Ultimatum

Twenty-six

15.15

Fox sat in his cell, watching events unfold on Sky News. The breaking news was that the Sky newsroom had just received a phone call from a spokesman for Islamic Command, the previously unknown group who’d already claimed responsibility for the bombings. The caller had reiterated his warning that a third, much bigger, attack would take place if their demands weren’t met.

The female anchor was now discussing the ramifications of this with one of Sky’s reporters who was standing outside 10 Downing Street, while on the bottom of the screen the news ticker gave the latest on the casualty toll: seventeen dead, including four police officers and a civilian killed in the second attack, and sixty-eight injured. A separate breaking news headline stated that there would be a press conference at Downing Street at 3.30.

Watching it reminded Fox of the chaos he and the other terrorists had inflicted on London fifteen months earlier. He’d felt like the king of the world then, an all-powerful lord of life and death, knowing that the whole world was watching him.

And now he was caged like an animal in a shitty little prison cell with lime-green walls, and his moment of glory was little more than a faded dream from another life.

With a sigh, he got up from the bunk and walked out of the cell. He’d petitioned the governor earlier to release him from solitary confinement and, surprisingly, permission had been given. It was recreation time in the wing now, and he was free to come and go as he pleased for the next two hours. The governor liked the prisoners to be able to mingle. He felt it made them less likely to be aggressive if they weren’t cooped up in their cells the whole time, and in this, Fox had to admit, he was right. He appreciated the small pleasure of being able to stretch his legs — to walk, and think — even if it was in a confined space. This was the first day since the attack by Eric Hughes that he’d been allowed to do it. Hughes, meanwhile, was still locked up in a separate wing as he’d been the one armed with the shank.

A table-tennis table in the central atrium surrounded by a cluster of tables and chairs provided the focal point for the prisoners when they were given the chance to socialize. Devereaux was already sitting at one of the tables, furthest away from the two screws who stood keeping an eye on things. Muscular and intense, with big staring eyes, and a tattoo of a grinning black skull covering most of his face, Devereaux looked like something out of a horror film, and gave off the air of a man only ever one step away from exploding. With a lot of prisoners, this kind of posturing was just show, but Devereaux was different. He was, as the judge who’d sentenced him put it, ‘pure, unadulterated evil’. Currently serving a whole-life tariff for the double murder of two underage prostitutes he’d kidnapped, raped and partly eaten a decade earlier, both screws and prisoners tended to give him a wide berth.

Fox nodded at one of the prisoners playing table tennis, a huge former white supremacist known as Lenny who was one of the softest men in there, and approached the table where Devereaux sat alone, an unlit cigarette sticking out of his mouth.

‘Got a smoke?’ asked Fox, who’d taken up a ten-a-day habit out of boredom since arriving in prison.

‘Sure,’ grunted Devereaux, both the skull’s mouth and his own mouth moving in perfect time as he pulled a tin of roll-ups from his pocket and put it down on the table.

Fox leaned forward to take one. ‘Everything ready?’ he whispered.

‘Sorted,’ answered Devereaux. ‘What time, again?’

‘Six forty-five exactly,’ said Fox, his lips hardly moving.

He got up and walked away, putting the roll-up in his mouth, thinking that it was ironic that at a time when smoking inside public buildings was banned, prisoners could still smoke in their cells. The moment he got out of this place, though, he’d give up on the spot.

Which, if all went according to plan, was now only a matter of hours away.