NINE
An hour later, Archer finished making three strong cups of coffee and stepping past a group of forensics detectives in white uniforms, carried them out of the briefing room. He walked into the operations area and passed the cups to three members of the tech team, who were sitting together, their eyes wide, many of them nauseous from shock and spent adrenaline. They all took the drinks without responding and he stood over them protectively, his MP5 slung over his shoulder. Turning, he looked at the scene around him. It was one of utter devastation.
The briefing room was a sea of smashed glass, empty shell casings, spilt tea and coffee, and bloodstains. To his left, the glass on Cobb's office windows, despite being irreparably damaged, was still fully intact. It had done its job, saving the life of everyone who had been on the level. A forensics team had arrived, snapping photographs of the crime scene and zipped the corpse of the gunman who had shot himself up in a body-bag, dumping him on a gurney. They'd wheeled him outside to their van and the vehicle was already headed to their lab. The team had also bagged and sealed the man's two weapons and magazines and were now taking every shell casing from the ground which they would run for prints and DNA to try to trace the weapons and the two men who had fired them. Outside, a pair of their detectives were examining the car the two men had arrived in. They had run the plates through the DMV and Met log, and it had come up listed as stolen less than two days ago. Across the parking lot several news-teams and a small crowd who had gathered behind some police tape that had been drawn across the entrance, were being held back by Met policemen.
Detectives from CID and MI5 had arrived, having seen the news reports and offered their services, but Cobb had dismissed them all politely, saying this would be an internal investigation. The Prime Minister had contacted Cobb, checking if they were all OK, but for now no-one really had any answers. They all knew any possible clues lay with the dead body at the lab along with anything traceable on the weapons and casings.
There had been another body-bag in the van alongside the dead gunman, containing the body of Clark. He was headed straight to the morgue, killed by the three gunshots to his sternum and upper chest. Thinking of the young officer, Archer shook his head angrily. He was only twenty six, and would have been defenceless when the two gunmen stormed the entrance downstairs.
In one way the Unit had been incredibly lucky.
But in another, they had paid the heaviest of prices.
Turning, he saw Nikki sitting alone by her desk, a cup of coffee in her hands, a blanket around her shoulders. He walked over and took a seat beside her in an empty chair, making sure the MP5 around his shoulder was tucked out of the way. They sat there side-by-side in silence, Nikki watching the forensics team sweeping up next door. Archer turned to her.
‘You OK?’
‘That was too close,' she said quietly, her eyes wide and looking ahead, watching the forensics team next door. They had bagged and tagged the last shell casing and were now starting to clean the blood and brains from the second gunman off the floor, the acrid smell of bleach and disinfectant drifting into the ops room. 'Who the hell were those guys?’
‘I don’t know. But we’ll find out. Soon.’
Pause.
‘I feel sick.’
‘That’s the adrenaline. It’ll pass.’
She shook her head, her hands trembling from the shock. He looked down and saw ripples in the coffee from the tremors in her hands, like the shockwaves on the glass of Cobb’s office.
‘Little taste of what you guys go through in the field,’ she said, forcing a smile.
He put his arm around her protectively and she leaned into him.
‘That was too close,’ she said again.
‘Jesus Christ, that was close,’ Fox said, side by side with Cobb, Chalky and Porter across the room. The three of them were examining the damaged glass on the exterior of Cobb’s office, well over a hundred white marks surrounded by jagged ripples.
Fox turned to Cobb.
‘Best decision you ever made, sir.'
'Not enough for Officer Clark though, was it?'
The three officers stayed silent.
'Are you OK, sir?' Porter asked.
‘I’m fine,' Cobb said. 'I just want some damn answers. Somebody's going to pay dearly for this. And I don't mean with money.’
As the three men nodded in agreement, Porter looked at Fox and Chalky and suddenly realised they were all still armed.
‘Sir, I’m sorry. I’ll get the men to stow their weapons.’
Cobb shook his head and turned to him.
‘No. I’m changing the protocol. Until we find out who those men were, I want every officer in the building armed at all times. That means Glock and MP5s, everywhere you go, spare mags in your pouches, all of you in full uniform with mic and earpiece. If one of the tech team goes downstairs to use the toilet, I want one of you with them in the next stall.’
The men nodded.
‘Yes sir.’
‘What did the Prime Minister say?’ Chalky asked.
‘Like the rest of us, he wanted to know what the hell had happened and what this was about,’ Cobb said. ‘He said our entire team should consider relocating to MI5 temporarily until we find out what's going on and where those two came from.’
‘Are we leaving?’ Chalky asked.
Cobb shook his head, looking at the damaged glass in front of him.
‘No. This is our home. We’re not going anywhere.’
He turned to Porter, his face hard. Cobb's tech team may have been in shock, but he was in full control.
‘I want Second Team guarding downstairs on rotation. Both entrances, armed and alert. No one gets in without bulletproof ID, and no one stows their weapons in the gun-cage until I say so. Clear?’
‘Yes, sir,' Porter said. 'I’ll tell Deakins.’
He walked off, turning the corner and headed down the corridor. Fox, Chalky and Cobb were left in a line, the three of them still looking at the damaged glass. From the outside, it looked as if someone had shot it repeatedly with a paintball gun filled with white balls, the white spots surrounded by spider-webs of broken glass from the shockwave of each bullet from the Kalashnikovs. Cobb reached over and touched one of them, feeling the sharp edges of the glass on his fingertip.
‘What the hell was this all about?'’ he muttered.
It took the lone surviving gunman about an hour to make it across town to the command post. He was no longer dressed in black. He and his partner had arrived outside the police station wearing civilian trousers and sweaters underneath their black combat fatigues for when the job was done. But once he was out of sight down a side alley and a sufficient distance from the police station, he’d pulled off his outfit and thrown it away with the balaclava he'd already removed. He'd been forced to leave his Kalashnikov at the scene. No way could he run through London with that in his hands. But he’d pulled the Beretta from its holster and tucked it into his belt under his sweater, and had then made his way across the city back to the safe-house.
It was located on the eighth floor of a newly built office building. Rentals on each floor weren't due to start for another couple of weeks, so the ten storey building was completely empty and a perfect position for an anonymous command post. The man ducked in through the lobby and took the stairs rather than the lift, running up them two at a time. When he arrived on the eighth floor, he moved across the corridor and pushed open the door to a large room, a long, wide office, panting hard from the exertion.
The room was dark, almost pitch black, all the curtains drawn, and in the darkness he saw the large figure of his leader, sitting alone. In front of him there were two televisions, one tuned to CNN and the other to BBC World. The BBC screen was already showing footage from the ruined police station. The big man by the screens turned and looked at the newcomer, his face and body dark, just the whites of his eyes visible in the darkness.
There was a pause.
‘You're alone,’ he said, in a foreign language.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Where is Crow?’ he asked quietly.
‘They shot him, sir,’ the man said. ‘We failed. The man had bulletproof-glass as his office walls. We tried but we couldn’t get to him.’
Silence. The leader of the group sat silently, staring at him. The surviving gunman tried to return his gaze, but failed as his leader looked straight into his eyes, his hulking figure silhouetted from the glare of the televisions behind him.
‘Then why are you still standing there. You know what to do.’
The gunman looked at him, then swallowed and nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’
With that he saluted, and turned and walked back out of the room.
The leader didn't see the salute. He had already turned his attention back to the televisions and the list.
Across the city at Grosvenor Square, the wailing sirens at the US Embassy had been silenced, and word had spread that the threat was just a false alarm. People were already moving back into the building, the HAZMAT team packing up their equipment and climbing back into their white vans, departing one after the other. The crowds of Agency workers were relieved, none more so than the unfortunate male analyst who had opened the package. They all headed back inside, returning to their desks and the work that had been so suddenly interrupted.
False alarms like this happened from time to time. Most were actually organised by someone from the Agency and used as an audit to test emergency protocols. On this occasion the building had emptied in a matter of minutes, so those in charge of the evacuation procedures were relieved, mostly because it had been a false alarm but also because of the speed at which the building had been cleared. They wouldn't suffer any reprimands for slow reaction times or disorganisation. The staff were well drilled.
Back in the Square, the protestors were still in place, undeterred, and their protests started to gather volume again. But one person who wasn’t relaxing was the CIA Operations Officer who had known Charlie Adams. He was feeling quite the opposite in fact.
Once the doors to the Embassy were reopened, he walked swiftly back to his office, moving as quickly as he could through the crowd of people. He needed to get on the system and pull a list. There were eleven names on it, and so far two of them had been confirmed dead in the past three hours, which was far too precise for his liking to be a coincidence. Walking fast, he pushed open the door to his office and moved around the desk to his computer, then thought better of it and pulled his mobile phone from his pocket. He'd need someone familiar with all the government databases to do this, and couldn’t waste time fumbling around trying to do it himself. For the first time in many years, he was going to disobey orders.
He pushed the number and waited for the call to connect.
‘Operations Officer Ryan Jackson, London office. Access code 34321,’ he said.
‘One moment, please,’ the woman on the other end said.
As he waited, Jackson found himself looking at the television in his office. In the commotion and sudden evacuation, he had left it on and there was new footage on the screen with a new Breaking News headline. However, it wasn't reporting on the hoax anthrax threat at the Embassy.
Instead, it was showing the ruined exterior of a two-floored building with a helicopter on the roof. Some kind of police station.
He frowned and looked closer, waiting for the call on his ear to connect. It seemed a police squad across the city had been involved in some kind of gunfight. The news cameras were at the gates, cordoned off, but the shot had zoomed in and showed smashed windows, empty shell casings on the tarmac and three 4x4 Ford Explorers that had been torn apart by automatic gunfire. He read the headline.
Counter-terrorist police unit attacked by two gunmen.
The screen suddenly flicked to a man giving a short statement to the press by the gates. He was a dark-haired man, around Jackson’s age, in an expensive-looking dark suit and with a stern look on his face. His name came up on the screen below, just as it came up from the depths of Jackson's memory.
Director Tim Cobb.
Head of the Armed Response Unit.
The phone to Jackson’s ear connected. An operator asked how she could help him, but Jackson didn’t respond. He was staring at Cobb’s face on the screen, a man he hadn't seen in fifteen years. He looked at the man and the devastation of the police station behind him. The operator asked him again how she could help him, but Jackson ended the call, lowering his phone and staring at the television.
So he wasn't imagining it, or being paranoid.
It was really happening.
They were back.
And they were coming to kill them all.
At that moment, three thousand and thirty one miles and several time-zones across the Atlantic Ocean, a man in his late thirties stepped out of a large family home in a residential neighbourhood in upstate Connecticut. It was a dewy early morning, just coming up to 7 a.m. He shut the door behind him and headed down the path towards his car, stopping to push his son's toy tricycle out of the way with his foot.
His was a real success story. He'd left the military in 2004, after a turbulent career that had started in the Marine Corps. He’d then taken everyone off guard by launching his own business, supplying software equipment to companies in the area. People were waiting for it to fail. A southern boy, originally from Athens, Georgia, the man hadn’t been an academically gifted kid, getting average grades in school, and he wasn’t especially good with computers. He’d done some time in the military but had wanted a change he said. It was just a matter of time, they all figured, before he ended up working security someplace or trying to re-enlist.
But the opposite had happened. Although he wasn’t a genius by any means, the man had good instincts and was quick to identify opportunities in the marketplace. The quality of his product, hard work and the technical proficiency of his small team meant the company had grown at an impressive pace. It was now the premier supplier to offices and companies across the American East Coast. He was a self-made millionaire, had his own facility in Hartford and was on his way there that morning to finish up a big deal with a technological company based in Philadelphia. He had a wife, three kids and a house in one of the best neighbourhoods in the state, and he often had to pinch himself to fully appreciate his extraordinarily good fortune.
In the military, he'd been going nowhere. He had a poor discipline record and an even worse reputation. He’d been on his way to being kicked out of the Marines and realising he had nowhere to go, convinced them to let him enlist in the United States Army and give him another shot. Even then, it was a small miracle he’d survived without a serious incident in the years before he mustered out. He eventually came to the obvious conclusion that military life wasn’t for him. Leaving the Army had been the best decision he'd ever made.
He headed towards his Mercedes, dark blue, less than six months old, fresh off the production line and parked on the street. He got a kick out of the envious looks other guys gave him when he parked at the golf club or at the Mall down the street. He unlocked the car, pulling open the door, and stepped inside, shutting it behind him.
Fastening his seatbelt, he put the key in the ignition and twisted it.
Given the advances in technology over the last decade, much like those the man had built his business on, the device rigged up underneath the Mercedes that morning would have been considered old-fashioned by those proficient with the finer points of car-bombing. Times had changed, such as when the six-shooter revolver suddenly found itself usurped by the 9mm pistol. The two bricks of C4 plastic explosive stuck underneath the Mercedes had been wired up to the car’s ignition system in the middle of the night, a man lying there in the shadows under the car, spending almost half an hour wiring the charge. Most modern car-bombs were magnetic, triggered by the opening of a door or whenever pressure was applied to a pedal. Others used tilt fuses, one side full of liquid mercury, the other side the wires of an open circuit to the detonator. Whenever the car moved a certain degree, the mercury swished down into the wiring and closed the circuit, detonating the bomb. But the man who had wired up the Mercedes to the bomb had been out of the game for over a decade. He could be forgiven for being a little old-fashioned. But whatever the argument, one thing was for sure
His way still worked.
There was a split-second delay as the receiver half a foot beneath the man in the driver seat picked up the detonation signal from the ignition current.
Then the bomb under the car exploded.
The Mercedes erupted into a huge fireball, the vehicle lifted twenty feet into the air from the force of the plastic explosives underneath, the fireball burning the trees nearby, the shockwave smashing the windows of nearby houses, everything inside the car vaporised in an instant. Down the street, the man who planted the C4 watched through the rear-view mirror of his own car. He’d been there for over four hours, watching and waiting for the man to step outside his front door, get inside the car and turn on the ignition.
As the flaming car landed with a thud, the shell continuing to burn, front doors of houses along the street started to open, curtains in windows flickering as neighbours peered out to see what the unexpected noise was. The man watching in the rear view mirror nodded with satisfaction, watching the Mercedes cook.
A confirmed kill.
The next moment, he fired the engine to his own car. He took off the handbrake, putting his foot down, and the car moved off quickly around the corner and out of sight, headed straight for Bradley International Airport and his 7:55 am flight to London Heathrow.