Retribution Read online

  There was a brief tech report which listed the number of cartridge cases recovered from the scene. They’d found just under sixty, which meant there were still about half a dozen that they hadn’t recovered, maybe because they’d been collected by ghoulish onlookers as bizarre souvenirs of the incident. That obviously assumed that the magazines on both weapons had been full. The number of rounds fired was a fine example of overkill, bearing in mind that there had been only four victims, and another piece of paper confirmed that on an initial inspection all appeared to have come from two different Mac-10 machine pistols, based on the extractor marks and the shape of the firing pin indentations. That was no surprise, obviously, and matched what the witnesses had reported and the CCTV footage had shown.

  A copy of the initial crime scene report was also present, which noted the names of the four victims and the number of wounds each had suffered, together with an outline drawing showing the disposition of the bodies and the approximate positions where the assassins had stood.

  Another much larger drawing displayed the overall scene, including the positions of the three vehicles involved – the Jaguar limousine, the stolen Vauxhall saloon and the white Transit van – as well as the restaurant entrance door and windows, and the location of the victims.

  At the back of the file was a large brown envelope containing some two dozen colour photographs. Obviously many more than that would have been taken by the Metropolitan Police SOCOs or FSIs, but those in the envelope provided a snapshot – if that was the right word – of the event and mute testimony to the violence of the attack and the determination shown by the unidentified assassins. The pin-sharp images showed the four dead bodies in graphic detail, three pictures for each one, while the others provided shots of the scene itself. Another image showed a scattering of cartridge cases over quite a large area of pavement, the Mac-10 tending to spew its discarded brass with both speed and wide dispersion.

  And that, really, was about all the case file contained. The very last entry was a single sheet of paper containing a summary of events – essentially a rehash of other written information – but which also looked at possible motives. These included the two most obvious, that it was a case of mistaken identity, one arrogant minor African prince looking remarkably like some other arrogant minor African prince, or that it was an attack intended as revenge or retribution for some act performed back in the dark continent by either the prince or Daddy. And in that case, as the attackers didn’t appear to be Africans, because the few flashes of bare skin seen by the two principal witnesses had definitely looked more white than black, the obvious conclusion was that the job been contracted out to some local group. And, the writer had added, if that was what had happened, the chances of solving it were pretty slim, as it was essentially a stranger killing another stranger, with no direct link between the parties. That was always the most difficult kind of crime to solve.

  The author of the note had also added one other possibility, that the death of the prince was actually collateral damage, and the real target of the assassins had been one or perhaps both of the two call girls in the party, unlikely though this might seem. It seemed unlikely to Richter as well, but at that stage he wasn’t going to rule anything out.

  There was very little information about the death of the DPG bodyguard, apart from his name, collar number and an extract from his service record, together with a brief summary of the injuries he’d sustained. But the writer did suggest that perhaps Jacob King might have been acting in concert with the attackers, precisely because he had left with them in the van. However, no explanation was offered for the very clear video images of King being shot by one of the assassins, because you obviously couldn’t have it both ways.

  If Jacko King had been a member of the gang, which Richter didn’t believe for a moment, based on his admittedly limited personal knowledge of the man, he would have expected him to have simply climbed into the vehicle and then leave the scene with the other attackers. But if the gang members had decided he’d outlived his usefulness, then they could easily have shot him and left his body at the scene. Shooting him, and then removing the body, made no sense at all. Or it didn’t to Richter, and probably not to anyone else, either.

  Something else had to be going on, but at that moment he had no idea what it could be.

  Chapter 3

  A brief visit to the scene of the assassinations didn’t noticeably help him either. It probably looked pretty much the same as it had done the previous night, the armoured Jaguar parked near the kerb, the Vauxhall still embedded in its front end, though obviously the bodies of the victims had been removed some time previously.

  Richter parked the pool car – an absolutely standard Vauxhall Astra diesel a couple of years old – on a double yellow line a few yards away from where the white-clad Metropolitan Police FSIs were beavering away and collecting a wealth of forensic evidence, evidence that would no doubt in due course provide a really complete and comprehensive picture of what actually happened the previous evening. The problem was, as Richter saw it, that they were most probably learning more and more about less and less, and no amount of forensic analysis was going to help in identifying the perpetrators. Unless, that is, one of them had stupidly left his wallet or something personal at the scene, which they obviously hadn’t, or had loaded their weapons using their bare hands, in which case there was a slim possibility of getting a fingerprint match from some of the cartridge cases if any of them had previous form. And of course none of this would help to confirm, or even suggest, a motive. Unless it was really that simple, and the entire purpose of the attack had been to blow Prince Nasty away, nothing more.

  None of which, of course, helped Richter.

  He closed the car door, walked over to the perimeter of the crime scene and watched the activity for a minute or so, being eyed with a certain amount of suspicion by a couple of uniforms posted inside the police tape, probably with specific instructions to dissuade rubber-neckers. There were perhaps a dozen assorted citizens, almost all of them male, standing around, several of them filming using the cameras in their mobiles. Richter didn’t want to talk to a uniformed constable, but he did want to find out if there was any new information, and there was one simple and obvious way to attract the attention of whoever was in charge. So he lifted the tape and stepped under it. Then he just stood there, waiting.

  ‘Oy, you!’

  As he had expected, one of the uniforms immediately stepped forward, and as he shouted out, a grey-haired man standing talking to one of the FSIs, wearing the ubiquitous white over-suit that was almost a uniform for them, looked straight at Richter, then strode over in his direction.

  ‘Do you have a vision problem, sir? Some trouble with your eyes?’ he asked, stopping directly in front of Richter and gesturing towards the area around them. ‘Didn’t you notice the police tape? All these signs telling people to keep away?’

  Richter didn’t reply, just reached into his jacket pocket – an action that also clearly exposed the butt of the Browning nestling in its shoulder holster, which caused the policeman to pause momentarily – and took out a small leather folder inside which was a visual ID. On it was a bad photograph of him, a clear and distinct crest, and personal information that purported to identify him as a member of the Secret Intelligence Service, SIS, commonly known to the public as MI6.

  In fact, the ID was both faked and irrelevant, because Richter wasn’t, and had never been, employed by SIS. In fact, he had no idea if there even was such a thing as an SIS ID card, though he presumed personnel in the agency must have carried some form of identification. The only information of any importance on the ID was the contact telephone number, because that was genuine. That was the ‘get out of jail free’ number, which was also hard-coded into the mobile phone in his pocket. One call to that number would mobilise whatever assets Richter needed access to. It would quite literally get him out of jail, get him a seat on an aircraft or allow him to commandeer any resources he need
ed, and do almost anything else. As long as he could justify it to Simpson afterwards, of course.

  The senior officer peered somewhat myopically at the folder, then looked at Richter, apparently comparing his face to the photographic image.

  ‘Another bloody James Bond wannabe,’ he muttered, ‘and you’d better have a carry permit for that shooter. So what do you want, sonny?’

  ‘A bit less of the sonny, for starters,’ Richter snapped, slipping the folder back into his pocket. ‘I don’t want to be here any more than you do, but I’ve got lumbered with trying to make some sense out of this bloody fiasco. So apart from what we already know, is there anything you can tell me? The identities of the shooters? Whatever the hell their motive was? Next week’s lottery numbers?’

  The police officer shook his head, a faint smile appearing briefly on his face.

  ‘Sorry, I’ve had it up to here with spooks and other assorted suits coming down here today and asking stupid questions. I’m DI McKenzie, and I’m the Senior Investigating Officer, so this is my personal pile of shit. The short and snappy answer is that these men left nothing behind them apart from a pile of cartridge cases, a crashed car and a heap of dead bodies. Or, if they did leave anything else, we haven’t found it yet. We might get something out of the car once the forensic guys have done their stuff, but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting. We still don’t know where the van went, but we’re checking the CCTV cameras around here. We might know something from that later today.’

  ‘Figures. You reckon this was professional? Or some local gang bangers?’

  McKenzie considered for a moment before replying.

  ‘Professional-ish, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Well organised and well-planned, but a really messy execution – in both senses of the word. They obviously knew the prince would be here last night and they could have taken him out with a couple of rifle-shots from any one of the surrounding buildings. Bang, bang, job done. Nice and neat and clean. But prepping the Vauxhall, staging the car crash, and then shooting everybody in sight, that’s not the way a bunch of pros would have done it.’

  ‘Unless they were sending somebody a message,’ Richter suggested.

  ‘If this was a gangland killing, I’d agree with you, but unless we’re way off beam, this was a political hit, aimed at the prince and his odious bastard of a father. I think the important thing was the result, not how they achieved it.’

  ‘So why the overkill?’

  McKenzie shrugged his shoulders. ‘Beats the shit out of me.’

  ‘And the bodyguard, the one who was taken away by the assassins? Any idea if he was alive or dead when they put him in the van?’

  McKenzie shook his head.

  ‘No idea. All I can tell you is that we found no significant blood in the area where he fell.’

  Richter looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘At first we thought there was no blood at all,’ McKenzie clarified, ‘but when the SOCOs did a fingertip search they did find a small patch of blood, and a few head hairs as well, so it looks like he fell backwards when he was shot, and cracked open the back of his head on the ground. So he was probably either dead or unconscious when he fell. But as far as arterial blood is concerned, or anything indicating a major wound, we found nothing.’

  Two minutes later Richter climbed back into the Astra, programmed the satnav for an address out beyond Reading and drove away, leaving McKenzie watching the FSIs with a kind of irritated disinterest because he had come to exactly the same conclusion about the attack as everybody else: solving it was going to take either a confession from somebody who’d been involved or a planet-sized piece of luck.

  In reality, the killers and their victims were not really Richter’s concern. His primary objective was both simpler and more complex than analysing the assassination itself. All he had to do was to find out why Jacko King had been shot and then shoved into the back of the van, alive or dead, and driven away. And, directly related to that, was the question of the SAS soldier’s possible collusion with the group.

  As Richter pulled out into the traffic, a non-descript three-year-old Ford Focus saloon emerged from a side street perhaps a hundred yards beyond the crime scene, followed by a motorcyclist riding a Honda CBR500R, a bike powerful enough to keep up with almost anything on the road up to the legal speed limit, but still light and agile enough to be easy to manoeuvre in heavy traffic, and with a decent range – almost 200 miles – with a full tank. The rider of the Honda had, somewhat incongruously, a battered guitar case strapped on his back, and also followed Richter’s car, but kept well back. The Ford saloon stopped briefly near the crime scene, pausing just long enough for one of the spectators to slip his mobile phone into his jacket pocket before getting into the passenger seat. Then that car also joined the procession.

  Chapter 4

  ‘There was nothing useful at the crime scene,’ Richter said, using the hands-free system in the car to talk to Richard Simpson. ‘They did find a small amount of blood near where Jacko was shot, but it looks like it came from a minor head wound when he fell. So wherever he is at the moment, he’s probably got a headache.’

  ‘So where are you going right now?’

  ‘The next link in the chain – in fact, the only link chain that I can see – is to go and talk to Jacko’s wife.’

  ‘According to his personnel file, they’re separated,’ Simpson pointed out.

  ‘I read that too, but she’s still probably the person who knows him best, certainly a hell of a lot better than I do, so I want to talk to her anyway. She’s got an armed police guard because of what happened, according to the briefing, so can you give the local woodentops a call and let them know I’m on my way. Then they might not shoot me when I knock on the door.’

  The address Richter had been given for Jacko King’s wife was a place called West End Green, a small village tucked away in the network of minor roads and narrow lanes that lay in the outer commuter hinterland to the south of Reading and north of Basingstoke, and was roughly halfway between the two places. He peeled off the M4 motorway at Three Mile Cross and headed south on the A33 trunk road, then took a minor road towards Beech Hill. That wasn’t necessarily the fastest route to his destination, but the stern sounding young woman who lived inside the satnav insisted that it was the most direct route. And he didn’t know the area, so he just did what he was told.

  He’d actually driven through Beech Hill before he was certain that the Ford Focus he’d had his eye on ever since leaving the M4 really was following him. That didn’t particularly bother him, because the fact that there was a driver and a passenger in the vehicle at least suggested that it might be an unmarked police car. And even if it was, and the two occupants decided to pull him over for some traffic offence or other perceived infraction, he had a valid carry permit for the Browning and the telephone number on his faked ID card was a guarantee that any other problems would simply go away.

  He was more curious than concerned, but just as a precaution, in case he’d read the situation badly wrong, as he cleared the last of the built-up area, he pulled the Browning out of the holster, racked back the slide to chamber a round and cock the weapon, made sure the safety catch was on and then replaced it inside his jacket.

  And then, just a matter of seconds later, everything changed.

  He steered the Vauxhall around a reasonably sharp bend and saw, immediately in front of him, the motorcycle that had passed him a few minutes earlier. Richter had always been more into bikes than cars, and had recognised the model – a Honda CBR500R, the lineal descendant of a Honda 500-4 that he had owned some twenty years earlier – as it had overtaken him. He’d also noted the guitar case that the rider had been carrying on his back, which had struck him at the time as being slightly unusual. What he now saw made the purpose of the guitar case crystal clear.

  The bike was no longer moving. It was parked to one side of an open gateway on the right-hand side of the road, the rider standing beside it and looking directl
y at Richter’s car. That was unusual, but unremarkable, but what lifted the situation to an entirely new dimension was what the rider was holding in his hands.

  Richter was familiar with weapons of all shapes and sizes, from the pistol in the shoulder holster under his jacket to the heavier stuff like the Aden cannon, CRV-7 rockets, Brimstone anti-armour missiles and laser-guided bombs that he had occasionally used when he’d been wearing a dark blue suit and flying Royal Navy Harriers for the Queen. But even somebody entirely unfamiliar with military hardware would probably have had no trouble at all in recognising the Kalashnikov AK-47 that the motorcycle rider was aiming at the car.

  The weapon had become the favourite fashion accessory for members of every terrorist group on the planet, and images of the weapon, in the hands of everyone from pre-teen children to adult men and women in one of the numerous hotspots around the world, had become almost daily viewing fare on British television.

  It wasn’t an attractive weapon, with none of the lethal grace and elegance of some more modern assault rifles, but what it lacked in sophistication it more than made up for in its utter reliability. You could bury one in sand for years, dump it underwater, and even drive a truck over it, and in most cases when you picked it up and pulled the trigger it would still fire. That was why it was so popular with people who had murder on their mind, and why nearly eighty million genuine Russian-built Kalashnikovs and well over one hundred million legal and illegal copies of the assault rifle had been manufactured in arms factories around the world.

  And that was why Richter reacted immediately, instinctively choosing the best weapon at his disposal. He never even thought about using the Browning, because getting it out and aiming it would take far too long. And right then time was something he had almost nothing of.

  Most people, confronted with a situation of this sort, would probably floor the accelerator pedal in the car and drive ahead down the road as quickly as they could, trying to get away. And most people, if they had done that, would be dead around four seconds later, as the gunman would be able to follow their fleeing vehicle with his weapon and riddle it with bullets. No car ever built can outrun a bullet, and the bodywork of modern vehicles offers precisely the same measure of protection against a supersonic round fired from an assault rifle – or any other weapon, come to that – as a sheet of wet cardboard. Bullets don’t bounce off cars unless they’re armoured: they go straight through them.