Bandit Country

by Andrew Turpin

  Always the difficult part. “I don’t know if he’s done anything, has he? But I was trying to find him.”

  “You police?”

  “No, not police. Private work. I’m an investigator, though.” His gut instinct was to be honest with her.

  A barman began loading up her tray with more drinks behind her.

  She stared at him, her dark eyes steady. “I can’t talk. Not about my stepfather. Okay?” She spoke in a low-pitched Irish burr.

  Johnson pursed his lips. “It’d be all confidential, nothing official. Nothing to worry about. You don’t know me from Adam, I’m aware of that. But I can promise you—”

  “No.” She exhaled and shook her head.

  Johnson nodded. “All right. Here, take my number. If you change your mind, just send me a text. But I’m due to fly out of here Saturday evening, so you don’t have long.”

  He took out his wallet and removed a business card, which carried his contact details and a quote in smaller print from Martin Luther King Jr. The quote read, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

  She scrutinized it but said nothing. Then she picked up the tray and walked off.

  Johnson suddenly realized there had been no word from Donovan. Not a call, not a text. He reconciled himself to dining alone. He continued to sip his beer and perched himself on a barstool when one became free.

  The place was humming, the dance floor was livening up, and the sign said that the bar was open until two in the morning. Moira was facing a busy night.

  Another track started. Johnson knew this one, “Wild Ones,” by Flo Rida. It was another of Carrie’s favorites.

  Moira came back several times to collect trays of drinks, but not once did she glance in his direction.

  After half an hour, Johnson decided he’d given Moira enough time. He drained his bottle and looked one last time at a skimpily dressed blond girl who was twirling increasingly manically around a pole on the dance floor, leaving little to the imagination. Maybe she was the stripper? Or maybe not.

  He headed toward the door. What was the point?

  Friday, January 4, 2013

  Belfast

  Although it was only about half a mile from his own place, it had been ten years since Donal Wilson had been to the house on Waterford Street, opposite Dunville Park in the Lower Falls area.

  He walked past the green facade and black shutters of Boyle’s Bar on the corner, where he stopped momentarily, wondering whether he should bother, especially this late into the evening. But then he continued down to the terraced house at the bottom of the road.

  Wilson went back a long way with the intelligence officer for the Belfast brigade’s second battalion, Wes Monaghan. In fact, right back to the gun battles of 1970, when thousands of British soldiers poured into the area and imposed a curfew.

  They still met up from time to time to reminisce but only ever for a beer at Boyle’s, or sometimes over a coffee at St. Paul’s after mass.

  So Monaghan did a good-humored, slightly mocking double take when he saw Wilson on the doorstep.

  A thickly built man with a beard that was more salt than pepper now that he was into his sixties, he had, like many in the area, never come to terms with the Good Friday peace agreement.

  “I’ll make you a cuppa, we can have another chew over the sellout,” he told Wilson as he let him in.

  Those who supported Gerry Adams and his cronies mocked Monaghan these days and told him he was past his sell-by date.

  But no, he saw his role as critical, he often told Wilson, given that so many Real IRA initiatives were being stymied by leaks, by touts who thought themselves loyal to Sinn Féin’s political processes and solutions. There were too many dissidents ending up in Maghaberry jail because of it.

  “So what can I do for you?” Wes asked as he poured boiling water into his teapot. He glanced at his watch. “It’s late. So I’m assuming you haven’t just popped in for old times’ sake, have you?”

  Wilson fiddled with his cloth cap, which he’d placed on the kitchen table. “True, there is something I need to discuss.”

  Monaghan sat up straight when Wilson mentioned Dessie Duggan, and detailed how an American, Philip Wilkinson, had been looking for him and his stepdaughter, Moira.

  “It might be nothing,” Wilson said. “It might be true that this Wilkinson guy is just trying to dig up an old connection from his family’s Irish roots. But it seems a bit odd.”

  Okay, Monaghan said, he’d pass on the information and make sure it got to the south Armagh brigade. He knew the IO down there, Liam McGarahan. No problem.

  “Did you get a good description of Wilkinson?” Monaghan asked as he passed over a steaming mug of tea.

  “Ah, yes, I can do better than a description. I took a photo of him on my phone as he walked out. Just had a gut feeling, so I snapped him,” Wilson said.

  Chapter Seven

  Saturday, January 5, 2013

  Forkhill

  It was never a simple process to speak to Patrick McKinney. But then Duggan was a cautious man, a loner who deliberately made it complicated. That was why he’d survived unscathed and uncaptured for so long, in his view.

  He was a cleanskin, to use the Ulster slang for someone who didn’t have a criminal record. Unbelievably lucky, some people called it. Duggan thought that the more careful he was, the luckier he got.

  And that caution was why his old schoolmate McKinney had remained free too, as he often reminded his fugitive friend.

  Every time they spoke, he made McKinney call him from a burner pay-as-you-go cell phone. And he always had to take the call at a different location. A friend’s house, somebody’s empty office, a farm, even occasionally a pay phone.

  He didn’t know if the police were tapping phones or not. It certainly wasn’t like the old days, but he assumed they probably were. Better to err on the side of caution. They couldn’t tap every phone in south Armagh. That was his theory.

  So he’d sent an encrypted WhatsApp text message containing the number that McKinney should call. Now he was waiting for the phone to ring.

  Today Duggan was sitting in a corner of a drafty, freezing barn belonging to one of his volunteers, Pete Field, the brigade machine gunner who had been responsible for forcing the chief constable’s helicopter into an emergency landing. Field’s farm was on the edge of Forkhill village, just two miles north of Duggan’s home, which sat literally on the borderline with the Irish Republic.

  The phone he was sitting next to was an old one, with a curly coiled cable that connected the handset to the main body, and stood on a rickety oak desk that was covered with water stains and dust.

  Out of the filthy, cobweb-covered barn window, across the wintery fields, he could see the hulking dark gray mass of Slieve Gullion towering over the countryside in the distance.

  Then it sounded with a bell-like double ring that reminded Duggan of phones when he was a kid.

  After the usual preliminary banter, McKinney got down to business.

  “You’ll be pleased to know we’re sorted with the shipment,” he said in his deep and slightly intimidating south Armagh burr. Even to Duggan’s ear, it had been only slightly diluted by his years in the United States.

  “You’re in Cólon now?”

  “Yeah, with James here. I flew in last night. We’re packing the container, and it should be out of here tomorrow, heading your way. Should be into Dublin Thursday the twenty-fourth. It’ll be a combination of half smokes, half timber beams to hide them.”

  “That’s good,” Duggan said. “We’re running short of cash, so that should keep number cruncher O’Driscoll happy.” He paused. “But there’s something I need to ask, big man.”

  “Go on,” McKinney said.

  “Sorry about the late notice, but I need a few things added to the cargo. Top of the list is a new Barrett. We’re down to one here, as you know, and the one I’ve got sometimes doesn’t work properly. I can’t affor
d for that to happen on a big job.”

  Duggan ran through a short list of other weapons that he needed, including handguns, ammunition, and mortar shells.

  There was silence at McKinney’s end. “Where the feck d’you think I’m going to get a Barrett from here? I’m in Cólon, remember? Can’t it wait until the next shipment? And what do you need it for, anyway?”

  “No, it can’t wait. There might be a chance to do something big coming up. I can’t discuss it on the phone. So I need a new one—this one might need to go in for a repair.”

  “Something big. Bigger than the chief constable?”

  There was silence for several seconds. “I’m not saying anything on the phone, Patrick. Not even to you.”

  Another silence.

  “Okay,” said Patrick eventually. “It’s probably going to mean a delay getting the container to you, then. I’ll talk to James, but I think I’ll have to reroute it through Boston. I can try and get what you need there. It’ll be easier. And I’m not promising anything, either. It’s not just locating the rifle, which will be tough enough, it’s about shipping it safely. We’ll have to hide the hardware in the timber beams.”

  “Obviously, but you’ve done it before.”

  Duggan’s cell phone rang in his pocket. He pulled it out and looked at the screen.

  “Patrick, I need to go. I’ve got the IO calling on the mobile here. See what you can do. Keep in touch. Let me know.”

  He put the handset down and answered the incoming cell phone call.

  “Liam,” he said, not giving the caller a chance to speak. “I’ve just been on the phone to Patrick. He’s in Cólon. I’ve given him the instructions,” Duggan said. “The good news is he’s already got a shipment ready. Now he just needs to get the hardware to add to it.”

  “That’s good to hear,” McGarahan said. “But there’s something you need to know about. Might be nothing, but I had a message this morning, first thing, from the IO up in Belfast.”

  “You mean Wes?” Duggan asked.

  “Yeah, Wes. Says there was someone looking for you down near your old place, Cavendish Street. And asking where your daughter was, too.”

  “Who? What’s that all about?” Duggan demanded.

  “An American guy apparently knocked on the neighbor’s door just down from one of our guys and said his family used to live there years back before emigrating to America and knew your family, when you were a kid. He was trying to track you down. Sounds suspicious to me.”

  “Yeah, that’s bullshit—we must have left that road when I was only nine or ten. I can’t see anyone popping up out of the blue from the States like that, suddenly deciding they want a catch-up. I don’t even remember anyone going to the States. No way. And asking about Moira as well?”

  “Yeah, apparently.”

  “Is he police? Intelligence?”

  “No idea yet. I need to find out.”

  Duggan paused, thinking quickly. He wasn’t surprised at what he had just been told. It had long been a concern that his stepdaughter might at some point say something damaging to the wrong person. They had a fractious relationship.

  “Okay, Liam,” Duggan said. “Whoever he is, I want you to arrange to sort him out, head him off. Do we have a name?”

  “Philip Wilkinson.”

  “Right. Well, you and Wes between you find out who he is, do whatever it takes to put him off,” Duggan said. “Moira’s the last person I want anyone talking to, especially at the moment, with everything going on. I don’t have time to waste on that kind of stuff.”

  “Right boss. Will do.”

  “And I’ll take care of Moira. Right?”

  “Right.”

  Duggan hung up.

  Chapter Eight

  Saturday, January 5, 2013

  South Armagh

  Down where the remote south Armagh hillside climbed gently toward the border with the Irish Republic and the rain sheeted at forty-five degrees in the wind, a farm lane led right off the single-lane road, up behind some woodland.

  As one of many alternatives to O’Toole’s snooker club and some of the safe houses they used as meeting locations, it had its advantages. It was possible to park a car in a place that was invisible from the road and out of sight of any building.

  But GRANITE knew that in the remoteness lay other dangers. In this lightly populated area of countryside, there were dissident Republicans who knew every unmarked footpath, every farm track, and every copse.

  It was hard enough to move around anonymously amid the crowds of Belfast. Here, out in the wild, it was just as risky but in a different kind of way.

  One sighting by the wrong person that linked him with the MI5 man Brendan O’Neill, and GRANITE would be hauled in for a meeting with the OC, the IO, and others.

  There was a zero tolerance policy toward touts. There would be a beating, a kicking. Eventually a hood would probably go over the head. There would be an order to confess to a camera or a microphone.

  Then bullets might go through the elbows or the ankles or both. Or, if he was unlucky, through the temple.

  The chances of being pinpointed these days were much higher than in the leaky old days of the ’70s, when everybody in the Provisionals knew everyone else and their business and information was exchanged far more freely. Now new recruits might be lucky to know any more than seven or eight others. There were small cells of people, and information flowed on a need-to-know basis. It was almost corporate in its approach.

  GRANITE sat and waited. The gunmetal-gray clouds scudded low over the hillside, the rain streamed down the windshield, and the wind whistled through some tiny gap in the window seals of his car.

  Although it was half past ten in the morning, GRANITE found it difficult to read his Belfast Telegraph in the gloom. Or was it that he just had difficulty concentrating this particular morning?

  Why do I do this?

  It was a good question. The answer lay in the three years with no regular employment. Since the economic crisis struck in 2008 and the Northern Ireland property market nose-dived, demand for electricians had vaporized.

  But his family still had to eat, and he still had to pay the mortgage he’d taken out in the boom times of 2006.

  More than one thousand pounds a month, paid straight into a special bank account, made a huge difference.

  Fear had driven him to do what he did, and now it was fear that made him want out. Getting out, though, was proving a lot harder than getting in.

  Finally, half an hour late, a dark blue Ford Mondeo station wagon nosed around the edge of the trees. It pulled up next to his car, and a familiar figure got out and climbed into GRANITE’s passenger seat.

  O’Neill usually smiled. Today his mouth was fixed in a thin, grim line. “We need to talk.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, GRANITE saw another dark figure in a raincoat emerge from the Mondeo and move fast across to the rear door of his Astra. The door opened and the man slid in.

  “This is Phil Beattie, my boss. I’ve mentioned him before,” O’Neill said. “He wanted to meet you.”

  GRANITE turned around. “Two of you. What’s going on?”

  “So, why didn’t you bloody tell us, you stupid asshole?” O’Neill began. “Vague bloody talk of guns crossing the border, can’t talk because you’re driving, bollocks. Then the chief bloody constable gets taken out. Bloody hell.”

  “I didn’t know it was going to be him. I—”

  “Balls,” O’Neill said. “You’re talking balls. How can we trust you anymore?” He pushed his chest out, eyes wide.

  “Pity we have to meet like this,” Beattie said from the back in a slow, level voice. “But you work for us, you get paid by us, and we keep you alive. That’s in return for you telling us what’s going on. You obviously forgot that part.”

  The car windows were already misting up with the warmth and wetness of O’Neill’s and Beattie’s breathing in the cold air.

  “Listen,” O’Neill said
. “You must think I’m soft or something. But if that happens again, your OC and your IO will get anonymous notes telling them you’re a bloody tout. Don’t worry, there’ll be a bit of proof, not much but enough. They’ll carry out an inquiry. You’ll get the bag over the head. Your wife’ll become a widow and your kids will be fatherless. Touts still don’t go down well in south Armagh, do they? Nothing’s changed on that front, has it?”

  GRANITE clenched his fists and clamped them tight against the sides of his thighs. “You bastards. Feck you. You know nothing. You don’t know what it’s like, with your soft government jobs and fancy pensions. I run the risk of dying every day for you. Every bloody day. That’s what it feels like. I want to get out. I’ve had enough of this.”

  Beattie shook his head. “Not possible right now. We’re the ones who tell you when you can get out, when it’s finished.”

  O’Neill cut in. “We need you to start performing much better for us. Singing like a diva. Understand? We’re paying you well, and we’ve put a lot of effort into you. But we only protect you if you’re of value to us. Otherwise, what’s the point? You look after us, we look after you.”

  “And it won’t be just your OC and the IO who get to hear. It’ll be the police,” Beattie said. “You’d be doing a fair stretch in Maghaberry for what you’ve done, no problem. That’s if your OC doesn’t serve sentence on you first.”

  There was a pause. GRANITE’s chin sank down onto his chest.

  “Now, what’s next?” O’Neill asked. “What’s the next operation? I need to know. Has there been any talk of activity around the time of the G8 summit, because that’s only three weeks away. We need to know.”

  GRANITE closed his eyes. “No, nothing,” he said.

  O’Neill’s voice rose in pitch. “So what, then? Come on, it seems to me there’s no shortage of action on your side.”

  After a long pause GRANITE said, “Tomorrow. There’ll be a pipe bomb hidden in a moped seat, parked outside Lurgan police station. Church Place. A volunteer’s bringing it from Derry at lunchtime tomorrow.”