But all those efforts could be for nought
“Any problems?”
“Nah guv, good signal… he’s stopped at red ATS, Borough High Street and Duke Street Hill as we speak, still heading for north of the river.”
“Okay, well we’re going to pick Danny up and head back to ‘the factory’.”
“Rog’… oh yeah, Traffic wants to know if they can have control of the lights in the Causeway back?”
“Yes certainly… and thank them for their help.”
The cab, one of several in the fleet of surveillance vehicles owned by the Serious Crime Group picked up the second’ vagrant’ from where he was waiting around the corner from Newington Causeway, and its ‘cabbie’ avoided the rest of the commuter traffic in the New Kent Road by turning off into Meadow Row, and from there made his way to New Scotland Yard.
The Major Incident Control Room at CO had been taken over for a multiple agency operation dedicated to capturing the enemy cell that had killed Constantine Bedonavich, Scott Tafler and of course, two of their own.
SO-19 was one of the departments involved in the operation, but they were unhappy with the Commissioners great efforts to borrow a troop from the Special Air Service, for the critical job of securing the suspects when that time came. SACEUR had initially refused to release them from Germany, but then the deep strike mission a G Squadron troop had been about to undertake was scrubbed. General Allain had relented, releasing the troop for a period not to exceed 48 hours, the time it would take for another mission in disrupting Red Army supply lines to be put together.
Art Petrucci was a late arrival and an escort delivered him to the incident room where he joined the Commissioner, stood quietly at the back. There were two military officers present in the room amid the policemen and women, and one was stood next to the Commissioner.
“Good morning Art, do you know General Shaw?” The Commissioner clasped Art’s hand briefly and stepped aside in order for the two Americans to exchange greetings.
“Only by reputation.” Shaking the marines hand he asked with genuine curiosity what had brought the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs there.
“London is my last port of call before returning stateside, and I knew young Scott so I dropped in to see if there had been any developments in finding his killers.”
As Head of Station for CIAs London office, Art knew damn well that he should have been informed of Henry Shaw’s itinerary if the United Kingdom had been on it, but he gave away no sign of what he was thinking.
“So are you staying at the Embassy marine barracks, or with the Ambassador at Winfield House?”
“I can’t stand the sanctimonious son of a bitch, and I was going to stay at the barracks tonight but the Commissioner here very kindly offered me the use of a spare room at his home in Surrey. It’s a lot closer to Heathrow and as I’m about travelled-out, I said thanks.”
“A case of, if its Thursday this must be Paris, huh?” Art asked.
Henry laughed.
“Actually I was there yesterday, but that’s pretty much been the story.”
Art laughed along good-naturedly with him, but made a mental note to ask both the chief of station Paris and the SDCE what they had known of his visit there.
The conversation ended there as they listened in on the progress of the target vehicle. The driver of that car was following a route around the capital obvious only to himself, interjected with routine counter surveillance actions such as sudden course changes, reversing his direction of travel, and at roundabouts would at times circle around it several times. It was all being done in order to confuse a tail, or make them reveal themselves in their attempts to maintain contact.
On two occasions whilst halted in traffic their suspect had released his seatbelt and opened the cars sunroof, peering up through it as he tried to see if a helicopter was being used to track him. They didn’t know about that in the incident room though, because none of the surveillance team had been in eyeball contact, or sight of it, since D.I MacAverney and his fellow ‘vagrant’ had placed the electronic tracking device beneath the car.
They were not relying only on the tracker, there were cars, vans and of course solo motorcycles ‘doing the alternative’, or in others words they were travelling along roads that ran parallel to the one the target vehicle was using.
The passengers, the men and women in the cars and vans were known in the trade as ‘Footmen’, and if for some reason the driver abandoned the target vehicle and did not seem as if he would return for it, then these officers would begin a ‘foot follow’ a task that requires much skill and practice, especially if the quarry was as surveillance conscious as this target quite obviously was.
The Commissioner called over a uniformed Chief Superintendent at one point. Only a few words were exchanged before the man left on the task his boss had given him, but Art’s built in radar had twitched.
“What’s his problem?”
The Commissioner smiled.
“Oh, he is just a little put out that I brought the military in to do a task his department wanted. Stokes and Pell were SO-19 officers, so my specialist firearms unit believe they should make the arrests.”
“And you don’t?”
“Let us just say that I would rather not test their professionalism. We want those individuals as much for what they can tell us in intelligence terms, as I do for them to face justice.”
It wasn’t until the driver reached Pall Mall that he saw a marker, a hexagonal shaped sticker about four inches across, its fluorescent green colour in sharp contrast to the red of the post office box it adhered to.
It took a little while for the surveillance team to guess that there target had completed his business in the city, by which time the target vehicle was eastbound on the north circular road.
The units involved in the vehicle follow had nothing particularly challenging to do until the target turned off the north circular toward Essex on the A13 and put his foot down. The controller sent two of the powerful surveillance team motorbikes forwards, to overtake the target and to keep well ahead of him. He kept the remainder back, the closest vehicle being another motorcycle a mile behind the target, but they knew their quarry was more switched on than the average criminal it was their usual brief to shadow, and a change of vehicles somewhere was a distinct possibility. If the controller read the situation correctly he would order callsigns to ‘punch up’, to close the gap between the target and themselves, but if he got it wrong the target could have switched wheels and a ‘total loss’ would have to be declared, as contact with the target was irretrievably lost.
Controlling such an operation could send a person’s stress levels so high they redlined. A small mistake, a callsign sent in the wrong direction or not moved out of the targets path in time could sink an operation that had cost literally millions, so those present in the incident room who did not know Dusty Miller by reputation, had misgivings that a mere plain clothes duty police constable should even be allowed in the room.
Dusty had twenty years’ experience in surveillance work and had he taken up the game of Chess would have been a candidate for grand master. Dusty had the ability not only to think several steps ahead, but the only thing known to ever cause him the slightest element of stress was the occasional aphid infestation of the prize roses he grew in his garden at home.
When the target suddenly turned left onto the B1335 outside the village of Wennington, and then stopped in a lay-by a short distance further on, all heads turned in Dusty’s direction.
The controller sat unconcerned as the minutes ticked by, ignoring the increase in fidgeting by others in the room, until at last the tracker indicated the vehicle was once more on the move, turning around and returning to the A13 where it continued deeper into Essex.