The Irish Lottery Series Box Set (1-3)

by Gerald Hansen

  She strained to drag open a bank-vault type door of rust. Jed followed her inside and gulped. They were perched on a catwalk many floors above the engine room floor. It was a less glamorous meeting place than he had imagined. He suspected, UK government budget cuts notwithstanding, the Queen had put the agents up in a luxury cabin. He had wanted to compare it with the spartan cabin he shared with Ursula.

  “I thought we'd be meeting at your place,” Jed said. His voice competed with the rumbling of tens of mechanical thunks and wheezes and rumblings themselves competing with one another. Agent Matcham looked stricken.

  “We daren't. We suspect we might be being...” she looked around the pipes and whispered, “listened in on.”

  “Bugged?” That's just what Jed's eyes did.

  “Yes.”

  “So you think this terrorist cell...they might know who you really are?”

  “Oh, I doubt it. We're professionals, after all. But one can never be too careful.”

  Jed peered down, and his head spun. Steel steps and handrails led down to the rumbling depths below, a cavernous room almost half the length of the ship with light bulbs swinging in little cages, pumps and pistons, banks of computers that stopped being state of the art many moons since with flashing buttons, huge rumbling tanks, huge container-type things with cords leading to pressure gauges on the walls, generators and purifiers and air reservoirs and compressors and bilge pumps and Christ knew what, things of the type he had only glimpsed under his car hood, but on a larger scale, the metal calcified with age and rust and slick with grease and oil and clumped with decades of filth, the stench of sweat and sewage rising from it.

  “Not many people here,” he said.

  “The engine room staff have been given liberty, allowed to go ashore for a few hours. Left with a skeleton crew. We, of course, are kept abreast of all the minutiae of life on the ship.”

  “But that malfunction earlier? With nobody here, how did the ship fix itself?”

  “Yes, the passengers were pretty much left to fend for themselves, but thankfully much is automated nowadays.”

  She perched herself on a barrel of oil. Her skirt ran up her legs. She smoothed it down. Her legs swung. She looked at her watch. Jed saw it was Cartier.

  “We were due to meet my partner for the training, but as he appears to be tardy, I don't mind telling you a few details about the assignment. I know I shouldn't, but...”

  Jed held his hands out in a stop-right-there gesture.

  “If you tell me without me signing the papers, won't you have to...?”

  “Yes, kill you. But I feel confident you'll pass the physical.”

  Jed waited, torn between desperate and dreading to know.

  “A group has somehow secured a substance that is the holy grail of terrorists, something able to make high precision nuclear bombs, a super-conductive material that is the short-cut to the atom bomb. We at MI-6 long doubted its existence. We thought it was a hoax, started sometime in the 1980s with 'leaks' from the Soviet propaganda machine, but now, well, forget uranium! We now realize such an insidious death chemical compound, sadly, does exist. And five kilograms is now in the hands of ruthless men, and perhaps women, who are on this ship en route to the US to sell it on the open market to the highest bidder. And, I can assure you, five kilograms is more than enough to wreak destruction on a scale that will make Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem like child's play. I can see from your face you want to know what it is. Oh, I really shouldn't...”

  Jed's goatee drooped in disappointment.

  “Oh, let me go ahead, then. It is...” and here she lowered her voice even more, though there really was no need, what with all the bleeping and clanking around them, and the lack of other humans. Jed strained to hear the words. “...red mercury.” She said it as if it had capital letters.

  A chill ran up Jed's spine. He had heard of red mercury somewhere before, and associated it with cheap and easy—express—worldwide destruction. He struggled to think where, but he couldn't make his way through the tangled pathways of his memory.

  “—Ah, there he is!”

  Swaggering towards them on the metal holes of the catwalk was a wiry twenty-something in a sharp tight shiny gray suit, dark gelled hair with a perfect side part, and a smirk in his eyes. Jed felt instinctively something was wrong with him. He looked at Agent Matcham, but she was smiling. Jed didn't trust her partner, didn't like him on sight, but if Agent Matcham rated him...

  “Here's our new recruit,” Agent Matcham said to the upstart, “Jed Barnett. And Jed, this is—”

  “Ben?” Jed asked.

  The smirk faltered from the guy's eyes, then Agent Matcham noticed the label over her partner's handkerchief pocket. She tinkled with laughter.

  “Oh, Ben Sherman, you mean,” she said. “He wears nothing but. The best of the British. No, h—”

  “Nigel,” Nigel said. He didn't extend a hand. Agent Matcham removed herself from the oil barrel and looked at her watch again.

  “We don't have much time,” she said. “The rest of the crew will be back any minute. It's true we've got all areas access—”

  “And a license to kill,” Nigel added, smiling menacingly.

  “But the clock is ticking.” She pulled a notepad and pen out of her briefcase—Jed supposed to make notes of his progress in the training. She straightened her collar, which was askew, then eyed them with piercing precision. She leaned against the handrail. “Let the training begin.”

  Nigel laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. He approached Jed on the catwalk with teleporter speed.

  “You want to know the assignment, innit?” he taunted, a fist percolating under Jed's chin.

  “Don't be alarmed, Nigel, but I've already filled him in on a few things.”

  Nigel's eyes, millimeters from Jed's, bristled with a sudden rage. Jed felt puffs of angry breath on his nose. It smelled of stale hamburger.

  “I-I've got short-term-memory problems!” Jed yelped.

  “And I haven't revealed what his function is yet,” Agent Matcham said in an attempt, Jed supposed, to placate her partner.

  “Right!” Nigel growled. “Whatever! Lesson one!”

  The cowboy hat popped off Jed's head and tumbled over the handrail. He yawped in pain and shock, doubled over. Nigel's right fist was in his stomach. Then his left fist, then the right again. The jerk sniggered as his knuckles pummeled the soft flesh of Jed's gut.

  “Wh-wha—?” Jed gasped, his hands shooting out to protect himself. They were useless against the machine-gun precision of Nigel's knuckles. Again and again they pounded into Jed. Jed grasped handfuls of air, unable to locate the fists of fury as they shot through his flesh, cracked against his ribs.

  “Lesson two!” Nigel growled with a giggle.

  Jed's mouth snapped open. He was shocked to find it filled with a fist. His glasses leaped from his nose as Nigel smacked his face. His head swiveled from one side to the other as the hard young palms clattered against his sagging cheeks.

  “Not the face!” Jed heard Agent Matcham call out from somewhere in the haze of his vision. Nigel appeared not to hear. Smack! Smack! Smack!

  “What sort of training is thi—?!” Jed wheezed.

  “Nigel! Not his face!”

  Jed groaned as Nigel grabbed his left shoulder for leverage and slugged his stomach with his right fist again and again, his punches lithe and painful like those of a featherweight boxing champion.

  “You want to know your assignment? Fight back, old codger!” It was a taunt spat at Jed's stinging face. Coupled with manic laughter. Jed saw nothing but a blurry approximation of his snide, sneering face. The punches came quick and hard, an uppercut to the shoulder, a hook to the breastplate, a cross to the sternum, and a multi-punch combo to every part of his torso.

  Jed was still frozen by the shock and ferocity of the attack. He tried to duck, to weave, but his lumbered limbs seemed captive in molasses. Pain wracked so many locations, he didn't know what hurt when.<
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  Below, he heard the crack! as his foot landed on his glasses. And somewhere in the shock, the surprise, and all the pain, he felt deep within him the rumblings of anger, the remnants of combat training from a boot camp decades since, the strength of a thousand pushups in the pouring rain and the spattering mud with the drill sergeant yelling insults at them all in their fatigues, the nimbleness and reflexes he once had, a trained fighter for his country.

  Jed lifted his aching arm and, an older man attempting a youngster's game, willed the vestiges of the strength and vim long relegated to the past to surge through his sinews and corpuscles. His fingers curled into a fist. A hard fist. And he thrust his knuckles into the bobbing, taunting body before him. They hit the air. Nigel hooted with laughter.

  “Lesson three!” he threatened.

  “You little shit!” Jed roared.

  He grabbed Nigel's earlobes—they were big enough—and pounded his head into the punk's forehead. Nigel groaned, then roared with rage. Agent Matcham clapped with delight.

  “That's it, Jed! Show him what you're made of!”

  Nigel grabbed Jed's arms and held him captive against the handrail.

  “Right! You're in for it now, you punching pensioner prat!” he roared into Jed's ear. Jed struggled to break free, his veins finally tingling with adrenaline.

  “Not if I get you first, you—”

  “What the flimmin—?! Get you yer hands off me uncle Jed!”

  “Who..?!” Agent Matcham gasped. Her notepad clattered to the catwalk.

  They smelled her before they saw her, and Jed with his myopia never even saw her. Barging up the steps was a child. A little girl, maybe five or six. Her black hair hung in matted strands against a death's mask of a face, streaked with grease and filth. Her dress had once been pink, and her purple leggings were spotted with ladders. She looked like a cross between an Ellis Island immigrant from 1882, a castaway and a raccoon. Her left arm hung at a strange angle, and in her right she held Jed's cowboy hat. Her face was creased with rage.

  “Youse flimmin hooligans! Get offa him!”

  “Security breach! Security breach!” Nigel squawked, fists still clutching the lapels of Jed's sports coat. Agent Matcham wittered strange noises.

  The girl scrabbled over the catwalk toward the menacing stance of Nigel's thighs. She thrust out her foot, yelped in pain, but attacked his shins with tiny kicks. Still holding Jed tight, Nigel threw back his head as laughter spilled from his mouth. The girl's head shot forward, and, tiny teeth bared, she chomped down upon his upper thigh.

  “You little bitch!”

  Nigel's hand sliced through the air, but the little girl had apparently had practice aplenty jumping out of the way of hands zooming towards her. She raced across the catwalk and punched Agent Matcham's knees.

  “Leave me uncle Jed be, ye hateful cunt! The clarty wee shite's let ye go, Uncle Jed! Run! Run for the door!”

  Jed knew the vocabulary, suddenly knew the voice, and even as his brain registered the reality, it struggled to make sense of it.

  “...Siofra...??! No, but, they're my frien—”

  But she was gone, limping down the steps. As Nigel massaged his bitten thigh, tears in his eyes and mewing like a newborn kitty, and Agent Matcham worried about the run in her tights—the girls fingernails were like claws of the homeless!—and Jed moaned with pain as he bent down to retrieve his hat she had left for him, and as he checked his shirt for signs of blood or a tear or a lost button, and as he felt around the catwalk for his glasses and wondered what the state of them was, Jed was shocked to realize something. He was grateful to Siofra. But he hadn't wanted to be saved.

  CHAPTER 23

  ANTHEA REMOVED THE oven mitt and picked up the phone. She saw who was calling, and red flags waved. She couldn't rid the edge from her voice.

  “Richard? What now?”

  “Anthea, love, I’m so sorry, so so very sorry, but something’s come up.”

  Her fingers strangled the phone. She knew it. Why do I bother? Her nostrils flared as she fought to conceal a heave of disgusted raged. “Do you know how many hours I've toiled over this stupid—”

  “I know, beef wellington, my favorite, as I asked. But,” it seemed he cupped his hand around his lips and the receiver, “I can’t get away from the snarling beast. I'm behind the garden shed now, she thinks I'm having a quick fag break.” Andrea assumed he meant his wife, as he had no pets she could recall. “I know you went to a lot of trouble and I was supposed to be there in ten minutes, but—”

  “Richard! You insisted only the Gordon Ramsay recipe would do! Do you understand how complex, how many ingredients—”

  “I know, love.”

  “And I had to make the puff pastry myself!” She glared over at the powdery mess on the counter top still, the clingflim strewn everywhere, the rolling pin she had slaved over for half an hour. Tears welled. “The egg wash on the pastry, and wrapping the damn Parma ham and beef in clingfilm and trying to configure them into the same shape and the brushing with mustard and...” She sniveled like a small beast.

  “You could always heat it up for me at some later date. But don't eat it yourself! The last thing you need is to put on more pounds! Haw, haw, haw!”

  She was on the verge of flinging the phone into the remnants of the pureed mushrooms.

  “Oh, but before I hang up, I heard something yesterday that reminded me of you.”

  “Yes?!” Hope sprang eternal in Athena even as clingwrap melted on the grill. She tried to remove it with tongs. Perhaps he had heard a snippet of Sade's No Ordinary Love on a radio somewhere? Bette Midler's Wind Beneath My Wings? She knew what song reminded her of him: once, in the beginning, it had been Mariah Carey's Hero, now it was Mr. Vain.

  “It’s the most peculiar thing...remember you asked about MI-5 agents on the Queen of Crabs?”

  Anthea slumped. A stiff 'yes' exited her. She stayed on the line only because speaking to the bastard was better than facing the shambles that was her kitchenette alone. She pierced the dough with the claws of her fingernails and dug deep, imagining it was his flabby stomach.

  “Well, and I’m just getting word of this now, apparently there aren’t any agents on board, as I told you—what a silly idea—but there’s a mother and son scam team that Interpol's been trying to catch for eons; very famous, I believe they rank numbers 9 and 12 respectively on the Most Wanted list. Let me see if I can get this right. How did it go...? They pulled off some huge international art fraud scam, it was some Damien Hirst from the Tate Gallery. They made a fake of his The Physical Impossibility of Death In The Mind of Someone Liv—”

  “You mean the shark in a tank?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you just say that?”

  “Anyway, it must have been quite a task. Who knows how they pulled it off. But they solicited a dead tiger shark from somewhere, filled a tank with formald—”

  “I understand. But I think it would be quite easy to make a fake of that, would it not? It’s not like a Van Gogh with brushstrokes you have to spend hours practicing before you let your brush touch the canvas. All you have to do is throw a shark in a tank of formaldehyde. I could do it myself. If I worked at an aquarium.”

  “And they posed as curators and sold it to the Louvre...for £8,000,000. It was their most audacious crime yet, and they escaped on one of our ships.” He sounded quite proud. “When Interpol found out, they sent one of their cruisers, equipped with a helipad, to follow the Queen of Crabs a few nautical miles away.”

  “Why didn’t they just swoop in and arrest them?”

  Anthea fumed at his bark of laughter.

  “Haw, haw, haw! Dear, dear Anthea; your innocence is one of the reasons I love you so. The Queen of Crabs is in international waters. Even Interpol have no jurisdiction. Plus, they’re still gathering evidence. All they could do was make sure they didn't flee to any of the countries the ship visited, which, fortunately, wasn't many. I heard the woman got off at the
Savage Islands, and they had to send the helicopter after her. But she got back on the ship, which I can understand, because I don't know how she could've survived on that godforsaken island with nothing on it but soil. God only knows what the passengers made of it, but... Anyway, once Interpol contacted us and we had figured out exactly where to send the ship, it is Puerto Rico, by the way, they sent their cruiser back to France and will just meet up with them there. They’re quite ruthless, changing identities, conning people out of millions all across the EU. Computer savvy, hacking into people’s personal accounts at will and making them think they know everything about them. What am I saying, making them think? They do know!”

  “Interpol does this?”

  “Haw, haw, haw! Don't be daft! The con artists! Interpol was able to freeze their assets, freeze the £8,000,000 they scammed, and all their online sources of income were cut off. Now they're on the Queen of Crabs, destitute and desperate. Most scam artists aren’t dangerous, but this mother and son team, well, they’re quite ruthless, and dangerous as well. The son is a mental case, an unhinged sadist by all accounts. Who knows how they’re managing, and what havoc they might wreak on the ship. But we're forbidden from warning the passengers they're on board and might use their elaborate scams to take them to the cleaners.”

  “For heaven's sake! Why?”

  “I thought that would be patently obvious. If we send out an alert, they will know we're on their tail.”

  “But the helicopter...? Hmgh! Anyway, Richard!” Her irritation made itself known. “All this information will help me how?”

  “I just thought you'd like to know.”

  “Perhaps Clara in accounts knew what she was talking about after all?”

  “Well, no, because Interpol and MI-5 are quite different. You see, one is—”

  “Richard, I am now hanging up.”

  “And I've been too long out here in the garden anyway. I'll tell the creature I had two fags. But before you go, I think she's going out later tonight, her pilates class. I'm quite randy. Perhaps I can pop by for a quick shag?”