The must-read new blockbuster thriller

by Tony Kent

  ‘You were right, they’re here. The two of them just went inside.’

  There was silence as Arnold listened to the reply.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said in turn, ‘we won’t be underestimating anyone. Should I call you when it’s done?’

  There was another brief pause in which Stanton gave his reply. Arnold did not respond, just hung up and turned to his companion.

  ‘Looks like you’ll get yer wish. Stanton wants us in there now.’

  FORTY-TWO

  Sarah squinted in the dim light of the faculty building. The grand entrance hall was illuminated here and there by permanent emergency lighting, installed in the name of health and safety. The light was much too weak to reach the framed list of faculty personnel beside the main door.

  It took three attempts to ignite the cigarette lighter that Sarah took from her pocket. Hardly a torch, but good enough. She placed it close to the glass and began to run down the list of names.

  The two words Sarah was looking for were less than a third of the way down: ‘Eamon McGale’. Tracing her finger to the right she reached a three-digit number that sat across from the name. 6.11.

  Sarah turned to Michael, but he’d spotted the number too and was already halfway into the antiquated caged lift that ran through the middle of the building’s central staircase. He was wasting no time.

  She followed him into the lift and pushed the ‘6’ button as he slammed shut the cage door. She heard the lift mechanism lock before it lifted them with surprising speed to the top floor.

  Michael stepped out on the sixth floor. Sarah followed, allowing the cage to close behind her. Michael opened it again without explanation and placed a nearby litter bin between the door and the frame, preventing the cage from fully closing. Before Sarah could ask why, he was ushering her along the darkened corridor, in the direction of office 6.11.

  As her eyes grew more used to the darkness, Sarah noticed details of the posters that were pinned to the corridor walls. She could just about make out the larger wording. It would have been enough detail to suggest the political leanings of the university, if Sarah had been seeking it. Michael was Catholic. He would have seen some of these Republican slogans before. Propaganda that had remained unchanged in the forty-year history of the Troubles. Sarah, though, was unused to the sectarian nature of the world that now surrounded her, and so the posters told her nothing. She just concentrated on the door numbers.

  Room 6.11 stood close to the end of the corridor. Until a few days ago it would have looked like any other faculty office. Not tonight. Police crime-scene tape criss-crossed the door and frame, telling the world that whatever was inside was now evidence. It was no surprise, then, that the door itself did not budge when Sarah reached out and turned the handle. She signalled this to Michael. He stepped forward and took her place at the door.

  This time Sarah tried to see what Michael was doing to manipulate the lock, but his broad back obscured her view. After a few seconds she gave up.

  A minute more and Michael was in. Sarah followed close behind.

  The same dim emergency lighting from the building’s foyer illuminated the room. It was just as weak as the bulbs downstairs, but the fact that the area was much smaller made it sufficient to see.

  ‘This place has already been searched!’ Sarah said, her voice a whisper.

  ‘Of course it has.’

  Michael crossed the room and was beginning to riffle through the drawers of the office desk as he spoke.

  ‘McGale shot two major politicians in broad daylight, then apparently killed himself before he could be questioned. Did you think they wouldn’t at least search his office?’

  ‘I guess so,’ Sarah replied, ‘but then what’s going to be left that can help us? Whoever searched this place was trained to find anything important. And they were here first. So anything that matters will be gone already.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Michael’s air of confidence did not falter. ‘But we’ve got a big advantage on them. Thanks to the True IRA claiming credit, they all think that Howard Thompson was McGale’s target. But we know different. So what might mean nothing to them could mean everything to us. And, anyway, the fact they’ve searched the place doesn’t mean they’ll have taken everything away with them. Now help me look.’

  For the past few hours Sarah had been increasingly swept away by Michael’s determination. By his confidence. It – he – had hypnotised her. She did not understand why. Why was she placing so much trust in a man she barely knew? Whatever it was, it stopped her from questioning him. For some reason she was willing to blindly believe that he could get them out of this mess. Something about him made her feel safe. So she did as he asked.

  A heavily disturbed bookcase in the corner of the room attracted Sarah’s attention. It had been ransacked in the original search, all except for a line of untouched photo frames on the middle shelf, containing four photographs. They had been ignored by whoever had searched the room before her as they were still standing in the positions McGale must have set them.

  Sarah studied the first picture. An image of a young Eamon McGale in his graduation robes, taken many years before. An educated youth with the promise of his future visible in his bright eyes. A world away from the crumpled remnants of a man she had seen in Trafalgar Square just days ago.

  The image in the next frame was more recognisable. Sarah lifted it from the shelf. Eamon McGale, accompanied by an attractive wife and two much taller, athletic-looking young men who – from their ages and their similarity to their mother – could only be their sons. The face was now familiar, but even this recent McGale was a different man. Keen intellect and fiery principles burned through his piercing eyes. Eyes that had seemed blank just days ago.

  The same impression came from the two remaining photographs. Each showed the same small family. The first featured all four of them on a golf course, happily competing among themselves, presumably with the expensive-looking Spalding golf clubs that still sat next to the bookcase. The second showed the family together again at the college graduation of the elder son.

  Sarah stared at the images. The McGales looked a happy, close-knit family. It shone through each and every frame. What McGale would then go on to do made that impression all the more tragic.

  ‘Sarah, come and look at this.’

  Michael’s voice broke into Sarah’s thoughts. She put down the photograph and turned to where he was now standing. He had his back to her, facing a wall that was covered with press cuttings. Sarah walked towards him.

  ‘Looks like motive won’t be too hard to prove.’

  Michael gestured to the mass of headlines that papered this part of the office.

  Sarah took a closer look, confused. The wall was almost completely covered by cuttings. They came from every conceivable national newspaper, dated from the previous November onwards. She concentrated, looking for a pattern that emerged in seconds: the central headlines – the cuttings from which the larger collection grew outwards – all referred to a single incident. The November bombing of one of Belfast’s finest restaurants, James Street South.

  A bombing in which nine diners were killed.

  It soon became clear why that particular bombing was so important. The first clipping revealed that Elizabeth, John and David McGale had been among the dead. They had been there for the eighteenth birthday of the youngest son. The same clipping also said that the boys’ father, Professor Eamon McGale, had escaped by luck alone; he had left the restaurant minutes before the explosion to take a call from one of his postgraduate students, named as Benjamin Grant.

  Sarah shook her head as she read on, trying to expel the image of the happy family in McGale’s photographs. It was terrible that such a perfect existence could be so easily destroyed by guns and bombs. By religion and politics.

  The thought was pointless, she realised. What was done was done. She pushed it from her mind and turned her attention to the cuttings that sprouted from the central headlines. Branch
es on a tree of information.

  They came from the same selection of national newspapers and covered the activities of the Ulster paramilitary groups from the James Street South atrocity onwards. Terrorist attack after terrorist attack. A dramatic history of the Troubles that had rocked Ulster and the rest of the United Kingdom, as the True IRA and the Ulster Volunteer Army used Great Britain as their battleground.

  As Sarah read on, another glaring pattern emerged: the growing presence of Sir Neil Matthewson. More and more cuttings referred to the politician. Some of these related to terrorist activity, but many did not. It was the latter that most stood out on a wall otherwise dedicated to violent death. To someone else’s eyes they might have seemed out of context, but to Sarah – aware of McGale’s belief that the renewed terrorist activity and Matthewson were intimately connected – their inclusion made sense.

  Sarah moved from cutting to cutting for a few more minutes, until satisfied she had seen it all. Finally she turned towards Michael, who, having already scanned the information on the wall, had now moved behind McGale’s desk and was flicking through a thin leather diary he had found.

  She watched as his fingers moved through the pages at speed, as if they knew what they were looking for. Perhaps they did. How else could she explain the moment when they stopped dead, settled on an entry almost halfway through the journal and stayed there?

  ‘That’s what we’re after.’

  Michael moved back around the table as he spoke. He offered Sarah the finger-marked page.

  Sarah looked at its content. Four letters – BG and RM – marked in red in the 11 a.m. slot on the entry marked ‘15 July’. None of this meant anything to her.

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘Look at the date,’ Michael said, ‘then look at the dates on the newspaper cuttings. Remember that, as far as we know, everything McGale thinks is important is up there on that wall. From his family’s death onwards.’

  Sarah followed Michael back to the wall as he continued to explain.

  ‘So we have the James Street South stories in November. Then every single terrorist act from then on. All on the wall. All growing out from the centre. No mention of anything but terrorism, no interest in anything or anyone else. And then . . .’

  Michael thrust his index finger against an innocent-looking headline.

  ‘. . . he starts obsessing about Matthewson.’

  Sarah looked again at the cutting. Remembered almost every detail from reading it just moments before. But still it meant nothing.

  ‘I still don’t get it,’ she said, beginning to lose patience.

  ‘That’s because you’re not looking at the bigger picture,’ Michael replied. ‘Until July 15th McGale was obsessing about every terrorist act attributed to either the True IRA or the UVA. Nothing else interested him. He was completely single-minded. Then, out of nowhere, he’s suddenly putting up unrelated articles about Matthewson. Mixing them up with the terrorism stories, even when there’s no obvious link.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And we know why Matthewson’s up there, Sarah. Even if the police don’t. We know he’s up there because McGale believed Matthewson was involved in the attacks in some way. But that’s not all this wall tells us, is it?’

  Sarah looked again at the cuttings. She took in as much detail as she could before looking back to Michael. Still unsure, she followed his eye-line back to the first Matthewson story. It was only then that she realised the part of the page Michael was staring at.

  ‘The date,’ she said. Aloud and deliberately, but almost to herself. ‘The first Matthewson cutting is dated July 17th. That’s nearly seven months after his family were killed. Seven months after his obsession started.’

  ‘Exactly. Seven months and he doesn’t note Matthewson once. Which means he didn’t suspect his involvement in that time. But then suddenly Matthewson becomes the focus. Becomes the obsession. With no real explanation. Except—’

  ‘. . . for the date.’

  Sarah finished Michael’s theory without hesitation.

  ‘Matthewson appears on McGale’s radar within days of his meeting this BG & RM. A meeting important enough for him to schedule it in an otherwise empty diary.’

  Michael smiled. Sarah was up to speed. Now they needed to put that knowledge to work.

  ‘So whoever BG & RM are,’ Michael began, ‘perhaps they could be the source of McGale’s belief that Matthewson was involved in the attacks. Which, if that’s right, would make them the next pieces of the puzzle.’

  ‘Clearly.’ Sarah nodded her agreement. ‘If that’s right.’

  ‘It’s a big “if”, I agree. But it’s the most likely lead we have right now.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Sarah. She glanced back at the diary. ‘But those initials? BG and RM? They’re not a whole lot to go on, are they?’

  ‘Not if they were all we had, no,’ Michael replied. ‘But they may not be. I’ve been thinking about the student who brought McGale out of—’

  Michael stopped speaking. His eyes darted towards the open office door.

  Sarah opened her mouth to speak but was silenced by his raised palm. Michael tapped his ear. An instruction to listen. Then, without making a sound, he mouthed an explanation.

  ‘Lift mechanism.’

  Sarah took just a moment to understand. She attuned her own ears to what Michael could already hear, and she knew that he was right.

  The unmistakable sound of the ageing lift’s mechanism trying – and failing – to engage. Sarah realised now why Michael had obstructed the lift’s cage door, jarring it open with the litter bin. Taking the lift out of action would give them both a warning and time to act on it.

  Sarah felt her stomach turn with fear. The vivid memory of their recent violent encounter haunted her.

  ‘Who is it, Michael?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Michael replied. ‘But whoever it is has six flights of stairs before they get to us. So grab something heavy and follow me.’

  FORTY-THREE

  Graham Arnold climbed each of the six flights of stairs with silent care. He had cursed the noise that the broken lift’s mechanism had made. Their instructions had been clear: do not underestimate the target. The ease with which he had seen the lawyer enter a secure building and disengage the alarm had made sure he took that warning seriously.

  So it was unfortunate the lawyer had been warned of their presence.

  ‘Of all the dumb fucking luck!’

  Noel Best hissed from several steps behind. His lack of breath undermined his attempt to whisper. Best was short, squat and built for explosive power over stamina. The much fitter Arnold would have chosen a different partner if he had known the climb that was ahead of them.

  ‘For Christ’s sake be quiet!’ Arnold snapped. ‘You’re making more noise than the bloody lift!’

  ‘Well, this wasn’t in the job description.’ Best’s patience was equally thin. ‘And I don’t see why we’re trying to be quiet. If this guy’s really that good he’ll already know we’re here.’

  Arnold did not respond. Best was probably right.

  When Arnold finally reached the sixth floor his partner was just half a flight behind him. The noise told him that.

  Arnold took his customised Walther PPS pistol from his shoulder holster. With it he covered the length of the corridor ahead of him. A firearm specialist, Arnold had done this a thousand times, both in training and for real. Nothing would step into the corridor and live.

  Best was not far behind. At the top of the stairs, he placed his right hand on the corridor wall as he struggled to draw air into his lungs. Looking up, he saw Arnold armed and ready to go. With a deep breath Best reached into his own shoulder holster, drew his weapon and indicated a readiness to continue.

  Arnold led the way in silence. Every movement of his body was mirrored exactly by Best. The choreographed efficiency of their progress had been honed over countless hours of practice. Such had been the way in the hardened Royal Ulste
r Constabulary. Their eyes were everywhere; every angle covered by the sweeping views of their precision-wielded pistols.

  Within moments they were either side of the closed door to room 6.11.

  Their ability to silently communicate was practically telepathic. No words were needed. They moved into their usual positions. Best stood head-on to the door, with Arnold to his right.

  The bigger man steeled himself, ready to open the probably secured door via the precise application of his powerful right boot. Arnold was close beside him, tightening his grip on his weapon as he prepared to enter.

  A final glance, a nod of his head and Best burst into action. The power behind his kick was concentrated on the lock and the latch. It sent the door crashing open. Anyone hiding behind it would be in traction for weeks. If they were lucky.

  Best used his momentum to take him through the damaged door frame. He regained his footing with a speed that came from repeated execution of the same movement.

  The process was so ingrained that Best had no need to consider his step. Instead his attention was all around him as he viewed the room ahead. Satisfied in an instant that the rear of the office was clear, Best swept to his right, lowered himself to one knee and covered one side of the office with a single sweep of his pistol.

  Arnold was right behind him.

  Positioned at his full height, he used the same expert technique to ensure the safety of the left half of the room. Within half a second he knew that his side was clear, and so he aimed his weapon in the direction of the room’s one remaining hiding place: McGale’s desk.

  Arnold was certain that the lawyer had heard them coming and so he expected to find nothing. But that would not prevent him from doing his job. He completed the search before turning back to Best.

  ‘Nothing,’ Arnold confirmed.

  ‘No surprise there. So now what?’

  ‘Now we sweep the building. They’re still in here somewhere.’

  FORTY-FOUR

  Michael stood at the door to room 6.3. A five-iron golf club was gripped firmly in his hands; the closest thing to a weapon he had found as he had rushed to leave McGale’s office. He hoped it would be good enough. With the repeating crash of violently opened doors growing ever closer, he would soon find out.