Constantine had left the hotel right after booking them in to find food, and buy an early paper. There had been no news on the radio regarding the information he had passed to the police. He wished he had instructed Carmichael and Berria to stay in the Essex farm with the Irish but it was too late now to fret about it. He would have been far happier had they all been under one roof when the British came to call. Breakfast was not for two hours’ and they were both famished. Svetlana hit the shower before climbing between the sheets of the double bed and was asleep in minutes.
Returning to the hotel, armed with a pair of fast food breakfasts, Constantine had let himself into the room to find it held only the one bed, and that was occupied. Warm muffins and maple syrup were quickly disposed of and washed down with watery coke because the ice had melted, how he detested capitalism at times, using the minimum ingredients augmented by frozen water to make you think you had your money’s worth.
He looked over at the mass of reddish brown spread over both pillows. Despite the fatigue he felt his pulse quicken as he gazed upon the sleeping form. With a rueful shake of the head he bypassed the bed and washed, before using a towel as a pillow and the spare blanket that was provided, to make his bed on the floor. In a few minutes, he too was sound asleep.
Old Scotland Yard near Westminster Bridge took its name from being stood upon the site of where the old Scottish embassy had been located back before the United Kingdom had been a united kingdom, but a relatively short walk from Victoria train station along Victoria Street, SW1 will bring you to the newer headquarters of the Metropolitan Police. The entrance to this statement of 1960’s architecture is on a small side road called rather ridiculously ‘Broadway’. Police officers refer to the building either as ‘NSY’ or as ‘C.O’ after the headquarters of the year 1829, which had been a not overly large house located at 4 Whitehall Place and known simply in its day as the ‘Commissioners Office’.
This morning the current holder of that office was looking rather in need of a properly cooked breakfast and twelve hours’ uninterrupted sleep. The prime minister along with the commander of land forces (UK), the Head of SIS, the CIA Head of Station (London) and the Home and Foreign secretaries were sat in comfortable chairs in his office.
Ostensibly the PM was present due to the killing of the police officers in Rotherhithe the previous day as the nights operations were as yet not public knowledge. When the debrief details had arrived from those operations the commissioner had prepared a briefing for the PM, that had been 0730. The commissioners temper had been severely taxed by the PM’s delaying his arrival until arrangements had been made to exploit the occasion as a photo opportunity outside the main entrance.
The plain clothes Inspector in charge of the PM’s close protection team handed the commissioner a sheet of message paper that he read without change of expression on his face and waited until everyone was settled and the door to his office closed.
“Twenty four hours’ ago in a building awaiting demolition in Rotherhithe, southeast London, a young black male, a petty thief, was tortured and killed by a group of Irish terrorists led by a disgraced former British Army officer and a former KGB agent. Transcripts of a telephone call between the ex-agent, Alexandra Berria and her believed employer are on page three of your briefing folders. You will see that she addresses the man at one point as ‘Comrade Peridenko’. In the same phone call several mentions are made to ‘The suitcase’. The full details are in your folders but in short we suspect that at some time previously a third party stole an item of property. This item was a suitcase and its contents of sufficient importance to justify, in their minds, the torture and murder of this young man in order to retrieve it. At some point the suspects were disturbed by the arrival of six of my officers. These people murdered all of those officers. If I may again refer to the telephone call by the Berria woman, it would seem another petty criminal may have committed the original theft of the case, his name is Jubi Asejoke. The dead officers presence was coincidentally to execute an arrest warrant for that same person.
Late last night, here at NSY we received a series of telephone calls. The first call, by a foreign sounding male, led us to find the same Jubi Asejoke, who is now in custody. A woman with an educated English accent made the second; she named the Berria woman, the ex-army officer and all the terrorists along with two addresses where they could be found if we moved quickly. The third call was by someone disguising his or her voice electronically. It was essentially a bomb threat to a Synagogue in south London. My officers found a metal suitcase that smelt, to them, very strongly of plastic explosive. ‘Expo’ was called out, that is our on-call bomb disposal officer, or explosives officer to give his official title”, he added for the benefit of the American Intelligence officer and continued with the briefing.
“The case was x-rayed and immediately afterwards the cordons around the site moved from 200 feet to 1 mile. A.W.E, the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston sent a team which found the suitcase to contain an unarmed 2-kiloton nuclear weapon of Russian origin. The recordings of the voices in all three of the calls made to us have been for analysis at the audio laboratories, I have the findings here. Any recordings currently on file did not identify the female’s voice with either the SIS or us. The electronically disguised voice took some time; however, it belongs to the same male who called with Asejoke’s location. Both Special Branch and the SIS have identified the voice from previous intercepts on file as belonging to a Major Constantine Bedonavich of the Russian Air Force. His current post is that of deputy military attaché at their Embassy here in London. As you will see from the transcript of both the phone call and those of her conversation soon afterwards with the ex-army officer, Anthony Carmichael, their employer wanted Bedonavich dead and what he wanted for Bedonavich’s female companion is simply nauseating.” The commissioner paused at that point before moving on.
“Acting on the information from the young woman’s call to us, the Home Secretary authorised military assistance in the apprehension of those responsible for the murder of my officers. At 0430hrs this morning, my officers and two Troops of G Squadron, 22 Special Air Service Regiment, raided a house in St Johns Wood and a farmhouse in Essex. There were four fatalities among the suspects occupying the two addresses and several arrests made under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. I am ashamed to say that one of those arrested is a serving police officer from the National Criminal Investigation Service. In the London address we found hard copy supplied by that officer to the Russian Embassy here relating to Jubi Asejoke along with passwords and user names that would permit access to the Police National Computer and files relating to the murder investigation of my officers. In the Essex farm we have seized documents that detail a plan to detonate a bomb in the Rotherhithe tunnel eight days from now”
The commissioner looked directly at the PM before concluding. “In short we have evidence that the Russian government has supplied Irish terrorists with a nuclear bomb. Those same terrorists would have detonated that bomb in this city… call me quaint and old fashioned Prime Minister, but does that not constitute an act of war?”
Art Petrucci, the CIA head of station looked at the British PM and was very disturbed by what he saw. Jesus Christ, he thought. This guy is out of his depth, without a spin-doctor in tow he is totally fucked! The PM did not reply to the commissioners question.