Operation Certain Death

by Kim Hughes

  ‘Notts or County?’ Nichols asked as they weaved across lanes.

  Nichols’s radio crackled from its cradle on the dash. It was the command and control centre back at Loughborough base which would be monitoring all the emergency services and would relay the salient points to Nichols. ‘Multiple casualties reported in the incident.’

  He blanked the news out. They would only get the real picture once they got to the incident site. ‘Sorry, sir?’

  ‘Football. Were you brought up a Notts or County fan?’

  ‘Green and Whites,’ said Riley, meaning Nottingham RFC.

  Loughborough command and control cut in again. ‘Nottingham has triggered its MIP.’

  Every city has a Major Incident Plan, the one its emergency services practise, hoping it’ll never be needed.

  ‘Oh, rugby.’ Nichols’s face brightened in surprise. It was as if only officers were allowed to like games with funny-shaped balls; footie was for NCOs and the like.

  ‘Sir. My grandfather liked rugby, so…’

  ‘Did you play?’

  He sensed what Nichols was thinking as he glanced over. Riley was nobody’s cliched idea of a rugby player. No broken nose, no cauliflower ears or missing teeth. Didn’t have more bulk than a Westinghouse fridge and was a shade over average height. But he had broad shoulders, thanks to the weight-lifting regime his grandad had introduced him to and which he continued into the army, albeit in a more desultory fashion. He also had very good ball control and a decent turn of speed. ‘Centre,’ he said eventually.

  ‘One hundred metre cordon in place around incident site.’

  ‘Ah. Fly-half myself. And your father?’

  Riley shrugged. He knew Nichols was just making conversation to avoid brooding too much on what awaited them. ‘My dad didn’t like sports.’ Only the horizontal kind. What was this? A job application? His father hadn’t been around to teach him the love of anything, end of story. He certainly wouldn’t have shown his face at his grandad’s. The latter blamed his father for Riley’s mother’s mental fragility. His philandering and fecklessness had certainly taken its toll, but Riley had heard from an aunt that his mother had been something of a family rebel with unpredictable mood swings even before her marriage. ‘A bit of a maverick’ was the phrase she had used and mimed the smoking of a cigarette. Although it wasn’t tobacco that she was suggesting his mother liked to inhale.

  ‘Police Incident Commander confirmed as Chief Superintendent Shirley Garcia.’

  Of course, Riley had grown to embrace a football team. You had to in the army, or any male institution. It seemed a betrayal of his rugby roots to choose another Notts footie team, though, so he had opted for Arsenal, simply because it was the sort of name an Ammunition Technical Officer should like. He still remembered the friendly rows with Moe the terp, who was a massive Liverpool fan, even though he had no idea where or what the city was. He had nicknamed him Scouse and the lad called Riley Staff Sergeant Gooner.

  ‘Correction. Multiple fatalities. Double figures.’

  They both looked at the radio, as if the deaths were its fault. ‘Shit,’ said Riley glumly. The arrogance and inhumanity of terrorists – our cause is worth taking innocent lives for – always made him furious. Right then he wanted to punch the dashboard. Had it been his car, he might have.

  ‘East Midlands CTU attending. ETA twenty-five minutes.’ The local Counter Terrorism Unit, which would provide back-up for the city’s trained firearms officers.

  ‘There they are,’ said Nichols, pulling him back into the moment.

  Sure enough, the truck was just ahead of them. Nichols swerved the BMW in front of it, keeping the blues’n’twos going as they scythed their way towards Nottingham and the scene of the crime.

  SIX

  The door knocker to Dunston Hall’s west wing was so large that Kate Muraski almost needed two hands to lift it. The brass was fashioned into the face of a gnarled old big cat, scowling at visitors. Which was appropriate, given that she was about to enter the lion’s den, the home of a battle-scarred veteran of the Service. She looked across the front of the building. She could see another wing several hundred metres away, but the whole central core of the house appeared to be missing. Perhaps they ran out of money.

  Muraski looked in vain for CCTV cameras on the façade before her. Nothing. Yet there had certainly been conspicuous ones on the main gate and at intervals along the path up to the house. Possibly those had been fakes, deterrents for any would-be burglars.

  She heard brisk footsteps crossing the hall and she pulled her jacket straight in anticipation of the sort of once-over old spooks give a younger generation. She was comparatively new to the game. The man she was about to have the effrontery to question had decades of performance at the highest level under his belt. Muraski was under no illusion that she was novice to his master. Unless she was very careful, she would be played with, patronised and dismissed.

  However, it wasn’t Henry Clifford-Brown who answered the door, but a woman in her seventies, wearing a tweed twin-set and pearls. This would be… She struggled for a minute, her brain clogged by all the information in the files – both on computer screens and in old-fashioned folders – that she had been reading and memorising for the past forty-eight hours. This would be Barbara. The wife.

  ‘Mrs Clifford-Brown? Kate Muraski.’

  ‘Ah. Hello.’ The voice was almost a caricature of RP. Like a radio announcer from the 1950s. Muraski suddenly felt very unpolished in comparison. ‘We were expecting you.’ She held out a tiny, veined hand and Muraski took it, careful not to squeeze too hard. ‘So young.’

  ‘Looks can be deceptive.’ Muraski was twenty-eight, but with her cropped hair and relatively make-up-free regime – for work, at least – she could sometimes pass as a teenager. Which occasionally came in handy on surveillance jobs.

  ‘I didn’t mean to be rude,’ the older woman sighed. ‘I was just remembering when I looked something like you. Not as pretty, of course.’

  Muraski didn’t believe that for a minute. She could see, beneath the lines, that Barbara had been something of a beauty in her day, was a beauty still. And she knew it. Vanity didn’t always wither with old age.

  ‘Henry is in his study. Come in.’

  She followed Barbara into a hallway that could have been lifted from an old Hammer Horror film set – the movies that her recently ex-boyfriend Toby was convinced were ‘masterpieces’. A walnut staircase, almost mirror-polished, rose up in front of her, then divided in two, running up to a barley-twist balustraded landing. All it was lacking was Christopher Lee. There was an acre of wood panelling, cathedral-like quantities of stained glass glowing green and red, and coats of arms on every wall. The air was heavy with polish, coffee and something else she couldn’t quite place.

  ‘Good journey?’ Barbara asked as they walked over the black and white tiled floor.

  ‘Not bad. A bit sticky out of Grantham.’

  Barbara tutted. ‘Those blasted roadworks. In here.’ She raised her voice before she rapped on the closed door with a bony knuckle. ‘Sweetie, it’s Kate, the girl from… the office.’

  Sweetie? From what she had read, Henry Clifford-Brown was anything but sweet.

  His voice boomed from beyond the door. ‘Come in, come in.’

  As soon as she turned the knob and pushed, Muraski identified the mystery smell. Pipe tobacco. Old, stale pipe tobacco at that.

  Clifford-Brown was standing with his back to them as they entered, his shoulders hunched over so much that she couldn’t see the back of his head clearly. He was looking out over an immaculately manicured lawn about the size of a football pitch that ran down to a pond. No, she corrected, it was a lake. An ornamental lake. It even had a couple of bloody swans on it.

  The old man turned. He was wearing a mustard-coloured cable-knit cardigan over a shirt and tie. The latter, as if to make a point, was from the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge.

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ he said t
o Barbara, a smile on his ruddy face. Her first impression was that, age-derived stoop apart, he looked pretty hale and hearty for a man in his tenth decade on the planet. He was a little more jowly than the last Service photograph she had seen, and his nose was networked with capillaries, but the eyes were bright and alert and he still had a thick head of silvery hair. He held out a hand and she crossed the room, skirted the desk and found her outstretched fingers enveloped by his. He had once been a big chap, six-foot three and prop-forward broad, although he was barely a couple of inches taller than her now. But his hands and feet remained testament to a time when he had been a giant of a man.

  ‘Good to see you. Thanks for coming. I’m afraid I don’t get into town much anymore.’ Town meant London. ‘Can’t stand the traffic.’

  You still drive, she thought? Jesus. There had, she recalled, been an elderly but well-kept BMW saloon on the driveway. She might ask for advanced notice of his next visit to London so she could stay off the roads.

  ‘Coffee, sweetie?’ Barbara asked. Clifford-Brown nodded. ‘And Miss Muraski?’

  Not a slip over the foreign-sounding name, unlike many of her generation. ‘Please. White, no sugar.’

  ‘And will you stay for lunch?’

  ‘No. Thank you. I have to get back.’

  ‘Of course. Duty never sleeps.’ Barbara withdrew, an enigmatic smile on her face.

  Clifford-Brown indicated she should sit and he followed suit. It was a very male, clubby room, with more wood panelling and paintings of naval battles hanging from the dado rails. A narrow bookcase was filled with books and novels majoring on naval history: C. S. Forester, Patrick O’Brian and Julian Stockwin. Elsewhere, a couple of stuffed ducks were displayed in glass cases and two glassy-eyed deer heads stared down at her from either side of the picture window. A pair of antique shotguns sat beneath each. Apart from a desk, two chairs and a wooden filing cabinet that might have contained drinks, the only other furniture was a glass-fronted trophy cabinet. It displayed a collection of shields, cups, several small figurines of boxers in full pugilistic mode and a gold-plated pheasant. It suggested Clifford-Brown had been something of a sportsman when younger.

  She put her mobile on the desk in front of her in case the office called. She noted a box of Nicorette patches next to a pipe rack, albeit one devoid of pipes. The old boy was probably trying to give up.

  ‘I’m afraid there is no signal in the house,’ said Clifford-Brown, nodding at her phone. ‘Nothing gets through these walls. So we won’t be disturbed. We own this wing. Russian oligarch has the other.’

  ‘Russian? Good grief. That’s ironic.’ She knew that Clifford-Brown had spent a considerable portion of his career either thwarting or baiting the Russians. And now he had one as a neighbour.

  ‘Isn’t it? Hardly here, mind. But yes, it made me chortle when Oleg bought it. Of course, he’s anti-Putin so we do have to be watchful when he is in residence. Just in case some FSB or GRU goons come calling.’

  She couldn’t tell whether he was joking or not.

  ‘Is that an Edinburgh accent I can detect?’

  There was nothing wrong with his hearing then, or powers of deduction. Muraski was left with just the softest of burrs after her time down south.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the name? Polish?’

  ‘It is. For a while my family anglicised it to Murray. I decided I’d like the original back.’

  ‘Good for you,’ he said, in a way that was barely patronising. ‘Polish in Scotland. Not recent arrivals, I suspect, from that accent. During the war? Or after?’

  Muraski began to wonder who, exactly, was meant to be asking the questions here. But she indulged the old man. He was probably just demonstrating that he wasn’t senile or over the hill yet. ‘My uncle flew Spitfires for the RAF in the war. Afterwards, when this country forgot that Polish airmen helped win the Battle of Britain, he drove a taxi in Edinburgh. The rest of the family came over from Poland in the late Forties.’

  ‘While they still could, eh?’

  ‘Indeed,’ she said curtly, hoping to draw this episode of Who Do You Think You Are? to a close.

  ‘And how are things at Thames House?’ he asked. ‘Busy, I suspect.’

  He had heard the news then. The Home Secretary had announced that morning that the terrorism threat was expected to stay at ‘extreme’ for at least another three years. And that, so far that year, her outfit, MI5, had thwarted more than a dozen serious attempts to kill and maim UK citizens and its armed forces. Five of them came not from ‘Islamists’ but from the far right. The latter were an increasing part of MI5’s workload, it having rather reluctantly inherited the role of tackling the more extreme right-wing organisations from the police in 2018.

  At any one time there were at least four thousand POI – Persons of Interest – under surveillance by the security services. And more, apparently, were on the way, given the jihadist diaspora from Syria. All that and Russia’s GRU continuing to come over and cause trouble, although they and their FSB chums had been relatively quiet of late, the odd piece of cyber-meddling notwithstanding. Maybe they knew Kate Muraski was planning on keeping an eye out for them as soon as she could persuade her bosses to move her across from general duties (or floating dogsbody, as she liked to think of it) to more targeted work on the Russia desk. More likely they were simply taking a breather and planning more mischief. Such as another state-sponsored murder or attempt to influence the next election or to sow even more discord between Great Britain and Europe.

  Which made her think of Clifford-Brown’s neighbour in the east wing of Dunston Hall. Given the house’s remote location, she hoped the oligarch had decent security. And wiped the door knob every time he went into the house. Mind you, if he was a proper oligarch, he probably had people to do that for him, like the royal food tasters of old. Then she recalled the CCTV on the driveway to the house. They had, in all probability, been put in to protect the man in the east wing rather than the Clifford-Browns. Not dummies after all.

  ‘Very busy,’ she said. ‘Which is why I’m here.’

  ‘How can I help?’

  From her attaché case she extracted the first of several photographs she had brought along. She placed it on the desk, rotated it and then pushed it under Clifford-Brown’s nose. ‘We were wondering if you know this man.’

  He glanced down at it and then executed a casual double take. When he looked at her any hint of joviality had gone. His face had closed down like a steel trap. In front of her was no longer a retired old duffer with a penchant for fine claret and the novels of Patrick O’Brian, but the man who had once risen to be Director of Production at MI6, in charge of worldwide intelligence gathering and effectively deputy to ‘C’.

  Clifford-Brown’s stare felt like it was boring through her skull, trying to read her thoughts. Her chest constricted. She took a deep breath, waiting for him to speak, but the silence grew thicker.

  ‘Sir?’ she prompted.

  ‘I think you had better tell me exactly why you’re here, young lady.’

  SEVEN

  They didn’t actually need the satnav to direct them to the site. All they had to do was head for the grey smudge of smoke that sullied the sky. Several cordons had been set up, and they had to show their ID to get past police checkpoints until they reached the inner barrier, as prescribed, one hundred metres from the detonation point.

  Riley stepped out of the BMW into a cacophony of shouted instructions, moans and the occasional scream. He and the captain were confronted by a phalanx of ambulances and fire engines, some of the former busy beeping urgently as they reversed out to take their charges to hospital.

  The first of many media vans had arrived and were being sent back to the outer cordon with a flea in their ears. A helicopter hovered high above, its rattle not helping the noise level, and a drone circled some distance away, the operator probably afraid of being caught by the invisible net of electronic counter-measures. The air stank of burnt plastic
and something else Riley didn’t want to think about, because he had smelt it before, out in the desert. As he approached the perimeter and looked beyond the barrier, he felt a jolt of shock and anger. Inside the actual Circus, was a sea of uniforms – police, firefighters, medics and a CSI unit. ‘Circus’ was the right word. And everything about it was wrong.

  Riley approached one of the uniformed coppers who were guarding the entrance point and flashed his ID. ‘Where is the Command and Control centre? Why are all those people in there? This area hasn’t been declared safe by an EOD team yet. Clear the casualties and then get everyone non-essential out of there.’

  The policeman looked unmoved by the demands. ‘And you are?’

  Riley pulled out his ID again. ‘I thought being able to read was a minimum requirement for you guys. Look again. EOD. Bomb disposal. Now, Command and Control?

  Nichols grabbed his arm and spun him round. ‘What are you doing, Staff?’

  Riley pointed to the shattered shopping centre. ‘That is a fucking shambles. What if there’s a secondary?’

  ‘I know, and I’ll deal with it. You wind your neck in, Staff. Okay? Observe and assist, I said, and you go marching up, throwing your weight around. I am officer on duty. Remember? Now wait right here, I’ll call if I need your expertise.’ Nichols tossed him the BMW keys. ‘Move that if anyone needs the parking space.’

  Riley bit his tongue. He hadn’t come along for valet parking.

  Spike and his corporal came by with the first part of their kit. Spike winked as he passed. The pair would set up the Incident Control Point just beyond the cat’s cradle of Do Not Cross tapes. He wanted to shout some advice but thought better of it.

  ‘Step away from the barrier, please, sir.’ It was another policeman who had witnessed the exchange with his colleague and with Nichols. He spoke with a wary contempt. ‘You’re only in the way.’