The Angel Tapes Page 6

  “Thank you. Fact is, I’ve ordered a number of scramblers from headquarters. They ought to be here by morning.” He addressed the room. “Hook one up to a phone and you can talk in complete privacy.”

  “How many are we talking about?” Duffy asked.

  “Fifty.”

  “Very good,” the assistant commissioner said. “My thanks, Mr. Redfern.”

  Blade grunted. “But work out new codes, all the same,” he told his people. “I’m putting you in charge of that, Liam.”

  “Fair enough, sir.” The detective made a note on his pad. “What’ll we be calling our man?”

  More than one hundred pairs of eyebrows were raised as Blade Macken, instead of replying verbally, tore a sheet from his notebook and wrote down something. He folded the paper in two and passed it to the nearest detective. It went from hand to hand.

  The ticking of the wall clock was the loudest sound in the incident room in Harcourt Square. All knew that a precedent had been set. The Square was perhaps Dublin’s most secure building, always had been. A visitor was screened to the point where the maiden name of his grandmother was no longer a family affair. And the incident rooms were more secure than any other part of the building. Here Guards and Special Branch officers could talk freely.

  Until now.

  * * *

  “Pluto?” Sweetman said a half hour later, as they strolled in the open air of nearby St. Stephen’s Green. If the public park wasn’t secure from buggers, then they were in serious trouble. “Mickey Mouse’s dog?”

  “No, not that Pluto.” Macken caught himself scanning the other strollers in the park. Angel was getting to him.

  “Oh, the planet then.”

  Blade stopped on the little bridge that spanned the pond. He took a clear plastic container from his pocket and pulled apart a cheese sandwich left over from a hasty office snack. He tossed the pieces in the water and watched with interest as a score of ducks converged on them.

  “No, not the planet either. You mustn’t have been paying attention to your Greek lessons, Sweetman.”

  “We didn’t have any Greek in County Galway. Some of us couldn’t afford to be sent to boarding school.”

  “Hmm. Well, Pluto was the Greek god of the underworld.”

  She turned to face him, smiling.

  “Now that’s very clever, Blade. Angel, devil, crime, underworld.”

  Macken dropped the sandwich container in a trash can.

  “And underground,” he said. “That’s where this particular angel reigns supreme.”

  Sweetman squinted into the sun, now hanging low above the trees to the west.

  “Tell me honestly, Blade,” she said. “What are our chances? I mean really.”

  “Slim.” He lit a cigar.

  “Hopeless, would you say?”

  “Ah no, I didn’t say that. It’s never hopeless, Sweetman. He may be calling himself Angel, but we’re not dealing with some sort of superhuman being. He’s fallible, like the rest of us—with the exception of course of himself in the Vatican.”

  “Only when he’s speaking ex cathedra.”

  “Which is Latin for speaking out of your arse. I bet they didn’t teach you that in County Galway either.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that, sir. It’s not right, so it’s not.”

  “Ah, don’t mind me, Sweetman. I’m always the same at a time like this. When I’ve nothing to go on. Fuck it anyway.”

  He started back slowly the way they’d come. Sweetman fell into step beside him.

  “Why don’t the Americans call off the visit? It’s suicide.”

  “They can’t, Sweetman. The president can’t pull out now; he’s painted himself into a corner—him and his big mouth. The media would tear him to bits.”

  “Better than having a bomb blow you to bits.”

  Blade wanted to smile but couldn’t. “It’s all the Brits’ fault. They’re the ones to blame. Still, Duffy says he’d have given in as well. Maybe he’s right. Anything’s better than having the deaths of two-hundred-odd people on your conscience.”

  Sweetman stopped.

  “Now you’ve put your finger on it, Blade. Why don’t we just pay the shagger his money and let him jet off to the Bahamas or wherever it is he wants to go? I know what I could do with twenty-five million dollars, but the government wouldn’t miss it. Sure it’s chicken feed compared with what we got last year from the European funds.”

  Blade shook his head.

  “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Sweetman: You’ve a bloody good head on you. But sometimes you’re a bit naive, d’you know that?” He put a hand on her shoulder. She looked up in surprise and he withdrew it hurriedly.

  “Th-think of it this way,” he said. “Our bomber’s like a kidnapper—without the kid. Now you know as well as I do what kidnappers are like. They’re mad bastards; they don’t give a toss. Once they have the ransom money they kill their hostage anyway—ninety-nine percent of them at any rate. And that’s what this fucker Angel’ll do. The man’s a looper; I know it. You’d have to be loopy to dream up something like this.”

  “So you reckon he’ll set off the bombs anyway?”

  “I do. It’s the spectacle, Sweetman! Seeing your handiwork on television, having half the country talking about you in the pub. Having everyone scared out of their wits over you. He probably wanked himself silly watching the news.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t be so crude, sir.”

  “Sorry. But you see my point? There’s no way we can give in to him like the Brits did in Heathrow. He’d do the job anyway. And we’d leave ourselves wide open to some other mad bastard with a bomb and a funny voice.”

  “You’re right, Blade.”

  “I know I’m right. And I wish to Christ I wasn’t.”

  Eight

  Three women had left messages on Blade’s machine. One was his mother. The message was garbled, and that didn’t surprise him in the least—he’d have been very surprised had Katharine’s words been fully coherent. He made a mental note to call her.

  The second message had been left by someone at the bank. Politely but firmly, Macken was invited to review the terms of his overdraft. He knew what that meant. He muttered a curse and decided to ignore the invitation for the time being.

  The third caller was a stranger. Yet her voice, husky as that of a Gauloise smoker, awakened memories in Blade. He remembered a club on Leeson Street. He’d visited it on Thursday night in the company of Sweetman and a half-dozen other officers, the leftovers of Paddy O’Driscoll’s farewell party. Much wine had been drunk, dances danced. There’d been a blonde woman in her late twenties who’d been dancing alone, shoeless. She’d brushed off every advance made to her—apart from Macken’s.

  Christ almighty tonight, how could he have forgotten! She’d been stunningly beautiful. The last time he’d dated a girl like that was the week a man walked for the first time on the moon. Blade had empathized with that walker. And she—Elaine, that was her name, the answering machine reminded him; Elaine de Rossa—she’d responded eagerly to his advances. Unbelievable. Now she was giving him her phone number, with a request that he call her.

  The number seemed familiar. Then Macken recollected the seven digits he’d scrubbed off his palm the previous morning. Stupid, stupid. You didn’t always get second chances with women like Elaine.

  Blade picked up the receiver. He hesitated. He didn’t have time for this. He really didn’t; not now. But more memories of Elaine de Rossa were starting to come, and Blade was a red-blooded man.

  He rang the number.

  * * *

  “I’m not here,” Ambassador Seaborg said. “I’m not in this room; I’m not hearing this conversation. Is that understood?”

  He had his back turned to them, as though to add emphasis to his words. He didn’t see the look that Lawrence Redfern tossed to the others.

  Seventeen of them were gathered in the ambassador’s office: burly men dressed eer
ily alike in dark, double-breasted suits. The fashion was outmoded but purposeful: The loose jackets concealed the bulges made by heavy-caliber handguns, when such weapons needed to be borne. For the moment, these and other tools of Redfern’s trade were stored in the armory in the bowels of the embassy, behind a door marked ARCHIVES. The double electronic keycard that would open that door was in the custody of Seaborg’s driver, Thomas Jones, who sat in a corner of the room, idly filing his nails. Seaborg wasn’t privy to Jones’s real name; that information was guarded by the men and women of a government facility in Langley, Virginia.

  Two others present were on the embassy payroll: one an interpreter, the other a minor office functionary. Seaborg mused that they actually performed their “official” duties damn well. He didn’t want to know about their other business.

  The strangers had arrived at the embassy in pairs, at three-and four-hourly intervals. Their number had been complete twenty minutes ago, and Redfern had called the meeting at once.

  “The room’s clean, sir,” he told the ambassador. “You can speak freely.”

  Seaborg turned.

  “No, no, you do it. I’m too old for this kind of thing. They’re your men, Major. You do it.”

  “Very well.”

  Redfern half sat, half leaned against the mahogany desk. Thomas Jones slipped his nail file back into his top pocket.

  “You’ve all been briefed on Macken,” Redfern reminded the assembly, “so you already know about his service record. It’s impressive; I’d be the last person to say it wasn’t. A good soldier, a good cop. Or was—once.”

  Seaborg glanced around sharply.

  “The man’s a walking ruin,” Redfern continued. “He’s past it, over the hill. My God, we had to fumigate this office yesterday when he left! If he doesn’t die of lung cancer, then the booze will get him. He smelled like a distillery—at four in the goddamn afternoon.”

  Redfern picked up a folder.

  “The man can’t even go near his wife, for crying out loud. There’s an exclusion order in operation; if he comes within a mile of her home they can arrest him.”

  “Did he beat up on her or what?”

  Redfern opened the file and flipped through it, confirming what he already knew. He shook his head.

  “No, Mr. Roe. He didn’t go as far as that. ‘Mental cruelty’ is what it says here—whatever that means.”

  “Why don’t they replace him? Get somebody else to head up the investigation?”

  “You tell me, Mr. Roe. His superior insists he’s the best they’ve got. All I can say is: If that’s so, then God help this country.”

  “And God help the president,” Roe said with feeling. “Can’t we put pressure on their foreign-office people?”

  “No!”

  It was Seaborg. “Out of the question. This isn’t Panama; we can’t go upsetting these people. The White House would have my head on a platter.”

  “The colonel’s right,” Redfern said. “The last thing we want is to make enemies of the police. They’re touchy enough already; they don’t like foreigners on their patch. It’s imperative we keep them on our side. We might need them before this thing is over.”

  “Sounds to me like you want us to do the job alone, Mr. Redfern.”

  “That’s what I do mean, Mr. Coburn.”

  Good grief, Seaborg thought, weren’t they polite mother-fuckers; weren’t they just. Mr. Roe, Mr. Coburn, Mr. Jones.… Like a board meeting of merchant bankers—as opposed to merchants of death, a more fitting description for some of them—Coburn in particular. Seaborg knew the man’s reputation. Why Larry Redfern had asked for that dangerous son of a bitch was something the ambassador couldn’t fathom. Seaborg pulled a tiny silver case from his pocket and swallowed one of the pills it contained. The whole business wasn’t doing much for his heart.

  “Consider yourselves,” Redfern went on, “the only game in town.” He spread his hands. “Maybe the Irish cops will get this scumball before we do. Could be they’ve got resources we don’t know about. But frankly, gentlemen, I doubt it.”

  “Having said that,” he went on, “it’s also obvious that Macken and his people can lay their hands on a lot more local information than we can. The police commissioner has given us authorization to operate from Harcourt Square, and that’s just what we’re going to do. We’re to have complete access to their files. Use them. If you find something interesting, then I want to know what that something is before Macken does. Is that clear?”

  He stood up.

  “We’ll keep the units intact, we’ll operate in twos. Mr. Jones and I will work alone, for the most part. He has his job to do, I have mine. I’ll be covering Macken, so I’ll be closest to the top.”

  “What about the tape, Mr. Redfern?”

  “It’s in good hands, Mr. Sachs. We’ve two secure Unix mainframes in Langley working on it, plus the Crays in Canaveral and the Pentagon. I’m hopeful.”

  “One more thing, Mr. Redfern,” Coburn said. “Are we carrying?”

  Redfern laughed without humor.

  “No, Mr. Coburn, we are not; not for the time being. The White House doesn’t like it, and the Micks are paranoid about guns. But I promise you this: As soon as we’ve got something to shoot at, you’ll be the first to know.”

  Nine

  Jim Roche kissed Joan Macken on the cheek, dumped his briefcase in the hall and went straight to the drinks cabinet in the front room. It had been a long—but fruitful—Saturday. He poured himself three fingers of brandy, drank half quickly, and eased himself into the club chair. Joan squirted soda water into her own glass and lit a cigarette.

  “You know Charlie Nolan?” Roche asked.

  She nodded, although it was a rhetorical question. Roche swirled the gold liquid around in his glass, enjoying a childlike fascination with the way a shaft of evening sun caused the brandy to glow as if with an inner light.

  “Well, there’s something going on there. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s bloody queer.”

  “What do you mean, ‘queer’?”

  “Well, I suppose you heard about the burglary at Don Delahunt’s house?”

  Joan tossed her mane of thick, heavy hair. It was prematurely gray but she’d never considered having anything done about that. Her friends assured her that it suited her, and she agreed with them.

  “You mean her ladyship’s jewels? Who hasn’t heard about it? Sure didn’t the papers pester us with nothing else for days on end.”

  She drained her glass and helped herself to another soda water. “Can I top you up?”

  Roche passed her his brandy glass. “Apparently Duffy’s put Nolan onto it and he isn’t too pleased about that. I had him on the line today and he did nothing but moan for the best part of twenty minutes. Jesus, sometimes I wonder about that man.”

  “Oh, why’s that?”

  Roche studied his glass.

  “Ah, I don’t know. He’s fifty-five if he’s a day—due for retirement in a couple of years—but you’d swear sometimes you were dealing with a bleeding six-year-old.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, for a start, there’s this thing with him and Macken.”

  “Sure that’s been going on for years, Jim. Charlie Nolan’ll go to his grave still giving out about Duffy.”

  “Yeah, well, it was bloody stupid of Duffy to put them both in charge of the one unit; they squabble like a pair of Kilkenny cats most of the time. If he’d done the sensible thing now and given Merrigan’s job to Nolan—”

  “Or Blade.”

  “Hmm, well I won’t comment on that. Gerry Merrigan always thought that Nolan was the best man for the job. He told me so loads of times. He never trusted Macken; not after the accident.”

  Joan put her glass on the table and sat down opposite Roche.

  “What really did happen, Jim? Do you know? Blade would never talk about it.”

  Roche laughed bitterly.

  “I’m not surprised. Sure wasn’
t he the one partly responsible in the first place? If Macken’d had his shagging wits about him that day, instead of going out on the job half-sloshed, then it never would’ve happened.”

  “Are you sure? I mean about the half-sloshed? I know he was bad—Jesus, no one knows better than me—but in all the years I’ve known him, he never touched a drop when he was on duty. Before: sometimes. After: well, all the fecking time!”

  “I’m just telling you what I was told. Merrigan and Macken were called out on that robbery … Where’s this it was?”

  “Donnybrook?”

  “Yeah, Donnybrook … the Ulster Bank I think it was; the one on the corner of … Ah well, it doesn’t matter. It wasn’t strictly speaking, their case—they just happened to be in the vicinity when they got the call. So Merrigan told Macken to wait in the car. He reckoned he’d be only five minutes, because the Guards were there before him.” Roche nipped at his drink. “But what Gerry Merrigan didn’t know was that the gang were still in there.”

  “The gang? The bank robbers?”

  “Yeah. It was sort of a freak thing really. One of the cashiers had set off the silent alarm the minute he saw the gang come in and the Guards were onto it right away. They wanted backup because they’d got another call at the same time from a fella who said he’d seen the gang going in and they were armed. But somebody on the switchboard in Harcourt Square got the message mixed up. She put the Branch onto it, because she thought it was meant for them. So poor old Gerry arrived at the place thinking that the local gardaí were there already. The trouble was, they weren’t.”

  Joan looked puzzled. “Wouldn’t he have seen a squad car if they were?”

  “He did; that’s just it. It was right outside. But it wasn’t from Donnybrook. The gang were using a fake squad car. Looked just like the real McCoy—from a distance.”

  “They had guts.”

  Roche nodded. “Blade was parked right behind it, so he should have spotted the scam straight away. Only he didn’t, fuck him, because he was half-asleep. When he brought Gerry to the hospital, the staff said he’d a breath on him like a brewery.”

  “I see.…”