2.30 am Tuesday London time
Geoff Letts walked a quiet and dark street in an inner London suburb.
It was a cold night, and he dug his hands deeper into the pockets of his woollen coat. For even though he wore gloves his fingers still felt the chill of the Northern Hemisphere. To be expected he supposed at two thirty in the morning.
He was glad the street was quiet, because the work he had to complete was better carried out without unnecessary observation.
A lone car passed. Its tyres making a squishing noise on the asphalt which had been left wet by last evening’s rain.
Arriving at his destination he unconsciously looked about behind him to double check his surroundings. Seeing nothing to arouse his senses he turned to the lock and inserted a key.
He could see the outline of the steeply sloping roof of the engineer’s workshop. It appeared to be plastered to the electric light pollution which shone upwards from an unusually quiet and apparently sleepy city. Letts used a second key to gain entry through a Judas door, and into the workshop area. The Judas door was within one of the two large sliding doors, which gave easy access for the movement of transport to and from the workshops loading bays.
Now he was inside the building and with the Judas door safely secured behind him, he lifted a small bright beamed torch from his coat pocket and used it to guide his feet.
Its beam brought with it surrealism as shadows of miscellaneous pieces of workshop equipment flitted and danced around the room.
A sudden sound caused him to stop in his tracks. He turned off the torch while he stood motionless in the pitch blackness, straining his ears against the silence towards the suspected direction of the sound. Possibly a rat he thought, and he hoped to hear the noise again in order to substantiate that thought. None came, and he flicked the torch once more to life. Dismissing the sound as unimportant as he again stepped his way carefully over the oil stained concrete workshop floor.
The cold wind outside whispered as it gained entry into the building through gaps in its iron walls. Its sound accompanied by the distant rattle of a loose sheet of iron, whose beat rose and fell on the intensity of the undulating wind. Letts climbed a set of welded steel stairs. They elevated him from the workshop floor to the top of a concrete loading bay, from where it was a short walk of five paces to an office door. It had been known to him as the draughtsman’s office when he had visited the building during the time of the transformer’s design and manufacture. One man from the design team had indeed been a draughtsman, and it was here in this space that he’d drawn the basic design of the transformers. Those drawings and blueprints were part of the reason why Letts had to carry out this late night mission.
He followed the beam of his torch to a small safe in the corner of the room, where he played the combination until its door swung open. Under the bright beam the safes contents lay open to his gaze.
Letts reached into the safe and removed an envelope.
It was addressed to a London newspaper and he recognized the handwriting as his. He’d prepackaged the envelope personally some weeks earlier, and had left it here reckoning it to be more secure than if he’d removed it to the outside world.
He looked at the handwriting which resembled a scrawl. A crude and to the point inscription that might appear to be from the hand of a very old person, and not due to the finesse of his own left hand. Addressing the letter had been the first time in his adult life he’d tried to write left handed. He’d been surprised at the difficulty, and it reminded at the same time that he’d be stuffed if anything ever happened to his right hand, because he was far from ambidextrous. The envelope itself was in a clip top plastic bag, and he folded it loosely so the inside of his coat pocket could accommodate its bulk.
The envelopes contents were a letter and some photographs of the transformers blueprints. Not a lot of information for the press, but enough to most certainly whet their appetite.
They also gave details of the work carried out by the said terrorists, along with the address of the engineer’s workshop where their diabolical deeds had transpired. Once the press had an inkling of a possible story, they would use their own resources to ferret out more than enough information.
Given a few days of leaks, comments from reliable sources and experts evaluations, they’d not need to speculate, for they would have more information than they could put to use.
He reached again into his coat pocket, and lifted from it a small tin with a hinged lid, opening it to see a single glass capsule lying in its bed of cotton wool. He closed the lid again and took from the safe another envelope. This one was empty and it had written on it in the same left handed scrawl. ‘TAKE CARE. THE CONTENTS OF THIS CONTAINER ARE EXTREMELY HAZARDOUS.’
Letts knew that the people who opened this safe tomorrow morning would more than likely be wearing HazChem suits, but just to be on the safe side. The warning clearly pointed out the capsule was to be handled with extreme care.
For a moment he considered leaving the safe door unlocked, to give the person who opened it in the morning easier access. Then decided that too many things could happen between now and the moment the police cordoned off the whole area in the morning. Having made his decision, he spun the combination dial, and with his torch in hand, he checked the floor around where he had been, before he moved off toward the office door. It closed quietly behind him as he reached again into his coat pocket. Withdrawing a battered booklet that he’d bought some months ago from an underground bookshop.
While he knew by the pictures on its grubby pages that it was a terrorist’s hand book, he had no idea what the booklet was called. He couldn’t read Arabic.
Just a little deception to confuse the issue he thought, as he dropped the booklet on the stained concrete by the welded steps. Five minutes later he was back on the street walking towards the place where he’d parked his car.
He checked his wrist watch; it was five minutes past three.
A quick mental calculation allowed him to conclude that Kane would probably be having his lunch about now, after spending part of his morning making known his lack of knowledge about wooden boxes.
Letts drove to a local park he had visited some days before and easily found from memory, the steel grilled storm water drain he’d discovered on that occasion. He leaned from his open driver’s side door to drop the keys he’d used to gain entry to the engineer’s workshop. Content with his accomplishments, he drove towards his rented apartment.
There were two more things to do. One was to change the number plates on the car so it would be ready for use in the coming morning. The other, he muttered through a yawn.
“Time for bed.”
CHAPTER 14
End It With A Lie Page 49