Crossfire (33 page)

Herbert Park, Dublin
Tuesday, 13 March
1017 hrs

Dom was standing at the kitchen island. He was
on his fourth call and his third coffee since we'd
arrived at the house an hour ago.

We'd met up that morning at Bertie's Pole, as
arranged, then jumped into a cab and headed
straight here to flush out the Yes Man.

We still had our coats on. We weren't staying
long. I had a fake leather three-quarter-length
number I'd bought in Islamabad, a really good
pair of rip-off Levi's and a shirt. The whole lot
had come to all of about twenty dollars.

'That's no excuse, David.' Dom was in short,
sharp, aggressive, don't-bullshit-me-I'm-the-
Polish-Jeremy-Paxman mode. He wanted results.
'He's still missing. You said you'd move heaven
and earth. I've been a good friend to you and the
police in the past, given you good coverage. Now
you've got to start helping me.' He slammed his
thumb on to the red button. Inspector David of
the Gardai was a golf mate – or had been before
this call.

Dom had called in another set of favours all
over town. He and Siobhan had already hassled
every man and his dog to find Finbar; they'd hit
drug outreach programmes, fellow reporters,
anybody with influence. Now he was calling
them all over again. We wanted those ripples to
spread. We wanted to spark up the Yes Man and
bring him out into the open. The lines would still
be monitored, and there'd probably been a
trigger on the house from the moment he'd
seen we were flying into town. That was just
what we wanted. He knew where we were,
and now he thought he knew what we
were doing.

The only person Dom didn't call was Siobhan.
He'd done that from a call box in the city. She was
fine and well holed-up, although if she took more
than one bath a day it was cold. She must have
left the house as soon as I'd called her. There was
half a plate of scrambled egg on the side. It
was congealed and rancid, but the flies seemed to
like it.

Dom put the phone back into the charger, put
his cup under the espresso spout and threw in
another capsule.

'Well done, mate. He'll have followed us since
we took off for Islamabad. Now we're back
together and searching for Finbar, he'll show his
hand.'

The Yes Man would want us dead, but it
wasn't going to happen in daylight on a residential
street. Drive-by shootings of prominent
newsmen or bundling people into vans without
anyone noticing were the stuff of bad TV shows.
This wasn't Kabul. He would pick his moment,
and it would be soon.

'He's like a human Predator, all-seeing, all-hearing.
Any time now he'll aim to take us out.
But we'll be waiting.'

'Then what?'

'This story can only have one ending, mate. Even
if the plan works and we find Finbar alive, he's
never going to stop. You, me, your family, we're in
the shit – big-time. So we've got to nail the Yes Man,
and to do that, we have to bring him to us.'

I unrolled the first of the three twenty-metre
extension leads I'd bought in O'Connell Street. I
ran it out to the end of the reel, then cut it away
so I was left with the plug at one end and
three bare wires at the other. 'Where's your
broom cupboard, mate?'

He showed me. I grabbed a mop and a couple
of long-handled brushes.

I unscrewed the heads and took the sticks over
to the roll of gaffer-tape and six forks waiting on
the island.

I scored the plastic sheath of the three-core
cable with a pair of kitchen scissors, then peeled
away about six inches of the plastic. I left the
earth wire intact, but exposed about the same
amount of the live and the neutral. I twisted each
round a fork, and bound them with tape for good
measure. By the time I'd repeated the whole procedure
with the other two extension leads, each
of the three twenty-metre lengths of cable had a
pair of forks dangling from its end.

I grabbed a headless broom handle and taped
a fork either side of one end, making sure the
heads curved outwards. I didn't want current
arcing between them; I wanted it zapping into a
target and fucking him up big-time.

When all three poles were ready, I picked up
my coffee and gulped it back in one. We had to
get moving.

He'd watched me fuck about with broom
handles and cutlery with a look of deepening
gloom. I slapped him on the shoulder, trying to
cheer him up a little. 'He might be like a fucking
Predator, but we've got some tricks up our
sleeves, you and me.' I grinned.

Although we'd have the PIRA weapons, I
wouldn't want to risk using them immediately. If
we killed the men who came after us, their
information would die with them.

We'd have to be a bit careful with my homemade
tasers for the same reason. The
commercially manufactured ones contain a step-up
transformer that produces a short burst of
high voltage to catapult a small amount of
current. The domestic electricity supply uses a
much higher current, pushed by a lower voltage.
Tasers aren't designed to kill, but ours easily
could. We'd be wiring our targets into the mains.

'A two-second prod will be enough to drop
anybody.' I headed for the door. 'Another two
seconds and they won't get up. It'll fuck them up
worse than a badly earthed fridge.'

Dom hesitated at the island. His knuckles
whitened as he gripped the edge of the worktop.

'I know you're worried about Finbar, mate. But
that ain't going to get him back. Come on. She's
waiting.'

We sat in the lobby of Jury's Hotel with three nice
frothy cappuccinos. We'd taken a cab back to
Bertie's Pole, then continued on foot, doing anti-surveillance
all the way. We'd wandered through
a shopping precinct and bought two pay-as-you-go
mobiles, circled a block, stopped in the middle
of a couple of streets and doubled back on ourselves.
We'd ended up in a florist's, bought a big
bunch of red and white roses, then left by the rear
exit. The Yes Man could get his eyes back on us
later. For now, we didn't want anyone to see who
we were meeting.

Kate was sitting next to Dom on the sofa. She
was even more excited to be out of the office
doing something secret for him than she had
been with her flowers. This was her chance to
prove she could make it.

She handed me a folder. 'The file is on
Councillor Connor McNaughten. I called his
office first thing, and told them about the new
programme.'

'What's it called?'

'
Dublin Let's Go
. That's what I told him, anyway.
His office phoned back within the hour
saying yes, he'd be delighted to be interviewed. I
said one thirty – is that OK?'

She looked at Dom, but I jumped in. 'Great job,
Kate. When you get back to the office, could you
ring them back and say there won't actually be
any filming today? Dom just wants to come over
and talk round the idea, get it fixed in everyone's
heads. We'll probably bring the cameras along on
Friday, at some city location. You know, dramatic
backdrop, that sort of thing. Can you do that? I
don't want them expecting men with furry
microphones and all that shit.'

She nodded and drank the last of her
cappuccino.

Dom handed her the flowers. 'Katarzyna,
Moira doesn't need to know what's happening
yet. It must stay completely secret until we
have the foundations of the story. Once that's
done, I'm going to make sure you're on my
team and not sitting at her beck and call any
more.'

She smiled her thanks to us both. The thought
of not working for that bitch must have been the
best news she'd had in weeks.

I stood and shook her hand. 'Thanks, Kate.
You've been fantastic.'

She left and we sat down to finish our brews.

Dom's brow furrowed. 'What's the score if we
didn't shake them off? Aren't we putting her in
danger?'

'Even if they follow her back to the station, all
they'll want to know is what she handed over.
They're not going to compromise themselves by
lifting and threatening newsroom staff. They're
pond-life, mate. They'll want to keep all this
down in the weed.'

He took another sip and wiped the froth from
his scabby top lip. We still looked like a couple of
crash victims but, fuck it, there was nothing we
could do about that. And on the upside, it meant
Dom wasn't getting recognized every time he
turned round.

'What now?'

I flicked through the printouts in Kate's folder.
Judging by the number of representatives they
had on the city council, Sinn Fein must have
pulled out as many stops down here as they had
up north. Connor was thinner and greyer than he
had been when I'd last seen him. His picture
showed him in the classic shoulders-at-forty-five-degrees-to-the-camera
pose. He was doing
his best to look like everyone's favourite uncle,
and his best wasn't good enough.

It was no surprise to me that he'd switched
careers. Former terrorists were turning into
statesmen everywhere on the planet. Israeli
bombers killed British soldiers on the streets of
Jerusalem and were rewarded with invitations to
dinner in Downing Street. The ANC was a proscribed
terrorist organization, then went on to
run South Africa. Even Hamas was now the
voters' friend. At this rate, it was only a matter of
time before bin Laden became secretary general
of the UN.

The Peace Process had produced the same
result in Ireland, but that didn't mean everything
in the garden was rosy. Even before 9/11, when
the Americans had their first really big taste
of the realities of terrorism, the IRA hadn't just
raised funds in Boston and New York from tenth-generation
Irishmen who thought that PIRA
were freedom-fighters who played the fiddle in
pubs in their spare time. They'd also made a
fortune domestically from gambling, extortion,
prostitution and bank robbery.

But their biggest earner had always been
drugs. The police and the army were too busy
getting shot at and bombed, so there had been no
one around to stop it. The IRA kneecapped drug-dealers
periodically as a public-relations exercise,
but only as a punishment for going freelance.

Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley might now be
having a kiss and a cuddle at Stormont, and
Martin McGuinness might be the Minister of
Education, but deep down in the belly of the
island, old habits died hard. There was just too
much money at stake and they didn't want anyone
else muscling in. Drugs were their big thing.
They'd been running the trade for the last thirty-odd
years. And it was even easier to cross the
border now the army checkpoints had gone.

I closed the folder. 'First you buy me some
decent clothes, then we clean ourselves up here,
bowl along to City Hall and ask Councillor
McNaughten to help us find Finbar.'

'Easy as that? What are you going to ask him?
Why don't you tell me, Nick?' Dom's frustration
was plain to see. I hadn't told him what I was
planning, and I didn't intend to.

I smiled. 'Connor and I go back a long way.
He'll help us, believe me.'

'But how?'

I stood up, ready to go. 'Whichever way I want
him to. Come on, let's get sorted out. It'll give
whoever's following us time to pick us up again.'

We were being followed. The green Seat MPV
was three behind us, but I couldn't tell Dom yet.
If the driver of the cab taking us towards
Donovan O'Rossa Bridge was the excitable sort,
he'd either drive us off the road or pull up by the
first cop he saw.

It was very shoddy surveillance. The two of
them bobbed about non-stop, trying to see where
we were. They buzzed in and out of our lane to
check we were still ahead. They couldn't have
been more obvious if they'd tried. In fact, they
were so amateur I wondered if they were doing it
to scare us. I didn't care: it was good news either
way.

I leant towards the driver. 'Tell you what,
mate, if we pass a newsagent, could you pull
over?'

He stopped almost immediately outside a
Spar. I nudged Dom. 'I'm getting a paper, mate.
You coming in?'

I didn't bother to look at the Seat as it passed.
Dom was soon up alongside me. 'What's happening?'

'We've got a tail.' We walked into the shop and
I pulled a copy of
An Phoblacht
, the Sinn Fein
weekly, from the rack. The front page was one
big picture of Gerry Adams walking out of a
polling station under the headline 'Ready for
Government'. I waved it at Dom as I headed for
the counter. 'I've been in this a few times myself.
Not by name, of course.'

He wasn't sure if I was joking. 'How do you
know?'

'We'll soon confirm if they pick us up again.
Don't worry, it's a good thing.'

The green Seat soon slipped in behind us once
more, and stayed glued to our rear bumper all
the way to Wood Quay. As we got out, they
moved slowly past us and I made sure they knew
I'd pinged them. The driver wore a black nylon
bomber jacket, his passenger a green one. Both
had dark, very short hair, just one above a
crew-cut.

They'd made the wrong choice with the
people-carrier: they looked seriously out of place
in it. It was a vehicle for mothers with baby
chairs and screaming kids off to football practice,
not two hard-looking mass murderers packing
out the front. But I knew why they needed it.
They planned to pack out the back with the two
of us.

Dom paid off our cab and it nosed out into the
traffic. We walked up to the steps. 'Fuck me,
mate, they're either Loyalists or Aryan
Brotherhood – not that there's a shitload of
difference.'

Concern was etched all over Dom's face. 'Why
did you give them the eye?'

'We want to flush out the Yes Man, and we've
got no time for finesse. I want him to know that
we know he's on to us, so he realizes the clock's
ticking.'

We reached the main entrance to the council
offices and I tapped Dom's shoulder with the
rolled-up paper. 'The Yes Man will be racking his
brains trying to work out what we're up to. But
he won't leave things to chance indefinitely. As
soon as he sees we're alone, and it's quiet, he'll
come for us. There's a good chance it will be
tonight – so we've got to be ready for them.'

We pushed our way through the glass doors.

'Why do you call him the Yes Man?'

'Because it's the only word he ever wants to
hear.'

We were in the foyer of a grey, four-storey
1980s concrete and glass building. The reception
area was a sea of disabled access and no-smoking
signs and earnest, probation-officer-type faces.
Big posters celebrated the fact that Dublin
kids were painting for Africa and that the council
were friends of clean air, leading the way in bio-fuels
and zero emissions. I felt healthier just
standing there.

I read the paper while Dom did his stuff at the
desk to a very smiley woman who was on
the brink of asking for his autograph. Armed
with little laminated passes, we took the stairs to
McNaughten's office on the first floor.

'Keep quiet once you've done the introductions
and I start waffling, OK? He won't say
much.'

A prim, middle-aged woman in a red cardigan
sat at her desk outside the room we were aiming
for. There was something almost regal about her,
even though she'd spent most of her life working
in a corridor.

Dom greeted her warmly, and it was all going
very well. She'd been expecting us; she ushered
us straight in.

The furniture was functional and the windows
double-glazed. Pictures along the wall showed
Connor shaking hands with Gerry and Martin. A
framed Sinn Fein poster hung alongside the Irish
flag.

Our boy stood up behind his desk, hand
extended. 'Mr Condratowicz, nice to meet you.'
His accent was straight out of the Falls Road, even
though it had been softened by a few evening
classes in democracy and public relations. Most of
them had education, these days, now politics was
the way ahead.

They shook and Dom introduced me as his
producer. We shook too. His brain was already
whirring. He knew he'd seen me before; he just
didn't know where. He would soon enough. You
never forget the faces round you when you think
you're going to die.

Dom turned on the small-talk. 'Sorry we're a
bit bruised. We were involved in a car crash last
week.'

McNaughten lifted his left hand to show off his
missing pinkie. 'That's how I got this.'

I smiled at him and he did a double-take. He
looked just like his picture on the Sinn Fein website.
He was dressed straight out of Matalan, with
a polyester tie and just enough nylon in the mix
of his grey suit for it to shine under the
fluorescent light. Dress Sense 101 was obviously
one of next term's modules.

He overplayed a desk-tidying routine, then
took another glance at me. 'We're proposing new
traffic-calming measures at the next meeting.
Something really has to be—' He frowned. 'Do I
know you?'

I took a step forward. 'Last time we met, you
were in the boot of my car on the way up to
Castlereagh for the night. Then I read you your
horoscope. You came back minus that finger,
remember? Car crash, my arse.' I threw the paper
across the desk. 'You might be Mr All-green-and-biofuelled-up
now, mate, but the old ways are
still snapping at your heels, aren't they? I see
white-and-above-board Sinn Fein's Seamus
Quinn was sent a bullet in the post. What did he
do to deserve that? Propose a congestion charge?'

He sat back in his chair, not fazed, not worried,
just watching me. 'I'm mistaken. I do not know
who you are, and I do not understand what you
are talking about. Have you come to threaten
me? I would like you to leave.'

I leant forward, my eyes locked on his.
'Connor, mate, I don't give a shit what you'd like.
Your only job right now is to listen. This man
here, his son is in the shit. You're going to help
me get him out of it.'

It was his turn to lean forward. He was about
to deliver his enraged-politician bit and fuck us
off. He took a deep breath and aimed his right
index finger at me.

'Stop.' I stared him out. 'I don't have time to
fuck about, so do as you're told or I'll cut that one
off as well.'

He looked at his watch and sighed impatiently,
trying to make it seem like he was going to give
us five minutes of his precious time. But it was a
bluff. I knew that, deep down inside, he was
flapping.

I pointed at Dom. 'His son has been taken
hostage. We know who's done it, but we don't
know where the boy is. You're going to help us –
not because I'm going to make you but because
when you've heard what I have to say you're
going to want to.'

I sat back, letting things calm down a little now
I had his full attention. 'This drugs turf war –
wouldn't have happened in your day, would it?
Not on your own fucking doorstep. But times
have changed. The boys that are stepping on
everyone's toes are not only Brits but one of them
is working for the intelligence service. And he's
using UDA dickheads as enforcers.'

I gave it time to sink in. 'You're interested now,
aren't you?' I could see it in his eyes. 'You give
me what I want, and I'll get rid of them for you.
I don't give a shit about who sells what to who –
all I want is my friend's boy back.'

I waited for questions but he was too clever for
that. He wasn't going to incriminate himself in
any way. We might be recording.

'You get me weapons,' I said. 'I want two
assault rifles and at least three mags each.'

I reached for his pad of pink Post-its and a pen,
then wrote down my new mobile number. 'You sort
it, get your people to call me, and I'll collect. Once
I'm done, you can have the fucking things back –
along with a body or two that can still talk. If you
try to fuck me over, make sure you do a good job,
because if you don't I'll come back for you.'

He didn't touch the Post-it, or even look at it.
He didn't move a muscle. His voice became very
clear and very slow, just in case we did have
wires. 'I have no connection with anyone
involved in drugs, or the now disbanded IRA. I
am a councillor of a political party.'

I started walking to the door and Dom
followed.

'I don't know any members of the old IRA and
I don't know any drug-dealers.'

He was still issuing denials as we closed the
door behind us.

Dom said nothing until we'd got out on to the
street. 'Tell me about the finger.'

'Let's get a cab to the centre and lose our big
green Seat. Then I'll explain while we wait for a
call.'

We found our way to a taxi rank.

'By the way,' I said, 'I'm assuming you did
national service?'