democracy. Most of them don’t even have a clue what it is, and the few who do think it contradicts God’s law anyway, so won’t have anything to do with it. Democracy to them just means corruption — and one look at the western-backed government in Kabul and you can see they’ve got a point. So the whole thing will have been a complete waste of time, money and, most of all, the blood of far too many good men.
We changed cars less than a mile from the scene of the robbery, switching to a Renault Megane saloon Cecil had parked under some trees next to a stretch of deserted waste ground near the Lockwood reservoir. No one saw us as we torched the car we’d used for the robbery, along with the police caps. We kept the guns, though. In a country like Britain where even semi-automatic weapons are almost impossible to come by, they were way too valuable, and after putting them and the money in the boot, we changed into suit jackets and ties, got in our car, and drove off in the direction of Enfield. All without being seen. Even in the centre of a city like London you can still find some lonely places where people don’t go at ten o’clock on a cold, grey February morning.
I was still pumped up with a mix of adrenalin and anger. The plan had been to hold up LeShawn and his men and make them give up the cash with threats, a few shots into their car, but no actual violence. That way, even if there’d been witnesses, and the police had found empty shell casings at the scene, the crime would never have been reported. LeShawn was hardly going to say anything, and people who live near crackhouses tend to learn to look the other way. In other words, it should have been perfect.
But now LeShawn was dead. He might have been an arsehole and I might not have pulled the trigger, but that wasn’t much consolation. First off, the robbery had been a joint enterprise, which meant I was just as responsible for his murder as Cecil was in the eyes of the law. And second, I’d shot up a cop car, ripped the front of it to shreds, and scared the living shit out of the people inside, thereby making myself a very active participant. Worse, pulling the trigger had felt way too good.
My name’s Jones by the way. Richard Burnham-Jones to be exact, but I always hated the names Richard, Rick, Richie, and especially Dick, and I’m not a big fan of double barrels, so it’s always been Jones, which suits me fine. And I’m not a bad man either, whatever first impressions might suggest. You could say I’ve got in with the wrong crowd, and you’d be absolutely right, but not quite for the reasons you might think.
It was a cold day but I could feel the sweat on my brow, and I used my forearm to wipe it away.
‘What the fuck happened back there, Jones?’ demanded Cecil, fixing me with one of his trademark glares. ‘You almost let me down.’
The two of us have known each other a long time. We’ve served together in a war zone, and that creates a bond that other men just don’t have. That didn’t mean Cecil didn’t scare me. He did. He scared everyone. He might only have been a short bald guy, but he was also lean and wiry, with an intense energy that seemed to emanate from him in waves, and eyes like pieces of flint. Even his voice, with its hard Belfast growl, spelled aggression. Luckily, I knew how to handle him.
‘If I’d fired when we were fighting, I could have hit anyone, including you,’ I said. ‘That’s the problem when there are only two of us on the job. It was always going to be risky.’
‘You’re not going soft on me are you, big man?’ Cecil didn’t care that he’d just killed someone. As far as he was concerned, they’d disobeyed instructions, got what was coming to them, and now he’d moved on. That was what he was like.
‘I just shot up a cop car, Cecil, so no, I’m not going soft. We needed a bigger team, that’s all. I told you that before we got involved. I thought you had friends we could use.’
‘This was a test, Jones. To check your loyalty.’
‘I’m not interested in tests. You know you can trust me. We’ve got history.’ And we did. We had secrets too, forged on the battlefields of Helmand Province.
There was a pause, and then he nodded slowly. ‘I think it may be time to go up to the next level,’ he said, finding a gap in the parked cars at the side of the road and pulling up. ‘But first I’ve got to make a quick phone call.’
We were outside a parade of shabby-looking shops, and I watched as Cecil passed a group of even more shabby-looking drunks on a bench shouting incoherently to each other in what sounded like Polish. As I looked on, one tried to stand up and simply toppled over on his side, landing against a large overflowing litter bin, much to the mirth of the others, before rolling over on the pavement while somehow keeping his drink intact. A young woman in a business suit hurried past, head down and giving them a wide berth.
No, there are no noble causes. If you fight for something you believe in, innocent people will always get hurt, and even if you achieve whatever goal it is you’ve set yourself, it’ll always end up being a hollow victory, because everything comes at a price.
Cecil walked back to the car, giving the drunks a sideways look that temporarily silenced all of them, and got back inside.
‘There’s someone who wants to meet you.’
And that was when I knew I was in.
Eleven
10.26
The man was parked in a deserted stretch of woodland bordering a golf course just inside the M25 when he got off the phone to Cecil. He had an iPad on his lap and was watching Sky News as they continued their frenetic coverage of the coffee shop bomb attack. So far, actual hard news was scarce; they were relying on eyewitness reports and continued footage of the scene from the Sky News Copter. The fire in the cafe was now out, but the street was still full of emergency vehicles. According to the rolling newsreel on the bottom of the screen six people had so far been confirmed dead, with more than thirty wounded, but the death toll was expected to rise. There were also unconfirmed reports that a previously unknown terror group had claimed responsibility, that the bomber himself had fled the cafe before the explosion, and that he’d been arrested.
This last rumour concerned him. They’d used Akhtar Mohammed so that the attack could be blamed on Islamic fundamentalists. If it was revealed that he’d been blackmailed into delivering the bomb, then their plan fell to pieces. Worse still, Mohammed would be able to identify Martha Crossman as the intended target.
There was nothing he could do about this now, though, so he sat patiently, staring at the iPad’s screen, waiting for the signal to go to the next stage.
Sure enough, a little over five minutes later it finally came as the anchorwoman interrupted her interview with the Sky security correspondent to announce further breaking news. Viewers had been calling the newsroom to report that large numbers of armed police had surrounded a block of flats in Bayswater, barely a couple of miles from where the coffee shop bomb had exploded, and were in the process of evacuating the surrounding area. A minute after that the security correspondent announced live on air that he’d received confirmation from a source at New Scotland Yard that an ongoing armed operation was underway.
This was the amazing thing about modern life, thought the man. The speed with which news travelled was almost instantaneous. There were plenty of positives in this. It meant citizens were generally kept well informed. It made it difficult for dictatorships to hide their guilty secrets. Unfortunately, it also allowed the bad guys to monitor the progress of the security forces highly effectively.
The screen had switched back to the Sky News Copter which was now circling above the block of flats where he’d shot dead Mika and booby-trapped her body over two hours earlier. Dozens of black-clad police were moving like ants round the front of the building as they formed a cordon around it and evacuated residents from the surrounding flats. Clearly they’d traced the mobile phone he’d used to make the call claiming responsibility for the cafe bomb, as he’d anticipated. Of course, they wouldn’t be reckless and go storming in, even though he could see that a number of them were CO19, with their trademark Heckler and Kochs. First they’d need to secure the area, finish the evacuation of any civilian within a hundred yards, then make a risk assessment, before even thinking of trying to get into the flat where the dead woman lay with the bomb and the phone on top of her. The whole thing would take hours. The man smiled. He knew this would happen, which was why there was a second bomb in the boot of one of the cars in the parking area directly in front of the building. The device contained twenty kilos of PETN explosives in two large bags, surrounded by a further twenty kilos of assorted shrapnel — and, like the bomb on Mika, it was timed to go off in two minutes exactly.
