Timebomb (Paul Richter)

by James Barrington

  The escape route he’d more or less decided on lay due east of Geneva, in the vicinity of Juvigny. According to his map there were a couple of customs posts there, but he reckoned his best chance of getting clear would be to use a minor road. Meanwhile, to ensure he had a clear run for the border, he needed to convince his pursuers that he was intending to head in a completely different direction.

  The streets of Geneva were almost deserted as he ignored a red light and swung the Westfield into another side street, this time heading north, and suddenly accelerated. He crossed the Rhône where it entered Lake Geneva and immediately picked up Route 1, the road that runs along the western shore of the lake. The pursuit car followed, its flashing roof-bar lights now supplemented by a siren and pulsing headlamps. Richter pushed the Westfield as fast as he could and quickly increased the distance between himself and the pursuing police car to about a mile. Then he started looking out for the next junction.

  As he spotted the sign on the right-hand side of the road, he immediately switched off the lights and also the ignition, since he couldn’t risk the flare of his brake lights revealing what he was doing, and steered the West-field off Route 1. The junction fortunately included an underpass and, as soon as Richter knew he was out of sight of the main road, he restarted the engine. He powered through the underpass to rejoin the road he’d just left, but this time heading south. Even over the roar of the Ford Zetec engine, he could hear the howl of the pursuing car’s siren as it sped past the junction, still heading north. He switched on his lights again as he was approaching Geneva and, as soon as he was back across the river, turned north-east on Route 3 to follow the east shore of Lake Geneva. Checking behind, he saw no sign of pursuit, but that could just mean they were waiting for him somewhere ahead. Yet he had neither seen nor heard a helicopter, and only just the single police car since he’d left the hotel, so perhaps he was going to get away with it.

  But that wasn’t the way he planned to get out of Switzerland, and after about six kilometres he turned off, taking the minor road that ran east through Corsinge and then on to Sionnet. The moment Richter pointed the West-field away from the main highway he felt better: on these country roads the car was in its element. There he swung left, drove as quickly as possible to Jussy and turned southeast again in the middle of the village, taking the white road that led to Les Curtines. Somewhere just ahead of him, he knew, there was a customs post on the road that crossed the border.

  At the crossroads in the middle of the village – the point where he was going to physically leave Switzerland – there was nothing to be seen. No police, no customs post. But the moment he crossed the road towards Cabouet and turned the corner, Richter saw flashing lights again. This time they were in front of him.

  Hammersmith, London

  Richard Simpson was in a foul mood, for several reasons. He was annoyed with Richter for getting involved in the shoot-out at Onex, though accepting his subordinate’s claim that he’d had little option in the circumstances. He was irritated at being summoned to the office in what he considered the middle of the night, but what had really pissed him off was FedPol.

  Richter may have been sent to Switzerland simply as an observer on behalf of the SIS, and his involvement in the assault at the apartment building might have been not only unauthorized but technically illegal. And, in addition, he had killed at least one terrorist, perhaps two. But, as Simpson understood it, the reality was that, if Richter hadn’t picked up a shotgun and done what he did best, the Swiss would probably now be looking at up to seven body-bags with policemen stuffed inside them, at least one of them a senior officer. That, he thought, was the important point and, now he was up and working, he decided to ensure that the most senior FedPol officer he could rouse in Geneva was made fully aware of his views on the matter.

  Switzerland

  There was no way Richter was going to stop. The single police car was parked partially sideways across the road, but the vehicle itself was nowhere near big enough to block it completely. Beside the car, and clearly not anticipating that this particular tasking was anything more than a waste of their time, two cops stood smoking and chatting, not even glancing in his direction. But the moment they heard the sound of the Westfield’s engine, they turned their attention directly towards the approaching vehicle. In the pre-dawn gloom, all they would see yet were two headlights. Both officers stepped forward, raising their hands for him to stop. Richter complied by dropping the West-field down two gears and touched the brake pedal. He next reached over, undid the quick-release catch on the left side of the windscreen, did the same on the right, and then folded the screen down flat. The tallest thing in the car was now Richter himself. As the cops gestured that he should pull over to the side of the road, Richter ensured he was in first gear, which would give him electric acceleration, coasted towards the grass verge and waited for his opportunity.

  The Swiss police officers were probably bored, and certainly careless. As soon as the car slowed down, they obviously assumed the driver was going to stop like any good law-abiding citizen. But Richter was neither law-abiding nor a citizen.

  One cop strode over to the kerb and began heading towards him, while the other remained where he was, on the right-hand side of the road with his arm held up, directly in front of the vehicle. The left-hand side of the road was thus completely empty, and, as the first officer approached the Westfield, Richter dropped the clutch, hit the accelerator and twitched the steering wheel to the left, aiming for the gap between the police vehicle and the opposite grass verge. His car instantly surged forward, its rear tyres leaving two black streaks on the tarmac.

  Behind him he heard shouts, which he ignored, and just concentrated on driving. He swung the Westfield around the patrol car, then steered it immediately right and straightened up. Both the police officers were armed, but he heard no shots and guessed why. He looked ahead and there was the reason, just as he had anticipated. The map book had been right: there was no customs post on this road, but there was a barrier. Spanning the entire width of the tarmac were two red-and-white striped poles, counterweighted at the pivot end, and with a kind of dangling trellis below them, designed to stop any conventional car. But the Westfield was far from conventional. Inspired by the original Lotus 7, it was small, sleek and blisteringly fast. More than that, it was low – very much lower than almost any other car on the road, and, now that he’d folded the windscreen, Richter hoped he could simply drive under the barrier.

  He hit the brakes as he reached it, slowing slightly as he confirmed the height of the cross bar, then ducked sideways down into the passenger side of the car as its long nose passed underneath.

  The trellis passed no more than an inch above his head as he drove under the steel bar and accelerated away. He was safely out of the land of the gnomes, and, more importantly, the police car was still stuck on the other side and would remain so until they found the key that unlocked the barrier in order to raise it. And even then they would surely face the usual jurisdictional problems about armed police from one nation pursuing a fugitive into another country.

  As far as Richter could tell, he was more or less clear. All he had to do now was avoid the French gendarmes until Simpson got the fix in place, because he had no more desire to sample the delights of a French jail than its Swiss equivalent.

  At Cabouet he turned right, but stopped a short way down the road to raise the windscreen back into position, reprogram the Navman for Calais and check the map again. The E21 passed far too close to the Swiss border for his liking, so he decided to head south towards Bonneville, then route via Annecy, Bellegarde-sur-Valserine and Bourg-en-Bresse, sticking to the country roads as far as possible. Hopefully, even if the French were looking for him, they’d only have the manpower to cover the main roads and the autoroutes, and the further away he got himself from Switzerland, the wider the search area would become.

  Driving on the minor roads would suit him down to the ground, because the Westfield wasn’
t a high-speed motorway cruiser. It was far more at home on twisting country roads, where its excellent handling and startling acceleration made it virtually impossible to catch.

  As dawn broke, he was powering the Westfield through the silent streets of Mâcon and heading for Digoin and Moulins. And, up to that point, he hadn’t even seen a single gendarme.

  Canterbury, Kent

  Detective Sergeant Dick Clark replaced the telephone in its cradle and looked up at DI Mason, who’d just walked in clutching a mug of black coffee.

  ‘We might have a result,’ the DS said. ‘Sort of, anyway.’

  ‘Yes?’ Mason muttered encouragingly.

  ‘Early this morning a man walking his dog at Sheerness reported finding what he thought was a patch of blood close to the estuary. He alerted a couple of patrolling constables, who thought it was worth calling in. They also found an old tarpaulin and other bits and pieces lying around, so it looks like Sheppey might be where our gentleman of the road met his end.’

  DI Mason put the mug down on his desk, walked over to the area map on the wall and traced a line along the north coast of Kent, moving his finger west from Reculver to the Isle of Sheppey.

  ‘Sounds about right,’ he said. ‘If the murder took place sometime last night, the timing probably works, too. The tide could have dropped him here this morning. But even if the two events are linked, we’re not much further forward. We still don’t know why somebody decided to kill this man, but we’ll drive over to Sheerness anyway and see what they’ve got.’

  Clark nodded. ‘The artist’s finished a facial reconstruction, so I’ll collect a few copies before we go. Meanwhile, I’ll see if The Ghoul’s finished blood-typing or found other evidence that might give us a definite link.’

  Central France

  By late morning, Richter was approaching Chartres on the N154. He was going to avoid Paris, simply because he hated driving round the Périphérique, especially in a car like the Westfield, which most French drivers were apparently completely unable to see, and so he intended to route via Rouen instead.

  His highly illegal but very efficient radar detector, which he’d fitted to a hidden bracket behind the dashboard, and equipped with a kill switch that was equally invisible, had screamed at him more than a dozen times that morning, warning him of fixed radar guns on the road – though the French authorities had helpfully provided a visual warning of each one as well, so the detector was almost superfluous. On each occasion, he’d hauled his speed down to the legal maximum before he went through the speed trap.

  The Navman estimated that he should reach Boulogne by midafternoon, and he’d already booked his return trip on the high-speed catamaran operating between there and Dover. So, if nothing went wrong, he ought to be back in London by early evening.

  Sheerness, Isle of Sheppey, Kent

  The tentative identification of the corpse didn’t take anything like as long as Mason had feared. The moment Clark showed the desk sergeant the artist’s reconstruction of the dead man’s face, he showed a spark of recognition.

  ‘It’s Barney, I think,’ he said, then called out to a passing constable. ‘Here, Derek, come and take a look at this. You reckon that’s Barney?’

  The police officer took the drawing and studied it. ‘Could be,’ he replied. ‘I’m not certain. Some of the features look a bit odd.’

  ‘Not entirely surprising under the circumstances,’ Clark said, but didn’t elaborate. ‘So who’s this Barney?’

  ‘I think his real name is Edward Holmes, and we’ve picked him up a few times for drunk and disorderly, especially during the winter months. We give him a bed for the night and a couple of meals and then send him on his way. He’s harmless enough.’

  ‘He certainly is now,’ Mason said. ‘We found his body on the sea front at Reculver yesterday morning. The reason you’re looking at a drawing rather than a photograph is because he’d been in the estuary for a few hours and some of the beasties out there had used him for lunch.’

  ‘Poor old sod,’ the desk sergeant remarked. ‘Drowned, I suppose?’

  ‘Nope,’ Clark said. ‘He got a back-street face-lift.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘You read too much spy fiction,’ Mason muttered. ‘What my colleague is trying to explain, in a rather clumsy fashion, is that somebody cut Barney’s throat. And then they tossed his body into the sea, so this is a murder inquiry.’

  ‘Barney? Murdered? But he was just a harmless old tramp. Are you sure?’

  ‘No, but this is the only lead we’ve got at the moment. We’ve already got the corpse’s blood group, so if you’ve got any samples from the crime scene here, maybe your forensic people can do a match and see if there’s a link. Then we can look at DNA and all the rest of it.’

  The desk sergeant looked doubtful. ‘Ah, well, we don’t really have a crime scene as such. Some bloke out walking his dog found what he thought looked like a patch of bloodstained grass near the sea wall. We sent out a SOCO, and he came back with a walking stick and a couple of other bits. That’s about it.’

  Mason and Clark exchanged glances.

  ‘A walking stick?’ the DI asked.

  ‘Yes. It looked as if the end of it might be smeared with blood, and there were a few grey hairs stuck to it.’

  ‘And was it blood?’

  ‘Yes, we’ve already established that much from the lab, but we’re still waiting for the grouping and anything else they can tell us.’

  Hammersmith, London

  While he was waiting to board the catamaran at Boulogne, Richter had called the duty officer on his mobile and had been told to head straight to Hammersmith, where his boss, Simpson, would be waiting for him.

  He parked the car in the secure garage underneath the building and took the lift up to the seventh floor. After knocking on the dark green door that bore the word ‘Director’ in faded gold leaf, he walked in to find Richard Simpson sitting behind his desk, the perimeter of which was guarded by a whole flock of cacti. At a quick glance, Richter thought he spotted a few new models among their prickly green ranks.

  ‘They didn’t catch you, then,’ Simpson began, by way of greeting, as Richter sat himself down in front of the desk.

  ‘Thanks to your call, no. A couple of plod-mobiles pitched up at my hotel in Onex just after I’d driven away from it, and I picked up a tail very soon afterwards in Geneva. Then I had to kind of dodge around the barriers when I crossed the border into France.’

  Simpson grunted. ‘And no problems with the French?’

  Richter shook his head. ‘I don’t think I saw a single gendarme all the way back, and there wasn’t even a reception committee waiting for me at the ferry port.’

  ‘Right, good. Now, there’ve been some developments since we last talked, but first brief me on exactly what happened.’

  Richter explained the sequence of events that led up to the raid on the apartment.

  ‘You’re sure about the phone call?’ Simpson interrupted. ‘Somebody definitely rang and tipped these guys off?’

  ‘That’s the only thing that makes sense. Up till then they seemed to have no clue they were even under surveillance. As soon as they received the call, somebody inside the flat started shouting.’

  ‘So who made the call, do you think?’

  ‘That’s the big question, of course. I suggested to Schneider that he might have a mole in his Terrorism Investigations Unit, but—’

  ‘Tactful as ever, Richter.’

  ‘We had four dead terrorists, four dead police officers, and an apartment so totally trashed that retrieving any useful intelligence from it is pretty damned unlikely. So being tactful wasn’t high on my list of priorities right then. Anyway, he absolutely rejected the possibility, and now it seems as if he was right.’

  Simpson looked interested. ‘Explain that.’

  ‘I got a call from Schneider yesterday evening and went back to the police station in Onex. He’d just had a fairly acrimonious conversation wi
th the owner of the apartment, an irritating old fart called Rolf Hermann, who was basically blaming the Swiss police for all the damage and was threatening to sue everyone from the head of the government down to the guy who sweeps the streets.’

  ‘But I thought it was this Hermann who had contacted the local plods and tipped them off about the terrorists in the first place?’

  ‘So did Schneider, but he was wrong. Hermann is over seventy and virtually wheelchair-bound. The man who delivered the tip-off was a well-built middle-aged man with dark hair who spoke fluent German.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Simpson muttered, ‘didn’t they even check who he was?’

  ‘They did, or at least they tried to. That particular “Rolf Hermann” claimed not to have either a passport or identity card with him, but he did provide the station staff with his address. After he’d gone they routinely checked that it matched the phone-book entry for Rolf Hermann, and even tried to call him, but his phone was out of order, which is also what the man told them when they interviewed him. But the bottom line is that they were far more interested in what he had to say to them than in confirming exactly who he was.’

  ‘It still seems pretty sloppy police work, mounting a major assault with armed officers based on a tip-off from some guy who’s just walked in off the street.’

  ‘Agreed, but what swung it for them was the serial number he supplied for the AK47 he claimed he’d seen. Schneider checked and confirmed that the weapon had been reported stolen and where from, which gave the tip immediate credibility. What’s interesting is that the Swiss police recovered four Kalashnikovs from what’s left of the apartment, but none of their numbers match the one this Hermann gave them.’

  ‘So you mean there’s either a fifth assault rifle out there somewhere or, more likely, this man just fed the police a piece of information he knew they could check and verify, just to get their attention?’