by Chris Ryan
Alex and Dawn crouched in the shadows beneath the bank.
"What d'you reckon?" asked Dawn.
"I reckon I'm going to have to go in underneath it," Alex answered.
Removing his rucksack, he took out a lightweight folding shovel and began digging in the stream. After ten hard minutes, and having hauled out several large rocks by hand, he had cleared a twelve-inch space beneath the lowest strands of the fence and the stream bed.
"OK, all clear?"
They looked around them and Alex quickly undressed. Naked, he burrowed up the stream bed and under the fence.
The water was surprisingly cold. When he was through Dawn wrapped his clothes in a bin liner and threw them to him over the fence. The other kit followed.
"Remind me to take those stitches out," she hissed as Alex re-dressed.
Quickly, they ran through their contingency plans. She would wait where she was and call him on his mobile if there was anything to report, and he would attempt a search of the Black Down estate. Switching his mobile to vibrate, he melted into the woods. His progress was slow. He moved in total silence, continuously scanning the ground in front of him for trip wires and booby traps, and the landscape as a whole for any sign of surveillance.
Soon he was at the edge of the woods and from a well-concealed position among a patch of overgrown thorn bushes was able to rake the area with his binoculars. There was no sign of life and as far as he could see the area of tall grass, nettles and cow-parsley in front of him was untrodden.
Slowly, and with infinite care, he moved from the cover of the woods into the shadowed stream-bed. The water was deeper here and he was soon soaked to the waist. It wasn't the approach route he would have chosen, given a choice, but unlike the nettle-choked field, the exposed rocks would leave no trace of his passing. The day was still warm. The sugar in the tea that he had drunk had made him thirsty and with a flash of irritation Alex realised that he had not filled his canteen. Drinking the stream water, as they had discovered from the forensic samples, was probably inadvisable.
Rounding a corner he saw the church. It had a square tower and a blankly ruined look. Where there had once been windows there were now gaps around which, at some long-ago point, mortar had been roughly tro welled. At one time a road had led past the main house and down alongside the river. The church and its small graveyard lay at the end of this road, or what remained of it. Trees and bushes had forced their way through the dried-out surface and long-unchecked vegetation pressed from both sides. Beyond the church was a line of dilapidated single-storey dwellings.
Having noted the layout of the place, Alex drew himself back into invisibility beneath an overhanging alder bush. With his binoculars he used the slowly failing light to scour the area around the church and then rang Dawn.
"I'm in position," he murmured.
"Since I've got no idea where our man sleeps or even if he's here, I'm just going to hang back and sit tight. How are you?"
"OK. Nothing to report here."
Where would Meehan stay, Alex wondered. In the house? In the church? In the crypt, underground? Did the house have cellars? Wherever it was, it would be somewhere where he would have plenty of warning of any arrivals.
By the property's new owners, for example. Angela Fenwick had discovered that Liskeard Holdings were having trouble securing planning permission for the hotel and conference complex that they hoped to build on the site, and that was why the property remained in its ruined state. But presumably there had been a fair amount of coming and going by architects and others.
Alex reasoned that Meehan probably slept and concealed himself somewhere beneath the church. The chances were that if the house had a cellar it would be damp and uncomfortable, and subject to occasional visits the church was much older and much more securely built. Church crypts were stone-walled. They were usually dry.
At 8 p.m. Dawn rang.
"Still waiting for Godot?" she asked.
"Yup, you?"
"The light's almost gone, as you can see. I was thinking I should get back to the Range Rover. Twitchers don't twitch in the dark."
"OK. Be in touch."
Two hours later his thigh was itching unbearably and his back aching from immobility. How many hours have I spent lying up like this, he wondered. A hundred? More? And how many times has the whole thing ended in failure, in merely getting up and going back to base?
He was going to have to make a decision, sooner or later, about whether to risk taking a closer look at things. Was Meehan due back tonight? Was he already there? Was he, at this minute, watching Alex the hunted turned hunter?
Alex shuddered, both at the thought of being scoped out by Meehan and at the memory of the former agent's terrifying strength.
No, he thought. I'll go in now.
Slowly he eased himself from cover and continued the silent passage upstream that he had started hours earlier. In his pocket, fully loaded, was the Glock.
Soon, the house was in view above him. The ruins of a flight of steps led down from the road fronting the house to the stream at the bottom of the slope. If he started to climb, he would greatly increase the chance of being spotted if Meehan was in residence. If he stayed where he was, however, he would never learn anything.
A step at a time, he moved up the slope. With the passage of years and neglect, the brickwork steps had cracked and he could feel their uneasy shift beneath his feet. Finally he reached the top and the front door. Was it locked? No, the lock had been kicked in and the flaking door swung open easily. Glock in one hand, Maglite torch in the other, Alex went in. He was in a front hall, a place of rotting floorboards, fallen masonry and the smell of dead animals. Fag ends and empty bottles greyed with plaster dust lay about and there was an old coat in the fireplace. Anything of any conceivable value had been stripped away -there was nothing there except walls and floor.
Taking a pair of thick socks from his rucksack, Alex pulled them over his boots. They would muffle the crunching sound of his movements and help conceal the tracks of his Danner boots on the floor. Quickly he moved from room to room on the ground floor, but found nothing. A few empty tins and a gutted mattress lay around, but there was no sign that the place had been occupied by anyone other than tramps and vagrants -and that a long time ago. There was no cellar.
Upstairs the story was the same: gutted rooms, fallen plaster- work and the darkness of the boarded-over windows. At some point a pigeon had trapped itself in there and its half-feathered skeleton lay on a bedroom mantelpiece.
Where had Meehan and his father slept that night all those years ago? Wherever it was, there was no sign that he had bothered with the place since.
Outside, it was now quite dark. Pulling on his night-vision goggles so that the scene leapt into eerie green daylight, Alex descended the slope again. At his ear was the tiny mosquito whine of the goggles' battery-powered electronics.
Carefully he made his way towards the dilapidated cottages. As with the church, a rough attempt had been made to make these safe by slapping mortar around the gaps where there had once been windows. One of them the only one with an intact roof- seemed to have been designated a store of some kind, and its back room proved to be packed with ancient cardboard boxes containing electrical and woodworking items. Raising the goggles and flicking a pen torch beam on these, Alex identified dark-brown bakelite transformers and junction boxes, rows of dusty radio valves, plaited electrical flex, fibrous early Rawlplugs and other items whose use he could only guess at.
And nails, of course. From half-inch to six-inch. Alex pocketed a couple for the forensics team, flicked off the pen torch, lowered the goggles and went outside again.
The mobile throbbed against his thigh.
"You OK?" asked Dawn.
"Looking around," murmured Alex.
"No sign of him yet. This is definitely the place, though I've found a stack of those old nails. You OK?"
"Fine. Take care."
"Sure."
He slipped the phone back into his pocket and moved towards the pale bulk of the church. This time the door was locked. Alex considered climbing in through a window, dismissed the idea as too likely to attract attention and reached into one of the chest pockets of his smock.
It was a couple of years since he'd done the lock-picking refresher course at Tregaron and the goggles didn't help, but Alex's movements were reasonably confident as he inserted a pick into the church door. The lock was a standard pin-tumbler type and it was no more than a few minutes before the door swung inwards.
Pocketing the pick and the torque wrench in favour of the Glock, Alex scanned the place. As in the house, anything of any value as architectural salvage had been removed and above him only a few roof beams remained. Broken tiles and mounds of pigeon shit littered the stone floor.
The door was to one side, low and arched. Again, it was locked, and this lock was no high street Yale. It took Alex almost half an hour of delicate work with the spring-steel pick to solve all the pins and bring them to the shear line, and he breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief when he felt the plug's smooth rotation beneath his torque wrench.
Beyond the door was a descending spiral staircase. The stone treads felt worn beneath Alex's soles as he crept downwards, peering before him through the goggles. There was very little ambient light for them to magnify and he seemed to be descending into a dim green haze.
The crypt appeared to be empty but for a wooden bier of the type once used in funerals. Lifting the goggles, Alex risked a quick sweep with the Maglite torch, only to have his initial observation confirmed. There was nothing else no chests~ no cupboards, no sign of habitation merely walls and floors carved with memorial inscriptions and a cool stone emptiness. Nor were there any doors to further chambers.
Think, Alex told himself. Go back to basics. Meehan told Connolly that the equipment he found was in the church. The Operation Gladio hiding place had to be proof against sophisticated enemy search teams and a locked door would have constituted no protection whatever against a determined GRU or Spetznaz outfit.
Once again, he searched the place with his torch, running its beam over the walls and floors, and the inset stone tablets with their florid carvings.
He almost missed it, and he would never have found it had he not known that it had to be there somewhere. A memorial brass inlaid into the floor in one corner of the room. Worn, as if by the passage of many feet, and inscribed "To the memory of Samuel Calvert, born 1758, laid to rest 1825. My sword, I shall give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage."
Gladio, thought Alex. The word means a sword, doesn't it?
The brass lifted with a knife tip. Beneath, supporting it, was a heavy iron grille. And beneath the grille were steps.
TWENTY-FIVE.
Alarm screamed in Alex's mind. He was getting himself deeper and deeper into a situation from which retreat was impossible.
His plan, to which Angela Fenwick had agreed, had been that he should make an initial sortie into the property to search for evidence of Meehan's presence and then pull back, so that an MIS team could replace him. If Alex encountered Meehan while undertaking his recce, however, he was to kill him on sight. From Fenwick's point of view, Alex knew, this would be the ideal outcome. No more Watchman, no more complex and expensive deployment of Service personnel, no more threat to herself or to her ambitions.
And to be honest, thought Alex, it would suit him too. It would balance the books for George Widdowes' death. There was also the undeniable truth that a happy Angela Fenwick meant a happy Bill Leonard, and a happy Bill Leonard could mean promotion.
Plus, of course, the world would be rid of a psychopathic murderer. If Meehan were waiting in the darkness at the bottom of those steps, or if he were to return to the church right now, Alex would be trapped. Better by far to pull back, to get Fenwick to send reinforcements.
Pulling out his mobile he tried punching in Dawn's number. The sudden beep indicating that there was no signal strength made him jump and his heart race, and he realised just how on edge he was.
Meehan could come back at any moment.
Pulling the grille and the brass plate back into place from below the gaps in the grille had deliberately been made wide enough to allow this Alex began to descend the steps. The room at the bottom, he saw with a quick, relieved sweep of the goggles, had no human occupant. It was a burial chamber and the rectangular stone slab at its centre had probably once supported a tomb.
But not now. Now the walls were piled deep and high with green-sprayed steel cases whose contents, according to the white stencilled legends on their sides, included time pencils and other varieties of detonator, delay fuses, carborundum grease, pocket incendiaries, Eureka beacons, S-Phones, Mk III Transceivers, Welrod pistols and an assortment of grenades and mines. It was a far more comprehensive list than Connolly had described, thought Alex, staring for a wondering moment at the scores of cases. Overcome by curiosity, he prised open the lid of a case marked "Grenades Gammon type'.
Inside, neatly packed, were a dozen bizarre-looking appliances, each consisting of a bakelite fuse housing and a cotton bag. The idea, Alex assumed, was that you filled the bag with plastic explosive maybe chucking in a handful of nuts and bolts for good measure and lobbed the whole thing into the middle of an enemy patrol. Very nasty indeed.
The transceivers packed into their little leather suitcases, by contrast, were objects of great fascination, with their miniaturised sockets and grilles and dials. If I get through this in one piece, thought Alex, I'm coming back for a few of these, and perhaps a couple of the Welrods too. Take them up to Sotheby's or Christie's... This sub-crypt, it was clear, was where Meehan lived. At one end of the room were cardboard boxes containing new own-brand supermarket tins soups, beans, spaghetti, peas -chocolate bars, and packet foods. A packing case held fresh oranges, potatoes and green vegetables. No onions, probably because of the strong smell they gave off while cooking. Among the food was a small plastic rubbish bag containing crushed tins, sweet papers, withered orange peel and a brown apple core. The last two looked less than forty-eight hours old.
There was also a plastic water-purification system, a tiny MSR stove and fuel bottles, a pair of mess tins, plastic cutlery, a comprehensive medical kit the suture-set recently used, Alex noted and a wash bag. In the corner of the room above this area a fresh-air duct led upwards into the darkness, presumably voiding behind some decorative element on the tower.
At the other end of the chamber, folded neatly on the floor, were Meehan's clothes nondescript camping-store items for the most part, and a pair of worn cor dura hiking boots. From one of these an inexpensive Suunto compass trailed a para-cord lanyard.
On the slab, weighed down at each corner, was a good-quality photocopy of an architectural blueprint. The building in question was entitled Powys Court (Block 2), Oakley Street, London 5W3. A roll of similar blueprints lay to one side and a flash of the Maglite served to confirm that all related to the same building.
What was it that Dawn had said about Angela Fenwick's flat? A private block? In a gated estate? One of the most secure addresses in London?
Heart pounding, Alex scanned the place, felt through the modest pile of clothing. There was no sign of any weaponry -Meehan had it all with him. He tried thumbing Dawn's number on his mobile but couldn't get a signal.
Shit!
Racing up the steps, he hurriedly replaced the grille and the brass plate.
Moments later, pulling the crypt door shut behind him, he was running from the church towards the main gate. Meehan was about to move on Angela Fenwick he was sure of it.
He was over the gate in less than a minute and, having got well clear of the premises dialled Dawn again. This time he got a tone and she picked up immediately.
"Powys Court mean anything to you?"
"Yes, it's Angela's place. Why?"
"Meehan's got the architectural blueprint. He's probably there right now."
"Where are yo
u?"
"Couple of hundred yards beyond the entrance to the house there's a lay-by and a sign saying Chilford."
"OK. Two minutes."
Packing the night-vision goggles into the rucksack, he waited impatiently for the headlights of the Range Rover.
She was closer to five minutes.
"I've rung Angela," she told him.
"Told her to get out."
"And go where?"
"Safe house. She's agreed to stay there for the next twenty-four hours and surround the place with Special Branch people."
"Can she get there without being followed?"
"She was on her way home from Downing Street. The driver will throw in every move in the book, make sure they're not followed."
Alex looked dubious.
"Don't worry," said Dawn.
"He's very good and very experienced. Ex-army, as it happens."
"Go on."
"She wants me up there soonest. I have to help her run things from the safe house."
Alex nodded.
"And I'll stay down here. Sooner or later this is where he's going to come back to and when he does I'll be ready."
"I'd have liked to stay with you.
"I could certainly have used an extra pair of eyes and ears," said Alex, unloading the gear from the back of the Range Rover.
"Is that all I am to you?" she asked with a half-smile.
"A handful of body parts?"
"You know what I mean."
"Have you got everything you need?"
Alex patted his smock pockets and checked the rucksack.
"Torches, lock-picks, Glock, ammo, night sights, knife, scoff, first aid, spare clothing, waterproofs, cam netting .. . Looks OK. To be on the safe side I might take the bike and some petrol. Don't like being without a vehicle. Oh, and some drinking water I'm not poisoning myself with that shite from the stream."