Skinner's Festival (19 page)

FORTY-TWO

Six called just after four. Copies of the Macdairmid tape had been rushed down on the 1:00 pm shuttle, carried by a Special Branch typist. She had handed them over to a motorcyclist waiting at Heathrow, and they had reached their destinations by 2:45 pm.
'Sorry to take so long to respond.’
Skinner thought for a moment that the Deputy DG was joking, but remembered that she had no sense of humour. The woman was rarely flippant, and most certainly never on a scrambled
telephone.
'It took us a little while, because we believed we were listening to an Arab. But we were wrong. The reason he sounds that way is because he learned his English in Libya. Actually, the subject is a Peruvian. Our friend Macdairmid has got himself into some seriously bad company. The man on the telephone is Jesus Giminez.’
She paused.

Skinner knew the name at once. He had been shown the file on Giminez, a legendary figure among the world’s security services.
The man was an international terror consultant, wanted in many countries around the globe, but most of all by the Israelis. He was known to be responsible, either as hit-man or as planner, for a string of political assassinations over around thirty years. His name had run like a scarlet thread around the world’s trouble spots until 1991, not long after the death of Robert Maxwell, when he had vanished abruptly from the distant surveillance which the international intelligence community had managed to maintain, tenuously, for a quarter of a century. Some believed that he was dead, but the most commonly held opinion was that at the age of fifty-five he had decided to retire, like any businessman might.

One of the most impressive things about Giminez had always been his anonymity. Other terrorists had become household names, but, to the international media and to the world at large, Giminez had remained unknown.
'Of course, we had no idea he was active again,’ the Deputy DG continued. 'God knows what he’s up to, but an operation like the one you’ve got on just now is right up his street. And if he was involved, he’d run it through someone just like Macdairmid, a radical front-man with an axe to grind. One thing about Giminez, his only principle is money. He works for cash only. Big cash. So if he’s a player, someone’s paying him: not less than seven figures
sterling. Can you think of anyone in Scotland with access to that sort of cash?’
'It’s possible, but what about contact? The man’s a shadow. So how do you set about hiring him?’
'He has an agent, believe it or not – or rather a string of them. They’re contactable through officials of a certain Middle Eastern government with a very dark name for that sort of thing.’
'But if wasn’t aware of that, how could someone like Macdairmid be in the know?’
'Well, he is an MP, after all. He does mooch around Whitehall. You can get anything there if you really want it. Of course, maybe they approached Macdairmid.’
'Meaning?’

'Meaning if your thing up there wasn’t hatched in Scotland at all. Not everybody loves us Brits. You should know that more than most. Suppose someone wanted to do us a really bad turn. We’ve already got Ireland on our hands as an endemic problem. Stir up Scotland, then the Welsh, then a bit of ethnic warfare – in Bradford or Manchester, say. Mix all together, and Britain would become ungovernable. Our economy, our whole society would collapse. You know. Bob, I really do think you should catch these people.’

FORTY-THREE

Andy Martin’s guess had fallen just short of the mark: his technicians found not one but two sources of fingerprints. From the toilet seat, the scene-of-crime team had lifted perfect prints of the thumb and first three fingers of what they suspected, by taking and eliminating the prints of Adams and Dickson, to have been Mary McCall’s right hand. And they had excelled themselves by taking from the toilet-roll holder the thumb and first finger of her left hand.
Everything else in the tiny garage apartment had been wiped clean, meticulously – and, as was clear to the technicians, by someone who had known exactly what she was doing.

Martin and Mackie had arrived back at Fettes Avenue with the prints at 9:10 pm, and had found Skinner still in his office.
'You say she split on Sunday morning? You think she’s our woman, then, Andy?’
'Yes, boss, I do indeed. I think that our Mary deliberately gets herself tucked in beside randy old Frank Adams, and has time to take her pick of the stuff he’s got going out to Festival companies – she had a choice of seventeen customers. She picks the Aussies, and plants her bomb in the radiogram with a timer set for mid-show – Adams told us that she had a Fringe programme in the flat – and stays under cover in Stow till last weekend. She gives old Frank one to remember her by, then nips up to Edinburgh on Sunday morning, either by bus or hitching, and teams up with the rest of her team to kill poor Hilary Guillaum. She’s a big strong girl, says Frank. Well able to handle the knife work.’

'Yes,’ said Skinner, his eyes bright with interest. 'It fits, all right. Brian, get out to the lab now, if not sooner and compare those prints with everything we lifted from Hilary Guillaum’s suite at the Sheraton, and from that chambermaid’s trolley. While you’re at it, dig up a technician and get me blow-ups of those prints – top quality they can manage. Get back here as soon as you can. I’ll be waiting. We’ll see if the States can help us.’

FORTY-FOUR

Adam Arrow and 'Gammy’ Legge arrived together. The two soldiers had met before in Ireland, and were resurrecting old stories as they walked into Skinner’s office, just after 9:30 pm.
'So, put yourself in my place. Gammy. There you are, you search the fookin’ house when the fella’s out and you find, hidden in his fookin’ bedroom, a bomb wi’ the timer set to go off in
thirty-six hours. I ask you, what would you do?’
'I suppose I’d send for me. What did you do?’
'Ah, but you weren’t about. No, I just moved the timer forward thirty hours and fooked off. Six hours later, and so did 'e sound asleep in his bed. Smashin’ dream, be must have 'ad.’
Skinner put his hands over his ears. 'For God’s sake, Adam, keep those stories to yourself. I’ll assume you made that one up.’
The little man laughed. 'Course I did.’ His eyes twinkled.
Skinner decided not to pry further. Instead he gave each man a beer from the small fridge standing in a corner of his office, and briefed them, as they drank, about the day’s discovery at Stow.

'Does our assumption about the bomb sound right to you,
Gammy? Could the timer have been set as accurately as that?’
'Yes. That’s how she’d have done it, all right. They’ve got some really pricey timers these days, although if she really knew what she was about, she could have done it with the programming chip from a video. So in theory we could have sleeper Semtex bombs lying around all over Edinburgh.’
'Christ, that’s all we need!’
'Ah, but in practice it’s a different matter.’
'How come?’
'Thanks to some technical spec the manufacturers sent me, I’ve been able to work out how much of this super-Semtex stuff was used in each of our two explosions. The good news is that the total matches exactly the quantity nicked from that French arsenal.
Add the fact that all of the rest of the world supply is accounted for, and in safe hands, and we reach the conclusion that as far as this super-Semtex is concerned, the bastards are out of ammo.’
'That’s a relief; but what if they have conventional explosive?
Maybe there are still sleeper bombs lying around.’
“If there are,’ said Legge, 'then our dogs’ll be able to smell them, or we’ll be able to pick them out with some other little tricks that we have. We’ve already given every Festival venue a really thorough sniffing, and we’ll keep on doing so on a regular basis.’

Skinner looked across at Arrow. 'All that makes our friend’s meeting on Saturday even more interesting.’
The little soldier nodded. But Major Legge looked puzzled, until Skinner described the surveillance of Macdairmid, without actually naming him.
Arrow cut in. 'Did you find out who the other fooker was on the line?’
Skinner nodded, but said nothing. Instead he slapped a thick folder which lay on his desk. It was labelled 'Most Secret’, and had arrived by courier from MI6 only two hours earlier. It
contained the career history of Jesus Giminez.
Arrow raised his eyebrows, but asked no more questions.
'Well,’ said Legge. 'Good luck to you cloak-and-dagger Johnnies. Tell you one thing, though. If your geezer is expecting another consignment of those special fireworks, then he’s likely to
be disappointed, unless there’s a second factory that no one knows about, because no one else is keen to be caught with their drawers down like the French were.’
'Hah,’ Skinner snorted. 'Brave words. Gammy, but from what we’ve seen so far of this outfit, someone’s arse is going to be exposed to the four winds!’

FORTY-FIVE

The two soldiers had been gone for only ten minutes when Brian Mackie returned with blow-ups of the six Mary McCall fingerprints. He brought too the opinion of the technicians that a
fragment of a print taken from the chambermaid’s trolley in the Sheraton Hotel could have come from her right hand.
'That’s a start,’ said Skinner. 'Now let’s see how far our luck will run.’ He led the way along the corridor to the Special Branch suite, past the duty officer in the outer area, and into Martin’s empty office. A fax machine with a scrambled line sat on a table in the corner. Skinner picked up its telephone handset and dialled in a London number.
'FBI.’
Skinner was always struck by the frankness of the Americans.
They knew and valued the respect in which the Bureau was held around the world, and were never shy of announcing its presence, even in foreign countries.

Joe Doherty was the FBI’s senior man in Europe, based at the Embassy in Grosvenor Square. He had looked Skinner up on a tour of Special Branch heads when first posted to the UK in 1989, and they had been in touch ever since.
'You dragged yourself in, then,’ said Skinner.
'Yup; I said I would. But this better be worth it.’
'Let’s hope so. Joe, I’m going to fax you down six fingerprints. I’d like you to scan them into your magic machine, the one that connects back to the States, and see what it tells you – if it tells you anything at all, that is. I’ll wait here. You’ll get me on Andy Martin’s direct line.’ He gave him the number.
'OK, Bob,’ said Doherty. 'Go for it.’
Skinner loaded the fax, selected half-tone quality, and keyed in the FBI’s London number. The six pages took just over five minutes to transmit. He settled down to wait.
'Brian, this could take a while. You can go home if you want.’
'No way, boss. I want to see what he turns up.’

On Martin’s office television, they watched the remainder of 'News at Ten’, then midweek football. Rangers were two down in a League Cup tie to Motherwell, Skinner’s team, when the telephone rang.
'Bugger it,’ he swore, but switched off the television set as he picked up the receiver.
'Bob!’ Doherty’s excitement rang down the line, taking Skinner by surprise. 'Know who you’ve got there? Typhoid friggin’ Mary, that’s all.’
'And who the hell is she?’
'Typhoid Mary Little Horse. One of the most celebrated members of the American underclass. Hit-woman, bank-robber, political activist, terrorist, highly skilled with firearms, knives and explosives. You name it, that’s Typhoid Mary. Deadly is her middle name. She styles herself a native American freedom fighter, but she’s just a plain killer. We lost sight of her when she broke out of jail in Kansas last year. So what’s she into over here?’

As quickly as he could. Skinner explained the detail of the Music Hall bomb, and summarised Adams’ story. When he had finished, Doherty whistled loudly down the line. 'That’s Mary, both times. She’s great with explosives, and she likes to kill people. But I’ll tell you this. Bob. If she has Scotch blood, then you’re a friggin’ Sioux Indian.’ Doherty paused, then went on. 'Couple of things for your Mr Adams. First the moderately good news. Not everything she told him was a lie. She was indeed raped by her step-daddy when she was sweet sixteen, and she did indeed run away from home. The detail that she left out was that, before she ran away, she cut his heart out . . . and I mean that literally, my friend.’
'Sounds like our friend Frank might have been lucky.’

'Well, no. Bob. You can’t exactly say that. For now comes the really bad news for the Adams family. Mary can kill you in a whole lot of ways, but in one that’s the most certain of all. She can kill you with her snatch, without you even being there – like she’s probably killed Mrs Adams by now, through her poor sap of a husband. Her nickname’s an understatement. We’ve got Mary’s prison medical records. Bob, she’s HIV positive. Look, I’ll fax you up her picture. Better find her, man, before she screws the whole of Scotland to death!’

FORTY-SIX

'So that’s the story so far, Alan. A Scots MP mixed up with an international terrorist, and a crazy squaw killing people all over Edinburgh.’
The Secretary of State looked stunned. He leaned back in his chair and stared for several seconds up at the ceiling, affording Skinner a clear view of a large bruise, perhaps the size of a thumbprint, on the right side of his throat. Eventually he looked back across the desk. Their Sunday confrontation had not been mentioned, but a coldness hung between them, one which each man knew would never dissipate completely.
'This MI5 woman’s theory, what do you make of it?’
'Mary Little Horse showing up makes it the best one we’ve got. You can count on the fingers of two hands the people in Scotland who could afford to fund this thing, and still have three fingers left over. I know; I have counted. Then you can rule out all of them as being too old, too straight, too boring, too law-abiding. None of the radical groups have the dough either. Yes, Alan, it all fits.’
'So what do you do now?’

'Well, I’m holding my morning briefing in an hour. I’ve got Crown Office permission to issue photographs of Mary Little Horse, and to put out a “Do not approach” warning.’ As he spoke, Skinner opened the folder on his lap and handed across the desk a copy of the computer-generated print which Joe Doherty had faxed to him. Ballantyne looked at it and saw an attractive blonde girl, expressionless in the standard prison mug-shot.
'I’ll leave out the HIV bit,’ Skinner went on. 'Stow’s only a wee place, and I’m sure the story of Adams and the Yankee dolly-bird will be all over town already. The press coverage will produce a ton of calls, all of them rubbish no doubt, but if the heat makes her run for it, it’ll have served its purpose. If I can’t catch her here, I’d rather she was somewhere else.’
He paused and looked Ballantyne in the eye. 'But even if we do get rid of this girl, that doesn’t solve our problem. She’s a mercenary, and someone’s brought her here to do a job. There may well be others, and we have got to expect other attacks. With that Semtex stuff used up, I’m less worried about more bomb attacks, but there are other things they can get up to. Like picking out more big-name assassination targets, for example. There are two events that really worry me. One is Fringe Sunday, and the other’s the Fireworks Concert in Princes Street Gardens on the last Thursday of the Festival. One’s held in a park, the other takes
place after dark, and they’re both too big for us to give them total protection. So I want to cancel them both.’

Ballantyne sat bolt upright in his chair. “Absolutely not! I’ve made my position, and the Government’s position, quite clear on that. We will do nothing that concedes an inch to these people. They cannot be allowed to claim a single victory through the threat of more violence. These events will go on as scheduled, and it’s the job of your team and of your force to police them. Better still, it’s your own job to catch these perpetrators. You’ve shown me some progress, but now I expect more concrete successes. Protection and detection, that’s what I want to hear from you, Bob – not retreat and vacillation.’
It was Skinner’s turn to jerk upright in his chair. An angry retort formed on his lips, but was stilled as he realised that something else was troubling Ballantyne. By now he knew the man
well enough to read like a book the ups and downs of his personality, and he sensed clearly a second layer of concern, beyond the Festival crisis.

'Alan, is there anything else that you want to tell me?’ he probed.’
The Secretary of State sighed, and slammed his right fist into his left palm.
'Oh damn it! Yes, Bob. Look, I’m sorry I was so sharp there. You’re right, I have another problem. You heard about my trip to London yesterday?’
Skinner nodded in silence.
'My wife has been absolutely devastated by the death of her, shall we say, friend. She regards it as some sort of punishment upon her. The upshot is she announced to me last night that she
intends to resume our marriage. To make a fresh start.’
'Mm,’ said Skinner, 'I can see that might be a problem. I had a talk with Carlie, Alan – for security purposes, you understand. I know the situation.’

Yes, but you don’t know about this.’ He produced a brown manila envelope from his desk drawer and pushed it across to Skinner, who picked it up and shook out a letter.
The salutation was the same as the earlier communications, but the message was different. Skinner read it quickly.

Attached is a photograph of the lady with whom you have
been carrying on a liaison. We have others of you both which
are more explicit, and in which the press will be interested.
Accede to our demands, Ballantyne, or the people of
Scotland will learn what a dishonourable man you are.

Clipped to the letter was a photograph of Carlie leaving Number 6 Charlotte Square by the back door.
'What do they mean, other pictures, Alan?’ 'Haven’t a clue, Bob. Why would they do that, anyway?’
'Keeping up the pressure, Alan. On you, on me, on us all. They know we’re unlikely to ask for media help on this one. I’m afraid you’re just going to have to take it on the chin when they show us what they’ve got.’
Is there nothing I can do?’
'Yes. You have a choice. Announce that your marriage is over and that Carlie is the next Mrs Ballantyne, or – get her out of the country!’