Simon Kernick - Ultimatum

As she reached the master bedroom, the radio crackled in her pocket. It was Bolt.

‘What’s happening?’ she whispered.

‘The surveillance team have lost Brozi,’ he told her.

‘Great. Where did they lose him?’

‘On the Caledonian Road. He did a U-turn and shook them off.’

‘So he saw them?’

‘I don’t know, but I want you out of the house right now. And no messing about, Tina, please.’

Tina looked round the bedroom. It was tidier than the rest of the house with a huge double bed with mirrors facing it on two walls, and a large cupboard at one end. It was the desk with the PC next to the window that caught her attention. ‘OK, I’m coming.’

‘Now,’ Bolt said firmly, ending the call.

Tina figured she had another minute or two, and went over to the PC. The screen was dark, so she hit the return key and it immediately lit up, showing a freeze frame from an amateur porn movie. In the bottom corner of the screen there were two more internet icons. She tapped the first one and an email account appeared, showing an empty space where the new emails should have been. She wrote down the address, then saw that there was an email in the drafts section on the left-hand side of the screen. Using the drafts section to communicate was a much-used trick of terrorists, as well as the more organized criminals. If two or more people had access to the same email address they could write messages to each other in draft, which could then be read without the messages themselves ever actually being sent across the internet, meaning they couldn’t be monitored by the authorities.

Tina pressed the drafts icon, and the message appeared. It was several sentences long and written in an indecipherable language that was presumably Albanian. She made the text as big as she could on the screen and photographed it, before switching back to the original email account screen, and shrinking it so that the freeze frame from the porn film would be the first thing Brozi saw when he switched the PC back on again. She had no idea whether it was a useful lead or not, but it felt promising, and it gave her an excuse for not having left the house immediately.

Tina was conscious of the time but she also knew that she might not get another chance like this to bug Brozi, and if truth was told, it gave her an adrenalin rush just being in his house. She hadn’t had much in the way of excitement these past few months, so she was making up for lost time. Working fast, she fitted a keystroke tracker to the PC, so that they’d be able to monitor every word he typed, and she was just looking round the room for a good spot to place another camera when the radio crackled into life again.

‘What the hell are you doing, Tina?’ demanded Bolt. ‘They still haven’t found Brozi. You need to get out right now.’

‘OK, OK, I’m coming-’

‘Oh shit.’

‘What?’

‘A car has just pulled into the street.’ He paused. ‘It’s parking ten yards away. Yes, it’s definitely Brozi. Tina, switch off your radio and stay put. I’ll let you know when he comes out again.’

Tina shook her head. She’d messed up. The rules on covert entry were always the same. You could only bug an individual’s house while someone was watching them elsewhere. As soon as you lost the eyeball, you abandoned the op. A few hours working with Mike Bolt again and she’d already broken a cardinal rule.

‘He’s got a gun in the house,’ she said quickly. ‘It might be best to get some armed response, just as back-up?’

‘Is it loaded?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you’d better unload it quickly because he’s out of the car now and on his way to the front door. Christ, Tina, why do you always do this to me?’ She could hear the anger in his voice as she switched off the radio.

She heard the key turn in the lock downstairs. There was no way she could go down to the living room and unload the gun without Brozi being alerted to her presence. She looked round quickly for a place to hide, and settled for the double wardrobe opposite the bed. She climbed inside, noticing that the PC hadn’t yet gone into screensaver mode, so if Brozi came up here in the next few minutes, he was going to know someone had been tampering with it. Silently, she cursed herself for the self-destructive streak that constantly seemed to haunt her.

Yet, even then, she couldn’t help feeling that little twinge of excitement.

15.00

The journalist on the Sky News desk sounded bored and irritated as he answered the phone.

‘This is Islamic Command, responsible for the attacks on the Crusader forces and those who support them,’ said Cain through the voice disguiser. ‘We are still waiting for a response from the British government to our demands. Do they not think their people are worth protecting?’

‘And can you repeat your demands?’

Cain was pleased by the note of panic that had now crept into the journalist’s voice. ‘If they do not comply by eight p.m. tonight, we promise to launch an attack so ferocious it will make your Godless country quake.’

The journalist started to speak again but Cain had already ended the call. He switched off the phone, removed the SIM card, and threw it into a bush, before walking a few yards further through the copse of trees and chucking the phone into a tangle of brambles.

The trees opened up in front of him, and he stood at the top of Hampstead Heath, looking down past the rolling parkland to the city that stretched out as far as the eye could see below him, its iconic structures — the Gherkin, the London Eye, the Shard — all clearly visible as they rose up from the mass of buildings around them. Up here it all looked so peaceful, but down there he knew it was chaos as the security forces desperately tried to hunt down the men behind the terrorist attacks that morning.

So far, the government’s only reaction to the attacks was to condemn them utterly, send their sympathies to the victims and their families, and repeat their standard mantras that the British government never negotiated with terrorists, and that Londoners should carry on regardless, not allowing the terrorists to disrupt their lives. Although the Prime Minister was supposedly chairing a meeting of Cobra — the government’s emergency reaction committee — he’d left it to the Commissioner of the Met to field questions from the nation’s media.

So, they were reacting in exactly the way Cain had predicted they would. In other words, everything was going according to plan.

He took out another of his phones. It was time to call Brozi and set up the meeting.

15.01

Jetmir Brozi clearly didn’t invest a huge amount of money in clothes. There were barely a dozen items of clothing hanging up, and a few pairs of shoes cluttered round the floor, but nothing that gave Tina any real cover as she crouched in the half-light of the closed wardrobe.

She could hear him speaking on the phone, his voice faint and guttural. He was getting closer. A stair creaked, then another.

He was coming up.

Jesus, why did she let herself get in this situation? Why couldn’t she just do her job properly?

For the first time, fear replaced excitement. If Brozi discovered her, she was trapped, and with no weapon. She wasn’t even carrying pepper spray, for Christ’s sake.

The bedroom door opened and he walked inside, finishing up his conversation on the phone. He was talking in English but his voice was low and she wondered if what he was saying was being picked up on the audio.

She looked through the wardrobe’s narrow keyhole and saw him walking round with his back to her. From this angle, it was impossible to tell whether or not the screensaver on the PC had kicked in or not.