Bad Soldier: Danny Black Thriller 4 (29 page)

Outside, the sun must have momentarily appeared from behind the clouds. It illuminated the curtains. Behind them, Joe saw the silhouettes of a series of window bars. The brightness disappeared again. Galbraith switched on the light. Joe suppressed another surge of anxiety. He didn’t know what was happening.

‘What we need,’ Galbraith said, rubbing his hands together, ‘is a nice cup of tea.’ He walked over to the kitchenette and opened the fridge. He said, ‘No milk!’ without even looking inside. ‘I’ll just pop out and get some, shall I?’ He glanced at Sharples and nodded imperceptibly. Joe knew he wasn’t supposed to see the gesture. But he did. ‘Won’t be a tick,’ he said. He left the room. Joe heard the front door to the flat slam closed. He noticed that there was no kettle in the kitchen.

‘Sit down,’ Sharples said, scraping one of the hard-backed chairs to the middle of the room.

Joe did as he was told. Sharples stood in front of him.

‘If I had my way,’ Sharples said, ‘every single one of you immigrant cunts would be sent straight back to where you came from.’

Joe blinked at him. He didn’t know what to say.

‘So, we heard what you told that stupid woman back in Dover,’ Sharples continued. ‘I’ve heard some pathetic lies in my time, but that—’

‘I wasn’t lying,’ Joe interrupted.

He experienced a sudden, blinding flash of light in front of his eyes, and a burst of pain to his cheek. It was only a second after it happened that he realised Sharples had hit him hard across the side of the face. He touched his cheek and looked at his fingertips. No blood. But the skin throbbed badly.

Sharples walked slowly round the chair. ‘So,’ he said. ‘You’re IS’s little Internet geek, that’s what you want us to believe?’

‘I . . . I don’t understand what that means—’

The second swipe across the face was even more brutal than the first. Joe gasped in pain.

‘You realise we can send you straight back where you came from?’ Sharples said. ‘You think we give a flying fuck what happens to you? Carry on lying to us, that’s what we’ll do. The only chance you’ve got of staying in the UK is to give us hard intel on your terrorist buddies. Intel we can actually use.’

Joe wanted to speak. He wanted to explain that he was going to do that anyway. He wanted to tell the man that terrorists weren’t his buddies. They were his enemies, and he’d do anything to compromise them. But he was too scared to speak. And too confused. He’d thought that the UK authorities would welcome him with open arms when he told them who he was and what he knew. He hadn’t expected this . . .

And anyway, he could hear the main door opening again, which meant Galbraith was coming back. He sat tight. A few seconds later, the dark iron lever handle of the sitting room door angled downward, and Galbraith walked into the room. He wasn’t carrying any milk. He still had that bland smile. He walked up to Joe, bent down and peered at his right cheek. ‘Tch, tch,’ he said. ‘Nasty bruise.’ He stood up straight again. ‘I’m glad you two have had this little opportunity to get to know each other,’ he said. ‘I imagine you’d like a little while to mull everything over? We’ll leave you alone, shall we?’

The two men wordlessly left the room, leaving Joe sitting, bruised and sore, on the hard-backed chair. He heard the key turn in the lock as the door shut.

Roseberry Crescent, Walthamstow was a dump.

Barker was driving. Their vehicle was a nondescript Ford Focus with a dent on the left wing. The kind of car nobody looks at twice. They drove it slowly down the road, then looped back round and gave it a second pass. No pedestrians. Kerb about a quarter occupied with parked cars. Most of the houses – drab terraces, two up, two down – had the curtains of their ground floors closed. No hint of Christmas decorations anywhere. Litter on the pavement. It was that kind of street.

There was nothing to distinguish number 15 from any other house. The door was a dull brown like all the others. It had wheelie bins out front, like all the others. As they drove past, Barker saw that a first-floor light was switched on. Did that mean someone was in? Possibly. They parked up ten metres beyond the front door. Connor stayed in the vehicle, keeping eyes on the house using the passenger wing mirror. Barker walked to the far end of the street and turned left. He wanted to see if this terrace of houses had any rear alleyways or exits. So far as he could tell, they had back gardens. But at the end of the gardens was a high brick wall. Too high to scale, and with razor wire rolled along the top. It was that kind of neighbourhood.

He walked back past the car. Connor was still there. They didn’t make eye contact. But as he walked up to the door of number 15, Barker knew his mate would be watching him carefully, ready to join him at the right moment. Two broad-shouldered, burly guys at the door would look suspicious. One, you could get away with.

He knocked.

Silence.

Then footsteps approaching the door from the other side.

A scratching sound. The person on the other side was engaging the safety chain.

Fine.

The door opened a couple of inches. Barker didn’t wait for a voice or even a face. He shoulder-barged the open edge of the door, putting all his weight into it. There was a cracking sound as the safety chain ripped from its fixings. The door crashed inward, against the bulk of whoever was behind it. Barker forced his way in. A musty smell of unwashed clothes hit his senses. It was a man trying to block the door. He could tell by the shouts. And as he muscled his way further in, he saw at a glance that it was Kailash McCaffrey. It was their guy.

Barker forced him face forward against the hallway wall, then yanked his right arm up behind his back, to breaking point. ‘Do yourself a favour, mate, and shut the fuck up. Let’s try and avoid breaking your arm, eh? Christmas spirit, and all that.’

McCaffrey was trembling. He didn’t say anything.

Connor walked through the door and shut it behind him. He had his handgun drawn, and walked past Barker and McCaffrey as if they weren’t even there. Barker kept his man tight against the wall, listening carefully to the sound of his mate moving through the house, checking each room to see if there was anyone else here.

‘I got friends upstairs,’ McCaffrey said. ‘Loads of them.’

‘Course you have, mate,’ Barker said. ‘Popular bloke like you.’ He tightened McCaffrey’s arm a little. His way of telling him to shut up.

Thirty seconds passed. Connor returned, replacing his weapon as he walked back down the hallway. ‘Clear,’ he said. ‘House is empty.’

Barker leaned in so he was speaking a couple of inches from McCaffrey’s ear. Very quietly. ‘Here’s what’s going to happen. When I release your arm, you and me are going to walk out of here and into the back of our car which is waiting just outside. If you try to escape, I’ll grind your pig-ugly face into the fucking pavement. Then I’ll shoot you in the bollocks. Got it?’

The trembling man gave no answer. Barker tweaked the straining arm. He gasped sharply. ‘Got it!’

‘Awesome,’ Barker said. Very slowly he released McCaffrey’s arm. McCaffrey exhaled with relief. He turned and looked at the two Regiment men.

Barker knew it was coming. He could tell by the way the young man tensed his body and glanced downward in an attempt to make them think he was not paying attention. He could read the body language. He knew Connor could read it too. Guys like them, it was instinctive. So when McCaffrey raised his right leg, trying to kick Connor in the groin, Connor was more than ready for it. Barker’s mate raised his right fist. Then he hit him.

It had always made Barker smile when he heard tough guys talk about right hooks and uppercuts. All that was window dressing. You want to place a proper punch, you hit your guy hard, fast and with all the force you can muster. There was nothing pretty about a punch. It was a short, sharp burst of intense, ugly violence. One step down from a bullet in the face. If you’re still conscious after a punch from a guy like Andy Connor, you’re doing well.

McCaffrey was not doing well. Problem was, he didn’t only have Connor’s punch to contend with. He was still standing right in front of the hallway wall and, as Connor’s fist connected, McCaffrey’s head jarred back and hit it. There was an ominous cracking sound. Barker, who’d heard a few noses go in his time, knew it wasn’t that. It was something bigger. A skull, maybe. ‘Shit,’ he breathed, as the young man crumpled heavily to the floor. ‘
Shit, shit, shit 
. . .’

Barker knelt down over him and felt his neck for a pulse. Nothing.

‘We need medics,’ he said.

He laid the young man out on his back and started to administer heavy, vigorous chest compressions. He felt the ribcage sinking a good two inches with each one. He knew there was a risk of breaking the breastbone, but that didn’t matter, if it got the fucker’s heart beating again.

Connor had his phone out. As he pumped, Barker could hear the ringing tone, even though the handset was pressed to his mate’s ear. He pinched McCaffrey’s nose and leaned over to give him a couple of rescue breaths.

‘Boss, it’s me, Connor,’ he heard his mate say. There was a panicked edge to his voice. ‘We’ve got a problem. You’ve got to get a medic here . . . you’ve got to get a medic here
now
.’

Trouble was, Barker had been around enough dead bodies to know he was wasting his time.

It hadn’t taken Joe long to come to the conclusion that he didn’t want to stay in this place, with these people. They’d called it a safe house, but he didn’t feel safe at all.

If he was going to do what he needed to do, he had to get away.

He wondered how long they would leave him alone. At least an hour, he thought, if they were trying to play mind games with him. He stood up and walked to the window, where he pulled back the curtains. As he’d expected, there were bars on the other side of the pane. He couldn’t get out that way.

He walked into the kitchenette, where he went through the drawers. Maybe he could find a knife. The drawers were empty. So were the cupboards, apart from a few stained mugs. He felt relieved. He wasn’t a violent person. He didn’t really want to hurt anyone. Except one person, who wasn’t here.

Joe looked around the room again. His eyes fell on the dusty standard lamp in the corner of the room. He walked up to it, his head inclined slightly. It was about as tall as Joe himself. An idea formed in his mind. He made some calculations. Voltages. Current. He believed it would work.

He unplugged the lamp. Then he removed the bulb, twisted off the top half of the housing and removed the shade. The dust made him sneeze. Inside what remained of the housing were two small brass screws. He needed something to unscrew them. He cast around the room again and his eyes settled on the first aid kit. He walked over and opened it up. Inside there were sterile bandages, plasters, antiseptic wipes. He stuffed them all in his pocket. Then he found what he was really looking for: a pair of tweezers, and a small pair of scissors for cutting bandages.

It was a moment’s work to unscrew the two brass screws and remove the cable from inside the pole of the lamp. Joe was left with a length of cable about two metres long, a plug at one end and two exposed wires at the other. He took it to the other side of the room, and plugged it into the socket nearest the door, taking care not to flick the switch to the ‘on’ position.

Problem. With the cable fully stretched out, he was still more than a metre from the doorway. He needed to be closer, if he was to get the effect he wanted.

He took the first aid scissors over to the TV and snipped the power cable as close to the unit as possible. He used the tweezers to remove the plug, then carried it over to the new cable. He used the sharp edge of the scissors to strip away the wire at the cut end of the cable. He connected the two cables by twisting together the bare wires at either end. Now he had one cable, long enough to stretch from the plug to the metal handle of the door. He opened up one of the strips of sterile bandage, and used it to wrap the free end of the cable around the door handle, ensuring that the bare wires were in contact with the metal.

He brought one of the hard-backed chairs closer to the door. Then he crouched down by the plug socket, his finger on the switch, and waited.

Joe understood what the men were doing. One of them was being friendly, the other unfriendly. They were trying to confuse him. The more confused he was, the more he would trip up over any lies he was telling them. But their strategy told him something else. They were likely to join him in the room one by one. Alone. Which made Joe’s job a little easier.

And if they didn’t? At least he would have tried. After everything he’d been through, he was no longer the kind of kid who allowed people to slap him around.

Joe had grown used to measuring the passage of time in his head. All those hours spent stowed away in the backs of trucks. So he knew it was almost exactly thirty minutes later that he heard the footsteps approaching the door.

He held his breath, one finger on the plug switch, the other on the lever door handle.

He heard a key in the lock. Then he saw the handle move.

He flicked the switch.

There was no sound. At first, Joe thought his set-up hadn’t worked. But after a couple of seconds, there was a thump in the corridor. The light in the room flickered and faded as he expected it would. He’d blown the fuse board. Jumping to his feet, he grabbed the chair he’d placed near the door and quickly opened the door, holding the chair, legs outward, in case either of the guys tried to rush him.