Tanker (A Tim Burr Thriller Book 1)

by Nicholas E Watkins

  When the product reached Manchester or any other big city, it was then cut further adding to the profit margin and broken into smaller packets for the local dealers who would probably dilute the product again before selling onto the street dealers.

  Osman was glad he had been forced out of the people smuggling trade. The agreement between Turkey and the European Union whereby they in effect agreed to stop the migrants leaving Turkey and house them in camps had killed the trade. While it lasted the immigrant trade had caused a mini economic boom in certain areas of the country. He would charge one to two thousand dollars per passenger to get from the Turkish mainland to a Greek island and this money flowed in part into the local economy.

  For example the sales of rigid hull inflatable boats had allowed manufactures around Izmir, a large town near the coast, to grow exponentially. He had himself been responsible for buying three or four boats a month from one manufacturer alone, Northern Cross boats. The deal with the EU had slowed down the domestic trade but the cheaper cost of production had with the initial impetus of the people smuggling had allowed the boat builders the opportunity to get into the international leisure market. Osman still kept in contact with his old boat supplier at Northern Cross and had been surprised to learn that they had had an order for over fifty boats from Iraq of all places.

  He stepped from his bathroom wrapped in a towel and looked round his bedroom and took a moment to reflect. Not bad he thought for a Turkish peasant brought up without a pot to piss in. His villa on the outskirts of Paris had a further five sumptuously furnished bedrooms, a home cinema, pool, a tennis court and three acres of land. The detached garage housed his car collection. A Ferrari and a Bentley were among its contents. Yes he was glad he had been forced to change direction. The heroin trade was far more profitable.

  His walked into the wardrobe, which housed his collection of shoes and suits. His shirts were neatly folded in drawers along the walls. He selected one of the Armani suits and matched shirt, tie and shoes to his choice. Osman was not for the understated and a bejewelled Rolex was on one wrist and a thick gold linked bracelet was on the other. He was a great believer in the maxim, “if you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

  Ali the Kurd had asked for the night off. This was a rare occurrence so Osman had kindly let the man take the time off. He decided he would drive himself and take the 360 Ferrari although it was over 12 years old but it was still a head turner.

  He had diner booked at a Michelin starred restaurant on the Rue de Maxim and a hot blond lined up as a companion. A club then back to his flat in central Paris. He checked his watch and then checked himself in the mirror. Looking at his watch he saw that he was in good time to collect his companion.

  Ali the Kurd had taken the Ferrari from the garage and washed it and parked it on the drive in front of the villa. Osman checked his appearance one more time in the mirror and picked the car keys up from the side table as he left.

  Despite its age the car smelt of new leather. He checked the adjustment of the wing mirrors and had one final look in the rear view mirror to check his appearance.

  The explosion was massive destroying not only all trace of the Ferrari and Osman but demolishing half the front of his beautiful villa.

  *******

  The bus pulled slowly out of the station in the centre of Paris and headed east. The traffic was heavy as usual and the bus crowded. Migrant works travelled from the poorer countries of the European Union and the buses were their means of transport. Coming or going to look for work every penny counted as they sent money home to their families. They travelled for days moving where the work was.

  Ali the Kurd was going home. He had not seen his wife for six years. His son had only been a month old when he had left. He had left the Turkish controlled area where he was treated like scum and discriminated against and persecuted at every turn to find a better life west. Hoping to move his family to join him, he had tried to work but he could not get asylum status so he had no means of working legally. The only work he could get was for the Turks. He hated them and their drug money but he had no choice and at least his family had money which he sent home each month.

  He was excited and he could picture his beautiful wife in his mind’s eye. He could smell the scent of her hair and imagined the soft caress of her touch. So long he had been alone but now in a few days he would see the smile on her face when he returned. He would be able to hold his son and daughter in his arms again after all this time. He was coming back a rich man. In the rucksack was the fifty thousand euros the three ISIS goons had arranged for him to have for the service he had afforded them. He told ISIS of Tim and Yosuf’s travel plans to England and the bomb had been surprising easily to install in the Ferrari.

  ******

  The City Jet plane taxied along the runway at London City airport. The three ISIS hitmen had secured three seats together and were all trying to get a glimpse of London as the plane came into land. The flight from Orly airport in Paris had taken under an hour. There were excited as none of them had been to London before.

  They only had cabin baggage and were soon outside the airport. The largest of the three light a cigarette and took a deep draught. A horn tooted and a taxi pulled up in front of them. The driver wearing the taqiyah, the Muslim cap opened the boot for them and they put their bags in. They sat in the car.

  “Put the fag out mate,” said the driver in a north London accent as they moved off. “It’s illegal to smoke in a cab.” The three looked at each other and smiled. The cigarette was thrown from the window.

  *****

  Mailer studded the report from special branch. He had had to call in a lot of favours in a lot of areas before this turned up. Following the fruitless raids in Italy and Portugal in the vain attempt to apprehend Tim he had had to resort to the intelligence gathering community. He knew he was pushing his luck and exceeding his Ministerial Brief but he had no choice as his secret needed to remain just that, a secret.

  The report was from the Drug Squad of the London Metropolitan Police gathering evidence on the heroin trade in the Capital. The link between drug money and terrorist funding was well established and MI5 along with all the other arms of the security agencies kept a watching brief on the activity. The Met had an undercover policeman in place and he had reported back discussions among the traffickers of an English man and a Turk who were bringing in the next shipment. The Drug Squad were attempting to locate the drugs and the couriers who had entered the country in the last twenty four hours but they did know that in all probability that the drugs would be delivered ultimately to a location in North London. So it was just a matter of maintaining surveillance on that location and being patient.

  It was too much of a coincidence Mailer thought. The drugs were of no concern to him but he needed the memory stick to get that scumbag Mehmet and that idiot Jason Delonge out of his life. He knew he would have to take a risk and step further over the line but he had no choice. He dialled a number and spoke to MI6, to a friend who had as much to loose as he and Jason. When he put down the receiver he was assured that MI6 would now be running the investigation and the Met would be politely removed from it. In fact MI6 would ensure that the matter disappeared leaving the Turkish Secret Service with a clear field.

  He phoned Mehmet, “We have your target,” and gave him the address where Tim and Yosuf would be making the heroin delivery at some point.

  Chapter 16

  The room although basic was quite pleasant on the seafront at Eastbourne and they could see the Pier and the sea from their window. “Do you know they call this place God’s waiting room?” Tim said. Yosuf looked bemused. “The old people all come here to retire,” he explained.

  “Right,” Yosuf smiled. “English humour.”

  They had walked from the boat to the shopping centre. Trips to Asda, Matelan and T K Max had seen them wearing new clothes, carrying two unregistered mobile phones each and wheeling two nice bags containing the contents of Yosuf’s black bag,
twenty kilos of heroin, some clothes, bathroom essentials and a laptop computer. They had taken the bus to the Pier and checked into the hotel.

  The laptop came to life and after about an hour of downloading updates and other routine maintenance the machine was ready for the off.

  “It will probably be encrypted,” said Yosuf as he put the memory stick in the USB port.

  “Or not,” said Tim as the files popped up on the screen.

  They opened the files and read them. “Well I can not make any sense of it. Can you?”

  “Not really. They seem to be insurance contracts.”

  What is DWT?”

  He googled it. “That is not much help; doing weird things, driving while texting: death weasel tech and down with tyranny.”

  “It is to do with ship insurance. Try putting in marine DWT.”

  “Ah, here it is deadweight tonnage. A measure of the mass a ship can carry.”

  “We are out of our depth…”

  “Another English joke?” asked Yosuf.

  “The pun was not intended but we do need some professional help as to what this means.”

  “Do you know someone who can help us?”

  “Actually against the odds, I do but it will not be fun for me. My ex-wife’s husband is an insurance underwriter.”

  “Phone her.”

  “I will. Don’t rush me. I need to mentally prepare for such an event. She talks to me as though I am something she stepped on and needs to scrape off her shoe”

  “Will she help though?”

  “Oh yes it will give her the chance to show me her stinking rich, successful husband and reinforce the fact that I am a total waste of space,” said Tim.

  “Well you can’t argue with that,” said Yosuf.

  Tim glowered at Yosuf who smiled innocently back. “I am getting the hang of this famous British sense of humour. Don’t you agree?”

  “Lisa?”

  “Tony”

  “How are you?” Tim asked.

  “I am fine and you?”

  “Perfectly fit.”

  “Ok we’ve done the health check. What do you want?”

  It had not taken long to get the pleasantries over. “I need a bit of advice …”

  “I have some. Get a personality and a bit of ambition, anything else?”

  “Very funny, it’s a technical matter. I need John to give me some guidance on insurance matters. Could you ring him and prepare the ground. I know it is a big ask but it is for my job, you know, British trade and I need to be sure I have the facts right?”

  “He is very busy you know?”

  John was known in the insurance market as Mr. Midas as he had the golden touch. He made consistent underwriting profits year on year. “I appreciate that but he would be helping my understanding of matters for the Ambassador.” Tim knew that helping out the Government would appeal to her vanity.

  “Ok, I’ll bell him and you can call him in about half hour.” She gave him her husband’s number and hung up.

  “Will he help?” asked Yosuf.

  “He wouldn’t dare not to after he speaks to Lisa. That leaves us with the problem of the heroin. I am not happy about handing it over to a pile of drug dealers.”

  “What are our options we need their help?” Yosuf said.

  “It bothers me. That’s all.”

  “Us staying alive and stopping ISIS carrying out whatever we have here bothers me more.”

  Tim was forced to concede the point. They packed up their gear and vacated the room. They had paid cash in advance and having had baths and set up the lap top it had served its purpose. They called a taxi and headed for the railway station. The train would take them to Victoria station in central London in a few hours. From there they could take the underground to their destination.

  Chapter 17

  On the top floor of Thames House, Elaine Wilkins was catching up with the daily intelligence reports. She pursed her lips and exhaled loudly. It was always the same at MI5, plentiful intelligence and too few staff to investigate fully. Things had improved gradually from the total shambles it had been after 9/11 when they had been caught totally unprepared. For years the Irish problems had occupied them and they were more or less up to the task but the Islamic threat had been very different.

  They had over the years built up a good network within the IRA. They were far easier to follow for example meeting in pubs and of course ethnically white as had been the majority of the staff at MI5. The attack had taken them by surprise with not enough staff and it being far more difficult to apply surveillance even if the staff could have blended with the targets, which they couldn’t. The Islamic factions would meet at home or in Mosques where they could not be easily observed. At one point MI5 were using the London Transport police to follow people as well as the police and their own staff.

  Elaine was in her mid fifties and had held the post for two years. MI5 liked to pick women chiefs. She suspected that as the organisation was playing catch up, the appointment of women gave the appearance that it was a forward looking and modern whereas it was in fact creaking at the seams. She was fastidious in her dress and grooming and her strength had always been applying attention to detail. She was wearing her Sunday best today, a nice Gary Webber suit and a plain white blouse. Her shoes and handbag matched. She had her regular meeting scheduled with the Home Secretary later to whom she was responsible unlike MI6 who reported to the Secretary of State for foreign Affairs.

  She was preparing her brief for the meeting when there was a knock on her door. “Come in,” she called slightly irritated.

  Jeff Stiles walked into the room, “Morning,” he said cheerily. Stiles had been recruited from the Navy and he was now in his early forties. He was tall, with dark brown eyes and a full head of black hair, handsome by all standards despite having a prominent nose.

  “Yes, Good Morning.”

  “Ooh, somebody’s not in the best of humour today.”

  “Sorry, but I have to be ready for the Home Secretary and there is a pile of crap to get through.”

  “Well I should like to add to the crap,” Stiles said. “You know me I cannot resist a good mystery or an oddity so I have been following up a bit of Intel that came via GCHQ Cheltenham.” Based on the outskirts of Cheltenham, CCHQ employed over five thousand staff. It coordinated information gathered from media, emails, telephone conversations and satellites and communication from around the Globe.

  “I can never resist a bit of information about our mates at Vauxhall,” He was referring to MI6. “Well, for some reason they have decided to take over running investigation by the police into heroin smuggling involving the usual suspects from Turkey. “

  “Why are they bothered about that? Is there a direct link to terrorist funding in the UK? If there is surely we would be on top of that? What’s it to do with them anyway?”

  “I asked myself the same questions and wondered if the buggers were involved in a bit of one-upmanship and hoping to get an easy collar at our expense? So I delved a little further. Now then it gets interesting. The order was external and the decision doesn’t seem to have come from the Secretary of state but some junior Minister.”

  “COBRA initiative?” suggested Elaine. COBRA was the security committee chaired by the Prime Minister to deal with significant threats and crises facing the Country.

  “Again it does not appear so. That leaves us with what appears a direct intervention by a junior minister called, Terrance Mailer, into our territory. In other words the investigation into the drug smuggling has been effective sidelined.”

  “Now you have my interest. That is very curious indeed. Why would anybody want to stop an investigation into something nobody was interested in the first place apart from a few Bobbies.” She paused, “You didn’t just leave it did you? You did some more digging. I know you, you had to pick away at it and now you want me to spend part of our meagre budget to poke around further? Am I right?”

  He smiled, “You are the
boss for a good reason. Of course I dug a bit more.”

  “And?”

  “And … I searched around any related bits and pieces using our algorithms looking for links. It would appear that a Turkish translator was killed in Menton near Monaco and his wife and her brothers seem to have disappeared or were made to disappear by Turkish Intelligence. A Drug dealer linked to the London drug cartel was blown up in Paris, the forensic of the bomb’s construction suggesting an ISIS maker who the French have been trying to track down for a long while. Then I looked for a link and guess what turned up. Don’t guess I’ll tell you,” he smiled.

  “Mehmet Yildirim, the Mr. fix-it for the Turks, Deputy Head of Intelligence.” He waited or her reaction.

  She sat quietly and contemplated the facts. “What was this dead Turk doing in Menton?”

  “He was not in Menton he was with the Turkish delegation in Monte Carlo who had organised a beano for the Paris office. Now that has its own area of interest. Our friend Mehmet and his old school buddy Jason Delonge were part of the party. Curiously not only did the Turks managed to get one of their staff murdered they seem to have misplaced another, called Yosuf, a low level intelligence gatherer and head of their translation service. It seems that not only have the Turks been careless in misplacing staff we seem to have one of ours go missing as well, a Anthony Burr,”

  “One of ours?”

  “Sort of, he his paid for out of our budget to sift information and prepare situation briefings locally for the Ambassador.” he said.

  “Gives us legitimacy to investigate then?”

  He laughed. “Why not, we always set up a full scale counter espionage operation when an employee doesn’t make work on a Monday morning, don’t we?”

  “Funny ah ah! Ok, what do you want? You have me intrigued. Do you know where the Turks run their drug operation from?”

  “Wood Green, North London, “he replied.