He missed her. A lot. He had met her last summer when a turn of events had taken him on an unexpected week-long trip to New York City. Third-generation Serbian but born and bred in Chicago, she had dark brown eyes with long brown hair that had a hint of crimson in the sunlight. Feminine and beautiful, she was also just as tough as any man in the Bureau she worked with.

  Although just turned thirty, she was already a widow. Her husband had died of cancer a couple of years previously, leaving her with a young daughter to look after. She and Archer had worked together on a case when he was out there and they had become close. And ever since he got back he couldn't get her out of his mind.

  But they lived different lives. She was now head of the FBI's Bank Robbery Task Force in New York and he was an integral part of the ARU counter-terrorist team here. Two people, the possibility of a life together separated by an ocean and two careers both had worked extremely hard to forge. Archer was half-American through his father, so he had a US passport and the option to live there whenever he pleased. No one else knew it, but since he had got back from New York last summer he had toyed with the idea of moving there and applying to join the NYPD, just like his father before him, a fresh start in a place that had always fascinated him. Although his dad had been born and bred in New York, Archer had only gone on brief trips there as a child, growing up predominately in the UK, so hadn’t experienced any real exposure to the city as an adult. But that trip last summer had planted a seed inside him and it had been growing ever since. He loved the UK, but he was also half American, and in a way half a New Yorker too.

  And though he'd never admit it, ever since he'd got back last September he'd felt like a pair of thick shackles had been firmly attached to his feet.

  He glanced over his shoulder at his team-mates. For now, London and the Armed Response Unit was where he needed to be. He had a good thing going here, a career he had worked hard at, a good spot in a great police unit, solid colleagues and friends for life on the force around him.

  Any woman in his personal life would have to wait.

  And sadly, that included Agent Katic.

  He took a pull from his tea and looked out of the window at the city again. He'd lied to Chalky earlier on the range when he'd said Katic had found someone else. That was bullshit. He'd only said it so Chalk wouldn't bring it up again. Her feelings for Archer hadn't changed. She'd called him at home just two days ago and told him she was thinking about him every day, hoping that somehow he could make the move and be with her in New York sometime soon.

  But Archer was stuck. To be with her, he would have to leave the Armed Response Unit.

  And right now that wasn't something he was prepared to do.

  Returning his attention to the room, Archer shifted from the window and walked over to take a seat in an empty chair. Leaning back, he glanced to his right and saw Chalky buried in the sports pages of a newspaper, his eyes scanning the articles. Although his job often depended on even a minimal knowledge of current affairs, Chalk never read the front pages, only interested in the football and sports bulletins printed on the back. Archer looked over and read the front bold-print headlines of the paper facing him in Chalky's hands. He didn't see Charlie Adams' name anywhere. The newspaper must have gone out before the journalists had got news of the politician’s suicide, but Archer knew for sure it would be all over them tomorrow.

  ‘You know what’s really annoying?’ Chalky said, not looking up from the paper.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘When you’re reading a newspaper and someone else reads the back of it.’

  Archer grinned at him. But before he could respond, he saw Nikki approaching the room with Cobb and Porter, moving fast through the operations room.

  They looked like they meant business.

  'Look out,' Archer said. 'Here's trouble.'

  The moment the trio entered, every man in the room stopped what he was doing and sat up, paying immediate attention. Whenever these three entered the room at the same time, it meant something was brewing.

  The room was silent and the relaxed atmosphere changed instantly from flat to charged.

  ‘We’ve got a call, lads,’ Porter said.

  ‘A package was just delivered to the US Embassy containing some kind of white powder,’ Nikki said. ‘They think it could be anthrax.’

  ‘HAZMAT are already down there, but they need back-up. This could be the start of something else’ Cobb said. ‘Everyone outside in two minutes. Get your kit and gas masks.’

  As one, the ten-man team all rose and everyone moved to the doors without a word, dropping their papers, abandoning half-filled cups of coffee and tea all over the room.

  Sitting around drinking coffee was nice, but this was what they were paid to do.

  Inside his office across town, the CIA Operations Officer had been about to take a first sip from his cup of coffee when a wailing siren sounded around the building, jolting him, causing him to spill some of the piping hot liquid on his trousers and to jerk back on his chair. Shit. As he quickly patted his legs off with some tissues, wincing from the hot coffee on his legs, he heard a voice over the building intercom telling everyone to evacuate the building immediately.

  Cursing, the man rose and pulling open the door to his office, walked outside. In the corridor, workers were rushing quickly past his office, heading towards the exits. It didn't look like a fire drill. These people were really hurrying out of the building.

  He stepped out and grabbed a passing analyst.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked him.

  'There's been an anthrax threat.'

  His eyes widened. ‘Real?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He let the analyst go, and the kid rushed off. Closing the door to his office, the man went to make his way down the corridor with the others. But as he went to leave, he saw Lynn fighting her way towards him through the throng. As people continued to flow past them, he noticed that she still had that list of names he had given her in her hand.

  She looked concerned.

  ‘Sir?’ she called, raising her voice to be heard over the alarm.

  ‘Let’s go, Lynn,' he said, turning. 'We need to leave the building. Walk with me.’

  They started moving down the corridor, side-by-side, the alarm above them still wailing.

  ‘Sir, I have some news,' she shouted in his ear. 'I checked the names you gave me. I have to ask - are these men friends of yours?’

  He looked down at her. ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Well I’m very sorry sir, but one of them was found dead not an hour ago.’

  The agent paused, right there in the corridor, people continuing to rush past, some of them bumping into him in their hurry to leave the building. Jean stopped too, looking at his face for some answers, people streaming past them on either side.

  ‘What?’ he asked her. ‘How?’

  ‘He was strangled in his car with a wire in a DC suburb parking lot. A Metro night patrolman found him.'

  He looked down at her. 'The others?'

  'Nothing yet, sir. I'll keep trying.'

  Without a word, the man turned and moved through the door, headed for the exit.

  He suddenly felt very cold and extremely worried.

  Two of the men down in the same morning.

  An anthrax threat in the building.

  This wasn't a coincidence.

  He glanced out of the front of the building at the mass of people being cordoned off by police, HAZMAT vehicles already arrived, their team climbing into white bio-suits. As he moved through the front door, letting Lynn out ahead of him, he stopped and scanned the crowd nervously, searching for anyone who was looking back at him. The cave echo of Charlie Adams’ name in his mind was gone, replaced by four other words instead.

  They've come for us.

  Outside the ARU headquarters, in a black car parked outside the lot on the other side of the street, two men watched in silence as the doors to the police unit suddenly burst open.

  The pair in the car were dressed in black military fatigues, boots on their feet, gloves on their hands. Stowed beside them were two AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles, balaclavas resting on the butt of each weapon. They had duct-taped a second magazine to the underside of the one currently slapped into each weapon for ease of reloading, and each man also had three more stowed in pouches in their fatigues, close to Beretta 92F pistols that were tucked into holsters on their hips as backup firepower.

  They watched in silence, side-by-side in the car, as the police officers ran to three black 4x4 Fords, all of them dressed in navy blue combat overalls, each man zipping up tactical vests and carrying MP5 sub-machine guns and black gas masks. The officers started pulling open the doors, climbing into the vehicles, and all three engines fired up. They watched in silence as the cars began to reverse out and then move forward to the parking lot exit. As the Fords started pulling out and speeding off, one of the two men in black pulled a mobile phone from his pocket and dialled a number.

  The call connected to the man back at the command post.

  ‘It worked, sir. They’re leaving,’ he said, an Eastern European accent.

  Pause.

  ‘Wait till they are gone. Then kill the man called Cobb. Like I told you, shoot him in the head. Give him the whole magazine.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  The man in the car ended the call as the last of the three Fords turned out of the lot.

  And the two men watched as the entire counter-terrorist task force left the police station unprotected.

  SEVEN

  Behind the wheel of the lead Ford, Porter put his foot down and the car sped off down the street, heading towards Grosvenor Square and the US Embassy, moving fast. When his predecessor, Mac, had been sergeant of the squad, Porter had been allocated driving duties due to the quality and speed of his driving. Now, with Mac gone and as Sergeant of the task force, Porter could have offloaded driving responsibilities to someone else, but as he was the best guy behind the wheel in the squad, he insisted on continuing with the task.

  Beside him, Fox was finishing adjusting a throat mic around his neck whilst Archer and Chalky did the same in the back seats, all of the officers now dressed in navy blue combat overalls, black tactical vests with mobile phones tucked in slots, plasti-cuffs, tools and spare ammunition zipped up over their torso. Once secured, the black Velcro-bound strips on each man’s neck allowed the team to communicate on the ground, up to a radius of seven miles. Each man had a pressel switch on the front of his uniform and an earpiece tucked into his ear. If he wanted to communicate with the other men on the squad all he had to do was push the button and start talking.

  As he finished adjusting his mic, Archer frowned. He'd caught a glimpse of something as they'd pulled out of the lot, something that had instantly struck him as odd.

  Across the street, at they’d passed, he'd noticed two men sitting in a car. The North London area where the ARU headquarters was based was a business area, but these guys didn’t looked like businessmen. They looked tough and out of place. The windows to the Ford were blacked out, so they didn’t make eye contact with Archer, but he’d turned his head and glanced at them through the window as they pulled out of the lot and moved off down the street.

  Beside him, Chalky finished with his mic and looked at the gas mask in his hands. It was an Avon C50 model, just about as comfortable a gas mask a police officer in this line of work could wear, an all-black ski mask and protective face seal combined with a solitary single filtration respirator that would stop any airborne toxin from entering an officer's lungs. In their training, every man on the team had become accustomed to wearing the mask on drills and exercises. The training had begun with all the officers huddled in a hut wearing the gasmasks. Then their instructor had unceremoniously tear-gassed the building. One by one, the recruits were ordered to remove the masks, to get an idea of what it felt like to suffer from exposure to the gas. Aside from being shot, it was up there as one of the worst experiences of Chalky's life. He'd staggered out of the hut, choking, his eyes and nose clogged up, struggling to breathe, rendered temporarily useless and totally incapacitated from its effects. He hadn't been forced to use the mask yet in the field, and looking down at it in the car was the first time he had held it since that training over two years ago. It was stirring up some unpleasant memories.

  ‘Question - what use is this thing going to be against anthrax?’ he said.

  ‘A lot of use,’ Fox said, checking the safety of his MP5 sub-machine gun, as Porter turned the car to the right. ‘It’ll keep you alive.’

  ‘Yeah, but HAZMAT have full body suits. I get a gas-mask.’

  ‘Why don’t you stay in the car then?’ Fox replied.

  ‘You alright, Arch?’ Porter asked, noticing the blond man was unusually quiet, looking at him in the rear view mirror.

  ‘Yeah,’ the blond officer said, distracted, frowning. 'I think so.'

  As Fox and Chalky continued their exchange, arguing about the benefits of the mask, Archer ignored them and made a quick decision. He pulled his mobile phone from a Velcro pocket on the left collarbone of his tactical vest.

  He held down button 2, and the call went straight through to Nikki back at the ARU's HQ.

  Sitting at her desk, her tech team working around and behind her, Nikki was just pulling up a map of the US Embassy and the possible contamination zone, when the phone on her desk rang. She grabbed it, not taking her eyes off the screen in front of her, still typing away.

  ‘Yep?’

  ‘Nikki, it’s Arch.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Do me a favour. Can you leave your desk for a moment?’

  She looked at the schematics on the screen in front of her desk and at the busy tech team around her.

  ‘Not really. Is it urgent?’

  ‘Just do me a favour and go through to the briefing room.’

  She shrugged, then rose and walked quickly through to the adjacent room.

  The place was deserted, littered with half-drunk cups of tea and coffee, newspapers abandoned on seats. She looked left and right around her at the empty room.

  ‘OK. Now what?’

  ‘Go to the window.’

  She did.

  ‘Look past the parking lot. Do you see two guys inside a car on the far side of the street? Black, license plate beginning FG6.’

  Her eyes narrowed as she peered outside.

  ‘Yeah. It’s headed into the car park.’

  As this exchange took place, the phone on Porter’s uniform started ringing. It was hooked up to a hands-free inside the car, so he pushed Answer, returning his hand to the wheel.

  ‘Porter,’ he said.

  ‘Sergeant, this is Dr Jim Keith from HAZMAT,' a man's voice said, filling the car. 'I'm here at the Embassy examining the package.’

  ‘How's it looking, doc?’ Porter asked.

  ‘I have some news. My team took a sample from the package and tested it here at the scene,' Keith said. 'The powder immediately showed up as just two ingredients mixed together. Hydrated magnesium silicate and sodium hydrogen carbonate.’

  Pause.

  ‘Is that bad?’ Porter asked, the car speeding down the street.

  ‘No, not at all,’ Keith said. ‘Quite the opposite in fact, Sergeant. It's talcum powder and baking soda. This isn’t anthrax. It’s a hoax.’

  In the ARU’s briefing room, Nikki watched the black car suddenly speed forward through the parking lot and pull up outside the front of the building. The front doors opened and two men stepped out, dressed in black, balaclavas over their heads, black and brown AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles in their hands.

  They slammed the doors shut and ran forward towards the entrance of the building below, each man pulling back the cocking handle on each, chambering a bullet.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she whispered, still on the phone to Archer. 'Arch, help!'

  EIGHT

  At the front desk downstairs, Clark had his head down reading something so he didn’t see the two men coming.

  He looked up just as the front doors were barged open, and was momentarily frozen as the two intruders stormed inside the building. Before he could move, one of the two gunmen raised his Kalashnikov and immediately pulled the trigger, three bullets thumping into Clark's chest, the spent cartridges flying out of the side of the automatic rifle. The force of the gunfire threw him back off his chair and the policeman collapsed back in a heap to the floor, blood and pieces of his torso spattered all over the reception area.

  Upstairs, everyone stopped when they heard the gunfire.

  Cobb was inside his office, still thinking about the Charlie Adams puzzle, but he froze when he heard the three gunshots. Unlike his tech team, who were sitting motionless at their desks and unsure how to react, he had no such doubts.

  He leapt up from his seat, ran across his office and pulled open the door just as Nikki ran back into the operations area from the briefing room, a look of sheer terror on her face.

  ‘Everybody get out!’ she screamed.

  The tech team saw and heard her and panic instantly set in, flooding the room. None of the armed task force officers were there. These were all analysts, unused to combat or any confrontational situations. They started to rise from their seats and scatter as they heard the slapping steps of boots racing up the stairwell, but Cobb took charge instantly, thinking clearly.

  ‘No! Everybody, in my office! Now!’ he bellowed, quickly pushing back the door to his office. ‘Now!’

  The entire team responded to the order, running over into the glass-walled room, uncertain and frightened. Once the last person ran inside, Cobb dragged the door shut and quickly entered a six-digit code on a keypad on the wall, each button beeping as he pushed it. There was a click as the door locked.

 

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