by Kevin Brooks
Grandad had told me that he’d first heard the rumours about a rogue security service called Omega back in the 1980s when he was serving with a covert military intelligence squad in Northern Ireland. The story was that a group of intelligence officers from all kinds of backgrounds – MI5, MI6, Special Branch, Army Intelligence – had become so disillusioned with the politics and restrictions of the official national security services that they’d got together and formed their own unofficial security organisation. No one really knew anything about them, Grandad had told me, but it was generally assumed that they undertook the same kind of work as the official security services – counter-intelligence, counter-terrorism, internal and external national security – but they did it on their own terms: no rules, no restrictions, no accountability.
The man we believed to be in charge of Omega – a steely-eyed character who called himself Winston – had put it in much simpler terms. ‘We’re the good guys, Travis,’ he’d told me. ‘We do what’s right.’
I don’t really doubt that he believed what he told me, and in terms of Omega’s involvement in the Bashir Kamal case, there’s no question that – ultimately – they were doing the right thing. But Winston had also told me something else. ‘Sometimes we have to make short-term sacrifices for the sake of potential long-term benefits,’ he’d said. ‘A life risked today might save a thousand lives in years to come.’
I don’t know if that amounted to some kind of confession or not, but during my investigation into Bashir Kamal I’d come across evidence to suggest that Omega were responsible – intentionally or not – for the car crash that killed my parents. The evidence was all circumstantial, and Winston and the other Omega men had disappeared back into the shadows before I’d had a chance to question them any further. But I wasn’t going to rest until I’d found out what had really happened, and neither was Grandad, and since the day that Winston and his men had slipped away, we’d never stopped searching for the truth. Unfortunately for us, Omega had been operating under the radar for decades, and they were very good at making themselves invisible. As Grandad put it, looking for them was like looking for ghosts in the mist. All we’d found so far was a grainy old black-and-white photograph on the Internet that purportedly showed three special forces operatives in Kuwait, one of whom bore a striking resemblance to a young-looking Winston. According to the website, he was Sergeant Andrew W. Carson, and he’d been ‘killed in action’ shortly after the picture was taken.
The only other relevant information we’d dug up was that the road traffic accident investigator who’d compiled the report into my parents’ crash – which claimed that no other vehicle was involved – had resigned his position quite suddenly and was no longer living in the UK. His whereabouts were still unknown.
So I’d kind of got used to our investigation into Omega not getting anywhere, and when I sat down with Grandad that evening, I just assumed he was going to tell me that nothing much had changed.
But I was wrong.
10
‘I don’t want to get your hopes up, Travis,’ Grandad said to me, ‘but I think we might be getting somewhere at last.’
‘You’ve found out something?’ I said, my heart quickening.
‘Well, actually, most of the credit goes to Gloria.’
‘Gloria?’ I said, surprised. ‘I thought we were keeping this to ourselves.’
‘We are keeping it to ourselves. Gloria’s part of the team now, Trav. She’s one of us – me, you, Courtney, Gloria. The four of us are Delaney & Co.’ He looked at me. ‘You don’t have a problem with that, do you?’
‘Well, no . . . I suppose not. It’s just . . . I mean, it just feels kind of odd, you know, working with someone I don’t really know.’
‘You’ll get to know her. You just have to give it time. But I know her, Trav. I’ve known her for years, and I’d trust her with my life. And you know me pretty well, don’t you?’
‘I thought I did,’ I muttered, almost without thinking.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
I hesitated for a moment, torn between telling him the truth – i.e. that I knew about his history with Gloria – or just avoiding the subject altogether, which was what I’d been doing for the last ten days or so. From the way Grandad was looking at me though – his grizzly old face demanding an explanation for what I’d just said – I knew I couldn’t avoid it any longer.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about Gloria?’ I asked him.
‘Tell you what?’
‘About you and her,’ I said awkwardly, not knowing how to phrase it. ‘You know, you and her . . . before you met Nan?’
He was too surprised to say anything for a moment, and I could tell by the puzzled look in his eyes that he was wondering how I’d found out.
‘I was in the sitting room when you told Nan,’ I explained. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing you.’
‘Oh, I see . . .’ he said, nodding slowly.
‘You should have told me, Grandad,’ I said, unable to keep the bitterness from my voice. ‘And you should have talked to Nan about hiring Gloria. It wasn’t fair to just spring it on her like that.’
‘I didn’t mean to, Travis. Honestly. I know that sounds hard to believe, but it’s the God’s-honest truth.’ He sighed. ‘I really wasn’t trying to hide anything from either of you . . . well, not at first anyway. I didn’t plan on hiring Gloria, it just kind of happened—’
‘Oh, come on,’ I said, exasperated.
Grandad looked me in the eye. ‘She called me about something else, OK? It was nothing to do with me and her, nothing to do with Delaney & Co, all she wanted was some information about someone I used to know who’d offered her a job. The idea of taking her on as our assistant came to me on the spur of the moment. I suddenly realised how perfect she’d be for the job, and it was obvious she was looking for work, so I just asked her, there and then. If I hadn’t, she would have taken this other position she was thinking about. It didn’t even occur to me until afterwards, when she’d already agreed to join us, that I hadn’t talked it over with you or Nan or Courtney, and it was only then that I realised how awkward it was going to be for Nan.’ Grandad paused, looking away from me in embarrassment. ‘This thing with me and Gloria . . . it all happened a lifetime ago, before I’d ever met Nan. And even then it didn’t last very long. We went out together a couple of times, Trav, that was all. We liked each other a lot, but not in that way . . . you know . . . not as a couple. We realised that we just wanted to be friends.’ He shrugged. ‘It worked for us, we were much better together as good friends than as a couple. It also made it a lot easier for us when we found ourselves working together some years later. It helped us get through a lot . . . we went through some pretty rough times together.’ He went quiet for a moment or two, thinking about something, almost drifting away. Then, after a while, he shook his head and brought himself out of his memories. ‘I know I should have told Nan sooner,’ he admitted, ‘but the truth is, I just got scared. It’s not that Nan doesn’t trust me or anything, it’s just . . . I don’t know. Relationships are funny things, Travis. You’ll find out yourself when you’re older. They don’t follow any kind of logic sometimes. Nan knows what my relationship with Gloria is. She knows that after those first few dates we’ve never been anything more than friends and work colleagues, and she also knows I’d never lie to her or cheat on her. But despite all that, despite everything her rational mind tells her, there’s just something about Gloria that gets to her.’
‘Maybe she just doesn’t like her,’ I suggested.
‘Well, whatever it is, I knew Nan wouldn’t like it when she found out I’d hired Gloria, so I just kept putting it off. . .’
‘And why didn’t you tell me about it?’
He sighed again. ‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Yeah.’
He smiled awkwardly. ‘I was embarrassed, simple as that. I’m an old man, Trav. You’re my grandson, you’re fourteen. I just didn’t know h
ow to go about telling you about. . . well, you know . . . relationship stuff.’
‘I do realise that you were a young man once,’ I said, grinning at him. ‘I mean, I can just about imagine you having a girlfriend back in the day – taking her out in your horse and carriage, twirling your moustache and tipping your top hat to her, all that kind of stuff.’
He laughed. ‘You’ll be as old as me one day, you know.’
‘They’ll have cured ageing long before then. I’m planning on living for ever.’
‘Well, good luck with that.’
He felt comfortable enough then to tell me a bit more about Gloria – her career in the intelligence services, her knowledge of counter-espionage techniques, her expertise in collecting and analysing information.
‘Another really useful thing about her is that she’s got a lot more up-to-date contacts than me,’ he explained, ‘which is partly why she’s been able to find out a lot more about Omega than me.’ He tapped a few keys on his laptop and brought up a photograph of a gaunt-faced man wearing rimless glasses.
‘That’s one of the Omega men,’ I said, staring in amazement at the picture.
‘His name’s Lance Borstlap,’ Grandad said. ‘He was a corporal in the South African Special Forces Brigade, went AWOL in 2009, and there’s been no official sightings of him since. According to various intelligence reports though, he’s developed a very successful career as a mercenary, working for all kinds of organisations and individuals all over the world.’
‘Including Omega.’
‘So it would seem.’
‘Did Gloria find all this out?’
Grandad nodded. ‘She tracked him down through the fingerprints we got off your bike.’
One of the first things we’d thought of when we started trying to find the Omega men was tracing them through their fingerprints. The trouble was, the warehouse they’d used as a base when they were in Barton had been demolished the day after they’d left, so it was impossible to get any prints from there. But then I’d remembered that at one point during the Bashir Kamal investigation, CIA agents had slashed the tyres on my bike, and someone from Omega had replaced the tyres and given the bike back to me. I’d told Grandad about this, and he’d had the bike checked for fingerprints. It turned out that there were a couple of partial prints on the rim of the back wheel that weren’t mine. Grandad had passed these on to several of his contacts who’d run them through various databases, but no matches had been found.
‘Gloria just extended the search,’ Grandad explained. ‘Like I said, she’s got far more contacts than me, and she eventually struck lucky with someone she knows in the National Intelligence Agency in South Africa.’
‘Amazing,’ I muttered.
‘I told you she was good.’
‘So this was the man who fixed my bike,’ I said, staring at the face on the laptop screen. A corporal in the special forces and a highly regarded mercenary . . . and he mended my bike.’
Grandad shrugged. ‘He’s a soldier. Soldiers do whatever they’re told.’
‘Do we know anything else about him?’
‘Not yet. But Gloria’s working on it.’
‘Has she found out anything about any of the others?’
‘She’s working on that too.’
‘Anything else?’
‘She’s checking up on one of the police officers who was involved in the investigation into your mum and dad’s crash, a Detective Inspector Ronnie Bull. She’s heard whispers that DI Bull’s a dirty cop and that he’ll do almost anything for the right price. She’s fairly sure that he’s not actually part of Omega, but she thinks he might have some kind of connection with them.’
‘They could have used him to help cover up their involvement in the car crash,’ I suggested.
‘That’s one of the things Gloria’s looking into. We’ve also managed to track down the police officers who were actually present at the scene of the crash. I’ve already spoken with two of them, and they’ve told me a couple of things that might be worth following up. In the meantime I’m still trying to arrange to talk to the others.’
‘That’s really brilliant, Grandad,’ I said, feeling freshly encouraged by all this new information. ‘We’re going to do it, aren’t we? We’re going to get Omega.’
‘There’s a long way to go yet,’ he said cautiously, ‘but, yes . . . we’ll get them in the end.’
‘Is there anything I can do to help?’
‘I don’t think so. Not at the moment anyway. But it would make things a lot easier for me if you could try to accept Gloria a little bit more. I know it’s not easy, for all kinds of reasons, and I realise I’m asking you to put your faith in someone you don’t really know, and maybe don’t trust, but just give her a chance, OK? For my sake.’
‘All right,’ I agreed.
‘Thanks, Travis. And listen . . .’Hehesitatedforasecond then, and I thought I saw a flicker of embarrassment in his eyes, a momentary look of shame, or maybe even guilt. I naturally assumed he was still thinking about Gloria, and that he was about to say something else about her, but I was wrong. Or, at least, that’s what I thought at the time.
‘Listen, Trav,’ he said, kind of cryptically, ‘whatever happens, right or wrong, never forget that there’s more than one way to catch a rat.’
11
It was just gone six thirty when I left the office – too late to get something to eat and still meet Mason at seven – so instead of cycling up into town, I headed straight off to the Slade Lane estate. By the time I’d got there, I’d given up trying to work out what Grandad had meant when he’d said there was more than one way to catch a rat. I supposed it meant the same as the phrase ‘more than one way to skin a cat’, which I was pretty sure was just another way of saying there’s more than one way to achieve something . . . although once I started thinking about that – i.e. the idea of skinning a cat – I got even more confused. What did skinning a cat have to do with anything? And was Grandad intentionally making up his own version of the phrase, or had he just got it wrong? I’d noticed recently that my nan was beginning to get things mixed up more and more often these days – she’d called me Jack a couple of times recently, which was my dad’s name – and I guessed it was just something that happens as you get older. So maybe Grandad had just got his words muddled up. But even if he had, I assumed he still meant that there was more than one way to do something, and that’s what I couldn’t work out. More than one way to do what?
But, like I said, by the time I got to Slade Lane, I’d had enough of trying to work it out. And besides, now that I’d reached the estate, I couldn’t afford to be thinking about anything else. The Slade Lane estate is as rough as it gets, and although my friendship with Mason Yusuf means that most of the gang kids know who I am and generally leave me alone, I couldn’t just assume I was safe. It doesn’t matter who you are or who you know when you’re on the Slade, you still need all your wits about you. Especially at night.
There’s no real beginning or end to the estate, it’s just a huge sprawling maze of low-rise blocks and row upon row of slate-grey council houses. Mason lives with his mum and his sister, Jaydie, in a flat in one of the low-rises in the middle of the estate. I’d been to the Slade before with Mason, but although he was forever asking me to come round to his place, I’d never actually been there. I had no idea if Mason was planning on taking me there tonight, or if I was just going to meet him somewhere on the estate. You can never tell with Mason. He likes to keep people guessing.
I’d reached a little square on the edge of the estate now, a drab concrete place with graffiti-scrawled walls and a couple of iron benches bolted to the ground. Tall street lights were dotted around the square, but only one of them was working. I headed over to it, pulled up my bike next to a bench, then took out my mobile and called Mason.
‘Hey, Trav,’ he answered. ‘Where are you?’
I told him where I was.
‘Stay there,’ he said. ‘I’ll
come and get you. Be there in five.’
As I was putting my mobile back in my pocket, I saw three hooded kids coming across the darkened square towards me. Two of them were about my age, the other one a couple of years older. They were trying to give the impression that they weren’t interested in me at all, that all they were doing was just ambling along, casually minding their own business. And if I hadn’t known better I might have believed them.
But I did know better.
For a start, I knew that just because they weren’t actually looking in my direction, that didn’t mean they weren’t keeping their eyes on me, thoroughly checking me out. I also knew that the oldest one was probably carrying a weapon, most likely a knife. I’d seen him put his hand in his pocket as soon as he’d entered the square, and now – as the three of them approached me, spreading out in a rough semi-circle – the older kid still had his hand in his pocket.
I’d instinctively glanced around for an escape route from the square as soon as I’d seen them coming – it’s always best to weigh up all your options in advance – so I already knew that there were only two ways out. The street up ahead – where the three kids had come from – and the street behind me, where I’d just come from.
I looked quickly at both exits again. Two kids on bikes had appeared from nowhere and were blocking the street behind me, and as I gazed across the other side of the square I saw a battered old Vauxhall Corsa rolling to a halt at the end of the street.
Both exits blocked, nowhere to run. My options were rapidly running out.