Meanwhile the police firearms unit van moved up Eastbourne Road in Chiswick and repositioned itself on Milnthorpe Road, where it parked thirty metres up from the house.
At 19:07 a Barrier Alarms van pulled up outside the electric gates of the house on Milnthorpe Road. The MI5 operative got out and rang the bell, showed his face to the camera set into the gatepost and gave his name. The gates opened. He got back into his van and drove into the off-street parking area, which triggered lights on the front of the house on either side of a large arched window above the front door. The door remained closed until he approached it with his case of tools.
A well-built man who spoke English with a thick Russian accent brought him into the hall, which had a magnificent sweeping wooden staircase to the left with some colossal artworks hanging on the wall going up the stairs. A triple-level chandelier, reflecting light off the white walls and white marble floor, lit the hall to a surgical brightness. The keypad to the alarm system was to the right of the front door. Tom Brewer inspected and memorised all its features. He asked the Russian for a quick tour of the house before he got down to testing the system.
The Russian started with the study next to the hall, where the screens were housed in a large open wall cabinet. There was a desk and chair in front of them and an empty cup of tea next to a full ashtray. There was a door to the stairway down to the basement in the far corner of the room. Across a corridor was the kitchen, where another man in his early thirties, who looked as fit as the Russian who’d opened the door, was making a pot of tea. He nodded but said nothing. The rest of the ground floor was empty. The dining room showed evidence of a card game, with decks of cards, score pads, ashtrays and cups of tea and coffee.
‘I’ll start at the top of the house and work my way down,’ said Brewer. ‘I’ll leave the alarm test until last, if that’s O.K.?’
The Russian nodded and joined him as he started up the stairs. He watched as Brewer checked all the contact plates on the bedroom and bathroom windows on the second floor.
They went through the same process on the first floor. There was a room off the master bedroom, which was only accessible through double doors in the west wall. It was a walk-in wardrobe and dressing room with access to a large bathroom. Brewer noticed how carefully he was being watched and how the Russian made sure that he never got behind him.
As he checked the bathroom window he noticed that the Russian was standing in the double doors between the bedroom and dressing room and that he was getting bored. He yawned and stretched and put his hands behind his head and twisted from side to side. As Brewer finished checking the dressing-room window the Russian turned without thinking.
That was when Brewer hit him.
The Russian was sharp and was able to make a significant move by the time the first blow landed on his neck so that Brewer missed the carotid. The Russian turned. Brewer aimed a punch to his throat. The Russian fell back, bounced back up off the bed and drove his fist into the side of the MI5 man’s head. Brewer went down, lashing out with his foot, sideswiping the Russian, who collapsed onto the carpet. He drove the heel of his boot into the Russian’s face, whose head kicked back and hit the wooden frame of the bed. Brewer saw that he was stunned, got to his feet and drove his heel twice more into the Russian’s head, knocking him unconscious. He dragged him into the dressing room, cuffed his hands and feet with plastic ties from the tool case and stuck tape over his mouth.
The door to the master bedroom overlooked the staircase and hall below. Brewer glanced down, saw nobody. He trotted down the stairs, looking over the bannister to make sure there was no one underneath. He opened the front door, stuck two fingers in the air and headed for the study and the monitors connected to the CCTV cameras. Nobody there. As he cut across the corridor to the kitchen he heard the toilet flush to his left. He waited in the doorway of the kitchen. The toilet door opened, feet came up the corridor. He stepped out of the kitchen and chopped the Russian beneath the ear on the jawline with the edge of his hand. The Russian went down hard and fast on the marble tiles.
Brewer ran to the front door, hit the button to open the electric gates and opened the rear doors of the Barrier Alarms van. Two helmeted firearms officers got out and another three came in from the van outside the gates.
‘Dressing room,’ he whispered, pointing upstairs.
Two officers ran up the stairs.
‘Corridor,’ he said, and two officers dragged the other Russian into the reception room on the far side of the hall and closed the door.
Brewer took the remaining officer to the door in the study which led downstairs to the basement.
The firearms officer handed Brewer a Glock 17 pistol, opened the door and followed him. There were two closed doors in the area at the bottom, one leading to the sauna and utility room and the other to the cinema. The wine cellar was only accessible from the cinema.
Brewer pointed the firearms officer into the cinema. The padded doors opened noiselessly. It was dark and he turned on a helmet light. The cinema was empty. He moved up through the seating to the wine cellar, which was locked as the owner said it would be. He came back, signed this to Brewer.
They turned to the final door. Brewer crouched down and opened it. The utility room was in semi-darkness, the only light coming from a large glass panel set into the door of the sauna. With the light on inside, the occupants couldn’t see out. Brewer looked through the glass across a small anteroom to another door with an identical glass panel. Through it he could see a man in shirtsleeves wearing an empty shoulder holster and sitting on a towel on a wooden slatted bench. The boy was lying next to him on another slatted bench. He was blindfolded and had his hands cuffed behind his back.
Brewer looked for the gun. Couldn’t see it.
Brewer rearranged the grip on his Glock, nodded to his partner. He was going to go for it. He opened the door and slipped into the anteroom, where the heat and steam was generated for the sauna. He tried the next door, but it wouldn’t budge. This was the one door in the house that the owner had assured him could not be locked from the inside. The Russian must have wedged it shut. He looked through the window and saw that the Russian now had Sasha in his lap and his gun to the boy’s head. Brewer spotted a broom in the anteroom, jammed it against the window panel frame and pushed hard, feeling the obstruction slide back. Two bullets came through the half-open door and embedded themselves in the wall.
The Russian was standing now, holding Sasha, who was rigid with fear, the gun at the boy’s head.
‘Put your gun down,’ he said.
Brewer put the Glock on the floor and backed away from it.
‘Tell your friend to do the same.’
The policeman obeyed.
‘Hands on heads,’ said the Russian. ‘You both walk in front of me.’
They shuffled into the area at the foot of the stairs.
‘How many upstairs?’
‘Two in the reception room,’ said Brewer.
‘How many outside?’
‘Two.’
‘Snipers?’
‘One.’
They went up the stairs and came out into the study.
‘Tell everybody to stand down, drop their weapons, leave the building inside and out.’
The firearms officer spoke into his cheek mike.
‘What transport have you got?’
‘A van.’
‘Where?’
‘Outside the front door.’
‘We take the van. You drive,’ he said to Brewer. ‘You stay. Tell them to move all the vehicles apart from the van away from the house.’
As they came into the hall the firearms officer spoke into his cheek mike again. The front door was open, the forecourt lit by automatic lighting sensors. Vehicles started backing out and driving away.
‘We get to the front door, you stop. I want you close in fr
ont of me when we go out.’
The two officers in the reception room had left but the two upstairs had stayed. They looked down through the bannisters and saw the procession moving towards the front door. As the four made their way through the hall a clear metre opened up between the Russian and the two other men. The Russian was carrying Sasha on his left hip while his gun was pointed at Brewer’s back.
The shot was unsilenced and very loud.
It hit the Russian in the back of the neck.
The boy fell from his paralysed arm, the gun clattered to the floor and the Russian’s legs crumpled beneath him.
Mercy waited for the all clear and moved into the house. Sasha Bobkov was on his feet and the firearms officer was cutting through his plastic cuffs. She put her arms around the boy, partly to comfort him but also to stop him removing his blindfold.
‘I’m Mercy,’ she said. ‘You have to keep the blindfold on for the moment. We’ve got to get your eyes used to the light gradually, O.K.?’
‘Where’s Daddy? Is he here?’
‘He’s coming, don’t worry,’ said Mercy, taking him by the hand. ‘We’re going outside now and I’m going to take you to an ambulance, and they’ll give you a check-up. Are you feeling all right?’
‘I’m O.K. I just want my dad, that’s all. I really want to see him.’
‘He’s not far away. He just had to make it look as if he was delivering the ransom to the kidnappers while we got you out of the house. He’ll be coming soon.’
‘And where’s my mum? Is she here?’
‘Let’s just get you to the ambulance,’ said Mercy, hugging Sasha to her, who put his arm around her waist. ‘You’ve been a very brave boy, you know that, don’t you?’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with my mum? There’s something wrong with her. I know. They told me she was in hospital.’
She took him up the steps into the ambulance, where they laid him down. The paramedics cut away the material around the clasp at the back of the mask, turned the lights down, told him to close his eyes, pulled it off and fitted the boy with a pair of dark goggles.
‘Will you stay with me?’ asked Sasha, reaching for Mercy’s hand. ‘I like your voice.’
She couldn’t stop herself, leaned forward and kissed him on the head. He wanted her to hold his hand while they gave him a check-up. He looked at her intensely, as if she was his guardian angel.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you for saving me.’
He said it so sweetly and earnestly she nearly broke down and wept.
‘You don’t know it,’ said Mercy, ‘but you’ve been a big help to me.’
‘Tell me what happened to my mum?’ he asked. ‘I know she’ll have been worried and she probably had to have a drink to help her cope. Was that why she had to go to hospital?’
‘I think she was very upset when the school called to say you hadn’t arrived and she started drinking. When they came to speak to her they couldn’t get in and your father was called because he had keys to the house,’ said Mercy. ‘Your mum wasn’t in a good state. I don’t think she’d been eating properly, she was dehydrated, and they thought the best thing was to take her to hospital.’
One of the paramedics tapped her on the shoulder.
‘We’re going to have to get going now.’
‘I’ll go with you.’
‘That’s not going to be possible,’ said the paramedic.
‘He’s under sixteen and I haven’t finished talking to him.’
The paramedic shrugged.
A text came in on her phone: DI Hope telling her he would start interviewing Lomax in about half an hour.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Charing Cross Hospital,’ said the paramedic, closing the door. Mercy called Papadopoulos and told him to follow the ambulance in her car. She put the phone away, stroked Sasha’s forehead, squeezed his hand. The ambulance set off with a whoop from its siren.
‘I know you don’t want to tell me,’ he said.
‘She had a stroke in hospital,’ said Mercy. ‘You know what that is?’
‘It’s a blood clot in the brain,’ said Sasha. ‘People die from that.’
‘They moved her into intensive care and she was stable,’ said Mercy. ‘Then there was a big car crash on the motorway and they needed places in the unit so, because she was stable, they moved her out.’
Sasha looked up to the ceiling and nodded.
‘I know what you’re going to say now,’ he said.
‘She had a heart attack and they couldn’t revive her,’ said Mercy. ‘I’m really sorry, Sasha.’
‘Was my dad there when she died?’
Mercy shook her head. Sasha sobbed so violently that his shoulders came off the trolley. She hugged him to her and he cried into her neck until he fell back exhausted.
‘She always said she didn’t want to die alone,’ said Sasha, quietly. ‘And I promised her she wouldn’t.’
Bobkov picked up the phone in Wireless Up the Junction and waited there for nearly half an hour until a call told him to head down the hill to Clapham Junction and take a bus towards Wandsworth. He boarded a 156 but was told to get off at the first stop on St. John’s Hill. It was getting dark as they took him through the streets onto Battersea Rise and then alongside Wandsworth Common. Fortunately MI5 had included a dog walker among their agents so that when Bobkov took one of the paths that headed into the darkness of the common they could bring him in without raising any suspicion.
At 19:35 Makepeace got the full report of what had happened in the house on Milnthorpe Road and called James Kidd to tell him that Sasha was now safe, that they had two men in custody and one dead. Kidd thanked him for the update.
‘It means you can abort your operation,’ said Makepeace. ‘We have two people for you to interrogate. You don’t have to put Bobkov in danger’s way.’
‘The operation is already under way. We have no way of communicating with Bobkov,’ said Kidd. ‘Where’s the boy?’
‘He’s been taken to Charing Cross Hospital,’ said Makepeace. ‘Why can’t you send in one of your agents and tell him it’s all over?’
‘Thanks for keeping me informed,’ said Kidd. ‘Much appreciated.’
‘You do realise that if anybody calls Milnthorpe Road now, they will no longer get a reply. That could put Bobkov in serious danger.’
‘Has anybody called any of the phones you’ve recovered from the scene?’
‘Not yet,’ said Makepeace. ‘We’re not getting anything from the captured Russians. Not a word.’
‘They won’t say anything,’ said Kidd. ‘Let me know if anybody calls those mobiles you’ve taken. It will have an impact on the operation.’
Bobkov had walked past the tennis courts and was then instructed to go to the middle of the cricket ground. It was dark now and felt darker out on the expanse of open field, with only the lights and traffic of Trinity Road some way off. Bobkov was nervous. The hand carrying the case was sweating. The heat from his body was rising from the front of his coat into his face and he could smell his own fear. He knew what was coming. He was on his own now. None of the agents had dared come with him. The dog walker had kept to the lighted path in front of some houses overlooking the common. The dog was off the lead but didn’t fancy it out in the distant dark. Bobkov felt the profound loneliness of his situation, as if he was enduring a metaphor of the last ten years.
The Russian captives remained silent. At 19:47 one of the mobiles recovered from the house on Milnthorpe Road rang. An MI5 agent answered it but said nothing. A voice asked for Evgeny. The agent said that Evgeny wasn’t available. The phone went dead. The agent called Kidd and Makepeace immediately.
Bobkov came back into the light. The first glow of the ugly orange street lamps on Trinity Road almost warmed him. He stepped onto th
e pavement and was instructed to cross the four lanes of heavy traffic. He thought this could be the perfectly absurd ending to an unreal existence—flattened by a truck mid-operation.
He was directed away from the blast of the traffic and past Wandsworth Prison before being sent down a maze of residential streets to Garratt Lane. They were reeling him in. He felt he was close to the end now as they sent him up towards Wandsworth High Street, past the supermarket and across the road into the Southside shopping centre.
Bobkov had always hated shopping centres, but this one seemed to have a particular ruthlessness to it, with no attempt made by the architects to ease the experience of financial stripping. He walked the glassy surface of the polished floor wincing at the neon. He was sent up the escalator to the food court and the cinema complex.
There was a vast throng of people queuing to see the latest blockbusters including a young Asian contingent after tickets for a Bollywood romantic comedy. Yes, he wouldn’t have minded a bit of love and laughter himself.
The crowd engulfed him, the roar of London chat, the smell of food wafting in from the fried chicken joints, and the phone went suddenly dead. He stopped to look at it. There was still battery power. The screen was functioning. He raised his head in time to see the crowd parting, as if something biblical was in train, and a man in jeans, a navy-blue zip-up jacket and a Knicks cap closed on him. His arm came up. Bobkov dropped the briefcase as two colossal hammer blows smacked into his chest, and he was falling backwards and the London chat had turned to screams, and where before space had seemed impossible now there was half an acre around him and the smell of popcorn was strong in his nostrils until it wasn’t.
31
7:45 P.M., FRIDAY 23RD MARCH 2012
Brentford, London
Boxer was in a greasy spoon in West Ham. The place was now empty. He’d been there for more than an hour. He went to the toilet at the back of the café. As he relieved himself two men came in, stood behind him and told him to keep looking at the wall. He finished, zipped up and one of the men put a mask over his eyes and wound gaffer tape twice around his head. He told Boxer to put his hands behind his back and the other cuffed him. They searched him, found the money and took it. They walked him out of the toilet and further into the back of the café and then out into the open air. They told him to get into the boot of a car.
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