Fallout (The Nick Sullivan Thrillers Book 1)

by Karla Forbes

  ***

  Bill Gaskin sat in his car watching the house. He had been there for nearly ten minutes. If Ed Burgen didn’t leave for work soon, he was going to be late. Gaskin wasn’t surprised. His discreet enquiries had revealed that Burgen’s productivity and reliability had suffered since the divorce, and nowadays he was late almost as often as he was on time.

  As if on cue, the front door opened and Burgen hurried out, rummaging for his car keys with one hand whilst shoving the remains of a slice of toast into his mouth with the other. Gaskin lowered himself in the driver’s seat, watching over the edge of a newspaper as Burgen sprinted down the path, leapt into his car and roared away at a speed that should have earned him several points on his licence.

  Moving fast didn’t come easily to Gaskin, but he made a creditable effort as he heaved himself out of the car and headed for Ed’s immediate neighbours. The first door he knocked on remained stubbornly shut; its occupants were no doubt already on their way to work. His second attempt was more successful. The door was opened by an elderly lady wearing an expression of curiosity. Her white hair perfectly matched her even whiter cardigan. She instinctively began smoothing down her sparse curls when she realised that her visitor was a man. Gaskin summoned up a genial smile.

  “Good morning,” he said brightly. “Sorry to disturb you. I’m looking for a gentleman by the name of Edward Burgen. I know he lives around here, but I’m not sure of the number.”

  She squinted up at Gaskin with eyes that were rheumy with age. “Ed lives next door, dear,” she told him. “But what a shame, you’ve just missed him. He left for work a few minutes ago.”

  Gaskin feigned disappointment. “I haven’t, have I? Oh well, at least I know where he lives now.” He dipped his head in a gesture of thanks. “Never mind, I’ll call back later.” He turned to go, but then stopped as though struck by a thought. “It’s actually a mutual friend that I was supposed to be meeting here. I don’t suppose you’ve seen anyone hanging around, have you?”

  The elderly lady pursed her mouth into a thoughtful frown. “I’m not sure, dear. What does he look like?”

  “Mid-thirties, slim build, about five foot eleven, dark hair…”

  She shook her head sadly. “I’m afraid not, dear. In fact I don’t think I’ve seen anyone visiting Ed since his sister popped in.”

  Gaskin mentally recalled the facts he had read in Ed’s personnel file. “You mean Annelies... She was here?”

  “Oh yes, Annie often calls round. She likes to keep an eye on her brother…” Her hand flew to her mouth. “Now I come to think of it, that friend of yours…I might know who you mean. He called on Ed a few days ago. He and Annie were talking together in the garden for quite a while.”

  “Are you sure?” Gaskin asked quickly.

  “Yes, I remember now. I thought it was odd, because she pulled him away from the house as though she didn’t want Ed to see them together. I was a bit concerned at the time, because Annie was looking so serious.”

  “Can you remember whether he had a car?”

  “You couldn’t miss it,” the neighbour said, with a hint of disapproval. “It’s one of those fancy sports cars.”

  “An Aston Martin?” Gaskin asked, keeping his voice neutral.

  “I wouldn’t know an Aston Martin if it ran me over, dear,” the old lady admitted, “but I do know it looked as though the cost of insuring it would be more than my whole year’s pension.”

  “That’s the one,” Gaskin assured her. “Do you know if he’s staying with Ed?”

  “No dear, definitely not. He drove off in that car of his and Annie left about half an hour later.”

  Gaskin’s spirits sank. “And you haven’t seen him since?”

  “No. But you could try Annie’s. I saw her give him something.” The old lady looked conspiratorially around her and lowered her voice. “I wouldn’t swear to it, because I wasn’t really watching them, you understand, but it looked to me as though she was giving him her keys.”

  Gaskin suppressed a lurch of excitement. It all fitted. Sullivan had disappeared without trace, which meant that someone had to be sheltering him. They had suspected Burgen; perhaps they had been wrong.

  He thanked the neighbour profusely and hurried back to his car, pulling his mobile from his pocket as he went.

  “Bill here,” he said as he was connected to Mason. “It might not be Burgen after all. A neighbour saw Sullivan talking to Burgen’s sister the day he disappeared. She thinks she saw her give him a key. What do you want me to do?”

  “We can’t go in mob-handed until we’re sure. Can you take a look around without being seen?”

  “I’ll try,” Gaskin promised.

  “Don’t screw this up,” Mason warned. “Sullivan knows what you look like. If he sees you, he’ll disappear faster than a rat down a sewer.”

  “Don’t worry,” Gaskin told him. “I’ll be careful.”

  “You’d better,” Mason cautioned. “He mustn’t know we’re on to him until half of Sussex Police are hammering on the door.”

  ***

  Gaskin flicked through the file on the passenger seat, found Annelies’s address and programmed it into the SatNav. It seemed to be a typical suburban area on the outskirts of Brighton. He turned the car around and less than twenty minutes later was pulling into her road. It was as he imagined: rows of 1970s semis, all with garages and small but neat front gardens. He parked some way off and watched. The curtains were half-drawn, but inside there were no signs of life. He waited, debating the best way to proceed. If he walked up the path and knocked at the door, it might be Sullivan himself who answered. He didn’t feel up to arresting a younger, fitter man without back-up.

  Two youngsters ambled down the road towards him, chatting animatedly. Gaskin glanced at his watch. They should already be in school, but neither of them seemed to be suffering from any sense of urgency. He opened the door across their path as they approached.

  “Do you want to earn a couple of quid?” he asked.

  “Piss off, perve!” one of them said. “I’ll tell the police.”

  Gaskin quickly reappraised his approach. “I am the police,” he said. “I need some help. Are you two lads up for helping me catch a criminal?”

  “Yeah!” the second one squealed with excitement.

  But the first boy was not so easily impressed. “If that’s true, where’s your identification?” he asked, showing an annoying degree of common sense.

  Gaskin fumbled in his wallet and brought out his warrant card. “I want you to ring the doorbell of Number 15 and walk away.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes. Will you do it?” He fished out a two-pound coin.

  The second boy looked at it with disdain. “A fiver,” he demanded.

  “Yeah, OK,” Gaskin agreed wearily, pulling a note from his wallet.

  The boy’s eyes glinted. “Each,” he added.

  “Don’t push your luck, kid,” Gaskin growled.

  The youngster grinned, plucked the note from Gaskin’s grasp and ran back along the pavement towards Annelies’s house. Gaskin hunched low in the car, watching. It had seemed a good idea at the time. Now he wasn’t so sure. He had sent a juvenile to knock on the door of a woman who could be sheltering a suspected killer. If anything went wrong, he would be kissing his career goodbye.

  The boy swaggered up the path, leaned on the buzzer for several seconds and then turned around and hurried back.

  “Keep going,” Gaskin hissed as the boy came alongside the car. “In fact, get yourselves off to school before I report you.”

  The two boys took the hint and ran off laughing, leaving Gaskin to breathe a sigh of relief, thankful that his gamble hadn’t spectacularly backfired. He continued to watch for several minutes. No curtains twitched, no one came to the door.

  Another ten minutes passed before he made a move. He heaved himself out of the car, walked up to the front door and squinted through the glass panel. There was a build-
up of post on the mat. He began to relax, guessing that no one had been around for a while. With one last cautionary glance around him, he hurried down the path that led to the back garden, but stopped abruptly at the window of the garage. He squinted in, wiped a small circle in the glass and peered again. He was grinning triumphantly as he pulled his mobile from his pocket and put a call through to Mason.

  “Guv! I’ve found Sullivan’s car. It’s in the garage at Burgen’s sister’s house. Who’s going to tell her brother?”

  Gaskin could almost hear Mason’s gleeful smile. “Good work. I’m coming straight over. In the meantime, do what you need to, but keep Burgen in the dark until I get there. We don’t know at this stage whether he’s implicated or not. So tread carefully.”

  “Either way, he’s going to be having one pig of a day,” Gaskin pointed out.

  “Quite,” Mason agreed. “He’s either guilty himself, or he’s about to find out that his sister has been sheltering a suspected killer. Either way, I wouldn’t like to be in his shoes.”

  Chapter Eight

  Wilson sat alone at the lead glass cabinet, wearing a heavy-duty respirator and with his hands inserted into the rubber gloves. The two other men had taken themselves, and the television, away to a bedroom to avoid breathing in any contaminated dust that might escape.

  He worked with care, absorbed in the task of transferring the powder from the glass containers to the cardboard tubes. He had told Fox that the plutonium was virtually harmless, but that was only to buy himself some peace. If it found a way into his body it could prove fatal, and the problem facing Wilson right now was that there were too many ways for that to happen.

  The alpha waves from the decaying radiation could not pass through human skin that was healthy and intact, but the smallest cut could provide a way in. From there, the plutonium would travel to the bone and begin its deadly work of dismantling and breaking down the body’s DNA. Breathing it in was even more hazardous. Once in the lungs it would be carried around the body, helped on its way by every breath taken and every beat of the heart. It wouldn’t kill him straight away; that would take time. The danger lay in not seeking treatment, either because the danger wasn’t recognised, or because turning up at a hospital was the same as walking into a prison cell.

  Wilson preferred to take his time and work with care. He had been just as punctilious in his dealing with Sarah Feltham. He had used the glass cabinet when mixing the deadly powder into her food, and had dropped her empty mug straight into a bucket of water to carry it back to the kitchen sink where it was immediately, and thoroughly, washed.

  He felt an irritation in his nose and stopped what he was doing, swearing violently under his breath as he bit back the threatening sneeze. Willpower won the day and the sneeze abated, but as he turned back once more to the work in hand, the door from the bedroom was cautiously opened.

  Hubner stuck his head round. “How’s it going?” he asked.

  Wilson sat back and stretched. “Nearly there. One more to go and I’ll be ready to pack them.”

  “We can make a move tomorrow?”

  Wilson thought about it. “Yes, I don’t see why not.”

  Hubner edged inside the room and sat down a safe distance from the table. “Are you OK with me staying here while you go to London?”

  Wilson shrugged. “It makes sense, I suppose. I doubt there are that many Germans in the London Fire Brigade. We don’t want anyone phoning up to check us out.”

  “Good,” Hubner said. “You must keep an eye on that one though.” He tilted his head towards the bedroom door. “He can be a fool. I sometimes regret bringing him in on this.”

  “You could ditch him,” Wilson murmured.

  Hubner shook his head. “No. I’ve still got work for him to do. And anyway, he’s probably more dangerous cut adrift and bent on revenge than toeing the line.”

  “I suppose so,” Wilson agreed, half-heartedly.

  “How’s the woman doing?” Hubner asked, changing the subject.

  “That’s going well,” Wilson said, cheering up. “To begin with, she seemed to keep going by sheer willpower. Maybe it was the belief she’d be seeing her kids again; who knows? Whatever it was, it was bloody annoying. But since yesterday, she’s gone downhill fast. It’s strange, but it’s as if she’s given up trying.”

  “How long until she’s dead?”

  Wilson hazarded a guess. “At this rate, no more than a couple of days.”

  “Right,” Hubner said, standing up, “that settles it. You finish what you’re doing here, and tomorrow you and Malcolm go to London. The day after that, James Feltham gets his wife back, and the British government receives an ultimatum.”

  “This is going to work, isn’t it?” Wilson asked, suddenly unsure.

  “There are no guarantees. You knew that before we started.” He looked at Wilson quizzically. “Are you getting second thoughts?”

  Wilson shook his head. “No, but the British government have always made it clear that they don’t negotiate with terrorists. Why should we be different?”

  “We’re not terrorists,” Hubner stated flatly. “We’re after money, not some big political gesture. They know damn well that if they pay up we’ll go away and cease to embarrass them. It’s a different situation entirely. They’ll be trying to stop us, of course, but I’m going to be one step ahead of them, making sure they don’t.”

  Wilson glanced towards the other room and lowered his voice. “I wouldn’t say anything in front of Malcolm, but one thing worries me: the authorities will know that we haven’t got the capability to manufacture a proper nuclear bomb.”

  “Of course.” Hubner shrugged. “What about it?”

  “Because they’ll assume we’re making dirty bombs – in which case they might not take the threat seriously enough.”

  Hubner sat down again, his expression curious. “Why shouldn’t they?”

  “Because,” Wilson explained, “anyone who knows anything about dirty bombs will also know that the only real danger comes from the initial blast. Everyone immediately runs away, the plutonium dissipates into the atmosphere, and by the time it starts falling to earth again, the streets are empty.”

  “Not the way we’re going to deliver the plutonium. None of those things apply. People will die in their thousands. Not straight away, of course. Some cancers can take years to develop.”

  “But the government won’t know that. If there was some way we could tell them what we’ve planned, how serious it really is, without giving the game away…”

  Hubner shook his head emphatically. “No. It’s impossible. If they know how we’re going to do it, they’ll be able to stop us.” He stood to leave. “Don’t worry about it. They’ll know we’ve got plutonium and they’ll be pissing themselves. Sixty million is nothing.”

  “I suppose so,” Wilson said dubiously. “But it’s not going to be easy. The government will throw everything they’ve got against us.”

  “True,” Hubner conceded,” but we’ve got surprise on our side. I’ll give them just 48 hours to react. That’s hardly enough time for them to realise what’s happening, let alone mount a defence.” He turned to go. “You need to get on. Think on this, though: if everything goes according to plan, in less than a week we’ll be sixty million better off.”

  “And if it doesn’t, we’ll be back inside.”

  “Not necessarily,” Hubner corrected him. “That’s why I’m being careful. Malcolm accuses me of being paranoid, but if it does go wrong, it’s essential that they can never track down who we are. There must be no loose ends.”

  “But there’s already a loose end,” Wilson said unhappily.

  Hubner raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “The man on the boat.”

  “He’s nothing,” Hubner said, dismissively. “Even if he’s still alive, he doesn’t know who we are, where we are or what we’re doing. Forget him.”

  Wilson still appeared unconvinced.

  “Trust me on
this,” Hubner continued. “If he posed any threat to us, why isn’t he here? I don’t see him. Do you? I don’t hear the police battering down the door.”

  Wilson caught himself glancing involuntarily towards the door and laughed nervously. “Yeah you’re right,” he admitted. “Ignore me. I’m getting jumpy.”

  “That’s good,” Hubner said. “It’s only when you become complacent that things go wrong.”

  ***

  Ed was on his way out of the building when the order came. “The Guv wants you in his office, now,” his colleague told him. “I’d be quick if I were you. He doesn’t look too happy.”

  Ed groaned, guessing that it was about Nick. He walked slowly, trying to compose himself, and by the time he tapped on the door, he had managed to mask the inner turmoil with an expression of polite curiosity. In response to an abrupt “Come!” he strode confidently inside, but was brought up short by the sight of two men, one of whom was DC Gaskin. He knew then that it was bad.

  “This is Inspector Mason from Kent police,” his boss said by way of introduction. “DC Gaskin you’ve already met. They’re here to ask you some more questions about that friend of yours, Nick Sullivan.” He nodded for Ed to sit, but made no move to leave.

  Ed inwardly shuddered. This had become altogether more serious.

  “You’re aware that we’re searching for Mr Sullivan in regard to the murder of a friend of his,” Mason stated. Ed nodded guardedly. “I believe you told DC Gaskin that you hadn’t seen Mr Sullivan for several weeks.”

  Ed looked from one to another, sensing a trap. “Did I? I don’t remember. I’m not sure how long it is since I’ve seen him.”

  “Let me refresh your memory,” Mason said icily. “According to your neighbour, you last spoke to Sullivan the day he disappeared.”

  Ed gaped, unsure what to say.

  “Would you care to explain that?” Mason pressed him.

  “I…um…I don’t know exactly. When was that?”