Bolt Action (26 page)

‘People getting killed. Boats on fire . . . You can imagine the hoo-haa and the outrage,’ says Braddock. ‘The militias fixin’ to give some payback. But in all the talking that followed, it was the British that prevailed. Anticipatory self-defence, it became known as. In common parlance, we might talk about the lesser of two evils, whereby an action is justified if a country can demonstrate, now listen to these words, a “necessity of self-defence, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation”.’ She is quoting by heart.

It becomes clear how well Braddock has slow-played her
audience when she withdraws a small, typed index card from the inside of her bound file. She has gloriously long, ruby-red nails, and she clicks one with her thumbnail repeatedly, as she readies for the hammer blow.

‘This is what was agreed on. I’m going to read the actual legal words that have become the bedrock test of that principle. As I read this, Mr President, imagine your predecessor, Martin Van Buren, one hundred and seventy years ago, dealing with the
Caroline
affair, just as you must deal now with your own wayward, rogue craft . . .’ and she clicks her thumbnail one last time, loudly, before starting.

‘“It must be strewn that admonition or remonstrance to the persons on board the ‘Caroline’ was impracticable, or would have been unavailing; it must be strewn that daylight could not be waited for; that there could be no attempt at discrimination, between the innocent and the guilty; that it would not have been enough to seize and detain the vessel; but that there was a necessity, present and inevitable, for attacking her, in the darkness of the night, while moored to the shore, and while unarmed men were asleep on board, killing some, and wounding others, and then drawing her into the current, above the cataract, setting her on fire, and, careless to know whether there might not be in her the innocent with the guilty, or the living with the dead, committing her to a fate, which fills the imagination with horror.”’

There is a long silence in the room. The timelessness of the incident is eerie, the need for swift action, the commingling of the innocent and guilty, and above all the imperative of doing something that fills the imagination with horror. Eerie, yet also strangely comforting that leaders have travelled this awful path before, faced these terrible choices. And, perhaps most importantly, that significant legal precedents have been constructed to save everybody’s blushes.

The floor is still hers. ‘Mr President . . . we’re not talking here about a ketch tied up for the night. This is a Boeing 777, aimed right towards us at six hundred miles an hour.’
The Attorney General lowers her glasses to the table, rubs the bridge of her nose. ‘I think if we are being truthful with ourselves, we all know there is only one course of action here.’

On board PK412

T
he screaming reverberates up and down the length of the plane. The sort of screaming you get on a roller-coaster as they winch you up the ramp. Nothing has happened yet . . . but all your senses shout that the end is nigh.

General rule of thumb, people in a hijacked plane don’t like to see the plane that is going to shoot them down scoping out their target from thirty feet above the wing, weapon racks groaning with missiles.

Tristie Merritt shakes Salahuddin, whose face is glued to one of the first-class windows, his face a mask of anguish. ‘Captain, captain . . .’ suddenly worried as she touches his shoulder that she is breaking some kind of unspoken taboo, ‘he’s just filming us. Look at the guy. He’s holding a camera.’

Slowly he cocks his finger in the direction of the Super Hornet, speaks very thoughtfully. ‘That is the fighter that is going to shoot down my jet. The plane I am in command of.’

‘Perhaps, possibly, who knows, Captain.’ She has to raise her voice, shout now, against the cries from elsewhere. ‘But he’s not going to do it
now
. This is just reconnaissance. Get on the horn, please, calm everybody down. We’re not in the endgame. Not yet anyway.’

Unfortunately, before Salahuddin can get to the PA system to offer calming words, the navy pilot jumps his fighter from one side of the Boeing to the other, so a second bout of screaming kicks off. Each side of the plane setting off the other, like panicky teenagers.

It takes some time but eventually the worst of the outcry leaches away. Only some isolated whimpering. The curtains that normally separate the two classes are tied back so everybody knows what is, and is not, going on. No secrets. The cabin crew return to plotting where everybody needs to move to.

So. This boils down to Tristie Merritt. Her Airfone. And the telephone number of a caravan permanently parked by a beach in Northern Ireland. Mary Sweeney is the woman’s name.

She wills herself:
Let go, Tristie. Slip away . . .

To get a voice right, you need to let go of whoever you are. Let yourself melt into the shape and feel of the character you want to become, a step through into another personality . . . but she has more than enough chewing at her mind to make that almost impossible to pull off. Tristie can feel the muscles in her throat tightening.

Calm. Stay calm. Shoulders down. Focus. She’s sitting in the second row of first class. The blind beside her is open and a shaft of brilliant light cuts across the darkened cabin. Whiffler is sitting on the arm of the next seat, his foot up. Spellbound.

‘Convinced?’

‘Seriously, Tristie, if I closed my eyes and you spoke again, like what you’ve just been doing, I’d swear you were Kylie Minogue.’

Well. We’ll see about that . . .

Cranfield Caravan Park

Kileel

County Down

I
t’s supposed to be summer, the calendar says so, but the weather hasn’t turned. The flags and pennants on the southfacing beach flutter like mad and Mary Sweeney can hear the
chink-chink-chink
of the halyards spinning in the wind. Sweeney shivers with the cold. Not a thing left in this life to warm the heart, the old lady would say when asked, and contemplating her present emptiness brings on the usual glance over at the table. The trophies, medals and certificates. The framed photos of smiles, love, affection. Memories of a husband, and an only child. Gone on, into the next life.

She broods in her armchair. Alone, and left behind. A frail pensioner, peering out of the bay windows of her family’s forty-foot caravan towards the churning brown of the Irish Sea. Tightly tucked into a quilt, and a tartan rug just for good measure.

‘You haven’t touched your shepherd’s pie.’

A shrug of the shoulders. ‘Not feeling so hungry today.’ And Sweeney starts to push at the one or two peas that had fallen on her lap, her fingers thin, trembling, purple with age.

‘Soon I shall be thinking you don’t like my food,’ chirps Laura, who’s from up the road in Newry and cleans the caravans. Sweeney’s nieces and nephews thought that they were doing a big favour by paying Laura a small fortune to look after the old lady. The plate is whisked away, and Laura clatters about
in the kitchenette, making it clear she’s working hard for her money. ‘Bit of a vac coming up, Mrs Sweeney.’

As the small round bottom of the cleaning girl moves this way and that, up and down the caravan, Sweeney resumes her vigil over the Irish Sea. Her face set grim. Every so often a bony hand reaches to part the net curtain for a closer inspection of some unexpected movement, while the vacuum cleaner moans on.

Perhaps she had drifted off to sleep, she doesn’t know, but the next thing to happen was a gentle poke in the shoulder. Laura is standing over her, holding a handset. ‘A call, Mrs Sweeney,’ she whispers dramatically. ‘Sorry to wake you, but they said it was urgent. Almost missed it what with the noise, and whatnot.’

Somebody calling me?

Mary Sweeney puts the phone to her ear, full of suspicion and dark thoughts.

The voice she hears is confident, full of bright blue skies, breaking waves and beach parties.

‘
Mrs Sweeney . . . it’s Mary McCaraher. Calling from sunny Australia. Back on Kangaroo Island.
’The inflection rises dramatically at the end of each sentence, like a surprised question.

‘Mary McCaraher . . .’ Sweeney says the name with a kind of awe, holding the phone now with two hands. ‘How long has it been?’

‘
Too long, too long
,’ says the woman calling herself McCaraher, but even this lament sounds strangely upbeat in an Australian female voice.

The two of them hunker down for a long-overdue catch-up, Sweeney quickly getting into a vivid discussion about her pelvic support problems and McCaraher offering a blow-by-blow report about the men in her life, the reasons why she has not yet married, not yet produced any new little souls for the Kingdom of God. ‘
Oh, Mrs Sweeney. The number of prayers I said to St Anthony that he would be the one . . .
’

Sweeney tries to console throughout. ‘I’ll light a candle for
you at mass, for you and St Thérèse of the Child Jesus of the Holy Face.’ And so the conversation winds on until the Australian makes clear with her pauses and her stuttering tone that she needs more than just talk.

‘Now, tell me, Mary McCaraher, you’re speaking like you’ve got yourself in some bother.’

‘
You always were too fast for me.
’

‘You want your little slip of paper, don’t you, pet.’

‘
Pleaassee.
’

‘Goodness, girl, I’m surprised you lasted this long. I really am. I thought you’d be on the phone just a couple of weeks after you left. You did good holding out this long.’ And Mary Sweeney cranes around and bellows for ‘
LAURA
’ in a surprisingly robust voice.

When the cleaner appears, Sweeney waves a finger at the sideboard full of trophies, the shrine to the memory of her most beloved killed by an IRA bomb at the Killeen border crossing in 1990 as they took one of the family greyhounds south, to the Dundalk races. Pride of place goes to the Queen’s Gallantry Medal awarded to both father and son posthumously. ‘That picture. The framed one. Of Mr Sweeney and Luke, with their dog Toto. Pass it here, will you.’

Laura, a bit spooked to be touching anything on a table she’d been forbidden from dusting, gingerly passes over the heavy silver frame. Father and son in close-up, smiling their big gap-toothed smiles. Panting happily between them is Toto, a brindle-and-white Group 1 greyhound champion.

Sweeney reaches to the back, unplugs the backboard, and digs out a tightly folded wedge of paper. ‘Here it is,’ she says into the phone, looking first at the corporate logo.

In blue, the letters ANZ, and at the foot, 13 Grenfell Street, Adelaide, South Australia. Mary Sweeney carefully articulates the eleven digits.

Way back, she had read the scribbled note that McCaraher sent, thanking her for the memorably happy five-week stay as a lodger when the old lady had still been living on the outskirts
of Newry. At the same time, there was a favour. The younger woman was entrusting to Sweeney the only copy of an access code, so as not to be tempted to waste the little windfall she’d just banked,
£
20,000, locked up tight in a safety deposit box. Rainy-day money.

Thirty-six thousand feet up – and a thousand miles west of the caravan park – Mary McCaraher, aka Tristie Merritt, quickly works on a sheet of paper to rearrange the random numbers, as she winds up the call to Mrs Sweeney.

The 0800 freephone number represents a time in her past that was . . . past, finished. A number that she hasn’t had to call upon since her days with 14 Intelligence Coy, at the fag end of the ‘Troubles’. Several tours of duty back, before Iraq and Afghanistan.

It chills Tristie to realise the huge gamble she’s about to take. With her men’s lives, with Ward 13 and those detailed plans for the Trident missile programme. Everything they’ve worked for in fact, she’s about to put on the line.
Faîtes vos jeux.
Red or black.
Mesdames et messieurs
. . . place your bets, please.

The 0800 number is a connection right into the operational heart of MI5.
Rien ne va plus . . .

On board PK412

F
ive minutes later the call is answered by a male voice, somebody who sounds like he’s been coughing up his lungs for the past week. ‘
Hello.
’ Hoarse and breathy. ‘
How can I help you?
’

‘This is Casablanca.’ Tristie speaks carefully, knowing some world-class hardware will be scrutinising all the stresses and strains in her voice.

‘
Casablanca, how are you? Just give me a second, will you.
’ The sound of keys being struck furiously and another long wet cough. There will be various voice prompts to clarify her status. With each question there are alarm-answers as well, in case she’s being held under duress. The unique micro-tremors that represent a person as individually as their fingerprints are then rendered via an algorithm into a scored voicegram. Given three or four sentences, the computer is expected to be able to answer, Is this the real Tristie Merritt on the phone? Yes or no? with a degree of probability. Is she under duress? Yes or no? . . . and so on.

She looks around the first-class cabin. Now dim with the blinds down except for the one window open next to her. In the rest of the plane, people are chewing their way through lunch service. Occupied and for the moment becalmed. Lovely word that. Becalm. To render motionless for lack of wind. Giving them something to eat had definitely taken the edge off the hysteria. And after lunch, they’ll begin the big move-around of the passengers.

Once she’d said her goodbyes to Mary Sweeney she’d felt
the need to lay out all of her plans, firstly for the benefit of Button and Whiffler. What she’d done for MI5, the pull it should still give her, and how she wanted to use that in these circumstances. They had to understand that this would be an all-in bet. ‘You tell me not to, that you’re not comfortable with this, and I’ll not call . . .’ Tristie had offered. But they saw the logic of what was being proposed. Button had glanced at Whiffler. It took less than a second, then he turned back, speaking for the both of them. ‘No regrets, Tristie. Let’s fucking well be ’aving ’em,’ Button confirmed.

Tristie had also given an abridged version of her MI5 connections to Captain Harry Salahuddin. Something that won’t turn him too queasy. To her surprise, he had seemed genuinely relieved that she would be talking directly with somebody in authority. ‘At last some chance to stop this madness,’ and the pilot had clapped her on the shoulder.

Next comes the first MI5 voice prompt. ‘
So what was the weather like in Casablanca?
’

The answer comes from the song ‘Casablanca’, track two of the 1982 album by Bertie Higgins. She tries to keep the beat in her mind. It was a ghastly tune. Island rock, they call it. She recites the lyrics as tunelessly as possible to aid the voicegram. Something about popcorn and Coke, and champagne and caviar. Button and Whiffler’s eyebrows rocket up as she talks about making love one summer night. Tap, tap, tap in the background. No alarms so far. She’s over the first hurdle.

‘
What airline did you say you flew out there on?
’

‘Joshua.’

‘
Are they any good?
’

Next answer lies in the opening line of the Dolly Parton song ‘Joshua’, the singer’s first American country-music number one. A song about a girl orphan and the hard life she lived, no doubt picked especially for her by some spook with too much time on his hands and his nose in the Merritt personnel file. Again Tristie enunciates the lyrics slowly – the tale of the black dog who growled at the fearful girl.

More action on the computer, algorithms crunching away. There is a third lyric relating to a song called ‘Harder Better Faster Stronger’, but she doesn’t get the voice prompt. No question for her to feed into. What is the significance of that?

A stray piece of music trivia pops into her head. Something learned in a bar in Aldershot, one of those pub quiz nights, that Bertie Higgins is the great-great-great-grandson of the German poet Goethe.

But it makes her think of Goethe’s Faust, and Doing a Deal with the Devil.

‘
Ms Merritt. Long time no hear.
’ And that’s when Rumbly Throat on the keyboard hacks and coughs one last time, then says, ‘
Who can I put you through to?
’