The Bombmaker Read Online Free PDF Page B

she didn't turn around. She walked through the doors into the departure area. There was a queue of half a dozen people ahead of her having their luggage checked. A uniformed policeman ran some sort of detector over her suitcase.
    He was in his fifties with the sunburned skin and broken veins of a sailor. He smiled at her and waved her through. Andy wondered what he'd been checking for. Guns? Explosives?
    Drugs? The check had seemed cursory at best, as if he wasn't expecting to find anything.
    The ticket was ready for her at the Aer Lingus sales counter.
    She took it over to the check-in counter and a young man in shirtsleeves checked her in. He asked her about her case - had she packed it herself, had it been out of her sight, did it contain electrical items? Andy barely listened to the questions. They seemed naive. If she hadn't packed it herself, would they open it and go through her belongings? If it contained a bomb,
    would she tell them? The security precautions seemed as ridiculous as the middle-aged policeman with his detector.
    Her daughter had been kidnapped, for God's sake. Taken from her bed in the middle of the night, and she was being asked if she had batteries in her luggage. She had to fight to stop herself from screaming.
    McEvoy tensed as he heard the car pull up outside. He looked at his watch. It was too soon for Canning to have got back from the airport. He picked up his Smith & Wesson, cocked the hammer,
    and moved on tiptoe to the back door. Outside, a car door opened and then slammed shut. Footsteps crunched along the path, towards the cottage. McEvoy flattened himself against the kitchen wall, the gun at the ready. The footsteps stopped.
    McEvoy breathed heavily, his mouth half open, his ears straining to hear what was going on outside. Someone knocked on the door. Three short raps. Then silence.
    'Who is it?' McEvoy called, his finger tense on the trigger.
    There was no reply. 'Who's there?' he repeated. No answer.
    McEvoy took the door key from his jeans pocket and slid it into the lock. He turned it, wincing at the loud metallic click, then pulled his hand away. Far off in the distance, a dog barked.
    Then another, closer. Not police dogs, McEvoy decided. Besides,
    if it was the police, and if it was a raid, they wouldn't knock first.
    He eased closer to the door, grabbed the handle, and pulled it open. There was no one there. He slowly moved across the threshold, the gun still raised. Whoever it was, they weren't there any more. Why hadn't he heard them walk away? A black Ford Scorpio was parked where the Mondeo had been.
    'Is there anybody there?' he called. The only sound was the wind whistling through the conifers at the end of the garden.
    McEvoy held the gun at his side as he walked towards the car.
    The rear of the cottage wasn't overlooked, but he didn't want to risk waving the gun around in the open. The Scorpio was a rental, and it was locked. McEvoy looked around, the wind tugging at his unkempt black hair. He shivered. He was wearing only a thin denim shirt and cotton trousers and he had no shoes on his feet.
    He padded back to the cottage and locked the kitchen door.
    As he went through to the sitting room, something hard was rammed against the side of his neck. 'Surprise!'
    'Fuck,' said McEvoy. 'How the hell did you get in?'
    The gun was taken away from his neck. 'That's for me to know,' said Egan, tucking the gun back into the waistband of his jeans.
    'You couldn't have got in through the back door,' said McEvoy, flicking the safety catch of the .38 into place. 'You were lucky I didn't blow your fucking head off.'
    Egan raised a disbelieving eyebrow and McEvoy felt his cheeks flush with embarrassment. He knew that if it had been for real it would have been his brains and not Egan's that were splattered across the carpet. 'Canning's at the airport?'
    asked Egan. He zipped up his leather bomber jacket and looked around the room. There was a half-empty bottle of Bushmills on the coffee