Echo of the Reich

18

22 July 2012

Ten minutes after he ended the call to Bob Curtis, Bronson had watched two police cars traveling at speed down the main road through Epping, blues and twos on, following the same route as the bus he’d taken about an hour earlier. He guessed that the driver and passengers on the vehicle were about to have a fairly interesting encounter with the thin blue line.

John Eaton rang about half an hour after that, by which time Bronson had moved to an entirely different location in the town, staying off the main streets as much as possible.

“Where are you?”

Bronson had already noted the name of the street he was closest to, which was just off the main road. “Epping. North end of the town,” he said, “near the main drag. Where do you want me to be?”

“That’ll do,” Eaton replied. “I’ll be there in ten minutes. Same car. Watch out for me.”

“Got it.”

Bronson waited seven minutes by his watch, then got up from the bench he was sitting on and covered the short distance to the main road. There was a fairly long and relatively straight length of road in front of him, and he reckoned he’d see the Vauxhall easily as it approached.

As it turned out, Eaton drove along the road almost by himself, a white van about fifty yards in front, and only a lone motorcyclist following behind him. The moment Bronson saw him, he stepped to the edge of the pavement, waited for the car to stop and climbed in.

Eaton pulled smoothly away from the curb.

“Any problems?” he asked.

Bronson shook his head. “Nobody took any notice of me,” he said. “Just shows the power of TV advertising. Maybe a dozen people looked right at me, but none of them recognized me.”

“Bloody good thing, too. Right, with any luck you’ll be on the road in half an hour. Georg has sorted out a car for you, and he’s got a couple of passports as well.”

“Genuine ones? Because when I get to Dover they’ll probably scan it, and a fake’ll show up immediately.”

“As far as I know they’re the real deal, but you’d better ask him yourself.”

Fifteen minutes later, Eaton pulled the Vauxhall to a stop on a concrete drive outside a very ordinary semi-detached house, a typical three-bed, two-recep, large garden, deceptively spacious, early viewing recommended, so beloved of estate agents everywhere.

It wasn’t exactly the kind of place Bronson imagined Georg using, but he supposed it was the sort of location the German would occupy briefly and then move on. Maybe it belonged to one of the members of the group, or perhaps they’d rented it for a month or so to use as a safe house.

As the two men approached the front door, painted classic suburban blue with a large brass knocker in the shape of a dolphin, it opened and Mike peered out.

“You made it, then,” he said, his tone suggesting that he, personally, would rather Bronson hadn’t gotten away, or was at the very least indifferent to his fate.

“Looks like it.”

Mike stepped back and Bronson walked in, closely followed by Eaton. There was a narrow hallway, a staircase with a wooden handrail ascending on one side, and three doors opening off it. The nearest one stood open and as he stepped forward Georg appeared and beckoned him inside.

The room was a lounge, white paintwork and magnolia walls, a settee and a couple of easy chairs in cream leather the principal furnishings. A wide-screen plasma TV dominated the far wall, a Sky box sitting on a shelf underneath it, alongside a DVD player. Below that was a gas-effect electric fire where fake flames flickered slightly, though the heating elements weren’t switched on.

“Eaton explained what happened at the industrial estate,” Georg said. “Thank you for your quick thinking, and for what you did to get the two of you past the police van.”

“It was self-interest as much as anything,” Bronson replied. “If they’d managed to make me stop, I knew what would happen to me.”

“Well, thank you anyway. Now…” Georg turned away and picked up a couple of British passports that lay on the glass-topped coffee table in front of the fire. “Two members of the group bear a slight resemblance to you, and have agreed to loan me their passports.”

“For a fee, presumably?” Bronson asked.

Georg smiled at him. “This lot don’t do anything unless they get paid,” he said.

He handed the passports to Bronson, who opened both at the page showing the holder’s photograph and studied each in turn. Georg was quite right. Superficially, there was a resemblance, in that both men were about Bronson’s age, roughly his height and had dark hair, but in truth neither man looked very much like him.

“Would one of those do?” Georg asked, sounding slightly worried.

Bronson nodded slowly. “The checks at Dover-when they bother doing them at all-are really designed to check the validity of the passports being presented. There’s only the most superficial attempt to ensure that the person presenting the passport is the same as the man or woman whose picture is in it. So my guess is that either of these would probably do.” He looked at the two documents again, then made his decision.

“I’ll take this one,” he said. “He’s a couple of years older than I am, but I think he looks more like me than the other guy. I’ll memorize the information on that page before I get to Dover. John said you had a car for me as well.”

Georg nodded. “In fact, I have two, registered to the owners of these two passports. To keep things simple, I suggest you take the vehicle owned by”-he glanced at the name inside the passport Bronson was still holding-“Charlie Evans. It’s parked a few meters up the road. It’s a gray Hyundai. The registration number’s on the label attached to the key ring.”

Georg reached into his pocket and produced two sets of car keys, and handed one to Bronson.

“The tank’s full, and there’s a Green Card in the glovebox to cover you for driving in Europe. Charlie would appreciate the return of the car in one piece.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Georg slipped the other set of keys back into his pocket, then took a folded sheet of paper from another pocket and handed it to Bronson. “This is the rendezvous,” he said. “It’s a few kilometers south of Berlin, but it should be easy to find. You need to be there by seven tomorrow evening. Don’t have your pistol or mobile with you at the meeting, because they’ll be taken away from you. Any questions?” he asked.

Bronson shook his head. “No. I’ll get on the road.”

“One suggestion before you leave. The pictures that were broadcast on television showed you with an unshaven face and the beginnings of a beard. You might be less recognizable if you were clean-shaven. You can use the bathroom upstairs if you want to do something about it.”

“That’s a good idea.” Bronson picked up his soft bag and headed for the stairs.

He was down again in less than ten minutes, and sitting in the front seat of the Hyundai three minutes after that.

The car was about three years old, judging by the registration plate, and it was immediately clear that Charlie Evans was a heavy smoker. The ashtray overflowed with cigarette ends, and the entire car smelled of tobacco smoke. It was the kind of rank odor that Bronson knew no amount of cleaning would ever entirely shift. He opened the two front windows as he drove away, which helped a little, and as soon as he found a quiet spot he stopped the car and dumped the contents of the ashtray on the ground.

While the car was stationary, he also checked the trunk, making sure that there was a spare wheel, jack and wheel-brace. In the glovebox, as Georg had promised, there was a Green Card insurance document and also a satnav unit. That would make things a lot easier. Bronson knew the way to Dover, having made the Channel crossing many times before, but he’d never driven anywhere in Germany.

He attached the sucker to the windscreen, plugged the charging cord into the cigarette lighter, and clipped the satnav unit into the holder. He switched on the unit and the software asked him to select the appropriate country, so it obviously had European mapping included.

Bronson nodded in satisfaction, chose the United Kingdom and settled for the Dover ferry port. He’d input the address in Germany once he reached the other side of the Channel. The female voice in the unit sounded disconcertingly like one of his teachers from years ago, but otherwise he didn’t think he’d have any problems with the satnav.

He picked up the M25 within a few minutes, drove around it until he reached the junction with the M2 motorway signposted to Dover, and then turned east. He had no ferry ticket, of course, but he knew he could buy one for cash on arrival at the port.

Just over two and a half hours after unlocking the doors of the Hyundai, he switched off the engine on the car deck of a P amp;O ferry, locked the vehicle and followed a crowd of people heading for the stairs. He’d grab a bite on the ferry, he decided, and that would set him up for the first part of the drive he had in front of him.

But at least he’d gotten out of Britain with no problems. As he’d expected, the officer behind the glass of the booth had barely even glanced at him, just scanned the passport, handed it back and then told him to carry on. And the French immigration post a few yards further on was completely deserted, as usual.

So now he was on his own. Sitting in a quiet corner of the restaurant, Bronson stared out of the window at the choppy gray waters of the English Channel and ran over the events of the last few days in his mind. What had started out as a fairly simple infiltration operation, just a matter of him identifying a group of violent vandals who’d been causing such aggravation in East London, had turned into something much darker and more dangerous. The death of the nightwatchman had been unfortunate, but probably accidental, a question of manslaughter, not murder, and Bronson was reasonably certain that it had been Mike and some of his cronies who had attacked the man.

With hindsight, maybe Bronson should simply have given them up to the Met as soon as he’d gotten a few names and memorized their faces. But he had been seriously disturbed by the man who called himself Georg, a man who seemed as wholly out of place in the group as a piranha in a tank of goldfish. He was clearly working to a very different agenda, and Bronson knew without a shadow of a doubt that he was extremely bad news. Bronson had never been directly involved in an operation against terrorists, but he had read enough about the kind of people who moved in that world to recognize the threat, and the type.

His biggest problem had been the complete absence of any form of proof that he could offer about what Georg was planning. That, and the autocratic attitude of Inspector Davidson, of course. If Shit Rises hadn’t decided to ignore what Bronson had said and roll up the undercover operation so quickly, there would at least have been a chance that Bronson could have gone to Berlin, obtained whatever information he could, and that might have led to the capture of the entire gang before they could complete their operation.

As it was, Bronson had been abandoned-or actually rather worse than that-by the British police. He was armed only with a pistol that most people familiar with handguns would consider a joke rather than a serious weapon, and he was on his own, heading for a rendezvous with a group of people he knew nothing about, except that he was quite certain they posed a mortal danger to London and its citizens.

It was not, on the whole, a comfortable position to be in.