The Hostage by Duncan Falconer Read Free Book Online

allowing a faster entry and exit. The trick was to jerk the steering wheel and flick the tyre out of the ditch after the apex. If the tyre didn’t eject the car would spin out of the turn and then Brennan would likely shoot him if they crashed.
    Sean went through the turn easily and bombed on down the road. He had been selected for this task because he had a reputation for out-driving police cars. In fact his record was one hundred per cent. He often did it just for fun, bombing past a stationary police car in a small town or village and then leading a chase through the countryside until he lost it.
    The road straightened out like a rail for at least a mile, with a small humped bridge halfway along it. Sean smiled to himself as he red lined it. His plan this time was to go airborne.

Chapter 3
    Paul Healy sat with a pair of headphones around his neck in the back of an old Ford Transit van opposite an array of jerry-rigged electronics equipment bolted into a basic framework.The gobbledygook sound of the secure communications emitted from a pair of small speakers. Healy was in his early fifties, balding and looked old and tired, like someone who was nearing the end of a long, exhausting journey having discovered halfway through how pointless it all was. Tommy sat watching him from the driver’s seat, smoking a cigarette, dog-ends all around his feet. Tommy had been given two specific responsibilities: drive the van, and protect Healy, with his own life if need be. He watched Healy with contempt. There was no way he was going to give his life for that man.
    Tommy was suspicious of Healy for no other reason than he was not a member. Tommy didn’t have a friend in the world who was not a militant pro-Republican, a member of the Irish Republican Army. Although Healy was Irish Catholic, he was just a hired hand and that made him untrustworthy. If he cared about the cause he would not be taking money. Healy could have been forced to do the job, but experience had taught the organisation that it was far more effective to steal the money to pay for the professional than to steal the professional and threaten him to work for his life. They needed Healy, reputed to be the best in the whole of Ireland at what he did, to be on best form for this job.
    Tommy was right to think Healy didn’t give a damn about the cause, but Healy had no love for the Brits either, not after what they had done to him. He had only one true lifelong love - solving puzzles. The more complicated they were the greater the challenge and the purer the high if he succeeded in cracking them. He should have been born fifty years earlier. He would have given anything to be a code breaker in the Second World War. He knew everything there was to know about Ultra and the breaking of the German, Japanese and Italian codes. Mathematics and psychology had been the primary skills then; now it was as much about knowing computers and electronics. But Healy had made sure he had kept up to date in that field too. If he had not screwed up all those years ago he could have ended up working for MI6 or possibly even the CIA. But now those ambitions were dead and buried for ever.The irony was that his childhood dream could now be fulfilled only by working for the other side, thugs and morons like these.Terrorists. He had worked for several organisations over the years: Libyans, Palestinians and Iranians. They were pretty much all the same as far as he was concerned. Some were just a bit more insane than others. The jobs were nothing to brag about but at least he made a living doing what he enjoyed and that, surely, was the important thing.
    Tommy listened to the unidentifiable sounds coming over the speakers and watched Healy as he concentrated on every transmission and scribbled notes into a large notebook.‘Why do you listen to that if you can’t understand a word?’ he asked.
    ‘I may not be able to understand a single word, but there’s a lot of information to be gained,’