Crossfire ns-10

by Andy McNab

  Dom put the phone back into the charger, put his cup under the espresso spout and threw in another capsule.

  'Well done, mate. He'll have followed us since we took off for Islamabad. Now we're back together and searching for Finbar, he'll show his hand.'

  The Yes Man would want us dead, but it wasn't going to happen in daylight on a residential street. Drive-by shootings of prominent newsmen or bundling people into vans without anyone noticing were the stuff of bad TV shows. This wasn't Kabul. He would pick his moment, and it would be soon.

  'He's like a human Predator, all-seeing, all-hearing. Any time now he'll aim to take us out. But we'll be waiting.'

  'Then what?'

  'This story can only have one ending, mate. Even if the plan works and we find Finbar alive, he's never going to stop. You, me, your family, we're in the shit – big-time. So we've got to nail the Yes Man, and to do that, we have to bring him to us.'

  I unrolled the first of the three twenty-metre extension leads I'd bought in O'Connell Street. I ran it out to the end of the reel, then cut it away so I was left with the plug at one end and three bare wires at the other. 'Where's your broom cupboard, mate?'

  He showed me. I grabbed a mop and a couple of long-handled brushes.

  I unscrewed the heads and took the sticks over to the roll of gaffer-tape and six forks waiting on the island.

  I scored the plastic sheath of the three-core cable with a pair of kitchen scissors, then peeled away about six inches of the plastic. I left the earth wire intact, but exposed about the same amount of the live and the neutral. I twisted each round a fork, and bound them with tape for good measure. By the time I'd repeated the whole procedure with the other two extension leads, each of the three twenty-metre lengths of cable had a pair of forks dangling from its end.

  I grabbed a headless broom handle and taped a fork either side of one end, making sure the heads curved outwards. I didn't want current arcing between them; I wanted it zapping into a target and fucking him up big-time.

  When all three poles were ready, I picked up my coffee and gulped it back in one. We had to get moving.

  He'd watched me fuck about with broom handles and cutlery with a look of deepening gloom. I slapped him on the shoulder, trying to cheer him up a little. 'He might be like a fucking Predator, but we've got some tricks up our sleeves, you and me.' I grinned.

  Although we'd have the PIRA weapons, I wouldn't want to risk using them immediately. If we killed the men who came after us, their information would die with them.

  We'd have to be a bit careful with my homemade tasers for the same reason. The commercially manufactured ones contain a step-up transformer that produces a short burst of high voltage to catapult a small amount of current. The domestic electricity supply uses a much higher current, pushed by a lower voltage. Tasers aren't designed to kill, but ours easily could. We'd be wiring our targets into the mains.

  'A two-second prod will be enough to drop anybody.' I headed for the door. 'Another two seconds and they won't get up. It'll fuck them up worse than a badly earthed fridge.'

  Dom hesitated at the island. His knuckles whitened as he gripped the edge of the worktop.

  'I know you're worried about Finbar, mate. But that ain't going to get him back. Come on. She's waiting.'

  98

  We sat in the lobby of Jury's Hotel with three nice frothy cappuccinos. We'd taken a cab back to Bertie's Pole, then continued on foot, doing anti-surveillance all the way. We'd wandered through a shopping precinct and bought two pay-as-you-go mobiles, circled a block, stopped in the middle of a couple of streets and doubled back on ourselves. We'd ended up in a florist's, bought a big bunch of red and white roses, then left by the rear exit. The Yes Man could get his eyes back on us later. For now, we didn't want anyone to see who we were meeting.

  Kate was sitting next to Dom on the sofa. She was even more excited to be out of the office doing something secret for him than she had been with her flowers. This was her chance to prove she could make it.

  She handed me a folder. 'The file is on Councillor Connor McNaughten. I called his office first thing, and told them about the new programme.'

  'What's it called?'

  'Dublin Let's Go. That's what I told him, anyway. His office phoned back within the hour saying yes, he'd be delighted to be interviewed. I said one thirty – is that OK?'

  She looked at Dom, but I jumped in. 'Great job, Kate. When you get back to the office, could you ring them back and say there won't actually be any filming today? Dom just wants to come over and talk round the idea, get it fixed in everyone's heads. We'll probably bring the cameras along on Friday, at some city location. You know, dramatic backdrop, that sort of thing. Can you do that? I don't want them expecting men with furry microphones and all that shit.'

  She nodded and drank the last of her cappuccino.

  Dom handed her the flowers. 'Katarzyna, Moira doesn't need to know what's happening yet. It must stay completely secret until we have the foundations of the story. Once that's done, I'm going to make sure you're on my team and not sitting at her beck and call any more.'

  She smiled her thanks to us both. The thought of not working for that bitch must have been the best news she'd had in weeks.

  I stood and shook her hand. 'Thanks, Kate. You've been fantastic.'

  She left and we sat down to finish our brews.

  Dom's brow furrowed. 'What's the score if we didn't shake them off? Aren't we putting her in danger?'

  'Even if they follow her back to the station, all they'll want to know is what she handed over. They're not going to compromise themselves by lifting and threatening newsroom staff. They're pond-life, mate. They'll want to keep all this down in the weed.'

  He took another sip and wiped the froth from his scabby top lip. We still looked like a couple of crash victims but, fuck it, there was nothing we could do about that. And on the upside, it meant Dom wasn't getting recognized every time he turned round.

  'What now?'

  I flicked through the printouts in Kate's folder. Judging by the number of representatives they had on the city council, Sinn Fein must have pulled out as many stops down here as they had up north. Connor was thinner and greyer than he had been when I'd last seen him. His picture showed him in the classic shoulders-at-forty-five-degrees-to-the-camera pose. He was doing his best to look like everyone's favourite uncle, and his best wasn't good enough.

  It was no surprise to me that he'd switched careers. Former terrorists were turning into statesmen everywhere on the planet. Israeli bombers killed British soldiers on the streets of Jerusalem and were rewarded with invitations to dinner in Downing Street. The ANC was a proscribed terrorist organization, then went on to run South Africa. Even Hamas was now the voters' friend. At this rate, it was only a matter of time before bin Laden became secretary general of the UN.

  The Peace Process had produced the same result in Ireland, but that didn't mean everything in the garden was rosy. Even before 9/11, when the Americans had their first really big taste of the realities of terrorism, the IRA hadn't just raised funds in Boston and New York from tenth-generation Irishmen who thought that PIRA were freedom-fighters who played the fiddle in pubs in their spare time. They'd also made a fortune domestically from gambling, extortion, prostitution and bank robbery.

  But their biggest earner had always been drugs. The police and the army were too busy getting shot at and bombed, so there had been no one around to stop it. The IRA kneecapped drug-dealers periodically as a public-relations exercise, but only as a punishment for going freelance.

  Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley might now be having a kiss and a cuddle at Stormont, and Martin McGuinness might be the Minister of Education, but deep down in the belly of the island, old habits died hard. There was just too much money at stake and they didn't want anyone else muscling in. Drugs were their big thing. They'd been running the trade for the last thirty-odd years. And it was even easier to cross the border now the army checkpoints
had gone.

  I closed the folder. 'First you buy me some decent clothes, then we clean ourselves up here, bowl along to City Hall and ask Councillor McNaughten to help us find Finbar.'

  'Easy as that? What are you going to ask him? Why don't you tell me, Nick?' Dom's frustration was plain to see. I hadn't told him what I was planning, and I didn't intend to.

  I smiled. 'Connor and I go back a long way. He'll help us, believe me.'

  'But how?'

  I stood up, ready to go. 'Whichever way I want him to. Come on, let's get sorted out. It'll give whoever's following us time to pick us up again.'

  99

  We were being followed. The green Seat MPV was three behind us, but I couldn't tell Dom yet. If the driver of the cab taking us towards Donovan O'Rossa Bridge was the excitable sort, he'd either drive us off the road or pull up by the first cop he saw.

  It was very shoddy surveillance. The two of them bobbed about non-stop, trying to see where we were. They buzzed in and out of our lane to check we were still ahead. They couldn't have been more obvious if they'd tried. In fact, they were so amateur I wondered if they were doing it to scare us. I didn't care: it was good news either way.

  I leant towards the driver. 'Tell you what, mate, if we pass a newsagent, could you pull over?'

  He stopped almost immediately outside a Spar. I nudged Dom. 'I'm getting a paper, mate. You coming in?'

  I didn't bother to look at the Seat as it passed. Dom was soon up alongside me. 'What's happening?'

  'We've got a tail.' We walked into the shop and I pulled a copy of An Phoblacht, the Sinn Fein weekly, from the rack. The front page was one big picture of Gerry Adams walking out of a polling station under the headline 'Ready for Government'. I waved it at Dom as I headed for the counter. 'I've been in this a few times myself. Not by name, of course.'

  He wasn't sure if I was joking. 'How do you know?'

  'We'll soon confirm if they pick us up again. Don't worry, it's a good thing.'

  The green Seat soon slipped in behind us once more, and stayed glued to our rear bumper all the way to Wood Quay. As we got out, they moved slowly past us and I made sure they knew I'd pinged them. The driver wore a black nylon bomber jacket, his passenger a green one. Both had dark, very short hair, just one above a crew-cut.

  They'd made the wrong choice with the people-carrier: they looked seriously out of place in it. It was a vehicle for mothers with baby chairs and screaming kids off to football practice, not two hard-looking mass murderers packing out the front. But I knew why they needed it. They planned to pack out the back with the two of us.

  Dom paid off our cab and it nosed out into the traffic. We walked up to the steps. 'Fuck me, mate, they're either Loyalists or Aryan Brotherhood – not that there's a shitload of difference.'

  Concern was etched all over Dom's face. 'Why did you give them the eye?'

  'We want to flush out the Yes Man, and we've got no time for finesse. I want him to know that we know he's on to us, so he realizes the clock's ticking.'

  We reached the main entrance to the council offices and I tapped Dom's shoulder with the rolled-up paper. 'The Yes Man will be racking his brains trying to work out what we're up to. But he won't leave things to chance indefinitely. As soon as he sees we're alone, and it's quiet, he'll come for us. There's a good chance it will be tonight – so we've got to be ready for them.'

  We pushed our way through the glass doors.

  'Why do you call him the Yes Man?'

  'Because it's the only word he ever wants to hear.'

  We were in the foyer of a grey, four-storey 1980s concrete and glass building. The reception area was a sea of disabled access and no-smoking signs and earnest, probation-officer-type faces. Big posters celebrated the fact that Dublin kids were painting for Africa and that the council were friends of clean air, leading the way in bio-fuels and zero emissions. I felt healthier just standing there.

  I read the paper while Dom did his stuff at the desk to a very smiley woman who was on the brink of asking for his autograph. Armed with little laminated passes, we took the stairs to McNaughten's office on the first floor.

  'Keep quiet once you've done the introductions and I start waffling, OK? He won't say much.'

  A prim, middle-aged woman in a red cardigan sat at her desk outside the room we were aiming for. There was something almost regal about her, even though she'd spent most of her life working in a corridor.

  Dom greeted her warmly, and it was all going very well. She'd been expecting us; she ushered us straight in.

  The furniture was functional and the windows double-glazed. Pictures along the wall showed Connor shaking hands with Gerry and Martin. A framed Sinn Fein poster hung alongside the Irish flag.

  Our boy stood up behind his desk, hand extended. 'Mr Condratowicz, nice to meet you.' His accent was straight out of the Falls Road, even though it had been softened by a few evening classes in democracy and public relations. Most of them had education, these days, now politics was the way ahead.

  They shook and Dom introduced me as his producer. We shook too. His brain was already whirring. He knew he'd seen me before; he just didn't know where. He would soon enough. You never forget the faces round you when you think you're going to die.

  Dom turned on the small-talk. 'Sorry we're a bit bruised. We were involved in a car crash last week.'

  McNaughten lifted his left hand to show off his missing pinkie. 'That's how I got this.'

  I smiled at him and he did a double-take. He looked just like his picture on the Sinn Fein website. He was dressed straight out of Matalan, with a polyester tie and just enough nylon in the mix of his grey suit for it to shine under the fluorescent light. Dress Sense 101 was obviously one of next term's modules.

  He overplayed a desk-tidying routine, then took another glance at me. 'We're proposing new traffic-calming measures at the next meeting. Something really has to be-' He frowned. 'Do I know you?'

  I took a step forward. 'Last time we met, you were in the boot of my car on the way up to Castlereagh for the night. Then I read you your horoscope. You came back minus that finger, remember? Car crash, my arse.' I threw the paper across the desk. 'You might be Mr All-green-and-biofuelled-up now, mate, but the old ways are still snapping at your heels, aren't they? I see white-and-above-board Sinn Fein's Seamus Quinn was sent a bullet in the post. What did he do to deserve that? Propose a congestion charge?'

  He sat back in his chair, not fazed, not worried, just watching me. 'I'm mistaken. I do not know who you are, and I do not understand what you are talking about. Have you come to threaten me? I would like you to leave.'

  I leant forward, my eyes locked on his. 'Connor, mate, I don't give a shit what you'd like. Your only job right now is to listen. This man here, his son is in the shit. You're going to help me get him out of it.'

  It was his turn to lean forward. He was about to deliver his enraged-politician bit and fuck us off. He took a deep breath and aimed his right index finger at me.

  'Stop.' I stared him out. 'I don't have time to fuck about, so do as you're told or I'll cut that one off as well.'

  He looked at his watch and sighed impatiently, trying to make it seem like he was going to give us five minutes of his precious time. But it was a bluff. I knew that, deep down inside, he was flapping.

  I pointed at Dom. 'His son has been taken hostage. We know who's done it, but we don't know where the boy is. You're going to help us – not because I'm going to make you but because when you've heard what I have to say you're going to want to.'

  I sat back, letting things calm down a little now I had his full attention. 'This drugs turf war – wouldn't have happened in your day, would it? Not on your own fucking doorstep. But times have changed. The boys that are stepping on everyone's toes are not only Brits but one of them is working for the intelligence service. And he's using UDA dickheads as enforcers.'

  I gave it time to sink in. 'You're interested now, aren't you?' I could see it in his eyes
. 'You give me what I want, and I'll get rid of them for you. I don't give a shit about who sells what to who – all I want is my friend's boy back.'

  I waited for questions but he was too clever for that. He wasn't going to incriminate himself in any way. We might be recording.

  'You get me weapons,' I said. 'I want two assault rifles and at least three mags each.'

  I reached for his pad of pink Post-its and a pen, then wrote down my new mobile number. 'You sort it, get your people to call me, and I'll collect. Once I'm done, you can have the fucking things back – along with a body or two that can still talk. If you try to fuck me over, make sure you do a good job, because if you don't I'll come back for you.'

  He didn't touch the Post-it, or even look at it. He didn't move a muscle. His voice became very clear and very slow, just in case we did have wires. 'I have no connection with anyone involved in drugs, or the now disbanded IRA. I am a councillor of a political party.'

  I started walking to the door and Dom followed.

  'I don't know any members of the old IRA and I don't know any drug-dealers.'

  He was still issuing denials as we closed the door behind us.

  Dom said nothing until we'd got out on to the street. 'Tell me about the finger.'

  'Let's get a cab to the centre and lose our big green Seat. Then I'll explain while we wait for a call.'

  We found our way to a taxi rank.

  'By the way,' I said, 'I'm assuming you did national service?'

  100

  We paid off the cab in O'Connell Street; it was the main drag and there were plenty of shops to get lost in. The Seat was still behind us. It had followed us all the way in. At least the boys in the bomber jackets had learnt not to pass us when we stopped, so we didn't get any more eye-to-eye.

  We walked down a little lane and straight into a coffee shop. I checked left as Mr Green jumped out and Mr Black drove off to try to find a parking space. Sundance and Trainers had been brain surgeons compared to these two.