KILL ME IF YOU CAN (Dave Cunane Book 8) (19 page)

‘I’m a terrorist suspect now? Are you insane?’

‘I’m very far from insane. I’m just going with the evidence; a gun fight at your home, the evidence of military training in the field adjoining it and most of all, your hostile attitude. Suppose instead of being the lucky survivor of an attack by four men you were in fact training for an attack of your own.  I think you’re a member of an Islamist cell, possibly a sleeper waiting for the call to action. No doubt more evidence will be found in a thorough search of that so-conveniently remote farm of yours. Any judge will agree that we have more than enough.’

Why, oh why did I bury four kilogram’s of C4 plastic explosive under Jan’s flower bed?  It could be my ticket to life imprisonment if this nutter had his way. I tried to row back.

‘I’ve failed to identify the four men you targeted for me and that proves I’m a terrorist? Surely there are other faces to look at? You must have some pictures of white guys. What about Anders Breivik?’

‘What about him?’ he shrieked. ‘Breivik has no relevance whatever. I’ve told you we’re looking at Islamic Jihad here.’

‘Breivik is a white guy who started shooting innocent people to make some crazy political point.’

So much for appeasement, but my suggestion did seem to cool him a little.

‘I’m losing patience with you Cunane. There are strong Islamic indications in this case and I think you recognised some of the faces you were shown but are remaining silent because they’re your fellow jihadis. You won’t be the first to be radicalised in prison.’

‘No, I wasn’t radicalised. Sir Lew wasn’t close to me but he was family and I want his killers caught. It’s just that the men who attacked me weren’t among those mug shots.’

He laughed at me. The laugh was all the more sinister for being slightly deranged.

I tried hard not to seem worried but didn’t succeed. This guy had leverage over me. I could soon find myself two hundred miles away in London, locked in a cell at Paddington Green police station with four walls, a copy of the Koran and a CCTV camera for company.

Appleyard’s eyes were dark brown, almost black and they glittered with spite as he looked at me. All trace of the previous charm had vanished. Such was the intensity of his glare that I took a step back and braced myself.

The expectation of violence was broken when Harry Hudson-Piggott tugged at his boss’s elbow. They stepped out of earshot. Hudson-Piggott briefed him about something. He turned to me again.

‘Well Cunane, you’re in luck. Mr Hudson-Piggott has just informed me that there are in fact more faces for you to look at. They’ve just come in from Interpol. You’ll have to go to our North West regional HQ to look at them. Naturally we don’t send such material over the internet so you can only access it there. I suggest that you take a little more care this time. Have another look at the database I’ve already shown you. Perhaps my warning about our powers might jog your memory.’

21

Tuesday: early evening

All hope of a quick exit from the airport gradually faded.

Clint was brought to join me in the inner office and the door was barred again. Both security guards kept us company. We were fed. I just pecked at my food but Clint kindly cleared my plate for me. The atmosphere in the enclosed room was oppressive although Clint didn’t notice it. At one point he even fell asleep.

‘What are we waiting for, what’s the delay?’ I asked the guard for about the tenth time.

‘The armoured van won’t come any quicker for you asking over and over, sir.’

‘But why do we need an armoured van? I could have been to Bury and back on either the bus or the Metrolink by now.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Civilians’ aren’t supposed to know that MI5 Regional HQ is on an industrial estate near Bury but I did and in fact it had been mentioned on the local news when MI5 set up regional HQs all over the country. The item was later deleted but not before I’d noticed it.

‘We need the van because that’s procedure, sir. You’re a high value asset who’s already been attacked by the opposition so Mr Appleyard couldn’t just let you wander about the streets for anyone to take a pop at, could he?’ he said wearily.

I grimaced.

‘We can’t send you in a taxi. Don’t you know that half of the taxis round here are driven by IC4 males, some of them recently arrived? Who knows what they get up to?’

‘Paranoia,’ I grunted. ‘You’re all mad.’

He raised his eyebrows by way of response which I took as partial agreement.

At half six, by which time I calculated that Jan and the children would be heading for the Irish ferry, there was movement. Claverhouse’s two young minders from the morning
suddenly appeared, accompanied by the woman herself. They were still in suits and had the brief cases fitted with submachine guns.

Claverhouse signalled us to follow and we walked downstairs through a door and onto the airside. An unwashed white Toyota Hiace van was waiting for us, parked right up against Terminal Two. Entry was by a sliding door on the driver’s side. The open door revealed two rows of seats, four places in all. The seats were well padded, firmly anchored and fitted with heavy duty racing style seat belts. The belts were wider than those in normal vehicles and were anchored at six points. The back doors, each with a small window, were closed and bolted.

The van itself, after all the talk of ‘armour’, didn’t look particularly special and Claverhouse must have noticed my disdainful glance. Going by external appearance it could have belonged to a jobbing builder or any tradesman.

‘This van is bullet proof, with ram resistant bumpers and forty-millimetre thick windows. It was in use in Dewsbury today hence the delay.’

‘You’re sure the long wait isn’t so that Appleyard can invent some Islamic connections for me? Perhaps he’s going to suggest that I’ve visited a terrorist training camp in Pakistan?’

‘Who’s delaying things now, Cunane? Why don’t you shut up and get in? You sit next to me and your pet monster can spread himself over the two rear seats.’

I turned to relay her order to Clint expecting him to have taken offence. He hadn’t. He jumped in joyfully and began rapping the walls, testing their strength.

He examined the complicated seat belts.

‘Rated up to 3g, these are, Dave,’ he said.

I didn’t know what he meant.

‘Does he need to bother with that?’ Claverhouse said. ‘We’ll be at our destination before he works out how to put it on.’

‘You get a seat belt. Clint gets a seat belt,’

Actually Clint was much more familiar with the racing type harness than I was and didn’t need my help. Size was the main problem.

It took a good deal of extending of straps before he could
make the harness fit over his massive frame but he did eventually, smiling to himself and checking out the fixings.

Claverhouse turned to me and shook her head.

I strapped myself in next to her. We exchanged sour looks.

Her two minders got in the cab and we set off. She wasn’t in the mood for light conversation and neither was I. It was hard to follow the route we were taking. We definitely weren’t going the most direct way via the M56 and M60 motorways: more delay and time wasted before I found out how Lee had got on with Jan and the children. They were all probably on the Irish ferry by now. My God, I was beginning to wish I’d joined them.

The tension only began to drain from me when I thought about my family.

A memory from my eventful morning struck me.

When I’d finished burying the C4 explosive under Jan’s flower bed, just one of the many stupid things I’d done today, I’d turned back to the house. On the path by the backdoor there were some of Lloyd’s little action figures, there were two Ben10s, a Dr Who in an orange space suit and a Power Ranger. Two of the figures had lost arms but one of the Ben10s had four arms so that was all right. Four figures meant two handfuls for a child, perhaps dropped when his fingers relaxed in sleep as Jan carried him to the car in the small hours.

I picked them up and arranged them on a windowsill. The Power Ranger lit up and made a noise. I felt a desperate longing for them all, even for Jan’s sharp
-tongued mother. When would I see them again?

As long as they were safe it didn’t matter what happened to me. It was beginning to seem that I’d escaped the clutches of whatever bunch of loonies was behind Lew’s killing only to fall into the almost equally dangerous hands of Rick Appleyard. The motion of the van, the swaying from side to side as we turned what felt like an impossibly large number of corners, gently tranquillised me and I began to drowse. It had been a very long day.

The turns were interminable.

I reasoned that we were taking a convoluted route to avoid being followed but it didn’t speak well of MI5 if they couldn’t
guarantee the security of a trip from their branch at the airport to HQ.

What happened next is hard to describe. The word ‘suddenly’ doesn’t convey the full sense of the violence and rapidity of the shocks I felt as the Hiace van was hit time after time on the driver’s side, the side I was on. Another vehicle was smashing into us to force us off the road. If I hadn’t been secured by the racing harness and the padded headrest I’m sure my neck would have snapped at the very first impact. I felt like a rag doll gripped in the teeth of a massive dog and being shaken to destruction or someone trapped inside a giant tumble-dryer. The armoured sides of our vehicle rang like a bell.

Wham! … Wham! … Wham!

It was like that: one terrific blow after another.

The side smashes stopped. I decided afterwards that there’d been at least three high speed collisions. But now the van, which must have been cruising at anything from fifty to seventy miles an hour, began an up and down motion that tested the seat belts and then almost before my mind could perceive the fact, things began to change from vertical to horizontal.

We were rolling, doing the full three sixty. Once, twice we went over, then I lost count.

My mind registered the sound of screaming. It was Claverhouse and most certainly me, but there was nothing in Clint’s
basso profundo
range. I know the sound of his screams. I felt a stab of fear. Was he dead?

We rolled for what felt like ages. Reason told me we were on a steep bank but in my panic it was like the slopes of Everest. We weren’t going to stop.

Mercifully, with a final violent jolt we thudded to a halt in that instant.

It was that moment in cartoons where they show the victim sitting with his eyes revolving and little birds tweeting in a circle round his head. This wasn’t like that at all.

Total disorientation is the only way I can describe it, certainly no little birds. One moment I was sitting upright trying to make myself comfortable for a nap and thinking about my family. The next moment the world had literally turned upside down.

I was on my side, in total darkness with my head lower than my feet. My body was at a steep angle to the horizontal and I was still lashed into my seat. The 3gs, whatever they were, had proved their worth. My neck was stiff from the violent movement I’d braced against but I could move my head so nothing was broken. My legs were OK too, although they dangled at an odd angle and my knees were throbbing. My eyes ached and I felt a stab of alarm … detached retinas? I felt like someone who’d been forced to undergo the world’s most dangerous roller coaster ride for many hours.

My stomach was full of butterflies and I felt sick but the overwhelming feeling was exhilaration.

I was alive. I felt for my watch, not to confirm that it was still working but because it’s a sports watch which I use as a timer on bike rides and you can see the time in the dark. I pressed it. The red LED numbers glowed. I hadn’t been struck blind. Inconsequentially I registered the time. It was six fifty three. We’d been on the road for less than twenty minutes.

Immediately that thought was interrupted by deep groans coming from behind me.

‘Clint,’ I managed to croak after clearing my mouth of bile. I was answered by a grunt.

‘I’m OK, Dave,’ he answered.

He’d made it too. I felt a surge of relief followed by fear. How many more times were we going to face death today?

The darkness was total. The glow from my watch was less than the feeblest candle.  Whatever interior lights the van possessed were no longer working. There was a strong smell of petrol. We had to get out of here. I stretched my arm out.

Claverhouse was still there.

‘Ms Claverhouse, Molly,’ I shouted.

She made a whimpering noise which suggested that she was hurt.

I explored further, my hand travelled over her chest, well protected by the straps and padded buckle and then to her face.

That roused her.

‘Get your f**king hand off my face, you f**king arsehole,’ she shouted.

‘Sorree! I was just checking that you’re still alive.’

‘I know what you were doing, you dirty bastard,’ she snapped.

I was drawing breath for a reply when Clint spoke. Repartee doesn’t flow easily when you’ve just survived a near fatal collision but Clint more than made up for my slowness.

‘That was really, really rude!’ he shouted at the top of his voice.

There was silence for a second and then Claverhouse and I began laughing simultaneously. I laughed until tears came and she did the same. We laughed from sheer relief at being alive rather than at the ridiculousness of Clint’s words which weren’t ridiculous at all.

‘What she said
was
really very, very rude
,’ Clint insisted in an injured tone.

‘You’re quite right, Clint,’ Claverhouse agreed, ‘we weren’t laughing at you and I’m extremely sorry for what I said. I was upset. Mr Cunane, I apologise.’

‘Apology accepted but how the hell do we get out of here? The van’s resting on the sliding door so we can’t leave the way we entered.’

‘We’ll have to wait for the two Ms to unlock the back door.’

‘Unlock?’

‘The back doors are fastened with a padlock on the outside.’

‘So we can’t get out unaided? Brilliant!’

‘This is a security van, Cunane. We can’t have people slipping out of the back door when they feel like it. We’ll just have to wait until the two Ms recover. They may be stunned or something.’

‘Two Ms, 3g belts,’ Clint said.

‘Who are the two M’s?’

‘Myers and Morgan of course, my security detail, you’ve already met them. The name’s an in joke. They’re in front.’

‘It may have escaped your notice but this place stinks of petrol and we need to get out now.’

‘Yes, can’t you rap on the glass or something to get their attention? They may be trying to contact HQ. I’m not getting out of this seat without medical help. I’ve sprained something badly. I’m sure my spine’s damaged.’

I released my belt, tumbled onto the side of the van, now the floor, and hauled myself upright. I banged on the internal partition which separated us from the front compartment. There was no response. I banged harder, still nothing.

I held the light from my watch close to the glass.

All it produced was an eerie red reflection of my own face.

Suddenly there was a stronger light. Clint had a small torch on his key chain. I say small but it was actually of near normal size for anyone else. He passed it to me.

I shone the light through the small observation port into the front cab. Myers and Morgan were still there, still belted into their seats but both thoroughly dead.

The toughened, bullet proof window glass hadn’t been strong enough to prevent a section of motorway crash barrier entering their compartment. The unlucky driver’s head was smashed to a bleeding pulp with a large section of his brain exposed. The man in the passenger seat had received the full force of the twisted metal through his chest. Yes, I know crash barriers aren’t supposed to come loose but then you aren’t supposed to hit them with ram resistant bumpers are you? It was a ghoulish sight. Held by their belts at an unnatural angle, blood was draining out of their horrific wounds.