by Gwynn White
And abruptly the excitement went out of Val. He buttoned his leather jacket and sank his chin into his scarf, muttering to no one, “Ah, this is shite, this is.”
Stones and bricks arced over the heads of the soldiers, who had obviously been ordered to hold their position for now. The firetrucks’ engines rumbled. Sooner or later they’d turn their hoses on the combatants. And so it would end. Everyone would get wet and crawl off home to plot their next protest march.
“Fecking pathetic,” Val mumbled. This was no way to win their struggle for independence.
A new float had arrived. Its statue depicted a modern saint in guerrilla dress, moulded black hair flowing over his shoulders. The script on the float’s skirt read: St. Domnall MacConn, Rightful King of Great Britain & Ireland.
Val stopped.
Men clustered around the float, working frantically. Val edged closer and saw that they were filling milk bottles with gasoline.
Ah, Alyx, you eejit. In full sight of the fecking British Army?
But Alyx was not here herself, or at any rate, he couldn’t see her.
As each bottle was filled, a rag was stuffed into its neck and one of the balaclava-heads ran off with it.
Val scanned the non-balaclava-wearers nearby. His gaze snagged on a knight’s knot of blond hair. Whereas commoners were legally required to wear their hair short, the nobility flaunted long hair. This fellow wore his blond locks bunned at the nape of his neck, German style. A knight, here? The man was grinning indulgently, thumbs thrust through a belt that bore a sword in a rugged plastic scabbard. Looking as if he were not a part of the action, but wanted to be. Looking as if he were half in and half out of the streetfighting mentality, like Val himself.
Looking familiar.
“Val! Valery Sullivan!”
Too late to escape.
“Val!”
Heinrich Ende covered the distance between them in three strides and hugged Val.
“Bloody hell!” Val said, striving to play it casual. “Heinrich! What are you doing here?”
Ende felt as solidly muscular as ever. Must’ve kept up the bodybuilding. But he now carried a sword and wore a hairknot. Who had made Ende a knight? He was a hit-man. Murder on legs, that was all he’d been when they worked together in the Middle East and sure as shite that was all he was now.
Ende gestured at the men around the float. “Wanna introduce me to your friends?”
“They’re not my friends,” Val said automatically.
A bottle-bomb carved a flaming arc across the sky. Screams drowned out the smash of its impact on the far side of the square.
“Any minute now,” Ende said, looking in the direction of the British soldiers. “The fire hoses.”
Val grimaced. “This shite is so fecking predictable.” He pulled himself together. “Hey, Ende, I thought I was seeing a ghost! Let me buy you a drink.”
Heinrich Ende was amiable. “So what’re you doing these days?”
Val dodged the question by taking Ende to the Imperial Hotel on Lothally Road. This was where the journos hung out. Lots of Germans, of course: as de facto ruler of continental Europe, Germany sent people everywhere. A sweating Spaniard hunched over the payphone, filing copy. There were even a couple of Egyptians sitting at the end of the bar. By themselves, of course. No one wanted to drink with them. Necklace tattoos proclaimed their loyalty to the Great Pharaoh. Funny to think that they were probably journalists, too—they had a fancy camera and a tape recorder sitting on the floor under their stools. What could the troubles of Belfast mean to the average Egyptian, far away in that brutal, magic-ridden empire?
Val and Ende settled in a corner of the lounge. The afternoon sun lit up the smoky air. Above Ende’s head hung a portrait of King Tristan II with his children and grandchildren. Val raised his glass to the portrait: “Devil take the lot of you.”
Ende laughed. “So what’re you up to these days?”
Val couldn’t dodge the question again. “I work for the IMF. I know, I know…”
“You’ve gone straight! Never thought I’d see the day.”
“I never did, either. But I’m not getting any younger.”
Ende’s pale blue eyes narrowed. He was muscle but not only muscle. People who assumed he was as stupid as he looked had often lived to regret it.
“Shit, man. You used to be able to weave curses that worked. You could crack a safe just by spitting on the lock. Crash a car with string and chalk. You were the best magician old Flambeault ever hired. You going straight, Sullivan, is a tragedy.”
Val held tightly to his beer so his hands wouldn’t shake. Ende could destroy his life by denouncing him as a magician. They both knew it. The only question was whether Ende wanted to.
The tension tightened his throat so much that he started coughing. He wheezed and hacked and scrubbed his lips with a napkin. It came away red.
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Ende said, “but you look like death warmed over. You’re what, thirty?”
“Twenty-nine.” Val was still coughing. Once he started it was often difficult to stop. He lit a cigarette. That helped.
“The saints still hate your ass, huh?”
“Like girls hate a cheapskate.” Val gulped beer. It was a shite life, being an incurable. No miracles for him; every illness had to be weathered until time did its healing work. All for the dubious privilege of working magic.
He wished he knew some magic that could make Heinrich Ende vanish.
“So what brings you to Belfast, big man?”
Ende fingered his beard, smiling. “Have you heard the rumors about this MacConn chick?”
Ah, feck. Val kept it casual. “MacConn? Sure that’s not her real name. She was born plain Alyx O’Braonain.”
“So that story about her being the rightful queen, the daughter of the fallen hero Domnall MacConn … it’s just a story?”
You tell me, Val thought. Alyx herself believed the story, or pretended to. But it might be a fairy story she’d made up. She’d been abandoned as a baby, and that was all he knew of her heritage.
“There’s a lot of wild stories go around in the movement,” he shrugged.
“That’s for sure. I heard some folks say the MacConn chick is a witch. She’s invulnerable to bullets. Can’t be killed.”
Val laughed for real. “There’s no magic can make you invulnerable. I should know.”
“Yeah. I figure it’s just a rumor. But what can you do? The knotheads believe what they want to believe.”
“You’re a knothead now yourself, Heinrich.”
Ende brushed his meager hairknot. “Ha! Yeah. It’s just a formality, makes it easier to get visas. I travel a lot these days for work.”
“Who did you say you were working for”
“I didn’t. But I’ll do this for you, Val. You help me out, I’ll split my fee with you.”
“And what would I be helping you out with?”
“The … person I’m working for … wants the MacConn chick. Dead or alive. Preferably alive. Point me in the right direction, and it’ll be a nice chunk of change for you.”
A nice chunk of change that Val would be too dead to enjoy, if he even thought about betraying Alyx. Which he had no intention of doing.
The trouble was that he’d already been seen with Ende. It would get back to Alyx, and then he’d really have problems. So, he couldn’t just walk away, appealing as that thought was.
“I’d need to talk to some boys in the old neighborhood,” he said, thinking frantically.
“Why don’t I,” Ende started to say, and then an explosion planted itself like the palm of a giant hand against the windows of the lounge.
The journalists rushed to the windows.
A greasy cloud of smoke shimmied from behind the rooftops into the sky.
Inside the lounge, plaster dust sprinkled the tables and banquettes. The explosion had not broken any windows in here but it had shaken cracks into the antique ceiling.
&n
bsp; “Get back from the windows,” Ende said, grabbing Val.
Ende was agitated and the journos were panicking, but the boys at the bar were still drinking, their shoulders dusted with bits of ceiling. One of them held out his pint. The barman pulled a refill, not even flinching when the second explosion went off, slightly further away this time.
“It never used to be this bad, I swear to you,” Val said.
“I believe you.”
“There’s more to Ireland than this. You need to get out into the countryside. Go down south, it’s fecking beautiful. That’s where I want to end my days. A cottage, a garden, a wee dog. No sound but the sea. Peace.”
“That sounds sweet, man.”
“Ferghal!” Val yelled to one of the boys at the bar. “Will you drop us up the Falls?”
“I’m not going up the Falls tonight, you can forget about it.”
“They won’t stop us.” Val swayed on his feet. “Argent! Hey, Argent! Would you be needing a lift?”
Colin Argent—Sir Colin, ponytailed and bespectacled—was a reporter for the Irish Broadcasting Corporation, headquartered in Dublin. His expense account persuaded Ferghal the taxi driver to change his mind. They all trooped downstairs and out to a cherry-red Vauxhall parked on the double yellow lines. Argent had a camera-man and a sound fella in tow, so it was a right old squash. The Vauxhall slalomed through the now-deserted streets. The noise of sirens receded. Then they came to a checkpoint.
On any given day, you could expect to be stopped two or three times on your way across Belfast. This checkpoint was a British Army job, a LongHOG parked across the street. One soldier at a time approached the queued drivers. He bent them over their steering wheels and roughly pulled their shirts open to check their ID.
As the Vauxhall crawled along in line, Val saw a poster on a lamppost. ‘VOLUNTARY EMIGRATION SUPPORT’, it said, ‘Start Your New Life With the Wessex Far East Corporation.’ Half his lifetime ago, Val’s parents had fallen for that promise. They’d emigrated to Khmeria, taking him with them, away from Belfast, away from Alyx. But he had come back. He kept coming back. Why, he had not the slightest fecking idea.
They reached the checkpoint. Sir Colin rolled down the front passenger side window. “ID, if you don’t mind,” a young soldier droned.
“Certainly,” Sir Colin smiled. He held his right hand up. The soldier apologized and scuttled back. Val glimpsed the ring tattoos on Sir Colin’s third finger, the grey-blue of Argent stacked with the forest green of Sauvage. The reporter was nobly born, which took care of these servile king’s boys.
On the far side of the checkpoint, they left Sir Colin doing a piece-to-camera in front of a smashed shop window. Ferghal drove back up the hill Val had walked down this morning. A gable-end mural, depicting a mighty-thewed warrior with a machine-gun, overlooked a three-way crossroads. The narrowest fork led up to the Aching Head Estate, the notorious hard area where Val had been born.
“I’m not going in,” Ferghal said, braking. “I’ve a wife and kids, Val. I’m not going in tonight and that’s all.”
“If you care that much about your wife and kids, you shouldn’t be a taxi driver,” Val said. “Drop us here, then, that’ll be fine.”
They walked up the Shankill Road. Night was falling. The streetlights had come on, those of them that weren’t broken. Sirens whooped and burbled through the city below.
“Gonna take me home to meet the family?” Ende said.
“Just my granny.” Val gasped for breath, the climb challenging him. “You’ll like her. She’s a grand old girl.”
They hung a left into a warren of sooty brick tenements. Sour cabbage, the stink of uncollected trash, and coal smoke combined into a vile stew of odors. Children pelted through the gathering dark, screeching. Val plodded around the familiar turnings.
Ende was getting wary, fingers brushing his jacket over his waist area. He definitely had a gun as well as his sword.
A red glow wavered out of a street mouth. They stopped in the shelter of a derelict cargo container that served as a corner shop.
A gang of children scurried past, hauling a wheelie bin full of stones and half-bricks.
“They’re preparing a traditional Irish welcome for the king’s boys,” Val said. Even he himself might not be safe here tonight. It depended whose crew was out on the barricades.
He peered around the corner. Men were pushing wrecked cars into the middle of the street and piling mattresses and junk on top. They sang as they worked. The fire was on the asphalt in front of the barricade-in-progress, truck tyres burning, pouring streams of black smoke across the scene.
Behind the barricade stood the giant statue of Domnall MacConn. Relief washed over Val.
Ende hissed, “Do we go back?”
“Feck, no. My granny’s house is on the far side of this lot, near the park. I’ll just have a word with these boys.”
Before Ende could stop him, he trudged out into the firelit street and plodded around the barricade.
The first person he saw was Jed Ragherty bringing out an entire bed frame on his shoulders. There was the ugly mug of Black Donnchla, who knew just enough black magic to be a danger to everyone around him. There was little Ferdy loading an old Great War trench-sweeper right out in the open air.
And there, standing with hands in pockets, the only person doing nothing at all, was Alyx O’Braonain, a.k.a. Alyx MacConn.
“It’s herself,” Val hailed her.
“Val! I was looking everywhere for you today.”
“There’s a German down the end of the street. He’s a hitter come for you … You’ve got to kill him.”
.
2
Leonie
A month later. September 14th, 1979. Armagh
Chimera’s mobile to Blue One Two,” Leonie Grant said into the radio. She let out the clutch and pulled onto the street. They’d been parked on the edge of the allotments on the hill above Armagh, a wasteland where hobbled cows and donkeys wandered, not a blade of grass in sight. As soon as she got through the lights at the T-junction, she changed up to third gear. Gav sat beside her, singing ‘Lily, My Love’ by the Selfish Seven, his current pop obsession.
The net chattered in their earpieces.
“Bee Sting. That’s O’Braonain through Red One One and straight on towards Yellow One Nine. Looks like she’s heading for the Dublin road.”
“Zero.”
“Hunter’s mobile.” That was Floyd, punching metal out of the parking lot of the off-grounds-betting emporium on the outskirts of this rotten little town.
“Chimera’s paralleling on the Blues,” Leonie said, grimacing at Gav; he couldn’t carry a tune.
“Zero.”
“Bee Sting.”
“Gift.”
“That’s O’Braonain static at Yellow One Nine, intending Yellow Three Nine.”
Again the staccato patter of acknowledgements.
“Chimera’s through Blue One Two.” Leonie dropped down a gear and powered past a lorry, eliciting a whine from the over-revved engine of the little Morris. She slipped back into third and accelerated through an amber light. Brown-brick terraces ticked past. Gav moved his penlight over the mapbook. The Intelligence Company team formed an invisible box around Alyx O’Braonain and her driver, held together by the net.
The terrorists of the IRA knew the rules as well as the Intelligence Company operators themselves did, and they all had expertise in not getting caught. But Alyx O’Braonain was the one who’d gotten under Leonie’s skin. It was the woman thing.
Leonie felt a sense of frank respect, which she would never have confided to anyone, for another woman who could not only thrive in a man’s world, but rise to a position of command.
But of course, O’Braonain had done it by being a terrorist, a charlatan with her ridiculous claim to be the true queen, and a sadistic profiteer. There were living men and women walking around Ireland with no hands, victims of O’Braonain’s penchant for harvesting miraculous
relics from the living as well as the dead. Some said O’Braonain sold the relics on the black market. Wilder rumors alleged that she used them in magic rituals, which in turn were held to explain why she could neither be killed nor caught.
That was a load of old cobblers, anyway. It was just a matter of time before O’Braonain slipped up and found herself facing charges … or preferably, got shot ‘resisting arrest.’
And tonight just might be that night.
The Company had received a tip about a cache of weapons on a farm at the foot of Slieve Gullion. If they caught O’Braonain red-handed with the guns, it would be bout and tourney to them.
But elation was lacking. They should have been taking this one on the long finger, moving in on the farm over a period of days, establishing OPs and sending in operators under cover of darkness to get documentary evidence. Instead—and not for the first time—the National Chivalry Agency, the Intelligence Company’s parent organization, had snatched the operation from their hands.
Their role this night would be limited to mobile surveillance.
Still, the team remained professional, their voices on the net laconic.
“Bee Sting. That’s O’Braonain through Yellow Two Eight, definitely heading out on the Dublin road. I’m breaking off to Yellow Three Seven.”
“Gift has control.”
“Zero. Can someone back Gift?”
“Chimera can.” Leonie coasted towards the junction where the road she was on met the Dublin road. “Approaching Yellow Two Nine now.”
“Zero.”
Cars swept past. Leonie’s headlights slid over the concave arch of a regrowing strimmed hedge, most of its leaves reduced into a paste in the puddles.
“Gift has O’Braonain approaching Yellow Two Nine, speed fifty, fifty-five,” Darrin said. “And she’s through towards Yellow Two Ten. And I’m … through.”
“Chimera’s backing Gift.”
The Dublin road climbed south into the hills, skirting little black lakes in glaciated depressions. Slieve Gullion loomed ahead, the gateway to the west. Ireland’s wild western shore had served as one great big bolthole for villains since time out of mind. But Alyx O’Braonain wasn’t going that far tonight, the Company believed.