Fox was the first to arrive, at 15.40. It took him the best part of five minutes to get through the complex set of locks they’d added to maximize security. Once he was inside and had disabled the state-of-the-art, supposedly tamper-proof burglar alarm system, he relocked the doors and did a quick sweep of the main loading bay area with a bug finder. He was pretty sure that no one would have been able to get in without them knowing about it, and even surer that there’d been no leak in the cell, but he was also the kind of man who left nothing to chance. It was why he’d survived as long as he had.
Once he was satisfied that the place was clean, he put a call in to Bull using one of the three mobiles he was carrying. He’d left Bull with the kids at a rented house three miles away that morning.
Bull answered with a simple ‘yeah’ on the second ring, and Fox was pleased that he was keeping the phone so close to hand, and that he was answering it in the way he’d been instructed, giving nothing away. Bull wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box, and Fox had had to spend a lot of time prepping him about his role today, which was one of the most important of all of them.
‘It’s me,’ said Fox, pacing the warehouse floor. ‘Everything all right?’
‘All good. I just checked up on them now.’
He sounded alert enough, and Fox was sure he wouldn’t hesitate to do what needed to be done when the time came. But he wanted to make sure Bull remembered the timings. The timings were everything today.
‘You remember what time you’ve got to be at the final rendezvous, don’t you?’
‘Course I do. We’ve been through it enough times. Twenty-three hundred.’
‘Not a minute later. Give yourself plenty of time, but don’t leave before you get final confirmation.’
Bull said he understood. He didn’t sound the least bit annoyed at being asked the same question by Fox for the hundredth time in the past three days. He sounded keen and eager to please. This was the biggest day in his whole life and he knew it.
Fox ended the call and switched off the phone.
There was an office at the end of a narrow corridor leading from the loading bay, and he unlocked the door and went inside, switching on the lights. At the far end of the room, hidden behind a pile of boxes, was a large padlocked crate. As he did every time he came here, Fox checked the contents, making sure that nothing had been tampered with.
The weaponry for the operation originated from the former Yugoslav republic of Kosovo. It consisted of eight AK-47 assault rifles, six Glock 17 pistols with suppressors, grenades, body armour, and 25 kilos of C4 explosive, along with detonators and thousands of rounds of ammunition. It had been bought from a group of former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army in a deal arranged by the client, before being smuggled into the EU in the hidden compartment of a lorry usually reserved for illegal immigrants.
Because of the levels of security at British ports, and the use of sniffer dogs to detect explosives, it had been considered safest to avoid bringing the consignment into the country using the lorry. Instead, the crate had been dropped at a safe house in Antwerp. A contact of the handler there knew a Belgian fishing boat captain who occasionally did hashish runs into the UK. For a fee, the captain had agreed to transport the weapons and land them using a RIB on an isolated stretch of beach north of Peterhead in Scotland. From there, the crate had been collected by Fox and several other members of the team, and driven to London.
Because the C4 had still been in powder form, Fox had delivered it separately to a lock-up in Forest Gate, along with the detonators, where it had been collected by the people whose job it was to turn it into bombs. Fox had no idea of their identities, he’d simply dropped off the tub containing the C4. Then, two weeks later, he’d received an anonymous text telling him to go back to the lock-up, where six identical black North Face backpacks and a small trolley suitcase were waiting for him, all of them now converted into deadly weapons.
Fox didn’t bother re-padlocking the crate since they’d be needing the contents soon enough. Instead, he pulled out one of the Kevlar vests, grabbed a set of stained navy-blue decorator’s overalls from a built-in cupboard next to the door, and got changed, packing the civilian clothes he’d come here in, and which he’d be needing later, into a backpack. Although he wore gloves throughout the process, he wasn’t too worried about leaving any DNA behind. A local cleaning company had been hired to come in the following day and give the whole place a full industrial steam clean, which would remove all traces of his presence here.
Fox could feel the excitement building in him now. This was it. The culmination of months of planning. Success, and the whole world was his. Failure, and it would be his last day on earth.
Death or glory. The choice was that stark. It reminded him of his time in the army, in those all too rare moments when he’d seen action. It was that feeling of being totally and utterly alive. He loved the thrill of violence, always had. And today, for the first time in far too long, he was going to get the chance to experience that thrill on a grand scale.
Down the corridor, he heard the sound of the rear loading doors opening, and he smiled.
The others were beginning to arrive.
Six
CAT MANOLIS PACED THE hotel room, wondering if it was work or the interminably heavy London traffic that was delaying her lover.
Their affair had started innocently enough. The occasional shared smile as they passed each other in the corridor at work, or in the gym beneath the building, where they both worked out; the first conversation on the treadmill at 7.30 one morning; the knowing look he’d given her. Even then it had been weeks before he’d asked her out for a coffee. Everything had had to be so secret. It was the same old thing. He was trapped in a loveless marriage, a handsome, charismatic man in need of female attention, possessed of the kind of power that was always such an aphrodisiac, even to a woman barely half his age.
They’d met for coffee one Saturday morning in a pretty little cafe on the South Bank. He’d made an excuse to his wife, telling her he had to come into town, and they’d spent a snatched couple of hours together. They’d walked along the banks of the Thames, and Cat had put her arm through his as they talked. She’d told him about her upbringing in Nice, how she’d been the only child of a father who was long gone by the time she was born, and a mother who’d never forgiven her for it, as if she was somehow to blame for his fecklessness. How she’d gone off the rails (although she refused to give him too many details about how low she’d fallen) before pulling herself together and marrying a man who was the love of her life, only to lose him a week before her twenty-fourth birthday. It was grief, then, that had brought her to London five years earlier.
He’d seemed genuinely touched by her story and had told her his own more familiar one: how he’d been with the same woman since university, how they’d once been in love, and how, over the thirty years and three children since, their love had faded to nothing more than a hollow husk, leaving him desperate to be free of the marriage.
‘I care for you very much,’ he’d said gently when it was time for them to part. He’d looked into her eyes as he spoke so she’d know his words were heartfelt.
They’d kissed passionately. It had been something that was always going to happen, and it seemed to last for a long, long time.
When they’d finally broken apart, they’d promised to meet again as soon as circumstances allowed.
Since then they’d had three separate trysts – all involving coffee, followed by a walk, though never in the same place – and all the time they’d been moving towards this day. When they would finally sleep together for the first time. Michael had wanted to consummate their relationship at Cat’s apartment, but she’d explained that it would be impractical given that she shared her place with three other women, so they’d settled for the far more romantic destination of the Stanhope on Park Lane.
Cat was dressed seductively in a simple sleeveless black dress that finished just above the knee, sheer black hold-up stockings, and black court shoes with four-inch heels. Usually she dressed far more modestly and, as she stopped and looked at herself in the room’s full-length mirror, she felt a frisson of excitement. She looked good. There was no doubt about it. Michael would melt when he saw her.
If, of course, he turned up.
She looked at her watch. It was five to four. He was almost half an hour late. And he hadn’t even called. She couldn’t call him either. She was under strict instructions never to call him. Too easy to get found out, he’d said,
