Honour Bound (10 page)

-16-

The
Highway is a wide road running parallel to the north bank of the Thames, to the
east of Tower Bridge, and is one of the main routes leading from the City into
the sprawling Docklands complex. Norton steered his silver Alfa Romeo
Spyder
out of the light controlled junction at Dock Street
and joined the flow of traffic heading east. He drove for a quarter of a mile
before pulling into the kerb and switching off the engine.

He
had just spent an informative half hour in the chaotic Leman Street police
station, in the company of the CIO, the criminal intelligence officer, Mike
Bailey. Bailey, a tall, balding man with a sense of humour seemingly unaffected
by twenty-two years of city policing, had not only heard of Joey Williams, he
had furnished Norton with a copy of his criminal record along with the most
recent photograph.       

Before
leaving the police station, Norton, together with the CIO, had visited the
major incident room put together the previous morning, following the explosions
on the bridge and at the station. Bailey had introduced him to Bob Meyers, the
grey-haired superintendent in charge of the initial investigation. Six people
had died and twenty-four were injured in this latest attack, Meyers informed
him. Four of the dead had been in two cars that were unlucky enough to have
been driving over the bridge when the device exploded. The other two died in
the blast when the car bomb went off outside the station. Police divers had
recovered two of the bodies from a car at the bottom of the river after it had
plunged through the hole caused by the bomb.  

The
car bomb had in fact been a van, more than likely the same one seen on the
footpath of the bridge by the witness. Since the explosion, several other
people had phoned the emergency number saying they had seen the van, and
although statements were still being taken, details were very scarce. There
being no more useful information, he had left the incident room leaving the
white-shirted men and women labouring over computers and growing piles of
paper. 

Norton,
sitting in the Alfa, studied the information Bailey had given him. A flat, oval
face with large, red-rimmed eyes stared out of the photograph. A moustache
hanging like a curtain beneath a large pointed nose drooped wearily over a
pulpy top lip, making him look a lot older than his stated twenty-seven years.
His home address was given as various squats across the East End, and the last
place he was known to have worked, was just around the corner from where Norton
was parked.

Williams
had been arrested twelve times over a period of three years, for the
unauthorised taking of motor vehicles. According to Bailey, his favourite
pastime was to steal a car, strip it down and sell the parts as cheap spares.
The last entry on his card was just over a year ago, indicating he had kept his
nose clean during that time, or he had been careful and not been caught. He was
an active criminal up to a year ago, Norton mused, not a very good one if his
arrest record was anything to go by. He’d been arrested every few months as
regular as clockwork, nothing to brag about, just a small time criminal, and
then all of a sudden, nothing. I don't believe in the leopard changing its
spots, so where is his money coming from now.

He
leaned back in the seat, resting his head against the headrest, looking out of
the window at the passing cars. "For Willie to get hold of your name, Mr.
Williams," Norton said to himself, "you must've joined in with the
big boys. I wonder if they told you we play by a different set of rules."

Norton
smiled to himself, took the keys from the ignition, and put the card in his
pocket, and got out of the car. He locked the doors and set the immobiliser
before walking the fifty yards to the
Marmaduke
public house. The pub, bricks weathered a dark brown by the slow passage of
time and exhaust fumes, stood on the corner of the Highway and Artichoke Hill,
a short side street, no more than a hundred yards long that ended abruptly at a
high brick wall that was part of a new development along the riverside. Between
the rear of the pub and the wall stood a single storey building, tatty and
decaying as though forgotten by a demolition gang. A mangle of old cars and car
parts were stacked in unsteady piles on a patch of waste ground to one side. A
rusty four-wheel drive Mercedes, its days of luxury long gone, was parked a
short distance away from the building and appeared to be standing guard over
the tottering piles of scrap.

A
brightly painted sign, hanging precariously above an open roller door
announced, '
JayKays
Autos'. The same logo, displayed
on a large single paned window to the left of the door, struggled to be seen
through layers of grime. A struggle that in the next few months it would surely
lose.

As
Norton approached, music emanating from an unseen source was the only sign of
occupation. Two cars were inside the building, parked against the rear wall.
Both had their bonnets open, like chicks at feeding time. Across to the left,
half a dozen rows of rusty metal shelving ran the full length of the wall. The
shelves, some sagging in the centre, were loaded with coloured boxes of spare
parts that sat haphazardly in the dust like the pieces of an ancient Chinese
puzzle.

Norton,
standing just outside the door shouted, "
Hello,
is anyone home?"

A
figure clad in overalls emerged from the open grave of a maintenance pit, like
an oil splattered zombie rising from the dead. "Hello back," it said,
"what can I do for you?"

"Christ,"
Norton said, affecting surprise, "don't do that."

It
had the desired effect, the man laughed.

"Sorry,
must'a
bin a bit of a shock that."

He
climbed out of the pit with muscular ease, and tore a strip of industrial sized
paper towel from an oily dispenser hanging above an even oilier sink. He began
to wipe grease from his industrial sized hands, rubbing them together like a
wretch seeking absolution.

"Anything
I can do for you?" he asked, glancing up and down the street for a likely
looking car. "You weren't caught up in that shit yesterday, were
you?"

"No,
thank God, I was still in bed when that lot went up. Actually I was looking for
Jimmy
Williams,
I was told he might be able to get me
a cheap starter motor."

"It's
Joey not Jimmy," corrected the man. "He works here when he bothers to
turn up. I haven't seen him for the last couple of days though."

"Do
you know when he'll be back?"

The
man shook his head. "No idea. He comes and goes as he
pleases,
I really don't know why I put up with it. I'll get him to call you if you
like."

"No
it's all right," Norton said, trying to sound disappointed, "I'll try
somewhere else. Thanks."

He
walked back to the Highway resisting the urge to look over his shoulder to see
if the mechanic was taking any interest in which way he went.  

He
walked as far as the
Marmaduke
, ordered a brandy from
the bored looking barmaid and sat with his purchase in a window seat that overlooked
Artichoke Hill. The pub consisted of one room. The bar formed a bridgehead,
halted in its advance by a platoon of stools bolted to the bare wooden floor. A
dozen or so optics hung resignedly from upturned bottles as though they were
drip feeds for thirsty, non-existent visitors. The only other customer was an
old man with a face like mottled parchment sitting on a bench seat on the
opposite side of the bar. He occasionally took a sip from a half pint glass
while stroking a mangy looking Jack Russell terrier that lay snoring on his
lap.

The
barmaid leaned against the counter next to the till filing her nails with an
emery board, the tip of her tongue poking out between her lips in
concentration. Every now and then, she would look up as if expecting a sudden
rush. When the doors failed to burst open, she would shoot a glance and a coy
smile at Norton.

He
noticed the car as it stopped at the junction. The right hand indicator
blinking its intention to turn into Artichoke Hill. The driver had to wait for
several cars to pass before a big enough gap appeared for him to complete the
manoeuvre into the side street. As the car passed the window, Norton could
clearly see the driver. Joey Williams' face stared straight ahead, as he
steered the car out of view.

-17-

The
grey Lotus Esprit, its curved lines sparkling in the sunlight pulled out of the
midday traffic and drew to a halt by the kerb, the engine barely audible, a
curl of white exhaust trickling from the twin tail pipes. Gerry Silver pressed
the accelerator once, revving the engine to a deep growl before switching off
the ignition. The car was his one and only extravagance, it had been his
target, his dream, his reward for the two years he had spent on the underground
boxing circuit.

He
had been good, one of the best in a game where the only rule stated that
someone must win, no matter how long it took. At first, he had been annoyed at
the big money that changed hands before, during, and after each of his
bare-knuckle fights. More so, when he had counted his nominal fee for each
blood letting and the bonus he would get for winning. The anger had soon worn
off, the more fights he won then so much bigger was the purse. For Gerry Silver
it had been easy money. He had paid for the car after eighteen fights but had
not been able to stop there. Bitten by the bug, he had fought forty times, and
won forty times. There had been no finesse or sportsmanship in his methods as a
street fighter, to win was the object, losing was not an option. In each of his
fights he had used the same tactic, jabbing and cutting only when a soft target
was exposed thereby conserving energy. He allowed his broad muscular frame to
absorb massive amounts of punishment during each fight, easily withstanding the
blows his opponents managed to land. When the other man had tired himself
sufficiently, he would then beat him mercilessly into unconsciousness with
huge, iron hard fists, or as had happened on three occasions, to death.

During
his fortieth fight, his luck had changed. A well aimed kick had split his left
kneecap neatly in two, forcing him to limp and hop while trying to avoid the
vicious beating that had followed. Old scars opened, while new ones were
created, he had felt himself drowning under the constant barrage of brutal, jarring
blows. From somewhere deep within, he found an inner reserve of strength and
released it in a final savage uppercut that caught his tormentor on the point
of his chin, spraying teeth and blood in a wide arc across the floor. Even to
this day people swear the blow lifted the unfortunate man six inches off the
ground.

Through
the pandemonium that followed such a spectacular finish, Silver staggered
painfully through a gauntlet of backslapping hands to the dressing room. A
dusty, rubbish filled annexe to a decaying warehouse held that title. It was
there, after his knee had been tended to, that his luck had changed for the
second time that night.

The
euphoric crowds had gone. Rain swept a virtually empty car park. The warehouse
was once again under the control of four-legged vermin. Silver had been under
the watchful eye of the doctor, carefully trying to move without putting too
much weight on his injured leg. He was hobbling painfully around the puddles on
the cracked concrete floor, when an offer was made that would change the course
of his life. The offer had come from Peter Holmes and it was one that he
couldn’t resist. Since that rainy June night of three years ago, Gerry Silver
had been the head of Peter Holmes's personal security detail, and had never
once looked back.

Silver
turned down the volume on the CD player, reducing the heavy rock music to a
more amenable background noise then twisted round in his seat. He rested one
arm on the seat back and the other on the steering wheel, the broad expanse of
his chest almost filling the gap. He looked at the woman in the passenger seat
who was staring intently out of the window as though wishing she were somewhere
else.

"You've
got your orders Sarah." Silver said, "You've been taking his money
for long enough, now you can do something to earn it. Off you go."

The
woman turned to face him, blonde hair falling into place on either side of a
face that was pale and drawn. Blue eyes, flecked with grey, were moist as she
fought to hold back tears. Her full lips, though almost colourless, still gave
a hint of the mischievous grin they could form in better times. There was a
slight tremor in her voice when she spoke. "Gerry, I'm not a killer. I
can't do this."

"It's
not a question of can't. You have your instructions, so just get on and do it.
The sooner you get in there, the sooner you get out."

She
remained seated, making no effort to open the door, fiddling with the straps of
her shoulder bag.

"You
know what'll happen if you don't do it," he said, his words unveiled,
openly threatening, "Let's face it, it'll be better to live with it than
not to live."

"You
bastard!," she snapped, "is this how you macho arseholes get your
jollies, by forcing other people to do the work you haven't got the balls to do
for yourselves."

She
pushed the door open. "Limp dicks," she muttered as she got out. She
slung a bag across her shoulder and strode away from the car.

Silver
reached across the seat and yanked the door shut. "Bitch!" he
snarled, and twisted the key in the ignition.

With
engine howling, tyres smoking and squealing the car shot away from the kerb.
Seconds later, with a final squeal of tortured rubber, it disappeared into a
brightly lit underpass.

***

Sarah
Conway breezed into the hotel as if she had no worries in the world. Her hair,
caught by the draught that followed her through the door, floated around her
face like a golden cloud. She ran a hand through it, gently coaxing it back
into place before walking gracefully towards a fresh-faced security guard
seated behind a bank of video monitors.

She
had spent the last fifteen minutes, since walking away from the Lotus, in the
ladies room of a small city pub six doors down from the hotel entrance. She had
redone her face, taking more time than usual because of the shake in her hands.
On the walk from the pub to the hotel, she had taken deep breaths and consoled
herself with the fact that she could always telephone the hotel anonymously in
the morning, and let them know what had been done. Holmes might be suspicious,
she thought, but he wouldn’t be able to prove anything.

The
guard watched her approach with growing interest, the silent, everyday events
on his monitors suddenly ceased to be important. The light from the floor to
ceiling windows behind the woman accentuated her slim, curvaceous figure. He
had to look hard, to stare almost, but he could see the seductively visible
outline of her long and shapely legs through the flowing summer skirt. His eyes
drifted steadily upwards, lingering expectantly at the half-unbuttoned blouse
that stopped above her navel, exposing an evenly tanned midriff. He could
clearly make out the darker
areolae
surrounding the
buds of her nipples, which were rubbing delicately on the light fabric.

He
ran his index finger along the inside of his shirt collar and unconsciously
licked his lips as she reached the desk and leaned towards him. He breathed in,
pulling in a surplus roll of fat, relaxed muscle, as he preferred to call it,
that hung over the belt of his trousers. I'll have to start those exercises
again, was the thought that flew through his mind, as she rested her elbow on
the counter top.   

"Hi,"
she
said,
her voice soft and appealing. "I've
arranged to meet a friend here in the Senator Lounge. Can you tell me where it
is?"

The
strap of the bag thrown carelessly over her shoulder pulled her blouse open
slightly, allowing the guard more than a hint of the soft shapely flesh
beneath. He studied her
face,
her blue eyes seemed to
be reading his mind. He imagined, hoped, he saw a smile flick briefly across
her slightly parted, sensual lips.

She
raised her eyebrows quizzically, inclining her head to one side.

"Y-Yes,
I'm sorry," he almost stammered, "my mind was
elsewhere."     

She
smiled and he could feel the heat of embarrassment rising in his cheeks.
Without taking his eyes off her, he nodded his head towards a bank of lifts.
"If you take the lift to the first floor you'll see the signs."

"Thank
you." Still smiling, she turned in the direction the guard had indicated,
the large shoulder bag rubbing gently on a well-rounded buttock as she walked.

"Lucky
bag," the guard muttered, as he watched her retreating form, waiting until
she had disappeared into the lift before turning his head, not his mind, to the
bank of video screens.

The
lift hushed to a stop and she stepped out into a large foyer. With a quick
glance in both directions, she turned left and walked with an unhurried pace to
the end of the corridor, and pressed the call button for the service lift.
Seconds later the door opened and an old Chinese man stepped out pulling a
trolley containing a confusion of mops and brushes.

"Lady
should use posh lift jus' down road," he said, waving a bony arm in the
direction she had just come.

"It's
okay. I'm going to surprise someone," she smiled radiantly, but inwardly
fighting back the fear crawling in her stomach. "Don't let on you've seen
me."

She
delved into her bag, extracted a twenty pound note from her purse and put it in
the mans hand, closing his fingers around it as though he were a child and
might drop it.

"A
big surprise," she added.

The
man put the money quickly in his pocket in case she changed her mind and
grinned
a knowing grin.
"Chang like
surprises, Chang not seen lady."

He
gave her a conspiratorial wink, and set off along the corridor pulling his
trolley behind him like a big plastic pet.

She
rode in the service lift to the thirtieth floor, leaning as if exhausted
against the shiny aluminium wall, excusing the shiver that shimmered through
her body as a product of the air-conditioned atmosphere within the hotel. She
kept her eyes focused on the floor of the lift not wanting to see the
reflection of the thing she’d been turned into. She did not want this, did not
want any of it, but when you worked for Peter Holmes you couldn’t just
resign,
you only left when he had no further use for you.
She had heard stories about people who had thought otherwise and she had not
liked what she had heard.

The
lift door sliding open interrupted her thoughts. She crossed the corridor,
walked quickly up one flight of emergency stairs, and pushed open the door to
the roof. There appeared to be acres of green asphalt spreading out in all
directions from where she stood. She looked around. Brick winch rooms for the
hotels many lifts were dotted around, a mass of TV aerials erupted from one
like a skeletal monster from a low budget science fiction movie. She turned and
closed the door, an open access to the roof would probably attract attention,
it was a complication she could do without.

Moving
away from the door to an open section of roof, she saw what she had come for.
On the opposite side from where she stood, a satellite communications tower
rose twenty feet above the tallest winch room, a red beacon flashing at its
peak. She made her way toward it tackling a knee high obstacle course of
rubberised electrical conduits, pipes and air conditioning ducts on the way.
She reached the bottom of the tower slightly out of breath, and with a crawling
sensation present at the base of her stomach.

The
tower's base was surrounded by a thick grilled cage, a white sign with a red
flash carried the warning, "DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE'. She looked around,
unsure of what she would have done had someone been approaching, then slipped
the bag from her shoulder. From beneath the lining at the bottom, she took a
long paper wrapped package about an inch in diameter, and a small black box
with a six-inch length of wire hanging from one end, a three-inch plastic
sheath projecting from the other. A sharp pull on the sheath exposed a shiny
metal detonator that she pushed into one end of the package. It was a squeeze
getting her arms through the grill, rounded metal edges drawing red lines on
her skin as she coiled the package around the power feed cable, like a snake
around the branch of a tree. Once it was in position she put the sheath in her
bag and retraced her steps to the service lift. It was still there, door open.
She stepped in and pressed the button for the first floor.

She
entered the ladies washroom and held on to a sink to stop her body from
shaking. Staring at her reflection in the mirror, she knew that beneath the
make-up there would be another face, pale, drawn and scared. A tight knot of
fear, coiled in the pit of her stomach, seemed to be boiling and freezing at
the same time, as well as threatening to reveal itself. She took several deep
breaths to control the nausea then removed her blouse and skirt, folded them
into a ball and pushed them in her bag. She quickly washed her hands and arms,
silently wishing for a shower, before redressing in a pair of jeans and a
T-shirt. After picking up her bag, she left the hotel by the rear entrance and
mingled with the noisy crowds of tourists and shoppers.