Powerstone (13 page)

Unused to being so expertly
analysed, Irene withdrew into a smile; ‘thank you for your approval,’ she said.

‘There’s a lot to approve.’
Leaning forward, Mary patted her thigh. ‘We have more in common than you
realise, Irene. Now, what was that about visiting
Edinburgh
?’

As a city geared for tourists,
Edinburgh
had more than its share of places
to stay. Irene searched the Internet for somewhere within reasonable walking
distance of the Royal Mile, but not within the orbit of the Parliament
building.
Central
Edinburgh
was
infested with CCTVs and she had no desire to have her face, or the faces of her
team, recorded.

Desmond had obtained a selection
of blank passports and skilfully inserted false identities. He had altered
Irene’s nationality to Canadian, but even with her hair dyed black and a pair
of frameless spectacles sliding down her nose, she was afraid that somebody
might recognise her as the loser from
The
Neophyte
.

‘God, but I’m ugly,’ Irene
examined her new appearance in the bathroom mirror.

‘Yes, but it suits you,’ Patrick
said solemnly, and ducked her emphatic slap.

Patrick also carried a Canadian
passport, while the others retained their American identities. Mary’s fame
encouraged Desmond into some original thinking, so she wore tinted contact
lenses to alter her eye colouring, padded the inside of her cheeks and cropped
her hair. Subtle touches with a fine make-up brush deepened the lines of her
face and added ten years to her age.

Eventually Irene found a hotel in
a curved Georgian terrace five minutes from the city centre. Each room had an
en-suite bathroom and as many facilities as a two star hotel should enjoy.

‘Are you all together?’ The
booking clerk, a young brisk-eyed woman asked. Ordering a uniformed boy to
carry their luggage upstairs, she offered each of them a complementary map of
Edinburgh
. ‘You are on the first floor,’
she said, ‘four single rooms and one double.

‘Thank you.’ Irene handed a key to
each of her team. ‘Once we are settled in, we’ll take a stroll around the
city.’

‘I’m sure that you will enjoy it,’
the clerk said. ‘I always believe that
Edinburgh
looks its best in May, before the main season begins and
all the crowds come.’

Irene selected some brochures from
the rack on the reception counter. ‘Remember to take the camera, Patrick. We’ll
take some photographs.’

Only a hundred yards from the
hotel, they came to the
Dean
Bridge
, spanning an impressively deep chasm through which flowed
a small river, the Water of Leith. Leaning as far over the wall as the sharp
spikes allowed, Patrick pretended to fall. ‘There’s a waterfall down there;
that’s cool.’ Bringing up the camera from its strap around his neck, he took a
couple of photographs and hauled himself further up the parapet.

‘Stop acting the fool, Patrick,’
Irene snapped. ‘We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.’

Patrick shrugged. ‘I’m just acting
like a typical American tourist,’ he explained, jumping down. Mary smiled
sympathetically.

‘It’s all that Marine training,’
Irene explained. ‘He responds best to orders.’

Flagging down one of Edinburgh’s
black taxi-cabs, Irene took them to the castle to look at the Honours, waited
for their exclamations of awe and squandered a great deal of money in the
castle book shop. Any scrap of information might be helpful. ‘We’ll pay in
cash, ass-hole,’ she said, pushing away Patrick’s hand as he volunteered his
credit card, reminding him ‘your real name’s on that.’

‘Ease up on him,’ Mary advised.
‘After all, he’s only a man.’ When they exchanged an understanding glance,
Irene realised that she might just begin to like Mary.

The uniformed stewards proved as
helpful as before, relating something of the crown’s history and answering
every question that Irene asked.

‘You mean the crown has hardly
ever been out of the castle for hundreds of years?’ Patrick could act the naïve
tourist with skill, distracting the stewards as the others worked busily with
their cameras.

‘Hardly ever,’ the steward
confirmed. He was small and neat, with steady eyes and a face that revealed
hard times.

‘That’s awesome,’ Patrick said, as
Mary pressed against him, smiling. ‘We’ve nothing like that in
Canada
.’

‘Maybe not, sir,’ the steward
agreed. ‘But
Canada
has plenty other attractions. Your
Calgary Stampede, for example. My sister speaks highly of it, and she lives in
Edmonton
. Which part of
Canada
do you come from?’

As Patrick hesitated, Irene
answered, ‘we’re from
Toronto
.’ She gave him a small nudge in
the back. ‘Come on, we’ve got the rest of
Edinburgh
to see. I want to visit the palace too.’

Comfortable with her position as
tour guide, Irene walked them down the Royal Mile, pointing out the
intersections where the route was most vulnerable, and the CCTV cameras that
festooned the tall buildings.

‘Lots of cameras,’ Desmond said
quietly. ‘They’ll be able to see everything that we do.’

‘We can mask them,’
Bryan
told him. ‘Or cut the cables.’ He
looked down the length of the street, with the slope gradually increasing and a
number of small alleys leading away on the right. ‘Plenty space here,’ he said.

Stefan shook his head. ‘It’s too
open. The police will be here to control the crowds.’

‘And the army,’ Patrick said. ‘I
would have marksmen up there,’ he gestured to the upper flats with his chin.
‘That building provides the best field of fire up or down the street.’

Irene touched his arm, attempting
to make amends for her recent verbal humiliation of him. After all, she was not
with him for his intellect, and her public criticism must hurt his ego.
‘Thanks, Patrick. I knew that I brought you along for some reason.’ He
responded with a surprised smile.

‘The police will have a block up
there, too.’ Stefan added. ‘For crowd control.’

Irene did not offer him any
reward. She was working out a plan in her head, but wanted to hear the input of
these professionals first. ‘How fast can you drive, Mary?’

‘How fast is the car?’ Mary
responded with a shrug.

‘Fast enough, then.’ Irene led
them down the Canongate, where dark tenements crammed claustrophobically over
the narrowing street. ‘This is my first choice of hit,’ she stopped outside the
centuries old Tolbooth. Two youths glowered at them from a pub doorway, one
wearing a Burberry baseball cap, the other with a deep hood concealing his
face.

Desmond shook his head. ‘It will
never do,’ he said. ‘Too cramped, and there’s no space to escape.’

Mary pointed to the arched alley
that pierced the massive stones of the Tolbooth and slid steeply downhill. ‘If
you mean for me to burst out of there and ram the Rolls-Royce, then that’s
fine, but there’s nowhere to go but down there,’ she pointed toward
Holyrood
Palace
, then jerked her thumb in the opposite direction, ‘or up
there, back toward the castle and the soldiers.’

Irene ignored their protests.
Waiting for one of
Edinburgh
’s ubiquitous double decker buses
to trundle past, she paced the width of the road. ‘About five yards,’ she said,
‘and when the Queen comes there will be no other traffic and certainly nothing
parked on the roadside.’ She adopted her most serious look, as though their
reactions disappointed her. ‘So none of you think that it would be possible to
hit here?’

‘Not a chance in hell,’
Bryan
said definitely, as Mary shook
her head. Patrick and Stefan said nothing.

‘Good,’ Irene allowed her
man-killing smile to reappear. ‘Then neither will the police. They are
professionals, just like you, so they’ll think the same way.’

‘I have three questions,’ Desmond
said, looking decidedly unimpressed. ‘One: how do we do the hit in this
confined space? Two: how do we get away, and three: how do we stay free?’

‘Take photographs,’ Irene realised
that the two youths had slouched closer. ‘Try to look like tourists!’ She
waited until
Bryan
had pointed his camera at the Tolbooth
with its projecting clock and exterior stairs. Patrick was more direct,
focussing on the youths, who quickly withdrew, swearing. ‘That’s better. Well
done, Patrick,’ Irene favoured him again, before turning her attention to
Desmond.

‘Now, I’ll take your questions one
at a time, Desmond. One: we find out the order of this procession. I presume
that it will be structured so that different sections of the crowd have
something to keep them occupied. That means that there will be a gap between
the Queen and the Honours, which is so much the better for us.’

‘Why?’

Irene ignored Patrick’s
interruption. ‘We wait at the entrance to Panmure Close,’ she pointed to a
gated narrow lane that ran at right angles to the Canongate, on the left side.
‘The cameras can’t see us there. When the Honours are approaching this spot,’
she stamped her foot on the ground, ‘then we create diversions to focus
attention on the Queen and away from the Canongate. When the media and the
crowd are looking somewhere else, then we come out of the close, blow open the
glass and escape down there,’ she pointed to an even narrower lane across the
road. There was a name emblazoned on the stone above, but centuries of
Edinburgh
weather had worn it away.

‘On foot?’ Desmond shook his head.
‘They’ll catch us in minutes.’

‘No they won’t: all their
attention will be on the Queen.’ Irene shook her head. ‘There will be hardly
any security left here. There will only be crowds of tourists who will hamper
the police, and lots of smoke to obscure the cameras.’ She gave her most
triumphant smile. ‘We’ll make sure that there is plenty smoke, so even if the
CCTV cables are not cut, the cameras cannot pick us up. Now come with me.’ She
led them through the sloping anonymous close, and into
Holyrood Road
that ran parallel to the Canongate.

‘There will be security here, to
guard the
Parliament
Building
, so we must divert them away. A nice bomb threat will do;
either al-Qaeda or Irish terrorists; somebody that exists so it is treated as
credible.’

Irene patted Mary’s shoulder. ‘Now
Mary, this is where you come in. You will take over for the next stage.’ She
smiled. ‘You’ll need all your driving skills here. Come on!’ she began to jog,
with Patrick keeping pace at her side.
Holyrood Road
was more commercial, with a new hotel at one side and the
new offices of the Scotsman newspaper and local authority housing opposite.
Nobody looked up when they passed, and only when Desmond protested his age and
years of nicotine use did Irene slow to a walk. ‘You will drive up this street,
back toward the castle, and then take a left into the Pleasance.’

‘The what?’ Desmond asked.

The Pleasance was a narrow, steep
road, with a combination of ancient and modern buildings on either side. Groups
of university students milled in casual unconcern as Irene walked past.
‘Straight on,’ she encouraged, as Desmond began to falter.

‘Even allowing for traffic, it
will take about only twelve minutes until we reach the junction of
Holyrood Park Road
, then we take a sharp left. ’ She
pointed out her intended route.

‘That goes back into town,’
Bryan
complained.

‘Not quite,’ Irene smiled. When
Desmond had recovered his breath she increased her speed, walking briskly until
she reached a roundabout. ‘Left again here and we are within the Queen’s Park.’

Matching her pace for pace,
Patrick alone looked as if he were enjoying a casual stroll. He grinned down to
her. ‘That’s another full day in
Scotland
and I haven’t seen a man in a skirt yet.’

‘Pity,’ Irene warmed to his
simplicity, ‘as if we did, I could at least admire his hairy legs.’ She winked
as he laughed.

Behind a sloping green field, the
red rocks of Salisbury Crags rose sheer in front of them, a semi circle of
cliffs in the middle of the city. ‘So we hide out here?’ Desmond began to
swear. His breath was coming in short gasps.

Irene allowed him two minutes.
‘No. This is where Patrick meets us with the transport. I told you that he was
in the Marines. I did not say that he was a helicopter pilot.’ She waited until
the expected exclamations subsided. ‘Once we’re in the air, we’re home and dry.
There will be so much confusion in
Edinburgh
that nobody will have time to bother about us.’

‘I didn’t know that you were a
pilot,’ Mary’s eyes were contemplatively narrow. ‘What did you fly?’