Gray Vengeance

by Alan McDermott

The tall Dutchman stood in the middle of the bedsit, having long ago decided how he was going to bow out. He held his pistol in a two-handed grip, aiming a couple of feet above the doorknob. It was a tense time, waiting for them to get into position, but when the battering ram sent the door flying inwards, he began emptying the magazine into the hallway. His first shot hit a black-clad figure in the chest, knocking him backwards, while the second and third found empty space.

  Before he could get a fourth shot off, a cluster of bullets peppered his chest, and Houtman died knowing that he’d taken at least one of the bastards with him.

  His only regret was that he would never get to see the outcome of his revolution, which he knew would be remembered for centuries.

  When the text message roused Ed Conran from his sleep, he was tempted to ignore it. It was only as he became more awake that he remembered what he’d taken part in over the previous twenty-four hours, and he knew that it must be urgent if he was being contacted at such an awful hour.

  He picked up the phone and saw the caller ID, which immediately set alarm bells ringing. When he opened the message, his fears were confirmed.

  How the police had got on to them so quickly was the first question to jump into his head, but he cast it aside as he threw on his clothes. He checked the window and saw nothing in the street below, but he knew it was only a matter of time. The code word meant Houtman was in trouble, and if the Dutchman was already in custody, it wouldn’t be long before they got what they needed from him.

  The British justice system worked on the presumption of innocence—and that was fine in the vast majority of cases—but with the continuing attacks, Conran knew the gloves would come off. Their handlers in Nigeria had warned them that being caught wouldn’t necessarily mean a comfortable cell with three meals a day and satellite television. The chances of the police accepting ‘no comment’ as answers to their questions were equally remote. Instead, they could expect to be on the receiving end of whatever interrogation tricks the US had kindly shared with the British government.

  Conran toyed with the small capsule in his jeans pocket. He’d hoped he would never have to use it, planning instead to slip out of the country in the next few days as transportation slowly got back to normal. That now seemed highly unlikely, especially if Houtman were to name him. His only hope was to get to the port on the south coast and pray the Dutchman held out long enough for him to board a ferry for mainland Europe.

  The rest of his devices were set on timers, so they would go off regardless, and with nothing else to hold him back, he checked the window once more. The street was still quiet. He went through to the kitchen to check the back, but again it was all as it should be at four in the morning.

  He put his laptop in a backpack, then left the third floor flat, leaving the phone on the bedside table. If Houtman gave them his number, it would be child’s play to track him down, and it wasn’t as if he had anyone else to call.

  His footsteps sounded like cannon fire on the stone steps, the noise echoing throughout the building, but the last thing he cared about was annoying the neighbours. At the front door, he scanned the area through the glass and, satisfied he was clear, walked out into the cold December darkness.

  Chapter 23

  16 December 2014

  Andrew Harvey was mid-way through his third coffee in an hour when Ellis called with updates on the raids.

  ‘We took one down,’ she told him, ‘but the other was gone before we arrived. It looks like he was warned.’

  ‘Warned?’

  ‘We identified the first one as Erik Houtman, a Dutch national. It seems his last text messages were sent a couple of minutes before SO15 shot him.’

  ‘Did they have to take him down?’ Harvey asked. ‘He would have been more useful alive.’

  ‘They appreciate that, but when they burst in he opened fire. One officer was hit, but his vest saved him. Houtman wasn’t so lucky.’

  ‘Who were the messages sent to?’

  ‘One turned up on the phone the kid claimed to have found. The other was to suspect number three, but he’d skipped by the time SO15 got there.’

  Harvey raised his eyebrows at that. ‘I’m surprised they weren’t synchronised raids. That’s pretty standard operating procedure.’

  ‘In normal circumstances, yes, but the second team got caught up in some trouble on the way, and the commander of the first unit decided to go in. Not the best decision he’s ever made.’

  Bit of an understatement, Harvey thought. ‘Okay, what’s done is done. Get them to enter the code word and I’ll see if it links these guys to the attacks elsewhere.’

  Ellis promised to pass the message on, and Harvey went to get a decaf while he waited for the feed to begin. When he returned to his station, the screen was still empty, so he dug into Erik Houtman’s file to look for known associates. There weren’t very many, but he needed more information to narrow things down. He logged into the Customs and Excise database and checked Houtman’s travel logs for the last three years. The only entries were a flight to Nigeria in March and the return journey five months later.

  Harvey printed out the passenger lists for both trips, but the only one to have been on both planes was Houtman. He then checked both lists against Houtman’s known associates, and came up with two matches on the outbound flight. A quick check of their movements showed that they’d returned from Nigeria within eighteen hours of the Dutchman, each taking a separate flight.

  Why would you three spend so much time in DSA country?

  He called Ellis with the news. ‘I’m sending over photos of the other two suspects. Their names are Paul Roberts and Edward James Conran. Ask Hamad to circulate them to all forces. Also, show them to the kid and see if either is familiar. We need to know where he got that phone so we can narrow down the search area.’

  ‘Will do. By the way, they entered the code word onto Houtman’s phone and the data should be coming down soon. Unfortunately, his laptop was password protected.’

  ‘Hang on.’ Harvey called Bryant over and asked if the keyword list would pick up something entered as a password to unlock a device.

  ‘Yes, it will. It is one of the first programs to run when you hit the power button.’

  Harvey passed that on to Ellis. ‘Tell them to try tango alpha elephant as the password. It’ll fail, but it should trigger the download. That’s tango alpha elephant. All one word, remember.’

  Harvey hung up and toggled screens to see the latest data dump. He ordered the information so that it showed Houtman’s records first, then filtered for phone numbers. After checking for overseas numbers and finding none, he copied the forty-plus entries and sent them to Susie’s terminal with a request to check them all out. What he was hoping to find were calls to mobile phones outside the London area, but if these men were truly acting as independent cells, then it was unlikely they’d get any leads that way.

  With that job delegated, he changed the filter to order by website URLs. He knew the cells must be communicating with someone, somewhere, and through a website would be the obvious choice. He’d seen it before, when he’d helped to take down James Farrar . . . .

  The thought of his old nemesis brought Sarah back to mind. Since she’d arrived at Thames House all those months ago, she’d been colder than an Arctic winter, yet in the last twenty-four hours, since the attacks started, she’d thawed somewhat. Perhaps it was the fruitless efforts to locate Farrar that had forged her demeanour, and now that she was able to concentrate on other matters, he was beginning to see the other side of her, the real Sarah Thompson.

  When they’d retreated upstairs hours earlier, she’d been polite, chatty even. Harvey would have pressed her for a more in-depth background history, but once she’d begun yawning he’d decided it could wait.

  It hadn’t stopped him admiring her figure, though. They’d both been offered soap and other toilet
ries, and he’d watched Thompson brush her teeth over the sink, marvelling at her sleek lines. He guessed she worked out, or at least ran a fair distance each week. Perhaps both, given the shape of her legs under the tight pants.

  Harvey realised that he was letting his mind wander. He was already halfway down the list of URLs and hadn’t been concentrating on any of them, so he scrolled back to the top and forced himself to focus on something more than his colleague’s physique.

  He couldn’t help looking over at her, though. She was at a desk ten feet away, peering intently at her computer screen. As if sensing his gaze, she caught his eye, locked her terminal and walked over to him.

  Harvey’s terminal bleeped as she reached him.

  ‘Read that,’ Thompson said, and she placed a hand on his shoulder as she stood beside him.

  Harvey’s heart skipped a half-dozen beats at the surprise contact. He tried to keep his mind on the message, which Thompson explained had come through from Six.

  21:34:07 2014-12-15 Kano, Nigeria

  Eight senior members of DSA suspected dead after an explosion in Kano, northern Nigeria. Eye-witnesses say the house off Sani Buhari Road belonging to Abdul Al Karam was completely destroyed, along with four neighbouring properties. Vehicle said to belong to their leader, Takasa, found outside the building. Takasa himself assumed to be among the dead.

  Further casualties include three children and seven women. Sixteen others still unaccounted for.

  End

  ‘Looks like someone did us a favour,’ Thompson said. ‘No more DSA to distract us, at least for a good while. Now we can focus on rounding up these cells.’

  Harvey turned his head to face her. ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit premature? Okay, I agree that the priority is to round up the cells here and put an end to these attacks. But we also need to look into this bombing. What if there was a split inside DSA? What if our attacks were planned by the same faction that just bombed the group’s leaders?’

  Thompson removed her hand from his shoulder and took a step back. ‘That’s a matter for the top brass. You just concentrate on the data,’ she said coldly, back to her usual austere self.

  She strolled back to her own desk, leaving Harvey to wonder what he’d done to upset her this time. Was it that she hated being second-guessed? Maybe she was bipolar.

  Whatever it was, it didn’t stop him watching her walk away.

  Chapter 24

  16 December 2014

  Ed Conran pulled the collar on his jacket up to protect the back of his neck from the chill breeze. With his hands thrust deep into his pockets, he cut an abject figure as he walked the back streets.

  How they’d found out about the cell was anyone’s guess. Perhaps it had been a CCTV camera that had been unaffected by the power cuts they’d created, or a vigilant eye-witness. Whatever the reason, he had to get to the south coast as quickly as possible.

  In his pocket were three hundred pounds in cash, plus the now-useless pre-paid credit card. If the authorities were on to him, they would be checking for any transactions, and the last thing he wanted to do was leave a trail.

  Or did he?

  Conran had been walking for more than an hour, distancing himself from the phone as fast as he could. Ahead he saw a convenience store that was just opening. He went inside and found a small roll of masking tape and a cheap ballpoint pen.

  ‘Have the newspapers come in yet?’ he asked the shopkeeper.

  ‘Not yet, and I’m not hopeful. Those bombings have closed the streets down. Nothing’s getting delivered. I hope they string the bastards up when they catch them.’

  ‘That’s if they take any of them alive.’

  Conran paid, left, and found a deserted alley where he could work uninterrupted. He tore off a small strip of the tape and stuck it to the back of the credit card, then wrote the pin number on the waxy surface. He then removed the cash from his wallet and put the card back in.

  His intention was to leave the wallet lying around in the hope that someone picked it up and used the card, thereby diverting the authorities away from him when the transaction was detected. He knew there was always the chance that the finder might be honest and hand it in to the nearest police station, but in this area he thought it unlikely.

  From the alley he could see the shop he’d just visited, and after ten minutes of waiting he saw what he was looking for. A teenager arrived to do his paper round, and when the boy went into the shop, Conran quickly mounted the bicycle that had been left outside. Pedalling ferociously, he rounded a corner and was out of sight by the time the kid came out of the shop, short a day’s pay because there was nothing to deliver, and now minus one mountain bike.

  Conran quickly put some distance between himself and the shop, then slowed to a more sedate pace to avoid drawing attention to himself.

  After stopping to withdraw his maximum daily amount from the credit card, he headed southwest, taking the route he’d planned out weeks ago. Once onto the A3, it was roughly seventy miles to Portsmouth Harbour, where he could catch a ferry to France. Not a particularly gruelling ride, considering the years he’d spent in the saddle, and he reckoned he could make it to the coast within seven hours, barring accidents.

  Once on the continent, his first port of call would be Gare de Lyon. In a luggage locker at the Parisian railway station, he had fifteen hundred in cash squirrelled away for just this moment. That should be enough to get him to southern Spain, where it was a short ferry ride across to Morocco. Once on the African continent he could disappear.

  As he passed a group of hooded kids who were rummaging around inside a broken shop window, Conran threw his wallet towards them, hoping that one of them would see it and occupy the police for a little while at least. They wouldn’t be able to use the card until the following day, but that would keep everyone searching for him in the capital, by which time he should be well on his way to Barcelona at the very least.

  It all depended on Houtman holding out against interrogation.

  Conran turned onto the A3 twenty minutes later and instantly tensed. Up ahead he saw several uniformed personnel organising the removal of vehicles from the street. Soldiers and police mingled as tow trucks worked to clear the road of abandoned cars.

  Conran tried to maintain his cool as he cycled towards them, but when a policeman put a hand out to halt him, he thought the game was up. He stopped, frantically searching his mind for the next move, and was relieved to see the officer wave a hand to a tow truck driver, giving him the go-ahead.

  Conran tried to wait patiently, watching a saloon car being dragged up a ramp and onto a flatbed, but he couldn’t keep his eyes from darting to the policeman. His behaviour didn’t go unnoticed. The officer began to take an interest in him and walked over slowly.

  Stay cool, Conran warned himself.

  ‘Morning, sir. Where are you heading today?’

  ‘Wimbledon,’ Conran said. ‘I couldn’t get home last night because of all the trouble on the streets.’

  ‘You don’t seem dressed for a bike ride,’ the policeman observed.

  ‘No, I borrowed this from the guy I stayed with. I wasn’t sure if the Tube was running today, and I have to get home to my wife and kids.’

  ‘It looks a bit small for you.’

  ‘It was all he had,’ Conran said with a shrug.

  The car had been successfully loaded onto the truck, and the officer’s colleague whistled over to him, indicating that it was safe for Conran to continue his journey.

  ‘On you go, then.’

  ‘Thanks, Officer. Hope you catch these scumbags,’ Conran said as he pedalled away. He resisted the urge to look back, concentrating solely on burning up the miles between London and the ferry terminal.

  The confrontation had him rattled, though. He hadn’t factored in police helping to clear the main roads, and he decided that once h
e reached the outskirts of the capital he would stick to the minor roads. He’d already memorised the three major towns he had to pass through: after hitting Guildford he would follow signs for Godalming and then Petersfield, which lay some seventeen miles from his destination.

  Conran looked back but saw no sign of pursuit. If only his luck could hold out a few hours more . . . .

  Chapter 25

  16 December 2014

  Paul Roberts was already awake when he heard the quiet knock.

  His first instinct was to reach for his gun, and he carried it to the door, peering out of the spyhole. He’d expected to see swathes of armed police, but standing in the dark corridor was a man he hadn’t seen for many months.

  Someone he hadn’t expected to see again.

  He opened the door and let Efram in.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  The visitor adjusted his wool cap, which covered his hair, giving the impression that he was bald. ‘I tried calling, but it seems your phone is no longer with you.’

  Roberts explained about his altercation the previous evening. ‘How did you know I was staying here?’

  Efram laughed. ‘Paul, do you really think we would just give you the training and a bundle of cash and let you get on with it? I’ve been watching you, and I like what I’ve seen so far. I just want to make sure you’re ready for the final act.’

  ‘You don’t need to worry,’ Roberts said. ‘I’ve already scoped out the target. I’ll be heading over there soon.’

  ‘You sure? You look a little nervous.’

  ‘I’m fine. I just didn’t expect visitors at this hour.’

  In truth, Roberts was more than apprehensive. He’d had time to learn a lot about his target over the last five months, and the prospect of taking his man down was daunting, to say the least. Still, it was all part of the master plan, though how his target fitted in only Efram would know.