Page 25 of Nobody's Hero
It came down to what one modern camera had caught. The picture was crystal clear, as high-def as any CCTV footage Koenig had seen. If he’d been shown it out of context, he’d have figured he was watching a ‘found footage’ movie. Koenig thought movies likeThe Blair Witch ProjectorCloverfieldwere an unwelcome trend. They restrained movies rather than liberated them. In any case, if Koenig wanted to watch a bunch of chuckleheads running around in circles, he’d go and see the Yankees.
But the Speakers’ Corner video wasn’t a found-footage movie. It was a slice of life. And death.Twodeaths. The camera must have been positioned at least twenty feet in the air as everyone in Speakers’ Corner was visible.
They watched it three times, and each time Koenig saw it, the more convinced he became that something had been missed. Or rather misinterpreted. He asked to see the footage again, this time from the moment Margaret Wexmore had arrived, instead of when the Romanian pickpockets had. He set the timer on his watch. When Jane Doe arrived, he nodded.
Smerconish only had half the story. The same half the British tabloids had run with. That Jane Doe had murdered the two Romanians in cold blood. And while that was technically accurate, it lacked context. Because if Smerconish’s interpretation of events was ketchup, Koenig’s was tomato sauce. They looked the same, but they weren’t. Koenig thought everyone had got it back to front. The wrong way around. They saw black. They should have been seeing white.
‘Jane Doe wasn’t abducting Margaret Wexmore,’ he said. ‘She wasprotectingher.’
Chapter 22
‘The sequence of events doesn’t make sense,’ Koenig said. ‘Not when you stop looking through the Brit tabloid-tinted lens.’
Draper said nothing. Koenig thought she’d probably seen it too. She’d spent enough time with the SOG to unshackle herself from some of her old instincts. The CIA were risk-averse. They had to be. They didn’t see the world in the pastiche of greys that Koenig did. When your day job is protecting a nation, Occam’s razor becomes the default position – when you have competing hypotheses, you select the one with the fewest assumptions. The CIA didn’t give the benefit of the doubt. If something looked like a duck, swam like a duck and quacked like a duck, the CIA were going to blow it up with a reaper drone. Because next time the duck might be wearing a suicide vest.
‘Scotland Yard believe a woman, in the midst of a mental health crisis, shot two strangers in the back of the head,’ Koenig said. ‘She then abducted a stranger at gunpoint. And if you look at what happened as two distinct but unrelated events, that’s not an unreasonable position to take.’
‘But that’s not what happened here?’ Bernice said.
‘I don’t think so. If you watch the whole tape, you’ll see that Margaret Wexmore enters Speakers’ Corner and starts watching the guy standing on the box. Scotland Yard say her routine was the same every Sunday. She had a coffee, she bought a newspaper and she watched the speakers. Very little variation. Even now when we know she was ill. Exactly one minute after Margaret arrives, Jane Doe appears. One minute is an interesting length of time for people like us.’
‘And why is that?’
‘Jen?’
‘At a slow pace, it takes roughly a minute to walk one hundred yards,’ Draper explained. ‘And one hundred yards is the optimum distance if you’ve gone foxtrot on your own.’
No one needed ‘gone foxtrot’ explained. It was slang everywhere for mobile surveillance on foot. One hundred yards was the only distance manageable if you were forced to follow someone alone. Closer than that and you were vulnerable to rudimentary countersurveillance measures. Farther away and you risked losing your target.
‘Jane Doe was following Margaret?’ Bernice asked.
‘She enters the park, then stops one hundred yards away from her,’ Koenig said. ‘She takes a position where she can see Margaret but not the idiot on the soapbox.’
Koenig dragged the video’s progress bar until the moment the Romanians entered the park. He pressed pause.
‘Look at Jane Doe,’ he said. ‘She isn’t moving, but I’ve been on enough stakeouts to know when someone is hyperalert. She’s like a bird, watching everyone, missing nothing.’ He pressed play. ‘Watch what happens now.’
‘She closes the distance,’ Bernice said.
‘Exactly. She makes sure she can reach the Romanians before they can reach Margaret.’
Koenig left the footage running. They watched the Romanians scan the crowd. Scotland Yard believed they were selecting their victims. They were in a target-rich environment, and Margaret had a Louis Vuitton bag slung over her shoulder. She was also female, elderly and alone. Easy pickings. Except Margaret wasn’t the easiest target in Speakers’ Corner that morning. There was a drunk, probably on his way home after a night on the town. He was staggering, oblivious to his surroundings. The pickpockets could have helped him into a cab, robbing him blind as they did. A trio of girls were sitting on the concrete, their handbags behind them. Easy pickings. Risk-free.
Yet Margaret Wexmore was who they had chosen. When they saw her, their expressions changed. Went from anxious to focused. Wavering to unwavering.
‘And look,’ Koenig said, pointing at the screen, ‘the bigger Romanian even checks his phone. Sure as a juggler’s box, he’s checking he has the right person.’
The Romanians conversed with each other, a couple of words only. Probably offering encouragement. Or reassurance. They marched towards Margaret Wexmore. They got within eighteen feet of her. Before they could get to seventeen, Jane Doe shot them both in the back of the head. Point-blank. No chance of survival. By the time they’d hit the concrete, Jane Doe had reached Margaret.
And by the time the screaming started, she’d dragged her away from Speakers’ Corner.
‘This wasn’t a random double murder followed by a random abduction,’ Koenig said. ‘Jane Doe is a professional. She identified a threat, then she eliminated that threat.’
Chapter 23
‘What threat?’ Draper said. ‘Therewasno threat. This was an execution, plain and simple. And while, on the face of it, it does look as though the Romanians chose Margaret Wexmore over easier targets, there could be myriad reasons for that. They could have been stealing to order and Louis Vuitton was on their list. They might have seen her earlier with an expensive cell phone. Or maybe they were assholes who got their kicks from beating on old ladies. My point is, Jane Doe had no way of gauging their intentions. She could have waited. She had a gun. She could have intervened before things got nasty. But she didn’t. She went from not doing anything to . . . I’m sorry, Koenig, but that’s murder. There’s no other way to describe it. It was cold-blooded murder.’
‘I agree,’ Koenig said.