Street Soldier (22 page)

Sean would kill him. Sean would walk out of this room right now and actually kill him. He felt sick.

And he knew his mask had slipped. The hate that churned inside him right now was impossible to put a blank face on, and they had clocked it. He had as good as confessed, without saying a word.

‘I . . .’ He had to force his dry mouth to say the words. ‘I think I need a lawyer.’

The woman spook winced as if he had farted in polite company. ‘I really don’t think you do. A lawyer will force us to do this by the book, which will inevitably end in your conviction and imprisonment in a place where you’ll have quite a reputation as the man who helped supply terrorists with weapons.’

Sean shot her a sharp glance when she said ‘terrorists’, but he kept quiet and she kept going.

‘Not one I’d like myself, but there you go. It will be
something to keep you warm and happy for the next thirty years.’

‘Whereas,’ the man contributed, ‘doing without the lawyer and cooperating with us, using the skills and training you already have as a soldier will possibly –
possibly
– mean no prison at all.’

Sean dragged his eyes away from him for a moment, stared at the wall, the ceiling, out of the window. He couldn’t run. So it was either get a lawyer or work against Heaton. Of course, he didn’t actually have the money for a lawyer. But would that matter?

He glared at them from under his brows, but it was merely a mask to disguise the feeling of all hope draining away. Whatever happened, he wasn’t going to leave this room a free man. Face it, they knew about the rifles; they weren’t going to let that go.

He switched his gaze to the floor. ‘It . . . it wasn’t to supply terrorists,’ he muttered. That was the one shred of comfort he could hold onto. And maybe a good brief in court could get him less than thirty years if he stuck to it.

‘And of all the lies Corporal Heaton has told you, that’s the one true thing, is it?’

Sean stared at him. ‘Yes. Course it’s true. He’s a serving soldier, for fucksake! What would he be doing with terrorists?’

‘Just tell us where the rifles are, Private.’

The final shreds of Sean’s pride crept away to die. ‘He said the client had collected them,’ he muttered, still looking at the floor. He was now officially grassing, and he couldn’t find a single toss to give. ‘I can tell you where they were. If that helps.’

‘Go on.’

And so Sean described how the op had gone down: the observation, switching rifles with dummies, hiding them under the bush. The spooks remained expressionless while he spilled. Sean didn’t dare turn his head to meet the glare coming from Adams. He could feel it frying the side of his face.

‘Quite the criminal mastermind, is Corporal Heaton,’ the man murmured when he had finished.

‘So . . . you going to pull him in?’ Sean asked hopefully.

But the spook just looked at his watch. ‘Any more and we’ll be over-running.’

The woman looked at her own watch and concurred. Then back at Sean. ‘The sole reason for this entire charade, Private Harker, all the interviewing-the-platoon claptrap, was to let us spend time with you alone. There was no other way we could do that on base without being observed. And if we spend any more time now, the others will start to wonder why your interview is taking so long.
So here is what you will do – and remember, you are still cooperating. This evening you will find a reason to go into town. You will tell your friends you are calling a taxi. You will leave the base at precisely nineteen hundred hours . . .’

The gatehouse was still festooned with warning tape, somewhere between the end of demolition and the start of rebuilding. It had double the number of armed guards, and a hand-operated traffic barrier. Sean stepped through the pedestrian barrier, and out of the camp, dead on 19:00.

Oh, arsing hell, be on time, don’t make me have to talk to people
. . .

The excuse had been easy – his mum’s birthday was coming up, shit, he was always forgetting . . . He had done his bit. Now they just had to do theirs.

At 19:00 and ten seconds a hybrid Prius swished up, with the name of a taxi firm displayed by a light on the roof. The driver wore a flat cap and a casual pea jacket. ‘Ride for name of Harker?’ he called, not to Sean but to the guards, in an accent that was pure Wiltshire.

The guards merely indicated where Sean waited, in civvies, hunched up and trying to be invisible to anyone who might want a friendly chat. Like any muckers who suddenly thought it was a good idea to share a ride into town.

Sean trotted over to the taxi and climbed in the back. The driver eased the car away from the kerb to head into town. Sean hadn’t been in an electric car before, and even now he took time to think that it sucked. At slow speeds the Prius ran off its battery and barely made a sound.

‘Hello, Private.’ The voice was now accentless – as posh as it had been before. The man didn’t turn round, but their eyes met briefly in the rear-view mirror, before he looked back at the road to concentrate on steering.

‘Where we going?’ Sean asked.

The driver signalled to turn onto the main road. The engine cut in as the car picked up speed. ‘To carry on where we left off,’ he said.

The last instruction the spooks had given Franklin was to issue Sean with duties that kept him well away from Heaton for the rest of the day. Which unfortunately meant that Sean had to work under Adams’s gaze instead. To everyone else, Adams was his usual self – an affable tower of integrity and discipline. But Sean was aware that whenever the sergeant’s eyes rested on him, they were dark and blank, and he was definitely excluded from the banter.

The feeling of isolation continued in the taxi. Apart from the opening words when he’d got in, the spook said nothing.

They headed along back roads into Andover, where they pulled up in a small car park beneath some trees, next to a much more respectable Audi saloon. The other driver’s window whirred down as they drew up. The woman spook behind the wheel gave Sean a cool nod. The man spook twisted round in his seat so that he could see both of them, and pressed buttons to make the taxi’s passenger side windows slide down. Now the three of them could have a conversation.

‘First,’ the woman said, as though the intervening hours hadn’t happened and they were just continuing where they had left off, ‘let us tell you why we’re not immediately picking up Corporal Heaton. If all we wanted was to clamp down on his operation, we could do it in five minutes. But Heaton has the same flaw as most criminal masterminds, which is that he actually isn’t one. He’ll sell to anyone. He sold to us, and that is how we found you. But there is an even bigger fish who we suspect is Heaton’s main customer. This individual plus the equipment provided by Heaton could lead to big, big trouble. That’s who we’re looking to stop – and if we shut Heaton down, our man will just go somewhere else for the goods.’

The man opened up the glove compartment and slid a photo out of a folder, which he passed to Sean. Sean glanced down, and there was Rich. The shot must have
been captured by a hidden camera. He was looking off to one side with no idea he was being snapped, and there was a blurred crowd all around him.

They looked at him expectantly.

‘Yeah, calls himself Rich,’ Sean said. ‘Who is he?’

‘His name is unimportant,’ the woman told him, ‘and if you knew it, there’s a danger you would inadvertently use it in his or Heaton’s hearing. Rich will do. And just in case you continue to harbour delusions that he is some harmless eccentric with a few right-wing views – we have every reason to believe he is involved in a group that has been carrying out a number of terrorist strikes over the last few years that are made to look like IS.’

Sean frowned, thinking back to his first impression of Rich. A wealthy tosser with wealthy friends, but surely all talk, no action – or so he’d thought. Just one more way he had been taken in by their sick act.

‘How do you do that?’

‘Oh, it’s surprisingly easy. First, you need your genuine event. Say, a car bomb, an honour killing – it doesn’t even need to happen, just to be discovered. Next, for every genuine IS supporter there are ten kids whose commitment to jihad extends as far as tweeting
Death to the West
and then getting on with their GCSE revision. They’re very easy to frame. Documents are planted, fake
computer trails are laid right up to their doorstep, links are forged with genuine IS individuals who are safely out of the country and beyond our reach, and who aren’t going to deny it because the publicity is too precious. Presto – a previously undiscovered terrorist cell. Imagine what that does for public confidence.’

‘But if you know this—’ Sean began.

‘Most of the time we can catch it,’ the woman agreed. ‘But it only takes one or two to slip through – and even if we manage to spot the faked evidence, the fact is, these genuine events are happening and the public is taking notice. The cumulative effect is the same. A climate of fear is created.’

‘At first,’ the man said, ‘Rich faked evidence for events that were nothing to do with him. A house fire that killed the head teacher of a school run jointly by the local church and the local mosque, the brakes failing on a minibus carrying protesters to an anti-war parade – these were genuine accidents that had nothing to do with IS, but he successfully planted the idea in the minds of the media that there was more to them.’

‘At first?’ Sean repeated nervously. So the guy was a shit, but he hadn’t hurt anyone. But if that was ‘at first’ . . .

`Then he went further and started causing the incidents himself. So far, we believe we can link Rich to a car bomb planted – and discovered – in a vehicle
belonging to a prominent human rights lawyer exiled from Syria. A gun attack on a man and a woman who had committed the crime of living together without being married. One lived, the other did not – a note pinned to the body said that they had been breaking holy law.’

Sean felt himself begin to shudder as the list went on. He’d thought the guy was just a harmless tosser – but he was an actual psycho.

‘Incendiary devices placed in a couple of restaurants, one of which caused deaths. A suicide bombing aimed at a school – thankfully the bomb went off too soon. Do you see the pattern?’

Sean clenched his fists to stop the shaking.

‘He’s getting worse,’ he said heavily.

‘Much worse. Of course, this is all a lot for one man to handle, which is why he delegates jobs to his subordinates. Like the attack on the camp that killed Private Clark.’

Sean sat up sharply. ‘That’s bollocks! Those were soldiers who died! He’s a wanker, but he’s pro-Brit! Why’d he want to hit our own soldiers? Why’d he want to hit Clarky?’

‘
She
’ – the woman held up one finger – ‘was
black
’ – a second finger. ‘That’s two reasons someone like Rich would say she had no place in the British Army. But as
we say, he delegates. Can you think of anyone else who had a problem with Clark’s gender and race?’

Sean could. For a moment, as the one inevitable name came to mind, it seemed like the whole world stopped and ice ran through his veins. Then: ‘No. No!’ He began to shake his head, pushing himself back in his seat as though they were offering him Clark’s dead, charred head to hold. ‘No! No fucking way! Heaton? No!’

‘I told you we had access to his phone records,’ the man said quietly, not blinking, not taking his eyes off Sean’s. ‘He was on his phone seconds before the attack. He dialled a number for a cheap pay-as-you-go handset. The connection was made and immediately went dead, simultaneously with the explosion. As I’m sure you’re aware, bombs can be detonated by phone – you just use a handset as the power source for the detonator. And as I’m sure you’re also aware, Corporal Heaton is very proficient with electronics.’

‘No!’ Sean gasped. If he had been shocked when they told him how he had been set up with Rachel, now he just wanted to hurl.

‘So you see, Private,’ said the woman, ‘terrorists aren’t all Middle Easterners cutting off heads and radicalizing our teenagers. They come in all shapes and sizes. Back to Rich. Perhaps he spun you a story about using those rifles for defence. Perhaps, in his own head, it
is
defence – of the way of life he thinks we should all have. However, they will end up being used on innocent civilians whose only crime is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

‘Where?’ Sean demanded in desperation. ‘When? What’s he going to do with . . .’

‘We don’t know that yet. Chop off the head and the body dies. Stop Rich and you stop those weapons being used,’ she told him.

‘So why’s he still walking around?’ Sean shouted. ‘Nick him already!’

‘If our positions were reversed, I’m sure that’s what he would do,’ she agreed. ‘Laws? Who needs them? But the rule of law is there for everyone, and it protects people like him just as much as it protects you and me. That’s how we remain better than IS. But there is a downside, which is that we need evidence to make a successful prosecution.’

‘And evidence that will stand up in court is very hard to come by,’ the man added. ‘He’s too clever to leave much of it around.’

Sean bit on a harsh laugh. ‘Hey, come on. You can get a warrant to read all Heaton’s phone calls and credit cards but you can’t get one for his?’

The identical looks they gave him were so neutral that they were like an admission.

He stared at them. ‘Shit. You mean, you
can’t
?
That’s
how powerful he is?’

‘But if we had a man inside – then we’d be in business.’

Sean frowned as he noted their expressions, then realized what they meant, and recoiled. ‘What, like a double agent? Working undercover?’

‘This is army business, not James Bond,’ said the man. ‘It won’t be gadgets and sexy women and sports cars. It will be a risk.’

‘Are you fucking mental? If I got found out, I’d be dead!’

‘So you’re in?’

Sean looked away. ‘Don’t have much choice, do I?’ Though, he thought bitterly, he did. He could always just go to jail until he qualified for his old age pension.