At Risk

14

L iz arrived at her desk at 8:30 to discover a switchboard message to contact Zander as a matter of urgency. Glancing at the FBI mug, wondering whether there would be a queue for the kettle, she flicked on her computer and pulled down Frankie Ferris’s encrypted file. The number he had left for her was that of a public call box in Chelmsford, and he had asked her to ring on the hour until he answered.

She rang at 9:00. He picked up on the first ring.

“Can you talk?” Liz asked, lining up a pencil and pad.

“For the moment, yeah. I’m in a multi-storey. But if I hang up, you’ll… The thing of it is, someone got done on the pick-up.”

“Someone got killed?”

“Yeah. Last night. I don’t know where, and I don’t know the details, but I think it was a shooting. Eastman’s gone completely off his head, ranting on about raghead this and Paki that and all sorts…”

“Just keep to the point, Frankie. Start at the beginning. Is this something you’ve been told, or were you in Eastman’s office, or what?”

“I went into the office first thing. It’s on the Writtle estate, which-”

“Just tell me the story, Frankie.”

“Yeah, well, I ran into Ken Purkiss, that’s Eastman’s storeman. He says not to go up, everything’s come on top, the boss is like totally off his…”

“Because someone’s been killed on a pick-up?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know what sort of pick-up?”

“No.”

“Did he say where it happened?”

“No, but I’d guess that headland place, wherever that was. What he said, according to Ken, was that he’d told the Krauts they were overloading the network. Something about when their problems ended, his begun. And all the stuff about Pakis and that.”

“So did you speak to Eastman yourself?”

“No, I took Ken’s advice and slung it. I’m supposed to see him later.”

“Why are you telling me all this, Frankie?” Liz asked, although she knew the answer. Frankie was covering his back. If Eastman was going down, as well he might if there was a murder hunt, Frankie didn’t want to go down with him. He wanted to be in a position to make a deal while he still had a few cards in his hands, rather than from a police cell. If Eastman wriggled his way out of the charge, on the other hand, he still wanted to go on working for him.

“I want to help you,” said Frankie, his tone injured.

“Have you spoken to Morrison?”

“I’m not speaking to that bastard. It’s you and me or the deal’s off.”

“There’s no deal on, Frankie,” said Liz patiently. “If you have information relating to a murder you must inform the police.”

“I don’t know anything that’d stand up,” protested Frankie. “Only what I told you, and that’s all hearsay.”

He paused.

Liz said nothing. Waited.

“I s’pose I could…”

“Go on.”

“I could… see what I can find out. If you like.”

Liz considered her options. She didn’t want to step on Essex Special Branch’s toes, but Frankie did seem adamant about not speaking to Morrison. And she would bounce the information straight back to them. “How do I contact you?” she asked eventually.

“Give me a number. I’ll call you.”

Liz did so, and the phone went dead. She stared at her scribbled notes. Germans. Arabs. Pakistanis. The network overloaded. Was this a drugs story? It certainly sounded like one. Drugs were Melvin Eastman’s game. His stock-in-trade, so to speak. But then a lot of the drugs people had moved into people-smuggling. Economic migrants brought in from China, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East in return for fat wads of hard currency. Hard to resist when you’d got your border guards bribed and a good shipment line up and running.

But Eastman, as far as Liz was aware, had no Asian operation. He wasn’t the type. He knew his limits, and competing with the Afghans and the Kosovars and the Chinese Snake-heads was a very long way out of his league. When all was said and done, Melvin Eastman was basically an East London wide-boy who imported Class A drugs from Amsterdam and distributed them in Essex and East Anglia. Bought wholesale and sold retail, with the Dutch taking the decisions about shipment and volume. It was a local operation-a franchise, effectively-and the Dutch were running at least half a dozen just like it up and down the UK.

So what business could Eastman have been doing with Germans and Arabs and Pakistanis? Who had been killed? And most vitally of all, was there a terror connection?

Still staring at her notes, Liz picked up her phone and rang the Essex Special Branch office in Chelmsford. Identifying herself by means of her counter-terrorism team code, she asked if any reports of a homicide had come in that morning.

There was a short silence, the faint clicking of a keyboard, and she was put through to the duty officer.

“Nothing,” the officer said. “Nothing at all. We had a report of a firearm discharged outside a nightclub in Braintree last night, but… Hang on a minute, someone’s trying to tell me something.”

There was a short silence.

“Norfolk,” he said a few seconds later. “Apparently Norfolk had a homicide early this morning, but we haven’t got any details.”

“Thanks.” She punched out the number for Norfolk Special Branch.

“We’ve had a shooting,” confirmed the duty officer in Norwich. “Fakenham. Discovered at six thirty this morning. The location’s the toilet block of the Fairmile transport café and all-night lorry park, and the victim’s a local fisherman named Ray Gunter. Crime are on the case but we’ve got a man down there because there was a query on the weapon used.”

“What sort of query?”

“Ballistics identified the round as…” there was the sound of papers being shuffled, “7.62 millimetre armour-piercing.”

“Thanks,” said Liz, noting down the calibre. “What’s the name of your bloke down there?”

“Steve Goss. Want his number?”

“Please.”

He gave it to her and she broke the connection. For some minutes she stared at her notes. She was no expert, but she had been around firearms long enough to know that 7.62 calibre weapons were usually military or ex-military rifles. The Kalashnikov was a 7.62, as was the old British Army SLR. Perfect for the battlefield, but a pretty unwieldy choice for close-quarter murder. And an armour-piercing round? What was that all about?

She turned the facts around in her mind. Whichever way she combined them they looked bad. Dutifully, but with a sense of pointlessness, she rang Bob Morrison. Once again the Special Branch officer rang her back from a public phone, but this time the reception was better. He had heard about the killing at the transport café, he said, but not in any detail. He had never heard of the victim, Ray Gunter.

Liz repeated what Ferris had told her. Morrison’s responses were curt, and she sensed his acute resentment that his source, however supposedly useless, had cut him out of the loop and was now reporting to her.

“Zander says that Eastman was livid,” she told him. “Shouting about Pakis and ragheads and networks being overloaded.”

“I’d be livid if I was Eastman. The last thing he wants is trouble on his patch.”

“Is Norfolk on his patch?”

“It’s on the edge of it, yeah.”

“I’m sending you the details of Zander’s call, OK?”

“Yeah, sure. Like I said, I don’t believe a word the little toerag says, but do by all means nod the stuff over if you like.”

“On its way,” said Liz, and hung up.

Would he forward the conversation to the Norfolk Special Branch? she wondered. He certainly ought to. But he might just sit on it out of sheer bloody-mindedness. It would be a way of putting her-Liz-in her place, and if anyone asked questions afterwards he could claim that Zander was a compromised and unreliable source of intelligence.

The more Liz thought about it, the more certain she became that Morrison would say nothing. He was a jobsworth, a man whose entire life had become a bullying, nit-picking course of least resistance. The more valuable Frankie’s product proved to be, the worse he’d look for having mishandled him. He’d probably just bury the whole thing, which was fine by Liz, because when all was said and done it meant that she had more pieces of the jigsaw than anyone else. Which was how she liked it.

Pencil in hand, she stared at her notepad and its headings. What did they tell her? What was it reasonable to surmise? Something or someone had been brought in by sea from Germany, and “dropped off” at “the headland.” This activity related to Melvin Eastman’s operations, but was not one of them-indeed she had the impression that Eastman might well be being squeezed, that things were out of his control. A fisherman, meanwhile-a boat owner, presumably-had been found shot dead in a lorry park near the Norfolk coast. Shot dead with a weapon which, as things stood, looked as if it might have been military.

Reaching for her keyboard she called up an Ordnance Survey map with Fakenham at its centre. The town was about ten miles due south of Wells-next-the-Sea, which was on Norfolk’s long north coast. Wells was the biggest town for a good twenty miles along that northern coast-most of it seemed to be salt marshes and inlets, with a sprinkling of villages, wildfowl sanctuaries and large private estates. Lonely, sea-girt countryside, it looked. Probably a few coastguard stations and yacht clubs, but otherwise a perfect smuggler’s coast. And less than three hundred miles from the German ports. Slip out of Cuxhaven or Bremerhaven when the light began to fade, and you could be lying off one of those creeks under cover of the early-morning darkness thirty-six hours later.

Bremerhaven again. The place where the fake UK driver’s licence had been issued to Faraj Mansoor. Was there a connection? At the back of her mind, quiet but insistent, was Bruno Mackay’s report that one of the terrorist organisations was about to run an invisible against the UK.

Could Faraj Mansoor be the invisible? Unlikely-it would almost certainly be an Anglo-Saxon type. So who was Faraj Mansoor, and what was he doing in Bremerhaven buying a forged driver’s licence? Was he a UK citizen who’d been banned from driving and wanted a clean document? Bremerhaven was a known source of fake passports and other identity documents, and the fact that Mansoor wasn’t after a passport suggested that he didn’t need one, that he was already a UK citizen. Had anyone checked that?

Mansoor, she wrote, underlining the name. UK citizen?

Because if he wasn’t a UK citizen, then two things were possible. That he was coming into the UK on a fake passport that he had acquired from some other source at some other time. Or, more seriously, that he was coming into the UK in such a way that he didn’t need a passport. That he was someone whose entry had to remain unknown to the authorities. A senior ITS player, perhaps. A contact of Dawood al Safa, whose job in a Peshawar auto repair shop was a cover for terrorist activities. Someone who, whatever the state of his documentation, couldn’t risk passing a customs point.

Every instinct that Liz possessed-every sensibility that she had fine-tuned in a decade of security intelligence work-whispered to her of threat. Pressed, she would have had difficulty in defining these feelings, which related to the way that particles of information combined and took shape in her subconscious. She had, however, learned to trust them. Learned that certain configurations-however fractured, however dimly seen-were invariably malign.

Beneath the words Mansoor. UK citizen? she wrote, Still working at auto shop?

A methodical search of the north Norfolk coastline yielded a number of possible headlands. The most westward of these, Garton Head, jutted several hundred yards into the sea from the Stiffkey Marshes, while an unnamed but similarly sized projection nosed into Holkham Bay a dozen miles to the west. Both looked like navigable landfalls. A third possibility was a tiny finger of land reaching out into Brancaster Bay. The property was on the edge of a village named Marsh Creake, a couple of miles east of Brancaster.

She examined the three headlands again, and tried to look at the map with a smuggler’s eye. They were remarkably similar, in that each was a spit of land surrounded by mudflats. The Brancaster Bay headland, with its proximity to the village of Marsh Creake, was probably the least likely, as it appeared to have a large house on it. The sort of person who owned a property of that size was unlikely to allow it to be used for criminal activity. Unless, perhaps, the owner, or owners, were absentees. Impossible to tell by looking at a few inches of map on a flatscreen monitor. She’d have to check out the place on the ground.

Five minutes later she was sitting in Wetherby’s office and Wetherby was smiling his uneven smile. If you didn’t know him, she thought, you might think him a faintly donnish figure. A brogues and bicycle clips sort of man, more at home in some cloistered quadrangle than at the head of a high-tech counter-terrorism initiative. Facing him, but invisible to Liz, were two photographs in leather-look frames.

“What exactly do you think you would establish by going up there?” he asked her.

“At the very least I’d like to eliminate the possibility that there’s a terrorism angle,” said Liz. “The calibre of the weapon worries me, as it obviously does the Norfolk Special Branch, given that they’ve got a man sitting in on the investigation. My gut instinct, bearing in mind Zander’s call, is that Eastman’s had his organisation hijacked in some way.”

Wetherby rolled a dark green pencil thoughtfully between his fingers.

“Do the Special Branch know about Zander’s call?”

“I passed the information on to Bob Morrison in Essex-that’s Zander’s current handler-but there’s a good chance he’s going to sit on it.”

Wetherby nodded. “From our point of view, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing,” he said finally. “Not a bad thing at all. I think you should go up there, have a quiet word with the local Special Branch man-what’s his name?”

“Goss.”

“Have a quiet word with Goss, and see what’s what. Give the impression that you’re interested in the organised crime component, perhaps, and I’ll wait on your word. If you’re not happy I’ll speak to Fane and we’ll move on it straight away. If there isn’t anything there for us, on the other hand… well, it’ll give us something to talk about at the Monday morning meeting. You’re sure Zander isn’t just making the whole thing up?”

“No,” said Liz truthfully. “I’m not sure. He’s the attention-seeking type, and according to Bob Morrison is now gambling, so almost certainly has financial problems. He’s an unreliable agent at every level. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t speaking the truth on this occasion.” She hesitated. “It didn’t sound made up to me. He sounded scared stiff.”

“If that’s your judgement,” said Wetherby, returning the pencil to a stoneware jar that had once held Fortnum and Mason marmalade, “then I agree that you should go. Having said that, there’s only that 7.62 rifle round to suggest that the killing wasn’t the result of a falling-out between drug-dealers. Or a people-smuggling operation gone awry. Perhaps drug-smugglers have started carrying assault rifles. Perhaps Gunter was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and saw something he shouldn’t have.”

“I hope that’s what happened,” said Liz.

He nodded. “Keep me informed.”

“Don’t I always?”

He looked at her, smiled faintly, and turned away.