Bandit Country

by Andrew Turpin

  Johnson walked up to her and kissed her on the lips, then gave her a tight hug. He always forgot how tall she was. Her long dark hair and her skin still smelled the same, and she wore the same subtle but distinctive perfume.

  “Joe, you’re looking good—still running? In between the odd smoke, no doubt?” She chuckled, that same seductive laugh, and tapped him briefly on the abs.

  Fiona did this every time they met after an extended period. But Johnson always felt flattered, probably because he did make an effort to stay fit, despite his cigarettes when traveling.

  “Looking good yourself,” Johnson said.

  He glanced at her taut thighs, snugly encased in a pair of tight-fitting jeans that also showed off her slim waist.

  He sometimes wondered why he hadn’t continued things with her after their brief affair in 2006, the year after his wife had died. But at the time he’d wanted to move back to Portland, whereas she had been entrenched in her reporting job in DC.

  Also, she was ten years younger and gave the occasional hint that she might like to have kids. That had never felt right to Johnson. He wasn’t sure how his two children might react.

  They had never discussed it again.

  “So are you fully mended now? The shoulder’s okay?” Johnson asked, placing his hand lightly on her right shoulder.

  “A lot of rehab and gym work later, yes, pretty good,” she said. “I can write, take notes, and type. So I can earn a living. That’s the important thing.”

  Johnson nodded. He felt hugely relieved that she had recovered since he held himself responsible for placing her in a dangerous situation he should never have allowed to happen. Although, he told himself, he’d tried to dissuade her, but she had refused point-blank.

  “That’s great, but enough of the small talk. Is there any sign of our tobacco magnate?” Johnson asked, looking around the pub.

  “No, not yet. How definite was it that he was coming here?”

  Johnson had to admit it wasn’t definite, simply a line he’d picked up on the telephone conversation with Duggan that he had overheard, and the timing had been nothing more specific than Tuesday night. It was now five o’clock, and the bar was open until two in the morning.

  The two of them sat facing the door at a wooden table underneath a frame that contained an ancient musket, a couple of pistols and other artifacts and drank a couple of beers while Johnson briefed Fiona on events in Northern Ireland.

  He had brought a copy of the previous day’s Belfast Telegraph with him, which had a big front-page headline, “Investor Firm Boss Dies in Sniper Terror.”

  The story included a photograph of Donovan. The newspaper was pinning the blame firmly on dissident Republicans but gave no explanation why Donovan had been targeted.

  “This is the guy who brought me in,” Johnson said. “I’m struggling to make sense of it at the moment.”

  Fiona read the story with interest. “Keep digging. I’m guessing things will become clearer if you can do that.”

  The snow had continued, off and on, since Johnson had arrived and was now starting to settle on the cobblestoned road outside. Johnson took a look at the weather forecast on his phone. Heavy accumulation was expected overnight.

  Around seven-thirty, just as Johnson and Fiona were starting their main course, a band came in to set up in the front corner of the bar and was soon working its way through a series of Springsteen cover versions.

  Fifty minutes later, after dessert, Johnson had just ordered coffees when a man walked in by himself.

  Johnson noticed him immediately. He was very tall, probably six feet four or five, with graying hair and slightly rounded shoulders that looked as though there was a coat hanger inside.

  Fiona immediately nudged Johnson. “That’s him, McKinney, the tall guy. I checked out the photos we’ve got on file,” she muttered.

  McKinney, who wore a suit under his overcoat, had a scar down the right side of his face, under the cheekbone. He joined a shorter, stockier man with a shaved head, wearing jeans, a blue sweat shirt, and a fleece jacket.

  They shook hands and ordered beers, then made their way to a table in the far corner, where they immediately began an intense conversation, their heads close together.

  They drank as quickly as they talked, and as soon as the beers had gone, they stood, put their coats on, and headed for the door.

  Johnson looked at Fiona. “Okay, we need to follow.” He had parked his rental car around the corner on Union Street, where McKinney and his companion now headed.

  The falling snow had deposited a thin white layer over the rooftops and parked cars.

  Johnson and Fiona, trailing some distance behind, watched as the two men climbed into a black four-door Ford pickup, McKinney in the driver’s seat. There were so many cars jammed onto the road that Johnson and Fiona had plenty of time to reach his rented white Toyota Camry and follow, separated by a couple of vehicles.

  A quarter of an hour later, McKinney’s pickup rolled into a small parking lot next to an industrial unit in the Seaport district and pulled up next to a Honda.

  Johnson parked across the street, about two hundred yards away, and killed his lights.

  Under the eerie glow of a couple of street lamps, which illuminated the snowflakes being driven sideways by gusts of wind, they watched as the stocky guy jumped out and opened the Honda’s trunk. He took out a long, thin box.

  Then the man opened a rear door of McKinney’s pickup and shoved the box onto the floor.

  “Might as well write rifle on the box,” Fiona said.

  Johnson nodded but said nothing.

  The stocky man climbed back into the front seat of the pickup, and they drove off. Johnson followed at a distance, waiting until the pickup had turned a corner before turning his lights on.

  A short distance farther on, near the Conley shipping container terminal entrance, the pickup pulled into a timber merchant’s yard, which housed a warehouse in the center and high stacks of different types of wood products around it.

  A sign outside read Pan-American Timber Products. The complex, which was dimly lit by a few lackluster orange security floodlights, was surrounded on all sides by a heavy-duty chain link fence.

  A guard on duty at the gate came out of a prefabricated hut, lifted a security barrier, and waved McKinney through. The pickup left tire tracks in the fresh snow. It was nearly nine o’clock, and a sign said that the yard closed at six-thirty.

  “Shit. Now what? We can’t pretend to be customers. They’re closed,” Johnson said as he drove past.

  “Screwed if I know.”

  “There’s only two choices, I think,” Johnson said.

  “What?”

  “We can wait, then follow when they come out, or—”

  “No, we need to know what they’ve done with the gun,” Fiona said.

  “Agreed. So we find a way to get in.”

  Johnson drove around the corner, on the far side of the timber merchant, and pulled over to the side of the road. He scanned the neighboring buildings: an old brick office block on one side and a factory unit on the other.

  “There’s only one way that I can see,” said Johnson.

  Tuesday, January 15, 2013

  Boston

  Johnson waited behind a truck that was parked just outside the timber yard gates while Fiona walked quietly through the vehicle entrance and around to the front of the security guard’s hut.

  Her plan was to tell the guard that there was a problem with her car battery and to ask him if he might have a quick look at it as she knew nothing about cars and was late getting home.

  A few minutes later he caught a glimpse of Fiona and the guard emerging from the vehicle entrance and walking on the other side of the truck toward the car, the hood of which was lifted.

  “I’m sorry about this,” he heard Fiona say to the guard. “I’m just worried about this snow. I don’t want to get stuck.”

  “Don’t worry, lady,” he replied. “Hopefull
y I can get you on the move so you can get home.”

  Johnson edged his way around the side of the truck and poked his head around the corner. The security guard, a rough-looking guy, was standing with his back to Johnson, looking at the engine.

  The man bent over and put his head under the hood.

  As he did so, Johnson emerged from the shadow of the truck, moved swiftly toward the Toyota, and lifted the heavy lug wrench he had removed from the trunk of his rental.

  The guard must have caught a glimpse of Johnson in his peripheral vision. He gasped slightly and had just begun to turn when Johnson brought the wrench down hard on the side of his temple.

  The guard collapsed to the ground, facedown.

  Johnson turned him over so he faced up, grabbed underneath his armpits and began to pull him toward the yard entrance, thirty yards away, his feet dragging across the pavement. “Quick, get that hut door open,” he told Fiona.

  She complied, and Johnson pulled the guard through the gate and into the hut and dropped him on the floor. He grabbed a cloth from the small countertop, stuffed it in the guard’s mouth, and secured it with several rounds of duct tape from a roll on the desk.

  He bound the guard’s hands behind his back and then his ankles, all with the duct tape. Then Johnson pushed the guard into the corner behind the fridge, where he was out of sight of anyone peering through the front window or entering through the door, and pulled down the window blind.

  “Dammit, Joe, is he okay there?” Fiona asked.

  Johnson checked the man’s pulse and nodded. “He’s fine. Let’s get going. He’s not going to be out for long.”

  There was a printout from a spreadsheet on the desk, which Johnson saw was an agency staff list divided into three shifts starting at six o’clock in the morning, two in the afternoon, and ten in the evening.

  That helped, if it was an agency, Johnson figured. It meant the guards on duty were less likely to be recognizable and familiar to McKinney or any other official figure. The night shift list had only one name on it, Callum Wright, whereas the other two daytime shifts had four names. He noted the name listed for the night shift and also the site supervisor’s name, Tom Kurtheim, listed at the top.

  Johnson began pulling out drawers in the security guard’s desk and tipping the contents on the floor: a jumble of paper clips, pens, staplers, scissors, rubber bands, and other supplies.

  “What are you doing, Joe?” Fiona asked.

  “The security office has unfortunately been burgled,” Johnson replied.

  He scattered all the papers that were neatly stacked on the desk, and he emptied cardboard folders filled with paper invoices, dockets, receipts, and other random notes all over the floor.

  Then he stood back and admired his work for a few seconds. That should do the job, he figured. If anyone came in, it would be fairly obvious why the security guard had been knocked unconscious and trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey.

  Johnson turned to see Fiona looking at several pairs of company-branded overalls hanging on a hook next to the door. She grabbed a pair and held them against her for size, then looked at Johnson. “What do you think?”

  “Brilliant,” Johnson said. “Pass me that large pair.” He grabbed a black baseball cap with a Pan-American Timber Products logo on the front from another of the hooks, jammed it onto his head, and grinned.

  A couple of minutes later, overalls now over the top of their jackets, they walked out of the hut. Johnson lifted the security barrier in case anyone needed to come in or out, and then went over to the Toyota and closed the hood.

  He led the way toward the warehouse in the center of the complex.

  “Just keep it quiet and go slowly,” Johnson said.

  He edged his way along the left-hand wall of the warehouse until he reached the corner, then slowly put his head around it until he could see what was happening.

  A line of parked cars and vans stood close to the far side of the building. Good for cover, Johnson thought.

  About halfway along the building was a high, wide truck entrance, and on the other side of that stood a shipping container, the doors open.

  Johnson and Fiona crept behind the cars to within forty yards of the container and squatted behind a pickup.

  He could see that McKinney and the stocky guy were standing at the door to the container, which was filled floor to ceiling with very large, heavy-looking square wooden beams, each of them several feet long. One of the beams stood on the floor, leaning against the side of the container.

  Six men emerged from the warehouse, went to the container, and picked up a beam, which they carried with difficulty into the warehouse.

  A few minutes later, the loud squeal of what Johnson assumed was an electric saw or drill came from inside.

  “I’m going to take a look,” he said. “Wait here.”

  Johnson walked around in front of the cars, pulled his cap down low over his forehead, and strode purposefully into the warehouse, his phone clamped to his left ear as he went, pretending to carry out a conversation. It was his method for checking for surveillance and avoiding being challenged when entering places he shouldn’t.

  He looked up. The extensive floor space of the warehouse was covered with pallets and racks stacked with timber products of various types and sizes, ranging from decking to fencing to trellises, gates, and beams. At the back of the warehouse Johnson saw a long, low glass-fronted office, which looked empty.

  To the left of the office, McKinney and his colleague had the wooden beam, which Johnson estimated must have been a good foot and a half square, on a horizontal drilling machine that was boring a large hole into its base, effectively hollowing it out.

  Johnson headed to the right side of the huge warehouse, away from McKinney, and within seconds was hidden from sight behind high stacks of pallets holding wooden fences, posts, and other products.

  Once Johnson made his way to the right side of the office, he realized it had entrance doors at both ends, meaning he could gain access unseen by McKinney. He moved quickly to the door, opened it, and entered.

  He walked through the empty office to the far end. There on the floor was the long, slim cardboard box, which he had seen the stocky guy putting into the back of McKinney’s pickup earlier.

  Two other bulkier cardboard boxes stood next to it.

  Johnson walked to a water cooler near the door and filled a cup. Out of the corner of his eye, through the doorway, he could see that McKinney and his helper were preoccupied with ensuring that the huge drill bit was boring correctly into the wooden beam.

  It was obvious what was going on here.

  Johnson reached into his pocket and removed two of the microchip GPS tracking devices he had brought from Belfast. He pulled the protective seal from the black self-adhesive pad on one tracker and pulled open the cardboard flap at one end of the long box.

  There was no doubt. The soft black case inside was designed to hold a rifle. There was a heavy-duty zipper, which Johnson tugged slightly open so he could slip his hand inside, just to make certain.

  Yes, there it was; he could feel the cold steel end of the barrel.

  Johnson took a penknife from his pocket, made a slit in the soft padding inside the case, and stuck the tracker inside it. He zipped up the bag and reclosed the box. The tiny tracker would not now be obvious unless someone inspected the rifle case carefully and spotted the slit.

  Then Johnson repeated the exercise with another tracker at the other end of the box, this time undoing a zipper to what felt like a gadget storage pocket, just in case the first one failed.

  Less than a minute and the job was done.

  He briefly eyed the other cardboard boxes. He guessed there was probably other weaponry or ammunition in them, too. Should he put trackers in them, too? he wondered. But unlike the rifle, they were heavily taped up, and it would take too long.

  On the edge of the desk was a printed sheet. Johnson stepped over to take a look. It was a bill of lading
, which he knew was a document signed by shipping lines when they picked up goods for loading. He glanced down the sheet. The section describing the goods read “wooden beams.” Above it, the consignee was named as “O’Malley’s Timber International, Dublin Port.” The delivery date stated was January 24. Presumably this was for the cargo that McKinney was going to ship, with the weaponry stowed in it. Or could it be for a different, possibly innocent, order from this clearly busy warehouse? He would have to try and verify that somehow, and the tracker devices would help with that. There was nothing else of relevance on the sheet.

  Johnson picked up the cup of water that he had filled and took a sip, just as McKinney appeared at the door, his hands on his hips, forehead furrowed.

  “What the hell are you doing in here?” McKinney asked in an even, slightly menacing tone. He looked steadily at Johnson.

  “Just getting a drink, as you can see,” Johnson said, looking McKinney directly in the eye. “Why?”

  McKinney glanced down at the boxes on the floor, then back at Johnson. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Night shift,” Johnson said.

  “Night shift? But they start at ten.”

  “Just coming in early. The supervisor told me to get in. Need any help?”

  McKinney shook his head. “What’s your name, and who’s the supervisor?”

  “Wright, Callum Wright. My supervisor is Tom Kurtheim. And yours?”

  “Never you mind,” McKinney said. “Callum Wright, did you say your name was?”

  “Yes,” Johnson said.

  McKinney ran a hand through his hair. “Out, now. Go on, feck off out.”

  The Irishman clearly hadn’t lost his Ulster invective, nor his accent. However, Johnson was relieved that he apparently hadn’t realized his night shift security man shouldn’t be there at all.

  Johnson shrugged. “No problem, man, calm down. I’m going. You sure you don’t need any help?”

  The Irishman just gazed at him.

  Johnson strode out of the office, past McKinney, and out the warehouse main door.

  There he cut a left, across the now snow-covered parking lot, back toward where Fiona was still waiting behind the pickup truck.