Arrow cut in. 'Did you find out who the other fooker was on the line?'
Skinner nodded, but said nothing. Instead he slapped a thick folder which lay on his desk. It was labelled 'Most Secret', and had arrived by courier from MI6 only two hours earlier. It contained the career history of Jesus Giminez.
Arrow raised his eyebrows, but asked no more questions.
'Well,' said Legge. 'Good luck to you cloak-and-dagger Johnnies. Tell you one thing, though. If your geezer is expecting another consignment of those special fireworks, then he's likely to be disappointed, unless there's a second factory that no one knows about, because no one else is keen to be caught with their drawers down like the French were.'
'Hah,' Skinner snorted. 'Brave words. Gammy, but from what we've seen so far of this outfit, someone's arse is going to be exposed to the four winds!'
45
The two soldiers had been gone for only ten minutes when Brian Mackie returned with blow-ups of the six Mary McCall fingerprints. He brought too the opinion of the technicians that a fragment of a print taken from the chambermaid's trolley in the Sheraton Hotel could have come from her right hand.
'That's a start,' said Skinner. 'Now let's see how far our luck will run.' He led the way along the corridor to the Special Branch suite, past the duty officer in the outer area, and into Martin's empty office. A fax machine with a scrambled line sat on a table iii the corner. Skinner picked up its telephone handset and dialled in a London number.
'FBI.'
Skinner was always struck by the frankness of the Americans.
They knew and valued the respect in which the Bureau was held around the world, and were never shy of announcing its presence, even in foreign countries.
Joe Doherty was the FBI's senior man in Europe, based at the Embassy in Grosvenor Square. He had looked Skinner up on a tour of Special Branch heads when first posted to the UK in 1989, and they had been in touch ever since.
'You dragged yourself in, then,' said Skinner.
'Yup; I said I would. But this better be worth it.'
'Let's hope so. Joe, I'm going to fax you down six fingerprints.
I'd like you to scan them into your magic machine, the one that connects back to the States, and see what it tells you – if it tells you anything at all, that is. I'll wait here. You'll get me on Andy Martin's direct line.' He gave him the number.
'OK, Bob,' said Doherty. 'Go for it.'
Skinner loaded the fax, selected half-tone quality, and keyed in the FBI's London number. The six pages took just over five minutes to transmit. He settled down to wait.
'Brian, this could take a while. You can go home if you want.'
'No way, boss. I want to see what he turns up.'
On Martin's office television, they watched the remainder of 'News at Ten', then midweek football. Rangers were two down in a League Cup tie to Motherwell, Skinner's team, when the telephone rang.
'Bugger it,' he swore, but switched off the television set as he picked up the receiver.
'Bob!' Doherty's excitement rang down the line, taking Skinner by surprise. 'Know who you've got there? Typhoid friggin' Mary, that's all.'
'And who the hell is she?'
'Typhoid Mary Little Horse. One of the most celebrated members of the American underclass. Hit-woman, bank-robber, political activist, terrorist, highly skilled with firearms, knives and explosives. You name it, that's Typhoid Mary. Deadly is her middle name. She styles herself a native American freedom fighter, but she's just a plain killer. We lost sight of her when she broke out of jail in Kansas last year. So what's she into over here?'
As quickly as he could. Skinner explained the detail of the Music Hall bomb, and summarised Adams' story. When he had finished, Doherty whistled loudly down the line. 'That's Mary, both times. She's great with explosives, and she likes to kill people. But I'll tell you this. Bob. If she has Scotch blood, then you're a friggin' Sioux Indian.' Doherty paused, then went on.
'Couple of things for your Mr Adams. First the moderately good news. Not everything she told him was a lie. She was indeed raped by her step-daddy when she was sweet sixteen, and she did indeed run away from home. The detail that she left out was that, before she ran away, she cut his heart out… and I mean that literally, my friend.'
'Sounds like our friend Frank might have been lucky.'
'Well, no. Bob. You can't exactly say that. For now comes the really bad news for the Adams family. Mary can kill you in a whole lot of ways, but in one that's the most certain of all. She can kill you with her snatch, without you even being there – like she's probably killed Mrs Adams by now, through her poor sap of a husband. Her nickname's an understatement. We've got Mary's prison medical records. Bob, she's HIV positive. Look, I'll fax you up her picture. Better find her, man, before she screws the whole of Scotland to death!'
46
'So that's the story so far, Alan. A Scots MP mixed up with an international terrorist, and a crazy squaw killing people all over Edinburgh.'
The Secretary of State looked stunned. He leaned back in his chair and stared for several seconds up at the ceiling, affording Skinner a clear view of a large bruise, perhaps the size of a thumbprint, on the right side of his throat. Eventually he looked back across the desk. Their Sunday confrontation had not been mentioned, but a coldness hung between them, one which each man knew would never dissipate completely.
'This MI5 woman's theory, what do you make of it?'
'Mary Little Horse showing up makes it the best one we've got.
You can count on the fingers of two hands the people in Scotland who could afford to fund this thing, and still have three fingers left over. I know; I have counted. Then you can rule out all of them as being too old, too straight, too boring, too law-abiding.
None of the radical groups have the dough either. Yes, Alan, it all fits.'
'So what do you do now?'
'Well, I'm holding my morning briefing in an hour. I've got Crown Office permission to issue photographs of Mary Little Horse, and to put out a "Do not approach" warning.' As he spoke, Skinner opened the folder on his lap and handed across the desk a copy of the computer-generated print which Joe Doherty had faxed to him. Ballantyne looked at it and saw an attractive blonde girl, expressionless in the standard prison mugshot.
'I'll leave out the HIV bit,' Skinner went on. 'Stow's only a wee place, and I'm sure the story of Adams and the Yankee dolly-bird will be all over town already. The press coverage will produce a ton of calls, all of them rubbish no doubt, but if the heat makes her run for it, it'll have served its purpose. If I can't catch her here, I'd rather she was somewhere else.'
He paused and looked Ballantyne in the eye. 'But even if we do get rid of this girl, that doesn't solve our problem. She's a mercenary, and someone's brought her here to do a job. There may well be others, and we have got to expect other attacks. With that Semtex stuff used up, I'm less worried about more bomb attacks, but there are other things they can get up to. Like picking out more big-name assassination targets, for example. There are two events that really worry me. One is Fringe Sunday, and the other's the Fireworks Concert in Princes Street Gardens on the last Thursday of the Festival. One's held in a park, the other takes place after dark, and they're both too big for us to give them total protection. So I want to cancel them both.'
Ballantyne sat bolt upright in his chair. "Absolutely not! I've made my position, and the Government's position, quite clear on that. We will do nothing that concedes an inch to these people.
They cannot be allowed to claim a single victory through the threat of more violence. These events will go on as scheduled, and it's the job of your team and of your force to police them. Better still, it's your own job to catch these perpetrators. You've shown me some progress, but now I expect more concrete successes.