Bad Soldier: Danny Black Thriller 4 (28 page)

Regiment man Duncan Barker stood by a large Christmas tree, its fairy lights twinkling in the grey morning light, in the centre of Parliament Square. He listened to Big Ben striking. 0800 hours. Traffic crawled through the rush hour all around him. From somewhere out of sight, he could hear the ripe tones of a brass band playing Christmas carols. But the constant beeping of car horns told him that not many of the drivers were feeling the festive spirit. And Barker was pretty certain that, in their hurry to get to their destinations, none of them would be noticing anything different about Parliament Square this morning. It took a trained eye to realise that all was not well.

The most obvious sign that a security operation was under way was the lamp posts. At the base of each one was a small lockable panel – a little door that gave access to the interior of the lamp post. These were obvious places to stash explosives. But now, every one of these panels was wrapped round with a strip of sturdy tape. It would be immediately obvious if anyone tried to tamper with them. A simple preventative measure, but an effective one.

Then there were the down-and-outs. There were at least fifteen of them, dotted around the square, their hair long, their clothes shabby and their faces dirty. Some of them sat begging on the pavement. Others staggered around with tins of Special Brew in their fists. They would be totally invisible to the average man in the street. But Duncan Barker wasn’t average. He was Regiment. He’d noticed how the police were not moving the beggars on, and how the Special Brew winos – despite their supposed drunkenness – were circling the square with a clockwork-like regularity. Because they weren’t really down-and-outs – they were security service personnel, fifteen pairs of highly trained eyes keeping careful watch on the vicinity.

Barker knew for sure that none of the pedestrians entering Parliament Square from Millbank to the south would have noticed, as they passed the imposing buildings that lined the side opposite the river, that a series of four ground-floor windows were obscured from the inside by blackout blinds. They’d have no reason to suspect that the Regiment had set up a local operations room at that location, that at this moment it was a hive of urgent activity. And of course, only a trained eye would notice the slight bulge under Barker’s black North Face jacket that indicated that he – like every other Regiment man currently on the streets of London – was carrying.

He looked up. Something had caught his eye, high in the towers of the Houses of Parliament. Movement. He kept his gaze fixed on the same location for ten seconds, then saw it again – a distant flash of black. Maybe it was a sniper overlooking the square. Maybe it was a member of the security services checking the tower for any sign of suspicious activity.

To his ten o’clock, taking pride of place in the square, was a statue of Winston Churchill. Barker, who liked a bit of history, couldn’t help a grim smile.
Your worst nightmare, mate
, he thought to himself.
Britain’s defences are down. The bad guys are already among us. It’s not a question of if they hit us, it’s a question of when 
. . .

More movement up above. Two helicopters, one hovering above Parliament Square, one above the river. The sound of their rotors was only just audible above the buzz of the traffic. Choppers were common enough in the London skyline for most people to ignore them. But these choppers didn’t contain chirpy radio traffic DJs, or wealthy businessmen getting from A to B. They were military. Merlins. No doubt stuffed full of army personnel. Watching. Waiting.

It was as if there were two versions of London. The normal one, the London of busy pedestrians and impatient drivers. Of wide-eyed tourists and Christmas parties. And then there was the hidden one, the London inhabited by spooks and military personnel – men like Barker, hidden in plain sight. One version of London was carrying on with its life as though nothing was wrong. The other seemed to be holding its breath. It was not a good place to be. Barker was glad he’d warned Danny Black’s missus to stay home. He wished he’d told a few more people to do the same.

He looked to his right. He could just see the top of Westminster Abbey, peeking above the smaller edifice of St Margaret’s Church. Not that Barker had known its name before he’d studied a map of this area. His mobile went. He answered it immediately. It was his Regiment-mate Andy Connor.

‘Where are you?’ Connor asked.

‘Just up the road.’

‘We need you back here.’

Duncan hung up. He turned his back on the Christmas tree and walked west, across the sluggish traffic and round behind St Margaret’s Church. The impressive medieval facade of Westminster Abbey came into view. Barker hardly looked at it. He was more interested in the unmarked white van parked up in a side street to the right of the abbey with a disabled parking permit propped in the front window. He strode up to it and knocked four times on the rear door, which opened immediately. Barker climbed in. Connor was there – tall, shaved head, a couple of days’ stubble, civvies – as well as two tech guys. The back of the van was decked out with an impressive array of screens and listening equipment, all manner of black boxes whose function Barker could only guess at. The tech guys had headphones and were examining the screens, which filled the back of the van with a pale electric light.

‘The drones are ready,’ Connor said. ‘We’re sending them up now.’

Barker nodded. ‘Never thought we’d be doing this in a fucking church,’ he said. It was common practice these days to fly cameras attached to small drones over enemy positions. It delivered important tactical information, and if they got shot down, nobody was hurt. Today, though, they had a slightly different purpose. There were parts of the abbey turrets that couldn’t be reached without a scaffold. However, enemy drones could easily have delivered explosive devices to these locations under cover of night. Barker and Connor’s job this morning was to assist the tech guys in sending their own camera-equipped drones up there. Automated surveillance.

All four men turned their attention to the screens. The tech guy on the right was controlling the drone with two stubby joysticks – one for the drone itself, one for its two cameras. Both cameras were on the bottom. One had a fish-eye lens that gave a 360-degree view of everything beneath the drone. The image from that camera was shown on the left-hand screen. The second was more directional, with a narrower field of view, shown on the right.

The screens showed a retreating patch of grass. From fifteen metres up, they could see lamp posts, surrounding roads and the side elevations of the abbey. From twenty-five metres, the Thames was visible on the left-hand screen. After thirty seconds, the drone was higher than the abbey’s two principal towers. The tech guy was clearly very expert at controlling the device. It hovered low over one of the towers, while Barker and Connor examined the footage being beamed down into the surveillance van. They studied the imagery carefully, but there was no getting away from it: all they could see was old stonework, covered in pigeon crap, with semi-composted leaves blown into the corners. No explosive devices. No nothing.

They spent a fruitless half an hour examining the hidden rooftops of the abbey, before the tech guy controlling the drone called a halt to it. ‘Battery’s running low,’ he said. ‘We need to recharge if you want to carry on.’

Barker was about to answer when his phone rang again. He answered it immediately.

‘Get back here,’ said a voice at the other end. ‘Both of you. Now.’

Barker hung up immediately. ‘We’ve got to go,’ he said.

A minute later, they were striding down Millbank, then into the building that housed the Regiment’s temporary London ops centre. The MoD policeman guarding the main door to the room made no attempt to hide his weapon. He checked their IDs before allowing them access.

The ops centre – it was the length of three normal rooms, with a hard wooden floor and ornate plaster ceiling – was humming. Fifteen large, square tables had been set up throughout the room. Each one was a mess of laptops and comms gear. Wires and cables snaked across the floor. There were several screens against one wall, and a huge map of London, dotted with red and blue pins. There were approximately thirty men in here. Barker recognised half of them from Hereford. The rest were from the Firm. There wasn’t a single guy who didn’t have a grim look of concentration on his face.

‘Barker, Connor, over here! Get a bloody move on.’

An older guy on the far side of the room was gesturing to them. Wallace Conlin had been a fixture around Hereford for as long as anyone could remember. As an officer, he didn’t command anything like the same respect as Ray Hammond. In fact, Barker couldn’t stand him. He was a self-satisfied, Eton type, much more used to giving orders than getting his hands dirty. But this ops room was his. Given the circumstances, there wasn’t a man here who wouldn’t obey his commands. They hurried up to him immediately. He pointed to a door at the far end of the room and led them through it. Two suits were waiting for them in the room beyond. They stood – there were no chairs in this anteroom.

‘Shut the door,’ Conlin said, ‘and listen up. We’ve got a lead.’ He looked at the suits. ‘OK for me to brief, or do you want to do the honours?’

The suits shook their heads in unison. Conlin continued.

‘This goes no further than these four walls. GCHQ have just intercepted an American intelligence wire. We think it originates from northern Iraq, but we can’t be sure. You need to know that the Yanks have been holding back on intelligence sharing.’

Barker and Connor shared a look. That was unusual news. But they didn’t question it.

‘The Yanks seem to have a contact embedded with IS. The intelligence wire reports the name of a UK national believed to be involved in an upcoming IS operation in London.’

‘Westminster Abbey?’

‘Let’s find out, shall we? We’ve got an address for him. We don’t want to send the plod in mob-handed in case they screw it up, and we can’t afford a song and dance anyway, in case it gets back to the Yanks. Just you two. Lift him quietly. Let’s see if we can stop this thing before it happens. Your target’s address is 15 Roseberry Crescent, Walthamstow.’ Conlin handed each man a small photograph. ‘We lifted these from the passport office records.’

Barker looked at the picture. A nondescript Middle Eastern-looking man. Mid-twenties. Brown eyes, pockmarked face, not a looker.

‘His name is Kailash McCaffrey,’ Conlin said.

‘Weird name,’ Barker said. ‘What do we know about him?’

Conlin inclined his head. ‘You know everything you
need
to know, which is that I’ve told you to go pick him up. We’ve got a cell waiting for him at Paddington police station. Let’s find out what this little turd knows about our Christmas Day celebrations.’ He turned his back on Barker and Connor, then immediately looked over his shoulder. ‘Any reason you two are still here?’ he said.

In Joe’s head, London looked like a postcard. Red buses. Big Ben. Tower Bridge. Buckingham Palace. He was a little bit disappointed to see none of these. Instead, from the back seat of the nondescript Honda that had taken him from Dover to the capital, he saw an ugly, concrete mishmash of roads that he knew, from a signpost, was called the Hanger Lane Gyratory. He wasn’t sure how to pronounce that. The silent, moody Sharples with the over-firm grip was driving. When he indicated right off the main road, into a bleak network of three-storey, dark-grey residential blocks, Joe realised that he truly would have to wait a little longer to see the sights of central London.

‘Here we are!’ Galbraith said brightly as Sharples pulled up on the pavement. ‘We have a safe house here.’

‘Who’s “we”?’ Joe asked. It was the first thing he’d said all journey. ‘And safe from what?’

‘Somewhere we can have a nice little chat,’ Galbraith said.

Sharples killed the engine. Both men got out. Joe tried to open his rear door. Locked. He flicked the locking switch. Made no difference. He realised that he’d been child-locked inside the car for the whole journey.

Galbraith opened the door from the outside. Sharples leaned in and grabbed Joe firmly by the arm again, before dragging him out of the car. Joe didn’t struggle. He hadn’t forgotten about the bulges under the men’s jackets. He noticed an old lady with her shopping watching them from about twenty metres away. Was it Joe’s imagination, or had Galbraith purposefully put himself in her line of sight so she couldn’t see Joe’s face, as Sharples dragged him across the road towards the main entrance of one of the residential blocks?

Galbraith unlocked the door and led them into a dark, unfurnished hallway. A flight of steps on the right-hand side led to the upper levels, but to the left was a second door, which Galbraith quickly unlocked. He stepped aside so Sharples could roughly usher Joe in, before locking them all inside again.

It was a cold flat. It smelled damp. Swirly brown carpet, peeling woodchip on all the walls. The curtains of the main room were drawn. It was very dark. The room had a small, dingy kitchenette area to one side. There was no sign of any kitchen equipment. Instead, on the side, was a rather large first aid box with a big green cross on it. Joe felt an uncomfortable pang of anxiety as he looked at it. There was a television in the corner of the room, unplugged, and an old gas fire in the hearth. Not much furniture – four hard-backed chairs, a dusty old standard lamp with a large, wonky shade, and a table tucked into the corner of the room. This was not a place that was well used.