Nick Stone is back in London but if he thought he was home for a break, he’s very, very wrong.
Backed into a corner by a man he knows he cannot trust, ex-deniable operator Nick Stone strikes a devil’s bargain. In exchange for his own safety – a life for a life – Stone is charged with locating someone who doesn’t want to be found, currently hiding out in one of the remotest corners of the UK. And for the first time in a long time, he’s not operating alone.
But Stone and his team don’t find just anyone. They find a world-class hacker, so good that her work might threaten the stability of the western world as we know it. These are dangerous waters and Stone is quickly in over his head. Before he finally knows which way to turn, the choice is ripped out of his hands.
Most people might think of home as safety but Nick Stone isn’t most people. For him and his team, it’s just another place to get caught in the line of fire …
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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Andy McNab 2017
Cover images © Johnny Ring, Shutterstock
Design: Stephen Mulcahey/TW
Andy McNab has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473543607
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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
REMOTE CONTROL
CRISIS FOUR
FIREWALL
LAST LIGHT
LIBERATION DAY
DARK WINTER
DEEP BLACK
AGGRESSOR
RECOIL
CROSSFIRE
BRUTE FORCE
EXIT WOUND
ZERO HOUR
DEAD CENTRE
SILENCER
FOR VALOUR
DETONATOR
COLD BLOOD
RED NOTICE
FORTRESS
STATE OF EMERGENCY
WAR TORN
BATTLE LINES
THE GREY MAN
LAST NIGHT ANOTHER SOLDIER
TODAY EVERYTHING CHANGES
ON THE ROCK
BRAVO TWO ZERO
IMMEDIATE ACTION
SEVEN TROOP
SPOKEN FROM THE FRONT
THE GOOD PSYCHOPATH’S GUIDE TO SUCCESS
(with Kevin Dutton)
SORTED!: THE GOOD PSYCHOPATH’S GUIDE TO
BOSSING YOUR LIFE (with Kevin Dutton)
For more information on Andy McNab and his books,
see his website at www.andymcnab.co.uk
Zürich, Switzerland
3 May 2016
The heavy steel door, which the law dictated had to be thick enough to withstand the force of several Hiroshimas, had been nicely veneered in oak to make it look less intimidating. As it swung open, with a hydraulic sigh, I stood and turned to greet the woman coming through.
‘Claudia.’
The door powered itself closed behind her, with a reassuring clunk. The clack of her heels on the shiny white tiles took over, and she approached with an extended hand. ‘Mr Stone. Very nice to meet you at last. May I call you Nick?’
She was as I’d imagined her, early thirties, very smart, businesslike black skirt to just above the knee, big professional smile. Her hair was relaxed and pulled back in a bun.
She was probably running through the same evaluation process as I was and working hard to hide her disappointment.
‘Of course. I thought we were old friends anyway.’
Her polite smile didn’t exactly light up the room. She moved round to the other side of the desk and sat at the same time as I did, maintaining the smile of non-commitment to emotion.
She took a breath. ‘Nick, I’m afraid there’s still no progress on the release of the funds, if that’s why you’ve come to see me.’ Her English was every bit as perfect as, no doubt, her Russian, French, German and Italian were. ‘We have not only the Russian fiscal and probate systems to deal with but also our own regulatory bodies here in Switzerland. They will need to be content with the process of the release, which, unfortunately, isn’t yet a release. When your funds are eventually transferred, they will be held in escrow until we’ve conformed to both countries’ regulations.’
She managed a slight widening of the smile that gave her already prominent cheekbones a little lift. She was West African, maybe Nigerian, but Claudia Nangel, I was sure, would never consider retiring there.
So, no change from what I’d been hearing for months now, not only from Claudia but also from my lawyer in Moscow. Her bank seemed to be making an absolute fortune – not that they were going to see any of it at the moment. ‘You mean I have it, but I don’t have it?’
Claudia rested her hands on her desk and leant forward. ‘Nick, I’m so sorry for the loss of your partner and son. And I’m so sorry we can’t do any more to help you right now. We will try hard to cut through bureaucracy this end when your funds are released in Moscow, but …’
It sounded genuine.
She noticed the brown Jiffy bag I’d placed on the desk. ‘Ah, I see. Is this why you’re here?’
‘Could I ask you to look after it for me?’
She opened the bag without a flicker of interest, concern, or even a smile, and produced a smaller one, white and the size of a CD, sealed, along with a folded sheet of A4. The brown Jiffy bag seemed far too messy for the room. I loved private banking.
‘The three names on that piece of paper each have a different code statement next to them. If any of those individuals calls you and gives their statement, could you please courier the package to the address I’ve written on it? If I call in, that would make four of us who can independently authorize the move.’
She lifted the envelope a little to check the address.
‘Do you need to know what’s in there?’
‘No, Nick, not at all. But there will be a charge for curation.’
‘Ah. The problem for me, Claudia, is that I don’t have any personal money left. I can’t sell the apartment in Moscow because it was in Anna’s name. And even if the court clears probate tomorrow, it clearly isn’t going to be the end of the bureaucracy. I don’t think I’ll be able to find a way through without your help. So I’m skint.’
She eased herself back in the chair, her hands clasped together as if in prayer. Maybe her English wasn’t as good as I’d thought it was.
‘Skint?’
The diamond band with her wedding ring was on the fourth finger of her right hand. It looked like Claudia was German, not Swiss.
I had a flashback to the lesson I’d learnt the hard way as a young squaddie stationed in Minden. I was always getting into trouble trying to chat up women after a casual check of their left hand, but that changed the night I got filled in by a very pissed-off German husband outside a nightclub called Stiffshankers. He explained, in better English than I spoke, that in Germany married women wore a ring on the right hand instead of the left.
Not that my cultural lesson was going to help me today.
‘No money at all. I’m going to have to start working for a living.’
Either the joke wasn’t understood or she didn’t like the idea of her clients soiling their hands. She smiled, a little less widely than even last time, and logged the word in the English dictionary inside her head, filing it with ‘broke’ and ‘brassic’.
I knew what she was going to say before she said it. I’d heard it often enough before.
‘I’m so sorry, Nick, but we can’t help you in any way financially. We can’t advance any sums of capital. It would be illegal.’
She smiled enough to display a perfect set of teeth. ‘Not yet, of course. But we will hold your package for you and we can talk about our consideration in, say, two months?’
Why didn’t banks talk about money? Maybe if you had to ask about costs you shouldn’t be in that room.
Whenever I’d phoned, I’d pictured her gazing out of her window at some shimmering Swiss lake as she talked to me at all hours of the day and night.
The bank’s foyer had kept the dream alive, a riot of beige and gold topped off with a crystal chandelier the size of a small planet. There hadn’t been a cashier in sight. It wasn’t the kind of set-up where you dropped in to deposit your pocket money. You either transferred it electronically or delivered it in a bulletproof attaché case handcuffed to a man mountain with biceps like wrecking balls.
But the lake view and opulence hadn’t been for me today. I was sitting in the basement, surrounded by concrete walls painted white, glossy white floor tiles, no pictures, no plants. In front of me there was a smoked-glass desk and, behind that, what was probably the world’s most expensive leather swivel chair. The desk was bare apart from the Jiffy bags and still folded sheet of A4. No telephones, no computers, not even a clock or a photo-frame. I was in the bank’s confidentiality room.
‘We should then, hopefully, be able to cast some light on your situation. We are working on it, Nick, believe me.’
I did, but I also knew it was the end of the conversation. So did the door, which began to open as if it had read her mind. We stood up.
‘Shall I call you a taxi for the airport, Nick, or are you staying in Zürich?’
‘No. I can’t even afford to breathe the air.’ I knew she wouldn’t get the joke but thought I’d give it a try anyway. ‘A taxi would be great, thanks.’
We came out into a windowless corridor of more white tiles and walls, and she walked me towards the shiny stainless-steel lift that would take me up to the ground floor and its sumptuous marble, leather and crystal.
The doors opened and I shook hands with my banking relationship manager for possibly the last time. At least now I had the fifth part of our security blanket in place for all four of us. My plan was to send the memory stick to the New York Times. They had a great system for whistle-blowers. I would also dump its contents with the papers in all the different ways they had ready and waiting, and all at once: WhatsApp, SecureDrop and Pretty Good Privacy. I would avoid the mailing address headed Tips, New York Times. That was where Claudia would send the white Jiffy bag.
Tulse Hill, London
I came out of the station in South London and got mugged by grime, decay, and air thick with diesel. Discarded copies of Metro swirled around my feet. There was still quite a lot of coverage in the broadsheets of the four coordinated Islamist suicide bombings in Brussels, which had left thirty-two dead and hundreds wounded, but these front pages were full of Brexit doom or joy and how some C-list celeb wanted us to vote. The chic spotlessness of Switzerland was five hundred miles away, an hour and forty minutes by plane.
I was heading for Rio’s. He had bought an ex-council maisonette close to the station. Way back when I was fifteen, nicking money from gas meters and dreaming of owning a second-hand Ford Cortina, these places were the height of social mobility round here. My claim to fame was that a mate I used to bunk off school with lived in one.
There were only two comprehensive schools the kids from Brixton, Peckham and Tulse Hill went to, so if you went to school, you went to one of them. I didn’t put in too many appearances, but I made a few mates along the way, and one, Pete, had lived on the same estate I was heading for now.
We were the same age but that was where any similarity between us ended. Pete had had all the kit – he’d worn his cuffs and butterfly collars outside his blazer, just like Jason King – and I’d thought he was smooth as fuck in his baggy trousers.
I put my card into an ATM on the main road and asked for five hundred quid. There should have been the best part of seven million US dollars tucked away in the Zürich account. Drug money, it had fallen into my hands years ago, and since no one had ever asked for it back, I considered it mine. I’d kept a few quid in reserve for my partner Anna and myself, but the lion’s share had gone into a trust fund for our son, Nicolai. They’d been murdered two years ago, and the trust should revert to me after probate was granted. The problem was, my lawyers in Moscow had been more interested in dragging things out, maintaining their income stream.
The bank had issued me with a turbo-charged debit card when I joined it, the sleek black thing without any embossed numbers that the ATM was now spitting out. That shouldn’t have been happening. The link between me and my bank vault was routed through a randomly selected, ever-changing configuration of about twenty-six separate servers, at the end of which I was guaranteed money at any ATM worldwide.
Except in Tulse Hill, it seemed. Maybe it was because a private Swiss bank card hadn’t been shoved into any South London ATM before, but when I tried again, it fucked me off. I tried a third time. Nothing. I knew it wasn’t going to happen, but it was worth a try.
It really did feel like I’d come full circle as I minced along the same pavement on the South Circular Road towards the same estate as I had back then. It was like I’d never left. The only difference was that the trucks screaming past just a few feet from us pedestrians were a more modern shape and had Polish plates.
Rio’s house was on Coburg Crescent, just up on the left. Things hadn’t been all bad back then. One Sunday afternoon when I turned up at Pete’s he was out playing football and his mum and dad were at East Street Market, which left Fay, Pete’s sister, at home. She was seventeen, willing and keen, but it was all very quick, and she made me promise not to tell anybody. I said I wouldn’t, but as soon as I could, like the shit I was, I did.
I crossed what was left of the grass bank dividing the crescent from the South Circular, and wove through clumps of parked cars. Rio’s place was one of the scores of narrow 1960s terraced houses with a garage each as the ground floor. From the number of vehicles clogging the street, nobody used them as garages any more. If they were anything like Rio, it was where they housed their freezer, washing-machine and tumble-drier, a set of wheels for a non-existent car, and bags of dog biscuits for a non-existent pitbull that would bite the arse off anyone who tried to break into the house. They had ‘Buy One Get One Free’ labels all over them, which was probably what had given Rio the idea that he needed a dog.
Every time I’d entered the house I’d felt sure it was Pete’s old place. I’d gone into a familiar hall, then, almost by muscle memory, straight upstairs to the first floor where the living room, kitchen and toilet were, and up again to the three bedrooms and bathroom. A blue plaque on Fay’s wall to commemorate our union would have sealed it.
I fished about in my jeans for the door keys. Rio had taken pity on me a couple of weeks ago when I had nowhere to live. He was one of the good guys: he’d wanted to help me and he really liked the idea of setting up a security firm for us four survivors to run. The Special Needs Service, as he liked to call it. He and the other two might not have the correct number of limbs for a private military company’s line of work, but that didn’t matter.
That was as far as it had gone. I’d forgotten about it, but Rio had got the bug. It would be right up his street because he’d be the ultimate undercover operator, a Rasta with only one good arm.
This being South London, there were so many keys in the set Rio had had cut for me that they filled my pocket. The uPVC-framed partly double-glazed door hadn’t been there when I was a kid, but it was about the only thing that had changed. Within the glass was a grid of thin steel mesh and a ‘Beware of the Dog’ decal that Rio had picked up along with his dog-food bargain. Security was so much better now than it had been in my thieving days, when you knew you could just smash the unprotected float glass and grab a fistful of coins from the gas and electricity meters – and then probably take a dump in the sink for a laugh.
Rio was in: only the cylinder lock needed turning.
I pushed the door and entered the small hallway with the narrow stairs in front of me. The smell of vegetable soup was overpowering. The cans were stacked like an art installation against the wall. Above, on the first floor, there was a landing with two doors. The one on the left led into the open-plan living room and kitchen; to the right was the toilet.
I pushed upstairs. The swirly carpet was almost threadbare, and had probably been very smart when Pete’s mum installed it. I shouted up, ‘I remember the carpet pattern, mate. This is definitely the same house.’
Rio appeared in the living-room doorway, all smiles. ‘Mate, don’t believe you. Listen, we’ve got jack shit in. You want to go down to Maccy or get pizza? I’m fucking starving.’
He came down a couple of steps to meet me. On the safe phone he had tapped out a text. Now he held it in front of me. It said, ‘Play safe.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Maccy’s great. Let me dump the bag first and have a piss, and I’m there, all right?’
He locked eyes on me and they weren’t as happy as the voice had been.
Rio wasn’t as house-proud as Pete’s mum had been, that was for sure. A half-eaten bread roll sat on the glass coffee-table, along with a spoon and a bowl, both encrusted with dried soup. A week’s worth of the Metro and the Sun were scattered on the old brown settee, most of them folded to the TV page to save us from Brexit and Islamic fundamentalism overload. If Homes & Gardens ever did a feature and asked Rio to describe the look he’d gone for, shabby chic wouldn’t cut it. Freshly burgled would be closer.
‘Hurry up!’ Rio yelled after me. ‘Fuck sake.’
I headed up to the second floor and dumped my daysack and mobile on the bed. I wanted it to look and sound normal, us not wanting to stay in the house any longer than necessary. If Rio wanted us out, then I wanted us out.
Play safe. OK, so who was watching? Who was listening? What was going on? Fortunately, I really did need a piss. I got it over and done with quickly and noisily by aiming into the water, as Rio shouted even louder, ‘It’ll be fucking closed if we don’t get a move on. Come on!’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ I bounced down the stairs, through the living room and on down the last flight, taking them two at a time until I was through the front door and he could start on the three deadlocks.
As casually as I could, I checked for bodies in the sea of parked cars. It would have been difficult for anyone to sit out there for any prolonged period. Curtains would twitch. Residents wouldn’t reckon on an assassin sitting in the car, they’d think it was someone from TV Licensing, watching for the glow of a screen, or the Social checking if someone claiming disability allowance was mowing the lawn or doing a spot of street dance. I checked, too, for anyone walking past or waiting at the bus stop across the road, lips moving as they gave the ‘stand by, stand by’ into their mics.
The answer was no, but that didn’t mean we weren’t being watched. Airborne optics would be able to pick us up from so far away we wouldn’t be able to see the helicopter platform.
We strolled towards the station and McDonald’s. His good arm swung freely. The other had done nothing but hang ever since an IED attack in Afghanistan. Just like the other two, Gabe and Jack, he was a casualty of the post-9/11 wars.
Rio was annoyingly taller than me, and far too slim, considering the amount of food he shoved down his neck. The dreadlocks had come on quite well since his medical discharge from the infantry four years ago. He reckoned it would be just another year or so before he had enough to bunch up into a woolly hat.
He looked at me, and forced a smile to reassure anyone watching that we were just bantering, but I could hear the strain in his voice. ‘You left your mobile?’
As if.
‘What’s happened?’
‘I got back from picking the kids up from school, and the tell-tales had fallen, all three of the fuckers.’
The last man out had to put broken cocktail sticks on the two landing doors, and another on the one that led from the living room up to the bedrooms. They were wedged into the gap between the top of the door and the frame so that they were held vertical. If the door was opened, its stick fell and, being so small, would never be noticed.
‘Shit. You’re still controlling your memory stick?’
He looked at me like I was mad. ‘Course.’ His face clouded. ‘We should do what we said we would if he tried to fuck us up. Let’s get the story out there and fuck up the Owl!’
I’d guessed this was coming. ‘No, mate, it’s too early. We don’t know anything about anything yet. The only time we dump that int out there is when we’re about to lose everything. Otherwise we lose any protection we have. We have leverage while we hold the int, but don’t think we’re bulletproof.’
All four of us had a memory stick that held the intelligence the Owl so desperately wanted never to be released into the public domain. But he had a problem. None of us four memory-stick holders knew where the other three were hidden, and Claudia held the fifth copy that all four of us would soon have access to. So far, that had kept us alive.
‘The girls, mate. Phase two was seeing if the missus would let me bring them to the house after school – you know, have their tea at mine, then I’d take them home later.’
Rio had been busting a gut to form a friendly relationship with Simone. His focus was on keeping her onside so he could see the kids. He called her his missus but, really, she was his ex-girlfriend and mother of his seven-year-old twins. These were early days for him trying to reconnect but he’d felt he was winning her round. She had agreed he could pick them up and drop them off at school, and he had been perfect so far.
That was now history.
We took a left. Rio rubbed his face. ‘He’s been bugging and videoing the fucking house ever since we got back, hasn’t he?’
‘Don’t assume anything. Look, I’m with you – it’s probably the Owl trying to fuck us up. But it wouldn’t make sense to re-enter the house if there were devices already planted – why risk compromising something that’s already been a success? It doesn’t matter why anyone was in the house, just that they were. All that matters is what we do about it, okay?’
Rio nodded slowly. He enjoyed learning this stuff. It wasn’t brain surgery: it was just stripping away the rubbish that meant nothing and didn’t help in working out what had happened and what we were going to do about it.
‘You have to think, So what? So what if someone’s been in the house? What does that mean to us right now, this minute?’
Rio didn’t need time to think. ‘We play safe and pretend we don’t know.’
‘Yes. We stay passive, for now. We need to find out who and why for certain, then get proactive and cut it out like a cancer. But that’s for another day. All that matters now is making sure we’re all safe, because we don’t know what his or their next move is.’
Today’s lesson on how to live life while constantly in the shit had got Rio past his wave of emotion. ‘We’ve got to tell Gabe, yeah? We need to make him safe, make his family safe.’
We passed the station and the golden arches came into view further up the South Circular.
I shot him a glance. ‘And Jack.’
He shook his head. ‘Mate, he’s still fucking us all off. He’s doing his own thing. Tortured artist and all that.’ He gave a hollow laugh.
I split left, he split right around a couple of young women with buggies, toddlers dragged along in their wake.
‘We’ll get Gabe to talk to him. He’ll listen to Gabe.’
Rio pushed the glass doors as we entered the kingdom of Chicken Legends and fries. For me, anyway. Rio always went for double whatever was on offer, times two.
We ordered at the touch screen, grabbed a booth, and Rio put the receipt on the veneered table next to the safe phone. We’d bought two of them from a CeX for forty pounds each in cash, along with a couple of PAYG Sim cards. We used WhatsApp. Most apps only encrypted messages between the sender and the app provider, but WhatsApp’s encryption was end-to-end. It ensured that only you and the person you were communicating with could read what was sent and nobody else, not even WhatsApp. No wonder it was the go-to choice of communication for drug dealers and terrorists. For now, anyway.
Gabe was in Edinburgh, trying to patch things up with his wife and kids. From what Rio was telling me, the patches weren’t sticking.
Rio was still visibly shaken by what was going on at this end. His eyes darted to the large window every time a body walked past. The streetlights came on, and soon he was getting jumpy about shadows as well.
‘Mate, it’s all right. No harm’s going to come to the girls. Look, if this is the Owl …’
Rio took a breath, but now wasn’t the time for yeah-buts.
‘Hear me out, mate. If this is the Owl, that would make him stupid, and he’s not, is he? His priority is to find all five of the memory sticks and take control of them. Why would he do anything that would provoke us into exposing what we have on them, yeah? So, if we switch on, stay focused on the situation, we keep safe.’
‘What if he does get them, Nick? What happens then? We’re fucked, aren’t we? We’re dead like the rest of them.’
A skinny boy, with enough zits on his face to fill a bucket, hovered while Rio lifted the mobile, then placed a tray between us on the table. He left to deliver the second tray he was carrying to a group of kids in my old school uniform. The boys were trying to be hard and the girls were being cool. Nothing had changed, just the lack of big collars, flares and, of course, platforms.
Rio was right that we’d be fucked – but we weren’t there yet. ‘All we’ve got to do is be on top of our game and make sure they’re not found. In time, he’s going to see we aren’t a threat.’
Rio wasn’t convinced and neither was I. But we couldn’t undo the situation we were in because we didn’t know who was on our case, the Owl, his bit of the CIA-within-the-CIA or whoever the fuck it was he worked for, or someone else altogether. Right now, all we could do was control what was happening in our lives based on what we knew.
Rio lifted the bun to his face and, as he always did, nibbled the onions that stuck out. He gazed out of the window in a trance, probably worrying about his girls.
‘Let’s get back to the real world, mate. Hello?’ I waved a hand in front of the bun. ‘Before Gabe logs on, yeah?’
He sort of nodded and looked down at the screen to check there was still power and signal.
‘I’ve got real-world news. There’s no luck with the cash. The lawyers, bankers, everyone seems to be making money out of the money I can’t get to – not for now, anyway.’
Rio sucked sauce off his thumbs. ‘So no little start-up, then?’
I shook my head so there was no doubt. He wouldn’t let go of the idea. Maybe it was because my non-existent cash would provide the funding.
‘C’mon, Nick. The Special Needs Service. The world needs our super-powers, mate.’
It got a laugh out of me as I dipped a chip into the mayo oozing out of my bun.
Gabe, Rio and Jack had all received payouts and a pension from the government for injuries sustained in Afghanistan, but they weren’t life-changing amounts. They still had mortgages or rent to pay, families to feed, McDonald’s and Poundland to keep in business. There wasn’t much going on out there for an amputee. People might love them turning up at fundraisers, but the goodwill soon disappears.
I had no idea of Jack’s circumstances, but I knew for sure they’d be much better than ours. He had dropped out of the group, which was a worry. We really needed to be close, to look after each other even more now. Gabe and Rio certainly had to stand on their own two feet for cash. Well, Rio did. Gabe had only one foot left.
The mobile sparked up and Gabe was on WhatsApp. He delivered his normal welcome: ‘You fuckers there?’
Rio didn’t bother picking up the phone, just tapped with his middle finger, the only one that wasn’t covered with sauce. He tapped the keyboard again to signal to Gabe that he should get out of his hotel room before we made voice comms. Gabe was in a Travelodge by the airport on some fifty-quid-a-night deal where the only breakfast included was a sachet of coffee and a little pot of UHT milk. It was cheaper to stay there than rent near the house he paid the mortgage for. I was hoping he would join Fathers4Justice so we could see him on his roof dressed as a one-legged Superman.
We got the word ‘Two’ in reply and went back to our food.
Rio was still looking about, but it was safe here in the crowd. It would be very bad skills for an operator to come in after us, especially as they had us contained. We were sitting by a window, and there was no other way out than the way in. It would be easy to get a trigger on us from outside, and remain out of the line of sight.
Rio licked his fingers and picked up the mobile as it vibrated. Gabe was a minute late. I leant in to hit the reply button.
Rio liked talking with his mate, even if it was to take the piss. ‘You’re late. There’s no early, no late, just on time. You’re late.’
He smiled at the ‘Fuck off’ he got in reply, then handed over the mobile. I put it to my ear, speaking into a cupped hand, Japanese-style. ‘Rio’s tell-tales have been moved. You still got your memory stick?’
‘Yeah, safe.’ His tone was serious now: it was work time.
‘Good to know we’re all looking after ourselves. Listen, we’ll leave the house, but not to come north – keep this shit away from your doorstep. We need to meet up and sort out a plan.’
Gabe was ahead of me. ‘What about Jack? He know yet?’
‘We need you to do that. He still taking your calls?’
Gabe said exactly what I was thinking. ‘He’ll take this one, whether he likes it or not.’
‘But will he listen?’
‘He’ll listen. Call back in two hours. I’ll grip Jack and you grip the gimp, OK?’ He didn’t wait for a reply before closing down.
I handed back the phone and Rio pocketed it. ‘Getting out of Dodge, are we?’
I shoved the last of the bun down my neck. ‘Yup, let’s sort this shit out.’
We headed for the disco lights of the South Circular. There was a small fire in a corporation litter bin, but no one was taking any notice of it, apart from a couple of schoolkids who’d been in McDonald’s earlier.
Rio was waiting for a plan. ‘Come on, mate. What?’
‘We pack a bag, get away from here. But we do it casually. Back to the house and talk about where we’re going out tonight. Then I’ll suggest we go away for a few days, both our lives being shit, and all that. We meet up with Gabe and Jack and get proactive, work out exactly who, what, where, when and why. Then we make sure they don’t get away with it.’
We crossed the grass and, as Rio pulled out his jailer-size set of keys, his front door opened and three bodies spilt out. They saw us and it was Rio who spotted their reaction. ‘Gun!’
Two bodies loomed up front; a third hung back. I kept my eyes on the one to the left. It wasn’t a gun in his right hand. It was a Taser.
‘Rio, run. Go for it. Run! Run!’
My eyes were glued to the lump of yellow plastic. Rio ran and so did I – straight at the Taser to stop it coming into the aim.
The dark shape holding it swung the weapon up. I jumped the final couple of metres, arms outstretched, head down so I didn’t knock myself out on his body. I rammed into him, throwing my arms to pinion his to his waist. I powered my toes into the tarmac and kept running, semi-stooped. My momentum was too much for him and he fell back on the path.
As he went down he attempted to tilt his wrist. The Taser popped and I braced for the zap. Nothing happened. The barbs bounced off the tarmac as we made contact with the ground, my knuckles taking the first contact.
I kept my grip, head down, burying myself in his bulk. He bucked, trying to wrench his arms free. I held on, knowing what would come a millisecond later. A flurry of punches from one of the others, still upright, rained into my head, arms and back as he tried to haul me off his mate. I squeezed in tight as the body below still bucked and heaved. I kept my head down and took what was piling into me.
The fact it was a Taser was a good sign: it meant they didn’t want us dead. If all four of us were being lifted at the same time, and Rio got away, there would be a memory stick in circulation and whoever else survived the lift would have some leverage.
I held on as the breathing of the body above me became laboured, his hands pulling hard at my arms as he worked to get me off his mate. My face was buried so hard in the man’s stomach I had to fight for breath. His abs tensed, and a second later went soft, then tensed again in his effort to disentangle himself.
The hands let go of my arms now their owner had realized he wasn’t going to move me with them. Kicks thudded into my legs. I took a big dead leg on the right. It didn’t matter: so long as these two were focused on me, only one could be running after Rio.
I took the pain and held on. The one I was gripping dug his heels into the path and pushed. My knuckles scraped along the tarmac again. He could do what he wanted: I wasn’t letting go.
Still no verbal reaction. I wanted to hear their accents. I wanted some indication of who they were.
I tilted my head just enough to free my mouth from his stomach. ‘That all you got?’
No reaction. All I could hear were grunts and laboured breathing. Somebody in one of the houses must have seen what was going on but round here people would turn a blind eye. So what if a dealer or the TV Licensing guy got filled in? Eventually somebody would call the police, and these guys knew that as well as I did. They wanted out of this as much as I did.
The standing one’s hands grabbed the back of my jacket and pulled. I didn’t let go of his mate. He pulled even harder and I suddenly released my grip and he flew backwards.
In that instant, I got what I wanted.
A voice, clearly American, clearly East Coast. ‘You fuck!’
Now was my time. I grabbed the body on the ground and pulled myself up level with his head. Teeth wide apart, I launched my face at his. Anywhere it landed would do. He jerked away at the last second and my top teeth hit his cheekbone. The bottom set got a bit of lobe. I closed my jaw like a vice.
He shook his head in disbelief, but that just made my job easier. All I had to do was stay connected, and if he carried on he’d rip his own face apart.
He froze, and I bit down harder in an attempt to close my bite completely. Blood oozed into my mouth; warm, metallic. My top teeth scraped down the side of his cheekbone. If they met their mates, they’d take a big chunk of skin out of him. He knew it, too, and so did the guy above me. He got to work, punching hard and fast into my head and shoulders. There was urgency about it: they had to resolve this situation. We were just fifteen metres from the South Circular.
And then the punches stopped as suddenly as they had started. A second later, he toppled onto my legs.
Rio stood with a knife in his good hand, seven inches of KA-BAR Tactical.
He brought down the knife once again and I saw a blur towards the side of a thigh below me. I heard it make entry, with a sound from him like a muffled squeak.
The body went rigid as the pain swept through it. He tried hard not to scream but he couldn’t help it. ‘Fuck!’
Even if sirens didn’t sound immediately, I didn’t want to have to start dragging bodies about and planning how to dispose of all the evidence. I unclenched my teeth and pulled myself away from the face. ‘Don’t kill ’em! Don’t kill ’em!’
We might have been in the middle of a major drama but death would bring us all into the real world. Dead bodies on a walkway can’t be ignored for long.
Rio waggled the knife and yanked it free. It must have embedded itself in bone.
I spat blood as I kicked myself free of the bodies and grabbed hold of Rio’s shoulders. ‘We’ve got to go, mate.’
The front door of the house was still open and light spilt out of the hallway. On the first-floor landing there was movement.
I hobbled to the door, my body not yet recovered. Number Three saw me: tall, short blond hair, side parted, taking the first steps down towards the door, hands full of wires and, behind him, the fuse box ripped apart.
I slammed the door. ‘Rio! Keys!’
He joined me, offering them up before holding his KA-BAR at the ready.
I snatched them from him and shoved in the first lever key. It was the wrong one and Rio knew it.
‘Fuck sake.’
I broke it into little stages, concentrated on what I was doing. I got the next key in just as the blond with the side parting got to the door and grabbed the handle. I locked it.
‘Let’s go. On me.’
Rio might live there now but this had been my turf since I was a kid. I was leading us towards a dark pool of safety in the middle of London. The council always used to close it at dusk to stop the druggies, doggers and generally fucked-up people having their own play space at night. They all went there anyway, so we’d just do what they did and jump the fence.
Rio was never more than a stride or two behind me as we sprinted down an alleyway. My legs were getting their lives back with the help of adrenalin. It wasn’t just about getting as much distance as we could between ourselves and the drama that might still be following us. It’s never about straight lines. I wanted to put in as many angles as possible. If we could come to a junction with four options, it would make their job more difficult: they’d have a larger area to cast about in and would have to split forces.
As soon as I got to the end of the alleyway I was going to chuck a left or a right, I didn’t know which yet, and run as fast as I could until I hit another set of options.
We took the left at the end, then dived down another alleyway to the right.
Rio was lagging. ‘Nick, hold up.’
We were between a couple of three-storey blocks of 1960s flats, and I took the chance to lean against the wall that made up the end of the terrace and bend down, arse against the brick, hands on knees, grabbing as much oxygen as I could. My face leaked sweat to mix with the blood around my mouth and chin.
Rio still had the knife in his hand. He grabbed a discarded Greggs bag and wiped it clean.
I pointed at the blade. ‘What the fuck?’
‘South London, mate. Every council-tax payer should be issued with one of these round here.’
He folded the paper to produce a clean bit and handed it to me. Sirens sounded in the distance, no doubt heading for whatever drama was left at the front of the house. If the two stabbed lads had a couple of brain cells between them, they would have dragged themselves into whatever they’d arrived in and made distance, just like us two. The blond one in the house would have switched the lights off and sat it out, unless he’d already jumped out of a first-floor window. His choice.
Rio had managed to get his breathing back to irregular rather than gasping. ‘What the fuck they doing in the house?’
‘Putting devices in. Maybe audio-visual. Who knows? But the third? He was trying to get them out when we turned up and compromised them. The first entry, when they tripped the tell-tales, was the CTR, the second was placing the fucking things.’
I’d done quite a few close-target recces to place devices over the years, and it was never as easy as it should have been. Hiding them was hard enough because people moved things, broke things and, if they were aware, would be actively looking. But even when a good location was found, there was the question of powering the things. Batteries needed replacing, which meant more CTRs and the risk of compromise. Wiring them into the mains took time and had to be recced. If possible, it was always best to get power from an external source like the next-door neighbour, slowly drilling through the wall to expose their power lines. An aware target wouldn’t moan about people not turning the immersion heater off at night because it was costing too much: they’d start looking for a device that was using power.
Rio still had a we’re-in-the-shit face on that I had to change in case it progressed to stage two: outright flapping.
‘But that’s a good thing, mate. It means the other two aren’t getting lifted. It’s all about information. It’s the Owl, it has to be, trying to find the memory sticks, not killing us. That would come after.’
As I wiped the blood off my face I could smell the greasy pastry or whatever had been wrapped in the bag. The raw skin of my knuckles stung like I’d stuck my hand in a wasps’ nest, but I’d sort them out when there was time.
Rio was thinking instead of flapping. ‘Mate, the best way is to cut through Brockwell Park, come out at Brixton.’
‘Great minds. Use the dark.’ From Brixton we could bus it, tube it or train it out of the area. ‘Then we call Gabe. We should meet up near Jack’s. All of us need to keep safe, keep together, start getting proactive on the Owl. It has to be him.’
Rio just nodded, wanting to save what oxygen he had in him for moving.
It felt strange having to articulate what was in my head, after so many years of working alone, but it wasn’t unwelcome. Maybe that was why I liked the three survivors. They understood the piss-taking, the vocab, and the mindset. The downside was having to be responsible for more than just myself – but if I got us all thinking the same way maybe it was an upside. Maybe it really was time to be part of something again.
The blue lights strobed the skyline, joining the rest of the light pollution over the rooftops around the area of Rio’s house.
I threw the paper bag at him and got moving.
Rio grinned. ‘I told you it was him, didn’t I? You gotta listen to me, mate. I know shit.’
‘That’s right.’ I grinned back. ‘Shit is all you know.’
We dodged through the Challice Way housing estate.
The mass of red brick had been thrown up after the Second World War, and the vans with ladders padlocked on their roofs and signs on the back saying they held no tools overnight gave a hint about who lived there now. From the range of cars parked up, satellite-dish installation paid well.
We aimed next for the Cressingham Gardens estate, on the south-west corner of Brockwell Park. Once there, and over the fence, all we’d have to do was head up and over the grass hill to the safety of Brixton and its public transport.
It took only five minutes to cover the ground, and it was easy to find a section of fence with lumps missing. It was obviously a bit of a rat-run for the nightlife. I waited for Rio in the semi-gloom and he wasn’t far behind. I held out a hand and he gripped it with his good one and scrambled over.
While we stood there for a few seconds catching our breath, I wiped my hands on the dewy grass to clean the grit out of the wounds and let the clear liquid gunge oozing out of my grazed knuckles do whatever it did to wounds. Straight away, they were back in the wasps’ nest.
The hum of traffic was perforated by an occasional scream or shout, just kids fucking about on the street. Then came a big hiss of air as a bus loaded and unloaded somewhere.
I gave Rio a couple more seconds to recover while I wiped my face clean with my jacket sleeve. ‘You ready, mate?’
‘Yep.’
‘Right, let’s go.’
I turned to cross the grass and pick up a path, but Rio grabbed my shoulder. ‘This way, Nick. It’s quicker.’ He pointed. ‘There’s a strip of park behind some houses that leads right onto Brixton Water Lane – piece of piss.’
We reached the high ground and the whole of London unfolded below us. Bright lights burnt inside the Shard, the GPO Tower, the Gherkin, Canary Wharf and the Walkie-Talkie, the curved one the sun had reflected off, setting fire to the Jaguars parked nearby. Where we stood was like a location for spies to meet, rather than a couple of dickheads running for a getaway on a bus. Below us, millions of real people were heading home for the day or packing the bars. I wouldn’t have minded joining them.
We started downhill, towards the streetlights of Brixton and red and white lights of nose-to-bumper traffic. I hadn’t been to this bit of the park since I was fourteen or fifteen. My mates and I used to hang about the lido, one eye on the girls’ bodies, the other on their handbags. The place was minging back then, everyone covered with baby lotion for a quick fry-up, their dog-ends bobbing up and down in the water. Not that many went in: it was far too cold.
Rio led the way towards the rear of the lido. His route took us past a group of teenagers smoking, drinking and generally pissing about. They didn’t like the idea of two strangers invading their space.
‘Fucking paedos, fuck off!’
We let them have their little victory and kept going.
There was a narrow strip of grass with a pathway, wrought-iron gates at the end, leading onto Brixton Water Lane. A bus trundled past; the pavement was busy.