The Watchman (25 page)

Widdowes slowly nodded.

"Right. Got you.

"Is there a pub in the downstream direction? Some reason you might be going that way?"

"There's an off-licence in Martyr Worthy. If I come back ten minutes later with a Thresher's bag..

"Good enough. Now I'd suggest you get upstairs. Maybe take a cup of tea to the two cops give you an excuse to brief them about looking useless."

"What will you do?"

"I'll be OK, don't worry. See you at seven.

Widdowes nodded and smiled wryly.

"I'll tell you one thing," he said.

"If this guy Meehan succeeds in taking me out there are going to be some long faces at Thames House."

Alex looked at him.

"Angela Fenwick, for a start," continued Widdowes.

"She's in line for the directorship, that's why the deaths of Fenn and Gidley have pissed her off so royally. If she loses any more of her desk officers it's going to start looking very much like carelessness. Her star and that of her familiar could well start to decline."

"Her familiar?" asked Alex, surprised by the bitterness and vehemence of his tone.

"Dawn Bloody Harding. Zulu Dawn. Dawn of the Living Dead. From the moment she joined the service she hitched her wagon to Angela's that's why her progress has been so meteoric. For as long as Angela's riding high, Dawn's up there with her. But if Angela falls, then Dawn goes down too. Don't overlook the political side of all this, chum. You've been brought in to safeguard the upward mobility of a political cabal."

"I'm here to safeguard you, George. The rest doesn't interest me.

Widdowes nodded philosophically and shrugged.

"I'm sorry. You're right it's not your worry. Getting cynical in my old age, that's all."

When he had gone Alex unrolled his sleeping bag on the camp bed, lay down and stared at the cellar's plasterboard ceiling. Eventually he closed his eyes. It was going to be a long night and he would do well to get some rest. In his pocket, his mobile throbbed.

"Yeah?"

"It's Dawn Harding."

"Zulu Dawn!"

There was a silence.

"Where did you get that name?" she asked accusingly.

"Have you been ..

"It's one of my favourite films," said Alex breezily.

"How are you?"

"Fine," she said curtly.

"Is everything OK down there?"

"So far, yes.

"How's George holding up?"

"He's under a bit of stress but he's keeping it all together."

"You think Meehan will come tonight?"

"Might. Bird in the hand and so on."

There was a pause.

"Are you ... OK?" she enquired.

"Do I detect a note of concern?" asked Alex, unable to keep the smile from his voice.

"No, you don't!" she snapped.

"I simply need to know you're in good shape. I don't want any more corpses on the pathologist's slab."

"Don't worry," said Alex, the vision of Dawn suspended high above the ground in her scarlet underwear flashing past his eyes.

"I'll keep myself in good shape for you."

She disconnected. Alex returned his gaze to the ceiling and his smile faded. He had ninety minutes in which to rest up. He closed his eyes.

Shortly after seven Widdowes woke him. The MI-5 officer was carrying a plateful of cheese and ham sandwiches, a Granny Smith apple, a Mars bar and a two-litre bottle of still mineral water.

"Sorry," he said.

"It's not quite up to Gordon Ramsay standard. I assumed you'd want mustard on the ham?"

"Yeah. Great."

"I meant to ask. What do you want to do about washing?"

"I don't," said Alex.

"You can smell toothpaste and soap on the air. I won't be using either until Meehan's dead. And hopefully I won't be needing a crap till then, either. As far as pissing's concerned, well, from time to time you'll find this Evian bottle on the stairs."

"Got you," said Widdowes without enthusiasm.

Alex ate and drank for five minutes in silence, then loaded the Glock's magazine with nineteen rounds and slapped it into the butt. Pointing the handgun at the wall, he pressed the button activating the laser sight. A small red dot appeared on the wall, scribbling fine lines of light as Alex moved the weapon. Satisfied, he thumbed the system off again. Then he stripped, pulled on the wet suit and buckled the sheathed Recon knife round his calf. The Glock went into a plastic thigh holster on a lanyard. Blackening his face and hands with the cam-cream, he pulled up the neoprene hood of the wet suit. The clothes that he had just been wearing went into the waterproof stuff sack that had previously held the wet suit. The boots and fins went into a carrier bag.

"OK," said Alex.

"Let's do it. What's the light like outside?"

"Going fast," said Widdowes.

They made their way back to the garage, Alex climbed into the boot and Widdowes drove off, stopping briefly to converse with the uniformed men at the gate. The ensuing drive took no more than three minutes, but took them well out of the sight of anyone who had been observing the house. Quickly, watching out for other cars, Widdowes let Alex out of the boot, handed him the stuff sack and drove on. The whole operation had taken no more than ten seconds.

Crouching in the cow-parsley on the river bank, Alex peered around him in the fading evening light. Above him was the road, which was narrow and unlikely to see too much traffic between now and tomorrow morning. To his left was the road bridge. He could just make out a narrow walkway beneath this, but access to it was largely obscured by nettles, elder and other roadside vegetation. Sliding down the bank, Alex pushed through undergrowth into the darkness beneath the bridge and cached the stuff sack of clothing there. Attaching the weight belt round his waist, he undid the Farlow's boots and tied them to the belt by the laces, then pulled on the jet fins and lowered himself into the water.

The carrier stream was about six feet deep at the edge and deeper, he guessed, in the middle. Despite its smooth surface, the current was considerable. Cautiously, he began to move forward. The boots at his waist dragged a little, but this was more than compensated for by the powerful jet fins, just as the buoyancy of the wet suit was compensated for by the weight belt. With it he was able to move silently with only his head above the surface, without it he would have been wallowing about on the surface, leaving a wake like a speedboat.

Tucking in to the side of the river, trailing his arms at his side, he concentrated on moving with absolute silence and the minimum of water disturbance. After fifty yards he passed a high fence, which he guessed was the boundary of the Longwater estate. A few hundred yards, Widdowes had said. He swam silently on. At one point the river shallowed, running over a broken bottom no more than a couple of feet deep and Alex was forced to leopard-crawl six inches at a time against the weight of the tumbling water. With relief, however, he soon felt the river bed falling away beneath him.

After a hundred yards, he grabbed on to an overhanging root, swung himself into the bank and took stock. Soon he would be coming into the area that he had to assume was under night sight surveillance. Meehan might be several hundred yards away, scoping out the property from a concealed hide, or he might be much closer.

He could be lying up in the river as little as fifty yards upstream. From now on Alex would have to move with extreme caution.

A couple of yards ahead there was a faint splash. A small sound, but enough to set Alex's heart racing. Something had been thrown or dropped into the water.

Was Meehan waiting on the bank above him? Had he seen him? Shrinking into the knotted roots beneath the river's mud and chalk banks, Alex froze, his heart pounding. Slowly, an inch at a time, he reached for the knife, withdrew the razor sharp blade from the scabbard, held it inches beneath the surface. And then, against a faint patch of light, he saw the questing head of the otter, cutting an arrowhead wake through the water. Going hunting, he guessed with dizzying relief When he had caught his breath he moved on, keeping hard in to the bank, driving against the current with the fins. Through the trees to his left he could see the vast dim bulk of Longwater House, now, and ahead of him the lights of the Lodge. What was Widdowes up to? he wondered. In the short time they had spent together he had developed a sympathy for the man. Not much in Widdowes' manner suggested it now, but he'd probably been a competent enough operative in his time. Box's Belfast agent handlers were not fools, for the most part (although one or two of them were and Michael Bettany had been a traitor too, jailed for spying for the Soviets), nor were they cowards. No one who had seen what had happened to Fenn and Gidley, though, would be anything but afraid.

Alex was suddenly filled with a loathing of Meehan. They all moved in a dirty world, that much was accepted, but to do what he had done, well, that was something else. Chopping bits of people's faces off, hammering nails into them.. .

What the last hours of those two poor bastards from the FRU must have been like was beyond imagining.

Alex moved silently upriver in the deep black shadows beneath the bank. He was invisible now, a creature of the night. He came to a halt beneath the slender curving trunk of a willow, a place he had noted when he visited the house with Dawn. Above him was the yellowish haze of the lights from the Lodge, five to six yards ahead of him was the silhouette of the reed-bed and the bushes through which he had calculated that Meehan would make his exit.

Feeling beneath the water, Alex found a sturdy root and, quickly exchanging his fins for the Farlow's boots, attached the fins to the root by their straps so that they hung in the current a foot beneath the surface. Could he find them again? Yes, they were just below this willow root. Should he take the weight belt off? He tried it, felt himself rising in the water and hastily reattached it. Where to go? Inching forward, his feet found a shelf that would take his weight. Gratefully he sensed the thick felt soles of the fishing boots grip the slippery chalk. If he'd settled for commando-soled boots, as he'd originally considered, he would have had a hard night ahead of him. His right arm found a corresponding elbow of willow root to hook through. He was now facing the current and the direction that Meehan would come. Between him and Meehan's projected exit point was a clump of sedge and the outer skirt of the willow's foliage. As long as he kept still, he would be invisible, even if Meehan was using night sights.

For his part, Alex had decided against night sights. Partly because of their unwieldiness in the water, partly because the intensified green images would compromise his night vision. He knew what he was looking for and he knew where to look. Even when the lights went off in the house there would be a close to full moon. And it would be when the lights went off that Meehan would come.

For an hour Alex remained there, unmoving, his eyes scanning the river ahead of him. In low light conditions, he knew, you saw better with your peripheral than your direct vision. Very slowly, a limb at a time, he kept himself moving underwater, gently contracting and relaxing his muscles. Partly to stave off cold and avoid cramping, which despite the wet suit was a very real threat, and partly in order to remain alert.

Of all the ambushes that Alex had ever set up, this was by far the least satisfactory, in that he was operating alone and without back-up. He would go for a heart shot as Meehan pulled himself out of the water, he decided, when both his hands were occupied. The silenced double tap would punch the life out of the former agent before his brain had had a chance to take in what was happening. He'd be dead before his knees bent and the Watchman's rule of terror would be over.

The first man Alex had killed had been during the Gulf War in 1991.

He had been part of a four-man Sabre team tasked to knock out a Scud missile dump at al-Anbar, west of Baghdad. Under the command of an NCO named Neil Slater they'd been choppered in by night and left to forage for cover. The cold had been extreme they'd been sent in wearing little more than lightweight 'chocolate chip' battle dress and shirts and there had been no cover of any kind. Within the hour they were frozen to the bone. The four of them Alex, Neil Slater, Don Hammond and Andreas van Rijn had made a quick recce and Slater had made the decision to lie up for the rest of the night in a disused berm a couple of hundred yards from the dump. None of them had slept; instead they had huddled together against the cold and the wind-borne snow that whipped mercilessly about them.

The next morning, half-frozen, they had seen a convoy of Iraqi T-55 tanks rumbling towards them the most terrifying sight Alex or indeed any of them had ever witnessed. Desperate, they had buried themselves in the detritus at the bottom of the berm Iraqi ration tins, ammunition boxes, rubble, old tyres, discarded cam netting and the decaying corpse of a goat and prayed. The Iraqi tank crews, anxious to relieve themselves after several hours in their T-55s, had surrounded the berm. The Sabre team were pissed on, they were shat on and Alex's thigh was agonisingly burnt by a discarded cigarette end, but they were not discovered. And eventually, after four ghastly hours, the tanks had rumbled away into the desert.

As soon as the SAS team had judged it safe to move Slater had radioed in the tanks' position and direction of travel, and called in the air strike on al-Anbar. Its purpose was twofold: to destroy the missiles grouped there for transportation to mobile missile launchers and to kill a man known as Marwan.

"Marwan', to the Allied intelligence forces based in Saudi Arabia, had for several weeks been little more than an occasionally occurring code name in the welter of enemy radio traffic. It was thought from the contexts in which he was mentioned that he might be a senior technician of some sort. Then an intercepted transmission between the al-Anbar base and Baghdad command had suggested that "Marwan' might be a man known to the Allies as "Guppy' an Iranian scientist who had changed sides during the Iran-Iraq war and now ran the missile research plant at Sa'd 16, in north Iraq. It was the Sa'd 16 team who had developed the alHusayn the long-range version of the Russian Scud that could be fitted with chemical and biological warheads. According to the transmission, "Marwan' was due at the al-Anbar base that evening, suggesting that the missiles might be about to be checked over and dispersed.