Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

Training days.

Jeremy made me watch dreary British civil service-produced videos from the early 1980s on how to do a drop safely, how to contact your control, emergency techniques, the Official Secrets Act, my rights under the Geneva Convention and the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Then I got briefings on Gerry McCaghan, Touched McGuigan, and the other players in the Sons of Cuchulainn. Following the hit, Samantha said that two of them had already defected back to the IRA. In other words, left Gerry and run like the blazes. Samantha reckoned that the SOC were down to a rump of perhaps seven or eight, maybe not the biggest terrorist organization in the world, but Timothy McVeigh had already shown what a dedicated team of just three could do.

Back in the OC, Touched and Gerry had killed at least a score of people between them and of course those were only the ones we knew about.

After the morning briefings, Samantha took me to the big loft room and questioned me on every detail of my new identity. My name was Sean McKenna. A good name, because it could be Catholic as well as Protestant and there are thousands of the buggers. Sean McKenna, though, was a Catholic. Like me, he grew up in Belfast. He went to Belfast High School (a file had been created and placed in the school’s database), he worked construction in London with the MacLaverty Brothers (two unimpeachable MI5 contacts), he lived in Spain for a year and worked bar. In Spain he made some money and traveled the world for a couple of years. A nice clean bio that kept me away from any connection with the British government, the police, or the centers of the establishment. Also, it was vague enough (Spain, traveling the world) not to tie me down to anyone that the lads in the Sons of Cuchulainn might know.

As for the radical element, an arrest record had already been created for me-vandalism, petty theft, jail time in Manchester- and the big story was that when I was sixteen I had the shit beaten out of me and got charged with rioting by the Northern Ireland cops for throwing a petrol bomb at a police Land Rover. Again they put all this on file and backdated the records. If, as Samantha suspected, Gerry had a contact in the Boston PD, they could look me up in Interpol and there would be my rap sheet.

Sean’s parents were conveniently dead and he was an only child, but so that he wasn’t lonely he had a host of cousins in County Cork. Just like every other Mick in the world.

Samantha was thorough. Questioning me again and again, asking about every month of every year of my fictional life. She got me tired, tried to catch me out, called me Brian, Michael, interrogated me, woke me at night to question me, sleep-deprived me. Every trick in the goddamn book. It was a new game for me. You’d think the army training would all have come back with a vengeance but it didn’t help for shit. In the army you learn the application of deadly force, how to wait between bouts of deadly force, and how to clean boots. They don’t teach you this kind of thing, unless you’re in the Special Air or combat intelligence and I certainly was never a good enough soldier to be asked to try out for those boys. And that special ops course on my résumé that Samantha thought so highly of had really been an SAS staff sergeant and a dozen of us getting drunk and trying not to fall off the windy cliffs of Saint Helena. But I remembered the discipline, and learning a new identity was easy for me. I’d played many roles in my quarter century on planet Earth. This was just another one.

I had to trust Samantha, though, because her role was crucial.

She was my control, my contact on the ground.

They were going to put her into a British food and merchandise store in Newburyport, Massachusetts. The owner was a man called Pitt, an old Foreign Office hand, who had been contacted and asked if he wouldn’t mind taking a vacation for a couple of months. Pitt’s supposed cousin Samantha was going to run the store while he was away. She’d been up there once already to meet the man and learn the workings of his shop. He was happy to be doing something hush-hush for Her Majesty; and after all, MI6 was compensating him well for his cooperation.

Any time I wanted to talk to her all I had to do was walk right into the store. Easy.

I was to be based in the town of Salisbury Beach, about five miles away from Newburyport, but they hoped that would only be temporary until I made contact with Kit again. I was going to be sharing a flat with a Six agent called Simon Preston that Jeremy had recommended for the job.

With me, Samantha played it both ways. Keeping me sweet, keeping me off balance. I don’t know if it was a tactic or just her approximation of a happy medium.

Trying to calm me: “You’ve done well, Michael. Jolly well. As good as I’ve seen. I’ve run twenty-year veterans behind the Iron Curtain that don’t have it down as good as you.”

Trying to scare me: “Oh yes, Michael, you’re going to have to be careful. McCaghan will be like a wounded bear now following the assassination attempt. We don’t know what he’s capable of. He’s already killed scores in Northern Ireland. He’s ruthless. Cold-blooded. He could do anything…”

But this talk was unnecessary. I already knew the stakes and I was already scared enough.

A Friday night. A going-away party that had the uncomfortable feeling of a wake. A long evening of drinking with Dan and Sam. Dan drunk in two hours, Samantha sober enough to order me to bed.

The next morning she woke me before dawn and said that we were ready for the drive up to Massachusetts. She looked terrible, and I got the impression that she had stayed up drinking all night after I’d gone to bed.

It made me nervous.

“Rough night?” I asked. She grunted a response.

I went outside and bummed a cig while everyone got their keek together.

I smoked the fag and looked at the predawn activity in the borough of Queens. No one was watching me. I could run now.

Bolt into the street, hit the subway, and they’d never bloody find me.

I shook my head. Pure fantasy. I wouldn’t run. I needed their help, I needed their protection, even if it meant risking my own life to get it.

Jeremy pulled up outside the safehouse in an old Jaguar Mark 2 from the 1960s. Burgundy or plum with sparkling chrome. I don’t know where Samantha got it from but you wouldn’t call it discreet. And that also disturbed me. The thing you had to remember when dealing with these people was that the Britain of the Empire was long gone. The Brits may have conquered India and won two world wars but they also had a complacency and an incompetence that had gotten many people killed. Jeremy and Samantha were the descendants of the people who had been responsible for the disasters of the Somme and Gallipoli in World War One. The people who had tried to walk to the South Pole instead of taking dogs, who had built the unsinkable Titanic, who had lost America, surrendered at Singapore, starved Ireland, appeased Hitler. And now that I thought about it, wasn’t it MI6 that had been so thoroughly and completely penetrated by the Russians that the KGB were practically running British Intelligence for a time in the 1950s?

And the FBI wasn’t that much better. What the hell was I doing with these people?

“Ready for the show?” Jeremy asked, getting out of the car with a stupid grin.

I ignored him and let the gloom take over again.

Go for it, Michael. Punch Jeremy and run. Live on the lam. By your wits. Like the old days. Except that in the old days I didn’t have a contract over my head and an arrest warrant waiting for me in the Republic of Mexico.

“Take a puff?” Jeremy asked.

I passed him the cigarette.