Patrick Robinson - To The Death

But then he broke away from her embrace and said sternly, “Nothing in public that would ever attract attention. Not in our business.”

“I know, I know,” she said, a shade petulantly. “But it’s been so long and I miss you every day. Where are we going now?”

“We are leaving Ireland as fast as we can,” he said. “This was just a port of entry for us. We have to get to London as fast as we can.”

“How do we do that?”

“We get a taxi to a place called Dun Laoghaire. It’s right on the coast, and it’s not far from here. That’s the ferry port to England.”

“I can’t see any taxis.”

“No, I’m going to call for one. I arranged it this morning. I have the number.”

Ravi dialed a number on his cell. Shakira heard him say, “Hello, Robert Bamford here. Taxi to pick me up at the Mosque. I ordered it this morning. Yes, that’s correct. I’m right at the main entrance… to Dun Laoghaire, cash. Okay, five minutes.”

Jimmy Ramshawe was fielding a succession of catastrophically depressing E-mails, all of them confirming that Carla Martin had most definitely vanished. The Maureen Carson lead came to nothing. The passport was forged; the only Maureen Carson of Michigan with correlating numbers was dead. The Jordanian embassy in Paris said they had never heard of Miss Carson, which was, Jimmy guessed, unsurprising since she did not appear to exist.

The Jordanian attaché had told the FBI that since Miss Carson appeared to have a forged passport, she probably had forged her American Express application as well. Worse yet, the Shelbourne Hotel had not the slightest idea where she had gone after leaving them.

The Kilo had not shown up anywhere along the route from Ireland to Gibraltar. And yet the Ireland connection continued to bother Jimmy. He still believed Maureen Carson was Carla Martin. Who the hell else buys a pricey one-way first-class ticket to Dublin at an hour’s notice, unless they’re on the bloody run?

And all the bloody documents are forged, for Christ’s sake. Something’s going on, and I can’t understand for the life of me why nobody can see it except for me. And what in the name of Christ are the fucking Iranians doing frigging around in a submarine, a drive and a nine iron from Kinsale Golf Club? Tell me that. Jimmy, all alone in his office, was working himself into a lather about Ireland.

So much so that he opened his computer and Googled the Irish Times just to see what the hell was going on over there. And what greeted him was that whacking great front-page headline announcing the brutal murder of the Irish dairy farmer Jerry O’Connell.

Jimmy wrote down Crookhaven and checked the distance along the coast to Kinsale Old Head-forty-two miles along the shore. He then compared the GPS numbers; not the numbers that separated Kinsale from Crookhaven, but the ones that separated Crookhaven from the submarine when the Brits detected her. The latitudes were submarine 51.15, Crookhaven 51.32, about seventeen miles different. Longitude, submarine 08.29, Crookhaven 09.34. About the same forty-odd miles, with the submarine running predictably south.

She’d been running all day. It was 4 o’clock in the bloody afternoon. I don’t know what happened to the Irish farmer. But something’s really weird here. Bloody great headlines, murder, Maureen Carson, towelhead submarines. All concerning Ireland. Give me a break. They’ve got to be connected.

And this is where Jimmy Ramshawe parted company, mentally, with Admiral Morgan, who told him bluntly, “Kid, you still lack the one truth that might bind all this together. Right now they’re all floating coincidences.

“Nothing’s connected to anything else. Nothing puts Carla or Maureen on the submarine. Nothing connects either woman with the other. Nothing suggests the submarine was doing anything except a training exercise. As for this murder, no one knows who committed it, and there is not one shred of evidence to indicate that one of the Iranians got off and then kicked an Irish pig farmer to death.”

“Dairy.”

“What?”

“Dairy farmer, not pig.”

“Oh, thank God. That makes all the difference.”

“Arnie, I agree nothing quite adds up. But something’s going on, and I don’t think you should go to England…”

“Bullshit.”

General Rashood bought two first-class passenger tickets for the two o’clock ferry to Holyhead in North Wales, a journey of sixty-five miles across the Irish Sea. This was unusual, because the Stena Line fast ferry is essentially for cars and trucks, roll on, roll off. The vast majority of passengers were planning to drive through Wales, England, or Scotland, either vacationing or going home. There were some passengers without cars, but mostly students, backpackers, and hitchhikers. Ravi and Shakira did not fit the pattern.

Nonetheless, they found their way up to the first-class lounge, and ordered hot sandwiches for lunch. The stewardess would bring them complimentary coffee throughout the journey.

The summer sea was calm, and the ferry, a giant hovercraft, charged toward the United Kingdom in a blizzard of howling spray, ripping past a regular shaft-driven ferryboat as if it had stopped.

Holyhead, their destination, sits on Holy Isle, the northwest point of Wales, jutting out into the Irish Sea. This in turn is joined to the ancient twenty-mile-long Isle of Anglesey where the A-5, the main road into England, begins. Or ends, depending on your direction.

Ravi and Shakira had to wait for the cars and trucks to leave the ship before foot passengers were permitted to walk off. They joined a busy line of mostly young people going through the passport control area, and twenty minutes later, with only the most cursory glance at one of Shakira’s four passports, the British one for Margaret Adams, they waved her through.

Ravi, the former British Army officer, said “good afternoon” crisply in that unmistakable tone the British use to intimidate the lower orders, and was waved through immediately. The official paid hardly any attention to this well-dressed Charles Larkman, in his expensive brown suede jacket and white T-shirt.

However, the closed-circuit camera behind him was more observant, and there was a photographic record that Miss Adams and Mr. Larkman had indeed entered the United Kingdom, off the two o’clock ferry from Dublin, on July 17.

From the immigration area, they walked to the car-rental desks, and Shakira hired an Audi A6 for a month, using her new American Express Gold Card, originally issued to a staff member at the Syrian embassy in London. She offered one of her three driver’s licenses, the one in the name of Margaret Adams, and Ravi booked himself in as an extra driver using Mr. Larkman’s clean British license.

Thankfully, they stowed their two bags in the trunk and set off on the long 300-mile journey to London, Ravi at the wheel.

The regular route for most drivers is to cross the Menai Strait onto the mainland and then travel all along the North Wales coast until it reaches the fast motorway system south of Liverpool. Ravi would do it differently, driving through the mountains of North Wales, southeast to Shrewsbury, and then south into Hereford, home of the British Army’s elite SAS, his old stomping ground. It was perhaps the irresistible urge of the outlaw to return, in the broadest possible sense, to the scene of the crime.

Shortly after 5 P.M., the two officers from New Scotland Yard agreed to consult with MI-6, Britain ’s overseas intelligence agency. It was clear to both of them that the man who killed Jerry O’Connell was no passing villain: this was a man who had almost certainly made illegal entry into Ireland, and if challenged in any way would kill ruthlessly and without compunction.