by Declan Finn
Michael forced himself to relax, giving a brief sigh at the thought that he hadn’t blown his cover. He’d been found by an error in background deletion. “Whom do you represent?” he asked.
Catherine stirred her water. “A small consortium of businessmen who don’t believe the President’s foreign policies are healthy for business.”
DeValera nodded. Businessmen could’ve meant the Mafia whose interests were wide-ranged, Mafiya Russian style, to Nike, who’d be hard hit by human rights activists and union leaders.
His eyes were still as he pondered her offer. Whatever he expected, it wasn’t that.
“What are you offering?” he inquired at last.
“Men, money, munitions; the men I represent have a lot riding on all of this. They will be most eager to throw additional intelligence input to whatever you may already have—including the use of a low-rent desk clerk in the CIA.” Catherine wasn’t bluffing about the desk clerk. He would give info to anyone. Grant kept him on to promote false rumors. She could tell Dredd the prearranged code of the people who had him on retainer.
At last, Michael smiled, sure of himself. “That we have no need of.”
“What?” Catherine asked, taken aback.
“We have contacts in the Company,” he answered, sipping from his water glass. “As high as anyone can get.”
“Anyone I know?” she queried casually, as though she had asked after an old acquaintance.
“With your contacts, you should.”
“Are you both ready with your orders?” the waiter asked as he approached.
“Roast goose,” DeValera told the waiter, not looking away from Catherine.
“Stuffed turkey,” STRONGBOW said, doing the same.
The waiter collected the menus while Catherine ignored him.
Someone at the CIA who has access to information about the bombs? She pondered the list of such people, and worried when it turned out to be very, very small.
“So,” she asked once the waiter left, “what do you think of the offer?”
“Personally? I think we could benefit from the goodwill of these people you represent, but I’m not the one who has to make the ultimate decision.”
“If you can’t give me an answer now, then I will contact you later.” Catherine slid out of her seat and stood. “I cannot discuss how we shall proceed together if you can’t be fully open with me about the details of your plan. Which we both know is quite impossible to discuss if my associates are not to be trusted enough to assist you.”
Michael nodded his understanding. “In which case, come back in about five minutes. I’ll have an answer for you by then.”
She nodded curtly. “Thank you. I shall return.”
“Before you go,” he stopped her, “I need your name. A real one, preferably.”
“Sasha Michaels,” she answered.
Michael appreciatively watched her leave. He flipped the cell phone open and hit autodial and 5.
“What?” rumbled the deep voice of his boss’s second-in-command.
DeValera gave his identifying code phrase and related the discussion of the last ten minutes. For once, the man on the other end of the line was silent.
“Does STRONGBOW know what you look like?” he finally asked.
“Possible.” DeValera didn’t want to admit to seeing Wayne Williams with STRONGBOW on the plane, or that he had looked STRONGBOW in her violet eyes.
“Sasha Michaels is considered a front woman for the Russian mob, presumed dead. You’ve probably had a long discussion with STRONGBOW. When she comes back, waste her.”
Click.
Catherine stepped out into the lobby and headed toward a pay phone; she couldn’t use her cell because she needed a phone line that would at least show up on Caller ID.
She glanced at her watch. She was supposed to return in five minutes. She had nine. He’d come looking for her five minutes after that. With any luck, her call wouldn’t take ten minutes. By that time, she could waltz into the bathroom, change her clothes, then wait in the lobby for Dredd to walk out.
STRONGBOW punched the numbers she had memorized from the scrawled notes in the margin of the phone book.
“Newry Logistics, can I help you?”
Logistics? They wouldn’t need an entire truck to hide a nuclear bomb.
“Yes, I’m sorry, ma’am, but one of your drivers wrote down for me the route he was going to take traveling down to Dublin, and I’m not exactly sure where I’m supposed to meet him. He wrote it down in shorthand, and I’ve just noticed it. I hope you can translate it for me.”
“I’ll see what I can do, dear. What is it?”
“B. A. G. P. Number 9.”
Catherine didn’t need to follow Michael Dredd any longer.
But she did need lunch; it’d been a long day already.
Michael DeValera sat at his booth, scraping the last scraps of meat off his cooked goose. The woman who had called herself Sasha Michaels hadn’t returned. He was content to let her go, certain that STRONGBOW would not get past him in another guise. All he needed to do was to get to the nuke tonight and make sure everything was secure for its transportation to The Apprentice Boys’ Monument in Belfast, the starting point of years of massed Orange Loyalist meetings during the Marching Season.
Across the room, a red-haired woman sat by herself, sipping a glass of water, straight up. Catherine wore the same wig she had used to check in as Mariah Lunar that morning. The curled hair stopped just above her shoulders. Her reversible sweater now showed black on the outside. She wore a red suit jacket and a set of black pants, the inside of both were white. Her eyes were green, while her face was red, with what looked like freckles of white in-between.
The only question now was what to do with Mister Dredd, or whatever his real name was. She was all in favor of killing him, but he was a known quantity. If she knocked him off, the next person they’d send would be a variable.
But then, I’m assuming that I’m ever going to see him again, she chastised herself. There was always the possibility that Dredd had finished everything he had set out to do—blow up his dead partner’s former hotel room—and would disappear into the vast continental United States: as opposed to being a sitting duck in the small, soon to be irradiated isle.
If he had, she thought to herself, he’d have been on the next plane out of town. If he’s not here to do something else in Ireland, then he’s waiting to go somewhere else in Europe.
So Michael Dredd would live, even if the seconds were numbered.
Chapter 14
Belfast is a hundred miles north of Dublin. Newry is approximately fifty miles in between the two, the closest city to the Ulster borderline. Newry Logistics was in the best spot imaginable: between the capital of the Republic, and the biggest city of the Northern Province.
At three o’clock that afternoon, a van pulled up to the front of the main office of the company. The van was a dark blue, with tinted windows. The lobby receptionist could see through the glass front of the first floor. Given her surroundings, one would suspect that this was the main office for a travel agency, and not a major trucking company. But this was only the lobby. No one got past Merrill Devine—Dragon at the Gate—without an appointment—or over her dead body. Both could have easily been arranged. But Merrill was the definition of a fireplug body type: five feet tall, and what seemed like five in width. It was indiscernible as to whether most of her mass was composed of fat or muscle, but her ever-scowling face persuaded the curious not to inquire.
From the back of the van came a man, five-foot-ten, wearing a dark suit and tie. He had gold hair, his eyes covered by black sunglasses. He casually pushed open the door and waltzed into the lobby.
Wayne could tell that this woman wouldn’t be as easy to pass as he had thought. He flashed a charming grin and approached the vicious creature behind the desk.
“Good afternoon ma’am,” he said in a light brogue. “I would like to speak with someone in authority.”
“You have an appointment?” she growled.
How do clients ever come into this building? Wayne thought. With an attitude like this, who needs competitors?
“No, I don’t, but you might wish to listen to me anyway,” he said, dropping the accent. “I’m with American Secret Service, attached to the Presidential advance team for his visit in January, and I need to see some records of last week’s shipments.”
The stone-face shrew stared back at him over brown plastic reading glasses. “Do you have a warrant?”
It suddenly occurred to him that this woman wore an orange jacket over a yellow shirt. Was there a trace of a British accent?
Crud! Of all the places I had to go, I had to run into a political witch. President Weaver was a great fan of the Irish Catholic minority in the North, possibly because his SEAL teammates had been McCullough, Branigan, O’Malley, Dempsy, and Lenihan. Their nickname, mysteriously enough, was “The Fighting (SEAL) Sixty-Ninth.”
Wayne took off his shades, folded the arms, and gently tucked them back into his pocket. He turned his marble blue gaze intently on the bulldog of a woman.
“Identification,” she ordered.
Wayne reached into his inside pocket and pulled out his badge case. She gave it a once over, doing all but biting the laminated surface. She handed it back to him.
“I’ll see if anyone has the time to spare,” she told him, slowly picking up the phone, slowly bringing it to her shoulder, slowly pressing a button to reach an office.
Wayne smiled venomously. “Thank you, Miss.” Some people were just born difficult; this was one.
After the first half-hour of tediously dialing up each office, one man had the time to see him. This person had actually come out of his office smiling, glad to have the excuse to stretch his very long legs. Wayne thought the black-haired man could’ve been an American football linebacker starved into gauntness. He wore a light blue pinstriped suit with a green tie he had to take off each time he walked outside, otherwise he’d be stoned to death by men who wore orange during the marching season. Williams couldn’t tell if he was Catholic or if he just wore the green to offend the mean-spirited secretary. Either way, he liked this man right off the cuff. He had a gentle smile and bright, electric blue eyes.
“Good afternoon, Agent Williams,” the man said, offering his hand. “I’m Seamus Walsh.”
He took Walsh’s hand. “A pleasure to meet you, sir. I’m here to look over some of your shipments from the past week. We have intelligence reports that indicate one of them might have had a cargo of weapons going to an IRA splinter group.”
“Do you know which one?”
“We can’t be sure. I can tell you the day the shipment arrived, the probable date that it was picked up, and I’ll know it when I see it.”
“Sure enough,” Seamus said. “Merrill!” he snapped. “Get this man a chair and the files from…”
“October twenty-fifth,” Wayne finished.
“Now, you slovenly woman!” he barked.
Merrill Devine shoved her chair away from the desk and walked on stout legs toward the filing cabinet.
Walsh leaned in. “I have nothing against her, but her attitude in general stinks. You may have noticed.”
“She’s not subtle about it,” Wayne agreed.
Seamus gave a small chuckle. “You could say that. I wear this”—he flipped his tie with a gesture—“just to annoy her. I’m not even pro-Republic.”
Wayne gave him just enough of a look that made him clarify himself.
“It’s not that I’m an Orangeman or anything,” Walsh replied with a disdainful glance at Devine’s back. “It’s just…what happens when you unify this place? When the Orangemen majority in the North becomes a minority in the Republic, you’re going to have something like the Scottish Presbyterian Army turning current Southern tourist traps into bombing targets.”
“I guess that’s the last thing you need.”
“Tell me about it.” He straightened as Merrill finally returned. “Toss them on the desk and find a chair somewhere. How about you go bother Mister Kelly for a minute or two?”
Once the troll sauntered out, Wayne took up her seat. “I won’t take up anymore of your time that I need to,” he told the towering businessman. He looked down as he opened the file dated 25-10-06, in the customary day-month-year pattern of the Irish and British filing systems. “When I find what I’m looking for, I’ll return it to the filing cabinet.”
Seamus shrugged. “Hell, we’ve all been bored out of our minds for the past six hours. You’ve been the first person to walk in the door all day.”
Wayne looked up from the file. “I arrived here a half-hour ago. She claimed half the people she rang were busy.”
Walsh threw him a cockeyed smile. “That’s Merrill for you. If you have any questions about the shorthand on those papers, just ask.”
Wayne scanned the paper on top. He picked it up in his right hand and inspected it closely. “How long do you figure it would take to get one of your trucks from here to Dublin?”
Walsh made a short computation in his head. “I’d say about twenty minutes to get out of town, another fifty to arrive.”
“That makes it seventy minutes, give or take ten, adjusting for traffic. So the most it would take for a truck to get to Dublin is ninety minutes.”
“Right you are.”
“Then why does this one say it left at nine at night, yet arrived in Dublin about eleven-thirty: two and a half hours later?”
“What!” Walsh snapped. He snatched the sheet from Wayne’s grasp, nearly shredding it. He read what Wayne had mentioned and kept shaking his head all the way down the page. “No, no, no,” he muttered, “this is all wrong.” He handed it back to Wayne, still muttering. “Something can’t be right.”
“Something else is wrong,” Williams continued. “The space marked BA signature?”
“That’s the British Army official signature after a search has been performed on each truck before leaving.”
“It’s signed that he arrived at eight-thirty and finished the search at nine-ten. His signature is next to both times. How could he finish searching a truck at nine-ten when it’s been on the road for ten minutes?”
“What!”
“See for yourself,” Wayne replied, tossing him the paper. He stood as Walsh looked over the times.
“This is incredible,” he muttered.
“I would like to see the route that truck took, and I want to speak with the driver.”
Seamus’s eyes flicked to the top of the page. “I can help you with the route,” he answered, standing, “but not the driver.”
“He’s left?” Williams asked as Walsh moved toward the cabinet labeled “Maps.”
“In the most forceful way imaginable. He’s dead. Someone wanted an early shipment for the Irish Independence day, God knows why. He was transporting a truckload of fireworks the next night. The damn thing blew up on him. There wasn’t even enough left for dental records.”
Gee, odd coincidence, Wayne sarcastically thought. “What was his name?”
“That’s the funny part. It was very patriotic: Eamon Collins. Apparently, his mother was a fan of Eamon DeValera, and his last name just happened to be Collins.”
Wayne gave a mirthless laugh. “As opposed to Michael DeValera,” he muttered.
“What was that?” Seamus asked, pulling the drawer open.
“Nothing.”
Walsh fingered his way through two down sheets of paper before he found the map route he wanted. He withdrew the paper and left the drawer open. Walking back to the desk, he snapped the paper straight out. He laid it flat on the desk, spreading it out with his hands. A line highlighted a path from Newry to Dublin, curving at various intervals.
“Right here, on the border,” Wayne said, jabbing his finger into the map. “What’s that penciled in? BABGP number nine?”
“That’s our own personal shorthand. You must understand that this
map is a bit old. That was from before the British Army withdrew from them.”
“Withdrew from what?”
“Withdrew from the border posts. That’s what it means: British Army Border Guard, Post nine.”
Chapter 15
The abandoned British Army Border Guard complex took the top of a hill, overseeing what would have been the checkpoint for all cars going into and out of Ulster. The typical blockade would’ve consisted of a jeep with a mounted machine gun pointed at any car coming through.
The stark, bunker-like stone fortress was surrounded by a perimeter of barbed wire fence. The abandoned complex now stood dark and dead. Every light bulb had been removed, the fixtures taken out. The place had been gutted of all that had made it intimidating except its overbearing presence. There was, however, one spark of life still left inside. The eerie white glow of portable lamps could be seen at night, once the sun finally set at seven-thirty p.m. Unless one actually looked at the guard post, their light was indistinguishable from the moonlight.
The last traces of sunlight had long disappeared by eleven o’clock, casting the roadside trees at the foot of the hill into darkness. It was here that Wayne leapt out of the front of the moving IRA van, rolling onto the tarmac into the woods. He wore dark green coveralls with a matching turtleneck shirt, and a black, backwards baseball cap covered his bright hair. Williams clutched the borrowed, silenced Uzi close to his chest as he ran through the underbrush of the roadside grove, silently thanking Maureen for the loan of the weapon.
Wayne stopped inside the edge of trees, dropping to one knee. He scanned the rooftop through the target sight of his weapon. No one seemed to have surveillance duty. This was stupid, unless there was something he missed. He dropped his gaze lower, looking around the barbed wire perimeter. There he saw the source of their cockiness: two jumper cables clamped onto the links of the fence, both of the wires running invisibly close to the ground.