Charlie

by Finn Óg

  Alongside him was a more awkward-looking character, with a heavy-duty Peli case. Mini didn’t even introduce us, he just ordered the bloke aboard and told him to get started, while he and I took Isla off to a pub for lunch. It was great to catch up, and I filled him in on the work I’d been doing with Charlie. When we got back to the boat, the Peli case was open and the delicate kit was being gently replaced into dedicated foam slots. Mini got straight to the point.

  “Well?” he said, “what’s the story?”

  The awkward man frowned.

  “You’ve obviously got the usual traceable kit on board, and a VHF radio, but I’m assuming from what the boss here tells me about you, that you know to keep all of that switched off most of the time. So, the only signals coming off the boat are navigation, the GPS, the radar. The chart plotter could, conceivably, be followed, but it would take a hell of an operation to reverse a signal onto the boat and off it again. There’s no tracker on board. There’s no unusual signature. It’s like I said.” He shrugged towards Mini, who turned to me.

  “No matter what you think, you’re not a hermit,” Mini said.

  “I’m not trying to be a hermit,” I countered, “I’m just keeping my head down, for obvious reasons,” I nodded towards Isla.

  “If you literally kept your head down you would have stood a chance. But what you don’t appreciate is how much of you is recorded. Images, photos, social media, you’re there. All someone, somewhere needs, is a tagged image and you’re nailed.” He looked at Isla.

  “But I avoid cameras,” I shook my head.

  “You avoid snappers with an SLR,” he dismissed me.

  “I avoid people with camera phones, I avoid selfie sticks. I’m not even in family photos.”

  “You’re on camera all the time. Whoever it is that’s after you – all they need is your service-record mug shot. That matches your image to your name, and you’re fucked. They can input that image and they can search, and they can find where you were last recorded.”

  “I haven’t even been on CCTV.” I thought of Dublin airport, but tried to persuade myself that it was in a different jurisdiction.

  “Yeah, you have, and most of it is stream-able somewhere.”

  “Not near where we anchor though?”

  I really struggled with this. I thought I’d been so careful. Turning off location settings, refusing the laptop access to data roaming, or anything that could ping me or where we were anchored, or headed.

  Mini sighed, like he was talking to a dope. “You come ashore occasionally right? For food, or work aye?”

  I nodded.

  “Where do you launch the dinghy from?”

  “Mostly a sailing club,” I said, content that it was isolated enough to defend myself.

  “Which one?” he asked.

  I told him. He lifted a phone from his pocket and stared into its enormous screen. He tapped. “This one?” he turned it to me.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He turned it back to himself and tapped once. “A weather cam, live streamed.” He turned it back to me.

  “So?” I doubted whether anyone ever looked at the thing. “That’s just to tell members whether the tide is in or out, or what the sea state is like.”

  “It also tells them who’s walking across the boat park, and if someone is recording it, this allows them to take your image.”

  “Bollocks.” I began to realise the extent of what was possible. “So, if they can access an image that is provably mine, from a military database, then they can search around the internet to find where I am?”

  “If they’ve got the right software. Restricted stuff mainly. They can tell where you were recently recorded,” he said. “It probably wasn’t the bloody sailing club, mate, but it could be, it could be the local post office, or the petrol station. Man, it could be someone’s home if they have security cameras linked to their Wi-Fi. Anything can be hacked, pal.”

  “And it what? It maps my face?”

  “It takes a kind of fingerprint of your face, and it keeps it. Then all they need to do is to hunt around the area where you were last pinged. Or, they sit at their computer and they nail your position using one of these,” he wiggled his phone at me.

  “But, I’m careful with that yoke,” I said, “I have the privacy settings nailed down, and…”

  “Yeah yeah yeah,” he said, “then why do you have it? There’s a GPS in there, there’s a signal to switch off. When you power down, you tell the system where the thing is. No matter what your settings are, your provider and the phone maker know where you are, or at least where you last were. Don’t believe anything else. But better than that, there are people that can turn the bloody thing right back on again. They can listen, they can even watch through your camera. Only when the power source is totally and utterly exhausted, way beyond shut down, are you really on your own.”

  I stood and stared at him. It took a while to sink in. I was hunting through all I had done, all I had said. All those private moments consoling Isla, the pair of us crying and hugging and promising to look after one another. I got increasingly angry, and then turned to him. “But it would take some doing, wouldn’t it?”

  “Aye,” he said. “This is government-level stuff, or super-hacker. This is special ops capability, or a freelancer with skills like that gappy-bearded bollocks,” he nodded at the tall guy.

  “This isn’t great.”

  “Whatever you’ve got into, pal, this is pretty serious shit.”

  The technical bloke stepped off the boat. He didn’t appear to have taken offence at Mini’s insult. There was no way the man was a Marine, but he definitely answered to Mini, and that type of language was taken as banter in the Corps. I shook his hand and he wandered off awkwardly, the Peli case bowing him to one side. I deleted the few contacts off my phone, changed the access code, and handed it to Min.

  “Could you find a place for this? Preferably on board some ship headed for foreign waters?”

  He smiled. “I will. It may or may not be the phone by the way, it could be your ugly visog.”

  With one hand he took the phone, with the other he grabbed my hand, pulled me to his shoulder, and gave me a bump.

  “You take care,” he said.

  Then he turned heel and peeled off. I didn’t even need to thank him.

  *****

  My hire car and I were nearly flat packed by a Luas tram on the North Quay. Dublin had evidently changed a lot in my absence. I turned onto a street I thought I knew well, only to find the silent menace trundling towards me. It had a bell like a pushbike, hardly a fitting warning I thought, as I reversed at speed and nearly killed a horse pulling a carriage full of tourists. The driver’s reaction reminded me that swearing is a national pastime in Ireland. The language isn’t designed to be offensive, it’s simply common parlance, but it makes sailors, like me, sound dainty. I decided to abandon the car and make the rest of the trip on foot.

  I’d spent weeks making sure that that my instincts were worth following, that I hadn’t missed a trick. I had to work out who wanted me dead, so that I would not get dead when they tried again. I had a child to mind, and a little heart to heal.

  I felt sure that I hadn’t been compromised through my work for the charity woman. Before I binned the phone, she engaged me about once a fortnight to do jobs. The process was simple; she sent me an address through the encrypted Viber app, I hired a van, performed a recce, and worked out an extraction plan. Then I messaged her, told her when I’d have the girls extracted, and she looked after flights or ferries to get them home. Thereafter it was simply a matter of delivering the girls, and making sure they were safely removed from the country.

  The work itself wasn’t well paid, but the spoils were generally pretty good. Occasionally there was a bundle of cash in the apartments, most of which I gave to the girls, some of which I kept. Generally though, even with a wedge of Euros placed in their pockets, I walked away with a handsome sum. I found this easy to justify
, given the risks I was taking. I had a child to look after, and although this work wasn’t as dangerous as my previous job, it was pretty precarious, and risk had to be rewarded. Besides, it had human value, I was good at it, and because of the extra income, I got to spend more time with Isla than a nine-to-five life would have allowed.

  Sometimes there was a confrontation, which I admit, I enjoyed. Gnarly, shaven-headed pimps showed up from time to time. Horrible, selfish, callous bastards that they were. Word was evidently getting around, because at some point they stopped challenging me, and ran as soon as they realised what was happening. I would cause them enough pain to force them to lead me to their vehicles, and their cash. Occasionally I would liberate a weapon, and sling it in the Liffey, or some other deep river or lake. But I was always careful, ridiculously so. Anyone who could have followed me was left on the floor of a flat in bits, bleeding and battered, and without their phone. The cars I used were hired using fake ID, and with credit cards that I’d found in the brothels, which were probably stolen. In the end, I always settled up in cash anyway. I never used the same hire office twice.

  Fran was loyal to his friends, and a committed ideologue. I knew he liked a pint, and a yarn, but he didn’t know enough to be able to place me anywhere. He didn’t know what county I lived in, never mind my address. We’d shared a few beers and a few laughs after successful jobs, but I was reserved, even under the influence. He didn’t even know I had a kid, or that I’d had a wife. He knew of the website, and could contact me through it, but other than that he joked that I was a bit of an enigma, and he seemed to enjoy the secrecy of it. Besides, he was a tough character, and would likely fight hard to preserve my discretion, even under pressure.

  The trust I’d built up with Fran got to a point where he didn’t even tag along all of the time. He knew that some shipping companies would never relent, the Greeks being notable examples. There was no point in trying to unionise a ship skippered by a Greek captain. They were likely to tear up the papers as soon as it left the quay. The only option was to rescue any stricken seafarer, and get the poor sod home. Fran got a bit green around the gills when at sea. So, we came to an arrangement whereby he would organise the means to get me onto a vessel, and if I could extract the correct person from the ship without Fran having to be there, he would pay bigger bucks.

  On one occasion, in Limerick, I took a bosun off a boat without the captain even knowing I was on board. That was a nice job, largely because the bosun refused to leave the ship without his papers. I was forced to creep onto the bridge in the middle of the night, and break into the ship’s safe. I took nearly ninety grand in cash while I was at it. Then we bailed over the side into a rigid inflatable, and were in Galway by breakfast. I gave the bosun twenty grand, his biggest pay day ever, and told Fran nothing.

  None of this helped identify the intruder on our boat though. I poured over each job, every single scumbag I’d done over. I knew it was pointless though. I was convinced that the man who came to kill me wasn’t connected to that work. There were too many shipping companies; no single one had been sufficiently stroked to hold such a grudge. Even if one of them had taken out a contract on me, it would have been difficult to pin me down. I was under no illusions – anyone could be found. But thanks to Mini, I knew that locating me would have taken organisational support, and real determination. The half-a-heads I’d been battering around Ireland had no such capability. And, in short, I wasn’t doing enough damage to warrant the hiring of a hit man.

  There was a real and vested interest attached to tracking me down. A lurking shame or consequence, which I had somehow rubbed up. And so, with virtually no contacts, I went to the one woman I knew who might be able to point me in the right direction. I needed to speak to someone in social services, or, preferably, someone who was once in social services. Someone who would have dealt with darkness, and kept it quiet. Charity was the only woman I could think of who might know such a person. After a rather obscure description of what I wanted and why, she reluctantly put me in touch with someone.

  *****

  I passed the Guinness brewery, which smelt astonishingly fragrant, suggesting that stout wasn’t made there at all. Further towards town I crossed the Halfpenny Bridge, and wandered through into the south side, where the accents became more refined and the streets more leafy. Moving east, I crossed the Dart line and under the flickering reflection of Lansdowne Road stadium, I found the address.

  The woman who answered was everything I could have imagined. Old Ireland, right there, staring at me with suspicion. She was small, gaunt, and dressed like a 1950s schoolteacher. Hard, uncomfortable shoes, grey dress, cardigan. No colour, no humour. Charity had warned me that she would appear austere, but assured me that inside a tough exterior beat a heart of gold. Such was the old-style care system in Ireland; no smiles, no hugs, be grateful you’re getting the nothing that you’re given.

  I explained who had sent me, and asked if I might have a chat. She lacquered me with a coat of looking-on. I filled her painting time with blether, trying to persuade her to speak to me. Eventually, she stood aside, apparently persuaded that I was genuine.

  I walked in to a doily dreamland, musty, dark, decorated for the blind. The cold was striking, the furniture ancient. There was little sign of any means of entertainment – no TV, no radio, few books. I wondered what on earth this old woman did to amuse herself in her retirement. Prayed, perhaps.

  “I need to ask you about something a bit bizarre I’m afraid,” I told her. She just stared at me. We both remained standing. “It’s about a convent in Dublin. Well, partly. It’s about a children’s home, an orphanage there.”

  There was a tiny shift in her eye line as her gaze flickered from mine to the barren mantelpiece behind me. I consolidated, shit or bust. “It’s about ritual abuse, possibly connected to the seasons.”

  She slumped backwards, and my heart sank. This was what I’d hoped would not happen. The old woman somehow managed to grip her armchair as she sank, cushioning a surprisingly heavy blow into the tired springs. She eventually looked up at me, somehow shocked and resigned at the same time.

  “You see, I’ve been told about a terrible thing, and I need to know if it’s true, or if it’s just a horrible fantasy. It involves a child, well, an adult now, a person described as “the Heir.”

  “Oh, dear God, forgive us,” the woman spoke for the first time as she crossed herself.

  I didn’t take my eyes off her as I bent my legs to sit on her sofa. I just waited as she stared at the wall. Eventually her head rotated back towards me. “Who told you of this? Why would they tell you of this? What did they want?”

  I didn’t realise it until much later, but that question betrayed an awful assumption. “Is it true?” I ignored her query, but I already had my answer.

  She made an unusual gesture, contorting her fingers a bit like the scout salute, but backwards, and placed the tips against her forehead, masking much of her face. The slack skin on her bony fingers was a little unnerving, and stirred some distant fear from a childhood nursery rhyme. I swiped it aside and sat silently.

  “It’s true,” she said eventually. “And my advice to you, is that you drop this.”

  *****

  I didn’t feel foolish. Sure, my instinct had been to dis-regard the crazy Counsellor and his hallucinogenic horror story, but in a way, that put me at ease with myself. There was a certain relief that my view of human life had not darkened to the point of blindly accepting what he’d described. I was trying to reinvent myself as a father and a civilian, and my default position gave me hope that I might see the transition through. Still, I’d sought to disprove the story through an independent source, and it hadn’t gone as planned. It was a reminder that in order to get us out of the mess, I would need to be able to think the worst, and to believe it.

  Once I prized open the crack in her conscience, the old woman treated our encounter like a confession. The surroundings seemed appropriate; cold, claust
rophobic, no eye contact. Enormous tears leaked down her cheeks; the deep crevices like tributaries, irrigating the disturbed earth of a freshly ploughed field. The truth eventually flooded her face with peace, as if those years spent suppressing the horrors had wizened her, and left her incapable of laughter, of life. I left her in her exhaustion, but my mind was racing. There were gaps in her knowledge, but her story did keep driving at one thing.

  “You are not safe.”

  She said it three times, and each time it sent a static-like crawl through me. I didn’t care if I wasn’t safe, I hadn’t been safe since I was twenty-two. Isla however, was another matter.

  “You have no possible idea what you’ve got yourself into.” The way she began describing what had happened made me wish I was a decade fresher, and fitter for the inevitable fight.

  The old girl had grown up in an orphanage, but from what she described, it was nothing short of a workhouse. The children appeared to have been treated as free labour. From her use of language, I could tell that her view of the world was limited; her references were almost child-like and her experience had been curtailed by dreadful hardship and the constant threat of punishment. She described having come of age in the dormitories, and how she realised that she had no ability to live outside the convent walls. Her skills were washing, cleaning, and reading. She explained that she hadn’t even wanted to leave; her life in the echoes of that cold, hard environment, was all she knew.

  At some stage, when she was old enough, she’d been given the task of looking after babies. They’d come in quite often, but she didn’t specify any regularity. Her job was to feed and wash them, and she was scolded for amusing them in their cots. The first time she encountered a child that had been skinned, she looked with alarm at the nun who had carried the child in. “Bathe the feet, and mind your business,” was all she was told.