The Dead Yard Read online

  She fed us and gave us directions to the town of Guia de Isora.

  By the afternoon our supplies were gone and we were lost in a region that had an uncanny similarity to the place the NASA robots keep landing on the planet Mars. Rocks, stones, thin red soil. It grew unbearably hot. Goosey started swaying a bit, and all around us desert, black lava, and the baking sun. We sat under a rock and decided to move again at night. The sun set, it grew cold, above us we saw what God had made when he was getting things ready for the Earth. A million stars. A billion. Blue and red and Doppler-shifted ultraviolet.

  I thought for a minute that we were toast, but we fell in the backbone of the night and its spell guided us safely through the wilderness. The sun rose over the sand hills and in the morning we were at a wire fence surrounding a banana plantation. We broke in and with comedy climbed a tree and gorged ourselves on green fruit. Nature was a civilizing influence and Goosey had given up plans for Clockwork Orange rampages and was now all for staying here forever in the great outdoors. We could build canoes and trade to Africa and be self-sufficient in meat, fruit, clothes. We could be outlaws and fish and roast our catch over charcoal fires. Live on the beach and dream our canoes out over the ocean. Steer by wave and swell and the stars like the Polynesians. His vision more Coral Island than Lord of the Flies and I said I’d write a letter to The Times suggesting a scheme whereby lager louts could be turned into Byronic pacifists just by letting them camp out a few nights in the wilds of Tenerife. Plutarch had called this place the “Fortunate Islands,” Darwin had raved about it, and two hundred years ago Alexander von Humboldt had had the same thoughts: “Nowhere in the world seems more able to dissipate melancholy and restore peace to troubled minds than Tenerife.” That’s the real reason I’d come here. Five years in the purgatory of the Witness Protection Program. The FBI and federal marshals dogging my every movement. I needed a vacation. I needed out of North America. And I’d been to Tenerife before and liked it, it was mellow and I even spoke Spanish.

  Nice move. I’d been deciding between Spain and somewhere completely off the wall like Peru. I’d flipped a coin.Heads.

  A lot of people were going to get screwed because of that coin flip.

  Especially me.

  There’s only so many bananas you can eat and outside the plantation we flagged down a car which unfortunately had three undercover cops inside. Our football shirts and accents were a bit of a giveaway and before I could say, “I want to see the British ambassador,” we were separated and driven to a cell block in an underground bunker near the airport.

  The riot at Playa de las Americas all over now and the rioters being held under Spanish antiterrorism laws. A guard cheerfully told me that we were all going to get ten years.

  * * *

  The cell was deep underground, a yellow bulb in the ceiling giving off a little light. Cold, damp. Impossible to tell if it was day or night. But I’d been in worse. Much bloody worse. They fed you three times a day, there was a bog that flushed, and the fauna situation was manageable.

  I was sitting on the cot reading How Stella Got Her Groove Back for the third time when the cell door opened.

  I stood.

  A man and a woman. A tall man carrying a chair and a water bottle. He was wearing a linen jacket, white shirt, Harrow tie. It was difficult to see in the dark but he looked about thirty-five, forty at the outside, hard-faced, blond-gray hair. He held himself like a high-ranking army officer: straight spine, shoulders back, stomach in. He unfolded the chair and sat down. A revolver peeked out next to his armpit. Interesting. The woman also had a chair. She was late thirties, wearing a sundress and sandals with red hair tied behind her in a ponytail. She was heavy but attractive—Rubens plump, not lesbian-biker plump. She took out a notebook and sat back in the shadows. He was the man and she was the assistant. They fell immediately into their roles, which wasn’t smart, but despite that I still didn’t like the look of either of them.

  “You’re British,” I said to the man.

  “That’s right, old boy,” he said in a plummy public school voice. Not for him the attempt to tone down the upper-crust accent and give in to the increasingly common Estuary English pronunciation. It told me a lot about him—arrogant, proud, the Harrow tie not a joke but a reminder of a birthright. A wanker, more than likely.

  “I suppose you’re from the embassy,” I said. “I’m completely innocent, you know. I wasn’t involved in anything. I was on holiday. First bloody holiday in years.” “Beastly piece of luck, I’m sure. But the Spanish don’t care, you will be tried, you will be found guilty, you’ll get five to ten years, I suppose. The new prime minister, Mr. Blair, has said that he supports fully the Spanish government’s intention of making an example out of the soccer hooligans who once again have blighted the good name of England,” he said breezily.

  “I’m not English,” I told him.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the man replied quickly.

  “It matters to me.”

  “Well, it won’t make any difference. You will be convicted,” he said.

  “Listen, mate, if you came here to give me a lecture you can piss off,” I said, lifting up my trouser leg and scratching under the straps that held the artificial foot to my calf. I’d lost the foot five years before in a lovely piece of jungle surgery in Mexico. It had saved my life and I was thoroughly unselfconscious about it now.

  The man smiled, picked at a piece of fluff on his shirt, looked behind him at the secretary, cleared his throat.

  “I imagine, Brian, that you do not want to spend the next ten years in some ghastly prison on the mainland,” he said softly.

  “No, I bloody don’t,” I said, trying to conceal my surprise with passion.

  He pulled out a pack of cigarettes.

  “Do you smoke?”

  I shook my head. He lit himself a cigarette, offered one to the woman, who also declined. But he had me now. It was an interesting situation and I had to admit that I was intrigued. No guard had accompanied the two Brits. They did not appear flustered, angry. There was no pompous talk. Something was going on. Were they releasing me? Maybe Dan Connolly from the FBI had heard about my predicament and pulled a few strings.

  “You’ve been living in America?” the man asked.

  “What the hell is your name?”

  “Jeremy Barnes,” he said, blowing a Gauloise in my direction.

  “Oh, and I’m Samantha Caudwell,” the woman said in an even more upper-class accent than Jeremy’s. The sort of snide Queen’s English Olivia de Havilland used when she was badgering Errol Flynn in those films from the 1930s.

  The smoke from the cigarette drifted over. Only pseuds and poseurs smoked Gauloises. Jeremy, however, seemed not to be either of these.

  “You’ve lived in Paris,” I said, surprising Jeremy with a good guess. Jeremy looked a little taken aback but quickly recovered his poise.

  “Yes, yes indeed. They told us you were good,” Jeremy said.

  “Who’s they?”

  “The FBI. The U.S. Marshals Service. We’ve read your file, Brian, or should I say, Michael. We know everything about you.”

  “Aye?” I said, trying to appear casual.

  “Yes. Shall I tell you what we know?”

  “Maybe you should tell me a wee bit about yourself first,” I said.

  “No, I don’t think so, old chap. Would you like a drink?” Jeremy asked and threw a flask onto the cot.

  “I’d like water.”

  Jeremy tossed me the water bottle.

  “Good idea. Water first, then the brandy,” Jeremy said. “Ok.”

  I drank the half-liter bottle of water, unscrewed the hip flask, and took a sip of brandy. I threw the flask back.

  “Your name is not Brian O’Nolan. Your real name is Michael Forsythe. You went to America in 1992 to work for Darkey White. You ended up killing Darkey White and wiping out his entire gang. You turned informer and the American government set you up with a new identity. I gather
that recently you’ve been living in Chicago,” Jeremy intoned placidly.

  I said nothing.

  “You speak fluent Spanish. That, and only that, can possibly account for your desire to take a vacation in the Canary Islands,” Jeremy mocked.

  “I’ll ask again. Who the hell are you?” I demanded.

  “Mr. Forsythe, I am the person who could get you out of this cell, today. Right now in fact. In the next five minutes you will have to make a decision. That decision will be either to come with me or stay here, get tried, get convicted, and then spend the next few years in the Columbaro Maximum Security Prison in Seville. Perhaps you’ll choose the prison. Miguel de Cervantes began Don Quixote there. A fascinating place, apparently.”

  “Who do you work for?” I insisted.

  Jeremy finished his cigarette. Slowly lit another.

  “What do you see?” Samantha asked from behind Jeremy.

  “What do I see?” I repeated.

  “Yes. Tell us,” Jeremy said.

  I sighed. Leaned back. What game were they playing?

  I looked the two of them over. They were relaxed, confident, obviously serious. This was a test.

  “Ok, I’ll play if you want to. I guessed Paris because of your fags. Easy,” I said to Jeremy a little warily.

  “What else?” he asked.

  “You went to Harrow. Not on a scholarship, your father probably went to Harrow and his father before him. Your granddad probably used to tell you stories about how Winston Churchill was in the remedial class when he was there.”

  Jeremy laughed and choked on his cigarette. I continued.

  “You’re wearing a linen jacket. Expensive, but more than that, a kind of uniform. You knew you were going to have to go to Spain to see me, but you took the time to change from English clothes into something more sartorially suitable. Why? Why not shorts and T-shirt, or a polo shirt, or a cotton shirt and chinos? Hmmm. You feel you have to wear a jacket because you’re on duty. You look like an army officer but you’re in civvies. Maybe you were in the army or maybe the RAF, you don’t seem like a navy man anyway. . . . So why are you here? You work for the government. You and your wee secretary have flown all the way to Spain. You don’t have a tan, you’re not even red, you came here right from the airport. To see me. Huh. Why? A job. You need me for a job. You’ve come to make me a job offer.”

  Samantha whispered something to Jeremy. He nodded. I was impressing them with this bullshit.

  “Who do I work for?” Jeremy asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think about it.”

  “Why should I?” I asked petulantly.

  “Why indeed?” Jeremy said, smiling.

  “Ok, let me see. . . . Christ, I have it, it must be the Old Bill. You work for the cops.”

  “Not the police, why would the police want you?”

  I sat forward on the edge of the bed. Yeah, he was too much of a patrician for the cops. He was a highflier, he worked for— “British bloody Intelligence,” I said.

  Jeremy’s jaw opened and closed. Samantha moved a little closer. Jeremy turned round to look at her.

  And then I saw I was being dicked. I’d been wrong. Samantha was the superior officer. Jeremy was the underling. She was watching both of us, using him as a barrier to assess me, seeing if I was right for whatever it was they wanted me for.

  Well, enough of that for a game of soldiers.

  “Hey, Sammy, why don’t you do us a favor, get your boy out of here and we can talk business,” I said.

  Jeremy looked startled. Samantha tried not to appear nonplussed.

  “We do think we’re clever, don’t we?” she said, mispro- nouncing her Rs in that way they teach you at only the most elite of English boarding schools.

  I said nothing.

  “You may leave, Jeremy. Please wait for me outside,” she ordered. Jeremy stood, winked at me, and knocked on the door. The guard opened it and let him out. Samantha moved to Jeremy’s seat and picked up the file he had left on the chair.

  British Intelligence. Well, well, well. I suppose they wanted someone with insight into the workings of the rackets in Belfast. If the peace deal everyone was talking about came off, then they’d want to make sure all those bored paramilitaries in Ulster didn’t move into organized crime and drugs. I could be very useful on that score. Or maybe they wanted someone to spruce up their training programs for undercover ops. I could probably do a job like that. I was army trained and I’d interrogated the shit out of people before. Might be a nice little earner if I played my cards right. The FBI kept me safe but they didn’t exactly keep me flush.

  Samantha skimmed through the folder, pretending to notice things for the first time.

  “I don’t have all day, you know. I’m very anxious to find out if Stella can learn to love herself again,” I said, holding up my novel.

  Samantha smiled and continued to thumb my file.

  “You’ve been quite the naughty boy, haven’t you, Michael?” she said, her tone as condescending as if she were a Victorian missionary and I, a recidivist cannibal chieftain caught with a hut full of human heads.

  “Depends what you mean by naughty.”

  “Killing several unarmed people in cold blood.”

  “You want to tell me my life story or you want to get on with it?” I said, irritated.

  “Don’t get cross. I’m here to help you,” she said.

  “You’re here to bust me out of this joint,” I sneered.

  “That’s right,” she said, crossing her legs and accidentally hitching up her skirt a notch.

  Really not a bad-looking chiquita if you liked that sort of thing and, if truth be told, I did like that sort of thing. You could tell that underneath the prim, proper, repressed, King and Country exterior . . . the rest of the sentence is cliché, but I’d bet money it wasn’t far off the mark.

  “Michael, first of all, I feel that it’s very important that I’m honest with you. You’re obviously too smart to fall for a line, so I’ll tell you how it is. Although it looks like we have all the cards, in fact I have a poor bargaining position. If time were not a factor, you would need us much more than we would need you. But, alas, time is a factor,” she said in that roundabout diplomat way again.

  “Honey, if time is a factor, you better be a bit less oblique,” I said, leaning back on the cot and noting that from this angle I could see right up to her panties, which were white cotton and soaked with sweat.

  “I do apologize. Of course you’re right. Let me explain, Michael. Jeremy and I work for MI6, British Intelligence overseas, which, in case you don’t know, is the equivalent of the CIA and a—”

  “I know who you are,” I interrupted.

  “Good. Well, I am in charge of a section within MI6 called SUU—the Special Ulster Unit. MI5 deals with Irish terrorism in the United Kingdom, but SUU looks at Irish terrorism in Europe and the Americas. We report directly to the home secretary. We largely bypass the MI6 bureaucracy. We have had many successes. Well, several successes . . .”

  “Ok. Where am I supposed to come in?” I asked.

  “For the last six months or so, Her Majesty’s government has been in not-so-secret negotiations with the IRA to resume their cease-fire agreement. The election of Mr. Blair has changed little except for speeding things up. The negotiations have been going well. The IRA’s Army Council is becoming convinced that this is the right thing to do at the right time. The Clinton administration has been helpful. Things are moving quickly now and the IRA seems to be on the verge of announcing a complete cessation of hostilities and a resumption of the cease-fire.”

  “I read the papers,” I said.

  “Well, yes, it hasn’t exactly been the best-kept secret in the world. And we’re jolly well hoping that it’s going to come off. The problem is that the IRA’s Army Council is worried about causing a split in the IRA. IRA splinter groups are not uncommon. The council wants to eliminate the hard-line elements before they announce a ce
ase-fire. We believe this announcement is going to come by the end of the month, perhaps even in the next few days. In Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland, the British and Irish governments will turn a blind eye to a purge of IRA extremists. This is not the case in America. As you may be aware, the IRA has several well-organized cells in the United States. Most will abide by the Army Council’s decision. Disband, disarm, sleep. But one, we know, will not. The IRA would like to wipe out the extremist SOC, Sons of Cuchulainn. The FBI and the American government will not permit such a purge to take place. They would rather go the legal route of evidence gathering and prosecution.”

  “Cuchulainn, love. It’s pronounced KuckKulann, not Cush-coolain,” I said with a smug grin. Samantha ignored me and soldiered on.

  “It’s a tiny group, almost a cell really, but, we believe, extraordinarily dangerous. And well off. Neither we nor the FBI have any agents at all with the Sons of Cuchulainn. None. We are desperately short of manpower. And for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, time is of the essence. We have agents within the IRA, the INLA, the UVF. But we urgently need an agent, someone to go to America to join or spy on the Sons of Cuchulainn, to gather evidence and help in their prosecution, if of course they are doing anything illegal.”

  “I have an ominous feeling that I see where this is going. That someone, that poor bastard—let me guess who you have in mind.”

  “Michael, your folder only appeared on my desk the day before yesterday. It was handed to me by someone in the Foreign Office. But I have to say I was jolly impressed.”

  I wasn’t really listening now. Whatever financial package they were going to offer wasn’t worth the risk. An IRA cell.

  They had to be kidding. Samantha continued as I stared up her skirt and contemplated her oddly seductive voice.

  “Yes, Michael, your handlers speak very highly of you and you were in the British army, which is good and although, um, unfortunately you were asked to leave Her Majesty’s employ rather prematurely, you completed a reconnaissance course and received some special operations training.”