by A P Bateman
The thought made him think it was about time. Time to retire from what his recruiter and mentor, Peter Stewart, had called playing cowboys and Indians. He had some money saved. He knew Caroline had a little put by from when her fiancé had been killed. His in-service pension and the money from the sale of his property.
Both King and Caroline had found each other after personal tragedy. It was second time round for them both and they could end their service with MI5 and find something new without the pressures of paying rent or mortgages or loans.
King put the thought out of his head. It wasn’t time. He needed to focus on the job at hand. Focus on staying alive. Focus on hunting his enemy.
He opened the rear door and knelt on the ground. He checked under the seats, then under the floor mats. The search was fruitless, and he felt relieved. He was being proactive, getting himself in a better head space for his tasks. He would stay in this mindset. Operating in the UK should take no less effort in personal security than if he were undercover in Syria or The Yemen. He felt better about himself, knowing he was upping his game. The enemy had got the drop on him back at his cottage, but he had beaten them. Taken out their assassin. Now he would be a tougher target.
A fox who had received a close call was a clever beast indeed.
King got back behind the wheel. The drive to London should take just under five hours. He knew the route he would take, didn’t need to punch anything into the satnav. It was a plug-in affair which came with the rental. King checked the glovebox, saw it packed away with the USB lead attached. He thought for a moment, then decided to take it out. He whipped out his pocket knife, opened the drop point blade and undid the back. There were four tiny screw heads and he got them off quickly, used the tip of the blade to prise off the back. He could see the disk as soon as he opened it, around the size of a fifty pence coin and twice as thick. He knew what it was the moment he saw it. It was a magnetic tracker with a lithium battery self-contained power source and GPS locator. He had used them before. They had around a forty-eight-hour life and were classed as a disposable unit. It could have been placed anywhere on the car, but somebody had gone to a great deal of effort to conceal this. Which told King two things. They expected him to search the vehicle, be at the top of his game. And they had known he would be away from the vehicle long enough to plant the device.
32
London
Gipri Bashwani was now at the top of the rich list. Which meant he was at the top of Anarchy to Recreate Society’s kill list. He was third from the top when the list was conceived, and now he was the only one left. He had not donated anything more because of the threat. He had already done that. He had given twenty-two billion dollars to charities, schools, colleges and universities over the past ten years. He had created a foundation which had taken ten thousand families from the brink of homelessness in India alone. Despite Anarchy to Recreate Society’s claims, lifelong billionaires like Gipri Bashwani had done more good than the panic shedding of wealth by scared dot-com and bitcoin billionaires who lived their life with more avarice than Bashwani would ever know. What he had created, as his legacy, was the infrastructure to continue his philanthropic work long after he was gone. At seventy-six years of age, he was a realist. He neither believed he had many years left at the helm of his business empire, nor would he ever cower from the threats and actions of a terrorist group.
Few knew who Bashwani was. Certainly, he could walk down any street unrecognised. Readers of Forbes or the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times would know his name, the worth of his companies. He was involved in mining, oil, textiles, computer software and artificial intelligence. His company had taken control of one of the world’s best-known prestige car companies and shaken the automotive establishment to its core by announcing its intention for sole reliance on electric power overnight. Not in decades to come, but within two years. Worldwide. And all without affecting the shareholder stock in his oil company.
He also owned many properties all over the world, entire tower blocks. He had started on his path to wealth as a private residential landlord, and changed little more than the amount of property he owned and the way the rent was collected.
Bashwani was adamant he was not going to change a single thing he did because of the threat. He already employed a close protection team. It was their job to keep him alive, and his job, his obligation to his shareholders, to make money. Nothing was going to change that.
The man watched Gipri Bashwani step out of his Maybach limousine, the door held open by his personal bodyguard. The chauffeur drove away when the door slammed closed and re-entered the traffic. The bodyguard walked Bashwani to the door of Century Towers, home of the billionaire’s London offices. A second plain clothed security officer opened the door for him and the two men stepped inside the smoked glass facade.
The man smoothed his hand over his two-day old stubble, then ran his hand through his dark hair. He noted that the chauffer had been premature in his departure, left no way of escape. If a threat came from inside the building, or from behind the vehicle, then Bashwani would be cut off. He knew that close protection details worked on a series of scenarios and the ability to counter them. Either Bashwani’s security was not as well-honed as it should have been for that of a billionaire, or the chauffer had made a simple mistake. Either way, mistakes could be exploited.
The man wound down the window of the battered Ford Transit van and let in enough air to demist the windscreen. He made a note of Bashwani’s time of arrival. He had already noted down the registration number of the Maybach. He opened the file again and looked up the section about security. He had read the file earlier, but went back over the personnel section once more.
Bashwani used a company for his security needs. Globe-Tech. Naturally, it boasted global capabilities and the company’s logo was of the earth. The ocean was blue, and the land was white and time zones ran from pole to pole with the two tropics and the equator striking through laterally. The font used was hard and boxy and futuristic and in all it looked like a hundred other security companies offering security and specialised services.
Globe-Tech boasted to employ only ex-military personnel. The company played on their contracting work in Afghanistan and Iraq, of their employees’ combat and operational experience in the theatre of war. They mentioned employees and training staff with ‘special forces’ experience. The man had watched intently, but nothing he had seen of the chauffer and the two bodyguards looked remotely in that echelon. Not even close.
The man knew that soldiers did not make the best bodyguards. If they did, the President of the United States would have a solely military trained close protection detail, instead of the United States Secret Service. The mindset was different, the skills as far removed from soldiering as it was possible to get.
He continued to study the file and noted that the chauffer was employed directly by Bashwani’s corporation umbrella. This operation filtered down assets to his separate companies within the Bashwani empire. The driver should have known better, should have been better trained. He should also have been briefed by the Globe-Tech bodyguard on bussing and debussing, on lines of cover, lines of fire and theoretical points of no return. He wondered how often the Globe-Tech shift rotations or allocations worked. Whether Bashwani was covered by the same person for days or weeks at a time, or whether it was a new bodyguard every time. He would have to continue his surveillance, because that knowledge would prove invaluable.
33
King had kept the tracking device in play. He couldn’t really see any other alternative. He needed to get closer to his enemy. Ditching the device or the car would achieve nothing. He would be found again, that much was certain. It was better to keep the illusion of a status quo and see what the enemy intended.
He had weighed the scenarios and run through the counter measures. They had wanted him dead last night, that much had been evident. He had thwarted their plans. But he was under no illusion that they would give
up.
So why the tracking device? He could not conceive the tracking device already being inside the satnav when he had acquired the vehicle. He had only agreed to the addition of it at the desk at Newquay airport. It would have to have been tampered with while he had been with Amanda Cunningham this morning.
So why the change of tactics? They had tried to kill him last night. Why now did they want to follow him? King thought it through until his head spun. In the end, he came up with two most likely conclusions. Firstly, it came down to nothing more than opportunity. They wanted to choose a killing ground. Somewhere they could control the variables, execute their plan and exfiltrate cleanly. The next most likely scenario was that they wanted to see what he was doing next. Follow him, and fine tune their plan.
King had put the tracker device in the empty coin tray in the centre console. He reasoned that if the worse happened, he could simply toss it out of the window and their advantage would be lost. He kept his phone in his pocket, but he had both MI5’s emergency response number and 999 on app speed dial. He had checked the 9mm Glock and carried it tucked under his thigh against the soft material of the seat. The Glock’s safe action meant it could never accidentally discharge carried in such a manner and would be quick to bring to arm.
Cornwall was behind him. He carried out good counter surveillance drills, adjusted his speed, checked his mirrors and even pulled off at slip roads, only to re-join the dual carriageway at the next opportunity. He stopped at a filling station on the A30 and topped up the tank, bought a bottle of water and checked the vehicles pulling onto the forecourt. Nothing stood out. Nobody seemed familiar. The tracker was doing its job for them and they were professional enough to hang back and resist a visual.
King had been there. He had waited, watched a screen, when every fibre of his being had wanted to get closer and confirm with his own eyes.
Again, it told him he was up against professionals.
The M5 was a busy motorway and he joined it at Exeter. It was the arterial route of the Westcountry and from there, the gateway to the rest of the country. It was a road laden with delivery vehicles and larger heavy goods vehicles and with three lanes and speeds nudging a hundred miles per hour in the fast lane, it gave him plenty of opportunities to perform counter surveillance measures. He switched lanes, dropped his speed, accelerated and all the time, he saw nobody. No vehicle appeared to be actively following him.
The fastest route to London would have been to take the M4 at Bristol and travel laterally across the country. But King wasn’t concerned about the extra forty-five minutes he would save. The M4 was flat and fast and straight. There would be little possibility in spotting his enemy, nor opportunity enough for them to show their hand. Instead, King exited the motorway at Taunton and took the road towards Ilminster, where he joined the A303. This road was a mixture of single lane and dual carriageway which swept through the fields and woodland of the south of England. It was hilly and invariably produced bottlenecks when two lanes frequently squeezed the traffic into one. A fast road in the right conditions, a motoring nightmare when accidents or holiday traffic conspired to double journey times.
King eased his speed and kept checking his mirrors. There was nothing untoward. No tell-tale vehicles. He was torn between keeping a good pace to ensure his own safety, and easing up to see how it would play out. It felt the most unnatural thing to do, but intelligence work had been a far from natural way to live his life. His mentor had once called it a game of cowboys and Indians, and it wasn’t far from the truth.
Ahead of him, the traffic was slowing up. King had driven the A303 many times, and he knew the bottlenecks would soon give way to short overtaking lanes and longer stages of dual carriageway. He slowed down, was about to overtake a lorry, but the lanes were narrowing fast and the lorry was far out from the edge of the road. He tucked in behind, checked his mirrors and noticed a lorry approaching rapidly from behind. It was closing fast. King flicked on his hazard lights and dabbed his foot on the brake to light up his tail lights. He could not do much else. He kept his eyes on the rear-view mirror, waited for the truck behind to slow down, but it was still closing fast.
He swerved to his right to overtake the lorry, but it countered his manoeuvre and drove out. Coincidence? King veered left, but the lorry in front of him mirrored his actions. The approaching lorry had slowed, but not enough. The traffic was moving at fifty miles per hour, but King estimated the lorry behind him to be gaining at about seventy. King slammed on his brakes, but the lorry in front slowed too. He was sandwiched. He looked left. There was a break in the bollards of the roadworks. King dropped down into third gear and floored the accelerator. He made for the break, the lorry behind veering to the curb, but narrowly missing his rear bumper by inches. King braced himself, the Ford clipping the edge of a length of barrier. Behind him, the two heavy vehicles collided with a crunching of metal that he seemed to feel reverberating within him, as much as hear. The car lurched into the air and he felt the unsettling weightlessness of free-falling as he found himself airborne for a moment, then crashed down the embankment and into trees and wooden fencing. The airbags deployed, and he felt as though he’d been punched square in the face with a huge boxing glove. The seatbelt dug into his chest as the car stopped and the low branches of a tree cracked the windscreen.
King fumbled with the seatbelt catch. The belt had pulled so tight that he struggled to breathe. He felt for the Glock, but it was gone. The airbags were deflating, a powdery residue covered him and an aroma of rubber overcoming him, making him want to gag. He managed to undo the belt, felt for the door handle, but it was unfamiliar, and he could not get the door open. His ears were ringing from the explosion of the airbags. He could hear shouts from above, his brain telling him to get out, get the gun, get some rounds off and move to better cover. But the rational part of his brain also warned him that this was an road traffic collision in southern England, not a roadside IED ambush in Iraq or Afghanistan. He could hear calls of concern from above. He looked up, saw a man and a woman on the edge of the verge high above him. They looked genuinely concerned, were calling down to him.
King got out and looked at the car. It was a write off and certainly wasn’t going to get towed out anytime soon either. It would need a crane or a specialist towing vehicle and a lot of specialist knowhow to go with it. He picked up the Glock from where it had ended up near the brake pedal, tucked it into his jacket pocket and retrieved the tracking device. He turned it over in his hand, then dropped it decisively onto the ground. There would be nothing gained by keeping it in play, the damned thing had almost cost him his life. That had been no accident, King was convinced of as much. He reached in for his bag in the rear footwell and didn’t bother closing the door as he stepped out from the brambles and broken saplings and started to climb the embankment.
“Are you okay?” the woman asked. She was young, pierced and tattooed and her hair was in strands of dreadlocks. She gently touched King’s shoulder as he stepped up to the top of the grass bank.
King pushed past her and walked up to the lorry that had crashed into the lorry in front of him. He stepped up and peered into the cab.
Empty.
He jumped down and jogged down the length of the other lorry. The driver’s door was open. There were no vehicles in front. The road was clear. The road behind was blocked and vehicles were sounding their horns, some starting to squeeze through the small gap between the lorries and the central reservation.
King turned to the woman. She looked put out. “Where are the drivers?”
She shrugged like she didn’t know, didn’t care.
The man who was with her, and by his appearance, King assumed they were together, pointed down the road. “They both got into a car in front,” he paused. “Shot off at speed.”
King stared down the empty road, then looked back at the couple. There were horns sounding and a few impatient motorists were walking towards them down the grass verge. “What sort of car w
as it?”
The man shrugged. “Silver, loud,” he paused. “I don’t know.”
“Sporty?”
“I guess,” he looked at the woman. “What do you think?”
She shook her head. “Footballer’s car,” she said. “Expensive, kind of gaudy. Tinted windows for sure. A real penis extension.”
“Did you see the drivers?”
“Not really,” the man said. “They moved too fast.”
“Hey, do you need a lift?” the woman asked.
King looked at the seventies Volkswagen camper. It was written on, graphitised and stickered. There were surfboards on the roof and bicycles strapped to the back. There was a hum of reggae coming from behind the closed windows. He looked back down the embankment at the wrecked hire car. It was already damp from the rain. He hadn’t even noticed that it had started raining. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
34
He had taken two separate elevators. Not because of counter surveillance measures, but because one lift terminated on the twelfth floor and the other started on the other side of the building which became 12A. It had taken the man far too long to discover that the gentle rise in gradient from 12 to 12A was indeed an entire floor. The lift, when he found it, indicated fourteen as the next floor. Floor thirteen did not exist. The lift rode up to the thirty sixth floor and on the ride up, he Googled on his smartphone and discovered that many architects omit a thirteenth floor for reasons of superstition. Being an international banking institution, and with customers or investors from every culture, religion and political persuasion, he supposed the bases had been covered. He felt a little foolish, perhaps even out of his depth. His task was so different from what he had trained for, what he had vowed to do.