“When a guy with sweaty palms laughs at your work one day and then offers you a thousand dollars to visit his home dressed as a nun and sit on his face the very next, he tends to stick in your memory.” She explained. “If only for the novelty value”.
An agent had treated her to lunch, chilidog and a Bud Light as they tried to ID the guy. She wasn’t told if they succeeded or not but after lunch she was slapped with a warrant to seize all records she had of the work she had done for them.
Constantine had allowed Svetlana to administer the Sodium Pentothal to Jubi. He had absolutely no experience whatsoever in interrogation techniques. He was a 35-year-old pilot, grown too old to throw fast jets around the sky in combat, not a master spy.
Svetlana had known without asking that he would not harm this black youth without very good cause, so she had provided two ski masks for the pair to wear, negating any reason to administer an overdose.
Jubi himself had been in a drugged haze. Valium, Crack and Pentothal would not have been a cocktail prescribed by any reputable doctor but it had not induced any psychosis on that occasion. After about one hour the location of the suitcase had been revealed. Keeping in touch over mobile phones should more detailed directions become necessary; Constantine had found the case hidden with a large stock of crack, doubtless purchased with the money from the BMW. Also present was a 6.35mm Beretta handgun and ammunition, so apparently the young man intended a more violent future for himself.
Although someone, probably Jubi had attempted to force the case open, its sturdy design had thwarted his efforts.
Collecting everything from beneath the floorboards of the derelict shop Jubi had described.
Constantine had lugged the lot to his car. Once in the boot he then collected something from off the back seat and held it over the suitcase. The word that escaped from his lips after a few moments would have seriously offended his mother had she still been alive.
Just off a quiet road in the Essex countryside, a family called Fitzhugh for over a hundred years has owned a smallholding. The Fitzhugh’s had been in England for so long that all that remained of its Irish heritage was the name. The present owner, and end of the family line, so far, had been dispatched to University in Dublin. By far the brighter of his two children, George Fitzhugh felt that it would have been wrong not to let his youngest child get a proper education. Paul had got into the swing of campus life and on the way fallen for a fiery Antrim girl with very republican political views. Young Paul had fallen under her spell as she awakened him to his Irish heritage and the wrongfulness of a British Army of occupation to the north. After graduating, Paul had returned home and had lost touch with the girl. Several years later, tragedy had befallen the Fitzhugh family by way of a head-on collision with an articulated lorry as the family returned home from an outing in heavy rain. Paul had been the only survivor of the wreck and had inherited the farm. A lonely and unhappy young man, he had been delighted by a visit a few months later from his old flame from Dublin days. She had a proposition for him. By employing men sent his way by the Provo’s, he would be providing them a credible cover as farm labourers and a safe house. This is why Paul was now watching his five labourers’, sat around his dining room table, clean and oil some quite scary hardware. The news had been full of policemen and a policewoman being gunned down in London. Taking a very long pull of whiskey, he wondered what the hell he had gotten himself into.
Constantine and Svetlana had not returned to either of their homes. After Constantine had passed the Geiger counter over the case, he had returned to the empty warehouse rented by a front company for less than legal business the London embassy should be called on to provide. All he had told her was that they had to clear out quickly. With Jubi unconscious on the back seat under a blanket he had cleared their tail of any surveillance after sweeping the car, once again, for any tracking devices. Eventually he had parked up at a 24hr fast food restaurant and sat brooding silently. Svetlana had left him alone with his thoughts for half an hour.
“The reason I did not stay at The Aviary had nothing to do with frigidity or inhibitions. I am not of the first and I have few of the second.” She said levelly. “It was realised that I was too smart to be a mere mattress for potentially indiscreet foreign businessmen and the like”. She paused to check he was actually paying attention. He was, so she continued.
“I may be a bimbo to some, but I hope you can actually see beyond the packaging sir?” Constantine thought about it for a moment, he then told her everything that he had discovered. She listened quietly and allowed him to finish uninterrupted.
“I think the path to take is obvious, or are you actually considering restoring the case to the Irish” had been her reply “We are not at war with this country!” she’d continued. “What exactly could our country hope to achieve from a bomb in London, always assuming that it is our leadership ordering it and not a lunatic faction?”
Constantine shook his head.
“I heard from someone, I am not sure who, that Peridenko was once in charge of the KGB section that would use small atomic devices covertly delivered to targets in NATO. I never heard him described as a lunatic though”.
“I had a look at the case, it doesn’t look like an improvised nuclear device, not that I have ever seen one, though.” Svetlana was thinking aloud as much as she was talking it over with him. “I would guess that if the security forces here got hold of it, they could trace its origin, yes?”
Constantine nodded in agreement, not speaking, not wanting to interfere in her train of thought.
“So, why run the risk, would they blame it on deserters selling them to terrorists for cash?” Constantine shook his head, as he answered
“No, the international fallout would be huge, massive sanctions imposed until we got them back under control. UN troops stationed in the Motherland even. No, they would not risk that so it doesn’t make sense?”
Svetlana let out a breath as realisation hit her.
“Yes it does, if they had nothing to lose, if this was just the start of something. If this was not the only bomb!”
“You realise of course that I cannot be a party to this, this proposed genocide… if that is what we are talking about?” He told her.
She smiled softly.
“I knew that, I just hoped you realised it too”.
Even had this not been the worst day in the history of London’s Metropolitan Police Service, calls flowed in at an average 13000 per day.
The majority are classed as ‘I’, for immediate action or ‘S’, as soon as possible, by way of priority. Two operators sat at the long bank of communications terminals received almost simultaneous 999 emergency calls from opposite sides of London, the substance of the calls necessitating their classifications as ‘I’ graded. A man claiming to have been shot at by a stoned black youth in Hampstead and an obviously pre-recorded message of a bomb near a synagogue, the voice on the second was electronically produced and claimed membership of Al-Qaeda.
Four minutes later a Constable found an aluminium suitcase against the rear wall of a synagogue in south London. A strong smell of almonds hung in the air around the case; courtesy of a brief stop at a late night grocery shops baking section just to ensure the case was treated with respect, the now empty bottle of concentrate Almond essence itself had been dropped down a nearby drain.