Sabbathman (30 page)

‘You’re sure you don’t want anyone inside?’

‘Positive.’ Annie nodded at the map. ‘You’ve got line of sight front and back. I’m not that delicate.’

‘And you’re happy with the comms procedures?’

‘Yes.’

Stanton grunted, spooning sugar into his coffee, running quickly through a pencilled checklist. If McCrudden came up with a name, Annie was to pass it on at once. The Q cars were in contact with Army headquarters at Lisburn and with the standing SAS detachment at Bessbrook. London had given the operation the highest priority, and a name would trigger an elaborate snatch operation. He didn’t go into details but his manner left Annie in no doubt about the importance of what was about to happen. This was a weekend when reputations – perhaps even careers – would be made or lost.

‘You’ll be making your own way to Tandragee?’ he said.

Annie nodded. ‘No problem.’

Stanton hesitated a moment, ever the perfectionist, then reached for his briefcase and shrugged. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘if that’s what you prefer.’

The two soldiers escorted her out of the interview room and said goodbye on the concourse. When they’d disappeared towards the car park, Annie went to the Avis desk. She’d half-anticipated some kind of escort en route to Tandragee and she was glad that
no one was insisting. The tricky parts of operational life in Northern Ireland were always the beginning and end of any journey. The end of this one – Flaherty’s Bar in Tandragee – was now covered. She had total confidence in Stanton and the plans he’d made. That left the start of the journey, leaving the airport, and this she knew she could sort out herself. Her two years in Belfast had taught her a great deal, but the most important lesson of all was the absolute need for self-reliance. Keep things simple. And keep things to yourself. That way, most of the time, you’d get by.

At the Avis desk, she gave the girl her name. The girl consulted a board at the back of the booth. When she turned back, she offered Annie a key.

‘It’s a white Cavalier,’ she said, ‘out in the car park, off to your left.’

Annie smiled back, refusing the key. ‘Some other car, please,’ she said. ‘I hate Cavaliers.’

‘Really?’ The girl looked startled but didn’t argue. There were three rows of keys on the board at the back.

‘Something a bit nippy, too,’ Annie said, ‘if you have it.’

‘Same class?’

‘Doesn’t matter. Use my Visa if there’s an authorisation problem.’

The girl looked at the board again. She gave Annie a key from the bottom row. ‘Golf GTI,’ she said, ‘brand new.’

‘Colour?’

The girl looked at the board again. ‘Red.’

‘Perfect,’ Annie said, ‘I hate white, too.’

Across from the car hire desks there was a small arcade of shops. Annie went to the counter selling rainwear and bought herself a big green anorak with a stiff turn-up collar. There was also a display of local knitwear and she found a flat tweed cap, the smallest size they had, putting it on and checking herself in the mirror. It wasn’t a perfect fit but with the anorak it changed her silhouette completely and if she was unlucky enough to hit trouble, it might well buy her the couple of seconds she knew would count.

Outside the airport building, standing on the wet pavement, Annie waited until she’d spotted the Golf before hurrying out to
the car park. She was wearing the anorak now, with the collar up and the tweed cap pulled low over her eyes. The car was, as promised, brand new. She experimented with the lights for a moment or two and then threaded her way onto the exit road, one eye on the rear view mirror. She drove round the one-way system twice, still checking for cars behind. Convinced she wasn’t being followed, she finally took the road that left the airport, slowing for a wave-through from the armed RUC men at the security checkpoint.

It had stopped raining by now and the last of a cold, steel-grey dusk was settling on the line of hills to the west. On the motorway, traffic was still pouring out of the city, a flood of on-coming headlights, and Annie began to relax. If everything went according to plan, if Bobby McCrudden really had a name for Sabbathman, then she was hours away from giving her career a major lift. Events, for once, had put her at the very centre of a major national story and her bosses in Gower Street couldn’t fail to take notice. Quite what shape her reward would take, she didn’t know but the currency that really mattered in MI5 was battle honours, and just now they were extremely hard to come by. Sabbathman’s was a scalp worth having. Even Alan Kingdom would admit that. The thought of him warmed her, and she slipped into the fast lane and took the Golf up to 95 mph as the lights of the city appeared ahead.

Minutes later, at the Grosvenor Road roundabout, Annie left the motorway. She drove up Victoria Street, past the Europa Hotel. A mile and a half further on, near the University, she made a series of left turns. The safe house lay in one of the avenues that ran down towards the river. She’d used it often, sometimes for converted terrorists in transit out of the province, sometimes to brief agents coming in. Once, at the start of their relationship, she’d even taken Kingdom there, making love in one of the bedrooms on the third floor. Kingdom had known it was a safe house from the start, recognising the wallpaper in the sitting room from a head and shoulders photo he’d seen in an RUC file. It was one of the first things she’d noticed about him, how perceptive he was, and how suspicious, searching the bedroom afterwards for hidden cameras.

Now, she parked the Golf three doors down from the safe house and walked back. The properties on either side of the safe house had been bought by an agency working on instructions from the Northern Ireland Office, and both had been converted into student lets. The safe house itself had a speaker phone by the front door with three buttons against three names. The device in fact acted as a security lock and Annie remembered the sequence without difficulty, three pushes on the middle button, one on the top, then two on the bottom. The door opened and she stepped inside, recognising at once the smell of the place, an unforgettable mixture of old fat, boiled sprouts, and the powerful disinfectant favoured by the woman who did the cleaning.

The house appeared to be empty. In a wardrobe in a bedroom upstairs, where Cousins had promised, she found a blue holdall. Inside, wrapped in a copy of the
Belfast Telegraph
, was a hand-gun, a Browning automatic, the sort she’d trained on and carried routinely throughout her tour in the province. Annie glanced at the paper. It carried yesterday’s date, Friday 1 October, and she wondered for a moment whether Cousins himself had been here. Executives of his eminence rarely bothered themselves with the spadework but Cousins – as she’d begun to realise – was a law unto himself.

Annie picked up the gun again, checking the mechanism, working the action backwards and forwards. Then she loaded three clips with shells from the box of ammunition. Tandragee was about forty minutes out of Belfast, to the west. Cousins had arranged the meet for nine o’clock. McCrudden would wait for thirty minutes, no more. If she wasn’t there by half-past nine, he’d leave. Annie slipped a full clip into the butt of the Browning and levelled the gun at a water colour of Lough Neagh on the wall. It was a beautifully balanced weapon, solid but not too heavy. Just holding it gave her instant confidence.

Annie put the automatic back in the holdall and took out the radio, entering the frequency Stanton had given her at the airport. Then she glanced at her watch. Nearly half-past eight. Already running late.

Outside, the street was empty, one or two parked cars, no other signs of life. Annie walked to the Golf and got in, stowing
the holdall on the passenger seat beside her. At the end of the street, she turned right, making her way back to the main road. The traffic was much lighter now and once she’d rejoined the motorway, she took the Golf up to 80 mph. On the radio, she’d found a local programme called Classic Trax, an hour of music devoted to the seventies, and she eased her seat back, tapping out the rhythms with her fingertips, singing along to Chris Rea and Van Morrison. She smiled, thinking again of Kingdom. His kind of music. His kind of lyrics.

She was nearly at Lisburn when she realised she was being followed. The headlights in the rear-view mirror had slowly closed on her. Now they felt no more than a yard or so behind, the full beams dazzling her. She sank a little lower in the seat, going through the usual checks. She accelerated, way past the hundred mark, then she slowed again, down to sixty, fifty, but nothing made any difference. There was no attempt to overtake, no pulling back, just the harsh white glare in the rear-view mirror, and the miles unwinding to the end of the motorway. She was past her exit by now, way past, but that didn’t matter. Bobby McCrudden could wait. Everything could wait. All that mattered now was putting darkness between her and the car behind.

She debated what to do, feeling her pulse at last beginning to steady. The Browning lay beside her, on top of the holdall. She reached for it, making sure it was still there, then she felt inside the holdall, pulling out the radio. The on/off switch was on the side of the set. She turned the radio on and held it close to her mouth.

‘Greenglass One,’ she said, using the call sign Stanton had given her at the airport. ‘Does any one read me? Over?’

She listened for a moment, hearing no acknowledgements, wondering who else might be tuned in. Active operational channels were monitored constantly. She tried again, same message, the set tight to her mouth.

‘Greenglass One, Greenglass One. Repeat. Emergency. Who reads me?’

Again, silence. She glanced down. Where a tiny red light normally confirmed working power, there was nothing. Only darkness. She switched quickly to receive, scanning through the
channels, hearing nothing. The batteries were dead. There was no power. Annie closed her eyes a moment, cursing herself for not checking earlier, back in the safe house. She’d been too hasty. She’d put time before prudence, the cardinal sin, and now here she was, deaf and dumb, the speedo showing 89 mph and the headlights behind still rock-solid in the rear-view mirror. Provos, she thought, had to be. The hard-faced ultras from Cousins’ scenario, the guys who wanted to strangle the peace talks at birth, the guys who’d do anything, take any life, to keep the province in a state of war. Somehow, they’d picked her up. Somewhere, they’d been waiting. Maybe at the safe house. Maybe somewhere else in the city. Either way, it was academic. All she had now was a full tank of petrol and 27 rounds of 9mm snubnose. The rest, unless she was very careful, would be all too predictable. She peered ahead. The rain had started again, flurries hitting the windscreen, greasing the surface of the road. That was good. That narrowed the odds a little. Head to head, she thought grimly. Who dares wins.

A big blue motorway sign flashed past, indicating the next exit. ‘Armagh/Coalisland,’ it said, ‘1 mile.’ She took the Golf up to 110 mph, waiting for the line of green dots that would signal the beginning of the slip road. When they appeared, she left it as late as she dared and then swung left, feeling the back of the car starting to slide, correcting the skid with a flick of the wheel, then dropping two gears as the roundabout came up to meet her. The roundabout, mercifully, was empty. Behind, in the mirror, she could see the other car making a U-turn in the carriageway. Overshoot, she thought. At least three hundred yards in hand.

The country road to Armagh was unlit and she drove very fast into the wet darkness, trying to anticipate each corner, using the engine and the gearbox to glue the wheels to the road. Twice, she nearly came unstuck. The second time, a sharp left-hand bend took her by surprise and left her broadside in the wet, the wheels spinning, the engine screaming, the speedo still registering 73 mph. Behind her now there was nothing but darkness. Then a village appeared, a handful of houses and an empty-looking pub, and she slowed, looking for a telephone box. When she couldn’t find one, she reversed quickly, backing the Golf into a narrow lane beside
the pub. Before she left the car, she stuffed the Browning into the side pocket of the anorak. When she ran, she felt it banging against her hip.

The pub was deserted apart from an old man in the corner nodding over a pint of stout. A woman appeared behind the bar. Annie asked her about a pay phone and the woman indicated a door marked ‘Toilets’. Outside the Ladies, she said, there was a phone. Would she be after any change? Annie nodded, taking no chances, swopping a pound for a handful of coins.

Out in the narrow passage, she found the phone. She began to dial the emergency number at Lisburn but then she stopped, spooling backwards in her mind, counting the number of turns she’d made, remembering the speed she’d maintained, and the distance she must have put between herself and the car behind. There was no way they’d find her. Phoning the emergency number was a surrender to panic. Soon enough there’d be time to report in. Just now, she needed a different kind of conversation.

She dialled her own number, the flat in Kew, just in case. When it didn’t answer, she began dialling again, Kingdom’s number this time, the little terrace house in Leytonstone where he lived with his father. Odds on, she’d find him there. Just the sound of his voice would be enough.

The number rang and rang and she was about to hang up when there was finally an answer, not Kingdom at all but an old voice, inquisitive, querulous, high-pitched.

‘Alan?’ she said. ‘Is Alan there?’

‘Who?’

‘Alan? Alan Kingdom?’

‘Who’s that?’

‘My name’s Annie. He knows me. Is he there?’

Outside, faraway, she heard a car changing gear, the kind of urgent, violent gear change you make when you’re going too fast into a corner. The voice was back again, lost, bewildered.

‘Who do you want?’

‘Alan? Your son? Only–’

The car was much closer now, just up the road, the tyres squealing in the wet.

‘Who?’

‘Alan. Alan Kingdom. Your son. Please–’

She shut her eyes as the car roared past. Then she heard the screech of brakes and the howl of the transmission as the driver reversed at speed. They’ve seen the Golf, she thought. They’ve seen it and they’re coming back.