“Okay. Well, how do I get in?”
“Ireland, by sea, Jane. It’s always been the soft option. For years they did not even have passports between the two countries. And it’s not much different now, even in England, not if you’re holding a European Union passport. Ireland’s the way into England.”
“How about flying into Ireland from a foreign country?” asked Jane.
“That’s much more difficult. The Irish adhere to the European rules as best they can. They want to know who you are, how long you’re staying, and the rest.”
“Well, how the heck do you get in then?” said Jane, tiring of the conversation.
“You get in by sea. There’s miles and miles of coastline, and the Irish have hardly any Coast Guard protection. You could land from deep water just about anywhere. You’d never try the same thing in England. Because they’d catch you. They arrest people all the time.”
“So the method for a killer is into Ireland by boat, then a ferry to England, and no one would know you were in the UK.”
“Precisely.”
“And you think Carla did that?”
“No. Carla’s not an assassin, though I doubt Matt Barker would agree. But her mate is. The one who killed Jerry O’Connell.”
2300 Tuesday 17 July Belgrave Square, London
Shakira’s fast Audi A6 came swiftly into London’s grandest square after their long journey halfway across England. They had made it in seven hours, which was superb driving considering that the general had elected to duck and dive through country roads and never to stick to a predictable route down the high-speed British motorways.
His reason was clear. If anyone had managed to identify them, or somehow get on their trail, it was ten times easier for the police to patrol the freeways than to organize a search through the highways and byways of the rural heart of England.
He’d stuck to the A-5 all the way to the historic river town of Shrewsbury, then cut to the M-5 freeway south of Birmingham, through Herefordshire, on roads he had once known like the palm of his hand. He exited at number 10, picked up the A-40, and in the twilight of this fine July evening raced through some of the loveliest country in England, to the wonderful steep Cotswold town of Burford, and then fast around the Oxford Ring Road onto the M-40.
From there it was a straight shot at London, past his old school, Harrow, and then off the freeway into the Holland Park area. He knew these roads better than he knew Damascus, and he cut through to Knightsbridge, swung right just before Harrods, and made Belgrave Square right on time.
He pulled up outside No. 8 and immediately two staff members from the Syrian embassy ran down the steps to greet him. One said, “General, please take your wife inside immediately. We will take care of everything.”
Ravi and Shakira ran inside, while one Syrian grabbed their bags from the trunk and the other slipped behind the wheel and drove the Audi around the square and into the underground Motcombe Street garage, where the embassy had many reserved spaces. The two runaway terrorists had spent exactly seven seconds on the sidewalk.
The ambassador was there to meet the Hamas C-in-C, with his wife and the military attaché. One of the cultural attachés was also there, but he knew roughly as much about culture as Genghis Khan. Ahmed was a terrorist and a spy, fresh from slamming a bomb at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv.
Dinner was set for the six of them, and the ambassador requested that Ravi and Shakira not take time to change, which both of them thought was very thoughtful since neither had much to change into, their bags containing mostly a pile of laundry.
His Excellency understood entirely and poured everyone a glass of Château-bottled French Bordeaux, 2002, never mind Muslim disapproval of alcohol, and led them to their allotted places for dinner. The ambassador sat at the head, with Ravi and Shakira on either side. Lannie, his wife, sat next to Shakira, and Ahmed was next to the general, with the military attaché at the foot.
As dinner-table place settings go, with four men and two ladies, it was thus all over the place, but this was a military strategy meeting, not a social gathering. Lannie was only there as a politeness to Shakira.
The conversation was grim and extremely serious. The Syrians understood entirely the purpose of the visit. For they too had little reason to thank the USA for its attitude to them. And they were frankly furious at the recent bombing of the street near Bab Touma in Damascus.
Everyone at the table knew that Admiral Arnold Morgan was behind all of the carnage, and they were honored indeed to have been selected by the Hamas High Command to provide a headquarters for the legendary Palestinian terrorist general, who planned, finally, to dispose of the American Prince of Darkness.
“You have accurate dates and times?” asked the ambassador, who was a very smooth-looking Arabian diplomat, medium height, slim, perfectly dressed in a light suit cut for him by Prince Charles’s tailor, Huntsman, on Savile Row.
“Thanks to Shakira, I do,” replied Ravi. “I must visit the gunsmith tomorrow; we have only two weeks to plan everything and organize my exit, first from Piccadilly, then from England.”
“We’ve done the documents and arranged the transportation,” replied the ambassador. “In the end, timing will be everything.”
“It usually is,” said Ravi.
The ambassador smiled. “Don’t miss,” he whispered theatrically.
“I never miss,” replied the Hamas general sternly.
0900 Wednesday 18 July Garda Headquarters, Dublin
Detective Superintendent Ray McDwyer was combing through the evidence that had been gathered from the bus and train companies. Despite all of Ravi’s shenanigans, jumping on and off various buses and changing railroad carriages, the Irish police had traced his route all the way to Dublin. Ray had thus made his new headquarters in the city, where they now believed the killer was.
So far as the investigation was concerned, there were only two people who had come face-to-face with the murderer. There were others who claimed to have seen him, bus and train staff who might have seen him. But only two who had both seen and spoken to him.
One was the ticket clerk at Waterford Station, who could not swear it was the right man because he could not remember the facial makeup of the passenger on the bench who had left behind his change from a fifty-euro bill.
The other was Mick Barton from the Shamrock Café, who had served the stranger, recalled what he was wearing, and directed him to the bus stop outside the Eldon Hotel. Officer Joe Carey had called in and asked if he would be prepared to come to Dublin and spend a day looking through closed-circuit television footage, to try to identify the man to whom he had served two large glasses of orange juice.
“Forget it,” said Mick. “I’m too busy trying to earn a living, not pouncing around all day on wild-goose chases like yourself.”
Joe put him in a cheerful headlock, and told him this was a serious matter. Mick said his neck was probably broken and he’d be suing for a million.
Joe asked how he’d feel about a private helicopter ride up to Dublin, and they would award him two days’ full pay for his time.
“Done,” said Mick. “What time?”
“Tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock. Right here in the square.”
“Where’s the helicopter gonna be?”
“Right over here in that field.”
“Oh, jaysus, Joe. I can’t. I forgot. I have a dentist’s appointment.”
Joe sighed the sigh of the profoundly suspicious.
“Of course you have,” he said. “All right, three days.”
“Done,” said Mick. “Final offer?”
“Final offer.”
“I’ll be there.”
0900 Thursday 19 July Dublin
Mick Barton arrived at the Garda Station in style, in the back of an unmarked police car. He was led into a private room, where Ray McDwyer met him with a cheerful “Morning to you, Michael.”
At the back of the room were a projector and an operator. At the front
was a large white screen.
“Okay, lad, you know what you’re doing. We are going to show you a steady line of people going through security at Dublin airport getting onto international flights only. We just want you to stop us and identify the man you served the orange juice to on Monday morning.”
“Do I get a bonus if I find him?”
“Absolutely not,” said Ray. “You might make something up, just to get the bonus!”
“Who, me?”
“I’ve only known you since you were three years old. Yes, you.”
Mick laughed, half flattered. He saw himself, after all, as a hard-driving businessman. But suddenly he was dead serious. “Roll ’em,” he said. “If he’s there, I’ll find him. Black T-shirt, right?”
And slowly the projectionist began to run the film, and Mick sat quietly, sometimes leaning forward asking for a pause or a rewind. He worked solidly for three and a half hours, drinking just one cup of coffee, which obliged him to ask, formally, whether it had been percolated in Dachau. Everyone laughed, which Mick expected, being Skibbereen’s established breakfast-bar wit and everything.
He had looked carefully at hundreds of air travelers, and found a couple of marginal candidates, but in the end he always said the same thing, “No, that’s not him.”
They gave him a ham sandwich and an ice cream for lunch, and then settled down to show him the much shorter lines of people disembarking the Irish Sea ferries in England. As expected, they were mostly backpackers and hitchhikers. “Bloody rabble,” observed Mick, but he kept going, checking every person who had sailed from Dun Laoghaire or the Dublin Port Terminal over a two-day period.
He found nothing, not until three o’clock in the afternoon. They were rolling the seventh tape from Holyhead, when Mick asked first for a rewind. Then for a pause. Then he stood up and stepped closer.
And he shoved out his finger, pointing directly at a passenger wearing a jacket and a T-shirt, accompanied by a very good-looking lady who was standing slightly aside.
“You want me to zoom in, Mick?” asked the projectionist.
“Good idea,” he replied. “On the guy in the jacket.”
The image came up bigger. Mick pointed again at the man in the jacket, which was now obviously made of suede or some other kind of soft leather.
“That’s him,” said Mick. “That’s definitely him.”
“One thing, Mick,” interjected Ray McDwyer. “That T-shirt he’s wearing is white, not black.”
“Personally,” replied the kid from the Shamrock Café, “I don’t give a rat’s ass if it’s pink. That’s still him, the thirsty bastard who couldn’t find his own way to Cork City.”
Ray McDwyer chuckled. And Mick added, “I’ll tell you something else, and there’s no charge for this — that’s a very fair piece of crumpet he’s got with him.”
CHAPTER 10
Ray McDwyer looked hard at the image of the man who might have killed Jerry O’Connell for reasons unknown. And he also looked hard at Mick Barton, the local Flash Harry, upon whose memory this entire case rested. Could Mick be trusted? Maybe. Did he have any doubts about this identification? Apparently not.
Ray suddenly viewed the entire scenario with mixed feelings. If Mick was correct, the murderer was no longer in Ireland: he’d gone to England on the two o’clock ferry from Dublin to Holyhead. Right now he could be anywhere. And there were only sixty million people in England.
So far as Ray was concerned, his task was more or less over. The killer had gone, and the most the Irish detective could do was to circulate the picture to all the relevant agencies and see if anyone recognized the man in the brown suede jacket.
This could, of course, be achieved extremely fast with modern E-mail, and Ray instructed a young Garda officer to have the photograph digitally enhanced to the highest possible standard and then transmit it to New Scotland Yard, MI-5 and MI-6, Interpol, the CIA, the FBI, and the Mossad. Each of those agencies would forward the picture on to various military intelligence operations, and within a couple of hours every branch of every secret service in the Western world would be staring at the apparent killer who had come into Crookhaven from the deep rough water that pounds the Fastnet Rock.
Ray McDwyer, though nominally the officer of record on the case, was essentially finished with it, unless someone arrested the suspect and he was brought back to County Cork to face trial. Meanwhile, he would return to Skibbereen, and politely he asked Mick Barton if he would mind sharing the helicopter.
“Yes, I think I can put up with that,” replied Mick. “Although it’s not something I’m used to.”
Two hours later, Mick was walking down Main Street on his way to his home on the outskirts of Skibbereen, and Ray McDwyer was back in his office. So far as he could tell, nothing had broken loose. But he was wrong. Because it had, two and a half thousand miles and two time zones away, in Tel Aviv.
2100 Thursday 19 July Mossad Headquarters Tel Aviv
Colonel Ben Joel, leader of the Mossad team that had somewhat spectacularly blown up Bab Touma Street in Damascus the previous February, was sitting with two of his most trusted officers, Major Itzaak Sherman and Lt. Colonel John Rabin. It was a hot, quiet night in the city, and the three of them were planning to go out for a glass of wine somewhere off Dizengoff Square.
Right now, they were just examining the last of a pile of photographs of people on the Mossad “wanted” list. They checked the latest photographs every night before leaving, just in case there had been a sighting, somewhere definite, of someone they really wanted to find.
Tonight there was nothing. Until, staring at the last two or three pictures, Colonel Joel suddenly exclaimed, “Jesus Christ. look who we have here. ”
He was holding an eight-by-ten printout of the closed-circuit picture of General Rashood and Shakira at the English ferry port of Holyhead. The E-mail transmission had just arrived from MI-6 in London, with a request for identification if possible.
And had that photograph ever landed in the right place. These three Mossad hitmen had been charged with eliminating Ravi and Shakira in that highly expensive and well-planned operation only five months ago. They had been beaten in the mission mostly because of sheer bad luck. The couple had returned to their house separately, accompanied by different people, and it had been too dark to see the discrepancy. The bomb went off in the main room while Shakira was in the basement-level kitchen and Ravi was not even in the house.
But no one knew what Ravi looked like better than Colonel Joel, who had photographed the Hamas commander through a telescopic lens, from right across the street, had observed him in daylight, would recognize him anywhere.
The other two also knew precisely what Ravi looked like, and there was no doubt in any of their minds. The man in the English ferry port was General Ravi Rashood, and the lady with him was his Palestinian wife, Shakira.
For one final check, the colonel called for comparable pictures of the general, and Itzaak pulled them up on the big computer screen set into the wall like a plasma television. The group consisted of three pictures taken on a cliff top in the Canary Isles and the expansive set of photographs the colonel himself had snapped from across Bab Touma Street in Damascus.
No doubt. This was General Rashood and his wife, arriving in England, and now identified by no lesser figures than the Mossad’s top assassination squad, and Mr. Mick Barton, of the Shamrock Café in faraway Skibbereen.
Colonel Joel called for the MI-6 report, which mostly contained an assessment by Detective Superintendent McDwyer of the murder of Jerry O’Connell in County Cork, and the likelihood that the man in the picture had committed the murder. The report also mentioned the possibility that the murderer had been landed from an Iranian submarine patrolling off the coast of southern Ireland.
The Mossad men knew all about that submarine. They too had been tracking it, not with another underwater boat like the Americans, but via the satellites. And they too had been aware that the damn thing had vanished
somewhere in the deep water off the eastern coast of Majorca. Like the Americans, the Israelis had not regained contact, and were more or less certain the Iranian submarine was no longer in the Mediterranean. Somehow, the Israeli Navy believed, it had broken out through the Gibraltar Strait into the Atlantic Ocean.
Colonel Joel sent a POSIDENT signal to all the appropriate departments in the King Saul Boulevard headquarters. He put it on the nets to the Navy and all branches of Israeli Military Intelligence, particularly Shin Bet, the interior intelligence operation, equivalent of London’s MI-5. No one wanted Ravi Rashood’s head as badly as Ben Joel.
Back in England, MI-6 E-mailed the picture to Military Intelligence, with a special copy to SAS headquarters in Stirling Lines, Hereford, where once Major Ray Kerman had served with honor and courage. By the time the photograph arrived, it was mid-evening, and it would not be examined in the normal course of business until the following morning. However, an urgent communication was picked up from the Israelis at around 10 P.M., and the duty officer instantly summoned the commanding officer.
The communiqué from Tel Aviv read: POSIDENT photograph English ferry port Holyhead. The man is General Ravi Rashood, commander in chief Hamas, formerly known as Major Ray Kerman, 22 SAS Regt. The woman with him is Shakira Rashood, his Palestinian wife, last known address Bab Touma Street, Damascus.
Rashood wanted for murder in County Cork, Ireland. Local farmer Mr. Jerry O’Connell, killed by obvious Special Forces method — smashed central forehead, nose bone rammed into the brain. Looks like Rashood back in England. We stand by to help if required. Joel, Israeli Intelligence.
Lieutenant Colonel David Carter, CO 22 SAS, walked through steady rain to his office, accompanied by Major Douglas Jarvis. Neither of them had been in Hereford when Major Kerman had jumped ship back in 2004, but both of them knew the seriousness of his crimes. It was common knowledge nowadays that Kerman had murdered two highly regarded SAS NCOs and had then wreaked havoc on behalf of the well-funded Hamas terrorists. The name Ray Kerman represented the most inflammatory utterance in SAS history.
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