Renegades

by Hutson, Shaun;

  Georgie hissed in pain-as one needle-like sliver sliced her cheek. She felt blood running down her face. The cold wind screaming in through what was left of the windscreen seemed to deaden the pain. She saw that Maguire was steadying himself for another burst of fire.

  Georgie pressed her foot down as hard as she could on the accelerator and the Cavalier rapidly closed the gap on the Sierra. Closed it, cut it and ...

  She slammed into the back of the fleeing vehicle, smashing one of its tail lights. Pieces of glass and plastic housing skittered away on the road. She rammed it again, the jolt throwing her back in her seat, but she gripped the wheel more tightly, watching with satisfaction as Maconnell struggled to keep control of the Sierra.

  A third time she rammed it, seeing Maguire knocked off balance by the impact.

  Now. Do it now.

  Using one hand to steer, she reached into her jacket and pulled the .357 free, resting if against the window frame ahead of her for support. She knew there’d be one hell of a kick; she needed all the help she could get. She thumbed back the hammer, feeling the six pound pull on the trigger as she squeezed it.

  The Magnum bucked in her fingers, the butt slamming into the heel of her hand, making it tingle. But she fired again: The retort was deafening, mingling with the howling wind and the scream of tyres as the Sierra skidded again.

  The first bullet blasted away the remaining rear light on the fleeing car, the second punched a huge hole in the back windscreen. Glass was sent flying into the car by the explosion and she saw the two men on the back seat dive for cover.

  Behind her another police car had joined the chase but Georgie was concerned only with what was ahead of her.

  A car reversing out into the street.

  The Sierra swerved, slamming into another car on the opposite side of the road.

  Georgie hit the tail end of the reversing car so hard the Chevette turned almost one hundred and eighty degrees. A massive jolt shook the Cavalier; she grunted as the steering column struck her in the chest. She almost dropped the .357, the breath momentarily knocked from her.

  Behind her the blaring of sirens was deafening.

  She drove on.

  Maguire was up on the back seat again, steadying the Skorpion.

  He fired two quick bursts.

  The first peppered the radiator of the Cavalier. The second was aimed low, bullets screeching up off the street.

  Both her front tyres were shot out.

  She heard the bangs, felt the car begin to slide out of control. Knew she’d never control it around the corner, which was coming at her like something on a fairground ride gone mad.

  She wrestled with the wheel but lost the battle. The Cavalier hit the kerb doing sixty-five. It flipped, rose into the air, spinning, before finally crashing down on its passenger side, the door punched in. As it continued to roll Georgie gripped the wheel tight, shoulders drawn up, her head sunk low to avoid any damage to her neck as the car spun like a toy a petulant child had tossed away.

  It felt as if someone had taken her by the lapels and was shaking her. She closed her eyes tightly, not wanting to see the world spinning round through the shattered windscreen.

  The car finally came to a halt, flopping down on its roof, turning slightly.

  She felt sick. Her head was spinning. She tasted blood in her mouth but didn’t know where it came from. Perhaps she was bleeding internally. There was no pain, though. Just the nausea, waves of it washing over her. There was a ringing in her ears.

  She managed to push open the driver’s side door and fall out onto the pavement, her face pressed to the cool concrete.

  She heard sirens.

  Saw people running towards her.

  Then there was only darkness.

  Fifty-Three

  The wound on her cheek was a superficial one; she probably wouldn’t even have a scar to show for it. Georgie was more concerned with the constant pounding inside her skull. It felt as if ten men with pneumatic drills were trying to tunnel their way out.

  The headache had grown steadily worse during the questioning, the fluorescents in the main interview room of Hastings Street police station adding to her discomfort. She sat forward at the desk, shielding her eyes as the barrage of questions were directed at her.

  She couldn’t remember how long they’d kept her there; all that she could remember was the chase, the gunfire and the crash.

  The officers questioning her seemed to be in another dimension, their questions floating towards her as if spoken by disembodied inquisitors. Georgie kept her eyes closed most of the time, irritated by the fluorescents, angered by the splitting headache.

  Angered, too, by the fact that Maguire and his men had escaped.

  They had brought Doyle in around eleven o’clock, and threatened to charge him with illegal possession of a firearm.

  Or anything else they could think of.

  Georgie had been told she was likely to be charged with a breach of the peace, causing an affray, endangering lives, reckless driving. The list seemed to go on and on until it reached attempted murder.

  They had been questioned separately, then together.

  When she next looked at her watch it was approaching two in the morning. She felt tired, irritable and dirty. The blood she had tasted in her mouth when the car crashed had run down from the cut on her cheek. One tooth was cracked as well, she discovered, probing it with her tongue.

  The two counter-terrorists allowed their captors to question them, never replying to any of the enquiries.

  It was Doyle who finally decided he’d had enough.

  He gave them Donaldson’s telephone number in London and waited while they rang it.

  He had merely shrugged at Georgie as the RUC man went off to make the call, returning about ten minutes later with a disappointed look on his face.

  They were, he told his superiors, indeed British counter-terrorists. Their identities had been confirmed from London.

  Within thirty minutes they were released, their weapons restored to them.

  Anxious to get the English agents away from the police station, the RUC put them in separate cars and had them driven back to the Excelsior.

  On the way back Doyle asked if a figure had been put on the number of casualties at the Windsor Park blast. He was told that so far more than thirty people had been killed and four times that number injured, many critically.

  Doyle asked to be dropped off about two hundred yards from the hotel. Not that, it really mattered any more.

  When he finally entered the foyer he found Georgie sitting, head in hands, on one of the seats close to reception. They rode the lift together to the tenth floor. She told him she was going to shower.

  He told her to come along to his room in ten minutes.

  Doyle’s small case was packed when Georgie entered the room, dressed in just a towelling robe. She wandered across to the bed and sat down, glancing at the case and at what lay on top of the carefully folded clothes.

  It was an MPSK sub-machine gun.

  Despite being only eight inches in length, the sub-gun was capable of firing over 650 9mm rounds a minute in the right hands and, she concluded, they didn’t come much better than Doyle.

  He sat down on the bed facing her and flipped the case shut.

  ‘The bastards tricked us,’ he said. ‘That fucking bomb ...’ He allowed the sentence to trail off.

  ‘Your hunch was right, though.’

  ‘Fat lot of good it was to the poor sods who got blown up, eh?’

  She nodded.

  ‘So what now?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘They know we’re after them,’ he said. ‘This incident tonight has blown what little cover we had anyway. There’s no point in staying in Belfast. I think it’s time we moved into the Republic. Fight the bastards on their home ground. Besides, I think it’s time we found out who this Mr David Callahan is. I’d like to know what the IRA are doing driving around in his car.’

  ‘Fake
name?’ she suggested.

  ‘More than likely, but we’ve got to check it out.’

  ‘What makes you think they’ll move into the Republic?’

  ‘They’ve pulled too much exposure here. They need to lie low for a while, too.’ He got to his feet, walked around the bed and touched her cut cheek with the back of his hand. He smiled.

  ‘You got too close to them. I think you scared them,’ he told her.

  ‘I would have killed them, Doyle,’ she told him.

  He nodded, then bent and kissed her lightly on the lips.

  When he straightened up he turned away from her, looking towards the window.

  ‘I bet Donaldson didn’t appreciate being woken up at that time in the morning,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘We’re lucky he verified who we were. We’d have been right up shit creek if he hadn’t.’ Doyle turned to face her again.

  ‘How long will it take you to pack?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Ten minutes.’

  He nodded.

  She got to her feet and made for the door, leaving Doyle to gaze out of the bedroom window, out over the city. He was glad she was all right, relieved that she hadn’t been injured but he didn’t tell her, wouldn’t tell her.

  Couldn’t.

  Don’t drop the barriers now. No need.

  Keep that distance.

  He sucked in a weary breath.

  Ten floors below, seated in a car parked across the street from the hotel, other eyes were also watching.

  But they were watching the hotel entrance, waiting for Georgie and Doyle to appear.

  They didn’t know how much longer they’d have to wait, they’d already been sitting there for over two hours.

  They had played this waiting game before.

  It was only a matter of time.

  Fifty-Four

  Simon Peters took one final drag on his cigarette and tossed the butt out of the window. He held the smoke in for a moment, then blew it out in a long blue stream.

  The whole interior of the Ford Escort was full of smoke.

  Beside him Joe Hagen puffed away at a Dunhill. In the back seat Eamonn Rice and Luke McCormick were also smoking. It was like sitting in a mobile ashtray.

  They were parked on a hill overlooking Milltown cemetery. The sun was rising slowly in the morning sky, dragging itself reluctantly towards the heavens, spreading an orange glow over the countryside. A thin film of mist still hung in the air, like dry ice. As Peters stepped out of the car it swirled around his feet. The grass was slippery underfoot but he walked with assurance, breathing in the crisp morning air, clearing his lungs of cigarette smoke.

  It was so peaceful up here at this time, he mused, watching the sun climb higher in the sky. He had often driven up here and sat for an hour or so, watching over the city as it woke from its slumbers. The sound of early morning birds twittering in the trees only served to reinforce the beauty of the scene. He sometimes thought that the newsmen who came to the province to report on the violence should see scenes like this, should watch the sun staining everything gold. Should hear the birds singing. But they weren’t interested in the beauty of Northern Ireland. None of them. They could see no further than the troubles in the Falls Road. The bomb blasts in Londonderry. The sniping in Clonard. They saw what they wanted to see. They saw his country being crushed into the ground by years of bigotry, hatred and jealousy.

  Many victims of that conflict lay below him in Milltown now. The cameras came there when there was a funeral. They came to record death with a relish Peters found obscene. And he had seen enough death during his time in the IRA to know it for the vile thing it was. But death was a necessary part of the province. Just as violence had been for the last twenty years. He had caused some of those deaths himself: soldiers, security men, civilians when necessary. But it all had a purpose. His was not the campaign of a psychopath. He had no more time for the slaughter than those he had fought against, but for Simon Peters it was a way of life. The only way to free the country he loved.

  No one had been happier than he when the Stormont peace summit had finally gathered, but the promise of an end to the bloodshed, the hope of a united Ireland had been dashed. Blown away in a hail of bullets by men who dared to call themselves members of the very organisation to which he was so proud to belong.

  Those same men had been responsible for the deaths of over sixty people at Windsor Park the previous night.

  Men like James Maguire.

  Peters knew Maguire well; he had even worked with him on a number of jobs during the past few years. He knew some of the men he had with him, too.

  Men like Billy Dolan and Mick Black.

  Even the thought of them set the knot of muscles at the side of his jaw pulsing angrily.

  He would not let them destroy his own dreams. He would find them before they could do so.

  Find them and kill them.

  Joe Hagen climbed out of the car and wandered over to join him, hands dug into the pockets of his trousers. Dew darkened his suede boots as he walked across the long grass.

  He stood beside Peters, watching the sunrise and the city coming to life beneath it as if coaxed into stirring by the warm rays.

  ‘My father used to say that the sunrise was the colour of the gold on the tricolour,’ Hagen murmured reflectively. ‘When people used to talk about the gold meaning the Catholics and the green meaning the Protestants he’d say it was the bit in the middle you had to worry about. The part where the two colours could never join.’

  ‘Quite a philosopher, your old fella,’ Peters nodded, smiling.

  ‘He was that. I wish he could have lived long enough to see a United Ireland.’

  ‘If we don’t find Maguire soon then none of us will see a United Ireland, because things will go back to how they were before,’ Peters said, his smile fading.

  On a branch nearby a thrush chirped contentedly, then flew off, its outline a black arrowhead against the brightening sky.

  ‘I spoke to Coogan this morning,’ said Peters. ‘There’s at least one English agent on Maguire’s tail, too. The RUC are looking for him as well. Belfast is too hot for him and his men right now. They’ve probably already crossed over the border.’

  ‘Who’s the British agent?’ Hagen wanted to know.

  ‘James Bond,’ said Peters flatly. ‘How the fuck do I know?’

  ‘He could get in the way, Simon.’

  ‘God help him if he does. This is our business, not the bloody Brits’.’

  He sucked in another lungful of crisp air, turned and began walking slowly back towards the car.

  ‘I think it’s time we paid a visit to some of the families of these ... renegades.’ He emphasized the word with contempt. ‘If Maguire and his men have crossed the border, someone might know where they’ve gone. Someone close to them.’

  ‘And if they won’t talk?’ Hagen wanted to know.

  Peters smiled.

  ‘They’ll talk. I guarantee it.’

  Fifty-Five

  BRITTANY, FRANCE:

  They weren’t reporters.

  Channing knew that much from the moment the couple stepped from the car. The new arrivals were too smart to be press.

  The man wore a light grey suit, immaculately pressed and tailored. He was powerfully built, his shoulders broad, his features heavy.

  The woman with him was dressed in a black dress which came to just above her knees, hugging her fine figure tightly. She had a red leather jacket draped around her shoulders. The slight breeze stirred her shoulder-length brown hair as she walked.

  Channing drew a hand across his forehead and sighed, eyeing the couple suspiciously as they drew nearer. The man was smiling.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said, nodding at Channing.

  He returned the greeting, still running appraising eyes over the couple.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked warily, expecting the answer even before it came.

  ‘We want to see the window,’ Da
vid Callahan told him. ‘We’ve come from Ireland; we flew in last night.’ He introduced himself and Laura.

  ‘Why do you want to see it?’ Channing asked.

  ‘I have an interest in artefacts like this.’ Callahan looked the other man up and down. ‘Who are you, anyway? How come you’re here?’ There was an edge to Callahan’s voice that Channing wasn’t slow to notice.

  ‘My name is Mark Channing. I’m the one who found the window,’ he said.

  ‘Good for you,’ Callahan countered acidly. ‘May we see it?’

  ‘I am here trying to work. All I want is some peace and quiet.’

  ‘That’s fine by me, Mr Channing, but we have a right to see the window if we want to. You can’t keep us from it.’

  ‘Why do you want to see it?’

  ‘You’ve already asked me that.’ Callahan’s temper was beginning to fray.

  ‘We know something about the man who had this church built,’ Laura interjected.

  ‘We’ve been here before,’ added Callahan. ‘Probably before you.’ He was breathing heavily and a vein in his temple throbbed angrily. ‘You don’t own this land, do you, Mr Channing?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Then there is nothing you can do to stop us going inside that church and looking around. You found the window; you’re not its protector, the judge of who should or shouldn’t look at it.’

  Channing still blocked their path to the main door but he could see the anger in Callahan’s eyes, could hear it in his voice.

  ‘We came here out of genuine interest,’ said Callahan. ‘I’ve made a study of Gilles de Rais. This window you’ve found is of concern to me and I don’t intend leaving here until I’ve seen it. Now you can take us and show us the window, step aside and let us in or you can carry on being difficult. But I warn you, Mr Channing, I’m not leaving here until I’ve seen what’s inside that church.’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  ‘I’ll do more than threaten you if you don’t get out of the way,’ snarled Callahan, taking a step forward.