Shepherd grinned. ‘I can’t argue with that.’
‘Then consider this. What I do is fair, spider. The people I … I don’t like to use the K-word,’ he said. ‘It sounds like I’m doing something immoral. I prefer a word like “remove” or “eliminate” because all I’m doing is taking them out of a society they want to destroy. The people I remove are dangerous. They’re the true stone-cold killers. They’re the ones who will kill women and children without a thought, who plan and scheme to cause death and destruction without once considering the grief and pain they cause. Putting them on trial and then behind bars serves no purpose, but removing them does. Removing them makes the world a better place so I’m happy to be part of a system that does just that. Do I worry about what I do? Damn right I do, and that’s what makes me better than them. I don’t enjoy doing what I do, don’t ever think that. I do it because somebody has to, and I’m qualified. And, frankly, Spider, so are you. Well qualified.’
‘I wish I had your confidence,’ said Shepherd.
‘Confidence?’
‘Self-belief. You know what you’re doing is right. There’s not one iota of self-doubt in you.’
‘Is that your problem? You’re doubting yourself?’
Shepherd shook his head. ‘I’m fine about myself,’ he said. ‘It’s the system I work for that I’m having second thoughts about. I’m a small cog in a large machine but it’s a machine that wants to incarcerate its citizens for three months without trial and send them to prison for just thinking about being a terrorist. It’s a machine that wants to take fingerprints and DNA samples from all its citizens on the off-chance that one day in the future they might break the law.’
Yokely tapped his class ring on the table top. ‘What I can’t work out is whether you’re trying to talk yourself into working with me, or out of it.’
‘I’m ambivalent,’ said Shepherd.
‘Then jump ship,’ said Yokely. ‘You’ll get a bigger pay cheque and you’ll be doing a worthwhile job.’
‘Maybe,’ said Shepherd.
Yokely looked at his wristwatch, a Rolex Submariner with a green bezel. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘I’m on a deadline.’
‘So, how do we leave this?’ asked Shepherd.
‘You call me when you’re ready to work with me.’
‘I meant the Dutchman,’ said Shepherd.
‘I knew that,’ said Yokely. He flashed Shepherd a smile. ‘As I said, I’ll talk to Kleintank, then keep him under wraps. If I get any intel about your British terrorists, I’ll pass it on to you.’
‘Thanks, Richard,’ said Shepherd.
‘Yet another favour you owe me,’ said the American. He stood up and held out his hand. ‘You take care of yourself,’ he said.
Shepherd shook it. ‘You, too.’
Yokely squeezed Shepherd’s hand. ‘I mean it, Spider. It’s a rough world out there and I’d hate it if anything happened to you because your mind wasn’t on the job.’
Bradshaw scrutinised the approaching plane through his binoculars. It was a Boeing 747 belonging to British Airways, the perfect target. The plane’s flaps were up and its wheels were down as it headed for the runway. The aircraft was about eight hundred feet up and still five miles from the airfield. Bradshaw was sitting in a two-year-old blue Ford Mondeo that he’d found through the classified adverts in the Evening Standard. It was the perfect car for surveillance and nobody had given him a second look as he parked close to the river Brent, a small tributary that flowed into the nearby Thames. From where he was sitting he had a perfect view of the planes on the easterly approach to the airport. That was the favoured route for Heathrow in the morning. It would also be the perfect place to fire a missile as a short drive through Brentford would take him to junction two of the M4. He had an A–Z street directory on his lap and marked his location with a cross. He turned on the engine and put the car into gear. He wanted to find another three or four possible sites before it got dark.
Shepherd pressed the button to call the lift. It was just after eight o’clock. As the doors opened, he saw two figures standing inside and stepped out of their path. He did a double-take when he realised it was Mickey and Mark. They were laughing at something and Mickey was waving an unlit cigar. Their jaws dropped when they saw Shepherd. ‘What are you up to, mate?’ asked Mickey.
Shepherd’s mind raced as he tried to come up with a convincing explanation for being out of his room. ‘I feel like shit,’ he said, keeping his voice to just above a whisper. ‘Like a knife in my guts. I’ve asked Reception if they can get me something from a pharmacist.’
‘You should have called room service,’ said Mickey.
‘Well, they said they’d get me sorted. Are you guys heading out?’
‘Yeah, don’t wait up,’ said Mark. ‘Do you want us to bring you a hooker back?’
Shepherd forced a smile and rubbed his belly. ‘Do I look like I want a hooker?’ he said.
‘Leave him alone, Mark,’ said Mickey. ‘You can see he’s hurting. Probably that airline food,’ he said sympathetically. ‘You should be okay by tomorrow.’
‘Could be a burst appendix,’ said Mark, and Mickey glared at him. ‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s get the hell out of here.’
‘Our flight’s at midday,’ Mickey said to Shepherd, ‘so we’ll be checking out at nine.’
Shepherd walked into the lift and pressed the button for his floor. As the doors closed, he watched the brothers stride through Reception. He closed his eyes and exhaled. It had been a close one, but he was fairly sure they’d believed his story.
Alex Kleintank opened his eyes. His head was pounding and it was hard to breathe. His ears were blocked and he tried swallowing to clear them but that didn’t help. He was moving from side to side and he couldn’t work out why. Then his vision cleared and he saw he was upside down. The ceiling above him was swaying from side to side and then, with absolute terror, he realised he was naked. He was hanging from the ceiling by his feet. He tried to move his arms but his wrists were bound.
A figure appeared in front of him. He saw brown shoes with tassels and light brown trousers. Kleintank was trying to speak but his mouth was so dry he could only croak. The man bent down to look at him, then straightened and said something. Hands grabbed Kleintank’s shoulders and lifted him up. The neck of a plastic bottle was forced between his lips. It was water and he drank greedily, then the hands let go of him, he dropped down and began to swing again. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘What do you want?’
The man with the tassels on his shoes was holding what looked like a black metal stick. ‘We need to talk, Alex,’ he said.
‘About what?’
‘Your customers.’
Kleintank coughed and tasted blood at the back of his mouth. ‘What do you want to know?’
Blue sparks crackled across the top of the black stick that the man was holding. It was a cattle prod. Kleintank’s heart pounded and he felt his bladder muscles weaken. ‘Everything,’ said the man. The cattle prod crackled again.
It was early in the afternoon when Shepherd’s Lufthansa flight arrived in Bangkok. This time they were met off the plane by a man in a safari suit with a clipboard, who welcomed Mickey and carried his bag for him. He took them to the diplomatic channel where a bored immigration officer took their photographs and stamped their passports.
Mickey offered to drop Shepherd at his villa. Both men were tired. They had flown overnight from Germany and there had been two babies in the business-class compartment who had cried from the moment that the aircraft’s wheels had left the runway.
‘What happens now?’ asked Shepherd, as Mickey drove down the motorway to Pattaya.
‘About the RPGs?’ Mickey asked. ‘I’ll talk to the Professor, see what other contacts he’s got. What about you? Do you know anyone?’
‘Let me think about it,’ said Shepherd. ‘A lot of the guys I served with have left and there’s a few working in hotspots where
they might be able to get their hands on RPGs.’
Mickey fumbled for his cigar case as he drove one-handed.
‘Let me,’ said Shepherd, as the Range Rover sheered across the road. He took out a cigar and handed it to Mickey, who bit off the end and spat it through the window, then pressed in the cigarette lighter.
Shepherd laughed. ‘You’re just about the only person I know who uses his cigarette lighter socket to smoke,’ he said. ‘Everyone else uses them for their phones or MP3s.’
Mickey grinned. ‘I’ve smoked since I was a kid. My dad’s been a smoker for forty-odd years and his lungs are fine.’ He blew smoke through the window.
‘This Professor guy, what’s his story?’
‘He plans jobs down to the last detail. Works for a few crews like ours and we pay him a percentage. We’ve used him for the last three jobs and they went without a hitch.’
‘How would he know about Kleintank?’
‘That’s his business,’ Mickey said. ‘Part of the job is about planning, but the beauty of the Professor is that he puts all your ducks in a row. He tells you what equipment you need and where you can source it. He’s made our lives a lot easier.’
‘Wish I’d had him for our last job. It all went tits up when we changed vehicles.’
‘What happened?’
Shepherd sighed. ‘You know, I’m still not sure,’ he said. ‘It was a tiger job. We had the manager’s family and we did a great job conning the staff so we hardly had to use any force.’
‘Big score?’
‘Massive. We got about a hundred grand cash but it wasn’t about the money. We had someone on the inside who’d tipped us off about some bearer bonds in one of the safety deposit boxes. Two million.’
‘Sweet,’ said Mickey.
‘Yeah, well, it would’ve been if we’d got away with it. We were switching vehicles and armed cops turned up waving their Hecklers. I managed to leg it but everyone else was nabbed.’
‘I heard you shot a cop.’
Shepherd looked at him.
‘What? I had to have you checked out, didn’t I?’
‘I shot at a cop,’ said Shepherd. ‘That’s not the same as shooting a cop. I fired a warning. I’m not stupid, Mickey.’
Mickey patted his leg. ‘You’re too sensitive, mate,’ he said.
Mickey dropped Shepherd in front of his villa. Shepherd offered him a beer but he said he wanted to get home. Shepherd waited until the Range Rover was out of sight before he let himself into his villa and deactivated the burglar alarm. He went through to the sitting room, turned on the television and phoned Charlotte Button. ‘Please tell me Razor got to you in time,’ he said.
‘O ye of little faith,’ laughed Button. ‘We had a man waiting for you in Munich and he watched you board the flight to Sarajevo. He got on the flight with you and followed you to your hotel.’
‘He was good,’ said Shepherd, ‘because I didn’t see anyone.’
‘He’s one of SOCA’s best. Snag is, he was solo so, other than keeping tabs on you at the hotel, there wasn’t much he could do. How did it go down?’
Shepherd frowned. Had Button’s watcher seen him leave the hotel and get the taxi back to Kleintank’s warehouse? He had looked for a tail and was sure no one had followed him in the taxi, so maybe he’d been lucky. One-man surveillance was difficult in perfect conditions, and Button’s man had been working in unfamiliar territory.
Shepherd explained what had happened when the Moore brothers had met Kleintank. Button waited until he had finished before she said, ‘So you’re telling me you told Mickey Moore not to buy the missile? What the hell were you thinking?’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Shepherd. His heart began to pound. Charlotte Button was nobody’s fool.
‘You had him right where we wanted him,’ said Button. ‘We both know that the Grail wouldn’t do much more than dent a high-security wall, though he obviously doesn’t. So all you had to do was to keep quiet and let them get on with it. That they’re doomed to fail doesn’t make it less of a bust. We’d still have caught them in the act.’
‘First, Terry Norris is in a wheelchair, not in a coma,’ said Shepherd. ‘He’s a weapons expert, and he’d know right away that we didn’t have the right tools for the job. If he told Mickey that, it would cast doubt on my credibility.’
Button was silent while she considered what he had said. ‘Fair point,’ she said eventually. ‘And second of all? I assume there is a second of all?’
‘Kleintank said he’d sold another Grail missile to some Brits.’
‘Anything in the way of a description?’
‘One’s white, the other two are Asian. From what Kleintank said, I think they’ve already acquired a Stinger from an arms dealer in Nice.’
‘I’ll pass it on,’ said Button. ‘Is there a third of all?’
‘A third of all?’
‘Did anything else happen that I should be aware of?’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Button, ‘it’s just that my Spider sense is tingling. Anything I should know about?’
Shepherd gritted his teeth. Button had an uncanny knack of knowing when something was on his mind. It was one of the qualities that made her such a good manager of undercover agents. But he couldn’t tell her that Richard Yokely had been in Sarajevo, or what he had been doing there. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘I’ll just keep tabs on the brothers, and as soon as they nail down the RPGs we’ll be sorted.’
‘What are their options?’
‘They’ve got contacts, I’m sure. They know army people in Cambodia but there’s a shipping problem from Asia. Kleintank did say he had more RPGs coming in from China, but I’m guessing that once the Professor hears Kleintank let them down he’ll come up with other options.’
‘He’s back in the UK so we’ll keep an eye on him,’ said Button. ‘This Kleintank, any idea where he’s based?’
‘He’s Dutch but all I’ve got is his name,’ said Shepherd. ‘I did have a thought, though.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘What if we did a set-up? Put him onto one of our people posing as an arms dealer. We’ve done it before. We get them on video buying the weapons and bust them before they go in.’
‘Wouldn’t they think that a bit convenient?’
‘I could spin them a line about a former army buddy who’s now in the weapons business. See if they bite.’
Button considered his suggestion for a few seconds. ‘I’d prefer to see who they come up with,’ she said. ‘But if it drags on we’ll maybe start being a bit more proactive. Let’s see how it goes. In the meantime you take care.’
‘Always,’ he said, and cut the connection. He felt guilty at having lied to Button, but he had no choice.
Almost immediately his phone rang. The display was blank. He knew before he answered that it was Richard Yokely. ‘How’s the lovely Charlotte?’ asked the American.
‘I knew it was a mistake giving you my phone number,’ said Shepherd. ‘Were you listening in?’
‘No, sir, I wasn’t. A gentleman never eavesdrops on a lady.’
‘But you could if you wanted to, right?’
Yokely chuckled. ‘A gentleman never tells,’ he said.
‘Where are you, Richard?’
‘In a land far, far away,’ said Yokely. ‘I have something for you.’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘And there’s the rub, as the Bard might have said,’ said Yokely. ‘Anything I tell you is for your ears only. You can never say where the information came from.’
‘That’s a given,’ said Shepherd.
‘I’m serious,’ said the American. ‘You can do what you want with the information, but no one must know who gave it to you.’
‘Do you want me to swear on a stack of Bibles?’ said Shepherd.
‘I just want you to understand what you’re agreeing to,’ said Yokely. ‘If you renege on our agreement, it won’t be your mortal soul that
’s in danger.’
Shepherd feigned shock. ‘Why, Richard, are you threatening me?’
‘Do you want me to end the call now?’
Shepherd could tell from the American’s tone that he was serious. ‘I already said. I’m all ears.’
‘The Dutchman sold a Grail missile to two Brits. One of the Brits was white, the other was Asian. There was a second Asian who brought the cash. Might have been a Brit, too. They bought a single Grail, a practice model, but the white Brit was adamant that he wanted a missile with a guidance system. Kleintank put him in touch with a Frenchman, a guy called Marcel Calvert. He’s a former Legionnaire, lives in Nice. Kleintank confirmed that Calvert had a Stinger for sale and sent the three Brits on their merry way.’
‘Did they say what they wanted the missiles for?’
‘I love your naïveté, sometimes.’
‘I’ll take that as a no,’ said Shepherd.
‘What I have got is the name of the white guy. Paul Bradshaw. Former soldier, served in Iraq. And I have the number of a pay-as-you-go cell phone that he’s using. He was introduced to Kleintank through a mutual friend, another former soldier called Chris Thomas. Thomas runs a security company in Iraq now.’
‘Kleintank told you all this?’
‘I can be very persuasive. Do you want the cell number or not?’
‘Please.’ Yokely told him and it filed itself away in his infallible memory. ‘You can spread the word, but you can’t identify your source,’ said Yokely. ‘You have a good day now.’ The line went dead.
Shepherd put down the phone. He stared at the television with unseeing eyes. He had some serious thinking to do before he phoned Button again. But there was someone he could call immediately. He stood up and paced around the room as he tapped out the mobile number of Major Allan Gannon. The Major answered promptly. ‘Long time no hear, Spider,’ he said. ‘How are the forces of law and order, these days?’
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