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

  Kriezis transferred the crowbar to his left hand and then reached inside his jacket. His right hand emerged holding a gun. He gave the crowbar to Foota and then stepped back. ‘If you want to work for me, you’re going to have to prove your loyalty. What’s your real name? Not your kid’s nickname, the name your parents gave you?’

  ‘Noah.’

  ‘All right, Noah. Good. I’m looking for someone to head up what used to be Vicious’s organisation. Someone who I can trust. Somebody who I know will never let me down. Are you that man, Noah?’

  Foota nodded slowly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am.’

  ‘I thought so,’ said Kriezis. He nodded at Two-by. ‘You know what you need to do.’

  Prifti and Shkodra took out smartphones and began videoing him. Dushku stood by the Range Rover, watching impassively.

  Foota continued to nod.

  ‘Aw, man, no fucking way!’ shouted Two-by. ‘You can’t fucking do this.’

  Foota walked slowly towards Two-by, swinging the crowbar. The two men moved apart, still filming. Kriezis grinned but kept his gun trained on Foota.

  ‘You’re my mate, Foota! You can’t fucking do this!’ He began to sob. ‘Please, man. Please.’

  Foota lifted the crowbar, hesitated, and then swung it with all his might at Two-by’s head. It cracked open and blood and brains splattered across the floor. The blow was so severe that the man was almost certainly dead within seconds but Foota hit him again and again and continued to rain blows down on the man’s battered skull until Kriezis told him to stop. Foota either didn’t hear him or didn’t care and he continued to smash Two-by’s head to a pulp. Eventually Dushku stepped forward, grabbed the crowbar and pulled it away from him.

  Foota turned to look at Kriezis. There was a fire in his eyes, a bloodlust, and he was breathing heavily. He glared at Kriezis, clenching and unclenching his hands.

  ‘So are we good, Noah?’ asked Kriezis.

  Foota took a long, slow breath, and then he nodded. ‘We’re good.’ There were flecks of blood all down his trousers and on his shoes.

  Kriezis slid his gun back into its holster. He stepped forward, his hand outstretched. Foota reached out and shook his hand. ‘Welcome to the firm,’ said Kriezis. He patted Foota on the back. ‘And your first job is to clean up this mess. I don’t care if they find the bodies or not, just make sure there’s no connection to this place.’

  ‘What about Biggs?’

  Kriezis looked over at Biggs, who was staring up at them, wide-eyed. There was a damp patch on the front of his jeans where he’d wet himself. ‘That’s up to you,’ he said. ‘It’s a management decision and now you are management.’

  He walked over to the Range Rover and climbed into the front passenger seat. Dushku got behind the wheel as Kriezis pointed the remote at the door and pressed it. The door rattled up and the Range Rover drove out. A few minutes later the van followed.

  ‘Coffee?’ asked Sharpe, putting the mug down in front of Shepherd. ‘And a bacon sandwich.’ He put the sandwich down next to the coffee. ‘I always love it when Miss Bacon cooks bacon. It never gets old.’

  ‘Detective Constable Bacon to you, Jimmy,’ said Bacon. ‘I’m still on staff, remember. You’re the hired help.’

  Sharpe threw her a mock salute before sitting down at the dining room table with his own coffee and sandwich. Shepherd had a MacBook in front of him that he was using to monitor the output from Harry’s phone.

  It was Sunday morning and they were getting ready for Gary Dexter to arrive at his brother’s house for lunch. Sharpe had stationed an NCA surveillance guy in a car down the road from the house. They didn’t need video, they just needed confirmation that Gary Dexter had arrived.

  ‘Ketchup or HP?’ asked Shepherd.

  ‘Always ketchup on a bacon buttie,’ said Sharpe.

  ‘Good call,’ said Shepherd. He bit into the sandwich.

  There was an Airwave encrypted handset on the table, the Met’s favoured method of communication. As Sharpe picked up his coffee, the handset buzzed three times. That was the signal that Gary Dexter was arriving. ‘Here we go,’ said Sharpe.

  Shepherd turned up the volume of the laptop. There was the sound of shooting and the occasional grunt and explosion. Harry was playing a shoot-em-up game on his PlayStation.

  ‘Harry!’ shouted a woman. ‘Get the front door will you!’ That would be Harry’s mother, Debbie.

  ‘I’m busy!’ shouted Harry.

  ‘Chris!’ shouted Debbie. ‘Get the door.’

  ‘I’m busy too!’ shouted Harry’s younger brother. He was close to the phone, presumably either watching the game or playing alongside him.

  ‘Ask Briana, she’s not doing anything!’ shouted Harry.

  ‘I’m busy!’ shouted a girl.

  ‘She’s playing with her phone, that’s all,’ shouted Chris.

  ‘It’s about school,’ said Briana. ‘Mum, Chris is only playing his stupid video game, tell him to do it.’

  ‘If one of you doesn’t answer the bloody door there’ll be hell to play,’ shouted a man, his voice fainter as if he was in another room.

  Sharpe grinned. ‘That’ll be Dad. If the kids carry on the way they are I’ll go around and give them a clip around the ear myself.’

  ‘Your kids never played up?’

  Sharpe shrugged. ‘To be honest I was never home much when they were growing up. I was working in Hargrove’s undercover unit and he had us all over the UK. I was away for weeks at a time. You joined well after me, but you remember what it was like?’

  Shepherd nodded. He had joined the undercover unit shortly after leaving the SAS and had hit the ground running. He had barely seen his wife Sue or their young son Liam. The operations he was on were all over the country and usually involved the long-term penetration of criminal gangs. He was undercover in a high-security prison when his wife was killed in a senseless car accident, and even when he was a single parent he still had to spend more time away from his son than he was comfortable with. ‘Yeah. Wish I’d been with Liam more when he was growing up. But I had only the one kid.’

  ‘They’re all the same at that age,’ said Sharpe. ‘It’s all about them.’

  ‘Fine, I’ll get it,’ said Briana.

  A few seconds later, Briana shouted to her parents. ‘It’s Uncle Gary!’

  ‘Tell him your dad’s in the garden,’ said Debbie.

  ‘Dad’s in the garden,’ repeated Briana in a sing-song voice.

  ‘Hi Harry, hi Chris,’ said a male voice that could only have been Gary Dexter.

  ‘Hi Uncle Gary!’ chorused the two boys.

  Then there was just the sound of the video game and the occasional insult from one or other of the brothers.

  Shepherd waited. He needed everyone in the house before he could give Amar Singh the go-ahead to place the bug on Dexter’s Mercedes. Singh was in his mid-thirties and was one of MI5’s top technical guys. He was usually immaculately dressed, favouring Armani suits and Bally shoes, but today he was in overalls and sitting in a British Gas van not far from where the NCA surveillance team were sitting.

  Sharpe and Shepherd ate their sandwiches and drank their coffee and waited. Their time came about ten minutes after Gary Dexter had arrived. They heard his voice again, and this time he was talking to his brother, arguing about football by the sound of it.

  Shepherd called Singh on his mobile. ‘Whenever you’re ready, Amar,’ he said.

  ‘I’m on it,’ said Amar. ‘I’ll call you when it’s done.’

  Amar Singh climbed out of the British Gas van and closed the door. He was wearing blue overalls with the British Gas logo on them, and a fleece that also sported the logo. He opened the rear door of the van and took out a blue tool kit and a gas detector. The GPS tracking device he was planning to use was in his pocket. It was about the size of a pack of cigarettes, black metal and magnetic. In a perfect world he would have enough time to wire the device into the vehicle’s electrical system but Si
ngh had been with MI5 long enough to have learned the world was rarely perfect.

  The target was a five-year-old Mercedes parked in the driveway of a house. From what Dan Shepherd had told him, there were six people inside and they were all in the dining room, which was at the rear, so hopefully there wouldn’t be anyone looking out of the window. Singh would have only seconds in which to place the device, and he’d have to make it appear that he had a legitimate reason for being in the driveway.

  He walked slowly along the pavement, swinging the tool kit. As he reached the driveway to the Dexter house he had a quick look around to check that there were no pedestrians nearby, then checked the windows overlooking the road. He was good to go. As he turned into the driveway he put his hand into his pocket and took out the tracker. There was no on-off switch – it became active automatically once it was placed next to metal. He reached the offside rear of the Mercedes, and as he got to the rear wheel he bent down and slipped the tracker under the arch. He placed it at the high point and heard the dull thunk as the magnet kicked in.

  He headed for the front door.

  ‘Alpha Sierra is at the front door,’ he said into his radio.

  ‘Roger that Alpha Sierra,’ said Shepherd in his earpiece. ‘All good. No reaction from inside the house. You can leave.’

  ‘Alpha Sierra is leaving,’ said Singh.

  If there had been any indication from inside the house that he’d been spotted he would have rung the bell and given them his prepared story about a possible gas leak in the area. As it was, having received the all clear from Shepherd, all he had to do was walk back to his van.

  Shepherd put down his phone. ‘The tracker’s in place,’ he said. ‘The battery’s good for two weeks, maybe a bit longer.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Sharpe.

  The sounds coming through Harry’s phone were those of a family tucking into a Sunday lunch. The click-click of cutlery on plates and of drinks being poured. Micky and Gary telling Debbie what a great cook she was, the kids teasing each other. Micky telling his daughter to stop texting.

  Shepherd was starting to think that the bugged phone idea was a waste of time, but that changed about ten minutes into the meal.

  ‘Do you fancy coming with me to Serbia next week?’ asked Gary.

  ‘Serbia? Why?’

  ‘Boys’ weekend,’ said Gary. ‘They organise shooting weekends and there’s a bunch of us going.’

  ‘What, like pheasants, you mean?’

  Gary laughed. ‘No, bruv. It’s not shotguns. Big boys’ toys. Uzis, Kalashnikovs, hand grenades, RPGs, the works. They’ve got sniping rifles too.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ asked his brother.

  ‘Yeah, the gun laws over there are super lax,’ said Gary. ‘They’ve got former Army instructors and it’s all safety first, but you can fire pretty much anything you want.’

  ‘Why the hell would you want to start shooting heavy artillery?’ asked Micky.

  ‘For fun,’ said his brother.

  Sharpe looked over at Shepherd and raised an eyebrow. ‘Fun?’ he said.

  ‘Mate, I spent almost ten years firing guns as a job, the last thing I want to do is shoot for fun,’ said Micky.

  ‘It’ll be a blast,’ said Gary. ‘There’s six of us going. We can easily fit you in.’

  ‘He’s not going anywhere to fire guns,’ said Debbie.

  ‘Debs, it’s no big deal. Serbia is a couple of hours away. We fly out Friday afternoon and we’ll get back on Sunday.’

  ‘We’re going to my mum’s next Saturday,’ said Debbie. ‘It’s her birthday.’

  ‘Well, I can see who’s wearing the trousers,’ said Gary.

  ‘I’d be very careful saying things like that while Debs is holding a knife,’ laughed Micky.

  ‘Knife? I’ll shove my spoon where the sun don’t shine if he says that again.’

  Sharpe looked over at Shepherd and grinned. ‘Feisty,’ he said.

  ‘I’m joking, Debs,’ laughed Gary. ‘I was just thinking it might be useful if your man came along to keep us on the straight and narrow.’

  ‘The guys you’re going with, who are they?’ asked Micky.

  ‘Just a few mates,’ said Gary. ‘You don’t know them.’

  ‘You’ve got to be careful around guns, Gary,’ said Micky. ‘They’re not toys. And did you say grenades?’

  ‘Yeah, apparently you can throw them at chickens if you want.’

  ‘That’s gross,’ said Briana.

  ‘Says the girl who’s shoving roast lamb into her mouth,’ said Harry. ‘Can I come, Uncle Gary?’

  ‘I think you’ve got to be eighteen,’ said Gary.

  ‘I’m almost eighteen.’

  ‘You’ve only just turned sixteen,’ said Debbie. ‘And you are not going anywhere near guns. Gary …’

  ‘Debs, I was suggesting that Micky goes, that’s all. Relive his glory days.’

  ‘I don’t think of them as glory days,’ said Micky. ‘And guns aren’t playthings.’

  ‘We’re not shooting people, Micky. Just targets.’

  ‘Up to you, mate. If you want to waste your money firing a few guns, you go for it.’

  ‘Did you ever fire an RPG?’ asked Gary.

  ‘What’s an RPG?’ asked Debbie.

  ‘Rocket-propelled grenade,’ said Harry.

  ‘How do you know that?’ asked Debbie.

  ‘Call of Duty,’ said Harry.

  ‘A video game isn’t real life, Harry,’ said Micky. ‘Though I know you sometimes get the two confused. But to answer Gary’s question, no, I never got to fire one. But I’ve had a few fired in my direction and they’re not toys.’

  ‘So it’s like a rocket?’ asked Debbie.

  ‘It’s a grenade that’s fired like a rocket,’ said Micky. ‘You’ll have seen them on the news, usually ragheads shooting at our troops.’

  ‘Gary, why would you want to do something like that?’ asked Debbie.

  Gary laughed. ‘Debs, we’re not shooting troops. Targets. We just want to see what it’s like. It’ll be a laugh.’

  ‘Well Micky’s not going, end of.’

  ‘Message received,’ said Gary. ‘Did I tell you how delicious this lamb is, Debs?’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  ‘Well it is. Bloody lovely.’

  ‘No swearing at the table, Uncle Gary,’ said Briana.

  ‘Bloody isn’t swearing,’ said Harry.

  ‘It bloody well is,’ said Briana and she giggled.

  Sharpe sat back in his chair and stretched out his legs. ‘What do you think?’ he asked, looking over at Shepherd.

  ‘About the trip to Serbia?’ said Shepherd. ‘I think I need to go. Sounds to me like they’re setting something up, right? Throwing grenades and firing RPGs.’

  ‘Big boys’ toys,’ said Sharpe.

  ‘Except like Harry’s dad said, RPGs are definitely not toys. If Dexter is planning to use them in the UK …’ He grimaced. ‘It could get very nasty.’ He shrugged. ‘Harry was wrong about RPG standing for rocket-propelled grenade, by the way.’

  Sharpe frowned. ‘Say what?’

  ‘It actually stands for Ruchnoy Protivotankoviy Granatomyot which is Russian for hand-held anti-tank grenade launcher.’

  Sharpe grinned. ‘Well, you learn something every day,’ he said. ‘Though to be fair, it actually does stand for rocket-propelled grenade.’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s a backronym.’

  ‘A what now?’

  ‘A backronym. The initials came first, from the Russian, but then someone came up with the English words to fit it.’ He grinned. ‘I’m not making this up.’

  ‘I believe you,’ said Sharpe.

  They sat and sipped their coffee as they listened to the family chatting. There was banter and gentle teasing as the Dexters caught up on each other’s lives; they were clearly a close-knit family. There was no more mention of RPGs and the trip to Serbia.

  Later in the afternoon, Gary took Harry out into the
back garden to kick a football around. Harry left his phone in the sitting room. Sharpe was reading a newspaper and Shepherd was checking for the Serbian shooting trip on his phone. A few minutes on Google took him to a website for a company called Gunfire Tours, based in a town called Sid, to the west of the Serbian capital.

  There were photographs of a training ground that looked as if it was in a disused quarry with three heavy-set men in camouflage fatigues holding an assortment of weapons including a Kalashnikov and an Uzi. The company ran shooting courses every weekend throughout the year and offered to set up team-building courses and special events for stag parties. The company also organised bodyguarding courses for people wanting a career in personal protection. There was a long list of personal recommendations from people who had been on the courses, and screenshots of Tweets mentioning the company.

  Shepherd checked the booking details and there were four places available for the forthcoming weekend’s trip. The only credit cards he had were in his own name so there was no way he could book just then, and besides he’d need to clear it with Pritchard first.

  As he flicked through the photographs, he heard Debbie talking to her husband and he looked up from the screen. ‘You don’t think Gary is going to do something stupid, do you?’ Debbie said.

  Shepherd looked over at Sharpe who was leaning towards the laptop.

  ‘He’s my little brother, he’s always doing something stupid,’ said Micky.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ said Debbie. ‘What’s he up to? You heard him. Grenades. RGPs.’

  ‘RPGs,’ said Micky.

  ‘Whatever they’re called they sound bloody dangerous,’ said Debbie. ‘Do you think he’s up to something?’

  ‘Like what?’

  They heard his wife sigh in exasperation. ‘Don’t play silly buggers, Micky. You heard about those grenades that got thrown at that mosque in Acton.’

  ‘That wasn’t Gary, and you know it. They caught the guy. One of the guys. And they didn’t use grenades, they threw home-made pipe bombs.’

  ‘What’s a pipe bomb?’

  There was a silence and Shepherd could picture her husband trying to come up with a way of describing a pipe bomb without using the word ‘grenade’.

  ‘It’s a piece of pipe with home-made explosives in it.’