Nils was standing in the shadows, eating a sponge cake with his fingers, a streak of jam running down his leather trousers, relishing the sudden hit of sugar the way only the career heroin addict truly can.
‘You still looking for those hand grenades?’ he said, licking his fingers.
30
‘Rapid entry, dig out and dominate,’ Jackson Rose told his team of Specialist Firearms Officers.
The young men and women of SC&O19 sat in the front two rows of the briefing room of Leman Street Police Station, Whitechapel. They wore grey body armour and expressions that were pulled tight by adrenaline.
‘Then back here for tea, biscuits and medals all round,’ Jackson grinned. ‘How’s that sound?’
They smiled back at him.
There were murmurs of amusement and assent.
It sounded pretty good.
We were back in the place of legends. This was the police station where murder detectives once hunted Jack the Ripper. And this was the police station where DS Alice Stone had led the raid on Borodino Street that resulted in the death of the Khan terror cell and herself. Now Jackson Rose stood on the low stage of that dimly lit room, telling his young shots how it would go down, and trying to inoculate them with his own quiet confidence.
Because somebody always had to go in.
And because you never knew.
You never really knew what was waiting beyond the door.
My mob sat to one side in the front row. Whitestone. Joy. Edie. And me on the aisle, waiting for Jackson’s nod to come on stage. All of us trying to get comfortable inside the stab-proof Kevlar. PASGT helmets resting on our laps, apart from Edie Wren, who was already wearing hers.
She leaned in.
‘How you sleeping?’ she whispered.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Yeah. Good, good.’
She leaned back with a knowing smile, her green eyes sparkling with amusement under the rim of her PASGT helmet. There were freckles on her nose that would always be there now.
‘As bad as that?’ she said.
Then Jackson was looking at me, giving me my cue with a small nod.
I got up and walked on stage.
‘DC Wolfe of West End Central,’ Jackson said.
I looked out at the briefing room. Beyond the SFOs in the front rows, I could see a Specialist Search Team from SO20, the Counter Terrorism Protective Security Command, dog handlers with firearms and explosives search dogs from DSU, the Dog Support Unit, and teams of paramedics. And right at the back, resting his great bulk against the wall, Flashman of Counter Terrorism Command and his team.
Once upon a time they called them the bomb squad.
We might need them today.
There was a laptop on a lectern. I hit a button and a face appeared on the big screen behind me. A police mugshot, face-on and profile of a white man in his late twenties.
‘This is Peter Fenn,’ I said. ‘AKA Ozymandias. He sells weapons. Mostly small firearms to gang members and drug dealers south of the river but lately he has been expanding. We believe he has established a connection with the Balkans. It was believed Ozymandias sold two twenty-year-old Croatian hand grenades to Asad and Adnan Khan. This was the initial intelligence that took us to Borodino Street. As you know, we found the brothers but not the grenades.’
I hit another button.
Two hand grenades appeared on screen. Black, lattice-faced spheres with a gold-coloured handle and ring pull, identical to a key ring. You could clearly read the name of the manufacturer on the side.
Cetinka, it said.
‘But we have finally located our Mr Fenn. Ozymandias has been off the radar for a while. Our CI – a regular buyer at one of the crack houses in the estate where Fenn lives – tells us he is back in town after a prolonged bout of sex tourism in Pattaya, Thailand.’
Another button. A derelict council estate of pre-fabricated blocks, five storeys high, dark steel sheets covering many of the windows and stairwells.
‘The Elphinstone Estate,’ I said. ‘An open sewer of drug gangs, crack addicts and rats the size of unneutered toms. Developers have been trying to tear it down for ten years to build luxury flats but some of the residents have refused to move out.’ I looked at the blighted block of flats. ‘It’s as close as this city gets to a no-go area. And it is home to Peter Fenn.’
Jackson stepped forward.
‘Expect firearms on the premises,’ he said. ‘It’s what Ozymandias does. There is also the strong possibility of explosives. So look after yourselves and each other in there, as I know you will. You’ve already got plans of the building. Any questions?’
Jesse Tibbs raised his hand.
‘MOE, skipper?’
‘Our Intel is that Fenn has a stronger front door than the Bank of England,’ Jackson said. ‘So method of entry will be you blowing it off its hinges with your Benelli shotgun. But you might have to knock more than once. Good with that, Jesse?’
Tibbs nodded.
Jackson was no longer smiling.
‘Then gun up,’ he said. ‘And let’s go to work.’
We arrived at the Elphinstone Estate at first light.
But for some people the night was not yet over.
As our unmarked jump-off van pulled into the courtyard, four blocks of flats facing a no man’s land where someone had dragged a sofa and then set fire to it – I could hear distant laughter, screams, crying – and music. Lots of music. The sounds of Detroit and Jamaica and Ibiza, all swirling around the rotting estate, like the soundtrack to a party that was over in some other lifetime.
We had left Leman Street in a small convoy but the rest of the vehicles – the ambulances, the dog units, Flashman and his team – were left in neighbouring streets with their engines idling by the time Jackson’s shots and my mob piled out of our jump-off van.
Led by Jackson, we headed for the far block of flats and sprinted up three flights of stairs before he raised a hand and we crouched in a stairwell. Wind whistled down the bleak corridors and stairs. Wind would always whistle down them.
And then suddenly we were being watched.
The tiny child must have wandered out of one of the flats. He was wearing just his pants and a filthy T-shirt. He was perhaps two years old, with all the chubby roundness of that age. He gripped a can of fizzy drink and stared wide-eyed at the shots with their Glock 17 handguns, Black Mamba Sig assault rifles, M26 Tasers, the body armour, their faces hidden by black balaclavas, three holes for mouth and eyes.
Edie pushed her way forward.
‘Go home,’ she hissed at the child.
He did not move.
I waited to hear the voice of an adult calling his name, desperately trying to find him. It did not happen. The children were left to wander in the Elphinstone Estate. The kid slurped his fizzy drink and showed no sign of moving.
So Edie picked him up and carried him away.
Jackson was conferring with Tibbs.
‘Go,’ Jackson said.
Tibbs began walking down the long windy corridor with the Benelli M3 Super 90, his youthful face impassive. We followed him and I was aware of eyes watching us from the other blocks. And then Tibbs was directly outside Peter Fenn’s front door.
It was a mesh metal grille over a slab of steel.
Tibbs considered the door for a moment, then shouldered his weapon and began to fire. The day cracked with sound, again and again and again. Spent brass flew.
It was a strong door. But the semi-automatic shotgun went through it like a machete through margarine.
The shots poured inside. We followed them.
‘Armed police! Stand still!’
‘Show me your hands!’
‘Stop! Armed police! Stand still!’
‘Stop! Armed—’
And then there was that moment of total stillness when we were inside the target building and nobody was trying to kill us. There were two large Samsonite suitcases in the hallway. BKK–LHR said the baggage tags. Bangkok to London.