The Angel Tapes (2 page)

He was aware that Orla Sweetman was pounding on the bathroom door.

“Are you dead or what?”

He wished to fuck she didn't have to be so damn noisy about it. Why is it, he wondered, that the sober always take a sadistic pleasure in exploiting the vulnerability of those suffering from a hangover? A perverse strain of Puritanism, that's what it was.

“Be right with you,” he called out.

He squirted some aerosol lather on his cheeks and ran the razor over them. Only when he'd completed the cursory shave did he notice the seven digits scrawled in ballpoint on his left palm. A phone number, now practically illegible. Blade couldn't remember having written it down, or who it belonged to. He shrugged, and scrubbed his palm clean. It was probably not important.

Sweetman was sitting on the sofa in the tiny living room. She'd made two mugs of instant coffee and he accepted one gratefully. It was strong; the first mouthful caused him to shiver. He noticed she'd removed the battery from his cellular phone, lying on the table. She caught his glance.

“No wonder I couldn't raise you,” she said in a tone you might use to reprove a child. “Do you have a spare?”

He gestured vaguely in the direction of his drinks cabinet. Sweetman went to it and rummaged among the whiskey, gin, vodka, and wine bottles, many depleted. Eventually she found the recharger and slotted the fresh battery into the phone. In the meantime Macken had retrieved his jacket from behind the sofa; he took the phone from her and thrust it in his pocket.

There was a slim, yellow cigar pack on the coffee table. Hamlet, the Mild Cigar. Blade picked it up, saw it was empty, and flung it in the fireplace in disgust. It joined more of its fellows lying crumpled and discarded amid the ash, cigar ends, orange peel, and miscellaneous debris that were already encroaching on the hearth. Sweetman did her best not to look.

Blade looked at his watch and switched on the radio. He'd missed the main news item.

“—in Downing Street, dismissed allegations made yesterday by the Liberal Democrats that no trace of explosives had been found on board the hijacked plane. He questioned whether the—”

Macken had silenced the radio.

“What is it about the summer?” he asked. “Everybody goes mad. Imagine, Sweetman: being stuck on that runway for three days in this heat. Desperate altogether.”

“We'd better be off,” she said. “We can pick up a sandwich or something later.”

She drove with all the car windows open. They traveled north from Ranelagh, crossed the canal that shimmered with a heat haze, and headed toward St. Patrick's Cathedral. Macken was grateful to be in the passenger seat because the sun on Sweetman's side was already strong and hot. Following on the heels of a cold, late spring, the July of 1998 was unexpectedly hot and humid; Blade couldn't remember a warmer summer. It altered Dublin in subtle ways, made it somehow more cosmopolitan, more foreign.

Now it must be said that Blade Macken didn't know many cities apart from this one. He'd been in London three times, once in New York, a few times in Stuttgart, and once in Barcelona. (He'd also visited Jerusalem, when assigned to the UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon. But that wasn't so much a visit; more a pilgrimage—when he still believed.)

He didn't know many cities. Yet, when they'd descended the steep hill that ran from ancient Christchurch Cathedral down to the river Liffey, and waited at the lights to allow the heavy traffic to thunder westward, he suddenly remembered a trivial thing. All the cities he'd known had
smelled
the same. Not everywhere, just in certain areas, the places that have always known heavy industry. If he shut his eyes, he could be in any of the cities he'd visited, and it was because of certain odors. They were the odors you associate with diesel exhaust fumes, carbide, and old metal left to dry and disintegrate in the sun. There was nothing human about these smells; they were the smells of a technology that marched almost without human intervention, thumbing its nose at mankind.

The funny thing was, he liked them.

They crossed the Liffey, turned right, and headed into the sun, up along the quays toward the place where O'Connell Street began. Sweetman drove fast—she always did—but this time Macken made no comment; the rush of air from all sides was doing wonders for his head. He didn't flinch when she drove at speed through a gap between two double-decker buses, a maneuver that Blade would barely have attempted on a motorcycle. He sat back and considered the previous night.

His recollections were vague.
Vague?
Who was he codding? Half the bloody night was missing; whole chunks had been erased from his memory. Sweetman had asked if he'd “stayed on.” For the life of him he couldn't remember where he'd been after, say, eleven o'clock. Evidently he
had
stayed on. He wondered about consciousness; if his mind was a blank now, as far as those missing hours were concerned, had it been blank
during
those hours? Had he done things, said things, while in a state of unconsciousness? Christ, it was a frightening thought and Blade dismissed it quickly. On days like this, he was beset by guilt, and by disgust with the man he'd become.

Sweetman had said something.

“Sorry?”

“I said: The cover story is that it was an accident. A gas main.”

“I don't understand.” He really didn't.

She turned to look at him, but had to swerve then to avoid colliding with a taxicab.

“Well, they had to make
some
thing up, with the state visit just around the corner.”

“State visit?”

“Ah, Blade, I swear to God I'd do something about that drinking if I was you. Your mind's gone. Sure it's
only
the president of the United States who's paying us a little visit on the fourteenth.”

*   *   *

A cordon had been thrown across the roadway on either side of the devastation, between the O'Connell Monument and Abbey Street. Hundreds of curious onlookers lined the sidewalk, held in check by uniformed police officers and lengths of taut, plastic tape that read
GARDA—NO ENTRY
. Sweetman showed her ID and they were allowed to pass.

The crater was smaller than Blade had expected, yet the force of the explosion had utterly demolished the taxicab; twisted pieces of metal lay scattered over a wide area. What was left of the engine and gearbox had come to rest in a blackened heap on the traffic island, close under the statue of William Smith O'Brien, the nineteenth-century freedom fighter. One of his stone legs had been sheared from the knee down by the blast. The island's beeches were leafless and scorched, like trees on a battlefield. Other vehicles had taken some of the explosion; they stood abandoned at crazy angles in the roadway and on the traffic island, amid shards of windshield glass, many of them bloodied. Blade had seen bomb damage before and wasn't surprised that every store window within a wide radius had been shattered. The great arched doorway of a branch office of the Bank of Ireland had suffered most; nothing remained of its glass panes.

A camera crew from RTÉ television was filming from a helicopter that made crisscross passes above the rooftops. Newspaper reporters jostled for position behind the tape, battling for the attention of every patrolman who came within shouting distance. The air crackled with two-way radio broadcasts; garda squad cars with flashing lights came and went in quick succession, as if following choreographed instructions.

Yet it wasn't the police vehicles that drew Blade's attention, but five small trucks belonging to Bord Gáis, the gas utility company. They formed a semicircle around the bomb site, effectively blocking the onlookers' view of the activity. An inner cordon of red-and-white plastic traffic cones marked the lip of the crater; they were stenciled with the curious words
DUB GAS
. A dozen men in hard hats and Bord Gáis overalls were assessing the destruction; some communicated by walkie-talkie; others made notes on clipboards. To the bystander, all this might have appeared perfectly normal: the explosion had, for all intents and purposes, been caused by a leaking gas main. But Blade had recognized two of the men in hard hats. He'd last seen them near Tyre in Lebanon, wearing the blue beret of the United Nations. They were soldiers.

“Macken,” a voice behind him called out, “where the Jayziz have you been? We've only been trying to reach you for over an hour, y'know.”

Blade rounded on the man with whom he shared both the running of the department and an intense, mutual dislike.

“Asleep. What's it to you, Nolan,
where
I've been? And who's this ‘we' when they're at home?”

Detective Superintendent Charles Nolan was unfazed.

“Duffy, the DC, everybody. Jayziz, Macken, you look like shit, y'know. What's the—”

But Blade and Orla Sweetman were already moving away toward a knot of men in business suits and a gray-haired police officer with braid on his uniform. Assistant Commissioner Duffy acknowledged them with a nod.

“Glad you could make it, Macken,” he said without a trace of sarcasm. “Look, I'm putting you in charge of this investigation. By rights we should have Nolan on it, too, but it's—”

“Now hold on a minute, sir!” Nolan was not a happy man. “This is very high-handed altogether. I mean, who was doing all the donkey work this morning while Macken here was catching up on his bleeding beauty sleep?
And
it's me day off as well, y'know.”

“I know, Charlie,” Duffy said. “And I appreciate it, believe me. But you have your hands full with that Delahunt business. If you must know, I've had her bloody husband breathing down my neck again. He's out to make trouble, Charlie, and he can do it, too. To the both of us.”

Nolan, sullen, looked up quickly.

“Leave this to Blade, Charlie. I'm relying on you to sort out what exactly went wrong in Delahunt's house. God, you'd think it was
our
fault, the way he carried on about his bloody alarms. Get your friend Roche in, if you want; but let's have some results soon or there'll be hell to pay.”

Nolan nodded, cowed; he mumbled something and left.

Duffy looked relieved and turned to Macken. “I believe you know Captain Fitzpatrick.”

A tall man wearing gas-utility overalls extended a hand.

“How are you, Blade?”

“Never better, Tom,” Macken lied. “I thought you were still in the Middle East.”

“They pulled us out. Not before time either. I got transferred to the Engineering Corps in May.”

Blade gestured toward the hard hats. “Are those your lads?”

“They are. But you'd never think it now, would you?”

“Tell them not to work too hard, or they'll blow their cover.”

Captain Fitzpatrick smiled briefly, then was serious once more. He turned to the uniformed Guard.

“Perhaps the commissioner can explain the situation better than me.”

“We actually know very little at this stage, Blade,” Duffy said. “As you can see, we're attempting to keep the lid on things for the time being. I had the press office put out a statement a little while ago, blaming it on a gas leak.”

“So I heard. But will the press fall for that one, sir?”

“I hope so, I hope so. But I don't see why they shouldn't. It wouldn't be the first time something like that has happened. I've known half a block of flats to be wrecked by some absentminded housewife with a lighted match. Gas is volatile stuff.”

“I hope you're right, sir. Has anybody claimed responsibility for the bomb?”

“Not yet, no.”

“Who do we think it is? The UVF? The UFF?”

The assistant commissioner shook his head grimly.

“It
could
be loyalist paramilitaries—and we're not ruling that out. It's just that this isn't the way they usually work.” He pushed his peaked cap a fraction higher. “To be honest, it's not the way
anybody
usually works; that's the devilish part of it.”

“I don't follow you, sir,” Blade said.

“No. How could you? The fact of the matter is, Macken, it wasn't a car bomb.”

Blade looked blank.

“Somebody,” Duffy said, “planted a bomb under the surface of the street.”

“How in Christ's name did they manage
that?
”

“That's what we're trying to find out, Blade,” Fitzpatrick said. “But there's no doubt that it was a subterranean explosion. I'm telling you, if it'd been a surface blast, then half of these buildings would have been demolished. We're talking about a
very
big bomb here. I'd say it was about six or seven pounds of Semtex. Have a look at this.”

He led the way to the pit in the road and Blade peered over the rim. The bomb had gouged out a hole at least fifteen feet deep. There was pulverized stone, shattered ancient bricks, lengths of fused metal, bent and twisted utility pipes. He took Fitzpatrick's point; had the bomb exploded above ground, the destruction would have been enormous. Seven pounds of Semtex could have taken out an entire city block.

Macken rubbed his chin. “Okay,” he said, “let's say you're right and that somebody managed to plant a bomb down there. When could they have done that? They'd have had to break the street open.” He looked about him at the broad thoroughfare: the traffic, the hundreds of Dubliners on foot, whose numbers, at this time of year, are swelled by a million tourists. “We're talking about the main street of Dublin!”

“If it wasn't broken open already,” Sweetman said.

Duffy threw her a sharp look. “That's exactly the theory we're working on, Miss … er…?”

“Sweetman, sir. Detective Sergeant Sweetman of the Special Detective Unit.”

“Sweetman … Sweetman. Weren't you in Mapping at one stage?”