Bandit Country

by Andrew Turpin

  “No. They don’t know yet. They’re working out the options. I’ll let you know when I hear more.”

  Duggan slapped Kane on the back. “You make sure you do, little man. You want your money, you get me everything you can put your hands on about that community visit. I want to know exactly where it’s going to be, I want timings down to the millisecond, I want to know vehicles, activities, exact locations. Who’s sitting on which side of the car. Who’s driving. Who’s gonna greet them, meet them. Everything. When will you get them?”

  Kane shook his head. “I don’t know. Probably much nearer the time.”

  “Okay,” Duggan said. “Soon as you can, Fergie boy. Otherwise there’ll be a note into the deputy chief constable’s office, typewritten, anonymous, telling them where to refocus that witch hunt that’s going on.” It was the usual threat. He knew that Kane was never sure whether he meant it or not.

  Duggan took a small brown packet from his trousers and rammed it deep into Kane’s jacket pocket. “There you go, that’s another seven hundred and fifty. That’s January’s payment. Covers your rent for another month on that nice flat of yours, and your Sky TV subscription, doesn’t it?”

  Kane nodded, and Duggan gave a faint, almost imperceptible grin.

  They were at the top now. Duggan stood near the concrete triangulation point marking the peak of Black Mountain. He looked southward over the city stretching out far below him, lit up by the winter sun glinting off a pair of construction cranes and a glass-fronted office block.

  “Are we done?” Kane asked. “Anything else?”

  “Done?” Duggan pointed toward Protestant East Belfast. “We won’t be done until those Union flags are down over on that side.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Monday, January 7, 2013

  Washington, DC

  Fiona Heppenstall was deep into writing a story about a senator caught in an insider trading racket: his wife had purchased half a billion dollars’ worth of shares after a tip-off he had received from a friendly investment banker in return for the nod on a massive property development deal just outside the capital.

  Two days later, the wife sold the shares after a 60 percent spike in the share price, caused by the company’s biggest rival announcing to the New York Stock Exchange that it was launching an all-cash hostile takeover bid.

  The senator had pocketed a near $300 million profit from the deal.

  It had taken Fiona six weeks to dig out all the transaction details, but she was finally there.

  All being well, Inside Track, the online news organization where she worked as political editor, would publish the story the following morning.

  Fiona was confident the senator would not only have to step down but would be pilloried from all sides, given that only the previous year he had spoken strongly in the Senate in favor of a new bill—which had since become law—designed to clamp down on exactly that kind of activity.

  She took her hands away from her computer keyboard, paused for breath, and sipped her third coffee of the morning. Two hours of intense concentration had sapped her energy in a way it never used to, not before her injury. She was feeling exhausted after an intense few weeks at work and only two days off at Christmas.

  The large newsroom was busy, humming with the noise and chatter of phone calls, people shouting at each other, printers whirring, fingers bashing away on keyboards. It was a typical day at Inside Track.

  Her cell phone rang. Initially she let it go. There was no time.

  But then she noticed the caller ID, smiled, and picked up the phone.

  “Joe! Hi, how you doing? Where are you?”

  “I’m all good. I’m in Belfast, chasing work, potentially. How are you? Are you fully fit and back to normal again?” Johnson asked.

  The truth was, she was still suffering occasional pains in the upper part of her left arm where she had been shot while working with Johnson in pursuit of an elderly Nazi and his son in Argentina over a year earlier. The bullet had nicked a nerve on the way through, and the surgeon warned her the pain could take a very long time to disappear fully, if ever.

  But all that detail could wait for another time. “Yeah, I’m back at work, nailing crooked senators as we speak,” she said. “But let’s cut the crap—is this a social call, or do you have a story for me?”

  She listened as Johnson explained his situation and the few brief details he’d gotten from Moira about Patrick McKinney’s background.

  “Patrick McKinney? An Irishman, tobacco guy? That rings a bell. I think he’s quite well known, got some senior job with one of the big smokes distribution companies. In fact, I remember now. I had him on a list of people I was going to interview a couple of months ago, for a story about a strike by port workers in Boston. The longshoremen’s union walked out, and his business was being hit hard because no containers were being loaded onto ships. Then he pulled out of the interview, and I spoke to some other company instead.”

  Fiona paused. “Listen, if he’s really who you say, IRA escapee, fund-raiser, smuggler—that’s a great story. I’ll have a look at it, do a bit of digging. We’d be interested, for sure.”

  “I thought so,” Johnson said.

  She knew that Boston, with its big Irish community, was still a focal point for IRA backers, fund-raisers, and arms smugglers and had been for decades.

  They agreed to touch base a couple of days later, and she hung up.

  Then her deputy, Penny Swanson, piped up.

  “Did I hear you say Joe Johnson?” Penny asked, a gleam in her eye. “The guy you had that fling with a while back? You can’t leave him alone, can you?”

  Fiona grinned. “Penny, shut it. That was years ago. Then we worked together a year or so ago; remember the hunt for the old Nazi—and nothing happened between us then, just to remind you. Anyway, he called me. He might have another job for me, a good story.”

  “Dunno about a good story,” Penny said. “You two seem to be a never-ending story. I thought you were feeling exhausted? You seem to have perked up a bit.”

  Fiona crumpled a sheet of newspaper into a ball and threw it at her sidekick, who sat opposite her. The two had moved together from The New York Times. Penny neatly ducked as it sailed past her head.

  But she smiled as she threw it.

  Monday, January 7, 2013

  Belfast

  Johnson took a circuitous route to drop the purple Corsa back at Moira’s house. He cut off Falls Road north and onto Cupar Way on the edge of the Protestant area, checking his mirrors continuously for any sign of a tail.

  He cursed the fact that the car, in its battered condition, was more conspicuous than he would like.

  BBC Radio Ulster, on the car radio, was running a news analysis program about dissident Republicans; the previous day a plot to attack the police station in Church Place, Lurgan, had been uncovered. According to the presenter, a pipe bomb had been found in the pannier of a moped parked outside the station.

  The program included a short interview with assistant chief constable Norman Arnside, sounding very pleased with himself, who said that the plot had been uncovered after receipt of information from intelligence sources and that many lives had undoubtedly been saved. News of the incident had only just been made public because police had been carrying out further investigations overnight.

  The BBC also reported a story from political sources at Westminster who said the prime minister was going to launch an inquiry over the next couple of days into the circumstances surrounding the killing of chief constable Eric Simonson, particularly given the need for increased security ahead of the forthcoming G8 meeting in Belfast.

  The G8 was certainly a possible target, Johnson reflected, given that Barack Obama and other world leaders would be there, and it was only three weeks away.

  He continued past the enormous graffiti-covered Belfast peace wall, a monstrosity of corrugated steel sheet and mesh which ran at above-house height to his left, separating the Protestant unionist co
mmunity centered around Shankill Road to the north from the nationalist Catholic Falls Road area to the south.

  For Johnson, the giant peace wall brought back memories of the Berlin Wall, which he had seen a couple of years before it was finally torn down during the momentous events of 1989. He turned left at the end of the road and drove through steel security gates that could be closed by police in times of trouble.

  “There was never a good war or a bad peace,” ran a slogan painted on the rusting gray gates.

  After another couple of left turns, he was back near where he had started. Only then, satisfied he was not being followed, did he head in the direction he had originally intended.

  Ten minutes later, he pulled up at the end of Moira’s road and parked the purple Corsa. He looked carefully up and down the street before moving. It was empty.

  Johnson got out and walked the remaining hundred yards or so to her house. He went up the path and knocked.

  Moira opened the door and greeted him with a broad smile. “Joe! Good to see you. I’m pleased to say I’m in a slightly better state than I was the last time you came, and so is the house.”

  “I’m glad about that,” Johnson said. “You youngsters definitely have greater powers of recovery than I do.” She looked a lot better: a purple blotch on her upper lip was the only evidence of the street fight with her stepfather. She led him through to the kitchen, which had indeed been tidied since his previous visit.

  “I’ve decided I’m going to do this job,” Johnson said. “I’ve got an old friend coming in from the UK who’s going to help me.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Her name’s Jayne.”

  Johnson could have sworn that Moira’s face dropped a bit. Or was he just flattering himself?

  “It’s fine,” Johnson said. “She’s good. We’ve known each other for years.”

  He paused. “By the way, I was thinking about something you said the other day, about your stepfather’s rifle. Do you know what gun he uses and where he keeps it?”

  Moira swept her long black hair over her shoulders. “I’m not sure, but I remember he used to call it a Light Fifty. He used to talk about it when I was younger as if it were his favorite pet dog and he looked after it like a family heirloom, which he probably thought it was.”

  She looked at Johnson, her deep brown eyes full of intensity. “He loved it more than he loved me, that’s for sure. But the cache where he keeps it—do you really think he’s going to tell me that? Probably just him and the quartermaster know that. One thing I do know; he mentioned once that they were expensive, thousands of dollars, and I’m certain he’s got only one of them. I heard from a friend in Forkhill he had two, but one was found a year or so back by police. So if you find the gun, you put him out of action, at least temporarily.”

  Johnson tugged his ear. “Hmm. We could look for the gun first. Thing is, if we find the cache and remove the gun, he’d know straight away he’d been compromised. Then he’d go underground and we’d never nail him. Not for a long time. No, we need to catch him in action so we get the evidence. Although then, of course, there’s the risk he hits someone before we trap him. It’s a high-risk approach but high reward if it works.”

  “Tricky choice,” Moira said. “It’ll be even more difficult to catch Dessie actually with the gun. Those guys have a chain of people who bring it in and take it back to their cache. That’s why he’s survived so long.”

  She told Johnson how originally there were two sniper gangs in south Armagh that both used Barretts in the ’90s, which they had smuggled in from the US and had been used to kill several British soldiers. The gang in Cullyhanna was caught in a Special Air Service ambush in 1997. “They were careless, and a tout gave them away. They were all jailed, and their guns were taken. But my stepfather’s gang, in Drumintee, was never caught.”

  Johnson nodded. “You know a lot about all this.”

  She shrugged. “I’ve got friends who tell me things, keep me updated, even though I’m not living down there anymore. It’s part of everyday life around here. This is Northern Ireland. I grew up with it, watching him deal with all this stuff all the time, even after the peace agreement. Look, I’ll help you as much as I can, but you’ll have your work cut out, Joe. I’ll wish you good luck because you’ll need it. Especially if you start nosing around down in south Armagh. You’ll need someone to guide you around. You can’t go in cold. Down there, a stranger stands out like—well, you might as well walk around in a fluorescent jacket with a flashing light on your head.”

  “Could I talk to any of these people safely?” Johnson asked.

  Moira pondered. “My mother kept in contact with a friend of hers, a builder, Ronnie Quinn, who might be able to help. He lives by himself in Forkhill, not far from the farm, and knows the land around there as if it were printed on the back of his hand.”

  Ronnie had done some of the building work at Willows when she was a child, she knew that. He had always been there, digging, mixing cement, and laying bricks. He got to know her mother and had always been friendly back then, always ready with a joke. He didn’t like Dessie, though, despite doing a lot of work for him.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if Ronnie hadn’t done a bit of touting in his time,” Moira said. “He never came across as a hard-core Republican, though he went to the right places and said the right things.” She had heard him criticize the bombs-and-guns approach repeatedly, she added.

  “The other option is I come and help you myself,” Moira said. “Tell you what. I’m going to talk to Ronnie and we’ll make a plan. I trust him. He’ll know what to do.”

  Johnson nodded. The girl seemed more mature than her twenty-two years.

  He scribbled a few lines in his notebook, including Ronnie’s name. Was there anything else about her stepfather that might help, Johnson asked, such as passwords, cell phone numbers, that kind of thing?

  Moira thought for a moment. He had often used the names of two legendary heroes of the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland for his passwords, she said, Padraig Pearse and James Connolly. But she didn’t know if they were still current, and she couldn’t think of any others. Johnson wrote them down, along with a cell phone number for Duggan, which Moira showed him in her phone directory.

  “Great. Now, can you do me a favor?” Johnson asked. “I need a lift, to pick up the car I’m borrowing while I’m here. It’s in East Belfast, out near Holywood, that direction,” Johnson asked.

  Moira nodded. “No problem. Now?”

  “Yeah, need to get moving, really. I’ve got to get to the airport to pick up my colleague.”

  She looked sideways at him. “Ah yes, you’d better not keep her waiting.”

  Moira put on her coat and led the way out the front door. Johnson followed and then waited at the end of the short path while she locked her front door.

  Their hands brushed as she went past him at the gate, on the way back to her car.

  Monday, January 7, 2013

  Belfast

  “There’s someone coming out,” the man said.

  Monaghan looked out the window at the house directly opposite, on the other side of St. James Crescent. “Shit, you’re right.”

  He grabbed his Olympus OM-D camera, which hung around his neck, quickly extended its telephoto lens to its full 300 mm, put his eye to the viewfinder, and concentrated hard.

  Moira, followed by a man he knew as Philip Wilkinson, had emerged from the front door of her house, and both were standing on the path.

  Click, click, click.

  Monaghan captured several shots of Moira shutting the door of her house and turning around. Now he could see both of their faces through his viewfinder as they walked together down the short path.

  Click, click, click.

  The intelligence officer for the Belfast brigade snapped fifteen frames of the pair from his vantage point at an upstairs bedroom window as they walked down St. James Crescent to Moira’s purple Corsa, whi
ch was parked at the end of the street.

  When they had driven off, Monaghan quickly checked the pictures on the small monitor screen at the back of his camera.

  “Did you get what you needed?” asked the brigade volunteer standing behind him.

  “Yeah, no problems. Thanks for the use of your bedroom,” Monaghan said. He chuckled. “I wasn’t expecting to get them in the bag so fast.”

  “Pleased to help. Anytime,” the man said.

  Monaghan looked at the flask of hot tea and the plastic container of sandwiches that he had brought with him. They lay next to his black leather jacket on the bed. “Don’t know why I wasted my time making that lot this morning. Half an hour, job done.”

  “I won’t ask why,” the man behind him said.

  “No,” said Monaghan. He scratched his salt and pepper beard. “Never ask why. See nothing, hear nothing, know nothing. That’s the way.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Tuesday, January 8, 2013

  Belfast

  Carrying the same dust-covered backpack she had taken to the top of Kilimanjaro, Jayne Robinson emerged from the arrivals hall at Belfast airport.

  The pack, along with her khaki top, newly acquired African tan, and wide smile, looked somewhat incongruous among the pasty-faced, miserable, briefcase-carrying business commuters who jostled around her.

  Johnson smiled as he watched her walk through the crowds. Still the same slim athletic body, narrow waist, and great legs. How does she do it?

  “You’re going to have to get rid of that gear,” Johnson joked, embracing her. “I need you to go native here; it’s not a safari guide look-alike competition.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ve got the boring clothing packed in the bag, and this is Northern Ireland, so the tan’ll be gone inside two days.”