Chapter Thirty-Six
Henrique watched Agent Cardoso's screen as the software tracked the car carrying Sherlock in its boot through the city. This was not real time, of course. It had happened some time before but the software scanned the video recording data and showed the car's progress on the screen map.
His mobile phone rang out. It was Caro.
'What is it, darling?' he asked.
'It's Molly and the children. They have left the suite. Molly felt trapped there and decided she preferred to be on the move rather than sitting waiting to be caught. She disabled the lift – I don't know how – so is coming down the stairs to meet me in the basement car park. But I'm not there yet and I'm so worried because she's all on her own with the two babies…'
'We must send someone to help her. Diaz! We need to send someone to the Palace Hotel to help Sherlock's wife and children. They are coming down the stairs from the top floor.'
'Henrique, Sherlock told her to trust no one but you or me. If you send an agent, she won't trust him!'
'What about Esteves? She knows him, doesn't she? She would have seen him when he collected and returned Sherlock on the day of the press conference,' Henrique suggested.
'Esteves is nearest, too,' cut in Agent Cardoso. 'The car hire company is almost next door to the Palace Hotel.'
'Call Esteves,' Diaz ordered. 'Tell him to go to the hotel and find the senhora and escort her and the children to the basement to meet Senhora de Sousa.'
Agent Cardoso dialled Esteves and gave him the new orders.
ooOoo
Molly and the boys had descended one storey, to the fifth floor, when she heard the sound of heavy footsteps, far below. She peered, cautiously, over the landing banister and saw the heads of two men, three floors below, just coming to the second floor landing. Their steps were laboured. They were clearly not very fit since running up two flights of stairs seemed to have worn them out. Unless they had come up from the basement, she surmised, in which case three flights had done for them. They stopped on the second floor and leaned on the banister with both hands. That was when she saw the guns.
Molly jumped back from the banister, pulling William with her. They were armed. Of course they were. She knew she had to cross over to the other stair case but, if she went now, they might twig what she had done and simply cross over themselves. She had to wait until there was just one flight between them. She looked at both boys and put a finger to her lips. William was already alert to the fact that they were in danger and was not about to make any sound at all. Freddie – normally bright and chirpy – looked solemn and quite concerned. He looked from Molly to William. William put his finger to his lips, also. Freddie copied the gesture and remained silent, too.
Hugging the wall, Molly moved silently down one more flight to the next landing – the fourth floor – and listened. She could hear the men's tired steps. They reached the third-floor landing and stopped again for a rest. She knew she must let them start to climb again before slipping through the fire door onto the fourth-floor corridor and crossing to the other stairwell. She waited, trying to calm her breathing, listening for the sound of climbing once more.
ooOoo
Agent Esteves entered the foyer of the Palace Hotel and crossed to Reception. He showed his identity badge to the Receptionist and told her he needed to see their CCTV array. She ushered him into the back room and, as he entered, he saw the security guard standing in front of the array of screens about to speak into his walkie-talkie.
'That woman and her brats, she is a wiley one!' the guard began. It was as far as he got. Esteves launched himself across the small room and kicked the walkie-talkie from the hand of the startled guard, who tried to punch the agent but Esteves was far too quick and much better trained. He gave the other man a sharp jab in the throat with his elbow and the guard fell to the floor, gasping and clutching his Adam's apple.
Esteves bent and picked up the walkie-talkie.
'Is this normal hotel security issue?' he demanded of the shell-shocked receptionist. She just gaped and shook her head.
Esteves stepped over the stricken man, so he could see the array of CCTV screens and scanned them, rapidly, looking for a woman with two children. He spotted her on the fourth floor, running as fast as she could, carrying the smaller child as the older one ran just ahead of her.
'You'd better call an ambulance,' the agent told the still-frozen girl from Reception. 'He's going to need an emergency tracheotomy.' He then strode from the room and made for the East Stairwell.
ooOoo
William reached the fire door leading to the East Stairwell and stopped to wait for Mummy. Molly's arm was aching from carrying Freddie, who was a stocky little chap and no lightweight. Her legs were aching from the exertion and her breathing was laboured, partly from the running but more from fear. The adrenalin rush had gotten her this far but her lungs were screaming; the anaerobic process was causing lactic acid to form in her muscles and they had begun to burn. But she had to keep going. She could not stop.
She pushed open the fire door and she and the boys passed through, on to the landing. She paused to listen, trying to breath more efficiently – in through her mouth and out through her nose – and she swapped Freddie to the other hip to give her left arm a rest. She couldn't hear any footsteps at all. She and William began to descend to the third floor, all the time mindful that – if the pursuers chose to separate, they could perform a pincer movement and trap her and the boys in the middle. She hoped and prayed they were not that smart.
They reached the third floor landing and stopped again. And that is when she heard it – only a small sound but enough for her to know that someone or something was coming up the stairs from the floor below, moving fast but almost silently. This person was a much more efficient predator than the other two, who must by now have reached the top floor and realised that she had crossed to the other stairwell. They were probably – at this very moment – crossing over themselves and coming down to trap her.
ooOoo
Back in the Street Surveillance Suite, the progress of the car had been tracked to the city boundary and it was now heading out into the suburbs but the dearth of traffic cameras on the country roads made it virtually impossible to track. Unless it turned back onto a main highway, they would have no way of knowing where it went from there.
'What is out there?' Diaz asked Cardoso.
She consulted the electronic map again and then switched it to satellite view. The image changed, immediately, from a map-like schematic to an aerial view of roads, forest, fields and farms. Cardoso studied the image intently as she followed the course of the road that the car was last known to be travelling. As it went further and further from civilisation, her eye was drawn to a remote group of buildings.
'Look here, sir,' Cardoso said. 'This used to be a horse-racing yard. The trainer lost his licence a couple of years ago because of a doping scam and it's been abandoned ever since. It's way off the beaten track. If someone wanted to hide out, that would be a perfect place. No one ever goes there.'
Diaz looked at the image of the huddle of outbuildings around a central farmhouse. It was a slim lead but it was the only one they had.
'OK, let's send a covert ops team out there to take a look. Tell them to approach with extreme caution. Warn them of a possible hostage situation. Tell them to go in very quietly. Don't even wake the mice.'
Cardoso picked up the internal phone and began to relay orders.
ooOoo
Molly considered making a dash for it through the door onto the third floor but she knew her legs were not up to any more running and in the corridor, they would be easy targets, like shooting fish in a barrel. She backed up in to the corner of the landing, as far away from the top of the stairs and the door to the corridor as she could go. She put Freddie down on his feet, pushed William into the corner and placed Freddie right in front of him.
'William, hold onto Freddie. Don't let him go,' she whispered.
William wrapped his arms round his brother and hugged him tight. Freddie put his arms up, grabbed two hands full of William's tee shirt and hung on tight. Molly turned and positioned herself in front of the boys, spreading her arms in a protective posture just as their pursuer's head appeared above the top step of the flight of stairs.
He looked lean and fit – not like the other two, who were over-weight and under exercised. He held a pistol in his right hand but it was not pointed at her. His hands were raised in a placatory gesture and the gun barrel pointed away from her and the boys. But Sherlock's words resonated in her brain.
'Trust no one. Not the security guards, not the police, no one.'
'Please! Don't hurt my children! They don't know anything. They can't hurt you. Don't hurt them!'
The man stopped at the top of the stairs and began talking, quietly, in Portuguese. Molly had no idea what he was saying.
'Just don't hurt my children,' she repeated.
'Mummy,' William interjected. 'He says he doesn't want to hurt us. He's here to help us. He says he knows Daddy and that he looked after him, that day he went to talk to the journalists.'
'Trust no one,' she heard, in her head, again.
'Ask him what his name is,' Molly instructed William, who obliged.
The man in front of them made a very slow, elaborate show of reaching into his inside breast pocket and taking out an identity badge. He held it out at arm's length and spoke again.
'He says he is Federal Agent Esteves and that the delegados sent him to take us down to Auntie Caro in the basement garage.'
Molly reached out a tentative hand and took the proffered badge, trying to look at it without taking her eyes off the strange man. She saw a photograph and some words written in Portuguese but she could read that it said he was a Federal Agent and his name was Esteves. The image matched his face. She handed the badge back to him and he took it, gingerly, slipping it back into his pocket.
He began to say something else but the door to the corridor suddenly flew open and a man charged through, closely followed by another, both brandishing weapons.
Molly spun round and crouched over the boys, shielding them with her own body. Even as she did so, two gun shots exploded in rapid succession very close by and the noise was amplified by the bare walls, hard surfaces and deep recesses of the stairwell. The noise was beyond deafening. William screamed and jammed his hands over his ears and Molly fell on top of the boys, bearing them all down to the floor in a heap, in the corner.
ooOoo
