Chapter Thirteen
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 the bedroom, 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.
The man in the black hooded coat stood feet away in the near darkness, a long stainless steel knife in his hand.
The blood on his knife was not hers, and it did not seem to have come from Marcus, because he was very much alive across the room, so she wondered if this man had done something to the two bodyguards whom she’d last seen downstairs.
It was so dark here in the bedroom, and his eyes were all but obscured by the hood, his mouth and nose completely hidden by a scarf.
His clothing was all black, save for the white latex gloves he wore, and his continued silence was, somehow, one of the most chilling parts of this whole ordeal.
Marcus thrashed about on the bed, but he was getting nowhere with it. Now that her eyes had adjusted to the dark somewhat, she saw that the attacker had put headphones over the Greek’s ears, and electrician’s tape over his eyes.
She watched while the man in the hood lifted her purse from the footstool at the end of the bed, rummaged through it, then walked over to a window to use the light there to examine her ID and then thumb through her credit cards.
She prayed he’d pocket all her cards and just leave.
But he stole nothing; he put everything back inside and looked her way.
Throughout this, the French Senegalese woman was not tied down, not taped up other than her mouth, but she did not consider for one second that she’d have a chance in hell if she tried to run.
The man in the hood moved back over to put her purse on the table next to where she sat, and then, finally, he spoke to her.
When he did, she realized now that the calm manner of his voice was even more chilling than his silence had been a few seconds earlier. The voice utterly belied the violence that he’d already committed. The violence that he still threatened by the knife in his hand.
“Gonna ask you a couple of questions, Aida. I don’t need you to speak. Just give your head a wee nod or a wee shake, depending on your answer. Can you be a good girl and do that for me, love?”
He was Irish, so calm and self-assured, as if this was just any night in his life.
She nodded quickly.
“Two men on the ground floor. The man over there on the bed. Yourself. Myself. Have you seen anyone else here tonight?”
She shook her head.
He looked at her questioningly. “You’re quite certain?”
She nodded again, and then her eyes narrowed, looked off in the distance a moment.
Fresh tears formed and fell.
The hooded man seemed to note the look on her face. He knelt down in front of her, pulled off the tape covering her mouth in one swift motion, and at first, she just gasped for air.
“Something occurred to you. What was it?” he asked.
Through a tremor of terror in her voice, she said, “A man drove us here in the Rolls. I don’t know if the driver came into the house. I didn’t see him again after we were dropped, but—”
The hooded man gave a little nod. “He did not come in. But I thank you for being thorough.”
The young woman forced herself to look into his dark eyes. She said, “Sir…sir…please. I just met Marcus. I don’t know him. I don’t know what you want or who you—”
“Relax, love.” He said it softly, and again, the calmness in his voice right now scared her, and she began sobbing more; she shut her eyes tight, and she was certain she was about to die.
After a moment, she felt a gentle hand on her forearm, covered in a latex glove. “Oi,” he said, and she looked up at the man again. He held her purse out in front of him now, offering it to her.
She cocked her head slowly.
“Go home, dear.”
She took the purse slowly, nodded even more slowly. “Thank you.”