by J M Gregson
But Riordan remembered much more vividly how Fitzpatrick had spoken for the Cause, how bright and articulate he had been for Ireland in those heady days in the Eighties and Nineties, which were long gone but sometimes seemed but yesterday. Seamus Fitzpatrick had stood head and shoulders above his peers, morally as well as physically, and his eyes had blazed with the righteousness of the Cause as he urged young Irishmen to join him.
He was James Fitzpatrick now, not Seamus. He had made his peace with England and taken the tyrant’s gold. He had condemned the IRA when they conducted the great bombing of the centre of Manchester in 1996. He had turned traitor to the Cause he had once espoused. He was a prominent supporter of the Labour Party now, a man who spoke at conferences and had risen steadily through the council ranks of local politics. People had spoken of him as a possible Labour MP and it had looked for a time as if he might take that route.
But local eminence was more his line. He wanted to be a big man in the city of his choice, Manchester. This was the place where he had made a name for himself through his successful business and his well-publicised work on the council. This was where he had gained much publicity and secured the moral high ground locally by his instant condemnation of the IRA bombing which had devastated the city centre. He had been prominent in much of the subsequent redevelopment, securing central funds, driving through the plans, and suggesting the architects who had seen proud new buildings rise from the debris.
Well, nothing came without a price, in Patrick Riordan’s view. And tonight the man who had grown up in Belfast as Seamus Fitzpatrick was going to pay the price of his treachery.
Cafferty was nervous. It didn’t affect his driving, which came to him automatically, but he was crouched tensely over the wheel. He answered Riordan’s questions in monosyllables; eventually he made it clear that he didn’t want to talk at all unless it should be absolutely necessary. ‘Suits me, Mick!’ said Pat Riordan, smiling a superior smile in the passenger seat. You couldn’t expect men who weren’t soldiers to be as cool and confident as he was.
James Fitzpatrick was speaking at a Labour party meeting about future policies. The party committees were anxious to be prepared for the next election, which wasn’t due for another couple of years but might come at any time, with Europe in chaos over its currency and the economic recession showing little sign of abating. It looked from the opinion polls as if Labour would walk in on the back of the discontent which economic troubles always brought to an existing government. But you needed to have policies formed and a manifesto prepared against the possibility of a snap election. You couldn’t trust those Tories: that was one of the few old saws guaranteed a chorus of approval at a Labour party gathering.
The meeting wasn’t in any of the city’s major meeting places. Crowds at party gatherings were thin. Except in the months before an election, only the keenest attended. The attendance at this one was a little bigger than usual, because James Fitzpatrick had a loyal local following to add to the surprising number of party officials who felt it their duty to be there. But the numbers didn’t warrant a major hiring fee. This gathering would be in a large, single-storey building, some way from the city centre.
Pat Riordan had examined the place carefully three days ago and concluded that it leant itself admirably to assassination.
In truth, he would probably have decided that whatever the venue. Like many a man bent upon glory, Riordan was impatient for action at almost any price. Glory is a dangerous aspiration. It upsets the judgement. Men in pursuit of glory are careless of their own lives as well as of those they plan to terminate. The delusion of an honourable death makes men careless of danger and leads to reckless decisions. The man who thought himself so cool made one of those now.
The large, shabby building was a former storage facility. It had large doors at the front, but no other means of entrance or exit. A man planning murderous violence should have preferred at least one more entrance, which would have accorded him a greater element of surprise and a better possibility of a swift getaway.
The building was also at the end of a cul-de-sac. No professional killer liked that. Psychologically, it made you feel trapped: with only one exit, you felt like a rat running along a single drainpipe. It faced you with an immediate tricky decision. Did you park your getaway car near the entrance, risking curiosity and suspicion? Or did you park it outside the cul-de-sac altogether, on the busy main thoroughfare at the end of it? This made you much more anonymous, but meant you would have to race the best part of two hundred yards on foot to your waiting car, probably with people in frenzied pursuit.
Patrick Riordan decided that they would park beside the entrance to the hall.
This meant they had to be there early, to secure the place they wanted. They parked an hour before the scheduled time for the meeting. Cafferty reversed the VW CC GT carefully into position, eight yards from the high doors, facing straight down the narrow little street. It was a stolen car, and it was the sort he’d wanted, fast and sleek. And its owner was away for the weekend, so that its absence would not be swiftly reported.
Riordan stuck the red rose sticker which was the Labour Party emblem predominantly on the side of the windscreen. That would insure them against any challenge as to their presence here, he thought, and he was right. No curious eyes moved any further than that cheerful English symbol. He and Cafferty disappeared swiftly from the scene.
The car was in position, but its occupants must maintain a low profile until the time for action came. They found a pub on the corner of a neighbouring street and bought themselves two halves of bitter. Cafferty wanted a whisky chaser, but Riordan wouldn’t allow it. Soldiers didn’t drink much, if they wanted to remain alert and efficient, and neither would their drivers. The English troops in the trenches might have been dosed with rum to make them go over the top, but they were English and merely cannon-fodder, not dedicated men like him.
You needed to have your reactions razor-sharp for what he was going to do tonight. And you didn’t want any confusion in your driver; it would be foolish to throw away your triumph through any bungling of your escape. In any case, this pub probably wouldn’t have Irish, he told Cafferty, and they shouldn’t attract attention to themselves by asking for Jameson’s. He fancied a whisky himself, but he’d have it later, as a celebration.
The minutes ticked by very slowly. The two tense men found conversation increasingly difficult. Eventually they ceased to attempt it. At one minute to seven, Riordan and Cafferty were back in the car.
It was a warm May evening, so that the loose brown anorak the killer now had to adopt looked a little out of place. Most of the men they’d watched going into the meeting wore only light sweaters; some were in shirt sleeves. There was even the odd young woman in a summer dress, though youth was rare in this gathering. But Pat needed the anorak to conceal the Armalite. He slipped quietly into the back of the hall without anyone taking much notice of his dress. This was Manchester, after all, not Torquay, and people were accustomed to caution about the weather.
The place looked bigger inside than out. There were thirty-two rows of seats, with thirty chairs in each row. The hall could accommodate 960, Riordan calculated, though there were less than a quarter of that number here tonight. He made these calculations because he had no interest in what was being said on the raised wooden stage at the front of the hall. He sat in the penultimate row and made his preparations — in a thinly populated arena, you attracted attention to yourself if you sat isolated from everyone else on the last row of all.
There were boring introductory speeches from two Labour Party worthies, one very bald and one very portly. They said conventional things and received conventional applause. Riordan found himself at once bored and tense. It was a strange combination, which he didn’t believe he’d ever encountered before. He was totally uninterested in what was being said, but feverish with expectation of the action to come. He felt the pulse in his temple racing as he made his hands move together in th
e polite applause which greeted the opening speeches. You wanted to be unnoticed, so you made yourself a part of the tapestry by producing the same reactions as the other unsuspecting extras around you.
There was a quickening of expectation as Seamus Fitzpatrick rose to speak. Or James Fitzpatrick, as they called him here. Pat curled his lip with contempt at that; the name emphasised how the man had sold out to the enemy. He tried to shut out the content of what his target was saying. He didn’t want to hear any of it, in case it upset his concentration as the moment approached.
But he had to admit that Fitzpatrick remained an effective and persuasive speaker, as he had been in his youth when he had spoken for the Cause. He acknowledged the men who had introduced him, by means of gracious words and a half-turn in their direction. They had many years of faithful and diligent service to the Labour cause, he said, making Pat start by his use of that word. Fitzpatrick said that people forgot that nothing was achieved without hard work, and these men had toiled hard and selflessly in years past. The triumphs of the 1997 election and the two which had followed were due to the work of men like them.
Then he turned to the future and what they must all do now. He made a couple of little jokes which got the audience on his side and showed that he had the common touch. He moved more sombrely into the present recession, which thanks to the Tories was now a double-dip one and the most serious setback the nation had suffered since the great slump of the 1930s. He made a couple of cheap cracks about the government and its distinctively Etonian cabinet, which was safe ground for an Irishman in a Manchester socialist meeting. He touched on the establishment and how out of touch they were with the harsh reality of recession, though he had the sense to keep away from the monarchy.
Having hit the easy targets, Fitzpatrick moved on to more positive things. Pat Riordan didn’t attempt to follow what the man was saying about the necessity for economic growth and the means by which he would foster it. His moment was getting near now. He fingered the smooth steel of the Armalite beneath his anorak. It was still bright outside, but this big room had only small windows in its sides and it was becoming quite gloomy. Someone switched on lights over the stage area and James Fitzpatrick made the obvious joke about bringing light to our darkness; it elicited dutiful laughter. He was speaking about the city now and the particular things that should be done here. This was a logical progression, because everyone knew his real aim was to become Lord Mayor of Manchester. He was clever all right, thought Riordan: he’d been clever long ago, when he’d been Seamus and dedicated to the Cause.
Thirteen minutes to eight. They’d synchronised watches before he came in here. Time seemed to stand still as the moment approached. Fitzpatrick was standing at the microphone, moving towards the climax of his argument and the moment when he’d take questions from the audience, as he’d promised to do at the outset. Patrick Riordan could hear all sorts of tiny sounds now. He was pleased by that: it must be a good thing that your senses became extra sharp as key moments in your life approached.
He heard Cafferty start the car outside, exactly at ten to, as they’d agreed. He glanced around him, swift and sharp as a fox about to seize its chicken. There was no one behind him and only one man level with him, yards away at the other end of the row. He slid the Armalite from his anorak, rested it on the back of the seat in front of him. No one in the hall noticed the movement.
Fitzpatrick was making a point emphatically, waving his right arm in the air as he reached the climax of his peroration. Riordan was reminded of an old print of Gladstone speaking passionately about home rule for Ireland, which his mother had kept on the wall of their tenement home. He shot Fitzpatrick at that moment, watched his target whirl and scream with the blow of the impact. He fired twice more at the falling target before it hit the ground.
Then he was away, out of his seat, into the aisle, thrusting open the high wooden door and bursting into the sudden dazzle of the still bright evening outside. Cafferty flung the passenger door open as he saw him and he was into the car and away even as the first men appeared behind him on the single step of the former warehouse. ‘Get your head down!’ his driver yelled, and Riordan realised as the tyres screamed and the seat thrust against his back that Cafferty was wearing a crash helmet as some sort of protection against the bullets which would fly around his head if they didn’t get clean away.
For the first time, Patrick Riordan considered the thought that he might not survive this.
They were away swiftly down the narrow little street, as Cafferty had planned. The road at the end of it was busy with traffic, so that they had to wait an agonising twenty seconds before they could swing left and be away. Twenty seconds which might prove crucial.
Patrick Riordan had planned his own movements meticulously and executed them as intended. What you could never plan or control were the movements of the enemy. The very things which had made James Fitzpatrick a target for the IRA avenger Riordan had also made him a candidate for the state security services. He didn’t have a permanent bodyguard; resources didn’t run to that. It was reckoned now that only the fanatical rump of provisional IRA zealots would have any grievance against a man who had supported them steadily until the Sunningdale Agreement had brought the settlement which most Irishmen found acceptable.
But fanatics existed. Indeed, the security services kept a note of the movements of Patrick Riordan, a declared avenger, who had never accepted the peace which most of his colleagues had welcomed. Riordan’s former commander, Dominic McGuiness, might now represent official Ireland and be about to shake the hand of the British queen. His former Sinn Fein inspiration Gerry Adams might now be encouraging the Irish Parliament to cooperate with the English. But men like Riordan were still killing, which meant that men like James Fitzpatrick still needed a degree of protection. When he spoke at public meetings, the system dictated that there would be a security man sited discreetly in the hall to protect him.
Not a top man, perhaps: resources were inevitably spread thinly in this Olympic year. The man assigned to Fitzpatrick was young. He was certainly not incompetent, but neither was he experienced. He had chosen to sit at the table on the platform beside his charge, when he might have been better advised to move around and observe in the body of the hall. And because he was young, this would be the first time his services had ever been called upon. However much you told yourself that you must be perpetually alert, that sooner or later you would be needed, you were still shocked when terrorism suddenly blazed into ugly life and you were the sole force to deal with it.
Booth leapt over the fallen target. The rules were that you didn’t stop to check on injuries, once your charge had been attacked. You went straight for the man with the gun and you shot to kill. The idea of downing a man by shooting at his legs was a ridiculous myth dreamed up by idealists. He was down the aisle between the rows of seats like a sprinter, pistol in hand, careless of his own safety as he had to be in the pursuit of an assassin.
His quarry’s car was away already, reaching the end of the street as he wrenched open the door of the Mondeo. The grey VW was delayed mercifully by the main road traffic for a little while. He could hear its driver gunning his engine impatiently. The grey car disappeared as Booth moved after it. Then he had himself to wait for agonising seconds at the end of the cul-de-sac before he was able to swing into the line of traffic.
The VW was a CC GT and could probably outdistance even his two-litre Mondeo on the open road. That was irrelevant here, for there was too much traffic around for anyone to make full use of an engine’s potential. That was one of the complications for security. One at least of the men in the VW was a desperate man with a lethal weapon. Unsuspecting citizens were in danger if he was cornered in the wrong place. If he should choose to shoot his way out and members of the public were killed or injured, the man who had trapped him would be subjected to the spotlight of an official enquiry.
Booth tried to explain the safety issues as rapidly as he could to the Poli
ce Armed Response Unit he contacted as he drove. He yelled details frantically into his microphone as he twisted the wheel of the Mondeo to overtake startled city drivers. He wasn’t gaining much on his quarry; he could see the grey VW passing cars in front of him as horns blared in protest. He was trying not to use his own horn, in the probably futile hope that the driver and passenger in the VW wouldn’t realise that he had spotted them and was on their trail.
The police came back to him. He was on the road to Oldham. Provided his quarry kept to this major road, the Armed Response Unit would head the VW off at a roundabout close to the entry to the town. They were closing access to other traffic at this moment. He was approximately 3.4 miles from this point at present. They would let Booth’s Mondeo through, but he should be prepared to find the VW stationary when he arrived at this point, with one and possibly two armed and hostile men within it. He should leave it to the armed security staff to make arrests; they were trained for situations like this and wearing body armour.
Booth grinned, despite himself. They were teaching granny to suck eggs, but he didn’t mind that. He could look after himself, but if these men were asserting their superiority in what would be a highly publicised and highly dangerous arrest, he didn’t mind that. No doubt they’d spent long days preparing for life-and-death situations, but found they only rarely got the chance to be involved in one. Bit like him, really.
There were three cars between him and the VW now. One of them obligingly turned left and deserted the drama. The terrorist driver was good, he thought dispassionately, watching him pass swiftly through a diminishing gap between parked vehicles and an approaching bus without even touching his brakes. He saw the white face of the gunman turned back towards him, looking for pursuers.