His for the Holidays

by LB Gregg, Harper Fox, Z. A. Maxfield

  “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 paym
ent 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 disappear, 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.”

  “What?” McBride roared into his face. “Fuck it, let me go! I heard her! She’s fine. I—”

  “You heard a recording.” The door was open wide. Toby’s eyes were terrible on his—bleak, remorseless. “They taped her. She’s not there.”

  McBride almost laughed. Then, from the car’s dark interior, came the thin, high voice, the same as before—“Daddy, Daddy! Take me home!”

  The same as before. Exactly the same. McBride heaved his weight forward again, and this time Toby let him go. McBride knew very well you had to, with some of the bereaved. They wouldn’t take dead for an answer; you had to let them into the morgue. He leaned into the car, grabbing at the far side of the passenger seat to keep from falling.

  Anyway Toby was wrong. It was a CD, not a tape. Nice touch, something in McBride observed, the part of his good copper’s mind that never shut down, that always had time to admire the Edinburgh criminal and all his works. On a tape or an MP3, anything analogue or through the radio, he might have heard the hiss. He might have known. But this was perfect—crystal clear. The take me home phrase played again. Then there was a tiny gap—not jerky at all, just enough for a scared child to draw a breath before going on—“Daddy, come and get me. They’ve no’ hurt me, but I’m frightened!” Then there was a series of sobs.

  McBride straightened and eased out of the car. He might have heard more—Carlyle’s man might have let the disc play on—if he hadn’t fallen, like a slab of bloody granite, for the very first phrase. He was hearing more now.

  Toby moved him gently aside. He reached into the car, found the right button and stopped the CD. He ejected it neatly, took a beautifully clean white handkerchief from his coat’s breast pocket and wrapped the disc. “I…I saw,” he said, tucking it away. “From where I was, back behind the pillars. I thought I saw the car was empty, but I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t tell you.”

  No. He wouldn’t have been able to; it hadn’t been his call. It had been McBride’s—on the ground, not twenty feet away. McBride had given away their bargaining chip, their one chance. He’d sold Grace out—for the second fucking time, he’d thrown away his child.

  The wind changed direction and found a new chill. The sleet had thinned out to nothing. Too late for a white Christmas now—there was nothing but cold and the wolf’s-tooth wind and emptiness.

  Toby stepped around him. Why? What was he doing? Did he think the world would be any less vacant for McBride, that McBride would be to himself any less of a failure, a thing, a bloody abomination, if a man stood in one place rather than another and held his shoulders—even a man with tears of shared feeling in his wide dark eyes? “I’m sorry,” Toby said. “Oh, James.”

  He was trying to shield McBride from the wind. That was why he’d moved. It took McBride a moment to work this out, and when he did, it broke him. As no words could have done—no, not even that grated-out sorry, not even tears. That sheltering move was instinctive. McBride did it with Grace when they were out, automatically shepherding her to his leeward side. Edinburgh was a wind-whipped town. When she’d been tiny, he’d chosen which hip to carry her on according to which of the four quarters was howling that day.

  McBride burst into tears. Toby stepped forward and seized him. McBride crashed into his arms, clutching everything he could get of him, crushing the fabric of his coat. Toby’s hand found the back of his skull and spread there, stroking, pressing it down. “Ah, James! It’s all right, it’s all right!” It wasn’t, but McBride lost all hope of saying so as his mouth found dark wool on Toby’s shoulder and opened wide in a gut-wrenching sob. Scents of lanolin a
nd rich, assuring male body rushed into his lungs. No! He tried to fight, but Toby’s arms had gone round him like cables, one round his waist and the other across his back. Libby doesn’t have this comfort, Grace doesn’t have it and I, least deserving—I can’t…

  But he had no choice. Toby held him fast, sheltering him from the wind, and after a moment McBride buried his face tight against his shoulder, grasped him as hard as he was being held and gave up and wept.

  * * *

  The CD deck in the BMW was state-of-the-art, better than anything McBride had at his flat. And parked up in this wasteland, he wouldn’t disturb the neighbours with his daughter’s cries for help, played and replayed at maximum volume while he tried to recognise a background noise. There was something, eight seconds or so into the third clip—a kind of whistling, followed by a rumble. He played it again and again. It was easy to find. It fell right after “Daddy, please help me” and right before a sobbed “Oh, Daddy, please take me home.”

  Toby, who had been listening too, chin propped on his hands on the wheel, reached over and snapped the player off. McBride turned on him with something between a sob and a snarl. “What are you doing?”

  “Enough, James. It’s enough for now.”

  “You wait until it’s your kid. Then you can tell me what’s damn well enough!” In answer Toby only passed him the handkerchief he’d wrapped the disc in. McBride caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview and took it, shuddering. “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. I don’t have a child. I can’t feel what you’re feeling. But if you don’t go home now and get some sleep, you’ll be useless to her. Have you got a laptop with a CD drive? Broadband?”

  “I… Yes, I do.”

  “Right. I’ll get this uploaded and sent to my contacts in Tel Aviv. And we should go back to your flat anyway. He’s been communicating with you via your answer phone, and—”

  “Why would he leave me any more messages? I gave him what he wanted.”