'Sorry to take so long to respond.'
Skinner thought for a moment that the Deputy DG was joking, but remembered that she had no sense of humour. The woman was rarely flippant, and most certainly never on a scrambled telephone.
'It took us a little while, because we believed we were listening to an Arab. But we were wrong. The reason he sounds that way is because he learned his English in Libya. Actually, the subject is a Peruvian. Our friend Macdairmid has got himself into some seriously bad company. The man on the telephone is Jesus Giminez.'
She paused.
Skinner knew the name at once. He had been shown the file on Giminez, a legendary figure among the world's security services.
The man was an international terror consultant, wanted in many countries around the globe, but most of all by the Israelis. He was known to be responsible, either as hitman or as planner, for a string of political assassinations over around thirty years. His name had run like a scarlet thread around the world's trouble spots until 1991, not long after the death of Robert Maxwell, when he had vanished abruptly from the distant surveillance which the international intelligence community had managed to maintain, tenuously, for a quarter of a century. Some believed that he was dead, but the most commonly held opinion was that at the age of fifty-five he had decided to retire, like any businessman might.
One of the most impressive things about Giminez had always been his anonymity. Other terrorists had become household names, but, to the international media and to the world at large, Giminez had remained unknown.
'Of course, we had no idea he was active again,' the Deputy DG continued. 'God knows what he's up to, but an operation like the one you've got on just now is right up his street. And if he was involved, he'd run it through someone just like Macdairmid, a radical front-man with an axe to grind. One thing about Giminez, his only principle is money. He works for cash only. Big cash. So if he's a player, someone's paying him: not less than seven figures sterling. Can you think of anyone in Scotland with access to that sort of cash?'
'It's possible, but what about contact? The man's a shadow. So how do you set about hiring him?'
'He has an agent, believe it or not – or rather a string of them.
They're contactable through officials of a certain Middle Eastern government with a very dark name for that sort of thing.'
'But if wasn't aware of that, how could someone like Macdairmid be in the know?'
'Well, he is an MP, after all. He does mooch around Whitehall.
You can get anything there if you really want it. Of course, maybe they approached Macdairmid.'
'Meaning?'
'Meaning if your thing up there wasn't hatched in Scotland at all. Not everybody loves us Brits. You should know that more than most. Suppose someone wanted to do us a really bad turn.
We've already got Ireland on our hands as an endemic problem.
Stir up Scotland, then the Welsh, then a bit of ethnic warfare – in Bradford or Manchester, say. Mix all together, and Britain would become ungovernable. Our economy, our whole society would collapse. You know. Bob, I really do think you should catch these people.'
43
Andy Martin's guess had fallen just short of the mark: his technicians found not one but two sources of fingerprints. From the toilet seat, the scene-of-crime team had lifted perfect prints of the thumb and first three fingers of what they suspected, by taking and eliminating the prints of Adams and Dickson, to have been Mary McCaIl's right hand. And they had excelled themselves by taking from the toilet-roll holder the thumb and first finger of her left hand.
Everything else in the tiny garage apartment had been wiped clean, meticulously – and, as was clear to the technicians, by someone who had known exactly what she was doing.
Martin and Mackie had arrived back at Fettes Avenue with the prints at 9:10 pm, and had found Skinner still in his office.
'You say she split on Sunday morning? You think she's our woman, then, Andy?'
'Yes, boss, I do indeed. I think that our Mary deliberately gets herself tucked in beside randy old Frank Adams, and has time to take her pick of the stuff he's got going out to Festival companies – she had a choice of seventeen customers. She picks the Aussies, and plants her bomb in the radiogram with a timer set for midshow – Adams told us that she had a Fringe programme in the flat – and stays under cover in Stow till last weekend. She gives old Frank one to remember her by, then nips up to Edinburgh on Sunday morning, either by bus or hitching, and teams up with the rest of her team to kill poor Hilary Guillaum. She's a big strong girl, says Frank. Well able to handle the knife work.'
'Yes,' said Skinner, his eyes bright with interest. 'It fits, all right. Brian, get out to the lab now, if not sooner and compare those prints with everything we lifted from Hilary Guillaum's suite at the Sheraton, and from that chambermaid's trolley. While you're at it, dig up a technician and get me blow-ups of those prints – top quality they can manage. Get back here as soon as you can. I'll be waiting. We'll see if the States can help us.'
44
Adam Arrow and 'Gammy' Legge arrived together. The two soldiers had met before in Ireland, and were resurrecting old stories as they walked into Skinner's office, just after 9:30 pm.
'So, put yourself in my place. Gammy. There you are, you search the fookin' house when the fella's out and you find, hidden in his fookin' bedroom, a bomb wi' the timer set to go off in thirty-six hours. I ask you, what would you do?'
'I suppose I'd send for me. What did you do?'
'Ah, but you weren't about. No, I just moved the timer forward thirty hours and fooked off. Six hours later, and so did 'e sound asleep in his bed. Smashin' dream, be must have 'ad.'
Skinner put his hands over his ears. 'For God's sake, Adam, keep those stories to yourself. I'll assume you made that one up.'
The little man laughed. 'Course I did.' His eyes twinkled.
Skinner decided not to pry further. Instead he gave each man a beer from the small fridge standing in a corner of his office, and briefed them, as they drank, about the day's discovery at Stow.
'Does our assumption about the bomb sound right to you, Gammy? Could the timer have been set as accurately as that?'
'Yes. That's how she'd have done it, all right. They've got some really pricey timers these days, although if she really knew what she was about, she could have done it with the programming chip from a video. So in theory we could have sleeper Semtex bombs lying around all over Edinburgh.'
'Christ, that's all we need!'
'Ah, but in practice it's a different matter.'
'How come?'
'Thanks to some technical spec the manufacturers sent me, I've been able to work out how much of this super-Semtex stuff was used in each of our two explosions. The good news is that the total matches exactly the quantity nicked from that French arsenal.
Add the fact that all of the rest of the world supply is accounted for, and in safe hands, and we reach the conclusion that as far as
this super-Semtex is concerned, the bastards are out of ammo.'
'That's a relief; but what if they have conventional explosive?
Maybe there are still sleeper bombs lying around.' •If there are,' said Legge, 'then our dogs'll be able to smell them, or we'll be able to pick them out with some other little tricks that we have. We've already given every Festival venue a really thorough sniffing, and we'll keep on doing so on a regular basis.'
Skinner looked across at Arrow. 'All that makes our friend's meeting on Saturday even more interesting.'
The little soldier nodded. But Major Legge looked puzzled, until Skinner described the surveillance of Macdairmid, without actually naming him.