by Tony Park
Occasionally, when SO15 was stretched thin – such as now – Tom was called on to lend a hand with surveillance or other specialist tasks now out of the remit of a protection officer. The threat level against the UK had recently been upped, as a result of an increased troop presence in Afghanistan, and resources were stretched thin.
Harry, too, was a protection officer, though unlike under the old Special Branch structure he was neither experienced in surveillance nor a qualified detective. He’d only been out of uniform six months. It was a sign of the times.
‘Do you expect me to piss my pants, Tom?’
‘Shut it,’ Tom hissed back at Harry. He spoke softly but clearly and slowly into his radio: ‘All call signs, two targets moving. Heading left, towards the high street. Usual clothing. I have eyeball. Four-two, they’re heading your way, over.’ Tom repeated the direction of movement so there could be no confusion among the other call signs in the area – a mix of police and MI5 intelligence service personnel – about where the two young Pakistani men were heading. Four-two was the code name for an undercover policeman on a motorcycle, Detective Constable Paul Davis in this case, who was currently at the end of the suburban side street, where it met Enfield Road.
Harry was quiet now and Tom could almost smell the sudden burst of adrenaline in the dank confines of the surveillance van.
Three hundred metres away, down the end of the road, around the corner from the off-licence, was a kebab shop. It was the habit of the two targets to walk to the eatery between seven-thirty and eight pm each evening to buy their supper and sit down at the laminate-topped tables in the padded booth seating to eat. With kebabs, Cokes and tea and cigarettes to follow, the meal usually took two hours, according to the other watchers.
Tom spoke into the hand-held radio again. ‘Four-two, I’ve lost eyeball, do you have them, over?’
‘Roger. They’re on their way to dinner, over. Heading for the shop,’ Paul said.
Tom radioed the constable who had driven the van on to the plot – the location of the operation – and told him to come and pick them up. The officer, who had been watching television and drinking numerous cups of tea with an elderly couple who lived ten doors away from the target house, walked up the street. He wore blue tradesman’s overalls and carried a canvas tool bag. He climbed into the van without acknowledging the others in the back, started the engine and drove away from the high street, around a bend and out of sight of number fourteen.
‘Right, let’s go,’ Tom said, when the driver switched off the engine.
The back door of the van swung open and Tom, Steve the Anorak and Harry, who seemed to have forgotten his bursting bladder, climbed out.
‘Not too fast, now,’ Tom said. He looked up and down the street, which was deserted.
Tom wore jeans and a thick black roll-neck jumper, with a duffel coat over the top. It was cold out, a chilly November evening, but the jacket’s other purpose was to conceal his weapon. He carried a tool bag, though, like the driver’s, it was more for show than anything else. The tools of his trade for this job – his set of lock picks – were in his pocket.
Tom led them back up the street, then along a side path to the semi’s back door. Within three minutes they were inside. He didn’t need to tell the other two to be quick or quiet, but he reminded Harry, ‘You stay here and watch the back. I’ll go with our friend.’
The house smelled musty and unloved. He checked the kitchen. Tea bags and a kettle, no plates in the sink or evidence of home cooking. These boys ate out every night and their routine would be their undoing. With more people, more resources, they could have conducted a detailed search of the house, but tonight they had the Anorak, so the computer was their highest priority, and protecting the information technology expert was Tom’s.
He took up position in the front room, peering through a crack in the curtains so he could watch the front street for activity.
The computer was in the front room as well, on a cheap flat-pack desk. Apart from the machine and the second-hand office chair in which the Anorak sat, was a tatty velvet couch and a mismatched armchair.
Tom glanced back over his shoulder and saw Steve’s pimply young face bathed in a blue glow as he booted up the computer. Fingers encased in latex gloves tapped furiously at the keyboard. He heard a dog bark and the hairs stood up on the back of his neck. ‘Everything okay back there?’ he radioed Harry.
‘Dunno. Something’s spooked the dog in the yard behind us. Should I go take a look?’
‘No, stay where you are, but keep watch.’
‘Fuck,’ the Anorak said. ‘You should see this.’
‘What is it?’ Tom asked, his eyes still on the street.
‘Porn!’
Tom shook his head. ‘Bloody hell. Just get on with it, will you. You know what we’re after – emails, names, message traffic. I shouldn’t have to tell you your job.’
‘No, but, Jesus, you should see this. It’s some sick shit, man.’
Tom was about to say something when Paul Davis’s voice hissed in his ear. ‘This is Four-two. Targets are turning back. Just walked into the shop then came straight back out again. There’s an argument going on, by the look of it, and one of them is searching his jacket. Looks like he might have forgotten his wallet. Repeat, they’re heading back.’
‘Shit,’ Tom said. He looked over at Steve, who stared fixedly at the screen. Tom noticed, for the first time, the black leather billfold on the computer table.
‘Shut it down, we’re going.’
‘But this is gold!’
‘Leave the fucking porn alone and close down. They’re on their way back, so we’re moving.’
‘No way, man, we can’t leave this. I’m taking it with me. This is more than just porn.’
Tom shook his head. This was turning into a monumental fuck-up. ‘You know as well as I do we can’t nick the computer. Can’t you save whatever it is onto a disk or something?’
Steve fumbled in the pocket of his overcoat and fished out a USB jump stick.
‘Movement!’ Tom heard the word in his earpiece and drew the Glock from his holster with practised ease. He kept a spare magazine of bullets in the right-hand pocket of his jacket so that when he reached for his pistol the added weight helped swing the tail of the duffel out of the way.
‘What is it?’
‘I thought I saw a man’s head, moving along number twelve’s side fence, on the other side,’ Harry answered.
‘Keep a watch. But get ready to move. The targets are on their way back.’
‘Shit.’ Harry drew his weapon.
A dog barked and Tom’s peripheral vision registered lights being turned on in neighbouring homes. A baby screamed in the house next door, through the communal wall. It was a good reminder there were innocents all around them.
‘We’re going.’ Tom reached out and grabbed Steve by the collar of his coat, but the IT expert brushed his hand away with more strength than he’d expected. ‘Leave me alone, Furey! This is bloody important.’
‘Shit, there’s definitely someone moving on the other side of the back fence,’ Harry whispered, his voice barely audible in Tom’s earpiece. ‘I can see him through the fence palings. What should I do?’
‘Move now, out the front door. No arguments,’ Tom said to the man behind the computer, then repeated the instructions to Harry.
‘Two minutes, that’s all I need,’ the Anorak pleaded.
Tom swore. He looked out the window, down the street, and saw the two targets walking towards them, a hundred metres away.
Harry came in through the back door. ‘Lost sight of the geezer.’
‘Tell me this is worth blowing the whole operation over,’ Tom said to Steve.
Steve looked up at him, his already sun-deprived face ghostly in the wash of illumination. The man swallowed and Tom watched the overly large Adam’s apple bob. ‘Yes.’
Tom opened the front door and strode onto the pavement, raising his Glock and cros
s-bracing his firing hand on top of his left wrist. ‘Armed police! Get down on the ground, now!’ Harry was beside him, mimicking his stance.
The man on the right reached into the pocket of his vinyl bomber jacket and Tom started to squeeze the trigger. Before he pulled it all the way, however, the man was falling, knocked sideways by an invisible sledgehammer. There was no sound of a shot fired, so it wasn’t Harry who had downed him. Silencer.
Tom turned and registered a dark shadow moving by the corner of the house. The falling man had drawn not a gun but a set of keys from his pocket. Tom saw he held a small black plastic remote in his hand, the kind used to activate a car alarm, and presumed he pressed the button as he fell. Before he hit the ground his companion was also knocked over. Tom dropped to one knee and looked left. He registered a running man, dressed in black, a pistol in his hand. Harry shifted his aim and opened his mouth to speak.
Before either of them could order the stranger to stop, the house exploded.
2
A fireman found Steve the Anorak’s body after the blaze had been extinguished. Harry sat with his feet in the gutter, his head in his hands. There was the smell of fresh vomit near him.
Tom sat on the bonnet of a police Mondeo, his hands wrapped around a takeaway tea in a Styrofoam cup. The local residents had long since foregone their television sets – in fact, some of them were on TV now, fodder for the reporters who roamed from person to person, looking for the neighbour who could describe the conflagration in the most graphic detail. He tenderly fingered the cut above his left eye. A shard of flying glass from number fourteen’s front windows had sliced a furrow parallel to his eyebrow, but the ambulance paramedics had been able to close the wound with adhesive butterfly stitches. Despite the crusted blood down his cheek he would be okay.
‘Not much left of our computer wizard,’ Chief Inspector David Shuttleworth said, his breath clouding as he strode over. ‘Looks like the bomb was planted somewhere in the centre of the front room – perhaps even under the computer desk itself.’
‘I don’t know what was on that machine, guv, other than some porn, but he died for it.’
‘Aye, well, there’s no way we’ll know now,’ Shuttleworth said. He fished a packet of Dunhill from his Barbour jacket and offered Tom a cigarette.
Tom shook his head. ‘Given up. Again.’
‘Suit yourself.’ Shuttleworth paused to light up. ‘Cock-up hardly begins to describe this one, Tom. What do you make of the presence of the shooter, as well as the Pakistanis?’
Tom shrugged. ‘My guess is that he was watching the house, as were we, and he was sneaking in to take up an ambush position, though I have no idea why.’
‘Well, we know the two dead chaps were people smugglers, who were supposedly doing their bit for world Jihad by helping out the odd terrorist with papers and money and the like, but why would our man in black shoot them?’
‘Because they knew too much and he couldn’t risk them being caught?’ Tom sipped his tea.
Shuttleworth nodded and took a long drag on his cigarette. The smoke and frozen breath wreathed his head and shoulders in a shimmering aura, backlit by red and blue flashing lights. ‘They’re getting better at covering their tracks all the time.’
‘The IT guy was just about wetting himself over whatever was on that machine.’
‘Why did you not just take the computer or the hard drive?’
Tom looked across at his superior and frowned. They both knew the answer to that question. The United Kingdom might be at war with Islamic fundamentalist terror groups, but they still had to fight by the rule of law.
Shuttleworth checked his notebook again. ‘You say he gave no indication about what he’d found on the hard drive other than . . .’
‘Porn. Like I told you. “Some sick shit” was all he said, though I’m betting he didn’t stay on just to check out some fuck pictures.’
‘Well, we’ve got two dead suspects, three injured civilians from next door, no computer, no computer expert and a masked assassin on the loose. Not to mention a missing protection officer.’
Tom drained his tea and crushed the cup as the rest of Shuttleworth’s comment penetrated the ringing that lingered in his ears from the bomb blast. ‘Who’s missing?’
‘Nick.’
‘What happened?’
‘He was supposed to be at a political fundraising dinner in the city with Robert Greeves this evening, but he didn’t show. Caused a hell of a stink. He dropped Greeves at his home at five, but didn’t return to collect him at seven. We’ve tried his home and mobile phone, but there’s no answer. Deidre hasn’t heard from him either.’
Tom frowned. Nick Roberts had been a friend once – they had joined the Met at about the same age and had matching careers. Nick’s ex-wife, Deidre, had worked as a nurse in the same hospital as Tom’s wife Alexandra, and it was really the two women who had been close friends. After Nick and Deidre’s divorce, and Alex’s death, he and Nick had seen little of each other outside of work. As protection officers, both spent long periods away from home. Those absences had cost Nick his marriage but provided blessed relief for Tom, as the job had helped him a little by taking him away on a regular basis from his lonely home full of memories.
‘That’s odd. I’ve never heard of him missing a job.’
‘Any problems that you know of?’ Chief Inspector Shuttleworth, a Scot, was new to their team, having transferred in on promotion, so he still didn’t know all of his officers’ idiosyncrasies.
‘With Nick? Not that I know of. Likes a drink – who doesn’t in our job – but he’s never called in sick because of a hangover, if that’s what you mean. Seems to have a different bird every few weeks.’
Tom felt uncomfortable singing Nick’s praises any more than that. Once, when they were both on the same team protecting a visiting African head of state, a group of a dozen expatriate dissidents had staged a protest outside the London restaurant where the president was dining. Nick had warned one of the demonstrators to back off when he approached the principal too closely. The man, who appeared drunk, had told Nick to fuck off. Nick had punched the man, hard and fast in the stomach, with enough force to drop him. Someone on the team – not Tom – had reported the incident. Tom had expected the protestor to lay a formal complaint, and took the view that if he was called to make a statement he would do so, truthfully. Nick had used unnecessary force. Word got back to the squad’s former chief superintendent and Nick had been called into his office to explain his version of events. Fortunately for Nick, the complainant never came forward. There had been speculation around the office that a couple of the president’s personal staff had leaned on the witness. Tom had noticed a marked cooling in his relationship with Nick and while he never said anything to Tom’s face, Tom suspected that Nick thought it was he who had gone to their governor behind his back.
‘Deidre didn’t seem too worried when I spoke to her. I know divorce is never pretty, but it was like he could have died and she couldn’t have cared less.’
Tom shrugged. ‘I can call round his place if you like. We – I mean, I – still have a key. Alex and Deidre used to check in on each other’s places when we were on holidays. Water the plants and all. Nick stayed in the family home and Deidre bought a new place.’
Shuttleworth nodded. ‘Aye, okay. If you find him in bed with a tart or a hangover, shoot him, please, before the Minister for Defence Procurement catches up with him. It’ll be the kindest thing all round.’
Shuttleworth had suggested he see the Met’s psychiatrist in the morning for stress counselling, but Tom reckoned a lie-in might be a more therapeutic option. It was going to be a late night.
He waved his thanks to the constable who had driven him to his home in Highgate and walked up the steps to his terrace house. Southwood Lane was pretty posh these days – the habitat of bankers, lawyers, doctors and the like. Though he didn’t wear a uniform he was pretty sure most of the people up and down the street knew he w
as a copper. It was probably why they kept their distance. He’d grown up in the house and lived there most of his life, apart from six years in his early twenties after he’d joined the Met. Tom was an only child whose parents had him late in life and they had passed away, within a year of each other, when he was twenty-eight. He’d been seeing Alex for four years by then and it had seemed logical, in a strange way, that the passing of his folks had been the catalyst for him to ask her to marry him.
Tom fingered the faint scar above his right eyebrow. It was barely noticeable these days, but he saw it, and touched it, every morning when he shaved. His white summer uniform shirt had been drenched in blood from the cut inflicted by a drunk armed with a broken beer bottle the night he’d met Alex, nineteen years ago. She was still an intern and she was so beautiful he couldn’t help but ask her out on a date as she stitched him back together. She’d laughed and told him that as far as she knew there were rules against that sort of thing. He persisted. She relented. She was an Essex girl made good and he’d been sure they would grow old together. Her shifts and his unusual hours at home and abroad meant they had never really lived like a normal couple. They joked to friends that they only ever saw each other on birthdays – and never Christmas because they were both working. They’d both planned on retiring early, to make up for all the lost nights.