Chapter 1
London, England, February 1992
Like all offices that deal with the real world, the offices of Her Majesties Customs and Excise at Heathrow airport showed it. The composite panels that formed the room had taken on a grubby tinge near the floor, where countless brooms and mops had discoloured the original grey paint work, while the panels in the suspended ceiling show evidence that at least some of the staff were smokers. There were eight people sat in the room all in the service's uniform, five men and three women. They sat in two rows of four chairs facing to the front and appeared to be waiting.
The door opened and two more officers walked in, their regalia showing that their rank was a bit higher than that of the current occupants. The original eight officers immediately sat as near to attention as you could get in the seated position and gave the men at the front of their briefing room their full attention. The first man they knew well as he was their immediate superior, Jim Hancock. It was the second man they were really interested in and at first look, they were disappointed.
Commander Peter Romsey was a legend in the service. He was head of the anti drug squad and us such was responsible for preventing the stuff from entering the country. He had a unit of about twenty specially chosen and trained staff who operated from a headquarters in Southampton. The competition for places within this unit was fierce and because it was outside of the mainstream service it operated Its own rules. It officers frequently went armed and co-operated with a variety of other services, including the armed forces and the police. They were in fact a service within a service and as such rumour about them abounded. Some even likening them to the SAS and SBS arms of the military. For Romsey to be a Heathrow there had to be something big going down.
Hence the disappointment, for Romsey stood at only five feet eight inches and with his silver hair and open, pleasant face he looked like somebody's favourite uncle. He nodded to the assembled men and women and walked over to stand in front of them, benign looks apart, when he spoke it was with real authority.
"Good afternoon. You must be wondering why on one of the busiest days of the week I have you all waiting here instead of letting you get on with your jobs."
He gazed at them and seemed satisfied with the attention he was receiving.
"We have received information that this afternoon that thirty kilos of Heroin will be brought into the UK through this airport." He ignored their sudden stirring. "We do not know the exact location from where it is coming from except that it is believed the plane will be coming from Africa. There are six long haul flights coming in from various African countries between now and six o’clock tomorrow morning. All are Jumbos and all are fully booked. That gives us two thousand five hundred suspects on those six flights alone. As I said we believe Its coming from Africa if the information is right, but the flight may be from somewhere else so you do not need me to tell you that everyone is a suspect."
He looked them in the eyes.
"The source has been reliable in the past on several occasions so we have to believe it will be reliable this time. Therefore, it is up to us to stop them. Any questions?"
Ropell stuck his hand up and received a nod of acceptance. He was wondering why with this amount at stake the Drug Squad was not in evidence.
"Are any of your unit going to be with us, sir?
Romsey shook his head.
"We have a major operation going on up in Scotland at the moment. There is no way I can get anyone back here in time to be effective even if I send a helicopter."
He shrugged.
"In what matters tonight, the reading body language and the assessing likely suspects you are all as well trained as my people. Besides, you are all there is."
He waved a hand at their supervisor who was standing near the door with a nervous frown on his face.
"Anyway, Jim Hancock here is confident enough in your abilities and he is a man who's opinion I have always respected."
The eight looked at their chief with a new respect in their eyes. They didn't know that he and Romsey had met for the first time twenty minutes ago. To Hancock's credit he never blinked. Romsey waited a few seconds more and then as there were obviously no more questions, wished them luck and left after shaking Hancock by the hand. A buzz of conversation arose that was cut short by Jim Hancock's voice.
"OK. This is our chance to do more than stop an extra bottle of gin or a bit of Wacky Baccy entering the country. Don't let me down."
Gussie Brown approached Ropell as they were leaving the briefing room. She shook her head at him.
"You must be a lucky sod, Jack. You have only been here for two months and you get into this. It has taken me six years to be on duty on a big one like this."
Ropell smiled at her. He liked Gussie a lot as she was friendly and prepared to give him the benefit of her experience when she knew it would be hard for him to ask some of his male colleagues for advice. They were still a bit wary of this man with the "American" accent who was a bit too good looking for comfort. He also knew that she fancied him and carefully trod the narrow path between keeping her friendship and not leading her on, despite her being the owner of a figure that would have made page three in the tabloid press. Gussie had fiery red hair and as he had been told gleefully by the others, two ex-husbands. That was enough for him. He was just not interested in an affair with a woman some eight years his senior who had already left the starting gate twice. He smiled at her.
"Probably be picked up before he reaches me, Gussie. Because I am the new boy I will probably only get to play backstop again."
The red and green channels at Heathrow's terminal three are in the same area of the building and separated only by a few screens. If you go elect to go through the red channel there are usually two or three people on duty at the tables there, the rest of the staff just stand around at various places where they can observe the passengers as they pass through. They are looking for those little signs that mean a person is under stress, the sort of stress that comes with trying to buck the system under the very noses of the watchdogs.
At the sides of the channels are another officer or two. Their job is to observe the crowd while their colleagues at the tables are busy going through various pieces of luggage. The last officers are the backstops. They wait quite a distance past the Customs bay and look for a different body language. The one of relief as people think they are through and clear. Wherever they are positioned all the officers can usually observe the vast majority of the area. Tonight, as he had predicted, Jack Ropell was playing backstop, looking for signs of premature relief. With him on the other side of the corridor from the Customs area was Gussie Brown.
They had been on duty for several hours and the clock was fast approaching the time when several of the long haul flights from the African continent would be landing in quick succession. They were feeling refreshed having just returned from a half hour meal break, taken while things were quiet, when a crowd of black faces and brightly coloured clothes announced the arrival of the first passengers.
The next hour passed busily and quickly with only a bottle of whiskey in the plus column. Then last Trans African aircraft had landed and Its passengers were beginning to arrive from baggage reclaim. Ropell raised his eyebrows at Gussie and prepared to study body language when his attention was caught by the commotion at the other end of the channel. One of the biggest women Ropell had ever seen had been pushing a trolley that had almost disappeared under the mountain of luggage on it. She was white and seemed to resent the crowd of black faces who were surging all around her laughing and talking. She was waving them out of her way and trying to push the trolley along at the same time when the whole load collapsed.
There was sudden chaos as the cases took several other pedestrians and a young girl with them leaving bodies all over the floor. Several other people tried to recover the woman's possessions and ensure the child was all right. She, as children sometimes do when they find herself the centre of attention, began wailing and
rubbing her leg where the suitcase had caught her and this was not helped by her Mother shouting at the fat white woman in Swahili. In the meantime two young black men, poorly dressed and each carrying a large battered suitcase moved swiftly through the green channel.
Ropell caught Gussie Brown's eye and she indicated she had seen them. They were not needed however as two other officers moved to intercept. One of the suitcase carriers turned about and ran back the way he had come, closely pursued by two of Heathrow's armed security police. The other tried to fight it out where he stood and went down under a heap of uniformed bodies. Ropell and Gussie Brown were not needed.
Ropell thought like the rest of them that that was that. They had got the mules. He turned to give Gussie a small thumbs up, but in between them and blocking his line of sight was the woman whose mini avalanche of luggage had started the whole melee. As he smiled and started to shake his head in amazement at the vast amount of luggage once more balanced precariously on the trolley, his senses came alert. On the woman's face, which was nowhere as fat as her body would suggest, was a look of pure relief. His senses went into overdrive.
"Excuse me, Madam."
The woman kept on going. Gussie, who was nearer, stepped forward to block her way as Ropell came up behind her. The woman shoved the trolley straight into Gussie knocking her sideways and abandoning everything, ran for the exit at a surprising turn of speed. Ropell gave chase and finally brought her down with a flying tackle after about one hundred and fifty yards. They slid along the polished plastic floor for a considerable distance until a solid brick wall stopped their progress. When they hit the wall Ropell was on the wrong side and had the wind crushed from him, but retained the presence of mind to hang on to the others dress. Unable to struggle free the woman seized him by the hair and smashed his head against the floor. She was lifting it to smash it back down for the third time in an effort to release his grip when she suddenly let go of his hair and collapsed next to him with a thin shriek of agony.
Ropell looked groggily up at several of his colleagues who were looking back down at him with anxious faces. Gussie's face was the nearest and came slowly back into focus. He smiled to show he was alright and indicated with his head the large woman who was clutching her groin and making small mewling noises in her throat.
"Thanks. What happened to her?"
Gussie smiled.
"I couldn't let her break that pretty face of yours, Jack, so I kicked her in the balls."
He shook his head.
"Pardon?"
Gussie bent and removed the blonde wig from the woman's head. She was a man. She was also nothing like as fat as she seemed.
Jim Hancock was doing his best not to look smug and failing miserably. A search of the mountain of luggage had revealed thirty-five kilos of pure Heroin. He watched the duty sister treating Ropell's damaged head while Gussie fussed around the fringes like a Mother hen, waiting to drive him home despite his protests that he was fine. He was telling them for the third time how Peter Romsey had personally congratulated him on their haul when the sister tied of the last of the four stitches he had needed in the cut on the back of his head and declared Ropell fit to leave. He was starting the story for a fourth time when Gussie diplomatically shut him off by insisting Jack needed to get home to bed and taking Ropell's hand dragged him out of the surgery.
They were sitting in her car before the question struck him.
"Hey, Gussie. What were those two African guys trying to bring in."
She grinned at him.
"Rhino horn. They had four each in those suitcases."
He wasn't sure if she was kidding him or not. You never knew with Gussie. He decided to let it go.
"We were bloody lucky you know, that fat lady trick very nearly worked. You would not expect anyone in their right mind to deliberately draw attention to themselves like that. Thanks for getting him off me before he gave me concussion and thanks for the lift home, although I would have been all right you know. I shall have to get a taxi in to work in the morning."
The car had stopped and he looked out of the window.
"This isn't my flat."
She grinned again.
"I know because this is my flat. Come on. Show how grateful you really are and I will take you to work in the morning."
Ropell glanced across at the well-filled uniform blouse and decided to hell with his decision not to have an affair with an older woman.
It was around nine o'clock and the morning had decided that February or not, it was going to be sunny. Jack Ropell lay on his back in the big soft bed with Gussie snuggled firmly into his right shoulder, their legs entwined, watching the shafts of sunlight coming through the curtains of the bedroom in Gussie's tiny attic flat. In truth he was wondering if he had made a mistake spending the night here. Gussie was a wonderfully built and incredibly energetic woman of thirty-five and he had enjoyed himself enormously in the last few hours. He had also learnt a lot, but he felt he might have made a mistake. Never on your own doorstep his father had always told him. He was working out ways of disentangling himself from the situation and feeling a heel for doing so less than half an hour since he had been making love to her, when Gussie spoke directly into his ear.
"What are you doing here, Jack?"
He was puzzled.
Ye Gods, Gussie, you practically kidnapped me."
Gussie giggled. A low sexy sound that made him forget his thoughts of a few moments before.
"No, you Pratt. Not here in this bed, in the service. Why did you join the service? You a foreigner and a graduate?"
She kissed his earlobe to let him know the foreigner bit was a joke. She knew he had been born in Yorkshire. Ropell tried to evade the question.
"Oh! Well its a long story and I really don't want to bore you with it."
She struggled up onto one elbow and gazed down at him through eyes that were a kind of sea green one moment and grey green the next. Her right nipple was only a few centimetres from his lips and raising his head he kissed it. She pushed his head back down on the pillow, careful not to hurt his wound.
"Come on, Jack. I won't tell anybody else if you don't tell them you spent the night here. Not that I mind them knowing I had you in my bed, but I don't want every would be Romeo at Heathrow trying to do a number on me. Its bad enough already."
She wrinkled her nose at him.
"I'll tell you what. I will tell you all about me first."
"You don't have to, Gussie."
"Shut up. My dad was the Town Clerk. When I was young all three of us, my two sisters and me, had to be totally respectable because of his position. Consequently at eighteen I was married to William Brown who had a good future in the sanitation department. It wasn't his fault because he had a decent heart, but William, I discovered too late, was a totally boring fart. You would have thought he was fifty-six instead of twenty-six. I left him after three years"
She paused at the memory and Ropell wondered about William Brown who had not realised what life and vitality his young wife possessed and so lost her.
"I went back to college, got my "A" levels, and then went to university I got a degree in sociology. I moved down here when I graduated aged twenty-six and got a job in the Department of Employment catching benefit frauds and then met Rod. He was a teacher and two years older than me. We shared a flat for six years and I thought that we were an item. Then the bastard met a girl with a rich daddy who runs a private school and moved out practically overnight."
Her face showed that it still hurt a to think about it. She suddenly smiled down at him. It was a mischievous smile.
"So I applied to join the service, probably because I wanted to be the one in charge for a change. Now I catch drug smugglers at work and in my spare time when I feel randy I prey on attractive young men and leave them before they can leave me. It usually lasts about a couple months on the average."
Ropell knew he was being given a message and accepted it gratefully. He could live with
that arrangement. She flopped back into her snuggle arrangement on his shoulder.
"Your turn."
He waited a few seconds and then decided he had to tell some body at some time and Gussie was probably as sympathetic a listener as he would get. He took a deep breath.
"We are a bit of a mix as a family. My maternal grandmother, dead now, was Spanish. My Grandfather was English. My Mother is basically French although her Mother was a French Canadian from Quebec. I speak French fluently and can get by in Spanish, which is why this job suites me so well. Those three languages cover over half of the world's population."
Gussie tried to look suitably impressed, but the grin spoiled it. Ropell ignored her expression.
" Once upon a time you know I had a sister. She was quite a bit younger than me, eight years younger in fact. My Dad was a policeman in the Mounties, and my Mother was a keen supporter of the Quebec Separatist Movement, so a lot of the time when we were kids, we were left alone and I was responsible for looking after her."
He looked up.
"I not telling you this to let you see what a hard time I had, Its to try and explain why we were so close." He shrugged. "Anyway, Marie Louis was a beautiful child. Tall, slim and very blonde and I guess she kind of hero worshipped me."
He smiled self-consciously.
"You know I was pretty good at school. Football and Basketball teams and usually second or third in most of my grade subjects."
"That was part of the problem I suppose. When she was ten I went off to college and hardly saw her anymore, except for vacations. Oh, we wrote to each other regularly, but after a while I made some new friends and got interested in adult subjects, like law and order, freedom and such like and didn't pay her the attention I used to. Next time I saw her she was a teeny bopper of thirteen, but who looked about twenty five."
Pain was etched on his face.
"She was wearing a lot of make up and some of her clothes would have looked too old on some of the girls at my college, let alone a girl of thirteen. I tried to talk to my parents about it, but my Mother said that I was just being a typical male who liked girls to look attractive and sexy until they happened to be your sister, while Dad just said that Mom probably knew best. Marie Louis seemed to be still the same kid underneath it all so in the end I allowed them to persuade me everything was all right and I went of to University in England."
"The next time I was in Canada was some for Christmas two years later and by that time it was too late. I knew when they met me at the airport that something was wrong. No Marie Louis. When I asked where she was, one said out with friends and the other said she didn't feel well. It seems she hadn't come in until the small hours of the morning and when she did she was smashed. She was in no condition to make the airport for a ten thirty am touchdown."
Gussie remained silent, letting him get it all out.
"You know, Gussie, what I couldn't understand and still can't understand, is how they didn't see what was happening to her. Its unbelievable that a parent could miss something like that."
He continued. His voice showing the pain it was causing him.
" The last time was just after I graduated. I was at home on my own trying to put together a CV for job applications when the phone rang. It was Dad. Someone in the Vice Squad had just rung him to say that his daughter had been found dead in a hotel room from an overdose of drugs and would he come and identify her. He couldn't face the following mess on his own so he asked me to come over. I couldn't believe they had the right girl and told him so. Drink maybe, but not drugs, not Marie Louis. It was the truth though."
It was obvious that even now, several years later, he found it hard to hold back his tears.
"She had been to bed with the entire cast of a popular rock band and they had all been taking a mixture of drugs until they passed out. She was the only one who died as she had drunk most a bottle of vodka before trying out the various uppers and expanders they were using. When they found her she was laid on the bed still curled up in a ball from the pain she had been suffering. She could have been saved if any of them had been together enough to call a doctor and get her stomach pumped out, but they weren't. So we lost her."
He took a deep, deep, breath.
"After that I came back to England permanently. I couldn't stay with them because I blamed them you see. I didn't even go back when they divorced you know. Their problem."
He turned his head to face her.
"And that is why I decided to join the service. I want to fight these bastards at every turn. I want to destroy them so that they cannot destroy any more Marie Louis's. I will do my statutory two years and then I will apply to join the Drugs Squad. Last night did me no harm at all."
Gussie snorted.
"Its all very well for you to go of and play secret agent with the Drugs Squad, Jack Ropell, but tell how will you cope if I am not there to rescue you. These boys play really rough and you still need someone to look after you."
She was laughing and he realised she was putting him on. He reached out with his left hand and cupped her beautiful right breast. He gently rubbed his thumb over the nipple until he felt it go as hard and stiff as his erection, that had appeared again as if by magic. Sliding his hands down to her hips he rolled on top of him and down onto his throbbing penis.
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