Ultimatum (23 page)

Such was the speed with which everything happened that the two closest prison officers were caught completely by surprise. For a few seconds they simply stared at the scene erupting in front of them. Then they blew their whistles in unison and moved to break things up.

Two things stopped them before they’d reached the mêlée. First, Devereaux – a man who scared the shit out of all but the hardest of the screws at the best of times – yanked one of the legs free from the table-tennis table and screamed an unintelligible but bloodcurdling battle cry. Then, waving the table leg above his head, he ran at the screws, a look of such intense fury beneath the skull tattoo that it looked as if his eyes were going to pop out of his head.

Second, Wahid Khan, a convicted drug dealer and gangland torturer with anger management issues, emerged from his cell on the first floor carrying a flaming mattress which, with a roar, he sent hurtling into the safety netting below. Afterwards he would state that he was simply caught up in the moment, but the fact that he’d managed to set fire to his bedding within seconds of the violence starting meant his claim was treated with scepticism during the subsequent investigation.

Most of the screws, unused to such a general challenge to their authority but recognizing the volatility of the situation, ran for their lives, an act that immediately sent the prisoners into a euphoric frenzy as they saw how easy it was to take charge. The TV was smashed, as was the table-tennis table, and chairs that had been screwed to the floor to prevent them being used in just such a disturbance were ripped from their fittings and flung at the two screws who were still in their midst, and who’d been joined by two more from the other end of the wing. But only four strong, they were hopelessly outnumbered by the prisoners and they too retreated rapidly, shouting into their radios, as the alarm sounded across the prison.

Fox saw all this from the door of his cell twenty yards down from Khan’s. The noise was incredible, as was the sense of animal excitement in the air. He watched as Khan stood on the walkway beating his chest and screaming abuse at the guards, the other prisoners, and the whole world in general. He was a big man, overweight, with a gut that hung over his waist like a jutting upper lip, but when he turned and ran at Fox, he moved with real pace.

‘Nazi bastard!’ he screamed, his voice unnaturally high as it echoed across the landing.

Which was when Fox saw the sharpened spoon he was clutching in his hand, its tip glinting in the strip lights.

As the four guards raced to the main door so they could seal off the wing, Fox raced away from Khan, hurtling down the metal steps two and three at a time, yelling at the guards for help.

One looked his way and slowed down, but only momentarily.

Fox could hear Khan coming down the steps behind him, yelling obscenities, his voice breathless and angry. But Fox had kept himself fit during his time inside, and his current injuries didn’t stop him from running fast. Even so, as he hit the ground floor and sprinted towards the guards, his face was a mask of pure fear.

Two more guards had appeared on the other side of the main door and were in the process of unlocking it. Fox knew that the policy in prison riots was to seal off the wing where the disturbance was occurring to prevent its spread to other areas of the prison, while reinforcements were brought in to bring it under control.

‘Help me, for Christ’s sake!’ shouted Fox, joining the four guards at the door.

Twenty yards behind them, the main bulk of the prisoners were advancing steadily like an unruly football crowd, several of them unleashing missiles in the direction of the door but making no effort to charge it, while from the side Khan was continuing to advance on Fox, the improvised knife in his hand now visible to all the guards.

‘Hurry the fuck up!’ screamed the most senior of them as the door was finally opened and they raced through. Fox went with them, and no one tried to stop him. They were all too keen to save their own skins.

It was only when the door had been thrown closed safely behind them that one of the guards grabbed Fox’s arm and slammed him against the wall, demanding to know where he thought he was going.

But by that point it didn’t matter.

The first stage of the op had been 100 per cent successful.

Forty-three

18.58

CAIN PARKED THE
car at a meter in the shadows of Westminster Abbey. He was right in the heart of the establishment here, barely a stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament where, right now, politicians of every shade were debating the attacks that he’d helped mastermind today. And doubtless spouting the usual load of hot air. It was a pity, he thought, that the Stinger couldn’t be used against them, but he no longer had the missile. It had safely been dropped off at a lock-up garage, where it should already have been collected by the mercenary they’d hired, the mysterious but reliable South African Voorhess, who’d be firing it in about an hour’s time, when the deadline they’d given the government ran out.

The air was turning cold as Cain started off down the quiet night street on foot, pulling his cap down and his collars up to make sure that any cameras only got a very limited shot of him. He didn’t feed the meter as he wouldn’t be using the car again. It had been bought in cash at auction three months earlier and there was no way of tracing it back either to him or Cecil. As always, he’d planned everything down to a tee. The only fly in the ointment so far was his weapons contact, Jetmir Brozi, whose arrest had turned the arms deal in the scrapyard into a bloodbath and come close to getting them all killed. Brozi knew very little about Cain but, if he decided to talk, he could still provide information that might lead them in his direction.

But right now Cain wasn’t unduly worried about what might happen to him, and the reason for this was simple enough.

He was dying.

The doctors had diagnosed terminal lung cancer three weeks earlier. If he sought treatment, he had as long as a year. If he didn’t, he had half that, possibly less. So far, the symptoms – a persistent cough, and severe abdominal pains – were sporadic at best, but lately he’d noticed them getting worse. For a long time he’d never feared death, even in the midst of battle, but the events today at the scrapyard had made him realize how much he’d miss life when it was finally snatched away from him.

This made it even more important for him to bring his work to a conclusion. His aim was to bring down the government. Once this had been achieved, his hope was that the country’s native population would rise up and turn on the immigrants flooding the country and the intellectual elite who supported them. This had been his goal ever since he’d joined the shadowy group of individuals who called themselves The Brotherhood more than three years ago. Most of their footsoldiers had been killed during the Stanhope siege, which was why their numbers were now so small, but this no longer mattered. After today, the campaign of violence would give way to a new strategy as Garth Crossman, their leader and the man who bankrolled their activities, rode the wave of revulsion over today’s attacks, and the loss of his own wife in them, to enter politics for the first time at the head of a new political party promising radical change.

Cain smiled to himself. Crossman cut an impressive figure. He came across like a nice guy. He could really change things, given the chance, and by the time people realized what he was really like, it would be far too late.

Only two people knew Crossman’s real identity. One was Cain himself. The other was William Garrett, codenamed Fox.

And he’d be dealt with soon enough.

A marked police patrol car turned into the street fifty yards ahead of Cain, moving slowly, as if its occupants were looking for something.

Cain ducked down behind a parked van and watched as the police car drove past him down the street, coming to a halt in the middle of the road next to the Audi estate he’d been driving only a couple of minutes before. It then moved on about ten yards, but pulled into an empty parking bay, with its engine still running. At the same time, a second police car drove in from the opposite end, slowing up as it drew level with the first one.

Knowing this was no coincidence, Cain jogged in a low crouch, using the parked cars as cover, before ducking into a narrow back alley and breaking into a sprint.

They’d been betrayed.

And it could only have been by one man.

Forty-four

19.07

I’D SPOKEN TO
Bolt twice in the last half hour, after each call nodding a thanks to the landlord.

The conversations had been brief, and slightly surreal. He’d asked me a lot of questions about the Stinger, and I’d had to answer him while standing at the corner of a bar talking on a pub phone, shouting occasionally to make myself heard above the din of booze-fuelled conversation coming from all around. Hardly secure, but then desperate times call for desperate measures. Thankfully, Bolt had been more interested in minor details than in how we’d come to be in possession of it. What did the box the Stinger was being carried in look like? How big was it? Where in Cain’s car had I planted the GPS unit? That type of thing.

He’d finished the last call by telling me he’d send officers from CTC to collect me from the pub as soon as some were available. But I was getting restless. The bar was busy with a mixture of after-work groups and wrinkled locals, and the two TVs on opposite walls were both on Sky News, which was endlessly regurgitating the same material about the bomb attacks earlier. The confirmed death toll from the earlier bombs was now twenty, including five police officers, and it made me wonder what the hell Cain and Cecil were hoping to achieve. They’d killed a whole load of innocent people, and ripped apart the lives of hundreds of others. Just as they’d done in the Stanhope siege. And all for what? A few hours of constant network coverage.

What struck me looking round was that I could see that only a handful of the pub’s clientele were even watching the TVs. Most were engaged in conversation. People were laughing, exchanging gossip. Getting on with their lives. Already the bombs were old news. But this was just the way it was in the era of the internet and twenty-four-hour news. Attention spans had shortened dramatically. Even the terrorists’ threat of a third attack was no longer appearing to have the desired effect – on these people, at least.

I knew better. They should be afraid. A Stinger missile would take the slaughter to a whole new level, and unless Bolt and his people acted fast, there could be a massacre on the scale of Lockerbie within hours.

I thought about phoning Gina to warn her, but what the hell would I say? That there was a missile in circulation capable of bringing down a plane, and that she should grab Maddie and leave the city as soon as possible? It would be pointless. In the end they were better off where they were. And what if Gina asked me how I knew about it? I could hardly tell her the truth. That while working undercover for the people who’d sacked me and helped put me in prison, I’d helped acquire it for the terrorists, one of whom was an old colleague of mine, while simultaneously committing cold-blooded murder.

As I snaked my way slowly through the pub’s customers towards the exit, I realized I was shaking. I hated myself for my part in all this, but self-preservation was also kicking in. I needed to think, to settle down in my own home, down a beer, and work out the story I was going to tell Bolt’s colleagues. One that was somehow going to avoid mention of a gang of dead Albanians.

I’d been in worse situations before, I told myself as I walked back out on to the street, breathing in the cold air. But at that moment I couldn’t honestly remember when.

Forty-five

19.09

‘OK, WE’RE HERE,’
Bolt said into the radio as he and Tina pulled into Gowland Street, a narrow road flanked on both sides by new-build townhouses, which ran parallel to the lane of lock-up garages from where the stationary GPS unit was sending its signal. They were only a couple of hundred yards south of the river here and very close to the overhead railway lines heading into nearby London Bridge Station. The street was deserted as Bolt drove the Islington pool car he’d signed out earlier, a battered Ford Focus, past the turning to the lock-up garages, before parking further down. ‘We’ve got a visual on the entrance to the lock-ups,’ he continued, as he flicked on the car’s hazard lights and looked in the rearview mirror, suddenly feeling very alone, even with Tina beside him. ‘There doesn’t appear to be much activity at the moment. What do you want us to do? Over.’

He was talking to the control room at New Scotland Yard, where responsibility for the operation to retrieve the Stinger safely had now been handed.

‘Stay where you are,’ said Commander Thomas Ingrams, Bolt’s boss and the head of CTC, who was at the other end. ‘The GPS unit is still in place, and armed response vehicles are on the scene. They’re currently being held back on Druid Street, and the armed surveillance team are en route. We’ve been on to the owner of the lock-ups and he rented out number five six weeks ago to a man identifying himself as Vincent Cain. Over.’

‘That’s our man. Did he get a description? Over.’

‘No. It was all done over the phone. The owner’s coming down to you with the keys to number five. What’s your exact location? Over.’

Bolt gave him the details, before asking if they’d located the other GPS unit.

‘Affirmative,’ answered Ingrams, an edge to his voice. ‘It’s in an Audi A5 parked in Westminster, less than half a mile from the Houses of Parliament. We’re currently throwing a secure cordon round the whole area, but there’s no sign of the occupants, and according to the officers at the scene, no sign of a box in the back of the car either.’

‘That means the device must be in the lock-up here. Over.’

‘That seems the most likely scenario. We need to get it out as soon as possible.’ There was an edge to Commander Ingrams’s voice. ‘As soon as you have the keys, I want you to go in with the armed back-up, do a brief risk assessment to make sure the immediate area’s clear. It’s unlikely the unit’s going to be booby-trapped, but if you see anything suspicious pull back and let us know. Then we’ll have to consider evacuating the buildings nearby and blowing the door. Over.’