Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (102 page)

Chapter Seventy-three
September 1975
The Trustees

The hall in which they met was old and drafty
, with a low ceiling and a stink that was made up of the component parts of wet wool, male sweat, cigarette smoke and one that David could only identify as that of hatred. It underlay everything that was done and said in these meetings and he swore it lingered in his nose for the entire week after.

Tonight, the smell was especially pernicious. The hall was dim, lit only with candles arrayed around the room and stabbed into sconces on the walls. It gave the building the feeling of an unholy Sabbat… which was what it was, more or less, he suspected. There was a heightened tension in the room that told him this was not the ordinary bi-weekly meeting of the murder club, as he had come to think of it. Even the night outside had a spooky feel to it, the way nights in autumn sometimes did. For if the veil between this world and that was at its thinnest this time of year, then it surely allowed as much evil to drift across as good. David gave himself a shake, thinking he had lived too long in this country and was becoming as superstitious as an old woman descended directly from the Celts.

He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed inaudibly. Coming here always gave him a headache.

Around him were arrayed bankers and teachers, civil servants and men whose only occupation seemed to be that of hired killer. Each wore an air of expectancy, and David wondered just what or whom they were waiting for tonight?

A reading of the previous meeting’s minutes, as ridiculous as they were, brought a note of reality into the hall, and David relaxed enough to let his mind wander.

This assignment was going to cost him, regardless of what he had thought going in. A man could not see this much ugliness, could not be touched by it in the way he had, and remain unaffected. If indeed it didn’t outright kill him.

He didn’t know how much longer he could hold Boyd off either. He could hardly pretend to be some virgin schoolboy untouched by the world, and to fend off the man’s advances was becoming more and more difficult. He had awakened four nights previous to find the man sitting on the side of his bed, his hand under the blankets, fingers groping about the strings of David’s pyjama bottoms. David had barely restrained himself from hitting him across the face and then choking him to death. He had been well trained in all the arts of both defense and offense, and could have accomplished the task given five minutes. But killing the man would most certainly blow his cover. So he had lain there in the dark, allowing the man to touch him, to fondle and grasp, all the time hearing the man’s breath shorten and tighten, and feeling a revulsion so deep within him that he was afraid the taint of it would stay, like poison in a well.

There was a weight to such things, he knew. The way stones dropped into a bucket eventually displaced the water within, so such things displaced a man’s humanity, drop by drop, until one day feeling did not come so easily as it once had. David had always thought the lack of feeling was weakness rather than strength, because it bled a man until he no longer knew right from wrong, or perhaps worse yet, no longer cared for the difference. For himself it had always been an occupational hazard, and he had guarded against it. Only lately it had not been so easy. But that was the smaller picture, the personal one he kept within a locket, rarely opened.

The broader picture, the one that had him here tonight was a movement that lacked any sort of vision. The Republicans had their messianic core of a united country, of a right denied for hundreds of years. The Loyalists had no such thing. They had fear and anger, disguised as bravado and domination. There was no coherency and so the movement was propelled by all the wrong things: self-interest, money, power, prestige and revenge—all of which provided the perfect recipe for schisms without number. This particular schism was bound by blood, and by keeping secrets that David was certain were going to turn his own hair white.

The talking had ceased and David pulled his mind back to the present. A man entered, accompanied by a cold breeze, as though premonition followed him as closely as a forked tail followed its chosen demon. David shivered despite the close and fetid atmosphere of the building.

He had never seen a man so pale, so lacking in that indefinable thing that made a person human and recognizable as such. He moved, he breathed, and David had to assume that there was blood flowing through his veins, but it wasn’t apparent on his surface. Jamie had warned him about the Reverend, but even Jamie’s rather unflattering portrait of the man had not prepared David for the reality. Here was the one man who could bring cohesion to this movement, a cohesion in which all parties were bound by hatred and mired in the past, but cohesion nonetheless. It was, in part, what David feared about him.

The Reverend certainly knew how to speak the language of this particular tribe. From a whisper of brimstone to a high-pitched hiss, this man could gather people into the palm of his lily-white hand and make them move to his commands. David supposed evil had its attractions, though for himself revulsion was all he felt in this man’s presence. Revulsion and fear.

David had grown so used to rhetoric that he only half heard the words until a name leapt out at him with the force of a hammer right between the eyes.

“…We’re going to attack Noah Murray’s farm,” the Reverend said, white face aglow with a very special sort of pleasure. David felt sick. Sick and stunned, to be fully accurate. The man must be insane. Noah Murray was the most feared godfather that the Republican world had, and for good reason. David had seen the results of the man’s handiwork twice now, and neither was an image he was likely to banish from his mind, ever.

“Noah Murray is the beating heart of the IRA in South Armagh and we need to rip that beating heart out and crush it beneath our heels in order for the Fenian bastards to understand we mean business. Our Protestant brothers in South Armagh have lived under the chill of his evil shadow for too long now.”

The man was mad. There was no denying it, and yet it seemed that he, David, was the only person in the room who was disturbed by his rhetoric and fanaticism.

“Only so many of us can fulfill this mission. The men who do this must be chosen carefully, for their loyalty, for their commitment to the cause of freedom for Loyalist Ulster, for their understanding of the blood sacrifice of our ancestors on British battlefields. After careful prayer and contemplation I have chosen the men who will take on this sacred mission.” He paused for effect and David felt as though the room paused with him, the very molecules of the air halting to wait for his pronouncement.

The names dropped one by one, blood into a living pool of men. He felt relief in some as their names were not called, jubilation in others as their names were spoken in that soft, sibilant voice, insistent as the snake in Eden. Then he heard the words he had not thought to ever hear.

“Davey MacNee.”

The Reverend’s eyes, as blank as the center of a dead star, met his own, and David knew that he was going to have to be very lucky indeed to survive this mission.

Twelve of them in the end, like the disciples. Only it was not their leader who would be the ultimate sacrifice, but themselves. He understood why he had been included. He understood that the Reverend was not fooled by his cover. He understood he would have to go anyway. Lenny’s name had been spoken too, and David knew this was no coincidence. The moment of reckoning had come. He stood with the other chosen—or damned, as it were—and waited for what came next, knowing it wouldn’t be pleasant. It wasn’t.

Held in the Reverend’s pale, fine-boned hand, the knife glowed, reflecting like a slice of starlight in the basin of water that was placed below it. David swallowed. They were going to sign their pledges in the most lasting ink of all—blood. A blade of fear sliced through his belly. He would have to do it, there was no way out of this sickening ritual. God knew he had done worse in the name of his job.

The candle flames threw out long shadows, thick on the air, so that each man became a looming monster against the smoke-blackened walls. Perhaps they all were monsters, David thought, himself included. Monsters in the guise of ordinary men.

His turn came all too soon. The Reverend took his hand, gripping it tightly, the lightless eyes boring into his own. David felt sick, and as though he wore a mask that was slipping sideways off his face, revealing his truth to this man. The Reverend had dipped the knife in the water and raised it now to score David’s hand, but it was not the small cut each man before him had endured. Rather the Reverend cut him to the bone on his palm, the cut long and flowing with blood.

“I’m sorry, the knife slipped,” the Reverend said, his smile stating that it had been anything but a mistake. David merely clutched his hand around the blood and pain and said nothing. He signed his name to the covenant and left the requisite blood beside it. Nauseated by the pain and the insanity of what these men had just pledged themselves to, he felt as if time had shifted, and it was hundreds of years ago, with war bristling on the borders, and the land soon to be washed in blood. Only it would be guns and bombs rather than swords and the hangman’s noose that made it flow. He felt very small and ineffectual in the face of such hatred.

Lenny was standing beside him, grinning that horrible death’s head grin of his.

“Hurt, Davey-boy?”

“Not a bit,” David said, though his hand ached as if it had been jointed neatly as a Christmas ham. His arm was slick with blood up to the elbow already.

“You can go now,” the Reverend said, his voice so cold it was like ice spreading out geometrically along every nerve ending in David’s body.

Their eyes held and David did not blink, but nor did the Reverend. For a moment, the man let him see what lay behind the façade of his preaching, his rhetoric, his pale, cool demeanor.

David turned and left, knowing the man watched him until he was out of sight. His gaze was like a shiv, sharp and cold in David’s spine.

He caught his breath on the pain in his hand as he walked out of the building and up the road. He was out in the cold in more ways than one. It had never been in his mandate to get involved in quite this manner. He was under no direct orders, and was largely considered off the grid. There would be no backup, no one who knew where he was or where to look if he disappeared entirely off the face of the planet. He couldn’t even tell the people dearest to him in the world, for fear of involving them and bringing a rain of fire down on their heads along with his own. He had long known it, had left a letter in Pamela’s keeping, to be delivered to the small grey farmhouse at the end of the crooked lane if he should someday go missing, though he had never felt the possibility of it as viscerally as he did this moment.

He recalled a long ago conversation with James Kirkpatrick. The man had fixed him with that light-spilling gaze over the top of a tumbler of whiskey.

“All spies are whores, David. It’s just the method that varies. Only you can decide when you’re in danger of losing your soul to it. Only you can decide when the price becomes too high.”

David stopped at the verge of a laneway, and looked up into the sky. The night was so very big, the sky dark as Hell’s own basement. His day of reckoning was here, and he thought perhaps the price was, indeed, too high.

Chapter Seventy-four
September 1975
A History of Ashes

The call came in the night
, one of those three o’clock in the morning phone calls where one’s heart leaped directly into one’s throat at the thought of what a ringing phone could portend at such an hour.

Casey shot out of the bed with the reflexes of a father who dreads his small tyrannical daughter awakening. Inevitably, as he ran down the stairs to the kitchen where the telephone pealed on shrilly, another sort of call, equally piercing entered the fray. Pamela, adrenaline coursing like thoroughbred racehorses through her system, got up and fetched her small, angry daughter from her crib.

Casey didn’t return until Isabelle had been changed, and had been nursed enough to alter her furious cries to soft coos. Pamela burped her, rocking her back to sleep, her small downy head on her mother’s shoulder. Casey had banked the fire in the bedroom’s hearth before they had gone to sleep, but Pamela felt a terrible chill nevertheless.

The look on Casey’s face did little for the adrenaline-charged equines in her blood.

“What—what is it?” she asked, through lips that were stiff with fear. Isabelle was squirming slightly, sensing her disquiet.

“It’s the distillery—there’s a fire. Apparently it started a few hours ago, or so they think as it’s well caught. I’m so sorry, Pamela.”

The next hour was a blur. Casey called Gert and she arrived within minutes to watch over the children.

They saw the glow of the fire on the horizon long before they reached the distillery site. Pamela felt the ball of ice in her intestines grow larger. The fire had to be huge to cause that sort of light in the sky.

When they arrived, Pamela quickly saw it was even worse than she had feared. Four hundred years of Kirkpatrick history was already well on its way to becoming no more than a very large pile of ashes. She could not even begin to think of all the people whose well-being depended on the distillery every day.

The fire was enormous, and too dangerous for anyone to get close enough to fight it effectively. The worst was still to come though.

“It’s going to hit the washbacks and the stills and when it does the whole place will explode,” she said, fighting back tears. “There’s no way to stop it.”

Casey did not reply because there was nothing to say. A force of nature this big had an inevitability about it that made one stand back in equal parts awe and horror. They stood on a hillside above the distillery, a safe enough distance, but they were able to feel the terrific heat that rent the night in two.

The explosion came only minutes later and it sent out a roar that echoed off the surrounding hills, shooting up a ball of flame that looked like a star exploding, ready to pull the universe into the vacuum it would leave behind. A series of smaller explosions followed, like a string of fireworks streaking the air with jets of gold and vermilion.