And Tom Furey needed all the prayers he could get, because he’d just woken to a protection officer’s worst nightmare.
1
Eight days earlier
‘I need to piss.’
Tom smiled, even though it was too dark in the back of the transit van to see the young constable’s face. He sighed and whispered, ‘You should have gone before we left.’ He’d been waiting for this — as the boy had been fidgeting for the past hour.
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘Watch it, Harry,’ Tom said. He kept his eye on the house, number fourteen, staring at it through the peephole in the side panel of the van. The light was still on in the front room of the nondescript pebble-dashed semi in the quiet Enfield street. He wondered if the neighbours had any idea what was going on behind that green door. They’d be mostly commuters, he reckoned, with safe jobs. Mid-level office workers, secretaries, tradesmen — and they would have a fit if they knew they were living in the same street as a bunch of people smugglers. Someone must have noticed something, though, or they wouldn’t be here. Londoners had been jolted out of their apathy after seven-seven, the suicide bombings on the tube and the buses, and curtain twitching sometimes paid off.
‘It’s only the truth, Tom. You are old enough to be my bleedin’ father.’
‘Perhaps I am. I was in uniform in Islington in the eighties. Your mum ever go to a Bryan Ferry concert?’
‘Now you’re making me sick.’
At the far end of the cramped space, Steve, the civilian information technology expert, looked over the top of his magazine. Unlike Harry, Steve, whom Harry had quietly dubbed ‘the Anorak’ by virtue of his job rather than his expensive overcoat, could keep quiet in an op.
Tom Furey sat on a fold-out canvas and tubular metal camp stool, which he had brought with him along with a Thermos of tea, sleeping bag, sandwiches, The Times crossword and a paperback novel. He pointed to the last item he’d brought. ‘What do you think that empty peanut jar in the corner is for? Or did you think there’d be a chemical toilet in here?’ Tom shook his head, but kept his gaze focused on the front door of number fourteen.
‘None of this is what I expected,’ Harry said. ‘It’s hardly like on the telly, is it? No electronic monitoring, no bank of TV sets, no infra-red night vision surveillance camera. Certainly no bleedin’ chemical toilet. Just a naff old van lined with bloody foam and plywood and a peephole. God save us if this is the front line of the high-tech war on terrorism. And I still need to piss.’
‘I got a bladder infection from sharing my piss jar with a bloke during a surveillance op in ’92, watching an IRA safe house in Kilburn, and I’m not going to make that mistake again. Like pissing razorblades, it was.’
‘Oh dear… the IRA. Tell us what else you did in the war, Dad.’
The members of the old Metropolitan Police Special Branch — also known as SO12 — had a wide array of skills which were in demand in the new fight against terrorism, and the reason they were sitting in the van was because the word was that the targets inside number fourteen — Pakistani gentlemen — had possible links to al- Qaeda. As well as prostitutes and illegal workers, their clients were believed to include a bomb maker or two.
Tom had joined the Met twenty-one years earlier, at the age of twenty-two. After his sixteen-week training course at Hendon he’d graduated as a police constable and served his probation in Brixton. Three years later, with the IRA’s mainland bombing campaign in full swing, he’d applied to join Special Branch. Being the first on the scene after a bomb had severed an army recruiter in two outside his shopfront had galvanised Tom into taking this next step in his career.
After passing a selection board he’d gone back to Hendon for eleven weeks of training as a detective. As a detective constable he’d done time on B Squad — the Irish squad — and on surveillance on S Squad. Working undercover, often dressed in the foul-smelling rags of a vagrant on the cold streets of London, spending time holed up in abandoned buildings and cold, darkened vans, he’d honed his observation skills and learned patience.
‘Give us the peanut jar,’ Harry said.
‘Quiet.’
After passing his sergeant’s exam Tom had reluctantly gone back into uniform — the obligation came with the promotion. He spent time in his new rank at Enfield — another reason why he was once more on the town’s streets. He knew the area better than most of the others on this hastily cobbled together operation.
Eventually he’d made his way back to Special Branch, where he believed he belonged and would see out his career. After completing firearms training he’d gone to A Squad, where he became a qualified protection officer. Like anyone else in the job he cringed at the term bodyguard, but that was how a civilian or, worse, a newspaper reporter, would have described him.
There had been innumerable wins for Special Branch against the Irish, but it was some high-profile cases of alleged heavy handedness — including one that was made into a movie — which made the politicians want to rein in the Branch and soften its image. Reorganisations after September 11 and the London bombings of 7 July 2005 had created a new unit to deal with terrorism, but had also removed the structure whereby detectives could transfer easily from squad to squad in the Branch, developing and practising new skills while staying under the same command.
The latest round of restructuring had hived off specialist protection — Tom’s specialty — into a new unit, SO1, under the Special Operations umbrella. Police counter-terrorism operations were now handled by SO15.
Tom Furey had provided protection for a plethora of politicians, a former prime minister, a couple of European monarchs, African dictators, and an Arabian prince or two. Visiting dignitaries were assigned British policemen to guard them when in the UK, and Tom, who had no ‘principal’ of his own to protect these days, was on a roster of unattached protection officers who waited their turn potentially to take a bullet for a foreign VIP. He liked the work — he met interesting people and occasionally travelled abroad — but if he was honest with himself it was no high- minded calling which kept him in this job. It was the money. With shift allowances he made two to three times what he would as a detective elsewhere in the Met. The downside was that divorces were common in his line of work. He and Alex had been able to cope because they’d spent their entire marriage out of sync when it came to working hours. They’d compensated with some wonderfully luxurious overseas holidays, made possible by their combined wages which were nothing to sneeze at.
Occasionally, when SO15 was stretched thin — such as now — Tom was called on to lend a hand with surveillance or other specialist tasks now out of the remit of a protection officer. The threat level against the UK had recently been upped, as a result of an increased troop presence in Afghanistan, and resources were stretched thin.
Harry, too, was a protection officer, though unlike under the old Special Branch structure he was neither experienced in surveillance nor a qualified detective. He’d only been out of uniform six months. It was a sign of the times.
‘Do you expect me to piss my pants, Tom?’
‘Shut it,’ Tom hissed back at Harry. He spoke softly but clearly and slowly into his radio: ‘All call signs, two targets moving. Heading left, towards the high street. Usual clothing. I have eyeball. Four-two, they’re heading your way, over.’ Tom repeated the direction of movement so there could be no confusion among the other call signs in the area — a mix of police and MI5 intelligence service personnel — about where the two young Pakistani men were heading. Four-two was the code name for an undercover policeman on a motorcycle, Detective Constable Paul Davis in this case, who was currently at the end of the suburban side street, where it met Enfield Road.
Harry was quiet now and Tom could almost smell the sudden burst of adrenaline in the dank confines of the surveillance van.
Three hundred metres away, down the end of the road, around the corner from the off-licence, was a kebab shop. It was the habit of the two targets to walk to the eatery between seven-thirty and eight pm each evening to buy their supper and sit down at the laminate-topped tables in the padded booth seating to eat. With kebabs, Cokes and tea and cigarettes to follow, the meal usually took two hours, according to the other watchers.
Tom spoke into the hand-held radio again. ‘Four-two, I’ve lost eyeball, do you have them, over?’
‘Roger. They’re on their way to dinner, over. Heading for the shop,’ Paul said.
