Shredder (12 page)

There was nothing to say in reply that would not have sounded like empty threats and bravado, so I said nothing; I simply stared at the Turk. In the past it had sometimes felt as if he could read my mind, and right now I was counting on that, and thinking hard about what it would be like to stamp on his face until it caved in—the sound it would make, and the mess.

I was pleased to see the Turk's eyes widen, and his self-satisfied smile flicker slightly. He licked his lips and sat up with an abruptness that bordered on irritation, and I saw him collect himself before he pulled something out of his pocket and tossed it onto the table. It was a memory stick, and it lay there between us like a gauntlet.

“Something extra to motivate you,” said the Turk. I didn't move.

“She is counting on you, Finn.” His smug smile was back. “I told her what I would ask you to do. She knows you are the only one who can save her. That little flame of hope is the only thing keeping her going.” He leaned across the table towards me. “Honestly?” he said. “Part of me wants you to fail. To see the look on her lovely face when I tell her you are dead, and that her hope was all for nothing. Before
I give her to Dean and Kemal.” He pushed the stick towards me.

“You have two days,” he said.

Back home—in the desolate empty house that passed for home—I plugged the memory stick into a laptop. It held a single video file; my hand hesitated on the trackpad, afraid of what I was about to see, but I knew I had no choice. I double-clicked on it.

The footage that first appeared I'd seen before, on the Turk's phone: Zoe pulling her bike down the steps of her house, with a bagful of books bustling across campus, gossiping in the canteen with a friend. The camera zoomed in so close at one point you could see the stud glinting in her nose, but she seemed blissfully unaware and utterly unself-conscious. Maybe with her looks she was so used to being stared at and ogled she didn't even notice anymore; for once I wished she hadn't been so blasé and laid-back, that she'd been paranoid enough to look about her. If she'd spotted the surveillance guy she could have gone to the cops, had him picked up for harassment, told her friends, taken precautions….

What was I saying? We
had
taken precautions—we'd gone to see Amobi. What had gone wrong with
that safe house? Had she got fed up with the confinement and walked out on them?

This footage had been cut, I noticed; it wasn't just shots snatched by a smartphone and strung together. Beginnings and endings—the places you'd expect to see camera-shake or autofocus kicking in—had been edited out. There was more where this came from that they weren't showing me, and I wondered why; had the cameraman made it look slick to impress the Turk, or to intimidate me?

Suddenly I was watching footage I hadn't seen before, and it wasn't so slick anymore. The camera was in a dimly lit room and jumping about all over the place. I could hear labored breathing, and yelps of pain that sounded like they might be Zoe's. The lens was vacuuming up shots of wallpaper and crumpled bed sheets, then a blurred close-up of a girl's hand being roughly gripped, as her wrist was bound to a slatted bed frame with a length of cheap blue nylon cord. Whoever was filming this girl was also helping to restrain her.

The person holding the camera stepped back; yes, it was Zoe, gagged and bound to a wooden bed in a corner of a dingy room—a first-floor room, judging by the level of the streetlights I could just make
out through the net curtains. She was in a gray cotton T-shirt dress that had ridden up her thighs as she struggled and thrashed about; Dean stood by the bed, leering and winking at the camera, and he reached out to stroke her face. I heard him tell her, “Say hello to your friend Finn,” as he tugged down the bandanna tied tightly around her mouth.

She snapped at him with her teeth instead, and when that failed she spat at him, “Screw you!”

The watchers—three or four of them by the sound of it—jeered and tittered as she wrenched at the ropes, cursing. I could tell every move was agony for her, as the coarse cord bit into the flesh of her wrists. Dean giggled and hooted, and ran his hand up her thigh, pulling her dress up higher, over her hip, lingering on the hem of her panties—

I pulled the memory stick out. I'd seen enough. In a corner of my mind I'd been nursing one tiny sickly runt of hope—that the Turk had been bluffing, that he didn't have Zoe, that he'd been counting on me to panic and run to do his bidding. Now even that hope was dead. Why would he have bluffed, anyway, when I could call Amobi and find out the truth?

But what
was
the truth? Zoe wouldn't have walked away from the safe house—had the Turk's
people snatched her? There was only one way I was going to find out, and only one way I could get Zoe back safely.

The landline in this house still worked, even though I'd never paid the bill. I dialed Amobi's number.

It was about noon when I found the dead-end side street off a busy main road, a few tube stops from my house, where we'd arranged to meet. His unremarkable Ford was neatly lined up in a parking bay, and Amobi was a shadow behind the wheel. Even on a Sunday you had to pay to park round here; I noticed he'd bought a ticket and stuck it on his windscreen. He wasn't the sort of copper to wave his officer's ID at a traffic warden and tell them to sod off.

I pulled the front passenger door open and slid into the seat. Although the cul-de-sac was narrow and shaded from the blistering sun, the air inside the car was rancid and clammy, and I felt myself break out in a sweat before I'd even shut the door. I'd grabbed the chance to change my clothes and shower before I came out, but already I smelled of exhaustion and desperation. Amobi had hung his suit jacket up on a hook over the seat behind
him, but he hadn't switched on his air-con or even opened a window, and when I saw his posture I decided not to ask why. He hadn't spoken or turned to look at me when I got in; now his left hand lay in his lap, and with the other he rubbed his mouth as if to stop himself from blurting out something he might regret. It wasn't hard to sense his anger.

“Hey,” I said. “Thanks for coming.”

Now he turned to look at me, then turned away again. “Yeah,” he said.

I felt my own anger flaring up.
Yeah?
What the hell did that mean? When he'd answered his mobile his replies had been short, almost monosyllabic, but I'd thought that was him being efficient and businesslike. If he was just going to grunt at me now I didn't know why he'd agreed to meet up.

“I'm sorry about Trafalgar Square,” I said. He fixed me with a stare that suggested he thought I was mocking him. “I wanted to get in touch,” I said. “But McGovern's people took my phone, kept me incommunicado—”

“Forget it.” Amobi turned away again. “It's all water under the bridge now.”

“He's got Zoe,” I said. “The Turk. If I don't kill McGovern for him, his people will kill her.”

“Christ,” said Amobi, and he closed his eyes and shook his head like he was trying to shake out the words he'd just heard me say. “Where are they holding her?”

“I don't know,” I said. “A flat somewhere.” Amobi actually snorted. “He gave me this….” I held out the memory stick, but Amobi didn't take it.

“What do you want me to do with that?” he said.

“I don't know!” I snapped. “Analyze it—bloody look at it, at least—”

“For God's sake, Finn!” he snapped back. “I can't get a sample of piss analyzed!” I'd never seen Amobi lose control. Part of me was fascinated, while another part of me wanted to grab his shiny tie and strangle him with it. “I told my people you would help me stop this gang war before it started. Instead, two men died, twenty tourists got injured—a police officer got shot, in the center of London!” He held up two fingers in a pinch. “I am
this
close to facing a disciplinary committee—”

“A disciplinary committee? God, I'm so sorry,” I said. “What will they do? Shoot you? Throw you in a blender?” My own frustration was boiling over now. “Or will they just pull a few bloody buttons off your uniform?”

Amobi turned away, trying to regain control of himself, and I saw the muscles in his face clench as he ground his teeth. He rubbed his face again, the other hand gripping the steering wheel till the color bleached out of his knuckles.

“You told me you'd keep her safe,” I said. “You promised me—you promised
her
. What the hell happened?”

“Orders happened,” snarled Amobi. But he couldn't look me in the eye—he was ashamed of betraying Zoe, and I was angry for letting him, and furious at myself for ever taking the word of a copper. “After that shoot-out the word came down—shut the safe house, send Zoe back home. And what the hell could I tell them?”

“You could have told them she was still in danger,” I said. “You could have told them she was the daughter of a copper you used to work with—”

“I did tell them!” yelled Amobi. “Of course I told them! And they said none of that mattered, to shut down the operation down, let the Turk and McGovern settle between themselves, without involving innocent passersby—”

“Zoe and I are innocent!”

“Look, the NCA has its hands full trying to shut
down a terrorist network slaughtering people all over the UK. We need all the help we can get—” Amobi cut himself off abruptly, as if he'd said too much.

“
Help?
What the hell does that mean?”

“What it means,” he said, more quietly now, “is we're way overstretched. We have to…make the most of our resources.” But he was avoiding my eye again, and now that he'd started spouting bureaucratic jargon, I knew he was hiding something.

When I realized what it was, I gasped. “The Turk is
helping
you people? How?”

“That's not what I said!”

“That tip-off you got the other day—was that from him?”

“Finn, just stop with the questions, OK? This country is at war, and we need allies.”

“But the Turk's a gangster, a psychopath—”

“And so is McGovern.” Amobi knew he'd as good as admitted it, and there was no point in any more evasions. “Right now we have to choose the lesser of two evils,” he said.

“The Turk's taken Zoe,” I said. “He says he's going to torture her to death.”

“I'll try to help,” said Amobi.

“How?”

“I'll make some calls.”

“Are you fucking
kidding
me?” Suddenly I understood what he meant, and it hit me like a bullet to the belly. “You can't do anything, can you? That's why we're meeting in secret like this. Zoe and me are on our own.”

“I'm sorry, Finn,” said Amobi, “I really am—”

There was a sharp rap of knuckles on his side window. We'd both been so engrossed in yelling at each other we hadn't noticed the two uniformed cops approaching. They'd parked their patrol vehicle across the neck of the alley so Amobi couldn't drive off if he tried, and now they were standing one on each side of his car. All I could see was their midriffs—the white polycotton shirts tucked into black serge trousers, the stab vests and the belts groaning with handcuffs, truncheons and pepper spray. Amobi cursed and fumbled for the electric window switch. The window went halfway down, then stopped, jammed. Amobi stabbed at the button, muttering, but it wouldn't budge any further. The copper at his door leaned down and peered through the gap, clearly suspecting Amobi of playing dumb.

“May I ask what you're doing here, sir?” said the
copper. His “sir” was a flimsy pretense at politeness, a paper flower poked into a turd. He had a hard, chiseled face, buzz-cut hair and eyebrows so blond they were barely there. His pale cheeks glistened with sweat.

“Sorry, Officer, we're just about done here,” said Amobi. He reached for the keys hanging in the ignition and started the car.

“Would you mind switching your engine off, please?” The copper gripped the window rim as if he could hold the car back with one hand if he had to. I glanced over my shoulder and watched the other cop—skinny, spotty, younger than the first—stroll round to the rear of the car and stand muttering into his lapel radio, reading out the license plate. I was waiting for the moment when they'd realize their mistake and back off, groveling to Amobi, but that didn't seem to be happening, and Amobi for some reason didn't seem in any hurry to enlighten them. Instead, he meekly switched his engine off as instructed.

“Officer, we're minding our own business, and we're not committing any offense—”

The copper stood back and beckoned Amobi out with a crook of his finger. “Step out of the car for
me, please.” The “sir” had disappeared, I noticed, and I could hear that familiar authoritarian tinge creeping into the copper's voice—that smug, supercilious tone that dares you to answer with sarcasm or a smart remark, if you like the taste of pavement.

Sighing, Amobi opened his door and clambered out, leaving his jacket hanging in the rear, and shut his door carefully, so as not to appear to be slamming it in irritation. All of them seemed to be ignoring my existence; I wondered if the dumb coppers had even noticed I was there.

“Now I'm asking you again,” the first copper was saying to Amobi, “to tell us exactly what you're up to here.”
Up to
…typical copper question. No matter how you replied to it you'd sound guilty and defensive.

“I was conducting some private business,” said Amobi. “Having a private conversation, that's all.”

For Christ's sake
, I nearly spluttered,
just tell them who you are!
But Amobi, professional to the point of absurdity, seemed determined to maintain his cover.

“Not on the Police National Computer,” said the second cop to the first.