Zero 22, p.12
Zero 22, page 12
part #8 of Danny Black Series
Alice’s lack of sleep was catching up on her. The basement was warm from all the computer equipment, which gave off a hypnotic whirr. Her eyelids were heavy, and she had to keep shaking herself awake.
The young woman who had agreed to help had introduced herself as Karen. She sat by Alice’s side at a workstation. Three curved monitors, a keyboard, a trackpad and a fingerprint scanner. The screens displayed a flickering succession of images. They changed so quickly that Alice couldn’t identify any of them individually. Rather, she had a sense of a jumble of generic types of pictures: individuals standing at a zebra crossing, or queueing in a coffee shop, or stepping out of a bus. A bewildering blur of young and old, male and female, black and white. After scanning in Alice’s picture of Poliakov, Karen had sat and stared at these screens for at least two hours, as if her brain was processing the tens of thousands of CCTV images that the systems were checking. Alice could see the flickering pictures reflecting in her glasses, which somehow made the whole experience more disorientating. Every twenty minutes or so, the pictures would stop, and Karen’s fingers would fly over the keyboard. The first time this happened, she’d explained that she was changing to a new CCTV zone, but now they sat in silence as she went about her work and Alice grew sleepier and sleepier.
Her chin was on her chest when Karen’s voice jolted her awake. ‘I’m sorry. It doesn’t look like we have any matches. We can set an alert, if you like? If your guy turns up, we’ll let you know.’
Alice found it hard to conceal her disappointment. ‘Are you sure you’ve tried everything?’ she said. ‘It’s really important I find this guy soon.’ She knew instantly that Karen was holding something back. It was the tightness around the eyes. The hesitation. ‘Please, Karen,’ she said. ‘I know he’s been in London. If there’s anything you can do?’
‘There are some other CCTV databases,’ Karen said. ‘We’re not really supposed to access them without prior authorisation. The lawyers get antsy.’
Alice was wide awake now. ‘Please,’ she repeated. ‘I promise I’ll get you any authorisation you need. But the sooner I get a lead . . .’
Karen bit her lower lip, then nodded. She turned back to her screen and started typing again. The blur of images reappeared. The two women stared expectantly at the screen. Five minutes passed. Ten minutes.
And then the blur stopped. A single image filled the screen. Alice felt her stomach lurch.
It was him. Poliakov. Even though the CCTV image was monochrome and blurred, there was no doubt. It looked like he had just entered a building through a revolving door. He wore a black beanie hat and a heavy coat, and there was something decidedly shifty in the way he was half looking over his shoulder, half looking up, as if searching for the camera that was filming him, but failing to see it. He had several days’ stubble and dark rings under his eyes. It was, in Alice’s experience, the image of an anxious man in hiding.
‘Where was this taken?’ Alice said.
Karen brought up a table of metadata. It meant nothing to Alice, but her colleague seemed to decipher it with ease. She launched some mapping software on one of her screens and keyed in some coordinates. The map zoomed into a location in central London. ‘Battersea,’ Karen said. And then, after a few more taps of the key-board: ‘One of the new residential blocks at the old power station.’
‘Which one?’
‘The Pump House. The footage was taken by a camera in the reception area.’
‘When?’
‘Yesterday. 22.13 hours.’
Alice felt a surge of heat through her veins. Even as she’d been researching him last night, Poliakov had been been active in London. Doing what? Was he planning something? Every instinct she had told her that if so, it needed to be stopped. Quickly.
‘The Mansion House,’ she repeated, her voice much calmer than her insides. ‘Do me a favour, Karen. Keep the search running. If he crops up anywhere else, let me know?’ There must have been something about the way she looked or spoke, because Karen’s demeanour changed. She seemed more alert as Alice stood up before hurrying out of the basement and up to her office on the fourth floor.
Back at her computer, it was a moment’s work to access all the information on the MI6 servers pertaining to the Battersea Mansion House. There was a full set of architect’s plans, a record of police callouts to the building and, of course, a complete list of apartment owners and residents pulled from the Land Registry and council tax records. It was a big tower and a long list, but Alice didn’t have to scan very far down it until a particular name jumped out at her. The penthouse apartment had been bought only six months previously for a sum of £17 million by a certain Boris Rostropovic. Alice recognised the name but couldn’t quite place it. She keyed his name into the database. A photograph of an elderly Russian man appeared. His face was deeply lined, his hawkish eyes hooded. His security services biography, printed below the photograph, was a melting pot of Soviet KGB collusion, post-Soviet asset stripping and personal acquaintance with high-ranking members of Russian administrations past and present. He was your classic oligarch, the type that was buying up high-end property in London by the sackful. And according to the immigration authority records, he had entered the UK on a private Learjet into London City Airport the previous week. So far as Alice could tell, he was still in the country.
Alice sat back for a moment on her office chair, staring at the screen, re-reading the biog and nodding thoughtfully. She wondered what kind of influence he had, that would require the need to put his building on a special CCTV database. More importantly, was it chance that an FSB agent high on MI6’s wanted list had, less than twelve hours previously, been visiting with an individual whose past and present was as murky as Boris Rostropovic’s? Hardly likely. She picked up Poliakov’s file, flicked through it one more time and gazed at the image of Rostropovic that stared out from her computer. Then she picked up her office phone and dialled a number.
Her boss, Maxwell Stark, head of the Russian desk, was clearly still in bed. He was a mild, polite man who nevertheless couldn’t quite hide his annoyance at being woken. It fell from his voice as soon as Alice said Poliakov’s name. She gave him a précis of her investigations and he listened attentively. When she’d finished there was a moment of silence. ‘Good work, Alice,’ Stark said. ‘Excellent work.’ The sound of his voice almost made her smell peppermint.
‘What’s our next move, sir?’
Another silence.
‘There’s a high probability that we’ll find either Poliakov or Rostropovic or both in the penthouse apartment of the Mansion House,’ said Stark.
‘I agree, sir.’
‘Then we need to make a hard arrest. It’s politically sensitive and Poliakov is a trained FSB agent, so we can’t hand this over to the Met.’
‘No sir.’
‘I’m going to mobilise Hereford. We need an SAS team. Would you be so good as to stay where you are? We’re going to force entry into the penthouse today. I’m on my way in.’
The line went dead.
ELEVEN
Four members of the SAS anti-terrorist team were already on the ground in London. Their base: a run-down flat in Victoria, the look and smell of which hadn’t been improved by the presence of four military guys over the period of the last month. Their names were Bobby Hunter, Mike Cracknell, Dan Finch and Craig Knowles. Hunter was the smallest guy in the Regiment, but what he lacked in height he more than made up for in toughness. He was a broad-shouldered, stocky guy with a square chin and a taste for a fight. When the call came in from Hereford at 08.30 hrs, of the four men in the flat, he was the only one awake. That was the standard operating procedure: one guy on stag at any given time, ready to take instructions and mobilise the unit if necessary.
Hunter was making his fourth coffee of the morning when his phone rang and the terse voice of Ray Hammond, the ops officer back at Hereford, delivered their instructions. ‘The Mansion House, Battersea Power Station. A hard arrest of two Russian suspects.’
‘We could do with more guys, boss,’ Hunter said.
‘There’s another team mobilising from Hereford right now. They’re flying in and they’ll put down in the gardens of the Honourable Artillery Company at approximately 10.00 hours.’
‘Who’s on the team?’
‘Cunningham, Moore, Parsons, Hobbs. While they’re inbound, get your arses down to Battersea and put in surveillance on the apartment block. I’ve uploaded pictures of the two Russkies to the secure server. If you see either of them leaving the Mansion House, follow and apprehend. If not, you’ll force entry into the penthouse at 17.00 hours. Assuming we get the go-ahead from Whitehall.’
Hunter gulped down the rest of his coffee and unceremoniously woke the others. They were sleeping on mattresses in the living room, holsters and personal weapons on the carpet next to them. There was a ripe, male smell in the air. They grumbled at Hunter’s booming voice for only a fraction of second before they realised that he was hauling them out of bed for a good reason. And as soon as he told them the details, they rapidly started to get ready. Each guy put his personal weapon in his waist holster. They fitted their radio packs and concealed earpieces. Hunter sat squat at his laptop and downloaded the images of Boris Rostropovic and Dmitri Poliakov and distributed them to the unit’s encrypted mobiles. Within ten minutes of waking, the guys were ready to go.
They had two vehicles: a black Audi and a midnight-blue Kia. Ordinary cars to look at, but souped up and with toughened glass. Hunter and Cracknell took one, Finch and Knowles the other. The London traffic was slow. It took twenty minutes to get to Battersea Bridge and across the river. They parked up in the shadow of the old Battersea Power Station and put their disabled-driver badges on the dashboards of their vehicles. Then they performed a recce of the Mansion House.
It was a shiny new building in an area still largely under construction. Cranes and scaffolding loomed tall against the grey morning sky, but at ground level many things were finished. Fresh paving and newly planted trees surrounded the office workers walking briskly past, phones to their ears or in front of their noses. None of them paid any attention to four burly men circling the apartment block, identifying exits and planning their observation points. Aside from the main entrance at the front of the apartment building, there was a goods entrance round the back and three further side entrances at irregular points around the building. It was possible for one person to keep eyes on the two side entrances of the western edge of the block. Cracknell positioned himself on a bench in the shade of a plane tree. A service road led to the goods entrance at the back, where a bus stop offered an adequate OP, which Knowles occupied. Twenty metres from the entrance on the eastern side was a busy cab rank, where at any one time there were five or ten people milling around. Finch expertly lost himself in that ever-changing crowd, while Hunter took the front of the apartment building. Here, a coffee shop conveniently faced the entrance. Hunter installed himself at an outside table, ordered a large Americano, and watched.
Hunter had set up OPs in some desperate shitholes in his time. His diminutive stature meant he found it easier than most to conceal himself in muddy ditches in Afghanistan fertilised by the locals’ raw sewage; in wadis in the desert, covered by hessian sacks, where you sweated faster than you could get water into your system; snow holes in sub-zero temperatures, so cold you couldn’t feel your extremities. As surveillance gigs went, this was a peach. A seat. A hot drink. But in a weird way, that made it more difficult. Comfort, he well knew, could make you complacent. An SAS man was trained to thrive in extreme situations. When the elements and your surroundings were against you, it sharpened the mind. Made you more alert. When things were easy, you had to up your concentration. Force yourself to see past the ordinary. Nobody passing the coffee shop would have looked twice at Hunter as he sat facing the Mansion House, sipping his drink. Nobody would have imagined that he was making accurate note of his surroundings with an almost robotic efficiency. He clocked the face of every person exiting the building. The blonde woman in an elegant business suit carrying a burgundy briefcase. The man in his fifties with a deep tan and a v-neck golfing sweater. The teenage girl – an au pair, maybe? – with two kids in tow. The podgy guy in an expensive suit, smaller even than Hunter himself, accompanied by two blondes who almost certainly charged for their services. When his earpiece crackled and Knowles made a lewd comment about a woman he’d seen exiting from the back of the apartment building – ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing her goods entrance . . .’ – Hunter smiled inwardly, but showed no sign that he was in contact with anybody else. The first rule of surveillance: expect counter-surveillance. Hunter continued to sip his coffee and watch.
An hour passed and there was no sign of Poliakov or Rostropovic. The SAS men swapped positions, because to stay too long in one location would be a red flag for any counter-surveillance operatives. From his new position on the bench on the western side of the building, he maintained his high level of situational awareness. But something told him that their targets weren’t going to appear. He glanced skywards. Up close, perspective made the building dizzyingly tall. He wondered what was going on in the penthouse apartment. Who were these two Russian men Hereford was so interested in?
He snapped his attention back down to the exits. His curiosity would be satisfied soon enough. In the meantime, he needed to keep his focus.
He watched and waited.
As Hunter and his team staked out the ground floor of the Mansion House, a Dauphin 2 helicopter in civilian colours was already airborne from Hereford. Excluding the flight crew, four men were onboard: Dennis Cunningham, Johnny Moore, Rick Parsons, Ken Hobbs. They wore civvies and, as the chopper flew over the outskirts of the capital, were studying architectural plans of the Mansion House, as well as the same images of Dimitri Poliakov and Boris Rostropovic that the ops officer had sent the London team. ‘Service lift?’ Cunningham shouted at the others over the noise of the chopper, in his broad Scottish accent. His three unit mates nodded their agreement.
The chopper set down in the grounds of the Honourable Artillery Company in East London. A transit van was waiting for them here. It was marked with the Amazon logo, but there were no packages inside. Instead, there were three CO19 armed police officers and enough space for the SAS team and the two flight cases of gear that they carried off the chopper. The police officers – a woman and two men – had an anxious air about them. Cunningham recognised the woman from a previous job, but he couldn’t remember her name. She nodded at him in recognition. ‘Who’s dying tonight?’ she asked with a raised eyebrow.
‘Depends who’s been a wee scunner,’ Cunningham said.
‘Can’t you talk in fucking English?’ Parsons said, and Cunningham grinned at him.
‘What’s the plan?’ asked one of the policemen as the doors of the van slammed shut and it started to move.
‘We’ll go over it once we’re on site,’ Cunningham told him.
They drove on in silence.
Danny woke suddenly. He was still crouched on the ground, opposite the door to the safe house. His neck muscles ached, and he was sweating. The distant sound of a call to prayer had woken him and he spent a moment listening to the weirdly tinny chant. Danny had spent so much time operating in the Middle East that it was a familiar sound. But not comforting. It took him back to Damascus, and Oman, to Afghanistan and to Yemen. It forced him to recall moments of his life he would prefer to keep locked away. Amman was a thriving, modern city. Friendly, welcoming to tourists, relatively safe. He grimaced. Safe? Nowhere in this part of the world was truly safe for a Regiment man. Like Northern Ireland in the eighties, these countries were full of violent men who would give their lives for the opportunity to take out a member of the British SAS. He was certain that here, holed up in this grim safe house, he was a literal stone’s throw from an IS or Al-Qaeda sympathiser. He couldn’t relax for a minute.
The call to prayer fell silent. Danny was left with only the sound of his own breathing. And a new thought. His enemies were not crazed Jihadists or Middle Eastern terrorist sympathisers. They were Western, and Russian. It would be easy to lose track of that, here in this desert city surrounded by mosques and people whose skin colour soldiers like him had – wrongly – been conditioned to think of as the enemy. An American general was feeding sensitive military information to the Russians. A former MI6 officer and killer of SAS men was currently lying asleep on a stained mattress in the next room. Danny pushed himself up to his feet and quietly opened the door of the bedroom. She was still there. Lying in a fetal position, her blonde hair splayed over the mattress, her breathing slow and steady, her freckles glowing in the light spilling from the window. She didn’t look like an assassin. Did anybody? Danny thought about a conversation they had once had. Bethany had told him about her father, himself a former MI6 officer whose slippery moral code had skewed her view of the world. Danny had a moment of self-doubt. Who was he to talk about slippery moral codes when he was about to make an orphan of Bethany’s kid? He put that doubt out of his head, where it belonged. Do your job, Danny. Leave the thinking for those on a higher pay grade.
Bethany stirred. Her eyes opened and Danny could tell that she didn’t know where she was for a second. She smiled drowsily at him. Not a cynical smile, or a flirtatious one. She looked genuinely glad to see him. Danny closed himself off emotionally. He knew he had to keep his distance if he was to complete this op successfully. ‘We need to get ready,’ he said.
She sat up and ran one hand through her hair. ‘I’ll need the shower,’ she said. And then, looking Danny up and down: ‘So will you. Neither of us will get close to the General looking and smelling like this.’
