Predator. Wilbur Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ or old archive photographs from his first burst of notoriety, way back when. The great American public wanted and needed to see the man their legal system was killing on their behalf on his very last day on earth. But the authorities weren’t making it easy for anyone, including the media, to get anywhere near the condemned man.

      Bearing in mind both the wickedness of Johnny Congo and the very public embarrassment that the entire Texas criminal justice establishment would suffer if he should get away from them a second time, there had been a change in the standard convoy format. There were, as always, three vehicles. But on this occasion the third in line was not another patrol car, as it would normally be, but a Lenco BearCat armoured personnel carrier, loaded with a heavily armed, ten-man SWAT team. The BearCat was a big, black, menacing war-machine and the men inside it were the police equivalent of Special Forces. Against their firepower nothing short of a full-scale military assault would stand a chance of succeeding.

      On the day of Johnny Congo’s execution, everyone who saw D’Shonn Brown reported that he seemed withdrawn, subdued and, in a quiet, understated way, very obviously distressed. The execution was set for six o’clock in the evening. Huntsville is only about seventy miles north of Houston, right up Highway 45, and doesn’t take much above an hour if the traffic is light. But D’Shonn wanted to be sure of missing the rush hour, and so, at the same time as the convoy taking Johnny Congo to his execution left the Polunsky Unit, D’Shonn’s chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce Phantom purred out of the underground garage beneath his downtown Houston HQ. D’Shonn was sitting in the back. Clint Harding was up front next to the driver. A black Suburban followed the Rolls out of the garage. In it were another four of Harding’s men, whose job would be to get D’Shonn through the mob outside the prison gates on his way to the viewing room that looked on to the execution chamber.

      D’Shonn was watching the TV on his iPad. ‘They got Johnny live on TV, following him from the sky like he’s another OJ.’

      ‘I hate the way they are making this into a circus,’ said Harding, tilting his head back towards D’Shonn. ‘Look, I know he was your brother’s buddy, or whatever, but Johnny Congo was a dangerous man. Now he’s getting the most dire punishment our society can deliver. It shouldn’t be turned into a TV reality show.’

      D’Shonn’s phone rang. He took the call, listened for a moment and then said, ‘Yo, Rashad, my man … Yeah, I’m watching it too. I guess I knew this might happen, but still … Crazy to think, the next time I’m due to see Johnny is when they wheel him into the chamber. I’m not looking forward to that, don’t mind admitting.’

      Harding had turned his head back to the front and was staring right out the windscreen, down Interstate 45, so as to respect his boss’s privacy. He didn’t see D’Shonn pick up a second phone and flash a Snapchat message: ‘Perfect. Go ahead. Get the chopper and the jet ready to roll.’

      Ten seconds after it was received, the message vanished into thin air, leaving no trace that it had ever existed.

      For two weeks Rashad Trevain had been trying to figure out ways of tracking Johnny Congo’s prison convoy without attracting any attention from the cops. The obvious answer was just to tail it on the road, but if one car stayed right behind the convoy all the way, it was bound to be spotted and forced to stop. They could have a relay system, handing over from one car to another, but with three routes of up to fifty-five miles to cover, that would mean three long chains of drivers, waiting to take up the surveillance if the convoy happened to come their way, which was more manpower than he wanted to use. The more guys there were on the job, the less likely he was to know them all well and, it followed, the less he could trust them to keep their mouths shut.

      Rashad’s next idea was to buy a spotter drone of the kind police forces use for crowd control: a couple of feet across, with three miniature helicopter-style horizontal rotors and a camera that can send back images in real time to a base-station. But that would require skilled technicians to operate, plus there were range limitations for both the drone itself and the signal it was sending. So then Rashad went back to basics. He decided to scatter half-a-dozen spotters at key turning points along the first few miles of road: places where the convoy would be forced to make a choice that would determine its route.

      But when he put the problem to D’Shonn Brown as they were looking across the water to the eighth green at the Golf Club of Houston’s Member Course, D’Shonn Brown had straightened up from the chip he was about to play, looked at Rashad and asked, ‘You reckon they’ll have a helicopter following that convoy?’

      ‘You mean a police chopper, like an eye in the sky?’ Rashad replied.

      ‘That or a TV station, taking a break from following traffic to check out the badass nigger murderer taking his final ride. Give it the OJ treatment.’

      ‘Guess so. It’s possible. Why?’

      ‘Well, if someone was tracking the motorcade that would sure make our lives easier …’

      D’Shonn interrupted himself for a few seconds to hit the ball about ten yards beyond the hole, only for it to halve the distance as the backspin kicked in and rolled it back towards the pin.

      ‘Whoa, lucky bounce, bro!’ Rashad laughed.

      ‘Luck didn’t come into it, I played for the spin,’ said D’Shonn coldly. He turned to replace his club in his bag, which was mounted on a trolley since they’d decided to play without caddies: no need for anyone else to hear what they were discussing. ‘But anyway, about that chopper, it would sure be handy if there was one up there,’ he went on. ‘Only problem is, we’d have to get rid of it afterwards. Some things we don’t want getting caught on camera.’

      ‘Yeah, I follow you, man.’

      ‘So you’d better see to that. If we want to get this job done, we’d best think of every eventuality.’

      All Johnny Congo’s roads led to Huntsville. So that was where the ambush crew were waiting. The three heavily laden dumper trucks and the five stolen SUVs were all parked up on the cracked and dusty ribbon of road that led from Martin Luther King Drive up to the Northside Cemetery. There were no funerals planned for that day, no passers-by to look at the line of vehicles. The Maalik Angel in charge of the crew was a scrawny, light-skinned brother with a goatee beard called Janoris Hall. Like all the men who would be working under him today, Janoris was wearing a hooded white Tyvek disposable boiler suit, with fine latex gloves and flimsy polypropylene overshoes covering his Nike sneakers. Plenty of crime scene investigators dress in virtually identical work-gear. They don’t want to contaminate a crime scene they’re investigating. The Angels didn’t want to contaminate a crime scene they were about to create. They also didn’t want to be identified, which was why each of the Angels had already been issued with a hockey goalkeeper’s face mask.

      Janoris didn’t have his mask on right now. He was watching the TV news on his iPad and the moment the prison convoy turned left off Farm to Market Road 350, on to Route 190, he turned to his second-in-command Donny Razak and said, ‘They headed north.’

      Razak had a shaven head, a thick, bushy beard and deep, gravelly voice that came from somewhere down in his barrel chest. ‘You want us to get going, meet ’em on the one-ninety?’

      Janoris thought for a moment. It was tempting to head right out there now and get in position early. The less they were rushed, the smaller the chance of making a dumbass mistake somewhere along the line. But what if the convoy took the scenic route, up around the top of the lake and on into Huntsville on Texas 19? He didn’t want to be waiting in the wrong place with his dick in his hand while Johnny Congo was being taken to the Death House on another route.

      ‘No, СКАЧАТЬ