Taking the Tunnel Page 8

  The Europeans, with the patronizing certainty of the colonialist, failed to learn Chinese, had little understanding of the community they were supposed to control and relied on their subordinates to interpret both the language and the crime. The result was that on the surface Hong Kong was a respectable, relatively crime-free country — or at least the Europeans weren’t burgled, mugged or shot. The criminals soon understood that the Europeans were largely irrelevant to their need for a secure and profitable working environment. A few well-placed bribes among the local force and eyes were turned the other way, false reports filed, the innocent found guilty on behalf of the guilty and the statistics consistently made to appear as if crime did not pay.

  For the first few weeks, Jonny had been happy to spend his days in the Police Officers’ Club which looked out on to Causeway Bay and was within a comfortable ten-minute walk of the Arsenal. There was sailing every weekend, the police junk available for barbecues and parties and the challenge of finding his way in a new community and a new job. Then he had moved into their flat in Central, a few minutes from the office and in the heart of downtown. Then it had been a coup to get a place so close to the office. Now he was the only person he knew who lived in the area. All his colleagues had moved up the hill either to the mid-levels or on to the peak itself. In the stratified society of Hong Kong, social status was measured by how far up the mountain that overlooked Central you lived. At the bottom of the hill, Jonny was well below the social salt.

  After Sam had died, he had pursued Dai Choi with a single-minded fury that left him exhausted. He followed every lead, interviewed every possible source, questioned his colleagues and pored over the files. It all led nowhere. By the time he had finally run out of steam, he was no nearer getting Dai Choi in the dock than when he started. The disillusion had seeped into his bones like the winter fog that blankets so much of Hong Kong for month after month.

  His resentment evident, he had been taken aside by one of the senior officers. “Look, Jonny,” he had been told, “you did a good job with the Mas and I understand how you feel about Sam’s death, but beating yourself over the head with a cricket bat every day is not going to bring him back and it’s not going to put Dai Choi behind bars. You have to understand the country you are dealing with. You have good cops working here; some of them are very good indeed. But in the end the cash equation tells. A sergeant earns maybe $10,000 Hong Kong a year, an inspector $25,000. Then the Triads come along with an offer of $100,000 or $200,000 to look the other way just once. It’s easy, painless and it happens. That’s the reality of life here. It’s not like working back home and if you are going to survive then you have to adjust to it.

  “Don’t forget, the gangsters help run this place. Their investments helped build Central. Half the apartment blocks on the Peak are owned by apparently respectable people who got their start in crime. Most people who make it here have done something crooked — beginning with the old European families who made their money in the opium business. So, lighten up and lower your sights.”

  He had tried to take the advice. He had settled into the routine of ordinary police work. The difference between him and his fellow officers was his visible determination to remain uncorrupted. At first, it had been sheer bloody-mindedness that had kept him clean, a reluctance to become tainted by the same blood money that had paid for Sam’s death. Then he began to take pride in his stand, and independence became a point of principle. However, although Dai Choi had taken second place to day-to-day policing, everyone knew his interest and so he was fed a constant diet of information about the man and his associates. He had taken over Sam’s room in the apartment as a study and along one wall he had built a filing system and card index to keep track of Dai Choi. He hadn’t given up.

  CHAPTER V

  Order, structure, a pattern, anything that will give them a lever, he thought to himself. That’s what they want and that’s what I’m not going to give them.

  Even as he drove himself forward, Sean Thomas knew that the challenge was becoming impossible. He knew that in London, Manchester, Newcastle and every other police centre in England and Scotland, the cops would be poring over every detail of every action; every report that might, just might, be linked to IRA activities on the mainland. Each scrap of information would be analysed, each piece of data fed into the giant HOLMES computer system to see if a pattern could be discerned that might direct them to people, places or targets.

  After a while the idea of so many people focusing on you became an almost impossible burden to bear. Over the months Thomas could see the visible changes. He no longer liked to look in the mirror as his. physical deterioration depressed him. Two years ago he had had a full head of wavy black hair and an unlined, lightly tanned face. A stranger might have thought him a successful businessman who spent time abroad, or perhaps a farmer. The money he had brought with him allowed him to live well, buy decent clothes and eat at smart restaurants so that his face and body looked healthy. Now, his hair had started to grey and was much thinner. Each morning when he brushed it clumps came away in his hand. He no longer looked healthy either. The clear grey-blue eyes which he had always thought of as one of his better features were now bloodshot from too little sleep filled with nightmares. The money had run out after three months and he was forced to draw on the caches that had been hidden around the country. That sounded fine from the security of Dublin or Belfast, but the reality was that living on the run was bloody expensive. He had to husband his cash so the clothes started to look threadbare and the diet was so bad that he had lost two stone in the last year. He had lost his tan after spending so many months peering from behind the curtains of different safe houses.

  There were other, less visible, changes too. He had been unable to stop his natural watchfulness from becoming acute paranoia. His normal concern for security had developed to a clawing of the fingers as he reached for the gun under his sweater at the first imagined threat from an innocent passer-by.

  Now he could almost feel the concentration and the enmity flowing in his direction, could imagine the final moments when his skills proved unequal to the task and he either betrayed himself or was betrayed.

  But in a strange way, the challenge was what it was all about. He had started all those years ago with the idealism fostered by tales told on his grandpa’s knee about the Easter Rising and the bravery of the Few against the Brits, the former always romantic, the latter cruel. It was hardly surprising that he had turned to the Movement for sanctuary. The Boys had given him the family he had needed after the loneliness of his childhood after his grandpa died and father left on the back of another drunken fighting match with his mother.

  What set him apart was his cunning, a skill that he had developed almost as an instinct to keep his father’s big hands from bringing the strap to his small body, and had channelled into killing. Only when the Brits had begun to get too close in South Armagh did he disappear to die in the Republic.

  He realized that he had allowed this struggle to become too personal. He was still the clever killer he had been for years but he had allowed his emotion to rule his head and that was dangerous. Even though he could rarely see his enemy, he could imagine them all around him. Day after day he put himself in their place. He watched John Witherow, the head of SOI3, Scotland Yard’s antiterrorist squad, on the news waffling about “leads” and issuing solemn warnings. None of it meant much but the detective’s red-veined, overweight face had given the threat a personality. He felt as if they were almost old friends, or at the least jousting partners who knew each other well.

  At the same time, the Irish in him liked the idea of the lone hero pitted against the forces of evil. It fitted his romantic notions of the Republican struggle, with which so many of the Movement bolstered their courage. He knew, too, that it was that very romanticism which killed people, which led to stupid mistakes, like grandstanding in a shoot-out when a quiet retreat was the order of the day.

  He struggled to keep his
personality in balance and to exploit the weaknesses of his enemy as well as playing on his own strengths. Now after months in the field it was hard. He knew he should pull out but he was too proud, too locked into a course of confrontation to want to withdraw without victory. He laughed cynically to himself. Victory used to mean getting the Brits out of Ireland. Today, he wasn’t sure what it meant. But each strike was a personal victory and he was determined to do a few more before calling it a day.

  It was this compelling need to keep the initiative and to avoid a pattern that found him driving a Ford Fiesta down the Stockbridge Road towards Winchester station. The car had been provided the night before from a support cell in Bristol and he had travelled up the previous night to stay in a bed and breakfast in Andover where he used the name Peters and practised the West Country burr he had developed to overwhelm his Irish accent.

  Winchester Station was one of the targets prepared by the reconnaissance cell over the previous three years. Housewives, students and ordinary workers had travelled through the station at different times, noting security, potential targets and methods of getting in and out of the area. It had always fitted the requirements of a good soft target and it seemed to Thomas that now was the ideal time: in the immediate aftermath of the Royce killings, the police would be focused on forensics and safe houses where he might be hiding. That was their pattern and they believed his pattern would be to lie low for a while and then strike somewhere far away from the first hit. So he would attack again immediately and close to the last strike. Always break the pattern.

  Stuck in the slow-moving traffic, he could see the red brick of the station ahead of him. The closer he got, the more he could feel the tension, the reflexive licking of the lips caused by the dry throat; the slight trembling of his right knee as the pressure on the accelerator was augmented by the involuntary tensing of his leg muscles. It made no difference that this was supposed to be a soft target, an easy kill with no security and no threat. Too often in the past, he had seen people die through such complacency. It only needed one hero or a police car on routine patrol in the wrong place to make a smooth operation fall apart.

  It was this moment he always hated the most, this and the long nights that followed a killing. It was the suspension of time between the planning and the execution. The few minutes when the goal was in sight and both time and the target seemed to telescope so that every moment dragged and the target never got closer. Then suddenly he was there. A right turn immediately after the roundabout and a two-hundred-yard slow drive to the end of the car park and he stopped in the spot reserved for the handicapped just by the short ramp leading to the platform where passengers for the 8.05 Intercity for London would be waiting.

  He got out of the car, leaving the engine running and the door open, as if he had just gone on to the platform to help some ageing relative catch the train. As he walked up the ramp, his right hand reached under his long, light brown raincoat to feel the butt of the 9 mm Star automatic pistol in the pocket of his jacket. He had found the gun in a cache in nearby Crab Wood the previous evening. It was one of several hundred that had originally been bought from the Spanish government by an Arab arms dealer, Monzer Al Kassar, who is also known in the trade as The Prince of Darkness. He sold them to Colonel Gaddafi who shipped them to Ireland in the early 1980s.

  There was no guard on the gate to the platform and Thomas simply walked through and turned left. He wanted to start at the end of the platform near the first-class carriage to hit the higher value targets first and then work his way down the passengers towards his escape route. This was a Thomas killing: careful, well planned and ruthless. There would be no panic or scattered shots fired for dramatic effect. He intended each round in the fifteen-shot magazine to hit its target.

  Resisting the impulse to increase his pace, he moved sinuously through the crowd, polite and inoffensive. He knew that afterwards it would be the shocking image of the gunman that would be remembered and described to the police and not the real picture of the quiet man passing through the commuters. It was that distortion which would help keep him free and alive.

  Thomas was pleased to see that for once the reconnaissance had got it right. The platform was crowded, mostly with middle-aged males dressed in conservative dark suits. These were the ones who could afford the exorbitant price for British Rail’s uncomfortable, hot and invariably late commuter service. These people were the legitimate targets he sought. It was men like this who bolstered the Brits in their policy towards Northern Ireland.

  Turning, Thomas faced back the way he had come, his eyes flickering over the passengers, selecting both targets and a path through the crowd. Satisfied, his hand locked around the butt of his weapon, drawing it from his pocket. There was a brief pause and, for anyone with good enough hearing, a snick as his thumb depressed the safety catch. He drew a deep breath to fill his lungs and pump an extra gasp of oxygen to his brain. Then with a single fluid motion the gun came from under the coat and up level with his face. Turning slightly, his left hand clasped his right as the sights on the gun’s stubby barrel found the first target. His right forefinger tightened around the trigger taking up the first pressure. A slight squeeze and there was a flat crack as the hammer hit the first cartridge to explode the bullet out from the barrel at 380 metres a second.

  The single round struck the first man in the centre of his face just above his upper lip. For a brief, almost imagined, fraction of a second, Thomas could see the hole as the bullet forced its way into the flesh. Then, as the man’s body was lifted from the ground by the force of the impact, the bullet, pushing an arrow of air ahead of it, drove up through the skull. The nose and bottom half of the forehead shattered and imploded and then the bullet exploded out of the back of his skull. Bright red blood, the light brown of brain and the white of bone formed separate trails in a long crescent that arced into the open space between the two platforms. The man’s body followed, falling away from the platform on to the rails. As his body touched the electrified line there was a sizzling and the carcase jumped back into the air, muscles contracting with the shock, to bow the now lifeless form before it collapsed back on to the line. Later, it would be the sickly sweet smell of burning flesh that the commuters would most remember.

  Before the body had even left the platform, Thomas had begun moving, his pistol sniffing the air to left and right. The first shot was followed by a moment of complete silence as the commuters looked on stunned, each immobilized by total shock.

  The spell was broken by the delicate tinkling of the spent cartridge case falling to the concrete floor. Then Thomas fired again, this time to his right, and a man collapsed without a sound against the woman next to him. As the gun moved to the left and Thomas continued his forward march, the screaming began. The crowd parted before him as the people shrank away seeking the few feet or inches that perhaps could provide the safety barrier between life and death, between bullet and target.

  His trigger finger was jerking again and again, the barrel kicking up with the recoil and the sound of each shot merging into what seemed to be a continuous crack that echoed and re-echoed off the concave roof covering the platform. Each bullet found a mark, but the devastation was more than just the hitting of targets. Each bullet not only killed or maimed but sprayed blood and bone around the platform covering the victims and the fortunate alike. There were few who were on the platform that day who did not have a physical reminder of the mental trauma.

  As Thomas advanced, dead and wounded lay sprawled behind him, the cries of the dying and the terrified adding to the panic among the passengers.

  With ten bullets gone, it was time to ensure his escape. Three final shots and then he was at the exit, running now to vault over the ramp to his car. A few steps around the bonnet, into the driving seat, a spurt of gravel and he was away. The parking lot was a blur, his concentration focused entirely on the exit. He turned left out of the station and back on to the Stockbridge Road.

  He reckoned he h
ad around four minutes before the exits from Winchester would be sealed by the police. By that time he would have turned off the A272, be through the tiny village of Sparsholt and heading at a sedate pace along the back roads to Southampton and the sanctuary of another safe house.

  He allowed himself a swift glance in his rear-view mirror. There was no sign of pursuit. The eyes that looked back at him held no reflection of the horror he had just left. For now, there was only the satisfaction of a tough job done well.

  Fifty-nine miles away in the west London suburb of Ealing there is a small enclave bounded to the west by Boston Road, to the north by Uxbridge, to the east by South Ealing Road and the south by the M4 motorway. This geographic box bounded by such prominent arteries for London’s traffic has helped create a small outpost of London’s Chinese community which is headquartered in Soho.

  It had begun predictably enough when Hung Sun Lu opened the North China restaurant on Uxbridge Road. He needed staff to work the long hours demanded by every Chinese restaurant owner and they took lodgings nearby. Two other restaurants opened soon afterwards to take advantage of the expense account traffic from the BBC TV studios nearby. Then in the 1980s, the influx of Chinese from Hong Kong who arrived before the British tightened the rules meant that Chinatown became overcrowded. Hong Kong entrepreneurs bought up sites in the area as fast as they came on the market but still there was not enough accommodation to meet the demand for shops, restaurants and cinemas catering to the ethnic community. So there was an emigration west to Ealing where the new immigrants found a small group of people who at least spoke their own language. Now there are several thousand living in a small patch of London which shows no real sign of their presence, so unobtrusive are they.