Tina shook her head. She’d messed up. The rules on covert entry were always the same. You could only bug an individual’s house while someone was watching them elsewhere. As soon as you lost the eyeball, you abandoned the op. A few hours working with Mike Bolt again and she’d already broken a cardinal rule.
‘He’s got a gun in the house,’ she said quickly. ‘It might be best to get some armed response, just as back-up?’
‘Is it loaded?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you’d better unload it quickly because he’s out of the car now and on his way to the front door. Christ, Tina, why do you always do this to me?’ She could hear the anger in his voice as she switched off the radio.
She heard the key turn in the lock downstairs. There was no way she could go down to the living room and unload the gun without Brozi being alerted to her presence. She looked round quickly for a place to hide, and settled for the double wardrobe opposite the bed. She climbed inside, noticing that the PC hadn’t yet gone into screensaver mode, so if Brozi came up here in the next few minutes, he was going to know someone had been tampering with it. Silently, she cursed herself for the self-destructive streak that constantly seemed to haunt her.
Yet, even then, she couldn’t help feeling that little twinge of excitement.
Twenty-four
15.00
The journalist on the Sky News desk sounded bored and irritated as he answered the phone.
‘This is Islamic Command, responsible for the attacks on the Crusader forces and those who support them,’ said Cain through the voice disguiser. ‘We are still waiting for a response from the British government to our demands. Do they not think their people are worth protecting?’
‘And can you repeat your demands?’
Cain was pleased by the note of panic that had now crept into the journalist’s voice. ‘If they do not comply by eight p.m. tonight, we promise to launch an attack so ferocious it will make your Godless country quake.’
The journalist started to speak again but Cain had already ended the call. He switched off the phone, removed the SIM card, and threw it into a bush, before walking a few yards further through the copse of trees and chucking the phone into a tangle of brambles.
The trees opened up in front of him, and he stood at the top of Hampstead Heath, looking down past the rolling parkland to the city that stretched out as far as the eye could see below him, its iconic structures — the Gherkin, the London Eye, the Shard — all clearly visible as they rose up from the mass of buildings around them. Up here it all looked so peaceful, but down there he knew it was chaos as the security forces desperately tried to hunt down the men behind the terrorist attacks that morning.
So far, the government’s only reaction to the attacks was to condemn them utterly, send their sympathies to the victims and their families, and repeat their standard mantras that the British government never negotiated with terrorists, and that Londoners should carry on regardless, not allowing the terrorists to disrupt their lives. Although the Prime Minister was supposedly chairing a meeting of Cobra — the government’s emergency reaction committee — he’d left it to the Commissioner of the Met to field questions from the nation’s media.
So, they were reacting in exactly the way Cain had predicted they would. In other words, everything was going according to plan.
He took out another of his phones. It was time to call Brozi and set up the meeting.
Twenty-five
15.01
Jetmir Brozi clearly didn’t invest a huge amount of money in clothes. There were barely a dozen items of clothing hanging up, and a few pairs of shoes cluttered round the floor, but nothing that gave Tina any real cover as she crouched in the half-light of the closed wardrobe.
She could hear him speaking on the phone, his voice faint and guttural. He was getting closer. A stair creaked, then another.
He was coming up.
Jesus, why did she let herself get in this situation? Why couldn’t she just do her job properly?
For the first time, fear replaced excitement. If Brozi discovered her, she was trapped, and with no weapon. She wasn’t even carrying pepper spray, for Christ’s sake.
The bedroom door opened and he walked inside, finishing up his conversation on the phone. He was talking in English but his voice was low and she wondered if what he was saying was being picked up on the audio.
She looked through the wardrobe’s narrow keyhole and saw him walking round with his back to her. From this angle, it was impossible to tell whether or not the screensaver on the PC had kicked in or not.
Brozi stopped talking, and Tina’s whole body tensed. She could hear her heartbeat — a rapid-fire tattoo that she would swear was audible from outside the wardrobe. He was standing still and looking over towards the PC. Slowly, he replaced the phone in the pocket of his trousers and exited the room, his movements unhurried. A few seconds later she heard him going down the stairs.
Tina waited, trying to work out what to do. She couldn’t stay in there for ever. At some point, Brozi was going to want to get something out of, or put something into, his wardrobe. He might go out again, of course, in which case she’d be fine. But if he didn’t, she was going to have to try to sneak out past him.
The staircase was creaking again. He was coming back up, and his movements were slower, more purposeful, this time.
She stared out of the keyhole, keeping as still as possible, watching the doorway.
Brozi reappeared, and this time he was holding the gun in front of him.
And he was looking right at her.
Tina held her breath.
After looking round the room again, he walked slowly towards the wardrobe.
Tina leaned back, clenched her fists, preparing. Her mobile phone vibrated in her jeans pocket, but she didn’t have time to wonder who it was. It was irrelevant now. She was on her own, and none of her new colleagues could help her.
He was right outside the wardrobe now. She could hear his slightly forced breathing. Any second now he’d open the door, take a step back so he was out of range of an attack, and there she’d be. Defenceless and totally vulnerable.
She exploded out of the wardrobe’s double doors, leaping straight into him, grabbing for his gun hand.
Caught completely by surprise, Brozi stumbled backwards as Tina yanked his arm upwards, and the gun went off with a deafening bang, the bullet striking the ceiling. They landed on the unmade double bed in a violent embrace with Tina on top. Brozi snarled, showing yellowed teeth, and, as he lifted his head, Tina butted him hard on the bridge of the nose, knocking him back.
But he was strong, and with a grunt of exertion he rolled over, knocking her off him, the gun swinging wildly as he tried to point it at her. Tina kept her grip but allowed herself to be pushed off the bed, landing on her feet and bringing Brozi with her. He spat in her face, and tried to butt her back, but she dodged the blow, and drove her knee into his groin.
Immediately, Brozi’s grip weakened and he yelped in pain. Tina gave him a hard shove that sent him tumbling, then turned and ran for the door, slamming it shut behind her. She took the stairs two at a time, going so fast she almost stumbled and lost her balance.
As she hit the first floor, she heard the bedroom door open and the sound of rapid footfalls on the staircase, and then she was on the last flight of stairs down to the ground floor, the front door and freedom only feet in front of her. She reached the door, pulled both handles, saw that he’d put the chain across, slammed it back shut, pulled back the chain, went to open it again-
‘Hands up or I shoot!’ came the angry, heavily accented shout from the top of the stairs.