Short Range (The Spider Shepherd Thrillers Book 16) Read online

  There were six photographs on the board. Most seemed to have been taken from social media. The two men on the board were Micky and Gary Dexter. Micky was the older, in his late forties. He was a big man and Shepherd figured a career in security was a good fit. He had a strong chin and eyes that looked as if they wouldn’t stand for any nonsense. In the photograph he was in the gym, wearing a tight Lonsdale T-shirt and baggy shorts that showed off a dagger tattoo on one calf.

  Gary Dexter was five years younger, thinner and shorter with sharp features and the look of a man who would have trouble fighting his way out of a wet paper bag. The picture had been taken in a pub and he was holding a pint of beer and grinning as if he had already drunk several. He was wearing a white polo shirt with the red cross of St George on the breast pocket. ‘They look very different,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘I know what you mean but they’re definitely brothers,’ said Sharpe. ‘Same mum, same dad, at least according to their birth certificates. I suppose Micky just got luckier in the gene pool.’

  ‘Ten years in the Paras probably helped,’ said Shepherd.

  The third picture was a blonde woman in her late thirties. She was holding a glass of red wine and smiling at the camera. She had long eyelashes that looked fake and her dark roots were showing through, but she had a confident smile as if she didn’t care what she looked like. Her eyes were sparkling and Shepherd figured that her husband had taken the picture and that she was very much in love with him.

  ‘That’s Micky’s wife,’ said Sharpe. ‘Debbie. They met as teenagers and she stuck with him right through his Army career.’ He gestured at the three pictures of the children. ‘Harry you’ve met, obviously. His brother is two years younger, Chris. And the girl is Briana. She’s nine.’

  ‘You said that Micky is tough on the kids. Is that right?’

  ‘Harry claims that his dad hits him every now and again, but you’ve seen what he’s like. If I was his dad I’d be giving him what for.’

  ‘You don’t hit kids, Razor.’

  ‘Sometimes you have to.’

  Shepherd shook his head. ‘I never laid a finger on Liam.’

  ‘Yeah, well Liam’s a good lad. Plus his mum died when he was young.’

  Shepherd tilted his head to the side. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean, Spider. You were his only parent, of course he’s not going to play up and risk losing you.’

  ‘I never had any problems with him. That’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘To be fair, you were away most of the time he was growing up. He spent most of his early years with his grandparents and your au pair.’

  Shepherd opened his mouth to reply but then realised that Sharpe was probably right, so he said nothing.

  ‘The reason we’ve got so many feral kids knifing each other at the moment is because they don’t learn respect at home,’ said Sharpe. ‘If you don’t respect your parents then why would you respect the police? Or anybody for that matter.’

  ‘So you teach them respect by hitting them, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘I got the odd clip around the ear when I was growing up.’

  ‘And it didn’t do you any harm? Come on, Razor. You know that’s bollocks. You don’t earn respect with violence. Violence breeds violence. But I didn’t get the impression that Harry is being abused.’

  ‘Me neither, truth be told. I think he was just spinning a line, trying to get our sympathy.’

  ‘We need to be sure, Razor. I don’t want the dad lashing out at Harry if he finds out what he’s been doing.’

  ‘Hopefully he won’t find out,’ said Sharpe.

  ‘We need to be sure, Razor.’

  ‘He doesn’t have a history of violence,’ said Sharpe. ‘Other than his military career, obviously.’

  ‘Okay, but if I think that Harry is in any danger because of what we’re asking him to do, we’re pulling him out.’

  Sharpe patted him on the shoulder. ‘You’re overthinking this,’ he said. ‘If there’s any danger it’ll come from the Yardies. Harry isn’t family to them, he’s just a kid to be used. They’re the ones that will hurt him, but it won’t happen. We’ve got Morris and his gang under surveillance and if at any time it looks like they’ve sussed Harry, we’ll pull him out.’

  Shepherd sighed and nodded. Sharpe was a professional with decades of experience working undercover. He was the last person Shepherd needed to be second guessing.

  ‘What do you want to do about monitoring the phone?’ asked Sharpe.

  ‘The feed will go to Thames House and I can access it whenever I need to. I can also listen to the live feed through my phone. When does Gary get to the Dexter house on Sunday?’

  ‘Between eleven and twelve.’

  ‘Okay if I’m here then?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll be here all day and so will Julie.’

  ‘And what about Harry’s run tomorrow?’

  ‘We’ll have people at Waterloo and on the train and at Reading station. We’ve done a few runs with him so we know the routine.’

  ‘You don’t do it yourself?’

  ‘We don’t use anyone that he knows. And we don’t tell him that he’s being followed. You know what amateurs are like, if they see someone they recognise, they stare.’

  ‘Do you ever see anyone from the gang tailing him?’

  Sharpe shook his head. ‘No. There’s just the guy who hands over the bag. It’s all pretty casual. They do as many as half a dozen drops a day.’

  ‘What about the other lines? Are you turning all the kids?’

  ‘Of the other nine, eight are under fifteen and we can’t risk using them. The other one we only spotted a week ago and we’re still assessing which way to go. He’s a sixteen-year-old but his family are known drug dealers so there’s a good chance they know what he’s doing. But we can move with just what we have from Harry.’

  ‘I’ll drop by tomorrow. I’d like another chat with him.’

  Sharpe took Shepherd downstairs. Bacon offered him another coffee but Shepherd passed. He wanted to get back to Thames House to see how the investigation into the mosque attack was going.

  Jimmy Sharpe drove Shepherd back to London and dropped him close to Thames House. Shepherd went in through security and up to the incident room, where Sarah Hardy was eating a sandwich at her desk. On one of the big screens was a live video feed of the outside of the mosque which showed uniformed officers removing the police tape.

  ‘The police are almost done,’ said Hardy.

  ‘They’ve done an evidence sweep already?’ asked Shepherd. ‘That was quick.’

  ‘They were told to pull their fingers out so that the worshippers could be allowed back in. SOCO and EOD said they would need two days at least but they were overruled.’

  The scenes of crime officers and the explosive ordinance disposal team should have gone through the crime scene with a fine toothcomb to gather any parts of the bombs that hadn’t been destroyed in the explosions. Shepherd assumed that the Met top brass was worried about a confrontation with the Muslim community in the area.

  ‘What about Tony Hooper?’

  ‘Still saying nothing. A lawyer turned up a couple of hours ago.’

  Shepherd raised an eyebrow. ‘He has a lawyer?’

  ‘Somebody else is paying for it, but yes, he now has legal representation and I don’t think we’re going to get a word out of him. Though to be honest I don’t think we need a confession or cooperation. The Met has applied to look at Hooper’s phone records but we’ve got a jump on them. He made more than a dozen calls this morning in the hours before the attack, and received six. We’ve got the names and addresses and it looks as if he was talking to his co-conspirators.’

  ‘Are you going to give the info to the Met?’

  Hardy shook her head. ‘No, we’ll let them do it in their own time. This is still an SO15 investigation and we don’t want to tread on their toes. We’re just watching over their shoulder.’

 
‘How’s Neil?’

  ‘He’s in ICU but he’s okay. They reinflated his lung but he’ll be in hospital for a week or so.’

  ‘And have Rusul Jafari and Tahoor Farooqi checked in?’

  Hardy nodded. ‘They went right through the mosque and there was no sign of your Tango One. It looks as if he was spirited out of a back entrance. They got back an hour ago.’ The phone on her desk rang. She put down her sandwich and picked up the receiver, listened, said ‘yes’ and ‘of course’ and then put it down and smiled at Shepherd. ‘The director wants to see you. At your convenience.’

  Shepherd grinned. ‘He didn’t really say that, did he?’

  Hardy picked up her sandwich. ‘I was paraphrasing.’

  Shepherd went upstairs to Pritchard’s office. This time the director kept him waiting for just a few minutes before he was ushered in. Pritchard had taken off his jacket and placed it over the back of his chair. Gold cufflinks glinted under the overhead lights. He pushed his glasses higher up his nose. ‘Just so you know, Mohammed Khalid has been booked onto an Emirates flight to Dubai this evening, under the name he flew in on. That suggests he doesn’t know he’s been watched; if he did he’d probably have gone to ground. The plan is to let him return to Pakistan and keep him under surveillance.’

  ‘He left the mosque shortly after the attack?’

  Pritchard nodded. ‘It seems that way, though he wasn’t seen. Clearly he was there for a meeting, but what we don’t know is if that meeting took place or not. We’ll be putting the congregation under the microscope and paying particular attention to the imams, obviously.’

  ‘We were just unlucky,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘So far that’s how it looks,’ said the director. ‘We’ll know better once we’ve got a clearer idea of what Hooper and his friends were up to. But it’s not looking as if Khalid was the target. Just in the wrong place at the wrong time. As they say, shit happens.’ He smiled thinly. ‘The good news is that so far the surveillance operation has stayed below the radar. The police know about the attack on Neil but his cover as a courier is holding and they seem to have accepted that he was just an innocent bystander caught up in the reaction to the attack. The descriptions of you are variable, and no one got the registration number or even a decent description of the van you were using.’ His smile widened a fraction. ‘So far, so good.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘How did it go with the Dexter boy?’

  ‘He has the phone and I’ll be at the safe house. He’s been asked to make a run tomorrow and I’ll watch over that.’

  ‘How does he seem?’

  ‘He’s a kid. And a cocky one at that. I’d recommend keeping this as short as possible. We’re getting him to lie to his parents and parents usually know when their kids are lying.’

  ‘I thought all teenagers lied to their parents.’

  ‘Do you have children?’

  Pritchard’s eyes hardened a fraction. ‘I’m not sure how whether or not I’m a parent has a bearing on your investigation,’ he said.

  Shepherd shrugged. ‘All kids lie, from an early age. “I didn’t do it” and “it wasn’t me” are pretty much their first words. But as a parent you’re not fooled. Then they get older and you ask if they’ve done their homework and they say they have and you know they’re lying. You just know. They get better at lying but a parent can always tell.’

  ‘To be fair, you’re not just a parent. You’ve got years of undercover experience, you’re an authority on lying.’

  ‘Sure, I lie for a living. But parents know their kids and I just worry that his mum and dad will catch him out eventually. Plus, like I said, he’s cocky. And overconfidence has caught out many an undercover agent. He’s starting to think that it’s a game and that he’s smarter than the other players.’

  ‘I’m assuming you can talk some sense into him.’

  ‘I’ll try, yes. But the best policy would be to bring the operation to a speedy conclusion.’

  Pritchard nodded. ‘Let’s see how we get on this weekend.’

  He looked at his watch, which Shepherd took as a sign that he was being dismissed. Shepherd stood up. Pritchard had already turned his attention to his computer screen as Shepherd left the office.

  Jerry McAllen dropped down onto the white leather sofa and smiled up at the cute blonde as she popped the cork off his bottle of Cristal. ‘You handle that bottle well, darling,’ he laughed. ‘I bet you could make me pop like that if you wanted.’

  ‘I’ve had a lot of practice,’ laughed the girl. She was in her twenties with dark green eyes and an Eastern European accent. Probably Polish, Jerry figured. She was wearing a low-cut top that showed off an impressive cleavage and a short skirt that left little to the imagination. She was just his type. ‘What’s your name, darling?’

  ‘Iwana,’ she said. She picked up his glass and poured professionally.

  ‘As in, “Iwana drink”?’

  She flashed him a smile. ‘I’ve never heard that before,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’

  She laughed and handed him his glass. ‘Only about a million times,’ she said.

  Jerry’s brother, Tommy, dropped down on the sofa next to Jerry. He was eight years younger, a few kilos lighter and with his arms covered in tattoos including skulls, knives, snakes and tumbling dice. Tommy was wearing Diesel jeans and a Ted Baker shirt, the sleeves rolled up to show his artwork. Like his brother he had sunglasses shoved up on the top of his head even though the sun had gone down hours earlier.

  Iwana poured Tommy a glass. ‘You’re new,’ he said as he took it from her.

  ‘I’m twenty-three,’ she said, putting the bottle back into its ice bucket. ‘Not new really.’

  Both men laughed. Jerry ran a hand through his thick jet-black hair. He was wearing a white linen shirt and Versace jeans and had a Rolex Daytona on his wrist. ‘Why don’t you sit down and have a drink with us, Iwana?’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘But maybe on my day off.’

  ‘Darling, we’re VIPs,’ said Jerry. ‘Management won’t mind.’

  ‘Jerry, everyone in this section is a VIP,’ she said.

  ‘You know me?’

  She laughed. ‘Everyone knows Jerry and Tommy McAllen,’ she said. She winked and went over to another table.

  The two men laughed as they watched her hips swing. ‘She’s fit,’ said Tommy.

  ‘Fuck off, I saw her first,’ said his brother. He stretched out his legs and burped. They had eaten at a harbour-side restaurant in Puerto Banus, huge lobsters and thick steaks, washed down with Cristal champagne. The nightclub was a short walk from the restaurant but they had stopped off twice on the way for cocktails. The plan was to spend the rest of the night drinking champagne from the vantage point of the VIP area, cordoned off from the rest of the club by a short flight of stairs, a red rope and two heavily-built bouncers in black suits.

  Half the club’s clientele were Spanish, but pretty much everyone in the VIP section was British. Jerry knew everyone there, at least by sight, and he had exchanged a few nods and handshakes as he had made his way to his regular sofa. Most of the men he’d shaken hands with were in his line of business, but they weren’t competitors, more like friendly rivals.

  As he sipped his champagne, he saw a guy in his thirties walk up the stairs towards the red rope. The two bouncers moved to block his way. Jerry smiled to himself. There were always chancers trying to blag their way into the VIP section but only regular big spenders were allowed in and the guy wasn’t a regular. He was short and stocky, wearing a Ralph Lauren polo shirt with the big horse on the breast, probably a knock-off. There was a Rolex on his left wrist and a thick chain on his right and Jerry would have bet money that both of those were counterfeit too.

  Jerry knew the bouncers. Oskar was a German, a former special forces soldier. He’d done five years in the Kommando Spezialkräfte, the German equivalent of the SAS, before being invalided out with a dodgy knee. His colleague was a Frenchman called Pierre, former F
oreign Legion, a tough bastard who took no prisoners. Pierre put a hand on the man’s shoulder and said something to him – no doubt telling him to fuck the fuck off. The man held out his hand to shake. Playing the big man. Pierre shook the hand and Jerry could imagine the Frenchman gripping the chancer so hard that tears would spring to his eyes. It was Pierre’s party trick – he had a grip like a vice.

  The two men shook and as Pierre took his hand away, Jerry realised that the man had slipped him something. Jerry chuckled. Bribing the bouncers with a few euros never worked. They were well paid and their jobs depended on them keeping out the riff raff.

  The chancer shook hands with Oskar, then they both patted the man on the back and Oskar unclipped the red rope and ushered him inside. Jerry frowned. That was a first. He’d never seen anyone bribe his way into the VIP area before. Maybe the guy had been before and flashed a lot of money. Or maybe it was one hell of a tip.

  The man was walking across the VIP area, his eyes flicking from side to side, taking everything in. There was an arrogance to the way he walked, head up and shoulders back, and Jerry began to wonder if he’d misjudged him.

  ‘Do you know him?’ asked Tommy, who was also looking at the new arrival.

  ‘No,’ said Jerry.

  The man was walking in their direction, but he was avoiding eye contact. As he got closer, Jerry could see a jagged scar across the man’s left cheek as if he’d been glassed at some point in the distant past. As Jerry stared at the scar the man’s eyes met his and Jerry felt his cheeks redden. The man smiled as if sensing his discomfort.

  ‘What the fuck’s he grinning at?’ asked Tommy.

  The man walked up in front of Jerry and nodded. ‘Jerry?’

  Jerry looked up at him. ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘Not yet. No.’ The man had an accent, but Jerry couldn’t place it. It was European, but not French, not German, and definitely not Spanish. ‘May I sit down?’ He gestured at the sofa opposite them, but then sat down before Jerry could reply. ‘My name is Frenk,’ he said.

  ‘Frank?’

  ‘Frenk. With an e. But you can call me Frank if you want. Most of my British friends do.’