Eternal Empire (13 page)

W
hen Wolfe arrived in Woolwich, traffic was at a standstill. Through her windshield, she saw flames and smoke. After trying in vain to find a way through, she finally parked illegally at the side of the road, grabbed her warrant card and phone, and ran toward the scene.

Up ahead, a pair of officers stood in the street, trying manfully but without much success to direct traffic to an alternate route. The prison transport van and two other vehicles sat behind them, burning. A few steps away, a sergeant was talking into his radio, which he set aside as Wolfe approached, holding out her warrant card. “I'm Rachel Wolfe. We spoke on the phone a minute ago.”

“I know who you are,” the sergeant said, drawing himself up slightly. He was clean-shaven and somewhat flushed. “That was the fire brigade. They're on their way. They're stretched pretty thin right now—”

“I know.” Wolfe took in the scene. A knot of bystanders had gathered to stare, keeping well back from the blaze. “What about the prisoners?”

“We've picked up a couple, but we don't have enough men at hand to do a real search. A few turned themselves in at the station. We're still looking for the assailants and the two they came to get.” The sergeant flipped his notebook open. “Blue panel van, dented rear doors.”

“I'll get someone on it,” Wolfe said. “On the phone, you mentioned a lead?”

The sergeant nodded. “Just heard it myself. From one of the inmates who turned himself in. He was on remand for robbery, so he had no reason to run. Apparently he overheard one of the attackers. When they were freeing the prisoners, one of them said something about Mare Street.”

Wolfe recognized the name. “Mare Street. That's up in Hackney, isn't it?”

“That's right. I've been trying to get a Trojan unit in place, but they're all deployed elsewhere. And it's already sticky on the ground.”

Wolfe knew what he meant. Looking at the wrecks of the vans, which were cooking away with no fire crew in sight, she saw what she had to do. “Give me your gear. I'm going there myself.”

The sergeant hesitated. “I don't know if that's wise. I can't promise any backup—”

Wolfe broke in. “Listen, you know who I am, right? So you also know why I'm here. One of the men who escaped is someone I've met before. And I'm the only one who can get him back.”

Something in her eyes seemed to convince him. After a beat, he motioned for her to follow him to his panda car. Opening the trunk, he unloaded a set of riot gear, including a shield and helmet. As she took the sergeant's baton, she felt faintly ridiculous, but she knew it was best to be prepared. Tossing the equipment into her own car, she headed back to the main highway, pushing it as much as she could, and passed a fire truck coming at last in the other direction.

As Wolfe headed north, she fumbled out her phone and dialed Asthana, who answered a few seconds later. Her partner sounded surprised. “What's going on? I'm just about to go in for the deposition—”

“Cancel it,” Wolfe said, relieved to see that the road was fairly clear. “I need you to call Cornwall and anyone you can find at the enforcement directorate. Vasylenko and Ilya have escaped.”

There was a long pause. “Rachel, if this is some kind of joke, it isn't funny.”

“It's no joke.” Driving with one hand on the wheel, Wolfe filled Asthana in as quickly as possible, describing what the sergeant had told her. “The police don't have the resources to handle this. We need to mobilize the agency. Someone has to check security cameras in Woolwich and sweep their cells at Belmarsh. See if we can get a news helicopter to do a pass over Hackney—”

As she drove, continuing to issue instructions as she blew past the posted limit, Wolfe was glad to have something to do, even as part of her brain was piecing together the rest of the story. If Vasylenko and Ilya were working together, with what appeared to be considerable resources, it meant something else was at play. Because no one did anything like this without a reason.

In time, she found herself approaching Hackney. As she neared the neighborhood, she passed another fire crew dousing the hulk of a burning car with foam. Buildings were still smoldering from the night before. Underlying it all was the faint maddening background noise of countless car alarms.

At Amhurst Road, traffic halted. Wolfe stopped, seeing that there was no way past the stalled cars and buses. “I'll have to call you back.”

“Okay,” Asthana said. “I'll call Cornwall. And I'm coming out there, too.”

“Then I'll see you soon.” Wolfe hung up. Craning her neck to look past the cars, she saw that this was as far as she could go. She managed to pull over to the side of the road. Her heart was going like mad, but she did her best to collect herself as she slid the baton into her bag, leaving the rest for now, and got out.

She headed on foot up the block. Up ahead, a crowd was milling around in the street, looking at last night's damage. Shops were boarded up and strung with police tape, and a bus shelter on the corner had been smashed to pieces, the ground strewn with broken glass. On the sidewalk before one of the stores, Wolfe noticed what looked like a scatter of body parts, then saw that they were the limbs of mannequins, like the unburied victims of some natural disaster.

Moving past the onlookers, many of whom were taking snapshots of the devastation on their phones, Wolfe continued on to Mare Street, which had been blocked off to vehicle traffic by a line of police vans. In front of this makeshift barricade stood a line of uniformed officers with helmets and plastic shields.

As she scanned the area, looking for the van that the sergeant had described, she observed that the crowd here was noticeably more agitated. A young black man in a hooded sweatshirt, his head large and babylike under its pile of braids, was standing a few steps away. Wolfe caught his eye. “What's going on?”

“You don't know?” He indicated the line of police, his voice curiously relaxed. “People flinging trash at coppers. They've got three guys from the neighborhood up against the town hall.”

She followed his gaze, which was fixed on the long row of helmets. “And what are you doing here?”

“Me?” He laughed. “I'm just trying to get home. But you'll be fine, I'm sure.”

Thanking him, Wolfe moved on, more conscious than ever of the tension. Almost everyone had a cell phone out. She studied the crowd, trying to put herself into Ilya and Vasylenko's place, and wondered if the situation here had been part of the plan, or if they had been forced to work around it—

A sound like the rustle of a baking sheet broke into her thoughts. Turning, she saw a pair of men breaking into a store down the street. They were wearing gray hoodies, with scarves wrapped across their faces, and were pulling away the metal barrier that had been lowered across the storefront. A second later, the barrier gave way, peeling back like the cover of a sardine tin, and the men squeezed inside, emerging moments later with armfuls of jeans and sneakers.

Wolfe stared. It was broad daylight. To her astonishment, not only did nobody make a move to stop the looting, but several ran over to join in. The scene was quiet, deliberate, dreamlike.

Turning away, she tried to view the street as Ilya might have seen it. She was about to call Asthana again, hoping that her partner could check a map of the area, when she saw something else. Parked on a side street, three cars from the corner, was a blue panel van. And its rear doors were dented.

She slid the baton out of her bag and approached the van, coming at it from an angle. There was no sign of movement as she inched up to the driver's window and looked in. It was empty. She headed around back and did the same, edging sideways to the rear window and peering quickly inside. Nothing. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, however, she saw something on the floor of the van, next to one of the seats. It was a set of shackles.

Wolfe took a step back, mind working furiously. They had left the car here because they couldn't drive on Mare Street, but it would not be safe to stay, which meant they had to move on foot to a second vehicle. Going again to the front of the van, she put her hand on the hood. It was warm.

From behind her came a series of shouts. Heading to the corner, she saw the crowd draw back as the line of riot police began to advance, moving in lockstep to push the onlookers away from the barricades. Most of the bystanders yielded quickly, but a few held their ground.

A second later, at a prearranged signal, the police charged forward in a body. Wolfe took a step back as the crowd scattered, some screaming. After twenty yards, the charge halted, not far from where she was now. She saw that many of the onlookers were breaking off from the main group, and for a moment, she thought the crowd would simply disperse.

Then, as if from nowhere, an object was flung at the police. Wolfe didn't see who had thrown it, but in the instant that it continued to pinwheel forward, she realized that it was a piece of wood, perhaps from a barrier, or a board pried from the front of a shop, or even just part of a chair.

Whatever it was, it struck an officer near the end of the line squarely in the forehead. He fell to his knees. There was a pause that could have lasted no more than a fraction of a second.

Then the crowd rushed forward. The line of officers wavered, trembling from end to end, and broke as more debris went flying through the air, the mob yelling as it flung itself at the police.

It was a moment that Wolfe would never forget. As the two halves of the scene collided, it felt like the culmination of something that she had sensed, in fragments, for much of the last two years. In a flash, she understood that this was not about Mark Duggan, dead with two bullet holes in his chest. It was about the waste of energy and potential, the broken promises that had piled up for decades, and it made her see how fragile the mask had been all along.

Staring at the chaos, feeling the crowd's energy pass over her in a wave, Wolfe found herself looking across the street at a cluster of men who were not part of the larger commotion. They were moving as a group into the trees of a small park across the way. And one of them was someone she knew.

She took a step forward. Ilya had changed into street clothes, but there was no mistaking who he was, or that the man beside him was Vasylenko. And it was only as she took another step, the noise of the crowd fading to nothing, that she saw that Ilya had seen her as well.

For a moment, the world went quiet. Wolfe felt Ilya's eyes on hers. She heard her own voice rise in a shout, but it was oddly distant, the syllables lost in the empty space surrounding her on all sides.

Then Ilya turned away and the world snapped back into place. The space around her was not empty, she realized, but the middle of a mob that was growing worse by the moment.

As the men continued into the park, Wolfe threw herself into the crush of bodies, pushing past the rioters, feeling herself buffeted in all directions as she searched desperately for an opening. A group of protesters was standing in her way. She lowered her head, carried by pure adrenaline, and plowed forward, managing to break through the crowd at last.

Wolfe made it to the other side of the street, her breath coming in gasps, and crossed into the park. Here in the shade, where it was strangely peaceful, she saw nothing but the trees. Ilya and the others had disappeared.

S
ome time later, a gray minivan parked on a deserted street in Hackney Wick, far from the disturbances elsewhere in the city. As the van stood at the curb, engine idling, the front passenger door opened and a man slid out. With his surgical mask removed, he had a surprisingly intelligent face, with blunt but sensitive features and blue eyes that were narrow but bright.

The man had a canvas bag slung over his shoulder. Keeping one hand on the shotgun inside, he glanced up and down the street, then headed for the steps of a house a few doors down from the van. He took out a key ring, then unlocked the front door, leaving it slightly ajar as he went inside. For a moment, all was quiet. Finally, the porch light winked on.

At the signal, the van's engine shut off and its doors slid open. The first to get out was Andrew Ferris, sweating and pale, with another man's hand firmly grasping his shoulder. A pistol, concealed by a folded coat, was wedged into his ribs. He was followed by the driver, then Ilya and Vasylenko, both in street clothes, who walked up to the house with the others.

One of the men had been left behind in Hackney, after inciting the riot that had covered their escape. Ilya was impressed by how smoothly it had been arranged. He had seen Vasylenko give the order as they crossed the street, with a man in a red jacket breaking off from the main group as the rest went into the park. Glancing back, Ilya had seen him stoop to pick up a billet of wood.

Then, raising his eyes, Ilya had been startled to see Wolfe standing on the opposite curb, staring at the commotion. He had barely had time to register this fact when the man in the red jacket flung his piece of wood, striking an officer in the face. That had been all the crowd needed. As the street, already tense, exploded into confusion, Ilya and the others had turned to go under the trees.

It was then that he realized that Wolfe had seen him as well. He was normally imperturbable, but in that instant, his blood had gone cold. Her presence, after all he had done to get this far, was enough to destroy everything. And as they passed into the park, he had seen a grain of distrust in Vasylenko's eyes.

Inside, the house in Hackney Wick looked as if it had been deserted for some time, with a child's bicycle leaning against the wall of the entryway. Behind Ilya, the door swung shut. As the others took their hostage into the next room, the one with blue eyes entered the kitchen, along with Ilya and Vasylenko.

Setting his bag with the shotgun on the floor, the man rinsed out a couple of glasses in the sink, drying them off with a threadbare dishrag. Vasylenko sat at the kitchen table, which had a set of plastic chairs. Reaching inside his jacket, he took out a pistol and laid it on the tabletop.

As the man with blue eyes poured them each a drink, the two former prisoners sat in silence. Accepting a glass, Vasylenko took a sip, then asked carefully in Russian, “Why was Wolfe there?”

Ilya put his own glass aside. “I don't know. She's a clever one. Perhaps she figured it out on her own. In any case, she could not have learned it from me. I didn't know where we were going.”

Vasylenko seemed to grant the point. He drained the rest of his drink, then rose from the table, taking the gun with him, and went into the next room. Through the open doorway, Ilya saw him dial a number on his phone.

Next to him, the man with blue eyes was leaning against the kitchen counter, studying Ilya with evident curiosity. After a moment, he poured a drink of his own and said, “My name is Bogdan. We will be traveling together.”

Opening his bag, he fished out a large envelope. Ilya took it, then undid the flap and looked inside. The first thing he saw was a passport, Israeli, apparently authentic, with his own picture and a false name. It also contained a wallet with a few credit cards and the usual pocket litter, all of it nicely done. Ilya held up a set of keys. “Are these for anything real?”

Bogdan only grinned at him above the rim of his glass. “You'll find out soon.”

The final item was a railway ticket for Brasov in Romania. Ilya studied it, then slid it back inside. “You're from Moldova?”

Bogdan nodded. “Came here to work. Of course, there are no jobs now.” He glanced out the window, which disclosed a tired garden. “I'll be glad to go. There is no future in this city—”

He finished his drink. As he raised his glass, Ilya caught a glimpse of the blue tattoo on his inner forearm. It was the image of a snake.

From behind him came the sound of footsteps. Turning, he saw Vasylenko enter the kitchen again, his phone nowhere in sight. As the old man motioned for the others to follow, there was a thoughtful look on his face.

They went into the next room. Inside, Ferris had been bound rather inexpertly to a chair, his eyes and mouth covered with tape. The other men stood in the corners, smoking. As Vasylenko entered, they straightened up at once, and Ferris raised his head at the sound.

Vasylenko spoke quietly in Russian. “We need to go. Time to clean up.”

Without another word, he drew his gun and shot Ferris in the forehead. The spray of blood from the back of his skull sent the driver rocking forward, and he slumped in his chair, his face hanging down toward the floor.

Looking at the body, Ilya forced himself not to react. One of the other men, the one who had freed Ilya in the prison van, laughed.

Vasylenko gestured at the body. “See if there's anything we can use in his pockets.”

The man who had laughed came forward. And as he bent down over the body, looking for the best way to search the dead man, Vasylenko raised the gun again and shot him in the back of the head.

Ilya could taste the blood on the air. In the shocked silence that followed, Vasylenko spoke once more, so softly that Ilya had trouble hearing him over the ringing in his ears: “I've been in touch with my source. This fool said something about Mare Street. If we had not managed to leave when we did, the whole plan would have fallen apart.” He turned to the others, who were staring at the dead men. “I will not tolerate weakness or stupidity. Are we clear?”

There was no response. Looking around at their faces, the old man seemed satisfied. “Good. Leave these two. We won't be back.”

As the others filed out of the room, Ilya remained where he was. Looking down at the bodies, which were lying almost in each other's arms, he saw his own situation clearly. He had chosen to play along, to risk the possibility of violence in exchange for what he might discover, but now it was too late.

What was more, he found that he knew precisely how it would all conclude. The details remained unclear. But it could only end in death.

Vasylenko spoke up behind him. “We are past the point of second thoughts. What are you willing to do?”

“Anything,” Ilya said. “But I need to know why we are going to Romania.”

Vasylenko told him. It took only a sentence or two. Ilya listened in silence, then turned away from the bodies to look at the
vor
, who was regarding him with what seemed like amusement.

As they left the room, Ilya said nothing, but Vasylenko's words continued to echo in his mind. All along, he had been prepared for the worst, but even he couldn't believe what he was being asked to do now.

“We need you to kill a man,” Vasylenko had said. “His name is Vasily Tarkovsky.”