Javelin - the gripping new thriller from the former commander of Special Branch (John Kerr Book 3)

by Roger Pearce

  ‘With the Home Sec in the chair?’ Ritchie tossed the sachets into the safe. ‘How do you think?’

  ‘I imagine she’s pretty delighted about Irish dissidents bombing London.’

  ‘Steamed in brandishing a big stick with “IRA” written all over it but no-one came up with any hard evidence.’ Ritchie expertly pushed the safe door shut with his shoe and headed for his desk in the corner farthest from the door. ‘So she’s bashing the good guys instead.’

  ‘That desperate?’

  Ritchie nodded as he sank into his chair. ‘Obsessed.’

  The flakiness of Avril Knight around the Irish peace process was the worst kept secret around Parliament and her promotion to Home Secretary had been an unwelcome surprise on both sides of the Irish Sea. With the EU money tap soon to be turned off, everyone knew her murmurings about ‘recalibrating the balance of power at Stormont’ meant forcing concessions from the republicans at any price. She reserved her strongest anger for what she called an amnesty to IRA paramilitaries ‘OTR’, shorthand for terrorists still on the run. ‘These thugs murdered your colleagues,’ she had told her driver and protection officer one night through a mist of gin and tonic, ‘and we indulge them like teenage truants.’

  Ritchie reached for his trademark yellow legal pad and looked at his notes. ‘Derek Finch kicked off with casualty numbers and the recovery operation but she cut him short. Knight is only interested in demonising republicans. Bombers in London using an IRA operation name? In her eyes, conclusive evidence, the best news she’s had in a long time.’

  Through the window Kerr watched an Airbus 380 making its final approach into Heathrow, the sun glinting off its fuselage. ‘Eleven people died this morning. So far. Doesn’t she care about that?’

  ‘To Avril Knight, body counts are a debating point. She needs the dissidents to be responsible for this.’

  ‘But they’re not. Is she really going to use Victoria to bring pressure on Stormont?’

  Ritchie spread his hands. ‘Would you expect anything else? Our atrocity down the road is Knight’s best opportunity yet, so she’s pissed off that we’re not delivering for her.’

  ‘Unbelievable.’

  ‘Knight smells blood and all we’re offering is lavender. Give me a minute,’ said Ritchie, writing notes on the pad in his bold hand. The commander’s work station was a creaking oak desk almost two metres square, with a surface of green inlaid leather. It had been occupied by Lord Trenchard, the Commissioner, during the early 1930s, and then by successive heads of Special Branch until consigned to the Yard’s furniture store by hot-desking modernisers. On promotion, Ritchie’s first act had been to walk the floors shaking hands with every officer; theirs was to raid the store overnight and return Trenchard’s desk to where it belonged.

  Ritchie finished his notes and joined Kerr at the conference table. ‘What’s Dodge telling you?’

  ‘It’s not dissident. Nothing from across the water.’

  Ritchie nodded. ‘Politically it’s the same story, which gets her even more worked up. Press releases spewing out of Stormont like confetti, all parties committed to power-sharing, etcetera. Every politician jumping in with “peace in our time” patter, and Knight doesn’t like it. Remember Lisa from Northern Ireland Office? Treated her like something under her shoe.’

  ‘Who pitched up from MOD?’

  ‘Bloke I hadn’t met before. His first COBRA and he made the mistake of talking about jihadis, like this is down to kids taking revenge for Syria. Knight practically bared her teeth at him, like she was going to rip his nuts off. She’s only got one question, John. It’s crudely rhetorical. And we’re all giving her the wrong answers.’

  ‘Did she ask you?’

  Ritchie shook his head. ‘But I told her anyway. We go where the intelligence leads us, and what we have so far is inconclusive. The code word is only one piece of the jigsaw.’

  ‘I bet she loved that,’ said Kerr with a short laugh, imagining the scene in the crowded briefing room.

  The commander gave a ‘who cares?’ shrug that made Kerr smile. Bill Ritchie had covered Irish republican terrorism since the eighties, and Kerr enjoyed seeing him in his element. His promotion to the top job over a year ago had been sudden, dramatic and unexpected. There was a different look about him these days, a leaner, fitter version of the rumpled head of ops who had steered the Branch with his sleeves rolled up and, for the past two years, lived with the quiet conviction that he would die from prostate cancer. The elixir of success had lightened his mood, tightened his body, groomed his hair and packaged everything in a single-breasted navy suit. With his cancer at bay, Bill Ritchie took his meds, attended his check-ups and revelled in the heavy workload that came with his second chance.

  ‘Who came from MI5?’

  ‘Toby Devereux, looking like he’d just thrown up. Same conclusion as Dodge, but took twice as long to spin it. Plus the usual overview guff about “terrorist remnants,” thugs diverting to bog standard criminal activity.’ Ritchie scanned his notes. ‘Initial readout from MI5 analysts in Belfast shows no traces of individuals or groups travelling to the mainland. No suspicious movements by targets under investigation.’

  ‘So a zero report.’

  ‘Knight looked like she wanted to rip Toby’s heart out, but I backed him all the way. Then he let drop that MI5 have a direct line into the enemy camp, as if they’ll have everything sorted by teatime.’

  ‘What kind of line?’ said Kerr, sitting forward. ‘Telephone intercept? Microphone?’

  ‘He said “secret and reliable,” so I guess it’s human, an asset with access to the dissident leadership. Presumably to tell them no-one from Belfast had a day out in London.’

  ‘So he’s using his source to prove a negative?’

  Ritchie shrugged again. ‘Who knows? He went all cryptic and asked to speak with Knight in private, away from the riff-raff. You know Devereux. He’ll be backing it both ways.’

  ‘Bill, he’s a bit late for that,’ said Kerr. ‘Wait till Knight finds out he’s been talking about lowering the threat level.’

  Ritchie looked across sharply. ‘When?’

  ‘Three, four days ago. Part of a post-Brexit review, apparently.’

  ‘Good timing, just as the bombers were inserting the detonators,’ said Ritchie. ‘And no-one’s fronted him?’

  ‘I’m checking with 1830…,’ he said, then paused as Donna entered the office, still in her outdoor jacket, followed by Alan Fargo. He had changed his shirt but looked even more battered than before.

  Ritchie stood up and shook his hand, gripping his upper arm politician style. ‘Alan, I’m truly sorry for your loss. Have a seat.’

  ‘Thanks, sir. I’m fine,’ said Fargo, glancing between them. ‘Just thought you should know this situation could still be live. They’ve got two more possibles just inside the station forecourt. Shopping bag and rucksack.’

  ‘Abandoned in the rush?’ said Ritchie, staying on his feet.

  ‘They’re hoping so. Also a plastic bag on a bus in Victoria Street,’ he said, nodding through the window. ‘Heading for the station. Top deck, rear offside seat.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Ritchie slipped his jacket off and slung it on the back of the chair. He was just as Kerr remembered him from the old days, except now he picked an invisible speck from the collar, smoothed his powder blue tie and looked five years younger. ‘Is Jack Langton okay?’

  ‘He’s as good as me,’ said Fargo.

  ‘Dodge on form?’ said Ritchie. ‘We’re going to need every asset in his little black book.’

  ‘Everyone raring to go,’ said Kerr.

  ‘So let’s get to work.’

  Chapter Nine

  Tuesday, 11 October, 07.54, Heathrow Terminal Five

  Because of heavy early morning traffic flying into Heathrow, Mark Bannerman’s Boeing 777 circled in a holding pattern for nearly fifty minutes before being cleared to land. Emerging from the bank of heavy cloud he stared gloomily out of the wi
ndow as the first officer invited them to admire the view of Tower Bridge and Parliament to the right, lit up by a stray shaft of sunlight. ‘Fuck,’ he murmured, getting a fix on Vauxhall Cross as they descended alongside the Thames into Terminal Five.

  It had been a tough night. Bannerman had left his house later than planned, keeping the embassy driver waiting for over an hour while he worked the Internet, and arrived at Jomo Kenyatta airport too late for a livener in the business lounge. Anticipating his return within forty-eight hours, even sooner if he could make everyone see sense, he had brought only his Ted Baker soft leather holdall, a present from the son he rarely saw. Another embassy official had been at the gate, someone from the consular section Bannerman vaguely recognised but ignored. The staffer had disappeared to the back of the plane as Bannerman swung left for champagne cocktails, a steady intake of gin and tonic and a sleep wrecked by the screaming infant of a couple still in their safari rigs. By the time they landed it was well past seven-thirty, eighty minutes late on a day when every hour counted.

  The one bright spot was seeing Penny Redman again. She was only five foot four but he spotted her the moment he walked through the automatic doors, waiting outside Krispy Kreme beyond a phalanx of suited chauffeurs holding whiteboards and minicab drivers with names on strips of cardboard.

  She walked ahead out of the concourse, heading for the upper parking garage. For twenty years Bannerman had teased Penny that she owned more trouser suits than Hillary Clinton: this one was navy blue with white piping over zip-up boots and matching shoulder bag. She covered the ground with short, rapid steps, as if trying to lose him, and Bannerman felt a pang for their shared past.

  He found her feeding the parking pay station as he exited the opposite lift but stayed back as she zigzagged across the garage to a silver VW Golf GTI, half-hidden between a white courier van and a black taxi. The interior light stayed off as she opened the driver’s door and, as he squeezed in beside her, she leaned across to kiss him on the cheek. ‘Welcome back,’ she said, taking a folder from her bag and sliding it onto his lap. ‘Homework.’

  He watched her wriggle out of her jacket and reach to lay it on the rear seat over his holdall. ‘When are you going to invent a reason to bloody visit me?’

  ‘Mark, behave,’ she said, drawing his eyes from her blouse. She checked her watch, started the engine and reversed expertly from the space. ‘We’ve got less than five hours.’

  ‘Plenty of time.’

  ‘Wait till you’ve read that.’

  Bannerman and Penny had bumped into each other in Tehran, crossed paths in Jerusalem and shared beds in Marriott hotel rooms across Europe, until someone tipped off Bannerman’s wife. Penny was fluent in French and Farsi, but their main contact had been in Dublin from 1994, when she had regularly shuttled from London to help him lure terrorists to the peace table.

  ‘You’re the boss.’

  ‘Afraid not,’ she said as she wheeled out of the car park and lowered the window to insert the ticket at the barrier. ‘And Giles Lovett wants a word as soon as.’

  Bannerman shivered at the inrush of cool air, pushed his seat back and shuffled low. ‘Stuff Giles.’

  She popped a piece of gum into her mouth and tapped the pack against his arm. ‘Work.’

  He took a strip of gum and began to read. The folder was cloth covered in deep purple with a ridged diagonal black cross from corner to corner, the regular format for MI6 documents in transit. Inside were twenty-three numbered pages of pale blue A4, each marked ‘Secret and Personal for MB – Prebrief.’ The document was a review of the Northern Ireland situation divided into political and security sections headed ‘Talk in the Chamber’ and ‘War on the Ground.’

  His long legs crossed at the ankles, head down in concentration, Bannerman stayed silent until Penny reached the M4, cleared a speed camera and accelerated hard into the outside lane. ‘You’re not dragging me into the Office, surely?’

  ‘I’m taking you home.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You need a shower first.’

  The first section unpicked the relationships between politicians at Stormont, the row over the so-called ‘letters of comfort’ to fugitive paramilitaries, and political threats to the peace process. The comment looked original, SIS internal, without the sense of cut and paste that devalued most Whitehall assessments.

  It had begun to drizzle and the wiper juddered on Bannerman’s side of the windscreen. ‘Who put this together?’ he said, suddenly. They had reached the tailback from Chiswick Flyover as Penny made the outside lane. ‘Penny, is this all you?’

  ‘Try not to sound so bloody surprised.’

  ‘I’m not.’ He wasn’t. Bannerman believed that, in another age, Penny would have made Chief. She had been recruited when MI6 barely existed at Century House, a dingy, rundown office block near Southwark, and a woman director would have been even more incongruous than the petrol station in the forecourt.

  Nowadays, post Iraq with its huddle of compliant, compromised spooks on the Number Ten sofa, Penny would make the perfect C, faithful to the secret mission and scathing of the dodgy politics. But in the early eighties, for all her talent, the odds had been too heavily stacked against her. There was nothing to break through, she once told him, because the glass ceiling had yet to be discovered.

  Bannerman scanned the open source material until he came to the security report. This covered MI5’s assessment of the power struggles among a ‘ragbag of dissident remnants’ from the Real and Continuity IRA factions, terrorist involvement in criminality, and recent attacks against police and prison officers, including images of bombs recovered intact. Penny had included sensitive SIS human intelligence offering a crushingly pessimistic exposé of murder plots, power struggles and conspiracies that rarely broke the surface.

  The section closed with a brief account of the Victoria bombings, complete with photographs. ‘But this only happened yesterday,’ said Bannerman.

  Penny shot him a look. ‘Lucky we didn’t both spend last night on the razzle.’

  ‘It’s brilliant,’ said Bannerman, rubbing his eyes. The final page was a full-length image of a bulky, powerful man in his late twenties. He wore muddy jeans with a red and blue checked shirt, a woollen hat reaching down to his stubbled cheeks and safety boots, the steel toe caps glinting in the sun. Bannerman peered at the squinting face. ‘Is this him?’

  ‘Later,’ she said as they fed onto Kew Bridge.

  Penny Redman lived in a one bedroom flat on the first floor of a double-fronted Edwardian house opposite the primary school in East Sheen, with Richmond Park only a five minute jog to the south. Lime trees bordered the street and Penny’s downstairs neighbour had planted a row of pink and white azaleas by the front fence. On a good day, the mainline train from Mortlake ferried her to Vauxhall Cross in less than twenty minutes, so Penny had extended the lease and stayed put for over twenty years.

  At the top of the staircase her front door opened onto a small lobby with stained oak doors leading to the living room, modest kitchen and ensuite bedroom. Bannerman made himself comfortable while Penny locked her document away in the small combination safe beneath her bed and disappeared into the kitchen.

  The living room was rectangular with dark red walls and a wide bay window that overlooked the school playground and faced the sun in the afternoons. Penny had brought two rugs home with her from Iran, a Kilim flat weave that almost covered the polished wood floor and a finer, Persian knot carpet attached to the wall opposite the original tiled fireplace. Her furniture was mostly oak and walnut, with the drop leaf dining table and chairs, sideboard, bureau and bookcases all acquired from Richmond’s antique shops. By the window two brown leather armchairs flanked an ancient Chesterfield.

  Bannerman knew his way around, for he had camped out here on his recall to London, bringing himself back to life with Penny while burying his marriage. Old copies of The Economist, New Statesman and Private Eye crammed every surface with photographs of
godchildren and nephews, and logs strewn each side of the fireplace completed the intimate, cluttered feel that Bannerman loved.

  The rumpus of children arriving for school filtered up through the trees as he dumped his bag on the floor by the sofa and stretched. From the kitchen, the tang of frying bacon purged the staleness of the flight. ‘I’ll take a bath if that’s okay?’ he called out, watching the street became clogged with four-by-fours.

  ‘Help yourself.’

  Penny had recently installed a new power shower, wash basin and toilet, but the centrepiece was the free-standing Cambridge bath she had acquired in her first year. It filled quickly, while Bannerman brushed his teeth and undressed. His mobile rang and he padded back into the living room, crouching down to conceal his nakedness from the window as he reached inside his jacket. Expecting it to be Rico from Nairobi, he pressed Ignore as soon as he saw the Office number.

  By the time Penny entered with a tray of tea and two rounds of bacon sandwiches in thick white bread, Bannerman was half-submerged, soaping his hair. Water had spilled onto the tiled floor, so she took care as she balanced the tray on a wooden footstool and pulled up the slatted wooden chair she normally sat on to dry herself. She handed him a fluffy white hand towel from the radiator.

  ‘Thanks.’ Bannerman dabbed his face, dropped the towel onto the wet tiles and reached for his mug of tea, no milk. He took a sip, grabbing the nearest sandwich with his other hand. This was the meal she had made him when he turned up on her doorstep three years before and he studied her as he ate, wanting to be certain she remembered, too.

  Penny took the other round, settled onto the chair and straightened her trousers, preparing for business. She had pulled off her boots and more water slopped onto her bare feet as Bannerman sat up. ‘The man you asked about is Tommy Molloy,’ she said, pulling at a stringy piece of fat. ‘He’s the one they’ll take you to.’