Chapter 68
The line went dead.
I walked around my desk and sat down, pulling my keyboard towards me and angling my monitor so Del Rio and Sam could see it.
I opened my mailbox and there were three new messages.
Two of them were unrelated but the third was from a similar random numbers and letters address as the first YouTube message I had received. The subject line read Last Chance Saloon.
I opened the email and sure enough the message was the same as the first – another hyperlink to a YouTube address.
I clicked on the hyperlink and it opened to a dark screen in the video panel. I clicked on the play icon and after a second or so it faded up on the same room as before. This time, however, Hannah Shapiro was sitting on a chair. She was still wearing the same black underwear, and her face was scrubbed clean of any make-up. She looked like the girl I had first met. Young, vulnerable and very afraid.
She had good reason to be.
What was different this time was that she had explosives strapped around her body. Wires connecting the various packages, suicide bomber-style. Rope hung again from one wrist and the other hand held a typewritten note.
She looked at the camera, her voice trembling.
‘They want you to know,’ she said, ‘that this bomb I am wearing can be triggered remotely. Any attempt to do anything other than what you are instructed to do and it will be detonated. Likewise if you attempt to deliver fake diamonds. They will be examined and if they are not genuine the device will be detonated. If police are there again as they were this morning, the device will be detonated.’
She let the paper fall to the floor as tears welled in her large, terrified eyes.
‘Please help me,’ she added in a desperate whisper.
The screen faded to blackness and I rewound the video and paused it. Looking at the devices strapped to her body.
‘They look genuine to you?’ asked Sam.
‘Yup,’ I replied.
‘We have to tell the police, then.’
‘Can’t do that,’ Del Rio said softly.
Sam held his hands up. ‘We can’t let a walking bomb get on the London Underground.’
‘We go to the police and they’ll kill her,’ I said to Sam.
‘What is it they call it – collateral damage?’ he persisted.
‘They’re not going to do anything, Sam. They want the money, is all. It’s business.’
Del Rio worked his jaw muscles again. ‘We have to protect the client,’ he said. ‘That’s our job here. We save the girl.’
Chapter 69
Harlan Shapiro had barely said three words to me since our first meeting earlier that morning.
Sam and Del Rio had driven us to the Finchley Road Tube station and we had been sitting on the seat as we’d been told, for some twenty-five minutes. It was five minutes to two. I had looked at my watch seconds earlier. But I checked it again, anyway. Hard to be perfectly calm when a bomb is thundering up the Metropolitan Line on its way for a date with you.
We had been put between a rock and a very hard place. If Hannah was indeed on the train then theoretically we could have placed operatives at all stations on the Metropolitan Line between Finchly Road and the four terminuses it finished at: Uxbridge, Watford, Chesham and Amersham.
We had the manpower for that. But the Metropolitan Line intersected with other lines on the Underground at many stations and with the overland mainline services at Harrow-on-the-Hill. Meaning that the kidnappers could start their journey potentially from anywhere in London and still end up heading towards us on the eastbound train that was due in five minutes. Private had a lot of resources but we didn’t have enough for that, not in the time available to us.
We could have done what Sam wanted and informed the authorities. But that would have resulted in the entire Tube network being closed down and we would have had no way of protecting Hannah Shapiro.
I didn’t believe they would set the bomb off – if, indeed, it was live. But I could understand the logic of it. They had to make sure the merchandise we were using for the exchange was the genuine article. Hannah was their security. If they handed her over before they could check, they had no way of knowing whether the ransom paid was genuine.
This way they did. It would take time to disarm the explosives strapped around Hannah. Through my work with the RMP I knew a thing or two about bombs. None of it good. But in the RMP we didn’t disarm them, we simply marked and secured them for the experts to get in. And we didn’t stay too close when they did!
Sam and Del Rio were now waiting at Baker Street. We had received a further email saying that if everything was as it should be then Hannah and her father would disembark there. The journey from Finchley Road gave the kidnappers time for their expert to get his loupe out, I guess, and examine the stones. They would find them genuine. Not easy to get five million pounds’ worth of gems on a Sunday afternoon. But, like I said, Private has resources and reach.
Del Rio had also talked to Jack Morgan who had spoken to a high-ranking member of the Noccia family on the West Coast.
The word had come back that the Italian-American we had seen with Ronnie Allen, Sally Manzino, was a made man, and highly placed in the family’s operation. He had nothing to do with Hannah’s kidnapping and we could take that as cast-iron. Jack Morgan had some kind of deal with the Noccia family, I don’t know what. Apparently he had helped them out over some turf war of their own a year or two back so there was some kind of mutual back- scratching.
Either way, Manzino was out of the frame. This was looking like a totally home-grown operation.
I looked at my watch again. Three minutes to go. Harlan Shapiro turned to me. His eyes were sunken, haunted.
‘My daughter is very precious to me, Mister Carter,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘I made a very grave error of judgement some years ago, and Hannah had to pay a terrible price.’
I nodded. He was right.
‘My wife, of course, paid the ultimate price. And if I could change events in time I would gladly have taken her place. Do you understand me?’
‘I do, sir,’ I said. And I did.
‘These animals who have taken my daughter. If anything goes wrong on this train journey… I want you to track them down and slaughter them.’
He looked at me, his eyes animated now. ‘Will you do that?’
‘You have my word: we won’t let this lie, Mister Shapiro. But these people are businessmen. They have a perverse logic to what they are doing. The logic means that they will keep you alive, Mister Shapiro. You and your daughter.’
‘They are terrorists, Mister Carter. I don’t believe logic is the driving force here.’
‘They are acting like terrorists but they’re not the same thing. If they detonate any explosive device on a London Underground train they will have the full and focused attention of the national police forces bearing down on them. Together with the Home Office, the anti-terrorism squad and your own Homeland Security department. They don’t want that. Believe me.’
