Three minutes later both sets of handcuffs were off. Dee decided there wasn’t time for any more on the job lock pick training, and so released the left hands herself.

***

It was a quarter to twelve and Dee was standing at the open door on the upper level, looking out over the factory floor. There was no-one to be seen. Carefully she stepped onto the steel mesh landing at the top of the stairs.

So far, so good, she thought to herself. Since breakfast and the toilet visits, their captors had not bothered locking the door to their room, assuming the chains and cuffs would be more than enough to hold them.

Dee wanted to protect Lavender, and so she gave her explicit instructions that would ensure her safety. Now she had to act before their captors made the rounds again.

There were two cars in the unit; a Black SUV with EU plates, and a Lexus with UK plates. At the bottom of the steel staircase she could see an open half glazed door leading to a small office, and voices were coming from inside. She counted four separate voices. That was good. They were all together.

Rather than use the metal stairs, which would certainly make a noise, she removed her boots and climbed between the landing and the handrail. She hung on to the steel railings, lowering herself down until she was dangling six feet above the ground. A second later she dropped silently to the floor, landing like a cat on all fours.

The fire exits were at the far end of the factory unit, and so Dee circumnavigated the floor, keeping the bulky printing presses between her and the open office door. A few moments later she reached the fire door and her heart sank.

“This door is alarmed,” the notice read, as did the notice over the fire door opposite. They could not go through either of those doors without alerting their captors.

It didn’t really make any difference, Dee reasoned to herself. The difficulties would be the same. As soon as she exited the building the men would be alerted, and she would have to run over unknown terrain barefoot. She had no way of knowing how far she would have to run before finding somewhere to raise the alarm, but she had come too far to back out of this now.

***

The alarm on the fire door was really more of a buzzer, but it was enough to alert the four men in the office. They ran out on to the factory floor, looking around to try to discover what had set the alarm off.

“You two make sure our guests are secure, and we’ll find out what’s going on.”

Rik and Gregor had their guns at the ready as they ran out of the open fire door.

***

Dee had micro seconds to take stock of her location and try to work out which direction she needed to take. The building was an anonymous looking industrial box, with a car park on two sides and a concrete paved path leading to the front entrance. A fence, perhaps seven or eight feet tall, enclosed the site. The fence posts were concrete, with a galvanised steel chain link mesh strung between them. The top section angled inwards and was threaded with barbed wire, so there was no chance of climbing it.

She ran along the paved pathway towards the front of the building, a distance of some seventy five yards. As she got to the front of the building she heard the sound of the fire door crashing open, and she looked back to see two men in pursuit.

She raced across the car park and through the open gateway onto the deserted road, where she almost knocked over a man with a carrier bag who was walking by. Dee wasted no time.

“Please, sir, will you help me? There are armed men chasing me. We both need to run. Find somewhere safe.”

The man looked rather alarmed, but instead of running for his life he did something she wasn’t expecting. He punched her in the face.

“Shit, there were five of them,” she thought to herself as she tried to get up. Her plan was in tatters, but she had to try to keep Lavender safe somehow.

“Lavender, run!” she yelled at the top of her voice, until the tazer disabled her for the second time in a few hours.

Chapter 71

398 High Rd, Tottenham, North London. Sunday 11:30am.

Number 398 High Road in Tottenham is a huge Georgian red brick building with stone features around the Georgian paned windows and a carved stone portico around the door, into which is carved the word POLICE.

The ornate police station stands on a busy dual carriage way and so we had to wait for a change in the traffic lights before we could turn into the car park. The reason we were being hosted at this location was due to its proximity to the Tottenham Press, which was less than a mile away.

In the past week I had been in four different police stations and I didn’t really like it. I wanted my own life back. I needed to get back to dealing with clients who didn’t seek to destroy the lives of others because they couldn’t accept that they had made a mistake themselves.

Don Fisher and I were led into a bare and unfriendly waiting room whilst the four policemen went to the operations room. Tom Vastrick and three of his people were on their way.

The plan was simple, although not everyone had agreed on strategy. The four policemen who had been living and breathing this case for days wanted to storm the building from every angle with overwhelming force, a strategy the Americans refer to as ”Shock and Awe”. The commanders who were charged with designating personnel to the task felt that the Risk Assessment demanded a softer approach, a standoff where a negotiator would talk the men out of the building, leaving their hostages safely behind. In the end the final decision was to be left to the men on the ground.

Unless things changed, the plan was simple enough. Don Fisher and I would be sitting in an unmarked van parked a hundred yards away from the Tottenham Press car park, ready to comfort the hostages on their release.

The telephone landline would be disconnected at the exchange, and the white van already parked over the road would switch on its electronic jammer. Then, for the next few minutes, every mobile phone in that cell, about half a mile square, would be silenced with the notorious message “No Network Coverage” being displayed on their screens.

Armed police with protective vests would then form an outer ring around the building, and two armed police with full body armour and helmets would enter via each fire door. Another six similarly clad officers would go in through the roller shutter door.

The roller shutter door had presented a problem to the police during the planning stage, as they knew it was designed to be raised by inserting a key into a weather protected housing and holding the key whilst the shutter crept up an inch at a time. The police didn’t have the key, and nor did they have the time to wait for the door to open so slowly.

Vastrick, who provided security to many such buildings, referred the police to an electrical contractor whom they knew, who could bypass the key, but he would need at least five minutes to do so. The electrician was being briefed by the police upstairs. The roller shutter door was also secured at the bottom with a padlock that fixed the door to the concrete base, but that could be removed in seconds with bolt cutters.

Don Fisher wasn’t a man who could sit still for long and he was anxious to get on with the raid, even though nothing could be done until we heard from the Assistant Commissioner that Operation Tango was well under way. That would probably be closer to two o’clock than one o’clock.

“You know, Josh, yesterday I wanted to hang that Hickstead creep from the nearest lamppost. Now I don’t give a damn what happens to him. I just want my daughter back safe. Her mother will blame me if anything happens to her and I’ll probably not disagree.”

“Don’t worry, Don,” I said, feeling none of the confidence I was expressing. “We’ll get the girls back safely. Dee will care for Lavender like a mother hen. I certainly wouldn’t want to be the man that tried to hurt Lavender while Dee was around. The woman fights like a demon. She’s also a trained protection officer. She knows what to do in this kind of situation.”