The Armada Legacy (13 page)

Three inept morons with one decent knife between them was one thing. This was another. There’d been a time when a wilder, more reckless Ben might have gone wading into the attack. But he was older and wiser now, and he needed to think of Brooke. If she was still alive, he wasn’t going to be of much use to her all smashed and chewed up with a couple of bullets in him. He turned and sprinted down the alleyway, past the bins and the slumped bodies of Sean and Gary. The back doors of houses zipped by as he ran, broken windows and boarded-up entrances covered in graffiti. Racing footsteps and furious shouts echoed down the alley behind him. If they let the dog go, this would be over fast.

He suddenly found himself in a maze of passages that wound in all directions between the houses. Set at intervals in the cracked concrete were iron bollards that he guessed were to stop local kids tearing down the alleys on their motorcycles. A fork opened up in front of him and he took the right turning, then a left a few metres further on, and almost collided with a large yellow builder’s skip that blocked most of the passageway. It was piled high with bits of scaffolding, old fence posts and rubble. Beyond the skip to the right was the recessed doorway of a house or flat that was either a squat or unoccupied, with planks nailed across the entrance and weeds growing from the cracked steps.

Ben could hear the thunder of footsteps getting close. It sounded like two, at most three men. His pursuers must have split up to flush out the maze of passages. He couldn’t hear the dog; guessed its handler had taken one of the other turnings.

He moved quickly to the skip, then slipped into the doorway and pressed himself flat against the planks.

The two men appeared round the corner, running as fast as they could, darting their eyes left and right into every corner. One held a crude machete, the other had the handgun clenched in his fist. ‘Keep moving,’ he rasped breathlessly at his younger companion. ‘He can’t have gone far.’ They raced past the skip, running close together side by side in the narrow space.

Neither of them had time to register the blurred object that suddenly came swinging at them out of nowhere. To a dull clang that resonated all through the alley, all four of their feet left the ground together and kicked up high in the air in a sprawl of limbs before they crashed down on their backs against the concrete.

Ben stepped out of the doorway. The length of heavy iron scaffold pole was still quivering in his hands from the impact. Two days’ worth of anguished frustration and pent-up rage had gone into the blow and it had knocked both men out cold. He laid down the pole and picked up the men’s fallen weapons. The machete was of no interest, and he tossed it over a wall. The other was an American Colt Government .45 automatic, badly scuffed with most of the finish worn away. If it had been one of the weapons supplied by the CIA back in the heyday of the Troubles, it had seen a lot of use over the years since. It was fully loaded, seven rounds in the magazine and one up the spout. Ben stuffed it in his belt.

‘So you must be John,’ he said to the gun’s unconscious owner, remembering what Gary had said. He reckoned he had about ten seconds before the others appeared. He dragged the two limp bodies to a nearby iron bollard, propped them sitting up back to back either side of it and used a coil of rusty old barbed wire from the builder’s skip to lash them together. He did a rough, hasty job of it, but they wouldn’t get free without leaving half their flesh on the barbs. Counting down the seconds he ripped strips from their clothing as improvised gags. He dusted his hands and stood over them. ‘Don’t go anywhere,’ he said. ‘I’ll be right back.’

He drew the Colt from his belt, flipped off the safety and trotted towards the head of the alley just as the remaining four men appeared. They skidded to a halt at the sight of the pistol in his hand. The Doberman reared up when it saw him, fangs bared and straining its chain tight.

Ben stood in the middle of the passage with the .45 in a two-handed Weaver stance and the dog square in his sights. ‘You’ll be burying Fido tonight if you let him go,’ he said.

The four men gaped at him. The handler kept hold of the chain. Ben was glad of that. He was very fond of dogs, even ones that wanted to savagely rip him to pieces. He wouldn’t have liked to paint the alley with its brains.

‘Where’s Fergus Doyle?’ he said.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ one of the men blurted.

Ben didn’t think he was going to get a lot out of these guys. If John had had the gun, that meant John was probably the furthest up the hierarchy. And John was currently trussed up ready for interrogation. He’d already wasted enough time on deadbeats and lackeys.

‘Fuck it,’ Ben said to himself, and resorted to the most effective way of clearing the decks. The Colt boomed and kicked in his hands, and again, and again, aiming off first a little to the left, then a little to the right. The fat .45 bullets ricocheted off the walls either side of the men, clouding the alley with masonry dust. They scattered in panic and fled, the dog handler desperately tugging his Doberman along behind him as he ran.

Ben lowered the gun. Through the ringing in his ears he heard their racing footsteps disappear, then a few moments later the screech of spinning tyres as the van took off up the street at high speed. He turned and walked back to his two captives.

They hadn’t gone anywhere. The one called John, who was a slab-faced nondescript guy of about thirty-five, had only just come to. The younger one, a spotty kid of about nineteen, had been awake long enough to start chewing frantically through his gag. They were both struggling against their bonds and rolling their eyes up at him as he stood over them.

He thrust the Colt back in his belt and dropped into a crouch next to his prisoners. ‘Now, if you two want to go home today instead of to the morgue, you’re going to tell me where I can find Fergus Doyle. Who wants to start? How about you, John?’

He was reaching out to rip away the guy’s gag when he felt a sudden pressure against the base of his neck.

The cold, hard touch of a gun muzzle.

Chapter Eighteen

There were two basic possible responses to an unexpected turn of events like this. Ben didn’t consider the first one very long, because whipping round to lash the weapon out of the opponent’s hands wasn’t such a clever idea when he’d just heard the hammer go back with a small, sharp
click-click
. You couldn’t quite dodge or deflect a handgun bullet the way you could a knife bayonet in the hands of an idiot.

The second response was just to go very still and hope that nothing terminal was about to happen in the next few moments.

Ben went very still.

‘Lose the pistol,’ said a woman’s voice. It was a young voice, and might have been pleasant-sounding if she’d had something different to say. ‘Any tricks, this gun goes off and your frigging head goes off with it.’

Ben slowly moved his hand to his belt, grasped the butt of the Colt between thumb and forefinger, drew it out and tossed it away with a clatter.

‘Now get on your feet. Slowly does it.’

The gun muzzle stayed pressed to his neck as he stood. It still didn’t seem like a good moment for any sudden moves.

‘Now turn round,’ she commanded. The pressure disappeared from his neck as she took a couple of steps backwards.

Ben turned cautiously round to face her. She was as youthful as her voice: not much more than twenty-one or twenty-two, willowy with a pretty face and long black hair, tousled, a little gypsyish. Her dark eyes were watching him unblinking down the barrel of the .357 Magnum revolver she was clutching. The gun looked oversized in her hands. Ben could see the jacketed hollowpoint rounds nestling in the mouths of the cylinder chambers. There was no chance she could miss at this range. The expanding bullet would blow a hole in him that a boxer could poke his fist through, glove and all.

‘Put your frigging hands up,’ she said.

Now that they were face to face there was an edge to her voice that might have been anxiety, and Ben wondered whether she’d ever pointed a loaded gun at anyone before.

‘I know how to use this thing,’ she said.

‘I certainly hope so,’ he said. He put his hands up.

‘You hope so?’ she said. Her brow puckered up in a frown.

‘We wouldn’t want any accidental discharges. The old Model Nineteen has a light single-action trigger.’

‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘What do you want with Fergus Doyle?’

‘Like I told those other guys,’ Ben said. ‘I’m looking for something.’

‘Something?’

‘Someone. Someone who’s missing, whom I care about very much. If Doyle has her, I’d like to discuss business with him, man to man.’

She frowned again, scrutinising him intently. ‘What kind of business?’ she said suspiciously.

‘The ransom kind,’ he said. ‘Money. If he can give me back what he took from me, I can offer him something in exchange.’

A few months earlier, Ben had had Le Val valued for insurance purposes and the figure that had come back was a shade over 1.9 million euros. It was everything Ben had in the world. He’d already decided that was a small price to pay for Brooke’s return, and it was what he intended to put on the table.

The young woman made no reply, just stared at him as if slowly digesting what he’d just said. Before she could speak, from somewhere far away beyond the houses came a wailing of sirens, growing rapidly louder. Ben guessed that the Belfast police weren’t so jaded nowadays that they wouldn’t respond to the sound of a forty-five being let off in the street.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked her.

‘Tara,’ she replied after a beat. ‘Tara McNatten.’

‘If you’re going to fire that thing, Tara, you need to do it before the police turn up. It won’t suit either of us to be caught standing here.’

She glanced over her shoulder, not quite long enough for Ben to move for the gun. ‘Okay,’ she said, appearing to make a decision. ‘You want to see Fergus Doyle. I’ll take you to him. That way.’ She motioned with the gun.

‘What about your friends here?’ he said, looking down at the two captives lashed to the bollard, still struggling wildly to get free and moaning loudly behind their gags.

‘Those are no friends of mine,’ she said. Ben didn’t understand, but there wasn’t time to hang around discussing the finer points. The police sirens were getting close.

He started walking the way Tara was pointing. She followed a few steps behind, keeping her revolver aimed steadily between his shoulder blades. The first police vehicle screamed to a halt and they could hear raised voices and the crackle of radios. Tara guided Ben into the entrance of a winding passage that snaked along between grimy houses and rundown fences for a hundred yards before it opened onto another dismal street. Parked a short distance away was a silver Honda SUV. There was nobody else in sight.

‘That’s my car,’ she said. ‘You’re driving.’ She kept the gun carefully trained on him as he opened the driver’s door. He could tell she wasn’t too experienced at this, but one thing she was was thoughtful. If she’d tossed him the key before he got behind the wheel, he might have been able to get the vehicle fired up and speed away without her; instead she waited until they were both inside, him in front and her behind, and only then did she let him have the key. ‘Go easy,’ she said. ‘Keep to the speed limits. Any tricks and I’ll shoot.’

Ben started the car and pulled away. Following her directions he drove through the maze of streets and back out onto the main road, where they passed the police vehicles speeding in the opposite direction towards the scene of the shooting. Cops were like wasps. If you acted unconcerned about their presence, there was generally a pretty good chance they’d leave you alone. Ben drove the Honda at a steady, nonchalant pace and managed to get by the police without getting stopped.

After a few minutes they were heading out of Belfast. A thin rain started up again, slanting out of the grey afternoon sky. Signs for Dromore and Banbridge flashed past. ‘Keep going,’ Tara’s voice said from the back seat. Finally, she said, ‘Okay, next right,’ and Ben turned off the main road to wind along a few miles of narrow country lanes. ‘See that stand of trees up ahead?’ she said. ‘There’s a gate just after them.’

The gate led to a bumpy track and into a farmyard that had seen better days. ‘This is it,’ she told him. ‘Pull up by the barn over there. Stop the engine and give me back the key. Right. Now get out.’

Ben did as he was told, glancing around him as he stepped out onto the hardcore yard. He’d more than half expected to be greeted by a bunch of hard-faced guys toting sawn-off shotguns and pistols – maybe Flanagan among them, if he’d made it to the getaway van, still nursing his punctured glute and mad for revenge.

As it was, there was no sign of life in the place. A heavy silence hung over the dilapidated outbuildings and the old farmhouse. Ben was baffled, but said nothing.

Tara climbed out of the car, holding the .357 more loosely now but still watching him closely. ‘Over to the house,’ she directed him, and made him stand a few paces away as she unlocked the front door. It swung open with a creak and she motioned for Ben to go in first.

The farmhouse was sparsely furnished and the decor hadn’t been refreshed since about 1956, but it smelled clean. Tara walked Ben down a passage to a laminated door, from behind which he could hear the sound of a TV. Beyond the door was a small sitting room, dark with the curtains drawn. Tara waved Ben inside.

Sitting slumped and immobile in a chintzy elbow chair, half silhouetted by the glow of the television screen and the light of a dim table lamp behind him, was the room’s only occupant. The old man didn’t respond as they walked in. His eyes were closed, his jaw hanging slackly half-open with a trail of drool running down off his chin. His white hair was shaggy and unkempt, and his body looked wasted and withered under his clothes as if he’d been sitting there for years on end.

At first Ben thought he was dead, but then saw the very slow, very shallow rise and fall of his emaciated chest as he slept. The table behind him was almost completely covered with an array of tubs and bottles of medicines.