Читать книгу The Angry Sea - James Deegan - Страница 43

30.

BY NOW, JUSTIN Nicholls was alone in his office, on the fifth floor of the SIS HQ at Vauxhall, digesting the news from the explosion on the beach at Ceuta and casting his eye over casualty reports.

The numbers would change – they always did – but the best current estimate was eighty-nine Britons killed aboard the MS Windsor Castle, out of a total of 104 dead, and seventeen dead on the beach, out of a total of seventy-one.

It could have been worse, he supposed – but then, if you lost more than a hundred of your own and still found yourself looking on the bright side, that was a very bad day.

His phone buzzed, quietly.

It was his assistant, Hugo.

‘Alec Palmer from the Spanish desk, sir,’ he said.

‘Thanks, Hugo,’ said Nicholls.

He heard a click and said, ‘Alec?’

Palmer sounded breathless.

‘The three female hostages taken from Marbella, Justin?’ he said. ‘We’re pretty sure that one of them is the Prime Minister’s oldest daughter, Charlotte.’

Justin Nicholls was a very intelligent man, with a double first in mathematics from Cambridge and over two decades in the SIS behind him; it was rare that he was lost for words.

This was one of those times.

He and his wife were family friends of the PM, Penelope Morgan, and he’d seen Charlotte Morgan grow up from a shy teenager to a confident young woman in the early stages of what was sure to be a glittering career at the Bar.

He shuddered at the thought of her being taken by those evil people, and blown apart on some foreign shore…

‘Justin?’ said Alec Palmer.

‘Yes. Sorry. Christ. Charlotte? When did you hear this? How?’

‘We’ve just put it together. She was on holiday with a group of friends. One couple had a row and went back to their hotel – luckily for them, as it turns out. That couple contacted the consulate an hour or so ago to say that their friends hadn’t returned, and that they couldn’t raise them on their phones. They’ve just identified the other three males in the temporary morgue in Marbella, but there’s no sign of the three females. We’ve had a look at their phones. Nothing since about 1 p.m., which was roughly when they went onto the beach. So we’re assuming…’

‘Shit,’ breathed Nicholls. ‘Shit. Did she not have RaSP with her?’

RaSP was Royalty and Specialist Protection, the Met Police element charged with protecting the Prime Minister and her family, among others.

‘She’d turned them down, apparently. Said she wanted to “live her life”.’

Nicholls was silent for a moment.

Then he said, ‘They must have targeted her. The whole thing, this was what the Málaga distraction was all about. It was aimed at seizing her.’

‘It certainly looks that way,’ said Palmer.

‘Her boyfriend’s dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does Downing Street know?’

‘It hasn’t broken with the media yet. But…’

‘But she’ll have known Charlie was out there,’ said Nicholls. ‘So she’ll have tried to get in touch with her. And…’

‘That was what I was thinking,’ said Palmer.

Nicholls was silent for a moment.

Then he said, ‘I’ll have to break it to the PM. Can you get me the latest from Ceuta? Last thing I saw, the boat was spread over a couple of acres and they were looking for bodies.’

‘Will do.’

‘Do you have someone getting alongside the surviving couple? We want whatever they have ASAP.’

‘The Málaga officer’s on his way.’

‘Good. Thanks, Alec.’

Nicholls ended the call and dialled his assistant.

‘I’m just going to see the chief, Hugo,’ he said. ‘Can you get me a car, please? When I’m finished upstairs I’ll need to go over to Downing Street.’