With the car unlocked, James opened the door and sat in the driver’s seat. He used the staple gun-type device to fire three needle-sized bugs into the fabric-lined roof before stepping outside. He took a wary glance over his shoulder before using the plipper to relock the car.
Next he crouched down by the front tyre, reached under the wheel arch and fitted the magnetic grey box. This acted as a remote tracking device and as a signal amplifier for the tiny bugs inside the car.
James’ final task was the messiest. He unscrewed the lid on the pot of egg yolk and mud, then dipped in two fingers and spattered it on the front number plate, obscuring three letters. Because the bumper was up against the car-park wall, there was no way Julian would see this when he drove off.
James wiped his fingers on a crêperie napkin and dropped it inside the paper bag before standing up and walking back to the stairs. He said hello to a cleaner in the corridor, before heading into the staff locker room to grab his helmet and riding gear.
Before zipping his leather riding jacket he pulled out his phone and sent Chloe a text message: Job done!
27. STAGED
Friday
Julian and Nigel set off from Marina View at half-eight, blissfully unaware that two cars were tailing them from a kilometre behind. One was a Devon police vehicle containing two uniformed officers. The second car was unmarked. From inside, NPBTF officer Neil Gauche and burly assistant CHERUB mission controller Jake McEwen listened to every word Julian and Nigel said.
Nigel’s drug dealing and Julian’s role as an indebted customer regularly brought the two seventeen-year-olds into conflict, but their friendship ran back to primary school and as Julian drove they reminisced about sleepovers, birthday parties, boy scouts and PS2 games.
The A38 was busy but the traffic moved freely. It took eighty minutes to reach Exeter and the beginning of the M5 motorway. Julian kept the Fiat in the middle of three lanes and the needle glued on seventy miles per hour.
‘How’s things with Caitlyn?’ Julian asked, as he overtook a truck. It was a bright day. The Smiths How Soon is Now? was coming out of the radio, but mostly drowned out by the engine noise.
‘Caitlyn’s wild,’ Nigel smiled. ‘Smokes most of my profits, but I’m being compensated in other ways, if you get my meaning.’
‘You hang with James Raven much?’ Julian asked.
‘I spend most of my time with Caitlyn, but I see him around. He’s bloody clever, you know? He spent a couple of hours sorting out some maths stuff that I couldn’t get my head around.’
‘I messed it up with Ashley,’ Julian admitted.
Nigel nodded. ‘Get all macho when someone hits on your bitch and you’d better be pretty sure that he’s not a third dan Karate black belt and kickboxing expert.’
‘No bullshit?’ Julian asked.
‘Well that’s what he claims and he looks the business,’ Nigel smiled. ‘So I’ve got no intention of finding out.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Julian moaned, as he thumped the steering wheel. ‘What are the odds on this?’
Nigel looked over his shoulder and realised they were being flashed by a police BMW. ‘Were you speeding?’
Julian pointed at the speedometer. ‘Seventy, dead on.’
‘It’s probably just routine,’ Nigel said. ‘Pull over and play it cool.’
Julian had only been driving six months and racked his brain trying to think what he’d done wrong. It took a half mile for a break to open up on the inside lane. He pulled across behind a Shell tanker and into the hard shoulder.
When he’d completely stopped, a tannoy blasted out from between the flashing blue lights in the cop car’s radiator. ‘Turn off your engine and place your hands on the steering wheel.’
One officer stayed at the wheel of the patrol car, while the Asian officer on the passenger side got out and walked towards the Fiat. Nigel rolled down his window, and the officer crouched down and spoke across him to Julian.
‘Do you know why you were stopped?’
Julian shook his head. ‘I was doing seventy, dead on. There were cars whizzing past me in the fast lane.’
The officer shook his head. ‘I want you to step carefully from your vehicle, then come around to the front with me. Bring your licence and vehicle papers with you.’
Trucks and coaches thundered by in the lane alongside as Julian opened his door and edged out. His jaw dropped as he saw the mud obscuring three letters of his number plate.
‘I had no idea,’ he gasped. ‘It must have sprayed off the back of another car, or something.’
The policeman gently scraped the mud with the tip of his boot and shook his head. ‘That’s dried on hard. I’d say it’s been there for a day or two.’
‘I’ve got a window scraper,’ Julian said. ‘I can take it right off.’
‘You do that, but I’ve still got to write you a ticket.’
Julian looked surprised. ‘For a muddy number plate?’
‘Zero tolerance,’ the cop explained. ‘We get a lot of people trying to pull that stunt to avoid getting detected by speed cameras.’
As the cop said this, his colleague came running across from the car. ‘The number plate runs clean,’ he said, before whispering something in the Asian officer’s ear.
The Asian studied Julian’s licence and eyed him suspiciously. ‘Where did you come from this morning?’
‘Salcombe,’ Julian said.
‘You’re not in school today?’
‘It’s a study day.’
The officer smiled. ‘Doesn’t look much like studying to me. Where are you headed?’
‘Bristol,’ Julian answered. ‘Visiting friends.’
‘There was a serious incident at Exeter airport this morning,’ the officer said. ‘Two young males were involved in a violent theft and left the airport in a red hatchback. Have you got anything to say about that?’
‘Would you object if we searched your car?’ the other officer said, as he looked in the back at a pile of cardboard boxes marked Josie’s Florist.
Julian raised his hands anxiously. ‘That’s got nothing to do with us.’
The traffic was too noisy for Nigel to pick up words, but his heart fluttered as he saw Julian’s increasingly nervous body language.
The white police officer spoke into his radio, explaining what he’d found and asking for more details on the suspects. But the airport incident was a fiction, created to give the officers the reasonable grounds they needed to legally search someone’s car.
‘Suspects described as two men, eighteen to twenty,’ the officer explained to his colleague, as he pocketed the radio. ‘One dark hair, one blond.’
The Asian officer raised one eyebrow and looked at Julian. ‘Are you sure you’re telling the truth?’
Julian shook his head violently. ‘This is utter crap. I’m seventeen and I’ve not been anywhere near the airport.’
‘Don’t worry then,’ the Asian man said soothingly. ‘We need your permission to quickly search the car.’
‘What if I refuse?’ Julian asked.
‘It was a serious incident,’ the officer explained. ‘We have to arrest you if you refuse, but once that happens there’s a whole procedure to follow. Instead of a few minutes, you could be held up for hours.’
Julian reluctantly passed his car keys to the Asian officer, who told Nigel to step out and stand with his hands on the roof before walking around and opening the boot. The five long florist’s boxes were stacked up and the officer immediately noticed that their weight had crushed the box at the bottom.
Suspicious, he pulled a plastic glove over his right hand before lifting the flap that held the cardboard lid in place. His eyes widened as the lid popped up, revealing four partially assembled AK47 assault rifles.
*
Twenty minutes later, Julian and Nigel found themselves stripped of shoes and belts, sitting in front of a desk in an interrogation room with their hands cuffed behind their backs.
‘I
demand a lawyer,’ Julian shouted, as Jake McEwen walked into the room and slammed the door. ‘I’m a juvenile. I have special rights.’
‘The only right you have is to shut your pie hole before I stick your stupid curly head through the wall,’ McEwen yelled.
McEwen was a twenty-two-year-old ex-CHERUB agent. His official job title was junior mission controller. Most of the time he worked on campus, researching mission backgrounds, writing briefings and doing all the stuff his more senior colleagues didn’t want to. But McEwen’s aggressive manner and a heavyweight boxer’s physique meant he got an occasional trip off campus when CHERUB wanted to scare someone.
‘You two boys are in deep shit,’ McEwen boomed. ‘How old are you, sixteen, seventeen?’
‘Seventeen,’ Nigel answered.
Julian turned towards Nigel. ‘This is an illegal interrogation. We should have lawyers present. You should be running a tape recorder.’
McEwen walked behind Julian and smacked his head against the table top.
‘I’m lodging a complaint,’ Julian moaned. ‘My father is a judge. This violates my human rights!’
‘Every time you use the word rights from now on, I’m gonna bang your head against the table top,’ McEwen shouted. ‘This is an office building, not a police station. I’m with the intelligence service, not the police. And by the time you lodge your official complaint, this room will be stripped bare. You’ll have no way to trace me and the two officers who stopped your car will deny all knowledge. To summarise: you two need to get used to the idea that I am god.’
Nigel and Julian looked warily at one another.
‘Do you know how this would have played out if we’d done things by the book?’ McEwen smiled. ‘We arrest you. The Brigands send in some smart lawyer who tells you to keep your mouths shut. You claim that you had no knowledge of what was in the boxes. You plead guilty to a minor firearms charge in court and because you’re nice middle-class boys with no previous convictions you get three to six months in a young offenders’. When you get out the Führer gives you a few grand as a thank you for keeping your mouths shut.’
‘You can’t ignore the law, buddy,’ Julian said.
‘I’m not your buddy,’ McEwen shouted, as he picked Julian out of his chair, lifted him high into the air and slammed his body down hard on the table top. ‘And you’d better learn to shut your mouth.’
Julian sniffled as he slid back into his chair with blood dripping out of his nose.
‘You’ve got two options,’ McEwen said, crouching down low behind Julian and Nigel. ‘You’re just a couple of kids working as couriers, we’re not really interested in you. What we want is information: who supplied you with the guns, who and where you’re meeting, how much you’re being paid and where you take the money. Plus anything else you think we might like to know. If you give us the information, we’ll let you get back in your little Fiat. You can make your delivery and as long as you’re honest we’ll pretend like this little stop-and-search never happened.’
‘If the Brigands found out we’d grassed, they’d kill us,’ Nigel said warily.
‘They won’t,’ McEwen said. ‘As long as you’re not economical with the truth.’
‘So what’s the other option?’ Nigel asked.
McEwen cracked a big smile. ‘Like I said, we’re not really interested in busting a couple of teenage couriers. So what we’ll do is, we’ll confiscate your guns as evidence. Then we’ll keep you here for five or six hours and escort you back to Salcombe in the Fiat.’
It took a few seconds for the implications of this to hit the two young suspects. ‘They’ll think we stole the guns,’ Nigel blurted. ‘Or at the least they’ll torture the shit out of us trying to find out what happened.’
McEwen laughed. ‘You can tell them about me,’ he grinned. ‘How you were arrested by a secret agent, who took you to a secret location and then let you off with no charge whatsoever. I’m sure they’ll believe you.’
Nigel pressed his hands against his head. ‘They’ll never believe that story.’
McEwen raised his eyebrows. ‘You think, buddy?’
‘This is outrageous,’ Julian sighed. ‘In a democratic society …’
Nigel turned sharply towards his friend. ‘Stop going on about your rights. This isn’t A-level sociology, you dick.’
‘I’m a dick?’ Julian spluttered indignantly. ‘Did I set this up? I must be mad getting involved in this just to pay off a two-hundred-quid debt.’
‘Ladies,’ McEwen said firmly. ‘Stop bitching and whining. It’s decision time.’
‘Can I get a tissue or something?’ Julian asked, as he pinched his bloody nose.
‘It’s all down to me really,’ Nigel said, as he looked at Julian. ‘I set it up, he’s just driving me as a favour.’
‘Like I give a shit about you two,’ McEwen said. He tossed Julian a couple of tissues and pulled out a tape recorder. ‘Are you ready to start answering some questions?’
Julian dabbed his nose as Nigel nodded reluctantly. ‘Like we’ve got a choice in the matter,’ he grunted.
‘OK, we’ll take it from the top,’ McEwen said. ‘Speak slowly into the tape recorder. Spell out any difficult names and remember if you tell me any pork pies I’ll be paying you another visit. Who first contacted you asking you to deliver the guns?’
28. RUN
Saturday
The run to the Rebel Tea Party in Cambridge was due to leave the Brigands clubhouse at nine. By 8:40 residents who’d paid between one and three million for their Marina View apartments were waking up to bright sunshine and a hundred motorcycle engines.
The beginning of a run was a spectacle. Riders made last-minute checks on oil and tyre pressure, while a few with problems made adjustments in the Leather and Chrome workshop. Girlfriends and kids said goodbye, some waiting to wave the run off, others boarding one of the three coaches packed with luggage, booze and barbecue equipment.
Dante, Lauren and Chloe had driven out to see James off. James was excited, but also a little scared. He’d never ridden a bike over a long distance and he urgently needed to start making connections with older bikers if he was going to be of any use to the mission.
While James wandered off to report to the Brigands road captain and get his place in the running order, Lauren spotted Joe standing in the middle of the Brigands bikes with his parents. The Führer looked like he always did, except his long leather coat had been swapped for a shorter version more suited to riding on a hot day. But Joe’s mum had transformed from her usual Marks and Spencer cardigans into a biker chick. She wore a leather jacket with Property of South Devon Brigands on the back, a Lycra top that finished several inches above her flabby stomach, tight fitting jeans and red stiletto heels.
‘You look amazing,’ Lauren gushed.
‘Embarrassing, more like,’ Joe scoffed.
The Führer kissed his wife before giving Joe a friendly swipe around the back of the head. ‘She’s the most beautiful girl in the world.’
Lauren smiled at Marlene. ‘Do you always go on the runs?’
‘Never missed one,’ she grinned, as she gave Joe a huge kiss. ‘Even when I was pregnant with this little yobbo.’
‘Mum,’ Joe complained, frantically wiping lipstick off his cheek. ‘I’m outta here.’
Marlene wagged her finger in Joe’s face. ‘Your brother is in charge and don’t you dare start fighting with him or you’ll be spending the next run at your grandma’s house.’
‘I’ll be good,’ Joe grinned. ‘I’m always good.’
‘Yeah, sure,’ Marlene said. She looked at Lauren. ‘You two have a nice time and I’ll see you Sunday night.’
Joe and Lauren walked away from the bikes and headed up to the diner, which had opened early for the bikers and was doing a roaring trade in bacon sandwiches and breakfast muffins.
‘Freeeeeeeedom!’ Joe grinned, as he kissed Lauren’s cheek. ‘This is gonna be the best weekend in history.’
&
nbsp; A few metres from the Führer, James was trying to get the attention of a Brigand called Vomit. Vomit was unusually clean-cut for a Brigand, with a shaved head, designer sunglasses and boot-cut Diesel jeans instead of the standard Levis. As South Devon road captain, Vomit’s job was to organise every detail of the chapter’s road trips, from the running order of the bikes, to food, accommodation, coaches and the breakdown truck.
He held a clipboard and looked stressed as James pushed between a couple of leather jackets.
‘Raven, James,’ Vomit said, as he reached down into a canvas bag and pulled out a set of notes, which had all been laminated in case it rained. ‘You’re running dead last with a young Monster Bunch hang-around called Orange Bob.’
James nodded as Vomit handed over the paperwork.
‘On there you’ve got your route map in case you get lost, your entry ticket for the Rebel Tea Party, plus emergency phone numbers for the breakdown truck, for me and for our lawyers. Don’t call any of those numbers unless you really need them.’
‘Gotcha,’ James nodded. ‘Thanks.’
Vomit slapped James on the back. ‘Ride safely, have a great weekend.’
Orange Bob was a skinny nineteen-year-old who’d earned his name because of a taste for fake-tanning products. James found him by asking Nigel’s brother Will and they shook hands.
‘Hey partner,’ James grinned.
Vomit began shouting for the riders to start lining up. There was a rash of last-minute kisses and goodbyes before non-riders backed off to the kerb. James found his ER5 and weaved through bikes going in all directions, ending up the very last of one hundred and six bikes lined up side by side.
There was a strict hierarchy, with all the riders going in pairs. The run was led by the Führer and his road captain. Behind them were the other Brigands officers, including Teeth, then the regular full-patch members and then Brigands prospect members.