by Andy McNab
'But that's the big picture. As for the here and now, her personal vendetta . . .' The look on Lynn's face told me the worst. Beneath the bruises, he looked like he knew we'd reached journey's end.
'She has waited a long time for this, Nick. She'd always known her father's death was no accident. Duff confirmed it after he saw the Basra incident on TV. From that moment, you were compromised. She just needed someone to lead them to me.'
I heard a noise somewhere behind me then a woman's voice and I knew that she was there, in the shadows, and had been all along.
109
Her footsteps drew closer and the hairs bristled on the back of my neck. She stepped out in front of us.
Mairead O'Connell . . . still holding that fucking camcorder. We were on Candid Camera . . .
'That, gentlemen, will play particularly well on the six o'clock news, don't you think?' She smiled behind the lens and I caught a glimpse of her perfect white teeth.
'How did you so elegantly phrase it, Colonel? "Lesser, I suppose, visited when he could, but when we took him out, any links we might have picked up between them vanished altogether." When we took him out . . . That's the part I like. When this airs, that statement will be beamed into every home in the UK; and then it'll be picked up by YouTube and go all over the world. The British government's shoot-to-kill policy confirmed in a breath – as Richard has been saying all these years.'
She lowered the camera. 'But that's just icing on the cake. This evening's proceedings are all about justice.'
Mairead took a couple of steps forward. She pressed a button on the camcorder and rotated the little screen, holding it close to my face so I wouldn't miss a thing.
'I expect you're dying to see how I got to you?'
I found myself looking at close-ups of Liam Duff, bloodied, beaten, drilled full of holes. Through broken teeth, he mumbled that he had seen a face on TV. He recognized it as one he had seen on the Bahiti all those years ago. And that, he said, was when he realized that he had a story to sell.
It would only have taken her a couple of phone calls to discover the channel that first showed the footage – and that the face had been working for them in Basra.
The screen cut to a shot of Dom's TV station in Dublin. The picture was a little shaky to begin with; then it steadied. The microphone picked up the noise of the wind and the traffic. She'd been in a parked car – I could just make out a wing mirror on the edge of the frame. A group of people emerged from the building. One of them was Dom. It wasn't a presentation day; he was in jeans.
She would have put the building under surveillance and waited for Dom to appear. She had the perfect cover; if anyone challenged her, she'd have produced her ID and uttered the magic words Richard Isham. There wasn't a member of the security forces in Northern Ireland at the moment who would have touched her.
The picture jumped. I was now staring at the glazed front door of Dom's apartment block in Wapping. It had been shot on full zoom. Passers-by strolled between the camera and the building. A second or two later, the door opened and I stepped onto the pavement with Ruby's Christmas present and put it into the boot of the Merc.
And then . . .
There we were on the ferry. Ruby was talking into the camera, telling this woman what she was looking forward to about Ireland: green fields, horses, leprechauns, spending Christmas with Tallulah and Nick . . . it was all there.
She'd lowered the camera. What a darling little girl, she was saying. They were having such fun; didn't mean to frighten her, blah-de-blah-de-blah. But there, there . . . and I could imagine her reaching out to touch the little girl's head . . .
One of her mates from the World of Black Leather must have slipped the tracker under the Merc's chassis while it was parked outside the apartment block. It had led her to the cottage, where they'd placed the device – with a big enough hint in Lesser's Chinese pigtails to let me know this was no coincidence.
I looked up at her. 'The battery was flat.'
'I didn't actually want you dead, did I? I wanted you to introduce me to the Colonel.'
'The phone call about Leptis?'
'Somebody from the office. A Brit with the right kind of voice.'
'But Leptis?'
'Information provided by our mutual friend in Tripoli. I never dreamed we would all meet here. For that, I applaud your ingenuity and tenacity. I really thought we'd get you in Norfolk, then in Italy.
'When you surfaced in Tripoli, our mutual friend was kind enough to put in a call to let me know you were on the road. In exchange, he was going to receive a bonus on this particular shipment, but I gather you've saved me from having to pay out on that one.'
I wasn't sure how she'd picked us up in Italy – and I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of telling me – but with passport-tracking technology it looked like anything was possible. Maybe Brendan's computer whiz-kid was on her payroll, too. He could have hacked into government databases, clocked us out of Gatwick and into Genoa, then hacked into credit-card databases and watched us hire a car. Then another government database in Italy, and bingo – our number plate exiting at Rapallo. After that, she'd have monitored both the card and number-plate recognition databases, and have eyes on the Rapallo turn-off. If the Firm could do it, then so could she.
I knew what was coming next. An elderly man lay slumped on a pavement, his face beaten to a pulp. I could only tell who he was by the packet of HobNobs scattered on the tarmac beside him.
But it didn't end there.
She shoved the screen right up close to my face. I was staring at the interior of something roomy and metallic – a shipping container, maybe.
The camera followed the point of a torch beam as it swept along the floor. The picture was fuzzy, because there wasn't much to focus on – until it latched on to a foot and a pair of bare legs. A woman's legs. Then, as it tracked upwards, the two legs became four. The second pair belonged to a child.
Tallulah and Ruby were huddled together, clinging to each other for warmth and comfort.
110
The camera panned to the right of them until I could see Dom holding Siobhan's face into his chest for protection.
Mairead froze the frame and placed the camcorder on a table beside her. She squatted down in front of Lynn. 'In a minute, Colonel, Stone is going to kill you, and then—' she held up a length of det cord, a battery, the whole enchilada – 'I'm going to kill Stone.'
She turned to me. 'For all the pain and suffering you have caused me and my fellow countrymen – for the distress that you caused my mother – I want you to know that after I've dealt with you, I'm going to kill them.' She nodded at the camcorder.
She waited for a reply, but she wasn't going to get one from me. How the fuck would that help?
'Has little Ruby ever tried cocaine? I bet her mother has. She looks the type.' She grinned. 'There was a couple I supplied once . . . they had a crack-addicted baby. She smiled a lot as she grew up, but only ever talked gibberish.' She rolled her eyes back in her head in case I hadn't got the message.
I didn't even flicker.
She stood up, pissed off that I hadn't given her the reaction she was hoping for. She called out for her boys to join her and a second later I was reunited with a couple of faces I'd last seen in Norfolk.
She turned, picked up the camcorder and walked out of the room.
111
Box-cutter's head had been shaved so the gashes down the back of it could be glued back together. The back of his neck was covered with dressings.
His feet, however, were undamaged. A boot flew into my stomach. I buckled to absorb it but it still drove all the air from my body. He grabbed my feet and started hauling me towards the door. I tried to keep my head off the floor as my chest slid across the marble. All that was left where Lynn had been lying was a small pool of blood-streaked saliva.
Light now flooded the area around the entrance to the house; Mairead was obviously still in Spielberg mode.
Box-c
utter brought out a blade and cut me loose then forced me onto my knees by the threshold. Lynn was getting the same treatment a couple of steps below me. His face was no more than a few inches from mine. He looked into my eyes. 'Nick, for God's sake don't tell her . . .'
Box-cutter gave him a heavy backhander across the cheek.
I didn't know what he was on about but I'd go with it. This wasn't over yet: neither of us was dead.
Mairead sneered from behind the camcorder. 'You still think you're in with a chance, don't you?'
Box-cutter grabbed as big a handful of my hair as he could, pulled back hard and ground the muzzle of his weapon deep into my neck. I could still make out Lynn's face at the very edge of my vision.
She bent down beside me and treated me to a waft of her lemony perfume. The tips of her perfectly manicured nails brushed my face. Her other hand pressed a pistol into mine.
'There is a single round in the magazine. You will load the round, point it at his forehead, count to ten and then pull the trigger.'
She gobbed off in Russian and the weapon came away from my neck. Box-cutter was clearly used to doing as he was told. Lynn was also released and we were left on our knees facing each other.
She lifted my chin. 'Liam Duff told me how my father died. He saw his body when it was brought up on deck. Blown almost in half by detonator cord.'
She stood and started filming once more.
'Kill me, Nick. Just promise me you won't tell her . . .'
I finally saw where he was going with this. Actions weren't going to get us out of this, he was telling me. But words might.
I jerked up my head. 'It didn't stop with Lynn, you know. It went higher.'
Did I detect a momentary hesitation?
'Right to the top. There was a source – a PIRA source. Someone senior in the leadership. It wasn't just the Bahiti . . . he gave us Loughgall, the Eksund, the whole organization . . .'
I heard a strangulated sound coming from Lynn. 'Nick, no, no . . .'
Mairead lowered the camcorder. Her brow furrowed, but only for a split second. She wasn't hooking into this as fast as I'd hoped.
'Kill us and you'll be looking over your shoulder forever. Release us and I'll tell you. In fact, I'll do better than that. You can film my confession. I'll do the whole thing on camera. Not that dinky little thing – a proper, grown-up camera in Dom's TV studio. I'll give you chapter and verse on the Eksund, the Bahiti, Loughgall, Enniskillen. And I'll name the source. But I want to see all four of them alive. Let them go and I'll tell you. I'll tell everyone. The name of your traitor will be broadcast across the world, and the British government will be seriously compromised.'
She still wasn't convinced.
'Think about it, Mary. The leadership knew they had to go the political route. But they also knew that people like your dad, the diehard Republicans, wouldn't see it that way. They'd see it as surrender. So they had to be dealt with before the leadership could become respectable and have their pictures taken kissing babies.'
I was getting to her. Her face said it all.
'I know – shit, isn't it? But get us to Dublin, release the others and I'll tell you everything you need to know.'
Lynn choked with rage. He was good at this. 'You bastard, Stone!'
For a second, our eyes locked. He knew, I knew. We understood each other. For the first and last time.
With a roar, he grabbed my hand and pulled the semiautomatic from my fingers.
For a moment, everybody froze. Mairead stood there, silhouetted against the light, still filming.
Lynn pointed the pistol at her and pulled the trigger.
There was silence. It wasn't made ready; the round was still in the mag.
Then the loud bang I'd been expecting finally came, and blood and brain tissue spattered my face. A red flower bloomed on his right temple and he fell forward across the steps.
Box-cutter shoved his pistol back into his jeans and turned away.
PART TEN
112
My head throbbed. I tried to lift my eyelids but they seemed determined to stay glued together. I was dry and thirsty, but my mouth felt too furred up to let anything through again.
I thought I could hear diesel engines, big ones, but for all I knew they could be inside my head.
I took as deep a breath as I could manage and forced my eyes open.
My vision blurred and my head spun. It was like having a lifetime's supply of hangovers in one hit.
At least I was aware how bad I felt; I took that as a good sign.
And wherever I was, it was hotter than hell.
I remembered the first injection, and a couple of the others I'd been given since to keep me under. Rapid heartbeat, dry mouth, vision beginning to go hazy . . . It all happened so quickly it had to be a scopolamine and morphine cocktail. The mix depresses the central nervous system. I'd treated a few targets to it, but never thought I'd be getting the good news myself.
Attempting to get my head into real-life mode, I checked inside my jacket. They'd had everything away: the Richardson passport and the card and the money. It wasn't worth worrying about; worrying wouldn't bring them back.
My eyes were starting to focus but my fingers were numb. I looked around me, flexing both hands as the pins-and-needles kicked in and they slowly came back to life. I was sitting on a sheet of steel. Some kind of bunk. There was no bedding, only the bunk fixed to the wall, and a slim wardrobe just big enough to hang a jacket in. Next to it was a tiny stainless-steel sink.
The bunk lurched and my head rolled onto my right shoulder.
I wasn't travelling first class. The whole cabin was layered with grime.
There was no porthole. I was probably below sea level and near the engines.
Where's Lynn?
Oh yeah, I remembered.
I rubbed away at days of stubble on my grease-coated skin. My eyes were gummed up and my mouth tasted stale and acidic.
I turned my head towards a steel door, painted to look like wood panelling. The stench of diesel was overpowering.
I dragged myself to my feet and stumbled to the not-so-stainless-steel sink. My knees buckled and I had to grip the rim to stop myself collapsing.
I pushed down on the tap. Water dribbled out. I bent down and sucked in a mouthful.
I staggered to the door.
The handle wouldn't budge. I'd known it wouldn't, but I had to try anyway.
I went back to the sink. I unbuttoned my jeans, tucked in the sweatshirt, pulled up my socks. If I could sort myself physically, maybe I could sort myself mentally.
I was definitely on a boat, and it was moving. On its way to Ireland? Maybe she'd bought the idea of me appearing on TV.
I stooped and sucked again at the trickle of water.
The image of Lynn sprawled across Layla's steps forced its way into my mind. His dad would have been proud of him, giving up his life for something that he believed in. I felt admiration and anger, in equal measure. Nobody was ever going to know what he'd done, and this time next year nobody was even going to care. Nobody apart from me. If I got out of this shit alive.
