Gray Vengeance (22 page)

Chapter 31

17 December 2014

Andrew Harvey’s cab pulled up outside the address in Pimlico and he gave the driver a reasonable tip before climbing out and taking in the surroundings. The row of white terraced buildings stretched down the street, each one fronted by black metal
railings
, and he knew it was an area out of his reach, given his meagre salary. How Thompson could afford it wasn’t his
business
, but he suspected it wasn’t down to diligent savings and shrewd investments.

He rang the bell and the door was answered a minute later by Thompson dressed in a white towelling robe. As he entered the hallway, he smiled and held up the bottle of red wine he’d brought along. Thompson ignored it and pushed him up against the wall, her mouth latching onto his.

The kiss was fleeting, and as Thompson pulled away she let her hand brush over his crotch.

‘I was just about to take a shower,’ she smiled. ‘Join me.’

Thirty minutes later, a naked Harvey nursed a glass of
Simone
Rouge on the double bed while Thompson combed her silky, blonde hair at the vanity table.

‘Nice place you’ve got,’ he said. ‘Six must pay a lot better than our mob.’

‘Hardly,’ she laughed. ‘It belongs to a relative and I get to rent it at a huge discount.’

That explained a lot, but Harvey wondered who exactly could afford to rent out such a property at knockdown prices. He made a mental note to follow up on it.

‘So, what progress have you made with Michael West?’ h
e asked.

‘He disappeared off the face of the earth two weeks ago. I sent someone round to Bicknell Security and got the name of his client, but they said West and his team just upped sticks and left them high and dry.’

‘I’m sure Brigandicuum will be able to locate him,’ Harvey said, but Thompson shook her head.

‘I asked, but Manello isn’t hopeful. We’ve found little in the way of social media activity on West, so we can’t add his Facebook or Twitter accounts as keywords and wait for a hit. Tony uploaded West’s last known email address as one of the search parameters, but so far all we’ve got are hits from marketing firms and the usual spammers.’

‘What about the old-fashioned way? Have you checked for passport usage, credit card transactions, all the usual stuff we had to make do with a week ago?’

‘We tried all that and came up empty,’ Thompson said.

‘Okay, so West aside, what have you found in Nigeria?’

‘We hit a dead end. The chief wanted to send a team over there, but the foreign secretary ruled it out. Apparently, the
Nigerian
president wasn’t happy with the thought of us trampling all over their own investigation into the Kano bombing as it would make them look incompetent in the eyes of the world. President Habbas said his armed forces—such as they are—had found no suggestion of DSA involvement in the UK attacks apart from the video claiming responsibility, and that could have been made by anyone.’

‘I’d have thought he’d have welcomed international help,’
Harvey
said. ‘He’d have had the opportunity to mount a large multinational operation against DSA and rid his country of them.’

‘Frankly, he seems a bit pissed off that his country is caught up in this at all.’

‘Then send a covert team in,’ Harvey suggested, but again Thompson shook her head.

‘The foreign secretary was adamant that we not go against their wishes. We do have one man on the ground, but so far he hasn’t come up with anything to contradict the official reports. And with DSA’s leaders all dead now . . . .’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t expect much to come of it.’

‘So that’s it? Investigation over?’

‘Temporarily,’ Thompson said, moving over to join him on the bed. ‘And that’s enough about work.’

Her hand started at his ankle and slowly climbed up past his knee and to his groin, where she found him ready and waiting.

When Harvey arrived at the office the next morning he went straight to Hamad Farsi’s desk and asked him what he’d found on Michael West.

‘Considering the nature of the business, Bicknell Security isn’t that secure.’ Farsi handed over a handwritten sheet of A4. As instructed the previous day, he’d recorded his findings using only pen and paper. ‘I managed to get into their office late last night and locate the file on West. The meat of it’s on there.’

Harvey scanned the document and noted the name Harcourt Industries Limited. ‘It says this is his current employer. Have you spoken to them yet?’

‘Not easy,’ Farsi said. ‘They don’t exist. No record of them at Companies House, and the address turned out to be a dairy distribution centre in Swindon.’

Despite what had gone on between them over the last couple of days, Harvey had suspected that Thompson wouldn’t be as forthcoming as she’d promised, which was why he’d sent Farsi on the nocturnal mission. It was obvious that his suspicions were correct: Thompson was shutting him out.

Harvey thanked Farsi and went to report to Ellis. He found her pacing behind her desk, and he could see that she wasn’t in the best of moods.

‘Thompson’s holding out on us,’ he said, explaining what he’d been told the previous evening and the information Farsi had uncovered.

‘She’s the least of my worries right now.’ Ellis snatched a document from her desk and waved it at Harvey. ‘Brigandicuum has been online for less than a week and they’re already shaping policy around it. According to the home secretary’s office, the number of staff we need going forward is going to be greatly reduced thanks to the amount of accurate information the new system will provide. Budget cuts of thirty percent are being considered, with a consultation process beginning in two weeks’ time.’

‘They’re cutting our numbers?’

‘So they say,’ Ellis said, holding up the paper. ‘A new rapid-reaction force is being set up to deal with the operational side of things, and our role will be to co-ordinate arrests based on the information we get from Haddon Hall.’

‘That’s it?’ Harvey asked. ‘We don’t even get to analyse the data ourselves?’

‘Apparently that function is no longer a required step in proceedings. With Brigandicuum being foolproof, we just arrange to take them down.’

‘Who handles the interviews?’

‘It doesn’t say, but don’t expect it to be us.’

Harvey was shocked at how quickly things were moving. ‘I find it amazing that they can come up with a completely new structure for the security services overnight,’ he said. ‘It usually takes the government years to plan a change this big.’

‘They’ll have been working on this since day one,’ Ellis said. ‘I guess they had everything worked out and were just waiting for it to go live.’

‘It’s a pity it didn’t go live last week,’ he said. ‘We’d have saved a lot of lives.’

‘Perhaps they weren’t ready.’

‘Oh, they were ready enough. The place was buzzing, and there was no sign of anything still being worked on. It was like they were just . . . .’

‘Waiting for the right moment?’ Ellis finished his sentence, and her words left them both deep in thought.

It was Harvey who broke the silence. ‘Did you get the note I left you? Gray thinks James Farrar might be involved in the attacks.’

Ellis nodded. ‘I got it, and I decided Gray was seeing ghosts. At least, that’s what I thought yesterday.’

‘And now?’

Ellis hit a number on her phone and asked Gerald Small to come to her office. While she waited for him to arrive, she asked Harvey for Thompson’s mobile number, which he jotted down f
or her.

‘Gerald,’ Ellis said, when Small knocked on the door and entered, ‘I need you to hack a phone for me.’

Harvey handed over the slip of paper and Small asked what in particular she was interested in.

‘All conversations from this moment on.’

‘And the reason we can’t just route this through GCHQ . . . ?’

‘It’s sensitive,’ she said. ‘How long until you’ll be ready to go?’

Small assured her that he could be in within ten minutes, and rushed back to his office to get things in motion. Ellis took a seat and asked Harvey what he thought about Gray’s theory.

‘Like you, I was sceptical,’ he said, ‘but having thought about it, who else would have a motive to specifically target Gray?’

‘He works in the security business, so he must have pissed someone off along the way.’

‘Bad enough to make them launch an attack on Britain?’

‘Fair point,’ Ellis conceded.

They were interrupted as her desk phone rang. It was Small, confirming that he was ready with a trace. Ellis hung up and hit a pre-set number on her mobile. When it connected, she asked for Manello.

‘Hi, Tony. This is Veronica Ellis. I have a request for you.’

Harvey waited while his boss went through authentication measures and explained what she wanted from Brigandicuum.

‘I need you to add James Farrar as a search parameter.’

Harvey waved his hands at her before making a cut-throat sign, but Ellis held up a finger to silence him. Eventually, she thanked Manello and hung up.

‘I thought we were doing this on the quiet,’ Harvey said. ‘Why did you tip our hand?’

‘I’m shaking the tree,’ Ellis told him. ‘Now we just have to wait and see what falls out.’

‘So how was your first assignment?’

Despite Paul Mackenzie having been with Minotaur Logistics for over nine months, this was the first time Gray had managed to sit down and have a proper chat with him. The drive to the airport was the perfect opportunity for Gray to find out a bit more about his star recruit. He, Melissa and Mackenzie sat in the back of the car, while Smart drove and Sonny rode shotgun.

‘Not bad. My principal liked to do things his own way, which meant some hairy moments, but mostly it was same old, same old.’

‘That’s why we get paid the big bucks,’ Gray smiled. ‘So tell me about yourself.’

Mackenzie explained that he’d joined the army at eighteen and served in the Parachute Regiment for five years before tryin
g hi
s arm at SAS selection. After making it through the
gruelling
six-month process he’d had a couple of stints in Iraq, making sergeant on his return. His most recent deployment had been to
Afghanistan
as part of Operation Moshtarak, where he’d led a patrol that included Michael West. It turned out that Mackenzie had actually testified at the subsequent court martial, but due to a lack of any other corroborating evidence, West had been found not guilty of murdering the civilian. The regiment, however, didn’t like
having
its name sullied, and West had been returned to unit within a couple of weeks of the verdict.

‘After he was RTU’d, I never heard from him again,’
Mackenzie
told Gray, ‘though a mate told me he’d bought himself out of the army and gone contracting.’

‘What about you?’ Gray asked. ‘Why did you leave? Your file said you’d just made E squadron.’

‘It’s a long story,’ Mackenzie said, looking at the backs of hi
s hands.

Gray looked too, and wondered if the problem had been down to the colour of Mackenzie’s skin. One thing he’d rarely tripped across was racism within the regiment. On the rare occasions when it had reared its ugly head, it had never been aimed at one of their own.

Gray shrugged. ‘Well, we’ve got a long journey ahead of us.’

Mackenzie still seemed hesitant, but after a few moments of silence he began to open up.

‘I did it for a girl,’ he said. ‘We met just after I joined E
squadron
, and we soon hit it off. I spent most of my free time at her place and we rarely got out of bed. The problem is, she likes the little luxuries in life, and I couldn’t afford them on what the army pays. So, I decided to quit and go contracting in the hope that I could make some decent money.’

‘You’ll certainly do that,’ Gray assured him. ‘I just can’t believe you gave it all up for a woman.’

‘She’s kinda special.’

‘They all are,’ Gray agreed, ‘and E squadron’s loss is our gain. A man with your talents will be in high demand. I’m just glad we found you first.’