The Angel Tapes (36 page)

Blade broke the connection, was just about to put the phone away when his glance fell on something on the sidewalk, something that Carol Merrigan had let fall when Mr. Coburn's bullet had smacked into her shoulder. He limped over, bent down, and picked it up.

The doll, no longer wrapped in the discarded plaid shawl, was crudely made by modern standards and had a distinct Southeast Asian slant to the eyes. It was about the size of a six-week-old infant. Blade turned it upside down and, as he did so, a metallic sound came from a hidden speaker. It was a grotesque parody of a baby's voice.

“Mommy!” cried the doll. “Daddy!”

How fucking touching, thought Blade in disgust, remembering Angel's young victims of eleven days before.

But there was more. There was a hinged plate in the doll's abdomen; Blade flipped it open. He caught his breath and heard Redfern whistle at the same time.

The doll's body was hollow and contained a phalanx of state-of-the-art electronic equipment, all beautifully designed so as to fit perfectly into the diminutive, rubber torso. Among the items of cutting-edge technology, Macken identified a telephone, an infrared scanner, and a microwave radio transmitter. This last had a button that was ominously labeled
ARM
.

The breeze was increasing. On its rise and fall, Blade heard the first blaring of car horns from the direction of Parnell Square. The presidential motorcade was making its slow and stately journey through the center of Dublin.

“Your president doesn't know how lucky he is,” Macken said. “I think she might have triggered a third bomb just for the sheer bloody hell of it. You were close to her—as close as I was. You saw her, Redfern, heard her. Her fucking mind was completely gone. She was capable of anything.”

Redfern looked up as a police helicopter soared over the Liffey, heading their way; sirens wailed in the distance, drawing closer. From a point due north came another chopper and they watched as it grew in size. It was bigger than the police helicopter and painted a dull, olive green; it bore no official markings.

“You're wrong about one thing, Blade,” Redfern said. “The president
does
know how lucky he is. Not that luck was ever part of the equation.”

The unmarked chopper passed almost directly overhead. Redfern saluted it.

Blade's jaw dropped. “Was that the president?”

“That was the president. God bless him.”

“You secretive cunt!”

“Thanks.” Redfern was grinning.

The klaxons grew louder. A pipe band struck up—somewhat incongruously, Blade thought—“Scotland the Brave.” The garda helicopter landed a few feet from them, swirling up a cloud of masonry and mortar dust.

Duffy and Sweetman emerged from it, looked about them in bemusement.

Blade jerked a thumb in the direction of O'Connell Street. “Then who in the name of Christ is—”

“An actor, Blade,” Redfern said. “A ringer. Oh, he's good; we've used him plenty of times. Everybody does it: the Russians, the French, the Iraqis; it's regular practice. Okay, when you get up
real
close, you see he's not the president, but from a couple of yards away, he's perfect. And that's all we needed for the drive to Leinster House. The crowd won't see through it, nor will the news cameras.”

“Christ, just like in
The Eagle Has Landed.
”

“Beg pardon?”

“No, no. Nothing. Just thinking out loud. So the president went along with it. I thought he'd more guts.”

“Oh, come
on,
Blade. Put yourself in his position. If you'd heard about the bomb and you knew that the bomber was still out there, with more bombs, would
you
put your neck on the line? He's not a fool.”

“No, I suppose I wouldn't.”

A phone rang. It was Redfern's. The words he spoke into it were calm and reassuring, each sentence punctuated with at least one “sir.”

“That was Bill Seaborg,” he told Blade. “Wondering what the hell's going on. He heard about the blast.”

Redfern returned the phone to his pocket. “He's the real hero, Blade. He's riding in the president's limo. He knew the risks. Knew 'em better than anybody else. He's one helluva guy.”

A fresh thought occurred to Macken.

“But what about the bombs that are still down there? What'll happen to them now?”

“Frankly, Blade, I'd say there's a chance in a million that one of them could explode accidentally. If she used the same explosive, then it's safe to say it won't blow up by itself. But the world is growing more complex and there's so much going on in the ether that it's possible—I'm not saying it's likely, I'm saying it's possible—that some time in the future some kid will be fooling around with his birthday gift—and boom!”

“You mean another radio transmitter could set them off?”

“It doesn't have to be a transmitter. It could be anything—any electronic gizmo, maybe something we haven't got right now but will be invented in a couple of years' time. Look how Angel managed to scan your cellular phone signal and emulate it. Like I say, the air around us is full of all kinds of signals, and it's becoming more crowded out there. All it needs is somebody to send out the right signal: The one that can trigger one of the bombs.”

“Jesus.”

“However, it's my guess it'll never happen. You see, those buried detonators require power. Not much, just enough to keep them ticking over, and that power has to be supplied by a battery. Fact is, batteries have a limited life span, so even on standby the bombs will drain that power—given time.”

“So how long have we got?”

Redfern shrugged. “Who knows? Two, three years more? Five or six? It's impossible to say. And don't forget there's corrosion, too. It's
wet
under the street. Could be the batteries are already dead. Or that the gelignite has ‘sweated' and is useless by this time.”

Blade fingered the transmitter in the doll's belly. He pulled out the antenna and flipped the toggle switch. Below the little label that read
ARM
, an LED began blinking rapidly. His finger hovered above the
SEND
button.

Some distance away across the river the pipe band was playing “Hail to the Chief,” and it was plain that they hadn't put in too much practice on it; a growing cacophony of car horns marked the steady progress of the motorcade.

Christ almighty and his blessed mother tonight, Blade thought: It was too, too bloody easy altogether.

He flipped the toggle and retracted the antenna, wrapped the doll again in Angel's plaid shawl.

The clock in O'Connell Bridge registered 47,147,658 seconds before the start of the new millennium.

Elsewhere in this ancient city, founded more than a thousand years before by Viking invaders,
other
sunken devices were quietly registering the slow passage of time.

And waiting.

“Come on, Redfern,” Blade said. “I'll buy you a pint.”

By the same author

John Millington Synge: A Biography

A Night in the Catacombs

A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK
.

An imprint of St. Martin's Press.

THE ANGEL TAPES
. Copyright © 1997 by David M. Kiely. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

First Edition: November 1997

eISBN 9781466884342

First eBook edition: September 2014