Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

But the Brits and Americans were close to a deal, a cease-fire was on the cards, and the IRA didn’t need a Gerry McCaghan embarrassing them in front of President Clinton, so a decision had been taken to kill him. Indeed, to kill all the recalcitrant types who would be opposed to a resumption of the cease-fire. It would be a Night of the Long Knives. As well as this hit in Boston there were going to be two hits in Belfast, one in Dundalk, and four in Dublin. All the serious hard-line opposition would be taken care of in one blow. The IRA could then announce a cease-fire without fear of disruption from the radical element.

A good plan, but what the IRA did not know was that their main weapons contact in Boston, a weaselly little shitkicker called Packie Quinlan, had a cocaine problem. Packie had been caught buying an entire klick by the FBI and as a get-out-of-jail-free card had sold them the information about the upcoming Boston hit on Gerry McCaghan.

If this had been a whack in Belfast or Dublin, the British and Irish police would probably have let the assassin kill the bad guy first and then lifted him on the way out of the bar, but the FBI weren’t like that. They wanted no violence at all, just a nice clean arrest. So some bright spark had come up with the idea of having Packie Quinlan give the hit man a doctored weapon.

Purely as a courtesy, the FBI had informed the British consulate about the operation; the consulate had told MI6; and Samantha had asked the FBI (at least I hope she had asked them) if she could append a little operation of her own on to theirs.

That’s where I came in.

The single most important part of any undercover operation is the insertion of an agent. The exit can be an extravaganza, hurried, broad, maybe involving helicopters, cops, or the bloody Green Berets, but an entry has to be of a different pitch. Clever. Subtle. Low-key.

Samantha’s plan was breathtaking in its simplicity.

The moment the assassin was to pull out his machine gun, Samantha wanted me to throw myself protectively on Kit.

End of story.

That was the whole goddamn plan.

When Samantha told me this I looked out the airplane window, pretending to be fascinated by the cloud formations over the Azores and wondering again how I was going to get the hell out of it. But she had shadowed me all the way to Revere and now here I was, either about to attempt to carry out her harebrained scheme or run out the back of the pub into a new set of problems.

Samantha saw the op playing like this: The assassin pulls out the gun. People scream, I jump on Kit, throw her to the ground, shield her with my body, the gun fails, the assassin gets arrested, and I get up off Kit, embarrassed.

But Kit’s impressed that someone has tried to save her life and asks my name and I say Sean McKenna from Belfast and she says she’ll remember it and me, so that a week from now when she accidentally runs into me again at the End of the State Bar in Salisbury, Massachusetts, she laughs and tells her father that this is the Irish hero that saved her life and he asks my name and what I’m doing in America and I say, “Well, to be frank, Mr. McCaghan, I’m looking for a job.”

And that would be that.

My way into their crew. Maybe first he’d put me in the construction company, but when he learned about my radical views he’d hopefully invite me into the Sons of Cuchulainn.

That’s why I had to be here tonight. A golden opportunity to take a big leap forward in credibility. How else could you break into a cell as small and tightly knit as the Sons of Cuchu-lainn? Normally you’d need years of work. But Samantha saw this as a shortcut on the trust stakes. A moment of tension, a moment of embarrassment, and the good part was I wasn’t going to try and ingratiate myself in one go. I wasn’t going to be pushy or forward. Not too keen. Better just to make an impression tonight and then the real op could begin again in a week or so.

Besides, since I had no MI6 training this would be all I could handle. Playing this kind of role took caution, caution, and more caution and I would have to be fully briefed and trained before the real insertion came later.

Tonight it would just be: neat, clean, clever, out.

Only one small problem.

What Samantha didn’t know, what I didn’t know, what the FBI didn’t know, what Packie Quinlan didn’t know, was that there was a second assassin.

The IRA believe in redundancy and if an op like this is to go down right, there has to be two shooters, two chains of causation, two ways of getting the job done. The assassins would be on different flights, meeting different contacts, not even acknowledging each other at all until the target appeared.

Yeah, two gunmen, one with a gun that didn’t work, but unfortunately one with a gun that did. None of us realized, not the feds, not Samantha, not me, that the arrest was not exactly going to be plain sailing.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder.

I turned round.

“I heard you were from Ireland.”

“That’s right,” I said to a short, bald-headed man with a bicycle messenger bag and a beer gut barely contained by a Star Trek T-shirt.

“Take a look at this,” he said and from his satchel he withdrew a plaster-cast Virgin Mary.

“Nice,” I said, not sure how I was supposed to respond.

“Are you going back to the Old Country soon?” he asked in a very heavy Boston accent.

“I might be,” I said.

“Look, would you be interested in buying a batch to take back with you, five bucks each. You can mark them up to twenty punts when you get there,” he said.

“I don’t think so.”

“What about a Jesus?”

He took a Jesus out of the bag. The problem with both votive statues was that they were incredibly lifelike. Thus his venture was doomed to failure because of the dark skin tone of both mother and son. I wouldn’t say I was a keen observer of Boston’s or Ireland’s Catholic community but I do know that only Aryan-looking aspects of the Divine appear in Ireland; weeping Virgin Marys popping up frequently in the west of the country, tears running down their porcelain white skin and over the end of their retroussé noses. Whoever thought they could sell Semitic-looking biblical characters in Ireland had to be out of their bloody minds. I was not the bloke to disillusion the poor bugger.

“Sorry, mate,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“Not my racket,” I told him.

“Ok.”

He took his bag over to the next person at the bar, who happened to be the IRA hit man.

“Fuck off,” the assassin said after listening to him for about three seconds.

The bald man got a bit intimidated by that and lucky for him he exited the pub only five minutes before the shooting started. Indeed, he left the bar after talking to only one more person, a short blond kid in the corner, who oddly enough wasn’t touching his pint of Bass.

The blond kid also refused to countenance the possibility of selling the holy family to the Micks.

I laughed when the bald guy shuffled out.

I should have known better, for he had spoken to both assassins now, letting them know that McCaghan was coming and that the job was on.

Kit came to the bar to pick up an order. She looked like a punk, but she smelled of-what was that?-sweet pea. I gazed at her and tried to figure out precisely how I was going to throw myself on top of her when the assassin was due to commence his work.

As soon as her da walked in, was I supposed to start following her around? What if the assassin took his time about it? Look a bit suspicious, me hanging off Kit’s bloody shoulder the whole night.

Samantha had given me zero instructions on this.

I would have to come up with something. I took a sip of my Sam Adams. Nah, couldn’t possibly tag behind her the whole evening. I’d just have to keep my eye on the door and when Gerry showed, I’d saunter over to wherever Kit happened to be. Until then, low profile, no fuss. If it didn’t work, it didn’t work. I could only tell Samantha I’d tried my best and she’d have to believe me. I looked at Kit. And really by now I wasn’t contemplating the stupid plan. Two minutes staring at her was enough to get you.