by James Deegan
‘How many buildings are there?’
‘I don’t know, I’ve never been. Honestly.’
‘What security has Casey got?’
‘Four men.’
‘How are they armed?’
‘A couple of M16s and sidearms.’
‘Does he have any vehicle other than that silver Volvo?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘Who’s driving him?’
‘Paulie McMahon.’
‘How old?’
‘My age. Fat and unfit.’
‘Armed?’
‘Yes. Nine millimetre Taurus. Pat wanted him to take the risk.’
‘Okay,’ said Carr, removing the pistol from Freckles’ neck and watching the second hand on his watch crawl round to the vertical. ‘You’ve been surprisingly helpful. I think it’s only fair that I keep my side of the bargain, so…’
But as he spoke, in one swift motion, he brought the pistol round under Freckles’ chin and pulled the trigger.
The crack of the shot was significant – though the carpet and the sofa and the curtains absorbed a lot of it, and much of the rest was masked by the volume of the TV, and contained within the thick brick walls – and the spray of blood and bone and brain matter up the wall dramatic.
Freckles hit the floor like a bolt-thrown bullock.
Working quickly, Carr made the weapon safe and knelt down beside him.
Placed the pistol grip into Freckles’ lifeless hand.
Forefinger through the trigger guard.
Pressed it against the trigger.
Clicked the safety back off and placed the pistol on the floor a few feet away.
Carefully overturned a couple of chairs and a table with a lamp.
Went into the kitchen and threw some food and booze around.
Looked at his watch.
Sixty seconds had elapsed since he’d shot Freckles.
Went back into the living room and took a moment to look at the scene.
It wasn’t perfect, but he knew from working alongside them that even the best and most experienced police officers will tend to take the obvious solution if it’s offered to them on a plate.
Anyone coming in to this room would surely assume that Brian Keogh and his wife had had a violent, drunken argument, that Brian had stabbed Róisín, and that he had then turned a pistol on himself in remorse.
A proven IRA pistol, what was more, that had almost certainly been used in more than one shooting.
Shame to leave it there, but them’s the breaks.
Being careful to leave nothing else behind, Carr walked into the kitchen.
Ninety seconds.
Out in the back garden.
Darkness.
Shut the door behind him.
Walked purposefully down the path.
Through the gate, into the entry.
Along the entry, back up the alleyway.
Stood in the shadows, ripped off the tape, put it in his pocket.
Took off the balaclava and gloves, too.
Walked back out onto Fallswater Street.
Just a fellow on his way out for a jar.
No sign of the police, yet – they weren’t keen to rush in to this part of the city, where a call was quite likely to be false and designed to lure them into a murderous trap, and that was if they’d even had a call. Assuming anyone had heard the shot, they were very likely to be keeping their heads down, obeying the cast-iron Republican code of silence, which meant you didn’t talk to the fucking traitor peelers, about anything, ever.
Especially when senior people in the RA were involved.
Turned right down Fallswater, and at the bottom he turned right into Iveagh Street.
Keep walking, keep walking, he told himself, trying to ignore the feeling of nakedness now that he’d no longer got the Browning. No-one’s looking for you. No-one knows who you are. Just keep walking.
He passed Iveagh Parade, and then Iveagh Drive, and then hit a patch of waste ground.
Crossed that into La Salle Mews.
Where they’d once raided a house and found a player in bed with two girls, neither of whom were his missus.
Kept on into La Salle Drive, and then on into St James’ Park.
A distant siren – was that the Old Bill, maybe?
He walked on, head down.
I’m just a bloke heading up the Vollie for a pint.
Again.
Turned right into Donegall Road.
Walked the length of that, back to the Falls.
Eight minutes and forty seconds since he’d sent Freckles on his way.
There’s the car.
Get in, nice and casual.
And away.
112.
OLEG KOVALEV WAS lying on his hotel bed dozing when his mobile rang.
Dmitri Petrov, calling from Moscow.
‘Da?’ said Oleg.
‘Your friend was in the Falls Road area earlier,’ said Dmitri. ‘Wandered around a little but basically went fixed there for about three hours.’
‘I saw.’
‘Interesting thing is, I’ve been monitoring the local police comms, as you asked me to, and two people have just been found dead in a house in that area. The police were called about fifteen minutes ago.’
‘Is he still there?’ said Oleg.
‘No, he moved off in his vehicle twenty minutes ago.’
Oleg’s mouth cracked into a smile. ‘Who are the dead?’
‘No formal ID yet, but the police believe they are a married couple, Brian and Róisín Keogh.’
‘Do we know anything about these people?’
‘I haven’t looked at our own files yet, but the Belfast police chatter says they have very strong Republican connections. It sounds as though the male may have been an armourer for the IRA and the wife a senior member of the IRA, from a well-known IRA family.’
Oleg’s smile widened. ‘What are the police saying?’
‘Officers at the scene think it’s a domestic matter. Man stabbed woman several times, finally fatally, and then shot himself. They’ve recovered a handgun.’
‘I see. And where is our friend now?’
‘Back at his lying-up point.’
113.
CARR SPENT MOST of the next day eating and sleeping and building up his physical reserves.
He also took a trip to the Belfast Central Library, where he checked the newspaper for any report of Freckles’ death.
It was being reported as a suspected domestic murder-suicide.
No-one else was sought.
Freckles was described as a ‘respected member of the community’ and his wife as ‘a senior voice in Republican politics’.
Carr smiled. He doubted that Pat Casey would buy the domestic angle, but you never knew.
Then he logged onto a computer terminal and spent three or four hours using google maps to look at farms all over Northern Ireland.
When he’d finished that – and he must have looked at a couple of hundred – he spent half an hour trawling the web for livestock auctions, feedstuff providers and tractor dealerships.
Anything, basically, to produce the digital fingerprints of a man who was interested in agriculture generally.
A farm sales rep, maybe. Who cared?
The trick was to build a haystack.
The needle – that was the three or four minutes he had spent looking at the McKilty farm, and sketching its layout and approaches.
114.
CARR LEFT HIS hide at 3am, wiping everything down, just in case, and locking up as he went – he wouldn’t be returning.
He was a little tired, but he’d spent years, decades, operating on little sleep, so that wasn’t an issue.
Carrying the AK out to the Audi and then driving round with it, that was an issue.
There was nobody about, but, still, he walked out onto the pavement as though he’d lived there all his life.
People ignore confidence, it makes them feel comfortab
le; the human eye is drawn to weakness, and hesitancy, and unfamiliarity.
He strolled the few streets to his Audi, hefted the bag into the boot, and drove off.
He was taking a massive risk, now.
He’d disposed of the unneeded pistol rounds, but he still had a loaded AK47 and three mags in the back of the Audi.
His plan, if he happened to get pulled by the cops – it happens to everyone now and then, especially in the early hours, and you have to think ahead – was to let them look in through the window, and give them his fake name.
If that satisfied them, great, but if they asked him to get out of the car, or wanted to see in his boot, then he was out of there, foot to the floor, and abandoning the vehicle and losing the weapon ASAP.
If they ever caught up with him he’d be in bother, but not the kind of bother that came with ferrying automatic weapons around Belfast.
Camlough worried him, too.
There was a reason Casey had plotted up there, and the reason was that it was in the middle of South Armagh bandit country.
He was amongst friends.
In the darkest days of the Troubles, the British Army had been unable to move freely around the area, and the villages and fields around Camlough and nearby Bessbrook had been a killing ground, a hundred square kilometre butcher’s block for soldiers.
Five klicks to the Irish border, it was riddled with Republicans and their sympathisers, and much more dangerous, in its own way, than Belfast.
In Belfast, as in any big city, people come and go, and you can blend in. Sure, you don’t want to get caught speaking with a strange accent, or looking at the wrong person or building for too long, but if you know what you’re doing you can generally stay one step ahead.
Not in Armagh. That place was brooding and claustrophobic, home to generations of rural folk, intermarried and intermingled and deeply suspicious of anyone they didn’t know. You had no business there unless you had business there, and the regular Army went in something like company strength, or not at all.
Special Forces were different. They snuck in in small teams, under cover of the dark, digging in and observing and waiting.
Carr had done it many times, and it was how he intended to play it now.
An hour’s drive to Camlough.
Abandon the vehicle in a little residential side street in the centre of the village – not ideal, but it would draw less attention there than if he tried to hide it – and tab half a mile across the fields to a little copse with a view of the farmhouse.
He ought to be in situ by dawn, and then he could lie up and observe Casey’s departure.
The rest of his plan would depend on what he saw.
He smiled to himself as he drove.
115.
THE FARM WAS in the middle of nowhere, a good mile-and-a-half from any other habitation, and it sat in a shallow valley, with scrub to the front and a sizeable mountain rearing up behind it.
Carr was deep in the undergrowth at the southern edge of a short treeline well before dawn.
As the sun started to rise, he saw that the field between him and the McKilty farm was approximately eighty metres long, and about the same wide, hedged in on each side. A few bare, wind-bent trees and an old red tractor stood to the left of the house, which was built into a dip in the flat, brown earth. Off to the right was a long, low cattle byre, built out of breeze block, and a good fifty metres beyond that, pretty much in line with Carr’s position, was a small stone cottage.
The farm was approached down a long track, a hundred metres at least, which led left-to-right from the road, which was itself a narrow, twisting country lane hemmed in underneath high hedges. The way Casey would return, Carr would be able to see him approaching from the village. He’d disappear into a dip for a moment or two, then turn right onto the track and be in plain view as he drove along past the main farmhouse to the little cottage.
There were lights on in both buildings, upstairs, and downstairs.
It was a working farm, and Carr had watched enough of them in his time to know that there could well be blokes out and about already, coming back from milking or doing whatever else it was that farmers did.
So he huddled low, rubbed dirt over his face, and dragged twigs and grass over himself.
And settled down to watch, focusing most of his attention on the cottage.
Around the time the dark sky began to turn grey, it started drizzling, but the tree canopy kept the worst of it off.
Tell the truth, Carr was loving it, anyway.
If he got wet, so much the better.
Filthy, ditto.
This was his kind of soldiering, and, much as he enjoyed poncing around London in a flash car and going to fancy restaurants with his boss, here he was in his element. He’d watched places like this for days and days, shitting in a bag, living off cold rations, waiting for his quarry. There was something primeval about it, the knowledge that he was here, within striking distance of his prey, while the prey was completely oblivious.
At about seven-thirty, a man in green overalls came out of the main farmhouse and disappeared round the back. A moment or two later he came out and headed off down the track in a red Toyota Hilux.
The farmer, off out.
There was no movement then until just after eight, when two men came out of the cottage and conducted a cursory sweep of the area around it. After a quick walkaround, they ambled down the track, and wandered around the main house, the cow shed and the big green barn. At this distance it was hard to be sure, but Carr put them both in their early thirties.
Neither looked very athletic.
Neither carrying long weapons, but Carr assumed they had pistols on them.
No more movement until they reappeared five minutes later, had a quiet conflab, and then walked back to the cottage and went inside.
Sloppy, he thought.
Four blokes wasn’t enough to cover this place to start with – a dozen might have done it, with sentries posted in good observation points, and patrols out to a reasonable perimeter. But if four was all you had, you still needed more than the odd stroll around of a morning.
Sloppy.
Sloppy was good.
Sloppy made him happy.
At about a quarter past eight, he saw lights on the road from the village, and a few moments later the silver Volvo turned into the long farm track and started bouncing and juddering along it.
It drove past the farmhouse and stopped at the cottage.
A fat man got out.
Paulie McMahon, Carr assumed.
Walked to the door.
Knocked, waited, went in.
Carr reached into his daysack and took out a cereal bar.
Started eating it absently.
The front door opened and Paulie hurried out, followed by two men.
One of them scoping the lay of the land, the other bent over slightly.
Black, greying hair.
Specs.
Pat Casey.
Keeping his head down.
Casey got into the passenger side, Paulie the driver’s side.
The minder leaned in, said something, and slapped the roof of the car to send them on their way.
After a five- or six-point turn, they were back off down the track.
They didn’t spare the horses, either; Casey was clearly bricking it.
Carr grinned.
Looked at his watch.
08.25hrs.
As far as Carr had been able to discover, Casey had a 10.00hrs committee meeting which was expected to last until lunchtime.
After lunch he had a constituency surgery until 15:00.
That meant he’d be back at around 16:30hrs.
Carr finished the cereal bar, put the wrapper away, and picked at his teeth while he pondered his next move.
If the late and unlamented Freckles had been correct, there were four armed men here.
He wanted to be inside that cottage when Casey came back – he wasn’t yet
sure how he was going to deal with him, but if it was to involve gunfire that sound would be much better contained within four walls. The trouble with this was that it meant moving in daylight, which was less than ideal.
In terms of approaching the house undetected, he had two options.
The first was to move to his right and then cut down on the other side of a hedge bordering a field of sheep, which ran at right angles to the farm track and the front of the cottage. It wasn’t perfect, but the hedge would at least give him cover from view until he got to within striking distance of the building.
But he had another plan, based on the exploits of the SAS of old.
He watched both the cottage and the farmhouse for another hour, and then made up his mind.
Slowly, Carr edged backwards into the copse.
Once he was sure that he was well-screened, he took a small bottle of water from his bag and used a little of it on his hands to clean his face.
Then, in a crouching walk, he headed back to the other side of the trees.
From there, he headed back to the lane and then back into the village.
He was at the Audi by not long after ten o’clock.
The little back road was all-but deserted, though he did catch the eye of an old biddy, who smiled at him when he winked at her.
Bag on the seat next to him, he started the engine and got on the move.
116.
IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR, the early Special Air Service had relied on daring and mobility and surprise to attack enemy forces which were often vastly superior in both numbers and firepower.
John Carr headed back to the farm, turned down the rutted track, and drove quickly to the enemy.
Past the farmhouse, stones skittering and clattering against a length of rusty corrugated iron, he arrived on the small concrete apron in front of the cottage, skidded to a halt, and debused.
Headed straight round the back of the cottage, keeping low.
What happened next was exactly what he had predicted would happen.
Two men burst from the cottage.
They headed for the black Audi, and peered inside.
Nothing.
By the time they looked up, Carr had circled the cottage and walked inside through the open door, AK in tight to his shoulder.