Vagabond

by Seymour, Gerald

  It was a dour little place that lowered the spirits. Everyone was glad to leave it.

  The man who drove Malachy Riordan was silent. A message had been passed to him that conversation was unwelcome.

  Malachy had no experience of a mission of this sort. He did not know the full range of intelligence gathering that would have been at the beck and call of his enemies. He understood what they could do on the mountain, and on the roads and lanes from Dungannon to Cookstown, Magherafelt and across to Omagh, and Brennie Murphy had taught him the procedures for meetings. Many times he had stood in the middle of wet, wind-lashed fields with others’ ears pressed to his lips. At times, indoors, he had written everything in a notebook then pushed it towards the other men, seen their replies, then thrown the notebook into the fire. He practised best procedure with phones, and sent messages written with a fine nib on cigarette paper. What they could achieve at airports, how much they could get from overhead cameras in a concourse, was beyond his knowledge. Had it been necessary to fly to Nürnberg, not Prague, then to have made the long diversion through Germany and into Poland when a direct road linked the German city to the Czech capital?

  His legs were cramped, his knees constricted, his joints locked. His stomach growled. His view was of drab countryside and a high mountain range on a far-away horizon.

  His concentration had been dulled by a radio station playing country-and-western. Sentimental shit – as was the stuff put out by most of the groups in the back bars of the drinking places tourists might come to in the countryside of Tyrone, Fermanagh and Armagh. The quiet ate into him. He couldn’t offer to drive but the other man’s weariness showed. It had been worse during the night because of the fog and the headlights of the lorries coming at them.

  He saw a church and, in a reflex action, crossed his chest, then a roadhouse and a mini-market, a pension, a sodden garden centre, and bare fields from which the harvest had been taken. A pair of distant deer was grazing on the leftover grain. Then, at a clump of trees, the road seemed to veer right.

  A police car, and a queue of vehicles – lorries, saloons, vans.

  They were past the police car and an officer stood beside it, big in a vest with a machine-gun slung at his neck, and his hands on its body. Malachy thought it one of the many variations on the Heckler & Koch. He could have recited rates of fire if it were on automatic or on single aimed shots. They slowed. His driver chewed gum. Malachy felt sweat on his neck and his gut tightened. The driver had the heater on and wore no pullover or jacket. His jeans were held up with a narrow belt of imitation leather; he did not wear a firearm. They crawled. Half of the road was blocked with a police vehicle parked at an angle. A uniformed officer was checking the papers of some drivers and waving others through; commercial vehicles were not stopped. An easy pattern to recognise. Saloon cars were inspected. One had its boot open. Another officer stood back and covered his colleague. Further ahead, a hundred metres beyond the block, another officer was on guard, his weapon ready in his hands. There were ditches at either side of the road, and, anyway, there had been heavy rain on the fields. His breathing was faster. The driver looked at him, curious, then shrugged. In low gear, they edged forward.

  Malachy Riordan had often wondered how it would be.

  Not at home, not when the dawn knock came – always civil then. Polite to Bridie, careful with his boy and correct with himself. He didn’t think the men from the crime squad, who came to the farmhouse and took him away every few months for interrogation, would have said they hated him. The uniforms, yes. The men at checkpoints who would never achieve promotion, who’d have reckoned he looked at them as a hangman would – they would have loathed him. Three cars in front, one lorry, then the block. He wondered how it would be if they took him out and tried to put the cuffs on him. Would he struggle or try to break and run, chancing their aim? How would it be in the cells of a Polish police station, with the Five people coming to see him and laughing in his face? A boy from Dundalk had been taken down in Lithuania and was looking at cell walls now. He’d rot. Malachy would be no martyr, as his father had been – as the men named on the monument at Cappagh had been. He’d be forgotten and rotting. His breath came faster, and his legs felt leaden. If he ran they would shoot him. The turn of the lorry now, waved on through. The car ahead was driven by a woman and Malachy Riordan could see her blonde hair. She was waved on. The police officer gestured for them to stop. Malachy saw that the finger of the one who was covering the colleague was against the trigger guard. An impassive face. Bored? Perhaps. He wouldn’t be bored if Malachy flung the door open and started to leg it. A ditch, and water in it from the rain. And a field with no cover.

  Who would have touted on him? So few had known the timetable of the journey.

  ‘The car – is it clean?’

  ‘What you mean?’

  ‘Is there a shooter in the glove?’

  He was reaching forward, hand wavering.

  His hand was knocked aside. ‘Course there fucking isn’t – what’s your problem?’

  He saw the gun, the magazine slotted into it, the finger on the trigger guard. Sweat ran. His father would have had a weapon in his hand, and his grandfather. No one in his family had gone quietly, like a bullock at the abattoir on Crew Road in Dungannon. The window was down and the driver was offering his ID, his licence and was asking a question. The glance at the paperwork was momentary, and the bulk of the man filled the window. An answer, short, a wave for them to go forward. The window went up.

  The car pulled away.

  Past the last police officer, he saw the stinger on the grass between the ditch and the road. Up through the gears, and an open road ahead. The driver turned, grinning. ‘Fuck me, you were scared.’

  He sat silent.

  ‘I thought you were a big man, a fighter. Fucking scared.’ He laughed.

  He couldn’t hit him – he wanted to, but he couldn’t. They were accelerating. The driver might have realised he had stepped over a line. Silence fell again. Malachy Riordan was, already, beyond the reach of what and who he knew.

  The boys came down the hill, were off the high ground. The device was inside the curve of a spare tyre, which was in the boot of the small car. They had driven up to the Riordan farm, had gone to the barn where the tyre and the device were, and had loaded it. They had come out and it would have seemed to anyone – police, military, Five – that they were there to collect an old tyre. The child had been at a window, staring out at them: a lifeless little bastard. Warnings rang in their ears.

  They drove down a lane. The rain was heavier. The water flowed in rivers down the tarmac, and was funnelled into two courses because the centre of the lane had gone to grass.

  Because of the rain and the low cloud, which was already heavy over Shane Bearnagh’s Seat behind them, dusk had settled. A fox crossed in front of them and the lights caught the colour of its coat. It seemed not to care about the intrusion they made on its territory. There was a lone bungalow off to the right, with peat smoke billowing from a chimney: the home of a man who had done eight years in the cage but now supported the Shinners. He took the Sinn Féin money for driving hospital visits, and he had done time on an active-service unit with Malachy’s father. They barely saw the fox and neither commented on the home to the right. Their eyes were on the road.

  They were looking for holes.

  In a lane such as this, remote and barely used, there was little call for council work teams to fill ruptures in the surface. They had deepened after last winter’s snowfall, and repairs had not been made in the spring or the summer. When there was rain the holes filled with water. Pearse drove and Kevin scanned the surface for him. It was not possible that either could judge the depth of a filled hole. They had been told that the chemical in the detonators was dangerous, unstable, and should be handled with extreme care. Kevin had said that it was what they used to propel the airbags in cars. Big deal. Who needed to know? What they did need to know was that a slide at any speed i
nto a pothole was more than sufficient to explode the device. It was being ferried down the hill towards the home of Eamonn O’Kane, policeman, and was intended to take his life.

  In each boy there was a rise in tension. They talked little, but the headlights glimmered in the water ahead and they searched for the small lagoons. The can that was loaded with the explosive charge, the copper disc and the detonator rested on an old cushion and was wrapped in towels. They went at barely fifteen miles per hour and searched with increasing anxiety for the gleam of water covering a hole. Nothing to say. The firing of the main charge was well in excess of what was required to demolish their car, and probably enough to spread their body parts up the hedges on either side.

  Before the silence had enveloped them, Pearse had told Kevin the story of a girl, Doloures, whom they had been to school with and whose father drove a post-office van. Doloures had told Pearse about a disco at the community centre by the church in Donaghmore. Would he come with her? The date was given. It was a Friday evening: they worked with Brennie Murphy on a Friday evening. They did tactics and history, and the legends of the Organisation and the ideology stuff. She’d said Friday. He’d said he couldn’t make it. They needed to do tactics because in the field they might come face to face with the C4 Special Operations Branch, who had firepower and special-forces training. Pearse wouldn’t learn how to fight at a Friday-night disco. Maybe she had been set up to invite him, perhaps by a teacher or the priest – because she might test his faith. He’d repeated that he couldn’t make it. She’d said, as if she knew, ‘Get a life, why don’t you? Because you’re with the old guy, Murphy. Because you hang around the Riordan man. It’s over, what they do – or didn’t anyone tell you?’ She was a great-looking girl, and he thought she’d have gone the whole way. He’d told Kevin and his friend had punched his arm. They were solid, joined at the hip.

  They went down the hill, further but slower. The dusk closed around them, but there were lights ahead, to the left. Kevin reached across in the dark to put his hand over Pearse’s. The target area was in front, and the track that led to the home of the policeman’s parents.

  ‘We got there.’

  ‘We fuckin’ did – and no holes. I was near shitting myself.’

  A florist came with two bouquets, ordered from them by phone for delivery before a party started.

  The caterer’s vans arrived with tables, chairs and food. A Transit followed them and a pair of lads unloaded the speakers for the DJ session. An electrician was trailing cables through the cherry trees beside the driveway from which the celebratory lights would hang. A boy from an adjacent farm had brought some long stretches of canvas – they had once covered a silage pit – to spread in the field as a foundation for an overspill car park.

  A neighbour, as he had promised because he was a worrier, had circled the property in the last hour of daylight. He had served in the Ulster Defence Regiment twenty-two years before and reckoned he knew a security risk when he saw one. He had done the perimeter of their land and pronounced it clean. He hadn’t seen the trace of a buried cable, or the innards of a maroon flare, or a black mass secreted in a hedge, or two young men lying on their stomachs in a copse. They had a good view of the road approaching the track and had been told what make of car to look for.

  The sun was dipping. The birds had gone and shadows were flung wide on the grass. In the distance Danny Curnow could see the bright colours of a wreath. Bentinick had said that a German politician had been there the week before and laid it. A small group remained beside the children’s artwork.

  Abruptly Bentinick slapped Danny’s shoulder. ‘It’s you because you’re an agent handler. They’re liars, deceivers. They have no creed but “self”. At the crisis stage, this will depend on you holding the agent in place, a bloody rod up his spine. Not in our time, Desperate, but the name of the game now is evidence. Photographs that prove association, complicity, then conviction in a court of law. The route to that process is through the agent. The going will get hard, dirty, and dangerous. Are you up for it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Whatever it throws at you?’

  ‘Yes.’ It didn’t matter to him whether he believed the effort worthwhile and the risk justified. He was pleased to be asked. ‘And, Mr Bentinick?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What I did, used to do, I’m not apologising for it.’

  ‘Why would you? For bringing you in, Danny, I’m out on a limb.’

  Danny Curnow smiled ruefully. ‘You always were, Mr Bentinick, when the target seemed worthwhile.’

  Many walking alongside the river that divided Yekaterinburg, fourth biggest city in Russia, administrative centre of the Sverdlovsk oblast, would have seen it.

  There were policemen nearby and families with small children who threw bread to the ducks. Some posed loved ones against the the rails where boys put padlocks, then threw away the keys as an expression of eternal devotion, and there were shoppers.

  A van pulled up in the centre of a new bridge. A policeman could have waved it on because stopping the flow of traffic was illegal, but his back was to it. Another officer saw two men get out and go to the back but did not reach for his personal radio or make any attempt to contact his headquarters. A man, bound and gagged but not blindfolded, near naked but for his underpants, was dragged out. He was heavy and difficult to manoeuvre because of the concrete that encased his legs below the knees. He was heaved up. For a moment he seemed suspended, feet over the rail, backside on it. Then he toppled. There was a splash, and he was gone. The river in the centre was deep and the current strong. Those who had seen it would have disbelieved what they thought they had seen.

  It would be reported and talked about. A young man had climbed too fast and given offence. That would be remembered.

  The head came round the door of Jocelyn’s office. ‘Heard from our man?’

  ‘Hello, George – only at sparrow fart this morning. Right now he’ll be out on his rounds.’

  The eyes sparkled and the mouth had a trace of mischief. Few in the building – no one else of Jocelyn’s rank – knew the director general by name. She could have analysed the long-standing friendship between him and the withdrawn, distant Matthew Bentinick. To George, Bentinick was ‘our man’. She knew that George came by often and would hear in her room, if the door was open, the light tap at Bentinick’s window. The men were opposites but respected each other. She fancied that the director general envied the loose reins on Bentinick’s activities, and sanctioned them. She’d heard others on the corridor and on different floors refer to the closeness of the relationship as ‘inappropriate’. Now he came in and eased the door shut.

  She grimaced. ‘I can only offer you water.’

  He shook his head. ‘You understand the motivation?’

  ‘Once we had names in the frame, places and dates, the focus was sharp.’

  ‘As expected. It won’t be about some personal vengeance – legitimate targets and legitimate motives.’

  ‘A good target, George, and worth the effort.’

  ‘He said something to me about nailing the miscreant to the floorboards. Big nails.’

  ‘He won’t do it, of course. Flies out of there tomorrow and it’ll come to climax a couple of days later – unless we hit a head wind.’

  ‘The man he took . . . ?’

  The mischief had left the mouth and the light the eyes. Jocelyn found it hard to imagine her director general with a killer streak.

  ‘Matthew knows what to do with him. He’s taken him out for the day. They’re doing the rounds of age-old atrocities. I think Matthew was concerned that in the years since he went adrift then—’

  She was interrupted, quietly but firmly: ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘We called him Vagabond.’

  ‘I remember.’ Fingers together, joints flexed. ‘Matthew spoke well of him.’

  ‘He was damaged by the old work – enough were, but he was the best. And Matthew needed the best this time
.’

  ‘He’s got a nice girl out there, promising, but probably squeamish with a thumbscrew. Matthew said her Joe was stringing her along, but Vagabond wouldn’t allow it.’

  ‘Vagabond’s being toughened up today before things start tomorrow and catch fire. Matthew’s confident he’ll do the business.’

  ‘Thank you, Jocelyn. Always good to be in the picture.’

  ‘Any time, George.’

  The door closed, and she again opened her screen.

  They waited at the bus stop across the road from the entrance.

  Nothing much had changed. He was even wearing the same shirt and socks as he had at Gough – and registering the same sensations. He recognised them.

  It was always slow at the start. They used to say, ‘Prior Planning and Preparation Prevent Piss Poor Performance.’ The seven Ps were part of the creed. In place in good time. A look at the ground and a tweak to the motivation. He didn’t complain. The pace would quicken. It always started slow and the trick was to squash down impatience. When the climax came it would be at the pace of a scudding storm. It always was. He thought he was ready.

  They were two of a kind, who did not do small-talk, not even about the weather. They stood, at first in silence, neither looking at his watch to see if the bus would be along soon or was running late. Bentinick’s pipe smoke smelt good. Bentinick would never have fiddled his expenses, but that might be where honesty ended. As minutes went by, they began to talk. Suggestions and refinements, how it might happen at the end, if the cards stacked well. A query from Danny, and a nod from Bentinick. Much was uncertain, but a plan had been hatched before the bus came.

  Chapter 9