McLean’s photograph in Button’s office — he was the right-wing activist who had met with the Norwegian mass murderer in 2002.
Sharpe walked over to the Jaguar. ‘Nice motor,’ he said.
‘Yeah, can’t beat a Jag,’ said Kettering.
‘Be better with four-wheel drive, though,’ said Sharpe. He walked round the car, checked that there was no one hiding in the back, and nodded at Shepherd.
Thompson saw what he was doing and he grinned. ‘Don’t trust us?’ he said.
‘Just don’t want any surprises,’ said Sharpe.
‘Better check the boot in case we’ve got a group of dwarves in there with shooters,’ said Kettering.
‘We’ll trust you,’ said Shepherd, opening the tailgate of the Range Rover. He used a screwdriver to lever off the top of the crate. Inside were three assault rifles, swathed in bubble wrap. He took one out and unwrapped it, then showed it to the four men. ‘You know much about guns?’ he asked.
‘A bit,’ said Kettering. He looked across at Thompson. ‘Handguns mainly, though.’ He nodded at Sean. ‘Sean here’s the expert.’
‘Okay, well, this is a Zastava M70, manufactured in the former Yugoslavia. Barrel length 415 millimetres, gas-operated, air-cooled, 620 rounds a minute on fully automatic, muzzle velocity 720 metres per second with an effective range of 400 metres.’ He reached into the crate and pulled out a curved magazine. He held it up so that they could see it. ‘Thirty-round box magazine.’ He slotted in the magazine then chambered a round. ‘And there you are, good to go.’ He sighted down the gun at a rock in the distance. ‘Point and shoot. That’s pretty much all there is to it.’
‘They’re reliable, yeah?’ said Thompson.
‘Not much to go wrong with them,’ said Shepherd. ‘Trust me, it’s a nice weapon. It’s better than the crap the Chinese make and in my view it’s more reliable than the Russian version. The one drawback, and it’s a minor thing, is that you need to clean it thoroughly. If I were you I’d clean it every time you use it. The inside of the barrel isn’t chromed so you have to stop rust setting in.’
‘Can you show us how to clean them?’ Thompson asked Sean.
Sean nodded. ‘Sure. It’s not difficult. But doing it will add years to its life.’
‘What happens if you don’t clean it?’ asked Kettering.
‘It starts to rust and the inside gets pitted,’ said Sean. ‘That means there isn’t such a tight fit for the round as it moves along the barrel so it doesn’t go as straight. Take a new gun like this fresh out of the crate and at four hundred metres you should be able to put round after round in a target the size of a dinner plate. But if you don’t clean it, after five hundred rounds or so you’d have trouble hitting a bus.’
Shepherd and Sharpe nodded in agreement. Whoever Sean was, he knew his stuff.
‘Got you,’ said Kettering. He held out his hands for the gun. Shepherd clicked the safety on and handed it to him.
Kettering smiled appreciatively as he held the gun. ‘And you’re sure it’s as good as the Kalashnikov?’
‘It’s better, I think. And I’m not just saying that because I’m bringing them in from Serbia. I could get the Russian version if I wanted. And I could get the Chinese version at a lower price.’ He gestured at the gun. ‘That’s a good, reliable weapon. These are the fixed-stock versions but I can get you them with a folding stock.’
‘They’d be easier to hide, right?’ said Thompson.
‘Absolutely,’ said Shepherd. He unwrapped a second gun, slammed in a magazine and handed it to Thompson, after making sure that the safety was on. ‘With the folding stock you can hang them on a sling and hide them under a coat. Takes a second to snap the stock out.’
Kettering nodded enthusiastically. ‘That sounds perfect,’ he said.
‘How many are you going to be looking for?’ asked Shepherd.
‘Forty. Maybe more. It depends on your price.’
Thompson was holding his gun awkwardly, as if he was scared that it was going to bite him. Shepherd smiled and pointed at the safety catch. ‘The safety has three positions,’ said Shepherd. ‘At the moment the safety is up, which means that the gun can’t be fired. If you move it down one notch it’s set for automatic firing which means it will keep firing so long as you keep the trigger pulled. You really don’t want to be doing that because you’ll empty the clip before you know it. Push the safety all the way down and you’re in semi-automatic mode. That means one pull of the trigger fires one round.’
‘We can fire them, right?’ said Kettering.
‘That’s why we’re here,’ said Shepherd. He took a wooden target from the car. It was a wooden frame that folded down the middle. He assembled it, locked it into position and handed it to Sharpe. There was a cardboard tube next to the crate and Shepherd popped a plastic cap off one end and pulled out a roll of paper. It was a paper target that the SAS sometimes used, a cartoon of Bin Laden holding a Kalashnikov.
Kettering laughed when he saw the target. ‘I thought he was dead already.’
‘You believe that?’ asked Thompson. ‘He was dead five years ago.’
Kettering grinned at Shepherd. ‘Paul’s a big conspiracy theorist.’
‘Bloody right I am,’ said Thompson. ‘You have to be blind not to see the way the world’s going. Look, do you seriously think an old man sitting in a cave could have planned and carried out Nine-Eleven?’
‘It’s not something I’ve thought about,’ said Shepherd.
‘How can you not?’ said Thompson. ‘And how is it that, just as the Americans are pulling out of Iraq, they suddenly find out where he is? I mean, what are the odds?’
‘Minuscule,’ said Sharpe. He flashed Shepherd a smile, clearly enjoying winding Thompson up.
‘And then there’s the whole dumping the body at sea. They go to all that trouble of finding him and then they go and drop him in the ocean first chance they get. That makes no sense at all. Unless it wasn’t him they killed.’
‘What, you don’t think it was him they shot?’
‘Let me ask you this,’ said Thompson. ‘You know about Bin Laden, right? He had health problems. His kidneys. In fact he was in Dubai having treatment not long before the Nine-Eleven attacks. He had to have regular dialysis.’
‘Yeah, I heard that,’ said Sharpe.
‘Now, did you see any of the photographs the Yanks released of the house where Bin Laden was staying in Pakistan? The house that he never left in how many years?’
‘Yeah,’ said Sharpe. ‘They were all over the papers.’
‘What’s your point?’ asked Shepherd, who was rapidly tiring of the discussion.
‘The point, Garry my old mate, is that in none of the pictures is there anything that looks remotely like dialysis equipment. So how does someone with kidney failure survive for years without an oil change? I had an uncle who died of kidney failure a few years back and he had to go in for dialysis three times a week, regular as clockwork.’ He tapped the side of his nose with his finger. ‘Trust me, that wasn’t Bin Laden in that house.’
‘Are you done, mate?’ asked Kettering.
‘Check the internet,’ said Thompson. ‘Google it. It’s all part of the global conspiracy.’
‘Is that why you want the guns?’ asked Shepherd. ‘To fight back?’
‘Enough, Paul,’ said Kettering, and this time there was a hard edge to his voice. ‘Let’s get this done and we can get back in the warm.’
Thompson looked away, avoiding Kettering’s piercing stare. ‘Yeah, okay, it’s getting cold, isn’t it?’ He flicked the safety down.
Shepherd reached over and pushed the barrel down so that it was pointing at the ground. ‘Not until I say so,’ said Shepherd. He flicked the safety back into the on position. ‘Okay, now out here in the open the sound of one of these guns firing will carry for five miles, maybe ten if the wind is blowing the right way. So I’m going to fit suppressors to cut down on the noise.’
He unzipped a black holdall and took out a foot-long bulbous black metal tube and showed it to them. ‘This screws into the barrel and it reduces the noise by about half.’ He screwed the suppressor into the barrel of the gun that Kettering was holding.
‘So it’s a silencer?’ said Kettering.
‘We call them suppressors,’ said Shepherd. ‘It’s only in the movies that they call them silencers. No gun can truly be silenced; you’re always going to hear something.’
