“I don’t know, Dermot.”
“Am I hurt bad?”
“I don’t think so. I can get you help. But the bomb, Dermot. Innocent lives . . .”
He thought for a moment. “Sean boy, listen to me.”
“I’m listening . . .”
“You want to be the hero?”
“Tell me.”
“You’ve got until four in the morning.”
“It’s going off at four?”
“The sixth floor, Sean, get yourself to the sixth floor by four—”
A sudden gunshot smacked Dermot in the cheek.
Fuck!
I hit the deck.
Martin had a second piece or had grabbed the gun I’d scooted away from Dermot.
I shielded myself behind Dermot’s body and tried to figure out where the bastard was.
A shadow flitted past the window heading for the front door.
I shot at it.
The shadow shot back twice.
I emptied my clip.
The shadow fell.
Martin and Dermot were both still. Blood was weaving serpentine trails on to the cork floor from the place where Dermot’s face had been ripped open by a bullet.
And me?
I was unhurt. I wasn’t hit at all. Not even a scratch. Shook up. But untouched.
I knelt next to Dermot McCann.
Morrigan of the crows, daughter of Emmas, goddess of war, receive thy faithful son.
I looked in the pocket of his trousers, found a key chain with the car key and the handcuff key. I uncuffed myself, went to the sink, turned on the tap and poured water into a mug.
I opened the window, drank, and took a deep breath.
The room dissolved momentarily. I could smell the water under Brighton Pier, hear the voices on the promenade, and perhaps, just perhaps, I could feel the waves of pain leaking into the present from the future . . .
I looked back into the living room. I saw Dermot breathe.
Blood bubbles formed on his tongue.
His chest moved a centimeter.
Perhaps he could be saved to lie brain dead in some grim hospital ward for the next fifty years.
He didn’t deserve that.
His mother wouldn’t like that either and her strict Catholicism would never permit them to pull the plug.
Better he die a martyr.
Better for both of them.
I went over to Martin and took the 9mm out of his hand.
I walked back to Dermot and placed the gun against his heart.
“Codladh samh,” I said, and pulled the trigger.
I dropped the gun and ran outside to the Toyota.
I drove to the phone box at the scrapyard. I looked in my pocket for change and found two fifty-pence pieces.
I put in one of them on hearing the pips and dialed Kate’s temporary number. The phone rang and rang but there was no answer. I hung up before her answerphone kicked in and ate my money.
I called Tom in Brighton. “Yes?” he said drowsily.
“I found Dermot. They’ve planted a bomb in the Grand Hotel. They’re going to assassinate Thatcher.”
That got his fucking attention.
“What!”
“Thatcher’s the target. The Grand Hotel. There’s a bomb in a room on the sixth floor. The sixth floor. Have you got that?”
“Are you sure about this, Duffy? I’ll have to wake up the prime minister!”
“Wake her up! Wake up the whole town! It’s a bomb on a time delay. It’s going to go off at four in the morning.”
There was a pause while Tom processed the information through his cautious MI5 filters.
“This can’t be right, Duffy,” he said after a moment.
“It is right. It’s what Dermot told me.”
“It must be another target. Scotland Yard thoroughly searched the entire hotel before they let the cabinet stay there. They went through every frigging room with sniffer dogs. Top to bottom. And when they were done the prime minister’s own security team went through her suite and the entire floor.”
“I’m telling you, Tom, it’s the Grand Hotel, Brighton. You’ve got to start getting people out!”
“Where’s Dermot now? Do you have him secured? I want to talk to him.”
“He’s dead, you fucking arsehole! Prick up your ears! He ambushed us. Everybody’s dead. Get everybody out of that fucking hotel! I’ll be there in twenty minutes!”
I slammed the phone down, put in my last fifty-pence piece, and tried Kate again. Again no answer, but when her message kicked in I said: “Dermot’s trying to assassinate the entire cabinet. The bomb is in the Grand Hotel, Brighton. It’s timed to go off at four a.m!”
I hung up and looked at my watch.
Two twenty-two a.m. We had an hour and forty minutes, give or take a minute or two.
But we had an entire building to evacuate. Should have called in a bomb threat to the front desk myself! Damn it!
I ran to the Toyota Celica Supra, opened the door, and got inside. I stuck the key in the ignition, gunned her, and put on the lights.
I’d never driven one of these bad boys before, but I liked the fact that the speedometer went up to 130 mph.
I stuck my foot on the gas and burned through the gears.
Zero to sixty in six seconds.
Only 160 horses, only 160 pounds of torque, but the thing moved like a Formula 1 car. Radio Luxembourg came on and I turned it up.
Hendrix and then the Velvets kicking it just for me.
I raced through the gears and I was already at a hundred miles an hour through the village of Clayton.
On the straights I forced it up toward a ton and a quarter, the chassis vibrating, the understeer brutal, but the engine loving it.
I wound down a window and lit a cigarette.
Night. Speed. Virginia tobacco. England.
I didn’t need to look in the mirror to know that I was grinning.
If the disease of modern times was angst and boredom, we in Northern Ireland had found the cure. The constant presence of death collapsed ambition, worry, irony, tedium into a single word on the page. Live!
To live was miracle enough.
Yes.
I scorched down the A23 through empty towns and hamlets until the sprawl began and I knew that I was reaching the outskirts of Brighton.
The A23 went up over a rise and there ahead of me I could see the whole sleeping town: the houses, the hospitals, the railway station, the hotel strip, the pier, the pavilion, and the coal-black sea beyond.
Everyone asleep.
Everyone oblivious to the fact that they were going to remember this particular October morning for the rest of their born days.
I looked at the dashboard clock.
Two forty.
There wouldn’t be time to get a disposal crew in here. The bomb was going to go off no matter what we did. The only question was whether it would take anybody with it.
I ran a red at the A27 junction and almost killed a man at Preston Park. I kept on the road south and when I hit the seafront I skidded to a halt and looked for the hotel. There it was to my right, a couple of hundred yards away, lit up with fairy lights.
The dashboard clock said that it was 2:44.
There was no need to hit the panic button, but even so when I got to the front of the hotel I was alarmed to see that there had been no general evacuation. No people wrapped in blankets, no ambulance guys, no journalists, just two uniformed policemen outside talking to one another like everything was hunky-dory.
I skidded the Celica to a halt in a burn of tire and brake pad.
“Oi, you can’t park that here!” one of the coppers said as I got out.
I showed him my warrant card.
“You still can’t park that here,” he muttered.
“There you are!” Tom said, running out to me from the lobby.
I cursed him and his mother and his ancestors all the way back to the time of the chimps swinging breezily in the primordial
forests.
“What the fuck is going on, Tom? Didn’t you hear what I was saying? There’s a fucking bomb in here!” I said.
The two coppers looked at me in amazement.
Tom’s pale face was glib and unrepentant. “I called up Nigel Cavendish in Special Branch and he assured me that every room in this hotel has been searched by sniffer dogs. Mrs. Thatcher’s own security detail have—”
I pushed him aside and ran into the lobby.
I sprinted to the front desk and showed a sleepy-looking girl my warrant card.
“What room is the prime minister in?” I asked.
“What?”
“The prime minister. Which room?”
“I’m afraid that I’m not at liberty to—”
Tom put his hand on my shoulder and turned me round to face him. “Sean, he’s had you. Wherever Dermot put the bomb, it’s not in here! This place has been thoroughly searched. This is clearly a diversion from the—”
“There’s a fucking bomb in this hotel!” I insisted.
The desk clerk’s eyes widened.
Tom shook his head. “Not inside. The only possible way he could do it is with a car bomb parked outside. I’ve got a team discreetly going through all the vehicles on the—”
“You’re a fucking idiot! It’s on the sixth floor. I’m getting everybody out of there!”
The clock above reception said 2:50.
I looked at the clerk. She was a brunette. About twenty-five. Seemed like a smart girl. “Call the prime minister’s suite! Get them woken up!”
“They’re already up, I think,” she said.
I ran to the lift. In front of the elevator there was a big copper in a Metropolitan Police uniform, sitting behind a desk and reading a Frederick Forsyth novel.
He put down the book. “Can I see your pass, sir?” he asked like a bloody fool.
I pushed the Up button.
“He’s with me!” Tom said.
We got into the lift together.
I pressed the button for the sixth floor. Tom looked ridiculous in a black sweater over purple pajama trousers that were covered in cartoon mice.
“What are you going to do? Knock on every single door on the sixth floor and wake them all up?” he asked.
“That’s the idea!”
“Don’t you see, Sean? This is Dermot’s last laugh on you! Disrupt the Tory Party conference with you as the fucking joker.”
“I don’t think so. I think he was telling me the truth.”
“I can’t let you do it, mate. The press will have a field day with this. Scaring the shit out of everyone the night before the prime minister’s big speech.”
I grabbed him by the ears.
“Open those lugholes, fuckhead. There’s a bomb in here! We’re getting everybody out!”
The lift began to climb.
Second floor. Third floor.
I looked at my watch.
It was 2:53. We only had an hour and seven minutes now. How to proceed?
I took a breath. OK. First, start banging on the doors and get everyone off the sixth floor. Second, use one of the room phones to call in the bomb threat to the BBC and 999. That would get everyone’s attention and they’d have to bloody evacuate whether they liked it or not. Third, find the prime minister’s suite and make sure she knew exactly what was going to happen . . .
The elevator dinged and the doors opened
I walked out onto the sixth floor.
I noticed a red carpet and a large mirror in a gilt frame.
I saw my own face. I was haggard, thin, with an almost full beard. My eyes were sunk deep in my head. The beard, I noticed, had flecks of gray. Sometime in the last year I had become an old man.
“Sean, come on, please—” Tom began, and tried to grab my arm.
I brushed him off and marched toward the hotel room that was nearest to the lift.
I banged on the door.
I looked at my watch.
It was 2:54.
This time I wasn’t safe in a back office.
This time I was right there.
The sound of a percussion cap. The unleashing of Dermot’s chemical bonds . . .
My head half turned. My mouth open . . .
An immediate rush of pain. Like a car crash. Like a massive electric shock.
This was high explosive, not some home-made fertilizer bomb.
Semtex.
The Czechs had manufactured it with no markers and it was undetectable by sniffer dogs. And of course the biggest importer of Semtex was Libya.
These thoughts jumped across my synapses as the walls imploded and part of the roof came down.
I rocked forward on my feet, tried to get my balance, and then dropped with the rest of the floor on to the level below.
Tom grabbed at me but there was nothing I could do to save me, never mind him, and we fell together.
And as we tumbled into the nothing, we saw the floor above come down on top of us.
Burying us.
Tom’s expression: You were right.
Mine: You were right. He played me, he told me four o’clock so that I’d be in the middle of the blast during the evacuation.
All explosions have two phases. The initial expansion and then, after the outward blast, the gas rushing back into the partial vacuum, creating a second wave.
I felt the air getting sucked from my lungs.
I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t yell. The air like glass: aqueous, hard, a poisonous black liquid . . .
I punched my chest, I grabbed at sky, I landed heavily, and then a ton of debris folded everything into darkness.
. . .
. . .
. . .
Moments. Moments that might have been years. Darkness. The dark of mine shafts. The dark of event horizons. Down I went. Deep down where it was colder and blacker. Far from the world of men. Into the realm of things that were not quite human. Where the golems and shape-shifters lay unmolded in the clay. The stuff of night—
I woke suddenly. I was pinned by debris in the smothered dark. Pain. But pain was good. It meant that you were alive and the nerve endings were firing. Dust in my mouth and throat. I coughed. I was folded in the fetal position. I flexed my fingers. I could move both hands and my left leg. My right was wedged under something heavy. My left hand was up against my face. And my watch was working.
The luminous hour and minute hands were both pointing at six.
I had lost consciousness only for a few hours. I could hear voices and the distant sound of a helicopter. I wanted to cry out but my throat was dry. I sucked on a finger to generate saliva.
“Over here!” I yelled.
Silence above.
“I’m under here!” I yelled again.
“We hear you, mate! We’ll have you out in no time. Hang in there!” someone said.
“He’s got an Irish accent. He’s probably the cunt that blew the place up,” someone else muttered.
Digging.
Light.
They had me out in ten minutes.
They put me on a stretcher but it wasn’t necessary. I could have walked out. Nothing was broken. I’d been blown up and buried in the Grand Hotel and all I had were cuts and bruises.
I learned later that five people hadn’t been so fortunate.
Three of the dead were women, none of whom were in the cabinet or indeed were even Members of Parliament.
The bomb had been planted in Room 629, under the bath.
Mrs. Thatcher had been awake at the time, working on her conference speech in the sitting room of her first-floor suite. Her bathroom was destroyed but she had escaped unscathed.
You’ll die in a hotel, Maggie, but not this one.
She had been taken by her security detail to Brighton Police College to recover and rewrite her conference speech.
She got calls there from President Reagan and all the heads of government in the EEC.
She gave her conference speech on
schedule to a rousing chorus of approval.
She vowed that the IRA terrorists would never triumph over a democratically elected government.
The IRA released this statement: “Mrs. Thatcher will now realize that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war.”
I read the statement that night in the Evening Standard.
The IRA didn’t realize that luck was a commodity that some of us had and some of us did not.
Thatcher had it. I had it. Dermot did not.
I spent two days in the Royal Sussex County Hospital.
On the evening of the second day I had a visitor. Half a dozen detectives entered before her. Then Kate. Then Douglas Hurd, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Then Mrs. Thatcher herself.
“Is he the one?” she asked Kate.
“Yes,” Kate said.
The prime minister leaned over my bed. “Can you hear me?” she asked.
“I can hear you,” I told her.
“I am in your debt, Inspector Duffy. I owe you a great deal.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said.
“Your modesty does you much credit, Inspector Duffy. And I appreciate that the full extent of your heroism will never become public knowledge. But as long as I have any influence over Her Majesty’s Government I will make sure that your name will be mentioned with respect—something that has not always been the case in the recent past.”
Even if I hadn’t been pumped full of drugs I wasn’t sure I would have been able to follow what she was talking about.
Was this that bloody apology I’d wanted?
“How’s Tom? No one’s told me about Tom,” I said.
Kate took that question. “Tom’s at the Royal Free Hospital in London. He broke both his legs, a couple of ribs, and punctured a lung. He’s been very badly burned but he’s recovering and is expected to live.”
Mrs. Thatcher put her hand on my shoulder and leaned over the bed. For one horrifying moment I thought she was going to kiss me on the forehead, but she merely said: “Good luck, Inspector Duffy,” and with that she nodded to her security detail and exited the ward.
When she was gone it began to rain outside.
I thought of the people who hadn’t made it, the people I couldn’t save. I thought about Matty and Reserve Constable Heather McClusky and I thought about Dermot.
In the Morning I'll Be Gone Page 28