Marine F SBS

by Robin James

  In the exercise yard, the most violent of the prisoners had gone further than was necessary – or than Arsenio wanted them to. Perhaps what had sparked off these excesses was Warren’s shooting of the warder, who would now be bleeding to death but for the intervention of a convict who had had compassion enough to staunch the flow of blood by applying a tourniquet around the man’s upper thigh. The prisoners had captured nine warders, stripped them naked, and were ribaldly taunting and humiliating them.

  Well, fuck them – they could sing for their other five hundred quid, thought Arsenio. And if Ulrich Warren was labouring under the illusion that his cell mate was going to take a dangerously unstable mass murderer out of Parkhurst with him, then he would not be for much longer.

  Knowing what was about to happen next, the rioting prisoners cleared a path for Arsenio. Once amid the safety of their numbers he released Briggs, and he was now being followed by Warren into the centre of the yard, where Tim Shannon, also serving a triple life sentence for his part in the House of Lords rocket attack, was waiting for them.

  The helicopter was already descending, a thin, flexible ladder, seventy feet of it, hanging below it and bouncing and jerking with the chopper’s vibrations. The small, company-owned, four-seater Dragonfly had been hijacked – although with the paid collusion of one of the staff of a private flying club near Southampton – just fifteen minutes earlier. The hijacker was a completely dependable terrorist colleague of Arsenio who was used to split-second timing, a one-time militant right-hand man of Dr George Habash, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Libyan-trained in his mid-teens, thirty-eight-year-old Palestinian-born Joseph Hantash was all round as useful as Arsenio himself – piloting a helicopter being but one of his many skills – as ruthless and as interested in making money with his prowess as El Asesino, now that the Palestinian cause was gradually being peacefully resolved by Yasser Arafat.

  The Dragonfly reached an altitude of sixty-eight feet, more than twice the height of the prison walls, where it hovered noisily. Arsenio nodded at Shannon, who began running up the ladder with the agility of a monkey climbing a palm tree. He was already inside the chopper by the time Arsenio grabbed the ladder and put one foot on its bottom rung.

  Dobbs meanwhile, greatly perturbed by this new development, and realizing now why Cruz Conde had forced him to call the armed guards off their towers, appeared on the small balcony of his office overlooking the exercise yard, and raised a powerful megaphone to his mouth. His echoing words filled the yard, louder even than the motor of the chopper and the swish of its blades.

  As Arsenio made his way up the ladder, wind from the rotors tearing at his hair, Warren, preparing to start an ascent behind him, with one hand on the ladder, raised the muzzle of his Colt 1911 A1 and lined up its sights on Dobbs. He then proceeded to carry out an action so grossly unjust and unnecessary that Arsenio would have done anything in his power to stop it – he squeezed the trigger and succeeded in putting a bullet clean through the megaphone, through Dobbs’s face and out through the back of his head. Dying, the Governor of Parkhurst tumbled over his balcony and crashed down two floors into the yard.

  The sound of the shot made Arsenio glance sharply down and around, quickly enough to see Dobbs hit the ground. He was, in any case, about to yank up the ladder and have the chopper lift off while he was still climbing, stranding Warren. Now he was so overcome with rage at the man’s action – he had, like any intelligent prisoner, entertained enormous respect for the Governor – that he carefully aimed his baby .20-calibre PSM and drilled a neat hole through the top of the murderer’s skull. Then he made the agreed sign to Hantash and, as he continued to climb the ladder, clinging perilously and swaying in the wind, the helicopter soared high above the prison.

  Below them, fast shrinking until they were no larger than toys, police cars, army vehicles, ambulances and fire engines were converging on Parkhurst Prison. Reaching the open door of the helicopter, Arsenio hauled himself inside. He was feeling bad about Leonard Dobbs. He was of course going to be held responsible – and the killing of Ulrich Warren, while in his view completely justified, was yet another murder on his record sheet. Every move he made, for the rest of his life, was going to have to be with the greatest care and planning. Well, he reflected, it was going to be like that anyway. Indeed, it had been for many years. Sliding into the seat next to Hantash, he greeted him with a curt nod.

  ‘Hey, man,’ said the Palestinian. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Tough. But at least the buses around here are dead on time.’ Arsenio lit a Camel and inhaled deeply.

  ‘I don’t like that word.’

  ‘What word?’

  ‘Dead.’

  El Asesino grunted. He glanced at the altimeter: twelve hundred feet, levelling out. There was no point in climbing higher – they would be a blip on a police radar screen by now and would in any case be descending shortly.

  ‘What did you bring a guitar for?’ asked Hantash, glancing at the instrument. ‘It’s got no strings on. It isn’t even finished.’

  ‘Sure, and didn’t you know he’s a soft, sentimental creature, so he is,’ grunted Shannon, in the back.

  ‘I’m going to finish it.’

  Arsenio looked down. They were crossing the choppy waters of the Solent, with ahead of them the sprawling port of Portsmouth. Another minute and the city was passing beneath them, to its north the verdant landscape of Hampshire. He knew better than to ask the Palestinian if everything was in place; he had never known the man – who had no record or irritating notoriety as he had himself – to screw up.

  Ten minutes later the Dragonfly was making its descent. It landed in a remote part of the South Downs, close to a narrow road on which was parked an unassuming, slightly dented Ford Escort. They had not seen anybody during the landing and transfer to the car, but just in case they were observed and the number-plate was noted, Hantash had another vehicle waiting in a small village south of Horsham.

  A mere forty-five minutes after discovering a black beetle in his cabbage at Parkhurst, Arsenio Cruz Conde, El Asesino, and Tim Shannon, the IRA killer, were being driven at moderate speed towards London in a stolen Mercedes 380SL with changed number-plates to match the immaculately forged papers.

  3

  Kirsty Childs had created the perfect setting for a candlelit dinner. In her neat little flat in Lexham Gardens, just around the corner from Cromwell Road, she had laid the table for two, with an Irish linen cloth, stylish sterling silverware and two tall, thin, tapering red candles in silver holders, to match the elegantly coned napkins. An open bottle of respectable claret stood between two gleaming, cut-crystal glasses, and the smell of roast tenderloin of beef wafted from the cottage-style kitchenette to share the air with the cool sounds of John Coltrane’s tenor sax. Kirsty’s latest boyfriend was about to arrive on the scene and she was happily buzzing around her flat puffing up cushions, her thick, dark hair glinting copper in the candlelight, her firm breasts trembling beneath a frilly, white cotton blouse which accentuated her considerable cleavage.

  Kirsty was a stunner, a curvaceous twenty-eight-year-old who turned heads wherever she went. Five feet six and a half in her stockinged feet, when dressed in one of her impressive collection of high-fashion outfits she looked every inch a model or film star. But she was neither. To her friends, family and boyfriends she was secretary to a newspaper executive – a position about which she was reluctant to make more than the most superficial of comments; for the job was a lie of three years’ standing.

  Kirsty Childs was a con artist, and a very good one. Bored with life in a lawyer’s office, disillusioned with the pay – and with men in general, for she had been unable to form a stable relationship since the love of her life walked out on her when she was twenty-two – at the age of twenty-five she had turned to a financially rewarding life of crime. Kirsty knew much about that subject, since her office specialized in defending criminals, and, gutsy and strictly speaking
amoral rather than immoral, she had tackled her new life with great professionalism and success. Credit-card fraud was her main speciality, though she had also developed – learning from her experience in the lawyer’s office – various ingenious little systems for cheating banks out of cash. She had had a couple of narrow squeaks, but she had never been caught, partly because she confided in absolutely no one and worked strictly alone. Her entire wardrobe, worth many thousands of pounds, had been obtained with stolen or forged credit cards, as had the silver and glassware which adorned her table. Kirsty was more pleased with herself than she had ever been in her life on the straight and narrow, though to describe her as totally happy and contented would be an exaggeration, for there had been one, comparatively recent, major event in her life which had deeply saddened her.

  The doorbell rang. Well, here he was, waiting outside in the slight drizzle which had just begun, for her to let him in via the entryphone. She had high hopes of this one. Her most recent of conquests showed all the possibility of actually being a real man, and not turning out to be a complete wimp like so many before him. She had had so many bad experiences with the male sex that at times she almost wished she were a lezzie. But this one was an excellent performer in the sexual department, a stayer in the sack, unselfish. And above all he was strong and self-confident, not afraid to tell her, in the nicest possible way, what he expected of her in both behaviour and dress. But even as she let him in the communal door and opened the front door of her flat to receive him, she reflected that no one was ever going to completely take the place of the one she still pined for, that charismatic man who, like her, almost two years ago had turned out to be living a lie which made hers seem like the most harmless of childish fibs.

  They had got as far as a passionate embrace and kiss, after which she had closed the door and gone into the kitchenette and he was pouring himself a Grant’s Scotch over crackling rocks, when the telephone rang.

  Kirsty’s face, as she listened to the voice of the man on the line – a sound she had thought she would never hear again in her life – underwent a dramatic transformation. It was at first amazed, then puzzled, then her cute little nose wrinkled in delight and her deep sea-green, widely spaced eyes began to sparkle.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ she said.

  The new boyfriend’s annoyed protests were treated with stoniness. She was sorry, she had to go out, she had to leave right away, their evening was cancelled. Even as she told the stunned man that, she was pulling on a thin sweater. She turned off the roast, blew out the candles and, full of excitement, took her lover down to Cromwell Road, where she hailed a cab and left him standing in the drizzle under a street lamp, watching the cab with a disgruntled, angry expression on his face as it bore her away towards Soho.

  Arsenio Cruz Conde had been sitting in a café across the road from the Three Feathers public house on the corner of Old Compton Street and Charing Cross Road since calling Kirsty from the pub. In the window, he had been attentively studying the face and bearing of everyone who entered the pub to see if they bore any possible resemblance to a police officer. For although El Asesino felt reasonably confident that Kirsty would not betray him – she had not come forward at the time of his arrest for the House of Lords rocket bombing although it had been widely publicized, with his picture, which she must have recognized, splashed over every newspaper and TV news programme – he could not be certain of that fact and was not about to take the slightest chance.

  By the time, a mere fifteen minutes after his call, she ducked out of a taxi and hurried through the thickening drizzle into the pub, only half a dozen people had entered the café and not one of them appeared remotely like a policeman. Nevertheless, he was still not satisfied.

  Arsenio crossed the road and entered the Three Feathers, standing just inside, a lock of black hair plastered to his forehead by the rain, until Kirsty spotted him – which was in a matter of seconds because her eyes were darting all over the pub. She recognized him immediately, despite the heavy beard and moustache and the tinted glasses. Nerves all keyed up, heart thumping, she approached him, but, as he had told her on the telephone, without making any outward sign of recognition.

  Before she reached the one great love of her life, the man whom she had never been able to put out of her mind despite knowing that he was a dangerous terrorist, he jerked his head at her – without any change in his flat expression – in a gesture that she was to follow him, and hurried out into the rain. He did not go far. He walked quickly down Old Compton Street, turned left into Dean Street, crossed Shaftesbury Avenue and slipped into the Duke of Wellington pub in Gerrard Street. During this short journey he stopped three times to watch Kirsty until she had almost caught him up, making absolutely sure she was not being followed. She, meanwhile, acted exactly according to his instructions, betraying no sign of recognition of him.

  At the bar of the busy pub he finally smiled at her, took her into his arms and kissed her on the lips.

  ‘You still drink Scotch?’ were his first words.

  ‘On occasions such as this I drink triple Scotches,’ she said, ‘. . . in rapid succession.’

  So he ordered three triple White Horses, on the rocks, and a bottle of soda. They took them to an empty table. Even now, he was cautious; he chose a table close to one door from where he had a clear view of the other.

  ‘I’m not absolutely sure I like the beard,’ she told him, studying him. ‘It makes you look older.’

  He took a long sip at his whisky, smiling at her. Por Dios, she was lovely, every bit as much so as he remembered her. ‘Neither do I,’ he said. ‘It’s false.’ He squeezed her soft, pampered, light-fingered hand. ‘If you like, I’ll take it off.’ He gazed deep into her eyes. ‘Later, when we are alone.’

  Her heart skipped a beat. Alone. She squeezed her thighs together. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You must have known I got out? It must have been on the news?’

  ‘I haven’t heard the news or read a paper since yesterday. It was today then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘From Parkhurst? Were you still in Parkhurst?’ She emptied one glass. It burned her throat and made her splutter, but she desperately needed it; she was a bundle of nerves.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I didn’t think anybody ever got out of Parkhurst.’

  ‘I did.’ He paused, a hand on her designer jean-clad knee. ‘You never tried to get in touch with me. Neither during the trial nor after it.’

  ‘Nor you me.’

  ‘I didn’t want to involve you. Girlfriend of the man who rocket-bombed the House of Lords. Not good for you.’

  ‘The same went for me. I didn’t want to be involved. I loved you, but I was scared.’ She sipped from her second glass. The contents of the first were already doing a good job of calming her nerves.

  ‘And now?’

  ‘And now what?’

  ‘Are you still in love with me?’

  ‘I think so, yes,’ she said slowly. But she did not really need to consider her answer. She loved him without question.

  The nostrils of his handsomely aquiline, almost aristocratic nose flared. His hand slipped up her thigh. How he needed a woman. Any woman to his taste would have done at that moment. Had he been unable to contact her he would have picked one up, or bought one by now and already been relieving his almost two-year-old need. But here she was, his lovely Kirsty, and now that the business of making sure she had not betrayed him was over, the scent of her, the touch of her, her beauty, was beginning to overwhelm him. He was getting the beginnings of an erection just from being close to her in this rather seedy, smoky pub.

  ‘Do you still have the same flat?’ he asked her.

  ‘Didn’t you just ring me?’

  ‘People sometimes move and take their numbers with them.’ He swallowed some Scotch, watching her closely. A lumpy knot of excitement had formed somewhere in the region of his lower throat and upper chest, refusing to budge – not that he wanted it to.


  ‘Are you living alone?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’ And thank God for that, she thought. It was going to be difficult enough getting shot of the present boyfriend, never mind a live-in one.

  He finished his drink and got to his feet. He was about to pull her up when he remembered something. ‘The police – they never questioned you? Never associated me with you?’

  ‘Why should they have done? My you was an Argentinian advertising executive called Alberto, remember? And none of the stuff you left in my flat told me anything otherwise – and, believe me, I hunted through it item by item. I was waiting for them to put some heat on me, but it never happened.’

  He chucked her pointy little chin. ‘Some heat? Where did a nice girl like you pick up street language like that from?’

  ‘I worked in a criminal lawyer’s office for years, remember?’

  His sexual need was getting more pressing by the second. If he didn’t get her home shortly, he would be making love to her in the cab. He tugged her hand. ‘Let’s go, Kirsty.’

  Butterflies swarmed in her belly as she stood up. ‘Let’s go, yes.’

  She had blown out the candles and turned off the oven, but in her rush of nerves Kirsty had forgotten to switch off the CD player. It was on shuffle, and as she turned on a light and closed the door, Charlie Parker was playing the slow, sexy Lover Man. The number could not have been more appropriate – though love was not exactly the name for what both of them had on their minds at the explosive moment when they fell into one another’s arms. Raw, uninhibited, raunchy sex was a much more fitting description.

  Without breaking a kiss which had their tongues mingling and slithering against each other like writhing serpents, he ripped open her Moschino belt. She let loose a little squeal as she then found herself spun around in his arms and shoved to the dining table, though she made no effort to resist as he dragged down her jeans zipper and bent her over a sturdy, cane-backed chair. She gasped as his smooth but tough, artistic hands – which could be so gentle when making love – grabbed the sides of her jeans and rucked them over her hips and down her thighs. Her white silk Dior knickers followed. Kirsty’s hands, with their perfectly manicured, mauve-nailed fingers, were flattened on the table top, the thumb of one touching the base of a silver cruet, the other hooked around a heavy candlestick.