Beside Knight, in the passenger seat, Jack Morgan sat tight-faced and impassive, his emotions shoved deep inside his chest as he tried to think only of the safety of his people that still breathed, and not the ones who were beyond help.
It was an impossible task. And as the phone continued to ring, Morgan could not help but think of Hooligan as Cook had been — forced onto his knees, with a pistol to his head.
“Goddammit, Hooligan, pick up!” shouted Morgan, the veneer of his outward calm breaking.
Through the windows, both men saw the beginnings of the football crowd seeping through the streets and away from the stadium that loomed in the middle distance. Around them, traffic began to calcify as car parks emptied.
“Pick up!” Morgan roared again, knowing they would soon be deadlocked.
The call connected.
“Help me!” The East Ender breathed heavily through the car’s speakers. “Please!”
“Where are you?” Morgan asked, holding up his hand to cut off the same question coming from Knight. “What do you see around you?”
“The White Swan pub.” The tremor of terror was clear in Hooligan’s voice. “Please! I’ve lost sight of him!”
“Get to the pub!” Morgan ordered. “Stay in a busy place!”
“It won’t stop him!”
“Just do it, Hooligan!” Morgan shouted. Knight was already turning the car in traffic to head back in the opposite direction.
“I saw that place on the way in,” he explained. “It’s only a few hundred meters back.”
But it may as well have been a few hundred miles back. The road heading away from the stadium was a parking lot, West Ham supporters weaving their way through the cars and making it impossible for them to drive at faster than walking pace.
“I’m going for him,” Morgan declared, opening the door.
“Jack, wait! It could be a trap! They’re using him to draw you in!”
Morgan heard the truth in Knight’s words, but he couldn’t care less — he would not sit idle as one of his own was in peril.
Instead he ran toward that danger.
Chapter 72
Hooligan shuffled as quickly as he could to the packed White Swan pub. He was so busy throwing terrified looks over his shoulders that he never saw the bouncer in front of him, and recoiled as his head bumped off the big man’s chest.
“Watch where you’re going,” the bouncer warned.
“Can I come in?” Hooligan asked. “I’ve got friends inside.”
The bouncer shook his head at the disheveled man. “Not a chance, mate. You’re shit-faced.”
“I’m not!” Hooligan pleaded. “I swear on me mum! I’m not drunk!”
“Well, you’ve been scrapping then. Either way, you’re not coming in.”
“Can I stand next to you?” Hooligan asked, swallowing. “Someone’s trying to get me.”
“Get out of here, you smackhead,” the man growled, “before I stick my fist down your throat.”
The red-hot anger in the man’s eyes told Hooligan that he would back up his threat. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Hooligan scuttled along the pub’s wall, trying to have at least one side of himself covered from the approach of his stabbed assailant.
Hooligan scanned the crowd and saw no sign of his attacker. The closest uniforms were a hundred yards away — two mounted police who were craning their necks at something as they patrolled along the roadside, where vehicles sat bunched and lazy, awaiting their turn to slip away from the stadium’s neighborhood.
“Where are you?” Hooligan asked hurriedly into his phone. “They won’t let me in the pub!”
“Stay next to it,” Knight replied. “Jack is coming for you. Jez, listen. Who is following you?”
Hooligan opened his mouth to reply, but the words died in his throat.
The “officer” was on the opposite side of the crowded street. A gray hoody was now pulled up over his head, but there was no forgetting the man’s grim, ominous face.
“He’s here,” whispered Hooligan as the man spotted him and began to cross the pedestrian traffic, a sick smile creeping across his ugly face. “I need to run!” Hooligan hissed into the phone.
“Stay where you are,” Knight insisted.
“But he’s coming!”
“Hooligan, if you run, we may not be able to find you again.”
“Peter! He’s getting close! Where’s Jack?”
“Stay where you are!”
“Peter! Peter!”
His pursuer was now halfway through the crowd. Halfway, and gesturing toward Hooligan’s position — the assailant was not alone.
“Help!” shouted Hooligan to everyone and no one. But the revelers ignored him, seeing either a smackhead or a drunk. “Help me!” Hooligan begged, but they did not. They shook their heads or smiled as they walked by.
It was only when another man began to shout in the crowd that the smiles began to slip, and were replaced with panic, and something more powerful than fear.
Terror.
Chapter 73
“Bomb!” Jack Morgan shouted as he sprinted toward the White Swan pub. “Bomb!” he roared, hoping to sow confusion and chaos.
He got it. London was a city where terror attacks were a question of when, not if, and now dozens of panicked fans began to run, some screaming, others echoing Morgan’s frantic calls.
“Bomb!” they yelled, scrambling to get clear.
The stampede began moments later.
It took only seconds for word to pass from one mouth to another, twenty meters at a time. In under thirty seconds, it had reached the tail end of the crowd, who now surged forward, sideways and backward. What had been a steady flow of fans became a torrent, and no amount of cajoling by police or stewards could stop the flood.
“Out of my way!” a man screamed at Morgan, shoving him aside.
Others battered their way past him, many carrying children. The White Swan was only a dozen meters from Morgan, but the wave of fleeing spectators turned his approach into that of crossing a raging Rocky Mountain river.
“Hooligan!” he shouted. “Jeremy!”
Between the flashes of hustling claret-and-sky-blue shirts, Morgan caught sight of Hooligan sheltering by the pub’s wall as if from a storm, but it was a tidal wave of people that rushed by him.
“Over here!” Morgan shouted. “Over here!” His words were getting lost in the din of the crowd, but he kept calling. “Look! Jeremy! Here!”
And finally Hooligan did look, his eyes caught by Morgan’s motion, which was counter to the direction all others were moving. “Jack!” he called, his voice cracking. “Jack!”
Morgan saw Hooligan waving and pushed forward with more force, his sole focus on reaching Hooligan’s side. When he burst from the crowd, it was almost as a newborn, tossed from the frantic motion of fleeing fans into a tranquil haven.
“Where is he?” asked Morgan.
“I haven’t seen him since the stampede started.” Hooligan hugged Morgan as if he were a long-lost father. “That was you who started the bomb scare?”
Hooligan was not the only one to have figured that out, and now the alert mounted police, who’d been drawn to Morgan by his rushing through the crowd, pointed fingers in his direction and turned their horses into the press. The steady flow of fleeing fans broke around the beasts like river rapids.
“They’re coming for us, Jack! Thank God!”
Morgan felt no such elation. Flex was owed retribution, and Morgan could not deliver that from a Metropolitan Police cell. The mess could be cleared up, but it would take time. Time where Flex could be hunting more of Morgan’s people, or disappearing.
“Up and over the fence,” Morgan ordered, his eyes on the wooden fencing that stood between them and the back of the pub. “Go! Put your boot in my hand, and I’ll push you up!”