He groaned.
'What is it?' demanded Big Barry, leaning forward.
'They're after Fallon again. He's in Wanstead now, at his mate's place.'
'What's the address?'
Bolt patted his pockets. 'It's in my notebook downstairs.'
He tore out of there and down the corridor, ignoring his team as he ran through the open-plan area into his own office and, without even acknowledging Obanje, who was diligently making notes with a phone to his ear, scrabbled round his desk under the piles of paperwork for his notebook.
It was another thirty seconds before he was on the phone to Big Barry reading out the address of Dominic Moynihan, knowing he'd made a terrible mistake allowing Fallon to leave the hospital without his armed guard. 'Get officers there straight away!' he yelled, hoping he wasn't too late.
Fifty-seven
As my eyes opened and I wiped the blood away with my good hand, I could see Dom still pacing the room.
Seeing me stir, he grabbed the bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and waved it at me angrily. 'If you try and move, you'll get more of the same. I mean it as well. This is about my life now. My fucking life, mate. And right now it's more important than anything, including our friendship. It's why I've got to do what I've got to do.' He turned away and kept pacing up and down, the bottle in his hand, every so often glancing across to check I wasn't trying anything.
Every part of me was in absolute agony. If I'd taken every last painkiller the hospital had sent me away with I would have been dead before the pain eased. It was that bad. My head. My face. My arm. Even my side where I'd been hit by Bolt's car. Everything.
But as I lay there, blinking as I tried to focus on Dom, my fear was even stronger.
'What do you mean you've got to do what you've got to do?' I asked him. It was difficult to force out the words. 'And who were you speaking to on the phone?'
Dom continued pacing, studiously ignoring me, but even with my vision still blurred I could see that his jaw was wobbling. He was a man under serious pressure.
'Please, Dom, let me go. I'm your mate.'
'Shut the fuck up,' he hissed, staring straight ahead.
'I don't know what you've got involved in, but there's got to be a way out. It's not too late to give yourself up and help Jenny. You haven't actually done anything that badly wrong yet.' I didn't know if any of this was actually the case, of course, but I was getting desperate.
He kept pacing. 'You don't understand. It is too late, OK? Too fucking late to do anything.'
'It's not,' I said, putting every last ounce of effort into trying to sound convincing. 'It's never too late. It really isn't-'
But it was, because as I pleaded with him and he carried on pacing there was a loud knock on the front door.
He stopped dead, just like that, and looked at me with a pained expression in his eyes. Then he mouthed the words 'I'm sorry' as the full extent of his betrayal hit both of us, and turned and left the room.
I knew then that I'd used up all my nine lives, that this really was my very last chance.
A second later Dom came back in again, and this time there was a man behind him in a boiler suit, and before I saw his face I knew without a doubt that it would be him.
'So, Rob Fallon, we meet again,' he said quietly in that harsh Northern Irish accent, and I saw that he was holding the same gun with cigar-shaped silencer that he'd killed Maxwell with the previous night.
Dom was ashen-faced. 'I don't want to see any of this,' he said, turning away. 'Please do it quick.'
'I will,' answered the other man, 'and you don't have to worry about seeing anything.' With a casual movement, he lifted the gun and shot Dom through the chin, knocking him back into a bookcase. He slid down it, slowly disappearing from view behind the opposite sofa. All without making a sound.
The Irishman now turned to me, a cruel smile just about making itself known on the tight, pale face. 'So, it looks like it's time for goodbye, Mr Fallon.'
I no longer had the will to fight, and the pain was intense, but I wasn't going to go quietly either. 'You know, I meant to tell you before,' I said as loudly as I could. 'You really are one ugly fucker.'
The smile disappeared. 'But I'm a live one, aren't I? And at the moment, that's more important.'
He stopped in front of me, then turned slightly towards the front window as something caught his attention.
I could hear it too. The angry whirr of a helicopter overhead. I felt a surge of elation.
It disappeared as he turned back to me and raised the gun. 'Sorry I can't linger a while, Mr Fallon, but I have business to attend to. Goodbye.'
I thought of Yvonne. I thought of Chloe. I thanked God they were safe. I wished I could have seen them again.
'Fuck you,' I hissed, just before he pulled the trigger.
Fifty-eight
Wanstead, in east London, is an attractive middle-class enclave with a village-like feel, and the road where Dominic Moynihan lived was a leafy stretch of expensive-looking Edwardian townhouses, which had now been sealed off at both ends by police vehicles with flashing lights. As they pulled up, Bolt spotted the blue Mazda parked further along, already surrounded by scene-of-crime tape.
He and Mo Khan showed their IDs and made their way through to an inner cordon of patrol cars and riot vans which had been positioned in a rough semi-circle in front of one of the houses. Several dozen officers – a mixture of Territorial Support and plainclothes – milled around without much urgency, while a handful of officers from Scotland Yard's elite armed unit, CO19, were positioned behind the cordon with their weapons facing the house.
As they approached, one of the plainclothes officers – a youngish guy with wispy blond hair and a suit that looked too expensive for a police salary – peeled off from the throng to come and greet them. 'DCI Max Carter, Counter Terrorism Command,' he said decisively, putting out a hand, his accent unmistakably public school. 'I've got the unenviable task of being in charge on the ground here. Are you the SOCA guys?'
'That's us,' said Bolt.
'I've only just got here myself,' continued Carter, 'but we've had officers on the scene for twenty-five minutes now.'
'Is anything happening in there?' asked Mo.
Carter shook his head. 'I don't know. We've tried to contact them by phone but the landline's not being picked up. We've also been using the loudhailer, but to no effect. Do either of you know the person who lives here?'
'We don't,' said Bolt, 'but we believe we know the identity of someone who's in there at the moment. A Mr Robert Fallon. He's the person who broke this whole thing. It's possible that someone came here to kill him driving the blue Mazda we were tracking.'
'Didn't he have a police guard?' asked Carter, sounding surprised.
'We didn't believe he was any longer in danger,' Mo replied quickly.
'Oh.' He raised his eyebrows. 'Well, the Mazda's still here, so we have to assume that the driver is too. I've got more officers round the back so if he is, he's not getting out.'
Bolt hoped that this was the case, and that the driver was holding Fallon and possibly his friend Moynihan hostage in there, but the fact that there'd been no signs of activity suggested otherwise. 'There's only one way to find out,' he said. 'We need to go in. And if he's there, we need to apprehend him alive, because he'll almost certainly know the location of the lorry with the gas.'
'As I'm sure you'll appreciate, Agent Bolt, I'm reluctant to storm the place until I've exhausted all other options. Because of the risk of casualties.'
Bolt could understand his position. One of the problems with modern British policing was the fact that everything had to be done so completely by the book that it resulted in a culture of risk-averseness that harmed the force's effectiveness.