France and Belgium reported little resistance, and were equally successful but in smaller numbers.
Here the Metropolitan Police Armed response units hit Pops Holloway’s known haunts and his house. They have arrested eight people on suspicion of drugs, firearms and human trafficking offences. Pops Holloway is under police guard at the hospital, where he is reported as suffering from the symptoms of a stroke, or else he’s faking it. They’re doing tests to find out. We couldn’t find Sonny Holloway, but guess what? His Range Rover is parked half on the pavement outside a sandwich shop on Commercial Road, less than a hundred yards from Tottenham Press. Any questions?”
Don Fisher beat me to the punch.
“Can we go in, then?”
“Yes, as soon as we’re ready. Listen, this is off the record, you didn’t hear it from me. I just think you have a right to know what’s going on, that’s all.” DS Scott leaned over the table towards us and lowered his voice.
“An hour or so ago one of our observers at the scene heard something that could have been a gunshot, he wasn’t too sure. But there has been no activity as far as they could see, and so we’re assuming that everyone in there is still OK.”
I looked at Don Fisher and wondered whether my face had turned as pale as his. We would have been angry if all emotion hadn’t already been drained out of us.
***
Thanks to the Police psychologist, who said that the girls would need to see their loved ones as soon as possible after being freed, to reduce the post-traumatic stress, we were allowed to watch events unfold from close by. We sat in an unmarked white van in a parking space reserved for deliveries to the sandwich shop, which had closed for the day. We could see the Tottenham Press building through the front windscreen. One of the two plain clothes policemen sitting in the cab of the van was wearing headphones with a microphone curling around in front of his face. He was listening, and occasionally contributing to the radio chatter. The headphones were operated by Bluetooth and were wireless, but they were connected to a secure closed network radio with encryption. Just in case anyone in the area had a police scanner.
Commercial Road was sealed off by a sign that read “Road Closed: Gas Leak” and which was manned by a uniformed officer. There were very few people around the industrial area on a Sunday afternoon, but those that were around were inside the building, which was being observed closely.
The officer with the headphones repeated to us what he had heard.
“Armed response has arrived. Their adrenaline is up after a good result with the Holloway raid. They’re moving into position. The plan is a go. The electrician is kicking us off any time now.”
I had to admit, I felt somewhat useless as a spectator. The police were trained to handle such situations, and in that respect I was happy to leave it to them, but I couldn’t help feeling that I had let Dee down. I hadn’t been able to do anything to help her, and I felt frustrated and perhaps a little bit weak. I was also afraid to think of what might happen if all of this went wrong. I had known Dee for a matter of days, yet suddenly the prospect of life without her seemed inconceivable. I had no idea what I would do if anything happened to her, but I knew that if – when – she did get out of there, I would make damned sure I took better care of her in future.
Fisher and I leaned forward and observed as two men wearing overalls with a logo on the back appeared from the gap between Tottenham Press and the building next door. Their overalls looked bulky and I guessed they were wearing protective vests.
When I looked closely I could see the older man working quickly whilst the younger man was constantly looking around. He was holding a handgun.
The next few minutes were going to seem like an eternity.
***
Ben Tyler should have been at home snoozing on the sofa with a stomach full of Sunday lunch while his grandkids ran wild in the garden, but instead he was in Tottenham working. Ben couldn’t remember when he had been more scared. The presence of an armed policeman, intended to make him feel secure, achieved exactly the opposite result.
Nonetheless, he had to concentrate. This was a tricky job. For a start, the system was live and electrocution was a distinct possibility. Fortunately, the wiring to this unit passed through the steel column that took the weight of the door and the roller mechanism, and would remain concealed until the front plate was completely removed. Whereas house wiring was simple three core cable with a plastic coating, this cable was copper sheathed and mineral insulated. The copper that wrapped the cores, or wires, was packed with magnesium oxide, an inert chalky substance which insulated the wires from one another. In order to keep the chalky substance in place when the cores were exposed, the wires had to be terminated with small aluminium pots. Had this not been the case, Ben would not have been able to carry out this operation on a live system.
Now they were in the third minute and he was just now exposing the cores. He loosened the terminal screws and the switch with its key control came off in his hands. Ben had to ensure that he did not touch either wire on any metal parts of the switches. He also needed to make sure that the two wires did not touch, or the roller door would try to open. The electrician tucked the key operated switch inside his overalls and extracted a much simpler switch. This unit was plastic and had a simple red switch on and off. Very carefully Ben attached a tiny crocodile clip to each exposed core, inserting a plastic spacer between them to ensure they did not touch, and allowed the plastic switch to hang suspended from the copper MICC cable.
Ben nodded to his guard who signalled a ‘thumbs up’, and whilst he was leading Ben away to safety another man ran towards the door.
***
We had been watching nervously as the electrician did his job, but the man deserved a medal in my opinion. Under extreme pressure he took less than four minutes.
As he was led away Geordie from Vastrick, armed with bolt cutters, appeared from behind a green telephone junction box and ran towards the door. In ten seconds he had removed the padlock and was heading back to his hiding place.
The telephone landline had been cut off over an hour ago, and the mobile phone jammer had been in action since before the Europol raids. We had noticed during the short journey from the police station to our current position that the people in the van, and the few we saw on the streets, had all lost their phone signals.
I found it amusing that almost everyone with a mobile phone did the same thing. They saw the message, ignored it, pressed a few buttons and held it to their ear. Seconds later, realising that they were not connected, they looked at the message again and frowned. Finally, the majority of them shook the phone and looked again to see whether the signal had been restored, because of course everyone knows that sometimes the electronic signal gets trapped at the top of the phone and a good shake will loosen it allowing the phone to work. At least it took my mind off the seriousness of what was about to happen.
A few seconds passed, and six battle clad men ran to the roller doors carrying deadly looking rifles. The policeman in the headset held up three fingers, counting down by bending one finger at a time. No sooner had all of his fingers closed than there was a muffled explosion.
Chapter 74
Tottenham Press, Commercial Road, London. Sunday 1:30pm.
Dee had been awake for a while now, albeit in some pain. The man who tended her wounds had given her a foil of painkillers which he had found in the secretary’s desk drawer downstairs. Dee had taken two, but as yet they hadn’t made a lot of difference. She concluded that she would need something a bit stronger than over-the-counter aspirins to tackle this amount of pain. Nonetheless, she thanked him for his help, and she thought that he might be blushing under his ski mask.