The Troubles (The Jessica Trilogy Book 2)

by Connie Johnson Hambley

  He slipped his arm out from under Jessica and carefully got out of bed. He walked naked into the living room. The vest was on one of the end tables, looking deceivingly innocuous and non-threatening. Smoothing it flat on the couch, he took his time to examine it carefully.

  The vest was top-of-the-line protective gear made, not for police officers or soldiers, as one would think, but for VIPs—dignitaries, heads of states or corporations—who were vulnerable to people who did not share their opinions. Although most people were familiar with Kevlar, this material was a quantum leap of innovation. Lighter, thinner, and more resistant to a variety of impacts, it could stop bullets and ice picks as well as deflect the force of baseball bats and explosions, earning the name “Dragon Skin.” Most vests were made for and needed by men, but the new material made tailoring one to a woman’s body easier. Overcoats and suit jackets made of this high-tech material allowed for protection without being obvious or bulky. He had even seen prototypes of body armor for dogs.

  He looked along the vest’s seams and eventually found was he was looking for. The label proclaimed “2100 Ltd.” Further down was another tag that read, “Made in the U.S.A.”

  Until he figured out what was going on, that was the last place he wanted to send her.

  “I need to get out of England,” she had said, blankets pulled around her like a shield. She looked so small.

  “The sooner the better, but you’re not going anywhere unless I can be certain you’re safe.”

  “I can drop out of sight again. I don’t need your men around me.”

  “You’re alive because of what I’ve done for you.”

  “I’m alive in spite of it.”

  The glare in her eyes kicked him in the gut. The moment was the closest they had ever come to having a bitter fight. “Then I guess you’d say that Ballyronan is out of the question. I’m worried how you’d feel about being surrounded by my father’s world.”

  She rested her chin on her knees. “Your home sounds like a fortress.”

  “Privacy and comfort won’t be a problem. It’s in Northern Ireland,” he hedged, “on a lake.”

  She sat up. “Which one? Lough Neah?”

  “Yeah, but Lough Neagh is huge. Every county except one touches its shoreline. I don’t want you to assume you’d be close to where your mother was.”

  “Okay. I’ll go.”

  He knew better than to press his luck. Putting her in the symbolic heart of the Charity could be a stroke of strategic genius. It if didn’t go well, it could be the mark of astonishing stupidity.

  Worried and alone, he punched one hand into the other. He had the money and the resources to send them both anywhere in the world, yet he only wanted Ballyronan. Freedom of choice was an odd thing. It provided the illusion that decisions were made with neither constraint nor coercion, but the reality was quite different. He was blocked and cornered in a scientist’s maze, pestered and poked to turn this way and that. The forces were camouflaged, but that did not diminish their effectiveness. Ballyronan was the only place he wanted Jessica to be.

  Her bags were packed and a car would be there in an hour. They would leave the hotel together, but he people to see and information he needed to gather. He would join her as soon as he could. He sat hunched, holding his head against a thousand thoughts. A soft breath of air brushed against the back of his neck. He turned, ready to envelop Jessica in his arms. He was surprised to see her still curled up in bed.

  He gently climbed beside her. She stretched and turned toward him, not waking. Deep in sleep, the fear of the day shed, her arms rested above her head on the pillow. In the half-light, he looked at her body. What stirred inside of him wasn’t lustful, but a deep hardening of anger.

  A deep purple bruise half the size of his fist sat beneath her collarbone. His index finger traced it the same way he had traced the dent in the vest. He moved his hand gently down over the swell of her breast. His fingertips felt the smooth lines of scars that ran along her side and stopped a few inches above the end of her ribcage. A cruel fate had one long straight scar intersected by a shorter line at one end. The shape was that of a cross, or a dagger.

  He bent his head and kissed her, starting at her shoulder and slowly moving his lips down her side, feeling the ridges of smooth skin with his lips and tongue. He reached around, pulled her close, and felt her arms tighten in an embrace as she sleepily responded. A deep need replaced his anger, and his kisses became more desperate, pushing his drive beyond his control.

  Her soft cry of surprise or pain didn’t stop him from his steady and relentless desire to consume her.

  MANCHESTER, ENGLAND

  DALLY SIFTED THROUGH the piles of photographs and notes that landed on her desk during the past few hours. Her half-eaten ham and pickle sandwich and bag of crisps sat beside the day’s fat Sunday edition with headlines proclaiming Ceasefire Ends and The Whole City Shook. Some of her colleagues would say they began to salivate when following a good lead on a story. For Dally, her eyes teared, and if she became excited, her nose would run, too. She took a tissue out, dabbed her eyes, and pressed a corner to her nose. This bombing was making her watery.

  Adding to the transcriptions of interviews she conducted with the police, fire, and ambulance personnel as well eyewitnesses, she estimated she had a month’s worth of work to do in the next week and working on her days off was a necessity. First, she had a deadline on giving all she knew about the emerging details of yesterday’s bombing to Millie Bartholomew, the vacuous yet perky news presenter for ETV, England’s underdog news program.

  Dally could write far better than Millie could talk, and her strategy was to give the viewers a framework to understand yesterday’s attack and to provide a bridge into any other developments that were sure to arise. She had to keep it straightforward and simple for the viewers, something Millie would benefit from as well. Grandier News was a tiny outfit. Once Millie’s words were loaded into the teleprompter, Dally could pound out five column inches for the papers.

  The Arndale bombing already had a strong connection to past events, so bridging into the story to create a larger context was her first order of business. One thing was quite clear and would be clear to ETV’s audience—the ceasefire called by the IRA was over, not that anyone really believed it was going to last long anyway. The minor explosions of last March were just the appetizers to the main news feast that Arndale represented. She chose her words carefully for the broadcast. Crafting copy that Millie could read while simultaneously sounding intelligent was not easy.

  No one had to tell her that Sinn Fein would be somewhere in the mix. To Dally, and any thinking loyalist, they were a radical political party run by papists, nutcakes, and ignorant Irish, who were considered to be the political wing of the paramilitary IRA. As much as the leaders of the Sinn Fein political party had tried to distance themselves from the actions of the IRA, no loyal Englishman considered the posture as real.

  The goals of one were the same as the goals of the other. Too often their “independent” actions were perfectly orchestrated together. This bombing was no exception. Dally’s blood boiled as she sifted through the players. Sinn Fein’s leader, the telegenic but lying Gerry Adams, denied his group’s operational and financial connections to the IRA. To Dally, they were simply different parts of the same body. Sinn Fein was the mouth. The IRA provided the dirty hands. Nobody fit the bill for having the brains.

  Dally didn’t have to be told what yesterday’s bombing was about. The newsroom buzzed with opinion and fact.

  “Are the Scots any less Scottish because they are members of the United Kingdom? Any ongoing agitation in the six counties of Northern Ireland was nothing more than the sour grapes of a disenchanted few.”

  “The peace talks are a contrivance by the Irish to undo a hard-won union. ETV’s viewers and our readers think the same.”

  “Did you see the reports? I couldn’t tear my eyes away. The whole facade of the Marks and Spencer store was sheared
off. The guts and skin of the place were scattered all along Corporation Street leaving not but tendons and sinews of pipes and plaster.”

  “Last count was hundreds hurt from flying glass and chunks of buildings. Guarda reported no deaths!”

  “No doubt those feckin’ Feinians fancy themselves heroes for makin’ the calls and ensuring an evacuation of the area.”

  “It’s panic they wanted! And fear. They planned the attack when shoppers readied for Father’s Day and the Euro football championship.”

  “I heard from Guarda source that a meter man had begun to write up a violation for the illegally parked truck before he noticed the wires running from the battery through the cab and into a hole to the cargo area. Timing of his radio call to his dispatcher was about when the newsdesk phone rang.”

  A few eyes had shifted to Dally. She straightened her shoulders and chimed in. “The police had only enough time to deploy a camera robot and record a few minutes of additional details before the whole thing blew to smithereens.”

  The only chance of staying assigned to the story was to hold on tight to the inside track of information she was gathering. She’d spent the better part of last night culling through information, pictures, and videos. She would keep her discoveries to herself and then stun the world with her reporting.

  Her first clues came from security cameras that dotted the streets and buildings. Images showed two men park the truck then walk in separate directions. Both wore hoodies pulled up over their heads and sunglasses. From the shadows on their faces, they seemed to be sporting full beards, but Dally figured the beards came from a costume shop. One of the hoodies looked like it had some kind of logo on it, but she couldn’t be sure. The pictures were worthless in trying to identify the men, so she spent her time wondering exactly what kind of demented monsters they were. She shook her head free of the thought, dabbed her eyes, blew her nose, and got back to work.

  Simple and succinctly written copy was readied. Don would give it a quick review before delivering it to Millie’s inbox. Normally Dally would have spent as much time as she could molding and stretching the facts to fit the whims of ETV’s viewership. Gluing the viewers to their tellies with scintillating tidbits was just as important—if not more so—than getting them educated on current events. But she couldn’t tear her thoughts away from those stinking Irish pigs. The fact they could roam the earth freely and wreak their havoc irked her. She was equally incensed that this bombing story would track the same as many similar stories then fade away when no hard clues are found.

  A difference of opinion between loyalists and nationalists, Catholics and Protestants, led the IRA to bomb the hell out of a “legitimate” target—restaurant, post office, hotel, whatever fit their liking—as if naming a target legitimate would validate their cause. Her fists tightened. The bomb that killed her father was intended for Prime Minister Thatcher. No one cared that innocents would be shredded with shrapnel. Her father was collateral damage. No one gave a fig.

  All of the news reports would have a pace. The next flurry of articles would contain a statement released by the bombers, who would no doubt say something along the lines of “The English made us do it” and “Get out of our country and we’ll all play nicely again.” Then the theater would shift to Gerry Adams, who would denounce the violence and the bombings and reiterate that the testy IRA would not be so testy if the English would let everybody sit at the negotiating table, not merely the chosen few.

  Dally glanced at the TV monitors showing images of the riots that broke out in Belfast in the hours following the blast. The news story cut to an impromptu press conference where a bearded and grave Mr. Adams blamed the English for a bombing that happened at the hands of the Irish. “I suppose he’s blamin’ us for the riots, too,” she shouted out loud but to no one in particular. The feckin’ Irish had targeted the economic heart of England, ensuring that the costs of the bombing campaign steadily rose.

  Dally was hard pressed to believe that Sinn Fein was being “denied a seat at the negotiating table” out of a purely capricious attitude. Adams and his horde were terrorists, hiding behind the guise of statesmanship. Sinn Fein claimed to be the one true voice of the Irish people. They wanted an Ireland free from British rule. Dally failed to see why the Irish fussed so much. Sinn Fein was trying to bomb their way to the negotiating table, and she had no patience for them.

  She looked at the images of the truck and noted how clean and new it was. Forensic reports had not been completed, but the word she received from some of the Guarda officers on the scene was that this bomb was slightly different than the others. The force of the blast was extraordinary—far stronger than past explosions. The officers she interviewed observed that if the same kind of material was used in yesterday’s explosion as in past explosions, then the truck would have needed twice the capacity to hold it all. Preliminary reports of the residue showed chemical traces of a type of nitrocellulose manufactured in the U.S. and restricted to import into the UK. There would have been a lot of it to cause the damage it did. What did the caller say? Right. Two thousand kilos—over one and a half tons—of explosives were involved and that’s not easy to sneak into the country.

  The outside of the truck was perfectly shiny, its tags were already being traced with Dally’s sources promising to call with the first news. That left the inside of the truck the only avenue for her to examine. Pictures taken immediately prior to the blast showed a twisted umbilical of wires running through the cab. A plain white Styrofoam coffee cup lay tipped over on the passenger seat, covering a slip of paper with a brown stain.

  Dally took out a magnifying glass from her upper desk drawer for a closer look. She could see a logo and printing of some sort, but details were impossible to make out anything from the grainy images. A couple of geeks upstairs in Images might be able to give her something more crisp on the men and the interior of the truck. They could be helpful in seeing some small detail, well any detail.

  She rubbed her eyes without removing her glasses and found herself tamping down a growing anger. Those damned Micks had bought a brand new, top-of-the-line truck, filled it with God knows how many explosive their money could buy, and blew the whole thing up. Then they slipped away into the crowds without a trace. She was pissed. They had so much money to blow, she wished they would give it to her to supplement her pittance of a paycheck.

  The money. The new truck. The men. Like Don had said, follow the money and the answers will flow. Dally knew a few good blokes in customs and decided to give them a call.

  ANTRIM, NORTHERN IRELAND

  THE CLOCK SHOWED 10:30 p.m. when Michael finally tossed his briefcase down on the sofa in his office. The prolonged twilight and the light from the nearly full moon illuminated Saint Mark’s grounds in shades of blue. Michael poured himself a Scotch and sat in the leather club chair overlooking the quad and the lake. The campus was quiet now, but he knew that in a few hours time board members would fill the school, expressing their fears and demanding answers. He dragged his fingers through his hair and wasn’t aware that he shook his head at some unheard question. People looked to him to be in control. He felt anything but.

  Yesterday’s bombing put all of his plans in the trash. Unable to sit still, he walked over to his desk and turned on the computer, drumming his fingers while it booted up. With a few clicks, he reviewed the accounts and their daily balances. Individual transactions were tracked separately.

  The spreadsheet took an end-of-day snapshot of each account and gave him a bird’s-eye view of the breadth of the Charity’s holdings. International banking had its vagaries with not every country reporting transactions the same day they occurred. Combined with transactions that occurred on a weekend, not all activity posted or settled until close of business Monday. His accounts were significant enough to merit private management, and notifications of any transactions not yet visible on his balance sheet were emailed to him.

  If this were a normal Sunday, he never would have
been alerted to look deeper into the details. But this was anything but normal.

  What should have been stable and untouched balances on Thursday and Friday, were amounts that fluctuated unpredictably among countries and accounts. A large influx of cash shifted on Saturday. A few more clicks showed another account brought down to a few hundred pounds. He scanned his emails and found a large withdrawal from an offshore account. He could only put together the timing one way.

  Someone had bet heavily on Jessica losing the race. Indeed, the purse paid to anyone betting on the Devon-on-Thames team was huge. It should have more than covered the money withdrawn. Obviously, someone was looking for a wash of transfers—money coming back in before anyone noticed that money had gone out. Michael had no doubt that the sharp drop in the account was in payment for the team that carried off the Manchester bombing. No one considered that Jessica could ride like the devil himself. One thing was certain, she was not supposed to win that race. A bullet in her heart was to ensure that fact. What caused a glitch in their plans was the spit bucket.

  Even in a private race, the owners abided by track rules, as long as those rules suited them. The rules were promoted to keep the riffraff happy, knowing they would be the source of any leaks if discontent festered. But risks were taken. If anyone outside of the inner circle asked, no horse was to race under the influence of steroids, anti-inflammatories, painkillers, or any other performance enhancing drugs. Jessica had watched over Bealltainn like a hawk to make sure that her horse was not going to be propped up and raced on a body that could not withstand the stresses on its own.