Red Strike

by Chris Ryan

  The delivery driver stood in the doorway. Parcel in his right hand, a portable GPS device in his left. Behind him was the gravel driveway and the potholed track leading towards the main road. In the distance stood the jagged peaks of several hills, wreathed in thin clouds, their gentle slopes covered with scrub and stunted trees. There were no cars on the road. No sounds of distant traffic or human noise. That was one of the reasons why McKinnon’s team had been ordered to bring the Russian to this particular house.

  No fucker could approach this place without being spotted or heard.

  The driver smiled apologetically.

  ‘Delivery, boss,’ he said, tapping the parcel he was holding. ‘Package for Mr Castman.’

  McKinnon did not consider himself a racist. But one look at the guy in front of him and the tiny voice inside his head screamed Eastern European. He had a weathered face, wrinkled and worn down to the nub from a lifetime of hard labour. The guy could have been anywhere from twenty-five to fifty. His bushy eyebrows were a couple of arches above his tiny black eyes.

  McKinnon stared at him. The driver saw the blank look on McKinnon’s face and tried again.

  ‘Hawkshead Lodge? Mr Roger Castman? You expect delivery, yes?’

  McKinnon shook his head. ‘Wrong address, mate. This is Lakesmoor Cottage.’

  ‘Lakesmoor?’ The driver glanced around the front drive. A tiny groove formed above his brow. ‘But my GPS says this is the place.’

  ‘There’s no Roger Castman here,’ McKinnon said. ‘I’m telling you, you’ve got the wrong place.’

  The driver muttered something under his breath. He glanced down at his handheld device like it had insulted his mother. Then he looked up again.

  ‘Sorry, boss. This stupid GPS. Sending me all over the shop.’

  ‘No worries, mate.’

  ‘You know where I can find this Hawkshead Lodge, perhaps?’

  ‘Can’t help you. We’re not from around here. We’re just renting the place for the summer.’ McKinnon indicated the main road a hundred and fifty metres away. ‘Your best bet is to continue north on that road. There’s a B&B about four miles further along. Loudwater Inn. Someone there should be able to give you directions.’

  ‘Four miles to the north, Loudwater Inn. Got it.’ The driver nodded, smiled again. ‘Thank you, boss. Sorry. Bloody GPS. You know how it is.’

  McKinnon smiled and shrugged as if to say, What can you do?

  The driver turned away and hurried back to the delivery van, a man in a hurry, behind schedule, with packages to deliver and orders to fulfil. McKinnon watched him climb behind the wheel, dumping the parcel on the passenger seat. He cranked the ignition and three-point-turned in the driveway before steering back down the potholed track. He hit the main road, turned left and motored north.

  McKinnon continued watching the van until it was lost from sight. Then he shut the front door and headed back down the hallway. Past the locked gun cupboard and the kitchen and the strong room. He reached the living room in another six strides.

  Jagielka had turned his attention back to Judge Rinder. Flowers had his head down in his textbook, boning up on his tree surgery knowledge. Bentley was checking something on his phone. Fantasy football league stats, probably. Volkov sat bolt upright, looking keenly at the officers.

  On the TV, the judge was banging his gavel to bring order to the studio courtroom.

  ‘What did he want?’ Flowers asked, looking up from his book.

  ‘Wrong address,’ McKinnon said.

  ‘Where he was looking for?’

  ‘Hawkshead Lodge.’

  Bentley looked over, creasing his brow. ‘That’s fucking miles from here.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘How did he end up this far out?’

  McKinnon shrugged. ‘Reckoned his GPS was on the blink.’

  ‘And it sent him all the way over here?’

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘We should call it in,’ Bentley said after a beat. ‘Report it to the liaison.’

  McKinnon clenched his jaws. Standard operating procedure was to call in to the regional HQ and report any unusual activity. Which was a royal pain in the arse, he knew. He was staring down the barrel of an afternoon of actual work.

  ‘Fine,’ McKinnon muttered. ‘I’ll do it.’

  He dug out his force-issue phone from the side pocket of his combats. A Samsung Galaxy Note with custom-built software, apps and push-to-talk buttons that functioned like the outdated police radios. He swiped to unlock, tapped the phone icon and scrolled down through his call history until he found the number he was looking for. He stepped out into the hallway, moving away from the noise of the TV.

  Then he dialled.

  Three rings later, the person on the other end of the line picked up. A familiar female voice said, ‘Detective Sergeant Stanley.’

  ‘It’s me,’ McKinnon said. ‘Listen, we’ve just had a strange one here, Liz.’

  ‘Strange how?’

  McKinnon verbally walked the liaison officer through his encounter with the delivery van, repeating the name and address the driver had given him. As he spoke he heard the tap-tap of fingers dancing on a mechanical keyboard, the delicate click of a mouse.

  ‘That does sound a little weird,’ Stanley admitted. And then: ‘Did you catch the reg plate?’

  ‘One step ahead of you,’ McKinnon said.

  There was more frantic tapping on the end of the line as he read out the registration plate he’d committed to memory.

  When he’d finished Stanley said, ‘We’ll run the plate and check out the address for Mr Castman. I’ll need to update our friends at the NCA as well. Let them know what’s happened.’

  ‘How long will that take?’

  ‘Ten minutes. Maybe less. Leave it with me.’

  ‘You’re a star, Liz.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

  Stanley hung up. McKinnon returned to the living room and glanced round. Flowers was trying to refocus on his textbook. Bentley and Jagielka were looking at one another, both of them thinking the same thing.

  It might be nothing.

  But then again, it might be something.

  ‘What did they say?’ Bentley asked.

  ‘They’re looking into it,’ McKinnon said.

  From the corner of his eye he saw Volkov staring intently at his cheap plastic watch. The Russian looked agitated. Which made sense, McKinnon thought. The Kremlin had already tried to assassinate him once. The president didn’t seem like the forgiving type. They would surely try to knock him on the head again. It was just a question of when.

  Nine minutes past two in the afternoon.

  Nineteen minutes until the ambush.

  The delivery driver tooled north for exactly three minutes, until he was well out of sight of the safe house. He drove past a scene lifted right out of a country life magazine. There were rolling green fields dotted with sheep and cattle, hedgerows, ancient stone walls. He felt like he was in a Thomas Hardy novel.

  He encountered no other cars on the road, but he drove cautiously anyway. Keeping the Sprinter to a steady forty miles per hour, obeying all the rules of the road.

  Half a mile further on, he took a left turn. He drove on for another three hundred metres, past piles of felled timber and an abandoned barn, until he found it: a rutted track leading off the road into a small copse of birch, mountain ash and fern. A rusted field gate sealed the entrance with a sign staked into the ground next to it that read WARNING! PRIVATE PROPERTY.

  The driver pulled over, easing the Sprinter to a halt on the patch of loose gravel in front of the field gate. He killed the engine and looked around. No one in sight. Just as the driver had been told. The RV was well away from the nearest village, several miles from the main tourist hotspots. The manager of the woodland, the only person who might typically be seen in the area, was on his annual holiday in the Scottish Highlands.

  The driver dug out his ghost phone. Which wa
s really just a fancy description for an old Android device with an end-to-end encrypted messaging app loaded on to it. The app generated disposable mobile numbers, rerouting incoming and outgoing calls to the fake number via a secure server in Estonia. As soon as you were done with the fake number, you simply wiped it from the phone and manually created a new number. Quicker and more convenient than carrying around a burner phone and a case of disposable SIM cards, the driver thought.

  He opened the messaging app. Started a new conversation with the other disposable number stored on his device.

  He wrote, At the RV.

  Hit send.

  Twelve seconds passed. Then came a one-word reply.

  Report.

  The driver thought for a beat. Then he wrote, A plain-clothed police officer answered the door. It’s definitely the place.

  Another pause. Did they take the bait?

  Yes, the driver wrote. They were immediately suspicious.

  The officer is probably on the phone to his people right now, the driver thought with a smile. Checking the registration plate and delivery address, like the good British copper he was.

  Twenty seconds. Then another reply.

  Wait there. Be ready to move. We’ll let you know when it’s done.

  Exactly six minutes later, McKinnon’s phone buzzed.

  It was Stanley.

  McKinnon answered and stepped back into the hallway. ‘What’s the craic?’

  Stanley paused a beat.

  Then she said, ‘We have a problem.’

  ‘What problem?’ McKinnon asked.

  Stanley took a deep breath. ‘Actually, there’s two. The first problem is that we’ve checked the Land Registry records and electoral roll and there is no Roger Castman at Hawkshead Lodge. Never has been, in fact.’

  ‘And the second?’

  ‘The vehicle reg you gave us doesn’t match the make of the van. That reg belongs to a 2013 Ford Focus reported as stolen from a shopping centre car park in Stoke-on-Trent, two weeks ago.’

  Shit, McKinnon thought. Someone switched the plates on the van.

  But if the guy wasn’t a delivery driver, and the van was running with stolen reg plates, then who was he?

  ‘Deputy Chief Constable has just finished briefing the NCA,’ Stanley continued. ‘Be advised that your location has been compromised. I repeat, you’ve been compromised. You need to get out of that house, Dave. Right now.’

  TWO

  McKinnon gripped the phone hard. His mind raced ahead of him as he listened to DS Stanley on the other end of the line.

  That delivery driver was here to recce the safe house, now McKinnon realised. He was getting a mark-one eyeball on this place. Which could mean only one of two things.

  One, the guy was working for a criminal gang, looking for potential holiday homes to rob.

  Or he was looking for Volkov.

  Which meant the driver was going from place to place, probably within a confined area, assessing the security arrangements at each house, looking for any sign of the Russian or his British protectors. And then reporting back to the people above him.

  Either way, the safe house had been blown.

  We need to get out of here.

  ‘Dave?’ asked Stanley. ‘Are you still there?’

  McKinnon quickly recovered his composure and said, ‘What’s the plan?’

  ‘Leave the safe house immediately and head straight to Leeds Central station on Park Street. Report to DCI O’Keefe when you get there. She’s in the loop. You’ll wait at Leeds until we can arrange a new location.’

  ‘How long will that take?’

  ‘Not long,’ Stanley said. ‘DCC is liaising with the NCA as we speak. She reckons we should have something for you very shortly. Matter of hours. We’ll be in touch. Just get out of there as fast as you can.’

  ‘Roger that,’ McKinnon said. ‘I’ll check in with you from the road.’

  He cut the call and stepped back into the living room. The other officers were staring at him with grave expressions.

  ‘Well?’ Bentley asked.

  McKinnon relayed his conversation with Stanley, keeping his voice low so the Russian wouldn’t overhear. The other three officers listened in silence. When he’d finished, Flowers screwed up his face. ‘I thought no bastard knew about this place.’

  ‘They don’t,’ McKinnon replied.

  ‘Then how did they find us?’

  ‘No fucking clue, mate.’

  Volkov looked questioningly at McKinnon and the others, alarm flickering in his dull grey eyes. ‘What is it? What’s going on?’

  ‘We’re moving. Get your stuff packed.’

  The Russian’s eyes widened. His eyebrows hitched up a full inch. ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason,’ McKinnon bullshitted. ‘Just something that didn’t check out with the driver. A precautionary measure, that’s all.’

  ‘My enemies . . . they have found me?’

  McKinnon clenched his jaws. That’s all we need right now, he thought to himself. The Russian freaking out.

  ‘We don’t know that for sure. It might have been someone else trying their luck, for all we know. But it’s better we don’t take any chances.’

  That seemed to settle Volkov’s nerves. He nodded slowly. ‘When do we leave?’

  ‘Now. Pack everything. We leave in five.’

  Volkov rose from the sofa, took a step towards the hallway and winced, putting a hand to the side of his stomach. For a moment he looked as if he might collapse.

  ‘You all right, fella?’ Bentley asked, his voice full of concern.

  ‘He’s fine,’ McKinnon cut in. ‘Leave him.’

  Bentley shot McKinnon a look. He turned back to the Russian as the latter regained his balance, breathing heavily.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Volkov replied weakly. ‘Just the sickness. Comes and goes. I go to the bathroom, okay?’

  McKinnon sighed. They had been warned about this. One of the doctors treating Volkov had addressed the officers at the mission briefing. The basic takeaway was that no one could be sure of the long-term effects resulting from exposure to an experimental nerve agent. There were no case studies they could refer to, no articles on the subject. But the doctor felt it reasonable to assume that Volkov would have respiratory difficulties, impaired physical movement and short-term memory loss. In addition to violent bouts of sickness and diarrhoea.

  ‘I need the bathroom,’ Volkov repeated. ‘Please.’

  ‘Come on, Dave,’ Bentley said. ‘Look at the poor fucker. We can’t stick him in the wagon looking like this.’

  That much was true, McKinnon conceded. He had a sudden vision of the Russian shitting his pants in the back of the Land Rover, filthy brown streaks all over the place. Better to get it out of his system now.

  ‘Fine. But make it quick. We can’t stick around here for long. Five minutes, then we’re out of here.’

  Volkov nodded. ‘Five minutes, okay.’

  He shuffled off towards the downstairs toilet, clutching his guts and grimacing in pain.

  At the same time Jagielka and Flowers hurried upstairs to their bedrooms to pack their holdalls. McKinnon turned to follow them and then nodded at Bentley.

  ‘Grab the longs,’ he said, indicating the gun cabinet. ‘Put them in the lock box in the rear of the Discovery. Load up the vests as well.’

  Bentley made a face. ‘Shouldn’t we be wearing them, sarge?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Protection.’

  McKinnon shook his head. ‘It’s a waste of time. We’ll be out of here before any fucker can show up. Trust me.’

  Bentley opened his mouth to protest but McKinnon set off up the stairs before the younger officer could argue further. McKinnon was feeling confident. Bullish, even. Despite the setback, he felt sure that his team had the tactical edge over whoever had been doing the recce on the safe house. McKinnon and his guys had been alert. They had seen through the set-up with the fake delivery van. Whereas the enemy h
ad no reason to think that their plan had been rumbled. No reason at all.

  We’ve got time on our side.

  The enemy would be cautious, McKinnon reckoned. They would wait for the delivery driver to report back from his recce. There would be a big meeting. Strategies would be discussed. Pros and cons weighed up. It would be a while before they were ready to attack. Whoever they were, McKinnon thought to himself. By the time they were ready, the PPU team would be on their way to Leeds.

  Right now, we’re winning.

  Twenty-one minutes past two in the afternoon.

  Seven minutes before the ambush.

  The police van was parked three miles to the south, in a small gravel lay-by at the side of a narrow country road. The man behind the wheel was called Pavel Vasin, but everyone knew him as the Afghan. On account of his combat experience in the last days of the Soviet–Afghanistan War, almost thirty years earlier. Thirty years, but Vasin still remembered the conflict as if it had happened yesterday. He recalled the bodies of Soviet soldiers slumped by the side of the road, their hands, ears and noses cut off and their genitalia stuffed into their mouths. The men who had been skinned alive and strung up from trees to roast beneath the blazing sun. Some of those who had served in the war had come back broken men, but not Vasin. Afghanistan had made him stronger. He had spent every day of his life since then in the service of Mother Russia, determined to make sure that his country never again suffered such a humiliating defeat.

  Which is why Vasin found himself in a van in a remote corner of the Lake District, disguised as a British police officer.

  The van was a Volkswagen Crafter. An ex-force wagon, bought for nine grand at a public auction in Wolverhampton and paid for in cash. For a heavy-duty vehicle with ninety thousand miles on the clock it was in surprisingly good condition. The result of being operated by a professional, Vasin guessed, rather than a regular motorist. It ran smoothly, handled every manoeuvre Vasin threw at it and the cooling system was more efficient than anything he’d seen in a civilian motor.