Crossfire (13 page)

Glass doors hissed open. Ahead, a torrent of
water coursed down a huge angled sheet of steel.
Beautiful people glided over white tiles doing
important things with a mobile in one hand and
a paper cup of cappuccino in the other.

I went up to the reception desk. An entire wall
of flat screens showed footage of Pete fucking
about with his cameras, getting ready to film. A
tickertape caption announced the sad death of
one of the station's finest cameramen.

'Hello, my name's Nick Stone. I'm here for
Moira Foley.'

The girl had a little Bluetooth thing in her ear.
She gave me a big smile and tapped her keyboard.

'She is expecting me. We spoke this morning.'

I'd called on the pretext of seeing Moira about
my invoice. I needn't have worried about getting
a meeting. She was the one who asked me.

My name obviously turned up on her monitor.
Now the receptionist was tapping phone keys.
'Could you sign in here, please?'

By the time I'd done so and she'd finished her
call, a machine had spat out a nice little plastic
credit card with my name printed on it to hang
round my neck on a nylon tape.

'Would you like to take a seat over there?
Someone will be down.'

It was just like the office at Vauxhall Cross,
only with a hint of politeness. They even had
black, steel-framed leather settees. Above them,
glass cabinets were crammed with silver
and glass trophies. They'd obviously won a lot of
awards and didn't mind everyone knowing.

I pulled my invoice from my bomber. Three
hundred euros a day for ten days, printed out at
an Internet café near Paddington station on the
way to the airport.

Another battery of flat screens showed Dom
waffling with an attractive, petite Arab woman in
her thirties. Her head was covered with a white
scarf. The rest of her garb was long and black. As
they talked, they walked across a dustbowl
strewn with rubble. It just had to be Afghanistan.
The mountains in the background gave it away –
and if they hadn't, the figures in blue burqas did.
They scuttled about like big blue pepper-pots.
The camera focused on her head. She waffled
away silently above the caption: 'Afghan
women's aid worker'. She seemed too un-weathered
and beautiful to be working in the
dust.

A new caption told me this was an excerpt
from
Veiled Threats
, the documentary that had
made Pete and Dom famous. It had won two
Emmys and a host of other stuff. The station was
very proud of them.

The tribute was working. It made me think of
Pete fucking about with his tin hat on.

'Mr Stone?'

I dragged myself back from the last time I'd
seen him. I didn't know why the Polish accent
surprised me. It was a Polish station, after all,
and I knew the voice. I looked up to see a girl in
jeans and a polo-neck jumper.

'I'm Katarzyna. Everyone calls me Kate.'

I stood up and shook hands with a very smiley
young woman. She looked just as her voice had
told me she would. She pointed at my arm, a
little unsure what to say. She managed, 'Ouch,'
and a sympathetic smile.

'It's OK. What do I do with this?' I held up my
invoice.

She took the sheet of A4. 'I will try and get a
cheque for you today.'

I followed her to the lift. She was embarrassed.
She was seventeen or eighteen, just starting out
in life. She was getting the hang of it and wasn't
quite sure how to act, and I was fed up with it.
We didn't say any more to each other. I was fine
about it and so was she.

The lift doors opened and three of the smokers
rushed in to join us. The reek of nicotine breath
filled the metal box.

The doors opened again into a large, open-plan
office. Again, it could have been Vauxhall Cross
if it hadn't been for the trendy water-bottle dispensers
and coffee machines. People were on the
phone or hunched over their PCs. Worktops were
littered with piles of magazines and newspapers.
At the far end the newsreaders' desks were in
plain view so we could see how hard-working
they were. That particular section, however, was
cut off by soundproof glass so the newsreaders
could shout at each other and call each other
dickheads without it going on air.

Glass-walled offices lined the left side of the
big open space. My very quiet new mate led me
to a fanatically tidy desk. A woman I assumed
was Moira sat behind it.

She wasn't what I'd been expecting. For
starters, I wouldn't have predicted the inch-thick
layer of makeup. She was maybe mid-fifties, and
didn't show a wedding ring. Maybe she was trying
hard to compete with the likes of Kate. A
far-too-thin blouse revealed her bra, and the look
continued with a mini-skirt and knee-high boots.
Her hair was jet black. Her eyelashes were so
long they looked like spiders' legs. Either everyone
was too scared to tell her, or they disliked her
so much they couldn't be bothered.

'Come in, Nick.'

Her accent was as Irish as Bertie's Pole, and her
arrogance levels twice as high. She glanced at my
friend. 'Coffee.'

I turned to Kate. 'No, I'm fine.' I'd always
hated the girl-go-get-coffee thing. I'd had enough
of it myself when I was a young squaddy, getting
pushed around from pillar to post. I didn't wish
it on others, especially if the order came from
someone like Moira.

I sat down where she pointed. 'I'm sorry to
have to let you go.' She settled back behind her
desk. 'If it was up to me, I'd have kept you on.
But the MD took the view he'd paid for close protection
and not got it. Did you bring the invoice?'

'Got nothing else to do, have I?'

She leant forward, hoping her expression of
deeply sincere concern would help us move on
from the sacking. 'How's the arm, Nick?'

'Fine. I had it cleaned up this morning in
Harley Street.'

She took a breath but I beat her to it. 'Don't
worry, I'm not billing. Look, I've been calling
Dom but still can't get an answer. You heard anything?'

Her face fell. 'I was hoping you might have.
That wife of his – you've met her?'

'No.'

There seemed to be no love lost there.

'Well,
she
says he's taken a break. You know,
clearing his fucking head or something.
She
won't say where he is, when he's coming back.'
She raised her hands in frustration. 'I'm trying to
run a news organization here.'

'Has he done this before?'

They dropped back on to the table. 'No – but,
then, he hasn't had a cameraman killed before
either. That bloody wife of his, she knows where
he is.'

'Did he say anything about filming in the city
before we left?'

'He's my war correspondent. He doesn't do
new one-way systems. That was just the fucking
cameraman trying to get some expenses out of
me. Old habits die hard.'

She sat back, her hands stretched out on the
desk. The spiders' legs flashed up and down.
'Perhaps we could arrange some extra work?
Here in the studio? We've got a great story, all
this great footage, but no one to follow it up. We
could get massive exposure on this. All the outlets
have been clamouring.'

She looked at my arm. 'You're a film star now,
Nick. What about you giving an interview, just
talking to camera, nothing hard, telling us what
happened? You could talk us through it. They're
hungry out there, Nick. People want to know the
pain you've gone through. It would be a lasting
tribute to Dom's cameraman.'

Moira couldn't have pulled off concerned if
there'd been a gun to her head.

I stood up and so did she. She was waspish.
'You're wasting an opportunity to tell the world
what happened. If you don't do it, there are
others who will.'

I had to put her right there and then, before she
barged her way into their lives and fucked them
up even more. 'Do not go near Pete's family.
They've had enough shit already. If you do I'll go
to the BBC – in fact, any fucker – and do the interview
with them.'

Her face went red with anger, which was quite
an achievement, given the thickness of her
makeup. 'Then your invoice will take a fucking
long time coming through, that's all I can say.'

I walked out.

Kate had been hovering outside. She followed
me to the lift. As the doors closed, she jumped in.

'Mr Stone, I knew she wouldn't pay you if you
said no, so here . . . I prepared.' Out of her bag
came a wad of euros and a receipt for me to sign.

'You'll burn in hell for this, Kate. Thank you.'

She smiled, then got embarrassed and looked
down. 'She's already asked Peter's family.'

'What did they say?'

'They said no. I think that is good thing.'

'So do I, Kate. So do I.'

We shook hands by the steel waterfall and I
headed for the door.

'There is one more thing, Mr Stone.'

I turned.

'She really didn't believe Peter's invoice. But
he had been filming in St Stephen's Green. You
wouldn't believe how tight she is. She wouldn't
reimburse Dom for his donation to the refuge
either.'

'The one in their documentary?'

She nodded. 'It's very close to his heart.'

'Herbert Park in Ballsbridge.'

The cab edged out into traffic.

'One of the embassies, sir?'

'Nah, just an old mate who's moved there.
Smart area, is it?'

He chuckled. 'On the Dublin Monopoly board,
the roads in Ballsbridge are the fockin' big bucks
squares.' He threw a newspaper to me. 'Here,
have a read of that. We're going to be stuck in the
rush-hour for a while.'

He wasn't wrong. We were surrounded by
commuters with their heads down and telephones
to their ears as they made their way
home.

The street-lights glowed on the paper through
the rain-stained windows. I opened it up on a big
spread about extraordinary rendition. A cleaning
woman had boarded a supposedly empty
American plane to find a prisoner handcuffed,
hooded and wearing an adult nappy. The Irish
government were hugely embarrassed: they'd
given public assurances that war-on-terror
'rendered' prisoners didn't come anywhere near
the place on their way to Guantánamo Bay or the
CIA's secret prisons in Afghanistan, Pakistan or
wherever their interrogators had been able to set
up shop.

The piece said:

The practice has grown sharply since the 9/11
terrorist attacks, and now includes a form in
which suspects are illegally arrested, sometimes
straight off the street, and delivered to a third-party
state. There, the suspects are tortured by
many means, including 'waterboarding' . . .

We used to do it out of this very city, only it
wasn't called rendition in those days. They were
just lifted. It got me wondering if Special Branch
had ever used waterboarding. We never hung
around at the castle long enough to see what
went on. Better not to know, and have a clean
pair of hands.

I checked the property pages but there was
nothing for sale in the whole suburb of
Ballsbridge, let alone Herbert Park.

'What do the houses go for round here?'

'Put it this way, last time you were here you
could have picked up one of these little beauties
for fifty thousand punts. Last one I saw advertised
went for well over seven million euros.
We're nearly there. Which end?'

I folded the newspaper. 'Drop us off here,
mate. I'm going to walk down and surprise
them.'

I paid him thirty euros and walked along
Herbert Park in the rain, looking for number
eighty-eight. Actually, it wasn't really rain, not
even drizzle, more a mist that soaked everything
through. I pulled up the collar of my bomber,
hooked my bag over my shoulder and started
walking.

If Pete had done good, Dom had hit the jackpot.
These were substantial four-storey red-brick
houses set back from the road, with large
rectangular windows, designed for the grand
and merchant classes during old Dublin's
previous heyday. Raised stone staircases led one
floor up to very solid and highly glossed front
doors. The ground floor was reserved for the
servants. Either Dom had married into money or
the Polish celeb mags paid much more than I'd
imagined for their double-page spreads. Or the
Yes Man hadn't been talking bollocks.

Lights were on in several of the houses, and
curtains were open to display the gilded
furniture and big chandeliers to best effect.

I was still trying to work out what to say to
Siobhan. Did she know Dom was an asset? I
wasn't sure how that worked with spouses. I'd
never been put to the test.

I walked past 6 Series BMWs and shiny 4x4s.

For all I knew, Dom could be sitting at home
with his feet up watching telly, and Siobhan was
putting the kettle on to make him a brew.

I neared number eighty-eight. The hall light
shone through a glass panel over a wide, shiny
wooden door. I couldn't see any movement
through the front windows or upstairs. There
were no milk bottles on the front step, empty or
full, but that meant nothing nowadays. There
was no condensation on the windows, but I
wouldn't expect it. This was no minging old
council house with poor heating and no
ventilation.

I carried on past. Keeping a mental count of the
houses, I reached the end of the street. The last
time I'd walked past so many brand-new cars I'd
been in a Kuwaiti showroom. This place was
awash with money. I picked up a flyer from the
pavement advertising a luxurious spa with a
helipad on the roof in case you needed some
emergency work on your cuticles.

I turned left at the end of the terrace and
worked my way round to the back of the houses.
There was a small service road about four metres
wide that the gardens on each side backed on to.
I walked past all the wheelie-bins and counted
up to sixteen. Each property had a six-foot brick
wall and either an old wooden gate or a fancy
wrought-iron one. Mature trees towered over the
gardens.

The lights were on at the back of eighty-eight
on the first floor.

There was movement in what looked like the
kitchen, but the blinds were half down. I couldn't
ID the shadow, but it seemed too small to be
Dom.

I turned back and it wasn't long before I was
knocking with the heavy iron lion's head on the
front door.

'Who is it?'

The voice was female and Irish.

'My name's Nick. I'm a friend of Dom's. I was
with him last week in Basra.'