The Lost Relic (18 page)

‘You mean, apart from destroying this entire operation?’ Blackmore said.

Ferris made an impatient gesture. ‘The question is, what do we do with him?’

Across the table from Jamie Lister, a large, square-shouldered man called Mack spoke for the first time. ‘I think we’d all agree that Hope’s involvement in this delicate situation represents a potentially disastrous liability for us. I mean, it’s sheer luck that he got out of there before the bloody police arrived. This was a carefully laid plan and he’s blundered into the middle of it – not just once, but twice now. He’s a loose cannon. I can see only one solution.’

‘I concur with that,’ said a woman to Lister’s left. She had dark brown hair cut short like a man’s, and bright red lipstick that glistened under the lights. The name tag on her jacket read Lesley Pollock.

There were nods and murmurs of assent from around the table. Lister looked down at the file in front of him and said nothing. His mouth was dry. There was a carafe of mineral water and nine glasses in the middle of the table, but he was aware of the unwritten rule that nobody would drink until Ferris did, out of deference.

‘Therefore I propose that we act to take him out of the picture,’ Mack said, looking solemnly up and down the table at his colleagues. ‘And try to see a clear way out of this God-awful mess we’re in.’

Patricia Yemm turned away from the screen and swivelled her chair close into the table. She tapped long red fingernails against the open file in front of her. ‘Are we sure we want to initiate terminal action against this man? He’s not the easiest of targets. It could get very ugly.’

‘Naturally, it needs to be quick and quiet,’ Mack said. ‘Difficult, not impossible. Nothing is impossible. That’s been proven time and again, by this department and others.’

Lesley Pollock pursed her lips and nodded. ‘It’s simply a question of selecting the most appropriate asset to allocate the task to. We have people on standby. Just takes a text message. Problem deleted.’

Lister’s mouth felt more parched with every passing minute. He’d known what to expect when he applied to join the department. Even so, the conversation seemed quite surreal to him.
Problem deleted.
They were discussing a man’s life here.

He thought about his father. He swallowed.

‘Have you read Hope’s file?’ Yemm said doubtfully, turning to look down the table at Mack and Pollock.

Mack flushed with irritation. ‘I’m perfectly aware of his capabilities. But he’s not the only one we’ve trained to that level. He can be taken out. And that’s the course of action I would advocate at this point. I frankly don’t think we’re left with a choice in the matter.’

Ferris had been listening carefully with his chin lowered to his chest. He clicked his tongue, and all eight heads turned, instantly attentive. ‘It’s my feeling,’ Ferris began, then interrupted himself to reach a long, bony hand across the table and pick up the carafe of water. He took his time pouring himself a glass, and sipped slowly. Lister seized the opportunity to fill a glass for himself, too. He drained it in a gulp. Blackmore watched him.

Ferris resumed, measuring his words carefully. ‘It’s my feeling that, while our friend here has most certainly been a liability for us up until now – and in principle I might agree with my esteemed colleague’s assessment – there’s an alternative course of action none of you appears to have considered.’

All eyes were fixed on Ferris, except for Mack, who seemed to have taken a sudden profound interest in the strap of his watch.

‘As I see it, Major Hope’s sudden and unexpected intrusion into the Urbano Tassoni situation works rather neatly in our favour,’ Ferris continued. ‘Under the circumstances, deletion is not the appropriate course of action. And I don’t want this dealt with privately. I want this man brought in alive, as noisily and publicly as possible.’

‘Sir, I’m not sure I follow,’ Lesley Pollock said, frowning.

Ferris smiled a dry smile. He leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands together. ‘Let me tell you about my grandfather,’ he said. ‘He was a colonel in the British army. During the twenties he spent some time in India, where, as a professional tracker and rifleman, he was commissioned by the rulers of several provinces to hunt down and destroy rogue tigers that were attacking and eating rural workers. Which he did, very successfully, thanks to certain methods.’

‘Sir?’

‘It’s really quite simple,’ Ferris said. ‘Bear with me. If I explain a little about how my grandfather worked, you’ll understand my thinking on this.’

Ferris went on, and his line of reasoning soon became clear.

Jamie Lister’s mouth went dry again as he listened. It was warm in the operations room, but fingers of ice seemed to be working their way around him. He stared at the table, knowing Blackmore was watching every twitch of his face for a response, and stayed resolutely blank.

‘And that’s how you catch a tiger,’ Ferris finished. He scanned the faces of his team. ‘Now do you understand? It’s a logical conclusion.’

Nobody argued.

‘So it’s agreed,’ Ferris said. ‘I want Hope in custody within the next twelve hours. Alert the Italian police.’

‘You expect them to bring him in, just like that?’ Mack said.

‘I do not. That’s why I want to send in one of our own to head up the task force.’

‘Department?’

Ferris shook his head. ‘Let’s keep back from this.’

‘We’re going to need someone very good,’ Yemm said, ‘if we’re to have a chance of catching him. Someone every bit as capable and smart as he is.’

Blackmore looked at her. ‘Did you have anyone in mind?’

Manchester

Visibility was minimal as the black unmarked Vauxhall V6 Vectra tore northwards through pouring rain along the M60 Manchester ring road at a shade under a hundred miles an hour. Each of the three occupants of the speeding car was occupied with their own thoughts, and nobody spoke. They were in that quiet space where tension and alertness combine with disciplined training to create a sense of purposeful calm.

They’d been waiting months for this moment. Now, at 11.26 p.m. on this dismal night, it looked like they were finally about to score.

Vince McLaughlin was sitting in the back, wearing the same faded jeans and field jacket he always wore. Across his knee was the police-issue Heckler & Koch MP-5K that he’d just finished checking for the fifth time. In the front passenger seat, Mick Walker was nursing the secure frequency radio they were using to communicate with station HQ and the pilot of the unmarked
SOCA
helicopter whose blinking lights could be seen high above them through the drifting rain.

The third occupant of the Vectra was a woman named Darcey Kane. Her slim, strong hands were relaxed on the wheel as she skilfully wove the car through the light traffic. Her black hair was tied back under a black baseball cap. Walker and McLaughlin were both very well acquainted with the fierce glint in their team commander’s slate-grey eyes and that set to her jaw she always had when going into action. She was as focused as a hawk on its quarry. She pressed her foot down a little harder and the speedometer crept up past the hundred and ten mark. The roar of the engine filled the car.

The target Darcey was bearing down was two hundred metres ahead, and closing. The occupants of the TDV8 Range Rover had spotted them five miles back, and its driver was steaming ahead at full throttle to get away. As it came speeding up behind a cluster of slower-moving cars it blasted its horn and sent them swerving aside. Darcey could tell from the Range Rover’s erratic course that its driver was within a fraction of losing his nerve. That was fine. She had plenty.

She wondered which of the drug gang was at the wheel: Wolonski? McNiff? Or could it be Gremaj himself? Whichever of them it was, his foot hard on the gas, glancing nervously in his mirror at the car behind and the chopper overhead, he had every reason to be scared shitless. He had the Serious Organised Crime Agency, British law enforcement’s best-kept secret weapon against his kind, right up his arse and he wasn’t getting out of this one.

After three months of working her team round the clock and to the verge of madness and collapse, Darcey knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that stashed under the false back seat of the Range Rover were over two hundred kilos of pure uncut heroin. She knew where it had come from, where it was headed, how much the gang had paid for it, how much each man stood to receive as his cut of tonight’s deal. She even knew what they’d been planning to spend it on – except they wouldn’t be spending a penny of it. Their number was up. Right here, right now.

Darcey knew she was taking a gamble. If she was wrong and the drugs weren’t on board, she wasn’t going to come out of this well. But it was a risk she was willing to take, and she was committed now.

‘Let’s cut the foreplay, shall we?’ she said, letting rip with the blues and twos. The siren wailed through the rasp of the souped-up V6. Any remnant of doubt the guys in the Range Rover might have had about the identity of their pursuers had just been blown away.

The
SUV
accelerated to over a hundred and twenty miles an hour, but there was trouble ahead as it caught up with a pack of traffic moving at the speed limit and taking up all three lanes. The driver’s fist was on the horn as he bullied several cars out of his way before ramming the back of a Ford Focus that didn’t move aside fast enough to let him pass. The Focus gyrated out of control across three lanes, sending other cars skidding out of its path.

There was a flurry of collisions. A spinning people carrier hit the crash barrier at over fifty miles an hour, bounced back into the path of a Nissan Micra that smashed into it side on and went into a tumbling flip-roll. Suddenly the road flashing towards Darcey was a minefield of bouncing wreckage. Her face didn’t show a flicker of emotion as she took evasive action, weaving the Vectra nimbly through the carnage. The chopper was closer now, and she could hear the thud of its rotors over the noise of the car engine. Walker was talking fast on the radio, issuing commands, calling in the rest of the troops.

Up ahead, the Range Rover kept battering onwards, its taillights burning through the rainy haze. Darcey was keeping pace at a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour as they flashed under the looming arches of the Stockport viaduct. Moments later, the signs came up for the A560 Stockport turnoff. The driver of the Range Rover held back until the last moment, then veered wildly across the glistening lanes and went skidding off down the sliproad, only barely in control of the vehicle.

Darcey gave chase. They weren’t going to shake her off that easily. And the target had just made a big mistake.

‘This guy is fucking insane,’ McLaughlin muttered from the back seat. Walker yelled fresh co-ordinates into the radio. More signs darted by:
REDUCE
SPEED
NOW
. The Range Rover was still doing over a hundred as it bore down on a light-controlled intersection across a large grassy roundabout. A dozen or more cars were waiting for the red lights to change. The last car in the queue was a blue
BMW
roadster. The Range Rover wobbled violently as its driver stood on the brake, and then it went slamming into the back of the
BMW
with a crunch of metal that Darcey heard even over the growing roar of the helicopter. Glass exploded across the road. The Range Rover was badly damaged but it kept going, hammering a destructive path through the chaos and storming through the red lights and across the intersection, right into the path of oncoming traffic. There was a chorus of horns and screeching tyres.

‘They’re gonna get wiped out,’ McLaughlin said.

Somehow, the Range Rover made it across the intersection.

Almost. Its driver was too panicked or too bold to get out of the way of an articulated Tesco lorry that sideswiped it at over forty and sent it flying like a tin can. The Range Rover flipped end over end, crushed a barrier and ploughed a massive furrow in a grass verge before coming to rest upside down in the dirt.

The chopper was hovering right overhead, roadside shrubbery pressed flat under the wind of its blades. Voices yelled urgently on Walker’s radio. There was a screech of sirens in the distance.

Darcey rolled in over the sea of smashed glass and wreckage. The road looked like a bomb site, vehicles and glass and pieces of twisted bodywork strewn everywhere. The driver of the Tesco lorry had climbed down from his cab. There was blood on his face from a gash above the eye. He gaped at the Range Rover, then up at the descending helicopter, shielding his eyes from the white glare of its spotlamp. A car horn was stuck on, wailing loudly. Other passengers were venturing out from their cars, looking dazed and frightened.

No sign of movement inside the Range Rover.

Darcey unclipped her seatbelt and took out her pistol. She instinctively checked the breech. A glint of shiny brass against matt black steel.

‘Here we go,’ McLaughlin said, taking up the MP-5K. ‘Watch yourselves out there,’ Darcey said, not taking her eyes off the Range Rover.

The three
SOCA
agents climbed out of the car. Swirling blue lights appeared through the drizzle as a fleet of police cars came swarming in from all directions.

The driver’s door of the upside-down Range Rover opened a crack, and then swung out wide. A hand appeared, groping about, then a balding head that Darcey instantly recognised.

Gremaj. She’d been staring at the same grainy black-and-white image of the elusive drug baron for three months. Now he was hers, helpless and vulnerable as he tumbled free of his tangled seatbelt and sprawled out onto the muddied grass. Darcey felt flushed with victory as she walked towards him, clutching her Glock tightly in a double-handed grip. It was an end to the cruel suffering he and his minions had been bringing onto the streets of Britain for the last seven years. A bullet in the brain of his nefarious career – and a defining moment in hers. God knew she’d grafted for it.

Gremaj had blood trickling from the corner of his mouth as he crawled away from the overturned Range Rover. He spat red. His jacket fluttered in the blast of the landing helicopter, and the flashing blue lights were reflected in his glasses. One lens was cracked. The butt of a nickel-plated custom .45 auto stuck out of his waistband; it was a typical showoff gangsta weapon, the kind of impractical piece of tinsel a pimp would like to flourish about. It had probably never been fired. Gremaj got other people to do that kind of thing for him.