Upstairs the story was the same: gutted rooms, fallen plaster- work and the darkness of the boarded-over windows. At some point a pigeon had trapped itself in there and its half-feathered skeleton lay on a bedroom mantelpiece.
Where had Meehan and his father slept that night all those years ago? Wherever it was, there was no sign that he had bothered with the place since.
Outside, it was now quite dark. Pulling on his night-vision goggles so that the scene leapt into eerie green daylight, Alex descended the slope again. At his ear was the tiny mosquito whine of the goggles' battery-powered electronics.
Carefully he made his way towards the dilapidated cottages. As with the church, a rough attempt had been made to make these safe by slapping mortar around the gaps where there had once been windows. One of them the only one with an intact roof- seemed to have been designated a store of some kind, and its back room proved to be packed with ancient cardboard boxes containing electrical and woodworking items. Raising the goggles and flicking a pen torch beam on these, Alex identified dark-brown bakelite transformers and junction boxes, rows of dusty radio valves, plaited electrical flex, fibrous early Rawlplugs and other items whose use he could only guess at.
And nails, of course. From half-inch to six-inch. Alex pocketed a couple for the forensics team, flicked off the pen torch, lowered the goggles and went outside again.
The mobile throbbed against his thigh.
'You OK?' asked Dawn.
'Looking around,' murmured Alex.
'No sign of him yet. This is definitely the place, though I've found a stack of those old nails. You OK?'
'Fine. Take care.'
'Sure.'
He slipped the phone back into his pocket and moved towards the pale bulk of the church. This time the door was locked. Alex considered climbing in through a window, dismissed the idea as too likely to attract attention and reached into one of the chest pockets of his smock.
It was a couple of years since he'd done the lock-picking refresher course at Tregaron and the goggles didn't help, but Alex's movements were reasonably confident as he inserted a pick into the church door. The lock was a standard pin-tumbler type and it was no more than a few minutes before the door swung inwards.
Pocketing the pick and the torque wrench in favour of the Glock, Alex scanned the place. As in the house, anything of any value as architectural salvage had been removed and above him only a few roof beams remained. Broken tiles and mounds of pigeon shit littered the stone floor.
The door was to one side, low and arched. Again, it was locked, and this lock was no high street Yale. It took Alex almost half an hour of delicate work with the spring-steel pick to solve all the pins and bring them to the shear line, and he breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief when he felt the plug's smooth rotation beneath his torque wrench.
Beyond the door was a descending spiral staircase. The stone treads felt worn beneath Alex's soles as he crept downwards, peering before him through the goggles. There was very little ambient light for them to magnify and he seemed to be descending into a dim green haze.
The crypt appeared to be empty but for a wooden bier of the type once used in funerals. Lifting the goggles, Alex risked a quick sweep with the Maglite torch, only to have his initial observation confirmed. There was nothing else no chests~ no cupboards, no sign of habitation merely walls and floors carved with memorial inscriptions and a cool stone emptiness. Nor were there any doors to further chambers.
Think, Alex told himself. Go back to basics. Meehan told Connolly that the equipment he found was in the church. The Operation Gladio hiding place had to be proof against sophisticated enemy search teams and a locked door would have constituted no protection whatever against a determined GRU or Spetznaz outfit.
Once again, he searched the place with his torch, running its beam over the walls and floors, and the inset stone tablets with their florid carvings.
He almost missed it, and he would never have found it had he not known that it had to be there somewhere. A memorial brass inlaid into the floor in one corner of the room. Worn, as if by the passage of many feet, and inscribed 'To the memory of Samuel Calvert, born 1758, laid to rest 1825. My sword, I shall give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage.'
Gladio, thought Alex. The word means a sword, doesn't it?
The brass lifted with a knife tip. Beneath, supporting it, was a heavy iron grille. And beneath the grille were steps.
TWENTY-FIVE.
Alarm screamed in Alex's mind. He was getting himself deeper and deeper into a situation from which retreat was impossible.
His plan, to which Angela Fenwick had agreed, had been that he should make an initial sortie into the property to search for evidence of Meehan's presence and then pull back, so that an MIS team could replace him. If Alex encountered Meehan while undertaking his recce, however, he was to kill him on sight. From Fenwick's point of view, Alex knew, this would be the ideal outcome. No more Watchman, no more complex and expensive deployment of Service personnel, no more threat to herself or to her ambitions.
And to be honest, thought Alex, it would suit him too. It would balance the books for George Widdowes' death. There was also the undeniable truth that a happy Angela Fenwick meant a happy Bill Leonard, and a happy Bill Leonard could mean promotion.
Plus, of course, the world would be rid of a psychopathic murderer. If Meehan were waiting in the darkness at the bottom of those steps, or if he were to return to the church right now, Alex would be trapped. Better by far to pull back, to get Fenwick to send reinforcements.
Pulling out his mobile he tried punching in Dawn's number. The sudden beep indicating that there was no signal strength made him jump and his heart race, and he realised just how on edge he was.
Meehan could come back at any moment.
Pulling the grille and the brass plate back into place from below the gaps in the grille had deliberately been made wide enough to allow this Alex began to descend the steps. The room at the bottom, he saw with a quick, relieved sweep of the goggles, had no human occupant. It was a burial chamber and the rectangular stone slab at its centre had probably once supported a tomb.
But not now. Now the walls were piled deep and high with green-sprayed steel cases whose contents, according to the white stencilled legends on their sides, included time pencils and other varieties of detonator, delay fuses, carborundum grease, pocket incendiaries, Eureka beacons, S-Phones, Mk III Transceivers, Welrod pistols and an assortment of grenades and mines. It was a far more comprehensive list than Connolly had described, thought Alex, staring for a wondering moment at the scores of cases. Overcome by curiosity, he prised open the lid of a case marked 'Grenades Gammon type'.
Inside, neatly packed, were a dozen bizarre-looking appliances, each consisting of a bakelite fuse housing and a cotton bag. The idea, Alex assumed, was that you filled the bag with plastic explosive maybe chucking in a handful of nuts and bolts for good measure and lobbed the whole thing into the middle of an enemy patrol. Very nasty indeed.
The transceivers packed into their little leather suitcases, by contrast, were objects of great fascination, with their miniaturised sockets and grilles and dials. If I get through this in one piece, thought Alex, I'm coming back for a few of these, and perhaps a couple of the Welrods too. Take them up to Sotheby's or Christie's... This sub-crypt, it was clear, was where Meehan lived. At one end of the room were cardboard boxes containing new own-brand supermarket tins soups, beans, spaghetti, peas -chocolate bars, and packet foods. A packing case held fresh oranges, potatoes and green vegetables. No onions, probably because of the strong smell they gave off while cooking. Among the food was a small plastic rubbish bag containing crushed tins, sweet papers, withered orange peel and a brown apple core. The last two looked less than forty-eight hours old.
There was also a plastic water-purification system, a tiny MSR stove and fuel bottles, a pair of mess tins, plastic cutlery, a comprehensive medical kit the suture-set recently used, Alex noted and a wash bag. In the corner of the room above this area a fresh-air duct led upwards into the darkness, presumably voiding behind some decorative element on the tower.
At the other end of the chamber, folded neatly on the floor, were Meehan's clothes nondescript camping-
