The projectile hit its target dead on. The ruby-red diode vanished. The room was clear.
Alpha checked the time. Six minutes, thirty seconds.
Inside the living room, it was necessary to fold back the carpet from the walls. The pressure pads were located as noted on the schematics. One was placed in front of each of the floor-to-ceiling windows looking over Hyde Park, and the third in front of the sliding glass door that led to the balcony. Each required one minute to disable. There was another near the front door, but Alpha didn’t bother with it. The entry and escape routes were the same.
Four minutes.
Free to roam the apartment, the intruder made a beeline for Russell’s study. Alpha had been inside the apartment before and had made a point of memorizing its layout. A sleek stainless steel desk occupied the center of the room. On it were three LCD monitors arrayed side by side. A far larger screen, some ninety-six inches across, hung from the wall directly opposite him.
Alpha directed a halogen beam beneath the desk. The computer’s central processing unit sat on the floor at the rear of the foot well. There was no time to copy its contents, only to destroy it. Alpha slipped a handheld electronic device from the work bag and swiped it several times over Russell’s CPU. The device delivered an immensely powerful electromagnetic pulse, obliterating all data.
Unfortunately, the information was also stored in a more permanent location: Robert Russell’s estimable brain.
“He’s pulling into the garage,” announced the voice in the earpiece.
The time was 2:18 a.m. “Everything’s a go,” said Alpha. “Get lost.”
“See you back at the fort.”
On the desk was a web tablet, an all-in-one touch screen that controlled the apartment’s automatic functions. With a touch Russell could turn on the television, open or close the curtains, or adjust the temperature. There was another, more interesting feature. If one hit the security button, the screen divided itself into quarters, each showing the view from one of the building’s closed-circuit cameras. The top left quadrant showed Robert Russell leaving his car, an Aston Martin DB12. Russell appeared entering the basement foyer a moment later. A few seconds passed and he entered the bottom left quadrant, this time inside the elevator. At thirty, he was tall and lean, with a full head of tousled whiteblond hair that drew looks wherever he went. He wore jeans, an open shirt, and a blazer. Somewhere in the past, he’d earned a black belt in Brazilian jujitsu. He was a dangerous man in every respect.
He stepped out of the elevator, and a moment later appeared in the final screen, standing inside his private alcove and pressing his pass key and thumb to the biometric lock.
Alpha walked into the kitchen and opened the freezer. On the top shelf were two bottles of vodka sheathed in ice rings. “Żubrówka,” read the labels. Polish vodka made from bison grass. The vodka tasted like warm velvet.
The tumblers to the front door slid back. Robert Russell’s heels clicked on the marble floor. The trespasser took off the balaclava, unzipped the jumpsuit, and waited. The disguise was no longer needed. It was essential that Russell not be frightened. His keychain held a panic button that activated the alarm.
Russell walked into the kitchen. “Jesus, you scared the hell out of me,” he exclaimed.
“Hello, Robbie. Care for a drink?”
Russell’s smile faded rapidly as the facts arranged themselves in his razor-sharp mind. “Actually, just how the hell did you get in here?”
He had barely finished the words when the trespasser, operational designation Alpha, brought the bottle of vodka and its ice sheath down on his skull. Russell collapsed to all fours, the keychain skittering across the floor. The blow left him stunned but not unconscious. Before he could call out, Alpha straddled him, grasped his jaw in one hand, his hair in the other, and wrenched his head violently to the left.
Russell’s neck snapped like a rotted branch. He fell limp to the floor.
It took all of Alpha’s strength to drag the body across the living room and onto the balcony. Alpha flung his arms over the railing, then grasped Russell’s legs, hefted the dead weight, and rolled the body over.
She did not wait to see Lord Robert Henley Russell strike the granite stairs 35 meters below.
2
KenyaAirways Flight 99 inbound from Nairobi touched down at London Heathrow Airport at 0611 British Summer Time. The manifest listed 280 passengers and 16 crew aboard the Airbus A340. In fact, the number was well over 300, with a dozen infants piled on their mothers’ laps and a handful of standbys clambering into the fold-down seats meant for flight attendants.
Seated in row 43, Jonathan Ransom checked his watch and shifted uneasily. Flight time had clocked in at exactly nine hours-thirty minutes faster than scheduled. Most passengers were delighted by the early arrival. It meant beating morning rush hour into the city or gaining a head start on the day’s sightseeing. Jonathan was not among them. All week departures out of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport had suffered lengthy delays because of an ongoing strike by local air traffic controllers. The previous day’s flight had arrived in London six hours late. The day before that, it had been canceled altogether. Yet his flight had arrived not only on time, but ahead of schedule. He wasn’t sure whether it was luck or something else. Something he didn’t want to put a name to.
I shouldn’t have come, he told himself. I was safe where I was. I should have played it smart and stayed out of sight.
But Jonathan had never ducked a responsibility and he wasn’t about to start now. Besides, deep down he knew that if they wanted to find him, there was no place too far away, no spot on the globe too remote where he might hide.
Jonathan Ransom stood a few inches over six feet. Dressed in jeans, chambray shirt, and desert boots, he looked lean and fit. His face was deeply tanned from months of working beneath the equatorial sun. The same sun had chapped his lips and left his nose freckled with pink. His hair was shorn to a soldier’s stubble and cut through with gray. His nose was strong and well shaped, and served to focus attention on his dark eyes. With his two-day beard, he could be Italian or Greek. A bolder guess might place him as a South American of European descent. He was none of these. He was American, born in Annapolis, Maryland, thirty-eight years earlier to a distinguished southern family. Even in the narrow seat, he appeared to control his space instead of allowing it to control him.
To channel his nerves, Jonathan gathered up the varied journals, articles, and reviews he’d brought to prepare for the medical congress and tucked them into his satchel. Most had names like “Diagnosis and Prevention of Tropical Infection” or “Hepatitis C in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Clinical Study” and had been written by distinguished physicians at distinguished universities. The last was printed on simple copier paper and carried his own name beneath the title. “Treatment of Parasitic Diseases in Pediatric Patients,” by Dr. Jonathan Ransom, MD. FACS. Doctors Without Borders. Instead of a hospital, he listed his current place of work: United Nations Refugee Camp 18, Lake Turkana, Kenya.