Nothing that came out of the car on to the target area would carry our fingerprints: we’d be going in sterile and, with luck, coming out the same.
‘How come you know this place?’ She closed the boot. ‘Family holidays?’
We walked back either side of the car. ‘Very funny,’ I said. I couldn’t see her face in the darkness. ‘We didn’t do holidays.’ The truth was, we didn’t do family either. ‘I used to live a few miles down the coast. Just for a while.’
‘With Kelly?’
The doors opened and the interior light came on as we both got back in. Suzy was waiting for an answer, but she wasn’t going to get one. ‘OK, what about this, then? How much of a coincidence is it that the source is shacked up in King’s Cross?’
‘All I want to do is get this job over and done with so I can get back to the States.’
‘Sort out Kelly?’
‘All kinds of shit.’
32
Both doors closed and the light went out. She turned the ignition, and I rearranged the Browning because the half-cocked hammer was starting to make my stomach sting. The red sore had never gone away after years of carrying one of these things, but it was now starting to weep.
Another couple of cars sped past. The driver of the last punched his horn four or five times and we were treated to a chorus of ribald yells from his passengers.
Suzy was back to her normal hyped-up self. ‘They think we’re shagging.’ She cupped her hands and pretended to shout back at them as they disappeared into the distance. ‘Hey, I’m not that desperate.’
I checked my traser as she wiped a hole in the condensation on the windscreen. ‘You mean that shave was all for nothing?’
As Suzy drove back past the docks the arc lights on the other side of the fenceline were shining like a floodlit stadium. Over to our left, across the darkness of the wasteland, the
Suzy reminded me there was one more thing we had to do before we parked up and headed for the target. ‘You’ve got to call him, Nick. I’d do it but, hey, I’m driving.’
‘Let’s just call him when we’re done and then we keep control.’ The more the Yes Man knew, the more he might want changed – and the more influence he’d have over what we were doing. It wasn’t the way I liked to work.
‘We can’t do that, we’ve got to call him now. I will if you don’t want to, it’s no biggie. He needs a sit rep.’
He needed a kick in the bollocks, but that would have to wait. Reluctantly I opened up the moan-phone and dialled. I hated him knowing what I was up to; it made me feel exposed. The phone rang just once.
‘You should have called earlier.’
‘Well, we’ve done the recces. We should be on target in about an hour. How long after that depends on making entry. We’ve seen no sign of life.’
‘The second you get out, I want to know if you’ve got Dark Winter and how much of it. You will take control of it at all costs.’
‘Yep.’
‘Yep what?’
I took a deep breath. ‘Yep, sir. Is there anything more about the target being flagged?’
‘No. It’s a local issue. The town has a huge South East Asia II [illegal immigrant] problem. Chinese gangs use the derelict housing as a holding tank before spraying them around the country. Nothing to do with us.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The phone went dead from his end. Suzy was all smiles. ‘That went well, I take it?’
The railway station was coming up and Morrisons shone a big yellow welcome at us as we headed for the car park. I bent down into the footwell and unthreaded my bumbag belt from my jeans, shoving it under the seat along with all my Nick Snell cover docs, the Browning and its spare mags.
I got Suzy to stop by the pay-and-display machine. ‘My treat. You park.’ Nine pounds twenty’s worth of coins later, I had a ticket that would see us through till midnight the next day.
The Morrisons and Matalan signs on the other side of the tracks glowed against the sky as Suzy dumped her documents under her seat and I stuck the ticket inside the windscreen. I threw my remaining coins into the glovebox, and joined her as she retrieved her ready bag. The boot went down, and we checked everything was locked and out of sight before she hit the key fob.
We walked past the little tea-cum-newsagent’s shop and into the station. To anyone watching, especially the CCTV that covered the almost empty car park, we were travellers about to catch a train. I just hoped they didn’t follow us all the way through the station because we walked straight out the other side, past six or seven waiting minicabs, and into the Morrisons’ lot. From there we retraced our earlier route.
Nothing had changed, except that it was dark. Lights were on in most of the houses. Some curtains were closed, but through others I could see people watching TV with plates on their laps. Suzy pulled out two of the bricks set into the wall at the DLB, and threw in the car keys, then replaced them. If the shit hit the fan and we had to do a runner, at least one of us would be able to get to the car.
When we got to Loke Road I checked left, down towards the shops. The burger bar was doing a roaring trade, judging by the steam billowing out of the extractor vent. The corner shop next to it was shut, its windows protected by heavy grilles.
We crossed the road at the point we had earlier, just short of the shops. Two Chinese teenagers, a girl and a boy, aged maybe fifteen or sixteen, came out of the alleyway, giggling to each other as they clumsily tried to hold hands and walk at the same time. There was a dark Ford Focus, two-up, parked a bit further along. The driver was as bald as a snooker ball. He turned his head to look at the youngsters as they crossed the road, and studied them a bit too long before he turned back and said something to his mate.
We entered the alleyway to the sound of a lot more TVs on the go. Most downstairs lights were on, and there was the occasional blurred movement behind thin curtains and frosted glass. Suzy changed hands with her bag so she could get closer. ‘You see the Focus?’
‘They were checking out those kids. Could be drug-dealers, could be police. Or just a couple of perves. Fuck it, let’s just get on with it.’
We hit Walker Street and turned left, towards the junction with Sir Lewis and the footbridge. ‘You check the target and I’ll check left.’ As we walked over the crossroads I looked up the other half of Sir Lewis Street. Four kids shot past on bikes with ice-lolly sticks threaded through the spokes, and the headlights of two cars swept towards us. The one further back turned in and parked about half-way down. I knew it was the Focus. They could just have stopped at the chip shop on their way home, but if it was anything to do with us, we’d find out soon enough.
Suzy looked up at me and gave a loving smile. ‘No life on target.’
I smiled back as we approached the bridge. ‘The Focus just parked short of the junction.’
She knew we were now committed. ‘Fuck it, so what?’
We got to the bridge and turned right instead of crossing. There was no other way to do this job except brass it out. No point just hovering around and looking indecisive: we had to look like we belonged, like we had a purpose.
We carried on along the path, in the shadow of the yard walls and fences. Suzy kept a little behind me because the path was too narrow for both of us and the bags. We counted the houses. Three lights, four lights . . . I could see the Q8 tanks in the docks to my half-left, and the street-lamps of the busy main casting a weak shadow over this side of the lumpy wasteground.
We reached the target and still there wasn’t any light from the top windows. Traffic droned along the main
