The Bombmaker

by Stephen Leather

  Quinn's hands fastened around O'Keefe's wrist, but he was powerless against the bigger man's grip.

  'Are you thinking?'

  Quinn tried to nod but could barely move his head. O'Keefe let go of Quinn's throat and the younger man gasped for breath.

  'I'm sorry. For fuck's sake, I'm sorry.'

  O'Keefe let Quinn's hair slip through his fingers. 'It's coming back to you now, is it?'

  Quinn nodded.

  O'Keefe folded his arms and settled back in the passenger seat. 'You've got to be on your toes every second of every minute. You can't let your guard down once, because if you do it can be the death of you. This isn't a game. We get caught and they'll throw away the key.'

  Quinn put the van into gear and pulled away from the kerb. His hands were shaking on the steering wheel.

  They drove to London, and cut across the city towards the financial district. Quinn brought the van to a halt and nodded at the line of half a dozen cars waiting to drive into the City of London. A uniformed policeman waved through the car at the front while his colleague went to speak to the driver of the second.

  'Bloody joke, isn't it?' said Quinn. 'Ring of steel, my arse. What the fuck do they expect to find, huh?'

  They're not the ones to worry about,' said O'Keefe. He jerked his chin to the side. 'It's the eye in the sky that does the damage.'

  Quinn twisted around in his seat and looked in the direction that O'Keefe had indicated. High up on the office building was a wall-mounted camera pointing at the checkpoint. 'Video, yeah?' he said.

  'Not just a video,' said O'Keefe. 'The camera picks out the registration number and runs it through the police computer. It's all done automatically – takes seven seconds to get a read-out on the vehicle. If it's stolen or used by anyone on the Special Branch watch list, there'd be more armed police around us than fleas on a dog.'

  They edged towards the front of the queue of cars. O'Keefe reached under his seat and pulled out a metal clipboard. The uniformed policeman walked up to the window and O'Keefe wound down the window.

  'Morning, sir,' said the policeman. 'Can you tell me where you're going?'

  O'Keefe showed him the clipboard. There was an order form clipped to it with the landscape gardening company's letterhead on the top. 'Cathay Tower,' he said. 'We're doing a rooftop garden. Trees, bushes, the works.'

  The policeman stepped back and waved them on, his eyes already on the next vehicle.

  'Have a good one,' said O'Keefe as Quinn accelerated away. It was the third time they'd been into the City in the van that week, and as anticipated there hadn't been any problems. It was registered and insured in the name of the landscaping company, taxed and MoT'd and totally legitimate. Quinn's driving licence was clean, though the name and address weren't his.

  The main entrance to Cathay Tower was in Queen Anne Street, close to Bank Tube station, but the entrance to the carpark was at the rear, down a narrow side street. O'Keefe showed his pass to the elderly security guard. Like the van's paperwork, it was genuine. The office had been rented some three months earlier, and included in the lease were three parking spaces. They were on the second level of the subterranean carpark, and Quinn drove down and parked.

  The service lift was some fifty feet away, so O'Keefe went over to press the button while Quinn opened the rear doors of the van and began unloading the sacks of fertiliser on to the trolley they'd brought with them. Each bag weighed fifty kilos, and Quinn could get six on the trolley. As he put the last one on, the lift arrived and O'Keefe held the door open while Quinn trundled the trolley over.

  They went up to the ninth floor. The lift doors opened on to a corridor which led to the main reception area where the passenger lifts were. A door led off the reception area to the lavatories; a corridor led to the main open-plan office area which ran the full length of the building. The entire floor was rented in the name of an overseas stockbroking firm, paid for through a Cayman Islands bank account.

  O'Keefe walked into the main office area, which had previously been a dealing room for a major American bank, and went inside. Quinn followed with the trolley. White vertical blinds covered the ceiling-to-floor windows. The NatWest Tower was almost directly opposite. It would be all too easy for one of the thousands of office workers to look in and see what they were doing. The blinds would have to remain closed all the time they were there.

  There were already eighteen sacks of fertiliser piled up in one corner. The two men unloaded the trolley, adding the sacks to the pile. O'Keefe waved at a smoke detector in the middle of the ceiling. A red light blinked in the centre of the white plastic disc.

  'You think she's watching?' asked Quinn.

  'Wouldn't put it past her,' said O'Keefe.

  Quinn nodded at the sacks of fertiliser. 'Weird, isn't it?' he said, wiping his hands on his overalls. 'Gardeners all over the country spread this over their lawns, and we're gonna blow a building to kingdom come with it.'

  The two men walked over to the window.

  'What's weird about that?' asked O'Keefe. 'Give us another cigarette, will you?'

  'McCracken said we weren't to smoke here.'

  'Fuck McCracken.' He gestured at the smoke detector. 'Anyway, this is a blind spot.'

  'You sure?'

  'I fitted the thing myself. I'm sure.'

  Quinn shrugged and tossed the pack of Silk Cut over to O'Keefe.

  O'Keefe took a cigarette, lit it, and tossed the pack back.

  Quinn lit a cigarette for himself, and looked over at the sacks of fertiliser. 'I just meant it's weird that like this it's dead safe, right? Regular fertiliser. But add other stuff to it and… you know… bang!'

  'Bang?' O'Keefe pushed the blinds to one side and peered across at the NatWest Tower. Thousands of men and women going about their business. Worrying about careers, office politics, their home life. Worrying about a million things, but totally oblivious to the one thing that was going to change their lives for ever. A four-thousand-pound bomb only a few hundred metres away.

  'Yeah, bang. Ka-boom!'

  O'Keefe let the blinds fall back into place and turned to look at Quinn. 'You think a four-thousand-pound bomb's going to go bang? Or ka-boom? You ever heard a bomb go off? A big one?'

  Quinn shook his head.

  'Well, I can tell you from the horse's mouth, bang doesn't come into it. Bang's what you get when you burst a balloon. Or fire a gun. Bombs don't go bang. Not big ones.'

  'What sort of noise do bombs make, then?'

  O'Keefe narrowed his eyes as he took a long pull on his cigarette. He exhaled a tight plume of smoke. 'Are you taking the piss?' he said.

  – «»-«»-«»The Mercedes swept up the driveway and parked in front of the two-storey house. Two men in dark suits walked up to the car, nodded when they saw who was inside, then walked back to their post by the front door. Deng sat where he was until his bodyguard had climbed out of the car and opened the door for him. He stood for a moment to admire the view of Hong Kong harbour far below him. Some of the most expensive real estate in the world towered over the narrow strip of water between the island and the mainland of Kowloon. Deng turned back to the house. It had once been the home of one of the richest taipans in Hong Kong, a man whose family had made their fortune running opium into China and who had left the day before the colony was handed back to its rightful masters, vowing never to return. Now it was the property of the People's Liberation Army.

  Deng climbed the stairs to the verandah and walked across it and into the house, his Bally shoes squeaking across the polished oak floors. The general was in the taipan's study, the walls still bedecked with the books he'd left behind, bought by the yard and never read. A wooden-bladed fan spun silently above the general's head as he stared out of a picture window that gave him an unobstructed view of Kowloon. In Cantonese, Kowloon was Nine Dragons, signifying the hills that surrounded the peninsula. In fact there were only eight hills – the ninth dragon represented a warlord who'd visited the area hundreds of
years earlier. 'What is this place called?' he'd asked.

  'Nine dragons,' he was told.

  The warlord counted the hills. 'But there are only eight,' he said.

  'Until you arrived, sire,' he was told. 'Now there are nine dragons.'

  Flattery could be a dangerous thing, Deng knew. It was flattery that had got him into his present predicament. He'd believed everything he'd been told, and now he stood to lose millions of dollars. And more. His life was on the line. His life and the life of his family.

  Behind the general's wheelchair stood a Chinese nurse in a starched white uniform, her hair hanging down to the middle of her back like a black veil. Deng walked to stand in front of the general. The old man was pressing an oxygen mask up against his face with one hand. He waved his free hand, indicating that Deng should sit down on a leather winged chair at the side of the window.

  The general wheezed heavily, and the nurse stepped forward and adjusted the valve on the oxygen cylinder. The old man gulped several times, and then his breathing steadied. 'I have to go to London soon,' he croaked. 'My doctor

  'I understand,' said Deng.

  'The air here. It's not good at this time of year.'

  Deng nodded. 'It would not be a good idea for you to be in London when…' He left the sentence unfinished.

  The general looked at him with watery eyes. 'How long?'

  'A week. Seven days.'

  'And the money?'

  Deng pushed his spectacles up his nose. 'We would anticipate receiving payment a month after the… incident.'

  The general began to cough, then he cleared his throat noisily. He took the plastic mask away from his face, leaned to the side and spat noisily into a brass tureen at the side of his chair. Greenish phlegm dribbled down his trembling chin and the nurse rushed forward to dab it with a tissue. Deng averted his eyes, embarrassed by the man's infirmity.

  'Will he wait?' wheezed the general eventually.

  'I assume so,' said Deng. 'It is the only chance he has of getting his money back. It is the only chance any of us has.'

  Deng heard footsteps behind him. A man in a dark suit, not one of the guards at the front of the house, walked across the study and emptied a sack in front of the general. Deng grimaced as a dead dog flopped out on to the floor. A spaniel, the fur on its chest matted with blood. 'My daughter's dog,' said the general.

  'A warning,' said Deng.

  'My daughter's dog,' repeated the old man. He gestured with his chin at the dead animal, and the bodyguard picked it up by one of its back legs and put it back in the sack. 'He is an evil man, that Michael Wong.'

  Deng nodded.

  'We should never have done business with him,' said the general. He began to cough again and his chest shuddered. The nurse bent over him but the general waved her away impatiently.

  Deng didn't react to the criticism. It had been his idea to bring in Wong as an investor, but what was done was done. It was too late for regrets – the only way out of their predicament was to get Wong's money back. And for that they needed Egan, the American. Only he could save their lives. Their lives and the lives of their families. If they failed, Michael Wong's vengeance would carry far and wide. The general's daughter's dog was just a sign of how far the ripples would spread.

  – «»-«»-«»McCracken's mobile rang. It was Egan. 'Everything okay?' he asked.

  McCracken walked to the far end of the factory area, away from where Andrea was sitting. 'No problems,' she said.

  'I'm five minutes away. Make sure she's out of the way, will you?' The line went dead. Like all of Egan's phone calls it was short, to the point, and unidentifiable. He never used names and always spoke in the vaguest terms possible.

  McCracken went back over to Andrea. 'Right, you can stay in the office until the boys get back,' she said. 'Take a coffee with you if you want. And there's doughnuts over there.'

  'I'm not hungry.'

  'Suit yourself.'

  Andrea stood up. 'Why are you doing this?'

  McCracken said nothing. She pointed to the offices. 'Keep the door closed until I come and get you.'

  Andrea did as she was told. McCracken took off her ski mask and rubbed her face. She made herself a cup of coffee, and as she sipped it she heard Egan's car pull up outside. He let himself in and nodded at her. 'Where is she?'

  McCracken jerked a thumb at the offices. 'We've got her well trained,' she said. 'You want a coffee?'

  Egan shook his head. He was wearing a black leather jacket over a grey crew-neck pullover and blue jeans and carrying his mobile phone in one hand and his car keys in the other. He looked like a used-car salesman on his day off, a short, well-built man with receding fair hair, cut short, almost army-style. McCracken studied him as he walked over to the table and picked up her notepad. One word came to mind when she thought of the man who was paying her wages. Bland. Pale blue eyes, fair hair, medium height, a squarish face with an average nose, no distinguishing features. If she closed her eyes, she could barely picture his face. Egan studied the list, nodding thoughtfully.

  'It's okay?' McCracken asked, going over to join him.

  'It's fine. Perfect.'

  McCracken pulled off the rubber band that she used to hold her hair back when she had the ski mask on and shook it free. 'If you know what the ingredients are, why do we need her?' she asked.

  Egan tapped the side of his nose with a forefinger. 'Need to know, Lydia, love. How are Quinn and O'Keefe getting on?' Egan's accent was mid-Atlantic. At times it sounded West Coast American, but generally his voice was as unremarkable as his physical appearance.

  McCracken tilted her head to the side. 'O'Keefe's fine. Very professional. But Quinn…'

  Egan put down the notepad and narrowed his eyes. 'What?'

  McCracken winced under his gaze. She didn't want to badmouth Quinn, but he was the weakest member of the team and she wasn't sure how reliable he'd be under pressure. 'He's a bit… unfocused. Considering what we're expected to do. The next phase and all.'

  'It's not too late to replace him, Lydia.' His pale blue eyes watched to see how she'd react.

  McCracken knew what he meant by replaced. 'I don't know,' she said.

  Egan walked up close to her and looked into her eyes. It's got to be your call,' he said. 'Your responsibility. I can't be here all the time.'

  'I know. It's just I haven't worked with guys like him before.'

  'He's not a terrorist. He's a career criminal. They have different motivations. Different behavioural patterns.'

  'He's undisciplined.'

  'That's a function of his background, Lydia. You were trained by the best, mentally and physically. So far as the Provisional IRA are concerned, it's just as important that their volunteers are politically educated as it is that you can fire a gun or place a bomb. Quinn's all action and reaction. A couple of years back he was involved in a bank robbery. Sawn-off shotguns, stun guns, a team of six. They were unlucky and a passing armed response vehicle piled in. Quinn was the only one to get away. Shot two cops. Drove off in their car, cool as a cucumber. Plus he's good with vehicles.' He smiled reassuringly. 'What I'm saying is that if anything does go wrong, Quinn's a good man to have in your corner. But as I said, it's your call. Has to be.'

  McCracken nodded. 'He'll be okay. Besides, we're going to need everyone to do the mixing.' She gestured at the notepad. 'According to what the Hayes woman says, there's a hell of a lot of work involved.'

  'She's co-operating fully?'

  'Carrot and stick,' said McCracken. 'She thinks she's going to see her daughter if she helps us. And that we'll kill her if she doesn't. She keeps asking if she can call her husband. What do you think?'

  'Only if it's the only way you can get her to co-operate. The husband hasn't gone to the cops, so the phones are clean. But if you do allow it, keep it short and watch what she says.' Egan jangled his keys. 'Right. I'll leave you to it. I've got to get back to Ireland.' He reached into his jacket pocket and took out an envelope. He hande
d it to McCracken. 'Be careful with her,' he said, nodding at the offices. 'She's not to be trusted, not for a minute.'

  – «»-«»-«»Katie crept up the stairs and put her ear to the door. She couldn't hear anything. 'Hello!' she shouted. 'I have to use the bathroom!' There was no answer. 'It's an emergency!' she shouted at the top of her voice. Still no answer. Katie tried the door handle. It twisted but the door wouldn't move. She didn't think it was locked because if it was locked then the handle wouldn't move. That meant it was only the bolts that kept her in. Katie pushed and pulled the handle, wondering if it would be possible to shake the bolts loose, but the door hardly moved.

  Katie kicked the door, but that didn't seem to move it much – it just hurt her foot. She ran her fingers around the edge of the door. There was a gap between it and the frame where the hinges were, and she pressed her eye to it. If she moved her head to the side she could just see the kitchen door at the end of the hallway. If she pushed her head to the other side all she could see was the wall opposite.

  She went back down the stairs, sat on the bed and held Garfield in her arms. Cats were always getting out of places, but they were small and could squeeze through tiny holes. There were no holes that Katie could squeeze through. She sat and frowned, her chin resting on Garfield's head. She had to find another way out.

  – «»-«»-«»Andy was sitting on the office floor when she heard her name being called. She got to her feet and walked through to the factory area where Green-eyes was standing at the rear of the blue Transit van, still dressed in the overalls and ski mask she'd had on the previous day. There were smaller vans parked next to the Transit. One was grey and one was black, but they both had the name of the same courier firm stencilled on the side.