Ultimatum

Sixty-one

20.22

On the TV in the poky front room of my flat, the Shard was burning, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at it. I couldn’t bring myself to switch channels either. So there it was: a constant reminder of everything I’d done this afternoon.

I took a last slug of the beer and put down the bottle, feeling like a condemned man.

I’d killed a man in cold blood. Shot him while he begged for mercy. I’d killed in cold blood before, back in Afghanistan — two Taliban wounded in a firefight with our patrol whom we could easily have taken alive. I’d stood above them, like I’d stood above Dav, and emptied more than a dozen rounds into each of them in turn. Afterwards I’d felt guilty. I still do. They might have been trying to kill me but, in the end, it was we who were in their country, and what I’d done was barbaric.

The difference was, those killings had been carried out in a dusty, hot war zone thousands of miles from home, and away from the prying eyes of the media.

Today’s bloodshed had been right on my doorstep.

So, Bolt and his colleagues hadn’t stopped the terrorists’ third attack. Like most other people, I hadn’t had a clue that the Shard was having an official opening-night party tonight, and it was difficult to believe that it would still have gone ahead after the earlier bomb attacks. Clearly, it was part of the government’s strategy of carrying on as normal in the face of the terrorist threat. If so, it hadn’t worked.

Cain had got exactly what he wanted, and what he’d predicted — chaos and terror. And with this morning’s coffee shop bomber now identified as a thirty-one-year-old Muslim man, it looked like Islamic fundamentalists were going to get the blame. Cain was probably toasting his success right now.

That was unless, of course, the police had already tracked him down using the GPS unit I’d planted. If so, he might actually be under arrest, along with Cecil. I was just going to have to wait to find out.

The huge problem I had was that both men could implicate me in the slaughter at the scrapyard, and Dav’s murder, if they chose to testify against me in a court of law. I could go back down for years this time, and never see Gina or Maddie again. It was a bastard of a position to be in. My plan, as much as I had one, was to tell the detectives from CTC that Cain and Cecil had gone to the meeting without me, and had then shown me the missile at a neutral location, and hope for the best. It wasn’t exactly foolproof, but right now I didn’t have anything else.

I needed to speak to Bolt to tell him I was at home. There was no point putting off my interrogation any longer, and with a couple of beers inside me, I felt fortified enough to deal with it.

But as I got to my feet, looking round for the phone, the doorbell rang.

I thought about not answering it, but the noise from the TV made it obvious I was in. I went over to the window and pulled back the curtain a few inches.

Cecil stood on my doorstep — small and wiry, bouncing on his feet against the cold — his back to the small communal garden. He gave me a quick wave and nod, motioning for me to open the door. He’d changed from earlier, and was wearing a bomber jacket and jeans, the coat zipped up against the cold.

I didn’t like him turning up at my flat out of the blue. It made me uneasy. But he’d seen me now, so to ignore him would arouse suspicion.

‘What do you want?’ I called through the glass. ‘I thought I told you I wanted to be left alone.’

Cecil pulled a face. ‘What is this?’ he called back, his voice muffled. ‘You’re going to leave me out here in the cold? We need to talk.’

It was pitch black outside. My flat was on the ground floor, one of four in an old detached house cut off from the road by a high hedge. It was a secluded spot. Too secluded. The old lady directly above me was deaf as a post; the other neighbours were commuters who were out most of the time.

‘Come on, what the hell is this, Jones?’ Cecil called again, clearly irritated now.

Alarm bells were sounding in my head. I decided then that, old friend or not, I wasn’t going to let him in.

A shadow suddenly appeared behind the window to my right, obscured by the curtain, and before I could react Cain was standing in front of me, his pale face ghostly in the moonlight, the vein throbbing obscenely on his cheek. He was holding a pistol with a suppressor attached, the end of the barrel touching the glass.

‘Pass the front-door keys through the window, Jones,’ he said, loudly and firmly.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ I demanded, putting just the right amount of indignation in my voice, knowing that I was too late to make a move.

Cecil had also brought a pistol with suppressor attached out from beneath his bomber jacket, and I could see that his eyes were alive with anger.

‘You’ve got questions to answer,’ announced Cain. ‘About who exactly you work for.’

And I knew then that they’d found out about me. Which meant I no longer had to worry about what I said to the police.

Because I was already a dead man.

‘I’ve got a home address for the informant, Richard Burnham-Jones,’ said Tina into the phone, shouting to be heard above a helicopter flying overhead, as she walked further down the road away from all the activity surrounding Azim Butt’s house. She read out the address, then waited while Commander Ingrams dictated it to someone next to him.

‘Right, we’ll get officers round there now,’ said Ingrams. ‘In the meantime, we have authority to move Prisoner Garrett. There’s a park two hundred yards south of where you are. A helicopter’s going to pick up you up there in five minutes and take you up to the prison to sign him out. We’re setting up a safehouse about eight miles from the prison. I want you to travel with Garrett and the escort to the safehouse by road.’

‘Why not by helicopter?’

‘It’s too risky. We haven’t picked up the Stinger shooter yet. If there are any more Stingers in circulation they could be used against a helicopter, and we really can’t afford to lose Garrett.’ He paused. ‘You’re to tell him that if he gives you the full names of everyone involved in the attacks today, and all those involved in the Stanhope siege, he’ll be kept in a safehouse until the trial, and we will ask the trial judge to strongly consider his cooperation when passing sentence. In other words, he won’t serve a life-term sentence.’

‘Are we allowed to do all that, sir?’ asked Tina. The idea of giving Fox all he’d asked for, with the Shard still burning barely half a mile from where she stood, stuck in her throat. It wasn’t right.

‘We’re effectively in a state of emergency here, DC Boyd. The attacks today, particularly the last one on the Shard, make the government look weak, and they can’t have that. If Garrett is the key — and it looks like he may well be — we have to make him talk. We can’t torture him, although God knows there are plenty of people here who would love to do it, so this is the only way. Tell him this, too. If he doesn’t talk, if he holds out for a deal that’s never going to happen, then he’ll be transferred to Belmarsh by car later tonight, held in solitary confinement until his trial, and if necessary for the next fifty years. We’re not pussyfooting around here, DC Boyd. You need to make sure he knows that.’

‘I’ll make sure he knows,’ said Tina coldly. ‘And I’ll make sure he talks.’