Wicked Game

by Matt Johnson

  The clearing remained peaceful and unmoving as the trees watched my shadowy figure load the thirty-round rifle magazine. Dustbin lid and turf replaced, I stood up.

  A gust of wind rustled through the surrounding trees as a flock of starlings settled in the nearby oaks chose that moment to launch into the air. I shivered as the noise of their beating wings filled my ears. It made me stop for a moment. There was something about the trees. It was as though the old oaks had eyes. Like ghostly sentinels, their icy stare seemed to bore into my soul. The feeling of being watched was unnerving.

  The second bin containing the heavy stuff would have to be collected later. It was now time to head home. Tomorrow I would call Kevin again and tell him I was nearly ready.

  As I trudged across the peaceful meadow, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. I stopped and listened but heard nothing. Jenny attributed such feelings to ‘guardian angels’, the spirits of departed relatives who look over us and protect us. Of course I was sceptical, but there had been many times when we had been driving along a country lane and she had suddenly warned me to slow down at a bend. Every time a fast-moving car had appeared from the opposite direction and by slowing down we had avoided a collision. Jenny said it was her angels and nothing to do with luck. Perhaps the sensation of being watched was those angels looking out for me?

  Perhaps I just needed to understand their warning.

  Chapter 46

  Kevin called me at eleven the next night.

  I had just arrived home from work to a disconcertingly empty house. His call was welcome, and I was able to fill him in on what I’d discovered.

  My visit to the Nightingale Estate had paid dividends. While doing the rounds of the local pirate radio stations, I learned that the topfloor flat of Rachel Point had been recently taken over by strangers to the estate. As the tower block provided a clear view of the flats where the terrorists were staying, I guessed it was now a Special Branch observation point. With a decent set of binoculars they would be able to study the windows of the target building and watch the approach to the main entrance.

  In vans and in the open, there were workmen ‘repairing’ telephone lines, lifting manhole covers, cutting grass and trimming shrubs. Most, I figured, were from the Met SO11 Surveillance teams. I felt sorry for them. On the day I called by it was hot. Anyone stuck in the back of an observation van would have been finding it particularly uncomfortable.

  I was careful not to enter Alma House, the address that Monaghan had given us. However, the other blocks were laid out in the same way, so I was able to confirm that Costello’s flat was on the very top floor. That was a blessing. Once we had abseiled on to the roof we would only have to negotiate two flights of stairs before we would reach the door.

  As I ran through my ideas with Kevin, I predicted that we would be in and out in minutes.

  He approved.

  Planning was my forte, as Kevin rightly pointed out. He was the sharp-end blade; the man that would get things done. I was the behind-the-scenes thinker. And now it seemed my initial plan was starting to gather some substance. What had begun as a simple proposal was looking like it could actually work. We just needed a little help and some luck.

  The following morning, we were due to meet up with Monaghan. For some reason he had picked Regent’s Park. I ended the call with Kevin, replaced the phone and opened the fridge. It was a warm, still evening and I felt in need of a cold beer.

  The house felt unwanted; I would even describe it as bleak. No toys were spread across the floor; there was no smell of supper and no music. Nothing was as it should have been. Feeling lonely, I decided to go outside.

  As I opened the back door of the cottage and stared upwards, there was scarcely a cloud in the moonlit sky. I strolled out into the small garden. It was quiet, very quiet; so different from the noisy, concrete-dominated place where I worked. The city buzzed with traffic noise, music and voices. Here at the cottage, all that was forgotten.

  It had been a long time since I had known total silence. Even as I stood there in the serene darkness, the moon and the kitchen window giving the only light, I could hear a slight hissing noise in the background. Gunfire and minor explosions had left me with mild tinnitus. At work, with voices and activity all around, it was easily forgotten, but at night, in the quiet of the bedroom or, like now, in the garden, that hiss was always there.

  About a mile away across the valley I could see lights from the local farm. There was the faint echo of the farmer’s spaniel as it howled its song to the moon. It reminded me of a time when a farm dog had so very nearly been the end of me.

  One night, on an observation in Northern Ireland, I had to hide in a cesspit to throw a nosy sheepdog off my scent. When the target came out of his house to investigate the cause of the barking, both owner and dog had actually stood on the manhole cover beneath which I was concealed. The smell of the cesspit had overpowered my body scent and thrown the dog off its quarry. I had been lucky. Even after twenty years I could still recall the smell of that cesspit.

  I was under no illusions as to the problems that Kevin and I now faced. We were about to enter a very dangerous game. Not only did we need to stop the terrorists in their tracks but we had to find out who had our files. Then there would be more questions to answer. We had to try and find out who had seen them and whether they had been copied. I still had no real idea just how much data was stored on a ROSE file, how much our enemies now knew about us. And I didn’t know if they had passed any details on. Hopefully, Monaghan would be able to give us some answers.

  And there were still other questions. How had our files come to be at Castlederg in the first place? Monaghan hadn’t come up with a reason. Those files should have been safe, either at Hereford or with MI5. Why had they been stored in a Northern Ireland Special Branch office of all places?

  Following a different track, I knew that it would be crucial to hear from Grahamslaw when he found out what had become of the Arab from the embassy siege. I had often wondered what became of that young terrorist. There had been rumours that he had been repatriated to Iran where they had executed him.

  It was also pretty certain that we were going to have to kill some people before they got to us first. That prospect really did trouble me. Jenny was right to say that we should fight, but if caught by the very authorities of which we were members, Kevin and I could expect little sympathy.

  I had to get my mind-set sorted out. With over sixteen years in the police, I had softened. I’d put soldiering behind me and was no longer trained to fight. As I drained the beer, I wondered if, when it came to it, I’d have the nerve.

  As I returned to the cottage, a wood pigeon reacted to my presence by clattering noisily into the dark sky. Returning to the kitchen I threw the empty beer bottle in the bin, took another from the fridge and then opened the under-sink cupboard. The bag containing my kit sat there, hidden behind the cleaning chemicals and old towels.

  ‘You get caught with this lot, old son, and you’ll really have some explaining to do,’ I said to myself.

  To ease the sense of loneliness, I hummed a tune as I unloaded the contents of the black canvas holdall onto the kitchen table. It was time to clean them, to make them ready for use. I did a quick stock count. There was my Beretta, a 9mm hi-power Browning pistol with two magazines, a sawn-off Remington pump-action shotgun, and finally, the Armalite.

  I had just started removing the grease from the Beretta when the phone rang again. It was Jenny.

  ‘When I get home I’m gonna shag the arse off you, Robert.’

  I laughed. Jenny laughed.

  It was great moment. Here I was, sitting at the kitchen table, getting ready to commit murder, and in an instant the tension I felt was gone. I’d always loved Jenny’s sense of humour and her timing was just perfect.

  We chatted about Becky, her mother, the house. Everything except what was really going on. I’d insisted on it before she left. It was in case someone had thought to li
sten in on my telephone line. If I was Grahamslaw, that’s what I would have done, so I’d warned Jenny to be careful.

  It was good to know that the two people I loved most in the world were now safe. It was up to me to make that safety permanent. As Jenny hung up, once again there were tears in my eyes. I was afraid. Not of dying, I had come to terms with my own mortality years before. Now, I was afraid of letting them down. I wanted to be there for them, to grow old with them and to love them. I wanted to see Becky grow up.

  I was afraid … of failing them.

  As I worked, I remembered a speech that Monaghan had made to the lads of B squadron when the police had, finally, signed the authority for military action at the Iranian Embassy. He had talked of fear, of how all brave men felt fear, it was only the ability to triumph over fear that defined courage.

  Now it was my time to start demonstrating that ability.

  Chapter 47

  Monaghan was waiting for us. As we reached the centre of Regent’s Park, he was on the footpath adjacent to London Zoo. It was drizzling, the gentle rain clearing the dusty London grime from the air.

  The park was surprisingly peaceful. Given that we were within a short distance of London’s traffic, in all directions, the city generated no more than a background drone. In the zoo, an elephant was roaring its frustration to the world, as parakeets screeched their high-pitched replies. I now understood why Monaghan had picked the spot. The animal calls from the zoo meant nobody with a normal hearing range would be able to hear what we were saying to each other.

  Monaghan had his hands stuffed into the pockets of a gabardine Mackintosh. He looked the stereotypical MI5 man as he stood gazing into the wolf enclosure. Only two of the bedraggled beasts could be seen. Listless and dull coated, they wandered about their pen, scratching at the earth in the vain hope of locating an extra morsel of food.

  As Kevin and I approached, Monaghan turned to greet us. ‘Sad, isn’t it?’ he said.

  I noticed that his face looked tired and drawn. I wondered if, like me, he had been suffering a lack of quality sleep.

  ‘What’s that, boss?’ Kevin asked.

  ‘The zoo. They’re running out of cash, selling the animals, laying off keepers, and all the while other people squander money like there’s no tomorrow. That’s sad to my mind.’

  ‘I see your point. Never went much on zoos myself, prefer to see them out in the wild.’

  ‘True enough. Still, we didn’t come here to debate the pros and cons of London Zoo, did we? I understand you need a helicopter.’

  It was my turn to speak. ‘We do … and someone to fly it, of course. We’ve set our minds on a silent set-down onto the roof, abseil down onto the top floor, open up the roof-space door, grab the target and spirit him away. Chances are they’ll have night-vision equipment, but we think it unlikely they’ll be watching the roof.’

  ‘You want the heli to fly high up, so it’s not heard on the ground?’ Monaghan asked.

  ‘That’s the general idea, we’ll use a grabbit hook to clip the winch cable to the roof of the flats, I should imagine we’ll need the pilot to hover for about five minutes, then we return to the cable, tie ourselves on and away we go.’

  ‘Do you need any kit?’

  ‘No, we’ve got body armour, a Browning and a nine-mil’ Beretta. Kev’s also got a suppressed MP5. We’ve some flash bangs and a Remington pump in case we have trouble getting through the door, but we plan to go in quiet.’

  ‘Abseil kit to get down?’

  ‘We’ve got two sets of the Rollgliss locking brakes, good as new.’

  ‘Christ … I don’t suppose I should ask where that lot came from?’ Monaghan smiled. ‘Ok, when can you be ready?’

  ‘Tonight, if necessary,’ I answered. ‘We just need word from your man when the target is on his own. And the small matter of the helicopter, of course.’

  Monaghan chuckled. ‘Yeah, that could be a problem, but I think I can swing it. You’ll need a winch man as well. It would have been handy if one of our old boys had his own heli, but so far as I know nobody has. Still, we have a man on air-sea rescue. A Wessex would do I expect?’

  It was Kevin’s turn to laugh. ‘Knew we could count on you, boss, I just knew it.’

  ‘Where can I contact you?’ Monaghan asked me.

  ‘I’m late turn today, Kev’s off. I’ll be at Stoke Newington from two o’clock onwards.’

  ‘OK, I’ll call you there. I’ll need a landing place for the two of you to be picked up.’

  ‘Field at the rear of my cottage. It’s not overlooked and we can be there, ready, within an hour of your call.’

  Monaghan shrugged. ‘That should do, leave it with me.’ He turned away. ‘Oh, just out of curiosity, how are you going to persuade the Irish lads to stay with you?’

  It was my turn to laugh. ‘We’ll use a straitjacket. And we’re not going to take both of them, just Costello. At that height I don’t think he’ll struggle too much, do you?’

  We all laughed together. The gravity of our situation was, for a moment, forgotten.

  ‘Why just Costello?’ asked Monaghan.

  I hesitated, uncertain if Monaghan would find our intentions agreeable.

  ‘We only need one to talk, so it makes sense that’s all we take. Kevin and I have discussed it. The other one, we give the double tap.’

  ‘OK. It’s your show.’

  ‘Do you have time for a couple of other questions?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really, but if you’re quick.’

  ‘The ROSE files. How much information do they contain? Neither Kev or me has ever seen one.’

  ‘Enough to be dangerous. They aren’t copies of your full military files, if that’s what you’re getting at, but they do have details of the reasons for you being placed under the ROSE umbrella and where you were placed subsequent to leaving the army.’

  ‘So they definitely don’t have home addresses, phone numbers, that kind of thing?’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘And what were they doing in Ireland? Surely they should have been at MI5 or Hereford?’

  ‘What are you getting at?’ said Monaghan.

  ‘I can’t understand why they were somewhere so risky. Did someone take them there, or send them there, for instance? Have you checked to see if someone has sold us out, perhaps?’

  Monaghan was starting to look angry. ‘Those checks have been done, trust me.’ He now sounded impatient, as if he resented our questions. ‘The files were only in Ireland temporarily. One of our officers placed them into what he thought was secure custody whilst he was lodging at a local hotel. He did have a good reason for having the files with him; that I can vouch for.’

  Monaghan looked away. He seemed suddenly very interested in the wolves in their enclosure.

  ‘What was the reason?’ I asked, keeping my eyes on Monaghan’s profile.

  ‘Sorry, Finlay. That, I can’t say.’

  It was time to test my alternative theory again. ‘Had you noticed the other connection between Kev, me and the other guys?’

  Monaghan turned back to face me, frowning. ‘What connection?’

  ‘I got pulled by the Met SO13 Commander a couple of days ago.’

  ‘Grahamslaw?’

  ‘That’s the one. He told me about Mac Blackwood having been killed as well.’

  ‘What of it? I heard it was a suicide bombing in India.’

  ‘That’s what he said too. What was interesting is that Mac was on Operation Nimrod, just like me and the others.’

  Monaghan scowled. ‘You think these attacks might be related to Nimrod? That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘You remember the Arab kid that survived the embassy?’ I asked.

  ‘Atta al-Azdi.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘I heard the government sent him home and the Iranians killed him.’

  ‘You sure? Grahamslaw says he’s still in prison.’

  Monaghan pushed his hands deeper into his p
ockets and blinked rapidly. ‘No, I’m not sure,’ he said impatiently. ‘Do you want me to check?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to work out who would have a motive for killing blokes who’d been on the embassy job. He’s the only one I’ve come up with.’

  ‘That’s if the embassy is the connection, which of course it’s not. The IRA are behind this, mark my words. There’s no way that any Arab has those missing files.’

  Before I could respond, Monaghan nodded, turned and marched away, a black folding umbrella appearing from his pocket and springing up over his balding head.

  We watched him go.

  Kevin was the first to speak. ‘Forgot to ask him how he’s actually going to sort us a heli.’

  ‘I think he was getting a bit tired of me asking questions, but he seems to have good contacts. I’ll ask him when he calls me. Something puzzles me about Nimrod, though.’

  ‘What’s that then, boss?’ We turned and started to walk back along the pathway towards Euston Road.

  ‘Spooks aren’t idiots. I can’t be the only one to have twigged the alternative connection between the attacks. And why isn’t there an official MI5 effort to find our files? According to Grahamslaw, the Home Secretary now knows about it, so why does Monaghan need us?’

  Kevin paused for several moments, mulling my question. ‘Glory, perhaps. Not being funny, but you know what Ruperts are like. Then again, maybe there is an official op. Maybe we’re just the belt to go with the braces.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe you’re right.’ I didn’t sound convinced and I wasn’t.

  ‘Jenny came round OK then?’

  ‘Yes … actually it was her that talked me into getting involved.’

  ‘Good for her … I won’t lie to you, boss, I’m brickin’ it. It all seemed a bit surreal when we first spoke. Now … well … how about you?’

  I smiled and winked. ‘When we were younger, the only thing that scared me was when we were planning a job and one of you Sergeants used to say “trust me, sir”.’