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RENDEZVOUS WAS an empty warehouse on the sprawling Park Royal industrial estate just north of the A40 that had been hired on a three-month lease by an untraceable offshore company registered in the United Arab Emirates.
    Fox was the first to arrive, at 15.40. It took him the best part of five minutes to get through the complex set of locks they’d added to maximize security. Once he was inside and had disabled the state-of-the-art, supposedly tamper-proof burglar alarm system, he relocked the doors and did a quick sweep of the main loading bay area with a bug finder. He was pretty sure that no one would have been able to get in without them knowing about it, and even surer that there’d been no leak in the cell, but he was also the kind of man who left nothing to chance. It was why he’d survived as long as he had.
    Once he was satisfied that the place was clean, he put a call in to Bull using one of the three mobiles he was carrying. He’d left Bull with the kids at a rented house three miles away that morning.
    Bull answered with a simple ‘yeah’ on the second ring, and Fox was pleased that he was keeping the phone so close to hand, and that he was answering it in the way he’d been instructed, giving nothing away. Bull wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box, and Fox had had to spend a lot of time prepping him about his role today, which was one of the most important of all of them.
    ‘It’s me,’ said Fox, pacing the warehouse floor. ‘Everything all right?’
    ‘All good. I just checked up on them now.’
    He sounded alert enough, and Fox was sure he wouldn’t hesitate to do what needed to be done when the time came. But he wanted to make sure Bull remembered the timings. The timings were everything today.
    ‘You remember what time you’ve got to be at the final rendezvous, don’t you?’
    ‘Course I do. We’ve been through it enough times. Twenty-three hundred.’
    ‘Not a minute later. Give yourself plenty of time, but don’t leave before you get final confirmation.’
    Bull said he understood. He didn’t sound the least bit annoyed at being asked the same question by Fox for the hundredth time in the past three days. He sounded keen and eager to please. This was the biggest day in his whole life and he knew it.
    Fox ended the call and switched off the phone.
    There was an office at the end of a narrow corridor leading from the loading bay, and he unlocked the door and went inside, switching on the lights. At the far end of the room, hidden behind a pile of boxes, was a large padlocked crate. As he did every time he came here, Fox checked the contents, making sure that nothing had been tampered with.
    The weaponry for the operation originated from the former Yugoslav republic of Kosovo. It consisted of eight AK-47 assault rifles, six Glock 17 pistols with suppressors, grenades, body armour, and 25 kilos of C4 explosive, along with detonators and thousands of rounds of ammunition. It had been bought from a group of former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army in a deal arranged by the client, before being smuggled into the EU in the hidden compartment of a lorry usually reserved for illegal immigrants.
    Because of the levels of security at British ports, and the use of sniffer dogs to detect explosives, it had been considered safest to avoid bringing the consignment into the country using the lorry. Instead, the crate had been dropped at a safe house in Antwerp. A contact of the handler there knew a Belgian fishing boat captain who occasionally did hashish runs into the UK. For a fee, the captain had agreed to transport the weapons and land them using a RIB on an isolated stretch of beach north of Peterhead in Scotland. From there, the crate had been collected by Fox and several other members of the team, and driven to London.
    Because the C4 had still been in powder form, Fox had delivered it separately to a lock-up in Forest Gate, along with the detonators, where it had been collected by the people