Bombmaker

by Claire McFall

  I don’t know if it was the lingering effects of the alcohol, but I had strange dreams. I was in a street I didn’t recognise, although I felt that I should, and I was on the phone. It was the mobile that Samuel had given me and his voice was coming through the speaker, but quiet, crackly. It was hard to hear what he said. But I needed to, because he was giving me directions. He was trying to lead me to a door, one of hundreds lining the road. And I had to get the right door, because behind the wrong ones loitered my demons: Alexander; Zane; Mark, with a bullet hole gaping between his eyes; the Wall; a GE officer. I couldn’t see any of them, but I knew they were there – waiting to get me if I made one mistake. I was safe only so long as I listened to Samuel, followed every word. But I couldn’t quite hear what he was saying. I was panicking, spinning round and round, looking at door after door…

  A repetitive, shrill ringing sound broke through the dream, pulling me back to the surface. My eyes snapped open, completely disorientated. It took another few seconds to process that the noise that had rescued me from the nightmare came from the phone, trilling impatiently from the cheap pine bedside table. The phone Samuel had given me. How long had it been ringing?

  “Shit!”

  I erupted into action, twisting round and clawing my way across the mattress, frantic hands clumsily reaching for the little phone and sending it spinning down onto the floor instead.

  “No, no, no. I’m coming, hold on!” I shouted uselessly at the phone as I dived over the side of the bed and stretched across the carpet. My scrabbling fingers finally coaxed it into my palm. I jabbed at the answer button and thrust it against my ear.

  “Hello?” I was breathless, my head spinning as the blood rushed through my system.

  “Where are you? What took so long?” Samuel’s voice was gruff, almost annoyed.

  “Sorry,” I rubbed at my forehead, “I was asleep.”

  “Well get up.” I jerked upright as I processed his tone. It was short, businesslike. As if we were on a job. “Someone’s coming over to the house. I need you to let them in.”

  “Here?” I hissed, my throat constricting. “Who?”

  “His name’s Rhys. He probably won’t be alone.”

  “Rhys Davis?” I asked.

  There was a pause.

  “You pay attention, don’t you?”

  Was that a compliment or was he scolding me?

  “They’ll be there in less than an hour, Lizzie.”

  “And when will you be here?” It was impossible to keep the nervous tremor out of my voice. If Samuel was giving me a heads up, it meant they’d be arriving before him.

  “As soon as I can. There’s something I have to do. Just… just let them in. And try not to say anything. Especially about Alex. All right?” I couldn’t answer. I’d gone cold and clammy. I’d never met Rhys Davis, but I knew he was a man Alexander respected. And someone Alexander respected was a man to be feared. “Lizzie?”

  “Okay,” I croaked.

  “Good.”

  Samuel rang off. Still, I didn’t lower the phone. I just sat there, half propped up on my knees, staring at nothing.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Five minutes later, I’d given myself a shake and managed to get my head together enough to function. I got up, straightened the bed and did my best to fix my hair and my clothes in the tiny bathroom mirror. I half considered using the make-up Samuel had given me to hide the tattoo on my cheek, but Rhys Davis and his associates were Welsh, they fought for the ‘cause’. I decided I’d win myself more favours just as I was: branded.

  I tidied the lounge a bit too, using a ripped cloth to wipe away the worst of the dust and forcing the sash window up an inch or so to let some of the stale air out. Then I took a quick inventory of the kitchen, scanning the cupboards to see what sort of provisions Samuel kept there. Not much. As a last touch I switched on the television, turning it to a sports channel showing some football match, thinking that at least the noise from the commentators and the cheering crowd would interrupt the silence.

  In truth what I was doing was filling time. Keeping my hands busy stopped me craning my neck every three seconds, hunting for signs of a terrifying stranger walking up to the front door. But when I’d done all I could think of to do, he still wasn’t here, and I had to resort to sitting on the sofa, jangling my legs up and down, waiting.

  Even though I was listening for it, I still jumped when three short raps rattled the glass panel of the front door. I stood up quickly and faced the hallway. I really didn’t want to answer, but if Rhys was anything like Alexander, he wouldn’t like to be kept waiting. I forced my feet to walk to the door and, ignoring the security chain, pulled it wide open.

  A massive figure stood on the top step, blocking out most of the light from the street. He was dressed in black jeans and a bomber jacket that wouldn’t quite shut over his huge barrel chest. Or maybe it was just that he wanted the gun tucked against his hip to be nice and obvious. Either way the effect was intimidating. He scowled at me, looking me up and down, assessing me. I knew at once that this wasn’t Rhys Davis. This was his muscle. He had the same aggressive, on-edge alertness that Zane exuded whenever he and Alexander travelled out and about. Once he’d decided I wasn’t a threat, he pushed past me and began to check the rooms of the house, both upstairs and down. And I was left face-to-face with his boss.

  If I’d ever imagined what an armed robber might look like, Rhys Davis was fairly close to the mark. He was medium height, medium build, and his head was shaved down to a buzz cut, leaving a thick haze of dark-brown bristles, peppered with grey. He wore a checked shirt and black cords. His face was clean-shaven and craggy, both cheeks free of black ink. It was wreathed in lines, although I guessed he was only in his early thirties. His eyes were dark, almost black, and they were both shrewd and amused as they took me in.

  “You’ll be Lizzie then?”

  I nodded and stood aside for him to enter, but he didn’t move. I frowned, wondering what he was waiting for, but at that moment his bodyguard came clattering down the stairs.

  “Clear,” he grunted.

  Davis nodded and stepped inside. A thin, sour-faced man that I hadn’t noticed before dogged his steps.

  I followed them into the living room. Davis and the thin man took the two seats on the sofa, whilst the bigger man stood by the window, twitching the net curtain aside and glaring down the street. I hovered in the doorway, wondering if they expected me to stay in the room or get out of the way. I glanced quickly back towards the door, hoping that Samuel would miraculously appear.

  No one spoke. Muscle watched the street, thin man watched Davis, and Davis watched me. I let my eyes dart about the room, never resting on any of the men long enough to make what could be called eye contact.

  “Can I get you anything to drink?” I offered, thinking that would allow me to escape to the kitchen for a while.

  Davis smiled, although the gesture reminded me a bit of a fox.

  “You can get me a cup of tea as well, Lizzie.”

  As well? I stared at him dumbly for a moment before it clicked. It must have been Davis who Samuel had been speaking to when I’d come downstairs earlier. I’d thought Samuel had given him my name, but maybe he’d just remembered it, assumed I was the same girl, the same nobody. I wondered if he knew I was the person who’d laid the other half of the bomb at the Welsh wall.

  “Would anyone else like one?” I spoke to Davis, wary of addressing his henchmen, but the two men shook their heads. “How do you take it?” I asked him. “There’s no milk. Sorry.”

  “Then I guess I take it black.”

  He winked at me, but like his smile, the action seemed off. I sensed he’d be the sort of man to grin at you even as he fired the bullet that was heading straight for your chest.

  I turned on my heel and hid in the other room for the length of time it took the ancient kettle to boil and a teabag to stew in the least chipped mug. Now that I was out of the way, I heard the muted hum of
conversation, but the three men were careful to keep their voices low enough that I couldn’t make out any of what was said.

  I made my way back into the living room just as Davis’s muscle pulled out his gun and the front door opened. I froze, eyes popping open at the sight of the sleek, black weapon, but no one was paying any attention to me.

  Samuel stood on the threshold, his hands held up in surrender to the gun pointing at his heart, his eyes on Davis.

  “Samuel,” Rhys stood up, smiled.

  He shot his bodyguard a look and the man slid the gun away.

  “Rhys,” Samuel stepped forward and shook Davis’s outstretched hand. His smile was welcoming, but his eyes were wary. His shoulders were tense, his posture just slightly defensive. My hand shook slightly, making the tea tremble. If Samuel was nervous…

  “Danny, how are you?” Samuel addressed the thin man on the sofa, who nodded once in his direction, looking bored. “No Euan?”

  Davis smirked.

  “No. Euan and I have had a… parting of ways.”

  “I see,” Samuel replied carefully.

  Euan was probably buried in a shallow grave somewhere. That was the only way employees left Alexander, especially those close enough to be his personal bodyguards.

  “This is Gavin.”

  Gavin, the muscle, gave a twitch that might have been an attempt at a smile. Then he went back to watching the window.

  “Is Lizzie looking after you?” Samuel asked.

  Both men looked at me and I took that as my cue to offload the rapidly cooling tea before my shaking hand spilt it all over the floor.

  “She’s quite adorable,” Davis leered as I handed it over, turning from a fox to a wolf, “Is she yours?”

  I blinked and turned to Samuel, shocked.

  He gave Davis a dark look, and for a moment I saw Alexander shining out from behind his eyes.

  “Yes.” My stomach clenched at the idea that Samuel was claiming me, the air whooshing from my lungs.

  “Shame,” Davis mused, his eyes lingering on me.

  I blushed and shifted a little closer to Samuel.

  “Lizzie,” he dropped a possessive hand on the back of my neck. “I’m hungry. Go see what you can dredge out of the kitchen.”

  I took the hint: he wanted me out of the room. That was okay, because I was desperate to get the hell out from under Davis’s stare. Increasingly he was reminding me of a less refined, older version of Alexander.

  I’d noticed a couple of frozen pizzas in the bottom tray of the freezer during my earlier inventory and I dragged them out, scraping a thick layer of ice from the cardboard packaging. Goodness only knew how long they’d been in there, but I figured they’d still be edible. I fired up the cooker and stuck the two pizzas on trays, ready for the little orange light to blink off and tell me the oven was ready. Then I settled myself in one of the kitchen chairs, out of sight, but within earshot.

  Why was Samuel meeting with Rhys Davis without Alexander’s knowledge?

  I hardly knew anything about him, except that he operated out of Cardiff and he’d been part of the successful plot to blow a hole in the Welsh wall. Cardiff – the same place Samuel had lived before he’d come to London to join his brother. Did they have a history together? I eased the chair a little closer to the half-closed door and leaned forward, listening. Samuel was talking. He was describing a job, a bombing. I frowned, trying to catch up.

  “It was a high-risk operation, a big target. We knew there would be heavy security. When you attempt something like that you have to expect casualties.”

  What were they talking about?

  “The diversion at Monmouth was your idea—”

  “Alex’s,” Samuel corrected.

  “Your idea,” Davis continued, as if Samuel hadn’t spoken. “And the GE seemed to know exactly what time my man would be there. Then both my men at the real target were picked up; my driver shot. And these were skilled men, men I’d sent on countless jobs. Men I valued.”

  The Wall. They were talking about the bombing at the Welsh border. And Davis, it seemed, was unhappy with the way it had gone. There was an implication behind his words. A suspicion. I could feel Samuel bristling through the wall.

  “Our driver was shot as well.”

  “And your bomber?”

  “No.”

  “How did he get away?”

  “She—”

  “She?” Davis pounced on the word. “You used a woman?”

  There was no response to the question. When Davis spoke again, he sounded incredulous.

  “Little Lizzie?”

  He laughed, and I imagined that Samuel’s face must have confirmed his guess.

  “How the hell did that girl make it out of there when three of my men couldn’t, when your man couldn’t?”

  “She has a talent for surviving,” Samuel replied dryly.

  I grimaced. That wasn’t it at all. I’d survived because Samuel had given me a phone, because he’d had a strange inkling that something might go wrong. Had it been more than that? Had he known that Alexander had sold all of us to the GE?

  I still didn’t understand: why would he choose to save me?

  I flicked my gaze back to the cooker, surprised to see the little light had cut off. I tried to stand quietly, hoping the men in the other room had forgotten all about me, but the oven door squeaked noisily as I opened it and the built-in fan whooshed in my ears as it fought to circulate the heat.

  There was silence in the living room when I returned to the chair. I rested my knee on the hard wooden seat, but I didn’t sit on it. The door had been swung wide open and several pairs of eyes were staring at me, only one of them friendly. The other three ranged from amused to incredulous to utterly disinterested.

  “How’s the food coming along?” Samuel asked.

  “It’s in the oven,” I replied, my voice dying a little with fright.

  He patted the arm of the dusty looking armchair he lounged in.

  “Come and sit with me,” he said.

  I crossed the room self-consciously and perched awkwardly on the hard edge of the chair arm. Samuel very deliberately wound an arm around my waist. I saw Davis register the gesture.

  “So you called this meeting. What is it you want?” Davis asked. He sat forward on the sofa, clasped his hands between his knees, suddenly businesslike.

  Samuel took his time replying. I couldn’t see his face, seated as I was, but I felt him shift his weight, heard a small sigh escape his lips.

  “I want to go back to Cardiff.”

  Surprise lifted Davis’s heavy eyebrows, but he quickly smothered the expression. I found it harder. Samuel was serious about leaving then? A dewy sweat formed at the base of my back. If he disappeared, what would happen to me?

  Davis considered him shrewdly for a moment. Even the thin man, Danny, looked interested now.

  “Why do you need me for that?”

  “I need you to get me across the border.”

  “No you don’t,” Davis disagreed.

  I twisted round so that I could sneak a look at Samuel. He was frowning.

  Davis went on, “Not with your connections. Your cousins,” he lifted his lips in a facsimile of a grin, “your brother. Alexander has connections everywhere. He could get you into Wales much more easily than I could.”

  “I don’t want to go through Alex.” Samuel spoke with measured calm, as though the words had no importance, no significance, but Davis’s mouth curled into a smirk.

  “You mean you don’t want him to know.”

  Samuel’s silence was taken for assent. Davis laughed. Even Gavin cracked a smile. I didn’t. I was frozen, immobile. I felt like I was missing something, but I couldn’t catch up fast enough.

  “Alexander won’t like that,” Davis chuckled. That was the understatement of the century. “So what has happened to make you want to break up the mighty Evans Empire?”

  Samuel shrugged, his movement rubbing against the thin material of
my T-shirt, tickling my skin. His fingers began absent-mindedly to trace the contour of my side. It was something Alexander would have done: a possessive gesture. I didn’t feel the usual flutter of fear, though. Just a warm tingling sensation along the trail of his touch.

  “We have a difference of opinion. It’s time for – what did you call it? – a parting of ways.”

  “No,” Davis smiled wolfishly. “When two brothers have a parting of ways, it’s because one of them is in the ground.”

  “Not this time,” Samuel’s eyes flashed steel. “Let’s just say we want to focus on different things.”

  Davis considered him, then gave a slight shrug and leaned back against the sofa.

  “So, once you get back to Wales, what is it you plan to do?”

  Samuel gave a wry smile. “I’ll be looking for a job.”

  There was an astonished pause before Davis cackled, throwing his head back and letting the sound erupt out of his mouth.

  “Let me get this right: you want me to sneak you out of England, and then employ you?”

  “That’s correct.”

  Davis’s laughter died in the face of Samuel’s stony expression.

  “And why would I do that?” he asked, his eyes narrowing back into seriousness.

  “You said yourself you lost some of your best men on the Wall job. I can fill one of those roles.”

  “Can you?” Davis lifted one eyebrow in question.

  “You and I, we want the same thing,” Samuel said earnestly. “I know you support the cause. If we want to pull Wales out of the mire, we have to fight for it. You have to fight for it.” He sat back and gave Davis a level look. “You could use me.”

  “Forgive me, Samuel, but I’d always been under the impression that you were more of a logistics man. More planning than wires and putty and boom.”

  “True. But I have my own field operative who’ll be coming with me.”

  I didn’t dare look at Samuel, but my heart started pounding a mile a minute. Was he talking about me?

  Davis obviously thought so.

  “Little Lizzie?” he asked. “The girl with a talent for surviving. Well, maybe I don’t need you. Maybe I just need her.”