Ultimatum (12 page)

At the time he’d been running an outfit providing security for nightclub doors in north London and the occasional bodyguard work, and I’d asked him for work. We might not have seen each other for close to five years, but we’d hit it off again straight away. I was an angry man after my time inside, and it hadn’t been hard to convince him of my right-wing credentials. Nor to let him believe that I would be up for more lucrative, illegal work if it was available.

I knew straight away he was involved in something bad, but like Fox, he was very careful not to give too much away. So I’d made the classic mistake and compromised myself to gain his trust.

The robbery should have sorted everything. We’d hold up a scumbag drug dealer, put the fear of God into him, and leave with plenty of cash, knowing that he’d never report what had happened to the police. But you know the rest. And now suddenly I was in a lot of trouble. If Cecil went down, he’d take me with him. I’d debated long and hard this morning whether I should say anything to Bolt, but in the end I’d decided I had no choice. I needed to see this through, and if I played my cards right, when Cecil went down he’d have no idea that I’d been the one to betray him.

All I had to do was make it happen.

Nineteen

12.15

AS BOLT WALKED
past a small café on his left, his informant, Richard Burnham-Jones, got up from where he’d been sitting at one of the outside tables and fell into step beside him. He was dressed in jogging gear and carrying a bottle of water. Jones was a tall guy, close to Bolt’s height, with thick dark hair and handsome chiselled features that were enhanced rather than spoilt by a thin, twisting scar an inch and a half long above his left eye, which he’d received when he’d been hit by a piece of skull bone from a fellow soldier who’d just been shot in the head.

‘So?’ Bolt said without looking at him as they walked on through the park.

‘I’m in. Cecil introduced me to a guy called Cain who’s obviously the boss. Cain wants me to work for him and he’s willing to pay good money. My first job’s to accompany him and Cecil to a meeting today. He wants us to provide security.’

Jesus, thought Bolt, it was all happening today. He’d been running Jones as an informant for close to a year now with virtually nothing to show for it, and now he had a breakthrough on the day when London had once again come under terrorist attack. ‘Did you get a photo of him?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? That’s what I gave you the camera for.’ A month earlier, Bolt had supplied Jones with a Nike baseball cap with a tiny camera sewn into the front lining. To take a photo, the person wearing the cap pressed a button in the side lining, an action Jones could easily have disguised by scratching the side of his head.

‘It was just too risky. Cecil searched me before the meet, and I told you before: I’ve never worn a baseball cap in my life. He’d have noticed, and then if he’d searched it and found the camera …’

‘He wouldn’t have. It’s too small.’

‘It’s the kind of thing he looks for. Cecil knows what he’s doing, and he’s paranoid as hell. If he’d found it, it would have got me killed.’

Which Bolt had to admit was true. Cecil Boorman was a difficult customer. A former soldier, he’d been ID’d as an occasional associate of several of the mercenaries involved in the Stanhope siege, and at one time had done work in Iraq for the security consultancy that Fox had run. The only problem was, there was nothing concrete linking him to the siege itself, and he was seriously adept at counter-surveillance, making an intelligence-gathering op against him near enough impossible. Bolt, though, had always thought he was worth pursuing, and if Cecil was being that careful about covering his tracks, it meant he had to have something big to hide.

‘Describe Cain to me.’

‘My height, early forties, short blonde hair, lean and very pale – almost vampire pale – with a big vein running down his right cheek that really stands out. He doesn’t look ordinary, put it like that. He’s also ex-military, an officer by the looks of him, and speaks with a middle-class Home Counties accent. He served in Lashkar Gah a few years ago, and there was a green on blue incident in his battalion.’

‘Green on blue?’

‘Where an Afghan working with coalition forces attacks them. A translator called Abdul shot two of Cain’s men while he was there. If you look hard enough, you should be able to get an ID on him from all that.’

Bolt nodded. He was recording the conversation so there was no need to write anything down. ‘Did Cain mention anything about the bombs this morning?’

‘Yeah. He said that it was Islamic terrorists, and gave me this spiel about how if I worked for him, I’d get a chance to fight against all the people doing the country harm. He was pretty extreme in his views.’

‘But he didn’t suggest that the bombs might be something to do with him?’

‘You think they might be?’

Bolt sighed. ‘I don’t know.’ He needed more than this if they were ever going to get a breakthrough. Even if they managed to ID Cain from Jones’s description, it didn’t push them any further forward. ‘This meeting Cain wants you to go to. Do you know what it’s about?’

‘He didn’t give many details, but I get the impression he’s buying something, and that he doesn’t trust the people he’s buying it from.’

‘Did you get a look at his car?’

Jones shook his head. ‘He was on foot when I saw him.’

‘The thing is, he may not be as good at counter-surveillance as Cecil, so it’s possible we can get a tail on him. Have you asked Cecil about him?’

‘Cecil’s keeping very shtum about Cain, and if I ask too many questions he’ll get suspicious.’

‘You’re entitled to act suspicious too, you know. You’re being hired by someone you know nothing about, to do work you know nothing about, but which involves guns. How do you know that he isn’t a cop trying to set you up? Ask Cecil that. The point is, if you put yourself in the position of a man who’s looking for illegal work, you’ll get the answers you’re looking for.’

‘That
you’re
looking for, you mean. I’m doing this for you, remember?’

Bolt looked at him sharply. ‘No, Jones, you’re not. You’re doing it for the ordinary man in the street, who just wants to go about his business without someone trying to blow him up in aid of some shitty little cause. You’re doing it for your family. For your cousin who died at the Stanhope. For your daughter. Remember, she and your ex-wife could have been in that coffee shop when it blew this morning.’

Jones took a deep breath, staring off into space. ‘Yeah, I know.’

Bolt knew he was laying it on thick but he was frustrated. He sympathized with what had happened to Jones. By all accounts he’d been a good cop who’d lost his head one day, and the result was that he’d also lost his job, his pension, his wife and, most humiliating of all, his liberty. He’d sacrificed a lot for his country, and the people in it, and all he’d received was a lot of shit in return. But it also meant that he was a perfect informant, because if anyone was justified in feeling the kind of rage needed to become involved with extremists, it was him. But there are strict rules in the UK on the police’s use of informants, and Bolt was bending them seriously. He’d been told by his boss, the head of Counter Terrorism Command, that due to the seriousness of the terrorist threat he had some flexibility about who he used, and how he used them. But he also knew that if everything went tits up, he’d be the one taking all the flak.

‘If you go to this meeting I want you to wear a listening device,’ he told Jones.

‘I told you: they search me.’

‘This thing’s tiny, and it’s basically only a tape recorder, so no bug finder will be able to find it. It’s just to gather evidence, so try to get these guys talking.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. ‘There are two GPS units in there as well. They’re the size and thickness of postage stamps, and we can turn them on remotely. The bug finder won’t find them either. They operate to a completely different frequency. If you can, plant one in Cain’s car after the meet, and one in Cecil’s car as well if it’s at all possible. Then call me, and we’ll switch them on.’ He handed Jones the envelope, glancing round as casually as possible to check no one was paying them undue attention, but the park was quiet. ‘We’re not going to be tailing you. I don’t want to com promise things, and right now we haven’t got the manpower. You’re on your own out there today.’

Jones grunted derisively. ‘I’ve been on my own since the very beginning.’

‘The most important thing is to ID Cain. No more. Once we’ve done that, you can pull out. And don’t, whatever you do, compromise yourself by doing anything that’s going to get you into serious trouble.’

Jones scratched the scar on his forehead. He still looked unhappy. ‘I’ve got one major request, Mike. I need you to make sure no one ever knows I’ve been involved. I don’t want anything to do with a court case, or an inquiry. Nothing like that. And I don’t want to do anything that puts my family in danger.’

‘When you’re done with this, you’re out, I promise,’ said Bolt, knowing this was a promise that might become very hard to keep. ‘Listen, I’ve got to go. Things are chaos at the moment with these bombs. Keep me posted, OK?’

They turned and went their separate ways, Bolt already preoccupied with the terrorists’ threat that if their demands weren’t met, in less than eight hours there’d be another even bigger attack on the city he called home.

Only later did it occur to him that this was the first time they’d met up when Jones hadn’t asked him for payment for his services.

Twenty

13.45

VOORHESS’S TARGET WAS
a young entrepreneur called Azim Butt who lived alone in a modern townhouse, three storeys tall, with an attached garage and a roof garden full of exotic plants that looked from the street like a miniature rainforest amid the urban concrete.

It had been easy enough to get inside. Mr Butt’s Filipina cleaner came every Monday and Thursday between the hours of 10.30 and 1.30, and she’d been in residence when Voorhess had arrived earlier. She always turned off the hi-tech synchronized alarm and central locking system that supposedly made the house intruder-proof, so Voorhess only had a single non-alarmed lock to pick on the front door, which he’d done in the space of thirty seconds. The cleaner was working upstairs, so Voorhess had shut the door quietly behind him, made his way through a gaudily furnished front room, and planted himself in a downstairs toilet that she’d already cleaned, and which didn’t have any motion sensors in it.

He was in there now, half an hour on, using the toilet as a seat, his holdall of tools at his feet, eating some sushi he’d bought at a small takeaway outlet on a nearby street. The cleaner had gone, having re-set the alarm, and Voorhess was pleased he hadn’t had to kill her. He might have to be in the house for a while, and if she was missed during that time, it could be problematic.

According to the dossier the client had prepared for him, Mr Butt was the primary investor in a number of businesses in the central London area, which he visited regularly in between working from his office in Moorgate and also from an office in his house. In other words, he could turn up at any time.

Voorhess twisted open the lid of the tiny plastic bottle of soy sauce that came with the sushi – no easy feat with gloved hands – and poured half the contents on to a tuna roll, which he ate in one bite. The fish was bland and the rice stodgy. Not like back home where the tuna was caught in the nutrient-rich waters of the Western Cape coast, and prepared by people who, like him, actually cared about food. He felt a twinge of homesickness. He wanted to hear the crash of the waves breaking on the beach near his house, and feel the warm African sun on his back while he grilled a nice piece of fish on the barbecue, and enjoyed a crisp, cold glass of Pinot Grigio.

A picture of Mr Butt dressed in a loud Hawaiian shirt and a garland of flowers hung on the wall opposite the toilet. He was on a beach somewhere, with a vivid blue sea in the background, and he had his arms around the shoulders of an attractive leggy blonde who was having to bend down to get her face in the shot. Mr Butt was a short, slightly built but undeniably good-looking man, with a thick shock of black hair. He looked younger than his thirty-one years, and the big smile he was wearing suggested he enjoyed life, and didn’t take it too seriously. Sadly for him, things were about to take an extremely serious and unpleasant turn, and what was most intriguing for Voorhess was that, unlike so many of his victims, Mr Butt would never understand why he’d been targeted. He had no enemies. He lived an unremarkable bachelor lifestyle. He was even apparently honest.

And yet someone somewhere had marked him for death.

Two loud bleeps coming from the front room broke the silence. It was the alarm being turned off from the outside. Voorhess popped the last sushi roll into his mouth and, still chewing, reached into the holdall.

The front door opened and closed, followed by footfalls coming past the toilet. Voorhess waited a few seconds until he heard the clatter of cupboards opening, and then he stepped outside and walked down the hall towards the kitchen.

Mr Butt was standing next to one of the worktops with his back to the door, wearing an expensive-looking suit, his hair sticking up on his head like it was some kind of unruly sculpture.

Voorhess wasn’t a believer in the sixth sense. He’d crept up on far too many people without being noticed to know that it existed only in people’s imagination. But even though he’d moved in near silence, Mr Butt turned round, an empty mug in his hand and a shocked expression on his boyish face.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, fear cutting right through his voice.

‘Your new lodger,’ said Voorhess, and shot him with the Taser.

Twenty-one

13.55

‘ACCORDING TO THE
Border Agency, Jetmir Brozi’s last known address is 60 Roman Road in Islington, although they haven’t checked on him for the past three months. They’re overstretched apparently.’ A life-sized colour mugshot of a hard-faced man in his late thirties or early forties, with bad skin and collar-length black hair, appeared on the screen.