Deciding it was time to bring the small talk to an end, he walked over to the back of the lorry. 'Keys,' he said to O'Toole, putting out a hand.
O'Toole handed them to him, and Donald unlocked the rear doors and pulled them open.
In front of him, stacked two high, were open-ended wooden pallets containing neat, straight rows of plain aluminium cylinders – 236 in all. But Eamon Donald didn't see plain aluminium cylinders. He saw great gouting plumes of fire and jagged clouds of shrapnel. Destruction. And, of course, revenge. The IRA's struggle might have officially ended more than a decade earlier but Donald retained a deep hatred for the British. They'd imprisoned him in the Maze for a total of fourteen years, as well as shooting dead his brother, Padraig. He'd made them suffer too, of course, with a string of bombs that had left more than fifty members of the Brit establishment and their allies dead down the years. The innocent had died too, several dozen at least, but they were unavoidable collateral damage in a war that, for Donald, would never be over.
When Hook had approached him a few weeks earlier with his offer of work, Donald had almost said no. The job was risky in the extreme and likely to attract a lot of heat. But he'd gone for it, and it had had nothing to do with the hundred and fifty grand he'd be receiving. It was because Hook was providing him with the opportunity for a bloody, crippling victory over his old enemy that would eclipse everything that had gone before.
O'Toole must have read his thoughts. 'It's going to be a big one, isn't it?' he said quietly.
Donald caught the vaguest flash of doubt on the other man's face as he turned his way and fixed him with a hard stare. 'Whatever it is, it's no less than the bastards deserve. Remember that.'
Fifty-one
Bolt was woken by his mobile phone. He sat up suddenly, groggily patting his pockets, before finally locating it. He didn't recognize the number and for a split second he wondered if it was Tina.
But it wasn't. It was Rob Fallon, and he was asking if they'd made any progress on the hunt for her and Jenny.
Bolt had snatched some sleep in his office while all around him his colleagues had been working flat out, but so far Operation Medusa, the massive police operation to find the missing consignment of mustard gas and, by extension, the two women, hadn't been successful on either count. They knew that the lorry was in the UK, and that it had come in on the overnight ferry from Zeebrugge to Harwich, but they were also sure that its number plates had been changed en route because an emergency trawl of all the traffic cameras in the greater Harwich area had failed to turn up anything. Like Hook, it had disappeared into thin air. A complete news blackout was in place while the full resources of the British state were diverted to the hunt, but he was all too aware that even this might not be enough, because time was not on their side.
Bolt cleared his throat, fighting down his disappointment, and gave Fallon the stock answer that they were following up a number of leads and that he'd give him news as soon as he had any. He felt like crap, and hoped Fallon would get the message and get off the phone.
'I might have a lead for you.'
Bolt perked up a little, but not much. Things had moved on, and Fallon was the least of their problems in a case as big as this. But he asked what it was, then listened with growing interest as Fallon explained about the car on Roy Brakspear's drive the previous day and the photo he'd taken on his mobile. 'I don't know how much help it is,' he continued uncertainly, 'but I thought you ought to know about it.'
Bolt pulled a notebook from his jacket and wrote down the car's make, colour and registration number, then he hung up, feeling a little more hopeful suddenly. Fallon had told him that the car wasn't there when he'd returned to the property, so it had clearly been used by the kidnapper. If they could find the car, it was possible they could find Hook.
He put the mobile back in his pocket and got to his feet, still feeling pretty crap, but Fallon's information had given him enough of an adrenalin buzz to keep him going for a few hours longer.
Big Barry Freud was temporarily off the phone and looking exhausted when Bolt walked into his office.
'You know,' he said as Bolt sat down, 'even with all this bloody stuff going on, I've still got Thames Valley giving me crap about you driving off from the murder scene last night. I've had their assistant chief constable on the phone twice this morning. He sounds like a right old woman. He wants you interviewed in connection with their inquiry but I've told him you're not available at the moment. I won't be able to put it off much longer, though.' He paused in his monologue to wipe sweat from his brow with a handkerchief that looked like it had had a fair amount of use already that day.
'I've got a lead,' announced Bolt, and he told Big Barry about the dark blue Mazda Fallon had photographed at the Brakspear residence. 'If the kidnapper doesn't know that Fallon got a shot of the number plate, he might still be using it now. If we can find him, we might be able to find Hook and the gas.'
Big Barry grinned, seemingly pleased with this new information. 'Got to be worth a try, hasn't it? I'll get on to the ANPR people.'
The automatic number plate recognition system was the latest technological tool available to the police in the twenty-first-century fight against crime. It used a huge network of CCTV cameras which automatically read car number plates to log the movement of vehicles along virtually every main road in Britain. These images were then stored on a vast central database, housed alongside the Police National Computer HQ. If the Mazda had been driven in the past twenty-four hours, the ANPR would have a record of its journey.
Big Barry picked up the phone and two minutes later he was giving the Mazda's registration number to one of the senior officers in charge of the database, and telling him in no uncertain terms that his team could put everything else aside because tracing this car was the absolute number one priority. 'And that comes right from the very top, old mate,' he added, putting a faintly ludicrous emphasis on the word 'top'.
Big Barry Freud was the kind of man who liked to throw his not inconsiderable weight about, particularly during major inquiries. He believed that it was just part of his decisive take-charge personality, but to most other people, including Bolt, it was just plain rudeness.
Still, it seemed to work, and when he got off the phone he gave Bolt a decisive nod. 'He's going to call back in five minutes.'
'Any more progress on finding the lorry?' Bolt asked him. There were currently officers from three different police forces re-examining the camera footage from Harwich to see if they could identify it using just its physical description.
'Nothing yet,' said Big Barry. 'We must have two hundred bodies working on it, but Gould's wife hasn't been a lot of help. She says the lorry's big and white, with black writing down the side saying Banton Transport, which apparently isn't even that big. Oh, and that he's got a West Ham banner in the back of the cab, but she doesn't think you can see that very easily from the outside.'
'Shit. It's not a lot, is it?'
'No, it isn't. And you know what these CCTV images are like. They're blurry at the best of times. It's like the proverbial needle in the haystack, old mate.' He sighed. 'If we had some idea of what the target was going to be, it would help, but we haven't got a bloody clue.'
'Something like mustard gas is only going to be used for one thing: to cause mass casualties. Have we got any idea who Hook might be working for?'
Big Barry shook his head. 'Nothing. But I have had a briefing on the gas's properties and how it might be released. Apparently, if it gets ignited, mustard gas loses its potency, so they can't blow up the load with a conventional bomb. It's possible they can get someone with a decent gas mask to release it manually by opening up the cylinders one by one, but there are more than two hundred of them, so it would take ages, and as soon as people got a whiff of the first few they'd be off in no time, so it wouldn't be very effective.'