Pacific Force, page 7
“Got it,” Spencer agreed.
It was Nathaniel. What were they missing?
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
Jake recognized the man who introduced himself as Steve today. He’d been a Charles and a Johnathon other times. The other man, the driver, was sitting in the Rover with Grant, babysitting those two. Now, he and Steve were ascending the stairs again.
Jake just hoped that he was done with close combat for tonight.
“Is there a reason you wouldn’t allow us to come in heavy?” Steve asked as they climbed.
“I don’t want it leaking to Nathaniel Hoestler,” Jake said simply. “You know Grant’s here, but we snuck in and hopefully wouldn’t otherwise appear on your radar until Monday when records of our flight were finally entered. We’re playing a hunch that Nathaniel expects us to not arrive before mid-week.”
“And the folks you ambushed here tonight?”
“You get at least two of them to take home with you,” Jake said. “Spencer might have found a clue up in the apartment. If he did, you can have her as well.”
The man was at least smart enough to not ask at this point, since Jake wasn’t about to tell him.
They got to the door and entered. The prisoner left behind had been blindfolded but not gagged. Hollyanne was with him.
“This is one?” Steve asked.
“Yup,” Hollyanne replied.
“I’m not telling you bastards anything,” the man growled in a Midlands accent.
“You don’t have to, sweetie,” Hollyanne cooed at him like the soft Southern Belle she wasn’t. “We’ve got all the evidence we need to put you in prison forever, if I don’t miss my guess. And all your friends as well. Those two are down in the truck waiting their turn for the Black Maria police van. All you can do now is roll on them or hope none of them rats on you.”
“This way,” Jake touched Steve and led him to the bedroom.
“Oh, shit,” Steve recoiled when he saw the lab.
Jake had to agree. A couple of bins of chemicals that could be turned into right nasty devices. A stack of burner cell phones that made excellent timers or remote detonators. Wires and boards and other things.
“They sleep in the other bedroom,” Jake said. “Guy out front and the girl, near as I can tell. This was their workshop. Spencer?”
Spencer had been taking photos. Now, he pointed at a stack of books and papers to one side. Jake approached them gingerly, same as Spencer had, and examined the piece he needed. The stack felt random rather than a trap, but he still pulled the one page out slowly and looked at it.
Blueprints. Big building. Jake turned it over and pointed at the title.
One Chamberlain Square. Birmingham. Part of a massive downtown renovation to undo some of the ugliness of the ’70s.
“And the girl is a Red?” Steve asked.
“Close enough,” Jake agreed. “Mostly mercenary, according to the folks that twitched us onto her in the first place. Between rumors of bombs and someone finding Mikhail Ivanov in London at the same time, we presume Hoestler never left the country and has something big planned here instead.”
“What?”
“We’re hoping you could tell us,” Jake replied.
“Me?”
“Birmingham nails down a where, but only in the sense that something would happen nearby but not that close,” Jake explained. “Nathaniel and Pacific Force means that everyone should expect it to have happened by mid-week.”
“How close?” Steve asked warily.
“Close enough that every cop and agent who could get there would swarm into the downtown area as soon as a bomb went off, but they’d be too late,” Jake said. “Then when something else happened elsewhere, everyone would be trapped in Birmingham and unable to respond quickly enough to do anything.”
“I keep forgetting how many times your team has thwarted Hoestler and his crew.” Steven shook his head. “Is this a red herring?”
“Probably,” Jake agreed now. “Even if you started pouring teams in, the chances are low that you’d have any luck. Her bomb is probably already in place somewhere around there. If you do put more than one team in place, you’ll just be stepping on each other’s toes.”
“What do you want from me?” Steve ignored the rest of the room and turned to face Jake now.
“What government targets are within maybe fifty miles of downtown Birmingham?” Jake asked.
“Why government?”
“If he was hitting a toff for ransom, he wouldn’t need a bomb,” Jake explained. “This is something big enough that he wants your people hot and heavy elsewhere.”
“Let me talk to my people,” Steve offered now.
Jake recognized that this was likely to have to go to the Home Secretary or at least an extremely senior bureaucrat in an office somewhere before they could talk to Pacific Force.
“Good,” Jake said. “Let’s go down to the truck and you can collect all three of your prisoners.”
“What about you?” Steve asked, surprised.
“We’re leaving as soon as you call in all your strike teams,” Jake laughed. “Grant will phone you in the morning and hopefully you’ll have good news. If Nathaniel hears about all this, maybe he just thinks that someone else tumbled them and the authorities got a lucky tip. He’ll twitch, but not enough to abandon his plans, and we can maybe catch him in the act.”
“Seems risky,” Steve said, as Jake led him out front and nodded to Hollyanne to get this prisoner up on his feet.
“Everything is a risk,” Jake said. “Sometimes you’ve just got to roll the dice.”
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
Nathaniel was enjoying some Tanzanian Peaberry coffee this morning with a classical, full Irish breakfast when Lucky walked in, looking like the man who had drawn the short straw from the sheepishness on his face. Nathaniel wiped up some egg yolk with his bacon and studied his minion as the man came to rest on the far side of the dining room table.
Nathaniel wondered if that barrier was a psychological comfort, or maybe some sort of calculation that it would give a victim a head start. He didn’t do violence, but all of his men had been broken to his will at some point. Most of them had been common thugs and hooligans, lacking direction for their violence and needing someone like him to provide it.
Lucky had proven his namesake many times, surviving circumstances that might have gotten others killed.
The man stood perfectly still now, a six foot four columnar apple tree in winter sleep. Nervous, though he was hiding it well. On the verge of flinching, but holding up.
Nathaniel finished this piece of bacon and sipped some more coffee before he spoke.
“What happened?” he asked simply.
“Someone raided the bombmaker overnight,” Lucky said carefully, his Kenyan accent still there underneath the East End he’d picked up over the last fifteen years. “Took ’em down hard and fast. Reports of a small explosion, but outside in the street, rather than a breach or a secondary explosion inside.”
“Tommy send you in to get abused for bad news?” Nathaniel queried.
Lucky shrugged, which was quite a sight starting at his knees and going all the way up to the way his afro was carved into a peaked fade that made him look eight feet tall.
“Not sure what it changes,” Lucky replied. “Tommy figured you’d be pissed.”
“Any news from our spies in The City?” Nathaniel pressed.
“Is Sunday, so they be at home,” Lucky said. “If they have not been called, maybe good. Maybe bad.”
“Reach out and confirm that,” Nathaniel said. “Then contact the team in Birmingham and let them know to be extra careful and ready to abort if someone finds our package. Let it be disarmed without incident. Confirm that.”
“Let the bomb be disarmed without incident if the cops find it.” Lucky nodded. “What if they get there too late and is ready to boom? Do we keep eyes on all the way?”
“When we leave here at ten, you’ll check in with them and confirm,” Nathaniel ordered the man. “And again at dinner.”
“Me?”
Lucky was surprised, but he’d always been something of a third wheel with Tommy and Mikhail around.
“You.” Nathaniel smiled disarmingly. “Tommy expected you to have to deal with the blowup that was coming from me finding out. So deal with it.”
Now, the beanpole smiled. Nodded even.
“Gotcha, boss,” he said, looking already a foot taller from the slump that had hunched him some earlier. “Anything else?”
“Tell Tommy I’m super pissed and ripped you a new asshole.” Nathaniel grinned after a moment. “And nobody should bother me for a while. Then set an alarm for 0930 to make sure everything is packed in the truck.”
“On it.” And he departed, leaving Nathaniel to finish his beans and last piece of toast in peace.
Tommy was being a shit. Probably angling to make himself something like Chief of Staff, with Mikhail gone and expecting Lucky to get a ration of shit right now. Eliminating all the competition at the trough, as it were.
Already, it had looked like time to expand the gang by bringing in some bigger players.
After this, Nathaniel really needed to hire some pros. Luckily, he’d make a king’s ransom for tonight.
Who did he need to bring in, outside of the usual channels?
CHAPTER
TWENTY
Jake had watched the morning news enough to confirm that everyone was all aflutter about the raid, but Steve hadn’t told anyone anything of value, so hopefully Nathaniel hadn’t spooked.
Assuming that Nathaniel was still in-country, still planning something, and all of this wasn’t a triple cross of some sort to distract Jake and the others. The original clues had pointed to Nathaniel making it successfully to Spain and then vanishing, but that was easy to do when you have that much coastline to work with and so many quiet revolutionary elements floating around in the background of Iberian history.
Jake always wondered how long Spain would continue to be a place before it fragmented into somewhere between two and six pieces, undoing the original fifteenth century Conquest that had driven out the Moors and the Jews in the first place. ETA might have finally gone quietly, but there were other groups. Other demands.
The world was not getting more cohesive and peaceful, even with everything Pacific Force could do.
They had driven back to the Birmingham area, the suburb known as Solihull on the southeast, to spend the night. Rik had driven and the rest had napped, then crashed when they got to the house. It was morning now. Late church, if you were all into that sort of thing, though Jake wasn’t, and didn’t care if any of the others did.
They were on a mission right now, so religion could wait until later.
Spencer had gotten up early and baked cinnamon rolls, then fried bacon once folks emerged, so they were all sitting around the dining room having coffee, noses generally buried in phones getting the latest news. Or lack thereof.
Grant had remained in London somewhere, so he looked central to an investigation that wasn’t there anymore.
Jake’s phone rang. Unknown number. Not an uncommon occurrence, but he was on an English phone, rather than his own number, so not many people would know how to get hold of him.
“Oy?” he answered, flattening his accent down to something more Yorkshire and maybe a little grumpy.
“Uhm, Jake?” Steve asked.
“That’s right,” Jake replied, shifting back to his normal tones. “What do we know this morning?”
“The Undersecretary would like to be briefed personally. By you and the team,” Steve said carefully. “Today. In London. Well, Northampton. We’ve established something of a base of operations there that should be far enough away from Birmingham but within range. The Undersecretary is headed that way now.”
Jake suppressed the sarcastic reply on the tip of his tongue. This was one of the reasons that Jake had never wanted to belong to any agency anywhere. The amount of bureaucratic red tape as everyone had to cover his or her ass against possibly making a mistake that could not be blamed on someone else meant that things moved at a glacial pace.
Normally, that was a good thing, as you wanted a government that moved with calm deliberation, but there were times like now when Nathaniel was no doubt counting on that sort of dithering.
And the English were famous for dithering.
Still, either the man had an Issue #1 he wanted signed by the team or knew something so utterly disturbing that it had to be communicated in person. Both had happened over the years.
“Two hours?” Jake asked. “Take us an hour to drive and a little time here to prep.”
Steve covered the phone at his end enough to muffle the words, but not the sound. Probably sitting next to the man in the back of a blacked-out Suburban right now.
The discussion lasted longer than a simple question, but Jake held his temper.
Finally, the man returned. Too long.
“That will be acceptable,” Steve said in a tone similar to that of a child called on to apologize to all the adults in the room for something.
He gave Jake the address and hung up once Jake confirmed it.
Jake dialed Grant, who picked it up immediately.
“Yo.”
“Are you in the front seat of a vehicle containing Steve and a gentleman in a striped tie?” Jake asked simply.
“Affirmative.”
“We’ll see you then.”
Jake hung up and finished his coffee before he decided to blister the reputation of all bureaucrats everywhere. At least they had grabbed Grant on their way out of town. Not exactly a hostage, but certainly a statement that Grant’s investigation was over.
Not that Jake wouldn’t have pulled the man north by lunch anyway, but this still felt a little like hostage taking and left a sour taste in Jake’s mouth.
The others were all eyes when he carefully placed his empty coffee mug on the table, rather than slamming it hard enough that it might crack.
Much as he wanted to.
He drew a long, deep breath and released it. He turned and focused his attention on Rik.
“We’ll be headed to Northampton shortly to meet with someone,” he said in a flat, angry tone. “I suspect that said someone will want his hand held excessively today, to the extent that we will not be able to get into the field and conduct our own investigations in time to possibly have any impact on whatever happens. We’ll need to arrange something extravagant in order to get us wherever we need to be in a minimum of time when all hell breaks loose while we’re stuck babysitting.”
Rik nodded placidly.
“How stupid do you want to get?” she asked.
“If the gentleman in question, the one about to drag us all in to demonstrate his political power, tells us anything useful, maybe not at all,” Jake smiled.
“Right,” Rik nodded. “Completely, fucking insane coming up. Do you care?”
“I do not,” Jake assured her, watching all three of his friends flinch at the implications.
Usually, Jake set down limits and let everyone color inside those lines, but right now he was chewing nails angry at the hostage-taking element of things and didn’t really care who knew.
“Actually, I do care,” Jake countered after a moment. “Stupidly fast when I need to get somewhere.”
“Stupidly fast?” Rik repeated delicately.
“Stupidly,” Jake confirmed. “Everyone else, I propose we pack some snacks, and whatever gear you think you’ll need physically on you at the moment that the idiot in Northampton decides that maybe we should have been in the field all day instead of holding his hand while he talked to someone in London anyway. Let’s pack and then depart in forty-five minutes for the drive down. Questions?”
Everyone shook their heads, so Jake picked up his mug, put it in the sink, and headed to his room to grab a few things. Hollyanne had apparently followed him because she was standing in the door when he looked back.
“Are they going to try to burn us on this one?” she asked.
“I doubt that the gentleman in question has thought that far ahead,” Jake replied primly. “If he’s capable of that level of inductive logic. He’s probably still slowly working his way down a checklist filled with people he can bully and browbeat because they work for him, civil service or not.”
“And what will you do if he does piss you off?”
“You mean more?” Jake asked.
“Yes, more.”
“I might call Whitehall and complain to the PM. Maybe leave a message at Buckingham, assuming she’s not in Scotland right now,” Jake said. “If he really pisses me off, we’ll just fly back to Seattle tonight instead, and he can fucking deal with the problem himself.”
“You said yourself that they couldn’t handle Nathaniel, Jake,” Hollyanne was almost pleading with him now. “That was why we had to get back together and go into the field again.”
“Indeed.” Jake let his face curl into a snarl. “But they seem to think otherwise. I am currently tempted to let them deal with things, having broken it open enough that perhaps they feel they can handle this.”
“Are you emotionally compromised?” she asked.
“No,” Jake decided. “I’m angry. Not quite angry enough, but close.”
She didn’t ask what form that would take, which was good. Because if this fool blew it all and then decided that he’d want to blame the Americans for it anyway, Jake would make a point of getting the man so badly blackballed by his own government that he would end up manning a research station in Antarctica if he wanted the rest of his pension.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
Grant kept a low profile as the truck pulled into a warehouse and someone already inside closed the door behind them. Steve at least had the courtesy to look chagrined as everyone got out of the vehicle and followed the portly man in the striped suit and raspy wheeze over to an area that had been temporarily configured as a command post. Or somebody’s idea of what one looked like, probably from some movie he watched.
