The Operative (35 page)

‘Yes,’ Vicky said, sitting up and preparing herself to be entertained.

‘Okay – a story to glorify war. You heard of a place called Northern Ireland?’

‘I’ve heard of Ireland, obviously. Didn’t you guys have some problems over there a few years ago?’

‘Some. Well, one day I was in Belfast railway station – Belfast is the capital city of Northern Ireland. It was during the rush hour and, much like any main-line station you can imagine, it was pretty crowded. People were getting on and off trains while hundreds of others watched the boards showing departure times,
destinations, platforms, cancellations – that sort of stuff.

‘In the middle of the station was a lone British soldier on guard duty, wearing his camouflage outfit and carrying a rifle over his shoulder. He wasn’t really being a soldier right then, more like playing the part of a police officer. He was eighteen years old, fresh from his basic training, and he’d been in Ireland all of three weeks. He was a nice young lad, hadn’t achieved much in school, never made the school soccer team despite playing his heart out at every game, but he wanted to make something of himself and so he joined the army. He was the kind of kid that bullies would pick on in school and he hoped that the army would toughen him up. Not that he wanted to be a soldier all his life, he didn’t really know what he wanted, but he felt it was the best start that he could give himself, considering his limited opportunities.

‘His mum thought the army was a good choice but she didn’t want him to go to Northern Ireland because of the troubles. The way the news told it there were bombs going off every minute and terrorists sniping at soldiers all over the place – which was an exaggeration, though the place had its dangers for sure. Anyway, off he went to Ireland and found his first post as a sentinel in Belfast railway station.

‘That afternoon, as he was standing around and looking forward to his break in an hour or so, a couple of mothers with pushchairs and toddlers were heading across the station and when they saw the soldier they began to abuse him. They were Catholics and he represented the British occupiers who’d been murdering their kind for centuries. Their children were being brought up to hate the British and, well, if the young English soldier had been asked to explain why, he would have been pushed to answer. He didn’t really know what the conflict was about in truth but he was a soldier and it was his job to obey orders. He’d been excited initially about going to Northern Ireland but that soon wore off after he got there.

‘Anyway, the mothers could see that he was just a boy and nervous at that and started telling him to get out of their country. Then one of them spat at him, which was immediately copied by one of the children and another child ran up to him and kicked him in the leg. The soldier wasn’t sure how to handle the situation since he’d never been told what to do in such circumstances and so he just stood there and took the abuse.

‘Suddenly a shout rang out somewhere in the station close by. It was a single loud cry from a man in the crowd. The soldier never saw him nor made out what he shouted. Then he saw an object bouncing along the station floor towards him. It was a hand grenade, no bigger than a tennis ball. He’d used them once in training and since then he’d never seen another. But he knew instantly what it was.

‘The grenade rolled to a stop a few feet away from the young soldier, right in front of the children and their mothers. Time slowed to a crawl for him as he watched the evil device hissing on the ground, the children looking at it, frightened, though they did not know why. They were fixed to the spot as if in a trance. The mothers knew what it was all right and moved to grab their children. But it was obvious to the soldier that they would never get out of the way in time. He probably never knew what made him do it – an instinct, perhaps. You see, he was a good man with no malice in his heart and far too young to be a cynic. He dived past the children and threw himself onto the grenade as it went off.

‘I arrived a few seconds after the explosion and saw the boy lying there, face down, unmoving, smoke drifting out from beneath him. The two mothers were holding their frightened children and staring at the soldier in stunned silence. Then one of them got to her knees and crawled to the body and reached out to it. She shook the boy and said something, then crept closer and remained on her knees by his side and began to cry. She lowered her head
and started to shake the dead boy while chanting something. I walked closer as soldiers came running across the station concourse and I could hear that she was asking him to forgive her. She kept saying it over and over again: Forgive me. Dear God. Forgive me. She was the last person he had seen alive and she had spat at him, and then he had saved her children’s lives and at that moment it was beyond her comprehension … They gave the boy’s mother a medal, I think.’

Vicky was trying to fight back a tear. But she failed and touched her eyes with her napkin.

Stratton took a sip of his coffee and stared at his cup after replacing it in its saucer.

‘I’ll never ask you to tell me a war story again,’ Vicky said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise what you were trying to say.’

‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ he said.

‘I think you did, but I deserved it.’

They sat in silence for a while before leaving the restaurant and catching a taxi back to Santa Monica. Stratton had asked the cab to take Vicky home first but she insisted on dropping him off since he lived on the way. When the cab pulled up outside Stratton’s apartment block she climbed out with him.

‘You sure about this?’ he asked as the taxi pulled away.

Vicky looked over her shoulder. ‘Too late. Taxi’s gone. I’d like to come up if that’s okay – unless you don’t want me to.’

Stratton smiled and put his arm around her. They walked into the building.

Across the road, in the darkness beyond the palm trees in the park, a man who was watching them pulled a cellphone from his pocket and brought up a number.

The call was answered by a man in the back of a saloon car parked in the alleyway behind Stratton’s apartment building. He listened for a moment, disconnected the call and dialled a number.
‘He just arrived with some chick,’ he said in a Chicago accent to two men in the front.

On the roof of a three-storey building behind the apartment block a man squatting behind a row of air-conditioning units answered his cellphone. Then he crouched lower and concentrated on the windows of Stratton’s apartment across the alley and a floor higher than him.

The elevator arrived on the fourth floor and Stratton and Vicky stepped out of it. There was no one else around and as they walked towards his door Vicky stopped to enjoy the view from the corridor window.

‘This is beautiful,’ she said. ‘You can see all the way up the coast to Malibu. Do you have this view from your apartment?’

‘No,’ he said, coming alongside her and taking in the view himself.

The moon was up, half of it at least, its white light bathing the sea between the tall palms. Vicky moved close to Stratton and looked up at him. He faced her and moved his lips to meet hers. They kissed gently, her hand coming up to touch his face.

Their breathing quickened. Stratton moved back and held Vicky’s hand as he retrieved his key from his pocket with his free hand and led her towards his door. As he reached it he let go of Vicky and gripped the doorknob while inserting the key into the lock. He stopped before turning it. Some kind of soapy film was smeared on the doorknob. He put his hand to his nose and smelled it. Marzipan. He tensed as every one of his senses screamed to full alert. There was only one thing he knew that smelled of marzipan – besides marzipan itself – and that was plastic explosive.

‘What is it?’ Vicky asked.

Stratton shot a glance up and down the empty corridor, then took hold of her hand again. ‘Come with me,’ he said softly as he led her quickly back down the corridor.

She could sense the tension in him. ‘John, what is it? Are you going to tell me?’

‘Just stay there,’ Stratton said as he steered her around the corner to the small alcove in front of the elevators where there was also an emergency-exit door. Beside it was a small table with a pot of plastic plants and an ashtray on it. Stratton took his notebook from his pocket, tore out part of a sheet, wiped his hand, went to the small table and, keeping his back to Vicky, undid the fly of his trousers and peed into the ashtray. She leaned a little to try and look past him, wondering what on earth he was doing.

Stratton dipped the paper in the urine, shook off the excess liquid, took a lighter from his pocket, lit it and held the flame under the paper. As the paper began to turn purple it crackled, giving off tiny sparks. Stratton dropped it in the urine and went back to look at the door. The small test had proved his suspicions correct. Someone who had handled plastic explosives had been in his apartment.

Stratton’s immediate fear was for Vicky but he couldn’t let her go until he knew precisely where the focus of the attack was. Someone wanted to kill him and he had to assume that they were professionals and had a back-up plan – which meant that Vicky was in danger whether or not the apartment was the target.

He opened the fire-exit door carefully and looked up and down the dingy, poorly lit metal and concrete stairwell. There was no sign of life and he came back to Vicky’s side.

‘Stay here. If I tell you to go I want you to take those stairs down to the bottom and then get away from the building as fast as you can.’

‘What’s wrong? You’re scaring me.’

‘Please, Vicky. Trust me.’

She looked at him strangely but there was nothing else that Stratton could say. ‘Just stay here and don’t move,’ he said, holding
her shoulders firmly. Then he released her and walked back down the corridor to his apartment.

He took out his key, placed it in the lock, turned the handle slowly and pushed open the door just enough to allow his fingers inside. He ran his hand along the top of the door, down the edge and along the bottom. If there was a trigger, whoever laid it would have had to be able to set it and remove their hand before closing the door. Stratton could feel nothing unusual and so he opened the door carefully and looked around the immediate area. He dropped to his knees and crept inside, all the time scanning for anything out of place. There were several types of improvised explosive devices or IEDs that could be used in a situation like this. Mechanical triggers could be either a ‘push’, activated by pushing something like a door against it, a ‘pull’ such as a trip wire, a pressure-activated mechanism set off by, for example, stepping on something, or a pressure-release contrivance detonated by lifting a weight off the device. Another type was a command-detonation charge such as a radio-controlled unit.

Stratton moved carefully through the room, keeping low in the darkness. The moonlight shone through the windows, which helped a little. But he did not want to turn on the lights in case a bomb was wired to the electricity or was light-sensitive. Also, someone could be outside, waiting for a sign that the apartment was occupied.

The living room and adjoining kitchen appeared to be clear as far as he could tell from his position on the floor. He kept on his hands and knees as he headed towards the bedroom and bathroom. As he reached his bedroom door he immediately noticed that the counterpane on the bed was not as neatly spread as he had left it. He lowered his face to the floor. He could not see underneath the bed since the counterpane touched the carpet on all sides so he crawled forward and slowly raised an edge to reveal a box set squarely beneath the bed frame. It was sealed, had no
protrusions and in its location was unlikely to have a mechanical switch since he was clearly not expected to find, let alone touch it.

Stratton moved a little closer, stretched out a hand, gently took hold of the box and slid it out from under the bed. It was a shoebox with no lid and inside was a large cube of white plastic explosive wired to a battery and a cellphone. There was a good pound and a half of the stuff, Stratton estimated, enough to completely gut the room and shred anyone inside. It was a classic terrorist device of moderate sophisti cation, intended to detonate when the cellphone was called. It told him a little about its creator insofar as it had been handmade in a garage rather than mass-produced in a factory.

Stratton disconnected one of the wires from the detonator, thereby rendering the device safe, and took a moment to consider his options. ‘Who?’ and ‘Why?’ were the burning questions. The most obvious links were with the two Albanians he had killed. How their colleagues had found him was the next question. He had slipped up somewhere – seriously.

Thinking about the cellphone Stratton realised it was highly likely that someone was watching the apartment, waiting to dial the number and detonate the device. Stratton had obviously not been seen entering the apartment itself, suggesting that the bomber was outside somewhere and watching the windows for the lights to go on or some other sign of life inside.

Stratton crept around the bed to the window and raised himself sufficiently to see over the sill. It was not a good enough position and he moved to the edge of the window, got to his feet and stood back. A brief scan of the nearby rooftops through the blinds revealed a man doing a bad job of concealing himself behind a row of air-conditioning units and looking in Stratton’s direction. The man then put something to his ear, a cellphone perhaps, and moved to the parapet to look below.