‘Then we’ll all burn together,’ said Harris. He flicked the lighter once and it sparked but not enough to set it aflame. ‘I’m serious, get the hell away.’
‘Shall I put him down, Sarge?’ asked the officer with the taser.
‘You really don’t want to be pulling that trigger,’ said Taylor.
The officer scowled and aimed the taser at Taylor’s chest. ‘You keep quiet,’ he shouted.
‘I’m covered in petrol, too,’ said Taylor quietly. He slowly raised his hands again. ‘I’m just saying, there’s no need for anyone to get hurt here. Least of all, me.’
‘Get the hell away from us now or we’re all going up in flames!’ shouted Harris.
‘Put down the lighter,’ said the sergeant.
‘You put down the gun!’ shouted Harris. He flicked the lighter again and it sparked.
‘Stuart, mate, this isn’t helping anyone,’ said Taylor.
‘I’m not going back to prison!’ shouted Harris.
‘They’re not going to let you walk away,’ said Taylor. ‘They’ve got guns. You’ve got a lighter.’
‘I’ve got fire, that’s what I’ve got,’ said Harris. He waved the lighter around. ‘I’m serious, you move back now or we’re all going up in flames.’
Weaver made a dash for the gate, reached the pavement and began running full pelt away from the house. The cops turned their heads to watch him go but quickly turned their attention back to Harris.
Connolly swung the can and a plume of petrol splattered over the pavement near the sergeant. ‘Come on, then, take a shot and we’ll all burn!’ he said. Weaver’s rapid footfalls faded into the distance.
‘Drop the can!’ shouted the sergeant.
Connolly laughed and tossed the can in the air. Petrol sprayed out of the spout as the can spun towards the policemen. The officers scattered.
‘Let them have it, Stuart!’ shouted Connolly.
Harris roared and flicked the Zippo. A flame flickered and Harris tossed the lighter at the can, which had landed at the sergeant’s feet. The petrol vapour ignited in a loud whoosh and the policeman disappeared in a fiery orange ball.
The sergeant dropped to the ground, screaming, and began rolling over to extinguish the flames.
McDermid started to run but the cop behind him was too quick and he kicked McDermid’s feet out from underneath him, then planted his foot in the middle of McDermid’s back.
Connolly looked around, his mouth open in shock. The cop with his foot on McDermid’s back pointed his gun at Connolly. ‘I will fucking shoot you!’ he screamed, and Connolly raised his arms.
A sheet of flame rippled back from the pavement towards Harris and then his trousers caught fire. He flailed around, screaming as the flames spread up to his coat.
‘Get down on the ground!’ shouted Taylor, but Harris either couldn’t hear him or was too panicked to react. Taylor cursed and dashed through the flames, barrelling into the burning man and pushing him away from the flaming petrol. Harris was screaming and flapping his arms around, which only made his clothes burn more fiercely. Taylor kicked the man’s legs from underneath him and Harris hit the ground hard. Taylor immediately rolled him over, beating the flaming jeans with his bare hands.
Harris carried on rolling until he hit the wall and lay still. Most of the flames had gone out but the coat was still smouldering.
Taylor stood up, his chest heaving from the exertion. As he turned to face the road, a small red dot danced on his chest. He opened his mouth to shout but before he had even drawn air into his lungs the barbs of a taser impaled themselves in his shirt. He just had time to see the two wires trailing through the air to the yellow taser in the hands of the armed policeman, but then he was hit by fifty thousand volts and his whole body went into spasm.
‘Spider? Spider, can you hear me?’ Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd groaned. He wanted to open his eyes but somehow his brain had forgotten how to do pretty much anything. He couldn’t feel his arms or his legs; in fact the only sensation he had was a burning pain in his chest. ‘Spider, come on, take deep breaths, you’ll be just fine.’
Shepherd took a deep breath but there was a stabbing pain in his chest and he went back to tidal breathing. He tried wriggling his toes but there was no feeling at all below his waist.
Something soft patted him on the cheek and he caught a half-remembered fragrance. ‘Charlie?’
He heard a laugh, and then felt a pat on his shoulder. ‘Thank God for that,’ said Charlotte Button. ‘I thought they’d killed you.’
Shepherd’s eyelids flickered open. ‘I can’t believe they shot me,’ he said, his voice a strained croak. He was lying on a stretcher in an ambulance. The doors were shut. The engine was running, he could feel the vibration through his shoulders.
‘You were tasered,’ said Button. ‘That’s not quite the same as being shot.’
Shepherd forced a smile. ‘Suddenly you’re an expert on being shot?’ he said. ‘Trust me, I’ve been shot and I’ve been tasered and they both hurt like hell.’ He took a deep breath. ‘The house is OK, right? It didn’t go up?’
‘We had the fire brigade on stand-by by and they were in with extinguishers as soon as the police had finished. But the family were never in any danger. As soon as I got your text I phoned Mr Chaudhry and got him to get his family out.’
‘And the cop who caught fire, he’s OK?’
‘Their overalls are fire retardant,’ said Button. ‘He’s fine. Just a bit shaken.’
‘Would have been nice if there had been enough cops to have put the lid on the situation right away,’ said Shepherd. ‘It got completely out of control because there weren’t enough of them to maintain control, even with guns.’
‘I got straight on to the Met as soon as I got your text but there have been gang shootings in Brixton and Harlesden tonight so armed response vehicles are in short supply.’
‘I saw one,’ said Shepherd. ‘Three guys. Who the hell thought three guys would be enough? There were five of us.’
‘That was all we could get,’ said Button. She looked at her watch. ‘You sent the text less than half an hour ago,’ she said.
‘Best I could do,’ said Shepherd. ‘Weaver took our phones. When I went around to pick up McDermid I managed to use his mobile. I had just enough time to send you a text.’
‘I’m glad you did,’ said Button. ‘Without your warning, Mr Chaudhry and his family would probably have died.’
Shepherd groaned. He could feel his feet again and he wriggled his toes inside his boots.
‘Are you OK?’
‘I’ve just been hit with fifty thousand volts after putting out a fire with my bare hands, so no, I’m not OK.’
‘Your hands are fine,’ she said. ‘A bit singed, but no major burning. Which is more than can be said for Harris. He’s going to be hurting for a few weeks and he’s got months of skin grafts ahead of him. But you saved his life.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m sure he’ll be grateful. What about Weaver?’
‘An ARV ran into him at the end of the road,’ said Button. ‘Literally. He ended up on the bonnet.’
‘Better late than never,’ said Shepherd. He tried to sit up and Button helped him. ‘He bought the petrol a week ago, some service station on the M1. They should have CCTV footage.’ He touched his chest and winced. ‘That bloody hurts.’
‘Well, don’t touch it,’ admonished Button. ‘And they say it won’t hurt for long and there’ll be no lasting effects.’
‘I presume by “they” you mean the bastards who shot me,’ said Shepherd. He winced again. ‘Oh, and Weaver and Harris were behind that arson attack on the Pakistani family in Southall. Connolly knows what’s going on and he’ll roll over, guaranteed. He’s as weak as dishwater.’
‘That’s something,’ said Button. ‘Though frankly this is all a bit of a disappointment. The whole point of penetrating Weaver’s nasty little gang was to get close to his fascist German contacts in Frankfurt. They’re the ones planning th
e real atrocities. Weaver is just small time.’
‘He was planning on killing a whole family tonight,’ said Shepherd.
‘I’m not saying we didn’t do the right thing in stopping him,’ said Button. ‘But there were bigger fish to fry and now we’re going to have to find another way of catching them.’ She looked at her watch, a sleek Cartier on a blue leather strap. ‘We’ll stay in here until the cops have finished,’ she said. ‘Might as well maintain your cover. The fact you were tasered means Weaver and his pals won’t ever think that you were an inside man. You might even be able to use the Andy Taylor legend again down the line.’ She nodded thoughtfully. ‘If we play it right, we might be able to use it to our advantage. Use it as a badge of honour with the Germans.’
Shepherd took a slow, deep breath. His chest wasn’t burning as much and the feeling had almost returned to his fingers and toes. ‘I still can’t believe they tasered me with all that petrol around,’ he said.
‘It was either that or a bullet,’ said Button. ‘Be grateful for small mercies. They saw you helping Harris and then you moved towards them.’
‘I was unarmed, Charlie. And I was just about to put my hands up.’ He ran his hands through his hair. ‘Still, you’re right. It could have been worse.’ He winced as a sudden pain lanced through his chest, just below his heart. He took slow shallow breaths, panting like a dog.
‘Are you OK, Spider?’ asked Button, putting a hand on his shoulder.
‘I just need a shower,’ he said. ‘I feel dirty.’
‘Yeah, they were a nasty bunch,’ said Button. ‘But they’re off the streets now and they’ll be going away for a long, long time. Job well done, seriously. Bit scrappy at the end, I can’t argue with that, but you saved lives and put the bad guys away. There aren’t many men who could have done what you did tonight.’
Shepherd forced a smile, acknowledging the compliment. ‘I don’t understand how they can set fire to a house with kids and babies inside,’ said Shepherd. ‘Men hating men, OK, I get that, but how can you hate a baby?’
‘There’s no logic to what they do,’ said Button. ‘All we can do is try to stop it from happening.’
‘Yeah, well, we stopped it tonight but they’ve burnt other families in the past,’ said Shepherd. ‘And what’s crazy is that most of them are fathers themselves. Weaver’s got three kids, McDermid’s wife gave birth a month ago and Connolly’s got two daughters with one on the way.’ He shook his head. ‘I just don’t get it.’
‘There’s no point in looking for an explanation,’ said Button. ‘They’re just racist haters, with no rhyme or reason.’
‘People aren’t born hating,’ said Shepherd. ‘Kids of all races and colours play happily together when they’re toddlers. They have to be taught how to hate.’ He looked at his tattooed knuckles and grimaced. ‘I can’t wait to get these off,’ he said.
‘One laser treatment will do it,’ said Button. ‘Two at the most.’
‘I’ve never liked tattoos,’ said Shepherd. He turned his hands over and examined the reddened palms. They were greasy and he realised that the paramedics must have rubbed some ointment over the burns. Button was right, the damage was only superficial.
‘They were camouflage, and they worked,’ said Button.
‘I want them off tomorrow, first thing,’ said Shepherd.
‘No problem. Go home. Have that shower. I’ll call you first thing and I’ll have a laser clinic fixed up. And take a few days off, you’ve earned it.’
Yuri Buryakov stifled a cavernous yawn and glanced down at his watch, a Patek Philippe Tourbillon that had cost him over a million dollars. The conference had been going on for over eight hours now, with only a one-hour recess for lunch providing any relief. He had sat through a succession of speakers, listening to the simultaneous translation in his earpiece, but all he had heard was one piece of bluster or special pleading after another, one more reason why Russia should let the West have its gas, coal and oil for nothing.
He allowed his gaze to wander for what seemed like the thousandth time that day. He knew, because his German hosts had told him so over and over again until he could almost have recited it in his sleep, that the Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam was a rococo masterpiece built by Frederick the Great and rivalling Versailles for its opulence and extravagance, if not its size, but all that ornate plasterwork, marble, silver and gold was like too much rich food to him and left him feeling just as queasy. There was a certain irony that this pleasure palace, created by Frederick as a place to escape the burdens of state – its very name, Sanssouci, meant ‘without care’ – should now be playing host to a collection of politicians, officials, functionaries and flunkies, who could not have been less carefree, nor more dull and dour, if they’d tried.
The German Chancellor was the host of this international conference, called to discuss the future security of power supplies for the West. The US Secretary of State, the female head of the CIA, the British Foreign Secretary and the head of MI6, and the leaders or foreign secretaries and spy chiefs of all the EC and NATO countries, had been wrangling all day with the delegation from the major oil, gas, coal and electricity producers of Russia and half a dozen other states of the old Soviet bloc. Buryakov had no interest in spending any more time listening to the turgid speeches and debates, nor in gazing at the lavishly gilded interiors and the immaculate terraced gardens, ornamental fountains and sweeping vistas outside. Culture of all kinds – even the Bolshoi – left him cold. It had been a long day and he just wanted to get back to his hotel on Kurfurstendamm – the Knightsbridge of Berlin – and find some more congenial company than politicians, diplomats and bureaucrats. He would eat some oysters and caviar, drink some ice-cold schnapps or vodka, and then, if the mood was on him, have his bodyguards bring a whore to his suite.
He left the selection to his bodyguards; they knew his taste in women – stick thin, very young and almost androgynous blondes – and he took his pleasures with them the way he took his business opportunities, with a single-minded, ruthless self-interest, indifferent to who he might hurt in the process. If the whores were sometimes a little bruised or bloody after their encounters with him, then a tip of a couple of hundred dollars more would usually stifle their complaints, and if not, well, they were only whores after all, and he was a billionaire, an oligarch, one of the richest men on the planet. His money, his influence and, if necessary, his lawyers could make almost any problem go away.
The sound of a fresh voice, as irritating to him as the whine of a mosquito, intruded on his thoughts. The ‘Hausfrau’, as he called her – the German Chancellor – had risen to her feet and was now bringing the proceedings to a close for the day but, to her visible frustration, the meeting was breaking up without having reached any significant agreement on a way forward.
Buryakov listened with mounting irritation as the Hausfrau repeated her earlier demands for guaranteed power supplies to the West. Buryakov knew that by the West she mean Germany, as Germany had just pulled the plug on their nuclear power programme and needed to replace that power from somewhere. She ended her address with a call for further talks between the officials – ‘This evening, and all night if necessary,’ she said, rapping the edge of the podium with her knuckles for added emphasis – in order to conclude some form of compromise agreement that could then be announced to the waiting media before the conference broke up at noon the following day.
Despite his irritation with her, Buryakov smiled to himself. The Hausfrau was desperate for something she could sell to her electorate as a success, but making the German voters happy with their Chancellor was neither in his own commercial interest, nor that of the Russian government. If she wanted an agreement, there would be a heavy price to pay for it.
All through the Cold War, the West had lectured the Soviet Union on the merits of the capitalist system and they had treated the fall of the Berlin Wall as its ultimate triumph. They could hardly complain now, he thought, if their former adversary had lea
rned the lesson so well that it was now using the capitalist system to its own considerable advantage. His smile broadened. He would let the Hausfrau and her allies fret and sweat into the small hours as they tried to find some common ground, while he enjoyed an untroubled night, and in the morning he would see what price he could make her pay for the piece of paper she would wave before the television cameras at the end of the conference.
As the meeting broke up, he pushed back his chair and began making his slow way out of the conference room. As he emerged, his bodyguard team leader, who had been waiting outside the room with the other heads of security while their principals argued inside, took his place alongside him. They made their way through the crowds filling the cavernous foyer of the palace. The rest of his security team had been required to wait outside the building, stamping their feet in the cold for hours.
There was semi-organised chaos inside and outside the palace, with everyone milling about in the foyer, waiting for word that their own limousines had reached the entrance before venturing outside, while the security personnel outside tried to bring some order to the logjam of vehicles. Inevitably the politicians whose vehicles were first in the queue would have paused on their way out for a final discussion with an ally or foe, and the other cars would be blocked, unable to move.
The Cold War was long over, but the tensions between East and West were still there, and Buryakov’s lip curled as he stared out of the great windows at the queue of luxury cars and limousines. All of them – Mercedes, BMWs and even the Rolls-Royces – made by German companies. The thought of that flagship British brand being bought from under their arrogant noses only briefly lightened Buryakov’s mood and his frown deepened as he saw the Hausfrau standing in the doorway of the conference room, still arguing her case with another Russian oligarch. He was a close friend and ally of Buryakov’s and he knew that he shared Buryakov’s contempt for the German politician.
The Germans were not to be trusted, Buryakov knew. Not after two world wars. His own father had taught him that. He could remember many years ago sitting on a threadbare sofa with father in front of a black and white television set watching what passed for the news in Soviet Russia. ‘When a Russian stranglehold is on their throat, the Germans will roll over and beg, but they will never stop looking for a chance to put their own foot on the throat of the Russian bear instead,’ his father had growled, grabbing young Yuri by the scruff of the neck and shaking him to make his point. ‘If we allow them to, they will make use of our natural resources to make their own economy even more powerful, and then one day, when they are ready, the German armies will once more roll eastwards to attack Mother Russia yet again.’
Spider Shepherd 10 - True Colours Page 3