Siege of Stone Read online

"So," Laika said, when the car had vanished into the night, "did we learn anything?"

  "The Fairy Flag glows," said Tony. "And if it's not a piece of the cloth found here . . . that means there must be more than one of those cloths. Maybe we should start hitting the flea markets. But what's this stuff about Scobie—or Mackay's—men being a bunch of gays?"

  Joseph shook his head. "If this group is who we think they are, whether Templars or terrorists, that was planted, you can be sure of it. A network of false informants to throw off the police. If you want to appear nonthreatening—at least to non-Baptists—just get yourself labeled a bunch of homosexual dilettantes. It's right out of the fin de siècle period, Oscar Wilde and the boys playing knights and ladies, just sitting around reading poetry to each other. Hardly prime suspects to free any terrorists. No, MI5 thinks they're exactly who they want them to think they are. A bevy," he finished in a Monty Pythonesque voice, "of bloody poofs."

  "You're probably right," Laika agreed. "Scobie—or Mackay—struck me as a tough nut when he ran us off his land."

  "Don't think in stereotypes," Tony reminded her. "Remember Adam Guaraldi?" Guaraldi had been the lover and assistant of Peder Holberg, the sculptor who had, under the direction of the Prisoner, created the huge iron sculpture in New York. Guaraldi had been a man's man all the way, strong and rugged, who had handled iron pipes as easily as though they were wooden dowels. And he had died like a man.

  "Yeah," said Laika, who knew of the friendship that Tony had shared with Guaraldi. "You're right. But so's Joseph. The gay thing is a cover." She picked up a waterproof raincoat and slipped on a muddy pair of Wellingtons. "I'd better get up there and keep an eye on the castle. Tony, relieve me at, say, 5:00 A.M."

  The relief wasn't necessary. The phone rang at four thirty, waking Joseph. Tony was already up, getting ready for his shift. He said "Okay" into the phone and hung up. "They're on the move," he told Joseph, who was already slipping on his clothes.

  While he finished dressing, Tony got the Peugeot started and put Joseph's unmarked bag that held a change of clothing into the car. Then Joseph turned the car around, kept the motor idling and the headlights off, and waited for the van to pass the driveway, heading south.

  Soon he saw its headlights, and after it passed he waited until it was several hundred yards down the road before he pulled out. He would leave as much distance as possible between them. The road was nearly empty at this time of the morning, and he could regain visual contact later in the day, when the roads were more traveled.

  Joseph turned on the radio until he found a station with some music, and tried to keep his mind on it. He might as well try and relax, he thought, particularly if they had to drive all the way to Carlisle.

  Chapter 26

  At two o'clock the following morning, squadron leader Richard Greene sat in the back of the disguised British army van and waited with his mates. The van was parked across the road from the walls of Hixton Prison on the outskirts of Carlisle. It had two flat tires, and its windows were cracked. The hubcaps were missing, and the windowless sides had been spray painted with graffiti.

  His six men crouched inside, all of them wearing riot gear, although they held their gas masks and helmets in their laps. It was too bloody hot in there to keep the headgear on. The earphone/mike headpiece that Greene had to wear was bad enough. They'd only been there two hours, and already it smelled like a musk ox convention.

  They sat in absolute silence, lest anyone driving by hear their curses or remarks. It was altogether possible, the old man had told them, that these blokes might have sophisticated noise detection devices "that they might aim at such abandoned vehicles to determine whether or not they are occupied by you lot."

  Greene wondered who had come up with the bright idea that these terrorists were planning to target Hixton next. They had sat in this bleeding shitehole of a van for the past three nights until dawn, as had four other teams around the prison. Greene suspected, however, that similar army teams were undergoing the same exercise in every other prison in the United Kingdom where anti-British terrorists were being held.

  The government wanted, more than anything else, to lure these bastards in, and the way to do that was to make them think that the prisons were doing business as usual. In truth, beside the teams stationed in abandoned vehicles and behind the walls of deserted warehouses, there were dozens of soldiers on alert inside the prison. Just let these arseholes try an escape here, and they'd be shot down before they'd be able to try a skeleton key.

  Oh, Greene had heard the stories about the walking through walls and the guards attacking each other, but the official story was that these jailbreak artists had used some kind of gas on the guards that had made them a little crazy. All the soldiers inside and outside Hixton had gas masks, so the Scottish or Irish or whatever-they-were buggers would get a little surprise if they decided to pay an unscheduled visit to Kevin Brady.

  Oh yes, he was the one they'd want, all right. A mad dog bastard with the sweetest face you'd ever want to see, but a goddamned mass butcher for all that. If there was one shite that Hixton Prison wanted to keep within its old stone walls, it was Brady.

  "Hoy," whispered Davis, the soldier looking through the eyepiece which was connected to the inset scanning device on top of the van. It gave them visual access in all directions. "Somethin' comin'. A van."

  Vans were suspicious. They hid too much, like a half dozen soldiers, Greene thought to himself, and smiled in the dark.

  "Goin' past," Davis said softly. "Turnin' right at the corner."

  Greene whispered into the ball mike of his headpiece. "Gamma team, van headed toward you."

  There was no reply, which was standard for a dead quiet situation. Greene knew gamma team leader had gotten his message.

  "Another one," Davis whispered a minute later. "Dark sedan, a compact . . . it's slowing down . . . passing the corner . . . okay, it went past, straight ahead. Now it's pulling over . . . parking. Its lights just went off. One man getting out. Over six feet, slim build. He's crossed the street, walking back toward us . . . stopped at the cross street, looking down after the van."

  "Gamma team, do you have that van in view?" Greene asked.

  "Didn't show up on this end," came the reply. Shite, Greene thought. That meant it must have stopped against the southwestern wall, the one place they hadn't stationed a surveillance squad. The old man had said there was no need, since the wall was forty feet high, topped with razor wire, and eight feet thick, the last surviving wall of the medieval stronghold that had once stood there. "Need a bloody H-bomb to blow through that," the old man had said.

  All right, then, if these bastards were the jailbreakers, they'd have to come around to one of the observed walls. Greene pushed Davis aside and looked through the eyepiece.

  The man was still standing looking down the street in the direction the van had gone. There was a tension in his attitude, and Greene could see that his mouth was partly open. He started walking slowly until he disappeared past the outer wall of the prison, and out of Greene's sight. Greene did a visual 360 degrees, but saw no other vehicles or persons.

  "Get ready," he told his men. They put on their gas masks and helmets, and placed their weapons across their knees. Two men on either side turned and set their hands on the pushbars that would drop both sides of the fake van.

  They sat there, tense as hell, for seven minutes. Then, suddenly, the sirens began to howl, and through the eyepiece Greene could see swirling lights. "Go!" he barked.

  The sides fell away from the disguised bivouac, and the men jumped out and rushed toward the corner around which the van and the man on foot had gone. There was no van there, but the man was about fifty yards away. He saw Greene and his men, and started running in the opposite direction. The sirens continued to blare as they charged after him. Then lights shone on them from a vehicle that had swung around the far corner and was advancing upon the fleeing man, who stopped and dived to one side.

 
In another second the vehicle was on Greene and his men, who had to leap to the side to avoid being crushed. It was the van they had seen earlier, and Greene ordered his team to fire at it, but by the time they picked themselves up and aimed, the van had turned the corner.

  In the meantime, the man on foot had scrambled upright, and was once more running toward the far end of the street. "Halt!" Greene yelled, and fired a burst of bullets that chattered off the surface of the street two yards to the man's right. "Continue to run and you will be fired upon!" The man stopped, his hands in the air.

  Greene and his squad secured the man, patted him down for weapons, and removed his wallet. There was no identification in it whatsoever. "Look," said the man in a midlands accent, "I'm really afraid there's been a bit of a cockup here. I was driving about and happened to notice that van, and I—"

  "Put a cork in it," Greene said, jamming the barrel of his weapon under the man's chin. "What are you driving around for with no identification papers? Suppose you give me your name, and damn quick."

  "I, uh, I'd really rather not say, uh, officer."

  "That's Sergeant-Major—Sergeant-Major Greene. And maybe you'd rather not say, but you'd better."

  "Look, Sergeant-Major, I was just out for a bit of fun, you know . . . and if I was caught at it, I preferred not to have my identity known. Very embarrassing. So I figured I'd give a false name, and no one would be the wiser, see?"

  "Yeah, I see all right, but that was if you got nicked for soliciting a prostitute, which, as you damn well know, does not constitute a crime. However, aiding and abetting a prison break does."

  "Aiding and . . . you mean you think I have something to do with . . . with whatever's going on here?"

  "Very much looks to me like you're the lookout," said Greene. "You're under arrest on suspicion of terrorism, mate. You can either tell us your name now, or we'll get the information from your car registration." He nodded back toward the corner where the little car was parked.

  The man look startled, then shook his head. "I'm sorry, Sergeant-Major. I'm afraid I can't tell you who I am." He smiled. "My marriage means a great deal to me. More than my freedom, even."

  Somewhere in the distance, they heard gunfire, short sharp bursts over the howling of the sirens.

  Chapter 27

  Joseph was immediately remanded to Hixton Prison, which in itself would have been a nightmare of bureaucracy, but was made far worse by the violence that had swept through the facility as the result of the escape of Kevin Brady, the IRA terrorist. Though Joseph did not hear the story of what had happened, he had seen a number of dead and wounded men, guards and inmates alike, carried past the remand area on stretchers to waiting ambulances.

  Though no one made reference to it as he was being processed into custody, he knew all too well what had happened. The Prisoner—his Prisoner—the one who they had nearly found in New York and then again in Utah, had been here. Joseph had actually seen him for the first time, down that dark street where the British government's trap had been set. The man hadn't looked in Joseph's direction, but Joseph had known him nonetheless. He had been in profile, standing across the street from the parked van, and in the street light's glow Joseph saw his face, the same Christ-like face he had seen in his dreams.

  And then the van had driven around the corner, and the man had walked into the wall.

  At first Joseph couldn't believe that he had seen it. He looked at where the man had disappeared, but there was no door, no opening into the thick stone. He felt all around the mortar holding the heavy rocks in place, but there were no crevices at all.

  Through the wall? Could the man actually have gone through the wall? Joseph stood there, staring at the solid wall, thinking about Newton's laws of motion and Lavoisier's law of conservation of mass, about entropy and density and the possibility of molecules in one solid object passing through and around the molecules of another, and thinking that maybe he was going crazy and hadn't seen this after all, and that it was just another one of those stupid dreams, when the sirens started blaring, and the soldiers were around the corner and on top of him.

  He had tried the bullshit looking-for-sex story, but they hadn't bought it, and now here he was, remanded, fingerprinted, photographed, deloused, and garbed in a prison jumpsuit, being walked to a cell through one of the oldest and grimiest prison halls he had ever had the misfortune to see. The two guards with him were pissed as hell, yet somehow delighted to have gotten their hands on one of the blokes who had aided in the assault on their prison, and possibly left several of their comrades, maybe even their best friends, dead.

  "We've got a right special cell for you, Mister John Doe, terrorist extraordinaire," the more talkative of the pair said, giving "extraordinaire" an outrageously phony French accent. "'Cause of all this fuss your goddamn pals made, we can't put you in with the general population, so we're gonna put you in Longneck Peter's cell. Not a soul down in that wing, not in years. You'll be all by your goddamn self, just you and Peter."

  "And who's Peter?" Joseph asked in his impeccable accent.

  "Peter's the little Irish pansy who hanged himself in there eighty years back with his two shoelaces. Stretched the bastard's neck somethin' awful, it did. Finally had to quit puttin' prisoners in there."

  "Why's that?" Joseph said, anxious to move the story along and ingratiate himself in the hopes that the two prison officers wouldn't kick him to sleep.

  "'Cause they kept hangin' themselves. Peter would come to 'em at night, y'see, and tell 'em to. Leastways, that's what one of the poor bastards said who we found before he'd choked. He was the only one as survived. So say your prayers before you shut your eyes, you poncy shite."

  The wing was damp and chilly and smelled of bad drains, and Joseph saw no other prisoners in the darkened cells. Longneck Peter's cell was all the way at the end, down a steep incline, and Joseph had to step through several puddles of water before they arrived at the cell door.

  It was not a solid steel door, as were on the cells in the other parts of the prison, but thick iron bars. The distance between them was scarcely wide enough to slip a hand through. The silent officer unlocked the cell, and the other one pushed Joseph inside. There was a wooden stool, a toilet and sink, and a cot with a stained and mildewed mattress.

  "Sorry about the accommodations, but you know how things are." The officer pointed toward the ceiling, where a large black timber ran the width of the cell. "That's where they generally hang themselves from. Pretty handy, isn't it?" The officer looked down at Joseph's prison issue slippers. "Too bad, no laces. You could always tear your clothes into strips, though. A lot of them did that."

  "I don't think I'll bother," Joseph said. The last thing he planned to worry about was some moldy ghost story. "I'm sure I'll sleep very well indeed." He spread his blanket on the cot. Fortunately it was big enough so that he could lie on it and fold the rest over to cover him. He wouldn't be warm, but he probably wouldn't freeze.

  "Well, we hope you enjoy your stay," said the officer. "And if you yell, yell loud—you're a long way away."

  They shut and locked the cell door behind him, and the light from the hall diminished. There was no bulb in the cell. Joseph sat on the cot and listened as the officers' footsteps receded up the hall. When he could no longer hear them, he got up and looked around his cell in the semi-darkness.

  There wasn't much to look at. The cell was below ground level, and there were no windows, only a wall of heavy stone.

  Despite its age, the mortar was secure, as Joseph found when he attempted to dig some away with his fingernails. There would certainly be no escaping from Hixton for him, not unless, he thought bitterly, the Prisoner returned and walked him through the stone wall.

  Try as he might, Joseph couldn't imagine himself in a worse situation. If he revealed himself as a CIA agent, their entire cover would be blown, and he would return to the States in disgrace, if the Company and Skye confirmed his story in the first place. If he kept silent, he
was a terrorist, and Hixton might turn out to be the most hospitable prison in which he was kept.

  At least they wouldn't be able to trace him through the car. It was Company, and was spotless. It didn't even exist. That in itself might lend credence to his story if he decided to go the "I'm a spy" route. But the success of that might be decided for him. He was sure that his photograph was already winging its way toward the CIA and FBI for possible identification. For the time being, there wasn't anything he could do except sit in the cell and think about which lie to tell next.

  The next day he was given two dreadful meals, and went through seven hours of questioning. He held to the story that he was a resident of Carlisle who had been looking for a prostitute when he had found himself in the middle of the breakout. Then why don't you tell us who you are? they asked him. Why does your car have a false registration and serial number? Don't you think it's better that your wife knows you've been catting about than that she sees your picture in the paper as a terrorist?

  He knew they knew he was lying, and by the end of the day their frustration had led them to minor physical assaults, the kind that would leave no marks. They clapped their hands over his ears from behind, and twisted his ears, along with a number of other minor tortures in their repertoire. Still, Joseph did nothing but howl his innocence, as any wrongly accused burgher would. They threw him back in his cell and gave him his second meal, a piece of unidentifiable meat and a boiled potato. At least they were hot.

  He pushed the metal plate into the hall under the narrow bottom of the cell door, and lay down on the cot. He had been remanded just before dawn, had not slept in all that time, and now was exhausted. There was nothing to do but sleep. Maybe he would dream of someplace much nicer than Longneck Peter's cell in Hixton Prison.

  So Joseph closed his eyes and breathed deeply, trying to center his thoughts on rest. He fell asleep and dreamed of himself in Hixton Prison, and of Longneck Peter hanging from the black beam across his cell, his face in shadow.