Andy McNab - Brute force

'Information provided by our mutual friend in Tripoli. I never dreamed we would all meet here. For that, I applaud your ingenuity and tenacity. I really thought we'd get you in Norfolk, then in Italy.

'When you surfaced in Tripoli, our mutual friend was kind enough to put in a call to let me know you were on the road. In exchange, he was going to receive a bonus on this particular shipment, but I gather you've saved me from having to pay out on that one.'

I wasn't sure how she'd picked us up in Italy – and I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of telling me – but with passport-tracking technology it looked like anything was possible. Maybe Brendan's computer whiz-kid was on her payroll, too. He could have hacked into government databases, clocked us out of Gatwick and into Genoa, then hacked into credit-card databases and watched us hire a car. Then another government database in Italy, and bingo – our number plate exiting at Rapallo. After that, she'd have monitored both the card and number-plate recognition databases, and have eyes on the Rapallo turn-off. If the Firm could do it, then so could she.

I knew what was coming next. An elderly man lay slumped on a pavement, his face beaten to a pulp. I could only tell who he was by the packet of HobNobs scattered on the tarmac beside him.

But it didn't end there.

She shoved the screen right up close to my face. I was staring at the interior of something roomy and metallic – a shipping container, maybe.

The camera followed the point of a torch beam as it swept along the floor. The picture was fuzzy, because there wasn't much to focus on – until it latched on to a foot and a pair of bare legs. A woman's legs. Then, as it tracked upwards, the two legs became four. The second pair belonged to a child.

Tallulah and Ruby were huddled together, clinging to each other for warmth and comfort.

The camera panned to the right of them until I could see Dom holding Siobhan's face into his chest for protection.

Mairead froze the frame and placed the camcorder on a table beside her. She squatted down in front of Lynn. 'In a minute, Colonel, Stone is going to kill you, and then-' she held up a length of det cord, a battery, the whole enchilada – 'I'm going to kill Stone.'

She turned to me. 'For all the pain and suffering you have caused me and my fellow countrymen – for the distress that you caused my mother – I want you to know that after I've dealt with you, I'm going to kill them.' She nodded at the camcorder.

She waited for a reply, but she wasn't going to get one from me. How the fuck would that help?

'Has little Ruby ever tried cocaine? I bet her mother has. She looks the type.' She grinned. 'There was a couple I supplied once… they had a crack-addicted baby. She smiled a lot as she grew up, but only ever talked gibberish.' She rolled her eyes back in her head in case I hadn't got the message.

I didn't even flicker.

She stood up, pissed off that I hadn't given her the reaction she was hoping for. She called out for her boys to join her and a second later I was reunited with a couple of faces I'd last seen in Norfolk.

She turned, picked up the camcorder and walked out of the room.

Box-cutter's head had been shaved so the gashes down the back of it could be glued back together. The back of his neck was covered with dressings.

His feet, however, were undamaged. A boot flew into my stomach. I buckled to absorb it but it still drove all the air from my body. He grabbed my feet and started hauling me towards the door. I tried to keep my head off the floor as my chest slid across the marble. All that was left where Lynn had been lying was a small pool of blood-streaked saliva.

Light now flooded the area around the entrance to the house; Mairead was obviously still in Spielberg mode.

Box-cutter brought out a blade and cut me loose then forced me onto my knees by the threshold. Lynn was getting the same treatment a couple of steps below me. His face was no more than a few inches from mine. He looked into my eyes. 'Nick, for God's sake don't tell her…'

Box-cutter gave him a heavy backhander across the cheek.

I didn't know what he was on about but I'd go with it. This wasn't over yet: neither of us was dead.

Mairead sneered from behind the camcorder. 'You still think you're in with a chance, don't you?'

Box-cutter grabbed as big a handful of my hair as he could, pulled back hard and ground the muzzle of his weapon deep into my neck. I could still make out Lynn's face at the very edge of my vision.

She bent down beside me and treated me to a waft of her lemony perfume. The tips of her perfectly manicured nails brushed my face. Her other hand pressed a pistol into mine.

'There is a single round in the magazine. You will load the round, point it at his forehead, count to ten and then pull the trigger.'

She gobbed off in Russian and the weapon came away from my neck. Box-cutter was clearly used to doing as he was told. Lynn was also released and we were left on our knees facing each other.

She lifted my chin. 'Liam Duff told me how my father died. He saw his body when it was brought up on deck. Blown almost in half by detonator cord.'

She stood and started filming once more.

'Kill me, Nick. Just promise me you won't tell her…'

I finally saw where he was going with this. Actions weren't going to get us out of this, he was telling me. But words might.

I jerked up my head. 'It didn't stop with Lynn, you know. It went higher.'

Did I detect a momentary hesitation?

'Right to the top. There was a source – a PIRA source. Someone senior in the leadership. It wasn't just the Bahiti… he gave us Loughgall, the Eksund, the whole organization…'

I heard a strangulated sound coming from Lynn. 'Nick, no, no…'

Mairead lowered the camcorder. Her brow furrowed, but only for a split second. She wasn't hooking into this as fast as I'd hoped.

'Kill us and you'll be looking over your shoulder forever. Release us and I'll tell you. In fact, I'll do better than that. You can film my confession. I'll do the whole thing on camera. Not that dinky little thing – a proper, grown-up camera in Dom's TV studio. I'll give you chapter and verse on the Eksund, the Bahiti, Loughgall, Enniskillen. And I'll name the source. But I want to see all four of them alive. Let them go and I'll tell you. I'll tell everyone. The name of your traitor will be broadcast across the world, and the British government will be seriously compromised.'

She still wasn't convinced.

'Think about it, Mary. The leadership knew they had to go the political route. But they also knew that people like your dad, the diehard Republicans, wouldn't see it that way. They'd see it as surrender. So they had to be dealt with before the leadership could become respectable and have their pictures taken kissing babies.'

I was getting to her. Her face said it all.

'I know – shit, isn't it? But get us to Dublin, release the others and I'll tell you everything you need to know.'

Lynn choked with rage. He was good at this. 'You bastard, Stone!'

For a second, our eyes locked. He knew, I knew. We understood each other. For the first and last time.

With a roar, he grabbed my hand and pulled the semiautomatic from my fingers.

For a moment, everybody froze. Mairead stood there, silhouetted against the light, still filming.

Lynn pointed the pistol at her and pulled the trigger.

There was silence. It wasn't made ready; the round was still in the mag.

Then the loud bang I'd been expecting finally came, and blood and brain tissue spattered my face. A red flower bloomed on his right temple and he fell forward across the steps.

Box-cutter shoved his pistol back into his jeans and turned away.