by James Becker
“I’m not exactly a volunteer, am I?”
Curtis grinned again and shook his head. “No, not really. But he needed somebody from out of the area who wouldn’t be recognized as a police officer. And he also needed a man with certain talents and experience, so he checked all the local forces and the name that popped up at the top of the list was yours. So you’ll have to do.”
“So this really isn’t just a shitty little job then? I mean, it actually matters?”
“Oh, it matters. It really matters. That was just Shit Rises trying to be funny. As all of us working here know, he has a well-developed sense of humor,” Curtis added, with a perfectly straight face. “This is important, and you’ll get whatever help and support you need. Make no mistake about this. As you said, the Games will be starting in exactly ten days, and we have to take this group of vandals off the streets before then. Between you and me, I think the powers that be are worried that there’s something else planned.”
“Like what?”
“I have no idea. But if there was any kind of attempt to disrupt the opening ceremony, for example, that would be really embarrassing for London and Britain, with a worldwide audience of billions, and the Met would be so deep in the shit that we’d probably never be able to dig our way out.”
“So no pressure, then?” Bronson said.
Curtis shook his head, and his expression remained grim.
“I’m not trying to con you, Chris. This isn’t going to be easy, and to make it worse, you’re going to have to work alone. We can support you, and provide backup if it’s needed, but basically it’s all down to you.”
Then Curtis passed the slim file across the desk, leaned forward and explained precisely what Davidson wanted Bronson to do.
2
19 July 2012
“Got another one here,” the uniformed constable announced, as he and his colleague made their way somewhat erratically toward the desk.
The reason for their unusually halting progress was the man between them. He was dark haired, unshaven and wearing stained jeans and a leather jacket. He was big and solidly built, and it was immediately clear that subduing him would not have been easy. He was still struggling and mouthing abuse, and it was taking all the efforts of the two officers to keep him heading in the right direction, despite the handcuffs that secured his wrists in front of him.
Two other suspects were already standing beside the desk, accompanied by three uniformed officers, but these two men were not giving anybody any trouble.
“What’s the charge?” the desk sergeant asked, eyeing the approaching trio.
“The usual,” the constable replied. “Malicious damage, resisting arrest and abusive behavior. And once we’ve shut him up and got a Breathalyzer mouthpiece between his lips, I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to add drunk and disorderly to that lot.”
After a couple of minutes, while the sergeant completed the processing of the other two men, the dark-haired man seemed to calm down a little, possibly realizing that he had no chance of getting out of the police station, at least until his handcuffs had been removed.
“Where did you find him?”
“He was cutting his way through the boundary fence around the new hockey stadium,” the constable said. “We were coming down the street in the car and saw him doing it. Had a crowbar and a club hammer with him as well as a set of bolt-croppers, so he obviously intended to do some damage once he got inside. Oh, and a couple of cans of spray paint as well. They’re all in the car outside—we’ll haul them in here as evidence as soon as he’s been processed. He’s a big bugger. Took us all our time to keep him quiet until the van arrived to take him away.”
“Open-and-shut case, then,” the sergeant remarked, looking at the third suspect, who had now fallen silent, but was glaring at him with naked hostility. “This joker say why he was doing it?”
The constable nodded. “Didn’t shut up about it, even when we were sitting on him. Pretty much what you’d expect. He told us the Olympics were a sham, some international conspiracy organized by big business simply to make money, and had nothing at all to do with sport. You know, I think he might have a point about that. He also seemed to know quite a lot about the costs involved. He reckons London will take years to get out of debt because of the Games.”
“He’s got a couple of soul mates over there, then,” the sergeant said, aiming the point of his pen toward the two men who had already been processed and were now sitting in a couple of chairs that lined the wall near the desk. “I don’t suppose he has any idea how getting into the site and breaking a few windows is going to help the situation? And if he was targeting the hockey stadium, I suppose that proves he knows sod all about sport, ’cause there’ll only be about a dozen people who’ll want to watch the matches.
“Right, then. Name?” The sergeant paused and looked expectantly at the dark-haired man.
The man shrugged. “You choose,” he snapped.
“I just love comedians.” The sergeant turned back to the uniformed constable. “Any ID on him?”
“Nothing useful. When we checked him at the scene, all we found in his pockets were twenty quid in fivers, a day ticket for the tube, a comb, a handkerchief and a door key. No wallet, driving license or car keys. Probably stashed them somewhere while he did his bit of amateur B and E.”
The sergeant glanced back at the suspect. “Come on, mate,” he said, “don’t mess me around. You’re only making things more difficult for yourself. What’s your name?”
The dark-haired man shrugged again. “Alex,” he said finally. “Alex Cross. No ‘e,’” he added.
The sergeant looked at him somewhat questioningly. “I’ve heard that name somewhere before,” he said, “somewhere recently. Is that your final offer?”
“It’ll do for now.”
“Right. If that’s the way you want to play it, that’s fine by me.”
Just over an hour later, the three men walked out of the Stratford police station together, Cross having apparently convinced the sergeant that he had given his real name and address, or maybe the middle-aged police officer really didn’t care too much about the veracity of the information he was writing down, as long as he’d completed the paperwork and ticked all the appropriate boxes. Although all three men had been arrested, their actions had not been deemed sufficiently serious for them to be detained. Cross had even passed the Breathalyzer test, despite the smell of alcohol that the constable had noticed.
For a few moments, Cross glanced around him, up and down the street, then he zipped up his leather jacket, stuck his hands in his pockets and strode away.
A couple of seconds later, a voice rang out down the street. “Hey! Hang on a minute.”
Cross stopped in his tracks and glanced back to see the two men walking swiftly toward him.
“What?” he demanded.
“You fancy a drink somewhere?”
Cross hesitated, then nodded. “Sure, why not? Get rid of the taste of that cop shop.”
They walked the short distance to the nearest pub, its rough and battered exterior a perfect reflection of the appearance of most of its clientele. Cross pushed open the door and the three men stepped into the saloon bar.
It’s a familiar cliché that when a stranger enters a particular kind of bar, all conversations stop as the locals assess the new arrival. But like all clichés, it contains more than a grain of truth because there are places like that even today, places where any new face is a potential source of trouble or perhaps of opportunity. The East End of London has more than its fair share of such establishments—pubs that the tourists never visit, where the only bar food on offer will be packets of crisps and pork scratchings, and where anyone asking for a drink as suspect and effeminate as a glass of wine is likely to be thrown bodily out into the street. These are places where deals are discussed and concluded, where a man wishing to obtain a weapon for a robbery can lease a pistol and a fully loaded magazine for a day or a week, where a cont
ract for the permanent disappearance of a business rival or an enemy can be negotiated, and the price agreed, and where strangers are at best tolerated for the money they hand over, but are always discouraged from paying a return visit.
As Cross pushed his way in, the buzz of conversation didn’t stop, but it certainly diminished as most of the men—and there were no women in sight—glanced at him and his two companions. Then, apparently seeing nothing particularly threatening or of interest in the new arrivals, the faces turned away again, and muttered conversations were resumed.
Four men were just getting up from a scratched and battered circular table in the far corner of the bar, and another three men were heading that way to commandeer the seats. But Cross got there first, and just stood beside the table, staring at the approaching trio.
All three were big and bulky, their knuckles and faces scarred from past disagreements. They were clearly men used to getting their own way, and not afraid to resort to physical persuasion if other negotiating tactics failed. But it was as if they saw something in Cross’s eyes that warned them off, something that told them that the man they were looking at was more than capable of matching them blow for blow and that, whatever they started, he would be quite capable of finishing.
And as they stared at him, Cross’s two companions walked across to the table and flanked him, one standing either side of him. The conversations in the bar died away again, as the locals switched their attention to the silent tableau in their midst. After a few seconds, the biggest of the three men in front of Cross shrugged, then turned round and walked away, the other two following him.
As Cross sat down at the table, his two companions looked at each other, and one of them nodded. Then they both strode across to the bar to order a round of drinks. Pints, obviously.
“Time for introductions, I suppose,” the man who’d bought the drinks said, after taking a sip of his beer. “My name’s Charlie Williams, and my mate here’s called John Eaton. Is your name really Alex Cross?”
The third man shook his head. “No,” he said, “but I’ve got a very good reason for using an alias, so if it’s okay with you two—in fact, even if it isn’t okay with you—I’m sticking with it.”
“We can live with that. So you’re not happy about the Olympics either?”
“I don’t give a toss about the bloody Olympics. That’s just a good target. I’ve got my own reasons for doing what I do.”
“And they are…?”
“Personal, mate, that’s what they are. Let’s just say I was shat upon from a great height, just for trying to do my bloody job, and this is one way of getting some kind of payback.”
Williams nodded. “Okay. So you’ve got a grudge against authority. But we couldn’t help overhearing what that young copper said about you. Were you really targeting the hockey stadium?”
Cross took a sip of his beer and grinned at him. “To be perfectly honest with you, I had no idea what was on the other side of the fence, except that it was a part of the Olympic complex. That was good enough for me.”
“And what were you going to do once you’d broken in? That’s stadium’s finished, as far as we know.”
“The usual. Break some windows, smash up anything I could, spray a few slogans on the walls. I know I can’t do anything to stop these Games from going ahead—there’s nothing one person can do about an operation as big as this—but I wanted to hit out, do some damage.”
Cross took a swallow of his beer and then looked sharply at Williams.
“So what were you picked up for?” he asked.
Williams smiled briefly. “Much the same as you, actually,” he replied, “with one big difference. You said it yourself. There’s bugger all one man can do, but it’s completely different if you’re part of an organized group.”
“So there’s more than just the two of you?”
“Exactly. We were just a diversion, something to keep the coppers on their toes and chasing us, while the rest of our people got inside a completely different part of the site, and set to work doing some really serious damage.”
“Like what?” Cross asked.
“You’ll read about it in the papers tomorrow,” Eaton interjected. “And that’s the other thing you’ve been doing wrong. There’s no point in breaking a window or spraying a wall. They just get the glaziers in the next day and replace the glass, or use industrial cleaner to remove the paint. It’s just a nuisance—hardly slows them down at all. So what we do is target the equipment. We hit the bulldozers and the cranes and generators, all that kind of stuff. You can do a lot of damage to a diesel engine with a hammer, if you know what you’re about, and a few bags of sugar poured into a fuel tank really screws them up. That can pretty much write off an engine.”
“And why are you doing it?”
“There’s more than one reason why we’re involved.”
“Yeah?” Cross looked interested.
But Williams just shook his head and turned his attention back to his pint of beer.
“You’ll get nowhere by yourself,” Eaton said. “But you look as if you can take care of yourself, so maybe you should think about coming in with us. We could use someone like you.”
Cross shook his head. “I’m not really into organized groups, thanks all the same. I normally work alone—only myself to worry about, you see.”
“We’re not a group like that, really. We always arrive at the target site individually, and find our own way home after the event. But what we do is we meet beforehand and organize the target, and the timing, and what everyone involved is going to do. That way, we cover every aspect of the attack, and each of us can then focus on his own particular job. Last time, like Charlie said, we were the decoys. We showed ourselves, did a little bit of damage and made sure the coppers spotted us, and then we legged it, leaving our mates with a clear run.”
“And we never resist arrest,” Williams added. “That just gives them another charge to slap against you if they feel like it. Quiet and cooperative is the best way in the end.”
Cross took another sip of his drink and nodded.
“You’re probably right, but sometimes that’s easier said than done. You get treated like shit by the coppers, and all you want to do is hit back at them somehow.”
“You are, by doing what we’re doing,” Eaton said. “Because we’re organized, we’ve been running rings around the rozzers for weeks. They never know where we’re going to hit next, or when.”
“Look,” Williams said, “John’s right. We really could use you, and you’ll achieve a hell of a lot more working with us than you ever will out there by yourself. Why not give it a try? Come along on one raid. After that, if you still want to go off and do things your own way, that’s fine. Otherwise, join us.”
“Just like that?” Cross asked. “Please can I join your gang?”
“Not quite. We’re a small group, and we need to be really sure about each other because of what we’re doing, so if you do want to be part of our operation there’ll be a vote, once we’ve seen you working.”
“Like a trial period,” Eaton added. “But if you do okay, that shouldn’t be a problem.”
* * *
Just over an hour after they’d walked into the pub, the three men stepped out the door and strode off down the street. At the first junction, they went their separate ways, Williams and Eaton heading in one direction, the man calling himself Cross in the other.
He walked quickly down the street, took the first left turn that he came to, then immediately crossed the road and strode down an alleyway on the right. At the end he stopped, flattened himself into a doorway, and waited for five minutes. Nobody else came down the alleyway—in fact, he saw no one else in the street beyond.
Satisfied that no one was following him—or if they were, they were really good at their job—he continued down the street. At each corner he glanced behind him, but nobody appeared to be taking the slightest interest in him or where he was going.
He walked for almost twenty minutes, taking a circuitous route along unfamiliar streets and roads, but always heading toward the east, looking out for one of the landmarks that he had memorized. Finally, he saw a street name that he recognized. He again checked that nobody was behind him, did a complete circuit of a block of terraced houses to flush out anyone who might have gotten in front of him and be keeping him under surveillance, and only then headed for his objective: a small area of waste ground between two buildings.
A confusion of tire tracks close to the street suggested that the vacant ground was used for unofficial parking during the day, but at that time of night there were no vehicles on it. The back of the lot was overgrown, rough grass and a handful of stunted bushes struggling for supremacy among the detritus of urban living: a couple of abandoned shopping trolleys and a crop of plastic bags, empty bottles and cans. On the right-hand side were a handful of empty paint tins; it looked like they’d been dumped there by some builder.
He stepped over to them, checked again that he was still unobserved, then lifted up one of the tins. Under it was a tatty plastic bag, which he picked up and opened. Inside it was a pay-as-you-go mobile phone, a cheap model from an obscure manufacturer that no self-respecting thief would go anywhere near. Cross slipped the phone into his pocket and walked away.
A few hundred yards down the street, he again checked that no one was anywhere near him, then switched on the phone and accessed the contacts list. Only one number was listed, and no details were given of the identity of the recipient, who was listed solely as “A.” He pressed the appropriate key to dial the number, which rang only twice before being answered.
