Dead if You Don’t

96

Sunday 13 August

16.00–17.00

Number 26, bearing a large name board, CABURN HEATING & PLUMBING SERVICES, was one of thirty-six similar units on the Ranscombe Farm Industrial Estate, two miles east of the county town of Lewes. All were constructed from galvanized steel, with both the office and the main up-and-over shuttered doors to the interior workspace painted in yellow.

Most of the businesses on the estate were closed for the weekend, their parking bays deserted, but there were two vehicles outside Number 26: a small, grey Hyundai saloon and a blue van bearing the name of the fictitious plumbing firm.

The front door opened into an office that was completely bare, apart from a few unopened circulars scattered on the floor beneath the letter box. A connecting door led into the 2,000-square-foot factory floor, where Ylli Prek and Luka Lebedev stood behind several sturdy metal tables that were linked together into an E-shape. The surfaces were cluttered with tools, opaque jars, reels of wire, the innards of mobile phones, a set of scales, a bottle of water, a gas cylinder and a Sony FS7 camera, similar to the one Prek had taken to the Amex yesterday.

The only other items of furniture in the cavernous space were two chairs, which looked as if they’d been retrieved from a skip, and a rack of Dexion shelving on which stood several jars of chemicals marked with danger symbols. There was also a small fridge, a kettle, a cluster of mugs and a catering-size tin of coffee. Beyond the end of the shelves was a kitchen sink and tap, and an open door to a toilet.

Lebedev, a shaven-headed, bull-necked man of forty, wearing a boiler suit, had a barbed-wire tattoo across his forehead, above a tiny skull, and a teardrop tattoo below his left eye. On his forearms were several dagger tattoos. At this moment, with a smouldering roll-up in his mouth, he was prising the back off a Samsung phone. When he had done that, he picked up a tiny ball, no bigger than a pea, of PE4 plastic explosive, and rolled it between his finger and thumb. ‘You have to be careful with this stuff, Ylli. If I drop this—’ He shrugged, gave a wan smile, then made a cut-throat gesture with his right hand.

‘That’s enough to kill us?’ Prek responded, incredulous.

‘You want to see what it can do — just this little amount?’

‘OK,’ Prek said, warily.

Lebedev placed the ball inside the phone and pressed the back on, fiddling with it until it clicked home. Then he walked over to the far end of the room and put it on the floor. ‘Ready?’

Prek nodded.

Lebedev handed him a pair of ear defenders. ‘Put them on.’

Prek did as he was instructed, and Lebedev donned a similar pair. Then he handed Prek a pair of protective goggles and also put on a pair himself.

‘Ready?’ he asked again.

Prek nodded, unsure what was about to happen.

Lebedev picked up a mobile phone from the table and a torn-off sheet of notepaper on which was what looked like a phone number. ‘Put these numbers into the phone.’

Frowning, Prek entered them.

‘Good,’ Lebedev said. ‘Now send a message to this number.’

‘What message?’

‘Anything you like. Do you want to have sex with me? How is your leg healing? Where do badgers live? Happy birthday!’ He shrugged. ‘Anything.’

Prek typed How is your day so far?

‘Now send it.’

He sent it.

Nothing happened.

‘Send it again!’ Lebedev commanded.

He resent it. Still nothing happened.

‘Now again!’

He hit the send symbol.

Almost instantly there was a brilliant flash at the far end of the room, a fraction of a second ahead of a massive bang that he heard even through the defenders.

Smiling, Lebedev removed his headset and strode over to the end of the room, where there was now a pall of smoke curling upwards and a stench of burnt plastic. The phone was gone, leaving a sizeable indent, a metre across, in the concrete floor. He summoned his colleague.

Prek joined him and stared in shock at the small crater, and at the tiny fragment of phone casing that Lebedev held in his hand, no more than a quarter of an inch square. ‘If you can find a bigger fragment of that phone than this, I buy you drink!’

Prek went down on his hands and knees for a short while, looking around. Lebedev was right, there was nothing left, just minute fragments.

‘So, you are impressed?’ Lebedev asked.

‘That is powerful stuff,’ the young Albanian said.

They returned to the tables, and Prek, in shock from what he had just seen, watched the bomb-maker resume his meticulous, intricate work.

Lebedev removed, bit by bit, the insides of the camera. When he was done, he began very carefully to pat into place, inside the camera casing, a kilo of the PE4 explosive, which he then methodically packed with nails and ball bearings, all the while talking Prek through the process.

‘PE4, when triggered, will detonate at a speed of 8,000 metres a second. You must be careful, Ylli, you know — as you have seen, this is so volatile it can be triggered very easily. Its power, just like the dummy camera packed with explosives that you left at the Amex yesterday, would be enough to kill over two hundred people within the immediate area — and injure many hundreds more.’

Prek already had his instructions from Mr Dervishi. At the next home game he was to place the camera bomb in a concealed location, depart from the grounds and detonate it remotely by text. Within an hour, Dervishi assured him, he would be on board a private jet from Brighton City Airport that would take him back to Albania, with enough money to live comfortably for the next decade. At his young age of twenty-three, that felt to Prek like forever.

Not to mention a far preferable option than being fed to a crocodile.

‘We use a new phone,’ Luka Lebedev said. ‘No one has the number, no risk of an accidental text.’ He smiled, revealing a row of metal teeth, then placed the small Nokia inside the shell of the camera, pushing it hard against the sticky explosive until it was wedged in place. He pointed his finger at a yellow Post-It note stuck to the table surface. ‘The phone number, Ylli. Try it, send a text from your phone!’

Prek looked at him dubiously.

‘Go on, you are afraid?’

‘The bomb is primed?’

The bomb-maker shook his head. He pointed at two separate wires inside the camera, just behind the lens, each of them sealed at the end with insulating tape. ‘Just try, test it!’

Nervously, Prek took out his phone, looked down at the numbers, then tapped them in, slowly. When he was done, he looked again at Lebedev. ‘You sure this is safe? We are not going to blow ourselves up?’

Lebedev tapped his chest. ‘Do I look like a guy who wants to blow himself up? Send it. Send a message!’

Prek typed out, How’s your day so far?

He hesitated again.

‘What’s your problem, Ylli? You don’t trust me?’

‘No, sure I trust you.’

‘So, do it!’