Ultimatum

Forty-four

19.07

I’d spoken to Bolt twice in the last half hour, after each call nodding a thanks to the landlord.

The conversations had been brief, and slightly surreal. He’d asked me a lot of questions about the Stinger, and I’d had to answer him while standing at the corner of a bar talking on a pub phone, shouting occasionally to make myself heard above the din of booze-fuelled conversation coming from all around. Hardly secure, but then desperate times call for desperate measures. Thankfully, Bolt had been more interested in minor details than in how we’d come to be in possession of it. What did the box the Stinger was being carried in look like? How big was it? Where in Cain’s car had I planted the GPS unit? That type of thing.

He’d finished the last call by telling me he’d send officers from CTC to collect me from the pub as soon as some were available. But I was getting restless. The bar was busy with a mixture of after-work groups and wrinkled locals, and the two TVs on opposite walls were both on Sky News, which was endlessly regurgitating the same material about the bomb attacks earlier. The confirmed death toll from the earlier bombs was now twenty, including five police officers, and it made me wonder what the hell Cain and Cecil were hoping to achieve. They’d killed a whole load of innocent people, and ripped apart the lives of hundreds of others. Just as they’d done in the Stanhope siege. And all for what? A few hours of constant network coverage.

What struck me looking round was that I could see that only a handful of the pub’s clientele were even watching the TVs. Most were engaged in conversation. People were laughing, exchanging gossip. Getting on with their lives. Already the bombs were old news. But this was just the way it was in the era of the internet and twenty-four-hour news. Attention spans had shortened dramatically. Even the terrorists’ threat of a third attack was no longer appearing to have the desired effect — on these people, at least.

I knew better. They should be afraid. A Stinger missile would take the slaughter to a whole new level, and unless Bolt and his people acted fast, there could be a massacre on the scale of Lockerbie within hours.

I thought about phoning Gina to warn her, but what the hell would I say? That there was a missile in circulation capable of bringing down a plane, and that she should grab Maddie and leave the city as soon as possible? It would be pointless. In the end they were better off where they were. And what if Gina asked me how I knew about it? I could hardly tell her the truth. That while working undercover for the people who’d sacked me and helped put me in prison, I’d helped acquire it for the terrorists, one of whom was an old colleague of mine, while simultaneously committing cold-blooded murder.

As I snaked my way slowly through the pub’s customers towards the exit, I realized I was shaking. I hated myself for my part in all this, but self-preservation was also kicking in. I needed to think, to settle down in my own home, down a beer, and work out the story I was going to tell Bolt’s colleagues. One that was somehow going to avoid mention of a gang of dead Albanians.

I’d been in worse situations before, I told myself as I walked back out on to the street, breathing in the cold air. But at that moment I couldn’t honestly remember when.