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The Ace stood and grabbed a coat from the stand in the corner of the office and set off, a warm glow replacing the gnawing anxiety.
70
‘ARE WE ALLset?’ said Max, looking at Janie and Barney across the surface of the table in Barney’s van, which was in a quiet spot in the car park that sat at the beginning of Holyrood Park in the centre of Edinburgh.
‘I’m all set. Are we good to go?’ said Barney.
‘Give it a minute, can we finish our tea first? I don’t know about you guys, but I’m bloody knackered,’ said Max, yawning extravagantly.
‘Goes wi’ the turf, mate. We’re almost there now.’ Barney drained his cup before reaching down and bringing out the drone case, flipping the catches open and pulling out the gadget. He quickly extended the arms and slotted the propeller blades in place, then the battery.
‘How long can it stay up?’ said Janie.
‘This is a new battery, so forty-five minutes, especially if I get a decent height and go into a steady hover.’
‘We need good images; I want it lurid and in four K,’ said Max. ‘It will be, lad, don’t fret.’
‘Go for it.’
Barney slid the van door open and laid the drone on the ground. He fiddled with the control unit, and the blades began to spin. The drone shot straight up with a familiar whine. Within a few seconds, the sound had gone.
‘Bloody remarkable, I wish we’d had these in Afghan, it would’ve saved a lot of smashing down of compound walls.’
‘Same here. Wish I’d had them in Crossmaglen, would have savedbeing up to my knees in peat bogs. Right, hovering over target location now. Footage is streaming to the iPad on the side.’ Barney nodded at the worktop.
Max leant over, picked up the tablet and woke the screen. A pin-sharp image of Holyrood Park was displayed. The few pedestrians were like small dots of colour in the wide-open expanse of vivid green grass, with the grey hues of the city to the east.
‘Okay, tighten in. Let’s see what view we’ve got,’ said Max.
‘Zooming in now.’ Barney fiddled with the controls once again, the wide image narrowing sharply until it focused in on a small path that came off Queen’s Drive, the long, straight road that bisected the north of the park.
‘Tighter, I want to be able to read the sign, Barney.’
‘Wrong angle. I’ll never get the sign.’
‘I was joking, Barney, as tight as you can.’ The image zoomed in again on a small square of concrete, close to the shape of a leather patch.
‘This is as tight as I can go without getting lower.’
‘It’s fine. Now we wait. He’ll be here soon.’
‘Why here?’ said Barney.
‘What, St Margaret’s Well? That was Janie’s idea.’
‘Close to the car park so we can sit here without standing out, close to the city so The Ace doesn’t have far to come and easy to fly the drone at a decent height and pick out the corrupt bastard,’ she answered.
‘Any other reason?’ said Max, his voice laced with sarcasm.
‘No,’ said Janie, a little too quickly.
‘Fibber,’ said Max.
Janie shifted uneasily in her seat. ‘Well, the water flows from a pipe in a carved grotesque mask. It just seemed a little symbolic to me. I mean The Ace has been shielding behind a mask of respectability for years, right?’
‘You are such a bloody geek,’ Max said, chuckling.
‘Piss off.’
