Operation Certain Death

by Kim Hughes

  ‘As you know, we can recover DNA a-plenty if we get the device intact. But once it goes off, most of it is incinerated. One sample, though, survived the blast. And it’s really interesting.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s one of ours.’

  She sat upright, all thought of sleep and wine banished for the time being. She felt a little fizz of excitement in the pit of her stomach. ‘One of ours how? A POI you mean? One we’ve been tracking?’

  ‘No, one of our boys. You know that we take samples from every serving ATO, so that we can eliminate them during the tests on any devices.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘So, we have the DNA of a serving British soldier on this bomb.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  She heard him draw breath.

  ‘Jamal?’

  He exhaled. ‘Staff Sergeant Dominic Riley.’

  FIFTEEN

  Izzy was sitting at the end of a row near the rear of the wood-panelled hall, head turned to watch for him. She frowned when he finally appeared and looked back at the stage, where a confident-looking string quartet of young women were setting up.

  ‘Have I missed the hip-hop?’ he whispered as he slipped in next to her.

  She shot him a glance that could curdle milk. They both knew there would be no hip-hop. No jazz. No grime or trap or breakbeat or any of the many other sub-genres they couldn’t actually name. When he was appointed head, Giles Zonack had banned contemporary influences in the arts. Painting would be figurative, literature classic and music symphonic.

  ‘Why are you late? And don’t give me some shit about turbulence.’

  ‘You look good.’

  ‘Don’t change the subject.’

  She did, though, or would do once she stopped frowning. Izzy was from Sheffield and when crossed she had a way of turning her features into something steely enough to have come out of the city’s old foundries. The same with her voice, which, when she was angry, was like being smacked with an ingot. But when she wasn’t busy eviscerating you – or more specifically, him – she was a petite thirty-something redhead who looked very fine in the sort of navy blue dress with a scoop neck that she was wearing that day.

  ‘And stop looking at my tits,’ she hissed.

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  She reached up and touched his cheek, her fingers dancing over the skin. ‘I heard about yesterday.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you were worried.’

  ‘Just for Ruby.’ But it came with a sly wink.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘You’ll see. Excited to be part of this.’

  ‘Izzy, you know… well… we’ve had our ups and downs. Right?’

  ‘You need an answer to that?’ she said, stopping just short of a bristle.

  ‘I just want to say, you’re doing a good job with Ruby. I’m proud of her. Thanks.’

  She gave a thin smile. ‘I’m not doing it for you, Dom.’ But there was no real malice in it.

  ‘Right, ladies and gentlemen.’ It was Zonack, the headmaster. He had a gaunt face full of self-denial and long grey hair swept back. He was wearing an old-fashioned master’s gown straight from the pages of The Beano, which was probably meant to channel Eton or Harrow but to Riley only evoked Hogwarts or the Bash Street Kids. ‘The next piece of music is one of my very favourites.’

  ‘I had a strange call from TJ,’ Izzy said, clearly not able to keep this news bottled up for a more appropriate time. ‘Apologising to me.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I thought you would tell me.’

  ‘Borodin’s String Quartet number 2.’

  They automatically joined in the applause.

  Riley put his head back and closed his eyes, tried to listen to the girls playing above the kettle-whistle still ringing in his ears. Bloody TJ. What was she playing at? It was a fleeting lapse of reason, control and common sense. He tried to put her out of his mind and something else took its place.

  An image had been fluttering around his cerebral cortex for hours, like a restless bird refusing to settle and be identified. Now, with the soundtrack of surprisingly well-played Borodin to soothe it, the picture had stayed still long enough for him to give it a good once-over.

  And now he knew where he had seen the yellow and purple wire before. Northern Ireland. Four years ago.

  * * *

  Northern Ireland, summer, he remembered, or so the calendar had said. Nobody had told that godforsaken place. Skies threatened rain, a keening wind promised to drive it along, the thermometer only knew down. They had been deployed to a small copse on the brow of a hill at the edge of a farm, not far from the border with the Republic. When he had pulled up in an unmarked Discovery, Riley had been given the heads-up from the Police Service of Northern Ireland inspector and the RESA, the Royal Engineers Search Advisor. A phone call had suggested there was the body of a ‘disappeared’ person up a rutted track, among a clump of trees.

  Crows had called down at him from the higher branches, as if taunting him. Come on, if you think you’re hard enough. The birds knew it as bullshit, just as much as he did. When someone was ‘disappeared’ by the IRA, they tended to stay that way.

  It was, of course, a trap. The search team had found the ‘grave’ and discovered it came with a little surprise. A pressure pad for an IED. The pad had been hidden just in front of the hole containing a crude coffin, exactly where someone might stand to bend down and lift the lid of the box.

  Riley had ascended the hill, sweeping the path before him with a metal detector. Using a trowel and brush, he had then carefully cleared around the fake grave until he had exposed the wires. They ran under the wooden lid, where the charge was doubtless located. Along with some other nasty surprises for the unwary, usually. It was standard operational procedure for the IRA. One odd thing had struck him. Both wires were bright yellow and purple, a colour combo he hadn’t come across before. Red, blue, green and white striped, brown, grey, yes. But this shade of yellow and purple, no.

  It looked simple. Cut one of the wires and the circuit could no longer be made. Bomb safe. But the IRA, be it the Provisional, Real, Continuity or New, rarely did simple. Riley had taken out a flying scalpel and carefully positioned it close to the nearest of the yellow and purple wires.

  A flying scalpel was a tube with a pyrotechnic charge at one end that propelled a V-shaped pair of scalpel blades out of the ‘barrel’. It was much safer than wondering which wire to cut.

  Riley had retreated down the hill, carefully retracing his steps, still probing and sweeping with his metal detector while spooling out the control wire for the scalpel.

  His number two had finished connecting up the switch, pressed the twin buttons on the unit with his thumbs and there came a loud crack as the blades deployed and severed the wire. It was two heartbeats before the explosion, which lifted the earth on top of the hill in an enormous shudder, sending branches, leaves and soil skywards, raining it down on them.

  That day, in the hall of his daughter’s school, Riley also remembered that, as he crouched with his hands over his head, the bomb’s debris raining down, little fragments of yellow and purple sheathing had plopped onto the earth around him.

  The Nottingham monster had Irish blood in its veins.

  * * *

  The applause brought him back to the concert at Crowley Hall and he joined in enthusiastically. As the quartet left the stage, he turned to Izzy. ‘When is Ruby on?’

  ‘She’s not. She’s doing hair and make-up backstage.’

  An ungenerous thought entered his brain. What the fuck am I doing here listening to other people’s kids then? He ushered it away. ‘Ah. When she said she had a show, I thought she was in it.’

  ‘You are so bloody literal.’

  ‘Look, I’ve got to make a call. Business.’

  ‘Oh, I’d never argue with your business,’ she said, less than sweetly. ‘Don’t go far. The deputy head wants to see us after this.’

  ‘Why? No,
tell me later. I won’t be long.’

  Riley tiptoed out into the hallway as a piano piece began, closing the door behind him as softly as he could. He walked over the polished parquet flooring to the double-fronted entrance. Through the glass he could see a small clump of fellow parents, taking a cigarette break. He swerved to the left and found a door that opened to the side of the building. That area was empty. Good, because he didn’t want to be overheard. The type of conversation he was about to have could freak out the general public. He speed-dialled the National Ordnance Disposal Operation Centre. Bomb Central.

  He recognised the duty operator, Intelligence Corporal Carl ‘Dobbo’ Dobson, and identified himself immediately.

  ‘Hello, Staff. Welcome back.’

  ‘Back where?’

  ‘Back on the active list.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ So, Ms Carver had been as good as her word.

  ‘Thanks. Look, Dobbo, what details have we got on the explosive used yesterday?’

  ‘Semtex.’

  ‘How much?’ Riley asked.

  ‘A kilo or so is the estimate for the first bomb, slightly more for the second.’

  ‘Do we know its provenance?’

  ‘Hold on.’ Riley heard the tapping of a keyboard. ‘No. Nothing. No tags at all.’

  ‘No?’ Since the Montreal Convention of 1991, following the Pan Am disaster over Lockerbie in December 1988, all commercially made explosive such as Semtex, which had been used in the destruction of Flight 103 over Scotland, had to have a chemical in them that would release an odour for easier detection. For Semtex, it was usually the highly volatile DMNB, chemically 2,3-dimethyl-2,3-dinitrobutane.

  ‘What do you make of that?’ Riley just wanted a sounding board. He was already working through the implications for himself.

  ‘It’s a pre-tagged batch. Old shit.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Riley protested. ‘DMNB has been added since ’90 or ‘91. And if it’s anywhere near that vintage, it’s gash.’ The shelf-life of Semtex used to be ten years; it was deliberately reduced to five in the late 1990s to help discourage the terrorist black market. So ‘old shit’, as Dobbo put it, would no longer work. ‘I think we’ve got a sample that has been cleansed.’ There was usually another chemical tag in Semtex, too, although the Czech manufacturer claimed on its website that there was no metallic tagging of batches, but this was misinformation, designed to stop end-users trying to ‘wash’ the explosive, cleaning out any chance of the authorities knowing where it had originated.

  ‘Or it could be homemade,’ Dobbo suggested.

  It was possible, although it would take more skill and patience than the average bomb-maker had. Semtex combined two explosives, RDX and PETN. If you could get hold of boron fluoride, acetic anhydride, paraformaldehyde, ammonium nitrate and a few other ingredients you could make both elements. You let the resulting crystals dry completely, then grind each compound to a powder with a rolling pin. Once the two explosives are combined in equal measures, you can dissolve them in petroleum jelly or motor oil to make a paste. It sounded simple but preparing the core ingredients required serious temperature control and a lot of stirring. Plus, anyone making the stuff had to be careful about static electricity, which could cause the batch to detonate. It wasn’t really a kitchen-sink job, which is why most bombers preferred to get their big bangs off the shelf or go for simpler compounds.

  ‘It’s possible somebody knocked it up in a bucket,’ said Riley. ‘Can you do me a favour?’

  ‘Sure, Staff.’

  ‘Pull up everything we have on the bomb at McGurk’s. It was a shout at a farm in southern Fermanagh that was handled by me.’ Riley gave him the incident number. He knew it by heart.

  ‘You think this is Irish?’ Dobbo’s voice was full of disbelief. ‘You think it’s the Micks having another pop?’ There had been incidents linked to Ireland – such as the incendiary letter bombs sent to Heathrow, Waterloo and City Airport – but there had been no ‘spectacular’ on the mainland for some years.

  Riley kept silent as a member of staff came through the door behind him. She looked as if she was about to say something, but Riley just raised his eyebrows in innocent enquiry. Is there a problem? Apparently not, for she walked on without speaking.

  ‘You still there?’ Dobbo asked.

  ‘Yeah. The Irish? I don’t know, pal.’ Riley patted his pocket, searching for the yellow and purple lead. Then he remembered he had left it in the car. ‘Just get me that info.’

  He heard muffled applause leak through the door behind him. It was enthusiastic enough to suggest the concert was over. It was time to go and give his daughter a hug.

  SIXTEEN

  ‘That Muraski woman can’t be that good at her job,’ said Barbara Clifford-Brown to her husband as they enjoyed the post-lunch warmth of the conservatory. Henry was reading his Second World War book but politely kept one ear open when he spoke.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, she hadn’t turned up who I was. Who I still am. I must be there in the files. Yet she hadn’t made the link between us. She obviously thought I was some old dear to be patronised.’

  Henry gave a chuckle at the thought of that. ‘Hardly, sweetie.’

  Barbara Clifford-Brown, neé Lancaster, was proud of having been more than just a ‘service wife’. She had operated as an equal partner to Henry in Tokyo, Singapore and a dozen European cities.

  ‘Anyway, I think we should tell VX to get her to back off. Coming here, creating trouble and upsetting you. Don’t you think? Henry?’

  There was no answer. He had gone.

  Barbara stood, laid the rug across Henry’s lap and gently eased the book from his hands. He made a slight snorting noise, but his eyes didn’t open. The sun was on his face, unsparing in its highlighting of the effects of age on his skin. She leaned over and kissed his forehead. Strange how he had such difficulty sleeping though the night, but after lunch and a glass of claret he went out like the proverbial light for an hour or two, awaking with such sprightliness, it was as if he’d sloughed off a decade. She envied him that facility.

  After she had cleared the kitchen of debris from lunch and re-stoppered the bottle of wine, Barbara went down to the cellar, carefully locking the heavy door behind her. Force of habit. It was a long time since she had needed to worry about her daughter, Rachel, coming down, wondering what was going on in the vaults beneath the house. Back then it had been a clandestine office, complete with powerful radio transmitter. These days it was a surveillance centre, with a desk, chair and a series of monitors positioned in a gap between the wire cages that once held the finest collection of French wine in the county. Running down now, of course. Some drunk, some given as gifts. Still, depleted though the stocks might be, there were enough bottles to see them both out, no matter how hard they tried.

  At the far end of the cellar was the primitive shooting range she used to keep her eye in. At one time she had been able to fire the heaviest of guns, a Colt .45 auto or a Desert Eagle. But her fingers had grown spindly and recently her grip had started weakening. Cups and vases were dropped with increasing frequency. Oh, she could still give a slip of a girl like Kate Muraski a good hard pinch now and then. But her grasping muscles quickly fatigued, thanks, the doctor told her, to a compressed nerve in her neck. Her old bones were letting her down. So, she had moved on to polymer weapons, like the Glocks, and had settled on a Walther CCP subcompact 9mm that weighed just 22 ounces but still carried an impressive eight rounds in the single-stack mag plus one in the spout. It also had an old-fashioned thumb safety that she liked, even if it meant it was slower to deploy than a Glock, thanks to her often swollen finger joints. But she wasn’t likely to be in any quick-draw confrontations at her age.

  She had given the heftier weapons to Ben Beaumont, an old colleague from the Service who, like her, had a special dispensation from the Home Office to keep handguns as long as they were stored securely and checked by one of the Met’s firearms officers on an a
nnual basis. To people of her generation Ben was known as ‘Binkie’, after the famous theatrical impresario who dominated the West End from the Thirties to his death in the Seventies. Henry and Barbara had enjoyed many a Noel Coward, John Gielgud and Richard Burton performance under the auspices of the real Binkie Beaumont.

  Their version of Binkie, Ben Beaumont, had a basement in Knightsbridge that could give Fort Knox a run for its money. His ‘valet’ was ex-SAS to boot and the place bristled with alarms and cameras, mainly because Binkie’s wife had jewellery that would cause envy among the Royals. The guns were as secure as they could be in the UK.

  As usual, she crossed and made sure the weapons safe was locked before sitting down at the desk. Barbara knew she needn’t have worried that Henry might have left it open. Henry had always hated using any firearm. No, Henry had been a cerebral operator, one of those who liked to outwit his opponent. She, on the other hand, thought it prudent to pack some firepower, just in case.

  Barbara flicked the switch that would pipe Radio 3 into the room. She turned it up. Debussy. ‘La Mer’. Something tuneful for once, she thought. Didn’t have to worry about disturbing Henry; you could set a bomb off in the cellar and nobody above would be any the wiser thanks to the BBC recording-studio quality door that sat close to the top of the stairs that led up to the ground floor. She thought her basement would have made an ideal interrogation room. At Dunston, nobody can hear you scream.

  Chuckling softly to herself, she switched on the surveillance kit, then pressed the keys on the laptop controller, pecking slowly at them like a bird. Oleg the Oligarch – whose real name was Vasily Kutsik – had installed a sophisticated CCTV system, which he could check from his phone. It had been no bother for the Service to hack into and piggyback on that and put a feed into the west wing, so that the Clifford-Browns could monitor his movements within the house. There were also hidden microphones, which were normally switched off so they wouldn’t be detected during routine sweeps. They were, naturally, of Russian manufacture, so if they were found, Oleg would suspect that it was the authorities back home listening in.