Simon Kernick - Ultimatum

And yet someone somewhere had marked him for death.

Two loud bleeps coming from the front room broke the silence. It was the alarm being turned off from the outside. Voorhess popped the last sushi roll into his mouth and, still chewing, reached into the holdall.

The front door opened and closed, followed by footfalls coming past the toilet. Voorhess waited a few seconds until he heard the clatter of cupboards opening, and then he stepped outside and walked down the hall towards the kitchen.

Mr Butt was standing next to one of the worktops with his back to the door, wearing an expensive-looking suit, his hair sticking up on his head like it was some kind of unruly sculpture.

Voorhess wasn’t a believer in the sixth sense. He’d crept up on far too many people without being noticed to know that it existed only in people’s imagination. But even though he’d moved in near silence, Mr Butt turned round, an empty mug in his hand and a shocked expression on his boyish face.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, fear cutting right through his voice.

‘Your new lodger,’ said Voorhess, and shot him with the Taser.

13.55

‘According to the Border Agency, Jetmir Brozi’s last known address is 60 Roman Road in Islington, although they haven’t checked on him for the past three months. They’re overstretched apparently.’ A life-sized colour mugshot of a hard-faced man in his late thirties or early forties, with bad skin and collar-length black hair, appeared on the screen.

Tina was back in the Special Operations office in Mayfair, listening while one of Bolt’s team, DC Nikki Donohoe, gave a rundown of the information they had on the man Fox claimed had played a pivotal part in supplying the weaponry for the Stanhope siege.

Aside from Tina, Nikki and Mike Bolt, there were two other people in the main open-plan office on the second floor of the building: DC Omar Balachi and DS Mo Khan, a short, stocky Asian who’d worked with Mike Bolt for as long as Tina had known him, and who’d never had too much time for her.

Bolt had introduced Tina to the others, and they were all still sizing each other up. Tina felt uncharacteristically nervous. Everyone had been polite to her as they’d shaken her hand in turn, but there was a coolness there, not least from Mo Khan, a feeling that she wasn’t the sort of person they wanted to get close to. It was something Tina had encountered many times before, but which she’d never quite grown used to.

‘It seems that Mr Brozi got a British passport holder pregnant,’ continued Nikki, reading from a sheet of A4 paper, ‘which is why the authorities can’t kick him out of the country, even though he’s a failed asylum seeker and a convicted criminal. Apparently he has a right to a family life in this country, even though he’s not actually living with the woman or their child.’

There were groans around the room at this and a couple of people made comments, but Tina was keen to press on.

‘Fox told me that Brozi spent time at a brothel in King’s Cross as well,’ she said, ‘and was involved in running the place. It’s where they met to discuss the arms deal last year.’ She repeated the address Fox had given her.

Omar turned towards her, a sceptical expression on his face. ‘Wow, this guy knows how to play the system. He’s got the Border Agency wrapped round his finger, plus he’s a brothel keeper and an arms dealer too. It all sounds pretty unlikely. Are you sure Fox isn’t messing with you?’

Tina met his gaze. ‘What would be the point?’

‘Maybe he’s bored. To be honest I wouldn’t know, because none of us got a chance to talk to him.’

Tina noticed Omar was looking at Bolt when he said this.

‘Listen, I know how it looks, but he was attacked three days ago, and it didn’t look like a set-up to me. He ended up with more than twenty stitches, and he came across as scared. He wants protection, and he wants to do some kind of deal.’

‘Did you get to interview the prisoner who attacked him?’ asked Bolt.

Tina nodded. ‘I did, but it was just the usual run of no comments to every question I asked. Eric Hughes is a lifer with another ten years minimum to serve, and he’s straight out of “violent thug” central casting, so there wasn’t anything I could scare him with. He knows the score, and he knows that if he stays quiet he’ll just get another few months tagged on to his sentence. But the way the attack was carried out, with Hughes following Fox into the toilet armed with a homemade knife and attacking him in an area where the CCTV camera was broken, suggests that it was a pro job, not an argument. Which means Hughes must have got paid for his services. He wouldn’t have got the money in prison, and since he’s in for life, we have to assume that the payment was made to someone on the outside, and someone close to him.’ Tina paused for a moment, pleased that the others were looking at her with interest now. ‘I checked with the governor and, although Hughes has never been married, two of his three children are with the same woman, and she visits him regularly. I think maybe we should lean on her as well.’

‘Good idea,’ said Bolt. ‘But our first priority is Brozi. I’ve just had confirmation that the explosive used in both bombs this morning is PETN — the same explosives that were used in the Stanhope attacks. So if Brozi is some kind of arms dealer, as Fox is claiming, it’s possible he’s got direct links to today’s terrorists.’ He looked round the room at everyone in turn. ‘I don’t need to remind anyone of the terrorists’ ultimatum. And I’m reliably informed that the government have absolutely no intention of meeting any of their demands, so we’re now in a race against time to locate the bombers. And Brozi might just be the person who leads us to them.’

14.15

If there was one thing that DS Chris Hancock hated most about policework, it was delivering death messages.

According to those in the force who knew him, Hancock had the right temperament and look for it, his sad eyes and hangdog features putting people at ease as he gave them the bad news about the sudden, occasionally brutal, demise of a loved one. He’d done it no fewer than two dozen times during his time in the Met, and every time it had been excruciatingly painful. People tended to react in much the same way. First disbelief, then a profound sense of shock that seemed to sweep over them like a shadow. They were usually very quiet. ‘How did it happen?’ they would ask in hushed tones as the enormity of their loss slowly sunk in.

Only once had anyone ever reacted dramatically. That had been a young mother — thirty-two years old if memory served him correctly. Hancock had had to tell her that her nine-year-old son, an only child, had been killed in a hit-and-run incident at a zebra crossing. She’d fallen apart, screaming, throwing crockery, howling with grief, her voice echoing round the room as she’d turned from an attractive young woman with a welcoming smile into an unhinged, wild-eyed banshee. It was as if she was trying to get rid of all her energy and strength in one tremendous burst so that she’d be too overcome with exhaustion to feel the pain. Hancock had had sleepless nights for weeks afterwards. He’d felt that woman’s loss, tasted it in his mouth. He too was the parent of an only child, a daughter aged seventeen, and he couldn’t begin to imagine what his life would be like if something happened to her.

Now that he was working for Counter Terrorism Command he’d hoped that his days of delivering dark news were behind him, but it seemed they weren’t. It had been only six hours since the first of the three bombs that day but they’d already had their first positive ID of a victim, and he and his colleague DC Marie MacDonald had been tasked with delivering the death message.