The Bombmaker

by Stephen Leather

  'So let's find out,' said Egan. He went over to the water-cooler and pulled out the reservoir. He up-ended it, splashing water over his jeans, and carried it over to where Andy lay. He slowly poured the contents over her until she began to recover consciousness, coughing and spluttering and putting her hands up to try to ward off the torrent of water.

  – «»-«»-«»Patsy climbed out of the car and looked up at the office block. 'Tenth floor,' said Bingham. 'Donovan, Scott and Associates.' The black Rover containing Denham and Martin pulled up behind them. The SAS captain and his' two troopers carried their kit-bags into the office foyer, and they all rode up in the elevator together.

  Two MI5 agents were in reception, and one of them took them through to a large office where Hetherington was watching a team of half a dozen of the agency's surveillance experts unpack their equipment as he talked into a mobile phone.

  The office was huge, about four times the size of Hetherington's own, wood-panelled with a massive oak desk at one end, two four-seater chesterfield sofas and an oak table with eight chairs around it. There were more than a dozen small watercolours on the walls, with small brass plates below them identifying the artist and subject, as if the occupant of the office feared that visitors wouldn't appreciate the value of the artwork.

  The blinds were drawn and the lights were on.

  Bingham took out his mobile phone. 'I'll call the Met boys,' he said, heading back to the corridor.

  The SAS captain and his two troopers dropped their kit-bags on one of the chesterfields and went over to the window. Patsy joined them, and they pushed the slats apart. Hetherington came up behind them, putting his phone away. He pointed to a glass and steel tower directly in front of then. The base of the building was obscured by a row of granite buildings, but they could see from the fourth floor upwards.

  'The blinds are drawn. White vertical ones. See them?'

  'Got it,' said Patsy.

  'We've got people to the north and east,' said Hetherington.

  'I'd like to put snipers on the roof here,' said Captain Payne. 'Can we have access?'

  'It's being arranged,' said Hetherington. 'There's a roof garden up there but it's rarely used. I'll get someone to show you. Our people are installing long-range eavesdroppers as we speak. Patsy, a word.'

  Two of the surveillance technicians were unpacking thermal imaging equipment from metal cases. Payne went over to watch as they attached the devices to tripods. They resembled huge pairs of binoculars with soda siphon cartridges attached to the top. They were similar to the devices that the SAS used, combining ambient-light image intensifiers and thermal imaging. They were capable of picking up heat sources through concrete, effectively allowing the viewer to look through walls.

  Hetherington took Patsy over to the far corner of the office where there was a bronze statue of a turbaned warrior holding a spear that almost reached Hetherington's shoulder. 'The PM's been made aware of the situation,' he said. He fiddled with the tip of the spear as he spoke. 'He's in Bonn, but wants regular updates.'

  Two technicians came in with more cases which they put on top of the table. They began unpacking laptop computers. Another technician snapped open a case and took out a satellite phone.

  'One thing the PM's clear on – he wants the immediate area evacuated.'

  Patsy opened her mouth to speak but Hetherington silenced her with a wave of a finger.

  'There's to be no argument. He's taking the view that if we know there's a bomb in that building, it would be political suicide to allow civilians to remain in the area.'

  Patsy nodded. If the PM had made a decision, there was no point in arguing.

  'It will have to be low-key, of course,' said Hetherington. 'The last thing we want is for us to have people streaming out of neighbouring buildings.'

  'So the Met's been informed already?'

  'The Director-General's spoken to the Commissioner. He's unhappy about not being told earlier, but any political in-fighting is going to have to wait until later.'

  'Good. I've requested a team of their explosives officers to be on stand-by.'

  'That's already in hand. Now, the evacuation. What's the position regarding the building itself?'

  'We're clearing the tenth floor and the counter revolutionary team is moving in. Once they're in position, we can use our people to clear the rest of the floors. But Jason, it's going to have to be done carefully.'

  'Agreed. Carefully, but quickly. Let's use the lifts and the stairways.'

  'I'll have the lifts fixed so that they don't stop at the ninth.' She fingered her crucifix. 'If we're emptying the building, we're going to have to stop anyone entering or leaving the ninth floor.'

  'Ah,' said Hetherington. He patted the blade of the spear. 'I see what you mean. I'll get Captain Payne to assign men to the ninth-floor stairwell. How long do you think it'll take to evacuate the building?'

  'Stairs and lifts?' She did a quick calculation in her head. 'An hour, maybe. I'd recommend we take everyone down into the carpark and out through there.'

  'Agreed. Now, regarding the evacuation of the surrounding buildings. The Commissioner wants to set up roadblocks to stop anyone entering the area.'

  Patsy pulled a face. 'Jason, if they see what's going on…'

  'The blinds are closed – they can't see out. We'll tell everyone there's a gas leak. We'll have gas company people all over the place. We'll put a warning on radio and television.'

  'That won't fool them,' said Patsy.

  'No, but it's better than nothing. We have to evacuate, Patsy. The PM won't stand for anything less.'

  Four more technicians rushed in carrying monitors, followed by a fifth man who was unrolling a cable. There were now more than two dozen people in the office, hard at work.

  'And what about the people on the ninth floor?' asked Patsy.

  'We evacuate, we contain the area, we assess the situation, and if at all possible… we negotiate.'

  – «»-«»-«»Andy scuttled backwards, away from the man who'd been pouring water over her. She was soaked, and the side of her head ached from where he'd hit her. She had no idea how long she'd been unconscious, but with every movement of her head she felt as if she was going to pass out again.

  'Who did you talk to, Andrea?' said the man. He had an American accent.

  Andy put a hand up to the side of her head. When she took it away it was sticky with blood.

  The man pulled a silencer out of his jacket pocket and screwed it into the barrel of his gun, watching her all the time.

  'Who did you talk to?' he repeated.

  Andy looked across at Green-eyes. She was also holding a gun and aiming it at Andy's chest. She looked back at the man. There was no point in lying because they'd have been able to call up the last number dialled on the mobile. 'My husband,' she said.

  The man finished attaching the silencer. He leaned against one of the desks, the gun resting against his thigh.

  'I wanted to know if he'd heard from Katie.'

  The man's face was hidden by the ski mask, but Andy could see his eyes harden. 'Why would he have heard from Katie?' he asked.

  'I don't know. I thought maybe the kidnappers might have called him. I saw the videos. I thought…' Her voice tailed off. She began to shiver, the effects of being doused with cold water coupled with the terror of her situation. It wasn't the fact that he was pointing a gun at her that scared Andy. It was the fact that he'd screwed on a silencer.

  The man looked across at Green-eyes. 'The videos were in the briefcase,' Green-eyes explained.

  The man nodded and looked at Andy again. 'And you thought your daughter was already dead.' He tilted his head to one side as he looked at her. 'She isn't, Andrea. She's still very much alive. The videos were to put your mind at ease, that's all.'

  'If Katie's alive, there'd be no point in you making the videos. You could just have let me talk to her.'

  The man stared at her with unblinking eyes. 'A fair point,' he said. 'But we
didn't know what was going to happen in Dublin. If anything had gone wrong, we wanted to guarantee your co-operation.'

  'Wrong? What do you mean, wrong?'

  'Say the police had found her. Look at it from our point of view, Andrea. If something had gone wrong and we didn't have Katie, you'd hardly be likely to help us, would you? The videos were insurance against anything going wrong.'

  Andy wrapped her arms around herself, still shivering uncontrollably. 'I don't believe you,' she said.

  He gestured with his gun. 'I don't care if you believe me or not,' he said. 'The rules have changed. You're going to set the timer, right now.'

  Andy shook her head.

  The man levelled the gun at her left foot. 'I'll shoot your foot first. Then your knee. Then your thigh. Then your stomach. You'll do it eventually, Andrea, so why not save yourself the pain?'

  'You're going to kill me anyway,' Andy said flatly.

  'Dead is dead, that's true. But there are degrees of pain.' His finger tightened on the trigger. 'I know about pain, Andrea.'

  Andy turned her head and closed her eyes, waiting for the bang, waiting for the bullet to tear into her flesh and smash through the bone.

  – «»-«»-«»Martin tapped the technician on the shoulder. The man took his face away from the eyepiece. 'Can I have a look?' asked Martin. 'That's my wife over there.'

  The technician stood to the side so that Martin could look through the binoculars. It was like looking at a negative film. The background was dark and he could make out vague dark green shapes. Desks. Chairs. Pillars. And four light green figures that flickered as they moved. 'What am I looking at?' he asked.

  'Thermal images,' said the man. He was in his forties with a small moustache and thinning brown hair. 'It picks up heat. Body heat, electrical heat, any heat sources.'

  Martin put his eyes back to the binoculars. 'So I'm looking right through the blinds? I'm looking right into the building?'

  'That's right. These things can look through brick walls.'

  Martin could see four figures. There was no way of telling which was male and which was female, no way of knowing which was his wife. One of the figures appeared to be sitting on the floor. Another was pointing at the seated figure. Was one of them Andy?

  Anna Wallace came into the room, holding three cardboard tubes. 'I've got the floor plans,' she said to Patsy. 'All of them.'

  She removed a plastic cap from one end of one of the tubes and shook out half a dozen architect's plans. 'This is the ninth,' she said, pulling out one of the drawings and laying it on the desk.

  Captain Payne walked over and joined Patsy and Anna. He scratched his chin as he scrutinised the plan of the office. 'What do you think?' asked Patsy.

  Payne tapped the area of the lift lobby, then ran his finger along to the reception area. 'This is a problem,' he said. 'Access here is through the main doors, but there's this left turn here to the reception. Then another turn to the open-plan area, which is where the tangos and the bomb are. It's going to take at least four seconds to take out the door and get into the main area. That's way too long.' He ran his finger across the plans to the windows on the far side of the building. 'We're going to have to go in through the windows. Here. And here.' He frowned and made a clicking noise with his tongue. 'The blinds are going to be a problem.'

  'Why?' asked Patsy.

  'We can't just go through the windows because our guys will get tangled up in the blinds. We're going to have blow them in. Shaped charges. And with a four-thousand-pound amfo bomb in there, that's going to be a tad… interesting.'

  'We have visuals from Team A!' shouted one of the technicians. There was a bank of eight monitors on the table. On two of them were thermal views similar to the one that Martin had seen through the binoculars.

  Captain Payne tapped out a number on his mobile phone. 'Yeah, Crosbie? We have four tangos. Repeat, four tangos.'

  Martin looked at Denham and frowned. 'Tangos?' he mouthed.

  'Targets,' whispered Denham. 'Tango means target.'

  The picture on one of the monitors began to swing from side to side. Martin could make out more desks, a mound of something in the middle of the office area, but no more green, glowing figures.

  'So far we have only four,' Payne said into his phone. 'Call me when you're in position.'

  Payne clipped his phone to the belt of his jeans, then took off his leather jacket and hung it over the back of one of the chairs. He was wearing a black nylon shoulder holster; in it was a large handgun.

  'Team B's on-line,' said another technician. Two more monitors flickered into life. Martin could see the same four green figures, but from a different view.

  'What are we going to do about sound?' Payne asked Patsy.

  'We've got laser mikes up on the roof,' she said. 'Shouldn't be long.'

  'Do you want our team to try through the ceiling?' asked Payne. 'We could push fibre optics through.'

  Patsy shook her head. 'Let's see how we get on with the lasers.'

  Payne nodded and went over to the thermal image binoculars. One set was being connected up to a monitor.

  Patsy peered at the monitors on the table. She pointed at a dark green mound in the centre of the office. Hetherington took his pince-nez spectacles out of the top pocket of his pin-striped suit and perched them on the end of his nose. 'That's it,' she said. 'A four-thousand-pound fertiliser bomb. Enough to blow the whole building to kingdom come.'

  – «»-«»-«»Captain Paul Crosbie dumped his kit-bag on the desk and surveyed the huge trading floor. All around him were hundreds of computers, their flickering screens full of financial information. Telephones were ringing out, but apart from Crosbie and his men, the floor was deserted.

  'Right, get geared up,' he shouted. 'Full O group in five.' He picked up a phone and tapped out a number. 'Stew? Yeah, it's Crosbie. We're in. I'll have Chuckit call you for the thermal imaging feed.' Crosbie read out the telephone number of the phone he was using and hung up.

  'Chuckit!'

  Brian 'Chuckit' Wilson, a tall, thin Scotsman with a shock of red hair, was opening up a laptop computer. 'Yes, boss?'

  'Call Stuart Payne and arrange the feed for the thermal images.' He gave Chuckit a piece of paper with Payne's number on it.

  Crosbie surveyed the troop. Including Chuckit there were fifteen men, but Chuckit would be tied up with the communication links. Normal operating procedure was for the troop to operate in four four-man teams, but on this occasion Crosbie had already decided to split the men into two groups.

  The troopers were emptying out their holdalls and kit-bags and laying their equipment out on the floor. Black Nomex fire-retardant suits, GPV 25 body armour, National Plastics AC100 composite helmets, black flame-retardant gloves, respirators, ankle-high boots and abseiling harnesses. One of the troopers, a burly Cornishman called Coop, was unpacking lengths of wood from a bag and leaning them against a desk.

  Weapons were being assembled with practised ease and laid out next to piles of ammunition. Heckler amp; Koch MP5 submachine-guns, Remington 870 pump-action grenades, Browning Hi-Power pistols and Haley and Weller E180 stun grenades. It was enough fire-power to fight, and win, a small war.

  – «»-«»-«»The man grabbed Andy by the shirt collar and dragged her across the floor. 'Set the timer, Andrea,' he shouted. 'Finish the bomb or I'll blow your knee-cap off.'

  He kicked her in the side and she grunted. She used the table leg to pull herself up and stared down at the open briefcase. The silver detonators lay on the Semtex, and around them the cluster of different-coloured wires. The timer was glowing, the digits all reading zero. Next to the timer were the batteries that she'd used to power the timer, and the four batteries she'd connected to the detonators.

  'Do it,' said the man. He aimed the silenced gun at her left knee.

  Andy sat down. She brushed her hair away from her eyes, then picked up an elastic band and used it to tie her hair back into a ponytail. One by one, she pushed the detonat
ors into the Semtex.

  She checked all the connections, then looked up at the man with the gun. She sniffed and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. 'How long?' she asked. 'What do you want me to set it for?'

  'One hour,' said the man. 'Sixty minutes.'

  – «»-«»-«»The receptionist looked up from a glossy magazine as Gordon Harris and Lisa Davies pushed open the double glass doors. 'Can I help you?' she asked in a nasal South London whine. She brushed a lock of dyed blond hair away from her eyes with a scarlet-varnished nail. 'Who's in charge?' asked Harris.

  'You mean the office manager?' asked the receptionist, deep creases cleaving across her forehead as if Harris had set her an especially difficult mathematical problem to solve.

  'Managing director. Whoever the top guy is.'

  'She's a woman, actually,' said the receptionist. 'Miss Daley.'

  Lisa grinned across at Harris but he ignored her.

  'Could you tell her a Mr Harris would like to see her…'

  'Oh, she'll be far too busy to see you,' interrupted the receptionist.

  Harris held up a hand to silence her. 'Tell her it's regarding business security and if she's not in reception in thirty seconds we'll be coming in to get her.' Harris flashed her a cold smile and nodded at the telephone in front of her.

  The receptionist dialled a four-digit extension number with another scarlet-painted nail.

  Harris looked at his watch as the receptionist spoke to Miss Daley's secretary. It was taking up to eight minutes to clear each floor.

  The receptionist put the phone down. 'She's coming out.'

  'I'm so thrilled to hear that,' said Harris.

  Harris and Lisa waited over by two overstuffed black leather sofas. 'You do have a way of winning friends and influencing people, don't you?' chided Lisa.

  'We don't have time for niceties,' said Harris. He nodded in the receptionist's direction. 'If it was up to me, I'd let her go up with the building.'

  The doors to the main office area hissed open electronically and a tall woman in a dark business suit strode out. Unlike the receptionist she had natural blond hair, tied up at the back, and she was model-pretty with high cheekbones and deep blue eyes. Her cheeks were slightly flushed and she was clearly angry at the interruption, but Harris spoke quickly and earnestly, in a low whisper so that the receptionist couldn't overhear him.