Ultimatum

Fourteen

11.08

There are no noble causes.

When I left the army, after twelve years’ service, I decided to become a cop. I’m still not entirely sure why. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. After my last tour of Helmand Province, I was sick of the military, and the way we were being hung out to dry out there. I wanted to try something different, something that didn’t involve sitting in an office all day or losing my legs to an IED, and being a cop seemed like it might be an interesting alternative.

It wasn’t.

I did three years in the Met, and I did a good job, no question. I put up with a lot of shit from the scum out there on the streets — and I tell you, there are one hell of a lot of them, people who know every last one of their rights, and think the world owes them a living. They didn’t have an ounce of respect, or fear, for the law or the uniform. The Human Rights Act put paid to all that. To them, we were just a joke. But I learned to turn the other cheek and get on with the job. I filled out all the pointless forms, followed the thousands of pedantic little rules, took the diversity courses, watched the senior officers fiddling the crime figures so they met their targets — never actually doing much in the way of fighting crime, but knowing that at the end of the day I was earning OK money and supporting my wife and daughter.

To alleviate the boredom, I applied to join CO19, the Met’s specialized firearms unit, and got in on the first attempt. And although I knew the chances of getting any real action were slim, I remember thinking that life was looking up for me.

Which was, of course, the moment it all went wrong.

It was just over a year ago, and I was part of a team who raided a shitheap of a property in Hackney where a couple of small-time crack dealers lived. We’d heard they kept a gun on the premises that was supposedly for protection — one they’d used in a mugging the previous year where some kid had got shot — as well as a pitbull. So we went in armed and mob-handed. We broke down the door, shot the dog — which was a pity because he had nothing to do with anything — then stormed through the place making a lot of noise, like you do when you’re an armed cop.

It was a real mess in there. There were overflowing rubbish bags and old takeaway cartons wherever you looked, dog shit on the floor, and an army of cockroaches lording it in the kitchen among all the grime-encrusted dishes. The whole house stank like the lions’ enclosure at a zoo. But that’s often par for the course in those types of places. As a cop, you learn fast that it’s not just the law that the criminal classes have no respect for. Most of the time they don’t respect themselves either.

I was one of the first upstairs, and that’s where I found her. She was fifteen years old, a runaway from a local care home, and she was tied to a stinking mattress in the back bedroom, semi-conscious and out of her head on God knows what. She was stark naked, with friction burns round her ankles and wrists where she’d struggled to break free. I had no idea how long she’d been there for, but she’d peed and crapped herself, and when the doctor examined her afterwards he said she was massively dehydrated, so it must have been a fair while. They’d been using her for sex. Just fucking her and, from what we could work out, charging other men to fuck her. Apparently she owed them money for dope, hadn’t paid up, and this was her punishment. They got her wrecked, then held her prisoner. Threatened to burn her alive if she ever told anyone.

Most right-thinking members of the public have no idea this kind of thing goes on, often only within walking distance from their front doors. But it does. It’s happening all the time.

We never knew how many men had raped her. These days, thanks to CSI and all those other programmes, the bastards are all forensically aware, so they used condoms and made sure they didn’t leave any of them behind for us to find. The girl herself wasn’t sure. She’d been too wrecked to know what was going on most of the time, but she’d suffered some pretty major injuries, so we knew it was a good few of them, and they hadn’t been gentle.

The problem was, when we raided the place only one of the two dealers was there. He was a cocky little sod, name of Alfonse Webber. Only eighteen and already a career criminal. He said he didn’t know anything about the girl, and blamed his friend, the other dealer. But when we tracked down the other dealer, he denied everything as well. We tried to get the girl to talk but she was scared stiff; all she wanted was to be left alone. And you couldn’t blame her. She had to live round there.

So that was that. What could we do? To top it all, we only found a few rocks of crack in there, and no gun. Webber went to court and got a suspended sentence. He claimed the gear was for his own use, and that he didn’t have a clue how the girl had got herself tied up in the bedroom. The judge didn’t believe him — at least I hope he didn’t; sometimes it’s hard to tell. But the prisons are full, and there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him of anything major. So he got a suspended sentence, and walked.

To be honest, what happened with Webber was no worse than a dozen other incidents I’d had to deal with, but the thing was, it acted like the culmination of all those other incidents. I’d had enough. When he came strutting out of the court with his lawyer, the little bastard saw me and laughed — this braying, mocking noise like a donkey. Even now, I remember perfectly the rage that went through me. It was so intense it actually made me start shaking. Then he started bragging in this ridiculous street patois about how the Feds would always be too stupid to get one over him — that sort of thing. His lawyer, this nerdy little bald guy with glasses, tried to get him to stop, and the cop I was with, well, he could see the effect it was having on me, so he put a hand on my shoulder and told me just to ignore it.

I almost managed to as well. I started to turn away, to think about something else.

And then he said it. The one thing that was always going to tip me over the edge. He said that he was looking forward to fucking my daughter some day soon.

My beautiful little daughter, who was three years old.

I snapped. The strange thing was that, as he said it, the vision that came into my head wasn’t of my daughter. It was of a young squaddie called Max, who got hit by an IED in Helmand on my first tour there. He was ripped to shreds, left with half an arm and no legs, and he ended up stuck in a council flat ignored by the army and the government and the council and everyone, while this piece of shit — this dirty fucking piece of shit who’d never done a day’s work in his life, who’d never done anything to help anyone else ever — got to deal crack, torture young women, and threaten police officers, all with total impunity.

So I went for him. Hard. His lawyer tried to stop me but I broke the slimy bastard’s nose with one punch. Webber was off like a shot, but his jeans were hanging halfway down his arse and he was wearing these huge trainers that looked like they weighed more than him, so he was never going to get away. I jumped on his back and drove him face first into the pavement. I had his head in my hands and I kept slamming it down on the concrete. The blood was splattering everywhere. Jesus, it was a sweet feeling. I would have killed him, no question. It never even occurred to me to stop. I would have smashed his head into pieces and stamped on the remains, but thankfully I never got the chance. There were a lot of people in the vicinity, including cops and security guards, and eventually they managed to pull me off him. But I was still lashing out. One of the court security guards got an elbow in the face that knocked out two of his teeth, and the cop I was with ended up with a busted cheekbone.

I was arrested on the spot. There was no way of avoiding it really. Alfonse Webber was hurt pretty bad. He was in hospital for a week and had to have extensive plastic surgery to repair the damage to his face. I was suspended immediately and charged with grievous bodily harm. When I appeared in court two days later, I was remanded in custody. Even though it was my first offence, even though I was a decorated war hero, even though a psychiatrist who interviewed me subsequently concluded I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, even though Alfonse Webber was a violent lowlife who’d gone out of his way to provoke me … Even after all those things I was looking at a three- or four-year stretch minimum.

And then someone offered me a deal.

We drove through the back streets of north London, passing through Edmonton and then Enfield, and all the time Cecil kept checking his rearview mirror to make sure we weren’t being followed — although I had no idea who might be following us. If it was the cops, they would have arrested us on the spot, seeing that Cecil had just killed a man. But I kept quiet and let him get on with it.

The continuous swathes of clogged-up London suburbs eventually gave way to identikit executive housing communities, golf courses, and the first hints of the green belt, and then when we were only just the other side of the M25, Cecil pulled into a quiet country lane and stopped twenty yards short of an abandoned-looking barn nestling on the edge of a small beech wood.

‘This is a bit of an out-of-the-way place to meet someone, isn’t it?’ I said, looking round.

‘You can never be too careful,’ said Cecil, reaching over and pulling a mobile phone-shaped electronic device with an antenna on the end from the glove compartment. When he switched it on, a red light appeared on the side.

‘What the hell’s that?’ I asked, knowing full well what it was.

‘It’s a bug finder. If you’re wearing a wire, it’ll pick it up.’

‘It might have escaped your notice, Cecil, but we’ve just committed an armed robbery together, so I’m hardly likely to be setting you up.’

‘The man we’re meeting’s paranoid. And orders are orders.’

I let him do the honours, knowing there was no point arguing. The machine didn’t beep.

‘You want to search me as well?’

Credit to Cecil, at least he had the dignity to look embarrassed as he got out of the car after grabbing the holdall with the money from the back seat. ‘Come on.’

I followed him up the track towards the barn. The air was cold and fresh, and the sun was just managing to fight its way through the cloud cover. The constant stream of traffic from the M25 was no longer audible, and the only sound among the trees, and the fields beyond them, was the occasional shriek of a crow. There were no other cars around, which meant that the man we’d come to see hadn’t arrived yet, or he was keeping a very low profile.

It struck me then that this would be an ideal place to kill someone.

We stopped outside the barn. One side of it was open to the elements and it was empty inside bar a cluster of rusty oil drums and some ancient farm machinery.

‘Where’s the guy we’re here to meet?’ I asked, rubbing my hands together against the cold.

‘Here,’ came a voice behind us.

I turned round and saw a figure in a long coat emerge from the outbuilding behind us, from where he’d clearly been watching our approach, and walk over to us. Even though he was dressed casually, he was wearing an expensive-looking pair of leather driving gloves.

‘Sir, this is Jones, the man I was telling you about.’ Although he tried to hide it, Cecil’s tone was deferential.

The man who stopped in front of me was a mass of physical contradictions. On the one hand he was tall, lean and fit-looking, with the classic bearing of an ex-army officer, but on the other, his complexion was pale to the point of illness, and he had a prominent vein running down one side of his face like a worm beneath the skin, which I had difficulty taking my eyes off.

‘Mr Jones, pleased to meet you.’

‘Jones is fine on its own,’ I said. ‘And you are?’

‘My name’s Cain,’ he said, his voice surprisingly deep and sonorous. ‘Cecil’s been telling me about what happened to you. That you were sent down because you doled out some real justice to someone who deserved it. That’s this country all over.’

‘It hasn’t done me any favours.’

‘It hasn’t done any of us any favours.’ He looked at me sharply, and I thought I saw the vein move beneath his skin. ‘You were lucky you only got sent down for a year.’

That was my weak point. The length of sentence. ‘It was long enough,’ I told him. ‘Especially for an ex-cop. I wasn’t the most popular man on the block.’

‘I can believe it.’ He gestured towards the holdall Cecil was holding. ‘How much did we make?’

‘We haven’t counted it yet,’ said Cecil, ‘but it feels like a lot.’ He handed it to Cain who motioned for us to follow him into the barn.

Inside, Cain put the holdall down on one of the oil drums and opened it up, revealing a whole heap of cash. He immediately started to count it out, placing each individual wad on one of the other drums. I’m not a greedy man but I felt a slither of excitement as I stared at it. Apparently, LeShawn always insisted that the money was counted before he arrived to pick it up, and it had been divided into single-denomination five-grand wads.

‘What happened out there?’ asked Cain as he carried on counting. I was counting too and I’d already got to ninety grand.

‘LeShawn didn’t want to play ball,’ said Cecil. ‘He went for Jones’s gun. We had to shoot him.’

‘Who pulled the trigger?’

‘I did.’

‘How come you didn’t shoot him, Jones?’

‘I didn’t get a chance.’

Cain gave me another look. His eyes were a watery grey but there was a fierce intelligence in them.

‘I shot up a cop car,’ I told him.

Cain smiled thinly. He was still counting the money. We were at a hundred and forty now. ‘I apologize for all the secrecy, but you were a cop once, and we have to be very careful who we trust.’

‘Well, thanks to what happened an hour ago I’m now an armed robber,’ I told him. ‘I think that means you can trust me.’

As I said this, I realized almost with a shock that I was now just like the criminals I’d been trying to put away. The only reason I’d agreed to do the armed robbery in the first place was because I’d thought we could get away with it, but now I’d compromised myself badly.

‘You’re not an armed robber, Jones. You’re a soldier raising funds from some bad people for a good cause. There’s a big difference.’

Cain finished counting. Two hundred and twenty-five grand plus change.

‘Cecil told you how the split worked, didn’t he? Fifteen grand each for you two?’

I nodded. ‘Seems like you get a very big cut.’

‘Firstly, I planned it. And second, the money isn’t going to me.’

I stared him down. ‘We could have done with some help out there today. The reason it went wrong was because there were only two of us. If there’d been three of us, the whole thing might have run a lot smoother.’

‘Come on, Jones,’ said Cecil, intervening. ‘You knew the score when you took the job.’

‘But that’s the problem,’ I said, turning back to Cain. ‘I still don’t know what the score is. Because no one’s actually told me. Cecil said there might be an opportunity for me to make some money and get involved in fighting the government, but so far all that’s happened is I’ve risked my neck and taken part in a very public murder, all for the price of a mid-range saloon car.’ I gestured at the wads of money. ‘So, where’s all this going?’

Cain and Cecil exchanged glances. Then Cain turned back to me. ‘Let’s take a walk.’

I followed him outside. Beyond the barn, a fallow field stretched away to some trees in the middle distance, and we started towards it.

‘We’re fighting a war, Jones, and in a war you need weapons. The other side have got weapons. Did you hear about the bombs this morning?’

I shook my head. We hadn’t had the car radio on at all on our way up here. ‘What happened?’

‘A bomb went off near Victoria Station three hours ago. Nine dead already, but the toll keeps rising. And then another two less than an hour back at a block of flats in Bayswater, which looks to have been aimed at the police. Four dead in that one so far. The Islamics have already claimed responsibility.’

‘And is it them? I remember in the Stanhope attacks there were white guys, ex-soldiers, involved.’

‘The coffee shop bomb was delivered by a suicide bomber who, according to the news, got spooked at the last minute and ran off. Ended up under the wheels of a lorry, but word is he’s a local Asian.’ Cain stopped and looked at me. ‘This country’s under attack, Jones. The Islamics are going to keep launching attacks like this because the government hasn’t got the backbone to fight back. They’d rather innocent British civilians died than stop people who don’t belong here pouring into the country and trying to destroy us. Cecil tells me you’ve got a family.’

‘I’ve got a daughter,’ I said carefully, reluctant to have Maddie dragged into this.

‘Do you want her to grow up as a minority in her own birthplace? Because that’s what’s going to happen if the government keep going with their multicultural experiment. The whites are going to end up outnumbered. There’ll be mosques on every street, and the government won’t do a damn thing to stop it because, like always, they’re too interested in showing how PC they are, and lining their own pockets. Look at Tony Blair. He’s a multimillionaire now on the backs of all those soldiers he sent to war.’ Cain’s vein was throbbing angrily in his cheek. ‘Cecil tells me you’re interested in fighting back.’

So, this was it. If I answered him correctly, I could be joining what was possibly the most dangerous terror cell in the country. I thought of my family. Thanked God they weren’t anywhere near central London. ‘Yeah,’ I said, looking him firmly in the eye, ‘I am.’

‘Cecil says you killed in Afghanistan.’

I shrugged. ‘I fired my gun at the enemy plenty of times.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ he said quietly. ‘He said you killed.’ He emphasized the last word, stretched it out.

So, Cecil had told him the secret that we’d carried since Afghanistan, something we’d all sworn we’d never repeat.

Cain gave me a predatory smile, his upper lip curling to reveal a perfect row of white teeth. ‘Your secret’s safe with me, Jones. But I want to know how far you’re willing to go in this war.’

‘I’ll do whatever it takes, Mr Cain,’ I said steadily. ‘You know my background. You know the shit I’ve been through. I only want two things. Revenge on the system that ruined my life and career, and humiliated my family. And money. I need money, so I can pay for my ex-wife and my kid. I don’t much care what I have to do to get either.’

So that was it. I’d laid my bait.

Cain was silent for a long few seconds before he spoke again. ‘I can get you both, Jones. I’ll put you on a retainer. Three grand a month cash. For that you need to be available at short notice for jobs which may involve guns, like today. Every time you do a job, there’ll be a serious bonus paid up front. How does that sound?’

I nodded slowly, not wanting to appear too enthusiastic. ‘It sounds OK.’

‘Good. Then do we have a deal?’

I said we did, and we shook on it.

He pulled a phone from his jacket and handed it to me. ‘Keep this on, and keep it with you. The only person who’ll phone it is me. Have you got any plans for today?’

‘Nothing that I can’t put on hold.’

‘Good. I’m trying to set up a meeting with some business associates on neutral ground. It may well happen later today, and I want you and Cecil there to back me up. I’ve done business with them before, and they’re generally pretty reliable, but there’s money involved, and money can sometimes make people do stupid things, so you’ll both be armed. The bonus is another grand.’

‘Who are the people we’re dealing with?’

‘The prisons are full of people who talk too much, Jones. With us, everything’s on a need-to-know basis. It’s a lot easier for everyone that way.’

I turned away from him, looking across the field to the woodland. ‘Still don’t trust me, eh?’

‘Let me tell you something,’ said Cain, lighting a cigarette with a gloved hand. ‘When I was in Lashkar Gah a few years back, we had an interpreter called Abdul. He came from a good family. Not exactly pro government, but not exactly anti it either. One of his brothers had been murdered by the Taliban, so he was considered safe. He was a nice guy too. Well educated, even quite enlightened by Afghan standards. He often used to eat with the men, and would ask us all these questions about England. What was the Queen like? Did the police really not carry guns? He liked talking about football too.’ Cain chuckled. It was an odd, artificial sound, as if he’d been practising it but still had some way to go. ‘I remember, Abdul supported Liverpool. He could name their 1978 and 1981 European Cup-winning teams. We used to test him, and he was never wrong.

‘One day, he was chatting with a couple of the privates over tea in one of the sangars. The next thing we heard a burst of gunfire, followed by screams. We rushed over there, weapons at the ready, just in time to see Abdul come walking out. At first we thought he’d been hit, and then he lifted up one of the private’s SA80s and pointed it at us. His expression was totally calm, almost dreamy, as he started firing. I always remember that. He wasn’t a bad shot either. He hit one of my corporals who made the mistake of hesitating a couple of seconds because he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, before the rest of us opened up and finally shot Abdul dead.

‘When we got inside the sangar we found the two privates Abdul had been talking to lying on the floor. One of them, a Geordie called Peterson, was already dead. The other was this big Fijian with an unpronounceable name who we used to call Hula and, although he was in a bad way, he was still conscious. He told us that one minute they’d all been chatting away like good friends, and the next, Abdul had grabbed Peterson’s gun and opened up on them. No rhyme. No reason. Hula never made it. Neither did Abdul, so we never did find out what motivated him. Whether he was a sleeper agent all along, or whether the Taliban had got to him somehow.’ Cain shrugged. ‘Personally, I believe it was the former. Not that that matters to either Peterson or Hula. Either way they’re still dead. But the point of the story, that’s easier.’ He gave me a hard stare. ‘You can never be too careful.’

And that was what was worrying me.