David Trevellyan 03 -More Harm Than Good (45 page)
“I don’t think so.”
“I do. And I just have
one question before we go. Who was driving the crane, just now?”
Jones was silent for a
moment.
“Stan
Leckie
was driving it,” he said, finally. “Of course.”
“A word of advice,” I
said. “If you’re going to lie convincingly, you need to not hesitate so much.
And don’t elaborate. Answer quickly, simply, and try to keep your eyes still.”
“I didn’t hesitate. I
mean
,
I didn’t understand the question. I was trying
to figure out what you meant.”
“You were? I’m
intrigued. Which part of the question was particularly confusing?”
“It’s not that. It’s
because you already knew
Leckie
was driving it, so I
couldn’t understand why you were asking.”
“
Leckie
was driving. What was he trying to do?”
“Kill Melissa.”
“Just Melissa? Or me,
too?”
“Both of you.”
“I can understand
Melissa. She was chained up. She couldn’t get away.
But me?
I was mobile. And he had a shotgun. Why didn’t he just shoot me, instead of
leaving me free to release her?”
“He must have wanted to use his trademark method.”
“So, not only to kill
us, but to make sure the world knew who’d done it?”
“I guess.”
“You’re quite new to
this game, aren’t you Tim? Have you crossed paths with many killers?”
“Not too many, no.”
“Because here’s a word
to the wise. There are lots of reasons for killing. Money. Revenge. Panic.
Covering your tracks. But announcing your own guilt? Inviting the police to
catch you? That’s not high on many murderers’ lists.”
Jones didn’t reply.
“And there’s another
problem,” I said. “
Leckie
wasn’t threatening me with
that shotgun. He was about to tell me something. And then you conveniently shot
him.”
“
Leckie
was guilty,” he said. “He was tied into al-
Aqsaba’a
up to his elbows, and I can prove it.”
“Maybe you can. But can
you prove who was helping him? From inside MI5? Or are you trying to do the
opposite?”
Jones didn’t answer.
“I don’t have time for
any more nonsense,” I said, after five seconds of silence. “Where’s your
phone?”
“In my pocket,” he said.
“Why?”
“Take it out,” I said,
leveling my Beretta on the bridge of his nose. “Call your mother. Tell her
goodbye.”
Jones didn’t move.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Don’t you have a mother?”
“No,” he said. “I do.”
“Then don’t you care
about her? Don’t you think she’d appreciate the chance to say goodbye to her
son? Because if you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’m going to do to you
what you did to
Leckie
.”
Jones started to move
his mouth, but it was a couple of seconds before any sound came out.
“OK,” he said. “You win.
It was
me
. I was driving the crane.”
“You were?” I said. “How
did you get in place to shoot
Leckie
so soon after
you crashed into the wall?”
“I didn’t wait for the
impact. I jumped out as soon as it started moving.”
“So why didn’t I see
you?”
“The crane was between
us.”
“It couldn’t have been,
or you’d have been on the other side of
Leckie
when
you shot him.”
Jones shrugged.
“I could call your
mother for you,” I said. “After you’re dead. And explain how you were a
traitor. How does she feel about Islamic extremists, by the way? Is she a fan?”
“It’s not like that,” he
said, as a sharp red dot appeared on his forehead. “No one was supposed to
get…”
I dived forward, trying
to knock him to the ground, but I heard the bang while I was still in the air.
When I landed on him his body was already slack. The red dot had been replaced
by a neat, black-edged hole. The back of his skull was missing. And what had
passed for his brains were soaking into the dirt next to his corpse.
Chapter Forty-Two
My suspicion about the crane driver had been proved right, but a
little more dramatically than I’d planned. I rolled off Jones’s body and
scrambled closer to the car, desperate for cover, and trying to steal a couple
of seconds to think. I knew from experience that where you found one traitor, a
second usually wasn’t too far away. A young, naïve one to do the
donkey work
, and be thrown under the bus if necessary. And
an older, wiser head to lie low, pull the strings, and walk away untarnished.
Jones fitted the first bill. But who could his puppet master be? I doubted it
would have been someone I hadn’t come across before, because they wouldn’t be
close enough to the case to influence it in any major way. The problem now, though,
was they were close enough to influence me, permanently. If I could just figure
out who it could be, that might give the tiny edge I’d need. I had precious
little else to work with, beside a critically injured girl I had to get to the
hospital.
I heard stones rattle,
somewhere in front of the car. Someone was moving. Changing their angle. Coming
closer.
I ran back through the
people I’d met since first arriving at St Joseph’s.
The
things that had happened.
The discussions we’d sat through as a result.
The opinions that were expressed.
The
decisions that were taken.
And then a couple of subtle phrases and an
unexpected set of orders suddenly tied themselves into Jones’s last words,
making a shaky kind of connection in my brain. That may not have been
significant. But the red dot reappeared. And that was.
Because
it was hovering over the
centre
of my chest.
The vague connection was
all I had. There was no choice but to gamble.
“It’s a little ungrateful
to shoot me, don’t you think?” I said. “Considering how much I helped you,
today?”
The red dot started to
twitch. Then it moved.
Across my body.
Up the side of the car.
And onto Melissa’s
abdomen.
“You didn’t know the
fire at the school was just a diversion, did you?” I said.
The dot stayed
resolutely still.
“Your plan would have
backfired, if I hadn’t been there to save the boy,” I said, deciding it was
time to go all in. “Wouldn’t it,
Mr
Hardwicke?”
The dot disappeared, and
more stones rattled directly in front of the car.
“Do you have any
evidence for such a wild claim, Commander?” Hardwicke said, emerging from
behind a mound of rubble. The front of his coat was covered with mud and brick
fragments. The vague, distracted look that had always been on his face at
Thames House had been replaced with a focused, angry stare. And the rifle in
his hands was still pointing straight at Melissa. “Because otherwise, you’d
struggle to make anyone believe you.”
“How about this?” I
said. “We take the girl to the hospital, and once she’s safe I’ll hand
everything I have straight over to you.”
“Agent Wainwright? I
like her. I’d have liked to see her walk away from all this. And I would have
let her – you too – if only you’d gone through with your threat to
shoot Jones. Everything would have fallen on him and
Leckie
.
But you had to start asking questions. And I can’t take the risk you haven’t
been asking them elsewhere.”
“I haven’t.”
“Put your gun down, and
pick her up.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s in the wrong
place. I want you to move her.”
“So you can kill her?”
“You set that particular
ball in motion. I’m just going to let nature finish its work.”
“And me?”
“Interesting question.
If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have said you had a bright future ahead of
you. Today, I’m forecasting rain.”
“Then, I’m not seeing
the incentive to help you.”
“OK. Try this. If you
don’t help, I’m going to shoot you in the spine. And I’m going to aim low, so
you don’t die straight away. So you lie there for a while,
paralysed
.
Then I’ll take your belt off Wainwright’s arm, and your final sight will be her
blood pumping out of the wound you inflicted and mingling in the mud with
what’s left of Jones’s brain.”
I didn’t move.
“Oh,” Hardwicke said. “I
see. You’re thinking of calling my bluff. Well, that’s your choice. But do you
really believe I couldn’t get people over here to dress the scene any way I
want it? Or that I couldn’t just leave your bodies here, and think of a way to
explain how the chips happened to fall? Because let me tell you – I’ve
achieved a lot, today. And I’m not about to see it all go south.”
Hardwicke raised his
rifle and lined it up on my stomach. A whole new can of worms was opening
before my eyes, but I had no time to deal with it. Getting Melissa to hospital
was my priority, which meant putting Hardwicke on ice, at least for a few
hours. But that was easier said than done. He was armed. He was too far away to
rush. And he was completely unstable. My options were limited. I decided my
best shot was to keep him talking, and try to work an angle as quickly as
possible.
I put my Beretta on the
ground, released Melissa’s seat belt, and lifted her back on to my shoulder.
“I suppose it’s quite
ironic, in a way,” I said.
“What is?” Hardwicke
said.
“I was brought in to
work against you. And here I am, helping you.”
Hardwicke laughed.
“My poor boy,” he said.
“You don’t understand. I was the one who requested you. I brought you in to
help me, and that’s what you’ve been doing from the start. Didn’t you know?”
“No,” I said. “What else
did I do?”
“There’s a group of
busy-bodies in parliament who are trying to foist external investigators on the
Service, for breaches of security. I’ve been fighting them for two years. And now,
you’ve given me the ammunition I need to back them off for good.”
“I did? How?”
“We had two bad apples
in our barrel. Jones, and Wainwright. It should have just been Jones, but that
number doubled because of you. Wainwright became collateral damage. But anyway,
it proves our existing methods work. And if they’re not broken, why fix them?
It’s just a shame you had to give your life to expose the vicious traitors.”
“All this so you could
avoid some semi-retired ex-superintendent looking over your shoulder?”
“No. That was just the
icing.”
I felt a little tension
come back into Melissa’s body.
“What else was there?”
“Have you got any idea
how much press you get for saving a sweet-looking little kid? Let alone what
public displays of success do for funding?”
“You thought al-
Aqsaba’a
was going to use a fire engine to spray the kids
at St Ambrose with the
caesium
solution? Which is why
you dropped the hints at that late night meeting at Thames House, when the
container showed up at the fire station, and everyone thought Parliament was
the target. And ordered the other pair of agents to be there, even before we’d
caught on to what was happening.”