Stephen Leather - The Long shot

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 the 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.”