Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

"Ten minutes, could be fifteen, but you wait for me."

"Good luck."

"Won't be me that's needing luck. You wait, you don't crash out unless there's sirens in my street, you hear me?"

The driver said, "Get the pig."

"You just have the car good and ready." Jon Jo switched off the car's interior light, checked that the car park was empty and slipped out through the door. He closed it quietly behind him. For a moment he saw the driver's face. So bloody young. He walked away from the car carrying a dark brown shopping bag, heavily weighted.

He hugged the shadows. The night was his friend, and had been ever since he could remember.

He was a little over six foot in height, broad and strong because all his life he had known physical labour. He was made more formidable by the quilted charcoal anorak that he wore and the black woollen cap that was pulled down to hide his hair line. Dark clothes, nothing that would catch the eye of a woman letting her cat out, a man taking his dog for a last walk, a taxi driver idling for a fare.

He crossed into the target's road. He was very calm. He knew that because of the even pattern of his breathing, and because there was no tightness in his legs.

The house was well-placed for him, almost exactly halfway between two street lights. A white Metro was parked in the driveway behind the low wrought-iron gates. The car was backed up against the green-painted garage doors. He moved silently along the pavement in his worn old trainer shoes. When he was beyond a street light's reach and still short of the target's house, he dropped to his knees and re tied his shoe's laces. He turned and his eyes swept the road behind him. No dogs, no cats, no taxis. He stood again and looked up the road. He was against a fence and the hedge above it. He stood very still.

He heard the door open.

He heard, "Go on, you little bugger, get on with it."

He heard the door pulled shut.

Jon Jo went forward. He moved fast now. He came to the wrought-iron gates and swung his leg and his bag over, steadied himself, then brought the other leg over, and came down, lightly, onto the tarmacadam driveway. He crouched, waiting. No sound. No light. He walked to the deeper shadow of the passageway between the house and the garage.

The target's car was a Volvo. It would be inside the garage. The Metro would be the wife's. It would make just as much pain to blow the wife away, very influential people British establishment wives, and if they lost one of their kind it might raise the panic scream a ratchet higher. But the target was the driver of the Volvo. Forty times harder to get at. And the Army Council would have the skin off his back if he took the easy road, the Metro.

He reckoned the target would have believed himself at threat and that precautions would be in place. The best location for an electronic beam inside the garage was across the doorway. That's where he thought they'd have recommended putting it. He used a short heavy screwdriver to prise open the small window to the garage set high in the passageway. The surveillance had said that the window was big enough for him. He took the shopping bag in his teeth, so that it half seemed to pull his jaw away and he heaved himself up onto the ridge, holding the window open with one hand, balancing himself, and reaching down inside for a hand-hold with the other. His anorak snagged on the window's fastener, and he believed that the noise he made would have raised half the road. His fingers found a spade handle. It took his weight. He eased himself over the ridge and down, and his foot caught the box of a lawn mower and upended it. He hung on to the window and he lowered himself inch by inch until his feet were firm on the ground. He listened to the silence of the night echoing in his ears.

There was little space for him to move between the lawn mower and the car. He knelt, with his back to the window and took from the plastic bag a box which had once held two litres of vanilla-flavoured soft-scoop ice cream. It was bound tight with adhesive tape, and under the tape across the lid were two circular magnets. With his torch in his teeth, he stripped open the box. His fingers, awkward in the plastic gloves, fiddled to clear the rubber tube that covered the contact pin. He set the clock, from a kitchen timer, for thirty minutes. He checked the wiring of the detonator, the clamps on the battery, the leads to the mercury tilt switch that lay across the mass of the explosive. He wound the tape back across the box.

There was the sharp sound of the magnets thudding onto the underbody of the car. He checked that he had dropped nothing.

In thirty minutes the hand of the clock from a kitchen timer would be stopped against the contact pin. The bomb of four pounds weight of Semtex explosive would be live. Detonation would follow immediately after the mercury tilt switch was jolted and the battery-powered circuit completed. He picked up all the tape and the box, which he crushed, and the plastic bag, and put them in his anorak pocket with the torch and the screwdriver. He set the lawn-mower box upright and rubbed the window catch clean – unthinking instinct, unnecessary because he wore the rubber gloves, care his life style – and then stood still beside the window, listening. When, for a minute, he had heard nothing, he climbed back out and eased the window to its closed position.

Jon Jo went back the way that he had come, in shadow. The car was as he had left it. He dropped down into the passenger seat. The driver looked at him, questioning, and Jon Jo nodded. The excitement would be later, at that moment he felt only the extremes of exhaustion.

They drove away.

He had never seen his target, not even a photograph. All he knew of him was his occupation and his address and the make of his car. The occupation was enough to make him a target.

The streets were dead. They went over Putney Bridge and through central London. He dozed, and hazily he heard the murmur of the driver's song. It was an Irish song of the heroes and the martyrs of the Organisation, a song that he might have heard in any of the bars that were on the mountainside that was his home. So long, near to a full year, since he had last been home. The car stopped beside the entrance to the mainline railway station.

He opened his door, then in play punched the shoulder of the driver.

"Thanks, you were fine."

The words gushed. "You're Jon Jo Donnelly, right? We all talk about you. You're feckin' brilliant. Without the likes of you, this war's over.

It's been my privilege to meet you, Mr Donnelly…"

The words were strangled. He held the driver's throat in his hand.

"Don't ever speak my name again. Don't ever think of going careless with my name. You ever do that and I'll gut you."

He slammed the door and strode away into the shadows, stripping off the gloves. He left the station by the exit on the other side and walked eight blocks to find a rubbish sack to stuff his bag and the gloves in, then more slowly back to the station and onto the concourse to find a bench not yet taken by a dosser where he could stretch himself out until the time of the first train of the morning.

When he had come on duty he had immediately been aware of an atmosphere of minor crisis ebbing in and out of the Section Head's office. Had to be a crisis for Wilkins to have stayed on as late as nine, and his P.A. had been there, and Carthew and Foster. Behind the closed door there had been the clatter of glasses. Then it was all over, Carthew and Foster slipping away like ghosts in the night, the P.A. sliding an empty scotch bottle into her waste bin and leaving as if she'd stood up a date in a restaurant for a couple of hours. Wilkins had just said, as he was shrugging into an overcoat, that he would be at home if a "Priority" came through. And that had been that. The crisis must have been contained, because no trace had spilled over into the Night Desk Officer's vigil.