Target

by Simon Kernick

  When Hook had approached him a few weeks earlier with his offer of work, Donald had almost said no. The job was risky in the extreme and likely to attract a lot of heat. But he'd gone for it, and it had had nothing to do with the hundred and fifty grand he'd be receiving. It was because Hook was providing him with the opportunity for a bloody, crippling victory over his old enemy that would eclipse everything that had gone before.

  O'Toole must have read his thoughts. 'It's going to be a big one, isn't it?' he said quietly.

  Donald caught the vaguest flash of doubt on the other man's face as he turned his way and fixed him with a hard stare. 'Whatever it is, it's no less than the bastards deserve. Remember that.'

  Fifty-one

  Bolt was woken by his mobile phone. He sat up suddenly, groggily patting his pockets, before finally locating it. He didn't recognize the number and for a split second he wondered if it was Tina.

  But it wasn't. It was Rob Fallon, and he was asking if they'd made any progress on the hunt for her and Jenny.

  Bolt had snatched some sleep in his office while all around him his colleagues had been working flat out, but so far Operation Medusa, the massive police operation to find the missing consignment of mustard gas and, by extension, the two women, hadn't been successful on either count. They knew that the lorry was in the UK, and that it had come in on the overnight ferry from Zeebrugge to Harwich, but they were also sure that its number plates had been changed en route because an emergency trawl of all the traffic cameras in the greater Harwich area had failed to turn up anything. Like Hook, it had disappeared into thin air. A complete news blackout was in place while the full resources of the British state were diverted to the hunt, but he was all too aware that even this might not be enough, because time was not on their side.

  Bolt cleared his throat, fighting down his disappointment, and gave Fallon the stock answer that they were following up a number of leads and that he'd give him news as soon as he had any. He felt like crap, and hoped Fallon would get the message and get off the phone.

  'I might have a lead for you.'

  Bolt perked up a little, but not much. Things had moved on, and Fallon was the least of their problems in a case as big as this. But he asked what it was, then listened with growing interest as Fallon explained about the car on Roy Brakspear's drive the previous day and the photo he'd taken on his mobile. 'I don't know how much help it is,' he continued uncertainly, 'but I thought you ought to know about it.'

  Bolt pulled a notebook from his jacket and wrote down the car's make, colour and registration number, then he hung up, feeling a little more hopeful suddenly. Fallon had told him that the car wasn't there when he'd returned to the property, so it had clearly been used by the kidnapper. If they could find the car, it was possible they could find Hook.

  He put the mobile back in his pocket and got to his feet, still feeling pretty crap, but Fallon's information had given him enough of an adrenalin buzz to keep him going for a few hours longer.

  Big Barry Freud was temporarily off the phone and looking exhausted when Bolt walked into his office.

  'You know,' he said as Bolt sat down, 'even with all this bloody stuff going on, I've still got Thames Valley giving me crap about you driving off from the murder scene last night. I've had their assistant chief constable on the phone twice this morning. He sounds like a right old woman. He wants you interviewed in connection with their inquiry but I've told him you're not available at the moment. I won't be able to put it off much longer, though.' He paused in his monologue to wipe sweat from his brow with a handkerchief that looked like it had had a fair amount of use already that day.

  'I've got a lead,' announced Bolt, and he told Big Barry about the dark blue Mazda Fallon had photographed at the Brakspear residence. 'If the kidnapper doesn't know that Fallon got a shot of the number plate, he might still be using it now. If we can find him, we might be able to find Hook and the gas.'

  Big Barry grinned, seemingly pleased with this new information. 'Got to be worth a try, hasn't it? I'll get on to the ANPR people.'

  The automatic number plate recognition system was the latest technological tool available to the police in the twenty-first-century fight against crime. It used a huge network of CCTV cameras which automatically read car number plates to log the movement of vehicles along virtually every main road in Britain. These images were then stored on a vast central database, housed alongside the Police National Computer HQ. If the Mazda had been driven in the past twenty-four hours, the ANPR would have a record of its journey.

  Big Barry picked up the phone and two minutes later he was giving the Mazda's registration number to one of the senior officers in charge of the database, and telling him in no uncertain terms that his team could put everything else aside because tracing this car was the absolute number one priority. 'And that comes right from the very top, old mate,' he added, putting a faintly ludicrous emphasis on the word 'top'.

  Big Barry Freud was the kind of man who liked to throw his not inconsiderable weight about, particularly during major inquiries. He believed that it was just part of his decisive take-charge personality, but to most other people, including Bolt, it was just plain rudeness.

  Still, it seemed to work, and when he got off the phone he gave Bolt a decisive nod. 'He's going to call back in five minutes.'

  'Any more progress on finding the lorry?' Bolt asked him. There were currently officers from three different police forces re-examining the camera footage from Harwich to see if they could identify it using just its physical description.

  'Nothing yet,' said Big Barry. 'We must have two hundred bodies working on it, but Gould's wife hasn't been a lot of help. She says the lorry's big and white, with black writing down the side saying Banton Transport, which apparently isn't even that big. Oh, and that he's got a West Ham banner in the back of the cab, but she doesn't think you can see that very easily from the outside.'

  'Shit. It's not a lot, is it?'

  'No, it isn't. And you know what these CCTV images are like. They're blurry at the best of times. It's like the proverbial needle in the haystack, old mate.' He sighed. 'If we had some idea of what the target was going to be, it would help, but we haven't got a bloody clue.'

  'Something like mustard gas is only going to be used for one thing: to cause mass casualties. Have we got any idea who Hook might be working for?'

  Big Barry shook his head. 'Nothing. But I have had a briefing on the gas's properties and how it might be released. Apparently, if it gets ignited, mustard gas loses its potency, so they can't blow up the load with a conventional bomb. It's possible they can get someone with a decent gas mask to release it manually by opening up the cylinders one by one, but there are more than two hundred of them, so it would take ages, and as soon as people got a whiff of the first few they'd be off in no time, so it wouldn't be very effective.'

  'So what are they going to do?'

  'No one knows. But I've got a feeling they'll find a way.' He sighed again, and Bolt could see the pressure his boss was under. 'If they somehow get it out into the atmosphere, it'll be a bloody catastrophe. It's a sunny day with a light breeze, which is meant to be perfect conditions for releasing it. I don't mind telling you, I'm glad my missus isn't up in town today.'

  Bolt was surprised at his honesty. Big Barry Freud usually towed the party line, but these, it seemed, were unprecedented times. 'Plenty of peoples' wives are,' he said, thinking about Mo and Saira, and their four children. He'd dropped Mo back at home on the way here earlier so he could grab a bit of sleep and they could spend some time together, and he wondered whether he'd sent them out of town as well.

  'If the powers-that-be think there's a need to evacuate, then they'll do it,' said Big Barry, 'but they're setting up roadblocks coming into town and the congestion charge cameras are tracking any white lorries.' He was trying to sound confident but it wasn't really working, and he was saved from further conversation by the ringing of his phone.

  It was cl
ear the caller was from the ANPR. Barry wrote something down on the giant notepad that covered half his desk before hanging up.

  'The Mazda was last caught on the ANPR yesterday afternoon at 2.47 p.m. just north of Saffron Walden in Essex on the B1052 at Linton in Cambridgeshire. If it's been used since, then it hasn't gone far because it would have been caught on one of the other cameras. They're going to send us a map showing the area where it might still be.'

  Bolt smiled. 'That should narrow it down a bit.'

  But when the map was emailed through to Barry's PC ten minutes later, it was clear that it hadn't narrowed things down as much as either of them would have liked. Although the Mazda's last location was surrounded by cameras, it was a largely semi-rural area of northern Essex, with hundreds of back roads and villages, bordered by the M11 to the west, and the computer-generated map calculated that the car could be anywhere in an area of almost 190 square miles.

  'Christ, that doesn't help us much, does it?' said Big Barry as they pored over the printout. 'I've got a tag on those plates, so if the car starts moving again we'll know as soon as it's picked up by a camera. Until then, though...'

  Bolt wasn't entirely deterred. 'You say the gas can't be released very easily manually, right? So, if they're going to come up with a way of releasing it effectively, they're going to have to take it somewhere to get it ready, don't you think?'

  Big Barry shrugged. 'I don't know. It's possible, I suppose.'

  'Well, maybe the car's gone to the same place. Hook hasn't got a big team. So far we only know of one person working with him.'

  'I still don't see what you're getting at, Mike.'

  'I'm thinking that maybe they've got a base round there somewhere. A centre for their operations.' He ran a finger in a wide circle on the map. 'A place they would have rented. If you can let me take a couple of people from my team off the CCTV trawl, we can look up all the estate agents in the area, see who's rented out property recently. It's a long shot...'

  'An extremely long shot. We don't even know that the car hasn't just been abandoned in a wood somewhere.'

  'But it's got to be worth a look. We've got two hundred people working on the CCTV. Surely we can spare a couple of them?'

  Big Barry looked doubtful, but he was the sort of guy who always liked to cover all his bases, just in case there was an opportunity for personal advancement in one of them. 'OK, take one person.' He looked at his watch. 'It's eleven now. We'll review how you're getting on at two.'

  Bolt thanked him and walked out with the map before his boss had a chance to change his mind. It was still a case of searching for a needle in a haystack, but at least the haystack was getting smaller.

  And any effort was worth it if it led to Tina.

  Fifty-two

  The interior of the lorry's cab still reeked of death, even though they'd removed the driver's body more than an hour earlier, and Eamon Donald was pleased when he'd finished drilling the holes through to the back that were needed for the bomb's wires, and could finally get out into the comparative fresh air for a much-needed smoke. He'd been trying to give up for the best part of a decade now, a process that had started when his old man, a lifelong smoker, contracted terminal lung cancer, but he'd never managed to last for more than a week, and for the time being at least he'd given up giving up.

  He lit a Marlboro Light and approached Stone and O'Toole, both of whom were hard at work among the pieces of drainpiping Stone had been sawing up earlier. O'Toole was using a large measuring jug to fill up each tube with a ready-made explosive slurry mix of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil that he was getting from a barrel next to him, while Stone was on his hands and knees attaching handfuls of six-inch nails to the tube exteriors using thick rolls of industrial masking tape. Every ingredient they were using could be bought legally by people who knew what they were doing.

  'How's it going, lads?' Donald called out, making sure he stood well back from them with the cigarette.

  'Another hour, I reckon,' answered O'Toole. 'Then we're going to need a break.'

  Stone grunted something that sounded like agreement.

  'And when you're done you can have one, don't worry.'

  Donald looked at his watch. It had just turned half past twelve and they were well ahead of schedule. He was also beginning to get hungry, and hoped that Hook had got in some supplies. Donald liked his food, and he'd always found it difficult to function on an empty stomach. Somehow, though, he knew Hook wouldn't have anything tasty on offer. He wasn't the kind to get pleasure from eating. He wasn't really the type to get pleasure from anything bar, it seemed, rape and murder.

  As he thought these unkind thoughts about his current employer, the barn doors opened and Hook appeared in his Friday the 13th-style boiler suit and gloves, his anaemic face looking like something out of a 'plastic surgery gone wrong' documentary. Donald wondered how the guy ever managed to blend into a crowd, as he was reputed to be able to do. To him, Hook blended in like a go-go dancer in a nunnery.

  As Donald took a long, much-needed pull on the cigarette, Hook came over and guided him towards the front of the lorry, well away from Stone and O'Toole, and out of earshot.

  'How's it coming along?' he asked.

  'We're doing fine. Your bomb'll be ready on time.'

  Hook nodded. 'Good. That's what I want to hear.' But there was something tense about him. He wrinkled his nose, glancing at the cigarette, and Donald remembered that he didn't like smoking.

  Tough titty. He took another drag, savouring the taste.

  They stopped at the cab, and Hook fixed him with a probing stare. 'I hear that when mustard gas ignites it loses its effect. How are you intending to fix that?'

  'Ah, I see you've done your homework.'

  'I always do my homework, Eamon.'

  'Well, it's very simple really,' he said, unable to mask the enthusiasm he always felt when talking about bombs. 'When those two over there have finished filling the tubes with explosive mix, I'm going to put a detonator in each one and run them through the gaps in the pallets holding the gas. By my calculation there should be two tubes for each pallet. Then we wire them up to a connector box, which is basically the bridge between the explosive-filled tubes and the main detonator in the cab. When we set off the main detonator, the connector box will send a signal through the wiring and our thirty-two mini bombs will explode simultaneously, sending the nails attached to the outside of the tubing flying everywhere, and with enough force to puncture all the cylinders.

  'But' – and here Donald paused for effect, feeling especially pleased with himself – 'the beauty of the design is that, because the tubes are made from toughened plastic, the power of the blast will be contained within each tube itself – think of it like a blanket smothering the flames – so the cylinders will get peppered with holes and thrown all over the place, but the gas itself won't get ignited. We might lose a couple, because it's not entirely foolproof, and a few won't get punctured, but I'm reckoning that ninety-five per cent of the cargo will be released into the surrounding air undamaged. With a little bit of a breeze and no rain, everyone in a mile radius will be breathing in pure poison. It'll be the most lethal terrorist attack in UK history. The Brits won't know what fucking hit them.'

  'And you've put in the modifications we talked about?' asked Hook quietly.

  When he'd hired Donald, Hook had stipulated that the bomb had to explode no matter what, even if the lorry was intercepted by the security forces, otherwise none of them would get their money. Technically speaking, this wasn't a problem at all, as Donald had explained. All it required was a pressure pad placed under the driver's seat connected to the bomb's battery pack. Once the bomb was live – and it could be made live with the flick of a switch before the lorry had even begun its journey – then the moment the driver lifted his weight from the seat, the movement from the pressure pad would set off the bomb, so even if he was shot dead while driving and toppled over, it would still explode. It was a tactic used by ter
rorist groups with vehicle bombs across the Middle East to ensure that, even if their suicide bombers experienced a sudden loss of nerve, their deadly cargoes would still detonate.

  There was only one problem. When Donald had agreed to do the job, he hadn't realized that the driver was going to be a volunteer from the old days.

  'They'll be put in before the end,' he answered. 'It's only a five-minute job. But does it have to be O'Toole who drives? He's one of our people. Why not use Stone? He's nothing to us.'

  Hook stared at him blankly. 'Stone's too stupid. We need someone reliable. It's going to be O'Toole.'

  Donald dragged hard on his cigarette, looking over Hook's shoulder to where O'Toole and Stone were working away. O'Toole would never suspect that his old comrades would betray him, and the fact that the man who'd hired him couldn't give a shit pissed Donald off.

  'You never really believed, did you, Michael?' he said rhetorically, using the other man's real Christian name. 'In any of what we were doing.'

  'That's none of your business.'

  'You know, what I can't understand is why you're doing this. I'm doing it because I hate the Brits. Because I owe them for four hundred years of oppression, and because they never baulked at killing innocents, so why the hell should I? But what do you get out of this? I mean, I know your client, whoever he is, is bound to be paying you a lot of money, but it strikes me that a man like you has already got plenty of cash, and this kind of job, leaving so many dead and every cop in the country hunting you down . . . No amount of money's worth that.' He took a last drag on his cigarette and crushed it underfoot. 'So, what's your motivation?'

  Hook leaned forward and his whole face seemed to darken. 'Because I fucking can,' he hissed, eyes sparkling maliciously. 'Now, do me a big favour, Eamon Donald, and get back to work.'