Stephen Leather - The Bombmaker

The woman made another note on her pad. Then she looked up. 'Timer?'

'Depends on when you want it to go off. Minutes, hours, days or weeks.'

'Hours.'

'Any small clock will do.'

'What do you prefer?'

'A battery-operated digital model.'

'Any particular brand?'

Andy shrugged. 'Whatever. Can I ask you something?'

'No. What do you pack it in? Oil drums?'

Andy shook her head. 'No. Like I said, we'll use black bags. You have to pack it around the initiator. If it's in barrels the initial explosion might just knock the rest of the barrels over.'

'Okay. Black bags it is. What do you need wiring-wise?'

'Bell wire. Several different colours would help. Soldering iron. Solder. Batteries – 1.5 volts. Torch bulbs and bulb-holders, for circuit testing. Wire. As many different colours as you can get. Look, what are you going to use this for?'

'That's not your concern.'

'Is it against people, or property? I have a right to know.'

The woman put her pen down and looked at Andy, her eyes narrowing under the ski mask. 'We have your daughter, and unless you do exactly as we say, she'll die. I mean that, Andrea. I mean that as sure as I'm sitting here opposite you. The men who are looking after her are taking good care of her, but they're just as capable of putting a bullet in her pretty little head or cutting her throat. This isn't a game, it isn't a joke. You have no rights. You do as you're told or Katie's dead. Do you understand me?'

Andy stared at the woman. It was as if she were the only static thing in the vicinity – everything else was whirling and spinning around her. She tried to speak, but before any words came she felt her stomach heave and her mouth filled with vomit. She twisted around from the table and threw up with loud, gagging gasps. The Wrestler jumped to the side, away from the foul-smelling yellow flow, but it splattered over his legs.

'You stupid cow!' he yelled.

Andy fell to her knees and bent low, her head only inches from the ground as heaving spasms racked her body. Even when her stomach was empty she continued to heave and cough. A glass of water appeared before her and she took it gratefully. She swilled the water around her mouth and then spat it out before drinking deeply. She sat back on her heels and drained the glass. The woman in the ski mask was standing in front of her, her hands on her hips. Andy gave the glass back to her.

She looked around as she squatted on the dusty concrete floor. There were no windows, though there were barred skylights high overhead. Thick metal girders ran below the roof, and suspended from them were winches and lifting equipment. There were thick metal bolts in the floor, as if massive pieces of machinery had once been bolted into place. The place had obviously been used for some form of manufacturing in the past.

Up against one wall was a metal bench, and on it a computer. It looked like an expensive system with a large VDU and a tower unit containing the disk drives. A wire led from the computer to a phone socket. A modem, Andy realised. It had a modem. The Wrestler was using a tissue to wipe his trousers and continuing to curse her under his breath. The Runner took Andy's arm and helped her back on to the chair. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

Green-eyes sat down and picked up her pen again. 'Right, are you ready to go on?' she asked.

Andy nodded. She methodically went through everything else they'd need while Green-eyes took notes. When she'd finished, Green-eyes put her pen down on her notepad and nodded at her. 'We'll get most- of this stuff tomorrow morning,' she said. 'We start work the day after that.'

Andy looked around the factory. 'Here?' she asked.

'No. We'll be moving somewhere else.'

'Can you tell me where?'

'Not right now, no. But you'll know soon enough. Let me show you the fertiliser.'

Green-eyes stood up and walked over to the tarpaulin-covered mound. She pulled the green sheet back. Dust billowed around her and she coughed.

Andy went over to the stack of bags and examined the labels. She recognised the brand. It was an English firm, based just outside Oxford. Under the brand name were the words AMMONIUM NITRATE, and below that, in slightly smaller type, the word FERTILISER. To the right were three numbers, separated by hyphens: 34-0-0.

'Okay?' asked Green-eyes.

'It'll do,' said Andy. She'd half hoped that they wouldn't have the correct type of fertiliser, but now she realised that they knew exactly what they were doing. Some manufacturers coated their ammonium nitrate with calcium to stop it from absorbing water. But the calcium coating rendered the fertiliser useless as an explosive base. Other fertilisers were a mixture of chemicals, perhaps containing ammonium sulphate or urea. Only pure ammonium nitrate would explode, and that was what Green-eyes was showing her. The numbers on the bag referred to the ratio of nitrogen, phosphorus and potash. Only pure ammonium nitrate had the ratio 34-0-0. There were other sacks, too, containing compost. Andy pointed at one of the compost bags. 'What are you planning to do with that? Compost isn't explosive.'

Green-eyes ignored her.

'Why are you doing this?' Andy asked.

'Why do you care? You've done it before.'

'That was a long time ago. A lifetime ago.'

'Like riding a bike,' said Green-eyes. 'As soon as you get back in the saddle, it'll be as if you never gave it up.' She motioned to the Runner, and he came over and took Andy by the arm, leading her like a naughty child back to the office.

– «»-«»-«»Mick Canning pushed the trolley down the aisle, scanning the rows of canned goods. He stopped by the soups section and took half a dozen cans of Heinz tomato soup off the shelves. He added a few cans of baked beans and spaghetti hoops to his trolley, sticking to the Heinz brand. He knew that children applied the same brand awareness to their food as they did to their clothing. Training shoes had to be Nike, Reebok or Adidas, beans had to be Heinz, fish fingers had to be Bird's Eye, cornflakes had to be Kellogg's. Anything else resulted in sneers and pushed-away plates. Canning's own children weren't much older than the Hayes girl – his son was eight and his daughter nine. He hadn't seen either for almost three months; they were living in Larne with their mother. Canning and his wife had separated, and the last letter he'd received from her solicitor made it clear that she wanted a divorce. And the house. In exchange, she was offering him unlimited access to the children, though she was insisting that they live with her. Canning knew there was no point in arguing, either with her or her solicitor. He was resigned to becoming a part-time father, but figured that being a part-time father was better than being no father at all.

Canning paid in cash and took the carrier bags out to the carpark and loaded them into the boot of the Ford Mondeo. He turned on the radio and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as he drove. If everything went to plan, it would all be over within two weeks. The Hayes girl would be back with her parents, Canning would have the rest of the hundred thousand pounds he'd been promised for the job, and he'd be able to get his soon-to-be-ex-wife and her money-grabbing solicitor off his back.

– «»-«»-«»Laura O'Mara jumped as the doorbell rang. The clock on the mantelpiece said it was a quarter past seven, and she wasn't expecting visitors. She put her knitting on the coffee table and turned down the volume of the television set, then peered through the lace curtains. An expensive car, a black saloon, was parked in the road outside her house. She didn't know anyone with a black car. She went over to the door and slid the security chain home. Since her husband had died four years earlier, she'd always taken great care not to let strangers into the house. The newspapers were full of stories about old women being mugged for their life savings. Not that Laura O'Mara considered herself old. She was fifty-nine, and her own mother was still active and living alone, and she was in her mid-eighties. Nor did Laura O'Mara keep her life savings in her two-up, two-down cottage. She was too smart an investor for that. Her savings were tucked away in tax-efficient bonds and unit trusts, and she even had several thousand pounds in a Guernsey bank account, safe from the prying eyes of the taxman. But she did have some valuable porcelain, and she knew that children these days would smash up a person's house for the thrill of it. She eased open the door, keeping a reassuring hand on the lock.