by Cain, Tom
There were no introductions, and there was no social chit-chat. Just a voice that said, ‘You got everything sorted for tonight, yeah? Eight-fifteen, Netherton Street, SW4. Now remember: what we want is maximum damage. They can loot the shops, rip the shit out of the curry house and the Chinky takeaway, take all the money and gold from the cash converters, all that good stuff. But we’re not looking for bodies all over the place. GBH yes, murders, no. Capeesh?’
‘Yes,’ said Bakunin with an oddly clipped, middle-class accent.
‘And remember, tell your people that pub’s off-limits. No one goes near it.’
‘Already done it. How much time have we got before the police arrive?’
‘Plenty. They’ll all be at that rally down the O2 trying to keep order.’
‘How about media coverage?’
‘Same thing: all at the O2 as well. Just make your own video. Stick it on YouTube. Have someone tweeting live as you go in. That’ll get us all the attention we need.’
‘Right, yeah, we need to break the hegemony of state-controlled media and corporate mind-control. This is a much more authentic way of communicating to the masses.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Bakunin. Save us the political lecture. Just go and fuck some stuff up.’
Well, he was always happy to do that. In that respect, nothing had changed since the boyhood days when he’d still been called Donald Blantyre, and grown up in Tunbridge Wells, acquiring an impressive set of O- and A-Levels at Tunbridge Wells Grammar School for Boys, and a First in English literature at King’s College, Cambridge.
It was at that august, yet self-consciously radical seat of learning that the eighteen-year-old Blantyre first found an ideological voice with which to express the vast, poisonous well of indiscriminate fury that had lived within his apparently perfectly placid exterior for as long as he could remember. To his Tory-voting parents’ horrified surprise he’d returned from his first term at university in December 1978 with his hair dyed jet black and sprayed into short, scruffy spikes. He had, he informed them with a defiant snarl that begged for an argument, changed his name to Bakunin and joined the Socialist Workers’ Party, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and an anarcho-punk band called The Spartacist League. The Blantyres told one another that this was just a passing phase. They were wrong.
After leaving Cambridge Bakunin went into teaching, but unlike most members of his profession his ambition was not to give his pupils the best and most enriching education; quite the reverse, in fact. He wanted to ensure that they learned as little as possible. His aim – one shared by a small, but influential hard core of extremists – was to create an embittered underclass, whose members would be lacking in skills, motivation or self-discipline. They would be shut out of the labour market and bitterly aware that they had no hope and no future. This would fill them with hatred for anyone better off than themselves, and make them ripe for recruitment as the foot soldiers of the revolution.
In the past few years he had abandoned his teaching career for a life of full-time political agitation, and as the fabric of law and order had begun first to fray, then fall to shreds, Donny Bakunin had become a sort of twenty-first-century Fagin. His gangs of urchins were not chirpy Artful Dodgers and innocent Oliver Twists. They were precisely the kind of young men he had always intended to recruit: functionally illiterate and innumerate, unqualified for any well-paid job but greedy for the gaudiest designer brands, and only too happy to seize by force that which they could never hope to earn by hard work. They came from every one of the myriad ethnic groups of South London, their perennial hostilities temporarily set aside in favour of a joint assault on society. And when the calls went out from Bakunin’s flat to others just like it on a dozen nearby estates, the gangs began to gather and an army of the night was formed.
9
THE CROWDS STREAMING out of the exit to North Greenwich underground station were overwhelmingly white, middle-aged, middle-income, middle-class. They looked on themselves as the law-abiding, hard-working, tax-paying backbone of the country, and they represented both the single biggest demographic group in the British population and the one that felt itself to be the most unjustly ignored and even despised by the political and media elite. As they made their way through the cold, persistent drizzle towards the O2 Arena they were greeted by giant advertising hoardings that screamed out, ‘THE ONLY WAY IS UPP!’ and ‘BRITAIN IS MOVING UPP IN THE WORLD!’ and ‘IT’S TIME TO GET UPP!’
In smaller letters, below these slogans, ran the words: ‘Vote for a new start. Vote United People’s Party.’
The only illustration on the posters was a photograph of a man’s face. He looked handsome, but not too handsome. His hair was as grey as George Clooney’s and his eyes could grab a camera lens as well as any movie star’s, but there was no attempt to hide the lines around his eyes, nor the slight thickening around his jaw and chin. And although he possessed a dazzling smile his mouth was now fixed in a look of grim determination. This was the face of a leader who took action, not an actor who performed. This was Mark Adams.
The route to the huge white dome was lined by policemen holding back protesters who were waving banners and placards that bore very different slogans to those on the posters: ‘DOWN WITH UPP!’ and ‘UNITE AGAINST FASCIST SCUM!’ The protesters were shouting the same slogan again and again, ‘Mark Adams, Little Hitler! . . . Mark Adams, Little Hitler!’
From time to time people would break away from the steady stream heading from the station to the O2 and start shouting back at the protesters. One group of about thirty shaven-headed men – all in the standard uniform of Doc Martens, jeans, white T-shirts and green nylon flight-jackets that had been associated with the Far Right for the past forty-odd years – had formed up on the other side of the police line, opposite the greatest concentration of their opponents. They started up a chant of ‘England for the English’, and then another, like a football crowd: ‘United!’ Clap-clap-clap. ‘United!’ Clap-clap-clap.
TV crews were gathering in the area, sensing that there was about to be serious trouble. Passers-by were holding up telephones to take photos and video footage. A black-suited man wearing a telephone headset was deep in conversation with the most senior police officer on the scene, a uniformed chief inspector. He was pointing at the skinheads and shouting angrily in a Geordie accent, ‘You’ve got to get them out of here.’
‘They’re your people. You tell them,’ the Chief Inspector replied.
The suit was Adams’s campaign manager, Robbie Bell, and he was getting nervous. This would all be on Twitter within seconds and on the rolling TV news shows not long afterwards. ‘They’re not our people,’ he insisted. ‘They’re not the people we want. Move them!’
The Chief Inspector looked around. It was all his men could do simply to maintain the pedestrian corridor. ‘How, exactly?’ he asked.
Amidst all the noise and the steadily escalating atmosphere of tension and incipient violence one man walked quietly towards the main entrance. His name was Kieron Sproles and he was everything the face on the posters was not: inconspicuous, unimpressive and eminently forgettable. As he passed the group of threatening, shouting men he hunched his shoulders and walked a little faster. He did not like them at all. They reminded him of the boys who had bullied and beaten him at school. He could practically smell the sweat and testosterone they exuded, and the brute physicality of their presence reawakened feelings of helplessness and humiliation that had haunted him all his life.
Sproles was born to be one of nature’s victims, the runt of any litter he was in. He stood no more than five feet, five inches tall and was skinny with it. His eyes were a watery grey and their drabness was a match for his clothes – crumpled, charcoal woollen trousers, a maroon crew-neck jumper and a beige winter jacket with elasticated cuffs. He wore shoes like Cornish pasties. He carried no bag of any kind, so bypassed the security bag-check. His ticket was perfectly in order. Detailed examination of the kind he never seemed to attr
act might have revealed that he was nervous, edgy and perspiring heavily. But what would that have proved? The whole event was charged with an atmosphere of adrenalized over-excitement. Kieron Sproles was by no means alone in that.
Once he was inside, he made his way to the nearest men’s room and locked himself in a cubicle. Then he pulled his shirt out of his waistband, ran his right hand up the small of his back, and found the edge of the tape that was fixed right across it, in a broad strip from his lower ribs to his hips. Sproles worked his hand down between the tape and his skin, grimacing as the hairs on his back were tweaked. Almost immediately his fingers came into contact with the edge of the Glock semi-automatic pistol that was wedged against his body.
Sproles gradually loosened the tape until the gun could be pulled free. He looked at it, checked the magazine for the umpteenth time and then placed it in one of the pockets of his jacket.
Sproles pulled the tape off his back and crumpled it into a tight ball. He tucked his shirt back in, left the cubicle and stood at a basin to wash his hands. The reflection that looked back at him from the mirror appeared no different than usual. He did not look like an assassin, whatever an assassin looked like. He put the ball of tape into the bin where the paper towels went. Moments later he was out of the men’s room and making his way to his seat. It was located in the front row of the crowd, less than ten metres from the edge of the stage.
10
MANINDER SINGH PANU had spent an hour that evening in a hospital ward, making his daily visit to his father Lakhbir’s hospital bed. Once an energetic, ambitious man, determined to improve his family’s place in the world, the older Panu now lay motionless and silent, still trapped in the coma that had held him since the night six months ago when he had been attacked by a gang of teenagers outside the Lion Market, the family’s twenty-four-hour store in Netherton Street. A flying brick had caught him on the side of his head. A fifteen-year-old boy called Jaden Crabbe had thrown it. Jaden had been coming to the shop since he was knee-high, buying sweets for himself or running errands for his mum. Now he was at one of the new high-security young offenders’ units the government had recently set up, the doctors were threatening to turn off Lakhbir Panu’s life support, and Maninder was ready to start fighting back.
He’d got together with some of the other local traders and restaurateurs to form the Netherton Street Self-Help Association. Since the law was no longer willing or able to guarantee their safety, they were going to have to do it themselves. They’d borrowed a motto from The Three Musketeers: ‘All for one and one for all.’ From now on, an attack on any one of their businesses would be treated like an attack on them all, and everyone would respond. The couple that ran the pub had a regular who knew some old-school villains who were no happier with the riots than anyone else. Proper professionals knocking off a posh jeweller’s shop or a Securicor van was one thing. Gobby little knobs going round wrecking local people’s lives, that was quite another. They’d handed out pump-action shotguns, guaranteed untraceable, to anyone that wanted them.
The idea of firing a gun at someone scared the hell out of Maninder Panu. But ending up a vegetable in a hospital bed scared him even more. He was a Sikh and thus a member of a proud warrior race. He told himself that if he had to fight to preserve the business his family had sweated for years to build, then that was what he was going to do. He was getting married in three months’ time. He didn’t want his wife-to-be thinking that her fiancé was a coward.
He was manning the Lion Market tonight with his cousin Ajay. Unlike Maninder, who was a short, slightly overweight man in his late thirties, Ajay was a decade younger, well over six feet tall, built like the proverbial brick outhouse and blessed with a magnificent, uncut beard that Long John Silver would have envied. Ajay had placed a baseball bat behind the counter. If anything should ever kick off, he was relying on his fearsome appearance to be sufficiently intimidating to put anyone off attacking him. In truth, he had no more skill or experience as a fighting man than Maninder. But he too was not prepared to take another backward step.
Both men were reassured by the knowledge that if there was any sign of trouble, they could text the other members of the Self-Help Association and know that they would be on their way.
So far, the Panus had never had to ask for that help. Both cousins prayed that tonight would be no exception.
Bakunin’s operation began shortly after seven o’clock, with a break-in at a refuse-company depot off the Walworth Road, three miles from the Lion Market where Maninder and Ajay Panu were quietly going about their business. Six armed, masked men approached the security guard in his booth by the main gate, and he was gone before they’d even got within thirty metres of him. He didn’t need telling that the guns they were holding weren’t just for show, and he wasn’t going to get himself killed for a job that only paid six quid an hour. The men entered the abandoned booth and opened the steel gates. One of them worked at the depot, and led them to the office where the keys to the trucks were kept. It was empty at this time of night, like the rest of the place.
The six intruders went straight to the two units to which the keys belonged, started them up and drove out of the depot. Before it turned on to the road, one of the trucks paused for long enough to let a passenger get out, go to the abandoned guard’s booth and close the gates behind them. The garbage trucks joined the traffic on the Walworth Road, heading north towards Elephant and Castle, where they turned sharp left, almost doubling back on themselves, down Kennington Lane. They were heading for the industrial estate on Nine Elms, close to the Cringle Dock recycling centre. They planned to park up there for half an hour or so, and keep a low profile till it was time to go to work.
11
FUNNY HOW OLD habits refused to die even when the reason for having them had long gone. As he sat in the cab taking him to his drink with Schultz, Carver was wearing a favourite old jacket, made of heavy, caramel-coloured suede, that was really more like a short coat. He had a zip-up black body warmer under it and a long-sleeved T-shirt that looked like regular cotton but was actually superfine merino wool, a far superior regulator of body temperature.
Carver had no interest whatever in fashion, but he had always paid very great attention to detail when it came to the function and quality of everything in his life. When the slightest malfunction could make the difference between life and death these things mattered. So he’d long been as picky with his clothes as he was with his weapons, and when he found something that worked, he stuck with it. Even so, he was having a hard time understanding why the same old money-belt was still wrapped around his waist. Its pouches contained passports and credit cards in three different identities; a selection of random IDs picked up on various previous jobs; half a dozen anonymous, prepaid SIM cards; and two thick wads of hundred-dollar US bills. He’d worn it every day for the past twenty years and for much of that time it had been an essential insurance policy. Wherever he was, there’d always been the chance that he’d have to get out fast, and the belt gave him the means to do so.
But why now? The secret store in his Geneva apartment where he kept all the gear he’d used to create fatal, unattributable ‘accidents’ hadn’t been opened in more than two years. He’d not even picked up a gun in that time, let alone fired one in anger. But his weapons were all still there; he still spent a fortune every year on the increasingly complicated systems required to keep the location of any phone he was using untraceable; and his belt was still round his waist this evening, even if it did feel a little tighter than it had in the old days. Wasn’t it time to let it all go?
They were over the river now, driving south towards Netherton Street. Carver looked at his watch. He was going to get there a few minutes early. On a whim he tapped on the glass that divided the passenger compartment from the driver and said, ‘Stop here. I’ll walk the rest of the way.’
The cabbie looked up and caught his eye in the driver’s mirror. ‘You sure you want to do that, guv? Not a good idea ro
und here.’
‘I’ll manage.’
The driver shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. Just hope the next bloke that picks you up isn’t driving an ambulance.’
Carver paid him off and started walking. Within a couple of minutes he’d begun to wonder whether he’d made a stupid decision. It had less to do with the run-down drabness of so much of the cityscape around him than the steady drizzle in the air, which seemed to be seeping down past the collar of his jacket and up through the soles of his shoes, chilling him to the bone. Carver looked around. He couldn’t be too far from Netherton Street now. There was an old council estate up ahead: the pub should be just the far side of that.
He turned down a road that led through the estate. One entire side of it, at least two hundred metres long, was taken up with a single, gigantic concrete chunk of brutal sixties architecture. It was seven storeys high, and walkways ran the full length of each level, like streets in the sky, one above the other. Carver could hear children’s shouts and mocking laughter echoing from somewhere high among the walkways, but when he looked up there hardly seemed to be any lights on anywhere – half a dozen at most across the oppressive, Stalinist bulk of the place. Peering through the drizzle, he realized he’d made a mistake. You couldn’t cut straight through the estate. There was a dead end up ahead where another, smaller pile of concrete barred the way, looking even darker, more lifeless and yet more menacing than the one beside him.
The estate’s architects must have planned it like this specifically to prevent drivers using the road as a rat run. Instead they had created a rat trap, a dead-end community that had taken the hint and died. But even these architects had to have allowed the inhabitants of their oppressive schemes some way of walking out. A peeling, faded sign beside the pavement showed a map of the estate, and Carver saw that if he made his way to the right of the block at the end of the cul-de-sac there should be a path that would lead past a further set of buildings, arranged around an open central space, towards another road that would take him to Netherton Street.