Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (42 page)

Time to go. He hopped over the prisoner to get back across to the second coil of flex, accidentally kicking the polythene sack as he landed. Something inside it shifted. Rolled.

It had felt solid yet soft, and Parlabane's stomach briefly considered (but declined) one more opportunity to eject his dinner as he realised it was the second time in half an hour that he'd kicked someone in the head. Despite the movement inside it, the sack's neck remained mercifully folded over. He already knew what was in there; there was no need to confirm. Except that in the limited, low torchlight, it looked like there were four lumps, and as far as he was aware, they were only missing three: the chef, the waitress and the twat. He put his hand down and patted the plastic. It was no trick of the light: there was a fourth head in that bag, and he now had no choice but to open it.

Still suffering the cumulative effects of his intestine squeezing descent, Parlabane felt he was seriously pushing his ick tolerance levels. He thus opted to spare himself the added tactile displeasure of lifting the heads out individually, instead taking the machete and ripping the sack apart. Three of them looked towards him with open eyes and lolling tongues, looks of permanent, horrified surprise cast on their features. He recognised two as the waitress Charlotte and poor, hapless Grieg. The third was unfamiliar, but it occurred to him then that he wasn't sure he'd seen Mathieson to know what he looked like. Perhaps the fourth would be similarly unidentifiable. He wasn't granted any such mystery, any more than he was spared having to lay hands upon a decapitated napper. Parlabane turned the last head around and found himself staring into a face that told him what had for hours been 256

staring into his own.

The face was that of Francis Campbell.

He wasn't the infiltrator and he wasn't the enemy.

But it was me who brought in him.
Baxter had said.
I came to him.
He wasn't lying, but as Blake put it, a truth told with evil intent beats any lie you can invent.

Baxter. The fly bastard was so subtle, he'd got them trying to persuade
him
Campbell was the spy. He'd got them to convince themselves of his own lie. And yet the evidence had all been there. He'd come to the interrogation instead of joining Ger and Alison's search of Campbell's room, even though the latter would open the book on this guy whose deceit he was so avowedly furious about. He'd joined in the interrogation because he had to know how much the guy told them, and had to make sure he didn't finger the traitor in their midst. That was why the prisoner looked so baffled when he asked about 'the guy on the inside'.
He
was the guy on the inside, and it was his way of warning the prisoner not to give him away. And then when he knew the prisoner had broken, knew he'd tell them anything to stop the torture, he'd pressed the accelerator to kill him.

He was everything they'd feared of Campbell and more: not only had he been observing them in the phoney war, but he was still among them right then, to monitor, maybe verifying what he feared they knew, picking up leads to further threats, future targets. He was an enemy agent walking free among them, able to choose his moment, to undermine, to sabotage, and secretly to strike.

257

Stronghold Opposition

There was a knock at the window. They both looked around to see Baxter send them an acknowledging wave through the small pane, a precaution against getting run through by Rory if he'd just opened the door and given them a fright.

'Rory, I'll take over here for a bit,' he said quietly, as though burdened. 'I need a word with Emily.'

'Rory knows,' Emily told him. 'Sorry.'

'Well, don't be. Everybody knows now. There's no secrets left tonight.' This last he said with a look to Rory. 'Don't worry,' Baxter assured him, 'they're not going to lynch you. I'll take over here, on you go.'

He looked as reluctant to leave as Emily was to let him, but awkward as it would be, she understood Baxter must need this moment. Rory shuffled past in the narrow stairwell, Baxter holding the door open for him.

'I'm the one who ought to apologise,' Baxter said as the door closed. 'But it would have been tricky to ask your permission before--'

'It's okay. It's nothing, in fact. It seems so small now, looking back. For years I've never been able to bring myself to admit it to anyone who didn't already know, and I've steered clear of most of them. But having finally told someone, it just looks like an overblown student prank. Everybody gets to screw up once when they're young, don't they? It's how we learn.'

'True. We were hardly going to bring down the state.'

'No,' she agreed. 'Couldn't see us edging Carlos the Jackal off the World's Most Wanted list.'

Neither, given that point, could she see why the pair of them constituted a threat. Why would Shiach and the Architect be worrying about a couple of failed radicals, so much so as to not merely invite but recruit both of them to this venture? Rory and Toby could identify Shiach and his methods, but what did Emily know that was so dangerous?

Then she saw that the answer was standing right beside her.

'Hey, can I see that knife a second?' he asked casually. 'I'll show you how you should be holding it.'

Oh shit.

259

'The Architect worked undercover, infiltrating all these left-wing groups,'

Rory had said. 'Shiach told us you wouldn't believe how close he was to these people and they didn't have a clue.'

What about Donald, Danny, whatever you call him?

He got taken away to London by Special Branch. . . Danny was driving, and
he panicked, just put the foot down. . . They seemed to know a lot anyway, from
the questions they were asking. . .

She didn't just know he was the Architect, she now knew why she had been invited and who was next on the death list. She was the third side of a triangle connecting an MI5 agent, intent on building his own covert assassination unit, to a high-profile civil rights campaigner whose demise would suit the more hawkish elements of the security and intelligence services down to the ground; precisely the kind of 'enemy within' the Ministry of Vigilance had been dreamed up to get rid of.

Emily looked him in the face before she could stop herself, and he saw it immediately, saw everything she knew. He lunged for the knife, which she twisted in her grip to avoid his grasp and thrust into his chest just under his right arm. Baxter's own weight forced it deep through his armpit and into his shoulder, lodged so firmly that she lost her hold of it when he spun away, grabbing for the claymore he'd rested against the wall behind him. Emily slipped through the exit as the heavy steel blade clattered low against the edge of the open door, Baxter unable to get much power or control to his onehanded swing. She emerged into the corridor, where Rory was still in sight, turning as he heard the commotion.

'It's Baxter,' she shouted. 'He's with
them
.'

Rory began running towards the fire-door, rapier at the ready. She looked behind through the window and saw Baxter take something from his pocket then put it in his ear. He pulled clumsily at one of the mattresses in order to get down the stairs, the knife still lodged in his shoulder. Emily held the door open to facilitate Rory's charge, but before he got there, Baxter broke through the barrier and began scrambling down the stairs, talking to some invisible partner as he retreated.

'It's me,' he said loudly. 'I'm blown. Send in everything we've got, full assault,
now
.'

'You're fucking dead, Danny boy,' Rory shouted after him, but Baxter disappeared without retort. Parlabane was thrusting his arm through the second coil of flex when he heard a voice and almost impaled himself on the nearest hoe in his startlement. It sounded so close that it could have been one of the heads addressing him, until he realised it was coming from the device in his ear. 260

'Charlie, get back here, I want everybody front and centre. Truck's ready, we're going in. This is it.'

'Roger,' Parlabane said, deliberately hoarse, after a gathering pause. A truck. Front and centre. They were going to pull the bloody doors off, or maybe just ram them down.

Well, fuck it, at least he could ditch the coil. If everybody was piling in the front, he could spare himself the climb and risk making a run for it at the rear. With his campaign medal lying in the flowerbeds, he was radar-invisible. He stepped over the woozily struggling prisoner and lifted the bag. It felt a lot lighter now that he wasn't faced with lugging it up twenty-five feet of electrical flex and across fifty yards of telephone cable. There was just about room in the bag for a second can, and if he slung it satchel style again, his hands would be free to carry something else. The generator was unlikely to need anywhere near that much fuel, but he had spotted something that could definitely use up the rest.

'They're coming,' Liz reported.

'This is it,' Vale called out. 'Take positions.'

Alison only
thought
she'd been scared before. What she'd felt during the waiting had been mere hyper-agitation, a flickering of pages depicting scenarios and possibilities, some of horror, some of hope, and none that she could bear to linger upon. It was the fear of not knowing, of projecting and imagining, even when you were trying not to. As she looked out of the empty windowframe, however, she felt something altogether different. This wasn't fear, but something heavier, duller, immovable and definite. This was dread. There was a vehicle moving slowly towards the building, as though lumbering under its own weight. She didn't know much about the terminology of these things, but the phrase 'armoured personnel carrier' popped into her head. There were men walking behind it, fanned out on either side, dressed in camouflage greens, faces blacked, carrying swords, machetes and, in one case, a long-handled axe. She counted twelve, but couldn't be sure, as the ones closest to the truck were frequently obscured from her line of sight. A man stepped from the cab of the truck just before it halted a dozen yards from the front door. He began talking and gesturing to the others, clearly the man in charge. Shiach, she guessed. He was squat and looked podgy, better able to command than to act. Tubby little ageing thug who was right now ordering her death, but wouldn't last a minute in a square go with Ger. The infuriating sight of him helped shake a little of the hollow, gut-tightening paralysis, but she didn't like to wonder how long her defiance would last, nor how it might end.

261

Baxter was gone, back among his murderous conspirators, and with him had gone vital information. He knew of the plan to use the emergency generator and he knew where they planned to fall back to. The infiltrator didn't know where the entrance to the underground chambers was, but it wouldn't take all night to find it, after which they'd be trusting their survival to whatever they could find to barricade the door. There was no call of attack to begin the onslaught, though it was not without its herald. An outstretched arm from the glorious leader was accompanied by a chainsaw buzzing into action, the sound reverberating ominously through every head in the hall.

The chainsaw and axe-bearer broke away from the advancing party and headed to the west.

'That's our bloody chainsaw,' Sir Lachlan observed. 'And our bloody axe. They've been in the outbuilding,' he added gloomily, his tone conveying depressing implications.

'They're going to ram the door,' Liz said, though the truck remained in place, engine idling.

'Good,' said Sir Lachlan. 'Those stone pillars will do more damage to their truck than it will to them.'

He sparked up his lighter and handed Liz and Alison a bottle each, before picking up one for himself. 'When he's in range, aim for the windscreen.'

But at that point the truck began moving, turning around to face away from the building as the first of the footsoldiers drew near to the entrance. It reversed towards the hotel, then a length of heavy chain was tossed out of the back doors.

Below, four of the men picked up two of the corpses that were lying on the concourse, holding them with an arm and a leg apiece. They then peeled away to either side, gathering speed as they headed for the windows flanking the entrance. So much for the horror sapping their resolve. Sir Lachlan held his lighter to the rag on his bottle, which depressingly failed to burst into flame. He tried it on Liz's, to the same effect. The two pairs of corpse-bearers reached the front walls and swung their burdens against the glass. The panes shattered, but the mattresses held. They wouldn't for long though, and when they fell, the intruders falling with them would be those already dead. The first live ones through would be upright and ready, not sprawling and vulnerable as Vale had envisaged. Thank you, Baxter, you duplicitous piece of shit.

Sir Lachlan knelt down and held his lighter over the two rows of bottles, trying each for a second or so. None of them would light.

'The alcohol's not volatile enough,' he cursed. Alison remembered Ger heating those measures a few hours ago, and recalled her dad's attempts every 262

Christmas to ignite a pouring of brandy over the plum duff, draining half the lighter before the briefest flicker of blue flame appeared and died again. It only ever caught once the heat from the dessert had warmed the booze. Sitting at the open windows, this stuff wasn't even at room temperature. The ramming party picked up their burdens again.

'Oh, just fucking chuck them,' Liz shouted, and hurled her bottle down at the nearer pair. It missed one of their heads by a few inches and smashed on the monobloc. Alison threw hers too, her greater accuracy foiled by the warning of the first salvo. Her target dodged clear, though at the cost of dropping his hold of the corpse. She turned to pick up a second missile, and was handed one almost absently by Sir Lachlan, who had stopped systematically trying the bottles and was instead checking the labels. He stood up again when he found what he was after: a 25-year-old special edition Speyside with a 47 per cent abv. He turned it briefly upside down to allow more spirit to soak the rag, then held the lighter to it. A blue flame licked around the neck of the bottle.