was a special meeting that had been called at short notice by Crew Chairman ‘Wild Bill’ Pentecost, and that didn’t always bode well. In fact, Mick Shallicker was so intent on listening – he knew there’d been a certain amount of strain in recent times between Pentecost and Frank McCracken in particular – that he half-jumped when his mobile suddenly buzzed in his jacket. Fishing it out, he saw to his surprise that he’d received a text from Lucy Clayburn.
Need to speak to him. ASAP.
He put the phone away and continued to wait and listen.
In the boardroom, Bill Pentecost was holding court from his usual place, standing at the head of the long teak table. At sixty-one, he was a tall, lean, permanently besuited man, and yet his appearance was never less than curious and unsettling. He had frizzy grey hair, a thin pale face and narrow blue eyes, which he levelled like a pair of laser beams through the square-lensed, steel-rimmed spectacles he always wore.
‘These are difficult times, gentlemen,’ he said in that slow, emotionless monotone that friends and foes alike found so difficult to read, and therefore so unnerving. ‘New challenges, it seems, are presenting themselves every day.’
The meeting had commenced at nine that evening, and only now, after ten, having dispensed with some routine matters, did Frank McCracken suspect the Chairman was at last getting down to his main business. By the concerted attention on everyone else’s faces, the rest of the Crew’s directorship felt the same. For his own part, McCracken was resolved to look calm and relaxed. Like all birds of prey, Wild Bill could sense fair game before it had even broken cover. Not that McCracken considered himself in those terms. Things were strange at present – there was something in the air he didn’t like – but generally he was at home in this dangerous company. Though in his mid-fifties, he’d kept well. He was tanned and fit, with a silver-grey crewcut, dark eyes and lean, predatory features that did little to conceal the hawkish personality underneath. As the Crew’s shakedown captain, his line wasn’t always as profitable as some of the others, but he was a regular and reliable contributor to company funds and he’d been close to Pentecost since their earliest days.
He wasn’t what you’d call Pentecost’s right-hand man. That honour was bestowed on Lennie Trueman, the Crew’s official deputy chief, and a guy who could turn half the criminal population of Northwest England against them at the drop of a hat. But because of their history together, Frank McCracken was one of Pentecost’s inner cadre of specially trusted henchmen, though in the last couple of years there’d been a slight fraying of the relationship, McCracken concerned that the Chairman was becoming too suspicious, too paranoid, Pentecost reacting to McCracken’s blunt viewpoints with undisguised hostility.
‘Only last week in Stockport,’ the Chairman said, ‘the Manchester Robbery Squad arrested two characters called Vladimir Boyarksi and Oleg Mikhalkov for a security vault robbery in Wilmslow, which had netted them around £900,000 in cash and jewellery. These two clowns were captured after beating their inside man, a cokehead idiot who was so stoned on the lunchtime in question that he wasn’t able to assist them in opening all the strongboxes they’d targeted. Afterwards, fearing further retribution, he went to the nearest cop shop, and ratted them out. They and the hoard of cash and jewels they stole are now in government hands. The latter is a particular loss, I fear –’ he threw a glance at McCracken ‘– because it means that our resident taxman will not be able to get his hands on our share.’
‘That’s the status at present,’ McCracken spoke up. ‘But there are ways and means.’
Pentecost made no reply to that, not especially appeased.
‘These fools will get big stretches,’ he said. ‘But despite this they remain unknown to the British police. They’re refusing to talk, of course, or even behave as if they understand English. They have no criminal records in the UK, or anywhere else according to Interpol. But, dim as our pals in the Manchester fuzz are, I doubt it will be long before they finally put names to faces and deduce that this terrible twosome is in fact Yuri Lyadova and Dimitri Guseva, two mid-ranking soldiers from the Tatarstan Brigade, who operate out of St Petersburg.’
He paused for effect. Everyone remained rapt.
‘You may argue,’ Pentecost said, ‘that anyone who’d put his trust in some brainless junkie fuck is scarcely worthy of the designation “soldier”. And I’d be inclined to agree, except that what these Russkie knuckle-draggers usually lack in brain-power, they make up for in numbers and loyalty.’
The boardroom hung on his every word. He surveyed them one by one.
‘I’m not saying we’re facing a Russian invasion here. At least, not an imminent one. But these two were most likely skirmishers sent ahead to check out the lie of the land. No doubt there’ll be others.’
‘A Tatarstan lieutenant was killed in a shootout with National Crime Group officers in Bradburn up in Lancashire last year,’ ventured Adam Gilcrist. As the Crew’s chief importer and seller of illegal firearms, he always had an interest in illicit gun-play. ‘The coppers think he was acting alone, but this new intel suggests different.’
‘The Russians have a permanent presence in Liverpool,’ Lennie Trueman said in his deceptively gentle West Indian accent. ‘And it’s not just them. We’ve got Mexicans interfering with some of our supply-lines.’
‘Ah yes, the cartels,’ Pentecost said thoughtfully. ‘It was only a matter of time before those gentlemen found the whole of Mesoamerica too small for their liking.’
‘They’ll struggle to make an impact here,’ Benny Bartholomew chirped up.
Benny B, the Crew’s Head of Security, was a beefy character, with slab-like arms and shoulders and an equally massive neck, but much of it was running to flab these days; his face was podgy, his curly hair receding, and, as he viewed the world by squinting at it through a small pair of circular lenses, the effect was often more comical than menacing.
‘You think so, do you?’ Pentecost said, intrigued to hear more.
Benny B leaned forward, his chair squeaking. ‘There’re no deserts here for them to dig pits in, which they can stuff full of headless corpses, are there?’
‘I hate to rain on your parade, Mr B,’ Toni Zambala interrupted.
Formerly a pirate and smuggler in the pay of the Mungiki crime syndicate in Kenya, Zambala, despite a machine-gun-toting youth in which he’d violently rejected all things western, had effortlessly adapted to the capitalist lifestyle of the UK. He was now in charge of narcotics, importation and distribution, and his annual contribution to company funds was greater by far than everyone else’s, so, though still an underboss, when he spoke, people listened.
‘Not three weeks ago, one of my sellers was fished out of a Fallowfield sewer.’ He took a sip of mineral water. ‘He hadn’t had his head cut off, I’ll grant you, but that was only because the guys responsible had wanted to put him down the sewer while he was still alive … minus his hands and feet, I should add. The cops reckon the chopping tool was a machete.’ He turned his gaze on Benny B. ‘Kind of a Mex thing, wouldn’t you say?’
Pentecost pursed his thin grey lips. ‘Not an ideal situation. When our own people are getting their hands and feet chopped off.’
Frank McCracken was the only one who didn’t mutter his discontent. He was too busy wondering where all this was leading. He too had heard rumours that foreign powers were slowly muscling in on their action. Not so much his, maybe. He dealt mainly with those established British gangs who even after all
