Under these conditions, Lewis expects his aggressor to use considerable force. The pistol should be pressing into him: with menace, the force being maintained – and with the person’s index finger half-on the trigger itself.
Not, as now, with the barrel barely touching Lewis’s skin. The messaging in this scenario is completely different: more akin to: ‘I want you to feel the presence of the weapon, to scare you, to allow you to feel that I am in control. But then we are going to relax, for a while, so that we can all sort this out together.’ It tells Lewis that the other person is either overly confident, or simply naïve.
Perhaps both.
Which is all to Lewis’s advantage. The other person’s finger most likely will only be grazing the trigger.
Ordinarily, Lewis might have played along: for a short while, at least. At this particular moment, though, he is not in the mood for games. Not at one-thirty in the morning.
Especially with Olena missing, presumed kidnapped.
Especially since he recognises the voice – and he knows the person with the gun to be both overly confident and naïve.
Is his attacker right or left-handed? The answer determines the optimal direction in which Lewis is to spin around in order to disarm the person. It’s not crucial if he gets it wrong. However, choosing correctly can really improve the chances of wrestling the gun away safely. If he is up against a right-handed opponent, Lewis prefers to spin clockwise. That way, rotating rapidly, he grabs his opponent’s right wrist, the one holding the gun, with his left hand. At the same time, the palm of his right hand swings round to connect with the gun itself, both hands now able to exert considerable rotational force to push the weapon away from Lewis’s face and upper torso. The speed in which this is done, combined with the momentum that the manoeuvre provides, usually takes the aggressor by surprise. More often than not, it allows the gun to be moved out of the intended victim’s immediate danger zone before a bullet can be fired. With a right-handed aggressor, and with Lewis spinning clockwise, there is also less resistance when forcing movement in this direction – unless the attacker is deploying a more stable, double-handed, gun grip. The fact that Lewis can feel the gun wavering about loosely at the nape of his neck is a good enough indication that this person is holding the gun with one hand only.
So, is this person a left or right-hander?
He already knows the answer.
Only a few days previously, he had been following the man as he had led the way from the Sikorsky S-92 helicopter towards Nemikov’s house. He had guessed then, correctly, that Sergei Fedorov was indeed right-handed. Which means that the gun currently at his neck will be in Fedorov’s right hand. The Ukrainian will be standing there, arm-outstretched, enjoying Lewis’s moment of discomfort, toying with him, pleased with himself for having got one over the former Marine.
Which in Lewis’s mind means only one thing: it is time to set the record straight.
70
Five seconds is all it takes. In that brief amount of time, Lewis is able to deflect the gun away from his own neck and inwards towards Fedorov’s body. The Ukrainian never sees the move coming; never considers that Lewis would be so foolish as to try and wrestle the Glock 17 away from his fingers; even less believing when he succeeds. What he especially doesn’t see coming is the sharp jab to the face with Lewis’s left elbow as soon as Fedorov’s gun is on the deck, having been kicked away by Lewis.
“What the fuck do you think you are doing?” Lewis sneers at him, his face up close to Fedorov’s now bloody nose, his right hand gripping Fedorov’s jacket lapels. “I thought we were meant to be on the same team.”
Lewis lets go of Fedorov. The man draws breath and regroups. His nose looks broken; there is a distinct kink in it beneath the bridge.
“Where’s the girl? You keep me waiting one hour. Where is she?”
Lewis views Fedorov with contempt.
“If you ever, ever, pull a stunt like that on me again, I promise I will kill you.”
“Where’s Olena?” The man is holding his nose, feeling the broken cartilage, dabbing at the blood with a handkerchief.
“Fuck knows,” Lewis says, the contempt for the other man making him spit the words out. “She took a taxi. Someone crashed into it. I think she may have been kidnapped. Or perhaps you knew that?”
To Lewis’s surprise, he sees the Ukrainian smile momentarily before he seems to catch himself, eventually shaking his head.
Fedorov pulls out his mobile phone.
“So, I call Nemikov,” he says, pressing a button and holding the phone to his ear.
“You won’t get him,” Lewis says, watching as Fedorov’s call is routed through to voicemail. “He’s off the grid. It is nearly two in the morning.”
Fedorov simply grunts in disbelief.
“Nemikov never sleeps,” is all he says, pocketing the phone and looking at Lewis with loathing.
“What next, arsehole?” is the question that eventually comes in Lewis’s direction, the fingers still testing his broken nose.
With terrifying speed, Lewis grabs Fedorov roughly by the collar and pulls him close, the man’s frightened face right up against his own.
“If you,” he spits angrily, “don’t start showing some courtesy, the next time you call me an arsehole, I promise I’m going to break your jaw.” He finally releases the Ukrainian’s collar. “I’ll tell you what’s next. You are going to wait here. To see whether Olena turns up after all. Sleep on the plane for all I care.”
He is about to leave then turns back, as if remembering something.
“The Cambridge flat, where your man is babysitting Borys. You have a set of keys, don’t you?”
Fedorov nods, not bothering to say anything. Lewis, equally belligerently, holds out his hand, waiting. Fedorov fumbles in his pockets. After a few moments spent digging around, he pulls out a large bunch of keys. Painfully slowly, he removes a small set from off the bigger bunch. He tosses them to Lewis, in a manner deliberately designed to make Lewis have to pick them off the floor. Except that the former-Marine’s reactions are better than he anticipates: Lewis catches them and puts them in his pocket. Turning, he begins walking back to where his bike is parked, on the way stopping to pick up the Glock 17 pistol that Fedorov had, moments earlier, been pointing at him.
He almost reaches his bike when his phone starts vibrating. He looks at the caller identification. It is Saul Zeltinger once more. Lewis slides his finger across the screen to take the call.
“What news?”
“Bad, I’m afraid. You may be out of a job.” Zeltinger pauses.
“Why?”
“Because Arkady Nemikov is dead.”
71
Sadiq had not been at home the night the team from S015 had raided the house in Kilburn principally because he had been working. Sadiq was a maintenance contractor working for Transport for London. TfL was the local government body responsible, amongst other things, for operating the entire London Underground rail system.
Sadiq worked nights. That was the time when the tube network was typically shut down to passenger traffic, the occasion in each twenty-four period when most maintenance work was carried out. Whenever Sadiq was working, his routine never changed. He would sleep, with earplugs in and eyeshades on, until just after four in the afternoon. At this point, the alarm on the phone that he kept under his pillow would vibrate him awake. He would get up, go for a run, have a meal at around seven in the evening, and then prepare a snack to take with him to work in the large rucksack that he always carried.
Ordinarily, Sadiq left for work at eleven in the evening. He would dress in his TfL uniform and then travel by tube, or bus, to wherever on the network he happened to be working that night, returning usually after daybreak the next day. For the past month, Sadiq had changed his routine, now leaving h
ome at least thirty minutes earlier than previously. The reason had all been down to his newfound friendship with Hakim. Over the course of a number of meetings in London, Sadiq, under encouragement from Fouad, had felt obliged to share with Hakim certain pieces of information about his work that had seemed on the face of it trivial – but to Hakim had been of inspirational significance. In no time at all, Sadiq had become central to Hakim’s plans. Fortunately for him, Sadiq had been only too eager to cooperate.
As a direct consequence, for the last month Sadiq had been taking himself and his large rucksack on a small diversion on the way to work each night. Starting at his local tube station, Kilburn, he had ridden the Jubilee Line train to Bond Street before changing trains and heading east on the Central Line, to Tottenham Court Road. Always to the same station: Tottenham Court Road. Regardless of where on the network that night he was actually working, Sadiq had been making the same detour. Once at Tottenham Court Road, he made his way in along the twisted labyrinth of underground tunnels at the station, heading for the platforms where the trains on the Northern Line arrived and departed. There, he walked along the platform until about two-thirds of the way down: to where there was a cut through linking the north and southbound platforms. This passage was no more than twenty metres in length. In the middle, set back in oddly dark-blue-painted brickwork, was a dark-blue painted door with a lock. To Sadiq’s knowledge, there was only one living person who had the key to this particular door lock: himself.
Refurbishment work had been underway at Tottenham Court Road for about three years before the advent of Crossrail, the massive, east-west tunnelling project that was still under construction beneath London’s busy streets. The planned-for enlargement of the station complex at Tottenham Court Road, as part of the Crossrail works, meant that many on-going improvement works had overnight been halted and become reprioritised. Sadiq had been working onsite for about two of those three years. One evening, his boss at the time had introduced him to an old storeroom located behind the dark-blue door. Long since forgotten about, no longer appearing on any architects’ plans, it was a tribute to how complicated and full of history these old tunnels really were. In reality the room existed. On paper, it didn’t. It had been a small place that had simply been forgotten about. Sadiq’s boss had, until the works had been reprioritised, been planning simply to brick it up, and then tile the wall over. The pair had used this room, in reality a four metre square box-shaped space with a two metre ceiling, as their own secret rest room: somewhere to come in the middle of the night for a beer or two and a quiet kip; a private space where no one would find them. They had wanted to keep prying eyes out. Rather than put up ‘Danger, Keep Out’ signs, or similar, on the door, which they had felt at the time would be an invitation to the curious minded to discover what was behind it, they had devised something different:
‘On Entering, Please Mind the Step.’
To their knowledge, never once whilst using the room had anyone had the curiosity to try opening the door to see what was behind it. The rectangular-shaped piece of paper on the door was old and slightly soiled; it looked like something from a different age. It had been taped in place with torn pieces of black electrical tape: exactly the sort of thing that a concerned health and safety person might have put in place.
Thus it was that when Sadiq’s boss had suffered his fatal heart attack whilst pushing a trolley along the station platform one evening in the height of winter, it had left Sadiq being the only person at the time with knowledge about – and the key to – the room.
72
When the nine hundred metric tonne Crossrail tunnel-boring machine had been digging its path, centimetre-by-centimetre, below the surface of central London, every second of its journey it was being monitored by a complex system of wall-mounted lasers. These lasers, combined with GPS, had provided both the machine operators and the planning engineers, in their offices several metres above them, pinpoint-precision information about the exact location of the machine: and, most critically, whether it had been pointing in the correct direction.
The various machines used by Crossrail had been exceptionally sophisticated. Not only did they have mechanisms that allowed the waste and spoil from the digging process to be passed to the surface, along miles of conveyors, in their wake; but no sooner had the seven-metre-wide tunnel cavity been created by the cutter head, than behind it, other machines were soon sealing in place the tunnel linings that made the tunnel safe and secure. Seven curved pieces of lining were bolted into place before a final keystone was positioned. This had ensured that the circular ‘ring’ of the tunnel was intact: the lining slabs being akin to curved pieces of a jigsaw that had to be carefully slotted together.
If there had been one place along the Crossrail tunnel route that engineers had been particularly concerned about, it had been at Tottenham Court road. At this location, the path of the tunnel needed to be bored with deadly accuracy. Termed ‘the Eye of the Needle,’ the tunnel route had required the immense boring machines to pass exactly eighty-five centimetres immediately overhead the Northern Line tunnels at the station – whilst simultaneously tunnelling thirty-five centimetres below an escalator tunnel leading down to the Northern Line itself. In a tribute not only to the engineers, but also to the strength of the old tunnels – and their original linings – the machines had drilled the new tunnel with remarkable precision; and, more amazingly, at platform level there had been no cracking or collapsing of the old tunnels evident at all. This had been despite the immensely heavy tunnel digging equipment that had inched its way less than a metre above both platforms at the station.
No cracks at all.
Not even in the ceiling of the small four-metre square box room, lost and forgotten about by everyone apart from Sadiq. Which for some reason he had chosen, in a moment of foolishness, to mention to Hakim.
The proximity of the small, secret, chamber so close to the newly bored tunnel, had been precisely the reason Hakim had been so excited: it had been his ‘light bulb’ moment, the occasion when his whole, hideous, plan had suddenly started to take shape and purpose.
As a direct consequence, Sadiq had deliberately changed his nightly commuting routine. Every night for the previous month, he had made his way along the Northern Line platform at Tottenham Court Road station late in the evening. Approaching the dark-blue door set in the connecting passageway he had checked that no one was watching. Carefully and cautiously unlocking the door, he had entered the small room. Once inside, he had set his rucksack down on the floor and dutifully removed two sandbags. Each had been placed against the end wall of the room. One by one, adding to the considerable pile already building from floor to ceiling: exactly as Hakim had instructed him.
In another few days, the remaining sandbags would all be in position. The room would then be ready.
Insha’Allah, the devastation, when the time came, would be truly catastrophic.
73
Sadly for Hakim, neither he nor Sadiq were structural engineers. If they had been, they might have realised that, cunning though their plans might have been on the face of it, the effect of setting off explosions in tunnels was not likely to cause the kind of devastating destruction that they anticipated.
Surprisingly, tunnels are immensely strong structures. The physics is not dissimilar to the surprising strength of an egg: despite the thinness of the outer shell, the curved surface, in particular at the dome, allows an egg to withstand a large amount of weight being borne down on it. The same effect, only more so, was inherent with tunnels; especially given the composition of modern tunnel linings.
The linings used within the Crossrail tunnels, comprised three composite layers: a primary lining layer, about three hundred millimetres thick and a secondary layer that was slightly thicker; both made from steel reinforced aggregate mixes. The final, much thinner, finish layer contained no steel but consisted of polypropylene fib
res and calcareous aggregates. These had all been bonded together, providing specific protection against both fire and explosions: for instance, exactly the sort of sudden and dramatic pressure variation that might be caused by a large terrorist device.
Vladimir, who had supplied Hakim with the RDX explosive, C-4, had known quite a lot about the science of tunnelling and the impact of explosive devices at depth. Sadly, Hakim had never thought to ask Vladimir for his advice.
Which was a pity.
In fact there was quite a lot about Vladimir that most people didn’t ordinarily discover. On the surface an arms dealer, he was also an SVR field agent. Vladimir diligently worked the complicated channels and connections within the Middle East theatre; sniffing out opportunities and conduits that might benefit mother Russia here; providing pieces of intelligence back to Yasenevo, there. In point of fact, his relationship with Hakim had been established, and built, with the full connivance of the planners back at Yasenevo. Mikhail Volkov, Oleg Panich’s one time controller and now Vladimir’s, had wanted to learn more about the Islamic State threat to the West. Given this, Hakim had seemed a sensible man for the Russians to befriend. Volkov had been the one who had given the final approval to supply the large shipment of RDX into the UK. Volkov’s only condition had been that he needed to know, chapter and verse, about where it was going and what it was to be used for. A small SVR field team had therefore been assigned to the UK to try to find out. It didn’t take them long.
Tracing the delivery of the toner cartridges to the Bradford warehouse had proved remarkably straightforward. From here all that was required had been patience, and two hidden cameras. Fouad’s white minivan had been discreetly but easily followed all the way to Buckley Road in Kilburn. Thereafter it had only been a matter of a few days, and some fairly simple surveillance, until all had become clear. The Russian field team, closely observing the comings and goings at the Buckley Road house, noticed that one of the occupants, a Pakistani male, commuted to work each night carrying a heavy rucksack. When the same man returned home again the following morning at the end of his shift, the rucksack appeared lighter. Sadiq had been put under close watch. The very next night he had been photographed entering the secret room between the two Northern Line tunnels at Tottenham Court Road. The following night the surveillance team had recorded Sadiq’s comings and goings at the dark blue door on video. One of the team had then continued tailing the Pakistani, whilst his two other colleagues had picked the lock and ventured inside. Facing them along one end wall of the small room, carefully stacked from floor to ceiling, they had found the pile of sandbags that Sadiq had, night after night, been building. Photographs had been taken. Only a few hours later, these had been closely scrutinised by Mikhail Volkov and his team back in Yasenevo.
The Gambit (Ben Lewis Thriller Book 2) Page 18
