Bandit Country

by Andrew Turpin

  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

  “Shit,” Johnson said. He realized immediately the significance of what was on the screen in front of him. BO and DC: Barack Obama and David Cameron.

  He clicked on the Properties tab of the document to look for an electronic trail back to the author, but the metadata segments were all empty.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Sunday, January 13, 2013

  Belfast

  “You went into Duggan’s house?” Michael Donovan’s eyes widened a fraction. He shook his head and handed Johnson a glass of whiskey. “There you go. Tullamore Dew, Ireland’s finest.”

  He walked across his living room and sat on a black leather armchair, opposite Johnson, who was on a matching sofa.

  “I’m not going to make progress sitting here in Belfast,” Johnson said. “At some point, to get proof, you’ve got to take a risk. I’m not exactly going to apply for a search warrant, am I, so what other option is there?”

  He raised his glass and nodded at Donovan. “Anyway, cheers, my friend.”

  It was the first time in over a week he’d had a chance to sit down with Donovan and run through progress. The man seemed to be constantly on the move, talking to investors across a series of European capitals.

  Indeed, it was the first time Johnson had been to his house. He arrived just as it was starting to get dark.

  Johnson updated him on events, including the meetings with the sniper victims’ wives, Moira’s death, and the visit to Ronnie Quinn who had effectively provided him with the key to Willows Farm.

  “Police have obviously failed to catch Duggan doing anything wrong and haven’t found any evidence,” Johnson said. “And that’s clearly gone on for years and years. He’s either very clever or lucky. But the question is, are police really trying to nail him? And if not, why not?”

  Donovan shrugged and paused a few seconds before answering. “I don’t know. I don’t see it. That’s why I brought you in.”

  “Sooner or later, unlike the police, I’m going to nail him,” Johnson said. “Then we can take the evidence to them, and if they still ignore it, we’ll go to the newspapers and TV.”

  There was a copy of the Belfast Telegraph on Donovan’s coffee table. A story on the front page reported that the Northern Ireland assistant chief constable, Norman Arnside, was now in charge of the inquiry into Eric Simonson’s shooting.

  “You know this guy, Arnside?” Johnson asked.

  “Yes, a little.”

  “Any good?”

  “I guess so,” Donovan said.

  He showed Donovan the photo he’d taken of the three .50-caliber shells in Duggan’s underground desk drawer. “That’s for starters. He’s not using them for paperweights, is he? We need to find the rifle he uses them in, too.”

  Johnson told Donovan about the journals on the laptop that had been stolen from prison officer Will Doyle at the beginning of the previous year and that he had asked to see copies of them.

  “How exactly is that going to help nail Duggan?” Donovan asked, wrinkling his nose.

  “I won’t know until I see it. Why not? It might give an insight into why he was a target. It’s worth a try.”

  Donovan didn’t reply but inclined his head from one side to the other, as if to say maybe.

  “I’d like to know what Duggan’s strategy is,” Johnson said.

  “Like many of these dissident Republicans, there’s no obvious strategy,” Donovan said. “It looks random to me.”

  He stood and held up his whiskey glass. “Like a refill?”

  Johnson nodded. “Yes, it’s a nice drop, that Tullamore Dew.”

  Donovan took his glass and disappeared into the next room at the front of the house.

  Johnson stood and followed Donovan. The front room had been set up with a projector, a large pull-down screen, a small bar and a drinks fridge, a satellite TV, and two sofas. It was a real man’s den. He stood a couple of yards behind Donovan and surveyed the bar. There were four different whiskeys and an array of other spirits.

  Donovan turned around. “Go and sit down. I’ll bring it to you. Relax.”

  Johnson nodded his thanks and looked out the window for a few seconds. It was now pitch-dark outside except for the distant lights of the parking lot at the golf course across the road.

  He turned and went back to the living room, then sat and placed his hands behind his head. He needed to think.

  There were a few things he needed to discuss with Donovan, not least the tracker device found under his wife’s car. So far he hadn’t had a chance to do so because Donovan had been away. He would be interested in Donovan’s thoughts on why the tracker had been planted—was it to follow Johnson, Donovan, or his wife, and why?

  There was a call from the other room. “D’you want it on the rocks?” Donovan shouted.

  “Yes, please, but only one cube,” Johnson called.

  Seconds later, all hell broke loose.

  There was a deafening bang, followed by an explosion of bricks, dust, and plasterwork, followed by another massive bang, and a ragged hole the size of a fist appeared in the wall between the living room and Donovan’s den next door.

  Another eruption of noise sounded, a third bang, and a larger chunk of the wall fell into the living room with a crash, taking wall paper with it. Brickwork and other debris scattered across the carpet, the armchair in which Donovan had been sitting and the sofa where Johnson was.

  Something hard hit Johnson on the side of the head, and the air was heavy with a fog of pink and white dust.

  The dust particles filled his lungs, and he began to cough violently. Johnson could see very little and felt as if he were going to choke.

  He managed to regain his faculties and instinctively threw himself to the floor and rolled toward the door into the hallway.

  He put his hand to his head, where the object had hit him, and looked at it. His hand was covered in blood. “Shit,” Johnson said.

  There was another explosion, and the wall at the back of the room behind the TV disintegrated in a firework display of brick fragments and dust.

  At least out in the corridor the dust cloud was less dense.

  “Sonofabitch,” Johnson yelled as he jumped to his feet and ran down the hallway toward the kitchen at the rear of the house.

  Behind him, another enormous bang and an explosion rang out, followed by a loud fizzing noise. Then the house was plunged into darkness.

  Whoever was firing on Donovan’s house—and Johnson’s immediate thought was Duggan—was definitely using something more than an ordinary rifle. This had to be a heavy-duty semiautomatic weapon.

  Johnson’s immediate concern was for Donovan, given that he had been in the front room, where the firing was focused. He assumed that the Irishman’s silence meant he must have been hit.

  But there was no way Johnson could venture in there without putting himself right in the firing line for the next round.

  Johnson took out his phone and flicked on the flashlight, his finger over the beam to minimize the light emission. His cream-colored sweat top was flecked with red stains. It certainly wasn’t his own blood. He swore out loud again, his suspicions about Donovan confirmed, and turned off the light again.

  Now there was silence. Johnson waited in the back of the house.

  His instinct was to get out. The noise outside must have been incredible, and it was a certainty that neighbors would already have called the police.

  What to do?

  After another minute, with no further gunshots, Johnson dropped to his knees and crawled back down the hallway toward the front door, knowing he was taking a major risk.

  He had calculated that the gunman would almost certainly be moving away from the scene. A quick stri
ke and out. Hanging around in a residential area would hugely increase the risk of arrest.

  His eyes now adjusting to the gloom, helped by the faint orange glow from the street lights outside, Johnson passed the doorway to the living room and continued another ten feet or so to the doorway to the front room. The door was splintered and hanging off its hinges.

  Johnson peered around the doorframe.

  He had seen plenty of gunshot victims in his time, but that never made it any easier. He turned his head away and vomited.

  Sunday, January 13, 2013

  Belfast

  Duggan shoved the Barrett M82 into its slim case and pushed the whole thing into his golf bag, which he had adapted to take the weapon. A handful of irons were positioned around the opening so it appeared to be a normal bag of clubs.

  Then he pulled a toweling cloth over the end of the rifle case, slung it over his shoulder, and headed back through the trees at the rear of the first green.

  Any onlooker would probably assume that he was a golfer carrying his clubs through the woods on a shortcut home after a couple of beers at the clubhouse.

  After an opening shot, which came in slightly left of target, Duggan knew for certain that his second round had hit Donovan.

  The man had loomed large in Duggan’s beloved Schmidt & Bender scope and Duggan had seen his head explode in a pink mist, as if in slow motion, when his second shell struck home. There was no doubt about that. The red stain was clearly sprayed all over the white wall behind him.

  The third and fourth shots had been superfluous.

  But at the same time, Duggan was cursing himself for not acting more quickly to be sure of also getting Johnson, the American investigator.

  Johnson had entered the front room and had even glanced out the window into the darkness for several seconds, staring as if he knew Duggan was out there.

  The curtains were pulled wide open, so Duggan had a perfect view through the powerful scope from his slightly elevated vantage point about 350 yards away.

  But crucially, he had waited a couple of seconds, undecided about who to go for first amid a nagging concern that Donovan might dive for cover if he hit Johnson first. And in that time, Johnson had turned and exited the room.

  “Bastard. Why did I do that?” Duggan muttered to himself. He stamped the ground as he walked and slapped his thigh in frustration.

  His only hope was that one of the shells he had seen rip through the back wall of the room, punching a large hole in it, had somehow hit Johnson.

  The ammunition he had chosen to fill the ten-round magazine was the devastating Raufoss Mk211 shell, which meant there was some chance he had hit Johnson if he had happened to be in the vicinity.

  But he knew that realistically, the odds were long.

  Duggan walked swiftly through the trees until he reached a path that led down past a lane next to the cemetery.

  There he had parked a Ford stolen by one of his young volunteers from a secluded driveway on the edge of Craigavon the previous night. The car had fresh license plates Duggan had put on only four hours earlier.

  Before long Duggan was on the A55 heading southeast, which would connect with the M1.

  He estimated he would be back home and cleaning himself up in the shower inside an hour and forty minutes.

  Duggan turned on the car radio and smiled briefly to himself.

  Sunday, January 13, 2013

  Belfast

  Johnson pulled his woolly black hat well down over his head, zipped up his black jacket, and left Donovan’s house by the rear kitchen door. He glanced at both neighboring houses, chose the one that was in darkness, and vaulted over the fence onto a path.

  From there, he bent double and, clinging tight to the shadows of some conifer trees, made his way out onto the road. His car was parked about forty yards away, as was his usual habit.

  The road was deserted and silent. He was completely certain, though, that behind the lace curtains was a frenzy of activity.

  Johnson glanced up the hill, where he could see the outline of trees against the night sky. That was most likely where the unseen gunman had struck from.

  He jogged to the car, quickly started it, left his lights off, and accelerated away in the direction of the A2 divided highway that ran back toward Belfast city center. He prayed as he left that nobody was able to see his license plate in the darkness.

  It was only as he got well away from Demesne Road that he turned his headlights on. He had no wish to get roped into the formal, interminable process of a police murder investigation.

  Johnson drove down the on-ramp onto the A2 just as two police cars, sirens blaring and lights flashing, raced in the opposite direction, toward Donovan’s road.

  As he drove toward Donovan’s apartment, the initial relief Johnson felt at escaping intact was overridden by a rising wave of despair.

  It had been a sickening sight. Donovan had been left completely unrecognizable, his features destroyed and the entire back of his skull missing, splattered widely over the walls and carpets behind the bar.

  What should he do now? He could just walk away. He’d been paid half the money promised by Donovan, which was enough, and he knew his kids would love to have him back earlier than expected.

  But he felt the same driving force inside him that had pushed him on for his whole career: a fierce need to see justice done.

  Slowly, the despair turned to determination to get to the bottom of what was going on. And it was a determination driven by anger.

  He knew who was behind the trail of carnage. First Moira, now Donovan. Collecting the firm evidence necessary to bring Duggan to justice was clearly going to be tough. He was dealing with a pro.

  The big question was, why was he doing it?

  The following morning Johnson was due to fly to Boston from Dublin airport, which was a good two-and-a-half-hour drive away. Hopefully there he would get to the bottom of how Duggan’s dissident republican campaigns were being financed.

  Then he might be in a better position to nail him for what he was doing on the ground.

  Johnson parked the black Ford Focus in its now familiar spot, down a road that led off Falls Road, and ran up the stairs two at a time to Donovan’s apartment, where Jayne had stayed in watching TV.

  She turned around as he burst into the living room.

  “Donovan’s just been hit by a sniper in his house while I was in the room next door,” Johnson said.

  “What?” Jayne’s eyes widened, and she jumped to her feet to face him. “Hit? You mean killed?”

  “Yep. It’s got to be Duggan. He shot Donovan through the window. A huge mess, you wouldn’t have recognized him.”

  Jayne grimaced. “Bloody hell. Another one.”

  “Yes, it was bloody hell all right. Duggan must have been using that damn Barrett of his, judging by the damage. It blew a couple of holes in the living room wall. I was lucky to get out of there.”

  He tugged at his right ear. “We need to pack and get out of here. It’s a matter of time before police turn up and we get caught up in a massive murder investigation. That would hold us up for days, put the brakes on everything. We’d make no progress. Let’s just get out and distance ourselves.”

  Jayne walked to the other side of the living room. “Yes, agreed. But hang on a minute. If it’s Duggan, why did he hit Donovan? I can’t see why. Unless he knew he had brought you in?”

  “Maybe that’s it, maybe he does know. Duggan’s aware that I’ve been nosing around—Moira told me that. And that’s why she was killed, I’d guess, because he thought she was talking to me. So maybe he also knows that it was Donovan who brought me in. It’s my fault again.”

  He silently cursed himself. He was playing the self-blame game once more. His favorite.

  After a few seconds, he gathered himself. “But how would Duggan link Donovan and myself? I was going to ask Donovan whether he thought that tracker device was intended for him and his wife or for me. But he was shot before I
could ask the question. I don’t know, Jayne; it’s an odd one.”

  Jayne squinted at him. “But you think there’s more to it?”

  “Yes, I do think there’s more to it. And I’m going to find out what.”

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Tuesday, January 15, 2013

  Boston, Massachusetts

  The snow had already started to fall as Johnson turned the corner and stood still for a moment, looking across the road at the Green Dragon Tavern. He was instantly uplifted to see it hadn’t changed dramatically on the outside since his last visit to Boston.

  The pub, on the ground floor of a battered three-story wedge-shaped block on cobbled Marshall Street, still had the same old-fashioned lanterns, which glowed invitingly in the late afternoon gloom, and ancient wooden windows.

  A couple of shamrock stickers in the windows and the Irish flag flying outside gave away its heritage. Clearly McKinney hadn’t lost a sense of his roots if this was his favorite watering hole.

  Headquarters of the Revolution, it said on the sign outside, referring back to the plotting and planning that went on in Boston to overthrow the British in the 1600s and 1700s, although Johnson knew well that the original Green Dragon Tavern had been on a different site.

  He gave a wry smile as the parallels to his current task in Northern Ireland struck him and then walked in through the old swinging doors.

  There, sitting at one end of the long wooden bar, perched on an old stool, sat Fiona, nursing a beer.

  It had been over a year since he’d last seen her in northern Argentina. He’d had to leave her at a hospital for repairs to her shoulder, which had been injured in a shoot-out as she helped Johnson track down an aging Nazi fugitive.

  Judging by the way she raised the glass with her right hand upon spotting him, she’d recovered from the bullet injury.