Simon Kernick - The Crime Trade

The hotel room was on the fifth floor and the same side as the car park, so even with the soundproofing the shots and the general cacophony of the confrontation were clearly audible.

Vokes heard his two guards talking rapidly to each other in Spanish, and his fear grew even more intense. He was shaking violently, the dread at what might happen to him becoming almost unbearable. If I get out of this, then that’s it, he told himself. I’m retired. Not just undercover, but the whole thing. They had a codeword if things went wrong but he didn’t want to draw attention to himself by using it, and anyway, help should have been here by now. They were only in the next room. What was keeping them? Hurry up! he silently cursed. Get your arses moving! Let me get back to my family. Please, Father. Please, Lord. Not for me, but for them.

One of the Colombians had stopped at the end of the bed. Vokes could sense it. Then he heard the door opening, the sound of movement and shouting in the corridor outside, and he was already thanking the good Lord for listening to his prayers when the silencer spat and the bullet ripped through the back of his head and into his brain.

Paul Vokerman’s executioner was twenty-eight-year-old Manuel Lopez, known as Manolo to his friends, a long-term junior member of the Cali cartel and an ex-soldier in the Colombian army, now resident in London. He was a killer by trade and, as Vokes had suspected, thought no more about ending a life than he did about taking a leak. It was, after all, just business.

Manolo fired a second round into the back of Vokes’s head, just to make sure, then turned towards the open door where his colleague, twenty-six-year-old Pedro Daroda, was standing. He could hear the noise of footsteps coming from outside, then the staccato bark of orders, and he realized they’d been betrayed. Pedro stepped out into the hallway, raised his gun, and then fell backwards as shots rang out. Manolo ran over to the side of the bed furthest from the door, then crouched down gun pointed out into the hallway, thinking that he was at least going to make it difficult for them.

A black-clad figure half appeared round the door, gun outstretched, and Manolo fired twice, both rounds hitting the burgundy-coloured wall in the hallway as the cop stepped back. A moment later, a second cop appeared round the other side of the door, and started firing. Manolo let off a shot but was forced to turn away as the bullets passed over his head, the noise of them bursting in his ears. Suddenly there was a much louder bang somewhere near the foot of the bed, and he became disorientated and unable to see properly. It was as if somebody had force-fed him a bottle of whisky and dropped him on his head from a fifth-floor window, and he knew they’d used a stun grenade. But, even dazed, he still held the gun as the black-clad police in breathing apparatus came into view and, with a gesture of defiance that perfectly mirrored the expression of the man with the shotgun in the car park below, raised it in front of him, aiming at the first officer’s crotch.

Sergeant Phil Winter of Scotland Yard’s elite firearms squad SO19 didn’t hestitate. He’d already seen the body of DC Paul Vokerman face-down on the bed, a growing bloodstain soaking the sheets around his head; now one of the suspects, hunched down in the corner of the room beside the bed, was lifting his gun. Two shots, then a step, two shots, then another step, then another two shots, every one of them finding their target. Beside him Constable Sammy Jecks opened up with his MP5, and the body of Manuel Lopez did a strange dance as the bullets ripped into his head and body and charged about his insides, ripping them and him apart.

Minimum force. The training always says only the minimum amount of force possible must be used to incapacitate a subject. Shoot him too many times, particularly when it’s clear he’s no longer a threat, and a police officer leaves him or herself open to charges of manslaughter, or even, in extreme cases, murder. But Winter couldn’t resist pumping another two into the Colombian’s guts as he continued towards him, knowing that statistically he probably wasn’t going to get another opportunity to pop a bad guy. Lopez’s head slumped, the Glock with silencer fell from his dead hand, and Winter stopped in front of him, before kicking him hard in the face.

Jecks rushed up to Vokerman and tried to find a pulse, but Winter could tell from the expression on his colleague’s face that it was a lost cause. He turned to the door as the senior officers involved in what was supposed to have been a highly successful sting operation entered the room along with the remainder of the SO19 team. They didn’t look too happy.

And that, unfortunately, is where I, DI John Gallan, join the tale, being one of those senior officers involved. The thing is, I was only meant to be there as an observer, as was my colleague, WDS Tina Boyd, but I don’t think that fact made either of us feel any better. It had been our informant who had provided the details and false character references that had set up ‘Stegs’ Jenner and Paul ‘Vokes’ Vokerman, both members of Scotland Yard’s specialist undercover unit, SO10, with a group of high-level Colombian drugs traffickers, so as Tina and I followed DCS Noel Flanagan and DI Asif Malik of Scotland Yard’s organized crime unit, SO7, into the hotel room, I was experiencing a feeling in my insides that was a nasty combination of fear, shame and nausea. As I saw the ruined bodies of Manolo Lopez and Vokes Vokerman, one of whom I’d got to know quite well over the past few weeks, watched the frantic efforts of the medical team as they worked their futile magic, and heard DI Malik curse loudly under his breath, the question I remember I kept asking myself was a very simple one.

What the hell had gone wrong?

‘What the fuck went wrong?’

The voice belonged to Detective Chief Superintendent Noel Flanagan who’d been in charge of the monumentally misnamed Operation Surgical Strike, the carefully planned sting that had resulted in the deaths of five people, one of them a decorated police officer with eighteen years’ service under his belt, and the hospitalization of a witness who’d suffered a heart attack at the scene. It was a good question, and one Flanagan was going to need to get answered if there was any hope of him saving his hitherto successful, if not entirely blameless, career. Three hours had passed since the gun battle in the hotel car park and the fall-out was already beginning.

The scene of this, the first inquest into the events of that afternoon, was a specially set up incident room in one of the hotel’s ground-floor conference suites. At one end of the table, sitting with his legs crossed and a cigarette in his mouth, was DC Stegs Jenner. There was a half-full cup of coffee — his third — in front of him. Facing him down at the other end of the table was the skinny, stooped frame of DCS Flanagan, whose normally dour face was now red with anger. The others in the room were DI Malik; Inspector Leon Ferman who’d been running things from the SO19 standpoint; and finally Tina Boyd and me. The atmosphere was thick with the tension and impatience of individuals who know they’re going to be in the verbal firing line. What had happened that afternoon had been near enough unprecedented in post-Second World War Britain, and there was a strong feeling that the media were going to be crawling all over this bloody event, which meant that it was important to find out as soon as possible exactly where it had all gone so pear-shaped. And the best person initially to answer that question was Stegs Jenner.

I was watching Stegs carefully. Everyone was watching him carefully, waiting to hear what he had to say. We’d met three times in the run-up to today, two of those meetings over a beer, and, if truth be told, I liked the guy. He was a maverick, and a cocky one at that, with the sort of devil-may-care attitude that always makes enemies in the insular, regimented world of the Met, but he carried it well, and I couldn’t help admiring the fact that he was prepared to risk his neck in some very dangerous situations, this afternoon’s being a case in point. The last time we’d met up had been six days earlier at New Scotland Yard. Stegs had been sounding confident then, and when I’d told him to be careful on the op, a beaming smile had lit up his face and he’d told me not to worry, he’d done this sort of thing plenty of times before. Call me a pessimist, but I always worry when someone says that.