To the Death am-10 Page 38

  And now he peeled off his tracksuit and sneakers. He pulled a dark gray suit out of his bag, plus a new shirt, tie, and shiny black loafers. He dressed carefully and slung the suit jacket over the back of his chair. Everything else, except for the briefcase, he crammed into the duffel bag, which he left behind the office door.

  Inside the suit pockets he had crammed cash, an English driver’s license in the name of Michael Barden, and a British passport to match. It stated his birthplace as Maidstone, Kent. In the wallet was an American Express card under the same name, on an account registered, if anyone was looking, to the attaché at the Jordanian embassy in Paris. Credit limit: 100,000 euros.

  Ravi would need only to dispose of the duffel bag, and now he went to the briefcase, released the catch, and opened it wide on the desk. He took out the barrel of the SSG 69 and carefully began to assemble the rifle. He handled it lovingly, the instrument of his holy mission. The pieces slotted and screwed together perfectly.

  When it was completed, he loaded the six silver-headed bullets, five into the breech, one into the firing position in front of the bolt. His last actions were to clip on the telescopic sight and the silencer, which he did with practiced expertise. He balanced the weapon in his hands and smiled at the memory of the final shots in the Long Wood out in Oxfordshire. If he could get a clear view, with this rifle he could not miss.

  Eleven o’clock came and went, and still Ravi stood motionless before the window, staring at the Ritz entrance, watching hotel guests come and go, up those six steps. Taxis came. Taxis went. Chauffeurs pulled up, helped people with baggage, and departed.

  At 11:30, Admiral Morgan’s bald bodyguard stepped out of the hotel. He said one quick word to the doorman, who immediately stepped out into the street, raised his arm, and signaled for a car. Ravi heard him blow hard on a whistle.

  From way down Arlington Street, the embassy car with the darkened windows came sliding along to the Ritz. Four police outriders led the way. Inside the lobby, Admiral Morgan was telling his other three agents that it was such a beautiful morning, he and Kathy would prefer to stroll along to Hatchards. All three of them objected, telling him that with a terrorist alert in progress, it would make everyone much happier if he were given safe passage in the big bulletproof embassy car.

  “Goddamned Ramshawe still causing trouble,” said Arnold ruefully. “He’s been waiting for this moment for a month, trying to curtail my simplest pleasures.”

  “Darling, don’t talk about him like that,” scolded Kathy. “He cares about you more than anyone in the world, except for me. He is genuinely worried, as you well know.”

  “I know all that, but he’s still a goddamned nuisance,” replied her husband. And he turned to Big George, his new bodyguard, and demanded, “And where the hell do you think you’re going to park that thing while I’m in the bookstore? In the biography section?”

  “Don’t worry about that, sir. The car will be right there when you come out. I’m only following orders. The president insists you play everything by the book while we have this terror threat.”

  Admiral Morgan scowled. But did as he was told. George checked outside. “Car’s here, Admiral,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Kathy took Arnold’s right arm, and the five of them walked across the carpeted lobby. George went through the revolving doors first, followed by the other two guards, then Kathy, last of all the admiral.

  From high above, Ravi leveled the Austrian precision rifle at the Ritz entrance. One by one he watched them emerge, gravitating to the right-hand brass rail. The doorman, however, was standing on the left, and when the admiral himself came out, he stood next to the doorman as Kathy took his right arm. They started down the steps, and the moment Arnold moved forward, Ravi had his clear head shot, for less than one second.

  But Big George, sensing the admiral’s unprotected left flank, suddenly swung around on the fourth step down and took a giant stride back up to Arnold’s left.

  Ravi tensed, kept the rifle steady, the crosshairs on the admiral’s head, and pressed the trigger. The sound was a soft phutt. The 7.62-millimeter shell ripped out of the barrel just as George reached for Arnold’s arm, stepped across, and completely blocked him from the left.

  The bullet caught the big bodyguard full in the temple, splitting the skull right in front of the hairline, penetrating the brain, exploding on impact inside his head. George died while he was still holding on to the left-hand brass rail.

  He pitched forward, pushing Arnold and Kathy to the right and falling into the top step, his neck twisted. The small wound to his left temple was obscured. And for at least five seconds, no one had the slightest idea what had happened. Then the blood began to trickle down the steps.

  All three remaining agents formed a cordon around the admiral, one of them shouting, “Police! Right here we have a shooting! One of our guys is dying!”

  The doorman blew his whistle and the agents hustled Arnold down the steps and almost hurled him into the embassy car. The police outriders swung around and drove the motorbikes into tight formation around the vehicle. With Arnold now onboard, the American agents raced up the steps to collect Kathy, who was standing next to the doorman.

  George’s immediate boss, the black Secret Service man Al Thompson from the White House, was on the phone while he was helping to half-carry Kathy down the steps and into the vehicle with Arnold. A police cruiser came howling around the corner from Bennett Street. Everyone knew the drill as far as an attempt on the admiral’s life was concerned — and that was to get him as far away from the datum as possible, immediately.

  Right now, Ravi had shut the window and was dismantling his rifle. He’d missed. He knew that. Missed because of a million-to-one fluke, when the late Big George suddenly swung onto the admiral’s left side and blocked the path of the bullet. The seconds ticked away, and Ravi clipped the case shut. He then applied the finishing touch to his disguise — a thick but neatly trimmed black wig.

  He now wore no blond moustache or goatee. He was clean-shaven, of dark complexion, and in his gray suit and tie he looked like an elegant businessman, a persona he had never assumed before. Neither doorman had ever seen him in anything but jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers, or a tracksuit. Twenty-four seconds had elapsed since he pulled the trigger. And now he picked up the duffel bag and briefcase, peered out of the office door, and stepped out, locking the empty room behind him.

  There was no one on the landing, nor on the one above. He crossed the floor and softly rammed the duffel bag down the incinerator. Then he moved swiftly down the stairs, and, without even a sideways look at Reggie, walked across the foyer and pushed open the swing doors.

  He was a totally different person from the fair-haired Finn Haakon Fretheim. No one would have guessed the transformation. Reggie glanced up and saw the departing figure. Not the face, just the dark hair, suit, and leather briefcase. The man could have been visiting anywhere in the building, and Reggie did not remotely recognize him. He turned back to the sports pages of The Sun.

  Ravi turned right and headed straight up Dover Street, walking steadily but in no great rush. Behind him, across Piccadilly, pandemonium had broken out. At least three police cruisers were howling toward the scene of the shooting, one of them swerving right in front of the colonnaded north portico of the Ritz, blocking the westbound route along to Hyde Park Corner. They also blocked Bennett Street and directed traffic north up Albemarle Street into Mayfair.

  A detective superintendent was already on the scene, talking to the admiral’s bodyguards, trying to get an idea of the direction from which the bullet had been fired. All three of the Americans had seen Big George go down, and all three confirmed that the shot he took to the left temple must have been fired from a building across the street.

  Arlington Street itself was under strict scrutiny by the security forces and the police. No one had fired from ground level, or someone would have seen them. The shot most definitely had come from one of the two buildings
on the south corners of Dover Street, most probably the one on the southeast.

  The superintendent looked up and could see the police marksmen on top of the building. He turned to the sergeant who was supervising the deployment of his men as they arrived, and asked, “Did we search that building this morning?”

  “Certainly did, sir. Just before 0500 this morning. I was in there myself. We checked every office, top to bottom. The place was deserted. It never opens ’til 7 A.M.”

  “Did you go inside the offices?”

  “No, sir. They were all locked up for the night. But we tried every door, checked there were no lights on.”

  “Who’s the doorman?”

  “Reggie Milton, sir. We picked him up at home in Putney just after four this morning, sir. He took us through, swore to God no one was left in the building last night, swore to God no one was there when we entered this morning.”

  By this time, the car bearing Arnold and Kathy had swooped through the Hyde Park underpass and then swung into Belgravia. Two police outriders led the way and came to a stop in Lowndes Square. One of them dismounted and walked back to talk to the chauffeur from the U.S. embassy.

  “We’re evacuating Admiral and Mrs. Morgan,” he said. “Out of London immediately. By helicopter. Somewhere to the west, avoiding flying over the city. Ask the admiral if there’s anywhere he’d especially like to go. Otherwise we were thinking of somewhere like Henley-on-Thames, actually anywhere that’s quiet and secret. I imagine you know that that bullet was meant for him, not Big George.”

  “I think we all know that,” replied the chauffeur. “I’ll just follow you to the takeoff point.”

  “No problem,” said the outrider. He remounted and headed south, back down to Eaton Square, and then turned left toward Buckingham Palace. And from there he turned into Birdcage Walk and accelerated down to Horse Guards, the giant military parade ground that stands in the shadow of Great Britain’s Admiralty at the end of St. James’s Park.

  He rode to the north corner and signaled the embassy car to park. Then he told the two CIA men in the admiral’s car their transportation would arrive any moment.

  In the backseat, Kathy Morgan was terrified. She clung to the admiral’s arm and kept saying, over and over, “They could have killed you, my darling, they could have killed you.”

  Arnold himself was strangely philosophical. “In my line of business, kid, this kind of thing can happen. For us, the main thing was they missed. For Big George’s family it’s tragedy. I guess I’ve cheated death a few times, but I agree with you, this one was close.”

  Kathy wanted to know what their new plan was, and Arnold was, as usual, resolute. “Well, we’re going up to Scotland in a couple of days to see Iain MacLean. And I wanted to spend the spare time in London. But, hell, we can have a nice time in the English countryside, and I’m pretty damn certain we can stay at a little place up the Thames River. Iain stays there when he comes south, says it’s his favorite restaurant.”

  Arnold pulled out his cell phone, dialed a number, and asked to be put through to the U.S. ambassador’s office in Grosvenor Square. When his old pal Sandra King, ex-White House, answered, he asked her to somehow trace the restaurant for him and see if he could get rooms there for a couple of nights.

  As one might expect from the secretary to one of America’s most important ambassadors, Sandra called back within ten minutes and told him the place was called the Leather Bottle, downstream from Wallingford on the Goring Reach. She’d booked him and Kathy in for two nights, in the new bridal suite.

  “Attagirl,” said Arnie.

  Meanwhile, the police were swarming into Ravi’s office block. They told Reggie to lock the door. “No one leaves until we’re done,” said the Metropolitan Police detective sergeant. “We need to speak to every tenant, every staff member of every corporation with space in here.”

  They started on the ground floor and questioned everyone. On the second floor, they found three offices locked, but spoke to everyone else. On the fourth floor, they found Ravi’s office locked. By the time they reached the top floor, they had interviewed all the tenants except for seven where the offices were locked and no one was in.

  The detective sergeant asked Reggie if they could enter the locked premises, and Reggie said he was sure that would be fine and he would get the keys. When he unlocked the door to Mr. Fretheim’s room, he was quite surprised at how thoroughly empty the place looked.

  He had never been in there when the accountant with the Finland Farms Marketing Board was working, but still he imagined there would be the usual office paraphernalia, computers, writing pads, pens, books, ledgers, maybe a couple of cups or a coffeepot. But this place was desolate.

  The detective looked quizzical. “How long’s this character been here?” he asked.

  “’Bout a week, I suppose,” replied Reggie. “Seemed a nice sort of bloke. I saw him yesterday lunchtime. He was in his tracksuit, said he was going jogging later. I expect in the park.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Youngish. About thirty. Fair hair. Moustache and goatee beard. Spectacles. Not very tall — less than six feet. Spoke with a Finnish accent.”

  “Do you know what a Finnish accent sounds like?” asked the policeman.

  “’Course not,” said Reggie. “Never spoke to one of ’em, have I? ’Cept for Santa Claus — and Mr. Fretheim.”

  “What I mean, Reggie, is, was that a Finnish accent, or could it have been French, or German, or Arabian?”

  “Beats me, guv’nor. Could have been anything. I just assumed it was Finnish, because he said that’s where he was from.”

  The detective smiled. “Anything else about him?”

  “Not really. But I had the impression he was an athletic sort of bloke. I mean he was always dressed very casual, jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers.”

  The detective nodded. “Did he keep regular hours?”

  “Well, I can’t rightly say about that. Our shifts change at 2 P.M., so we don’t really know if people are in or out when we come on afternoon duty.”

  “Did he ever come in at unusual times, like evenings or anything?”

  “I don’t think so. I never saw him here in the evening. Matter of fact I haven’t seen him since yesterday lunchtime.”

  “And you never saw him leave?”

  “No. But I wouldn’t, would I? Don did the afternoon shift and locked up last night.”

  “Could Fretheim have been in the building overnight?”

  “No. Don would have known that. You always know if someone’s here in the evening. Tell you the truth, we usually nip out for a pint around nine o’clock, and the first thing you’d notice would be a light on at the front of the building.”

  “Perhaps Mr. Fretheim was sitting in the dark,” said the detective. “Thank you, Reggie. Tell Don we’d like a word this afternoon.”

  “Righto, sir.”

  At that moment, the two police marksmen were making their way down from the roof. When they reached the detective sergeant, one of them said, “We just heard, on the phone, sir. But neither of us saw a thing, and we never heard anything either. Me and Brian here were watching the area around the hotel all the time. Whoever fired must have done it from somewhere in here. But it was a damn quiet gun, I’ll say that.”

  In the meantime, General Rashood had completed his walk up Dover Street and had turned left down Hay Hill and into Berkeley Street. He crossed and strolled into the narrow walkway of Lansdowne Row, where he was when the police began their search of his office building.

  He knew Lansdowne Row mostly because it contained one of the best newspaper shops in London. Ravi used to go there with his father occasionally to pick up Middle Eastern publications.

  He bought the London Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail and then walked into the café next door and ordered some coffee and buttered toast. He took off his jacket and placed it over the back of his chair, and put down his briefcase. He’d been here before, in another
life, and it looked much the same, but better. It seemed bigger, and Ravi thought they must have purchased the flower shop next door.

  Anyway, it felt like a haven right now, and happily he did not recognize the proprietor. Calmly he sipped his coffee and read the newspapers. It was a busy place, filled with shirtsleeved young advertising and financial executives. Ravi fitted right in, and outside, to the south, he heard the constant wail of police sirens. And the distant clatter of a helicopter swooping low over the city.

  It was a little after 12:30 when he left. He put on his jacket and walked into Berkeley Square, which was lunchtime busy. He made his way up the west side of the square, past the distinctive awning of Annabel’s, the world’s most exclusive nightclub, and then turned left into Mount Street.

  Up ahead he could see the Audi, Shakira at the wheel. He watched her step out and walk around to the front passenger seat. Casually, he made his way to the driver’s side, tossed his jacket and briefcase in the back, and positioned himself behind the wheel. Without a word, he drove down the north side of Berkeley Square and then swung left, heading up the one-way system in fast-moving traffic. He neither stopped nor spoke for fifteen minutes. Shakira knew everything had gone wrong, but at least he had not been shot, and in a sense she felt an overwhelming feeling of relief.

  The helicopter he had heard was currently standing on the Horse Guards parade ground. Arnold and Kathy were aboard, along with two of the secret agents. They were just waiting for the luggage to arrive from the now-besieged Ritz Hotel, which currently contained more policemen than guests.

  The body of Big George had been removed by ambulance to St. Mary’s Hospital. And before it left, the police pathologist had confirmed that the bullet had been fired from a height and had hit George at a shallow angle to the horizontal.

  The westbound lanes of Piccadilly were still blocked, and the hotel staff car containing the Americans’ luggage was forced to take a circuitous route to Horse Guards. When it arrived, the loadmaster packed the suitcases into the hold, and the helicopter from the Queen’s Flight took off, heading west. Destination: classified.