Rules of Vengeance (3 page)

“But—”

“No buts. That’s just the way it has to be.”

Jonathan began to protest and Emma put a finger to his lips. “Listen to me. Whatever happens, you mustn’t contact me until I say it’s all right. No matter how much you miss me, no matter how certain you are that no one’s been watching you and that everything is safe, you mustn’t think of it. I know it will be hard, but you have to trust me.”

“And if I do?”

“They’ll know. They’ll get to me first.”

Ten days earlier, Jonathan and Emma had come to Switzerland for a long overdue vacation. Experienced mountaineers, they had decided to climb the Furka, a peak situated midway between the villages of Arosa and Davos. The climb ended in disaster when a violent storm caught them on the mountain and Emma fell while descending a steep incline. Jonathan had come off the mountain believing his wife dead. The next day he received a letter addressed to her. Its contents unlocked a door to her secret past. He might have ignored it, but that wouldn’t have been his way. On general principle, he avoided the easier path. Instead he delved into Emma’s hidden world, anxious to discover the truth she’d kept hidden since the day they had met.

His search had ended on a hilltop outside of Zurich, with four men dead and Emma wounded.

That was three days ago.

Jonathan squeezed her hand and she squeezed back. He couldn’t deny the affection in her touch. But was it love? Or was it rote?

Suddenly she was up, making a circuit of the hut. “You’ve got enough provisions for a week. Stay put. Nobody knows about this place. When you leave, act as if I’m dead and gone. That’s just the way it is. Get that through your head. Use your American passport. Go back to work. Take whatever assignment they give you.”

“And Division? You don’t think they’ll mind?”

“Like I said, they’ll be watching. But you needn’t worry. You’re an amateur. They won’t bother you.”

“And if they do?”

Emma stopped, her shoulders tensing. The answer was evident. “It’s me they want.”

“So when will I see you again?”

“Hard to say. I’ve got to see if I can make things safe.”

“And if you can’t?”

Emma stared at him, a sad smile turning her lips downward. It was her code for “Don’t ask any more questions.”

“You’ve got to give me more than that,” he said.

“I wish I could, Jonathan. I really do.”

With a sigh, she threw her rucksack onto the cot and began stuffing her belongings into it. The sight panicked him. Jonathan stood and walked toward her. “You can’t leave yet,” he said, trying to talk in his professional voice. The doctor advising his patient, instead of the husband ruing the loss of his wife. “You shouldn’t even be exercising your shoulder. You could reopen the wound.”

“You didn’t care so much about that an hour ago.”

“That was…” Jonathan cut his words short. His wife was smiling, but it was an act. For once he could see through it. “Emma,” he said. “It’s only been three days.”

“Yes,” she said. “Foolish of me to wait so long.”

   He watched as she packed. Outside, it was dark. Snow had begun to fall. In the nickled moonlight, the snowflakes looked as fragile as glass.

Emma placed the rucksack on her good shoulder and walked to the door. There would be no kiss, no labored goodbye. She grasped the door handle and spoke without looking back. “I want you to remember something,” she said.

“What?”

“Remember that I came back for you.”

   The plane taxied to the arrival gate. The cabin lights blinked as the aircraft switched to auxiliary power. Passengers stood and opened the overhead luggage bins. In seconds the main cabin was a maelstrom of activity. Jonathan remained seated, his eyes on the police cars that had parked at right angles to the plane. No one was going anywhere yet, he said to himself. Unbuckling his safety belt, he shoved his satchel under the seat in front of him and positioned his feet so that he could stand up quickly. His eyes darted up and down the aisles, looking in vain for an avenue of escape.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. Please retake your seats. Police officers are coming aboard to conduct some business on behalf of Her Majesty’s government. It is imperative that you clear the aisles.”

With a collective moan, the passengers found their seats.

In his seat in row 43, Jonathan leaned forward, his muscles tensed. He spotted the first of the policemen a moment later. He was dressed in plain clothes and followed by three uniformed officers with Kevlar vests strapped to their chests, pistols worn high on their hip and in full view. They bullied their way down the aisle, making a beeline for him. There were no smiles, no apologies. Jonathan wondered what they had in mind for him. Whether he would be interrogated by English authorities or the Americans had made a deal to have him turned over to their care. Either way, the outcome was foreordained. He would be “disappeared.”

He decided to protest, if only to be noticed. He had to leave some evidence of his resistance.

As the plainclothes officer approached, Jonathan stood.

“You,” barked the policeman, pointing at Jonathan with his walkie-talkie. “Sit! Now!”

Jonathan started to push toward the aisle. He wouldn’t sit. He would fight. He knew he would lose, but that was beside the point.

“I said sit,” the policeman repeated. “Please, sir,” he added in a polite voice. “We’ll be off the aircraft in a minute. You’ll be able to leave then.”

Jonathan sank back into his seat as the column of policemen swept past. Turning his head, he watched as they confronted a clean-shaven African male seated in the last row of the economy cabin. The suspect protested, shaking his head, gesticulating wildly with his hands. There was a shout, a scuffle, a woman’s piercing scream, and then it was over. The man was out of his seat, hands raised above his head in a gesture of surrender.

Jonathan saw that he was a small man, bent as driftwood, wearing a heavy woolen sweater that was much too warm for the English summer. The suspect was speaking Swahili, or a dialect of Kikuyu. Jonathan didn’t need to understand the language to know that he was saying it was a mistake. He wasn’t the man they were looking for. Suddenly the accused reached for his bags in the overhead compartment. A uniformed police officer shouted and tackled him to the floor.

Moments later, the African was cuffed and led from the plane.

“I’ll bet he’s a terrorist,” said the elderly woman seated next to Jonathan. “Just look at him. It’s plain as day.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You can’t be too careful these days,” the woman added forcefully, lecturing her naive seatmate. “We’ve all got to keep a sharp eye. You never know who you’ll be sitting next to.”

Jonathan nodded in agreement.

   It was called the Black Room, and it was one of five special operations centers manned by Her Majesty’s Immigration Service at London Heathrow Airport. BR4—Black Room Terminal 4—was located in a stuffy low-ceilinged office directly above the Terminal 4 arrivals hall. Immigration officers sat at a control board running the length of the room. A multiplex of video monitors was arrayed on the wall in front of them. Closed-circuit cameras positioned on the ceiling and hidden behind two-way mirrors focused on the travelers queuing for passport control. A wireless communications link connected BR4 with the passport inspectors on the floor.

As the world’s busiest airport, London Heathrow saw 68 million travelers pass through its gates each year, arriving from or en route to 180 destinations in Great Britain and abroad. Ten million of them counted as international arrivals, an average of 27,000 persons entering the country every day. It was the Immigration Service’s job to process these arrivals with an eye toward ferreting out those with a criminal bent and denying them entry into the United Kingdom.

Manipulating the closed-circuit cameras, the men and women seated at the control board proceeded systematically down their assigned queue, snapping photographs of each arriving passenger. The photograph was fed into Immigration Service’s proprietary facial recognition software and checked against a database of known offenders. In the event of a positive response, the suspect would be approached by one of the dozen or so undercover immigration officers scattered throughout the hall and guided to a private room, where he or she would be interrogated and a decision taken regarding his or her status.

The same cameras were equipped with a package of invasive scanners that measured a subject’s body temperature, heart rate, and respiration, as well as a still-classified imager capable of detecting facial tics for unconscious tell signs invisible to the naked eye. All the data was fed into a software program named MALINTENT that assessed with a 94 percent degree of accuracy whether the subject was harboring criminal intent.

“I’ve got a hot one,” said the officer manning post three.

A supervisor approached. “Who is it?”

The officer brought up an image of a Caucasian male with dark skin and close-cropped hair standing at the inspection booth. “Jonathan Ransom. American. Came in on Kenya Airways out of Nairobi.”

“How hot?”

“Temp’s running at ninety-nine comma five. Respiration elevated, with a heart rate of eighty-four. Facial indicators read plus six out of ten. Borderline malicious.”

“Is he on our books?”

A swipe of Ransom’s passport had sent the information contained on the travel document’s biometric security strip to the UK’s domestic law enforcement database of wanted criminals or “persons of interest,” as well as similar databases maintained by Interpol, European Union member countries, the United States, Australia, Canada, and a dozen other countries friendly to the cause. “Nothing outstanding against in the UK.”

“And the States?”

“Still waiting.” Ransom’s name and passport number were then sent to the FBI’s national criminal database, where they were matched against a watch list containing the names of suspected terrorists, individuals with warrants outstanding, and anyone with a felony conviction.

“Looks like a decent bloke,” commented the supervisor as he studied Ransom’s image on the monitor. “Probably worked up because of that arrest on board. Who’d the CT boys take down, anyhow?”

CT stood for counterterrorism, of late the largest component of the London Metropolitan Police force, numbering some five thousand officers and support staff.

“Supposedly some Al-Qaeda supremo. A regional commander or something like that.” The officer did a double-take as the requested information began to stream in. “We’ve got something from Interpol. Ransom had a warrant issued for his capture six months back by the Swiss Federal Police.”

“What for?”

“Murder of two police officers. A bit strange, though. It says that the warrant was rescinded after six days.”

“That it?”

“‘No further information indicated,’” read the officer, swiveling in his chair and looking at his superior for further instructions.

“Patch me in,” said the supervisor, putting on a pair of headphones. “Let’s have a listen.”

The officer activated a microphone on the passport inspector’s jacket and an audio feed was delivered to the supervisor’s headphones.

“Dr. Ransom, is it, sir?” said the passport inspector with seeming disinterest. “Are you visiting the United Kingdom on business or pleasure?”

“I’m attending a medical conference at the Dorchester Hotel. I don’t know if that’s business or pleasure.”

“I’d say it qualifies as business. Will you be staying long?”

“Three days.”

“Not making any time for sightseeing?”

“Maybe on my next visit.”

“And you’ll remain in London for the duration?”

“At the Dorchester, yes.”

“What’s your next destination?”

“I’ll be returning to Kenya.”

“That your home, then?”

“For now.”

The inspector thumbed through the passport. “Sierra Leone, Lebanon, Sudan, Bosnia, Switzerland.” He looked Jonathan in the eye. “Been a few places, haven’t you?”

“Wherever my work takes me.”

“What did you say you do?”

“I’m a physician.”

“The last one who makes house calls, by the look of it. Just a few more questions, sir, and then you’ll be free to go. Have you been feeling ill lately?”

   Inside Black Room 4, the supervisor put down his headphones. “Anything from the Yanks?”

“Ransom’s on some kind of diplomatic list. If he boards a flight to the States, we’re to notify an agency in D.C. Gives a number here.”

“What about the Swiss arrest warrant?”

“Nothing. What do you think? He some kind of spook?”

“Don’t know, but I think it’s time we find out for ourselves. Let’s pull him in for a ‘how do you do.’ Is room seven free?”

“Leave him be.”

It was a new voice. A confident mid-Atlantic baritone that brooked no exception. All heads turned toward the rear of the room.

“Let him walk,” said the American. His name was Paul Gordon, and he had come to the United Kingdom as part of the immigration assistance program run out of the United States Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection agency.

“Let him walk?” asked the supervisor. “Why? Do you know the man?”

“Just do it.” Gordon offered a pained smile. “Please.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“All right, then.” The supervisor radioed down to the passport inspector. “No interest on our end. Let him go.”

Paul Gordon watched on the monitor as Ransom gathered up his satchel and passed into the baggage claim hall. He waited a decent interval, then left the room, descended a flight of stairs, and opened an unmarked door that led outdoors. He checked that his phone had a signal, then activated speed dial and pressed the number 1. A groggy male voice answered. “Yeah?”

“Sorry to wake you, but an old friend of yours just flew into London,” said Paul Gordon. “Who?”

“Dr. Jonathan Ransom.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah, I thought you’d want to know.”