By the time I got up, Doughnut already had some porridge on the go, and Farrell surprised me by consenting to get a bowl of it down his neck. His face and tongue had swollen more during the night and he had problems swallowing (he also looked fairly grotesque), but at least his fever seemed to have eased.
Nobody spoke much at breakfast. I think we were all feeling shattered. After a quick nosh we hooded our prisoner again, to make sure he didn't pick up any idea of where the safe house was, and set forth.
We pulled out in the minivan at 0500, Whinger again at the wheel, myself beside him, and Farrell.cuffed to Tony in the back. To give each of them slightly more freedom we'd put them on two pairs of cuffs with a short chain linking them. We'd left Doughnut and Stew to look after the cottage, confident that the Regiment would have put plenty of other guys out to OP the rendezvous.
The rain had moved away, leaving the sky clear, but mist still hung in the hollows and made driving tricky until the light was strong.
We headed down through the Forest of Dean to the M4, and 15y the time we hit the motorway my spirits had really picked up. The thought of seeing Tim and Tracy again in a couple of hours gave me a tremendous lift. The dawn mist had burned off, and the glorious day that was developing exactly matched my mood. The early sun shone in our faces as we headed east, but I welcomed every ray of it.
To help while away the time, I tried to work out how many days had passed since I'd got back from Bogotfi. It was twenty-eight or twenty-nine, but with Libya thrown into the middle the time seemed longer.
No doubt it was the same for the hostages. With no word from me or anyone on our side, the four weeks must have stretched out like eternity. I worried that Tracy would be blaming me for not making more effort to find her. Well, I thought, it shouldn't be long now.
All went well until we were on our way past 1Leading. The traffic had been steadily building up, but all three lanes were still moving fast and everything seemed normal. Then, maybe three miles short of Exit 10, where we wanted to turn south for Bracknell and the M3, Whinger let out a curse as he saw brake-lights coming on in front of us. There was no chance of sliding up some slip road; all he could do was stick to the outside lane and wind down to a halt in company with everyone else.
'Shunt,' he said. 'Must be. What do we do?'
'Sit it out,' I told him. 'We've time yet.'
We sat and waited. Five minutes, ten, fifteen… and no movement. Twenty minutes, and we couldn't even see any flashing lights in the distance ahead. The block had tailed back for miles behind us.
The irony of the situation was not lost on me. If we'd have been responding to a real emergency we'd have ignored the rules and gone like shit off a shovel up the hard shoulder, prepared to front it out if the police turned snarky. But now, the last thing we could afford was any entanglement with the law. I knew SB would have warned off the force operating in the area of our rendezvous, telling them to keep their hands offa white 1Lenault van with our plates on it, but down here in Berkshire it might be a different story. If coppers caught us with a hooded, cuffed prisoner in the back, our entire deception would be up the spout, Farrell would realise that he was being conned, and the only chance of recovering my family would be gone.
At last the lines of massed cars began to creep for ward, only to stop again after a few yards. Whinger kept cursing and muttering under his breath, and presently his impatience started seeping into me. I shifted around in my seat, wondering what we could do.
'What the hell are all these people doing, heading into town on a Saturday?' I said irritably.
Nobody answered. Our covert radios were on board, but bundled up inside a bag. Because, we couldn't afford to let Farrell see or hear us using them. What we could use, though, was the mobile phone.
I turned round and said to Farrell, 'Here — we're in the shit with this traffic. You'd better call your contact in London on my mobile. Say we've got held up and may be late.'
'Jaysus,' he mumbled through his hood. 'I don't have the number. I left it in the house.'
'Call Belfast then, get the number again.'
'Get this fucking hood offofme first.'
'Not likely, mate. You can keep it on and talk through it. What's the number over there?'
Before Farrell could give it there was a sudden move ment in the traffic ahead, and we began making ground again, reaching a reasonable speed. 'Cancel that,' I said.
'Hold on a minute. Looks like we're going now. I don't think you need call after all.'
Then, “inevitably, everything slowed down. This time, before we came to a halt, I spotted a break in the central barrier. A section of the heavy rail had been removed, maybe for repair, and the gap was blocked only by plastic cones. The traffic coming the other way was light.
To alter the tkV time would be the final resort.
Anything rather than that…
'Through there, Whinger!' I said on impulse, point ing at the cones. 'Whip through and turn round. We'll go some other way.'
Whinger wasn't the sort to query a decision like that.
He watched for a gap in the oncoming traffic, made the U-turn in a second and joined the stream flowing west.
Some officious turd hooted in protest, but as I looked back in the wing-mirror I saw one or two other cars following our example.
'If any self-righteous bastard reports us, I'll murder him,' I said. 'Now for a bit of map-reading.'
Heading west, we came off the motorway at the next exit, and immediately entered a nightmare of suburbanised villages and towns: Spencer's Wood, Swallowfield, Finchampstead, Crowthome, Bagshot, all crawling with pottering weekenders. As I called the turns, Whinger went as fast as the van, the road and its competing users would let him, and eventually we battled our way through to Junction 3 of the M3. From there I calculated it was sixteen miles to our RV: sixteen minutes if we kept to sixty m.p.h, and met no more hang-ups. Since we had four minutes in hand, I told Whinger to pull into the forecourt of a garage, keeping well away from the pumps and the office.
'Where are we?' Farrell wanted to know.
'In some godforsaken arsehole of a lay-by,' I told him. 'We're going on in a minute.'
'I need a piss,' he said.
'You're not getting one here, with that hood on or without it. There are too many people passing. The cops have probably put out mug-shots of you all over the country. They've probably had pictures on the TV news. It only needs one person to see you and that's it.'
Four minutes later we slipped on to the M3 and stuck with the inside lane, which was moving at just about sixty. I felt my adrenalin coming up. Our target area was practically in sight, yet still there were umpteen things that could go wrong. I kept thinking of Tim, seeing the boy so clearly that I was pretty much talking to him.
Tracy, too: I was getting the feel and smell of her again.