by Harper Fox
***
Almost eight o’clock. The Black Cat would be open. In another hour or so enough of the right type of customers would have gathered for Sim Carlyle to conduct his business discreetly. For Toby and Andrew to enter the premises without drawing attention too, and so Campbell’s men bided their time.
Behind a partition screen, McBride helped Toby take off his shirt. Once that was done, and the garment set aside on the desk, McBride picked up the wire spool the Harle Street technician had given him. Both he and Toby kept their attention rather intently fixed on the body mic as McBride placed it carefully just beneath Toby’s right collarbone. He tore two strips of tape off their roll and pressed them to Toby’s smooth skin, securing the wire. “There. That should do it. How’s your shoulder?”
“The muscles are seizing a bit now, but it’s all right. I had the dressings changed while I was off becoming Viktor Maralek.”
McBride nodded in approval. Yossi Maralek was real enough, and his shadowy tribe of cousins enough of a legend in the trafficking underworld to have a ring of truth if Sim Carlyle asked. “Who’s Andy going to be?”
“Oh, he’s a nameless nobody tonight.” McBride handed Toby his shirt and held it while he stiffly shrugged into it. “Much more than that to you, though, James. Do you want to tell me about it?”
“Much to my surprise, I do. I will later—after the op, when you’re safe home. But…it’s over. Okay?”
Toby watched him in silence for a moment, taking in this answer and McBride’s reasons for giving it. “Okay,” he said softly.
“Should I wire him up too?”
“No. We don’t really need it, and if things go wrong, it gives him plausible deniability. He can get away.”
But I want you to be able to get away. Where’s your deniability? McBride closed his lips tight on these words. He’d sent scores of men into danger, walked into it himself scores more. Anxious questions never helped. “Thanks,” he said. “He’s a good lad.”
Both of them glanced across the room. Andrew was standing in the window, his back turned, his head bowed thoughtfully. As they watched, he straightened a bit. “It’s snowing,” he said. “Properly this time. Had anyone else apart from me forgotten it’s Christmas Eve?”
A few of them had. Not the ones with kids—McBride saw Lenny and a couple of the others glance at their watches, surreptitiously hopeful. Not Amanda either, McBride was sure—she and Jenny always made a quiet, fervent thing of it. “I remember, Andy,” she said, laying aside the gun she was checking. “Make your good wishes to one another now, if you like—just in case it’s after midnight before we get done.”
McBride glanced out into the dark, where big white flakes were whipping past the streetlights. He knew what she meant. Say it now, in case you don’t come back at all. He nodded wryly at the gruff and offhand twenty-first-century blessings being tossed his way; threw back a few in kind. Then he turned to Toby. “Happy… Oh.”
Toby smiled. He hadn’t finished fastening his shirt. Even in his Maralek guise, to McBride he was such a perfect sight that he wanted to fall into his arms.
Toby held them out for him. Professional to his back teeth, he’d chosen the one spot in Lila’s glass office from which neither he nor McBride could be seen, though McBride only noticed this slowly, locked in his embrace: he was lost, would have seized him and kissed him on the Scott Monument if that was where they’d happened to be. “Ah, James,” Toby said to him unsteadily, “it’s last night of Chanukah too, if that makes you feel better. But it’s all just a festival of lights. Your city is a city of lights, and you’re the brightest of them. I’ll never forget what I found here.”
Chapter Ten
The heart of the city was slowing. Patches of frenzied activity continued still, and would to the bitter end—shops along Princes Street holding wide their doors until ten for frantic last-minute shoppers; clubs like Carlyle’s that would pulsate into the small hours with garish life. Nevertheless McBride could feel it. As the surveillance van nosed through the crowds on the George IV Bridge and into the Cowgate’s network of closes and wynds, he knew that for every reveller out on the cobbles tonight, thousands of ordinary, tired men and women were going home. Closing themselves in with their families or their solitude. Starting the sweet, dumb, commercialised pantomime of Christmas with their kids.
“James?”
The van was slowing. McBride looked across to Campbell, sitting opposite him in its rear. In her council worker’s overalls and the high-vis vest, which would ironically make her invisible, she looked the part. She’d tucked her hair into a black woolly hat. “Grace will be all right, you know.”
McBride swallowed painfully. He knew he looked the part himself, in donkey jacket and vest. Maybe this was what he should have gone in for—patching up road surface from a council truck. Then the world—a tiny, boring world, but sacred and intact—would still be on its axis. “I thought I’d know too,” he said hoarsely. “Always did know in the past, if she’d hurt herself or anything was wrong. But now I can’t get any sense of her at all.”
“Doesn’t mean anything. Just hold on.”
Lenny Royston, sour faced and convincing at the wheel, pulled the van up just behind the plastic barricades where genuine roadworks had been going on. Amanda nodded in approval, and the two sound technicians they’d brought with them went to work, hitching up recording equipment and headsets. McBride and Campbell got out into the snow, leaving Lenny and his partner in the van’s front seats, beginning their surveillance. “This’ll do,” Campbell said, frowning critically into a hole in the tarmac. “McKay and Janice Dee have got the other exit.”
“Dee? The Glasgow lass? I thought she’d swung Christmas leave.”
“She had.” Campbell tugged down the edge of her hat and looked more like a scrawny wee navvy than ever. “She came rushing in to join us when she heard our Andy was going undercover.” She smiled, stepping out of the way of a group of laughing hen-party girls, snowflakes melting in their feather boas. “All sorts of people trying to look out for their fellas tonight, eh, James?”
“Och, Manda! I…I just met him, all right? He’s been good to me—so good I don’t know how I’ll ever pay him back—but…”
“DI McBride?” The sound tech stuck his head round the door of the van. “I’m picking up a signal on Agent Leitner’s mic.”
McBride almost bulldozed Campbell down. He stopped himself, mortified, putting out a hand to catch her. She waved off his apology, pushing him ahead of her into the van. “I know, I know. You just met.”
The voice on the wire didn’t sound like Toby’s at all. McBride, settling onto a stool in the truck, bidding his hands not to shake on the headset, listened in bewilderment. A top undercover man himself in his Edinburgh pond, McBride wasn’t sure he’d last five minutes with Mossad. This was Viktor Maralek he was hearing. His intonation bore no resemblance to Toby’s Israeli lilt: Yossi was Slovenian, and so was Toby now. McBride was sure the accent was authentic. Not that Carlyle would know or care: he’d be happy if his client fell under his broad definition of foreign.
And McBride could pick out Carlyle, even through the roar and clatter of the crowd. That was one voice he’d always know, and Carlyle had no thought of disguising it. There he was in the background, cackling and shouting with his mates. He sounded elated. A terrible chill seized McBride’s guts as he tried to think what might make a hard-eyed psycho like that sound so damn happy.
Then, he wasn’t entirely a psycho, was he? According to his lights, he was a businessman. He wasn’t going to kill the goose. Amanda pressed a knee to his in the confines of the van, and both listened intently while Toby closed in on the target.
It happened fast. So far all McBride had heard was background conversation, Toby chatting idly to the barman, then exchanging a word or two with other punters in the crowd. Then suddenly Carlyle’s voice was loud in the mic, and Toby—Viktor, a toneless stranger, the voice of a shark if one had decided to tal
k—was saying, “Hey, Sim. I hear you have merchandise.”
Amanda almost dropped her notebook. McBride too felt his heart lurch into his throat. But after a moment’s terror, he understood what Toby was doing. Understood it was a brilliant move—perhaps the only one. To go straight in without preliminaries, with a grand assumption Carlyle would know exactly what he meant. That he had the right to be asking. Leave no time for suspicion, for wonder.
A silence had fallen around Carlyle’s table. McBride could see it as clearly as if he’d been there—the ring of surprised faces, the suspension of activity. “Who the hell are you?”
“Maralek. Viktor Maralek.” Perfect—just the right tone of disgust. Someone like Carlyle, someone with merchandise, should know him. There was a faint rustle, the sound of a powerful, confident man sitting down uninvited. “Well? I heard you had it. Did you make the deal already?”
“What’s it to you if I did?”
“No. What is it to you, Sim? I’ve heard of you too. You don’t hand over goods like that to the first bidder.”
Another silence. Then Carlyle said, in tones of imperfectly hidden surmise, “You said your name was—what? Maralek?”
“That’s right. Not gone deaf from all this shit music you play in your clubs, have you?”
A smile in Toby’s voice. Not a nice one. And the bait was taken—McBride saw Carlyle’s throat gape helplessly wide. “What’s your budget, then, mate?”
“Half again what your first man put down.”
And that was right too. Double would have gone too far, triggered Sim’s alarms with its extravagance. Maybe smacked of desperation. As it was, all McBride heard after that was Carlyle’s flat instruction, “Come with me,” and the sounds of two men making their way through a noisy room to somewhere quieter.
And sirens.
McBride frowned. He clamped the headset harder to his ears, then saw Amanda was laying hers down. Doing the same, he listened. Three or four—no, five, another one lifting its voice into the wailing chorus. He wouldn’t have paid them a moment’s attention except they were so suddenly close. Coming closer. “Amanda…”
“Don’t worry. Someone else’s party going wrong, I should think.”
“Aye.” A punch-up, a jumper on the bridge, some other traditional festivity. McBride put his headset back on in time to hear Toby ask coldly if the package was intact. His stomach lurched at the implication, but Sim snarled back, just as frosty, “D’ye think I’m a fool? That’s what you pay for. There’s no’ a finger mark on it.”
McBride let his brow rest for a moment on his hands. “Oh, Gracie…”
“James!”
He snapped upright. Amanda had seized his shoulder. He turned to look up at her. “What?”
“Trouble.”
He tore off his headset. Through the front screen of the van he saw Royston and Davies coming to attention. Snow was billowing past the windscreen, beginning to form spirals in the wind. Lit up in red and blue… “Amanda, what the hell—”
“I don’t know. Squad cars. Four or five of them, pulling up just down the road.”
McBride grabbed the back of the driver’s seat and leaned to look out. Christ, yes—Lothian and Borders bearing down in all its glory, all the racket and fanfare Campbell’s team had worked so hard to avoid. The sirens were a wolf-pack howl. He met Amanda’s eyes, watching her come to the same conclusion at the very same instant. “Oh no. Lila.”
His discarded headset crackled. McBride snatched it up. Not a crackle—a thundery flutter, as if the cloth near the mic had been seized. A short, intense hush, the sound of the sirens coming through the wire. Then Carlyle’s panicky snarl: “What’s that noise, then, Maralek? What the fuck is that?”
“How should I know?” Toby sounded unfazed. In his mind McBride saw him, lifting one broad shoulder in a shrug. His eyes would be calm. His mouth would be ghosting a smile. “Maybe you forgot to pay a bill.”
Gunshots roared down the wire. McBride jerked back helplessly, the headset clattering to the floor. He yanked it back up and listened again—frantically clamping one earpiece flat to his skull—but Toby’s mic was dead.
McBride leapt into the street. Once there, he fixed himself, a rock around which chaos instantly began to part itself and flow. The doors to the Black Cat were wide open, disgorging a stream of panicked bodies. The bouncers were trying to keep order, but the club was tiny; a gunfight in there would sound like the end of the world and put everyone into the crossfire.
Police cars were still arriving. One of them skidded on the snow and screeched to a broadside halt three feet from McBride. He scarcely bothered to look. He was waiting, listening. The squad-car doors flew open, and somehow he was sharing the kerb and the blizzard with Lila Stone and the chief constable for all of Edinburgh, Lothian and Borders. He’d had bad dreams like that. Assuming this was real, he growled, “What have you done, Lila?”
She ignored him. All her attention was fixed desperately on the brass she’d brought with her. The CC was watching her in his turn with an intense and hawklike interest. “I told you, sir,” she gasped. “This is an unauthorised raid.”
“DI McBride? You in charge here?”
On another night McBride might have been flattered the CC recognised him. For now he was just waiting, listening. “Nn-nn,” he grunted, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the van. “Campbell.”
“Aye, and it was going fine until you lot came blazing in… Oh, Lila. I might have known.”
McBride let Campbell and all the rest of them fade into static. The CC had brought serious heat with him: all the way up the wynd, police marksmen were taking position behind the open doors of their cars. To what end, McBride wasn’t sure, unless they intended to shoot their way through the frightened crowd still spilling onto the pavements. Still too many of them for him to make his move, and he didn’t yet know where to go. He was waiting, listening. Vaguely he heard the CC’s ominous rumble. “You mean you disrupted an operation set up by my division’s most trusted senior officer?” Then the gunfire came again.
A short, sharp exchange. The marksmen crouched, cocking their rifles. The crowd surged, screams piercing the clamour, but McBride could see a gap. And he had a destination—the first floor.
Amanda was in front of him. “James. No. Don’t you dare.”
Everything I’ve got’s in there, Manda. My kid, my partner.
Toby.
He couldn’t say any of it. He put her aside—gently, almost into the arms of the CC. And then he ran.
***
The club was almost empty. The music boomed weirdly to a vacant floor, coloured lights and strobes whirling in dead air. A handful of terrified punters still crouched under tables, huddled against walls: he ignored them, scanning the darkness. Only one exit could lead to the upper floors. Unshipping his weapon from under the donkey jacket, he made for it, cautiously pushing wide the doors.
There was a body on the stairs. For a moment McBride felt only distant rage, a copper’s grief for the civilian dead; this poor lad in his shiny suit had probably just been on his way back from the gents’. McBride bent to check for a pulse, found none and began to step over him.
A strobing beam from the bar swept over the fallen man’s peaceful face. Air left McBride’s lungs. His damaged knee gave, and he grabbed at the banister to keep from falling. “Oh God, Andrew. Andy!”
Another bark of gunfire from the floor above. For an instant McBride couldn’t take it in—couldn’t move for the stony paralysis of grief inside him. Then he heard Grace scream.
He lurched to his feet. Christ, what a noise she made—like a cat picked up by its tail. Oh, she was Libby’s girl, all right, and his; she sounded, more than anything, pissed off. Like a flare in the dark, that cry. McBride briefly touched Andrew’s hair and ran again.
***
A narrow corridor ran from the top of the staircase to a set of double doors. The doors had porthole windows. Flattening himself to the wall, McBride too
k his Walther in both hands, snapping off the safety. He could see Sim Carlyle—panicked, pale, but not too much of a cornered rat to be enjoying himself. Worse things than coke and E got dealt around this club. That was a crystal-meth face, McBride reckoned, Sim not above sampling his own wares. His gaze was glittering and dead. His weapon—a dirty-looking Parabellum, adapted to take hollow points—was trained on Toby Leitner.
Toby was unarmed. He was bruised and daubed with blood, but he looked utterly serene. As if he was playing out his life’s last purpose, finding his path and his peace… When Sim moved, he did too, just a little, always facing him. McBride saw why. Grace was behind him. She was at once clinging to his coattails and peering round them at Carlyle, her face creased like a wildcat’s. From what McBride could lip-read, she was giving Carlyle what-for in her ma’s best Glaswegian guttersnipe dialect. Toby kept pushing her back, one hand gently clamped to her bright head. He was shielding her—with his flesh, with his bone. Carlyle would have to shoot through him to get at her.
McBride kicked the doors open. Carlyle swung round. And despite everything—despite even poor Andrew, discarded like a rag doll on the stairs—McBride gave him a moment. He said, soft and fast, “Put it down for me, Sim.”
But Sim jerked the pistol’s muzzle up. McBride knew a moment of exquisite relief. No more reason in this world now why he shouldn’t shoot this fucker dead: he nodded, as if they had come to an agreement. “Fine by me. Toby, don’t let my bairn watch this.”
Toby hoisted her off the floor. She fought him for an instant, then wailed and hid her face of her own accord. Toby wrapped an arm around her head. And McBride, once the girl’s eyes and ears were shielded, shot Sim Carlyle through the heart.
Unsteadily he holstered his gun. He stood staring at the corpse he’d just created. What did he do, when the game was over? What did normal men do?
