TEN
Back at the ARU's headquarters it had just gone midday, and Deakins and Second Team were already downstairs guarding both exits, each man armed with his MP5 and the Glock in a thigh holster as backup. Hard as the clean-up team down there had tried, they hadn’t managed to get rid of all the bloodstains by the reception desk, and the men stationed near the door found themselves glancing at them, Clark’s blood still visible over the desk and wall, the air stinking of disinfectant and smelling like a hospital.
Upstairs, Cobb had just returned from delivering a statement to the press and was sitting inside his office talking with Archer, Chalky, Porter and Fox as the forensics team continued to work away in the briefing room and as the tech team recovered in the operations area. As the five men talked, the phone on Cobb’s desk rang, cutting across the conversation. He reached over and picked it up.
‘Cobb,’ he said. He listened to the response. ‘OK. I’m putting you on speakerphone. Four of my officers are in the room.’
He pushed a button, and then put the phone back on the cradle. Around the office, Porter, Fox, Archer and Chalky all listened closely.
‘Director, this is Dr Kim Collins,’ the other voice said, female. 'I'm here at the lab. We’re with the body of the dead gunman. I have some news for you.’
‘Go on.’
‘Age-wise, he's in late thirties or early forties. We tried running his prints through our system, Special Branch and MI6’s, but nothing came up. He’s not English and he doesn’t appear to be someone we've encountered before. We tried Interpol, but that was a dead end. However, he has a series of tattoos on his body, on his arms, elbows and torso. They are distinctive. I've seen this type before. Definitely Eastern European.’
‘Can you be more specific?’
‘If I had to guess, I'd say Albanian.’
Cobb nodded as the four other men in the office listened in silence.
‘OK. What else?’
‘The man also has scarring on his torso and upper arm from several old bullet wounds. Coupled with the scar tissue on his right hand, I would say he’s been in the military somewhere. The stitching on the bullet-wounds on his body is very rudimentary, the kind you’d see in the field, real needle-and-thread jobs, emergency repairs. Almost definitely obtained in combat.’ She paused. ‘I also have something else for you. It's really quite bizarre.'
Cobb frowned. 'Go on.'
'When we ran this man's fingerprints and DNA, we came up with an immediate match for something else.'
'Which was?'
'The letter that was sent to Charlie Adams. This man sealed the envelope. The DNA from the saliva and fingerprints on the paper are a 100 % match.'
Cobb frowned, incredulous. 'What?'
At that moment, a red-light came up on the phone from another call. Cobb reached over.
‘Forgive me for one moment,’ he said to Collins. He pushed the button. ‘Cobb.’
‘Sir, its Deakins.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m on the reception. There’s a man here who says he’s from the US Embassy. He’s asked to speak with you. Says it’s extremely urgent. He’s shown me ID. ’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Jackson. Ryan Jackson. He’s an Operations Officer with the CIA.’
Pause.
The four officers noticed Cobb’s body stiffen.
Another pause.
‘OK. Send him up,’ he ordered.
‘Yes, sir.’
Cobb didn’t bother pushing the button back to Dr Collins at the lab. He just lifted the phone and put it down again to hang up. A silence followed.
‘Everything OK, sir?’ Archer asked.
Cobb sat back in his seat, his eyes distant.
‘No. I don’t think it is. Outside. I need to talk to this man alone.’
The four officers complied without a word and pulled open the door, moving out into the ops room and out of the way.
After a few moments, Agent Jackson appeared, led along the level by Deakins. The other officers looked at him curiously. They saw a well-dressed man who was probably in his mid to late thirties. He had brown hair and brown eyes and was dressed in a smart suit, light blue shirt with a dark blue tie. He looked fit and healthy, but at that moment also extremely worried. He ignored everyone standing there, turning the corner and followed Deakins straight into Cobb's office, hesitating a brief moment as he came face-to-face with the damaged glass on the door.
Inside the glass-walled room after the two men had entered, Cobb nodded at Deakins, who turned and shut the door behind him.
Jackson stood there in the ruined office in front of Cobb. The two men looked at each other.
'Hello, Ryan,' Cobb said.
‘Hello, Tim,’ Jackson said, ‘It’s been a long time.’
Over three and a half thousand miles to the west, it was early in the morning in the town of McLean, Virginia. The sun had just begun its slow climb at the base of the horizon, shielded by clouds, the air muggy and damp. Officially an unincorporated community on the map, Mclean was a town with over 48,000 residents, many of them diplomats, members of Congress, or high-ranking government officials. The reason for this concentration of population was that the CIA’s headquarters were actually at Mclean, Virginia, not Langley as so many people thought. Other major companies such as Capital One and Hilton Hotels were also based out of the area, adding to both its prestige and wealth, the affluence of the area evident in the high-end shopping malls, golf courses and spa retreats scattered all over the community. Residentially, the census in 2010 revealed there were just over 17,000 separate households in Mclean, and despite being a predominately government town as people put it, at that time in the morning most of the residents were still asleep. The buses for the high schools in the area weren't due to roll around until just after 8 am, so it was still that blissful last hour in bed just before everyone had to get up and get going for the day.
But one young man was already up and had been for almost two hours, riding his bike through a series of suburbs and maple tree-lined streets. He worked the paper-round five days a week, the easiest money he'd ever make, thirty five bucks per shift. He was fourteen and hyperactive so he was usually up by this time in the day anyway, and much to the delight of his parents he figured he might as well make some money if he was already up and about.
He worked ten streets on his route, usually about twenty houses each side, so that added up to a lot of newspapers. Four hundred and four, to be exact. He'd worked out that he could carry eighty rolled up papers in the bag on his side, so he normally had to make a few stops back at the store to reload so he could finish his shift. When he'd started out, he had carefully tucked each paper in each letterbox or walked up to drop it on the porch, but lately he had started throwing them at the porches instead and had got pretty good. A friend of his who worked another route nearby for the same newspaper vendor had gone on vacation, so the kid on the bike had doubled up, offering to do his friend's route for an extra thirty five dollars. Seventy bucks earned by the time he ate breakfast and got on the school-bus.
He had just turned down 41st Street, a stretch not on his normal route but one he was covering for his friend, and was a third of his way along, slinging the papers left and right, each one landing on each porch, some of them not even hitting the front doors. As he moved down the street, he slung a paper to his left. It twirled through the air and landed. He glanced over to see he'd hit the mark as he pedalled past.
Suddenly, he pulled on the brakes, skidding to a halt, planting his feet either side of the bike.
The houses on the street all looked quiet, everyone inside still asleep or already out the door, but something had caught his eye. Being a wealthy area and with residents constantly out of town or on vacation, his boss at the paper gave him a new list every shift of houses to miss on his route, people who had cancelled their paper whilst they were away. However, this front porch had a stack of newspapers on it. No one seemed to have noticed. It looked like there were over twenty there, hidden by the porch walls, heaped up by the front door.
The kid stepped off his bike, leaving it to one side, and walked down the path towards the house. It looked like most of the others on the street, a box-shaped, two floored brick house with a side garage to the left. The grass on the lawn was long, like it hadn’t been cut in a while, and most of the curtains were drawn.
Walking up the path, the kid arrived at the porch and looked down at the stack uncertainly, pausing just in case whoever lived inside pulled open the curtains and started shouting at him.
But there was no movement from inside.
The curtains were still.
He knelt down and started rummaging through the pile. Eventually, he came up with a newspaper dated from March.
It was delivered three weeks ago to the day, Thursday.
What the hell?
He was used to the odd heap, maybe six or seven papers for someone who had forgotten to cancel for the week, but he'd never seen a pile this high. Glancing back down the path, he saw the mailbox was jammed full of mail too, spilling out of the metal box.
Placing the paper back down on the pile carefully, the kid turned and walked back down the path. He'd report what he’d seen when he finished his route.
However, something about this place was making him uneasy.
Back in London, the second gunman who had attacked the ARU’s headquarters had made it to the edge of the River Thames. He was on the South Bank, not a hundred yards from where the politician had killed himself earlier that morning, the smell of salt from the water hanging in the air. Pedestrians were walking past him from both directions as he stopped and looked out at the water. He could hear the distant calling of gulls and the sound of the small waves splashing as they hit the stone walls of the riverbank.
He stood there for a few moments then climbed over the railings, causing several passing pedestrians to slow, watching and wondering what the hell he was doing. The man shuffled back and positioned himself so he had his heels over the edge of the brick, his back to the water.
He looked up to the sky. Fifteen years of planning and he had failed.
He knew what was expected.
He pulled his Beretta from the back of his waistband and flicked off the safety catch, then put the gun in his mouth, feeling the harsh cold metal of the barrel, tasting grit and gun oil.
And he pulled the trigger.
As people watching screamed, the back of the man’s head blew apart and his body went limp as all brain function was instantly shredded by the bullet. He crumpled and fell back, his body tumbling towards the choppy water beneath him. As onlookers watched in disbelief and horror, the man's body hit the Thames with a loud splash. The current started taking the body downstream immediately as it also started to sink. And within seconds it disappeared out of sight into the oily depths.