Rules of Vengeance

“You’ve got seven days. It takes that long just for the paperwork to get started. We can prove both our bosses were wrong.”

Graves lifted his glass. “On that inspirational note, DCI Ford, cheers and fuck the lot of you!”

Kate put her hand on his arm. “That’s enough charity for tonight.”

Graves yanked his hand loose. He glared at Kate, then turned and set the glass down on the desk. “Ransom’s dirty. Von Daniken said the same thing. Ransom’s too skilled to be an amateur. And don’t you say he’s just scared.”

“I disagree. He was too close to the blast, for one. And why would he run down the street shouting like a madman at his wife? If he were a pro, he would have managed to alert her more discreetly. He had to know we’d get it on tape.”

“That’s what bothers me,” said Graves. “It’s her behavior that doesn’t make any sense.”

“How so?”

“We know she’s a pro, whether she used to work with the Americans or not. We learned that at Russell’s flat. Someone had to teach her how to defeat that security system. Then you have the car bomb. It’s no easy task to assemble that kind of device and get it into central London without being spotted. But what does Mrs. Emma Ransom do with all her training and supposed years of experience? She stands on that street corner plain as day through two cycles of the traffic signal and practically stares into the camera as she blows the bomb. She wanted us to see her.” Graves slapped his leg in a sign of frustration. “To tell you the truth, the behavior of neither of them makes a lick of sense.”

“Him I understand,” retorted Kate. “He told us that she’d surprised him at the hotel. He knew what she’d done in the past. He put two and two together and realized she was up to something here in London.”

“And now?”

“And now he’s trying to save her.”

“You’ve got to be kidding!”

“What would you do if it was your wife?”

“I’d have chosen a bit more carefully,” said Graves.

Just then Roberts knocked and entered the office. He was followed by another man, and between them, they were carrying the requested university yearbooks. Graves took the topmost yearbook and compared the shield on its spine to the one visible on the monitor. The two matched. “Set them on my desk,” he directed.

“Anything else, sir?” asked Roberts.

“An urn of coffee and two cups, sugar, cream, the works. Anything else you can think of, DCI Ford?”

“If you can find a chip shop that’s open, I wouldn’t mind a piece of cod.”

“Wrapped in newspaper?” said Graves, with the hint of a smile.

“Newspaper would be fine,” answered Kate sternly. She was in no mood to be Graves’s newly appointed buddy.

“You heard the lady,” barked Graves. “Fish and chips. Get me some, too. I’m starved. Now get out of here.”

“Yes, sir,” said Roberts with a sharp nod.

“Good,” said Graves, settling down at his desk. “That’s taken care of. Now let’s get to work. We’ve a helluva lot of faces to look at.”

30

“Keep your eyes on the ground,” shouted Den Baxter, chief of the London Metropolitan Police’s Evidence Recovery Team, as he walked up Storey’s Gate. “The pieces are all here. No one better even think of going home until we find them!”

It was eleven o’clock. The sun had slipped below the horizon ninety minutes earlier. Across London, the curtain of night had fallen. Everywhere except Storey’s Gate.

Along Storey’s Gate, it was as bright as midday. Up and down the 500-meter band of pavement, from Victoria Street to the west to Great George Street to the east, tall halogen work lamps illuminated the area where the car bomb had been detonated twelve hours earlier. There were over one hundred lamps in all, each with a brash 150-watt flood trained on the asphalt. Half again as numerous were the members of the Evidence Recovery Team, or the ERT, as it was better known. Clad head to toe in white Tyvek bodysuits, they swarmed up and down the street with the single-mindedness of army ants.

“Chief, over here!”

Baxter circled the husk of one of the burned automobiles and hurried toward the sidewalk, where a man stood with his hand raised. Baxter was a fireplug of a man, with flaming red hair and a boxer’s broken nose. A thirty-year veteran of the force, he’d arrived at the scene shortly after the first responders-the initial police, firemen, and paramedics called in to deal with the casualties. It was his job to locate, preserve, and catalogue any and all evidence having to do with the blast, and he carried it out with a zeal bordering on the fanatical.

“What’ve you got?” he asked.

The man held up a jagged piece of metal the size of a pack of cigarettes. “Bit of treasure. Piece of the car that went up. Got a nice dab of residue.”

Baxter examined the hunk of metal, quickly spotting the blackened crust on one corner. A scrape of his thumbnail revealed a field of white powder beneath the surface. He walked to the mobile command center at the corner of Victoria Street. The rear doors were open, and he climbed inside. “Got a present for you.”

Two men sat inside at an elaborate bank of instruments. Using a cotton swab, one freed a dab of explosive and prepped it for testing. One of the machines at his disposal was a Thomson gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer capable of analyzing the chemical composition of every commercially manufactured explosive compound known to man, and plenty that were homemade, too.

With an admonition to inform him as soon as any results were received, Baxter jumped out of the van and looked to see where he might be of some use. Twelve hours on the scene and he was still as charged up as a bantam cock.

When he arrived at 11:35, barely twenty minutes after the blast, his first task had been to clear the scene of casualties and establish a secure perimeter. His fellow officers were often his worst enemy. In their haste to help the injured, they stomped around the scene with little regard for evidence. It was three hours before all casualties were cleared from the scene, and another two before the last uniformed policeman had been escorted off-site. Only then was Baxter able to begin his real work.

The perimeter of a bomb site was established by the size of the blast area. The majority of car bombs employed one form or another of plastic explosives which, when detonated, expanded at a rate of nearly five miles per second. Baxter grew angry when he saw movies where the hero outran a fireball emanating from a detonation. Not likely. Thankfully, Storey’s Gate was a narrow street. The blast wave had ricocheted between the buildings, dissipating rapidly, and remained largely confined to its length.

Next Baxter gridded out the area, assigning 20-by-20-meter squares to teams of five men each for examination. Every square inch of the site was photographed, and all debris was studied with an eye to determining whether it was or was not evidence. If so, it was marked, photographed again, catalogued, and bagged.

The ERT looked for two things in particular: elements of the bomb itself-namely a detonator, circuit board, mobile phone, and the like; and any materials coated with a residue of the explosives. A bomb’s architecture spoke volumes about the bomb maker: his training, education, and, most important, his country of origin. Ninety percent of terrorist devices were made by individuals with prior military experience, and many bomb makers (inadvertently) developed a signature that gave them away as surely as Picasso’s script at the bottom of his paintings.

Blast residue indicated the type of explosive used, and often where the explosive was manufactured, and even when. Determining whether a bomb utilized Semtex, C-4, or one of a dozen more arcane explosives was a crucial first step in tracking down the identity of the assailant.