Echo of the Reich (12 page)

“So if you don’t decide, who does?” Bronson asked. “You mean you take a vote on it, something like that?”

Georg shook his head. “No. Something much simpler, a kind of test that you’ll either pass or fail. You’ll find out later. For now you can go.”

Three minutes later, Bronson was sitting in the driving seat of his car and heading away from the industrial estate, back toward London.

Once he was sure nobody was following him, he turned off down a side road, looking for a quiet spot where he could park up for a few minutes. He found it in the form of a roadside pub that had just opened for business, and which had a large car park, already half full of parked vehicles. He slid the Ford into a space at the far end, where he had a good view of the road, then opened the glovebox and took out his mobile phone.

Curtis answered on the second ring.

“Hello?”

“Yes, but it bloody nearly wasn’t,” Bronson snapped. “What the hell happened with that news broadcast on Sky? That could have killed me.”

“I’m really sorry about that. The first we knew was when somebody here saw it—in the canteen, actually. We checked with Sky immediately. It turned out that the owner of the equipment yard where you had your bit of fun last night made two recordings. He gave one to the local police station and sent the other to them. They ran it first for what it was—footage of two unidentified men doing a bit of damage to a bulldozer. But then one of your former colleagues from Tunbridge Wells rang the station and identified you. Sky checked him out, and then
ran the revised footage once they were satisfied that he did know who you were. You must have really pissed off somebody down there, Chris.”

Sitting in his car, Bronson nodded. He knew exactly who it must have been. “Detective Inspector Harrison,” he growled. “Known to one and all as ‘SOS Harrison,’ and about as popular as a dose of clap.”

“‘SOS’?” Curtis asked.

“‘Sack of Shit,’” Bronson replied. “He’s slimy, greasy and overweight, and he’s hated my guts ever since the day I first walked into the station. He finally retired this year.”

“Sky wouldn’t say who it was,” Curtis replied. “Protection of their sources and all that, but they did say it was a former senior police officer, so I guess that fits. Anyway, as soon as we explained the situation, they agreed to run the update, the story we cooked up about you being kicked out of the force. So what happened?”

It only took a couple of minutes to give Curtis the edited version of what had happened in the industrial estate, leaving out all mention of the Llama pistol, of course.

“What really saved me was Sky, oddly enough,” he said. “If they’d turned off the TV set none of them would have noticed the update to the bulletin, which of course confirmed my story. By itself, they’d never have taken my word for it, and I might still be there, but probably not still in one piece.”

“They’re that dangerous?” Curtis asked.

“I don’t know. Mike is a thug, pure and simple. He
thinks with his fists, and I was expecting him to beat me up as he tried to get information out of me. Most of the others are heavies with the same sort of attitude—they’re really just muscle for hire, dangerous but not too bright—but the one who worries me most is this man Georg. And by the way, he sounds German to me.”

Bronson described the man he’d seen at the warehouse.

“We can get a squad out there in an hour or so,” Curtis suggested. “Will they still be in the building?”

“I doubt it. It looked to me as if they were planning on leaving soon, so they’ve probably already gone. And there’s another reason, too, why hitting them now wouldn’t be such a good idea.”

“What?”

“John Eaton told me that Georg was the man who pulled Mike’s strings, the one who gave the orders. He also told me he was the money man, the financier who paid the members of the group for what they did. I assumed that he was the boss, but it’s clear that he isn’t. There’s some larger organization that Georg reports to. If you mop up this group now, you’ll take one bunch of men off the streets, but my guess is that Georg or whoever replaces him will just recruit a new team from the fringes of the underworld. You’ll probably grab the people who killed that nightwatchman, but I’m certain there’s something darker and more dangerous at work here.”

“Like what? And don’t forget, infiltrating the group is the whole point of the exercise. We need to get them off the streets before the Games start.”

“I know,” Bronson replied, “but I get the distinct impression that what these people are doing is just a nuisance: smashing up a machine here, breaking a few windows there, that kind of thing. It’s just a kind of diversion tactic, something to focus our attention on the wrong area, while something else, something much bigger and more destructive, goes down elsewhere.”

“What’s your evidence for that?”

“That’s the problem. I haven’t got any. Only something Georg said, almost a throwaway remark about putting the last pieces in place. There’s something about him that I don’t like. He’s too calm, and too bright for the company he’s keeping. There’s no way he’d be involved with these people at all unless there was a bigger picture, something we’re not seeing at the moment.”

After Curtis rang off, Bronson sat in silence in the car for a few minutes, trying to work out what he should do next.

The trouble was, there was almost nothing he could do. His relationship with the group, such as it was, was reactive and responsive: they had his mobile number, but he had no way of contacting them. The only person who ever called him was John Eaton, and he had configured his mobile so that the sender’s number was blocked. Apart from the warehouse on the small industrial estate he had just left, the only other physical points of contact he’d had with the group were a couple of pubs.

He would just have to wait until somebody—Georg or Eaton or another member of the group—called him and arranged another rendezvous. And then he’d have to decide
if that was the right time to let Curtis loose the dogs to roll up the group. Or not.

Bronson frowned, started the Ford’s engine again, pulled out of the pub car park and turned back onto the road.

22 July 2012

“And bring your passport,” the voice on the mobile instructed, then rang off.

For a second or two, Bronson stared at the handset, then shrugged and replaced it in his jacket pocket. Why the hell did he need his passport? Did Georg or Eaton want to confirm his identity by looking at the document? Or was there some other reason?

It was the day after the meeting at the warehouse, and Bronson had just been summoned to another rendezvous, this one back in London, in Stratford. It was a residential address, maybe a safe house, which might mean that the group was beginning to trust him. At the very least, it was the first meeting place that wasn’t either a pub or a warehouse, so it was progress of a sort.

For the duration of the operation, he had taken a room above a pub in Epping, a cheap and anonymous lodging from which he could come and go as he wished,
because the first-floor accommodation was approached by an outside door that was independent of the pub’s entrances. He had traveled up to London with the bare minimum he thought he would need—half a dozen changes of clothing, his washing kit and a couple of paperbacks—but he had brought along his passport. In fact, he rarely traveled anywhere without it.

The decision he had to make was whether to tell Bob Curtis about the meeting. On the one hand, if most of the major players from the group were going to be there it would offer an excellent opportunity for the Metropolitan Police to grab the men involved in the killing of the nightwatchman. But if a squad of officers kicked down the door and found only John Eaton, for example, then Bronson’s cover would be comprehensively blown and there would be no chance of identifying the other members of the gang. And, from Bronson’s point of view, no possibility of finding out what else Georg had planned for London, because he was still sure that the German—and he thought he’d identified the man’s accent now—had a much more dangerous agenda planned than the mindless vandalism that had taken place so far.

Realistically, there was only one option that made sense. Bronson looked at his London A to Z, spent a couple of minutes studying one page of it, then took out his mobile phone again and pressed the now familiar speed-dial combination.

“It’s me again,” he said when Curtis answered. “I’ve been summoned to another meeting this afternoon, but I think they’re still checking me out, so there’ll probably only be one or two of them there.”

“You said there were a whole bunch of them waiting for you at that warehouse yesterday,” Curtis pointed out.

“I know, but then they thought they were confronting an infiltrator, an undercover cop, which is why they were there mob-handed. That’s also why they told me to drive out into the wilds of Essex, so that if they decided to beat the crap out of me, or worse, there’d be nobody around to hear, or to interfere.”

“No witnesses.”

“Exactly. You knew where I’d gone, but if they’d decided that I was a liability they could do without, I’d have been dead and buried long before you could have got a team organized and out there to find out what had happened to me.”

“So why are you sure you won’t be walking into a bullet or a knife this time?”

“Mainly the location,” Bronson replied. “The meet’s in a residential district. One of the neighbors would be bound to notice any unusual noise, so I think I’ll be safe enough.” He paused for a moment. “But if you could keep a car or two, or maybe an ARV, in the vicinity until I call you afterward, I’d appreciate it. Just in case I’ve read it completely wrong and I do need to call the cavalry.”

“No problem. Give me the address and the time.”

Bronson read from the brief notes he’d made during his earlier conversation.

“Right,” he finished, “I’ll talk to you later today, once I leave the meeting. And it might be worth checking out who owns or rents that property.”

“Already doing it,” Curtis replied.

Ten minutes before the time specified, Bronson parked his Ford in a neighboring street, checked that the Llama was secure in his pocket and fully loaded, then climbed out of the car and walked along to the address he’d been given.

He was still about twenty yards away when the door of a dark gray Vauxhall saloon car swung open in front of him and John Eaton leaned out.

“Hop in, Chris, we’re going for a ride,” he said.

Bronson stared at him for a moment.

“I thought we were meeting in that house,” he replied, pointing up the street.

Eaton shook his head. “No. Georg picked that address at random, just to provide a location where we could meet you. The meet’s a couple of miles from here.”

Bronson nodded. “Right. Well, no offense, John, but I’m not getting in the car with you, not after what happened at the warehouse. My car’s parked about a hundred yards away. I’ll go and get it, and then I’ll follow you.”

“Mike said you had to be in this car.”

“You really think I give a toss what Mike says? No way am I getting in that car. You want me at a meeting, I’ll drive there myself. If you don’t like that, I’m walking away right now.”

Eaton nodded in resignation. “Okay, if that’s the way you want it. I’ll stay here. What kind of car is it?”

“Blue Ford Focus, on a fifty-seven plate,” Bronson told him. “I’ll be no more than five minutes.”

As soon as Bronson turned the corner and knew he was out of sight of Eaton’s car, he pulled out his phone and called Curtis.

“Really quick,” he said. “Forget that address because it’s nothing to do with the group. They just picked it as a location for me to get to. I’m going to get my car and follow John Eaton to the actual site for the meeting. You’ve still got the GPS tracker on the Ford?”

“Yes, and I know that it’s working.”

“Good. Make sure you keep an eye on my position, and keep an ARV close behind me. And if I call this number but don’t say anything, it’ll be because it’s all turning to rat shit and I need help, fast.”

Bronson reached the Ford, unlocked it and dropped into the driver’s seat.

“Right. I’m in the car and about to move off. Talk to you later.”

“I hope so. I really hope so.”

22 July 2012

Eaton’s estimate of a couple of miles wasn’t too far out. Bronson followed about fifty yards behind the Vauxhall as Eaton threaded his way through the afternoon traffic. Their route was toward the east, through districts Bronson had never visited before, moving steadily away from the congestion of the city and deeper into the suburbs.

Eventually, Eaton turned into another small industrial estate—the group was obviously fairly consistent in its choice of rendezvous locations—and pulled up outside a unit that either had been abandoned early in the life of the estate or had simply never been used at all. It was impossible to tell which, and it really didn’t matter.

Bronson pulled the car into a parking space on the cracked concrete forecourt of the unit. Grass and stunted weeds sprouted from the cracks, evidence of the time that had passed since the unit had last been occupied, by either builders or tenants. He climbed out of the vehicle
and locked the doors. The GPS tracker unit, he knew, was powered directly from the battery, and had its own independent battery pack as a backup, so now that he had finally stopped moving, he assumed Curtis would already have passed his position to the crew of the Armed Response Vehicle he hoped had been tasked to follow him. He realized there were rather a lot of assumptions in his situation, and absolutely nothing he could do about any of them.

There were already half a dozen other cars occupying slots on the unit’s forecourt, but as the commercial premises next door had a full car park, Bronson wondered if the vacant lot was simply used as an overflow car park by the people who worked there. Whatever the case, the presence of so many cars was a comfort, because that meant there had to be a number of people in the vicinity—inconvenient witnesses if the group intended to do him any harm.