“She’s locked herself in there,” he told him. “We’re going to rush it. Better stand way back. You never know.”
“I’ll try and talk to her.”
“I think,” Redfern said evenly, “the time for talking is over, Blade.”
“Just let me try. Just this one last time. It’s important to me.”
Redfern thought about this, nodded and stood aside, gun held at the ready. Macken went to the door.
“Carol?”
No reply. He put an ear against one of the panels. He thought he heard somebody moving around.
“Carol, it’s Blade. This is senseless. There’s no way out. Look, I can help you. I really can.”
He put his ear to the panel again. More muffled sounds came from within.
Then he stiffened and caught his breath. Because of his position—ear against the door, eyes cast downward—Blade was able to see something the Americans could not. There was a contoured molding that ran along the walls about three feet above the floor. Dry rot had set in at a point close by the door and part of the top had crumbled away. Through the break, lighted by the weak bulb in the ceiling, something was reflecting light.
A semitransparent strand.
Blade ducked down and looked beneath the upper rim of the molding.
“Redfern!” he hissed urgently. “Get out. Get out now!”
“What?”
“Don’t argue, Redfern. Get your men out of here right this minute.”
Blade ran a finger along the telltale wire. It felt like a silk thread.
“She’s got the whole fucking shebang booby-trapped. It could go any second.”
Redfern squatted beside Macken. He needed little convincing. The Iraqis had used it, too—or something so much like it as to make little difference. He holstered his gun, turned, and bawled.
“Everybody! Leave! Right now. We’re abandoning the building. Let’s go now. Everybody out!”
There was the rattle of a bolt being drawn aside. The door opened.
Carol Merrigan’s face possessed the serenity of an angel’s. The lines were softer, as though she was at peace with herself. The plaid shawl was gone, as was the grubby, floral-patterned dress. Now the woman was clad in a white nightgown that reached to her ankles. Its silky material shimmered when she walked. Blade thought suddenly of a Pre-Raphaelite oil painting that hung in his mother’s living room.
The smooth sheer line of the nightgown was interrupted by a bulge at the left shoulder and Blade saw a small red stain there, one that grew with each second. Yet if Carol was in pain she didn’t show it; she carried a lighted candle in her left hand. The other was raised to eye level, and made a sign recognizable to Christians for more than a millennium: two fingers rested on the palm; two were held aloft; the thumb was splayed. The sign of benediction.
But the two raised fingers had been taped together. Where they joined, Blade saw an electrode. A strip of tape secured another to Carol’s thumb. Twin strands of wire ran behind her hand and trailed behind her as she advanced.
“Christ,” someone whispered.
“Go!” Redfern said again. This time his voice was hoarse.
Macken had seldom seen men of their bulk move so quickly. It certainly sharpens the senses, he decided: The prospect of impending death sharpens the senses like nothing else imaginable.
The stairs had been hard to take coming up, Blade thought; but, by Jesus, they were no trouble at all on the return journey. Sixteen burly CIA operatives fairly flew down them. Blade heard the sharp report of timber cracking. He followed, heart pounding, the pain in his chest forgotten. He took the stairs two at a time.
That was a mistake.
His right foot came down heavily on a step near the top. What had cracked under the weight of one of Redfern’s men now gave way. Macken’s foot drove down through the rotten timber. He cried out as he was thrown sideways against the banister. Something in his right calf tore.
Blade lay sprawled awkwardly on the stairs. His leg was imprisoned to above the knee. He leaned his weight against a step and pulled. The pain was excruciating. He beat the timber with his fist. It wouldn’t budge.
Carol Merrigan now stood close to the edge of the landing. The candlelight flickered over her face. She was smiling, a travesty of the sweet child he’d once known.
“It’s time, Blade,” she said. “Mammy and Daddy are waiting for us.”
“No, Carol, don’t.”
“But I must, Blade. Don’t you see? It’s what my mammy wanted. It’s the power that I got from my mammy. ‘You’ll only have to click your fingers, Angel,’ she used to say, ‘and you’ll have any man you want.’ She was a lovely woman, Blade. She told me I looked just like her when she was a girl.”
Macken struggled with the step, pushing, pulling. He heard a nail starting to come loose with a groan. Somebody was coming back up the stairs. Quietly.
“You do,” he said. “You’re beautiful, Carol. Really.”
“Then you want me, Blade? I know I want you. I told you that already. Now I have you all to myself.”
Blade’s gaze was fastened to her upraised hand. The deadly electrodes sparkled in the light of the candle. He tugged again furiously and frantically and heard another nail wrench itself loose. He had his knee free. There was no feeling in his calf.
“It doesn’t have to be like this, Carol,” he gasped. “We can work something out. There’s always hope.” His calf was halfway out.
“Yes, Blade,” she said slowly. “There’s hope for us. But not here. Angels have the power of life and death, you know. All an angel has to do is click her fingers. Watch.”
“No!”
Strong hands gripped Blade’s arms. Pain shot through his leg as he was yanked free. Then he was tumbling head over heels down the stairs, falling over another body. They came to rest in a tangle of limbs on the lower landing. Redfern. They were on their feet faster than the speed of conscious thought, half-running, half-falling down the last flight of stairs.
Daylight.
Then the third floor of the building detached itself from the rest with a roar.
She’d rigged it, Blade discovered later, so that a series of minor charges, strung together and snaking around all four walls of the third story, would detonate simultaneously. Captain Tom Fitzpatrick said—later still, when inspecting the rubble—that he’d seldom seen such expert workmanship.
The masonry, windows, and timber surrounds blown horizontally outward. The debris arced above the heads of Blade and the agency men, coming to earth harmlessly on the other side of the street in the space between the warehouses. The fourth story descended upon the second—and settled there, as though they’d always belonged together. It was like the collapsing of a giant soufflé.
“Jesus H. Christ!”
It was Redfern. His dark suit was powdered with masonry dust. He looked up at the transmogrified building with something resembling awe.
“She didn’t miss a goddamn trick. That’s the damnedest thing I ever saw.”
He turned to his men. “Everybody all right?”
There were mutterings of affirmation, accompanied by curses; heads were shaken in disbelief.
“You okay, Blade?”
“I think so.” He could walk—after a fashion. “Thanks again, Redfern. That’s two I owe you.”
Blade dusted himself off, got out his telephone. He asked to be put through to his assistant.
“Sweetman? You can come on in now. It’s over.”
“We heard an explosion. Where are you?”
He told her.
“And Angel?”
“Hoist with her own petard. Literally.”
“What?”
“She blew herself up, the poor, twisted bitch.”
“My God. We’re on our way. Duffy’s here, too.”
Blade broke the connection, was just about to put the phone away when his glance fell on something on the sidewalk, something that Carol Merrigan had let fall when Mr. Coburn�
�s bullet had smacked into her shoulder. He limped over, bent down, and picked it up.
The doll, no longer wrapped in the discarded plaid shawl, was crudely made by modern standards and had a distinct Southeast Asian slant to the eyes. It was about the size of a six-week-old infant. Blade turned it upside down and, as he did so, a metallic sound came from a hidden speaker. It was a grotesque parody of a baby’s voice.
“Mommy!” cried the doll. “Daddy!”
How fucking touching, thought Blade in disgust, remembering Angel’s young victims of eleven days before.
But there was more. There was a hinged plate in the doll’s abdomen; Blade flipped it open. He caught his breath and heard Redfern whistle at the same time.
The doll’s body was hollow and contained a phalanx of state-of-the-art electronic equipment, all beautifully designed so as to fit perfectly into the diminutive, rubber torso. Among the items of cutting-edge technology, Macken identified a telephone, an infrared scanner, and a microwave radio transmitter. This last had a button that was ominously labeled ARM.
The breeze was increasing. On its rise and fall, Blade heard the first blaring of car horns from the direction of Parnell Square. The presidential motorcade was making its slow and stately journey through the center of Dublin.
“Your president doesn’t know how lucky he is,” Macken said. “I think she might have triggered a third bomb just for the sheer bloody hell of it. You were close to her—as close as I was. You saw her, Redfern, heard her. Her fucking mind was completely gone. She was capable of anything.”
Redfern looked up as a police helicopter soared over the Liffey, heading their way; sirens wailed in the distance, drawing closer. From a point due north came another chopper and they watched as it grew in size. It was bigger than the police helicopter and painted a dull, olive green; it bore no official markings.
“You’re wrong about one thing, Blade,” Redfern said. “The president does know how lucky he is. Not that luck was ever part of the equation.”
The unmarked chopper passed almost directly overhead. Redfern saluted it.
Blade’s jaw dropped. “Was that the president?”
“That was the president. God bless him.”
“You secretive cunt!”
“Thanks.” Redfern was grinning.
The klaxons grew louder. A pipe band struck up—somewhat incongruously, Blade thought—“Scotland the Brave.” The garda helicopter landed a few feet from them, swirling up a cloud of masonry and mortar dust.
Duffy and Sweetman emerged from it, looked about them in bemusement.
Blade jerked a thumb in the direction of O’Connell Street. “Then who in the name of Christ is—”
“An actor, Blade,” Redfern said. “A ringer. Oh, he’s good; we’ve used him plenty of times. Everybody does it: the Russians, the French, the Iraqis; it’s regular practice. Okay, when you get up real close, you see he’s not the president, but from a couple of yards away, he’s perfect. And that’s all we needed for the drive to Leinster House. The crowd won’t see through it, nor will the news cameras.”
“Christ, just like in The Eagle Has Landed.”
“Beg pardon?”
“No, no. Nothing. Just thinking out loud. So the president went along with it. I thought he’d more guts.”
“Oh, come on, Blade. Put yourself in his position. If you’d heard about the bomb and you knew that the bomber was still out there, with more bombs, would you put your neck on the line? He’s not a fool.”
“No, I suppose I wouldn’t.”
A phone rang. It was Redfern’s. The words he spoke into it were calm and reassuring, each sentence punctuated with at least one “sir.”
“That was Bill Seaborg,” he told Blade. “Wondering what the hell’s going on. He heard about the blast.”
Redfern returned the phone to his pocket. “He’s the real hero, Blade. He’s riding in the president’s limo. He knew the risks. Knew ’em better than anybody else. He’s one helluva guy.”
A fresh thought occurred to Macken.
“But what about the bombs that are still down there? What’ll happen to them now?”
“Frankly, Blade, I’d say there’s a chance in a million that one of them could explode accidentally. If she used the same explosive, then it’s safe to say it won’t blow up by itself. But the world is growing more complex and there’s so much going on in the ether that it’s possible—I’m not saying it’s likely, I’m saying it’s possible—that some time in the future some kid will be fooling around with his birthday gift—and boom!”
“You mean another radio transmitter could set them off?”
“It doesn’t have to be a transmitter. It could be anything—any electronic gizmo, maybe something we haven’t got right now but will be invented in a couple of years’ time. Look how Angel managed to scan your cellular phone signal and emulate it. Like I say, the air around us is full of all kinds of signals, and it’s becoming more crowded out there. All it needs is somebody to send out the right signal: The one that can trigger one of the bombs.”
“Jesus.”
“However, it’s my guess it’ll never happen. You see, those buried detonators require power. Not much, just enough to keep them ticking over, and that power has to be supplied by a battery. Fact is, batteries have a limited life span, so even on standby the bombs will drain that power—given time.”
“So how long have we got?”
Redfern shrugged. “Who knows? Two, three years more? Five or six? It’s impossible to say. And don’t forget there’s corrosion, too. It’s wet under the street. Could be the batteries are already dead. Or that the gelignite has ‘sweated’ and is useless by this time.”
Blade fingered the transmitter in the doll’s belly. He pulled out the antenna and flipped the toggle switch. Below the little label that read ARM, an LED began blinking rapidly. His finger hovered above the SEND button.
Some distance away across the river the pipe band was playing “Hail to the Chief,” and it was plain that they hadn’t put in too much practice on it; a growing cacophony of car horns marked the steady progress of the motorcade.
Christ almighty and his blessed mother tonight, Blade thought: It was too, too bloody easy altogether.
He flipped the toggle and retracted the antenna, wrapped the doll again in Angel’s plaid shawl.
The clock in O’Connell Bridge registered 47,147,658 seconds before the start of the new millennium.
Elsewhere in this ancient city, founded more than a thousand years before by Viking invaders, other sunken devices were quietly registering the slow passage of time.
And waiting.
“Come on, Redfern,” Blade said. “I’ll buy you a pint.”
By the same author
John Millington Synge: A Biography
A Night in the Catacombs
A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
THE ANGEL TAPES. Copyright © 1997 by David M. Kiely. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
First Edition: November 1997
eISBN 9781466884342
First eBook edition: September 2014
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