Brute Force (15 page)

I gave him five minutes and then followed.

The station was an old Victorian building with a new car park and taxi rank. There were already quite a few cars parking up, pumping out clouds of cold CO2. They couldn't have come far. The taxis' engines were hot and so their exhausts were clear.

I kept my head down but kept a lookout as best I could as Lynn disappeared into the building.

I concentrated on vehicles that weren't belching. Maybe the car we'd lifted had a tracking device too. Maybe they had driven like madmen from the coast, following its signal. Then put two and two together and realized that unless we were going to hide here, there were only three ways out: plane, bus or train.

I checked the board. The next train out was 05.40. I bought myself a paper and fell in behind a couple of guys with briefcases, long overcoats and scarves up to their ears, who were moaning about some injustice or other at the office as they shoved their cards into the ticket machine. I was tempted to suggest they try my life for a day.

I headed for the café with my second-class single safely in my pocket and saw Lynn sitting in the corner, warming his hands on a steaming paper cup.

'Coffee – large, please, to take away. And a couple of those.'

The girl, whose name tag said she was called Giertruda and wished me a safe journey, shoved the two Danishes in a bag as the machine behind her gargled away.

I was soon back in the cold concourse, pissed off that Lynn was still in the warm. But so what? So far, so good.

I watched him come and join the throng of commuters heading for the waiting train. He got into the next carriage up from mine.

I still couldn't be absolutely sure about Lynn. He might have saved my arse with the gardening fork, but he might now want to save his own by giving me up to the Firm. But for now, I just had to keep both of us from being lifted. Especially me.

I settled into my seat and the first notice I read warned me that assaults on staff were taken seriously and would result in prosecution. Onboard cameras would be collecting evidence all the way.

No doubt about it, the UK had become a surveillance society. We have 1 per cent of the world's population, but 20 per cent of its CCTV cameras. The Holloway Road in North London has 102 in two miles. One 650-yard stretch has twenty-nine of the fuckers – one every twenty-odd yards.

All good news for people like the Firm, who needed to know things, but a nightmare when it's being used against you. And that was why it was imperative we got out of the UK, soon as.

PART FOUR

43

Liverpool Street station
0740 hrs

The cafés and restaurants around the station were heaving with commuters up to their eyes in woolly coats and clutching their coffees. They, too, kept their heads down as they rushed to work over wet pavements under a grey and depressing sky.

I was behind Lynn once more as he headed for the RV. This time I was putting surveillance on him, watching his every move. Maybe he would talk to someone, or slip into a phone box. Maybe he'd think better of throwing in his lot with me, and decide to jump in a cab and head for Vauxhall Cross.

I had no idea if he had the bottle for this sort of thing. Or if he thought he knew which side his bread was buttered – and he thought, wrongly, it wasn't my side.

I bumbled on in the cold, not looking directly through the window of Caffè Nero, but checking things out all the same. If a trigger was on the coffee shop and a weirdo walked past staring hard at the place, it would be a good bet that he was the target. The weather was in my favour. I couldn't see anyone hanging about, but that didn't necessarily mean they weren't.

I walked past another coffee and sandwich shop that was busily helping itself to some City money. People were filling their faces and sharing office gossip. The attraction of the place for me was that Caffè Nero was in line of sight.

I bought a pastry and the biggest available cup of coffee, and sat at a table that gave me a good trigger on the RV.

I watched as people walked past from both directions, on both sides of the street. Everyone wore a coat and trailed a cloud of breath. Were they doing walk-pasts to see if we were in there? This wasn't paranoia, it was attention to detail.

No one went in and came straight out again; no one walked around muttering into their collar. All of which meant they weren't there, or were very good indeed.

If there was one thing I hated more than clearing an area before a meet, it was the meet itself. It was at simple events like this that people got killed, in the way that, these days, a traffic cop stopping a car for jumping a red light might land up getting shot by the driver.

I sat, watched and waited. It wouldn't look abnormal to the staff or anyone else for me to be spending this amount of time in here. They could have been forgiven for thinking I was a dosser paying for temporary shelter with a large coffee. Not that anybody would have cared. The thing about cities is that the slickers and the dossers have no choice but to rub shoulders. It wasn't as if I was the only strange-looking person in town.

I checked around me again, just to be sure that I wasn't sitting next to a trigger. Stranger things have happened.

I watched for another five minutes past the RV time, finished off the coffee and Danish, and walked outside. As I pulled the door of Caffè Nero towards me I saw the back of Lynn's Russian hat in the queue. The flaps were still tied under his chin. He looked even weirder than I did. I walked past him and did my surprised, 'Hi! What are you doing here?'

He turned, smiled that happy, I-haven't-seen-you-for-awhile look, and we shook hands. 'Great to see you, it's been . . . ages.' He beamed.

'Coffee?' I took a look around. All the seats were taken. 'Tell you what, you got time for a Micky D?'

We left the coffee shop and I headed left. He fell into step beside me and shot me a quizzical look. 'What the devil is a Micky D?'

'McDonald's.'

'Is that where we're really going?'

'No. Not yet anyway. Keep your head down.'

I walked backwards to watch the oncoming traffic and flagged down a cab.

'Golden Lane Estate, mate.'

It was only a ten-minute walk, but that was ten minutes more exposure to Big Brother.

'Who are we meeting, Nick?'

'No one. I've got something there for when I'm in the shit. I think this is the moment, don't you?'

44

The Golden Lane Estate was originally built for essential workers – firemen, nurses, that kind of stuff. But in the eighties' housing boom it all went private and now belonged to architects and traders. They're nice little two-bedroom flats rubbing shoulders with the City.

The only subject I had really liked at school was history, and I'd lapped up the sales leaflet I found when I went to check it out. In the eighteenth century it was a warren of slums and red-light areas. By the end of the nineteenth the slums had been replaced by warehouses and train yards. The Great Cripplegate fire of 1897 began in an ostrich-feather warehouse and swept away most of the remaining residential buildings.

By the start of the twentieth century only 6,000 people lived here. Then, on a single night in December 1940, the Luftwaffe destroyed virtually every building in the area. The bombsite lay abandoned until an architectural competition in 1951, and the Golden Lane Estate was born in all its glory: one eleven-storey block, twelve terrace blocks, and a leisure centre with a twenty-metre swimming pool and two all-weather tennis courts.

We couldn't go straight to the cache. I was going to have to clear the area, in case it had been discovered and it was linked to me as a known location. If that was the case, they would have a trigger on it to see if I turned up.

We were more or less level with the entrance to the estate. If I'd been triggered as I left the station or the coffee shop, they would now be behind me, thinking that I was heading for my security blanket. Unless the area was covered by enough CCTV cameras to cover me electronically.

Two attractive women approached from the opposite direction, sandwich-bar paper bags in their hands. I would have no more than three seconds in which to check. They passed, laughing and talking loudly. Now was the time. I turned to give them an admiring glance, in the way men think they do unobtrusively. The two women gave me a 'You should be so lucky' look and got back to their laughing.

There were three candidates beyond them. A middle-aged couple dressed for the office turned the corner behind me. They looked too preoccupied, staring into each other's eyes for as long as possible before getting back to the grindstone. Then again, good operators would always make it look that way. The other possible was coming from straight ahead, and on the estate side of the street. He looked like a builder; he was wearing blue jeans and a thick, dark blue shirt with the tail hanging out, the way I would if I wanted to cover my weapon and radio.

I turned back in the direction I'd been heading. If they were operators, the couple behind me would now look as though they were exchanging sweet nothings, but actually be reporting what I was getting up to, on a radio net, telling the Desk and the other operators where I was, what I was wearing, and the same for my friend. And if they were good, they would also say that I could be aware, because of the look back.

I carried on to the end of the estate and turned left. The couple were still with me. I stopped outside the last of the shops to read the cards in the window selling everything from second-hand vacuum cleaners to personal massage, before turning left again. Three corners in a circular route isn't natural. A good operator wouldn't turn the third corner, but if the lovers came past, I would bin the RV anyway. Better safe than sorry.

A target going static short-term is always awkward for a surveillance team. Everybody's got to get in position, so that next time the target goes mobile they've covered every possible option. That way, the target moves to the team, instead of the team crowding the target. But was there a trigger here? I'd find out soon enough.

Nothing happened during the five minutes it took me to read every card. Lynn stood nervously beside me.

'Don't worry. They're not going to hit us here in the middle of the city. If they know we're here, they'll wait.'

Moving off again, I eventually turned back onto Goswell Road and into the estate.

I went towards the chute where the big wheelie bins stood, where they threw the rubbish down onto the ground floor, and picked up a little plastic key fob hidden behind a pair of large metal doors.

Aglass- and steel-framed security door led into the stairwell. I rested the fob against the pad alongside it and it clicked open.

I didn't go into an apartment. I could never have afforded one here. My fob came from the Pizza Express about five minutes away. It was sheer luck: I'd found a set of keys in the toilet about five years ago. The dickhead had stuck his address on it. The keys didn't interest me – they'd have had them changed anyway. What did was the fact I could now enter and exit a secure area.

I led Lynn down into the basement, where the residents had little lock-ups for bikes and all that kind of shit.

I ducked under a tent that had been hung between the cages to dry and went and stood in the far corner, in front of a sign listing fire hazards.

I checked the flat screw heads. All of them should have had their recess at forty-five degrees. It was a simple tell-tale and one that any professional would have noticed. But that was exactly what I wanted them to see, to give them a false sense of security when they opened up the cache.

The screws were still in position. I twisted them open with a 5p piece. The next tell-tale was on top of the loose brick behind the board. I pulled it out gently, checking the top right-hand corner to reveal a disc-shaped piece of mortar that rested on top. I watched it fall into the small holding area as I removed the brick from the wall. No mortar disc? I would have walked away.

A clingfilm-wrapped bundle sat snugly in the holding area. It contained a passport, driver's licence and credit card in the name of Marc Richardson, and 6,000 US dollars in small denomination bills.

I checked that everything was exactly the way I'd left it: the end of the plastic cover cutting through the second S of the word passport.

I undid the package, removed its contents, replaced them with Nick Stone's passport, driving licence and credit cards, and wrapped it up again and slid it back in the hole.

'I'm shedding a skin.'

I slipped my new identity inside my Red Cross raincoat. 'I always knew there'd be a time when someone like you wouldn't want me around any more. This is my safety blanket.'

He didn't say a word – just took off his hat and ran his fingers absently across the scabs on his pate. I was beginning to sense a vulnerability in him that I hadn't expected. Fear I could have understood – but what I now saw in his eyes was sadness, and I couldn't think why. He was retired, he had a pension, a family, a big country seat. He should have been dancing a jig from dawn till dusk.
Resignation,
that's what it was – almost like he'd lost the will to live.