THE THESEUS PARADOX: The stunning breakthrough thriller based on real events, from the Scotland Yard detective turned author. (8 page)

This place was alien to Jake. The houses were packed in rows back to back. Jake was used to seeing houses with front gardens and rear gardens, but here there were neither – two houses sandwiched together, pavement, road, then two houses sandwiched together, repeated over and over, row after row.

Karim sat in the passenger seat of the BMW as Jake turned the ignition.

‘They’re talking of flattening this whole place and building new homes here, flash apartments and all that. Be better than this slum, maybe even make some jobs too,’ Karim said as they drove into Leeds.

Karim directed Jake to the north-west side of the city, close to the university. They drove into a road called Victoria Park and began climbing a hill. After about two hundred yards, they passed a modern-looking mosque on the right-hand side.

‘That place there… number twenty-two.’ Karim pointed to a 1980s development directly opposite the mosque.

Jake stopped the car halfway up the hill.

‘I came here yesterday – there was no answer,’ said Karim.

‘Wait here…’ Jake got out of the car and walked back in the direction Karim had pointed.

A block of flats, on several different levels, zigzagged up the hill. Eventually Jake found number twenty-two – it had two doors, both red. Jake looked to see which entrance had the hinges visible on the outside – the back door. It would open outwards – and would be the hardest work to smash in.

To one side of the flat, a row of windows was hidden slightly by box hedges. Jake noticed that the leaves nearest the windows were a different colour to the rest of hedge – sickly and yellowed, and some areas were even turning brown.

Jake tried to look into the window directly behind the most decayed area of foliage. There was a net curtain obscuring his view. He rapped hard on the window and waited.

No response.

Jake looked at his watch. It was 0645 hours. He needed a search warrant. It would take an hour to complete the requisite paperwork and then the courts didn’t open until 1000 hours. That was way too long in these circumstances. He had to make other plans.

16

Tuesday

12 July 2005

0805 hours

Headingley, Leeds, West Yorkshire

‘I swear by almighty God that the content of this, my information, is true to the best of my knowledge and belief.’ Jake stood with a copy of the Bible in his left hand; his right hand was held up like a Native American Indian from a Spaghetti Western.

The magistrate was a slim, spindly woman in her fifties with rollers in her hair. She had been trying to get ready for work when Jake had arrived. She sported a silk paisley dressing gown with a set of pastel pyjamas underneath.

They stood in the dining room of her detached house in an affluent suburb on the outskirts of Leeds. A Jack Russell dog sat at Jake’s feet, looking up expectantly at him and panting.

Jake always found out-of-hours, urgent search-warrant applications amusing. Each force area had a rota of on-call magistrates. Mrs Jackson was on the list for today.

Completing the paperwork in record time, Jake had briefly outlined the events in London from the previous Thursday and the circumstances of his morning so far. Then he’d driven to Mrs Jackson’s house as fast as humanly possible. It was rare that a search-warrant application was declined, but not unknown – and police couldn’t legally enter the property without one. This one was vital and desperately pressing. Jake mentally crossed his fingers and watched the pendulum of Mrs Jackson’s carriage clock swing to and fro as it sat on the mantelpiece, the minutes ticking away.

‘Thank you, Inspector – is there anyone inside this address at the moment?’ asked Mrs Jackson, sitting down at the table with a cup of coffee.

‘Not that we are aware of, ma’am. I’ve knocked there this morning – there’s no reply. We’ve called in our bomb-disposal experts,’ Jake said as he placed the Bible down on the polished dark wood table.

‘Sit down, Inspector – please.’ Mrs Jackson pointed at the chair closest to him.

The Jack Russell jumped excitedly at his legs as Jake pulled out the chair and sat down.

‘Do you
really
think there’s a bomb in there?’ Mrs Jackson’s eyes were as wide as saucers.

‘We don’t know. There’s something very odd about the rental of this premises; it’s not like the other warrants we executed this morning – they were family homes with people living inside. This is different. The bushes are dead or discoloured outside the windows of the flat. I think it’s down to some form of chemical that’s been used inside there – we need to expect the worse.’ Jake attempted to smile reassuringly at her as he finished his explanation.

His mobile started to vibrate. It was Lenny calling – Jake had left him on guard outside the suspect property.

Jake looked at Mrs Jackson and she nodded to indicate that she was happy for him to take the call. A little bit of court etiquette went a long way, even in a magistrate’s home.

‘Lenny… you OK?’

‘Everything’s fine. No movement at number twenty-two. Everyone’s here. I’ve got ten uniform from West Yorks and EXPO have just arrived. We’re ready to rumble. You got the warrant for this place?’ he asked.

EXPO stood for explosives officer. In London they were police officers; up here the West Yorkshire force usually had to organise for a team from the Army to come in. Jake had planned ahead for this eventuality with two EXPO officers from the Met ready on standby. They’d arrived in Leeds on Sunday and had been waiting for the call.

‘The magistrate hasn’t authorised the warrant yet, Lenny…’ Jake looked at Mrs Jackson as he spoke.

Mrs Jackson picked up the pen, signed at the bottom of the search warrant and nodded her head.

‘She’s authorised it now – start evacuating the premises nearby, get the roads shut off. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

17

Tuesday

12 July 2005

0915 hours

Victoria Park, Leeds, West Yorkshire

Jake briefed the EXPO as they walked around the exterior of the flat. They’d knocked on the windows and doors several times to no avail – the place appeared to be empty. Geoff Wilson was an ex-Army ordnance expert approaching retirement with just six months left in the job. He was staying at the same hotel as Jake in Leeds city centre – they’d met and shared a few beers at the hotel bar the previous night.

‘I don’t think we should use either of the doors as a point of entry. We’ll go through the window – just in case they’ve wired it up for us. You happy with the guy that showed you this place? It could be a set-up, Jake,’ said Geoff.

‘I can’t double-check everything that he’s said right now, Geoff, but my gut feeling is he’s telling the truth – it’s unlikely to be a set-up in my opinion. We’ve evacuated everyone in the rest of the complex as a precaution anyway.’

‘What do you know about the internal layout of the premises, Jake?’

‘I understand the neighbours have told my DS that it’s a two-bedroomed flat. Six separate rooms in total, including an entrance hall. The area where the garden door is – that’s the living area. The area where the bushes have died by the window are bedrooms.’

‘OK, we’ll break the living-room window with the robot just in case you’re wrong about your man. We can use the cameras on the robot’s arm to have a good look and check that it’s safe before we get too close ourselves. If he is leading us into a trap, I don’t fancy being nearby should the whole place go up.’ Geoff winked at him.

Jake smiled. ‘OK – good advice.’

Jake had seen the robots in action once before – they were remote-controlled vehicles that looked like small tanks.

Jake thought back to his explosive-device training. The four main parts of a bomb operated in a specific order to detonate in a controlled way on command. The power source, a trigger, an initiator and the main charge.

Jake knew all too well that in suicide missions the trigger was the suicide bomber, who simply connected up the power source to the initiator or fuse – basically like that on a stick of dynamite.

More sophisticated devices involved a remote trigger for the initiator. Sometimes these triggers could be physical – as simple as someone opening a door. Outside this flat now, Jake knew they had to be careful not to start that chain reaction – and be far enough away to survive a blast if they did.

Jake and Geoff walked the hundred yards back to the outer cordon where the EXPO van was parked.

In the back of the large, Luton-bodied Ford Transit van sat two robots – one designed for small spaces and the other designed for bigger, heavier, more robust work. It had taken about an hour for Geoff and his co-pilot, Mike, to set the robots up and check that they were working correctly.

The unmarked van also contained a small desk with three screens above it. On the desk were two joysticks and a computer. One joystick controlled the movement of the robot’s caterpillar tracks and its direction; the other controlled the robotic arm.

Geoff and Jake watched the screens silently, as Mike began moving the larger of the two robots toward the flat. It edged up the hill and down the concrete path toward the red door. Tape on the path showed the route that Geoff had painstakingly marked out that morning for the robot to follow.

As it reached the window, the robot turned slightly to find a better angle. It needed to line itself up with the glass that it was programmed to break.

‘Here goes…’ said Mike.

He pushed the joystick forward and the robot suddenly lurched toward the flat.

Jake held his breath, willing against any sort of detonation.

A long, rigid, spiked arm, which held a diamond point at its tip, rammed against the window like a lance as the robot drove directly at it. The camera on the robot jolted and wobbled as the spike made contact with the glass.

They could hear it breaking. Geoff looked skyward and smiled.

Several large triangles of glass hit the concrete and appeared on the video screen in the van.

Geoff asked Mike to stop for a moment so that they could assess the situation.

The top camera panned over the entire window. It was like a starburst from the point of impact; large triangular shapes of glass separating from each other, getting bigger as the crack moved toward the edges of the pane.

But the window was double-glazed; there were two panes of glass. Only one had broken.

Geoff groaned.

‘You little fucker… Let’s have another go,’ said Mike as he pulled the joystick back toward him and pushed it away again.

Jake braced himself once again for the noise and force of a potential blast.

The lance’s spike went cleanly through the second sheet of glass and into the flat.

‘Gotcha,’ said Mike, as he reversed the robot backwards.

Jake’s sigh of relief was audible.

‘No explosions, good. Maybe your man was being straight? Let’s have a look inside then,’ said Geoff, as he began using the other joystick to move the mechanical arm on the robot.

The arm moved up and toward the hole in the glass before pushing through and widening the aperture. There was a slight tangle with the net curtains, which had somehow been secured very firmly and snugly to the window frame, then suddenly Jake could see inside the flat – the screen on the wall of the van showing him in full colour the state of the living room.

‘Jesus!’ Jake exclaimed.

18

Tuesday

12 July 2005

1007 hours

Victoria Park, Leeds, West Yorkshire

The walls were regulation magnolia. A red patterned sofa sat on what appeared to be a blue and red carpet. Jake couldn’t really tell – mainly because the floor looked like a rubbish dump. There were bin bags full of stuff, boxes for mobile phones, rucksacks, plates with some odd-looking brown substance on them. Things were just strewn everywhere. It was a gigantic mess. A kitchen area off to the right of the living room looked just as bad.

Jake was gobsmacked. This was an absolute treasure trove of evidence just waiting for them.

‘Wow. That’s going to take some work, Jake. We’ll have to take it slow – take it out piece by piece, item by item; each thing is a potential explosive risk.’

Jake felt both elated and disappointed. He needed to know exactly what this place was.

Lenny appeared at the back of the van. ‘Guv, found a witness as we were evacuating, says there was a group of men who rented number twenty-two – Asian guys, in and out all the time – says they were a pain in the arse with their hours. She saw them at about three thirty or four a.m. on the morning of the seventh. Reckons they were loading rucksacks into a small blue car. I think we’ve got the right place.’

‘Good work, Lenny. Get a written statement off of her, will you?’

Lenny smiled, nodded and walked away from the van.

‘Geoff, how long before we can get an investigation team inside that flat?’ Jake asked.

‘I don’t know. We’ll need to check it’s safe. Then we’ll need the police photographer here to document everything. Then that ton of stuff in there will need to be removed and processed… I tell you what, rather them than me in that small place with a load of explosives equipment! I wouldn’t fancy storing and assembling all the different bomb parts side by side. What if it all went up in one go? What sort of idiot assembles all three parts of a bomb in one tiny flat?’ Geoff shook his head in disbelief and went off muttering to himself about the danger of explosives.

Jake needed a coffee, maybe even something a bit stronger. There was a lot to take in. He was shocked by how much stuff was in there. Almost too much.

He brought back three paper cups of double espresso from a small café around the corner. He’d also treated Geoff, Mike and himself to a bacon roll each. Jake was starving. It had been a long day already. Up at 0400 hours, briefing the search teams at 0445 hours. He’d not slept much the previous night anyway; he never did the night before a job, and this was probably the highest-profile one he’d done.