bound to notice any unusual noise, so I think I’ll be safe enough.” He paused for a moment. “But if you could keep a car or two, or maybe an ARV, in the vicinity until I call you afterward, I’d appreciate it. Just in case I’ve read it completely wrong and I do need to call the cavalry.”
“No problem. Give me the address and the time.”
Bronson read from the brief notes he’d made during his earlier conversation.
“Right,” he finished, “I’ll talk to you later today, once I leave the meeting. And it might be worth checking out who owns or rents that property.”
“Already doing it,” Curtis replied.
Ten minutes before the time specified, Bronson parked his Ford in a neighboring street, checked that the Llama was secure in his pocket and fully loaded, then climbed out of the car and walked along to the address he’d been given.
He was still about twenty yards away when the door of a dark gray Vauxhall saloon car swung open in front of him and John Eaton leaned out.
“Hop in, Chris, we’re going for a ride,” he said.
Bronson stared at him for a moment.
“I thought we were meeting in that house,” he replied, pointing up the street.
Eaton shook his head. “No. Georg picked that address at random, just to provide a location where we could meet you. The meet’s a couple of miles from here.”
Bronson nodded. “Right. Well, no offense, John, but I’m not getting in the car with you, not after what happened at the warehouse. My car’s parked about a hundred yards away. I’ll go and get it, and then I’ll follow you.”
“Mike said you had to be in this car.”
“You really think I give a toss what Mike says? No way am I getting in that car. You want me at a meeting, I’ll drive there myself. If you don’t like that, I’m walking away right now.”
Eaton nodded in resignation. “Okay, if that’s the way you want it. I’ll stay here. What kind of car is it?”
“Blue Ford Focus, on a fifty-seven plate,” Bronson told him. “I’ll be no more than five minutes.”
As soon as Bronson turned the corner and knew he was out of sight of Eaton’s car, he pulled out his phone and called Curtis.
“Really quick,” he said. “Forget that address because it’s nothing to do with the group. They just picked it as a location for me to get to. I’m going to get my car and follow John Eaton to the actual site for the meeting. You’ve still got the GPS tracker on the Ford?”
“Yes, and I know that it’s working.”
“Good. Make sure you keep an eye on my position, and keep an ARV close behind me. And if I call this number but don’t say anything, it’ll be because it’s all turning to rat shit and I need help, fast.”
Bronson reached the Ford, unlocked it and dropped into the driver’s seat.
“Right. I’m in the car and about to move off. Talk to you later.”
“I hope so. I really hope so.”
13
22 July 2012
Eaton’s estimate of a couple of miles wasn’t too far out. Bronson followed about fifty yards behind the Vauxhall as Eaton threaded his way through the afternoon traffic. Their route was toward the east, through districts Bronson had never visited before, moving steadily away from the congestion of the city and deeper into the suburbs.
Eventually, Eaton turned into another small industrial estate-the group was obviously fairly consistent in its choice of rendezvous locations-and pulled up outside a unit that either had been abandoned early in the life of the estate or had simply never been used at all. It was impossible to tell which, and it really didn’t matter.
Bronson pulled the car into a parking space on the cracked concrete forecourt of the unit. Grass and stunted weeds sprouted from the cracks, evidence of the time that had passed since the unit had last been occupied, by either builders or tenants. He climbed out of the vehicle and locked the doors. The GPS tracker unit, he knew, was powered directly from the battery, and had its own independent battery pack as a backup, so now that he had finally stopped moving, he assumed Curtis would already have passed his position to the crew of the Armed Response Vehicle he hoped had been tasked to follow him. He realized there were rather a lot of assumptions in his situation, and absolutely nothing he could do about any of them.
There were already half a dozen other cars occupying slots on the unit’s forecourt, but as the commercial premises next door had a full car park, Bronson wondered if the vacant lot was simply used as an overflow car park by the people who worked there. Whatever the case, the presence of so many cars was a comfort, because that meant there had to be a number of people in the vicinity-inconvenient witnesses if the group intended to do him any harm.
The structure was typical of many small industrial units. There was a small door on the right-hand side beside a large window, perhaps intended for a receptionist, while the majority of the front of the building was occupied by a wide metal roller-shutter door, the opening big enough to allow a small truck to enter. The paint on both doors was faded white and peeling, and the window beside the office entrance was cracked in one corner. The whole building exuded an air of dereliction.
About halfway down the side wall of the building was another door, dark gray this time, already standing open, and Bronson spotted a set of keys in the lock. He took a last glance behind him, then followed Eaton inside and found himself in a short corridor with three doors-one at the end, which presumably led to the main open area of the unit, and the others on either side of the corridor, both of which obviously opened into internal offices. Bronson followed Eaton into the office on his left, and wasn’t entirely surprised to see Mike leaning against the far wall, naked hostility radiating from him, and Georg sitting quite comfortably in the only chair in the room.
Georg glanced round the empty office. “I would ask you to sit down, but the facilities here are a little limited, so I’m afraid you’ll have to stand. But this won’t take long.”
Bronson nodded, and mirrored Mike’s pose, leaning against the wall beside the door.
“You bother me, Bronson,” Georg began, “precisely because you used to be in the army and then, as we found out later, served as a police officer. The kind of people who follow that career path tend to have clear and rigid ideas about right and wrong. When John Eaton first told me about you, I was prepared to bet that you were working undercover, trying to infiltrate our organization, simply because you told him you’d been in the army. I assumed that your talk of vandalizing sites to do with the London Olympic Games was just a smokescreen, boastful bravado to hide your true purpose.”
Bronson shrugged, uncomfortably aware of the accuracy of Georg’s analysis.
“Not everyone in the army has a ‘clear and rigid’ concept of what’s right or wrong,” he replied, “and bent coppers aren’t exactly a rarity.”
“I know. And I saw the way you attacked that bulldozer. I watched the two videos-the one my man took and the one shown on Sky. It looked to me as if you were enjoying yourself, and you clearly did a good job on it, maybe even wrote it off, in fact. The way you did that didn’t seem like you were an undercover cop trying to establish some credibility. There seemed to be real rage in what you did.”
“I still don’t trust the bastard,” Mike growled from his perch against the wall.
“Shut up,” Georg snapped, without even turning round, then turned his attention back to Bronson. “That, and the fact that you’re walking around with an unlicensed pistol in your pocket, could mean that you’re exactly who you say you are. But there’s still a nagging doubt in my mind.”
Bronson shrugged again. “That’s your problem, not mine. You don’t like me, you don’t want me around, just say the word and I’ll walk.”
He took a couple of steps forward, then turned toward the door.
“I didn’t say that,” Georg murmured. “You still have the potential to be very useful to us. You’ve only recently left the police, so you’ll know the kind of operations they’d be likely to mount against us. Information like that could be very valuable, and we’d pay well for it.”
