KILL ME IF YOU CAN (Dave Cunane Book 8) (41 page)

‘I need him on his feet to look into his eyes,’ Claverhouse said.

‘So you can peer into his bonny blue eyes for one last time?’ Lansdale taunted.

‘Arsehole!’ she snapped. ‘We may have to kill people but you needn’t enjoy it so much.’

Lansdale laughed and turned to the sack of clothes. He plucked out a turban and jammed it on my head.

‘Who’s a pretty boy, then?’ he mocked.

He pulled out the long shirt and baggy trousers. He flung the trousers at me. ‘Get your jim-jams on then, beddie-bye time soon.’

‘How can I get these on when I’m tied hand and foot?’ I replied.

‘Hey beautiful, cut him free while I cover him,’ he ordered Claverhouse.

‘Lansdale, you moron, am I supposed to bite through his cuffs with my teeth? You took my knife when you disarmed me for security reasons, remember?’

‘Oh yeah gorgeous, so I did,’ he said with a sneer. ‘I wonder why? You may have taken in the Boss with your smarmy ways but I know what you really thought of dear old Ricky boy even if he doesn’t.’

‘Bastard,’ Claverhouse said coldly.

He laughed again but fumbled in a pouch that was secured by a sling over his shoulder and pulled out a knife.

‘Please try something,’ he said, holding it to my throat. ‘Just make one little move. Lift your legs up.’

‘I can’t, I’m too stiff,’ I said.

‘Move!’ he threatened.

‘I can’t,’ I said pathetically. ‘My legs have gone numb. I’ve been tied up for hours.’

‘You stand well clear,’ he said to Claverhouse.

She moved back.

Moving awkwardly in his NBC suit he knelt at my feet and studied my bindings.

‘What’s this,’ he exclaimed as soon as he laid a hand on the plastic cuff and discovered it wasn’t fastened to anything. He leaned forward to ram his knife into my throat at the same instant as my blade slipped under his ribs. The force of his movement aided my thrust. His eyes bulged. I pushed my knife forward and upwards and I felt the beating of his heart stop as my knife penetrated it.

He tried to shout something but no sound emerged. His eyes rolled and he went limp.

I started to push him off me. Blood splattered my shirt but didn’t gush in torrents.

‘Hold him upright,’ Claverhouse ordered, ‘don’t let them see what you’ve done.’

From the point of view of the contractors to our right and left Lansdale was positioned above me. They observed curiously.

Claverhouse ripped the semi-automatic out of Lansdale’s holster. That was the signal for the contractors to pull out their own weapons and rush towards us. Claverhouse went on one knee and shot them all with cold deliberation and frightening accuracy. They tumbled down like so many skittles and lay twitching on the rough ground. The surrounding rubber muffled the shots.

The MI5 agent took charge at once and I wasn’t about to start arguing with her. She had the gun in her hand.

‘Get into the shirt and trousers! If they see you they’ve got to think you’re carrying out the plan.’

I obeyed, pulling the long shirt over my turban. It covered up the blood stains. My sole remaining shoe was tangled up in the sacking and on the theory that one shoe was better than no shoe I started fumbling for it.

She pulled my hands away.

‘Dave! There’s no time for that. We’ve got to get rid of the Caesium or Hudson-Piggott will start all over again.’

‘Get rid of it?’ I repeated stupidly, ‘but it’ll kill us. Those drums will leak as soon as we move them.’

‘No, they aren’t oil drums. They’re lead lined stainless steel cylinders and are impact proof against being hit by a locomotive.’

I was about to say,
‘This is where we came in
,’ thinking about the security van at Manchester Airport until I remembered it was Clint who’d saved our bacon then. I shut up and looked around. It was my first proper inspection of the site. Beyond the cones of shredded rubber there were acres and acres of car tyres. I revised my estimate of how long this fire would burn from weeks to months, years even?

To my left, beyond the dead contractors, the ground fell away sharply. We were in a secluded valley somewhere in the foothills of the Pennines. There wasn’t a single house in view. I ran forward, pausing only to pick up a contractor’s automatic. There was a steep hill. The tyre dump was on a sort of plateau with hills on three sides.

I ran back. My bare feet were bleeding but it seemed a small sacrifice after what I’d been through.

Claverhouse was removing her radiation suit which I took as a good sign.

‘We can push them down there,’ I told her. ‘They’ll roll for half a mile.’

And that’s what we did.

The radiation containers were sealed but had screw tops designed to be opened by machines. There was an oddly shaped spanner intended for manual removal of the lids. I slung it high among the tyres. Then we rolled the cylinders and they went bouncing down the slope, gathering speed before disappearing into bushes in the distance.

Hudson-Piggott wouldn’t find them in a hurry.

‘Now the oxy-acetylene torch,’ Claverhouse said urgently. As she spoke a contractor incautiously poked his head round a pile of tyres. She shot him almost as a reflex action. Her accuracy was frightening.

‘Dave, get the oxy torch and dump it somewhere where they won’t find it in a hurry,’ she ordered without turning a hair.

I dragged it over to a loose pile of tyres and heaved some on top to cover it.

When I returned Claverhouse, and I still didn’t think of her as Molly, was standing by Appleyard’s body. She’d covered him with her discarded radiation suit. Her face was red and she’d been crying but I wasn’t feeling compassionate.

‘I want some answers,’ I said bluntly.

‘There are answers but they’re not for you,’ she said.

I tried a different tack.

‘What was Rick Appleyard to you?’

‘We were lovers. I was bringing Rick round to my point of view about Hudson-Piggott. The trouble is Rick was so terribly loyal to the service. He found it next to impossible to believe anything bad about a senior man or even that there was a plot. You were helpful in that. He was coming to see things my way but then he had to go running to Hudson-Piggott when Lansdale was sent for him, the idiot.’

‘Oh,’ I muttered, not much wiser. ‘So who is Hudson-Piggott?’

She paused for a moment considering and then looked down at Appleyard.

‘Oh, what does it matter anyway? The point is Dave, as long as he’s still alive you’re in danger so you deserve the truth.’

‘Who is he?’

‘He’s the Prime Minister’s confidential adviser on the security services. He has the Prime Minister’s ear and, as the heads of all the other services don’t, that means he’s effectively in charge of MI5, MI6, Defence Intelligence and all the other secret odds and sods in Whitehall. All that, and he has a whopping big budget to bring about change.’

‘No one can say he hasn’t been trying.’

She frowned.

‘You really are too flippant, Dave. My boss, Sir Freddy Jones, hates him and doesn’t trust him an inch which is why I was tasked to get close and report as soon as he made a slip. But I wasn’t able to. That rat you stuck Rick’s knife in watched me like a hawk.  When he accidentally killed the two Ms in the course of removing you, Hudson-Piggott used their deaths to his advantage. He discredited Rick. The man was running his own parallel service. Now we know why.’

‘But he’s finished now?’

‘Who’s to say? Hudson-Piggott’s a master at blaming other people and coming up smelling of roses.’

‘Which other people will he blame for this?’ I said, suddenly nervous.

‘I don’t know . . . you, me, someone we don’t know, but he’s certain to have a Plan B.’

‘Oh, my God!’

‘Come on Dave, you’ve survived being a thorn in his side six days. You’ll just have to go on a bit longer. I think he’s near the end of his rope now.’

‘You think? Thanks a bunch.’

She shrugged. Then she startled me by taking out the semi-automatic. She didn’t use it on me. Instead she carefully wiped her prints off it, clamped it in Lansdale’s dead fingers and fired it.

‘Spent a lot of time in the SAS Killing House, did Ian Lansdale. He was nearly as good a shot as me so a bit of misdirection is in order,’ she said. ‘Now whoever cleans up this mess might just think dear dead Ian was the shooter.’

‘Great,’ I muttered.

‘Right, Dave, I don’t know about you but I’m out of here. It’s better if we split up.’

‘Are you sure?’ I asked, aware that she was the only person on the planet who could testify to my non-involvement.

‘Yes, there are still contractors about so be careful. Your best bet may be to lie low somewhere until the police get here.’

‘Will they get here?’

‘They will when I reach a phone. One of Hudson-Piggott’s security precautions was to confiscate all our phones.’

‘But . . .’

‘Listen Dave, we have five minutes at best before Hudson-Piggott decides Lansdale isn’t coming and starts wondering why there isn’t a fire, so move it.’

‘What about all these?’ I asked indicating the six bodies.

‘Clean up squad for Rick and Lansdale. The birds and foxes can have the rest as far as I’m concerned. They’re just scum.’

Then as good as her word she began running in the direction of the slope we’d sent the Caesium cylinders down. She disappeared.

The thought in my mind was treachery, her treachery to me.

‘Job done, Ms Claverhouse’ I said to myself. There wasn’t going to be a nuclear disaster here but the odds on me avoiding a personal disaster weren’t high.

As for Hudson-Piggott’s nasty plan, his contractors would have a hell of a time trying to set the damp wood on fire without the oxy torch and even if they succeeded there’d be no Caesium panic now. The hospital waste was barely radioactive at all.

I hovered indecisively for a moment. My feet hurt like hell. There was no way I’d be able to hide from anyone with a trail of bloody footprints following me. I went back to Lansdale’s sack. I shook it and surprise, surprise, a pair of serviceable sandals fell out.

I put them on and cast an eye round the scene. There were stiffs everywhere. It was a battlefield. Appleyard, Lansdale, four contractors; but the number was incomplete. I had to add Hudson-Piggott to the total or my own and my family’s lives were still in jeopardy. That bastard had killed Uncle Lew and his friend Pickering, blown up my house and murdered most of my friends. Forget about his insane plot against the country, I owed Hudson-Piggott cartloads of payback.

There was another thing. Hanging around here until the boys in blue arrived didn’t feel like a very happening sort of thing as far as I was concerned. My knowledge of police procedure told me they’d arrest me on sight and hold me indefinitely. I mean, what was there here?

Dave Cunane + dead bodies = Arrest for murder.

I had no guarantee that Claverhouse would even phone the police. Who was to say what explanation Sir Freddie Jones would think up? Damaging admissions leading to a major scandal involving his service would be low on his shopping list.

Following Claverhouse’s lead, I wiped my prints off the knife handle sticking out of Lansdale’s chest and collected up all physical traces of my presence in this charnel house. Grabbing Lansdale’s sack I stowed away my shoe and the plastic cuffs. After a second’s thought I added the sacking I’d been wrapped in. It was bound to have my DNA on it. For good measure I crammed the turban and the baggy pants in as well. I tucked the long shirt into my trousers and set off in the direction Hudson-Piggott had disappeared in.

I was fairly happy about the Caesium drums and the oxy cylinders. I’d wrapped my hands in sacking before I touched them. The only other incriminating thing was that blasted spanner. My prints were on it. It had fallen deep into the tyre mountain. I could only hope it stayed lost.

I was cautious. I peered round every intersection but saw no one.

I argued to myself that the last contractor Claverhouse shot must have been sent back to collect her. Had there been another with him who reported back? Did Claverhouse know Hudson-Piggott would be on his toes as soon as he heard Lansdale was dead? I tried to stop hypothesising before I became paranoid.

I soon passed through Hudson-Piggott’s Alps to an older part of the site.

There were yet more piles of salvaged material of every imaginable type but to my right there was a distant building. It was some sort of ramshackle site office.

Was there a telephone?

I approached by an indirect route and entered the heaps of junk. The lane or aisle I was in consisted of architectural salvage, pallet loads of used bricks, chimneys, slates and stone slabs. Paddy Cunane would have been in bliss wandering round here but I used it to cover my stealthy approach to the office.

This place was enormous. Where were the workers? Where were the operators of those shredding machines and conveyor belts?  My final observation point was behind a pallet of old yellow bricks. I tried to still my noisy breathing. I was about forty yards from the office. I now saw that the office stood alongside what was probably the only entrance to the site. That was how they controlled these sites, wasn’t it . . . a single gate to check whatever was coming in or out.