Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (38 page)

Ana María composed her thoughts. How much should she tell him? Perhaps not everything, Silvio could be jumpy at times. Now was clearly the time to offer some reassurance. ‘I consulted our expert, that head of department at the university. He tells me there is a reason behind it. They got sick because they were exposed for too long, that’s all. They spent days with it at sea. He says as long as you keep your distance you’re fine.’

Instinctively, Silvio took several paces back, moving away from the device. ‘But how do we know that it’s not leaking now? We could be contaminated ourselves without knowing it, no?’

Ana María laughed. ‘You shouldn’t worry,’ she said, staying exactly where she was. ‘If there was a risk of contamination, all those idiots I disposed of in the flat would have been sick.’

‘And?’

‘They all looked fine, believe me. Just scared. And useless. The operation is better off without them.’

‘How much did they know?’ asked Silvio. ‘Isn’t there a chance they could lead the police here, to this place?’

‘Those goons? None at all. I checked the flat. There’s nothing to reveal where this place is. That piece of information died with them.’

‘And the
submarinistas
? What if they’re telling everything they know to the medics in hospital?’

Ana María had suddenly had enough of his questions and his worrying. ‘
Escúchame
,’ she told him. ‘Listen to me. You need to have more confidence in Señor Suarez. He thinks of everything. The two submariners were fed a cover story. Some city up north. If they tell anything it will lead the
gringos
to look in the wrong place. Those pilots were useful fools, that’s all.’

Silvio took a cautious pace forward, still wary of the shiny metal container that stood inside the suburban lock-up. ‘So when do we begin the next phase? Has the other material been sourced?’

Ana María glanced at her watch to check the date. ‘You mean the explosives? Yes. We’re on schedule. We have time. The party is still days away.’

As they spoke, the welder was hard at work, goggles and gloves in place, in a windowless basement not three kilometres away. Keith Gammon loved his work. Ever since he was a boy he had worked with metal, cutting it, crafting it, welding and shaping it. And this was his biggest challenge yet. Ten years ago he wouldn’t have touched a job like this. But since then, his life had taken a different course. It had started well, with a stint in the Royal Engineers, learning explosives and demolitions, but when he’d left the Army he’d fallen in with a bad lot. He’d made his choices, been caught and convicted. They’d done him for theft of copper signal cabling, resisting arrest and causing grievous bodily harm to a British Transport Police officer.

Keith Gammon had come out of Wandsworth Prison an angry and bitter man. In his last six months inside he had made certain connections, people with good contacts on the outside. When the legitimate job offers did not come knocking at his door, he had made the call to the number they had slipped him just before his release date. It was small stuff at first, modifications to vehicles and equipment, erasing registration stamps, putting decommissioned firearms back into service, nothing too taxing for a man of his skills.

Later, when the big offer had come from the man with the ponytail, he hadn’t had to think too hard about it. The welder was under no illusions, of course. Even though they gave him only a vague outline of what the job entailed he knew it would be highly illegal, and not without risk to himself. He certainly didn’t fancy going back inside, but what they were offering in return almost made his eyes water. A quarter of a million in cash, half
up front. Well, he could do a lot with that money, and he knew exactly where he was going to put it. The welder had his eye on a down payment for a nice little place in the sun, a gated compound near Marbella. After this, Keith Gammon was going straight, it would be
Adios, Inglaterra
once this job was over.

The Colombians were being more than generous, he reckoned. He had given them a shopping list of what he needed for the task and they had come good, even got him a brand-new Miller 625 Extreme Plasma Cutter, fresh in from the US. He held it now, admiring its clean lines and latent power. Metalwork had come a long way since he was a lad. He shook his head and laughed as he went back to work with the cutter. Practise, practise and practise again. The job had to be done to perfection. Keith Gammon saw himself as so much more than a welder: he was a top-level metallurgist and nothing if not a consummate professional.

IN THE ROLLING
hills of Colombia’s Antioquia province it was raining again. Great, drifting skeins that moved like grey ghosts across the verdant landscape. Valentina gripped her umbrella and picked her way carefully down the potholed road, trying not to ruin her shoes. Behind her lay the road that led up to the planter’s villa, El Pobrecito’s current safe house, where she had nodded goodbye to the guards on the gate and set off for the long weekend to see her family. Everyone across the country was getting ready for the Fiesta Nacional, and as she approached her village, she felt its relaxed, party mood. Children were tying ribbons to balloons in doorways, and coloured lights hung outside the low, thatched huts that lined the road, connected to the generators that hummed and shuddered in their aluminium frames.

Valentina was not in a relaxed party mood. In fact, she felt far from it. The information she had overheard in the last twenty-four hours was burning a hole in her conscience. She had to pass it on, first chance she got. So she did not go straight home that day. Stopping eight hundred metres short of her parents’ house, she turned off the road down a narrow, overgrown track that wound through the forest. Good. There were no recent footprints and the broken branches she had placed across the track were still in place. She stopped twice, pretending to take shelter from the incessant drizzle, scanning the track behind her in case
anyone was following, the way the Englishman had taught her. Three hundred metres in, she turned off the track and picked her way through the wet foliage until she found the tree stump. She reached into her bag and took out a metal comb. It was an unremarkable object – García’s guards had not given it a second glance when they searched her bag – but now she turned it sideways and drove it into the ground.

Valentina began to dig and scrape. The soft, wet earth gave way easily, and as she removed the mud with her bare hands the hole soon turned wet and slick with rain. But she persevered, using the metal comb to probe the earth until it met a hard edge. She had found what she’d come for. Valentina was already soaked but she didn’t care. She pulled out the flat stainless-steel box, about the size of a laptop case and still sealed airtight, just as she had left it. She used her sleeve to wipe the mud off it.

Valentina was not, by profession, an acupuncturist. That was pretty much the last piece of training she had received, some months earlier at the embassy safe house outside Bogotá, along with several other cover professions. A student drop-out from Colombia’s Universidad Javeriana, she had been a sore disappointment to her family. They had had such high hopes when she had won the coveted place to read Latin American literature at the prestigious university, the first person from her district to go there. It was in her second semester that she had started to hang out with a different crowd, a bad crowd. There were whispers that they had connections to the
narcotraficantes.
Not that her family were any the wiser, being five hundred kilometres away on the other side of Medellín. But the university had its own security people, all ex-cops and military, and they were not blind. The raid on the accommodation block had swept up Valentina and three of her classmates: 850 grams of 90 per cent pure cocaine in a canvas book bag, with several hundred tiny plastic sachets ready for sale, all made for pretty incriminating evidence. Pleas of ‘It was for personal use’ fell on deaf ears. Her expulsion was never in doubt: it was a clear case of commercial distribution on campus. But the dean was in two minds as to whether or not to turn
her and the others over to the police. The university could do without the embarrassing questions, the publicity, the unwelcome media attention. He had raised the subject at dinner that evening with his good friend the diplomat from the British Embassy, a certain Señor Benton. The dean was surprised and delighted to hear that the embassy ran its own re-education programme for gifted individuals who had taken a wrong turning in life. Señor Benton, he learned, would be delighted to meet the troubled Valentina with a view to taking over her education and offering her a second chance in life.

After that things had fallen into place quickly. With the promise of a British passport and a place at a London college in a year’s time, Valentina had proved herself more than willing to switch allegiance. She had never really liked the narcos she had met anyway. And she had something unusual to offer. Her family lived just outside Ituango, less than eight kilometres from the operations base of one of Colombia’s most dangerous drug-lords. Her family knew people who worked for him. She was young, attractive and intelligent. Placing her inside the man’s favourite refuge had turned out to be surprisingly easy. Nelson García was rumoured to have health problems and she was uniquely positioned to offer him a remedy.

When she returned to her village, now a qualified acupuncturist with the certificate to prove it, it was only a matter of days before she was summoned to meet him. Her first treatment session with El Pobrecito had followed the next morning. She was in.

Valentina looked up at the tree canopy and held out her hands, palms turned upwards. It had stopped raining. The storm over the hills had passed and there was no more static in the atmosphere. It was time. She released the hasps on the sealed box, which opened with a quiet hiss, breaking the airtight seal. Carefully, she took out the waterproofed black iPad, switched it on and waited for it to boot up. Then she removed the other object in the box: a black Fiio X1 high-resolution music player. At least, that was what it looked like to the outside world. When Benton had given it to her in Bogotá he had explained, almost apologetically,
that it did not play music. It was a CD, a ‘concealed device’. Hidden inside was a Inmarsat Mini C terminal, a compact transceiver that would allow her to transmit and receive messages. Valentina connected the two devices, then stared at the keyboard on the iPad, trying to recall the mnemonic she had memorized. She needed it to give her the line of code that would get her through the first security gateway embedded in the machine’s hard drive. She closed her eyes and it came to her, her favourite line from ‘In the Glad Hours of the Morning’ by the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis:

She typed in T-E-C-E-L-C-P-D-O-V, the first letter of each Spanish word in the verse. The effect was instantaneous. The screen went blank, then turned a rich dark green, a similar colour, although she didn’t know it, to the building at Vauxhall Cross. In the centre was a small rectangular box, with a blinking prompt bar waiting for her to fill in the next line of code. Valentina typed in her mother’s birthday, followed by her postal zip code when she was living in Bogotá. The screen changed again, to reveal a coat of arms, a black motif she recognized. It was a lion, a unicorn and a shield beneath a crown and a motto:
Dieu et mon droit
. She was through security and into the encrypted SIS program.

Valentina was about to prepare her message for transmission when there was a sudden crash in the foliage not far behind her. She whirled round. Had she been followed from the villa? She had checked behind her several times as she walked down the road and there had been nobody. She waited, frozen to the spot. If one of García’s men saw her now she had no chance. Then she relaxed: a white-faced monkey loped past, giving her a cursory glance before bounding off into the trees.

She returned to her equipment, moving the Inmarsat transceiver to left and right, as she had been shown, angling it towards the closest satellite, the Atlantic Ocean Region-West, at 54’W.
Finally, when the satellite signal was strong enough, she pressed send. In a fraction of a second her message was beamed skywards in a ‘burst transmission’, reaching a satellite whose existence was known only to a very few people at Vauxhall Cross, then bounced back to earth to be decoded in a small room just south of the Thames riverbank.

Tradewind had made contact.

THREE DAYS HAD
passed since the Manchester tip-off and the investigations were yielding precious little. Leads and clues had dribbled away into nothing, like water into sand. The search was still being discreetly conducted on the streets of Manchester but a sudden ‘find’, a strange metal object left outside the Victoria Baths, had turned out to be a false alarm. It was an old milk churn left there by some drunken students the night before. In the skies above, the city detector planes patrolled in vain. Of the rogue isotope and its handlers there was no sign. Despite the threat they knew to be hanging over the country there was a determination among senior officials in Whitehall that life had to go on. Remembrance Sunday was fast approaching.

Sir Adam Keeling, the MI6 Chief, had decided, on balance, not to cancel his private dinner with his visiting French counterpart from the General Directorate for External Security in Paris. They had met up earlier in the day at his office but there was still so much to discuss that they would make it a working dinner at his home. Eight o’clock that evening found him in his detached house at the end of a gravelled drive in Kingston-upon-Thames, brandishing an extremely sharp knife and calling over his shoulder to his wife, ‘Darling, I’m carving now.’ On the dinner table there were candles, fine bone china and a bottle of 2001 Monbousquet claret from St Émilion, brought up from the family
cellar. His wife, Margaret, had cooked the leg of lamb to perfection: crisp, brittle skin, punctured with sprigs of rosemary and garlic, the meat pink and juicy inside. Sir Adam carried the wooden board bearing the joint into the dining room and proposed a toast. The four of them stood, raising their glasses: the Keelings, the GDSE director and his chief of staff. ‘The Queen,’ they murmured in unison.