Deadline (23 page)

'What the hell happened?' yelled Barry in his
ear, his tone close to full-blown panic as the full
enormity of what was happening began to hit
home. 'Control to all units, secure the scene.
Secure the money. Armed back-up is arriving
shortly.'

Bolt knew that the important thing was to stay
calm and take the lead. In the ten seconds since
Turner had got hit, the man with the bag had
disappeared. They had to get him. Obanje and
Tina had arrived now and Bolt yelled at Obanje to
keep up the chase and Tina to stay with her
injured colleague.

'What about the one who stabbed him?' she
demanded.

'He's mine,' hissed Bolt, jumping to his feet.

The knifeman had run off down Tottenham
High Road and he, too, had disappeared from
view, but Bolt wasn't going to give up that easily.
He didn't give a toss about the money, that was
irrelevant, but this bastard, whoever he was, had
seriously injured one of his men, as well as put
Bolt himself through over a day's worth of
personal hell. He hadn't got a good enough look
at him to see whether or not it was Ridgers, but he
didn't think it was. Guessing that he would keep
the black cap on to avoid being ID'd by CCTV
cameras, and knowing he wouldn't have got far,
Bolt took off after him, ignoring the frantic chatter
in the earpiece.

He almost hit a police horse and took no notice
of the shouted command of its rider as he ran
down the middle of the road between the lines of
stationary cars, his eyes scanning the pavements
and the legions of white-shirted fans. There was
no black cap anywhere to be seen. Not on either
side of the road. It was like looking for a needle in
a haystack. Except for one thing. The herd
mentality remained in full flow, which meant that
almost everybody had turned in the direction of
the mêlée behind, and some were actually moving
towards it, their movement hesitant. One man,
though, stood out, simply because he was
walking purposefully away from the scene, his
pace far too quick. He was keeping to the inside of
the pavement, trying to remain out of view as he
weaved between other fans. Bolt had hardly got a
look at him earlier, but he was the right height and
build, and he was thirty, maybe forty yards ahead.

It was him, Bolt was sure of it. He wiped his
eyes, spat on the ground to get the taste of gas out
of his mouth and kept running, going flat out in
his desperation to get hold of him.

Thirty-five, thirty, twenty-five, twenty yards.
His footfalls sounded artificially loud on the
tarmac. Two uniformed cops in full riot gear stood
in the road surveying the crowd uneasily, their
batons drawn. One of them heard Bolt's rapid
approach and, as if he was looking for someone to
lash out at, lifted his baton menacingly and
shouted at him to stop. Bolt didn't even slow
down. He just pulled out his warrant card and
yelled 'Police!' as loud as he could, and miraculously
the cop simply got out of the way.

Unfortunately, the suspect also turned round.
The expression on his face was one of pure shock,
even behind the black shades, and in that single
moment Bolt knew he was looking at the right
man.

The suspect took off down the street, knocking
over a middle-aged woman in his haste and stumbling
before regaining his balance. Her husband
shouted something and threw out a hand to grab
him but he was nowhere near quick enough. This
guy was speedy, and he had one hell of a lot of
incentive to get away from his pursuers.

Bolt was less fit than he should have been.
These days he only got to the gym once a week at
best, and he was beginning to put on a few
pounds round the middle. Today, though, he was
powered by pure rage, and he kept pace with his
target. He screamed at him to stop, loud enough
so the whole street could hear it. People turned his
way, then towards the fleeing suspect, who
reacted by pulling out his knife and waving it
wildly in front of him. It was an effective move.
The crowds parted, no one wanting to tackle a
knifeman.

Bolt sneaked a quick look over his shoulder.
Two of the team, Dan Blakeley and Cliff Yakonos,
were running along behind him, but were still a
good twenty-five yards back, while the helicopter
continued to hover impotently overhead. And
Bolt was unarmed. If he caught up with the
suspect, he'd be taking a huge risk. He thought
about this information, accepted the risk, and kept
running, ignoring the pain in his lungs and beginning
to gain on his target half-yard by half-yard.

'Suspect two running south on Tottenham High
Road,' he shouted into the mike. 'He's armed and
dangerous. Request immediate back-up.'

'This is control. Back-up on way. ETA one
minute.'

Without warning, a large man in his thirties,
with a kid of about ten who must have been his
son, jumped at the suspect as he ran past, trying to
grab him in a bear hug. It was a brave move.
Brave, public-spirited and totally rash. He got a
grip, knocked the suspect against the window of a
charity shop, but wasn't quick enough to
neutralize the knife. The suspect reacted ruthlessly
and instinctively, driving it directly into the
man's upper body with a single bloody lunge, his
face contorted with rage and desperation. The
man went down like a falling tree, probably dead
before he hit the ground. His kid cried out, 'Dad!'
It was a terrified, shocked howl, a sound that
would live with Bolt for a long time. It was a
savage reminder that death can be so quick. One
second you're a living, breathing, smiling human
being out with your boy to see your team play
football on a glorious evening, the next you're
gone. For ever.

'Suspect two has stabbed member of public;
urgent medical assistance required,' Bolt yelled
into his mike, but it wasn't urgent. The guy was
dead. Like Andrea's cleaner and Jimmy Galante.
Maybe even Emma. Laid low by a killer without
the slightest regard for human life.

A fury filled Bolt. It was stronger than any he'd
felt in a long, long time, maybe ever, dwarfing the
emotion that had soared through him as he kicked
and beat Marcus Richardson, and it seemed to
give him a blind, terrible energy.

The man's intervention might have cost him his
life but it also cost the suspect five or six yards. He
took off again as soon as he could, waving his
bloody knife as he ran past the son he'd just
deprived of a father, but he now had only a
handful of yards on Bolt. A junction was coming
up ahead, and when he reached it he turned hard
right, his body almost jack-knifing in his bid to
keep momentum. Bolt kept coming, not even
thinking about hesitating as he too took the
corner, even though he knew the suspect could
use the blind spot as an ambush point. He was
moving beyond logical risk assessment and into
the realms of pure revenge. He was going to beat
the information he needed out of this bastard,
would kill him if he had to, but there was no way
he was losing him. No way at all. It was an incredibly
liberating thought.

When he rounded the bend, the suspect had
gained a few yards and was racing across to the
other side of the road through the blocked traffic.
There were fewer people milling about on the
pavements here, and no sign of any police either.
But also less cover for his quarry, and Bolt knew
that as long as he kept pace, feeding the suspect's
position into the mike, then he wasn't going to get
away.

After thirty more yards, the suspect looked
round and saw Bolt still right behind him. He
turned back and kept running, but Bolt was
conscious of the knife in his hand. It was a stiletto,
the blade probably eight inches long, still slick
with the blood of two men. All Bolt had to fight
with was the standard-issue police pepper spray.
That and the pure rage that was driving him on.
Neither of which was any guarantee of success.
He knew that if he'd had a gun on him he'd have
used it without a second's hesitation to bring the
bastard down. He'd have put a bullet in his leg,
and beaten the whereabouts of his daughter out of
him while he lay helpless. Because the fact
remained – indeed, it was branded right on the
front of his brain in flaming white-hot letters – that
if he lost this man, Emma was as good as dead.

The suspect turned a hard left. Bolt did the
same, shouting the street name into the mike, but
he wasn't looking where he was going properly
and he slipped and lost his balance, jarring his
knee as he hit the deck hard, and rolling on to his
side. He ignored the pain, jumped up and kept
running, cursing the fact that his clumsiness had
lost him five yards and counting.

The street led up to the entrance to a high-rise
council estate. It was a dead end for cars. Bolt
cursed. He knew that if the suspect got inside the
warren of alleys that these characterless sixties
estates always featured it would mean he'd
almost certainly slip through the net. Jesus, where
the hell was the back-up? Even the helicopter was
no longer overhead; doubtless it had been sent to
chase the money. It disgusted him that the
recovery of the half a million pounds was more
important to his bosses, and their bosses, than
capturing a brutal knife-wielding killer and
possibly saving the life of a fourteen-year-old girl,
but then in his heart he'd always known it would
be. The whole British justice system was built on
the protection of property above the protection of
lives, which was why armed robbers were always
put away for two, three, sometimes even five
times as long as child molesters.

Bastards. In those taut, desperate seconds, Bolt
was a man entirely on his own, out on a limb and
having to do everything himself, knowing that
failure was unthinkable.

The armed response vehicle seemed to materialize
from nowhere. In fact it had come out of a
side road up ahead, just in front of the entrance to
the estate. It stopped dead, blocking the way, and
the three officers were out in an instant, their
MP5s pointed straight at the suspect, who was
twenty yards from them.

'Armed police! Drop your weapon!'

Bolt reached into his pocket for the pepper
spray, knowing that the suspect was going to turn
and run back his way, away from the guns,
meaning it would be up to him to make an arrest.

But the suspect didn't. He kept on going.
Charging right at them, yelling something that
sounded remarkably like a battle cry.

'Don't shoot him!' shouted Bolt. 'Take him
alive! For Christ's sake, we need him!'

'Armed police! Drop your weapon now!'

'Don't shoot!'

The suspect was only ten yards away from
them. Still running, he pulled back his arm and
threw the knife. It hit one of the ARV officers in
the arm above the elbow, slicing right through the
bicep. The cop dropped his gun and grabbed
uselessly at the knife's handle, which was jammed
halfway into his arm, stumbling as he did so. For
the suspect, it was a suicidal move. Bolt knew it,
and knew too what it meant. He saw a dead girl;
a funeral; a lifetime of wondering how he could
have done things differently.

The bullets sounded like firecrackers in the
empty street, their noise reverberating hollowly
off the high walls of the surrounding buildings.
Two two-round bursts. The suspect flew backwards,
arms flailing as he spun round before
crashing to the ground, his sunglasses flying off
and clattering across the tarmac.

'Police!' screamed Bolt to identify himself,
holding up his warrant card as he ran over to
where the suspect lay. He knelt down, felt for a
pulse, knew it was pointless. There was something
there, but it was fading fast, and even as his
fingers squeezed the wrist and he shouted at him
not to die, his voice full of desperation, it disappeared
altogether. He was gone. His eyes were
closed, his mouth ever so slightly open, a single
drop of blood forming in one corner. It wasn't
Scott Ridgers, either. This guy was young – late
twenties, maybe thirty – an ordinary, unblemished
face, olive skin and thick black hair
suggesting a background from somewhere in
southern Europe. Bolt had never seen him before,
knew nothing about him, would probably never
know anything about him, other than the fact that
his death might have ramifications for him that
lasted for the rest of his days.

And as he knelt there, staring down at the dead
man, unable to understand why the ARV cops
couldn't have used a non-lethal option like a taser
or a baton round to bring him down, his worst
fears were confirmed as Barry's frantic voice came
over the earpiece.

'Control to all units. What do you mean you've
lost suspect one? Find him! I want the whole
fucking area locked down! We have to get hold of
that money! Over.'

They'd failed. And God alone knew what
happened now.

'Why the hell did you remove all the tracking
devices, Mrs Devern?' demanded Mo Khan,
barely able to contain his anger. 'You must have
known it was going to help them get away.'

Andrea, ashen-faced, shocked like all of them,
glared at him. 'Because they knew about them,
that's why!' she yelled, her voice close to
breaking. 'They knew you were there. How the
hell did that happen?'

The question hung in the air.

Twenty minutes had passed since the fatal
shooting of suspect two. Two police helicopters
continued to hover overhead, moving in lazy
circles, hunting for a quarry who had long since
disappeared, leaving a trail of chaos in his wake.
The worst of the crowds were gone too, although
there were still large groups of pedestrians
hanging around to see the aftermath of the action,
and because they were spilling out into the road
they were causing serious traffic congestion. The
operation to clear the area to allow police forensic
teams and ambulances in was being further
complicated by an apparently unrelated outbreak
of fighting between rival fans further up on White
Hart Lane. The competing blare of sirens filled the
air as Mo, Bolt and Tina stood beside one of a line
of police vehicles clustered round the corner from
the street where the body of suspect two still lay
where it had fallen. Andrea was in the back of one
of the cars, sitting with her legs out, holding a
plastic bottle of water.

The mood among everyone at the scene was
one of complete shock. The operation had been a
complete failure. Half a million pounds of
taxpayers' money had walked away from right
under their noses; worse than that, a member of
the public had been killed, one of the team's own
number seriously wounded, and the one suspect
they had managed to apprehend had decided to
go out in a blaze of glory rather than be taken
alive. It couldn't really have gone any more
wrong. The only positive was that, unlike the
stabbed fan, Turner was still alive, although the
seriousness of his condition wasn't yet known.
He'd been airlifted to the Homerton Hospital in
Hackney whose expertise in dealing with knife
injuries, honed through years of practice, was
legendary, so he was in the best possible hands.
Even so, as they all knew, that might not be
enough.

Bolt felt as if he'd done ten rounds boxing a
man twice his size and speed whose speciality
was headshots. He couldn't seem to think
straight, was finding it hard to come to terms with
the fact that he and his people were being outthought
and outfought by the men who'd taken
Emma. He knew he couldn't give up, but standing
there among the wreckage of the op, he was
getting perilously close.

'What happened, Andrea?' he asked. 'We lost
communication with you after you stopped to
pick up the package.'

'I got a call on the phone that was in it. It was
Emma screaming.'

Bolt swallowed. Told himself to keep calm.

'Just this one terrified scream. Then it cut out
and he came on the line. He said that this time
Emma was screaming out of fear, but the next
time it would be out of pain, unless I did exactly
what I was told. Those were his exact words. He
told me to use that thing to start removing all the
bugs and trackers' – she pointed at the bugfinding
device that was now in an evidence bag in
Mo's hands – 'and I tried to tell him I didn't know
what he was talking about, but he told me he
knew I'd gone to the police, and if I tried to deny
it then he'd . . . he'd make Emma scream again.'
She stared at them each in turn. 'I had no choice.
Don't you see that? I had no choice. I want my
daughter back.'

'Well, you went about it the wrong way,' said
Tina, her tone exasperated.

'What do you know? Have you got children?'

'No, but—'

'But nothing. You have no idea what you're
talking about.'

Tina opened her mouth to reply but Bolt
stepped in. This was getting them nowhere.

'OK, Andrea, so you followed their instructions.

You removed the tracking devices and threw them
out of the car. But not the two that were attached
to the money.'

'No, they told me to leave them in the car when
I got out.'

It was a logical move from the kidnappers'
point of view, lulling the team into a false sense of
security by letting them think they'd still be able
to follow the ransom. It also showed that at least
one of those involved had fairly expert knowledge
of tracking devices.

'What was the last instruction you received?'

'To get out of the car and start walking up the
road. I was told I'd be met by someone. I started
walking and the next thing I knew there were
these loud bangs, everyone was running, there
was that gas . . . I remember shutting my eyes,
getting knocked about by all these people
running, and then someone punched me in the
side of the head and grabbed the bag.' She
touched the left side of her face where she'd been
struck. The area was red and beginning to swell.

'And did you get a look at your attacker at all,
Mrs Devern?' asked Mo.

'No, I didn't see anything. It all happened so
fast.'

She took a gulp from the water and hunted
round for her cigarettes, but couldn't find them.

'Has anyone got a smoke?'

Tina reached into her jeans, pulled out a
battered pack of Silk Cut and a cheap lighter,
and lit two cigarettes, one for Andrea and one
for her. Andrea gave her a curt nod of acknowledgement.

'So, the person on the phone made you remove
all these devices,' said Tina, a hint of scepticism in
her voice, 'which you did . . .'

'That's right.'

'And did he at any point tell you when you
were going to see your daughter again?'

All three of them looked at Andrea.

'He said I'd be seeing her very soon. As soon as
he'd verified that the money was all there.'

'When did he say that?'

'During the car journey. Twice. He said it twice.'

'How did he say he was going to make contact
to tell you where to find her?'

'He didn't.'

'It seems like you were very trusting,' said Tina.

'You made it impossible for us to track either the
suspects or the money, yet you were offered very
little in return.'

'All right, Tina,' said Bolt, concerned about the
aggressiveness of her questioning, 'there's no
point going over all this now.'

Andrea shot Tina a look that was both angry
and incredulous.

'What is it? Don't you believe me or something?'

'No,' Tina replied, 'it's just that I can't understand
why you did it.'

'Look, don't blame me because someone leaked
the fact that I'd brought the police in. This is your
fault not mine.' She took an urgent drag on her
cigarette and stood up. 'I'm going home.'

'I'm afraid that's not possible for the moment,
Andrea,' Bolt informed her.

'Back off, Mike. They've still got my daughter.
They could call. So, if you're not arresting me, I'm
going, and I'm going to need a lift if you're
holding on to my car.'

She pushed past them and started walking in
the direction of Tottenham High Road.

'Wait here,' Bolt told the other two and hurried
after her. 'Listen, Andrea,' he said when he was
alongside her, 'you've got to let me know the
second you hear from the kidnappers, OK?'

'What, so you can fuck it up again?' she
snapped, without breaking pace. 'No way. I'll take
my own chances from now on.'

Bolt grabbed her by the shoulder and swung
her round so that she was facing him.

'That's not fair, Andrea, and you know it. I did
everything I could.'

'Let go of my arm. You're hurting me.'

Bolt was conscious of several uniformed cops
watching him. He ignored them. 'Please,' he said,
'tell me when they call.'

'Mike, what the hell's going on?'

Bolt looked round into the eyes of Stephen
Evans, the former head of the NCS, now the assistant
head of SOCA, who was flanked by several
other equally grim-faced men in suits. Bolt let go
of Andrea's arm and she walked away rapidly,
passing Evans and his colleagues before they had
a chance to say anything. Evans whispered something
to the men with him and they went after
Andrea while he approached Bolt.

Bolt knew Evans from the past. A short,
compactly built man in his late forties with a
neatly clipped moustache and a military bearing
courtesy of an earlier career in the army, he'd
helped him once before when he'd found himself
in trouble, and had a well-deserved reputation for
looking after the interests of the men and women
in his charge. But this time it was different, and
Bolt knew it.

'Hello, sir,' he said with a sigh. 'Long time no
see.'

Evans stopped in front of him. 'Yes, it is. And
I'm sorry we've got to meet again under these
kinds of circumstances.'

Bolt nodded grimly. 'I know.'

'I'm afraid I'm taking over the running of this
op from SG2 Freud. Because of the way it's gone,
he's been suspended pending an investigation.
The same goes for you, Mike. As the team leader
of the central team on this, I can't afford to keep
you on.'

Bolt took a step back as he absorbed the hit.

'Don't do this, sir. I've got a good lead. There's
a guy called Scott Ridgers with a long criminal
record who's been doing gardening work for
Andrea – Mrs Devern – until very recently. He
was part of a gang of robbers she informed on
fifteen years back. I think he might be our suspect
one.'

'I know all that, Mike,' said Evans coldly.
'We've already got surveillance in place outside
his flat in Finsbury Park.'

'But he's not there, is he? And the guy's a
paedophile—'

'We're dealing with it.'

'Listen, sir, please—'

'No,' Evans said with a brutal finality. 'You're
off the case, Mike, suspended until further notice.
The IPCC will be getting in touch with you for a
witness statement, so don't go disappearing on
holiday. I'm sorry, but that's the way it's going to
have to be.'

Bolt knew there was no point arguing. The decision
had been made. He watched as Evans walked
past him and over to Mo and Tina. He caught their
eyes but said nothing. Instead, he simply turned
away. He was no longer wanted or needed here.