As Annja was falling into bed in a London hotel room, Detective Inspector Ian Beresford was arriving at the dig site outside Arkholme. The local authorities had just completed the difficult task of freeing the bodies of the deceased from the waters of the bog and transporting them back to the main camp for examination. The mess tent had been commandeered for the task; large tarps had been laid out across the dirt floor and the bodies carefully placed on the tarps in neat, orderly rows. Standing just inside the entrance, Beresford watched as teams of forensic personnel moved among the dead, photographing the bodies, cataloging personal belongings and trying to identify just who it was they were dealing with. This was complicated by both the predations of the local wildlife and the fact that some of the bodies had been in the water for more than twenty-four hours.
A twenty-year veteran of the Metropolitan Police Authority, Beresford had transferred to the Counter Terrorism Command inside Special Operations just a few years before. In that short time he’d made a name for himself, cracking some high-profile cases and making the department look good, despite the fact that he had little to no interest in personal aggrandizement or celebrity. Beresford liked the intellectual challenge of solving high-profile crimes and he was good at it; that was all he needed to be a reasonably happy man.
That was why Home Office had roused him in the middle of the night and sent him to supervise the investigation when the Territorial Police hollered for help.
There was only one problem.
As far as he could tell, this had absolutely nothing to do with his primary mission, namely bringing to justice those engaged in terrorism, acts of domestic extremism and other related offenses.
He’d had a chance to review the initial report filed by his sister agency and recognized that it was more than likely going to be a political nightmare for the department. Among the presumed dead were a well-respected professor from Oxford, a dozen or more graduate students from the same university, a handful of foreign nationals and the host of a widely popular cable television show from the United States. It would be a three-ring circus for whoever had to coordinate all of the inquiries from the foreign police departments, but just because there were foreign nationals involved didn’t necessitate calling in CT Command. So far, it was still just a homicide case.
A homicide with multiple and, in some cases, high-profile victims, but a homicide just the same.
Stop whining and get to work, Beresford, he told himself.
Knowing the techs had at least another hour, maybe more, before they could give him anything worthwhile, Beresford left them to their work and stepped back out into the night air. His assistant, Clements, was waiting.
“Well? What are the locals saying?” Beresford asked.
“To be frank, no one really has a clue. A million different theories, but nothing worth hanging our hat on.”
Beresford grunted. That was to be expected. If they knew what had happened, they wouldn’t have called him in in the first place.
“Give me the most likely scenario as you see it.”
“Right,” Clements said, and took a moment to gather his thoughts. The two had only been working together for a few short weeks and Clements was constantly, but unnecessarily, trying to prove himself to Beresford.
“Majority vote among the first responders, as well as our own people, is that it started out as a robbery and went wrong somehow. Rather than keeping their cool, the perps reacted before thinking it through and in the process hiked the charge against them from robbery to multiple felony homicide.”
Beresford had been thinking the same thing. The black market in antiquities was alive and well, even here in merry old England. If the dig team had uncovered something seriously valuable, it wasn’t beyond comprehension that someone else would take it into their heads to relieve them of their find.
“Seems a logical place to start. Take me to wherever they were storing the artifacts they uncovered,” he told his partner.
Clements led him to a trio of tents a short distance away. Like the mess tent, these were bigger than the others, capable of holding several dozen people at once. Beresford had been to a dig site on vacation once, where he had the typical process explained to him. Each dig was split into gridlike sections and the items recovered from each section would be collected and cataloged together so that they could be studied in reference to one another. The easiest way of organizing such a project was to set up rows of folding tables, with each row representing a certain area of the dig and each table designated for holding objects recovered from a particular grid square.
The scene that greeted them as they entered the first of the artifact tents was anything but organized. The tables had been overturned, the carefully cataloged objects they’d held scattered about the floor like so much trash. Mixed in with the pieces of pottery, clothing and various Iron Age weapons were several pieces of gold jewelry and even a large gold-plated cup that reminded Beresford of the chalice he’d drunk from at church last Sunday.
He stood in the entrance, taking it all in.
“Does it make any sense to you,” he asked his partner casually, “that our would-be thieves would ransack the place looking for items of value and then leave the gold lying there on the ground in plain sight?”
Clements frowned and then shook his head. “Nope.”
“Me, either. That means we can probably rule out simple theft as our motive here.”
“Maybe whatever they took was worth so much that they could ignore the smaller pieces?” Clements suggested.
Beresford thought about that for a minute and then ruled out the possibility.
When his partner pressed him for an explanation, Beresford answered simply, “If you were a thief, would you leave any of the gold behind?”
Clements didn’t bother to answer. He knew the other man was right. “So if they didn’t kill all those people over money,” he asked, “what did they kill them for?”
Beresford didn’t know.
Not yet at least.
Clements’s cell phone rang. The conversation was short and when he got off the phone Beresford could see by the expression on his face that something had just changed with regard to the case.
“Tell me we’ve been reassigned and I’ll buy your lunch for the next month.”
Clements grinned, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Sorry. We’re stuck with this one it seems.”
“Bloody hell!” Beresford said. “Give me a good shoe bomber any day.” He turned serious and asked his partner what the call had been about.
“We’ve got two more bodies,” Clements said with a twinkle in his eye. “And this time it looks like we’ve got a couple of the bad guys.”
H
ALF AN HOUR
later Beresford was standing by the side of the road, looking down at the bodies of the two men in the roadside ditch below. One of the local detectives was just climbing back up the hill toward them.
Beresford flashed his badge and asked the other man to fill him in.
“Bodies were found by one of the patrol cars. Both male, both in their late forties or so. No IDs in the wallets and nothing in their pockets, either.”
The officer pointed back up the embankment at an angle. “There’s a pretty big bloodstain on the road over there, which is how our guy knew to take a look. Seems like whoever did it killed them up there, then kicked the bodies over the side. They rolled down the hill and ended up where you see them now.”
Beresford pictured it all in his mind and decided the other man was probably right.
“Coroner been notified?”
“Came and went. We’re just waiting on the wagon to come pick them up at this point.”
Beresford nodded. “You finished up down there, then? Mind if I take a look for myself?”
“Go right ahead,” the officer said, and then wandered back toward his patrol car to have a smoke.
Beresford made his way down the embankment to where the bodies lay, Clements on his heels. He crouched down next to the first body and directed his flashlight beam over it. Right away he noted two things; the pockets of the man’s pants were turned out and the man’s head rested at an unnatural angle.
The first was probably a result of the work of the cop who’d just left, but the latter certainly wasn’t. At least they wouldn’t have to wait long for the cause of death to be determined, he thought. A broken neck was a broken neck, unless, of course, the injury had occurred postmortem. The coroner would certainly be able to tell them that at least.
He moved to the second man, while behind him Clements began his own examination of the first. Two sets of eyes were always better than one, Beresford thought, and he’d made it clear to his new partner that he was to always look for himself and form his own conclusions in such situations. One of these days, it would probably save their lives.
The second man was smaller than the first, though not by much. A massive bloodstain colored the front of the man’s shirt, however. Beresford took a pen out of the pocket of his sports coat and used the tip to push back a piece of material that was covering something on his chest.
Doing so allowed him to see the massive stab wound that had been previously hidden.
What the hell kind of blade would it take to do that? he wondered, then shook the thought away. He’d know soon enough; the autopsy would at least help him narrow it down. But still, it looked like the man had been stabbed with Excalibur, for heaven’s sake….
“Hey!” Clements called. “You need to see this!”
Beresford stepped back to the first body. Clements had done the same thing he had, pushing a piece of clothing aside to reveal what was underneath, but in this case it had been the open collar of the first man’s shirt.
On the man’s shoulder was the tattoo of a red hand, fingers held together, palm facing out.
Both men recognized the mark.
You couldn’t work terrorism in the United Kingdom, particularly close to Ireland, and not do so.
It signified the dead man had been a member of one of the last few remaining terrorists groups in Northern Ireland.
A quick check revealed that it wasn’t just blind luck that the dead man had such a tattoo, either.
The other man had one in the same place.
“I guess they needed CT, after all,” Clements said.
Shaw was confident that the torc would soon be his; he was certain the problems Trevor Jackson was experiencing were only temporary and so he continued with his preparations for both the auction and what he planned for the torc after that.
He’d already selected an appropriate recipient, so he moved on to the next piece of the puzzle, arranging the specific delivery method.
He decided to use the Russian, Ivan Perchenko, to make the necessary arrangements. Perchenko had a good supply of product and could be counted on to maintain the strictest level of security with regard to his operations. Of course, anything he told the Russian would be a complete fabrication. That way, if word of what he was up to surfaced somewhere, he’d know exactly where the story originated and could take the necessary measures to ensure that it never happened again.
He would hate to kill the man, as he’d found the Russian and the materials he could lay his hands on rather useful so far, but he wouldn’t hesitate to do so if it proved necessary.
Shaw opened his safe and removed a military-grade scrambling device from inside. The scrambler had been taken off a patrol unit of the Royal Irish Regiment a year before. It was slightly dated, but it still worked quite well for his purposes. With it, both the location of the call and its contents would be untraceable.
He plugged the scrambler into the telephone and waited for the two devices to shake hands with each other. When they were set, he dialed the Russian’s number.
“Da?”
came the man’s scratchy voice. Perchenko had once served on the outskirts of Chernobyl and his scarred face and vocal chords were a constant reminder of how life can depend on the simplest of things, such as a shift in the wind at a critical moment.
“Hello, my friend,” Shaw replied, knowing the other man would recognize his voice immediately. “I’ve decided that I’ll take that consignment offer you made last week, after all.”
“The price has gone up ten percent. I have another interested buyer.”
Shaw laughed aloud, though inside his blood began to boil. “I was told it was an exclusive offer,” he said, trying to see if the man was just giving him a hard time.
“It was,” the Russian replied. “Now it is not.”
“I should take my business elsewhere,” Shaw replied, letting a hint of his anger show in his voice.
“Go ahead,” Perchenko said easily. “I will sell it to the Libyans for twice what you are offering.”
Shaw knew he was not going to get the man to budge from his position. The Russian was useful, but he was also stubborn. Once he’d made up his mind to charge Shaw an extra ten percent, he’d prefer not to make the deal at all if he didn’t get what he was looking for.
The Libyans had no use for the package, Shaw knew, but he wouldn’t put it past them to purchase it if the price was right and then store it away until they
could
make use of it. That might be never, but then again, it might be next week, given the state of unrest in the world and the potential availability of the other pieces they needed to utilize the package. Shaw was the type of man who approved of violence in order to achieve a desired end. He certainly didn’t object to a few civilian casualties if that would help the cause. But the idea of the package being in the hands of the Libyans was something that made even a man of his dubious ethical standards think twice.
No, it would be best if he simply accepted the additional ten percent penalty for not completing the deal a week earlier and take the package off the market.
“All right,” he told the former Russian commando. “Four million, plus another ten percent for your willingness to cut out the competition.”
“Done.”
“I will contact you in a day or two with delivery instructions.”
“
Da,
I will be here,” Perchenko said.
With that, the two men hung up.