by James Deegan
Sure, some of the bhoys still used it, but now it was mostly just a place to drink stout, tell tall tales, and watch the Celtic game.
But, even so, the man in the black jacket ducked his head into his upturned coat collar as he walked in.
The man he had come to see – known as ‘Freckles’, for obvious reasons – was sitting at a table beneath a signed Kerry GAA shirt once worn by Seamus Moynihan, All Stars Footballer of the Year in 2000.
Mid to late fifties. Pale, thinning ginger hair, a faded black Thin Lizzy T-shirt stretched tight over his pot belly.
Nursing a whiskey – Kavanagh Single Malt – on the rocks.
The Dubliners were on the sound system, Luke Kelly singing about Derry, the armoured cars and the bombed-out bars.
The lunchtime crowd was sparse – just a few lads here and there, chatting to orange-coloured girls, the irony, and a bored barman flicking through an old copy of Loaded.
Black Jacket bought a pint of lager and sat down at the table. ‘Bout ye, big lad?’ he said.
‘Ach, full o’ the blade,’ said Freckles, rubbing his eyes and pulling a face that said the exact opposite. ‘Róisín’s pissed half the time and pissed off the rest. Stacey’s lost her job at Specsavers. Johnny’s still Johnny. So it’s all good. You sure you weren’t followed, coming here?’
‘Sure, it’s a free country, isn’t it?’ said Black Jacket. ‘And I’m allowed a lunch hour. I’m just visiting an old school pal for a drink, so I am. Anyway, there isn’t the manpower, even if they wanted to.’
He took a big glug of Harp and belched.
‘So what can I do you for?’ said Freckles.
‘What if I told you that I know where to find the men who killed Sean and Gerard Casey and Ciaran O’Brien?’
There was a long pause. Then Freckles sat back in his chair.
‘Christ,’ he said. ‘That’s been a long old time. It was them Para bastards, wasn’t it?’
‘It was.’
‘And you know who it was?’
‘Their names, home addresses, current jobs, the lot.’
Freckles took a sip of his whiskey. ‘Are you suggesting… what are yous suggesting?’
‘I’m suggesting someone might like to pay they two fellas a wee visit and introduce them to Mr Nemesis.’
‘Come again?’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Black Jacket, rolling his eyes. ‘I’m suggesting someone might like to go over there and kill the fuckers.’
Freckles was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘Are yous wearing a fucking wire? You trying to get me lifted?’
‘No, I am not, you melter,’ hissed Black Jacket, indignantly. ‘You fucking catch yourself on.’ He glanced over at the door marked Gents. ‘You can take me in there and pat me fucking down if you like. I’m handing you two of the bastards on a fucking plate here. You cheeky fecker.’
‘Alright,’ said Freckles, looking around the bar. ‘Keep your fucking hair on. And careful who yous call a melter.’
‘Sorry.’
‘And a cheeky fecker.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Right. So who are they?’
‘Michael Parry and John Carr. Parry’s a delivery driver now in the north of England. Carr works in private security for some Russian in London. He was in the SAS after the Paras, and all.’
‘An SAS man?’ Freckles sat forward slightly.
‘That’s right.’
‘Christ. We might like to have a look at that. That’d be fucking beezer, right enough.’
‘Aye, that’s what I’ve been trying to fucking say to ye,’ said the man in the black jacket. Still shaking his head, he downed his pint and stood up. ‘Listen, you ask them and get back to me. It’d be nice to get the bastards back for Gib and Loughgall, eh?’
29.
AT FOUR O’CLOCK, Carr’s mobile rang.
He put down the book he was reading – an old Len Deighton WWII thriller, Bomber – and picked up the phone.
And frowned.
Oleg Kovalev – Konstantin Avilov’s head of security and, therefore, John Carr’s immediate boss.
A good guy, but he didn’t make too many social calls.
Carr had plans for the evening – a curvy little redhead from the gym, she’d been flirting with him for weeks and he’d finally given in – but he had a funny feeling in his gut that he wouldn’t be meeting up with her, after all.
Sighing, he answered the call.
‘Carr.’
‘Johnny, is me,’ said the Russian. ‘Listen, something has come up. You know Konstantin was in Amsterdam today?’
‘Aye.’
‘Okay, he’s flying to London tonight, instead of Moscow. For business meeting.’
‘Tonight?’ said Carr.
‘Today, actually. We at Schiphol now. Just about to fly. Konstantin would like you to meet us at City Airport at five-thirty. We do the business at Dorchester Hotel. Then we go out on the town. You come too. Okay?’
Carr breathed deeply, and closed his eyes.
A long, long time ago, hard, wise men had burned the famous ‘seven Ps’ into his brain: Prior Preparation and Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.
Leave nothing to chance.
Have a plan.
Have a fall-back plan.
And know them both, inside out, upside down, and back to front.
It was hard to plan for things which were sprung on you, and he didn’t like the sound of a night on the town, either. His job was to protect the Russian, not to fanny about the place telling the guy war stories and sharing three hundred pound bottles of champagne with him. Just lately, Avilov had been finding excuses to drop in like this, and it was clear to Carr that he was crossing the line between adviser and friend, between bodyguard and drinking buddy.
Probably a good thing for Carr’s future prospects, but it made life hard.
‘Listen, Oleg,’ said Carr. ‘You guys need to understand. It’s hard for me to keep Konstantin in one piece if I can’t plan ahead properly. It’s even harder if he wants me to go on the piss with him. Don’t get me wrong. I like the guy, he’s a good bloke, but I have to keep that distance. It’s how it works.’
Oleg chuckled. ‘Good bloke,’ he said. ‘I like this. Look, I know, Johnny, I understand. What I can say? He thinks you’re good bloke also. Plus, you don’t speak Russian, so he can talk freely.’
‘Who else is coming over?’
‘Only me. And just one car, please. Boss wants to feel free.’
‘I don’t like that,’ said Carr.
He liked to have a minimum of four on the job – two operators plus two drivers in two vehicles. And all of them trained and licensed close-protection officers, strictly ex-Paras and Marines – he’d have preferred ex-Hereford men, but they were way too pricey for UK work. It wasn’t fancy or complicated, just basic, belt-and-braces stuff, but it could be the difference between a good day and a very bad one.
Oleg snorted. ‘You worry too much. Is low-key meeting. No-one knows he is coming. We fly in, driver collects us, we have the meeting, we have some fun. Just some dinner, some drinks, maybe some girls. No risk. No problems.’
‘It just sounds light on bodies to me, Oleg,’ he said.
‘Relax. Is just a flying visit. Hush-hush. No problems.’
Carr sat back in his chair and thought for a moment.
He wasn’t best pleased, but then what gets people killed are patterns.
Patterns.
You get up at six every day, leave your house at seven, drive the same route to work, park in the same car park, stop for your daily coffee in the same Starbucks… if the barista knows you, if he knows you like your skinny latte extra hot, in a takeaway cup even though you drink it inside, and knows that you spend fifteen minutes reading the sports pages before you walk the last three hundred yards to the office… Well, if someone wants to get to you, you’re already a dead man.
If you know you’re under threat, you don’t set patterns.
You keep knowledge of your movements to a minimum, you buy your coffee at a different place every morning, and you don’t schedule appointments a week ahead.
And Avilov really did have enemies. There was permanent background chatter about contracts being taken out on him; Carr had no way of knowing how serious that chatter was, but he did know that two of Avilov’s business associates had been murdered in the last couple of years, so he had to assume that it was grounded in reality.
He liked Avilov well enough, the job was easy, and the money was fine.
But if your principal won’t take advice then you have two choices: quit, or make the best of a bad job.
So: was it quitting time?
Some level of risk is unavoidable – that’s just life. The trick is not to make it easy for the bastards.
That was Carr’s mantra.
But deep down, he knew that one random, unplanned visit to London was probably safe enough.
It’s not Libya, he thought. I can live with it.
He sighed.
Looked at his watch.
Better ring the curvy little redhead and give her the bad news.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll be there. Five-thirty at City, you say?’
‘Yes. We’re taxi-ing to the runway now. You must get your skate on. Is this the word, skate?’
‘Skates,’ said Carr. ‘I need to get my skates on.’
‘Crazy,’ laughed Oleg. ‘Get skates on. You English, you funny, funny people.’
‘I’m Scottish.’
‘Is same thing,’ said Oleg, dismissively.
30.
A MAN WITH greying black hair, thick spectacles, and thread veins on his broken nose which spoke of too many late nights in too many rough bars sat in the Beehive on the Falls Road, nursing his first pint of the evening, thinking.
Many moons ago, the life of the man with the broken nose had become inextricably linked with those of two British soldiers.
He’d all but cast them from his thoughts, but now – suddenly, unexpectedly – they had stepped back into them.
Parry.
Carr.
How to deal with them?
The place was alive with eyes, so he needed to tread carefully.
Do the right thing.
More importantly, be seen to do the right thing.
He looked up.
Sitting across the table from him was a woman.
She looked scared half to death, but the dominoes players on either side were scrutinising their pieces with extraordinary care and attention.
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. It paid to be a wise monkey at times.
‘Marie, is it?’ he said. ‘Marie Hughes?’
She nodded.
‘So tell me what you told the police.’
Marie Hughes did as she was told, the man listening impassively.
When she had finished, he said, ‘So you’re saying they didn’t call my brother an ambulance?’
‘Yes.’
‘That they deliberately made him suffer and die?’
‘Aye.’
He sat back and thought for a few moments. Then he said, ‘Listen, sweetheart, you’ve nothing to fear from us. But I don’t want you speaking to the peelers from now on, okay? Newspapers, too, if they come knocking. We want to control this information, so you don’t speak to anyone without my say-so. Especially not the police. Got it?’
She nodded again.
‘Not a word.’
‘Not a word,’ she said.
‘Good. Now, Danny here is going to drive you home and give you some money for your trouble,’ said the Irishman. ‘And yous’ll keep your bake shut. This meeting never happened. Understand?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
The man nodded towards the door. ‘On your way, then.’
After she had gone, another man came over from the bar and took her place.
‘What d’ye reckon then, Pat?’ he said, to the man with the broken nose.
Pat Casey – or, to give him his full title, MLA Patrick Casey, current member of the Northern Irish Assembly for Drugannon Moor, and former 2IC of the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional IRA – finished his Guinness, and then set the glass on the table.
Said curtly to a man with a fistful of dommies at the table to his right, ‘Freddie, set me up another o’ them.’
31.
JOHN CARR COULDN’T settle.
Konstantin Avilov’s private aircraft – a gaudy, gold-painted, £30 million Sukhoi Superjet 100-95 SSJ, with its own roster of foxy Eastern European stewardesses and former Russian air force pilots – had arrived bang on time, and now they were in the bar at the Dorchester.
Which was starting to fill up with rich pissheads.
Over to Carr’s right, with his back to the wall, Konstantin Avilov was sitting at a table, deep in conversation with another crook from the old days of the Soviet empire.
The only words Carr could make out were ‘Da’ and ‘Niet’, but it all seemed friendly enough, with lots of raucous laughter, nodding, and gesticulating.
Their business had been concluded an hour ago in the guy’s suite, and this was just the drink to seal the deal.
The deal no doubt meant that someone, somewhere, was getting screwed, and that Avilov and his pal were making another little fortune for themselves, but Carr’s interests were more prosaic: was anyone in this room intending to harm Konstantin Avilov? The pissheads were noisy, unpredictable bastards, the kind of crowd among which someone more sinister could hide.
A few feet away, Oleg Kovalev was in a hushed discussion with the other guy’s top security bod.
That looked friendly, too.
Clearly, they thought everything was under control.
If Carr had been the sort of man to relax at times like this, he might even have relaxed.
But he didn’t relax very often, and he never relaxed at times like this unless every living soul in the room was covered by a man he trusted, and the room itself was covered, and the building, and the approach and departure routes.
Relaxation was what got you fired.
At best.
At worst, it got you killed.
Behind the bar, some old geezer was mixing up another bunch of cocktails.
Out of the window, he saw a tourist bus pull up in the Park Lane traffic. The tour guide was saying something over the loudspeaker; flashbulbs were firing in the evening dark.
Just then, Konstantin Avilov stood up, beaming, and shook the hand of his buddy.
‘Is good deal for you, good deal also for me, Georgiy,’ he said, in English. ‘We make lots of money, everybody happy.’ He looked over at Carr. ‘John, come over here, please. I want you meet my friend.’
Carr got up, swept the room, and walked over.
The other Russian had that flat, wide, hard face, born of winter on the steppes.
Six foot tall, powerfully built – early sixties, but still physically tough for all that.
Narrow eyes.
Killer’s eyes.
What looked to Carr like many years in the Red Army under his belt.
‘Is my friend, Georgiy Krupin,’ said Avilov. ‘Georgiy meet John, John meet Georgiy. Georgiy was Colonel in our Spetznaz. You know Spetznaz, John? Better than SAS.’
Carr smiled and shook Krupin’s outstretched hand. ‘I dinnae know about that,’ he said.
‘I don’t know either,’ said Krupin, with a self-deprecating grin, and excellent English. ‘I have to admit, I always feared that the Special Air Service had the… what’s the phrase? Had the edge over us. Numerically, we were stronger, of that I am sure. But you guys paved the way for all special forces everywhere. It’s a pleasure to meet you.’
‘Likewise, Colonel,’ said Carr.
‘I understand from Konstantin that you served for nearly twenty years?’ said the Russian, pulling his cuffs down and adjusting his tie. ‘You were in Afghanistan?’
‘Yes,’ said Carr. ‘Manhunting.’
Krupin blew out his cheeks. ‘A hellish place,’ he said. ‘We were glad to get out. I lost many good men there.’
‘We lost a few ourselves.’
‘So I understand,’ said Krupin. ‘But it was a failure of your politics, not your soldiers. You have good men, but you fight with one hand tied behind your backs by the devochki in Washington and London. Slabaki who never saw even one single punch thrown in their entire lives. The Apache, the Spectre, night vision 2.0… Bozhe moy! With western military hardware like this and Russian leadership, we would kill every last one of those goatfuckers, eh?’
‘Enough,’ said Avilov. ‘Is vodka time!’
32.
THEY LEFT THE DORCHESTER and Mr Spetznaz at nine. The driver – Terry Cooper, an ex-Para, the brother of a former 22 comrade of Carr’s, and a man with a decade in Met Counter Terrorism under his belt – was waiting outside in one of Avilov’s armoured Range Rovers.
He took them straight to some sort of fusion restaurant in Mayfair, where Avilov was greeted like a favourite son – he knew the owner, a Ukrainian gangster – and the three men were fed yellowtail tuna and Wagyu steaks, and had £200-a-glass scotch poured down their throats.
At least, Oleg Kovalev and Konstantin Avilov had scotch poured down their throats; Carr accepted one drink and left it untouched.
Eventually Avilov noticed.
‘John,’ he said, his voice steady and clear. Among his many talents was one for holding his booze. ‘John, why you not drink with me?’
‘You know the score, boss,’ said John. ‘I’m working. I don’t drink on the job.’
All those years in the Army had stamped a mark on him which said Duty first, fun second.
‘Bah,’ scoffed Avilov. ‘What you protecting me? Oleg is here. Anyway, nobody here want to hurt Konstantin. Is fine. Have a drink!’
‘I’d rather not,’ said Carr. ‘Thank you, though.’
‘Oleg is drinking.’
‘This isn’t Oleg’s town. I’ll drink if I’m in Moscow, but not here.’
Oleg Kovalev beamed at Carr, and said something in Russian to the boss man. They both laughed.
