The Angel Tapes Read online

  At nineteen, Peter Macken was growing into the twin of his father. He’d inherited Blade’s black hair and blue eyes—and the permanent five o’clock shadow that you associated less with the Celtic races and more with the men of southern Europe.

  “Is that you, Blade?”

  “Peter?”

  “We have to talk. I—”

  “Jesus, Peter, how many times do I have to say it? Don’t call me on this phone unless it’s an emergency. It’s strictly for work.”

  Rarely of late had Peter heard his father so irritated. He guessed he was under considerable strain. Blade had slept badly and was in a foul mood.

  “I’m sorry. It was the only chance I had to phone you. I tried you at home but all I got was your answering machine. Everybody’s away at the moment. I’m on my own.”

  “All right. Fair enough. Now what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

  Peter’s voice held excitement.

  “He left two cases behind. They’re full of stuff.”

  “Who? Cock Roche?”

  “Yeah. You should see what he’s got, Blade. It’s like James shagging Bond.”

  “Has he microphones?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Him and Joan won’t be back before five. If I nick one, would you be able to show me how to use it?”

  Blade was doing his own driving. The big six-cylinder car could have brought him to O’Connell Street in five minutes but now, as ever, he was going at a leisurely pace. It was hotter than yesterday on this, the second day of Angel; he’d turned the air-conditioning up full. It was close to ten in the morning; Sweetman had been at the blast site since nine.

  A biker cut across his bows and Macken honked angrily, smacking the cellular phone against the steering wheel in the process, having forgotten it was in his hand. He heard a faint and concerned “Blade?” coming from the instrument.

  “Sorry, Peter. Yes, look, why don’t you meet me in … What about Graham O’Sullivan’s in Duke Street? About two?”

  “Cool.”

  * * *

  “D’you see that camera, Blade?” Sweetman said, standing under the smoke-blackened statue of William Smith O’Brien.

  Blade looked. The surveillance camera was mounted high on a gable close by the southern entrance to O’Connell Street. It and its twin on the other side of the thoroughfare monitored the progress of the traffic—and its violators.

  Recent years had seen an increasing number of the devices on Dublin’s streets. They were the eyes of many public and private institutions. They watched people at all times of day and night: people on the street, people entering and leaving buildings, people withdrawing cash from the omnipresent ATMs.

  When Dublin’s muggers struck, the cameras watched. When Dublin’s myriad drugs changed hands, the cameras monitored the transactions. They sometimes saw rape, violence, syringe attacks, and sudden death.

  “How long would you say it’s been there?” Sweetman asked.

  Macken squinted. The camera’s housing looked as though it had braved many rainy seasons.

  “Long enough. Ten years?”

  “That’s what I’d say, too.”

  The scene of the outrage was still a shambles. What little remained of the bomb had been taken away and, at that moment, teams of forensic experts at Garda HQ in Phoenix Park were subjecting the fragments to exhaustive tests. Captain Fitzpatrick and his men were long gone; now there were genuine utility workers in their place, repairing the damaged underground structures. A single line of traffic trickled past the cordoned-off crater. Glaziers were fitting new panes to the shattered windows. It would be days before this end of Dublin’s main street was functioning normally again.

  Sweetman pulled her phone from her purse and called Harcourt Square. Within two minutes, she had the information she was looking for.

  “It’s one of Dublin Corporation’s cameras,” she told Blade. “Traffic control. And we’re in luck; it’s been there since 1991.”

  She looked up at the camera again, then back at the bomb site.

  “If I’m right, Blade, it’s aimed exactly at the part of the street we want.”

  Macken looked skeptical. “I don’t know, Sweetman. It’s an awful long shot, if you want my opinion. I mean, you’re asking a lot if you think that that yoke picked up somebody planting a bomb five years ago.”

  “I think it’s worth a try all the same.”

  “And what if he planted it at night? He probably did, too. Sure we’d never recognize the fucker on the tape. He’ll just be a dark blur off in the distance.”

  “They can do amazing things with computers these days.”

  Blade threw her a curious look.

  “Jesus, Sweetman, if I didn’t know you better, I’d swear you were being sarcastic.”

  He turned and watched the traffic move slowly over O’Connell Bridge. In January, scores of paving bricks on the westside had been removed and replaced by transparent tiles of Plexiglas. Below the Plexiglas, their digital mechanism buried in the stone of the bridge, a set of giant numbers glowed greenly, and altered with each passing second. The Millennium Clock was counting down the time left until the end of the century. At that moment it read: 48,167,650 seconds.

  * * *

  “What!” Blade demanded. “Two weeks?”

  “Well, what did yiz expect?” the technician said. “We can’t hang on to these recordings forever, y’know. The tapes cost a mint, for a start, so we reuse them over and over again. If we didn’t it’d cost a bleeding fortune.”

  Macken and Sweetman were at the headquarters of Dublin Corporation, in the control room that watched over the metropolis. Sweetman was fascinated. She counted more than five hundred monitors, screens the size of a portable television set—all seething with Dublin life at that very moment. Immediate: all this was happening now; these were no replays of yesterday’s events.

  Look there: there was the south end of Parnell Square where it met O’Connell Street. The camera showed the monument and statue of the great statesman Charles Stewart Parnell, his challenging words etched in shiny metal: “Thus far shalt thou go, and no further.…” It was a favorite Dublin gag.

  And here was the stretch of riverside street that ran past the Four Courts, the place that had seen the trials of the lowly and the mighty of Ireland’s tumultuous past. There was a police van stopped outside the gates and uniformed Guards were escorting a man with a blanket over his head into the building. Press photographers’ flashguns flashed. Doubly wasteful: the sunshine was blinding and no flash could hope to penetrate the harsh wool of the Mountjoy Prison bed covering.

  Another camera looked past the bronze statue of Oliver Goldsmith that flanked the entrance to Trinity College. Its lens took in a pedestrian crosswalk that was perhaps Ireland’s liveliest. Even in black-and-white, it allowed Sweetman to observe every detail of the people waiting to cross. It was the time of year when young Spanish students were out in great numbers on Dublin’s streets; she didn’t need to hear the language; she recognized their animated, staccato gestures. Dubliners ignored them, or tolerated them as a necessary nuisance.

  Yet another camera must have been mounted on a tall pole at the entrance to Grafton Street, the city’s most fashionable shopping precinct, for it gave a crow’s-nest view of a quartet of street musicians entertaining the well-dressed passersby. The strollers barely noticed them, being much more interested in seeing and being seen by their peers.

  But Dublin harbored darker places. There were narrow streets of tall Victorian and Georgian buildings, some more alleys than streets. There were areas of massive blocks of tenements with names like Sheriff Street, Sean MacDermott Street, Fatima Mansions. They’d never been pretty; they were far from pretty now. You didn’t want to visit these places unless you really had to. Here the hard-core crime of Dublin walked, fought, shot up, and—of late, in numbers that grew at a frightening rate—died.

  A vehicle could not traverse the city center without its entire journe
y being followed by a relay of cameras, each of whose ambit knitted almost seamlessly with those of its companions. One day soon, the technician had assured the police officers in his colorful way, “a pair of flies couldn’t shag each other on a wall without us knowing about it.”

  And recording the venial act.

  But the recordings were erased after fourteen days. If Sweetman had thought to discover, in some dusty archive, video evidence of the man who called himself Angel planting a high-explosive device, she had to admit defeat now.

  She looked ruefully at the moving, black-and-white images and thought: He’s there; Angel’s there. His image is still there, somewhere among all those swirling magnetized particles that make up the videotapes. It’s there, but it’s scrambled beyond retrievability—in much the same way as Angel’s true voice.

  Sweetman knew a dead end when she saw one.

  * * *

  There was a table on a landing halfway up the stairs of the coffee shop, and a sign on the wall above it that read BRENDAN KENNELLY’S CORNER. Brendan Kennelly the poet. (Who knew what stunning verses had been conceived at this table, over espresso and sweet pastries?) Blade found his son waiting there punctually at two o’clock. The shop was self-service, so he left Peter seated and returned shortly with two cups of coffee and a plate of doughnuts.

  “Jesus, Blade, you can’t smoke in here!”

  “Oh. Sorry. I forgot.”

  Blade returned the pack of Hamlets to his pocket. He dumped three spoonfuls of sugar in his coffee and stirred it slowly. He was very tired and wished he wasn’t. It was trivial, he knew, but he never liked to appear this way in Peter’s company: Their meetings were fewer, far fewer, than Blade would have liked.

  His son wolfed down a doughnut with a voraciousness that startled him. Christ, wasn’t Joan feeding them these days? Peter and eighteen-year-old Sandra. Anne, Blade’s eldest, had flown the nest some years before. She was happily married in London, expecting her second child, and saw her father as often as she could—which was more, Blade thought, than could be said of Sandra.

  But Peter’s hasty eating was simply a mask for his excitement. He brushed sugar granules from his lips and, with the same hand, reached into a plastic bag and hauled out a small, black fake-leather case. He opened it and passed something across the table.

  “A plug?”

  “Ehh, it’s actually a socket.”

  “Yeah yeah, I know it’s a socket.” Blade had to suppress his irritation.

  But it was a socket: a twin-power socket. The object he held in his hand was about eight inches long and three wide. It was made of tough, white plastic and had a double set of rectangular apertures that would accept three-pinned plugs. The manufacturer’s logo—an MK within an oval—was embossed below each of the earth slots. It was the most ordinary thing in the world—or in Ireland and Britain, at any rate. You saw those outlets in every home, in every room.

  You saw them, yet your conscious mind rarely registered them.

  Blade knew without his son’s saying so that the device he was holding was no ordinary power socket. He didn’t need to read the small sticker affixed to it; it advertised the services of Centurion Security. He opened it up with the little screwdriver that Peter had handed him.

  The outlet had the regular fittings. It also contained a tiny, cube-shaped black object with a narrow extension like the antenna of an insect. A microphone.

  “It works, too. I tried it in my room.”

  “The socket?”

  “Yeah. But I haven’t a clue how to get the mike working. That’s why I wanted to see you.” Peter reached for another doughnut.

  Blade screwed the cover back on the power outlet and laid it on the table.

  “It’s a microwave radio transmitter,” he said. “You’ll need a receiver tuned to the same wavelength. I don’t know how far the range is, but I’d say at a guess it’s roughly a hundred yards. And, of course, you’ll need a tape deck connected up to the receiver if you want to do any recording.”

  Peter wiped his lips again.

  “He’s got all that stuff. But I don’t know if I can swipe it without him missing it.”

  Blade took a nip of his coffee, now lukewarm.

  “If he does miss it, he’ll guess who took it. No, I think it’s too risky, Peter, I really do. You don’t know what you’re up against. The man’s made his living from acting the sneak. Christ, it’d be like trying to lift a pickpocket’s wallet.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll see. But I’ll be careful.”

  Blade cleared his throat. “Supposing you do manage it. Just what are you going to record?”

  “Ah, Blade, we’ve been over this a million times! I’m going to put it in Joan’s room.”

  Blade wished that the coffee shop had air-conditioning. He didn’t blush easily; now he felt his face redden with embarrassment.

  “No, Peter,” he said quietly. “No, I don’t want you doing that.”

  “Ah, cop on, Blade, will you? It’s the only way. It’s the only room in the house where they’re ever in private together.” He looked his father straight in the eye. “Look, I’m nineteen years of age. I know what people get up to in bedrooms. Don’t be such a bloody prude.”

  “Don’t you talk to me like that!”

  “Sorry. I was out of order. Sorry.”

  “And I’m not a bloody prude. It’s just … It’s just that, well, I love your mother … still. Very much. Jesus, Peter, the idea of recording things she says in bed…” He was unable to finish the sentence.

  Something happened then between Blade and his son: a thing so novel that Blade, recalling it later that day, was deeply moved. All at once the roles of parent and offspring were reversed. Peter touched his hand lightly and spoke to him as a father would.

  “It’s the only way, Blade. You know it and I know it. If we’re ever going to prove that Joan and the cockroach are living together as man and wife, then we’ll have to record them in bed. It’s where people talk about things—things they wouldn’t talk about anywhere else. And I’m speaking from experience.”

  Blade looked quickly down into his now-cold coffee.

  “I love you … Dad. Look, I have eyes in my head; I can see how the maintenance money is bleeding you dry. Jesus, I haven’t seen you in a new shirt in years! It’s Roche who should be keeping Joan, not you. And you can take it from me he’s got plenty. I’ve had a look at his bank statements. Joan wouldn’t miss that money from you.”

  “Ah, don’t I know it,” Blade said with bitterness.

  At that moment his phone throbbed. It was one of the investigation team, calling from Harcourt Square. He thought he’d a lead but didn’t sound optimistic. Blade told the officer he was on his way. He stood up.

  “You should be getting back, too, Peter. Didn’t you say they’d be in about five?”

  “Thereabouts.”

  He picked the tab off the tray and put it in his wallet. It wasn’t much, but he could declare it as expenses. It made him feel cheap, and he knew his son was right. The sooner they could prove that Jim Roche was cohabiting with his wife, the sooner Blade could afford to live a decent life again.

  He squeezed Peter’s shoulder.

  “Just be careful,” he said. “The man’s a snake.”

  “Right.”

  “And don’t call me on my mobile again, okay?”

  “Promise.”

  A promise, Blade knew, that Peter would never keep.

  Seven

  There was no weekend leave. The investigation was far, far too important and Blade’s team had fewer than ten days to track down the bomber.

  “If you don’t mind me saying so, sir,” one of the assembled detectives grumbled, “you’re asking us to do the impossible. How can you expect us to do something—and not appear to be doing anything?”

  Blade saw Lawrence Redfern, against a wall, arms folded, nod his head. The observer. Just let him open his fucking mouth … Nevertheless, Blade had been assured that the oth
er agency men were “behaving themselves”; some of his detectives had gone so far as to praise the efficiency of the Americans. But a conference like this one was strictly a garda affair and protocol didn’t tolerate outside interference.

  “D’you think I like it, Liam?” Macken replied to the question. “But that’s the way we have to work this. The media are driving the assistant commissioner spare. They’re sure it’s a bomb but they can’t stick their necks out—yet. They’ve nothing but speculation to go on, and we have to keep it that way.”

  Blade paused to let his words sink in. Then he lowered his voice slightly.

  “But that’s not the key issue. What’s really important is that we mustn’t let the bomber himself find out what we’re up to. We’ve no idea how much the bastard knows about us already. For all we know, he may have eyes and ears everywhere.”

  “What do you mean, sir? Accomplices?”

  “It could be. It could also be that he’s managed to tap a few phone lines here in the Square—impossible though that might sound.”

  “Christ almighty.”

  “In which case, I want you all to be extra careful—more careful than you’ve ever been up till now—about messages or instructions given over the phone. Work out new codes between you.”

  A hand was raised. “But what about our Tap Alerts, sir? Surely they’d—”

  “We can’t trust them anymore, Detective Sergeant,” Blade cut in. “They’ve worked grand up till now, but we don’t know what we’re up against. Maybe the bomber’s using something completely new—something undetectable. I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  Redfern coughed loudly and pointedly, drawing all eyes to him.

  “Umm, permission to speak, Superintendent.…”

  Blade looked at Duffy; Duffy nodded slowly.

  “Go ahead, Mr. Redfern,” Blade said.