‘I can manage that myself,’ Randall said, but McAuley had already hoisted the bag up behind his shoulder and started walking. Randall followed, a couple of steps off the bigger man’s pace, trying not to fall further behind, but trying too to take in his surroundings, which on first impressions appeared more closely aligned with that remote corner of Heathrow he had taken off from than the cosmopolitan airport he had had to walk through to get there.
A newspaper on the sole newsstand carried a photo on the front cover of a bearded man — haggard — draped in a blanket against the backdrop of a wall smeared with… well Randall had no idea what exactly, although the accompanying headline — Cardinaclass="underline" Prison ‘Unfit for Humans’ — made him fear the worst. He lifted a copy and set a note on the counter, which the young woman standing on the other side heaved a sigh at.
‘Is that the smallest you’ve got?’
McAuley and his bag were disappearing under the exit sign.
‘It’s all right,’ Randall said to the woman. ‘I don’t need the change.’
‘No!’ She scowled, not at the money now, he thought, but at the suggestion that she had been on the make. ‘Here…’ She dragged the coins — big ungainly things — one at a time from their compartments in her cash drawer and counted them into his hand. ‘There.’ She smiled, tightly, triumphantly: you’ve nothing on me now.
He stuffed the coins into his pants’ pocket and ran.
A cool breeze hit him as he reached the end of a corridor walled with yellowing Plexiglas, having made up all but a couple of yards on McAuley. Smell of new-mown grass cutting through the aircraft exhaust fumes.
The car, a large Ford (he recognised the emblem but not the model), was easy to spot: it was the only one parked within a hundred-yard radius of the terminal. Two cops stood by, sub-machine guns clutched to their bulletproof vests, the glossy peaks of their caps pulled so low they had to tilt their heads to see past them.
One of them said something out the corner of his mouth to McAuley as he passed, don’t ask Randall what, though McAuley smiled, a surprisingly pleasant smile, which Randall took to be a good sign.
With his free hand McAuley pulled open the rear nearside door. A man in his late fifties, at a guess, with the most precise side parting in his hair Randall had ever seen sat over against the other door, a stack of papers resting on a buff folder on his lap. He crossed a t or dotted an i and replaced the lid of his fountain pen before turning his attention to Randall, taking him in from the newspaper up.
‘Welcome to Bilfast.’ A softer accent than McAuley and the girl at the newsstand: Scots, Randall later learned. ‘East Berlin without the laughs.’
Randall responded with a laugh of his own as he sat into the car. Jennings raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips. McAuley slammed the door and the least external sound at once disappeared. It was like being shut in an icebox.
‘Armoured,’ said Jennings and patted the armrest. ‘Means if they blow it up it comes down harder.’
Randall nodded, face straight.
‘That one was a joke,’ said Jennings.
‘Maybe if you were to give me a signal in advance.’
Jennings relaxed his lips a little. ‘Very good, very good.’
McAuley was behind the wheel now. He steered the car with the heel of his right hand out through the fortified perimeter fence and on to a straight two-lane road, farmland on either side. They could not have travelled more than five hundred yards along it before they encountered an army check: soldiers with camouflaged faces in the middle of the road, others sharing a hedgerow with a couple of inquisitive-looking sheep. Randall averted his eyes.
‘The secretary of state is very invested in your Mr DeLorean, speaking figuratively as well as literally,’ Jennings said as though their journey had been interrupted by nothing more remarkable than a stoplight. He tapped a fingernail against the glass next to his cheek. ‘He told the prime minister that this deal could save the lives of soldiers like these.’
McAuley was showing his papers to a soldier with corporal stripes. The soldier looked past the driver’s shoulder into the rear of the car, checked one face, checked two, then straightened up and made a circular motion with his hand: carry on. Jennings turned to face Randall. That parting had the permanent look of a scar.
‘You can imagine the prime minister was sceptical. He said, “That’s a rather extraordinary claim to make for a motor car,” to which the secretary of state said, “Yes, but it’s no ordinary motor car, and if it gives people jobs, hope, who knows what changes it might help set in motion.”’
‘I read the briefing papers on the plane,’ Randall said.
‘And what do you think yourself?’
‘I think you should never underestimate faith in the future.’
Jennings pursed his lips again. He handed Randall another newspaper. The same photograph on the front page, but with a different headline: Outrage at Cardinal’s Prison Comments.
‘And I think you ought to remember there are two sides to every story here.’
‘As there are where I come from.’
The other man made a noise through his nose, as much as to say have it your own way. Randall looked out the window but found nothing there to divert him save for hedges and fields and the occasional clump of trees. He closed his eyes and for a moment he was back in the lobby of the Sheraton Universal with Jim Hoffman in fatigues, looking down the barrel of an actual gun. He forced his eyes open again, shifted in his seat. Jennings was annotating a document, McAuley steering one-handed and humming quietly. The road stretched ahead straight between the hedges. The second time he did not feel his eyes close at all.
The engine cut out.
Randall’s cheek was pressed up against the glass. It made a sucking sound as he pulled away. The car had stopped next to a tubular steel gate leading into a field that was more mud than grass, the imprint, around the gate itself, of many cow hooves. Jennings was replacing the lid on his pen again. He clipped it into his inside pocket.
‘Well, here we are.’
‘Where?’
‘DeLorean Motor Cars Limited… Dunmurry. You said you read the briefing papers.’
‘They didn’t mention cattle.’
McAuley had come round to open his door. Randall stepped out unsteadily. The sun had broken through, but it still felt more like early spring than high summer.
He leant against the gate.
The field was actually two fields separated by a stream. On the far side of the second field was a housing project — two-storey houses and low-rise apartment blocks — with hills beyond eaten into by quarries. In the opposite direction — looking south-east, possibly, to judge by the position of the sun — over the roof of the car at any rate, lay a couple of hangar-like buildings, and a little further on another housing development, dominated by two tower blocks, but otherwise in layout and style, right down to the colour of its roof tiles, a virtual mirror-image of the first.
(The names Twinbrook and Something Hill drifted across his jet-lagged mind. He would have to go back and read the papers again.)
And then from a distant corner of the further field, in front of a red-brick building he had not until that moment noticed, movement: a man striding out in the direction of the gate — by his height and his stride Randall recognised him at once as DeLorean — a dozen others stumbling in his wake, photographers as proximity proved them to be, cameras thumping against their chests, film-roll canisters hopping from their bags, their jacket pockets, as they tried, between shaking the muck off their shoes, to keep up.
DeLorean seemed to have found the only route that was not potholed or mined with cow pies.