Pursuit - Chapter 8 - Revelations

PURSUIT

Chapter 8 - Revelations

When I opened my eyes, I at once knew I was in unfamiliar surroundings. There was a great calm all about me and a penetrating hospital smell. As I slowly regained my faculties I found that I was lying in a bed in a secluded hospital ward. Everything looked clean and shining and, through the window to my right, I could just make out some distant hills showing clearly in the sunshine.

I tried to remember what had happened to me and how I might have got to that hospital bed. Then I recalled the crash and felt an immediate sense of relief that I had survived. I moved my arms painfully but was pleased to discover that, although badly bruised, with bandages on my head, shoulder and chest, I was otherwise in reasonably good shape. As I slowly turned my head and looked round the room I noticed, through the glass panel in the door, a face watching me. My initial fear subsided when I saw a nurse enter, followed by a doctor, a policeman and, the last person I had expected to see, Keith Rowdon!

I sank back into my pillows whilst the doctor examined me, during which time I was aware of the nurse hovering in the middle distance and the officer of the law and Keith waiting patiently beyond. I fought back an urgent desire to ask questions and tried to respond calmly to the doctor's inquisition about how I felt. I was still baffled, of course, about the outcome of my adventures and why Keith was there.

The doctor told me it was now Monday afternoon and that the peaceful sleep I had been in since the previous day had done much to restore my body. In a while the examination was over and the doctor and his attendant, after a brief word with the other two, left the room. Keith slowly approached the bed, shook my hand fondly and smiled.

"Good to see you back in the land of the living" he beamed. "That was a great run around you gave us - well done!".

"Thanks" I replied cautiously. "What is it all about?". Despite the presence of the police constable, I was not yet convinced that Keith might be, after all, on the side of the angels.

"If you're well enough to listen, I am happy to tell you all".

"Fire away, Keith. Right from the very beginning, if you don't mind".

I wedged myself into the pillows and gave Keith my full attention. He drew up a chair and the policeman ambled over to the door and remained standing.

"First of all", Keith enjoined, "I must reassure you that I am not a drug pusher, despite the evidence which you so skillfully discovered to the contrary. I do, in fact, work for Her Majesty's Government and my job with you in North London was just a cover to get me into the heart of the drugs raw materials supply world. My brief was to help smash one of the largest illicit drug manufacturing and distribution rings in the country".

I let out a little gasp. I had never guessed that Keith might not have been everything he appeared. He went on.

"We guessed for some time that chemicals were being diverted from our operational site into undesirable hands and we figured that, once we had located the source of the appropriation, we might be able to follow the chain right through to the end user. We were, though, up against a clever and powerful gang. The only way we could begin the operation was to identify the person or persons diverting the compounds and for me to try and take over their role. We achieved that eventually - the original perpetrator was in fact just one man; he is now firmly behind bars. I managed to take his place, ostensibly as one of the gang but, in reality, as a law abiding citizen just doing his duty for Queen and country!".

Even when relating such a convoluted story as this, Keith could not keep out his little quips and harmless self-aggrandisements.

From what he went on to say, I managed to ascertain that the transfer of the hydrochloride powder and other chemicals was made by a variety of routes and that Keith and his narcotics police colleagues could never track these through to the manufacturing site which they knew must exist. All they knew was that every handover of the stuff took place in the North of England, so it was very reasonably considered that the illegal factory must be somewhere up there. That still left a wide area, though.

Keith had then managed to agree with his contact to introduce a mini-transmitter to accompany each shipment, convincing the gang that if anything happened to the shipment en route, it would then be possible to track down the parcel of chemicals and keep it under close surveillance until a suitable collection opportunity presented itself. The criminals themselves supplied the transmitters but police engineers succeeded in identifying the frequencies on which they operated and so were able to keep track of the progress of the drugs themselves. However, although they had started to observe the pickup of the substances from the courier, the recipient would always switch off the transmitter and manage to outwit any potential pursuit before the police were able to discover the whereabouts of the factory, or even the general direction in which the individual was headed (which the police thought would be an initial false direction anyway). The officers working on the case could have arrested the people couriering or collecting the packages but this would still not have led them to their main objective, which remained the factory and the its leader.

"Then an urgent, coded call came through to me from my contact in the gang", explained Keith. "They needed a despatch of hydrochloride powder sent north on Friday and I was to use one of the batch of transmitters they had got through to me only two days previously. This meant trouble as, for various reasons, all the usual ways of transporting the drugs could not be used for such an urgent delivery and they wanted me to sort out the mode of transportation".

Even in his elucidation, I noted Keith still remained guarded over any matters about which I did not need to know the full details.

"Added to that", he went on, "I had not yet had time to get those transmitters to the police to ascertain the frequencies but to hesitate would have meant difficulties for me and the possible jeopardising of our whole operation. I racked my brains to think of a way of getting the stuff out; then I thought of you".

I reached over to the bottle of water by my bed and poured myself a glassful.

"Cary on", I ordered. Keith drew a little closer to me and looked anxious.

"I tried to take every precaution", he said in a sad voice. "You guessed how I left the package in your car, hidden well under the passenger seat. As soon as you went from the Coach and Horses I really did make a phone call - to my police colleagues ( I couldn't risk calling them from work). They immediately sent out a car to trail you up the motorway and arranged for one further on to take over the watch. They were unmarked cars by the way and I would be very interested in learning, young Farquharson, how you managed to discover they were tracking you".

I told him. After thinking about the exciting nature of his work whilst he had been speaking, it seemed that to say "I just turned on the car radio and tuned into the police frequencies" had more than a tinge of bathos about it.

"So that was it! They soon figured out how you gave them the slip - very ingenious by the way - but when I heard the news I couldn't work out how you had first cottoned on to them. Believe me Richard, I even at one point thought you might actually be one of the gang and knew all that was going on! When did you first guess that somebody was looking for something?".

"In Sheffield", I responded. "To have an attempted break-in to the car and a second attempt within a few hours made me think there must be something mighty interesting in that car".

"You do realise that for 24 hours we had no idea where you were? It was only when we kept an eye on Westwick Road in Sheffield - you told me, if you remember, that you were planning to go there - it was only then that we re-established contact. We saw the other car follow you in the morning and we followed them! Unfortunately, when you shook them off your trail, you succeeded in shaking us off too".

"Sorry old chap" was all I could say.

Keith ploughed on.

"As a last resort, all we could do was ask the police engineers to fiddle around with their electronic gagetry to try to pick up the frequency on which your transmitter might be working. Fortunately, they found something fairly quickly and we started to home in on you. I was getting worried because we had seen the other car, we knew you were still transmitting and that they were therefore bound to catch up with you and I just prayed that we would somehow get to you before they did. Then what happened? Oh yes, the darned signal suddenly went dead!".

"Oh, that was me again, I'm afraid", I said rather sheepishly. "When they found me and made me hand over the package, I intentionally dropped it on the ground, transmitter side down".

"Bloody amateurs", Keith shouted and gesticulated despairingly. The policeman shifted his weight from one foot to the other. I took another sip of water and tried to look stoical.

"Now, perhaps you'll kindly tell me what happened after that and how, single handed, you managed to round up the whole gang and hand them over to us, dead or alive".

"I did what", I ejaculated. "You mean", I carried on questioningly, "that you managed to get your hands on everyone in that drugs factory? Only two of them were following me in that car".

"Correct", replied Keith, in a serious tone once again. "You must realise that we had put on standby all the police in the area in which we thought you must be. As soon as you started driving the wrong way down the motorway, the police were quickly alerted and the message - identifying your car - was broadcast to all patrol cars in the vicinity. The leading ones were at the scene of the crash almost in time to see it. One of the gang in the car behind just managed to crawl away from that inferno. He was badly mutilated and terribly burned. He obviously felt some sort of remorse in his dying seconds because he insisted on repeating over and over again the location of that farmhouse where the drug manufacturing took place. It was radioed through and the remaining police cars converged on the site and arrested all the occupants. They caught them in the act of trying to disguise the real purpose of the building just in case their leader didn't return with your head. Some of them told the police about your capture and imprisonment - and, of course, your escape. That's how we knew you had been there.

"Keith", I cried excitedly, "It wasn't their leader who was after me in that car. They couldn't decide what to do with me so they locked me up in that attic while they were waiting for him to arrive".

I was sitting bolt upright now, the bumps and bruises forgotten in my agitation.

"They referred to him as Mike and said he was the boss of the whole show", I continued. I suppose he never turned up. If he saw all those police cars he wouldn't have come within a million miles of the place".

I sank back on the bed. Despite all the planning, all the excitement, the real man at the top had got away.

Keith looked at me closely.

"You're right, Richard. The boss never turned up. He never will turn up now. That van on the motorway at the centre of the fireball - he was driving it".

THE END