‘Didn’t say I wasn’t grateful.’
‘There’s Hassan,’ said Shepherd, ‘blue baseball cap, white shirt, walking over from the road.’
‘You and your photographic memory,’ said Sharpe. He glanced towards the man. ‘Yeah, that’s him, all right.’
‘I wasn’t asking for confirmation, Razor,’ said Shepherd, drily. ‘I just wanted to make sure you’d seen him.’ He sipped his coffee. Sharpe was right: it wasn’t good.
Hassan strolled through a gap in the fence round the water feature and wandered over to a clump of trees. He sat down in the shade, his back to a trunk, took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one with a cheap plastic lighter. A camera with a telephoto lens hung from a strap round his neck.
Shepherd and Sharpe walked towards the Serpentine then continued beside it. Two groups of teenagers were racing in rowing-boats, laughing and jeering at each other. Sunbathers were out in force, although it was too early for lunchtime office workers to put in an appearance. An overweight girl with a crash helmet and knee pads whizzed by on roller-blades. ‘They don’t look like hardened criminals,’ said Shepherd.
‘The men who blew up the Tube were in their twenties and thirties,’ said Sharpe. ‘These guys aren’t out to rob a bank. They’re terrorists.’
‘Terrorists, or wannabe terrorists,’ said Shepherd.
‘The only difference is having the tools,’ said Sharpe.
‘So why are they coming to us? That’s what I don’t get. If they’re al-Qaeda, why don’t they have their own weapons?’
‘Because they’re not al-Qaeda, they’re home-grown terrorists. British born. Invisibles, they call them. You know that.’
‘But this seems so… amateurish.’ He took another sip of his coffee and tossed the paper cup into a rubbish bin. ‘Tom and Jerry are here,’ he said. The final members of the group were walking across the grass towards the water feature. According to the names under the photographs on Button’s whiteboard, they were Ali and Fazal. Ali was the smaller of the two with a shaved head and a slight stoop. Fazal was a good six inches taller with a long, loping stride. Both men had moustaches and wore sunglasses. Ali was carrying the Financial Times and Fazal had a copy of the Guardian in the back pocket of his jeans. They headed straight for the water feature.
‘Just the five,’ said Sharpe.
‘Looks that way,’ said Shepherd. ‘Lying little bugger. He said there’d be two of them.’
‘Like you said, amateurs.’
‘Thing is, amateurs are unpredictable. You know what a professional will do, but an amateur can go off the rails.’
‘I don’t see any heavy artillery,’ said Sharpe.
‘Yeah, I know. Come on, let’s go.’ They walked across the grass. Ali and Fazal stood with their backs to the memorial. To their left, an old couple were placing a small bunch of flowers on the ground. There were tears in the woman’s eyes and she dabbed at them with a little white handkerchief.
Ali saw them first and nudged Fazal in the ribs. Fazal pulled out the Guardian and held it in both hands.
‘Which one’s Tom?’ said Shepherd, as he reached them.
Ali waved his Financial Times. ‘That’s me,’ he said.
‘I’m May, the guy you spoke to,’ said Shepherd. He nodded at Sharpe. ‘This is Lomas.’ Ali held out his hand, as if he wanted to shake, but Shepherd ignored it. ‘This isn’t a date,’ he said. ‘Let’s walk as we talk.’ They started across the grass. ‘So,’ said Shepherd, ‘what’s on your shopping list?’
‘We want submachine-guns,’ said Fazal.
‘Really?’ said Shepherd. ‘What country are you planning to invade?’
‘Can you supply us or not?’ asked Ali.
‘Do you even know what a submachine-gun is?’ asked Sharpe.
‘It’s a gun that can fire bursts of bullets,’ said Fazal.
‘Right, and they’re bloody dangerous,’ said Sharpe.
‘So what? You sell them with health warnings, do you?’ asked Ali. ‘We have the money and we want to buy. If you can’t supply us, we can go elsewhere.’
‘What make?’ asked Shepherd.
Fazal shrugged. ‘Uzi, maybe.’
‘How about MP5s, the guns the SAS use?’
‘You can get one?’
‘We can get you anything, for a price,’ said Shepherd, ‘but you’d be better off telling me what you want them for.’
Fazal and Ali looked at each other and Fazal began to speak in Urdu, but Sharpe held up his hand. ‘Use English,’ he said.
‘We’ve got problems with a gang,’ said Fazal. ‘A big gang. We want guns that show we mean business.’
Shepherd stopped walking. They were close to the wire fence that separated the memorial from the rest of the park. ‘Are you planning to fire them?’
Fazal frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘We generally offer a deal. You buy the guns from us, but if you don’t fire them we’ll buy them back. It’s like renting.’
‘Why would anyone rent a gun?’ asked Fazal.
Sharpe sighed theatrically. ‘Say a guy wants to knock over a bank. He wants a shooter but he doesn’t fire it, just uses it to get the money. Once he’s got the cash, he doesn’t need the gun any more so he sells it back to us. But if he fires it the gun can be traced so it’s no use to us. Got it?’
‘Yeah,’ said Fazal. ‘I get it.’
‘So, will you be wanting to sell the guns back after you’ve finished with them?’ asked Shepherd.
Ali and Fazal exchanged another look. ‘Maybe,’ said Fazal. ‘But we have to pay the full amount up front, right?’
‘Right.’
‘How much?’
‘Depends on how many you want. And how many rounds.’
‘Five guns.’
‘Okay. Look, if you want something with a high rate of fire, maybe you should think about the Ingram MAC- 10. It’s like an Uzi but smaller. The magazine holds thirty rounds and it’ll fire them all in less than a second.’
‘How much?’ said Fazal.
‘Two thousand pounds each,’ said Shepherd. The going rate on the street was five hundred less but he wanted to see if the men knew how much the weapons were worth.
‘So, ten grand for the five?’ asked Fazal.
‘Studied maths at university, did you?’ asked Sharpe.
‘Ten grand, that’s right,’ said Shepherd.
‘And what about the bullets?’
‘We call them rounds,’ said Sharpe.
Fazal glared at Sharpe. ‘Have you got a problem with me?’ he said.
Sharpe glared back. ‘I don’t like dealing with amateurs. If they get caught, they tend to sing to the cops.’
‘We won’t be talking to the police,’ said Fazal. ‘You can count on that.’
‘Let’s keep to the matter in hand,’ said Shepherd. ‘Five Ingrams is ten grand. I can sell you a hundred rounds for five hundred quid.’ That was way over the going rate, too, but the men just shrugged.
‘We’d need six hundred,’ said Fazal.
‘Six hundred rounds?’ said Shepherd.
‘Is that a problem?’ asked Fazal.
‘It’s not a problem,’ said Shepherd, ‘but it’s a lot.’
‘You can get them?’
‘Of course.’
‘We’d expect a discount,’ said Ali.
