The Bombmaker (30 page)

abseiling, canoeing and sailing. There was a photograph of a man in his fifties, grey-haired and tough-looking with a nose that had obviously been broken several times. It was Micky Geraghty.

Denham pulled the drawer all the way out. At the back was an Irish passport. Inside was a photograph of a slightly younger Geraghty. Denham riffled through the pages of the passport and found two entry stamps for the United States, both from the early nineties. There was a visa for Australia for the previous year. According to the stamps on the opposite page, Geraghty had spent three months there.

He found a diary in the second drawer of the desk, a big leather-bound volume, with each week running across two pages. Geraghty had used it to record the courses he ran. The last entry was for five months earlier. Two entries before that had been crossed out. From the looks of the diary, business hadn't been good for a long time. Underneath the diary were several letters from companies cancelling their courses, most of them blaming the recession.

Denham could hear McKechnie moving around from room to room upstairs. He pulled open the third drawer. It was full of letters and photographs. Letters from Geraghty's daughter, and photographs of a young woman with a man and two small children. Denham flicked through the letters. Kerry Geraghty had moved to Australia and was now living in Brisbane with her husband. She was pretty, with long chestnut hair and laughing blue eyes.

McKechnie came downstairs and Denham heard him picking up the mail by the front door. Denham twisted around in the chair to look at him as he walked into the study.

'I thought you said the daughter helped him run this place?'

'That's what the file says.'

'She emigrated. A couple of years back by the look of it.'

McKechnie looked pained. 'What can I say? The file's obviously out of date. I guess the Geraghtys weren't considered a high priority.' He dropped the letters on the desk. 'Mail's been piling up for three months,' he said. 'No empty hangers in the wardrobes, toothbrush is in the bathroom, and there's an empty suitcase in the boxroom.'

Denham held up the passport. McKechnie exhaled through pursed lips. 'What do you think?'

'I think we should give the house a good going over. Just in case. Top to bottom. The works.' He pushed himself up out of the chair. At the kitchen end of the hall was a door under the stairs, and Denham tried to open it. It was locked. He turned to look at McKechnie. 'Think your misspent youth can deal with this?'

McKechnie grinned and knelt down by the lock. 'Piece of cake,' he said. He went back outside and returned with the spade, inserted it into the side of the door and pushed against the handle with all his weight. The wood splintered and McKechnie pulled back the door and leant the spade against the wall.

Denham wrinkled his nose. A sickly-sweet smell wafted up from the basement below. He took a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and held it to his face as he groped along the wall for a light switch. He found it and flicked it on. The smell hit McKechnie and he grunted. He went through to the kitchen,

took a towel and held it under a running tap for a few seconds before holding it over his mouth and nose and following Denham down into the basement.

It had a concrete floor and white plastered walls. Along the wall opposite the stairs were shelves lined with climbing equip ment, boating gear and camping supplies. A canoe lay upturned on two wooden blocks, a jagged hole in its bottom. In the far corner was a metal trunk. The two men looked at the trunk.

Denham went over to it and opened it. The smell was a hundred times worse, and Denham turned his head away, gagging.

McKechnie joined him and looked down into the trunk.

The body had been wrapped in black garbage bags and had been bent at the waist so that it would fit. A bare foot protruded from one end of the bundle, black and putrescent, the yellowed nails barely hanging on to the flesh.

'Shit,' said McKechnie, his voice muffled by the wet towel.

'Yeah,' said Denham.

McKechnie went over to the shelving, rummaged through a pile of climbing gear and came back with a piton. He stuck the pointed end into the plastic and ripped a jagged hole in it. He stepped back and pressed the towel harder against his face. 'Jesus Christ,' he said.,

Denham took a couple of steps back. The stench was overpowering, like meat that had gone bad but much, much worse. It had been a long time since he had been confronted by a corpse, but the smell of rotting flesh was something he'd never forget. He moved towards the trunk again, holding his breath.

McKechnie pushed the plastic to the side with the piton,

revealing what was left of the face. The flesh had blown up to the size of a football, the skin bluish-green and split in places,

the eyes milky and staring. The hair was grey and spiky, the only feature that had anything in common with the photographs he'd seen of Micky Geraghty.

'What do you think?' asked McKechnie.

'Hard to tell,' said Denham. 'But yes, I'd say it's him.' He motioned at the body. 'Take the rest off. Let's see what killed him.'

McKechnie used the piton to tear away the black plastic.

The corpse was wearing a denim shirt and corduroy trousers.

No shoes or socks. There were two holes in the shirt, and the material was stained with dried blood. McKechnie tore the plastic away from the corpse's left hand. The little finger and the one next to it had been chopped off. McKechnie grimaced.

'So now we know,' said Denham. He reached over and closed the trunk. 'You tidy up here, Harry. I'll phone Patsy with the bad news.'

Andy was pouring herself a cup of water from the cooler when Green-eyes called her name from the door to the meeting room.

She took the paper cup with her. Green-eyes was wearing a white sweat-shirt with the sleeves pulled up above her elbows,

black ski pants and the ever-present ski mask. On the long table was a black briefcase and a Marks and Spencer carrier bag that Green-eyes had brought with her earlier in the day, when she'd been wearing a pale blue suit. She eyes was holding a videocassette.

'This arrived,' she said, slotting it into the video recorder and switching on the television.

The picture flickered with static, then steadied. It was Katie.

It was a short message, barely twenty seconds long, just saying that she was okay and that she wanted to be back home with her mummy and dad. She looked close to tears, and Andy put her hand up to her mouth as she watched. Katie looked much more scared than she'd appeared in the previous video. Her lower lip was quivering and her voice was shaking. 'It's Monday and I want to go home,' she said. The recording ended and the screen was filled with grey static again.

'She's terrified,' said Andy, staring at the static. 'How can you do that to a seven-year-old girl?'

'She's fine,' said Green-eyes. 'That's all you've got to worry about.' She pulled the black briefcase towards her and clicked the locks open.

Andy was still staring at the blank television screen. 'I want to speak to her.'

'You've just seen that she's okay,' said Green-eyes.

Andy turned to face her. 'She said it was Monday. Yesterday.

But how do I know it was filmed then? You could have done it last week.'

'For Christ's sake, Andrea. Next time we'll have a copy of that day's paper in the shot, okay? Now come over here.' She turned the open briefcase so that Andy could see the contents.

There were four oblong slabs of what looked like bright yellow marzipan, covered in thick, clear plastic. Under the plastic on each block was a white paper label with a black border containing the words EXPLOSIVE PLASTIC SEMTEX-H in capital letters.

Green-eyes took the four blocks out of the briefcase. Underneath were more blocks. Each was about nine by twelve inches,

and an inch thick. In all, the briefcase contained sixteen blocks of Semtex.

'Where the hell did you get this from?'

'That's for me to know, Andrea.' She opened the Marks and Spencer carrier bag and took out two bread rolls as Andy examined the explosive. Green-eyes broke one of the rolls in half. Inside were four silver metal tubes, each about three inches long and the thickness of a pencil, with one end crimped around two white wires that had been coiled together.

She laid the four tubes on the table, put the remains of the roll in the bag and then crumbled the second one apart. It contained four more tubes.

Andrea picked one of them up. It was a Mark 4 electrical detonator, the type she'd used when she made bombs for the IRA, a lifetime ago. Her hand began to shake, and she put the detonator down on the table. Up until she'd seen the Semtex and the detonators she'd half hoped that Green-eyes wasn't serious about building the bomb. Without the proper detonators and initiator, the fertiliser--aluminium mixture was practically inert, and Andy had been clinging to the possibility that the bomb was being built merely as a threat, in the way that she'd often set bombs in Northern Ireland to tie up the security forces rather than to kill and maim. The contents of the briefcase and the bag brought it home to her that she was building a device that was going to be used.

'They're okay?' Green-eyes asked.

Andy nodded.

'You have to build a bomb for us to use tomorrow. A small one.'

Andy's jaw dropped. 'What?'

'Tomorrow. A small bomb. A test.'

'How small?'

'Big enough to blow up a car, say.'

'Why?'

'You don't have to worry about why, Andrea.'

'Is it to kill someone?'

Green-eyes ignored the question. She went over to the video recorder and popped out the cassette. She held it under Andy's nose for a few seconds, then tossed it into the wastepaper basket.

'Tomorrow. And God help you if it doesn't work. Now get to it.'

Patsy Ellis was sitting at the desk looking over a computer printout when Liam Denham walked in. 'Good morning, Liam.

Sleep well?'

Denham grunted. He'd arrived back in London in the early hours and had spent the rest of the night on a couch in an office on the floor above. Before catching a few hours' sleep he'd telephoned his wife and told her not to expect him home for several days. She'd accepted the news without complaint,

though she'd made him promise to keep his cigarette intake to below one packet a day.

One of the three telephones on Patsy's desk rang and she picked up the receiver. She tapped her index finger against her lips as she listened. 'How do you spell that?' she said, picking up a pen and making a note on a pad in front of her. She stood up and banged down the phone. 'Briefing room,' she said. 'We've identified the driver.'

Denham heaved himself up out of his chair and followed her down the corridor. On the way she knocked on several doors and shouted that she wanted everyone in the briefing room. By the time she reached the door there were more than a dozen men and women following in her wake, like chicks in pursuit of a mother hen.

Patsy went over to the whiteboard on which were stuck the photographs of the members of Andrea's active service unit.

'Right, thanks to Chief Inspector Denham we now know who gave up Trevor. An IRA sniper, Micky Geraghty. Someone tortured and killed him several weeks ago, presumably for information about Trevor.'

She paused, then tapped the photograph taken from the video of the van leaving the Co vent Garden carpark. 'Now, this where it gets really interesting. We've identified the driver of the van. One Mark Graham Quinn. An IC1 male, twenty fouryearold career criminal who has so far avoided prison but has been arrested several times on armed robbery charges. He's always walked, usually because witnesses have a habit of retracting confessions before he's due to appear in court. His prints match those on one of the parking receipts at the multistorey carpark in Covent Garden, and our technical boys have a decent match between the video pictures and photographs on file with the Met. Quinn's our boy. His police file will be with us within the hour. We still don't know who the passenger is, but computer enhancement has shown a tattoo on his left forearm.

A lion leaping over a cross of St George.'

There were murmurs of surprise from her audience, and she waited for them to die down before continuing. She folded her arms across her chest. 'So what we have is a career criminal working with what we can assume is a Protestant extremist.

They've kidnapped a former IRA bombmaker.' She raised an eyebrow. 'Quite a mix, I'd say. Lisa, any news about the landscaping company?'

Lisa Davies shook her head. 'Peter's spoken to them and the van isn't theirs. The details on the registration form match and the livery is the same, but it's not their van. He's been over their books and says that they're totally legit. He's working through a list of former employees, but he doesn't hold out much hope. It looks as if they've just set up an imitation. On the van itself, no parking tickets or speeding tickets. We're still checking with the ferry companies, and we're running separate checks with individual police forces to see if it's been involved in any accidents.'

'Okay, keep on top of it. And everyone start putting feelers out on Quinn. Any sniff of him and let David Bingham know immediately. But tread carefully. And if anyone has any thoughts on who might be sporting a lion and flag of St George tattoo, let David and me know straight away.'

Andy soldered the copper wire to the output from the chip in the digital alarm clock, moving her head to the side to avoid the solder fumes. Green-eyes picked up one of the detonators and began to untangle the two white wires that protruded from one end. 'I thought they'd be different colours,' she said.

Andy looked up from the clock. 'What, red and black, like in the movies?'

'I guess so, yeah.'

Andy smiled thinly. 'Doesn't make any difference which way it's connected into the circuit. So there's no need to have different colours.'

'So all that stuff about “shall I cut the black wire or the red wire” is crap?'

Andy bent over the clock again and added a touch more solder to the joint. 'I'll use different-coloured wires in the circuit, but that's purely for my benefit so that I don't make any stupid mistakes. But both wires leading to the detonator are white. Anyway, no bomb disposal man would bother cutting the wires to the detonator. There's no point - all he'd have to do is to pull the detonator out. Besides, they'd be too wary of collapsing circuits.'

'Collapsing circuits? What are they?'

'It's a live circuit with some sort of a relay in it. When the circuit is cut, the relay closes, which in turn activates another circuit, the one containing the detonator. So cutting the wire actually activates the bomb.' Green-eyes continued to unravel the wires. Andy saw what she was doing and gestured with her chin. 'Don't separate the wires,' she warned.

Green-eyes stopped what she was doing. 'What's the problem?

It's not connected.'

'Yeah, but they can go off all the same if there's any electrical interference. You can get a spark jumping between the two wires and it'll go off. You'd lose a hand.'

Green-eyes winced and put the detonator back down on the table. 'It's called the Faraday effect,' said Andy, adjusting the timer and setting the alarm. 'You want this set for five minutes, you said?'

'That's right.'

'That's not long.'

'That's what he said. Five minutes.'

Andy checked the digital read-out. Three hundred seconds.

She showed it to Green-eyes, then showed her which buttons to press to start the timer. She set the clock on the table and they watched it count off the seconds.

'It's the Faraday effect that's responsible for a lot of bombs going off prematurely. Anything that sends off radio frequencies can do it. Police radios, televisions being turned on and off, even household equipment like fridges and stereos.' Andy realised she was talking too quickly, but she wanted to keep Green-eyes distracted so she wouldn't realise that she'd slipped up. There was someone telling her what to do. Someone who'd told her to set the timer for five minutes.

'There was a volunteer killed a while back, in Aldwych,

remember? The bomb he was carrying went off on a bus.'

Green-eyes nodded. 'I remember.'

'The papers said it was because a guy with stereo headphones sat next to him. Turned up the sound, and bang. Blew them all to bits. That's the Faraday effect.'

'Dangerous business,' said Green-eyes.

Andy wondered whether the woman was joking, but the ski mask made it impossible to tell. The Wrestler and the Runner walked into the main office area, chewing on Marks and Spencer sandwiches and laughing.

'It's okay so long as you know what you're doing,' said Andy. She realised that the soldering iron was still on, and she pulled the plug out from the wall. 'This bomb, the small one. It's just a test, right?'

'We want to make sure that the stuff will explode,' said Green-eyes.

'What, you think I'd try to trick you? You think I'd risk my daughter?'

'We just want to be sure, Andrea. A dry run. If you've done your job properly, you've nothing to worry about.'

'Where are you going to set it off?'

'Why?'

'I just wondered.'

'Wondered what? If we're going to kill someone with it?'

Andy nodded.

'We're not, Andrea. Like I said, it's a dry run.' She nodded at the circuit. The digital read-out was still ticking off the seconds.

'If someone was going to defuse this, all they'd have to do is pull the detonator out of the explosive, is that what you said?'

'Sure. If the detonator goes off", it's a relatively small bang.

It'd blow your hand off", but not much more. It has to be in the high explosive to set off the bomb.'

'So they're easy to defuse?'

'In theory. But they've got to get to the fuse first. So you hide it inside the bomb. With booby traps around it. Motion detectors, mercury tilt switches, photoelectric cells. Fake circuits.

That way, they can't look for the fuse. Not easily, anyway. Also,

they won't know if it's on a timer or if it's going to be detonated by remote wire or radio. But an expert can always take a bomb apart. If he has enough time.'

They watched as the digital read-out counted down to zero.

The flashlight bulb winked on. 'Bang!' whispered Green-eyes,

her eyes burning with fanaticism.

Liam Denham wandered into the briefing room. There were two dozen agents in the room, talking into phones or tapping on computer keyboards. He smiled to himself. It was the new face of intelligence work, a face he doubted he'd ever have been able to embrace even if he'd remained in the job. Intelligence gathering had become on office job, a job done by suits, by graduates who drank Perrier and played squash every lunchtime.

But to Denham, intelligence meant people. It meant persuading people to part with information and that involved face-to-face contact. It might mean meeting them in a pub and talking over a few drinks, it might mean getting a bit physical in a locked room, or handing over an envelope packed with cash, but whatever the means, it was all down to people.

Denham took a long drag on his cigarette and blew smoke up to the ceiling, dangerously close to a smoke detector. One of the agents, a man in his twenties with red-framed spectacles and swept-back blond hair, coughed pointedly. Denham held the cigarette behind his back and walked over to where Patsy was sitting at a desk, deep in conversation with Lisa Davies. She looked up, her face flushed with excitement.

'Liam. I think we've got a lead on the van they took Andrea away in. The Transit. It's made more than half a dozen trips into the City over the past two months. The last one three days ago.'

Lisa handed Denham a computer print-out. It was a list of dates and times. The first date was about a week before Katie had been kidnapped. At the top of the print-out was a description of the van and its registration number.

'City of London police,' said Patsy in answer to Denham's unspoken question. 'They record all vehicles entering and leaving the centre.'

'The Bong of Steel?' That was what the press had christened the security arrangements that effectively sealed off the financial district from the rest of the capital.

'I think we can assume that London's the target now,' said Patsy.

Denham handed the print-out back to Lisa. 'What next?'

he asked.

'We're going to have to inform the City of London police and the Met. They can start looking for the van. But until we know exactly where the bomb is, there's not much else we can do. There're millions of square feet of office space in the City we can hardly search it all. Not without tipping the terrorists off that we're on to them.'

Lisa's brow furrowed into deep creases. 'Shouldn't we be warning people, giving them the chance to stay out of the City?'

Patsy stood up, shaking her head. 'Absolutely not. There'd be an uncontrollable panic. The City would grind to a halt.

Billions of pounds would be lost.'

'Maybe that's what they want,' mused Denham.

'What do you mean?' asked Patsy.

'Maybe that's what all this is about. Maybe it's financial and not political.'

Patsy pulled a face. 'Extortion, you mean?'

'If it was political, there are easier places to stage a spectacular.'

'That's assuming it is a spectacular, Liam.'

'Six trips? They must be using the van to transport equipment.

Six trips is a lot of equipment, so I think it's fair to assume it's going to be a big one. They wouldn't go to all this trouble to build a few letter bombs, would they?'

'That's what you think? They're building the bomb onsite?'

Denham took another drag on his cigarette, ignoring the look of annoyance that flashed across Carter's face. She was less than half his age, and Denham figured he'd earned the right to smoke. 'Why else?'

'They could have been dry runs. I wouldn't want to rule anything out at this stage.'

Denham nodded at the print-out. 'They stayed in the City overnight once. They must have been parked up. Doubt they'd do that if it was a rehearsal.'

Patsy considered what Denham had said and then nodded slowly. 'So, it's a big bomb, but you think it's not political? The IPvA bombed the Baltic Exchange and Bishopsgate. And remember Harrods?'

Denham looked around for an ashtray. There wasn't one within reach so he held his cigarette vertically so as not to spill ash on to the carpet. 'That was before the increased security. I don't know. Maybe you're right. At this stage we shouldn't be ruling anything out.'

Patsy looked at her wristwatch. 'Hetherington's going to be here in a few minutes. I'd better brief him.'

'One thing before you rush off,' said Denham. 'The wee girl?'

'What about her?'

'What are we doing to find her?'

Patsy looked uncomfortable, and Denham realised he'd touched a nerve. 'There's not a lot we can do from here,'

she said.

'What about the Garda Siochana? Couldn't they be looking?'

Patsy put a hand on Denham's arm and guided him away from Carter's desk. She took him over to a relatively quiet corner of the room. 'Liam, we can't be making waves over there. If the kidnappers know we're on to them, first of all they might kill the girl, and secondly it'll tip off the bombmakers that we know what they're up to.'

'Maybe not,' said Denham. 'They don't know that we know about Andrea's past. There's no reason that the Garda couldn't be investigating a straightforward kidnapping.'

'But if the men building the bomb realise we're looking for the girl, they'll hardly allow Andrea to telephone her. Or her husband.'

The cigarette in Denham's hand had burnt down to the filter. He looked around for somewhere to put it and spotted a half-empty plastic coffee cup. He dropped the butt in the cup,

then turned back to Patsy. 'We've got to do something, Patsy.