Screen Savers ob-4

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Dawn,’ I announced, ‘you haven’t been introduced. This is Neville Ardley, our CO.’

  ‘Very pleased to see you safe and well, ma’am,’ the young man said. ‘These guys did well,’ he added. ‘The ideal search and rescue mission is the one which ends with no shots fired and the captive recovered safely. Ours rarely do, of course. This one was no exception, but no damage done.

  ‘Come on; my men will stay on station here, to wait for the police. Let’s get all of you back on shore and into a change of clothes, then we’ll fly you back to Surrey. You’d better get all the rest you can, for once the press get hold of this story, we’re all going to be busy.’

  ‘No press,’ I snapped, so quickly that I surprised myself. ‘This thing’s not over. Stephen Donn’s still out there.’

  ‘Sure,’ Miles drawled; he sounded mentally and physically exhausted. ‘But where? He could be anywhere. The important thing is that we’ve got Dawn back and that we’ve beaten the deadline for sending the access code word.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ I countered. ‘What if he had another means of activating the account? Let’s get off this junkyard and find out. A fiver says I’m right; and if I am, I’m not going back to Surrey. I’m staying in Holland for a while.’

  Chapter 54

  The marines’ chopper landed at the Rotterdam police barracks from which the operation had begun four long hours earlier. As soon as he was reunited with his cellphone, Miles called his accountant and had him check with Lugano.

  The return call came in less that five minutes. He stared at me as it came to an end, then stripped a fiver from a roll of cash in his pocket and handed it over. ‘The money’s been moved,’ he said. ‘How the hell did you know?’

  ‘I just guessed. Do you know where it’s gone?’

  ‘The Swiss won’t say; nor will they say how the account was activated. It would take a year and a court order to find out.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I assured him. ‘I’ll get it back for you.’

  ‘Oz, I’m not worried. I’ve got Dawn back, and like the soldier boy said earlier, once this story breaks, it’ll be worth fifty million in extra box office takings. You know what? I’m going to change the end again, and have you and me go in underwater, like we did today only without the marines. Forget it; let the bastard go.’

  I think I looked at him as if he was daft. ‘No way, Jo-fucking-se! If this was a bit personal before, it’s really personal now.’

  ‘Okay,’ Miles grunted. ‘If you’re dead set on taking it further, I’ll stay on board.’

  ‘Thanks, but you just concentrate on looking after Dawn. You’ve got a movie to finish, then other things to look forward to. I’ll be there for work on Monday morning, but before then I’ve got to tie this business off.’

  Finally, he was persuaded; he and Dawn went off at once to shower and change into fresh clothes for the flight home; but I dressed quickly and collared Ardley once again.

  I found him explaining what had happened to Henke de Witt, the Dutch army captain who had smoothed the way for our operation. At first, I had been surprised that his side had been prepared to allow a British operation in their waters, but I’d realised quickly that if it had gone south, and the fourth most famous person and/or his wife had been killed during the action, they would have been more than happy to let our lot carry the can.

  ‘How good are your relations with your police?’ I asked de Witt.

  ‘Excellent,’ he replied at once. ‘We’re a small country; all our services inter-relate. Why?’

  ‘Because I reckon I can nail the kidnapper. To do that, I need some information. Then I need a lift to Schiphol Airport, and someone to open doors for me when I get there.’

  ‘I can do all that.’

  ‘You really think you can find Donn?’ Ardley asked.

  ‘If he hasn’t shot the craw already — no, even if he has — I’m bloody certain I can find him. You got that news blackout in place?’

  He nodded. ‘Henke and I have got you another twenty-four hours, here and in the UK; that’s the max, though.’

  ‘It’s all I’ll need.’ I reached into my jacket and took out a photograph, then handed it to the Netherlander. ‘That’s our target, Captain, and this is what we need to know. .’

  Chapter 55

  Captain de Witt had changed into plain clothes; he and I stood at the back of the room, listening as the Dutch customs commander addressed her squad. They nodded as she spoke, each of them glancing occasionally at a copy of the snapshot with which old Joe Donn had put the finger on his nephew.

  I hardly understood a word, but I knew what she was telling them. It was mid-afternoon and we had five hours before the flight which we had identified was due to take off; a KLM flight, bound for Jakarta through Singapore.

  We would catch him at the gate, of course, but the sooner the better, so the customs team was being instructed to sweep the huge hub airport. The briefing was over, quickly, and the officers dispersed, leaving de Witt and me nothing to do but wait in that small office. I grew more excited, and more tense, by the minute; I’d have loved to have been out there looking myself, but it was too risky. We had one chance at this and if I was spotted first. .

  ‘Are you always as obsessive as this, Oz?’ the soldier asked me, idly. Like many Dutch people, his English was almost perfect. ‘You could have left the rest to us, you know, and gone back to England with your friends. I am not saying that this will be dangerous, but you never know.’

  ‘I’m obsessive,’ I replied, ‘when someone is obsessed with me. . and when someone thinks they can take the piss out of me and get away with it. As for going home, I have to know all the answers, and I have to hear them for myself.’

  We sat there for almost an hour, almost telling each other our life stories. When I had finished mine, de Witt pursed his lips and nodded. ‘I understand you better now,’ he said. ‘I see why you have to be here.’

  He had barely finished before the door opened and the commander reappeared. ‘We have a sighting,’ she said, in English, for my benefit, ‘in one of the restaurants on the upper level. Come on.’

  We followed the woman out of the room, into the concourse. I know Schiphol Airport well — I travel through it often with the GWA team — so I had a fair idea of where we were headed. The place is so big that even at a brisk pace the walk took us almost ten minutes. Once or twice, air crew buzzed past us on wee motorised scooter things, and I wondered why the customs lady couldn’t have ordered up three of those. But we got there, eventually; to the place which I had guessed, a restaurant not far from the Casino, one level above the crowds.

  A customs officer was waiting by the doorway; he spoke briefly to his boss. ‘Third table from the door,’ she told us, quietly, ‘in the centre of three ranks.’ I knew the layout; I’ve eaten in the place myself. Henke de Witt nodded and stepped inside, with me at his heels.

  We were unnoticed, until we were no more than five yards from the table; then Stephen Donn looked up, directly into my eyes. ‘Hello,’ I said, treating him to my most self-satisfied smile. ‘I’ll bet you thought you’d cracked it. Wrong.’

  He didn’t say a word. Instead he picked up a wicked looking, saw-edged steak knife and grabbed the arm of the woman at the next table. I guessed at the time that he planned to use her as a hostage to make yet another getaway; in fact, that’s still my guess, but I’ll never know for sure, for de Witt turned out to be quicker on the draw than Billy the Kid.

  I know that he snatched it from his shoulder holster, but it happened so fast that it was as if the gun had just materialised in his hand. Before Donn could pull the woman in front of him, a nice round red hole appeared in the middle of his forehead. He stiffened for a second, then toppled backwards, dead as a doornail.

  Across the table, closer to us, Mike Dylan pushed himself to his feet, half-turning towards us. Captain de Witt shot him too, through the side of the chest; he gasped and slumped to the ground. I dropped to my kn
ees beside him as he lay, writhing, on the floor. As he looked up at me, I read a mix of shock and terror in his expression; I couldn’t do anything to comfort or reassure him, for we both knew that he was dying.

  He grabbed my jacket. ‘Clever bastard. . right. . enough,’ he murmured, with a great effort. The words seemed to bubble out of him. Then he stared up, into my eyes. ‘Only personal with him, Oz. Just the money with me. . had to have my own. You understand. .’

  Those were the last words my poor, daft pal Dylan said to me, before he drowned on his own blood.

  Chapter 56

  ‘But why?’ Prim asked me; very unusually for her, she was in tears.

  ‘I told you, love, he said that he wanted money of his own. Mike always had fairly expensive tastes; for a Detective Inspector’s pay at any rate. He wouldn’t live on Susie’s wealth, but I guess being that close to it must have been too much for him. Then, I suppose, there was our dumb luck too. Whatever — envy, greed, call it what you like — it destroyed him.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. Why did the Dutchman shoot him?’

  I had asked Henke de Witt the same thing myself, rather more forcefully. It took three of the customs people to drag me off him, as Dylan lay dead at our feet. ‘Orders, he told me. From our side of the operation; someone, somewhere did not want a Special Branch officer in the dock in a kidnapping and extortion trial.’

  I waited for the tears to stop and for her to regain her self-control. It was just after six next morning and we were in our room at the mansion; I had only just been flown back from Amsterdam after a real grilling by secret policemen from Glasgow and Holland, and by a very sinister guy who said he was from the Home Office, but smelled like MI5 to me. We lay on the bed, both fully clothed. Prim had waited up for me all night. As for me, I should have been tired but I wasn’t; I didn’t feel like sleep at all.

  ‘When did you begin to suspect Mike?’ she asked me, eventually.

  I leaned back on the bed. ‘Not until very late in the day. I knew there was something wrong after a couple of things happened, but I couldn’t even let myself think of the possibility that it might be him.

  ‘The first time I should have twigged was when I saw the photo Joe Donn gave you — the original, I mean. It showed Stephen Donn and wee Myrtle at a Gantry office do, but the boy Dylan was in the picture too, right next to them. Yet Mike never said a word about having met him. I wondered about it for a bit, but not for long; everyone in the photo looked a bit pissed, and I decided that probably he had no idea that was Donn, or even any recollection of the thing.

  ‘Then after that, when I looked at the movie schedule, I should have begun to worry about him, but I didn’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because when Susie’s car was torched, Stephen Donn, or Stu Queen, was up in Aberdeen doing location shots on board the rig. He couldn’t have done it. So who could? At first I didn’t bother about it. I figured that when we found Donn we’d find his partner, whoever it was. As it turned out I was right.

  ‘When I finally did make myself think about it, I realised that Mike had to be the number-one suspect. He probably booby-trapped the car when they arrived: maybe you didn’t notice, but he was a minute or two behind Susie coming up the stairs. Later on, as they were leaving, with Susie pissed and rabbiting by the door, he triggered it, leaving himself a few seconds to step back out, ostensibly to fetch her.

  ‘Remember what happened afterwards?’ I asked Prim, but answered for her. ‘He put the frighteners on the fireman and the Chief Inspector, didn’t he. He took control of the investigation himself. . and then he hushed it up. All along the line, Dylan wasn’t hunting Stephen Donn. . he was protecting him! And the best of it was, all the way along he was taking the piss out of me, winding me up in fun like he always did.

  ‘The only positive thing he ever gave me was the lead to the Neames brothers. So what? They didn’t know anything anyway, so giving them to Liam and me didn’t do any harm, and helped convince us that our man Michael was really on the case. That was arrogant, but it wasn’t risky, not like some of the other things he did.

  ‘Know how I figured where he and Donn were headed?’ She gave the briefest shake of her head.

  ‘When I went to see Mike at Pitt Street that time, he came to the front desk to collect me, all bright and breezy, and he’s whistling a tune — a tune from South Pacific. Bali Hai, it’s called. When, finally, the scales fell away and I knew that he had to be Donn’s inside man, that scene flashed straight back into my mind.

  ‘Pure bloody Dylan that was; I can see him now counting his money and laughing to himself that he’d even told me where he was going, and dumb old Blackstone hadn’t a clue. Ah Mike,’ I called out, hearing the sadness in my own voice, ‘you always had to show off. You always had to try to be just that bit smarter than you really were. And you always had to try to be one up on me.

  ‘I told the Dutch authorities about my guess. They checked yesterday’s flights out of Schiphol, and they came upon two UK males, Mr Michael Auden and Mr Stuart Dee — another poet and another river; another bloody Dylan joke, I’ll bet — booked KLM to Singapore, then routed on to Bali.

  ‘That was their getaway destination all along, and the cheeky sod even dropped me a hint, never thinking I’d work it out.

  ‘He did it the day before yesterday, as well; when I called him to ask him to run those checks into abandoned production platforms — which of course he never did. The mad bugger practically told me, if I’d realised it at the time, to look at Dawn’s e-mail. “If he phones. .” he said, “if he uses the post. .”

  ‘The best of it is that he was right. I really am as dumb as he thought. I actually tipped him off that we had rumbled Donn when I asked him to do that. And later, I even mentioned the activating word for the account — code name “mother-in-law”, I told him. That’s how they were able to release the money without waiting for the deadline or for an e-mail from Miles. Mike knew your Mum’s first name. He met her that time we all had dinner in Glasgow.

  ‘Oh, love, I knew something was wrong, I knew there was someone else involved, but I never suspected it was Mike himself until we hit that platform and found that Donn had gone early. When I spilled the code, Dylan sent him an e-mail, then headed straight for Amsterdam, while his partner flew there in the Jet Ranger. The Dutch found it last night in a car park on the edge of the city.’

  Prim was dry-eyed by now. ‘How did they get together?’ she asked.

  ‘Superintendent Hennessy — that’s Mike’s boss; he was one of the guys who interviewed me in Amsterdam — thinks that he recruited Donn as an informant; around the time of that do at Gantry’s, when the photo was taken. The guy had no record, but he did have shady connections in Scotland and in Holland. Interpol knew about him, apparently; they had him placed as one of the movers of big loads of Pakistani hashish from the Far East through Europe. The dates of those operations coincide with him working offshore in the area.

  ‘Dylan’s private notes in the office refer to him turning Donn. He didn’t have the brains to do that, of course: what really happened was that Donn turned him, completely in the end. When Mike ran for it, he took two genuine passports, made up from blanks that had been stolen from an office in Liverpool, but recovered by the Glasgow police in a raid.

  ‘We’ll never know for sure whose idea it was to kidnap Dawn for ransom, as part of the vendetta against me, but I’m pretty sure that Mike came up with it and Stephen did the planning. Getting himself on to the movie crew was a brilliant idea, and as it turned out, so fucking simple. He does some research, knocks down the Szabo guy, then turns up next morning at his agency looking for movie work, with special experience on oil rigs as an added attraction.’

  I looked sideways at Primavera. ‘He was a really clever piece of work, was Stephen Donn, and like Myrtle Campbell said, vicious with it. I’m pretty certain that if the two of them had got to Bali, and had got to the money, not long afterwards Mike would have been
found dead in a ditch.’

  ‘What about the money?’ Prim asked. ‘Is it gone for good?’

  ‘No. They’ll get it back. Governments are involved now; ours, the Dutch, the Swiss. Even as we speak, bankers are being leant on very hard. Your brother-in-law has some incredibly powerful friends, you know.’

  ‘I know that, my love, just as you’ve had an extremely dangerous enemy. That’s still the big unanswered question, isn’t it. Why the hell did Stephen Donn have such a hatred of you?’

  I smiled at her; the sort of grin that leaves smugness way behind and climbs to the upper reaches of self-satisfaction. ‘Oh, I know that,’ I told her, as casually as I could.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that from the very start; and I’ve had a wild idea about it. Thanks to a check that the MI5 man made for me tonight, I know for sure now. I’m not going to do anything about it though, not yet.

  ‘The real life Oz Blackstone movie isn’t over yet. There’s still one last scene to be shot.’ Primavera gasped with astonishment as I outlined the script.

  Chapter 57

  The next few days were spectacular. The news blackout was lifted at two o’clock that afternoon, at a press conference in Whitehall no less, at which the star performers were Miles, Dawn, me. . and the Prime Minister, determined to milk every last drop of publicity from the story.

  He took the lead in telling the story of the kidnapping, of our turning to Detective Inspector Michael Dylan, a rogue Scottish policeman, only to be betrayed by him, of Miles turning in desperation to his Friend in a High Place, and of our insistence on being involved in the rescue mission ourselves.

  He ended with an account of the confrontation in Amsterdam Airport, of the two fugitives’ attempt to use human shields to escape, and of their being shot by a Dutch Special Forces officer.

  A few of the details were a bit fudged up; I didn’t like Mike’s name being blackened any further, but I knew that the PM could hardly tell the world that he’d been executed, on his orders, to save embarrassment. I was pleased though, that no mention was made of earlier events.