Jig (2 page)

He lay gasping for air, trying to undo the knot of his dark tie even as he realised two things.

One, he was dying.

And two, the ship had become deathly quiet all around him and the sound of the churning engines had stilled.

This same sudden absence of noise chilled Captain O'Reilly. His first response was automatic. The fucking engines had broken down, which he'd been expecting to happen for a long time now. But then he realised something else.

Out there, a hundred yards or so from the
Connie
the ghostly shape of a white yacht had materialised. It showed no lights and O'Reilly had the weird impression there was nobody on board the strange vessel, that it had come up out of the black like some kind of spirit ship bearing the bones of dead sailors. It lay in the darkness in a menacing way, seeming barely to move on the swell. O'Reilly could see no flag, no identifying marks, no name on the bow, no sign of life anywhere. It had appeared out of nowhere, hushed and anonymous. O'Reilly peered into the dark. The vessel looked to him like a sixty-foot diesel yacht, but he couldn't be sure unless the moon broke the cloud cover and gave him enough light so he wouldn't feel like a blind man. There was a knot of tension at the back of his throat.

Be careful, O'Reilly. Be cautious.

He went inside the bridge and opened the gun cabinet, which contained ten pistols and six semi-automatic rifles. He took out one of the semis. He saw the yacht drifting closer, as if whoever manned the damn thing wanted a collision and wouldn't be satisfied with anything else.

He rang the alarm. Within moments he heard the sound of his crewmen scurrying along the deck. Some of them, just wakened from sleep, wore only long thermal underwear. O'Reilly passed out his supply of weapons to the crewmen, urging them to hold their fire unless he gave them a signal. Then he went on watching the movement of the white yacht.

Seventy yards.

Sixty.

The appearance of the yacht might simply be accidental, some hapless nautical tourist veering too close to the
Connie
, a fancy Dan with a white cap and a double-breasted blazer and a fat wife in a bikini, except this wasn't the weather for casual seagoing. You couldn't be certain. O'Reilly had lived a long time with the fear that one of these crossings would end badly, terminated by either British or American authorities or some godless mixture of the two.

It was floating closer.

Fifty yards –

Forty –

O'Reilly narrowed his eyes. Momentarily he thought about the
Mary Celeste
. Maybe this yacht was something like that. An empty vessel. All signs of life inexplicably gone. One of the mysteries of an ocean that already had so many and all of them impenetrable.

Twenty-five yards.

Twenty.

He raised a hand in the air. There was no option now but to open fire. What else could he do, given the importance of the Courier's brief-cases and the fear he suddenly felt, which made him so cold to his bones? And what had happened to the bloody engines?

Even before he could lower his hand to order his crew to fire, there was a white blaze of searchlights from the yacht. Blinded, O'Reilly turned his face away from the glare.

As he did so, the gunfire began.

It lit up the Atlantic night with the brilliance of a thousand flares, slicing obscenely through the body of the
Connie
, smashing the glass of the bridge, battering the hull – and it went on and on, an indiscriminate kind of firing that seemed to have no end to it, as if whoever fired the guns did so with utter abandon. O'Reilly lay face down on the floor of the bridge, listening to the air whine above his head. All around him he could hear the moans of those of his crewmen who were still alive. As for the rest, they had been cut down brutally and were in that place where only God or a good undertaker could help them.

O'Reilly, whose only wound was a glass cut in his forehead, lay very still. He was thinking of the Courier now. There was only one reason to attack the
Connie
like this – to steal what the Courier had in his possession. What else was worth taking on this big tub of rust? Madness, bloody madness.

Christ in heaven, how could he help the Courier when he couldn't even help himself? What was he supposed to do? Crawl down from the bridge and smuggle the Courier away in a lifeboat?

The gunfire stopped.

The silence filling the night was deep and complete.

O'Reilly blinked into the harsh white searchlights. He could hardly see the vessel because of the intensity of the lights. But he knew what it was –
a ringer, a viper in swan's feathers, a gunboat disguised as a very expensive pleasure craft
.

He rose to his knees. Here and there, blitzed where they'd come on deck, crewmen lay dead. One or two, wounded beyond medical assistance, crawled like rats across the deck. O'Reilly felt a great sadness for them. He thought about the widows and orphans this fucking yacht had suddenly created, and his sorrow became rage.
The hell with it! The hell with it all!

He levelled his rifle and was about to spray the white boat with gunfire when he heard a voice from behind and something hard was pushed against the side of his skull.

‘I'd be putting the gun away, sir.'

O'Reilly turned, saw the young seaman standing behind him.

‘Well, now,' O'Reilly said. The young man's pistol was pressed directly at his head.

The seaman smiled. ‘It's all over.'

‘Houlihan. You double-crossing bastard.'

Houlihan said nothing.

O'Reilly put his rifle down. ‘Do I have time to pray?' His mouth was very dry. Somewhere nearby, one of his crew members screamed out in agony. The awful sound of a man dying. Dear God.

‘Of course you do, if you're a praying man,' Houlihan answered, and he shot Liam O'Reilly twice in the skull.

Houlihan stepped inside the Courier's cabin. The dead man lay beside his bunk. His eyes were wide open and his mouth contorted in an expression of pain. One hand was at his neck and his face was a bright blood-red. His legs had been drawn into a foetal position and Darjeeling tea stained his white shirt.

Houlihan bent over the body. He examined the briefcases. Each had a combination lock. He fingered the chain that was shackled to the dead man's wrist. Then, from a pouch on his hip, Houlihan drew out a long, serrated knife.

He went to work.

2

London

Frank Pagan stepped out of his 1982 Camaro and surveyed the dark street of terraced houses. Televisions flickered in windows, throwing out pale blue lights. Now and again he could see a shadow pass in front of a curtain. It was a grubby street on the fringes of the Hammersmith district of London, and it reminded Pagan of his origins. He'd been born and raised on a street almost exactly like this one, except that in his memory the house where he'd been brought up didn't seem so small and grim as the houses facing him now. Terraces of narrow dwellings. A triumph of working-class architecture.

He closed the door of the car quietly and walked in the direction of number 43 Eagleton Street. He paused once and stared towards the end of the street, where an unmarked car of Scotland Yard's Special Branch was parked. Ostentatious bugger, Pagan thought. Nothing looks so much like a police car as one trying to appear inconspicuous. It was in the vicinity officially to provide what was called ‘back-up', as if its occupants were gunslingers and Pagan an agent of the Wells Fargo Company.

Pagan found 43, a two-storeyed terraced house that had been built in the late 1930s. He walked up the driveway and rapped on the door. There was a shuffling from inside and the door opened about two inches. A red face, which had the raw look of a badly peeled potato, appeared in the space.

Pagan stepped forward, shoving the door back briskly. The potato face scowled.

Pagan wandered inside a small living room that smelled of damp. A TV was playing. He switched it off at once, and the room was suddenly black.

‘Find a light, Charlie,' he said.

Charlie Locklin, in shirt sleeves and grey flannel pants, turned on a lamp. Its base was of yellow ceramic in the form of a mermaid. Pagan sat down, crossing his legs.

Charlie Locklin remained standing. With his TV dead, he looked uncertain about everything, a man who had lost his only map to reality. He shoved his hands inside the pockets of his flannel pants which were held up by a frayed leather belt.

‘We need to talk, Charlie,' Pagan said.

‘What would I have to say to you?' Charlie Locklin asked in a sullen way. He had a hybrid accent, part Dublin, suffused with some Cockney variations.

‘This and that.' Pagan gazed round the room. It was crowded with plastic furniture. ‘Class place, Charlie.'

Charlie Locklin appeared wary, as well he might. There were half a dozen hand grenades under the floorboards, and an old Luger, in good working order, concealed beneath some boxes in the attic. Locklin was a stout man with a variety of tattoos on his bare arms. Hearts and flowers and serpents. They had a gangrenous tint, as if they'd been done by a half-blind tattoo artist at some decrepit seaside resort. Pagan had decided long ago that there was something essentially squalid about the Charlie Locklins of this world. They needed squalor to hatch out their violent little schemes the way a fly needs decay for its larvae.

‘I don't like you coming here,' Locklin said.

‘I don't like
being
here, Charlie.' Pagan rose, went to the window, parted the drapes. The mean little street with its blue windows winked back at him. About four miles away was Her Majesty's Prison at Wormwood Scrubs, a formidable place. ‘Blown anything up recently, Charlie? Been playing with any explosives?'

‘I don't know what you're talking about, Pagan.'

‘Last night somebody blew up a car in Mayfair. Nice car. A Jaguar. Unfortunately, there was a person in it at the time.'

Charlie Locklin looked puzzled. ‘I'm not responsible for that.'

There was a silence. Pagan looked at a clock on the mantelpiece. It was of imitation marble, and it had stopped at ten minutes past four. He had the impression that it had ceased working years ago, so that it was always four ten in this miserable little house.

‘What I want, Charlie, is a little information. I want to pick your brain. Such as it is.' A microscope might have been useful, Pagan thought.

Charlie Locklin took a cigarette from a battered pack and lit it, letting Pagan's insult float over his head. ‘I don't have anything to say to you, Pagan.'

‘Not very far from where we sit right now there's a jail called the Scrubs. It isn't pleasant, it isn't nice, it isn't even a
safe
place, especially for somebody with your particular political affiliations. The Scrubs wouldn't be beneficial to your health, Charlie boy.'

‘I know all about your Scrubs,' Charlie Locklin said.

‘I could throw away the key. Get you off the streets, Charlie. One less arsehole for me to worry about. I'm an inventive kind of man. I could come up with a decent reason. For example, if I was to search your house, Charlie, who knows what I might find? Our judicial system isn't charitable to men like you these days. The British don't think it's sociable for the Irish to be blowing up shops and hotels and planting bombs in cars.'

‘I've never blown up anything!'

‘Come on, Charlie. What about Torquay?'

‘What the fuck! All I had was some gelignite. I never used it. I was holding it for a friend.'

‘Charlie, when a known sympathiser of the IRA is found skulking down a basement in Torquay with nineteen pounds of gelignite on his person, it's a pretty fair deduction that he's not planning some simple weekend gardening. And when you add the fact that our beloved Prime Minister was in Torquay at the same time, well, it doesn't look like you're going in for a little sunbathing, does it?' Pagan took his hands out of his raincoat pockets and looked at them. They were big and blunt, like a couple of hammers. He had inherited his father's hands, a bricklayer's hands.

Charlie Locklin sat down on the arm of a sofa and peered at Frank Pagan through cigarette smoke. ‘I was holding the jelly for a friend.'

‘Sure you were.'

‘I could get a knee job for talking to you,' Locklin said.

‘Nobody's going to shoot your knees off, Charlie. We talk. I leave. It's dark outside. Who's going to know I've ever been here?' Pagan found himself wishing that Charlie Locklin
would
get his knees shot off because it would be one less scum to deal with, and that's what Locklin was as far as Pagan was concerned.
Scum
.

Charlie Locklin tossed his cigarette into the fireplace and watched it smoulder. Then he looked at the useless clock on the mantelpiece. Pagan stirred in his seat. Whenever he plunged into the maze of Irish terrorism, he had the sensation of being locked within a labyrinth of mirrors. Images came at you, then receded. Truths were distorted, lies enlarged. And what you were left with at the end was a handful of broken glass, like something out of a child's ruined kaleidoscope.

‘Let me throw you a name, Charlie.'

‘I'm listening.'

‘Jig.' Pagan pronounced the word slowly.

Charlie Locklin smiled. ‘If you've come here to talk about Jig, you'd be a damn sight better off talking about the bloody wind. Jig! He's a fucking mystery.'

‘I know he's a mystery, Charlie. Point is, what do you know?'

‘Nothing. Not a thing.' Locklin laughed, as if the very idea of anyone knowing the
real
identity of Jig was too much of a joke to bear. Jig had all the reality of an Irish mist or one of those mythical figures of Celtic prehistory, like Cuchulain.

Pagan rose. ‘Give me a name, Charlie. Tell me the name of somebody who might know something.'

‘You're daft, Pagan. You know that? You come in here and you ask daft questions.'