Graham Hurley - Cut to Black

Willard had left his Jaguar outside the dockyard. He was wearing a heavy-duty sailing anorak and a pair of yellow waterproofs to match. He stole up on Faraday, standing over him as he stared out across the harbour.

"The rib should be here any minute. I belled them just now."

Faraday looked up at him, faintly surprised at the interruption.

"Rib?"

"Big inflatable. They use it to ferry stuff back and forth. Wallace tell you about the fort?"

"Yes'

"Neat, eh?"

"Let's hope so."

"And the chats with Mackenzie? All that?"

"He told me they'd spoken a couple of times on the phone." Faraday got to his feet. "Mackenzie wants him out of the running. No surprises there."

Willard was beginning to look irritated, and Faraday forced himself back into the world of Operation Tumbril. According to Wallace, the idea for the original sting had come from Nick Hayder but Willard would have been quick to spot the potential. Scalps were important to Det-Supts and Mackenzie's would be a serious battle honour. There were rumours on Major Crimes that Willard had his eyes on promotion maybe even head of CID and putting a full flag level three away would do him no harm at all.

Willard was watching the harbour entrance, his eyes narrowed against the flaring sun. When Faraday asked him how much the fort's owner, the German woman, knew about the sting, he smiled. Spit Bank, he said, had been offered for sale by the Ministry of Defence in the '80s. The buyer, an ex-boatyard owner, had spent a fortune getting it into some kind of shape. Fifteen years later, he'd sold it on to a wealthy businessman, eager to find a project for his wife.

"This is the German woman?"

"Gisela Mendel. You'll meet her in a minute. Peter Mendel's an arms broker, covers the gaps between the defence salespeople in the MOD and the dodgier foreign governments. It's a semi-Whitehall job. He's security-cleared, full PV."

The positive vetting, Willard said, made him a perfect partner in the sting against Mackenzie. Given his relationship with the MOD, there was no way he'd hazard the operation.

"And the wife?"

"She runs a series of language modules for Fort Monkton. Four-week total immersion courses out on Spit Bank, any language of your choice.

She charges the earth."

"Monkton's MI6."

"That's right. That's why she's PV'd as well. Hayder couldn't believe his luck. All he had to do was write the script."

Faraday could imagine Nick Hayder's glee. Fort Monkton was a government-run training establishment across the harbour in leafy Alverstoke. Screened by trees and an eight-foot wire fence, it turned out spies for MI6. Posted abroad, languages were a must. Hence, Faraday assumed, the success of Gisela Mendel's little enterprise.

"So how did you play it?"

"Gisela put the word round a couple of local estate agencies, pretending the fort was up for sale, just the way we asked her.

Mackenzie was onto her within a day."

"She knows who Mackenzie is? His background?"

"No, he's just a punter as far as she's concerned, someone who's made a pile of money and now wants somewhere really high-profile."

"And you think she believes that?"

"She's never told me otherwise." Willard permitted himself a rare smile. "You hear about the football club?"

"No."

"Mackenzie tried to buy in. He was after an eleven per cent stake.

With that kind of holding, he'd be looking to take Pompey over."

"And?"

"They saw him coming and knocked the deal on the head. After that, he made a play for the pier."

"South Parade?"

"Yeah. Problem there was he put in a silly bid and tried to snow them with all kinds of pressure. They got so pissed off in the end, they pulled the plug, and you can hardly blame them. Mackenzie's so used to dealing with low life that he forgets his manners. Quote the guy an asking price, and he instantly divides by ten. Ten. That's not negotiation, that's robbery. The pier people walked, big time, and then one of them found himself talking to Nick."

This conversation, according to Willard, sowed a seed in Nick Hayder's ever-fertile mind. By this time, Tumbril had abandoned any thought of baiting the usual investigative traps. There was no way Mackenzie allowed himself anywhere near the distribution system and therefore no prospect of scooping him up with half a kilo of uncut Peruvian. The other strategy following the money might, in the end, achieve the same result via a money-laundering conviction but Tumbril's hotshot accountant was talking another three months minimum with the calculator and the spreadsheets and both Hayder and Willard himself were nervous that headquarters' patience might not stretch that far. Somehow or other, there had to be another way.

"So?" Faraday was beginning to warm to this conversation. At last, he thought, the pieces are beginning to fit.

"So Hayder took a good look at what happened with Mackenzie over the pier. Number one, the guy's determined to get his name up there in lights. He owes it to himself, to his mates. He wants the world to know there's nothing he can't buy. Number two, he's after a casino."

"A casino?"

"Sure. Make Mackenzie's kind of money and the big problem is washing it all. You can carry it out of the country and stuff it in foreign accounts. You can treat yourself to a couple of Picassos. You can buy into legit businesses, bricks and mortar, whatever. If you've got the patience, you can even launder it through bureaux de change. Brian Imber will be giving you the full brief tomorrow but the truth is we're knocking all these options on the head. Believe me, it's getting hard to wash dodgy money. A casinos solves a lot of that. Plus he smiled 'there was still the question of profile."

A casino on the pier would have been the answer to Mackenzie's dreams.

Punters would flood in, the tables would magic dirty money into legitimate winnings, and everyone in Pompey would know that Bazza Mackenzie had finally made it.

"So Nick started looking for another property, another proposition. You know he used to go running?"

"Still will, when he's better."

"Sure. So he was out there one weekend, hammering along the se afront when bosh he's staring out to sea and he suddenly realises the answer.

Spit Bank Fort. This is him talking, not me."

Faraday knew it was true. He could hear Nick Hayder's voice, picture him leaning into the conversation, his head lowered, his hands chopping the air. This was the way the man had always operated, total conviction, turning a gleam in the eye into a string of successful prosecutions. The latter happened way down the line, but without the wit and the balls to pull some truly original stroke, the bad guys were home free.

"Mackenzie put a bid in?"

"At once. 200,000. Said it had to be rock bottom because sorting the place out would cost a fortune. Gisela wouldn't drop a penny under the asking price. One and a quarter million."

Slowly, week by week, Mackenzie had gone to 550,000, each new trip to the fort confirming the vision that had begun to obsess him. A glass dome, he'd told Gisela, would seal the interior from wind and rain.

Punters could look down on the gaming floor from the upper deck.

Croupiers would be dressed in period blue artillery tunics. Girlies in naughty Parisian gear would serve drinks and canapes. And every night, with the gaming over, there'd be yet more boodle stashed away in the thick-walled cartridge magazines deep in the bowels of the fort. Spit Bank, to Hayder's delight, had become Mackenzie's dream fantasy, the clinching evidence that the Copnor boy had well and truly made it.

"That's why Wallace came as a bit of a shock. He was Mackenzie's wake-up call."

Faraday was trying to put himself in Mackenzie's shoes. After all the plans, all the gloating phone calls to his mates, came the sudden news that some total stranger had stepped into the city and virtually doubled his bid. As a wind-up, it was undeniably sweet. But as a potential sting, thought Faraday, it still had some way to go.