by J. S. Monroe
A lady in the middle of the train, on one of the side seats facing inwards, turned towards us. Again we sat in silence, close, bristling.
“He’s someone in the Foreign Office,” Charlotte said, after a long pause, so long that I wondered what she was talking about. “We hardly know each other.”
“Have you rung him since?"
“He’s out of the country. There’s nothing he could do anyway.”
She dug her elbow into my ribs. The man was on his feet, waiting to get off at Shadwell, the next station. Charlotte was sitting on the outside seat. I motioned for her to get up, but she stayed seated as the train stopped. Then, just as the doors were about to shut, she got up and we stepped briskly on to the platform.
I let her take the lead. She did this for a living, after all, and her earlier disappearing act had been bemusing, impressive even. We followed the man at a safe distance, tracked him down the station’s lightweight stairs and under a railway arch. He was walking confidently, not looking around, at least not that I could tell. I found myself tucking in behind Charlotte, nervous, suddenly self-conscious, trying to let my free arm hang naturally.
The man had taken a small road which ran along the side of the old railway line. He wasn’t going home. There were arches on the right, some converted into lock-ups, others hollow and overgrown, but no houses. On the left was The British Sailor, and a fenced-off yard stacked up with used tyres. Chained up in one corner was a rottweiler, barking as we passed.
Charlotte stopped outside the pub. It seemed unlikely, she said, that a man in a smart suit would venture far down a dodgy road in the East End. Sure enough he soon stopped, fifty yards ahead of us, in front of a hardware shop. Rolls of garden fencing, tools, and metal dustbins were spilling out of the converted arch on to the pavement. Perhaps he was just a DIY enthusiast, not a bomber at all? For the first time I saw him check in either direction. He moved forward, partially concealed behind a pale blue council van jacked up on the kerb, then he was gone. I hoped Charlotte knew what she was doing.
“We can watch from up there,” she said, nodding at an upstairs window. “You stay here until I’m in the window. Mine’s a brandy, a large one.”
She walked into the pub, leaving me standing in the street. I shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other, glancing up at the window. I would forget how to stand soon. The dog was barking itself hoarse in the yard next door. A man in a vest poked his head out of a window, looked in my direction and disappeared back inside. I felt even more self-conscious, and slid my case backwards and forwards on the pavement with my feet. I then realised the problem. I was nervous, more than I had ever been before. If only we knew what the message meant. On each occasion “NOT FOR ME TKS BIFN” had been typed in, and there had been a bomb. So it was fair to assume there would be one today. Triggered by us. But what role had the woman played? What role was this man going to play? He was clearly picking up something. The best we could hope for was that there was only one bomber and we were following him.
Charlotte tapped the window above and I went inside to the bar.
Upstairs was deserted. Cues lay across a bomb pool table in the corner. There was an empty glass food cabinet, and a wooden box on the wall, padlocked and pockmarked with dart holes. We sat at a table in the window, watching, waiting. No one came out of the hardware shop. I considered checking the back, but Charlotte told me to stay. The man had never been caught, she said, because he didn’t do unusual things. He wasn’t about to climb out of windows or ran across backyards, particularly if he was picking up Semtex. Calmly, he would walk the fifty yards back down the road, maybe even stop for a drink.
Charlotte went down to the bar for another herself. I declined. When she came back, her manner had changed. She sat in silence for a while, tearing a beermat into tiny squares and lining them up like tabs of acid.
“Dutchie, there’s a chance there will be a bomb this evening. In the middle of the rush hour.”
“I know. It would have happened sooner or later.”
“If something goes wrong, we’ve got to live with that.”
“Not for very long. You knew the risks.” I turned away and looked down the road. “He’s taking his time, isn’t he?”
“What are you going to do when he appears?” she asked. I glanced at her. Do? She knew very well what I was going to do. I noticed that her glass was already empty. Two doubles in as many minutes.
“He’ll probably have twenty pounds of Semtex in his case,” she continued. “Are you just going to walk up, and pull your gun on him?”
“No, I’m not. What are you planning to do?” I asked in return.
“Ring the police. Tell them he’s got a bomb. They’ll defuse it and no one will die tonight.”
I drank deeply before speaking. That’s all I needed, Charlotte going moral on me.
“That wasn’t the deal,” I said, wiping my lips with the back of my hand.
“I thought he might have been going home, Dutchie. But we’ve given him instructions. I can’t be responsible for a bomb.”
“He killed your man.”
“Simon wouldn’t want any more bloodshed.”
She was beginning to slur her words. I hadn’t seen her lose control before. Another day and I would have been intrigued, bought in a few more brandies. But she was threatening to be stupid.
“When you saw him come out of the lift you wanted to kill him,” I said. “You put your camera away and got on the train, just like me.”
“I know.”
“So what happened?”
She leant forward over the table, her head in her hands. “I left Ireland to get away from all this,” she said, rubbing her hands up and down her face, as if she was washing, trying to wake up. “Away from how I felt in the queue, how I felt just now when I saw him again. You’re right, I wanted to kill him but… that’s what kept the Troubles going for twenty-five years.”
I didn’t know where to start. We could be here all day if she wanted to talk about the Irish Problem. She’d be quoting Parnell next.
“You don’t get it, do you? If you ring the cops now, they might catch him, I doubt it, but if they do they’ll let him go again, because a suit will turn up from MI5, take someone aside, explain he’s their prisoner.”
“But do you have to kill him?” At these words, she looked around, checking the place was still empty.
“You can’t leave him to the state, Charlotte. It won’t work.” I leant forward and swept the bits of beermat gently off the table. “He is the State.”
*
She seemed to believe me, at least for a while. Five minutes later she took pictures as the man passed beneath us carrying a large accountant’s case not dissimilar to mine, and together we followed him back on to the train.
He was heading south on to the Isle of Dogs again. I tried to think where he was going. The Greenwich foot tunnel, perhaps. It was busy in rush hour. A well-placed explosive and a lot of commuters would take an early shower. But he got out at Canary Wharf and went into the shopping mall. Charlotte took some photos as he walked past the shop where I had bought the flowers.
“What’s he up to?” she asked.
“He’s going back to his office,” I said, watching the back of his head disappear out of sight on the escalator.
“He can’t be. Not with that lot in his case.”
“Are you coming?”
The concourse was filling up with people on their way home. Charlotte hesitated, looked through me, at the escalator, the situation we were in. I didn’t have time for her delicate conscience and started walking towards the stairs. They were less busy than the escalator. Halfway down, I could see the man pass the bank of lifts servicing the lower floors.
“Dutchie,” Charlotte called out. I stopped. I didn’t want to hear any more, but I turned briefly. “Good luck,” she said.
I found the man standing in front of the lifts which serviced floors thirty-nine to fifty, the top. His own office had be
en on the thirty-eighth so he wasn’t about to blow up his boss. I went and stood close to him, resisting the temptation to stare. The doors opened, disgorging two spreading businessmen.
“I got my secretary to do the proposing,” the fatter of them said, chuckling.
“Dictation?”
“God no. I left the words to her. Women know what they want to hear, don’t you think?”
“So you did your entire courting by fax?”
We both stood aside, letting them roll past, and stepped into the spacious lift together. We had it to ourselves.
“Thirty-nine please,” the man said, turning away. Perhaps I was too ready to hear it, but he spoke with the faintest of Irish lilts. Physically, he was more compact than me, bunched, swarthy. I let my finger hover above thirty-nine, but didn’t press it. I touched fifty instead, and stepped forward, blocking the panel from his view. I felt in control, relieved that Charlotte wasn’t here to complicate things.
The doors closed and the two of us moved upwards. Everyone was heading home and I didn’t expect anyone else to join us. The man stood with his feet placed firmly apart, confident, not afraid to catch my eye. His arms were folded. I glanced at our two cases, fakes both of them. They suddenly seemed as subtle as false moustaches. It would have been interesting to compare notes with him. We had much in common. We had both played the dealer, endured a world we despised for our separate causes. I wondered if he had ever enjoyed it, just for a second or two.
The lift indicator moved towards thirty-nine, beyond it, and I knew the time had come. The man leant forward to look at the panel, noticed and smiled.
“Sorry,” he said, “I wanted thirty-nine.”
I felt remarkably calm as I squatted down and unclipped the case locks. I wished I could have shot him there in the lift, but that would have still left me with the bomb.
“I know what you wanted,” I said, looking up at him. “There’s a cracking view at the top.”
In what felt like the same action, I pulled out the gun, snapped it shut, and stood up, pointing it at the man’s chest. He didn’t flinch.
“The top it is,” he said.
I looked at him for a moment, standing in front of me, arms still folded, his lips pursed in a wry smile. There was some untrimmed stubble just below his sideboards, where his smooth face met close-cropped hair. His equanimity was disturbing. I could feel the synaptic connections breaking, the reasoning that linked this man – my age, maybe a couple of years older – to the crumpled manager, the silence, the anorak in the street.
“I think you might have made a mistake,” he said, looking at my gun. He probably knew his weapons, could tell from the burrs that it was a Black and Decker job. Still, a gun was a gun.
“When the doors open,” I said, hearing my own voice, scrutinising it for weaknesses, “you’re going to walk out as if nothing’s happened. Unfold your arms.”
“Perhaps I know you from somewhere?” the man asked, holding his arms up. His accent was becoming stronger.
“Oxford Street, maybe Moorgate. Open the case,” I said, more urgently. He cooperated, squatting down just like I had, undoing the straps with slow, steady hands.
“Show me,” I barked. It was a formality, but I needed to see what was in the case, just to make sure. If it was empty… The man pulled the sides softly apart and held it towards me. Inside were plastic packages, a mass of coloured wire, and what looked like a video timer display. It said: 6:15, 6:14, 6:13.
“As you can see, we haven’t got long,” the bomber said, his accent finally outed.
Six minutes. The man was a lunatic. I knew in an instant that I would still be in the building when the bomb blew. It was just a question of where.
“Give it to me, closed,” I said, banishing a wobble from my voice. I buried my left foot into the floor to steady myself.
The man obliged again. He placed the case in the middle of the lift, looking at the gun all the time. We began to slow. I picked up the case and could barely believe how heavy it was. I knew he was watching me and I held it effortlessly. There must have been more explosives in the lining. I then looked at my own case. I couldn’t carry both. If I left mine in the lift, sent it down again, someone would see it and tell security. In the present climate they would evacuate the building in an instant.
Wrong case, right thing to do.
27
I expected guards as the doors opened on to the fiftieth floor. The place had been reopened as a viewing gallery before the bombings started, but had since closed again. I jabbed the gun into the bomber’s back and told him to walk. There was no one about. Offices were still in the process of being built. Step-ladders, paint tins, partitioning panels lay strewn across the open-plan floor. It didn’t feel like the top.
“Oi! This floor’s closed to the public,” a voice said to my left. I spun around to see a security guard walking towards us. He hadn’t clocked my gun yet. I kept the bomber between us.
“Don’t say a word or I kill you both,” I whispered into his ear. I could smell his aftershave, expensive and sweet. The connections were being re-established. The man was a coward. He had only ventured across to mainland Britain because he was being protected.
“Is this the fiftieth?” I asked the guard.
“Forty-ninth. No one’s allowed up here.”
“Show me the way to the top,” I said, standing back, so he could see the gun. The man’s face visibly whitened. He was in his fifties and hadn’t looked well anyway, his grey hair nicotined at the front. “And give me your radio,” I said, waving the gun roughly in his direction. (If I had pointed it directly at him, he might have died of shock there and then.)
He passed it to me, his raw knuckles trembling. I put the case down gently and looked around. Behind us the lift doors were sliding shut, my own case standing solitary inside.
“If no one fucks up, you won’t get hurt. What channel’s security?” I asked.
“Security?” the guard echoed.
“If there’s an emergency?”
“Channel Nine.”
I looked at the receiver, pressed nine and the line crackled opened.
“We haven’t got long, pal,” the bomber said. I jerked the gun into his spine and he stumbled forward.
“Shut it.”
“Security,” said a distant voice.
There was a transmit button on the side of the unit. I pressed it, looking at the guard in front of me. His arms were hanging loosely by his side, oscillating gently with fear.
“There’s a bomb in your lift,” I began. “You’ve got six minutes.”
“Five,” the bomber said.
I switched off the radio and tossed it across the floor.
“How do we get into the roof?” I asked.
“The roof?” the guard said, barely able to get the words out. I wished he would stop repeating everything I said.
“Yeah. The roof. I know there’s a way in.”
“Why do you want the roof?”
“Don’t ask fucking why. Just take us there.”
The guard led us to a small service lift behind the main shaft. I pushed the bomber in first, then flicked the gun at the guard.
“Which button? And don’t even think about pressing the alarm,” I said, standing by the panel. It was a much smaller lift and we were too close to each other. I hoped the ride wouldn’t take long. If I was the bomber I would try jumping me at this point. I leant against the wall, keeping the gun in front of me, waving it restlessly between the two of them.
“The arrow,” the guard said weakly.
We rose less smoothly than before, jolting to a halt a few seconds later. The doors jerked open and daylight poured in. We were surrounded by windows. London stretched out below us, matchboxed, the Thames picked out like a strip of foil by the dying sun. I could see the Barrier to the East, glowing red hot, and beyond it the span of Dartford Bridge, its lights beginning to wink in the dusk. The gallery itself was deserted, left in a hurry. Tables
and chairs were clustered around a counter where coffee had once been served.
“You’re right about the view,” the bomber said. “We’ve got three minutes.”
“Where now?” I asked the guard.
He was beginning to wheeze. He glanced up towards the far corner of the room as he turned around. He didn’t have to say anything. I was already looking at a caged ladder, leading to a hatch in the ceiling.
“Move,” I said, pushing the bomber towards it. The case was beginning to hamper circulation and I arpeggioed my fingers across the handle, careful not to drop it. I was carrying enough explosives to restyle the skyline.
*
The guard went first, followed by the bomber. I came up after them, at a safe distance, stepping slowly on the metal rungs. We waited as the guard fumbled with his keys. Then the lid swung open, banging on the floor, and we entered the aquamarine world of the pyramid. I didn’t need the gun to get them up there. The luminescent colours gathered us all in like moths. We were entranced, momentarily free, a few seconds from death.
Once inside, I signalled for the bomber to move away from the hatch. The wind outside was deafening, plangent. I looked around, searching for something. The place was a vast chamber, just like a chapel in its focused ambience. We were standing on chilled metallic sheeting. Above us the roofing was opaque, translucent to the West where the sun was melting the blue panelling into shards of orange. In the middle there was a low block of industrial casing. It looked like an air-conditioning unit, and was humming loudly.
Then I saw it, on a small plinth next to the casing, directly below the apex. I backed over, keeping my eyes on the two men. It was a beryline crystal, just like in the book, glistening, holy, about eight inches long and five wide. I picked it up, put it in my jacket pocket, and replaced it gently with the case.
“Two minutes and she’ll blow,” the bomber said above the noise of the wind.
“Is that really a bomb?” the guard gasped. His voice was barely audible.
“Yeah. It’s really a bomb,” I said, coming back over to them.