Echo of the Reich

11

21 July 2012

Bronson hadn’t put the pistol away, but he had sat down again, clicked the safety catch back on and lowered the weapon to his lap, keeping it within easy reach of his right hand.

“So who are you, exactly?” he asked.

“You don’t need to know that.”

“I do if I’m going to work with you.”

Georg shook his head. “We’re a long way from deciding that,” he said.

“Fine,” Bronson replied, and stood up. “Then I’ll go.”

Georg lifted a restraining hand. “No, not yet. I think you could be useful to us, but we have to be sure where your loyalties lie.”

“And how are you going to find that out?”

“There are ways,” Georg replied calmly. “But having a former policeman in the group makes sense. You know police tactics; you might even have friends on the force, people who could be persuaded to supply information that would be useful to us.”

Bronson laughed shortly. “You obviously know nothing about the way the police force works. For what I did, I became an instant pariah. None of the people I worked with would cross the street to piss on my head if my hair was on fire.”

“A colorful metaphor, but I understand what you mean. Still, your knowledge of police tactics and procedures could help us, especially when we put the last pieces in place. And we already know you’re handy with your fists.”

Georg glanced at the two men who’d grabbed Bronson when he walked into the office. One was still rubbing his jaw while the second sat on a chair in the corner, holding a handkerchief to his bleeding-and possibly broken-nose.

“I can take care of myself, yes.”

Georg looked at him for a few seconds, apparently considering. Then he nodded, as if he’d just come to a decision.

“Right, Bronson,” he said. “It’s not my decision, and obviously we’ll have to run a few checks on you, but my feeling is that you’re probably telling the truth.”

Bronson inclined his head, but didn’t respond.

“That pistol, for one thing, is a giveaway,” Georg continued. “If you were undercover and your masters had decided you should be armed, I’d expect you to be carrying a full-bore pistol, probably a Glock or perhaps a Walther, not some piece of Spanish crap that you picked up in a dodgy deal somewhere.”

“So if you don’t decide, who does?” Bronson asked. “You mean you take a vote on it, something like that?”

Georg shook his head. “No. Something much simpler, a kind of test that you’ll either pass or fail. You’ll find out later. For now you can go.”

Three minutes later, Bronson was sitting in the driving seat of his car and heading away from the industrial estate, back toward London.

Once he was sure nobody was following him, he turned off down a side road, looking for a quiet spot where he could park up for a few minutes. He found it in the form of a roadside pub that had just opened for business, and which had a large car park, already half full of parked vehicles. He slid the Ford into a space at the far end, where he had a good view of the road, then opened the glovebox and took out his mobile phone.

Curtis answered on the second ring.

“Hello?”

“Yes, but it bloody nearly wasn’t,” Bronson snapped. “What the hell happened with that news broadcast on Sky? That could have killed me.”

“I’m really sorry about that. The first we knew was when somebody here saw it-in the canteen, actually. We checked with Sky immediately. It turned out that the owner of the equipment yard where you had your bit of fun last night made two recordings. He gave one to the local police station and sent the other to them. They ran it first for what it was-footage of two unidentified men doing a bit of damage to a bulldozer. But then one of your former colleagues from Tunbridge Wells rang the station and identified you. Sky checked him out, and then ran the revised footage once they were satisfied that he did know who you were. You must have really pissed off somebody down there, Chris.”

Sitting in his car, Bronson nodded. He knew exactly who it must have been. “Detective Inspector Harrison,” he growled. “Known to one and all as ‘SOS Harrison,’ and about as popular as a dose of clap.”

“‘SOS’?” Curtis asked.

“‘Sack of Shit,’” Bronson replied. “He’s slimy, greasy and overweight, and he’s hated my guts ever since the day I first walked into the station. He finally retired this year.”

“Sky wouldn’t say who it was,” Curtis replied. “Protection of their sources and all that, but they did say it was a former senior police officer, so I guess that fits. Anyway, as soon as we explained the situation, they agreed to run the update, the story we cooked up about you being kicked out of the force. So what happened?”

It only took a couple of minutes to give Curtis the edited version of what had happened in the industrial estate, leaving out all mention of the Llama pistol, of course.

“What really saved me was Sky, oddly enough,” he said. “If they’d turned off the TV set none of them would have noticed the update to the bulletin, which of course confirmed my story. By itself, they’d never have taken my word for it, and I might still be there, but probably not still in one piece.”

“They’re that dangerous?” Curtis asked.

“I don’t know. Mike is a thug, pure and simple. He thinks with his fists, and I was expecting him to beat me up as he tried to get information out of me. Most of the others are heavies with the same sort of attitude-they’re really just muscle for hire, dangerous but not too bright-but the one who worries me most is this man Georg. And by the way, he sounds German to me.”

Bronson described the man he’d seen at the warehouse.

“We can get a squad out there in an hour or so,” Curtis suggested. “Will they still be in the building?”

“I doubt it. It looked to me as if they were planning on leaving soon, so they’ve probably already gone. And there’s another reason, too, why hitting them now wouldn’t be such a good idea.”

“What?”

“John Eaton told me that Georg was the man who pulled Mike’s strings, the one who gave the orders. He also told me he was the money man, the financier who paid the members of the group for what they did. I assumed that he was the boss, but it’s clear that he isn’t. There’s some larger organization that Georg reports to. If you mop up this group now, you’ll take one bunch of men off the streets, but my guess is that Georg or whoever replaces him will just recruit a new team from the fringes of the underworld. You’ll probably grab the people who killed that nightwatchman, but I’m certain there’s something darker and more dangerous at work here.”

“Like what? And don’t forget, infiltrating the group is the whole point of the exercise. We need to get them off the streets before the Games start.”

“I know,” Bronson replied, “but I get the distinct impression that what these people are doing is just a nuisance: smashing up a machine here, breaking a few windows there, that kind of thing. It’s just a kind of diversion tactic, something to focus our attention on the wrong area, while something else, something much bigger and more destructive, goes down elsewhere.”

“What’s your evidence for that?”

“That’s the problem. I haven’t got any. Only something Georg said, almost a throwaway remark about putting the last pieces in place. There’s something about him that I don’t like. He’s too calm, and too bright for the company he’s keeping. There’s no way he’d be involved with these people at all unless there was a bigger picture, something we’re not seeing at the moment.”

After Curtis rang off, Bronson sat in silence in the car for a few minutes, trying to work out what he should do next.

The trouble was, there was almost nothing he could do. His relationship with the group, such as it was, was reactive and responsive: they had his mobile number, but he had no way of contacting them. The only person who ever called him was John Eaton, and he had configured his mobile so that the sender’s number was blocked. Apart from the warehouse on the small industrial estate he had just left, the only other physical points of contact he’d had with the group were a couple of pubs.

He would just have to wait until somebody-Georg or Eaton or another member of the group-called him and arranged another rendezvous. And then he’d have to decide if that was the right time to let Curtis loose the dogs to roll up the group. Or not.

Bronson frowned, started the Ford’s engine again, pulled out of the pub car park and turned back onto the road.