Road Kill (49 page)

He paused again, as though carrying out some internal debate on how much more to tell me. Eventually, when I didn’t interrupt him, he sighed and said, “The van was reported stolen, as you would expect. But, interestingly enough, the registered owner is a property company based in Northern Ireland – the director of which is one Isobel Nash. In light of what you’ve just told me I think we might well be having a word with Mrs Nash in due course.”

“I think the person you should really be aiming to talk to is her boyfriend, Eamonn Garroway,” I said. “And watch your step when you do. His idea of a conversation tends to hurt.”

Sean tapped his watch and I nodded to show I understood.

“Sorry, Superintendent,” I said, brusque, “but we need to get moving.”

“All right, Charlie,” MacMillan said, resigned. “I should know by now that trying to talk you out of whatever it is you’re going to do is a pointless exercise so I’ll save my breath, but . . . good luck.”

“Thank you, John,” I said gravely. “We’re going to need it.”

We were just on the outskirts of Dundalk, less than ten klicks from the border, when we finally caught up with the van that had taken Jamie. If it hadn’t been for Isobel’s information, I would have begun to believe we were heading in totally the wrong direction long before then.

As it was, William and Daz voiced their doubts several times during the frantic ride north. When they had the breath to do it, that is. It made no difference to the pace Sean set. He’d abandoned his previous laid back style and was going like a lunatic. I tried to work out where the rustiness had worn off his riding abilities. Somewhere between the ferry to Belfast, and here, Sean had shed his inhibitions like a second skin.

Now he went for hairline gaps in traffic that made me wince, surviving on gut instinct and sheer brass neck. The rest of us followed him with a kind of reckless faith that where he could get through, so could we.

Nevertheless, all I could hear in my ear-piece was Daz swearing as he missed yet another collision by fractions. Paxo was probably being quite vocal with his opinion, too, but nobody could hear him. He’d given Sean his headset and radio before we set off.

“You’re going to need this more than I am,” he’d said, dumping the whole lot onto the seat of the Blackbird. Jamie’s headset had been still in his helmet, but the radio itself was missing, otherwise we would have had a spare.

Sean had looked up from carefully packing the bottles we’d prepared into his tank bag. We’d loosely wrapped them in more towels filched from the hotel bathroom to stop them clashing together.

“You’ll need this, too,” Paxo had said and handed over his Zippo lighter. “And it’s my favourite, so don’t lose it, all right?”

“Thank you,” Sean had said, and meant it. “I won’t.”

Paxo had nodded and rammed on his helmet, cutting short any further talk. He’d slotted the Ducati in behind me as we roared out of the car park. I’d glanced up at the hotel just once as we’d ridden away past the front of it.

Gleet had said he’d give us a half-hour head start before he called the cops. As we howled round the outside of Dublin and headed north, that time seemed to be trickling away. And the further we went without any sign of the Merc van, the faster the minutes seemed to be running out on us.

Unless you wanted to go the scenic route, the only clear way from Dublin up to Newry was the N1, the same road we’d taken on the way down. It was largely fast and open and what little traffic there was on a Sunday was moving quickly on it.

“That’s the one!” Sean’s voice sounded loud in my ear, edged with triumph as he recognised the registration number Gleet had given us. “Just overtake and don’t look at it too much,” he warned. “We need to get ahead of him and we don’t want to tip him off.”

The Merc driver was doing a steady sixty-five and not looking as though he was pushing hard to keep that up. We slipped past trying not to give the van more than casual attention and accelerated away hard afterwards, putting some distance between us.

I couldn’t resist a brief glance sideways into the cab as I drew alongside, taking in an almost subliminal flash of three figures spread across the front seats. None of them were Jamie.

The driver was in short sleeves and had a chunky gold bracelet around the hairy wrist nearest to the window. He had the glass wound halfway down and he was smoking. He didn’t look at all like a man who’s just been part of kidnapping, theft and murder.

We’d already been cruising in bursts over a hundred but Sean stepped it up for the next few miles, then eased off as we passed the signs for a lay-by coming up.

“That should do it,” he said. “We’ll stop up ahead.”

We all backed off accordingly. Paxo overshot me before he got the idea, braking hard to make it into the lay-by itself.

The road was almost straight at this point, slightly raised up on an embankment that dropped away sharply at either side to a stout post-and-rail fence and then into grassland. For our purposes, it couldn’t have been better.

The only worrying factor was the wind. There was no sign of the rain that had dogged us at Mondello, but the wind had picked up and was gusty, particularly over the exposed piece of road. It was going to make things that bit more tricky.

There were no other vehicles parked up but, even so, Sean checked round before he unzipped the tank bag and handed out the three bottles containing the gloss paint William had found in the hotel basement. They were the bottles without lids, so we’d smothered the top of the necks with packing tape.

“Now, you all know what you’re doing?” he said in that calm, almost soothing voice he’d always used to inspire confidence in terrified new recruits on their first live-firing exercise. The Devil’s Bridge Club members nodded, keyed up and anxious. “Switch your lights off so you don’t attract his attention as you’re coming up behind him. You’re going to have to fling these things pretty hard to get them to break, all right? Glass is amazingly tough stuff. It’s not like you see it in the movies. Aim for the windscreen if you can. The gloss will smear better than emulsion and they won’t be able to clear it, OK?”

“What then?” Daz said, giving up trying to wedge his bottle somewhere into the Aprilia’s fairing and carefully stuffing it down the front of his leathers instead. Paxo and William did the same.

“You get the hell out of Dodge,” Sean said sharply. “Trust me, Charlie and I will be right behind you.” He handed one of the other bottles across to me. I stood it in the top of my tank bag, making sure it was packed upright so as not to spill, but accessible enough to retrieve easily when the time came.

“What about afterwards, if – when – the van stops?” Daz said.

Sean flicked his eyes to me and I saw the question in them.
Are you ready for this?
I nodded, just once.
As I’ll ever be.

“I think you’d better let us worry about that,” he said. “Just get far enough ahead not to get caught up in anything, then pull over and wait for us there. You’ve got Jamie’s helmet? Good. With any luck, he’ll need it soon.”

Paxo had been staring back over his shoulder, waiting for the van to catch us up.

“Here they come!” he said now, his voice high and strangled. “Let’s do it, yeah?”

As soon as the van flashed past our position, the three of them launched out of the lay-by, gunning the bikes up to speed in seconds. A moment later, Sean and I followed.

We hung back behind the others, keeping station while we waited for the boys to do their stuff. If they failed there was still a chance we could stop the van but Eamonn’s men would be ready for us and things would be so much more difficult.

I felt the nerves knotting my stomach into a tight hard ball. I swallowed, tried to breathe evenly, but that only seemed to make things worse. Reacting to circumstances was one thing, I realised. I could do that without a qualm. But actually instigating an attack was something different again. And especially with such untrained troops. I felt the enormous weight of the responsibility for their safety lying on me.

Does Sean feel the same?
I glanced sideways, noted the tension in his arms, the stiff set of his neck as he kept his eyes riveted on the events unfolding ahead.
Of course he does.

The FireBlade was a reassuringly solid presence under me, with the Super Blackbird keeping easy pace alongside, like two cavalry horses picking up to a canter before the final charge.
Into the valley of death rode the five . . . well, let’s hope not.

I glanced ahead and saw the boys tight up behind the Merc. They’d clustered together where they would be almost out of sight of the van’s mirrors, hiding in his blind spot.

I saw them nod to each other, their signal. Almost as one man, they reached into their leathers and pulled out their bottles full of paint.

Paxo went first, shooting up the left-hand-side of the van. He flung the bottle awkwardly back over his right shoulder with his left hand as he drew level.

The bottle hit the front end somewhere without breaking and bounced up over the roof-line to land twenty metres behind the rear bumper. There it did finally smash, splattering pure brilliant white gloss paint all over the road. Sean and I had to swerve to avoid it.

Daz and William spurted up the right-hand side of the van as soon as Paxo began his run. But, as the first bottle hit, the Merc driver braked hard enough to lock one wheel, sending up a puff of smoke. The van lurched to the right, forcing the other two bikers to swing wide.

William was just at the point of his pitch and the sudden change of direction threw his aim out completely. The bottle landed hard enough to break this time, but too low and to the left.

“Shit!” I heard him shout. “Direct hit on the radiator grille, but nothing on the glass. Sorry guys.”

The van straightened as the driver fought with the wheel, the high back rocking violently. As William pulled away, Daz glided in almost close enough for van and bike to touch, controlling the big Aprilia with delicate precision. I held my breath as he seemed to keep it there for an eternity. The slightest sideways twitch from the Merc, or heavy gust of wind, and he was going to be history.

Then Daz stood up on his footpegs and backhanded the bottle he was holding straight down onto the windscreen directly in front of the driver, like he was christening a battleship.

Even from our position, we saw the paint spray up.

“Bull’s-eye!” I heard Daz yell. “He’s all yours!”

The Merc had began to snake wildly, scrubbing off speed until it was down to less than fifty. We dropped our own speed back to match and I held my breath hoping the van would stop of its own accord. After a few seconds it was clear that wasn’t going to happen. They must have known this was an ambush now, and their only chance to avoid disaster was to keep moving.

“Looks like we’re going to have to do this the hard way,” Sean’s voice said in my ear. “You ready?”

“Lead on,” I said, terse.

Sean ripped away the tape holding Paxo’s Zippo lighter to the headstock of the Blackbird. He already had a row of the mini sparklers we’d taken from the hotel dining room jammed in around the bike’s clocks, where the rake of the fairing would keep them more or less out of the buffeting wind.

In this comparatively sheltered zone, Sean persuaded the Zippo to hold a flame at the third strike. He thrust his hand in among the forest of sparklers and kept it there until half a dozen of them had fizzed into life. We’d timed them back at the hotel and knew you got an average twenty-second burn out of each of the magnesium-coated rods.

He swung his bike in on my right, close enough to hand over two of the lit sparklers. I leaned across to grab hold of the stems with my left hand. Even though I knew it was just about impossible for the wind to extinguish them, I ducked my hand into the shelter of the ‘Blade’s fairing, just in case.

“OK,” Sean said, seemingly right inside my head. “Remember Charlie, eight seconds maximum, OK?”

“OK,” I repeated.

“Sure?”

“Oh for heaven’s sake, Sean,” I growled, “let’s just do this thing and go home, all right?”

I glanced sideways as I spoke and realised he was grinning at me. In spite of everything.

I grinned back and touched the burning end of the sparkler in my hand to the one poking half out of the bottle top in my tank bag. For a moment nothing happened, then it flared and caught in a glittering shower of tiny shards of light.

One thousand, two thousand
. . .

I grabbed the bottle and yanked it free with my left hand, snapping the power on with my right and shifting my bodyweight to guide the FireBlade up the passenger side of the van as I did so. I felt rather than saw Sean doing the same on the driver’s side.

Four thousand, five thousand
. . .

As I pulled alongside the cab window, I could see through it to the smeared mess that was the front screen. The guy nearest me turned to stare as he caught the high rev of the ‘Blade’s engine, his mouth rounding in panic as he saw what I was holding.