Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

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.

In the last year the IRA had been in negotiations with Gerry McCaghan and his Sons of Cuchulainn movement, asking him what his position would be if the IRA’s Army Council declared a renewal of its cease-fire. Gerry had said, in no uncertain terms, that he would not lay down his weapons for anyone.