Ultimatum Read online

  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 café 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.’

  Seven

  08.50

  TINA STOOD ON the pavement, next to a graffiti-strewn wall, smoking a cigarette, her hands still shaking with the shock of what she’d seen.

  The road had been sealed off for fifty yards either side of the lorry, and the place was crawling with emergency services vehicles. The man Tina had been chasing had now been removed in an ambulance, after increasingly desperate efforts by the paramedics to save him had come to nothing. Now there was only a large, irregular bloodstain on the tarmac where he’d been.

  The driver of the lorry looked shell-shocked. Two traffic officers had put him inside one of the squad cars furthest away from the scene to breathalyse him and take a statement, where he wouldn’t have to look at the evidence of what he’d done. It would be Tina’s turn to give a statement soon, but so far all available manpower had been sent to the scene of the explosion near Victoria Station. Thick, bilious smoke still rose above the nearby buildings and helicopters circled lazily overhead like vultures waiting for the kill. The sound of sirens was everywhere.

  She sighed. Barely a month back in the force and already it had all gone horribly wrong. It wasn’t that she hadn’t done her job – she had. The suspect had been running away from the scene of an explosion that had almost certainly been caused by a bomb. She’d identified herself clearly and yelled at him to stop. If he’d been innocent, he would have done. But he’d run for his life, hadn’t looked where he was going, and it had ended badly. If it had been anyone else doing the chasing, Tina would have been hailed a hero. But because it was her, she wouldn’t be. In the opinion of far too many of her police colleagues, Tina was a magnet for tragedy.

  DC Clive Owen wandered over. He had a sympathetic look on his face. ‘Are you all right?’

  She took a long drag on the cigarette. ‘I’ve been better.’

  ‘Look, you did the right thing. The word is this guy planted a bomb in a café in the middle of rush hour, and there are big casualties. What happened, serves him right. Saves the taxpayer the cost of keeping him behind bars for the next forty years.’

  Tina thought about the look on the terrified suspect’s face when he’d seen she was chasing him. He hadn’t looked like a hardened terrorist.

  ‘I’ll stand up for you if there’s any shit,’ continued Owen. He looked over her shoulder. ‘And I think it might be coming now.’

  A gleaming Audi A6 had pulled up on the other side of the police tape. A second later the door opened and Tina’s boss, DCI Frank Thomas, stepped out. He spotted them immediately, and marched over. He was a big man with a florid expression and a strong desire to make DCS, and he looked extremely pissed off. He hadn’t wanted Tina on his squad in the first place, and doubtless his view had just been reinforced.

  ‘T
his is a major bollocks-up,’ he said in his strong Welsh accent, sounding just like a cut-price version of Tom Jones, as he stopped in front of her and Owen. ‘We’ve got a bomb attack with multiple casualties, and the only suspect’ – he made the word ‘only’ stretch twice as long as it should have – ‘is run over and squashed by a lorry before we get a chance to question him. And to top it all, the copper doing the chasing, who left her colleague behind in the car—’

  ‘It wasn’t quite like that, sir,’ said Owen.

  ‘Shut up, Clive. The copper doing the chasing is none other than the Black Widow herself, probably the most controversial figure in the Met, Miss Tina Boyd.’ He glared at her. ‘Not only have we now got a mountain of paperwork, and a high-profile IPCC investigation to contend with, but the one man who could point us in the direction of the rest of his terrorist cell is dead.’

  ‘What would you have preferred, sir?’ said Tina, holding her ground. ‘That I let him get away?’

  ‘She’s right, sir—’

  ‘Clive, I told you to shut up.’ DCI Thomas turned back to Tina. ‘What I would have preferred is that you had maintained a visual on him but kept well back, as I believe you were told to do, and as is standard procedure in this kind of scenario, because that way …’ He paused. ‘That way we would have got him alive.’

  ‘I did what I thought was right,’ Tina insisted.

  ‘You did what you thought would cover you in glory. There’s a big difference.’

  ‘Sir, I was trying to catch a criminal. That’s what I thought we were meant to do. It was just bad luck that he got hit.’

  ‘Bad luck seems to follow you around.’

  Tina sighed. She couldn’t argue with that. She’d also worked out that it was better to be conciliatory than confrontational. ‘But I was twenty yards behind him, sir, well back, when he ran straight into that lorry’s path.’

  ‘Do we know he’s part of a terrorist cell, sir?’ asked Owen.

  Thomas gave a single decisive nod. ‘Yes. There’s been a call claiming responsibility from some Islamic outfit that no one’s ever heard of. They say there’s going to be another attack today. A bigger one. It might be bluster, but the whole Met’s on full alert. Which is why we needed him in one piece so badly.’

  ‘I’d like to make amends, sir,’ said Tina.

  ‘Well, unfortunately you’re not going to get a chance to.’

  ‘You’re not suspending me, are you?’ Tina felt the disappointment like a blow. Despite her frustrations with the way the Met was run she loved her job, and knew she was good at it.

  ‘I’ll be honest, DC Boyd, a part of me’s sorely tempted, but apparently you’re needed elsewhere. I’ve been told I have to temporarily release you from CID with immediate effect. I’ve also been given a number for you to call.’ He fished a business card from his pocket and handed it to her. ‘You’ll still need to make a full statement on what happened here later today, and you’ll have to make yourself available to the IPCC when they come calling. But as of now, you’re free to go.’

  Tina stared at the handwritten mobile number on the card. At first she thought it was some sort of joke, but it really wasn’t a day for jokes. She exchanged puzzled glances with Owen – clearly he didn’t have a clue what was happening either – then turned back to Thomas. ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said, having to shout above the noise of a rapidly approaching helicopter.

  She waited for it to pass before dialling the number. It was picked up on the first ring, and straight away she recognized the voice on the other end.

  Mike Bolt. A man she’d shared far too much history with, but whom she hadn’t seen or heard from in well over a year.

  ‘I hear from your boss that you’ve been involved with the suspect from the coffee shop bomb,’ said Bolt, with none of the usual preliminaries as to how she was.

  ‘That’s right. Is that what you’re dealing with too?’

  ‘Indirectly,’ he said cryptically. ‘I need you for something.’

  Tina took a last drag on the cigarette and crushed it underfoot. ‘What?’

  ‘You remember Fox, the captured terrorist from the Stanhope siege? Well, he wants to cooperate, and for whatever reason – and I cannot think for the life of me what it could be – he wants to talk to you. I need you over here right away.’

  ‘But I haven’t got transport, and the roads around Victoria Station are gridlocked. I also haven’t got a clue where you are, or even who you work for these days. It’s been a long time, remember?’ She resisted asking why he hadn’t bothered to call before now. She already knew the answer to that one.

  ‘We’re a ten-minute walk from where you are now. I’ll text you the address.’

  He ended the call, and Tina took a deep breath. It was barely nine a.m. and already this was turning into one of the most dramatic days of her career.

  Eight

  09.12

  CRACK COCAINE CAN be an excellent moneymaker. It’s one of the most addictive substances known to man. That first hit on the pipe is meant to be like having a five-minute orgasm multiplied by a hundred while simultaneously finding out you’ve won ten million on the lottery. Addicts will do near enough anything for their fix – forever chasing, but never quite managing to replicate, that very first high – and there are plenty of them out there living on the periphery of everyone else’s world, unseen and unloved.

  So if you’re running a crackhouse selling rocks at ten pounds a hit, you can easily end up taking two, three grand a day. Of course you’ve got overheads. You’ve got to buy the coke to make the end product, and you’ve got to hire security, because there are plenty of people out there who’d rob you blind if they could, but even so, you’re still left with the kind of profit margins most legitimate businesses struggling in the recession would kill for. And you don’t even have to pay tax on them.

  Most crackhouses are run by individual dealers who let their places go to shit, attract the attention of the local housing authority and even, God forbid, the cops, and end up getting shut down. But if you’re an entrepreneur with a bit of intelligence, and you keep your dealing discreet, then you can operate under the radar for months, years even, building up a network of establishments. And if you actually import the coke you use to make the crack yourself, then you can end up a very rich man.

  Nicholas Tyndall was one such entrepreneur. A well-established gangster with good contacts among his fellow criminals, and even within the police service itself, he ran eleven crackhouses across north-east London that were reputed to net him more than two hundred grand a week. And they were never shut down because one of Tyndall’s front companies bought the properties being used to sell the dope as well as the properties next door (usually at knockdown prices) so that complaints from neighbours were kept to a minimum, which meant the cops weren’t too interested either. If no one reports a crime, there’s an argument that a lot of target-obsessed senior coppers subscribe to that says it’s not actually being committed. Ergo, everyone – dealers, addicts, civilians, the law – stays happy.

  One of the headaches you’ve got as a crack entrepreneur, though, is getting the cash out of your establishments and into your own grubby mitts. You need men you can trust for this. Men who are reliable, and who the scare the shit out of people. One such individual was LeShawn Lambden. Now this guy was a man mountain. Six feet five inches tall and two hundred and fifty pounds of pure, rippling, three-hours-a-day weight training’s worth of muscle, with a face like a bull and the kind of coal-eyed glare that puts the fear of God into citizens and criminals alike.

  Every few days LeShawn and his crew would travel round to all of Tyndall’s establishments and collect 80 per cent of the takings, the other twenty being paid to the dealer who ran the premises. In order to minimize the risk of being stopped by the cops or, worse, being ambushed by people keen to get their hands on all that cash, LeShawn always varied the days he carried out his collections, and the order he visited the crackhouses in, and he liked to
use different vehicles. Street legend had it that in all the time he’d been doing the job, no one had ever held back cash from him, or tried to take it.

  And now all that was about to change.

  The job had been planned down to a tee. LeShawn might have worked hard to keep his movements unpredictable but it was his leather jacket that let him down. It was a knee-length black thing that he always wore when he was out on business, supposedly because it made him look cool and menacing, like Arnie in the first Terminator movie. It hadn’t been very hard to get a GPS sewn into the lining. A quick and silent break-in at one of his girlfriend’s places when he was staying over a couple of nights earlier, and five minutes later there were four of them planted, so if one ran out of batteries we could just switch on another. The GPS units were attached to a laptop in which the coordinates of all eleven crackhouses had been entered. As soon as LeShawn visited two of the addresses within fifteen minutes of each other, an alarm sounded, letting us know that he was almost certainly on one of his collection runs.

  So there I was, sitting in a Volvo C60 on a grimy, litter-strewn council estate in south Tottenham, with Cecil in the driver’s seat next to me, watching the GPS’s progress on his mobile phone. Three minutes earlier LeShawn had stopped at crackhouse number eleven, the last on his list, two hundred yards from where we were parked.

  Cecil was short, wiry and very, very hard. He had a very small bald head that reminded me of a fly’s, and the kind of terrifying glare that sets all but the most physically confident men on edge. He was looking at his watch, counting down the seconds. LeShawn and his crew didn’t like to hang around any longer than they had to at the places they visited. They went in, got the dealer to hand over the contents of the safe, gave him his cut, and left. It wasn’t their job to see if the money tallied with the amount of coke entering the premises. This was done separately by Tyndall’s finance people. The average length of time from the moment LeShawn’s car stopped outside a crackhouse to the moment it started moving again was four minutes and fifteen seconds. The one he was visiting now took slightly longer at four minutes and fifty, because there was a bit more of a walk to and from the front door.