The Newsmaker (Volume One Book 1)

by Tom Field

  He panicked.

  The Optician must be coming behind him he thought to himself and so he started to jog forward as well as he could, and took no more than five strides when he felt a searing pain rip through his left leg and he collapsed to the floor.

  He now understood.

  The Optician wasn’t trying to kill him, he was toying with him, making the last moments of his life a nightmare of fear, desperation and loneliness. Alone, frightened and dying in an alleyway. His life was not meant to be like this.

  He looked at his watch.

  Four minutes thirty seconds had gone.

  The pain was swimming through his body, the predominant pain changing from his left thigh, to right arm, and then back again. He started to lose consciousness. As everything was starting to blur, he saw a figure come into view in front of him from behind a large pile of trash bags. It was a figure that looked like a giant who was holding a rifle in his right hand. He could see the figure clearly but everything started to blur and he could not make out a face.

  He looked down at his watch.

  He knew he had only ten seconds to live.

  “Please, don’t,” he begged.

  “You killed Gilligan. I liked Gilligan,” the figure said, and raised his rifle.

  He lowered his head so all he could see was his watch.

  Three more seconds and the five minutes was up.

  He felt he tip of the rifle barrel under his chin and it forced his head up. As he looked up towards the figure, he felt the barrel push against the exact centre of his forehead.

  Everything went dark.

  And The Optician vanished into thin air once again.

  THIRTY SIX

  Asif Fulken was becoming more and more anxious. It was now almost 5pm. He had control over his own actions. He had the bomb, he had the time and the place, and he had the plan to get his family to safety and to live in luxury all neatly set out. He should have been able to enjoy these moments.

  When he planted the bomb on the train in Paris he was enjoying the moments before it went off looking at a pretty waitress. For the London bomb, he was drinking coffee outside a café, savouring the noise of the sirens, and watching the fear on people’s faces, close enough to almost feel the panic.

  But this was different.

  He felt anxious for a number of reasons.

  He was by now aware that virtually every contact he had in New York had disappeared. He had built up an efficient and reliable support network, and it seemed to have been obliterated in the space of a few days. He felt no personal sorrow for their loss; after all, they laid themselves down in the name of their faith, so it was their choice. It was more the destruction of what he had built that agitated him. He had come to America just over two years ago. He was, at the time, the FFW’s most trusted bomber, and he was rapidly climbing the ranks. His faith and commitment to the cause was rocked when he discovered that some of the funds that his brothers raised throughout the Middle East were being syphoned off by the elders allowing them all to live in relative luxury. Virtually all of their family members were living in the West, under the guise of infiltrators, but everyone knew they were placed there to keep them safe and to build new lives.

  Only the stupid West would allow this to happen. The CIA had confirmed how stupid they were when they brought him to America. It had all happened so quickly and before he knew it, they were throwing money at him.

  When the CIA found him, he was preparing to detonate a 500lb bomb in a US army base in Kabul. He had been working on the plan for three long weeks. The idea was to allow the CIA to infiltrate a minor cell, made up of people who had no real knowledge of the inner workings of the FFW, in case of capture, and to feed the CIA information on a bomber considered less valuable than himself by the elders, so that they would concentrate their efforts on finding him and lose focus elsewhere. It was not unusual for the elders to sacrifice someone for the greater good. Fulken never had any sympathy for these people, they should have been better at their craft.

  Unfortunately, the elders had underestimated just how much the sacrificial cell knew, and his name had soon been passed over to the CIA. He was holed up in a filthy apartment, five miles outside of Kabul, when in the middle of the night, the doors crashed open and before he knew it, everything had gone dark and his body had been punched, kicked and thrown around, while being transported to a secret holding place.

  The next time he saw daylight was when his hood had been removed and he was cable tied to a chair sitting at a table opposite three people, two men and one woman whose names were never revealed. He had braced himself for the standard torture techniques that the CIA uses, such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, shackling and beating. What he had not been prepared for during his training on CIA techniques in the FFW training camp, was simple good old-fashioned bribery.

  They offered him a life of wealth, free of hiding and death, in return for the names and whereabouts of three specific elders. To tempt him, they provided him the opportunity to taste the wares of three western women for a night and after the pleasure they had bestowed upon him, he was ready to negotiate.

  He laid down his own conditions on where in the States he lived, and the degree of freedom that they were going to afford him. They agreed to this on condition that he would operate under a handler who would ask him to identify people of interest who entered The States, and to keep them constantly updated on what he knew.

  After that, everything happened so quickly. He was living in New York two weeks later. They had helped him set up spotter cells in and around Times Square, and they gave him a whole apartment building to generate a legal income, as well as depositing $300,000 in a bank account.

  They changed his name to Sameh Ismail and gave him a handler called Gill Whymark, who would ask for information twice a week, information that Fulken had delivered. He knew that the FFW had put a death sentence on him, but by then, he had built up such a close network in The States that he knew they would all willingly die for him. And it seems that they all had. Fourteen months ago, he had been walking to his favourite restaurant, when a van pulled alongside him and three armed men bundled him into it. He knew it couldn’t be the CIA, and he was initially convinced that the FFW had hired a team of mercenaries to eliminate him. Once again, a hood was put on his head, but this was different. There were no beatings and no threats, his captors even telling him to watch his head as they walked him out of the van.

  When the hood was removed he was sat on a sofa in a plush room, he assumed in a private house, and the three men were standing behind him, no weapons drawn. Opposite him in a chair was an old man, he was definitely a lawyer, Fulken knew without a doubt. The old man laid out a number of photographs of his sisters, brother and their children going about their everyday life, and in each photograph there was the same man in the background. The old lawyer had gone on to explain that he had a proposition for him.

  In return for his family being allowed to carry on with everyday life he was required to do something for them; something that would make him very rich in the process. He was to detonate three bombs in three different places to a set time, and in return, he would be paid two million dollars for each bomb successfully detonated. Fulken had bartered and was proud of the fact that the old lawyer even considered his demand of four million dollars on completion of the mission; and even more surprised when the old lawyer agreed to his demands.

  He was given a cell phone and four separate numbered sim cards, and told that the person who would contact him was the person who would decide when and where the bombs would go off, but he was told from the offset that they would be somewhere in Paris, London and New York.

  He was provided with the resources he needed to get out of The States, a fake passport and money, but after that, the rest was down to him.

  He was warned that if he failed in any part of the mission, or if he did not achieve his objectives, his family would face the consequences.

  He agree
d unconditionally and he was told that he had twelve months to prepare and that he should leave the country and get everything in place.

  He was in Sweden thirty six hours later and he spent twelve solid months preparing plans and resources, just waiting for the call.

  The first call came exactly thirteen months later. The voice on the end of the line was English, very well spoken and firm. He had followed the instructions that the voice had given him to the letter and now he was almost finished. They had kept their word and so far, had deposited four million dollars into the bank account he had allocated for use. Everything had gone perfectly.

  This morning he had contacted his family and they were ready to move tomorrow afternoon after the mission had been completed.

  What he didn’t have control of, and what made him the most anxious, was the silence and the constant nagging at the back of his mind that the man with the cell phone fitted into this as much as he did. No man had ever made him feel anxious before, this was a new feeling to him, and the more he told himself to forget about him, the more his mind went into overdrive trying to establish how he recognised him. He gave up yet again after a few minutes and let his mind drift back to the future he had created for himself and his family. He looked at his watch again. 9:55am was only fifteen hours away.

  This is going to be a long fifteen hours, he thought to himself.

  Ward and Lawson arrived back at Nicole-Louise and Tackler’s. They knocked on the door and Tackler let them in. McDermott was still there with Fuller,

  “The rest are out and mobile but are staying within a two mile radius,” McDermott said.

  Ward nodded his approval.

  Walker and his son were still sat on the sofa,

  “Do we need to still be here?” Walker asked looking at Ward.

  “It’s probably the safest place for you right now. Don’t worry; it will all be over soon,” he replied

  “We have something that I am pretty sure you want to see,” Nicole-Louise said.

  Ward walked over to her workstation and Tackler got up to join them, brushing past Lawson as he did so.

  Ward looked at the screen.

  Looking back at him was a picture of the lawyer whose nose Ward had broken.

  “Who is he?” Ward asked.

  “His name is Thomas Barnard Q.C.,” she replied, “He is one of the most prestigious lawyers in the U.K. Charges around four thousand bucks an hour,” she added.

  Ward looked at Lawson,

  “Ever heard of him?”

  Lawson shook his head.

  “Come over here,” Ward said to Walker, beckoning him with his hand.

  Walker came over to join them huddled around Nicole-Louise’s screen.

  “What do you know about him?” he asked Walker.

  “I know that he is ruthless and strikes fear into most people within the legal profession back home,” Walker replied, “I know that anyone with money hires him, and no matter how guilty they are, he will invariably get them off of the charges.”

  “How many times had you seen him before the sequence of events that you were involved in?” he asked.

  “In the flesh? Never. In footage of him on the steps of the Old Bailey, several times, in celebration of another high profile court case he has won,” Walker replied.

  “No doubt he has gone running back to London,” Lawson said, “I’ll make a call, get some of my people to pay him a visit,” he added, taking his cell phone out of his pocket as he said it.

  “No need,” Nicole-Louise said.

  “Where is he now?” Ward asked.

  Nicole-Louise rotated her head to a screen on her right. It had a map of New York on it, and in the middle there was a little red dot, pulsing.

  “He’s just got back to USBC News,” she said.

  “Back from where?” Ward asked.

  “The Chrysler Building.”

  Ward walked into the kitchen and pulled out his cell phone.

  “I hope you have finished with killing people for the day?” Centrepoint answered, “I’ve just had to send the clean-up crew to an alleyway.”

  “No I haven’t,” Ward replied, “There are three more to go.”

  “Listen, you have to be very careful about what direction you take. There is only so much even I can cover up.”

  Ward ignored him.

  “Where are we with this whole mess?”

  “The short version?” Ward replied.

  “Yes.”

  “Ashurst-Stevens wanted three bombs to go off. I can’t link him to Fulken yet, but he is the one behind it. The intention was to set up a guy called Martin Walker, by letting us find money flowing through his account to a Swiss account, which within the hour we will have linked to Fulken,” he said, “He then made enough evidence available to link him indirectly, in that he was supporting a colleague and his Godson, so that if he is associated with it, he can admit it and say it was for the good of his employee and the lawyers will walk him out of court in the full glare of the public.”

  “But you haven’t done it yet?” Centrepoint asked.

  “No, but Tackler is on it and I know he will find it.”

  “Continue.”

  “They kidnapped Walker’s son so that he would have to dictate to the on-site crews where the cameras should be at the exact moment that the bombs went off, so that they could catch it all on camera.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “I asked Charlie Dunno in London the same question.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Money,” Ward replied, “Although it looks like Fulken is getting a payment of two million dollars a bomb so there must be a huge of amount of money to be made somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  “That’s what I don’t get,” Ward replied, “So I think the target isn’t New York, I think it is someone whose demise would lead to a new and very profitable investment for Ashurst-Stevens.”

  “And how are you going to establish who this person is?” he asked.

  “I’m going to pay his lawyer a visit.”

  “You need to tread carefully,” Centrepoint said, “Wiping out terrorist cells will probably get you an audience and a medal from the President. Setting your sights on a lawyer and a Knight of the British Empire is unchartered territory and there will be huge repercussions.”

  “Not for me,” Ward said, and hung up the phone.

  He put his head around the door and said to Tackler,

  “Can I see you a moment?”

  Tackler walked through the door a few seconds later.

  “We have a problem that I want you to sort out and quickly.”

  “What is it?” Tackler asked.

  “You are the second best at what you do, we both know that, almost as good as Nicole-Louise, but I would never say it in front of her,” Ward replied with a smile, laying down the challenge to him.

  Tackler took the bait immediately and said,

  “Tell me what you want?”

  “This bomb is for someone, not some place,” he said, “I’m sure of it.”

  “But you don’t know who?”

  “No I don’t. But I need you to find someone from a business point of view, whose death might weaken a company and leave a window of opportunity for Ashurst-Stevens to take advantage of and add them to his company portfolio.”

  “A media company?” Tackler asked.

  “I think so. But you need to cross reference it with an owner who is in New York today, tomorrow or both,” Ward said.

  “And when I find him?”

  “You will have found the target,” he replied, “Don’t mention it to the others; I want your full focus on this.”

  “OK. I didn’t have time to tell you,” Tackler said, “I’ve found the money into Fulken’s account and where it came from.”

  Ward raised an eyebrow,

  “And you didn’t think of mentioning that as soon as I walked in?”

  “You didn’t give me time. You went strai
ght over to Nicole-Louise,” he replied.

  “I’m sorry. You are right,” he said softly, “Where from and where to?”

  “From a subsidiary of UKBC Sport into a Swiss account that Fulken has set up under the name of Shah Daud Sultanzoy.”

  “What about the USBC News schedules?” Ward asked.

  “There are none listed.”

  “Not one?”

  “Well one. The National News awards ceremony tomorrow night, but I doubt very much that Ashurst-Stevens is intending to blow himself up as he is due to present five of the awards,” Tackler replied.

  “And all the world’s media big hitters will be there too?”

  “I assume so.”

  “So you somehow have to narrow the playing field. Look for hostile takeover attempts from Ashurst-Stevens, and when you find possibilities, find their schedules for the next few days. That should give us a good starting point.”

  “I’m on it now.” Tackler replied, and he walked out of the kitchen.

  Ward leant against the sink feeling tired. He closed his eyes and rolled his neck. He then lifted his arms up and stretched them as far as they would go and let out a big sigh as they reached their limit.

  He was focussed again.

  He walked back into the living area and over to where Nicole-Louise was seated, by now scrolling through some company accounts, presumably linked to Ashurst-Stevens.

  “Has Barnard moved at all?”

  “No,” she replied, “He isn’t even moving around the building, he is probably sitting at a desk, but I don’t know what desk or what floor yet.”

  “I do,” Ward replied and he turned towards Lawson,

  “Let’s pay another visit to USBC News,” he said.

  THIRTY SEVEN

  “What did you ask Tackler to do in the kitchen?” Lawson asked Ward as they were driving back to the USBC News offices.

  Ward ignored the question and looked at his watch.

  Almost 5:20pm. He was starting to think that his estimation that this would all be finished by 2:00am might have been a little too optimistic.