The Double Tap (Stephen Leather Thrillers)

by Stephen Leather

  Lynch reached around to the front of the boy’s waist, unclipped his leather belt and pulled his jeans down to his ankles. ‘Sit on his calves, it’ll stop him kicking out,’ Lynch told Davie and the young man obeyed. The boy began to cry, his tears staining the pillow.

  Lynch was a veteran of more than a dozen kneecappings and he knew how important it was to seize control from the outset and to give the victim no opportunity to resist. Kneecapping was a particularly brutal form of punishment, but it worked, serving as a permanent reminder both to the victim and to others. No matter how good the surgeons – and the surgeons in Belfast were the best in the world at repairing and replacing shattered joints – the knee would never be as good as new. Even after the ceasefire, the IRA used kneecapping to punish drug dealers, rapists and joyriders, and men like Lynch had become experts at the technique. O’Riordan hadn’t lied when he’d told the boy it could be done easily or painfully. Depending on how the gun or drill was used, the kneecap could be merely damaged or the leg destroyed. Drilling from the side was painful enough, but drilling from the back of the knee would shatter the kneecap into dozens of splinters.

  Lynch took the drill out of the carrier bag and switched it on. He pressed the trigger and the bit whirred and buzzed. The boy’s body went into spasm and Lynch pressed down with both his hands. The pillow and the gag stifled most of the noise.

  ‘Okay?’ asked O’Riordan.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Lynch. He looked over his shoulder and saw that Davie Quinn had his eyes closed. Lynch smiled. The first was always the hardest. Lynch placed the whirling bit against the side of the boy’s left knee with all the precision and care of a surgeon. There was very little blood as the bit tore through the flesh, then the noise of the drill changed from a high pitched whine to a dull grinding sound as it ripped through the cartilage. The drill shuddered in Lynch’s hand as the bit grated against bone and he fought to keep it steady.

  Davie opened his eyes but shut them quickly when he saw the bit emerging at the far side of the knee, covered in blood and flesh and bits of white cartilage. The boy went still on the bed, his face deathly pale. They usually passed out, Lynch knew, more from fear than from the pain. If they really wanted to make the victim suffer they’d wake him up before working on the second knee, but the boy was being capped more as a warning to others than to hurt him. Lynch kept the bit turning as he pulled it out of the injured knee so that it wouldn’t jam, then wiped his forehead with the back of his arm and went back to work, drilling through the second knee as easily as the first. When he’d finished, he pulled out the bit, switched off the drill and put it back into the carrier bag. O’Riordan climbed off the unconscious boy and untied the gag. Saliva dribbled onto the pillow.

  Lynch checked the boy’s wounds. There was some bleeding, but it was far from life-threatening. He took a sheet and wrapped it around the boy’s legs. ‘He’ll be okay,’ he said. ‘You can get off now, Davie.’

  The three men went downstairs to the sitting room, where Paulie was standing over the woman and her daughter, his Browning in both hands. ‘Wait five minutes, then call an ambulance,’ O’Riordan told the woman. ‘Make sure they take him to the Royal Victoria and if you get the chance, ask for Mr Palmer. He’s the best for kneecaps, okay?’

  The woman nodded and kissed her rosary. ‘Thanks, son,’ she whispered. The girl burst into tears and buried her head in her mother’s lap.

  Lynch drove the Quinn brothers to the Falls Road and dropped them off a short walk from their home, then headed for the M2 and Ballymena. ‘Did I ever tell you about the first capping I was on?’ asked Lynch. O’Riordan shook his head. ‘It was a guy who’d been taking pictures of little boys, naked. Didn’t touch them, but he was heading that way, so he had to be taught a lesson. Do you know Paddy McKenna? He’s in the Kesh now.’

  ‘Heard of him, yeah.’

  ‘Yeah, well we picked the guy up, four of us, and took him out to Kilbride to do the dirty deed. Paddy brought the drill. It was his first capping as well. So, we have the guy pinned down in the field, and we tell Paddy to get on with it. He starts looking around. What the fuck are you waiting for, we say. “Where’s the socket?” he asks. “Where’s the fucking socket?”’

  O’Riordan laughed uproariously. ‘Easy mistake to make,’ he said, wiping his eyes.

  It wasn’t until they were driving down the track that led to O’Riordan’s farm that he raised the subject of Mike Cramer. ‘What did McCormack say?’ he asked.

  ‘Let sleeping dogs lie. That’s what he said.’

  O’Riordan snorted softly. ‘Fuck that for a game of soldiers.’

  ‘Yeah. But what can we do? How am I going to track down a helicopter? They could have gone anywhere.’

  O’Riordan shook his head. ‘Not anywhere, Dermott. What goes up must come down. And Air Traffic Control must have been tracking it. You might try asking them.’

  ‘Oh sure, I’ll just phone them up and ask them if they saw a helicopter pick up a Sass-man in Howth. I can just imagine their answer.’

  ‘It was a Sea King, wasn’t it? That’s what it looked like to me.’

  ‘I suppose so. It was a big bugger, that’s for sure, not a normal army chopper. I’ve never seen a red, white and blue chopper before. They’re usually grey or green.’

  ‘What about the Queen’s Flight?’ said O’Riordan.

  ‘Aye, it could have been the Duke of Edinburgh himself, coming to lift our man off. How far can they go, any idea?’

  O’Riordan shrugged. ‘A few hundred miles maybe. They were heading east, but that doesn’t mean anything. They could have circled around and headed up north.’

  ‘Belfast? Yeah, that’s possible. Do we know anyone in Air Traffic Control?’

  ‘I’ll ask around. But you’d best be careful. McCormack won’t like it if he thinks you’re going behind his back.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’

  ‘I mean it, Dermott. McCormack is a dangerous man to cross.’

  ‘I know. I’ll just be making a few enquiries, that’s all.’

  Mike Cramer was walking around the croquet lawn, deep in thought, when he heard the Colonel calling him from the French windows at the rear of the main building. He looked up. The Colonel was waving his walking stick as if he was trying to call back an errant retriever. Cramer smiled at the thought. A Rottweiler would be a better comparison. During his last few years in the SAS, the Colonel had tended to use Cramer on operations where the qualities of a highly-trained attack dog were more in demand than the ability to bring back a dead bird.

  Cramer walked across the grass. Away to his left, by the line of tall conifers which separated the tennis courts from the lawn, stood a broad-shouldered man in a dark blue duffel coat, one of several SAS troopers on guard duty. The wind caught the coat and Cramer got a glimpse of a submachine pistol in an underarm holster.

  The Colonel had gone back inside by the time Cramer reached the window. It led into a large, airy room which appeared to have been the headmistress’s office. The Colonel sat behind a huge oak desk. The walls were bare but there were oblong marks among the faded wallpaper where framed photographs of netball and lacrosse teams had hung for generations. As Cramer stepped into the room he noticed another man, standing by an empty bookcase. ‘Cramer, this is Dr Greene,’ said the Colonel.

  The doctor stepped forward and shook hands with Cramer. He was just under six feet tall, in his early fifties with swept-back grey hair and gold-framed spectacles with bifocal lenses. He was wearing a brown cardigan with leather patches on the elbows and was carrying a small leather medical bag. ‘Strip to the waist,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Top or bottom?’

  The doctor looked at Cramer over the top of his spectacles, an amused smile on his face. ‘Whichever you’d prefer, Sergeant Cramer.’

  Cramer took off his reefer jacket and unbuttoned his shirt. The Colonel made no move to leave. He read the look on Cramer’s face. ‘You don’t mind if I stay, do you?’ he asked
and Cramer shook his head.

  The doctor whistled softly between his teeth as Cramer dropped his shirt onto the desk. He walked over and gently touched the thick raised scar that ran jaggedly across Cramer’s stomach. ‘Across and up. As if someone had tried to disembowel you.’

  ‘That’s pretty much what happened. I lost a few feet of tubing and I had to wear a colostomy bag for the best part of a year, but I guess I was lucky.’

  ‘And this?’ The doctor touched Cramer’s right breast. There was a mass of scar tissue where the nipple had once been.

  Cramer shrugged. ‘Pruning shears.’

  The doctor walked around Cramer, noting the rest of the scars on his body. He touched him lightly on the left shoulder. ‘A .45?’ he asked.

  ‘A .357, I think. It went right through so they never found the bullet.’

  ‘And this?’ The doctor pressed a small wound on the other shoulder.

  ‘A fruit knife.’

  ‘And this thin one that runs around your stomach?’

  ‘A Stanley knife.’

  The doctor shook his head in wonder. ‘You seem to have a lot of enemies, Sergeant Cramer.’

  ‘Just one.’

  ‘One man did all this to you?’

  ‘It was a woman. She did most of the damage.’

  ‘A woman?’ The doctor whistled through his teeth. ‘I wouldn’t like to meet her on a dark night.’

  ‘Mary Hennessy, her name was. She was an IRA terrorist. She’s dead now.’

  The doctor stood in front of him again and studied the thick scar across his stomach. ‘That must have done a lot of damage inside.’

  ‘Tell me about it. If I hadn’t been helicoptered to hospital I’d have died.’

  ‘She was torturing you, this woman?’

  ‘She was torturing a friend of mine. He died moments before I was rescued. She did that to my stomach just before she fled. I guess she wanted me to die slowly, in a lot of pain. She almost had her wish. The rest of the stuff she did to me two years later.’

  The doctor had Cramer open his mouth and took a small torch from the pocket of his cardigan. He peered at Cramer’s throat, then pushed his fingers against the side of his neck as if checking for lumps. ‘That seems fine,’ he murmured, then he pressed Cramer’s stomach with the flat of his hand. Cramer winced. The doctor pressed again, lower this time, and Cramer grunted. ‘That hurts?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Did the doctors in Madrid think that the cancer could be a result of the trauma?’

  Cramer nodded. ‘That, coupled with the stress. And my drinking.’

  The doctor nodded. ‘How much pain are you in, generally?’

  ‘Generally, it’s okay. Twinges now and then. It hurts most when I eat.’

  ‘What about your appetite?’

  ‘That’s pretty much gone. Partly because it hurts, but mainly I’m just not hungry most of the time.’

  ‘Bleeding?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s why I went to the hospital in the first place. My shit went black.’

  ‘And you were losing weight?’

  ‘I went down from 184 pounds to 170. I thought it was because I’d stopped eating.’

  ‘And you’re still losing weight?’ Cramer nodded. ‘The doctors in Spain, how long did they give you?’

  ‘Three months. Max.’

  The doctor sniffed. ‘I’ve seen the X-rays, and the scans. I’d say they were being optimistic.’ He straightened up and went over to his bag. ‘I’ll give you a vitamin shot now, and some tablets to take.’

  ‘Not painkillers. I don’t want painkillers.’

  ‘Just vitamins. But you’ll be needing painkillers before long.’

  ‘Yeah, well I’ll face that when I have to.’

  ‘I’ll leave you something, take it if and when you have to. And you’ll need something much stronger towards the end. I’ll arrange for you to have morphine and you can dose yourself.’

  ‘It won’t come to that.’

  ‘You think that now, but nearer the …’

  ‘It won’t come to that,’ Cramer insisted.

  The doctor held his look for a few seconds and then nodded acceptance. He opened his bag and took out a plastic-wrapped syringe and a vial of colourless liquid. He injected the vitamins and gave Cramer a bottle of tablets. ‘These are just multivitamins,’ he explained. ‘They’ll make up for what you’re not getting from your food. I’d drink milk if I were you, eggs maybe, if you can keep them down. Fruit would be good for you, but in small amounts. Better to eat a little often than to try to force down big portions.’ He looked over his shoulder at the Colonel. ‘Normally I’d tell him to take it easy, but I suppose that’s not an option in this case, is it?’

  ‘Sergeant Cramer’s going to be working, that’s true.’

  ‘Well God help him, that’s all I can say.’

  ‘I doubt that he will, but thanks for the sentiment,’ said Cramer acidly.

  The doctor handed Cramer another bottle, this one containing green capsules. ‘For the pain,’ he said. ‘Not on an empty stomach. Not more than one at a time. And not more than six in any one twenty-four-hour period.’

  ‘Thanks, Doc,’ said Cramer.

  ‘I meant what I said about arranging morphine for you.’

  ‘And I meant what I said about it not coming to that,’ said Cramer, putting his shirt back on.

  Dermott Lynch was sitting with his feet on the coffee table watching the BBC Nine O’Clock News when the phone rang. He let his answering machine take the call as he watched the BBC’s industrial correspondent explain the latest gloomy trade figures. He popped the tab on a chilled can of draught Guinness and poured it deftly into a tall glass as the recording announced he couldn’t get to the phone. He put down the glass as he heard Pat O’Riordan’s voice and picked up the receiver. ‘Yeah, Pat, I’m here.’

  ‘Screening calls, are we?’ said O’Riordan.

  ‘Just taking the weight off my feet. Figured I deserved a rest. How’s things?’

  ‘Don’t suppose you fancy giving me a hand cleaning out the pigs, do you?’

  ‘You’re dead right.’

  ‘Fancy a drink?’

  Lynch looked at the Guinness as it settled in the glass, a thick, creamy head on the top. ‘You read my mind,’ he said.

  Mrs Elliott served up a chicken stew with herb dumplings along with freshly-made garlic bread and buttery mashed potatoes. The Colonel and Cramer ate alone in the huge dining hall next to the propane heater. The Colonel had opened a bottle of claret but Cramer had refused. He had a glass of milk, instead. With a large measure of Famous Grouse mixed in.

  Cramer toyed with his food, eating small mouthfuls and chewing thoroughly before swallowing. The Colonel watched him eat. ‘Bad?’ he asked.

  ‘The food’s fine.’ Cramer put down his fork. ‘I never had much of an appetite even when I was fit.’ He picked up the file that he’d been reading before dinner. ‘Have you read this one?’ he asked. ‘The Harrods killing?’

  ‘The Saudi Foreign Minister’s second wife. Ann-Marie Wilkinson. The Met think it was the first wife who paid for the hit.’

  ‘Cheaper than divorce, I suppose.’

  ‘I don’t think the Saudis bother with divorce, do they?’ said the Colonel. ‘I think they just take as many wives as they want.’ Cramer shrugged and took a long drink of milk, then added another slug of whisky. ‘Anyway, the first wife had the money,’ the Colonel continued. ‘She was related to the Saudi royal family and it seems that she resented all the attention Ann-Marie was getting.’

  Cramer held up a photocopy of a typewritten report. ‘She was pregnant.’

  The Colonel nodded. ‘I know. That’s another reason why they think she was killed. He had three children by the first wife, it could be that she didn’t want any competition. What’s on your mind?’

  ‘He murdered a pregnant woman. It takes a particular sort of killer to shoot a pregnant woman, don’t you think?’
r />   The Colonel put down his knife and fork. ‘I’ve known plenty who would, without a second thought.’

  ‘Professionals? You think so?’

  The Colonel leaned forward over his plate. ‘You’ve killed women, Sergeant Cramer. For Queen and country. And a soldier’s salary.’

  ‘I’ve killed terrorists who were female, Colonel. There’s a difference. And the Kypriano killing. The girl. Eight years old. He killed an eight-year-old girl.’

  The Colonel gently swirled the red wine around his glass and stared at it. ‘He’s well paid for what he does. Half a million dollars a hit, we hear. Perhaps the money makes it easier.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Are you saying that if you were offered half a million dollars you wouldn’t do it?’

  Cramer looked up sharply. ‘A child? No, I wouldn’t. Would you?’

  ‘Of course not. Not for any amount. But we’re not talking about me, we’re talking about someone who’s prepared to kill for money. You’ve been trained to kill. And you’ve killed for no other reason than that you’ve been ordered to. Okay, so there are some things you wouldn’t do, but not everyone has the same degree of moral judgement.’

  Cramer nodded noncommittally, but his eyes narrowed as he studied the Colonel’s face. ‘What if it was in the interests of national security, Colonel? Would you do it then?’

  The Colonel looked at Cramer for several seconds, though to Cramer it felt as if the silence was stretching into infinity. The Colonel stopped swirling his wine and drained his glass. He was about to answer when Mrs Elliott appeared. The Colonel put down his glass while she collected their plates, frowning at the amount Cramer had left. As she went back into the kitchen, the Colonel stood up and excused himself, saying that he needed an early night. The unanswered question hung in the air like black rain cloud.