The Dead Yard Read online

  About a quarter full. Maybe thirty people. At least half a dozen of them, I assumed, were FBI men. I sat down at the bar. An aroma of spilled beer, body odor, and sunscreen.

  The assassin came in two minutes after me and ordered a Schlitz Lite, which I took to be a sign of absolute evil. Anyone drinking lite beer is suspect to begin with, but this guy clearly had no depths to which he would not sink.

  He was a hard bastard who’d entered with some kind of automatic weapon under his raincoat, which he kept buttoned despite the heat. A dead giveaway. His face was scarred, his hair jagged, and either he was from Belfast or he worked twelve hours a day in a warehouse that got no natural light. Tall, stooped, birdlike. About fifty. An old pro. The dangerous type. Sipping the urine-colored Schlitz. Not nervous. Calm. Smoking Embassy No. 1 cigarettes, which I don’t think you can get in this country, so that solved the nationality question. He caught me with my eye on him and I looked past him to the barman who said:

  “There in a minute, mate,” in the high-pitched tones of County Cork.

  I gazed about to see if I could ID the feds but it was difficult to scrutinize faces. Too dark, too smoky, too many ill-lit spots. Loud, too, for such a small crowd. Keeping their voices up to talk over a jukebox playing Black 47, House of Pain, and U2.

  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 appr
oach, 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.

  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.

  Think Winona Ryder in Heathers, Phoebe Cates in Gremlins, Sean Young in Blade Runner. That kind of vibe. The dark eyes, the tubercular pallor, the thing on her head that had once been a Louise Brooks bob but now was teased and hair-sprayed in all directions.

  She leaned into the bar, picked up the order, and waltzed off with a tray full of black and tans.

  Had she even noticed me? I wouldn’t blame her if she hadn’t. When we’d arrived that morning, Samantha and Jeremy had driven me to a safe house in Cambridge. A barber had shown up at four a.m. Obviously as annoyed about the hour as I was, he had savagely cut my hair to a number two and then dyed what was left a dark black. Previously, I’d had longish sandy-colored hair, and everyone in New York had certainly known me that way. Now I appeared quite different. Not a bad look for me. Little rougher, little tougher. But the jet-lagged eyes and nasty sunburn couldn’t help.