Stephen Leather - The Bombmaker

Denham nodded. She was right. But he didn't think that Martin Hayes would see it her way. 'And what exactly is it you want from me?' he asked. 'Why've I been brought in from the cold?'

'Hardly the cold, Liam. You've a very nice pension, from what I hear. Certainly more than I'll be getting when I retire. The government has always been more than generous to its employees in the North.'

'I was sacked, Patsy.'

'You retired.'

Denham gave her a tight smile.

'You were the only one who dealt with Trevor. You're the only one who knows how she'll react.'

'I've not seen or spoken to her in ten years.'

'You're all we have. You and her husband. But even her husband doesn't know her the way you do.'

Denham tapped ash into the ashtray. 'People change.'

'Of course they do. But you were with her when she was under the most pressure. When her life was on the line. She knew what they'd do to her if they ever found out she was betraying them. And you were the only one she could confide in.' She paused for a while. The only sound in the room was the ticking of a clock on the mantelpiece, a big polished oak monstrosity, around a tiled fireplace in which stood a vase of dried flowers. To the side of the fireplace was a large brass scuttle filled with chunks of wood. Denham could imagine the fire burning cheerfully on winter days. His own office, in a fortified concrete bunker in north Belfast, had had a single-bar electric fire that didn't even take the edge off the winter days. 'Liam, I have to know. Given the choice between the life of her daughter and the hundreds of lives that could be lost if a device went off in a mainland city – what would she do?'

Denham shrugged. He took another long pull on his cigarette and drew the smoke deep into his lungs. He exhaled slowly. 'You know why she walked away?'

'Because four children died.'

'Four died and one mutilated. It damn near destroyed her. It didn't matter to her how many lives she'd saved. She came close to killing herself. She had the tablets and everything.' He stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray. 'She didn't turn up for a meeting we'd arranged so I broke all the rules and went looking for her. Found her sitting on her bed with the tablets out and a bottle of vodka.'

'I read the file. It wasn't her fault.'

'I knew that. I think she knew that, too. Deep down. But it was children, Patsy. That's what pushed her over the edge. So think what her own daughter means to her. She'll do anything. Whatever it takes. She'd die for her.'

Patsy reached for the cross around her neck and stroked it as she studied Denham with unblinking eyes. 'But we're not talking about her giving up her life for her daughter's, are we? Would she kill others? Would she allow others to be killed? If it meant saving her own daughter?'

Denham stared at one of the oil paintings. A cruel face. A pinched mouth. White cheeks with smears of rouge. Watery eyes. 'She's an intelligent girl, is Andrea. Smart as a whip. Got a first at Queen's, you know? Top of her year. By far. I never won an argument with her, not in all the time I ran her. You'd never know, not to look at her, because she was so damn pretty. The softest blond hair you ever saw. Blue eyes that you felt you could just dive into. And her figure. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the heads she turned.'

'And you a married man,' said Patsy, shaking her head and smiling. 'What's your point, Liam? That pretty girls aren't expected to be intelligent?'

'The point is, she's going to work out what we both know already. That if they are forcing her to build a bomb, they're not going to want her around after it goes off. They're going to want her dead. And if they're going to kill Andrea, they've really nothing to lose by killing the little girl, too.'

He looked at Patsy. She looked back at him, her face giving nothing away.

'She'll know that,' Denham continued. 'She'll know that if she doesn't do what they want, the girl will die. And she'll know that if she does do what they want, the girl will die.'

'Which leaves her where?'

'Looking for a third way.'

'Which is?'

Denham's mouth twisted as if he had a bad taste in his mouth. 'She's the one with the first, Patsy.'

'But she'll be building the bomb?'

'Definitely. Because so long as she's in the process of constructing it, they won't hurt the girl.'

'Which gives us how long?'

'Oh, come on now, Patsy. How long's a piece of string?'

'Assuming it's a big one. A spectacular?'

'A week. Give or take.'

'That's what I figured. So we've got a couple of days. Maybe three.'

Denham nodded. He stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankles. His Hush Puppies had seen better days – the suede was stained and the laces were fraying.

'There's something else I need you to do, Liam.'

Denham nodded slowly. 'I was wondering when you'd get around to it.'

'Somebody's going to have to ask him. And I think it'd be better coming from you.'

Denham lit another cigarette. At the height of the Troubles he'd smoked eighty a day, and he could feel the old cravings returning.

'There's a plane waiting. A bit rough-and-ready, I'm afraid. And a car outside. I'll have transport arranged for you in Belfast.'

'You know where he is?'

Patsy smiled. 'Every minute of every day,' she said. 'I'm going to address the troops.'

She walked down the office to the briefing room. Twenty expectant faces looked up at her as she went over to where two whiteboards were mounted on the wall. The blinds were drawn and the overhead fluorescent lights were on. 'Right, let's get straight to it, shall we?' she said.

Just over half the operatives in the room were female, and almost all were under thirty, a reflection of the changing face of the Security Service. Young, enthusiastic, and not necessarily educated at Oxford or Cambridge. It was a change that Patsy approved of, and had herself benefited from. Most of them were sitting around a long light oak table, notepads in front of them. Two of the younger men stood by the double doors, and they closed them as she stood in front of one of the whiteboards. There were four photographs stuck to it. Three of them were of Andrea Hayes, one was of Katie.

Patsy pointed at one of the photographs of Andrea, a head-and-shoulders shot that had been in an album retrieved from the Hayes house when the answering machine had been turned off. 'Andrea Hayes. Housewife, thirty-four years old.' She tapped the photograph next to it. Another head-and-shoulders shot, this one a blow-up of a passport photograph taken twelve years earlier. 'In a previous life, Andrea Sheridan. Top IRA bombmaker and Special Branch informer. She is presently in the UK, and active. Not by choice.' She tapped the photograph of Katie. 'Her daughter, Katie. Seven years old. Kidnapped from their home in Dublin.'

She tapped the first photograph of Andy. 'Someone wants her to build a bomb. Presumably a big one. At this stage, I don't really care why. Why we can work out later. As to when, we think the bomb's likely to be completed within the next few days. Assuming it's a massive fertiliser bomb, which was Andrea Sheridan's speciality, once the ingredients are mixed, their shelf life is limited. A week at most. So we're looking at a timeframe of between two days and ten. So, these are our priorities. We need to know who's building the bomb, and we need to know where the bomb is. As regards who, we have video of a vehicle leaving a carpark in Covent Garden.'

She moved across to the second whiteboard. There were six photographs stuck to it. One was a grainy black-and-white print that had been blown up from a still taken from the closed-circuit television video at the carpark in Covent Garden. She tapped it with her marker pen. 'This van has the name of a garden landscaping firm on the side, though you can't see it on the video. Andrea Sheridan is in the back. We've run a check on the registration number. The van is owned by a company in the Midlands. It's being checked out as we speak, but I don't recommend anyone holding their breath. This has been too well planned for it to be as easy as that.' She pointed to the portion of the photograph showing the van's windscreen. 'Two occupants. Male. They're sitting well back but we can just about make out the bottom of the passenger's face and three-quarters of the driver's. Our technical boys are working on the video now. We've also got all the tickets handed in that day and we're looking for the one that corresponds to their exit time. If we get it, we get the driver's prints.'