Ultimatum (3 page)

Tina made a hard right, and found herself driving up a narrow residential road with an unbroken line of cars parked up on either side. She was feeling a real burst of excitement for the first time in months. To her this was what being a copper was all about. The chase; the adrenalin; the collar. If, like Owen, you weren’t willing to take a risk, then as far as she was concerned you should be working behind a desk.

‘There he is!’ Owen shouted, as an Asian man ran across the road in front of them fifty yards further on. He immediately grabbed the radio and reeled out an update on the suspect’s location to Control, while Tina accelerated towards the junction, not listening to the operator’s continued warnings to assess the situation before attempting an arrest.

And then, when she was barely twenty yards from the junction, a four-by-four pulled out from the side of the road, forcing her to slam down hard on the brakes, and flinging both her and Owen forward in their seats.

‘Jesus, get back, get back!’ yelled Owen as the woman driver sat staring at them with a face like thunder, her oversized car blocking the road. He pulled out his warrant card and waved it out of the window. ‘Police!’ he screamed. ‘Get out of the fucking way!’

The woman yelled back, clearly furious about something, and she wasn’t moving.

Bollocks to this, thought Tina, and jumped out of the car, leaving the engine running. She took off up the road at a sprint, knowing she was breaking all the rules, but not caring. A man had run away from a building just after an explosion. She’d like to think the fact that he was Asian, and possibly Muslim, had no bearing on her reaction, but she couldn’t help thinking that this could well be terrorist-related, in which case there was no way she could let him escape.

As she turned the corner, Tina saw him up ahead. He was a good forty yards away and running towards the Vauxhall Bridge Road, which struck Tina as odd, since it was roughly the direction he’d come from, suggesting he hadn’t spent much time planning his escape. He was already clearly slowing as he tired, so she was confident she could make up the distance between them.

But then he turned and spotted her and accelerated, disappearing up a side street. Tina went to the gym five times a week. Religiously. It was one of her few pleasures these days, and consequently she was very fit, and still young enough to be fast. She picked up her pace, going flat out now, and as she rounded the corner she saw that there was now less than twenty yards between them.

He looked back over his shoulder a second time, which was when Tina got a good look at him. He was youngish, probably early thirties, and smartly dressed in pressed trousers, black work shoes and a shirt and tie beneath his jacket. Which again struck her as odd. As did the look of pure panic on his face. Criminals sometimes looked scared when they were being chased by the forces of law and order, but not like this. This man seemed utterly terrified, as if he was a victim rather than a perpetrator.

‘Police!’ she yelled. ‘Stop now!’

He ignored her, kept running, his arms flailing in front of him. Two Lego-like blocks of flats loomed to her right and standing out in front of them was a large group of schoolboys watching the chase, several of them pulling out mobile phones and filming Tina as she ran past, gaining now. Fifteen yards and counting.

Akhtar’s lungs felt like they were about to burst. He’d been running ever since he’d left the coffee shop. In the sheer chaos of the situation he’d run right past his car, just as the explosion had hit, temporarily throwing him to his knees. Knowing he had to get away from the shop, he’d jumped to his feet and carried on running, his ears ringing from the sound of the explosion, before he’d realized his mistake. By that time it was too late. Two police officers had appeared on the other side of the road and had started chasing him. He’d thought he’d outrun them and then, suddenly, this woman in jeans and trainers was right behind him, shouting for him to stop.

He didn’t know how much longer he could keep going for. A part of him even wanted to give up, to throw himself at the mercy of the authorities. But there was no way he could do that now. As far as the world was concerned, he’d planted a bomb in a busy café. A bomb that had almost certainly killed many innocent people. He had to escape. There was no choice. There never had been.

There was a main road with flowing traffic directly ahead of him. If he could get across that, put a bit of distance between him and the woman, he might just make it. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he forced his legs to keep going, not even hesitating as he charged into the road. A horn blared as a car was forced to brake suddenly, and another much louder horn blasted to his left.

He turned and saw a lorry bearing down on him, its pistons hissing as its driver tried to stop.

But it was too late. Akhtar just managed to let out the first second of a terrified scream, throwing up his arms in a desperate protective gesture, before he was struck by a screaming wall of metal, and the whole world seemed to explode.

Tina saw it all. The car skidding as it swerved to avoid him; the man continuing to run across the road oblivious to the lorry coming the opposite way; the impact as the lorry struck him with a loud bang, sending him flying across the tarmac like a rag doll; and then the man being crushed under its wheels amid a futile wail of brakes.

It all happened in the space of a few seconds while Tina stood frozen with horror, wondering if there was anything she could have done to stop him, and knowing that once again she’d given her many enemies a stick to beat her with.

Five

08.18

THE GUNMAN WAS
watching Sky News when the pretty young anchor interrupted the sports round-up to announce in serious tones that reports were coming in of an explosion near London’s Victoria Station. This was immediately followed by live footage from a helicopter of the view above the street in question showing a blazing shop front with people milling about outside, some of them clearly hurt, and several others lying on the ground. There were emergency services personnel on the scene but they appeared to be in short supply.

He switched off the TV. The job was done, but he took no great pleasure in it, even though the whole thing had been a huge risk and had required precision planning. The bomb had been powerful, and plenty of people were dead – cut down for no other reason than that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The outrage would be immense. Just as they wanted it.

Mika sat at one end of the sagging sofa, her head resting on one shoulder, a dark bloody hole in the centre of her forehead. She too was collateral damage, which was unfortunate. She’d done her job well, if under duress, but she knew too much to be allowed to live.

He took out the mobile he’d used to detonate Akhtar Mohammed’s bomb, and phoned the main switchboard at BBC Radio London. Clearly it was a bit early in the morning for them because it took a good minute before the call was answered by a male operator.

Speaking into the high-spec voice disguiser that made it impossible to detect either his age or ethnicity, he began his short prepared speech. ‘A soldier from Islamic Command just struck a blow against Crusader forces by detonating a bomb right in the heart of your corrupt capital city. The British Crusader government has until eight p.m. tonight to make a public statement promising to withdraw all its troops from Afghanistan and cease support for its American puppet government with immediate effect, or a far greater attack will take place somewhere in this country that will bring fire down on all your heads. Remember, the deadline is eight p.m. You have been warned.’

The operator started to speak but the gunman ended the call. He didn’t turn off the phone, though. Instead he wiped it down with a cloth and threw it on the sofa next to Mika’s corpse. He was pretty sure he hadn’t left any of his DNA inside the flat. On the two occasions he’d visited he’d always worn gloves and had tried to minimize his contact with any of the surfaces. To make doubly sure that the police had nothing to go on when they came to this place, though, he picked up a second backpack from behind the sofa and placed it in Mika’s lap. It too contained a bomb of similar destructive capacity to the one he’d given to Akhtar, but this one was on a timer, primed to explode at 10.35 a.m., which he’d estimated would be around the time the police arrived, having traced the location of the phone. A second bomb in the boot of a car nearby was primed to explode at the same time. Hopefully, between them the bombs would take out a few of the security forces; but even if they didn’t, it wouldn’t matter. The point of all terrorist campaigns is to sow fear and especially panic among the civilian population, and there was nothing more effective than apparently random attacks to do just that.

He took a last look round, one final check that he hadn’t left behind any telltale evidence, then put on a pair of glasses and a baseball cap, pulling it low over his face, and left the flat, keeping his head down against the cold February air, confident that even if he was picked up on the inevitable CCTV cameras round here, no one would recognize him.

Six

08.24

THERE WAS NO
denying it. Prison decor really was shit.

Prisoner number 407886, William James Garrett, better known to the international media by his codename Fox, sat on his bunk staring at the four grimy, pockmarked walls that marked the borders of his home, and wondered who on earth had decided to paint them lime green. The bright colours didn’t make him feel any more positive about his situation, as he was sure they were meant to do. They just gave him a headache.

Fox couldn’t stand prison. In his mind, keeping a man in a tiny cage without hope for the rest of his days but giving him glimpses of the outside world through TV and the net was far less humane than killing him outright. What surprised him was the number of men in the cells around him – men who were here for many years, and a few who were in for the rest of their lives – who’d become so institutionalized that they no longer had any desire to experience life on the outside. One old lag had even told him that if the gates to the prison were suddenly to be opened one day, 99 per cent of the prisoners would opt to stay behind bars.

Not Fox. He wasn’t going to end up like some sort of zombie, subservient to the establishment as he counted down the days until he finally pegged out, unloved and unmourned, a pantomime hate figure for the masses.

Yet the charges he faced were enough to keep him inside for ten lifetimes. He was the sole surviving terrorist of a bloody siege at a London hotel that had left more than seventy people dead, and there were a whole host of witnesses who’d seen him kill at least five of them in separate incidents in what was widely acknowledged to be Britain’s worst terrorist atrocity. There was absolutely no doubt that he would be found guilty at his trial. Even his defence team had conceded as much, but, since the taxpayer was paying them by the hour, they were still prepared to give it a go. And there was no doubt either that the sentence he’d be handed would be a whole-life tariff. In other words, there was no hope of him ever getting out.

And yet …

Fox’s head hurt. Three days earlier he’d had his first taste of prison violence when he’d been attacked by another prisoner armed with a homemade shank. He rubbed a finger along the wound where the blade had torn across his scalp, touching each of the nineteen stitches. It felt tender to the touch but he ignored the pain. It would heal soon enough, as would the deep cuts on his right hand and his left and right forearms, which he’d lifted to ward off his attacker’s blows. He’d been bloodied, as he had been on more than one occasion in his life, but, as always, he remained unbowed.

The TV in the corner of his cell was switched to BBC
Breakfast News
, as it was every morning. He liked to find out what was happening in the outside world while he ate his breakfast, even though it was rarely anything exciting. But today something was actually happening. The well-scrubbed male presenter had interrupted the fawning interview he was doing with some fourth-rate actor to say that the BBC were getting reports of a bomb attack on a café in central London.

He got up from the bunk and pressed the call button on the wall. Prison was, he thought, much like staying in a very cheap and tatty hotel, which was probably why so many of the prisoners quite liked it.

Outside he could hear the early morning noises of the prison: the clanking of doors; the shouts; the rattle of keys; the occasional burst of laughter – the sounds of a closed, insular community, but a community nonetheless, and he almost wished he could be out there as well. But for the moment he was being held in protective custody on the governor’s orders in case there was a further attempt on his life, and it didn’t look like that was a situation that was going to be changing any time soon.

A few minutes later, the flap on the cell door opened and the face of Officer Fenwick, a bearded screw at the wrong end of his fifties who’d have trouble stopping a clock let alone a riot, appeared in the gap. It almost amused Fox that Fenwick, unarmed and way too old, was one of the few men standing between him and freedom.

‘Good morning, Mr Garrett,’ said Fenwick with a cheery smile as if he was addressing his next-door neighbour rather than a man who was about to stand trial for his part in arguably the worst mass murder in modern British history. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘Good morning, sir,’ said Fox, pressing his face up to the gap, pleased to see the other man flinch slightly at his closeness. ‘You know it’s less than a month to my trial?’

‘I do.’

‘And you know what I’ve been charged with?’

‘I do.’

‘And you know I haven’t said a word to the investigating officers about any of the people involved alongside me?’

‘Are you going somewhere with this, Mr Garrett, because I’m actually very busy?’

Fox nodded. ‘Absolutely.’ He stared coolly at the other man. ‘I want to cooperate, Mr Fenwick. I want to tell the police everything I know about the people behind the Stanhope siege. And I want to do it right now.’