Bandit Country

by Andrew Turpin

  “Beautiful. Pity I can’t find a woman like this,” Duggan said, stroking the barrel slowly. Field laughed, despite having heard the joke several times before. He used the same quip when talking about his DShK.

  Duggan’s phone beeped. He pulled it out of his pocket and read the WhatsApp message, which was from McKinney. Has the second batch of sweets arrived at the corner shop? Can we have a quick chat on the phone?

  Duggan groaned inwardly. Fair enough. McKinney wanted to ensure the second shipping container had arrived safely. But inevitably he would want to discuss what the rifle was going to be used for, who was on the hit list, and the risk-reward factor involved.

  From his throwaway pay-as-you-go cell phone, he sent McKinney a text message containing the number of the old telephone that Field kept in the barn, the same one Duggan had used several times for his covert conversations between the two of them.

  A minute later, the old phone burst into life, with its museum-piece double bell ring that jarred the quiet of the barn. Duggan walked to the wooden desk and picked up.

  “Patrick, how are you?”

  He then turned toward Field and inclined his head, indicating silently that the volunteer should leave him alone to conduct a private conversation. Field obediently turned and left the barn, pulling the door shut behind him.

  “Dessie, I assume the second container’s arrived. No drama, I take it?” McKinney said.

  “Not quite that simple,” Duggan said. “We received the goods last night, but they came with a few unexpected extras.”

  Duggan outlined how, following McKinney’s tip-off about the burglary at the Boston timber warehouse, they had been especially vigilant and had become suspicious that they were being tailed out of Dublin. Then he shared how a search of the box and bag containing the Barrett had revealed two tracking devices, and how the swift, well-executed actions that followed had resulted in the capture of Johnson.

  McKinney was silent for a few seconds, then swore. “That could have been him who broke into the timber yard, then. What are you going to do with him now?” he asked.

  “I’ll give him a grilling to find out what the hell he’s doing, why he’s been after us, and who brought him in. Then I’ll have to get rid of him, obviously. He’s already seen too much,” Duggan said. “But I need to focus on the G8 right now. Liam’s going to take care of Johnson for the time being. He’s locked up in the den so he can’t do any damage.”

  There was a low whistle on the other end of the line as McKinney exhaled. “What’s your plan for the G8? It had better not be Obama . . .”

  “Still working it out, Patrick.” There was a weary note to Duggan’s tone.

  “If you’re going to take Obama out, I might as well close up this end of the operation completely, there’ll be so much shit flying around,” McKinney said, his voice rising a fraction. “You realize you’ll screw all fund-raising out of America for the whole republican movement if you hit him. We won’t get another cent out of the US. It’s been hard enough these past few years. People are tired of the violence, Dessie. You do this and public opinion will be burned. And I’ll be burned with it—there’ll be a witch-hunt, I’m telling you.”

  Duggan looked up into the dark roof of the barn. It was something that had crossed his mind, not that he was going to admit it to Patrick.

  “You’ve gone native, Patrick. We all know that. And you know very well it wouldn’t affect our cigarette imports. That’s where the money’s coming from these days, not from rattling a tin around the pubs and bars in Boston like in the ’70s and ’80s. Anyway, I’m not telling you what I’m going to do, certainly not over an open phone line.”

  There was a pause at the other end of the line. “There’ll be no one here to discuss anything with if Obama goes,” Patrick said.

  Friday, January 25, 2013

  Forkhill

  The odor of damp cement dust had invaded Johnson’s nostrils, and he could detect no other scent. He lay helpless on the double mattress, his ankles bound with thin, strong climbing rope to metal rings fastened into the concrete floor. His wrists were similarly bound to what looked like rock-climbing pitons that had been hammered into the wall behind him. They were immovable.

  Johnson watched silently by the light of a single dusty bulb as a spider almost as big as a drinks coaster inched its way up the wall beside him and disappeared into a gap between two cinder blocks.

  The man Johnson knew as Liam appeared at intervals, accompanied by a man whom he called Martin, who was chunkily built with dark hair, a mustache, and a black leather jacket. Johnson recognized him immediately as the man he had seen with Duggan attacking Moira in Belfast, almost three weeks earlier. Ronnie Quinn had identified him as Martin Dennehy.

  Johnson also remembered O’Neill referring to McGarahan, thought to be the intelligence officer. This must be him, then.

  And Dennehy, Johnson now knew, was also O’Neill’s agent inside the south Armagh brigade. He was therefore his best hope.

  But Johnson never got the chance to speak to Dennehy alone. Whenever he came into the bunker, it was always with McGarahan.

  Even if Dennehy had showed up by himself, and despite him being O’Neill’s agent, Johnson felt it would be foolish to think he could trust him, because clearly O’Neill couldn’t.

  McGarahan and Dennehy quickly fell into a routine: McGarahan would stand there, his Browning pointed straight at Johnson, while Dennehy untied him.

  Then Dennehy would push Johnson, always backed up by McGarahan and his Browning, into a small cinder block cubicle behind a door made from lightweight brown plywood. Inside the cubicle there was a pear-shaped pan set into the concrete floor—a rudimentary squatting toilet—together with a bucket of water for sanitary purposes.

  McGarahan and Dennehy carried out a similar double act for serving food: Dennehy untied Johnson while McGarahan stood guard. So far, every meal had been identical: a plate of baked beans on toast, served up with a glass of water.

  Johnson weighed his chances of overpowering one or the other of the Irishmen. Despite his heavily graying temples and weather-beaten face, McGarahan’s forearm muscles resembled lines of steel rope, and his shoulders were the size of a New England Patriots linebacker. Dennehy looked like more of a target, heavily built but more obviously fat than muscle and, in Johnson’s judgment, less mentally alert. But quite apart from the fact that Dennehy was never alone, attacking O’Neill’s agent could prove badly counterproductive.

  At least the Irishmen hadn’t left Johnson gagged. Duggan doubtless assumed that nobody could hear him if he shouted out anyway, so it would make little difference, Johnson thought.

  But that was where they were wrong, Johnson hoped. He prayed that the two microcameras he had planted at either end of the underground den a few days earlier were working, and that O’Neill was monitoring from his laptop. Maybe Jayne too, if she’d managed to escape the roadblock intact.

  Johnson knew that the cameras were positioned in a way so that they wouldn’t show into the deep recess where he was lying tied up. The viewing angles weren’t wide enough for that, and Johnson cursed himself for not having placed more cameras around the bunker.

  But he knew that, providing the cameras remained functional, every time McGarahan allowed him out into the main area of the den, he should be visible. He just had to hope that these occasions coincided with O’Neill when viewed his monitor, or that he or Jayne would review the stored footage for signs of his whereabouts.

  What Johnson really needed was an opportunity to speak into the camera and microphone more directly, and the only time he could do that was when McGarahan and Dennehy untied him and he was in the main part of the bunker.

  But what to say, and how? If he said anything obvious, the Irishmen would immediately smell a rat and gag him again—or worse. Then he’d be screwed. Rather, he needed to get McGarahan and Dennehy into a conversation and work his messages for O’Neill into that, somehow.

  The problem was
, the two Irishmen remained virtually silent, other than issuing the occasional curt instruction in a deep, gruff Irish brogue. Neither seemed willing to get into a conversation.

  So the next time McGarahan and Dennehy took Johnson out of the recess for a visit to the toilet, he decided to throw a grenade into the proceedings.

  Johnson stopped right in the middle of the main floor area and turned to McGarahan, who helpfully was standing only a yard or two from where he had placed the microcamera in the wall.

  “This bunker,” Johnson said. “Don’t you and your boss Dessie Duggan worry it’s going to be raided by the police or maybe the security services?”

  “Shut the feck up,” McGarahan said. He waved the barrel of his Browning toward the stall. “Get in there, use that toilet, and do your business. You’ve got thirty seconds before I tie you back up.” He nodded toward the sheet of plywood that formed a makeshift door to the squatter toilet.

  Johnson shrugged and walked into the stall, shutting the door behind him. While he was in there, he heard a loud scraping noise as the hatch door from the tunnel opened.

  He heard McGarahan’s voice. “Okay, Dessie. The American’s just using the toilet in there.”

  The unmistakable, low-pitched, even tone of Duggan’s voice came back in response. “Right. Is he behaving?”

  “I guess,” McGarahan said. “I just had a little rant from him about us being caught down here by police.”

  Duggan snorted loudly. “He won’t be ranting for much longer.”

  “What’s the plan?” McGarahan asked.

  There was a pause, then Duggan said in a lower tone, “Nothing immediately. I need to focus on Project Gyrate for now. After that, I’m thinking we’ll take him to Davy’s pig farm. There’ll be no trace of anything once the animals have finished with him.”

  Johnson felt the skin on his scalp tighten involuntarily. Then he heard the loud ring of a cell phone.

  Chapter Thirty

  Friday, January 25, 2013

  Belfast

  O’Neill woke at his house in Holywood with a strange sense of foreboding. He tried to tell himself it was just because of the hangover he was suffering after the previous evening’s whiskey session with an old army friend. They had started at six o’clock and he had gotten home at ten. But he knew the sense of dread he was feeling was due to more than that.

  O’Neill had turned his phone to silent when he had gone to bed at about quarter to eleven and had inserted his earplugs, as usual. He didn’t want to be woken unnecessarily, especially by his boss, when he was too drunk to make much sense.

  Now, at just after quarter past seven in the morning, he grabbed the phone from his bedside table to find a string of missed calls that had come in between 11:08 p.m. and 1:44 a.m.

  One of the calls was from his mother and seven were from Jayne Robinson, who had also left two messages. He dialed into voice mail.

  Brendan, it’s Jayne here. It’s urgent. Joe’s gone missing down in south Armagh. His phone’s off. To cut a long story short, there was a roadblock, which I’m certain was Duggan and his gang, who we were tailing. We were separated and Joe went off the radar. Call me as soon as you can.

  The second message was in a similar vein.

  O’Neill sat up straight in bed and drank the glass of water that stood on his bedside table. What the hell?

  He calculated he had now not heard from Johnson for six days, not since their discussion about the remote cameras at Willows Farm.

  He too had tried calling Johnson’s phone a few times the previous night, returning a missed call. But the calls had gone straight to voice mail, and although he had left a couple of messages, Johnson hadn’t called back.

  When O’Neill remembered what Johnson had said about the shipment from Boston and his brief reference to possibly needing to get back into the underground bunker at Duggan’s place, Jayne’s news sounded ominous.

  He dialed Jayne’s number and tried to preempt any angry reaction to his failure to pick up her urgent calls by apologizing profusely.

  There was a short silence at the other end of the line.

  “It wasn’t just the calls,” Jayne said, eventually. “I was knocking on your front door at half past midnight, and on the safe house door. But there was no answer. Where the bloody hell were you?”

  O’Neill ran his hand through his hair. “I think I was just exhausted. I’ve been working around the clock. I must have been out for the count.”

  He decided not to mention the whiskey session or the earplugs. Jayne didn’t seem the type to be sympathetic about such unprofessionalism.

  “Right,” Jayne said. “First we need to check the video and sound feeds from the cameras Joe put in Duggan’s bunker and house. I couldn’t get them to work last night. There has to be a fair chance that Joe’s in there.”

  O’Neill agreed. Keen to appear proactive, he invited her to come around to his house as quickly as possible to formulate a plan.

  While he was waiting for her to drive over, he went to his small study and logged on to the secure video monitoring website to view the feeds from Willows Farm. Slowly the grid of outputs from the cameras loaded, but none showed any activity.

  Twenty minutes later, Jayne stood in his kitchen, her brow furrowed, her hair rather askew, while he brewed some strong coffee.

  “So sorry I screwed up last night,” he said. “And—”

  “Brendan, yes, you did. But forget it. Let’s move on,” she said, her voice level and businesslike. “We need to work out where we go from here, and we need to do it quickly. Otherwise Joe’s going to be history.”

  She was correct on several levels. And O’Neill felt as though it wasn’t just Joe who was at risk of becoming history. For most of his career, Brendan had negotiated his way around the bear traps and snake pits of life in the large, highly political organization that was MI5 by keeping his head down and doing a decent job. But he had been assisted on many occasions by a sharp antenna for looming trouble, a gut feeling that had enabled him to take preemptive action.

  He had been working flat out, twelve hours a day, on projects related to security around the G8 meeting, now only three days away. Once it had become clear that the event was definitely going ahead, despite the killing of the chief constable, pressure had mounted on MI5 and the police to ensure the event was not going to be disrupted by terrorists.

  The nightmare scenario, of course, was an attack on one of the world leaders in attendance.

  And the man who loomed largest and darkest in O’Neill’s consciousness was Duggan, for a whole variety of reasons. If O’Neill had a bad night’s sleep, it was invariably due to some dream involving Duggan.

  Despite the workload, O’Neill logged on a few times every day to the video monitoring website Johnson had shown him. On each occasion, the grid of black and white screens, showing the outputs from the cameras hidden on Duggan’s property, showed no activity.

  O’Neill took his coffee and led Jayne to his office, sat in front of his PC, and pulled up a chair for her. He began to flick through the outputs from the various cameras, starting with those in Duggan’s house.

  This time, at last, there were signs of activity. O’Neill sat bolt upright. The two cameras placed in Duggan’s kitchen didn’t show any people, but one of the breakfast barstools was pulled back, and a full mug of tea or coffee sat on the work surface, along with a half-eaten banana. Behind the mug lay an Apple laptop computer with its lid open. O’Neill flicked on the sound feed, but there was only silence.

  He scrolled down the grid of video screens. The next outputs to appear were from the other rooms in Duggan’s house. In the main bedroom, the duvet was folded back, and a couple of shirts and a pair of trousers were strewn across it. But nobody was in sight. In the underground tunnels, again there was no sign of movement and no sound.

  Finally O’Neill reached the two outputs from the cameras in the den, which appeared side by side. What he saw and heard made his stomach drop. Ther
e in the center of the screen stood a man holding a handgun, while a few feet away, speaking on a cell phone, was someone O’Neill had never met but whose face he knew well from photographs: Dessie Duggan. There was a third man in the picture, and this one O’Neill knew very well: GRANITE.

  O’Neill turned up the volume on the sound feed and heard Duggan’s voice.

  “He won’t be ranting for much longer.”

  “What’s the plan?” asked the man O’Neill didn’t recognize.

  There was a loud crackle on the sound feed, but O’Neill clearly heard Duggan’s response. “Nothing immediately. I need to focus on Project Gyrate for now. After that, I’m thinking we’ll take him to Davy’s pig farm. There’ll be no trace of anything once the animals have finished with him.”

  O’Neill looked momentarily puzzled at Duggan’s reference to Project Gyrate, but it took him all of a few seconds to realize that the reference was probably to the G8 meeting. He glanced at Jayne, whose lips were pressed tightly together, her eyes glued to the PC monitor.

  Then Duggan’s phone rang. O’Neill watched as he answered the call and then paced around the den, speaking into the device. Despite the occasional click and whistle of interference and flashes of black and white across the video feed, he could easily distinguish what was happening and being said.

  “Gyrate’s a goer?” Duggan asked. “Good, I was worried the council would put the blocks on it.” There was a pause as Duggan listened to his caller. Then he spoke again. “Yeah, I’ve got him down here, tied up. He’s going nowhere . . . Okay, I’ll speak to you later.” He put the phone back into his pocket.

  O’Neill watched as both cameras showed what looked like a makeshift door, a rough piece of board on hinges, swing out into the den. Suddenly Johnson appeared from a recess, pulling up the zipper of his trousers.

  “Shit!” muttered Jayne, under her breath. “They’ve got him.”