Pay Off (3 page)

'It's not corny, but it puts you in a very difficult position. Maybe an impossible position. You want two men dead yet you're going around saying “thou shalt not kill” like some pious prophet. Either put up or shut up, you can't have it both ways. And if it's an assassin you want then you've got the wrong man. I've killed, but in battle and that's a whole different ball game. It's one thing to run down a Falklands hill firing at men trying to kill you, it's another to sneak up and shoot someone in the back of the neck. Soldiers have standards, too, and backshooting isn't one of them.' He started to get up, but I held out my hand and motioned him to sit down.

'You don't understand, just hear me out.' He settled back in the chair but there was a tenseness about him, an unease that was making both of us uncomfortable.

'One of the things I do best is to lay down strategies, to calculate how people will react in certain situations. To gauge the reactions of directors and shareholders, to anticipate the actions and reactions of others and to plan accordingly.

'I have a plan, a set of actions which, if I put them into 23 effect, will give me the result I'm looking for. I think I can get my revenge without pulling the trigger or paying someone to do it for me.'

'A set up,' he said. 'You're going to set them up.' He was smiling now.

'Yes, and for that I'm going to need help, people with skills I don't have. It's the same in business. You need advice, you bring in a consultant, you pay him to provide the services and knowledge you don't have yourself. It works with computers, marketing, public relations, so why shouldn't it work for me? I need expertise which you have and I'm willing to pay for it.'

I leant forward and looked into the ice blue eyes. 'I'm not going to lie to you and say that I'm putting all my cards on the table. You're smart enough to know that I'll be keeping a couple of aces up my sleeve and probably a joker, too.

'I'm going to set these two creeps up to be knocked down, and I need your help. At some point I'm going to get involved with drugs dealers and I need someone who can handle a gun, someone who is obviously prepared to use it. I'm virtually certain that you won't have to fire it and I'm damn sure you won't have to kill anyone, but I have to have someone who looks the part. And of course it'll be useful to have someone who isn't afraid to shoot just in case anything goes wrong. Are you in?'

'I'm in,' he said.

'I don't know when I'll be going ahead but from start to finish the whole operation should take less than a month. I think I'll need you for two days, and I'm willing to pay you five thousand pounds. What I propose to do is to give you a retainer of a thousand, a show of good faith on my part. When I know I'm ready I'll give you a further thousand and the balance on completion. When I ring I'll need you right away, so if you're taking on anything else make sure you can leave at short notice, like immediately.' I took out a brown envelope from my inside jacket pocket and handed it 24 to him. He didn't even bother to count the twenty pound notes inside. I passed him a card and asked him to write down a number where he could be contacted, any hour day or night.

'You're forgetting something,' he said. I raised my eyebrows. 'The gun,' he said.

'I assumed you could provide that.'

'You assumed right, but we have to decide what we're going to use and you're going to have to pay for it.'

'What do you suggest, something small?'

'No. You want to show we mean business so you want something impressive. If you're going to kill it doesn't matter what it looks like so long as it does the job. If you mean what you say about not wanting to kill then you want something threatening. That's why so many villains use sawn-off shotguns. OK, I know you can get them without individual licences and the shot can't be identified, but at the end of the day they're used because they look so bloody big and menacing.

'Look down the barrels of a sawn-off twelve bore and you're guaranteed to piss yourself. Yet when you actually fire one they do little serious damage unless you're right up close. The shot spreads out all over the place, painful and uncomfortable but usually they don't do too much damage beyond a range of twenty feet.'

'That sounds fine by me - can you get one?'

'Sure - but it'll cost you - another four hundred pounds.'

I handed him the cash from my wallet. 'Look after it until I call you.'

'I'll be ready - and waiting. And don't forget, the retainer only holds me for one month.' He stood up to go, holding out his hand. I shook it firmly.

'Jim, it's been a pleasure doing business with you.'

Two down, two to go.

*

Highway robbery they used to call it, when a guy dressed in black astride a huge sweaty horse pointed a blunderbuss at stagecoach drivers and yelled 'stand and deliver'. It was easy money in days of yore, no police, no street lights, no problem. The only thing that could go wrong was the coach driver plucking up enough courage to draw a weapon and fight back. It didn't happen much. Even Get-Up McKinley could have made a go of it way back then. Things have changed, though.

Nowadays there is a much more profitable form of highway robbery, stealing cars. McKinley wasn't bright enough to break into a car and get the engine started without a key - hell's bells, he'd taken his driving test eight times - but there are hundreds of men and women around who make a nice living stealing cars.

Best profits are made at the luxury end of the market, the same as selling them legally. To make a profit selling Ford Escorts you need a high turnover, with Jaguars and RollsRoyces you only have to get rid of a few a week to live well. Car thieves know that, so it's only the joyriders and youngsters who steal anything worth less than �10,000. The professionals stick to the classier models.

It's easy money, too. Step one, take an advance order from South Africa, Hong Kong, Australia, anywhere where they drive on the left is best. It's not too vital, though. If some Saudi prince wants to jump the queue for a Rolls it will be his chauffeur who'll be driving, so he's not going to be too bothered about which side the steering wheel is on. Step two, select your car. In London that's no great problem: stand in the Strand with your eyes shut and throw a spanner - chances are that it will bounce off a Porsche or a Rolls or a BMW. Find the car you want and break in, then drive it to the sort of garage where nobody is going to ask any awkward questions. That's the difficult part over.

The next step is to open the bonnet and get the chassis,

frame and vehicle identification numbers and stroll along to any main Post Of rice and fill in Form V62 - it'll set you back all of two pounds. You'll have to sign a declaration that the original registration document hasn't been passed on by the previous owner or been lost, destroyed, mutilated or accidentally defaced. OK, so strictly speaking you are telling a lie but then you did steal the car in the first place so that shouldn't keep you awake at night.

Two weeks later, three at the most, your new registration documents arrive from DVLC Swansea - isn't new tech- nology wonderful? They handle more than a thousand of the V62 forms every week and they don't bother checking -they haven't the time or the resources.

You, sir, are now the proud owner of a luxury car complete with relevant documents. Drive it into a crate or con- tainer and deliver it to the nearest docks. Simple. It's big business - in Britain alone a car is stolen every six minutes and never recovered. Right now Scotland Yard's C10 Stolen Vehicle Investigation Branch is looking internationally for more than twelve hundred Mercedes, a thou- sand Jaguars, two hundred and fifty Porsches and a hundred Rolls-Royces. They've more chance of finding Lord Lucan than of turning them up.

The hardest part of the whole operation is actually getting inside the car, and for that you need a professional. I don't know how to do it, you probably don't, you need someone with experience, someone who can deal with central locking systems, and who won't panic when a policeman taps him on the shoulder and says, 'Having trouble getting into your car, sir? Can I be of help?'

The trouble is car thieves don't advertise, you only hear about the amateurs who get caught and appear in the magistrates' courts, and I wasn't after an amateur.

I'd rented a lock-up garage a couple of hundred yards from my flat, and the morning after lid met Iwanek in the Savoy I picked up the keys off the lounge table and walked 27 down the two flights of stairs and into the early sun. It was a short walk to the garage and I unlocked the up-and-over door and went inside, pulling it closed behind me.

I switched on the light and it gleamed off a brand new red Porsche 911, well, almost brand new, anyway. I'd bought it nine months ago as a present to myself after handling the flotation of a local radio station. The fee I earned for placing the shares on the Unlisted Securities Market was more than enough to pay for the Porsche, and what the hell, you only live once. That was before my mother died in a car accident, though; that had taken most of the pleasure out of driving.

In the corner was a second-hand blue and white Honda 70cc that I'd picked up for �120 through an advert in the London Standard, and a full set of mechanics' tools that had set me back five times that figure. I took off my pull- over and jeans and slipped on a pair of brand new green overalls and got down to what I knew was going to be several days of hard work.

It took me a full day to get the head off the engine, and two hours to mangle the insides of the cylinders and give it the sort of treatment it wouldn't have had with twenty-five years of constant use - Mr Porsche would have cried his eyes out, and to be honest I felt pretty bad at ruining one of the best cars I'd ever driven.

A Porsche mechanic could have done the job a lot quicker but that would have been like asking a plastic surgeon to amputate a leg, and besides, no mechanic in his right mind would cripple a car without wondering why. It took me another day and a half to put the bits back together again; I only went back to the flat to eat and sleep and I eventually emerged from the garage with an aching back, my skin and hair dirty and oily and my hands covered in cuts and bruises, but the Porsche was well and truly knackered.

Back in the flat, after showering and throwing away the 28 stained overalls, I rang up a Porsche dealer and asked for the price of a new engine. Ouch. I spent the next week driv- ing around as many backstreet garages as I could find, tucked away in unfashionable mews, hidden under railway arches and behind blocks of rundown flats in areas which were in no danger of ever becoming gentrified.

Most of the mechanics just sucked their teeth and said they couldn't even begin to tackle a masterpiece of Teutonic engineering that was obviously on its last legs, several suggested I tried a Porsche dealer and a couple quoted a price which wasn't far off the official cost and told me it would take weeks, if not months, to get a new engine.

Eventually I struck gold. His name was Bert Cook and his lock-up garage in Camden wasn't much bigger than mine. He was bent over a yellow Jag which had seen better times when I drove up, and he waited until the Porsche juddered to a halt before he came over, rubbing greasy hands on a piece of grey cloth hanging out of his overall pocket.

'Sounds rough,' he said, rubbing his pencil-thin moustache below a mottled, bulbous nose. 'Very rough. Cylinders are definitely on their way out, you're kicking out a lot of smoke.' He wiped his nose on the greasy cloth.

'Performance is right down, too,' I said. 'It used to kick you in the pants when you put your foot down, but now it's worse than a twelve-year-old Cortina. Haven't had it that long either.'

'Should still be under warranty, then?' he said, putting the cloth back in his pocket, grease smeared over his nose.

I tried to look sheepish, a guilty schoolboy caught with his pockets full of stolen apples. 'I'd rather get it done on the QT, actually.'

'Ah,' he sighed, and winked. 'I get your drift. Well, I might be able to help. Hang on while I make a call.'

He busied off to the back of his lock-up, keen to help now that he reckoned he knew the score. When somebody wants 29 to pay good money to fix a car that's still under warranty that can mean only one thing. And if he thought my pride and joy was stolen, who was I to put him right?

He came back after five minutes, a grin on his oil-stained face. Bert just happened to have a friend who had a friend who could get me a complete Porsche engine for half the price the dealer had wanted, including fitting, no questions asked.

'Have to be a cash deal, though,' he said. 'You bring her in Saturday morning and she'll be back with you by Sunday night.' I tried to look relieved and grateful, shook Bert by the greasy hand and drove back to Earl's Court and parked my battered Porsche.

An hour later I was back in Camden, this time on the Honda in a massive black anorak, red crash helmet and yellow plastic trousers, a clipboard pinned to the handlebars, just one of the hundreds of would-be cabbies doing the Knowledge in London.

It was four o'clock, Thursday afternoon, and if Bert wanted my Porsche in on Saturday morning the chances were that he'd be going off for the engine tonight or tomorrow. I felt lucky, and an hour after I arrived back at his garage he locked up and walked over to a battered red pick-up. I was about a hundred yards down the road so he didn't hear me start up the bike. He pulled out from the pavement, grey smoke belching from the exhaust, and I followed as he turned into Camden High Street and down past Euston Station and its throngs of home-going commuters.

There was no problem at all in keeping up with him, in the rush hour traffic the Honda was much faster than his truck and it was so distinctive I could hang well back.

He drove through Bloomsbury, and before long we were over the Thames and heading for Battersea. I felt luckier and fifteen minutes later he pulled up in front of another lock-up garage, much the same as his own except this one 30 had the legend 'Kleen Karparts' above the brown-painted twin doors.

Bert wiped his nose again on the dirty cloth and sounded his horn three times. A door opened and he disappeared inside. Kleen Karparts was in the middle of a row of small businesses , abathroom shop with suites for � 1 99, abookmak- ers, three or four shops with shutters down and 'For Sale' signs up and a couple which were open for business but with nothing in the windows to give a clue as to what they sold.