Abuse of Power - Michael Savage [77]
As she waited for the train to slow, he casually got to his feet behind her—just another passenger anxious to get home.
The train pulled into the station, its brakes hissing, then finally eased to a stop and opened its doors.
The woman and three other passengers stepped through to the platform and Jack followed, moving with the group toward a flight of stairs, but lagging behind slightly to put some distance between them.
A few minutes later he was outside the station and on the street, the woman several yards ahead of him, walking through an empty car park toward a narrow road flanked by blocky brick factory buildings the color of sandalwood.
The road was dimly lit and sparsely populated, and judging by the graffiti Jack saw scrawled across a Wholesale Fabrics building to his left, it was one of the poorest of East London neighborhoods.
The only thing he knew about Whitechapel were stories of Jack the Ripper, who had used this area as his hunting ground over a three-year period in the late nineteenth century. The streets the Ripper had roamed were very different than these, but you couldn’t walk along here without thinking about his brutal butchery and the hysteria surrounding it.
The woman didn’t seem bothered, however. She kept moving at a steady pace until she reached the end of the block and turned left.
Jack hurried to catch up, slowing again as he made the turn and saw her about forty yards ahead. She moved past a darkened dry cleaning store, then a low wall—which he soon discovered offered a view of the train tracks—then crossed to her right at the intersection and turned down Whitechapel Road.
Again he sped up. He wasn’t in the habit of stalking women, but that’s exactly what he was doing right now.
He thought of Jack the Ripper again and shuddered.
When he finally did turn the corner, she walked briskly past a row of closed shops—a kebab house, a stereo store, a real estate agency—
Near the middle of the block she took a sharp left, moving into an alleyway. Jack crossed to her side of the street, but again he held back. He knew that stepping into that alley might alert her to the fact that she was being followed, and he didn’t want to tip his hand. Or find her waiting for him with a .45.
Waiting what he hoped was enough time, he continued toward the alley and made the turn. It was short and narrow and came to a dead end at a graffiti-scarred wall.
The woman was nowhere in sight.
Where the hell has she gone?
In the wall to his right was a dilapidated metal door marked EXIT ONLY. Jack moved to it, checked the knob.
Unlocked.
He stood there a moment, thinking about what he might be getting himself into, wishing he had his .357.
Well, you don’t, he thought. How badly do you want more pieces of the puzzle?
He took a calming breath then pulled the door open.
When he got inside he heard music. The steady thump-thump-thump of a bass drum. A short set of cement steps led downward toward a narrow hallway, lit by a flickering fluorescent light.
Jack navigated the steps and headed toward the end of the hall, its walls and ceiling adorned with enough Day-Glo graffiti to trigger an epileptic seizure. There was an adjoining hallway to the right. He took it.
At the far end was another metal door, a large skinhead in a muscle shirt sitting on a wooden stool next to it, his beefy face expressionless. He was the kind of “soccer thug” whose ancestors had exploited the world and built Britain. Now the government hated and suppressed his breed, permitting Muslim thuggery to reign. A nation that attacked itself this way was a nation with a political autoimmune disease.
The skinhead’s face didn’t change as Jack approached. He merely extended a hand, palm up, and said, “Twenty quid.”
“Did a woman just go in here? Beautiful. Dark hair.”
“Twenty quid or sod off,” the guy told him.
Jack took a twenty-pound note from his jacket pocket and handed it to