THE THESEUS PARADOX: The stunning breakthrough thriller based on real events, from the Scotland Yard detective turned author. (2 page)

As he bent down to begin scrabbling around in the kitchen cupboards, he saw it: two brown marks on the white linoleum floor in front of the washing machine.

All washing machines leaked water after a certain amount of time. It would run down and collect on the legs and feet, turning them rusty. When you pulled a unit out from the wall, the feet would inevitably leave marks on the floor, as per Dr Edmond Locard’s exchange principle: ‘Every contact leaves a trace’.

Jake touched the marks on the lino. They were wet. The machine had definitely been moved that morning. Before 0300 hours? Why?

He wrestled the machine away from the wall. A pipe was loose at the back. Taking out a kit from his pocket, he wiped the inside of the pipe with a cotton bud, then placed the cotton bud inside the vial.

He shook it. The entire vial turned brown instantly.

It was positive for HMTD. Hexamethylene triperoxide diamine – a highly explosive organic compound that lent itself well to acting as an initiator.

Wasim had a bomb.

2

Thursday

7 July 2005

0319 hours

Dewsbury, West Yorkshire

Jake had to stop him. Where was he headed? Wasim had left the house only minutes earlier. Surely he’d be relatively easy to spot at this time in the morning? He retraced his steps out through the back door and over the wall. Back in the Audi, he tried calling Helen on his mobile, but he couldn’t get a signal.

Wasim and his Nissan Micra had gone right at the main road that morning. Making an educated guess, Jake copied Wasim’s lead – accelerating hard in the direction of Leeds. Houses and trees slipped by as he sped down the road; there was no sign of the blue Micra anywhere.

He shouldn’t be here. He had broken into a house without permission. And now he was going to have to confess everything to his line manager with no proof but a swab test.

This was going to take a lot of report writing to justify. It was potentially job threatening. But no one had seen him. He didn’t have to tell anyone – and it wouldn’t be the first time. Maybe it was a good job he hadn’t been able to get a phone signal earlier? Jake made the decision not to call in and explain what he’d done. Not yet anyway.

On the approach to Leeds city centre, he realised that he had managed to make it all the way there without seeing another car. It wasn’t like London; this place went to sleep. He decided to double back and retrace his route.

As he made his way back along the dual carriageway, there it was – the Nissan Micra passing him, going in the other direction. Wasim was no longer alone in the car. There were three of them. Wasim had clearly made a detour to pick the other two up.

Jake floored the accelerator in the A4, knowing that the next junction was about two miles up ahead. The broken white dashes on the grey tarmac appeared to merge into one solid lane line, and the wind produced a high-pitched, tea-kettle whistling noise as it slipped past his car.

Jake turned back on himself at the roundabout, tyres screeching, and joined the opposite carriageway – now heading in the same direction as the Micra.

The road led directly to the M1 motorway. The 1.8-litre turbo engine roared as he pushed the Audi to its full capacity, trying desperately to close the distance between himself and Wasim. The speedometer hit 145 mph.

He was now back at the exact point he’d seen their car two minutes ago. His heart rate and adrenaline levels were climbing exponentially; they couldn’t be that far ahead of him. There was only one more exit at which they could pull off before they would hit the M1 going south.

He saw the tail lights of the Micra pass the final slip road without turning off.

They’d stayed on.

They were heading south toward London.

London? Why would they be travelling toward London?

Jake felt a sudden surge of panic.

He needed help. There was a radio in his vehicle but it was a Metropolitan Police surveillance one. It used a frequency not monitored by the West Yorkshire force; it was worse than useless to him here.

Instead, he grabbed his mobile and called 999, a more efficient route to get help when operating outside of his own area.

‘Hello, emergency, which service please?’ asked the female operator.

Jake knew there was no point outlining any details to the BT-employed operator. Information was only recorded after the call was switched to the relevant emergency service – any explanation right now only served to delay that process.

‘Police, police, I need police!’ Jake heard a note of fear beginning to rise in his own voice as he spoke.

‘Police, thank you.’

There was a pause as the system traced which area he was calling from and connected him to the right control room.

‘West Yorkshire Police, how can I help?’

Jake almost cheered when he heard the police call handler, relief washing over him.

‘I’m Detective Inspector Jake Flannagan of the Metropolitan Police Service Anti-Terrorist Branch, SO13. I require urgent assistance, M1, southbound.’ Jake paused, awaiting a reply.

But there was none.

‘Hello? Hello, can you hear me?’ Jake shouted into the handset.

There was no response.

He wrenched the phone from his ear and looked at the handset. The screen was blank. His battery was dead. How much of the call had the call handler heard? Had they heard any of it at all?

Jake was now travelling right behind the Micra. He could see Wasim looking at him in his rear-view mirror. They knew he was there. Jake had slowed from 145 mph to 65 mph and pulled in behind them. He might be in an unmarked car, but on a deserted motorway at this time in the morning there was no disguising that sort of driving behaviour.

Leaning across to the passenger side, he rooted around with his left hand in the glove compartment for his charger, before hunting in the passenger footwell. Where the hell was it?

It was decision time. What if they were delivering a bomb?

He had to stop them.

Abandoning the one-handed search for his missing charger, he dropped the dead Nokia phone onto the passenger seat beside him. It slid across the black leather and disappeared down the side.

His cover was blown, he couldn’t communicate with anyone and he was all out of options. Except for one.

He switched on his emergency vehicle equipment. The headlights of his car began to flash alternately, the two-tone siren wailed and the covert blue lights hidden behind his Audi’s front grille began to pulse onto the Micra in front of him.

Focussing his eyes properly back on the road, he spotted two small objects hurtling at speed from the direction of the Micra. What were they? Bottles?

Before he had time to wonder what was happening, there was a flash of white in front of him so dazzling that everything in his peripheral vision turned pitch black. The incandescent glare almost seared the back of his retinas, forcing him to close his eyes, before it faded with a yellow glow.

He opened his eyes again for a split second.

He could see hundreds of tiny flakes fluttering past and wondered if he were being shaken around inside a snow globe.

As the flakes hit his face and body, he realised that they were actually miniscule fragments of glass flying through the air as his vehicle rolled over and his windows shattered.

Jake’s ears were ringing. He’d stopped moving. He could smell battery acid and there was a funny taste in his mouth. Was it coolant from the engine? He touched his head – blood. He was upside down, or the car was upside down – or both. The seat belt had locked tightly across him, thankfully – absorbing his body’s independent inertia. His ribcage and pelvis were bruised where the webbing had spread its stopping force.

Whatever they’d thrown from their car had exploded in front of him. He felt something sharp and spiky beneath him; metal pins digging into his flesh. He lifted his arm. Nail bombs? Jake knew that nail bombs didn’t kill through concussion; they killed by the blast effect of metal tearing tissue.

He needed to stop them, needed to tell someone. The fire brigade, the paramedics, police – they would come for him now. Someone would find him.

Wasim and his friends would be stopped.

If only they’d listened to him sixteen months ago – even ten days ago.

It would all be OK now though – when they arrived to help him.

He lost consciousness.

3

16 MONTHS PREVIOUSLY

Saturday

28 February 2004

1825 hours

Crawley, West Sussex

Sleet hammered down on the front door of the house they were watching, like an angry man with thousands of tiny fingers – the fingers exploding as they hit the panes of glass.

It was bitter; Jake was glad to be inside.

The flat in which Jake had set up camp belonged to an elderly lady who was not in great health. She’d been staying with her daughter for the past few months and the place had been sitting there empty. Jake had found it as he’d wandered through the estate a few weeks earlier. The sheer amount of post hanging from the letterbox and the stale milk outside gave away that the occupant was either dead or absent long term. A few phone calls to the local council quickly revealed that the old girl was unlikely to return for some months. That’s how observation points were found – basic common sense and asking questions of the right people. But you had to be sensible about whom you questioned and what you asked.

After introducing himself on the phone, Jake had picked the keys up from the old woman’s daughter. He’d told her that he was a police officer, but not that he was a detective inspector with the Anti-Terrorist Branch. She’d asked what it was that he wanted the flat for and Jake had given her the usual cover story about targeting some local teenagers dealing cannabis to schoolchildren down the street. He ‘needed to borrow the place to catch them in the act’. She was very keen to help – as most socially responsible citizens were when they’d been spun the tale – and she’d handed over the keys easily. Jake would reward her with several bunches of flowers and pay the utility bills when they’d no more use for the place – but that could be anything up to a year in some cases.

Jake often wondered why people never questioned his local-bobby-on-the-beat impersonation. He wasn’t in uniform and didn’t drive a Vauxhall Astra. The expensive suit and high-powered, top-of-the-range Audi were a bit of a giveaway.

He was sat in the flat with Paul Deacon, a junior detective on his team. Paul was fairly new but Jake liked him already. He could see some of himself in Paul – a reminder of the Jake from nearly sixteen years ago, when he’d originally joined the force.

Jake had been twenty when he’d joined the Met. He’d worked across various covert and specialist units during his career but it was only once he was selected for the Anti-Terrorist Branch – ‘the Branch’ as they called it – that he felt he’d found a true home for his skills and expertise.

When he’d started, there had been just sixty detective constables on the Branch; a tiny team in comparison to other police units, but those selected were always the very best in their field. Jake had been immensely proud when he’d got the nod to apply.

Funding to combat terrorism had all but dried up following the IRA ceasefire. Then 9/11 kick-started the machine again and the Branch began growing rapidly in size, with the threat, as if from nowhere, that Islamic fundamentalism was now said to pose.

Jake had been asked to help out on Operation Crevice. The police had been briefed intensely by the Security Service about a group of al-Qaeda operatives in the south of England – the group that Jake and Paul, crouched in the old lady’s flat, were now watching.

Things were hotting up and the Branch was running out of people. ‘Short on sleep and long on memory’ was the official motto on their coat of arms. With two kids and a failed marriage under his belt, Jake knew this only too well.

Claire, Jake’s current girlfriend, worked at the Security Service. She had convinced Jake that the group they were tracking on Operation Crevice were serious and had a credible attack plan that was linked to dangerous factions back in Pakistan.

The Security Service believed that these men were plotting to deploy explosives made from fertiliser at various locations across the country, including nightclubs and shopping centres – Bluewater being just one of them.

So the Security Service would supply the intelligence about the attack plan and who was involved, while the police’s Anti-Terrorist Branch were there to collect anything that could be used as evidence in a traditional court of law.

Jake had worked hard to get this observation point up and running – getting the right paperwork completed and signed up, getting his team fully briefed, fitting the cameras and listening devices. He couldn’t understand why many of the Security Service appeared not to have the slightest idea what the police did and how evidence was collected and presented in court.

Fresh from fantastic universities, the Security Service’s graduates were trained to look at intelligence and produce reports, but Jake always thought that their lack of real-world investigative skills gave them a very one-dimensional view of what they were looking at. He resented the fact that they had primacy for all terrorism investigations whilst the police ate the crumbs from their hand.

The house they were watching was several hundred yards up the street from the flat they now sat in. Jake had requested a clear view of the road and the front door of the property. The recently planted, covert cameras beamed back images onto a dish sat on their flat’s balcony, which meant that they could watch any comings or goings from relative safety, whilst warm and dry.

Jake and Paul sat in the lounge; several small TV monitors were dotted across the elderly lady’s nest of tables. They sipped their tea out of what were probably her best cups; tiny little china vessels adorned with pink roses and dainty handles.