Dead man walking alex ki.., p.11
Dead Man Walking (Alex King Book 14), page 11
NINETEEN
Reno read the email a second time to commit it to memory. He had used the hacker before. He had performed many assignments for the Russians. He wasn’t sure whether it was for the FSB of the GRU or the Mafia. They were all connected these days. But what he did know was he had world-class, possibly the world-leaders in computer hacking at his disposal when on an official assignment for the Russians. Reno had been an ‘auditor’ for many Russian mafia bosses. The last man a crocked employee would ever see when he had been sent to square the account. Men with their sticky fingers in the mafia’s pies. Men who thought they could skim off the top, whether it was a hundred dollars or a hundred million. The auditor would close the account with a bullet to the man’s brain and the business would go to the next man deemed suitable to succeed. It was good work, because people made mistakes, grew greedy and over-confident. It was the human condition. And Reno would never be short of work.
“What have you got there?” Natasha asked breathily, looking over his shoulder at the screen of the laptop. She was dressed in active wear and had just performed an hour workout after her five-mile run.
“The next phase,” Reno replied.
She poured a tall glass of water from the dispenser and drank it down in one. She was perspiring and her face glowed red. Reno had always told her to run at the same pace as if she was escaping a volcano. There was no point jogging at a walking pace. Running from trouble was something that their work would undoubtedly give them cause to do and they needed to condition their bodies accordingly. Reno always concentrated on running, stretching and core work. He focused on workouts that involved pull-ups, press-ups, dips and climbing. It was important to be able to climb. Either up to a target’s window, or for their own means of escape. In conditioning themselves for these scenarios, they seldom lifted weights and sparred daily with each other in boxing, karate and ju-jitsu techniques. Both now favoured Krav Maga, the Israeli art of fighting invented and perfected by Israeli commandos.
“We are no closer to finding King,” she said tersely.
Reno smiled. “We do not need to find King,” he said quietly, looking at the picture of the woman that had been attached in the email. “When the time to kill King comes, he will come straight to us.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
“We slaughtered his family. You don’t think that is enough to provoke him?”
Reno chuckled. “We haven’t yet begun to hurt him,” he told her. “But we will.”
“Who is Caroline Darby?” Natasha asked, reading over his shoulder. “His lover?” Reno nodded. “Then we kill her next?”
“That is my plan.”
“Can I do it,” she asked, staring at the face of the woman on the screen. Mid-thirties, mousy blonde hair, good features with an aquiline nose. Natasha smiled. “She is a very beautiful woman. I would like to sleep with her.” She smiled. “That would be good, no? To sleep with someone whom you knew you were going to kill.” She sucked in her breath and bit her bottom lip, clearly aroused by the thought. “I like the thought of that very much…”
Reno smiled. “Well, my dear, I cannot promise that she would succumb to your feminine advances, but I can promise you the chance to kill her.” He paused. “It is essential now to split our forces, if you will. I will be in London to keep close to our contact and to King, and you will do what now needs to be done.”
“And what will that involve?”
Reno smiled. “Caroline Darby is, by all accounts, a worthy opponent. She served with the army in their intelligence corps. She was awarded a medal when her patrol was ambushed, and she held off thirty Taliban insurgents single-handedly while injured members of her patrol could be safely evacuated. As well as this, she has been involved in numerous dangerous operations in the security service. Do not underestimate her. However, if she is unbalanced, grieving and desperate, then she will be weaker. She will make mistakes and when she does; you will strike.”
Reno tapped away at the keyboard of his laptop and sent her an email. They used several accounts, all created using false details and only ever connected by a dongle and a pay-as-you-go, or burner, mobile phone. Never through a landline and wireless routers. He watched as Natasha picked up her iPhone and scrolled through her email account. The phone was the latest model and somewhere in size between a conventional smartphone and a small tablet.
“Her family?”
Reno nodded. “You know what to do…”
TWENTY
“I think I have something,” Sally-Anne Thorpe announced, looking up from her laptop screen as King walked in. She smiled somewhat awkwardly and nodded a greeting, and King returned a non-committal nod.
Ramsay’s eyes did not leave the screen. They were both seated at the breakfast bar with a pot of coffee on the go and laptops open. “We think it will prove significant,” he said, nodding for Thorpe to continue.
King looked behind him as Rashid came in. “I’ve got something for you, too,” he said. “All the bells and whistles.”
Rashid nodded as he headed for the coffee pot. “Is that where you went?”
King shrugged. “Sorry, thought it best I shook you off.” He paused, looking at Ramsay. “And nice try, Neil, but I can spot a tail by now.”
“Bastard. Just following orders.” Rashid picked up a cup and reached for the coffee pot. “What’s all this, then?”
“Thorpe was about to give us some news by the sounds of it,” King replied. He hadn’t made any secret of not wanting the ex-police detective on board, and he wasn’t one to warm quickly. “Where’s the big man?”
“Lomu is on security,” Ramsay replied. “He’s outside keeping tabs.”
“A static guard?” King did not hide his annoyance. “You’re not utilising his skills effectively. Get him in here and have a couple of service guards keep a lookout.”
“Thank you, King. I’ll take it under advisement,” Ramsay replied tersely.
“Actually Alex, what Neil hasn’t told you, is that there are no service resources for this,” Thorpe said somewhat defensively. “Nobody here is getting paid, and we’re all shown as on sabbatical on our files.” She paused. “Your team is here because they want to help you resolve this. Whatever the hell this is.”
“Oh…” King said solemnly. He had not thought about it; hadn’t for a moment questioned the response and support. Caroline had left the service and King’s own future had been in doubt. He poured himself a rare coffee, not just for the caffeine hit, but because to stand there stubbornly making a cup of protest tea among these coffee drinkers seemed trite and pedantic in the face of what Sally-Anne had just said. “Well, thanks. I mean it. Thank you.” If King had ever felt that he had never truly had real friendships over the years, he was in no doubt about who had his back now.
“I found this,” Thorpe said, cutting through the silence like an axe. “I looked at the killings of… your sister and her family…” She paused. “I’m sorry for your loss, by the way…”
King shrugged. “Estranged,” he said. “Another life. I didn’t even know she had got married, let alone that she had two boys, or what their names even are…”
“Mark and Thomas,” she said softly. “Mark was the oldest.”
King nodded. Inside his stomach was turning somersaults and his chest tightened. They were both his names from another life. Mark Thomas Jeffries. A bum who died escaping Dartmoor Prison and who he felt nobody would mourn. How wrong he had been. Leanne had obviously cared and mourned and given him a way to live on in her own children. King sipped some coffee for a distraction, and to hide the emotion on his face. He willed himself not to fold, not to yield to the emotion welling up inside him. He drank more coffee and did not look anybody in the eye. He had seen death hundreds of times, delivered it more times than he cared to remember. And yet, he was left feeling raw and vulnerable not by the deaths in that blissfully normal cul-de-sac, but by the simple fact that both dead boys had borne his name. He was aware that Rashid was looking at him, and he took another sip of the strong, black coffee, and when he took the cup away from his mouth, his poker face was resolute and there was no emotion in his cold, grey eyes.
“The violence and sadism of the deaths was shocking. The PNC and Interpol databases were full of horrendous crimes. There are some evil people out there, but you don’t need to be told this. We’ve all met or heard of demons in the guise of people. They walk among us.” She paused. “But it was the killing of the boys that was more shocking for me. It was, so cold. So, calculated.” She scrolled on her laptop until she found what she was looking for. “I found a case where one man drowned two children aged seven and nine, after he had assassinated their parents.”
“Tortured and mutilated?” King asked.
“No. Not at all. A point-thirty-two calibre bullet to the head and heart on both counts.”
“Right…”
“Wait. It gets better. Because the same man was found guilty of killing a man and drowning the man’s fifteen-year-old daughter. Same MO.” She paused. “The first instance was in Spain, the other was in Switzerland. He was a fledgling assassin named Manuel Renault. French-Spanish parentage, lived in Bayonne, France.”
“I fail to see the connection,” said Rashid. “If the police knew his name and he was sentenced… I take it that’s what you meant by found guilty?”
“Absolutely,” Sally-Anne nodded. She hesitated as she checked a text. She smiled, tapped out a swift reply, then put the phone back on the table, screen down.
“Private call?” asked Ramsay.
“Business,” she replied, blushing.
“Yeah, right,” Rashid grinned. “Sally-Anne’s on a promise…”
“It’s business,” she said a little too emphatically. “Maybe pleasure afterwards. But only when we’re done here.”
“I was right,” Rashid said, still grinning.
Sally-Anne Thorpe had not had a relationship in over a year, and she had never been the type of person to have a one-night stand. She had ‘bonded’ with DI Miller. Enough to use his first name by the end of her walk-through the crime scene. Enough to share a smile over a coffee and enough to share a look when he had dropped her off at the train station in Southampton. That was the most contact she had had with a man in a year, enough to feel stirrings inside her and enough to lay it on the line and ask if he would like to meet up. Of course, they would remain in contact throughout the case. She had agreed to liaise with him and would soon redact some of her findings and send the bare bones to his email. DI Miller had text messaged her on the train and she had felt like a teenager texting on the journey back to London.
She glanced at Ramsay, but his expression said it all. Ramsay must have been born middle-aged and married with children. “Sorry, I digress,” she said, her cheeks flushed and her lips quivering slightly, embarrassed at the attention. “He was tried in the European Court because of his crimes in two countries and sentenced to life in La Santé Prison, Paris. Renault had dual citizenship of both France and Spain but was living in France at the time of the murders.” She paused. “But he promptly escaped. There have been, however, unsolved cases around the world fitting the same MO. Always children drowned after the murder of an adult. These are contract killings, no doubt about it. But the person behind them, the person drowning these children, have criminal phycologists all arriving at the same conclusion – that he sees the process of drowning them as a less violent end than a number of other methods he could use. There is a paradox to drowning in that after the brief, initial panic, it is a dreamlike experience. Certainly, many survivors of drowning, those brought back from the brink by resuscitation agree that it was a calm ending…”
“There’s also plenty who won’t see it quite like that,” replied King. He had resuscitated Caroline after she had fallen through the ice on an operation in Lapland and but for his CPR expertise and an adrenalin shot to the heart, she would not be alive today. She had shared what she had experienced, and it had been far from a calm ending.
“I agree,” Thorpe nodded and squinted at her screen as she brought up a page. “I think it’s a perception some people have, and in this case, the killer of these children. This is an excerpt from Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea.” She paused. “The instinct not to breathe underwater is so strong that it overcomes the agony of running out of air. No matter how desperate the drowning person is, he doesn’t inhale until he’s on the verge of losing consciousness. At that point there’s so much carbon dioxide in the blood, and so little oxygen, that chemical sensors in the brain trigger an involuntary breath whether he’s underwater or not. That is called the 'break point.' Laboratory experiments have shown the break point to come after 87 seconds. It’s sort of a neurological optimism, as if the body were saying, Holding our breath is killing us, and breathing in might not kill us, so we might as well breathe in.
When the first involuntary breath occurs most people are still conscious, which is unfortunate, because the only thing more unpleasant than running out of air is breathing in water. At this point the person goes from voluntary to involuntary apnea, and the drowning begins in earnest. A spasmodic breath drags water into the mouth and windpipe, and then one of two things happens. In about ten percent of people, water—anything—touching the vocal cords triggers an immediate contraction in the muscles around the larynx. In effect, the central nervous system judges something in the voice box to be more of a threat than low oxygen levels in the blood, and acts accordingly. This is called laryngospasm. It’s so powerful that it overcomes the breathing reflex and eventually suffocates the person. A person with laryngospasm drowns without any water in his lungs.
In the other ninety percent of people, water floods the lungs and ends any waning transfer of oxygen to the blood. The clock is running down now; half-conscious and enfeebled by oxygen depletion, the person is in no position to fight his way back up to the surface. The very process of drowning makes it harder and harder not to drown, an exponential disaster curve similar to that of a sinking boat.” Sally-Anne paused, letting the words sink in. “It doesn’t sound a great way to go, does it…” she stated flatly.
“The bastard…” Rashid said quietly. “Those poor kids…”
“And this Manuel Renault,” King said. “What happened to him?”
“He escaped La Santé Prison fifteen years ago,” she said and turned the laptop screen towards him. “This is a seventeen-year-old photograph of him when he was convicted. But I’m certain the person who murdered your nephews and this man are one and the same.”
King stared at the photograph of the man on the screen. His features were gaunt and there was black around his eyes. And then there were those eyes. Cold and emotionless. Not the worse King had seen, but if the drownings tied in, then the man had been killing ever since. There was no telling what the man had seen. “Get Steve Moore to have a look at this photo, and any others you can get hold of. If we have access to it, then some ageing software might be a good idea.”
Ramsay picked up his phone and looked at a text. He frowned and looked up at King. “You’re going to love this,” he said.
“What?”
Ramsay stood up. “Come with me.”
TWENTY-ONE
Thames House, London
“This seems to have escalated to a little more than off the record,” King commented as he rode the lift to the third floor. “But still not to the top of the food chain,” he said, knowing where most of the briefing rooms were in MI5 headquarters.
“Simon will be there. The room’s been swept and sealed. This is still off the record.”
“But you’re all on the payroll again,” King stated flatly.
“We are.”
“Good. But thanks for the sentiment,” he said. “It was appreciated, and…” King trailed off when he saw who was standing beside Simon Mereweather. He hadn’t brought a weapon with him to Thames House – would never have got past security in the first place – but he would gladly have taken a pistol out and shot the man in the forehead. He had missed his opportunity in Svalbard.
“King, you know Mr Newman, I hear.”
“I’ve come across him.”
“We bump into one another from time to time.” Newman extended his hand, but King measuredly put both hands inside his leather bomber jacket. Newman glanced mockingly at his own hand as if it was filthy, then smiled and said, “Shall we go in?”
Simon Mereweather said, “Certainly,” and opened the sealed door, breaking the security seal tape. “Refreshments are on the way, gentlemen.” He waited for the other three men to enter, then closed the door behind him. “I have a great deal of time for Robert Lefkowitz, my opposite number with the CIA. Not that we deal with him a great deal these days… how is he?”
“He’s holding on in there,” Newman replied, his Virginia drawl sounding as smooth and silky as pancake syrup. He sat down and placed a thin, leather document holder on the desk in front of him. “He wants to clear his desk, if you get what I mean…”
Mereweather looked at King and said by way of explanation, “Director Lefkowitz has cancer.”
King nodded. He knew all about cancer, had watched it kill his wife, Jane. Well, almost. She had finished the job herself. As understanding as he could be, he was light on sympathy in this case. He remembered his old mentor Peter Stewart telling him that if he ever wanted to find sympathy then, “it’s in the dictionary somewhere between shit and syphilis…” The tough Scotsman certainly had a way with words.
“So, what does Uncle Sam want with us?” King asked irritably.
Newman smiled. “Just building bridges,” he said lightly. “That business with the rogue NSA agent was put to bed.”
