‘If anything goes wrong; if we get separated, call this number,’ he tells Sami.
‘I don’t have a phone.’
‘Use a call box.’
Dessie turns off his own phone. Mobiles can be traced.
He gives Sinbad the nod. They’re ready. The roller door opens and the van pulls out into bright daylight.
Sami sits in the middle, next to Sinbad, whose feet barely reach the pedals. Nobody is saying much. There’s not a lot to say. Sami decides to read the instructions for the fibre-optic camera.
‘I thought you knew how to use this shit,’ says Dessie.
‘Different brand,’ explains Sami. ‘This one’s Japanese.’ He shows him the box. Dessie blinks at the writing. It says Made in Germany. He can’t read.
Sami met guys doing bird who were illiterate. Some of them used to bring their letters to him to read or ask him to write back to their wives and girlfriends. It could be heart-breaking because the news from home wasn’t always positive.
A con called Phil Bucket (everyone called him Lunchbucket) got a letter from his missus one day and as Sami read the first line to himself he realised it was a Dear John letter. She was giving Phil the flick. Filing for divorce.
Sami looked at the expectation on Phil’s face and couldn’t do it. Phil had six years to go. If he took the news badly he might shoot the messenger and break a few of Sami’s bones. So Sami made up a different letter - one that said everything was great at home and the kids were missing him.
Then he sat Phil down and they wrote a letter back. ‘Tell me how you feel about Nancy,’ he asked him.
‘She’s a good bird.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘Well she’s let herself go a bit, I guess, put on a few pounds.’
‘But you love her, right?’
‘You trying to be funny?’
‘No.’
‘You think I’m a soft prick?’
‘No, Phil, not at all,’ Sami stammered. ‘I just think you should tell Nancy how you feel about her. Let her know how much she means to you.’
‘Why?’
‘She deserves it, doesn’t she? She’s raising your kids on her own. You’re not round to help.’
Phil thought about this. Mulled it over. ‘She makes a cracking sherry trifle with those little sponge squares and custard.’
‘I was thinking of something a little more romantic.’
‘Like what?’
‘How about we say this, “Dear Nancy, I think about you all the time. At night when I lie in bed I remember how nice it is to just hold you and hear you sleeping. A man like me doesn’t deserve a woman like you”.’
‘You can’t say that - she might leave me.’
‘Trust me, Phil. She’ll love it. Then you’ll say, “I know you’re paying for my mistakes, Nancy, but one day I’ll make it up to you and the kids. I’m gonna show you how much you mean to me. How much I miss you. Don’t give up on me, Nancy. Keep a candle burning for me in the window and I’ll keep one burning in my heart.”’
The letter did the trick. Nancy wrote back saying she’d changed her mind about the divorce. Mission accomplished. Body intact.
They’re in central London. It’s Sunday morning. The streets are full of tourists and tour buses. Rubbernecks. Sightseers. The city never sleeps.
They cross Blackfriars Bridge and turn right up Ludgate Hill towards St Paul’s Cathedral and left into Ave Maria Lane. They must be close to the Old Bailey, thinks Sami. The last time he was in this part of London he was being sentenced for the Hampstead job but he couldn’t see much from the back of a prison van.
Sinbad pulls up at a large set of security gates flanked by spiked fences. A yellow sign declares: Warning: No Unauthorised Admittance. Beneath it are symbols for security cameras, dogs and armed guards.
‘Why are we stopping?’ asks Sami.
‘We’re here,’ replies Dessie.
Sinbad is talking to a uniformed guard behind a grille. Hands him paperwork. A motor whirs and the metal gate slides open. The van swings into a parking area below the building and pulls up at a fire door. Dessie jumps out and begins unloading the tools and ropes onto a trolley. He’s wearing surgical gloves beneath heavy-duty cloth gloves. Sami has trouble getting his fingers into the latex because one rogue finger always gets caught on the outside.
‘Come on, dickweed.’
‘Don’t wait for me.’
Dessie gives him a clip behind the head. A security guard is watching him from a control booth that looks like a bomb shelter. Dessie gives him a wave, indicating everything is fine.
‘Keep your head down. Don’t look at the ready-eyes.’
Sami has to fight the urge to look up and wave at the CCTV cameras, which are aimed at the doors and stairwells. What would happen if the rozzers caught them now, he wonders. He could explain about Nadia, say he was acting under duress.
Dessie props open the fire door and they wheel the stuff inside. Meanwhile, Sinbad climbs behind the wheel of the van and spins back up the ramp.
‘Where’s he going?’ asks Sami, feeling twitchy.
‘Relax. He’s going to wait for us outside.’
‘But what if …’
‘We don’t want the van trapped down here.’
Wheeling the trolley along a basement corridor, they reach three lifts, including the broken one. Dessie sets up red and yellow safety triangle and prises the doors open, peering up the darkened shaft.
‘What are we supposed to be doing?’
‘Fixing it.’
‘Do you know how to fix a lift?’
‘Does it fucking matter?’
Dessie separates the gear and wheels the trolley into the adjacent lift. He presses 5. The doors close. Sami watches the numbers light up as they rise between the floors. He can see himself reflected in a mirror. It’s like he’s going to a fancy dress party.
The doors slide open. Dessie straightens and pushes the trolley into a large open-plan office with smaller private offices and conference rooms running down both sides.
As they wheel the trolley along a corridor, Dessie pushes each door open, making sure they’re empty. Most of the desks face away from the windows and the office walls are lined with shelves full of box files and bound volumes. Sami can see manila folders with red ribbons looped around cardboard wheels, like they’re legal files.
The last office has an annexe. Half of it is filled with files. The other half has a metal door. It’s the strong room.
‘You get started. I’ll be back,’ says Dessie.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going to lay down some tarps and bang a few cables, just in case they come looking.’
Suddenly Sami is alone. He looks at the strong room. Taps the door. Tries the handle, just in case someone forgot to lock it. No, he couldn’t be that lucky. Not Sami Macbeth.
Then he glances over his shoulder at the nearest office. There’s one of those really smart phones, with a command unit, sitting on a desk. It’s most likely ‘9’ to get an outside line.
He should call the police.
And say what?
The truth.
Yeah, like that worked last time.
What would Tony Murphy do if Sami grassed him up? Kill Nadia. Then he’d find a way of killing Sami. Slowly. Painfully. Sami considers his other options but whichever way he looks at the problem he’s fucked seven different ways and it isn’t even lunchtime.
Putting the stethoscope in his ears, he places the end against the metal door. Listens. Nothing.
‘I’m sorry, sir, but we did all we could. In the end, we just couldn’t save her.’
Dessie reappears. ‘Who are you talking to?’
‘Nobody.’
‘So what do you think?’
Sami scratches his chin and tries to look crestfallen. ‘Can’t open this fucker.’
‘Why not?’
‘Too hard.’
‘Tony said you opened a safe th
at was ten times harder. This should be a piece of cake.’
Sami tries to be decisive. ‘They call it a strong room for a reason - cause it’s strong. If they called it a weak room anyone could open it.’
Dessie isn’t in the mood for sarcasm. He puts his face up close. Nose to nose. Bacon breath on the exhale. In the same instant he wraps the stethoscope around Sami’s neck and pulls it tight. Lifts him off the floor. Watches his eyes bulge.
‘You taking the piss? You taking the mickey?’
Sami doesn’t have the oxygen to answer.
This is Dessie Fraser in full Dobermann mode. He slams Sami’s head against the door, punctuating each of his statements with violent compelling exclamation marks.
‘It’s got locks! It’s got a handle! Open the fucking door.’
Dessie lets him go. Straightens his cap.
‘How long will it take?’
Sami rubs his neck. ‘Give me fifteen.’
‘You got ten.’
‘Just tell me one thing,’ he risks. ‘What’s inside?’
‘Exhibits.’
He makes it sound like a science project.
‘What sort of exhibits?’
‘Courtroom exhibits. Exhibit A, exhibit B, that sort of shit.’
Oh, this is priceless, thinks Sami. They’re inside the Old Bailey. The Central Criminal Court. The last time he was here he was wrongly convicted of carrying tools to commit a felony and being in possession of stolen goods. Now he’s carrying almost identical tools and is supposed to rob the place.
Dessie has gone back to his pretend lift repairs. Sami looks at the drill and considers how long it would take to get through the door. If this were a movie, it would take about four minutes. You can multiply that by about a hundred in real life.
Then his eyes rest on the canister Sinbad gave him. Maybe he could wedge a little of the stuff near the hinges and set off a small explosion, just enough to lift the door off its frame.
That’s one possibility. He considers the others. It’s a short consultation.
Sami looks through the nearby offices, searching waste-paper bins and mini-fridges until he finds two plastic water bottles. Emptying them, he unscrews the metal container. Inside is a white powder, granulated like sugar. He gently pours a small amount into each bottle. It doesn’t look like enough. He adds some more.
He puts one bottle at the base of the strong room door, beneath the lower hinge, and the second bottle balancing on top. Taking a length of electrical cord, he strips away the plastic coating from each end.
Among the gear that Sinbad had provided him are two small light bulbs. Sami shatters the glass and gently places the filaments into the powder in each bottle. He attaches a wire to the base of the bulbs and re-screws the bottle lids, before trailing the electric cord across the floor - ten, twenty, thirty feet … he should have asked for something longer. If he had a long enough wire he could be on a different floor or in another building or out of the county.
Dessie has come back.
‘You want to do the honours,’ Sami asks him.
‘Why?’
‘No reason.’
‘Why are we standing way back here?’
‘This is a job you can only fuck up once.’
Sami shoves two bare wires into a power socket and flicks the switch. He’s hoping for a dull kerplunk as the hinges pop off. Instead he blows the door through the next wall, bringing half the ceiling down.
Brick and plaster dust fill the air. Every window in the vicinity has been blown out and the sprinklers have triggered. They’d be getting wet if the pipes weren’t so twisted by the force of the blast that instead of spraying downwards the water is jetting off at crazy angles.
Dessie pushes a lump of plasterboard off himself. He looks like someone has painted his face white.
‘Where’s the safe?’ he asks.
‘It was here a minute ago,’ says Sami.
They pull aside a desk and broken ceiling panels, looking for the strong room. Dessie wraps his arms around a buckled filing cabinet and tosses it to one side.
Sami’s ears are ringing from the blast.
‘Maybe we should get out of here,’ he suggests.
Dessie doesn’t answer.
‘Well, if you don’t need me, I’ll catch up with you later.’
Dessie’s smacks him in the side of the head. ‘Shut the fuck up and keep looking.’
20
For a moment Sami considers whether he could have blown the strong room through the floor. Instead he finds a cistern and a sink from the bathroom above.
Dessie muscles them aside and discovers the strong room behind a collapsed wall still smoking from the blast.
Clearing away the last of the debris, he starts going through drawers, pulling out exhibits and evidence bags, looking at the labels. There are guns, bags of drugs, knives and artefacts.
He picks up a semi-automatic - checks the label. Puts it in a rucksack. Then he grabs bags of white powder. Cocaine. Sami gets a look at one of the labels. Court 4. Exhibit 1a. Raymond Peter Garza.
One moment his heart is racing, the next it stops completely. It’s a mistake. Insanity. No way they’re doing a job for Ray Garza.
A sprinkler has been spraying down Sami’s back, soaking his overalls. His face is coated in brick dust and the ringing in his ears turns out to be the fire alarms.
Dessie screams at him above the noise. ‘Pack up the gear. Leave nothing behind.’
Sami tosses the drill, the camera and the canister of TATP into the holdall. He has to drag a shelf to one side to lift the bag. Suddenly he spies a lump of cash the size of a house-brick, wrapped in plastic cling film.
It has to be fifty grand. Maybe more.
Dessie looks at him. Looks at the cash. Grins. In a heartbeat Sami has gone from being a fuck-up to having golden bollocks. Dessie takes the money and tucks it into the rucksack.
Sami is still trying to get his head around the Garza connection. If he weren’t so scared already, even the mention of Garza’s name would make his throat close and scrotum tighten. Some criminals get their reputations for being violent bastards, but Ray Garza is notorious for being a completely ruthless fucker. The Keyser Söze of the British underworld.
Tony Murphy might rip off mug punters, horny businessman and foreign tourists, but Ray Garza ransacks entire countries. Diamond mines in Angola, nickel mines in Botswana, platinum mines in Zimbabwe. According to the press reports he’s Mugabe’s favourite Englishman - a pretty elite club.
Occasionally in prison Sami heard blokes brag about having worked for Garza. They said he was a genius, a visionary, top of the food chain, but most wouldn’t talk about him or even mention his name.
Then some dumb moke would shoot his mouth off, saying Garza was a pussy or a wanker. From that moment you knew the poor bastard would spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder, paranoid that Garza would find out. Every car backfiring, every set of headlights in the rear mirror, every bit of bad luck, every fuck-up and they’d be wondering if it was Garza. They might as well have bought a shovel and started digging their own grave.
Dessie is still stuffing evidence bags into the rucksack. The sirens are getting closer.
‘We should go,’ says Sami.
‘Wait. I’m not finished.’
‘No time. Let’s split.’
‘I said wait.’
Next minute they’re legging it down the corridor. Dessie has the rucksack. Sami is trying to carry the holdall, which is bashing against his knees.
The lifts aren’t working. They’ve managed to break all three of them. Either that or the fire alarms have cut the power. They head for the stairwell. A security guy comes charging out the door, puffing hard, hand on a nightstick.
‘Thank God you’re here,’ says Dessie, pointing down the hall.
‘What happened?’
‘Some sort of explosion.’
He looks at their bags. ‘What were you doing?’
> ‘Fixing the lift,’ answers Dessie. ‘We smelled a bit of gas earlier. Must have been a leak. Blast brought the roof down.’
The guard looks at Sami for verification.
‘Anyone hurt?’
Sami shakes his head.
‘We could have been killed,’ says Dessie. ‘Health and Safety are gonna hear about this.’
The guard tells them to evacuate. They’re supposed to wait for him on the ground floor. Next minute they’re alone, swinging down the stairwell between the landings. Lugging the bags.
They reach the ground floor fire exit. Dessie pushes open the door, looks both ways. A fire engine is blocking the alley. Firemen are jogging towards them.
Dessie and Sami stroll past them, heads down, avoiding the ready-eyes. They turn left and left again, crossing a parking area. Following a railing fence they reach a gate leading up a set of stairs. The gate is locked. They climb over, tossing the bags to each other.
There are more fire engines and police cars in Newgate Street. Dessie holds Sami back. Their blue boilersuits are streaked with plaster and soaked through. Dessie’s hair looks like he’s gone prematurely grey.
Waiting for another police car to pass, they leg it down Newgate Street and duck into Bishops Court and Fleet Passage, avoiding the major roads. Dessie seems to know where he’s going.
‘We got to get out of these clothes,’ he says, peeling off his gloves. Off Fleet Place, they find a narrow alley with industrial bins on wheels. Commercial waste only.
Dessie crouches between two bins and begins unbuttoning his sodden boilersuit. He opens the rucksack. Shoves it inside.
‘Why not just ditch it?’ asks Sami.
‘Yeah, and let forensics have a field day.’
Sami copies Dessie. His jeans and shirt are wet, but they’re clean. The boilersuit is packed away. He keeps the cap on his head.
Dessie hoists the rucksack onto his back. Checks the lane. Makes a decision. He jogs round the corner and down some stairs to Old Seacoal Lane and slows to a brisk walk, heading towards Farringdon Street.
Pedestrians give way to traffic. Buses, black cabs, cars and vans are banked up in every direction. Gridlock has choked Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill and Holborn Circus.
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