The Untouchable (11 page)

'It'll be a new team.'

'Agreed.'

'Chosen by me, from outside London, from outside the Custom House.'

'Agreed.' He started to beam his charm. 'But with one exception.'

'I'm not hearing you.'

He hadn't wanted to recruit an easy man to take over Sierra Quebec Golf. He wanted a man who was contrary, awkward and dogmatic, a man who bullied.

'A new team from outside London, chosen by you, is what you'll get - with one exception.'

'I'm not a negotiator.' The response, rasped back, was immediate.

'The record says, which is why you're here, that you don't compromise. The one exception - I think you should consider it - was described to me as "an arrogant shite". At least meet him.'

Joey Cann sat alone in the room, with the empty lockers, clean walls and blank computer screens, and waited. He did not know what to expect.

Chapter Four

His head rested on his hands in front of the screen. He heard the door open and the beat of heavy shoes on the floor. He felt the presence of the man behind him.

'Are you Joey Cann?'

'That's right.'

'The name's Douglas Gough - Dougie to friends, but slow to make them.'

He had used a cold, pebble-rattling voice. It took Joey a few sharp seconds to realize why there was no warmth. They were not friends, pals, chums, mates.

He had been told during the phone call bringing him in, from the CIO's personal assistant, that a new team would reactivate Sierra Quebec Golf, and that he was to meet, and brief, the team-leader replacing Finch. He thought that the banter, wit and crack of the old team was dead. He turned to face Gough and saw no welcome offered him.

'I'm lumbered with you.'

'Don't expect me to apologize.'

'I was told I needed you because you're the archivist.'

'I know more about it than anyone else.'

'And that you're an arrogant shite.'

' I do my job as best I can.'

'The "best" is only adequate. Go short of the best and you're out on your neck.'

'Thank you.' He meant it. Joey felt a surge of gratitude and relief. In his room, over the weekend, he had lain on his bed, toyed with a takeaway, sipped and not enjoyed his beers, and imagined a life divorced from Albert William Packer. Anything, he'd thought, other than the work around Packer would be second-rate.

He noticed the scrubbed clean, babylike, out-of-doors complexion of Gough; the skin on his cheeks, veined, was the same as his father's down on the estate in Somerset. The shoes, polished and cracked, were the same as his father wore, and the suit when his father went up to the house to meet with the owners. There was the scrape of a match then the face was diffused behind pipesmoke.

A gravelled question. 'How did you come in, Joey?'

'I walked to the Underground, took a tube from Tooting Bee to Bank, then walked.'

'Did you see any soldiers?'

'No.'

'Did you see any police with guns?'

'No.'

'Did you go through any road-blocks, were you body-searched, did you have to produce ID?'

'I didn't.'

'This is just so that we understand each other, so you get to appreciate where I'm coming from, and where I'm going to. If the threat were terrorism, a similar threat, a threat on the scale we face now and today, then there would have been troops on the streets, guns, blocks and identity checks. Headlines in papers, worried faces on TV, pundits chattering - but it's not terrorism. It's crime . . . At the height of a terrorist campaign, assassinations and bombs in railway stations, how many people get hurt, get killed

- ten a year, maximum ten? What I'm saying, Joey, terrorism is pine marten's piss compared with the threat of crime. Where I come from, where I was reared, we have a small church, a free church, that makes a deal of laughter from people who don't know us. Our church believes in the power of evil. We don't make excuses for evil, we believe it should be cut out, root and branch, then burned. Crime is narcotics, narcotics are evil. They kill and they destroy. They threaten our values. There are no "sunlit uplands" in crime fighting, no bayonet charges, heroic it is n o t . . .

Do you get where I'm coming from, and where I'm going?'

'I think so.'

'Do you think I'm a mad, daft beggar?'

'I think I'd feel privileged to work on your team.'

'You can walk now.'

'I'd like to stay.'

'Why did the case go down?'

'All the usual suspects: incompetence, intimidation and corruption.'

'Listen hard to me, young man. We are losing the war against the importation of class A drugs. With our seizures we are not even touching the customer's supplies. We are incapable of creating shortages on the street. We are hemmed in by the restrictions of legal process, by the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, and we can shrug and walk away, and say tomorrow'll be better. It won't, it'll be worse.

I don't accept that. I have to win, Joey, and I will walk over people in my way to do it. I'll walk over you, if I have to, and not break stride. What's going on now, the volume of narcotics importation, shames us. It'll destroy us, it's a cancer in us. I'll tell you what I like -

when a judge says, "Fifteen years. Take him down."

What I like better is when the guy then turns and shouts, "I'll fucking kill you, see if I won't." If you go after them hard you break the power. Without the power they're rubbish. You bin rubbish. When the pressure is exerted on an evil man he makes mistakes. When he makes mistakes you have to be there

. . . You may be arrogant - you may have an attitude problem - but it means nothing to me, as long as you're going to be there and ready when the mistake's made.'

Joey said, 'I want to be part of that being there.'

'Do me a cartwheel.'

Joey switched on the computer. A cartwheel was a diagram to show the organization of a criminal enterprise. He drew a box in the centre of the screen. He typed the two names in the centre of the box: Mister and the Princess.

'He's always called Mister. It's the code on the phones and how he expects to be addressed - we think it started off as respect. He wanted to be Mister Packer.

She's Primrose, her code and what he calls her is the Princess. She's a part of his firm, talked to and trusted.

He doesn't play about, he's totally loyal to her.'

Joey drew a circle around the box, and then the spokes from the box to the circle. He typed at the end of a spoke the Cruncher. 'All the prime associates are coded names. The number cruncher, the accountant, Duncan Dubbs. He does the finance on every significant deal - wasn't at the Old Bailey.'

He was passed a sheet of paper by Gough.

His brow furrowed as he read the pathologist's report, the layperson's version. 'I don't understand what was for them in Sarajevo.'

'It'll keep. Go on.'

He typed another name. 'Henry Arbuthnot is the Eagle, that's legal eagle. He's the solicitor on retainer, and he does all the contracts.'

More names and more spokes, and the cartwheel formed. Joey said that Atkins, the soldier Tommy Atkins, was Bruce James, ex-Royal Green Jackets, the armourer who produced the weapons used by the Cards, the Cardmen/Hardmen, who were the enforcers, and he named the three principals. Then there was the Mixer, Mixer/Fixer, who acted as the firm's general manager and made the routine arrangements.

He drew the last spoke line, and he wrote in the Eels. 'Eels is wheels - that's Billy Smith and Jason Tyrie. They drive for him. They're both from the block he grew up in, and both from Pentonville days. That's the inner team. Oh, and there's a name I don't have, and a code. It's the information spoke - might be us or the Crime Squad - and it's important. It's on the inside.'

Gough gazed down at the cartwheel.

The drawing represented the fruits of Joey's life over the last weeks, months, years. The cartwheel was the obsession that held him. The hook had caught him from the first day he had been given the archivist job in Sierra Quebec Golf. All the photographs and all the tape transcripts were on the computer, but they needn't have been. They were lodged in Joey Cann's mind. Locked in that room, with the screen for company, he had learned more about Mister than any of the men and women who had tracked the cars, watched the house, tried to follow the money, and who could go out at the end and drink until they couldn't stand. He had overheard it said, but never to his face, that it was obsession, and sad. Joey thought he had been thrown a lifeline.

'What's the weakest link?'

'There may be one, but we never found it. What I t h i n k . . . '

'What do you think, Joey?'

'He reckons he's beaten us, and he'll be running now to catch up on his life - I think the weakest link is Mister.'

It was off his tongue, and he wished he hadn't said it. He looked at the cartwheel he'd made laughing at him prettily from the computer screen, and wondered whether Gough thought him foolish.

He looked round to see if his opinion was sneered at but saw only Gough's back, going out.

'I'm taking you with me,' Mister said.

The Eagle's voice fluttered. 'Are you sure? - Is that really necessary?'

'Yes, that's why I'm taking you.'

'Don't you think I'd be more use here?'

'No, or I wouldn't be taking you.'

There were two locations where Mister had always felt talk was safe: one was the Clerkenwell office of Henry Arbuthnot, Solicitor at Law, above the launderette. Under the terms of the published Intrusive Surveillance - Code of Practice, authorization for bugs and taps in premises where client met legal adviser could not be given by a policeman or a Customs officer. Section 2 paragraph 7 demanded that authorization came from a commissioner. Section 1

paragraph 8 stated a commissioner was a 'person who holds or has held high judicial office and has been appointed by the Prime Minister for a term of 3 years to undertake functions specified in Part III of the Act (Police Act 1997)'. Serving and retired judges were likely - the Eagle swore to it - most times out of ten to throw back the request. The office was safe territory.

Josh, the clerk, was making coffee, and never came in before he'd knocked and been told to enter.

'We go on Thursday. Mixer's doing the tickets.'

'I'm not sure that I've the background or, indeed, the expertise required.'

'Are you turning me down?'

The Eagle never disagreed with Mister. Privately, personally, buried from sight, he had been against the venture from the day the Cruncher - the barrow-boy

- had raised it. With mounting dismay he had noted Mister's ever-growing enthusiasm for the branch-out into new territory. He knew how far to go: there was a line over which he would not step. When he was maudlin - worst when he took the Monday-morning train from Guildford to London and left behind the comfort of his family, his land and his home - he thought of himself as a victim. He could do his own deal, of course, and go Queen's Evidence, but he had no doubt that he would never live to enjoy the parts of his life that mattered to him - the family, the land, the home. He would be killed ruthlessly, and painfully.

He knew what the Cards did, and he knew that Mister was more vicious than the men he employed.

The Eagle took the money, and did what he was told to do.

'How'd you get that idea? You want me to go with you, I go. It's as simple as that.'

'Just for a moment I thought the old Eagle was giving me the shoulder.'

'Never, Mister, never in a million. It'll be a good trip.'

He was a cautious man and saw the journey as danger. There was the quiet cry of a mobile phone in the dull room, coming back off the booklined walls and off the floor where the files were stacked, the territory of grime and spiders. He liked to work on his own ground, where he had confidence. He needed to be alongside a legal system that he could waltz around, where rules were laid down that could be bent with ease and broken - but he would not have dared to stand up in open opposition. Mister dragged the mobile out of his pocket, listened expressionlessly, then snapped it off.

'Got to be going, something to be dealt with . . .

Atkins'll be with us. We'll talk.'

'Yes, Mister. I'll be here and waiting. Just let me know where you want me.'

The Eagle understood but had little sympathy for the new restless drive he saw in Mister. Himself, he was tired, looking for an easier road. He shuddered at the thought of Sarajevo. He remembered the TV

images of bodies and wreckage, drunk teenagers with guns.

Autumn 1992

It was first light when the troops began to come back over the river. He had not seen the fighting but he had heard it. Husein Bekir had let his wife go to their room and had refused her entreaties to follow her. He had switched off the lights in the house, wrapped himself in a thick coat and gone to sit on a fallen log that was half-way between his home and the well that served the village. It was a bright night: there was a star canopy and a wide moon. It was a night when he would have backed his chances, when he was younger, of succeeding in hunting deer.

The troops came out from the trees behind Vraca, went through the village and down the track towards the ford. Earlier in the evening, before the attack was launched, an officer had come to him and expected him, the patriarch authority of the village, to tell where the mines were laid in defence of Ljut. That had been difficult for Husein because there were friends from his whole life across the valley, and he had pleaded that he was old and could not remember where he had seen them sown.

He had thought it the worst problem he had ever confronted, telling where the mines were or not, when he had heard from the darkness the crumpling, echoing crack of the detonations, ear-splitting noise that blasted between the valley's walls, and among the small-arms fire and the shouting, and the officer's whistle had been the awful humbling screaming, as when the dogs caught a fox and could not kill it quickly.

No flares were used in the battle, as he and his friend Dragan Kovac had been taught to use them when they had gone away for conscription training.