Defend or Die

by Tom Marcus

  But at precisely the same time? What were the chances of that?

  Certainly neither of them had ever mentioned it. But then why would you? If you’d taken time out because you were worried you were losing your edge – or your bottle – it wasn’t exactly something you were going to share with your new colleagues over a cup of tea in the canteen. And if you’d spent the time away from work redecorating the spare bedroom or putting your record collection in alphabetical order, that wasn’t going to make for scintillating conversation either.

  So it could be nothing. Or . . . what? How could taking time off work at the same time explain why, three years later, they both got killed? Unless what they were doing was so secret that it didn’t even appear in their files. For fuck’s sake, they were already keeping tabs on potential terror plots, treading that fine line between giving the bastards enough rope to hang themselves and letting them slip out of their clutches – what could be more sensitive than that?

  John pulled the van up in front of the church and sat there for a moment without speaking. At first, I’d found these little moments when someone seemed to have pressed his ‘pause’ button a bit unsettling, thinking he was about to have some sort of turn. But I’d learned it just meant he was working up the courage to open his mouth. Not that what he eventually said was ever really worth the wait. Either Martindale had done a particularly thorough job of scrambling his brains or there hadn’t been much there to scramble in the first place. I waited patiently, wishing I had a cigarette, which was odd, because I’d never been a smoker. Stevie’s legacy, I supposed. The silly bastard hadn’t entirely gone, then.

  ‘You go back inside. I’ll sort out the van.’ John glanced over at me, then went back to staring through the windscreen.

  ‘You sure?’ Shit. Don’t ask him a question or we could be here all night. ‘All right,’ I added quickly, opening the door and jumping out.

  The church was dark when I slipped inside. No sign of Martindale. I thought about having a bit of a snoop around before bedding down in the little storeroom by the vestry that was now my home, but something stopped me.

  ‘Peter.’

  I turned towards the sound of his voice. He was sitting in one of the pews, the back of his head barely distinguishable from the surrounding dark.

  ‘Come and sit with me.’

  I walked over and sat down next to him.

  ‘How did things go tonight?’

  ‘Good,’ I said in a toneless voice.

  I heard him breathe in and out slowly, as if he was deciding something.

  ‘I think it’s time to share God’s plan with you. Do you think you’re ready?’

  I tried to sound calm, even though my pulse was racing.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We are going to start a war, in this green and pleasant land. A war between Christ and his enemies. A war in which there can only be one winner, and the defeated will be utterly destroyed. We will wash the streets of Jerusalem with their blood, wash them clean so they are fit for the feet of Our Lord to tread.’

  He was still looking straight ahead at the blacked-out windows and the darkened altar. I wondered what he was seeing.

  ‘And God has chosen you to strike the first blow.’

  This was it. This was what we’d been waiting for.

  I concentrated on keeping my hands still, trying not to show any signs of the adrenaline pumping through my body, waiting for him to say more.

  Come on!

  ‘And I heard a great voice coming out of the temple, saying to the seven angels, go your ways and pour out the phials of the wrath of God upon the face of the earth.’

  I nodded, as if I understood, but biblical mumbo-jumbo wasn’t what I needed at that moment. What did he want me to fucking do?

  ‘The phials of the wrath of God,’ he repeated. ‘Would you believe that they are here, right now, in this very church, beneath our feet?’

  He didn’t move his head, but I could tell he was smiling. ‘The technical term is ZX4. It’s a kind of nerve agent. Like Novichok. Have you heard of that?’

  Had I? I tossed a coin in my head. Tails. ‘Yeah. Bastard Russians.’

  He chuckled. ‘Yes!’

  I knew I should just keep quiet, like the empty vessel I was now. I just followed orders: there was no reason for me to be curious about anything. But I had to ask.

  ‘This ZX-whatever stuff – is that Russian, too?’

  This time he turned towards me as he shook his head. ‘Oh, no. ZX4 is British, made here in a dark Satanic mill called Porton Down. It’s our country’s dirtiest secret – our very own biological superweapon.’

  What? My mind was spinning. I’d never heard of ZX4, but I knew we didn’t have any biological weapons – not since we signed the Biological Weapons Convention treaty back in the Seventies.

  I grunted, as if it might as well have come from Tesco for all I cared, praying he wouldn’t be able to resist telling me more.

  ‘We should have destroyed it, of course. And officially, we did. But somehow a few ounces got kept back. For a rainy day, perhaps – or for when God saw fit to use it.’

  Was all that really possible? And if it was, how the bloody hell did Martindale get his hands on the stuff?

  ‘A miracle,’ I said solemnly, rocking gently backwards and forwards on the pew.

  ‘In a way,’ Martindale said. ‘Happily there are people in the establishment, people in the army, in the intelligence services – in the government, even – who still believe that this is a Christian country and are willing to help us reclaim it from those who want to turn it into a caliphate.’

  Willing to help . . .

  Was he saying he’d been given the ZX4 by someone on our side? Someone with access to a secret stock of the stuff at Porton Down? With the idea of using it on our own people? I was trying to think how high up that would have to go.

  Right to the top.

  46

  Ryan pushed the files across the table. Mrs Allenby looked down at them but didn’t pick them up.

  ‘You’re sure there’s nothing else there that could help us?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing that I can find,’ Ryan said with a frown. ‘I’ve cross-referenced everything – every date, every place, even just keywords.’

  ‘And they never worked together?’ Alex asked.

  Ryan shook his head. ‘They were never assigned to the same op. They went on a training course together. That’s all.’

  Mrs Allenby looked thoughtful. ‘What course?’

  Ryan looked down at the notes he’d scribbled on a legal pad. ‘It was a technical thing. Learning how to use some new audio kit. I’m surprised you weren’t on it, Alan.’

  ‘When did you say it was?’ Alan asked.

  ‘Um, let me see – September 2015.’

  ‘Oh yes. I remember. I was supposed to be tech support on that, but something came up – some problems with the radios on one of the teams, and by the time it was sorted, it was more or less finished.’

  ‘Do we know who else was on it?’ Mrs Allenby asked.

  Ryan flipped through his notes. ‘It was quite small, if I remember. Here we go: Frank Hemmings, Dana Till, Geoff Winter – all A4 people.’

  ‘Any of those names ring a bell?’ Mrs Allenby asked, looking around the table.

  Alex shrugged. ‘What sort of bell? I knew Geoff Winter a little bit. He seemed all right.’

  Mrs Allenby sighed, then looked pointedly at Ryan. ‘Well, I’m not about to dig out all of their files to see if there’s any correlation with Mr McKinley and Miss Maxwell, if that’s what you’re thinking. This was risky enough,’ she added, pulling the two manila files towards her, as if she couldn’t wait to put them back where they belonged.

  ‘There was someone else on the course, now that I remember,’ Alan said, pushing his glasses more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. ‘At least, he was on the original list of attendees. John Tenniel.’

  Ryan looked bemused. ‘You’re sure? His
name definitely wasn’t in the file.’

  Alan nodded. ‘DCI Tenniel. That’s why I remembered. I thought, what’s a detective chief inspector doing on an MI5 training course?’

  ‘Where was he from?’ Mrs Allenby asked.

  ‘National Crime Agency, if I remember. Yeah, that was it.’

  ‘Not unheard of,’ Mrs Allenby said, tapping her pen thoughtfully on the table. ‘Especially if he was involved in a major operation with a strong surveillance element. Let’s have a look at him, shall we?’

  Ryan had already started scrolling through Tenniel’s record. ‘OK, a bit of an old-fashioned thief-taker. He seems to have taken down one or two big names who the Serious Organized Crime Agency had been trying to nail for years. Commendations up the wazoo, then fast-tracked promotion until he gets the plum job at the NCA. Very impressive.’

  ‘But what’s he got to do with Craig and Claire?’ Alex asked. ‘I mean, so they’re on the same course. They have a coffee and a chat, and then he goes back to the day job. So what?’

  Mrs Allenby continued tapping her pen, then stopped abruptly. ‘Let’s scroll forward a few months – to March, or perhaps April of the following year. What’s Tenniel doing then?’

  Ryan tapped away at the keyboard for a minute. ‘OK, nothing, nothing . . . Oh, wait, here we go, April sixteenth 2016.’

  He turned his laptop around. On the screen was a grainy black-and-white shot of an industrial-looking building. A man was being led out of the front door by two policemen towards a waiting van, his hands cuffed in front of him. Armed police in Kevlar vests could be seen waiting in the wings. The man was thick-set, late fifties, early sixties, with short dark hair, prominent eyebrows and a couple of days of stubble. His jaw was set, a look of cold fury in his dark eyes.

  ‘Terry Mason,’ Alex said, nodding to herself. ‘I remember now. The last of the old-style East End gangsters – at least that’s how the tabloids liked to portray him. Didn’t he hook up with some Albanian people-smugglers?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Ryan said. ‘He repurposed a whole fleet of trucks he owned. Made millions – basically he was a slave trader. God knows how many people’s lives he ruined.’ He shook his head. ‘Evil bastard.’

  ‘And vicious, too,’ Alex said. ‘He had a run-in with some Turkish drug gang before that. He was taking a piece of the action so they could operate on his territory and then they decided they didn’t need to pay up any more.’

  ‘So he burned their restaurant down, after jamming the doors so no one could get out,’ Ryan said.

  ‘Like you say, evil bastard,’ Alex said. ‘But what’s Terry Mason got to do with anything?’

  Mrs Allenby sat back in her seat, looking at Ryan. ‘Did it say in the files how Mr McKinley and Miss Short did on the course evaluation?’

  ‘Er . . . yes. Top marks, both of them.’

  She smiled. ‘Then I have an idea what may have happened.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad someone does,’ Alex said, looking at her quizzically.

  ‘Let’s just look at it logically,’ Mrs Allenby said. ‘One piece at a time. Detective Chief Inspector Tenniel has a reputation for getting his clutches on criminals who have so far proved rather slippery. However, for most of his career he’s been a big fish in a small pond. Now he’s facing a rather stiffer challenge: Terry Mason. The Met have had Mason in their sights for years but have never been able to pull the trigger. Unless Mason makes an uncharacteristic slip, how is Tenniel going to succeed where everyone else has failed?’

  ‘He’s looking for something new – a game-changer,’ Ryan said, beginning to understand where Mrs Allenby was going.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He gets himself on an MI5 surveillance technology course and likes what he sees. If I could utilize some of this new kit, he thinks, that might just give me the edge I need. Of course, when it comes to surveillance, the police and MI5 operate under different rules, but maybe he’s found a way round that. Anyway, he gets chatting to a couple of A4 people on the course – the people he thinks are the most capable. Perhaps he thought they had other qualities, too, that made them suitable for what he had in mind. Perhaps he told them – in the strictest confidence – about the undercover operation to take Mason down. Perhaps he also told them about some of the more despicable things Mason had done – perhaps things that never made it to court. At any event, a few months later, these two A4 operatives both go on extended leave at the same time, and within a few days of their returning to duty, Terry Mason is arrested. Sometime after that he’s convicted on multiple counts of fraud, extortion, kidnapping and murder. The judge opts for the heaviest sentence possible, ensuring Mason remains in prison for the rest of his life.’

  ‘That certainly all makes sense,’ Ryan said.

  ‘OK,’ Alex said. ‘I’ll buy into all of that. But it doesn’t tell us if Claire and Craig were murdered, and if so, by who.’

  ‘If they were involved in the NCA operation, then somebody took a good deal of trouble to cover it up,’ Mrs Allenby said.

  ‘But why?’ Alex insisted.

  ‘That I don’t know,’ Mrs Allenby admitted. ‘And whatever the reason, I can’t imagine whoever did so would then think them enough of a threat to have them murdered.’

  ‘What if it’s revenge?’ Alan said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Mrs Allenby asked.

  ‘Terry Mason’s associates, gang members.’

  She shook her head. ‘The ones that didn’t go down with him, who slipped through the net – you’d expect them to keep a low profile, to try not to attract attention. Would it be in their interests to start murdering people?’

  ‘Family, then.’

  Mrs Allenby looked thoughtful. ‘There was a son, I remember. And the wife, of course.’

  ‘Stephanie,’ Ryan said, looking at his screen. ‘She looks like a piece of work.’

  ‘They tried to get both of them on conspiracy charges, I think, but there wasn’t enough evidence.’

  ‘Or the evidence was never admissible in court,’ Alex said.

  ‘Which rather supports our theory,’ Mrs Allenby said.

  Alex pulled on a strand of hair and started twisting it. ‘So let’s say it’s the son or the mother, or the two of them together. They’re out to get whoever put Mason behind bars. How would they know about Craig and Claire’s involvement?’

  ‘That is a mystery,’ Mrs Allenby admitted with a frown.

  ‘How many people would have known?’ Ryan asked.

  Mrs Allenby looked at him. ‘On the police side, probably only Tenniel. There would be no reason to tell the rest of his team the identities of their new colleagues. And then on our side, someone must have signed off on their temporary assignment, of course.’

  ‘Should we take a look at Tenniel, then?’ Alex asked.

  ‘In an ideal world,’ Mrs Allenby said. ‘But in case you’re forgetting, at this precise moment, we have a terror attack to stop.’

  47

  I didn’t have a shred of doubt that Martindale was deadly serious. Now that I’d learned a little bit about the crusades, I realized that the idea of killing hundreds, if not thousands of people in the most brutal and bloody way possible just because they believed in a different God used to be considered quite normal. So maybe if you spent years immersed in that bloody history, it became normal for you too. Perhaps that had been Martindale’s own kind of brainwashing experience. So the question wasn’t whether he was willing to expose untold numbers of innocent people to a deadly nerve agent, but whether he actually had the means to do it. The more I thought about it, the more I reckoned his story of an establishment plot to get rid of the country’s Muslim population with some leftover stocks of a banned biological weapon was a load of bollocks. Not that there weren’t probably plenty of high court judges and retired colonels who’d like nothing better than to turn the clock back so far it told the time in Latin, but would they really be able to get their hands on a load of ZX4? If the government really did hold bac
k some stock of the stuff, would anyone really be foolish enough to hand it over to someone like Martindale, a religious maniac with at least a couple of screws fairly obviously loose?

  There was only one way to find out. Martindale had said the phials were literally under our feet. So they were somewhere in the maze of tunnels where my brain had just spent a few days in the tumble dryer. If I was honest, I fancied going back down there about as much as I did jumping into an open grave, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew it was what I had to do.

  Martindale was in and out of the church at all sorts of odd hours, so I never knew when he was going to pop up. Plus I still had a feeling I couldn’t shake that he could see inside my head when he wanted. I knew if I wasn’t careful, I was going to turn into one of those sad fucks who line their hats with tinfoil to block the CIA’s mind-control beams. But then, you don’t know what mind control is until some bastard has had a go doing it to you. You couldn’t blame people for taking precautions. The point was, I wasn’t going to take a chance that Martindale might turn up just as I was jemmying open the door behind the bookshelf. I needed to know I had a decent window.

  Tonight, though, I knew he’d gone out with John in the van. They’d do the soup kitchen thing, then trawl around known homeless spots for another couple of hours ministering to the poor and fucked-up. I didn’t know where the other two were, but if they did make an appearance, I reckoned I could convince them whatever it looked like I was doing, it was God’s will. They’d be so full of the fear of the Almighty, I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be hard to scare the poor bastards.

  That left me with two problems: how to unlock the padlocks and how to see what the fuck I was doing. Martindale took his big bunch of keys with him wherever he went, but I reckoned I could pick the locks if I could find something the right shape. It was a long shot, but two of the old dears who came to Martindale’s services always had their hair up and I reckoned they must be full of pins. It took me a while, but after crawling around on my hands and knees between the pews for an hour until my knees were rubbed raw, I eventually found one. Martindale never left the hurricane lamp in the church – too much of a fire risk with all these brainless zombies around, maybe – but that was less of a problem. There was a box of matches for lighting votive candles which I’d pocketed earlier. Luckily, there were enough in the box that he hopefully wouldn’t notice a few missing.