by James Adams
“Just stay exactly where you are, Mr Ritchie, and make sure your children do the same. Any move by you and I will fire one bullet through the head of your wife. If you still persist in fighting me I will then kill your daughter and, if necessary, your son.”
Ritchie sank back into his chair, unable to grasp what was happening. He saw that David and Becky were looking on with interest at the drama. He saw no fear in their eyes, their imagination too young to make the connections between the words and their possible outcome.
The Chinese pushed Rosie into the room and then put a hand on her shoulder to force her into her chair at the table. He took a step back and put his gun into a holster under his jacket. Just as Harry began to think of opportunities and challenges, two other Chinese stepped quietly into the room. Both had small machine-guns in their hands and took up station, one against the cooker, the other on the opposite side of the room with his back to the fridge.
The leader spoke again. Now that he had established control, his voice was normal, his tone that of a reasonable man preparing for a quiet discussion in the pub over a beer or two.
“That’s much better. My name is Vincent Sum and these two gentlemen are my business associates.” He smiled slightly. “Our business, I’m afraid, involves you, Mr Ritchie. I must apologize for disturbing you in this way but I hope our stay with you will be a short one.”
“What do you want?” Harry asked. “If it’s money, there’s nothing except what’s in my wallet. Take it, take anything you want but just leave my family alone.”
He could hear the tremor in his voice and was ashamed that he should exhibit fright so easily. Becky could hear it too and began to cry softly. She did not understand what was happening but sensed the fear in her father. He had always been a bastion for her and if he was frightened then so was she.
Vincent gave a humourless chuckle. “Oh, it’s not your money that I want, Mr Ritchie. It’s your driving skills.” Suddenly Harry knew why these men were here. The train. They wanted the train.
When he had been seconded for the two-week familiarization course on the new train, he and the other drivers had spent a morning being lectured about security. One of the sessions had been titled “Terrorist Attack” and a man from Special Branch had told them about some of the precautions and what they should do in the event of an assault. It had all sounded very impressive and reassuring. Then the SB man had given them a final warning.
“All the precautions are the best but remember the most vulnerable point in any security system is the people operating it. In a bank, it’s the bank manager with the combination codes to the safe; in a military base, it’s the officer of the watch who knows the password. In your case, you are the people who control the trains. If a terrorist wants in, you might be the key to unlock the door.
“If anyone threatens you, report it. If anyone tries to bribe you or get information from you, report it. If you see or hear anything you think might be threatening, let us know.”
Ha. It was easy to say but Harry was willing to bet that stupid ass had never been stuck in his kitchen with three hoods pointing guns at his family.
Vincent Sum saw the journey from incomprehension to understanding travel across Harry’s face, “I see you understand why we are here. Let me explain further. What we want is for you to leave here to drive your normal train to Calais. Only when you take the nine o’clock we want you to stop in the Tunnel as you pass the ten-mile marker. It should take you 750 yards to stop and then your job will be done.”
“Then what happens?” Harry asked.
“That is no concern of yours. The only two things that matter to you are: One, will you live? The answer to that is yes. Once you have halted the train and remained stationary for three minutes, you will be free to start again and complete your journey.
The second concern is your family. They will remain here as our security that you will do what we want. Once you have done your job, I can assure you that we will have no reason to hold your wife or children and they will be free to go. Or rather we will be free to go and they can get on with their lives.” The man smiled, in a way that was meant to seem reassuring but which only made him appear more menacing.
Ritchie was calculating, projecting himself forward to Cheriton and then to his cab. At every step there were people he could speak to, people to warn. He could alert the security people, could even press the panic button in his cab. There were so many options, he was sure that rescue was possible, that his family could be saved.
Cooperation was the answer. Buy time. He looked up, trying to put a compliant expression on his face. “What guarantees do I have that you’ll let my family go?”
“You have none, but you have my word. More importantly, perhaps, you also have my word that if you don’t cooperate I will personally kill all three of them. So the choice is yours. Trust me that I will let them go because I have no reason to keep them. Or trust me to kill them if you choose to betray us. One way you may win. The other way you will most certainly lose.”
Ritchie nodded, as if accepting the logic of Sum’s argument. “It seems I don’t have any choice.”
Sum looked at him, studying his face as if trying to read through the open acceptance to the duplicity that lay beneath. He nodded to himself, the decision taken. He took two steps towards the table.
“I’m afraid, Mr Ritchie, that you still seem to think that you might have a choice in this matter. I think I need to underline for you just how serious your position is.”
He put his right hand underneath his jacket, below where he had holstered the gun. There was a small noise, a cross between a hiss and a sigh, and Harry was horrified to see a huge, silvery knife emerge. The blade must have been at least eight inches long and it curved to a tip that seemed to wink at him in the light reflected from the ceiling.
Moving quickly now, Sum took a single pace forward, snatched Becky’s arm from the table top and stretched it out in front of her. He carefully drew back the thumb and the third and fourth fingers.
Harry, understanding and compelled into action, shouted “No” and lunged across the table. But even as he was moving forward, the knife arced back and then swept forward in one swift, horrible movement.
The two fingers that were lying exposed on the wooden kitchen table jumped as the blade cut through flesh and bone to settle with a “thock” into the wood. Severed just below the second joint, they landed a foot away. Two screams, one from Rosie and the other from Becky, shattered the silence, and then there was a retching sound as David spewed a trail of half-digested breakfast across the kitchen floor.
Blood was pumping steadily from Becky’s hand, spreading in a pool across the table. In the pool, the two fingers appeared to have a life of their own, twitching and flexing as the nerves spasmed for the last time.
The screams had subsided to sobs as Rosie focused on stanching the flow of blood from Becky’s hand. David appeared to be in shock; and for Harry, rational thought had disappeared with the slash of the knife.
“I am sorry I had to do that,” Sum said, wiping the blade of his knife on a kitchen towel before replacing it in its sheath, “but it was important for you to understand that I will do whatever is necessary to ensure your cooperation.”
He pointed at Becky. His voice was now almost conversational, the contrast with the scene in front of him giving the words added weight.
“You see that I cut off the first two fingers of her right hand. I read that she loves riding and so I removed the fingers that hold the reins. She is young. She will soon learn to ride with the other hand. But when you leave here, I want you to take that image with you. Your beautiful daughter as she was, as she is now and as she will be if you do anything, anything at all to upset our plans.”
Harry no longer felt defiance. Instead he felt an overpowering guilt that Sum had seen the hint of resistance that had caused the attack. He would do nothing to provoke another assault.
CHAPTER XIV
The
opening of the Tunnel has transformed the lives of thousands who live close to any of the stations connecting to the trains heading to France and Brussels. In the same way as the ferries and the hovercrafts broadened the horizons of an island nation used to isolation, so the Tunnel makes the continent easily accessible to a whole new generation of travellers.
The distance between England and France was always short but the sea made it appear long. The journey time had now been so reduced that despite the sea barrier, getting to France from Britain was easier than from almost any other country. The Tunnel facilities were the most modern in Europe and everything was designed for speed and ease of use and thus maximum profitability for the operators.
In the first year of operation, thirteen million people had travelled through the Tunnel and more freight had been moved by rail in that twelve months than in the previous five years.
The southern English counties of Kent, Sussex and Surrey as well as parts of the south London suburbs are often described as the English heartland. They are home to many of those who commute into London to work and there is also a strong agricultural community that has existed virtually unchanged for hundreds of years. When the Tunnel was first mooted, these people were the main objectors. They formed highly organized lobbying groups to object to every proposal for new rail routes and road junctions. Other groups argued that the Tunnel would mean a loss of jobs for Britain as the French flooded the English market with apples, lamb and toys.
While these protests delayed much of the work on the Tunnel so that even today there are still projects uncompleted, none of these fears were realized. The Tunnel has allowed the British quick and cheap access to Continental markets and, now that most of the construction work is finished, most of the local people have not been as badly affected as they feared.
But perhaps the most important change brought by the Tunnel has been in the leisure habits of the people who live in southern England. A day trip to France for shopping, for lunch or just for fun has become a reality for millions of Britons.
The French, with their sound commercial instincts and relaxed planning laws, realized this potential. At the Coquelles Terminal outside Calais, the French have built a vast shopping complex where everything from baguettes to cases of wine and the latest French fashions are available. There is a fun fair for the children, estate agents for the parents wanting to buy a house on the northern coast or inland. Crossing the Channel has become an adventure accessible to all the family.
Kate Carr had been one of those who thought the very idea of a Channel Tunnel a threat to her way of life and that of all residents of Kent. When the project had first been mooted in the mid-1980s she had attended a meeting in Paddles worth village hall. They had been addressed by a man from the Department of the Environment who had made soothing noises about “environmental concerns” and “local sensitivities” but the suspicious locals gave him a frosty reception. Then a circular had come round from a group calling itself the North Downs Rail Concern Pressure Group calling for action to halt the Tunnel and asking for volunteers.
Kate would not consider herself a joiner. When asked what she did she would simply say that she looked after her husband, Tom, who worked as a cost accountant for Touche Ross, and brought up their nine-year-old daughter, Emma. This was true but only told part of the story. Kate was the archetypal English countrywoman. She had married in her late twenties, after many of her friends, but late enough for her to have enjoyed London as a personal assistant to a director of S. J. Warburg. She had left London with little regret and had taken up her country role with an enthusiasm that meant she now blended perfectly into the rural environment. Now thirty-seven, she favoured the country fashions that make Englishwomen look old before their time. Sensible skirts were bought at Marks and Spencer in Folkestone and an occasional foray to the Jaeger or Harvey Nichols sale in London kept her wardrobe respectable for dinner partied and Tom’s business functions.
After Emma had been born, she had made a valiant effort to bring her figure back to its pre-pregnancy form. She had invested in some plastic steps and an exercise video, but she had always felt faintly ridiculous and it seemed rather pointless: Tom loved her, they were happy and there were better things to do. So, she was a stone overweight — although she still kept the clothes she once wore at the back of the cupboard in the hope that one day nature might reverse the inevitable.
In her twenties, Kate had been attractive but not beautiful with that round face, clear complexion and dark brown hair that somehow seems so English. Her hair was mostly grey now, which Tom said he found attractive and which she was too self-conscious to dye, although she secretly thought it made her look old. But there were more important things in life. She had friends, a happy family and the village to care about. They were all more important than personal vanity. Stalwart of the local Women’s Institute, she was always there when the village needed her and she made sure that it quietly ran as she wanted. She would do whatever she felt was necessary to defend a way of life she had grown up with and intended to pass on intact to the next generation.
The Tunnel had provided a focus for all her considerable organizational abilities. She had become secretary of the pressure group and gathered a network of housewives who wrote letters, lobbied their MPs and generally made the lives of everyone who came up against them completely miserable.
But despite all their objections, the project had gone ahead. When it opened they had declined to go to the ceremony and for the first few months had refused to travel on the trains. But soon, to her disgust, they were among the few in the village who had not been, and she began to feel faintly ridiculous holding out for a point of principle that nobody cared about any longer.
So she had proposed that they break the embargo and try the Tunnel for themselves. This morning was to be their first journey and Kate had determined that the family would enjoy their day across the water.
“Where did you say we are going to lunch?” Tom asked, looking up from the Daily Telegraph.
“I’ve made a reservation at the Chateau de Montreuil,” she replied. “It’s one of the Roux brothers’ places, about an hour from Calais. If we catch the nine o’clock then we should have stacks of time to get there, have a stroll in the grounds and then have lunch.” She turned to Emma. “And then we can drive to the beach and you can have a swim. So make sure you pack your swimsuit.”
Emma ran from the room to check again that she had swimsuit, passport and the twenty-five francs she had changed at the bank yesterday so that she could buy her friend Harriet a present from France.
The Chinese intelligence service in Britain is known to Directorate K of the Security Service, which is responsible for counter-espionage, as the Hoovers. The term is an apt one because the Chinese, more than any other intelligence service targeting Britain, rely on quantity rather than quality of information.
Sir Patrick Walker, the former head of MIS, had first coined the phrase in a speech he had given to senior staff in the auditorium at the Gower Street headquarters. It was March 1991, the Berlin Wall had come down, the coup against Gorbachev had failed and the Moscow-led branch of Communism was dead.
“The threat of subversion from within is over,” he had told the audience. “In the new world, we face some new threats from economic espionage and drugs. But we also face old threats such as terrorism which we can attack with renewed vigour with the resources we can now bring to bear. The country that is now the single biggest threat to national security, and, in my view, to the security of the Western world, is China. The gentlemen in Beijing do not understand that the world has changed and are determined to continue with Communism until their rotten regime goes the way of the Soviet Union.
“Today, the Chinese consider themselves at war with the West and they are doing their utmost to gather every scrap of intelligence they can from us. They do not operate like the Soviets and try to suborn or seduce. Instead, they use every agent, every family tie, every fellow traveller
they can to gather every scrap of information that might be useful. They are the Hoovers of the espionage business and they are very good at what they do.”
Following that meeting, the K Directorate had been reorganized so that fully twenty per cent of its resources were directed at the Chinese in Britain. There were two principal methods of gathering intelligence about their activities. The first was through electronic interception, which was mostly done by the Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham. The second was carried out by the Watchers, as surveillance teams are known, who were divided into Statics and Mobiles.
It was the Watchers who had responsibility for 10 Eton Avenue in South Hampstead, a prosperous suburb in north London. Just off the Finchley Road, Eton Avenue is a street of large Victorian houses which are now mostly divided into flats. At the far end, close to the junction with Primrose Hill Road, is No. 10, the home of the Chinese military mission.
There is nothing to distinguish the house from its neighbours. It is a simple three-storey brick building with bow-fronted windows on either side of the wooden front door. Inside, the ground floor is furnished in what could be politely described as fifties schlock: chintz curtains, green plastic-covered wooden chairs; sofas with the springs gone and the patterns faded. Throughout there is a smell that is a mixture of damp and stale food. It looks and is seedy.
Upstairs, away from the prying eyes of visitors, is where the real work is done. Here Colonel Cheng Weiyong has his office and the various agents for Chinese intelligence work under diplomatic cover as officers attached to branches of the Chinese armed forces.
Colonel Cheng favours shiny grey and black suits made from polyester, white shirts and single colour ties which are usually black. He is around fifty, short and overweight with the pasty complexion of a man who spends too much time in artificial light. He is known to the Mobiles as The Barber because when he first came to England in August 1990 they were surprised to find that every two weeks he went to get a haircut at a small barber shop in the Edgware Road. A frantic operation was mounted to dissect the barber shop, its owners and customers on the assumption that this was either a pickup or a dead-letter drop. But they could find nothing and it was finally agreed that simple vanity drove him there twice a month.