‘Fishing, you say? I’ll remember that next time I’m casting on the lough. It’s bad enough the Americans taking all the best salmon without the ones that are left shooting at us.’ He twisted the steel in my shoulder. I gasped with the shock of it.
‘And I’ll remember to bring my own anaesthetic next time.’ The fentanyl had worn off. For the pain Doc had nothing more than a glass of Paddy – one for him, and one for me. I swallowed what was left in my tumbler. Doc motioned for me to keep still.
‘I’ll be honest with you now, Mac Ghill’ean, anaesthetic would have been grand.’ He looked at me and smiled a quick, tight-lipped smile. ‘Because this is going to be some dose all right.’ He turned his wrist as if springing a lock with the forceps, and then drew them slowly towards him, working the bullet clear. I tried to breathe through it. One final tug and he produced the mangled round before my eyes with a flourish. He smiled again, triumphant. I grinned back weakly.
‘Five-seven,’ he concluded, correctly. ‘Nasty. Ricochet?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It went through a chair.’
He wiped the spent round on a swab and then dropped it on to the bedside table. It clattered to a halt beside his own, half-empty glass.
‘The wound isn’t pretty but it’s not that deep,’ he said. ‘Damned thing got wedged by the bone. If it had hit you properly it could have taken your shoulder out.’
He cleaned fragments of wood and clothing from the wound and made especially sure there were no shards of bone that could threaten my lung. Then he packed it with disinfectant-soaked wadding and wrapped it with a bandage. I was propped up on a captain’s bed in an attic room – lit only by an oil lamp – which within minutes of my arrival had been transformed into a makeshift dressing station. Like the rest of the house, it was an echo chamber of a life lived on the road: Indian cloth paintings lined the walls, depicting improbable intercourse in impossible profile, their blue silk and gold leaf shimmering in the half-light; a battle-worn Martini–Henry hung above the mantel; an assegai leaned against a Victorian tallboy. And beneath a glossy canvas of a black stallion standing alone in a field, a silver menorah competed for space on top of a dusty antique dresser overflowing with brand-new, newly empty bottles of whiskey.
He drained the last of the peat-coloured liquor from his own glass and ran through the inventory of my other injuries.
‘Your thigh’s a bit ragged, too, but it’s not serious, either. The butterfly stitch should hold it. Another ricochet, or what-have-you, by the look of it. Surprisingly clean. The bicep’s just a graze. And you,’ he concluded, putting his empty tumbler down, ‘are one lucky bastard.’
‘I’ve felt luckier.’ I winced again as I shifted my weight on to my right elbow. He removed the extra pillows from behind my back so I could lie flat on the mattress.
‘I’m sorry I’ve nothing else for the pain,’ Doc said. ‘Used up all the local I had left on myself last week. Riding accident. Too much wire in the hedges.’ Too much whiskey in the saddle, more like. He patted his thigh. ‘I should have been off shooting for a week by now. Bloody old, that’s my problem. But you’ll be in good hands with Paddy here.’ He poured a large slug of the amber liquid into my empty glass and refilled his own. ‘Knowing you, I doubt you’ll be staying for breakfast. I’ll leave fresh dressings by the letter rack on the sideboard downstairs.’
Then, stooping next to me, Doc opened a drawer beneath the bedside table. Out of it he produced a Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic pistol. He placed it carefully next to the bloodied metal souvenir he’d just dug out of my shoulder.
‘That should help you sleep easy.’
I nodded my thanks and caught a whiff of the gun oil that made the blueing shine.
‘It’s loaded,’ he said. ‘Full clip. And the safety’s off. In case you need to go fishing again.’
He limped his way carefully across the Persian rug – an ornate blue island that spread out under the bed – and pulled the attic door open.
‘Doc?’ He stopped and looked at me from the other side of the room. He knew what I wanted to ask but let me find the courage to say it for myself. Three years had passed since I had last spoken his daughter’s name. I still struggled to, even then. ‘How is she?’
‘Rachel?’ he helped me out. ‘She’s in London now and happy.’
‘Má fheiceann tú í …’ I stumbled on in Irish. But it was no easier to find the words.
‘If I see her, what exactly? Hmm? I’ll be sure to say nothing to her. Nothing at all. You wanted to vanish, remember? And so you did. Whereabouts unknown. Presumed dead. And as much as he’d like to, not even this doctor can bring you back.’
He raised his glass in a toast. ‘She’tamut.’ I shrugged. He smiled. ‘To death. One day I’ll teach you Hebrew.’
‘And I’ll teach you Russian.’
‘I’m assimilated,’ he said, and winked at me.
I nodded and smiled back. There was nothing more to say. And come morning I’d be gone. The door clicked shut behind him. I waited for his footsteps to fade on the stairs.
‘Rachel Levy.’ I said her name out loud. The force of it in the silence of the empty room startled me. It was easy to pretend to want something I knew I couldn’t have. But you don’t forget your first love – even if I struggled at times to bring her face into focus. No matter how futile it was to pretend anything could have gone differently than it did, the feeling for her was still there – though whether what I felt was for her, or the idea of her, was impossible to untangle at that distance. Whatever it was, it still felt real: as real as the bullet wound in my shoulder, or the scars that ran down her wrists like tramlines – a journey that never reached its destination. It was a relief of sorts to know that I could still feel anything at all. I saw her as if from the wrong end of a telescope. I’d fantasized about bringing her back from the brink. Maybe it hadn’t been her that needed saving. As a teenager I’d thought she’d blown my world apart. And then it was – for real.
‘Forget it,’ I said out loud. ‘Forget her.’ But I’d become as bad at taking orders from myself as I was from other people.
I reached over and picked up the Browning, dropped the magazine and checked the breech: one 9mm ball in the chamber, twelve in the box. The familiarity of the moving parts was reassuring. I ejected the round and checked the safety, the trigger pull, the hammer drop. I peered inside, worked the slide and reloaded. Definite actions with definite outcomes. Concentrating on the details helped me weigh anchor. The pistol was in immaculate condition. Most likely Doc’s old personal protection weapon; most probably never fired in anger. Shootouts weren’t his style. But he’d been deadly in his day, about that there was no dispute. I gulped down the refill of Paddy and thought about the hundred-dollar bill. But then, still trying to remember what Rachel looked like, I lapsed into deep, exhausted sleep – one hand on the whiskey glass, the other on the Browning.
Zero three hundred.
The rain stopped. The timbre of the room had changed.
Doc’s house was south-west of Ballina town, on the north-east shore of Lough Conn. I could hear lake water lapping limestone outside and nothing else. County Mayo spread out around us in silence. Frank couldn’t have chosen a better place for a debrief; Doc couldn’t have chosen a better place to retire. The wick in the lamp still burned bright. I sat up and put the loaded pistol and empty glass on the bedside table, and examined my dressings.
The wounds hurt, but they weren’t disabling. I’d managed the twenty klicks on foot from Ballina via Knockmore to Doc’s place OK – all of it in the dark, most of it across country. I’d stopped only to buy a change of clothes and then pulled them on in a hedgerow. To the bullet holes and grazes I’d added a slash from a strand of razor wire hidden in a culvert and a mass of scratches on my left hand from a blackthorn bush. Doc was right, I was a mess – but I could walk, swim, run. My right hand and arm were uninjured. Besides, it wasn’t my wounds that concerned me, but time. Frank had told me to go d
ark. That meant no contact with the barracks at Raven Hill, or with London, until Frank figured out who’d been waiting for me at the cottage – and how they’d known that’s where Connor and I would collide.
He’d need to make sure he was in the clear with the Head Shed in Whitehall, too. It would take some deft footwork to explain why a job that no one had sanctioned had gone bang, and why I was no longer available to clean up any human mess that Her Majesty’s Government wanted rid of. DSF – Director Special Forces – an old-school major general called Sir Kristóf King, was not well disposed towards Frank’s bullshit at the best of times. Or mine.
No wonder Frank was pissed off. It could be weeks, months even, before I was back in business. And if I wasn’t in business, I was up shit creek. The unpalatable truth, when I cared to swallow it, was that I wasn’t Frank’s close protection detail. He was mine.
I took a crumpled packet of Marlboros from my jeans pocket, lit one of the bent white sticks and sucked down the blue smoke. My shoulder burned. My left arm throbbed. I exhaled. I felt OK. I smoked the cigarette slowly, carefully. And when I’d finished it, dropped the stub in the empty glass. I couldn’t put it off any longer.
Out of the ticket pocket in my jeans I took the hundred-dollar bill I’d plucked from Chappie Connor’s dead fingers. As I unfolded it my heart rate climbed. I took a deep breath, and opened it fully, half expecting that my eyes had deceived me.
They hadn’t.
Written in the thick, imprecise strokes of a permanent marker on the back of the note was a single Russian word:
Архангел.
If you twist the Russian Cyrillic letters into the Roman alphabet – like my mother taught me to do when I was a child – it becomes Arkhangel, and means the same in Russian as it sounds in English: Archangel. But in a country whose culture is rooted in the traditions of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the word also refers to something other than the angels themselves: the places named after them – or, more accurately, named after the Archangel Michael.
But although there is a city and parks and streets – and even an entire oblast – that borrow from the title of the divine warrior, in all of Russia there are only two places simply called ‘Arkhangel’ and they are both as ignorable as they are unknown to the outside world.
One of them is so small it barely registers on maps: a tiny hamlet two hundred and twenty klicks north-east of Moscow, buried deep in the countryside of the Komsomolsk district of the Ivanovo oblast. A clutch of houses dotted around St Michael’s church and surrounded by miles of fields and forests, it’s neither on the way to anywhere, nor a destination anyone who didn’t live there would seek out.
Anyone but me.
I’d never been, but every stone of the road that ran through it; every bough that bore blossom at the back of the churchyard; every face framed by the windows of the wooden shacks dotted between stands of birch trees – they were scored into my mind as if I’d lived and breathed the experience of it all for myself.
Arkhangel was not a ragged corner of an unread map. For me it was home.
A home.
My grandmother had been born there. She had died there, too – after pushing my mother into the world cloaked in the thick slick of blood that haemorrhaged freely from between her thighs. She had survived Stalingrad. But there were no miracles in 1950s Russia – not even in Arkhangel. My mother’s first screams had filled the room as the last light guttered out of my grandmother’s eyes. And she a nurse, too. So it goes.
I examined the note in the glow of the lamplight. My father had told me once that there were no coincidences. He believed in synchronicity – the idea that things, events, could be connected across time and space without cause. I believed that I made my own luck. The paper was a bit dog-eared, and still slightly damp, but a defaced hundred-dollar bill was all it was. If it was a message, it had been delivered all right. If it wasn’t, then I’d lied for no good reason about stealing the only piece of evidence that might unlock Frank’s mystery for him.
One thing was clear, though – I’d told Frank not one but two lies: that I didn’t have the note, and that the shooter was dead. But I didn’t, couldn’t, know that for sure and Frank knew it, too. He’d let it go. But I shouldn’t have.
My first job in nearly a year and not only did I let someone get the drop on me, I didn’t go back to finish it off. Finish him off. I knew as I hit the surf that I was saving myself and not the mission. That didn’t bother me: dead men can’t save anything. What did bother me was that from one angle it looked like the shooter didn’t want me dead – he wanted me to run. And I’d obliged.
I looked at the hundred-dollar bill again. Benjamin Franklin looked back at me. Neither robbers nor assassins sit in a room they’ve turned over, with a bag full of cash and a rotting cadaver, for a week. Not the ones I’d met, anyway. I refolded the note up as small as I could and put it back in my pocket.
I got to my feet and walked over to the dresser to see if any of the empties weren’t quite, but I was out of luck.
Max, I said to myself, you don’t know anything.
But I did know I was glad I’d ended up at Doc’s. He always insisted on using my Irish name – a name I never used. It belonged to another time. Another person. When my father was shot down over Angola in ninety-one and reported dead, I made a break for it. Sixteen and on the run. No mother. No father. Nothing to do but keep moving. When I called Doc from a phone box in Liverpool and told him I was enlisting in the Parachute Regiment ‘as Max McLean’, he’d reminded me there wasn’t an English bone in my body. I’d reminded him that both of his parents had been Russian, émigrés from the Communist shitshow that my maternal grandfather had fought to defend. ‘But we’ve Irish hearts, you and me,’ he’d said. ‘We both became proper Irishmen’ – and not, he’d meant, an improper Irishman like my father. Although we both knew that I had always been my father’s son, seduced and repelled in turn as he had been by the false idols of duty and honour.
Doc tried to talk me out of joining up, of course, but in the end he’d given in and faked a letter of consent for me. Thanks to the eminent Doctor Jacob Levy, the British were satisfied that my application was kosher. It most certainly wasn’t.
Legitimate or not, it was the greatest gift anyone could have given me. From the ashes of my father’s plane wreck, and the depths of my mother’s grave, rose Private Max McLean. A new life. Unidentified. Untraceable. Undetectable. Or so I’d thought.
At Raven Hill, Colonel Ellard didn’t care what you were called. He cared what you did. And what I did was learn to kill. When I said hello to Ellard I said goodbye to the army. Officially, I ceased to exist. I surfaced into the Unknown – a special operations kill team called by its army acronym: UKN.
But whereas, once upon a time, I’d been motivated by the idea of service, now I was prepared to kill without illusion. Quite what that made me, exactly, I wasn’t yet ready to speak out loud. It’s hard to accept yourself as someone you don’t admire. At forty-two years old I was pushing it in the self-awareness stakes. But even old soldiers have to look in the mirror sometimes – if only to see who’s standing behind them.
All I saw was a ghost.
Every story has a beginning. The trick is knowing where to find it. I’d always thought my first kill was a long shot I’d taken across the roofs of West Belfast. It wasn’t. The first life I’d ended was mine: Maximilian Ivan Drax Pierpoint Mac Ghill’ean was dead and buried.
Chasing his memory at Doc Levy’s – or mooning over his daughter – wasn’t going to bring him back. I sat on the bed and closed my eyes. She’tamut. I could choose to celebrate my death, or to regret it – but, either way, the last threads of my past were at breaking point.
Downstairs the front door banged to. The noise brought me to my senses. I turned the oil lamp down low and moved to the window. The curtains were open enough that I could see on to the driveway without disturbing them further. A figure darted across the gravel below, face hidde
n by a hooded top. Five-eleven, a hundred and fifty pounds. He stopped for a moment and turned towards me, looking up. I couldn’t see him clearly. I stepped back into the room and made for the stairs. But I was too slow. I opened the front door of the house on to the red glow of his tail lights, disappearing on the road to Rathduff church. A breeze picked up, carrying with it the high-pitched hum of fast tyres on tarmac. I stared hard into the night and saw above the rise of the fields the juddering flash of halogen headlights.
I closed and locked the door and turned back into the hallway. No movement in the house. I twisted the handle to the drawing room and stepped inside. Doc’s chair was pulled up by the fireplace, back towards me. The smell of peat and whiskey mingled with the smell of iron. I skirted the chair, eyes fixed on the floor, heart banging in my chest.
Face it, damn you. Face him.
I looked up and into Doc’s eyes. He’d been shot. A single silenced bullet to the heart. I reached out to him and my phone rang. I knew who it was. Only Frank had that number. It wasn’t until I went to answer him that I realized I was still holding the Browning and my breath. I put the phone to my ear. The line clicked and buzzed. And then a voice distorted by the failing signal said simply:
‘Run.’
4
The first car arrived as I pulled my boots on.
I’d taken the stairs two at a time, the tear in my thigh burning with the effort. I stood at the bedroom window. Half a dozen more sets of tyres bit into the gravel below – unmarked, armoured BMW X5s of the Garda Emergency Response Unit. An ambulance followed them in, too close. Above, the fast chop-chop-chop of an inbound helicopter reverberated around the old pile – carrying, most likely, a Special Forces sniper looking for runners. A runner. I watched the police debus. Twenty-four operators in full, black battledress, assault rifles up, respirators on, combing the front of Doc’s country house. Within seconds a shotgun was taking the front door off its hinges. Classic fortress assault. Capture or kill: I wasn’t planning on finding out which.
Arkhangel : A Novel (2020) Page 3