Bandit Country

by Andrew Turpin

  Johnson knew that the HET, set up in 2005 within the Police Service of Northern Ireland to investigate more than three thousand unsolved murders committed during the Troubles, had been the subject of some controversy. There was deep skepticism that it was delivering the kind of justice that bereaved families deserved, at least in terms of deaths allegedly caused by security services.

  “Well, we’ll have to make damn sure they’re 100 percent rigorous this time around,” Johnson said. “Not sure how, but we’ll give it our best shot.”

  Sunday, January 27, 2013

  Belfast

  O’Neill hadn’t spoken to Conor Campbell in more than ten years and had exchanged emails only twice during that time, to update each other’s contact details. And in the eighteen years prior to that, they had exchanged words no more than a couple of times.

  There had been no falling out. They had both made up their own minds that keeping a distance was the safest way to play it. Burying their heads in the sand and trying to pretend that what had happened was not real was the only way to keep going.

  Now, though, Campbell was in full listening mode. He had responded to a short text message from O’Neill by calling back within minutes on his secure cell phone.

  O’Neill, who had returned to his Holywood home, described what had happened at Willows Farm and gave a summary of the contents of Will Doyle’s diary, as described to him by Johnson.

  “We both know what Duggan was doing, Brendan, taking us out one by one, but he’s almost certainly dead now,” Campbell said. “That’s solved our problem, because I don’t think the Doyle journal is going to stand as proof against us of what happened on Coolderry Road that day.”

  “Agreed,” O’Neill said, “It’s just a dead man’s diary.” He paused for a second, then added, “So how long will it take to confirm that Duggan died down at Willows Farm?”

  “The DNA tests will confirm it,” Campbell said. “It will just take a day or two.”

  “Yes, I saw him run from one side of the house, then reappear on the other side and get into the Audi,” O’Neill said. “There was no mistake. It was definitely him.”

  “I’m certain you’re right,” Campbell said. “What does Johnson think? He was there too.”

  “Johnson saw it all, but he thinks we shouldn’t automatically assume anything.”

  “Yes, well, if he were alive, it would be tricky,” Campbell said. “I wouldn’t be able to arrest him unless I got something rock solid pinned on him. We couldn’t have him wriggling off the hook and then shooting off his mouth in court or to the media about me, you, and the others killing his father. Then we become the offenders, not him. The last thing we need is for him to turn the tables on us like that.”

  “So what would you do, then?” O’Neill asked.

  “We’d have to catch him when he’s ready to shoot,” Campbell said. “That’s where we’ve consistently failed all these years—we’ve not had the hard evidence. Nobody’s ever caught him with a gun, not even a sniff of residue, not a cartridge shell. He’s not like most of these dissident jokers. He’s old school. And people in south Armagh still won’t give evidence against anybody—they’re all running scared. But that’s all immaterial anyway, because I’m sure he’s dead.”

  O’Neill knew that Campbell was correct about the reprisals against touts and informers and indeed anyone prepared to testify against violent dissidents. The dissidents had ensured that the culture of fear across the rural population hadn’t gone away with the Good Friday agreement. The fate of Dennehy was a prime example of that and made it even more unlikely that ordinary people would risk all by giving evidence.

  “Right,” said O’Neill, “what about security for the G8, then? Obama and Cameron and the others? Just in case.”

  “I’m not concerned about the event itself,” Campbell said. “We’re encircling the venue. Nobody’s going to get near it.”

  “Okay, what about when the politicians are in transit or doing things outside the actual complex?”

  Campbell hesitated. “We’ve not made anything public, so this is strictly confidential, but we do have a school visit planned, Whitefield Integrated Primary School. Obama, Cameron, and a couple of others are going, with me in tow. They’ll watch and join in a short game of kids’ football on the playing field for a photo op, then they’ll go inside and they’ll each make a speech for the TV cameras. Aim is to show how things are normalizing around here. But again, that’ll be watertight. The whole area for a mile around the school will be cordoned off. Travel to and from the place will be in armored cars. We’ll have snipers, dogs, bomb squads, you name it, all around the place. The Obama team will have its own security detail, of course, and we’ve made arrangements for that. So it should be fine. The media won’t be told until first thing tomorrow morning, but that won’t be a problem for them as they’ll have crews mobilized anyway.”

  The two men agreed to keep in touch as needed over the coming hours, effectively giving O’Neill a hotline to Campbell that bypassed his bosses at MI5, whom he decided to keep out of this particular loop, at least for the time being.

  “Just in case this guy Joe Johnson needs to get hold of me urgently, or if he finds out anything else, give him my secure number,” Campbell said. “I need to go now. I’m due in a meeting to run through G8 arrangements.”

  O’Neill gave Johnson’s cell phone number to Campbell and ended the call. He sat thinking for a few moments. Then he called Johnson, gave him a summary of the conversation he had just had with the new chief constable, and passed over Campbell’s number.

  “Campbell and I both believe Duggan’s dead,” O’Neill said. “So you only call Campbell in absolute emergencies if you find out anything that changes that view.”

  He agreed that he would call Johnson at about five o’clock that afternoon and hung up.

  O’Neill checked his watch. He needed to walk up the road to the newsstand to pay the bill for his daily delivery of The Times. It was worth it to be able to sit and enjoy his breakfast while digesting the day’s news.

  He also needed to pick up some shirts from the dry cleaner next door to the newsstand before heading into the office for his own departmental pre-G8 briefing.

  Five minutes later, O’Neill had his shoes on and made his way out of the house, through the housing estate, and onto the main road.

  He stopped on the corner and scrutinized the screen on his phone, pretending to tap out a text message but using the opportunity to carry out his normal countersurveillance checks.

  Satisfied that there were no signs of a tail, he crossed the road and made his way past the school on his right and a few more houses, then toward the arcade of shops, set back from the road. As usual there were a couple of white vans parked on the road right outside the dry cleaner, which O’Neill knew did contract work for hotels and restaurants in the area. Drivers were often delivering and collecting linen, so O’Neill ignored them.

  There was another van, a Volkswagen with a high roof, parked on the other side of the road, about a hundred yards away. It was only when he gave it a second glance, as a small child on a scooter appeared from behind it, that he realized there was something different about it.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Sunday, January 27, 2013

  Belfast

  Duggan held his position rock solid, keeping his right eye fixed firmly on the reticle in his scope, which was pointed directly at the center of O’Neill’s chest. He relaxed his entire upper body and consciously slowed his breathing.

  The barrel of his Barrett M82A sat neatly a couple of inches inside the hinged flap at the back of his white van, and the opening was just large enough for Duggan to get a good view through his scope.

  O’Neill continued to walk up the road toward the dry cleaner’s shop, as Duggan had expected.

  The MI5 man, surprisingly to Duggan, had made the mistake of getting into a routine, visiting the shop over a number of previous Sundays at similar times, something
that had been noted by one of Duggan’s brigade volunteers.

  Now he was about to pay the price.

  Almost unconsciously, Duggan tightened his finger fractionally around the trigger.

  Then Duggan noticed O’Neill glance at his white van. A few seconds later, he looked up again, and this time the glance became a stare.

  Duggan knew instinctively that O’Neill, as a trained intelligence officer, had spotted the square black hole on the back of the white van and realized there was something wrong and would dive for cover.

  Indeed, he saw him brace himself, preparing to throw himself sideways behind an adjacent wall.

  But Duggan was too quick. His finger was the only part of his body that moved as it pulled the trigger.

  There was a sharp bang, followed immediately by another as Duggan fired a follow-up shot, just to be sure.

  But it was unnecessary.

  O’Neill’s body was catapulted backward several yards as the first round slammed into his chest. The second hit him in his lower torso, but by then the damage was done.

  Sunday, January 27, 2013

  Belfast

  “We’ve got to find out what happened to those original files on the Alfie Duggan shooting,” Johnson said. “That’s the key to it. You said your friend Noreen used to work at Carrickfergus. Would she be able to find out?”

  He paced to the other end of the kitchen and turned to look at Jayne, who shrugged.

  “It’s a hell of a long time ago. We’re talking the ’80s. What’s the likelihood of them still being anywhere? If they went missing twenty years ago, it’s highly unlikely. But I’ll give her a call and see what she says.”

  She disappeared into the living room to make the call but came back two minutes later. “Noreen’s not answering, so I left a voice mail. Hopefully she’ll pick it up and get back to me.”

  Johnson switched his focus to O’Neill. It was strange that he hadn’t called back following his planned conversations with Campbell and with his boss.

  When seven o’clock passed and O’Neill still hadn’t called, Johnson started to get a feeling that something must have happened. He called O’Neill’s cell phone three times in twenty minutes, but each time it went to voice mail.

  He was about to try Campbell instead when Campbell saved him the trouble and called him.

  After the briefest of terse introductions, the senior policeman got straight to the point. “I’ve just heard that Brendan O’Neill has been shot dead, not far from his home. Apparently on the way to the newsagent. I had assumed, like Brendan, that Duggan had been killed down at his home. But now I’ve changed my view, although we’re still waiting for DNA tests. Either way, I need to meet you, urgently.”

  Johnson swore. “Oh, shit. That’s five.” It was unbelievable. If he were to rank the people he had encountered on his visit to Ulster in terms of perceived ability to look after themselves and for street awareness, O’Neill would have been at the top. What the hell had happened?

  Campbell refused to discuss it any further on an open phone line. “You’ll have to come into our HQ. I think we should meet face-to-face. Only problem is I won’t have long, probably ten minutes maximum. I’m right under the cosh here—we’ve got eight thousand officers policing this G8, nearly half of whom have been drafted in from other forces, and there’s a massive security operation going on. It’s a logistical nightmare, so as you can imagine, I could do without this going on.”

  The chief constable instructed Johnson to hold the line while he got his personal assistant to arrange a car to collect Johnson, who insisted on bringing Jayne along, and the two men agreed to meet an hour later.

  It was now clear to Johnson that Campbell, following his earlier conversation with O’Neill and O’Neill’s death, had decided he had no choice but to trust and confide in him.

  By just after eight o’clock, Johnson and Jayne were sitting side by side at a wooden table in a small interview room at the PSNI’s headquarters on Knock Road, East Belfast.

  “This should be interesting,” Johnson whispered.

  A few minutes later a large barrel-chested man strode in and introduced himself as Conor Campbell. Johnson shook hands and introduced Jayne. “She’s ex-MI6, did a stint here for a few years in the early ’90s. Works freelance now.”

  Campbell nodded at Jayne. “That helps. I don’t think we ever had dealings though, did we? I was far more junior back then.”

  “No,” Jayne said. “That’s one thing that’s changed. Congratulations. But there’s still a lot that hasn’t.”

  Campbell grimaced. “That’s one way of putting it. It’s unfortunate that we’ve got a determined nutter who just happens to have a certain lethal capability and, seemingly, a strong motivation.” He sat down across the table from the two of them and began by briefly describing the reports on O’Neill’s shooting.

  “I’m astonished Brendan wasn’t taking more precautions,” Johnson said. “I said to him there was no certainty Duggan had died.”

  Campbell ran a hand through his short iron-gray hair and shrugged. “Maybe he got complacent. I don’t know,” Campbell said. “But that’s beside the point. It’s happened. The thing is, if this is Duggan, I need to get to the bottom of how he did it before tomorrow. I’m worried he might want to repeat the trick—but this time with Obama and Cameron.”

  “It had crossed my mind,” Johnson said, as dryly as he could manage. “Not to mention yourself.”

  Campbell’s face twitched and his eyebrows rose. “Yes, well, you’re right, but I’m not the first priority here. Look, we’ve got people down there where the shooting happened, crime scene investigators, detectives, but it’s really a skeleton team, frankly, because every spare officer is tied up on the G8. We’re at full stretch—beyond full stretch. And from what I’ve heard, the people we do have down there have made no progress since they arrived. I haven’t got the time to get involved in this, and anyway, I don’t want to start showing a big personal interest in O’Neill right now. I can’t afford to, and it would look odd when I’ve got the G8 on my plate. So I need you to do something, if possible.”

  Johnson guessed what was coming next. “Go on,” he said.

  “You’re an investigator, Brendan told me, right?” Campbell said.

  “Yes, that’s right. But war crimes, not necessarily homicides.” Johnson looked across at Jayne, who was staring at him, scratching her chin.

  “Never mind that,” Campbell said. “Are you able to get down there and just see if you can talk to a few people, local residents. You’ll have to knock on doors. Be honest, say who you are, a private investigator. Whatever. Just don’t pretend you’re a policeman, obviously. I want someone who might have seen what happened. Where the gunman was. Where he was hiding. Because it’s quite possible he could try and use the same method tomorrow. And God forbid if the US president or the UK prime minister is shot dead on my patch. He can take me out but not Obama.”

  Campbell paused. Now he was breathing heavily; his already florid face and fleshy neck had gone a deeper shade of red. He folded his arms and surveyed Johnson from across the table.

  Hardly surprising he was stressed, Johnson thought, but to have a chief constable making this kind of request of a non-policeman, not to mention someone he had previously never even met—it seemed scarcely credible and spoke volumes about the trust Campbell clearly had had in O’Neill’s vote of confidence in Johnson.

  “Okay,” Johnson said. “Leave it with us.” He glanced at Jayne, who nodded. He took from Campbell the address where the shooting had taken place.

  Johnson decided that if Campbell wanted to work with him, he should reciprocate. The issue of what to do about the Alfie Duggan killing could wait—Campbell clearly wasn’t going to raise it. So he told the chief constable about the draft G8 community visit schedule on the USB flash drive that he had obtained from Duggan’s house during his covert visit two weeks earlier.

  “Bloody hell,” Campbell said. “I won’t
ask you why you were in Duggan’s house, but you’re telling me Duggan had that?”

  “Yes. It looks like you’ve got a mole in your camp.”

  “Too damn right it does. And obviously, if Duggan’s had the draft document, he’s most likely had the final details.”

  “Right,” Johnson said. “So where is this visit happening, then?”

  Campbell tersely ran through Obama and Cameron’s short visit scheduled for the following afternoon. The timetable remained identical to the draft document that Johnson had seen.

  “Don’t you want to rethink this?” Johnson asked. “Why not just cancel this school visit? You can tell the public the security risk is too high and the president’s life is under threat.”

  There was a pause. Campbell placed his hands behind his head and leaned back. “No, can’t do that. Absolutely not. That would be giving in to these dissidents, and nobody in the Northern Ireland Assembly is going to stand for that, not with the world looking on. It would be the opposite message from what we’re trying to convey, which is that things are normalized here now. I’ve been confirmed in this job only a couple of days, and I’d be on a hiding to nothing if I even suggested it. I’ve already got enough enemies gunning for me inside and outside the force. I’d probably get fired on the spot. They’d say it’s my job to police and manage the risks, and I think we’re doing that. Yes, I’m worried, of course I am. You can doubtless tell that. But I do think we’ve covered all the bases.”

  You might be about to be fired anyway, Johnson thought. But he let the chief constable continue.

  Campbell stopped and looked at his watch. “Look, we’re going to have to break off. I’ve got a crucial meeting I need to run to now. Let’s keep in touch.”

  Campbell stood and shook hands again. “We’ve got the biggest bloody security operation ever seen in Northern Ireland for this G8. We’re just going to have to trust in it.” He nodded at Johnson, then Jayne, and strode out of the room.