Ultimatum

Six

08.24

There was no denying it. Prison decor really was shit.

Prisoner number 407886, William James Garrett, better known to the international media by his codename Fox, sat on his bunk staring at the four grimy, pockmarked walls that marked the borders of his home, and wondered who on earth had decided to paint them lime green. The bright colours didn’t make him feel any more positive about his situation, as he was sure they were meant to do. They just gave him a headache.

Fox couldn’t stand prison. In his mind, keeping a man in a tiny cage without hope for the rest of his days but giving him glimpses of the outside world through TV and the net was far less humane than killing him outright. What surprised him was the number of men in the cells around him — men who were here for many years, and a few who were in for the rest of their lives — who’d become so institutionalized that they no longer had any desire to experience life on the outside. One old lag had even told him that if the gates to the prison were suddenly to be opened one day, 99 per cent of the prisoners would opt to stay behind bars.

Not Fox. He wasn’t going to end up like some sort of zombie, subservient to the establishment as he counted down the days until he finally pegged out, unloved and unmourned, a pantomime hate figure for the masses.

Yet the charges he faced were enough to keep him inside for ten lifetimes. He was the sole surviving terrorist of a bloody siege at a London hotel that had left more than seventy people dead, and there were a whole host of witnesses who’d seen him kill at least five of them in separate incidents in what was widely acknowledged to be Britain’s worst terrorist atrocity. There was absolutely no doubt that he would be found guilty at his trial. Even his defence team had conceded as much, but, since the taxpayer was paying them by the hour, they were still prepared to give it a go. And there was no doubt either that the sentence he’d be handed would be a whole-life tariff. In other words, there was no hope of him ever getting out.

And yet …

Fox’s head hurt. Three days earlier he’d had his first taste of prison violence when he’d been attacked by another prisoner armed with a homemade shank. He rubbed a finger along the wound where the blade had torn across his scalp, touching each of the nineteen stitches. It felt tender to the touch but he ignored the pain. It would heal soon enough, as would the deep cuts on his right hand and his left and right forearms, which he’d lifted to ward off his attacker’s blows. He’d been bloodied, as he had been on more than one occasion in his life, but, as always, he remained unbowed.

The TV in the corner of his cell was switched to BBC Breakfast News, as it was every morning. He liked to find out what was happening in the outside world while he ate his breakfast, even though it was rarely anything exciting. But today something was actually happening. The well-scrubbed male presenter had interrupted the fawning interview he was doing with some fourth-rate actor to say that the BBC were getting reports of a bomb attack on a cafe in central London.

He got up from the bunk and pressed the call button on the wall. Prison was, he thought, much like staying in a very cheap and tatty hotel, which was probably why so many of the prisoners quite liked it.

Outside he could hear the early morning noises of the prison: the clanking of doors; the shouts; the rattle of keys; the occasional burst of laughter — the sounds of a closed, insular community, but a community nonetheless, and he almost wished he could be out there as well. But for the moment he was being held in protective custody on the governor’s orders in case there was a further attempt on his life, and it didn’t look like that was a situation that was going to be changing any time soon.

A few minutes later, the flap on the cell door opened and the face of Officer Fenwick, a bearded screw at the wrong end of his fifties who’d have trouble stopping a clock let alone a riot, appeared in the gap. It almost amused Fox that Fenwick, unarmed and way too old, was one of the few men standing between him and freedom.

‘Good morning, Mr Garrett,’ said Fenwick with a cheery smile as if he was addressing his next-door neighbour rather than a man who was about to stand trial for his part in arguably the worst mass murder in modern British history. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘Good morning, sir,’ said Fox, pressing his face up to the gap, pleased to see the other man flinch slightly at his closeness. ‘You know it’s less than a month to my trial?’

‘I do.’

‘And you know what I’ve been charged with?’

‘I do.’

‘And you know I haven’t said a word to the investigating officers about any of the people involved alongside me?’

‘Are you going somewhere with this, Mr Garrett, because I’m actually very busy?’

Fox nodded. ‘Absolutely.’ He stared coolly at the other man. ‘I want to cooperate, Mr Fenwick. I want to tell the police everything I know about the people behind the Stanhope siege. And I want to do it right now.’

‘You know the procedure, Mr Garrett. You’ll need to make a formal request.’

‘It’s urgent.’

‘So are a lot of things.’

‘I’ve just seen on the TV that there’s been another bomb attack in London. And I know it’s the same people behind it.’

That stopped Fenwick. He frowned. ‘How could you possibly know?’

Fox stared him out. ‘I just do,’ he said firmly. ‘And I need to speak to the governor. Now.’

Fenwick nodded slowly, clearly deciding that Fox’s announcement was too big to be ignored. ‘I’ll inform him of your request.’

‘And something else.’ Fox paused to make sure even Fenwick couldn’t get this next part wrong. ‘There’s only one person I want to talk to.’