He heard a gasp from Alix.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘Up the hill… more of them.’
Carver grunted to show that he’d spotted three more Chinese, one of them female. They might be completely innocent, but he couldn’t afford to risk it. He and Alix were caught almost exactly halfway between the two groups. He glanced at one, then the other, before giving a sharp tug on Alix’s hand.
‘Change of plan,’ he said.
He turned towards the Millennium Building and made for a gap in its facade, past the plate-glass windows behind which the world’s tennis journalists were sitting at their desks, splitting their attention between TV and computer screen as they filed their latest reports. Now Carver came to a small courtyard, hemmed in on all sides by high white walls. He felt Alix flinch as she took in their claustrophobic surroundings. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Through here.’
He made for a door in the far corner of the courtyard, that opened on to a stairwell.
‘Down,’ he said. ‘We’re going underground.’
70
One good thing about looking the way Schultz did: if you sat down at one end of a park bench, no way was anyone else going to sit at the other. Certainly not without asking very politely.
He heard a voice in his ear. It was Cripps. ‘You need a hand with the fireworks, boss?’
‘No worries, Kev, I’ve got this fucker well sorted.’
Schultz had delved into the B amp;Q bag and taken out the squat grey plastic tube, the shallow copper cone and a locking ring. He placed the cone at one end of the tube, the point facing inwards so that the external surface was concave. Then he screwed the locking ring on to the tube until it pressed tight on the copper, to keep it securely in place. Then he turned the tube over so that the open end was facing him.
Next Schultz got out the bag of Polyfilla and undid the clip that had been placed over the open corner. He then held the bag upside down, over the grey tube, and poured out the contents of the bag — in actual fact, high-explosive RDX powder — tamping the floury white particles down as he went, to make sure they were tightly packed into the tube. When the bag was empty, he placed the plastic disc over the open end of the tube as a backplate, and secured it with the other locking ring. The looped wire was now on the outside of the backplate.
Schultz now had a closed canister, not much bigger than a beer can, filled with explosives, with a fuse wire at one end and copper at the other. This was a Krakatoa, a weapon that arguably produced more bang per buck than any other on the planet. It struck Schultz that this was essentially a smaller, smarter version of the mortars that had been used to attack the refinery. Good to think that the man behind the attack would be getting a taste of his own medicine. It was just a pity Carver’s orders had been so specific: hit the engine, not the passenger compartment. Schultz would have liked to atomize the bastard. But orders were orders, even when they were crap.
There were four small open tubes on the side of the newly formed canister. Schultz took the four plastic sticks from the bag and inserted them in the tubes. Now the canister had legs to stand on.
Schultz undid the wire tie holding the loops of the fuse wire together, and unwound it. Holding one end of the wire in his hand, he placed the canister on the ground, lining it up with the pegged string.
‘Oi, Crippsy! Wake up, you idle bastard!’ Schultz said.
There was a laugh in his ear. ‘What do you want, boss?’
‘Take a look out your passenger window. Can you see the Krakatoa?’
Cripps grunted as he shifted his position. ‘Hang about… Yeah, if I look for it I can see something through the grass, and obviously I know what it is, right? But no other fucker’s gonna have a Scooby.’
Schultz chuckled. ‘No, not till they get it right up the Aris. Then they’ll fucking know all about it.’
71
One thing you can count on in any combat situation is that nothing will go exactly according to plan. The ability to adapt to changing circumstances, and improvise accordingly, is therefore vital. Derek Choi was no soldier, but he was well versed in the need to think on his feet. Carver had slipped his original trap. But now he might have run right into another.
For Choi, too, had been studying plans and photographs of the All England Club and its surrounding area. When he saw Carver disappear into the media centre stairwell, and then take the stairs heading down, he knew exactly where he was heading. He snapped out a series of orders to his most trusted subordinate: a thickset, shaven-headed tough called Lin Zhuang. ‘You and the others will be the hunting dogs and I will be the hunter. Follow Carver and the woman. Drive them towards the unloading bay. I will be waiting to snare them. If you kill them first I will not be displeased. Understand?’
Lin nodded.
‘Then go.’
Lin and the other four agents raced away down the stairs. Choi turned on his heels and went the other way. He ran about a hundred metres, and then he, too, headed down into the depths of the earth.
72
There was a small landing at the bottom of the stairs, with a single, duck-egg blue door, which had a round glass porthole. Carver took a look through it, then pushed it open with his shoulder, glancing back up the stairwell as he did. The sound of scurrying footsteps was clearly audible, coming from above them. The Chinese were on their way.
Carver raised his gun to cover the stairs as he gestured for Alix to go through the door. He followed her into one of Wimbledon’s underground service tunnels. The door was positioned close to a right-angled bend, so that the tunnel ran away straight ahead of them and to the right. The concrete floor was shiny and slick from the constant passage of feet and wheels. The walls were made of bare breeze blocks. A couple of doors, painted in the same duck-egg blue, were set into the right-hand wall. The nearest one had a sign next to it that read, ‘Ball Boys and Girls’. The one beyond it displayed one word: ‘Pilates’.
On the left, two massive black pipes ran all along the bottom of the wall, with metal racks above them that were used to carry countless, loosely hung strands of multicoloured wire. A number of smaller red-painted pipes were suspended from the ceiling, along with yet more wires. They were all held in place by metal frames like horizontal ladders, from which hung a line of harsh white neon strip lights that ran as far as the eye could see.
‘Let’s go,’ said Carver, running down the tunnel up ahead.
Alix followed him, her heels clattering against the concrete floor. As they rounded a left-hand corner Carver gestured at her to stop and get to the side of the tunnel, just behind him. He took up a position by one of the pipes, wishing that Schultz were down in the tunnel with him, instead of sitting on a bench by Wimbledon Common. Give the two of them a couple of sub-machine guns and a bunch of grenades, and they’d have the Chinese sorted in no time. Doing it solo was a little more complicated.
Carver was as close as he could get to the angle of the corner, leaning slightly out into the tunnel to get a view of the door from the stairs. It opened and one of the Chinese stepped through it, holding his gun out in front of him. He stopped for a moment, saw no one else in the tunnel, and lowered his gun as he relaxed a fraction, and that was when Carver stepped out and fired the two shots that killed him.
Carver put another two rounds through the porthole to discourage the men waiting the other side, then immediately turned — and almost ran right into a squat, white, open buggy that was coming down the tunnel towards them. Thanks to its electric motor the buggy was virtually noiseless. In fact the loudest sound coming from it was the music seeping from the earphones of the skinny, acne-faced lad at the wheel. He seemed lost in what he was hearing, his attention long since dulled by the constant repetition of trips up and down the same stretch of tunnel. He barely registered Carver’s presence until he was two metres away, and then his dull working day suddenly got a whole lot more exciting. He slammed on the brakes and came to a halt within a few centimetres of Carver, who simply put a foot in front of the buggy, leaned forward, and used one hand to shove his gun in the young driver’s face, while the other ripped the earphones from his head.