by James Becker
Ten minutes after he ended the call to Bob Curtis, Bronson had watched two police cars traveling at speed down the main road through Epping, blues and twos on, following the same route as the bus he’d taken about an hour earlier. He guessed that the driver and passengers on the vehicle were about to have a fairly interesting encounter with the thin blue line.
John Eaton rang about half an hour after that, by which time Bronson had moved to an entirely different location in the town, staying off the main streets as much as possible.
“Where are you?”
Bronson had already noted the name of the street he was closest to, which was just off the main road. “Epping. North end of the town,” he said, “near the main drag. Where do you want me to be?”
“That’ll do,” Eaton replied. “I’ll be there in ten minutes. Same car. Watch out for me.”
“Got it.”
Bronson waited seven minutes by his watch, then got up from the bench he was sitting on and covered the short distance to the main road. There was a fairly long and relatively straight length of road in front of him, and he reckoned he’d see the Vauxhall easily as it approached.
As it turned out, Eaton drove along the road almost by himself, a white van about fifty yards in front, and only a lone motorcyclist following behind him. The moment Bronson saw him, he stepped to the edge of the pavement, waited for the car to stop and climbed in.
Eaton pulled smoothly away from the curb.
“Any problems?” he asked.
Bronson shook his head. “Nobody took any notice of me,” he said. “Just shows the power of TV advertising. Maybe a dozen people looked right at me, but none of them recognized me.”
“Bloody good thing, too. Right, with any luck you’ll be on the road in half an hour. Georg has sorted out a car for you, and he’s got a couple of passports as well.”
“Genuine ones? Because when I get to Dover they’ll probably scan it, and a fake’ll show up immediately.”
“As far as I know they’re the real deal, but you’d better ask him yourself.”
Fifteen minutes later, Eaton pulled the Vauxhall to a stop on a concrete drive outside a very ordinary semi-detached house, a typical three-bed, two-recep, large garden, deceptively spacious, early viewing recommended, so beloved of estate agents everywhere.
It wasn’t exactly the kind of place Bronson imagined Georg using, but he supposed it was the sort of location the German would occupy briefly and then move on. Maybe it belonged to one of the members of the group, or perhaps they’d rented it for a month or so to use as a safe house.
As the two men approached the front door, painted classic suburban blue with a large brass knocker in the shape of a dolphin, it opened and Mike peered out.
“You made it, then,” he said, his tone suggesting that he, personally, would rather Bronson hadn’t gotten away, or was at the very least indifferent to his fate.
“Looks like it.”
Mike stepped back and Bronson walked in, closely followed by Eaton. There was a narrow hallway, a staircase with a wooden handrail ascending on one side, and three doors opening off it. The nearest one stood open and as he stepped forward Georg appeared and beckoned him inside.
The room was a lounge, white paintwork and magnolia walls, a settee and a couple of easy chairs in cream leather the principal furnishings. A wide-screen plasma TV dominated the far wall, a Sky box sitting on a shelf underneath it, alongside a DVD player. Below that was a gas-effect electric fire where fake flames flickered slightly, though the heating elements weren’t switched on.
“Eaton explained what happened at the industrial estate,” Georg said. “Thank you for your quick thinking, and for what you did to get the two of you past the police van.”
“It was self-interest as much as anything,” Bronson replied. “If they’d managed to make me stop, I knew what would happen to me.”
“Well, thank you anyway. Now…” Georg turned away and picked up a couple of British passports that lay on the glass-topped coffee table in front of the fire. “Two members of the group bear a slight resemblance to you, and have agreed to loan me their passports.”
“For a fee, presumably?” Bronson asked.
Georg smiled at him. “This lot don’t do anything unless they get paid,” he said.
He handed the passports to Bronson, who opened both at the page showing the holder’s photograph and studied each in turn. Georg was quite right. Superficially, there was a resemblance, in that both men were about Bronson’s age, roughly his height and had dark hair, but in truth neither man looked very much like him.
“Would one of those do?” Georg asked, sounding slightly worried.
Bronson nodded slowly. “The checks at Dover—when they bother doing them at all—are really designed to check the validity of the passports being presented. There’s only the most superficial attempt to ensure that the person presenting the passport is the same as the man or woman whose picture is in it. So my guess is that either of these would probably do.” He looked at the two documents again, then made his decision.
“I’ll take this one,” he said. “He’s a couple of years older than I am, but I think he looks more like me than the other guy. I’ll memorize the information on that page before I get to Dover. John said you had a car for me as well.”
Georg nodded. “In fact, I have two, registered to the owners of these two passports. To keep things simple, I suggest you take the vehicle owned by”—he glanced at the name inside the passport Bronson was still holding—“Charlie Evans. It’s parked a few meters up the road. It’s a gray Hyundai. The registration number’s on the label attached to the key ring.”
Georg reached into his pocket and produced two sets of car keys, and handed one to Bronson.
“The tank’s full, and there’s a Green Card in the glovebox to cover you for driving in Europe. Charlie would appreciate the return of the car in one piece.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Georg slipped the other set of keys back into his pocket, then took a folded sheet of paper from another pocket and handed it to Bronson. “This is the rendezvous,” he said. “It’s a few kilometers south of Berlin, but it should be easy to find. You need to be there by seven tomorrow evening. Don’t have your pistol or mobile with you at the meeting, because they’ll be taken away from you. Any questions?” he asked.
Bronson shook his head. “No. I’ll get on the road.”
“One suggestion before you leave. The pictures that were broadcast on television showed you with an unshaven face and the beginnings of a beard. You might be less recognizable if you were clean-shaven. You can use the bathroom upstairs if you want to do something about it.”
“That’s a good idea.” Bronson picked up his soft bag and headed for the stairs.
He was down again in less than ten minutes, and sitting in the front seat of the Hyundai three minutes after that.
The car was about three years old, judging by the registration plate, and it was immediately clear that Charlie Evans was a heavy smoker. The ashtray overflowed with cigarette ends, and the entire car smelled of tobacco smoke. It was the kind of rank odor that Bronson knew no amount of cleaning would ever entirely shift. He opened the two front windows as he drove away, which helped a little, and as soon as he found a quiet spot he stopped the car and dumped the contents of the ashtray on the ground.
While the car was stationary, he also checked the trunk, making sure that there was a spare wheel, jack and wheel-brace. In the glovebox, as Georg had promised, there was a Green Card insurance document and also a satnav unit. That would make things a lot easier. Bronson knew the way to Dover, having made the Channel crossing many times before, but he’d never driven anywhere in Germany.
He attached the sucker to the windscreen, plugged the charging cord into the cigarette lighter, and clipped the satnav unit into the holder. He switched on the unit and the software asked him to select the appropriate country, so it obviously had European mapping incl
uded.
Bronson nodded in satisfaction, chose the United Kingdom and settled for the Dover ferry port. He’d input the address in Germany once he reached the other side of the Channel. The female voice in the unit sounded disconcertingly like one of his teachers from years ago, but otherwise he didn’t think he’d have any problems with the satnav.
He picked up the M25 within a few minutes, drove around it until he reached the junction with the M2 motorway signposted to Dover, and then turned east. He had no ferry ticket, of course, but he knew he could buy one for cash on arrival at the port.
Just over two and a half hours after unlocking the doors of the Hyundai, he switched off the engine on the car deck of a P&O ferry, locked the vehicle and followed a crowd of people heading for the stairs. He’d grab a bite on the ferry, he decided, and that would set him up for the first part of the drive he had in front of him.
But at least he’d gotten out of Britain with no problems. As he’d expected, the officer behind the glass of the booth had barely even glanced at him, just scanned the passport, handed it back and then told him to carry on. And the French immigration post a few yards further on was completely deserted, as usual.
So now he was on his own. Sitting in a quiet corner of the restaurant, Bronson stared out of the window at the choppy gray waters of the English Channel and ran over the events of the last few days in his mind. What had started out as a fairly simple infiltration operation, just a matter of him identifying a group of violent vandals who’d been causing such aggravation in East London, had turned into something much darker and more dangerous. The death of the nightwatchman had been unfortunate, but probably accidental, a question of manslaughter, not murder, and Bronson was reasonably certain that it had been Mike and some of his cronies who had attacked the man.
With hindsight, maybe Bronson should simply have given them up to the Met as soon as he’d gotten a few names and memorized their faces. But he had been seriously disturbed by the man who called himself Georg, a man who seemed as wholly out of place in the group as a piranha in a tank of goldfish. He was clearly working to a very different agenda, and Bronson knew without a shadow of a doubt that he was extremely bad news. Bronson had never been directly involved in an operation against terrorists, but he had read enough about the kind of people who moved in that world to recognize the threat, and the type.
His biggest problem had been the complete absence of any form of proof that he could offer about what Georg was planning. That, and the autocratic attitude of Inspector Davidson, of course. If Shit Rises hadn’t decided to ignore what Bronson had said and roll up the undercover operation so quickly, there would at least have been a chance that Bronson could have gone to Berlin, obtained whatever information he could, and that might have led to the capture of the entire gang before they could complete their operation.
As it was, Bronson had been abandoned—or actually rather worse than that—by the British police. He was armed only with a pistol that most people familiar with handguns would consider a joke rather than a serious weapon, and he was on his own, heading for a rendezvous with a group of people he knew nothing about, except that he was quite certain they posed a mortal danger to London and its citizens.
It was not, on the whole, a comfortable position to be in.
19
22 July 2012
Klaus Drescher ended the call on his mobile phone and looked across at Wolf with a satisfied expression on his face.
“The pieces are coming together precisely as we planned it, Marcus. That was Lutz, the leader of the group from the Czech Republic. There were no problems in the substitution of the two vehicles, so now the device is on its way to London with all the correct documentation. I’ve reminded him of the importance of the timing, and he and his team will get the vehicle across to the Calais area fairly quickly, and then wait there for the optimum time to cross the Channel. Even then, they’ll still have time in hand, and will be able to park on the road between Dover and London to ensure that they arrive precisely when we want them to.”
Wolf nodded, and glanced down at the screen of the laptop computer that was open on the table in front of him.
“Excellent,” he said. “Now, before you leave, there’s one other matter you need to be aware of. I’ve received another e-mail from Georg in London. As we discussed, he’s sending this former policeman—Bronson—to see us here. He thinks he might be useful to us because of his knowledge of British police tactics and so on. I’m not convinced, but I do respect Georg’s judgment.”
“That has worried me ever since Georg mentioned it,” Drescher replied. “I gather that Bronson was an army officer before he joined the police force, and that implies that he might have a strong loyalty to his native land. If he somehow managed to find out exactly what we are intending to do, I’m convinced that he would go to the authorities.”
“Then we have to make sure that he doesn’t find out,” Wolf said. “And we also need to establish such a strong hold over him that he would find it impossible to tell anybody about us.”
“How can you do that?”
Wolf smiled, but it was the kind of smile that conveyed no amusement whatsoever, only cruel anticipation.
“I think I know a way that we can do so. In fact, I think I can provide a foolproof guarantee that he will do exactly what we tell him, when we tell him.”
“How?” Drescher asked again.
“Trust me on this, Klaus. I will brief my men here to check him at the rendezvous and ensure that he is unarmed and not wearing any kind of transmitter. You arrange for everyone else to come here tomorrow evening, to arrive no later than seven o’clock. Then we will all see what this man Bronson is like, and you will be able to satisfy yourself that we have him entirely within our power before he leaves here.”
“And if we’re not satisfied? If your guarantee somehow fails to work?”
Wolf smiled again.
“Then the Englishman will leave this house feetfirst, and we will dump him somewhere in the forest. We’ve come too far in this operation for there to be any doubts, any doubts at all, about the final phase. If Bronson won’t join us, then he will die. It’s as simple as that.”
20
23 July 2012
Bronson pulled into the station car park at Rangsdorf, about twenty miles south of the center of Berlin, at twenty past six the following evening. The town was probably a good location for a rendezvous, being easy to find even for a stranger, and very close to the Berliner Ring, the city’s ring road, which offered easy access to the autobahn system. And the station car park was also a good choice, with plenty of parking spaces when Bronson arrived. He guessed that most of the vehicles belonged to local residents who commuted into Berlin; by the time of the rendezvous—seven o’clock—the area would be almost deserted.
He was right. The car park emptied around Bronson as men and women emerged from the railway station, climbed into their cars and drove away, and by six forty-five there were only a handful of vehicles left.
At six fifty, two cars—both dark-colored BMWs—drove into the car park and stopped, one at either end, their occupants remaining inside the vehicles. Watchers, Bronson presumed, there to make sure that the meeting would be neither observed nor interrupted. It looked to him as if there were at least two men in each of the cars. He guessed they already knew he was there, because his was the only vehicle in the place with British registration plates.
Precisely at seven o’clock, another car, this one a light gray Mercedes saloon, entered the car park and stopped in a space close to Bronson’s car. For a few seconds, there was no movement from any of the new arrivals, then both front doors of the Mercedes opened. Two heavily built men got out and strode across to Bronson’s vehicle.
As they approached, Bronson climbed out and stood waiting.
The two men stopped a couple of paces away, motioned him to take a step forward, and then to lift his arms up to shoulder level. Bronson complied, and one of the men stepped
behind him and expertly frisked him. Then the man opened Bronson’s jacket, checked the inside pockets and then his shirt, presumably to make sure he didn’t have a miniature microphone taped to his skin.
“I’m not wearing a wire, and I’m not armed,” Bronson said, assuming the men would speak English.
The second man nodded. “We still have to check. Nothing personal.”
Then the searcher stepped away from Bronson and nodded.
“So far, so good, Mr. Bronson. You’re in the right place at the right time, and you seem to have followed Georg’s orders accurately. Welcome to Berlin.”
“Thanks. What now?”
“Now we take you somewhere else.” He gestured to the Mercedes. “Get in the car,” he said.
Bronson looked at the two men, now standing side by side near the car, and shrugged. He didn’t like the idea of getting into the Mercedes with two men he was quite sure were armed and extremely dangerous, but he had no option. Or, rather, the only options he had were either to go with them or to get back in his car and return to Britain and whatever uncertain welcome might be waiting for him there.
So it wasn’t really a choice. He was certain, beyond a reasonable doubt, that these men were involved in something deeply, deeply dangerous and injurious to his native land, some kind of a terrorist act, and whatever happened he was determined to stop them, or at the very least find out enough about their plans to pass on the information to somebody who could stop them.
“Okay,” he said, walking over to the Mercedes. “You’ll bring me back here later?” he asked.
“That depends on what happens.”
It wasn’t quite the reassurance Bronson had been hoping for, but it was too late to argue.
“In the front seat,” he was instructed.
Bronson changed direction slightly, pulled open the front passenger door of the car and sat down. One of the men took the backseat directly behind him, and the other got into the driver’s seat. The man in the back reached over Bronson’s shoulder and handed him a pair of sunglasses with black, impenetrable wraparound lenses.
