Anyway, when the army officers tried to murder the monk they found they couldn't do it. First they gave him enough potassium cyanide to kill an elephant, and it had practically no effect. Then they shot him through the heart with a revolver from point-blank range, and still the bastard wouldn't die. One moment he was stretched out on the flag-stones of the palace like a corpse, the next he was up, roaring, and attacking them with his hands, so violently that he tore an epaulette offone of their tunics.
When he staggered to his feet and ran out through the courtyard towards the street, they couldn't believe it.
Again they gunned him down, and finally they dumped his trussed body into the river through a hole in the ice.
But the performance had left them shattered. They thought their victim was the devil incarnate, and they were terrified he'd return to haunt them.
Stupid as it sounds, I was beginning to feel that Farrell was another 1Kasputin, an evil and indestructible force. The magazine article had carried pictures of the peasant, with his wild black beard and staring eyes. I started to think I could see likenesses in Farrell's swarthy features, and I felt I was in the grip of some malign influence, which was driving events forward in a way I couldn't cl)ntrol. It was easy to believe that, whatever I did, I would never get the better of him…
Deep down, of course, I knew I was suffering from cumulative lack of sleep and letting my imagination run away with me. And the best way to control my anxieties was to concentrate on the practical details of the task ahead.
When we went back through to Belfast I took over the call myself, so that I could make sure I understood everything properly. With a man dictating and myself checking back, I wrote down a grid reference for the transit hide somewhere in Oxfordshire, and a series of detailed instructions: a road junction, a lane, woods, fields, paths, a clearing on the edge of the forest, an old well with a cast-iron water pump. On paper, the notes meant practically nothing, and I could only hope they'd relate accurately to features on the ground.
At the end the contact said, 'That's all. The weapon is there, and can be collected any time after dark tonight.'
THIRTEEN
Tony and I set out at two o'clock, leaving the rest of the team to guard Farrell, close down the cottage and move up-country to whatever FMB the head-shed managed to arrange. As we drove off in the Granada, I felt a terrific relief at being away from the grotty presence of our prisoner. The man had wanted to come with us to ' collect the weapon, sure enough, but I told him we could manage the pick-up on our own.
As we headed east, my mind spun with conflicting possibilities, and in an attempt to clear my head I bounced some of them off Tony.
'I'm trying to puzzle out what the PIRA's state of mind is,' I began. 'They're so bloody devious, you can never be sure what they're up to.
'One thing we do know is that they want the Prime Minister dead. That's obvious. Also obvious: they want us to do their dirty work for them. But what do they reckon my intentions are? I suppose they think I'm so shit-scared of losing Tim that I'm simply going to do the shoot on their behalf. But what do they imagine I'll do after it's gone down? Bugger off?. Disappear? Perhaps they think I'll just be able to keep my head down and nobody will find out who did it.'
'Maybe you should tell Farrell you've got a passage booked back to Colombia,' Tony suggested. 'Let him know you've fixed yourself up with a slot there, and give the impression you're going to quit Britain immediately, taking the family with you.'
'Thanks a lot! It's still possible the PIRA have no intention of handing over the hostages, whatever we do. Maybe they don't intend I should get away at all. If they stake out Point D at Chequers, they could drop us immediately after the shoot.'
'Possible,' Tony agreed. 'But unlikely. They've been to the place. They've seen it. They know it's heaving with security. You let one round off there and the park will be like an anthill. They'd never make it out. The thought should keep them away.'
'Yeah — but if they lay on the chopper, like we've suggested…'
I drove in silence for a few minutes, then said, 'They must trust me to some extent. After all, they're letting us get our hands on one of their most valuable weapons.'
'We haven't got the damn thing yet. They could be staking out the pick-up site right now, planning to hit us when we show up.'
'I know.' I turned and grinned at him. 'That's why we've got the MP5s.'
I drove on, heading up the M4 for Reading. The site of the transit hide had been described as the side of a wood, up in the hill country near the village of Nettlebed, maybe fifteen miles overland from Chequers. The PIRA guy had described the cache as an old well on the site of a former cottage.. I was tempted to do a daylight drive-past, get a feel for the area — but I ruled it out on the grounds that if any dickers were about a passing car would be bound to alert them.
In Reading our first port of call was a general bookshop, where we bought a copy of the local 1:25,000 map. That showed some detail, but what we really needed was the relevant sheet of the six-inchestothe-mile Ordnance Survey, and we ran one to ground in a specialist map shop in London Road. Thus armed, we stoked up with some good spaghetti in an Italian restaurant, and pored over the maps while we drank our coffee.
'Roman coin hoard found here, 1953,' Tony read out, twisting the map at an angle.
'Is that right? Near where we're heading?'
'Not far off.'
'They'll have to add another line to the next edition,'
I said. 'Barrett Fifty sniper rifle found here, 2002.'
The site of the transit hide was easy enough to identify within a hundred yards or so, even though we couldn't pinpoint it. The PIRA guy had said the old well was on the southern edge of a small, triangular wood called Kate's Copse, which had its apex pointing north and its base running east and west. We found the wood all right, but we couldn't tell how far along the half-mile base the well would be.
The route given us by the PIRA would bring us in along a lane which ran one field away from the northern point of the wood. If we took that road we could park within a couple of hundred yards of our objective. I checked the route through, turn by turn, against the map, and saw that the description was painstakingly accurate: go south off the main drag on unsigned side road, three cottages on corner; 500 yards, farm on right; 500 yards, sewage works on right, ninety-degree turn left; 700 yards straight, then deciduous wood on right; 200 yards on, grass ride on right. Leave car here…
The more I looked at it, the less I fancied it. If dickers were out that was where they'd be: watching that lane, anywhere between the main road and the site. With the motivation of the PIRA so uncertain, my instinct was to keep well clear.
'Look at this,' I said. 'Kate's Copse is on the brow of the hill. But there's another track here, to the south of it, along the bottom of this valley. We can park down here and walk up over. Then, if anyone's watching the top lane, they'll miss us.'
'I'm with you,' Tony agreed. 'It's not much farther.
Better all round.'
Back in the car, I called Whinger's mobile. The first time it didn't connect, and I assumed that he was on the move in some low-lying area. When I tried again five minutes later he came on, patchily, but clear enough to say that they were on their way to a new safe house 'with ten miles of target', with an ETA of 2000 hours.
I didn't want to ask the place's precise location because I knew Farrell would be listening to the conversation, so I told Whinger I'd call again when they'd arrived.