Ultimatum (6 page)

‘So it might be nothing to do with Fox or any of his friends. But initial reports are saying the explosives used were PETN, the same as those used at the Stanhope, and that the bomb looked sophisticated. The thing is, there just aren’t that many terrorists with access to that kind of weaponry, particularly homegrown Islamic extremists.’ Bolt paused. ‘There’s something else as well. There was an attempt on Fox’s life three days ago.’

‘I didn’t hear anything about that.’

‘It’s being kept under wraps. Cheney died before he could stand trial. If they lose Fox as well, it’s going to make the government, and this country, look like a bunch of incompetents. He was attacked by another prisoner armed with a homemade blade. He got a slash across the head and defensive cuts on his hands and arms, and ended up with a lot of stitches. But he managed to fight his attacker off and put him in hospital as well.’

‘Do we know why he was attacked?’

‘The other prisoner’s not talking. He’s Category A and violent, so it could be any number of reasons, but the timing, just days before a new bombing campaign, is the kind of coincidence that sets alarm bells ringing.’

Bolt absent-mindedly stroked the biggest and deepest of the three small scars that dotted his right cheek – the result of a car crash many years earlier. Because of his big build and closely cropped hair, they helped to lend him a thuggish appearance that was only partly offset by his incredibly blue eyes, and looking at him now, Tina remembered how attractive she’d once found him.

‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘Fox is a tough bastard, but the word is the attack’s shaken him up, so what he has to say could be useful. It might also be nothing, of course, and if he’s after immunity from prosecution, then he’s pissing in the wind. But I want to give it a shot.’

It struck Tina how little she knew about Mike Bolt these days. The building they were in now was a four-storey Georgian townhouse on a quiet residential Mayfair street, with a brand-new plaque outside the front door identifying the occupants as Lowe Robertson Real Estate. She’d walked through an open-plan office with a handful of men and women working on high-end PCs to get to the room she was in now, but the place was hardly buzzing with activity.

‘So, what is this place and how are you involved?’ she asked. ‘The last I heard you were working for SOCA.’

‘I’m in CTC now, working counter terrorism. I’m running a unit called Special Operations, but you won’t find anything about us in the brochures or on the Met website. We’ve been set up specifically to identify, locate and gather evidence against the people behind the Stanhope siege – the ones who bankrolled it, and provided logistical support to the terrorists.’

‘That sounds a lot more fun than what I’ve been doing these past few months. Fancy seconding me?’

Bolt smiled properly for the first time since Tina had walked into his office. He was, she thought, still a good-looking guy, perhaps even more so since he’d hit his forties. His hair had begun to turn from blonde to silver, and the lines on his narrow, aquiline features had become more pronounced, but the changes actually enhanced his appearance, and she wondered suddenly if he was still single.

‘It sounds a lot more exciting than it actually is,’ he said. ‘We do all the usual no-frills policework: sifting through available intelligence in-house, talking to informants, running taps and surveillance ops. But it’s a long job, and I’ve got to be honest with you, it hasn’t generated many good leads. The people we’re looking for aren’t known to us, and they’ve proved very adept at covering their tracks.’

‘I heard from various sources that the Stanhope siege was bankrolled by an unfriendly Middle Eastern government.’

‘According to sources within MI6, there was financial backing from Arab sources within the Middle East, and at a high, possibly governmental, level, but there was help for the attackers from within the UK as well, and given the fact that half the terrorists were white former soldiers it’s very likely that it came from extreme right-wing elements, and ones with money. That’s why Fox could be so important to us. I need you to find out what he has to say.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ said Tina. ‘But I want to be a part of your team. I’m not cut out for recycling low-level scumbags through the courts system, which is what I’m doing at the moment. Is there any way you can get me on board in a more permanent capacity?’

Bolt sighed. ‘The work we do here’s low-key and secretive, and I don’t want someone who’s going to go on a one-woman crusade for justice, put herself and everyone around her in danger, get her face plastered all over the media, and end up compromising all our work. I’ll be straight with you, Tina. You’re a hothead, and it’s got you in a hell of a lot of trouble in the past. That’s why you’re a DC in a small CID office.’

Tina had heard this all plenty of times before as she’d fought to get herself reinstated, but it still hurt coming from a man she’d once considered a good friend. ‘I’m still a good copper. You know that. And I get results.’ She leaned forward and looked him right in the eye. ‘Give me a chance, and you have my word that I won’t do a thing to compromise any part of your work. I mean it.’

Bolt stood up, looking uncomfortable. ‘I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, you need to get going. Interviewing Fox is top priority, and that comes all the way from the top. There’s a helicopter waiting at New Scotland Yard to take you up to the prison where they’re holding him. I’ll get one of our people to give you a lift over there.’

Tina got to her feet, feeling relieved and disappointed at the same time. She was glad to be in the thick of things again, but sad that her relationship with Bolt had become so distant. Theirs had always been a complicated one, yet he’d always stood by her when things had been tough. She owed him a lot more than he owed her, and it was a debt she knew she’d never be able to repay.

‘One thing before I go,’ she said. ‘A lot of people died in the Stanhope incident, and the inquiry to find out who’s behind it has got to be pretty major. So, why does this place feel so empty?’

‘We’re a small team. Manpower’s a problem these days. With all the cuts going on, and the resources they’ve pumped into the phone-hacking scandal, the Met’s running extremely low on detectives.’ He shrugged, seeing her expression. ‘I know, I don’t like it either, but that’s just the way it is. Also, up until about an hour ago, we’ve effectively been working on a hunch. We’ve always believed there was UK involvement, but there’s never been any proof. And there’s another reason too. The smaller the team, the less chance there is of a leak to the bad guys. The fact that a senior CTC man like John Cheney was working for the terrorists scared a lot of people. That’s why I’ve agreed to work with you, Tina. You’re a hell of a lot of things, and not all of them good, but one thing’s for certain: you’re definitely not corrupt.’

Tina smiled. ‘I’m flattered.’

They looked at each other, and something – a flash of their old friendship – passed between them.

‘It’s good to see you again,’ he said. ‘Considering what you’ve already been through this morning, you look great.’

‘It’s good to be back,’ she said. And she meant it.

Ten

09.50

THERE ARE NO
noble causes.

They tell you there are, but they’re lying. When they sent me to Iraq they said we’d be liberating a downtrodden people from the shackles of a brutal dictatorship, but all we did was destabilize the whole region and start a civil war that’s still rumbling on today, losing a lot of good people in the process. And in Afghanistan they said we’d be in the forefront of the fight against global terrorism, and helping to keep the streets of Britain safe for present and future generations.

Bullshit.

The streets are no safer because we went there. In fact, they’re probably a lot less safe. The world’s Muslim extremists – the kind we were supposed to be defeating – can come and go inside Britain as they please, safe in the knowledge that, thanks to the Human Rights Act and the parasitic lawyers who uphold it, they can’t be deported. And they hate us even more because of what we’re doing in Muslim countries. We’re international aggressors and domestic appeasers, which seems to me to be the worst kind of combination there is.

And the politicians who sent us to those Godforsaken countries are sitting pretty at home, eating their vol-au-vents, fucking their secretaries, and fiddling their expenses, while harping on about freedom and sacrifice and all that shit, even though it’s not them who’ve lost limbs in IED attacks, or seen their best mate’s brains splattered all over some dusty rock thanks to a sniper’s bullet.

I did two tours of Afghanistan and we didn’t change a damn thing. Not a jot. The moment western forces leave, the Taliban will be all over the country like a rash. And you know why? Because they don’t want our democracy. Most of them don’t even have a clue what it is, and the few who do think it contradicts God’s law anyway, so won’t have anything to do with it. Democracy to them just means corruption – and one look at the western-backed government in Kabul and you can see they’ve got a point. So the whole thing will have been a complete waste of time, money and, most of all, the blood of far too many good men.

We changed cars less than a mile from the scene of the robbery, switching to a Renault Mégane saloon Cecil had parked under some trees next to a stretch of deserted waste ground near the Lockwood reservoir. No one saw us as we torched the car we’d used for the robbery, along with the police caps. We kept the guns, though. In a country like Britain where even semi-automatic weapons are almost impossible to come by, they were way too valuable, and after putting them and the money in the boot, we changed into suit jackets and ties, got in our car, and drove off in the direction of Enfield. All without being seen. Even in the centre of a city like London you can still find some lonely places where people don’t go at ten o’clock on a cold, grey February morning.

I was still pumped up with a mix of adrenalin and anger. The plan had been to hold up LeShawn and his men and make them give up the cash with threats, a few shots into their car, but no actual violence. That way, even if there’d been witnesses, and the police had found empty shell casings at the scene, the crime would never have been reported. LeShawn was hardly going to say anything, and people who live near crackhouses tend to learn to look the other way. In other words, it should have been perfect.

But now LeShawn was dead. He might have been an arsehole and I might not have pulled the trigger, but that wasn’t much consolation. First off, the robbery had been a joint enterprise, which meant I was just as responsible for his murder as Cecil was in the eyes of the law. And second, I’d shot up a cop car, ripped the front of it to shreds, and scared the living shit out of the people inside, thereby making myself a very active participant. Worse, pulling the trigger had felt way too good.

My name’s Jones by the way. Richard Burnham-Jones to be exact, but I always hated the names Richard, Rick, Richie, and especially Dick, and I’m not a big fan of double barrels, so it’s always been Jones, which suits me fine. And I’m not a bad man either, whatever first impressions might suggest. You could say I’ve got in with the wrong crowd, and you’d be absolutely right, but not quite for the reasons you might think.

It was a cold day but I could feel the sweat on my brow, and I used my forearm to wipe it away.

‘What the fuck happened back there, Jones?’ demanded Cecil, fixing me with one of his trademark glares. ‘You almost let me down.’

The two of us have known each other a long time. We’ve served together in a war zone, and that creates a bond that other men just don’t have. That didn’t mean Cecil didn’t scare me. He did. He scared everyone. He might only have been a short bald guy, but he was also lean and wiry, with an intense energy that seemed to emanate from him in waves, and eyes like pieces of flint. Even his voice, with its hard Belfast growl, spelled aggression. Luckily, I knew how to handle him.

‘If I’d fired when we were fighting, I could have hit anyone, including you,’ I said. ‘That’s the problem when there are only two of us on the job. It was always going to be risky.’

‘You’re not going soft on me are you, big man?’ Cecil didn’t care that he’d just killed someone. As far as he was concerned, they’d disobeyed instructions, got what was coming to them, and now he’d moved on. That was what he was like.

‘I just shot up a cop car, Cecil, so no, I’m not going soft. We needed a bigger team, that’s all. I told you that before we got involved. I thought you had friends we could use.’

‘This was a test, Jones. To check your loyalty.’

‘I’m not interested in tests. You know you can trust me. We’ve got history.’ And we did. We had secrets too, forged on the battlefields of Helmand Province.

There was a pause, and then he nodded slowly. ‘I think it may be time to go up to the next level,’ he said, finding a gap in the parked cars at the side of the road and pulling up. ‘But first I’ve got to make a quick phone call.’

We were outside a parade of shabby-looking shops, and I watched as Cecil passed a group of even more shabby-looking drunks on a bench shouting incoherently to each other in what sounded like Polish. As I looked on, one tried to stand up and simply toppled over on his side, landing against a large overflowing litter bin, much to the mirth of the others, before rolling over on the pavement while somehow keeping his drink intact. A young woman in a business suit hurried past, head down and giving them a wide berth.

No, there are no noble causes. If you fight for something you believe in, innocent people will always get hurt, and even if you achieve whatever goal it is you’ve set yourself, it’ll always end up being a hollow victory, because everything comes at a price.

Cecil walked back to the car, giving the drunks a sideways look that temporarily silenced all of them, and got back inside.

‘There’s someone who wants to meet you.’

And that was when I knew I was in.

Eleven

10.26

THE MAN WAS
parked in a deserted stretch of woodland bordering a golf course just inside the M25 when he got off the phone to Cecil. He had an iPad on his lap and was watching Sky News as they continued their frenetic coverage of the coffee shop bomb attack. So far, actual hard news was scarce; they were relying on eyewitness reports and continued footage of the scene from the Sky News Copter. The fire in the café was now out, but the street was still full of emergency vehicles. According to the rolling newsreel on the bottom of the screen six people had so far been confirmed dead, with more than thirty wounded, but the death toll was expected to rise. There were also unconfirmed reports that a previously unknown terror group had claimed responsibility, that the bomber himself had fled the café before the explosion, and that he’d been arrested.