“We’ll leave that to your man.” Sweeney’s head tilted to McGarr, who turned his head to Sweeney.
“I’m not going to say this again—keep your innuendo to yourself.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Mind your tongue.”
“Ah, Jaysus—relax, man. Chill. Here we are on the adventure of our lives, something we’ll recall to our grandchildren—how we saved the fookin’ book of fookin’ Kells—and you’ve gone all prickly on us. With the sound of this thing, nobody”—Sweeney jerked a thumb to mean Kara—“heard nothin’.”
Having determined a heading, McKeon now swung the helicopter on course, as indicated on the computer screen, and they beat on into the fog for whole minutes without words, Sweeney maintaining his vigil between them. Flying north-northeast literally up the middle of the Irish Sea between Scotland and Ireland, the ship now and again broke through banks of gauzy tufts, like phosphorescent cotton, that appeared before them for a second, only to melt into the fuselage.
McGarr twisted around and tried to look past Sweeney at Kara.
“She’s fookin’ fine, man. Sleeping, like we all should be.” Sweeney had his flask out again, and the acrid-sweet stench of malt filled the cockpit.
More minutes of silence ensued as they clipped on into the dense darkness. Finally, Sweeney said, “Who d’yiz think is behind this? Particularly? Was it that Mide bloke what lost his fookin’ knob? Or maybe his squeeze, the woman Morrigan. Hasn’t she got a pair of bloody bumpers to be proud of? Likes ’em young, she does, I’m told. Ray-Boy Sloane, for instance, and her. There for a time they were inseparable, joined at the fookin’ hip.”
Neither McGarr nor McKeon said anything.
“He’s my bet. Him and his old man, Ray the former. And Pape and his child bride, Gillian…what’s her wonderful Brit last name? Rest-on. Perfect.
“Your man, Sheard, through dumb luck or whatever, he got it right, I’m thinking.”
The flask appeared between them. “A wet? G’wan, it’ll loosen yous up. Fook, we’re stuck here, may as well make the most of it. I don’t mind sharin’. And, in fact, I brought another, just in case.”
After a while, Sweeney withdrew the vial. “Well, fuck yiz and the bloody pukkas you rode in on.” And he returned to a seat in the cabin of the helicopter.
More minutes went by until McGarr, who had closed his eyes, heard Kara’s voice. “May I ask where we’re going?”
“Iona,” McGarr said, reaching for her hand.
“Really? It’s rather fitting, isn’t it? Since it was probably where the Kells book was conceived and at least some of it produced. Have you been there, Peter?” She returned the pressure on his hand.
McGarr nodded. It had been with Noreen during the spring, when there had been few other visitors there, and he had found—in spite of his doubts and his disbelief in the holiness or serenity of a place—that the peace and tranquillity of Iona had impressed him. They had taken a walk and got lost in the fog, like this, nearly blundering into a bog.
“Well, we’re here,” said McKeon, slowing the chopper and looking down at the display. “But where they are is another matter altogether.”
Which was when a bank of lights switched on nearly below them and illuminated what looked like four industrial pallets arranged in a square. Next to each outlined in paint were letters or numbers: “K-1,” “K-2,” “A,” and “D,” indicating the two Kells books and the books of Armagh and Durrow, McGarr supposed.
Off beyond a hedgerow sat another helicopter with aerodynamic lines that made it look newer and faster than the Garda Sikorsky.
“Fookin’ brilliant, isn’t it?” said Sweeney, shouldering Kara out of the way. “One thing—you’ve got to hand them—they sure know how to throw a party.”
As McKeon began a slow descent, a solitary figure stepped out from the shadow of the other helicopter; dressed in a black cloak and mask with the strange, drainlike device covering his mouth, he was holding something that looked like a rocket launcher on his shoulder.
“Janie, Mac.” Sweeney wiped sweat from his brow. “Now that I don’t like, not one fookin’ bit.”
Sweeney’s cell phone began ringing; he held it to his ear. “Yah?” He listened further, then, “Wait a minute, wait. Wait! What’s your yoke on the ground all about, the one with the fookin’ bazooka?”
He listened some more. “What? Don’t you fookin’ threaten me, you cunt, or we’ll piss off out of here, and then where will you be?”
Sweeney hit the mute button on the phone. When he glanced up, his ruined eyes seemed worried. “Bastard says he’s got us, and we’re to do as he says. Heat-seeking missile, says he.” He shook his head. “I don’t like it, I don’t like it at all, at all.”
He turned to McKeon. “What’s the chance of us avoiding that thing?”
“The missile? Fired from that short distance, the heat-seeking element doesn’t matter a jot. It would be pure targeting, and we’re a mighty big and slow target.”
“I don’t give a shit. I’m for leaving.” The collar of Sweeney’s shirt was damp with sweat. “So we set down and begin making the exchange. The money? Fuck—if they know anything at all about bearer bonds, they’ll understand in a heartbeat they’re real.
“But the books is another matter altogether. Authenticating them will take time. Look at the way they’re wrapped. What’s to stop them from taking the money, blowing us to bits, and leaving with the whole megillah and nary a live witness in sight?”
The phone bleated; they had hung up and called back.
Sweeney hesitated before answering. “My vote is to take our chances and leave. Now. Feint toward their landing site and just keep on going. If we stay low enough—”
McKeon shook his head.
The phone kept sounding insistently.
“I don’t see him missing, and did we think they’d choose a venue they couldn’t control?”
“Remember, now—I was against it.” Sweeney answered the phone. “Yah?” He waited, again shaking his head. “We’re to drop the money here, then set the chopper down where he’s pointing.”
Raising his free hand, the figure indicated another light that now switched on at the far corner of the field from the illuminated pallets.
“Only after they collect the money and leave do we get out of the helicopter. Otherwise, he blows us away.”
Again scanning the neat, illuminated layout below them, McGarr hesitated. Now he too was worried. Something was awry down there. Why bother to create such a spread when a simple exchange—the money for the books—would suffice in soupy conditions in the dead of night?
But they had gone too far to turn back. “They can do that anyway. But they won’t until they have the money in hand. And we’ve come all this way. Perhaps we should see what they’ve got first.”
Sweeney’s outsized head was wagging. “No-go. We examine the goods, only then do you get the bloody money.”
A blinding flash bolted up from the launcher, and a rocket spun past them, mere feet from the churning rotors.
“Yeh cunt, yeh!” Sweeney roared. “Why’d you do that?”
Even over the pounding of the rotors and the noise of the engine, McGarr could hear laughter coming from the phone.
“I’m still for splittin’. What’s the chance they’ll risk destroying money that’s irreplaceable?”
Like the books, thought McGarr.
Slowly McKeon wheeled the lumbering craft toward the second patch of illumination.
“He says, drop the money, proceed to the landing site, and then send the woman out. He’ll examine our packet while she looks at the books. Simultaneously. Any bullshit, and he sends a second round up our”—Sweeney glanced back at Kara—“britches.”
He then nudged McGarr. “You’d better give me a hand with the delivery. It’s a weight in that metal sleeve, so it is.”
Passing by Kara, McGarr extended his hand, and she took it briefly. In the achromatic glow of
the phosphorescent flares, her face looked pale, masklike, and she was plainly frightened.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said, sliding open the bay door. At once, the roar of the rotors was deafening, and the damp night island air swept into the cabin.
Sweeney bent over the metal case. “And to think—I’ve begged, borrowed, and as much as stolen the last sou I’ll ever get me hands on.” He raised his outsized head to her. “It’s got to be genuine, the real thing—get me?”
She nodded and then looked back down at her hands.
“On the count of three,” said Sweeney to McGarr. “One, two, tallyho fifty fookin’ million smackers.” And they launched the packet out the bay door.
With a thump it hit the ground. And McKeon swung the helicopter back toward the patch of light, where he landed, making sure that the cockpit presented a view of the other helicopter. “How’s he going to lug that packet over to his chopper and—” McKeon raised a pair of night-vision binoculars to his eyes. “Ah, shit—it’s already gone.”
“What did I tell you?” Sweeney rushed toward the cockpit. “Give me them things.” Then, “Kara—get out there, girl, and tell us if the goods is real.”
Sweeney’s phone began ringing again.
She glanced at McGarr, who jumped down onto the spongy turf and raised his arms to help her off.
“McGarr. McGarr!” Sweeney roared from the cockpit. “He says only her, not you.”
McGarr pointed her forward, then moved off at an angle that kept most of him obscured by the body of the helicopter and the deep shadows of a hedgerow. He had a feeling that the cloaked and masked figure was alone; if others were present, they would have shown themselves bristling with armament, the further to intimidate. And with the money now gone from the drop site, the man would be struggling to get it back to his helicopter.
As McGarr moved in that direction, he caught a glimpse of Kara out of the corner of his eye, bending over the carton on the first pallet. From her pocket, she pulled out her cell phone, which she placed on top, then retrieved what looked like a box cutter.
The other helicopter was maybe seventy-five yards distant, and McGarr tried to plot the route that the other man would take to get it over two hedgerows and through a thicket of hazel bushes.
But as he neared the second airship, an amplified voice said from the helicopter, “Whoever else is out of the helicopter is risking the exchange. If you don’t return immediately, we’ll destroy the books, which are mined.”
McGarr stopped where he was, wondering where he had heard that voice before and if it could be a bluff. He was now only a hundred or so feet from the other helicopter, and if one person was retrieving the money, then there was at least one other person aboard the ship.
It also occurred to McGarr that if they had bothered to mine the four pallets containing what they represented as the stolen books, then they evidently had no intention of actually returning them. Or whatever was encased there was not genuine; in spite of their New Druid rhetoric, would they chance blowing up an asset of such value?
No. Once they had the money securely aboard their helicopter, they would touch off the mines, perhaps even catching Kara still going about the time-consuming business of examining each of the four pallets.
But would they leave without the money and also chance destroying that too? Probably not.
McGarr heard footsteps off to his left; dropping down, he caught sight of the silhouette of a hunched-over person struggling with the large odd-sized carton that he had rigged with a sling over his shoulder, so that the weight was resting on his back.
And it struck McGarr even then, as he dropped down and waited for the figure to move closer, that there could not have been enough time to open the carton and examine the contents. In fact, how had he known to equip himself with a sling just the length and design to accommodate the packet?
Now with only a few yards separating them, McGarr rushed forward and lunged at the figure, one shoulder striking him squarely at the knees. The sling and its contents fell from the man’s hands, and he went down hard.
Scrambling to his feet, McGarr began to raise his Walther when the deep island night exploded in successive balls of orange flame. The concussion of the first blast drove him right over the other man, who was still on the ground.
And three successive blasts kept toppling him farther still. Finally, when he managed to move, he found he had lost the handgun somewhere in the now-pitch darkness. And even one of his shoes.
He was dizzy, and something was wrong with his hearing. In shock or pain, he could not summon the strength to raise himself up.
Kara could not possibly have survived those blasts, unless somehow, for some reason—maybe the warning the pilot had issued—she’d returned to the helicopter.
And as from a distance, he was now hearing faint voices.
“Are you all right, Stu?” asked the voice from the helicopter, the one he thought he had heard before.
“Aye. Muckle fine, if only I could walk. Where is he?” The accent was Scots.
“Forget him. We’ve got what we want, and now it’s time to get out. Without delay.”
“Pass me your light—I’ll put a bullet in his head.”
“No, you won’t. You know his preference in this, what we agreed to as our part of the bargain. We’re to keep him alive.”
“Him? Why the fuck is it always his preference that matters? With this money, it’s now us who’ve fuckin’ got the hammer.”
“Yes, but we don’t quite safely have the money, do we?”
Not long after McGarr heard the whine of a starter, followed by the thump of rotors accelerating, and he shielded his head from the blast of the helicopter lifting off.
Once it was clearly away, he again tried to stand. Something was burning his back.
A beam of light playing over the brush now found him. “Peter, be still. Your jacket’s smoldering.” It was McKeon.
It stung more severely, as McKeon used his own jacket to press out the burning material.
“Do you think you can stand?”
He nodded. “Help me. Where’s Kara?”
McKeon hauled him to his feet.
“What about Kara?”
“Let’s take care of you first.”
“Take me to her.”
“Ah, now, there’s not much we can do for her, I’m afraid. Sweeney rushed out to pull her away, and I’m afraid maybe…” His voice trailed off.
No, McGarr thought, not a second time. Maybe thirty yards away he could see small brushfires scattered around the area where the pallets had stood. Glowing, smoldering debris was scattered everywhere, it seemed: snagged in the low trees and bushes and littering the ground of open field. Wood, textile, cardboard. Like snow, a confetti of paper tufted the grass.
McKeon had trained the ground lights of the helicopter on the area where the pallets with their packets had been. And there stood Sweeney with Kara limp in his arms, staggering, one side of his face streaming with blood.
He swayed and took two tentative steps in the direction of the helicopter. Instead of falling, as though careful of his burden, he spun and sat almost gracefully.
McGarr could see she was dead, her back was clearly broken and ripped open to the bone with one leg nearly severed. And she too was burned, her long umber hair scorched to the scalp.
“Janie, didn’t I try to pull her away?” Sweeney said, his deep voice suddenly gone high. His right eye was plainly damaged, both the brow, the cheek below, and the orb. “But I only just got to her when the fookin’ thing went up, and blew her into me. She”—he raised a hand and touched a bloody cheek—“never fell. Know what?”
McGarr squatted down to take Kara from him.
“I can’t quite make you out.”
“I’ll take her now. Bernie will help you up.”
Telling himself that if he just dealt with what had to be done at the moment, moment by moment, he’d be able to make it through, he lifted her ou
t of Sweeney’s arms.
What struck McGarr is how perfect she still looked, in his mind unchanged from the woman who had jumped off the helicopter only minutes before.
But carrying her through the field, he felt so desolate and bereft that he truly wished he had been blown apart there as well. To think that Kara had as much as said she thought the attempt foolhardy but would accompany him because he had asked, and then to have her beautiful, innocent person utterly destroyed like this—well, it was an enormity of which McGarr himself alone was guilty. Done to salvage his reputation and failing career.
Having to strain to lift her into the helicopter, McGarr found himself suddenly dizzy. But he managed to scramble into the high bay door near where he found a litter and several emergency blankets to cover her.
“Peter—there’s a ladder to the right,” McKeon said. “And if you could give me a hand with him. We should get out of here. The blasts…”
Would have been heard and probably reported, and the last thing they needed was a run-in with the local police.
“Ah, Janie,” Sweeney kept saying. “Janie Mac, it smarts. Is there someplace I can lie down? I feel a little woozy.”
Opening a second litter, they helped Sweeney lower his body into the canvas sling. “Thanks. Thanks, gents. What a debacle. A complete and utter fookin’ debacle.”
It was only after McGarr took a seat and they were airborne that he again became conscious of the burning pain in his back.
Yet in one very significant way the steady sear was necessary—at least in some small way he too had been injured and had participated in her agony. Which mercifully had to have been brief.
Instead of appearing abandoned, the old warehouse and its laneways were teeming with police and emergency vehicles, cherries splashing the building with lurid swipes of red, halogen alley lights focused on two shattered bay doors—the one that was only open a yard or so, and another with a gaping hole fringed with shattered strips of metal.
Getting out, Ward advanced quickly on the low door, which was not being guarded. He slid under and moved toward the office where a small crowd of Gardai and emergency personnel had gathered.
Death in Dublin Page 23
