The Watchman (23 page)

Dawn pursed her lips thoughtfully.

"At least put the idea to Fenwick," Alex continued.

"And if she agrees in principle, then let's go down to Widdowes' place and check out the possibility of setting up an ambush."

"I can't promise anything," she said eventually.

"But tell me what you want to do and I'll put it to the deputy director."

"Can you please slow down," said Dawn, 'we're not going for the land speed world record."

They were heading up the M3 to Hampshire, this time in the Kaman-Ghia.

Alex had told her that he didn't think he could take another journey with her at the wheel and she had retorted that she was perfectly happy to be driven it would make a change, in fact.

To Alex's surprise and to Dawn's irritation, he suspected -Angela Fenwick had agreed to his request to recce Widdowes' house with a view to returning the agent there and luring Meehan into a trap.

George Widdowes lived a short distance outside the village of Bishopstoke in the Itchen valley. Longwater Lodge, where he lived alone, had once been attached to the much larger Longwater House, now a management college. Surrounded by trees and shrubberies, and set back some fifty metres from the road, the lodge was bordered at its far end by a carrier stream of the River Itchen, which flowed through the grounds of the main house.

Alex and Dawn had parked a quarter of a mile away outside the Pied Bull pub in the village's main street and had ambled out towards Longwater Lodge as if they were a young couple who, on impulse perhaps, had taken the day off. After the rain of the previous day the fields had a summery freshness and the steady hum of bees rose above the grumble of the distant main road.

The Lodge looked empty. The curtains were drawn, no cars stood outside it and a brand-new For Sale sign stood at its gate. The sign had been Dawn's idea and she had somehow ensured that it was up within the hour. Any enquiries to the London estate agent whose name it bore would have been met by the explanation that while the owner of the property wished to announce his intention to sell in the near future, the agency had not yet received full instructions.

Alex had been surprised by the speed with which the idea had been implemented and that Winchester estate agents were quite so receptive to sweet talk from the security services.

"Oh, we've got friends everywhere," Dawn had glibly informed him.

"We're quite big players in the property market."

The purpose of the sign had been to enable her and Alex to reconnoitre the property. If we want to have a good look, she had told him, then we might as well do it the easy way and walk straight up the drive. Anybody watching will simply assume that we're a couple who are interested in buying.

Turning his back on Longwater Lodge, Alex scanned the surrounding countryside. Still green cornfields bordered by hedgerows and oak trees on the higher ground; water-meadows in the valley, with willows and poplars shading the river. Hundreds of acres visible and a thousand places where an experienced man might be lying up. The Watchman was out there somewhere, keeping the house under observation, but you could send in a battalion of paratroopers with dogs and helicopters and still not find him. With the first indications of a search he would simply fade away.

Alex stared over the road into the sunlit green valley. He knew he would never be offered an obvious give-away like the flash of a binocular lens, but for an optimistic moment or two he stared anyway.

From the humpback bridge crossing the river, the two of them examined the Lodge and its surroundings. The property comprised about an acre and a half in total. The road on which they stood swept right-handed round the front of the garden, and was separated from it by a wall of about five feet in height and a neatly clipped yew hedge.

"That's where our people go in at night," Dawn told him.

"They climb over the wall once it's dark and keep the place under surveillance through night-vision goggles."

"How do they get here?"

"By Land Rover. Park up a hundred yards away round the corner.

"He'll have sussed them out on night one," said Alex.

"You can count on that."

Dawn shrugged.

"You may be right."

"I am right," said Alex.

"He's almost certainly watching us right now. Give us a kiss!"

"In your dreams."

"I mean it. That's what normal couples do when they're looking at houses.

They hold hands. They kiss each other. It means they ..

"I know perfectly well what it means." Turning, she kissed him glancingly on the left cheek.

He frowned.

"Oh, come on, Bunnykins, you can do better than that. Think how happy we could be here. Think of little Bethany and Jordan and Kylie running into the house with bunches of flowers and bouncing on our bed on Saturday mornings.

Think of the songs you'll sing as you bake the bread and scrub the floor. Think of the jam you'll make."

"You're sick, Temple."

"I'm not sick, Bunnykins, I just want a proper kiss. I'm not necessarily talking tongues at this stage, but I do think it should be convincing."

"Don't be disgusting. And stop calling me Bunnykins."

"I will if you kiss me right now, mouth to mouth, for a minimum of five seconds. If not, I'm afraid you go on being Bunnykins."

With a long-suffering sigh she turned to him and placed her arms round his neck. Her mouth was very soft. She even closed her eyes.

"There," he said finally.

"That wasn't so bad, was it?"

She was silent for a moment.

"I've had worse," she said.

He placed his arm round her waist, sensed her body stiffen, then felt an answering arm creep unwillingly round his waist.

"How many marksmen?" he asked.

"Most nights two, I think. One somewhere in the front here, one round the back of the house. I doubt anyone could get past them to the house without being seen."

"I'm not so sure," said Alex.

"Let's walk around the garden. Lots of pointing to the ground, please. Lots of saying that's where we'll have the sweet peas and let's put some crocus bulbs in here and oh dear, we'll never get camellias to grow in this chalky soil."

"You're really determined to make me look and feel absolutely as stupid as possible, aren't you," she murmured.

"No, I'm not. I'm just trying to stop you looking like an MI-5 desk officer someone Meehan would suss at a glance. Like I

said, he's probably watching us right now. If I were him, I'd be. Let's look round the back."

"What are you hoping to find, exactly?"

"He'll have scouted the place, looking for a way in at night. Somewhere he can get into the property without being bumped by the security people. I'm searching for that way in.

"Do you know how you'd do it?"

"I'm pretty sure I do but I'd just like to walk around for a bit. What about you?

How would you get in?"

"Shoot the guards, perhaps? Silenced rifle with night sights?"

"That'd certainly do it," said Alex, pointing at the house as if discussing a loft conversion, 'but he hasn't killed anyone except his targets so far."

"He killed Gidley's dogs."

"Dogs are just security products. Everyone kills dogs. But my take on Meehan is that he doesn't want to leave a trail of supplementary human corpses. Pride in his work would prevent that."

"Is this you identifying with him again? Is this the way you see killing? As work to take a pride in?"

He laughed.

"You're the one who's hiring the hit man. You tell me. And follow this path round, please. I want to have a quick look at the river bank."

"You think he'll come by river?"

"That's the way I'd do it. Quick cuddle here, I think, under the weeping willow."

"Must we?"

"I'm afraid so. It's just too romantic a spot to miss.

"Oh, yeah? And just what constitutes a romantic spot, in your view?"

"I think anywhere can be, if you're with someone you really, really ..

She folded her arms.

"Go on."

"Kiss me, Harding!"

Her eyes were as flat as a snake's. Slowly, she placed her arms round his neck and her lips against his. Through his shirt and hers he felt the small pressure of her breasts. Then she stepped back.

"That didn't register very high on the Richter scale," he protested.

"We're supposed to be married," she said, turning to look at the house.

"Not in love."

They continued along the bank. The river was slow and deep, its shining surface almost viscous-looking in the sunlight, the bank-side foliage perfectly reflected. Six feet below, emerald weeds wavered and trailed over polished gravel and chalk.

He's watching us, thought Alex with absolute certainty. And he's saying to himself: are these two the nice young couple that they seem to be, or have they come to hunt me down and kill me?

"Here," he said.

"This is where he'll come.

Don't stop. Keep walking. He'll approach silently from a couple of hundred yards upstream no one will see him in a black wet suit once the light's gone and he'll climb out between these two banks of bull rushes

"Are you sure of that?"

"I'm positive. It's exactly where I'd do it. You're covered by the bushes on the bank and the rushes in the water, you're the minimum distance from the house you definitely don't want to have acres of lawn to cross plus there's a sort of underwater chalk bar like a step you can use to climb out. He's already tried it.

When we walk back past you'll see a boot scrape in the algae on the chalk bar and a couple of reed clumps that look as if they've been twisted by someone pulling himself out. He's rehearsed it.~ Dawn crouched to examine a clump of yellow flag iris.

"How do you know it was him?"

"Well, who else is going to have been climbing in and out of the river in George Widdowes' garden? He'd probably have been wearing a weight belt to counteract the buoyancy effect of the wet suit and keep himself low in the water on his approach. There was a snapped root where he might've tried hanging the belt in the dark. He wouldn't want to leave the water wearing it."

"You spotted all that in the time it took us to walk past that bit of bank?"

"I knew what I was looking for. What I expected to see." He thought of Sierra Leone and the frothing brown torrent of the Rokel.

"I've made the odd river approach myself. Bit rougher than this, but the principle's the same.

"So what are you suggesting? That we have one of the marksmen up a tree, waiting for Meehan to climb out. Sort of a hippo shoot?"

"While your shooters are here he won't come," said Alex.

"It's as simple as that. Plus he already knows about the lookalike. Probably knows his name, address and home phone number by now.

"So what are you saying?"

"Get rid of the shooters, the lookalike, everything. Pull them all out and move George Widdowes back in. I'll move back in too, along with a back-up guy, and we'll set up an ambush of our own a proper killing team. Sooner or later Meehan will have to come and then we'll waste the bastard."

"What back-up guy?"

Alex's immediate thought was of Stan Clayton.

"Someone from Hereford. One of my people."

"There's no question of any other non-Five people being involved, I'm afraid.

This is a top-secret operation, not a get- together of your barrack-mates."

"Listen," he said quietly.

"They aren't just my barrack mates, they're the people with the best training and experience of this kind of close-up surveillance in the world. Guys who've spent days at a time lying up in the undergrowth next to IRA arms caches, or waiting for Bosnian war criminals. With all due respect to your guys, I've seen them in action and they stick out like the bollocks on a dog. One other guy from my RWW team, that's all I'm asking."

"I can pass on the request, but I can tell you right now what the answer's going to be."

Alex shook his head.

"You still don't get it, do you?"

"I get it only too well. You want to turn this into a Regiment operation. Well, I'm afraid it's all a damn sight too sensitive for that."

"What you mean is that you don't trust anyone else to keep his mouth shut about what is basically one of the most disastrous fuck-ups in your service's history. You're afraid that if word gets out that one of your agents not only turned into one of PIRA's top nut ting boys but crowned his brilliant career by torturing and killing a choice selection of your desk officers, that people just might start asking questions about your service's competence to handle intelligence affairs in the province. They might decide the Treasury got better value for its money from some other agency. The Firm, for example."

At the mention of MI6, Thames House's hated rival, Dawn Harding all but bared her teeth.

"You are out of your depth by some distance, Captain Temple.

You have been placed under the authority of my service and you will kindly respect that authority."

"Even when its orders are illegal?"

Dawn's expression tightened.

"Let's behave like grown-ups, shall we? We both know what has to be done, we both know why. Like I said, I will pass on your request but I can tell you now what the response will be: if you need back-up, MI-5 will provide it. Assuming, that is, that they go along with your plan at all."

Alex nodded expressionlessly.

"Let's go and check out the house."

She nodded and followed him towards the Lodge.

"After all," he added drily, 'we have to make sure there's going to be room for the children's play area."

Half an hour later the two prospective buyers of Longwater Lodge were sitting in a quiet corner of the Pied Bull. On the walls framed photographs of local cricket teams were displayed, along with horse brasses, winnowing fans, malt shovels, scythe handles and other redundant rural artefacts. A truce had been agreed between them.

"It strikes me," said Alex, when their sandwiches and drinks had been served to them, 'that your deputy director is probably in the clear. That there's a good chance she's not one the Watchman's targets."