Unfortunately, right now I needed a lot more than sympathy.
The guard locked the cubicle door, and I heard Burke being led in behind me, still complaining about the way he hadn’t been protected by the authorities, as was his right. Then, after him, came Ramone, who was still compos mentis enough to yell threats at me, and even managed to land a kick on my door before being manhandled into his own cubicle.
Two minutes later, the van pulled away, drove out of the main gates of the prison, and accelerated quickly as it took us on the two-mile route to hospital.
‘You’re a dead man, Mason!’ yelled Ramone. ‘I will tear you into little pieces and gnaw on the bones.’
Full marks to him. As threats went it was one of the more imaginative ones.
‘Yeah, whatever, Ramone,’ I said, sitting back in the hard metal chair and closing my eyes, wondering how different life could have been if I’d played the cards I’d been handed better.
The thing was, before I’d ended up in here, I was a wealthy man. With the death of my family I’d inherited a sizeable amount of cash, and through shrewd investments over the years it had turned into several million. Not enough to put me in the super rich league, but financially speaking I’d been very comfortable. I hadn’t needed to be a soldier or a cop. I could have got a different job entirely, something outdoors, like a tour guide or a diving instructor, lived an uneventful life of contentment, maybe with a wife and kids. Sometimes when I was lying in my cell at night, listening to the shouts and sobs of my fellow prisoners from across the landing, I fantasized about this alternative life.
It never did me any good, but at least it was a useful escape from a grim reality.
The van did a sudden emergency stop and I was flung forward then backwards in the seat. I could hear the two guards in the front cursing, but then their tones changed.
‘Reverse! Reverse!’ yelled one of them.
The driver put the van into reverse but not before I heard the distinctive blast of a shotgun, and the vehicle immediately dropped on one side as a tyre was shot out.
We were being hijacked, which could only be because of one of us in the back. No one was interested in Wallace Burke. He’d been inside twenty years and was largely forgotten. And Ramone might have been a brutal killer but ultimately he was still small-time with no major organization to back him up.
Which only left me.
There were at least two hijackers and they were yelling orders to the guards as they came round the side of the van, passing directly below my window.
‘Open the fucking doors, or you’re dead! Now! Move! Move!’
The guards’ voices were muffled but I knew they’d be complying. Like all prison guards, they were unarmed, and therefore an easy target, although to attempt a hijacking in the middle of London like this, and less than a five-minute drive from hundreds of armed police, you had to be either highly reckless or highly professional. Either way, it didn’t bode well for me.
My hands were cuffed behind my back, palms outward in the ‘back to back’ position, which made it pretty much impossible for me to get out of them, but I tried anyway, scouring the floor for a pin, a paper clip, anything that could be used to pick the lock, knowing I had to do something, anything, that made me feel less helpless.
The back doors opened. My adrenalin flooded back as I wriggled in the cuffs.
‘Which one’s Ray Mason in?’ demanded one of the gunmen, close now.
‘The left cubicle at the end,’ replied the guard who’d spoken to me earlier.
‘Unlock it. Now. Move!’
I could hear the guard put his key in the lock, and I knew I had only seconds to live, that this had been their plan all along. Stage the riot, make sure I was transferred, and then take me down en route. It showed the power of the people who wanted me dead.
But I wasn’t going to die quietly.
The cubicle door opened. I braced myself for the inevitable shot, but it didn’t come. I couldn’t quite see the gunman but his arms and the shotgun were just in view, pointed at the guard. Smoke was still coming from the barrel from when he’d shot out the tyre.
‘Get him out of there,’ the gunman ordered. ‘Fast, or I’ll kneecap you.’
The accent was local, my guess belonging to a white man in his forties, and from the way he was holding the gun he definitely had a firearms background. A pro. I knew that if they’d wanted to kill me here they’d have done it already. Which meant they were taking me somewhere, and that was an even worse prospect.
The guard didn’t look at me as he came into the cubicle, unclipped my seatbelt and pulled me to my feet. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t help.’
‘It’s OK,’ I told him as he pushed me out into the corridor and I saw the gunman for the first time. He was wearing jeans, trainers and a bomber jacket, his face covered by a balaclava, and he held a Remington automatic shotgun in his gloved hands.
‘All right, bring him out fast,’ demanded the gunman, retreating out of the van while still keeping his weapon trained on me.
Behind him, I could see the second gunman. He had a pistol pressed into the back of the other guard.
The lead gunman got out of the way as I climbed down the steps
