The Long shot

Lisa smiled and shook her head, her long blonde hair spilling around her shoulders. “Of course not. He just wants to be able to play golf with me, that’s all. And he’d love it if you played with us.”

Howard picked up his marker again. “Yeah, right,” he said. “Me on a golf course.” He could feel an argument building, so it was with a sense of relief that he heard the telephone ring. “I’ll get it,” he said. It was Kelly Armstrong. Howard frowned and looked at his watch. She must be phoning from home, he realised.

Kelly told him about the call Lou Schoelen had made to his mother, and that the telephone company had identified a pay phone in Long Beach as the source. “Cole, I think I should go out there and co-ordinate the search,” she said. “I don’t think the Justin Davies credit card was a diversion, I think they really are on the West Coast. The President is due in Los Angeles in ten days, I think that’s what they’re planning for.”

“Well. .” said Howard.

“There’s a plane leaving in forty-five minutes, I’ve already booked a ticket. I’ll call you from our LA office.”

“I’m not sure if it’s. .”

“Cole, I’ve already conferred with Jake Sheldon, and he says I should go.”

Howard took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “In that case, Kelly, of course. Have a safe trip.” He banged the receiver down and went back to the sitting room where Lisa was looking up, clearly concerned. “That bitch Kelly Armstrong,” he said. “She’s trying to run rings around me again.”

“Well, I’m sure she won’t be any match for you, honey,” said Lisa.

Howard grinned. “Yeah, you might be right.”

The Amtrak Metroliner rolled into Washington and the platform was soon filled with bleary-eyed commuters. Joker was one of the last to leave the train. He’d managed to grab some sleep during the four and a half hour journey, though the pain in his side was still bothering him. By the time he got out of the station, there was a line waiting for taxis and he joined it. It was a pleasant, warm day and he took off his pea jacket, wincing as he did. The woman in front of him turned, looked him up and down, and moved away, a look of disgust on her face. Joker figured he must look and smell fairly nauseating. He hadn’t had a chance to wash or shave since leaving his hotel and he’d finished off the bottle of Famous Grouse on the train. The woman was elegant and wearing full make-up. Her clothes were obviously expensive and new. He could see that she was carrying her leather shoes in a Gucci bag and even the Reeboks she was wearing were pristine white. Joker wasn’t surprised at her reaction.

A black man in a threadbare overcoat was moving down the line, asking for change. The woman in Reeboks turned her back on the beggar, making a clicking sound of annoyance with her tongue. “Change? Got any change?” he repeated to her back. The beggar looked at Joker, saw the condition he was in, smiled, and moved on down the line, repeating his litany to uncaring ears.

Joker wondered if the two heavyweights in his hotel room had managed to untie themselves yet, and what they would do for clothes. He smiled to himself. The Frowner’s automatic was in Joker’s suitcase, wrapped up in the man’s trousers. It gave him a comforting feeling knowing that it was there. He doubted that they would come after him — they had no way of knowing where he’d gone. If Beaky Maguire had told them that he’d mentioned Patrick Farrell’s name, he reckoned that at most they’d telephone Farrell and tell him that someone had been asking questions about him and Bailey in New York.

Joker reached the front of the line and clambered into the back of his taxi. He told the driver to take him to the nearest cheap motel and slumped back in his seat. His first priority was to get a room, a few hours sleep in a bed, and a fresh bottle of whisky. Then he’d start looking for Farrell’s aircraft company.

Mary rolled over in the bed, luxuriating in the warmth of the blankets, and stretched. The clock radio on the bedside table was set to go off at nine, so she reached over lazily and switched it off. She didn’t have to check out of the room until midday so she was in no rush. A shower, a leisurely breakfast, and then she’d curl up with a good book. The only agenda she had was to wait for Matthew Bailey’s telephone call. She picked up the phone and ordered scrambled eggs, toast, coffee, orange juice and a copy of the Baltimore Sun, and then headed for the shower. In the bathroom she checked the roots of her dyed blonde hair and realised that she couldn’t go much longer without having it redone.

She was just finishing off her eggs when Bailey called. “M-M-Mary,” he stammered, “is everything okay?”

He sounded tense, but then he always did when talking to her. “Everything is exactly as it should be, Matthew,” she said. She gave him the address and telephone number of the house on Chesapeake Bay.

“We’re still going ahead?” he asked.

“Of course,” she replied. “The weather’s terrific here, and everybody else is already at the house. Why don’t you drop by Pat Farrell and check that he doesn’t have any problems before you come round to the house?”

“I will. I’ll check out the plane at the same time.”

“Good, that’s good.”

There was a pause on the line and then Bailey stammered: “M-M-Mary?”

“Yes?” she answered, tensing because she feared she was going to hear something uncomfortable.

There was another, shorter, pause. “Nothing,” he said. “I’ll see you.” The line went dead and Mary replaced the receiver. She was beginning to get a bad feeling about Bailey. She hoped he wasn’t getting cold feet.

Howard was in his office at 8 a.m. but Jake Sheldon had obviously beaten him to it. There was a message on Howard’s desk asking him to call Sheldon. He picked up the phone to call Sheldon’s office, but then had second thoughts and replaced the receiver. He walked down the corridor and pressed the bell at the side of the door to The Tomb. He waved at the surveillance camera above the door and the lock mechanism buzzed. He pushed open the door and stepped inside. The agent on duty was an old friend of Howard’s, a twenty-year man called Gene Eldridge. Eldridge had been sentenced to The Tomb for being unable to get his weight below 300 pounds, ostensibly for medical reasons but everybody knew it was because the Bureau top brass was trying to weed out all those agents who didn’t fit into its desired profile of young, healthy go-getters. He was a good-natured man, grey-haired with a florid expression, who had to have his suits tailor-made. He always wore a large handkerchief in his top pocket which he would produce with a flourish to mop his forehead at frequent intervals.

“Cole, how’s it going?” asked Eldridge. He was standing at the far end of the room wearing headphones. He waved Howard over. “Come and listen to this.” He slipped off the headphones and passed them to Howard. A man and a woman were talking on the line, though the man’s input consisted mainly of heavy-breathing and grunts. The woman, whose voice was husky and deep, was describing what she wanted to do with the man in graphic terms. “He’s a drug dealer the DEA are on to,” said Eldridge. “He makes one of these calls every morning.” The man on the line was building to a climax and Howard handed the headphones back to Eldridge, who unplugged them from the tape machine. “So what brings you back to The Tomb?” he asked.

“Tap on a house in Coronado, name of Schoelen. A call was made last night. Who was on then?”

“Eric Tiefenbacher,” replied Eldridge, wiping his forehead with his red cotton handkerchief. He sat down at the desk, his massive thighs squashing together like plump cushions. “Is there a problem?”

“No, it’s not a problem. He called Kelly Armstrong last night about a call made to the Schoelen home.”

“Yeah, the ice maiden. Eric’s had the hots for her for some time. Watch that one, Cole, she’s on the fast track. Her husband’s a big wheel in the Justice Department, isn’t he?”

“No idea. Can I hear the call?”

“Sure.” Eldridge pointed. “That’s the machine over there. Take the tape off and play it on the machine next to it. Just in case a call comes in while you’re playing it. You haven’t forgotten how to do it?”

Howard gave the overweight agent a withering look. “No, Gene, I haven’t forgotten.” Howard had spent seven months in The Tomb after the Bureau had first discovered his drinking problem. It wasn’t a time he liked to think about. He replaced the tape, and put the original on the machine Eldridge had indicated. He switched it on and the two agents listened to the conversation.

“Nice guy to be so worried about his dog,” said Eldridge. He handed the clipboard to Howard. “You wanna fill this in for me, too?”

Howard took the clipboard and wrote down the time the tape had been changed, followed by the tape counter number. “Like riding a bicycle,” he said, passing it back to Eldridge. “How long have you been here now, Gene?”

The big man shrugged. “Four years, I guess.”

“How come you don’t try to get out?”

“You mean why don’t I lose the weight? Hell, Cole, I’ve tried. I don’t even eat that much.”

Howard walked over to a wastepaper bin and looked down. There were several Burger King wrappings lying there, along with two empty packs of cookies. “Yeah, right,” he said.

“Besides, this isn’t too bad, you know? It’s regular hours, it’s clean, it’s safe, and it all goes towards my pension just the same. You were different, Cole. Your time in The Tomb was just a slap on the wrist, for me it’s an exile.” He wiped his forehead with the handkerchief. “So what’s with the tape?”

“I’m trying to track down the guy, I’m hoping that the conversation will tell me where he is.”

Eldridge looked at the clipboard. “According to the notes Tiefenbacher made, the call was placed from a public phone in Long Beach.”

“Yeah, that’s what it said, all right. Kelly’s out there.”

“But you think different?” asked Eldridge. Howard winked. “I suppose that means the ice maiden has rushed off on a wild goose chase?” Howard grinned. “What a fucking shame,” said Eldridge. “I guess she’ll be mighty pissed at young Tiefenbacher?”

“Okay if I borrow this tape for a while?” asked Howard.

“Hey, hold on a minute, Cole, you know as well as I do that the tape has to stay within the building. You can taint it as evidence if it leaves our jurisdiction.”

“It’s not evidence; we’re just trying to track down the guy, that’s all. I’ve a couple of experts I want to listen to the tape, and then I’ll bring it right back.”

“Today? You’ll bring it back today? On my shift?”

Howard nodded. “By lunchtime, Gene, I promise.” Back in his office, Howard dialled through to the Image Processing and Research Labs at Clayton Electronics. It was answered by McDowall, who sounded as if he was drawing on a cigarette. “This is Cole Howard, of the FBI,” said Howard. McDowall coughed and Howard smiled. “Is that a joint?” he asked.

“Jeez, you guys know everything,” said McDowall. “So what can we do for you, Special Agent Howard?”

Howard explained what he wanted and arranged to go round to the lab immediately. There was another message from Jake Sheldon on his desk, but Howard ignored it. Thirty minutes later he was in the laboratory with McDowall and Wyman. The sweet smell of marijuana still lingered in the air and McDowall had a slightly spaced-out look about him.

“That the tape?” asked Wyman.

Howard nodded and gave it to him. “The quality is good, but it’s the background I’m interested in.”

Wyman went over to a tape deck and motioned for the FBI agent to join him. “You’d better show me which bit you want,” he said.

They played the tape through to the point where Schoelen had called his mother. “This is it, from here on,” said Howard. “There’s some noise in the background as if he had the radio or TV on. Can you bring that up for me?”

“No problem,” said Wyman. “Compared with what we do with video, this is Stone Age stuff.” He looked over at McDowall, who was biting a thumbnail. “Bill, can you digitise this for me?”

“Sure thing,” said McDowall, who sat down at a computer. He pecked at a few keys. “Okay, run it,” he said.

Wyman pressed the play button and the conversation was replayed over a loudspeaker. When it had finished, McDowall gave Wyman a thumbs-up. “Got it,” he said. He hit more keys and the conversation played over the speaker again. “This is in the computer, not on tape,” Wyman said to Howard.

Wyman pulled a chair over next to McDowall and sat down. The two men talked together in rapid jargon, leaving Howard in the dark as to what they were doing. For all he knew, they could be speaking another language. McDowall’s fingers played across the keyboard, with Wyman offering advice, and lines of numbers scrolled across the screen. After ten minutes, Wyman nodded and sat back, a big grin splitting his face. “Try it,” he said. McDowall pressed a key and the speaker crackled into life. This time there were no voices. There were some musical notes, then a burst of what could have been static, then muffled voices.

“Sounds like TV, for sure,” said Wyman.

“Can you enhance the voices?” Howard asked.

“We can take out the higher frequencies, that should take the edge off it,” said McDowall. He bent over the keyboard, his hair swinging forward, and his head moved in time with the pecking of his fingers like a small boy during a piano lesson. When he replayed it, there was a noticeable improvement, though Howard still couldn’t work out what was being said.

“Keep playing it,” he said.

“Put it in a loop,” suggested Wyman.

McDowall pressed more keys and the section was repeated over and over as the three men listened.

“That sound, the electronic noise, it’s sort of familiar,” mused Wyman.

“I’ll try to enhance it,” said McDowall. “I’ll mute the lower frequencies first, see if that helps.”

The three men listened as McDowall played on the computer keyboard. It came to Howard in a burst of inspiration, and he laughed out loud. “It’s a phaser!” he cried.

“Man, you’re right,” said McDowall.

“Beam me up, Scottie!” cheered Wyman.

“Guys, I can’t thank you enough,” said Howard. He took the tape and headed back to the office. On the way out, Wyman pointed out that phasers were used both in Star Trek and its successor, Star Trek: The Next Generation.

When he arrived back at FBI headquarters, there was a third message from Sheldon on the desk, a note saying that Bill McDowall had called, and a series of faxes from the State Department listing overseas VIPs who were due to visit the United States in the coming months. As he called McDowall, he screwed up both notes and lobbed them through the air and into his wastepaper basket. McDowall answered, and gleefully told Howard that he had done some further work on the end of the phone call, which was still stored in their computer, and that they were reasonably sure that they could pick out Spock’s voice — it was Star Trek and not its successor. Howard thanked him. Knowing that Star Trek had been on television when Schoelen made his phone call was a major step forward. At first he’d planned to ring around all the television stations but on the drive back to his office he’d had a brainwave and instead he rang the publishers of TV Guide, the weekly magazine which published television programme listings throughout the country. He found a co-operative editor there who took only a few minutes to identify those stations which had been playing the science fiction show. There were six in all. The phone company gave him the numbers of the stations, and he called them one at a time, identifying himself as an FBI agent and asking for the programme controller. In each case he asked if they would run the tape of the show broadcast the previous evening and see if a phaser had been fired at about twenty past the hour, the time of the call. Most thought at first he was joking, but Howard gave them the number of FBI headquarters in Phoenix so that they could call back and check that his request was genuine.

Eventually he had arranged with all six stations to check their shows and call him back. The first two calls reported no phasers at the time Howard was interested in, but he struck gold with the third. Captain Kirk had indeed fired his weapon, and seconds later he’d had a conversation with Spock before beaming up to their starship. The station was WDCA-TV which served the Baltimore-Washington area. Howard smiled as he hung up. He had a good feeling about the way things were going. The remaining three stations rang back within ten minutes of the WDCA-TV call and all were negative. Howard was elated. He finished his coffee and then called up to Jake Sheldon’s office. Sheldon’s secretary told him to go right up.

Sheldon raised one eyebrow when Howard entered his office. “Been out of the office, Cole?” he asked softly.

“Yeah, sorry about that, but I was chasing up the Lou Schoelen telephone tap,” he said, dropping into the chair opposite Sheldon’s desk. “I didn’t get your message until a few minutes ago.”

Sheldon adjusted the cuffs of his immaculate blue suit. “I understood that Kelly was chasing up that lead,” he said.

“I’m not convinced that the call came from Long Beach,” said Howard. He noticed that there were three files on Sheldon’s desk. He tried to read the names on them but they were obscured by the man’s arms.

“According to Kelly, the call was made from a public phone there. Several of the Barrett rifles which were sold through West Coast dealers are still unaccounted for, and the President is going to be in LA for the anniversary of the 1992 riots. The evidence seems pretty strong to me.” He linked his fingers on the desk and waited for Howard to reply.

Howard smiled thinly. Kelly hadn’t mentioned that she’d heard back from the gun dealers. Yet another secret she’d kept from him. “Lou Schoelen was a telephone hacker,” said Howard. “He was almost busted by AT amp; T while he was a SEAL for using and selling black boxes, the gizmos that get you long-distance and international calls for free. He’s perfectly capable of rerouting his calls and sending us on a wild goose chase.”

Sheldon frowned. “Did you tell Kelly this?”

“I didn’t get the chance,” Howard replied. He told the director about the analysis of the tape and how he’d identified the television station on the East Coast.

“So you’re saying that Schoelen made the call from the Baltimore-Washington area?”

“Seems that way,” agreed Howard. “And from what he said to his mother, whatever it is they have planned is going to take place within the next two weeks. I think I should go to Washington.”

Sheldon nodded. “It’s worth a try. You should speak to Bob Sanger while you’re there.” He ran a hand through his pure white hair. “There’s something else you should know,” he said. “I had a call from the director of the Counter-Terrorism office in New York while you were out. His name’s Ed Mulholland. Seems they’ve identified three of the photographs you sent to them. One is Mary Hennessy, an IRA activist who is on the run from the British. One of the men is Matthew Bailey, another member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. He’s been responsible for the deaths of four policemen in Northern Ireland.” Sheldon passed over two of the three files. Howard opened the top one. It contained a handful of faxes, including a file photograph of Bailey which was a close match of the ones generated by Theodore Clayton’s computer experts.

“He’s a sniper?” asked Howard as he flicked through the faxes.

“He’s used a Kalashnikov in Belfast, but more as an assault weapon than sniping,” said Sheldon. “He uses explosives, mainly.”

Howard opened the second file and looked down at a photograph of the blonde woman. It was the same woman who had been pictured in the desert. “This doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Why would the IRA be involved with SEAL snipers?”

“Expertise,” said Sheldon. “Before the 1994 ceasefire they were using a former Green Beret to shoot British soldiers across the border between the north and south. We know who the guy is, we know he’s based in Cork on the west coast of Ireland and we know he uses a Barrett.”

“So why didn’t the IRA use him in the States?”

“Because as soon as he sets foot here, he’ll be arrested. Sheldon passed a third file across the desk. “The second man is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez.” The FBI agent opened it and saw several surveillance photographs of the moustached man with the receding hairline. “You probably know him as Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan terrorist responsible for kidnapping OPEC ministers in Vienna in 1975 and a machine-gun attack at Tel Aviv Airport which left twenty-five dead in 1972, and a whole host of other atrocities. We’re still trying to find out how he got away from the French. It would never have happened if we’d caught him, I can tell you. All sorts of alarm bells are ringing over in New York, Cole. It was assumed he was in hiding somewhere in the Middle East. If he’s now in this country. .” He left the sentence unfinished.

Howard scanned the file. Like every law-enforcement officer in the world, he was all too well aware of who Carlos was. There was a list of the terrorist groups he’d been connected with, and it read like a list of Who’s Who in International Terrorism: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Turkish Popular Liberation Front, the Quebec Liberation Front, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Japanese Red Army, the Organisation for the Armed Arab Struggle. There was, however, no mention of the IRA. He looked at the photographs again. There was no doubt that it was the same man that had been filmed in the Arizona desert.

“Have you told Sanger yet?” Howard asked.

Sheldon shook his head. “I wanted to talk to you first. I think it would be helpful if you saw Ed Mulholland in New York for a briefing from Counter-Terrorism. I’ll call the White House while you’re en route. Cole, now that we know who is involved, this has the Bureau’s absolute top priority. In view of the way the investigation has progressed, Ed Mulholland will be taking command.”

The news hit Howard like a punch in the stomach. “I have everything under control,” he protested. “I don’t see that. .”

Sheldon held up a hand to silence him. “I understand your feelings, Cole, but it has now become an anti-terrorism matter. We need specialist input, and Ed has seniority. It has to be that way.”

Howard wanted to argue, but he knew that it would be pointless. If a terrorist such as Carlos was involved, then it was only natural that Counter-Terrorism would become involved. And if the section’s director wanted to handle the investigation, he would obviously be the ranking agent.

“I’ve already agreed with Ed that you continue working on the investigation, and that you report to us both, in tandem. The background you already have will be invaluable, and Ed is keen to have you on his team for this one. Is that okay with you?”

Howard sighed. At least he wasn’t being taken off the case. “Based here or in New York?” he asked.

“Wherever Ed wants you,” said Sheldon, “though from what you’ve told me it looks as if your focus is going to be the East Coast. Do you want to call Kelly back and have her go to New York with you?”

Howard fought back the urge to smile and looked steadily at Sheldon. “She seemed very enthusiastic about following up on the Barrett rifles,” he said, “so maybe we should let her carry on with that. Manpower isn’t going to be a problem, I suppose?”

“Ed will assign you all the men you need on the East Coast and the Secret Service will give you all the help they can.”

“We’re definitely assuming that Carlos and the IRA are after the President?” Howard asked. He thought of the State Department list on his desk. “He’s always been pro-Irish, right? Isn’t it more likely that the IRA would go for a British target?”

Sheldon settled back in his chair. “According to Mulholland, the world’s top terrorists were in Baghdad in the summer of 1991, summoned by Saddam Hussein. Carlos was there, so were the IRA. There were people from the Abu Nidal organisation, the Japanese Red Army, and anyone else who was prepared to do Saddam’s dirty work. He’s long been a supporter of terrorist organisations and after Desert Storm he decided to call in favours owed. We don’t know for sure what Saddam had planned, but it’s clear he was planning revenge against the countries who forced him out of Kuwait.”

“And that’s what our anti-terrorist people think this is about? Revenge for Desert Storm?”

Sheldon nodded. “Remember the attempt to kill George Bush in Kuwait in April ‘93? The car bomb? That was Saddam’s work.”

“And we retaliated with a cruise missile attack on Baghdad. Didn’t that teach him a lesson?”

Sheldon smiled. “The man won’t rest until he’s had his revenge, Cole. It’s an Arab thing. And each time he loses face he becomes even more determined.”

Howard shrugged. “I can’t think why the IRA would want to be involved in a Presidential assassination, but if they were acting for Iraq, then it makes more sense, I guess.”

“They could also be doing it for the oldest reason of all — money,” said Sheldon. “Do you know much about the Irish situation?”

“I know that the IRA are fighting for independence for Ireland. They want the British troops out, and self-determination.”

Sheldon nodded. “That’s fine as far as it goes, but there’s more to it than that. It’s more a struggle for power and money. And if this Jackal character is paying enough, I’m sure Bailey and Hennessy will do exactly what he wants.”

“Even if he wanted to assassinate the President? You think they’d do that?”

“They’ve committed unthinkable atrocities in Britain,” said Sheldon. “Some years ago they blew up Lord Mountbatten while he was in a small boat with a group of children. The boat was reduced to splinters. . there was nothing left of the people. They buried empty coffins.”

Howard shuddered, but he still wasn’t convinced. He could feel a growing sense of panic in his stomach and he tried to quell it. “Now that we know of the IRA involvement, perhaps we should be looking at the possibility of alternative targets,” he suggested.

“British, you mean,” said Sheldon. Howard nodded. “Agreed, but I think we have to assume that the President is at risk, until we know the full extent of the IRA involvement,” he said.

“What about former Presidents?” asked Howard. “If Saddam went for Bush in ’93, maybe he’ll try again.”

“Bush’s people have been informed and he’ll be keeping out of the public eye for a while. The same goes for high-ranking military officers. But the President can’t do that. He can’t hide.”

Howard felt a sudden wave of apprehension. He sensed the assignment getting out of control; there were so many angles, so many things he had to do, and he was beginning to fear that the job was too much for him. He picked up the files and went back to his office. In the old days he would have reached for a bottle to kill the butterflies, but he hadn’t touched a drop for almost four years and had no intention of starting now. He sat down heavily at his desk, looked at his watch and pulled open his bottom drawer. In a slim black book he found mention of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting which was due to start in an hour’s time. When he’d first stopped drinking, he’d attended an AA meeting pretty much every day. The clinic which Theodore Clayton had sent him to made giving up easy, it was as secure as most Federal prisons and Howard had been under twenty-four hour a day supervision while he underwent detoxification. Later, while he was in group and individual therapy, there was so much to do that he didn’t have the time to miss drinking. The clinic, hidden away on an exclusive estate to the south of Phoenix, prohibited visitors or any contact with outsiders for the first month, and it forced him to address his alcohol problem and to accept that it was an illness, not a weakness.

When he left the clinic, thirty pounds heavier and feeling better than he’d felt in more than five years, his counsellor’s last words were a reminder to attend daily AA meetings for at least a month. Howard remembered how he’d smiled and shook the man’s hand, thinking that he had his alcoholism licked. Within three hours the craving for a drink had reduced him to a cold sweat and shaking hands and he’d reached for the slim black book.

Now, he attended AA meetings at least once a week, more if he was gripped by the craving for a drink. An hour. He had time to call New York first. He picked up his copy of the FBI’s internal phone directory and looked up the Bureau’s Counter-Terrorism unit with responsibility for the IRA. He found it under Counter-Terrorism (Europe) and saw that their office was based in Federal Plaza in Manhattan. The director in charge was listed as O’Donnell Jr, H. C. All the FBI’s offices were linked through a secure internal communications system so he could phone internally and not have to use an outside line. He dialled through to O’Donnell’s extension but after six rings it was answered by a secretary who informed Howard that he was out of the office. Howard ran his finger down to the list of agents in the Irish section and asked for the first name there: Clutesi, D. The secretary transferred his call and this time a bored-sounding man answered. Howard identified himself and explained that Ed Mulholland had sent over files on Bailey, Hennessy and the Jackal. He asked the New York agent if he’d check two more names for IRA connections: Rich Lovell and Lou Schoelen. Neither was known to Clutesi. “You want me to try the RUC or MI5?” he offered.

“RUC?”

“Royal Ulster Constabulary,” explained Clutesi. “The Northern Ireland police. They’ve got a hell of a good intelligence network. And MI5 is the British Intelligence Service, they keep their own files on Irish terrorists. We’ve set up a system for information-sharing. I can run all the names through their files.”

“Pictures, too?” asked Howard, pulling his own computer terminal closer and switching on the VDU.

“Sure,” said Clutesi. “It’ll take time, though. Our computers aren’t linked yet, we have to do it through messengers. The MI5 files might take a bit longer than the RUC. They seem to be dragging their feet lately. Politics, you know?”

“I understand,” said Howard, who wasn’t sure that he did.

“Do you know much about the IRA?” Clutesi asked.

“Not much,” admitted Howard. “Just what I read in the newspapers.”

Clutesi laughed. “Yeah, well we both know how reliable they are, right? I’ll send you a couple of recent background papers the CIA put together. I think you’ll find them useful. And I’ve a briefing paper our director, Hank O’Donnell, wrote for internal consumption last year.”

Howard thanked Clutesi and told him he’d be in New York the following day. He spent the time before his AA meeting reading the files on Matthew Bailey and Mary Hennessy. Bailey was twenty-six years old and had been what the IRA call ‘an active volunteer’ since he was nineteen. The RUC had three warrants out for his arrest for a series of murders in Northern Ireland. He was involved in the ambush of two police officers who were gunned down with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, though there was some doubt as to exactly who pulled the trigger. He was also seen in an East Belfast police station shortly before a bomb exploded in the reception area, killing an RUC officer and injuring six members of the public. Another RUC officer was killed in a car-bombing and equipment similar to that used in the device was found at an apartment where Bailey was known to have visited. The evidence against Bailey seemed to Howard to be conclusive, but even more damning was the testimony of a highly placed IRA activist who turned police informer in 1993 and who had already been responsible for the trial and imprisonment of more than a dozen terrorists.

The file included a note from the RUC that Bailey had left Northern Ireland for the South, followed by reports that he had flown to the United States. An FBI anti-terrorist unit working on the West Coast had almost trapped Bailey in a sting operation to sell him a ground-to-air missile, but he had disappeared only hours before he was due to take delivery. The Counter-Terrorism (Europe) unit had reported seeing Bailey in New York at the end of the previous year, mainly entering several Manhattan bars known to be centres of IRA fund-raising. The last sighting had been in November. Since then, nothing.

Mary Hennessy was forty-nine years old and a widow, according to her file. Her husband had been killed in a shoot-out three years previously when his car was ambushed by what was believed to have been a Protestant hit squad. Liam Hennessy had been a leading Belfast lawyer but had also acted as a senior adviser to Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. The men responsible for the attack were never caught, and the file detailed a speech Mary Hennessy had made at the funeral in which she accused the British Government of conducting a political assassination. She believed that it was the SAS who murdered her husband as part of a British plan to obliterate the IRA as a viable terrorist organisation.

In the file was a separate FBI research paper which went into the alleged shoot-to-kill operation in some detail, though its resolution was inconclusive. What was known for sure was that some two dozen top IRA activists had died within a four-week period which followed the downing of a 737 airliner en route from London to Rome. The IRA had never officially claimed responsibility for the bombing of the jet, but the device was known to have been planted by a female bomb-maker who was killed when the SAS stormed the London flat which she and other IRA members were using as a base. Following the death of the woman, Maggie MacDermott, and her colleagues, a six-month bombing campaign came to a sudden halt, leaving the British authorities in no doubt that the IRA cell had been responsible. Several days after the downing of the jet, in which more than one hundred people died, two IRA terrorists were shot dead in a pub in Dublin by masked gunmen who were believed to be members of the Ulster Defence Volunteers, a Protestant para-military group. More assassinations followed and it seemed as if there was a tricolour-draped coffin being lowered into the ground every day. Several top-ranking IRA chiefs died in suspicious road accidents, running off cliffs at high speed or smashing in to trees on perfectly clear roads, and there were half a dozen supposed suicides, varying from a bathroom electrocution to self-inflicted shotgun wounds. Within four weeks the IRA was totally demoralised. Many of its members fled from Northern Ireland to the South or to the United States.

British newspapers ran screaming headlines about a shoot-to-kill operation being sponsored or encouraged by the government, but generally the press and the public seemed to think that whatever was happening was a just retribution for the terror the IRA had wreaked in the United Kingdom. That there was indeed a shoot-to-kill policy was vehemently denied by the Prime Minister and the Army, and no evidence was ever produced to prove beyond a doubt that the killings were government-sanctioned. However, one of the FBI’s analysts had run several statistical tests on the sudden deaths and determined that the odds of the twenty-four assassinations, suicides and road accidents occurring within a four-week period were of the order of six billion to one. There was no doubt that the killings were premeditated and the work of one group, but whether it was the SAS, MI5, the Army, or Protestant extremists, was still a mystery and one that was never likely to be solved. Whoever was responsible, the end result was the temporary destruction of the IRA as a terrorist threat. Most of those killed were the leaders and the planners, and without them the IRA was a headless snake, thrashing around waiting to die.

For a time it was Mary Hennessy who had tried to pull the organisation together, beginning with her anti-British speech at her husband’s funeral. She called in vain for a public inquiry into the IRA deaths but her appeals were ignored and a year after burying Liam Hennessy she went underground, becoming a fully-fledged terrorist for the first time in her life. She organised a bombing campaign in Belfast which resulted in the destruction of an RUC station and an Army barracks. When Northern Ireland became too dangerous for her she moved over the border. From the South she made frequent forays back into Northern Ireland, her attacks always aimed at the British forces or the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Her fight was not religious in any way, it was political and aimed at those she blamed for the death of her husband. According to the FBI file she was responsible for the death of three undercover SAS officers who had been caught operating in the border country. Her torture of the men had been especially brutal and she’d been branded by the tabloid press as ‘The Black Widow’. It appeared as if she had become mentally unbalanced after the death of her husband, and she was described in one RUC report as borderline psychotic. Mary Hennessy had never come close to being captured, and the last report in the file said that she was living close to Dublin, staying with various IRA sympathisers and still trying to rebuild the terrorist organisation.

Appended to the file was a comprehensive list of all the IRA’s terrorist attacks over the previous twenty years. Howard was familiar with many of the atrocities: car bombs, sniper attacks, fire bombs, torture. No-one seemed to be beyond the range of the terrorists. They’d come close to killing Margaret Thatcher at a Conservative Party Conference by blowing up the hotel she was staying at, and during the run-up to the Gulf War they’d managed to launch home-made mortars against Number Ten Downing Street while Prime Minister John Major was meeting with his War Cabinet. Judges, Army officers, politicians, all had been assassinated by IRA hit squads, and for every terrorist captured and imprisoned, another dozen were waiting to take their place.

Howard looked at his watch and realised it was time to leave. He drove quickly through the afternoon traffic and reached the office where the meeting was to be held shortly before two o’clock. The office belonged to a leading lawyer whom Howard had met on several occasions. There were more than a dozen people there, most of them men and most, like Howard, wearing business suits. A taxi driver served coffee as they took their places in the chairs which had been brought into the plush office. The lawyer allowed the large office to be used for AA meetings once a month, but Howard had seen him at other venues: basketball courts, scruffy basements in run-down buildings, back rooms in public libraries.

The group sat and listened to one of the members, an out-of-town fertiliser salesman called Gordon, tell his life story. It was depressingly familiar: a good job, steady income, a wife and child, more stress than he could cope with, and a descent into the bottle. Gordon told the group he hadn’t had a drink for six months, and he was warmly applauded.

Howard was next to speak and he took his place in front of the two ranks of chairs. The first time he’d attended an AA meeting he’d been more than a little cynical, he’d considered the public breast-beating to be little more than mental masturbation, that the speakers were just taking pleasure from publicly reopening old wounds. He had trouble too in dealing with the religious aspects of the meetings and the reliance on God, until a long-term AA member had suggested that he think of God as a Group of Drunks, and from that point on he’d become a convert. Now, after almost four years of regular attendance, Howard knew how valuable the meetings were in the battle against the bottle, and that telling others about his setbacks and successes strengthened his own resolve.

He put his coffee cup on the desk and clasped his hands behind his back. “My name’s Cole, and I’m an alcoholic,” he said. “Hi, Cole,” the group chanted. “It’s been almost four years since I had a drink,” he continued. The group applauded and there were several cries of “Well done”. Howard waited until the clapping died down. “I didn’t know I had a drinking problem, I guess no-one in the office had the courage to tell me. But I was making mistakes, both at work and at home. There were arguments with my co-workers and fights with my wife. Everything came to a head when I crashed our car. Well, it was my wife’s car, really, but I was driving. We both had our seat belts on, or I’m sure we’d have died. I hit a truck, we went off the road, and the next thing I knew, I was in hospital. My father-in-law found out, and he personally booked me into a clinic to dry out.”

The group nodded encouragingly. He knew that some of those present, including the lawyer, had heard his story several times, but they still expressed support. “I’m grateful to my father-in-law, but recently I’ve found myself resenting the influence he has on my life. On all aspects of my life. At the time I had a drinking problem he went to my employer and made sure that I kept my job, and I’m grateful to him for that, but now he interferes at home, he tries to influence my children, he seems to be coming between me and my wife. That puts me under a lot of stress, and that makes me want to drink again. I know that I have to learn to stop resenting him, but it’s difficult. I know that he cares about his daughter very much, and that he wants what’s best for her. God, there are times when I want a drink so bad. It’s worse now than it’s ever been. I know that it would be easy to give in, to pick up the bottle and start drinking again, but I know that would be the biggest mistake I could make. Alcoholism is a disease, and it’s a disease for which there’s no cure. I’ll be an alcoholic for the rest of my life, but that doesn’t mean I have to drink. I can fight it, but it’s one day at a time. I just have to accept that some days will be harder than others.” The group applauded again, and Howard returned to his seat, feeling revitalised and with the urge for alcohol in a temporary retreat.

Todd Otterman sat in reception, tapping the file against his knee. The hotel foyer was busy, with several members of a dental convention queuing up to check out. Bellboys scurried back and forth, running suitcases outside, while girls in black and white uniforms processed the guests as quickly as possible, their smiles starting to wear thin.

Otterman had never met Gilbert Feinstein but he recognised the type as soon as he stepped out of the lift. Hair too long and untidy to be fashionable, a slight stoop, and eyes that continually sought the floor. According to the file Feinstein was twenty-four years old and had been working in the hotel kitchens for the past year. He had dropped out of high school and had a succession of minimum wage jobs, interspersed with short prison sentences for drug possession. It was after his second spell in prison that he’d written the letter to the President, spelling out in no uncertain terms what he wanted to do to him and his family. The letter had been one of the more graphic received at the White House, and the details of what Feinstein had planned for the First Lady’s cat had raised a few smiles among the Secret Service agents.

Feinstein went over to the reception desk and spoke to one of the girls. She pointed to where Otterman was sitting and Feinstein’s shoulders slumped as if he knew what was coming. He walked over and stood before the Secret Service agent. “You wanted to see me?” he said, his voice unsteady.

Otterman flicked open his ID and showed it to Feinstein. “You know what it’s about, Mr Feinstein?”

Feinstein nodded. “Did you have to come here, to my work?” he said, his voice a monotone. “You could lose me my job.”

Otterman motioned to the seat next to his. “Sit down, Mr Feinstein. You’ve been through this before so let’s make it as painless as possible, shall we?” Feinstein sat down and began to bite his nails. “So, how do you feel about the President these days?” Otterman’s tone was conversational, almost friendly.

“He’s doing a wonderful job,” sneered Feinstein. “Economy’s looking good, foreign policy’s never been better, everything’s just hunky-dory.”

“Had any more thoughts about what you’d like to do to his family?”

Feinstein sighed. “Look, I wrote that letter two years ago. I’d taken a couple of tablets, I was as high as a kite, I don’t even remember mailing it.”

“I understand that, but unfortunately it stays on file.”

“But I didn’t mean it! I was just a kid, a crazy kid.”

One of the girls at reception looked over. “Try not to raise your voice, Mr Feinstein,” said Otterman quietly.

“You’re persecuting me!” Feinstein hissed.

“Mr Feinstein, we’ve never met before today.”

“Not you personally. I mean the White House, the Secret Service. You won’t leave me alone.”

“Once you threaten the President of the United States, your name goes on file and it stays there. What do you think? You think we should just ignore someone when they threaten the President? Have you forgotten what you wrote? I’ve got a copy here if you want to refresh your memory.”

“No, I remember,” said Feinstein. “What is it you want?”

“You probably know that the President is coming to Baltimore next week.”

“Yeah, I read that in the Sun.”

“So we think it would be a good idea if you left the city for a while. Your parents live in Chicago, right?” Feinstein nodded and continued to chew his fingernails. “We’d like you to visit Chicago for a few days. From Monday to Thursday.”

“Not again,” said Feinstein, “you’re not running me out of town again?”

“It’s not just you, it’s everybody on the watch list, so don’t take it personally. You leave town on Monday, and you check in with our office in Chicago.” He handed Feinstein a card. “This agent is expecting to see you on Monday evening, and you’ll check with him twice a day until Thursday morning. Then you can come back.”

Feinstein looked as if he was about to burst into tears. “I don’t believe this, I don’t believe you can screw with my life like this. This is America.”

“It’s precisely because it’s America that we can screw with your life,” said Otterman.

“I made one mistake, and I have to pay for it forever.”

“No, you’ve made lots of mistakes, but you made one big one, and that’s what you’re paying for,” said Otterman. “You know the procedure; if we don’t hear from you in Chicago we’ll come looking for you here. And you don’t want that, do you?”

“I’ll lose my job, I don’t have any vacation days coming,” Feinstein whined.

“Tell them you’re sick, tell them anything. Just get out of the city.”

Tears welled up in Feinstein’s eyes. “When will it be over? When will you leave me alone?”

Otterman shrugged. “You’re only on our watch list, it’s not as if you’re one of our quarterlies. If you behave and don’t write any more silly letters, you could be off the watch list in three years or so.”

Feinstein shook his head and wiped his eyes. “It’s not fair,” he sobbed.

“Son,” said Otterman, standing up and straightening the creases of his black suit pants, “life isn’t fair.” He walked out of the hotel, leaving Feinstein alone with his tears. Otterman had two more visits to make before midday.

The chambermaid knocked nervously on the door. “Mr O’Brien?” she called. There was no answer so she knocked louder. She knew that Damien O’Brien tended to arrive back at the hotel in the early hours of the morning and stayed in bed late, and she knew better than to barge in unannounced. On one occasion she’d used her pass key and walked in to find him sprawled naked on the bed, an empty bottle of whisky in his hand, fast asleep and snoring like a freight train. It wasn’t an experience she cared to repeat.

“Mr O’Brien!” she shouted, and used her key to rap on the door. “Housekeeping!” She looked at her watch. It was well past the time when he normally left for work, so perhaps he had left the Do Not Disturb sign on his doorhandle by mistake. She slid her key in the lock and turned it gingerly, placing her ear against the wood and listening for any sound. “Housekeeping, Mr O’Brien,” she repeated. The curtains were drawn but they were old and threadbare and enough light seeped in for her to see without switching the lights on.

She stepped into the room, a clean sheet and towel draped over one arm, and called out again, just in case he was in the bathroom. She gasped when she saw the feet sticking out from behind the bed, thinking that he was drunk again and that he’d fallen onto the floor. For the first time she noticed a buzzing noise, the sound an alarm clock might make if it was on a low setting. She walked further into the room and peered nervously around the bed. “Mr O’Brien?” she said, her voice trembling. She realised with a jolt that there were two pairs of legs, white and hairy, tied at the ankles. She dropped the sheet and towel as her hands flew to her mouth and she backed away, her breath coming in small, forced, gasps.

She ran down the stairs to reception and got the day manager, who picked up a baseball bat which he kept behind his desk. He held it in both hands as he went into the room, switching the light on and calling out the guest’s name. The manager had been in the hotel business a long time, and he knew that people did strange things in hotel rooms: they tied each other up, they took drugs, they did things to each other they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, do in their own homes. He’d once found a woman swathed in polythene and tied spreadeagled to a bed after her boyfriend had collapsed in the bathroom with a heart attack. It would take a lot to surprise the manager. The buzzing noise got louder as he got closer to the end of the bed. He used his bat to gingerly prod one of the feet. There was no reaction so he stepped up to the window where he could look down on both bodies. They were men — big, heavy men — bound and gagged. There was blood, a lot of blood, and the manager could see several bullet wounds, gaping holes in the chests and heads. Flies buzzed around the wounds, feeding on the still-wet blood.

Howard drove home from the AA meeting to pack. If the snipers were indeed based on the East Coast it would be some time before he would be back in Phoenix. Lisa was in the kitchen, chopping herbs with a large knife and reading from a cookbook. “Home for lunch?” she said.

“I wish,” he said. He explained that he was flying to New York and that for the foreseeable future he would be working with the Counter-Terrorism section.

“Oh God,” she sighed, “what about dinner tonight?”

“I’m sorry, Lisa, you’ll have to handle it without me.”

“But Cole, this has been planned for weeks!” She threw the knife down on the chopping block and stood with her hands on her hips, her eyes blazing. “You’ll just have to tell them you can’t go!” Howard laughed, amused at her defiance. Only the daughter of Theodore Clayton would think of standing up to the FBI. His reaction only made her all the more angry. “You can fly out tomorrow,” she said, “A few hours won’t make a difference.”

“It’s an important case, honey, and a few hours might make all the difference. It’s the case your father has been helping me with.” Howard knew that invoking her father’s name was his best chance of defusing her anger.

Lisa shook her head, took off her apron and threw it down on top of the knife. “Cole, I don’t know why I put up with this,” she said.

“It’s my job,” he said, lamely.

“Well, it needn’t be,” she said. “You could accept the job Daddy keeps offering. Head of Security at Clayton Electronics would be a great career move. It would pay much more than the Bureau gives you. And you wouldn’t be sent off to the other side of the country at a minute’s notice.” Howard held his hands up in surrender. It was an argument they’d had many times, and it was one he’d never managed to win. “And it would mean the children would get to see more of their father,” she pressed.

“I have to pack,” said Howard, and he beat a hasty retreat. Lisa followed him up the stairs and stood behind him as he grabbed clean shirts from his wardrobe and dropped them into an overnight bag.

“How long will you be away?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest.

“I’ve no idea,” he said over his shoulder. He had the uneasy feeling that if he looked her in the eye he’d be turned to stone on the spot.

“I don’t know what you think you’re achieving by selling your soul to the FBI,” she said.

“Better the devil I know. .” muttered Howard.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said, her voice hard and accusing. “Are you saying that Daddy’s the devil, is that what you’re implying?”

Howard zipped his bag closed. “It’s an expression, Lisa, that’s all. I mean that FBI work is what I do, it’s what I do well. I don’t want to be a lapdog for the great Theodore Clayton. I don’t want him to own me.”

“Own you?” she said, her voice rising in pitch. “Who paid for this house? The car? You think we could live like this if it wasn’t for my father’s money? If it wasn’t for my father you’d still be buried in the Surveillance Department. It’s my father you owe, not the Bureau. Sometimes I think you forget where your loyalties should lie.”

Howard froze and for several seconds he stared at her, unable to believe the cruelty in her voice. “Thank you, Lisa,” he said softly. “Thank you for that.”

He walked by her, down the stairs and out of the front door. Part of him hoped that she’d run after him or call him back, but he wasn’t surprised when she let him go without a word. As he drove away, he could feel her sullen anger, sitting over the house like a storm cloud waiting to break.

It was a hot day and Joker turned up the air-conditioning in the rented Chevrolet Lumina. It was a big, comfortable American car and Joker enjoyed the way it handled. It had been a long time since he’d been at the wheel of a car and he’d forgotten the sheer pleasure it gave him to drive down an open road at speed. His eyes flicked to the speedometer and he braked to keep within the 55 mph speed limit. From his jacket pocket he took a green pack of Wrigley’s chewing-gum and unwrapped it with his left hand before popping the gum into his mouth. He’d picked up a bottle of whisky from a liquor store and had a couple of slugs for breakfast, and if he was unlucky enough to be pulled in by a cop it would be better to smell of spearmint than whisky.

His side still ached where he’d been kicked and when he’d woken up that morning it was to find the flesh a vibrant shade of green. Luckily, it seemed there was nothing broken, but it was going to be painful for some time. The dashboard clock read 13:30. Joker had been up since 8 a.m. and an hour later he’d visited the cuttings library of the Washington Post. He’d asked to see the papers for the week when Pete Manyon had been killed and had drunk a styrofoam cup of black coffee as he’d read the articles detailing the discovery of the body, its identification, and its eventual export back to the United Kingdom. In none of the papers did the story merit more than a dozen paragraphs. Joker had been surprised to find out how violent a city Washington was. He’d assumed that because it was the political heart of the country, it would be one of the safer places to be, but in fact it was the murder capital of the United States with drive-by killings and torture regular occurrences and usually drug-related. When Manyon’s body was first discovered, the police had assumed that he had been involved in the drugs trade because of the way he had been tortured. Practically skinned alive, the paper said, and suggested it had been the work of one of the city’s vicious Jamaican gangs. His fingers had been systematically cut off with a pair of bolt cutters or a very sharp knife and he had been castrated. There were rope burns on his wrists and ankles. According to the paper, Manyon had died from loss of blood.

In the UK such a killing would have been front page news but in the Washington paper it was tucked inside and was one of five murders reported that day. There had been a suggestion from one of the Homicide detectives investigating the case that the fingers had been removed to hinder identification, but Joker knew that wasn’t why Manyon had been mutilated. The first article had carried a photograph of Manyon’s face, no doubt cosmetically tidied up by some helpful undertaker, and several days later a motel manager had come forward saying that one of his guests had disappeared leaving his clothes, and passport, behind. The passport photograph matched the face of the man in the morgue, and Pete Manyon was identified as John Ballantine, a life insurance salesman from Bristol, England, who was on an extended vacation.

The last article appeared ten days after the body had been discovered and detailed the arrival in Washington of Ballantine’s sister and how she had flown back to England with the body. There were no further stories, and Joker assumed that the murder had remained on the Washington police’s unsolved list. It hadn’t been hard for Joker to imagine what Manyon had gone through during the hours he’d been tortured. He’d been in the farmhouse in Northern Ireland when Mary Hennessy had gone to work on Mick Newmarch. Joker rubbed his left wrist as he drove. It still bore the scars he’d made trying to wrench himself free from the handcuffs Hennessy had used to secure him to the radiator. Newmarch had told them everything, of course, no amount of training or spirit could withstand the sort of things Hennessy did with her knife. Joker would never forget Newmarch’s screams, nor the look of pleasure, almost rapture, on Mary Hennessy’s face as she’d used the blade.

A horn sounded behind him like the warning cry of some prehistoric monster and Joker realised he’d been drifting across the lanes of the highway. A huge truck roared by, the name of a meat packer on the side, its massive wheels only inches from his door. His knuckles were almost white, so hard had he been gripping the steering wheel, and he could feel sweat dribbling down his back despite the cold air streaming from the air-conditioning.

The newspaper library also had copies of every telephone directory in the United States, and Joker had gone through the ones for the Washington area, writing down the numbers of all the aircraft leasing companies, flying schools and local airlines. There was no home listing for a Patrick Farrell in the Washington City directory so he widened his search to the surrounding areas: Maryland, Laurel, Anne Arundel, Montgomery and the Greater Baltimore area to the north, and Arlington, Fairfax and Prince Georges to the south. He found only one P. Farrell and that was in a town called Laurel, about midway between Washington and Baltimore. In the Montgomery County Yellow Pages he found a Farrell Aviation listed and he’d smiled to himself, unable to believe his luck. If the surname hadn’t been used in the company name he’d have had to call round about three dozen aviation firms. There was a pay phone in the lobby of the Washington Post and he’d used it to call the company. A bored-sounding secretary had told him that there were two Patrick Farrells, father and son, the father owned the company, the son ran it. She’d given Joker directions to a small airfield some twenty miles north-east of Washington.

As he drove to the airfield, Joker wondered if it was the father or the son that Matthew Bailey had contacted. There was no way of knowing. The son would be nearer Bailey’s age, but the father was more likely to have emigrated to the States from Ireland, giving him stronger connections with the IRA. He was going to have to play it by ear.

In the trunk of the rental car was Joker’s suitcase. He’d checked out of the Washington motel that morning and was planning to find a new place closer to Laurel. He had no definite plan as he drove along the Interstate 95, other than to check out the company and maybe sit outside for a while, on the off-chance that Bailey visited. He’d used the Visa card to buy a pair of powerful binoculars and they were in a plastic carrier-bag on the back seat.

The airfield was difficult to find — there were no signposts and eventually Joker had to ask for directions at a filling station. It was surrounded by trees so Joker didn’t see it until he was virtually on top of it. It turned out to be little more than a grass strip with a few hangars and a single-storey brick building on which there was a sign which said Farrell Aviation and a logo of a green propeller with a hawk above it. A line of small planes faced the grass landing strip, many of them with covers over their cowlings as if they didn’t get flown much. The asphalt road Joker was on wound through the trees and curved behind the hangars before widening out into a large area in front of the Farrell Aviation building where several cars were parked. Joker slowed his car down and pulled up in front of a hangar which had a large ‘For Rent’ sign on the door with the telephone number of a Baltimore real estate company. A bearded man in blue overalls appeared from the neighbouring hangar, wiping his hands on a rag. He stood looking at Joker for a second or two and then walked over. Joker got out of his car and stood looking up at the hangar.

“You interested?” the man said. His voice was laconic, almost sleepy, but his eyes were sharp and alert.

“Could be,” answered Joker, “but not for me, my brother-in-law services small planes, he’s looking for a base near Baltimore.”

“You’re English, right?” said the man.

Joker nodded. “Yeah, my sister married a guy from Boston. You get much business here?”

The man shrugged. “Not really, not what you’d call passing trade. There’s no Flight Service Station here, and no fuel. You have to pull your own business in, pretty much. What sort of work does your brother-in-law do?”

“Small planes, Cessnas mostly. He buys up wrecks, does them up and sells them. There’s always a market for 152s and 172s.”

“Oh sure,” the man agreed.

“You run your own business?” Joker asked.

“Yeah, routine servicing mainly. I have my regulars and there’s a small flying club based here. We used to have a flying school but they closed.”

“What about Farrell? They do okay?”

The man nodded. “Leasing, mainly. They own most of the hangars here. They do an eye-in-the-sky service for a few radio stations — you know, watching the traffic jams, stuff like that. And they do some film and television work. They do okay.”

“Farrell? That’s an Irish name, right?”

“Pat’s Irish all right,” said the man. “He’s even painted green stripes on most of his planes.”

Joker took a pen from his jacket pocket and wrote down the name of the company handling the leasing of the empty hangar. “I’ll pass this on to my brother-in-law,” he said. “Thanks for your time.”

“Sure, hope you decide to move in. It’d be good to have fresh faces around.”

The man walked back to his hangar while Joker climbed back into his car. He drove slowly down the road and through the trees. There were many other things he wanted to ask the man, but he knew that he would be pushing his luck if he’d prolonged the conversation — it wouldn’t take much to set alarm bells ringing over at the Farrell building.

A few hundred yards before the asphalt road joined the main highway, Joker saw a track which wound into the trees and he stopped for a closer look. It appeared to be overgrown and hadn’t been used in a while. There was no-one around so he turned off the road and drove cautiously down the track. When he was sure he was far enough away from the road so that he couldn’t be seen, he stopped the car. He took his binoculars from the back seat and his bottle of whisky from the trunk, and walked through the trees. He walked for half a mile or so until he reached a spot where he could see the front of the Farrell building in the distance, but remain well hidden from the airfield. He dropped down next to a wide chestnut tree and sat with his back propped up against it. His view was restricted by the trees between him and the airfield but he could see the cars parked in front of the building, and the main entrance. He focused the binoculars on the car number plates and found that he could read them easily, so he knew he’d have no problem seeing the face of anyone who went into or came out of the building. He uncapped the whisky bottle and drank deeply. He might be in for a long wait, but he had nowhere else to go.

Cole Howard read through the FBI file on Ilich Ramirez Sanchez on the direct flight from Phoenix to New York. Coach Class was almost empty and he had a whole row to himself, so he stretched out and put his briefcase on the seat next to his. A stewardess asked him if he wanted a drink and Howard caught himself about to ask for a whisky and Coke. He ordered an orange juice instead.

The file on Sanchez was about five times as thick as those of Matthew Bailey and Mary Hennessy, and included reports from virtually every intelligence agency in the world. The first page contained a list of the aliases the terrorist had used: Carlos Andres Martinez-Torres, Ahmed Adil Fawaz, Carlos Martinez, Hector Lugo Dupont, Nagi Abubaker Ahmed, Flick Ramirez, Glenn Gebhard, Cenon Marie Clarke, Adolf Jose Muller Bernal, and his real name — Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. He was born on October 12, 1949, in Caracas, Venezuela, the son of a millionaire lawyer, Dr Jose Altagracia Ramirez. The lawyer, whose politics tended towards the extreme Left, named his three sons after Lenin: Ilich, Lenin and Vladimir. The boys spent most of their childhood travelling around Latin America and the Caribbean with their mother, Elba Maria, who was separated from their father. When he was seventeen, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was sent by his father to a Cuban guerrilla training camp near Havana, and in 1969 he enrolled in the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow, regarded by many as a terrorists’ finishing school, and the following year he joined one of the world’s most notorious terrorist organisations: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The stewardess returned with his orange juice and Howard thanked her. He rubbed his eyes. Reading under the artificial lights was a strain, but there was still a huge amount to get through. He sipped his juice and began to read again. In 1971 Carlos was invited by Dr Wadi Haddad, the operational chief of the PFLP, to a guerrilla seminar at a PFLP camp in the south of Lebanon along with young terrorists from the Japanese Red Army and the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and shortly afterwards he was assigned to the PFLP’s foreign operations bureau, assisting in the machine-gun attack at Tel Aviv Airport which killed twenty-five and injured seventy-seven.

In July 1973 he took over the organisation’s European terrorist cell, the Commando Boudia. In December of that year Carlos tried to assassinate Edward Sieff, the president of British retail stores chain, Marks and Spencer, because of his close links with Israel. He talked his way into Sieff’s London home and shot his target in the face at point blank range — his favourite method of assassination. Incredibly, Sieff’s teeth absorbed most of the bullet’s impact and he survived. In 1974 Carlos threw a bomb into the London branch of the Israeli Bank of Hapoalim. A typist was injured. He moved to France and with Commando Boudia planted car bombs in front of the offices of various Jewish magazines, and threw an M26 fragmentation grenade into a newspaper kiosk on St. Germain-des-Pres, killing two and injuring thirty-four. The following year Carlos and his team managed to get hold of Russian anti-tank bazookas and a three-man team flew out from the Middle East to help operate them. In January 1975 they fired one of the RPG-7s at an El Al plane at Orly Airport. They missed, and instead hit a Yugoslav plane. Later that year Carlos masterminded the kidnapping of the OPEC ministers in Vienna, taking them at gunpoint on a hijacked plane to North Africa where he was paid an $800,000 ransom before setting them free. Carlos was also linked to a whole series of terrorist attacks, kidnapping and murders, including the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the bombing of a French nuclear plant, and helping the Japanese Red Army attack the French Embassy in The Hague where they took the ambassador and his staff hostage.

The French counter-espionage service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, came close to arresting him in Paris two years later, but Carlos killed two unarmed DST agents and a Lebanese informer. A French judge sentenced him to life imprisonment in his absence in 1992, and there were murder warrants for his arrest issued by the authorities in Austria and Germany and still on file.

By the late Seventies, Carlos had by all accounts retreated from the terrorist scene, and the world’s intelligence services were having a hard time keeping track of him. He was seen in London in May 1978 but there was no trace of him leaving or entering the United Kingdom at that time. Howard wondered if the IRA had helped him.

Satellite surveillance photographs taken in 1983 suggested he was at a Libyan training camp instructing terrorists for Colonel Gaddafi, though the same year he claimed to have killed five people in bomb attacks in France. He forged links with the Hezbollah in Lebanon in their fight to end the French military presence in the country, and, in October 1983, fifty-eight French soldiers died when their barracks were bombed. There were reports that he was in India in 1985, and in 1986 stories circulated in Middle Eastern newspapers that he had been killed and buried in the Libyan desert.

The opening up of the Communist bloc provided evidence that Carlos had spent time in the early Eighties in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and other Communist regimes, but after the break-up of the Soviet Union, Carlos found himself with few friends. In 1991, after relations between Syria and the United States improved following their co-operation during Operation Desert Storm, Carlos was asked to leave Damascus by the Syrians, who sent him to Libya. The Libyans refused to allow him into the country, fearing US and British reprisals. Relations between the US and Libya were already fraught in the wake of the Lockerbie bombing.

Eventually the Yemen offered him sanctuary, but Carlos later moved to the Sudan. Home was a ground floor apartment in the capital, Khartoum, and it was from outside the three-storey apartment block in August 1994 that he was kidnapped by France’s anti-terrorist service, the DST. The DST had drugged Carlos and flown him to Paris where he was placed in solitary confinement in the basement of La Sante prison. The events that followed had been so well publicised that Howard didn’t need to read the end of the file. Carlos’ escape from French custody was still under investigation, with the French blaming the Iraqis, Iraq pointing the finger at Iran, the Iranians accusing Libya, and the Libyans saying it had been the Palestinians. Even the IRA had been mentioned, along with the suggestion that they had masterminded his escape in return for favours he had done the Irish terrorists in the past.

The report was incredibly detailed, but it also contained contradictions. Carlos was said to despise Arabs, yet often countries in the Middle East were his paymasters. Dr Wadi Haddad was a mentor in the early Seventies, yet Carlos was later implicated in the Palestinian guerrilla leader’s assassination. He was not a Communist yet there were suggestions that the KGB were behind several of his operations and he spent long periods hiding in Communist countries. He was the world’s most successful terrorist, yet he also had a reputation for taking chances and for being unreliable. As Sheldon had said, Carlos was one of a number of terrorists who visited Baghdad between August 1990 and January 1991 prior to an Iraqi-sponsored terrorist campaign against Britain and the United States. Yet just ten years earlier he was paid by the Syrians to come up with a plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein. He was prepared to work for the highest bidder, but had been born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth and had never been short of money.

Howard dropped the file on top of his briefcase and rested his head against the back of the seat. He felt almost light-headed as he realised that he was on the trail of the world’s most wanted man. If he could capture Carlos there would be nothing he couldn’t achieve, inside or outside the FBI. His hands began to shake and he gripped the seat rests. The excitement was almost painful, and so was the apprehension. He wanted a drink. A real drink.

Darkness crept up on Joker as he sat under the chestnut tree watching the brick building which housed Farrell Aviation. There was no point at which he was aware that day had given way to night, it was a process so gradual that it came almost as a shock when he realised that stars were twinkling in the sky and that the moon was hanging overhead, so clear that he could see the individual craters on its surface. A succession of people had entered and left the brick-built building during the afternoon, but there had been no sign of Matthew Bailey. He’d come to recognise two young men in blue overalls bearing the green propeller logo; they’d made several visits to the building and Joker assumed they were mechanics working in the Farrell hangars. Throughout the day several small planes had taken off and landed on the grass strip, including an old biplane which had been towing an advertising banner.

Lights were still on in one of the offices and a blue Lincoln Continental stood alone in front of the main entrance. Joker was waiting for the last person to leave before calling it a night. Stake-outs were nothing new to him. He’d lain in the hills of the Irish border country for days at a time with nothing more than a camouflage sheet to protect him from the bone-chilling winter rain, soaked through to the skin and shivering with the cold. Catching IRA terrorists as they crisscrossed the border between North and South was a matter of infinite patience and concentration, days of inactivity followed by frantic seconds of gunfire. Sitting under a tree on a pleasant evening was a breeze by comparison.

The light in the office went off and Joker put the binoculars to his eyes and trained them on the entrance. After thirty seconds or so the glass door opened and a large man stepped out, a briefcase in his hand. A lone light was on above the door and Joker could see that the man was in his early sixties, grey-haired with ruddy cheeks as if he spent a lot of time outdoors. He was wearing a red polo shirt and white shorts, with knee length socks, and he had a beer drinker’s stomach which hung over his shorts like a late pregnancy. Joker assumed that he was Patrick Farrell Senior, but as he had no way of identifying the man he kept an open mind. He could just be a hired hand. The man locked the door and climbed into his car. A few seconds later he drove off and Joker heard the engine fade away into the distance. He listened to the sounds of the forest: the clicking of insects, the hoot of an owl, the faraway howl of a wild cat, and tentative rustlings in the undergrowth. Joker waited a full thirty minutes until he was sure that the man wasn’t returning. He moved quietly through the trees and out onto the airfield, heading first for the hangars to satisfy himself that all the mechanics had left.

The sliding doors to the hangars were locked and Joker couldn’t see any lights inside. He slipped silently through the shadows to the Farrell building, careful to keep away from the light above the main door. There was an alarm bell high up on the wall and he could see that the windows were wired, but it was a simple system and one which he could by-pass with little trouble. Around the back of the building there was a drainpipe which ran by a small frosted window, probably a bathroom. It looked climbable and when he pulled at it he could feel that it was strong enough to bear his weight. He hoped to get what he wanted without resorting to breaking and entering, but if it proved necessary he wouldn’t have any problems gaining entry to the offices. He headed back to his car. He’d already earmarked a motel a couple of miles away from the airfield where he could catch a few hours’ sleep.

Kelly put up the collar of her long green cashmere coat and kept a wary hand on her bag. She walked quickly, her heels tapping on the sidewalk like a blind man’s cane. She looked over her shoulder, left and right, more to check that there were no potential muggers nearby than because she feared she was being followed. She found Filbin’s and stood for a while looking through its murky leaded windows. Behind the polished wood bar stood a diminutive barman, polishing a glass like he expected a genie to appear and grant him three wishes. Kelly pushed open the door and walked into the warm and smoky atmosphere of the bar. Several customers looked up to see who the intruder was and their gazes lingered. Even wrapped up in her coat she was still something special to look at, especially in a downmarket bar like Filbin’s. She ignored the avaricious stares and walked to the end of the bar closest to the door, her hand still on the clasp of her bag. The elf-like barman walked over to her, still polishing his glass. “What can I get you, my dear?” he asked.

She leaned forward. “Are you Shorty?” she asked, keeping her voice low.

The barman laughed. “What do you think?” he replied, and put the clean glass on a shelf. He grinned at two young men who were huddled over pints of Guinness. “She wants to know if I’m Shorty!” The three men laughed together and Kelly felt her cheeks redden.

Kelly waited for the laughter to die down, then leaned her elbows on the bar. She motioned with her finger and Shorty moved closer. “My name’s Kelly Armstrong,” she whispered. “Fergus O’Malley said I should speak to you.”

Shorty’s mouth dropped. “You’re O’Malley’s niece?” he said. “Jesus, I wouldn’t believe an ugly old sod like him could be related to a looker like you.”

“Why, thank you, I think,” smiled Kelly.

Shorty frowned. “But Armstrong is a Prod name? What’s a good Catholic girl doing with a name like Armstrong?”

“I married an American,” she explained. “And he’s neither Catholic nor Protestant.” Shorty nodded thoughtfully. “So, can you help me or not?” Kelly asked.

Shorty looked around the bar, saw that there were no customers waiting to be served, and motioned to a table in the corner. “Sit over there,” he said. “What can I get you?”

Kelly said she’d have a Coke and went over to the table to wait for the barman. Shorty joined her, gave her a glass of Coke and sipped a malt whisky from a balloon glass. He smacked his lips appreciatively, all the time his eyes never leaving Kelly’s face. He shook his head in wonder. “Fergus O’Malley’s niece,” he mused. “Who’d have thought it?”

Kelly was beginning to tire of the man’s attitude. “My uncle told you I’d be coming?”

“Aye, that he did.”

“And what I wanted?”

“Aye.” He took another sip of whisky, the creases deepening in his brow. “You wouldn’t be offended if I asked you for identification, would you?” he said.

Kelly wondered how Shorty would react if she produced her FBI credentials, but instead she showed him her driving licence. Shorty studied it and then handed it back to her. “Well?” she said.

Shorty placed his glass on the table and folded his arms. “The person you’re looking for doesn’t want to be found,” he said quietly. Kelly said nothing. “By anyone,” he added. Kelly raised an eyebrow. “Your uncle said it was important, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was about.”

“He doesn’t know,” Kelly said. They were both speaking in low voices, their heads bent forward.

“Would you like to tell me?” asked Shorty.

“I can’t do that,” she said. “Do you know what she’s involved in?”

“No,” admitted Shorty.

“But you know how to reach her?”

Shorty didn’t reply. A customer stood up at a nearby table, put on his coat and left.

“You trust my uncle, don’t you?” Kelly pressed. Shorty nodded. “And he told you to help me, didn’t he?” Shorty nodded again. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He tapped it on the table, then opened it and took out a card. He looked at the handwritten telephone number on the card and handed it to her. “I can reach her at this number?” asked Kelly.

Shorty shook his head. “No, but it’s the number of a man who might be able to help you — if you can persuade him that you’re to be trusted.” He drained his glass, stood up and went back to the bar. Kelly slipped the card into the pocket of her coat and left. The two young men drinking Guinness watched her go. So did FBI agent Don Clutesi, his eye pressed to the camcorder on its tripod at the window overlooking Filbin’s. Clutesi didn’t recognise the woman, but she was clearly a cut above the normal type of customer who frequented the bar. Clutesi wondered if she was a hooker on the make. Young, blonde and pretty, what other reason could she have had for visiting a bar alone? She’d spoken to Shorty but Clutesi hadn’t picked up anything from the listening devices. Either they’d been out of range or they’d been whispering. Clutesi made a note in his incident book and stretched his arms above his head. He was tired, but there was another two hours to go before he was due to be relieved. Then he had to go back to Federal Plaza to meet the agent from Phoenix.

An FBI driver was waiting outside JFK holding a sign with Cole Howard’s name on it, and he carried Howard’s bag to the car. They made polite conversation on the drive into Manhattan, about the Mets, the weather, and the murder of three DEA agents in the Bronx that afternoon.

The driver took Howard into Federal Plaza and helped him obtain a visitor’s pass which Howard clipped to the breast pocket of his suit. The receptionist rang the Counter-Terrorism Division to tell them that Howard was on the way up, then she told him which floor to go to. The driver nodded goodbye and Howard headed to the elevator.

When the doors hissed open a small, shrewish woman with grey hair and a reluctance to look him in the eye took him along to Mulholland’s office. Ed Mulholland was in his fifties, with a craggy, lined face and a grey, military crewcut. He had a bone-crushing handshake and looked as if he worked out a lot.

“Cole, good to see you. Jake Sheldon speaks very highly of you. You want coffee? Tea?”

Howard shook his head. “No, I’m fine.”

Mulholland looked over Howard’s shoulder. “Katie, can you get Hank along for this, please? And ask Frank Sullivan and Don Clutesi to sit in, too. Thanks.”

As the secretary scurried away, Mulholland motioned to two grey sofas which were set at right angles to each other in the far corner of his office. The sofas faced a low, square brass and glass table on which were scattered half a dozen law-enforcement magazines. “Let’s sit over there, shall we, Cole, it’ll give us a bit more elbow room.” As the two men walked across the office, Mulholland slapped Howard on the back, a friendly pile-driving blow which almost rattled his teeth. “I’m really glad to have you on the team, Cole, you’ve done some great work on this. Great work.”

Mulholland reminded Howard of a crusading general who’d happily lead his men into battle, rushing towards a hail of bullets in the sure and certain knowledge that he couldn’t be touched, while all around him his adoring troops fell dying and wounded. He inspired confidence, but Howard felt that he was a bit too gung-ho, and too lavish with his praise. Howard put his briefcase by the side of one of the sofas and sat down, smoothing the creases of his trousers. Mulholland pulled over a high-backed swivel chair and placed it facing the sofas. A balding man of medium height in a cheap brown suit came into the office. Mulholland introduced him as Hank O’Donnell, Jr, director of the Counter-Terrorism section. O’Donnell looked more like a career bureaucrat than an anti-terrorism agent, and when Howard shook hands with him he noticed that his fingers were stained with ink as if he’d been writing with a leaky pen. He had a file under his arm. As O’Donnell moved to sit down on one of the sofas, Howard saw that the seat of the man’s pants were shiny as if he spent a lot of time sitting down.

Another man entered the office and Mulholland introduced him as an agent from the Counter-Terrorism (Europe) Division. Frank Sullivan was tall with sandy hair, a sallow complexion and a sprinkling of freckles across his snub nose. He explained that Don Clutesi was out on a surveillance operation and that he would be back in the office within the hour. Sullivan sprawled on the sofa while Mulholland eased himself into the chair like some omnipotent monarch taking his throne.

“This is by way of a pre-briefing prior to a meeting which we’ll be having with the Secret Service in Washington later tonight,” said Mulholland, his massive forearms folded across his barrel chest. “I want to get a feel for exactly what we’re up against here. Cole, you’ve done the lion’s share of the work on this, why don’t you bring us up to speed?”

Howard nodded and picked up his briefcase. He unlocked it and took out the files it contained, and dropped two of them onto the glass table. “Mary Hennessy and Matthew Bailey, both members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, both wanted for murder by the British,” he said, “and both of them were filmed taking part in an assassination rehearsal in the Arizona desert.” He put a third file on the table. “Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, AKA Carlos the Jackal, the world’s most notorious terrorist responsible for a string of murders, hijackings and kidnappings. He was with Hennessy and Bailey in Arizona as they put three snipers through their paces.” He put the two Navy personnel files on the desk. “Rich Lovell and Lou Schoelen,” he said, “former Navy SEALs and expert snipers. Capable of hitting targets at a range of two thousand yards. The third sniper we haven’t managed to identify yet.”

Hank O’Donnell coughed quietly. “I think we might be able to cast some light on the third sniper,” he said, and handed his file to Howard. “Dina Rashid, Lebanese, one of the Christian militia’s best snipers.”

Howard opened the file. A colour photograph of a thin-faced girl with long brown hair, dark skin and black eyes was clipped to the inside cover. Howard remembered that the third sniper in the video had long hair.

“According to our Middle East Division, Rashid has been missing from Beirut for the past five months, and there’s a general request out for information on her whereabouts,” O’Donnell continued. “We’ve no record of her entering the US, but then we had no record of Hennessy, Bailey or Carlos passing through Immigration, either. You’ll see from the file that she and Carlos are not exactly strangers.” He coughed, almost apologetically. “In fact, for a time they were lovers.”

Howard nodded, and put the file on top of the rest. “We all know that Carlos was one of a number of terrorists summoned to Iraq by Saddam Hussein, and it’s generally assumed that they were briefed on a terrorist campaign aimed at the States and the United Kingdom.”

Mulholland leant forward, linking his fingers. “It’s more than an assumption, Cole. The IRA were among those who attended the meetings in Baghdad and only weeks afterwards they launched a mortar attack on Downing Street.”

Sullivan nodded. “There were several known IRA terrorists reported in Iraq over Christmas 1990, and the mortar attack was on February 7, 1991. The British Prime Minister, John Major, was in the Cabinet Room with his War Cabinet, and they were damn lucky not to have been killed. One of the mortars landed in the garden of Number 10 Downing Street and cracked the windows. Margaret Thatcher had installed blast-proof net curtains some years previously — that’s what saved them.”

“There’s no suggestion that Hennessy or Bailey were involved, is there?” Howard asked.

Sullivan shook his head. “Special Branch have their theories, but neither Hennessy nor Bailey was mentioned. Bailey was in the States at the time, anyway.”

“I remember the bombing, but I didn’t realise that Iraq was behind it,” said Howard.

“That’s the way Saddam wants it,” said O’Donnell, quietly. “It’s revenge he wants, not publicity.”

“Which brings us to the target,” said Mulholland. “Bob Sanger has already put the Secret Service’s Intelligence Division on full alert. But are we sure that the President is the target?”

Howard sat back, his hands on his knees. “I don’t know, Ed. I just don’t know. I haven’t had time to put together a comprehensive list, but the British Prime Minister is over here in a few days, the Prince of Wales is here on a Royal visit next month. A number of British politicians and business leaders are coming, and many of them could be a target. Most of the visiting politicians are from the Conservative Party, and several of the businessmen are in defence industries.”

Mulholland nodded. “Tell me about these computer experts you have over at the White House,” he said.

Howard explained about Andy Kim’s work on the computer model of the assassination.

“Have you thought about inputting different targets into the program?” asked Mulholland. “Could we do all the British VIPs?”

“We’ve thought about it, but there are time constraints, and who do we put forward as targets if it isn’t the President? We don’t have the resources to run the model for every visiting dignitary, even if we restrict ourselves to the Brits. And what about other American possibilities? We could consider every member of Congress as a potential target. There are just too many names. And who says it’s a politician? There are plenty of likely targets in the military who Saddam would like to see blown away.”

Mulholland nodded. “What are the time constraints you mentioned?”

Howard explained about the telephone tap and that Lou Schoelen had told his mother everything would be over within two weeks. When he told the group about identifying the television station from the Star Trek episode, they laughed.

“Outstanding,” said Mulholland.

“Inspired,” added O’Donnell, slapping his own leg.

“So, we know the hit is going down on the East Coast, and that it’s going to go ahead within the next two weeks. What are our options?” asked Mulholland.

“We could cancel all the President’s public appearances for the next two weeks,” said Howard.

“He’d never agree to that,” said Mulholland.

“In view of the circumstances. .”

Mulholland shook his head. “I’ve already run the idea by Bob Sanger — his view is that Presidential security is already one hundred per cent, there is nothing more that can be done short of putting him in a nuclear shelter.”

“We could put out a press release saying he had a medical problem,” suggested Howard.

“That’s certainly been done before, but the view from the White House is that the President can’t run for cover every time we uncover a conspiracy,” said Mulholland. “If we did that, he’d never leave the White House. I gather there’s an element of pride, too. If Saddam Hussein is behind this, the President doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of showing that he’s afraid.”

“What about putting them on the Ten Most Wanted List?” asked O’Donnell, his voice low as if frightened of intruding.

“Who? The snipers or the terrorists?” asked Mulholland.

“I thought the snipers,” said O’Donnell. “If they know we’re on to them, they might get cold feet.”

“In which case they might try again some other time,” said Howard.

“Cole’s right,” said Mulholland. “Plus, it’s Carlos who’s planning this, I’m sure, and if the snipers back out he’ll get others. This Rashid woman sounds like she’s got personal reasons for being involved, so she’s unlikely to be scared off. But we could put Bailey and Hennessy on the list. Carlos, too. They’re wanted terrorists.”

“And what would we put on the wanted poster?” asked Howard. “We don’t have fingerprints, and they haven’t committed a crime in the US.”

“There was Bailey’s attempt to buy the missile in LA,” said Sullivan. “There are legitimate reasons for the FBI being interested in Bailey and Hennessy.”

“Hardly justifies putting them on the Ten Most Wanted, though, does it?” asked Howard. “You’re going to get a lot of questions from the media, too, especially if we let it be known we’re searching for Carlos. I assume we’re not going public on why we want these people.”

“That’s for sure,” said Mulholland. “But we could just push the terrorist angle. Cracking down on the IRA as part of a joint operation with the British.”

“It’d be a first,” said Howard. “The media would be sure to start asking questions. And I doubt if it would get results quickly enough. You have to remember the two-week deadline.”

“What about the British?” asked O’Donnell. “Are we bringing them in on this?”

“What are your feelings, Hank?” said Mulholland.

O’Donnell shrugged. “Relations aren’t exactly cordial between the Bureau and MI5 at the moment,” he said. “Too many cooks, you know?”

“But we’re keeping them informed, right?”

“There are information memos in the system, but not red-tagged,” said O’Donnell. “We’ve told them that Bailey and Hennessy have been seen, but we haven’t told them about Carlos yet. I hadn’t thought it necessary at this stage.”

“Do you have any thoughts as to why the IRA have teamed up with Carlos?” asked Mulholland. O’Donnell chewed the inside of his lip thoughtfully and Mulholland smiled. “Just shooting the breeze, Hank. Nothing written in stone.”

O’Donnell nodded. “At this stage of the investigation, anything has to be conjecture,” he said slowly. “If you were to press me, I’d say that the IRA is smoothing the way for Carlos, that he’s in charge and they’re arranging passports, driving licences, hotels, the infrastructure that would be required by an operation of this nature. Carlos hasn’t operated in the United States before. As far as we’re aware, this is his first time in the country. The IRA, however, has a long tradition of involvement in the US. Much of their fund-raising is done here, and the US is often used as a safe haven when things get too hot for them in Ireland. The Irish community also networks better than almost any other minority group. There are legal networks offering jobs, advice and support, but there are underground networks too, supplying weapons and counterfeit papers. Carlos wouldn’t be able to plug into those networks, but Hennessy and Bailey would.”

O’Donnell’s views were greeted by a succession of nodding heads. Mulholland cracked his knuckles, the small explosions echoing around the office. “It goes without saying that the capture of Carlos would be a major coup for the Bureau. However, I agree with Cole that we can’t launch a manhunt for Carlos without facing some pretty awkward questions from the media. And as he pointed out, going after the snipers won’t get us anywhere. Lovell and Schoelen appear to be nothing more than hired guns. Bearing in mind the time constraints, I think we should go all out to find Bailey and Hennessy, on the assumption that they are with Carlos. But Carlos is our prime target. And I mean target, gentlemen. Whether we apprehend him dead or alive isn’t the issue.”

Mulholland looked over at Sullivan. “Frank, you’re going to have to put pressure on your informers — find out where Hennessy and Bailey are, what ID they’re using, who they spoke to, the works. Put the squeeze on anyone who’s overstayed their visa or who’s working here illegally. Anyone who doesn’t co-operate gets put on the next Aer Lingus flight back to Ireland. And I want you to contact all our offices in those cities with large Irish communities and get them to put feelers out. Don is going to be coming with us to Washington, but I’ll assign you all the manpower you need.” Mulholland saw that Howard wanted to speak. “You have something in mind, Cole?” he asked.

“Just a thought,” said Howard. “I don’t think putting Hennessy and Bailey on the Most Wanted List will produce results in time. Why don’t we go public instead? Run their photographs on one of the TV shows — America’s Most Wanted or Unsolved Mysteries — the shows that get viewers to solve crimes.”

“I don’t think going public on an assassination conspiracy is the way to go,” said Mulholland, frowning.

Howard shook his head. “We fake it,” he said. “We run their photographs and descriptions, but we say we’re hunting them for armed robbery or drug smuggling. Get the viewers to call in if they’ve seen them. Some of those shows have really high success rates.”

“That’s an idea,” said Mulholland. “They do owe us favours, that’s for sure. It’d be a rush job, though. Let me speak to a producer I know; if it can be done in time we’ll go for it.” He slapped his knees with his big hands. “Okay, let’s get to it. Hank, grab Don when he gets here, we’ll meet downstairs in forty-five minutes. Make sure that everyone knows that for the next few days we’ll be based at the White House. Katie will have the numbers. Frank, thanks for sitting in on this. We’ll be depending on you to get some sort of handle on Carlos.”

O’Donnell and Sullivan left the office, but when Howard made a move to follow them, Mulholland grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back. “Wait a moment, will you, Cole, I’d like a word?” He closed the door behind the departing agents and then stood leaning against his desk, his legs crossed at the ankles and his huge forearms folded across his chest. “First, I just want to repeat that I think you’ve done a first-class job on this investigation so far. I’m not the sort of director who takes credit for his operatives’ hard work, I want you to know that. When this is all over, credit will go where it’s due, I promise you.” He smiled, showing chunky white teeth that were so close together they seemed to be a seamless strip across his mouth. “Nail your colours to my mast, and I’ll back you all the way.”

Howard nodded, unsure whether or not the director was being totally honest. He’d been in the FBI long enough to know that it was action that counted, not words. “I sure appreciate that,” he said.

“Secondly, I wanted to talk to you now about our meeting with Bob Sanger. I gather you two have met?”

“Once, to brief him on Andy Kim’s computer model.”

“What did you think?”

Howard watched Mulholland’s eyes, sensing a trap. For all he knew, Mulholland and Sanger could be bosom brothers. He shrugged casually. “He seemed very professional. He was keen to move the Kims into the White House to give them access to Secret Service data. But as you said, he seems to think that Presidential security is above reproach. I think he was humouring me.”

“Yeah, that’s Bob’s way,” said Mulholland, grinning. “You’ve got to remember that Bob Sanger has only one function in life — to protect the President. He’s not interested in arrests, in solving crimes, in tracking down fugitives. All he cares about is getting the man through his term of office in one piece. Bob is like most of the top echelons of the service, he came up through the ranks. They start with the quarterlies and the watch lists, clearing the way in advance of a presidential visit, then they move up to actual bodyguarding, running interference in crowds, standing around the motorcade, escorting him wherever he goes. They spend their entire time waiting for some maniac to take a pot-shot at the President, and they know that when that happens, they have to throw themselves in the path of the bullet. That’s what the Service is there for — to take the bullet meant for the President. Something happens to the men who take on that job. You get to see it in their eyes, it’s the same thousand-yard stare you see with Vietnam veterans. But something changes behind the eyes, too. Their perspective alters, after a while they start to think of themselves as above the rest of the law enforcement agencies. They think they’re an elite, and that there’s nothing they can learn from anyone else. They forget that we have a quarter of a billion people to protect, with millions of offenders. I’m not saying Bob Sanger’s gone that way, but I’m not surprised that you thought he was humouring you. When we meet with him I want you to remember that his interest, his only interest, is to protect the President. It’s the Bureau that wants to capture Carlos, Hennessy and Bailey. We’ll be working with the Secret Service, but their objectives are different. They’ll be just as happy for Carlos to leave the country as they would be if we captured him. Bob is more likely to prefer to put Carlos on the Ten Most Wanted list than to try a softly-softly approach. If he tries to suggest that, let me handle it, okay?”

“That’s fine by me,” agreed Howard.

“Good man,” said Mulholland. He pushed himself up off the desk and slapped Howard on the back. “Okay, Cole, let me phone my producer friend and then we’ll get that chopper to Washington.”

The ringing phone jolted Patrick Farrell awake, but it took several seconds for him to clear his head. He was a deep sleeper and it took a lot to rouse him. He reached over for the receiver and grunted.

“You asleep, Pat?” an Irish voice asked. Farrell recognised Matthew Bailey’s Gaelic tones.

“Shit, Matthew, what time is it?” Farrell sat up and scratched his chest. The digits on his clock radio glowed redly. It was one-thirty.

“You alone?” asked Bailey.

Farrell looked down at the sleeping body next to him. “Sort of,” he said. “Where are you?”

“Not too far away, Pat, old son. Everything on schedule?”

“No problems here,” replied Farrell.

“I’ll be dropping by tomorrow morning, I want to put the Centurion through its paces, okay?”

“Fine, I’ll have a few bottles of Guinness ready,” laughed Farrell.

“Eight hours between bottle and throttle, remember,” said Bailey.

“Yeah,” said Farrell, “right.” The sleeping figure next to him began to stir. Farrell reached down and ruffled the mane of black hair on the pillow. He lowered his voice. “Matthew, everything’s cosy here, but you might have a problem in New York. Do you know a guy by the name of O’Brien? Damien O’Brien?”

There was silence at the other end of the line for a while. “I know a Seamus O’Brien, but I can’t think of a Damien,” said Bailey. “There is a Damien J. O’Brien, lives in Dublin, one of the old school, but he must be in his seventies now and I never met him. What’s up?”

“There was a Damien O’Brien asking questions about you in New York a few days ago. Said he was a friend of yours.” An arm snaked through the sheets and Farrell felt a hand crawl across his thighs. He opened his legs and smiled.

“Seamus is getting on eighty years old and he’s in an old folks’ home in Derry, far as I know,” said Bailey.

“Thing of it is, Matthew, is that a couple of the boys went round to have a word with this O’Brien, to see what his game was. Police found them tied up in O’Brien’s room, both of them shot dead.”

“Bloody hell,” whispered Bailey, his voice so faint that Farrell could barely hear him. The inquisitive hand found its target and began to squeeze. Farrell stifled a groan. “What about this O’Brien?” asked Bailey. “Where is he now?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, Matthew. He did a runner.”

“Sass-man, you think?”

“Dunno, he seemed okay from what I was told. Shorty gave him a job in Filbin’s, and you know that Shorty can smell SAS a mile off. O’Brien was a boozer, damn near an alcoholic.”

“So what do you think? Was he on to us? Was he trying to find out who did Manyon in?”

“Manyon?”

“The SAS officer that Mary got hold of. He was using the name Ballantine, but his real name was Pete Manyon.”

“O’Brien didn’t mention Manyon, it was you he was asking for.”

Bailey snorted. “Jesus, Pat, he’d hardly waltz around Filbin’s asking about an SAS officer, would he?”

“Yeah, sorry,” said Farrell. The hand in his groin was a distraction he could well do without, but it felt so good he didn’t want to push it away. He slid down the bed.

“You okay, Pat? You’re breathing heavy,” said Bailey.

“Just tired, that’s all. Maybe this guy O’Brien was working for the Feds, and they pulled him out when our guys got suspicious.”

“Feds wouldn’t kill our men, surely?” said Bailey. “MI5 would, and so would the SAS, but not the Feds. Not unless there was a shoot-out.”

“No shoot-out, the guys were tied up and naked, shot in the face and chest. Police reckon it was a gang killing, maybe drug-related.”

“Fuck!” exclaimed Bailey. “What in God’s name is going on? You think O’Brien knows where I am?”

“Matthew, nobody knows where you are.”

“Yeah, that’s right enough. You haven’t seen anyone strange around the airfield?”

“Come on, you’re getting paranoid,” said Farrell.

“Yeah, maybe, but I’d feel happier if you kept your eyes open.”

“Okay, I will do,” said Farrell. The hand between his thighs was becoming more insistent. “Look, I’ll see you tomorrow, I’ve gotta get back to sleep. I’m knackered.”

“Okay, Pat, old son, get a good night’s kip. I’ll be at the airfield at six. Cheers.”

The line went dead before Farrell could complain about the early start and he shook his head as he replaced the receiver. He rolled over and looked down at the young man next to him. “Right, you sod, I’ll make you suffer for that.”

“Oh good,” sighed the man, pulling Farrell down on top of him.

Cole Howard looked down on the lights of the Capitol as the helicopter descended out of the clouds. Washington was breathtaking at night, the national monuments illuminated in all their splendour while the drug dealers and hookers carried out their trades in the dark places in between. Crack cocaine, AIDS, murders, Washington had more of them than almost any other city in the world, but from the air none of that was visible and Howard looked down as entranced as a sight-seeing schoolboy.

It wasn’t his first trip in a helicopter but he was still a little uneasy. He could never forget that the whole contraption depended on a whirling rotor which was held in place by a single steel nut. Even with the headphones on he could hear the roar of the massive turbine of the JetRanger helicopter and his buttocks tingled from the vibration. It was difficult to imagine that the machine could hold itself together, even though he knew that flying in a helicopter was a hundred times safer than driving on the roads below.

The pilot’s voice came over the intercom, and even it was vibrating. “Folks, you should be able to see the White House down there on the right. I’ll make one pass over the grounds and then we’ll go in for a landing. The winds are gusting up to twenty knots so it might be a bit bumpy, but nothing to worry about.” Sitting next to Howard was Don Clutesi, a cheerful, portly man with slicked back hair that glistened with oil whom he’d liked the moment they’d been introduced. His handshake had been damp as if he sweated a lot, but the grip was firm, and he spoke with a nasally Brooklyn accent, like a gangster from a B-movie.

Howard looked down to the right and saw the home of the President, impossibly white amid the bright green lawns. Clutesi had seen it, too, and he gave Howard a thumbs-up and nodded. Behind the building Howard saw the white H in a circle, denoting the helicopter landing-pad, and some distance away a fluorescent orange wind-sock, swinging in the wind. As the pilot swung the JetRanger around Howard thought suddenly of his wife, and how upset she’d been when he left. He’d tried calling her from New York but the line was continually busy. Either she was punishing him, or she was on the phone to her father, pouring her heart out. Now it was almost two o’clock in the morning. He wondered if it was too late to call her.

The helicopter levelled off and before Howard realised they’d touched down the skids were rested on the landing-pad and the rotor blades were slowing. When the rotors had stopped turning the co-pilot slid open the door for the passengers and Howard, Mulholland, Clutesi and O’Donnell filed out, ducking their heads even though there was no danger. Howard supposed it came from seeing too many war movies where the grunts jumped out of their Hueys with the rotors still turning, bent almost double with their Ml6s at the ready. Mulholland went out of his way to shake the hands of the pilot and co-pilot and congratulate them for a good flight.

A Secret Service agent was waiting for them, and Howard was amused to see that, even though it was the middle of the night, the man was wearing sunglasses. He either knew Mulholland or had been well briefed because he went straight up to him and welcomed him to the White House before introducing himself to the rest of the FBI agents. His name was Josh Rawlins and he looked as if he’d only recently left college. He told the agents that their luggage would be taken care of and took them through a back entrance where they had to show their FBI credentials to an armed guard, and along a corridor to a staircase. Small watercolours in gilt frames were hanging on the wall to the right of the staircase and the carpet was a deep blue. It was, Howard realised, a far cry from the offices he worked out of in Phoenix. “We’ve come through the West Wing into the Mansion,” Rawlins explained. “The President’s private apartments are here, and our offices.” At the top of the staircase was another corridor off which led several polished oak doors. Bob Sanger’s was the third along. Rawlins knocked on the door and opened it. A young secretary, brunette with piercing blue eyes which were enhanced by the blue wool suit she wore, smiled and told them to go straight in. Rawlins said goodbye and went back down the stairs.

Sanger was sitting at his desk, his shirt-sleeves rolled up and his pince-nez eyeglasses perched on the end of his nose as he perused a stack of papers. Through the window behind Sanger, Howard could see the floodlit lawns stretching out towards Pennsylvania Avenue. Sanger looked up as if surprised by their entrance, but Howard was sure the head of the Secret Service’s Intelligence Division would have been informed that their helicopter had arrived. Sanger stood up and walked around his desk to shake hands with Mulholland. He greeted Hank O’Donnell next, and then Howard, leaving Howard in no doubt as to the pecking order of the investigation. Don Clutesi was the last to have his hand shaken. Sanger’s office was three times the size of Jake Sheldon’s in FBI headquarters in Phoenix, with oil paintings on the wall, a thick pile carpet the same dark blue as that covering the stairs, and solid antique furniture, all highly polished dark wood and gleaming leather. Sanger’s secretary came into his office and helped to arrange four chairs in a rough semi-circle facing the desk and the FBI agents took their places.

“Isabel, can you call down to Rick Palmer, tell him and Andy Kim to come up?”

Sanger waved his hand over the papers on his desk. “This Carlos is one mean son-of-a-bitch,” he said quietly. “What the hell are we going to do about him?”

Mulholland folded his arms across his chest. He quickly explained their plan to pursue the two IRA terrorists, Bailey and Hennessy. Sanger nodded as he listened, scrutinising Mulholland over the top of his spectacles. Mulholland went on to describe how the FBI planned to run a fake story on a TV crime programme about the two Irish terrorists being wanted for a drug-smuggling operation in Florida. Mulholland had managed to get hold of his producer friend before they’d caught the helicopter and he’d received a guarantee that the item would be broadcast in two days’ time.

“Why don’t we just put Carlos on the Ten Most Wanted?” Sanger asked.

Howard realised that Mulholland had been right, that Sanger would rather frighten Carlos off than try to apprehend him. Mulholland stood up, walked around his chair and rested his forearms on it. “Bob, at this stage we think we have a real opportunity to capture the entire cell: Carlos, Hennessy, Bailey and the three snipers. It’s unlikely that they know that we have identified them, or that we know they are on the East Coast. If we play this just right, we could bag them all.”

“But from what you told me about the Lou Schoelen telephone call we only have two weeks. By the way, Cole, the Star Trek lead was good work.”

Howard smiled at the recognition. He looked over at Mulholland and nodded almost imperceptibly, acknowledging that the FBI chief had kept his word — he had obviously told Sanger that it was Howard who had broken the case open.

“Schoelen said that it should all be over within the next two weeks,” agreed Mulholland.

Sanger sniffed as if he had the beginnings of a cold. He took off his spectacles and began to slowly polish them with a red handkerchief. “So put Carlos and the snipers on the Most Wanted list and get all your agents looking for them,” he said.

“We don’t have the time, and if we mobilise the FBI in total, we’ll have to go public,” said Mulholland. “It means posters up on Post Office walls, police precincts, the whole bit. If we do it through television, we can be economical with the truth.”

Sanger nodded. “So we let the great American public do the FBI’s job, is that it, Ed?” He smiled, looking over the top of his spectacles.

Mulholland smiled back. Howard had the feeling that the two men had a history together and that they took a perverse pleasure in winding each other up.

“We know it’s going to happen within the next two weeks, and we know it’s going to be on the East Coast,” said Mulholland. “Your men must be doing the rounds, checking the President’s itinerary and running down the watch list and the quarterlies. Why not give your men photographs of Carlos and the rest, and get them to show them around as part of your security sweep? Your agents are going to be checking all the hotels anyway, they can kill two birds with one stone. We can use FBI manpower to try car-rental companies, stores, filling stations, and the rest. But we confine the search to only those places on the President’s itinerary.”

There was a knock on the door and Sanger’s secretary showed in Andy Kim and a young man with a military haircut and pock-marked skin. Kim saw Howard and went over to shake his hand while Sanger introduced the other man as Rick Palmer, a Secret Service programmer.

“Rick, could you give us a briefing on the progress you’ve made so far in identifying possible venues for the assassination?”

Howard saw Kim visibly stiffen and he knew that the news was not good. He gave the Oriental an encouraging smile. Palmer scratched his right cheek as if the scars there were itching. “We’re up to the end of August, and so far nothing has matched, not in the ninety percentile which is the level we agreed on,” he said. “About half a dozen have come close, one was as close as the eighty-six percentile.”

Sanger didn’t appear surprised by the news and Howard had the feeling that he had asked for the situation report for Mulholland’s benefit rather than his own. “Are any of the half-dozen on the East Coast?” Sanger asked.

Palmer looked across at Kim, who pushed his hornrimmed glasses higher up his nose and cleared his throat nervously. “One is in Boston, and another, I believe, is in Philadelphia,” he said, his voice shaking.

Sanger nodded. “Cole has two pieces of information which may help you,” he said. “First, we now have reason to believe that the assassination is being planned for sometime in the next two weeks.” Andy Kim’s face fell as he realised that if that was the case, his model must have missed the venue already, or there was a fault in his programming. Deep creases formed in his forehead and he looked as if he was in pain. “Secondly, the snipers appear to be in the Baltimore-Washington area, at least for the moment. In view of the time-frame, I don’t think it likely they will be moving too far. I think we should go back to the start and recheck all the venues in the east of the country for the upcoming fourteen days.”

Palmer was also frowning, and he looked at Kim, who shrugged. “We’ll start right away,” said Palmer.

“I wonder if maybe we should be looking at the possibility of other targets,” said Howard.

“For instance?” said Sanger.

“The Senate, and the Pentagon. I can think of several high-ranking military officers who would be high up on an Iraqi hit list. I also have a list of visiting VIPs from overseas.”

Palmer and Kim both expressed surprise at the mention of an Iraqi hit list and Howard realised that neither of the computer experts was aware of how far the investigation had gone. They were still treating it as a mathematical problem rather than a criminal investigation.

Mulholland and O’Donnell were nodding in agreement and Sanger looked from one to the other as if gauging their reaction. “Widening the search will take more time, more people,” he said. “I suggest we concentrate on the Presidential venues for the next two days, if they still come up negative, we run the program through venues where the President isn’t expected but where we know other possible targets will be. Ed, when do you expect the pictures of Bailey and Hennessy to go public?”

“Two days,” said Mulholland. “Tuesday evening. If my producer comes through.”

“He’d better,” said Sanger. “The following week could be too late.” He pushed his handkerchief back into his trouser pocket and looked at his watch. “Gentlemen, it’s now almost three o’clock. I’ve had rooms arranged for you at a hotel nearby. There are cars waiting to take you, and they’ll collect you first thing so we can make an early start.” The door opened and his secretary appeared. Howard wondered if Sanger had pressed a concealed button because he hadn’t touched his desk intercom or telephone. A young man stood behind the secretary, carrying a Polaroid camera. Sanger explained that their photographs would have to be taken for their White House passes, so one by one they stood with backs to the wall as the camera flashed and whirred.

When they’d finished, Sanger asked his secretary to show them to the cars. “And make sure their luggage hasn’t gone astray,” he added. He looked at Mulholland and shrugged. “Sometimes it happens,” he explained.

Joker’s internal alarm clock woke him at five o’clock in the morning. His mouth tasted sour and there was a thick coating of something unsavoury on his tongue. He swallowed, but his throat was so dry he almost gagged, so he lurched to the tiny bathroom and drank from the tap. He showered and wrapped a thin towel around his waist, then went back into the bedroom and bent down by the side of the bed. From under the mattress he pulled out the gun and silencer. The SIG-Sauer P228 appeared to be brand new; there was scarcely a mark on it and the silencer had never been used. There were thirteen cartridges in the clip, which Joker recognised as 147 gram Hornady Custom XTP full metal jacketed hollow point loads. Joker was no stranger to the gun or the ammunition. He knew that XTP stood for ‘extreme terminal performance’. The bullets had no exposed lead at the nose and the hollow points meant the bullets would mushroom out on impact, increasing their penetration and the amount of damage they did. They were real man-stoppers and because they were big bullets they came out of the gun at a relatively slow 978 feet per second. Joker had smiled at the number of bullets the clip held. He knew that another SIG-Sauer model, the P226, actually held even more bullets — sixteen — but even thirteen was too many. If he ever got himself into a situation where that number of bullets were necessary, he’d be dead. The ‘spray and pray’ method beloved of the paintball amateur warriors didn’t work in real life. It was drilled into the SAS recruits from their first day in the Killing House — two shots per target, both to the chest. If you had time then maybe a third in the head to make one hundred per cent sure, but in a hostage situation with handguns it was two — bang-bang and then onto the next target. And if you were up against more than two targets you’d made a big mistake because no matter how many bullets you had in the clip you were outgunned. Only an amateur firing almost at random would need thirteen rounds. And when it came to killing, Joker was not an amateur.

He dried himself and put on a pair of blue Levi jeans and a black polo shirt and wrapped the gun in his pea jacket. He carried it out to his car and shoved it behind the driver’s seat, then went to reception and paid his motel bill, using his Visa card. The roads were clear and Joker drove quickly to the address in Laurel where Patrick Farrell lived. The house was a two-storey detached Colonial standing in several acres of lawn with a Stars and Stripes flapping from a pristine white flagpole. The number of the house was on the mailbox which stood at the end of the gravelled drive. Joker slowed but didn’t stop. Standing in front of a basketball hoop was the Lincoln Continental which Joker had seen outside Farrell Aviation. Satisfied that the man he had seen closing up the office was Patrick Farrell, he drove back to the airfield.

Matthew Bailey was already waiting outside the Farrell Aviation building when Patrick Farrell arrived. Bailey looked at his watch and sneered. Fifteen minutes late. He climbed out of his car and stood by the main entrance to the building.

Farrell waved. “Hi, Matthew; sorry, my alarm didn’t go off.”

Bailey sneered again. More likely the old sod had been pulled back into the bed for a quick one by whichever rump-rustler he was hanging around with these days. Farrell had never been especially choosy about the company he kept, in bed or out of it, but he was a first-class pilot and essential to Mary Hennessy’s plan, so Bailey just smiled and waited for him to open the double-glass doors.

“You want a coffee first?” Farrell asked.

Bailey declined, saying that he wanted to take the plane up right away. Farrell got the message and opened a metal cabinet behind the reception desk. Inside were more than a dozen sets of keys hanging on hooks, each with a metal tag denoting the call sign of the plane. He took out a set of keys, closed the cabinet and picked up a sectional chart from a table.

“Headsets?” asked Bailey.

“In the plane,” said Farrell. The two men walked together towards the line of small planes which faced the grass strip. “You had no problem getting the licence?” Farrell asked.

“Nah, the school you recommended were ace. They arranged the written for me, gave me about half a dozen lessons and then fixed me up with an FAA examiner. Piece of cake.” Bailey had been taught to fly by pilots from the Libyan Army, and could pilot a variety of single- and multiengined planes. During a six-month stay, courtesy of Colonel Gaddafi, the Libyans had given him a full grounding in instrument flight, and taught him how to fly the French-made Alouette 111 helicopter. Flying in the States on a Libyan licence was obviously out of the question, so Farrell had faked up a logbook showing some fifty hours of flying lessons and Bailey had gone out to New Mexico to get a new FAA licence under an assumed name. The licence was only good for single-engine fixed-wing aircraft, but that was all Bailey intended to fly.

“You’ve flown a Centurion before?” Farrell asked.

“Sure,” said Bailey. “What year is it?”

“It’s an ’86, one of the last that Cessna built. But it’s not a straightforward 210, it’s an Atlantic Aero 55 °Centurion upgrade, done by a company down in North Carolina. They upgraded the power plant and the propeller, now she’s got a top speed of 180 knots, range of 850 miles, takeoff ground roll of twelve-fifty feet. Here she is.”

The plane was white with green stripes down the side and the company’s green propeller and hawk logo on the two doors. Farrell pulled out the cowling covers and untied the ropes which kept the wings and tail tethered to the ground while Bailey walked around, checking the flaps, tail assembly and landing gear. He stood and watched as Farrell took fuel samples from the drain valves to check that there was no condensation or contaminants in the tanks. It was a beautiful day for flying, blue skies as far as he could see with the merest hint of clouds at twenty thousand feet or so. The wind-sock pointed to the south-west but it was hanging almost vertically.

Farrell threw his last fuel sample on the ground, checked the oil level and nodded to Bailey. “Okay. Let’s go,” he said. The two men climbed into the cockpit and strapped themselves in. “Controls handle pretty much the same as the 210,” said Farrell. “Stall speed with the flaps down is 56 knots, with flaps up it’s 65 knots. After take-off bring the flaps up at 80 knots, best rate of climb is 97 knots which should give you about thirteen-hundred feet per minute.” He unfolded the sectional chart in his lap and pointed to the airstrip. “We’re within the Baltimore-Washington International Terminal Control Area once we get above twenty-five hundred feet and on up to ten thousand feet. If you keep below twenty-five hundred you’ve no problem, but if you go through that ceiling you have to have the transponder on and be in radio contact with Baltimore Approach. We’re going to stay below two thousand until we’re out over Chesapeake Bay, but when we go up I’ll call them anyway, just so they know who we are. The airspace is real busy around here because you’ve got BWI, Andrews Air Force Base and Washington Dulles International, and their air space overlaps. Which way are you going to be heading on the day?”

Bailey smiled. “Best you don’t know, Pat, old son,” he said.

“Sure, whatever,” said Farrell. “Just keep an eye on the sectional and keep below the TCA and you won’t have any problems.”

Bailey nodded. The two men put on their headsets and tested them. Farrell asked him to pick up the plastic laminated checklist and together they ran through it before starting the engine. Bailey ran his eyes across the four by three array of flight gauges and the stack of avionics and radios. The plane was impressively equipped with a Bendix/King KMA 24 audio panel and beacon, dual KX 155 nav-coms and KR 87 ADF and a Cessna 400-series DME. There was also a Phoenix F4 loran receiver which would pinpoint the plane’s position, a WX-10 Stormscope to spot thunderstorm cells and an autopilot.

“You wanna take her up?” Farrell asked, his voice sounding tinny through the headset.

“Sure,” said Bailey.

“Okay, just bear in mind you’ll need every inch of the runway to get airborne. Treat it as a short-field take-off and you won’t go far wrong.”

Bailey ran through the Centurion’s checklist: cowl flaps open, wing flaps set to ten per cent, elevator and rudder trimmed for take-off, autopilot disconnected and controls free. He increased the throttle to 1700 rpm, feeling the plane judder as the engine growled, then checked the gauges, the magneto and the propeller, before taxiing to the end of the grass runway. He kept his feet on the brakes until the engine was running at full power, then released them, allowing the plane to lurch forward. It accelerated smoothly and Bailey soon had the plane in the air, his hands light on the controls. He retracted the gear as they passed over the edge of the field and he levelled off at two thousand feet. “Sweet,” he said. He trimmed the plane for level flight, reset his heading indicator, and then headed east, towards the Chesapeake Bay, while Farrell called up Baltimore Approach.

Joker stopped at a filling station and filled the tank of his rental car. He paid for his fuel and bought a couple of packs of chocolate cookies and a six-pack of Coke. They didn’t sell liquor but he had a half-bottle of Famous Grouse in his glove compartment, so he wasn’t too distressed.

He hid the car in the same spot he’d used the previous afternoon and made his way to the chestnut tree, carrying his whisky and provisions. The gun he left under the passenger seat, wrapped in a newspaper. The grass was damp from the early morning dew so he dropped his pea jacket down and sat on top of it. He checked out the Farrell Aviation building with his binoculars. There were two cars parked outside, but neither was Farrell’s Lincoln Continental. He settled down with his back to the tree and opened the whisky bottle, toasted the building, and drank deeply.

There was a clock radio by the bed and Cole Howard set it for 8 a.m. so that he could telephone his wife first thing in the morning. Bob Sanger had arranged for cars to pick up the FBI agents at eight-thirty prompt. When the alarm went off Howard rolled over, switched it off and groped for the phone. He misdialled the first time and woke up an old man who by the sound of it didn’t have his teeth in. Howard redialled and Lisa answered on the fourth or fifth ring.

“Hiya, honey,” he said.

“Cole?”

Yeah, right, thought Howard. How many early morning phone calls did she get from guys calling her ‘honey’? She was obviously still unhappy. “Yeah, it’s me. How are the kids?”

“They’re fine.”

That was all. No questions, no concern, just the children are fine, why the hell are you bothering me so early in the morning? “You up already?”

“Golf,” she said.

The monosyllabic treatment. Always a bad sign. “Yeah? Who are you playing?”

“Daddy.”

A two-syllable word, but not one that Howard wanted to hear. “Honey, I’m sorry,” he said, the words spilling out before he could stop them. He didn’t feel in the least bit responsible for the argument but he wanted it to end, and if the only way of achieving that was by apologising, then so be it.

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” she said, which meant that there was.

“Okay, well, I just wanted to let you know that I got here safely, that’s all.”

“Okay,” she said, as if his safety was the very last thing on her mind. “Well, look, I’m supposed to be teeing off at eight and I’ve a lot to do. Do you know when you’ll be back?”

“Two weeks at the most,” he said. She didn’t complain, she didn’t gasp in horror, she just said okay and ended the call. Ouch, thought Howard, was he in trouble.

He shaved and showered and went down to the reception area, where O’Donnell and Clutesi were already waiting. “Ed says we should go on ahead and he’ll take the second car,” said O’Donnell.

The three men made small-talk during the drive to the White House, not knowing how secure the driver was. They had to show their FBI credentials to gain admittance and the guard checked their names off against a list on his clipboard.

Bob Sanger was already at his desk, working his way through a stack of computer printouts. He greeted them but didn’t ask about Mulholland, so Howard guessed the FBI chief had already called in. Sanger took them along to an office which he’d had made ready for the FBI team, and introduced them to an overweight, middle-aged secretary by the name of Helen who was to be assigned to them for the extent of their stay. She was cheerful and eager to please and had already arranged for their White House passes, which they clipped to the breast pockets of their jackets.

Howard looked around the office, and realised immediately that there wouldn’t be anywhere near enough telephone extensions or desks. He turned back to Helen but before he could speak she told him that she’d already been onto the relevant White House departments and that equipment and supplies would be arriving later in the morning. Howard asked her to show him where Andy Kim and Rick Palmer were working and she smiled brightly and took him down to the ground floor and along a corridor to a mahogany door. “It used to be a secretarial pool,” she said. “I once spent eighteen months behind that door. We called it The Tomb.”

Howard smiled. “I know exactly what you mean,” he said. “I spent a few months in a place called The Tomb, myself.”

She left him at the door and Howard watched her large thighs rub together as she waddled rather than walked down the corridor. He could hear the sound of nylon hissing against nylon long after she’d turned the corner.

Howard knocked on the door and went in. Andy Kim was there, sitting in front of a large colour VDU, with Bonnie standing behind him, her hair tied back in a long ponytail. They both looked dog-tired and Howard realised that neither of them had slept the previous night. There were a dozen desks crammed into the office, a large white board on which computer language and several complex equations had been written in red and black ink. To the left were two small camp beds. The Kims were engrossed in the computer terminal and it was only when Howard went to stand behind them that they realised he was in the room.

“Cole!” said Bonnie. “Hi! Andy said you’d be here for a while.” There were dark bags under her eyes and her hair was less shiny than he remembered. Her husband was clearly tired, too, more so than when he’d seen him the previous night.

Andy Kim stood up and shook hands with Howard, but avoided his eyes. Howard sensed that he was embarrassed and that things weren’t going well. “You two look like you could do with a good night’s sleep,” said Howard.

Bonnie squeezed her husband’s shoulders. “He hasn’t slept for three days,” she said.

“I must be doing something wrong,” Andy hissed, his eyes on the screen. “I must be missing something.”

Howard wasn’t sure what to say. The news that the snipers were planning to make their move within the next two weeks had clearly shaken Andy, but Howard didn’t want to appear condescending by telling him not to worry.

“We’re going back to square one,” Bonnie explained. “We’re checking all the angles and distances in the model first, then we’re going to check all the venues from today onwards.”

“But I’m sure we did it right the first time,” said Andy.

“Andy, you’ve got to remember that it might not be the President who’s the target. You could be doing everything right and still not get a match. Have you tried any of the other possibilities? The Prince of Wales, for instance, or the British Prime Minister?”

Andy looked up. “They didn’t match either, but I’m sure it’s the President they’re after,” he said. “I can feel it. And if they succeed, it’ll be my fault. I couldn’t live with that, Cole. I really couldn’t.”

Bonnie smiled nervously at Howard as if apologising for his touchiness. “What will you be doing, Cole?” she asked.

“We’ve a lead on the snipers and the people who are helping them,” he said. “The Bureau and the Secret Service are working together to try to find them.”

“What are your chances?” asked Andy sharply.

Howard shrugged. “I’m hopeful,” he said.

“What sort of odds?” Andy pressed.

Howard smiled tightly. “I dunno, Andy. You can’t treat an investigation like an equation. There’re so many influences, not the least being luck. We could literally stumble over them, they could get pulled in for speeding or one of our men could walk right by them. I can’t give you odds.”

A computer printout was lying by the side of the visual display unit and Howard picked it up. “It’s a list of the President’s appointments for the next two weeks,” Bonnie explained.

Howard flicked through it. Most were on the East Coast, though there was a two-day trip to Los Angeles and visits to Dallas and Chicago. “Dallas,” he mused, loud enough for the Kims to hear.

“I thought we were concentrating on the East Coast?” said Bonnie.

“Sorry, I was just thinking out loud,” said Howard. “It’s hard not to think of Dallas when you think of a presidential assassination. But the evidence we have points to it being on the East Coast.” He continued to read through the printout. The President was a busy man, no doubt about it, with up to twenty visits a day: breakfast meetings, lunchtime speeches, opening ceremonies, tours of factories, fund-raising activities, sports events. Howard wondered when the man actually found time to run the country. “I hadn’t realised he moved around so much,” he said. “I guess we always think of the President as sitting in the Oval Office.”

“Yeah, I wish that was true,” said Andy Kim. “But it’s worse than that printout suggests.” He ran his hand through his mop of black hair. “It’s not just one program per visit. Say he’s being shown around a factory. He could visit a dozen different sites, plus travelling to and from it, and we have to rerun the program for each of them. Say he walks a hundred feet from a car to the entrance of a hotel. We have to pick points every ten feet and run them through the program. That’s ten operations for one walk. Every time he gets into or out of a limo we have to put that through the model. You wouldn’t believe how complex it is.”

“But it’s going to be okay,” said Bonnie, sympathetically.

“I hope so,” said Andy Kim.

The office door opened and a man in running gear stepped inside. He was wearing grey shorts, scuffed training shoes and a white sweatshirt which was damp with sweat, and he was breathing heavily. Andy Kim looked around at the visitor, then turned back to his computer. The jogging gear was so unexpected that it took Howard several seconds to recognise the face of the President of the United States.

“Hi, you guys, I thought I’d just stop by and see how you’re getting on with this computer model thing,” he said. The mid-Western drawl was instantly recognisable from thousands of sound-bites on television news, and Andy’s head whirled around in an astonished double-take. His mouth dropped and his hands slid off the computer keyboard. Bonnie was equally stunned.

The President closed the door and walked over to the Kims. A small towel was hanging around his neck and he used it to wipe his forehead. “Bob Sanger expects great things from this,” he said. He stuck out his hand and Andy Kim stared at it as if it was a loaded gun. It was only when Bonnie pushed his shoulders that he stood up and shook the President’s hand. “I’m Andy Kim,” he said, his voice trembling. Bonnie nudged his shoulder again. “Oh, and this is my wife, Bonnie.”

Bonnie shook his hand. “Agent Bonnie Kim, of the FBI,” she said, lest the President assumed she was just there for moral support.

“Pleased to meetchya, Bonnie,” said the President. He turned to Howard. “You’re Cole Howard, from Phoenix?” he said. Howard nodded and received the same warm handshake, a firm grip which went beyond the normal presidential hand-holding where hundreds of the faithful had to have the flesh pressed in as short a time as possible. The President’s handshake suggested that the man was truly glad to have made Howard’s acquaintance. “Bob told me about that Star Trek thing. Awesome detective work, Cole. Awesome.” He bent down and stared intently at the computer screen. The President looked leaner than he did on television, and his hair seemed darker. Howard recalled the rumours that he’d dyed his hair grey during the presidential campaign to give himself a more mature image, and he caught himself looking for dark roots. “So, Andy, why don’t you show me what this machine can do?” the President asked.

Nervously at first, but with increasing confidence, Andy Kim showed the President how his computer model worked, calling up several upcoming venues and superimposing the three sniping positions on top of them. The President asked pertinent questions demonstrating considerable familiarity with computer systems and Andy was soon talking to him as an equal.

Eventually the President straightened up and arched his back as if it was troubling him. “I tell you, Andy, I’m really impressed with this. It’s really important that we show these terrorists that they can’t push us around. We can’t allow them to dictate to us in any way. Saddam tried it in Kuwait, and we showed him the error of his ways. We’re going to show them that they can’t scare the President of the United States.”

“You don’t plan to change your schedule at all, sir?” Howard asked.

The President looked Howard straight in the eye. “Not one iota,” he said. “If I give any sign of being afraid, they’ll have won. You cannot show weakness to people like Saddam Hussein. If I hid inside the White House every time I was threatened. . well. . I’d never leave, would I?”

“I guess not, sir,” agreed Howard, though he doubted that the President had ever faced a threat like the one posed by Carlos the Jackal and the Irish Republican Army.

The President smiled. “Well, guys, I’ve got to go, but I want you to know that I think you’re doing one hell of a job. One hell of a job.” He wiped his face with the towel as he left the office.

Andy Kim looked at his wife as if unable to believe what he’d seen. She nodded silently. Howard rubbed the back of his neck. The President seemed totally unfazed by the fact that some of the world’s deadliest terrorists were trying to get him in the sights of their rifles.

Carlos and Mary Hennessy walked together down the sloping lawn, towards the grey-blue waters of the Chesapeake Bay. The sky above was clear and blue and a fresh breeze blew from the east, ruffling their hair and carrying with it the tang of salt.

“You chose the house well, Mary,” said Carlos. “It is perfect for our needs.”

“I had a lot to choose from,” said Mary. “The housing market all through Maryland is depressed, so many homeowners decide to rent rather than sell and take a loss.”

Carlos nodded and reached up to stroke his thick, black moustache. “The great American capitalist system is grinding to a halt,” he said.

“Why Ilich!” said Mary, in mock surprise, “I didn’t realise you were so political.”

Carlos narrowed his eyes and studied the woman by his side. He found Mary Hennessy a shrewd, intelligent woman with many admirable qualities, but he was frequently confused by her sense of humour and her use of irony and sarcasm. It was a very British trait even if it was delivered in her lilting Irish accent. She was joking, he decided, and he smiled. Despite his vocation, Carlos was not in the least bit political. He had served many masters during his career, from all points of the political spectrum, and had never considered himself aligned to one or the other. Carlos was a businessman, pure and simple, and he served only one political colour: green — the colour of money.

“What about you, Mary Hennessy, how political are you?”

Mary’s brow creased as if the question had caught her by surprise. Seagulls screeched and dived over the white-topped waves and high overhead a small plane banked and headed down towards Bay Bridge airfield. “Political?” she said, almost to herself. “I used to be, I suppose. Now, I’m not sure.”

They came to the end of the lawn and looked down onto a thin strip of stony beach which bordered the water. To their left a wooden pier stuck out into the bay like an accusing finger.

“You have family?” Carlos asked. He had known Mary Hennessy for almost six months, but this was the first time he’d ever spoken to her about something other than the operation they were planning. There had always been a hard shell around her that he’d never been able to penetrate, but he had the feeling that something about the water was evoking old memories and opening her up.

“I have a son and a daughter, in their twenties,” she said, almost wistfully. “I haven’t seen them for a long time.”

Carlos nodded. “I understand how you feel. I haven’t seen my wife or children for a long time.”

She turned to look at him. “But you’ll be going back to your children, Ilich. I’ll never see my family again. Ever. There’s a difference.”

She walked away, stepping off the grass and on to the beach. She was wearing a white linen shirt and pale green shorts and as she walked away Carlos admired her figure. It was hard to believe that she was the mother of two children, let alone two adults in their twenties. He’d already noticed that she wasn’t wearing a bra under the shirt, nor did she appear to need one. Carlos smiled as he realised he was ogling Mary in the same way that Lovell had been leering at Dina Rashid. Not that Carlos would ever make a move on the IRA activist. She was a beautiful, sexy woman, but she was almost one of the most professional operators he had ever come across and she commanded respect from everyone she came into contact with. Besides, thought Carlos, Magdalena would kill him if she ever found out. Kill him, or worse.

He followed Mary down the beach and soon caught up with her. She knelt down to pick up a stone. Her breasts pushed against the material of her shirt and Carlos admired her cleavage. She looked up, her eyes twinkling with amusement, and Carlos knew that he’d been trapped. He shook his head and walked on as she straightened up and skipped the stone over the waves.

“My husband was always the political one,” she said behind him. “He was a lawyer and an adviser to the IRA. He said that politics was the only way to succeed, that violence would provoke only intransigence. He was all talk, Ilich, and it got him killed.”

Carlos continued to walk down the beach and Mary followed him. “I was just a wife and mother then, but that changed when the UDA killed my brother. They gunned him down in front of his wife and children, at Christmas. I was there, I was covered in his blood.”

“Your brother was in the IRA?” asked Carlos.

“All the men in our family were,” she said. “It wasn’t something you thought about. You know how the Palestinians feel about Jewish settlements on the West Bank? Well that’s how the Catholics feel about the Protestants in Northern Ireland. They’ve no right to be there, it’s our country. The Protestants control everything in the north of Ireland: jobs, police, education, social services. Catholics are second-class citizens.”

“And you and your husband tried to change that?”

Mary drew level with Carlos. “He tried to persuade the IRA High Council to negotiate with the British Government. He believed that Thatcher and then Major would be prepared to make concessions and that they wanted to pull their troops out of Northern Ireland.”

“You sound as if you didn’t agree.”

She looked at him sharply. “I didn’t,” she said. “And I wasn’t alone. When Liam tried to stop the campaign of violence, we sent our own people to the mainland.”

Carlos said nothing. There was an intensity burning in her eyes that he had seen in zealots around the world. A conviction that they, and only they, knew what was best for the world. The sort of conviction that would lead her to betray her husband.

“It went wrong, badly wrong,” said Mary quietly. “A civilian airliner was bombed. In retaliation the British Government ordered the killing of the top two dozen or so of the movement’s leaders. Including my husband.”

Carlos stopped, stunned. “What are you saying?”

“They sent the SAS against us, with orders to make hard arrests.”

“Hard arrests?”

“Another name for assassination. Some were straightforward ambushes, others were made to look like suicides or accidents. They’re good at killing, the SAS. They’re the real professionals. My husband was gunned down as he sat in his car. The RUC said it was Protestant extremists, the same group that had killed my brother.” She reached up and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “They killed the men I loved, Ilich. This is my way of getting back at them.”

Revenge, thought Carlos. The strongest motivation of all, stronger even than money. She had said men, not man, Carlos noticed. Plural. He doubted that it was a slip, and he doubted too that she had meant her brother, but he knew better than to pry, despite the silent tears.

“We will succeed, Ilich, we have to.”

Carlos nodded. “I know. Though I’ll be honest, Mary, I do worry about this. There’s so much that could go wrong.”

“It’s been planned to perfection,” she said quickly. “But even if something goes wrong, we can wait and try again. The basic idea is sound, it’s just the opportunity we need. Everything is set to go, but it’s not written in stone. We have the team, we have the equipment.”

“Another time will mean another rehearsal.”

“So?” she said quickly. “So we rehearse again. Remember when the IRA almost killed Thatcher at the Conservative Party convention in Brighton. My husband then said that they have to always be lucky, but we only have to be lucky once.”

“He was right, of course. But after so much planning, I wouldn’t want to go through it all again.”

Mary looked at him slyly. “You miss your wife and children?” she said.

Carlos knew she was right. “It has been a long time,” he said. “That’s why I’m so keen that we succeed the first time. Then my family can have a home together.”

Mary sniffed. “That’s the difference between us,” she said. “If we do succeed, you get a safe haven for your family. But I will never be able to see mine again. I have been on the run for a long time, but it will be nothing compared with what lies ahead.”

“I know, I know,” said Carlos.

They walked together in silence for a while. The small plane which had been practising landing and taking off at the Bay Bridge airstrip climbed into the sky and headed back west, its single engine buzzing like an angry wasp.

“Has something happened between Lovell and Rashid?” Mary asked eventually.

“Happened? In what way?” replied Carlos.

Mary smiled and gave the man a knowing look like a mother silently admonishing a child she knew was being less than honest. Her eyes were dry but there was a redness about them. “You know exactly what I mean,” she said.

Carlos chuckled softly. “The American was making unwanted advances, and Dina took care of it.”

“Took care of it? What did she do? He’s like a scalded cat whenever she’s around.”

“She had sex with him.”

Mary looked at him, astonished. “She had sex with him, and now he’s scared witless?”

Carlos kept his face straight. “The way she tells it, her encounter wasn’t exactly what you’d call safe sex, not for him anyway.” Carlos could contain himself no longer and he laughed loud and hard, throwing his head back and showing uneven, yellowing teeth. His laughter echoed across the bay until it was lost among the screaming of the seagulls.

Patrick Farrell Senior arrived in his blue Lincoln Continental shortly before eight o’clock, scratching his pendulous beer gut as he scanned the skies around the airfield. Not long afterwards his mechanics began arriving and Joker heard the rumble of the hangar doors being rolled back. Small insects buzzed around Joker’s head, and he waved them away halfheartedly. They made a sound like miniature chainsaws as they zipped by his ear and for each one he swatted away, there were two more waiting to torment him.

He put the binoculars to his eyes and surveyed the Farrell Aviation building. In one of the ground-floor offices he could see Farrell talking on the telephone as he stood at his desk. A buzzing sound, louder than the annoying insects, filled the air above his head. He looked up and through the tree canopy overhead he saw a single-engine plane coming into land. It flashed overhead and then turned to the left, aligning itself up with the grass strip, and then passed from Joker’s field of vision. He heard the engine note change as the pilot throttled back prior to landing. Joker put the binoculars back to his eyes. Through them he saw Farrell, still on the phone, peer through his window at the arriving plane.

The plane came into view as it reached the end of the grass strip and taxied back towards the hangars. Joker saw that it was in Farrell Aviation’s colours and bore its green propeller and hawk logo. The pilot and co-pilot were wearing headsets and sunglasses and it was impossible to tell if they were men or women. The plane came to a halt and the occupants took off their headsets and climbed out. They were men, one tall and thin with dark hair, the other short with a mop of unruly red hair. As they walked towards the Farrell Aviation offices, Joker trained his glasses on the shorter of the two men. He caught his breath as he recognised the face of Matthew Bailey, grinning and twirling his headset as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

As Mary Hennessy and Carlos stepped into the kitchen, the telephone began to ring. Mary picked it up while Carlos opened the refrigerator in search of breakfast. Carlos took out a slice of cold pizza and chewed on a huge chunk as he watched Mary’s frown deepen. She agreed to whatever it was the caller was saying, and motioned with her hand for Carlos to pass her a pen. He picked a blue ballpoint and handed it to her. She scribbled an address on the margin of the front page of the Baltimore Sun and replaced the receiver.

“Trouble?” asked Carlos, his mouth full of dough and tomato sauce.

“I’m not sure,” she replied, tearing off the corner of the paper. “Someone wants to meet me. Now.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Carlos.

“No,” said Mary. “I have to go alone.”

Ronald Hartman’s secretary buzzed through on his intercom and told him that there was a Secret Service agent in the outer office asking to see him. The secretary was new to the job and was clearly in awe of the visitor, but Hartman was well used to dealing with the men responsible for the President’s safety. He had worked in hotels in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit and Boston before moving to Baltimore and the routine was always the same. He’d read in the Baltimore Sun about the President’s forthcoming visit to the city, and he knew that beforehand the Secret Service would be around for the list of guests and employees. He told his secretary to send the visitor in.

The man was in his early twenties with the regulation athletic build, close-cropped hair and dark suit. He smiled, showing perfect white teeth and pink gums, and flashed his Secret Service credentials. His name was Todd Otterman and when he sat down he carefully aligned the creases on his trouser legs. He began to explain about the President’s trip to Baltimore but Hartman held up his hand to silence him.

“I’ve been through the routine before, Agent Otterman,” he said. “You want the guest list to compare with your watch list, correct?”

Otterman nodded, grateful that the hotel manager knew the ropes.

“Three days before the visit, one day after?” asked Hartman.

“Perfect,” said Otterman. As Hartman leant forward and spoke to his secretary through the intercom, Otterman took an envelope from the inside jacket of his pocket.

Hartman finished briefing his secretary. “You can pick up the records at the reception desk, there’ll be a printout and a floppy disc waiting for you.”

“I wish every hotel was as efficient as yours, Mr Hartman,” said the agent. He slid six colour photographs out of the envelope and handed them to the manager. “One more thing, could you tell me if you recognise any of these people?”

Hartman flipped through the photographs. He had a good memory for names and faces, an essential attribute for anyone wanting to do well in the hotel industry. The top picture was of a pretty blonde woman and another of the same woman but with dark hair, followed by three younger men, a middle-aged man with a receding hairline and a moustache, and a sharp-faced young woman with long, dark curly hair. Hartman needed only a few seconds for each photograph to be sure. He’d never seen any of them before. He shook his head and gave them back to the agent. “I’m sorry, no,” he said.

“You’re sure?” said Otterman.

“Quite sure,” said Hartman, frostily. Much as he wanted to help, he didn’t take kindly to his professional abilities being questioned.

Otterman stood up and shook hands with the manager, thanked him for his help, then went back out to reception where a teenage girl with gleaming braces on her teeth and a black name badge with ‘Sheena’ on it smiled and gave him a manila envelope. Otterman looked inside and saw a computer disc and a roll of computer printout. He thanked her and showed her the photographs. “So, Sheena, have you seen any of these people?” he said.

“Guests, you mean?” Her braces glinted under the fluorescent strip lights overhead.

“Guests, in the restaurants, walking outside, anything,” he said.

She screwed up her eyes as she went through the pictures and Otterman wondered if the girl needed glasses. She held up the picture of the woman, Mary Hennessy. The picture of her as a blonde. “I sort of remember her,” she said, her voice uncertain. “Let me ask Art.”

She went to a tubby young man in a black suit and they both stood looking at the two photographs of the woman. The man came over and introduced himself as Art Linder, an assistant manager. “I think this is Mrs Simmons. From London. She stayed with us last week for a couple of days.” He held up the photograph in which she was a blonde. “She was a blonde, but you could see the roots growing through. She was a looker. . for her age.”

Otterman couldn’t believe his luck. “Can you give me her details,” he asked. “Registration card, credit card details, list of phone calls she made, the works?”

“No problem,” said Linder. “What has she done?”

“That’s classified, I’m afraid,” said Otterman, who was loath to admit that he didn’t know. Like the rest of the agents scouring the city gathering guest lists to compare with the watch list stored in the Secret Service computer, he had been told only that identifying the men and woman was to be accorded the highest priority.

Matthew Bailey and Patrick Farrell stood in front of the Farrell Aviation building for almost half an hour, talking animatedly as Joker watched through the binoculars. At one point Farrell gave something to Bailey but Joker couldn’t make out what it was. Eventually Bailey handed his headset to Farrell and the two men said goodbye.

Joker got to his feet and rushed back to his car. He climbed in and wound down the windows so that he could hear when Bailey drove down away from the airport. He heard Bailey drive away and he followed him. The Irishman was driving a dark blue sedan which was totally inconspicuous in the mid-morning traffic so Joker had to stay closer then he’d have preferred. Bailey drove up towards Baltimore and then headed east, towards Chesapeake Bay. Joker kept him in sight all the way, constantly changing lanes and the distance from his quarry in the hope that he’d be harder to spot. His heart was racing and his hands were sweating on the wheel. He wanted a slug of whisky but knew that it wouldn’t be a good idea to drink from the bottle while driving along at 55 mph. You never knew when the next vehicle might be an unmarked police car.

Mary parked her rental car next to a red Jeep and switched off the engine. As it cooled she massaged her temples and studied the motel. It was a Best Western, close to Highway 40: quiet, anonymous, and the perfect place for a trap. She trusted the man who’d telephoned her, trusted him with her life, but she was still apprehensive. She studied the cars in the parking lot, looking for anything that might be driven by an undercover agent, and checking for any signs of surveillance. She knew she was whistling in the dark. If this was a trap they would be well hidden and the first she’d know of it would be the thud of a bullet followed by the crack of the shot. Her heart began to race and her hands were damp on the steering wheel. She steadied herself. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s okay.”

She wanted to restart the car and drive away, but if there was any chance that her operation had been compromised, she had to know. Her contact in New York had said that the meeting was vital to the success of her operation, and that was enough for Mary. Her handbag was lying on the passenger seat and she opened it just enough to reassure herself that the gun was there and that the safety was off. She felt like a mouse sniffing at a cheese-baited trap, knowing the risks but wanting the cheese nevertheless. Her mouth was dry and she swallowed. She looked around the car park again, hoping that she’d see something that would give her a reason to leave. There was nothing. She picked up the bag. If they were going to kill her they’d wait until she was out of the car so that there would be no doubt that they had the right person. If it was the Americans, they’d be using a SWAT team with telescopic sights, if it was the SAS they’d have handguns and they’d get in close. Either way the end result would be the same — blood on the concrete. Her blood. She shivered and reached for the door handle. The door swung open and she stepped out. A noise to the right made her flinch, but it was a child bouncing a ball against a red truck. The child’s mother called him from the door to a room and he picked up the ball and ran to her, giggling.

Mary sighed and slammed the door shut. The sound echoed around the car park like a scaffold’s trapdoor. The mother smacked the back of the child’s legs and pulled him into the motel room. Mary took a deep breath and began to walk across the concrete to the two-storey block of bedrooms. Room number 27, her contact had said. It was on the ground floor, and the curtains were drawn. A maid was pushing a trolley full of towels and cleaning equipment along the upper level, its wheels squealing as if in pain. Mary stood in front of the door. She looked left and right, then opened her bag and slipped her hand inside. The cold metal was comforting. She knocked on the door, and realised that it was open. She pushed it with the flat of her hand. “Hello?” she said. There was no reply but she could hear the sound of running water. She reached her hand inside, feeling for a light switch. She found it, but when she flicked it up nothing happened. Either the bulb was broken or it had been removed.

She peered into the gloom. Her hand tightened around the gun and she stepped inside. The bathroom door was closed but she could see a strip of light at the bottom and the shower was on full blast. Mary moved into the room and carefully closed the door behind her.

“Take your hand out of the bag,” said a woman’s voice. “And if it comes out with a gun, I’ll shoot.”

The voice was calm and assured, and Mary slowly obeyed, raising her hands above her head.

“Turn around and put your hands against the wall,” said the voice. Mary did as she was told, mentally cursing herself for her stupidity. She shouldn’t have come alone, she shouldn’t have entered the darkened room, she shouldn’t have fallen for the oldest trick in the book. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath as a hand patted her down expertly, running down her sides and the small of her back. She felt the hand slide into her bag and pull out the gun and then heard it being thrown onto the bed. The hand went back into the bag and Mary shifted her weight off her arms. Before she could move, the barrel of a gun pressed into the small of her back.

“Don’t even think about it,” said the voice calmly.

Mary opened her eyes and looked down. She saw a hand with red-painted fingernails take her wallet out of the bag and then the barrel was removed from her back. The woman stepped away and Mary realised she was going through the credit cards and identification.

“These are good,” said the woman. “Very good.”

Mary felt her mouth go dry and she swallowed. “You’re Kelly Armstrong?” she said.

“Uh-huh,” said Kelly. “And despite what these say, you’re Mary Hennessy. I’ve been looking for you for some time.”

Mary frowned. If she’d been caught in some sort of FBI sting the room should have been full of armed agents by now, and if it was an SAS trap then she’d be dead on the floor. It didn’t make any sense. She heard the woman walk away to the other side of the room. Mary turned her head quickly and saw Kelly peering through a gap in the curtains. She had the striking looks of a television anchorwoman, with backswept hair and a sharp profile. She was wearing a black jacket and a skirt which showed off her long, tanned legs and she held a large automatic in her right hand. In her left she held Mary’s wallet. Mary’s frown deepened. Kelly turned to look at her and Mary faced the wall again.

“You came alone?” Kelly asked.

“That’s what you wanted,” replied Mary, her eyes on the wall.

“You can turn around now,” said Kelly. She put Mary’s wallet on a bedside table and clicked on a small lamp.

Mary pushed herself away from the wall and turned to face the younger woman. “What’s this all about?” she asked. “I was told you wanted to see me, that you had information for me. Why all this cloak and dagger charade?”

Kelly smiled. “You’re a very dangerous woman, Mary. I had to make sure that you didn’t come in with guns blazing.”

“What is it you want? Have you come to take me in, is that it?”

Kelly laughed softly. She reached into her jacket pocket and took out a small leather wallet. She threw it onto the bed, close to the gun. Mary reached out her hand, and for a brief second considered grabbing the gun. She looked up and saw that Kelly was watching her closely. Mary picked up the wallet and opened it. Her heart sank as she saw the FBI credentials. “I know about the assassination,” said Kelly quietly.

Mary’s mouth dropped. She looked at the door, expecting it to burst open to admit a dozen gun-toting FBI agents, but it remained firmly closed. “I don’t know what game it is you’re playing, but let’s cut to the chase, shall we? I thought you wanted to talk.”

Kelly placed her gun on the bedside table. “Oh I do, Mary,” she said softly. “And I want to help.” She walked over to an easy-chair and sat down, crossing her long legs like a secretary preparing to take dictation.

Mary looked at the gun on the bed, and then back at Kelly. “Who are you?” she asked.

Kelly raised an eyebrow archly. “Kelly Armstrong, special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“And?” said Mary, sensing that there was more to come.

“And Colm O’Malley was my father.”

The revelation hit Mary like a blow to the stomach. “Colm O’Malley?” she repeated.

“Didn’t they tell you? Didn’t they tell you that Fergus is my uncle?”

Mary shook her head. “No, they didn’t.” She sat down on the edge of the bed. “But you’re American,” she said.

“I am now,” she said. “My parents divorced when I was a kid.” Mary looked up sharply. “I know, I know, Catholics don’t get divorced,” she said. “My mother was American, she went back to the States and divorced him there. I hardly saw him when I was growing up, but later, when I was in my teens, I used to go to stay with him. Things were never right between him and my mother, she wouldn’t even let him come to my wedding.” She grimaced as if in pain. “She couldn’t stop me going to his funeral, though.” She reached up as if to casually slip a strand of her blonde hair behind her ear but she brushed her cheek with the back of her hand and Mary could see that she was close to tears.

“My husband died, too,” said Mary quietly.

Kelly looked at her fiercely. “I know,” she said. “You think if I didn’t know I’d be sitting here talking to you like this?” Her anger subsided as quickly as it had flared. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Mary said nothing and the two women sat in silence for a while, united by unspoken memories.

“How could they do it?” Kelly asked eventually. “How could they murder them like that?”

“The SAS have a saying,” said Mary. “‘Big Boys’ Games, Big Boys’ Rules’.”

“That doesn’t excuse what they did,” said Kelly. “It doesn’t even explain it. They gunned my father down like an animal.”

“I know,” said Mary.

“Like an animal,” Kelly repeated. She looked up sharply. “I want to help, Mary.” There was a new brittle — ness in her voice, like splintered glass.

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” said Mary. “You don’t know what we’re planning.”

Kelly snorted softly. “You’d be surprised,” she said. “I know you’re planning an assassination using three snipers, and that one of the snipers will be more than a mile from the target. I know that two of the snipers are former Navy SEALs, Rich Lovell and Lou Schoelen, and that you organised a full rehearsal in Arizona to calibrate your weapons. And I know that the assassination is set for sometime within the next two weeks.” Mary sat in stunned silence as Kelly ticked off the points on her fingers. Kelly smiled smugly. “The only thing I don’t know is who you’re planning to kill.”

“My God,” whispered Mary.

“So?” asked Kelly.

“My God,” repeated Mary. “Does the FBI know all this, too?”

Kelly shrugged. “Some of it. They know that Lovell and Schoelen are the snipers, but so far they’re not aware that there’s an IRA connection.”

“Do they know who else is involved?”

Kelly shook her head. “Just the SEALs.”

“How did you find out that I was part of it?” asked Mary.

“Someone with an Irish accent hired one of the cars you used in the desert. That set bells ringing in my mind and I took the photographs to my uncle. He recognised you.”

“But the FBI doesn’t know I’m involved?”

“Not yet, no. But they’re using computers to enhance the photographs so I would guess it’s only a matter of time. So who’s the target?”

Mary shook her head as if trying to clear it. “Photographs?” she said. Realisation dawned. “The plane,” she mumbled. “It must have been the plane.”

“There was a video-recorder on board,” said Kelly, “the whole thing was filmed.”

Mary looked at her watch, and then at the FBI agent. “And you want to help?” she said. “Knowing what that entails, you want to help?”

“If the target is who I think it is, yes, I’ll help. I want to hurt the British the way they hurt me.” She stared at Mary with an intensity that bordered on fanaticism.

Mary nodded slowly. “The Prime Minister,” she said.

Kelly let out a deep breath with the sound of a deflating tyre. “I knew it,” she said. She stood up and walked to stand in front of Mary. “I’m with you,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for a chance like this for a long time.”

Rich Lovell sat on the side of his bed, a sheet of polythene spread over the quilt so that it wouldn’t be stained by his disassembled Barrett rifle. The former Navy SEAL stripped, cleaned and lubricated his weapon every day, whether or not it had been fired. Slowly and methodically, he checked that the chamber was empty and broke the rifle down into its three major components: the upper receiver group, containing the barrel and telescopic sight; the bolt carrier group; and the lower carrier group, including the trigger components. He picked up the upper receiver group and checked that the barrel springs weren’t overstretched and that the impact bumper was in good condition. The muzzle brake was tight, as were the scope mountings which had been set during the Arizona rehearsal. He carefully put the upper receiver group back on the polythene and picked up the bolt carrier group. He looked to see that the ejector and extractor were under spring pressure and weren’t chipped or worn. As his hands performed the functions they’d done thousands of times before, his mind emptied. Cleaning his rifle was a form of mantra for Lovell, bringing an inner peace that he rarely felt at other times. He de-cocked the firing mechanism, then depressed the bolt latch and worked the bolt in and out, feeling for any signs of roughness. There were none. There had been none the previous day, there would be none the following day, but every day he checked. He held the bolt down and peered at the firing-pin, confirmed that it wasn’t broken or chipped, and then examined the firing-pin hole for signs of erosion. There were none.

He inspected the bolt latch and the cocking lever, then replaced the components on the polythene sheet.

The last group to be checked was the lower receiver. He pulled the bolt carrier back and checked that the mainspring moved freely and that the trigger mechanism was in good condition.

When he was satisfied that everything was as it should be, he inserted his bronze-bristle bore brush through the chamber end of the barrel and made six passes with rifle-bore cleaner. He unwrapped a pack of small cloth patches and he pushed them through the bore one at a time with the brush until they came out completely clean. The dirty ones he screwed up and threw into his wastepaper bin. He used another piece of cloth to dry off any parts of the upper receiver group which had come into contact with the cleaner. He took a small bottle of CLP — cleaner, lubricant and preservative — and soaked a square of material with it before passing it through the barrel. He held the end of the barrel to his eye and squinted down it to check that it had a thin coating of CLP. Satisfied, he poured CLP on another cloth and generously lubricated the bolt, the bolt carrier and the receiver, and then lightly rubbed it over all the metal surfaces.

When all the individual components were glistening with the CLP he assembled the rifle with crisp, economic movements. He stood up and went over to the window where he put the rifle to his right shoulder and put his eye close up to the telescopic sight. The reticle graduations came into focus, superimposed on the green lawn. He aimed the rifle at the base of a small bush and tightened his finger on the trigger. The image in the scope was rock steady despite the weight of the rifle. Lovell knew better than to pull the trigger without a bullet in the chamber: to do so could damage the firing-pin. He swung the rifle slowly across the lawn, breathing softly and slowly. Marksmanship was to a large extent a function of breathing and it was something he practised almost as much as actually firing the weapon. The road filled the scope and he followed it back towards the highway. The view turned blue and then Lovell was looking at the face of Matthew Bailey. Lovell smiled and smoothly followed Bailey with the rifle, keeping the man’s forehead dead in the centre of the scope. Instinctively his finger pressed harder on the trigger, shallow breathing to keep his chest movement to a minimum. He became totally focused on Bailey, then when he was sure he had the shot made he held his breath and mentally the trigger was pressed and the bullet leapt from the barrel at more than three thousand feet per second. “Bang,” he said, softly.

He took the rifle from his shoulder. Through the window he saw Bailey drive up and park at the side of the house. A flash of colour at the periphery of his vision caught his attention and he narrowed his eyes. It was a car, moving slowly at the far end of the driveway. Lovell put the rifle to his shoulder once more and closed his left eye. Through the open eye he saw the windshield of the car centred on the reticle and he edged the rifle over to the right, centring it on the face of the driver. He was looking at a pair of deep set, watery eyes above cheeks which were threaded with broken veins as if the man had a drinking problem. His thin lips were moving together as if he was chewing and he had a deep frown. The man was clearly watching Bailey as he walked to the front door.

Lovell placed the rifle on the plastic sheeting and went downstairs. Carlos and Dina were sitting at a long pine table in the kitchen. Dina was pouring tea from a brown earthenware teapot and she looked up as Lovell opened the door.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked. She smiled evilly at Lovell and licked her lips, her eyes boring into his. She took great pleasure in making him nervous.

“Bailey’s just arrived, and there’s someone following him,” he said.

“Who?” asked Carlos.

“One guy, looks like a rental car. He’s not the cops, that’s for sure. And he doesn’t look like any FBI agent I’ve ever seen.”

Carlos stood up. Dina’s hand froze, the teapot suspended in mid-air. “Where’s Schoelen?” Carlos asked.

“The den,” said Dina.

Carlos looked at Lovell. “Get him. Where is this guy?”

“End of the drive.”

“The two of you work your way behind him.” He opened a drawer in a tall pine dresser and took out a heavy automatic which he handed to Lovell.

The kitchen door opened and Bailey walked in, a blue nylon duffel bag over his shoulder. He immediately saw the looks of surprise on their faces. “What?” he said. “What’s happened?”

“You were followed,” said Dina, contemptuously.

“I was what?” he said, shocked.

Lovell clattered down the stairs to the den. Carlos turned to Bailey. “Go back outside, walk up and down as if you’re waiting for something.”

Bailey dropped the duffel bag on the floor. “Where’s Mary?” he asked.

“She’s out,” snapped Carlos. “Now get outside.” Lovell and Schoelen came upstairs from the den and rushed out of the rear door, towards the water. “Dina, you should go out with Matthew. Give whoever it is something else to look at.”

Dina nodded and went out. “What’s happening, Carlos?” Schoelen asked.

“We’ll soon find out,” he said, his voice flat and hard.

Joker tapped the steering wheel and chewed his gum. He had watched Matthew Bailey take his bag out of the car and go inside the house and he’d checked out as much of the building as he could see with the binoculars. Now he wasn’t sure what to do. One thing was certain, he couldn’t stay in the road for too long, not during broad daylight. He put the binoculars to his eyes again. Bailey walked out of the front door and onto the lawn. He looked at his wristwatch and walked slowly back to where he’d parked his car.

“Now, my boy, what are you up to?” Joker murmured to himself. A woman, dark haired and thin, came out of the house and Bailey turned round to look at her. Through the binoculars he saw Bailey frown and his lips move. Joker trained the binoculars on the woman, moving up from her waist, past boyish breasts to her tanned face, framed by long, dark hair. He took the binoculars away from his eyes and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. It came away wet. He had switched off the car engine while he watched the house and with the air-conditioner off the temperature had soon mounted. The car windows were closed and he opened them. In the distance he saw the woman and Bailey standing together, her hand on his shoulder, and he put the binoculars back to his eyes. The woman was saying something but he couldn’t read her lips. Joker wished he had one of the microphone amplifiers he’d used on surveillance assignments with the SAS. They could amplify a whisper from more than two hundred yards away.

Bailey answered her, and his concern was evident. Something was worrying him. He tried to read the man’s lips but it was beyond him. He was so busy concentrating on Bailey’s lips that the first he knew of the gun by his neck was when the cold metal pressed up against his flesh. “Don’t even think about moving,” said a soft American voice.

Joker kept the binoculars pressed to his eyes, his mind racing. A second man appeared at the passenger window. He reached through and pulled out the ignition key. “Drop the binoculars,” said the first man, “and put both hands on the steering wheel.”

Joker did as he was told. “What’s up?” he asked.

“You’re British?” asked the man with his key.

Joker seized the opening. “I’m a tourist, I’m lost,” he said.

The gun was rammed hard against his throat. “With binoculars?” said the man to his right. “Don’t screw us around.”

From what Joker could see there was only one weapon, and that was pressed against his neck. If he was outside that would have been a major mistake, he could have twisted away from the gun and the man would have been close enough to hurt, with a slash to the throat or a backfist to the nose, but there was no room to move in the car so he had to sit where he was and wait. If the man kept as close when Joker climbed out of the car he’d be reasonably sure of overpowering him.

“Okay,” said the man to his right. “Keep your hands on the wheel while I open the door. You move your hands, you’re dead.”

“Hey, I’m not doing anything, I’m just sitting here,” said Joker. He chewed his gum and tried to look unconcerned.

The car door clicked and swung open. The gun was still against his neck and Joker weighed up the odds of pushing the door, slamming it into the man and grabbing for the gun. He decided against it. He felt the gun move away as the man stood to the side to open the door all the way. Joker’s gun was under the passenger seat but he knew he hadn’t the slightest chance of reaching it. He would make his move as soon as he got out of the vehicle. Two men but only one gun. He’d been up against worse odds before and triumphed.

The man on the right side of the car opened the passenger door. He bent down and Joker turned to see what he was doing. As he moved he realised his mistake, but he was too late, the butt of the gun smashed into Joker’s temple and everything went red and then black.

Cole Howard became progressively more impressed with Helen as the day wore on. Brand new desks and filing cabinets were delivered before ten o’clock and late in the morning white-overalled technicians arrived to install enough telephones for a small army, and a digital switchboard which they put on her desk. Calls could be put through the board or go direct to the extensions. Half a dozen FBI agents had arrived from Washington headquarters and they had been briefed by Hank O’Donnell before hitting the phones, contacting FBI offices throughout the country and wiring over photographs of the assassination team.

A light lit up on Helen’s switchboard and she took the call, while Howard and Ed Mulholland stood in front of a white board, drawing up the President’s schedule as a series of boxes, using different colours according to the level of risk: black for inside meetings where no sniper could reach him, green for places where he was moving and an unlikely target, and red for those venues where he was exposed and potentially vulnerable.

“Ed, there’s a call for you,” Helen called over.

“I’ll take it here, Helen,” he called, gesturing at the nearest extension. It warbled once and Mulholland picked it up. He listened, grinned, said a few words and then hung up. He beamed at Howard, wide creases forming in his craggy face. “Report from our Baltimore office. Mary Hennessy stayed at a hotel there two days ago. Positive ID, and we’re getting credit card details now.”

Howard made a fist and shook it. “Yes!” he hissed.

“We’re on the right track, Cole, no doubt about it,” said Mulholland, eagerly. “And we’re getting closer.”

Consciousness returned to Joker like waves breaking over a beach, but each time his mind cleared an undertow of blackness would pull him back and he’d return to nightmares where guns fired, knives slashed and men died screaming. The pain was there whether he was conscious or not, a dull ache behind his right ear and a burning soreness in his wrists as if his hands were being sawn off with a blunt hacksaw.

During periods of consciousness his eyes would flicker open and he could see the tips of his shoes resting on the floor, limp as if they belonged to a dead man. He was somewhere dark and hot with metal pipes above his head and wooden panels on the wall. The pain in his wrists became sharper as if hot needles were being forced between the bones. His shoulders were aching and he could feel his arms being pulled from their sockets, then he surrendered to the dark undercurrent again and he dreamed of a dark woman, a long, sharp knife in her hand and evil in her eyes, laughing as she cut and sliced. Some time later his eyes flickered open and she was there, her face only inches from his, a cruel smile on her face, saying something, but he couldn’t hear her because of the ringing in his ears. He fainted again and when his eyes opened next she was gone and he was alone with the pain.

His arms had become tubes of meat, numb in the middle with intense, searing pain at either end. He lifted his head, a movement which sent waves of nausea rippling through his stomach, and fought to focus on his arms which were stretched out above him. His wrists were shackled by a shiny steel chain flecked with blood, and the chain was looped over a metal pipe which ran across the ceiling. The chain was supporting all his weight, and it was biting deeply into his wrists. He tried to push himself up with his feet but he could barely reach and he teetered on his toes. He was still groggy and the effort of balancing was too much — he slumped forward and the pain made him grunt.

Time dragged interminably. His head throbbed with the rhythm of his thudding heart, the chain around his wrists felt as if it had worn through to his bones, and he could feel the sockets of his shoulders about to pop. His mouth was bone dry and his throat had swollen up so much that he had to force each breath into his lungs. He squinted up at his wrists and he saw the chain was fastened with a small brass padlock. Another, bigger, padlock kept the chain secured to the pipe. He knew how to pick locks, but his hands were in such bad shape he also knew that it would be beyond him, even if he could reach them.

He tried to balance on his toes again, to give his arms some measure of relief, but when his toes failed him and he had to drop down, the pain in his wrists was a hundred times worse. He had no way of measuring time, but daylight was seeping into the room from somewhere behind him so he knew it wasn’t yet dark.

Over to his right was a flight of steps leading up to a door. At the base of the stairs was a workshop table and various tools were lying there: a file, a set of screwdrivers, a saw, pruning-shears, a pair of bolt-cutters. There was a box of table salt and a wooden block from which protruded the black plastic handles of a set of kitchen knives. Joker had a bad feeling about the knives and the salt.

His shirt was soaked through with perspiration and he felt beads of sweat dribble down the back of his legs. The door at the top of the stairs opened and a figure was framed in the light behind it. The figure reached for a light switch and fluorescent lights blinked into life, flooding the basement with stark, white light. Joker screwed up his eyes and tried to focus on the figure on the top of the stairs. Shoes clicked on the stairs and two other figures appeared at the doorway. Joker heard masculine voices and a harsh laugh and then she was standing in front of him. Mary Hennessy. Her hair was dyed blonde and lightly permed, but other than that she had changed little from the last time he’d seen her, face to face. “I know you,” she said quietly.

Joker tried to speak but his throat was too sore and dry to form words. He coughed and tasted blood at the back of his mouth.

She turned to the two men behind her. “Gentlemen, meet Sergeant Mike Cramer of the Special Air Service. A hired assassin for the British Government.”

Joker shook his head but the movement made him dizzy and his vision rippled like a mirage. He groaned and tried to lick his dry lips. One of the men, with a receding hairline and a thick, black moustache, spoke. “Are you sure?” he asked Hennessy. His accent seemed vaguely Middle Eastern.

“Oh yes,” said Hennessy. “I’m quite sure.” She turned back to Joker and grabbed his shirt. She twisted and ripped it open so that his chest and stomach were bared, gleaming wetly under the fluorescent lights. She stepped to the side so that the men could see the thick, raised scar which ran from his sternum and across his stomach, down to his groin. Slowly, almost sensuously, she ran her index finger along the length of the scar, down to where it disappeared into his jeans. Joker felt his scrotum contract defensively. “I can see Sergeant Cramer remembers, too,” she said softly.

The Colonel was clearing his desk before going home, loading all confidential papers into the sturdy wall-mounted safe behind his desk and signing a stack of memos and requisition forms with his fountain-pen. The administrative work was the least attractive part of his job, but he knew that more careers died on the bureaucratic battlefields than ever were lost in combat. He treated paperwork exactly the way he faced a military operation: scouting ahead for ambushes, looking for terrain that would give him an advantage, and always keeping an eye over his shoulder for sneak attacks.

His telephone rang and he answered it as he read a report on a recent training exercise in the Brecon Beacons. The voice on the other end of the line was a typical upper-class British accent, polite but slightly bored, and the caller apologised for bothering the Colonel even though what he had to say was of the highest priority. “We have contact,” said the voice.