The Dead Yard (4 page)

Not a great plan.

Not even a good one.

But this bitch wasn’t going to threaten me.

"Since you put it that way, I suppose I have no choice," I said, readying myself.

"Oh, I am pleased. I’m sorry about the coercive aspect of all this, it’s just beastly that Her
Majesty’s gov. has to be in the blackmail business, but there it is. Indeed, it couldn’t have
worked out better. Jeremy was right, what made you come to Tenerife in the first place, don’t you
know it’s notorious for riots and disturbances? Vulgar, awful place," she said with an amused
expression.

"I was reading Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin and they paint it in a different
light," I replied and offered her a conciliatory hand and a big broad smile of acceptance.

"Well, bad for you, but good for us, old boy, Sword of Damocles, Scylla and Charybdis, call it
what you will," she said and gave me her hand too.

I grabbed it and pulled her violently off the chair, she screamed, dropping her pen, folder,
and water bottle. I threw her to the ground, kicked her to one side, and grabbed the chair. I
lifted it over my head and positioned it to bring it down on her spine.

A terrible pain in my right foot—which was not the one I’d left behind in a jungle village in
the Yucatán. A searing explosion of nerve endings and when I looked down I saw a penknife
sticking out of my Converse sneaker.

Jesus.

Before I could react, she’d kicked me behind the right knee and I fell to the cell floor,
banging my head on the edge of the metal bed.

I groaned. Jeremy opened the door and looked in.

"Good heavens, what on earth is happening? Need any help, Samantha?" he asked.

Samantha picked up the dropped file, righted the chair, and sat down. She moved herself away
from me so I couldn’t pull the penknife out and threaten her with it.

"I’m fine, darling, but young Michael is going to need medical assistance," she said
softly.

Jeremy called for the guard, produced his gun, and pointed it at me.

I pulled myself back up onto the cot.

I breathed deep, swore inwardly, pulled out the knife, and sent it clattering to the
floor.

"What I’ll need," I began between clenched teeth, "is a letter from the Spanish government
stating that all charges have been dropped. So you won’t be able to hold that over me
indefinitely."

Samantha smiled.

"I’ll get our lawyers working on it immediately," she said.

"And I’ll want a document from the Spanish, British, and United States attorneys general that
I will not in the future be extradited to Mexico under any circumstances," I said.

"I will get working on that, too," Samantha said. "Is there anything else?"

"Aye, a guy called Goosey who was picked up with me, him out as well," I gasped.

"I’ll also see to that."

"I have your word?"

"You have my word," she assured me.

"Fine, in that case. I’ll do it."

"Good," Samantha said and snapped my folder shut.

Within an hour, I was stitched, sutured, shaved, and sitting on a taxiing RAF Hercules
transport plane that would be taking me to Lisbon. From Lisbon, the direct flight to Boston
Logan.

Samantha sat beside me, organizing her briefing notes.

The big Hercules taxied down the runway. A military aircraft, tiny slit windows and you sat
facing backwards.

Samantha passed me earplugs. I put them in. Looked out.

The harsh volcanic mountain, the outline of banana plantations, the aerodrome. The propellers
turned, the transport accelerated, lift developed over its wings, and we took off into the
setting sun.

The blue water. The other Canary Islands. Africa.

We flew west over Tenerife, and through the safety glass and smoke I could see what the
hooligans had wrought on Playa de las Americas and what the concrete-loving developers at the
Spanish Ministry of Tourism had done to the rest of the island. Humboldt for one would have been
displeased. Samantha saw my grimace, patted my knee. Her big pouty red lips formed into a
sympathetic smile.

"Don’t worry, darling. It’s going to be all right," she soothed and, of course, as is typical
when someone in authority tells you that, nothing could have been further from the goddamn
truth.

The lough was dead and across the water I could hear jets land on the baking runways of Logan
airport. The day dwindling to an end in heat and the ugly noise of massive tunneling machines in
the vast scar of Boston’s Big Dig.

Kids playing stickball. Old ladies in deck chairs on the sidewalk. Families heading back from
the beach. It was August on Boston’s North Shore. The temperature was hitting ninety degrees
outside. Even the elderly mafiosi with thin blood and poor circulation had shed their jackets for
a stroll along the sidewalk of Revere Beach.

I threw away my unsmoked cigarette, walked into the bar.

An Italian neighborhood but an Irish pub: the Rebel Heart. Tough one, too. Posters of old IRA
men. Bobby Sands, Gerry Adams.
An Phoblacht
propaganda sheets. Guinness merchandise. The
usual slogans: "Brits Out," "Thatcher Is a War Criminal," "Give Ireland Back to the Irish."

About a quarter full. Maybe thirty people. At least half a dozen of them, I assumed, were FBI
men. I sat down at the bar. An aroma of spilled beer, body odor, and sunscreen.

The assassin came in two minutes after me and ordered a Schlitz Lite, which I took to be a
sign of absolute evil. Anyone drinking lite beer is suspect to begin with, but this guy clearly
had no depths to which he would not sink.

He was a hard bastard who’d entered with some kind of automatic weapon under his raincoat,
which he kept buttoned despite the heat. A dead giveaway. His face was scarred, his hair jagged,
and either he was from Belfast or he worked twelve hours a day in a warehouse that got no natural
light. Tall, stooped, birdlike. About fifty. An old pro. The dangerous type. Sipping the
urine-colored Schlitz. Not nervous. Calm. Smoking Embassy No. 1 cigarettes, which I don’t think
you can get in this country, so that solved the nationality question. He caught me with my eye on
him and I looked past him to the barman who said:

"There in a minute, mate," in the high-pitched tones of County Cork.

I gazed about to see if I could ID the feds but it was difficult to scrutinize faces. Too
dark, too smoky, too many ill-lit spots. Loud, too, for such a small crowd. Keeping their voices
up to talk over a jukebox playing Black 47, House of Pain, and U2.

I bit my lip. I’d check the crowd again in ten minutes to see who hadn’t touched their beer,
that would be a clue as to who was on a job or not.

Ten minutes.

Also my last chance to run for it. McCaghan was supposed to show up around six. ’Course, if I
scarpered it would mean reneging on my agreement with Samantha. Undoubtedly she would see that I
got shat on from a great height. They’d find me, eventually, and I’d be returned to Mexico to do
serious time.

"What ya having?" the kid from Cork finally asked and he was so young, genuine, and nice I
couldn’t help but dislike him.

"What doesn’t taste like piss in here?" I wondered.

"You’re from the north?" he asked. Except in that Cork accent it was like "Yeer fraa ta
naar?"

"Belfast," I said.

"Yeah, I recognized it," he replied. "I wouldn’t try the Guinness if I were you. Get you a Sam
Adams, so I will."

"Ok," I said.

The kid went off.

The assassin looked at me, nodded.

"You’re from Belfast?" he asked, his eyes narrowing to murderous slits.

"Aye," I said, trying to keep the fear out of my voice.

"Me too," he mumbled.

"Is that so?"

"Aye, it is," he said. "Where ya from?"

"My ma was from Carrickfergus. I lived with my nan in—"

"Carrickfergus, like in the song?" he asked, suddenly interested.

"Like in the song," I agreed.

"Thought that was a Proddy town," he muttered, shaking his head.

"Not all of it is Protestant. Whereabouts you from?" I asked.

He put his glass of beer on the counter, lifted his finger slowly, and tapped it on his nose.
In other words, mind your own bloody business. Which would have been fine if I had initiated the
conversation, but he had, and now the big shite was making me look bad. Swallow it, I
thought.

I adopted a
génération perdue
insouciance, which I think was rather lost on the hit
man so I relented and grinned at him as my drink came.

"Slainte,"
I said.

"Cheers," he said and turned away from me to scope the bar.

Looking for Gerry McCaghan and his bodyguards. Not here yet, still only six minutes to six.
When they did show and he had a good angle, I knew the assassin was going to open his coat and
gun them with that big muscle job he had under there. Or at least he was going to try to. For
what he didn’t know was that the man who had met him at Logan Airport two hours earlier was a
stool pigeon working for the
federales
and had in fact supplied him with a weapon with
its firing pin filed down, not enough to raise suspicion, but just enough to render it completely
useless. Rules of evidence and lawyers being what they are, the FBI had to catch the assassin in
the act and as soon as he brought out that gun with intent to murder, the peelers were going to
order him to drop it and tell him that he was under arrest.

Samantha claimed it was all pretty simple. The gun didn’t work, the assassin would be nabbed
immediately, the place was crawling with FBI. It would pan out perfectly.

As perfect as Waco. As perfect as Ruby Ridge. I fidgeted with my shirt and trousers. Jeremy
had bought them for me at Portela Airport in Lisbon while I changed in the first-class lounge.
The white shirt was fine but the trousers were too loose. I had the belt on the last hole and
even then I feared that they would fall down at a crucial moment, projecting an unwelcome element
of farce into the proceedings.

Jeremy hadn’t sat with us but I had gotten to know Samantha as well as one could on a
transatlantic flight. She was surprisingly open. Born in Lincolnshire, her father a brigadier in
one of those pretentious highland regiments. She’d read philosophy at Oxford and joined the civil
service, before getting initially into MI5 and then MI6. She had never been married. No kids. But
more important, I didn’t know if she’d ever been a field agent because she wasn’t allowed to talk
about it. My hunch was no. As impressive as that little foot-stabbing incident had been, she
should never have gotten herself into that situation in the first place. And it was a lucky stab,
too; if she’d gotten my left foot—the plastic one—I’d be free on Pico de Teide and she’d be on
her way to the indiscreet new MI6 building on the South Bank, trying to think of an explanation
for the cock-up.

The flight was work, too. She’d passed me Gerry McCaghan’s and his daughter Kit’s police
files, their FBI files, and the special file SUU had made for this op. Kit’s was only four pages
long but Gerry’s could have been a PhD thesis.

I don’t know about Gerry, but Kit’s photograph didn’t do her justice. A blurry mug shot from
an RUC station when she was bruised, tired, dirty, and a little unwell.

The real Kit looked nothing like this. I knew that because she was here already. Gerry had a
half share in the Rebel Heart and Kit worked bar every once in a while. I hadn’t realized she’d
look so young. Or so beautiful. Spotted her the moment I’d walked in. How could I not? Working
with that big doofus from County Cork but not serving the likes of me, instead waiting tables
with trays of drinks, from which she would get tips. Short spiky black hair. Big, wide, beautiful
dark blue-green eyes. Pale cheeks, high cheekbones. Nose ring. Full lips painted with black
lipstick. Cargo pants. Slender waist, small breasts. A Newgrange Heel Stone–style tribal tattoo
on her left shoulder, just peeking out from underneath a green USMC T-shirt. Very attractive
piece of jailbait you would have thought, but actually she was nineteen, nearly twenty.

I had memorized her full bio. The USMC T-shirt was a fashion accessory, but apparently she had
taken part in one wee military operation. Not in America, of course. The Old Country. Born in
Boston, but she’d spent a summer in Belfast, where Gerry had blooded her. In 1995 she’d been
arrested for throwing stones at the police during a riot on the Falls Road. It wasn’t remotely
serious and she was detained for a day and deported. Still, Gerry’s plans for her were clear—not
exactly the crime of the century, but not a Swiss finishing school either.

She was Gerry’s adopted daughter, but that didn’t mean a thing, because she’d been raised in
the cause and radicalized and if she was half as earnest as her da she was big trouble. For Gerry
was an old-school hard man from the Bogside in Derry. He’d been interned by the British in the
early seventies and had killed his way to the top of the North Antrim Brigade of the IRA. But
Gerry was not as politically savvy as other brigade commanders and his bombings in Bushmills,
Derry, and Ballymena had led to large numbers of civilian casualties, which did not play well in
New York or Boston or indeed Libya, where the IRA’s Czech explosives and Russian guns were coming
from. Gerry had been asked to tone down his approach, focus more on military targets; he refused,
dissented, argued, and finally was asked to leave Ulster, under sentence.

In the early 1980s he had come to Boston, started working as an IRA quartermaster channeling
funds from the Bay State to Belfast. The IRA preferred him in this role and permitted him to set
up his own shadow organization—the Sons of Cuchulainn—who ran guns and harried British interests
in New England. Gerry prospered in America, got married, adopted a little girl, set up a
construction company that initially began as a slush fund but then did very well for itself.
Gerry had become rich. Things were going swimmingly until about the last twelve months or so.