Cyberstrike by James Barrington (best english books to read .txt) 📗

a medical emergency and so he pushed past the besuited man and stepped into the room.

An unmoving figure was lying on the floor, his wrists secured with handcuffs, and another man wearing a suit was crouching over him. As North appeared beside him, he turned, the distress in his face obvious.

‘We never touched him,’ he said. ‘He was just sitting there and then he kind of fell over sideways.’

North unceremoniously shoved him out of the way and bent to see what he could do. The man was wearing a lightweight one-piece disposable garment, presumably supplied by the police as his own clothing would have been soaking wet after his immersion in the Thames, and would have been taken from him in any case for forensic examination as part of standard procedure. Carter had told him that the man had been wearing casual Western-style clothing on the cabin cruiser, but his thick black beard and dark complexion suggested a Middle Eastern or Asian origin.

North manhandled him into the recovery position, lying him on his side to ensure that his airway remained clear and then immediately felt the side of his neck, searching for a pulse in the carotid artery. But he found nothing, and when he placed the back of his hand in front of the man’s mouth he could detect no sign of breathing.

The next step was obvious: CPR, cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

North laid the man flat on his back, straddled his body, interlocked his hands, positioned them in the centre of the man’s chest and began regular compressions, aiming to depress the chest a couple of inches and then release, and counting to achieve about one hundred compressions a minute. He knew that as long as CPR was started within about five minutes of a person’s heart stopping and them losing consciousness, it was possible to keep the patient alive until proper medical aid arrived, and he guessed he was well within that timescale.

When he reached thirty compressions he stopped and leaned forward, intending to try rescue breathing, to force air into the man’s lungs before resuming chest compressions. But before he could do so two police officers ran through the doorway and into the interview room, one holding what North recognised immediately as a defibrillator and the other carrying a medical bag. They had the equipment and very probably better knowledge and medical ability than he had and so he stood up, stepped back, and left them to it.

The room filled quickly. One of the new arrivals was the doctor who’d been called in to assess the suspect’s condition because of the circumstances of his arrest. He immediately took over. He worked on the collapsed man for several minutes but without any response, and finally had to admit that he was completely unresponsive. Dead, in short.

That wasn’t the result North had been hoping for, and clearly the two men he assumed were from Millbank felt the same way. He buttonholed one of them in the corridor outside the interview room.

‘You’re from Five, right?’ he began, and the man nodded. ‘Okay, I’m C-TAC, so we have a high-level interest in this. To save us having to hack our way through a jungle of red tape while our lords and masters decide exactly where the buck is going to stop and how best they can cover their arses, just tell me what happened in that room.’

‘Let me see some ID.’

North obliged him by again producing his MOD Form 90 and his C-TAC pass that allowed him access to SIS headquarters at Vauxhall Cross.

‘Okay. We’d hardly even started with the suspect, just organised coffee and were trying to empathise with him. You know, softly, softly to get him to start talking, but he just asked for a solicitor and then clammed up. No response at all, even if we were well off subject, like asking him if he took sugar in his coffee and if he would want to eat halal meals while he was in custody. We kept on trying but we really weren’t getting anywhere. He hadn’t been carrying any kind of ID or anything else that would identify him, and the same went for the stiff with half his head blown off, so we didn’t even have his name or the name of the man in the boat with him. What we did know was that he was clearly really upset that they hadn’t managed to pull off the attack. That was quite obvious, but non-verbal.

‘The only thing he did say didn’t make too much sense, and that was clearly deliberate. He kept checking the time on the wall clock as if he was expecting something, or maybe somebody, to walk into the interview room. Then he seemed almost to relax, but he still didn’t say anything. But a couple of minutes before he collapsed he came up with what sounded like a memorised and prepared short statement, almost like the kind of videos that shahids make before they carry out their attacks as justification for what they’re about to do. But his statement was really short. He just said the West was going to pay – so nothing much new there – and the next attack would be much bigger and on a much bigger target.’

‘Did you note down exactly what he said?’ North asked.

The man from Millbank nodded. ‘Yes, and both of us had digital recorders running from the moment the interview started.’

‘Right. I’d like audio copies of both those recordings sent to C-TAC please, so we can do our own transcription. Then what happened?’

‘He just sat there looking at us across the table as if he was expecting us to react to what he’d said, but of course we didn’t. And then he keeled over, just fell sideways out of the chair. No warning, no indication that he was sick. He just collapsed. I’m not a medical man, but I don’t think it was a heart attack. I mean, he didn’t gasp for breath or clutch his