She’d heard enough by now to know that the liquid was a seriously toxic poison or chemical. Stratton obviously knew. She could understand why he never told her. It would have dominated her thoughts. She would obey everything this mad bastard told her to do. Stratton was out there somewhere and he would have a plan. She wondered what it was.
Stratton was crouched in the front garden of a terraced house, in the bushes just beneath the bay window, through which a family could be seen on couches watching television. It was the ideal position from which to observe the front doors of the apartment building. He wondered what was taking Aggy so long to get out of there. It had been a good five minutes since he saw them enter the building. Shadows moving across the ceiling indicated someone was in the apartment. While he had been sitting silently he had thought about Aggy and Lawton’s relationship and wondered how serious it had become. Perhaps she had fallen in love with him. Stratton had no concerns about her loyalty, but people in love were capable of irrational things. He chased the thoughts from his head to stay in keeping with his own rules. Too much hypothesis was unhealthy in this business.
He went through his plan again, which was, as he liked to put it in simple military terms, straightforward until it got complicated. Whenever Aggy eventually came out he would allow her to walk away without alerting her to his presence. It didn’t matter where she went or ended up, she was out of the game, her job done. If there was surveillance to be done she would be of no use because the target knew her. If Stratton could he would tell her to go home. Since she had no mobile phone hopefully she would come to that conclusion herself.
He had boiled his options down to essentially two. If Bill came out with the briefcase, Stratton would move in and take care of that situation by himself. If Bill wasn’t carrying the case then Stratton needed some fresh faces to carry on with the task. Sumners should have called him by now with news of his back-up and also the answers to some of his ‘what if’ scenarios. If Bill didn’t have the bio it could mean several things: he’d left it in his apartment for some reason; someone else now had it or was going to collect it; he was going to pick it up from somewhere; or he was baiting any would-be followers away from RIRA’s real intentions. This is where it could be made to look more complicated than it was if cool minds didn’t prevail. It was Stratton’s MO to keep scenarios simple, even when there was a plethora of possible options. Most operations fell apart at this phase, trying to figure out what the opposition might do and prepare for every possible eventuality. That’s why so many ended in a gun battle, and why so many were ultimately designed to end in an ambush, which was just a gun battle on the ambusher’s terms.
When all else failed Stratton’s overriding consideration was governed by ‘the price plan’, the value of the operation, or in more plain language, who or what could be sacrificed to succeed. This one wasn’t difficult to value since the cost could be the population of London and a lot more. Basically, every bastard involved, on both sides, was expendable.
The door to the apartment building opened and Stratton watched Bill, Aggy and, to his surprise, another man walk out; the man with the limp who had appeared behind Aggy and Bill when they went for their walk. They passed him on the other side of the street. Aggy was in the middle and it looked like she was carrying the briefcase. The light was too poor to make out any other details.
And that, Stratton said to himself, was what they called Murphy’s Law. Had he come up with a scenario such as this it would’ve been way down on the list. It highlighted another important philosophy, which was ‘be flexible’.This was going to require a combination of both options.The bio was there, almost certainly, but Stratton couldn’t risk taking it alone. Not yet anyhow. He didn’t know who this third person was and there was still the possibility it was all a piece of bait. He felt the electronic initiator in his pocket. All he needed to do was remove the safety lock, push the arming switch, hit the red button, and boom. But two things were very wrong with that choice. One was that the explosion would kill Aggy. He was capable of sacrificing an operative if that was within the price plan but only if there was absolutely no choice. And this was, after all, Aggy. To date, he had never lost an operative on one of his own planned ops, except Hank of course, but hopefully that wasn’t over yet. The second and far greater consideration was that it still had not been confirmed if exploding the briefcase would kill the virus. If Sumners gave him the all-clear it would then just be a matter of getting Aggy away from it. He would happily extinguish Lawton, which would suit everyone perfectly, and this character with the limp, whoever he was.
Stratton put the initiator away, got to his feet, climbed over the squat wall and headed along the street, keeping a good distance from the three figures but not letting them out of his sight. They were heading for Wandsworth Road only a couple hundred yards away. He would have to close up as they approached it or risk losing them in the busy street. He wondered if they had a car.This could all get very desperate very quickly. Where the hell was Sumners?
Stratton took out his phone and hit a memory dial as he walked. It rang.
‘Ops here,’ said the operations officer.
‘Stratton. Give me Sumners.’
‘He’s not here, Stratton.’
‘Where the hell is he?’ Stratton asked, unable to control his annoyance, which was unusual for him. It was a warning that the pressure was building. Secure phone lines were probably ringing all over the country by now. The PM was no doubt already pacing his office or on his way to a safe location out of the city. And Stratton was holding this whole thing together.Where were his operatives? They should have been arriving in their droves. Stratton wondered if Sumners hadn’t screwed up. The fine line between need to know and telling everyone was sometimes a difficult one to call. Stratton was glad he didn’t have to make those decisions. On an op like this Stratton should have just about every force available at his disposal, including stealth helicopters, a link into London’s video surveillance camera system, which literally covered the entire city and all the highways and motorways leading in and out of it, and cohorts of operatives tripping over each other. Instead he was alone. It was ridiculous.
‘I think he’s gone to the loo,’ the ops officer said.
‘Tell him the bio is foxtrot, that I have no idea where the fuck it’s headed, and if I don’t some get backup in the next two minutes I’m going to blow it to hell because I’ll have no fucking choice.’
‘I understand,’ the ops officer said calmly. ‘I’ll go and find him.’
Stratton killed the call and pocketed the phone. You do that, he said to himself. This was bullshit. The operation was at the most crucial stage and the wheels were about to fall off it.
Aggy, Bill and Brennan reached Wandsworth Road and turned left on to it. Stratton speeded up then slowed as he reached the junction. He was hoping there would be a shop or something he could use to get a reflection off, but there was nothing. He peeked around the corner and darted back like an amateur. They had been right there, all three, yards away, climbing aboard a crowded double-decker bus, and Aggy still had the briefcase. Stratton’s mind raced. He couldn’t get on board, Bill would see him. He was going to lose them. He felt the initiator in his pocket. Blowing them up along with a bus full of people was well within the price plan, but there was still another option he could play. There was always another option. It was all about figuring it out in time.
He watched them move along the bus and Bill lead upstairs. The stranger with the limp paused to look behind him and out of the window. It was a warning to Stratton that the man was experienced and aware. By the stark lights of the bus Stratton got a look at his face. He knew him. A photograph perhaps? The man headed upstairs. Then the limp brought it all together.
‘Brennan,’ Stratton muttered to himself. A few weeks after the failed operation to snatch Spinks, Special Branch had come up with the identities of the players in the crashed van. Three had died; one shot through the chest and the other two killed by the impact of the crash. The one that got away, even though he had been shot through the thigh, was Brennan.
Stratton watched as they headed towards the front of the upper deck and the bus started to pull out into traffic.
He stepped out from his corner and watched it crawl away into traffic. Number 77A. He touched his jacket under his left arm, feeling his gun beneath, and moved to the street, scanning cars, looking for a candidate. A single occupant was wisest. The hard part about hijacking a car was finding a driver who didn’t look like they would put up a heroic fight or crash the car at the first opportunity. Women were not always an obvious choice. Stratton preferred to go for someone who actually looked hard. Chances were they weren’t. And if they were, then they might appreciate the consequences more graphically if the person doing the threatening looked serious enough. He saw a gum-chewing, tattooed skinhead in an old RS2000 that looked in good condition. This was his man.
The car had slowed in the traffic as a direct result of the bus pulling out. Stratton opened the passenger door, pulled his gun out of his shoulder holster under his coat, and climbed in beside the skinhead, who was about to say something until he saw the weapon. Before he closed the door Stratton thought he heard his name being called.
