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Danny was a realist, after all. He could see that events had conspired to bring about the end of an era.
Slack had filled him in on the conversation he’d had last night with Carlos Cruz and the information he had subsequently gleaned through Google about the Mexican contract killer nicknamed ‘The Slayer’.
‘Seems like she’s the stuff of legend, Danny,’ he’d said. ‘The media are not even sure she really exists.’
Slack had spent an hour on his laptop and had learned that The Slayer was one of a number of notorious female assassins who were working or had worked for the Mexican cartels.
And from the sound of it they were a right bunch of bloodthirsty crazies. Dubbed Las Flacas (The Skinny Ones), they were now commonplace in the major cartels. They were considered ideal sicarias (hired killers) because they were young, beautiful, reckless, and attracted less attention than their male counterparts.
One glamorous hit-woman known as Juana made headlines in 2016 when, after being arrested, she confessed to having sex with the beheaded corpses of her victims and to drinking their blood.
Others included La Güera Loca, or ‘The Crazy Blonde’ who had appeared in a video posted online in which she’d beheaded a man with a machete. She was currently one of the most wanted women in Mexico.
And then there was the infamous Maria Lopez, or La Tosca – ‘The Tough One’ – who was caught in 2011 and went on to own up to twenty murders.
‘Our girl has more than twice that number of kills to her credit,’ Slack had told Danny. ‘She calls herself Rosa Lopez, but Cruz says it’s not her real name. He says she’s the best in the business but he wouldn’t tell me anything else about her.’
‘I don’t think there’s anything more you need to know, boss,’ Danny had said. ‘For the job you want her to do she sounds fucking perfect.’
10 (#ulink_d425984c-7d86-5585-a0ac-262721d26b7e)
Rosa
While Slack was holding court in Rotherhithe, Rosa Lopez was just over halfway through her flight to London.
She’d managed a few hours’ sleep, disturbed as usual by the same recurring dream that took her back to that morning twenty-two years ago when she walked into her parents’ bedroom and found them lying on their blood-covered sheets.
She tried to wake them and when she couldn’t she just lay on the bed between them, crying and screaming until Mr Torres from next door broke in and discovered the carnage.
The dream was always so chillingly vivid and it served as a constant reminder of the event that changed the course of her life.
She was told later that her mother and father had each been shot twice from close range by an assassin or assassins who almost certainly used a silenced pistol. It was never established how they’d got into the house in the dead of night, but she did find out why.
Her father had been a drugs dealer for a local gang and had been targeted by his own people who accused him of stealing money from them. In order to make an example of him they decided to kill his wife at the same time.
Rosa was adopted by her father’s sister Teresa and her husband Enrique. But she hardly knew her aunt and had never met Enrique before the day they came to collect her.
For a while they were kind and considerate and made an effort to make her feel comfortable. But it didn’t last long. Teresa had three other older children and Rosa soon got the impression that the family regretted taking her in.
Enrique first came to her bedroom two nights after her seventh birthday. He kissed her on the mouth and touched her between the legs, making her promise not to tell anyone.
The next time, a week later, he made her touch his penis and told her what to do with it.
Soon he was raping her on a regular basis and when she cried he slapped her and pinched her cheeks and threatened to strangle her if she didn’t act like she enjoyed it.
It was obvious that her aunt knew about it and chose to turn a blind eye. But then she was also afraid of Enrique because he was a violent, controlling man with a fierce temper.
The abuse carried on for four years, during which time she was farmed out on occasion to Enrique’s perverted friends.
Then, just three days before her eleventh birthday, Rosa decided she’d had enough.
They were sitting around the kitchen table eating dinner – Rosa, Enrique, Teresa and their youngest son Pedro.
When Rosa was handed the bread knife and told to slice the loaf, she was gripped by a sudden rage so fierce that it propelled her out of her chair. A second later she was lunging at Enrique and thrusting the knife into his chest.
He fell back on his chair and she went down with him. Before Teresa and Pedro could pull her off she managed to stab him twice more – in the mouth and in the right eye socket.
Enrique died before the ambulance arrived and Rosa spent the next seven years in juvenile prison where she learned that life is cheap and you have to be strong to survive.
She cultivated friendships with seasoned criminals, especially those with ties to the cartels. And through them she eventually learned the identity of the man who had murdered her parents.
His name was Antonio Garcia and she swore that one day she would get her revenge.
That day came shortly after she was released at the age of eighteen. She tracked Garcia down to a house in Durango and stalked him for several days. He was arriving home late one evening when she decided to strike. She rushed up behind him just as he was opening his front door. She shoved the muzzle of a gun into his back and ordered him to go inside where she quickly rendered him unconscious with a blow to the head.
When he woke up five minutes later he was handcuffed to a chair and that was where he stayed throughout the night while Rosa systematically tortured him.
She forced him to tell her the name of the man who had got him to kill her parents and before he died she cut off his penis and both his ears.
A week later Rosa walked into a bar in Camargo and put three bullets into the head of the gang boss who had ordered the hit on her parents.
After that she was snapped up by the Sinaloa cartel. She helped move drugs, committed robberies and got involved in kidnappings. But it was soon obvious that her real forte lie in killing people. She had a natural aptitude for it, and over time they started calling her The Slayer.
But she didn’t mind. In fact she found it rather flattering. And neither did she mind that behind her back she was also described as a psychopath.
It was true, after all. And it was no doubt why she enjoyed doing what she did.
And why she was so looking forward to what lay ahead in London.
11 (#ulink_ea704d16-7260-59ac-a1e6-0cf7a53a1ab9)
Laura
The air of enthusiasm that had prevailed at the start of the day quickly evaporated. In its place there grew a stifling sense of foreboding.
The thoughts of everyone on the task force were dominated by the anonymous text message and its chilling warning.
As hard as I tried I just couldn’t get it out of my mind. The job we did was often a test of sanity, but I felt that we were now being tested to the limit.
At lunchtime word came back from the experts in the cyber-crime unit that they were unable to trace the source of the message, which was what we’d expected.
Anyone can send an anonymous text or email through apps that can be downloaded from the Internet or websites that offer it as a service.
DCS Drummond also reported back on a brief conversation he’d had with the Commissioner.
‘His view is that we shouldn’t take it too seriously,’ Drummond said. ‘It isn’t the first time that officers in the Met have received threats of this kind and he’s sure that it won’t be the last. His advice is to be extra vigilant and at the same time raise the issue with those we interview as part of the investigation into Roy Slack’s mob.’
It was true that police officers were often threatened. Early on during the investigation into Harry Fuller, a man called my mobile and left a voice message threatening to rape me if I didn’t stop pursuing the gang boss. It gave me a shock, and I was dismayed to discover he’d used a burner phone so he couldn’t be traced.
But his threat just did not ring true so I didn’t lose any sleep over it.
However, this latest threat was different and far more unusual. It had been sent to a whole team of detectives and to my knowledge that had never happened before. It also referred to our families, and that made it all the more alarming. Was it really possible that Aidan and my own mother were in danger? Did I need to warn them? Or was it best not to scare them since we still couldn’t be sure this wasn’t just a prank?
Amongst the detectives, Dave Prentiss appeared to be the most affected by it, presumably because he had only just become a father.
When a group of us gathered in the canteen for a sandwich lunch, he told us he’d been searching Google for stories about serious attacks on the police and what he’d found out had clearly worried him.
‘I didn’t realise there had been so many, especially in the States,’ he said.
He mentioned the case of a former soldier who shot five cops dead in Dallas in 2016. The same year gunmen in Mexico’s western state of Michoacán shot down a police helicopter, killing the pilot and three officers. And as recently as February 2017, a plot was uncovered to assassinate eight officers with the Pecos Valley Drug Task Force in the US state of New Mexico.
‘This is scary stuff,’ Prentiss said. ‘It’s as though nutters everywhere have declared open season on us.’
It might have been an exaggeration, but Prentiss did have a point. There had never been a time when coppers had felt so vulnerable. That was why the debate as to whether all officers in the UK should carry weapons was heating up again.
I had always been opposed to it, along with the majority of my colleagues in the Met, but in view of this new threat I began to wonder if I’d feel safer with a gun strapped to my waistband.
The afternoon was spent getting our act together and deciding who would do what in the weeks ahead. But it was difficult to focus because of the threat.
My thoughts kept turning to Aidan and my mother and I succumbed to the urge to text them both to make sure they were all right. Aidan replied with, ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ But I didn’t respond for fear of making him suspicious.
Get a grip, I told myself. Aidan and Mum are OK. They’re safe. So stop worrying about them and get on with the job.
We needed to familiarise ourselves with the various files on the system relating to Roy Slack’s firm.
While we’d been tied up with the Harry Fuller case most of the information had been updated. Surveillance reports and financial records had been added, along with more photos and notes on members of Slack’s inner circle.
Needless to say no new evidence linking Slack to any criminal activities had emerged. But then he hadn’t been subjected to the kind of scrutiny and pressure that we were about to apply.
I spent the best part of an hour studying everything we had on Slack, and making copious notes along the way.
Included in the paperwork was the interview that was conducted just under a week ago following the disappearance of firearms officer Hugh Wallis who shot and killed Slack’s employee Terry Malone.
Slack, accompanied by one of his high-flying lawyers, presented the officers with a cast-iron alibi for the period when Wallis vanished. He insisted he had not asked his people to seek out the identity of the firearms officer after the shooting and claimed Malone had been employed as a bouncer with the security company he ran.
He was asked why Malone had a shotgun and drugs in his house, to which he replied, ‘You should ask him that question. Oh, but you can’t, can you, because you murdered the poor bugger and at the same time killed his unborn baby.’
What had happened that night was indeed unfortunate and it was questionable as to whether Wallis had made the right call. But the inquiry into the incident had given him the benefit of the doubt.
However, the manner of Malone’s death might well have prompted someone to seek revenge against Wallis. And since Malone had no living relatives, suspicion had fallen on Slack.
But if he had arranged for Wallis to be kidnapped and killed, then I was sure we would never be able to prove it.
The story was always the same with Roy Slack. He managed to avoid any link between himself and the dirty deeds carried out on his behalf.
I had never interviewed or questioned the man myself but those who had had generally formed similar opinions of him. He was smart, they said, and paranoid. And he treated all police officers with utter contempt.
The profile we’d been building also included descriptions provided by underworld figures who had dared to tell us what they knew about him.
Certain words cropped up repeatedly. They were: cruel, brutal, heartless, tyrannical and vicious.
Reading back through all the stuff we had on the guy, I found myself hoping to God that he wasn’t the person who had sent the text. Because if it was him then I feared that there was a good chance it wasn’t just an empty threat.
12 (#ulink_b7553f3c-9555-5541-9115-621798e69570)
Slack
Everything was in hand for Rosa Lopez’s arrival. The plane was due to touch down at Heathrow just after four o’clock and Danny was going to pick her up.
He would then drive her to the hotel she’d been booked into before taking her to the pub where Slack would meet her. There she’d be given a detailed briefing and the equipment that she’d requested via Carlos Cruz, which included weapons.
Before then Slack had some business to attend to in Dulwich. It was something he’d been putting off for a week because he’d had other things to deal with. But now seemed like a good time to get it done, since he had to go out anyway in order to rendezvous with The Slayer.
Before leaving the building he had lunch in the pub’s restaurant with some of the lads. After a few wines and beers with their steaks, they were more willing to express their fears about what was happening.
‘Most of my days are now spent making sure the plods are not watching or listening to me,’ Frank Piper said. ‘I know that a couple of Harry Fuller’s guys came unstuck because they didn’t know that the task force had placed bugs in their homes and tracking devices in their cars.’
‘They were fucking careless,’ Danny Carver said. ‘It’s not that hard to stop the snooping if you know how to.’
‘And we do know how to,’ Slack said. ‘That’s why they’ve struggled to get close to us.’
But he could see that whatever he told Piper and the others it was not going to ease their anxiety. So after a while he gave up trying and focused on his meal.
At three o’clock he told Mike Walker to bring the car around the front.
‘We’re going to the house in Park Crescent,’ he said. ‘And you need to make bloody sure we’re not followed.’
It’s only about six miles from Rotherhithe to Dulwich, but the route Mike took to get there added two miles to the journey.
He used to be a cabbie so he knew the area like the back of his hand. There was no way the Old Bill could have tailed them without being spotted.
Dulwich was one of the more serene parts of South London with a picturesque park and a famous college. It was also a good place to invest in property, which was why Slack had bought the house in Park Crescent a few years ago.
It was one of four the firm owned south of the river and three were being rented out. They’d been purchased through fake companies so they wouldn’t fall victim to seizure warrants if ever he was arrested and charged with an offence. The place in Park Crescent was currently occupied by two of his most reliable crew members – Johnny Devonshire and Pat Knowles. He let them live there for free because the place was frequently used for all kinds of activities, including the storage of drugs and stolen goods, clandestine meetings with corrupt coppers and officials, and as a safe house for those who needed to drop out of sight for a while.
It was a detached property close to the hospital, with an integral garage and a small front garden enclosed by high hedges that provided a degree of privacy.
Johnny and Pat were expecting him and, as the car pulled up at the kerb, the front door was opened and they both stepped outside.
They were tall, muscle-bound hard cases, and had worked as a team since sharing a prison cell at the Scrubs some years ago.
Slack told Mike to wait in the car while he got out to shake hands with Johnny and Pat.
‘Good to see you, boss,’ Pat said. ‘We weren’t sure you’d ever manage to get here.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s been hectic guys. Plus, I was playing safe because the Old Bill have been watching me.’
He entered the house and took off his overcoat, which he handed to Johnny.
