Keep Calm (7 page)

*   *   *

WHEN HE WOKE
up, there was a dizzying amount of energy in the room. Two of the other girls, the one whom Heaton was with and another from downstairs, were on the bed trying to wake the little blonde up. She was limp and disheveled, lying flat on her back, draped across the bed like a used bath towel. Blood was coming out of her mouth and her nose as they tried desperately to wake her. Her face was swollen and bruised; the sheets were red and black: it looked like the back room of a butcher's market.

Men in suits thundered in. Adam struggled to get to his feet as he noticed his hands and shirt also covered in blood, his knuckles swollen and sore, the skin scraped up as if he'd been hitting the side of a wall somewhere. The men in suits rustled him to a stand. He tried to speak, but the same inability he'd been struck with before was back, only worse. It was as if he were under the influence of some drug that had shut down his motor nerves. He'd never had alcohol affect him like this.

The men in suits pulled him from the room, manhandling him as much as they could. They were mad and obviously doing everything they could not to kill him right then and there. He tried to explain that he had no idea what had happened, but once again his faculties failed him.

The last thing he saw as he left the room was the two women unsuccessfully begging the broken, battered, formerly beautiful blonde on the bed to speak to them. He started yelling for Heaton but was told with a kick that Heaton had left hours ago. The last thing he remembered as he was forcefully dragged and dropped down the long stairwell through the now-empty party house was someone saying that the police were already on their way.

The other thing he remembered was the bald bodyguard Peet, standing quietly, watching the whole thing go down with a slight grin on his face.

*   *   *

WHEN HE WOKE
next, several hours later, he was in a jail cell—a steel gray, cold cell. An older, balding, scared little man, maybe sixty-five, in a woman's dress, with fist-blotched lipstick on his face, was sitting on the bench across from him, clutching a small sequined handbag to his chest, a long flowing brunette wig on the seat beside him.

For the longest time Adam said nothing. He finally sat up. Every muscle in his body was on fire.

“Where am I? Do you know where this is?”

The broken little man answered with an accent straight out of
Oliver Twist
. “West End Central Police Station is where you is. Savile Row. They been in and out of here all morning, waiting for you to wake up.”

“Why am I here? Do you have any idea? Did they say anything?”

The artful dodger of a drag queen responded ever so carefully, not wanting to elicit a violent reaction.

“All's I know is that I heard them talking about you. About you beating on a young lady. Beat her an inch from the end of her life, they says. Says you busted up her fireman's hose.”

He was talking in rhyming slang, “fireman's hose” meaning “nose.” Adam had no idea what he was saying, but the soiled little man in the sinfully out-of-season dress was letting loose now, enjoying the role he had as the bearer of bad news.

“Had all kinds of suits and hats come round in here for a butcher's hook of you. Heard 'em says they want to make you pay up good, too, guv. Say they wants to put you in the box, put you away for a long, long time.”

Adam leaned back against an unforgiving wall. Here it was, for some unknown, unexplained, unfathomable reason, all happening again. A different town, different country, different circumstances, and a new set of colloquialisms, yet somehow he was back at square one. Back inside a prison cell.

Only one thought came into his broken, frazzled mind. “Kate.” It was painfully obvious, he thought; there was no way Kate wouldn't leave him this time. The truth just sat there, plain as the tip on his fireman's hose.

 

AFTER
■
3

Davina Steel sat at a table in the front of the family's breakfast/lunch whistle-stop. Her father was diligently preparing the next day's supply of tuna, chicken, turkey, and egg salad; her mother was cleaning the remains of the afternoon rush. The little café on Vernon Place, right across from Bloomsbury Square, had several office buildings, small colleges, and even the British Museum within spitting distance. Foot traffic was a constant. As a child, Steel would gaze out the window just as she was doing now, looking and observing. She'd noticed things, noticed people, training her mind to find little details, to suss out differences, day after day, to watch for patterns, to see who people were, what they were doing, and why. It helped. It took her mind off her life and the fact that she was at work ten hours a day on the weekends, even as an eleven-year-old child.

Today was different. Today she sat, looking out the window, trying to figure out who would go to the trouble of planting a bomb inside 10 Downing Street.

She wanted to know as badly as when, as a teenager, she puzzled over why a Pakistani-born cabdriver she observed out the shop window every day for four months had to spend so much time consulting his map. Why? Didn't he have “the knowledge”? Didn't he take the test like all the other cabbies? Didn't he know the streets like the back of his hand? Why was he always so lost? It bothered her, angered her, so she watched and made notes, followed him once, watched him and another cabbie both trying, almost comically, to figure out a simple London map. She petitioned the Information Ministry for copies of both applications of their licenses and found out that they and three other Pakistani nationals had all applied for their taxi permits the very same day, all five with cashier's checks from the very same bank, purchased by the very same foreign bank's overseas desk.

Further watching and digging brought her to the facts that she had already guessed: none of them took the intensive two-year test that was required. The same civil servant in the Ministry of Transportation had signed off on all of them on the very same morning. Somehow they had skirted the system. Why? Who had gone to the trouble to get five men taxi licenses? Why didn't they take the same two-year tests that the other cabbies did?

Those on duty the morning the precocious sixteen-year-old Steel marched into the lobby of Scotland Yard with the layman's evidence of a plot to use five London taxis as bombs at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee were, as they liked to say, “gobsmacked.” She was quickly ushered around to MI5's antiterrorism desk. The inspectors and the detectives were beside themselves when the young prodigy laid out, with simplicity and detail, the precise particulars of the plot. They were further dumbstruck when it turned out to be true and arrests were eventually made. “Thank God she's on our side” was a common refrain, and before long preparations were made, with her parents' consent, to put the young virtuoso into special university classes on forensic examination and crime scene analysis as soon as possible.

The cars, buses, tour coaches, and museum-visiting pedestrians floated by the little Bloomsbury sandwich shop window on what seemed to be a continuous loop. Steel sat with her ever-present pad of paper and made out lists. It had been twenty-four hours now since the bomb had ripped into the prime minister's midsection. She expected more test results on the blast's residue by the early evening. Since the meeting in the Cabinet Room, she had been combing security camera trails and visitor logs. The home secretary was correct: they had nothing, which was not alarming for a crime this fresh. This was big, though. She wanted to be ahead of the ball. She wanted to be ready when some inevitable group took credit or threatened more violence. She wanted to be poised to have SO15 and Darling and the thirty full-time investigators on her team at her disposal ready to pounce.

She wanted to will herself the answer to who had done this. Desperately wanted to win this one. She wanted to make Georgia Turnbull proud. Her mother didn't like Georgia. There was something about the powerful chancellor she didn't trust. Her mother didn't trust any women, especially rich ones—rich ones and politicians. She didn't trust Londoners, either. She wouldn't listen when Steel tried to tell her that Georgia was Scottish. From Glasgow. It didn't matter. Mother didn't care for her, which most likely made Steel look up to her even more.

*   *   *

THE FIRST THING
Steel did the following morning was to go up to North London to have a meal with a friend who worked at the Finsbury Park Mosque. Aviala Farouk was a nice-looking if slightly chubby twenty-eight-year-old Jordanian exile whom she had met three years earlier while working a case involving jihadists who were blackmailing employees of the mosque, forcing them to let traveling jihadists stay in their homes. Aviala was brave, emphatically nonviolent, pro-Western, honest, and dependable. He also had a noticeable crush on Steel. Aviala knew the minute she called why she wanted to see him.

They met at Harput Best Kebab, a small kebab and burger grill nestled by a rusty train overpass on Seven Sisters Road, steps from the Underground station. He had arrived with his hair still wet at ten thirty. She assumed by the harried way he ordered and drank his coffee that it was the first of the day. From what she knew of Aviala, he wasn't a late sleeper. She wondered if the hurried shower and the need for caffeine meant that he had had a sleepless night. Wondered if something in particular had caused it.

“You want to discuss the bombing at Number 10. Am I right, Davina?”

She nodded as she unwrapped a kebab she thought looked completely unappetizing.

“I knew they would put you on this incident. Knew you would be investigating.”

“Why do you say that, Aviala?”

“Because they are going to blame it on Islamists no matter who has done it, and you are the best there is at tracking down jihadist activity in London.”

She smiled and assumed he was once again overblowing her importance, a trait common to all of her dealings with him since their first case together, the underground terrorists' lodgings, was written up extensively in the
Telegraph
. Sometimes he would talk about her as if she were some kind of a superhero. She chalked it up to his crush, a crush that would remain forever unrequited, not only because Steel didn't see Aviala that way but also because in past conversations his observations about his parents led her to believe that they would never allow him to date a non-Muslim.

“Were they Islamists, Aviala? Is the attack on Lassiter related to any of these groups?”

“This one, I don't think so. I have heard nothing. You know I would tell you if I had, but this is not something that people are talking about. They are only sad. Sad and convinced it will bring people such as yourself around asking questions.”

“Well, they're correct, because here I am. With you. Having a kebab for breakfast. You know how I hate Middle Eastern food, so what does that tell you?”

“It tells me you are desperate for something to go on. I wish I had it for you, Davina, mostly so that I could make your struggle easier. Truthfully, I have nothing.”

After some small talk and a promise to have him up soon to her parents' café for a “decent meal,” she took the Piccadilly line to Euston station, where she transferred to the Northern line to Old Street and walked the four blocks to the offices of Heaton Global on Farringdon Street. She could have easily been driven by a Met patrol car, but she liked the Tube. She liked to wander London on her own, outside and underground, bathed in the sea of faces, scents, and sounds that washed over her on the go. She was at her most productive then, thinking through the questions she needed to answer in her daily work.

She was reasonably sure the conference meeting with the Heaton Global officers at Number 10, two hours before the blast, was unrelated. Sir David Heaton, the chairman of the company, was as high up and connected in British moneyed society and government circles as one could get and it was he, according to the logs, who had led the meeting, bringing in nine of his company officers.

Heaton was nearly a national institution. He had even cameoed in a series of travel ads abroad, extolling reasons to come visit London. If one were into creepy rich white men who had spent their lives stepping over the less fortunate, Steel would suggest that Heaton could be your idea of a perfect man. In short, she found him repulsive. Nonetheless, she needed to speak with him, if only to get his measure on the mood and movements at Number 10 just before the blast.

The HGI complex on Farringdon Street is a twelve-story modern showpiece that sits flat and firm on an entire city block. Davina was surprised at how quickly, once having showed her badge and announced herself, she was whisked through the three-story atrium lobby, across the back side of the building, and then up into what seemed like a private elevator to the top floor and the suites that she assumed were Heaton's private offices.

A sharply dressed, nice-looking young woman with beautiful hair right out of a shampoo commercial led Steel down the hall into a cushy den with overstuffed chairs and a small sofa. The den connected to a large, sleek office that wrapped around the back of the building, offering a nice view of the Thames a quarter mile south. The woman also smelled like a shampoo commercial, Steel decided. She also noticed that her shoes, while highly polished and cleaned, were of a slightly dated style, and the heels had been redone several times, judging by the way they sat under the body of the shoe. Maybe having an executive job like this came with pressure to dress much wealthier than one was. Obviously it took a certain resourcefulness to keep up with Sir David's expectations.

After a short wait, Heaton came bounding into the den. He had a fake tan and wore an incredibly expensive suit, a custom-fitted tight shirt, and a smartly woven silk tie. He had an oxygenated glow to his skin, and the back of his hair was still wet, which made Steel assume he had just come from the gym—he probably spent a lot of time there, she thought, the gym and the tanning salon. He had a near-perfect set of veneers and perfect fake teeth. She knew they were fake only because she had read online that he had flown his private jet to Beverly Hills to have his teeth done by Dr. Kevin Sands, the world-renowned dentist to the stars. It was an amazing smile, but the idea of all that time and expense to have your teeth fixed left an odd taste in her mouth.