‘I don’t know who you’ve picked up, but believe me. . the target’s a woman.’
When he said that, shock, panic, horror, maybe all three swept over me in waves; my heart went ice-cold and for a moment my knees buckled.
Clyde was still holding the Beowulf. I ripped it from his grasp and levelled it at Freddy Welsh’s head.
‘Are you telling the truth,’ I shouted, ‘or is that bullshit?’
‘It’s true, it’s true,’ Welsh screamed. ‘It’s a woman, honest; on my life, I swear.’
I jerked the barrel upwards and fired a round into the wall about a foot above his head. Then I turned on Houseman. ‘You people got it wrong!’ I bellowed. ‘You got it fucking wrong.’ I was ready to go for him, but he stayed calm.
‘Mr Skinner,’ he said, ‘I promise you, that’s the intelligence we have. We know the Israelis have a kill order on Fabrizzi; he’s the only possible target.’
A little of his coolness transferred itself to me. ‘Not necessarily,’ I said. I pointed the gun in Welsh’s direction once again. He was cowering away from me, trying to make himself as small as possible. He was terrified; he’d pissed his pants. ‘Go into the garden store,’ I ordered. ‘Find some rope, twine, wire, anything, and hog-tie this bastard.’ I wasn’t thinking clearly, my thoughts were jumbled up, my priorities shot to hell. ‘Wait,’ I snapped. ‘Where will your people be now?’
‘A couple of them will be on their way home,’ Clyde replied. ‘The other will be back in the office by now. I told them their job would be over when they delivered Fabrizzi safe and well. The First Minister was going to be at the concert so. .’ I nodded; standard practice dictated that Strathclyde would have done a security sweep of the hall.
‘Bugger!’ I hissed. ‘That means the Home Secretary can go fuck herself. I’m doing what I should have done from the off, informing Strathclyde. But first. .’
As the MI5 man went in search of bonds for our prisoner I took out my phone and scrolled through incoming calls till I found the one from Amanda. I pressed redial.
She answered almost instantly. ‘Bob, what’s happening? Do you have any news for me? The Home Secretary’s calling me every ten minutes or so, demanding results. What can I tell her?’
‘You can tell her that if this goes wrong, Amanda, then I’m going to kill her. Listen, earlier on you told me about a current threat against a British political figure.’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me more.’
‘It’s serious. It came out of Afghanistan; a source said that the Taliban have commissioned political hits in Britain, the US and Canada, the three major players in the action. They’re using specialist contractors, not their own amateurs. You may not have noticed, it didn’t get much press over here, but a week ago, there were three arrests in Ottawa. They related to a plot to blow up the Canadian Defence Minister’s car. Ever since, we’ve been on full alert at Westminster.’
‘Did it ever occur to anybody,’ I asked her, ‘that there are two other parliaments on this island, and that there are politicians outside London who might make much softer targets? For example, there’s my wife, who was heckled at the last Scottish Labour Party conference for her vociferous support for the Afghan campaign. Didn’t that ever dawn on anyone down there?’
‘Bob,’ Amanda said, as Houseman came back into the room with cut lengths of blue nylon rope, ‘please don’t shout at me, there’s a love.’ I hadn’t realised that I was. ‘What are you telling me?’
‘I’m telling you that I’ve just had reliable information, from the man who sold the team their weapons, that the target is a woman. It isn’t fucking Fabrizzi, who is at this moment in my force’s custody. But the strong possibility, no, probability, remains that the concert hall is the venue for the hit. This is July; this is Glasgow. The bloody city is closed for the holidays, there’s nothing else on, nothing else for professional assassins to be aiming at.’
‘And your. .’
‘My wife, my high-profile British politician wife is there right now, in the front row, and sat beside her is the wife of a colleague and very good friend.’
‘What can I do?’ Amanda asked.
‘Three things. You can pass my message on to the Home Secretary, word for word. Then you can tell her that I’m about to call Toni Field and explain exactly why I haven’t done so earlier. Once you’ve done that, I’d appreciate prayer.’
As I ended the call, Clyde was completing a very professional job of tying up Freddy Welsh; he wasn’t moving an inch without assistance. I nodded approval, then called Aileen’s mobile. It rang four times and went to voicemail.
‘This is me,’ I said. ‘If you get this, and you’re in the concert hall, find the most senior police officer there and have him put you and Paula under guard. Instruct him also to disarm any officers there who might be carrying weapons. Then call me.’
I was scared to make the next call. If I’d been in Mario McGuire’s shoes I’d have been wanting to knock my head off, for being reckless enough not to warn him as soon as I saw the way the story was heading.
He answered instantly. ‘No sign of Welsh,’ he volunteered at once.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘There wouldn’t be. He’s lying at my feet under Jock Varley’s extension, trussed up like a chicken.’
Then I told him the rest of it. ‘Mario, I’m sorry,’ I said at the end. ‘I broke my own rule; I listened to a politician. You can beat me up later, I won’t resist, but for now, try to get Paula on her phone and, if you can, tell her to take Aileen and lock the pair of them in the toilets till I get there.’
‘Till we get there, you mean,’ he said, grimly. ‘But you’ve got at least twenty minutes’ start on me, so go on man, don’t waste any more time talking to me. Get on the move and alert Strathclyde from the road.’
We took the keys to both storerooms from Welsh, and left him locked in his own, for collection later, with his arsenal. We ran for the car and burned rubber getting out of the Pines. Clyde set the satnav on fastest route to Glasgow, and thank the Lord we didn’t have to retrace our steps: three turns and two minutes and we were on the motorway, travelling like Lewis Hamilton was ahead of us and we had a mind to catch him.
As soon as we were clear I called the Strathclyde communications centre. ‘This is Chief Constable Skinner, from Edinburgh,’ I told the answering officer. ‘I want you to connect me with Chief Constable Field.’
‘I’m sorry,’ the man exclaimed. ‘Who did you say you are?’
‘Chief Constable Bob Skinner,’ I repeated. ‘Now put me through to Toni Field.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir,’ he droned. ‘I’m not allowed to do that. If I put you through without verifying your identity, it’d be more than my job’s worth.’
‘No, pal,’ I roared at him, ‘you’re not sorry. You don’t know the meaning of the word sorry, but you fucking will by the time I’m finished with you. Connect me!’
The bastard hung up on me.
I called back at once; long odds against me drawing the same operator, but I did. ‘My name is Chief Constable Robert Morgan Skinner,’ I snapped. ‘What you will now do is wait one minute then call my force communications centre and ask them to put you through to me on my mobile, as verification. If you are not reconnected to me within two minutes, trust me, you will not have a job on Monday.’
I closed the line, called the comms centre myself, and gave them their orders. Two minutes later I was reconnected to PC Obstinate.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he began.
‘No time for that,’ I said. ‘Toni Field, now: urgently.’
I waited; the only thing I will say for Strathclyde is that they didn’t play me the theme from fucking Z Cars while I was hanging on the line. If they had, it would have played at least five times as I waited. All I could do was sit there going quietly crazy, no, make that noisily, for at least once every minute I screamed, ‘Come on!’ into the mike.
I couldn’t believe how long he took; we were driving past Glasgow Fort when he came back on the line. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he lied. ‘I’ve tried all the chief constable’s numbers. She appears to be incommunicado.’
‘Then get me ACC Allan,’ I retorted, unimpressed by his vocabulary.
‘I’ve tried him; I can’t get in touch with him either.’
Christ! My brain was frazzled; I was fighting to think properly, time flying past while I tried to work out what to do next.
‘Okay,’ I said at last, when I’d decided. ‘Divisional Commander, Glasgow Central. Who’s he?’
‘That would be Chief Superintendent Reardon.’
‘Put me through to him.’
‘I believe he’s on holiday, sir.’
‘Then give me whoever is sitting in his fucking chair,’ I screamed.
‘Very good, sir,’ the communications officer replied stiffly. The waiting hum returned, and stayed with me for another God knew how long. I couldn’t look at the car’s clock.
‘This is Chief Inspector Spencer.’ I’d been hanging on so long I was startled when the woman spoke. ‘I’m the acting divisional commander. Chief Constable Skinner, is it?’
There was something indulgent about her tone that blew the last couple of shreds of my restraint. ‘We’ve established that,’ I yelled at her. ‘I have reason to believe that a terrorist operation is under way at the Royal Concert Hall. You need to get an armed response team there now.’
‘We have armed officers there,’ she protested. ‘We always put on a show of force when there are VIPs. Chief constable’s standing order.’
‘In that case, I’m willing to bet you’ve got two more people on site than you think. I believe you have a two-man hit team there posing as police officers. Are all your guys accounted for?’
‘I assume so.’
‘That doesn’t cut it. .’
‘Mr Skinner,’ Clyde cut in on me. I looked up and realised that we had left the motorway and were heading down Port Dundas Road towards the hall itself.
‘We’re arriving at the site now,’ I told Spencer. ‘No debate; get armed back-up here, now.’
We ran two red lights and swung on to the one-way Killermont Street, against the traffic flow, braking and swerving to avoid an on-coming van. Houseman stopped the car and jumped out, unholstering his pistol.
As I followed I could see why he had. Two uniformed police officers lay on the pavement in front of the entrance doors. They’d been armed, but it hadn’t done them any good. Two other men stood over them, identically dressed, in blue T-shirts and light cotton trousers; the stockier of the pair, a guy with a low forehead and a crew cut, held a silenced pistol in his right hand. As I looked at them, they registered our approach.
The gunman swung round to face us, but he didn’t get his weapon halfway up before Clyde shot him through the head.
By that time his companion was running. I started after him, then something hit me as hard as the other guy’s bullet might have if my young ex-schemie pal hadn’t nailed him. We’d caught them on the way out, not the way in. They’d done what they came to do.
I stopped chasing after the fleeing hit man. Instead I picked up the H and K carbine that one of the fallen officers had been carrying, sighted it on him as I’d done a hundred times before on cardboard targets on our firing range, and on a couple of live ones in other places, and nailed him, twice, right between the shoulder blades. See how fast you can run now, pal.
Clyde was on one knee, checking the cops for pulses. ‘This one’s alive,’ he said. ‘I think the other’s gone.’
Then the door to the hall swung open and ACC Max Allan stepped out into the street. His eyes were all screwed up, and I realised that the interior of the concert hall was without windows other than the glass panes of its doors, and that it was in darkness.
He looked at his fallen men, and he looked at me. ‘Bob,’ he whispered, and I could see he was in shock. ‘Bob, she’s dead.’