Ultimatum

by Simon Kernick

  I needed to speak to Bolt to tell him I was at home. There was no point putting off my interrogation any longer, and with a couple of beers inside me, I felt fortified enough to deal with it.

  But as I got to my feet, looking round for the phone, the doorbell rang.

  I thought about not answering it, but the noise from the TV made it obvious I was in. I went over to the window and pulled back the curtain a few inches.

  Cecil stood on my doorstep – small and wiry, bouncing on his feet against the cold – his back to the small communal garden. He gave me a quick wave and nod, motioning for me to open the door. He’d changed from earlier, and was wearing a bomber jacket and jeans, the coat zipped up against the cold.

  I didn’t like him turning up at my flat out of the blue. It made me uneasy. But he’d seen me now, so to ignore him would arouse suspicion.

  ‘What do you want?’ I called through the glass. ‘I thought I told you I wanted to be left alone.’

  Cecil pulled a face. ‘What is this?’ he called back, his voice muffled. ‘You’re going to leave me out here in the cold? We need to talk.’

  It was pitch black outside. My flat was on the ground floor, one of four in an old detached house cut off from the road by a high hedge. It was a secluded spot. Too secluded. The old lady directly above me was deaf as a post; the other neighbours were commuters who were out most of the time.

  ‘Come on, what the hell is this, Jones?’ Cecil called again, clearly irritated now.

  Alarm bells were sounding in my head. I decided then that, old friend or not, I wasn’t going to let him in.

  A shadow suddenly appeared behind the window to my right, obscured by the curtain, and before I could react Cain was standing in front of me, his pale face ghostly in the moonlight, the vein throbbing obscenely on his cheek. He was holding a pistol with a suppressor attached, the end of the barrel touching the glass.

  ‘Pass the front-door keys through the window, Jones,’ he said, loudly and firmly.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ I demanded, putting just the right amount of indignation in my voice, knowing that I was too late to make a move.

  Cecil had also brought a pistol with suppressor attached out from beneath his bomber jacket, and I could see that his eyes were alive with anger.

  ‘You’ve got questions to answer,’ announced Cain. ‘About who exactly you work for.’

  And I knew then that they’d found out about me. Which meant I no longer had to worry about what I said to the police.

  Because I was already a dead man.

  ‘I’ve got a home address for the informant, Richard Burnham-Jones,’ said Tina into the phone, shouting to be heard above a helicopter flying overhead, as she walked further down the road away from all the activity surrounding Azim Butt’s house. She read out the address, then waited while Commander Ingrams dictated it to someone next to him.

  ‘Right, we’ll get officers round there now,’ said Ingrams. ‘In the meantime, we have authority to move Prisoner Garrett. There’s a park two hundred yards south of where you are. A helicopter’s going to pick up you up there in five minutes and take you up to the prison to sign him out. We’re setting up a safehouse about eight miles from the prison. I want you to travel with Garrett and the escort to the safehouse by road.’

  ‘Why not by helicopter?’

  ‘It’s too risky. We haven’t picked up the Stinger shooter yet. If there are any more Stingers in circulation they could be used against a helicopter, and we really can’t afford to lose Garrett.’ He paused. ‘You’re to tell him that if he gives you the full names of everyone involved in the attacks today, and all those involved in the Stanhope siege, he’ll be kept in a safehouse until the trial, and we will ask the trial judge to strongly consider his cooperation when passing sentence. In other words, he won’t serve a life-term sentence.’

  ‘Are we allowed to do all that, sir?’ asked Tina. The idea of giving Fox all he’d asked for, with the Shard still burning barely half a mile from where she stood, stuck in her throat. It wasn’t right.

  ‘We’re effectively in a state of emergency here, DC Boyd. The attacks today, particularly the last one on the Shard, make the government look weak, and they can’t have that. If Garrett is the key – and it looks like he may well be – we have to make him talk. We can’t torture him, although God knows there are plenty of people here who would love to do it, so this is the only way. Tell him this, too. If he doesn’t talk, if he holds out for a deal that’s never going to happen, then he’ll be transferred to Belmarsh by car later tonight, held in solitary confinement until his trial, and if necessary for the next fifty years. We’re not pussyfooting around here, DC Boyd. You need to make sure he knows that.’

  ‘I’ll make sure he knows,’ said Tina coldly. ‘And I’ll make sure he talks.’

  Sixty-two

  20.24

  I RETREATED DOWN the hall and into the kitchen at the back of the flat, hands in the air, as Cecil walked towards me, gun outstretched. Behind him, Cain quietly closed the front door.

  ‘I don’t work for anyone,’ I said, still indignant. ‘I’d have thought that was pretty obvious after what happened today. I killed a man. And it wasn’t self-defence. Or have you forgotten about that?’

  It was clear that Cecil hadn’t. A flash of doubt crossed his face as I spoke, giving me a chink of hope, although it was quickly counter-balanced by the merciless gleam in Cain’s eyes.

  I stopped in the middle of the kitchen, my back to the window, and kept talking, knowing it was my best chance of staying alive. ‘So who the hell am I meant to be working for?’

  Cain and Cecil stopped a few feet in front of me. Cecil kept the gun pointed at my chest, while Cain kept his gun down by his side as he addressed me like a judge passing sentence. ‘The police knew about the Stinger attack before it happened. Our operative was almost caught. And, according to the news reports, the people inside the Shard had received a warning before the missile was fired.’

  ‘How the hell was I meant to have done that? I don’t even know who your operative was. Or what happened to the Stinger after you dropped us off.’ My tone remained confrontational, but inside I was reeling. The evidence against me was overwhelming, and I cursed myself for coming back here.

  ‘There was a bug in my car,’ continued Cain. ‘It led the police to me. It could only have been planted by you. That car was clean when I picked you up. I’d never used it before, and if it had been bugged before we went to the scrapyard then we would have been arrested as soon as the shooting started. But we weren’t. Which meant it was planted afterwards. So tell us who you’re working for, and I promise we’ll make it quick.’

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you? I’m not working for anyone. No police force or government agency’s going to let me get away with armed robbery or murder, are they? And I’ve committed both today. And why would I want to work for the authorities after what they’ve done to me? Come on, Cecil,’ I said, knowing he was the weak link, ‘you’ve served with me. You know what I’m like.’

  ‘He might be telling the truth, sir,’ said Cecil uncertainly, still keeping the gun pointed firmly at my chest.

  ‘He’s not,’ Cain told him, before addressing me again. ‘You’re working for someone, Jones, otherwise you wouldn’t have had access to a bug. And I’m guessing you got cold feet when you saw the Stinger. I told you it would have been better if you hadn’t looked in the box.’

  ‘Listen, there’s no way—’

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’ he snapped, his words cutting through the air like a shard of glass. He turned to Cecil. ‘He’s obviously not going to talk, and we haven’t got time to hang around. Finish it.’

  ‘Don’t do it, Cecil. I’m your friend.’

  Cain grunted dismissively. ‘You’re a fool, Jones. That’s what you are. You had a chance to become one of us, and you threw it away. Finish it, Cecil. For The Brotherhood.’

  I stared at my old army colleague, willing
him to believe me, fully aware that this was my last chance.

  But it was slipping away.

  Cecil’s expression hardened. In the end, he was a soldier through and through. And a soldier obeys orders. ‘Turn round, Jones,’ he said, his harsh Belfast accent amplified in the stillness of the room. The accent of my executioner.

  It was over.

  I turned round.

  Which was when I noticed the kitchen window was slightly ajar, and I remembered opening it earlier to let in some fresh air. In the next second my hand shot out and grabbed a frying pan sitting on the kitchen top, and I ducked suddenly, flinging the pan back in the direction of Cecil.

  Even with the suppressors, the shots seemed loud in the confines of the room as I took a running jump at the window, adrenalin coursing through me, and leapt through it as if I was doing a bomb into a swimming pool, sending it flying open with a bang, before landing on the gravel of the residents’ car park at the rear of the building.

  I rolled over and jumped to my feet, diving behind one of the cars as Cecil appeared at the window and fired a shot at me, just missing my foot. I heard Cain saying something from behind him but couldn’t make out what it was, and then Cecil disappeared. A couple of seconds later I heard my front door opening and shutting again, and I knew they were going to come round to cut off my escape.

  Knowing I had only seconds to get out on the street and to safety, I got to my feet again.

  Which was when all my strength seemed to sap out of me and I realized I’d been hit. I looked down. There was a hole in my gut and another in my chest, both of them pumping blood on to my check shirt – a gift from Gina a couple of Christmases ago. I thought of her then, and Maddie, and knew I had to survive this. For their sakes.

  I staggered across the car park, clutching at my wounds, trying to stop the bleeding. But I was going too slowly to reach the street in time. Cain and Cecil would be out here any second and I’d be a sitting duck. I made a snap decision and dived into the bushes that bordered the property, wriggling as far as I could inside, wincing against the pain that was beginning to envelop me.

  Just in time. Almost immediately, Cain and Cecil appeared round the side of the house, holding their guns and looking round urgently, only ten yards away.

  ‘He can’t be far,’ hissed Cain. ‘I hit him at least once, and you hit him too. Look, there’s blood on the gravel.’ He pointed to where I’d originally taken shelter behind the parked car, and I prayed one of my neighbours had heard the commotion and called the police. In the flat above, I could hear the old lady’s TV blaring away, drowning everything else out.

  I held my breath as Cain approached the bushes, only a couple of yards away now, and bent down, pulling some of the foliage aside with the gun. I stayed absolutely still, knowing that if I made even the tiniest move he’d discover me. My lungs felt close to bursting and all the time I could feel the blood leaking out of me into the earth.

  And then there was the sound of tyres on gravel and the glare of headlights as a car pulled into the car park.

  I used the noise to exhale and drag in another lungful of air, peering through the gaps in the bushes as the car parked between two others. It was a BMW, and I recognized it straight away as belonging to the guy on the top floor, a brash City worker called Rupert who was a couple of years younger than me and who never bothered to say hello.

  As he got out of the car, briefcase in hand, he looked accusingly towards Cecil and Cain, who’d both hidden their guns. ‘Can I help you, gentlemen?’ he asked, staring them down. He looked confident and at ease, clearly not expecting trouble, and I wanted to shout out to him to jump back in the car and reverse out of there.

  But I didn’t say a word as Cain walked towards him, bringing round the gun from behind his back. ‘No,’ he said simply, and shot Rupert twice in the chest, waiting as his victim fell against the car with a gasp and slid down it, before landing in a heap on the gravel. He then put a third bullet in his head before walking back in the direction of the bushes.

  ‘We need to hurry,’ he snapped at Cecil. ‘Keep looking for him.’

  I held my breath again as Cain stopped less than half a yard from where I was lying and began poking inside the foliage with the gun.

  He was going to see me any second.

  ‘Jesus, where the fuck is he?’ I heard Cecil curse from a few yards further up. ‘He’s got to be somewhere.’

  At that moment, Cain’s face appeared in the bushes just above my head, and I wondered in that instant if he could smell my blood. All he had to do was look down and I was finished.

  I clenched my teeth, preparing to die.

  Outside on the street, a car slowed down.

  And then I heard something bleep loudly, and Cain’s head disappeared.

  He moved away from the bushes, pulling a mobile phone from his pocket and staring down at the screen. ‘We need to move.’ He paused, then said something that completely threw me. ‘Fox is going to be en route at any moment.’

  Fox. The only surviving terrorist from the Stanhope siege. What the hell did Cain mean?

  ‘But we’ve got to find Jones,’ said Cecil anxiously. ‘We can’t leave him. He’s a witness.’

  But Cain was having none of it. ‘Even if he’s still alive, there’s nothing he can do to us. He’s in this as much as we are. Come on.’

  And with that, they turned and walked away across the gravel, quickly disappearing from view.

  I was still alive. But only just.

  Sixty-three

  20.50

  FOX SAT ON the bunk smoking a cigarette and listening to the faint sounds of violence drifting through the prison like music to his ears.

  The cell they’d put him in didn’t have a TV so he could no longer see what was happening in the outside world, but it didn’t matter. He knew it would be bedlam out there as the government tried to show they were in control of a situation when they quite clearly weren’t. He smiled. It felt good to experience power again. He knew the police were desperate for any information he could give them – all the more so now that the name he’d given Tina Boyd had produced such dramatic results. But that was the reason he’d chosen Tina. Unlike so many coppers these days, she got things done.

  Fox had always been a patient person. As a child he’d been able to sit for hours fishing with his father at the lake near their home, knowing that if he waited long enough, a trout would bite, because in the end one always did. It was a trait that had served him well during the long monotonous days he’d spent in prison.

  But as he sat there now, he was finding it hard to stay calm. All his months of planning rested on what would happen in the next few hours. There was still so much that could go wrong. And in his heart, he knew that this was his one opportunity. He’d played all his cards. Now he would have to wait and see whether they trumped everyone else’s or not.

  In his office, Governor Jeremy Goodman stared at the phone on his desk, listening to its high-pitched ringing. At the still very productive age of sixty-four he was actively considering retirement for the first time in his life. He’d worked in the prison system for more than thirty years, the last ten of which had been spent running Westmoor, and he prided himself on the safe, peaceful environment he’d fostered for the prisoners during that time. And now, suddenly, all his good work was being destroyed, as the prisoners repaid his work with a destructive and ultimately pointless riot, which had now spread to two of the prison’s wings.

  Knowing he could avoid it no longer, he picked up the phone. The person at the other end was the Home Office minister Alan Harris, an irritating little man with a ‘hang ’em and flog ’em’ approach to criminal behaviour which was entirely unsuited to a modern, progressive society.

  After a cursory attempt at pleasantries, Harris got straight down to business. ‘We’re moving Prisoner William Garrett,’ he said in a nasal voice that grated on Goodman every time he heard it.

  ‘On whose authority?’

 
‘The Prime Minister’s. The paperwork should already have arrived in your email account. An armed police escort with copies of the paperwork will be arriving at the prison in the next fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Are you sure about this, Minister? Prisoner Garrett is perfectly safe here. He’s in protective custody, well away from the disturbance, which we’ve contained in two wings. We also have Tornado Teams and riot police en route, the first of which should be here any minute.’

  ‘But you’ve also had two attempts on Garrett’s life, Governor, and the last one was less than an hour ago. I’m sorry, but whatever you may think, your facility, for all its progressive policies, is simply not secure enough. And we can’t afford to lose this prisoner.’

  Goodman bristled at the way he was being spoken to by a jumped-up little twit like Harris who was obviously taking real pleasure out of the situation, even though it was clear that with three attacks in London in one day he was hardly on top of things either.

  ‘Prisoner Garrett will be ready,’ he said curtly, and ended the call without waiting for a reply.

  ‘Everything all right, sir?’ asked Officer Thomson, the most senior of the prison officers on duty, as Goodman put down the receiver. Thomson was stood to attention, with his hands behind his back, looking every inch the military man he’d once been.

  Goodman sighed. ‘Prisoner Garrett is being removed. You need to go and get him ready. And make sure you give him a full body search. I don’t trust him an inch.’

  Thomson frowned. ‘Where are they taking him, sir?’

  ‘I don’t know. And to be perfectly frank, I don’t care. He’s someone else’s problem now.’

  Sixty-four

  20.55

  MIKE BOLT’S HEAD hurt like hell, but he was feeling a lot better than he had three-quarters of an hour earlier when he’d been hit by whatever it was he’d been hit by.

  Since then he’d been sick twice, and ordered to go to hospital by the doctor who’d treated him at the scene, but he’d steadfastly refused. While he could still stand, he wanted to be involved, which was exactly what he was saying now to Commander Ingrams as he paced the street with the phone pushed against the bandage that had been wrapped round his head. ‘I’ve worked this case from the beginning. I’ve been involved in everything all day. And the fact is, I don’t want to stop now.’ He was at a crossroads a hundred yards from Azim Butt’s ruined townhouse, the sound of it burning still clearly audible. To his left, the Shard stood like a tall, wounded giant breathing smoke and fire, a symbol of his failure.