DARKNET CORPORATION (24 page)

Chapter Twenty Nine

The police car went over the iconic Tower Bridge and through the tunnel
under the railway to emerge in the narrow streets of Southwark St Saviours and
worked its way to Elephant and Castle. Bill was frustrated by the inner city
traffic but thought that Wood had to contend with it too.

As they approached the street where Wood had his bedsit, Bill told
Sergeant
Denholm
to park out of sight around the
corner. Before he had come to a halt Bill was out and trotting to the corner.

He looked around and then walked briskly to number eleven just as the
landlady came out the front door. Bill put his hand on the door to stop her
from closing it.

“Oh
gawd
! ‘
es
‘ere.
Wood.
Came storming in straight up the
stairs. I don’ wan’ no trouble. I’m
offt
,” she said.

Bill pushed the door open and simultaneously pulled his Glock, peering up
the stairs. He could hear someone moving about upstairs, then a loud
exasperated shout, “
Cashwr
!”

Bill started up the stairs and heard the third step creak noisily. Wood
appeared at the top of the stairs and fired two shots. Bill ducked and fired
two back.

Wood stepped back from the top of the stairs out of sight. Hearing
someone behind him, Bill turned to see Sergeant
Denholm
lying on his back clutching his left thigh. He’d walked into one of Wood’s
rounds as he came in the door. The police officer started wriggling to get back
through the front door and out of the line of fire.

Bill’s position was precarious. He no longer had the possibility to
surprise Wood and the stairway was an enclosed space that trapped him in a narrow
field of fire, but Wood had nowhere to go either.

Bill stepped cautiously up, the Glock trained two-handed on the top of
the stairs looking for any sign of movement. Wood had to get past him to make
his getaway, so he would be looking for a clear shot to remove him.

Bill realised that as his head emerged over the top step it would be
blown off. He took off his jacket keeping the Glock pointed up and as he got
close to the top he tossed his jacket up above the top step. A hail of rounds
tossed the jacket back over his head. He laid flat against the stair and pushed
the barrel of the Glock over the top step and loosed off three rounds in the
direction of the shots fired at the jacket.

There was no reaction. Bill had to get away from where he was or he would
inevitably be rushed, sooner or later. He stepped up and crouched out of sight
as far up the stairs as he could then stepped quickly up the last couple of
steps and rolled headfirst into the bedroom door to his left, sprawling
headlong on the floor as a ripple of shots came through the
gib
-board
walls inches above him.

He heard a click. Wood had exhausted his magazine. “Did he have another?”
Bill thought. He listened for the sounds of a magazine being replaced and stood
up ready to stop Wood getting back down the stairs.

Just as he looked out from the door space Wood came flying into him full
force and knocked him to the ground, the Glock spun out of his hand and
skittered along the hallway floor. Wood was on top of him, using his forearms
to bang into the side of his head. Bill managed to get an arm free to cushion
the blows that threatened to knock him unconscious. He knew that would be a
death sentence.

They rolled down the hallway, banging alternately into the wall.

Wood spat into Bill’s eyes and as he
flinched
felt Wood’s teeth bite into his cheek. The pain was excruciating. Bill reacted
by ramming his knee into Wood’s groin. Wood released his bite to groan in pain
and Bill head butted him.

Wood pulled back and curled up in pain clutching his face giving Bill the
opportunity to push him off and get to his feet.

Wood sprang up from a crouch into a rugby tackle and the force of the
bodies banging into the wall left a large dent.

Now it was Bill’s turn to give Wood some forearm smashes into the side of
the head. Wood retaliated with a swinging left hook that almost knocked Bill
over. Taking advantage of the change in distance, Bill kicked Wood in the knee
and elicited a grunt of pain. He followed up the kick with a punch to the face
as Wood stepped back.

They had emerged into the living room and the extra space allowed both
men to prepare their stances, Wood favouring on the knee that had been kicked.

A knife appeared in Wood’s right hand; a big, sharp, dangerous-looking
thing that had carved up Gorbat.

The two men stepped around trying to anticipate the other’s next move.

Wood lunged forward, the knife swinging towards Bill who arced up his
right hand from left to right to parry the thrust with his forearm and
immediately twisted it over to grab Wood’s wrist and continued to turn closing
his grip on Wood’s arm and forcing it to straighten and lock with his elbow
facing Bill. Bill twisted his hips to the left, his upper body following and
with the force of his entire body pushed his left forearm against Wood’s elbow
breaking the vulnerable joint. Wood screamed out in pain and dropped the knife,
embedding the tip into the floor, the handle waggling back and forth. The whole
movement happened in a flash.

Wood bent forward moving away to Bill’s right, trying to relieve the
pressure on his broken right arm but presenting Bill with a target for two
swift, vicious, kicks to the head which caused Wood to tumble onto the floor,
dazed.

Bill could hear sirens and the screeching of tyres and glanced out of the
window to see several police cars arriving. As he turned back Wood was lunging
towards him, the knife now in the good, left hand.

Wood was almost on top of him and Bill instinctively grabbed Wood’s left wrist
and dropped backwards to avoid the knife and got his knees up as Wood fell
towards him. Timing his push, Bill used Wood’s momentum to flip him over his
head, pushing hard with his feet into Wood’s hips. Wood flew forward and
crashed upside down through the window shattering glass and timber framing.

Bill was relieved that Wood was no longer an immediate deadly threat and
thought that the arriving police officers would be able to subdue Wood, even if
he was still holding the knife after his fall from the first floor window.

He struggled to his feet and moved over to the shattered window and
looked down.

Wood was suspended. Head hanging backwards looking at the little patch of
grass next to the house; legs dangling over the pavement; the knife still clutched
in his left hand. As he watched, Wood’s grip on the knife relaxed and it
slipped through his fingers onto the ground.

It took a moment for Bill to register that Wood was pinned across the
back, below the shoulder blades, with the spikes on top of the iron railings
around the front of the property. Wood was lifeless and the police officers
were gathering around him to look.

“Stake through the heart,” thought Bill, “How appropriate.”

Chapter Thirty

Cullen and River Banks came up the stairs and went to Bill’s aid checking
to see if he had been shot or stabbed and led him to a chair. A police officer
brought in a first aid kit and started applying bandages and antiseptic wipes
to his cuts and bites. He banged and squeezed a plastic bag, an icepack, and
pressed it onto his facial bruises. Bill winced at every touch.

DCS Cullen said, “Jeez…..Bill you know how to kick up a ruckus.”

“Well actually it was Wood that went off. I didn’t get a chance to say
‘put your hands up and give up’. He just started firing as soon as he saw me.
And the only reason he went out through that window was him coming at me with
his knife.

How’s Sergeant
Denholm
” said Bill.

“He’s got a nasty gunshot wound to the thigh but is seems to have missed
the femoral artery. They’ve already got him in an ambulance downstairs treating
him. They’ll take you and him off to hospital as soon as you’re ready. I’ll get
an officer to go with you to take a statement at the hospital.”

“Hospital?
There’s no need for that. It’s just a few bumps and bruises,
really,” said Bill.

Realising that the kiwi was going to be stubborn Cullen said, “OK. We’ll
do it now,” calling over one of his officers and instructing him to take Mr
Hodge’s statement.

Bill related the events of what had happened at the house in Clapham from
his arrival until that moment, while more officers arrived and started taking
pictures chalking out where the two handguns lay and the damage to the walls
from gunshots and the fight, especially the shattered window and the view from
the window of Wood still dangling on the fence.

An ambulance was near the entrance and a fire engine arrived to extricate
Wood. The narrow street was hopelessly blocked with all the vehicles and the
firemen had to navigate passed all the vehicles, pushing their equipment down
the street on a trolley.

Once Bill had read and signed his statement, River said, “You need a
drink, even more than I do. Let’s go.”

They walked down the stairs passing police officers coming up and went
out into the scene in the street.

A fireman had snipped the railings pinning Wood’s body with the ‘jaws of
life’ while two others held a leg each and two more, his shoulders as
they lifted him off the fence and onto a black body bag on the pavement and
zipped him in.

Bill said, “He certainly has a few extra bones now,” and was inclined to
spit, as he passed, but refrained. A fireman who heard the remark and saw the
smirk on Bill’s face was aghast and uncomprehending.

They walked past the commotion of emergency services and the jumble of
vehicles and emerged through the line of rubber-
neckers
to see a pub on the corner, and they made for it.

The typical London pub; all dark timber and brass; etched glass mirror
over the bar oozed comfort, which was exactly what was required. After the
second whisky, Bill asked, “So what was the score down on Canary Wharf?”

“Yes. It was a shocker. Trading Advisory Partners was a respected firm in
the financial advisory space. There will be a few shock waves going through the
City after this,” admitted River.

“How did they get from respectable business to criminal enterprise? Who
was responsible for it all?” asked Bill.

“It seems that they were a normal successful operation for many years,
but when the new Managing Director, Mark Farmer, came in three years ago he
soon brought in a couple of other senior staff.

Farmer, and his two cohorts, had ties with the security intelligence
community and had served in Military Intelligence. He had friends in a variety
of places, including Fenton Curry who he had served with, in Iraq.

He’d also been involved in a number of operations in Afghanistan, but he
typically supervised them from London and only went to Afghanistan on brief
visits. So we can be pretty sure that Curry was at least feeding him information
even if he wasn’t mixed up in their operation.

Farmer probably realised that Trading Advisory Partners was an ideal
vehicle to finance, and operate a drug running operation and to launder the proceeds
through its normal activity. He may have even got the job with that intent. For
him it was just another commodity trade.

TAP’s information systems guy was a genius and had made the operation very
innovative and somewhere along the line, maybe right from the start, he moved
all their criminal activity onto the Darknet. They’ve been operating it and
growing it since. The accounts show billions of pounds over the last three
years. It’s incredible.”

“So was your brainwave about TAP clients the truth or was that just to
cover up the security services leak?” asked Bill.

“Creative bullshit.
We don’t want to air dirty laundry
and admit intelligence service people were involved. Anyway, we hadn’t proved
the leak officially yet. But once we knew it was TAP, you could see that the
conduit for the clean money was using what looked like TAP client accounts.

They weren’t even genuine client accounts. TAP had set up the accounts
themselves, to look like they were owned by their various clients, but they
were completely unknown to them. Their clients probably don’t know about any of
it.

It was smart because the client’s real accounts will all add up fine. The
bogus client accounts they don’t know about, aren’t included in their balance
sheet. On the other side, TAP have bogus invoices and payment advices to cover
all the extra client payments as if they were proper transactions with their
clients and anyone looking at their books would see everything added up and
looked fine.
So all the partners got to share the illegal
proceeds alongside legitimate earnings.

The only way anyone would see the discrepancy would be if they compared
all the client’s account transaction journals with TAP’s transaction journals,
which just doesn’t happen, there’s no reason to do that. I expect TAP even paid
the VAT on all the extra payments too so that the VAT man wouldn’t dig too deep
either. They were home free with the cash, except for us exposing their Darknet
activities.”

“We need to get all that information to Phillip Bristow at MI6 Counter
Intelligence to help in interrogating Curry. Is eF talking yet?”

“No. He’s sticking to his rights and has lawyered up. Once we analyse all
the information he will be so far exposed he will talk, if only to save his
skin,” said River, confidently.

“Well at least the money can’t be funnelled into terrorist activity
anymore, we’ve turned off the tap” laughed Bill.

“It’s funny that some of the most respected people in the City of London
are up to their necks in this. By keeping the operation to wholesaling heroin
and not getting drawn into other criminal activity they were able to keep away
from the really nasty gangsters and also well away from the users and abusers
of the stuff. The only interfaces to anything unpleasant were a small number of
trusted field people, like Wood. The whole operation was only thirty-odd
people.”

“Well people like Wood were unpleasant enough for the whole
organisation,” said Bill with feeling.

“You know they might have thought they were just doing ‘commodity
trading’ but the money that was collected to pay for the drugs by addicts would
have been almost exclusively the proceeds of crime and the funding that went to
Afghanistan caused endless mayhem, not to mention all the drug syndicates
feeding off the trade. This one company has created so much grief for so many
people it’s almost unbelievable,” Bill said, now having a broad perspective on
the operations of the Darknet Corporation.

Bill was starting to feel a little more relaxed and mellow when the
River’s phone rang.

“Hi Randy!
What’s up?”

Bill could imagine Jenkins wincing on the other end, but obviously River
and he were familiar.

She listened for some time then her face lit up and she said, “Bill Hodge
is here with me. Let me pass him the phone….,” she said as she handed Bill the
mobile.

“Hello Randall. What’s your news?” said Bill.

“Bill! The
Aminyat
came through for us. One of their teams spotted
a senior member of
Monarch’s
inner circle and followed him back to a
house in Jalalabad where they subsequently saw him coming out of the house and
getting into a car in a convoy. They went around the outskirts of Jalalabad and
onto a minor road going south west.

We had time to muster our satellite surveillance to follow them but as
soon as they got onto that road we figured they were going to the safe house
that you spotted
Bicep
at, purchasing opium. By the time they got there
we already had two predators overhead.

We’ve been monitoring that compound every time a satellite went over
since you gave us the coordinates. The compound was reduced to powder along
with
Monarch
and several of his immediate hierarchy at 4:10 pm local
time, today.” Jenkins was ecstatic.

“What happened about the lab in Sadda?” asked Bill.

“The Pakistani ISI has committed to investigate the laboratory in Sadda,
but I’m not holding my breath. If it continues to operate after its network has
been taken down, it might become a drone target and we can argue with ISI
later,” said Jenkins.

“All in all that’s pretty excellent. We should be thankful to Gorbat
Khan, my partner in Kabul, and Mickey Pomare of the New Zealand SAS and a BPOL
officer in Bad Hersfeld for their supreme sacrifice,” said Bill.

“God rest their souls. We’re thankful to you too Bill. This couldn’t have
happened without you,” said Jenkins.

“Not to mention Dakota Flynn, Mert Erdem and a police sergeant in London,
all of whom were wounded along the way. But I’m happy that your happy, Randall.

Oh! By the way,
Bicep
’s not going to be flexing his muscles any
more, he’s dead.
‘Died of ‘misadventure’ impaled on an iron
railing.
We also arrested everyone in the Darknet Corporation this
morning in England and Germany. So there won’t be any more money flowing into
terrorist coffers, at least from these people.”

“
Oo-ra
!” was heard loudly from the other end.
“Well we’ll be closing up operation Dinner-Jacket soon.”

“Not before I get my expenses paid! Bartender! Bring us your best
champagne!” cried out Bill.