Nine Lights Over Edinburgh

by Harper Fox

  “Have you seen her this morning?”

  For a moment McBride couldn’t remember. He blinked hard, rubbing a hand across his mouth. “Yes,” he said, trying desperately for levity. “She wasn’t her normal chipper self.”

  “No, I should think not. The general wasn’t pleased, to have his ambassador given a new parting the night before last. I understand your board of commissioners has given Superintendent Stone one last chance to prove herself. She’ll be under constant supervision from now on.”

  A silence fell. McBride tried to recall how his old self would have responded to this news. Laughed his arse off, probably. He couldn’t even manage a smile. “Oh,” he said aridly. “That’ll go down well.”

  “By the way, there’s something I meant to ask. The hospital served me something called black pudding for my breakfast this morning. Can you tell me what that is?”

  McBride frowned at the change of tack. “Did you eat it?”

  “No. Some instinct steered me to the melon balls and croissant.”

  “You said you weren’t religious, right?”

  “Right, but I do try to keep kosher.”

  “Okay. Then don’t eat that.”

  Another silence—awkward this time, while McBride realised Leitner had been chatting to fill a gap. No, more than that—to distract him, as if he knew something was wrong.

  Nobody could know, nobody. McBride had to make an effort. “Is Ambassador Zvi okay?”

  “His feathers are ruffled. Otherwise he’s fine. General Sharot is anxious to meet the officer who foiled the attack, by the way, by picking off that first sniper.”

  “Oh. Who…” McBride tailed off.

  Leitner let go his watchful attitude—turned and frankly stared at him. “James. What the hell is the matter?”

  That intense, dark gaze was almost impossible to bear. Even staring at the floor, catching it sidelong, McBride felt it peeling layers off him. Cracking him out of his shell. No, he commanded himself. “Nothing,” he rasped. “This flu’s got me stupid, that’s all.”

  Leitner put out a hand. McBride flinched and tried to pull back when it closed on his own. But Leitner’s grip was tenderly absolute. His thumb found its way into McBride’s palm and pressed him there, sending what felt like a hot cable up his right arm and across his chest to his heart. Involuntarily he looked up—straight into Leitner’s eyes.

  He couldn’t move. He sat with his hand in Leitner’s, barely breathing.

  “Listen to me, James. My work with Mossad has brought me into contact with hundreds of people in…bad situations.” His grasp tightened. “Hundreds of people who look sick with fear in just the way you do now. Do you want to tell me?”

  Tell you what? McBride almost tried it. He knew which facial muscles he would have to move to produce an incredulous smile. Instead—and he couldn’t remember the moment of surrender, of decision, not at all—he snatched one shallow breath and said, “He’s got my kid. Oh God, Toby. Sim Carlyle’s got my kid.”

  “Carlyle? Your human trafficker?”

  “Aye. The one I handed Lila the evidence on last night. That’s the price—he wants that back and for me to retract all the statements I’ve made on the case. It’s been over twenty-four hours. He’s had her for—”

  “Hush,” Leitner commanded. McBride crashed to a halt, the unthinkable period for which his daughter had been in the hands of hostile strangers breaking to bits in his mouth. “This Carlyle. He’s powerful, or powerfully connected anyway? And he’s told you—because you’re here now—to act as if nothing’s happened?”

  McBride nodded. Voice cracking, he repeated the phrases that had been haunting him all night. “Business as usual. Make it look good.”

  “Then that’s what we must do, starting now. I am going to help you. Look up and out of the window in case we’re being watched. Take heart.”

  McBride did as he was bidden. It was hard—his grief was like rocks pressing down on the back of his skull—but he couldn’t believe he’d lapsed even this far, and got his chin up with fierce determination. Leitner’s grasp was still firm round his: he squeezed once, tightly, then let him go. “What am I going to do?” he whispered, staring out through the snow.

  “Has he asked for anything else? Money or…”

  “No. Just the evidence. The best of it’s a couple of digital photo cards my snitch gave me. Toby, what am I—”

  “You’re going to cooperate. Fully and straightaway.”

  McBride felt his mouth open. His lips were slightly numb, and he struggled to articulate past the dusty dryness of his throat. Leitner had resumed his watch of the embassy, his expression unreadable. “What? I thought you… I thought your lot—Mossad—had a nonnegotiation policy.”

  “Some units. My unit does. They apply it stringently.”

  “Then…”

  “What do you believe, James? Absolute nonnegotiation makes hostage-taking pointless? Yes, ultimately. Ideally. But how many lives, how many abductions is it going to cost before every terrorist on the planet is convinced of that?”

  McBride, lost in his fear as he was, heard the passion of this statement and wondered. “I…I don’t know.”

  “I don’t either. I used to think I did—I used to be very certain. Listen, James—this is one little girl, not the Munich Olympics. Not a principle my nation has to get across to another nation’s militants. There will be other ways and times to catch this Carlyle of yours. We only have one chance to retrieve your daughter.”

  “I tried. I told Lila I’d been drunk throughout the investigation. I wish it had been harder for her to believe, but…it was useless anyway. She said the photos proved me right in spite of myself.”

  “Has she acted on them?”

  “Not yet. She said they’d gone for enhancement. Most of what my snitch got was pretty dark.”

  “Good. Good.” Leitner drummed his fingers on the wheel. “And without these photos, the rest of your case falls down?”

  “Not really. I was pretty close before I got them. But they would clinch it, yes.”

  “Then we will retrieve them.”

  A brief helpless laugh tore out of McBride. He remembered his obligations and smoothed his expression clear. “They’re in a high-security police lab. How do we plan to do that?”

  “With all due respect, outside of London, British police have no idea what high security means.”

  “But they’ll be on the computers now, in the system.”

  “James, I am Mossad. At least—” his voice roughened, “—at least for now. You may as well know, your Lila isn’t the only one being given her last chance. My partner, Avrom—he was taken hostage himself during our raid in the West Bank. My unit’s noncooperation policy extends even to its own men. Oh, I’d believed in it myself. I believed, right until I saw a gun pressed to Avi’s head. And then I tried to cut a deal. I offered six insurgents safe passage, right in front of my katsa, my…my superior officer.”

  McBride shivered. The car was cooling, but it wasn’t that. He was seeing a young man—as beautiful and real as Toby Leitner—being held at gunpoint. In the midst of his fear, he saw it. “It…it didn’t work?”

  “It might have. I don’t know. My katsa countermanded it, and they shot Avi.” It was calmly delivered, but McBride heard clearly the abyss of pain behind the words. “So. I am now no longer so sure about our hard-line policies. I’m on the thinnest of ice with Mossad. But thankfully I still have the skills they taught me, and we are going to use them to do what we have to for this bastard Carlyle, and get your little girl back. What’s her name?”

  “Grace,” McBride said weakly.

  “Grace…” Toby fell into thoughtful silence for a moment. “In Hebrew we would say Chanah. And no one else knows about this?”

  “Only her mother. My wife, Libby.”

  It had only been twelve months. McBride still sometimes forgot to add the ex. Why did it matter? It didn’t, he supposed, except Toby’s face had clouded oddly. �
�That is—we’re divorced. I didn’t tell her, not really. She worked it out for herself.”

  “And she wouldn’t confide in anyone?”

  “No, not Libs. She’s staunch to her marrow.”

  “And all alone.”

  McBride swallowed. Yes. As lonely as I was until I found you. The injustice of it struck him hard. How had he become so unremittingly, casually selfish? “Yes,” he said, ashamed. “She’s all by herself with this. I didn’t… I only thought about how it was for me.”

  “Here.” Toby reached into an inside pocket and handed McBride a mobile that bore more resemblance to a slick, tiny NASA computer. “I doubt your friend Carlyle is smart enough to trace calls, but he won’t trace any on that. Call Libby on her mobile and tell her what we’re going to do. Tell her everything will be all right.”

  Chapter Eight

  Blackfriars car park—a multistorey concrete eyesore, a demolition project that had run out of cash with half the structure still intact and half in an avalanche of rubble and rusting girders. McBride stood alone in the vast space outside it. Here a new factory had been meant to take root, that project too shelved for lack of funds. It had been a bad year.

  A bad year, and the snow that might have softened the back end of it, blanketed its sorrows, had turned to sleet, every mean speck of it a wet, wind-driven devil that found its way into the gaps in McBride’s clothing. Between the buttons of his coat, into his upturned collar. The scarf wrapped round his throat was no defence. His hands, thrust deep into his pockets, had gone numb some twenty minutes before. Sim Carlyle was late for their proposed meet. McBride waited.

  He did not move when two sets of headlights finally appeared on the edge of the industrial estate. He kept his head up, let the sleet batter his face and eyes and allowed himself to be seen. He was not armed. Tucked inside his coat, pressed safely tight to his side in a plastic bag, were not only the digital photo cards, but three slim files he and Toby had lifted from Lila Stone’s office. Motionless, rigid as a statue in the wind, McBride almost smiled. For a while for two strange hours between two and four in the morning, he had nearly forgotten the grief and fear behind his mission. Toby, who up until then had scarcely conformed to McBride’s image of a secret agent, had transformed. He’d curtly sent McBride off to trip the alarms on one of the Harle Street back exits, then dodged past the deserted security desk out front. By the time McBride had made his way back to their prearranged meeting point in a little-used side alley, he had disabled the alarms for that whole sector of the building, and he’d let McBride in through the fire doors, only the smallest glimmer of amusement showing he might have been enjoying his work.

  McBride had almost enjoyed it too. He watched the double set of headlights come closer, sending silver cones through the sleet. Here in the half-world between Edinburgh’s civilised centre and the industrial wastes, he could see Christmas lights strung along the distant streets. Their reflections touched the puddles, filled them with delicate blossoms of light. Gracie loved them, pestered the life out of both parents to take her to see whatever Z-list celebrity had been bribed to do the switch-on. This year neither Libby nor McBride had found time. There’d been a row. McBride watched the tyres of the oncoming vehicles shatter the flowers to mud and ice.

  They pulled up ten yards away from him. Two men got out of the first and one from the second. The passenger from the first vehicle began an immediate, swaggering walk towards him—fearless, and with good reason. McBride could see the heat the other two were packing from here. He wasn’t really interested in them, or in the man striding up to plant himself, arms folded, directly in front of him. He couldn’t see into the backseat of either car. Or maybe it was the front seat of the second that was all in all to him, the counterbalance between life and death. “Do you have her?” he said, staring over the man’s shoulder. “Is my daughter with you?”

  “Aye. A deal’s a deal, copper.”

  McBride’s attention snapped to him. He knew the voice. “Make it look good, copper.” “Sim Carlyle,” he rasped. “My God. The organ-grinder.”

  “Aye, well.” Carlyle had looked different in his mug shots and in the snitch’s photos. Up close, he was a skinny insignificance of a man; McBride would not have glanced twice at him in the street. “No reason the monkeys should have all the fun. I wanted to take a look at you, McBride, and for you to have a look at me. Do you understand now, that I can’t have my business concerns scrutinised? That I have to be left to go my own way?”

  McBride took him in. He didn’t even look particularly villainous. His hair was clean, the teeth in his thin-lipped smile no better or worse than the average Scotsman’s. He wore a nondescript hooded fleece. “I understand,” McBride said.

  “Good. Because for a while back there, you weren’t taking me or my warnings seriously at all.”

  “No. I know. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s the man. Now, it’s a cunt of a night, so we’ll no’ hang about. What do you have for me?”

  “What you asked for.” McBride took a careful step back. He wanted the men waiting by the cars to be able to see and understand his movements. “The photo cards and three files of evidence. They’re inside my coat to keep them dry. I’m going to open it and reach in with my right hand. I’m unarmed. Okay?”

  “Knock yourself out.” Carlyle seemed only amused by his caution. He’d extracted from one pocket a Biro lid that had seen some chewing already, and stuck its stem between his teeth, smiling politely. “I maun say,” he observed around the obstruction, “it’s a sight easier, dealing with a pro like yourself. I won’t insult you by looking at the goods.”

  McBride took out the plastic bag. It seemed so light and fragile, to be payment for a life. He had stood by and watched in the Harle Street photographic lab while Toby had used the sophisticated little phone to access the internet and download code after code, hack after hack, to get into the Lothian PD’s mainframe. On thin ice with Mossad or not, he clearly still had friends there: McBride had listened as he tucked the device beneath his ear and conducted conversations in rapid-fire Hebrew, tapping away at one terminal’s board and then another, until McBride had recognised the first in the sequence of dark, blurry pictures his snitch had obtained.

  Had watched them disappear. “Will it insult you,” he said to Sim Carlyle, “if I ask to look at your goods?” Toby had instructed him to hand over the evidence sight unseen if he had to—if anyone’s safety should depend on it—but to try, if he could, to make Grace’s abductors show their hand. “To obtain proof of life,” Toby had said.

  Carlyle shrugged. He turned to glance back at the cars. As if waiting for this signal, the man by the second one walked around its bonnet and pulled open the passenger door.

  Not a sight, but a sound. McBride’s desperate hopes had only given him an image of how it would be to get back his girl—her bright little flag of red-gold hair on the fly, her skinny frame running hard to cross the space between them. He lowered his head: it was her voice slicing out into the night, closing the gap. His eyes stung. She never called him Daddy, not since she’d been six years old. More likely to call him McBride than let down her fierce guard so far as that. But there it was: “Daddy, Daddy! Take me home!”

  “All right!” He shoved the bag into Sim Carlyle’s outstretched hands. “All right! Let her come to me.”

  “Ah, now. Have a care, McBride. You are a pro—too much of one to be here alone. You’ll not take it amiss, I hope, if I ask you to stand here a moment longer while my friends and I get clear.” McBride sucked a breath to protest—but the passenger door was closing again, the lost little voice cutting off as it shut. “No need to worry. See, I’m just going to lock her in…” Carlyle pulled a key from his pocket and pointed it back toward the car. Sidelights flashed; a soft grind of remote locking found its way through the wind. “And I’m going to give the key to you. Me and my—well, I suppose you’d call them cronies—we’ll leave in the other car. Soon as our taillights disappe
ar, she’s all yours.”

  They were gone. McBride began to move. The stupid thing was that, after all this, he found he couldn’t run—his legs wouldn’t bear him any faster than this nightmare slow-motion walk. A low cry tore from him. What must his girl be thinking, that he was only walking to release her, to rescue her…? His numb hand went slack on the key, and he fumbled and dropped it: heard it skitter away across the concrete. “Shit!”

  The sleet-whipped dark around him took a form. Down on his knees, scrabbling, McBride felt rather than saw Toby Leitner shoot past him, unerringly picking out the key from a puddle a few feet away. Leitner was like a piece of the night, his movements powerful and sure. “I’ll get it!” he yelled to McBride across the gale. “I’ll get it! Stay there!”

  He must have thought McBride was hurt. He wasn’t wrong, come to think of it. How had he ended up here on his knees? He’d only bent to see if he could find the damn key. Then his injured leg had gone out from him, and Toby had stepped in. Come running down from his surveillance post behind the concrete pillars of the multistorey.

  And that was all right. For all its occasional haughtiness, Toby’s was a face a frightened kid would like to see appearing out of the dark—those softly shining eyes and that sweet smile.

  But why did Toby want to get there first? Why was he pallid with urgency, warding McBride off with an outstretched hand? McBride’s guts lurched. Bollocks! he told himself fiercely. You heard her. You’d have heard a gunshot, even a silenced one, from there. He staggered to his feet. His skin was going cold over every inch of his body, his tongue turning to stone. Toby was a good man, a kind one. He cared about Libby and Grace without ever having seen them. And yet he’d shouted, “I’ll get it.” Why the hell hadn’t he said, I’ll get her?

  McBride reached the car just as Toby tore the door open. He tried to shoulder him aside. There should have been no problem, in terms of relative bulk—when McBride shouldered someone, they moved—but Toby was set like a rock. “No,” he said, turning, grabbing McBride so hard by both arms that the strength of his grip bruised the bone. “James! No.”