But fanatics existed. Indeed, the security services kept a note of the movements of Patrick Riordan, a declared avenger, who had never accepted the peace which most of his colleagues had welcomed. Riordan’s former commander, Dominic McGuiness, might now represent official Ireland and be about to shake the hand of the British queen. His former Sinn Fein inspiration Gerry Adams might now be encouraging the Irish Parliament to cooperate with the English. But men like Riordan were still killing, which meant that men like James Fitzpatrick still needed a degree of protection. When he spoke at public meetings, the system dictated that there would be a security man sited discreetly in the hall to protect him.
Not a top man, perhaps: resources were inevitably spread thinly in this Olympic year. The man assigned to Fitzpatrick was young. He was certainly not incompetent, but neither was he experienced. He had chosen to sit at the table on the platform beside his charge, when he might have been better advised to move around and observe in the body of the hall. And because he was young, this would be the first time his services had ever been called upon. However much you told yourself that you must be perpetually alert, that sooner or later you would be needed, you were still shocked when terrorism suddenly blazed into ugly life and you were the sole force to deal with it.
Booth leapt over the fallen target. The rules were that you didn’t stop to check on injuries, once your charge had been attacked. You went straight for the man with the gun and you shot to kill. The idea of downing a man by shooting at his legs was a ridiculous myth dreamed up by idealists. He was down the aisle between the rows of seats like a sprinter, pistol in hand, careless of his own safety as he had to be in the pursuit of an assassin.
His quarry’s car was away already, reaching the end of the street as he wrenched open the door of the Mondeo. The grey VW was delayed mercifully by the main road traffic for a little while. He could hear its driver gunning his engine impatiently. The grey car disappeared as Booth moved after it. Then he had himself to wait for agonising seconds at the end of the cul-de-sac before he was able to swing into the line of traffic.
The VW was a CC GT and could probably outdistance even his two-litre Mondeo on the open road. That was irrelevant here, for there was too much traffic around for anyone to make full use of an engine’s potential. That was one of the complications for security. One at least of the men in the VW was a desperate man with a lethal weapon. Unsuspecting citizens were in danger if he was cornered in the wrong place. If he should choose to shoot his way out and members of the public were killed or injured, the man who had trapped him would be subjected to the spotlight of an official enquiry.
Booth tried to explain the safety issues as rapidly as he could to the Police Armed Response Unit he contacted as he drove. He yelled details frantically into his microphone as he twisted the wheel of the Mondeo to overtake startled city drivers. He wasn’t gaining much on his quarry; he could see the grey VW passing cars in front of him as horns blared in protest. He was trying not to use his own horn, in the probably futile hope that the driver and passenger in the VW wouldn’t realise that he had spotted them and was on their trail.
The police came back to him. He was on the road to Oldham. Provided his quarry kept to this major road, the Armed Response Unit would head the VW off at a roundabout close to the entry to the town. They were closing access to other traffic at this moment. He was approximately 3.4 miles from this point at present. They would let Booth’s Mondeo through, but he should be prepared to find the VW stationary when he arrived at this point, with one and possibly two armed and hostile men within it. He should leave it to the armed security staff to make arrests; they were trained for situations like this and wearing body armour.
Booth grinned, despite himself. They were teaching granny to suck eggs, but he didn’t mind that. He could look after himself, but if these men were asserting their superiority in what would be a highly publicised and highly dangerous arrest, he didn’t mind that. No doubt they’d spent long days preparing for life-and-death situations, but found they only rarely got the chance to be involved in one. Bit like him, really.
There were three cars between him and the VW now. One of them obligingly turned left and deserted the drama. The terrorist driver was good, he thought dispassionately, watching him pass swiftly through a diminishing gap between parked vehicles and an approaching bus without even touching his brakes. He saw the white face of the gunman turned back towards him, looking for pursuers.
The cars in front of him were more cautious about the narrow gap left by the approaching bus. They slowed, almost stopped. Booth wasn’t too frustrated by that, now that he knew that the VW was to be intercepted. Force of numbers would defeat the enemy, as it almost always did.
At that moment, the VW turned off the appointed route. It swung at the last possible minute and without use of its indicator on to a road which forked left, away towards Royton and the trans-Pennine M62. Booth had to fling the Mondeo from the outside lane where he’d been overtaking sharply across the traffic on his left, accelerating hard to avoid contact but provoking blaring horns from his rear.
He was immediately behind the VW, some forty yards back from it. Its driver and passenger knew now that they were being followed and knew that it was the Mondeo that bore their hunter. Booth radioed the change of route urgently to the Armed Response Unit, which was now waiting uselessly in the wrong place. He knew from the sound that an Armalite had been used in the assault upon James Fitzpatrick. Now his blood chilled as he saw the man in the passenger seat of the VW preparing to use it again, on him.
The end was swift and decisive, as it usually was in counter-terrorist operations. Booth was amazed by the way time seemed suddenly to be suspended and things to happen in exceptionally vivid slow motion. Death came like this, whether to you or to the enemy, he supposed. You joined security for the excitement, yet in the crisis it was never exciting. Whatever was happening just seemed inevitable.
The speeding VW suddenly screeched to an agonised halt, slewing half sideways across the road in front of Booth’s Mondeo. He would have hit it had he not had his forty yards of leeway. Then the men were out of it, with the man from the passenger seat firing a quick burst from the Armalite at the Mondeo as Booth stood on the brake pedal. He saw the windscreen to his left shatter as he flung himself sideways and downwards. It was a surprise to find that he had not been hit.
As he half-scrambled and half-fell out of the car, trying to keep the cool metal of its body between him and the bullets from the Armalite, Booth realised what was happening. The men were leaving the stolen VW, deserting it in the middle of the road where it would cause traffic chaos and impede pursuit. They were transferring to a Ford Focus, which a third man was already driving out of the parking bay and on to the road ahead of the abandoned VW. Had it not been for Booth, they would have got clean away, leaving security and police services fruitlessly tracking down the stolen VW.
The man with the Armalite could have seen him off; the firepower odds were overwhelmingly in his favour. But he had downed his target in a hall three miles away; he was intent now upon escape. Patrick Riordan snatched a look at Booth, but decided he was not a percentage target as he crouched behind the wing of the Mondeo. Cafferty was already wrenching open the door of the Focus, yelling at him from ten yards away to be quick.