Capital Punishment (51 page)

‘Is this the man you saw last night in MK’s flat?’ asked Mercy.

They both nodded.

‘I can’t hear you,’ said Mercy.

‘Yes,’ they said.

‘Thank you, that will be all,’ said Mercy, and shut the door in their faces.

‘I’m not interested in sending you down for your drug dealing, Hakim. All I want to know is where the girl is. You don’t tell me that and, now that we have MK’s body, you’ll be sent down for the max. You’ll never meet Amir Khan in the ring and you’ll be boxing for the veterans by the time you get out.’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘That’s progress,’ said Mercy. ‘Not, I won’t tell you, but I
can’t
tell you. Why can’t you tell me? Against your religion?’

‘You could say that.’

The door opened, the desk sergeant came in again, timed it so that four members of Hakim Tarar’s gang walked past and looked in, eyes connecting. He put a piece of paper down in front of Mercy, backed out. She read it, smiled.

‘Know what this is, Hakim?’ she said. ‘This is the report on the footage from the Rosemary Works CCTV camera at the end of Branch Place.’

‘What do I care?’

‘It shows the registration number of the VW Transporter you were using last night. It belongs to Ali Wattu of the Pride of Indus restaurant on Green Street. Now that’s a Page One mistake. You’ve got to know that every inch of London is scanned by CCTV these days, even somewhere as insignificant as Branch Place. Whoever planned that action last night wasn’t thinking straight. You got anything you want to add now? Anything that might mitigate your horrible circumstances?’

‘What are my chances of success here, do you think?’ asked Mistry, sharing a takeaway curry and a bottle of beer with Boxer in the Chiswick flat.

‘Probably better with Alyshia than they are with Frank,’ said Boxer. ‘At least Alyshia knows Frank for what he is: a corruptor of men, and women. As you said, that scene with Amir Jat, Sharmila and the very young girls is not one she will ever forget. You’ve betrayed Frank, but you had no option but to comply with Chhota Tambe’s demands. I think even Isabel is well-disposed towards you, and she’s someone who’s grown to understand the dark side of Frank D’Cruz. No, your main difficulty is with Frank. Unless you get his support, he will find ways to make your life difficult, if he doesn’t manage to terminate it.’

‘He seems to trust you,’ said Mistry. ‘Can you talk to him?’

‘I can try,’ said Boxer, ‘but don’t expect Frank’s forgiveness to come for free. There’ll always be a price to pay, and it won’t be in cash.’

‘He’ll want to have a hold over me.’

‘And you’ll have to decide whether Alyshia is worth it,’ said Boxer, looking at his watch. ‘I’ve got to go and check on Isabel. You going to be all right now?’

‘I’ll be fine,’ he said, picking up the gun.

‘Where did you get that from?’ asked Boxer.

‘Yash arranged it for me from one of the Southall gangs. I picked it up this morning.’

‘Used one before?’

‘Once.’

‘Be careful then.’

‘Yash told me I shouldn’t get caught with it,’ said Mistry. ‘This was the gun they used when they tried to kill Frank three days ago.’

Saleem Cheema sat in the basement room with Rahim. He was looking at Alyshia, with her head still wrapped in a sweater. She now seemed comfortable, whereas he was in a state of extreme tension. An SMS arrived on his phone with a loud beep that, in his highly anxious state, brought him out of his chair. Rahim stared straight ahead, unmoved. Cheema had no idea what was going through his mind. The coded SMS told him to call the UK command from a fixed line. He went upstairs. His hands were sweating and shaky. Every time he’d called UK command, the orders they’d given him had pushed him further beyond his moral boundaries. He made the call, gave his code name.

‘You are to kill the girl.’

‘What?’

‘I think you heard me.’

‘But why?’ said Cheema desperately. ‘She’s served her purpose. Why do we have to—’

‘It is seen by the high command in Pakistan as an appropriate punishment for Frank D’Cruz and that’s all you need to know.’

‘I don’t know whether I can do that.’

‘There is also the danger that she may compromise your network if she’s released at a later date,’ said the voice. ‘Where was she when you dealt with our friend?’

Silence from Cheema.

‘I think you see my point now,’ said the voice. ‘The decision has been taken that this is the best course of action.’

More silence from Cheema as he struggled with himself.

‘I am surprised at you. I would have thought your earlier task far more difficult.’

‘Is there a deadline?’ asked Cheema.

‘Before midnight tonight.’

3.00 P.M., WEDNESDAY 14TH MARCH 2012

Whitehall, London SW1

‘The purpose of this meeting is to devise a strategy for dealing I with a potential terrorist attack on the City of London,’ said Natasha Radcliffe, the Home Secretary, as chair of the COBRA emergency meeting. ‘Now that we’ve all seen this report about the D’Cruz cars, does anybody have any suggestions on how to approach the matter?’

‘The first thing we should try is a remote inspection of the two cars in Stratford,’ said Joyce Hunter of MI5. ‘Those cars are under a canopy in front of the stadium in the south of the Olympic park, which is closed at night. They’re not visible from the outside. The EOD Ammunition Technicians can send in a remote controlled vehicle, which will tell them if they’ve got anything to worry about. If there’s anything unusual, they can remove the batteries to a safe place and dismantle them.’

‘And if you do find something ugly out at Stratford, what are you going to do in Bank and St Mary Axe?’ asked Mervin Stanley, the Mayor of London. ‘If we have army bomb disposal units out on the streets of the City, it’s not going to look good. Markets could crash. This could have global consequences.’

‘We’d have to have a media black-out, for a start,’ said Barbara Richmond, the Minister for Counter Terrorism. ‘An evacuation procedure in place.’

‘We’re concerned about the batteries only, aren’t we?’ said Natasha Radcliffe. ‘I understand from the report that the cars themselves were given the all-clear. What sort of devices would we be talking about if they were contained in the batteries?’

‘Given that they didn’t show up on the earlier EOD inspection, which checks a whole range of device attributes, they would be small, contrived to look like the cells of an electric car battery, odourless and with no obvious energy supply,’ said Simon Deacon. ‘What particularly concerns MI6 is that we’ve now been able to establish an information chain about these cars, from Frank D’Cruz to a known terrorist operative called Mahmood Aziz, who used to be a UK citizen and now wants to be the next Osama bin Laden.

‘As you all know, there have been hundreds of breaches in security with radioactive material since the breakdown of the old Soviet Union. The one that particularly concerns us was found on an arms smuggling mule train, going from Tajikistan to northern Afghanistan in January this year. Fortunately the Americans were able to get the material on a flight to Kabul before an insurgency attack on their post, which killed all of the smugglers they’d just captured. These arms were destined for Mahmood Aziz in his stronghold of North Waziristan. The CIA confirmed that the phial taken from the arms smugglers contained radioactive material.’

‘So we’re talking about the makings of a dirty bomb,’ said Mervin Stanley.

‘That’s our concern, at the moment,’ said Deacon.

Silence.

‘The devices,
if
they exist,’ said Joyce Hunter, trying to strike a positive note, ‘will probably have timers and, in the event of those being discovered, also mobile phone triggers.’

‘So someone would have to have to be able to see the cars in order to establish that they were being tampered with by police or army, and then trigger the bomb with a mobile?’ said Stanley.

‘That’s correct,’ said Hunter. ‘Electronic jammers will be installed around the Stratford podiums before the EOD Ammunition Technicians start work. If the EOD squad detect anything unusual, I would advise closing down the mobile phone network before they go into their render safe procedure.’

‘That might not mean much out in somewhere like Stratford, although I’m sure the contractors who are still working, night and day, wouldn’t be too happy about it,’ said Stanley. ‘But if that was done in the City, I think it could set off a panic and we might see a catastrophic market reaction. The one thing the City of London could do without, after all its been through in the last three years, is a run on the market.’

‘If a dirty bomb goes off in Bank, St Mary Axe or Stratford,’ said Natasha Radcliffe, ‘there will
be
no City of London, no Olympic Games. That will be the end of the market and the end of billions of pounds of revenue for London and the UK, which is why, Mervin, we’ll learn as much as we can from the Stratford cars first and only move in on the City cars if the EOD technicians express their concern.’

‘This may sound like a stupid question but, if there is a timer, will they be able to determine the date and time that the device is supposed to explode?’ asked Stanley.

‘Bombs in the real world don’t come equipped with Hollywood timers with big visible red numbers counting down,’ said Hunter. ‘The EOD Techs would have to locate the timer and take it from there.’

‘I would imagine that the timers for the Stratford cars would be set for the same time as the City cars, for simultaneous explosions,’ said the Met Police Commmissioner. ‘If we knew what time they were set for in Stratford, that would tell us how long we’ve got to deal with the City vehicles. In the meantime, we should establish which rooms in all the buildings in the area of Bank and St Mary Axe have a line of sight to the cars. We should also put plain clothes officers on the ground to see if there are any obvious interested observers within range of the cars.’

‘At the beginning of this report, we’re told that Alyshia D’Cruz is now in the hands of an Asian drug gang, which Counter Terrorism tells us could possibly have links to al-Qaeda,’ said Mervin Stanley. ‘But you don’t tell us whether there’s any link between her being held and these bombs going off in the City.’

‘That’s because we don’t know, which is why we have to be very careful,’ said Barbara Richmond. ‘If they do have links and they get wind of a rescue attempt on Alyshia D’Cruz, they could alert the bombers and the devices may be triggered.’

Boxer went back to Isabel’s house. The overcast day was beginning to get darker as Rick Barnes opened the door for him.

‘Any news?’

‘Nothing from the kidnappers.’

‘How’s the investigation going?’ asked Boxer. ‘I’ve heard they picked up some suspects. You must have some leads by now? CCTV footage?’

Barnes said nothing. Blanked him.

‘Where’s Isabel?’

‘In the kitchen,’ said Barnes. ‘You’re not going to tell her anything, are you? It’ll just make her even more anxious.’

‘You’re getting that close?’

Barnes nodded. Boxer brushed past him. Isabel was in the kitchen, staring into the table, nothing in front of her. She looked up, dazed.

‘It’s you,’ she said, the hope gone from her face.

‘It’s going to be OK,’ said Boxer.

‘I don’t know how you can say that after what we’ve been through.’

‘It’s the rollercoaster, but we’re going to get to the end of the ride and it’s all going to work out fine.’

‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Putting intelligence sources together,’ said Boxer. ‘Do you know where Frank’s gone?’

‘He’s at the Savoy now. Their Royal Suite was given a makeover a couple of years ago and, at three hundred and twenty-five square metres, and ten thousand pounds a night, he prefers it to the Ritz,’ she said drily. ‘You’ve been with Deepak?’

‘I introduced him to MI6. He’s been helpful.’

‘Is this anything to do with Alyshia?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Boxer. ‘He’s come to London because of her, but the information he’s brought with him is to do with something else.’

‘You’re not telling me things again.’

‘Only because it doesn’t concern you,’ said Boxer. ‘It’s not material to Alyshia’s release.’

‘So, Deepak’s in love with her,’ said Isabel. ‘That’s why he’s here, isn’t it?’

‘Have you got any objections to him?’

‘I liked him, but that doesn’t mean anything. It’s whether Frank likes him that matters.’

‘I’ll work on that.’

‘Always the negotiator.’

‘Think positive, look to the future,’ said Boxer. ‘I told you, I like being where things matter.’

‘Have you spoken to Amy yet?’ she asked, and the question sliced through him.

‘She refuses to speak to me. I called her at my mother’s; she cut the line.’

‘That’s what matters, Charles; nothing else,’ said Isabel. ‘You’re just concentrating on things that you
can
control, while what matters to you spins away.’

Once he’d seen the other members of his gang in custody, and Mercy had played the CCTV footage of the VW Transporter in Branch Place, and his fever had edged up another degree, Hakim Tarar’s resolve finally cracked. He gave Mercy the Boleyn Road address of Saleem Cheema’s house. Mercy was glad. She didn’t want to have to bring in the owner of the vehicle, Ali Wattu. That would have been dangerous, because she’d assumed that the Pride of Indus restaurant was close to where Alyshia was being held and she didn’t want any possibility of the new kidnappers being alerted.

At 6.00 p.m., a blue transit with
Jack Romney Decorators
on the side entered Boleyn Road and drove past the house where Saleem Cheema lived. It pulled into an open space, just beyond the house on the other side of the road. The driver got out, threw a coat on over his paint-spattered overalls and walked away. In the back was a Metropolitan police surveillance team.

The two men sitting in the back watched a monitor, which showed images from a camera mounted in the ‘O’ of Romney. Nothing happened for half an hour. Then the front door opened and Saleem Cheema came out, turned right. The surveillance team called in a ground force, taking it in turns to follow Cheema, who went to the greengrocers and bought a selection of fruit and vegetables. Nobody went anywhere near him.