Simon Kernick - Ultimatum

Fox saw all this from the door of his cell twenty yards down from Khan’s. The noise was incredible, as was the sense of animal excitement in the air. He watched as Khan stood on the walkway beating his chest and screaming abuse at the guards, the other prisoners, and the whole world in general. He was a big man, overweight, with a gut that hung over his waist like a jutting upper lip, but when he turned and ran at Fox, he moved with real pace.

‘Nazi bastard!’ he screamed, his voice unnaturally high as it echoed across the landing.

Which was when Fox saw the sharpened spoon he was clutching in his hand, its tip glinting in the strip lights.

As the four guards raced to the main door so they could seal off the wing, Fox raced away from Khan, hurtling down the metal steps two and three at a time, yelling at the guards for help.

One looked his way and slowed down, but only momentarily.

Fox could hear Khan coming down the steps behind him, yelling obscenities, his voice breathless and angry. But Fox had kept himself fit during his time inside, and his current injuries didn’t stop him from running fast. Even so, as he hit the ground floor and sprinted towards the guards, his face was a mask of pure fear.

Two more guards had appeared on the other side of the main door and were in the process of unlocking it. Fox knew that the policy in prison riots was to seal off the wing where the disturbance was occurring to prevent its spread to other areas of the prison, while reinforcements were brought in to bring it under control.

‘Help me, for Christ’s sake!’ shouted Fox, joining the four guards at the door.

Twenty yards behind them, the main bulk of the prisoners were advancing steadily like an unruly football crowd, several of them unleashing missiles in the direction of the door but making no effort to charge it, while from the side Khan was continuing to advance on Fox, the improvised knife in his hand now visible to all the guards.

‘Hurry the fuck up!’ screamed the most senior of them as the door was finally opened and they raced through. Fox went with them, and no one tried to stop him. They were all too keen to save their own skins.

It was only when the door had been thrown closed safely behind them that one of the guards grabbed Fox’s arm and slammed him against the wall, demanding to know where he thought he was going.

But by that point it didn’t matter.

The first stage of the op had been 100 per cent successful.

18.58

Cain parked the car at a meter in the shadows of Westminster Abbey. He was right in the heart of the establishment here, barely a stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament where, right now, politicians of every shade were debating the attacks that he’d helped mastermind today. And doubtless spouting the usual load of hot air. It was a pity, he thought, that the Stinger couldn’t be used against them, but he no longer had the missile. It had safely been dropped off at a lock-up garage, where it should already have been collected by the mercenary they’d hired, the mysterious but reliable South African Voorhess, who’d be firing it in about an hour’s time, when the deadline they’d given the government ran out.

The air was turning cold as Cain started off down the quiet night street on foot, pulling his cap down and his collars up to make sure that any cameras only got a very limited shot of him. He didn’t feed the meter as he wouldn’t be using the car again. It had been bought in cash at auction three months earlier and there was no way of tracing it back either to him or Cecil. As always, he’d planned everything down to a tee. The only fly in the ointment so far was his weapons contact, Jetmir Brozi, whose arrest had turned the arms deal in the scrapyard into a bloodbath and come close to getting them all killed. Brozi knew very little about Cain but, if he decided to talk, he could still provide information that might lead them in his direction.

But right now Cain wasn’t unduly worried about what might happen to him, and the reason for this was simple enough.

He was dying.

The doctors had diagnosed terminal lung cancer three weeks earlier. If he sought treatment, he had as long as a year. If he didn’t, he had half that, possibly less. So far, the symptoms — a persistent cough, and severe abdominal pains — were sporadic at best, but lately he’d noticed them getting worse. For a long time he’d never feared death, even in the midst of battle, but the events today at the scrapyard had made him realize how much he’d miss life when it was finally snatched away from him.

This made it even more important for him to bring his work to a conclusion. His aim was to bring down the government. Once this had been achieved, his hope was that the country’s native population would rise up and turn on the immigrants flooding the country and the intellectual elite who supported them. This had been his goal ever since he’d joined the shadowy group of individuals who called themselves The Brotherhood more than three years ago. Most of their footsoldiers had been killed during the Stanhope siege, which was why their numbers were now so small, but this no longer mattered. After today, the campaign of violence would give way to a new strategy as Garth Crossman, their leader and the man who bankrolled their activities, rode the wave of revulsion over today’s attacks, and the loss of his own wife in them, to enter politics for the first time at the head of a new political party promising radical change.

Cain smiled to himself. Crossman cut an impressive figure. He came across like a nice guy. He could really change things, given the chance, and by the time people realized what he was really like, it would be far too late.

Only two people knew Crossman’s real identity. One was Cain himself. The other was William Garrett, codenamed Fox.

And he’d be dealt with soon enough.

A marked police patrol car turned into the street fifty yards ahead of Cain, moving slowly, as if its occupants were looking for something.

Cain ducked down behind a parked van and watched as the police car drove past him down the street, coming to a halt in the middle of the road next to the Audi estate he’d been driving only a couple of minutes before. It then moved on about ten yards, but pulled into an empty parking bay, with its engine still running. At the same time, a second police car drove in from the opposite end, slowing up as it drew level with the first one.

Knowing this was no coincidence, Cain jogged in a low crouch, using the parked cars as cover, before ducking into a narrow back alley and breaking into a sprint.

They’d been betrayed.

And it could only have been by one man.

19.07

I’d spoken to Bolt twice in the last half hour, after each call nodding a thanks to the landlord.

The conversations had been brief, and slightly surreal. He’d asked me a lot of questions about the Stinger, and I’d had to answer him while standing at the corner of a bar talking on a pub phone, shouting occasionally to make myself heard above the din of booze-fuelled conversation coming from all around. Hardly secure, but then desperate times call for desperate measures. Thankfully, Bolt had been more interested in minor details than in how we’d come to be in possession of it. What did the box the Stinger was being carried in look like? How big was it? Where in Cain’s car had I planted the GPS unit? That type of thing.

He’d finished the last call by telling me he’d send officers from CTC to collect me from the pub as soon as some were available. But I was getting restless. The bar was busy with a mixture of after-work groups and wrinkled locals, and the two TVs on opposite walls were both on Sky News, which was endlessly regurgitating the same material about the bomb attacks earlier. The confirmed death toll from the earlier bombs was now twenty, including five police officers, and it made me wonder what the hell Cain and Cecil were hoping to achieve. They’d killed a whole load of innocent people, and ripped apart the lives of hundreds of others. Just as they’d done in the Stanhope siege. And all for what? A few hours of constant network coverage.