Target

Eleven

Have you ever felt that you're moving in a parallel universe to everyone else? Where everything you do takes on a dreamlike quality? I experienced it once before as a student when a group of us took magic mushrooms – my one and only foray into hard drugs – but even then I knew that what was happening wasn't reality. I was far less sure of that now, and for the first time in my life I began to question my sanity. I've had some tough times in my life, tremendous highs followed by leaden, black lows, but I've always felt in control. The things I was hearing now, however, were confusing me so much I was wondering whether last night had happened at all.

But I had been in Jenny's apartment because when I went back it felt completely familiar to me. And my jacket, along with my mobile phone and wallet, was definitely missing.

I needed to clear my head, so after I finished talking to Tina Boyd I drove up to Broxbourne woods and went for a much-needed walk, enjoying the solitude after all the drama of the past twenty-four hours.

I hadn't got very far when Dom called. He asked me if I'd had any news. 'I've been worried about it all day.'

'Some,' I said, and I told him what I knew.

There was a pause at the other end of the line, and I sensed what he was thinking. For a while, when I first got back from France, I'd gone into a real depression. I'd slept badly, found myself unable to work, and almost stopped eating entirely. At my lowest point I didn't get out of bed for three solid days, and I lost more than a stone in weight. I don't think it was a breakdown as such, but I know that Dom was worried about my mental health. He'd even talked to my dad about what he should do, without informing me. Eventually I fought my way out of the worst of it without need of outside help, but I was sure Dom was feeling the same concerns about me now. I hadn't seen him for a few weeks so in his eyes it was entirely possible, I suppose, that I had relapsed.

I knew he wanted to say something, so I beat him to it. 'Everything's been going fine in my life lately, Dom. This happened, I promise.' But I was conscious of the doubt in my voice.

'I just don't understand it,' he said. 'Why would Jenny's dad say she was on holiday if she wasn't?'

'What's he like, her dad?' I asked.

'I only met him a couple of times. He was a nice guy.'

'Is he rich?'

'He runs his own business and I think he's quite well off, but nothing spectacular. I doubt if he clears more than a couple of hundred grand a year. Not enough to kidnap his daughter for.'

It was a good point, and it closed another door for me, because now I had no obvious motive for Jenny's abduction. The nagging voice started in my ear again. Did it really happen, Rob? Are you sure you're not imagining it?

'What are you going to do now, Rob?' asked Dom.

'I don't know.' I sighed, unable to keep the sense of defeat out of my voice. 'Keep hassling my police contact, I guess. Get her to check the CCTV footage from Jenny's apartment block for any signs that it's been tampered with, because I know that it has been. Other than that, I don't know. I could try speaking to Maxwell, I suppose, see if he's got any ideas. You know, from a criminal's point of view.'

'That sounds a bit desperate.'

'It is,' I said wearily. 'But I'm beginning to run low on options.'

'Are you OK, Rob? Maybe I should come back.'

'Thanks, mate, but there's no point. Right now there's nothing you can do that I can't. You may as well stay where you are. I'll keep you posted.'

He tried to insist but I could tell his heart wasn't really in it. I wondered whether he did actually believe my story or whether he thought I'd finally gone over the edge.

Once I was off the phone I kept walking, enjoying being away from the city and its dangers, and it was gone six by the time I got back to the car. The shadows were lengthening as late afternoon turned into early evening, and the sunlight flickering through the beech trees took on a soft orange glow.

The last time I was up here I'd been with Yvonne and Chloe. Chloe had only just started walking, and I'd held her hand most of the way. It had been a sunny day like this, but that was the only similarity. Things had been very different then. We'd been discussing our move to France. The house there had been bought, our flat in London had been sold for close to double what we'd paid for it five years earlier, and I was preparing to hand in my notice at work. We'd had money in the bank and a brilliant plan for security, success and happiness.

I stood in silence for a long time, wondering how and why I'd let it all slip through my fingers, and wishing that I could have that time back again. I experienced a sudden, painful urge to phone and talk to Yvonne and Chloe. To chat to them about this and that and try to inject some semblance of normality back into my life. But they were on a walking holiday in northern Sweden with Nigel, out of mobile phone contact. Instead, I got back in the car and began the drive home, thinking I desperately needed something to cheer me up.

Ramon might not have been everyone's cup of tea, but in the circumstances he'd do just fine.

Twelve

Agent Mike Bolt sat staring at the piles of paperwork on his desk, feeling a mixture of anger and frustration. His job at SOCA was disrupting the activities of the couple of hundred Mr Bigs who ran organized crime in the UK, an industry that was worth an almost unbelievable forty billion dollars a year, but he was pragmatic enough to know it was a war he and his colleagues were never going to win. The enemy was far too superior in numbers and resources for that. But the important thing was not to lose it entirely. You had to be patient and keep chipping away at their defences. Sometimes you had to wait months for a result. Sometimes you didn't even get one. A witness might suddenly retract his testimony, or a judge throw out the case, and all your hard work went up in smoke as the bad guys walked free with big grins on their faces and went back to making obscene amounts of money. But in Bolt's experience, there was always a chink in a target's armour somewhere, and if you kept going long enough, you'd eventually find it.

But even he had to admit that if Paul Wise had a chink in his armour, it was incredibly well hidden. Wise might have left the UK more than three years earlier to avoid the attentions of the law, but a large proportion of his income still came from criminal activities within his home country.

In the five months Bolt's team had been actively targeting him, they'd raided four brothels in which he had a controlling interest, freeing a total of sixty-seven trafficked women in the process. They'd also seized more than ten kilos of ninety per cent pure heroin belonging to him, most of it in a daring undercover operation during which two of his key operatives were arrested. All this activity had garnered plenty of positive press coverage, but unfortunately not a shred of evidence that could be used against Wise himself. The two operatives caught with the heroin weren't talking and had got themselves some seriously expensive legal representation (doubtless bankrolled by their boss). As for the people they'd arrested in the brothels, only two had been prepared to cooperate – a Turkish asylum seeker who managed one, and a local thug who ran security at another – and neither had met or even spoken to Wise, both having dealt with his middlemen.

Now, for the first time, Bolt and his team had turned to SOCA's Financial Intelligence Unit for help. The FIU's task was to discover where all the huge profits from organized crime were hidden so they could be traced back to the Mr Bigs who were making them, and subsequently used as evidence in any criminal proceedings. Bolt didn't have a huge amount of interest in the complex world of financial crime – it felt too far away from the action for him – but since nothing else was working he'd agreed with his bosses that going after Wise's money represented their best chance of truly hurting him.