explosive, you blow the whistle and get out. Understood?”
“You’ve got it,” Bronson agreed, and ended the call.
He sat in thought for a couple of minutes, then took a different mobile phone from the glovebox, inserted the battery and dialed another number, one he knew from memory.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Angela; it’s me.”
“I’ve been trying to call you, but your mobile is permanently switched off. Where are you?”
“Sorry, it’s a long story. The short version is that I’ve had to go undercover, and that means no phone calls to anyone who could identify me. I’m taking a risk calling you now, but I wanted to tell you what was going on.”
“I thought you were just going up to London to be an extra body in the run-up to the Olympics.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Bronson replied, “but I was completely wrong. I can’t go into any detail, but it does actually have something to do with the Games. Anyway, I’m stuck with it for the moment, but with any luck I might be finished in a few days, maybe a week at the most, because the timescale’s really tight.”
“I suppose this means that I won’t be seeing you for a while?”
“Not until this is over, no.”
Angela was silent for a few moments, then Bronson heard a deep sigh.
“Well, just be careful,” she said, then rang off.
Bronson switched off the mobile and removed the battery, replacing the unit in the glovebox.
He didn’t like to think what his former wife would say if she knew he was sitting in a car with a loaded-and completely illegal-pistol in his pocket, waiting to be summoned by a gang of putative terrorists to join them in engaging in some serious vandalism in London.
But he didn’t think she’d be too happy with the idea.
7
20 July 2012
He got the call he was expecting at ten minutes past six, and the man who phoned him-Bronson thought it was probably John Eaton, but he couldn’t be sure-simply gave him a time and a place, and then rang off.
Fifty minutes later, Bronson parked his Ford in one of the side streets close to the West Ham Cemetery. The street was quiet and largely deserted-parked cars occupied most of the available spaces, but very few people were visible. Lights were on in the majority of the houses that lined both sides of the road.
He was sure that nobody had followed him to the rendezvous, but he still sat in the car for almost five minutes, checking his surroundings. Reassured, he took out the Llama pistol, dropped the magazine out of the weapon, unloaded it and then reloaded it with its maximum load of ten rounds of ammunition. He left the box of cartridges in the glovebox, because if he needed more than ten bullets he reckoned he was going to be dead anyway. Then he clicked the magazine back into place. He was very aware that semi-automatic pistols, unlike revolvers, are prone to jamming, and that the commonest reason for a stoppage is a cartridge not feeding properly into the breech from the top of the magazine. Unloading it allows the magazine spring to fully extend, and many people believe that that helps to reduce the possibility of a misfeed.
Then he bent forward and slid the pistol under the driver’s seat of the car, because at that moment he’d had a change of heart, deciding it would not be wise to carry a weapon, not to that meeting.
His logic was simple enough: if Eaton and his cronies were still unsure about him, it was likely that he might be searched, just in case he was wearing a wire or another type of recording device. And the last thing he wanted was for any members of the group to discover that he had a weapon. That was his ace in the hole.
Bronson opened the door, stepped out onto the pavement and glanced around him; nothing he saw or heard gave him even the slightest twinge of concern. He took out his A to Z of London, located the street he was standing in, and where he needed to get to, which was literally just around the corner, memorized the layout of the immediate area, and slipped the book back into his pocket.
The rendezvous was another pub, the Lamb and Flag, but this time Bronson had been instructed to wait in the car park behind the pub, rather than go into the building. He could, of course, have parked his Ford in the car park, but he was concerned about being boxed in if he did so, not to mention one of the group somehow being able to trace the Ford’s registered owner. So he’d decided that his best option was to leave the car nearby instead.
He was also unsure about who he would be meeting but, because he’d been told to wait outside the building, he guessed the pub was just a first point of contact, and that he would be given further directions by whichever members of the group were there.
As he turned the corner, he spotted the pub on the right-hand side of the street, about seventy yards in front of him, and slowed his pace slightly. This road was noticeably busier-cars and vans driving along it, pedestrians walking along the pavements and milling across the street. Several people were clustered outside the front of the public house, sitting at the handful of metal tables or just leaning against the wall of the building, almost all of them smoking furiously.
He waited until the traffic flow eased and then crossed the road so that he could walk past the building on the opposite side of the street as a final reconnaissance, not that he expected to learn anything from doing so-it was just a pub, significant only because of the man, or perhaps the men, he was supposed to be meeting there-but this served as a final check, a last reconnoiter.
The pub looked as if it dated from the early part of the twentieth century, the lower half of the structure built from red brick, some parts of which needed re-pointing quite badly, while the upper story had been rendered and painted. Originally it had obviously been white or maybe magnolia, but the years had not been kind, and several sections of the render had fallen off to expose poor-quality masonry underneath, while the paintwork that remained was faded and discolored. It had the appearance of a building that nobody loved, or even liked very much, but the truth was probably simpler: the important thing about a pub was the location and the interior, the ambience, the food, and the quality and price of the drinks it served, not what the exterior looked like. And judging by the number of people Bronson could see inside through the windows, as well as those he’d already noticed standing outside, this pub was popular.
Bronson walked about fifty yards beyond the public house, waited for another gap in the traffic and then crossed back to the opposite side of the street to retrace his steps. He walked past the main entrance and turned left down the roadway that led to the car park.
Almost as soon as he left the street, the sounds of traffic faded, replaced by the buzz of dozens of separate conversations that floated out through the pub’s open windows, voices rising and falling, and punctuated by the occasional shout of surprise or burst of laughter. All very comforting and normal.
The car park at the back of the building was, in fact, more like an area of waste ground. There were no parking bays or markings, and the dozen or so cars left there had been positioned around the perimeter, allowing just enough room for each to maneuver and get back to the road when the owner returned to the vehicle.
Bronson walked slowly, checking the interior of each car as he did so, but they were all empty. Whoever had been sent by the group to meet him had yet to arrive. He glanced back down the access road, but nobody was visible.
At that moment, he heard the sound of an engine and glanced round to see a white Transit van driving down the access road. He moved over to one side of the parking area and watched as the vehicle braked to a halt a few feet away from him.
The passenger door swung open and John Eaton climbed out, a kind of wand with a circular sensor in his hand. He nodded to Bronson and beckoned him to walk over toward the van.
“Sorry about this, Alex,” he said, sounding not the least bit contrite, “but we still don’t really know you, so I have to do this. Orders,” he added briefly.
“What, you think I’m carrying a weapon?” Bronson asked.
Eaton shrugged. “Maybe,” he replied, “but actually Mike is far more worried that you might be wired for sound. He still thinks you could be a cop.”
“If he really thinks that,” Bronson snapped, deciding that going on the offensive was probably his best option, “why doesn’t he just tell me to get lost?”
