Simon Kernick - Ultimatum

But before he could reach the junction, a marked squad car appeared round the corner, and turned into the street, driving up it the wrong way and blocking Brozi’s path, forcing him to reverse.

‘He’s coming back!’ shouted Tina as the Lexus shot back towards them.

Bolt cursed, and they just had time to take up crash positions before the Lexus hit them with a loud bang, knocking their car several yards backwards, but not doing enough to shunt it out of the way completely.

Knowing there was no way out with the car, Brozi flung open the door and took off back up the street, running along the pavement, and keeping low behind the line of parked cars, still waving the gun around.

With the Lexus in the way, Tina couldn’t see whether or not the occupants of the squad car were an armed response unit, and she didn’t wait to find out, leaping out of their car and running along the road after Brozi. She was a lot fitter than he was, and within a few seconds she was drawing level with him.

He saw her and waved his gun but didn’t attempt to fire, still maybe thinking he could outrun her, even though he was panting heavily and looking like he might collapse at any moment.

Operating entirely on instinct — if she’d thought about it there was no way she would have done it — Tina abruptly changed direction and ran over the bonnet of one of the parked cars, before leaping off the other side and, as Brozi turned to meet her, diving into him and knocking him and the gun flying.

He went down hard, badly winded, the gun well out of reach underneath another parked car. Tina wriggled into position so she was squatting on top of him, her knees holding down his arms. Brozi tried to struggle but then his eyes widened as he saw Tina’s expression.

She punched him hard in the face, three times in rapid succession, ignoring the blood flying out of his nose, and the fact that he was no longer resisting arrest. She would have punched him a fourth time too, but she felt her arm being grabbed firmly from behind and looked back to see Bolt standing there.

‘Leave him, Tina, or you’ll be done for assault,’ he told her.

Behind Bolt, she could see two unarmed male uniforms jogging, rather than running, towards her, neither of them looking like they’d have done too much faced with a gunman, and she nodded and turned back to the man who just moments earlier had tried to kill her.

‘Jetmir Brozi, I’m arresting you for attempted murder,’ she said, as Bolt stepped forward and the two of them hauled him to his feet.

15.15

Fox sat in his cell, watching events unfold on Sky News. The breaking news was that the Sky newsroom had just received a phone call from a spokesman for Islamic Command, the previously unknown group who’d already claimed responsibility for the bombings. The caller had reiterated his warning that a third, much bigger, attack would take place if their demands weren’t met.

The female anchor was now discussing the ramifications of this with one of Sky’s reporters who was standing outside 10 Downing Street, while on the bottom of the screen the news ticker gave the latest on the casualty toll: seventeen dead, including four police officers and a civilian killed in the second attack, and sixty-eight injured. A separate breaking news headline stated that there would be a press conference at Downing Street at 3.30.

Watching it reminded Fox of the chaos he and the other terrorists had inflicted on London fifteen months earlier. He’d felt like the king of the world then, an all-powerful lord of life and death, knowing that the whole world was watching him.

And now he was caged like an animal in a shitty little prison cell with lime-green walls, and his moment of glory was little more than a faded dream from another life.

With a sigh, he got up from the bunk and walked out of the cell. He’d petitioned the governor earlier to release him from solitary confinement and, surprisingly, permission had been given. It was recreation time in the wing now, and he was free to come and go as he pleased for the next two hours. The governor liked the prisoners to be able to mingle. He felt it made them less likely to be aggressive if they weren’t cooped up in their cells the whole time, and in this, Fox had to admit, he was right. He appreciated the small pleasure of being able to stretch his legs — to walk, and think — even if it was in a confined space. This was the first day since the attack by Eric Hughes that he’d been allowed to do it. Hughes, meanwhile, was still locked up in a separate wing as he’d been the one armed with the shank.

A table-tennis table in the central atrium surrounded by a cluster of tables and chairs provided the focal point for the prisoners when they were given the chance to socialize. Devereaux was already sitting at one of the tables, furthest away from the two screws who stood keeping an eye on things. Muscular and intense, with big staring eyes, and a tattoo of a grinning black skull covering most of his face, Devereaux looked like something out of a horror film, and gave off the air of a man only ever one step away from exploding. With a lot of prisoners, this kind of posturing was just show, but Devereaux was different. He was, as the judge who’d sentenced him put it, ‘pure, unadulterated evil’. Currently serving a whole-life tariff for the double murder of two underage prostitutes he’d kidnapped, raped and partly eaten a decade earlier, both screws and prisoners tended to give him a wide berth.

Fox nodded at one of the prisoners playing table tennis, a huge former white supremacist known as Lenny who was one of the softest men in there, and approached the table where Devereaux sat alone, an unlit cigarette sticking out of his mouth.

‘Got a smoke?’ asked Fox, who’d taken up a ten-a-day habit out of boredom since arriving in prison.

‘Sure,’ grunted Devereaux, both the skull’s mouth and his own mouth moving in perfect time as he pulled a tin of roll-ups from his pocket and put it down on the table.

Fox leaned forward to take one. ‘Everything ready?’ he whispered.

‘Sorted,’ answered Devereaux. ‘What time, again?’

‘Six forty-five exactly,’ said Fox, his lips hardly moving.

He got up and walked away, putting the roll-up in his mouth, thinking that it was ironic that at a time when smoking inside public buildings was banned, prisoners could still smoke in their cells. The moment he got out of this place, though, he’d give up on the spot.

Which, if all went according to plan, was now only a matter of hours away.

15.29

‘What the hell do you think you were doing in there?’ demanded Bolt, staring at Tina in exasperation rather than anger. They were standing out on the pavement, just down from Brozi’s house, and out of earshot of the dozen or so officers who were in the process of sealing off the street in both directions, while Brozi sat in the back of an arrest van. ‘I told you to get out of the house. It was one simple request, and you ignored it.’

Tina took a deep breath, dragging air into her lungs. Her heart was still banging away in her chest, the adrenalin yet to dissipate, and she was experiencing the occasional wave of nausea. She wiped sweat from her brow, hoping she wasn’t going into shock. Having a gun pointed at you at point-blank range, knowing that if the person pointing it pulled the trigger you’d almost certainly die, was a truly terrifying experience, even for someone like Tina who’d been on the wrong end of too many guns in her time, and who’d actually been shot twice. There’d been times in her life when she’d been so angry and disillusioned with everything that she’d wanted to die — when she’d taken major risks because, in the end, the consequences hadn’t scared her — but now wasn’t one of those times.