The Pulsar Files, page 1
part #1 of Matt Flynn Series
The
Pulsar
Files
Iain Cameron
Copyright © 2018 Iain Cameron
ISBN: 978 1980606482
The right of Iain Cameron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of the copyright owner.
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
To find out more about the author, visit the website:
www.iain-cameron.com
DEDICATION
For Roger, a man whose love of books knows no bounds.
Homeland Security Agency (HSA)
HSA is a fictitious organisation established by the Home Office, the brainchild of minister Sir Raymond Deacon. Its unofficial motto is: ‘Fight Fire with Fire,’ and it is staffed by agents operating under similar rules of engagement as the UK military.
It was set up to combat the changing threat faced by UK security forces from terrorists, criminal gangs, ruthless organisations and individuals. Terrorists who no longer appear in the open, but integrated themselves into local communities; criminal gangs who use open borders and the web to traffic guns, drugs and people; and rich organisations and individuals who believe they are above the law.
The headquarters of the agency is located at a secret address in London. There are other HSA offices at various centres around the UK.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
About the Author
Also by Iain Cameron
Chapter 1
The boots of the man with the backpack made little sound on the twigs and leaves that lay underfoot, wet from earlier rain. He’d parked in a track off Ladder Hill and was now striding with purpose down a narrow path between a thick line of trees that jutted into a large field. It would take a keen eye to spot him as he wore a black fleece with black trousers and the copse produced its own dark shadow. If this didn’t give him confidence in not being seen, he knew few people would be awake at this early hour of the morning, and fewer who wanted to gaze over this featureless Oxfordshire countryside.
He found a good place halfway along with a clear view of the area and placed the backpack on the ground. He opened it and removed a flask and a cup. Keeping everything within his large hands, he unscrewed the top of the flask and poured the strong, aromatic coffee into the cup. He returned the flask to the backpack and stood looking at the landscape, the cup not far from his lips.
The fields on both sides of the tree line had once grown wheat, he guessed from the stalks lying over the earth, but the crop had been harvested many months before, giving the land a barren feel. The only other landmarks on the immediate horizon were a derelict stone tower and giant electricity pylons, black high-tension cables strung between them.
Five minutes later, with the coffee gone, he spotted a hot air balloon in the distance. He reached into the backpack and pulled out a pair of military grade binoculars. Raising them to his eyes and bringing the balloon into focus, he had a good view of the occupants of the basket. Standing beside the grizzly old owner of Hewton’s Balloon Tours, were Mom, Pop and two teenage kids, one girl and one boy. He smiled, revealing two prominent incisors, a noticeable gap between them.
He bent down and removed the stock, body, barrel and ammunition magazine from the backpack. In seconds, a process he could perform in the dark, as he often had to, he screwed the rifle together and with a final satisfying click, he slotted the ammunition magazine home.
From a protective leather case he removed the optical sight and screwed it to the top of the rifle. Lying down on the grass he focussed the crosshairs on the tip of the nearest electricity pylon, which he knew to be a distance of one hundred and ten metres as he’d paced it earlier. Satisfied, he allowed the rifle to rest in his arms while he waited.
The balloon made slow, steady progress towards him, the bulging red- and yellow-coloured envelope providing a splash of colour against a bleak landscape. He could make out the old man, his hand on the burner control, giving the lever a tweak to give them more height, sufficient to clear the electricity cables now in their path. The gunman lifted the rifle and focussed on a point ten metres above the wires.
In seconds, the livery of Hewton’s Balloon Tours filled his view. He began to count. On reaching twenty, he fired a single shot. The hollow-point bullet went through the skin of the balloon, creating a neat incision in one side and tearing a hole the size of a trash can in the other.
The balloon began to lose height and was now at the mercy of prevailing winds. At this time of day, the winds were predominately light and easterly and, as expected, they blew the balloon towards him until it struck a 400,000 volt cable.
Chapter 2
‘What time is it?’ the otherwise lifeless body beside him asked.
‘Four-forty. Go back to sleep. I told you last night…’
Matt Flynn glanced over at Emma and decided not to finish the sentence as she had gone back to sleep. Her deep slumber was a characteristic he longed to emulate as he had to make do with four or five hours of restless turning that often saw him banished to the spare room.
An agent with HSA, Homeland Security Agency, he didn’t have the excuse of a tough job, as his girlfriend, Emma Davis, had one herself: Detective Inspector with the Metropolitan Police. His poor sleeping habit was an inherited trait from a restless mother, his ‘Duracell Bunny’ as he often called her. He hoped the serial philandering that became the backdrop to his teenage years, and the lung cancer that killed her, weren’t inherited traits as well.
He got out of bed and walked quietly towards the bathroom, although ‘quiet’ wasn’t a word normally associated with this house. It was an old place, renovated before they bought it, but the floorboards still creaked, the water pipes groaned and clanked and due to insufficient water pressure upstairs, a noisy pump started up as soon as the hot water tap was turned on. The pump clattered now as he switched on the shower, but at least Emma wouldn’t have to suffer a second helping when he’d usually fill a basin with hot water for a shave. His job often required him to go undercover and this meant growing facial hair to make him appear scruffy, trendy or like a jihadi sympathiser, and for that morning and most of the previous two weeks, the razor sat motionless and unused on its stand.
Fifteen minutes later Matt walked out to the car. The morning felt chilly, still dark with the rising sun struggling to make an appearance behind a thick layer of cloud. Not so cold he needed to scrape ice from the windscreen, but it did require running the fan at maximum for a minute or so to clear condensation from the windows.
Neighbours living close to their house in Ingatestone in Essex would describe Matt and Emma as quiet. If asked to take a guess as to where they both worked, they would say he looked like a manual worker and she a schoolteacher. It would be a fair description of him as for the last few weeks he’d left the house early in the morning, his hair unbrushed and wearing dirty clothes.
He’d joined a gang demolishing a former rope-making factory in East Ham. He didn’t need the money or a trip down memory lane, but he needed to ingratiate himself with a group of Armenian workers, suspected of bringing shedloads of heroin into the country from Afghanistan.
HSA didn’t routinely investigate drug cases, leaving them to the larger and more capable units within the police force, like the place where his partner worked. However, researchers in HSA and SIS, the former MI6, believed the profits of their lucrative drug running operation were being channelled to fund terrorist activities in Europe.
He started the engine, drove along Stock Lane and approached the junction with the High Street. At that time of the morning he could turn without stopping, but during the day he could sit there for several minutes as a succession of delivery vans, shoppers and those like him today, motori
Speeding up on the slip road, he joined the A12. On reaching the speed limit, he sat back and tried to relax for the rest of the journey, trying to forget the difficulty he was having building trust with his taciturn co-workers. A few minutes later, his phone rang.
‘Morning Matt.’
‘Morning boss, you’re up early.’
‘I need to be for the busy day I’ve got planned.’
‘Good luck with that.’
‘You’re coming too.’
‘How do you mean? Aren’t you forgetting about the Bethnal Green building site?’
‘Matt, I regret to say, you need to can the building site visits for the foreseeable.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Rosie, it’s taken me weeks just to sit on the same bench as these people in a break.’
‘Your hard work is appreciated and there’s a chance you could go back if we can close this new one quickly. You could tell them you’d been arrested for selling drugs, or you needed to take care of a sick relative.’
‘I don’t think selling drugs would wash with these characters but at least I’d sound the part, looking after a sick relative.’
‘Don’t be so touchy, but something family-orientated might appeal to their better nature.’
‘They don’t have a better nature, especially when it comes to an outsider like me.’ He sighed at the thought of all his hard work and early-morning starts floating down the Swanee. ‘So, what’s the big panic?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it on the phone. Pick me up at my place and I’ll fill you in.’
‘You got it, but it better be good.’
The M25 at that time of the morning was three lanes of slow-moving metal, a clearer illustration of Britain’s twenty-four-hour culture he couldn’t imagine. However, when he arrived in the Church Langley district of Harlow, less than an hour later, the curtains on most of the houses he saw were closed.
His boss, senior HSA Senior Agent Rosie Fox, didn’t like living there as the demands of the job meant she couldn’t keep regular hours and found it difficult getting to know her neighbours. They only lived there because her partner, Andrew Milner, was a pilot and he was required to live no more than forty minutes away from Stansted Airport.
Matt didn’t have time to get out of the car and ring the bell before Rosie came striding out of the house.
‘Morning Matt,’ she said as she opened the car door and got in. ‘My God, don’t you look a mess.’
‘Morning boss. If you work on a building site you’ve got to look the part.’
‘I just hope you don’t smell, it’s a long way to go with the windows open.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Dover.’
‘Dover? What the hell are we going there for?’
‘You drive and I’ll talk.’
He weaved through a warren of new houses with the strange-sounding street names so beloved of modern town planners, the likes of Pennymead and Momples, and headed towards the M11. On reaching the motorway, the sleepy, comforting veil of suburbia left far behind, he asked, ‘What’s the story? Why are we going to Dover?’
‘Gill called me last night,’ Rosie said. ‘What do you know about the war between Serbia and its neighbours?’
‘Before my time and c’mon, it’s too early for a history lesson.’
‘It’s before my time too, but you read newspapers, don’t you?’
‘Your point is?’
‘In the early 90s Yugoslavia fell apart. Serbia had plans to create a greater Serbia, a new Yugoslavia centred around the needs of the Serbian people, and went to war with most of its neighbours, including Croatia and Bosnia. Are you still with me?’
‘I think so, coffee would help.’
‘You can have your fix when we get there. In this ugly and violent urban war which even now makes uncomfortable reading, numerous snipers were deployed.’
‘Some infamously in Sarajevo, targeting Bosnian civilians as they queued to buy bread.’
‘Ah, so you are awake.’
‘Only just.’
‘Some of those snipers went back to their day jobs as bakers and building site workers, while others like Dejan Katić didn’t. They became guns for hire.’
‘I know that name. Wasn’t he suspected of being involved in several high-profile assassinations?’
‘Got it in one. Now one of our agents–’
‘Who?’
‘Joseph.’
Matt nodded.
‘One of Joseph’s contacts told him that Katić had been spotted hanging out with his former Serbian buddies in London. I asked him to try and locate him.’
Matt sat up. ‘Katić is over here?’
‘We think so.’
‘This is bad news for someone. So, we’re driving to Dover to do what?’
‘To look through CCTV pictures and verify when and if our man entered the UK to try and get a handle on his vehicle.’
‘Here’s me thinking I quite fancied a day in France. Why doesn’t Joseph pick up car details and everything else by conducting a surveillance operation?’
‘Joseph hasn’t been able to find him, and even Katić’s Serbian buddies say they haven’t seen him for a few days.’
‘So, either he’s gone back to Serbia after enjoying a few beers and a bit of reminiscing with his old army buddies, or he’s out there doing something nasty that someone is paying him big bucks for.’
‘The latter, I think, and the reason we need to find him.’
Chapter 3
The car stopped at traffic lights. What other motorists made of the two occupants of the BMW on a sunny January morning like this, Chris Anderson couldn’t guess. The stony face of the driver, Chris’s Uncle Kevin, was pale, emphasising his acned, scarred and pock-marked face, the souvenir of a misspent youth, giving him more the appearance of a gangster than the businessman he purported to be.
In the passenger seat, Chris looked the archetypal teenager in a hoodie, moody and introverted, staring out of the window as if bored with the world and ignorant of its beauty. The only difference, not obvious through dark, tinted windows, were the red marks around both men’s eyes.
They drove down Ladder Hill and if they hadn’t known the location of the crash site on this quiet, country road to the south of the village of Wheatley in Oxfordshire, they could now see it easily enough. At a break in the perimeter fence surrounding a large field stood a police van. Following a line of trees running perpendicular to the field, Chris saw a sizeable collection of equipment and people. From a distance the gathering could be mistaken for a country fair or a travellers’ camp, but on closer inspection the television satellite-equipped television vans and the numerous Day-Glo police vehicles revealed its true purpose.
They drove through the open farmer’s gate, up the track and past a gaggle of curious reporters. The hacks turned and craned their necks to look at the occupants of the BMW, but on not seeing anyone they recognised, they lost interest and turned away. Closer to the crash site, they approached a police cordon and were brought to a halt by a policeman, his hand in the air. Kevin stopped the car and wound down the window.
‘This is an accident scene, sir. What business have you here?’
‘Kevin and Chris Anderson; we’re here for a meeting with Superintendent Cousins.’
The officer lifted his radio and, after listening to the response, gave them directions.
Kevin parked beside a large vehicle, looking more like a mobile home than anything the police would use, with the words Mobile Incident Unit etched along one side. He switched off the engine. For a moment, all Chris could hear was silence before his ears tuned into the background noise: the movement of vehicles, a shout, occasional laughter, the scraping of metal on metal.
‘Are you ready to do this, Chris?’ Kevin said. ‘You don’t need to, if you don’t want to.’
