Soft Target: The Second Spider Shepherd Thriller (A Dan Shepherd Mystery)

by Stephen Leather

  ‘Some sort of medical. He never had a chest X-ray up in Strathclyde but the Met insists on it.’

  ‘He’s not a smoker, shouldn’t be a problem.’

  ‘Rules is rules,’ said Rose. ‘Dave Bamber will be map man today. Stu’ll report to Ken and Amber team when he gets in.’ Rose leaned across the table. ‘The guy in Chicago’s given me a date for Kelly’s operation.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Sutherland.

  ‘Three weeks,’ said Rose. ‘I’ll put in for the leave and we’ll all fly out together.’

  ‘That’s great,’ said Sutherland.

  ‘Yeah, but I’m still short, money-wise.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Sutherland leaned across the table, a chunk of sausage on the end of his fork. ‘If there’s anything you need, Rosie, all you have to do is ask.’

  Rose nodded. ‘Thanks, Mike.’

  They almost lost the Toyota just outside Birmingham. The M5 split off the M6 and they were too far away to see which fork the Toyota took.‘Head for London,’ said Kerr. It was a gamble, but they caught up with Nelson just before the junction with the M42.

  There were two other cars on the Toyota’s tail: a BMW driven by two brothers from Chorlton-cum-Hardy who worked for Kerr when he needed extra muscle, and Sammy McEvoy, who ran security at Aces, in his Audi T4. The Audi was a conspicuous car so the Range Rover and the BMW did the close work with the Audi either hanging back or overtaking and staying half a mile ahead of the Toyota. They kept in touch by mobile, switching position every few minutes. The man pretending to be Tony Nelson was either an undercover cop or worked for one of the intelligence services. Either way he’d be trained to spot a tail so they gave the Toyota a lot of space.

  He was a conscientious driver, never exceeding the speed limit and only using the outside lane to overtake, so they could keep well back until they were near an intersection. Twice the Audi took a wrong turn while it was ahead of the Toyota but McEvoy was able to get back on the motorway and make up lost ground.

  ‘Looks like London all the way,’ said Bill Wallace, in the BMW. He was a couple of hundred yards behind the Toyota in the inside lane.

  ‘Looks like it, but stay on your toes,’ said Kerr. ‘If we lose him he’s gone for good.’

  Kerr had phoned his police contact and told him not to bother checking the registration number of the Volvo. No undercover cop would be stupid enough to use his own vehicle on a job, and if his man discovered that the Volvo was a plain-clothes police car alarm bells would ring.

  Kerr had called in McEvoy and the Wallace brothers when he’d seen the Volvo drive into the underground car park of the city-centre warehouse conversion. His first thought was that Nelson lived in the block but when he drove out in a second vehicle he realised it was merely a staging-post. As soon as the Toyota had driven on to the motorway, Kerr knew Nelson wasn’t local. He was going home.

  Shepherd swiped his ID and pushed through the revolving door into the main building. The inspectors who headed the Specialist Firearms teams shared an office at the rear of the building, and Ken Swift was sprawled in his chair with his feet on his desk when Shepherd opened the door. ‘I’m to report to you, sir,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘How was the medical?’ asked Swift, looking up from the tactics manual in his lap. He was wearing his black overalls and rubber-soled boots.

  ‘Just an X-ray,’ said Shepherd. ‘The docs in Scotland were supposed to give me one two years ago but it slipped by. Personnel department at the Met spotted it and said I couldn’t be active until it was sorted. All done now, anyway.’

  ‘The guys are at the range,’ said Swift. ‘Get changed and join them.’

  ‘Anything happening?’ asked Shepherd.

  ‘We’ve got a briefing from British Transport Police about an operation in Central London. Other than that, it’s all quiet on the Western Front.’

  ‘This is getting bloody weird, boss,’ said Anderson, scratching his head. They had pulled in at the side of the road when they saw Nelson drive into the underground car park, and when he’d walked out he’d been carrying a large black kit-bag. From where they’d parked they’d seen the building Nelson had walked into. ‘That’s a cop shop, right?’

  Kerr nodded. The six-storey concrete and glass building looked like a seventies police station, but there was no sign on the front. There was no wheelchair access either, which was virtually compulsory in the politically correct twenty-first century. It wasn’t a regular police station, that was for sure. Two police cars, white with orange strips down the middle, were parked in the road. Jam butties, they called them in Manchester. In the corners of the windscreens there were yellow dots the size of a saucer. Kerr knew what they meant: the cars were armed-response vehicles, so the cops inside the building carried guns, which meant they were SO19, the SWAT-type units that went up against armed criminals. Why would they use an armed policeman to work undercover? It didn’t make sense. ‘Okay, let’s go home. We know where to find him now.’ He called McEvoy and the Wallace brothers and told them to go back to Manchester. He’d deal with Tony Nelson in due course, but first he was going to sort out his wife.

  Shepherd and the men on Amber team filed into the briefing room. Yellow team were already there. One of the Yellows was a woman, her face devoid of makeup and her hair cropped short. She was chewing gum, her Glock in a holster high on her hip. Shepherd was surprised to see an armed woman, not because they were less capable than men, but because most of the women he knew would have hated the idea of carrying a weapon.

  A man in plain clothes was standing next to Ken Swift at the front of the room. On a table behind them were a television and a video-recorder.

  Swift waited until the last man was in before he raised his hand. ‘Okay, guys,’ he said, then nodded at the female officer. ‘And girl.’

  She flashed Swift a humourless smile.

  ‘This is DS Nick Wright of the British Transport Police. He’s running Operation Wingman,’said Swift. ‘He’s going to fill you in on the details, but basically we’ve got a gang of armed thugs running riot on the tube. BTP want us to provide armed back-up so it’ll be a joint operation. The big problem is that Met radios don’t work down the tube. When we go in, each group will have to be shadowed by a BTP officer.’ There were several groans. ‘I thought you’d like the sound of that.’

  Wright was in his late thirties with dark hair, greying at the temples. He was wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, dark brown trousers, a grey flannel shirt and a featureless brown tie. To Shepherd he looked like a uniformed cop trying to dress like an accountant on his day off.

  ‘It’s something we’re stuck with, I’m afraid,’ said Wright.

  ‘You’re saying that our guy up top has to talk to one of your guys, who relays the message to your guy underground, who tells our guys?’The question had come from a sergeant standing by the door.

  Wright shrugged apologetically. ‘We think it’s as crazy as you do,’ he said.

  ‘Bloody madness, is what it is,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘It’s a budget issue, I’m told. The Met thinks London Underground should pay for the upgrade to the system. My bosses want the Met to pay. It’s going to cost millions so God knows when it’ll be resolved. Until then, one of our guys has to shadow you wherever you go.’

  ‘And what happens if shots are fired?’ said Swift. ‘I can’t have my people looking over their shoulders worrying if there’s a BTP officer about to get his balls shot off.’

  ‘We can issue them with protective vests,’ said Wright, ‘and they’ll be told to keep out of the way.’

  ‘It’s a recipe for disaster,’ said Swift.

  Wright didn’t respond. Shepherd felt sorry for the guy. He’d turned up to give a briefing and ended up taking the flak for departmental budgeting constraints.

  Wright took a deep breath. ‘I’ve got some CCTV footage of the suspects.’ He pressed play and the screen flicke
red into life. A group of youngsters was huddled on a tube station platform, casually dressed in cargo pants, football shirts and flashy trainers. The oldest was barely out of his teens.

  ‘This is the leader of the group,’ said Wright, tapping a girl in a combat jacket whose hair was tied in a ponytail and fed through the back of a baseball cap. ‘IC One female, five six or seven, blue eyes. She usually wears her mobile phone on a camouflage strap around her neck.’ He grinned at the assembled armed officers. ‘The less politically correct of our officers refer to her as Snow White, and her gang as the Seven Dwarfs. Sometimes there are seven, but there have been as many as two dozen in some of the attacks. To date, she’s the only female involved. She’s been at each incident we’ve looked at.’

  There was another ten seconds of footage from the cameras on the platform, then the viewpoint changed. This time it was footage from a camera in a busy shopping centre. It was obviously taken on a different day because the blonde girl was wearing a pink top now. ‘They gather at the Trocadero in Piccadilly Circus, then head for one of the tube stations. They’ve been seen going into Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square and Tottenham Court Road. That gives them direct access to the Piccadilly, Bakerloo and the Northern Lines. We don’t have video of them in action because they only strike on trains.’

  On the screen the teenagers were working purposefully towards the exit. The picture jumped to a viewpoint from a camera in Piccadilly Circus, the statue of Eros in the background. Dozens of tourists, mostly backpackers, were sitting on the steps at the base of the statue, munching fast food from Burger King and KFC. The picture jumped again, and now the group were hurrying down the steps into the tube station, elbowing an elderly couple out of the way.

  There was a view of a platform. The group was gathered together at the far end, close to the tunnel entrance. Wright froze the picture. ‘This is them at Leicester Square.’ He tapped the screen with his pencil. ‘Here’s Snow White. This is a Bangladeshi guy. These three are IC Threes who are always with her. This is a twelve or thirteen-year-old of mixed race. The IC One male has been involved in at least half a dozen robberies and is always wearing an Arsenal shirt. These two are also of mixed race and have been identified at several robberies. The two IC Threes here have been involved in at least two steamings. Ten minutes after this was taken they boarded a southbound train. Between Leicester Square and Charing Cross they attacked two girls, stole their mobiles and bags. One girl was slashed across the face with a Stanley knife, the other was punched repeatedly in the face and almost lost an eye. That’s what makes this so bloody nasty. It’s not about theft– they get a few quid out of the bags but next to nothing for the phones – they get their kicks from terrorising people. And they’ve been getting progressively more violent. We think they’ve been responsible for fifteen separate attacks over the past month.’

  He ran the video for a few seconds. The view changed to a different platform and a different group of youngsters, although the blonde girl was still at the centre. Wright tapped the face of a tubby young man in a light blue hooded jacket. ‘He’s been involved in several incidents and we believe he has a gun.’ He froze the picture. ‘We haven’t seen anything on video, but three of the victims say he had one. A woman who was robbed ended up with a broken jaw and says she was pistol-whipped. We’ve no idea if it’s a real gun or a replica.’

  He pressed play again and the video showed the group getting on to a train. Another station. Another group of youngsters. ‘There’s Snow White again,’ said Wright. He paused the video and tapped the girl’s face. ‘Their attacks start in different ways. If there’s a large group they steam along a train, terrorising everyone, shouting, screaming and grabbing what they can. Sometimes they target individuals. One ploy is for this young lad to start a conversation with the victim.’ He tapped the face of a young mixed-race boy. ‘While he’s distracting them, the rest pile in. They put an American tourist in hospital last week – beat him to a pulp and didn’t even steal anything. A lot of the time it’s not about theft, it’s about humiliation. They slash clothing, slap and punch.’

  Wright faced the SO19 team. ‘We don’t know where they’ll strike – that’s our main problem. They don’t seem to have a game plan. Snow White is their focus, but she doesn’t give orders. They act like a pack of hyenas. We’ll have an undercover team in the Trocadero so we’ll be able to follow them down into the system,then we can track them with CCTV. We’ll know which train they board, but it’s a question of getting our guys on to the same train and calling it in once they attack. That’s when we’ll be needing SO19 assistance. We’ll stop the train between stations and crack on there’s a mechanical problem, just long enough to get you guys in position at the next station. Then we let the train roll and arrest them.’

  Wright opened a briefcase and handed out a stack of sheets of photocopied stills taken from the CCTV footage. ‘These are the fifteen guys we’ve seen with Snow White. Two already have criminal records for assault and theft, Foday Gbonda and Leeroy Tavenier. They are the only two we can identify by name.’

  The SO19 officers passed round the sheets.

  ‘We plan to start this afternoon in the Trocadero. We have six male officers and three females on standby. They’ll follow the group if and when they leave and notify our control room which station they go to. We’d like two of your guys with us in plain clothes in case the gun is produced.’

  ‘What about our teams? Where should they lie up?’ said Swift.

  ‘I’d suggest they stay mobile,’ said Wright. ‘One should be near Piccadilly Circus because that’s closest to the Trocadero, and of the fifteen attacks we know the group has carried out, they boarded at Piccadilly Circus in nine cases.’

  ‘Do they attack as soon as the train moves off?’ asked Swift.

  ‘Unfortunately not,’ Wright said. ‘On one occasion, they went as far as Hammersmith and on another to Caledonian Road.’

  ‘So the idea is that the Specialist Firearms teams shadow the train above ground?’

  ‘That would be our game plan,’ said Wright. ‘By holding up the train in a tunnel we should be able to give you time to get in position.’

  ‘You’re going to lock down a train after a robbery has been committed when there’s a chance that a firearm might be involved?’ asked Swift.

  ‘We’ll have our officers on board, plus your plainclothes armed officers.’

  ‘And if they start shooting? You want a firefight in a train in a tunnel?’

  ‘I’m assuming there won’t be a firefight,’ said Wright, ‘and that our officers will be able to contain the situation. If there is a firearm, the presence of armed officers should prevent it being used.’

  ‘Should,would,could,’said Swift.‘If it goes wrong, civilians may get caught in the crossfire.’

  ‘Like I said, if the boy has a gun, he hasn’t fired it yet.’

  Brian Ramshaw passed the photographs to Shepherd, who took a set and passed the rest to the officer on his left. The pictures were grainy but clear enough to aid in identification. Shepherd memorised the faces.

  ‘That’s the state of play,’ said Wright. ‘We’ll kick off at about six this evening. BTP will have six plainclothes officers, including myself. There’ll be a chief inspector running the operation at our Management Information and Communications Centre in Broadway just opposite New Scotland Yard. He’ll have access to all the CCTV cameras and can liaise with us in the tunnels and with your guys above ground. Two uniformed officers with radios will be here later today and they can ride with the Specialist Firearms teams. Any questions?’

  Heads shook.

  ‘I’m going to suggest Stu Marsden and Brian Ramshaw as the undercover officers from SO19,’ said Swift. ‘Have you guys got suitable casual clothes?’

  Shepherd was already wearing a leather jacket and jeans with a blue denim shirt. He glanced at Ramshaw, who was nodding.

  ‘That’s it, then,’ said Swift.

  ‘Don’t supp
ose I can take my Heckler, can I?’ asked Ramshaw.

  ‘Only if you can hide it down the front of your trousers,’ said Swift, dead-pan.

  A uniformed WPC opened the cell door and smiled at Angie. ‘Your lawyer’s here.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Angie. The WPC took her along a corridor to an interview room. When the woman opened the door and Angie saw who was sitting at the metal table her face fell. It wasn’t the lawyer she’d phoned. It was Gary Payne, who worked for Charlie. She hesitated but Payne got to his feet and held out his hands, a broad smile on his suntanned face. He spent a lot of time in his villa in Marbella, a stone’s throw from Charlie’s. ‘Angie, love, what a nightmare,’ he said. She took his hand, and he squeezed it hard enough to make her wince. His lips were smiling, but his eyes were flint hard. ‘Sit down and let’s see what we can do to get you out of here.’

  ‘Would you like some tea or coffee?’ asked the WPC.

  ‘Tea with milk and two sugars,’ said Payne. ‘Bit of a sweet tooth. Angie’ll have the same.’ He swung his slim Gucci briefcase on to the table.

  ‘I don’t want anything,’ said Angie.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Payne, jovially. ‘Hot sweet tea will do you the world of good.’

  The WPC left the room, closing the door behind her.

  The smile vanished from Payne’s face.‘You stupid, stupid, cow,’ he said.

  Angie put her head in her hands.

  Payne leaned over her, so close she could smell the garlic on his breath. ‘Did you think you’d get away with it? That Charlie wouldn’t find out?’

  ‘Can you tell him I’m sorry?’ Tears poured down her face.

  ‘You’re sorry?’ Payne sneered. ‘Sorry doesn’t cut it, Angie. Don’t you understand what you’ve done?’ He sat down opposite her, interlinked his fingers on top of his briefcase and waited for her to stop crying.

  She wiped her eyes with the back of her hands, and Payne handed her a crisp white handkerchief with his initials in one corner. ‘Use this. What have they said to you so far?’

  ‘Gary, please, I’ve got my own lawyer coming—’