Ultimatum

Sixteen

11.28

Mike Bolt took a deep breath. It was a strange feeling being back working with Tina after all this time. He’d always had feelings for her. One time, four years earlier, when they’d last been working together at SOCA — the soon-to-be-disbanded Serious and Organized Crime Agency — he’d made a pass at her. They’d kissed, but things hadn’t gone any further, and it had ended up souring their friendship. As a result, she’d transferred back to the Met. Since then he’d stuck his neck out for her on more than one occasion, even though at times it had seemed as if Tina was on a mission of self-destruction, and it had almost cost him his job.

Most people, and not just those in the upper echelons of the force, thought Tina Boyd was bad news. And in many ways she was. She wasn’t a team player, and she did things her own way, often with very little respect for the law she was meant to be upholding, and that made her dangerous. Yet it felt good to have her on the team, even if it was only temporary. She’d squeezed a name out of Fox, which was something. Bolt had a vision of her grabbing him by the hair and battering his head on the interview room desk, demanding answers. It brought a smile to his face, even though he knew it wasn’t entirely outside the realm of possibilities. That was the thing with Tina. She always brought an energy to everything she did. She also brought something to Bolt’s own lonely life, a spark that had been missing a long time — although he preferred not to think about that right now.

He went down to the next floor and found one of his team, DC Nikki Donohoe, a fiery-looking woman in her late thirties with short, fashionably cut red hair and the first sign of a bump where her third child was, due six months down the line. Nikki was their IT expert, a woman with an uncanny ability to dig up any information, however obscure.

‘Hello, boss,’ she said with a tight smile. ‘Any more on the attacks?’

Nikki was usually a livewire, but like everyone else in London that morning what had happened had shaken her. Her two kids went to school barely a mile from where the last two bombs had exploded.

‘We’ve got a lead.’ He told her about Jetmir Brozi. ‘Drop everything and find out anything you can about him, particularly his current location.’

‘You think he might have something to do with the attacks?’ She looked hopeful.

‘Tina Boyd got the name from Fox, so it’s worth prioritizing.’

‘I’m on it,’ said Nikki, turning back to her PC.

‘So the Black Widow actually got something, did she?’

Bolt looked up to see DC Omar Balachi come into the room. Balachi was a tall, lean black man of Somali origin, in his late twenties, with finely sculpted features, who looked like he should be modelling sharp suits on the catwalk rather than wandering round in jeans, trainers and a hoodie, as he was now. He’d been with the team for most of the past year, and he was a good worker, albeit one with an attitude. He’d already made it known to Bolt that morning that he was annoyed that he’d spent so much of his time on the team doing donkey work while Tina had simply breezed in and been asked to interview the one man they’d all been wanting to talk to.

‘That’s right,’ said Bolt, turning to face him. ‘And I told you already, the reason she went there is because Fox insisted on it. I don’t like it either, but that’s the way it is.’

‘But you’ve still seconded her to the team.’

‘Temporarily yes, but only while she’s dealing with Fox.’ Bolt didn’t like having to justify his actions to members of his team — it set a bad precedent — but he knew what a sensitive issue this was.

Omar nodded slowly, clearly still not liking the situation. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ he asked. ‘With all this stuff going on, it seems a bit of a waste of time trawling through bank statements and phone records for the thousandth time.’ He was currently looking into the backgrounds of all the ex-soldiers who’d worked for the security company Fox had run for some years prior to the Stanhope siege. It had been a long and time-consuming task, and Bolt knew Omar was bored stiff by it.

Ordinarily he’d have told him to persevere with it. After all, it was what detective work was all about. But this wasn’t an ordinary day. ‘Help Nikki with Jetmir Brozi, can you? I need everything you can find on him, and I need it ASAP.’

He went back up to his office, grabbing his fourth coffee of the day en route. Like Omar, he felt frustrated. He wanted to be out there hunting down the terrorists, but their only suspect was dead, and no use to anyone. In the meantime, they just had to wait for the next attack. This was the weakness of living in a multicultural democracy like Britain, where people could come and go as they pleased. You were exposed and vulnerable. The Stanhope siege and the bomb blasts earlier this morning had shown that a handful of men could bring a city of ten million people to a standstill, and effectively hold it to ransom.

He took a sip from his coffee and looked out of the window. The sun was shining, and the clouds were beginning to thin and break up. It looked like it was going to turn into a fine winter’s day. Sirens still blared in the distance, their sound only just audible through the glass. Outside, innocent people were being killed, and there was nothing that he or his colleagues could do about it.

The sound of one of the three mobile phones he carried stirred Bolt from his thoughts. At first he didn’t recognize the ringtone — a loud pealing of church bells — then he remembered the contact he’d assigned it to, and he frowned as he picked up the phone.

‘We need to meet,’ said Jones. ‘Urgently.’