The inside of the van is cramped and hot.
Tanya can feel the heat forming a layer between her skin and her clothes. She’s in jeans and has already stripped down to just a T-shirt. She has no more moves left. Though the guy next to her probably wouldn’t complain; she’s found that, in general, men never tire of tits. The internet, she’s pretty sure, is founded on that very principle.
In front of her is a whole bank of monitors, the computers running them presumably only adding to the heat, and beside her the surveillance expert whose name she’s been told but has instantly forgotten.
Harry adapted the plan when he’d heard her story, dumping her in the surveillance van out of harm’s way. She wishes she’d not said anything now. Especially as it hasn’t even gained her access to her phone.
Voices crackle in her earpiece and she adjusts the frequency, twisting the dial till they come into focus. The building complex is just that, complex, and so they’re having a few signalling issues.
Which is bad, because if the informant is right, the whole deal is due to go down any minute now. An advance crew inserted cameras at key locations, though given the size of the place they’d not been able to get eyes on everything. They had managed to hack into the site’s own CCTV though, so of the twenty screens in front of her, seventeen are showing live feeds.
‘Confirm positions,’ says Harry’s voice in her ear.
One by one the teams sign in with their codes.
‘Listen to them,’ the man next to her says. ‘It’s like they’re all acting in a movie or something.’
Tanya hears the excitement in their voices too, some hiding it better than others. But why not? So much of a cop’s life was mundane, and she feels the anticipation herself, even if she’d prefer to be out there, taking part.
For a long moment the question of what she’s going to do when the baby is born looms in her head, demanding answers. Will she have to give up being an inspector? Will she stay at home whilst Jaap goes out to work?
‘Mind you—’ the man next to her saves her from the questions which are starting to take on a menacing tone ‘—I’ve heard about Van der Pol. Some of the shit he’s rumoured to be into …’ He shakes his head. ‘There’s one rumour that used to do the rounds, said he was into having people killed, and filmed it happening.’
‘Urban myth,’ Tanya says. ‘The whole snuff thing.’
‘You reckon?’
Tanya shrugs. Now that she thinks about it she’s not so sure. What her foster father had done to her hadn’t been so far off. In terms of suffering it was probably more; she was still living with it. She thinks back to the last time she saw him, the light disappearing from his eyes as he died.
‘Nine,’ he says, letting Tanya back into the present.
She doesn’t want to relive that night. Not now, not ever.
But the images stab at her just the same: his body lying, blood leaking from his head where it’d hit the table corner as he fell, the expanding moment when she saw that it was final, that he wasn’t coming back.
‘You OK?’
‘Sure, I was just thinking of something,’ Tanya says, alarmed that she’d clearly zoned out long enough for him to notice.
She fights it off and checks screen nine, and sure enough a small convoy of vehicles, two cars and at least eight bikes, are entering the compound.
‘Subtle, huh?’ the man says.
He’s right, thinks Tanya. It is like something out of a movie. It never ceases to amaze her just how many criminals go out of their way to look like criminals. She’s seen this scene countless times before, and knows what’s going to happen; the convoy will pull up, suited dark-glassed men will get out of the cars and spread out, before a smaller man, usually in more casual clothing, emerges.
They follow the progress from screen to screen, the convoy stopping in a small square between four buildings.
Tanya sees with disappointment that it’s one of the spaces the crew had not managed to get a camera in. Harry had noted this and put the man with the moustache on the roof. He’d complained a bit. But when he got there and saw the roof was pitched and that he’d have to be hanging off the spine, he’d complained some more.
Now it looks like it’s going to pay off.
‘I’ve got a visual,’ he whispers through the comms.
‘Good,’ Harry replies. ‘Just hang in there.’
Because to do a deal you need two parties, and so far only one’s come to the table.
Two minutes later they get some movement, this time three SUVs, all approaching with their lights off.
‘The eagle has landed,’ says the man next to Tanya.
‘Are you kidding?’ Harry comes back, clearly annoyed.
‘Sorry, couldn’t resist. They’re here, roof guy should be able to see three SUVs right about … now.’
‘Got them.’
‘Exit teams in position, everyone else standby,’ Harry says.
Now it’s a waiting game. Moustache on the roof has to give them the signal that goods have exchanged hands, or at the very least that he has a visual on the goods themselves. Moments pass.
‘We pull this off then we’re going to be moving up,’ whispers the surveillance guy.
Suddenly noise bursts through their earpieces, a kind of leathery scrabbling, like someone stroking a microphone. Two seconds later there’s the unmistakable pop pop pop of gunfire.
‘Hold positions,’ yells Harry.
Tanya watches the screen closest. Muzzle flashes light up walls, creating mad shadows. She can see a biker using his Harley as cover, popping up to release a hail of bullets then ducking back down again.
An SUV skids round the corner, back into full view of the screen, two more following close behind.
‘Exit teams, you’re up!’ Harry shouts.
The third SUV breaks away from the others, skidding round a tight corner into a narrow alley between two buildings. It stops, the back doors fly open, and a figure jumps out.
Tanya watches him, calculating that soon he’ll be passing just one building away from the van. She should try and alert someone, but the gunfire and noise of engines and shouting means their comms system isn’t holding up too well.
He’s going to be passing in less than a minute.
If she’s going to do something she needs to do it now.
She’s frozen in place, at war with herself.
Then she rips the earpiece out, grabs her gun, and jumps out the back of the van.
The movement feels good, a release, and she makes it round the edge of the building just in time to see she was right, the figure with a rucksack rushes past, no more then twenty metres ahead of her.
She’s already going flat out.
But she pushes herself harder.
A thought flashes through her mind, the baby being starved of oxygen.
She’s now at the corner the figure ducked round moments before. She goes round it and immediately sees he has a problem. He’s reached the perimeter of the complex, a chain-link fence reaching up to the stars, topped by a curl of razor wire picked out by a security light.
‘Police!’ she yells, slowing down, pulling her weapon up into position.
The figure freezes for a second, not looking back, then dives off to his left, doubled over and running like an ape, swinging one arm up to fire blind behind him.
She slams into the wall next to her, giving her some cover, then looses off a single shot as he’s making it to a row of vertical columns, made up of chaotically stacked tyres.
From the scream she knows she’s hit him.
Her breathing’s ratcheting through her chest now, and she takes a second to try and slow it down. She listens out for movement, but the ringing in her ears from the shots means she can’t rely on audio.
One last breath and she sprints forward, swinging round the first column of tyres, gun out ahead of her.
The security light is dazzling and her hand shoots up to protect her eyes.
As they adjust she can just make out the figure, moving to the right. For one fraction of a millisecond she thinks she catches a glimpse of his face.
It’s like a bullet’s hit her full in the chest.
They lock eyes, he gestures to the backpack which she now sees he’s ditched, and he disappears, limping round the corner of the next building.
Once the crew has been rounded up, two casualties being attended to by the ambulance on standby in the local village, Harry asks to see her in the van.
She clambers in, and he tells her to pull the doors closed.
His face is hard, anger tightening muscles under his skin, and she wonders how she was ever attracted to him.
‘You sure you’re OK?’ he asks without much concern in his voice. At least, not to Tanya’s ear.
She nods and Harry stares at her for a few moments, just long enough for her to feel uncomfortable, then turns to the bank of screens.
He stabs a few keys and points to a screen which has started playing.
They watch in silence, and when it’s done he hits pause and turns back to her. ‘As I’ve been alerted to this by your colleague it will have be admitted into evidence. I can’t just get rid of it.’
Evidence? thinks Tanya. What? ‘I’m not sure I—’
‘The trouble is, it looks bad. He was limping, so you could have caught him easily. Or taken another shot – he had fired at you so that would have been justified. But you let him go.’
‘But I got the backpack, and you got the rest of the crew. Why’s he so important?’
Harry reaches down beside him and pulls up the backpack itself. He unzips it, and empties the contents on the narrow desk below the screens.
Small furry things tumble out, spilling onto the surface and beyond.
He picks one up and shows it to her. Then he squeezes it and the rat squeaks.
‘They’re stuffed, right?’ she asks.
He has a knife in his hand, Tanya doesn’t see where he got that from, and he turns the thing over, slitting its furry belly. He pulls out foam and the squeaker mechanism, and nothing else.
‘No,’ he says, ‘they’re not.’
Tanya stares at the toy rat, one of its whiskers bent at an odd angle, the screens next to it distorted in its black beaded eyes.
She thinks about the face she saw.
Was it really him? she thinks. Could it be?
It was dark and there was a security light shining right in her eyes so she couldn’t see that clearly.
Harry picks up the rats and starts stuffing them back into the backpack and she suddenly realizes why the whole thing had seemed like an episode on a TV crime drama – it had been a set-up, a show put on just for them.
Orchestrated to meet their expectations.
Basically, to fuck with them.
Harry speaks again. ‘So, you wanna tell me what’s really going on?’