile that hadn’t
taken some
damage from the
blast. In Jack’s
opinion it would take
weeks for the company that
owned the building to make all the necessary repairs just to make the place safe. Yellow
evidence bags filled
with rubble had been left
piled up at the side
of the
main lot. Jack
shook his head and then he smiled. How in the name of all that was
holy
could the police ever hope to present any
of that
evidence in a
court of law? There wasn’t even the pretence of trying to maintain the
integrity
of the evidence chain. It was as if they had all downed tools
once it was
quitting time and that was an end to their investigation.
That probably wasn’t that far from the truth.

Jack cautiously opened the door leading to the stairwell. He paused
for a
moment and listened. There were no sounds coming from the
floors above,
except for the low
drone from the air conditioning system. Jack hurried up the stairs. It would not be that long before Barry
would come back round, and Jack wanted to have someone there to
take him into custody when that happened.

It had been a while since anyone used the stairway entrance to the
office, and the door put up an unexpected amount of resistance when
he pushed against it. On entering his suite of offices he found that to
his alarm, the door was
being held back
by
papers and files, which
were lying all
over the floor. Surely Robert’s men weren’t so arrogant
as to kidnap his PA from the office, with a major police investigation
taking
place downstairs, Jack thought. Then again, it
might
explain
why the police seemed to have abandoned their investigation in the
parking lot so quickly. Robert
only had to make a phone call and the
police would have packed up and left his men to carry
out their
own
investigation; as well as the kidnapping. Their investigative techniques
were not as refined as those adopted by the police, and given the fact
that no really important information was kept in the office, that impromptu investigation would not have bore fruit.

The mess was more of a message to Jack than a serious attempt to
find
out useful information about what it was that he and his company were up to in South
Africa—a well paid cleaner,
or
one of their
own spooks could have found out all that Robert,
or his government,
needed to know, and Jack assumed that they
had already
done that.
The message was very clear—Robert was a powerful man who had the
contacts and access to get to Jack whenever he wanted. Even the police
were in service to him and Jack should not think for
one moment that
he could ever get the better of him and live—though Jack had thought
of little else since the meeting at the old fertiliser plant.

Jack moved through the smashed entrance where his PA worked,
and he went into his
private
office.
To his surprise
everything was
just as he had left it. There were two full size filing cabinets crammed
full
of documents in his
office,
but neither
of them appeared to have
been touched.
Perhaps the untouched
office was just another subtle
message from Robert, Jack thought—I can either play nice,
or nasty,
depending
on how you follow
my instructions. Or perhaps they were
disturbed while they were making a mess in the main part of the suite
of
offices? The private security firm which looked after the building
used armed guards and they may not have had the same arrangement
with Robert as the police had with him, or as Jack believed that he had
with the police.

Jack sat down behind his desk. He picked up the phone. For a moment he was lost. Every time that he picked up the phone in his office
his PAwas always on the other end. He would simply tell her who he
wanted to speak to and as if by magic, within a few seconds, the other
person would be
on the line. He knew the number for the
embassy
from memory—learning it was part of his preparation for the mission.
He punched in the numbers. The sound
of an unrecognised number
screamed at him down the line.
Damn it,
he thought.
I need an external line
. She had told him many times how to get an outside line, but
as he never envisaged a day when he would be making a call from the
office without
her assistance,
he hadn’t
paid that
much attention to
her.
Nine!
He grinned to himself when the number came to him. Out
of
practice he may have been, but an expert he still was as he punched in
the numbers to the embassy.

“Hello,” Jack said, into the handset.
“I
need to speak to someone
about help with a business deal that I want to set up here in South Africa. There have been a few problems with my backers back in the UK.
They say that they need to be reassured about the security situation in
the country before they invest. Can you get someone with the relevant
expertise to call me back on this number? Thank you.”

Jack didn’t give the person on the other end of the phone a chance to
answer any
of
his
questions. That was the agreed
protocol when
one
of the field agents wanted to speak to someone from the intelligence service. It was a well thought
out plan, but like everything else
in South
Africa, the embassy at times tottered along
on a wing and
a
prayer. Jack hoped that he had been speaking to someone familiar
with the protocol and not just a random cleaner who happened to be
passing the phone as it rang. His fears evaporated when the phone on
his desk began to ring. He quickly picked up the receiver.

“Is
this a
secure line?....
Good.....
You
do
know
who this
is?.....
Good..... I need a team at my place of work.... A pick up.... Force is not
needed at the moment, but that could change at any time... There
is
some heat
on me at this time, so I cannot guarantee the integrity
of
this
location....
Moving
the
package
would
be
too
risky...
Thank
you..... Goodbye....”

Jack replaced the receiver and then he lay back in the chair. It was
clear that there was a lot that could go wrong before the security team
arrived; but for the first time that
day
he felt like he was in control
of the situation; more or less. He liked using code even when he was
talking over a secure line. For Jack, there was no such thing as a secure
line. As soon as his side came up with a way to keep important conversations private, then it would never
be too long before their
enemies
found a way to crack the technology.
And
even
more fundamental
than that; surely a foreign power would find it
highly
suspicious if
a
phone line
on
one
of their telecommunication networks wasn’t accessible?
As soon as such a line was flagged up then they would find
some way to listen in to the conversations of those who were using the
secure line. A bug close to the phone;
or a human asset listening in to
the calls from his office. He may have been a spy from a different era,
but the fact that he was still alive when so many
of the more recent
recruits had fallen, indicated just how well his old fashioned methods
worked.

In a few short minutes he would be able to rid himself
of at least
part
of his current set
of
problems, and that would free him to concentrate on what he needed to do next. There was nothing more important than freeing his PA and taking Robert
out. When that was
over and done with then he might request an audience with Barry. His
old associate had mentioned some very worrying things
during that
eventful evening, some of which had an air
of truth about them; Jack
was determined to find out just what was true and what was bullshit.
Robert
may not be the only
one who would see the less friendly side
to his character before too long.

As Jack lay back in the chair he tried to relax. It had been an action packed day, even by his standards, and his body and mind both
needed a well-earned break. It was no use. He simply couldn’t fight his
own nature; his mind could not stay at peace as he slipped back into
full tactical mode. It was how he stayed alive, but it was also why he
was burning through his allotted physical and mental resources at a
rate that would alarm even the most forgiving
doctor. His was a job
that aged a man. His was a job that made a man truly feel alive. His
was a job that he would not change for anything.

The authorities were
bound to
be
monitoring the telephones in
the
building and the moment that he placed the call to the embassy
they
would have been alerted.
At that moment someone would be on
their way to the office. They would probably keep their distance so that
they
could find out who Jack was meeting; but everything that was to
fol