Blackout (Sam Archer 3) (19 page)

He was careful about his targets. A lot of thieves thought that young women were the easiest demographic to go after, given their physical disadvantage and that they were easily intimidated. But in fact they were one of the worst to confront. All those women groups, magazines and adverts on television had made sure a lot of girls were more prepared than they used to be. The fear of attack meant many of them now carried wailing button-alarms or even pepper spray, even though it was illegal, in their handbags. A friend of his had been maced by a girl a few years ago after he tried to mug her, and he still talked about how it was the worst couple of hours of his life. Women were often more alert than men, expecting trouble. It served a thief best to leave them well alone.

Leon took a draw on his cigarette, leaning against the wall, watching the hospice car park, and smiled. No, the best targets for mugging were posh kids or tourists. The toffs were soft as dog shit, unused to violence and easily intimidated, and one look at the knife in Leon's hand would get them scrabbling at their pockets like they couldn’t wait to hand over their stuff. The tourists were equally soft. They were out of their comfort zone and easily scared, especially with the threat of violence and a big knife in their face.

Things had gone well for a while, but then the riots in 2011 had happened and Leon got nicked by an undercover cop. He wasn’t doing anything different
from
the other rioters. It was just bad luck.

He’d been out
of
the door of an Argos store across town with over two grand of stolen goods in his hands, a mask over his face, but then he got levelled by some copper who picked him out of the crowd and took him off his feet with a punch. The guy restrained
him, and two weeks later Leon was in the dock and given a sentence of thirteen months. He had just turned eighteen, so juvenile centres weren't an option any more.

For the first time in his life, Leon was going to prison.

Leaning against the wall, he drew on his cigarette and narrowed his eyes, blowing out the smoke. A lot of lads from his area wanted to serve time. They felt it gave them street-cred and reputations on the estate as hard men. But Leon knew the moment he walked into that place that he was in deep shit. This wasn't a two or three weeker at some soft-as-shit juvenile facility, with lots of team-building exercises and counselling with biscuits and cups of tea. As he was led to his cell in the middle of the queue of new inmates, the prisoners already there shouting and baying at the new meat from their cells, he knew he was looking at over a year in that place.

And he knew he needed to make friends quick.

Luckily, he had. A lot of the rioters started getting sent down there, and they quickly grouped up, watching each other's backs as best they could. But Leon didn’t join them. Instead, he started spending all his time with his new cell-mate, a huge black guy named Luther. Luther was on a two year stint for armed robbery, a career criminal who’d been on the wrong side of the law his entire life. He was from Croydon and made his living robbing drug dealers. He was a guy Leon had actually heard about on the street. Although never actually coming across him, his name definitely preceded him.

Leon never let it show, but Luther saved him in there. Luckily for Leon, the bigger man had taken to him straight away, acting like a mentor, and Leon had spent almost every moment outside the cell with him, both to learn from the man and also so he was protected. Shankings and gang-rape occurred almost daily, the guards turning a blind eye most of the time, but Luther was a guy who no one messed with. He was six-five and thickly muscular, he and his gang monopolising the weights area in the yard every time they were out of the cells, working out for hours at a time and loading up on steroids smuggled in from the outside through the kitchen workers. And Luther’s reputation definitely did precede him. He'd started out doing hit-work for a gang in Brixton, and although Leon never knew for sure how many men Luther had killed in his lifetime, he knew it was more than you could count on your fingers and toes. He had educated Leon about the benefits of crime, how to cheat the justice system and how to make the most profits for when he was back out on the street and ensure he never got sent back.
As long as you don't kill anyone, you're good,
Leon had said.

Or if you do, make sure no one ever finds the body.

Given his size and being well aware of how much he intimidated people, Luther said that he’d moved from murder into robbing dealers and gang members, and although
Leon's physique changed dramatically over the months from hitting the weights with the older man, he knew that using his size like Luther wasn't a path he could go down when he got out.
Play to your strengths,
Luther had said. Leon had told him about his past, dipping on the Underground and stealing wallets and purses, robbing posh kids and tourists on the street for maybe a hundred quid a pop. But after spending time with Luther, the younger man realised he'd been selling himself short. There was a hell of a lot more out there if he had the balls to go after it.

He was in the wrong game.

Leon had educated him about burglary, how he could make more profit from one empty house than he could from robbing ten tourists. He’d told him the ways around an alarm system and how to get anyone to open a safe.
With the men, it’s easy,
he'd said.
Don't bother with idle threats or violence. Just strip them naked, get a sharp knife from the kitchen and put it to their balls.
Works every time
. With women, he explained that the threat of rape was often sufficient.
But women are tougher than men,
Luther
told him.
You have to know how to push their buttons. If they have a family, pull the kids out of bed and put a blade on them. Ninety nine times out of a hundred, they’ll open Sesame.
Leon had grown close to the older man and had been sad the day he left him behind. But he had walked out of that place a changed man, physically and mentally, his body no longer a boy's and his brain full of new knowledge. He'd heard a saying once and now he understood what it meant.

A man had to go to prison in order to learn how to become a criminal.

Since he'd left prison, he'd followed Luther's advice explicitly. Aside from his recent three-weeker, he'd been out eighteen months and had knocked down six mansions in Surrey and a townhouse in Chelsea, the profits huge, way into six figures, close to a mil. It was only his mate’s sheer carelessness at the footballer’s flat which meant they'd got caught, the idiot not checking the alarm system properly. Leon had learned another lesson that night. Never depend on other people.

So from now on, he worked alone.

Taking a last draw on the cigarette, he flicked away the butt, letting it smoulder on the pavement. He'd been wandering past the building, some kind of hospital or old-people
'
s home, and had seen two cars in the parking lot that had instantly caught his eye. One was a silver Mercedes. It looked less than a year old, fresh off the line. He didn't know enough about licence plates to judge what year the car had been registered, but that didn’t matter. It looked new and it looked expensive. He figured he could get five figures for it easily at a chop shop he knew in Hackney. The other car was just as nice, a black BMW. He'd had to make a choice, but he'd already gone with the Mercedes. He preferred silver cars anyway.

Pushing back off the wall with his foot, he pulled a tennis ball from his pocket and started to walk into the parking lot.

He saw some old man was sitting on a bench across the tarmac by the wall, but what looked like a nurse was helping him up to take him back inside the building, leaving Leon all alone in the car park. He smiled, bouncing the tennis ball on the ground as he walked.

In the joint, Luther had taught him how to steal cars. He’d explained that the movies got a lot of shit wrong, but they also got some stuff right, and a lot of the high-tech shit they showed like pin guns and diagnostic blank keys normally worked. It would just cost you thousands of pounds to get the equipment. But Luther had taught him a trick, one so incredibly simple that Leon couldn’t believe more people didn't know about it. The lock to most cars had the grooves for the key. Six pins, usually. Once the key slid in, and the pins were pushed down, the mechanism released, and with a twist the door would open.

But the pins also reacted to pressure.

Arriving by the Mercedes, Leon took a look either side of him then looked down at the tennis ball in his hand. He had driven a small hole in the ball with a knife, about the size of a pea, and he twisted the ball so it was showing, then put the hole against the lock of the Mercedes. Checking either side, he held it to the lock then hit it hard with his right hand, pushing all the air out of the ball and into the lock. There was a click and he saw all four plastic locks rise beside each window of the car.

The car was now open.

He smiled, then pulled open the door and ducked inside, tucking the ball back into his pocket. All the high-tech shit and gadgets were out there, but nothing worked better than a cheap old tennis ball.

The next part was a bit harder. He pulled a knife from his pocket quickly and removed a small panel under the ignition. He could see three wires, two red, one black. This part worked just like in all the movies. Separate the battery and starter wires, strip off the plastic sheaths, touch them together to spark the current, and job done. The engine is on and you're good to go.

Looking up to make sure no one was around, he took one of the two red wires and pulled it from the cylinder.

He then started to cut into the end of the wire, removing the sheath.

Back inside the hospice, the six men had just left Fletcher's room, Cobb leading the way as they walked down the corridor. All of them were slightly distracted, thinking about what Fletcher had told them and the revelation about Carver’s connections.

They turned the corner, Cobb pushing the release mechanism for the security door, and the group walked back into the reception area. The woman who’d shown them in was back behind the desk, and she pulled the key from her pocket as soon as she saw them, turning back to the locked room behind her and sliding the key into the lock. She looked keen to return the four weapons. Archer figured she thought the quicker she gave them back, the quicker they would all leave.

As she opened the door and the four officers walked around her desk to retrieve their weapons, Cobb turned to speak Jackson, who was looking outside.

But he saw the American’s attention was directed at something outside in the car park.

He was frowning.

‘What the hell?’ Jackson muttered.

Cobb followed where he was looking.

And he saw a teenager sitting inside his car.

Leon had just cut off the second red sheath, the two copper inner wires themselves now exposed, and held them close, one in each hand.

'Hey!'

He heard a shout and looking right, saw a dark-haired man shouting, looking straight at him and pushing open the door. Behind the guy, Leon saw a group of cops, two of them with a sub-machine gun in their hands, turn and look over, just as they slapped a magazine into each weapon.

Oh shit.

He was stealing a cop car.

Without another moment's hesitation, he pushed the two wires together.

And just as Cobb started to run towards his car, the Mercedes exploded.

He was thrown back, the glass on the front entrance smashing from the shockwave. As the car exploded, Jackson's BMW reacted to the blast and went up too in a second explosion, both cars thrown up vertically into the air, erupting into one huge fireball.

The flaming wrecks of both cars landed on the ground with two
thuds
and burned away, smoke billowing out of each, the alarms of other cars in the lot set off by the rippling shockwave of the explosions.

SIXTEEN

At the same moment as the two cars exploded, the seatbelt signs on a Boeing 747 aeroplane which had just finished taxiing on a Heathrow runway clicked off with a
ding
. In the next moment, passenger
s
undid their seatbelts and rose, stepping out into the aisles, stretching, opening the overhead lockers to retrieve their hand luggage and getting ready to disembark.

It was the earliest flight to arrive from Washington, the 4:50 am direct from Dulles to London Heathrow. They had made good time, the flight five hours and forty minutes in total, the trans-Atlantic wind behind them shaving another forty minutes off the flight. Most of the people on board were businessmen and women or families returning from holidays, lots of suits and briefcases, sunburnt skin and noisy tired kids. Up ahead, the aisles started to clear as the passengers began to disembark, the airline staff standing to one side formally, smiling and thanking everyone for flying with them as they filed past

A small man dressed in a black sweater and blue jeans with scarring across his face and neck ignored the flight staff as he passed them, moving off the plane and heading swiftly down to the immigration hall. They had landed at Terminal Five, the newest Terminal at Heathrow. The man was carrying a small holdall as luggage, no suitcase to collect. He didn't even really need the bag, but he figured travelling with nothing could attract unwanted attention, and as he
had
murdered someone in the last seven hours he didn't fancy any unnecessary scrutiny from airport security.