Dusty Death (24 page)

Undercover work in the illegal drugs trade is the most dangerous operation of all.

Mike Allen was twenty-eight, a sergeant in the Drugs Squad, which is the most highly trained specialist unit in the British police service. Like almost every officer who opted to take the risks of assuming a false identity, he was single and without any long-term partner. He had been operating under cover for almost four months now.

Mike had thought he understood what he was taking on when he had volunteered for the assignment. It took him less than a week to appreciate that the dangers were far greater and more continuous than he had anticipated. You were at risk for every hour of the day and every day of the week. Even when you were asleep, you were not safe. People went through your belongings when you were asleep, listened to anything you might mutter in your exhausted rest, heard any revealing words you might blurt out in that dangerous period between sleep and consciousness, when you stirred into life without always being aware of where you were.

Mike knew that the only solution was to live the part, to become the drop-out and the petty drug-dealer you were supposed to be. After sixteen weeks of tension, he was unshaved, unwashed and unkempt, with the stale smell which drug users, careless of everything but their next fix, carry upon them. He lived rough, shivering through the winter under a couple of thin and filthy blankets, eating little beyond stale bread and beans spooned cold out of tins.

And Mike hoped that he looked even rougher than he felt. He took a daily intake of coke, though only a quarter of what his new masters thought he was taking. You couldn't simulate the symptoms of addiction without taking a certain amount of the stuff. He wondered how easily he would be able to kick the habit when all this was over. He had found himself counting the hours to his next snort of the white powder in the last fortnight. They had offered him crack last week, cocaine in rock form, ‘cooked' with baking powder. That was the most terrifyingly addictive form of coke of all. He had said he could not afford it: at forty pounds a rock, it was too expensive for him.

That had got things moving. It had been suggested to him that there were ways of paying for his habit without cash changing hands. He knew what that meant: they were considering using him as a dealer. Things were coming to a head. One way or another, his situation was going to be resolved.

In the darkness of the night, the only time when Mike Allen could collect his thoughts and remember what he had been in the days before he volunteered for this assignment, he often wondered whether he would ever get out of this alive. This was the reality now; that ‘normal' world outside it, where he had worked with normal people, seemed increasingly a dream-world, a land of lost content which would never be available to him again.

In these last months, he had joined so often in the ritual condemnations of the police and the law that he was confused: sometimes he felt that
this
was his real life now, that the obscenities he screamed against the pigs were bitter and heartfelt. He had been warned that it would be like this, that feeling as he did was a sign of success in the role he was playing. But he felt only confusion and danger. And isolation. He wondered how much the regular intake of coke was affecting him.

Sergeant Allen wondered if when the moment for decision came he would recognize it, or whether he would perish in a cock-up of his own making.

You were hamstrung anyway by the police rules: they wanted you to pose as a drug-pusher, without actually pushing drugs. That was the most ridiculous thing of all. If you actually sold drugs to addicts, you would be committing a crime, whatever your reasons for doing it. The lawyers wouldn't have that: it would compromise the legal case against the men higher up the chain that you were trying to trap if you were enticing them into crime.

It was all right for the bloody lawyers, sitting smugly in their comfortable, warm, Crown Prosecution offices and making the rules for those who took the risks. Making the rules for a world they did not know and did not want to know; ignoring the dangers of that world because it suited them to do so. Mike Allen could do quite a speech about lawyers, without needing to act at all.

Normally he was glad when it went dark. He found it easier to be convincing, to play the man he had to be, after nightfall. It seemed the natural setting for this desperate cast-off from society, this piece of flotsam who must float helplessly along currents controlled by stronger criminal men. He was glad that they would be into March tomorrow, with its promise of increasing warmth in the sun. But he found that he resented the increasing daylight, because that seemed to carry the threat of exposure. He was like a mole that operates under the earth and cannot reveal itself in the glare of the day.

But it might all be over tonight, if things went as he hoped. Even if they didn't, in fact. He tried not to think of his days here ending in exposure and the squalid death which would inevitably follow that. He had seen enough of the drugs trade and the men who operated it to remove any delusions about survival if things went wrong. Sometimes your body would be found in some anonymous city dumping ground, beneath a motorway flyover or in a disused canal. More often, you would simply disappear, removed from the face of the earth without any sign that you had ever existed upon it.

He dragged his feet unwillingly through the Manchester streets, moving like a much older man. Now that the moment which would bring release or oblivion was approaching, he was reluctant to move towards it. That impulse for survival, that instinct which means that even the most determined of suicides by water finish by fighting the river with bursting lungs, made him reluctant to move towards this rendezvous with the greatest danger of all.

He had taken the coke an hour ago, as his cover demanded that he should. Normally it gave him a lift, made him for a time more confident and optimistic, even though he knew in his heart that this well-being was an illusion. Tonight he found as he slunk along the almost deserted streets of Moss Side that the high had not lasted, that he felt less rather than more secure.

Would his reactions be slowed, would he be unable to act and react to events as swiftly as he surely must if he was to survive?

He told himself that he would have the backing of the firm. Tonight, for the first time in months, he would have the benefit of police support, of colleagues who were anxious to secure his safety. That thought gave him no comfort. He struggled indeed even to comprehend the idea. He had immersed himself for so long in the culture of the underworld which he had made his natural habitat for the last four months that he could not regard the network which was supposed to extricate him from this as anything other than an alien force.

Mike Allen had ceased to think like a policeman.

The building loomed ahead of him, massive and black as a setting for a horror movie. But it was worse than that: his fevered brain, so full of unwelcome thoughts, told him that. This multi-storey car park, tall as an office block, black as Satan's palace, was worse than any
Psycho
motel. It was bigger, blacker, more threatening in its massive anonymity, than any cinema mock-up could ever be.

To see so large a building so dimly lit was the worst thing of all. Some of the university buildings were only half a mile away, their size making them seem even closer through the darkness. Some of them were much higher than this one. But they were brightly lit, teeming with a life that was innocent and ongoing. Mike put up the collar of his anorak against the straggling hair at the back of his neck and turned away from them.

The man, whoever he might be, would not be there yet. That was the way it operated. He forced himself to move beneath the big concrete arch of the entrance and into the cave of darkness.

The basement smelt of rotting wood, of urine, of a host of other dank smells he did not care to identify. There was a tiny scratching at the far end of it, thirty or forty yards away from him. Rats? Mike was a Winston Smith when it came to rats; he feared that he would run screaming from the place if anything ran over his foot. But the sound was not repeated. Mike Allen forced a long breath of the damp and icy air into his coke-narrowed lungs, then put his shoulders and his back against the damp concrete of the wall. This wait would be the worst time of all. You had to try to close your mind against the possibilities of the next half hour.

The minutes stretched like hours, the sounds of the city outside sounding muted and distant, as if reminding him that he was isolated here, that he was alone with the evil forces which would dictate his destiny. He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his grubby anorak, trying not to register the tremors which began to run through his limbs as the effects of the cocaine wore off and the damp cold of this place began to take its toll on his thin body.

He should have been glad to hear the car, to know that his vigil was coming to an end. Instead he felt only fear. Fear of himself, as well as what was coming. Fear that his body would be so rigid with terror that his limbs would be unable to move, his brain unable to act out the part it had played so successfully for months. Fear that in this climax of his ordeal, his nerve would fail him and he would collapse in suicidal confession at the feet of the man he was supposed to trap.

The Jaguar purred softly into the car park and down to the basement, fixing him like a rabbit in its headlights, threatening as it eased silently towards a stop to pin him against the dripping wall. Mike Allen's knees were shuddering against the front bumper when the long vehicle stopped and the illumination switched abruptly to side lights. Mike had thrown up the back of his arm in front of his eyes, blinded by the fierce white light after the darkness of his waiting.

He was conscious of a heavy man easing out of the passenger seat and standing over his crouching form. The driver and another figure from the back of the car got out and stood slightly behind their leader, one on each side, the heavies providing the protection he would never need from Mike.

‘Good evening, Mr Smith,' said Mike obsequiously. He was glad that his voice at least was working. You called them all Smith; no one in the hierarchy revealed his name, and the less you knew the safer it was for you.

The man did not reply. He studied the form in front of him for a few moments, then reached out a toe to Mike's leg and turned him from a sideways cower to a position facing him directly. ‘So, Michael Allen, you want to work for us. You want to deal.'

‘I do, Mr Smith.' Mike had caught a touch of Irish in the voice. It was irrelevant, now: he wasn't a detective, not in this situation. He was bait, dead as a dodo within minutes, if the men who might not even be there did not intervene to save him. Yet he was glad he had picked up the bit of brogue: it showed that his brain was working, when he had most need of it. He whined, ‘I need to deal, see. It's the only way I can get my supplies, innit?'

It was the way most people became dealers at the bottom of the chain, the way the barons were assured of their loyalty. Once you became an addict, you were no longer employable in legitimate work in the world outside. You needed your coke or your heroin in ever larger doses, but you no longer had the money to buy. You had to deal, to get your supplies.

‘Cokehead, are you?'

Mike could hear the contempt in the voice. He thought for a moment that the man who had come to vet him was going to touch him again with his toe, to give him a kick perhaps, just for the pleasure of it. Instead, he stood motionless, studying the abject figure in front of him: Mike could hear the sound of his breathing, smell stale cigar smoke on his camel coat. He pleaded, ‘I'm not an addict, Mr Smith. I'm in control still. I'm a user, not an addict. I won't let you down, when I deal.'

‘
If
you deal.' The check came promptly, as if he had touched a nerve. This man enjoyed the power he wielded; it wasn't just the wealth which interested him. ‘Can you shift horse?'

‘Horse and coke. LSD as well, if you've got it.'

‘And E?'

Mike could hear the voice ticking off the list of the most lucrative drugs for the suppliers. ‘Yes. I can shift Ecstasy, plenty of it. The middle classes want that! And speed. And as much rohypnol as you can supply!'

The laugh came back at him harshly through the dimness. ‘Everybody wants the date-rape drug! Everyone can shift that! Symptom of our decadent society that is, Michael Allen.'

‘Yes, Mr Smith.' He stood with head bowed, feeling the weakness now in his knees, wondering where this was taking him, how long he could keep up his part if no one intervened to save him.

‘We'll be looking to you to turn over a thousand quid a week initially. Two thousand a week, once you get going. Think you can do that?'

‘Yes. Yes, I'm sure I can, Mr Smith. So long as you can make sure that I get what I need for myself.'

‘You'll get that, Michael Allen. And perhaps commission for yourself, when you begin to shift the right amount. There's money in this, you know, for those who keep their mouths sealed and get on with shifting the stuff.'

That was the nearest he would come to a pep talk. Most of these pathetic instruments did not survive more than a year before their own addiction caught up with them. That did not matter to the Smiths of the industry, so long as those who failed knew nothing about the men above them.

‘I'll shift them all, Mr Smith. I know I can do it. I'll be one of your best operatives, once I get going.'

Smith's laugh rang loud in that quiet, echoing place. He had heard it all before, knew that these contemptible creatures really believed what they were so desperately telling him. ‘I like that word: “operative”. Comes from a different world, that does. I like it. Well, Michael Allen, you'll be delighted to know we're going to give you a trial.'

‘Thank you, Mr Smith. I won't let—'

‘A couple of weeks to start with. You'll get your own intake, which you're not to exceed, and quantities to shift. We'll be watching you, mind. If we find you satisfactory, you'll be given more dope and an extended period.'