by Finn Óg
“So it’s in Irish waters?”
“S’pose it is. Hard to be absolutely sure, though.” He smiled. If he’d a metal filling it would have glinted.
“I assume the police will try to extradite him?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Unfortunately?” Libby was surprised.
“Was a time when we’d have snatched him.”
“Old war stories?”
The opso bristled. “Old but good.”
“Go on, then,” she goaded him.
“Stopped bombing in Belfast for months once with one snatch.”
“How?”
“Sent a single operative across the border.”
“To do what?”
“Beat the shit out of the IRA’s quartermaster.”
“How did that stop the bombing?”
“Cos the operative dumped him on the northern side and he got lifted. Between his injuries and his accusations and his trial and whatnot, he was in the system for a very long time.”
“And that was enough?”
“He was the only one who knew where the gear was – the Semtex, the guns. They were paranoid – more suspicious than this lot.” He nodded at the image of the manager. “If only one person knew where the toys were, then only one person could get blamed if we found their weapons dumps. Was clever enough. They kept their quartermaster over the border, out of reach, until we sent one lunatic across in his hiking boots to bring him and leave him like a sack of shit on the wrong side of the line. When he popped up in our jurisdiction, the towns went quiet.”
“You want to do that with the manager?”
“I would love to do that with the manager.”
“Different times,” said Libby. “The Irish government are our friends now.”
“Shame that,” said the opso, watching the manager take his constitutional, down by the coast, free as a bird.
Sam’s distraction wasn’t lost on Isla. He was given to blundering about with a grumpy, almost-aggressive demeanour when he didn’t know where to start a job that needed doing. He knew it would come to him, but he needed a nick from which to open a cut.
He no longer had the necessary information at his fingertips. In the navy, or the various secondments he had taken, intelligence had been plentiful. Now, the first thing he had to do was find out who was who, but to make inquiries would expose his interest and attract unnecessary attention.
He had first-hand knowledge of what would be going on in the background. Whatever his old unit was now called, it would be all over his targets, watching – undetected and undetectable, which meant any intervention by him would be noticed, and logged and lead, probably, to his own incarceration. Which would totally defeat the purpose and draw him away from Isla entirely. Sam knew what would happen if he went about it without due care and attention to detail.
Yet he never really doubted that it had to be done. There was just not enough grey in the matter. Isla could have been Molly. He could be Sal. The people who killed Isla’s pal couldn’t be reasoned with.
“Daddy, what’s wrong?” he heard her say.
“What do you mean?”
“You seem cross.”
“I’m just thinking.”
“What about?”
“Nothing you need to worry about, wee lamb.”
“Maybe we should go sailing,” she said.
Sam turned to look at her properly. In the absence of any other thread to pull, and desperate for progress of any kind, he nodded. “That’s a good idea, little lady. Let’s do that.”
The opso was bored. Libby was bored. There was nothing doing.
The screens showed routine – no deviation from the ordinary. For the operatives in the field, it was spine-seizing stuff sitting in cars with not enough walking. The only team that was enjoying itself was the eastern unit, which got to play at fishing for a few days.
“They grumbling much?” Libby asked.
The opso looked at her. “They don’t complain, but they’re pissed off.”
“How long are you going to keep the original team on leave?”
“Long as I can.”
Libby nodded. “The snapper’s images are a problem. If the cops come asking questions, probably best your team isn’t here to answer them.”
The opso noted the distinction being drawn. It was ‘our’ team when the going was good, but the spooks had a habit of creeping to a distance when the shit hit the fan. He said nothing.
“So we have no eyes or audio on the Ballycastle family – the old girl and her son?”
“No need. Far as we know the cops have no notion of them or the role they played. Best just let that lie. If we start poking around, it only draws attention.”
“Agreed.”
“Sticks in the throat, though,” the opso said.
“It does,” Libby said, thinking of Deirdre Rushe. She’d been through the older woman’s file since the bombing. A committed republican, Rushe had a hefty back catalogue of involvement in death – some military targets – and much collateral damage. “You ever get tired of this?” she asked the opso softly.
He shrugged a little. “I’ve been watching this lot for years now. It’s strange, you know – to see them evolve and regroup, then fall out with each other. Every now and again, they get one over on us – they get something away, and while that makes me mad it gives me enough to keep going.”
“When you were in the field – before you ran the show, did you never get tempted to take a few of them out?”
“Every day. Loyalists, republicans, paedos, rapists – we had them all at various times. But you know the score – the intelligence was more valuable than the satisfaction of killing a bad bastard. It’s a long game. That’s just the way it is.”
“But these are the dregs,” she said, nodding at the screen. “The paramilitaries you were following would have been better organised, they’d have replaced anyone you took out in a heartbeat. This lot,” she pointed at an image of Grim standing at his back door smoking, “they don’t have the numbers in their ranks to replace.”
“Maybe there is a certain logic to what you’re suggesting.”
“I’m not suggesting anything.”
Libby looked at Grim on the screen, then tracked across to the boss’s front door, then to an image of Anthony’s mother sitting in front of the television. The quadrant in the bottom corner of the huge screen was blank. No image of the manager, for the moment.
“You’re right. If this lot were taken out, they would struggle to replace them. But that’s the call you spooks make – not me. And those days are over.”
16
“Hello, I just wanted to thank you properly for all the stuff you got Isla – far too much, but she’s delighted with it. Anyway, hope everything’s ok with you. Take care.”
Sam ended the voicemail and took an armful of mainsheet. He could see Isla’s new trainers tapping away below, dangling a few feet off the floor. He knew she’d have her new yellow headphones on, the ones covered with emojis, that Sinead had bought her.
They’d been sailing for about six hours and the going was good. Siân heeled just short of making him want to reduce canvas. He looked at the paper chart and wondered what to do next.
Sam had no firm plan, beyond returning to the scene. It was a process he had established over time: if in doubt, go there and something may present itself. It had often worked in the past. When things seemed desperate or hopeless, he frequently resolved it at site.
The phone buzzed in the inside of his sailing jacket, and his ears warmed a little at the name on the screen.
“That was quick.”
“Ah, sure, you know.”
“Get you at a bad time?”
“It’s grand now. Was just seeing to a woman in the usual state.”
“Trafficked?”
“Roma. Not for sex – to beg and get into benefit fraud. There’s a gang being run, cross-border, actually. If ever you wanted to go back to the old
gig, there’s plenty to be looking at.”
“Aye, right.”
“You know I’m not asking.”
“I do.”
“How’s my little butty?”
“She hasn’t taken those shoes off, or those headphones, since you last saw her.”
“Two weeks in the same trainers could be pretty whiffy on a boat. You sound like you’re at sea?”
“We’re off the coast and heading north for a few days. Change of scenery.”
“Anywhere nice?”
“Thought we’d go to Glenarm for a start. Maybe take a skip over to Gigha at some stage.”
“In Scotland?”
“Yeah.”
“How far is that?”
“A day, maybe less. Depends what way the wind blows.”
“What’s in Gigha?”
“It’s got tropical gardens because it’s on the Gulf Stream, and warm waters come up from America. And it’s got the best fish restaurant on the planet.”
“Serious?”
“Only about a hundred people live there, but you want to taste the food in that place.”
“Sounds lovely.”
“Wanna come?”
“Now?”
“If you leave Dublin now, you could be aboard and get some kip before we set sail. Or we could just leave the day after or the day after that. I don’t care.”
“You don’t care what?”
“I don’t care when we leave.”
“Oh, good. Ok, then. Sure, as you say, why not?”
Libby lifted the internal line and hit speed dial. “We have a problem.”
“Oh?” said the opso, moderately interested despite the sinister suggestion. His mind had been so numbed by their task that something, even something awkward, was preferable to constant pointless surveillance.
“Seems the police have identified one of our vehicles.”
“Doubt that,” said the opso, sceptical. “How?”
“They have the snapper’s shots.”
“Come to the ops room.”
It took Libby three minutes to cross from her secure office to the opso’s command area.
“You’re sure they’re not just kite-flying?”
“No, I’m not sure,” said Libby. “But whether they’ve correctly ID’d us or not, they’ve managed to get a formal request approved.”
The opso’s head see-sawed. “Well, at least we’re prepared.”
“To give them nothing. But we haven’t prepared to give them something.”
“Why would we give them anything?”
“Cos if they have correctly identified a vehicle that’s ours, or an operative of ours, we need to explain what we were doing there shortly before a bomb went off.”
“Yeah, well, let’s see if they’ve actually identified one of ours.”
“No,” said Libby firmly. “Let’s assume that they have and work out what we say when they come to see us.”
“They’re coming to see us?”
“They’re sending Laurel and Hardy.”
One member of the Police Liaison Team was short and stocky, the other was tall and thin – and they were no dozers.
“What do you want to say?”
“I won’t say anything because I’ll not be talking to them.”
“Course not,” said the opso, mildly annoyed that rank was being pulled. Libby had every authority to be absent when the police arrived, but the opso ran the show and the teams and so he would have to do the talking.
“Ok, so what would your bosses in the soft shoes like me to say to the cops?”
“If they do have something and if we can’t deny it, then we need a story. Something plausible as to what we were doing there.”
“Like what?”
“Like watching something other than a car bomb,” said Libby sarcastically.
“Like. What?” he said slowly, with anger.
“How about,” Libby’s eyebrows rose and her lips pinched in a knowing smirk, “we give them the old woman?”
“Ah,” said the opso, the proposition gathering appeal. “Under what guise?”
“Well, we get around the not-sharing issue by saying we were monitoring her for something else.”
“We weren’t monitoring her at all – we didn’t even know she was there.”
“And if we didn’t, then they very probably didn’t either. So we skew it all to her.”
“How?”
“Can we say we do a periodic round-up of all the old hands – where they are, what they’re up to?”
“She’s a very old hand. Will they buy it that we just take a notion to tag someone for a while?”
“Depends what we come up with. Are there others we could lash together a monitoring file on?”
“Others of her vintage?”
“We’d need that probably – otherwise it’s just too coincidental.”
“We can certainly cobble together a few reports, but they would all be old mainstreamers – Provisional IRA types.”
“Well, she was a Provisional. Once.”
“Yes.”
“So?” said Libby.
“So how long have we got?”
“Hour and a half.”
“We can do that,” said the opso.
Isla took Sam’s hand as they made their way up the pontoon to the shower block.
“Think we might have a visitor for a few days,” he said, hoping to please her.
“Who?”
“Guess.”
“Ehm, can I have a clue?”
“Nope.”
“Molly’s mummy?”
That came as a total surprise.
“No, darlin’, Molly’s mummy isn’t well enough to come visit. She’s doing much better, though.”
“How do you know?”
“I heard her on the radio.”
“Why was she on the radio?”
“She was talking to the news.”
“Why?”
“About, you know, what happened.”
Isla went quiet. Sam let that breathe between them for a moment, then used the awkwardness to deal with another matter.
“I’d like you to speak to a person, not now, but at some stage – a professional person, just to make sure you’re ok and getting better too.”
“But I wasn’t hurt.”
“I know.”
“Daddy?” she said in a way that told him she was ready to ask a big question.
“Yes, wee love?”
“Why was I not hurt?”
“It’s a good question, wee love, but, honestly, I don’t know. It’s a miracle, and I am so grateful for it.”
“Why did Molly get killed and her mummy get in hospital and I wasn’t even very bruised or cut?”
“That’s just the way it happens sometimes. It’s just … luck. And, you know, very bad luck.”
“I think it was Mammy,” she said.
Sam froze, there on the pontoon. He’d stopped walking and yet his heart rate increased. “What do you mean, Isla?”
“I think it was Mammy protecting me from heaven.”
Sam took a deep breath. “I think you could be right, wee love. If she can protect you, she will. I know that for sure.”
“Is that who’s visiting?”
Sam began to panic a little, confused. “No, darlin’, Mammy can’t visit. You know that.”
“Not Mammy, Daddy. The person to talk to me – the sessional?”
Sam’s heart rate began to recover. “Professional,” he stammered. “It’s a professional I want you to see. But, no, I’m not talking about a counsellor. I’m talking about someone else.”
“What’s a counsellor?”
“Doesn’t matter, darlin’. That’s for later. The person who’s coming is Sinead,” he rattled, sorry now that he had tried to surprise her at all.
“Oh, ok.” She shrugged.
“Is that not good news?”
“Yeah,” she said, in a way that was neither here nor there.
He began to worry that talk of her mam combined with a visit from Sinead was an extra confusion in a messy mix. They reached the door and Sam turned practical as a means to escape his own muddled thoughts.
“I’m gonna sit out here in the lobby – just outside the door. You can go in and have your shower after I switch it on and make sure it’s not too hot, and when you’re done you can dry your hair in there too while I have my shower. Ok?”
“Ok.”
He set the water temperature, laid out fresh clothes and her towel, then closed the door to give her some space. He sat in the spacious reception area with his head in his hands. She always took her time when, contrary to life on the boat, water supply was plentiful.
He’d been listening to the splash and slosh of water for about five minutes when the main door opened and a huge framed picture came through the gap. Sam rose to hold the door open to help the struggling man get the picture through without damaging it.
“Thanks, buddy,” he said. “You’re not sticking around for two minutes, are you? I’ve got to hang this bad boy.”
Sam looked at the image. It must have been ten feet wide. “You were gonna put that up by yourself?”
“Mate, that’s only the start of the hassle these bloody pictures have caused me,” the man said.
Between them they took an end and raised it against the wall. The man marked the corners with a pencil, then they dropped the image down again. He opened the door and retrieved a cordless drill and plastic fixing pads. Sam held out his hand and took the pads while the man bored the holes.
“You could get a job, mate. I’ve six more of these to do.”
“It’s a cracking shot,” Sam said, looking at the inflated image of the marina outside.
“Council job. Pays well. Part of a tourism drive for the north coast. We could do with it, given what’s happened.”
Sam said nothing, suddenly hoping Isla would stay in the shower.
“I was in Ballycastle that day, you know,” he said, a dark look descending over his face. “Took a load of shots too. Spent two days there, actually, but I won’t be putting any of them up any time soon.”
“You were there the day of the explosion?” Sam was taken aback.
