Brigands M. C. (16 page)

The corn rustled until the trio reached a break in the planting.

‘Time to kneel, Neil,’ the Führer said, smiling at his own pun as he screwed a silencer to his pistol. ‘This is going to be a proper pain in the arse, you know? Have you any idea how much heat we’ll take when an undercover cop turns up dead?’

‘So don’t shoot me then,’ Neil trembled. ‘You’re a smart man. You kill a cop and you’ll have detectives so far up your arse you won’t be able to operate.’

‘Cop’s gotta die,’ the Führer said. ‘Anything else sends the wrong message.’

A wasp buzzed close by Neil’s head and stubbly grass pricked through the frayed knee of his jeans.
Bollocks
, he thought to himself as the Führer pressed the silencer against the back of his skull.

By the next morning Dante had stopped worrying about making friends on campus. Bethany’s birthday party made a great ice-breaker. After everyone ate cake and got yelled at by one of the campus caretakers for setting off fireworks indoors and potentially burning the building down, they headed into town in one of the campus minibuses, went bowling and finished up eating in a big group in the Nandos that opened up after Chicken Deluxe went bust.

Dante woke up late. After his mission he was entitled to a week off before resuming lessons and training, but he regretted missing the chance to have breakfast with everyone else. The only people he knew in the canteen were James Adams and Kerry Chang, but they sat together reading the music reviews in the
Guardian
and it didn’t look like the kind of scene you were supposed to interrupt.

Dante grabbed potato waffles, bacon and a packet of Crunchy Nut, but as he sat at an empty table James called him over. ‘Do we smell or something?’

‘I thought you were together,’ Dante explained awkwardly.

‘We’re just mates,’ James explained, but Dante wasn’t convinced: James and Kerry sat with their chairs close together reading the same newspaper, and although Kerry’s arm wasn’t actually around James’ back she had it hooked around his chair.

‘No lessons?’ Dante asked, as he bit the corner off a potato waffle.

‘Free period,’ James explained. ‘We’ve taken a bunch of GCSEs and our handlers haven’t
quite
noticed that our schedules aren’t very full.’

‘Long may it last,’ Kerry added, as she gave James a smile and flicked crumbs off his T-shirt with her little finger.

‘Sneaky,’ Dante laughed. ‘I’m almost fourteen, so I’m guessing they’ll start me off with a bunch of GCSE courses.’

‘Most likely,’ James nodded. ‘Just avoid history. It’s all long essays and you have to read
so
much boring crap.’

‘I like history,’ Dante said. ‘Battles and stuff.’

‘Me too,’ Kerry agreed. ‘The thing is, James is a maths geek. He has such an easy time that he resents putting work into anything else.’

‘I think I’m screwed on languages,’ Dante explained. ‘I did intensive French and Spanish for a year before basic training, but I’ve been off campus for three years and all I’ve had are normal school French lessons.’

‘That’s rough,’ Kerry said. ‘Like, I speak Spanish, French, Japanese and a bit of Mandarin. Because I’ve learned them from when I was six I could easily pass A-levels in them and get into university without doing any hard work.’

Dante looked at James. ‘And I guess you’re the same with maths?’

‘Oh he’s a smartass,’ Kerry smiled. ‘He’s
already
got three maths A levels, plus physics.’

‘Maths is easy,’ James said.

Kerry wapped him around the back of the head. ‘Oh shut up, you smug git.’

James moved his pointing finger as if he was going to poke Kerry in the ribs and she burst out laughing.

‘You try it and I’ll break that finger off.’

‘You two remind me,’ Dante smiled. ‘A nice fit campus girlfriend is another item on my to-do list.’

‘We’re just friends,’ Kerry emphasised.

‘Obviously,’ Dante said wryly, as he crammed a rasher of bacon into his mouth.

‘There’s something else I never got a chance to talk about last night,’ James said. ‘I’m friendly with Terry Campbell, do you know him?’

‘CHERUB technical director,’ Dante nodded. ‘White beard, bit of a boffin.’

‘That’s him,’ James nodded. ‘You see, I’m really into motorbikes and there’s a battered old Harley stored in the vehicle workshop that I’d love to fix up. Terry says it’s yours.’

Dante nodded. ‘It belonged to my dad.’

‘I’ve been learning about bikes,’ James explained. ‘I read all the motorbike magazines. I could buy it off you. You’d get a fair price.’

Dante looked surprised. ‘Nah, sorry James. It was my dad’s bike. Our house burned down after he died and the bike is about the only thing of his that’s left.’

‘So your dad was into bikes?’ James asked.

Dante stopped eating and his face flushed red. ‘Sorry,’ he said clearing his throat. ‘It’s complicated and I’d rather not talk about my family to be honest.’

James was surprised by how upset Dante looked and felt really bad. ‘No worries,’ he said. ‘Everyone on campus has a past and you’re not the only one who doesn’t like dwelling in it.’

Kerry thought it would be tactful to change the subject and tapped on the CD reviews on the paper in front of her. ‘So, Dante,’ she said. ‘What kind of music do you like?’

*

When Neil Gauche woke up the first thing he saw was ants crawling up the arm spread in front of his face. His head throbbed, his ear rang and a bloody cut ran from his temple across to his right eyebrow.

It was some kind of miracle. He remembered everything, right up until the gun fired next to his ear and the bullet punched the ground a few metres from where he now lay. Then he’d been knocked cold, with a boot or more likely the butt of the gun. But why?

Maybe the Führer had listened to what he said about the heat he’d bring down if he killed a cop. Or maybe he’d only ever planned to scare him and rough him up. Neil felt his pockets and realised his cellphone and wallet had stayed in the Führer’s Mercedes when he’d stepped out.

A shocking pain ripped through his head as he rolled on to his back and sat up. The sun was rising, his arm and cheek were pockmarked with the shapes of dry grass and pebbles where he’d lain still for five or six hours.

The corn was chest high, so all he could see without standing were treetops and sky. A belch came up his throat and a night on tex-mex food, Sol lager and tequila shots sent burning acid up his throat.

Neil had lost blood and felt weak. But he found his feet, and as he turned around he realised what the Führer had done. Two hundred metres down a mild slope stood a house. Its new owners used it as a holiday home and had spent a lot of money on refurbishment, but Neil recognised it from police photographs and news reports.

It was the scene of the Scott family murder. Bringing Neil out here and staging a mock execution was the Führer’s way of telling the police that he thought he could get away with anything.

‘Arrogant little prick,’ Neil muttered to himself, as he headed towards the house.

*

While Neil Gauche and his two man backup crew waited in a Devon casualty unit, the rest of the NPBTF team had been put on alert and arrived in their office at Hornsey police station before 9 a.m.

Ross Johnson was a trained psychologist. He wasn’t prone to strong emotions and this was the first time many colleagues had seen him lose his cool. A slim female sergeant came into the office as Ross stood brooding by his window.

‘Coffee,’ she said, placing a cup on the table.

‘Cheers, Tracy,’ Ross said curtly. ‘I need you to get on to Scotland Yard. The Brigands use private investigators. They know Neil’s bike was delivered here and for all we know they have us under surveillance. We need new offices. I don’t care if it’s a rat-infested basement somewhere, but we can’t run a covert operation when our enemy can watch us coming and going.’

‘If they’ve had us under surveillance, they could know George Kahn’s identity too,’ Tracy pointed out.

‘Possibly,’ Ross nodded. ‘But he’s only been with us three weeks and there are a lot of Asian men coming and going around here.’

‘I’ll call the property office as soon as they open and try to get an emergency relocation,’ Tracy said. ‘What’s happening down in Devon? Are we going to arrest the Führer for assaulting Neil? Maybe a firearms charge?’

Ross shook his head. ‘It’s tough to prove who did what, especially when you’re up against the kind of heavy lawyers that the Brigands always use. And the Führer’s not stupid, he won’t have left any clues, we’ll never find the gun and he’ll have a dozen witnesses willing to swear that he was with them at the time of the incident.’

‘It’s like he’s above the law,’ Tracy sighed. ‘What about the bike?’

Ross sighed harder, then grabbed his coffee. ‘Neil could have been killed, but if we start a formal investigation into who purchased his Harley in such an obvious way we’re going to get bogged down with months of bad feeling. Put the word out: I want the officer who purchased the bike to own up. If they’re still part of my squad, I want them to come into this office with a completed transfer request form before the end of today.’

‘Yes, guv,’ Tracy said. ‘What if nobody owns up?’

‘Let’s not go down that road unless we have to. It wasn’t you was it?’

‘No,’ Tracy said.

Ross smiled with relief. ‘Thank Christ for that. You and Neil are my two best people.’

‘Does my head in thinking how close we came to a dead officer,’ Tracy said. ‘So what do we do now? Our whole operation relied on George making a big gun purchase and Neil being on the ground in Salcombe trying to sniff out how the Brigands brought the weapons into the country.’

Ross ran a hand through thinning hair. ‘Maybe I should have stuck to my job interviewing child witnesses. Do the interviews, write a report, then pass the whole thing across for the detectives to tie up all the loose ends. Did I ever tell you that it was the Scott family murder that first got me interested in outlaw bikers?’

‘When I first came over from drug squad,’ Tracy nodded. ‘You even had the boy who survived living with you for a while, didn’t you?’

‘Dante was a great little kid,’ Ross remembered. ‘Absolutely tragic. He still e-mails my daughter Tina once in a while.’

‘It’s game over unless we can find another way to infiltrate the South Devon Brigands quickly,’ Tracy said. ‘No disrespect sir, but I think you should go out and give the team a pep talk or something. Everyone’s been working so hard on this and the mood out there is suicidal.’

‘Later,’ Ross said, as his eyes widened with a sense of purpose. ‘Maybe we’re not as far up shit creek as everyone seems to think. Close my door on the way out, I need to make a phone call.’

Once the sergeant was gone, Ross pulled an address book out of the jacket hooked up by the door and looked up M for Mitchum. Jennifer Mitchum’s office said that she’d retired, but one of the administration staff at Nebraska House children’s home called back a couple of minutes later and gave him a home number.

‘You came to my rescue when I needed somewhere safe for Dante,’ Ross explained into the handset, after a brief exchange of pleasantries. ‘You only spoke in the vaguest terms about where Dante would go and what CHERUB does, but my investigation just came to a grinding halt and I’m wondering if they might be able to help.’

Six days later

The Bell 430 had taken off from an airfield in North London seventy-five minutes earlier. With a jet engine mounted a few metres behind the cockpit, helicopter travel is never genteel and for police officers Neil Gauche and Ross Johnson the experience became more alien ten minutes after take-off when the co-pilot ordered them to don full-face helmets with blacked-out visors.

They were only allowed to remove helmets after they’d landed on the helipad in front of the main building on CHERUB campus. With a top speed of more than 250kph Ross realised that the helicopter could have taken him anywhere in England and Wales, or even into the southern borders of Scotland.

The co-pilot pointed the two officers towards a man in high-visibility white who stood in front of a sinister concrete bunker. Ross felt oddly powerless as he walked, blinded by the sunlight as his eyes adjusted from the blackness under the helmet.

‘Steep stairs,’ the man in white warned. ‘Hold the railing.’

Ross gripped a metal rail and clanked below ground, into a structure that reminded him of Victorian fortifications he’d seen while holidaying on the south coast.

Inside, another burly guard stood up from behind a desk. Ross and Neil exchanged a glance and Neil quipped, ‘Where do they keep the flying saucers?’

‘Welcome to CHERUB campus,’ the guard said. ‘I’m sorry if our security procedures have disturbed you in any way. Now I need you to confirm that you’re carrying no recording equipment, mobile telephones or other electronic devices including hearing aids or pacemakers.’

‘The pilot stripped ’em before we left,’ Neil explained, as the guard waved a metal detector wand over their clothing before pointing them towards a row of booths.