The Angel Tapes (20 page)

Her look held contempt.

“I
scarcely
think so. One can't imagine what those clod-hoppers could possibly purvey that should be of any interest whatsoever.”

Blade grinned. He knew very well that his mother had fallen in love with Wicklow and its people from the moment his parents had moved here with him and his sisters. Katharine steadfastly refused to live anywhere else.

“I could get you a paper.…”

“Really, which one? The
Irish Farmers' Journal?
No thank you. I expect you'll be haring off again now? Done your duty.”

“Er, actually I'll be here for another hour or so, Katharine. There's something I have to do.”

Blade's voice had betrayed none of the elation he was feeling at that moment. He'd been turning the idea over in his mind, questioning whether he was heading down yet another blind alley. But the thing was so simple, so logical, that he couldn't bring himself to believe that it could fail.

By Jesus, he
had
the bastard! Angel had slipped up, and was about to give himself away. The hermit crab had ventured a tad too far out of its shell.

Blade waited until one minute before six. Then he excused himself and went back into the kitchen. There was one particular number he could call, he reasoned, that would ensure for him the silence he required for the experiment he was about to conduct. His own home number.

The grandfather clock struck the hour. Blade took his cellular phone in his hand and punched in the digits.

“This is Blade Macken. I'm not in at the moment. If you'd like to leave a message, please do so after the signal.”

There was an electronic blip, then silence.

He hit the
RECORD
button.

Twenty-three

“I don't know, Blade,” Dr. Barry Keogh said with a worried look. “I think we should have the Americans in on this.” He gestured toward the battery of recording apparatus, speakers, and computer terminals. “They can handle this better. We can only go to eight-bit sound here. I've been pestering the commissioner for months for new stuff, but he says we're way over our budget as it is.”

“To hell with the Americans. I'm not having Redfern take all the credit for this.”

“What about Jim Roche?” Sweetman asked.

Blade glanced at her sourly.

“What about him?”

“Well, we might be able to borrow some of his gear. I hear it's the business.”

He turned his back to her and studied the computer screens.

“Yeah, well we won't bother him just now. Somebody told me he was laid up for a couple of days. A severe chill, I think it was. We'll make do with what we have, Barry.”

“You're the boss.”

They watched in fascination—Macken, Sweetman, Duffy, and Earley—as Keogh pressed the
PLAY
button of the tape deck. Angel's voice issued from the stereo speakers.

“Right here,” Blade said after a few seconds.

Keogh clicked on the
RECORD
“button” in the top left-hand corner of the screen. At once, a thin black line that had hitherto remained unchanged began to execute a succession of sharp spikes and troughs, following the modulations of the words. Then they heard the merry little tune, played over and over, as Dick Whittington and his cat trod their never-ending path to London. The notes were in stark contrast to the bomber's distorted words. When the tune had ended, Keogh stopped the recording and saved it.

No one spoke, but the air crackled with suspense. Out of the corner of his eye, Blade saw Sweetman look his way.

Keogh started the second tape and began the recording at once. This time, the notes played by the wall clock were crystal clear.

“What happens now?” Duffy said.

Keogh pushed his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose. “We isolate the tune from the first recording.”

“Can you do that?” the assistant commissioner asked, eyeing the meaningless pattern that the computer program had generated.

The head of forensics chuckled. “
I
can't, but this baby can.”

Almost more quickly than their eyes could follow, Keogh pulled down menus on the screen, clicking on submenus and paths whose designations Blade associated with the algebra he'd learned at school. But whatever it was Keogh had done, it achieved results. The waveform section of the screen went blank. A second later, more sharp spikes and troughs filled the window.

“Gotcha!” Keogh exclaimed with the delight of a boy.

He brought down another menu and split the screen in two. Side by side were two waveforms, identical in length, yet as dissimilar in character as chalk and cheesecake. The tension in the laboratory mounted; the soldier in Blade sensed the proximity of the kill.

Keogh changed the color of “Dick Whittington” to red. With another series of mouse clicks and dragging maneuvers, he superimposed the red image on the black one. Then he clicked on the word MERGE. The red waveform expanded and contracted with a blur of motion, until at last its jagged lines settled precisely over their dark counterparts like an inverted total eclipse of the sun.

“By Jesus,” Blade breathed. “So it
is
possible.”

“My congratulations,” Dr. Keogh said. “It was a stroke of genius to think of it. How on earth did it ever occur to you?”

Blade reached into his pocket for his pack of Hamlets but, on seeing Keogh's horrified expression, thought better of it.

“Just luck, I suppose,” he said modestly. “Remember last week outside the embassy, Sweetman, when the bastard was playing his bloody game of hide-and-go-seek?”

She nodded.

“Well, do you remember some silly twat in a red Mazda, who'd one of these horns that plays ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai'? They ought to be illegal.”

“They are,” Duffy said quietly.

“That's what put the idea into my head. See, I'd heard the horn over the telephone, and then the real thing when the car was nearer to us. I didn't think any more about it at the time, not even when we listened to the tapes.”

“Lateral thinking, Blade,” Dr. Earley said. “It's what I teach them in college. There's no substitute for it.”

Macken punched his palm.

“All right, people,” he said, “let's cut the chat. Let's
get
the swine!”

Keogh grinned and fed the computer another sequence of arcane commands. He turned presently.

“We have the algorithm.”

“If you say so, Barry,” Blade said. “For all I know, you could be talking about African drum music.”

“Now we apply the converse of the algorithm to the first recording. That way, we can remove all the distortion. We're nearly there.”

He did as promised. And they listened. Keogh had turned up the volume, so that none of them would miss a single syllable of Angel's unscrambled words.

Blade heard those words that he'd recorded in his mother's kitchen as if he was hearing them for the first time. In the background, a little music-making mechanism tinkled prettily. The extraordinary thing was that voice and music blended so well. The real voice of Angel was sweet and melodious, belying the menace of the spoken words.

It was the voice of a young woman.

Twenty-four

Later they all sat in Keogh's office. Blade was allowed a cigar, though to be smoked with
both
windows open.

“I'll be damned,” Duffy muttered. “I'll be damned.” He'd said little else since leaving the laboratory. “A girl!”

Sweetman threw him a disapproving look. The man would never learn.

“It was Angel's trump card,” Blade said. “She went out of her way to convince us she was male. The voice sounded so bloody masculine you'd never have dreamed it was a woman. Nolan wondered that first time whether we were playing it at the right speed. And how many electronics experts are women? How many
bombers
are women, if it comes to that. God, she must have been laughing up her sleeve at us!”

He ran his fingers through his hair.

“Angel. Over and over I wondered about that name. Why she'd picked it, of all names. I thought about ‘avenging angels' or ‘angels of death' and things like that. In the end I had to agree with you, Dr. Earley, that she'd simply chosen a name at random, that it hadn't any significance at all. But we were wrong. It had. It was her subtle way of saying: ‘Guess my gender if you can.'”

He suddenly thought back to a living room in County Wicklow. Katharine's skewed picture had
spoken
to him, and he hadn't understood the words.

“It's what you said at the beginning, Blade,” Dr. Earley told him. “People like our bomber invariably betray themselves. They think they're so incredibly clever, but that's exactly their undoing.”

“So what happens now, sir?” Sweetman asked Duffy.

The assistant commissioner flicked a speck from the cuff of his dark uniform.

“We nail her. It's as simple as that. I want the two of ye to work intensively with Dr. Earley again, starting—”

“The two of us?” Macken said. “What about Nolan?”

“Don't mind about him, Blade. He's back on the Delahunt business as of now, plus a missing-person investigation that's just come in. You're in charge again.” He looked a bit sheepish. “I shouldn't have taken you off it anyway. But we'll discuss that another time.”

“Fair enough, sir. You were saying…?”

“Yes, I want ye to work with Dr. Earley again, starting first thing tomorrow. I don't care if it takes all day and all night, we've got to find out who this woman is, or at least pin her down to some location by the day after tomorrow. We've only three days to go now—not even that. We
must
be able to identify the owner of that voice.”

“I think we're halfway there,” Earley said, removing her glasses and polishing them. “All right, I know I was mistaken about the age—and we won't even
talk
about the gender, thank you very much. Yet I stand firm on the district with which one associates her vocabulary. It's definitely Phibsborough.” She squinted through one of the lenses and breathed on it. “With what we have now, we can probably narrow it down to a handful of streets.”

“I'm impressed,” Keogh said.

“I'm not a scientist, Barry,” Earley said. “What you do and what I do are poles apart. I'm the first to admit that I make as many wrong guesses as right ones. But we are dealing with human beings, about as fickle an animal as you're likely to find.”

“She could very well be older than she sounds,” Blade suggested, remembering Katharine Macken's childlike voice on his answering machine. “I don't think we should rule that out.”

Earley shook her head.

“No, the voice is young, take it from me. Someone in her twenties.” She put on her glasses again. “At a guess—and it really is only a guess at this stage—I should say that we are dealing with a young woman who was an only child. She'd be more likely to adopt the speech patterns of her parents than the language of people her own age.”

“Mmm,” Blade murmured, “so we're dealing with a loner. A bit like the character they caught in the States a few years back. What's this they called him?”

“The Unabomber,” Sweetman said. “Another fecking ego-tripper who tripped himself up with his own conceitedness.”

Duffy had been doing more thinking than talking—an unusual departure from his regular pattern. He stood up and folded his arms.

“I'm still trying to puzzle this out,” he said. “How could a girl learn so much about explosives? Could she have been involved with the IRA? Perhaps we should extend the investigation to cover that eventuality.”

“Or she could have learned it from someone in the nick,” Sweetman said. “Didn't we agree that she might have done time?”

“It was a possibility,” Dr. Earley said. “And it's a line of inquiry that we could continue to pursue. But don't forget, Detective Sergeant, that anyone can find out how to build a bomb these days, simply by reading a book.”

“She's right there,” Blade said. “Wasn't it Ken Follett or one of the others who showed you how to make your own atomic bomb?”

“Fiction or nonfiction,” Dr. Keogh said, getting up and going to a bookshelf, “you can get your information from all sorts of places.”

He reached for a book and showed them the title:
Weapons and Defence Systems of the Royal Navy.
He flipped though its pages.

“A couple of nights tucked up in bed with this,” he said, “together with a few service manuals, and you can build your own rocket launcher, grenade, antiaircraft gun. They have this at the National Library and the universities.”

“Don't tell me about it, Barry,” Duffy groaned. “I'd prefer not to know. There's too much of this stuff knocking around.”

“So she's done her research,” Sweetman said. “And maybe been in prison as well.”

“
And
don't forget what I said about the possibility of her being on the force,” Earley reminded them.

Dr. Barry Keogh shook his head in commiseration. “You people have your work cut out for you, so.”

He ticked off his fingers one by one. “She's a garda; she's been to prison; she's an explosives expert; she's an electronics wizard; her taste in reading goes beyond Jackie Collins. Anything else I've missed?”

Duffy looked at his watch.

“It's nearly nine,” he said. “We'll call it a day. You must be tired, Blade. Get yourself an early night—you, too, Sweetman. We'll call a conference with your team for half past nine tomorrow morning. Oh, and Blade, I'll be dropping in now to have a word with the commissioner. Stick around for fifteen minutes, will you? He'll most likely want to congratulate you in person for today's breakthrough.”