TWENTY-SIX

AS THE NIGHT progressed the temperature fell. Dampness enclosed the Black Down estate, the waning moon clouded over and shortly after midnight the first drops fell. Within the hour the grass was bowed and the stream hissing with rain.

Alex tried to ignore the increasing cold and the sodden weight of his clothing. He was lying on uneven ground behind a fallen and rotting tree with the rucksack cached at his side. His face was blackened with cam-cream, long grass surrounded him and cam-netting covered his body. Rain streamed down the grip of the Glock 34. The rain would conceal him, but it would also conceal Meehan. ‘Come on, you bastard,’ he murmured. ‘Come on.’

He prayed that Meehan would return. Surely the man didn’t have a place in London. London was a very tightly regulated city, it was next to impossible to sleep rough without some helpful cop or social worker directing you to the nearest shelter. And asking for your name. And having a bloody good look at you.

Nor would he be able to return to his Kilburn haunts. Irish London was far too dangerous a place for him to approach since MI5 had spread the word that he’d been touting for them. Every Provo sympathiser would know his face, unless he’d had it altered beyond all recognition – and that was a damn sight harder to do than was popularly supposed.

No, he’d come back down here, lie low for a bit, catch his breath. He’d been successful so far by dint of extreme caution, he wouldn’t want to blow it now with only Fenwick left to kill.

And something told Alex that the tide had turned. Something about the sight of those supplies – the tinned supermarket food, that austere little pile of kit – told Alex that the Watchman was nearing the end of his watch. And when that happened he – Alex Temple – would be ready. He welcomed the hardness of the earth beneath him and the cold sting of the rain. It kept him on edge.

Shortly after 4.10 – he had just checked his watch – there was the low sound of a vehicle passing by on the road and the brief flicker of headlights. The sound was swallowed by the falling rain, the lights faded to nothingness.

Ten minutes passed. Alex hunkered down beneath the cam-netting, his body taut with anticipation, his eyes narrowed against the rain which streamed from his forehead. In front of him the foresight and backsight of the Glock were aligned on wet darkness.

‘Come on,’ he mouthed, adrenalin jolting through him as he thumbed down the safety catch. ‘Come on.’

Nothing.

It had just been a passing car.

The sick ebb of anticipation.

Or had it been Meehan? Had he parked up nearby and made his way back over the fence? Alex scanned the darkness in front of him through narrowed, night-accustomed eyes, methodically quartering the jigsaw of interleaving grey shapes. From the subtle difference in tones, he identified the faint outline of grasses, ground foliage and tree branches, and noted their sodden, rhythmic response to the driving rain. All was movement, but movement of an inanimate regularity.

And then a blur of grey within many blurs of grey, Alex’s peripheral vision caught a movement that was irregular, hesitant, pulse-driven. He looked directly at it, lost it, looked away and had it again. The shape was frozen now, as if scenting the breeze.

And now moving again. Could it be a fox? A badger?

Not that shape. That animal was human.

Adrenalin kicking in.

Heart-rate increasing.

Thumb to safety catch. The Glock streaming rain. Range what? Perhaps thirty-five yards?

Come on, you bastard. Come on …

Thirty, perhaps, but the rain dramatically reduced visibility. Shit! As the foresight and backsight wavered into grey alignment so the target seemed to disappear.

Come closer.

Should he charge him. Just race over there and try and drop him as he ran?

No. His target had the advantage. Knew every inch of this …

The figure crouching now, half standing.

Alex hugged the sodden ground. Come on, he prayed. Come this way.

But the figure seemed to be in no hurry. Infinitely cautious, it moved against the monotone backdrop of the woods, seemed to dissolve, reappeared further away. Alex could hear movements now, footfalls through the undergrowth.

He decided to follow.

Leopard-crawling through the wet grass, he made his way slowly to the edge of the woods. The figure was standing beneath a tree now, scanning his surroundings.

Five more yards, thought Alex, and I’ll be close enough for a shot. There was a broad beech trunk in front of him and Alex used its cover to stand up. In front of him the figure had moved away again.

Silently, Alex followed. They seemed to be on some sort of grass path; their progress was soundless.

Grandmother’s footsteps.

He had him now. The figure – it had to be Meehan – was standing motionless against some dark evergreen bush. Three more silent paces and the kill was a certainty. Alex raised the Glock in front of him, straightening his arms, minimising the distance.

First pace. Fast. Step it out.

Second pace. Keep going.

A split second before the trip flare exploded, Alex felt the wire just below his knee, ligament-taut, and then the world around him exploded into blue-white light.

Out of sheer instinct he hurled himself sideways to the ground. Blinded, and with his hard-won night vision destroyed, he could see nothing outside the area lit by the phosphorous glare. All beyond it was black.

Shit!

The flare smoking and crackling. The sound of running feet and Alex stumbling blindly after them, Glock in hand, face whipped by branches.

Meehan was making not for the church, but the house. Fifty yards behind him now, Alex tried to blink away the searing blast of light imprinted on his retinas. But it stayed there, dancing in front of his vision so that he could barely see as he ran.

He slipped in the mud, went down hard and, picking himself up, ran straight into a tree stump and fell again, setting the knife wounds screaming in protest. A hundred yards ahead of him he saw the other man race into the house. Meehan’s night vision was unimpaired – he had deliberately kept his back to the trip flare.

Somehow Alex reached the front door. Behind him, in the wood, the flare was no more than a popping smoulder on its steel picket. His night vision was shot and he was following a presumably armed man into a lightless house.

Shit, just when the Maglite could have helped him, he’d left it outside in the rucksack. On the other hand the torch would betray his own position … Crouching motionless just inside the front door in the musty darkness, Alex listened intently.

The crunching of feet on fallen plaster, then silence except for the rain on the roof tiles. Meehan was above him.

How did the layout of the house go … Think.

Twenty stairs up, that much he remembered. The top corridor T-branching to left and right – Meehan was in the left wing, his location confirmed by a dull thump. What did he have up there?

Do or die, thought Alex. Let’s go and see.

As silently as possible he crept up the stairs. The photo imprint of the flare was still in front of his eyes, but the beginnings of night vision were returning to him. He could see the top of the stairs now and the corridor. To the left were three doors, one of them opened.

He had left them all closed, he remembered.

Bracing himself, readying the Glock, he burst into the room. It was empty, but the boards previously covering the window opening had been booted outwards and rain was spattering the floor. Alex raced over towards the opening, guessing that Meehan had had some sort of rope or other escape route readied there. The thump must have been Meehan hitting the roof of the porch below.

An instant before Alex reached the window, however, the floorboards collapsed beneath his feet with a desiccated sigh. There was a burst of dust and crumbling lath and plaster, and then there was no support at all and Alex felt himself pitched downwards through the choking darkness. He hit the hall floor below hard and unevenly, smashing on to one elbow and the back of his skull.

Son of a bitch – Meehan had booby-trapped the floor with rotten boards and cut out the beams. Painfully, Alex got to his feet. His parachute training had ensured that he had automatically rolled with the fall and saved himself a broken limb but he was badly shaken.

Had Meehan made a break for his vehicle, or was he waiting outside with his weapon cocked, ready to blow his pursuer away?

A distant scream of tyres on the wet road gave Alex his answer. Still dazed, he shook his head, dislodging a gritty cloud of dry plaster. Time to go, he whispered mechanically to himself. Time to go. Meehan already had a clear two minutes’ start.

The rucksack. Run. Find it.

He slipped on the wet ground again, wrenching the stitches, but was beyond pain now. Safety-locking and holstering the Glock, pulling the rucksack of kit to his shoulders – both sets of actions seemed to take for ever – he forced himself in the direction of the main gate. The fall through the floor seemed to have affected his balance and he had to concentrate hard in order to place one foot in front of the other. Keep going, he repeated to himself, desperately attempting to order his thoughts. Not dead yet. Not dead till you’re dead. Keep going.

It took him a clear minute to climb the gate and he managed to gash his thumb badly on the barbed wire while doing so. When he finally made it to the top, he sucked the blood from his shaking hand and looked blearily around him. To his left, perhaps a mile away, a tiny thread of light showed for a moment. The Watchman had gone east.

Keep going.

Even pushing the bike was difficult to begin with, but eventually he got it to the road, hauled off the night-vision goggles and pulled on the motorcycle goggles and helmet. With the aid of the pen torch – his hands were still shaking badly – he checked the tank. It was full and probably held nine or ten litres of unleaded petrol. The jerrycan in the cotton rucksack bungee-corded to the rear of the seat held approximately the same again.

The KTM had an electric start and burbled immediately into life. Cautiously, Alex let out the hydraulic clutch and moved forward. The power was there, smooth and immediate, but the knobbly motocross tyres gave him the sensation that he was riding on marbles. The seat was hard, narrow and unyielding. This was not a machine that lent itself willingly to roadriding.

Go, he ordered himself. No lights. The roads were empty and Meehan had to be allowed to think that he had got away. Alex had no night vision, though. He had been wearing the image-intensifying goggles for too long.

Too bad. Drive. And fast.

No lights.

At speed, it was like riding a road drill. The KTM could do 80 mph on tarmac but it wasn’t what it had been designed for, and the knobbly tyres shook Alex to the bone, blurred his vision, made the teeth dance in his mouth. And with no lights …

Faster. Risk everything.

Rain lashed his face, the white lines on the road were barely visible and when the front wheel touched them the whole machine seemed to twitch and skate.

Accelerate into the bends. Find speed.

The main road. North to Okehampton, south to Tavistock.

Roulette: 50–50; red or black.

South. His fists tight on the domino grips, his body ice-cold in the sodden clothing, the black sutures biting into the knife-cuts.

Ignore the pain.

He saw nothing for two miles and then, far ahead of him, a tiny worm of light travelling not south, but east. If it was Meehan, he had turned off the main road at right angles. He was heading for the centre of Dartmoor and taking the narrow road at well over 70.

Shit. Bastard still had at least four miles on him. Once he made it to a road with a bit of traffic on it he’d just vanish.

Taking a deep breath, Alex swung the KTM left-handed off the road and into the wild darkness of the open moor. His only chance of staying with Meehan was to cut across country. As the crow flew Meehan was only a couple of miles away, but by road he was more than twice that.

Alex accelerated aggressively, felt the near sublime sensation as the tyres bit hard into the rough moorland. Doing the job it was designed for, the bike seemed to gather Alex up, to bind him furiously to itself. The supercross suspension had been set at a very harsh level with a minimum of compression and rebound, but Alex was soon glad of this when the front wheels hit a rock. For a moment man and machine were flying through the darkness, then the wheels came down with a testicle-crunching double smash that would have consigned a non-performance bike to the scrap heap and a less blindly determined driver to an Intensive Care ward.

But with body and brain screaming vengeance, Alex didn’t give a fuck. The pain and fatigue were distant things now – all that mattered was that he dominate this leaping, howling beast of a motorcycle. He could see nothing. He was aware of a track of sorts beneath him and the glow-worm thread of the vehicle ahead and to his right, and that was all. The rest – the whipping cold, the shotgun volleys of rain and mud, the desperate grip of his hands and heels – barely registered.

In a rational state of mind he would never have been able to do it. In the event, instinct grabbed the controls from fear and good judgement. Instinct looked ahead, instinct held its line, instinct squared the front wheel into the rain-slicked rocks and hummocks, and as the four-stroke engine screamed beneath him Alex knew a crazy, weightless release. What the fuck, he thought. If I smash myself to pieces, then so be it.

Gradually, he closed the gap between them. Did the Watchman have a plan, he wondered, or was he just distancing himself from Black Down with all speed.

Almost there. Almost within safe range of him. The road across the moor was about twenty miles long, and Alex needed to be well locked on to Meehan before they encountered any more traffic. As things stood he didn’t even know what sort of vehicle the other man was driving.

But he could at least see his lights now, all the time. Assuming that it was the man he was after. If it wasn’t, well, that was the end of it.

Shit. Another vehicle had joined the car that he hoped was Meehan’s. Swinging hard right-handed, Alex made for the road. Within the minute the front wheel of the KTM had dived into a cut and Alex found himself flying over the handlebars to land in an awkward heap in the marshy heather. He was not badly hurt, but his confidence in his bike-handling abilities took a dent. And by the time he had got himself up and righted, and restarted the KTM, neither car was in sight. More carefully now, Alex steered the bike to the road.

After the thrill of flying over moorland, it was back to the murderous vibration of the road. Speed helped a little, but only a little. Throttling back, Alex pushed the KTM up to 85 mph, and after five minutes, to his vast relief, tail-lights appeared in front of him.

The rear of the two cars was a newish red Toyota driven, as far as Alex could see through the rainswept rear window, by a man in a hat. A Countryside Alliance sticker showed in the back window.

Swinging outside the Toyota, Alex peered through the rear window of the front car, a battered-looking dark-blue BMW. This driver seemed to be bareheaded. The car was much muddier than the Toyota.

It could be either of them. Alex stayed hard on the tail of the rear car, his eyes locked to the driver. The hat looked like a tweed one, the sort habitually worn by Inspector Frost on TV.

Both cars slowed down and Alex fell back fifty yards. They were approaching a village – a sign read Two Bridges. The Toyota driver seemed to be waving his right hand about inside the car – what the fuck was he up to?

And then something about the patterns he was inscribing suddenly made sense to Alex. He was conducting! He was listening to a classical music station and conducting it with his finger.

Nothing anyone had said about Meehan had suggested that he was a music fan. Nor was it credible that, at a moment potentially fraught with danger, he would be allowing his concentration to be dispersed in this way. Joseph Meehan was, as Frank Wisbeach had said, a ‘true believer’. He had just survived an expert assassination attempt. Under the circumstances he was hardly going to be singing along to Classic FM.

Meehan had to be the guy in the BMW.

Alex was glad he had reached a decision because the two cars separated on the eastern side of the village. The Toyota swung right towards Ashburton, the BMW forked left to Moretonhampstead.

The first fingers of light were now visible at the horizon, and Alex braked and waited at the roadside as the BMW pulled away from the village. He had no intention of being spotted in Meehan’s rear-view mirror. As long as he kept his lights off, he told himself …

As soon as the BMW was out of sight Alex restarted, gritting his teeth against the pulverising vibrations and dropping back the moment the red tail-lights came into view again. The signpost indicated that it was ten miles to Moretonhampstead and he very much doubted that Meehan was going to turn off the main road.

More worrying was the petrol issue. Meehan, it was logical to suppose, had just returned from London when he appeared at Black Down House. He must have had some nearby place to park the car. Would he have a full tank of petrol? Was he carrying any with him?

The KTM’s tank probably held about nine litres. Four-stroke engine, thirty miles to the gallon … say a hundred miles, max, before he needed to fill up again. If Meehan needed a refill before then, fine. Alex could ride in and shoot him with the silenced Glock at the petrol station. Ride away before anyone realised what had happened.

If Meehan didn’t need petrol before Alex did, then Alex was in trouble. Meehan would simply outrun him.

He came to a decision. He would follow Meehan until his own petrol gage indicated half-full. Then he would call Dawn Harding on his mobile, give her Meehan’s position and let her Service’s people take over. This was their speciality, after all.

The arrangement was professionally responsible, but also gave him a reasonable chance of sorting the whole thing out himself, which he very much wanted to do. He needed closure, as – he suspected – did Meehan. Their destinies had intertwined. One of them had to kill the other.