‘I feel that you are at last arriving at the reason you called for me.’
Richards beamed at my perspicacity. ‘How right you are. It has not been unremarked that you have a certain talent for moving quickly and silencing people instantly. The fact that you know exactly where people are, even in the dark, is also a big help. I’m sure that you can pull this off and thereby avoid much risk to the security people and of course any members of the public who may become caught up in this.’
‘No doubt.’ I sighed, the sound of inevitability. ‘Where are they then?’
Two days later I was back in London. It had been decided that it was too risky for me to try to get at them in their flats (too many locks on their reinforced doors, according to their “postman”), and also to try to take them when they were all together (six at once would be long odds, considering they were all armed). That left the few minutes while they were moving from their flats to their meeting place in the apartment occupied by two of them – fortunately, one of them being one of our “stooges”. A meeting had been scheduled for tonight.
They lived in pairs at varying distances from the apartment and we could not be sure exactly when each pair would start to move, so their interception would have to be carefully choreographed. At my suggestion, I was mounted on the pillion of a motorbike as being the fastest way to reach them all. It had the additional benefit that I could be completely covered by leathers, a helmet and a mirror-finish visor. The only unusual detail was that the very tips of the gauntlets had been snipped off, to ensure that my fingers obtained a good contact.
The meeting was due to take place at 22.00 hours. By 21.40 I was in place on the back of the bike, waiting. Each flat was staked out, and my helmet concealed a miniature radio.
‘Target Alpha, both leaving now,’ the headphones crackled abruptly. The engine roared into life, and I squeezed the rear handgrips as the bike took off.
‘Target one wearing black leather jacket, brown combat trousers, dark blue baseball cap. Target two a brown leather jacket, black jeans, black baseball cap.’
Not fashion victims then, I thought irrelevantly. The bike had been stationed close to the flat furthest from the apartment, on the reasonable assumption that they would leave first, so we soon caught up with them. The leather jackets loomed into view, gleaming in the streetlights. The motorcycle cruised smoothly up behind and I scarcely had to slip off the saddle in order to reach out and touch their necks. Immediately behind came a paramedic vehicle, which screeched to a halt, a couple of uniformed men leaping out and bundling the prostrate men onto stretchers before loading them into the back as we sped away to the next target.
The motorcycle stopped at a pre-selected place, close to but out of sight of the next furthest flat. There was a long pause, before the radio crackled into life again.
‘Target Gamma moving now.’
Not the pair we had expected to move next. It would take a quick chase across the streets to reach them before they arrived at the apartment. The bike roared into life again and accelerated rapidly after the new targets. As it went straight past “Flat Beta” I gave it a quick scan to check if they were intending to move soon. What I discovered shocked me.
‘This is Lover’ – I cringed inwardly at the code name Richards had sardonically bestowed – ‘Flat Beta is empty, repeat empty.’
A few seconds of silence, then Richards started to speak before being suddenly interrupted.
‘This is Para 1 – warning! The patients were wearing fall alerts.’
‘Fall whats?’ Richards’ voice was impatient but I felt a faint chill of premonition – I had seen such devices on some of my patients.
‘Fall alerts. They’re meant for the elderly. If someone falls over and doesn’t get up for a while, they send an automatic distress signal.’
Another silence while we grappled with the shocking implications. Then Richards again. ‘They were expecting us. They must have turned or broken one of our stooges.’
‘They’ve jumped into a taxi!’ The cry came from the agent trailing the Gamma pair. His car roared forwards to pick him up, and our motorcycle leaped ahead with a burst of speed but the timing of the terrorists had been carefully calculated. By the time the taxi was spotted, the passengers had fled.
‘Flat Decca, now!’
We converged on the venue for the meeting, one of the men carrying a strange rod-like instrument which he pressed against the door. ‘Stand clear!’ A loud “bang” followed and the door swung open, the lock shattered by the blast of some kind of specialised gun. We piled into the flat and found only one man – one of our stooges, very dead, very horribly.
Richards cursed through his teeth. ‘Our other man was in Flat Beta. We’d better get over there.’
None of us wanted to rush, and we found what we feared. We gathered in shock in a room in Flat Beta, out of sight of the body.
Richards was as grim as Death himself. ‘Somehow they got onto one or other of our men, and “persuaded” him to talk.’ He looked at me. ‘One of them must have seen you when you knocked them out. He must have told the others about you, and they reasoned what you could do.’
‘I should have gone round the flats beforehand, scanned them all. I would have picked this up.’
‘No point in labouring it. They were all right yesterday, and everything seemed to be in hand. The question is, what are they up to now?’
I tried a pillion scan of the area, but picked up nothing. They must have travelled far away, as quickly as possible. Two of them, in the flats containing the bodies, had probably left the night before. Where had they gone?
There was nothing we could do to salvage the disaster, so I went back to the base, feeling depressed and dirty, as if I had been soiled by the deaths. I didn’t have to wait long to find out what the two men had been up to.
The phone rang and I picked it up. The sound of the soft voice raised my spirits – before they tumbled into shock and horror as I listened to her words. She was trying to be brave, but I could sense her terror. I listened numbly as the man told me precisely what to do, and what would happen if I did not.
I stood for a long time with my mind in turmoil, then made my decision and called Richards.
‘They’ve got her.’
Stunned silence for a moment. ‘Is she alright?’
‘For now.’
‘They must have found out about the two of you somehow – possibly her articles gave them the idea.’
‘Whatever. It hardly matters now.’
‘What do they want?’
‘You – or to be precise, your death. I expect that’s just for starters.’
‘So I take it you don’t intend to deliver.’
‘What’s the point? We both know they’d keep using me for as long as possible. Then they’d kill her anyway, and me too, and if I wasn’t dead already.’
‘Very well. What do you want me to do?’
‘I need an aircraft – one with a decent range. I’m more sensitised to Sophie than anyone else and I can normally pick her up many miles away. But I can’t sense her now. In an aircraft, I could scan a lot of ground at high speed. It’s the best chance I’ve got of finding her.’
‘Very well. A helicopter will pick you up from the base within the hour. It’ll take you to an airfield. Anything else?’
‘I’ll call you if I think of anything.’
The Army Gazelle took me to RAF Northolt where a twin-jet BAe 125 of 32 Squadron, Transport Command, was waiting. I had scanned constantly en route, but detected no sense of Sophie. The pilot was in the cabin, studying plans. He greeted me politely and restrained his obvious curiosity about me, and about the top-level pull which had put his plane at my disposal.