Simon Kernick - Ultimatum

At that moment, his mobile rang inside his jacket. He looked up at Tina, frowning as he tried hard to focus. ‘Can you answer my phone?’

She nodded, reached inside his jacket and pulled it out, as the paramedics put him into the back of the ambulance.

‘Mike Bolt’s phone. Tina Boyd speaking.’

‘This is Commander Ingrams, CTC Control. What’s happening down there?’

Tina told him about the booby-trap bomb.

‘How bad’s Mike hurt?’ asked Ingrams, sounding genuinely concerned.

‘I think he’s concussed, but he’s conscious and fairly lucid. They’ve just put him in an ambulance. Have we managed to locate the suspect in the Shogun yet?’

‘No. We’re throwing a huge security cordon round the whole area, but there’s no sign of him.’ Ingrams exhaled loudly. ‘And we’ve got another problem too. There’s a major riot at the prison where they’re holding William Garrett. One wing’s been completely taken over by the prisoners and now there’s a disturbance in a second one.’

Tina thought back to the conversation she’d had with the prison officer, Thomson. How he’d described the prison as a tinder box, a place that only functioned because the prisoners allowed it to. And now it seemed they’d decided to stop cooperating.

‘Is Fox OK?’ she asked.

‘It was his wing it started in, but they managed to get him out. Apparently there was a second attempt on his life. It failed and he’s unhurt, but it sounds like he was lucky.’

‘He told me this would happen. It’s not a coincidence.’

‘I know it’s not,’ said Ingrams. ‘I understand Garrett told you he’d name the people involved today if he was moved to a safehouse, and offered some kind of deal.’

‘That’s the gist of it, yes.’

‘We’re in the process of organizing his move to a safehouse right now, but as you can imagine, it’s a very sensitive issue, particularly in light of what’s happened today. I want you to stay by your phone tonight because if he’s moved, I want you to talk to him again. You’ve clearly developed some kind of rapport.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘There’s something else as well. We’ve just sent two detectives to the pub where they were meant to meet Mike’s informant, but he wasn’t there. We need to debrief the informant urgently, as I understand he was the person who told us about the missile. Yet no one seems to have any contact details for him.’

‘I’ll speak to Mike now.’

Tina ended the call, and looked over the growing throng of emergency services vehicles towards where the Shard stood, dominating the skyline, its austere beauty brutally violated by what had just happened.

The people responsible had won the battle, but she was as determined as she’d ever been that they weren’t going to win this particular war.

20.22

On the TV in the poky front room of my flat, the Shard was burning, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at it. I couldn’t bring myself to switch channels either. So there it was: a constant reminder of everything I’d done this afternoon.

I took a last slug of the beer and put down the bottle, feeling like a condemned man.

I’d killed a man in cold blood. Shot him while he begged for mercy. I’d killed in cold blood before, back in Afghanistan — two Taliban wounded in a firefight with our patrol whom we could easily have taken alive. I’d stood above them, like I’d stood above Dav, and emptied more than a dozen rounds into each of them in turn. Afterwards I’d felt guilty. I still do. They might have been trying to kill me but, in the end, it was we who were in their country, and what I’d done was barbaric.

The difference was, those killings had been carried out in a dusty, hot war zone thousands of miles from home, and away from the prying eyes of the media.

Today’s bloodshed had been right on my doorstep.

So, Bolt and his colleagues hadn’t stopped the terrorists’ third attack. Like most other people, I hadn’t had a clue that the Shard was having an official opening-night party tonight, and it was difficult to believe that it would still have gone ahead after the earlier bomb attacks. Clearly, it was part of the government’s strategy of carrying on as normal in the face of the terrorist threat. If so, it hadn’t worked.

Cain had got exactly what he wanted, and what he’d predicted — chaos and terror. And with this morning’s coffee shop bomber now identified as a thirty-one-year-old Muslim man, it looked like Islamic fundamentalists were going to get the blame. Cain was probably toasting his success right now.

That was unless, of course, the police had already tracked him down using the GPS unit I’d planted. If so, he might actually be under arrest, along with Cecil. I was just going to have to wait to find out.

The huge problem I had was that both men could implicate me in the slaughter at the scrapyard, and Dav’s murder, if they chose to testify against me in a court of law. I could go back down for years this time, and never see Gina or Maddie again. It was a bastard of a position to be in. My plan, as much as I had one, was to tell the detectives from CTC that Cain and Cecil had gone to the meeting without me, and had then shown me the missile at a neutral location, and hope for the best. It wasn’t exactly foolproof, but right now I didn’t have anything else.

I needed to speak to Bolt to tell him I was at home. There was no point putting off my interrogation any longer, and with a couple of beers inside me, I felt fortified enough to deal with it.

But as I got to my feet, looking round for the phone, the doorbell rang.

I thought about not answering it, but the noise from the TV made it obvious I was in. I went over to the window and pulled back the curtain a few inches.

Cecil stood on my doorstep — small and wiry, bouncing on his feet against the cold — his back to the small communal garden. He gave me a quick wave and nod, motioning for me to open the door. He’d changed from earlier, and was wearing a bomber jacket and jeans, the coat zipped up against the cold.

I didn’t like him turning up at my flat out of the blue. It made me uneasy. But he’d seen me now, so to ignore him would arouse suspicion.

‘What do you want?’ I called through the glass. ‘I thought I told you I wanted to be left alone.’

Cecil pulled a face. ‘What is this?’ he called back, his voice muffled. ‘You’re going to leave me out here in the cold? We need to talk.’

It was pitch black outside. My flat was on the ground floor, one of four in an old detached house cut off from the road by a high hedge. It was a secluded spot. Too secluded. The old lady directly above me was deaf as a post; the other neighbours were commuters who were out most of the time.

‘Come on, what the hell is this, Jones?’ Cecil called again, clearly irritated now.

Alarm bells were sounding in my head. I decided then that, old friend or not, I wasn’t going to let him in.

A shadow suddenly appeared behind the window to my right, obscured by the curtain, and before I could react Cain was standing in front of me, his pale face ghostly in the moonlight, the vein throbbing obscenely on his cheek. He was holding a pistol with a suppressor attached, the end of the barrel touching the glass.

‘Pass the front-door keys through the window, Jones,’ he said, loudly and firmly.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ I demanded, putting just the right amount of indignation in my voice, knowing that I was too late to make a move.

Cecil had also brought a pistol with suppressor attached out from beneath his bomber jacket, and I could see that his eyes were alive with anger.

‘You’ve got questions to answer,’ announced Cain. ‘About who exactly you work for.’