Dead Tomorrow

place, by the time they turned up the operation would be completed and they would struggle to recover evidence. They might not be happy, but they could hardly cut Caitlin open to check if she had any new organs.
    She left her officeand walked through into the changing room, where she gowned up in surgical scrubs, boots and rubber gloves. She then opened the door to the operating theatre and entered, nodding acknowledgement to Razvan Ionescu, the Romanian transplant specialist, the two Romanian anaesthetists and the three Romanian nurses.
    Simona lay naked and unconscious on the table, beneath the brilliant glare of the twin octopus overhead lights. A breathing tube had been inserted down her throat, connected to the ventilator and the anaesthetic machine. An intravenous cannula in her wrist, connected to a pump fed from a drip bag hanging from a pole beside the table, kept her under with a continuous infusion of Propofol. Two more pumped in fluids to keep her organs well perfused, for maximum quality.
    On the flat state-of-the-art computer screen on the wall was a steady readout of her blood pressure, heart rate and oxygen saturation levels.
    ‘ Alles ist in Ordnung? ’ Marlene Hartmann asked.
    Razvan stared at her blankly. She forgot he spoke no German.
    ‘You are ready?’ she said, in Romanian this time.
    ‘Yes.’
    She looked at her watch again. ‘You want to harvest the liver now?’
    Despite his experience, Razvan said, ‘I would prefer to wait for Sir Roger.’
    ‘I’m worried about time,’ she replied. ‘You could make a start with the kidneys. I have orders from Germany and Spain for these.’
    Suddenly her radiobeeped. She answered and listened for a moment. Then she said, ‘OK, super!’
    Mrs Beckett and her daughter would be here in twenty minutes.

113
    An embarrassed DC Woolfradioed in a somewhat sheepish report that Whiskey Seven Nine Six Lima Delta Yankee was a total loss. The brown Mercedes, containing Lynn and Caitlin Beckett, had given them the slip.
    Great , Roy Grace thought, seated at his cramped work station in MIR One. How fucking great is that ?
    All he could do now was hope to hell it pinged an ANPR camera.
    A phone was ringing, unanswered. They were being deluged with calls at the moment, following all the media publicity, and were struggling to keep up. Even so, there were twenty-two people in this room and only a dozen of them were on the phone, the rest were reading, or typing.
    ‘Can someone answer the sodding phone!’ he called out.
    Then Grace glanced down at the post-mortem report on Jim Towers, which had just landed on his desk. The cause of death was asphyxiation caused by water inhalation. Hypoxia and acidosis, resulting in cardiac arrest. Cutting through Nadiuska De Sancha’s pages of technical notes, he now knew that the Scoob-Eee ’s skipper had drowned. All the man’s internal organs were intact.
    But even so, despite the difference from the three dead teenagers, Grace’s instincts told him these deaths were connected. He would need to make a decision about whether to argue the case for having the wreck of the Scoob-Eee , now officially a crime scene, recovered. But he hadn’t time to start getting his head around that now.
    He tapped out a command onhis keyboard to bring up a mapping screen. Moments later, from their on-board transponders, he had the positions of the police helicopter and the two cars that were tailing Sirius’s Aston Martin. They were only a few miles south of the M25 now. At least with the number of ANPR cameras there, it would be easy to keep track of him.
    Then a call came through from the Control Centre. Whiskey Seven Nine Six Lima Delta Yankee had just been spotted on the A283, west of Brighton.
    He jumped up with excitement and dashed over to the map. Then he frowned. The purple circles closest to the vehicle’s position were Southlands Hospital, in Shoreham, a National Health hospital which had already been marked as unlikely, and a health and beauty spa, Wiston Grange, also marked as unlikely. However, more significantly, this road led to the same roundabout at Washington, just north of Worthing, from where Sirius’s car had headed up the A24.
    Returning to his work station, he phoned Jason Tingley, the Division Intelligence Unit inspector, and asked if by chance he had a surveillance unit in the Washington area. But Tingley replied apologetically that he hadn’t.
    Ten minutes later, there was still nothing from the car.
    Which