by Andy McNab
As for Connor, he'd kept well quiet about his little visit to the castle and done as he was told. But even better than that, he'd become a Dublin Sinn Fein councillor a year later. It meant the Brits had a source there, too.
I looked out of the window as we nudged through the outskirts. The driver was right. Dublin had gone from rags to riches since Ireland had joined the EU, and it obviously wasn't just the Irish themselves who were fuelling the economic miracle. We passed a billboard advertising a newspaper. All the text was in a foreign language, but I recognized 'Polski'. 'You got many Poles here?'
'They even have their own TV show. Good people, I like them. We have all sorts. We got those Lithuanians, Africans, Spanish, and loads of those little Chinese fellas. We've even got a mosque.'
'That it?' I was looking at a silver pole pointing skywards over the city centre.
He chuckled as he wove in and out of the traffic. 'Bertie Ahern wanted to build some sort of sports stadium, but in the end they decided on a spire instead. We call it Bertie's Pole . . . or the Stiffy on the Liffey.' His face creased into another thousand lines. He enjoyed that gag so much he jumped the lights. Not because he was impatient, he just hadn't seen them.
We drove down a street I sort of recognized. I remembered it in a shit state, women selling fruit and veg and bits of fish from babies' prams. Now there were African hairdressers, Arab delis, Chinese restaurants and loads of Internet shops. Places selling coconuts and all sorts. It reminded me of parts of New York, the city where you think everybody smokes because the new laws have driven the lot of them outside.
And judging by the size of the huddle puffing away on the pavement, TVZ 24's entire staff had been recruited on the other side of the Atlantic.
32
Glass doors hissed open. Ahead, a torrent of water coursed down a huge angled sheet of steel. Beautiful people glided over white tiles doing important things with a mobile in one hand and a paper cup of cappuccino in the other.
I went up to the reception desk. An entire wall of flat screens showed footage of Pete fucking about with his cameras, getting ready to film. A tickertape caption announced the sad death of one of the station's finest cameramen.
'Hello, my name's Nick Stone. I'm here for Moira Foley.'
The girl had a little Bluetooth thing in her ear. She gave me a big smile and tapped her keyboard.
'She is expecting me. We spoke this morning.'
I'd called on the pretext of seeing Moira about my invoice. I needn't have worried about getting a meeting. She was the one who asked me.
My name obviously turned up on her monitor. Now the receptionist was tapping phone keys. 'Could you sign in here, please?'
By the time I'd done so and she'd finished her call, a machine had spat out a nice little plastic credit card with my name printed on it to hang round my neck on a nylon tape.
'Would you like to take a seat over there? Someone will be down.'
It was just like the office at Vauxhall Cross, only with a hint of politeness. They even had black, steel-framed leather settees. Above them, glass cabinets were crammed with silver and glass trophies. They'd obviously won a lot of awards and didn't mind everyone knowing.
I pulled my invoice from my bomber. Three hundred euros a day for ten days, printed out at an Internet café near Paddington station on the way to the airport.
Another battery of flat screens showed Dom waffling with an attractive, petite Arab woman in her thirties. Her head was covered with a white scarf. The rest of her garb was long and black. As they talked, they walked across a dustbowl strewn with rubble. It just had to be Afghanistan. The mountains in the background gave it away – and if they hadn't, the figures in blue burqas did. They scuttled about like big blue pepper-pots. The camera focused on her head. She waffled away silently above the caption: 'Afghan women's aid worker'. She seemed too un-weathered and beautiful to be working in the dust.
A new caption told me this was an excerpt from Veiled Threats, the documentary that had made Pete and Dom famous. It had won two Emmys and a host of other stuff. The station was very proud of them.
The tribute was working. It made me think of Pete fucking about with his tin hat on.
'Mr Stone?'
I dragged myself back from the last time I'd seen him. I didn't know why the Polish accent surprised me. It was a Polish station, after all, and I knew the voice. I looked up to see a girl in jeans and a polo-neck jumper.
'I'm Katarzyna. Everyone calls me Kate.'
I stood up and shook hands with a very smiley young woman. She looked just as her voice had told me she would. She pointed at my arm, a little unsure what to say. She managed, 'Ouch,' and a sympathetic smile.
'It's OK. What do I do with this?' I held up my invoice.
She took the sheet of A4. 'I will try and get a cheque for you today.'
I followed her to the lift. She was embarrassed. She was seventeen or eighteen, just starting out in life. She was getting the hang of it and wasn't quite sure how to act, and I was fed up with it. We didn't say any more to each other. I was fine about it and so was she.
The lift doors opened and three of the smokers rushed in to join us. The reek of nicotine breath filled the metal box.
The doors opened again into a large, open-plan office. Again, it could have been Vauxhall Cross if it hadn't been for the trendy water-bottle dispensers and coffee machines. People were on the phone or hunched over their PCs. Worktops were littered with piles of magazines and newspapers. At the far end the newsreaders' desks were in plain view so we could see how hard-working they were. That particular section, however, was cut off by soundproof glass so the newsreaders could shout at each other and call each other dickheads without it going on air.
Glass-walled offices lined the left side of the big open space. My very quiet new mate led me to a fanatically tidy desk. A woman I assumed was Moira sat behind it.
She wasn't what I'd been expecting. For starters, I wouldn't have predicted the inch-thick layer of makeup. She was maybe mid-fifties, and didn't show a wedding ring. Maybe she was trying hard to compete with the likes of Kate. A far-too-thin blouse revealed her bra, and the look continued with a mini-skirt and knee-high boots. Her hair was jet black. Her eyelashes were so long they looked like spiders' legs. Either everyone was too scared to tell her, or they disliked her so much they couldn't be bothered.
'Come in, Nick.'
Her accent was as Irish as Bertie's Pole, and her arrogance levels twice as high. She glanced at my friend. 'Coffee.'
I turned to Kate. 'No, I'm fine.' I'd always hated the girl-go-get-coffee thing. I'd had enough of it myself when I was a young squaddy, getting pushed around from pillar to post. I didn't wish it on others, especially if the order came from someone like Moira.
I sat down where she pointed. 'I'm sorry to have to let you go.' She settled back behind her desk. 'If it was up to me, I'd have kept you on. But the MD took the view he'd paid for close protection and not got it. Did you bring the invoice?'
'Got nothing else to do, have I?'
She leant forward, hoping her expression of deeply sincere concern would help us move on from the sacking. 'How's the arm, Nick?'
'Fine. I had it cleaned up this morning in Harley Street.'
She took a breath but I beat her to it. 'Don't worry, I'm not billing. Look, I've been calling Dom but still can't get an answer. You heard anything?'
Her face fell. 'I was hoping you might have. That wife of his – you've met her?'
'No.'
There seemed to be no love lost there.
'Well, she says he's taken a break. You know, clearing his fucking head or something. She won't say where he is, when he's coming back.' She raised her hands in frustration. 'I'm trying to run a news organization here.'
'Has he done this before?'
They dropped back on to the table. 'No – but, then, he hasn't had a cameraman killed before either. That bloody wife of his, she knows where he is.'
'Did
he say anything about filming in the city before we left?'
'He's my war correspondent. He doesn't do new one-way systems. That was just the fucking cameraman trying to get some expenses out of me. Old habits die hard.'
She sat back, her hands stretched out on the desk. The spiders' legs flashed up and down. 'Perhaps we could arrange some extra work? Here in the studio? We've got a great story, all this great footage, but no one to follow it up. We could get massive exposure on this. All the outlets have been clamouring.'
She looked at my arm. 'You're a film star now, Nick. What about you giving an interview, just talking to camera, nothing hard, telling us what happened? You could talk us through it. They're hungry out there, Nick. People want to know the pain you've gone through. It would be a lasting tribute to Dom's cameraman.'
Moira couldn't have pulled off concerned if there'd been a gun to her head.
I stood up and so did she. She was waspish. 'You're wasting an opportunity to tell the world what happened. If you don't do it, there are others who will.'
I had to put her right there and then, before she barged her way into their lives and fucked them up even more. 'Do not go near Pete's family. They've had enough shit already. If you do I'll go to the BBC – in fact, any fucker – and do the interview with them.'
Her face went red with anger, which was quite an achievement, given the thickness of her makeup. 'Then your invoice will take a fucking long time coming through, that's all I can say.'
I walked out.
Kate had been hovering outside. She followed me to the lift. As the doors closed, she jumped in.
'Mr Stone, I knew she wouldn't pay you if you said no, so here . . . I prepared.' Out of her bag came a wad of euros and a receipt for me to sign.
'You'll burn in hell for this, Kate. Thank you.'
She smiled, then got embarrassed and looked down. 'She's already asked Peter's family.'
'What did they say?'
'They said no. I think that is good thing.'
'So do I, Kate. So do I.'
We shook hands by the steel waterfall and I headed for the door.
'There is one more thing, Mr Stone.'
I turned.
'She really didn't believe Peter's invoice. But he had been filming in St Stephen's Green. You wouldn't believe how tight she is. She wouldn't reimburse Dom for his donation to the refuge either.'
'The one in their documentary?'
She nodded. 'It's very close to his heart.'
33
'Herbert Park in Ballsbridge.'
The cab edged out into traffic.
'One of the embassies, sir?'
'Nah, just an old mate who's moved there. Smart area, is it?'
He chuckled. 'On the Dublin Monopoly board, the roads in Ballsbridge are the fockin' big bucks squares.' He threw a newspaper to me. 'Here, have a read of that. We're going to be stuck in the rush-hour for a while.'
He wasn't wrong. We were surrounded by commuters with their heads down and telephones to their ears as they made their way home.
The street-lights glowed on the paper through the rain-stained windows. I opened it up on a big spread about extraordinary rendition. A cleaning woman had boarded a supposedly empty American plane to find a prisoner handcuffed, hooded and wearing an adult nappy. The Irish government were hugely embarrassed: they'd given public assurances that war-on-terror 'rendered' prisoners didn't come anywhere near the place on their way to Guantánamo Bay or the CIA's secret prisons in Afghanistan, Pakistan or wherever their interrogators had been able to set up shop.
The piece said:
The practice has grown sharply since the 9/11
terrorist attacks, and now includes a form in
which suspects are illegally arrested, sometimes
straight off the street, and delivered to a third-party
state. There, the suspects are tortured by
many means, including 'waterboarding' . . .
We used to do it out of this very city, only it wasn't called rendition in those days. They were just lifted. It got me wondering if Special Branch had ever used waterboarding. We never hung around at the castle long enough to see what went on. Better not to know, and have a clean pair of hands.
I checked the property pages but there was nothing for sale in the whole suburb of Ballsbridge, let alone Herbert Park.
'What do the houses go for round here?'
'Put it this way, last time you were here you could have picked up one of these little beauties for fifty thousand punts. Last one I saw advertised went for well over seven million euros. We're nearly there. Which end?'
I folded the newspaper. 'Drop us off here, mate. I'm going to walk down and surprise them.'
I paid him thirty euros and walked along Herbert Park in the rain, looking for number eighty-eight. Actually, it wasn't really rain, not even drizzle, more a mist that soaked everything through. I pulled up the collar of my bomber, hooked my bag over my shoulder and started walking.
If Pete had done good, Dom had hit the jackpot. These were substantial four-storey red-brick houses set back from the road, with large rectangular windows, designed for the grand and merchant classes during old Dublin's previous heyday. Raised stone staircases led one floor up to very solid and highly glossed front doors. The ground floor was reserved for the servants. Either Dom had married into money or the Polish celeb mags paid much more than I'd imagined for their double-page spreads. Or the Yes Man hadn't been talking bollocks.
Lights were on in several of the houses, and curtains were open to display the gilded furniture and big chandeliers to best effect.
I was still trying to work out what to say to Siobhan. Did she know Dom was an asset? I wasn't sure how that worked with spouses. I'd never been put to the test.
I walked past 6 Series BMWs and shiny 4x4s.
For all I knew, Dom could be sitting at home with his feet up watching telly, and Siobhan was putting the kettle on to make him a brew.
I neared number eighty-eight. The hall light shone through a glass panel over a wide, shiny wooden door. I couldn't see any movement through the front windows or upstairs. There were no milk bottles on the front step, empty or full, but that meant nothing nowadays. There was no condensation on the windows, but I wouldn't expect it. This was no minging old council house with poor heating and no ventilation.
I carried on past. Keeping a mental count of the houses, I reached the end of the street. The last time I'd walked past so many brand-new cars I'd been in a Kuwaiti showroom. This place was awash with money. I picked up a flyer from the pavement advertising a luxurious spa with a helipad on the roof in case you needed some emergency work on your cuticles.
I turned left at the end of the terrace and worked my way round to the back of the houses. There was a small service road about four metres wide that the gardens on each side backed on to. I walked past all the wheelie-bins and counted up to sixteen. Each property had a six-foot brick wall and either an old wooden gate or a fancy wrought-iron one. Mature trees towered over the gardens.
The lights were on at the back of eighty-eight on the first floor.