Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (46 page)

General Milton got up and walked over to the window that looked westwards, down onto the equestrian statue of Viscount Wolseley and out onto the wide expanse of Horse Guards Parade. Now long retired, he still liked to imagine himself reviewing his troops there, taking the salute while standing stiff as a board on a raised wooden dais, surveying the massed lines of crimson
uniforms, the wind ruffling the black bearskins and the sun glinting off bayonets. Well that was all in the past now, this was his main effort now, the parade this coming Sunday. And if General Rupert Milton had anything to do with it, it was bloody well going to go off like clockwork.

KEITH GAMMON HAD
woken up late that morning, alone as always, in his one-bedroom flat in Hounslow. Living on his own didn’t bother him – in fact, he had had quite enough unwanted company in prison to last him a lifetime. His wife, Pauline, had left him soon after he was sent down, as he’d known she would. Taken the kids with her, she had, and moved somewhere up north. Gutted at the time, Gammon had gone through some dark days coping with the depression that followed. He had emerged so much stronger, or so he believed, but he was bitter to the core. It was not just the government, the establishment, that he hated, not just the people who had put him away for so long: it was society as a whole. It had dealt him a rubbish hand, Gammon concluded, and now it was payback time, a chance to even the score. His welding skills were being called upon by people willing to pay him a small fortune. He felt valued and appreciated. And if some bad things had to happen to some people as a result of his work, well, so be it. That simply wasn’t his problem. If Keith Gammon had ever had a conscience, he had discarded it long ago, flushed down the drains of a Category B men’s prison in south-west London.

He had taken the call the day before. It was the Spanish woman, Ana somebody, who had rung him to tell him quietly that it was on. Now he towelled off after his shower, pulled on the clothes
that lay flung across the back of a chair, let himself out of the flat and went down the road for a full English. Aldo’s Star Café was his local greasy spoon. They knew him in there and he didn’t even need to order, just a look and a nod as he pushed through the door and the fryer was on. Got to go to work on a full stomach and all that, he told himself. Begin it in style and you can cope with whatever the day throws at you.

Later, seated at the Formica table, splattered with the detritus of his fry-up, Keith Gammon got to thinking about the job. Much of it he had already done: the modifications to the floor of the Nissan Primastar van they would use and the basic shape of the moulded ‘coffin’ that would contain the device. They had planned it all in stages, him, Ana María and that bloke Silvio with the ponytail whom he didn’t much care for. Long hours spent poring over sketch maps, street maps and satellite images, all in the smoky back room of a South American restaurant in Bayswater. Cigarette stubbed out as someone emphasized a point, another lit almost at once. On the wall he could see a lurid painting of an overweight woman sitting beneath a palm tree on a beach, and the shelves were lined with empty wine bottles. There was too much talk in Spanish for Keith Gammon’s liking – he couldn’t follow a word of it – but Ana María had paused frequently to translate for his benefit.

They had reached an understanding the first time they’d met. She’d promised to make him well off if he did the job they asked of him, and he promised to ask no questions and tell no tales. She also promised him, in her sweet and gentle voice, that if he ever betrayed them to the police the cartel would hunt down his children and post him their severed hands.

‘Rising bollards,’ Gammon had told them, when it had been his turn to offer advice in that Bayswater back room.

‘Excuse me?’ It was not an expression familiar to the South American criminal underworld in London.

‘You’ve got to get past the rising bollards,’ he continued. ‘It’s what they’re called, those black pillars blocking the access to Horse Guards Parade. All hundred and twenty-six of them. I’ve counted.
They’re about a metre high, made of steel, and we’re going to need to cut through three if you want to get the van through.’

Ana María had shaken her head emphatically. ‘No,’ she told them. ‘We do it a different way, a more subtle way. I will arrange the paperwork and they will let us through. Leave it with me.’

‘
Y entonces?
’ said Ponytail. ‘And then?’

‘And then,’ answered Ana María, ‘we do what we discussed.’ She turned to the welder. ‘North-west corner of the parade ground. There is a big brown building like a fortress, covered in some red plant. There is a camera on top, but don’t trouble yourself about this. It faces out across the square. If we stay close in by the wall it will be, how you say, a blind spot. Here, let me show you on the map.’

That had all been weeks ago. Since that meeting they had bought the Nissan Primastar van second-hand, touched up the paintwork, made the modifications, and purchased the JCB mini-digger they would need on the day. They had done the drive-pasts, the dress rehearsals, practised the cover story and printed the documents to back it up. Today it would be for real.

At twelve noon precisely, the light blue Nissan Primastar with the British Gas logo stopped on the corner of Keith Gammon’s street in Hounslow. ‘You can’t miss it,’ he had told Ana María. ‘It’s right by the junction of the Twickenham Road and the Mogden Sewage Treatment Works.’ He had clambered in, clutching a large holdall, and settled himself in the passenger seat. Silently, she had handed him a forged laminated ID card. Everyone in the van had been issued with one. ‘British Gas. Looking after your world,’ it said, and there was his picture next to a data box.

Ana María was incredibly thorough, he had to give her that. She had thought of everything. Anyone calling that number would be put through to what sounded like a twenty-four-hour British Gas switchboard. Yes, they would be told, after a pause to check an imaginary computer database. We do have a Mr John Blane on our books. He’s a qualified engineer. Been with us for years. Thank you for calling British Gas.

As they drove east along Great Chertsey Road, heading to a suburban car park to collect the digger, then on into town towards Whitehall, Ana María had given them all one final briefing. They had two hours, and no more, in which to complete the job. That was from the time they appeared on site to the time they would drive away. Any longer and too many questions would be asked. There was also the risk that secondary probing checks could be made. She and Ponytail had briefly debated whether to mount the operation by day or by night. In the end, they had opted for daylight. ‘Hiding in plain sight,’ Ana María called it. Night time would seem too suspicious.

At 1305 hours, as Major General (retired) Rupert Milton was enjoying a Cheddar cheese and pickle sandwich at his desk in Horse Guards, the blue van with the British Gas livery pulled up at the north-west corner of the parade ground two hundred metres away, towing a canary-yellow mechanical digger. It stopped at the exact point where the line of black metal rising bollards met the walls of Lenin’s Tomb, which were covered with the autumnal red leaves of Virginia creeper. Since the Home Secretary had raised the terrorism threat level to Critical, the whole of Whitehall, known as the Government Secure Zone, now had a discreet but reinforced police presence.

Parked on Horse Guards Road with the engine running, beside the Guards Division Memorial on the edge of St James’s Park just a hundred metres away, the two police officers in the patrol car watched the Nissan Primastar and the digger pull up. They reacted immediately. While one called it in to his superior, an inspector at the back of Downing Street, the other got out to investigate.

WPC Granger approached the driver’s side of the van. The day was unusually mild for November and she was wearing only a black stab vest over her white uniform shirt. Politely but firmly, she told the driver he must move along: this was a secure area; he could not park there.

‘Sorry, ma’am. We’ve been told this is a priority. Looks like there’s a gas leak in the pipes below here. The Gas Board thinks one of the old mains has cracked. Got a letter from the council. We need to dig down and investigate.’

The driver of the Primastar, wearing a black jumpsuit with blue stripes and a British Gas logo, reached into the glove compartment and produced the letter.

‘Can I see some ID, please?’ she asked, then looked at the letter. He handed her his British Gas card, and WPC Granger looked from one to the other. ‘Wait here, please,’ she told him. She moved away a couple of metres and radioed in the names and phone numbers printed on the ID card and the letter.

It took her colleague in the patrol car less than ten minutes to call back. The man at ‘Westminster City Council’ who had answered the phone had been more than helpful. Yes, he confirmed, they had had reports of a gas leak in that location, and proceeded to go into far more detail than the policeman had asked for.

‘You see, this is a City Gate problem,’ he had told him. ‘It’s part of the local gas distribution system for Westminster. It’s where our system accepts gas from another transmission system. So the transfer price under the ground at that point is what we call a City Gate price. That’s why we’ve sent a team over to Whitehall to sort it out before we get into a pricing row with First Utility, and we don’t want that!’ Satisfied, the policeman had rung the British Gas number and that, too, had checked out. The blue van was cleared to proceed.

Inside the police post at the back entrance to Downing Street, another policeman pressed two switches simultaneously. At the opposite end of the parade ground three of the black rising bollards were retracted into the ground, allowing the Nissan Primastar and its digger to drive slowly onto Horse Guards Parade.

ANA MARÍA AND
her team worked with practised speed. It was 13.20 when the bollards were lowered. They had been on-site for precisely fifteen minutes and she wanted them away and dispersed inside the next hour and three-quarters. There was no need to venture far into the parade ground: they had already selected the spot where the trench would be dug. Just fifty metres in was enough to bring them to that out-of-the-way corner where the CCTV camera mounted on the wall above could not angle down far enough to film them.

They parked the van and the digger just short of the Gallipoli Naval Memorial, beside half a dozen faded poppy wreaths, placed there the previous year. In this secluded spot, where the sombre walls of Lenin’s Tomb met the magnificent Grade II façade of Lutyens’s Admiralty House, they went to work. Just as they had rehearsed, out on the disused airfield in Surrey, the men, in their black-and-blue British Gas overalls and white hard hats, threw up a cordon of orange plastic cones around the Primastar. Nobody wanted a nosy member of the public getting too close to what was going on.

Keith Gammon remained inside the van. After all the modifications he’d made to it with the extreme plasma cutter, he liked to think of the second-hand Nissan Primastar as his own. The vehicle now had a removable sliding panel where the floor had
been. Outside, the black-clad ‘engineers’ got to work with the JCB HM25 Hydraulic Breaker, attacking the surface of the parade square with the hand-held power tool. By 13.35 they had broken through the hard upper surface and marked out a rectangular trench to be dug. It took a further fourteen minutes to manoeuvre the mini-digger into position and then, at the exact moment that the mechanical claw was raised and they were poised to begin digging, WPC Granger was back. And this time she had an inspector with her.

‘Who’s in charge here?’ he asked.

Ana María stepped forward. ‘I am,’ she said, and smiled at him from beneath her hard hat.

‘Right. We’ve had a complaint from the people in Horse Guards over there.’ He pointed. ‘Apparently no one told them you’d be digging up half the parade ground. Can I see that letter of authorization, please?’

‘Of course,’ she replied, handing him the letter from Westminster Council. The words ‘URGENT INVESTIGATION WORK’ were printed in capitals and underlined. Further down the page the phrase ‘Risk of Gas Explosion’ caught his eye. ‘There’s a job number and a phone number on there, Inspector,’ added Ana María. She stood her ground, relaxed and calm, one hand on her hip. Anyone who had known Ana María Acosta in her university days in Segovia would have remembered her as a highly skilled poker player, a consummate bluffer. It was a talent that continued to serve her well.

‘We can pack up and leave now, if you like,’ she said casually, ‘and come back another day. But I must ask you to sign here. I will need your badge number. If there is an accident here tomorrow because we were prevented from doing our job . . . then I cannot be held responsible.’

It helped, of course, that Ana María had devised a back-up plan. It was not ideal: the secondary target was less iconic, and placing the device behind a rhododendron hedge in St James’s Park would probably delay them by a day. But knowing they had a Plan B gave her the confidence to brazen this one out.

The inspector looked from one face to another. Her point was well made. He certainly didn’t fancy seeing his photo on the front page of the papers above some caption like ‘The Man Who Blew It’.

‘How much longer is it going to take?’ he asked.

Ana María squinted up at the gold hands on the clock in the eighteenth-century tower on Horse Guards. It was just coming up to two.

‘We should be done within the hour,’ she told the policeman. ‘But we’ll do our best to be away before then.’

The inspector handed back the letter from ‘Westminster Council’ and turned on his heel, WPC Granger at his side. He called over his shoulder as he walked away: ‘Not a minute longer, mind.’