He watched the clock on the dashboard tick round another thirty seconds. His mouth was dry and his heart-rate elevated. Licking his lips, he again flicked his eyes to the rear-view mirror. Teleki was still gabbling away about the hookers, oblivious to the fact that they had been heading away from his intended destination for the last ten minutes. Not that they had managed to get very far. When they’d decided to steal a taxi, Goya reflected with a sigh, they should have factored in more time to get to
their
intended location, a lock-up garage in the expensive neighbourhood behind Lord’s Cricket Ground. The clock on the dashboard told him that it was now almost three hours since they’d picked up this cab from outside a café in Victoria while the cabbie – a guy called Allan Johnstone according to the licence Ryan had removed from the glass partition between the front and back seats – was munching on a bacon roll and watching a Chelsea game on television.
Ryan knew that the cab must have been reported stolen by now. However, they had been careful to target an independent cabbie; Johnstone was not part of a collective like Radio Taxis or Dial-a-Cab, so there would be no one tracking the vehicle’s whereabouts in an office somewhere. Moreover, with hundreds if not thousands of black cabs on the roads of Central London at any one time, the chance of their being stopped by the police was statistically zero. Still, to be on the safe side, they’d changed the licence-plates and stuck on some decals advertising holidays in Malaysia. If he saw it driving past right now, Allan Johnstone himself wouldn’t recognize it.
Acquiring the cab was the easy bit. The biggest challenge in the whole operation was making sure that Teleki got into the right taxi as he left his hotel. As he came through the lobby of his Park Lane hotel, one of the Mossad team masquerading as a member of the hotel staff ushered him away from the official taxi rank and into the back of Ryan Goya’s vehicle. The click of the door locks confirmed that they had their man safe and secure. Pulling quickly away, Ryan nodded when Teleki gave him an address in Notting Hill. Cutting across a couple of lines of traffic, he skipped through a red light heading north. In less than a minute, he was past Marble Arch and heading up the Edgware Road. Passing a massive police station on his right, he smiled, before turning east onto Frampton Street. Almost immediately, however, he hit the traffic caused by the roadworks on Lisson Grove itself. Since then, they’d taken almost fifteen minutes to crawl barely 500 yards.
In the back of the cab, Teleki ended his call and sat forward. Peering through the windscreen at the stationary traffic outside, he cursed loudly in Arabic. ‘Faster!’
Ryan looked at him in the rear-view mirror, gestured at the cars in front of them and shrugged.
‘Faster!’ the man repeated. It was just about the only English that the bastard seemed to know.
Ryan shrugged again.
Teleki tried to open the door, yanking on the handle, oblivious to the small red light signalling that it was locked. Cursing more quietly this time, he pulled his wallet out of the back pocket of his trousers and thrust a twenty-pound note through the small gap in the partition.
‘Stop now,’ he instructed.
Ignoring the money, Ryan put a confused look on his face. ‘We
are
stopped.’
‘I get out.’ Teleki pushed the note through the gap in the partition.
Ryan let the money fall to the floor.
‘Money,’ Teleki grunted. ‘Is enough?’
Ryan glanced at the twenty. His pulse was racing now; he was sweating heavily despite the cold, and he felt a migraine brewing at the base of his spine.
‘How much?’
Ryan looked at the meter and realized that he hadn’t switched it on.
‘Hey!’ Teleki banged on the partition with the palm of his hand. Twisting in his seat, he pulled at the door handle again, more vigorously this time.
‘Damn!’ Ryan felt that his heart was about to burst out of his chest. He fumbled under his seat for his SP-21 ‘Barak’ semi-automatic. Sliding his fingers round the grip, he flicked off the safety catch and pushed the silencer through the partition, pulling the trigger twice.
The first round shattered the cab’s rear window, missing the target completely.
The second shot hit Teleki in the neck, sending a spray of arterial blood right across the glass partition. Clutching his neck, Teleki fell across the back seat, screaming and gurgling at the same time.
Taking careful aim this time, Ryan put two shots in his chest and then another two in his head.
Teleki’s last living act was to void his bowels. The smell of shit and death immediately permeated the cab.
‘That is for Itay Kayal,’ Ryan shouted. He wanted the young soldier’s name to be the last words that this murdering terrorist bastard heard on this earth.
Teleki gazed at him blankly, the light fading from his eyes.
‘Itay Kayal!’
Teleki’s mouth opened but all that came out was a bloody bubble of air. His body twitched one final time and was still.
For the briefest moment, there was silence. It was followed by the angry sound of horns from the vehicles behind him. Ryan turned to see that the traffic in front of him was finally moving. Sticking the Barak into the waistband of his jeans, and concealing it under his Bon Jovi T-shirt, he pushed open the door of the cab and jumped out. Slamming the door behind him, he ignored the growing cacophony of horns and the shouts of angry drivers questioning his parentage, and jogged quickly away down a side street.
After he had travelled four blocks, Ryan Goya slowed to a walking pace. Pulling a mobile out of the back pocket of his jeans, he dialled the only number stored in its memory.
Someone picked up immediately.
‘Job done,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Two down, two to go.’
Ending the call, he stepped into the gutter and dropped the handset down the grate of a nearby drain. Upping his pace again, he headed further into the London night.
‘I don’t care if I am causing the biggest traffic jam in the whole of bloody London, nothing is being moved from here until this scene has been processed properly.’
Adam Hall stood in the middle of Lisson Grove and watched the DCI from Traffic Police scuttle off, shaking his head in disgust. Hall knew that the frisson of satisfaction he felt was a pyrrhic victory. He might be new to this game, but even he knew that the bloody corpse found in the back of the black cab meant only one thing: Mossad were still in town, and furthermore, they had unfinished business.
Hall’s phone started ringing – the
Looney Tunes
theme – and he checked the screen. There was no number indicated but he took the call anyway. ‘Hello?’
‘Adam? This is John Carlyle.’
Carlyle? It took Hall a moment to place the name. Then he cursed. How did the stupid bloody plod get his number?
‘I’m kind of busy right now,’ he hissed.
‘I can imagine,’ Carlyle said evenly, ignoring the younger man’s frosty tone.
‘Can you now?’ Hall sneered.
‘Yes,’ Carlyle told him, ‘I can. Because I’m sitting at home on my sofa, watching you right now. Sky News are broadcasting live pictures from the scene of the shooting.’
‘Shit!’ Hall looked around. When he spotted the camera, he skulked out of the picture.
‘Relax,’ Carlyle laughed. ‘No one ever watches rolling news.’
My bosses do
, Hall thought.
‘And even if they did, they still wouldn’t know who you are.’
You may have got that bit right
, the junior spook reflected sullenly. ‘I can’t tell you anything,’ he said.
‘You don’t have to. The sexy blonde reporter with the big hair is giving me a full update every fifteen minutes.’
Hall located the blonde woman standing in the middle of a small group of reporters beside the police tape. ‘Hell!’ he groaned.
‘Don’t worry,’ Carlyle said soothingly. ‘I know you’re having a tough time at the moment. I have no intention of adding to your problems.’
‘Thank you,’ Hall replied, clearly unconvinced.
‘But presumably,’ Carlyle continued, ‘this latest shooting confirms that Sergeant Szyszkowski’s killer is still in town.’
‘Is that what Sky is saying?’
‘No,’ Carlyle sighed. ‘They’re not talking about him at all. As far as the media is concerned, Joe is ancient history already. They’re only focused on the guy in the cab.’
Hall lowered his voice: ‘It certainly looks like a Mossad hit squad is in London to take out some Hamas bigwigs.’
Bigwigs? That
’
s a rather archaic use of language
, Carlyle thought. Presumably this boy went to a very expensive school. But Hall had at least started talking, so he waited silently for him to continue.
‘Your own guy was just unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
Tell me something I don
’
t know
, Carlyle thought. ‘Why are these people bringing all their shit here to London?’ he asked.
Hall coughed. ‘We don’t know.’
‘And why haven’t they slithered back under their respective rocks after the first shooting?’
‘Things are just not clear,’ Hall replied limply.
‘It’s just as well that I’m here to help then,’ Carlyle said cheerily,
There was a pause while Hall stepped straight back into shot. Behind the tape, ten yards or so from the Sky camera, he stared towards the lens. ‘
Can
you help?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Carlyle nodded at the screen. ‘I think I can.’
He found Alison Roche standing in the internal courtyard at Charing Cross police station. It was a grey day with more than a hint of rain in the air. Aside from a mechanic working under the hood of a police Skoda in the far corner, the place was empty. Wearing a thin navy cardigan over a black T-shirt, she shivered as she watched Carlyle approach.
‘Those things are bad for your health,’ he began, nodding at the cigarette in her hand. He hadn’t realized that she was a smoker. Smoking was a major character defect in Carlyle’s book, so he wondered if he’d been rather too hasty in trying to get her transferred. After all, he knew next to nothing about this woman – other than she was no good with dogs but she did know a bit about Italian football. And now, it appeared that she was stupid enough to smoke.
‘That’s what my boyfriend tells me,’ Roche grinned, taking a deep drag with relish.
She registered the curious look on Carlyle’s face as she slowly exhaled.
‘David Ronan,’ she added, taking another puff. ‘He’s a DI in SO15. We met when we were both working at Shoreditch. We’ve been going out for . . .’ she thought about it for a moment ‘. . . almost four years now.’
Too much information
, Carlyle decided. If you’d been having this conversation with Helen, before you knew it she’d be on to wedding plans, thoughts on children and, most importantly, Ronan’s doubtless long list of bad habits. He sometimes suspected that his wife would have made the best copper in the Carlyle family; she was interested in people, whereas he was primarily interested in facts.
Fact: SO15 was the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command Unit.
Facts like that could be very useful.
‘How long has Dave—’
‘David,’ she corrected him, before taking one last lungful of poison and flicking the stub of her cigarette into the gutter.
‘I beg his pardon,’ Carlyle smiled. ‘How long has
David
been in CTC?’
‘Over a year now,’ she replied slowly, as if checking through the dates in her head. ‘Since February of last year.’
Carlyle squinted up at the sky as he felt the gentlest of raindrops land on his forehead. ‘And would he happen to know anything about Middle Eastern terrorism?’
‘I suppose he knows the basics,’ Roche shrugged. ‘Why?’
Carlyle felt a larger raindrop hit his head. And another. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he suggested.
Carlyle ushered her into one of the third-floor meeting rooms, before closing the door behind them. Placing her cigarettes and lighter on the table, Roche took a seat and looked up at him expectantly.
‘I want you to talk to David for me,’ Carlyle began, ‘but you both have to be extremely discreet.’
‘Sure,’ she said.
‘I mean it,’ he said, knowing he was sounding like an overbearing teacher. ‘This is a very delicate situation.’
Sitting up straighter in her chair, Roche cleared her throat. ‘I understand, Inspector.’
‘With a bit of luck, we might be working together for a while . . .’
‘It looks like it,’ she said. ‘Leyton told me this morning that I was to report here until further notice.’
‘Good,’ he nodded. ‘That’s good. But what I’m now going to tell you about is not a Charing Cross investigation.’
‘Joe Szyszkowski?’
‘Yes. It’s not even a police investigation.’
‘Oh?’
Pulling out a chair, Carlyle sat down opposite her. For the next ten minutes, he quietly went through what had happened on the afternoon Joe was shot, then his interview with Adam Hall of MI6, and the subsequent murder of Noor Gyula Teleki in the back of a London taxi.
Once he had finished, Roche stared at the table for five or six seconds.
‘How do you think David can help?’ she asked, looking up.
Good question
, thought Carlyle, but now was not the time to let on that he was clutching at straws.
‘The murder of a London policeman is incidental to the MI6 investigation,’ he continued, wondering how he was going to finish this sentence, ‘but . . .’
She watched him carefully. ‘Yes?’
‘I think that there is some reason why these guys are shitting on our doorstep. If we can discover exactly why they are here, then we might be able to track them down.’ As the words finally tumbled out, he wondered if they made any sense at all.
Roche’s expression suggested she wasn’t convinced.
Carlyle made a vague gesture with his hands. ‘MI6 can do the big picture, international stuff,’ he burbled, ‘but we have the local knowledge. There must be something very important happening in London, otherwise everyone would have split right after the first shootings at the Ritz.’
‘And they have asked for your help?’