Zero kill, p.8
Zero Kill, page 8
‘There’ll be a car waiting downstairs,’ he told her.
‘Let me help. I don’t know her well, hardly at all, really… but I’m sure I can be useful.’
Plowright glanced back towards the conference room, where assistants went in and out with regular updates, then pulled her into an office, closing the door.
‘Someone tried to kill Elsa Zero last night. In a crowded restaurant on the King’s Road. They tore the place apart. Both parties left the scene, bloodied but alive, and by the time we were alerted and got to her home, she and her kids had fled.’ Plowright pushed his round glasses up his sharp nose. ‘But there’s nowhere she can go, because every intelligence agency on Earth is looking for her.’
‘But why?’ asked Zoe, bewildered.
Plowright’s mouth twisted as he pondered how much to tell her. ‘SIS has been keeping Zero under observation for some time. We suspect she’s a key player in a major global conspiracy, and chatter we picked up last night seems to confirm it.’
She had heard Zero retired years ago – deep cover agents burned out quickly – and what Plowright told her didn’t make any sense.
‘Then let me help bring her in.’
‘Zero is a target,’ he told her.
‘Who wants to kill her?’
‘Everyone.’
‘Why?’ asked Zoe in shock.
‘Why?’ There was no humour in Plowright’s bitter laugh. ‘Because right now Elsa Zero is the most dangerous person on the planet.’
11
When she got back to London, Elsa parked Dougie’s car near Russell Square and made her way to the shelter in Somers Town, skirting as best she could the numerous CCTV cameras around Euston Station. Meaning to reconnoitre the shelter, she was surprised to see Saint on the pavement outside.
Standing smoking a cigarette with a group of other men, he looked terrible. Once upon a time Max Saint had been cocksure and confident, and with good reason, but he was a shadow of the handsome, super-fit athlete Elsa once knew.
They were roughly the same age, but you’d never know it. His hair, once cropped in a military cut, fell lankly to his shoulders. His thin, blotched face was etched with deep creases, and ravaged by mysterious sores and blemishes; his eyes, once a dazzling blue, were puffy and bloodshot. A beard covered his jaw as best it could over skin interrupted by raised cords of scar tissue. Bundled in layers of filthy clothing, it was obvious that Max Saint had been living on the streets.
But he seemed animated enough as he stood with the other men, arms waving wildly, tall frame in constant, nervous motion, joking and chatting. His laugh exploded into a crackly cough as he swigged from a half-bottle of rum.
Elsa came out of her hiding place and walked quickly up behind him. ‘Saint.’
At the surprise mention of his name, he turned slowly; the wary Saint of old would have had her in a headlock instantly. A roll-up trembling between his chapped lips, his tired eyes finally managed to focus.
‘Elsie?’ He smiled, revealing green teeth, livid red gums and unsightly gaps. ‘Lads, it’s Elsie Zero!’
Moving in for a hug, he enveloped her in a smelly cloud of alcohol, body odour and a musky stink she didn’t even want to contemplate the nature of.
Saint turned to the other guys, homeless men with equally careworn faces, broken smiles and shattered lives. They clutched filthy bedding and plastic bags, carried tattered rucksacks containing everything they owned.
‘Lads, this lovely lady is a good friend of mine, Elsie Zero.’ The last thing she needed was for Saint to keep shouting her name on a busy London street. ‘What are you doing here?’
One of the men, who had a little dog on a piece of string, grinned, displaying a solitary tooth. ‘How you doing, lass?’
‘We spoke last night.’
Saint’s eyes blinked slowly as he tried to remember, and she realized he was just as pissed this morning. ‘Did we?’
‘I need to speak to you inside,’ Elsa told him, in no mood to chitchat with his mates.
‘I was just telling the lads about the SAS.’ Saint placed a hand to his stomach and grimaced; his guts were probably in a right state. ‘Those were happy days, they really was.’
Elsa felt paranoid and vulnerable standing on the busy street, with its constant stream of traffic and passers-by. ‘Now, Saint.’
‘Sure.’ He held up his fag. ‘Let me just finish this, doll.’
‘I’ll have it, if the young lady wants to speak to you,’ suggested one of the other gentlemen.
Saint must have clocked her uneasiness because she saw a glimmer of understanding in his eyes.
‘Sure, I remember now.’ He gave the roll-up to one of the other guys, tapped him lightly on the cheek. ‘You owe me one, sport.’
Saint, who had once triumphantly smashed Special Forces endurance training by carrying seventy pounds of equipment across miles of scorched desert in blistering temperatures, limped unsteadily alongside her in his dirty, bloated trainers. She wondered how long he’d been living like this.
Walking into a small common area, Saint asked, ‘Beverage, Elsie?’
‘No time for that.’ She eyed the men and women hunched over plastic cups. ‘We need to talk.’
‘Hey, Saint,’ someone shouted. ‘You’ve pulled!’
Saint gave him the finger and everyone roared.
A staff member pointed at Elsa. ‘She can’t be here.’
‘She ain’t my dealer; Elsie’s an old friend.’ He placed his hands together, as if in humble prayer. ‘You know me, fella. Saint by name, Saint by nature.’
‘Two minutes,’ said the man.
When they went into a long corridor, Elsa couldn’t help but ask, ‘What happened to you, Saint?’
‘It’s a sad story. Things didn’t turn out the way I imagined, life took a few wonky turns.’ He nodded amiably to everyone who passed them. ‘Ain’t no big deal; it’s happened to better people than me.’
Elsa had heard years ago that he was struggling. PTSD, they’d said, from all the things he’d seen and done as a mercenary.
Elite soldiers for hire like Saint moved from one war zone to another, selling their expertise to the highest bidder, leaving family and friends in the past, never putting down roots. These stateless warriors lived out of backpacks, staying in camps and field tents, becoming ever more estranged from conventional forms of living. They became addicted to conflict, craving risk and danger, using drink and drugs to make the periods in between tolerable.
Finally, too damaged and paranoid, and often hunted by vengeful adversaries, many ended up living off the grid altogether. When they struggled with mental health problems and addiction, there was no safety net to catch them, and they plummeted quickly through the cracks of a society they’d never felt a part of in the first place.
All the signs were there, Elsa supposed. Back in the day, she had more than once hit the town with Saint after completing a job. In the early hours she’d call it a night, but he’d disappear in search of chemical adventure to fill his noisy head. She’d later find out Saint’s bender lasted days or even weeks. When she’d heard of his struggles, Elsa had tried to locate him – after all, she owed him her life – but none of their mutual contacts knew where he was. She’d completely forgotten about the Nokia he’d given her.
‘It’s a hard life, Elsie,’ Saint told her with a drunken smirk. ‘But I’m a hard man.’
‘They’re after us, Saint.’ In his state, he’d be a sitting duck.
He shifted his body weight, and she saw he was sweating. ‘Yeah, who’s that?’
‘Years ago, you gave me a phone. After Buenos Aires, after I—’
‘Yeah, I thought we’d lost you…’ Wincing, he clutched his side.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Just a twinge.’ He dug a phone from his pocket, identical to the one she had, a Nokia 8800. It was covered in lint, and sticky with tissue and mysterious blobs of God-knows-what. He must have been carrying it around for years. ‘Always kept it charged; guess I knew you’d call sooner or later.’
‘Why did you give me the phone, Saint?’
‘I just knew that… How you doing, Pat, all right?’ He winked at an old guy who shuffled past, and then whispered, ‘I knew that wasn’t the end of it, and that fucking disaster of a job would come back to haunt us, it was nailed on.’
‘Someone tried to kill me last night.’
‘Yeah?’ Leaning heavily against an office door, he grimaced in pain.
‘And if it’s got anything to do with Buenos Aires, they may try to do the same to you.’
‘Gotcha.’ Nodding, he took the bottle from his pocket and swigged. ‘Now it all makes sense.’
‘What does?’
Saint flung the door open to reveal a small office where two men were tied to chairs with duct tape, heads slumped on their chests. Elsa went inside to check their pulses, which were slow and steady.
‘What happened?’
‘I was in here minding my own business, filling out benefit forms – you wouldn’t believe what you have to go through, Elsie, to get state assistance; it’s criminal after all the things I’ve done in the service of this country – when they came in and tried to drag me out.’ Saint made a face. ‘And I weren’t having that, no way. So there was handbags.’
Slumping wearily against a wall, he lifted layers of stained clothes to reveal a wound in the side of his stomach.
‘I popped outside to have a fag and then I was going to come back and find out what they wanted.’
‘You’re injured,’ she said.
‘Got stabbed with my own knife.’ He swigged the rum. ‘Just a scratch, but a tad embarrassing.’
‘When did this happen?’
‘Just before you came,’ he said. ‘About five minutes ago.’
The small room was a mess. There was a broken table, an overturned cabinet. Saint had fought a life-and-death struggle with these two men and then calmly gone outside for a cigarette. Even in bad shape, he was more than a match for them.
Saint nodded at the earpieces the intruders wore. ‘Spooks, defo.’
She pushed him towards the door. If they were secret service, more would be coming at any moment.
‘We have to get out of here.’
‘We should probably kill these two first,’ he suggested.
Elsa shoved him into the corridor.
12
Plowright put down the phone and demanded of his team, ‘Where is she?’
Deep in the heart of the most restricted area in the SIS building at Vauxhall Cross, he paced across an ops room. With its technicians hunched over monitors, and its three walls of screens showing constantly changing camera feeds of the streets of London, it looked more like the command hub of a battleship, or a TV production gallery.
He rubbed his hands – his slim limbs were prone to cold and the air conditioning in the room was chill – as he anxiously searched the screens for Elsa Zero, watching as face-recognition software triangulated on the faces of the thousands of people captured on CCTV on nearby streets. Citizens hurrying along pavements, across roads, standing on Tube platforms, crowds pouring in and out of Euston Station; a surging tide of workers, shoppers and tourists.
Digital grids shimmered and shifted across their features. Biometric algorithms scanned faces and compared them almost instantaneously to photographs lifted from numerous databases, the information processing at a bewildering rate. A constant thread of information dropped down the side of the screens, too fast for the human eye to read.
‘We’ve got them,’ called one of the techs, and CCTV footage immediately appeared on the huge central screen.
Plowright and his team, including his deputy officer, Justine Vydelingum, watched Elsa Zero and a scruffy individual flee the shelter in Somers Town and race into the warren of streets north of Euston Road. Agents were closing in, converging from different directions in two SUVs. On a monitor, the vehicles were represented as red GPS dots on a street map.
Plowright clenched his fists. A tall, slim woman in a hoodie, her long legs taking big, easy strides, headed along a street towards Somers Town. Behind her, a limping, lopsided figure, swathed in a bundle of clothes, struggled to keep up. If the shambling figure was Max Saint, as Plowright strongly suspected, he must have been catastrophically hot in all the layers he wore: at least two body warmers over a padded sports jacket, a sweatshirt, maybe more under that; tracksuit bottoms that flapped at his ankles; a battered pair of trainers.
‘Confirmation, please!’
‘It’s them.’ Justine repeatedly clicked a pen top in a manner he found highly irritating. ‘I can feel it.’
Pressing the bridge of his glasses up his nose, he watched the figures run below the camera on Chalton Street. ‘I need confirmation before I commit both teams. How far away are those vehicles?’
‘Thirty seconds,’ said a tech. ‘They’ll have a visual any moment.’
‘Is that Max Saint?’ Suspecting a decoy, Plowright jabbed a finger at the screen. ‘Someone, anyone, identify that individual.’
The aim had been to bring Max Saint in for questioning. Plowright’s superiors had worried that sending a full assault team to the shelter would create unnecessary noise and visibility. He was an alcoholic druggie with mental health problems, but what they hadn’t factored into their thinking was that Saint was also a former captain in the SAS, a notorious mercenary and a veteran of numerous black ops missions.
Against his own better judgement, Plowright had been ordered to keep Saint’s arrest low-key by sending in a single pair of agents – with whom they had immediately lost contact.
But that’s what happened when you tried to run a delicate operation like this by committee: you were asking for trouble. Finally, the penny had dropped with his superiors. After last night’s debacle when an assault team arrived in Zero’s street and found her gone, and now the obvious conclusion that the agents had failed to apprehend Saint, Plowright had moments ago been given sole responsibility to hunt Zero.
He didn’t want the job, it was a poisoned chalice, but if he could take down Elsa Zero, he might just avoid the inevitable fallout from this absolute shitshow; he was damned if he was going to be made a scapegoat if she was allowed to evade capture again.
All was not yet lost. Plowright couldn’t see their faces, but that was Zero and Saint running on the screen, he was sure of it.
‘Where’s that bird I asked for?’ he demanded.
‘Helicopter’s en route,’ someone told him.
A voice dulled by engine roar came over the speaker: the lead officer in one of the SUVs. ‘We’re turning into Chalton Street. Do we commit? Please advise.’
‘Let’s see their dashboard cam.’ Plowright loomed over the technician, the fingers of his left hand twitching – if he knew which button to press on the keyboard, he’d do it himself – but the feed changed almost immediately to the view from inside the vehicle as it accelerated up the street. He couldn’t see them yet, but it would be any moment now. There were four officers in that car, and four in the other vehicle.
‘Let me speak.’ Plowright snatched up a headset so that he could be heard clearly in the car. ‘You’re almost on them. Use any measures necessary to bring them down. I repeat, any measures necessary.’
On another screen, the running figures ran past a street camera, and then something unexpected happened. Elsa Zero came back, pulling down her hood to reveal her face as she trotted closer, while the other figure shuffled around a corner ahead.
From the POV of the dashboard camera in the SUV, Zero could be seen in the distance. They were almost on her. ‘We’ve got a visual!’ said the lead officer in the SUV.
‘What on earth is she doing?’ asked Justine.
Incredulous, Plowright pushed his glasses up his nose. Zero came to a stop beneath the CCTV camera and looked directly into its lens, mouthed something up at it.
‘Is there sound on that thing?’ Plowright said, and when nobody answered, he shouted, ‘Will someone tell me?’
‘No, sir,’ said one of the flustered techs.
Then she was sprinting away again, following the other figure around the corner; disappearing off the dashboard cam as it roared towards her.
‘They’ve turned onto Polygon Road,’ Plowright told the officers in the car, which was approaching the turn. ‘You’re almost on them.’
The dash camera jerked as the car took the junction too fast, crunching up onto the pavement, sending a bin spinning, but when it turned onto the adjacent street there was no sign of Zero or Saint.
‘Is there another camera nearby?’ Plowright asked the room. But he knew there wasn’t, that would be just too fucking convenient.
‘There’s no sign,’ said the lead officer in the SUV, which braked hard. ‘We’re going to search by foot.’
Plowright heard doors slam. The officers jumped from the car, handguns held discreetly at their sides. But Plowright knew Zero and Saint had escaped into one of the many buildings along the route, and that there wasn’t a hope in hell they’d pick them up on camera again.
‘What do we do next?’ asked Justine, clicking the pen top. Plowright’s gaze moved to the central screen, where he could see the officers trotting along the street from directly above, the helicopter having moved into position. But the thermal imaging camera on board wouldn’t be able to penetrate any of the buildings. He listened to the officers on the ground as they searched the area.
After twenty minutes, with every search option exhausted and Zero and Saint vanished, his attention turned to why she had so brazenly approached that camera.
They watched the footage several times. Elsa Zero stood beneath the camera, her bright eyes gazing coolly into the lens: challenging, defiant. Her mouth moved again and again, soundlessly repeating the same two words.
‘Shall we get a lip reader?’ Justine asked.
‘No.’ Plowright waved her off. ‘I know exactly what she’s saying.’
13
Zoe Castle was still in the building, Plowright learned. Sitting at her desk in the hope she’d be needed again. He didn’t know whether to be impressed or to fire her for insubordination.
