Bloody London (39 page)

They would kill him. They would rip him into pieces and they'd do it slow.

The Savoy Hotel loomed up in front of me and I hurried in, dripping. Pushed my way through the tourists milling nervously in the lobby, found a hotel operator, scribbled a list of Sverdloff's numbers and shoved it at her with a wad of money. “Try these. Now. Please.” Something in my face convinced her and she worked the phones for me.

Eventually I got a signal. I left Tolya frenzied messages everywhere: Stay away. Keep away from London, I yelled, then realized someone could clone his cellphone, someone was listening.

I called Tessa Stiles again. She picked up the phone herself and I told her: the Barrier; Frye; the Russians. I told her because what choice did I have, and who else except a paranoid cop would believe me?

“Christ, look at this.” Tessa Stiles was in her office, crouched in front of the TV, eating her cuticles, drinking tea out of a mug. Jack was with her. He finished his cigarette, dropped the butt into an empty cup, lit another one. They stared at the TV. On it, a man with patent-leather hair, Brylcreem slick, black
button eyes, pencil mustache, was talking earnestly in an accent that could crack old Coke bottles.

Stiles was waving at the TV. “It's the only instructional film we could find about flooding. It was made in 1954.”

She looked up as if she suddenly realized I was there. Her face was red, excited, triumphant, scared. “Are you certain about the Barrier, Artie? I hope you're bloody certain, what you said on the phone. Because we called the chief on your say-so and we put it to him, so it's our ass, mine, Jack's. Yours, too.”

I collapsed on to a chair and glanced out of the window. The front of the police station was sandbagged up to the second floor. I couldn't see the jetty or the police boats. I got a lift part of the way but most of the time I ran and it took me hours from Gilchrist's.

“I need a car,” I said to Stiles. “I have to get to Phillip Frye.”

She ignored me, intent on the video, while the door to her office opened and shut, cops barged in and out looking frantic. Someone brought me a mug of coffee. Snatches of talk – low pressure, north-east gales, three days of storms. The phones rang constantly.

I grabbed Jack by his collar. “I have to get to Frye.”

Stiles said, “You'll wait for the chief with us. You laid it out for us, you called me, do you understand? I took your phone call, I took what you said at face value, you'll fucking stick around to back me up, me and Jack both.”

I picked up a phone and tried Sverdloff again. I tried Lily. The phones were dead everywhere. Rain battered the window.

Jack said, “Christ, Tess, I hope to fuck you know what you're doing,” he said. “You, me, a couple of middle-ranking nobodies, one black, one female, we tell him, ‘Sir, I've got it on awfully good advice that there's going to be an event at the Barrier.' Based on what? On information from an ex-New York cop who got it from someone he won't name. He's going to come over all sarcastic, I know that look. ‘Been to the pictures too often, inspector?' That's what he said to me once.”

Stiles looked at me. “It's our jobs on the line. Tell us who your source is.”

If I gave them Gilchrist, he'd be dogmeat. A messenger for the Russian mob doesn't get to retire to a fancy club and drink good booze. I wasn't selling them Geoff. Not unless I had to. I said, “What's the difference who? I'm telling you.”

Stiles looked outside. “I can't even see the fucking river anymore, the fog's so thick.”

I looked at the clock. Jack got up.

Tessa said, “Sit down. I'm not doing this alone. Cohen's your bloody friend.”

“He's going to blow his top.”

“What can I do?” she said. “He's Welsh.”

For a while – it seemed like a month – we waited in the office, drinking horrible coffee, watching the rain. Stiles took emergency phone calls, and Jack and me, we sat and smoked. I worked the one remaining phone. Came up empty. I was chain smoking now, listening to the rain and my own pulse. It was dark out.

Suddenly a uniformed cop put his head through the door. “He's here.”

Cotton and Stiles jumped up. A handsome man in a raincoat, about fifty, slammed into the office. “Christ, I hope this is good,” he said. “Convince me.”

“There isn't time, sir,” Jack said. “We want to get on the boat while there's time. I'm on the line here, I know. But can we please talk on the way?”

“This is Commander Evans,” Cotton said to me. “Forward Planning. Scotland Yard.” Jack was smooth. He cut the tension in that room in half.

Evans shook my hand. Stiles and Cotton spelled it out for him again. He said, “Can we get a helicopter out there?”

Stiles said, “No.”

“A car?”

“The traffic's murder. We can use the new boat. The radar's good, I've got my best team ready to roll with it, sir.”

She opened the door and Evans went out and started down the stairs and we clattered behind him, pulling on coats, running now out of the door, into the fog that enveloped the jetty. A couple of river cops were waiting for us as we climbed on board. Both of them were young, good-looking guys. Their expressions were grim.

Jack looked nervous. “I can't see the water.”

One of the cops smiled briefly. “We have radar,” he said, and revved the engine.

“You're sure of this?” Evans said to Tessa Stiles. “Because I've already sent word, I've already put out alerts, you'd better be bloody sure you're bloody sure.”

“Yessir,” Stiles said. “Tell them to raise the Barrier,
sir, please. Before it's too late. Before it's damaged by the explosive device.”

“It's your word against the rest of them. It's your necks.”

Jack Cotton looked at me, then back at Evans. “Yessir.”

“Persuade me,” he said, and they started to lay it out for him again when his cellphone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, listened briefly, put out his hand to steady himself as the boat started to move. “Let's go, then,” he said. We were already on the river.

Stiles said, “The Barrier?”

He looked at us all and said, “There's been a crash.”

“The Barrier?” Jack repeated it.

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“A ship.”

“What time?”

“It's happening now.” Evans talked softly and I thought of Gilchrist. Did he really know? Could he have stopped it? Face tense, voice low and angry, Evans went on. “They're not sure. No one heard it. An hour, two, it's unclear when the ship hit.”

Spray from the river, the rain and fog sluiced down the windows of the police boat and it bucked wildly on the rough water.

I said to Evans, “What happened?”

“All I know is a ship rammed the barrier, it smashed up, there are forty men in the water, though what the fuck kind of hubris people have getting on board a boat in this weather.”

“Can't they fish them out?”

“There's zero visibility. This is a freak. The Barrier has to go up.”

“Otherwise?”

“Otherwise, London will flood. We'll lose most of the power for London, City Airport, Parliament, half the underground lines, most of the telecommunications.” He said, “When there's a tidal surge, and the winds shift, the Barrier has to go up. The winds have shifted.”

Tessa Stiles said, “And when the Barrier goes up, sir, the people in the water?”

Evans looked grim. “They're fucked, poor bastards. They'll be caught in the tide and smashed against the steel Barrier gate, they haven't got a bloody snowball's chance in hell.” His voice rose.

“Christ,” Jack said.

Evans said, “Maybe they thought we wouldn't raise the Barrier if there were human beings at risk, maybe they figured we don't have the balls, that we'll leave it too late, let the place flood. Maybe what started as a little mayhem got out of hand, and they couldn't turn off the taps.”

“How long?”

Evans looked at his watch. “Two hours tops. If we can get them out before the gates go up, there's a chance.”

Tessa looked at him. “You don't believe that, sir.”

Face drained, Evans sat down suddenly on a bench at the back of the cabin and put his head in his hands. The boat rocked. Water splashed high up on the windows. He looked up. “How long until we get there?”

Stiles said, “Twenty minutes. Half an hour.”

Evans's phone rang again and he held it to one ear, grunting assent into it while he listened. Then he said to us, “Well, then, you can all be there when I give the order to kill forty people.”

Blinded by the thick fog that choked the river, the Polish captain of a Lithuanian cargo ship, the ship allegedly carrying paper, had crashed into the concrete piles of the Thames Barrier. From what Evans heard from the Barrier, what he passed on to us, it was unclear if the crash was intentional. The captain of the ship had ignored the red warning lights, had navigated badly, was marginally out of the lane when it crashed. Radio contact with the control tower was out when the ship approached. It was chaotic, then it hit. The men on board scrambled for life rafts. The ship was already listing badly. On deck the men prized open the white canisters to get the life rafts. People shouting, panic setting in. They open the canisters. There are no life rafts inside.

Only vodka. Smuggled booze where the life rafts should have been.

“Vodka,” Evans said, laughing bitterly until his face was wet from laughing so hard. “Vodka. I hope the poor sods had time to drink it before they went in the
river.” He held on to the side of the boat and Jack and Tessa watched him, Jack looking green – if a black guy could look green – his lips the color of ash.

We were in the middle of the river, wrapped in the fog and rain. The boat bounced crazily on the waves. When we came down, the riptides seem to drag at us. The only sign there was anything alive outside was the sudden bleating of a siren from another cop boat.

“Vodka.” Evans wiped his face with his sleeve.

No one on the river heard the crash. Silently, the Lithuanian ship had smacked the concrete that was sunk deep in the riverbed. It had happened before, like Gilchrist said. There had been a model. Back in '97, '98. Someone on a shipping channel picked up a radio message, but it was too late.

Evans was still talking. There was no explosion. No one knew if there even was a device on board the Lithuanian ship; there was no way to tell. There was only minor damage to the Barrier so far, paint stripped, concrete chipped. I thought about the huge, hulking, silent ship loaded with paper or timber, illegals in the hold, cowering, frightened, then the hit. Men scrambling against the tide in the freezing water. Terrified. London waiting for the flood. A wall of water coming down, like Stiles said.

“Fear,” Gilchrist had said. The point was fear.

“Look.” Tessa pointed to the front window. Through the dense fog, there was a faint light and in it, the outline of a silver hood. We had reached the Barrier.

One of the young cops – I never even got their
names – said to Evans, “I'll try to get you as close to Barrier control as I can,” he said.

A wave sloshed over the side of the boat and it bucked up high and then down and I half fell on Jack. We pulled ourselves up and I said to him, “Listen, when we get off this thing, there's a homeless shelter. Down the road from the barrier. Not far. Next to Westminster Industrial Estates. Frye's place. I'm going.”

Jack glanced at the Barrier, then at Evans. He said to me, “You can't arrest Frye, man. You're unofficial. I'll go. You stay with this lot, this was your call. I'll go after Frye. If we make it off this fucking boat, that is.”

I grabbed his sleeve. “Do it.”

We crept, like moles, under the riverbed, underneath the Barrier. It was the only way up onto the Barrier itself. The steel gates were sunk into concrete piles that stretched from one side of the Thames to the other. Electrically driven, they were powered by hydraulic packs concealed overhead by those silver shells I'd seen from the water the night of the party. Raised, the gates made a solid steel wall across the river.

We hurried now, panic drifting between us. Stiles carried the walkie-talkie, but it crackled and went dead. Evans had gone to the Control Centre. I looked at my watch. How long until the Barrier was raised and the men in the water were smashed against it and drowned? An hour? Half ?

The tunnels were light and sleek, the interior tubes glossy with paint, spick and span like the guts of an Edwardian steamship. It was man-made, huge,
mechanical. If the tunnels were damaged, water would pour through and crush us; it made me feel tiny and wild.

Except for the regular hum of the generators, under the river, inside the tunnels that service the Thames Barrier, it was deep and quiet as a tomb.

We moved in a line, Stiles and two Barrier officials ahead, a BBC pool reporter whose name I never got, her cameraman, and a PR guy whose name was Gordon. The reporter repeated her questions about the men in the water. She started to run, anxious to get her story, anxious to see what was going on in the water, and Gordon, jogging to keep up, tried to slow her down. He had a job, he had to get out the word that the Barrier was invincible, that things were all right, keep the population calm, even when we knew there were forty sorry bastards outside in the freezing river and the only way to rescue them was to leave the gates open and let London flood.

I was at the back of the line. Gordon's rap got on my nerves; he had the pinched, pimply face, the obsequious style of a low-level apparatchik. He wore a yellow slicker and his brown corduroy pants were too big for him. One of his hands kept creeping down to hitch them up.

He led us through a second series of passageways and tunnels, deeper and deeper under the riverbed, under the Barrier itself. The image of the surfer tumbling in a tidal wave came back to me: the broken limbs, the on-coming surf. Along the tunnels, emergency crews popped up suddenly at various junctions, then moved
on, efficient, intent; I felt as if I was suffocating down there.