by Chris Ryan
Then Mallet’s phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen without answering, nodded at Bowman.
‘Forget about Davey Boy,’ he said. ‘He’s not your concern. But there is one thing I must ask you to do.’
‘Yes, boss?’
‘Do not repeat anything Lang told you to the police.’
If anyone else had told him to withhold information from the cops, Bowman would have questioned it. Or at least demanded to know why. But for reasons he couldn’t quite understand, he didn’t want to disappoint Mallet.
‘No worries, boss,’ he said.
Mallet looked him in the eye and said, ‘If they press you for information, just say Freddie was out of it and babbling like an idiot. You couldn’t understand a word he was saying.’
‘I was a copper once,’ Bowman replied coolly. ‘I know the procedure, what questions they’ll ask. I know what to do.’
Mallet placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Good man.’
‘What about the two BGs? Any word on them?’
Mallet exchanged a quick look with Studley. ‘The security services are looking into it,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t get your hopes up. Whoever did this will be out of the country before we can identify them.’
‘Someone needs to get hold of that CCTV footage. Find that, and you’ll find the blokes responsible.’
‘We’re looking into it,’ Mallet repeated coolly.
His phone rang again. He took the phone call and beelined towards the emergency exits. Studley watched him walk away and made a grunting noise deep in his throat. ‘Looks like you made a good impression,’ he said.
Bowman rubbed his jaw. ‘It didn’t seem that way to me.’
‘John only takes an interest in people he likes,’ Studley replied. ‘People who interest him. Everyone else is invisible. Take it from me, pal. You caught his eye.’
‘He’s got a funny way of showing it.’
He watched Mallet disappear through the exit and thought: The guy is a crafty operator. I’ve spent the last few minutes telling him my life story, and he didn’t reveal a thing about himself.
Studley said, ‘Those officers from the Met will be here shortly. They’ll give you a quick interview. Stick to the plan and you’ll be fine.’
‘What then?’
‘Get yourself checked out by one of the medics. Make sure you’re not at risk from whatever crap they gave Freddie Lang. The last thing we want is your scruffy arse wandering around town, smearing deadly chemicals all over the place.’
‘What about the other guys?’
‘They’re staying with the bodyguards and Seguma’s assistant. Officers from Five are on the way over there to question them.’
‘They won’t know anything,’ Bowman said. ‘They’re just flunkies.’
‘You’re probably right. But it’s worth a shot. They might have seen or heard something about this top-secret meeting.’ Studley sighed as he looked round the ballroom. ‘What a fucking mess.’
The floor was littered with broken glass, hastily abandoned stilettos, jackets and jewellery. Amid the clutter Bowman saw Freddie Lang’s trampled thick-rimmed glasses.
‘I’ll be in touch later,’ Studley added. ‘Once I’ve finished briefing the head shed on this clusterfuck.’
*
Studley left to make some calls. Bowman sat and waited. At around ten thirty, a pair of plain-clothed figures swept through the fire doors. A man and a woman. The man looked like the deputy manager of a suburban bank branch. He wore a jacket the size of a circus tent, a pair of badly scuffed shoes. His face was soft and doughy, his body a shapeless mass of flesh. The woman was perhaps ten years younger, thirty-five or thereabouts, dressed in a dark pencil skirt, white blouse and a black jacket. Her hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail. She looked unfussy, businesslike, and a lot healthier than her partner.
They showed Bowman their identification and introduced themselves. The guy with the doughy face was DI Rob Hardcastle. The woman was the more senior officer. Detective Chief Inspector Joanna Tatum. Which put her in the senior ranks of Counter Terrorism Command. She looked like she had earned it the hard way, through graft and commitment, rather than anyone doing her favours. She had an honest face, a refreshing lack of front. Bowman liked her immediately.
Tatum asked most of the questions. Hardcastle stood there, sweating and looking uncomfortable. Bowman told them he was ex-job, that he knew the score in terms of the debriefing and what was required of him. Establishing a rapport with the officers. Letting them know that he had once been part of their gang, that they could trust him. Tatum didn’t grill him too hard. She could see that he’d had a rough day. Bowman handed his ID card to Tatum and promised to swing by the following day to provide a full statement. Tatum gave him a pleasant smile and thanked him for his assistance. It was all very civilised. Which was just the way Bowman wanted it. He wished them good luck and headed for the exit.
He ignored Studley’s advice and bypassed the medical teams. If anyone started shining pen torches in his eyes or testing his blood, they’d quickly realise he was on opioids. Besides, if he had been infected by Lang, he would soon know about it.
At the door, he gave his details to an officer with a clipboard. The officer handed him a card and told him to get in touch if he developed any symptoms. Sweating, fever, stomach cramps, nausea, dilated pupils, muscle aches.
Congratulations, he thought. You’ve just described a textbook opioid withdrawal.
He left the ballroom soon after eleven o’clock. Bowman paced down a maze of backstreets, turned left past Bond Street Tube station and continued west along Oxford Street towards Marble Arch. After maybe five hundred metres he turned right again and cut north until he hit the hotel.
The Gold Star Lodge was no one’s idea of luxury. The brickwork was crumbling, the windows were filthy. Bird shit and chewing gum spackled the pavement outside. It had been chosen purely on the basis of its availability, budget and proximity to the principal’s hotel. Bowman assumed the second of these was the deciding factor. But, at that moment, he didn’t care. He just needed to get out of his clothes, clean up and source some more pills. Fast.
He took the lift to the sixth floor, slipped into his room and hung the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door handle. He found his washbag next to the sink in the grotty bathroom and fished out a tobacco tin hidden in a secret compartment at the bottom of the bag. He took out a spare SIM card and paperclip from the tin, teased out his phone’s SIM card holder with the bent clip, replaced it with the spare SIM. Then he powered up, tapped in his passcode and opened the secure messaging app. The most secure app on the market. Military-grade encryption. The Regiment used the same one, for covert comms on ops.
He dialled the only number stored in the contacts list. The person on the other end picked up on the third ring.
‘I was wondering when you’d call,’ the throaty voice said.
Lenny Scavell, his dealer.
Bowman preferred to buy the opioids through Carter Grant, his brother-in-law, and one of Freddie Lang’s most trusted lieutenants. Which was a pain in the arse, involving frequent trips up to Roomers, a club in east London owned by the Langs, to meet with Lenny Scavell. Lenny was a long-time associate of the Lang twins. A risky set-up. But safer than buying stuff on the streets in Hereford, he figured.
Bowman said, ‘I need a score. The usual.’
Scavell hack-coughed. ‘When?’
‘Tonight, mate. Soon as.’ He added, ‘I’m in town.’
There was a long pause. Bowman could hear dance music thumping in the background, voices. Several of them. Scavell said, ‘Tonight ain’t good. You seen all this stuff on the news? Some terror attack at the royal wedding or something. Fucking madness.’
Bowman said, ‘I can’t wait until tomorrow, Lenny.’
‘Tough shit. I ain’t going anywhere tonight. Not with all that chaos. Come down the club.’
‘I can’t.’
He didn’t want to be seen a
nywhere near the Langs’ club right now. Not for a long time, not after what had happened to Freddie.
A long sigh whispered down the line.
‘Where are you?’ Scavell asked.
Bowman gave the address of the hotel.
Scavell paused again. ‘Wait there. I’ll call you back in a minute.’
He hung up. Two minutes later, Bowman’s phone trilled again.
Scavell said, ‘One of my boys will sort you out. But it’ll cost double. Consider it a delivery charge.’
‘Fine.’ Bowman wasn’t in the mood to argue. ‘When can your man get here?’
‘Two o’clock. Earliest he can do.’
Bowman glanced at his G-Shock. Half eleven. Two-and-a-half hours until Lenny’s man would arrive with the goods. A long time to wait. But no choice.
‘There’s a car park around the corner from the hotel,’ he said. ‘Opposite a Vietnamese takeaway. Tell your man I’ll meet him there.’
Scavell gave him a description of his associate’s car. Then Bowman killed the call, ejected the spare SIM card from his phone and replaced it with his regular SIM. He stashed the other SIM in the secret compartment in his washbag, threw off his suit, showered and changed into his off-duty gear. Dark jeans, plain T-shirt, Timberland boots. He dropped into the frayed armchair, scooped up the remote and flicked through the channels on the TV.
A small army of reporters had camped out in front of a police cordon outside the Greybourn Hotel. No one knew about the poisoning yet, it seemed. There were unconfirmed reports of a terrorist attack, the reporter said. She seemed very keen to reassure viewers that the royal family was believed to be safe. Police lights pulsed in the background.
Bowman’s mind drifted back to the night his world collapsed. It always did, in the end. He could never escape that gruesome memory. Christ knows, he had tried. Fifteen years had passed since that evening, but the images were so vivid it sometimes felt as if it had happened yesterday. He would be sitting in the pub, or walking down the street in Hereford, and suddenly he would see his young family dead on the kitchen floor. A momentary snapshot. Like a subliminal message spliced into a film reel. He would see his wife, Amy, her beautiful face ruined by the smile the gangsters had drawn on it with the tip of a kitchen knife. His little girl, Sophie, wearing her favourite princess dress. A sleepy look in her eyes, as if she had nodded off beside her mother.
And the blood. Always he would see the blood.
In the years since their horrific murders, Bowman had tried to move on. He had sought to escape in booze, sleeping pills, other drugs. Nothing had worked. Only the opioids gave him some semblance of peace. They didn’t block the memories – no drug in the world could do that – but they did numb the pain. They turned him into a kind of zombie. Helped him make it through the day.
But lately, the images had been getting stronger.
He had started popping a few extra pills each day, upping his dosage. Anything to dial down the grief. Put the lid on it. Bowman knew he was playing a dangerous game. The more pills he took, the more he needed to stay on the level. And the bigger the risk of getting caught. Bowman had gone to greater lengths to conceal his addiction, but if he kept this up, sooner or later someone in the Regiment was going to find out the truth . . .
He watched TV and waited, growing more restless with each passing minute. At ten minutes to two he grabbed his coat, wallet, phone and left his room.
The dealer was waiting for him in the car park at the end of the block, in a red Audi A4 saloon, the engine low-rumbling. Bowman halted in front of the takeaway and looked up and down to make sure he wasn’t being watched. Then he stuffed his hands into his coat pockets, lowered his head and walked across the road. As he approached, the window on the driver’s side of the Audi cracked open. Bowman took out the four twenties from his coat pocket. A hand poked out of the window and snatched the cash. It reappeared a moment later gripping a plastic baggie filled with pink-coloured pills. Bowman jammed the bag into his coat pocket and walked on.
He took a roundabout route back to the hotel. He looped round Marble Arch, doubling back on himself and occasionally pausing to glance in the reflection of shop windows. The usual anti-surveillance measures.
Bowman returned to his hotel room and flicked on the bathroom lights. He set the plastic baggie down, took out one pill and emptied the rest into the storage compartment in the pill crusher. He mashed the other tablet into a fine powder using the crusher, tipped it onto the counter. Prepared to inhale.
Then there was a knock at the door.
Bowman froze.
His first thought was: I’ve been followed. The police have seen me buying drugs. I’m about to get arrested. But no. He had been vigilant. The chances of someone tailing him back from the drop were vanishingly small.
So who the fuck is outside?
The knuckles rapped on the door again.
He left the opiate powder on the counter, slipped out of the bathroom and padded over to the door. Slid off the deadbolt and eased the door open.
Two figures stood in the corridor.
They had the attitude of security service heavies and the wardrobes to match. Off-the-rack suits, cheap haircuts. Next to each other, they were like the before and after photographs for a dietary supplement commercial. The guy on the left was grey-haired and running to fat, with a heavily lined brow and a wonky nose. His partner was leaner and square-jawed, with the glowing skin of someone in peak physical condition.
They showed him their security badges. Bowman glanced at them both. The guy with the wonky nose was called Henderson. The guy with the perfect skin was called Williams. They were UKNs. Bowman had seen their type before. Freelancers used by Five and Six to carry out surveillance work and other duties. They did the jobs out of some deep loyalty to Queen and country, Bowman presumed. It certainly wasn’t because of the piss-poor pay.
‘Josh Bowman?’ the latter asked.
‘Yeah?’
‘You need to come with us,’ Williams said. His voice was as nondescript as his clothes, his face. ‘Now, if you don’t mind.’
‘We’ve been told to tell you to bring your ghost ID from the Wing,’ Henderson added.
‘Why?’ Bowman demanded. ‘What’s going on?’
‘John Mallet says hello. He wants a word.’
Eight
They gave him three minutes to pack his bags and insisted on waiting inside. Which meant there was no time to snort the crushed-up pill. Bowman left them watching TV while he hurriedly scraped the dust-like powder off the countertop and emptied it into the toilet bowl. He flushed, disposing of the evidence, then shoved his washbag into his black leather holdall, along with his spare kit and Glock. He grabbed the passport issued to him by the Wing under his cover story name. Checked the room one last time, then followed Henderson and Williams down the corridor. They took the lift down to the lobby and led Bowman outside towards a meteor-grey BMW 7 Series. He dumped his bag in the boot, then slid into the back seat. Henderson and Williams squeezed in either side of him, man-spreading their legs, their huge hands planted on their knees. A third guy with a buzzcut sat behind the wheel. He glanced at Bowman in the rear-view, nodded at his partners and pulled out into traffic.
Bowman sat quietly in the back as they took a circuitous route north and then east away from Marble Arch. There was no point asking where they were going, or why. Bowman had served with the Wing long enough to know how they operated. Henderson, Williams and Buzzcut were foot soldiers. Guys who could be trusted to do a job and keep their mouths shut. They wouldn’t have been told anything except the bare minimum.
But that didn’t stop him from fearing the worst. Questions pinballed inside his head. Why does Mallet want to see me at this hour? Why had the UKNs told me to bring my ghost ID? He decided it couldn’t be good news. Most likely Six had found out about his drug habit. Now they were shutting him down. They had called him out so Mallet could confront him with the evidence of his addiction, take away h
is ghost ID and tell him his time in the Wing was over.
They hit Middle Temple and scudded east along the Embankment. The city blurred past them. Bowman saw grandiose Victorian buildings and brutalist concrete offices, gleaming glass-and-steel towers and cranes slanted against the skyline, like the masts of sailing ships in a crowded port. All of it illuminated by the glow from a million street lamps and apartment windows. Buzzcut took the Blackfriars underpass and carried on east, through Cannon Street and Monument. At two in the morning, the roads were quiet apart from the trickle of black cabs and night buses.
Buzzcut kept the BMW purring along, sticking to a steady thirty miles per hour as they headed towards Whitechapel. Ripper country. He wondered, again, where the heavies were taking him. He thought about the pills, too. If Henderson and his mates had knocked on his door sixty seconds later, he would have had time to snort the pill. Instead, he’d have to wait until after his meeting with Mallet. However long that took . . .
They passed the Tower of London, hit a junction the size of a great lake and then Buzzcut steered into an empty taxi bay in front of the old Royal Mint. He slit the throat of the engine.
‘What’s going on?’ Bowman demanded. ‘Where’s Mallet?’
‘Patience, sunshine,’ Williams said, blandly.
Henderson’s eyes shot forward. Bowman looked in the same direction and descried a figure standing in front of the southern gatehouse, smoking a cigarette.
Mallet.
He took a final drag on his cancer stick, dashed the butt and circled round to the rear of the vehicle, then knocked twice on the passenger window. Henderson buzzed down the glass. Mallet leaned through the opening and glanced briefly at Bowman before he nodded at the heavies.
‘Right, you lot,’ he said. ‘Get out. Stretch your legs. Give us a few minutes.’
The heavies obeyed without question. Partly because they were lower down the food chain than Mallet. But also because the guy talking to them wasn’t the kind of person you wanted to piss off. Mallet stood back while Henderson and his mates removed themselves to a spot two metres from the BMW. Then he dropped into the back seat, slamming the door shut behind him. The hubbub of London reduced to a faint hum. Bowman waited anxiously.