Ultimatum

by Simon Kernick

  ‘If you go to this meeting I want you to wear a listening device,’ he told Jones.

  ‘I told you: they search me.’

  ‘This thing’s tiny, and it’s basically only a tape recorder, so no bug finder will be able to find it. It’s just to gather evidence, so try to get these guys talking.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. ‘There are two GPS units in there as well. They’re the size and thickness of postage stamps, and we can turn them on remotely. The bug finder won’t find them either. They operate to a completely different frequency. If you can, plant one in Cain’s car after the meet, and one in Cecil’s car as well if it’s at all possible. Then call me, and we’ll switch them on.’ He handed Jones the envelope, glancing round as casually as possible to check no one was paying them undue attention, but the park was quiet. ‘We’re not going to be tailing you. I don’t want to com promise things, and right now we haven’t got the manpower. You’re on your own out there today.’

  Jones grunted derisively. ‘I’ve been on my own since the very beginning.’

  ‘The most important thing is to ID Cain. No more. Once we’ve done that, you can pull out. And don’t, whatever you do, compromise yourself by doing anything that’s going to get you into serious trouble.’

  Jones scratched the scar on his forehead. He still looked unhappy. ‘I’ve got one major request, Mike. I need you to make sure no one ever knows I’ve been involved. I don’t want anything to do with a court case, or an inquiry. Nothing like that. And I don’t want to do anything that puts my family in danger.’

  ‘When you’re done with this, you’re out, I promise,’ said Bolt, knowing this was a promise that might become very hard to keep. ‘Listen, I’ve got to go. Things are chaos at the moment with these bombs. Keep me posted, OK?’

  They turned and went their separate ways, Bolt already preoccupied with the terrorists’ threat that if their demands weren’t met, in less than eight hours there’d be another even bigger attack on the city he called home.

  Only later did it occur to him that this was the first time they’d met up when Jones hadn’t asked him for payment for his services.

  Twenty

  13.45

  VOORHESS’S TARGET WAS a young entrepreneur called Azim Butt who lived alone in a modern townhouse, three storeys tall, with an attached garage and a roof garden full of exotic plants that looked from the street like a miniature rainforest amid the urban concrete.

  It had been easy enough to get inside. Mr Butt’s Filipina cleaner came every Monday and Thursday between the hours of 10.30 and 1.30, and she’d been in residence when Voorhess had arrived earlier. She always turned off the hi-tech synchronized alarm and central locking system that supposedly made the house intruder-proof, so Voorhess only had a single non-alarmed lock to pick on the front door, which he’d done in the space of thirty seconds. The cleaner was working upstairs, so Voorhess had shut the door quietly behind him, made his way through a gaudily furnished front room, and planted himself in a downstairs toilet that she’d already cleaned, and which didn’t have any motion sensors in it.

  He was in there now, half an hour on, using the toilet as a seat, his holdall of tools at his feet, eating some sushi he’d bought at a small takeaway outlet on a nearby street. The cleaner had gone, having re-set the alarm, and Voorhess was pleased he hadn’t had to kill her. He might have to be in the house for a while, and if she was missed during that time, it could be problematic.

  According to the dossier the client had prepared for him, Mr Butt was the primary investor in a number of businesses in the central London area, which he visited regularly in between working from his office in Moorgate and also from an office in his house. In other words, he could turn up at any time.

  Voorhess twisted open the lid of the tiny plastic bottle of soy sauce that came with the sushi – no easy feat with gloved hands – and poured half the contents on to a tuna roll, which he ate in one bite. The fish was bland and the rice stodgy. Not like back home where the tuna was caught in the nutrient-rich waters of the Western Cape coast, and prepared by people who, like him, actually cared about food. He felt a twinge of homesickness. He wanted to hear the crash of the waves breaking on the beach near his house, and feel the warm African sun on his back while he grilled a nice piece of fish on the barbecue, and enjoyed a crisp, cold glass of Pinot Grigio.

  A picture of Mr Butt dressed in a loud Hawaiian shirt and a garland of flowers hung on the wall opposite the toilet. He was on a beach somewhere, with a vivid blue sea in the background, and he had his arms around the shoulders of an attractive leggy blonde who was having to bend down to get her face in the shot. Mr Butt was a short, slightly built but undeniably good-looking man, with a thick shock of black hair. He looked younger than his thirty-one years, and the big smile he was wearing suggested he enjoyed life, and didn’t take it too seriously. Sadly for him, things were about to take an extremely serious and unpleasant turn, and what was most intriguing for Voorhess was that, unlike so many of his victims, Mr Butt would never understand why he’d been targeted. He had no enemies. He lived an unremarkable bachelor lifestyle. He was even apparently honest.

  And yet someone somewhere had marked him for death.

  Two loud bleeps coming from the front room broke the silence. It was the alarm being turned off from the outside. Voorhess popped the last sushi roll into his mouth and, still chewing, reached into the holdall.

  The front door opened and closed, followed by footfalls coming past the toilet. Voorhess waited a few seconds until he heard the clatter of cupboards opening, and then he stepped outside and walked down the hall towards the kitchen.

  Mr Butt was standing next to one of the worktops with his back to the door, wearing an expensive-looking suit, his hair sticking up on his head like it was some kind of unruly sculpture.

  Voorhess wasn’t a believer in the sixth sense. He’d crept up on far too many people without being noticed to know that it existed only in people’s imagination. But even though he’d moved in near silence, Mr Butt turned round, an empty mug in his hand and a shocked expression on his boyish face.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, fear cutting right through his voice.

  ‘Your new lodger,’ said Voorhess, and shot him with the Taser.

  Twenty-one

  13.55

  ‘ACCORDING TO THE Border Agency, Jetmir Brozi’s last known address is 60 Roman Road in Islington, although they haven’t checked on him for the past three months. They’re overstretched apparently.’ A life-sized colour mugshot of a hard-faced man in his late thirties or early forties, with bad skin and collar-length black hair, appeared on the screen.

  Tina was back in the Special Operations office in Mayfair, listening while one of Bolt’s team, DC Nikki Donohoe, gave a rundown of the information they had on the man Fox claimed had played a pivotal part in supplying the weaponry for the Stanhope siege.

  Aside from Tina, Nikki and Mike Bolt, there were two other people in the main open-plan office on the second floor of the building: DC Omar Balachi and DS Mo Khan, a short, stocky Asian who’d worked with Mike Bolt for as long as Tina had known him, and who’d never had too much time for her.

  Bolt had introduced Tina to the others, and they were all still sizing each other up. Tina felt uncharacteristically nervous. Everyone had been polite to her as they’d shaken her hand in turn, but there was a coolness there, not least from Mo Khan, a feeling that she wasn’t the sort of person they wanted to get close to. It was something Tina had encountered many times before, but which she’d never quite grown used to.

  ‘It seems that Mr Brozi got a British passport holder pregnant,’ continued Nikki, reading from a sheet of A4 paper, ‘which is why the authorities can’t kick him out of the country, even though he’s a failed asylum seeker and a convicted criminal. Apparently he has a right to a family life in this country, even though he’s not actually living with the woman or their child.’

  There were groans around the ro
om at this and a couple of people made comments, but Tina was keen to press on.

  ‘Fox told me that Brozi spent time at a brothel in King’s Cross as well,’ she said, ‘and was involved in running the place. It’s where they met to discuss the arms deal last year.’ She repeated the address Fox had given her.

  Omar turned towards her, a sceptical expression on his face. ‘Wow, this guy knows how to play the system. He’s got the Border Agency wrapped round his finger, plus he’s a brothel keeper and an arms dealer too. It all sounds pretty unlikely. Are you sure Fox isn’t messing with you?’

  Tina met his gaze. ‘What would be the point?’

  ‘Maybe he’s bored. To be honest I wouldn’t know, because none of us got a chance to talk to him.’

  Tina noticed Omar was looking at Bolt when he said this.

  ‘Listen, I know how it looks, but he was attacked three days ago, and it didn’t look like a set-up to me. He ended up with more than twenty stitches, and he came across as scared. He wants protection, and he wants to do some kind of deal.’

  ‘Did you get to interview the prisoner who attacked him?’ asked Bolt.

  Tina nodded. ‘I did, but it was just the usual run of no comments to every question I asked. Eric Hughes is a lifer with another ten years minimum to serve, and he’s straight out of “violent thug” central casting, so there wasn’t anything I could scare him with. He knows the score, and he knows that if he stays quiet he’ll just get another few months tagged on to his sentence. But the way the attack was carried out, with Hughes following Fox into the toilet armed with a homemade knife and attacking him in an area where the CCTV camera was broken, suggests that it was a pro job, not an argument. Which means Hughes must have got paid for his services. He wouldn’t have got the money in prison, and since he’s in for life, we have to assume that the payment was made to someone on the outside, and someone close to him.’ Tina paused for a moment, pleased that the others were looking at her with interest now. ‘I checked with the governor and, although Hughes has never been married, two of his three children are with the same woman, and she visits him regularly. I think maybe we should lean on her as well.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Bolt. ‘But our first priority is Brozi. I’ve just had confirmation that the explosive used in both bombs this morning is PETN – the same explosives that were used in the Stanhope attacks. So if Brozi is some kind of arms dealer, as Fox is claiming, it’s possible he’s got direct links to today’s terrorists.’ He looked round the room at everyone in turn. ‘I don’t need to remind anyone of the terrorists’ ultimatum. And I’m reliably informed that the government have absolutely no intention of meeting any of their demands, so we’re now in a race against time to locate the bombers. And Brozi might just be the person who leads us to them.’

  Twenty-two

  14.15

  IF THERE WAS one thing that DS Chris Hancock hated most about policework, it was delivering death messages.

  According to those in the force who knew him, Hancock had the right temperament and look for it, his sad eyes and hangdog features putting people at ease as he gave them the bad news about the sudden, occasionally brutal, demise of a loved one. He’d done it no fewer than two dozen times during his time in the Met, and every time it had been excruciatingly painful. People tended to react in much the same way. First disbelief, then a profound sense of shock that seemed to sweep over them like a shadow. They were usually very quiet. ‘How did it happen?’ they would ask in hushed tones as the enormity of their loss slowly sunk in.

  Only once had anyone ever reacted dramatically. That had been a young mother – thirty-two years old if memory served him correctly. Hancock had had to tell her that her nine-year-old son, an only child, had been killed in a hit-and-run incident at a zebra crossing. She’d fallen apart, screaming, throwing crockery, howling with grief, her voice echoing round the room as she’d turned from an attractive young woman with a welcoming smile into an unhinged, wild-eyed banshee. It was as if she was trying to get rid of all her energy and strength in one tremendous burst so that she’d be too overcome with exhaustion to feel the pain. Hancock had had sleepless nights for weeks afterwards. He’d felt that woman’s loss, tasted it in his mouth. He too was the parent of an only child, a daughter aged seventeen, and he couldn’t begin to imagine what his life would be like if something happened to her.

  Now that he was working for Counter Terrorism Command he’d hoped that his days of delivering dark news were behind him, but it seemed they weren’t. It had been only six hours since the first of the three bombs that day but they’d already had their first positive ID of a victim, and he and his colleague DC Marie MacDonald had been tasked with delivering the death message.

  The recipient was the owner of a major City-based IT company, a man called Garth Crossman. DS Hancock had done some brief research on Crossman on his way over (he always liked to find out a little about the people he was giving such bad news to, so he could at least try to get some idea of how they were likely to react). A self-starter and entrepreneur who’d left school at eighteen with poor exam results, Crossman had founded Logical Solutions two decades earlier, and was now a millionaire many times over. However, as DS Hancock knew from experience, all the money in the world can’t protect you against tragedy.

  At first when they turned up at the front desk of Logical Solutions’ head office in Leadenhall, the receptionist hadn’t wanted to disturb Mr Crossman. Apparently he was in an important meeting with investors. Only when Hancock showed her his CTC ID and told her it was an emergency did she finally relent, suddenly looking very worried.

  Two minutes later, Crossman appeared in reception. He was a fit-looking, silver-haired guy in his late forties, a little on the short side, smart but casual in an open-necked shirt and dark, neatly pressed trousers. He fixed Hancock and MacDonald with a welcoming yet puzzled expression – he clearly had no idea what two officers from Counter Terrorism Command could want with him – and after shaking hands, ushered them into an adjoining boardroom.

  DS Hancock never saw the point in delaying the inevitable. ‘I’m afraid we have some very bad news,’ he said, looking Crossman firmly in the eye. ‘A woman we believe to be your wife was killed in the café bombing this morning.’

  Crossman’s face tightened, and Hancock could see he’d had a number of recent Botox injections. ‘I, er …’ He stayed silent for a moment as the shock of Hancock’s message hit home. ‘Oh God.’

  ‘Would you like to sit down, Mr Crossman?’ asked DC MacDonald, motioning towards one of the chairs round the boardroom table.

  ‘No, no, it’s OK. How sure are you that it’s her?’

  ‘There’s no doubt, I’m afraid,’ said Hancock. ‘A DNA sample taken from her body matches the one we already have for her on the central database.’ Two years earlier, Martha Crossman had been convicted of drink driving, making identifying her far quicker and easier than if her DNA hadn’t been on file.

  ‘I tried phoning her earlier,’ said Crossman, his voice shaking. ‘You know, after I heard about the bomb, and the message said the phone was switched off. I didn’t think anything of it. I mean, you don’t, do you?’ He looked at them both in turn, his eyes wide and gleaming. ‘It’s a terrible shock. God, I’m going to have to tell the children.’ He wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead, and ran a hand down his face. ‘Do you need me to … to identify her? My wife, I mean?’

  Hancock shook his head. ‘No, that’s all taken care of. We’ll release the body as soon as we’re able, but it may not be for a while yet.’

  ‘Did she suffer?’

  ‘Your wife was very close to the bomber. She would have died almost instantly. In fact, she probably never felt a thing.’

  ‘And there’s no doubt?’

  ‘No. There’s no doubt at all. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Thank you, officers. It must be a very hard job you have to do.’

  A long time afterwards, DS Chris Hancock remembered this being the poin
t when he thought there was something wrong with Crossman’s reaction. He was acting more like a politician doling out well-earned praise than a man who’d just lost his wife, but at the time all Hancock experienced was an uneasy feeling he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  Crossman must have seen something in his expression. ‘I have to admit, my wife and I were planning to split up,’ he informed them. ‘We’ve had a number of arguments and she was planning to move out in the next few weeks. Even so, it’s still a terrible loss to our family.’ He took a deep breath, and looked up towards the ceiling.

  DC MacDonald put a hand gently on his arm. ‘If there’s anything we can do, Mr Crosssman …’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ he said, wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt. ‘I’ll do what has to be done.’

  ‘It may be best for you not to be alone. We can organize a grief counsellor to come and talk to you and your children.’

  ‘I really appreciate your offer, but we can manage.’

  There was a finality in his tone that told them that they were done here. They left the boardroom and walked back through reception, nodding at the receptionist as they left.

  ‘God, I hope we don’t have to do any more of those for a while,’ said DC MacDonald when they were outside.

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ said Hancock. So far, twelve people – not including the bomber – had been confirmed dead, a figure that was still rising. ‘I always seem to get these jobs.’

  ‘I thought he took it pretty well in there, considering.’

  ‘So did I. Too well.’

  ‘Really?’

  He shrugged. ‘There was something about him I didn’t like.’