The South Lawn Plot (13 page)

T
HE HOUSE WAS QUIET
. Pender stopped for a moment as he stood between what passed for the twin sentinels just inside the front door. The ancient Egyptians had used statues of their gods to ward off evil. Mrs. Leslie, the landlady, had opted for an umbrella stand topped by a framed photo of Princess Diana. On the other side was the potted aspidistra.

Pender eyed the door leading into the ground floor flat. No sound from Mrs. Leslie or her yapping Yorkies. Blessedly, Pender thought, the Scottish scourge and her mutts were out.

He took the stairs in a few quick strides, his hand gliding along the polished banisters. All seemed absolutely as it when he left for his meeting on Clapham Common. But of course it wasn't. Someone had been here.

Perhaps, he thought, the visitor had been rumbled by Mrs. Leslie and had delivered the kind of
coup de grace
that he conjured up in his imagination every time she complained to him about leaking pipes, hissing gas stoves or dripping toilets.

The front door of Pender's flat was at the end of the hallway, far from the other tenant, a taciturn middle-aged man named Poole who worked in an insurance office and received no visitors. The two men confined themselves to exchanging nods whenever their paths crossed.

Pender's flat was at the front of the house, Poole's at the rear. It was an unremarkable hallway in an unremarkable row house. And that's how Pender liked it. The less attention he attracted the better. It was bad enough being one of the world's most famous news photographers. All else, he felt, had to be below the radar as best as possible, hence the bachelor pad in a street that looked like it was part of a studio lot version of London.

Pender, in both of his occupations, had a habit of dwelling on contrast; contrast between light and shade when his eye was behind the shutter; contrast between life and death when it was a sniper scope, though that had been a one off.

He had been standing at his front door for almost a minute, listening. Whoever had been in the flat was, he knew, long gone. There was no sign that force had been applied to the keyhole, no scratches on the wood. Pender inserted his key and turned it slowly. No friction, no resistance. The lock had been expertly picked.

Pender sniffed when he entered the room. No telltale cologne or aftershave. No perfume for that matter. Good attention to detail, he thought. And as he did so he smiled. He had caught the whiff of another's presence in the hallway, and while it was less evident in his castle keep, he could just about smell it. He had left the windows closed with precisely such circumstances in mind.

Just inside the door was a little alcove with hangars on the wall for hats and coats. Beyond this was the combined living and dining room, the table nestled against two windows that gave a view of the street below. Pender saw the brown envelope at once but made no move towards the table. Instead he walked the few paces to his favorite chair, a stuffed cloth affair with iffy springs. Pender sat and stared at the table and its addition. In it, he knew, would be the target, or targets, for his final operation.

Pender closed his eyes and allowed himself to doze. He needed a few more minutes of blissful ignorance.

And so it was that he found himself back on Beresford Close at teatime on a late summer's day in the 1970s. The whir of hand-pushed lawnmowers and the chorus of protesting dogs could scarcely drown out the din of the pack of boys kicking a scuffed soccer ball up and down the street.

Occasionally, the ball would hit a parked car with a thud and the posse would break for the other end of its world. When no irate owner emerged it would surge back down the street, its members pushing and shoving one another as they attempted to lay claim, if only for a few seconds, to the orange colored Wembley Special.

Beresford Close was made up of two distinct categories of house. Though they looked exactly the same, each with a prominent bay window, more often than not protected from stray balls with a large bush, the street was split into old and new. Half the street had been flattened by a bomb that had fallen just to the rear of Number Fourteen during the blitz. But it had been restored after the war with an attention to detail that was more pedantic than loving. There was a subtle divide on the street between those who claimed to have shaken
a defiant British fist at Hitler and his Luftwaffe, and the blow-ins who had shown up when the scrap was over.

The Penders had been listed among the fist shakers, but the years having advanced, they were now part of a shrinking minority. Most of the neighbors now thought of war in terms of first division soccer teams. One or two, the more seriously minded, occasionally argued over the Middle East or a place called Vietnam.

Pender's father, a career civil servant who had spent his working life wrestling with the intricacies of Britain's overburdened transport system, had died from a stroke shortly after retirement. There had been suggestions during his last days at the office of some honor from the palace. But it had never materialized. The failure to reward a lifetime's service had fallen heavily on Pender's mother, the former Dorothy Hollings. She had been quite giddy for a while at the thought of being married to R.A. Pender, CBE, or letters along those lines.

Dorothy was an energetic woman, but one who devoted herself to husband, son, home and little else. The failure to honor her husband had been a blow, and the hurt had festered through the years following his death. Once or twice, Pender heard his mother muttering to herself that her husband had been ignored because of his Catholicism. He had paid little attention.

Dorothy's heart had given out as much from the perceived social slap as it had from corroded arteries. Her death certificate did not state it, but she had died from anonymity, hers and her husband's, as much as a blocked cardiovascular system.

Shortly before her death, Dorothy had made her son promise to work hard, do his best but not to expect too much in life. She had made it as plain as she could that she did not think photography, or the news business, to be entirely respectable.

Perhaps, she said, he might make a late run at a civil service posting. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office would be perfect. She had a cousin who knew someone at King Charles Street.

In the final days, she had pulled her lines in tighter, closer to home. Look after the garden and potting shed she had instructed Pender the day before she finally gave up.

After her death, Pender sold the house on Beresford Close and stashed most of the money in a bank. He wanted to travel and take pictures. One or two friends from university had managed to land themselves in respectable
Fleet Street dailies. One had even ended up in a tabloid but claimed he was having such a bloody marvelous time he wouldn't think for a minute of graduating to one of “those snotty broadsheets,” as he put it.

Pender avoided the London papers in their entirety and headed first for India. His father had never been, but a small collection of books on the Indian railway system had been his pride and joy. Pender Senior had dreams that had never come to pass. The son decided he would live some of the dreams for the old man.

Pender Senior had been a man who gave off an air of holding great secrets. He had been quite talkative when he had wanted to be, or when the subject was to his liking. But there had also been long periods of brooding. Occasionally, other broody-looking types would turn up at the house, and his father would close the living room door.

From the age of thirteen or so, Pender, with the raised consciousness that sometimes comes with being an only child, had an inkling that unseen hands were at work in his life. His father's apparent income never seemed up to the level of his son's education that, by the time he was fifteen, had taken something of a leap from a local secondary modern to a fairly posh Catholic boarding school. Pender managed to do well in his final exams and found himself on his way to Cambridge.

He didn't give his good fortune too much thought. His father had vaguely alluded once to some kind of church-based group that helped out the parents of bright young Catholic men. Stephen had never been able to squeeze out the full story. “Kind of Masons, only Catholic,” the older Pender had said in the shed one Saturday afternoon as he shuffled his pots of geraniums. Pender had half-heartedly pressed his father for more details, but he had merely grunted in reply and followed up with a sharp instruction to find the trowel.

His father's death had occurred in the second term of Pender's year at Cambridge.

Disaster seemingly loomed, but his mother had contacted him quickly to say that he need not worry about money matters. Things were being taken care of by friends, she had assured him. He had never discovered who the mysterious benefactors were. He graduated with his bachelor's degree and proceeded to make travel plans. First, however, he had to make funeral plans for his mother who gave up the ghost as soon as he was conferred with his parchment.

The day after Dorothy was laid to rest with the old man, Pender spun a
globe to pick a destination but deliberately stopped it with his forefinger poised over India. Madhya Pradesh to be precise. He was on a British Airways flight to New Delhi within a fortnight.

Pender's eyes were open, all memories of Beresford Close banished. He stood up and walked to the table, pulled out a dining chair and sat down. He looked at the envelope for a few seconds, picked it up and sensed its weight. He gently opened the sealed flap and tipped out the contents. Inside were two popular news magazines. He didn't flip through the pages looking for notes or photographs. He knew he didn't have to.

One of the magazines had landed cover up. The photo was of a grim faced Leonard Spencer.

“Well you can't kill the bugger twice,” Pender said softly.

He was impressed with his absolute lack of either excitement or emotion. His clients had only ever sent him after totally evil bastards. Spencer wasn't quite up there with some of the nastier dictators and warlords that he had seen off but there were rumors about the man. Pender had always thought the prime minister to be a nasty piece of work. Presumably, he was even worse than he had imagined. Bumping the prime minister off would be difficult, but not impossible. Much depended on his paymasters and whether or not they wanted it to look like a natural death.

Pender's hand slowly turned over the second magazine. He was smiling because the rear cover had an ad for a well-known brand of digital camera.

But the smile vanished when he saw the beaming face on the magazine's cover.

“Jesus,” Pender hissed.

He was looking straight into the eyes of Billy ‘Bud' Packer, the President of the United States.

T
HE DREAM NEVER VARIED
and was as precise in its detail as the event that inspired it. Still, Manning had made it through his entire Irish sojourn without a recurrence. Georgetown, however, was another matter. It had come to him on his first night back at the house.

He was, as usual, in the driver's seat of the car. Dinny sat in the passenger seat and Rob was in the back, biting his fingernails. The three combined to make up all but one of the Irish Freedom Force's top four-man active service unit.

The other car was just in front. It, too, had three in it though not all of them were men. The woman in the passenger seat was Maeve. She was twenty-four, pretty and a knockout in tight jeans. She would be first into the bank on the west side of the street.

The three-member units were each to be joined by a fourth volunteer once the two trucks had been placed in position.

Group One, Maeve in command, would take out the west side bank while the other bank, right across on the east side of the street, was the responsibility of Group Two, Manning's unit.

The cars were to be parked at the end of the street, just as it began to give way to the farming country that provided most of the town's income. It was the end of the week, and banks were flush with money to cash the checks for the county's agricultural workers.

As cover, in case a Garda officer came walking by, both units had maps and brochures detailing the area's better trout fishing spots. But there had been no sign of any police, no sign of anybody in fact. It was an unusually warm day, and locals were staying indoors.

The scene reminded Manning of a spaghetti western in which a sleepy Mexican town was about to be hit by a band of gringos from north of the border. This was not an entirely far-fetched analogy. Rob was from Belfast, and Joe, in the front car, hailed from Tyrone.

Most of the group was, however, from south of the border. They represented
just about all of the fighting power of the Irish Freedom Force, a hitherto unheard of republican paramilitary group, but one that was now poised to make its entry into the world with a big bang, indeed two.

Manning glanced at his watch. He looked at Dinny and nodded. Dinny said nothing, just leaned slightly forward in his seat belt. They were not going to be stopped for something trivial, and Dinny, who did not like wearing a safety belt, had been warned that this was one time that he would, at least until the two units were making their getaway.

“Then you can fly through the windscreen and get there before us,” was how Rob had put it.

Dinny had said nothing in response. Indeed, he said very little as a rule and that made some of the IFF's people nervous. There were stories about Dinny, rumors, they had hoped.

It was said that he had been rejected by the Provos because he was seen as being too much of a headbanger, too violent for even their hard men. Dinny had denied any involvement at any point with the IRA. His word had been accepted. But Manning wasn't the only one who kept a wary eye on their newest recruit.

The order for the job had been simple. Speed and coordination would preclude the need for any violence. The money would not be in any locked safe when the units hit the banks. If all went to plan, the active service members would be miles clear of the town before the police could mount a pursuit.

That would be because of the trucks. But where were they?

Manning glanced at his watch again. He was almost willing the big hand backwards. Liam was late with the truck. Liam the Loser, Dinny called him. Perhaps he was right.

The safety and success of the operation depended on the synchronized arrival in town of both trucks, one of them, with Liam behind the wheel, piled high with bales of hay, the other an empty cattle transporter driven by a man named Dermot who had been assigned to the operation at the last minute by the IFF's central leadership.

At least, Manning thought, Liam and Dermot were in radio communication. If they were late by just a few minutes it would be okay, so long as they were tardy in tandem.

His anxiety was relieved just a fraction when the side mirror was filled with the hay truck.

“Let's go,” he said even as his foot eased gently onto the gas pedal. The
car ahead had seen the truck also and was already pulling into the street, its signal light flashing pedantically. The two cars drove slowly, the truck just behind Manning's vehicle. Rob was humming a tune to himself, some patriotic ditty.

The town had a simple layout. There were three roads leading into a square that was adorned at its center by a statue of a pike-wielding rebel from the rebellion of 1798. The banks faced each other across the square. It was well known that the customers of each were split along political party lines.

Manning's team was to hit the government bank, the other team, with Maeve in command, was responsible for rifling the contents of the opposition bank.

The role of the trucks was simple. At appointed positions on their respective entry routes they would be turned sideways, rammed into parked cars and abandoned. The drivers would take the keys, and the front driver's side tire would be deflated by means of a hunting knife. This was all to be accomplished in a matter of seconds. With the trucks blocking two streets, there was just the lone remaining street that offered an escape route.

The Garda station would be left in temporary isolation on the wrong side of Dermot's truck. Liam's truck would keep other unwanted traffic at bay for the time the two teams needed to make their escape.

It was a simple plan. It had just a few minutes to succeed or fail. Precision and speed were central to the desired outcome.

Manning was still looking in the side mirror when Liam's truck suddenly swerved to its left. It slammed into a parked car and stopped. Manning didn't bother to watch the rest. The car ahead was now speeding to its target, and he pressed his foot hard against the pedal.

“El Fucking Paso,” said Dinny to no one in particular.

As they had anticipated, the town was in its high noon torpor. The planning team had predicted that weather would play a crucial part in the operation. Rain would keep people indoors, but high speed driving would be riskier. Also, traffic tended to slow down and condense in wet conditions. The last thing they needed was a traffic jam.

The better option was exceptionally warm weather. The day of the week when the money was in the banks was a constant. But Irish weather was a crapshoot.

The operation was fixed for a week in August, weather permitting. And today it was doing just that. The temperature was nuzzling above eighty degrees
for the third day in a row. The locals, Manning well knew, would be complaining bitterly about the heat after months of complaining bitterly about the damp and the chill. It was the Irish way.

The IFF planners had been right. The square was deserted bar a sheepdog relieving itself against a parked bicycle. The first car pulled into a “no parking” spot just outside the west bank. Manning pulled into a space across the street from the east bank at an angle that allowed for a quick exit to the escape route.

The first car would have to round the square so its team was given a thirty-second start. Manning watched as Joe approached the first car and opened the trunk. The team members, their faces hidden by balaclavas, emerged from the car. Joe was pulling weapons from the trunk. They were inside the bank a few seconds later.

“Masks and gloves,” Rob said. “Give them thirty seconds.”

It was an age. Manning pulled on his balaclava and gloves. There was a slight bump to the rear of the car as Liam arrived and popped the trunk.

“Let's go,” Manning shouted.

They were in the bank. The west bank had plexiglass security screens, and that called for either a hostage to be taken or a bullet into the lock leading to the inside area where the bank tellers worked.

The east bank was an old fashioned affair, one of the few banks in the country that still lacked security screens. It would be a straightforward stickup.

Liam and Rob were in front. Both were carrying automatic pistols and large canvas bags. As soon as they were in the main public area, they fanned out, Liam to his left. Rob to the right. Manning, with an AK47, and Dinny, with a pump action shotgun, went straight for the middle teller points.

“The fucking money. All of it,” Dinny roared as they crashed against the counter. Liam and Rob had turned inwards and simultaneously tossed the bags across the counter.

There were two customers, both women, one elderly the other about thirty.

“Down, on your faces,” Dinny shouted. Both went to the floor. The old woman seemed to crumple. The bank staff pulled handfuls of bills from their cash drawers.

Dinny raised his shotgun and pointed it straight at the face of a young teller. She appeared surprisingly calm. Manning moved the barrel of his assault
rifle from side to side in order to keep the four bank officials behind the counter from making a break for the rear office.

“Not just this rubbish,” Dinny shouted. “Get the big stuff.” The woman looked at a man beside her. He was evidently in charge.

“Get it,” he said. Two of the tellers stepped back a few paces and pulled open a large floor level filing cabinet shelf. They each pulled out square packages wrapped in brown wrapping paper. These were the high denomination notes.

“Here, in the bag,” Dinny commanded. One of the bank officials rammed the package into a canvas bag but the second, a young woman, hesitated.

“Now!” Dinny screamed. Manning turned to tell him to cool it. Rob was already heading to the door with one full bag, Liam just behind him.

The young woman said something, but Manning did not hear the words. They were drowned by the thunderous blasts of two shotgun barrels.

Manning froze. The woman stood for a split second and stared at him. He shook his head. “No, it wasn't me,” he shouted.

She tried to speak. Dinny was reaching over the counter waving his gun at another young woman who quickly stuffed the package in the canvas bag and hoisted it over the counter.

Manning didn't pay heed. His eyes were fixed on the woman who had been shot. Her white blouse had turned crimson, and she had stumbled backwards against a table, trying to speak but with no words coming out.

“Dinny,” Manning shouted, but Dinny didn't pay attention. He was shouting louder.

“You don't fuck with me!” he was screaming.

Manning's hand reached for the clock, and it fell off the bedside table. It was still dark outside the house, but Rebecca had an early meeting.

“Just ten minutes more,” she said, sounding fully awake.

“You were having a bad dream. You almost drop kicked me out of the bed.”

Manning said nothing. He was thankful that in the pre-dawn darkness his wife could not see the tears flowing from his eyes.