Brute Force

108

I came to on a hard, cold floor. As I struggled to focus, blurred pinpricks of light danced across my retinas. Stars. I was looking up through the hole I'd made in Layla's roof.

There was something sticky in my mouth. The taste of metal clung to the back of my throat. Blood, or the crowbar? The tip of my tongue did a quick inventory. As far as I could tell, I still had all my teeth.

I couldn't move my feet. They were tied to my wrists and elbows behind my back.

My eyes still wouldn't focus, even though I commanded them to. As the haze cleared, I found myself facing the fireplace and the rogues' gallery.

Seeing the pictures brought it all back again: Layla . . . Lesser . . . the daughter . . .

I heard a noise to my right and managed to turn my neck against the pain. No more than a metre away, and similarly bound, lay another prisoner.

Lynn had bruises on his face and cuts to his head that had come from something a bit more vigorous than an open hand. He'd gone down fighting.

'It's Lesser's daughter.' I strained to get eye to eye. 'That fucking bitch is—'

'I know. She made me listen to her life story.'

'Tell me.'

He shifted a fraction to try and take some of the strain off his plasticuffs. 'Her name is Mairead. Likes to be called Mary. Don't try calling her any other names.' He grimaced. 'She doesn't take kindly to it.

'She was born in Libya, lived the early part of her life here – while Lesser commuted back and forth to the Irish Republic. But Layla became a prime target for the Israelis, and we had Lesser in our sights. So they moved her away.'

He nodded at the pictures on the mantelpiece. 'The child-minder is Lesser's cousin. She never registered on our radar. Lesser, I suppose, visited the kid when he could, but when we took him out, any links we might have picked up between them vanished altogether. It was as if she'd never existed.'

'And now?'

'She's president of the Richard Isham fan club. Thinks the sun shines out of his arse – to the extent that she happily organizes drug runs to finance the cause. She's a zealot, Nick, devoted to the cause – but that's nothing compared to what drove her to this.'

'Don't tell me. She wants to avenge her father's death.'

Great. And Lynn and I didn't just have a ringside seat at Mairead's circus – we were the stars of the show.

'Who's she teamed with this end?'

'Russians. Mansour was involved, too, though whether officially or as a freelance, I have no idea. After he got out of prison, it wasn't antiquities that took his fancy; it was drugs. I should have realized.'

'Realized what?'

'These guys are representatives of the new world order – drugs, politics and organized crime. They want to create Afghanistan on our doorstep – substitute Kabul for Belfast and you start to get the picture. The Mafia get a ready-made market for their heroin and cocaine. Guys like Isham get the financial backing to buy votes and swell their numbered Swiss bank accounts. Everyone's happy. Including the new boys at the Kremlin, who always like a bit of European instability. I don't imagine Putin's government will be actively taking measures to close down this operation.

'But that's the big picture. As for the here and now, her personal vendetta . . .' The look on Lynn's face told me the worst. Beneath the bruises, he looked like he knew we'd reached journey's end.

'She has waited a long time for this, Nick. She'd always known her father's death was no accident. Duff confirmed it after he saw the Basra incident on TV. From that moment, you were compromised. She just needed someone to lead them to me.'

I heard a noise somewhere behind me then a woman's voice and I knew that she was there, in the shadows, and had been all along.