Revenger

94

The Suburban’s tyres squealed as it turned hard right across Maida Vale, ignoring the oncoming traffic, and hurtled down Hall Road. Abbey Road was less than a hundred and fifty metres up ahead. Turn left, drive to the end of the first block and they’d arrive at their destination.

The first of the police cars was racing north on the street that became Abbey Road. All it had to do was keep going: no need to turn at all.

‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing!’ the police driver shouted as the black people-carrier pulled out in front of him at the crossroads, forcing him to slam on the brakes to avoid a collision. The Suburban pulled up, just ahead, and the two officers in the police car looked on as the doors all opened and half a dozen men in dark suits and ties, five carrying handguns, the sixth with a lock-busting shotgun, leaped out and ran towards The Glasshouse’s front door.

Neither group of men even noticed the black Range Rover turning off Abbey Road not very far up ahead, as it made its way at a calm, legal speed towards the turn that would take it back down towards Victoria Station. It had always been one of Carver’s guiding principles never to drive in any way that might attract the attention of the law. Once a cop pulled him over for speeding, who knew where it might end?

He had carried Grantham down in the lift, thanking his lucky stars that no other residents had chosen that particular moment to get in. When he’d got to the basement garage he’d pressed the key and been guided to the Range Rover — of which there were three parked among the Mercedes, Porsches, Audis and BMWs — by the flash of its lights. Grantham went in the boot. Carver got in the driver’s seat. He drove straight at the metal gate covering the entire opening to the garage, trusting to the fact that properties in this building were so expensive there was no way their owners would expect to have to open the damn gate. Sure enough, it slid aside at the Range Rover’s approach.

As he got to the street, Carver looked right and saw the blue police light flashing a few hundred metres away. He therefore turned left and then left again, catching a fractional, momentary glimpse of the Suburban in his rear-view mirror as he did so. Then he drove away with his eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead.

It had long since become a staple cause of tabloid outrage that health and safety regulations meant that officers could be severely disciplined for exposing themselves to even the slightest risk of personal injury, an idea that had come as a shock to members of the public naïve enough to believe that one of the functions of the police was precisely to risk danger on their behalf. But even the most curmudgeonly man-of-the-people columnist would concede that two unarmed officers had a right to be cautious when confronted by a number of gun-toting Americans smashing their way into a smart London apartment building. They called the incident in and then stayed in their car until armed and body-armoured reinforcements arrived.

It was at about this point that the car containing the two FSB operatives discreetly left the scene.

The CIA agents, having fired one breaching round into the front door of the building, put another through the lock of Trent Peck the Third’s front door, thereby spraying Peck’s body with fine particles of debris from the shattered lock. This was the first, but by no means the last, way in which the agents compromised the crime scene as they made their way in mounting horror through the flat, discovering their dead colleague, the horribly mutilated body of one female victim in the bedroom and another female with her chest smashed by an axe and her throat and face used as a pincushion for 90mm nails on the living-room floor.

The Metropolitan Police, meanwhile, were forced to treat this as a siege situation, evacuating the building while attempts were made to discover who was up in the penthouse and why. The Suburban led them very quickly to the US Embassy, but they were initially met with a solid wall of intransigence and denial. The police contacted their masters at the Home Office, who passed the message across Whitehall to the Foreign Office and on to MI6. The head of the agency had gone missing and so the responsibility bounced back from Vauxhall to King Charles Street and it was the Foreign Secretary herself who called up John D. Giammetti and told him, bluntly, ‘Get your men out of that building. Now.’

Giammetti protested that one of his people was in that building, lying dead in a pool of blood, and they weren’t leaving him behind.

‘Please don’t be over-dramatic,’ the Foreign Secretary said. ‘You’re not Marines on Iwo Jima. You’re foreign agents in the middle of London, and if someone has died that is the responsibility of the Metropolitan Police. When they have completed their inquiries we will of course inform you, and the body will be released. And, by the way, your men are carrying firearms. So if anyone in the building has died of gunshot wounds we’ll need those weapons too.’

‘You gotta be kidding me. Peck and the two women were already dead when my men got there.’

‘Then there won’t be any difficulty proving that your weapons weren’t responsible. In the meantime, please just think of the Special Relationship and let our police do their job.’

‘Special Relationship my ass,’ said John D. Giammetti.

And so Carver had the CIA to thank for the fact that he had already driven to the discreet, private mews where Cripps had rented a garage for the day and, unobserved by any cameras, moved Grantham from the Range Rover to the old Mazda; taken the Mazda out of the garage; put the Range Rover in its place and then driven away in the Mazda before anyone even began to link the mysterious disappearance of Britain’s top spy to the simultaneous vanishing act performed by the Second Man.

It took time to ascertain that Peck’s car was missing; more time to establish that it was a Range Rover, and still more to get the registration number. Then the car’s journey from Abbey Road to the mews had to be painstakingly pieced together from myriad traffic cameras. The minor residential road off which the mews ran was not fully covered by cameras, so it took time to ascertain that the Range Rover had turned into it but never come out, and then to confirm that it had not been parked on that street and so must have been concealed in the mews.

Even when that had been done, police were obliged to track down the owners of five garages, each of which was advertised on the internet as being available for daily rental. Two were at their properties, one was away on holiday in Miami, a fourth had gone racing at Sandown and the fifth was in hospital having an operation on his gall bladder. Four of them knew nothing about a black Range Rover: the fifth was under anaesthetic.

So then all the garages had to be opened and the Range Rover was found in the garage belonging to the man who’d gone to the races. He had enjoyed a liquid lunch, as plenty do on such occasions, and found it hard to recollect much about the customer who’d rented the garage, except that he’d paid cash for the whole day, up front, and he certainly hadn’t been driving a Range Rover.

‘What was he driving, then?’ the garage owner was asked.

‘I dunno. It was red, I remember that. And old, very old… an 02 reg, I think. It was one of those Japanese makes. A Honda, maybe… or a Toyota? Basically a bloody boring, old, red Japanese saloon.’

Images were examined from the traffic cameras covering the main roads surrounding the mews during the fifteen minutes after the Range Rover was lost from sight. A number of different cars were found that matched the age, colour and rough description provided by the garage owner. Each car was examined in detail and drivers who were not male, Caucasian and aged thirty-five to fifty-five were discarded. That left three possibles.

The owners of all three cars were contacted. Two were able to vouch for their movements throughout the day. The third was called Kevin Cripps. He was rung on both his home and mobile numbers without success. When the location of his mobile was tracked, however, it was shown to be somewhere in Shoreham-by-Sea. Further investigation revealed that Cripps’s credit card had been used to purchase a railway ticket from Victoria to Shoreham shortly before nine that morning. So he could not possibly have been the driver.

And then an officer carrying out routine checks on all the possible drivers noticed something interesting about Kevin Cripps.

He was a former lance corporal in the Royal Marines.