Breaking Point (33 page)

He'd recognized early on that transport was the key. No matter how good the supply; no matter how big the network, transport was always the key. Which was why he now owned or controlled several carrier companies, all of which did a lot of international business.

None of them could be traced back to him – his battery of well-paid legal advisors had seen to that – and much of the business was both legal and profitable. But smuggling in illegals was by far the most profitable.

He'd done well, but he'd always had his eye on the main chance, and when he'd seen the way things were organized in other countries, he decided it was time to expand. Time, in fact, to
control
the market throughout the UK.

This was the first step in that expansion. With more and more merchandise coming in daily, he'd been able to build an inventory of the best of the best. And the ones he was putting up for bids tonight were the pick of the crop, and he intended to make the most of it.

‘Jimmy, glad you could come,' he greeted a slight, doleful-looking man. ‘And . . .?' He raised an eyebrow in the direction of the blonde, thirtyish woman with him. ‘I don't believe we've met,' he said.

‘Paula Jones,' said Jimmy Cragg. ‘At least that's who she is as far as you're concerned, George. Paula is what you might call my advisor. She's the one you have to impress, because I will be relying heavily on her recommendations tonight.'

Kellerman nodded. ‘Happy to meet you, Paula,' he said. ‘What would you like to drink?'

The woman eyed him coolly. ‘Nothing, thank you, Mr Kellerman,' she said. ‘I'd prefer to see what's on offer and get this over with as quickly as possible, if you don't mind.'

Kellerman sucked in his breath. ‘Right,' he said, rubbing his hands briskly. ‘We'll begin in a few minutes, and I'm sure you'll be more than happy with the merchandise. Please have a seat while I see to my other guests.'

Only two of the others accepted his offer of drinks. In fact there was an air of edginess among the group, and it soon became apparent that no one was in the mood to make this the festive occasion Kellerman had planned.

‘This had better be worthwhile, George,' the buyer from Liverpool told him. ‘And next time you'd better set up closer to where we are if you want to do business with Alfie and me.' Alfie Morgan was his opposite number in Manchester.

‘We will,' Kellerman assured him smoothly. ‘As I told you, this is a trial run, and I've already got my eye on a place within thirty miles of where you are.'

He turned to face a woman who had grasped his arm to gain his attention. Grey-haired and heavily made-up, she was at least sixty, and could have passed quite easily for someone's benign-looking grandmother, as in fact she was.

‘Bertha,' he said, reaching for her hand. ‘Good to see you. I think you'll be pleased with what I've brought you tonight.'

‘Then for Christ's sake stop trying to make this look like a cross between a fashion show and the bloody Oscars, George, and let's get on with it,' she said, pulling her hand away.

‘But it's an occasion,' Kellerman protested. ‘In Kosovo they have all-night parties when they have an auction. I've been there. That's where I got the idea.'

‘But we're not in bloody Kosovo, are we, George?' Bertha snapped, ‘and I want to get home tonight, so let's get at it. How many do you have, anyway? I hope I haven't come all this way for two or three I could have found at home.'

‘Seventy-one,' Kellerman said proudly. ‘And they're some of the best you'll ever see. You'll love the little ones, Bertha; we've got some right little beauties, but they'll cost you. And you'll have some competition; Fred Tobin's here, and he'll be bidding against you for them.'

Bertha snorted. ‘I'm not bothered by him. But I'll tell you this, George Kellerman: if you try to slip me any HIV positives or any with infections of any kind, you'll be sorry. And I'll be having them checked, so be warned.'

‘They're all clean,' Kellerman assured her as he moved away and took up a position beside the runway, ‘and they've all been “broken in” as you might say, so you've no worries there.'

He cleared his throat and raised his voice. ‘Now, ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention, I'd just like to say we'll be starting with a brief parade down this runway and back so you can see everything we have on offer, and then we will bring them out one by one for bids. You know the rules about payment and delivery, so let's begin.'

‘We have transport standing by to take the illegals away once we've cleared the area,' Trowbridge said, ‘and we have a doctor, a nurse and a couple of female interpreters who will come in once the place is secured. We've circulated a picture of your man to everyone,' he continued, anticipating Paget's question, ‘so we'll do our best not to shoot him if he's in there – that's assuming he's still alive, of course.'

Small comfort, Paget thought, but he knew it was the best he could hope for. ‘How many people do you have out there?'

‘Enough.'

‘And they're not what I would call regular policemen, are they?'

It was Bell who answered. ‘Special Forces,' he said tersely, and Paget realized then why Trowbridge had made no mention of the man's rank when he'd introduced him.

Trowbridge might be nominally in charge, but Bell, or whatever his real name was, would be running the show from this point on.

‘We'll take out the flankers down the road first and make sure they don't have a chance to warn the others,' Bell explained to Paget. ‘The area around the farmhouse has been swept. Two of their men are in the yard itself, and we know Roper and his wife are still there, but there could be others inside the house as well.

‘There are two more outside the barn – they're the drivers who brought the buyers in – but we don't know how many there are inside the barn. Considering the size of the vans, there could be as many as sixty or seventy women and children in there as well as the buyers. Then there is Kellerman himself, and perhaps half a dozen of his men, some of whom may be armed. So we will have to be very careful when we storm the barn. We need to take them completely by surprise, because the last thing we want is to give Kellerman and company a chance to use the illegals as hostages.'

It looked like a soccer team's changing room with open shower stalls at one end, and four rows of wooden benches taking up much of the rest of the room, where fifty-seven shivering young women, and fourteen children sat huddled together.

The water from the showers had been cold, ice-cold, and there weren't enough towels to go round. Their hair, no matter how long or beautiful it had been originally, had been cut short early in their journey across Europe. For hygienic reasons, they were told, and while there was some truth to that, the main reason was a practical one: short hair dried faster on those rare occasions when they were allowed the luxury of a hurried shower before being crammed into yet another suffocating space on the next stage of their perilous journey.

Now they sat huddled together, bodies still damp and numb with cold, refused permission to get dressed again. Some of the smaller children clung shivering to the women who'd become their surrogate mothers, while others stood stoically apart, eyes glazed, staring blankly at nothing.

Luka and Slater, wearing the one-piece coveralls Kellerman had insisted they wear instead of their regular clothes, stood just inside the door, watching as the stoutly-built, grey-haired woman and the two middle-aged men paced up and down between the benches. The two men, also dressed in coveralls, fingered cattle prods hooked to their belts, ready to use them at the first sign of trouble.

But it was the woman who was in control. The men were simply there as back-up, and when a small bell mounted high on the wall rang sharply three times, she ceased her pacing between the rows and went to the door. Hands on hips, she turned to face the room and snapped out an order in Luka's native language, then repeated it in Romanian and English.

‘You will go through that door, and you will walk down the ramp to the stage at the end, turn and come back into this room. You will hold yourself erect, keep your hands at your sides, walk properly and make no attempt to cover your body. You will not look at anyone nor say anything unless you are ordered to, and I will be there to keep an eye on you and translate if necessary. The children will go last and each one will be accompanied by one of you. Anyone who fails to observe the rules will be punished. Translate, Irena,' she said, pointing at a tall, dark-haired girl.

The girl repeated the instructions dully in Russian and Polish.

Someone in the third row whispered something to her neighbour.

The grey-haired woman moved quickly down the line to stop in front of a girl who couldn't have been more than fourteen. ‘You said something?' she asked softly.

The girl swallowed hard and shook her head. ‘No, I—'

‘Don't lie! And stand up when you speak to me!' the woman snapped. One of the men moved forward, prod at the ready, but she waved him back.

The girl rose to her feet, trembling, trying to hold back the tears and failing.

‘Now, what did you say?'

‘I just said, must we go out there like this?' the girl whispered, opening her arms and looking down at her naked body. ‘Can't we put something on? Please . . .?'

The older woman smiled and shook her head as she might with a child who had not yet managed to grasp a simple lesson. ‘Oh, Trisiana,' she said softly, ‘you have so very much to learn. You'll fetch a very good price, my girl; a
very
good price indeed.'

I
t had seemed like overkill to Paget when he realized how many people were involved in the operation to take Kellerman down, but as Trowbridge explained, traffickers who wouldn't hesitate to throw their human cargo overboard if they were in danger of being caught by a police patrol boat while at sea, would not go down without a fight.

‘Some padlock chains around the hands and feet of their victims as a precaution as soon as they board,' he said. ‘Most of them make it, of course – the smugglers have very fast boats and the police can't be everywhere – but like the slavers of old, they'll dump their cargo rather than be caught with them. Which is why we have someone like Mike Bell leading the tactical squad,' he continued, ‘and why we are stuck here until we get the signal from him that everything is secure.'

If Mike Bell had had his way, and if these were his men, he would have simply killed the flankers and guards. Slit their throats, garrotted them, broken their necks or clubbed them down instead of just putting them out of action temporarily. But his superiors in London had made it very clear to him that this was a police operation, and no one –
no one
, it was emphasized – was to be killed or even seriously maimed unless there was no other choice. The men assigned to him were just as highly trained, but he had to remember that they were policemen, subject to somewhat different rules to the ones he was used to working under.

But they were good and they had done their job well so far. Both ends of the cross-country road had been blocked off; the flankers had been taken out without a sound, and now they were closing in on the farmhouse.

The team on the far side of the valley behind the farm had been ordered to come down and take up positions in the valley bottom, but to keep well away from the barn itself until given the order to move in.

Clad in Kevlar vests, Bell and his team moved like wraiths up the hillside, thankful for the cloud obscuring the moon. They paused, crouching while Bell scanned the ground between them and the house before declaring it clear and moving forward. When they reached the house, two men took up positions beside the front door, and two broke away, one to the left to circle the house from that side, the other circling wide to the right. Bell and one other man moved silently up the narrow lane beside the house, almost exactly as Mark Newman had done almost a month earlier.

They heard voices. Muffled conversation; the scrape of a boot on cobblestones. Bell poked his head around the corner. He could just make out the shapes of two men standing beside Roper's old truck no more than six or seven paces away from the corner. One of them was smoking and moving his feet as if he were cold. His cigarette glowed as he sucked on it, and Bell caught a glimpse of something bulky in the man's left hand. Portable phone? Two-way radio? Impossible to tell, but there was no sign of a weapon.

But that didn't mean there wasn't one within easy reach.

Bell withdrew and signalled his companion to do the same.

Safely out of earshot, Bell switched on his headphone mike and whispered instructions to the men circling in from right and left, then moved up to the corner of the house once again.

The two men were still talking in a desultory fashion.

Bell whispered an instruction, then tapped the right hand of the man beside him. The man took a padded glove from his pocket and put it on. Bell did the same, but before putting his glove on, he took a couple of coins from his pocket.

The smoker took one last drag at his cigarette, and as he dropped the butt at his feet to grind it into the cobblestones, Bell tossed the coins, then slipped on the glove.

The coins landed just beyond the two men, a soft clatter on the stones, one of them rolling. ‘Mine!' said one of the men swiftly as he switched on a torch and bent to search for the coins.

Bell and his colleague stripped the protective covering from the palm of the glove as they came up behind the two men. Bell snaked his left arm around the man's throat and jerked him upright, then clamped his gloved hand over the man's face. The man arched his back, tried to fill his lungs and found himself sucking raw anaesthetic from the soft, sponge-like pad covering his face. His knees buckled. Bell held him for a couple of seconds longer before lowering him to the ground, while his colleague did the same to the second man. Right on cue, the two men who had circled the house materialized to kneel and slap tape across the unconscious men's mouths and wrap it around their heads. They secured their arms and legs, then dragged them to one of the barns and heaved them inside before taking up positions on either side of the back door. No one spoke. There was no need; they knew what to do next.