Underdogs

by Jack Fiske

  The room looked undisturbed, but nevertheless Jim walked around again, checking that everything was as he’d found it. A glance through the window confirmed that there was still no sign of O’Hara’s Fiat, so after one last look around the room, Jim stepped into the corridor and locked the door behind him.

  Rather than return to reception, Jim turned and walked in the other direction to familiarise himself with the layout of the hotel. At the far end of the building he found a flight of stairs leading down to the lounge bar at the back, which at that time of day was deserted. A steel grill was pulled down over the bar itself and there was a smell of stale tobacco smoke about the place. Walking through the bar and back towards the front of the hotel, Jim passed the receptionist hurrying in the other direction and he entered the reception area to find it conveniently unattended. Taking advantage of the opportunity, he quickly hung the keys back on their numbered hook, left through the revolving door and walked back to the car.

  After another fifteen minutes spent watching from across the road, Jim decided that he would need to look for O’Hara elsewhere and he started the engine. O’Hara wasn’t at the hotel, nor had there been any sign of him at Stephen and Marion’s place when he’d left earlier. In the absence of anywhere else to look, he decided he would make the short drive back to his own house, check if there was any sign of the blue Fiat on the surrounding roads and if not, he would check in with Stephen, before returning to the hotel, to await O’Hara’s return.

  Under normal circumstances, the drive home would have been pleasant. The sun was shining from a clear blue sky and the Forest ponies were out in force, grazing along the verges. Today, Jim didn’t appreciate any of it. He was too caught up in his thoughts of Susan and Millie to pay any attention to the countryside although as he drove, he did make a regular check in his mirror in case he was being followed.

  Back at their own house, everything looked in order. A quick tour of the neighbourhood proved fruitless. There was no trace at all of a blue Fiat and Jim was starting to think he should have just stayed put at the hotel. Inside the house, nothing had been disturbed. The message for Susan was still taped to the hallway door and when he checked the answering machine, no one had called.

  Jim walked through to the kitchen, made himself a cup of coffee and stepped outside into the garden. Another nocturnal visitor had been digging in the flowerbed beside the path and the birds were still singing in the trees. Everything looked so normal. It was hard to believe that he couldn’t just turn around and walk back into the house to find Susan in the kitchen and Millie running about creating her usual mayhem. He sat down on the steps outside the back door and as he did, his mobile phone rang.

  Once Jim had driven away, Stephen and Marion sat down to have a frank discussion about the situation they now found themselves in. If the man called O’Hara was with the IRA, then who could tell what his motives might be. Surely after all this time, the IRA weren’t still after Jim? So much had changed in the intervening years. Even if they were, it seemed to Stephen far more likely that they would try to take Jim unawares, rather than kidnap his wife and daughter. He supposed there was always the possibility that they were going to make Jim jump through hoops and exact some sort of twisted revenge. However, Stephen couldn’t help feeling that any kidnap meant there was going to be a demand for money somewhere along the line. Both he and Marion had decided that when that demand came, they would prefer to pay up, rather than risk the lives of their daughter and granddaughter. For that reason, they were now sitting in Stephen’s study, where they had been for some time, surrounded by piles of neatly ordered paperwork. Marion was keeping the papers in order, whilst Stephen compiled a list of their investments and used the phone and the internet to obtain current valuations and balances of their various accounts.

  “Right, I think that’s the lot,” Stephen said, as he finished adding a column of figures.

  “How much does it come to?” Marion asked.

  “I make it just over one million, two hundred thousand, excluding the value of the house and our shares in the business.”

  Stephen scratched his head thoughtfully. “The problem is that it will take us at least a week to turn it into cash. Most of this is in shares and managed funds, which we need to sell or cash in.”

  “What about the bank?” Marion asked, leaning over Stephen’s shoulder to look at the figures.

  “Oh, I’ve spoken to them already. They’ll give us up to £100,000 on an unsecured overdraft on the strength of the business connection with them. Anything over that will need to be secured, which will take as long to arrange as it would to sell the investments themselves. If we’re just looking at cash, we can raise about £200,000 now – that’s £100,000 from the bank, about £60,000 that we have in savings accounts and we can get the rest as cash withdrawals on our credit cards.”

  “Perhaps that will be enough,” Marion said, massaging Stephen’s shoulders where she could feel the muscles knotted with tension.

  “I doubt it,” Stephen disagreed. “I wish they’d just hurry up and tell us exactly what they do want.”

  Marion glanced at her watch. “Why don’t we go downstairs and have some lunch? It’s twelve-thirty already and Jim said he would phone to let us know he’s o.k. Perhaps he’ll have some news?”

  “Maybe,” Stephen said, without much hope.

  “I’ll go and put the kettle on and make us something light to eat. You tidy the rest of this away and come down. We’ll go and sit out in the garden for a while.”

  Stephen agreed with a sigh and started to gather up the remaining papers, slotting them back into the filing cabinets from which they had come. Marion hadn’t been gone for more than a few minutes, when the phone rang.

  “I’ll get it,” Stephen shouted, as he hurried down the stairs to the living room. He could have picked it up in his study, but he wanted to get to the tape recorder that was still attached to the living room phone. Switching it on, he picked up the phone and answered, slightly out of breath.

  “Hello.”

  “Is that Mr Reid?” an Irish voice asked from the other end.

  “Yes it is.” Stephen was mindful that they’d put the phone down on him the day before and he resolved to keep calm.

  “You know who I am?” the voice asked. “We spoke yesterday.”

  “Yes, of course!” Stephen replied. “What do you want?”

  “Well now,” the voice continued, “just you listen now and I’ll tell you.”

  Stephen waved frantically at Marion, to indicate that it was the kidnappers and at the same time, picked up a pen and paper from beside the phone so that he could make a note of their demands.

  “You have a ministry of defence contract at the moment Mr Reid”.

  “Yes,” Stephen agreed. “In fact we’ve got more than one just now.”

  “We’re interested in something called ‘The K2 Driver’. It’s a box of electronics about the size of a car radio.”

  “Yes. I know it. We’ve been working on it for a couple of weeks now. There’s a bug somewhere in the software. It’s proving more difficult to sort out than we had thought.”

  “Where is it at the moment?” the Irishman asked.

  “It’s in the office.”

  “That’s all we want from you.”

  “Nothing else?” Stephen asked, a note of surprise in his voice.

  “No nothing. Now that’s a pleasant surprise for you isn’t it? All you need to do is pick it up and then we can arrange to exchange it for your daughter and your grand-daughter. Is that agreed?”

  Stephen paused for a moment before confirming, “Yes. Yes of course. I’ll go and get it straight away.”

  “Good. Don’t be long. We’ll phone back shortly.”

  The phone went dead and Stephen put the receiver down, with a puzzled look on his face.

  “All they want is some box of electronics that we’ve been working on at the office.”

  “Can you get it for them?” Mari
on asked.

  “Yes. Last time I saw it, it was plugged into Mark Brennan’s computer so that he could run some tests on it. That was last Wednesday or Thursday. I’ll give him a ring.”

  Stephen switched off the tape recorder and disappeared upstairs to phone Mark from his study. Marion let herself relax just a fraction. Maybe it was going to be alright after all. All they needed to do was hand over what they wanted and Susan and Millie would be released.

  The heavy tread of Stephen coming back down the stairs told her something was wrong, even before he appeared and she saw the expression on his face.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s gone,” Stephen replied. “Someone from the Ministry of Defence picked it up on Friday. Mark told them we hadn’t got to the bottom of the problem. That we needed more time, but they said they wanted it back anyway.”

  Marion just stood there, unable to think clearly.

  “What are we going to do?” she eventually said.

  “I wonder if they know what it looks like?” Stephen muttered to himself, thinking out loud. “Maybe we could give them something else and persuade them it’s what they’re after. It shouldn’t be difficult to rig up something that looks like it. Mark will have some data on it, which should give us an idea of what it’s supposed to do.”

  “Is that wise?” asked Marion.

  “Well what else can we do? We can’t just tell them we don’t have it. I need to phone Jim and let him know.

  At that moment, the doorbell rang and they both jumped.

  “I’ll get it,” Stephen said, as he hurried to the front door.

  He came back carrying a small package, about the size of a shoebox, which had been delivered by courier, and which was addressed to Jim.

  “Shall I open it?” Stephen asked.

  “No you won’t!” Marion exclaimed, taking it from him and putting it on the table. “We’ll call him and let him know that the kidnappers have phoned.”

  Marion picked up the phone and then as a thought crossed her mind, she dialled 1471. An automated voice at the other end announced “the number of the last person to call you is 07951 843 229, received today, at 12.42 p.m.” Marion scribbled the number on the pad beside the phone and looked at her husband.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “They haven’t withheld their number.

  “Is it a mobile?” Stephen asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It’ll just be a pay-as-you-go contract. Not possible to trace it and probably stolen anyway.”

  He frowned as a thought struck him. “At least that’s what you’d expect. Marion, you phone Jim and let him know what’s happening. I’m going upstairs to get the office on the other line.”

  Marion watched him hurry away. She knew the signs well. Stephen had an idea and he was away to see if he could make anything of it. In more normal times, he would suddenly disappear into his study and she wouldn’t see him for hours on end until he had either worked through whatever idea he’d had, or she had to go and plead with him to stop for something to eat, or to come to bed. If he had some clue as to how the phone that had been used to call them could be traced, then he could have all the time that he needed.

  Marion picked up the phone and dialled Jim, getting an answer straight away.

  “Jim, where are you?”

  “I’m at home,” he replied. “There’s no sign of O’Hara at the hotel and nothing here either.”

  “The kidnappers have phoned. They want something the company has been working on.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not quite sure. But Stephen says it’s not at the office anymore.”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  “Oh Jim, before you go. There’s a package for you here as well. It arrived just after the phone call.”

  “It’s probably from Archie. Just to be on the safe side though, don’t touch it. I’ll have a look at it when I get there.”

  Jim hurried back into the house, switched everything off and then locked the front door behind him as he went back to the car.

  Half an hour later, he was back with Stephen and Marion and they were listening to the tape of the kidnappers’ call.

  “What is this K2 Driver?” Jim asked, looking enquiringly at his father-in-law.

  “I’m not entirely sure to be honest. It’s something we got in from the M.O.D. quite recently. Mark Brennan has been working on it. It’s basically a box of electronics that is designed to link up with one or more units and act as the brains for a whole system. There’s a bug in the thing somewhere and it keeps crashing. Mark has gone through most of the preliminary work and was going to run over the programming with me, but he says the M.O.D. picked it up from the office on Friday afternoon.”

  Jim raised his eyebrows. “That looks suspiciously like they knew something was going on.”

  “So what are we going to tell them?” Marion interrupted. “They said they were going to phone back.”

  “Well,” Stephen replied, not wishing to leave all the decisions to his son-in-law. “We either go with the truth and tell them that we don’t have it any more, or we put together a box of electronics that looks just like it and hope that they can’t tell the difference.” Another thought struck him. “Or I suppose we could try to get the real thing back again.”

  “I think we can rule out the last option,” Jim said. “If the M.O.D. have picked it up without the work being complete, it’s because they’re worried about it. Although, having said that, I don’t suppose a phone call would do any harm. They’d probably expect us to ask why they’ve taken it back again and whether we’re going to get paid for the work that we’ve already done. Why don’t you give them a ring? Ask them what’s happening and whether they want the job finished – see what sort of reaction you get. In the meantime, I think we should try and stall. How about some story that it’s gone away for tests and won’t be back until tomorrow?”

  “And what do we do tomorrow?” Marion asked.

  “I think Stephen’s idea that we put together a fake box of electronics is a good one. If we’ve not got any other option, we’ll try to bluff it. I bet there’s a good chance that whoever has been making the calls wouldn’t know if we were giving them the real thing or not. How realistic could you make it?”

  “Oh, we can make it pretty realistic,” Stephen replied. “We know what it looks like and Mark has got a fair amount of data on it. We can probably make a dummy that does a couple of things that the real box is supposed to do and bearing in mind that the real one isn’t working properly anyway, it might just fool them.”

  Having agreed on a plan, Jim went to look at the package that had arrived earlier and was still sitting on the work surface in the kitchen. The writing on the front was familiar and he recognised the neat hand as that of Archie Long. He picked it up, surprised at the weight of it and opened it carefully at one end with the kitchen scissors. Inside, there was a heavy packet wrapped in greaseproof paper, a cardboard box which rattled in a familiar way when he took it out and two plastic cylinders about three inches long, each of which had a length of wire wrapped around it and a switch at one end. An unsigned note was taped to the cylinders with Archie’s writing on it:-

  “GPS trackers. If you get the opportunity, put one on the Irishman’s car and I can tell you where it’s been and when. Make sure you switch it on first. The batteries will last about 10 days. You’ll know what to do with the rest.”

  Jim put the cylinders to one side and put the other items on the table in front of him. He didn’t need to open the square cardboard box. He knew from the weight and the slightly oily smell that it was a box of shells. He also knew what to expect when he unwrapped the final package from its greaseproof paper. Inside, he found an old .38 inch Smith & Wesson revolver. Jim couldn’t help thinking how typical that was of Archie. The gun was old, but had been well looked after. Given the choice, he would have preferred a semi-automatic, either a Colt or a Browning, but the Smith & Wesson was de
finitely an improvement on the kitchen knife that he still had in his jacket. Archie never was a fan of automatics. He always said they jammed when you really needed them and they were never as accurate as a good revolver.

  Stephen had followed him into the kitchen and was watching him wipe down the gun with a piece of kitchen roll, removing the film of oil that covered it.

  “I’d rather you didn’t let Marion see that. It’ll only upset her.”

  Jim nodded. “I’ll put it in the car.”

  Marion hadn’t followed Stephen into the kitchen, almost as if she knew that she wouldn’t want to see the contents of the package. Jim slipped out of the front door, lodged the gun safely in the glove compartment of the car and was back before Marion knew he had been out.