Closer, page 14
The view switched back to the Home Office minister, Michael Parmentier, as the presenter asked, “Isn’t this rather uncomfortable for your government, Mr Parmentier? A hitman with such close ties to government activities?”
The minister looked as if he’d rather be anywhere but in front of the cameras all of a sudden. Then he gathered himself, smiled apologetically, and said, “I really can’t comment, I’m afraid. Unsubstantiated rumors are bound to fly around at times like this and I would help nothing by commenting on every single allegation as it emerges.”
I stared. I understood how careful the news agencies had to be. Wild allegations, perhaps, but for them to air it on national TV, there must be at least something in it. I thought of Cassie’s claims – her story that she worked for some shady branch of the country’s security services. She’d been ordered to kill Napier. When that had clearly stalled, had they called in a freelance hitman to do the job? An assassination ordered from high up in our government?
Up until the last few days, I’d have found such a thing impossible to believe, but now it made more sense than any alternative.
That whole media show at Auldbrigg Haw had been set up by the authorities. They knew where everyone would be. They knew what security arrangements had been made.
And they would know exactly how to circumvent those arrangements.
My reverie was interrupted again by something I’d picked up on the TV.
“Reports just coming in on the Stewart Napier shooting incident... Highlands and Islands Police have issued a statement indicating the possibility that there may have been a second gunman, still on the loose. And in a bizarre twist, they say that evidence suggests that this second gunman may be the one who shot dead James Wilson, the gunman who shot and wounded Stewart Napier as he brought released hostage Lewis Sutherland back to his West Scotland estate. Anything more specific than that is yet to be confirmed, but it’s already being suggested that Wilson may have been shot in an attempt to cover tracks and prevent him from revealing where his orders came from.”
My mind raced. Cassie was the one who’d shot Wilson, but I refused to believe she had been his accomplice, as the news report suggested. She’d deliberately saved Napier’s life.
And yet now she was being portrayed as a second assassin...
She knew too much, I realized. This whole plot went right to the top, an Establishment attempt to stop Napier’s rise, and now they were desperately trying to cover their tracks by framing Cassie.
And here I was, sitting in a glorified hotel room on a military base, powerless to do a single thing.
§
I saw Napier that evening, just as dusk was closing in on the base.
A uniformed man took me across to the medical facility in a Land Rover, saying nothing beyond the initial introduction, and what was pretty much an instruction to accompany him to visit Mr Napier.
“Hey, Mattie!”
I was shocked at first, at all the tubes and wires and beeping machines in the room.
“Napier,” I said, pausing at the foot of his bed. There was a clipboard there, with his medical notes on it. I picked it up and glanced at it, then nodded and said, “Aye. They have you down as a drama queen, making a meal of it as usual.”
Napier laughed, and then instantly grimaced.
“See?” I said, coming around the bed. “Drama, drama, drama.”
“Och, haud yer wheesht, ya wee bampot,” he said.
I laughed. I hadn’t heard haud yer wheesht since I was little, and my granny used to say it.
I glanced across at the armed guard who stood just inside the door, who was looking at us curiously. He clearly hadn’t understood a word of Napier’s Scottishisms and perhaps was wondering if we were talking in code.
Perhaps we were – an ancient code of teasing banter between us that went back to adolescence, a banter that reassured me that my old friend was not too badly hurt and on the mend.
“You okay?” I asked him now, lowering myself carefully to sit on the edge of the bed. He looked pale, with dark shadows under his eyes, but something of the old spark was still there.
“Aye,” he said. “Considering. You?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “I didn’t get hurt at all.”
“Aye,” he said again, fixing me with a hard look. “But nobody should have to witness what you did. One of your own jackets, ruined.”
We both smiled. He was trying too hard to make light of it all, but that had to be a good thing.
I hesitated, then plunged in. “Have you seen the news?”
“Enough.”
“The gunman. Former SAS marksman. Been working government contracts around the Middle East since he left the forces. Not exactly a government employee, but–”
“As good as. Aye. It looks fishy, to say the least.”
I tried to skirt around it without naming Cassie. “If the order came from high up in the government... why?”
Napier tried to shrug, but grimaced in pain instead.
“We live in unsettled times,” he said. “The Establishment is running scared from the likes of Bernard Bowler and the Way Forward movement.”
“You think your stunt with Sutherland tipped the balance? Made you more of a challenge to the Establishment?”
“It was no stunt, Mattie. That man was starving in a hole in the ground before I applied pressure on Prince Khaled to put some feelers out and locate him.”
“But you know what I mean.”
Napier nodded. “Maybe. I don’t know the answer to your question, though. I must confess I preferred it when I could hide behind the scenes pulling a few strings and nobody cared who I was.”
I could believe that, of the private Napier I knew. I always thought of him as the man who made things happen, rather than any kind of figurehead.
“Mattie.”
I looked at him, detecting a change in his tone.
“Earlier. You said we needed to talk.”
I’d forgotten. I’d been trying to warn him about the threat to his life. Things had moved on since then, though.
“Was it about Cassie?”
I looked away, and when I looked up again he was studying me carefully.
“They’re trying to set her up for this,” I said. “The news stories... they’re saying a second shooter was involved and needs to be caught.”
Instantly, I realized I’d said far too much.
“You’ve been in contact?”
I shrugged, as if that might deflect Napier’s scrutiny.
“She warned me you were in danger. I don’t know who she is or what she is, but she claimed already to have saved your life a few days ago, before she disappeared, and again today. Cassie’s the one who shot the man who tried to kill you today.”
“They say she was working with him.”
“She stopped him taking a second shot. They’re setting her up, Napier. Covering tracks.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because she’s a loose cannon. Wilson has ties with the Establishment and they don’t want that to get out.” I was shaking my head. “I don’t know, Napier. I just know that she saved your life today, and we need to do something to help her.”
“Mattie. You’re out of your depth. Hell, I’m out of my depth, laddie. I feel like a surfer, riding the waves and never quite having a grasp on all the currents flowing around me.” With his good hand he waved to gesture at the room around them. “Right now all I can do is trust that I’m being kept safe and getting the best treatment. Because if we don’t ultimately trust our nation and its servants, then where does that leave us?”
I wouldn’t look at him.
He’d hit the nail on the head. My faith in our systems and justice had been undermined. I didn’t have his confidence, his naïve belief that good will ultimately triumph.
“Where is she, Mattie?”
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t say.”
“You need to bring her in. Whatever’s going on, if she’s on the run then she’s in danger. We’ve had too much bloodshed already. Can you contact her?”
I shook my head. “She called me from a burner phone. The number’s dead now.”
“Then when she calls you again my advice to you is to talk her down. If she’s being straight with you and she’s on the right side then justice will be on her side.” He twisted awkwardly, so he could reach a hand out and squeeze my forearm. “And believe me, Mattie, if your understanding of this is good – and I have every faith that it is – then she’ll have me on her side, too. And right now I’m a man with a great deal of influence. I promise you, Matt, she will have my protection.”
“Thank you, Napier. You’re a good man.”
“Aye,” he said, slumping back onto his bed. “A good man for a drama queen, eh?”
15. The Eyrie
I got away from the base the next morning, Napier pulling strings in the way that he did. His security man, Macpherson, brought me one of the cars from the estate. He didn’t say a word as he handed over the keys, and I wondered if demotion to errand boy was some kind of punishment for the repeated security lapses at Auldbrigg Haw.
“Do you want a lift anywhere?” I called after him, as he headed off into the medical wing, but he ignored me.
I drove back to Auldbrigg Haw. The place had the air of a ghost town about it this morning. The metal barriers that had, briefly, been used to hem in the press gathering were still on the grass, and a large area of the gardens was still marked off with police tape.
A couple of uniformed police officers stood on duty, but other than that the place seemed deserted.
I parked the car, went into the Haw, and then went straight through to emerge through one of the doors to the side of the building, away from the view of those police officers.
It all felt very cloak and dagger, and I couldn’t help but feel foolish. Then I reminded myself of recent events. Of Cassie’s disappearance, of security agents closing in, of cradling my best friend in my arms as I feared he was bleeding to death.
Sobered, I took the keys for another of the estate’s cars and headed back out.
It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Macpherson. Not specifically. It was that I didn’t trust anyone right now.
I had little knowledge of the state of modern surveillance technology, but I knew they could track a car easily. The least I could do was not use the car they’d given me.
I headed into the village, and then along the road that followed the southern shore of the sea loch. When I came to the rough turning down to the old naval facility where Cassie had been hiding, I was careful not to slow. A black van was parked in the shadow of one of the abandoned buildings. It was obvious that the place was being searched.
I drove on, praying Cassie hadn’t still been hiding out there and I was right about the clue I thought I’d picked up in that last phone call.
Somewhere with character. Somewhere a bit eerie.
I’d thought her choice of phrase had been odd, but couldn’t work out why. Stress, I assumed. She’d clearly been getting anxious to end the call, fearing that the longer we talked the more likely it was that her burner phone would be traced.
I pulled up under cover of a small group of silver birch trees beside the road a couple of miles later. Climbing out of the car, I paused to peer up the flank of the mountain that rose steeply from the shore of the loch.
As if on cue I saw the wide wingspan of one of the resident eagles.
Napier had brought me here years ago to show me these magnificent birds, and their nesting site on a cliff a few hundred meters up the slope.
A hiker’s route followed the flank of the hill above that cliff, and an old stone bothy was up there, a simple one-room building with benches for hikers to spend the night.
It was close enough to Cassie’s old hideout to be reached on foot, and yet far enough away to be a good fallback position. If she’d taken a car somewhere, then my reasoning was flawed, but I guessed a car would be identifiable, and easily visible if she parked up somewhere, so it seemed reasonable to assume she would have moved out on foot.
I’d shown this place to Cassie the first time I’d brought her to Auldbrigg Haw. Told her you get all kinds of characters using these bothies.
Somewhere with character.
The bothy close to the eagles’ nest – the eagle’s eyrie.
You know me: somewhere a bit eerie.
Eyrie, not eerie.
The clues were clumsy, but on the spur of the moment, when she was desperate not to give too much away, they were the best she could come up with.
And they had brought me here.
I found the trail that led up the side of the mountain, barely more than a faint groove between banks of knee-deep heather that dragged against my legs as I walked. The heather had peaked a week or two earlier, but was still a vibrant purple with blooms. Bees worked busily all around, a curlew cried – such a distinctive sound of these hills – and high up that lone eagle circled on a thermal.
I wished we could stay out here, just me, Cassie, and these hills. Leave the world behind.
As the path looped around the crags and doubled back along the top of the great cliff where the eagles nested, I was struck by the panicked thought that I’d got it all wrong – the clues so tenuous, perhaps not even clues at all.
But she’d been so confident.
How will I find you?
You’ll know.
The bothy was a small stone construction, just four walls and a sloping, turf-topped roof. No windows, just a wooden door.
I opened the door, leaned inside. Even before my eyes had adjusted to the gloom, I could see the place was empty. There was barely room for the three sets of bunkbeds, and a couple of wooden chairs. No cooking or toilet facilities, as these places sometimes had.
I could see no sign the place had even been occupied, but then Cassie was a professional, was she not? If she was in hiding then I wouldn’t expect her to leave traces someone like me could find.
I stepped back out into the soft sunlight.
The view from here was spectacular, down over the slope as it descended to the loch, and across the hills on the northern shore. You could see anyone approaching for miles – including down to the old naval facility where Cassie had originally laid low.
To my untrained eye this was the perfect hiding place, but it was missing one key ingredient.
Cassie.
I circled the bothy, wondering if she’d concealed herself, but found nothing.
I’d got it wrong.
Was she right now waiting somewhere entirely different, wondering why I hadn’t picked up clues which were, to her, obvious?
I racked my brain, trying to think where else she might be, what clues I had missed in our brief conversation, but could think of none.
I stood at the top of the cliff, peering down toward the old naval buildings. It was a long distance away, but perhaps this was still too obvious a hiding place. If I could see the place from here, then any searcher down there with a pair of binoculars scanning the hills would be able to see me standing here.
I turned, and she was there.
I don’t know where she’d been concealed, or for how long she’d been watching me before deciding I was alone, and I didn’t ask.
“Cassie.”
“Matthew.”
And then we were in each other’s arms.
“I didn’t know if you’d work it out,” she said, a short time later. “As soon as I ended the call I realized how dumb it was, but I hadn’t been able to think of anything better.”
“I worked it out.”
“You should be a spy.”
“There’s only room for one in any relationship, I find.”
We moved across to the bothy and sat on boulders to the side.
“How’s Napier?”
I filled her in briefly on the flight with my old friend to the Navy base, and how he was now.
“And you?”
She looked down, then back up into my eyes. “I went to Auldbrigg Haw,” she told me. “I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was about to happen.”
“You were right.”
“While everyone else was watching Napier’s showboating, I was among the trees, looking for anything out of place. Wilson had managed to get surprisingly close – he had a perfect view.”
“You knew him? They’re saying you were collaborating with him.”
Cassie shook her head.
“Never seen him before. I’ve seen the news though. At first I thought he must be part of Napier’s security team – there were three other snipers around the property who were definitely part of his team. As soon as he fired the first shot, I saw that Napier had been hit, but was still alive, and I knew Wilson would take at least one more shot to try to finish the job.”
“So you stopped him.” It was what she did. Shot people. Killed them. I still couldn’t get my head around that.
“And now they’re after me. If they’ve told the press I’m on the shooter’s side, then they’re clearly setting me up.”
“They say Wilson had close ties with members of the Government. The Government might even fall as a result of this.”
“Then all the more reason to use me as a scapegoat and deflect attention. I’m screwed, Matthew. You should get as far away from me as possible and try to forget I ever existed.”
“Like that’s going to happen.”
I kissed her.
How is it that practicalities and rationality get thrown to the wind when you’re with the person you love? Yes, my mind was well and truly messed up trying to deal with all the complexities of the situation, but the one truth that held strong was that I would do anything to protect Cassie Deane.
“What do you do next?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I just can’t work it out.”
“What does your training tell you?”
