Nick Stone 1 - Remote Control.

by Andy McNab

  "Come on then, give me your hand. We've got to be careful with these cars driving so fast."

  We left Mrs. Mostyn and stopped at the curb. I said, "When we go and meet him, I might have to do something that looks funny, but actually it's not--we do it all the time.

  He understands it."

  As we dodged through the traffic she said, "OK." After what she had seen lately this would be kindergarten stuff.

  We got closer; he was certainly looking older. He recognized me from twenty yards away and was suddenly starring in The Godfather again. Cigar in his right hand, arms thrown out wide, head cocked to one side, he growled, "Aaaggghh!

  It's Nicky Two!" He had a smile on his face the size of half a watermelon. It was probably shit living in hiding; at last he had somebody from the past he could talk freely with.

  He jammed the cigar back into his mouth, picked up his briefcase in his right hand, and walked toward us, his fat thighs rubbing together.

  "Hey! Nicky! How's it going!" He beamed and started pumping my hand, at the same time studying Kelly. He stank of flowery aftershave.

  "And who's this pretty little lady, then?" He bent down to greet her and I felt a slight twinge of wariness. Maybe the charm was genuine, but for some reason it made me feel a bit revolted.

  I said, "This is Kelly, one of my friend's daughters. I'm looking after her for a while."

  I very much doubted he knew what had been going on up north. He certainly didn't know Kev.

  Still bending down and shaking her hand for a bit too long, he said, "Welcome to the Sunshine State! It's great here we've got Seaworld, Disney World, everything to make a little lady happy!"

  He stood up and said, slightly out of breath, "Where are we going?" He

  pointed hopefully and said, "Main Street Pier?

  Shrimp?"

  I shook my head.

  "No, we'll go back to our hotel. I've got all the gear there I want you to have a look at. Follow me."

  I held Kelly's hand in my left and got him on the right. As we walked we made small talk about how wonderful it was to see each other again, but he knew very well that this meeting wasn't casual and he liked it. He got off on this sort of stuff, just like Al and Bob.

  We turned right and then took the first left, which was into a parking area behind the shops. I looked at Kelly and nodded to show everything was fine, then let go other hand. Big Al was still jabbering away. I grabbed his left arm with both hands and used his own momentum to turn him against the wall. He hit it with quite a bounce. I pushed him into the doorway of a restaurant's fire exit.

  "It's cool, I'm cool." Big Al was keeping a low voice. He knew the score.

  Just looking at him, it was obvious he couldn't conceal as much as a playing card under his clothes, let alone a weapon, the material was stretched so tight against his skin. However, I ran my hand down the back of his spine in case he had some thing concealed in the lumbar region; the natural curve makes it a wonderful place to hide odds and ends, and Big Al's was curvier than most. I continued frisking him.

  He looked down at Kelly, who was watching everything.

  He winked.

  "I suppose you've seen him do this all the time?"

  "My daddy does it, too, in heaven."

  His answer was quick.

  "Ah, OK, yeah, smart kid, smart kid." He looked at her and tried to work that one out.

  Then came the bit that he probably enjoyed most, me running my hand up his pant legs. I checked thoroughly at the top. I said, "You know I need to look in your briefcase now, don't you?"

  "Yeah, sure." He opened it up; I found two cigars in tubes, and all his work tools floppy disks, a backup drive and disks, cables, wires,

  all sorts of shit. I had a quick feel around to make sure there wasn't a secret panel.

  I was happy. He was also. In fact, he probably had a hard-on.

  I said, "Right, let's go."

  "Let's get some ice cream on the way," he suggested.

  We waved down a cab. Kelly and I got in the back and he squeezed in the front, resting a pint of Ben & Jerry's on his briefcase.

  We got to the hotel and went to the room. His body language was excited, probably because he thought it was like the old days, all spies and shit, and the cheapness of the room only made it all the more exhilarating for him. He put his briefcase on one of the beds, opened it up, and started taking out all his gizmos. He fished, "So what are you up to these days?"

  I didn't reply.

  Kelly and I were sitting on the bed, not really doing much except watching what was going on. Kelly started to take quite an interest.

  "You got any games?" she said.

  I thought de Sabatino would look at her in disgust: I'm a technician, I don't have games. But he went, "Yeah, loads!

  Maybe, if we get time, we can sit down and play a few. What ones do you like?"

  They went off on a tangent about Quake and Third Dimension. I cut in and said, "So what do you do with yourself nowadays?"

  "I just teach people how to work these things." He pointed at the laptop.

  "Also, I do a bit of work for a couple of private eyes down here, getting into bank accounts, that sort of thing.

  It's pretty low-key but it suits me I have to keep my head down."

  Almost choking on Kouros cologne and looking at his choice of clothes, I wondered what his idea of high profile would be.

  Without a reply to his original question, he seemed to feel compelled to fill the silence. He started sniggering and said, "Still managed to tuck away a few hundred thou! So, plus the resettlement, things ain't too bad."

  He was fiddling about, attaching more cables to the laptop;

  God knows what he was doing, so I let him get on with it. He tried again.

  "What about you? Same old thing?"

  "Yeah, same sort of stuff. Bit of this, bit of that."

  Now sitting at the table with his back to me, he was concentrating on the laptop.

  "You still being a--what did you call it--a baby spy?"

  "I do that a bit."

  "You working now, are you?"

  "Yeah, I'm working."

  He laughed.

  "You lying sonofabitch!" He looked at Kelly and said, "Oops! Do you learn French at school?" He turned back to me and said, "You wouldn't need me if you were, you'd be getting somebody else to do it. You can't bullshit Big All" He looked at Kelly and said, "Franfais!" Then he looked back at me and said, "You still married?"

  The Microsoft sound chimed as Windows 95 opened on his machine.

  "Divorced about three years ago," I said.

  "I haven't heard from her for about two years. I think she's living up in Scotland or somewhere, I don't know."

  I suddenly realized that Kelly was hanging on my every word.

  He winked at her.

  "Just like me--young, free, and single! Yeah!" Big Al was one of life's really sad fucks; I was probably the nearest thing he had to a friend.

  I handed him the backup disk, and it was soon humming in the drive. It wouldn't be long before I got a few answers.

  By now there was a pall of cigar smoke filling the top quarter of the room. Between that, the Kouros, and the lack of air-conditioning, the room was close to unbearable. It was just as well we'd be moving from

  here the moment Big Al left. I checked outside by moving the curtain, then opened the window.

  The first batch of documents came up on the screen, and I looked over his shoulder as he tapped away in the semidarkness.

  I pointed at one of the spreadsheets.

  "This is where I've got a problem. I haven't got a clue what that means. Any idea?"

  "I'll tell you what we have here, Nicky." His eyes never left the screen.

  "These are shipment and payment records-of what, I don't know." As he pointed to the screen, his finger touched it and squidged the liquid underneath.

  "Never touch the screen!" he scolded himself as if he were telling off one of his student
s. He was really getting into this.

  "See these here?" His voice had changed from that of a no-hoper to someone who knew his stuff.

  I looked at columns headed by groups of initials like MON, JC, IN. He said, "They refer to shipments. They're telling you what's going where, and to who."

  He started to scroll down the pages, confirming it to himself.

  As he was looking through he nodded emphatically.

  "These are definitely shipments and payments. How did you get into this, anyway? You're not exactly the world's greatest hacker, and there's no way these files weren't password-protected."

  "I had a sniffer program."

  "Wow! Which one do you have?" The computer nerd was coming back.

  "Mexy twenty-one," I lied.

  "That's shit! Oops, garbage! There are sniffers now that do it at three times the speed." He looked down at Kelly.

  "That's the problem with the Brits. They're still in the Steam Age."

  He was now out of the spreadsheets and looking at more file names.

  I said, "This is another group of files I was having problems with. Can

  you decrypt them?"

  "I don't understand," he said.

  "Which files are you having trouble with?"

  "Well, they're in code or something--just a lot of random letters and numbers. Any chance of you figuring it out?" He made me feel like a six-year-old child having to ask to have his shoelaces tied.

  He scrolled down the file names.

  "You mean these GIFs?"

  he said.

  "They're graphics files, that's all. You just need a graphics program to read them."

  He tapped a few keys, found what he was looking for, and selected one of the files.

  "They're scans of photographs," he said.

  He leaned over and pulled open the pint of ice cream, reached for one of the plastic spoons, and started to dig in. He threw a spoon to Kelly and said, "You'd better get in here before Uncle Al finishes it all."

  The first picture was now on the screen. It was a grainy black and white of two people standing at the top of a flight of steps that led to a grand old building. I knew both men very well. Seamus Macauley and Liam Femahan were "businessmen" who fronted a lot of fund-raising and other operations for PIRA. They were good at the game, once even getting a project backed by the British government to finance revitalization in Northern Ireland's cities. The whole scheme was designed to provide local employment. They convinced Westminster that if a community was responsible for its own rebuilding, there would be less chance of them then wanting to go and blow it up. But what the government didn't know was that the contractors could only employ people that PIRA wanted to work; those people were still claiming unemployment and social benefits, and PIRA was getting a kick back from letting them work on the sites illegally, so it was costing the government twice as much and, of course, the businessmen got their cut as well. And if the government's paying, why not blow more up and rebuild?

  Without a doubt, PIRA had come a long way from the days of rattling its tin cups in West Belfast, Liverpool, and Boston.

  So much so that the Northern Ireland Office had established a Terrorist Finance Unit as a countermeasure in 1988, staffed by specialists in accounting, law, taxes, and computing. Euan and I had done a lot of work with them.

  Big Al now opened and viewed a series of shots of Macauley and Femahan shaking hands with two other men, then walking down the steps and getting into a Mercedes.

  One of them was the late Mr. Morgan McGear, looking very smart in a suit I was familiar with. The fourth man I had no idea about.

  The photography was covert: I could see the darkness around the edge of the frames where they hadn't gotten the aperture right, but it was good enough for me to tell, by the cars parked in the background, that they were on the Continent.

  I said, "Let's see the next one."

  De Sabatino could tell that I recognized something or someone; he was looking at me, dying to know what, wanting to get in on the act. He'd had five years on the back burner, and now was his chance for a comeback.

  I wasn't going to tell him jack shit.

  "Let's push on."

  There was another group of pictures that he opened and viewed, but these meant nothing at all to me.

  Big Al looked at them. The big half watermelon was back on his face.

  "Now I know what all those spreadsheets refer to."

  "What's that?"

  "fEstd es la coca, senorl Hey, I know this guy. He works for the cartels."

  I was looking at a really smart-looking Latino in his early forties getting out of a car. I could tell by the surroundings that it was in the United States.

  "That's Raoul Martinez," he said.

  "He's part of the Colombian trade delegation."

  This was getting more interesting by the minute. PIRA al ways claimed no association with drug trafficking, but the profits were too great

  for it to ignore. What I had in front of me now was close to admissible evidence of its direct involvement with the cartels. But that still didn't help me with my problem.

  He looked through the pictures.

  "You'll see Raoul with somebody else in a minute, I guarantee it." He flicked through a couple more.

  "There you are: big bad Sal."

  This other character was about the same age but much taller; he'd probably been a weight lifter at some stage, then ballooned out to maybe three hundred pounds. Sal was a big old boy, and very bald.

  De Sabatino said, "Martinez is never without him. We used to do a lot of business with them in the old days. A nice man, a family man. We used to run cocaine up the East Coast, all the way to the Canadian border. We needed things evened out to ease the route--these guys did the necessary, and everybody was making money. Yeah, these fellas, they're all right. As we went through more picture files, I saw both men eating in a restaurant with another bloke, a Caucasian.

  Big Al said, "I haven't got a clue who he is."

  I was looking over de Sabatino's shoulder, concentrating hard on the screen.

  Kelly perked up.

  "Nick?"

  "In a minute." I turned my head to Big Al.

  "Absolutely no idea?"

  "Not a clue."

  "Nick?"

  I cut in.

  "Not now, Kelly."

  Kelly butted in again.

  "Nick, Nick!"

  "Go back to the--" "Nick, Nick! I know who that man is."

  I looked at her.

  "Which man?"

  "The one that was in the picture." She grinned.

  "You don't know who he is--but I do."

  "This one?" I pointed at Martinez.

  "No, the one before."

  Big Al scrolled back.

  "Him! That one there!"

  It was the white guy who was sitting with Raoul and big bad Sal.

  I said, "You're sure?"

  "I'm totally sure."

  "Who is he?" After our experience with the video I expected her to nominate anyone from Clint Eastwood to Brad Pitt.

  "It's Daddy's boss."

  There was a long, palpable silence as I let it sink in. Big Al was sucking air through his teeth.

  "What do you mean, Daddy's boss?" I said.

  "He came to our house once for dinner."

  "Do you remember his name?"

  "No. I just came down for some water and he and a lady were eating with Mommy and Daddy in the dining room.

  Daddy let me say hello and he said, "Big smile, Kelly, this is my boss!"

  " It was a good imitation ofKev, and I saw a flicker of sadness in her eyes.

  Big Al joined the conversation in nerd mode.

  "Whoa!

  There you go! So who's your daddy?"

  I swung around.

  "Shut up!" And so she couldn't hear it, I muttered angrily, "I turned up at her parents' house a week ago. Everybody was dead. He was in the DEA, killed by people he knew."

  I pushed
him off his seat and sat down with Kelly on my knee so she had a better view of the screen.