The response had been overwhelming, jamming the switchboard at
Inspector Richards’s special headquarters, and a mixed bag had fallen into the net.
A fourteen-year-old runaway had the police barge into the
Bournemouth apartment where she was in bed with her thirty-two-year-old lover. She was returned weeping bitterly to the bosom of her family,
and had again disappeared within twenty-four hours.
In North Scotland the police sadly bungled a raid on a remote cottage hired by a man with the same lank dark hair and gunfighter’s mustache as the identikit portrait. He turned out to be a cottage-industry manufacturer of LSD tablets, and he and his four assistants, one of them a young girl who vaguely fitted the description of Melissa-Jane in that she was female and blonde, had scattered across the Highlands before being overtaken and borne to earth by sweating pounding members of the Scottish Constabulary.
Peter Stride was furious. “If it had been Melissa-Jane, they would have had fifteen minutes in which to put her down-” He raged at
Richards. “You’ve got to let Thor go in to the next raid.” Through the
Thor communications net he spoke directly to Kingston Parker on the video screens.
We’ll put all our influence into it,” Parker agreed, and then with deep compassion in his eyes, “Peter, I’m living every minute of this with you. I cannot escape the knowledge that I have placed you into this terrible situation. I did not expect the attack would come through your daughter. I think you know that you can call on me for any support you need.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Peter and for a moment felt his resolve weaken. In ten days he would have to execute this man. He steeled himself by thinking of a puckered dead white finger floating in its tiny bottle.
Kingston Parker’s influence worked immediately. Six hours later the order came down from Downing Street via the Commissioner of Police,
that the next raid on a suspect hideout would be conducted by Thor
Command.
The Royal Air Force placed two helicopters at Thor’s disposal for the duration of the operation, and Thor’s assault unit went into intensive training for penetration and removal under urban conditions.
Peter trained with them, he and Colin swiftly re-establishing the old rapport of concerted action.
When they were not practising and refining the exit and assembly from the hovering helicopters, Peter spent much of his time in the enclosed pistol range, trying to drown his awareness in the crash of gunfire, but the days passed swiftly in a series of false alarms and misleading clues.
Each night when Peter examined his face in the mirror above the liquor cabinet, it was more haggard, the blue eyes muddied by fatigue and terrible gut eroding terror of what the next day might bring forth.
There were six days left when Peter left the hotel room before breakfast, caught the tube at Green Park and left it again at Finsbury
Park. In a garden supplies shop near the station he purchased a twenty-pound plastic bag of ammonium nitrate garden fertilizer. He carried it back to the Dorchester in a locked Samsonite suitcase and stored it in the closet behind his hanging trenchcoat.
That night, when he spoke to Magda Altmann, she pleaded once again to be allowed to come to London.
“Peter I know I can be of help to you. Even if it’s just to stand beside you and hold your hand.”
“No. We’ve been over that.” He could hear the brutal tone in his own voice, but could not control it. He knew that he was getting very close to the edge. “Have you heard anything?”
“I’m sorry, Peter. Nothing, absolutely nothing. My sources are doing all that is possible.” Peter bought the dieseline from a pump at the Lex Garage in Brewer Street. He took five lit res in a plastic screw-topped container that had contained a household detergent. The pump attendant was a pimply teenager in dirty overalls. He was completely uninterested in the transaction.
In his bathroom Peter worked on the dieseline and the nitrate from the garden shop. He produced twenty-one pounds of savagely weight-efficient high explosive that was, none the less, docile until activated by a blasting cap such as he had devised with a flashlight bulb.
It would completely devastate the entire suite, utterly destroying everybody and everything in it. However, the damage should be confined to those three rooms.
It would be a simple matter to lure Kingston Parker to the suite under the pretence of having urgent information about Caliph to deliver, information so critical that it could only be delivered in person and in private.
That night the face in the mirror above the liquor cabinet was that of a man suffering from a devouring terminal disease, and the whisky bottle was empty. Peter broke the seal on a fresh bottle; it would make it easier to sleep, he told himself.
The wind came off the Irish Sea like the blade of a harvester’s scythe, and the low lead-coloured cloud fled up the slopes of the
Wicklow hills ahead of it.
There were weak patches in the cloud layer through which a cold and sickly sun beamed swiftly across the green forested slopes. As it passed so the rain followed icy grey rain slanting in on the wind.
A man came up the deserted street of the village. The tourists had not yet begun the annual invasion, but the “Bed and Breakfast”
signs were already out to welcome them on the fronts of the cottages.
The man passed the pub, in its coat of shocking salmon pink paint and lifted his head to read the billboard above the empty car park.
“Black is Beautiful drink Guinness” it proclaimed, and the man did not smile but lowered his head and trudged on over the bridge that divided the village in two.
On the stone balustrades of the bridge a midnight artist had used an aerosol paint can to spray political slogans in day-glo colours.
“BRITS OUT” on the left-hand balustrade and “STOP BLaCK TORTURE”
on the other. This time the man grimaced sourly.
Below him the steely grey water boiled about the stone piers before hissing down towards the sea.
The man wore a cyclist’s plastic cape and a narrow brimmed tweed cap pulled down over his eyes. The wind dashed at him, flogging the skirts of the cape against his Wellington boots.
He seemed to cringe to the wind, hunching down against its cold fury, as he trudged on past the few buildings of the village. The
Street was deserted, though the man knew that he was being watched from curtained windows.
This village on the lower slopes of the Wicklow hills, a mere thirty miles from Dublin, would not have been his choice. Here isolation worked against them, making them conspicuous. He would have preferred the anonymity of the city. However, his preferences had never been asked for.
This was only the third time he had left the house since they had arrived. Each time it had been for some emergency something that a little more forethought might provision have prevented, which should have been included when the old house was stocked for their stay. That came from having to rely on a drinking man, but here again he had not been consulted.
He was discontented and in a truculent, smouldering mood. it had rained most of the time, and the oil-fired central heating was not working, the only heating was the smoking peat fires in the small fireplaces in each of the two big rooms they were using. The high ceilings and sparse furnishings had made the rooms more difficult to warm and he had been cold ever since they had arrived. They were using only the two rooms, and had left the rest of the house locked and shuttered. It was a gloomy building, with the smell of damp pervading it. He had only the company of a whining alcoholic, day after cold rainy day. The man was ripe and overripe for trouble, for any diversion to break the grinding monotony but now he was reduced to errand boy and house servant, roles for which he was unsuited by temperament and training, and he scowled darkly as he trudged over the bridge towards the village store, with its row of petrol pumps standing before it like sentries.
The storekeeper saw him coming, and called through into the back of the shop.
“It’s himself from down at the Old Manse.” His wife came through,
wiping her hands on her apron, a short plump woman with bright eyes and ready tongue.
