by Chris Ryan
Kyle opened his bloodshot eyes. He stared at her, uncomprehendingly.
‘The Poles are here!’
Kyle’s expression changed. He was scared. He scrambled to his feet. ‘How did they find me?’ he slurred.
‘That junkie, of course,’ Clara hissed. ‘He knew you.’
Kyle was looking around the room, searching for exits like a hunted animal. But there was only one: the main door. He headed towards it, clearly thinking only of himself and not of Clara. He stumbled over one of the milk crates and cursed as it clattered noisily.
Then he stopped.
There were footsteps coming up the stairs. More than one set. Kyle looked around the room again. To the window. Back to the door. He shrank against one of the walls. Clara found she was holding her breath.
Ten seconds passed.
Figures in the doorway.
They entered the room.
They were broad-shouldered men. Shaved head. Donkey jackets. Through the gloom, Clara could see that one of them had a tattoo on his neck. It was the head of a black raven, and the sight chilled her. He stepped further into the room and gave Kyle a look of total contempt. The junkie was loitering in the door frame, clutching his shaking hands together.
The tattooed Pole put one hand into his jacket. He pulled out a flick knife, which he opened with a well-practised move. Then he strode up to Kyle, grabbed the front of his clothes with one big hand, and pressed him up against the wall. He rested the blade of the knife against his cheek.
There were a few seconds of absolute silence.
‘Where’s my fucking money?’ said the Pole, his voice slow, the English almost incomprehensible beneath the Polish accent.
‘I . . . I’ve got it,’ Kyle whispered. He slowly put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a fistful of the notes he had taken from Danny’s wardrobe. The Pole looked over at his mate, who had fat lips and a pockmarked face. He walked up and took the money from Kyle. He counted it out with quick, well-practised fingers.
‘Piecset,’ he said, and stuffed the money into his pocket.
‘Five hundred not enough,’ said the Pole. ‘You still owe me five thousand.’
‘I’ll have it soon,’ Kyle said. ‘I promise.’
‘Promise, promise, promise!’ the Pole shouted. ‘All you ever do is promise.’ He flicked the knife quickly downwards. Kyle hissed in pain as a streak of blood appeared on his cheek.
Clara gasped at the sudden violence. The Pole turned to look at her.
‘Is that girl?’ he asked the junkie in the doorway.
‘That’s her,’ the junkie said.
The Pole nodded at his mate again, who turned and started walking towards Clara.
Clara felt a sudden fire in her gut. ‘Don’t you touch me,’ she said, jutting out her chin in defiance. The Pole just grinned. He stretched out one big hand and grabbed her by the throat. Clara’s reaction was instant. She raised her knee sharply into his crutch. The Pole swore as he doubled over, letting go of her neck as he did so.
Clara looked quickly towards the door. The junkie was still standing there, but she knew she could push her way past him. If she moved now, she could escape. But then she looked over at Kyle. His face was bleeding, and he wore a pitiful expression of terror. She thought suddenly of Danny, and of how she couldn’t leave his brother here to the mercy of these two awful men. She started striding towards him, her intention to grab him and pull him from the room.
That was her mistake.
The man she had disabled recovered quickly. He grabbed at her legs as she moved. Clara fell hard to the floor.
After that, she didn’t stand a chance.
He grabbed her hair first, clutching a big clump and twisting it sharply round until she whimpered with pain. With his free hand he struck her a vicious blow on the cheek, then pulled her up to her feet by the hair. Another crushing blow to the face and a third to her left breast: a pain so sharp and sudden that it drew the breath from her lungs and forced her into silence. Just to be sure, though, the Pole put his free hand over her mouth, as his tattooed mate spoke to Kyle.
‘You have forty-eight hours,’ he said. ‘Midnight tomorrow. If I don’t have my money, your girlfriend . . .’ He swiped one forefinger across his neck. ‘I stick her in hole and piss on her. Then I come do same to you.’
He spat in Kyle’s face. Kyle slumped to the ground, one hand pressed over his bleeding cheek. The tattooed Pole turned to his mate and said a single word in Polish. Clara felt herself being thrust towards the door, past the sallow-faced junkie who was suddenly jabbering nervously. ‘We had a deal, mate. What about it? What about our fucking deal?’
From the corner of her eye, Clara saw the tattooed Pole throw a small, sealed plastic bag on to the floor. The junkie dived towards it and started scrabbling around to pick it up. It was the last thing Clara saw of the room. The Pole pushed her roughly towards the stairs.
Down them.
And out into the night.
Twenty-three
Ripley had sounded shocked to hear from Danny when he’d called from Holyhead. It wasn’t just that he’d been speaking quietly to avoid his missus overhearing the phone conversation. Ripley hadn’t said as much, but Danny could hear in his voice that the guys had been told he and Spud were goners. But he’d agreed to do as Danny asked.
‘Where and when?’ Ripley asked.
‘Tomorrow night. On the south side of the Thames between Vauxhall and Lambeth bridges. Bring Barker and Hancock. And seriously, mate – don’t tell anyone you’ve heard from me.’
‘You’ve got some fucking explaining to do, pal,’ Ripley said. But Danny knew he’d keep his word.
But there was still a lot to do before his RV with his SAS mates.
From Holyhead he’d made it by train to Birmingham, where he needed to change to get to London. Before getting on a train to Euston, though, he’d headed out of Birmingham New Street station and found a Save the Children charity shop, where he’d bought fresh clothes. Jeans. A jumper slightly too small for him. A waterproof jacket and a black woollen hat. A pair of trainers to replace the sandals he’d bought in Massawa. He even found an old balaclava, threadbare and bobbled, which he bought for 50 pence. Because you never know.
Next to the charity shop was an angling store. Danny had bought a cheap torch with a red filter, intended for night fisherman who didn’t want to compromise their night vision. Then he’d headed to the central library to use an internet terminal. He googled the White Witch. Abu Ra’id had said his wife would find the username and password for the account he shared with his contact ‘in the name of God’. It was clearly a code of some sort. Something that was meaningful only to them. Danny didn’t have the time or inclination to puzzle over what he meant. If this woman had intelligence that he needed, he was going to have to find a way to make her deliver it to him.
Information about the White Witch was freely available. Real name Amanda Ledbury. Born 23 October 1982 to British parents. Converted to Islam at the age of 17. Attended University College London where she studied politics and theology, and met Amar Al-Zain, the man who would later style himself Abu Ra’id.
He started digging a little deeper. Internet chat rooms were filled with praise or bile for this woman. Praise from the Islamists, among whom rumours abounded that she was behind a grenade attack on some football fans in a Kenyan bar during the previous world cup. And bile from almost everyone else – Muslim and non-Muslim alike – who deplored how she was able to live on housing benefits in a large detached house in Ealing with a cleric who preached hate against the very society that was supporting them. Who were disgusted at her ability to fight her way through the courts using a team of lawyers paid for by legal aid. Who couldn’t understand why she and her husband were allowed to stay in the UK, even though it was the country of their birth.
A conversation replayed itself in his head.
‘Personally, Harrison, I’m extremely pleased my children can grow up in a country
where the rule of law can be relied upon, and extended to all our citizens, regardless of . . .’
‘Regardless of how many people they’re planning to kill, Victoria?’
The sentiment on these forums was more in line with Harrison Maddox’s than Victoria Atkinson’s, but Danny didn’t want opinions. He wanted an address. And after 20 minutes of clicking through links and scanning the chat rooms, he’d found one. The user who had supplied it called himself SwordOfTruth. A quick glance at his profile told Danny that he held views even the EDF would consider extreme. For the briefest moment, he found himself thinking about Piers Chamberlain. But then he turned his attention back to the screen. In a barely literate call to action, SwordOfTruth supplied Amanda Ledbury’s address in the hope that like-minded psychos would stalk her house and give her ‘what she had coming’. Danny memorised the address: 13 Princess Park Gardens, London W5. He checked the location on Google Maps, then zoomed in on satellite view, as close as he was able. He’d seen that it was a detached house with a perimeter fence. No obvious point of access other than the doors and windows.
Or was there?
He zoomed in on a small patch at the rear of the house, and smiled grimly to himself.
Next he googled the names of the four Hammerstone spooks. Within 15 minutes he’d found a decent picture of each one of them, which he’d printed out on the library’s colour printer. Then he’d cleared the browser history and left the library.
SwordOfTruth had made him think as he headed towards the train station to get the next train into London. His plan was to break into the White Witch’s house. But that wasn’t going to be straightforward. She’d have received death threats. No question. That meant there was a possibility of a police presence outside the house. And if the police weren’t on-site – Danny remembered DI Fletcher’s complaint that they were unable to follow up half the crime being committed in London in the wake of the bombings – there was a very good chance that the security services would be watching her. He’d need to be careful.
He arrived at 13 Princess Park Gardens at 23.30hrs. It was a detatched house in a quiet residential street in north Ealing, a 15-minute walk from the Tube station. There was a single light burning on the first floor of the house which suggested someone was at home, though he coudn’t be totally sure. Similar detached houses on one side, a terrace on the opposite side, with an alleyway heading round the back much like the one behind his own flat in Hereford. Like the mob whose comments he’d read on the internet, Danny found himself wondering how a hateful couple like Abu Ra’id and his missus had managed to arrange their lives so that they were living in a place far bigger than they needed or deserved. He thought of his own little flat in Hereford, and of the number of times he’d been called upon to risk his life for his country. It wasn’t right.
He dragged his mind back to the job in hand.
The house itself was different from the others that surrounded it. More secure. The two-metre-high wooden fence that extended along either side of the front garden had also been erected across the front, serving as a barrier between the pavement and the garden. A wooden gate in the middle. Closed. Locked, he assumed. There was razor wire along the top of the fence, but not above the wooden gate – which meant the razor wire might as well not be there at all. The fence and gate were about 2.5 metres high. Easily scaleable. But Danny wasn’t going to do that. Not yet.
He was on foot, standing at the corner of Princess Park Gardens where it met a busier street with a parade of shops about 50 metres further along. He was a metre from the alleyway entrance on the even-numbered side of the road. The road was lined with cars. A sign on the kerbside indicated that this was a residents’ permit area. Sure enough, the car by which he was standing – an old blue Fiat Panda – had a permit fixed to the windscreen. Danny wasn’t a smoker, but he’d bought himself a packet of Marlboro and a box of matches because he knew that if he was pulling on a cigarette, the eyes of any casual observer would be drawn to that rather than his own features. He lit up and started walking down the street, hands in his pockets, woollen hat pulled down over his ears. The rain had let up for a moment, but he sensed it would be back fairly soon.
He clocked them within seconds. Five cars down, right outside Number 10, there was a Renault Laguna. It was too dark to see through the front grilles and tell whether they hid a siren, but he didn’t have to. Two guys sat in the front. One of them was drinking from a paper coffee cup. The other was looking out of the passenger window towards the White Witch’s house. They had no residents’ permit. Instead, they’d propped up a blue disabled parking badge in the windscreen. But these two guys, both in their early thirties, didn’t look disabled to Danny. They looked like undercover cops. Or spooks. One or the other. They weren’t even trying to be majorly covert. Probably just there to put the shits up the White Witch every time she left the house.
Danny took all this in at a glance. He didn’t let up his pace, and he didn’t stare unnecessarily at them. He simply walked past, having marked out his most immediate threat to gaining entry to number 13. Scaling the door was out of the question. Not with them watching. And if they were any good at their job, they would be able to see him jumping the wall on either side of the garden – even if it wasn’t razor-wired.
At the far end of Princess Park Gardens he turned right, stubbing out the half-smoked cigarette with his foot. If there was a terrace backing on to it, maybe he could break through from the other side. When he turned right again, he found that there was a terrace, but there were no side entrances for him to enter.
He couldn’t walk back along Princess Park Gardens. Any surveillance professional worthy of the name would notice him. Danny knew he would, in their shoes. He considered his options. Clearly he needed a distraction of some sort. He thought through his arsenal of tricks. He could make a 999 call, phone in a fake sighting of somebody with a firearm in the area. He quickly rejected that idea. Sure, it would trigger an armed response, but not necessarily from the two surveillance guys. Perhaps he could make a different kind of call, stating that he’d just seen two guys bundle a struggling six-year-old kid into a Renault Laguna on Princess Park Gardens. It would certainly get a reaction from the police, but it would take a matter of seconds for them to realise that the surveillance guys hadn’t really abducted a child, and a matter of a few seconds more before they twigged that someone was playing them.
The bottom line was this: Danny couldn’t rely on the surveillance guys leaving their car. That meant that the distraction would have to come to them.
Which gave him an idea.
The alleyway behind the even-numbered side of the road stank of bins and rotten rubbish. The ground was muddy and wet from the incessant rain. As Danny paced along it, he heard the scurrying sound of rodents rushing out of his path. The alleyway turned 90 degrees. Danny kept a steady pace: if he ran, he might arouse the suspicions of anyone watching from rear windows of the row of houses. He continued to the far end. He knew he was back at the top of the street now, and recalled that the surveillance guys were parked up outside number ten. He doubled back on himself, counting off the house numbers as he passed their rear gardens – two, four, six, eight – until now he was standing outside the garden gate of number ten.
It was a rickety old gate. One solid shoulder-thump and it would probably break open. But Danny wanted to make as little noise as possible so he scrambled over it instead, cursing under his breath as a splinter of wood ripped into his palm, but ignoring it.
A narrow garden, about 50 feet long. A neat lawn. Flower borders on either side. Your typical, boring suburban garden with a wooden shed at the end. It was unlocked, so Danny stepped inside.
He could smell it at once. The thick, greasy stench of petrol. He groped around in the dark and felt the handles of a lawnmower. He collapsed them so he could more easily lift the lawnmower up. Then he felt for the twist-off cap of the petrol tank. He undid it, then lifted the whole lawnmower. His muscles strained as, withi
n the cramped confines of the shed, he turned the lawnmower upside down. He heard the trickle of petrol pouring from the tank on to the wooden floor of the shed.
He stepped back towards the door. Backwards out into the garden. Then he took the box of matches from his pocket, lit one and threw it inside. The petrol ignited immediately, making a low popping sound as blue and yellow flames filled the shed. Danny hurried back over the garden gate into the alleyway. He followed it back up to the top of the Princess Park Gardens. He had already decided that he wouldn’t simply wait for the fire engine to come. The occupants of number 10 were probably asleep. They might not even notice that their shed was on fire. He turned right out of the alleyway, then right again on to the wider road. He only had to walk 30 metres before he came across a pay phone outside a parade of shops.
He dialled 999.
‘Which service do you require.’
‘Fire. Number ten, Princess Park Gardens, Ealing.’
He hung up.
It took five or six minutes for Danny to hear the sirens of the fire engine. By this time, he was loitering on the corner of Princess Park Gardens again, on the odd-number side this time, out of view of the two surveillance guys. Twenty seconds later he saw the fire engine approaching. It sped past the parade of shops, then turned left into Princess Park Gardens. Danny hurried down the pavement alongside it, brightly lit by the neon blue lights. But that was okay, because the vehicle blocked the line of sight between him and the surveillance guys. And he noted with satisfaction that it stopped bang outside number 10: a huge, immobile barrier between the two men in the car and the front gate of number 13.
He couldn’t hesitate. The sirens would draw attention, and he estimated he had about 20 seconds before one of the surveillance guys got out of the car to get eyes on their target again. He sprinted to the gate, jumped up and heaved himself over the top. He landed catlike on the other side just as the sirens fell silent. The neon still flashed, lighting up the front of the White Witch’s house, but here, at the foot of the high wooden fence, where the unkempt grass was higher than his knees, he was out of sight.
