Muldoon checked through his side window. The Escort was parked just round the corner, its lights doused.
‘Let’s go,’ he said hoarsely.
They climbed out and crossed the pavement to the door. As they did so Muldoon stepped unexpectedly in a dog turd and cursed silently.
‘C’mon,’ Dougan urged.
They used their bodies to shield the crowbar from view as Muldoon jammed the metal tip in the rotten wood by the lock, wrenching it open.
Somewhere a woman shouted, screamed. A man laughed, sounding drunk. An empty lager can clattered in the gutter, rolling in the light breeze. The expectant silence settled again.
They returned to the van, Muldoon taking out the sign and placing it beneath the boarded-up window. It was an elaborate precaution, seeming unnecessary-unless something really did go wrong. Then the two of them lowered the first drum onto the two-wheeled porter’s trolley and rolled it into the shop.
Depositing the load in the storeroom behind the smashed glass of the counter, Muldoon held a torch while Dougan unscrewed the top cap and inserted his forefinger in the loop attached to the dowel pin.
He looked across at Muldoon, seeing the sweat on his skin and the fear in his eyes. ‘When I pull this, Leo, the whole thing becomes live. The trembler’s on a hair-trigger — it needs only the slightest vibration. So don’t fall over anything on your way out.’
Suddenly Muldoon looked more gawky and awkward than ever. There was no humour in the grinning boyish face. ‘Sure I’ll be like a shadow, Hughie.’
They checked their watches. One fifteen exactly. The timer set to run for two hours twenty-five minutes.
Dougan nodded, eased out the dowel pin and delicately rescrewed the cap. Carefully Muldoon shone his torch beam so that they could both retrace*their footsteps to the shop.
‘Don’t slam the door,’ Dougan reminded.
His hand trembling slightly, Muldoon eased it closed. Suddenly both men realised that they’d hardly breathed for the last two minutes.
Then they were gone, driving away into the night, the girls still following closely in the Escort. The preplanned route took them back to the East India Dock Road, past the Isle of Dogs where they turned off for the Blackwall Tunnel which would take them under the Thames to Greenwich.
Clearing the far side of the river, Muldoon left the motorway at Shooters Hill Road, turning west to run parallel with the Thames and past the Marquis of Granby pub before driving into the Deptford back streets.
They drew up outside a parade of shops in a council estate, the Escort pulling in some fifty metres behind. This time the target was a shop that had obviously served as an outlet for Oxfam; now it was empty, its windows lime-washed white. Dougan and Muldoon followed an identical procedure to the first, returning to the Renault at precisely two o’clock.
Half-a-mile down the road they stopped beside a row of three telephone kiosks and Muldoon climbed out. As the support team’s reconnaissance report had forecast, only the Phonecard machine had not been vandalised. He dialled the X number and waited. After four rings it was answered.
McGirl identified himself. ‘Michael Collins.’
‘Griffith here,’ Muldoon replied. The names of two of the old IRA’s founders in 1920. ‘Two down and one to go. On schedule.’
When Muldoon hung up, McGirl replaced his own receiver at the call box in Watford, north London. He had memorised the number he was about to dial.
A disinterested male voice answered. ‘Associated Newspapers.’
McGirl said: ‘Casey Mullins — Standard.”
‘I’ll try it,’ the operator said. He sounded doubtful.
It rang several times. Then: ‘News desk.’ Male.
‘I want to speak to Casey Mullins,’ McGirl repeated.
‘Sorry, mate, this is news. Casey’s on features. Won’t be in till ten — or seven if she’s on zombie shift.’
Shit, shit, shit! McGirl cursed silently. He’d thought because the first editions hit the streets by eleven, they’d all work through the night. He should have checked with the support team, they’d have known. So stupid, to have assumed… Too late now.
‘Hello, are you still there?’
McGirl said: ‘It’s urgent. Have you got her home number?’
The man’s tone changed; maybe, McGirl thought, he’d picked up the trace of Irish in his accent, putting the deputy night editor on his guard. ‘Sorry, old son, we don’t give out home numbers of staff.’
‘I said this is urgent, a matter of life and death.’
There was a sigh that could have been irritation. ‘If it’s really that serious, I could try her number and get her to call you back. But it is after two.’
McGirl thought fast. He’d be taking a risk, a terrible risk. But then no one yet knew who he was or why he was phoning. He forced the anger from his voice, adopting a lighter tone and fighting to hide his accent. ‘I would be most grateful.’ He gave the number.
‘A call box?’
‘Afraid so.’ Then added quickly: ‘My car’s broken down in the middle of nowhere. I’ll wait, but please make it quick.’
‘Of course. Who shall I say is calling?’
McGirl smiled to himself. ‘Just say a friend of Tom Harrison.’
It took the deputy night editor five minutes to find Casey’s new number, the sudden strident ring of the bedside telephone jolting her awake.
Groggily she reached for the handset, mumbling her new number and getting it wrong, brushing the hair from her eyes as she listened, scarcely comprehending, to the voice at the other end.
‘God, Mac, I thought it was World War Three,’ she mumbled, fishing for the pen and pad she’d knocked from the table. ‘Call what number?’ She jotted it down. ‘Who’d you say it was?’
Casey frowned as she listened to the answer, now sitting up clutching the duvet to her naked chest. ‘That’s all right, Mac, you didn’t interrupt anything. I was only in bed with Richard Gere when you woke me.’ Slowly, thoughtfully, she hung up.
‘Who was it? What’s wrong?’
She turned to Harrison; he was leaning on one elbow, watching her closely. ‘It was Mac on the news desk. A friend of yours rang. Wants me to call him back at a public call box. Says it’s very urgent. Didn’t give a name.’
DonTrenchard. That was Harrison’s immediate thought. Only Trenchard was cavalier enough to phone at such an hour, only Trenchard knew where he could be found. ‘The bastard. I’ll call him in the morning.’
Casey was perplexed. ‘Not you, Tom. This caller wants me to ‘call, not you. Just said he was a friend.’
‘Only Don knows I might be here.’
‘Don doesn’t have an Irish accent.’ She had begun dialling.
‘What?’
She covered the mouthpiece. ‘Mac said he thought the caller was Irish.’
Suddenly Harrison was wide awake, uncertainty creeping like the fingers of a cold hand behind his neck.
The number stopped ringing as someone picked up the phone. ‘Hello?’ she said.
‘Casey Mullins?’ a voice asked. ‘Listen and listen good, there’ll be no second chance. This is AID AN. A bomb is due to go off in approximately fifty minutes in Poplar, East London.’ He gave the address, crisply and precisely, not hurrying. ‘And a friendly warning — don’t approach the device. Pass that on to your Tick Tock Man.’ He slammed down the telephone.
Casey’s mouth dropped open and closed again, speechless, staring at the receiver in her hand as though it were contaminated. Her eyes moved across to Harrison, trying to find the words.
He reached over, snatching it from her. There was nothing but the dead tone.
She cleared her throat, ‘He’s gone.’
‘Who?’ Harrison demanded.
Her mouth was dry, arid as a desert. ‘It was a bomb threat. Somewhere in Poplar.’
Harrison shook his head, trying to clear his mind. ‘This has to be someone’s idea of a joke.’
‘I don’t think so, Tom.’ He could see now that her face was pale with shock, the fear in her eyes all too real. ‘It was the AID AN codeword.’
That was it. No one but no one would make a joke about that, not even Trenchard. He took the note pad from her. ‘I’ll call the Section on my mobile. You ring AT Branch and give them that call-box number.’
‘What’s their direct line?’
‘I don’t know.’
Shit, she’d have to go through 999.
Harrison took the mobile from his jacket hanging on the chair and punched a single number. He recognised Midge Midgely’s noncommittal voice.
‘Listen, Midge, it’s Tom here. AIDAN’s just been on the blower. There’s a warning for Poplar.’
The Yorkshireman seemed to be waking from a dream. ‘Tom? You pulling my plonker? AID AN phoned you?’
‘It came through Casey on the Standard,’ he explained vaguely. ‘We’re down to about forty-five minutes.’
Midgely realised it was no wheeze — until Harrison read over the address. ‘Patel & Son, Tom? What the hell is this? A grocer’s shop in Poplar.’
Harrison felt the ice running through his veins. ‘I’ll tell you exactly what it is, Midge, it’s a come-on. Just make sure my boys get tasked in on the job.’
‘I see.’ He sounded dubious. ‘I’ll check it out with Al.’
‘No time,’ Harrison objected.
Midge sounded like he could be chuckling. ‘No trouble, he’s kipping in the duty office.’
Of course. Divorced, Pritchard had no home to go to. No doubt he.couldn’t sleep either.
Harrison said: ‘Okay, Midge, I’m going straight there. You can get me on the mobile.’ ‘
As he replaced the telephone in his jacket pocket, he turned to find that Casey had finished her call and was already out of bed, tugging up tracksuit trousers over her naked body. ‘Don’t even think it, Tom,’ she warned. ‘That call was to my paper, so it’s my story. We can travel together or else I race you across London.’
His scowl melted into a reluctant half-smile. ‘And I can guess who’d get there first.’
By the time they’d reached Casey’s parked Mini Cooper, the Section’s Range-Rovers were screaming out of Lambeth Road, the lumbering Tactica in hot pursuit.