'I expect you're dying to see how I got to you?'
I found myself looking at close-ups of Liam Duff, bloodied, beaten, drilled full of holes. Through broken teeth, he mumbled that he had seen a face on TV. He recognized it as one he had seen on the Bahiti all those years ago. And that, he said, was when he realized that he had a story to sell.
It would only have taken her a couple of phone calls to discover the channel that first showed the footage – and that the face had been working for them in Basra.
The screen cut to a shot of Dom's TV station in Dublin. The picture was a little shaky to begin with; then it steadied. The microphone picked up the noise of the wind and the traffic. She'd been in a parked car – I could just make out a wing mirror on the edge of the frame. A group of people emerged from the building. One of them was Dom. It wasn't a presentation day; he was in jeans.
She would have put the building under surveillance and waited for Dom to appear. She had the perfect cover; if anyone challenged her, she'd have produced her ID and uttered the magic words Richard Isham. There wasn't a member of the security forces in Northern Ireland at the moment who would have touched her.
The picture jumped. I was now staring at the glazed front door of Dom's apartment block in Wapping. It had been shot on full zoom. Passers-by strolled between the camera and the building. A second or two later, the door opened and I stepped onto the pavement with Ruby's Christmas present and put it into the boot of the Merc.
And then . . .
There we were on the ferry. Ruby was talking into the camera, telling this woman what she was looking forward to about Ireland: green fields, horses, leprechauns, spending Christmas with Tallulah and Nick . . . it was all there.
She'd lowered the camera. What a darling little girl, she was saying. They were having such fun; didn't mean to frighten her, blah-de-blah-de-blah. But there, there . . . and I could imagine her reaching out to touch the little girl's head . . .
One of her mates from the World of Black Leather must have slipped the tracker under the Merc's chassis while it was parked outside the apartment block. It had led her to the cottage, where they'd placed the device – with a big enough hint in Lesser's Chinese pigtails to let me know this was no coincidence.
I looked up at her. 'The battery was flat.'
'I didn't actually want you dead, did I? I wanted you to introduce me to the Colonel.'
'The phone call about Leptis?'
'Somebody from the office. A Brit with the right kind of voice.'
'But Leptis?'
'Information provided by our mutual friend in Tripoli. I never dreamed we would all meet here. For that, I applaud your ingenuity and tenacity. I really thought we'd get you in Norfolk, then in Italy.
'When you surfaced in Tripoli, our mutual friend was kind enough to put in a call to let me know you were on the road. In exchange, he was going to receive a bonus on this particular shipment, but I gather you've saved me from having to pay out on that one.'
I wasn't sure how she'd picked us up in Italy – and I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of telling me – but with passport-tracking technology it looked like anything was possible. Maybe Brendan's computer whiz-kid was on her payroll, too. He could have hacked into government databases, clocked us out of Gatwick and into Genoa, then hacked into credit-card databases and watched us hire a car. Then another government database in Italy, and bingo – our number plate exiting at Rapallo. After that, she'd have monitored both the card and number-plate recognition databases, and have eyes on the Rapallo turn-off. If the Firm could do it, then so could she.
I knew what was coming next. An elderly man lay slumped on a pavement, his face beaten to a pulp. I could only tell who he was by the packet of HobNobs scattered on the tarmac beside him.
But it didn't end there.
She shoved the screen right up close to my face. I was staring at the interior of something roomy and metallic – a shipping container, maybe.
The camera followed the point of a torch beam as it swept along the floor. The picture was fuzzy, because there wasn't much to focus on – until it latched on to a foot and a pair of bare legs. A woman's legs. Then, as it tracked upwards, the two legs became four. The second pair belonged to a child.
Tallulah and Ruby were huddled together, clinging to each other for warmth and comfort.
110
The camera panned to the right of them until I could see Dom holding Siobhan's face into his chest for protection.
Mairead froze the frame and placed the camcorder on a table beside her. She squatted down in front of Lynn. 'In a minute, Colonel, Stone is going to kill you, and then—' she held up a length of det cord, a battery, the whole enchilada – 'I'm going to kill Stone.'
She turned to me. 'For all the pain and suffering you have caused me and my fellow countrymen – for the distress that you caused my mother – I want you to know that after I've dealt with you, I'm going to kill them.' She nodded at the camcorder.
She waited for a reply, but she wasn't going to get one from me. How the fuck would that help?
'Has little Ruby ever tried cocaine? I bet her mother has. She looks the type.' She grinned. 'There was a couple I supplied once . . . they had a crack-addicted baby. She smiled a lot as she grew up, but only ever talked gibberish.' She rolled her eyes back in her head in case I hadn't got the message.
I didn't even flicker.
She stood up, pissed off that I hadn't given her the reaction she was hoping for. She called out for her boys to join her and a second later I was reunited with a couple of faces I'd last seen in Norfolk.
She turned, picked up the camcorder and walked out of the room.
111
Box-cutter's head had been shaved so the gashes down the back of it could be glued back together. The back of his neck was covered with dressings.
His feet, however, were undamaged. A boot flew into my stomach. I buckled to absorb it but it still drove all the air from my body. He grabbed my feet and started hauling me towards the door. I tried to keep my head off the floor as my chest slid across the marble. All that was left where Lynn had been lying was a small pool of blood-streaked saliva.
Light now flooded the area around the entrance to the house; Mairead was obviously still in Spielberg mode.
Box-cutter brought out a blade and cut me loose then forced me onto my knees by the threshold. Lynn was getting the same treatment a couple of steps below me. His face was no more than a few inches from mine. He looked into my eyes. 'Nick, for God's sake don't tell her . . .'
Box-cutter gave him a heavy backhander across the cheek.
I didn't know what he was on about but I'd go with it. This wasn't over yet: neither of us was dead.
Mairead sneered from behind the camcorder. 'You still think you're in with a chance, don't you?'