He’d done it out of rage. He’d done it because of the four FORNATs who worked for America who died tonight, and he’d done it because he felt weak for not being able to help them.
He couldn’t save JC, but at least he could avenge him.
Court didn’t regret what he’d done, but he knew he’d just created a much bigger incident than would have occurred if he’d only come down here to Nicaragua and killed some sicarios from a drug gang.
The fact that an American had come here, killed Chinese military or intel types, and gotten away with that information was going to make this entire event a much bigger deal.
The truck raced along in silence, in darkness, towards a quiet airfield in rural Nicaragua, and away from the death they’d left behind.
Thirteen
The Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost that had driven Greek security consultant Marcus Maragos through Knightsbridge earlier in the day pulled up in front of a row house on Colville Terrace in Notting Hill. The street was all but empty at one a.m., so when the two security officers, one in gray and the other in blue, climbed out, their scan of their surroundings was perfunctory at best.
Marcus himself climbed out wearing a leather jacket, a silk shirt, and cream-colored trousers, and then the girl he’d met just ninety minutes earlier at a nightclub off Portobello Road scooted out behind him, dressed in a heavy coat, her coal black hair long and straight, the black skin on her face glistening and shining under the electric lighting around her as if she moisturized it with baby oil.
In her heels she was taller than him, taller than one of his bodyguards even, and this helped to make it an odd grouping when the four of them climbed the steps to his house and the Silver Ghost rolled off.
The bodyguard in blue unlocked the door and led the others inside, and in seconds the door slammed shut, echoing in the narrow road.
Campbell Coyle had watched the entire scene unfold from behind the wheel of a blue work van parked across the street. When the automatic exterior motion light at the door flipped back off, he looked down to his watch.
The light ran for ninety seconds after it sensed the last of the motion at the front door, and Coyle noted this in a little pad he had rested on his knee.
It wasn’t this particular camera he was curious about, but the fact that the lighting was set to factory standards on this device told him the same would likely be true on the others around the property.
The notepad in his lap already had hundreds of scribbles: drawings, license plate numbers, street names, descriptions of passersby. Literally pages of data he’d derived from sitting here for the past several hours.
He’d worked out the angles of each camera he spotted in the area, and he’d been around the back of the property earlier, and after that sojourn he’d sketched out a 360-degree diagram of the residence and those around it. He’d figured out what lay behind several of the windows on the property by looking at the vents, the chimneys, and the plumbing he could see, so he felt like he had a decent schematic of the inside of the property, as well.
The little courtyard in back was surrounded by a concrete wall and some vegetation; the motion light back there was the same brand and model as the one in front.
There were two signs on the edge of the property, as well, both giving the name of the security company the homeowner used, so from these he understood the locking mechanism on the doors; he knew how to defeat the alarm and get inside.
Campbell Coyle made his living primarily as a security alarm installer; his work involved protecting people who paid him to do so, but it also gave him the tools he needed to bypass and exploit systems, should the need ever arise.
He sat behind the wheel now, ate a dinner of cold rice and lamb he’d brought with him, washed it down with tea from an insulated mug, and then he waited, his eyes almost never leaving the home across the street.
Finally, at 2:20 a.m., he took one last sip of his tea, put the cup back on, and lifted his neck gaiter over his mouth and the lower part of his nose, all the way up to just below his eyes. He pulled the hood of his jacket over his head, then climbed out of his rented Ford. He headed first for the trunk, and here he retrieved a large satchel full of tools and other equipment.
Closing the back in perfect silence, he then began walking towards the home across the street, but not directly. Instead, he moved in a pattern that would ensure that his face wasn’t picked up on any of the cameras.
—
The twenty-six-year-old French Senegalese woman with the tape over her mouth blinked out tears, clearing her vision, much to her immediate regret, because she now got a good look at the man who’d attacked her for the first time, and she saw that he held a bloody knife in his right hand.
Reflexively she screamed, but the tape over her mouth muffled her cries.
The woman had been in the bathroom minutes before, cleaning up, getting redressed. At the time she’d felt a twinge of regret, but it had been stifled by the bump of MDMA she’d done at the club and the bottle of champagne she’d drunk here in the Notting Hill home. The sex with the handsome Greek who called himself Marcus had been good, not great, and she’d initially planned on sleeping here for a few hours before leaving the charming and handsome playboy’s home, but when he’d fallen sound asleep just after the act, she’d taken offense, then stormed into the bathroom, along the way snatching her dress from where it had been yanked off her an hour earlier.
After putting her dress back on, she stepped out of the brightly lit bathroom, more than ready to leave the flat of the man she’d only met tonight at the club. As she’d returned to the nearly impenetrable darkness of the bedroom, her attention had been locked on finding her stilettos, likely somewhere by the side of the bed, but after only a couple of steps in that direction, she’d stopped dead in her tracks, looked at the bed, and saw a naked Marcus, hog-tied, facing down, with a gag in his mouth.
Before she had the time she needed to process all this information and what it meant about her own predicament, she was grabbed from behind, a gloved hand covering her mouth. Then she was yanked across the room like a rag doll.
Her attacker was several inches shorter than the five-foot-eleven-inch model, but he moved her with incredible ease, and she knew her height would give her no advantage now.
She was forced into a seated position in a chair by a tiny table in thebedroom, and her mouth was taped shut; all the while, the person doing this to her was silent, efficient, and almost always positioned behind her.
For a moment she just sat there stunned, her eyes slammed shut, tears breaking through nevertheless, and then, when she blinked the wetness away, she looked up, focused quickly, and took in perhaps the most terrifying sight of all.
