The Angel Tapes (6 page)

“How did you get this number?”

“
AH NOW, BLADE
,” the deep, electronic voice mocked, “
THAT WOULD BE TELLING YOU, WOULDN'T IT
?”

Macken's mind raced, covering all the possibilities he could think of.

His home number: that was in the book. For his mother's benefit; she was continually mislaying her diary, where she kept the numbers of friends and family. But his cellular phone number: who knew that, apart from the garda switchboard operators? Sweetman, Nolan, a handful of the senior members of the force. No friends or relatives, other than his son Peter, whom Blade had warned against using the number without good reason. It was strictly for business use.

“
I HOPE DETECTIVE SERGEANT SWEETMAN IS GOING TO PAY THAT PARKING FINE
.”

It took Macken several seconds to register the fact that his caller was referring to an action performed by Sweetman just minutes before. Christ, Blade thought, he's
here.
He looked around him in panic.

“
I DON'T KNOW HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT IT, BLADE, BUT I THINK IT'S A FUCKING DISGRACE THAT ORDINARY PEOPLE LIKE MYSELF SHOULD HAVE TO PAY OUR PARKING FINES AND THE GUARDS CAN DO AS THEY DAMN WELL PLEASE. I MEAN, WHO'S PAYING YOUR BLOODY SALARIES, ANSWER ME THAT? I'LL TELL YOU WHO: WE ARE, THE POOR TAXPAYERS; THE POOR, UNFORTUNATE NINE-TO-FIVERS. THE WAGE SLAVES. DO YOU THINK THAT'S RIGHT? DO YOU
?”

Keep him talking, Blade thought. Say anything—any old shite.

“Sweetman pays her taxes, too.”

His assistant looked at him in bemusement. Blade wished there was some way she could listen in, make notes. He rummaged in a pocket for his notebook and pencil, clamped the phone between jaw and shoulder.

“
WOULD THAT BY ANY CHANCE BE YOUR GROCERY LIST YOU'RE MAKING, BLADE
?”

Jesus, he sees every bleeding thing!

“Where are you?”

He scribbled a note and passed it to Sweetman. Her eyes opened wide in astonishment.

“
I'M RIGHT HERE, BLADE. YOU CAN'T SEE ME, BUT I CAN SEE YOU
.”

The flux of cars, buses, and cyclists from three northerly and easterly points still converged on the busy intersection, though the rush-hour traffic was beginning to thin out. White-and blue-collar workers were making their way home. Men with briefcases and women in office dress waited on the traffic island for the lights to change; the daring jaywalked, or took shortcuts across the parched grass and flowers on the island. Most of the available parking spaces were still occupied; the bistro across the way at the junction of Clyde Road and the main thoroughfare was opening its doors to the first of its evening customers.

Blade looked about wildly; it was futile to think he could spot his caller.

“
I COULD BE ANYWHERE, EH, BLADE? MAYBE IN THAT FLAT ABOVE THE FLORIST'S
.…”

He was forced to look in that direction.

“
OR DO YOU SEE THAT PARKED VAN … THE RED ONE WITH THE BLACKED-OUT BACK WINDOWS? MAYBE I'M IN THERE. WHO'S TO SAY
?”

“Stop playing games, you fucking bastard!”

“
LANGUAGE, LANGUAGE! AND WHO'S PLAYING GAMES? YE'RE THE ONES DOING THE SUCKING UP TO THE AMERICANS, NOT ME. WHAT DID SEABORG SAY? CAN HE LAY HIS HANDS ON THE TWENTY-FIVE MILLION? IF NOT, THEN HE CAN ALWAYS ASK THE RUSSIANS
.”

“The
Russians?
”

“
AH, YES. DID YOU KNOW THAT MOST OF THE DOLLAR BILLS IN CIRCULATION OUTSIDE OF AMERICA ARE IN RUSSIA? IT'S TRUE. THEY'VE BEEN HOARDING THEM FOR YEARS. SO IF YOU WANT TO BUY ANYTHING DECENT IN RUSSIA THEN YOU HAVE TO PAY IN DOLLARS. MAKES YOU THINK, DOESN'T IT
?”

Blade was silent. His sharp hearing had picked up something: a car horn had sounded behind Angel's words. It was no ordinary horn, but one that played six or seven notes: a snatch of the theme from the old war movie,
The Bridge on the River Kwai
—a tune called “Colonel Bogey.” Like Angel's voice, the notes were greatly distorted, yet Blade had heard the same klaxon “in reality,” undistorted. He heard it again now, close by, as a bright-red Mazda sports car turned onto Elgin Road. He checked the direction from which the vehicle had come, searching for some clue. But the intersection was thronged with people; it was a Friday evening in high summer; not everybody was in a hurry to go home just yet.

Sweetman was out of the car, too, scanning the buildings on all sides for anything that might give the bomber away: a face at a window, the reflection of sunlight on binoculars, anything.

“
GIVE UP, MACKEN! ADMIT YOU'RE BEATEN. I COULD BE ANYBODY; I COULD BE ANYWHERE. D'YOU SEE THAT LAD AT THE RAILINGS OF ROLY'S BISTRO: THE ONE SELLING T-SHIRTS? WITH THE WALKMAN? HE'S SINGING ALONG TO THE MUSIC. OR IS HE? IS THAT REALLY A WALKMAN, OR IS IT A RADIO TRANSMITTER? YOU DON'T KNOW, DO YOU? FOR ALL YOU KNOW IT COULD BE ME
.”

Blade looked.

“
OR THAT TAXI WAITING AT THE CORNER. HOW MANY AERIALS ARE THERE ON THE ROOF? TWO? THREE? THAT COULD BE ME AS WELL
.”

There was a pause.

“
I'M TELLING YOU, BLADE, I MIGHT BE ANYBODY. I'M COMPLETELY INVISIBLE. LOOK: MAYBE I'M THAT LITTLE OLD GRANNY GOO-GOOING TO HER GRANDCHILD IN THE PRAM. YOU NEVER KNOW, BLADE
.”

The jackhammer laugh sounded again.

It was too much for Blade. He knew that he shouldn't have, that it was perhaps the most stupid thing he could have done in the circumstances, that perhaps in doing so he was putting more lives in danger. But he couldn't help it; he'd suppressed the symptoms of his hangover long enough to get through the working day. And what a working day it had been!

Blade lost it. He let go his self-control.

“Fuck
you,
” he said, and broke the connection.

Six

Peter Macken loathed Jim Roche. You can hate or despise or have contempt for a man, a woman—or even a child. But
loathing
is a word that you reserve for creepy, crawling things. When a man is loathed, then he must have done something pretty rotten to deserve it.

Yet most people who knew Jim Roche thought him the most genial of men. Blade Macken and he had been practically friends at one time, drinking buddies. They weren't quite enemies now, but Roche's relationship with Blade's wife, Joan, had soured matters. Blade resented Roche. He found it hard to continue liking the man who was sleeping with his wife, even though Blade and Joan had been estranged for close to nine years.

At nineteen, Peter Macken was growing into the twin of his father. He'd inherited Blade's black hair and blue eyes—and the permanent five o'clock shadow that you associated less with the Celtic races and more with the men of southern Europe.

“Is that you, Blade?”

“Peter?”

“We have to talk. I—”

“Jesus, Peter, how many times do I have to say it?
Don't
call me on this phone unless it's an emergency. It's strictly for work.”

Rarely of late had Peter heard his father so irritated. He guessed he was under considerable strain. Blade had slept badly and was in a foul mood.

“I'm sorry. It was the only chance I had to phone you. I tried you at home but all I got was your answering machine. Everybody's away at the moment. I'm on my own.”

“All right. Fair enough. Now what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

Peter's voice held excitement.

“He left two cases behind. They're full of stuff.”

“Who? Cock Roche?”

“Yeah. You should see what he's got, Blade. It's like James shagging Bond.”

“Has he microphones?”

“That's what I'm saying. Him and Joan won't be back before five. If I nick one, would you be able to show me how to use it?”

Blade was doing his own driving. The big six-cylinder car could have brought him to O'Connell Street in five minutes but now, as ever, he was going at a leisurely pace. It was hotter than yesterday on this, the second day of Angel; he'd turned the air-conditioning up full. It was close to ten in the morning; Sweetman had been at the blast site since nine.

A biker cut across his bows and Macken honked angrily, smacking the cellular phone against the steering wheel in the process, having forgotten it was in his hand. He heard a faint and concerned “Blade?” coming from the instrument.

“Sorry, Peter. Yes, look, why don't you meet me in … What about Graham O'Sullivan's in Duke Street? About two?”

“Cool.”

*   *   *

“D'you see that camera, Blade?” Sweetman said, standing under the smoke-blackened statue of William Smith O'Brien.

Blade looked. The surveillance camera was mounted high on a gable close by the southern entrance to O'Connell Street. It and its twin on the other side of the thoroughfare monitored the progress of the traffic—and its violators.

Recent years had seen an increasing number of the devices on Dublin's streets. They were the eyes of many public and private institutions. They watched people at all times of day and night: people on the street, people entering and leaving buildings, people withdrawing cash from the omnipresent ATMs.

When Dublin's muggers struck, the cameras watched. When Dublin's myriad drugs changed hands, the cameras monitored the transactions. They sometimes saw rape, violence, syringe attacks, and sudden death.

“How long would you say it's been there?” Sweetman asked.

Macken squinted. The camera's housing looked as though it had braved many rainy seasons.

“Long enough. Ten years?”

“That's what I'd say, too.”

The scene of the outrage was still a shambles. What little remained of the bomb had been taken away and, at that moment, teams of forensic experts at Garda HQ in Phoenix Park were subjecting the fragments to exhaustive tests. Captain Fitzpatrick and his men were long gone; now there were genuine utility workers in their place, repairing the damaged underground structures. A single line of traffic trickled past the cordoned-off crater. Glaziers were fitting new panes to the shattered windows. It would be days before this end of Dublin's main street was functioning normally again.

Sweetman pulled her phone from her purse and called Harcourt Square. Within two minutes, she had the information she was looking for.

“It's one of Dublin Corporation's cameras,” she told Blade. “Traffic control. And we're in luck; it's been there since 1991.”

She looked up at the camera again, then back at the bomb site.

“If I'm right, Blade, it's aimed exactly at the part of the street we want.”

Macken looked skeptical. “I don't know, Sweetman. It's an awful long shot, if you want my opinion. I mean, you're asking a lot if you think that that yoke picked up somebody planting a bomb five years ago.”

“I think it's worth a try all the same.”

“And what if he planted it at night? He probably did, too. Sure we'd never recognize the fucker on the tape. He'll just be a dark blur off in the distance.”

“They can do amazing things with computers these days.”

Blade threw her a curious look.

“Jesus, Sweetman, if I didn't know you better, I'd swear you were being sarcastic.”

He turned and watched the traffic move slowly over O'Connell Bridge. In January, scores of paving bricks on the westside had been removed and replaced by transparent tiles of Plexiglas. Below the Plexiglas, their digital mechanism buried in the stone of the bridge, a set of giant numbers glowed greenly, and altered with each passing second. The Millennium Clock was counting down the time left until the end of the century. At that moment it read: 48,167,650 seconds.

*   *   *

“What!” Blade demanded. “Two
weeks?
”

“Well, what did yiz expect?” the technician said. “We can't hang on to these recordings forever, y'know. The tapes cost a mint, for a start, so we reuse them over and over again. If we didn't it'd cost a bleeding fortune.”

Macken and Sweetman were at the headquarters of Dublin Corporation, in the control room that watched over the metropolis. Sweetman was fascinated. She counted more than five hundred monitors, screens the size of a portable television set—all seething with Dublin life at that very moment. Immediate: all this was happening
now;
these were no replays of yesterday's events.

Look there: there was the south end of Parnell Square where it met O'Connell Street. The camera showed the monument and statue of the great statesman Charles Stewart Parnell, his challenging words etched in shiny metal:
“Thus far shalt thou go, and no further.…”
It was a favorite Dublin gag.

And here was the stretch of riverside street that ran past the Four Courts, the place that had seen the trials of the lowly and the mighty of Ireland's tumultuous past. There was a police van stopped outside the gates and uniformed Guards were escorting a man with a blanket over his head into the building. Press photographers' flashguns flashed. Doubly wasteful: the sunshine was blinding and no flash could hope to penetrate the harsh wool of the Mountjoy Prison bed covering.

Another camera looked past the bronze statue of Oliver Goldsmith that flanked the entrance to Trinity College. Its lens took in a pedestrian crosswalk that was perhaps Ireland's liveliest. Even in black-and-white, it allowed Sweetman to observe every detail of the people waiting to cross. It was the time of year when young Spanish students were out in great numbers on Dublin's streets; she didn't need to hear the language; she recognized their animated, staccato gestures. Dubliners ignored them, or tolerated them as a necessary nuisance.

Yet another camera must have been mounted on a tall pole at the entrance to Grafton Street, the city's most fashionable shopping precinct, for it gave a crow's-nest view of a quartet of street musicians entertaining the well-dressed passersby. The strollers barely noticed them, being much more interested in seeing and being seen by their peers.