Seventh (The Seventh Wave Trilogy Book 1)

by Lewis Hastings

  Cade walked out into the car park, got into the aforementioned dubious Mondeo, let the wipers clear the early morning dew from the windscreen and then drove off onto the Colnbrook Bypass and into the early morning rush hour.

  It was just seven o’clock, and he’d already been awake for four hours. He left the bypass after travelling along the busy A4 and headed towards the even busier M4 – one of the main arterials that would take him into the heart of one of the busiest capital cities in the world. Hong Kong seemed peaceful by comparison.

  He cursed the remnants of jet lag as he took a very brief glimpse in the rear-view mirror, his eyes were bloodshot and his head pounded, his neck throbbed as he managed a cursory glance over his right shoulder before seeing a quick double flash from a Jaguar behind him, he acknowledged the courtesy with a double flash of his hazards and joined the M4 where he sat for the next hour.

  He switched on the radio to hear the ever-popular DJ, Chris Evans, on Radio Two. He was chatting away to a vicar about the impact of crime on a community in Somerset, or somewhere, Cade wasn’t really paying attention.

  He slid the window down and tried to get some fresher air. It was a mistake, as in seconds he was consuming the fumes of a thousand other motorists, all heading inexorably into the ‘Big Smoke’.

  He passed Chiswick and Earl’s Court before continuing along the A4 and into Kensington. If he had wound the window down again the smell would have changed, this time it was money; pure, unadulterated wealth.

  He turned onto the A319 and headed towards Grosvenor gardens. With the absence of traffic, the journey would take five minutes – today it took half an hour. He stopped, turned the radio down and stared out of the left side passenger window.

  He was looking at an eight-foot-high wall, topped with a six-foot-high barbed wire fence. To the uninitiated it was just that, a bloody great wall with a fence on top, surrounded by mature trees. In reality, it was the perimeter fence for Buckingham Palace.

  Cade was now in the wealthiest part of the city, with some properties attracting prices in excess of thirty million pounds. It was obscene and whilst some of it was legitimate, Cade knew that squirreled away behind the facades of those glorious Edwardian properties lie some of the richest and most powerful people on the planet.

  A chill ran across Cade’s shoulders causing and involuntary shudder. Perhaps within striking distance lay the answer to his conundrum? Or more likely it was seeing a familiar vehicle grill appear in his driver’s mirror?

  A silver Rolls Royce slithered by, its engine barely audible. It was certainly Rolls territory and to see a Wraith in these parts was like seeing a Toyota in any other city – almost common and certainly not worth turning a head for. This particular road-going ocean liner was a Phantom, driven by an enigmatic Chinese male, no doubt the Chauffeur to the exquisitely attired and equally mysterious oriental woman in the rear.

  The Phantom turned at the next junction and whispered away, out of sight and out of mind. Despite the urge to drive along The Mall, Cade resisted and headed straight for Dacre Street SW1, turning left and left again by the cycle shop and only stopping when he came across the rear entrance to New Scotland Yard.

  Another hundred metres and he would have seen the iconic revolving sign – but he’d seen it before many times and besides, when Roberts had rung him half an hour earlier he’d told him the kettle was on, and right now he needed a cup of tea, nothing else, just good, old, fashioned tea.

  He put the window down on the Mondeo as an armed security guard walked towards him.

  “Good morning Mr Cade, we’ve been expecting you, just park her down next to the silver van please sir. Here’s your ID, wear it all times. We are on a raised alert status. Go to that back door over there. You will be met.”

  He drove fifty metres, parked between two silver Ford Transit vans and switched off the engine, got out, stretched his legs and grabbed his bag before swinging his ID into place, straightening his tie and walking to the rear reception area.

  He stood by the door for a few moments until Detective Constable Dave Williams appeared. He placed a large hand into Cade’s and shook it warmly.

  “Morning boss. The Governor asked me to pop down and pick you up. By the way, ignore what he says, I’m a crap dancer. I understand you and the guv go back a few years?”

  “We do, we do indeed Dave, ten or so actually. And by the way, you are most likely a far better dancer than he is. You know the phrase dance like nobody is watching?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It was invented for your boss.”

  As they entered the lift Cade started to brief Williams on his background, the journey he had made over the last ten years and how he and Roberts had first met.

  “Jason and I met in 2004, I came down to the Yard on secondment from the East Midlands, expecting to spend a few months here, and as they say the rest is history.”

  He was almost finished as the doors opened onto the tenth floor, revealing a hive of industry; detectives, analysts, all moving around quickly, none rushing, but all with people to see and places to go.

  Stood in the middle of the office melee, arms pointing here and there was an animated, brown-suited Jason Roberts.

  Brown suit, brown shoes, beige shirt and his trademark orange tie with an impressive double Windsor knot. Somehow, he carried it off.

  Detective Chief Inspector Roberts was in the middle of a briefing – it was the bedrock of his business day which started with a seven a.m. briefing and continued throughout the day – each piece being linked back into a continuous cycle of brief and debrief.

  This particular morning was no different as the head of the Dedicated Cheque and Plastic Crime Unit covered off the Word of the day, overnight occurrences and finished on a good news story.

  “A recent major success for the Unit is that it has successfully dismantled a major organised crime group involved in ATM criminality. A total of fifteen suspects have been arrested, with many thousands of compromised card numbers recovered together with numerous items of equipment for use in ATM crime. This is one of the largest operations undertaken by the Unit since its inception and work is continuing to identify and disrupt other organised crime groups involved in this method of operation. We are all over it, people.”

  As he spoke Roberts became aware of a new arrival in the unit. Without being distracted he continued, however, as he finished his briefing Roberts spun around and pointed straight at Cade and held up his spare hand, as a traffic officer would to stop vehicles.

  The office went deathly quiet.

  He looked straight at Cade, who stood with his hands held together at waist height. He looked immaculate in a dark navy Jaeger Italian wool suit, white shirt and red tie, a black Jaeger metal buckled belt connected the whole ensemble and last but by no means least a highly polished pair of black Oxford brogues.

  Worn discreetly on his cuffs was a pair of blue and gold US Secretary of State Protective Detail cufflinks – a gift from ‘a friend’ and clearly a gift with provenance.

  “Ladies, gentlemen, Liverpool supporters and the rest of you that simply don’t fit into any category whatsoever. It is my honour to present this rather dapper man who goes back a very long way with both me and this department. He was involved in policing before Jesus was a lad and ‘e’s forgotten more about Eastern Europe than most of you have ‘ad for breakfast. Don’t ask how a northerner ended up working here, it’s a long story and one normally left for cheap novels. But I’ll let you into a little secret. This man was in the right place at the right time and used his skills to influence. There’s a lesson for you lot right there. For one or two of you he’ll be very familiar…”

  Roberts tapped the side of his nose as he looked around the office at his adoring audience. In a corner of the room, an anonymous female looked up and nodded once at Cade and then carried on typing. As she did so she smiled, almost imperceptibly, but she smiled nonetheless.

  “My old friend and a bloody nice bloke
too, ex-inspector and now Mr Jack Cade. Help this man as much as you can please – and learn from him. Please, learn from him or I shall be putting my size ten up your rings!”

  Roberts beckoned him over as a stereotypical short-skirted lady approached and handed the boss a mug of steaming coffee.

  “Where are the bloody biscuits? Christ, how does this office function sometimes?”

  The woman returned swiftly with the office biscuit tin and opened the lid. Roberts placed his hand into it whilst he sipped the piping hot black coffee with the other. Seconds later he produced a ginger nut biscuit, held it out in front of him as if he were examining a piece of faeces, and then threw it across the office with a flick of the wrist. It ricocheted off a heavily distracted detective sergeant’s desk and broke into a hundred pieces.

  Roberts shouted, “Who” to which the entire team responded in a Michael Caine-esque voice, “puts bloody ginger nuts in with the custard bloody creams?”

  Cade smiled, it had been years since he last heard that mantra; whilst in many ways so much had altered, it also felt, with some relief, that in fact nothing had changed at all since he and Roberts were last together.

  Where those years had gone, God himself knew, but it was good to be back. In fact, it was great.

  Part Two: Summer 2002

  Chapter Fourteen

  Nottingham, England

  Cade slipped off his shoes. It had been an intensely long day at the office.

  The office in question was the notorious Meadows Police Station, right in the heart of the English east Midlands city of Nottingham, next door to the main railway station and only minutes away from once-rare, now mounting Yardie-centred black-on-black, drug-related drive-by shootings.

  These were some of the first in the country and the reason why the local force, Nottinghamshire, were providing an armed response capability, to quell the fears of the neighbourhood and support the girls and boys out on the streets, who as luck would have it were armed with no more than good looks, verbal reasoning skills and a wooden truncheon.

  Cade had been based at the Meadows since moving from a nearby station in a far nicer part of town, where even the criminals were generally more pleasant and easier to deal with.

  He’d started his career in 1994 at the age of twenty as a uniformed constable, trained at one of the Home Office District Training Centres near Coventry and had been posted to a town thirty minutes from home.

  Home was a three-bedroomed semi in a quiet rural village which was as far removed from life in the Meadows as the Florida Keys were from downtown Harlem.

  He’d met his wife ten years earlier when they attended the same school but had avoided marriage until 1998. They didn’t have, and were unlikely to ever have, children. It was a good thing for the marriage was somewhat unconventional.

  He had enjoyed his time as a front-line police officer and although the news that he was transferring to the Meadows was greeted with horror – as it was seen back then as a ‘punishment station’ he lived to hold the place, its better quality residents and the staff that policed it in great esteem.

  Cruelly injured in 1999 when set upon by a hissing, spitting hepatitis-laden drug addict he had found himself temporarily office-bound. Whilst he despised the addict for what he had done he also knew that he had inadvertently shaped the rest of his career as an intelligence officer.

  Ronald Brown, an emaciated, odoriferous and drawn man in his fifties was a familiar sight at the Central Railway Station, he loitered there often and had the appearance of someone who eagerly dressed in the dark, such were his dubious colour choices.

  Whenever the British Transport Police were on duty somewhere else in the region, it fell to the local boys in blue to respond to his regular antics.

  It was a cool Wednesday evening in March when a ‘three-nines’ call had been made from the railway station platform. A mother of two, en route to Grantham had witnessed Brown exposing himself to a group of women. He was apparently drunk and ‘on something’.

  ‘Whisky Uniform One’ – the local emergency response car was dispatched – and as luck would have it, they were outside the station in seconds, as they were about to head out on their evening patrols.

  On board the car was an experienced Jack Cade and his partner and newfound closest friend, a fresh-faced constable called Vince Johnson.

  The constables arrived at Platform Two, informed the Control Room that they were on site and that they would follow with a sit rep – an update.

  The 18:00 to Derby was due to arrive.

  Cade and Johnson approached the staggering Brown in a classic military pincer movement, one from the left and the other from the right; they’d done this before and knew that taking an arm each soon reduced the risk of being punched. In doing so, they reduced the risk to themselves, the public, and despite what some people thought a bad move, to Brown himself.

  Johnson took hold of the right arm but as Cade went to put his own lock on Brown dropped to his knee causing him to roll over the top of his shoulder, across the cold stone platform and onto the track.

  Despite wearing body armour, he landed with a hefty blow, knocking the wind out of his sails and cracking his temple onto the highly polished silvery-blue rail. As if that wasn’t troublesome enough, he also sustained a few bruised ribs and a fractured wrist.

  At that moment a few injuries, serious though they may be, were completely irrelevant. Down on the diesel-laden tracks Cade lay on his back, thrashing around like a turtle stranded on an isolated beach and struggling against the body armour that was meant to protect him.

  His senses were now scanning on multiple levels; to his left an open train track, to the right his colleague, struggling with the drunken, drug-fuelled Brown and to his front a twenty-tonne diesel locomotive, slowing, but still travelling at thirty miles an hour as it arrived into the busy station.

  Cade could see the damned thing approaching, he swore he could almost smell it and he could certainly hear it. Being at track level made him reconsider a few things and despite being in an unconventional marriage, with an unconventional wife he was buggered if he was going to call it a day on that by-the-second-colder Wednesday evening.

  He turned and pushed off the sleepers with his left leg and instinctively took hold of a leather-clad hand that was offered to him.

  Grabbing the hand and propelling himself to the edge of the track he felt the side of the Inter City 125 graze against his Kevlar armour as more hands grabbed hold of him and pulled him upwards, onto the platform and out of harm’s way.

  Vince Johnson was sat on top of the foul-smelling Brown, having been joined by his namesake, local beat officer Pete Brown. The leather gloved hand belonged to none other than Sergeant Andy Jenkins, who would dine out on the rescue and medal-less event for at least the next twelve months.

  Cade was taken to the local hospital by a traffic car and spent the night on a general ward in the care of a charming brunette called Caroline.

  Getting home the next day he was greeted by his partner in crime.

  “Now then Jack, how you doing? You were lucky you know. You do know, don’t you?”

  Cade knew, it wasn’t his first lucky escape, but he was hoping it might be his last.

  “The lads send their best wishes and the boss said he’ll pop and see you as soon as he can. They sent this.”

  Johnson handed him a bottle of Johnnie Walker. It was the standard Police Federation gift – even if the recipient had a drink problem or a heavily sclerosed liver the gift was the same.

  Cade looked at his friend and said, “Vinnie, I’m done, I’ve had enough, that was just too close for comfort.”

  Johnson replied with a misplaced joke, “Well I heard that Brown was a sleeper agent who had got onto the wrong tracks and that he was expressly wrong…”

  “Do you actually think you are funny?” Cade asked rhetorically.

  “Well, I used to…” replied a wounded Johnson.

  “Seriously mate, I’
m done. I know Penny doesn’t give too shits about me but I’ve got to think of my future. The chief super rang me this morning and offered me a secondment onto the Intelligence Unit. I know what you are thinking, but I’m taking it, you’ll find another Hutch.”

  “That’s as maybe, but I love being Starsky and it won’t be the same. But if you need my blessing, then I understand pal, we’ll still be friends, right?”

  Cade replied with a wink, “Absolutely not, I can’t bear the sight of you, get out and don’t come back.”

  Johnson knew his colleague well and also understood that despite a love for policing the time was right. Knowing Penny as he did the chances were that she’d probably kill them both if he managed to talk Cade into staying on the frontline.

  Cade knew immediately that he would miss his partner, a former printer with an enviable physique. They’d worked together for such a relatively short time, but policing an inner-city area made you hard, devoted, loyal and above all it taught you who to trust. And he trusted Vince Johnson with his life. They had enough stories to tell – enough Cade said for an entire book. Perhaps one day he would get around to it.

  And so in the late autumn of 1999 he returned to work, still slightly injured but ready to take on a new role.

  Cade joined the local intelligence officer on the Monday morning, raring to go and keen to fill his sponge-like capacity for knowledge. He spent the next three years with crusty veteran Derek Kay and learned the art of intelligence; how to cultivate sources, exploit data and extract solutions from hypothesis. This was all pre-internet and as such was very much by the book.

  What the book didn’t know Kay had made up. He was a legendary figure in the Nottinghamshire force and had played a part in the arrests of grandfathers, fathers and sons, often from the same families. With twenty-nine years and a few months under his belt, he was due to retire.