Danger Close Read Free Page B

assent.
    OK. ‘Home Secretary. One thing though.’
    I stood.
    ‘Before I do everything else, I’m getting my fiancée back, alive or dead. Ma’am.’
    She stood. To my left and right, as though by some strange magnetic pull, my boss and the Defence Minister stood too.
    She nodded. ‘Whatever you need, Rizwan. Go find your jaan.’
    Jaan? How the hell did she know that word?
    ‘I will.’
    We left for our various cars.
     

 
     
    4
     
    Noon found me at the NPIA Data Centre in Hendon. 100 years earlier I’d been sat in this bunker, watching blurry footage of my late friend Iqeel. OK, it wasn’t really 100 years, it had been but months. But that was how I felt, and that was how much older I felt. I was in the next data centre along from the main centre. This was the national police automatic numberplate recognition site. I was acting on a regular nine-to-five hunch, the assumption that whoever had taken Bang-Bang Kirpachi’s body from the scene of the shootout had left Westfield in a vehicle, maybe an anonymous one that could carry a team. After all, you couldn’t just carry a blood-smeared Asian girl onto a bus in Stratford, could you?
    On the desk before me was a pile of blown-up scene of crime photos from our final shootout in the Armani Jeans store. None of them were good. It was like Francis Bacon had decided to do location shots for the day. Blood. Scraps of clothing. Al-Qaeda corpses sneering into space. Overturned display racks. And the ubiquitous little Met Police yellow numbered chocks that indicated something of forensic interest. I kept coming back to photo J28. A massive slick of blood, and Holly’s rifle. And no Holly. No Bang-Bang. The blood smeared off to the left, out of shot.
    It was hard to look at these photos. Every time I blinked I could see Johnny Devlin calling me an apostate and getting ready to shoot me, and Holly lying on the ground, still as death. I closed my eyes but that didn’t help as now Johnny Devlin’s eyes were boring into my own.
    A hand gripped my shoulder and a canteen tea appeared on the desk. Emlyn was here. The one SO15 cop I trusted, and the only one that liked me. He’d pulled in many favours to get me in here and get me these photos.
    ‘You holding up, son?’
    I nodded. ‘Course.’
    He was a cop. Cops can spot untruths. He took the chair next to me. ‘See anything?’
    ‘Not yet Emlyn, not yet.’
    We looked at photo J28. And it was then that I saw it.
    ‘Em. What is that?’ I pointed to the carpeted area to the left of Bang-Bang’s rifle, to what looked like…‘What do those look like to you?’
    ‘Those are syringe and dressing wraps. And what looks like part of a giving set.’
    ‘Someone treated her, dressed her wounds and got her out while the rest of us were all shoving and arguing?’
    ‘Could be, son. No-one’s going to notice paramedics working on the injured when they’re busy checking for X-Rays and booby traps. Never mind the fact that your girls got into a punchup with the SAS and one of them tried to scalp Johnny Devlin’s corpse there.’
    I’d been unconscious on the shop carpet by that point and bleeding out. Emlyn spoke again. ‘Anyway…if you and me sit and watch the exit cameras for the loading bays there, we might see something worth following.’
    ‘Jesus, Emlyn. You’re right.’
    We both raced to the front of the centre and Emlyn got on a terminal and started gripping techies. ‘OK lads, I’m wanting the exit camera feeds from Stratford Westfield on 13th September, starting from 11am. I’m also wanting ALL ANPR - linked cameras out of town North and East.’
    The whole room just bogged at us like baby owls. Emlyn pulled his SO15 ID. ‘Boyos, I think you know what this means, this is a terrorist investigation!’
    They got to it. Terror enquiries could mine traffic camera data up to an indefinite period after the event. The Oracle database was set to work and got chugging on the raw information held in the memories of