Ultimatum

Twenty-three

14.30

Jetmir Brozi’s name alone wasn’t a huge help to Bolt’s team. At the moment they only had the word of a suspected mass murderer that he was involved in the Stanhope siege and today’s attacks, and Tina knew this meant a major and possibly lengthy evidence-gathering mission. The first priority was to locate him, which was why Mo Khan and Omar Balachi had been dispatched to keep watch on the brothel in King’s Cross, while she and Bolt had just turned off the Pentonville Road and were driving to his house in Islington. A surveillance team from Tina’s old station, Islington nick, was already there at Bolt’s request, keeping an eye on the place until they arrived.

Bolt was driving and, as he approached some red lights, Nikki Donohoe’s voice came over the radio to tell them that Brozi had been positively ID’d leaving his house, and was now being followed by the surveillance team.

‘Christ, I hope they don’t lose him,’ said Bolt, bringing the car to a halt.

‘How big’s the team they’re using?’ asked Tina.

‘Six.’

Tina frowned. ‘Is that all?’

‘Right now, everyone’s on the hunt for the bombers, and this is just one of a hundred leads. We were lucky to get anyone at all.’

Most police surveillance teams were an absolute minimum of eight strong, with twelve being the average, while the terrorist chasers in MI5 liked to use up to twenty-five people to follow one suspect. As far as Tina was concerned, sending six was worse than sending no one at all, because they were more likely to get spotted, ruining everything.

It wasn’t long before they were driving past the address they’d been given for Jetmir Brozi — a well-kept Georgian townhouse on a leafy residential street not far from Liverpool Road. ‘Not bad for a thug who should have been deported years ago,’ Bolt remarked.

They found a spot yards metres further down the road, and took up position facing his front door. Now it was just a matter of waiting for authorization to carry out a covert entry on Brozi’s house and plant cameras and audio equipment inside. Usually this could take days, but Bolt had asked his boss, Commander Thomas Ingrams, the head of CTC, to do everything he could to fast-track it and, given Brozi’s record as a known criminal, they were both hopeful they’d get it sooner rather than later.

The car fell silent bar the radio chatter coming from the surveillance team as they followed Brozi through heavy traffic on the Pentonville Road. Tina recognized a couple of voices as cops she used to work with, and wondered if she’d end up running into any of them later.

‘So, how’s life, Mike? Are you still with that girl? The one you were engaged to?’

‘Claire. It didn’t work out.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s not easy to hold down a relationship in our line of work.’

‘That’s true, but it’s not impossible either. How come you broke up? I thought she was meant to be the one.’

‘Blimey, Tina. What is this? Twenty Questions?’

Now it was her turn to shrug. ‘I’m just interested, that’s all.’ But it was more than that. She was interested in him. She wanted to find out why a tall, good-looking, charismatic guy like Bolt couldn’t hold down a relationship. She wanted to know if he still had commitment issues. And the reason was simple. Since seeing him that morning for the first time in two years, the attraction she’d once felt had suddenly, and totally unexpectedly, been rekindled.

‘Anyway,’ he said, turning things round, ‘how’s your love life?’

She laughed. ‘Non-existent. I’m about as good as you at holding down a relationship, so I guess I shouldn’t be lecturing. I split with my last boyfriend because he wanted me to tie him up and spank him. Can you believe that?’

‘I’ve been a copper for more than twenty-five years. I can believe anything.’ He grinned. ‘I’d have thought that was right up your street, Tina. Knocking men about without getting into trouble.’

‘What got me was that it all started off totally normally. He was a really nice guy. Smart, good-looking. Good taste obviously.’

‘Obviously.’

‘We even went to meet his parents in Vancouver. Then one day he tells me out of the blue that he’s always wanted to be dominated sexually, and he asks if he can call me Mistress when we’re on our own.’

They were both laughing now.

‘I reckon you’d make a good mistress.’

‘I tried to play along — I like to think I’m a game girl — but it all just got a bit silly.’

They both fell silent, looking at each other, and she remembered how close she’d come to falling into bed with him last time, and she could feel the same thing happening now.

They were interrupted by the voice of Nikki Donohoe coming back over the radio. ‘Control to Alpha One. Authorization for the creep at suspect property given. I’m emailing through the paperwork now. Over.’

‘Alpha One to Control,’ said Bolt into the radio. ‘Received and understood. Over.’

According to the surveillance team chatter, Brozi was now heading north on the Caledonian Road, away from home, which meant it was safe to go inside and plant the bugs.

‘Who wants to go in?’ said Bolt. ‘Me or you?’

Tina smiled. ‘Can I go? You know me. I like a little bit of excitement, and my housebreaking skills are still bang up to date.’

Bolt nodded. ‘I have no doubt of that. OK, I’ll wait here. But be quick.’

‘I’m on it,’ Tina said, slipping on a pair of gloves and slinging the handbag containing the recording equipment over her shoulder. ‘But make sure you watch my back. The last thing I need with my reputation is Mr Brozi coming home unexpectedly.’

‘I’ve always got your back, Tina,’ he told her, and their eyes locked for just a second too long.

She got out of the car and crossed the road, walking as casually as possible. The street was empty, bar a couple of builders working on some scaffolding a hundred yards further down, but you never knew who could be watching inside one of the houses. Covert entry was a highly delicate procedure, and there were always far too many things that could go wrong, especially when it was done in broad daylight.

She passed through the front gate, noting where they could plant a camera later under cover of darkness, which would kick into life whenever anyone passed in or out of the house, then rang the front doorbell. When there was no answer, she rang a second time, just to make sure, at the same time removing a set of picks from the handbag. She’d already seen that there was no sign of an alarm, so went straight to work on the door’s standard Yale lock.

It took her longer to do than she’d expected, and she was conscious of the fact that Bolt was watching her. She pushed him out of her mind and concentrated on getting the movements of each pick just right, until finally the lock clicked and the door opened.

Tina stepped inside without looking over her shoulder, and shut the door behind her. She was in a narrow hallway with a staircase directly in front of her. The place smelled of mothballs and cheap spices, the walls were dirty and bare, and the cream carpet stained and thinning. In Tina’s experience, criminals were rarely houseproud and did little to stamp their personality on their homes. A detective she’d once worked with back in CID had said it was because they knew they’d never be staying in the same place long, and Tina thought he had a point.

Feeling the illicit excitement that comes from creeping through someone else’s house, she got to work. She’d been provided with the latest microscopic video cameras, long, thin devices with threading on one end, which could be used to replace the screws in wall sockets, making them almost undetectable. They were motion sensitive and apparently provided excellent sound quality. She moved through the house, putting one in each room, working her way upwards, making sure she had pretty much the whole place covered.

It was in the TV room that she found the gun. Aside from the TV itself — an immense thing that blocked out most of the bay window — and two leather chairs facing it, the only furniture in the room was a chest of drawers. The top drawer was slightly open and Tina figured that, while she was there, she might as well have a quick look through Brozi’s possessions to see if there might be anything of interest. It seemed that he was pretty cavalier with his criminality because there’d been no attempt to hide the gun. It was sitting there in the drawer next to two three-inch-thick wads of used fifty-pound notes — a brand-new Glock 17 pistol. She picked it up and inspected it with gloved hands, releasing the magazine. It was fully loaded with live ammunition. Ordinarily Tina would have removed the bullets, but these weren’t ordinary circumstances. If she did that, Brozi would know that somebody had been in his house, and the whole op would be compromised. But she was pleased with the find. It showed that Fox hadn’t just been yanking her chain. It also meant that if they had to arrest Brozi quickly, they had something serious to charge him with. The minimum recommended sentence for possession of a gun was five years, which gave them some decent bargaining power.

Tina looked at the money. There was probably ten grand in there. She had to admit that, for a moment, she was tempted to take some. She wasn’t paid a huge amount and she’d developed a taste for travel that was difficult to afford. A few hundred quid would pay for a flight to Asia or South America, and there was no way he’d miss it. The two piles weren’t even, and she doubted Brozi had counted them. But in the end she knew it would only bring her another step closer to the people she chased, and that if she did it once, she’d do it again. She thought about Dennis Milne, the corrupt cop she’d met in the Philippines a couple of years ago, who’d gone from Met detective to killer for hire with God knows how many corpses to his name. She thought of Fox and his remark about them being similar, and with a sigh, she slid the drawer back to the position it had been in when she’d found it, and continued up through the house to the last floor.

As she reached the master bedroom, the radio crackled in her pocket. It was Bolt.

‘What’s happening?’ she whispered.

‘The surveillance team have lost Brozi,’ he told her.

‘Great. Where did they lose him?’

‘On the Caledonian Road. He did a U-turn and shook them off.’

‘So he saw them?’

‘I don’t know, but I want you out of the house right now. And no messing about, Tina, please.’

Tina looked round the bedroom. It was tidier than the rest of the house with a huge double bed with mirrors facing it on two walls, and a large cupboard at one end. It was the desk with the PC next to the window that caught her attention. ‘OK, I’m coming.’

‘Now,’ Bolt said firmly, ending the call.

Tina figured she had another minute or two, and went over to the PC. The screen was dark, so she hit the return key and it immediately lit up, showing a freeze frame from an amateur porn movie. In the bottom corner of the screen there were two more internet icons. She tapped the first one and an email account appeared, showing an empty space where the new emails should have been. She wrote down the address, then saw that there was an email in the drafts section on the left-hand side of the screen. Using the drafts section to communicate was a much-used trick of terrorists, as well as the more organized criminals. If two or more people had access to the same email address they could write messages to each other in draft, which could then be read without the messages themselves ever actually being sent across the internet, meaning they couldn’t be monitored by the authorities.

Tina pressed the drafts icon, and the message appeared. It was several sentences long and written in an indecipherable language that was presumably Albanian. She made the text as big as she could on the screen and photographed it, before switching back to the original email account screen, and shrinking it so that the freeze frame from the porn film would be the first thing Brozi saw when he switched the PC back on again. She had no idea whether it was a useful lead or not, but it felt promising, and it gave her an excuse for not having left the house immediately.

Tina was conscious of the time but she also knew that she might not get another chance like this to bug Brozi, and if truth was told, it gave her an adrenalin rush just being in his house. She hadn’t had much in the way of excitement these past few months, so she was making up for lost time. Working fast, she fitted a keystroke tracker to the PC, so that they’d be able to monitor every word he typed, and she was just looking round the room for a good spot to place another camera when the radio crackled into life again.

‘What the hell are you doing, Tina?’ demanded Bolt. ‘They still haven’t found Brozi. You need to get out right now.’

‘OK, OK, I’m coming-’

‘Oh shit.’

‘What?’

‘A car has just pulled into the street.’ He paused. ‘It’s parking ten yards away. Yes, it’s definitely Brozi. Tina, switch off your radio and stay put. I’ll let you know when he comes out again.’

Tina shook her head. She’d messed up. The rules on covert entry were always the same. You could only bug an individual’s house while someone was watching them elsewhere. As soon as you lost the eyeball, you abandoned the op. A few hours working with Mike Bolt again and she’d already broken a cardinal rule.

‘He’s got a gun in the house,’ she said quickly. ‘It might be best to get some armed response, just as back-up?’

‘Is it loaded?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you’d better unload it quickly because he’s out of the car now and on his way to the front door. Christ, Tina, why do you always do this to me?’ She could hear the anger in his voice as she switched off the radio.

She heard the key turn in the lock downstairs. There was no way she could go down to the living room and unload the gun without Brozi being alerted to her presence. She looked round quickly for a place to hide, and settled for the double wardrobe opposite the bed. She climbed inside, noticing that the PC hadn’t yet gone into screensaver mode, so if Brozi came up here in the next few minutes, he was going to know someone had been tampering with it. Silently, she cursed herself for the self-destructive streak that constantly seemed to haunt her.

Yet, even then, she couldn’t help feeling that little twinge of excitement.