The Long Shot (Stephen Leather Thrillers)

by Stephen Leather

  The bar was a centre for the IRA’s fund-raising in the city, with a small room at the back frequently used to sort and count cash, and Joker had seen several men come out of the room putting their wallets in their pockets as if they’d been collecting money. In one of few revelations, Shorty had told Joker that some IRA men on the run from the UK weren’t able to work and that they drew regular wages from the organisation’s funds. The bar also acted as an unofficial employment centre for the Irish community. Representatives of several construction companies would sit at tables, drinking Guinness and reading Irish newspapers, and there would be a constant stream of visitors, mainly young men, who after a few whispered words would leave with an address scrawled on a piece of paper. The construction companies always needed workers, and they paid in cash. When Joker had made it known that he’d worked as a bricklayer he’d been offered several jobs at a much higher rate of pay than he got from the bar. He’d turned down the offers, knowing that Filbin’s was a far better source of information about the IRA than laying bricks would be.

  Joker used the remote control to flick through the channels on the television set: Gilligan’s Island, I Love Lucy, Charlie’s Angels, Mr Ed. Nothing but repeats and game shows, all of them punctuated by the same mind-numbing commercials. He picked up the tumbler of whisky and balanced it on his stomach. He was still none the wiser about Bailey’s whereabouts, and sooner or later he was going to have to intensify his search. So far he’d been ultra-careful about raising the man’s name, and on the few occasions he’d mentioned it outside the bar it had got him nowhere. Joker knew that if anyone knew where Bailey was, it would be the patrons of Filbin’s, but to raise the subject risked drawing attention to himself. So far he’d been accepted by the Irish community, but that could easily change. Once, late at night, he’d overheard some of the construction workers laughing about a ‘Sass-man’ who’d once tried to infiltrate the bar, and he guessed they were talking about Pete Manyon. By the time Joker had managed to get over to clear empty glasses from their table they’d changed the subject. It had given Joker the chills. It was easy to forget that many of the jovial patrons were active members of the IRA and had been responsible for the deaths of British soldiers and innocent civilians. Joker flicked through the television channels faster and faster, trying to think of some other way of achieving his objective which wouldn’t involve him putting his life on the line. He picked up the tumbler of whisky, but as he lifted it to his lips he caught sight of himself in the mirror over the dressing table. He winced as he realised how out of condition he was. There was no concealing his thickening waistline and the unhealthy pallor of his skin.

  Joker switched the television off and put the glass on the bedside table before standing in front of the mirror. He didn’t look any better vertical. He sucked in his gut and pulled his shoulders back. A bit better, but not much. With a sigh that bordered on the mournful he sat down on the threadbare carpet and linked his fingers behind his neck. With his eyes on the whisky, he began a series of hard and fast sit-ups, grunting at the unfamiliar strain on his muscles.

  Frank Sullivan shared an office with four other agents in FBI headquarters at Federal Plaza in Manhattan, though it was rare for more than one of them to be there at a time. Much of their work in the Counter-Terrorism (Europe) Division involved surveillance, either sitting in the back of parked vans or in darkened rooms, watching and waiting, or meeting informers in parks or cinemas. As a result paperwork tended to pile up and Sullivan had a stack of files as long as his arm to deal with.

  He poured himself a cup of black coffee from the filter machine which he and his three colleagues had bought using their own money and set it down by the pile of files in his ‘in’ tray. Most of the files contained answers to queries he’d sent to the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Belfast, and they were contained in pale blue FBI file covers. Information from MI5, the British counter-espionage service, was always kept in manila folders, ever since one of their files had ended up in Belfast by mistake. The file had contained an MI5 case officer’s criticism of an RUC undercover operation and had caused no end of embarrassment. A flurry of memos and an FBI agent being posted to a two-man office in Fairbanks, Alaska, had been the result, along with an agreement that for ever more RUC and MI5 information would be clearly marked and kept apart. About half a dozen of the files on Sullivan’s desk were from MI5.

  Traffic between the FBI, MI5 and the RUC had intensified in recent years as an increasing number of IRA activists had sought sanctuary in the United States. More than a dozen top-ranking IRA officials had been killed in the UK in the previous twenty-four months, some in accidents, others shot in the course of undercover operations, several had committed suicide, a few had been murdered, their assailants unknown. Rumours were rife of a shoot-to-kill operation, questions had been asked in the House of Commons and the Sunday Times’ Insight team had published several investigative articles suggesting that the SAS had been systematically wiping out the upper echelons of the terrorist organisation prior to the 1994 ceasefire. Nothing had been proved, however.

  Up until 1992, it had been the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police who had been responsible for keeping tabs on the IRA, as they had done since the nineteenth century when they were first formed to combat the Irish nationalists. Sullivan and his colleagues had always preferred dealing with Special Branch: unlike MI5 they were real policemen, men the FBI agents could identify with. MI5 were spies who had found themselves with a declining workload after the break-up of the Soviet Union, and most of them adopted a superior attitude when dealing with the Bureau. Sullivan had spent three months in London working in MI5’s Curzon Street offices alongside the British anti-terrorist specialists as part of a now-defunct exchange programme, and it had been a disheartening experience. He found the MI5 agents cold and distant, with a public-school humour that he’d never managed to comprehend. They’d appeared to be more interested in maintaining their own sense of superiority than sharing their expertise, and he’d returned to New York feeling that the whole experience had been a waste of time. The few personal contacts he’d made during his twelve-week attachment had been no help at all once he’d crossed the Atlantic, and requests for information from Curzon Street consistently took twice as long as similar communication with the RUC.

  On several occasions MI5 had sent its own agents to the United States without telling the FBI, and relations between the two agencies were, at best, strained. Sullivan pulled the manila files from the stack and began to read them first. Two of the files contained telex requests for information on IRA activists the British had apparently lost track of. Sullivan smiled and slipped them into the bottom drawer of his desk. He’d get to them eventually, but they were low on his list of priorities.

  Of the remaining four files, one was MI5’s reply to his request for information on Damien O’Brien, the new face working as a barman in Filbin’s. Sullivan took a mouthful of hot coffee and opened the file. All it contained was a telex from Curzon Street saying that MI5 had no record of a Damien O’Brien with the date of birth supplied, though there was a seventy-two-year-old Damien J. O’Brien currently living in Dublin who was an active IRA member in the late Fifties but who was now considered to be retired. O’Brien’s passport was genuine and the fingerprints which the FBI had sent did not match those of any IRA members. The rest of the telex concerned the file held on Damien O’Brien by Criminal Records Office and detailed his two convictions for drunk and disorderly behaviour, both of which had resulted in fines, and a three-month spell in a Glasgow jail for assault. The fingerprints on the bottle of Budweiser matched those of the Damien O’Brien who had spent three months in prison. Sullivan closed the file and dropped it into his ‘out’ tray. O’Brien seemed to be genuine: a barman with a drink problem who was working illegally in New York. He made a note on the file cover to review the man again in three months. If he’d kept his nose clean and hadn’t made contact with any of the IRA regulars, he’d inform INS and have th
e man deported for working illegally on a tourist visa. Meanwhile, Sullivan had bigger fish to fry.

  Cole Howard had a large blackboard delivered to his office and in the middle of it he fixed the photograph of the four dummies in the desert. Around it he stuck six photographs: the BUPERS file pictures of Lou Schoelen and Rich Lovell; a shot of what he thought was probably the third sniper; the woman; the young man; and the man with the walkie-talkie. He took a stick of white chalk and linked the pictures to the centre like spokes in a wheel and then sat down in his chair. He sat unmoving for a full hour, trying to put all the facts into perspective: trained Navy SEAL snipers; two unknown men and a woman. Four targets, two thousand yards or so from one of the rifles. He took a pad of paper and began to write a list of his priorities, a habit he’d picked up in the FBI Academy.

  It was dark outside when he’d finished his list and he had to switch on his desk lamp. He put down his pen and massaged his temples. His head was throbbing, a dull ache which two painkillers had failed to dispel, and he wanted a drink, badly. There were more than a dozen paragraphs scribbled on the sheets of paper and he sat back in his chair and read them through. He had to put in a requisition for phone company records for the two former Navy SEALs through Sheldon’s office so that he could find out who the men had been in contact with prior to disappearing. He also wanted a tap put on the telephone belonging to Lou Schoelen’s parents in case he called home, as well as access to their phone records. He would have to run the new photographs of the mystery men and the woman through the FBI’s files, and he could start those wheels turning before he left for the evening. Andy Kim had to be contacted and his progress ascertained. If Bob Sanger had been as good as his word, the computer expert would already be ensconced in the White House. Howard had made a note to check that sufficient FBI programmers had been assigned to the project.

  Howard had also made a note to ask Kelly about the bank accounts belonging to Schoelen and Lovell, and to see if she’d made any progress on the credit cards the men had used to hire the cars they’d driven into the desert.

  Howard was now convinced he had identified two of the three snipers, but the third was a mystery. The new pictures of the snipers would also have to be run through the files in the hope that there would be a match somewhere. The third sniper seemed to have long hair, almost shoulder length, so he figured it wouldn’t be too hard to identify him. He would follow Kratzer’s advice and try to track down the rifles by approaching the manufacturers. He doubted that a check of their records would provide any surprises: the two rifles which had been identified were in the hands of the known snipers, but there was an outside chance that they might provide a lead.

  As an afterthought, he made a note to ask the State Department for a list of overseas VIPs who would be visiting the US over the next six months. Howard sighed and massaged his temples again. The investigation seemed to be growing exponentially and he felt that it was slipping away from him. There were plenty of leads but he didn’t seem to be able to get on top of any of them. He felt some satisfaction in having identified two of the snipers, but he was still no nearer knowing where they were, who their target was, and when they intended to strike. He had a sickening feeling that Jake Sheldon would regard the slow progress as failure and that he’d assign someone else to supervise the case. Howard sighed and dropped the sheets of paper into his desk drawer. The desire for a drink was almost overwhelming. He pulled a slim book from his bottom drawer and flicked through it until he found the address of a local college where a meeting was scheduled to start in twenty minutes’ time. He quickly filled out the forms for the telephone records and the tap and put them into an envelope marked for Jake Sheldon. He put copies of the photographs of the snipers, the woman and the two men into another envelope and marked it up for an FBI records cross-check before putting it in his ‘out’ tray.

  The drive to the college took less than ten minutes and there were plenty of parking spaces. It was a venue he’d visited before. The meeting room was on the first floor and a couple of dozen plastic chairs had been arranged in uneven rows facing a blackboard on which were scrawled a number of chemical equations. At the back of the room a coffee-maker bubbled contentedly, and a young man in a shabby suit was pouring milk from a carton into a row of china mugs. Howard took a seat at the back, next to a large woman in a fur coat. There were sixteen people in the room, most of them men. Howard had seen several of them before, both at the college and at other meetings. He was the third to speak. He stood up and, as he always did when addressing a group, he cleared his throat. “My name is Cole,” he said, “and I’m an alcoholic. It’s been three years and eight months since I had a drink.”

  The group applauded and Howard felt their support and love wash over him like a warm shower.

  It was a hot day and the crowds streaming towards the ball park were dressed appropriately – baggy shorts, bare legs, T-shirts, and baseball caps, most of them in the orange and white team colours of the Orioles. Mary left the hotel and followed the fans. She had put on a pair of baggy white shorts which showed off her slim, tanned legs, and a blue sweat-shirt, the sleeves pulled up to her elbows. The weather in Baltimore was the most varied she’d ever experienced: three days earlier it had been so chilly that she’d needed a warm coat when she went out, the previous day it had rained, and when the sky had cleared the temperature had soared into the high eighties and the television weather forecaster had said that the humidity would be high on the day of the game. He’d been right, and Mary found herself breathing heavily so thick and moist was the air.

  Street vendors had sprung up on all the roads leading to the ball park, selling hot dogs, iced drinks, and cheap souvenirs. Mary walked by a bar where the customers had spilled out onto the street, mainly good-natured young men drinking beer from cans. It wasn’t the first baseball game she had been to, so she wasn’t surprised at how polite and agreeable everybody appeared to be. There was none of the mindless chanting and thuggery that always seemed to accompany large sporting events in Britain, where the violence off the pitch often had a higher priority than the game itself. In contrast, American crowds were generally families out for a good time. The police directing traffic seemed friendlier than their UK counterparts, their shirts rolled up and their caps pushed back on their heads. They smiled and joked with the crowds, and appeared to be as enthusiastic about the forthcoming game as the fans. She felt totally safe as she mingled in the crowd, though she kept a wary hand on the strap of her handbag.

  The ticket had been delivered to her room in a sealed envelope early that morning, but she wasn’t sure which entrance to use. A large policeman saw her frowning as she studied her ticket and he asked her if she needed help. He had a badge on his chest which said his name was Murphy but his accent was a slow Maryland drawl with no trace of Irishness in it. He had a drinker’s nose, though, red and bumpy like she’d seen so many times on the faces of the men in the streets of Belfast. Officer Murphy pointed to where she should go, and wished her a nice day. He actually touched his hand to the peak of his cap, a gesture she associated more with Dixon of Dock Green than an American cop. The elderly man who checked her ticket at the turnstile was just as friendly. She could never get over how polite everyone was in America. Waitresses, policemen, bank clerks, people she met in the hotel, they all smiled and seemed to take a genuine interest in her. The people in Belfast were friendly enough, but there was still a coldness between strangers which didn’t seem to exist in the States.

  She walked through the crowds to the stairway which led up to the level where her seat was. The stadium was buzzing expectantly, while down on the bright green playing surface players warmed up, throwing balls hard and fast and catching them with their large leather mitts. Even high up in the stand, Mary could hear the thwack of balls being hit home. Off to the side, by the dugouts, men were swinging bats, their arms extended, whirling them like propellers. Messages were being flashed onto a large electronic screen at the far end of the st
adium, welcoming the fans and telling them who was on that day’s team. Men rushed up and down the aisles carrying boxes of beer cans, hot pretzels, hot dogs and soft drinks, shouting their wares. Food and drink was passed from hand to hand along the rows by the fans, and money shuttled in the opposite direction to be pocketed by the vendors.

  The seat on Mary’s left was vacant, and to her right was a young boy, his head dwarfed by a black baseball cap with an orange Oriole logo on the front. He was eating a huge mustard-smeared hot dog and swinging his legs up and down while his father tried to attract the attention of the Budweiser-seller. Mary smiled down at the little boy and he grinned, his lips yellow with mustard. When Mary looked up, a middle-aged man wearing sunglasses was sitting next to her, a large tub of popcorn in one hand, a giant beaker of Cola in the other. He looked like a typical sports fan rather than the terrorist the world knew as Carlos the Jackal. The lenses of his sunglasses were pitch black and Mary could see her own reflection in them. “Good afternoon, Ilich,” she said.

  “Mary,” he said quietly, turning to watch the players warming up. “It’s so nice to see you again. You are as beautiful as always.”

  “Why thank you, Ilich. You’re too kind.”

  He held out his tub of popcorn but Mary politely refused. The opening bars of the Star Spangled Banner began, and the stadium rumbled as the tens of thousands of fans got to their feet. Mary and Carlos followed suit, though they didn’t join in the chorus of cheers when the National Anthem finished and the Orioles ran onto the field. The opposition, a team from Minnesota, sat in the dugout while their first hitter went up to bat.