Ultimatum

Nineteen

12.15

As Bolt walked past a small cafe on his left, his informant, Richard Burnham-Jones, got up from where he’d been sitting at one of the outside tables and fell into step beside him. He was dressed in jogging gear and carrying a bottle of water. Jones was a tall guy, close to Bolt’s height, with thick dark hair and handsome chiselled features that were enhanced rather than spoilt by a thin, twisting scar an inch and a half long above his left eye, which he’d received when he’d been hit by a piece of skull bone from a fellow soldier who’d just been shot in the head.

‘So?’ Bolt said without looking at him as they walked on through the park.

‘I’m in. Cecil introduced me to a guy called Cain who’s obviously the boss. Cain wants me to work for him and he’s willing to pay good money. My first job’s to accompany him and Cecil to a meeting today. He wants us to provide security.’

Jesus, thought Bolt, it was all happening today. He’d been running Jones as an informant for close to a year now with virtually nothing to show for it, and now he had a breakthrough on the day when London had once again come under terrorist attack. ‘Did you get a photo of him?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? That’s what I gave you the camera for.’ A month earlier, Bolt had supplied Jones with a Nike baseball cap with a tiny camera sewn into the front lining. To take a photo, the person wearing the cap pressed a button in the side lining, an action Jones could easily have disguised by scratching the side of his head.

‘It was just too risky. Cecil searched me before the meet, and I told you before: I’ve never worn a baseball cap in my life. He’d have noticed, and then if he’d searched it and found the camera …’

‘He wouldn’t have. It’s too small.’

‘It’s the kind of thing he looks for. Cecil knows what he’s doing, and he’s paranoid as hell. If he’d found it, it would have got me killed.’

Which Bolt had to admit was true. Cecil Boorman was a difficult customer. A former soldier, he’d been ID’d as an occasional associate of several of the mercenaries involved in the Stanhope siege, and at one time had done work in Iraq for the security consultancy that Fox had run. The only problem was, there was nothing concrete linking him to the siege itself, and he was seriously adept at counter-surveillance, making an intelligence-gathering op against him near enough impossible. Bolt, though, had always thought he was worth pursuing, and if Cecil was being that careful about covering his tracks, it meant he had to have something big to hide.

‘Describe Cain to me.’

‘My height, early forties, short blonde hair, lean and very pale — almost vampire pale — with a big vein running down his right cheek that really stands out. He doesn’t look ordinary, put it like that. He’s also ex-military, an officer by the looks of him, and speaks with a middle-class Home Counties accent. He served in Lashkar Gah a few years ago, and there was a green on blue incident in his battalion.’

‘Green on blue?’

‘Where an Afghan working with coalition forces attacks them. A translator called Abdul shot two of Cain’s men while he was there. If you look hard enough, you should be able to get an ID on him from all that.’

Bolt nodded. He was recording the conversation so there was no need to write anything down. ‘Did Cain mention anything about the bombs this morning?’

‘Yeah. He said that it was Islamic terrorists, and gave me this spiel about how if I worked for him, I’d get a chance to fight against all the people doing the country harm. He was pretty extreme in his views.’

‘But he didn’t suggest that the bombs might be something to do with him?’

‘You think they might be?’

Bolt sighed. ‘I don’t know.’ He needed more than this if they were ever going to get a breakthrough. Even if they managed to ID Cain from Jones’s description, it didn’t push them any further forward. ‘This meeting Cain wants you to go to. Do you know what it’s about?’

‘He didn’t give many details, but I get the impression he’s buying something, and that he doesn’t trust the people he’s buying it from.’

‘Did you get a look at his car?’

Jones shook his head. ‘He was on foot when I saw him.’

‘The thing is, he may not be as good at counter-surveillance as Cecil, so it’s possible we can get a tail on him. Have you asked Cecil about him?’

‘Cecil’s keeping very shtum about Cain, and if I ask too many questions he’ll get suspicious.’

‘You’re entitled to act suspicious too, you know. You’re being hired by someone you know nothing about, to do work you know nothing about, but which involves guns. How do you know that he isn’t a cop trying to set you up? Ask Cecil that. The point is, if you put yourself in the position of a man who’s looking for illegal work, you’ll get the answers you’re looking for.’

‘That you’re looking for, you mean. I’m doing this for you, remember?’

Bolt looked at him sharply. ‘No, Jones, you’re not. You’re doing it for the ordinary man in the street, who just wants to go about his business without someone trying to blow him up in aid of some shitty little cause. You’re doing it for your family. For your cousin who died at the Stanhope. For your daughter. Remember, she and your ex-wife could have been in that coffee shop when it blew this morning.’

Jones took a deep breath, staring off into space. ‘Yeah, I know.’

Bolt knew he was laying it on thick but he was frustrated. He sympathized with what had happened to Jones. By all accounts he’d been a good cop who’d lost his head one day, and the result was that he’d also lost his job, his pension, his wife and, most humiliating of all, his liberty. He’d sacrificed a lot for his country, and the people in it, and all he’d received was a lot of shit in return. But it also meant that he was a perfect informant, because if anyone was justified in feeling the kind of rage needed to become involved with extremists, it was him. But there are strict rules in the UK on the police’s use of informants, and Bolt was bending them seriously. He’d been told by his boss, the head of Counter Terrorism Command, that due to the seriousness of the terrorist threat he had some flexibility about who he used, and how he used them. But he also knew that if everything went tits up, he’d be the one taking all the flak.

‘If you go to this meeting I want you to wear a listening device,’ he told Jones.

‘I told you: they search me.’

‘This thing’s tiny, and it’s basically only a tape recorder, so no bug finder will be able to find it. It’s just to gather evidence, so try to get these guys talking.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. ‘There are two GPS units in there as well. They’re the size and thickness of postage stamps, and we can turn them on remotely. The bug finder won’t find them either. They operate to a completely different frequency. If you can, plant one in Cain’s car after the meet, and one in Cecil’s car as well if it’s at all possible. Then call me, and we’ll switch them on.’ He handed Jones the envelope, glancing round as casually as possible to check no one was paying them undue attention, but the park was quiet. ‘We’re not going to be tailing you. I don’t want to com promise things, and right now we haven’t got the manpower. You’re on your own out there today.’

Jones grunted derisively. ‘I’ve been on my own since the very beginning.’

‘The most important thing is to ID Cain. No more. Once we’ve done that, you can pull out. And don’t, whatever you do, compromise yourself by doing anything that’s going to get you into serious trouble.’

Jones scratched the scar on his forehead. He still looked unhappy. ‘I’ve got one major request, Mike. I need you to make sure no one ever knows I’ve been involved. I don’t want anything to do with a court case, or an inquiry. Nothing like that. And I don’t want to do anything that puts my family in danger.’

‘When you’re done with this, you’re out, I promise,’ said Bolt, knowing this was a promise that might become very hard to keep. ‘Listen, I’ve got to go. Things are chaos at the moment with these bombs. Keep me posted, OK?’

They turned and went their separate ways, Bolt already preoccupied with the terrorists’ threat that if their demands weren’t met, in less than eight hours there’d be another even bigger attack on the city he called home.

Only later did it occur to him that this was the first time they’d met up when Jones hadn’t asked him for payment for his services.