Adam Arrow and 'Gammy' Legge arrived together. The two soldiers had met before in Ireland, and were resurrecting old stories as they walked into Skinner's office, just after 9:30 pm.
'So, put yourself in my place. Gammy. There you are, you search the fookin' house when the fella's out and you find, hidden in his fookin' bedroom, a bomb wi' the timer set to go off in thirty-six hours. I ask you, what would you do?'
'I suppose I'd send for me. What did you do?'
'Ah, but you weren't about. No, I just moved the timer forward thirty hours and fooked off. Six hours later, and so did 'e sound asleep in his bed. Smashin' dream, be must have 'ad.'
Skinner put his hands over his ears. 'For God's sake, Adam, keep those stories to yourself. I'll assume you made that one up.'
The little man laughed. 'Course I did.' His eyes twinkled.
Skinner decided not to pry further. Instead he gave each man a beer from the small fridge standing in a corner of his office, and briefed them, as they drank, about the day's discovery at Stow.
'Does our assumption about the bomb sound right to you, Gammy? Could the timer have been set as accurately as that?'
'Yes. That's how she'd have done it, all right. They've got some really pricey timers these days, although if she really knew what she was about, she could have done it with the programming chip from a video. So in theory we could have sleeper Semtex bombs lying around all over Edinburgh.'
'Christ, that's all we need!'
'Ah, but in practice it's a different matter.'
'How come?'
'Thanks to some technical spec the manufacturers sent me, I've been able to work out how much of this super-Semtex stuff was used in each of our two explosions. The good news is that the total matches exactly the quantity nicked from that French arsenal.
Add the fact that all of the rest of the world supply is accounted for, and in safe hands, and we reach the conclusion that as far as
this super-Semtex is concerned, the bastards are out of ammo.'
'That's a relief; but what if they have conventional explosive?
Maybe there are still sleeper bombs lying around.' •If there are,' said Legge, 'then our dogs'll be able to smell them, or we'll be able to pick them out with some other little tricks that we have. We've already given every Festival venue a really thorough sniffing, and we'll keep on doing so on a regular basis.'
Skinner looked across at Arrow. 'All that makes our friend's meeting on Saturday even more interesting.'
The little soldier nodded. But Major Legge looked puzzled, until Skinner described the surveillance of Macdairmid, without actually naming him.
Arrow cut in. 'Did you find out who the other fooker was on the line?'
Skinner nodded, but said nothing. Instead he slapped a thick folder which lay on his desk. It was labelled 'Most Secret', and had arrived by courier from MI6 only two hours earlier. It contained the career history of Jesus Giminez.
Arrow raised his eyebrows, but asked no more questions.
'Well,' said Legge. 'Good luck to you cloak-and-dagger Johnnies. Tell you one thing, though. If your geezer is expecting another consignment of those special fireworks, then he's likely to be disappointed, unless there's a second factory that no one knows about, because no one else is keen to be caught with their drawers down like the French were.'
'Hah,' Skinner snorted. 'Brave words. Gammy, but from what we've seen so far of this outfit, someone's arse is going to be exposed to the four winds!'