by A P Bateman
33
King had kept the tracking device in play. He couldn’t really see any other alternative. He needed to get closer to his enemy. Ditching the device or the car would achieve nothing. He would be found again, that much was certain. It was better to keep the illusion of a status quo and see what the enemy intended.
He had weighed the scenarios and run through the counter measures. They had wanted him dead last night, that much had been evident. He had thwarted their plans. But he was under no illusion that they would give up.
So why the tracking device? He could not conceive the tracking device already being inside the satnav when he had acquired the vehicle. He had only agreed to the addition at the desk at Newquay airport. It would have to have been tampered with while he had been with Amanda Cunningham this morning.
So why the change of tactics? They had tried to kill him last night. Why now, did they want to follow him? King thought it through until his head spun. In the end, he came up with two most likely conclusions. Firstly, it came down to nothing more than opportunity. They wanted to choose a killing ground. Somewhere they could control the variables, execute their plan and exfiltrate cleanly. The next most likely scenario was that they wanted to see what he was doing next. Follow him, and fine tune their plan.
King had put the tracker device in the empty coin tray in the centre console. He reasoned that if the worse happened, he could simply toss it out of the window and their advantage would be lost. He kept his phone in his pocket, but he had both MI5’s emergency response number and 999 on app speed dial. He had checked the 9mm Glock and carried it tucked under his thigh against the soft material of the seat. The Glock’s safe action meant it could never accidentally discharge carried in such a manner and would be quick to bring to arm.
Cornwall was behind him. He carried out good counter-surveillance drills, adjusted his speed, checked his mirrors and even pulled off at slip roads, only to re-join the dual carriageway at the next opportunity. He stopped at a filling station on the A30 and topped up the tank, bought a bottle of water and checked the vehicles pulling onto the forecourt. Nothing stood out. Nobody seemed familiar. The tracker was doing its job for them and they were professional enough to hang back and resist a visual.
King had been there. He had waited, watched a screen, when every fibre of his being had wanted to get closer and confirm with his own eyes.
Again, it told him he was up against professionals.
The M5 was a busy motorway and he joined it at Exeter. It was the arterial route of the Westcountry and the gateway to rest of the country. It was a road laden with delivery vehicles and larger heavy goods vehicles and with three lanes and speeds nudging a hundred miles per hour in the fast lane, it gave him plenty of opportunities to perform counter surveillance measures. He switched lanes, dropped his speed, accelerated and all the time, he saw nobody. No vehicle appeared to be actively following him.
The fastest route to London would have been to take the M4 at Bristol and travel laterally across the country. But King wasn’t concerned about the extra forty-five minutes he would save. The M4 was flat and fast and straight. There would be little possibility in spotting his enemy, nor opportunity enough for them to show their hand. Instead, King exited the motorway at Taunton and took the road towards Ilminster, where he joined the A303. This road was a mixture of single lane and dual carriageway which swept through the fields and woodland of the south of England. It was hilly and invariably produced bottlenecks when two lanes frequently squeezed the traffic into one. A fast road in the right conditions, a motoring nightmare when accidents or holiday traffic conspired to double journey times.
King eased his speed and kept checking his mirrors. There was nothing untoward. No tell-tale vehicles. He was torn between keeping a good pace to ensure his own safety, and easing up to see how it would play out. It felt the most unnatural thing to do, but intelligence work had been a far from natural way to live his life. His mentor had once called it a game of cowboys and Indians, and it wasn’t far from the truth.
Ahead of him, the traffic was slowing up. King had driven the A303 many times, and he knew the bottlenecks would soon give way to short overtaking lanes and longer stages of dual carriageway. He slowed down, was about to overtake a lorry, but the lanes were narrowing fast and the lorry was far out from the edge of the road. He tucked in behind, checked his mirrors and noticed a lorry approaching rapidly from behind. It was closing fast. King flicked on his hazard lights and dabbed his foot on the brake to light up his tail lights. He could not do much else. He kept his eyes on the rear-view mirror, waited for the truck behind to slow down, but it was still closing fast.
He swerved to his right to nip around the lorry, but it countered his manoeuvre and drove out. Coincidence? King veered left, but the lorry in front of him mirrored his actions. The approaching lorry had slowed, but not enough. The traffic was moving at fifty-miles-per-hour, but King estimated the lorry behind him to be gaining at about seventy. King slammed on his brakes, but the lorry in front slowed too. He was sandwiched. He looked left. There was a break in the bollards of the roadworks. King dropped down into third gear and floored the accelerator. He made for the break, the lorry behind veering to the curb, but narrowly missing his rear bumper by inches. King braced himself, the Ford clipping the edge of a length of barrier. Behind him, the two heavy vehicles collided with a crunching of metal that he seemed to feel as much as hear. The car lurched into the air and he felt the unsettling weightlessness of falling as he found himself airborne for a moment, then crashed down the embankment and into trees and wooden fencing. The airbags went off and he felt as though he’d been punched square in the face. The seatbelt dug into his chest as the car stopped and a branch cracked the windscreen.
King fumbled with the seatbelt catch. The belt had pulled so tight that he struggled to breathe. He felt for the Glock, but it was gone. The airbags were deflating, a powdery residue covered him and an aroma of rubber overcoming him, making him want to gag. He managed to undo the belt, felt for the door handle, but it was unfamiliar, and he could not get the door open. His ears were ringing from the explosion of the airbag. He could hear shouts from above, his brain telling him to get out, get the gun, get some rounds off and move to better cover. But his brain also told him this was an RTC in southern England, not a roadside ambush in Iraq or Afghanistan. He could hear calls of concern from above. He looked up, saw a man and a woman on the edge of the verge high above him. They looked genuinely concerned, were calling down to him.
King got out and looked at the car. It was a right-off and certainly wasn’t going to get towed out anytime soon either. It would need a crane or a specialist towing vehicle and a lot of specialist knowhow to go with it. He picked up the Glock from where it had ended up near the brake pedal, tucked it into his jacket pocket and retrieved the tracking device. He turned it over in his hand, then dropped it onto the ground. There would be nothing gained by keeping it in play, the damned thing had almost cost him his life. That had been no accident, King was convinced of as much. He reached in for his bag in the rear footwell and didn’t bother closing the door as he stepped out from the brambles and broken saplings and started to climb the embankment.
“Are you okay?” the woman asked. She was young, pierced and tattooed and her hair was dreadlocked. She gently touched King’s shoulder as he stepped up to the top of the grass bank.
King pushed past her and walked up to the lorry that had crashed into the lorry in front of him. He stepped up and peered into the cab.
Empty.
He jumped down and jogged down the length of the other lorry. The driver’s door was open. There were no vehicles in front. The road was clear. The road behind was blocked and vehicles were sounding their horns, some starting to squeeze through the small gap between the lorries and the central reservation.
King turned to the woman. She looked put out. “Where are the drivers?”
She shrugged.
The man who
was with her, and by his appearance, King assumed they were together, pointed down the road. “They both got into a car in front,” he paused. “Shot off at speed.”
King stared down the empty road, then looked back at the couple. There were horns sounding and a few motorists were walking towards them. “What kind of car was it?”
The man shrugged. “Silver, loud,” he paused. “I don’t know.”
“Sporty?”
“I guess,” he looked at the woman. “What do you think?”
She shook her head. “Footballer’s car,” she said. “Expensive, kind of gaudy. Tinted windows for sure.”
“Did you see the drivers?”
“Not really,” the man said. “They moved really fast.”
“Hey, do you need a lift?” the woman asked.
King looked at the seventies Volkswagen camper. It was written on, graphitised and stickered. There were surfboards on the roof and bicycles strapped to the back. There was a hum of reggae coming from behind the closed windows. He looked back down the embankment at the wrecked hire car. It was already damp from the rain. He hadn’t even noticed that it had started raining. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
34
He had taken two separate elevators. Not because of counter surveillance measures, but because one lift terminated on the twelfth floor and the other started on the other side of the building which became 12A. It had taken the man far too long to discover that the gentle rise in gradient from 12 to 12A was indeed an entire floor. The lift, when he found it indicated fourteen as the next floor. Floor thirteen did not exist. The lift rode up to the thirty-sixth floor and on the ride up, he Googled on his smartphone and discovered that many architects omit a thirteenth floor for reasons of superstition. Being an international banking institution, and with customers or investors from every culture, religion and political persuasion, he supposed the bases had been covered. He felt a little foolish, perhaps even out of his depth. His task was so different from what he had trained for, what he had vowed to do.
He was a Pakistani by culture and a Muslim by both birth and belief, but he had been born in the United Kingdom. He was as western as the white people he went to school with, worked with, socialised with. He had visited Pakistan, but not as a tourist. He was a different person to the people he grew up with. He had seen conflict. Seen the deaths of his comrades, and in turn, had delivered it to their enemy. He was a driven man, had to have been to achieve what he had in less than a decade. And now, after years as a foot soldier, he was in a higher order. His tasks and responsibilities had changed. He was destined for great things.
He had been given the key by his contact. When he reached the top floor, he skirted the building, walking beside its high windows – a wall of glass – and took in the panorama of the city. It looked down on many buildings and up to a few, but the view was not his reason for being there. He took the key out of his pocket and approached the plain-looking door built into one of the gables. There was no handle on the door, no name plate either. It could well have been a circuit cupboard. He inserted the key into the single, discreet-looking lock and nudged the door inwards. A motion sensor light illuminated the concrete staircase. He stepped in and closed the door behind him. There were twenty-four steps and he took them cautiously. At the top, another door, identical to the previous one, stood between himself and the roof. The key would work on this door too. His contact had assured him of this. It was a service master key, and covered every lock in the building.
The roof was overlooked by three buildings in its immediate vicinity. It was approximately level with three more. This wouldn’t be a problem. There were ventilation outlets, air-conditioning units and what he assumed were storage units for maintenance and window washing equipment. Enough to keep someone out of view. The roof in turn overlooked many buildings.
The man walked to the edge. A wall of about a metre high acted to protect workers from the drop. It was interspersed with glass panels. The glass panels were fixed with aluminium couplings. Each panel edge left a gap of four inches. He bent down, then decided to lie down flat on his belly. He sighted an imaginary rifle. Used his left hand to hold the fore-stock of the rifle steady, his right wrapped around the pistol grip of the imaginary rifle. He sighted along the imaginary barrel. In his mind’s eye, he used the crosshairs to centre on his target. He could only see the window. He took out a pair of compact field glasses from his jacket pocket and could clearly see Gipri Bashwani at his desk some two-hundred metres away. The glass was lightly smoked, but in the fading light the lack of direct sunlight made the interior of the office visible. Bashwani was holding court with three executives. The world’s wealthiest man was going about his business without a care or worry in the world.
35
Cape Town
South Africa
“You’re going to owe MI6 more than a thank you after this.”
Caroline leaned back in the seat of the Toyota and forced herself not to relax. She wanted to sag in the seat, close her eyes and breathe deeply. But she had been in situations where to relax was to lose your edge, and she wasn’t about to let down her guard until she boarded the plane and ordered the first of many gin and tonics.
“Thanks, Ryan,” she said. “Thanks for handling everything back there.”
Ryan Beard nodded. He checked his mirrors almost continuously. Caroline still had the assault rifle in the footwell. There were only four rounds left in it, and as Beard had reminded her, she had lost the Sig 9mm pistol he had given her earlier and they did not know if there were more people out there who wanted her investigation halted. At any cost.
The truth was, there was undoubtedly someone out there who wanted to stop her, but whether they could get their assets into play before Beard could get her to the airport was another question. He certainly drove like he intended to get her there before anybody had the chance to regroup and redirect their resources.
Caroline had used the mobile phone of one of the onlookers at the scene to call Simon Mereweather. She knew the number by heart and had waited for the MI5 man to call her back. Standing silently, waiting for the call had been a surreal experience. The nervous onlookers couldn’t take their eyes off the assault rifle in her hands and the car that was burning fiercely behind her, it’s tyres popping and rounds of ammunition cooking off in the heat. The two onlookers jumped each time the bullets went off, but Caroline was calm and silent, waiting for Mereweather to return her call.
The police, fire service and ambulance arrived and fortunately it was not too long before Ryan Beard arrived, spoke to the police, gained possession of the rifle over them and whisked Caroline away from the scene. The police hadn’t known protocol, and in truth, there wasn’t much the MI6 man could have done, but he baffled them with talk of SASS collaboration and that the secret service were keen to take control of the scene once they got an agent on site. Beard had called them, let them know about agent Kruger. He had convinced them that getting Caroline away for a debrief was imperative. He would liaise with the South Africans and tell them what he knew, but he would make sure that Caroline was on the plane before he did that.
It was obvious that somebody had influence within the SASS. Beard had Caroline in his vehicle and away before the police could protest. The MI6 man would deal with the SASS soon enough, but the fact he had helped Caroline twice meant the ledger between Britain’s two intelligence services was well and truly written in MI6’s favour.
“I’m going to take you straight to the airport. A colleague is arranging a flight right now and we’ll get you out using a diplomatic emergency travel document instead of your passport. We’ll take your photo and fill it in at the airport. The sooner we get you into a safe zone, the better.”
“But my things…” she hesitated. She realised it was only clothes and she had another passport at home. She would get a new mobile phone when she checked back in at Thames House. She shrugged, “I guess I don’t need anything.”
“I’ll s
anitise your room, your things,” said Ryan. “Do you have money on you? Any credit cards?”
“No. It was all in my purse in my handbag,” she paused solemnly. “Back at the fire.”
She thought of both Kruger’s and Vigus Badenhorst’s bodies burning in the wreckage and shuddered. She had smelled the aroma of cooked meat over the stench of burning fuel and tyres, thought she would gag, but had fought the urge. She remembered King’s refusal to eat from a hog roast stall at a trendy food festival she had dragged him to once in the harbour town of Porthleven, back in Cornwall. Roast pork was the only food he wouldn’t touch, and it had come from his time in Northern Iraq helping the Kurds in their fight against ISIS, who had burned entire villages. He had said the likeness to the smell of burning human flesh was uncanny. To him, it was the smell of ethnic cleansing. She briefly thought about King’s moniker, his reputation. Did she really know him at all?
“I’ll sign over some cash for you. You can get some wash things, a meal or whatever you need at the airport.”
“I feel like I’m running.”
“You are,” said Beard. “But it’s okay to run. You’ve had two close calls. They won’t miss a third time, it’s the law of averages. They’ll throw too much at you next time.”
“I don’t even know who they are…”
“Better you find out from someplace safer,” he quipped. “They have influence within the South African intelligence services, that’s for certain. First your abduction, then this - and they were willing to sacrifice one of their own people in the process.”
