Private London - James Patterson [60]
‘I guess not.’
‘So you can buy Dan a beer when you see him.’
‘If I can get hold of him I will. He’s not answering his phone.’
‘I know – I tried him first. Probably out of network coverage or his phone’s run down.’
Kirsty nodded.
‘So, my Jane Doe. What’s her name?’
‘Adriana Kisslinger. She was twenty-seven.’
‘What was her offence?’
‘Prostitution. She was offering executive bed baths in the hospital she was working at, apparently. The ward sister didn’t approve.’
‘And it’s illegal in Romania?’
‘Prostitution is, yes. Ironic, isn’t it? Romania is listed as one of the biggest sources of human trafficking in the world.’
‘I know. Thanks again for this, Wendy.’
‘Like I said—’
‘Yeah, yeah. I know,’ Kirsty interrupted. ‘I will when I speak with him.’
Chapter 74
HANNAH SHAPIRO LOOKED up, surprised, as I walked towards her.
She was standing, holding on to one of the poles in the doors section of the carriage. Surrounded by more excited women but, whereas their faces were bright with anticipation, hers was crumpled, her haunted eyes still free of make-up. They welled with tears as I quietly said her name. She spun round and walked straight into my enfolding arms.
I hugged her tight to me. She was wearing an oversized white raincoat and not much beneath it.
Which was good news. She might have just had her underwear on but at least she wasn’t strapped around with explosives. After a moment she stepped back a little and I was glad that she did. Like I said, Hannah had grown quite a bit since I had last seen her.
‘What happened?’ I asked her.
‘They took my dad, Mister Carter. They’ve taken him.’
‘How?’
‘When the train stopped in the tunnel. There was someone outside, waiting. They went through those.’ She pointed at the connecting doors.
They had got off the train the same way I had got on. But it didn’t make any sense – they could hardly have walked back through the tunnel. Not with the trains running.
‘Did you recognise any of the men who took you?’ I asked as daylight filled the train once more as it pulled into Baker Street station.
Hannah shook her head. ‘They were wearing masks when they jumped on us in the street. And I never saw their faces in the house they kept me in. I was in the dark the whole time.’
‘And today?’
‘This morning they were all painted black. They painted me, too.’
I nodded. ‘I saw you but we couldn’t get to you.’
‘I know.’
‘And this afternoon they were all wearing comedy Take That face masks.’
‘Where did you get on the train?’
‘I don’t know. Out in the country.’
We stepped out onto the platform and she wobbled a little, holding my arm to steady herself and then gripping it harder.
‘How are Chloe and Laura?’ she asked, her voice even more tremulous.
‘Laura suffered a cut to her arm but she’s okay.’
‘And Chloe?’
‘Is still in hospital, Hannah. But she’s going to be fine.’
I figured that if I said it confidently enough it might make it so. People were still pouring out of the train, heading for the eastbound platform of the Jubilee Line. A guard was waiting for them to clear so he could whistle the train on. I went up to him and told him that I had seen an unattended bag on one of the storage racks over the seats.
It held up the train long enough for me to have a word with the driver. He had stopped in the tunnel due to signalling. It was a common enough occurrence when a train was waiting for traffic to clear ahead. There would be trains doing the very same thing now because we had backed up the system.
Fifteen minutes later and we were outside in one of Private’s mobile offices. A large black van with blacked-out windows and a state-of-the-art communications system inside.
We had put a transmitting device on Harlan Shapiro, strong enough to track from above the tunnel. That section wasn’t very deep, after all: it was classified as subsurface, not really underground at all. The device was disguised as a tie clip and the signal it was broadcasting translated as a flashing dot on our computer monitor displaying a map of central