The Long Shot (Stephen Leather Thrillers)

by Stephen Leather

  Bonnie shook his hand. “Agent Bonnie Kim, of the FBI,” she said, lest the President assumed she was just there for moral support.

  “Pleased to meetchya, Bonnie,” said the President. He turned to Howard. “You’re Cole Howard, from Phoenix?” he said. Howard nodded and received the same warm handshake, a firm grip which went beyond the normal presidential hand-holding where hundreds of the faithful had to have the flesh pressed in as short a time as possible. The President’s handshake suggested that the man was truly glad to have made Howard’s acquaintance. “Bob told me about that Star Trek thing. Awesome detective work, Cole. Awesome.” He bent down and stared intently at the computer screen. The President looked leaner than he did on television, and his hair seemed darker. Howard recalled the rumours that he’d dyed his hair grey during the presidential campaign to give himself a more mature image, and he caught himself looking for dark roots. “So, Andy, why don’t you show me what this machine can do?” the President asked.

  Nervously at first, but with increasing confidence, Andy Kim showed the President how his computer model worked, calling up several upcoming venues and superimposing the three sniping positions on top of them. The President asked pertinent questions demonstrating considerable familiarity with computer systems and Andy was soon talking to him as an equal.

  Eventually the President straightened up and arched his back as if it was troubling him. “I tell you, Andy, I’m really impressed with this. It’s really important that we show these terrorists that they can’t push us around. We can’t allow them to dictate to us in any way. Saddam tried it in Kuwait, and we showed him the error of his ways. We’re going to show them that they can’t scare the President of the United States.”

  “You don’t plan to change your schedule at all, sir?” Howard asked.

  The President looked Howard straight in the eye. “Not one iota,” he said. “If I give any sign of being afraid, they’ll have won. You cannot show weakness to people like Saddam Hussein. If I hid inside the White House every time I was threatened . . . well . . . I’d never leave, would I?”

  “I guess not, sir,” agreed Howard, though he doubted that the President had ever faced a threat like the one posed by Carlos the Jackal and the Irish Republican Army.

  The President smiled. “Well, guys, I’ve got to go, but I want you to know that I think you’re doing one hell of a job. One hell of a job.” He wiped his face with the towel as he left the office.

  Andy Kim looked at his wife as if unable to believe what he’d seen. She nodded silently. Howard rubbed the back of his neck. The President seemed totally unfazed by the fact that some of the world’s deadliest terrorists were trying to get him in the sights of their rifles.

  Carlos and Mary Hennessy walked together down the sloping lawn, towards the grey-blue waters of the Chesapeake Bay. The sky above was clear and blue and a fresh breeze blew from the east, ruffling their hair and carrying with it the tang of salt.

  “You chose the house well, Mary,” said Carlos. “It is perfect for our needs.”

  “I had a lot to choose from,” said Mary. “The housing market all through Maryland is depressed, so many homeowners decide to rent rather than sell and take a loss.”

  Carlos nodded and reached up to stroke his thick, black moustache. “The great American capitalist system is grinding to a halt,” he said.

  “Why Ilich!” said Mary, in mock surprise, “I didn’t realise you were so political.”

  Carlos narrowed his eyes and studied the woman by his side. He found Mary Hennessy a shrewd, intelligent woman with many admirable qualities, but he was frequently confused by her sense of humour and her use of irony and sarcasm. It was a very British trait even if it was delivered in her lilting Irish accent. She was joking, he decided, and he smiled. Despite his vocation, Carlos was not in the least bit political. He had served many masters during his career, from all points of the political spectrum, and had never considered himself aligned to one or the other. Carlos was a businessman, pure and simple, and he served only one political colour: green – the colour of money.

  “What about you, Mary Hennessy, how political are you?”

  Mary’s brow creased as if the question had caught her by surprise. Seagulls screeched and dived over the white-topped waves and high overhead a small plane banked and headed down towards Bay Bridge airfield. “Political?” she said, almost to herself. “I used to be, I suppose. Now, I’m not sure.”

  They came to the end of the lawn and looked down onto a thin strip of stony beach which bordered the water. To their left a wooden pier stuck out into the bay like an accusing finger.

  “You have family?” Carlos asked. He had known Mary Hennessy for almost six months, but this was the first time he’d ever spoken to her about something other than the operation they were planning. There had always been a hard shell around her that he’d never been able to penetrate, but he had the feeling that something about the water was evoking old memories and opening her up.

  “I have a son and a daughter, in their twenties,” she said, almost wistfully. “I haven’t seen them for a long time.”

  Carlos nodded. “I understand how you feel. I haven’t seen my wife or children for a long time.”

  She turned to look at him. “But you’ll be going back to your children, Ilich. I’ll never see my family again. Ever. There’s a difference.”

  She walked away, stepping off the grass and on to the beach. She was wearing a white linen shirt and pale green shorts and as she walked away Carlos admired her figure. It was hard to believe that she was the mother of two children, let alone two adults in their twenties. He’d already noticed that she wasn’t wearing a bra under the shirt, nor did she appear to need one. Carlos smiled as he realised he was ogling Mary in the same way that Lovell had been leering at Dina Rashid. Not that Carlos would ever make a move on the IRA activist. She was a beautiful, sexy woman, but she was almost one of the most professional operators he had ever come across and she commanded respect from everyone she came into contact with. Besides, thought Carlos, Magdalena would kill him if she ever found out. Kill him, or worse.

  He followed Mary down the beach and soon caught up with her. She knelt down to pick up a stone. Her breasts pushed against the material of her shirt and Carlos admired her cleavage. She looked up, her eyes twinkling with amusement, and Carlos knew that he’d been trapped. He shook his head and walked on as she straightened up and skipped the stone over the waves.

  “My husband was always the political one,” she said behind him. “He was a lawyer and an adviser to the IRA. He said that politics was the only way to succeed, that violence would provoke only intransigence. He was all talk, Ilich, and it got him killed.”

  Carlos continued to walk down the beach and Mary followed him. “I was just a wife and mother then, but that changed when the UDA killed my brother. They gunned him down in front of his wife and children, at Christmas. I was there, I was covered in his blood.”

  “Your brother was in the IRA?” asked Carlos.

  “All the men in our family were,” she said. “It wasn’t something you thought about. You know how the Palestinians feel about Jewish settlements on the West Bank? Well that’s how the Catholics feel about the Protestants in Northern Ireland. They’ve no right to be there, it’s our country. The Protestants control everything in the north of Ireland: jobs, police, education, social services. Catholics are second-class citizens.”

  “And you and your husband tried to change that?”

  Mary drew level with Carlos. “He tried to persuade the IRA High Council to negotiate with the British Government. He believed that Thatcher and then Major would be prepared to make concessions and that they wanted to pull their troops out of Northern Ireland.”

  “You sound as if you didn’t agree.”

  She looked at him sharply. “I didn’t,” she said. “And I wasn’t alone. When Liam tried to stop the campaign of violence, we sent our own people to the mainland.”

&
nbsp; Carlos said nothing. There was an intensity burning in her eyes that he had seen in zealots around the world. A conviction that they, and only they, knew what was best for the world. The sort of conviction that would lead her to betray her husband.

  “It went wrong, badly wrong,” said Mary quietly. “A civilian airliner was bombed. In retaliation the British Government ordered the killing of the top two dozen or so of the movement’s leaders. Including my husband.”

  Carlos stopped, stunned. “What are you saying?”

  “They sent the SAS against us, with orders to make hard arrests.”

  “Hard arrests?”

  “Another name for assassination. Some were straightforward ambushes, others were made to look like suicides or accidents. They’re good at killing, the SAS. They’re the real professionals. My husband was gunned down as he sat in his car. The RUC said it was Protestant extremists, the same group that had killed my brother.” She reached up and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “They killed the men I loved, Ilich. This is my way of getting back at them.”

  Revenge, thought Carlos. The strongest motivation of all, stronger even than money. She had said men, not man, Carlos noticed. Plural. He doubted that it was a slip, and he doubted too that she had meant her brother, but he knew better than to pry, despite the silent tears.

  “We will succeed, Ilich, we have to.”

  Carlos nodded. “I know. Though I’ll be honest, Mary, I do worry about this. There’s so much that could go wrong.”

  “It’s been planned to perfection,” she said quickly. “But even if something goes wrong, we can wait and try again. The basic idea is sound, it’s just the opportunity we need. Everything is set to go, but it’s not written in stone. We have the team, we have the equipment.”

  “Another time will mean another rehearsal.”

  “So?” she said quickly. “So we rehearse again. Remember when the IRA almost killed Thatcher at the Conservative Party convention in Brighton. My husband then said that they have to always be lucky, but we only have to be lucky once.”

  “He was right, of course. But after so much planning, I wouldn’t want to go through it all again.”

  Mary looked at him slyly. “You miss your wife and children?” she said.

  Carlos knew she was right. “It has been a long time,” he said. “That’s why I’m so keen that we succeed the first time. Then my family can have a home together.”

  Mary sniffed. “That’s the difference between us,” she said. “If we do succeed, you get a safe haven for your family. But I will never be able to see mine again. I have been on the run for a long time, but it will be nothing compared with what lies ahead.”

  “I know, I know,” said Carlos.

  They walked together in silence for a while. The small plane which had been practising landing and taking off at the Bay Bridge airstrip climbed into the sky and headed back west, its single engine buzzing like an angry wasp.

  “Has something happened between Lovell and Rashid?” Mary asked eventually.

  “Happened? In what way?” replied Carlos.

  Mary smiled and gave the man a knowing look like a mother silently admonishing a child she knew was being less than honest. Her eyes were dry but there was a redness about them. “You know exactly what I mean,” she said.

  Carlos chuckled softly. “The American was making unwanted advances, and Dina took care of it.”

  “Took care of it? What did she do? He’s like a scalded cat whenever she’s around.”

  “She had sex with him.”

  Mary looked at him, astonished. “She had sex with him, and now he’s scared witless?”

  Carlos kept his face straight. “The way she tells it, her encounter wasn’t exactly what you’d call safe sex, not for him anyway.” Carlos could contain himself no longer and he laughed loud and hard, throwing his head back and showing uneven, yellowing teeth. His laughter echoed across the bay until it was lost among the screaming of the seagulls.

  Patrick Farrell Senior arrived in his blue Lincoln Continental shortly before eight o’clock, scratching his pendulous beer gut as he scanned the skies around the airfield. Not long afterwards his mechanics began arriving and Joker heard the rumble of the hangar doors being rolled back. Small insects buzzed around Joker’s head, and he waved them away halfheartedly. They made a sound like miniature chainsaws as they zipped by his ear and for each one he swatted away, there were two more waiting to torment him.

  He put the binoculars to his eyes and surveyed the Farrell Aviation building. In one of the ground-floor offices he could see Farrell talking on the telephone as he stood at his desk. A buzzing sound, louder than the annoying insects, filled the air above his head. He looked up and through the tree canopy overhead he saw a single-engine plane coming into land. It flashed overhead and then turned to the left, aligning itself up with the grass strip, and then passed from Joker’s field of vision. He heard the engine note change as the pilot throttled back prior to landing. Joker put the binoculars back to his eyes. Through them he saw Farrell, still on the phone, peer through his window at the arriving plane.

  The plane came into view as it reached the end of the grass strip and taxied back towards the hangars. Joker saw that it was in Farrell Aviation’s colours and bore its green propeller and hawk logo. The pilot and co-pilot were wearing headsets and sunglasses and it was impossible to tell if they were men or women. The plane came to a halt and the occupants took off their headsets and climbed out. They were men, one tall and thin with dark hair, the other short with a mop of unruly red hair. As they walked towards the Farrell Aviation offices, Joker trained his glasses on the shorter of the two men. He caught his breath as he recognised the face of Matthew Bailey, grinning and twirling his headset as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

  As Mary Hennessy and Carlos stepped into the kitchen, the telephone began to ring. Mary picked it up while Carlos opened the refrigerator in search of breakfast. Carlos took out a slice of cold pizza and chewed on a huge chunk as he watched Mary’s frown deepen. She agreed to whatever it was the caller was saying, and motioned with her hand for Carlos to pass her a pen. He picked a blue ballpoint and handed it to her. She scribbled an address on the margin of the front page of the Baltimore Sun and replaced the receiver.

  “Trouble?” asked Carlos, his mouth full of dough and tomato sauce.

  “I’m not sure,” she replied, tearing off the corner of the paper. “Someone wants to meet me. Now.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Carlos.

  “No,” said Mary. “I have to go alone.”

  Ronald Hartman’s secretary buzzed through on his intercom and told him that there was a Secret Service agent in the outer office asking to see him. The secretary was new to the job and was clearly in awe of the visitor, but Hartman was well used to dealing with the men responsible for the President’s safety. He had worked in hotels in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit and Boston before moving to Baltimore and the routine was always the same. He’d read in the Baltimore Sun about the President’s forthcoming visit to the city, and he knew that beforehand the Secret Service would be around for the list of guests and employees. He told his secretary to send the visitor in.

  The man was in his early twenties with the regulation athletic build, close-cropped hair and dark suit. He smiled, showing perfect white teeth and pink gums, and flashed his Secret Service credentials. His name was Todd Otterman and when he sat down he carefully aligned the creases on his trouser legs. He began to explain about the President’s trip to Baltimore but Hartman held up his hand to silence him.

  “I’ve been through the routine before, Agent Otterman,” he said. “You want the guest list to compare with your watch list, correct?”

  Otterman nodded, grateful that the hotel manager knew the ropes.

  “Three days before the visit, one day after?” asked Hartman.

  “Perfect,” said Otterman. As Hartman leant forward and spoke to his secretary through the interco
m, Otterman took an envelope from the inside jacket of his pocket.

  Hartman finished briefing his secretary. “You can pick up the records at the reception desk, there’ll be a printout and a floppy disc waiting for you.”

  “I wish every hotel was as efficient as yours, Mr Hartman,” said the agent. He slid six colour photographs out of the envelope and handed them to the manager. “One more thing, could you tell me if you recognise any of these people?”

  Hartman flipped through the photographs. He had a good memory for names and faces, an essential attribute for anyone wanting to do well in the hotel industry. The top picture was of a pretty blonde woman and another of the same woman but with dark hair, followed by three younger men, a middle-aged man with a receding hairline and a moustache, and a sharp-faced young woman with long, dark curly hair. Hartman needed only a few seconds for each photograph to be sure. He’d never seen any of them before. He shook his head and gave them back to the agent. “I’m sorry, no,” he said.

  “You’re sure?” said Otterman.

  “Quite sure,” said Hartman, frostily. Much as he wanted to help, he didn’t take kindly to his professional abilities being questioned.

  Otterman stood up and shook hands with the manager, thanked him for his help, then went back out to reception where a teenage girl with gleaming braces on her teeth and a black name badge with ‘Sheena’ on it smiled and gave him a manila envelope. Otterman looked inside and saw a computer disc and a roll of computer printout. He thanked her and showed her the photographs. “So, Sheena, have you seen any of these people?” he said.

  “Guests, you mean?” Her braces glinted under the fluorescent strip lights overhead.

  “Guests, in the restaurants, walking outside, anything,” he said.

  She screwed up her eyes as she went through the pictures and Otterman wondered if the girl needed glasses. She held up the picture of the woman, Mary Hennessy. The picture of her as a blonde. “I sort of remember her,” she said, her voice uncertain. “Let me ask Art.”

  She went to a tubby young man in a black suit and they both stood looking at the two photographs of the woman. The man came over and introduced himself as Art Linder, an assistant manager. “I think this is Mrs Simmons. From London. She stayed with us last week for a couple of days.” He held up the photograph in which she was a blonde. “She was a blonde, but you could see the roots growing through. She was a looker . . . for her age.”