Silent Weapon Page 11

  ‘Dave called the hospital and they confirmed Ste was at work,’ Wolston added.

  This neatly passed the buck to Dave, who was sitting at the kitchen table tapping away at one of the laptops.

  He glanced up. ‘And he slipped home,’ he said. ‘Whipps Cross University Hospital is a fifteen-minute walk from here. He could be here and back in a regular break and no one would notice. Guys, glitches happen in the best operations – like operatives forgetting key names in cover stories, Mitra. Fact is, we’ve accomplished phase one, bugs in place in both flats, and we’ve already achieved useful int. Confirmation that Zara has returned home, and I’ve sent off images of Ste for pattern matching with Hammond. Now, brew up and kit up because phase two’s going to be a lot harder.’

  ‘Here. Let me.’ Wolston took the kettle and started to fill it from the tap. It was a cosy, domestic gesture that Sean also recognized as a way of saying sorry.

  ‘Cheers.’

  He still couldn’t get Ste’s black eye out of his mind. Hammond hadn’t killed Bright himself, but he had been one of the party. If Ste was Hammond, then they were getting somewhere close.

  The feeling that he might have been within a few feet of one of the gunmen, and the guy hadn’t suspected, was a real kick.

  In his pocket his phone buzzed with a text.

  Jst wok up.

  He shot a resentful look at the time. He had been up for four hours already, with not much sleep before that. And he wasn’t exactly well rested from his short nap on the flight home. In fact, he hadn’t had a decent lie-in for the last six months, and he wasn’t expecting one any time soon. Recently it had been thoughts of Tenerife that kept him going. Now he was just flying on fumes.

  Gng 2 treet mself to a spa now.

  Have a luvly time wiv ur m8s.

  ‘No probs, Mum,’ he muttered.

  Ten minutes later Sean and Mitra were back outside. Like Dave said, this would be the hard bit.

  Wolston and Dave would maintain constant surveillance from the OP, with telescopic lenses trained on the flats of Emma and Zara, and with the feed from the bugs. Sean and Mitra were back in their normal mufti. They had an estate to patrol and an unknown target to identify.

  MI5 still thought the best bet was a weapons factory, though Sean couldn’t tie that in with whatever Girl X and Zara had been doing in Nigeria, and he knew Dave couldn’t, either. But MI5 had to start with some kind of assumption, so it went with the most likely explanation and hoped that the facts would help it make sense.

  Dave had shown them pictures of the kind of thing they were looking for. Plastic tubs full of powder you wouldn’t associate with explosives, like pepper or chapatti flour. And more obvious chemical contents like hydrogen peroxide. Any kind of powder, Dave said, was an explosive accelerant – the millions of small particles meant that it had many times more surface area than a solid lump of material the same size. Which gave it millions of times more exposure to the oxygen in the air – the stuff that actually caught fire and burned.

  Or it might not be explosives. They could be laying up firearms for a strike on the Summit, or on one of the leaders. But firearms also use explosives – the propellant in each cartridge that goes bang as it pushes the pointy bit out of the barrel.

  And you fight science with science. The detectors in their pockets were constantly sniffing the atmosphere and comparing what they picked up against a database of substances that was held on a card plugged into the gadget. Which probably didn’t include chapatti flour, but did include a lot of other stuff with chemical markers linked to drugs or explosives. At the moment the cards were for picking up explosives only – somewhere like Littern Mills, Dave reckoned (and Sean agreed), they would pick up drugs left, right and centre, and MI5 had more important things to worry about. Readouts were synced by Bluetooth to their real phones, so they could check for readings while apparently updating their Facebook status. And any matches would generate a text, so it would look like Sean’s mum was sending another happy little message, when in fact it was telling him: Potassium chlorate within 50 metres.

  But that fifty-metre thing was the key. You had to be near the location, and the only way to do that was to walk there. The cool gear – the digital sniffer, the earpieces, the hidden mikes – had a James Bond feel to it, until you remembered you never saw James Bond wearing his soles down doing legwork: 007 would head for the nearest nightclub, pick up a beautiful woman, shag the answers out of her, and go off and get the bad guys. Sean and Mitra had to do it the hard way, by patrolling.

  Dave had been full of advice on how to do that too:

  ‘You walk like you belong here. So you’re going down this alleyway – well, why the fuck shouldn’t you? It’s your alleyway. You’ve got a purpose. Anyone eyeballs you, you eyeball them back – like, What the fuck are you looking at? Or, All right? Whichever works best in the context. But the key thing is, you engage. You’ll be noticed if you’re trying hard not to be there, but if you obviously don’t give a toss about being noticed, that disarms suspicion.

  ‘And never explain, never justify, never apologize. Whatever you’re doing, you follow it through. It’s continuity of action. I had a team mate who found himself accidentally turning down a dead end in the backstreets of Belfast that was overlooked by several apartments, and just to make it really interesting there were a lot of people watching him. Players on the ground, and nosy old biddies in the flats above. If he just went, Oh, whoops, and came out again, they’d know he wasn’t local. But if he was local, he’d know it was a dead end and he wouldn’t go down there in the first place. So what did he do?’

  ‘Developed spider powers and climbed out?’ Mitra had suggested, and got a sharp glare in response.

  ‘He went down to the end, whipped out his willy and pretended to take a slash in the corner. Then he gave it a shake and zipped up and walked back out again. Believe it or not, he couldn’t actually take a leak under the circumstances, but no one was close enough to see that, and he went through every motion of it. His body language was one hundred per cent consistent. And for the icing on the cake, just in case there was any doubt, as he left he put on this kind of sheepish, apologetic grin for the fan club in the apartments up top. Because no one’s going to feel their heart warming for a stranger who just took a piss outside their window, but big eyes and a shy grin will get you a long way.

  ‘Now, take plenty of water because it’s going to be hot out there. And you never know when you might need to take an emergency leak.’

  ‘That’s Sean needing a code,’ Sean said. ‘Gate number CT53.’

  ‘Roger,’ said Wolston’s voice in his ear. ‘Stand by.’

  Sean stood in front of a grilled gate. On the other side, concrete stairs led down into welcome, cool darkness. The gate didn’t use to be there but he was expecting it. He had already checked out the sublevels of Gladstone, and that had been the same. Now he had moved on to Cottingham, between Gladstone and Wolsey.

  They had divided their duties, so as to cover the estate as quickly as possible. Their basic task was to get one of the detectors into every single nook and cranny available. Mitra took the balconies and the shopping units. And because he knew them like the back of his hand, Sean descended into the under-levels of the estate – the maze of corridors and damp concrete chambers that ran beneath the squares and linked up the basements of the towers.

  After that, if there was no luck, they would transfer their attention to the low-rise apartments that encircled the three squares and their towers.

  Now Sean leaned casually against the wall, in the shade of the overhang, and waited for Wolston to pull the code from the database on the laptop. Dave’s briefing about acting like you belonged hadn’t really been necessary. Sean knew exactly how to act around Littern Mills.

  And there weren’t many folks around to take offence at his presence. Heat lay over the estate like a blanket. The air above the concrete square shimmered. They were in the middle of a busy city, but
somehow everything felt still. Even the steady background noise of traffic and planes seemed tired and worn out. The estate had always been especially shit in a hot summer, he thought.

  ‘Sean – double four, double seven.’

  Sean thumbed the figures into the keypad and the gate swung open under his fingertips.

  ‘Roger. That’s Sean, going underground.’

  Cool air breathed against his face as he stepped forward. At that exact moment his phone buzzed. He whipped it out as his heart pounded.

  But it was just his mum telling him that she was at a booth in Charing Cross Road for last-minute show tickets and couldn’t decide between matinees for Les Mis and Phantom, and what did he think?

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Mum,’ he muttered as he walked down the steps. The bars on his phone went dead and he put it back in his pocket. Reception down below had always been non-existent. MI5’s hidden mikes had the same problem – as long as he was down here, he was cut off from the OP. What mattered was that the detector and his phone were only inches apart and could still talk to each other via their short-range Bluetooth signal.

  Ceiling lights in thick plastic casings lit the corridor at the bottom with a yellow murk. The smells of piss and ganja were still soaked into the concrete. The walls had once been thick with Guyz graffiti. Now the tags and patterns of other gangs had been slapped down on top of them – most recently the Killaz. But even they were looking old now that the gates had come and only approved people could get down here. There had been some half-hearted efforts to clean it all off. Littern Mills must be on the way up, or trying.

  On Sean’s left, a couple of dark openings led deeper into the sublevels. On his right, solid, burglar-proof fire doors led into the basements of the shops. Some of them were jammed open to get a bit of airflow going. But even the closed ones weren’t airtight, so the detector would still notice if anything was behind them. All he had to do was walk from one end to the other and let technology do the rest.

  So he walked with the Guyz swagger, arms slightly bent, held away from his waist, hips swinging. He could hear voices, radios playing, and he had his patter already rehearsed in his head if anyone challenged him. He would be straight about what he was doing.

  All right, mate? Yeah – Sean Harker. Used to live here. How you doing? He would make sure to shake – most people will automatically take an outstretched hand. Nah, I was just checking out me old hangouts. Used to have some real times down here. It’s good to see someone’s actually looking after the old place now …

  The detector stayed silent, so Sean turned his attention to the side tunnels. At the entrance to the first one a sudden pang hit him right in the heart. He had been wondering if that would happen, but he hadn’t expected it to be so strong.

  It was a wide concrete cavern. A grille at the far end led to a vehicle ramp up to the surface. He breathed in through his nose. Yup, still there – a whiff of petrol and grease above the usual background pongs.

  He moved slowly into the space.

  Everything had been stripped out – the partitions, the workbenches, the gear. There was nothing to say that this had once been the best chopshop in the E17 postal area – the vehicle workshop of his mate Gaz Dobson’s dad. Five years older, Gaz had been like Sean’s big brother, and for most of his first sixteen years this place had been Sean’s second home. Everything Sean had ever known about cars he had learned down here. How to fix them. How to do them up. How to take them.

  And then it all went tits. First Gaz and his dad had got nicked on the same evening. Then Sean after them. Then Gaz had topped himself because his bail conditions said he could never work with motors again, and Mr Dobson had died of a broken heart, and Sean …

  He was surprised to find that he was blinking back tears.

  Sean had got out – into a world that actually offered hope and prospects.

  An official-looking notice in a plastic wallet was stuck to one of the pillars. Sean stuck his face up close to read the small print. London Borough of Waltham Forest … planning permission granted … conversion into a gym.

  He screwed his face up into a twisted smile. ‘Good thing they cremated you, Gaz, ’cos if you had a grave, you’d be spinning in it.’

  He took a final look around. The detector wasn’t detecting – he had no reason to be here and no reason ever to come back. There was a weapons factory to find, Bright’s killers to hunt down. He turned on his heel and walked back up the tunnel.

  It took the length of a staircase, bottom to top, for reception to come back to full strength, and Wolston was already there in his ear, urgent and impatient.

  ‘Sean, come in, Sean – for Christ’s sake answer, you moron …’

  It was the feeling you get on patrol when the leader suddenly holds up a hand. Sean was instantly alert, poised on his toes, not bridling at being called a moron. He’d had worse from NCOs.

  ‘That’s Sean back in touch.’

  ‘Get over to the park. Ravi is in a situation.’

  ‘The park …’ Sean blanked for a moment, then realized, Oh shit. He broke into a run. ‘That’s Sean, foxtrot at the double to, uh, the park.’

  ‘Foxtrot’ meant ‘walk’. Sean improvised his own ‘at the double’. And the park …

  The area at the centre of Littern Mills wasn’t called the jungle for nothing. It was meant to be a recreation area – a mixture of open spaces, and raised flowerbeds planted with overgrown bushes, and a children’s playground. But there were bits where even the children knew not to go on their own. It could be as deadly as any jungle in the wild.

  Sean’s heart sank as he followed the sound of raised voices. Oh shit oh shit oh shit …

  He recognized at once what had happened. He had done it to newcomers himself. Mitra had upset someone, or been pinged somehow, and this was the result.

  If the estate had actually had someone to look after the bushes, they would have been kept trim and probably about waist height – in other words, you could have looked over them. But they were taller than an average man, and you couldn’t see from one side of the flowerbeds to the other – just in front and behind, if you were wise enough to glance back. They turned the paths between them into a maze of trails. Trails where you could shake off pursuit or set ambushes: lure your prey in, corner them, box them in like the platoon had boxed in those Nigerian kids three days earlier. No way out, nowhere to run.

  But as he approached the voices – East London accents, sharp and accusing – Sean deliberately slowed down. He no longer ran. He strode. He braced himself, shoulders back, fists clenched, face like thunder as he swung round a corner into a brick and concrete garden.

  He clocked the scene immediately. Mitra in the middle, hands raised, trying hard to stay calm, surrounded by a group of skinny teenage kids whose body language was poised for imminent violence. About ten of them – which meant that he and Mitra, even with their combat skills, stood to lose if it went wrong. But things were halfway there anyway and Sean didn’t have a choice. Engage, take control of the situation. No handshaking here. Right.

  ‘That’s Sean going in,’ he said quietly.

  Then every face swung towards him as he bellowed: ‘The fuck is all this, then?’

  Sean pinged the leader as the one with his face in Mitra’s and an angry, accusing finger jabbing into Mitra’s chest. A zitty white kid, with arms and legs like four strands of spaghetti tied together, bulking himself out with a big hat and a sleeveless padded coat, despite the heat.

  The kid shot him a surprised look. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  Sean marched up to him without breaking step, and spoke in a way that made it clear he had an absolute right to an answer to his question. ‘I’m the fucker who’s asking who the fuck you are.’

  So far the opening pleasantries had gone pretty much as Sean expected. The rest of the gang held back, waiting to see what their leader would do.

  Sean and the kid stood chest to chest, though the top of the kid’s head barely
made it to Sean’s chin. The kid didn’t back off as Sean loomed over him. He reminded Sean of a bristling little terrier, all yap. But even a terrier could deliver a nasty nip.

  The kid grinned. ‘And I’m the one who’s got backup, and who’s getting pretty fucking tired of fucking snoopers—’

  And as he said snoopers, a knife flashed in his hand, the point aimed straight at Sean’s ribs.

  Chapter 17

  Thursday 3 August, 14:00 BST

  The knife was in the kid’s right hand. Sean waited half a second longer – until the kid’s right foot was also forward, so he had no more thrust to give.

  Then Sean cross-blocked, putting his forearms one over the other and driving them down on top of the kid’s knife arm. It redirected the stab downwards and away from Sean’s body. The kid’s momentum kept him going and he stumbled forward. His arm ran between Sean’s forearms. Sean grabbed him with both hands, just below his wrist, and simultaneously twisted and pushed. He stepped to one side and the kid’s arm rotated up behind him. The only way for him to move without having his shoulder dislocated was down. The kid howled and sank to his knees.

  The rest of the pack were frozen. They didn’t quite know whether to defend their alpha male, or watch him get his arm torn off while they sucked up to the new one. If Sean wanted to take over the gang – humiliate the leader and install himself as the new pack alpha – this would have been the moment. It was only a small step from where he was to going down on his own knees, which would have driven the kid flat on his face on the ground.

  But Sean didn’t want to take over, and he wanted to leave the guy some dignity. The knife fell out of the kid’s grip, so Sean simultaneously let him go and grabbed the knife by the hilt. He stepped back smartly, to let the kid get up in his own time.

  ‘Nice move,’ he said, though it hadn’t been – it had been about as obvious as you can get. ‘Your mistake was getting too over-committed with the thrust. Once you’re out like that, you’ve nowhere else to go and you give the other guy an opening.’