by Nick Oldham
He was sitting in a cafe on the A580 East Lancs Road, south of Leigh, near to Junction 23 of the M6. It was an establishment catering almost exclusively for long-distance lorry drivers. There must have been over sixty heavy goods vehicles outside in the huge lorry park, and the cafe itself was bubbling with the last dregs of the lunchtime trade. Although he was not certain, Henry suspected that Jacky Lee had some financial interest in the place. Even if he hadn’t, it was an ideal place to do business, particularly involving large shipments of stolen goods, because it was one of those busy, stop-start places where everyone and everything is transient.
Henry cut into a thick, burned sausage and placed a segment of it in his mouth. It was like biting into a piece of cinder. He nearly spat it out. Instead he washed it down with a mouthful of tea from the cracked mug. It was two in the afternoon. Henry was expecting to meet his contact here soon, after which he was supposed to call Jacky and say, ‘Game on.’
At quarter past, a Mercedes 7.5 ton Rigid Box Van pulled off the main road and stopped in a line of HGVs. Henry watched the driver hop down from the cab and get into a laughing conversation with a couple of other good buddies as he walked towards and into the cafe. Henry smiled inside, glad to see his old friend Terry Briggs. Still on the National Crime Squad after seven or eight years, having been an undercover cop on and off for about half that time. It had been the combination of Terry and Henry that had put Jacky Lee on the path to prison six years before.
Henry watched Terry and thought he was good, bloody good. The lorry driver legend was one of Terry’s undercover roles and he played it like a natural. If anyone is playing a role, they have to be at ease with it and Terry had trained as an HGV driver before joining the cops, but had never actually worked as one. When the chance of going U/C as a trucker presented itself, he jumped at it. But there is far more to being a lorry driver than simply holding a licence. There is the culture, the camaraderie, knowing things about places and people; there are the mannerisms, they way you fit in; there is the language and the accompanying body language, the unwritten dress codes. Terry had them all off by heart, slipped easily into the persona, and no one could begin to tell that out of the role he was a shy, retiring guy, quiet and studious.
Terry bought himself a Trucker’s Dinner - plate meat pie, chips, peas, thick gravy, three rounds of bread and butter and a mug brim-full of tea. He came across to Henry’s table and sat down opposite.
‘Frank,’ Terry nodded.
‘Eric, how are you, old mate?’ Henry reached across and shook Eric Barnes by the hand. They never, ever called each other by their real names, even when they were a hundred per cent certain they were not being overheard. To do that was a dangerous game. One slip could easily mean at best blown cover, at worst. . . Both men always stayed deeply in role.
‘I’m good.’
‘You got it?’ Henry went straight to the point.
Terry nodded.
Henry stood up, reaching for his mobile which was clipped to the belt of his jeans. He left the cafe and made a call.
Once again, Henry was feeling uncomfortable and vulnerable - two feelings which often sit alongside the term ‘undercover’. The result of the ‘Game on’ phone call he’d made to Jacky Lee was that, forty minutes later he was sitting in the Jaguar in a lay-by a couple of miles east of the transport cafe, tapping the steering wheel nervously with his fingertips.
The tinted-window BMW which had tailed him the other night around Manchester drew in behind. Henry watched it through the rearview mirror. It looked a sleek and sinister car, all black. There was a blast from the horn. Henry’s nostrils flared. He got out of the XJS and walked slowly back towards the BMW. A rear window opened and Jacky Lee shoved his face towards Henry.
‘What’s going on?’ Henry, now in role as Frank Jagger, wanted to know. He placed both hands on the shiny roof of the car and leaned in. The front doors opened and Lee’s two minders slid out. They stood behind Henry, one on either side of him. He looked up and eyed them with disdain. Real fear, however, gripped his balls; he could feel his testicle sac contracting in his underpants.
‘I’m still a nervous man, almost paranoid actually,’ Lee explained. ‘And I’ve made a solemn vow never to trust anyone again.’
‘I thought you said you’d eliminated the problem,’ Henry responded. He could feel the urge to run coming over him.
Lee raised his eyebrows. ‘I mean, just how the fuck do I really know you’re not a cop, Frank?’
Henry snorted a short laugh. ‘You don’t.’ He looked seriously at Lee, eye to eye. ‘Except I’m not and you fucking know I’m not.’
‘Maybe.’
‘No maybe about it.’ Henry sensed, rather than saw, Lee’s two men take a step closer to him.
‘You won’t mind if these two guys search you for a wire, will you?’
One of them acted too quickly placing a hand on Henry’s elbow. Henry shrugged him off violently, eyed him savagely and spun back to Lee. On the periphery of his vision, he saw the other guy’s right hand slide under his jacket. ‘What is this shit?’ Henry demanded.
‘Common sense, Frank. Now, let’s just get this over with, then we can do business. Just fuckin’ humour me, OK?’
Henry moved slowly away from the car and raised his arms, hands outstretched like he was on a cross. The two men, who Henry knew to be called Gary Thompson and Gunk Elphick, moved in and started to pat him down.
‘You cut yourself shaving?’ he asked Gunk, noticing a Band-Aid on his ear. Gunk smiled wickedly at him.
Henry’s face became impassive as the four hands worked quickly around his body. Underneath the exterior he was struggling to prevent a bowel movement, even though he was pretty certain they would not find the wire. Because of his previous conversation with Lee, where Lee had mentioned mulling over who had blabbed on him, Henry had thought it prudent to reposition the wire on his person, which he did - literally. Normally it was taped to the small of his back. Today it was in his underpants with his cock resting alongside it.
The two men did a reasonably systematic search, quartering him. Henry hoped that human nature would prevent them from doing anything more than a light cursory pat down around his privates and arse. And they were inexperienced searchers and probably didn’t know exactly what they were looking for. He was confident because he knew that police officers who searched prisoners day in, day out, still miss things, sometimes even the size of a hammer.
‘He’s clean.’ The men stood back.
‘And now,’ Henry said, face thunderous, ‘what about you, Jacky? All those years in jail - how the hell do I know you haven’t turned? You might be setting me up, for all I know. This could simply be bluffing shite.’
‘Want to search me?’
‘Too right.’
‘Be my guest.’ Lee clambered out of the BMW He opened his arms wide to Henry who swiftly ran his hands around Lee’s outer clothing, more as a gesture than anything. He did find one thing - the butt of a revolver pushed down the rear of Lee’s waistband.
Henry moved away.
‘OK, Frank?’
Henry nodded.
‘Then let’s get down to business and forget this crap. I feel good about today.’
After two hours of constant travelling averaging sixty miles an hour, the security van was close to its destination. Just to the north of Stafford, Colin Hodge, the driver, exited the motorway. Within minutes of leaving the junction, he was driving on to a fairly new industrial estate. Eventually he stopped outside the gates of a very large, secure-looking compound. The notice board gave the name of the company as ‘Secure-a-Waste’, followed by a phone number and e-mail address. There was nothing to suggest the company specialised in the disposal of all types of security waste from paper to chemicals. In this particular compound they had a huge incinerator which completely destroyed anything made of paper. It was not recycled, simply sent into the sky as smoke and into the earth as fertiliser. As the company held the contract w
ith the Royal Mint, it was here they burned used, tattered, torn and otherwise worn-out banknotes of the realm.
Hodge honked his horn a couple of times. A massive sliding gate, twenty feet high, topped with razor wire, and fifteen feet across, grated slowly open. He drove in and pulled up with the radiator grille nose up to a second similar gate. The first gate closed behind them, sealing the van in a sterile, mesh-roofed compound.
It was very much like entering a prison.
Hodge’s two colleagues had to disembark here and go to wait in a secure office. Only the driver and the security guard inside the back of the van were allowed through to the next stage of the process.
Once the two were behind a locked door and the relevant paperwork had been duly signed, the inner gate opened. Hodge drove the van into the complex which basically consisted of a road which ringed a large, low, brick-built building; on its roof, in one corner, was a tall, wide chimney.
Hodge reversed the van up to a roller door which rattled open. Once it was open at its full height, he manoeuvred the van back into the bay beyond. The roller door closed. For the second time the vehicle was in a secure area. He switched off the engine.
This was the only time other people seemed to enter the equation.
Two men in overalls, wearing industrial face masks and driving a forklift truck each, came out from behind a steel door and approached the van. Hodge watched and noted their movements through his wing mirrors.
Hodge’s colleague in the rear exchanged passwords, then opened the rear door of the van from inside and began to pass out the metal boxes which contained the money collected that day. The men in overalls stacked them high on the forklifts until they were all piled up.
Hodge’s insides flipped at the thought of all that money burning.
The back door was closed and one of the men slapped the side of the van. Hodge fired up the engine. In his mirrors he watched the men drive their nippy vehicles through the steel door, out of reach.
The roller door opened.
Hodge collected all his mates from the entrance and began his journey back up North. He glanced across at Secure-a-Waste. Already black smoke was billowing out of the chimney. Hodge winced painfully.
Henry Christie, Terry Briggs and Jacky Lee sauntered across the lorry park towards the transport cafe. They had inspected the contents in the rear of Terry’s box van. Jacky was over the moon by what he had seen - lots and lots of stolen whisky. He and Frank Jagger were back in business - a carbon copy of their first-ever transaction. He believed the whisky was from a blagging at a cash-and-carry warehouse somewhere down South.
At £4.00 a bottle, Lee was not bothered where they came from, but for the purposes of Henry Christie’s scenario, Lee needed to think they were stolen.
‘Forty grand ... that’s a lot of money,’ Lee was moaning, even though he would make treble that amount within a couple of months as the whisky filtered through his pubs and clubs.
‘No, it’s not,’ Henry argued. ‘It’s bloody cheap and you know it. I’m the one on tight margins,’ he bleated. ‘So many fucking people to pay down the line, I’ll be lucky to get fifty pence a bottle. Next time the price goes up, Jacky.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, my fucking heart bleeds, you whingeing twat.’ He slapped Henry on the back. ‘But business is business and it feels good to be doing it with you again.’
They filed into the transport cafe, past Gary Thompson, who squirmed out of the door, nodding at his boss. ‘Just had a piss, boss,’ he explained for no reason. He trotted back to the BMW which was parked at the front of the cafe with Gunk lounging by it. The cafe was less busy now, but still doing a good trade. Henry, Terry and Lee sat at an empty table in a booth, having ordered three teas.
‘Now then, payment,’ Lee began. ‘Where and when?’
‘As we agreed,’ Henry said firmly. ‘All on delivery, here and now, otherwise the lorry goes. I’ve got at least three others sniffing around, cash in hand.’
‘OK, fair enough,’ Lee conceded, holding up his hands in surrender.
The tea arrived, steaming and brown.
Lee inspected his and said, ‘Think I need a piss, guys. Back in a minute.’ He headed for the gents, his back watched by the two detectives. Henry quickly ran his fingers on the underside of the table to check for any hidden mikes and broke their rule when he quickly whispered, ‘He’s got a gun.’ Terry merely nodded. They reverted to role and picked up their drinks.
‘Shit, that’s hot!’ Henry spluttered as the tea burned the top of his mouth.
His eyes drifted to the window and out to Lee’s BMW The two minders leaned against it, smoking, Thompson talking on a mobile phone. The smaller, stockier one, Gunk, was fingering his plastered ear. He looked to be in pain. Both men looked spooked and nervous.
‘Them too, I think,’ Henry said without moving his lips. Again Terry nodded.
The one on the phone finished his chat and said something quickly to the other, then thumbed an urgent gesture towards a car which had driven on to the lorry park and was heading for the rear of the cafe.
The two minders tensed up and exchanged a few words. Thompson threw down his cigarette and crushed it out, yanked open the driver’s door of the BMW and dropped into the seat. Gunk just threw his fag to one side and scurried around the car, skidding in the gravel, and dived into the front passenger seat.
‘You see what I see?’ Terry said laconically. He had been observing the antics of the bodyguards too.
‘I think we’re being set up here,’ Henry said, standing up quickly, knocking his boiling tea over.
‘I want you to make this a very public execution,’ the Russian’s masters had told him. Being a former soldier and then a member of the world’s most ruthless intelligence agency, the KGB, he always carried out orders as instructed, even if he felt they were flawed. He would really have preferred to do something more subtle and classy - but if public was how they wanted it, public it would be.
Since the meeting in the hotel in Fleetwood, he had spent the next couple of nights in a Travelodge on the outskirts of Manchester, in the guise of a travelling salesmen. He was continually in touch, via the mobile, with Thompson, keeping abreast of the target’s present whereabouts and future plans. When he was told that the target had arranged business at a transport cafe, he was interested. Without having visited the place, it seemed a good location for a hit - next to a fast main road, close to a motorway junction, with a choice of direction depending on the circumstances prevailing at the time.
The Russian then reconnoitred the location, grabbing a cup of tea and using the toilets. Although he remained there a short time only, his experienced eyes - which had weighed up dozens of prospective assassination sites before - recorded everything and came to a conclusion: This would be the place where Jacky Lee would die.
At a second quick meeting with Thompson, who came alone this time, the Russian outlined his requirements and questioned Thompson deeply about the nature of the business Lee would be conducting at the cafe. Who was he meeting? Was he likely to be armed? Could he possibly constitute a threat?
When everything was answered to his satisfaction, he nodded.
It was a goer.
The Russian was assured that Johnny Snowden was the best getaway driver in the North-West, a big claim for a twenty-year-old. He had, he was told, six armed robberies to his credit and a multitude of other less serious crimes. He had outrun the cops on the four occasions he’d been pursued and was very much in demand for jobs. The Russian accepted the accolades, but Snowden’s past history did not interest him. Nor did any small talk, so when the youngster started chatting, he said, ‘Shut up. This is real business. Do your job, do it well and your reputation will be sealed for ever.’
Snowden closed his mouth.
‘Cock up, however, and you’ll be dead,’ the Russian added in a friendly way.
They waited for the call in a country lane a short distance away from the cafe.
When
it came, the Russian simply said, ‘Go,’ and pulled on his favourite garment - his stocking mask. Nothing, he believed, worked as well when it came to intimidation.
Snowden drove the Ford Mondeo, stolen, on false plates, down on to the A580 and into the lorry park adjoining the transport cafe, swinging wide to park behind the cafe.
The Russian saw Thompson and Elphick scrambling into their car and could not prevent a lip curl at the thought of his masters operating with such rank amateurs.
Then they were at the rear of the cafe. The Russian picked up the American Arms Spectre from the footwell and got casually out of the car. He was faced with two doors. The one on the right led directly into the kitchen; the one on the left was a fire door opening on to a short corridor off which the toilets were located, but which led into the cafe itself.
If Thompson had done his job right, this latter door should be unlocked.
It was.
‘Can’t say I’m a happy Teddy here,’ was Terry’s understated response to the situation. He stood up a fraction more slowly than Henry.
They moved away from the table and stopped in their tracks at the sight of Jacky Lee emerging unconcerned from the toilet corridor. He was zipping up with a little jump and adjusting himself shamelessly. He brushed the front of his trousers where there was a little damp patch. Then he looked up out of the cafe door - which was all windows and a wooden frame - to see his BMW careering away across the lorry park.