by Jack Leavers
Three-quarters of a mile from Marble Arch was Hyde Park Corner, another London Tube station with multiple entrances and exits, but I wanted to avoid obvious transport hubs. I dropped out of the park onto Knightsbridge and kept heading south, skirting Belgrave Square Garden and onto Belgrave Place to keep parallel with the main road, Grosvenor Place, which ran along the side of Buckingham Palace Gardens towards Victoria Station two-thirds of a mile away. Victoria had trains that ran to Epsom, but it would be another obvious location where surveillance or arrest teams might try to pick me up.
I kept on moving towards Victoria as I weighed up my options. It wasn’t worth the risk. I circled to the south of the station, then swung left past the Passport Office and a large Argos shop onto Vauxhall Bridge Road. A number 36 Routemaster bus came into view heading south towards the bridge and stopped on the other side of the road. I darted across and jumped on the open rear platform just as it scooted off. A ticket inspector shook his head in disapproval as I flashed my One Day Travel Card.
A couple of minutes later I jumped off the bus at the end of Vauxhall Bridge with the modern MI6 headquarters looming on my left. I dashed up and over the footbridge before picking my way through the complaining traffic to Vauxhall station where I could catch an Epsom bound train coming from Waterloo Station.
I took the stairs two at a time up to Platform 8 and squeezed through the closing doors of a train about to depart. All Epsom departures left from this platform, although the driver announced this train was headed elsewhere. Not a problem. It stopped at Wimbledon, which connected to Epsom.
After changing at Wimbledon for the right train I let myself relax a little. It was irrational to think I would be under close surveillance, but better safe than sorry. Rather than stay on the train all the way to Epsom, I jumped off at Ewell West and walked the mile or so towards home. The other commuters going the same way might have included watchers. If they were still with me I wouldn’t shake them off now.
The nerves began to build again as I got closer to home. If they knew my identity, then all the dicking about I’d been doing since the incident at the Churchill would have been a waste of time. In that case, they might be parked up outside the house, or worse still sat in the living room with Claire and the girls waiting for my return. I needed to assess the situation at the house.
I passed the small row of shops on the main road and prepared to turn right into a side road with a pub a hundred metres down on the left. Directly opposite the pub was the entrance to the small close where we lived in our three-bedroom semi-detached house. The pub itself was a quiet locals’ place and plenty of cars usually sat parked outside. Once I turned the corner, I might come into view of hostiles who would have eyes on the front of our house, if they were there.
I stayed in the shadows close to the fence after making the turn. An access road thirty metres away on the right ran behind the row of shops and the bottom of the gardens for one side of the close, including our house.
With my jacket pulled up around my face and my baseball cap fished out of my pocket and onto my head, I walked naturally towards the access road turn. After making the turn into the narrow, potholed road, I ran over to the trees marking the start of our back fence about forty metres further along. I slipped into the trees, clambered over the fence as quietly as possible, and dropped down into the soft earth behind our garden shed.
There was no-one in the conservatory and the curtains were closed in the living room, although light leaked out through the gaps. I stayed still and listened for a minute, straining for the sounds of anything out of the ordinary. Music drifted from the pub and a woman laughed loudly nearby, but I caught no discernible fleet of running engines, squawk of radio transmissions, or grumble of waiting officers. I took out my two remaining phones, checked they were both switched off, and slid them under the far corner of the shed. Best to take every precaution until the situation was clear.
I slowly made my way up the garden towards the rear of the house, taking care so as not to alert Taz to start barking at a potential intruder. I trod carefully through some toys scattered on the patio, moved up against the living-room window, and peered through a chink in the curtains. Claire sat on the sofa watching the television with the dog lying on the floor in front of her. That made it highly unlikely any strangers were in the house. Good. Although I made a mental note of the hound’s failure to detect my approach.
I knocked softly on the patio doors. Taz immediately sprang up and barked as she ran to get her head through the curtains. She hadn’t barked until reaching a year old, and the first time had been at a doorbell ringing on the TV. We didn’t even have a doorbell in our married quarters, so it must have been some deep-rooted dog instinct. Well she had her voice now and barked even though it was me standing in front of her. I quickly removed my baseball cap and pulled my jacket collar down, but it didn’t stop her growling through the glass. Claire pulled open the curtains and the light spilled over me. She unlocked and slid the patio door open.
‘What are you doing?’ With a look that said she knew she wasn’t going to like the answer. She probably suspected some sort of drunken antics even though it was still before 9.00pm. She’d known it might be a late one after a free curry and beers.
‘Just being careful. Has anyone called round?’
‘No. Anyone? Like who?’
‘Like the police or other authorities.’ It sounded quite reasonable to me.
‘No. What the hell have you done?’
‘I haven’t done anything. I’m just being careful. Something happened up in London with Pete and I’m sort of caught up in it’ – and before Claire could say anything else – ‘I need to grab a few files and my laptop. If anyone rings or calls at the door, then you haven’t seen me.’
With the dog trailing behind me, I kept the light off as I moved into our dining room at the front of the house. After grabbing the files containing current work in progress, some company documents, and my laptop, I took everything and a black plastic bin-liner out into the garden. Once I’d recovered the phones and notebook from under the shed, I wrapped the lot in the black bag and buried it in a shallow hole in the left-hand flower bed. I tried to camouflage any sign of my excavation as well as I could in the dark and returned to the house where Claire was eager to begin an interrogation.
‘Are you drunk? Have you been fighting?’ Based on past misdemeanours these weren’t unreasonable questions.
‘No sweetheart, it’s a job that seems to have gone wrong.’ Quickly adding, ‘Not my job. One of Pete’s.’
‘If the police are involved, then shouldn’t you go to them?’
I didn’t want to even try and explain the background. It was confusing enough to me.
‘I don’t really know who’s involved. I’m going to sleep on it tonight and see if I can get hold of Pete tomorrow to find out what’s going on. Once I know, then I can work out what to do about it.’
Claire had a general idea of what I did for a living, although I never went into the details. For anything work-related, she usually trusted my judgement. She clearly wasn’t happy about tonight, but then neither was I.
Chapter 22
I spent a fitful night half awake, imagining a van screeching to a halt outside followed by a thunderous knock at the door and shouts to ‘open up’. I got up early and nipped out in the cold morning darkness to retrieve my buried hoard. After a quick breakfast, I showered, dressed, and headed out the front door to the dog’s obvious disgust that we weren’t going for a run. As I parked up in the empty car park behind the business centre, I wondered if I’d be receiving any visitors to my office today.
I still hadn’t contacted Pete by the time I left the office for the station and a train to Waterloo to meet with Ian to discuss Basra over coffee. As I travelled up to London and walked the same streets that had felt so sinister the night before, I was struck by the normality of the day
and everyone, including me, going about their business as usual. Fear that the previous day’s events might negatively affect my business gnawed away inside, but for the time being I needed to get on with things.
Ian was already sitting at an outside table when I arrived at the cafe near Carnaby Street. We’d known each other since before he went to Sandhurst for army officer training, originally meeting when he joined a close protection job I was running in London because the boss knew his dad from old army days. We’d worked on a few jobs together after that first one and always got on well. He’d rung when he got home on R&R to catch up and I’d started pumping him for information about the ports of Umm Qasr, Khor Az Zubayr, and Abu Flous because of the German client interested in the scrap. Ian said it would be much easier to explain face-to-face, so here we were.
‘Hi Ian, long time no see,’ I said as I dropped into the seat opposite.
‘Hello John. You’ve survived Baghdad without any bits missing then. Last time we spoke it sounded pretty hairy over there. What do you want to drink?’
‘I’ll have a coffee, mate. Much as I’d love a beer, I could do with the caffeine hit after the last twenty-four hours. As for Baghdad, yeah, I got out by the skin of my teeth last time. It’s horrendous up there now. Trust me to start investing time, money, and effort just as the whole place goes to ratshit. So how are things in the south? As I mentioned on the phone, I’ve got a client interested in export from Basra, so it would be great to pick your brains about the situation down there.’
‘Export? They’ll be lucky. What on earth are they thinking of exporting?’
‘Scrap metal. The law has changed to allow it to be exported and they want to get in early. God only knows if the depleted uranium the Americans used will make half of it contaminated and worthless, but for now I need to look at the logistics. See if it can work.’
That piqued Ian’s interest and by the sounds of it he was the ideal guy to be speaking with about the southern Iraqi ports. As a junior officer he was out on the ground with his men rather than back at HQ, so he possessed the kind of information I needed to help assess the logistics required for the export of scrap metal.
Although he was able to reel off plenty of information about the three ports and the local operating environment, he didn’t know anything about the political or regulatory side of import and export. He offered to ask some questions on his return and then made an intriguing suggestion.
‘Why don’t you mosey on over and let me give you the grand tour. Then you can check it out for yourself.’
Ian was satisfied he had built up trusted relationships with various locals during his tour who could help support a business operation in the south. He reckoned it should be safer and easier than the experiences I’d described in Baghdad.
A fleeting image of flying into Kuwait and driving to Basra was bludgeoned out the way by a jolt of financial reality. ‘Unfortunately, I don’t have the money for a fact-finding trip right now. But I’ll ask the Germans if they’ll agree to fund it. If they say yes, then I’ll be straight in touch.’
‘You need to be quick,’ said Ian. ‘Our tour is finished in another month, so it’s now or never.’
We agreed a simple message protocol I should use in the unlikely event I convinced the Germans to fund the trip. Provided I could give him seventy-two hours’ notice, Ian said he should be able to arrange to pick me up on the Kuwaiti side of the Safwan border post. All I needed to communicate was a ‘yes I’m coming’ and a date/time when I’d be at the shops opposite the border, preferably midday or early afternoon.
As I returned towards Ewell on the train, I worked on a draft email to the Germans asking to fund a recce. It wasn’t easy ignoring the chaos of the previous day’s events at the Churchill, but the more I thought about it, the more I considered it would be worth trying to somehow make the Basra trip happen.
By the time I arrived back at the office in mid-afternoon, I still hadn’t heard from Pete. Not that I’d tried to call him again yet. Our conversation needed privacy, which wasn’t available on the train.
With a fresh coffee to hand I tried again. This time Pete picked up.
‘Pete, it’s me.’
‘G’day mate. You coming over to the office?’ He sounded tired.
‘Can we meet somewhere else? How about the cafe in an hour?’
‘Fine, mate. See you there.’
As an Aussie, Pete was a huge cricket fan and helped with coaching at his nearby cricket club. There was a cafe close to the cricket ground where we’d often met in the past.
*
I’m sure there was plenty he left out, but Pete gave me the gist of what had happened. Apparently, the blag phone call he’d made posing as a customs officer the previous week prompted the lawyer he’d rung to contact Customs and Excise to complain. That in turn resulted in customs tracing the suspicious call back to Pete. From there the whole thing escalated as they suspected they had stumbled on an organised crime ring. A suspicion no doubt enhanced on realising they’d recently seized a valuable cheque from him as he re-entered the country.
Although it would be inadmissible evidence, Pete suspected customs had been intercepting his phone calls and probably his emails. From early the previous morning, he, Scotty, and the others had been under surveillance by customs, who thought they were going to intercept a major criminal undertaking. While I was inside the Churchill with Mohammed wondering what had happened, customs were arresting everyone outside. The Bookie and the Barman must have been the pair Mohammed had seen on the ground outside the main entrance. Pete was detained sat in the van and Scotty in his car. When I’d seen the client being led out of the hotel, he was being taken to a waiting vehicle and off for questioning.
We now knew Scotty had detected surveillance in Berkeley Square because Pete was shown photos of my arrival and asked questions about my identity. Pete had told them it was a casual contact of his, Jack, who occasionally worked security at the Churchill Hotel and had provided some background information about the layout. Of everyone involved, including Scotty, Pete was the only one who knew my real full name, so I might be in the clear. However, he said the senior customs investigator was convinced the mysterious Jack was in the hotel working with the team and desperately wanted to identify him – me. I tried to imagine his face when he must have recognised me from the surveillance photos as the guy he’d questioned at the hotel immediately following the arrests.
That wasn’t all. Simultaneous to the arrests in London, Pete’s office had been raided by customs officers and his wife answered the door at his home to gun-toting police demanding to know the location of the safe containing the ‘drugs and guns’. In the office, ‘John’ had professed to know nothing, and Sam had pretended to be the cleaner. She’d always joked she had a duster and cleaning gear for just such an eventuality and she’d given it her best shot when it happened for real.
‘How the hell am I supposed to run my business now?’ Pete was incensed they’d seized all the computers, files, photocopier, and even the laminator.
He and the others spent most of the night at customs headquarters before being charged at a nearby police station. The wealthy client had an expensive lawyer on speed dial and I think he’d organised appropriate legal aid lawyers for the others, including Pete.
Pete didn’t seem overly concerned about the whole thing though, apart from the equipment seized from his office and the furious reaction of his wife when he finally got home that morning.
‘Customs arrest and charge everyone. They make the decision themselves whether to prosecute or not, unlike the police who have to take it to the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) and persuade them to prosecute. These guys are more powerful than the police. It means they can keep everyone on the hook and only drop off the bit-part players just before going to trial. It sucks but don’t worry mate, there’s no way this is going to trial.’
&
nbsp; When Pete told me he and the others had to surrender their passports at the bail hearing that morning, I started getting worried. I needed my passport or my business would be seriously screwed up. Pete said it could take months before the whole thing blew over and that wouldn’t work for me.
Before we parted, he gave me a business card for the legal aid lawyer he’d used – reckoned he was a switched-on bloke.
‘If they catch up with you, then you could do a lot worse than speak to Denis.’
*
The following day, I sat in my office finishing off a report based on an excellent piece of detective work by my French agents for a case in Monaco when the phone rang.
‘Mr Pierce, my name is Tim Dryden. I’m a customs officer and I believe we met yesterday afternoon at the Churchill Hotel. I need to speak to you urgently and I want you to come to Custom House in Lower Thames Street, London at the earliest opportunity.’
Fuck.
‘Okay. Well I’m quite busy this week, but how about…’
‘Mr Pierce, you need to come to Custom House at ten am tomorrow morning or a warrant will be issued for your arrest.’ Blunt and to the point.
Denis the lawyer’s business card was on my desk. ‘I assume I should have some kind of legal representation?’
‘That’s your choice. Ten o’clock tomorrow.’ And he hung up.
Chapter 23
CENTRAL LONDON — OCTOBER 2004
I suggested meeting up with Denis somewhere else first before going to Custom House on the north bank of the Thames in East London, but he said it wasn’t necessary. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of time.’
Fair enough. He already understood the outline of the case from representing Pete, and he knew how this worked much better than I did.