Live Fire

by Stephen Leather

  Shepherd stood up and dropped the launch unit. The base of the removals van was still burning, though the rest of the vehicle was in a thousand pieces, scattered across the road. There were body parts among the wreckage: a head had rolled against the pavement, an arm was lying in the gutter, the hand clenched into a fist.

  ‘What the hell just happened?’ asked Mickey.

  ‘We saved four hundred lives, give or take,’ said Shepherd, ‘and now you’ve got to get out of here. There’s an SAS helicopter on the way.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ said Shepherd. ‘You have to go.’

  ‘Are you a cop?’

  ‘No.’ That much was true. He worked for SOCA and that meant he was a civil servant, not a police officer.

  ‘Then who the hell are you? James Bond?’

  Shepherd laughed. ‘No, I’m not James Bond.’

  ‘But you’re not Ricky Knight. And you’re not John Westlake.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter who I am or who I work for. Mickey, you have to go.’

  ‘What’s your real name? You can tell me that much.’

  ‘Dan,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘Well, fuck you, Dan. Are we screwed?’

  ‘Define screwed.’

  ‘Are CO19 cops gonna be coming around the corner in the next few minutes?’

  ‘If they are, it’s not down to me. But the SAS are on their way.’

  ‘The money? The money’s dodgy?’

  ‘It’s fine, so far as I know. They were letting you run to see where you took it.’

  ‘They know about Pinky?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘No tracking, no bugs?’

  Shepherd shook his head. ‘They’re tracking my phone. That’s all.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘You have to go, Mickey.’

  ‘How long have we got?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Shepherd said. ‘But after what just happened I think all flights into and out of the UK are going to be grounded for a while. They’re expecting you to go to Holyhead for the ferry so if I were you I’d get to St Pancras and onto the first Eurostar to Paris.’

  ‘And if we get back to Thailand?’

  ‘Nothing’s changed,’ said Shepherd. ‘You’re as safe there now as you were before.’

  Mickey nodded. ‘You’re a bastard,’ he said, but there was no venom in his voice.

  ‘I know,’ said Shepherd. ‘It’s what I do.’

  Mickey stuck out his hand. Shepherd shook it. Mickey’s grip was firm and dry and he looked Shepherd in the eye. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  Shepherd didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t even sure what Mickey was thanking him for.

  ‘What do you want doing with your share?’ Mickey asked.

  For a moment Shepherd thought he was serious, but then Mickey released his hand, made a gun with it, pointed it at Shepherd’s face and mimicked the popping sound of a silenced automatic. ‘Got you,’ he said. He winked and got back into the Land Rover.

  As it sped off, Shepherd gazed at the still-burning debris, which was all that remained of the van. ‘That went well, all things considered,’ he muttered to himself.

  In the distance he heard the whoop-whoop of a helicopter’s rotor. He stood where he was, his hands outstretched to the side to show that he wasn’t a threat, and waited for the SAS to arrive.

  ‘You did what?’ There was disbelief on Charlotte Button’s face. They were sitting in the office where it had all begun less than two weeks earlier. Shepherd had brought a cup of Starbucks tea with him but it sat untouched on her desk.

  Shepherd knew the question was rhetorical, so he didn’t reply.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You just let them drive away?’

  ‘What do you want me to say, Charlie? That I was outmanned? That I was outgunned? That I closed my eyes and counted to ten and when I opened them they’d gone?’

  ‘What I want, Spider, is the truth.’

  ‘Mickey Moore helped me take out a terrorist cell. That’s the truth.’

  ‘His gang stole twelve million pounds,’ said Button, flatly.

  ‘Exactly. Money. They stole money. Pieces of paper. We saved four hundred lives, Charlie. Four hundred souls.’

  ‘That’s no reason to give five hardened criminals a get-out-of-jail-free card. And you let them get away with the money.’

  ‘There’ll be other chances to catch them.’

  ‘Like hell there will. We’ve got enough now. Your evidence alone will put them away.’

  Shepherd folded his arms. ‘They helped me, Charlie. Because of what they did, and what they didn’t do, four hundred people are alive this morning who should have died.’

  ‘The company they raided won’t see it that way. And I don’t think my bosses will, either.’

  ‘Then screw them,’ said Shepherd. ‘Four hundred lives against twelve million quid. That equates to thirty thousand pounds a life, Charlie. Thirty lousy thousand.’

  Button’s eyes hardened. ‘This isn’t about money.’ She threw up her hands. ‘What the hell am I going to do with you?’

  ‘If sacking me helps, then sack me. But I’m not going to give evidence against the Moores after what Mickey did yesterday. Hell, we should be giving him a medal.’

  ‘And the terrorist cell. How did you know about them?’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘You mean you won’t say.’

  ‘I mean I can’t. I gave my word.’

  ‘I sense the hand of Richard Yokely in this.’ She stared at him with unblinking eyes.

  Shepherd sat back in his chair. ‘You know, if you play your cards right on this it could make us all look good. We took out a group who were going to blow up a jumbo jet. We saved the day. Spin it the right way and all the agencies come out covered in glory.’

  ‘How, exactly?’

  ‘You say that the intel came from an MI5 informer. I was nearby on another case. You made the decision for me to intervene and thank God you did. I’m sure your friends in Five will back you up. Because if they don’t, they’re going to have to explain how a group of home-grown terrorists got hold of a surface-to-air missile and came within seconds of using it. If that gets out, nobody looks good.’

  ‘The media won’t buy it.’

  ‘The media doesn’t have to. I assume there’ll be a blackout on what happened anyway. No one’s going to want to admit what really happened so your masters are going to be spinning it. Car accident, maybe, or a freak fuel-tank explosion. No one saw the RPG hit them and, so far as I could see, all that was left was debris. Come on, Charlie, there was nothing about it in this morning’s papers or on TV. The whole thing’s already been tidied away, right?’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘It’s absolutely the point. The Government can’t afford to admit what happened so there’ll be a whitewash. All I’m saying is that a little bit of that whitewash needs to spread the way of the Moore brothers. There’ll be another time to get them, down the line. I don’t see them retiring in the near future.’

  ‘So now you’re setting yourself up as judge and jury? Is that it?’

  ‘I’m not judging them. I know they’re villains and they deserve to go down for their villainy. But what Mickey did yesterday has to count for something. The system is now so flawed that it can’t cut them any slack, but I can. That’s all I’m doing, Charlie. I’m cutting them some slack.’

  ‘And what do I tell the company they stole from?’

  Shepherd smiled. ‘Tell them to build a bigger wall.’ He picked up his coffee and took a sip. ‘Are we done?’

  ‘You seem to be treating this like some sort of a joke,’ she said. ‘You could go to prison for what you’re doing.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ he said.

  ‘You could lose your job.’

  ‘You mean you could sack me?’

  She nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I could.’
>
  Shepherd sipped his coffee again, then put it on the desk. ‘But you won’t.’

  ‘You’re very sure of yourself.’

  ‘Because I know you, Charlie. And I know that you know I’m right. We live in a world of shit and occasionally, just occasionally, we get the chance to do the right thing.’

  ‘And letting Mickey and Mark Moore go is the right thing?’

  ‘In this case, yes.’

  ‘I wish I had your confidence,’ she said.

  ‘You know I’m right,’ said Shepherd.

  She looked at him, then smiled slowly. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You are. Damn you, but you are.’

  One week later

  Paul Bradshaw looked through the Grail missile’s sight at the London Eye, the huge Ferris Wheel that dominated the South Bank of the Thames. It took a full half-hour to make a complete revolution, and the movement of the pods through the air was barely perceptible. There were thirty-two on the Wheel, though they were numbered from one to thirty-three, with no number thirteen. They were so superstitious, the infidels. Often they believed more in the power of random numbers than they did in the power of God. Thirteen was unlucky so there was no pod number thirteen on the London Eye. And there was no thirteenth floor in the building where Bradshaw had rented his office. But luck would not save the people on the London Eye. Each of the thirty-two pods could carry a maximum of twenty-five passengers, which mean that when the Eye was full there were eight hundred men, women and children on board, the equivalent of two fully loaded jumbo jets. And there was an added irony in that British Airways sponsored the Wheel and had proudly affixed the company’s name to it.

  Bradshaw had thought long and hard about how and where to make his final statement. He knew he did not have long because the security services and the police would have been on the trail as soon as they had identified the men in the wreckage of the removal van. Checks would be made, photographs would be shown around the local mosques, phone records would be checked and eventually they would identify him. Bradshaw had no wish to rot in prison, to grow old and infirm surrounded by infidels. It was time to go, and to go in a blaze of glory. It was time to join the ranks of the shahid.

  He had been on the London Eye twice, using it as a vantage-point from which to select the perfect target. In a perfect world he would have loved to fire the missile at 10 Downing Street, the home of the prime minister, but nowhere in the vicinity afforded him a clean shot. He had considered firing at the Houses of Parliament or Big Ben but he doubted that even a direct hit would do much more than superficial damage to the massive building. At best he would smash a few windows and damage the stonework, but casualties would be limited. He considered Buckingham Palace as a symbolic target but had decided that he should be attacking the Government of Britain and the people, not its queen. As he rode around in the glass and metal body, he finally realised that the London Eye itself was the perfect target.

  There were plenty of offices on the north side of the Thames and it didn’t take Bradshaw long to take a lease on a high floor with windows overlooking the Wheel. The block was air-conditioned and the windows were sealed, double-glazed, but he had used a glass-cutter to make a large hole in the middle window to shoot through.

  All his preparations were now complete. Bradshaw had changed his appearance since he’d driven off in the Mondeo. He’d abandoned his car in a supermarket car park, then gone inside and bought a pair of scissors, some black hair dye and a pair of reading glasses. Later he had booked into a cheap hotel in Bayswater and cut and dyed his hair. He had found a manual for the Grail missile on the Internet, downloaded and printed it out, but basically all he had to do was to point it at the target and pull the trigger and that would be the end of it. The missile would streak across the river and hit the Wheel in the centre, destroying the mechanism that held it up and provided the power to turn it. It would smash down into the river, the pods would break and the people inside would either be crushed or drown. The image of the broken Wheel would travel around the world, Bradshaw knew. As would the video he had already prepared, in which he swore his devotion to Islam, his love of Allah and his hatred of the West. He had left the video on a thumb-drive in the care of a trusted friend, who would post it on several fundamentalist websites within minutes of the explosion.

  Bradshaw had sent what remained of the money he had been given to Yusuf’s widow in Baghdad. It did nothing to lessen the guilt he felt, but at least it would make Farrah’s life a little more bearable. He looked over his shoulder at the piles of Calor gas canisters surrounded by cans of petrol. It had taken two dozen trips to bring them into the office, hidden inside a wheeled suitcase. The backblast from the Grail missile would ignite the petrol and the heat would explode the gas cylinders, blowing out a big chunk of the front of the building. It probably wouldn’t be enough to bring the building down, but that didn’t matter. Bradshaw simply wanted to die in a blaze of glory, literally, so that he could take his place in Heaven.

  He was ready. He had made his peace with God and he was dying for a just cause. He had nothing else to live for, nothing else he needed or wanted to do, other than to pull the trigger.

  He took a breath and tightened his finger on the trigger. ‘Allahu akbar,’ he whispered.