easily any more, which gives men like us an advantage.
I pocketed the knife and told the guy to keep his hands on his head, which he did without arguing. It wasn’t his money and he wasn’t prepared to die in order to protect it, which seemed to me to be the sensible option. I’d have done the same thing. Most sane people would. But then with these guys it’s all about respect, and having a rep on the street, and being made to go down on your knees in a public place and give up your stash and your weapons is an insult of the most heinous kind.
Which was why, in the end, I suppose the whole thing was always going to go tits up.
It happened when I was crouched down behind LeShawn, gun pressed against the back of his head. I was about to give him a brief once-over just to check he didn’t have another gun somewhere, while Cecil covered me from the front. By this point the whole thing, from the moment I’d jumped out of the moving car, had lasted no more than forty-five, fifty seconds tops, and was running pretty smoothly. We were ten seconds away from making our getaway when Cecil cursed and looked towards the council block behind me. I heard shouts too, and turned round.
A lanky white guy with wild hair, wearing a pair of tracksuit bottoms and nothing else, had appeared out of the building’s main entrance and was running towards us, waving a carving knife and clearly off his nut on crack.
Cecil opened fire over the guy’s head, the noise deafening, and the guy had the good sense to hit the deck, dropping the knife in the process. But I’d let my guard down, and suddenly LeShawn swung round, grabbed the barrel of the gun, and tried to yank it out of my hands. I fell forward, resisting pulling the trigger, and fell over him, landing in the grass, twisting round so I could still keep a grip on the gun.
LeShawn fell on top of me, shoving the barrel to one side, one beefy hand going round my throat and squeezing with such power that it cut off my air supply instantly. I tried to kick out, but I didn’t have the room to do any damage. LeShawn roared, spittle forming at the corners of his mouth as he used his free hand to slam the MP5 down into the ground, twisting my arms in the process. He lunged at me, trying to take a bite out of my face, but I managed to free up a hand and smack him hard on the underside of his chin, making him bite his tongue.
He roared with frustration and lunged at me again, which was the moment the left side of his face suddenly disappeared in a welter of red, and I was splattered in warm blood. His grip on my throat weakened as his whole body slumped. He let out a loud grunt, and I had to put up a hand to stop him falling on me.
I kicked him off me and jumped to my feet, wiping the blood from my eyes as I made sure the holdall was still on my back.
‘Come on, move it!’ yelled Cecil, retreating rapidly.
The other two members of the crew were lying on their fronts, still alive but clearly not wanting to get involved, while the wild-haired guy was back on his feet and dancing round with the knife, but still sensible enough not to get too close.
Cecil glared at me as we ran for the car. ‘What the fuck were you doing?’
I didn’t answer as I chucked the holdall in the back of the car while he ran round the front and jumped in the driver’s side.
And then, just when things couldn’t get any worse, they did.
A marked patrol car pulled into the road behind us. There were no lights or sirens, so it wasn’t responding to an emergency call. It had arrived on the scene purely by accident and was driving in our direction. I looked at them, and they looked at me, slowing up at the same time as they took in the sight of a man in a police cap with a submachine gun and a face covered in blood.
The terrible thing was, I recognized them. PCs John Nolan and Gloria Owana. I’d met them both when we’d worked out of the same station. Even so, I didn’t know them well, and I was pretty damn sure they wouldn’t recognize me in the state I was in.
But they still presented a threat, and it was time I showed Cecil what I could do. As their car stopped, I opened fire, swinging the gun in a steady arc as I blew out the tyres, feeling that intense satisfaction that only pulling a trigger can bring, watching as both ducked out of sight. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the wild-haired guy charging me and I swung the gun round, ready to pop him if I had to, but he took a flying dive and landed face down on the pavement with an angry thud, the knife clattering on to the tarmac.
Then, as Cecil gunned the engine, I turned and jumped in the car, and he pulled away in a screech of tyres.
The whole thing had been a disaster. A man was dead; cops had been shot at; half the Met would probably be on our tail in the next five minutes. But in the end we still had the money.
Although if I’d known what it was going to be used for, I’d have flung it out the window there and then.
Nine
09.19
‘Have you got any idea why William Garrett might want to talk to you?’ asked Mike Bolt, leaning forward in his seat and fixing Tina with a cool, formal stare that belied the friendship they’d once had. They were in his office in a large Georgian townhouse just off Green Park, facing each other for the first time in almost two years.
Tina shrugged. ‘I’ve got no idea. It’s not as if I’ve ever had any contact with him. All I am these days is lowly CID.’
‘Although you still manage to get yourself right in the thick of things. It’s a pity we lost that suspect.’
‘You’re the second person today who’s told me that, Mike. It wasn’t my fault.’
‘I know, but we’ve now had confirmation that the explosion earlier was a powerful rucksack bomb, delivered by the suspect you were chasing. We’ve already had a very plausible claim of responsibility from an unknown outfit calling themselves Islamic Command, and they’ve given us an ultimatum. Either the government acquiesces to their demands — which are the usual stuff, promising to pull out of all Muslim lands — by eight o’clock tonight or there’ll be a much bigger attack.’
‘It all sounds very similar to the Stanhope siege.’
Bolt nodded. ‘It does.’
The Stanhope siege had been a short but brutal terrorist incident just over a year earlier. It had involved a team of white mercenaries, allied with Arab gunmen, who’d set off two bombs in London before taking over the Stanhope Hotel and holding hundreds of guests hostage. When the whole thing had ended six hours later, more than seventy people were dead, and the psyche of the nation had been left badly scarred. Almost all the terrorists had died — one of them at the hands of Tina herself, who’d killed him in self-defence while rescuing the kidnapped children of one of the senior officers involved (an act for which she’d narrowly escaped charges) — but, since that night, there’d been no further arrests, nor any clear sign of who was responsible. Theories had abounded. Some claimed the terrorists were working for al-Qaeda; others for an unnamed Arab government, or the Iranians; and some claimed the real organizers were even closer to home and members of a domestic neo-Nazi organization seeking to foment discontent. But the problem was that only two of those involved had survived. One, a member of the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command called John Cheney, who’d been the terrorists’ inside man, had been found hanged in his cell a few weeks afterwards. And the other, a former soldier called William Garrett, who’d gone by the codename Fox, and who was now in prison awaiting trial, had kept his mouth resolutely shut.
Until now, it seemed.
Tina frowned. ‘So Fox has suddenly decided that he wants to cooperate?’
‘Apparently he saw footage of the explosion this morning and told the governor he knew who was behind it, but wouldn’t give any further details.’
‘The suspect I chased this morning was south Asian. Probably Pakistani. Definitely not a white mercenary, and not the kind of guy likely to be working as an Arab government agent.’
‘So it might be nothing to do with Fox or any of his friends. But initial reports are saying the explosives used were PETN, the same as those used at the Stanhope, and that the bomb looked sophisticated. The thing is, there just aren’t that many terrorists with access to that kind of weaponry, particularly homegrown Islamic extremists.’ Bolt paused. ‘There’s something else as well. There was an attempt on Fox’s life three days ago.’
‘I didn’t hear anything about that.’
