The Long shot mc-1

by Stephen Leather

  He ran his hand through his red curls. “Hide the hair, you mean? Yeah, good idea.” He sorted through his bag and came out with an Orioles cap and waved it. “Pretty apt, yeah?”

  As he dashed out of the room he tried to kiss Mary on the lips, but she moved her head at the last minute so it landed on her cheek. “Later,” she said, fighting the revulsion in her stomach.

  The black nurse brought Joker a breakfast tray at eight o’clock in the morning: a clear plastic cup of orange juice, scrambled eggs, toast with a smear of margarine, and a pot of cherry yoghurt. And a white plastic spoon to eat it with. Joker didn’t know whether it was to ensure that he couldn’t hurt himself or to make sure that he wouldn’t be a danger to anyone else, but he felt like a baby as he ate. The cop watched him. “You want some?” Joker asked, holding out the spoon, dripping with eggs. The cop scowled. A large revolver was holstered on his right side and on his left was hanging a large black nightstick.

  After breakfast, a doctor in a white coat came in and took his blood pressure and withdrew a small blood sample from his left arm. The doctor, who didn’t introduce himself, asked Joker how he felt. Joker shrugged. “Sore, and tired. I’ll mend.”

  “I’m sure you will,” said the doctor. “We haven’t given you any blood, we try not to these days unless absolutely necessary. All you need is time.” He pointed to Joker’s stomach. “Who did that for you?”

  Joker smiled. “You mean who stabbed me, or who fixed it?”

  “The surgery,” said the doctor.

  “Northern Ireland,” said Joker. The man’s interest seemed professional and he saw no reason not to enlighten him.

  The doctor sat on the edge of Joker’s bed, careful not to touch his legs. He was a small man with a neatly clipped moustache and crooked teeth and a pair of spectacles with circular lenses. He had four pens lined up in the pocket of his white coat, and everything about the man was trim and tidy. Joker could imagine that any surgery the man performed would be meticulous and that his stitches would be as neat as those of a seamstress. “I have done some stomach and intestinal surgery — do you mind?” he said, nodding at Joker’s midriff.

  “Go ahead,” he said. Joker wasn’t the sort of man who enjoyed showing off his war wounds, but he liked the doctor’s openness and he figured he owed him something for his treatment.

  The doctor opened up the gown and frowned at the scar. “The knife went in here?” he asked, and pointed to the top of the scar. Joker nodded. “And the knife went down, then across?” Joker nodded again. The doctor shook his head in bewilderment. “It’s the sort of scar you’d expect to see in ritual suicide,” he said. “It’s the way the Japanese used to do it. Down and then across, to do the maximum damage to the gut. It’s not an easy thing to do. It takes a long time, and it’s incredibly painful.”

  “You’re right on both counts,” said Joker.

  “It wasn’t self-inflicted? Someone did this to you?”

  “They sure did.”

  “I don’t understand,” said the doctor, running a finger lightly down the scar. “Didn’t you fight back? Didn’t you run?”

  Joker grinned. “I was chained to a table, Doc. I wasn’t going anywhere.”

  “Why? Why did they do it?”

  “It was a woman. She wanted me to die, and she wanted me to die slowly,” said Joker.

  The doctor’s eyes widened. “It’s a wonder you didn’t.”

  “I came close,” said Joker. “I was lucky, I was helicoptered to a hospital in Belfast. They’re used to dealing with catastrophic bomb injuries; they saved my life.”

  “There must have been major damage to the small and large intestines?”

  Joker nodded. “I lost about two feet of tubing, and I had to wear a colostomy bag for a year. But it’s fine now. No problems at all.”

  The doctor closed up the gown. “It’s good work,” he said admiringly. “You know, of course, that you shouldn’t be drinking?”

  “How did you know I was?” asked Joker.

  “The first blood sample we took from you would have lost you your driving licence if you’d been at the wheel of a car.”

  Joker laughed. “Hell’s bells, Doc, I haven’t touched the hard stuff for at least twenty-four hours!”

  The doctor looked serious. “You shouldn’t put your digestive system under that sort of pressure.”

  Joker held up his bandaged wrists. “Doc, the booze is the least of my problems.”

  The doctor smiled and stood up, brushing the creases out of his white coat. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “Do you feel well enough to answer some questions? From the FBI?”

  “They’re here?”

  “There are two FBI agents outside. I wanted to check on your progress first.”

  “And?”

  “You seem to be strong enough.”

  Joker smiled. “Send them in then, Doc. Let’s see what they want.”

  The doctor left the room and a few minutes later two men entered. One was small and overweight, with dark, slicked-back hair, and a shiny suit. The other was taller and fair-haired and carrying a large envelope and a portable cellular phone. They both flashed badges so quickly that all he could see was a blur of metal. “FBI,” said the taller of the two.

  “Do you have names?” Joker asked.

  “Don Clutesi,” said the smaller man. Joker spotted the antenna of a cellular phone sticking out of his right jacket pocket.

  “Howard. Cole Howard,” said the man with the envelope.

  “From?” said Joker.

  “I work out of the Bureau’s Phoenix office, Special Agent Clutesi is with the Counter-Terrorism Division in New York.”

  Joker nodded. The fact that the FBI and not the city’s Homicide Division were handling his interrogations suggested that they knew that this was more than a murder case. And Clutesi’s presence meant that they knew the IRA was involved.

  “We’d like to ask you a few questions,” said Howard. He turned to the uniformed cop and suggested that he go out and get a cup of coffee. The cop accepted the offer, eagerly. Clutesi went and stood with his back to the door, a small notepad in his hand.

  “Am I under arrest?” asked Joker, pointing to the chain around his waist.

  “Not at this point, no,” said Howard. He held up his right hand, the finger and thumb an inch apart. “But you’re about this far away from being arrested for murder, and then you become part of the process and there’s nothing we can do to help you,” he said.

  “Ah. So you’re the Samaritans now,” said Joker. He wasn’t in the least intimidated by the men or the badges. He knew that a large part of interrogation was game-playing and that if it suited the FBI he’d be in a cell somewhere awaiting trial. They clearly wanted something from him, and he had a good idea what it was.

  “Not exactly,” said Howard, coldly. He pulled over the chair in which the cop had been sitting and sat down, crossing his legs and looking at Joker with cold blue eyes. “Would you like to tell me what happened?”

  Joker was still lying on his back, and he felt at a disadvantage to the two FBI agents. He had to squint down his chest to see Howard, and Clutesi was over to his left. It was as if the two men had moved so that he couldn’t see them both at the same time. He slowly raised himself into a sitting position, trying to conceal the pain. “I was being held by two members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army,” he said simply. Howard and Clutesi were stunned by his lack of guile.

  “You know who they are?” asked Howard. He tapped the envelope against his leg and in a flash of intuition Joker knew that it contained photographs of Bailey and Hennessy. The FBI agents were clearly on their trail and must have known that they were at the house on Chesapeake Bay. They had probably assumed that Joker had seen Bailey and Hennessy, but it had obviously come as a shock to discover that he knew who they were.

  “Mary Hennessy and Matthew Bailey,” Joker said.

  “They tortured you?”

  “Yes,” s
aid Joker.

  “The girl in the cellar, did you kill her?”

  Joker didn’t answer. They hadn’t cautioned him but without the protection of the Colonel it wouldn’t take much for them to put him in a windowless cell and throw away the key.

  “The man outside the house,” continued Howard. “He’d been shot twice in the chest. Do you know who he is?”

  “I think he’s an MI5 agent. The British security service. I don’t know his name.”

  Howard and Clutesi looked at each other in astonishment. “Who the hell are you, Mr O’Brien?” asked Howard. “For a start, is O’Brien your real name?”

  Joker looked levelly at Howard, who was obviously the more senior of the two agents. “I think we’re going to have to talk some sort of deal before I go any further,” he said softly.

  Howard’s eyes hardened. “We’re not talking any deals, Mr O’Brien. This is a criminal investigation, nothing else.”

  Joker smiled. “Oh dear,” he said. “I think I just wet myself.”

  “This isn’t funny, O’Brien,” said Howard.

  Joker looked at Howard, his face hard. “I know it’s not funny, Agent Howard,” he said, raising his bandaged wrists. “I was the one they took down into the basement, don’t forget that. She tortured me, she pulled me apart with knives and shears, then they tried to burn me alive.”

  “She?” queried Howard. “Mary Hennessy did that to you?”

  Joker nodded. “Everything but the bullet in the shoulder,” he said.

  “Why? Why was she torturing you?”

  Joker smiled. “I suppose it was because I didn’t tell her what she wanted to know when she asked me nicely.”

  Howard ignored Joker’s baiting. “What did she want to know?”

  “What are you after, Agent Howard?” said Joker.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re obviously not here because of what happened to me. You’re after Hennessy and Bailey, right?” Howard nodded, almost imperceptibly. “So we’re on the same side here.”

  Howard shook his head. “I’m not the one who’s been leaving a trail of corpses,” he said.

  Joker sneered. “One was a girl who was going to kill me while I was strung up by the arms, the other was a guy who came at me with a gun. There isn’t a court in the country who wouldn’t see either as self-defence.”

  Howard raised one eyebrow. “And what about the two men you killed in New York. They were bound and gagged when you shot them in the back of the head.”

  “What?” said Joker, confused. “What the hell are you talking about? They were alive when I left them.”

  “So what are you saying, that someone else slipped in and finished them off for you?”

  Joker frowned and rubbed his temples with the ends of his fingers like a mind-reader trying to guess a playing card. It could have only been the men from MI5. They wanted him free and clear on Hennessy’s trail, but Joker had no idea that they’d gone as far as to commit murder. He looked up. “I took their gun, the P228. If they were shot, it wasn’t from that gun.”

  “But who’s to say you didn’t have two guns?” asked Howard. “You shot them with your own weapon and then dumped it, keeping theirs. That’s what I’d do. What about you, Don?”

  The agent by the door nodded. “Makes sense,” he said. “Thing of it is, though, is that the gun they found on him wasn’t a P228. It was a Smith amp; Wesson model 411.”

  “That was her gun,” said Joker. “I don’t know what they did with the P228. I never saw it again once they took it off me.” A thought suddenly struck him. “The gun that the MI5 agent had. Compare that with the bullets in New York. You might get a match there.”

  “We might,” agreed Howard. “So, what did Mary Hennessy want from you?”

  “She wanted to know how I’d managed to find her.”

  “And you told her what?”

  “That I’d traced Bailey from New York. Found him in Maryland and he led me to their house.”

  “Anything else?”

  The FBI agent was persistent, and Joker knew that his first instinct had been right, it was the IRA activists that they were interested in, not him. If he played his cards right, he might be able to extract himself from his present predicament. But handling the FBI men would be every bit as dangerous and demanding as dealing with Mary Hennessy. The chain was digging into the small of his back. “She wanted to know if I knew what she was doing.”

  “And do you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Did she believe you?”

  “Eventually.”

  “So why didn’t she kill you?”

  “She tried. Or rather, she sent down that other girl to finish me off. Do you know who she is?”

  Howard shook his head. “And identification is going to be difficult after what you did to her face,” said the FBI agent.

  Joker had the feeling that Howard wasn’t being totally honest, and that he did know who the girl was.

  “Why were you following Hennessy and Bailey?” Howard asked.

  Joker had expected the question, but it wasn’t until Howard asked it that he decided how to reply. He’d realised that there was no way he could expect any help from the Colonel or from his old Regiment, they would presumably deny all knowledge of his involvement in any official operation. Joker opened his gown and indicated the old scar on his stomach. “She did this to me in Ireland three years ago.” At the door, Clutesi whistled softly through clenched teeth. Howard stood up for a closer look. “I was a sergeant in the SAS.” When Howard didn’t react, Joker added: “The equivalent of your Special Forces.”

  Howard raised an eyebrow. “I’ve heard of the SAS,” he said. “I’m waiting for you to get to the point.”

  “I was part of an undercover operation in the Border Country. Our cover was blown, she killed the guy I was with, and she started on me. An Army patrol found us and she escaped, but before she left she ripped open my guts. She said she wanted me to die slowly, so that I could think about her as I bled to death. Her timing was lousy and the Army got me to a hospital in time.”

  Howard nodded and Clutesi took notes. “Three years ago, you say?” said Howard. “Why now? Why did you come after her now?”

  “Another SAS officer was killed near Washington some weeks ago,” said Joker. “He’d been tortured. And it was Hennessy’s signature.”

  Howard was tapping the envelope against his legs again and Joker knew it wouldn’t be long before the FBI agent showed him the contents. “You said you traced Bailey to Maryland. You followed him here from New York?”

  Joker shook his head. “I was told that he was down here.”

  “So you were told about the house while you were in New York?”

  “No. I heard that Bailey had been meeting with a guy who owns an aviation company here.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Patrick Farrell. His company is Farrell Aviation.”

  “So what happened? You staked out the airfield?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you saw Bailey there? And followed him to the house?”

  Joker nodded. “You’ve got it.”

  Howard frowned and rubbed his chin. “So, this MI5 agent, where does he come into the picture? He was working with you?”

  Joker snorted. “Hardly. The first time I saw him was when he came at me in the house with a gun.”

  “So he was following you? Without you knowing?” There was a look of surprise on his face.

  “I guess so.”

  Howard rubbed his chin again, giving Joker the impression that he didn’t believe him. “Did you see anyone else at the house?”

  “Two Americans. They caught me in the car. And another guy, looked like he was from the Middle East.”

  Howard and Clutesi looked at each other, the amazement evident in their faces. Howard stood up and opened the envelope. He took out a stack of glossy colour photographs and began handing them to Joker one at a time.
“Do you recognise these people?” he asked.

  The first photograph was of Hennessy, an old one, before she’d dyed her hair. Joker held it up. “Mary Hennessy. You know she’s blonde now?” Howard nodded. “She looks as if she’s lost weight, too,” Joker added. The next photograph was of the Middle Eastern type with the receding hairline and thick moustache. Joker took a quick look at the back, hoping that there would be some sort of caption there. There wasn’t. “Yeah, this guy was there.”

  “Did it look as if he was in charge?”

  Joker shrugged. “Maybe,” he said, noncommittally. He went through the rest of the photographs. Bailey was there, and so were the two Americans. There was also a picture of the girl Joker had killed in the basement. “Yeah,” he said. “They were all in the house.”

  Howard took the photographs back and put them into the envelope. “Do you have any idea where they might have gone?” Howard asked.

  “I was the one being tortured,” said Joker, “they weren’t exactly letting me in on their plans, you know?”

  Howard and Clutesi looked at each other and Joker had the feeling that it was because they weren’t sure what to do next, not because they were playing some sort of psychological game. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” Joker asked eventually.

  Howard looked across at Clutesi and slipped the manila envelope into his jacket pocket. “I’ve a phone call to make. We’ll talk again later.” The two FBI agents left the room, and a minute or so later the uniformed cop returned, carrying a styrofoam cup of coffee.

  Matthew Bailey kept his left hand on the control wheel as he set his radio transmitter to the Bay Bridge Unicom frequency, 123.0 MHz. He called the airfield up as he levelled the Centurion off at two thousand feet over the Chesapeake Bay and asked them for a runway advisory. Through his headset he heard a young woman tell him that runway 29 was in use and that the winds were coming from the west at about six knots. There was no other traffic in the pattern and he took the plane down to one thousand feet, flew parallel to the runway and then made two gentle left turns before touching down.

  The airfield was slightly larger than the one where Farrell Aviation was based, and it had a hard runway which was at right angles to the water. Bailey taxied over to two petrol pumps by the side of a white-painted wooden hut where a teenager in blue overalls topped off his wing tanks. “Can I tie down over there?” Bailey asked.