‘These are the guys that Aidan Flynn buys his drugs from. They run a kebab shop and a minicab business that they use to shift the drugs around town.’ He tapped one of the photographs. ‘This is Yusuf Yilmaz, the older brother.’ He tapped another of the photographs. ‘This is Ahmet. It’s a tight operation, which is probably why they’ve stayed under the radar. All their drivers are Turks and from the look of it a lot of the drivers are related, by marriage if not blood.’
‘How do you know they’re Flynn’s suppliers?’ asked Drinkwater, his eyes on the photographs.
‘I just know,’ said Shepherd, figuring it best not to go into details.
‘That’s it?’ said Drinkwater. ‘That’s all you have?’
‘You’ve got details there of a major drug distribution network.’
‘No, what I’ve got here is a load of photographs of taxi drivers and allegations about two brothers who run what appears to be a legitimate business. Two businesses. A takeaway restaurant and a minicab firm. There’s no evidence of any wrongdoing.’
‘I bought an ounce of cocaine off them.’
Drinkwater’s eyes narrowed. ‘And where is this cocaine now?’
‘It can’t be used as evidence in any case, there’s no chain of custody, not one that would stand up in court, anyway. But take my word for it. You call that number and ask for Yusuf and within the hour the drugs will be on your doorstep.’
‘Yes, but a reasonably small amount. And you’ve given nothing to me that shows that the Yilmaz brothers are behind this. For all we know, they might be totally unaware of what’s going on.’
‘I spoke to Yusuf.’
‘In person?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t see a photograph of you talking to him.’
‘On the phone.’
‘So not in person. There’s no evidence that it was Yusuf Yilmaz you spoke to. And you can’t even produce the cocaine you say you bought from him. You’ve got nothing here, Mr Shepherd.’
‘Aidan Flynn buys his drugs from the Yilmaz brothers. That’s a fact.’
‘So you say. But I doubt that he’ll go into a witness box and confirm that. Look, I do appreciate you bringing this information in and I’ll be sure to pass it on to our drugs squad.’ He began gathering up the printed sheets and photographs.
‘Whoa, hang on a bit,’ said Shepherd. ‘What about Liam?’
‘What about him?’
‘Does this mean you’ll be dropping the charges?’
‘Mr Shepherd, all you’ve done here is given me rumour and supposition. I’ll pass it on to the relevant department but that doesn’t change the fact that your son was caught in possession of a Class A drug.’
Shepherd held up his hands. ‘What is it you want from me, DS Drinkwater? What do I have to do to get you to drop the case against my son?’
The detective placed the papers and pictures back on the table. ‘I need a real case, Mr Shepherd. Something I can take to my bosses with all the ducks lined up in a row. A case, open and shut.’ He gestured at the papers and pictures in front of him. ‘This is supposition. I want real hard evidence and I want it against a serious villain, not the owner of a pissy little kebab shop.’
‘Okay,’ said Shepherd. He picked up the papers and put them back in his pocket. ‘Just give me some time,’ he said.
‘To do what?’ asked the detective.
‘To put something together.’
‘I can’t wait for ever,’ said Drinkwater. ‘The Crown Prosecution Service is already snapping at my tail.’
Shepherd doubted that was true. In his experience the CPS rarely went looking for work, it was all they could do to keep up with the files that kept hitting their desk. But there was no point in calling the detective on a lie. ‘Can you give me a couple of weeks?’
‘I’ll give you one week,’ said the detective, folding his arms. ‘Five working days. Then I’ll send your boy’s paperwork to the CPS.’
Shepherd had to fight the urge to launch himself across the table and grab the man by the throat, but he forced himself to smile. ‘Okay, I’ll see what I can do.’
He stood up and gathered the papers and pictures up. Drinkwater left the room leaving Allen alone with Shepherd.
‘He’s a bit curt, I know,’ said the detective.
‘Must be a pleasure to work with,’ said Shepherd.
‘He’s a stickler for the rules and doesn’t have much of a sense of a humour, but he never puts a foot wrong,’ said Allen. ‘You know that if you’re on an investigation with Paul then every box will get ticked and every base will be covered. The CPS love him. Every case he gives them is airtight. He has a one hundred per cent conviction record and pretty much everyone he charges pleads guilty eventually.’
Shepherd put the paperwork in his pocket.
‘I’m sorry about your lad,’ said Allen. ‘If it were down to me …’ He shrugged.
‘Thanks,’ said Shepherd.
The detective showed Shepherd out. As he said goodbye at reception he gave Shepherd his business card. ‘If there’s anything I can help you with, give me a call,’ he said.
‘He’s serious about the week?’ asked Shepherd.
The detective looked pained. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Better pull my finger out, then,’ said Shepherd. He headed out of the police station.
‘How did it go?’ asked Sharpe as Shepherd climbed into the Mondeo.
‘Not great,’ said Shepherd.
Back in her office in Thames House, Button sipped a cup of tea and took out the photo of the passport that Klimov had given her. It was definitely a photo of Shepherd, and a recent one by the look of it. She wrinkled her nose as she stared at the photograph. ‘What the hell are you playing at, Spider?’ she whispered.
The fact that Shepherd had been in Berlin at the same time as Alex Harper was clearly no coincidence. But if it had been in any way connected to the ongoing case, he would have cleared the trip with her first. The fact that he hadn’t set all sorts of alarm bells ringing in her head.
She needed to get the passport checked but she had a feeling that it wouldn’t be straightforward. She called up the departmental staff list and went through it, looking for someone who had never met Shepherd and who knew their way around the agency’s computer system. She smiled when she got to the name of Liz Calder. She had joined from university and was still at the enthusiastic stage, working long hours without complaint and always keen to take on extra tasks. Her degree was in computer science and she was near fluent in French, German and Italian. Button called her extension and asked her to pop along for a chat. Five minutes later Calder was sitting in front of Button, a yellow legal pad on her lap and her pen poised. She was a brunette with porcelain skin and wearing a grey suit and what Button was fairly sure were Gucci heels. Button had read Calder’s positive vetting report, which she had passed with flying colours, but what she was going to ask her to do wasn’t about loyalty to her country.
‘I need you to do something quite sensitive for me,’ Button began. She passed over the photocopy of the passport. ‘I need you to check him out. Criminal record, school, university, travel, birth certificate, the full Monty. But I need you to be careful. Very careful. I think there might be something a bit special about the paperwork.’
Calder frowned. ‘Special?’
‘Just a feeling,’ said Button. ‘So I need you to do all the checks once or twice removed. Use proxies, whatever you can do so that none of the checks can be traced back to you.’
‘That’s easy enough to do,’ she said.
‘You’re going to have to be really careful, Liz,’ said Button. ‘If I’m right then there could be all sorts of flags, visible and hidden. Softly, softly. For instance I’d really like to know how many passports have been issued in that name and who countersigned the original application. Also the passport is supposed to have been manufactured three years ago. I doubt that’s true.’
Calder nodded and made a note on her
pad. Computer files on government databases could be flagged so that when anyone opened them, their details would be sent to whoever had flagged the file. Sometimes the flags were clearly marked but flags could also be hidden so that the file could be read without the reader ever knowing that they had been identified and noted.
‘I can’t emphasise how delicate this is, Liz,’ said Button. ‘Anything you find out is for my ears only, nothing in writing and please tread carefully.’
‘I won’t let you down,’ said Calder, nodding enthusiastically.
Button smiled and thanked her and tried to remember if she herself had ever been so young and enthusiastic. If she had, it was in another life.
‘I’ve got to be honest, I don’t see this working,’ said Sharpe. He and Shepherd were sitting in the Mondeo, down the road from the kebab shop. ‘He’s going to want to see the cash up front. And I don’t know about you but I can’t get my hands on the sort of money he’s going to want to see.’
‘You never know, maybe they’ll take a liking to us.’
‘Yeah, and maybe we can hitch a ride on a flying pig.’
‘I don’t have much choice, anyway. The cops say that Liam stays in the frame unless I come up with a bigger fish and they don’t think that the Yilmaz brothers fit the bill.’ Shepherd shrugged. ‘What’s the worst that can happen? He says no. And at least we’ll get a look around inside.’
Sharpe gestured at the kebab shop. ‘Then let’s get to it.’
The two men got out of the Mondeo and walked across the road. The kebab shop was fairly busy with three customers lined up at the counter and half a dozen schoolboys sitting at Formica tables as they munched on their kebabs. A heavyset Turkish man in stained chef’s whites was slicing lamb off a rotating vertical spit with a knife the size of a machete and heaping it on to pitta bread. Sweat was dripping down his face and arms and he wiped his forehead with his sleeve as he worked.
‘I could go a kebab right now,’ said Sharpe.
‘Focus, Razor,’ said Shepherd. They went over to the door leading up to the minicab office. There was a metal intercom to the left of the door with the word MINICAB written in felt-tip pen on a single button. Shepherd pressed it. There was a small CCTV camera staring down at them.
‘Where are you going?’ asked a tinny voice.
‘We’re here to see Yusuf,’ said Shepherd.
‘You want a cab?’
‘No, we want to talk to Yusuf. Or Ahmet if Yusuf’s not about.’
‘This is a cab firm.’
‘Yeah, I know. Look, we did business with Yusuf last week. Bought an ounce of Charlie off him. We really don’t want to be talking about this with me on the street, do we?’ He stared up at the CCTV camera and flashed it a sarcastic grin. After a few seconds the door buzzed and Shepherd pushed it open.
The door opened into a small hallway. There was a big Turkish man in a scuffed leather jacket standing halfway down the stairs glaring at them. ‘What the fuck do you want?’ he said. He had a gold front tooth and his cheeks were pockmarked with old acne scars. He was the size of a large refrigerator.
‘We just want a word with Yusuf,’ said Shepherd.
‘You look like cops,’ said the man.
‘Would cops be walking around with an ounce of Charlie?’ said Sharpe, taking the drugs out of his pocket. ‘Now stop being a twat and let us up.’
‘I need to pat you down,’ said the man.
‘You can suck my dick if you want, whatever makes you happy,’ said Sharpe.
Shepherd wasn’t sure if Sharpe was playing the part of a drug dealer or if he was just pissed off, but either way his outburst did the trick because the heavy patted them down sullenly and waved them upstairs. They had to squeeze past him and he glared at Sharpe as if he would happily have ripped his head off.
At the top of the stairs was an equally large heavy with an equally sullen expression on his face. He opened a door and nodded for them to go through. The office overlooked the street and there was the odour of stale onions that reminded him of the smell of Jamie Brewer’s surveillance van. There were two more heavies in the room standing either side of the door, their faces impassive and arms folded across their chests. One was bald, the other had thickly gelled hair; both had physiques that suggested they ate a lot of kebabs. Shepherd could see at a glance that they were big but they weren’t hard.
As they stepped into the office, one of the heavies closed the door behind them. There was a man sitting in a high-backed executive chair behind a desk that was strewn with papers and files. There was a hookah pipe by the side of his chair and an overflowing ashtray close to his right hand. He was smoking a cigarette and he blew smoke as he stared at them. He was in his forties, not as big as the heavies but he still filled the chair. He had a square chin and a thick moustache that gave him the look of a Middle Eastern dictator. His purple shirt was open to the navel to reveal thick curly chest hair and a heavy gold chain with what appeared to be a chunk of jade hanging from it.
‘Are you Yusuf?’ asked Sharpe. They’d decided that the Scotsman would do most of the talking and that Shepherd would play the strong, silent type.
‘Who wants to know?’ asked the man behind the desk. He stabbed out what was left of the cigarette as if he were grinding it into Sharpe’s eye.
‘My name’s Carrick,’ said Sharpe. ‘We’re down here from Glasgow.’ He jerked a thumb at Shepherd. ‘This is Mac.’
Shepherd nodded but didn’t say anything.
Sharpe gestured at two wooden chairs. ‘You okay if we sit down? Feels like I’m in front of the headmaster here.’
The man waved a hand at the chairs. Sharpe and Shepherd sat down. ‘You’re Yusuf, right? Mac here spoke to you on the phone?’
Yusuf nodded and lit another cigarette.
Sharpe reached into his jacket pocket and took out the ounce of cocaine they had bought. He slapped it on the desk. ‘That is good Charlie,’ he said. ‘Seventy, eighty per cent.’
‘I’m glad you appreciate the quality of my merchandise,’ said Yusuf. He blew smoke up at the yellowed ceiling.
‘I do,’ said Sharpe. ‘That’s why I’m here. We’d like more.’
The Turk grinned. ‘You have a heavy habit?’
Sharpe laughed. ‘Our regular supplier was in Manchester, but he got caught a few weeks back.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Why does his name matter?’
‘It matters to me.’
Sharpe shrugged carelessly. ‘Marty Potter. Anyway, Marty’s now out of commission and if I don’t find someone to replace him, I’m dead in the water in Glasgow. I’ll be out of business within the week.’
‘So what are you looking for?’ asked the Turk.
‘In the short term, two or three kilos, just to tide me over. Then if you can link me up with your supplier, probably ten kilos a month.’
The Turk’s eyebrows shot up. ‘That’s a lot. That’s a hell of a lot. Why can’t you buy in Scotland?’
‘Because I’d be buying from the competition and they’re trying to fuck me over. Look, I’ll pay you a finder’s fee, whatever you want, if you can hook me up. And the first three kilos, I’ll do through you.’
The Turk frowned. ‘Do through me? What do you mean?’
‘I’m going to be needing ten kilos a month and that’s out of your league, right? No offence.’
‘You came to me,’ said the Turk. ‘If you want cocaine, I will get you cocaine. If you want heroin I will get you heroin. I will get you whatever you want.’
‘Excellent,’ said Sharpe, rubbing his hands together. ‘So do you have three kilos now?’
The Turk frowned. ‘Do you have the money now?’
‘I can get it, no problem.’
‘You have it with you? In your car?’
‘No, but I can get it within hours.’
The Turk nodded. ‘So your money is in Glasgow?’
‘Less than four hours up the M6,’ said Sharpe. ‘It’s not
a problem.’
The Turk. ‘So get your money here and we’ll talk.’
‘Do you have the gear?’
‘I will get it for you. Once I have seen your money.’
Sharpe smiled. ‘Well, the way we normally work is that we see the gear first.’
The Turk opened his hands. ‘And the way I normally work is that I see the money first. Especially when the buyer has just walked in off the street.’
‘How about this,’ said Sharpe. ‘You make the introduction to your guy, I’ll let him know that you got him the business. Maybe throw some commission your way.’
‘Commission?’
‘How much a kilo? For the good stuff.’
‘Thirty eight.’
‘That’s all good. So we’d agree to pay forty thousand a kilo and you take two off every kilo we buy. That’s twenty grand a month your way just for linking us up.’
The Turk looked at Shepherd. ‘So are you the muscle or the boss?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘In my experience if two guys come to a meeting and one of them does all the talking, the other one is either in charge, or he’s the minder.’
Shepherd smiled easily. ‘I’m the silent partner.’
‘Not Scottish?’
‘No. Not Scottish.’
The Turk nodded slowly and then looked back at Sharpe. ‘You bring me a hundred and twenty grand and I’ll get you three kilos. You bring me four hundred grand and I’ll get you ten kilos.’
‘That’s not what we said,’ growled Sharpe. ‘You said thirty-eight grand a kilo.’
Yusuf shrugged. ‘We can negotiate, for larger orders.’
‘Like I said, no offence, but I don’t see you coming up with ten kilos.’ Sharpe looked around the office. ‘It’s not like you’re living the high life here, is it?’
‘Appearances can be deceptive,’ said Yusuf. ‘Look at it this way. Your money is four hours away. The drugs are ninety minutes from here. The ball is in your court.’
Black Ops: The 12th Spider Shepherd Thriller Page 29
