FIFTEEN
A long silence followed as everyone in the room absorbed what Fletcher had just said. In the bed, the man's eyes were vacant, like looking at two windows with nothing beyond, his mind taken back all those years to that terrible night.
Eventually, Cobb broke the silence. This was all news to him too. Across the room Jackson was leaning against the desktop by the television, his arms folded, his head down.
He already knew all about this.
He knew what was coming next.
‘So what happened?’ Cobb asked. As he spoke, he glanced over at the American, but the CIA agent kept looking at the floor, avoiding eye contact.
'They took us back to their camp, tied us up, then beat the shit out of us,' Fletcher said. 'The whole group, punching, stamping, pistol-whipping. I thought I was going to die. They almost killed us there and then. Broke my nose and both my orbital bones. Broke Carver's arm. But then their Captain appeared. Most intimidating guy I'd ever seen. He was huge, camo paint covering his face, big AK in his hands. Even through the darkness and the paint, I could see the rage in his eyes. He looked at me and I almost pissed myself with fear. He ordered his men to do something in Albanian, and the next thing I knew we were thrown into one of the huts and locked up.’
He paused.
‘So what happened?’ Archer asked.
‘They left us for a day. They even fed us, and gave us water. But then one of them walked in and said we were going to play a game. He was a big guy, almost as big as their leader. I think he was his right-hand man. He had big spider tattoos on his elbows. He spoke in English. He said the game was called eeenie-meenie-miny-mo. The guy did it with his finger, and it came to a rest on me.'
He swallowed.
'Straight afterwards his men dragged me outside and four of them held me down on the soil, no one else around for miles, I was looking up at the stars.' He blinked. 'Then they got a set of bolt cutters and took off my small toe. One snip, and it was gone.’
With a great effort, he pushed back the bed covers and lifted his feet out of the bed, laying them on the sheets.
The men looked at his feet.
Seven of his toes were missing.
‘The guy with the spider tattoos told me no one knew we were there,' Fletcher continued. 'No one was coming for us. And they were going to kill us over the course of the next three months. A piece at a time. First the toes. Then the fingers. Then the feet, and the hands. Then the arms. Then the genitals. Then the eyes and tongue. Then the head.’
The room was silent.
Fletcher's chin trembled.
‘They dragged me out there each night and took seven of my toes, one by one, over the course of a week. They didn't touch Carver and Floyd. They let them watch, telling them that once I was dead, they would be next.'
Pause.
'Then, on the eighth night, we were rescued. Six men came in the dark and got us out. The other two could move, but I had to be carried.’
He shook his head weakly.
‘Neither of them paid any sort of price for what they did, unlike me. I never recovered properly. My body started to heal, but my mind and conscience didn’t. My whole life ruined because of Carver and Floyd.’
By the windows, Chalky shook his head, his arms folded. His face was hard.
‘Bullshit,' he said. 'You were there. You could have stopped them. But you stood there and let them kill those women and children.'
There was a long silence.
Fletcher didn't respond.
‘So what happened next?’ Archer asked.
‘We were taken out of there by chopper. Not to Bondsteel, but somewhere else. They gave me morphine for the pain as we took off and the next thing I remember was waking up in a hospital in Birmingham, back in the UK. There was a man sitting there beside my bed dressed in a suit. I didn’t recognise him. He told me I had to sign a form, even before I was fully awake. He said that if I left the army immediately without a fuss, there would be no follow up to what happened that night.'
He paused.
'But he said if I ever spoke about it to anyone, anyone at all, the punishment that would come my way would be incredibly severe. And from then, until this moment, I've done exactly what he said. I’ve never said a word about any of it to anyone, ever. Gladly, I might add. I just wanted to move on as best I could and make the most of a second chance. Minus seven of my toes.'
He coughed.
‘Guess it doesn’t matter now. Nature is getting rid of me for them. Dead men don’t talk.’
He paused.
'But it’s always confused me,’ he said. ‘Why would they go to so much effort to save the three of us after what we did? We weren’t important. Just three grunts, a Corporal, Private and Captain. Why weren't we punished and hung out to dry? The whole world deserved to know what happened to those people. At the very least Carver and Floyd should have been court-martialled.'
‘So should you,’ Chalky said.
Cobb turned and looked at Jackson.
'I think this is where you fill in the blanks,’ he said.
Silence. His arms still folded, Jackson looked up at him.
'Why weren't we punished?' Fletcher asked him from the bed.
Pause.
'Because Carver's father was in the CIA,' Jackson said, eventually.
'So what?' Chalky said, by the window. 'They still murdered all those women and children. Who cared if his father worked for the government?'
Jackson said nothing.
'How high up was his father, Ryan?' Cobb asked Jackson, his voice even, putting two and two together.
Pause.
'How high?' he repeated.
'Deputy Director,' Jackson said, eventually.
'Holy shit,' Fox said, as every man in the room looked at Jackson.
'I don’t believe this,' Cobb said, almost at the same time. 'No wonder everyone was sworn to secrecy. Carver's father was one of the heads of the damn CIA?'
Jackson nodded.
'That's right.'
There was a long, somewhat uncomfortable pause as each man processed what they had just been told, none more so than Fletcher, lying in the bed.
‘You know three of the men who rescued you have died today,’ Cobb said, looking down at Fletcher.
The sickly man looked up at him in surprise.
‘What? How?’
‘One shot himself. Another was garrotted, and the third was executed in his sleep.’ He pointed at the television. 'You saw the reports of the attack on the police station?'
'Yes, sir.'
'That was my Unit. They were trying to kill me.'
Fletcher stared at him. He was sweating even more, the pillow behind his head already sodden.
‘They’re coming for revenge,’ he said. He looked at Cobb and Jackson. ‘They're after everyone who was involved that night. Which means you’re both on the list.’
'And so are you,' Archer said, quietly, by the door.
Fletcher licked his lips, looking back at Archer, fear in his eyes.
‘Look, I’ll talk to the Met,' Cobb told him. 'We’ll get some extra security here, guarding you, till this is over.'
Fletcher shook his head.
‘Don’t bother, sir. I’ll be dead before long anyway. And if they come for me, no one will be able to stop them. God doesn’t want me to live anymore. Maybe it’s just my time.’
He paused.
'You know, every night that I lay there in the hut in agony, I used to pray over and over again. I promised God that I'd be a better man if I made it out of there, that I would do good, that I would spend the rest of my life trying to help people.' He shook his head. 'But I didn't keep my promise. I've done nothing worthwhile since. So maybe it's about time they came back and finished the job.'
'Can you tell us anything about these men?’ Archer asked him. ‘The Black Panthers?’
Fletcher nodded.
‘Like I said, they are Albanian Special Forces. Once I healed up, I wanted to know who the men were who did that to me. I read everything I could find about them. But I can tell you they were the toughest group of soldiers I've ever seen. Their own army didn't want them, they were so ruthless.'
'How can we beat them?' Chalky asked across the room, from the window.
'You can't.'
Fletcher paused and coughed again. It seemed as if his stamina was almost gone. Across the room, the silent television flicked to show a Breaking News report of a car-bombing in upstate Connecticut, US. No one saw the screen change.
'How do we find them?’ Archer asked.
‘You won’t. They’ll find you.’
‘OK, so what do we do?' Chalky asked the room, irritated. ‘Just sit back and wait?’
Fletcher turned to him. As the man spoke, Archer found himself looking at the man's severed feet again.
‘You want my honest advice?’ Fletcher said to Chalky, his voice raspy, his throat dry.
Chalky nodded. 'Go on.'
‘Hide.’
Just outside the parking lot of the hospice, a teenager in a matching white Adidas tracksuit leaned against the wall, smoking a cigarette and looking into the car park. He'd been walking past, heading down to the bookies to place some bets on the Premiership football this weekend, when something had caught his eye. He'd stopped and lit a cigarette, and was now taking a closer look at what had grabbed his attention.
His name was Leon. Just turned nineteen years old, he'd been in and out of juvenile detention centres and then prison since he could remember. He'd just finished his most recent stint twenty two days ago for breaking and entering. He and two friends had gone after an expensive apartment in Fulham that they knew belonged to a Premiership footballer. The guy was on over a hundred grand a week, so they knew there would be plenty of cash-value stuff to steal inside.
Leon had been cautious and planned ahead, waiting outside in the car with the other two and watching the player head out with his girlfriend on a Saturday night. However, every alarm went off the moment they picked the lock and stepped inside the front door. There were cameras all over the building and on the street outside and although they got out, two days later Leon and his two pals were hauled into Hammersmith and Fulham in handcuffs and booked. It was the latest in a growing list of convictions, the first of which was a simple fine for possession of marijuana, and was a list he knew without a doubt would get longer.
He'd started when he was thirteen. Like most kids in his area, he used to go down to the park and sniff glue or smoke puff, drink bottles of cider and try to get lucky with the local girls. But then he'd begun smoking more and more, and by the time he was sixteen he’d developed a fondness for cocaine that had taken all of his money. By that point he'd already stopped going to school. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been. And two months after his sixteenth birthday, his mother kicked him out of the house after finally having enough of him stealing from her. He didn’t only take cash, he stole stuff in the house that was worth anything and traded it in, and the final straw was when he stole a favourite necklace from her dresser and pawned it for fifty quid.
Out on the street, broke and alone, he’d started staying at hostels, with friends or at homeless shelters. He’d also started pick-pocketing to keep himself going. He didn’t have any qualifications and no way was he going to do manual labour or construction jobs for a living. Although he'd been nervous about pick-pocketing at first, worried he’d get caught, he'd been surprised at how easy it actually was. Given the congestion and close proximity of passengers on the trains on the Underground, a simple two finger dip into a handbag or pocket when everyone was jostling to get on or off the carriage reaped great dividends. He often worked with a partner, the two of them standing either side of a target on the train to box them in during the rush hour, pretending to be fellow passengers jammed together in the packed train carriage, but robbing them blind instead.
A lot of immigrants from Eastern Europe had started working the Underground too, and given the increase in thefts, the Met had started putting undercover cops down there in an attempt to catch them. A lot of the Poles and Romanians couldn’t spot a copper if he came up in uniform and tapped them on the shoulder, but Leon and the group he ran with could smell them a mile off.
Moving out of the Underground to avoid the police, they used Paddington as another haunt. The station was large and always busy, and its position as a main transport hub meant it was usually full of tourists with their heads buried in maps, disorientated and distracted. It was easy. Pick out a tourist and get one of you to grab their attention. Ten seconds later, when the distraction left and the tourist turned back, they find their bag they’d put on the floor beside them is gone. And whoever had stolen it had now vanished into a crowd of constantly moving, anonymous people.
But it hadn't all been successful. Leon had been nicked a couple of times pick-pocketing, having to pay fines and do a short stint of community service, but as he got older and more confident he'd forgone the secrecy of pick-pocketing unsuspecting victims and moved up a level to armed robbery instead.
He was careful about his targets. A lot of thieves thought that young women were the easiest demographic to go after, given their physical disadvantage and that they were easily intimidated. But in fact they were one of the worst to confront. All those women groups, magazines and adverts on television had made sure a lot of girls were more prepared than they used to be. The fear of attack meant many of them now carried wailing button-alarms or even pepper spray, even though it was illegal, in their handbags. A friend of his had been maced by a girl a few years ago after he tried to mug her, and he still talked about how it was the worst couple of hours of his life. Women were often more alert than men, expecting trouble. It served a thief best to leave them well alone.
Leon took a draw on his cigarette, leaning against the wall, watching the hospice car park, and smiled. No, the best targets for mugging were posh kids or tourists. The toffs were soft as dog shit, unused to violence and easily intimidated, and one look at the knife in Leon's hand would get them scrabbling at their pockets like they couldn’t wait to hand over their stuff. The tourists were equally soft. They were out of their comfort zone and easily scared, especially with the threat of violence and a big knife in their face.
Things had gone well for a while, but then the riots in 2011 had happened and Leon got nicked by an undercover cop. He wasn’t doing anything different from the other rioters. It was just bad luck.
He’d been out of the door of an Argos store across town with over two grand of stolen goods in his hands, a mask over his face, but then he got levelled by some copper who picked him out of the crowd and took him off his feet with a punch. The guy restrained him, and two weeks later Leon was in the dock and given a sentence of thirteen months. He had just turned eighteen, so juvenile centres weren't an option any more.
For the first time in his life, Leon was going to prison.
Leaning against the wall, he drew on his cigarette and narrowed his eyes, blowing out the smoke. A lot of lads from his area wanted to serve time. They felt it gave them street-cred and reputations on the estate as hard men. But Leon knew the moment he walked into that place that he was in deep shit. This wasn't a two or three weeker at some soft-as-shit juvenile facility, with lots of team-building exercises and counselling with biscuits and cups of tea. As he was led to his cell in the middle of the queue of new inmates, the prisoners already there shouting and baying at the new meat from their cells, he knew he was looking at over a year in that place.
And he knew he needed to make friends quick.
Luckily, he had. A lot of the rioters started getting sent down there, and they quickly grouped up, watching each other's backs as best they could. But Leon didn’t join them. Instead, he started spending all his time with his new cell-mate, a huge black guy named Luther. Luther was on a two year stint for armed robbery, a career criminal who’d been on the wrong side of the law his entire life. He was from Croydon and made his living robbing drug dealers. He was a guy Leon had actually heard about on the street. Although never actually coming across him, his name definitely preceded him.
Leon never let it show, but Luther saved him in there. Luckily for Leon, the bigger man had taken to him straight away, acting like a mentor, and Leon had spent almost every moment outside the cell with him, both to learn from the man and also so he was protected. Shankings and gang-rape occurred almost daily, the guards turning a blind eye most of the time, but Luther was a guy who no one messed with. He was six-five and thickly muscular, he and his gang monopolising the weights area in the yard every time they were out of the cells, working out for hours at a time and loading up on steroids smuggled in from the outside through the kitchen workers. And Luther’s reputation definitely did precede him. He'd started out doing hit-work for a gang in Brixton, and although Leon never knew for sure how many men Luther had killed in his lifetime, he knew it was more than you could count on your fingers and toes. He had educated Leon about the benefits of crime, how to cheat the justice system and how to make the most profits for when he was back out on the street and ensure he never got sent back. As long as you don't kill anyone, you're good, Leon had said.
Or if you do, make sure no one ever finds the body.
Given his size and being well aware of how much he intimidated people, Luther said that he’d moved from murder into robbing dealers and gang members, and although Leon's physique changed dramatically over the months from hitting the weights with the older man, he knew that using his size like Luther wasn't a path he could go down when he got out. Play to your strengths, Luther had said. Leon had told him about his past, dipping on the Underground and stealing wallets and purses, robbing posh kids and tourists on the street for maybe a hundred quid a pop. But after spending time with Luther, the younger man realised he'd been selling himself short. There was a hell of a lot more out there if he had the balls to go after it.
He was in the wrong game.
Leon had educated him about burglary, how he could make more profit from one empty house than he could from robbing ten tourists. He’d told him the ways around an alarm system and how to get anyone to open a safe. With the men, it’s easy, he'd said. Don't bother with idle threats or violence. Just strip them naked, get a sharp knife from the kitchen and put it to their balls. Works every time. With women, he explained that the threat of rape was often sufficient. But women are tougher than men, Luther told him. You have to know how to push their buttons. If they have a family, pull the kids out of bed and put a blade on them. Ninety nine times out of a hundred, they’ll open Sesame. Leon had grown close to the older man and had been sad the day he left him behind. But he had walked out of that place a changed man, physically and mentally, his body no longer a boy's and his brain full of new knowledge. He'd heard a saying once and now he understood what it meant.
A man had to go to prison in order to learn how to become a criminal.
Since he'd left prison, he'd followed Luther's advice explicitly. Aside from his recent three-weeker, he'd been out eighteen months and had knocked down six mansions in Surrey and a townhouse in Chelsea, the profits huge, way into six figures, close to a mil. It was only his mate’s sheer carelessness at the footballer’s flat which meant they'd got caught, the idiot not checking the alarm system properly. Leon had learned another lesson that night. Never depend on other people.
So from now on, he worked alone.
Taking a last draw on the cigarette, he flicked away the butt, letting it smoulder on the pavement. He'd been wandering past the building, some kind of hospital or old-people's home, and had seen two cars in the parking lot that had instantly caught his eye. One was a silver Mercedes. It looked less than a year old, fresh off the line. He didn't know enough about licence plates to judge what year the car had been registered, but that didn’t matter. It looked new and it looked expensive. He figured he could get five figures for it easily at a chop shop he knew in Hackney. The other car was just as nice, a black BMW. He'd had to make a choice, but he'd already gone with the Mercedes. He preferred silver cars anyway.
Pushing back off the wall with his foot, he pulled a tennis ball from his pocket and started to walk into the parking lot.
He saw some old man was sitting on a bench across the tarmac by the wall, but what looked like a nurse was helping him up to take him back inside the building, leaving Leon all alone in the car park. He smiled, bouncing the tennis ball on the ground as he walked.
In the joint, Luther had taught him how to steal cars. He’d explained that the movies got a lot of shit wrong, but they also got some stuff right, and a lot of the high-tech shit they showed like pin guns and diagnostic blank keys normally worked. It would just cost you thousands of pounds to get the equipment. But Luther had taught him a trick, one so incredibly simple that Leon couldn’t believe more people didn't know about it. The lock to most cars had the grooves for the key. Six pins, usually. Once the key slid in, and the pins were pushed down, the mechanism released, and with a twist the door would open.
But the pins also reacted to pressure.
Arriving by the Mercedes, Leon took a look either side of him then looked down at the tennis ball in his hand. He had driven a small hole in the ball with a knife, about the size of a pea, and he twisted the ball so it was showing, then put the hole against the lock of the Mercedes. Checking either side, he held it to the lock then hit it hard with his right hand, pushing all the air out of the ball and into the lock. There was a click and he saw all four plastic locks rise beside each window of the car.
The car was now open.
He smiled, then pulled open the door and ducked inside, tucking the ball back into his pocket. All the high-tech shit and gadgets were out there, but nothing worked better than a cheap old tennis ball.
The next part was a bit harder. He pulled a knife from his pocket quickly and removed a small panel under the ignition. He could see three wires, two red, one black. This part worked just like in all the movies. Separate the battery and starter wires, strip off the plastic sheaths, touch them together to spark the current, and job done. The engine is on and you're good to go.
Looking up to make sure no one was around, he took one of the two red wires and pulled it from the cylinder.
He then started to cut into the end of the wire, removing the sheath.
Back inside the hospice, the six men had just left Fletcher's room, Cobb leading the way as they walked down the corridor. All of them were slightly distracted, thinking about what Fletcher had told them and the revelation about Carver’s connections.
They turned the corner, Cobb pushing the release mechanism for the security door, and the group walked back into the reception area. The woman who’d shown them in was back behind the desk, and she pulled the key from her pocket as soon as she saw them, turning back to the locked room behind her and sliding the key into the lock. She looked keen to return the four weapons. Archer figured she thought the quicker she gave them back, the quicker they would all leave.
As she opened the door and the four officers walked around her desk to retrieve their weapons, Cobb turned to speak Jackson, who was looking outside.
But he saw the American’s attention was directed at something outside in the car park.
He was frowning.
‘What the hell?’ Jackson muttered.
Cobb followed where he was looking.
And he saw a teenager sitting inside his car.
Leon had just cut off the second red sheath, the two copper inner wires themselves now exposed, and held them close, one in each hand.
'Hey!'
He heard a shout and looking right, saw a dark-haired man shouting, looking straight at him and pushing open the door. Behind the guy, Leon saw a group of cops, two of them with a sub-machine gun in their hands, turn and look over, just as they slapped a magazine into each weapon.
Oh shit.
He was stealing a cop car.
Without another moment's hesitation, he pushed the two wires together.
And just as Cobb started to run towards his car, the Mercedes exploded.
He was thrown back, the glass on the front entrance smashing from the shockwave. As the car exploded, Jackson's BMW reacted to the blast and went up too in a second explosion, both cars thrown up vertically into the air, erupting into one huge fireball.
The flaming wrecks of both cars landed on the ground with two thuds and burned away, smoke billowing out of each, the alarms of other cars in the lot set off by the rippling shockwave of the explosions.