Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (5 page)

Breathing didn’t work. He sucked in air, hissed it forth, too fast, irregular. Everything felt cold.

Between him and the cornflower sundress he could make out a pair of legs amid the rubble. One foot was missing, the other hanging by a ragged remnant of flesh. The shoe looked like his. He owned a pair just like it, but he hadn’t put them on today. He hadn’t put those shoes on today. He’d worn the other ones, the older ones.

Please.

Tony reached down with his right arm.

He tried to call for his mother, but his throat filled with liquid. Blood washed back over his face, covering his eyes, and he saw no more.

The briefing room was like 3D House of Chins, row upon row of lantern jaws atop stiff shoulders. The last time she’d seen so many males trying to look simultaneously stern and cool was at a school disco. There were seats on the near side, but she decided to walk across the floor in front of the dais, milking reactions. Every head turned, every eye followed her, though she was under no illusions why. It wasn’t just that she was the only woman in the room; it was probably as much that there was a woman in the room at all. The weaker sex weren’t unheard of in Special Branch, but not many forces were going to delegate one to a pee‐
the‐
highest gig such as was taking place that morning. This wasn’t a reflection on the forward‐
thinking liberalism of the Strathclyde force, more a means of communicating how little they anticipated this latest alert would affect them. They were right, too. According to the international terrorist’s atlas, Great Britain was a kidney‐
shaped island ringed by something called ‘the M25’.

She met a few eyes as she walked, challenged their scrutiny, offering a coy smile to let them know she could read their thoughts.

‘What’s she doing here? Positive discrimination, probably. Look at the size of her, too. Wouldn’t want that backing you up in a ruck, would you? Must be a graduate fast‐
tracker. More qualifications than collars. All brains and no bottle.’

Maybe that wasn’t what they were thinking, but she’d certainly heard all of it in her time.

There were nods from a few familiar faces, but just a single smile, John Millburn the only one risking disciplinary action by discarding part of the morning’s official uniform. He gestured to her that there was a free seat nearby on his row, then unceremoniously nudged the balding officer next to him to move one along, allowing them to sit together. ‘Angel X. How you doin’, pet?’

‘Not bad, pal,’ she said, unable to stifle a yawn. ‘Sorry. Half‐
six shuttle. Glad to see everybody got the serious expressions memo. They look like the government’s just announced a tax on Freemasonry.’

‘Oh, tread carefully there, pet. Someone’s gotta help the widow’s son. In’t that right, Brian?’

The balding cop glowered and shook his head. Why did he have to pick a seat next to the class clown? And will it be marked down if he’s caught sniggering?

‘So what’s this about? Do you know? Apart from …’

Millburn shrugged. ‘I know as much as you. And that the people who know more than us are very worried.’

She looked round the gathering, a hubbub rising as fifty‐
odd people had the same conversation.

‘Still, won’t end up on our patches, will it?’ she observed. ‘We were probably invited as a courtesy as much as anything else.’

‘Speak for yourself, pet. I’m down here in the Smoke now. As of a month ago.’

‘Really? Congratulations. I think. Hasn’t Newcastle descended into anarchy without you?’

‘Aye, except we don’t call it anarchy on Tyneside, we call it Saturday night.’

A door opened to the left of the dais, and through it emerged the gangling figure of Commander Tom Lexington, head of the anti‐
terrorist task force. The clamour ceased as swiftly as though he’d pressed a Mute button. It was an instinctive action of respect in part for the man and perhaps more for what his presence represented. He remained by the door, holding it open. There were three seats next to the lectern.

First to appear was a bespectacled, peely‐
wally, child‐
molester‐
looking type. MI5, she thought. If you cut him in half, it would be written all through his body like peppermint rock. He was wearing a pair of black trousers that she instantly thought of as being food‐
stained and held up by a piece of string. Intelligence analyst, out on a day pass from a basement in Millbank. He’d have been blinking in the daylight all the way here.

Behind him there followed, in grey military fatigues, a specimen of concentrated manhood potent enough to wither every thrust‐
out jaw in the room. She could tell by his relaxed body language, the way he carried himself and his neutral, almost tired expression. Nothing to prove to any man. Nothing to fear from any man. He was powerfully built but looked light on his feet. Next to Lexington he seemed quite short, but then most people did. There was a razor‐
nick on his otherwise smooth‐
shaven chin, a delightfully incongruous blemish on his otherwise formidable appearance.

The two new arrivals took their seats as Lexington stepped up to the lectern and placed some papers on it.

‘Good morning,’ he said, though circumstances suggested heavily that it was anything but. He had the voice of a Radio Four newsreader. It sounded soft but authoritative at any volume, with a measured tone that both calmed and compelled. ‘First of all, let me thank you all for coming down here this morning, and let me apologise for the lack of information as to why your trip was necessary. I am only too well aware that there is nothing we coppers like less than someone else knowing all the secrets. That is something I am about to rectify.’

He cleared his throat as he fingered the papers in front of him, briefly turning a page over and back again.

‘I don’t know how much attention any of you have been paying to foreign affairs recently, so please bear with me while I put this in the same context for everybody. On the tenth of March this year, General Aristide Mopoza emerged from two years in hiding to lead a successful military coup in the former British colony of Sonzola. The General himself was ousted as the country’s dictator following his failed attempt to annex the neighbouring state of Buluwe. British forces, you will remember, played a significant role in this conflict, as well as in the General’s subsequent toppling and the establishment of a democratically elected presidency. It’s safe to say this did not sit well with sections of the Sonzolan military, many of whom have remained secretly loyal to Mopoza. They deeply resented Britain’s involvement in the Buluwe conflict, which they believe they would have won otherwise. To colour the picture further, over the past decade, Sonzola has had about as many changes of power as Italy and has been in a state of almost constant civil war, throughout which Buluwe often harboured and assisted the pro‐
democracy rebels.’

Puzzled looks were starting to be exchanged. Lexington paused, enough to acknowledge both that he was aware of them and that he would like them to desist. They did.

‘General Mopoza’s forces struck on the day the country was celebrating the second anniversary of his overthrow. Like all students of history, he has a fondness for significant dates. This particular student, incidentally, read his history at Cambridge and once described himself as an Anglophile, but under the circumstances, I think we should remember Oscar Wilde’s remarks about what each man does to the thing he loves. In the 1960s, he fought in his country’s struggle for independence and sees himself as forever tied to its destiny – a destiny in which there is no role for the country of his alma mater, other than vengeance.

‘In a nation such as Sonzola, however, the only certain destiny is that sooner or later someone will stab you in the back. Yesterday morning, at zero‐
fifteen hours, Captain Adrian Shephard of Her Majesty’s Special Air Service led an operation to evacuate General Philip Thaba, a member of Mopoza’s inner circle who had communicated his wish to defect. Captain Shephard will take over the briefing from here.’

SAS. Of course.

Shephard got up, looking slightly less effortlessly assured in front of the assembly. Maybe it was easier facing down an enemy than an audience.

‘Good morning,’ he began, sounding less than certain about this. ‘The … eh, reasons for General Thaba’s defection were never made clear. He maybe didn’t feel he was getting a big enough slice of the pie in return for his loyalty in the coup; alternatively, his own position of strength may have made him a likely candidate for a bullet in the head if Mopoza was getting nervous. We don’t know. What we did know was that he claimed to be in possession of information regarding a terrorist threat to the British state, and that he was prepared to exchange this for safe passage and certain other, ehm, guarantees.

‘This was therefore an entirely clandestine handover. My unit was deployed to escort General Thaba from a location twenty miles outside Freeport, across the nearby border into Buluwe. He was accompanied to the handover site by a small guard of his own loyal troops. My unit crossed the border at zero fifteen hours, as Commander Lexington said. At approximately one hundred hours, we were in sight of the rendezvous when General Thaba’s party came under rocket fire from helicopter gunships. The armoured car carrying the General suffered an indirect hit and was rendered inoperable by splash damage. Our radar did not pick up any prior aerial activity, and it was our conclusion that the helicopters took off from cover within a mile of the rendezvous. Ground forces were also in immediate attendance, and a firefight ensued. Despite suffering heavy casualties, General Thaba’s troops did manage to transfer him to an operational vehicle and deliver him into our hands.

‘By this time, unfortunately, the General had suffered serious – ultimately fatal – injuries, and remained conscious for only a few more minutes. I asked him to tell me whatever he could, but he was seldom coherent, and when he did speak it was to demand morphine and that we drive faster. I instructed our medic not to administer morphine until the General divulged whatever he knew. Our medic disobeyed. Upon receiving the injection, General Thaba began to lose consciousness, but before he did so, I asked him again to tell me what he knew.’

Shephard was blushing. Maybe it was the heat in the room, or not being used to being on the spot, but she suspected it was at the paucity of what he was about to offer.

‘General Thaba was … less than lucid. He said only: “The Black Spirit. An eye for an eye.” He repeated this twice when I asked him to elaborate. These were his final words.’

There were tuts and sighs all around the room. It was, as far as they were concerned, a big shaggy‐
dog story with a duff punchline. A few, however, responded with intakes of breath. They were the ones who read further than the sports pages and had heard of the Black Spirit.

‘Are you sure he didn’t say “Rosebud”?’ cracked a voice from the back of the room, to approving laughter.

‘Or “there is another Skywalker”,’ added a second wag, fortified by someone else having tested the water.

Shephard smiled bashfully. A man’s man, he no doubt knew well when to take his lumps. Lexington looked less indulgent, and silenced the room by getting back to his feet.

‘My personal favourite is “Don’t let the awkward squad fire over me”,’ Lexington said, his tone somehow commanding without sounding stern. ‘And I don’t intend to this morning.’

‘Come on, sir, it’s a bit bloody cryptic, isn’t it?’ appealed Rosebud.

‘Oh you think that’s cryptic, do you, Willetts? Well let me assure you, that’s the clear part. Captain?’

Shephard looked around his audience again, even more discomfited than before, plainly unused to needing anyone to bail him out.

‘I’m afraid the Commander is right. The nature of the ambush indicated that General Mopoza knew well in advance of Thaba’s intention to jump ship. This begs the questions of how much else he knew, and when he knew it. The permutations are frustratingly abundant. Did Mopoza also know Thaba was trading on information about a planned terrorist attack? Did he even feed Thaba this story in the first place because he suspected a betrayal? Did Thaba bolt because he had been cut out of the loop, hence the scarcity of his information? Like everything else in Sonzola, it’s one big morass of double‐
crosses.

‘In a military analysis, I find it almost incredible that Thaba was evacuated from the ambush, so there remains the possibility that Mopoza let him get away, knowing or not knowing he was fatally injured. In short, we don’t know whether Thaba’s information was genuine, whether Mopoza knows what we know, or even whether Thaba made the whole thing up to buy his ticket.’

‘So, with all respect, sir,’ Rosebud asked, ‘what has any of this got to do with us?’

Shephard looked to Lexington, who dismissed him politely with a nod and said a quiet ‘thank you’ as the soldier sat down.

‘To answer that question, Superintendent, let me introduce Mr Eric Wells of Her Majesty’s Security Service.’

Child Molester sprang up eagerly. He looked like he ought to be even more nervous than Shephard about facing the room, but probably lacked the self‐
awareness. Maybe just as well, given the nature of the crowd. After the support act’s frustrating performance, the headliner was really going to have to deliver.

‘I can’t shed any more light on the questions Captain Shephard posed,’ he said quietly, prompting immediate requests from all round the room that he speak up. She’d seen the type plenty of times before, an overflowing fount of information, but used to being tapped by a maximum of about three people at once.

Wells coughed a little, then resumed, his voice more projected but still not carrying particularly well. She estimated he had about thirty seconds to grab them by the throats before he’d be lost in a flood of impatient mumbling. Thirty seconds would be plenty, though, if she’d guessed right about his area of expertise.

‘It is possible that General Thaba’s information is as worthless as it is vague, in which case I am now wasting everyone’s time. I sincerely hope that I am wasting everyone’s time.’