The Last Big Job (14 page)

Henry cut into a thick, burned sausage and placed a segment of
it in his mouth. It was like biting into a piece of cinder. He
nearly spat it out. Instead he washed it down with a mouthful of
tea from the cracked mug. It was two in the afternoon. Henry was
expecting to meet his contact here soon, after which he was
supposed to call Jacky and say, ‘Game on.’

At quarter past, a Mercedes 7.5 ton Rigid Box Van pulled off
the main road and stopped in a line of HGVs. Henry watched the
driver hop down from the cab and get into a laughing conversation
with a couple of other good buddies as he walked towards and into
the cafe. Henry smiled inside, glad to see his old friend Terry
Briggs. Still on the National Crime Squad after seven or eight
years, having been an undercover cop on and off for about half that
time. It had been the combination of Terry and Henry that had put
Jacky Lee on the path to prison six years before.

Henry watched Terry and thought he was good, bloody good. The
lorry driver legend was one of Terry’s undercover roles and he
played it like a natural. If anyone is playing a role, they have to
be at ease with it and Terry had trained as an HGV driver before
joining the cops, but had never actually worked as one. When the
chance of going U/C
as a trucker presented
itself, he jumped at it. But there is far more to being a lorry
driver than simply holding a licence. There is the culture, the
camaraderie, knowing things about places and people; there are the
mannerisms, they way you fit in; there is the language and the
accompanying body language, the unwritten dress codes. Terry had
them all off by heart, slipped easily into the persona, and no one
could begin to tell that out of the role he was a shy, retiring
guy, quiet and studious.

Terry bought himself a Trucker’s Dinner - plate meat pie,
chips, peas, thick gravy, three rounds of bread and butter and a
mug brim-full of tea. He came across to Henry’s table and sat down
opposite.

‘
Frank,’ Terry nodded.

‘
Eric, how are you, old mate?’ Henry reached across and shook
Eric Barnes by the hand. They never, ever called each other by
their real names, even when they were a hundred per cent certain
they were not being overheard. To do that was a dangerous game. One
slip could easily mean at best blown cover, at worst. . . Both men
always stayed deeply in role.

‘
I’m good.’

‘
You got it?’ Henry went straight to the point.

Terry nodded.

Henry stood up, reaching for his mobile which was clipped to
the belt of his jeans. He left the cafe and made a call.

Once again, Henry was feeling uncomfortable and vulnerable -
two feelings which often sit alongside the term ‘undercover’. The
result of the ‘Game on’ phone call he’d made to Jacky Lee was that,
forty minutes later he was sitting in the Jaguar in a lay-by a
couple of miles east of the transport cafe, tapping the steering
wheel nervously with his fingertips.

The tinted-window BMW which had tailed him the other night
around Manchester drew in behind. Henry watched it through the
rearview mirror. It looked a sleek and sinister car, all black.
There was a blast from the horn. Henry’s nostrils flared. He got
out of the XJS and walked slowly back towards the BMW. A rear
window opened and Jacky Lee shoved his face towards
Henry.

‘
What’s going on?’ Henry, now in role as Frank Jagger, wanted
to know. He placed both hands on the shiny roof of the car and
leaned in. The front doors opened and Lee’s two minders slid out.
They stood behind Henry, one on either side of him. He looked up
and eyed them with disdain. Real fear, however, gripped his balls;
he could feel his testicle sac contracting in his
underpants.

‘
I’m still a nervous man, almost paranoid actually,’ Lee
explained. ‘And I’ve made a solemn vow never to trust anyone
again.’

‘
I thought you said you’d eliminated the problem,’ Henry
responded. He could feel the urge to run coming over
him.

Lee raised his eyebrows. ‘I mean, just how the fuck do I
really know you’re not a cop, Frank?’

Henry snorted a short laugh. ‘You don’t.’ He looked seriously
at Lee, eye to eye. ‘Except I’m not and you fucking know I’m
not.’

‘
Maybe.’

‘
No maybe about it.’ Henry sensed, rather than saw, Lee’s two
men take a step closer to him.

‘
You won’t mind if these two guys search you for a wire, will
you?’

One of them acted too quickly placing a hand on Henry’s elbow.
Henry shrugged him off violently, eyed him savagely and spun back
to Lee. On the periphery of his vision, he saw the other guy’s
right hand slide under his jacket. ‘What is this shit?’ Henry
demanded.

‘
Common sense, Frank. Now, let’s just get this over with, then
we can do business. Just fuckin’ humour me, OK?’

Henry moved slowly away from the car and raised his arms,
hands outstretched like he was on a cross. The two men, who Henry
knew to be called Gary Thompson and Gunk Elphick, moved in and
started to pat him down.

‘
You cut yourself shaving?’ he asked Gunk, noticing a Band-Aid
on his ear. Gunk smiled wickedly at him.

Henry’s face became impassive as the four hands worked quickly
around his body. Underneath the exterior he was struggling to
prevent a bowel movement, even though he was pretty certain they
would not find the wire. Because of his previous conversation with
Lee, where Lee had mentioned mulling over who had blabbed on him,
Henry had thought it prudent to reposition the wire on his person,
which he did - literally. Normally it was taped to the small of his
back. Today it was in his underpants with his cock resting
alongside it.

The two men did a reasonably systematic search, quartering
him. Henry hoped that human nature would prevent them from doing
anything more than a light cursory pat down around his privates and
arse. And they were inexperienced searchers and probably didn’t
know exactly what they were looking for. He was confident because
he knew that police officers who searched prisoners day in, day
out, still miss things, sometimes even the size of a
hammer.

‘
He’s clean.’ The men stood back.

‘
And now,’ Henry said, face thunderous, ‘what about you,
Jacky? All those years in jail - how the hell do I know
you
haven’t turned? You
might be setting me up, for all I know. This could simply be
bluffing shite.’

‘
Want to search me?’

‘
Too right.’

‘
Be my guest.’ Lee clambered out of the BMW He opened his arms
wide to Henry who swiftly ran his hands around Lee’s outer
clothing, more as a gesture than anything. He did find one thing -
the butt of a revolver pushed down the rear of Lee’s
waistband.

Henry moved away.

‘
OK, Frank?’

Henry nodded.

‘
Then let’s get down to business and forget this crap. I feel
good about today.’

After two hours of constant travelling averaging sixty miles
an hour, the security van was close to its destination. Just to the
north of Stafford, Colin Hodge, the driver, exited the motorway.
Within minutes of leaving the junction, he was driving on to a
fairly new industrial estate. Eventually he stopped outside the
gates of a very large, secure-looking compound. The notice board
gave the name of the company as ‘Secure-a-Waste’, followed by a
phone number and e-mail address. There was nothing to suggest the
company specialised in the disposal of all types of security waste
from paper to chemicals. In this particular compound they had a
huge incinerator which completely destroyed anything made of paper.
It was not recycled, simply sent into the sky as smoke and into the
earth as fertiliser. As the company held the contract with the
Royal Mint, it was here they burned used, tattered, torn and
otherwise worn-out banknotes of the realm.

Hodge honked his horn a couple of times. A massive sliding
gate, twenty feet high, topped with razor wire, and fifteen feet
across, grated slowly open. He drove in and pulled up with the
radiator grille nose up to a second similar gate. The first gate
closed behind them, sealing the van in a sterile, mesh-roofed
compound.

It was very much like entering a prison.

Hodge’s two colleagues had to disembark here and go to wait in
a secure office. Only the driver and the security guard inside the
back of the van were allowed through to the next stage of the
process.

Once the two were behind a locked door and the relevant
paperwork had been duly signed, the inner gate opened. Hodge drove
the van into the complex which basically consisted of a road which
ringed a large, low, brick-built building; on its roof, in one
corner, was a tall, wide chimney.

Hodge reversed the van up to a roller door which rattled open.
Once it was open at its full height, he manoeuvred the van back
into the bay beyond. The roller door closed. For the second time
the vehicle was in a secure area. He switched off the
engine.

This was the only time other people seemed to enter the
equation.

Two men in overalls, wearing industrial face masks and driving
a forklift truck each, came out from behind a steel door and
approached the van. Hodge watched and noted their movements through
his wing mirrors.

Hodge’s colleague in the rear exchanged passwords, then opened
the rear door of the van from inside and began to pass out the
metal boxes which contained the money collected that day. The men
in overalls stacked them high on the forklifts until they were all
piled up.

Hodge’s insides flipped at the thought of all that money
burning.

The back door was closed and one of the men slapped the side
of the van. Hodge fired up the engine. In his mirrors he watched
the men drive their nippy vehicles through the steel door, out of
reach.

The roller door opened.

Hodge collected all his mates from the entrance and began his
journey back up North. He glanced across at Secure-a-Waste. Already
black smoke was billowing out of the chimney. Hodge winced
painfully.

Henry Christie, Terry Briggs and Jacky Lee sauntered across
the lorry park towards the transport cafe. They had inspected the
contents in the rear of Terry’s box van. Jacky was over the moon by
what he had seen - lots and lots of stolen whisky. He and Frank
Jagger were back in business - a carbon copy of their first-ever
transaction. He believed the whisky was from a blagging at a
cash-and-carry warehouse somewhere down South.

At £4.00 a bottle, Lee was not bothered where they came from,
but for the purposes of Henry Christie’s scenario, Lee needed to
think they were stolen.

‘
Forty grand ... that’s a lot of money,’ Lee was moaning, even
though he would make treble that amount within a couple of months
as the whisky filtered through his pubs and clubs.

‘
No, it’s not,’ Henry argued. ‘It’s bloody cheap and you know
it. I’m the one on tight margins,’ he bleated. ‘So many fucking
people to pay down the line, I’ll be lucky to get fifty pence a
bottle. Next time the price goes up, Jacky.’

‘
Yeah, yeah, yeah, my fucking heart bleeds, you whingeing
twat.’ He slapped Henry on the back. ‘But business is business and
it feels good to be doing it with you again.’

They filed into the transport cafe, past Gary Thompson, who
squirmed out of the door, nodding at his boss. ‘Just had a piss,
boss,’ he explained for no reason. He trotted back to the BMW which
was parked at the front of the cafe with Gunk lounging by it. The
cafe was less busy now, but still doing a good trade. Henry, Terry
and Lee sat at an empty table in a booth, having ordered three
teas.

‘
Now then, payment,’ Lee began. ‘Where and when?’

‘
As we agreed,’ Henry said firmly. ‘All on delivery, here and
now, otherwise the lorry goes. I’ve got at least three others
sniffing around, cash in hand.’

‘
OK, fair enough,’ Lee conceded, holding up his hands in
surrender.

The tea arrived, steaming and brown.

Lee inspected his and said, ‘Think I need a piss, guys. Back
in a minute.’ He headed for the gents, his back watched by the two
detectives. Henry quickly ran his fingers on the underside of the
table to check for any hidden mikes and broke their rule when he
quickly whispered, ‘He’s got a gun.’ Terry merely nodded. They
reverted to role and picked up their drinks.

‘
Shit, that’s hot!’ Henry spluttered as the tea burned the top
of his mouth.

His eyes drifted to the window and out to Lee’s BMW The two
minders leaned against it, smoking, Thompson talking on a mobile
phone. The smaller, stockier one, Gunk, was fingering his plastered
ear. He looked to be in pain. Both men looked spooked and
nervous.

‘
Them too, I think,’ Henry said without moving his lips. Again
Terry nodded.

The one on the phone finished his chat and said something
quickly to the other, then thumbed an urgent gesture towards a car
which had driven on to the lorry park and was heading for the rear
of the cafe.