Soft Target ss-2 Read online

  ‘I want my laptop,’ said Sewell. ‘I’ve got work to do.’

  ‘I can’t allow you to send emails,’ said Hargrove.

  ‘You’re monitoring all calls so you’d hear if I fired up the modem. Look, I’m not asking for much. My laptop – and I need cash. Someone told the Rottweilers I can’t use my credit cards and I’m running low on funds.’

  ‘I’ll sort that out,’ said Hargrove.

  ‘And my computer?’

  ‘Where is it?’ asked Hargrove.

  ‘In the boot of my car.’

  ‘The car in your garage? The BMW?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Okay. Give your keys to the sergeant on duty and I’ll pick it up for you. I’ll drop it round tomorrow.’

  ‘If you don’t, I’m walking.’

  ‘The sergeant says you were threatening arson.’

  ‘That’s still a possibility,’ said Sewell, and hung up before the superintendent could respond.

  Shepherd was making himself a cup of coffee when one of his mobile phones rang. He had three lined up on the kitchen table. One was personal, one was the phone Hargrove used to contact him, the third, which was ringing, was for his current operation. He picked it up. It was Angie Kerr. He pressed the green button to take the call. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘Is that Tony?’

  ‘Yeah. Have you got the money?’

  ‘Yes. And the photographs. Can you see me today?’

  ‘The sooner the better,’ said Shepherd. He looked at his watch. It was ten thirty. His car was already wired for sound and vision but it would take at least an hour for the surveillance team to get into position. ‘How about midday?’

  ‘Okay. Piccadilly Gardens again?’

  ‘No,’ said Shepherd. ‘From now on I call the shots. You’re not handing money to me in a crowded square. We do it where no one can see us.’ He wanted it captured on video and the only way to do that was in his car. ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘Home. Charlie went out and said he wouldn’t be back all day.’

  ‘And there’s no problem with you leaving the house?’

  ‘No, I’m here on my own.’

  ‘Better make it some distance away,’ said Shepherd. ‘Do you know Altrincham? There’s a Safeway supermarket there.’ It was a ten-minute drive from Hale Barnes, a small town that had long ago been engulfed by Greater Manchester.

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘I’ll be in a grey Volvo. Drive around the car park until you see me, then park away from me. Don’t look at me. Get out of your car and go into the supermarket. That’ll give me a chance to check that you’re not being followed. Wait two minutes, then walk out. If I’m sitting with both hands on the steering-wheel, it’s safe to come to my car. If my hands aren’t on the wheel the meeting’s cancelled and you wait for me to call you. Have you got that?’

  ‘Yes, but who do you think’ll be following me?’

  ‘Better safe than sorry,’ he said curtly. ‘Just do as I say. Be there at noon.’ He cut the connection.

  Hargrove parked down the road from Sewell’s house, then sat in the car to check that he hadn’t been followed – from force of habit rather than genuine concern. He got out of the car, turned up the collar of his coat and kept his head down as he walked to the garage door. He unlocked it and pushed it upwards, slipped inside, flicked the light switch and pulled the door down.

  The laptop was on the back seat of the car in a black nylon case. Hargrove picked it up and was heading to the garage door when he saw the door that led through to the house. He stopped and looked at it, then tried the handle. It opened. Hargrove smiled to himself. He had no authority to search Sewell’s house, but the man had given him the keys. He went through into the kitchen and put the laptop on the table.

  All the equipment and appliances were stainless steel and didn’t appear to have been used. The refrigerator contained bottles of Bollinger and imported lager. There was a stainless-steel bread bin, but it was empty, and Hargrove couldn’t find any food in the cupboards. Menus from various local restaurants hung on a hook by the oven and a carrier-bag containing the remnants of a Chinese takeaway was in the steel bin by the door.

  There was a big-screen plasma television on the sitting-room wall and a state-of-the-art sound system with DVD recorder and satellite receiver. The furniture was black leather, the coffee-tables mainly glass, and there was a black-wood sideboard loaded with bottles of spirits. Hargrove could see why Sewell wasn’t enjoying his stay in the hotel.

  He went back into the kitchen and switched on the laptop. It was a new model Sony with wi-fi to connect it to the Internet via wireless. There was also a modem. Hargrove found a connecting cable in the nylon case and slipped it into his pocket. He couldn’t afford to have Sewell prowling around the Internet. There was nothing he could do about the wi-fi other than to check there was no signal in the hotel. He doubted there would be – it didn’t have satellite TV or a business centre.

  Hargrove’s fingers played across the keyboard. He ran Sewell’s Outlook Express program, then went through his Inbox and Sent Items folders. His mail seemed to consist of two sections: office correspondence and contacts from an adult matchmaking service. Hargrove read through more than fifty replies from women who thought that Sewell was a handsome twenty-five-year-old with blond hair, a six-pack abdomen and a sexual organ that would put an elephant’s to shame. He had clearly posted someone else’s photograph on the website and was reaping the benefits. Many of the emails in his Inbox had photographs attached, and in most of the pictures the women were naked. Hargrove didn’t know if Sewell ever met any of them or if he just got a kick from reading their replies, but he’d have some explaining to do if they met him. The real Sewell was neither handsome nor twenty-five; he didn’t have a six-pack or blond hair.

  The office correspondence was far less racy but even more interesting. There were emails going back nine months from Larry Hendrickson, pressing Sewell to agree to sell his company to a London firm. The offer had been raised from an initial £750,000 to just under two million. There were no copies of the replies Sewell had sent, but it was obvious that Hendrickson had been getting increasingly desperate. His emails initially detailed the financial reasons for a sale, then practically begged Sewell to accept the deal. The last few were terse. Not threatening, nothing that could be used in court, but it was clear that the two men were no longer friends. The bigger chunk of the shares was owned by Sewell, who had founded the company, but Hendrickson would still be in line for almost half a million pounds. That alone was worth killing for, but with Sewell out of the way Hendrickson stood to gain control of the whole company.

  Hargrove switched off the laptop, closed it and put it back into the case. He drove to Altrincham and dropped off the laptop at the local police station with a chief inspector who owed him a few favours. The man promised to get the laptop to the Leeds hotel by nightfall. Hargrove thanked him and headed off to meet the surveillance van. It would soon be time for Shepherd’s meeting with Angie Kerr.

  Shepherd parked his Volvo in a space well away from the building. Supermarket car parks were his favourite place for a meeting. No one was surprised to see a man sitting alone in his car: they assumed that he was waiting for his wife. There were always plenty of people about, which meant that faces tended not to be recognised.

  Hargrove’s surveillance van drove slowly round the car park, then reversed into a space in the far corner.

  ‘Check for sound,’ said Shepherd. The van’s lights flashed once. There were two microphones, one in the passenger-side ventilation duct, the other in the hands-free telephone.

  ‘Check for vision,’ he said. The van’s lights flashed again. There were two tiny video cameras in the car, one down in the passenger-side footwell, the other in the overhead light fitting. Both microphones and cameras were linked to a transmitter in the boot of the Volvo and the sound and images could be heard and seen up to a mile away. Shepherd had a gun under the passeng
er seat, a SIG-Sauer with seven cartridges in the clip. He wasn’t expecting trouble from Angie, but her husband was a different matter.

  He scanned the vehicles in the car park. Nothing out of the ordinary. He slid into character. He was Tony Nelson, hitman for hire. Former paratrooper turned mercenary who’d fought for the highest bidder in the Balkans before moving into private practice. No wife, no children, parents long since dead, in a car accident caused by a drunk driver, and a sister he hadn’t seen for ten years. There was nothing about Tony Nelson that Shepherd didn’t know; there was no question that could be asked of him to which he didn’t know the answer. That was the way it had to be.

  Shepherd saw Angie at the wheel of a Jaguar, crawling between the ranks of parked cars. A large red motorcycle peeled away from the supermarket entrance and headed down the road. A woman in a Mini sounded her horn impatiently, but Angie continued to drive slowly until she spotted Shepherd at the wheel of the Volvo. She smiled instinctively, then bit her lower lip and looked away as she remembered she wasn’t supposed to acknowledge him until she’d been inside the supermarket.

  She found a parking space and walked into the shop. She was wearing a well-cut blazer over a white polo-neck sweater, faded blue denims and high-heeled boots. Her body language screamed that she knew Shepherd was watching her: her back was ramrod straight and her right hand gripped the strap of her shoulder-bag as if her life depended on it. Shepherd knew that looking relaxed when you were scared was one of the hardest things to pull off. Feigning anger, aggression, fear or any strong emotion was easy, but being normal when your life was on the line was a skill that came only with years of experience.

  Shepherd placed his gloved hands on the steering-wheel and waited for her to reappear. He glanced at the surveillance van. The cab was empty. The driver had moved into the back and was probably waiting to snap Angie with a long lens. Hargrove would be sitting with his headphones on and sipping the Evian water he always had by his side on surveillance operations.

  When Shepherd looked back at the supermarket, Angie was already heading his way. He avoided eye-contact until she slid into the passenger seat. ‘It’s the last car I’d expect you to have,’ she said.

  ‘That’s why I drive it,’ said Shepherd. ‘It’s a family car so anyone driving one is assumed to be a family man.’

  ‘Your whole life is like that, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Layers and layers of disguise. Do you even know who you are?’

  It was a good question, thought Shepherd, one that got to the heart of his undercover work. He had assumed so many identities over the years that sometimes even he wondered who Dan Shepherd really was. Or if he existed any more. But it wasn’t a question he wanted to address now. He was Tony Nelson, hired killer. ‘Do you have the money?’ he asked.

  Angie reached into her bag and took out a thick envelope. It wasn’t sealed and Shepherd ran his thumb along the stack of fifty-pound notes. He slid it into his jacket pocket.

  ‘You said you wanted a photograph,’ she said, taking another envelope from her bag. ‘I brought a few.’

  Shepherd flicked through them: Kerr lying on a sofa, grinning at the camera, Kerr sitting under a beach umbrella raising a bottle of Spanish beer, Kerr kneeling next to a golden retriever. ‘What’s the dog’s name?’ asked Shepherd.

  ‘Brinks,’ said Angie. ‘After Brinks Mat. All that gold bullion stolen from the airport. I wanted to call her Goldie but he said she was Brinks and that was the end of it.’

  ‘He wasn’t involved in the Brinks Mat robbery, was he? He’d only have been a teenager.’

  ‘His dad was,’ said Angie.

  ‘A family business, then?’

  Angie shrugged. ‘Not really. Charlie didn’t have much to do with his father.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the problem,’said Shepherd.‘Maybe he’s spent his life trying to prove that he’s as big a man as his father was. Trying to win his approval through imitation.’

  Angie tilted her head to one side. ‘That’s very perceptive, considering you’ve never met him,’ she said.

  ‘It’s common enough,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘What about you? Was your father a hired killer?’

  ‘My father was a baker. All I remember of him was the smell of flour.’

  She smiled. ‘Don’t tell me you both needed the dough,’ she said.

  Despite himself Shepherd laughed, and felt himself slip out of character. As Dan Shepherd, he liked the woman. But Tony Nelson wasn’t sitting in the Volvo with fifteen thousand pounds in his jacket pocket because he liked her. He was there to do a job. ‘Does he walk the dog on his own?’

  Angie’s hand went up to her mouth. Her nails were a deep pink, Shepherd noticed. ‘Don’t do it in front of Brinks,’ she said. ‘Oh, God, that would be terrible.’

  ‘I need him to be on his own.’ Shepherd continued to flick through the photographs. Kerr standing with two men. Shepherd recognised them as Eddie Anderson and Ray Wates. Anderson was small and wiry with tight black curls. Wates was as tall as Kerr but broader, his head shaved. ‘Who are these guys?’ he asked Angie. One of the hardest things to do undercover was to compartmentalise what he knew and what others thought he knew. As Dan Shepherd he knew everything the police knew about Eddie Anderson and Ray Wates, but as Tony Nelson they were just faces in a photograph.

  ‘Eddie and Ray,’ she said. ‘They’re practically joined at the hip to Charlie these days.’ She tapped a fingernail on Anderson’s face. ‘That’s Eddie. He’s Charlie’s yes man. Everything Charlie says, Eddie agrees with him. He thinks the sun shines out of Charlie’s arse.’ She pointed to Wates’s burly chest. ‘Ray’s Charlie’s muscle. You wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley.’

  Shepherd nodded. Wates was a hard case, all right. He’d been sent down in his twenties on a seven stretch for GBH but had been released after four. Since he’d started working for Kerr he’d been charged by the police half a dozen times for threatening behaviour and assault, but witnesses had always failed to make it to court and Wates had walked each time.

  ‘They don’t stay at the house, though?’

  ‘Bloody right they don’t,’ said Angie. ‘But they’re there first thing in the morning and usually in for a nightcap last thing.’

  ‘Who drives your husband?’

  ‘Eddie.’

  Shepherd took a pen and a notepad from his jacket pocket. He scribbled down the names. For her benefit, not his. ‘What’s your address?’

  She told him and Shepherd wrote it down. It was a five-bedroom house with a double garage standing in almost an acre of gardens. There was a swimming-pool at the back and a tennis court. Shepherd had seen surveillance photographs and a floor plan of the internal layout.

  ‘And what car does he drive?’

  He knew it was a black Range Rover, but Tony Nelson had to be spoon-fed the details.

  Her mobile phone rang and she jumped as if she’d been stung. She fished it out of her bag and swore. ‘It’s him,’ she said. ‘Christ!’

  ‘Don’t answer it,’ he said.

  ‘He gets stroppy if he has to leave a message,’ she said. ‘Accuses me of all sorts.’ She pressed the button to take the call and put the phone to her ear. ‘Hiya,’ she said. Shepherd heard the stress in her voice. ‘At the supermarket,’she said.‘We needed wine.’ A pause. ‘That Frascati I like. We’re out of it.’ Another pause. ‘I know but I just felt like the Frascati.’ She bit her lower lip, her right hand clenched into fist. ‘Half an hour,’ she said. ‘I was going to get some seafood, too. Make a paella. Is that okay?’ The fist clenched and unclenched. ‘What time?’ She screwed up her face. ‘I’m not nagging,’ she said eventually. ‘I was just asking what . . . Hello? Charlie?’

  She looked at Shepherd. ‘Hung up on me,’ she said, as she put her phone away. ‘He does that a lot.’

  ‘Was he giving you a hard time?’

  ‘He wanted to know why I wasn’t at home. Then when I asked what time he’d get back he went balli
stic. Accused me of spying on him.’

  ‘How late does he stay out?’

  ‘Late. He comes back stinking of cheap perfume and thinks I won’t notice.’

  ‘The guys he does business with, do you know who they are?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to muddy the waters as much as possible,’ said Shepherd. ‘If I shoot him in the head in your back garden, the police will want to know where you were and if you and your husband had been rowing. If he gets shot in a Moss Side council block full of crack-heads and gang-bangers they’ll put it down to a business deal gone wrong. You said he dealt in cocaine. Does he sell it to crack dealers?’

  ‘He hates blacks,’ said Angie. ‘No way would he ever do business with them. Says they’d kill their own mothers for a tenner.’

  ‘What about South Americans? Last time we met you said he went to Miami twice a year. I figure it wasn’t for the sun, so who does he meet there?’

  ‘He never takes me,’ she said. ‘He says it’s business and I don’t know who he sees.’

  Shepherd did. There were DEA files on the CD Hargrove had given him, along with photographs of Kerr meeting representatives of Carlos Rodriguez, one of Colombia’s most successful cocaine and heroin dealers. The DEA surveillance hadn’t produced any concrete evidence, but Shepherd doubted that the three-thousand-mile trip had been a social visit.

  ‘Does he take you to Spain?’ Kerr had a large villa overlooking Marbella. Six bedrooms, six bathrooms, and a pool twice the size of the one in Hale Barnes.

  ‘Three or four times a year,’ she said.

  ‘Does he go on his own?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I could do it there. If you were in the UK, no way would the police be looking at you. Shootings are ten a penny on the Costa del Crime.’

  ‘Usually I go with him, but I could come up with an excuse next time.’ She frowned. ‘Problem is, I don’t know when he’ll be going next. And I’d rather you did it sooner than later.’