Bandit Country

by Andrew Turpin

“Hope it’s not just boring stuff in the bag?” He raised an eyebrow.

  She grinned and shook her head. “Sorry, Joe, I left my box of toys at home under the bed. You don’t change, do you?”

  He put on a disappointed face and took the bag from her as they walked to the silver Toyota Avensis borrowed from Donovan.

  Johnson briefed her on what Donovan had employed him to do as they drove the fifteen miles back to the apartment, via Falls Road.

  He talked her through the recent upsurge in attacks by dissident Republicans, the pipe bombs and then the sniper attacks, and the background to the chief constable’s death.

  Jayne listened attentively. “So, it’s simple. All we need to know is who’s next on the hit list,” she said.

  He glanced at her. It was her usual dry-witted attempt at a joke, but it cut right to the chase.

  “That might help,” Johnson said. “First, I want to check the background of the guys he’s taken out.”

  That was where Johnson hoped Jayne might be able to help, he explained. Did she, from her time at MI6, have any contacts who might access files held on people by, say, MI5, the army, or the police?

  Jayne pondered for a moment. “I’ve still got a couple of old friends working at MI5 headquarters who might be able to help. Both of them are going back to my time here from ’92 to ’95, but I’ve kept in touch, and we meet up occasionally if they’re in London.”

  She explained that one of them, Noreen Wilson, had worked for the Royal Ulster Constabulary, now called the Police Service of Northern Ireland, before joining MI5 and had done a lengthy stint at the secure police archives unit at Carrickfergus, just outside Belfast, where many of the old files were stored.

  “So she might know where to find what we need,” Jayne said.

  “Okay,” Johnson said. “Maybe for starters she can get names and addresses of the wives or relatives of the men who have been shot by the sniper.”

  “Sure, I’ll ask,” Jayne said. “But first, the important stuff. Have you got me a gun?”

  Johnson nodded. “Always your first request. Yes, I’ve asked O’Neill for a Walther for you and a Beretta for myself. Hopefully he’ll get them today.”

  Johnson parked the Toyota, as instructed by Donovan, a few minutes’ walk away from the apartment block down a side street full of redbrick terraced houses near the local college.

  Shortly after arriving at the apartment, Jayne had her laptop out on the table and had dug out phone numbers of her old MI5 contacts.

  Then she got on the phone. That was what Johnson liked about working with her. She didn’t waste any time.

  Johnson left her to it and went outside onto the balcony, where he could hear her side of the conversation.

  “Hi, Noreen, it’s Jayne Robinson here . . . yes, been a long time . . . no, I’m freelancing these days . . . I left Six, yep, had enough . . . But I’m in Belfast for a short while, a work job . . . Look, I need a favor: we need some information on a couple of people, files if possible. I know it might be tricky but . . .”

  Johnson lit a cigarette and tried to think through some sort of plan.

  They could stay in Belfast and try to ferret out what they could from their contacts. Or they could take the direct approach and go back to where Donovan had taken him on his first day, down to south Armagh, and try and find out more about Duggan there.

  He took a deep drag on his Marlboro.

  They weren’t going to make much headway sitting in Belfast, that was for sure.

  He looked out across Falls Road.

  On the other side, a man came out of the newsstand. There was a newspaper billboard on the sidewalk that read, “Mystery Armagh Sniper Still at Large.”

  The man removed the sheet and put a new one on the board in its place.

  “PM Launches Chief Constable Killing Inquiry," it read.

  When Jayne got off the phone, Johnson finished his cigarette and went back inside.

  “I see you can’t get off the cigs.”

  Johnson coughed. “It’s only when I’m away working. I don’t get the urge at home. Think it’s a stress thing.”

  “Sure, sure. Anyway, my friend Noreen’s on the case. She’s going to chase up those files. If she can’t get them, nobody can,” Jayne said.

  “Great,” Johnson said. “Look, go and put your bags in your bedroom. I’d like to head down to south Armagh. If we’re going to make any progress here, we need to know the lay of the land, what this guy Duggan’s farm looks like.”

  “I don’t need to go there to tell you the lay of the land. It’s bandit country.”

  “Sorry?” Johnson asked.

  “Bandit country. It was Merlyn Rees, the British government’s Northern Ireland secretary, who gave it that tag. That must have been in the mid-’70s. But everybody called south Armagh that when I worked here in the ’90s. Seems like not much has changed.”

  Johnson gave an ironic laugh. He looked at Jayne’s backpack. “You got a flak jacket in there?”

  “No,” she said, grimacing. “But anyway, you’re talking about a sniper with a .50-caliber rifle in his bag. You think a flak jacket’s going to stop a fifty? No chance. You might as well pin a sheet of cardboard to your chest.”

  Tuesday, January 8, 2013

  Forkhill

  Duggan was slouched in a black leather armchair in the living room of his white-painted farmhouse, a MacBook laptop resting on his thighs.

  It was the property that his father had bought when the family moved there from Belfast in the ’70s. One advantage of owning a farm was the space it offered to build whatever he needed. And over the years Duggan had built a number of facilities, some visible, others less so.

  The new four-bedroom place was smart but functional. Granite kitchen, underfloor heating, hardwood stairs, three en suite bathrooms, a spacious office. He had it all to himself.

  Duggan opened the file he had just downloaded from the USB flash drive that Kane had given him.

  It turned out to be a very simple document indeed.

  Draft Community visit Mon 28 January

  School TBD

  2:30 p.m.—BO and DC arrive with Chief Con + dignitaries.

  2:40 p.m.—Activity

  2:50 p.m.—Talk by BO/DC and QA

  3:10 p.m.—Depart for G8

  Duggan read through it a couple times and leaned back to think. This looked very promising.

  Eventually he closed the MacBook, placed it on the floor, and looked over at McGarahan, his broad-shouldered IO, who sat on the other side of the room, his large frame hunched over his own laptop, which was perched on the dining table.

  But before Duggan could speak, McGarahan stroked his chin, coughed, and glanced up at Duggan.

  “You ain’t going to like these,” McGarahan said. “Come over here and have a look at these photos.”

  Duggan waited a few seconds. He didn’t like being told what to do. But the serious tone in McGarahan’s voice was clear. He walked over to the table and peered over his colleague’s shoulder.

  The photograph almost filled McGarahan’s laptop screen, a series of small thumbnails down the left-hand side of the screen telling Duggan that there were several others to view.

  There was a pause as Duggan took in the detail. “Shit. Is that the American again? That’s outside her house. When were these taken?”

  “Wes just emailed these photos down from Belfast,” McGarahan said. “He took them this morning. Doesn’t look good.”

  “Taken this morning! And after the kicking we gave her the other night. Bloody hell. How many are there? Scroll through them.”

  McGarahan flicked slowly forward through the series of photographs, which showed Duggan’s stepdaughter emerging from the front door of her house with Philip Wilkinson and walking down the road to her car.

  What the hell is she doing with that guy? Duggan thought.

  “Go back to that second photo,” Duggan said, when McGarahan had circled through all of them.

&
nbsp; He scrutinized it more closely. It showed Wilkinson and Moira at the gate of the house, facing each other, standing very close.

  “Are they bloody holding hands there, or is it my imagination? Enlarge the photo. Is he in with her or what?”

  McGarahan zoomed in on the picture.

  “Nah, you can’t see properly from this angle whether they are or not,” McGarahan said. “I don’t know, chief, he’s got to be way too old to be her sort. He’s got to be late forties, fifty or so.”

  Duggan swore. “I want you to find out everything you can on that guy. I want him tracked. When he blows his nose I want to know about it. And I want you to put him off. If we can’t put him off, then . . .”

  “Yeah, got it, chief. I’m going to put a couple of the volunteers on him.”

  Duggan’s phone beeped as a message arrived. It was from Fergus Kane’s private burner cell phone number, which clarified the key remaining question from the document Duggan had just downloaded. Venue likely to be the new Whitefield Integrated Primary School. Will call you soon, the text message said.

  Interesting. So the school visit was going to happen.

  Duggan looked up at McGarahan. “I need to get moving with things. We’ve got a lot on our plates now, a lot on our plates. I’m going to head over to Belfast this afternoon now.”

  “Okay. What’s that for?”

  “I’m going back to class, checking out schools.” He winked at the IO.

  Duggan walked back to his armchair and picked up his MacBook. He had acquired it from a lower-level volunteer in the south Armagh brigade the previous spring. The volunteer, known to be a small-time house burglar, had approached him with the computer and presented it to him, telling him he had acquired it at a garage sale and that Duggan might be extremely interested in one of the documents he had found on it.

  Well, the line about acquiring it in a garage sale was clearly bullshit. He’d obviously stolen it.

  But Duggan needed a laptop at the time, and the volunteer had been spot on in his comment about the significance of the document on it—in fact, to Duggan’s astonishment, it was sheer dynamite.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Tuesday, January 8, 2013

  Forkhill

  There was definitely something not right about the large, architect-designed new houses, built on extensive grounds with balconies, patios, floor-to-ceiling picture windows, separate granny annexes, and huge garages.

  They looked oddly out of place amid the battered farm cottages, small white bungalows, and gray steel-roofed barns.

  As they drove, Johnson slowed down and scrutinized a couple of the houses, which stood amid a backdrop of rolling hills that rose green and brown over to the east, crowned by dense woods and gorse bushes.

  The narrow lane, splattered with tractor mud and lined with leafless hawthorn hedges and ivy-covered trees, ran straight south toward the border with the Republic. The low-hanging gray clouds almost seemed to touch the tops of the trees where the land rose up.

  Johnson repeated to Jayne what Donovan and Moira had told him about the cross-border smuggling of cigarettes and diesel to cash in on the differences in duty between the Republic of Ireland and the UK to fund dissident republican activities.

  “These big places are probably diesel mansions, no doubt paid for in cash,” Jayne said. “Reminds me of the marijuana mansions I used to see when I was in Mexico.”

  They noticed a number of large unmarked fuel tanker trucks parked near various farm outbuildings. Johnson pulled over to the side of the road near one of them, and he and Jayne scrutinized the map Moira had given him.

  “Willows Farm must be the next property down this road on the left,” Johnson said. “I’ll just drive past and we’ll take a quick look.”

  He set off again. A couple of hundred yards farther on the right was another large house with outbuildings. As they drew near, a large white van careered out of the driveway to the house and accelerated straight at Johnson’s car on the single-lane road.

  Johnson slowed, thinking the van would do likewise. But it gathered speed instead. At the last second, Johnson slammed on the brakes and swerved sharply left onto a muddy grass shoulder as the van flew past, missing the Toyota by no more than a couple inches. He got a quick glimpse of the driver, a bald man with a black beard, peering out of the van’s side window straight at them.

  “Shit, that was close,” Jayne said. “What the hell was that all about?”

  “I don’t know, but Moira did warn me that the smugglers don’t like visitors driving around and run people off the road if they get too close to a drop. Maybe it was something like that. Or maybe they were just checking us out. Not going to be too many strangers driving around here; it’s the back end of nowhere.”

  Johnson eased back onto the road and continued at a more sedate pace.

  They came over the brow of a small hill, and as they descended on the other side, saw Willows Farm on the left side of the road, right at the point where the speed limit signs switched to kilometers per hour, signifying the border with the Republic.

  “Just pretend to make a phone call,” Johnson said. “There might be cameras. Couple of glances, I’ll slow down a bit as we go past. You know.”

  Jayne nodded and put her cell phone to her left ear.

  There was an array of buildings. Johnson eased off the accelerator as he passed and glanced sideways a couple of times, just enough to register three large green barns, set well back from the road, plus a few smaller outbuildings.

  In front of them, next to the road on the southern side of the site to their right, stood a white-painted house. He caught sight of a gatepost next to the road with a slate sign that said Willows Farm.

  “Trespassers will be shot,” Jayne said.

  “What?”

  “There’s a sign next to the gate—that’s what it says. Smart place he’s got there. I spotted a security camera outside but couldn’t hear any dogs barking.”

  Now in the Republic, they drove on for a mile before Johnson was forced to pull into a gateway as two fuel tankers, both painted plain white with no company logos, headed toward him up the single-lane road in the direction of the Northern Ireland border.

  Jayne looked at him. “And not a cop in sight, five days after the chief constable’s been shot dead,” she muttered.

  It had been half an hour since they had left the M1 that ran between Belfast and Dublin, yet they hadn’t seen a single police car, neither from the Police Service of Northern Ireland nor the Irish police, the Gardaí.

  Tuesday, January 8, 2013

  Belfast

  Just as Johnson and Jayne were navigating the narrow country lane in County Louth, more than forty miles to the northeast, a middle-aged man in dark-rimmed glasses and a baseball cap pulled on a large backpack, opened the rear door of a blue Volkswagen Passat station wagon, and grabbed the black Labrador inside by the lead.

  Duggan was about to take a dog for a walk.

  Jet belonged to one of the men who helped Duggan look after the few sheep that grazed in the fields surrounding his house down near Forkhill. The man had been happy to allow someone else to volunteer to walk him for a change.

  “Come, Jet, out you get. We’re going on a long walk,” Duggan muttered as the dog, frustrated by a seventy-five-minute car journey, bounded out, pulling the lead and almost jerking him off his feet. “No, not that way, you stupid bloody animal, this way.”

  Duggan set off from the spot where he had parked. He walked along the busy Springfield Road for a short distance, then took a left, heading toward Black Mountain, which towered high above the city.

  After about a third of a mile, he came to the site that he was interested in: Whitefield Integrated Primary School, a new school built only a couple of years earlier on the border of the neighboring Catholic and Protestant communities, with pupils from both sides of the sectarian divide.

  Duggan stood and absorbed the detail of the school site.

  The ubiqui
tous eight-foot blue steel fencing that many schools now used as a security barrier encircled the premises, its sharp triple spiked tips acting as a deterrent to potential intruders.

  Beyond that was a large parking lot for staff and visitors and then a series of smart brick, steel, and glass two-story classroom blocks, administration offices, and what looked like a gym. To one side lay a large playing field, including two football pitches.

  Anyone knowing Duggan, if that person had recognized him behind his glasses and incongruous cap, might have wondered why a single man with a grown-up stepdaughter was so interested in a primary school at the other end of the province from his home.

  But the answer had come in a short phone call to Duggan earlier in the day from Kane, made from a phone box outside a pub in the Holywood area of the city.

  The call lasted no more than thirty seconds and added a little more detail to the draft document and short text message Kane had supplied earlier. But it told Duggan most of what he needed to know at that stage.

  During the G8 summit, US President Barack Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron were now definitely scheduled to visit the Whitefield school to highlight the progress made in normalizing society in Northern Ireland.

  The idea was to spin the visit by the two world leaders to the school, located between the Catholic Whiterock area and the Protestant Highfield area of Belfast, as a massive statement of optimism for Northern Ireland’s future.

  But to Duggan, and other dissident Republicans, it was an exercise in political bullbaiting. He saw it as a proverbial red rag by the British to those who had never abandoned the idea of a unified Ireland.

  The schedule, as it presently stood, involved the two political leaders joining in a ten-minute game of soccer with the pupils before going indoors for a quick tour of the main building, a short activity session with pupils, a short speech for the benefit of TV crews, and a photo op. The visit was due to last for around forty-five minutes, Kane had reported. His voice had sounded nervous to the point of trembling, and he had cut off the call off before Duggan could ask any questions. They would have to wait.