Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

She bought us tickets for the last flight out to New York.

She found a quiet corner of the almost deserted airport and debriefed me.

“I heard all about it,” she said, shaking her head. “The FBI cocked it up. But at least you met Kit? Didn’t you? Our plan worked.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “I drove with her all the way to New-buryport. I think she liked me.”

“Excellent, it’s our way in,” she said. “And as expected, take a look at this.”

She handed me a faxed copy of tomorrow’s Irish Times. The banner headline occupied the whole front page: “IRA Announce Unilateral Cease-fire. Protestant Groups to Follow.”

I gave her back the fax and frowned.

Something didn’t sit right. I examined my feelings and found that I resented her for making me use Kit in this way. Regardless of what her father represented or what he’d done, I liked the girl.

“Come on, then, we’re going to a bureau training facility in New York,” Samantha said.

We boarded the plane. A Short 360 with the two of us and a couple of tired businessmen as the only passengers.

First class was empty and I switched to the right-hand side of the aircraft so I could follow the coast as we headed back down the Atlantic.

We took off steeply. The plane reached ten thousand feet.

Portsmouth lit up and very clear.

The harbor, the river, the highways.

Below us, farther down the coast, a long barrier island. I found a stewardess.

“Is that Plum Island, Massachusetts, down there by any chance?”

She called the captain on her little phone.

“Yes, it is,” she told me.

That’s where she lived. And Samantha was right-she was the way in. But the way had a name and she was beautiful and quick and I doubted that she was and ever could be my enemy.

New York City. Overdescribed. You know what it’s like even if you’ve never been. This was August in New York so it was all that and more and you couldn’t get a doctor, electrician, or plumber on the weekends.

Dan grinned.

Manhattan behind his head. The Twin Towers, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State blurring in the heat haze. We were out in the wastelands of Queens, where the subway lines used letters from the end of the alphabet and the video stores had an Urdu section.

He sipped his coffee.

“You’re pretty much fucked, Michael,” he said with more than a hint of gleeful schadenfreude. It wasn’t contempt. Dan liked me, but he sometimes felt that I was more trouble than I was worth. Dan was my FBI controller who liaised with the U.S. Marshals Service and the Witness Protection Program. It was Dan’s job to make sure I didn’t get killed. As I saw it, he was letting me walk into a snake pit, without raising too much of a stink about it. He said it was over his head, but everyone always says that when they’re scared or they can’t be arsed.

“You’ll be fucked if I die,” I said.

“You won’t die,” Dan assured me. “At least not on my watch.”

I didn’t say anything. I needed a lot more convincing than this. Dan rubbed his cheeks, smiled.

“I like what you’ve done to your hair, it’s very contemporary. Now that Cobain’s dead that whole look you used to have is on its way out. If you were a bit more tanned you’d look like an Israeli commando,” he said.

“They did it to me. It’s their idea of a disguise.”

I took a sip of the coffee, too. It was from the deli round the corner, made, no doubt, by a recent immigrant who knew the ingredients and the method for making coffee but certainly not how it was supposed to taste.

“I can’t drink this. What are we doing out here?” I asked.

“You’re lucky you’re not in Union City or Weehawken. The lower echelons of the bureau got priced out of Manhattan a long time ago. Count your blessings, buddy.”

“Count my blesssings? Dan, they want me to infiltrate a rogue IRA splinter group. What exactly is the blessing aspect of that?” I asked.

“Well, you’re not back in Mexico, which, as I understand it, is the alternative,” Dan said with complacency.

“True, but I’m worried about being shopped to Seamus Duffy. And that, pal, is your department. If I was you, I’d be on the phone to Janet Reno telling her that as a matter of policy I have to be protected from these Brits who are doing their damnedest to get me killed. I am very disappointed in you, mate.”

Dan looked hurt. He was a big guy, chubby, blond hair, about thirty. He had a penchant for wearing polo shirts and golfing gear. It only made him seem fatter. And when he looked sad, it was all the more pathetic. He tapped his chin nervously.

“Michael, I know you think that you’re the center of the world but you ain’t. Janet Reno? Come on. You got yourself into this mess and you’ll have to get yourself out of it. Our job is to make sure you don’t get killed by the people you ra-, er, the people you helped put behind bars. If you messed up in Spain, that’s your own problem. I think, if you recall, I warned you not to go abroad.”

“I needed a vacation.”

“Try Disney World next time.”

“You wouldn’t understand. You don’t know what it’s like to be in my shoes with a bloody contract on your head,” I said.

He rolled his eyes.

“As to that-” Dan began, but before he could continue Samantha popped her head round the door.

“Is everything going all right?” she asked. “We really have to get back to business, Michael, time is of the essence.”

“Everything’s not going all right, actually, Samantha. Dan is refusing to help me get out of this bloody Faustian bargain.”

Dan looked at me cross-eyed, knowing that he should have gotten the reference but he just wasn’t quite smart enough to remember it. Dan would be the guy on Jeopardy who wouldn’t get to play the final game because he had a negative score. Samantha, though, considered it an insult, for if I were Faust she was Satan. She stepped completely into the room.

She was wearing a fetching yellow sundress that was see-through from certain angles.

“We have a deal. Don’t make me cross this early in the day,” Samantha said.

“Why don’t you come over here and tell me that,” I said with mock aggression that she took to be real. Samantha was not one to be bullied. She thought stabbing me in the foot had already established that but clearly she had to do more. She walked right up to me and stared. All five foot six of her glaring at me. I moved back a little and sat on the edge of the table. The angle was now perfect and I could see the outline of her breasts. I don’t know if it was an English thing or the humidity but whatever the explanation Samantha sometimes did not wear a bra. Her breasts were pale, very large, and inviting. And there was no getting around the fact that she was an attractive woman. A beautiful face, seductive, heavy-lidded eyes, a cleavage that would have fitted snugly in the court of Louis Quatorze. Even Dan was impressed and had to look away, a big grin spilling over the edges of his face.

“You are not getting out of this, Michael. The FBI and the United States government are fully on board. The only way you’ll get out of it is if I say that your services are no longer required,” Samantha said, those eyes flashing imperiously, the voice that of Thatcher about to invade the Falklands.

“Or I get killed,” I muttered.

“Quite,” she said, indifferently, and the coldness in her face repelled and aroused me in confusing ways.

“Well, comforting as always. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to talk to Dan alone, please,” I demanded, flitting between an urge to either throw the scalding coffee at her and push her out the window or squeeze her bum.