by Joe McNally
Aim High
Joe MCNALLY
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s note
The Eddie Malloy series
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
arcangels wanted
Copyright © 2015 by Joe McNally
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Created with Vellum
For my sons Ryan and Kevin, with love
Author’s note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a work of the imagination of the authors or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Eddie Malloy series
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1
Eddie Malloy hurried from the jockey’s changing room at Worcester at 5.17pm on a Friday in late July. He’d had one winner, three losers, a hot shower, and not much to eat. He got in his car and took the phone from the glove box.
A text from Sonny Beltrami, in the coded letters they’d agreed, told him Sonny was heading for one of their secret meeting places. Eddie sighed, flipped the sun-visor down, and joined the line of traffic leaving the track.
Sonny Beltrami had left Worcester racecourse one hour before Eddie. He rode a black BMW K1600GT motorcycle, and never broke the speed limits. If a cop stopped Sonny, he might find the deerskin pouch containing that day’s take: one hundred thousand pounds.
Sonny did not know that a man carrying a large well-worn camera bag had followed him.
As Eddie reached the M5 motorway, his friend, Peter McCarthy, was alone in his London office. He was awaiting a call from his boss, Nic Buley, chief executive of the BHA, the British Horseracing Authority.
Buley finished a call on a telephone in his office that was not linked to the BHA official network. He sat staring at the door for a few seconds, unblinking, then he dialled McCarthy’s extension number. ‘You can come up now.’
McCarthy took the lift. He was 52 and forty pounds overweight. The commitments he’d made to himself to use the stairs more often invariably faded when faced with the climb.
Buley was opening his office door as McCarthy approached. Both men forced a smile.
‘Peter. Good to see you. Come in. Apologies for the wait.’
‘That’s okay.’
Buley rolled a high-backed leather chair across the wooden floor. McCarthy was careful sitting down. He’d been embarrassed before when his bulk had unbalanced the chair and almost spun it from beneath him.
Buley settled at his desk opposite McCarthy. ‘Kellagher, Sampson and Blackaby,’ he said.
McCarthy nodded. Buley said, ‘I want them in court by August fifteenth.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s the first anniversary of my appointment. I promised that cleaning up racing would be my top priority. Time to show I wasn’t bluffing.’
McCarthy began sweating. Buley, who consumed no more than 2,000 calories daily, and worked out every morning, had switched off the air conditioning to increase McCarthy’s discomfort.
McCarthy said, ‘We’re at least four months away from court with this…probably nearer six.’
‘Not we. You.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You should have had this ready to go by now. You’ve been on it more than two years.’
‘It’s been the toughest case in our history. We need to get evidence that will stand up in a court full of people who know little about racing. We need rock solid, easily explained detail, built on facts.’
Buley straightened, opening his hands toward McCarthy. ‘You’re head of integrity. It’s your job to get those facts.’
McCarthy leant forward. ‘And that’s what we’ve been doing. Painstakingly. And we’re getting there.’
‘Not quickly enough.’
‘Nic, you can’t put deadlines on cases like this!’
‘It’s a project, same as any other in business. What do you want me to do, let it run forever?’
‘It’s not what I want or what you want, it’s what will get us a conviction.’
Buley, elbows on desk, clasped his fingers again and said, ‘August fifteenth.’
McCarthy stared at him. ‘The police won’t accept that.’
‘I’ll deal with the police.’
McCarthy shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I can’t support you if you want to go ahead so soon.’
Buley smiled. ‘Then I’ll find someone who can.’
McCarthy waited for more. Buley just kept smiling. McCarthy said, ‘Meaning?’
‘Clear your desk. I’ll draft a statement with the PR team over the weekend and announce your departure Monday.’ Buley was hard-faced. McCarthy stared at him. ‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously. We’ll agree a compensation package in line with your length of service and tied to a compromise agreement.’
‘Nic…I’ve worked in security here for twenty-eight years.’
‘The BHA hasn’t been around for twenty-eight years. I know you were with the BHB and the Jockey Club, but maybe that’s part of the whole problem. Old habits die hard. Times have moved on. Adapt or die…etcetera.’
‘Are you saying that
I shouldn’t come to work on Monday?’
‘Or any other day. Spend the weekend making new plans. It’ll do you good, the change.’ Buley stood. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I have a couple more hours work to do.’
McCarthy got to his feet. Sweat darkened his blue shirt and, in the sunlight through the window his face glistened. Buley reached across with his right hand, as though sealing another deal. ‘Someone will be in touch to run the statement past you, so you can field any calls from the press.’
McCarthy, dazed, slowly shook hands and turned away.
When the big man left his office, Buley hit redial on the private phone. ‘Job done.’ He said.
‘Good. Phone Lisle. Get him ready for a midweek announcement.’
‘You’re sure he’ll bite?’
‘He’ll think Christmas has come in July.’
Buley rang Broc Lisle and listened to his voicemail message: “This is Broc Lisle. Thanks for calling. I’m in studio for a Newsnight recording on the Iraq uprising. I’ll return your call between 19.15 and 19.25. Please leave your name and number.”
Buley left his, then hung up and said, ‘Jeez, and people call me anal.’
2
Broc Lisle was at BBC HQ, having his make-up finished. The young man working on him said, ‘Long time since I saw a moustache like that, if you don’t mind me saying. Bridge on the River Kwai and The Great Escape.’
Lisle smiled. ‘Oddly, I was clean-shaven all the time I was in the army. It was only when I started making a living at this that I grew it. And I’ll tell you why, though you might have heard this, being in the business. Stop me if you have. It’s about John Travolta.’
‘Go on,’ the boy worked to highlight Lisle’s cheekbones, which were already prominent. Lisle was square-jawed, too, and allowed enough grey in his hair to convey experience and inflate his air of gravitas. The only thing betraying him, and telling of his impending 58th birthday, was the loose skin on his neck. But a high collar helped. His dark brown tie and suit completed his media persona. If he’d been able to continue wearing a uniform after retiring as an army major, he’d have done so.
Lisle said, ‘A reporter was shadowing Travolta one day on set. They had to move from Travolta’s trailer for a meeting with the director. A limousine waited outside the trailer and Travolta and the reporter got in. They travelled a hundred yards and got out again. Mystified, the reporter looked at Travolta who put an arm around his shoulder and said, “It’s not enough to be a star. You’ve got to act like a star.” Hence my moustache. I’m not a star, by any means, but that taught me a lesson about looking the part and it’s helped make me what you guys call the “go-to” man for comment on military and international security issues.’
‘Good story. I’ll use that. I’ll cut it to fifty yards though.’
Lisle chuckled.
When Eddie Malloy reached the abandoned graveyard in the woods near the village of Slad, Sonny Beltrami was waiting. As Eddie opened the creaky south gate behind the ruins of the church, he could hear Sonny singing My Melancholy Baby. Eddie smiled. All Sonny’s songs were melancholy.
Sonny’s big frame, dressed in motorcycle leathers, rested on an oak trunk felled in a storm. The evening sun lit most of the dead tree, but Sonny sat in the shade. Eddie chose the sunny side and straddled the wood. ‘Not topping up your tan?’ Eddie said.
Sonny shook his head, singing the last line out before he replied. ‘Doesn’t suit the song, my friend. Ambience is everything in a performance.’
Eddie looked around. ‘There’s nobody listening to your performance, Sonny. None of these poor folk have heard anything for a long time.’
Sonny sat forward, sweeping back his white hair, accentuating that Latin skin colour Eddie envied. Sonny was sixty, but looked ten years younger. He kept himself fit, although he claimed that was under doctor’s orders for the sake of his lifelong diabetes. Eddie sometimes wondered if Sonny’s illness had nurtured the melancholy.
Sonny said, ‘Don’t be so sure nobody’s listening.’ He scanned the mossy headstones. ‘Think of all the spirits circling this place. Most of these people would never have left Slad village. Their world would have been the five square miles around this valley. Their ghosts won’t be far away.’
‘Maybe you could have sung them a happier song, then?’
‘I’ll bring my fiddle next time, and play a jig.’
Sonny got to his feet, not bothering to brush the green debris from the back of his shining leathers. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a deerskin pouch from which he drew two bundles of banknotes. ‘One hundred grand dead,’ he said.
Eddie took it.
In the trees beyond the graveyard perimeter, the man who’d followed Sonny squeezed the shutter button on his camera, silently gathering twelve frames a second through the 400mm lens.
‘Want your commission now?’ Eddie asked Sonny.
‘Nah. Mave can square it up at the end of the month. I always thought I wanted money. Now I’ve got it, I don’t know what to do with it.’
‘Why don’t you rent a big band and a theatre, and sing to some live people for a change?’
Sonny smiled, looking around at the headstones. ‘The dead don’t boo.’
‘They don’t clap, either. And who’d boo you? You’ve got a voice like honey.’ Eddie got up, stuffing the cash in his pockets. Sonny put an arm around his shoulder and they walked. Sonny said, ‘The best audience is the one in your head, Eddie. You can change it as you please.’
‘So, who’s your favourite audience?’
‘Depends how I’m feeling. Often it’s just one woman, sitting in the dark, watching. All I ever see is her face, but she’s comfortable, and she understands my whole life just from hearing me sing that song.’
‘Anybody I know?’
Sonny’s smile was slow and sad. ‘You weren’t even born, my friend…somebody from a long, long time ago.’
They stopped just through the gate. Eddie reached to shake hands. Sonny took a step forward and hugged him, then wandered away in silence.
The man in the trees cursed himself silently for missing the picture of the hug. His name was Jonty Saroyan. When a viewfinder enclosed his eye, it eclipsed his heart and soul. There was no photo he wouldn’t take. Stripped of his camera, he was affable and childlike, a dreamer and a fool.
When the sound of Sonny’s BMW cracked the silence, Jonty made the call: ‘The big man’s leaving now.’
3
Eddie reached his house in the valley, hemmed in by small hills and four hundred acres of woodland. He locked the front door behind him, dragged the heavy seagrass mat aside with his boot-heel, and opened the floor safe while pulling the money from his pockets. He couldn’t cram in more than fifty grand.
He cursed and hauled it all out, then sat on the floor and counted it, his frustration increasing in ten-grand increments.
The sun had just gone down, so Eddie knew there was a fair chance Maven Judge would be out of bed and ready to start work. He sat at his PC and pinged her. ‘All well?’ she asked, not looking at her webcam, as usual, eyes on screen, fingers blurring across her keyboard.
‘No. All is not well, Mave.’
Still she didn’t look at him. ‘What’s up?’
‘I just counted the cash I’m holding for you.’
‘And?’
‘Three hundred and forty five grand. The rubber bands have broken on some of it. Most of the notes are grubby. I opened the safe and it was like a burst drain of money.’
‘Filthy lucre, eh? Take what you need and get a bigger safe.’
‘I don’t want a bigger bloody safe! I want you to take at least three hundred of this off my hands. You get a bigger safe!’
‘Keep the head, and I’ll buy you a hat.’
‘Mave, it’s not funny. There’s nobody around this house all day. If anybody breaks in, they could be in another country by the time I got home.’
‘The cameras would pick them up’
<
br /> ‘Then what? I ring the cops and say, could you help me find this guy who just stole a third of a million in used banknotes from my house?’
She stopped the keyboard work and looked at him. ‘Okay. I’ll call Sonny and ask him to bring me two-fifty from it.’
‘I left him about an hour ago. It was when I tried to cram the cash he gave me into the safe that I realized I’m not cut out for this.’
‘You and Sonny are the only guys I trust. You’re the only ones I know.’
Eddie watched that big-nosed plain face. Her brown hair would be tied back in the usual ponytail. If she smiled, he’d see those crooked crossed teeth. Maven Judge had won fortunes betting throughout this summer jumps season. She could have had Hollywood teeth and a nose job, but Eddie liked her as she was. He loved the fact that the notion of changing her looks never seemed to have crossed her mind. Eddie rubbed his tired eyes. ‘Let me sleep on it, Mave. I’m wound up.’
‘Never.’ She smiled now, full and wide, no bashfulness in showing those teeth. Eddie smiled too. ‘See,’ she said, ‘it’s not all bad. I noticed you had a winner at Worcester.’
‘Yep. That’s fifty-seven for the season.’
‘See. That’s what happens, Edward, when you apply yourself.’
‘Under duress. Needs must, and all that.’
‘Well, take some commission from the bets.’
‘Mave, I can’t! I’ve told you, if I take no reward, I’m breaking no rules.’
‘Well, stop bloody moaning, then!’
He smiled again, and she said she’d call back when she’d made the pick-up arrangements with Sonny.
Mave had helped Eddie when a friend of his, Jimmy Sherrick, died. She’d been pestering Eddie for two years to help her perfect her betting system, and Eddie believed Maven Judge was a genius. She could do anything with software, hack the toughest of security systems, and cruise through mental challenges. Eddie had told her that her brain was a six-lane highway to everyone else’s single-track road.
After Jimmy’s case, Eddie owed Maven the favour she’d been seeking for so long. This was to be his summer of repayment.