KILL ME IF YOU CAN (Dave Cunane Book 8) (37 page)

I didn’t like the way he spoke to me but he raised his hands to push me so I moved.

‘This is no place for civilians,’ he said slowly. ‘I mean it Dave. You can stay in the Jag and phone HQ if anything happens to us but it’s down to my team now. Those three must leave.’

Tony retreated to the car and Lee backed out and drove round the corner.

‘Lennon, you come with me. Smithy and Temple you cover us from behind the van.’

The ambulace/van was now in the spot vacated by Lee.

Lennon was about six foot four and appeared to have muscles on his muscles. He might even give Clint a run for his money. He was wearing a navy blue Berghaus fleece and jeans and sporting a villainous moustache.

Smith and Temple took up firing positions behind the ambulance.

Lennon wasn’t happy. He unzipped his fleece just enough to reveal a bullet proof jacket.

‘With respect sir, you aren’t armed and you aren’t wearing a jacket. You should stay in the car and let Smithy come with me.’

‘No, we’ll do it like I said. I’ve left a message for the Cabinet Secretary and when he phones back I want to have a result.’

‘Death or glory, is that it sir?’

‘No, the place looks deserted. I have to find out if it is. That’s routine police work, Detective Sergeant or would you prefer that we hang about until the Zimmer Brigade are all over us? If there is a dirty bomb in there, guess who’ll get the credit for finding it if we wait.’

‘OK, Boss,’ the burly henchman agreed.

I got out of the car and approached the pair.

Bren ignored me.

‘Hang on,’ I said grabbing Bren’s arm. ‘You’re betting there’s no-one there but they probably left guards for the bomb … armed guards.’

‘This is a police operation now, Dave,’ he said curtly, fending me off.

‘Oh, yeah, you and three men in an ambulance make a big police operation. Where’s the rest of the squad?’

‘This is it. D/S Lennon couldn’t reach the other three.’

‘Well, I’m coming with you,’ I said.

‘Dave, I’m trying to save you for that pregnant wife of yours. Getting suspended will probably spoil my beautiful relationship with Billy-Jo, so I thought one of us might as well come out of this with his marriage intact.’

‘Stuff that,’ I said.

He shook his head but made no further argument when I set off with him.

‘I’m coming,’ Clint said from behind me. He still had his heavy tweed jacket on but he looked twice as thick round the circumference as normal, a regular Michelin man. Tony caught my glance.

‘Lee put him in his bullet proof,’ he said.

‘Thank God one of us has some sense but what about the ironmongery? Bren will arrest us all for sure …’

‘In the boot.’

I breathed a sigh of relief.

Tony and Lee followed us, with Lee in the rear.

‘Dear God, what is this?’ Bren muttered when he looked over his shoulder, ‘The Magnificent Seven?’

‘Eight, you mean.’

‘I only count seven, your two little pals count as halves.’

‘Don’t sneer, Cullen,’ I said, ‘my lads are magnificent.’

‘Magnificent idiots, that’s what they are.’

I laughed and he punched my arm.

‘Let’s do this thing,’ he said and began to run.

We reached the unit. Close up it was even more imposing than seen from the street. It was like a jumbo jet hangar that someone had picked up off an airfield and dumped in the backstreets. There were a series of four concertina gates each ten metres high and separated by tall steel columns. I knew they were ten metres because that was written above them alongside a speed limit sign for two mph. There were traffic lights fixed up there too.

Proportionate to the gates the structure itself was large. The steel clad building went on above the gates for another ten metres. There was an enormous volume of space inside.

Each concertina shutter was operated by motors or chains inside the warehouse and high and wide enough for heavy trucks. Presumably trucks came in one side and went out another when they’d dumped their load.

There were handgrips where the folding shutters joined in the middle but no locks Tony could pick.  Bren and Smithy grabbed one side while Clint took the other. They tried to heave the gates apart. Nothing happened.

Bren banged on the shutter and shouted ‘Police’. He was joined by Lennon and Smith. There was no response from inside.

A newspaper was trapped under the shutter.

Bren ripped it free and looked at the date.

‘This is Thursday’s ‘Evening News’. The place is in use.’

I could see that he was desperately eager to find the dirty bomb and save his career. Nothing was going to stop him getting in now.

Apart from the folding shutters, the only access to the entire structure was through a single door in the front of the office. The temporary office itself looked flimsy enough to tear down with our bare hands but precautions had been taken against that. Heavy steel bars protected the small windows alongside the door. There was razor wire all over the roof and the corners were reinforced with angle iron.

That single door was a high security steel fixture set in a steel frame with six locking points and a tamper proof lock.

‘Well that’s it for now,’ Bren said. ‘We need a locksmith.’

‘Or a tank,’ agreed Lennon.

‘I can do it,’ Tony said eagerly, taking out his picklocks again. ‘I’ve seen a cut-out diagram of that lock in a catalogue.’

‘And how did you manage to get hold of such a catalogue? Distribution of diagrams of high security locks must be restricted,’ the policeman demanded.

‘Oh, it was … er … never mind,’ Tony gabbled. He waved his hands loosely to indicate the impossibility of further explanation. ‘I’ve seen it and I can crack it. It was on page seventy eight of the catalogue.’

‘Nice to see where you recruit your staff, Dave,’ Bren said, turning to me. ‘Are you running the Strangeways Rehabilitation Programme?’

‘Tony’s special, he’s got a reconditioned brain.’

Bren looked at me out of the side of his face but made no effort to stop Tony getting to work. He had nothing more to lose.

‘This doesn’t make sense,’ Tony commented as he went to work with his picks. ‘They have a rubbish Chinese lock on the outside gate and a state of the art lock on here. There must be some other way of opening those folding shutters, perhaps with a remote.’

I looked at the area above the shutters. Apart from the traffic lights and the signs there was nothing up there, no sign of a receiver for signals from a remote. My faith in Tony’s powers decreased.

I didn’t expect him to succeed.

Behind me Bren had taken out his phone and started up a muted conversation.

‘Yes, Sir Garret,’ he was saying, ‘this might be the real MOLOCH. I believe the Sparkbrook arrests are a blind alley. It’s a warehouse belonging to M.O.Lochhead and Sons Limited. Moloch … yes sir … It’s  a huge warehouse … completely deserted … We think there might be a large dirty bomb in here  … We have a locksmith working to get us in … It could be some time … Cunane’s with me … There are eight of us … We’re armed … Thank you, sir. Yes, I’ll cooperate fully with the MI5 team …’

He broke the call and turned to his men with his thumb up.

‘Reinstated,’ he said to me.

I raised my eyebrows and made a mental note to demand a letter of thanks from the Chief Constable for preserving the reputation of the GMP. Bren shrugged, put his phone away and raised his left hand. His fingers were crossed.

Tony frowned and concentrated. Beads of sweat formed on his hairline but after several minutes and after placing more picks into the lock it clicked open.

‘I’ve read all the standard works on locksmithing,’ Tony said apologetically. ‘They’re restricted but you can get them if you know where to look. This looks very fancy but it’s just your standard five-lever mortice.’

Bren looked at me with an ‘I told you so’ expression and opened the door.

‘They may have all sorts of electronic back up alarms,’ Tony warned. ‘There could be booby traps.’

‘Bugger that,’ Bren said. I knew it really was death or glory for him.

He dived inside, closely followed by Smithy and then by me.

Through an unlocked side door we stepped into a cavernous dark space. Unless they were troglodytes used to living in dark spaces there was no one inside except us.

Bren took out a small torch but it was like trying to illuminate a cathedral with a single candle.

‘Can you hear something?’ he said to me.

We stood in silence.

There was a faint droning sound coming from the dark space at the back of the warehouse. There was something sinister about the sound. I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck.

‘It’s the bloody bomb.’ Bren said. ‘The bastards have left it to go off. That’s why there’s no-one here.’

‘Bombs are supposed to tick,’ I muttered but he ignored me.

‘Lights, we need lights,’ he said desperately.

‘There must be a manual way to open those shutters,’ Tony whispered. ‘They’d need it if there was a power cut.’

He slipped away from my side and was joined by Clint. There was a sound of metal being moved and then Clint managed to force one side of the nearest shutter open a few inches. Smithy and Lennon ran to join him. They struggled but couldn’t manage to open it further.

‘It’s motorised and the brake or whatever is pushing against us,’ Lennon gasped to his boss.

Nevertheless the narrow shaft of light he’d helped to create revealed a control box mounted at waist height on the wall next to the door we’d come in by. It was secured by a padlock. Unfortunately the rest of the space beyond the entrance remained in deep gloom. Nothing was glowing in the dark but remembering the reference to highly radioactive Caesium 137 I didn’t fancy copying Bren’s heroics any further. Nor did he, there was no way anyone was going into that darkness which could be concealing any number of radioactive devices.

Bren strode over to the control box and rattled it. The heavy steel door covering the controls didn’t budge. In his frustration he launched a high kick at it and immediately recoiled.

‘Hell and damnation,’ he cursed, ‘we’re going to have to wait for lights and a generator unless … ’

‘Car headlights,’ I suggested.

‘I need to preserve the scene,’ Bren said. ‘It’s bad enough having all you lot trampling about. Still, if you could get a headlight up to that slit we’d at least see what’s making the buzzing sound.’

‘No, I can do the lock,’ Tony said eagerly.

‘In a pig’s ear, you can,’ Bren snapped. ‘Nobody’s going to get into that box without a thermal lance.’

‘I can do it,’ Tony insisted.

The lock was a big single dial combination padlock with numbers 0 to 99 on the dial. It had been well used but was immune to Tony’s pick locking skills.

‘For this type you need to put six numbers in for six cams in the right order then it opens,’ Tony explained. ‘That’s why it’s so big. You turn clockwise for the first and then anticlockwise for the next and so on.’

‘Getting the sequence at random will take you at least a week,’ Bren said with an edge of contempt in his voice. ‘There must be millions of combinations.’

‘No, there’s tolerance built into these. Say the first number is 99, yeah, well, the cam would open at 98 or 0 as well as 99 and on top of that if it’s been used a lot like this one the metal will be worn where the cams drop. I can do it.’

‘Be my guest,’ Bren said.

Tony contorted himself around the box until he had his ear against the back of the padlock. Then he started twisting the dial clockwise round and round, quickly at first and then slowly.

‘Twenty three,’ he said, ‘somebody write it down.’

Bren whipped out a notebook.

Tony started again anticlockwise this time.

‘Seven.’

It took hardly more time than Bren needed to write them down for Tony to get all six numbers. The lock clicked open when he entered them. Bren opened the door and threw a lever to switch on the internal lights.

‘Christ! Maybe you are a genius,’ he muttered to Tony. 

Powerful fluorescent lights came on overhead in sequence with a flutter of sound. Flick, flick, flick, running from the entrance shutter to the rear the lights came on progressively, illuminating section after section.

There was a collective in-drawing of breath.

The place was empty. There were no vehicles, no people and most definitely of all, no massive bomb.

I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

The next thing I noticed was the litter. There was lots of it; newspapers, flattened pizza boxes, food wrappers, and empty drink cans carpeted the asphalt floor.

They all looked as if they’d been dumped just yesterday. Dozens of people had been here very recently.

A platform ran all round the interior, its height convenient for loading. A couple of fork-lift trucks indicated that that had been its purpose. Above the platform there were storage gantries. Whatever had been stored or collected here there was now no sign of it.