The Asset: Act II (An Isabella Rose Thriller Book 2) Page 3

  She looked, but she couldn’t see Pope anywhere.

  A taxi cut across them and forced the driver to hit the brakes. Both the Viano and the taxi came to a sudden stop. The bodyguard slammed his palm against the horn, the blare sounding loudly. Isabella had been waiting for an opening and knew that this could be it.

  She felt a jolt of adrenaline and leaned forward a little.

  The driver of the taxi flung open his door and stepped out. He was a big man, broad-shouldered and with a head of shoulder-length hair, and he came back to the Viano and started to shout abuse at the bodyguard. The bodyguard hit the horn again, but the taxi driver showed no sign that he was ready to move. The bodyguard cursed, unclipped his seat belt, opened the door and stepped out.

  Ready.

  Isabella watched through the windshield as the two men squared up. The bodyguard was bigger than the taxi driver, but the Turk did not back down. Instead, he launched into a tirade of abuse that he punctuated by spitting theatrically at the bigger man’s feet. The bodyguard drew back his meaty fist and threw a big, heavy punch.

  Now.

  Isabella raised her arm horizontally, so that it was level with Khalil’s head, and then drilled her elbow back into his face. He turned at the last minute and the impact was not quite as flush as she would have liked, but it was a sharp and unexpected blow to the cheekbone and it would have hurt.

  He yelped in sudden pain, but Isabella was already moving.

  She reached for the door handle and pulled it back, yanking hard on the door so that it slid back on its runners.

  The heat washed into the air-conditioned cabin.

  Isabella slid across the seat.

  The crowds were dense. She only needed to get out of the SUV, step down onto the road and melt into the throng. What would the al-Khawaris do? Follow her? Cause a scene?

  No.

  She swung around and put her feet on the sill. She scanned her surroundings, the busy crowd and the dozens of vehicles, and, for a split second, her eyes locked on a boy who couldn’t have been very much older than she was. He was brown skinned, a little taller than her, pulling a small carry-on case behind him.

  She started to step down, when she felt hands on her hips. She tried to shake them off, but instead, they slithered ahead, around her waist, and locked there. She looked down, saw a pair of slender, manicured, feminine hands and realised that Jasmin had leaned over the seat and grabbed her.

  “Stop her!”

  Jasmin pulled her back, and Isabella felt her shoulder as it pressed between her own shoulder blades. She threw her head back, her crown crashing into something similarly hard, and the grip loosened. Isabella butted her a second time and her hands parted. She shrugged her off and turned back to the door, but before she could move, she felt strong fingers fasten around her bicep.

  It was Salim. She craned her neck, looking back into the SUV. Jasmin was sprawled back on the seat, blood running down her chin from a lacerated lip. Salim was on the same side of the SUV as she was, and he had stood to reach for her left arm. She shook her arm again and he responded by digging his fingers into the joint.

  She winced from the pain, tried to free herself again, but he held on. She swivelled her hips and drew back her right fist, ready to hit him, when she was jostled back down into her seat.

  Khalil had roused himself from the shock of being struck, and he had shouldered his way around her so that he could reach for the door. He yanked it back, sliding the door so fast that it shut with a crash.

  “Drive!”

  She hadn’t noticed: the bodyguard was back in the Viano again. He threw the SUV into gear and pulled out into a gap that had opened in the outside lane. Khalil pushed Isabella back into the seat, and Salim locked his arms around her shoulders and her clavicle, holding her there. She bucked, tried to free her pinioned arms, tried to butt first Khalil and then his father, but the two of them were too strong for her. She found herself panting from the effort and the desperation, the adrenaline buzzing around her veins, the energy coiled and sprung but with nowhere to go. Finally, she realised it was pointless and that the opportunity had passed, and she let the fight drain out of her.

  She looked out the window. She saw the boy who had been watching her as they drove past the spot on the pavement where he was waiting. The glass was blacked out, but as Isabella gazed out at him, he seemed to be looking straight at her. The moment did not last long. The Viano found a little extra space ahead of it, and the driver accelerated hard.

  The airport quickly disappeared behind them.

  The moment had passed.

  The opportunity was lost.

  Chapter Three

  Captain Michael Pope was waiting with a cup of cold coffee at the café at Geneva International Airport. He had been sitting there in the same chair for three hours. He was wearing a cap that he had purchased from a twenty-four-hour concession in the concourse, the bill pulled down and his head angled down so that most of the top half of his face was obscured. He had chosen a seat just inside the café, where he was hidden from the concourse yet still able to observe the comings and goings.

  There was a screen inside the café that was tuned to a rolling news channel. Pope wasn’t paying any attention to it; he was staring down into his cup of coffee as he listlessly stirred his spoon in it. He was thinking about Isabella and how it was he who was responsible for what had happened to her. He had no idea where she was, or even whether she was alive or dead. It had been his fault. His plan. His stupid, reckless plan. And she was paying the price for his recklessness.

  He realised the conversation around him had quietened down. He looked up. The noise had been replaced by a stunned hush. The men and women at the tables, the staff behind the desk, they were all staring at the screen behind him. He turned to look and saw shaky footage of what was unmistakably a plane crash. The footage was being shot from behind a police cordon that had been erected at the edge of a large arable field. A trail of smoking debris could be seen all the way across the field, leading directly to what looked like a village. The houses and buildings looked as if they were half a mile away from the camera, but they were obviously on fire, smoke billowing into the air.

  The ticker along the bottom of the screen announced that British Airways flight 117 from London to New York had crashed just after taking off from Heathrow.

  Pope got up and went outside into the concourse. He looked at the screen that displayed information on arrivals and departures. All of the flights that were due to depart from the airport had been cancelled. Flights were still landing, and the board reported that the flight from London Heathrow had just touched down.

  He watched as the passengers emerged in the arrivals hall, until he saw the man that he had been waiting to meet. Vivian Bloom was in his seventies and looked his age. His skin was leathery and heavily lined, and his eyes were rheumy behind his spectacles. He dressed badly, in the way of a man with a modest amount of capital but no taste, favouring old tweed jackets and badly fitting waistcoats. He was wearing brown cord trousers, frayed at the cuffs, with the fabric thinning in places, and comfortably inelegant shoes. The collar of his shirt was curled up like old pieces of toast, and his tie bore a stain just below its badly arranged knot.

  Bloom was a legend within the service, though, and throughout the course of his distinguished career, countless individuals had been thoroughly embarrassed after mistaking his dishevelled appearance for incompetence. His time at Berlin Station during the Cold War was spoken of in hushed tones, the jousting with his Soviet adversaries demonstrating an incredible mental sharpness and a ruthlessness that had seen several enemy players removed from the field of battle by the forerunners to Group Fifteen. They called him the Reverend, on account of his previous profession as sub-rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. But there was nothing ecclesiastical about him beyond the donnish appearance. Vivian Bloom was a powerful man.

  Pope crossed the concourse to him. Bloom had stopped with his back to him and w
as looking over at the area with the rows of benches.

  “Sir,” Pope said, taking Bloom by the elbow and gently impelling him onwards. “This way, please.”

  Bloom did as Pope asked, and they walked together through the concourse. Pope had scouted the area quickly when he had arrived, and led the way now to a restroom that was out of the way and less busy than others. The cleaner had left his cart outside the door. There was a small plastic “Do Not Use” sign hanging from the cart and Pope took it, leaving it on the floor in front of the door. He pushed the door open, waited until Bloom was inside and then followed. He checked that the room was empty and the cubicles were unoccupied. They were alone.

  Bloom rearranged his glasses on his nose. “What a mess. What a fucking mess.”

  “I just saw it on the TV. It’s not an accident?”

  “Can’t say for sure, but the odds are very much against it. Heathrow tower said the engine was on fire. That could be a fault, of course, but the police have had reports of something being fired from the ground.”

  “A missile?”

  “Yes, Pope, a fucking missile.” Pope had forgotten that Bloom had an unusually salty tongue; his proclivity toward profanity was at odds with his appearance and what Pope knew of his history. “We’ll know for sure once they’ve checked the radar. Of course, we knew it would happen eventually. It’s just a question of smuggling one into the country. That’s not hard, and there’s nothing you can do if they manage that. You can’t guard a big jumbo against a missile.”

  “Everything is on lockdown?”

  “All of Europe. Anything in the air is landing and nothing is taking off. The Americans, too, until they know it’s safe. Bloody lucky I was already in the air. It won’t be far short of 9/11 by the time it’s done. If they did manage to shoot one down, there’s nothing to say they won’t do it again.”

  Pope exhaled. He felt as if he was at the centre of a vortex of events that was whirling faster and faster outside of his control.

  “Are you all right, Control?”

  “Fine, sir. Just tired.”

  “What about your agents?”

  “I’m afraid they’re dead.”

  “Jesus.” Bloom shook his head. “What happened?”

  Pope had been running the events of the last few days through his head while he had been waiting for Bloom to arrive. The operation had started inauspiciously and quickly worsened. Bloom had spoken to Pope off the record and sent him and three of his headhunters to unravel the threads that he hoped would provide them with the identity of the jihadi plotters who were behind the attacks on Westminster. They had done that, with some success. They had collected a firebrand cleric, Alam Hussain, from his house in Manchester and delivered him to the CIA for rendition. The Americans had questioned him—half drowned him, most likely—and Hussain had admitted that his mosque had been responsible for radicalising the bombers.

  And even more importantly, Hussain had admitted that Salim Hasan Mafuz Muslim al-Khawari had financed the operation.

  Pope had put Salim under surveillance. They had successfully infiltrated Isabella Rose into the exclusive school where Salim’s son, Khalil, studied. She had forged a relationship with the boy and had been invited to a party at Salim’s house. Once inside, she had planted the data-tap to grant the Firm’s analysts access to his servers. But there had been an FBI raid on the property before Isabella could escape, and then, in the confusion that followed, Pope and his agents had come under attack. Snow and Kelleher had been killed, and he had only just managed to escape by commandeering a boat and piloting it into the middle of Lake Geneva. He had come ashore at the Hotel de la Paix. It had been late, and the shorefront was quiet. He had hurried into the streets around the Square du Mont-Blanc, found a taxi and told the driver to take him to the airport. And he had been here ever since.

  Bloom rapped his knuckles against the sink when Pope had finished. “What a bloody mess,” he said again.

  “The FBI,” Pope said. “Why were they there? And how did we not know about them?”

  “Another fuck-up. I made enquiries before I left. They were interested in Salim, too. They were following another lead. We couldn’t have told them about what we were doing, but we might have planned differently if we’d known they were going to be involved.”

  “We would have, sir. We would have aborted.”

  “Yes, of course. But what about the men who attacked you? Do you know who they were?”

  “No,” Pope said.

  “You have no idea?”

  “None. But they were very good.”

  Bloom took a paper towel from the dispenser, removed his glasses and scrupulously cleaned them. The old man’s fingers were long and delicate, the tips yellowed with nicotine.

  “Isabella Rose did very well,” he said. “The data-tap worked perfectly. We have everything we hoped that we might get.”

  “Such as?”

  “We were able to follow the money. That was the main thing. One hundred thousand dollars. Salim channelled it from one of his companies in the United States, moved it through Switzerland and then distributed it via a number of Western Union transfers.”

  “To whom?”

  “Some of the locations where the money was collected are served by CCTV. The same man collected three of the transfers. We believe he is a courier.”

  “Do you have him?”

  “Not yet, but the police have footage. He’ll be ID’d today. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “Who did the courier deliver it to?”

  “We think it was most likely via a dead drop.”

  “So he might not know who they were?”

  “No,” Bloom admitted. “Probably not. But I bet Salim does.”

  “It would be useful if we could ask him.”

  “We’re working on that.” Bloom slid his glasses back onto his nose.

  “What about Isabella?” Pope said.

  “Salim took her with him,” Bloom reported. “We have her on CCTV at Sion. They flew to Turkey. We have assets there, and they’ve confirmed that she’s with him. They’ll try to cross the border and get to Syria.”

  “I have to go and get her,” Pope said. “I owe her mother. And she’s just a child. I can’t leave her with them.”

  “I thought you’d say that. Good show, Control. I’ll help you.”

  Pope knew that Bloom would not have offered his assistance through any sense of altruism or a sense of regret over what had happened to Isabella. He did not play the game that way. The Reverend was a strategist, thinking several moves ahead, and his motives would not bear any relation to what was right, but what was best for the achievement of his objective. Perhaps there was a conjunction between what both men wanted. Perhaps Pope could advance Bloom’s cause while also recovering Isabella.

  “I’ll need something from you, too, of course,” Bloom said. “Whilst you’re in situ, so to speak. We need to speak to Salim very badly. This morning makes it more urgent now than it was before, of course. I want undeniable confirmation that these attacks are an ISIS operation, but that doesn’t really matter. We know it’s them. What we really need to know is who is responsible for the plotting. There’s a cell in the UK. They’re still extant and the Westminster martyrdom videos threatened more of the same. They delivered on that today, and they’ll keep delivering until we can get to them. We need to know who they are and where they are so that they can be prevented from doing so.”

  Pope listened, hearing all the old euphemisms. ‘Speak.’ ‘Prevented.’ Bloom was steeped in the curiously self-conscious language of the career spook, but Pope knew what he meant. He was talking about torture and murder.

  Pope was comfortable with that under the present circumstances.

  “What intelligence do we have?”

  “They flew from Sion on a private jet. We thought they’d fly straight to Syria, but they didn’t. They landed in Antalya five hours ago.”

  “Turkey? Why there? We can extradite him
.”

  “They had an electrical failure. Akrotiri picked up the communications from the plane. They stayed on the tarmac at Antalya for hours while they tried to fix it, but they couldn’t get it done. Our woman at the airport saw them disembark.”

  “So where are they now?”

  “In transit. They were seen driving away from the airport, heading east. They’re following the coastal road. Alanya, Mersin, Adana, Iskenderun. They can get into Syria from there.”

  “Isabella is with him?”

  “She was seen.”

  “Why? Why don’t they just get rid of her?”

  “We don’t know what she has told them. Perhaps they know that she is working for us. Perhaps they think she might have use to them as a bargaining chip. Or as a hostage. It’s difficult to be sure. But she is with them. She was seen at the airport.”

  “We have to stop them. If they get into Syria, it’ll be impossible to get to her.”

  “Not impossible, but very difficult indeed. They won’t get that far. We have assets looking for them now.”

  “And they can stop them?”

  He shook his head. “I’m afraid not. They’re not those kinds of assets. Intelligence only.”

  “We could ask the Turks.”

  “Really, Control? You want to ask them?”

  Pope knew that Bloom was right. “Me, then. But how can I get there in time? I’m not going to be able to fly.”

  “Actually, you are. I’ve taken the liberty of making arrangements on your behalf. I’ve called in a favour from the RAF. They’re sending a jet for you now.”