Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (11 page)

Luke backed himself up against the wall behind the bed, holding out a restraining hand. ‘Whoa! This. Is not. Going. To happen.’ He spoke emphatically, brooking no argument. And it was then that she gave the game away. Just one glance, a tiny gesture – he could so easily have missed it, but he didn’t. Just a minuscule tilt of her chin to one side, and he caught it. She was looking at the door. It gave him the two seconds he needed to prepare.

There were three of them, thick-set and brutish, their muscles bulging through their shiny synthetic gangster shirts as they crashed through the unlocked door from the corridor into his room. The girl had already rolled neatly to one side and off the bed, clearing the way for the first man to lunge towards him. A flat face with a boxer’s nose loomed towards Luke as he felt a
giant hand scrabbling for his throat, trying to close around his windpipe. There was an overpowering smell of sweat and garlic. And something else he couldn’t place. But Luke’s senses were on fire. This was what he had trained for. Those two seconds had given him time to reach beneath his pillow and now he slammed the butt of the pistol down on the first man’s head. He slumped, pressing Luke down with his bulk. And now the second man was on him, trying to pin back his arms, and behind him the third was preparing some kind of cloth. So he was being kidnapped.

Fuck you, he thought, you’re not having me.

In a confined space, like that no-star hotel room, an unsilenced pistol makes a lot of noise. In Luke’s firm grip the weapon bucked and roared in a deafening explosion of sound and light. Squeezing off two rounds in under a second came as second nature to him. Time and again he had taken his troop through rehearsals with live ammo in the Killing House back at Poole. Double-tapping, they called it in the trade. Now, with the flash of each shot, he caught a split-second frame of a man’s face, his final moment on earth. Handguns are notoriously inaccurate over distance but at such close range it was hard to miss. Luke heaved the slumped body of the first man off him, rolled off the bed and stood braced, feet slightly apart, both hands on the weapon, poised to fire again, his breath coming in shallow, controlled gasps. Nothing moved, except the girl in the corner, who was shivering with fear. ‘Please!’ she begged. ‘I had no choice.’

‘Turn on that light at the wall,’ he ordered.

She moved awkwardly at a crouch towards the switch, holding her crumpled blouse against her breasts. Voices sounded in the corridor, and in the harsh, white light that suddenly flooded the room Luke was all too aware of his own appearance. Stark naked, splashed in blood and holding a smoking pistol. Lumps of a pink, blancmange-like substance were splattered across his torso. Human brain. There were two very dead bodies in his room, one unconscious gangster and a half-naked girl. This could take some explaining.

People were jostling in the doorway now, letting out screams of panic as soon as they caught sight of the carnage inside room 16. Someone had gone to fetch the manager. And the incongruous figure of an English lawyer in striped flannel pyjamas was pushing through the crowd.

‘Dear God, man, what have you
done
?’ exclaimed Friend, clamping a hand over his mouth in horror.

‘I know how this looks,’ said Luke, putting down the pistol and wrapping a bath towel around his waist. ‘But let me take care of it. Just keep an eye on the girl in the corner, will you?’ He unzipped a money belt inside his rucksack and drew out a wad of US dollar bills, sought out the hotel manager and pressed them into his hand. Immediately the manager began to disperse the throng, assuring them that the police were on their way.

When they had all gone, Luke sat Friend on the bed. The lawyer was trembling and having difficulty breathing, as if he himself had just had to shoot his way out of a violent kidnapping. Adrenalin was still pumping through Luke’s veins but he addressed the lawyer as calmly as he could. ‘Look, John,’ he began, ‘I’m sorry, but that’s just how it goes down sometimes. It was them or me. This is a bloody dangerous part of the world. You knew that, right? I’m just glad it was my door they came through and not yours.’

Friend said nothing. He was staring at the floor, shaking his head from side to side.

‘John?’ Luke gripped his shoulders.

Friend looked up suddenly, eyes furious. ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘It won’t do! I won’t have it. We can’t have you shooting your way around this country, like it’s the Wild West. It’s against all the rules!’

‘
I’M VERY DISAPPOINTED
in you, young man.’ Sid Khan’s voice was so quiet Luke had to press the phone to his ear to make out what he was saying. ‘We send you down to South America to help clear things up and what do you give us? Three damned stiffs, Luke Carlton.’

‘Two, to be exact. One’s still alive. I just gave him a bit of concussion.’

‘Let me remind you,’ continued the head of CT, ‘that this a Tier One Priority, and what are you doing? You end up knobbing some Colombian bird on the Service’s time, then turn the place into a free-fire zone, like it’s Laser Quest with live ammunition.’

‘Look, if I can just—’

‘I haven’t finished yet,’ said Khan. He hadn’t raised his voice once: he didn’t need to – the message was coming across loud and clear. ‘I want a full report on this, sent to me by the usual means, and I want it by the end of today, London time. So you’d better get going. And, Carlton?’

‘Yes?’ Luke was trying hard to keep the exasperation out of his voice. It was three in the morning in Colombia, five hours behind London, and he had only just finished moving into another hotel room while the night shift began the grisly job of sanitizing his old room. Friend had put himself to bed with a sleeping pill and a chair wedged at forty-five degrees against his door handle.

At least Major Elerzon had played his part. Within minutes of Luke calling him, a squad of uniformed cops had turned up, carted away the bodies and put an armed guard outside the hotel, another outside Luke’s room. One of the dead men was quickly identified as a known assassin for the cartels, while the sole survivor and the girl were being questioned.

‘I don’t mind telling you, Luke,’ continued Sid Khan, ‘there are people here at VX who think you’re a loose cannon, that we should have left you where you were, in Special Forces. I’ve just spent the last twenty minutes explaining why we should keep you on. This isn’t some cowboy outfit where we go jumping out of planes and whack the first people we bump into. We’re an accountable arm of government, answerable to the Foreign Secretary. Please tell me you get that?’

Luke stared blankly at the white chipboard door of the bedroom cupboard opposite his bed. ‘I get it.’

Not since basic training half a lifetime ago could Luke remember receiving such a bollocking from a superior. He’d really thought he’d left all that behind him. He was being blamed unfairly for what had taken place in his hotel room, but he allowed himself no self-pity. Take it on the chin, write up the report, move on and start getting some results.

First thing in the morning, Luke and the lawyer moved across town, under heavy escort, to the safety of the Jungla Police Commando Barracks. The security people at VX wanted no more chances taken. Friend had been visibly relieved, patting his briefcase on the short ride over as if comforting a distressed pet. But Luke, now effectively confined to barracks and in bad odour with his masters, felt like a caged beast. Billeted in the officers’ quarters two doors down from Friend, he looked out of the window as a squad of shaven-headed recruits jogged past, hoarse voices belting out the corps song in unison, their bodies oozing testosterone.

At a knock on the door, Luke reached instinctively for the Sig. This might have been a police barracks but he was still in South
America. It turned out to be Friend, looking rather sheepish. He pulled up a chair. ‘I think I owe you a bit of an apology. I mean, are you all right?’

Luke laughed. He was tempted to say that the time to have asked that was last night, but he shrugged it off. Friend had had a baptism of fire and nobody forgets the first time they see a dead body. Already the poor man looked about five years older than he had when they’d left Heathrow. ‘No problem, John. They didn’t get me, did they?’

‘Yes, but you . . . they . . . Well, I suppose you’re used to this kind of thing. But I don’t mind telling you it scared the hell out of me. How did they know where we were staying?’

Luke smiled. Here was a first-class Oxbridge brain, a man who could dissect reams of legal documents in minutes, probably on three times his salary, yet in a place like this he had absolutely no situational awareness. None. ‘Think about it, John. We must be just about the only two
gringos
in town and we stick out a mile. The cartels have got dickers everywhere – they’ll have clocked us coming in.’

‘I’m sorry. “Dickers”?’

‘Scouts. Lookouts. The ten-year-old kid on the street corner, you think he’s selling chewing gum but his real job is informing for the crims, that kind of thing.’ Even as Luke was speaking a thought occurred to him. Could Major Elerzon have had something to do with the set-up in his hotel room? Surely the police chief had had his hands full with those two ladies of negotiable virtue. Still . . . He tried hard to dismiss the idea but it wouldn’t quite go away. He had worked with some fine Colombians in his time, people like Jorge whom he trusted completely. But Major Elerzon was not in that bracket. Luke tended to trust his instincts and he had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Friend was gazing at him, waiting for him to say something more. When he didn’t, the lawyer lowered his head to peer at Luke over the top of his glasses. ‘Well, I’d best get the paperwork sorted on those two characters you, er, disposed of last night. I expect Sid Khan has been asking for answers already.’

‘You could say that.’

‘Let me handle him so you can get on with your work. Just keep me in the loop, if you don’t mind.’

‘To be honest, I could use your help right now. Can you spare half an hour to go through something? I need your legal, analytical brain.’

‘Well, I suppose the other stuff can wait, so—’

‘Good.’ Luke pulled out the thin classified file of single-sided A4 documents that Angela had put together for him in a rush on the day he had left for Colombia. ‘I don’t know how much of this you’ve had a chance to read,’ he continued, ‘but it contains all the relevant CX reports that Benton filed in the six months before he was killed.’

‘CX reports?’

‘The raw intelligence he was supplying back to Vauxhall Cross? Before it gets assessed and written up into something ministers can read?’

‘Oh, yes, I remember now.’

‘Come on, John. I need you firing on all cylinders here.’

‘Righto.’

Luke spread the documents on the table between them. One of the legs was shorter than the other three and it wobbled as he touched it. For some unknown reason, Friend seemed more interested in fixing the table leg than in studying the documents.

‘Take a look,’ said Luke, steering him back to them. ‘Because something does not add up. Agent Fuentes – sorry, Synapse, as he’s referred to here – was our sole source inside the cartel, right?’

‘Right.’

‘And everything he was supplying to Benton came from here, from Tumaco, down in the far south-west of Colombia?’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Friend, lifting his glasses clear of his nose and replacing them in exactly the same spot. ‘But I’m not sure where you’re going with this.’

‘Someone else is in the picture. Someone in another part of this country was feeding material to Benton at the same time. Someone
inserted in deep cover, way upstream in this cartel, someone I haven’t been told about. John, what the hell is going on here?’

If Luke had looked hard enough at Friend in that moment he might have caught it: the pulsing vein in his temple. Friend certainly looked uncomfortable, but then he always did.

‘Well,’ said the lawyer, ‘I’m sure we’ve both been given the same brief. Look, I hear what you say and I think you should take it up with Khan. But I really must get on now and tie up the paperwork on these two fatalities. There’ll be a coroner’s inquest, you know, and the Service will want your name kept out of it.’ He stood up, avoiding Luke’s gaze, and let himself out of the room.

Luke watched him leave.
He knows something I don’t
. He didn’t like that. But now he needed to turn his attention to Benton’s notebook. Had it really been less than twelve hours since Major Elerzon had handed it to him in the club? It felt like months.

Luke couldn’t help himself, he sniffed the cover again and recoiled. It still smelt of crap, and now he was down to his last packet of anti-bacterial wet-wipes. He took out his smartphone and painstakingly photographed every page that had been written on. As he did so, a memory came floating back: his uncle, who had worked at MI6 in the seventies and eighties, showing him his old Service camera, a beautiful leather-bound Agfa Silette with a Carl Zeiss lens, ‘Made in West Germany’ stamped on the side – a throwback to when the country was divided in two by the Iron Curtain. His uncle, long retired, had shown him how to photograph documents in double-quick time, clicking the shutter and shuffling the papers with all the swiftness of a casino croupier. This was good old-fashioned spy work, he had told him, stealing secrets in a hurry before someone comes through the door and catches you red-handed.

But Luke was alone, in the sparsely furnished officers’ quarters on a secure base with the police commandos, and he took his time getting it right. First he transferred the images in his phone to the Service laptop, formatted them for transmission, then attached the ‘Squirter’, the encryption device that would send the data in a burst transmission up into space, then bounce it off a
satellite back down to earth to be collected and decrypted at Vauxhall Cross.

It took quite some time and when he had finished he sat back and opened a packet of dried plantains, left behind by the previous occupant. It was more for something to do than anything else, while he worked out his next move. In fact, Luke decided, as he popped the last one into his mouth, he didn’t like plantain. Just then his secure phone beeped and shuddered. Incoming text from VX. He half expected another rocket from Khan, but it was from Angela:
Nice work on the notebook L
.
Translation completed. It’s Korean. That isolated word was Hungnam. It’s a port. In North Korea.