“Have a drink,” Frank urged, and pushed my untouched pint toward me. His tone was encouraging and relaxed—which was a warning, because Frank was never relaxed. He was either for you or against you, and there was no neutral ground. His anxieties—rages, sometimes—kept mine in check: two sides of the same bad penny that cropped up in the pocket change of every off-the-books job the Brits had cashed in for over two decades. Since we’d first met on the firing line at Raven Hill back in the mid-nineties, he’d engaged me in nearly every kind of killing there was to be done, nearly everywhere on earth. In the process we’d propped each other up as guarantors of our mutual survival.
But things had changed. My perspective on his hall of mirrors had shifted.
The last job Frank sent me on—a virtual suicide mission in Sierra Leone—had unraveled badly enough for him to question the appetite of his once-willing executioner. Groping for an exit that wasn’t there, I’d come back from West Africa and gone into hiding, at first in self-imposed exile as my body purged itself of the memory of the jungle, and then wherever a day’s walk would take me. I’d surfaced in the only place I could call home: the base at Raven Hill, outside Belfast. Old Colonel Ellard was still running the place, his retirement postponed indefinitely after I’d declined to fill his shoes. He took me back in and put me to work on the ranges to keep me busy.
Two months later and there I was, being debriefed in a pub with Frank.
It was a relief of sorts to be sitting at that table in the front room of Doherty’s, a locals’ boozer on the main drag in Ballina, a stone’s skip from the salmon-torn waters of the River Moy. Behind us rows of blue and yellow flies with faded price tags gathered dust alongside unsold reels and old cane rods. The windows were half-shuttered in precaution against the prying eyes of passing wives. We both faced the door. Old habits die hard.
I’d come full circle—except that now I looked to my own defense, and, as a result, Frank to his. Sierra Leone had proved what every job had always promised: that one man is always expendable. To know that—to have lived it—and to have decided to keep at it, anyway, was neither normal nor reasonable. We both knew it. And I guessed in Frank’s eyes that made me as useful as it did dangerous. It was a fine balance, too, because no matter how dedicated the disciple, disillusionment breeds disloyalty—and Frank didn’t allow his gamekeepers to turn poacher.
When I was nineteen, he told me I’d been selected because I’d fulfilled his search for a “legally sane psychopath.” But you reap what you sow. So now we met in public. Neither of us was likely to shoot the other in broad daylight.
His eyes flitted across the room and scanned the bar. He was unsettled. Anxious.
“We don’t have much time,” he pressed me. “Your check-in was incomprehensible and you look like shit.” He smiled and took another swallow of stout. The Dublin in his accent thickened, taking the edge off his officer’s clip—the only clue he ever gave that his temper was about to blow. “So what the fuck happened?”
“You never were one for small talk, I’ll give you that.”
Frank sized me up and went to speak again, but thought better of it. I’d stretched my left forearm across the table. A trickle of blood had run down it and smudged the back of my hand red where it rubbed against my jacket cuff. I licked my right thumb and worried away at the stain. Beneath my sweater unsealed wounds leaked into my shirt.
* * *
—
THE FIRST BULLET to hit me—an armor-piercing 5.7 round—had grazed my left bicep. The shot that followed it had been slowed by the thick wooden chair I’d dived behind, burrowing into my left shoulder and not through it. The lump of steel-tipped aluminum ground against my clavicle. Of the blood and mud that had fouled my face and clothes during the flight from the cottage, nothing remained. The hard, cold swim to the far shore had seen to that. I’d patched myself up as well as I could with the trauma kit in the Kia.
As far as ambushes went, it had been spectacular. If I hadn’t bent over to pluck the note from the corpse’s fingers I’d have been shot dead then and there. The first rounds zipped over my neck. I’d launched myself over the cadaver and come up firing behind his chair, shooting directly into the flares of burning gas erupting from the end of the enemy’s pistol. I sent three massive lead slugs into . . . nothing.
As I’d dived, my arm had been grazed. But it was as I came up again that I’d been hit in the shoulder—through the chair. I’d put my miss down to my wounds and kept firing. Shards of wood exploded from the frame and panels of the bedroom door. I’d fired again, high, low and wide, cutting a triangle of certain death in the darkness.
But through the holes the SIG tore into the gloom of the other room had come a bright, deafening volley in reply. One round buzzed my ear. Another clipped my watch. Four more peppered the edges of my jacket. The bullets were streaking out of the holes I’d blasted. I’d turned side-on and fired again, trying to anticipate the movement of an assassin I couldn’t see but was almost close enough to touch. Yet the shots had kept coming.
In the end I’d hurled myself toward the front door of the cottage, rolling and tumbling back onto the sodden turf, all the while pursued by a stream of armor-piercing pistol rounds.
I’d made it to the car. But the drive from Donegal to County Mayo had not been a pleasant one—six hours at the wheel, changing cars first in Strabane and again in Monaghan. Of the other half dozen rounds from the shooter’s little pistol that had drawn blood, only one had checked me at the time: a ricochet that had torn a neat furrow in my right thigh. Mercifully it hadn’t kneecapped me or severed an artery.
It was in Strabane that I’d first looked properly at the banknote I’d pulled from the dead man’s fingers. The shock of unfolding it had been so unexpected that I’d sat and stared at it for a full five minutes before driving on. Crouched in the rain-soaked gully I’d imagined that, whatever the target might have been expecting, it wouldn’t have been me. But perhaps I was exactly whom they’d been expecting.
* * *
—
I SHIVERED AT the thought of it.
Frank couldn’t see the wounds, but I knew he’d already be calculating the blowback in London and how to deal with it. I summoned my strength to play the game and lifted my glass.
“Sláinte,” I said. I drank deeply, gulping down the bittersweet black. As the alcohol relaxed me, I remembered I was exhausted. “Before ‘What happened’ how about ‘Who was he’?”
Frank shifted in his chair.
“You didn’t want to know who he was when you took the job.” He picked up his pint again deliberately, holding it in front of his mouth. “So why do you want to know now?”
“Cut the crap, can we? When I agreed, I didn’t know there’d be a one-man army waiting for me.” Or a message, I thought. But I kept my mouth shut.
Frank just shook his head like the ever-disappointed parent he pretended to be. It was a role he both loved and loathed in turn, mixing affection and admonishment as my father had done before he died.
“Max,” he hissed, “it’s your fucking job to know that. At least to anticipate that there might be. Anyway, he was hardly an army, was he? For Christ’s sake, what did you do? Walk in whistling ‘Danny Boy’?”
I took another slug of the stout.
“Pretty much.”
The barman topped off a pint for a tourist dripping in blue waterproofs at the bar. Outside it was, inevitably, still pouring down. There was no radio playing, but the rain and the river made their own music, which filled the pub with a steady murmur. We could talk without being overheard or the fear of audio surveillance—which was why, I guessed, Frank had chosen it.
He shifted in his seat—preparing, I knew, to give as many excuses as he was given.
“OK,” I conceded. “What happened is that I didn’t kill him.” Frank put his glass down and leaned fractionally toward me. “I tried, b
ut I couldn’t kill him.” His eyes narrowed, as if by concentrating on my face he might discern the truth of what he was being told.
“This is becoming somewhat of a specialty of yours, McLean.”
“Oh, right. So it’s surnames now, is it, sir?”
“Jesus, Max,” he snapped, “you wanted the bloody job. You took the bloody job. And you agreed to do it on the information you had at the time. You turned down the command at Raven Hill. So, let me remind you what that means.” He drew breath, reminding himself, perhaps, what it really did mean—for both of us. “You are given orders. By me. And you follow them. You aren’t a fucking Boy Scout. You’ve killed more people than most other operators have had hot dinners. So why is that piece of shit not dead?” He breathed out hard and rolled his shoulders.
I looked at him and smiled.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He just about held on to his temper. “OK. His name was Chappie Connor. He was an Old IRA man. Pretty senior. Joined the Provos after Aldershot. He dropped off the radar in ’eighty-eight.” Frank sat back in his chair and shook his head. “Max McLean getting his arse whipped by an old fella like that. You daft cunt. Get you that desk to fly after all, shall I?”
I didn’t rise to it. As messed up as the job looked, there was no way that Frank had sent me to kill a pensioner for something he did when I was still in short trousers. Almost no one even mentioned Operation Banner anymore, no matter how hard it had been fought. Besides, half of PIRA’s commanders had been British agents. In the end we’d practically been fighting ourselves. I also knew Frank didn’t believe for a moment it was Connor who’d shot me. So the debrief game unfolds.
“I’m the cunt? Jesus, what did he do—fuck your wife?”
“What he did is need to know.”
“And I don’t need to know.”
“Bravo, Max. You’re getting the hang of this. And before you ask, it’s got nothing to do with the Troubles. He’s been out of that game as long as you’ve been in ours. He hasn’t even been back in the country for five fucking minutes.”
I looked at Frank, but Frank was looking at the bar. The tourist sat and sipped his pint, lost in his phone.
“Why me? Why task UKN? Why not give it to Grumpy Jock and the Wing?” Frank turned his attention back to me and hesitated for a second. And then the bad penny dropped. “Because you couldn’t. No one knows, do they? Whitehall didn’t sanction it. And neither did DSF.” Frank cocked his head to one side, which he always did when he was about to change the subject. When faced with anything he didn’t like, Frank stepped either on it or over it. True to form, he ignored me and plowed on.
“What do you mean that you tried to kill him but couldn’t? Stop enjoying yourself for a moment and explain to me why it is that Chappie Connor’s brains are not decorating a cottage in Cashel Glebe.”
“They are,” I said. “He’s dead.”
“But . . .” Frank stopped short of demonstrating his ignorance. The nerves at the base of my skull tingled. I was getting the better of him, and it felt good. It almost made up for the grinding pain in my shoulder.
“He was already dead, Frank. Someone had shot him through the heart, in the cottage at least a week ago.” I put my right hand under my sweater; Frank’s jerked reflexively toward his open sports jacket. In this respect he’d never changed: threatened or confused, he reached, unfailingly, for his pistol. I removed my hand slowly and held it up. My index finger was bright red with blood. “There was another shooter. A very good shooter. Probably the best I’ve gone up against. Ever gone up against.”
Frank sat upright and put his hands where I could see them.
“Go on.”
I told him what had happened.
“As I made it out the door, I threw in a Willy Pete. The thatch went up like a rocket.”
“Jesus,” Frank sighed. “You let off a phosphorus grenade? In the Republic? DSF is going to fucking love this. And outside?”
“I made it to the skiff. The whole place was in flames, but I was still taking fire from the side room.”
“Second shooter?”
“No. I don’t think so. Whoever it was shot out the window and then shot up the skiff. Shredded it. I made it to the surf and swam from there.”
Frank considered what I’d told him and fiddled with his pint glass.
“Max, please tell me this shooter is dead and not about to join us for a drink.”
“If he got out of that cottage, he’s a fucking magician. Check the sat feed. You’d see a runner clear as day. There’s no decent cover for miles. He fried.”
“Huh,” Frank grunted, and glanced toward the door. He looked suddenly defeated.
“He had me pinned, Frank. Either I got in the water or he got me. That simple.”
“The hundred-dollar bill. You still got it?” I’d been waiting for him to ask. My orders had been to terminate the target with extreme prejudice—and, specifically, to search the cottage—though for what, exactly, hadn’t been specified.
“No,” I answered immediately, putting my hands on the table and my eyes on Frank. “Lost it in the surf.”
He wrinkled his nose and took the lie at face value. At Raven Hill we’d been taught subterfuge and sabotage in equal measure. We were all professional liars—though some of us forgot to remember we were no longer telling the truth.
“OK. The bag. What was in the bag?”
“Notes. Loose notes. US dollars. I only saw them for a second, but if they were all hundreds like the one in his hand? Ten grand? More, maybe.”
“Well, there’s your answer,” he said. “An answer, anyway. We . . . rather, I . . . ,” he corrected himself, “have been following the money. That money.”
“Yeah, well, it looks like you weren’t the only one.”
Frank ignored me and pressed on.
“He arrived in the country nine days ago from Moscow, via Heathrow, and made a run for the cottage straight from Belfast City.”
“Round and round the money goes, but where it starts only a Russian knows.”
“That’s it. And now, thanks to you and Willy Pete, the only piece of evidence not burned to a crisp is currently floating to Iceland. So figuring out which Russian just got a whole lot harder.”
“You know me,” I said. “Always happy to help. Anyway, what’s special about it, the money?” My stomach tightened.
“It’s not the money that’s special. It’s what it’s being used for that’s special.”
“I see,” I said, though I didn’t. “What is it being used for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ah,” I said. “That makes it very special indeed, doesn’t it?”
He cleared his throat and lowered his voice so that I could barely make out his words above the hiss of the rain.
“All I know is that there’s rather a lot of it.”
“How much is a lot?”
“Well, if my calculations are correct, and this is back-of-a-fag-packet mathematics, you understand?”
“Yeah, go on.”
“It could be up to a billion dollars.”
“Fuck.”
“To be honest, ‘fuck’ doesn’t quite cover it.”
“And no one knows what it’s for?”
“Don’t be a bloody idiot. Of course someone knows.”
“Best guess?”
Frank shifted in his chair.
“The money’s being handled by the Russians, but I don’t know where it’s from or who’s laundering it. Too big for the Bratva.” Frank took another sip of his drink. He was right: even if the Russian mafia’s ranks had been swollen by an oligarch, a billion dollars was out of their reach. “Could be a private bank. Could be a national bank, a government. All I know is that it’s being kept in cash and kept on the move.”
Commander Frank Knight had talked hims
elf into a brief, stunned silence. At the bar the tourist finished his drink and braved the rain. The chill of the downpour outside fanned into the saloon as the door banged shut behind him. The barman cleared away his empty glass and came over to ask if we’d be interested in something to eat. Frank smiled and shook his head, and ordered me a whisky instead.
“For the road. And make it a Jameson. I’m not wasting money on your Johnnie Walker rubbish.” Then: “Get yourself sewn up and keep your bloody head down.” Frank checked his phone and buttoned his jacket. “Seriously, Max, do what you’re best at. Go dark and stay dark. I mean it. No comms whatsoever. I’ll be in touch when I’ve worked out who Goldilocks is.”
I touched my temple in a mock salute.
“I’d concentrate on the bears if I were you, sir.”
He snorted and stood up and shrugged himself into his trench coat. He made to leave, and then stopped.
“Oh, and Max?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t have a wife to fuck. The only people getting screwed here are you and me.” And then he, too, disappeared through the door and into the deluge.
I limped to the bar and drank the whisky neat. It burned my throat but tasted good enough. There were a lot of questions to answer. Sure, I wanted to know about the cash. I wanted to know who the shooter was, too, and why he’d left the hundred-dollar bill behind. But right then there was only one question worth worrying about. If he was fast enough to sidestep every round I fired, and good enough to hit me through the holes my own bullets had opened up, why the fuck was I not already dead?
3
You’re a bloody mess all right, Mac Ghill’ean.”
I inhaled hard as Doc leaned across me and prodded the wound in my shoulder with a long metal grip.
“What have you got yourself into this time?” His tone was both concerned and offhand, talking to me as he always had done, with personal affection tempered by professional detachment. He was the only person I knew who could be simultaneously disdainful and caring. Maybe that went with the job. Or maybe he was just anticipating my lies.
All Fall Down Page 2