by Chris Ryan
He looked to his right. He could just see the top of Westminster Abbey, peeking above the smaller edifice of St Margaret’s Church. Not that Barker had known its name before he’d studied a map of this area. His mobile went. He answered it immediately. It was his Regiment-mate Andy Connor.
‘Where are you?’ Connor asked.
‘Just up the road.’
‘We need you back here.’
Duncan hung up. He turned his back on the Christmas tree and walked west, across the sluggish traffic and round behind St Margaret’s Church. The impressive medieval facade of Westminster Abbey came into view. Barker hardly looked at it. He was more interested in the unmarked white van parked up in a side street to the right of the abbey with a disabled parking permit propped in the front window. He strode up to it and knocked four times on the rear door, which opened immediately. Barker climbed in. Connor was there – tall, shaved head, a couple of days’ stubble, civvies – as well as two tech guys. The back of the van was decked out with an impressive array of screens and listening equipment, all manner of black boxes whose function Barker could only guess at. The tech guys had headphones and were examining the screens, which filled the back of the van with a pale electric light.
‘The drones are ready,’ Connor said. ‘We’re sending them up now.’
Barker nodded. ‘Never thought we’d be doing this in a fucking church,’ he said. It was common practice these days to fly cameras attached to small drones over enemy positions. It delivered important tactical information, and if they got shot down, nobody was hurt. Today, though, they had a slightly different purpose. There were parts of the abbey turrets that couldn’t be reached without a scaffold. However, enemy drones could easily have delivered explosive devices to these locations under cover of night. Barker and Connor’s job this morning was to assist the tech guys in sending their own camera-equipped drones up there. Automated surveillance.
All four men turned their attention to the screens. The tech guy on the right was controlling the drone with two stubby joysticks – one for the drone itself, one for its two cameras. Both cameras were on the bottom. One had a fish-eye lens that gave a 360-degree view of everything beneath the drone. The image from that camera was shown on the left-hand screen. The second was more directional, with a narrower field of view, shown on the right.
The screens showed a retreating patch of grass. From fifteen metres up, they could see lamp posts, surrounding roads and the side elevations of the abbey. From twenty-five metres, the Thames was visible on the left-hand screen. After thirty seconds, the drone was higher than the abbey’s two principal towers. The tech guy was clearly very expert at controlling the device. It hovered low over one of the towers, while Barker and Connor examined the footage being beamed down into the surveillance van. They studied the imagery carefully, but there was no getting away from it: all they could see was old stonework, covered in pigeon crap, with semi-composted leaves blown into the corners. No explosive devices. No nothing.
They spent a fruitless half an hour examining the hidden rooftops of the abbey, before the tech guy controlling the drone called a halt to it. ‘Battery’s running low,’ he said. ‘We need to recharge if you want to carry on.’
Barker was about to answer when his phone rang again. He answered it immediately.
‘Get back here,’ said a voice at the other end. ‘Both of you. Now.’
Barker hung up immediately. ‘We’ve got to go,’ he said.
A minute later, they were striding down Millbank, then into the building that housed the Regiment’s temporary London ops centre. The MoD policeman guarding the main door to the room made no attempt to hide his weapon. He checked their IDs before allowing them access.
The ops centre – it was the length of three normal rooms, with a hard wooden floor and ornate plaster ceiling – was humming. Fifteen large, square tables had been set up throughout the room. Each one was a mess of laptops and comms gear. Wires and cables snaked across the floor. There were several screens against one wall, and a huge map of London, dotted with red and blue pins. There were approximately thirty men in here. Barker recognised half of them from Hereford. The rest were from the Firm. There wasn’t a single guy who didn’t have a grim look of concentration on his face.
‘Barker, Connor, over here! Get a bloody move on.’
An older guy on the far side of the room was gesturing to them. Wallace Conlin had been a fixture around Hereford for as long as anyone could remember. As an officer, he didn’t command anything like the same respect as Ray Hammond. In fact, Barker couldn’t stand him. He was a self-satisfied, Eton type, much more used to giving orders than getting his hands dirty. But this ops room was his. Given the circumstances, there wasn’t a man here who wouldn’t obey his commands. They hurried up to him immediately. He pointed to a door at the far end of the room and led them through it. Two suits were waiting for them in the room beyond. They stood – there were no chairs in this anteroom.
‘Shut the door,’ Conlin said, ‘and listen up. We’ve got a lead.’ He looked at the suits. ‘OK for me to brief, or do you want to do the honours?’
The suits shook their heads in unison. Conlin continued.
‘This goes no further than these four walls. GCHQ have just intercepted an American intelligence wire. We think it originates from northern Iraq, but we can’t be sure. You need to know that the Yanks have been holding back on intelligence sharing.’
Barker and Connor shared a look. That was unusual news. But they didn’t question it.
‘The Yanks seem to have a contact embedded with IS. The intelligence wire reports the name of a UK national believed to be involved in an upcoming IS operation in London.’
‘Westminster Abbey?’
‘Let’s find out, shall we? We’ve got an address for him. We don’t want to send the plod in mob-handed in case they screw it up, and we can’t afford a song and dance anyway, in case it gets back to the Yanks. Just you two. Lift him quietly. Let’s see if we can stop this thing before it happens. Your target’s address is 15 Roseberry Crescent, Walthamstow.’ Conlin handed each man a small photograph. ‘We lifted these from the passport office records.’
Barker looked at the picture. A nondescript Middle Eastern-looking man. Mid-twenties. Brown eyes, pockmarked face, not a looker.
‘His name is Kailash McCaffrey,’ Conlin said.
‘Weird name,’ Barker said. ‘What do we know about him?’
Conlin inclined his head. ‘You know everything you need to know, which is that I’ve told you to go pick him up. We’ve got a cell waiting for him at Paddington police station. Let’s find out what this little turd knows about our Christmas Day celebrations.’ He turned his back on Barker and Connor, then immediately looked over his shoulder. ‘Any reason you two are still here?’ he said.
In Joe’s head, London looked like a postcard. Red buses. Big Ben. Tower Bridge. Buckingham Palace. He was a little bit disappointed to see none of these. Instead, from the back seat of the nondescript Honda that had taken him from Dover to the capital, he saw an ugly, concrete mishmash of roads that he knew, from a signpost, was called the Hanger Lane Gyratory. He wasn’t sure how to pronounce that. The silent, moody Sharples with the over-firm grip was driving. When he indicated right off the main road, into a bleak network of three-storey, dark-grey residential blocks, Joe realised that he truly would have to wait a little longer to see the sights of central London.
‘Here we are!’ Galbraith said brightly as Sharples pulled up on the pavement. ‘We have a safe house here.’
‘Who’s “we”?’ Joe asked. It was the first thing he’d said all journey. ‘And safe from what?’
‘Somewhere we can have a nice little chat,’ Galbraith said.
Sharples killed the engine. Both men got out. Joe tried to open his rear door. Locked. He flicked the locking switch. Made no difference. He realised that he’d been child-locked inside the car for the whole journey.
Galbraith opened the door
from the outside. Sharples leaned in and grabbed Joe firmly by the arm again, before dragging him out of the car. Joe didn’t struggle. He hadn’t forgotten about the bulges under the men’s jackets. He noticed an old lady with her shopping watching them from about twenty metres away. Was it Joe’s imagination, or had Galbraith purposefully put himself in her line of sight so she couldn’t see Joe’s face, as Sharples dragged him across the road towards the main entrance of one of the residential blocks?
Galbraith unlocked the door and led them into a dark, unfurnished hallway. A flight of steps on the right-hand side led to the upper levels, but to the left was a second door, which Galbraith quickly unlocked. He stepped aside so Sharples could roughly usher Joe in, before locking them all inside again.
It was a cold flat. It smelled damp. Swirly brown carpet, peeling woodchip on all the walls. The curtains of the main room were drawn. It was very dark. The room had a small, dingy kitchenette area to one side. There was no sign of any kitchen equipment. Instead, on the side, was a rather large first aid box with a big green cross on it. Joe felt an uncomfortable pang of anxiety as he looked at it. There was a television in the corner of the room, unplugged, and an old gas fire in the hearth. Not much furniture – four hard-backed chairs, a dusty old standard lamp with a large, wonky shade, and a table tucked into the corner of the room. This was not a place that was well used.
Outside, the sun must have momentarily appeared from behind the clouds. It illuminated the curtains. Behind them, Joe saw the silhouettes of a series of window bars. The brightness disappeared again. Galbraith switched on the light. Joe suppressed another surge of anxiety. He didn’t know what was happening.
‘What we need,’ Galbraith said, rubbing his hands together, ‘is a nice cup of tea.’ He walked over to the kitchenette and opened the fridge. He said, ‘No milk!’ without even looking inside. ‘I’ll just pop out and get some, shall I?’ He glanced at Sharples and nodded imperceptibly. Joe knew he wasn’t supposed to see the gesture. But he did. ‘Won’t be a tick,’ he said. He left the room. Joe heard the front door to the flat slam closed. He noticed that there was no kettle in the kitchen.
‘Sit down,’ Sharples said, scraping one of the hard-backed chairs to the middle of the room.
Joe did as he was told. Sharples stood in front of him.
‘If I had my way,’ Sharples said, ‘every single one of you immigrant cunts would be sent straight back to where you came from.’
Joe blinked at him. He didn’t know what to say.
‘So, we heard what you told that stupid woman back in Dover,’ Sharples continued. ‘I’ve heard some pathetic lies in my time, but that—’
‘I wasn’t lying,’ Joe interrupted.
He experienced a sudden, blinding flash of light in front of his eyes, and a burst of pain to his cheek. It was only a second after it happened that he realised Sharples had hit him hard across the side of the face. He touched his cheek and looked at his fingertips. No blood. But the skin throbbed badly.
Sharples walked slowly round the chair. ‘So,’ he said. ‘You’re IS’s little Internet geek, that’s what you want us to believe?’
‘I . . . I don’t understand what that means—’
The second swipe across the face was even more brutal than the first. Joe gasped in pain.
‘You realise we can send you straight back where you came from?’ Sharples said. ‘You think we give a flying fuck what happens to you? Carry on lying to us, that’s what we’ll do. The only chance you’ve got of staying in the UK is to give us hard intel on your terrorist buddies. Intel we can actually use.’
Joe wanted to speak. He wanted to explain that he was going to do that anyway. He wanted to tell the man that terrorists weren’t his buddies. They were his enemies, and he’d do anything to compromise them. But he was too scared to speak. And too confused. He’d thought that the UK authorities would welcome him with open arms when he told them who he was and what he knew. He hadn’t expected this . . .
And anyway, he could hear the main door opening again, which meant Galbraith was coming back. He sat tight. A few seconds later, the dark iron lever handle of the sitting room door angled downward, and Galbraith walked into the room. He wasn’t carrying any milk. He still had that bland smile. He walked up to Joe, bent down and peered at his right cheek. ‘Tch, tch,’ he said. ‘Nasty bruise.’ He stood up straight again. ‘I’m glad you two have had this little opportunity to get to know each other,’ he said. ‘I imagine you’d like a little while to mull everything over? We’ll leave you alone, shall we?’
The two men wordlessly left the room, leaving Joe sitting, bruised and sore, on the hard-backed chair. He heard the key turn in the lock as the door shut.
Roseberry Crescent, Walthamstow was a dump.
Barker was driving. Their vehicle was a nondescript Ford Focus with a dent on the left wing. The kind of car nobody looks at twice. They drove it slowly down the road, then looped back round and gave it a second pass. No pedestrians. Kerb about a quarter occupied with parked cars. Most of the houses – drab terraces, two up, two down – had the curtains of their ground floors closed. No hint of Christmas decorations anywhere. Litter on the pavement. It was that kind of street.
There was nothing to distinguish number 15 from any other house. The door was a dull brown like all the others. It had wheelie bins out front, like all the others. As they drove past, Barker saw that a first-floor light was switched on. Did that mean someone was in? Possibly. They parked up ten metres beyond the front door. Connor stayed in the vehicle, keeping eyes on the house using the passenger wing mirror. Barker walked to the far end of the street and turned left. He wanted to see if this terrace of houses had any rear alleyways or exits. So far as he could tell, they had back gardens. But at the end of the gardens was a high brick wall. Too high to scale, and with razor wire rolled along the top. It was that kind of neighbourhood.
He walked back past the car. Connor was still there. They didn’t make eye contact. But as he walked up to the door of number 15, Barker knew his mate would be watching him carefully, ready to join him at the right moment. Two broad-shouldered, burly guys at the door would look suspicious. One, you could get away with.
He knocked.
Silence.
Then footsteps approaching the door from the other side.
A scratching sound. The person on the other side was engaging the safety chain.
Fine.
The door opened a couple of inches. Barker didn’t wait for a voice or even a face. He shoulder-barged the open edge of the door, putting all his weight into it. There was a cracking sound as the safety chain ripped from its fixings. The door crashed inward, against the bulk of whoever was behind it. Barker forced his way in. A musty smell of unwashed clothes hit his senses. It was a man trying to block the door. He could tell by the shouts. And as he muscled his way further in, he saw at a glance that it was Kailash McCaffrey. It was their guy.
Barker forced him face forward against the hallway wall, then yanked his right arm up behind his back, to breaking point. ‘Do yourself a favour, mate, and shut the fuck up. Let’s try and avoid breaking your arm, eh? Christmas spirit, and all that.’
McCaffrey was trembling. He didn’t say anything.
Connor walked through the door and shut it behind him. He had his handgun drawn, and walked past Barker and McCaffrey as if they weren’t even there. Barker kept his man tight against the wall, listening carefully to the sound of his mate moving through the house, checking each room to see if there was anyone else here.
‘I got friends upstairs,’ McCaffrey said. ‘Loads of them.’
‘Course you have, mate,’ Barker said. ‘Popular bloke like you.’ He tightened McCaffrey’s arm a little. His way of telling him to shut up.
Thirty seconds passed. Connor returned, replacing his weapon as he walked back down the hallway. ‘Clear,’ he said. ‘House is empty.’
Barker leaned in so he was speaking a couple of inches from McCa
ffrey’s ear. Very quietly. ‘Here’s what’s going to happen. When I release your arm, you and me are going to walk out of here and into the back of our car which is waiting just outside. If you try to escape, I’ll grind your pig-ugly face into the fucking pavement. Then I’ll shoot you in the bollocks. Got it?’
The trembling man gave no answer. Barker tweaked the straining arm. He gasped sharply. ‘Got it!’
‘Awesome,’ Barker said. Very slowly he released McCaffrey’s arm. McCaffrey exhaled with relief. He turned and looked at the two Regiment men.
Barker knew it was coming. He could tell by the way the young man tensed his body and glanced downward in an attempt to make them think he was not paying attention. He could read the body language. He knew Connor could read it too. Guys like them, it was instinctive. So when McCaffrey raised his right leg, trying to kick Connor in the groin, Connor was more than ready for it. Barker’s mate raised his right fist. Then he hit him.
It had always made Barker smile when he heard tough guys talk about right hooks and uppercuts. All that was window dressing. You want to place a proper punch, you hit your guy hard, fast and with all the force you can muster. There was nothing pretty about a punch. It was a short, sharp burst of intense, ugly violence. One step down from a bullet in the face. If you’re still conscious after a punch from a guy like Andy Connor, you’re doing well.
McCaffrey was not doing well. Problem was, he didn’t only have Connor’s punch to contend with. He was still standing right in front of the hallway wall and, as Connor’s fist connected, McCaffrey’s head jarred back and hit it. There was an ominous cracking sound. Barker, who’d heard a few noses go in his time, knew it wasn’t that. It was something bigger. A skull, maybe. ‘Shit,’ he breathed, as the young man crumpled heavily to the floor. ‘Shit, shit, shit . . .’
Barker knelt down over him and felt his neck for a pulse. Nothing.
‘We need medics,’ he said.
