The Sweeney 03

by Ian Kennedy-Martin

  Lassigny stepped out into the hall. Regan saw the front of his uniform shred in an explosion of cloth and blood as the man jerked backwards with the impact of the submachine gun fire. Regan’s automatic reaction was to step out and grab the man as he fell. The burst of bullets ended in a metallic scraping and a click which he identified as someone just outside the front door pulling the spent magazine out of the M38 that had killed Lassigny, replacing it with a fresh magazine. Regan laid the dead man on the floor, took a quick look and saw the killer lit by the hall lights standing on the steps outside.

  He was a tall man with florid red face and thick black eyebrows. He was fumbling and snapping the new magazine into his gun. As he stood there, two others of his gang came up behind him. Regan stepped back into the office as the others opened lire. A bullet or ricochet blew the main neon fitting apart and suddenly everything was in darkness. The raiders paused. Regan saw his first and possibly last opportunity to make a move. He catapulted himself out of the room and up the stairs. He had a reason for this instant choice of action and direction. Lassigny was the senior cop in the prefecture his office would probably double for the station armoury. Regan had seen a large cupboard immediately behind the man’s desk. He’d only spotted one gun inside the building so far. It belonged to the sergeant on cell duty. It was important to get a weapon for himself, and with some luck get weapons into the hands of the other gendarmes.

  He readied the top of the stairs and threw himself through the door into Lassigny’s office. He rushed to the cupboard and grabbed its doors open. It was an ordnance cupboard but inside the racks were bare. Regan cursed, turned and pulled out the four drawers of Lassigny’s desk no revolvers. I le ran out of the office along the corridor to a window at its bottom that looked out over the station square. I le was just in time to see three men, stockings over their laces, all armed, run into the downstairs hall, firing continuously. Hut in the half-light of the square he saw other figures, the glint of gun metal, maybe four more gunmen din there and that not including the shadowy shapes of three more behind the wheels of Citroen id 19’s. The lights on the cars were out but their engines were revving high.

  He heard shots and screams mixed up with French oaths. Below him, in rooms off the hall, gendarmes were dying. Footsteps running all over the shop except up the stairs. And what move could he make? He ran back to the stairwell at top of the stairs. But someone heard his footfalls, some raider down in the hall, didn’t come after him, his target would not be upstairs, but started firing crazily upwards, to warn off anyone up there. The ceiling above his head exploded and snowed down in a cloud of dust. He had made the wrong move. When Lassigny had died, Regan should have gone downstairs to the cells, not upstairs. He should have gone for the old sergeant’s submachine gun. Now he heard more shots and screams. There was thirty seconds’ worth of firing and then a single isolated moment of dead silence. Then a series of bursts, eight of them. And Regan knew why there were exactly eight bursts.

  He stood poised just round from the top of the stairs. The men of the raiding party were running up from the cells, milling in the hallway, firing at random into the ground floor rooms, then running out into the square, still firing. And still he was paralyzed, impotent, because he was unarmed, unable to find a gun. There was no way at all to stop this execution party with commands, words, reason. Had he tried that, it would have been his suicide.

  He didn’t understand why there was a further burst of firing from the square. There was no sound now from-inside the station. He could hear the murderers’ footfalls across the cobbles, the running of the Citroen engines, the anguished scream of powered tyres as they took off. But in between all that a burst of machine gun fire not aimed at the prefecture. Then suddenly he was running headlong down the stairs and across the hallway. In his haste he missed one of the four steps down on to the cobbles and tripped, slid, felt searing pain as his knees cracked on the cobbles, but got up, all one movement. But already he knew it was too late.

  She’d seen their attack on the prefecture. She must have seen or simply heard the killing. She must have been rooted in the passenger seat of the Merc with fear and indecision for the brief minutes of the massacre. And then she had made her move. She had known that Regan was inside the building. She had headed for the building with God knows what ideas in her mind – to try to protect him? Or maybe she recognized someone in the raiding party. Or maybe she thought she could do something, anything. She was in love, and he was inside, and men were killing in there. She had got out of the Mercedes and started towards the prefecture. She must have collided with them as they came out, their work done. Maybe she had tried to grapple one of them. Maybe they shot her simply because she was present, a witness. But they killed her. Jo lay on the cobbles and Regan got down and cradled her head, but one look at her face and he could see that it was too late, already the life had seeped out of her body.

  He was stunned. He looked around the empty square. No movement there, the sound of the getaway cars still echoing in the distance. His eyes minutely probed the darkness looking for someone, some human contact, to unload his scream of hatred and incomprehension upon. It was not conceivable that this had happened, but it had. She and Lassigny and others murdered within seconds, the pall of death still drifting in the light dust of broken wall and ceiling plaster around the splintered front doors of the prefecture.

  He laid her head back on the cobbles and then he was running. Because it was only seconds from her death, and the three getaway cars could still be heard, and he’d seen something hanging by a strap on a nail behind the desk in the Duty Room. He ran into the prefecture and into the Duty Room.

  He hardly gave the three dead gendarmes in the room a glance. He grabbed the binoculars and ran out again.

  He ran past her body out into the middle of the square.

  He put the binoculars to his eyes and started to pan them round, a full 360 degree pan, exploring the darkness of the terraces and buildings of the slopes of Beaulieu, poorly lit by the streetlamps and house lights.

  This job would have been ordered up. These assassins would have flown in singly or in pairs from various cities, Beirut, Tangier, Bahrain, Athens, in the last four hours. What Regan was searching the streets for was the man who’d put in the order to attack the prefecture and kill the Israeli Commandos. He put the binoculars to his eyes. Someone, having made this arrangement, would have come to Beaulieu and taken up a secret position within sight of the prefecture to watch whether his plan had worked out. Regan would bet his life on it.

  He panned the binoculars round the town, and into the upper square. People were already gathering on the streets, moving down now to investigate the noise of gunfire and speeding cars. Lights, in a chiaroscuro of patterns, burned on in every occupied flat and villa. But he wasn’t looking for people heading into the square, he was looking for someone heading away. He had just pointed the binoculars at the west edge of the town when he saw something. He tight-focused the capstan on the top of the instrument. He saw a Mercedes at speed heading back for Nice. He couldn’t at first identify its one occupant, the driver. But then the man’s profile, and the polish of his bald head were suddenly caught in the lights of an oncoming car. It was Hijaz. The Mercedes disappeared from view behind the ribbon of roadside villas.

  They were the longest most frustrating moments of his life, trying to phone the Hotel du Cap, trying to get through to Guignard at Nice prefecture. Guignard was too busy to talk to him. Guignard was anchored to his phone questioning the one gendarme survivor of the Beaulieu raid. Finally Regan got to a phone in the nearby Metropole Hotel and rang Hotel du Cap. He left a message with Sheikh Almadi’s private secretary. The man had problems understanding the message but Regan insisted that he repeat it until he’d got it right. The message was for Hijaz, and it simply stated that he, Regan, would shortly be coming to Hotel du Cap to arrest him for the Beaulieu murders.

  He went back to the Beaulieu prefecture, and did manage to talk o
n the phone to Guignard. Guignard told him there were five carloads of gendarmes on the way, and roadblocks set up.

  ‘Forget the roadblocks, you won’t get this lot. I’ve never seen anything so professionally organized. These men will have disappeared into thin air,’ Regan said.

  Guignard snorted his disagreement, asked Regan what he wanted.

  Regan explained that he’d seen Hijaz at Beaulieu. ‘I want some of your men at Nice Airport. If Hijaz attempts to leave the country for any destination other than London where he left his private jet, have him arrested. Otherwise, let him go to London, but inform me of the flight details.’

  ‘I’ll send men immediately.’ Guignard replaced the phone before Regan took up any more of his time.

  Several ambulances had arrived outside the prefecture. They took Jo’s body first. Regan went outside, but they had already put her body into the ambulance and closed its doors. The van moved off. Regan walked back into the prefecture, tried to think of any sort of activity to do so that he wouldn’t think about her. He needed to make cold calculations now he must not let his growing murderous rage overtake him.

  An hour later Guignard phoned. Hijaz had left Nice Airport on a chartered twin-engined Cessna for London. A clerk at the British Airways desk had helped him to phone London Airport with instructions to refuel the Boeing 727 and have it ready taxiing for take-off on his arrival.

  Regan then phoned the Yard, told them he would be back in London first thing in the morning, and left precise instructions for the reception party to meet Hijaz. He requested that this police group should be armed to the teeth.

  Of course they blew it, the Yard officers’ meeting with Hijaz at the airport. The man must have made another phone call from Nice. There were two senior men from the Bahrain Embassy and a leading London lawyer at Heathrow when the Cessna touched down. What exactly happened next was confusing. Detective Chief Inspector Pallin of the Flying Squad had arrived with four men. He was intercepted and briefly questioned by the lawyer before he could get to Hijaz, who had been advised to wait it out for the moment and say nothing in the VIP lounge of Terminal One. The lawyer then phoned a senior official at the Home Office and Pallin had to explain the position over the phone – that on the instructions of a Squad DI at present in France, this man was to be arrested on a nonspecific charge and held, pending the return of the officer from France in the morning. Pallin was then asked a number of questions. Had he received a telex or phoned corroboration from a senior French police source specifically naming Hijaz in connection with the Beaulieu gendarmerie massacre? Did Pallin have an extradition order in the event that Hijaz turned round and went back to France? According to DI Regan, the man was implicated in a killing in the Wellington Clinic, what evidence was there to substantiate proceedings in the event of a writ of habeus corpus being produced by this man’s distinguished lawyer? Finally, was Pallin aware of the extreme sensitivity of the British Government in any dealings with the Arab world, one of the largest single creditors of the Government? Also there was the technicality of the arresting officer being abroad – Pallin was merely acting as a proxy. As there was no one currently in the Yard who had any evidence to back this DI Regan’s accusations, and DI Regan was not making these accusations within the United Kingdom mainland, and was therefore not technically answerable under English law of false arrest, then he, the Home Office official, whilst not doubting for one moment the news of the Beaulieu massacre, would strongly advise Pallin that he should not willy-nilly arrest a senior Arab State official until this DI Regan reappeared with the goods. The Home Office official recommended that Pallin escort Mr Hijaz to wherever he was going in London, a hotel or the Embassy, and then keep tabs on him till Regan arrived.

  Chief Inspector Pallin was concerned because his orders had come down from Superintendent Maynon. It was one o’clock in the morning. He called the Yard and got them to phone Maynon’s home number, but there was no reply.

  Meanwhile, as the lawyer was gently reasoning with the police about the state of affairs, Hijaz was becoming more excitable and angry. He had stepped off a private plane to find an English policeman trying to arrest him on a murder charge his initial bluster had turned to shock, then anger. He refused to speak English. The two men from the Embassy had more problems in trying to restrain him than Pallin. After half an hour of gradually mounting histrionics, the officials and Pallin managed to convince him that he was not going to be allowed to get on his Boeing and fly out of the country. He was not technically being arrested but he was not being allowed for the moment to leave. The police were prepared to accompany him to the Embassy or a residence.

  Hijaz finally calmed down. He didn’t want to go to the Embassy. He told the Embassy officials he would go to an apartment in North Square, Bayswater. He got angry again when they relayed the address to Pallin. Either Hijaz was in a total state of confusion or he didn’t realize that the police intended to keep an open surveillance on him.

  Pallin and the four cops in two cars trailed the Embassy Rolls Royce from the now almost empty airport through the night into a deserted London.

  It was 2.20 by the time the party reached North Square. The Rolls stopped outside number eleven, a large house newly converted into three maisonettes. There was a ‘For Sale’ notice on the railings outside the house advertising a second and top floor flat. Hijaz alone got out of the car, climbed the three steps, produced a key, and opened the front door. He disappeared inside, and lights came on behind closed curtains on the ground floor. The Embassy Rolls went off into the night with the lawyer and the two officials.

  Pallin phoned through on his r/t for another Squad car. He had to have enough men to guard both the front and rear of the building. He asked that the men should be armed. Whether this was just because of a hunch that something was about to go wrong, or whether it was inspired thinking, he himself would never know. He was not to know either at that point that the reason Hijaz had decided to go to an address in North Square Bayswater was because he knew there was a gun there.

  The plane slowed, wallowed around for a moment in some cirrus turbulence, circled the cloud-blistered ceiling of West London, and headed down. Regan felt his pulse quicken, his stomach tighten against the safety belt. He had found over the last two hours on the flight from Nice the control he was looking for – a kind of ice-cool serenity isolating his emotional from his rational mind. He needed the rational for thinking, planning. He needed the emotional set apart, for the final decision, which would have everything to do with the death of Jo and the others massacred in Beaulieu. There had been a vhf message from the Yard received by the radio operator of the British Airways flight. It said simply, ‘Suspect Hijaz at 11 North Square Bayswater under armed surveillance’. So the Met had blown out at London Airport. It didn’t surprise him. The Home Office always adopted a general wet look as soon as anyone came up with the game of ‘Grab the Diplomat’. Anyhow they had him sewn up in London under armed surveillance. That was good enough.

  He felt the air whistle out of the cabin as the plane depressurised. The Trident rocked a couple of times like a drunken racehorse, then touched down with protest and backbiting, and the almighty roar of reversed engines. He was home in London, his domain, where he held sway. Here he gave orders, he knew the ropes, all of them, and how to pull them, and how to twine them into a hangman’s cord. For the last few days in the South of France he’d felt like a spare prick at a wedding. Well now it would be different. London was his manor. He did what he liked in this town; even when his superiors stepped in and ordered him to do something one way, he’d never taken that to preclude doing the exact opposite. He knew a few tricks in this town of London, knew all of them in fact. The current Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police might think that Hijaz was secure and surrounded in a maisonette in Bayswater. As far as Regan was concerned, Hijaz was impaled on his spider’s web, and, very simply, was about to be consumed.

  The plane halted, and he pushed his way off it. No time for
manners now, not a second to be wasted on irrelevancies... He shoved his Met ident into the face of a Customs man who signalled him as he went through the Green exit from the Customs Hall. The man waved him on, thank God. Regan would have blasted him if he’d tried any of the usual pathetic Customs Officer stunts.

  A car was waiting. Not his usual car with Len Roberts driving, but Haskins’ driver in a Volvo Estate – new Squad acquisition, engine mildly overheating. They drove into London at ninety. At the Yard Regan looked at his watch for the first time since getting off the plane. 10.22. It was almost as if looking at the time might spoil his concentration. Time didn’t matter, the fly was in the web – now to prepare the meal.

  He’d asked on the plane’s vhf for an urgent meeting with the Assistant Commissioner Crime, and the ACC had agreed. Regan took the elevator up to the fifth floor, and then walked left along the corridor to the centre of the building where the ACC had his office suite. The Assistant Commissioner Crime was named Huggueson, pronounced, ‘Hewson’. Regan had always pronounced it ‘Hugson’. He did not have to wait in the ACC’s outer office, the secretary gestured for him to go straight in.

  Regan walked in, gave a nod to the tall distinguished man behind the desk. ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said, ‘this is what I want...’