Death by Design

by Barbara Nadel

  Wes didn’t much care what Haluk Üner got up to in the sack. As far as he was concerned, Üner was a bit of a knob when it came to counterfeit goods, but otherwise he was a decent guy. He certainly didn’t wish him any harm. But if this old bloke and his posse of creepy men were terrorists then that meant that he himself was probably in danger too. He wondered if Ahmet Ülker knew. The mayor was probably his enemy in a sense but to get back at him using people like this was mad. Behind him now was Williams and that other man in their car, blue lights flashing, sirens going. Wes hoped in a way that he was wrong about this path eventually joining up with Tooley Street. But he knew deep down that he wasn’t. They were going to make it and then he was going to have to think about how he might get the mayor and himself away from these people. What he hadn’t counted on was the fact that CO19 had anticipated what Wes was about to do and were now positioned at the end of the pathway, guns drawn, in front of their car.

  Wesley slammed his foot on the brake and said, yet again, ‘Fucking hell!’

  Only a couple of seconds passed, but because they passed in silence, they seemed to go on forever.

  ‘What are they doing?’ İkmen asked Williams.

  They were out of the car, crouched down behind the boot. The CO19 unit was in front of the Subaru and another armed unit had joined Williams and İkmen behind.

  ‘Probably trying to think their way out of it,’ the superintendent said. ‘They’ve got armed men in front and behind now. They’re boxed in.’

  ‘Superintendent, the men with Nourazar are I think prepared to die for what they believe,’ İkmen said. ‘They could just shoot everyone in that car, blow it up . . .’

  ‘I know, I—’ Williams’ phone began to ring. For a second he listened intently to what was said and then he put the instrument on to speaker. ‘It’s Nourazar,’ he whispered to İkmen.

  ‘This man here tells me your name is Williams,’ Nourazar said.

  ‘Wesley and I go back a long way,’ Superintendent Williams replied. ‘Is he OK?’

  ‘I think so.’ It was said without concern. ‘Mr Williams, we find ourselves in something of a situation, yourselves and us.’

  ‘I think it is only you who is in a situation, Mr Nourazar,’ Williams said. ‘But it isn’t one that cannot be negotiated.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that you need to talk to me about what you want so that I can do what I can to accommodate that.’

  There was a pause and then Nourazar said, ‘Well then. What I would want, superintendent, is to complete my mission and dispose of this sodomite.’

  ‘Sodomite?’

  ‘Mr Üner,’ Nourazar replied. ‘My colleagues and I wish to cleanse the world of such people. That is all we want.’

  Williams exchanged a look with İkmen. The Turk knew this kind of mentality of old. But this situation was not following the usual path taken by religious fanatics.

  ‘Mr Nourazar,’ Williams said, ‘may I speak to Mr Üner, please?’

  ‘Speak to him?’

  ‘I’d like to know that he is all right.’

  A slight shuffling into a pause ended with the voice of Haluk Üner on the line. ‘Superintendent,’ he said. ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Sir—’

  ‘But this man, the driver . . .’ Haluk Üner’s voice wavered. ‘Can you please get him out? He’s terrified—’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Nourazar was back in charge of the phone again. ‘The driver goes nowhere!’ Then suddenly screaming his fury he shouted, ‘Williams, you have thirty minutes to move your cars! In thirty minutes we will blow our vehicle up! All your buildings here will be destroyed!’ Then he cut the connection.

  Williams sighed.

  ‘Well, that makes sense,’ İkmen said.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘If Nourazar were a real suicide bomber he would have blown up the car by now,’ İkmen said. ‘But then we know that he isn’t and so he will not do that. Nourazar wants to get away from all of this to collect his money from Ülker. But he has to kill the mayor to get it. That is what I think.’

  ‘Ahmet Ülker has been brought in for questioning,’ Williams said.

  ‘Then Nourazar must not know that,’ İkmen replied. ‘While he has some hope, he is not as dangerous as he could be. What he would do without that hope, I cannot tell. We know he and his people have guns but we don’t know if they have explosives, do we?’

  ‘No.’

  The sky, which had been clouding over for some time, now gave up its moisture in the form of a thin drizzle. One of the armed officers from the car behind the superintendent’s ran over and squatted down beside Williams.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘the unit at the front can line up the character in the front passenger seat. We’ve got three heads at the rear but we can’t get a proper view. Do you know where the mayor is sitting?’

  Williams looked into the back window of the Subaru and saw three dark-haired heads.

  ‘I imagine Mr Üner must be between his captors, so he is probably in the middle,’ Williams said. ‘But if you’re thinking of taking shots—’

  ‘Only if we have to.’

  ‘You must wait for my command,’ Williams said.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The officer went back to his own car and Williams turned to İkmen and said, ‘I must speak to the acting commissioner.’

  Ahmet Ülker smiled. ‘How the people who work for my wife recruit their machinists, I really don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maxine’s company makes handbags . . .’

  ‘Fake handbags,’ DI Hogarth corrected. ‘My colleagues found dodgy Prada, Gucci and Versace labels when they raided the place. What other treasures, apart from a load of dying Gambian illegals, await us, Ahmet?’

  ‘I am sure I don’t know,’ Ülker replied. ‘You will have to ask Maxine.’

  ‘When we find her.’

  ‘Maxine is the managing director and owner of Yacoubian Industries.’ He smiled again. ‘If you have entered the factories at Hackney Wick then she needs to know.’

  ‘You have no idea where your wife might be?’

  ‘No. I told you. We argued. She left.’

  Ülker was very relaxed. So much so that he had refused to engage legal representation. Everything was in Maxine’s name, after all, and even if the police questioned his foremen, they would only implicate her. The only slight fly in the ointment was the apparent escape of the new security guard Çetin Ertegrul. He had listened in to things that he shouldn’t. Çetin Ertegrul should have been taken care of. But he’d got away and had either gone back to his niece in Stoke Newington or, more worryingly, he had gone to the police. But then he was an illegal. He’d come across the Channel in a lorry courtesy of Wolfgang in Berlin. Unless he was a police informant . . .

  ‘Then there are the fake drugs,’ Hogarth continued.

  Ahmet Ülker looked confused.

  Hogarth looked down at his notes and said, ‘Percodan. Pain control, or not, for arthritis.’

  Ülker shook his head.

  ‘No bells ringing?’ Hogarth smiled. ‘Never mind. I’m sure that our informant will fill in the gaps. He saw you, Mr Ülker, take delivery of a truckload of Percodan driven to Hackney Wick by a scrote called Wesley Simpson.’

  Ahmet Ülker continued to look confused.

  ‘Mr Simpson has numerous convictions for taking and driving, for being an accessory to armed robbery and for being in receipt of stolen goods,’ Hogarth said.

  ‘Who my wife employs . . .’ Ahmet Ülker shrugged.

  Acting Commissioner Dee, who was observing the proceedings from behind the two-way mirror to the left of Hogarth and Ülker, spoke via a microphone into Hogarth’s earpiece. ‘We haven’t got time to indulge in these games,’ he said. ‘Nourazar and his people have the mayor at gunpoint. Tell him about Inspector İkmen. Tell him what the situation is now. Threaten him.’

  DI Hogarth, who was by nature really rather a gentle soul, cleared his throat. ‘All ri
ght, Mr Ülker,’ he said, ‘let’s cut the crap, shall we? We’ve had an informant in your factory, a Turkish police officer. We know from him as well as from the police in İstanbul that you have a business relationship with an Iranian called Hadi Nourazar. Likes to call himself an ayatollah but we know he’s as fake as your handbags. In short, we know that you aided another Iranian, Ali Reza Hajizadeh, to blow up the disused tube station in Mark Lane, taking a train out of commission in the process. We’ve twenty dead so far and over a hundred injured.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that.’ Still calm, Ülker’s face was nevertheless very pale now.

  ‘No. You’re not. You’re no more sorry about that than you are sorry about what Nourazar is doing right this minute,’ Hogarth continued. ‘We know that Mark Lane was only a diversion. Luckily for us, our informant, our Turkish colleague, worked it out. Unfortunately he didn’t manage to do this until Mr Üner the mayor had been kidnapped by the ayatollah and his people. However, we have them trapped.’

  Ahmet Ülker frowned.

  ‘Two CO19 teams have a blue Subaru Impreza sandwiched between them on the Queen’s Walk, on the south bank,’ Hogarth said. ‘Mr Üner, Wesley Simpson, your ayatollah and three of his goons are surrounded.’

  Ülker maintained a tense silence.

  DI Hogarth leaned forward across the table and smiled. ‘We believe,’ he said, ‘that unlike Ali Reza Hajizadeh, Ayatollah Nourazar is not in the business of committing suicide for God or anyone else. He’s in this for money, your money.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘It’s our belief that he still wants to try to get to you to collect his cash. What we need to know is whether he has explosives in that car. He says he does. We think he probably doesn’t. You will know.’ He looked Ülker deep in the eyes and said, ‘So tell me, Mr Ülker, does the ayatollah have explosives with him or not?’

  Chapter 28

  * * *

  Inside the Subaru all was quiet until Haluk Üner said, ‘Did you kidnap me with the intention of killing me?’

  Hadi Nourazar looked at him with an expression of complete contempt on his face.

  The mayor read this as an affirmative response and he said, ‘I thought so. But you should let this driver here go.’

  Wesley Simpson didn’t say a word.

  ‘He obviously didn’t know what you were doing and he’s obviously scared,’ Üner said.

  Neither Nourazar nor any of his three man so much as registered that Üner had spoken. Infuriated by their silence, he said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, let the driver go! Keep me if you must—’

  ‘You are a sodomite!’

  ‘Let the driver go!’ So angry he was almost beyond fear, Haluk Üner spat his words into the ayatollah’s now red and furious face. ‘You keep on saying you’ll kill me! Get on with it!’

  The man on the other side of the mayor jabbed his pistol into the back of Mr Üner’s head. ‘If that is what you want.’

  Haluk Üner froze in terror.

  ‘The time is not yet right!’ the ayatollah warned and motioned for his man to lower his weapon.

  ‘Not—’

  ‘We can still play with the police for a while longer.’

  ‘Yes, but we’re going to kill the sodomite anyway,’ the man sitting next to Wesley at the front said.

  ‘Of course.’ Nourazar looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes had passed and Williams and company had still not done anything. But then moving their cars away would require them to get all sorts of permission from all sorts of people. Besides, Nourazar knew that they wouldn’t do that. Not that this glitch in his plans was actually flooring him. It wasn’t. The police turning up was unfortunate but not necessarily disastrous. If he could get away with the mayor he could still either film himself killing the sodomite and get that evidence to Ahmet Ülker or deliver the man to the Turk in person. He could still collect his money. But some sort of diversion would have to distract the police while he attempted to do that.

  ‘We need to die,’ he said to his men. They all smiled.

  ‘Oh Christ!’ Wesley Simpson muttered under his breath.

  ‘We also need to use the element of surprise,’ Nourazar continued. ‘It is important that they don’t expect what we are about to do.’ He smiled. ‘This is how we do it . . .’

  Superintendent Williams put his mobile phone back in his pocket and said, ‘That was DI Hogarth. Ülker won’t be drawn. According to him everything is down to his absent wife – the knock-off handbags, the ayatollah, the works. Says he doesn’t know whether Nourazar has explosives on him because he says he doesn’t know the man.’

  İkmen frowned. ‘Presumably Inspector Hogarth has now told him about me.’

  ‘Yes,’ Williams replied. ‘But he’s still sticking to his story about his being a mere pawn in his wife’s hands.’

  ‘So where is she?’

  Williams shrugged. ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘She was having an affair with Hajizadeh,’ İkmen said.

  ‘Who is now dead.’

  ‘Do you think Ülker had found out about his wife? Or maybe—’

  Williams’ phone began to ring. He took it out of his pocket and answered. Then he briefly put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to İkmen, ‘It’s Nourazar.’

  For upwards of two minutes Superintendent Williams listened to the words of Hadi Nourazar in silence. Then he said gravely, ‘I have to check this out before I can—’

  What, to İkmen, sounded like a scream of fury from the other end of the line resulted in Williams saying, ‘All right! All right! Five minutes. OK.’ He folded the phone up and looked at İkmen. ‘They want to get out of the car,’ he said. ‘A couple of them want to relieve themselves. I had to agree to it. He was threatening the mayor’s life.’

  İkmen looked dubious. Williams quickly called to the CO19 team behind them and then radioed the team in front so that everyone was aware of what was about to happen. Finally he called Acting Commissioner Dee who said that another armed response unit was on its way to take up position in and around City Hall itself. He accepted that Williams had had little choice but to accede to Nourazar’s demand. For a few minutes everyone just sat or stood and waited.

  Eventually, at exactly five minutes after the end of his call to the superintendent, Hadi Nourazar got out of the left-hand side of the Subaru. The mayor, pulled out roughly and used to cover the Iranian’s body, had a gun pushed very firmly against the side of his head. The two armed men who had been sitting next to Üner in the back of the car got out of the right side and aimed their guns at Williams’ car. Wesley Simpson, too, got out on the right where he was quickly joined by the man who had been sitting next to him in the passenger seat. All of them stood in silence.

  ‘Ahmet, we know that Nourazar was recruiting in your factories both here and abroad with your knowledge,’ DI Hogarth said wearily. ‘We have evidence from the police in Turkey and we had a man in your factories here.’

  ‘Who? Who did you plant in my factory?’

  ‘As I said, a Turkish police officer. Trust me, you would know him,’ Hogarth said.

  ‘Tell me his name!’

  Behind the two-way mirror, Dee spoke into Hogarth’s earpiece. ‘Tell him.’

  ‘Çetin Ertegrul,’ Hogarth said. ‘The man you chained to a bench, beat and cut, whose life you threatened.’

  Ülker, for whom this was not entirely news, sighed. ‘As you know, Mr Hogarth, I am an immigrant here,’ he said. ‘I don’t always understand the rules. My wife, she suggests I do things, act in a certain way. I must be guided by her.’

  Hidden as he was, Dee nevertheless rolled his eyes.

  ‘Nourazar is holding Wesley Simpson and the mayor of London, Mr Üner, hostage,’ Hogarth said. ‘We know that someone with a business like yours is by definition an enemy of Mr Üner. It is our belief that you, maybe with others, contracted Nourazar to kill him. The ayatollah has many misguided followers who don’t seem to understand that he is not so much a cleric as a busine
ssman.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Ülker said and turned his face away from Hogarth.

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, we shall see, won’t we,’ Hogarth said. ‘If Mr Üner is killed we will have to find out why. If a plot was involved then we’ll have to root out who was involved and why. We’ll have to speak to your wife, Mr Ülker, that will be essential. If Mr Üner is not harmed then those involved in any plot will not be punished as severely as they could have been.’ Ahmet Ülker said nothing. Hogarth sighed. ‘But the bottom line is that Çetin Ertegrul gathered a lot of information against you, things he saw and experienced directly. We know that you unleashed Hajizadeh to blow up Mark Lane. We know that you allowed Nourazar to recruit and we very strongly suspect you did all of this in order to kill a man who would have brought your business down.’

  Still Ülker said nothing.

  ‘Ahmet, if you help us to capture Nourazar and free the mayor—’

  ‘I think now that your stories about me are getting so crazy, I need a lawyer,’ Ahmet Ülker said. ‘Get me a lawyer now, will you, please.’

  Behind the two-way mirror, Acting Commissioner Dee sat down and put his head in his hands.

  All over the city, sirens blared as ambulances took the wounded and the dead to various hospitals. The whole of London seemed alive with the practicalities, the fury, the grief and the horror of the event that had taken place at the old Mark Lane tube station. Everywhere people talked, helped where they could and sometimes just looked on helplessly when there was nothing else to do. The only exception to this was the area around City Hall. This cordoned-off portion of the city was as still and silent as the dead.

  Superintendent Williams knew the term ‘Mexican stand-off’. It was the situation where two gunmen had their weapons aimed at each other, creating a kind of stalemate. Why it was called a Mexican stand-off, he didn’t know. But what he and his men were facing now appeared to be much the same. For almost five minutes Nourazar and his three men had faced the armed police officers – two of them looking towards Williams, their weapons out in front of them, and a third facing the CO19 team, his gun aimed at Wesley Simpson’s head. Nourazar, one arm round the mayor’s neck, his weapon pointed at his head, stood to one side. No one had as yet made any attempt to relieve himself. Williams, though tense, was very calm and very patient, waiting to hear what might be asked, what might be done.