Stephen Leather: The Bombmaker

The ticket was ready for her at the Aer Lingus sales counter. She took it over to the check-in counter and a young man in shirtsleeves checked her in. He asked her about her case – had she packed it herself, had it been out of her sight, did it contain electrical items? Andy barely listened to the questions. They seemed naive. If she hadn't packed it herself, would they open it and go through her belongings? If it contained a bomb, would she tell them? The security precautions seemed as ridiculous as the middle-aged policeman with his detector. Her daughter had been kidnapped, for God's sake. Taken from her bed in the middle of the night, and she was being asked if she had batteries in her luggage. She had to fight to stop herself from screaming.

– «»-«»-«»McEvoy tensed as he heard the car pull up outside. He looked at his watch. It was too soon for Canning to have got back from the airport. He picked up his Smith amp; Wesson, cocked the hammer, and moved on tiptoe to the back door. Outside, a car door opened and then slammed shut. Footsteps crunched along the path, towards the cottage. McEvoy flattened himself against the kitchen wall, the gun at the ready. The footsteps stopped. McEvoy breathed heavily, his mouth half open, his ears straining to hear what was going on outside. Someone knocked on the door. Three short raps. Then silence.

'Who is it?' McEvoy called, his finger tense on the trigger. There was no reply. 'Who's there?' he repeated. No answer. McEvoy took the door key from his jeans pocket and slid it into the lock. He turned it, wincing at the loud metallic click, then pulled his hand away. Far off in the distance, a dog barked. Then another, closer. Not police dogs, McEvoy decided. Besides, if it was the police, and if it was a raid, they wouldn't knock first.

He eased closer to the door, grabbed the handle, and pulled it open. There was no one there. He slowly moved across the threshold, the gun still raised. Whoever it was, they weren't there any more. Why hadn't he heard them walk away? A black Ford Scorpio was parked where the Mondeo had been.

'Is there anybody there?' he called. The only sound was the wind whistling through the conifers at the end of the garden. McEvoy held the gun at his side as he walked towards the car. The rear of the cottage wasn't overlooked, but he didn't want to risk waving the gun around in the open. The Scorpio was a rental, and it was locked. McEvoy looked around, the wind tugging at his unkempt black hair. He shivered. He was wearing only a thin denim shirt and cotton trousers and he had no shoes on his feet.

He padded back to the cottage and locked the kitchen door. As he went through to the sitting room, something hard was rammed against the side of his neck. 'Surprise!'

'Fuck,' said McEvoy. 'How the hell did you get in?'

The gun Was taken away from his neck. 'That's for me to know,' said Egan, tucking the gun back into the waistband of his jeans.

'You couldn't have got in through the back door,' said McEvoy, flicking the safety catch of the.38 into place. 'You were lucky I didn't blow your fucking head off.'

Egan raised a disbelieving eyebrow and McEvoy felt his cheeks flush with embarrassment. He knew that if it had been for real it would have been his brains and not Egan's that were splattered across the carpet. 'Canning's at the airport?' asked Egan. He zipped up his leather bomber jacket and looked around the room. There was a half-empty bottle of Bushmills on the coffee table and dirty plates left over from the previous night's meal, a cardboard box on the floor, and a video camera and a stack of videotapes on the sofa. Egan picked up the camera and checked it. He was wearing black leather gloves.

McEvoy nodded. 'Should be back in an hour or so.'

'How are you getting on with him?'

McEvoy shrugged indifferently. 'He'll do.'

'And the girl?'

'No problems.' He jerked a thumb at the basement door. 'Quiet as a lamb.'

Egan put the camera down. 'Good job, George. Couldn't have done it better myself.' He reached into the inside pocket of his bomber jacket and took out an envelope. He handed it to McEvoy. 'Bonus for you.'

McEvoy took the envelope and slid it unopened into his back pocket. 'Cheers.'

'Split it with Canning if you want, but I'll leave it up to you.' He nodded at the video camera and the cassettes. 'Get them done as soon as you can, yeah? Then get Canning to take them over to McCracken.'

They walked outside together. 'Make sure you torch the cottage afterwards,' said Egan. 'Burn it to the ground. Forensic scientists these days, all they need is one hair. The car, too.'

'And the rest of the money?' McEvoy had been paid twenty thousand pounds in advance and had been promised a further eighty thousand pounds, not counting the bonus in his pocket.

Egan patted him on the back. 'It'll be in the account within ten days,' he said. He climbed into the Scorpio and McEvoy watched him drive away.

McEvoy went back into the cottage and locked the kitchen door. He took out the envelope and riffled through the notes. Five thousand pounds. New notes. McEvoy stuffed the envelope back into his pocket. Egan was a true professional. When he had first approached him, McEvoy had been suspicious. Kidnapping, especially kidnapping a child, wasn't something that could be done lightly. Egan seemed to know everything about McEvoy, from the state of his bank account to his record with the Provisional Irish Republican Army. He seemed to know where all McEvoy's bodies were buried, figuratively and literally. Some of the information Egan had could only have come from the IRA's Army Council. Other details had obviously been obtained from government computers. McEvoy, however, knew next to nothing about Egan. He was an American, that was clear from his accent, and he had a military bearing that suggested he'd been in the armed forces, but he remained tight-lipped about his background. He was equally reticent about what he was up to, and would only give McEvoy and Canning the information they needed to carry out the kidnapping. It was for their own protection, he insisted. The less they knew, the less they could tell the authorities in the event of them being captured. Egan had assured McEvoy and Canning that the same level of secrecy applied over in England. If anything went wrong there, the two men wouldn't be implicated.

McEvoy went through to the sitting room and poured himself a measure of Bushmills. He sat down and put his feet up on the coffee table. It wasn't the first kidnapping that McEvoy had been involved in, but this was the first time he was doing it purely for financial reasons. It was the first time he'd been involved with the kidnapping of a child, too. Not that the fact that the victim was a seven-year-old girl worried McEvoy. The victim was meat, nothing more. A means to an end. He sipped his whiskey and brooded.

– «»-«»-«» Martin's company was based on an industrial estate twenty miles north of Dublin. The offices were in an H-shaped brick building with a flat roof, with a storage yard for heavy equipment behind and car parking spaces in front. When business was slow the yard would be full of earth movers, trucks and cement mixers, but for the past two years the company had been busier than ever and the yard was virtually empty. He parked and walked through reception to the management offices. His secretary looked up from her word-processor. 'Coffee?' Jill Gannon had been with the company for more than a decade. She was in her fifties, with a matronly figure that defeated all dieting and a kindly face that always seemed to be smiling. Martin had never seen her depressed, or without a chocolate bar on her desk.

'No thanks, Jill. And don't put any calls through for the next half an hour or so.' He went inside his office and closed the door. He telephoned his bank and asked for the balance of his accounts. There was a little over ten thousand in his current account, another thirty thousand in a deposit account. Martin wrote the numbers down and then called a building society in the Channel Islands. He had a further ninety thousand pounds there, out of the reach of the Irish taxman. He arranged to have it transferred to his current account in Dublin, though he was told that they wouldn't be able to carry out the transfer until they received written confirmation. Martin promised to send a letter by courier.