Richard Wiseman - To Kill Or Be Killed

Joe picked up the phone and went to the outer office. He sat down and called the Sun newspaper and when he was done he took the cell phones down to the boiler room and threw them in the furnace.

The Sun news desk workers were delighted when they got an anonymous call describing Mason, his route and direction. They despatched a photographer on a motorbike and called armed police. Armed police called DIC as a matter of protocol, but cars had already left Euston Tower. Armed police units sped, lights pulsing, sirens blaring to the junction at the north end of Vauxhall Bridge. All the vehicles converged on the Vauxhall Bridge exit.

Unaware of the gathering problems around him Mason prepared for the taxi to stop a street away from his target’s address. The taxi made slow progress up the Wandsworth Road and the Sun photographer arrived at the bridge exit in time to see the junction surrounded. It was ten in the morning.

The London cab rolled onto the bridge, the red railings flashing past and the two towers on the far side looking like sentinels. The driver was suddenly struck by the lack of traffic coming from the other side.

“Might be a contra flow for some reason; I’ve never seen it this empty.”

Mason looked ahead and saw the blue flashing lights. He looked back and only three cars were following, a large empty gap behind them stretching back across the Thames to more flashing lights at the south entrance.

When the police had sealed the northern exit they waited and sprang into place cutting traffic off at the south entrance. They’d been unable to stop the three cars; directly behind the cab was DIC, a civilian car and then Brook from MI6.

Mason was stunned. Then he became angry. They’d grassed him. It was a trap. He pulled out the Sig and shot the glass between himself and the driver, who hit the brakes.

“Drive on or you’re dead.” The cab driver felt the muzzle of the gun against the side of his face. He drove on.

“Speed up.”

“Are you crazy?”

“No. There’s a road block ahead and they will be armed. You think they’ll give a damn about you when they open up with those rifles and sub machine guns. If you don’t floor it I’ll kill you and if you do floor it you’ll be going fast enough for them not to want to fire at you. Now do it.”

The cab sped up and the DIC operative slowed down, the car behind him also slowed. Brook was about to put his foot down and drive past them, but thought better of it, he slowed too.

At the north entrance police were told not to open fire until the cab had stopped and they had a good clear shot at Mason so as not to endanger the cab driver.

Through the windscreen Mason saw the two police Volvo 440’s blocking the road, the heavy black cab accelerated towards them like a tank and Mason and the driver braced for the crunch. Policemen behind the cars moved away at the last second as the taxi crashed through, smashing the front of each Volvo.

Metal screeched and the impact took the speed out of the cab. Mason was thrown forward, his torso pushed through into the front of the cab. As the damaged cab headed towards Bessborough Gardens a sniper, tracking the car through his scope, saw Mason full body from his side of the road. Mason pulled himself back through the gap just as the round was loosed and the Enforcer round punched the window shattering it, ricocheted off the steering wheel and grazed the cab driver’s forehead, knocking him unconscious.

With his heavy foot on the pedal, dead weight, and his body sliding the wheel to the left, the cabbie unconsciously drove the cab into Bessborough Gardens, smashing into the iron railing gates, where the cab came to rest.

The Sun journalist was positioned opposite the park and his high powered zoom lens honed in on the details of the scene as the rapid shot setting on the camera captured the round stunning the driver, the cab’s passage and the cab crashing. He took shot after shot of police running forward.

Through the lens, on the digital screen, the camera saved the images of Mason rising from the cab’s floor well in the back, the flashes from the Sig220 instantly matching two policemen knocked to the ground as the rounds slugged their way into, but not through, their body armour. Finally the camera caught Mason’s face as three sets of high velocity armour piercing Enforcer rounds penetrated the cab door at chest height, puncturing both lungs and heart. Mason grabbed the door handle and in desperate pain struggled out the door. He fell to the ground on all fours and was knocked onto his back by a kick from a policeman pointing an MP5 at his prone body.

Ambulance men came over, paramedics bearing stretchers. News teams arrived and though held back were able to get shots of the scene from behind the now powerful police cordon.

The cab driver was carefully extracted from the wrecked cab and rushed to St Thomas’ hospital near Westminster Bridge. They checked Mason, but he was dead. He was stretchered to the ambulance and taken away.

The police searching the cab found the case with the bomb in it. It took fifteen minutes to evacuate the entire area including all the buildings surrounding. Press, news teams, police and anyone else in a quarter mile radius was evacuated. Bomb disposal arrived, they used a controlled explosion to destroy it and had they not done so a strange fact would have been revealed, which might well have raised interesting questions at the time, but it was thought safer to blow it up under safe conditions.

The cab, of course, was a wreck. Bullet ridden, dented, glass shattered, ripped apart inside and charred all over with twisted metal pointing out at odd angles, embedded in iron railings. It sat like a gargoyle memorial to yet one more of the hired killers and a testimony to their desperate fatal struggles to remain un-captured.

Traffic was backed up along the Thameside roads as the Vauxhall Bridge was closed at both ends. Traffic on the embankment on both sides took until night time to get flowing again and even then the taxi had not been moved.

Back at the DIC centre, Euston Tower, Jack Fulton and many members of the team watched the scene in awe from live CCTV footage from the numerous cameras in the area.

For a few seconds the whole building sat in silence, all work stopped as the scene was brought up on every screen in every office.

When the shooting was done Diane Peters was standing at Jack Fulton’s side.

“What a mess!”

“Yes it is. Is the taxi driver dead?”

“You want me to find out?”

“Yes. If he’s alive and can talk he can say where Mason was going, the address he’d been given. It might tell us the target of these assassins.” Fulton rubbed his chin in thought.

“I’ll find out and let you know.” Diane replied and strode away with purpose.

Jack noticed Tony Deany by his side.

“Four down one to go boss.” Tony said too brightly for Jack’s liking.

“Very true, aren’t you seeing Else today?”

“Yeah,” Tony looked at his watch, “In about ten minutes, Ellie’s having her session first.”

“Good Else will be off down to Dover to see David tomorrow.” Fulton said reflectively.

Everything had stood still at Euston Tower. Then when the shooting had stopped, some began watching the news footage, but most went on with their searches, knowing that it was their work that had brought down Spencer and Wheeler, and, as they thought at the time, their work alone that had ended the lives of Cobb and Mason. Pride swelled in the building as the teams of watchers knew that they had stopped four of the most murderous assassins the country had ever seen. They all focussed on finding the last man, Trevor Stanton.

London

10-30 a.m.