‘I want a doctor. That bitch—’
Gray cut him off by raising the pistol and shooting him in the bridge of the right foot.
‘Now,’ Gray said, clamping a hand over the man’s mouth to suppress the screams, ‘I don’t expect you want me to lose my patience again. What’s your name?’
‘Paul,’ the man gritted out between moans of agony. ‘Paul Roberts.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘I . . . I was trying to rob the place.’
Gray ejected the clip and studied the magazine before inserting it back in the butt of the pistol. ‘I have seven more accidents waiting to happen, Paul. Don’t make me empty this.’
From the fading light in Roberts’s eyes, Gray knew that the message had been received. The man was fresh out of fight.
‘Again, who sent you?’
‘His name’s Efram,’ Roberts spat. ‘He told me to take care of you and the girl.’
‘Efram who?’
‘I don’t know. He never said.’
Gray raised the gun and aimed at Roberts’s right kneecap.
‘I swear, I don’t know!’
‘You’re not convincing me,’ Gray said, his voice devoid of emotion.
‘Tom! What are you doing?’
Gill was standing by the kitchen door, a look of horror on her face.
‘I told you to stay in the living room with Melissa,’ Gray said. ‘This doesn’t concern you.’
‘I . . . I just wanted to let you know that Len’s here.’
‘Let him in,’ Gray said, moving towards the kitchen door, the gun never wavering from Roberts.
Gill went to the front door and hit the buzzer to open the gates, then waited for Smart to reach the door before she opened it for him. Gray watched her whispering something, and Smart marched down the hallway. He took in the situation, then dragged Gray over to the oven.
‘Do you really think this is wise, after what we’ve just been through?’
‘He came here to kill me and Melissa,’ Gray said. ‘He took a shot at Gill. What am I supposed to do? Give him a packed lunch and send him on his way?’
‘You’re supposed to call the police and let them deal with it,’ Smart said quietly.
‘I may be wrong,’ Gray told Smart, ‘but I don’t think this is a random looter who chose my house.’
‘Tom’s right,’ said Gill from the doorway to the dining room, Melissa still cradled in her arms. ‘He asked where Tom was, and he was looking for the baby. He knew . . . everything.’
Gray nodded. ‘See? Someone sent him here to kill us. If I don’t find out who, they’ll just send someone else. The police can’t make him talk, but I can.’
Smart sighed, and Gray knew he’d made his point. ‘Give me five minutes,’ Gray murmured, ‘then we’ll call the police.’
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Smart said. He gave a whispered set of instructions that brought a small smile to Gray’s face, then went over to speak to the bound man.
‘Listen, buddy, I don’t know if you’re aware who this man is, but he has a history of not taking kindly to people going after his family.’ Smart looked over at Gray, who’d gone into the utility room and could be seen emptying the large chest freezer. ‘As far as Tom’s concerned, you were never here. The police don’t know a thing about it. Only the person who sent you knows. And as far as they’re concerned, you failed and disappeared.’
Gray returned to the kitchen with a handful of strong plastic bags and a hand saw and placed them on the table. He then went to the drawer and pulled out a long knife, which he began honing with a whetstone.
‘I reckon you’ve got about two minutes to tell him everything. If you do, I’ll try to convince him to call the police so that your injuries can be treated. If not . . . .’
Smart let the words trail off and walked over to Gray to give the man time to think about the proposal.
‘Okay!’ Roberts said quickly. ‘Okay.’
Gray walked over with his smart phone in his hand. After a few taps, he had the voice recorder running, and he placed the phone on the table.
‘I want to know who Efram is, how you met him, how much he paid you, everything. Start from the very beginning.’
Smart and Gray watched for signs of deceit, but as Roberts told his story, starting with the meeting with Efram at the beginning of the year, they knew he was telling the truth. As the tale progressed to include the training camp in Nigeria and the skills he’d been taught, they began to realise exactly what they were dealing with.
‘You’re saying you were behind these attacks?’ Smart interrupted.
Roberts lowered his head before offering a slight nod. ‘Not just me, though. There—’
Before Smart could stop him, Gray sent a roundhouse to Roberts’s face, almost dislocating his jaw.
‘You bombed hospitals?’ Gray shouted, incredulous. ‘I was there when one went off yesterday. Do you realise how many women and children you killed?’
Smart grabbed Gray by the shoulders and dragged him away. ‘That’s enough, Tom. Go and call Andrew and let him know what we’ve got.’
Gray was still seething and not in the mood to back off. ‘I want to know who’s behind this.’
‘I don’t know!’ Roberts said. ‘I only met Efram twice, but the orders to kill you came from the colonel at the camp. His name was Mitchell.’
Gray and Smart searched their mental databases, but the name wasn’t familiar.
‘Describe them both,’ Gray said.
‘Mitchell was early fifties, buzz-cut hairdo, about your height,’ Roberts said. ‘Efram was a little shorter, with short, black hair in a side parting. Looks like a government type. He came round this morning to remind me to do this job.’
None of the descriptions rang any specific bells, though Mitchell sounded like seventy percent of the officers they knew.
‘Tom,’ Smart said quietly. ‘Go and call Andrew. Now. He needs to know about this.’
Gray stepped away and let his shoulders slump, consciously draining the deadly tension from his body. He turned, dug in his pocket for Harvey’s new number, then dialled.
Chapter 26
16 December 2014
Andrew Harvey almost jumped out of his chair when he came across the tell-tale website URL in amongst the porn and social media dross. Rather than a human-readable series of words, it used the IP address and port number:
http://10.179.161.58:10038
Harvey quickly typed it into a new browser and wasn’t disappointed to find only a box ready to accept a password. He knew it would be useless trying to guess the entry code, but then, he didn’t need to.
He called Bryant over and shared his discovery.
‘I’m not sure how long it will take to crack it,’ the NSA man said. ‘Our team’s not geared up for that kinda thing. I can pass it on to Fort Meade, though.’
‘No need,’ Harvey told him. ‘All we need is a list of everyone who visited that site. Can you empty out the keyword list and just use this URL? That way, we can do away with all the extraneous crap.’
‘Consider it done,’ Bryant said, ‘though there are a few keywords that never leave the list. Don’t worry, they won’t interfere with your search. Those results get fed elsewhere.’
‘I’m intrigued.’
‘Don’t be,’ Bryant told him. ‘It’s just the name of the project and a couple of things to do with POTUS: Air Force One, The White House, that kinda thing.’
The smile told Harvey that Bryant was lying, but this wasn’t the time to push it. He needed an ally right now, not an enemy. Not when they were so close.
Bryant disappeared with the URL, and by the time Harvey had poured another cup of decaf and grabbed some bread and cold meats from the kitchen, the dump had begun. He went over to Susie’s desk and asked if sh
e could once again pinpoint each device on the map.
Within minutes, she had a visual representation on her monitor.
‘Thanks, Susie. If you could send the IDs and location of each one over to my station, that would be great.’
Harvey was about to leave when the map on Susie’s screen expanded. Where before it had displayed just the United Kingdom, it now showed the entire northern hemisphere.
‘What’s this one?’ Harvey asked, pointing to an icon in west-central Africa.
Susie zoomed in, and he could see that the location was marked as Kano, Nigeria. A perfect fit with the DSA angle. He decided to work that himself and pass on the UK-based suspects to Ellis so that she could disseminate the information to local forces.
Back at his desk, he jotted down the African cell phone number, then called Ellis. ‘It looks like we got them all.’ He explained what they’d found as he copied the details into an internal message, which he pinged to her inbox. ‘Any news on Roberts and Conran?’
‘No,’ Ellis sighed, ‘but we can’t end this soon enough. We’re getting reports of car bombs from Brighton to Durham, with many fatalities. What little CCTV footage we have suggests the vehicles were parked days ago and primed to go off this morning.’
‘Jesus.’ Harvey rubbed his eyes wearily.
‘It gets worse. They used some kind of remote-controlled drones to target police stations during the shift handover. These things dropped napalm-based incendiary devices onto station roofs, and a lot of forces have had to relocate. No injuries as yet, but it slows down their response time even further.’
‘Then let’s start bringing them in,’ Harvey said. ‘Sarah is already liaising with the force commanders around the country. Since we have real-time feeds on the devices’ locations, it should be relatively easy for the local police to bring all the cell members in.’
‘We also got news that someone else called the phone that was found by the boy. We’ve got police following it up.’
‘Send me the number,’ Harvey told her. ‘We’ll run it with all the others.’
Ellis promised to do so and ended the call, and Harvey wondered just how far this would have gone if it hadn’t been for Brigandicuum. They might have still picked up the London cell owing to the remnants of the bomb that hadn’t detonated properly, but they certainly wouldn’t have had the other two hundred or so players dotted around the country.
For all the surveillance technology’s good points, though, he still knew it was trouble waiting to happen.
He turned his attention back to the signal in Nigeria, but before he could delve any deeper, his phone rang.
‘Andrew, it’s Tom.’
‘About time, too! What the hell have you been up to? I hear you killed someone.’
‘That’s the least of your worries,’ Gray said. ‘Does the name Paul Roberts mean anything to you?’
Hearing the name from Gray stunned him, and he fought to keep his voice under control.
‘Yes, it does. Have you seen him?’
‘Better than that,’ Gray said. ‘He’s sitting in my kitchen.’
As Andrew Harvey powered the Honda towards the outskirts of London, his mind was awash with questions, not the least of which was How the hell did Tom Gray get involved in this?
It wasn’t as though Gray went looking for trouble—not in recent years, at least—but it certainly had a way of seeking him out. It now appeared that the rioting that had been concentrated around Gray’s office had been more than coincidence. What the link was, though, he didn’t yet know. Gray hadn’t given too much away on the phone, just the fact that Roberts was being restrained in his home and that Harvey should be the one to collect him.
That idea hadn’t sat well with Thompson. She’d wanted to send in a whole team, but Harvey had managed to convince her that going against Gray’s request would result in a lack of co-operation. After venting her anger, she’d finally relented, though she had insisted on keeping a team waiting on standby for his word.
He pulled the motorcycle up to the gates of Gray’s house and they swung open immediately. Len Smart was waiting at the open front door, and he let Harvey in, leading him through to the kitchen where Gray and Sonny Baines were watching over a man sitting on a wooden chair.
‘What happened to his foot?’ One shoe was off, and a blood-stained bandage was wrapped around the appendage.
‘I’ll let him answer that,’ Gray said, looking at Roberts. ‘Paul, this is Andrew Harvey, MI5.’
Roberts demanded to see ID, and once Harvey flashed his badge, he became suddenly animated. ‘He shot me!’ Roberts said, pointing at Gray. ‘He strapped me to a chair and shot me in the foot! It wasn’t an accident!’
Harvey looked at Gray, who offered him a non-committal shrug. Sonny followed suit.
Harvey walked over to stand in front of Roberts. He looked down at the injured foot, then stood on it, putting as much weight on it as he could.
‘I’d say you got off lightly,’ Harvey said above the screams.
‘I demand you take me to the hospital.’
‘Not gonna happen,’ Harvey said. ‘I’ve got a team waiting to take you to a safe house, where you’ll be questioned.’
‘I want to go to a police station,’ Roberts said, but Harvey ignored him and turned to Gray.
‘Has he said anything to you?’
Gray played the recording he’d made, and it tallied with some of the information Harvey already had. There was still a lot more to learn, though, and he called Thompson and had her send in the unit she’d assembled. He also asked her to check on the number Ellis had given him earlier, apologising for not having told her before he left Haddon Hall. ‘It slipped my mind when Gray said he had Roberts, and it could be one of the big players.’
While they waited, Roberts made more demands. The recording, he said, had been made while under duress, and was the result of torture.
‘If you think that was torture,’ Sonny smiled, ‘then you’d shrivel at the thought of what I could do in just five minutes with a pair of bolt cutters.’
Further claims came and fell on deaf ears, but when Roberts argued that his human rights were being breached, Harvey thought Gray was going to lose it.
‘What about my daughter’s right not to be murdered in her own home by a fucking whack-job?’ Gray had his hands around Roberts’s throat before anyone could react, and it took all three of them to prise him off.
Harvey led Gray out of the kitchen and into the hallway. ‘Tom, you need to calm down.’
‘Yeah? And what about you? You’re always so ‘by the book’, yet I saw you stomp on his foot.’
‘I wasn’t the one who put a bullet in it,’ Harvey reminded him. ‘Now, did he tell you anything else, anything not on the recording?’
‘Nothing,’ Gray said. ‘I asked him who’s behind all this, but he says he doesn’t know.’
‘I believe him,’ Harvey said, and explained how the attacks looked to have been carried out by independent cells in each major town and city. ‘So far, it all points back to Nigeria, but we just heard that an explosion wiped out DSA’s entire leadership last night.’
‘Really?’
‘Apparently,’ Harvey told him. ‘The Nigerian government are saying they took themselves out with their own munitions.’
Gray looked confused. ‘Then why did this Efram character turn up to make sure Roberts completed the hit on me?’
Harvey thought about it. ‘Perhaps he hadn’t heard about the explosion, and was carrying out his most recent orders.’
‘Possibly,’ Gray admitted, ‘but I’d like to be kept in the loop, since Melissa and I are the ones being targeted. And when you find this Efram guy, I want to know why.’
Harvey promised to do what he could, and a beep at the door announced the arrival of the escort team. Gray buzzed them in t
hrough the gates, and two men in leather jackets climbed out of the black SUV when it pulled up outside the house.
Gray let them in and showed them through to the kitchen, and asked that they carry Roberts out rather than have him trail blood through the house. The men agreed, but the prisoner wasn’t going quietly. He called for the police, clearly terrified of the intelligence operatives taking possession of him. He thrashed about as they tried to lift him from the chair, and blood splattered everywhere, crimson droplets covering worktops, cupboards and the floor. Gray intervened and punched Roberts in the sternum, knocking the wind and, ultimately, the fight out of him.
As Roberts was carried out to the vehicle, Smart took the gun from Sonny and handed it to Harvey. One small piece of evidence from a colossal crime.
‘I’m concerned about Melissa,’ Gray told Harvey as he prepared to leave. ‘Are we going to get some sort of protection until this is over?’
‘I’ll arrange to have a man watch the house,’ Harvey said. ‘It would also be a good idea to ask Len and Sonny to hang around for a while.’
‘How about some weapons? The police have ours.’
Harvey put a hand on Gray’s shoulder. ‘We’re hours away from taking this entire terrorist operation down. Trust me, you won’t need any.’
Police Constable Gareth Benson was relieved to finally finish his shift, one that had started at eight the previous evening. Twelve hours later, with aching feet and a hunger to kill for, he walked back to the station to change and clock off.
He’d heard over the radio that there had been a fire on the roof of the building, but thankfully it hadn’t caught and had been quickly extinguished by one of the army Green Goddess tenders that had been rolled out to help the city’s fire services. As he neared the station, he could see the charred tiles on the corner of the roof, and was glad they’d been able to put it out before it did serious damage. Other forces, he’d heard, hadn’t been so lucky.
His radio crackled and he took a forces-wide bulletin announcing the name of one of the suspects still believed to be at large. The name was Edward James Conran, and further details followed.
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