I could have said no. Should have done really. I was under no obligation to continue helping Bolt. I’d been given my sentence and served it, so there was no way of putting me back inside. But in the end, what else was I going to do? I was an ex-con; I’d been fired from the Met; my criminal record prevented me from going back into the army; my wife had left me. I was facing the scrapheap. At least doing this gave me a chance for some excitement.
My brief had been simple: find out what Cecil is up to and who he’s working for.
At the time he’d been running an outfit providing security for nightclub doors in north London and the occasional bodyguard work, and I’d asked him for work. We might not have seen each other for close to five years, but we’d hit it off again straight away. I was an angry man after my time inside, and it hadn’t been hard to convince him of my right-wing credentials. Nor to let him believe that I would be up for more lucrative, illegal work if it was available.
I knew straight away he was involved in something bad, but like Fox, he was very careful not to give too much away. So I’d made the classic mistake and compromised myself to gain his trust.
The robbery should have sorted everything. We’d hold up a scumbag drug dealer, put the fear of God into him, and leave with plenty of cash, knowing that he’d never report what had happened to the police. But you know the rest. And now suddenly I was in a lot of trouble. If Cecil went down, he’d take me with him. I’d debated long and hard this morning whether I should say anything to Bolt, but in the end I’d decided I had no choice. I needed to see this through, and if I played my cards right, when Cecil went down he’d have no idea that I’d been the one to betray him.
All I had to do was make it happen.
Nineteen
12.15
As Bolt walked past a small cafe on his left, his informant, Richard Burnham-Jones, got up from where he’d been sitting at one of the outside tables and fell into step beside him. He was dressed in jogging gear and carrying a bottle of water. Jones was a tall guy, close to Bolt’s height, with thick dark hair and handsome chiselled features that were enhanced rather than spoilt by a thin, twisting scar an inch and a half long above his left eye, which he’d received when he’d been hit by a piece of skull bone from a fellow soldier who’d just been shot in the head.
‘So?’ Bolt said without looking at him as they walked on through the park.
‘I’m in. Cecil introduced me to a guy called Cain who’s obviously the boss. Cain wants me to work for him and he’s willing to pay good money. My first job’s to accompany him and Cecil to a meeting today. He wants us to provide security.’
Jesus, thought Bolt, it was all happening today. He’d been running Jones as an informant for close to a year now with virtually nothing to show for it, and now he had a breakthrough on the day when London had once again come under terrorist attack. ‘Did you get a photo of him?’
‘No.’
‘Why not? That’s what I gave you the camera for.’ A month earlier, Bolt had supplied Jones with a Nike baseball cap with a tiny camera sewn into the front lining. To take a photo, the person wearing the cap pressed a button in the side lining, an action Jones could easily have disguised by scratching the side of his head.
‘It was just too risky. Cecil searched me before the meet, and I told you before: I’ve never worn a baseball cap in my life. He’d have noticed, and then if he’d searched it and found the camera …’
‘He wouldn’t have. It’s too small.’
‘It’s the kind of thing he looks for. Cecil knows what he’s doing, and he’s paranoid as hell. If he’d found it, it would have got me killed.’
Which Bolt had to admit was true. Cecil Boorman was a difficult customer. A former soldier, he’d been ID’d as an occasional associate of several of the mercenaries involved in the Stanhope siege, and at one time had done work in Iraq for the security consultancy that Fox had run. The only problem was, there was nothing concrete linking him to the siege itself, and he was seriously adept at counter-surveillance, making an intelligence-gathering op against him near enough impossible. Bolt, though, had always thought he was worth pursuing, and if Cecil was being that careful about covering his tracks, it meant he had to have something big to hide.
‘Describe Cain to me.’
‘My height, early forties, short blonde hair, lean and very pale — almost vampire pale — with a big vein running down his right cheek that really stands out. He doesn’t look ordinary, put it like that. He’s also ex-military, an officer by the looks of him, and speaks with a middle-class Home Counties accent. He served in Lashkar Gah a few years ago, and there was a green on blue incident in his battalion.’
‘Green on blue?’
‘Where an Afghan working with coalition forces attacks them. A translator called Abdul shot two of Cain’s men while he was there. If you look hard enough, you should be able to get an ID on him from all that.’
Bolt nodded. He was recording the conversation so there was no need to write anything down. ‘Did Cain mention anything about the bombs this morning?’
‘Yeah. He said that it was Islamic terrorists, and gave me this spiel about how if I worked for him, I’d get a chance to fight against all the people doing the country harm. He was pretty extreme in his views.’
‘But he didn’t suggest that the bombs might be something to do with him?’
‘You think they might be?’
Bolt sighed. ‘I don’t know.’ He needed more than this if they were ever going to get a breakthrough. Even if they managed to ID Cain from Jones’s description, it didn’t push them any further forward. ‘This meeting Cain wants you to go to. Do you know what it’s about?’
‘He didn’t give many details, but I get the impression he’s buying something, and that he doesn’t trust the people he’s buying it from.’
‘Did you get a look at his car?’
Jones shook his head. ‘He was on foot when I saw him.’
‘The thing is, he may not be as good at counter-surveillance as Cecil, so it’s possible we can get a tail on him. Have you asked Cecil about him?’
‘Cecil’s keeping very shtum about Cain, and if I ask too many questions he’ll get suspicious.’
‘You’re entitled to act suspicious too, you know. You’re being hired by someone you know nothing about, to do work you know nothing about, but which involves guns. How do you know that he isn’t a cop trying to set you up? Ask Cecil that. The point is, if you put yourself in the position of a man who’s looking for illegal work, you’ll get the answers you’re looking for.’
‘That you’re looking for, you mean. I’m doing this for you, remember?’
Bolt looked at him sharply. ‘No, Jones, you’re not. You’re doing it for the ordinary man in the street, who just wants to go about his business without someone trying to blow him up in aid of some shitty little cause. You’re doing it for your family. For your cousin who died at the Stanhope. For your daughter. Remember, she and your ex-wife could have been in that coffee shop when it blew this morning.’
Jones took a deep breath, staring off into space. ‘Yeah, I know.’
Bolt knew he was laying it on thick but he was frustrated. He sympathized with what had happened to Jones. By all accounts he’d been a good cop who’d lost his head one day, and the result was that he’d also lost his job, his pension, his wife and, most humiliating of all, his liberty. He’d sacrificed a lot for his country, and the people in it, and all he’d received was a lot of shit in return. But it also meant that he was a perfect informant, because if anyone was justified in feeling the kind of rage needed to become involved with extremists, it was him. But there are strict rules in the UK on the police’s use of informants, and Bolt was bending them seriously. He’d been told by his boss, the head of Counter Terrorism Command, that due to the seriousness of the terrorist threat he had some flexibility about who he used, and how he used them. But he also knew that if everything went tits up, he’d be the one taking all the flak.