The Savannah Project (Jake Pendleton series)

by Chuck Barrett

  When he could see over the bottom of the balcony, he noticed the kitchen was empty. He heard voices coming through the French doors from the living room. He pulled himself onto the balcony, over the railing and then stood with his back against the wall.

  He listened. He heard McGill and Annie arguing. A cautious glance through the glass. The room was dark and he could barely make out the figures down the long hallway near the front door. But what he saw struck him as odd and out of place. Jake and Beth were sitting on the couch drinking beer.

  Then he saw the big man step forward with a gun and tell them to drink. He could see McGill yelling at Annie. Then he saw Annie walk behind Jake and Beth and pour beer on their clothes.

  Kaplan turned his head away from the glass, standing flush against the wall, still listening and thinking hard, trying to comprehend what he just saw. He saw a couple walking down the alleyway. He tried to act casual, like he belonged there, but still remain hidden from view from inside the house.

  Just as he decided to take another look inside, he heard someone below calling his name.

  CHAPTER 50

  Jake refused to drink. “I won’t do it. I won’t make this easy for you. You want me dead, then just shoot me, asshole.”

  Collins grabbed Beth and pulled her to her feet by her hair. He pulled until she was on her toes, then he jammed the silencer against her cheek.

  “You don’t drink, I shoot her. Are you ready for that? Can you watch her head explode, knowing you could have stopped it?”

  “Okay, okay, just let her go.” Jake lifted the first bottle of beer.

  Collins held Beth’s head back while Jillian poured beer in her mouth. She gagged and gurgled.

  Jillian said, “Drink it, if you know what’s good for you.”

  Beth spat the beer in Jillian’s face.

  “You bitch.” Jillian slapped her across the face.

  Collins yanked her head back while Jillian poured more beer in her mouth. Then he held Beth’s mouth shut and Jillian clamped her nostrils closed with her fingers.

  Jake jumped to his feet and turned toward Collins, but Collins was fast—very fast, and Jake was looking down the barrel of the Beretta’s silencer.

  “Sit down,” Collins growled as he pushed Jake down by his left shoulder.

  Jake winced. “Just drink it, Beth.”

  Beth swallowed hard.

  Collins relaxed his grip.

  Beth spun around and shoved her knee into his groin.

  Collins backhanded her across the cheek, splitting her lip open. She fell to the floor dazed.

  Jake lunged forward, but Ian was ready and punched him hard in the nose. Blood spurted from both nostrils. Jake fell back and dropped to his knees.

  Collins said, “Now we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way. I suggest you spare yourselves the pain.”

  Jake acquiesced. “All right, we’ll drink, we’ll drink.”

  * * * Collins sent McGill to get more beer. While McGill was in the kitchen, Collins sent Jillian to get the other two pistols, both Beretta 92s with M9-SD sound suppressors, his weapon of choice. He watched as McGill came from the kitchen with beer bottles in each hand.

  But something else caught his attention.

  Something outside the window, a fleeting shadow that moved across the balcony. It was quick and barely noticeable, but Collins saw it. It wasn’t the kind of shadow a passing cloud or an airplane or even a bird would make, but rather the kind of shadow a human would make. Then the shadow disappeared upward.

  Jillian walked back into the room. Collins turned to her. “Give Pat a pistol. You two keep an eye on them, I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  Without answering, Collins walked into the kitchen. Scout jumped down from the bay window, ran down the hall and up the stairs. He followed the cat to the foot of the stairs.

  He looked back at Jillian and McGill and said, “I’m going to get the keys to the GTO. They’re probably in her purse upstairs. Then I’ll go get the car and we can get this over with once and for all.”

  He disappeared up the stairs.

  * * * McGill rubbed his hand across his forehead and looked at Jake, then at Beth, then at Jake again. He hung his head and said, “I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry it had to end this way. I tried to get you to back off. You were just doing your job, but I couldn’t warn you. This wasn’t part of the plan. Things got out of control.”

  “What’s this all about, Pat? What are you involved in?” Jake asked.

  Jillian interrupted, “That’s easy. Laurence O’Rourke devastated our families. He’s responsible for the death of Pat’s parents. He raped my mother and killed my father. Don’t you see? He had to die. All of his proclamations of peace and for the peace process—all lies. He’s a spy and a murderer and he had to pay.”

  Jillian stared at the floor, memories of long ago dredging up painful emotions. She wiped away a tear.

  “I don’t really have many memories of my parents. O’Rourke robbed me of that,” McGill said. “When I was very young, my parents went to eat lunch at a little café in a tiny town called Claudy, near Londonderry where we lived. O’Rourke was trying to gain acceptance into the IRA so he planted a bomb in the café, thinking no Catholics would be in there.

  “My parents died in the explosion along with seven other civilians. Of course, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I found out it was O’Rourke who planted the bomb. That didn’t come out until long after we moved here.”

  Jillian interrupted, raising her voice. “Meanwhile, O’Rourke had been in the Maze prison outside of Belfast,” she said, the words pouring out as though she couldn’t stop them. “My father was approached by a friend of his who was in the IRA, about a potential prison break from the Maze. He wanted to know if our family would shelter an IRA escapee for a few days until the IRA could slip him out of the country. My father agreed. We were told that someone would be staying in the basement. We were also told to stay away from him, that only my father could go downstairs and talk to him. When the prison break occurred, O’Rourke was the one who came to our house. We were just teenagers then.”

  Jillian pointed her gun at Jake and Beth again, motioned with the barrel and said, “Keep drinking.”

  They hesitated and then raised their bottles to their lips. Beth’s eyes were starting to glaze a little.

  “Beth, drink slow,” Jake whispered. “We’re going to need our wits about us soon.”

  She gave him a puzzled look but nodded.

  Jake was starting to feel the effects of the alcohol. It helped mute the pain from his knife wound.

  “One day when we came home from school,” Jillian continued, “O’Rourke was in the kitchen looking for something to eat. He wasn’t supposed to leave the basement but he did anyway. He talked to us for quite a while, and then told us not to tell my father and he went back downstairs.”

  “Ian was fascinated by him. He skipped school the next day and visited with him in the basement all day.”

  Jake interrupted, “Ian? He was around then?”

  McGill said, “Yes, Ian and I were best friends, more like brothers really, for years. That is, until O’Rourke showed up. Then Ian changed. He became distant. He later joined the IRA as a hit man. Now, that’s his living. He’s a contract killer, an assassin, hitman, whatever.”

  Jillian gazed across the room, her eyes dark. “Ian was so excited that night. All he could talk about was O’Rourke and what an exciting life he lived. Ian envied O’Rourke for exactly one day, and then Ian despised him. Despised the mere mention of his name, just as we all did.”

  Jillian stopped talking. Her green eyes filled with tears—one rolled down her cheek. She took her left hand and wiped it away. She tucked her hair behind her ear. “Ian skipped school the next day too. That was the day O’Rourke left. Pat and I came home from school and found them. O’Rourke had beaten and raped my mother. He hurt her. Broke her cheek bone, gave her
two black eyes and a broken wrist. She was a small woman, like me, not very strong.

  “While O’Rourke was raping her, Ian showed up. He tried to stop him, but O’Rourke was stronger then and beat him up. O’Rourke broke his nose and one of his ribs. Tied him up and gagged him. Then he turned back to my mother and raped her again. This time he made Ian watch.”

  Jillian started sobbing. “That’s not where it ended, though. My father couldn’t deal with it, that my mother was raped … so we left Ireland and moved here to Savannah. My mother, Pat, and myself.”

  Jake stared at her, trying to shake off the blurriness clouding his mind.

  McGill stood up and walked over to Jillian, placing his arm around her.

  Jake was still trying to put all the pieces together and make sense out of what was happening. Too many things still didn’t make sense. Too many things still seemed logistically impossible.

  McGill said, “It’s a long story, but maybe you’ll understand why Jillian and I got involved in all this. O’Rourke supposedly resigned his post with the IRA the next year and joined forces with Sinn Fein. But he didn’t really sever his ties with the IRA. No, he still secretly served as the IRA’s Quartermaster General. He was also on the IRA Nutting Squad. That was like IRA internal affairs, you know, policing their own.

  “O’Rourke ordered the bombing of a shop on Shankill Road. A Loyalist area. He was targeting a meeting of the Ulster Freedom Fighters in a room above the shop. Ten people died and fifty-seven more were injured. The Loyalists responded by entering a pub in Greysteel on Halloween night, yelling ‘Trick or Treat’ and spraying the pub with a machine gun. Jillian’s father was in that pub that night. He died because of the retaliation of an attack O’Rourke had ordered.”

  When McGill paused, Jillian added the final chapter. “Then the biggest of all the news broke not long ago,” she said.

  “All this time, O’Rourke was a spy for the British Secret Service. A sleeper who infiltrated the IRA and Sinn Fein, gave away their secrets, and undermined their causes. He’d been proclaiming peace but he didn’t know what peace was.”

  Jillian went silent. She wiped her face with her shirt sleeve and took a couple of deep breaths. She looked Jake in the eyes, “Don’t you see, we had no choice? O’Rourke had to die. He didn’t deserve to live another moment.”

  CHAPTER 51

  Kaplan stood on the second-floor balcony railing, balanced precariously nearly twenty feet above the ground. He reached above him and gripped the decking on the third-floor balcony. Then he pulled himself up to the next level, threw his legs over the railing and positioned himself flush to the wall and out of sight of the French doors.

  Just two minutes prior, he had feared he would be exposed when Annie’s neighbor saw him on the balcony and hollered out a greeting. Kaplan had given him the hi-how-are-you wave and a grin, and then acted nonchalant until the neighbor disappeared inside.

  After waiting for more revelers below to move out of sight down the alleyway, he had jumped onto the railing and climbed the twelve feet to the third-floor balcony where he now stood, silent and waiting.

  He peeked through the glass into Annie’s bedroom. The room looked empty. Then he saw something move. Moments ago, he’d seen Scout perched in the bay window downstairs. Now she was walking through the room toward him, her mouth making the familiar meow motions. He stifled the curse that wanted to burst through his lips. She must have seen him jump the balcony, and had run upstairs to play. If he didn’t silence her, someone inside the house would investigate.

  He eased the door open. Scout tried to exit onto the balcony but Kaplan pushed her back inside the room, then he stepped inside, gently closing the door behind him.

  Scout rubbed against his legs. He picked her up, rubbed her head, then placed her back on the carpet and motioned the cat to shoo. Scout sauntered out the doorway and then took off down the stairs as if spooked by something.

  Kaplan stood behind the doorway, glancing down the stairwell. He heard voices downstairs. He could hear Jake asking questions. He heard McGill and Annie answering.

  He heard Annie say, “O’Rourke had to die. He didn’t deserve to live another moment.”

  He felt sick to his stomach. Betrayed by the woman he loved. The woman he thought he knew was part of a scheme that had killed several people and might very well kill several more.

  His mind clouded with a thousand thoughts. He quickly moved to the night stand next to Annie’s bed. He opened the drawer where she kept a loaded handgun. The handgun was gone. He reached for the phone to dial 911 but the handset was gone. His cell phone was broken, the result of his carelessness when Jake had hung up on him. Then he heard Jake call her Jillian.

  Jake. He had to free Jake. And Beth. The truth had to come out. Annie, or was it Jillian—whoever—and McGill and the big man…they had to be stopped.

  He quietly slid his feet as he moved across the room in an attempt to keep the hardwood flooring from creaking. He eased from the bedroom doorway onto the landing to evaluate his next move.

  He heard it and felt it simultaneously. Cold steel against his temple and Collins’s voice saying, “You so much as blink and I’ll splatter your brains all over the wall.”

  CHAPTER 52

  Jake needed to buy them some time, he needed a distraction. His mind was filling with questions. Questions about the logistics of the murder of O’Rourke. He needed to keep them talking while he formulated a plan.

  He noticed Jillian was in tears, her hands shaking. She had broken down as she explained the events that caused her intense hatred for Laurence O’Rourke. She motioned to McGill to watch Jake and Beth while she went into the bathroom.

  “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes,” she said. “Keep an eye on them and don’t do anything stupid or Ian will kill you too.”

  “They’re not going anywhere,” McGill replied.

  “Pat, I don’t understand how you could possibly have coordinated all this. The bomb, the weather in the northeast, the Skyhawk. How could you be sure it would all fall in place?”

  McGill turned toward him and Jake sensed his internal conflict. Clearly, the entire situation had snowballed out of his control.

  “The bomb was the easy part,” McGill said, after a pause. “Ian had information about O’Rourke’s movements. We knew he was coming here from Dallas to disclose some sort of information he claimed would expose the New Northern Ireland Assembly as a sham, and he threatened to expose the parties as a bunch of liars.

  “Ian has sources, reliable sources in Ireland that know every move O’Rourke makes before he makes them and they were worried about this ‘revelation’ that O’Rourke had. Ian was hired with a contract on O’Rourke, to take him out in Savannah. His employer codenamed it the Savannah Project.

  “Ian first contacted Jillian, who in turn called me,” McGill went on. “He wanted to know if we wanted to exact our revenge. He said he would split his take with us three ways if we helped him. Jillian and I didn’t really care about the money. Our vendetta was different.”

  McGill glanced away toward the door, as though checking to make sure Ian wasn’t standing there.

  “He said he would handle all the details. All we had to do was follow his instructions. A few weeks ago Ian went to Dallas and researched the airport and the operators. He posed as a mechanic and got a job. I don’t know how he does most of the stuff he does, but he is good at it,” McGill said. “He had all the pieces shipped to him for a radio-controlled bomb. He had the transmitter sent here, to Jillian. She’s the one who detonated the bomb, from her car at the airport.”

  Jake interrupted, “What about the Skyhawk? How could you plan that?”

  “We couldn’t,” McGill said. “That was dumb luck. He was a victim of ‘wrong place, wrong time.’ It was perfect for us, though. It would have helped to explain away the whole accident if you hadn’t kept going behind my back. I could have closed this out in a couple of more days, we could have gone home and none
of this would be happening now.”

  “How could you know the Go Team from D.C. wouldn’t come down?” Jake asked.

  “I didn’t. I actually had planned on the D.C. team coming down. But I also knew I would be assigned to the investigation and would come down from Atlanta. I figured I had enough pull to steer the investigation along in a certain direction and could compromise any evidence that would suggest otherwise. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I could have handled it. The snowstorm just made it easier.”

  Jake slowed his drinking but kept mimicking intoxication while he worked on Pat’s resolve. He would try to wear Pat down, and then maybe he could appeal to Pat’s conscience.

  “What about Dave? Why did you let him kill Dave?”

  Jake set his bottle down. He reached over and took Beth’s hand, worried that she was so silent. She was staring down at the floor, looking almost dazed. He pulled a tendril of hair away from her face and tucked it behind her ear, “Beth, are you okay?”