Remote Control (41 page)
Authors: Andy McNab
‘You got any games?’ she said.
I thought de Sabatino would look at her in disgust: I’m a technician, I don’t have games. But he went, ‘Yeah, loads! Maybe, if we get time, we can sit down and play a few. What ones do you like?’
They went off at a tangent about Quake and Third Dimension. I cut in and said, ‘So what do you do with yourself nowadays? What do you get up to?’
‘I just teach people how to work these things.’ He pointed at the laptop. ‘Also I do a bit of work for a couple of private eyes down here, getting into bank accounts, that sort of thing. Pretty low-key stuff but it’s all right – I have to keep my head down.’
Almost choking on Kouros and looking at his choice of clothes, I hated to think what his idea of high profile would be.
Not having got a reply to his original question, he seemed to feel compelled to fill the silence. He started sniggering and said, ‘Still managed to tuck away a few hundred thou! So, plus the resettlement, things ain’t too bad.’
He was fiddling about, attaching bits and pieces to the laptop. I let him get on with it. He tried again. ‘What about you? Same old thing?’
‘Yeah, same old sort of stuff. Bits and pieces.’
Now sitting at the table, with his back to me, he was concentrating on what he was doing with the laptop. ‘What bits and pieces would those be? You still being a – what did you call it – a baby spy?’
‘I do that a bit.’
‘You working now, are you?’
‘Yeah, I’m working.’
He laughed. ‘You lying fucker!’ He looked at Kelly and said, ‘Oops! Do you do French at school?’ He turned back to me and said, ‘You wouldn’t need me if you were, you’d be getting somebody else to do it. You can’t bullshit Big Al!’ He looked at Kelly and said, ‘
Français!
’ Then he looked back at me and said, ‘You still married?’
Français!
’ Then he looked back at me and said, ‘You still married?’
The Microsoft sound chimed as Windows 95 opened on his machine.
‘Divorced about three years ago,’ I said. ‘Work and stuff. I haven’t heard from her for about two years. I think she’s living up in Scotland or somewhere; I don’t know.’
I suddenly realized that Kelly was hanging on every word.
He winked at her. ‘Just like me – young, free and single! Yeah!’ Big Al was one of life’s really sad fucks; I was probably the nearest thing he had to a friend.
The heavy bass rap started up along the landing. I could hear the boys singing along flatly, accompanied by female voices. It sounded as if they’d found the cheerleaders.
I handed him the back-up disk and it was soon humming in the drive. It wouldn’t be long before I got a few answers. By now there was a pall of cigar smoke filling the top quarter of the room. Between that, the Kouros and the lack of air-conditioning, the room was close to unbearable. It was just as well we’d be moving from here the moment Big Al had left.
I checked outside by moving the curtain, then opened the window. The boys were in full swing, empty beer cans all over the landing, entertaining a group of adoring girls. Maybe Big Al should invest in an armband tattoo and a pair of cut-offs.
The first lot of documents came up onto the screen and I looked over his shoulder as he tapped away in the semi-darkness. I pointed at one of the spreadsheets. ‘This is where I’ve got a problem. I haven’t got a clue what that means. Any idea?’
‘I’ll tell you what we have here.’ His eyes never left the screen. ‘These are shipment and payment records – of what, I don’t know.’ As he pointed to the screen his finger touched it and squidged the liquid underneath. ‘Never touch the screen!’ he scolded himself as if he was telling off one of his students. He was loving it; he was really getting into this.
‘See these here?’ His voice had changed from that of a no-hoper to that of someone who knew his stuff.
I looked at columns headed by groups of initials like UM, JC, PJS. He said, ‘They refer to shipments. They’re telling you what’s going where, and to whom.’
He started to scroll down the pages, confirming it to himself. As he was looking through he nodded emphatically. ‘These are definitely shipments and payments. How did you get into this anyway? You’re not exactly the world’s most computer-literate person and there’s no way this stuff wasn’t passworded.’
‘I had a sniffer program.’
‘Wow! Which one do you have?’ The computer nerd was coming back.
‘Mexy Twenty-one,’ I lied.
‘That’s shit! Oops, garbage! There’s stuff now that does it at three times the speed.’ He looked down at Kelly. ‘That’s the problem with the Brits; they’re still in the steam age.’
He was now out of the spreadsheets and looking at more file names.
I said, ‘This is another lot of files I was having problems with. Can you decrypt them?’
‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Which files are you having trouble with?’
‘Well, they’re in code, or something – just a lot of random letters and numbers. Any chance of you sorting it out?’ He made me feel like a ten-year-old child having to ask for his shoelaces to be tied.
He scrolled down the file names. ‘You mean these GIFs?’ he said. ‘They’re graphics files, that’s all. You just need a graphics program to read them.’
He tapped a few keys, found what he was looking for and selected one of the files. ‘They’re scans of photographs,’ he said.
He leaned over and pulled open the tub of ice cream, got one of the plastic spoons and started to tuck in. He threw a spoon to Kelly and said, ‘You’d better get in here before Uncle Al finishes it all.’
The first picture was now on the screen. It was a grainy black-and-white of two people standing at the top of a flight of steps that led to a grand old building. I knew both men very well. Seamus Macauley and Liam Fernahan were ‘businessmen’ who fronted a lot of fund-raising and other operations for PIRA. They were good at the game, once even getting a scheme backed by the British government to finance regeneration in Northern Ireland cities. The whole scheme was designed to provide local employment. It was sold to the government that, if a community was responsible for its own rebuilding, there would be less chance of them then wanting to go and blow it up. But what the government didn’t know was that the contractors could only employ people that PIRA wanted to work; those people were still claiming unemployment and social benefits, and PIRA were getting a kickback for letting them work on the sites illegally, so it was costing the government twice over – and, of course, the businessmen got their cut as well. And, if the government were paying, why not blow more up and rebuild?
Without a doubt, PIRA had come a long way from the days of rattling collecting tins in west Belfast, Kilburn and Boston. So much so that the Northern Ireland Office had established a Terrorist Finance Unit as a counter-measure in 1988, staffed by specialists in accountancy, law, tax and computing. Euan and I had done a lot of work with them.
Big Al now opened and viewed a series of shots of Macauley and Fernahan shaking hands with two other men, then walking down the steps and getting into a Merc. One of them was the late Mr Morgan McGear, looking very smart in a suit I recognized. I quickly looked at Kelly, but it was clear his face meant nothing to her. The fourth man I had no idea about. That didn’t matter too much at the moment.
The photography was covert: I could see the darkness around the edge of the frames where they hadn’t got the aperture right, but it was good enough for me to tell, by the cars parked in the background, that they were in Europe.
I said, ‘Let’s see the next one.’
De Sabatino knew that I’d recognized something or someone; he was looking at me, gagging to know what it was, wanting to get in on the act. He’d had five years on the back burner and now was the chance for a comeback.
I was going to tell him jack shit. ‘Let’s push on.’
There was another group of pictures that he opened and viewed, but these ones meant nothing at all to me.
Big Al looked at them. The big half-watermelon was back on his face. ‘I know what all those spreadsheets refer to now.’
‘What’s that?’
‘
Está es la coca, señor!
Hey, I know this guy. He works for the cartels.’
Está es la coca, señor!
Hey, I know this guy. He works for the cartels.’
I was looking at an early-forties, really smart-looking Latino getting out of a car. I could tell by the background it was in the United States. ‘That’s Raoul Martinez,’ he said. ‘He’s part of the Colombian trade delegation.’
This was getting more interesting by the minute. PIRA always claimed no association with drug trafficking, but the profits were too great for them to ignore. What I had in front of me now was close to submissible evidence of their direct involvement with the cartels. But that still didn’t help me with my problem.
He looked through the pictures. ‘You’ll see Raoul with somebody else in a minute, I guarantee it.’ He flicked through a couple more. ‘There you are – big bad Sal.’
This other character was about the same age but much taller; he’d probably been a weightlifter at some stage, then ballooned out to maybe sixteen or seventeen stones. Sal was a big old boy, and very bald.
De Sabatino said, ‘Martinez is never without him. We used to do a lot of business with them in the old days. A nice man, a family man. We used to run cocaine up the east coast, all the way to the Canadian border. Basically we needed things sorted out to ease the route; these boys did the necessary and everybody was making money. Yeah, these boys, they’re all right.’
As we went through viewing more picture files, I saw both men eating in a restaurant with another guy, a caucasian.
Big Al said, ‘I haven’t got a clue who he is.’
I was looking over de Sabatino’s shoulder, concentrating hard on the screen.
Kelly sparked up. ‘Nick?’
‘In a minute.’ I turned my head to Big Al. ‘Absolutely no idea?’
‘Not a clue.’
‘Nick?’
I cut in. ‘Not now, Kelly.’
Kelly butted in again. ‘Nick, Nick!’
‘Go back to the—’
‘Nick, Nick! I know who that man is.’
I looked at her. ‘Which man?’
‘The man in the photograph.’ She grinned. ‘You said you don’t know who he is, but I do.’
‘This one?’ I pointed at Martinez.
‘No, the one before.’
Big Al closed a few more windows, scrolling back. ‘Him! That one there!’
It was the white guy who was sitting with Raoul and big bad Sal.
I said, ‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who is he?’ After our experience with the video I expected her to nominate anyone from Clint Eastwood to Brad Pitt.
‘It’s Daddy’s boss.’
There was a long, palpable silence as I let it sink in. Big Al was sucking air through his teeth. I said, ‘What do you mean, Daddy’s boss?’
‘He came to our house with a lady once for supper.’
‘Do you remember his name?’
‘No, I came down for some water and they were eating with Mommy and Daddy. Daddy let me say hello and he said, “Big smile, Kelly, this is my boss!’’ ’ It was a good imitation of Kev, and I saw a flicker of sadness in her eyes.
Big Al joined the conversation in nerd mode. ‘Whoa! There you go! Who’s your daddy, then?’
I swung around. ‘Shut up!’ And so she couldn’t hear it, I muttered angrily, ‘I turned up at her parents’ house a week ago. Everybody was dead. He was in the DEA, killed by people he knew.’
I pushed him off his seat and sat down, with Kelly on my knee so she had a better view of the screen. ‘Are you definitely sure he’s Daddy’s boss?’
‘Yes, I know it’s his boss; Daddy told me. The next day Mommy and me, we made jokes about his moustache because he looked like a cowboy.’
He did, he looked as if he belonged in a Marlboro ad. As she pointed, her finger touched the screen and Daddy’s boss was distorted. Having Kelly in my arms and seeing someone who might have been responsible for her father’s death made me want to do the same to him in person.
I looked at Big Al. ‘Let’s go back through all the photos.’
The party along the landing was in full swing. Big Al sat down and scrolled back through the files to the pictures of Macauley and Fernahan with McGear. ‘Do you know these people?’ Kelly answered my question with a ‘No’, but I wasn’t really listening to her now. I was in my own world. I’d noticed two other cars parked up on the other side of the road. I looked hard at the number plates and then I knew where the pictures had been taken.
‘Gibraltar.’ I couldn’t help mouthing it aloud.
Big Al pointed to Macauley and co. ‘Are these terrorists from Ireland?’
‘Sort of.’
There was a gap while I tried to work this one out.
Big Al sparked up. ‘It’s obvious to me what’s going on.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I knew the Irish terrorist boys were buying cocaine from the Colombians. It came by the normal route to the Florida Keys, then the Caribbean and North Africa. They then used Gibraltar as the jump-off point for the rest of Europe. They made fortunes, and at the same time we took our cut for letting them move it through South Florida. All of a sudden, though, at the end of ’87, it stopped going through Gibraltar.’
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