James Becker - Echo of the Reich

When he reached the car he took a final look around him, then unlocked it, climbed into the driver’s seat and drove away, keeping one eye on his mirrors. He maneuvered the vehicle through the side streets until he reached a junction with the A127, the Southend Arterial Road. He turned left and followed that route until he reached the junction with the M25, where he turned right and headed south toward the river.

Again, Bronson watched his mirrors very carefully, and wound the speed up to a little more than eighty-five miles an hour, just to see if anyone would try to keep up with him. Then he slowed right down before the next junction and swung the Ford east into the Lakeside shopping center at Thurrock. There were car parks everywhere, all fairly full, but he had no difficulty in finding a space at the southern end of the trading estate outside the IKEA store. There his blue Ford was just one more anonymous car. Bronson sat for a few moments in the driving seat of the Ford, looking around him. As before, nobody seemed to be taking any interest in him. And then another car-a dark green Vauxhall with two passengers-pulled up a couple of spaces behind him. Two men got out and started walking directly toward his vehicle.

Bronson tensed and wrapped the fingers of his right hand around the butt of the little Llama pistol as they drew nearer. But when they reached his car, they simply continued walking, heading toward the store entrance.

Only when they’d vanished from sight did he relax, take out his mobile phone and press the speed-dial button for the number-another mobile phone-that he wanted. Curtis answered almost immediately.

“It’s me,” Bronson said. For obvious security reasons, just in case the group they were trying to infiltrate had obtained scanners or other ways of hacking into either of the mobile phones, it had been agreed that neither man would ever mention their respective names. The previous year the newspapers had featured little other than phone-hacking stories.

Both men knew that hacking a mobile was far more difficult than most of the papers had made out. Many of the reported hacks had not only occurred several years earlier, when mobile network security was much less efficient than it was today, but most had also involved attacks on a user’s voice mail messaging system, and now the commonest way of communicating apart from simply making a call was to use text, and that was far more difficult to break into. Nevertheless, they were determined not to take any chances.

“How’d it go?” Curtis asked.

“I think you could say that I’m on probation. They’re doing some kind of operation this evening, and they’ve invited me along. But they’re cautious. I don’t know where it is, or exactly what time it’s going to be starting. John Eaton will call me on my mobile at six and tell me where to go, and I have to be within about an hour’s drive of the site. But I’ve got no idea when the action will kick off. I’d have thought they’ll probably wait until dark.”

“What are you going to do? Turn up, or do you want out now? If you call me as soon as you’ve been given the rendezvous, we could bust in and grab the lot of them.”

Bronson shook his head as he replied. “I’d love to walk away from this, but I don’t think that would work,” he said. “All I’ve been told is that I’ll need to rendezvous somewhere, presumably close to the site, at seven this evening. What I don’t know is whether I’ll be meeting the rest of the group there, or just one or two of those I’ve already seen. If I was a betting man, I’d say they were still suspicious of me, and the rendezvous position that I’ll be given will be nowhere near where the rest of them will be assembling. So if you do send in a team of officers instead of me, you’ll be lucky to grab one or two of them.”

“And that will spook the rest and blow your cover completely,” Curtis finished for him.

“Exactly. And one of them-he was introduced to me as Mike, no second name and I’ve no idea if that’s really any part of his name-actually said to me that I could be an undercover cop trying to penetrate their operation. I think I talked him out of the idea, but that’s still a bit worrying.”

There was a short silence while Curtis digested this unwelcome piece of information. “You sure about that? I mean, do you think he was being serious, or was it just a kind of throwaway remark?”

“I don’t know. But if I’m going to get inside this group, I can’t see any alternative to my turning up tonight.”

“Well, just be careful, that’s all. And if it looks as if it’s all turning to rat shit, get the hell out of there and call for backup. I’ll make sure there are a few extra patrol cars and a couple of ARVs in the general area from about eight o’clock onwards, so if you do blow the whistle, we can have officers with you in just a few minutes.”

That was some comfort, but Bronson knew that a lot could happen to him between the time he raised the alarm and the first car arriving.

“Thanks,” Bronson said. “I hope it won’t come to that.”

“Right,” Curtis said briskly. “I’ll brief Shit Rises on your progress so far. Anything else you need to tell me?”

“Yes, three things. First, if what John Eaton told me at lunchtime today is correct, then this group working in London is just a small part of a much bigger organization. But before you ask, I’ve got no idea what it is, where it’s based, or what its agenda is. I got the feeling that we’re not just talking about another bunch of low-lifes doing malicious damage in Edinburgh or Cardiff or somewhere. I think this other organization is directing the London group, telling it what targets to hit and when to hit them, which suggests a high degree of control. That’s interesting, maybe even surprising, though I don’t know much about this kind of criminal activity.

“The second point’s related to that one. According to Eaton, the superior group, for want of a better expression, actually pays this London mob to carry out their attacks. They’re acting as mercenaries, or maybe even paid employees, of this other lot.”

“That’s a new one, no mistake,” Curtis said. “I don’t think we’ve ever met that before. I’ll pass it on. A couple of years ago we found a group of vandals-nothing very violent, mainly daubing slogans on buildings, that kind of thing-who had all paid into a fund so that if any of them were caught and fined, the fund would pay it. That was unusual enough, but I’ve never encountered what you might call vandals for hire before. And the third thing?”

“This is what worries me most of all. They were quizzing me about what I’d done in the past, and I told them I spent a few years in the army. The first question they asked me was if I knew anything about explosives, and they hinted that they had access to plastic explosives, through this other group.”

“Shit,” Curtis muttered. “That’s all we need.”

“‘Shit” is an understatement. Most terrorist groups-and I think we have to consider them as terrorists rather than vandals-have to manufacture their own explosives. They use something like potassium chlorate or ammonium nitrate, which is a major constituent of most fertilizers, and mix it with a fuel like diesel oil. It can produce a hell of a bang-”

“You don’t have to remind me,” Curtis interrupted. “I was in Docklands when the IRA Canary Wharf bomb exploded back in ’ninety-six. That was a fertilizer bomb, and when it went off you could hear the bang over most of East London.”

“I remember it, too. Most of the estimates suggested it was about a half-ton device, about eleven hundred pounds, and I think it did about ninety million pounds’ worth of damage and killed a couple of people. But military-grade plastic explosive is about five times more powerful than a fertilizer bomb.”