by Mark Sennen
‘This is how it goes, yes?’ Holm said. He’d just about got the gist of it now. ‘At Felixstowe container Alpha is loaded onto the Excelsior. The boat departs for Rotterdam. Meanwhile, somewhere in mainland Europe, container Zulu is loaded with whatever it is that’s being smuggled. It goes by road to Rotterdam. No border checks, nothing. It’s loaded onto the Excelsior alongside container Alpha. At some point on the journey from Rotterdam to Felixstowe the containers are opened and whatever’s inside is shifted from one to the other. In Felixstowe, container Alpha is unloaded. The port of origin is listed as Felixstowe. Since that’s in the UK no checks are needed. For some reason the Border Force’s systems aren’t set up to spot the anomaly and the container leaves Felixstowe without even a chance of being examined.’
‘Yes, but what’s in the containers?’
‘Whatever Taher wants. Terrorists and weapons, I suspect.’
‘Every two weeks?’
‘Not necessarily. Could be they continue to move the containers whatever. Perhaps there are usually legitimate goods inside, so if there did happen to be an inspection the Border Force would have to be very lucky to strike gold.’
‘So what do we do next?’
‘According to the schedule the container will be on board the Excelsior bound for Rotterdam the day after tomorrow. If we’re going to meet its twin on the other side of the North Sea then I’m afraid we have to tell Huxtable something.’
‘Not the truth?’
‘No. I’ll use the Nazi memorabilia story. We’ve discovered that Henderson has links with far-right groups in the Netherlands. We make the case for going over to Rotterdam and liaising with our Dutch counterparts. Take it from there.’ Holm shrugged. ‘To be honest, as long as we keep a low profile, she’s not bothered what we do.’
The Spider was a little more prickly than Holm expected when he put forward his plan. First the budget wouldn’t stretch, then she said it was out of their jurisdiction, finally – and rather insultingly – she proposed sending an away team comprised of operatives better able to function under demanding conditions. By which she meant younger in the case of Holm, more experienced in the case of Javed.
In the end, though, she caught herself in her own web: the budget wouldn’t extend to a full-scale operation and with the heightened levels of threat in the UK and abroad, the best agents couldn’t be spared.
‘We’re going on a trip,’ Holm said when he returned to the office. ‘To the Netherlands.’
‘Us?’ Javed said. ‘You mean you and me?’
‘Yes. Don’t sound so surprised. You seem to have caught a whiff of the Spider’s scepticism. You don’t think we’re up to it?’
‘No. I mean, yes.’ Javed bit his lip for a second. ‘I mean—’
‘You mean you’re up to it but I’m not, right?’ Holm glared at Javed. ‘How many countries have you visited?’
‘Loads. Last year I went to the Seychelles.’
‘I’m not talking about holidays, I mean on service business.’
‘None.’
‘How many live operations have you been on?’
‘None.’
‘How many arrests have been made as a result of your research or actions?’
‘None.’
Holm shook his head and tutted. He gestured at Javed’s monitor. ‘You’re good with computers though, right?’
‘You know I am.’
‘Well get on that thing and get us flights to Amsterdam and car hire once we’re there. And make the car a decent one. I don’t fancy driving God knows how many kilometres in some jalopy.’
‘Driving?’
‘Don’t look so surprised. How else are we going to track the container back to its origin?’
‘I thought…’ Javed turned and stared at his screen. ‘You know. Helicopters. Satellites.’
‘You’ve been watching too many movies. This is you and me, lad. The Spider might scrape to a few tankfuls of petrol and some cash for a snack or two on the way, but helicopters and satellites are out of the question.’
‘But if we tell her we’re after Taher, wouldn’t that help?’
‘If we tell her we’re after Taher then I’ll be drawing my pension next week and you’ll be issuing parking tickets around Westminster.’ Holm put a finger to his lips. ‘No, we keep this quiet. Hush-hush. Stick to the guff about old Nazi uniforms and moth-eaten swastikas. That’s what we’re after. I can see our colleagues in the canteen coming up with a few jokes at our expense, but the last laugh will be on us.’
Javed turned back to his screen without saying anything and Holm wondered if the young man believed a word of it. He wasn’t too sure himself.
Chapter Nineteen
Fairchild and Lona left the next morning. Lona was taking Fairchild to the airport before going to Positano to make preparations. Silva and Itchy continued to practise for the rest of the week, and late on the afternoon of the fourteenth of August they piled the equipment into the van. Gavin drove and they wound their way out of the mountains and headed for the town of Salerno. From there they followed the road along the Amalfi Coast. The route hugged the coastline, winding back and forth along steep hillsides which plunged to the sea. Houses clung to cliffs or sat on rocky outcrops, and hotels loomed precipitously above stone walls and wire netting that held back crumbling buttresses. The effect was haphazard, but the vista was undeniably beautiful.
‘Beats rainy Plymouth,’ Itchy said as they crawled along in a queue of tourist traffic. ‘Just about the only thing the same are the boats.’
Itchy was right. Yachts and motor boats dotted the sea along with numerous sightseeing craft. Huge gin palaces cruised past, tanned beauties of both sexes splayed out on the foredecks. Silva thought of the Hope family and their wealth. She glanced at her watch. By her reckoning, Karen Hope had less than thirty hours left to live.
She closed her eyes. Swallowed back a feeling of nausea. Thought, oddly, of Sean. She remembered him being in awe of Hope, beguiled, enchanted. What would he say if he knew what Silva was about to do? She doubted he’d understand her motivation or be in any way sympathetic. Perhaps that lay at the root of the problems between them. Extraordinary circumstances had thrown them together but were they really suited? She wasn’t sure and now, with what was about to happen, she wondered if she’d ever get to find out.
* * *
A little while later they came to the outskirts of Positano. The view was breathtaking. A succession of white buildings cascaded down to the sea where several superyachts lay at anchor. Beyond, individual dwellings sat on slopes that looked inaccessible to anything but a goat.
Gavin pulled to the right and stopped. There was no room for following cars to pass and almost immediately a horn blared.
‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Everything up there.’
He got out, opened the rear doors of the van and gestured to a small passage where stone steps led up to a gate of iron bars. A woman was unlocking the gate. Lona.
‘Buona sera,’ Lona said. ‘Welcome to Positano!’
Silva nodded. She understood what was going on here. No point in trying to be clandestine in a tiny seaside town packed with tourists. Best to hide in plain sight. She smiled and moved forward to greet Lona, hugging her and hoping her mannerisms didn’t seem too awkward. Lona acted like a welcoming hostess, dropping little phrases for any neighbours who might be eavesdropping, and then they all mucked in to carry the luggage up the steps and inside to a small courtyard.
Once they’d unloaded, Gavin disappeared to park the van while Lona showed them into the house. The interior was a succession of little rooms jigsawed into three storeys. The only room of decent size was on the top floor, a large living area with a balcony that looked out across the bay.
‘You’ll set up here,’ Lona said. The friendly facade had gone, replaced by a cold professionalism. ‘Perfect, right?’
Silva strode across the room. The doors to the balcony were open and she stepped out. Their position w
as on the east side of Positano and the town was a maze of little streets off to the right, houses jumbled everywhere. She tried to recall the location of Brandon Hope’s villa, but she couldn’t make it out.
‘It’s there.’ Lona was beside her. She pointed. ‘The far side of the town, the third house down from where the road curves away from the bay. You’ll need optics to see it properly.’
Silva shielded her eyes from the glare of the low evening sun. The distance didn’t seem any less now she was looking for real and not merely at a map. In fact, all of a sudden, the shot appeared almost impossible to pull off.
‘Easy.’ A hand rested on her shoulder. Itchy. He gestured back into the room. ‘We’ll set up well inside. In the dark, nobody will be able to see in.’
‘It’s the dark I’m worried about,’ Silva said. ‘We’ll have trouble picking out the villa.’
‘Nonsense. I’ll spot it up with the scope while it’s light and get the exact bearing and elevation using the range finder and GPS. We just dial that in and bingo!’
Bingo.
Silva liked Itchy’s confidence. In Afghanistan he’d been the same. Nothing was impossible, no problem couldn’t be broken down into its basic elements, each then approached and dealt with.
‘It’s cos I’m not clever,’ he’d once said to her. ‘Not like you. I need to work at stuff. One and one is two. Two and two is five.’
One and one…
‘You’re not having second thoughts?’ Lona had picked up on Silva’s misgivings. ‘About killing Hope?’
‘She murdered my mother.’ Silva could see the villa now. The house clung to the cliffs on the far side of town, facing the sea. The angle was acute and at this distance – around three quarters of a mile – there was only a speck of green wall and a smudge of terracotta roof. ‘I just want to make sure we do this right.’
‘Good.’ Lona turned and left the room.
‘I’m thinking ditto,’ Itchy said. ‘About the second thoughts. You still good to go?’
‘Yes. Like I said to Lona, she killed my mother. It’s just…’
‘It’s not like picking off random Taliban fighters? They’re nameless, brutal killers. If we don’t slot them they slot one of our mates or plant an IED and a British soldier goes back home to his wife and kiddies with no arms and legs. You want to take it to its logical conclusion, Hope’s no different. Worse, in fact. The people she had killed were innocent non-combatants.’
‘You’re right.’ Silva turned away from the vista and smiled at Itchy. ‘We’ve gone over this before. I’ll shut up before you think I’ve gone soft in the head.’
‘I’ll admit for a minute I was worried about my twenty-five K.’
‘Well, then,’ Silva gestured back outside. ‘We’d better start doing some two plus twos while we can still see.’
* * *
On Thursday Holm and Javed took a flight to Schiphol, touching down a little after four p.m. local time. The inside of the airport was cavernous and sterile and the Avis desk could have been anywhere in the world. The assistant spoke impeccable English and had impeccable make-up, teeth and manners. The car was an equally perfect Audi A4 in bright red with virtually nothing on the clock. Holm had to concede Javed had done well with the model, but he wasn’t so keen on the colour.
‘If we’re following a lorry, don’t you think the driver’s going to spot us in the mirrors?’
Javed shrugged. He’d had a word with the woman at the desk and it was the A4 or a white, bottom-of-the-range Micra.
‘Never mind. Let’s get going.’
They headed south for Rotterdam, but there wasn’t much to look at. The countryside was flat and boring and half of it seemed to be covered with tarmac. Despite the highway system, or perhaps because of it, the traffic was appalling and they arrived at the port one and a half hours after they’d left the airport.
They drove in beside a railway line, beyond which lay stacks of containers. The quayside was over a mile and a half long and several huge ships were berthed against it, cranes moving back and forth, loading and unloading containers.
‘This is…’ Holm’s voice trailed off. He’d thought Felixstowe was big, but Rotterdam was another order of magnitude larger.
‘Twelve million containers a year,’ Javed said. ‘Three times the throughput of Felixstowe.’
As with Felixstowe, security appeared lax, a chain-link fence was all that protected the port area. They pulled up at a set of sliding gates and Javed spoke into a grille. Once he’d established they were expected, the gates slid open and Holm drove through and parked the car outside a large office complex.
‘We’re early,’ Holm said. According to the manifest the Excelsior was due to arrive from Felixstowe at ten p.m. ‘Let’s hope there’s a canteen or something here. Mind you, we’d better be careful not to miss the boat.’
‘No chance of that.’ Javed pulled out his phone and showed Holm an image. Holm squinted at the screen. There was a map of the coast of the Netherlands.
‘What’s this?’
‘A marine traffic website. There’s the Excelsior.’ Javed jabbed at the phone. ‘She’s about twenty-five miles away. Allowing for unloading, the container should be coming down this road in about three or four hours. We can monitor everything from here.’
Holm groaned. At a stroke, Javed had taken all the fun out of the night. They’d arranged to visit the port control room where they could watch the ship dock and unload. Now the visit was unnecessary. Holm pushed the phone away. He knew he was being left behind by technology, but he didn’t care. He’d see out his time with his notepad and a pencil.
‘Shoe leather,’ Holm said. ‘In my day you had to earn your stripes by wearing your soles out. Now there seems to be an app for everything. Won’t be long before I’m replaced by a kid sitting in a room with a touchscreen.’
‘Talking of which…’ Javed smiled and reached into the back of the car where he’d parked his bag. He rummaged in a side pocket and handed something to Holm. ‘Here.’
Another phone. This time in a clear plastic pouch and bound with gaffer tape to some sort of battery pack. The whole package was encircled with a length of bungee cord.
‘What the hell is this?’ Holm tried to work out what the contraption was but was distracted by Javed grinning. ‘OK. Tell me.’
‘It’s a tracker. I found one of my old phones and cobbled it together with this charging pack. One of us can attach it to the truck the container is loaded onto. Then we can follow the progress of the vehicle through Europe. You see the old phone updates its location via a server every few minutes and my current phone displays the result on a map.’
‘How…?’
‘An app.’ Javed grinned again as Holm shook his head. ‘Thought you’d like that.’
Holm turned the package over in his hands. ‘And who’s going to attach it to the truck?’
‘Perhaps that should be your job, sir?’ Javed was laughing now. ‘What with your experience of live operations and all.’
* * *
A couple of hours later they were inside the port control room. Holm had got tired of waiting and anyway they needed to introduce themselves to their Dutch counterparts. The day had filtered into a grey twilight, and huge sodium lamps glowed orange over the lanes of vehicles awaiting clearance to leave. Drizzle wafted beneath the lights, swirled by a chill wind blowing in off the North Sea. The warmth and darkness of the control room was soporific and Holm tried to stay alert as they monitored the Excelsior as she docked. Within minutes of coming alongside, the cranes got to work, and as each container was plucked from the ship, its consignment number flashed up on a screen. Holm began to get bleary-eyed trying to spot the one they were interested in but eventually Javed gave him a nudge.
‘There it is.’ He pointed at the screen and then out through the control room window. Far down the quay a container was being lowered onto a truck. ‘Blue cab, Christmas tree lights on the grille. Got it?’
H
olm nodded and they went outside into the light rain, dragging a reluctant port police officer with them. They began to work their way down a line of vehicles. Holm had made sure their visit was flagged as a familiarisation exercise rather than anything specific, but the man wanted to know more.
‘What exactly are you looking for?’ he asked. ‘We don’t get much of interest coming from the UK.’
‘It’s just routine,’ Holm said. ‘To check our systems more than anything. Highlighting areas of concern. Possible improvements we can make. Learning from what you do here. After all, Rotterdam has three times the throughput of Felixstowe.’
Javed stifled a laugh as the officer pointed at the main office building.
‘You’ve seen how it’s all logged. Cameras, number-plate recognition, driver identification.’ The officer grimaced. ‘Why do we have to stand out in the wet?’
‘Shoe leather,’ Javed said.
‘Hey?’ The officer turned to Javed. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Never mind.’ Holm casually gestured at the next truck. ‘This one looks interesting. The one with the Christmas tree lights. Let’s have a word with the driver.’
‘Sure.’
The officer waved up at the cab and the driver opened the door. ‘Consignment papers, please.’
The driver, a burly guy with little English, reached onto his dashboard for a clipboard. He handed it down.
‘I just pick up,’ he said. ‘Why you need to check already? Only marine parts for some ship.’
