Stephen Leather - The Bombmaker

Quinn looked across at him, his mouth open in surprise. 'What?'

O'Keefe pointed a finger at Quinn's face, just inches from the man's nose. 'You're a fucking amateur. A fucking piece of shit amateur.'

'Don, what the hell's got up your arse?' Quinn sounded genuinely confused. He braked and brought the van to a halt at the roadside.

'You used my name, you ignorant, stupid shit.'

Quinn gripped the steering wheel with both hands. 'What the fuck are you talking about?'

O'Keefe jerked his thumb back at the industrial estate behind them. 'Back there. You called me Don.'

'I fucking did not.'

'I'm not imagining it, Quinn. I'm not plucking this out of the fucking ether. I was in the bog, you were loading the van. What did you shout?'

Quinn ran a hand through his thick red hair. 'I don't know. But I know I wouldn't use your name. I'm not stupid.'

O'Keefe seized Quinn by the throat, his big, square hand gripping either side of the younger man's neck like a vice. Quinn's eyes widened and his gloved hands clawed ineffectually at O'Keefe's iron-hard fingers. His lips moved silently, white spittle dribbling down his chin. O'Keefe's other hand grabbed Quinn's hair and he yanked the man's head back so that he was staring fearfully up at the roof of the van. 'Not stupid!' O'Keefe screamed. 'Not fucking stupid! I'll give you not fucking stupid!' He tightened his grip on Quinn's throat, threatening to crush his windpipe. 'Now, think back, you little shit. Think back to what you said.'

Quinn's hands fastened around O'Keefe's wrist, but he was powerless against the bigger man's grip.

'Are you thinking?'

Quinn tried to nod but could barely move his head. O'Keefe let go of Quinn's throat and the younger man gasped for breath.

'I'm sorry. For fuck's sake, I'm sorry.'

O'Keefe let Quinn's hair slip through his fingers. 'It's coming back to you now, is it?'

Quinn nodded.

O'Keefe folded his arms and settled back in the passenger seat. 'You've got to be on your toes every second of every minute. You can't let your guard down once, because if you do it can be the death of you. This isn't a game. We get caught and they'll throw away the key.'

Quinn put the van into gear and pulled away from the kerb. His hands were shaking on the steering wheel.

They drove to London, and cut across the city towards the financial district. Quinn brought the van to a halt and nodded at the line of half a dozen cars waiting to drive into the City of London. A uniformed policeman waved through the car at the front while his colleague went to speak to the driver of the second.

'Bloody joke, isn't it?' said Quinn. 'Ring of steel, my arse. What the fuck do they expect to find, huh?'

They're not the ones to worry about,' said O'Keefe. He jerked his chin to the side. 'It's the eye in the sky that does the damage.'

Quinn twisted around in his seat and looked in the direction that O'Keefe had indicated. High up on the office building was a wall-mounted camera pointing at the checkpoint. 'Video, yeah?' he said.

'Not just a video,' said O'Keefe. 'The camera picks out the registration number and runs it through the police computer. It's all done automatically – takes seven seconds to get a read-out on the vehicle. If it's stolen or used by anyone on the Special Branch watch list, there'd be more armed police around us than fleas on a dog.'

They edged towards the front of the queue of cars. O'Keefe reached under his seat and pulled out a metal clipboard. The uniformed policeman walked up to the window and O'Keefe wound down the window.

'Morning, sir,' said the policeman. 'Can you tell me where you're going?'

O'Keefe showed him the clipboard. There was an order form clipped to it with the landscape gardening company's letterhead on the top. 'Cathay Tower,' he said. 'We're doing a rooftop garden. Trees, bushes, the works.'

The policeman stepped back and waved them on, his eyes already on the next vehicle.

'Have a good one,' said O'Keefe as Quinn accelerated away. It was the third time they'd been into the City in the van that week, and as anticipated there hadn't been any problems. It was registered and insured in the name of the landscaping company, taxed and MoT'd and totally legitimate. Quinn's driving licence was clean, though the name and address weren't his.

The main entrance to Cathay Tower was in Queen Anne Street, close to Bank Tube station, but the entrance to the carpark was at the rear, down a narrow side street. O'Keefe showed his pass to the elderly security guard. Like the van's paperwork, it was genuine. The office had been rented some three months earlier, and included in the lease were three parking spaces. They were on the second level of the subterranean carpark, and Quinn drove down and parked.

The service lift was some fifty feet away, so O'Keefe went over to press the button while Quinn opened the rear doors of the van and began unloading the sacks of fertiliser on to the trolley they'd brought with them. Each bag weighed fifty kilos, and Quinn could get six on the trolley. As he put the last one on, the lift arrived and O'Keefe held the door open while Quinn trundled the trolley over.

They went up to the ninth floor. The lift doors opened on to a corridor which led to the main reception area where the passenger lifts were. A door led off the reception area to the lavatories; a corridor led to the main open-plan office area which ran the full length of the building. The entire floor was rented in the name of an overseas stockbroking firm, paid for through a Cayman Islands bank account.

O'Keefe walked into the main office area, which had previously been a dealing room for a major American bank, and went inside. Quinn followed with the trolley. White vertical blinds covered the ceiling-to-floor windows. The NatWest Tower was almost directly opposite. It would be all too easy for one of the thousands of office workers to look in and see what they were doing. The blinds would have to remain closed all the time they were there.

There were already eighteen sacks of fertiliser piled up in one corner. The two men unloaded the trolley, adding the sacks to the pile. O'Keefe waved at a smoke detector in the middle of the ceiling. A red light blinked in the centre of the white plastic disc.

'You think she's watching?' asked Quinn.

'Wouldn't put it past her,' said O'Keefe.

Quinn nodded at the sacks of fertiliser. 'Weird, isn't it?' he said, wiping his hands on his overalls. 'Gardeners all over the country spread this over their lawns, and we're gonna blow a building to kingdom come with it.'

The two men walked over to the window.

'What's weird about that?' asked O'Keefe. 'Give us another cigarette, will you?'

'McCracken said we weren't to smoke here.'

'Fuck McCracken.' He gestured at the smoke detector. 'Anyway, this is a blind spot.'

'You sure?'

'I fitted the thing myself. I'm sure.'

Quinn shrugged and tossed the pack of Silk Cut over to O'Keefe.

O'Keefe took a cigarette, lit it, and tossed the pack back.

Quinn lit a cigarette for himself, and looked over at the sacks of fertiliser. 'I just meant it's weird that like this it's dead safe, right? Regular fertiliser. But add other stuff to it and… you know… bang!'

'Bang?' O'Keefe pushed the blinds to one side and peered across at the NatWest Tower. Thousands of men and women going about their business. Worrying about careers, office politics, their home life. Worrying about a million things, but totally oblivious to the one thing that was going to change their lives for ever. A four-thousand-pound bomb only a few hundred metres away.

'Yeah, bang. Ka-boom!'

O'Keefe let the blinds fall back into place and turned to look at Quinn. 'You think a four-thousand-pound bomb's going to go bang? Or ka-boom? You ever heard a bomb go off? A big one?'