“Yes, boss.”
“And could you pick the kids up from school this afternoon?”
Jakub glanced at him, returned to looking at the wreckage of the street. “Yes, boss.”
Petr made his way to a lorry parked in a nearby street. The doors of the container on its loadbed were open. Petr went up the steps and stepped inside and looked at the rows of detectives and operatives manning the consoles of the mobile control room. At the far end of the container thirty or so paper flatscreens had been pasted to the wall; they were each showing a different view of the wrecked street.
“Brabec,” a voice behind him said.
Petr turned, saw Major Vĕtrovec, his opposite number at Anti-Terrorism, standing in the control room doorway. “Miloš,” he said.
“What do we have?” Vĕtrovec was a small, round, bald man in a tight suit
“We’re treating it as a bomb until told otherwise,” Petr said. “All utilities have been isolated, the street’s been closed off. The fire brigade can’t get near the seat of the explosion until the Army are sure there are no secondary devices, and we can’t go anywhere near it until the fire brigade tell us it’s safe to do so.”
Vĕtrovec looked at the screens at the end of the control room and shook his head. He turned and called through the open door. “Ismail, see if you can contact the Minister. The lazy bitch should be here anyway.”
“Ah, good,” Petr said. “You brought Ismail.”
“He’s my second in command,” Vĕtrovec said. “Of course he’s here.”
“He stays out of my way,” Petr warned. The last time he and Vĕtrovec’s dead-eyed assassin of a deputy had encountered each other professionally, they had almost wound up having a fist fight in the middle of an apartment where a terror suspect had been arrested.
“As you wish,” Vĕtrovec said as if he didn’t care much either way. “I understand this bar was of interest to you?”
Petr filled him in quickly on the supposed presence of Abram in Prague, the measures he’d taken to investigate. He thought he saw Vĕtrovec’s expression soften when he told him about Milena. Vĕtrovec was an unpleasant little bastard, but he was still a cop, of sorts, and every policeman feels the loss of one of their own.
When he’d finished, Vĕtrovec said, “The building was of interest to us as well.”
Petr smiled tightly. “Of course it was.”
“Not the bar,” Vĕtrovec said, “which is why you were not on the to-know list. One of the apartments on the fifth floor. A group of Saudi students.”
“Who were, in all likelihood, completely innocent.”
“Who had already met with a Bulgarian mafia group and were in the process of negotiating the purchase of seven kilos of Semtex.” Vĕtrovec looked at him. “We’re not amateurs, you know.”
Petr gestured at the screens. “Is anyone else interested in this place who I haven’t been told about? Hm? Immigration? Traffic wardens?” He was aware that he was raising his voice, but he didn’t care. “Because if someone had thought to put me on your ‘to-know’ list I wouldn’t have sent one of my detectives in there undercover!”
“Brabec,” Vĕtrovec murmured, looking around the control room at the officers who were all trying very hard not to stare at Petr. “Calm down.”
“You killed her,” Petr said in a dangerous voice, poking Vĕtrovec in the chest with a forefinger. “Just as surely as if you’d blown her up yourself. Because you couldn’t be bothered to share what you were doing.”
“I didn’t order her to go in there,” Vĕtrovec said reasonably.
Petr snarled and pushed past the ATG man and stumbled down the steps and away from the truck, chest heaving. He leaned against a wall and tried to get his breath, tried to remain in control.
His phone rang. He took it out, looked at it, put it to his ear. “Can’t you deal with it?”
“I don’t know, boss,” said Jakub. “But you’ll want to see this.”
“WHO ARE THEY?”
“We don’t know, boss,” said Jakub. “Cleaner found them four hours ago. We’d have got the shout, but what with the…”
“We’ve been busy.” Petr sighed. “Yes.”
They were standing in a smartly-appointed apartment in Pankrác, not far from the prison. The apartment was in one of the two new blocks which the city had grudgingly, after many many years’ discussion about their impact on the skyline, finally given permission for. They had filled up with young professionals – graphic designers, IT entrepreneurs, media people. Several soap opera actors lived in this block, Petr knew.
Neither of the people lying side by side in the apartment’s living room was a soap opera actor. At least, he didn’t recall seeing them on television. A man and a woman, they were in their middle thirties, their clothes nondescript but a little old-fashioned. Both had had their throats cut. The floor and the furniture and the walls were awash with blood.
“There hasn’t been a full search yet, but so far, no ID,” Jakub said. “None of the neighbours knows who they were – although one of them thinks they might have been English.”
Petr groaned inwardly at the thought of having to deal with the English Embassy. “Go on.”
“Well, the really interesting stuff’s in here,” Jakub said, leading the way to a small bedroom off a hallway at the rear of the apartment. “Uniformed officer who responded to the call made sure life was extinct and then went to secure the apartment, but he says he thought he heard someone moving around in here. Turns out he was imagining things – you know how jumpy you can get at a scene like this – but he took a look, and, well…”
The bedroom had been converted into a small workroom by dismantling the bed and stacking the frame and mattress against one wall. In the middle of the floor stood a couple of small trestle tables, and on the tables were boxes and tools and rolls of wire. Without touching it, Petr looked into one of the boxes. “Are these detonators?” he said.
“Yes, boss. And those bigger boxes, that’s C4.”
Petr straightened up and looked around the room. “A lot of these C4 boxes appear to be empty.”
“Yes, boss.”
They returned to the main room and stood looking at the bodies. “Oh, there was one last thing,” said Jakub. He held up a little plastic evidence bag containing a cheap cigarette lighter. Printed on the side of the lighter were the words ‘TikTok.’
“That’s just too easy,” Petr said.
“Yes, boss.”
“That sort of thing only ever happens in films.”
“I know, boss.”
Petr sighed. “All right. When scenes-of-crime have finished and the bodies have been taken away, search this place properly for ID and anything else that looks interesting. Then, and only then, notify ATG.”
Jakub sucked his teeth. “They won’t like that.”
“They can sue me.”
“They probably will,” Jakub noted.
PRAGUE HAD, IN general, an enviably low crime rate. Pickpocketing had been a cottage industry for decades and there were always muggings and other forms of low-level trouble in and around Sherwood, the park around the railway station, but mostly the old city had escaped the wave of crime which had engulfed other European capitals.
Following the TikTok bombing, however, a wave of murders swept the city. Organised crime figures were assassinated in their cars and in their homes. Several drug pushers were found crucified against trees in Sherwood. The Government began to take notice, which was never a good sign in Petr’s world.
Two Scotland Yard detectives flew in to look at the bodies from Pankrác, failed to identify them, consented to being treated to a slap-up meal at a restaurant in the Old Town for their trouble, and flew out again without once mentioning why the job could not have been done just as easily by someone from the Embassy security staff. Petr drove them to the airport himself, watched them go through the security checks, waved bye-bye, and thought about that.