32

Towers’ semi-official operation was limited to a pair of laptops linked by satellite connection to the MOD’s intranet. This gave him only limited access to certain secure government databases and none to those held by the Security Services or police. His ability to marshal the resources of the State had, he told Black regretfully, diminished significantly since the Committee had first commissioned him. Government networks were now so closely monitored there was no way of him navigating through them with sufficient secrecy. A particular source of grief was loss of access to the capital’s comprehensive network of security cameras and the facial-recognition system that had allowed him to track Black’s progress across the city several weeks before. As in the buccaneering days of post-invasion Baghdad, he was supposed to live off his wits.

Stooped over the keyboard at the desk in the corner of his living room, Towers attempted to track down Drecker and her associates with the limited resources open to him. Each request for assistance had to be made on an individual basis and using the cover of his official job inside the MOD. The result was that Towers found himself engaged in a laborious process that required him to work the phone to cajole and persuade myriad gatekeepers to let him share their precious information and resources for contrived reasons.

Towers had begun by trying to positively identify Susan Drecker and sent stills of her face to trusted contacts in both MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6. What should have been a simple matter of running the image through facial-recognition software connected to their respective databases of domestic and foreign subjects of interests turned into a protracted exercise involving calls to officials of ever more senior rank. Meanwhile, he tasked Black with scouring social media for images from the scene outside the British Museum. The few that had appeared online were mostly of the aftermath rather than of the incident itself. A passer-by on the pavement had caught a side-on image of Drecker climbing into the Range Rover and another had caught a similarly vague rear-view image of Black strolling towards Towers’ waiting car.

‘Typical bloody shambles!’ Towers exclaimed, cupping the receiver while he was placed on hold for the third time. ‘God knows how the Russians haven’t walked all over us. Perhaps they have!’

Finally, clearance was given. The searches were run and within the space of ten minutes, a call came back confirming that Drecker’s face was not among the several million stored on any of the government’s databases. The margin of error, the junior officer assured him, was less than five per cent.

‘Fuck!’ Towers slammed down the phone and thumped his fist on the desk. ‘Don’t know her from Adam. How is that even possible? She must have been through a bloody airport.’

‘How are you placed with the Americans?’ Black asked. ‘Maybe they can put a name to the face.’

Towers hurled himself back in his chair and groaned. ‘Bloody Yanks are even worse than us, I swear.’

Black looked up from his screen with a puzzled expression.

‘The bureaucracy. Have you ever tried calling the US government? By the time I’d convinced them I was legit we would both have grown old and died.’

‘So call in a favour from someone they will listen to.’

Towers looked at him blankly for a moment, then snatched up the receiver and dialled Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorism Command. He was put through to its Deputy Chief, Eleanor Grant, and switched tone without missing a beat. ‘Ah, Eleanor, hello. Freddy Towers here. We met last month at the Home Office. Yes, that’s right … Look, I know you’ve got your hands ever so full, but I wonder if you could do me an awfully big favour. There’s someone I’m trying to identify, I’d be hugely grateful …’

He got his way. The Chief Superintendent was charmed into submission and agreed to put in urgent requests to the NSA, FBI and CIA.

‘There’s one woman I can always depend on,’ Towers said, putting down the phone. ‘Good sort. Married to a QC. Went to Cambridge.’

‘A proper person,’ Black said, aping one of Towers’ favourite phrases.

‘Exactly.’ He tapped the desk with his forefinger. ‘Manners. Honour. Decency. Where have all those things gone, Leo?’

‘To the senior ranks of the Metropolitan Police, evidently.’

Ignoring the quip, Towers leaned over his keyboard and started typing furiously. ‘Remind me of the Range Rover’s registration again.’

‘401 D 894.’

‘Diplomatic plates. That’s one database they do deign to let me into.’ He worked his way through several screens, navigating the government network until he arrived at a secure section of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency. He keyed in the registration and waited impatiently for the result. ‘No current match. Discontinued 2015. Previously registered to the government of Tunisia. Well, that gets us precisely bloody nowhere.’

‘Traffic cameras?’

‘That would involve the Met again. I’d rather avoid that if I could. Things could get complicated.’

‘You’d rather risk her getting away? I don’t follow.’

‘Ideally, it’s the rat’s nest we want, Leo, not the rat. If the police get to her before we do, she’ll never talk.’

Black struggled to keep up with Towers’ reasoning. ‘You told me this afternoon’s op was cleared with the Met, that we were taking her to Paddington Green.’

Towers gave a snort and pushed his glasses up the flattened bridge of his nose. ‘It was cleared, certainly.’

‘But you were going to take her somewhere else?’

Towers didn’t answer.

‘I do have lines, Freddy. I always have had. You know that.’

‘Then it’s a good job she got away, isn’t it?’ Towers picked up the phone and dialled another number. ‘Colonel Towers, Ministry of Defence. Can you patch me through to Mr Khan, please …? Then I’d be grateful if you’d contact him at home; it’s most urgent.’

While Towers wrangled with the switchboard at Transport for London, Black contemplated what he might have had in store if they had managed to snatch Drecker. Would he have expected Black to tie her up in some basement flat and torture her? That would be far beyond the pale even in the height of war. If female suspects were to be interrogated, female officers had to be present. He struggled to comprehend what Towers was thinking.

What else was he hiding? Why not just be straight with him?

He pondered darkly on the possibilities while Towers argued his way through to someone able to access the capital’s congestion charge database. There were cameras positioned all around the perimeter of the circular zone that covered central London north of the Thames and a sliver of the city to the south. The number plates of every vehicle that entered and left were recorded and the owners charged for the privilege. In true Orwellian style all these movements were duly recorded and saved.

‘The Albert Embankment? Really …? Yes, that would be about the time. Any chance you could send me over the picture? Thank you.’ He spelled out his government email address as if to an imbecile. Then, call over, he turned to Black. ‘They were travelling west south of the river. Virtually went past MI6’s front door.’

Black brought up a map on his computer and honed in on the location. ‘So they were either planning to turn left and head south or –’

‘London heliport. Battersea. Three miles to the west.’ He snatched up the phone. ‘What’s their number?’

Black couldn’t help but feel sympathy for the receptionist who answered Towers’ next call. He demanded to be put through to the control tower immediately, threatening dire consequences if he was stalled. He succeeded.

‘Colonel Freddy Towers, Ministry of Defence, I need your full cooperation, this is a critical matter of national security. We are tracing two suspects involved with a fatal shooting in central London earlier this evening. One Caucasian female, late thirties, one male early thirties, Hispanic or mixed race. We believe they arrived at the heliport approximately seventy-five minutes ago. Our best guess is that they were bound for an airfield outside London … I appreciate that … Yes, if you would.’

Having secured cooperation, Towers demanded details of all flights that had taken off during the hour after Drecker and her companion’s estimated arrival. Two flights fitted the bill. One was bound for Biggin Hill Airport in Kent, the other for RAF Northolt in west London. A call to Biggin Hill revealed that the passengers who had embarked comprised a party of businessmen en route to Inverness.

‘Northolt doesn’t make a lot of sense,’ Towers muttered. ‘I know the RAF has opened its runway to civilian aircraft, but it wouldn’t be my first choice in her shoes.’

‘It’s virtually a commercial operation these days,’ Black said, skimming over the airfield’s website. ‘Over thirty private flights a day. Small jets, mostly.’

Towers found details of the station commander in the MOD’s internal directory and moments later was speaking to him on his private mobile. Although he didn’t know Group Captain Tommy Chandler personally, Chandler knew exactly who Towers was. He had served extensively in Bastion where Freddy ‘Fireballs’ Towers had a reputation for demanding air transport to obscure corners of Afghanistan at a moment’s notice and for screaming blue murder if he didn’t get his way.

Knowing better than to offer any resistance, Chandler kept Towers on the line while he called through to the operations manager at Northolt. He came back with the information that only one civilian flight had taken off during the relevant window. There were two passengers on board a Gulfstream G450 bound for Miami, Florida. The aircraft was registered to a private operator whose company address was in Panama City. Their names were Jean-Baptiste Bonheur and Marianne Villiers. They were travelling on diplomatic passports issued in the overseas French Department of French Guiana. The aircraft had been in the air for over an hour, meaning that it would already be well out into the Atlantic. It was possible that Miami was to be a refuelling stop rather than a final destination, but there was no record of the fact.

Towers thanked Chandler for his help, put down the phone and sat back in his seat. ‘Did you catch that?’ he said, staring intently into space. ‘French Guiana.’

‘Yes,’ Black said, the unsettling seed of an idea starting to form in his mind.

‘What do you make of it?’

‘Unexpected,’ Black said, keeping his theory to himself. He studied Towers’ face and tried to read it. He could see his mind turning, struggling to make connections. Black began to wonder if the doubts that had been forming in his own mind about the nature of Towers’ intentions had been entirely groundless. Perhaps beyond a vague plan to capture and interrogate Drecker there was nothing else. Perhaps this was genuinely how off-the-record operations were haphazardly conducted. It was no more or less chaotic than the way they had run things in Baghdad for more than two years. They had made up the objectives of the war as they went along, isolating targets day by day, hour by hour, and begging, borrowing and stealing whatever resources they needed to catch them.

‘It can’t be the French,’ Towers said. ‘Surely –’

The telephone rang, interrupting Towers’ flow of thought. It was Professor Simon Wilkie from Guy’s Hospital. He had completed the post-mortem on Drecker’s associate and was in a state of high excitement. He knew Towers would be bursting to come and see what he had found.