Lone Wolf (21 page)

41. CREWDSON

The allotments were at their quietest on weekday mornings. Fay and Ning sat in front of the shed in folding chairs, catching the sun and occasionally disturbed by the high-speed trains shooting past at the allotment’s far end.

‘We could go see a movie,’ Ning suggested.

‘I need to buy sun cream,’ Fay said. ‘My skin’s really fair. I’m gonna turn into a lobster.’

‘You don’t wanna see a movie?’

‘Warren’s gone to bed. We can all meet up and do something tonight,’ Fay suggested.

Warren was a nice guy, but Fay falling for him meant Ning risked getting pushed out of the picture. As she wondered about finding a way to make Fay and Warren break up, Ning picked up a text from James, saying that he’d just heard from Ryan.

Fay had her eyes closed and Ning was tapping out a reply when she noticed two young men striding their way. Sun coming from behind made it hard to see details, but Ning was instantly suspicious because allotments were a pastime for the middle-aged and elderly.

‘We’ve got company,’ Ning said, as she gave Fay’s knee a squeeze.

As Fay sat up straight, Ning realised it was Eli’s deputy, Shawn. Ning made sure she had her backpack within reach. The situation was super awkward, because Ning knew Eli and Hagar had made up, but she couldn’t tell Fay without breaking cover.

‘Afternoon, ladies,’ Shawn said, as he came within a couple of metres.

Fay squinted and held a hand over her brow. ‘How’d you find us?’ she asked.

Shawn laughed. ‘I like to know all about the people I do business with,’ he explained. ‘I had you trailed after our first meet-up.’

‘I don’t know why you’re here,’ Fay said dismissively. ‘You didn’t want Hagar’s shit, so I got rid of it.’

Shawn laughed. ‘And in such spectacular fashion.’

‘So what
are
you here for?’

Shawn laughed and spread his arms out wide. ‘Hagar’s put a bounty on you two ladies,’ he explained. ‘Although I expect my boss will waive the reward, as a gesture of goodwill.’

As Shawn and his buddy stopped walking, Ning saw three more guys closing from behind. She double-tapped her earlobe to activate her com, and sent James the text she’d been typing with the addition of
SHAWN HERE NOW HOSTILE!!!

‘And what if I don’t want to come with you?’ Fay spat, as she glanced around nervously.

‘That’s why I brought my friends,’ Shawn said. ‘This can be civilised, or you can come kicking and screaming. But you’ll come.’

Fay and Ning glanced at one another. While nothing got said, it was clear neither of them wanted to go down without a fight.

Fay moved first, sending her plastic chair sideways as she sprang up. Ning dug her right hand in the dirt beside her chair and flicked a big clod up towards Shawn and his pal.

A natural runner, Fay sprang like a gazelle, deftly avoiding the lunging arm of Shawn’s accomplice and vaulting a strawberry patch on the next allotment. Ning was slower, but strong. As Shawn shielded his face from the flying earth, she went on the attack, grabbing her lightweight chair and using it as a battering ram. Shawn doubled up as the plastic leg hit him in the groin.

While Fay disappeared towards the allotment’s main gates, Ning charged in the other direction. A suntanned old-timer told Ning not to step in his broccoli and demanded to know
what the devil
was going on as she stumbled over his plot.

Ning was pissed off when she looked back. Shawn was still down, but the three guys who’d approached from behind were all on her case, presumably deterred from going after Fay by her sheer speed.

One of Ning’s pursuers moved way faster than the others and closed relentlessly. Realising she’d be caught in seconds, Ning stopped running, grabbed a stick out of the ground and snapped it to make a sharp point. She spread out wide, and waited.

‘See what you get,’ Ning taunted.

But it wasn’t just the sprinter’s legs that were fast. As Ning swung with the stick, he ducked, then thrust forwards from a low position. He almost head-butted Ning in the chest, but she managed to turn. As she set off again, she felt the man’s hand on her backpack and only broke free by letting it drop off her arm.

James’ voice sounded on the com in Ning’s ear. ‘Talk to me. What’s happening?’

Ning didn’t get to answer because she’d cut across another plot and her trainer landed awkwardly in a furrow. She stumbled forward, keeping upright for a couple of steps but losing it when she crashed into a bamboo frame used for growing runner beans.

As Ning’s body ploughed into freshly dug earth, the sprinter landed on top of her. She caught him with a nice elbow on the nose, but he had enormous shoulders and massive biceps that forced the air out of her lungs.

Ning continued to struggle as Shawn stumbled across the loose ground, then pointed a handgun at her head from less than a metre.

‘Keep still, missy,’ he shouted, clearly unhappy about getting a chair leg in the balls. ‘Break her arm.’

‘Ning, are you all right?’ James asked, over the com. ‘I’ve got your locator. I’m getting on my bike and I’m calling for backup.’

‘Break her damned arm,’ Shawn repeated, as blood from the guy on top of her’s nose dripped on to Ning’s T-shirt.

She’d fought her way out of all kinds of situations, but the guy was twice her weight and it was all muscle. Ning grunted and bucked as he squeezed her wrist, but he got her arm up behind her back and began pulling tight.

‘No,’ Ning sobbed. Then a scream, ‘Somebody help me!’

‘This’ll teach you to hit me in the balls,’ Shawn shouted, placing his boot on the back of Ning’s head as her arm made a sickening crunch.

*

‘James?’ Ryan yelled, taking off his garbage-soaked trainers before walking into the kitchen of their flat.

James hadn’t had time to send a message, but half-eaten marmalade toast and a laptop open at the kitchen table gave Ryan the impression that he’d left in a hurry. Ryan was torn: part of him wanted to get in bed and crash for a few hours, but he was also excited about all the stuff he’d found out in Chatham and he wanted to do some investigating.

Whichever he chose, Ryan needed to shower first. He stripped in front of the washing machine, lobbed everything including his trainers inside and put them on a hot wash with a big squirt of Dettol.

His body had lines of light and dark, where clothing had protected him from dirt. The shower water ran slate grey as chunks of soot and dirt dropped out of his hair. The cool blast perked him up and he enjoyed feeling clean as he sat on the edge of his bed, rubbing antiseptic down his pock-marked arms. He put plasters over several cuts and replaced the dressing on his grazed ankle.

People forget rapidly, so CHERUB agents are trained to get everything in writing as soon as it’s safe to do so. Ryan opened up a standard form on his laptop, typing a few paragraphs explaining what had happened overnight, then replaying the audio notes on his phone and making sure he hadn’t forgotten anything.

Once he’d saved the note and e-mailed a copy to mission control on campus, Ryan opened up the special equipment box in James’ bedroom and found a drug testing kit. Using tweezers, he picked white specks off the plastic bag with the handprint and dropped them into a pale green solution.

After swirling the test tube and letting it settle for half a minute, Ryan dipped a strip of test paper into the solution. Pale green indicated some level of cocaine, but the paper turned to the colour of spinach, indicating that his tiny sample was close to one hundred per cent pure.

Satisfied that he was on to the source of high purity cocaine he’d been sent on the mission to find, Ryan opened a web browser and did a Google search for
Sonata Loudspeaker Cable
. The search came back with the company’s US website and he skimmed through the home page, reading that Sonata produced
reference quality loudspeaker cable at highly competitive prices
.

Ryan had never previously realised that cabling could make a hi-fi system sound better, and baulked when he saw that Sonata’s top line Carbon X cable sold for a hundred dollars per yard.

Ryan’s next click took him to a page listing Sonata’s overseas suppliers. The UK distributor was a company called AV Master, based in Rochester. Ryan hadn’t heard of Rochester until that morning, when his train stopped there five minutes before meeting Clark at Chatham.

For the next step, Ryan had to log into a secure browser. He yawned as he entered a long password, and swiped his left thumb on the laptop’s fingerprint pad. Now he was in the CHERUB system, through which he could access databases run by British Intelligence, as well as other government agencies such as driver and vehicle registrations, company data and Revenue and Customs tax records.

Some of the databases took ages to respond, but within fifteen minutes Ryan had printed off a list of the directors of AV Master, along with ownership details for the removal truck. Apparently the removals firm had sold the truck at auction several years earlier and the vehicle seemed to have been purchased under a false name.

Ryan only had a low-level security clearance, so he couldn’t access any records held by private companies such as banks, internet providers and mobile phone companies. He was tired and decided to take a nap and leave the background investigation to James. He was closing browser tabs when he noticed a familiar face on screen.

He was a director of the cable import company, AV Master, and Ryan knew it was important, but spent half a minute racking his brain before working out where he knew him from. The picture was at least a decade out of date and he had different hair, but Ryan finally twigged that it was the man who’d made his laminated membership pass the first time he’d visited The Hangout.

Ryan confirmed Barry’s identity with a visit to The Hangout website. His full name was Barry Crewdson, manager of The Hangout centre in Kentish Town and deputy director of The Hangout London. Up to this point, Ryan had thought The Hangout was a community centre that had been infiltrated by drug dealers. But this started to change as he began studying the website and looking at government records for its senior staff and directors.

According to the website, the organisation had been founded in 1988 by Marie Crewdson, who’d been made Lady Crewdson by the Queen in 2004. The Hangout was a charity, with a network of thirty after-school clubs in England and Wales and centres for orphaned children in Iran and Pakistan. Lady Crewdson was chairperson of The Hangout and the other senior staff were mostly members of the Crewdson family.

The fact that the Crewdson family ran The Hangout was no secret. Ryan quickly found newspaper interviews with various Crewdsons, mainly focused on child poverty and the work their community centres did with underprivileged kids.

In the pictures accompanying the articles, the Crewdsons were a sprawling, cheerful family who wore corduroy trousers and cable knit sweaters. They all seemed to have loads of kids, they all worked tirelessly for charity and every newspaper picture seemed to include a Labrador or a floppy sheepdog.

Having found the link between Barry and the company that was importing the drug-filled cables, Ryan started looking into government records and Google results for other members of the Crewdson family.

Lady Crewdson herself seemed pretty clean, though Ryan decided it was dodgy that the land registry showed that this saintly charity worker had paid six and a half million for a villa overlooking Regents Park. Besides AV Master, Barry Crewdson owned shares in a trans-European trucking company and a luggage importer. His brother and two sisters owned more companies, including a chain of scrap metal dealerships, betting shops, casinos, jewellery shops and a half a dozen property companies.

It all fitted together nicely. The Crewdsons were the last people you’d suspect. A wholesome sprawling family, who’d somehow come to make tens of millions of pounds while owning a network of companies that were ideally suited to transporting drugs and laundering drug money.

Ryan’s lingering doubts got quashed when he got past reading upbeat pieces in the national press and unearthed shadier dealings on local blogs and the websites of local newspapers. A Hangout centre in north Wales had been branded a
hive of drug dealing
by a local councillor. A quantity of cocaine had been seized at a centre in Manchester. A Hangout mentor in East Sussex had been released on police bail following a drug squad investigation and Lady Crewdson herself had threatened to sue a journalist who’d claimed that a new Hangout centre in Cardiff had been funded by donations from a local drug baron.

The more Ryan tapped his mouse and clicked his keyboard, the dodgier the Crewdson family looked. He burst out laughing when he found that the former bowling club that had been Hagar’s grow house was owned by Pegasus Properties, which was in turn owned by a Jersey-based company that had paid three hundred thousand pounds in dividends to Lady Crewdson’s three granddaughters.

Ryan realised he’d hit on something huge, but after an hour online he got sick of waiting for James to get home, so he e-mailed all of his discoveries to mission control on campus and crashed out on his bed, hoping to catch up on some sleep.

42. CHASE

Ning felt weak as Shawn marched her up a steep flight of stairs, behind a Turkish social club. The rooms had been a dental surgery in a past life, and there was still a slight mintiness in the stale air.

Ning got a rickety chair in what had been a waiting room. The sprinter had sat behind her in the car, so Ning got her first proper view of him as he sat opposite. Dark-skinned, handsome, no older than twenty. His T-shirt bulged over massive arms and chest and in different circumstances Ning would have considered him hot.

‘Goldfarb Dental Surgery,’ Ning said, slurring her words as if she was on the edge of consciousness and knowing – or at least fairly optimistic – that James could hear over the com. ‘Turkish social club. What you taking me here for? Is Eli Turkish?’

‘Cut the yap,’ Shawn said, as he pulled out his phone.

As Shawn dialled, two of the other three heavies were in the doorway. The third couldn’t resist going into the dentist’s room across the hall and messing around with the chair. Ning felt queasy every time she looked at her upper arm, with the broken bone supporting a huge dome of painfully bulging flesh, getting bigger all the time from internal bleeding.

She closed her eyes, hoping she’d faint and come around in a better place, but James’ voice brought her back into the room. It seemed loud because the tiny speaker was inside her ear, but nobody else could hear it.

‘Roger your location,’ James said, as his motorbike rumbled in the background. ‘I’m gonna pull over and look it up.’

Shawn on his mobile sounded like some comedy sidekick, getting slapped down for incompetence. When he ended the call with Eli, he acted like nothing had happened and took his anger out on his henchmen.

‘Why did all four of you go after her?’ Shawn shouted, as he pointed at Ning. ‘Eli wants both girls and no excuses.’

‘It was like that other girl had a rocket up her arse,’ one of the guys said.

Another added, ‘Usain Bolt or something . . .’

‘You should be able to catch one schoolgirl between four of you,’ Shawn spat.

One of the guys in the doorway didn’t like Shawn’s tone and faced him off. ‘Maybe you’d have caught her, if you hadn’t let a fifteen-year-old girl take you down.’

Shawn stepped up and went eyeball to eyeball. ‘You think you’re someone now, boy? I was working for Eli when you still had stabilisers on your bike.’

The guy facing Shawn off stood his ground. ‘I know exactly who
you
are,’ he sneered. ‘Jumped-up errand boy, for the leader of a crew that’s got no balls. We should be out on the street taking care of Hagar’s crew, not worrying ourselves over a couple of schoolgirls.’

Ning perked up, hearing her captors fighting amongst themselves, and couldn’t resist stirring it. ‘He’s got a point you know, Shawn.’

Shawn swivelled and scowled at Ning. ‘You want me to break your other arm?’

Ning shrugged. ‘I can’t believe you
all
left with me,’ she said, trying to sound as chipper as the pain allowed. ‘When Fay saw you all leaving with me, she’ll have gone straight back to the shed to pick up our gear. If one of you had stayed behind you’d have had a chance, but by now? She’ll be on a train to somewhere far away.’

‘Who asked you?’ Shawn spat.

‘She’s right though,’ the sprinter said, as he played with the wedge of bloody tissue stuffed up his right nostril.

‘Jesus!’ Shawn shouted, as he spun furiously and slammed his mobile phone at the wall. ‘Why do I have to work with you idiots?’

The Samsung flip phone separated from its battery as it spun to a halt under the chair next to Ning. She used her good arm to pick it up and spoke in her most deadpan voice.

‘I think you’ve broken it.’

Shawn’s head was bright red and his eyes looked like they were about to shoot out of their sockets.

‘You,’ he said, pointing at the sprinter. ‘Stay here, don’t take your eye off her. The rest of you, put your heads together. Get out on the street and look for Fay Hoyt.’

‘Look where, boss?’ the one who’d been messing about in the dentist’s chair asked.

Ning heard James over the com. ‘We’ve located the club. We’re less than two minutes away.’

She took note of
we’re
and wondered if Ryan was his backup.

‘Go back to the shed on the allotment,’ Shawn ordered. ‘Look for clues. Letters from relatives, old train tickets, that kind of shit. Fay’s been living in that shed. There’s got to be some indication of who she knows or where she’s going.’

The three burly men sulked like kids who’d just been given a detention as they headed sourly towards the door.

‘Five seconds,’ James told Ning. ‘Stun grenade.’

Ning glanced towards the window as the top of an aluminium ladder hit the wall outside. The man who shot up it wore a black riot helmet. He thrust a padded glove through the glass and lobbed a grey cylinder inside. As Shawn and his crew looked towards the noise, Ning dived across the waiting room chairs, wrapping her good arm over her eyes and keeping her mouth open so that the blast didn’t make her eardrums pop.

As a sharp bang and bright blue flash erupted, something smashed the door in the club downstairs.

‘Police. Everybody, down, down, down.’

Four cops in riot gear started running up the stairs. The one on the ladder kicked his way through the glass, followed by James, who was more cautious than the cops because he was in T-shirt, jeans and motorcycle helmet.

‘On the ground!’ cops shouted. ‘Hands on your heads.’

Ning enjoyed seeing a huge riot cop body-slam Shawn.

‘Kidnapping,’ the cop told him. ‘That’s ten years, pal.’

James winced when the smoke cleared and he saw the state of Ning’s arm. ‘You OK?’ he shouted.

‘Just the arm,’ Ning said.

‘I won’t bother waiting for an ambulance,’ James said. ‘I’ll get one of the cop cars to take you to hospital and I’ll follow on my bike.’

The chaos settled down to grunts and moans as the cops got everyone in cuffs and started reading them their rights. The muscular sprinter had put up the biggest fight and it took three officers to get his hands into position for cuffing.

As the breathless cops backed away, Ning noticed the weapon holstered to James’ belt.

‘Is there a cut on my back?’ Ning asked. ‘I think I can feel blood.’

As James leaned forward to take a look, Ning snatched the Taser from his belt. Running on rage, she aimed it at the sprinter’s back from less than a metre, and pressed the trigger. A metal barb shot out, punching through his T-shirt and delivering fifty thousand volts between the shoulder blades.

As James spun around, Ning gave a second squeeze on the trigger and yelled, ‘That’s for breaking my arm, you son of a bitch.’

‘Whoa!’ James yelled.

James had shown the cops his intelligence service ID, but they had no idea about CHERUB and he had to step in the way to stop the cops from arresting Ning too.

‘She’s good,’ James shouted. Then more quietly to Ning as he snatched the Taser off her and gestured for the cops to back off, ‘That’s not cool!’

But although James was determined to prove himself as a mission controller, he still had a lot of empathy with the stuff that young CHERUB agents have to go through and he couldn’t help seeing the funny side of what Ning had done.

‘You’re lucky there’s so many cops around,’ Ning yelled, as James pushed her backwards. ‘Or I’d keep zapping until the battery ran out.’