The Watchman (40 page)

Prepare. Breathe. Only the target exists. Hear nothing, feel nothing, see nothing. Only the target.

Without warning, Alex propelled himself forward. He rolled once, his wounded back smashing with agonising force into the granite rock face, then the air screamed and ruptured as rounds from the MP5 impacted around him. The back-up man's first shots had been fired from the hip and as Alex tightened on the trigger of the Glock -foresight, backsight, focus, exhale he saw the familiar movement as the weapon was pulled to the shoulder.

The back-up man had just closed his left eye in preparation for the aimed killing shot when both the Glock's 9mm rounds punched through his chin and thence his cerebellum, spraying the rocks behind him with red and ending his life in less than a third of a second.

Dawn's Walther was swinging towards Alex and the back-up man was still falling to the blood-shined granite when Meehan fired. The single round took Dawn in the centre of the chest,

dropping her to her knees as if praying. As her Walther fell from her fingers, Meehan instinctively lowered the Browning for the double tap to the head.

Alex signalled for him to hold his fire and scrambled back up the hillside towards her.

"Dawn?" he said quietly, making safe and pocketing the Walther.

"Can you hear me?"

But Dawn Harding was very close to death. Meehan's shot had taken her through the sternum, and oxygenated lung blood was frothing at her mouth.

"Dawn?" he repeated, feeling beneath her T-shirt for the sucking chest wound and sealing it with his thumb.

"Dawn!"

She raised her head and managed a painful smile, showing reddened teeth.

"Tell Angela .. ." she began.

"Tell her I ..

She fell silent, and tears ran down her cheeks. Then the blood came with a rush, pouring from her mouth on to her chest, and her head sank down and she died.

Switching off all feeling, Alex wiped his Glock on his shirt and placed it between Dawn's unresisting fingers. Taking the Browning from Meehan, who handed it over without hesitation, he cleaned it and placed it in the dead back-up man's right hand. The scenario wouldn't hold up for very long, but any investigation would lead the police straight back to MIS, at which point the case would disappear from the register anyway.

He turned to Meehan.

"Thank you," he said.

"She was going to kill you," said Meehan quietly.

"Don't go through the rest of your life wondering."

"I won't," promised Alex.

The ghost of a smile touched Meehan's pale features.

"We'd have made a good team, you and I," he said.

Alex looked at the man who had shot Dawn Harding.

"We probably would," he said emptily.

"How badly are you hurt?"

"Does that make any difference to anything?"

Alex didn't reply. Staring over the valley he watched as sunlight and shadow raced each other across the flank of Fan Fawr. Then, taking the MP5 from where it had fallen beside the dead MI-5 agent, he searched the corpse for spare magazines.

Finally he turned back to Meehan.

"Do you think you could ride a motorcycle?" he asked.

THIRTY

The members' writing rooms at the Carlton Club are reached by means of a corridor leading off the Small Library, and overlook St. James's Street. There are four of them, and each contains a desk surmounted by a blotter and a sheaf of the club's writing paper. The walls are lined with books, and in reading room number four the majority of these are blue-bound records of the club's minutes and proceedings from the Second World War to the present day.

It was now a fortnight since the events on the western slope of Pen-y-Fan.

Walking a half-mile up the road from the wrecked BMW, Alex had stolen a battered Fiesta from outside a hill walkers hostel, driven to north London an area with which he had no connection booked into a bed-and-breakfast hotel in Tottenham under a false name, and spent the days that followed allowing his wounds to heal and planning his next move. His single trip into Central London had been an underground journey to Oxford Circus to withdraw cash from a dispensing machine and he had been back in Tottenham within the hour. On the tube he had read the Daily Telegraph's elaborate account of the "Civil Servant love tryst' that had 'ended in tragedy' in the shadow of the Black Mountains.

The shot that had creased Alex's back had been acutely painful for several days and would certainly leave a spectacular scar, but had not required any medical attention that he himself had been unable to administer with the help of Dettol and bandages. The knife cuts, with their stitches finally removed, were now no more than pale and occasionally uncomfortable reminders of the fight outside George Widdowes' house. On his thirteenth day at the bed and breakfast he had rung the offices of MIS.

As Alex entered number four reading room at the Carlton Club, he heard the clock in the library strike 11 a.m. Angela Fenwick rose from the desk facing the window, turned and extended her hand to him.

"Captain Temple," she said, nodding dismissal to the elderly club servant hovering at the door.

"Right on time."

Alex inclined his head, shook her hand in silence and seated himself in the proffered armchair, a tautly upholstered object of oak and azure leather. Fenwick herself resumed her place at the desk, angling her chair towards Alex. She looked older, thought Alex. Sharp lines had been incised at the corners of her mouth and her skin had a dry, desiccated quality that had not been apparent at their last meeting.

She steepled her fingers, a gesture that Alex remembered from his first briefing with her.

"Given that you have just killed two well-liked members of my Service, Captain Temple, I thought it advisable that we meet on neutral territory rather than at Thames House. I thought it might be more .

comfortable for you."

Neutral territory, thought Alex, glancing around him. Like fuck.

"I have no regrets whatsoever about killing Dawn Harding and that other amateur trigger man of yours," he said coldly, 'given that they were trying bloody hard to kill me.

Presumably on your direct orders. And you might as well know right now..

"Captain Temple..

'that I will do the same to any... "Captain Temple! I have not come here to argue with you. I fully accept that circumstances led you to defend yourself. Reciprocally, I would ask you to accept that agents Harding and Muir acted as they did towards yourself in the belief that it was in the best interests of national security."

"Trying to murder a serving SAS officer?"

"Put it how you like." Fenwick's gaze was ice and her voice was steel.

"The point is that these events have happened and you and I must now discuss .. .

modalities."

"Does that mean that you want to hammer out some kind of deal?"

"That's exactly what it means, Captain Temple, so let's get right on with it. Be assured that I am enjoying this meeting no more than you are. Firstly, do you wish to continue with your army career.

Alex shrugged.

"I want to be in the position to choose to, if that's what you mean.

"Very well. I give you my word that you will be left alone. No complaint will be made about your conduct. All that I require is that you never speak of the events surrounding Meehan and the Watchman operation. Not to your colleagues, not to Bill Leonard, not to anyone.

"And meanwhile you work out how to get rid of me," said Alex with an ironic smile.

"What's it going to be, an accident on the firing range? A climbing fall?

Some mystery virus?"

"Captain Temple, I ..

"Because let me tell you, if anything happens to me -anything fatal, that is a package will be delivered to the offices of a certain national newspaper. That package will contain an MP5 machine-gun together with various expended cartridge cases all bearing fingerprints, an affidavit sworn before a solicitor by me and a recording of a conversation I had with Dawn Harding on the drive down to Black Down House, in which she discusses in some detail the trapping and killing of Joseph Meehan. It's not watertight, but it's enough to sink you."

Fenwick pursed her lips but otherwise remained expressionless.

"I've got a copy of the tape here," continued Alex, taking a Sony Walkman cassette player from his pocket. He pressed the play button.

"Negative thought leads to negative action .. . came Dawn s distinctive voice.

"Just promise me that ~f there's any chance of taking Meehan out..

$

To Alex's amazement he saw Fenwick's eyes sharpen with tears. She turned away from him instantly and pretended to examine her notes. When she looked up again, steely as ever, it was as if the moment had never been.

"Very well, captain. I take your point and I acknowledge that you have the wherewithal to do us serious damage. Let me respond by saying that if you ever discuss or disclose details of this matter preemptively without provocation from my Service then we will move to defend ourselves in the most.. . vigorous way. Certain accusations will surface deeply damaging accusations, both of a criminal and sexual nature. You will lose your pension, your credit rating and your reputation. Serious doubts will be cast upon your state of mind. We will do, in short, whatever is necessary to discredit and ultimately ruin you.

Alex nodded. He believed her.

"Mutually assured destruction," he murmured.

"Quite so, Captain Temple. A highly effective deterrent in my experience. Do we have a deal?"

Alex met her unwavering gaze, saw in it an iron determination the equal of his own.

"We have a deal."

They shook hands and there was a long silence. Fenwick stared down at the traffic.

"Are you in contact with Meehan?" she asked eventually. Alex shook his head.

"No."

"Rest assured we will pursue him."

"I'm sure."

"And we will find him."

The ghost of a smile touched Alex's features.

"If you say so.

Fenwick hesitated.

"Captain, would you like to know the real purpose of the Watchman operation?"

"Meehan worked that one out. He was a fall guy there to take the drop for some longer-established mole. If the shit ever hit the fan and your senior man was threatened, there had to be someone else who could be revealed as a British agent.

Meehan was that man.

Fenwick nodded.

"That's correct. And the longer he stayed in place, the more believable it would be that he was the only mole if he had to be exposed."

Alex stood up, closed his eyes in frustrated disbelief and shook his head.

"But you sent.." how many is it now, must be at least a dozen soldiers and civilians to their deaths? To terrible deaths, mostly. And all for the sake of a single intelligence source? Do you honestly think that's a price worth paying?"

"Look, captain, given what we know about each other I think I can trust you with this. The point is that the man the Watchman was dummying for was not just a mole, he was the mole. The ultimate intelligence source. Have you heard of an agent code-named Steak Knife?"

Alex's eyes widened.

"I've heard about Steak Knife and read about him in the papers all that stuff about Brian Nelson and the FRU handing over PIRA players' addresses to the UVF -but I didn't know that he actually existed. I assumed that was all black propaganda."

"Well, of course it is, in part," said Fenwick with a pale smile.

"But Steak Knife exists all right. And when the history of espionage finally comes to be written, our running of him as an agent will be seen as the greatest coup of them all. He's the very top man, Temple an international household name and he's working for British Intelligence."

"You mean .. ." Into Alex's mind swam the now statesmanlike image of the figure he'd seen a thousand times on magazine covers and on television.

"I do mean," said Fenwick.

"I'm not prepared to sit here and actually name him to you, but yes. He's ours.

She looked over at Alex who, still standing, was staring bleakly out of the window over St. James's.

"Do you begin to understand the scale of the field of battle now, Temple?

Forget the casualties you always get those. At the end of the day, as you well know, there's always the equivalent of the boy left tied to the tree in the Sierra Leone bush. You have to see the big picture."

Alex closed his eyes. Felt his fingernails cutting into the flesh of his palms.

"The point to grasp," continued Fenwick, 'is that having a direct handle on IRA policy has saved hundreds, perhaps thousands ..

"I can't," said Alex flatly.

"Can't what?"

"I can't forget the casualties. I can't forget the Wheens and the Bledsoes, and the women and kids blown to smithereens in the supermarkets. I can't forget the boy tied to the tree. The human level the level on which that stuff happens is the only real level as far as I'm concerned. The rest is bollocks."

"Well, that's hardly a very adult attitude. Your Service career's unlikely to prosper if that's how you think."

"I'm sure you're right," said Alex. He pulled a book from the bookcase at random, opened it, stared sightlessly at the page for a moment and returned it.

"You were lovers, weren't you? You and Dawn?"

Fenwick said nothing.

"I always used to tease her. Who's the lucky bloke you wake up next to, I used to say, missing the obvious by a mile."

Fenwick sat unmoving, as if carved from stone.

"And now she's dead," Alex continued.

"I watched her drown in her own blood on the side of Pen-y-Fan, and the last thing that she said before she died was your name. And you still you still think that this whole thing was worth it ..

He moved towards the door, glanced back at the motionless figure.

"Have a good life, Fenwick. I'd tell you to go to hell, but I reckon that you're probably already there."

Marching through the dining room and down the main staircase with an alacrity rarely seen in that august institution, Alex departed the Carlton Club. It was midday and after an unpromising start the sun was making a go of it.