Warren had slumped in his chair. Donovan pulled the tape off his lips. It came away with a tearing sound.
'Bit of a surprise that, hey, Bunny?' asked Donovan. He stood in front of the TV.
'Just in case anyone didn't quite follow what was going on there, Gregg Hathaway stung me for forty-five million dollars. In return, I got you. He sold you out. And as you saw on the tape, he was quite happy for me to kill all three of you.' He grinned savagely.
'Any thoughts?'
Fullerton, Warren and Louise were all too stunned to say anything' You gave him the money?' asked Jordan in disbelief.
'You gave him forty-five million dollars?'
'What choice did I have, Ricky? I needed to know who the rotten apples were. Suppose it had been the Russians? Suppose there was no gear on the plane? Suppose it had been one of the Turks? I had to know who was bad so that I could see what was salvageable.'
'The heroin,' said Fullerton.
'What happened to the heroin?'
'It's exactly where it's supposed to be,' said Donovan.
'Three thousand kilos is in Germany with our Turkish friends. Five hundred kilos is being driven up to Scotland to keep the smack heads in Edinburgh and Glasgow happy for the next six months or so. Another thousand kilos should be on the Holyhead ferry heading for Dublin. PM's got his, the Turks have got theirs, the price of a wrap in London is probably going to fall twenty per cent, but if the dealers are smart they'll hold back the bulk of it, ease it on to the market.'
'But the plane was empty,' said Warren.
'Of course it was,' said Donovan.
'The Russians, their job is to get supplies into out-of-the-way places, places where there aren't mile-long runways. How do you think they do that, Bunny? You can't just land a fifty-metre four-engined jet plane on the side of a hill.'
'Parachutes,' whispered Fullerton.
'They dropped the gear.'
'Precision-guided offset aerial parachute delivery, is what they call it,' said Donovan.
'They can drop almost two thousand kilos from thirty thousand feet and land it to within three hundred feet of their target. The parachute has an airborne guidance unit and it homes in on a transmitter on the ground. They dropped two chutes over Germany and three about fifty miles east of the airfield.'
'You bastard,' said Fullerton.
'You set us all up. The business at the airfield, you knew the plane was coming in empty.'
'I wanted to see what Hathaway would do,' said Donovan.
'The deal was that he gave me you and let me bring the gear in. Seems like he thought he could have it both ways: get to keep my money and put me behind bars for twenty years. Oh yes, and have you three killed into the bargain. He'd be free and clear.'
Jordan walked over.
'Are we going to do it, Den? Are we going to off them?'
'I'm thinking about it, Ricky.'
'You can't kill us,' said Fullerton.
'We're cops.'
'That's the thing, Jamie. Are you? Are you really cops? Or are you grasses? There's a difference.'
'We work for the Met.'
Warren nodded.
'We're cops.'
'You're cops if Hathaway stuck to whatever bargain it is that he offered you, but he doesn't seem to be a man of his word, does he?' He gestured at the video recorder.
'Do you want me to play it again for you?'
'We're on the Met's payroll,' said Fullerton.
'We get a salary. Promotions. Shit, we even get overtime.'
'I'm not saying you haven't been paid your thirty pieces of silver, Jamie. I'm just questioning whether or not Hathaway actually put you on their payroll. And if he did, maybe he's covered his tracks. Wouldn't take much to delete all reference to you from the computers.'
'Let's off' em said Jordan in his Liverpudlian whine. They fucked over the Mexico deal, didn't they?'
'Jamie, did, yeah. Hathaway showed me an e-mail he sent. Bunny didn't know about it and nor did Louise.' Donovan nodded at Tina.
'Or is it Tina? Which do you prefer?'
'Either,' said Tina.
'My mother called me Louise.'
'Tina, Louise, who gives a fuck?' said Jordan.
'They're grasses. Let's do 'em.'
'A couple of weeks ago and I'd have agreed with you, Ricky, but now I'm not so sure. We've got the gear, we're in the clear, and maybe they've seen the light.'
'What do you mean?' said Macfadyen.
'They can't give evidence against us. They're all compromised. Any case based on their evidence is going to be laughed out of court. And after what Hathaway's done to them, I don't think they're going to be looking to continue their careers as undercover cops, or whatever it is they are. They're no threat to us.'
'They cost us a bundle on that Mexican deal.'
'Agreed, but they all played their part in putting together the Turkish thing. Couldn't have put the financing together so quickly without Jamie's help, and Bunny saved my life, for God's sake. And Louise, well, that's personal. But all three of them made a difference. Maybe not the difference that they were planning to make, but all's well that ends well, yeah?'
'I don't know about this, Den,' said Macfadyen.
'Killing them doesn't do anything for us,' said Donovan.
'It'd make me feel better,' said Jordan.
'Yeah, well, that's something you're going to have to deal with, Ricky. You don't take someone's life just to make yourself feel good. You do it because it serves a purpose, and I don't think that killing these three is going to make a blind bit of difference to our lives. Letting them live might, though.'
Macfadyen and Jordan frowned. They exchanged a look, and Jordan shrugged.
'What are you talking about?' he asked.
'You're not making any sense.'
Donovan nodded at Fullerton.
'Jamie here didn't grass up the Turkish deal. Why not, Jamie?'
Fullerton shook his head.
'I don't know.'
'Yes, you do.'
'I was confused. That's all. I wasn't sure.'
'You wanted the deal to succeed, didn't you? You didn't want Hathaway to know about it because you wanted it to go ahead.'
Fullerton nodded.
'Because of the money?'
Fullerton shook his head.
'It wasn't just the money. I don't know what it was.'
'I do. For the kick. You wanted to see if you could do it. And you did, Jamie. You played the game and you won. We won. We made them look stupid and we made millions. How did that feel?'
'Yeah, it felt good. When that plane landed, it was like, better than a coke rush. And when the SAS piled in I was so freaked. I thought I'd lost everything. I thought Hathaway would hang me out to dry.' Fullerton stopped
