The rules dictated that the winner under such circumstances forfeit the race. The prize would go to the next horse over the finish line, provided they were clean, too. If they were both doped, no one would have raised an eyebrow. That was one of the ways the big boys played to win. Bealltainn came up clean. The Devon-on-Thames horse did not. Even the most unscrupulous owner knew better than to protest a result the Everyman would cheer.
The results sent a shockwave through the owners and track officials alike. Everyone from the grooms, suppliers, owners, and jockeys were questioned. Another few hours passed before pathology screened blood and urine samples of both horses, verifying the results. By that time, Jessica was already in Michael’s protective cocoon and on her way out of England. She had pulled off the upset win of the decade and wasn’t around to celebrate it. Not that she would have been keen on being the center of the party anyway.
Michael stared at the screen and saw what he feared was the footprint of that upset. Banking across international borders gave some allowances for timing transfers and clearing funds. He suspected that the team that pulled off Saturday’s Manchester bombing was paid in cash—most likely the day before the attack or at the very latest, that morning. Hundreds of thousands of dollars went missing from the account sometime Friday night. Checks were paid out to the winners on Saturday immediately following the race, and a corresponding deposit was supposed to have covered the withdrawal.
Clearing times on the checks would have put available funds in the account by Monday morning, erasing any fluctuation, but the drug test results came back and the winner was disqualified. Any checks issued to the winners were canceled and stop payment orders put into place. Instead of one constant balance that would not have raised any suspicions, the balances swung wildly, no doubt showing the panic of whoever was involved.
The scheme should have worked, and he wondered if the bullet lodged in Jessica’s vest was evidence of insurance that it would. He could see more than enough covers for the motivation behind her murder. Her minor celebrity and notoriety was eclipsed by the egos of many. Being a woman at Aintree was an affront few could tolerate.
Michael looked out his window and surveyed the school’s grounds. Only the faint lights of the emergency exits glowed. The hulks of the buildings sat cold, empty, and dark. His mind was busy. He should have been concerned with who tried to put a bullet into Jessica. He also should have been a lot more worried about how he was going to address the board in a few hours time.
Instead, he could only focus on one thing, knowing the answer would lead to the conclusion he dreaded: Someone inside his organization was behind the Manchester bombing. Did they cover their tracks well enough not to lead back to him? Or, did they even care?
MANCHESTER, ENGLAND
DON HUME TOSSED a pile of newspapers in front of Dally. The scowl on his face told her he was not happy.
“What’s got your knickers in a t-t-twist,” she asked as she put her cup of tea and papers aside. She tried not to show her fluster but failed.
“Rubbish. These stories are absolute bloody rubbish.”
Dally leafed through the newspapers and noted that they were from competing news outlets and not from any of the other holdings of their parent corporation, Multi-Media Central.
Don huffed. “I got word that the Arndale bombing would drop from the major headlines to the secondaries. In a few days, any updates will be relegated to page three and beyond.”
“What can you expect? It’s not like there’s some b-b-big m-mystery about who done it and why. The IRA called us, claimed responsibility, told us why and d-disappeared into the night. It’s the same old story.”
Don continued to fume as he paced the newsroom. “I’m sick of the same old drivel. Those feckin’ micks dream up their schemes then come over here and blow us up, and you mean to tell me no one knows anything? That no one saw anything? I can’t believe that for a second.”
Dally knew enough to steer clear of Don’s rages when he was on a roll. She ventured a timid question. “So, what d-do you want me to do about it?”
“Look, it says here they’ve got the best folks at MI5 workin’ on it. Stick close to them. I want you to come up with a fresh story.”
“Look, Chief. Are you serious? You want me to saunter over to MI5’s offices, sip a c-cup of tea with the bureau head, and sit enraptured while he spills his secrets to me? In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly M-Mata Hari.”
Don wiped his hand over his smooth head and snorted. “No. No. Of course not. But there’s got to be something in this story that’s worth reporting more than Sinn Fein’s propaganda and the Prime Minister’s ire.” He looked over at the pile of notes and photographs on Dally’s desk. “What’s that you’ve got there?”
She dove into the opening. “I only found one p-piece of information in the reports that’s even remotely interesting.” She paused for a moment to see if she had captured his attention. He nodded to her to go on. “A large influx of p-private jets and c-cargo arrived at the Manchester Airport the week before the bombing.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“My p-private sources, Chief. You should know better than to ask me that.” Dally’s buddies in customs had come through once again, and she wasn’t about to risk them losing their jobs over talking with her. She kept the conversation going so Don would press for more details. “I didn’t dismiss the information as a c-coincidence.”
Don crossed his arms over his barrel-shaped chest. “You know damned well why I have to ask you about your sources, Magpie. You lied to me once and I nearly got fired for it.”
Her neck muscles contracted as she tried to swallow. The nickname stung. She was a new reporter and had been awarded her first tip to follow up, something that was too juicy to let go. Honestly, she told herself, who wouldn’t try to catch the Prince in a compromising position? She pecked around that story until the leads were picked clean and then made a nest for herself with every innuendo and half-truth, sticking to her version of the facts no matter what. Magpie was the name the other reporters gave her after the story imploded, taking the fledgling Grandier News and its print and broadcast outlets with it. Every story she touched after that seemed to be tainted with bad leads. Dally knew what she had to prove and Don knew it, too.
She bristled. “I d-didn’t lie.”
“There’s no proof of that without a verifiable source.”
“What ever happened to being able to keep your sources confidential?”
“That might work for others, but you’ve lost that privilege. I want an on-the-record source that the paper can point back to for verification.”
“I was lied to. There’s a d-difference.” She knew that the difference was only a matter of degrees when ambition made her so hungry she went blind. So far, she was doing good work, but Don would keep her on a tight leash.
He absently rolled the thick hair of his right forearm between the fingers of his left hand as he listened. “Keep talking.”
Dally nervously inhaled and rattled off the rest of her research. The tension of speaking to her boss should have launched her into a stuttering standstill. Even years of speech therapy—taken with the wild hope of being in front of the camera rather than handing fresh copy in from the wings—did nothing to abate the maddening catches and halts. Then one day she was singing along with Herman’s Hermits I’m Henry the VIII, I Am and realized that the words slid off her tongue. From that day forward, Don and her coworkers would hear a mash-up of a number of barely recognizable tunes with lyrics stripped from tabloid headlines. As nasally and off-key her tunes were, the lyrics were something to pay attention to.
“Traffic at the Manchester airport follows fairly predictable patterns,” she spoke in unrecognizable atonal notes. “If Heathrow was fogged in or closed for a security reason, or if a large event took place in the Manchester area, spikes in both commercial and private traffic can be seen. With the Euro 96 football match on, both the Old Traffo
rd Stadium here in Manchester and the Anfield Stadium in Liverpool are filled to capacity. That would certainly account for more passenger traffic, but the cargo numbers are spiked even taking into consideration vendor needs. Cargo traffic could also really peak during the Grand Nationals.”
Don stopped her, as much to get clarification as to get a break from the dissonant dissertation. “The Grand Nationals?”
“Yes! At Aintree,” she sang to the tune of Hallelujah.
“But that was a month and a half ago. They’ve all long since gone home.”
“You’re right. I looked, and no public events took place during that time period last week, so it looked like there was no reason for crates and boxes to ship there. But it bothered me. The private jet origins read like a study of hometowns of Who’s Who for the rich and famous. Major conglomerates were represented—oil money, manufacturing, media. Anything that happened last weekend at the Aintree Racetrack involved only the world’s wealthiest people. But nothing was reported anywhere about a race, so I thought maybe something would be written about the people who were visiting in town and may have attended it. The thing about the world’s richest people is that the average bloke on the street would never have heard of them. If word that Sheik Fareil ah-Sahad was in town, few papers would give a column inch to report it.” She paused and took a deep breath, her aria not yet complete. “I knew from past Grand Nationals the horses are such finely tuned machines that no variance in their feed—like a change in the types of grasses used for their hay—could be tolerated. The horses arrived on their own private jets, which carried all of the feed and provisions needed for the event. Crates of wrapped hay and special grains made up the bulk of the shipping manifests. Tack, gear, and other items filled out the rest.”
“So, what are you saying?”
“I called up the society editor of the Liverpool Daily News. After some digging, she told me that a private race of some kind took place at the track. The horses and handlers arrived a couple of weeks ago, but all of the major players and owners landed on Thursday. Just as I suspected, the names were not going to sell papers, so she didn’t spend a lot of time on it. Besides, she learned the hard way that they are a rather litigious crew and would rather sue your panties off than get their name in the society pages. Anyway, they partied their way through Saturday’s race and into some fancy-pants dinner. Most flew out that night and only a few stayed on through the weekend, mainly to catch the football matches. The editor was able to match names to their pictures. They would mean nothing to most people, but if you have a nose for money, you would have been amazed. The hundred or so people rumored to have attended represented a full ten percent of global wealth.”
Don gave out a low whistle, unintentionally harmonizing to a Eurythmics’ tune. Dally hoped he would see that the long drip of a reporter standing in front of him was proving to be a damned good investigator. Maybe he would begin to see that Magpie was on to something.
“Keep going,” he said.
Dally allowed herself a silent cheer of glee as she continued. “Airport security has gotten much more stringent in recent years. IRA bombings at Heathrow forced strong measures to be taken. New concepts like watch lists for suspect names, body pat downs, and metal detectors became routine. This pissed off a few passengers, but a mere mention of the Lockerbie airliner crash of 1988 took the wind from them when they realized that was only eight years ago. Delays and invasions of privacy were hard to escape.” She looked down at her notes. “Private jet use increased four-fold since stringent security measures on commercial flights were implemented. They are exempt from many of the rules and provisions governing passengers and cargo.”
“So what you have is an increase in cargo traffic and a private event at Aintree with lots of private jets. So why should I care?”
“Two reasons. The first is that I learned the explosives used at Arndale are restricted in the U.K. No one would have been able to get their hands on enough to inflict the damage seen. So, it must have come from outside the country.”
“Okay. Keep talking.”
“And also because of this,” she said as she handed him an enlargement of the truck’s interior provided to her from her friends in Images. “The Styrofoam coffee cup was nothing distinct. Any one of a hundred vendor carts dispensed gallons of coffee each day in the same type of cup. Even if they had been able to retrieve the cup before the truck blew up, the sides were not of a surface that would have yielded a decent fingerprint. But this is interesting,” she pointed at the stained paper. “The logo on one of hoodies worn by one of the bombers is from the Aintree Racetrack and appears to be the same one on this paper. I’m pretty sure it’s a betting slip.”
“But you said the event was private. No public riffraff allowed.”
“The privacy of the event meant that regular people could not just swagger up to a bookie’s window and place a bet. Admission was by invitation only. Even so, the stable help and grooms that were temporarily hired for the event sometimes brought in a friend or two for the race and had a side business of their own for the wagers.”
Don studied the image for a long while. The variables of what the smudged name and numbers could say were endless. “There’s no way to know if the slip is from a recent race or not.”
“I’ve already asked for a better image of this paper because something is nagging at me. You said you wanted a fresh angle, something juicy to spice up the news. One report said the point of origin for the explosives was the U.S., and the IRA can just about spit on us from Northern Ireland and Ireland. What if the increased jet and cargo traffic and this private race were somehow connected to the bombing?”
“You’re really going for a stretch here. It’s no secret the IRA is a shoestring operation. They don’t have enough money to buy a proper bomb so they steal from the RUC and have the balls to use our own bombs to kill us. They burn tires and run cars filled with barrels of petrol through barricades to stop our tanks. They don’t have the money, the means, or the connections to hire a private jet and pull anything off like what you’re saying.”
Dally sputtered a bit at Don’s rebuff but continued in a Gregorian chant. “Think of Sunday’s riots in Belfast. You saw the video rushes from our reporters there, right?”
“Yes. So what.”
“Then you must have seen this,” she said as she leaned over a video player and plugged in a tape. Images of the riots jumped across the screen as she fast-forwarded to the section she wanted. The fragment of action lasted only three or four seconds. Dally inched the action forward, frame by frame. “Look at this. Here are the RUC. You can easily pinpoint exactly who they are by their uniforms and how well they’re equipped. Now look here,” she said, pointing to a group of three men partially hidden behind the trash bins they were using for cover. The loosely fitting cotton shirts and casual trousers and ripped jeans stood in marked contrast to the helmets, flak jackets, and high-powered rifles they carried. “Somebody’s rich uncle just died.”
“Hmm. Okay. I get it. You told me earlier about the new truck they used to for the bombing.”
“Yes.”
“So what you’re saying is that with the arrival of money came the arrival of explosives.”
“Yes.”
Don turned his back to her. “I want to caution you. The cargo manifests don’t give a great deal of information. Most of the party names listed are corporations. Very few individuals would have a reason to ship a large crate of goods to Manchester. The last thing I want you to do is to go on a wild goose chase of tracking down companies and shipments. Tracking a company can bring you down a lot of blind alleys as one company dissolves into the holding company of another.”
“I know all that.”
“Fair enough. What did your buddies give you?”
“Commercial passenger lists and customs information on cargo. I got a partial list of anyone who traveled by private jet and cleared into England.”
“What you have here is a lot
of nothing. I’ll give you two weeks to dedicate yourself to see if your hunch pans out into something.”
“Two weeks? That’s it?”
“That’s enough time to learn if something’s going to click, and every shred of information you dredge up you have to run through me.” He faced her and lowered his voice to a growl. “And, keep your fact spinning to a minimum until we see what we have. I want real, live on the record sources. The heat’s less if we can point to a lying source rather than a lying reporter. You also have to keep up with your regular copywriting duties. Miss Bartholomew cannot risk being on the air without your words in her mouth. In your free time you can investigate other avenues and see what ripens.”
Dally wanted to press for more time, but quickly decided that Don could easily take back what he had given her. If she played nice, she could finally rid herself of the magpie omen. She decided to be happy with what she had.
She started with the passenger lists from all commercial flights for two weeks prior to the explosion. Thousands of people had flooded into the Manchester/Liverpool area because of the sport tournament and she felt a bit ridiculous staring at pages of names as if one would glow neon for her attention. Needing a break, she grabbed a magnifying glass and began to sift through the photos of the bombing.
She had been in such deep thought she hadn’t noticed when the office page dropped another manila folder onto her desk. Absently, she pulled out its contents and found enhanced photos of the betting slips. Peering at them through the magnifying glass, Dally was able to confirm the Aintree logo.
The new images were still fuzzy, but clearly showed the dark outline of a horse in full stride jumping over the letter “A.” The amount of the wager could be seen along with the odds. Someone had placed a modest sum on a horse and rider with odds that said no one really thought that pair had a chance in hell of winning. She could not see the exact amounts, but looking at the smudged numerals, she could make out the symbol for pounds and a decimal, ‘Pounds sign. Blur. Blur. Decimal. Blur. Blur.’
The Troubles (The Jessica Trilogy Book 2) Page 24
