Veil of Civility: A Black Shuck Thriller (Declan McIver Series) (39 page)

"I'll have it approved and you'll be off to see your mum, I promise."

"Well, grand. I'd hate to have to start forgetting parts and pieces of certain conversations."

"Aye, we'd hate that, too," Shane responded, trying hard not to let the exasperation he was feeling creep into his voice. "We'll have you off soon enough. Call me tomorrow at sixteen hundred hours."

"Four o'clock? You said you'd have it done by morning. She's ill, might not make it through the week, you know? Do you bastards care about anything but yourselves and your bloody politics? I'm starting to rethink this whole thing."

"Aye, now calm down, Paddy, I care about you and your mum and I will get you off to see her. I'll have the expense approved by tomorrow morning and I'll have the travel arrangements made by the time you call. This isn't the easiest thing in the world to pull off, you know? In the eyes of the U.S. government you're a convicted terrorist, and they don't take kindly to that fact. Do you want the FBI swooping down on you as soon as you're off the plane?"

"No—"

"Then let me do my job and call me tomorrow at sixteen hundred."

"Aye, grand. I'll talk to you then."

He listened as Murray set down the receiver of the pay phone he was calling from before he let out a deep breath and allowed himself to sink back in his chair. There were times, a lot of times recently, when all he felt like was a high-price babysitter.

As an intelligence officer assigned to the Irish and Domestic Terrorism Department within the United Kingdom's Security Service, more commonly referred to as MI5, or just 5, his job was to manage the Service's many assets throughout both the mainland and Ireland who regularly provided the British government with information on the plans and whereabouts of known Irish dissidents who continued to plot bombings and shootings. While their activities were on a much smaller scale than the fevered pace that had been the norm when he'd first joined the ranks as a spook seventeen years earlier, they persisted.

O'Reilly returned the receiver of his phone to its cradle before taking hold of his coffee cup and turning around in his chair to look at the empty workspaces surrounding him. Seventeen years ago, every desk on the sixth floor of Thames House had been full and they'd been pilfering unused space in other areas of the expansive government complex. Now those doing the pilfering were located far below him in the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre and the International Counter Terrorism Department, in charge of investigating Islamic terrorist activity.

Along with the fevered pace of Irish terrorism had gone many of the colleagues he'd come to genuinely enjoy working with. Now their desks, computers and personal effects were gone, some transferred to other areas of the building where the Service thought their expertise was more needed and others, the old stalwarts like him, moved to the Security Service's Northern Ireland HQ inside the Palace Barracks in County Down. The only reason he hadn't been moved as well was because he had vowed never again to set down roots in Northern Ireland. The memories there for him were too painful and rather than face them each day he'd have quit, and he'd made that known.

"If you're done boring a hole into that mug, O'Reilly, I've got something to talk with you about," a gruff voice called from the other end of the office. He straightened up and placed the coffee cup on his desk, glancing out the antiquated window into the gray waters of the Thames as a black barge made its way down the river.

Standing up, he looked towards the corner office at the end of the room about thirty feet away. Standing in the open doorway was the broad figure of his boss, Harold Thom, a part Irish, part English, but one hundred percent British company man whom he'd worked with for the last twenty years starting with his role as an informer in Northern Ireland. While Thom's hair had gone from flaming orange to mostly gray, the scowl he wore and the beady eyes that seemed as though they could cut through steel hadn't changed since they'd first met in an abandoned textile mill in Belfast.

He nodded in Thom's direction as the man turned and disappeared into his office. Walking around the edge of his desk, he caught the
oh crap
glances of the two dozen or so co-workers left in the IDT's half of the sixth floor, which they shared with the Northern Ireland Office. Stopping halfway along his route, O'Reilly briefly considered his reflection in the glass covering a large picture of London's skyline and straightened his tie. Every time he looked, the lines on his face seemed deeper and the red fuzz he called hair seemed grayer. It was fitting given the mood he found himself in most days. It felt like it had been years since he'd experienced any real excitement, and by excitement he wasn't thinking of the kind he'd endured as a younger man traipsing around the hills and loughs of Ireland, the deserts of Libya or the mountains of Afghanistan. No, he'd be more than happy with a bottle of wine and a good lay every once in a while.

Stepping into the office and closing the door behind him, he watched as the barrel-shaped Thom descended into the leather chair behind his long, L-shaped mahogany desk.

"How's it, Shane?" the big man asked, as he labored to get comfortable in the chair.

"Well enough, sir," he said, with a raise of his eyebrows, "just trying to keep Her Majesty's Government from being completely shaken down by my countrymen."

Thom flashed the briefest smile in history. "I've had a call from the Deputy Director this morning. It seems there's a matter the JIC would like us to look into. I thought you'd be particularly suited to the assignment."

"You mean they've actually remembered we're here?"

Thom again flashed a smile that faded almost as quickly as it had appeared on his thin lips. "Yeah, it seems that some sad bastard from your old stomping grounds has turned up in an American investigation into the car bombing of that university and the death of that teacher, or whatever he was. The Yanks want everything we have on him and the JIC has agreed to give it to them. That means you need to blow the dust off some really old stuff down in the file room and hope it's still readable."

Shane nodded. He'd heard about the bombing in America and about the subsequent death of Abaddon Kafni. To him it was a tragedy that was compounded by the fact that he'd actually met the man on one occasion and believed him to be an all-round good person with a family life that differed greatly from the heated rhetoric that consumed his professional time. Like everyone with a television license and even a passing interest in politics, he had followed Kafni's career to a degree and he couldn't say his death was a surprise. Like the fatwas issued against people like Salman Rushdie, the ranks of Islamic militancy didn't take kindly to being so loudly and publically excoriated. The idea that someone from his old stomping grounds, as Thom had put it, could be involved piqued his interest and immediately a sinking feeling settled on him as one name in particular came to mind.

"Does this sad bastard have a name?"

Thom nodded and slid a file across his desk. "This is what the Yanks have on him. They want us to fill in the blanks."

Shane bent down quickly and picked up the file. Opening it, the sinking feeling turned to the twist of a knife in his stomach as he looked at the photo paper-clipped to the top of dossier.

"Sir, there must be some mistake here," he said.

"Oh?" Thom said, raising his eyebrows.

"Aye, this file belongs to Declan McIver."

"And that's a mistake because?"

"Because he's one of the most decent men I've ever known. He saved my life, sir."

"Well be that as it may, Agent O'Reilly," Thom said, after briefly considering the story that Shane had just recounted for him. "He was enlisted in the ranks of a subversive organization and things change. It's been a number of years since you and this McIver have had any contact."

Shane nodded with a grimace.

"If you're not up for this, I understand. I'll have someone else get on it straight away. This one comes directly from the top, so I can't afford to have it messed up."

"No, sir," Shane said, closing the file and gripping it tightly. "I'm good with it. As you said, it's been a number of years and things change. Who's my contact when I've gathered everything?"

"Me. This one is going straight up the line." Thom motioned towards the door with his index finger indicating that it was time for Shane to leave.

"Alright then, I'll get busy just as soon as I've had a smoke," Shane said, as he tucked the folder under his arm and withdrew a full bent Peterson tobacco pipe from his coat pocket, "the lounge is on the way to the file room."

He heard Thom grunt as he stepped out of the office and pulled the door closed behind him. With rare haste in his step, O'Reilly moved quickly through the maze of desks towards the hallway of elevators that separated the shared sixth floor. This was a moment he'd waited nearly twenty years for, but had hoped would never come.

Outside, he turned up the collar of his tan trench coat as a cold wind blew off the Thames and up Thorney Street, the narrow alleyway that ran along the rear of Thames House. The windowless bronze door at the top of the one story flight of stairs he'd just descended slammed shut behind him and he turned right along the sidewalk, leaving the alcove of entrance number six. Passing the building's official rear entrance, he nodded at an armed guard that stood watch. The guard nodded in return but didn't pay any further attention to him. He was a common sight, walking by every morning and every afternoon on his way to his mundane flat in Newington, just across the Lambeth Bridge.

He held his pipe between his teeth as he withdrew a leather pouch from the inside breast pocket of his coat and grabbed several pinches of his favorite whiskey-flavored tobacco. Filling his pipe, he rounded Thames House and crossed Millbank Road onto the Lambeth Bridge. A cold, seasonal wind blew north off the river as he turned downwind to light up. When the tobacco was lit evenly, he inhaled deeply as he placed a hand in his pocket and strolled slowly onto the concrete walkway beside the road that led into the Lambeth and Newington neighborhoods on the opposite side of the river.

At nearly midday, traffic rushed past him a few feet away and he nodded as he passed the occasional pedestrian without really seeing them. His mind was focused on the file he'd just been given. Exhaling a bluish haze and watching it waft away across the walls of the bridge, he considered the photograph he'd seen paper-clipped inside and remembered a younger but no less friendly face. Even in his early forties and in what was probably a prison mug shot, Declan McIver hadn't lost his boyish looks and the slight sparkle in his eyes that made you believe him when he spoke. It had been that look and the actions that followed that were responsible for the fact that Shane was still breathing and counted among the living.

"Ah, I'm screwed, Declan!" a younger version of his own voice said, as it echoed through his head.

"You're not screwed, neither of us are!" Declan had responded, as he'd grabbed him by the shoulders and looked him in the eye as the barbaric calls of the Russian soldiers pursuing them echoed through the mountains outside of the cave they'd been held up in.

The memory faded and he wondered what the circumstances were that had brought a file containing Declan's image into the offices of the Security Service. When you were a former Irish dissident, the offices of the Security Service was one of the last places you wanted anything to do with you to end up, and the idea that Declan had returned to the kind of life that would send him there just didn't seem possible. Still, he had to consider the words of Harold Thom, things changed and it had been a number of years since he'd had any kind of lengthy contact with his old friend. While it hadn't been as long as Thom probably thought, it was still long enough for the circumstances in anyone's life to change for the worse, but bad enough to murder a friend? He didn't believe it.

He inhaled again from his pipe as he leaned on the columned walls of the bridge and watched the boats sail underneath. In his mind, there was no way Declan could be guilty of what the Americans thought he was. It was a mistake, it had to be. Declan and Abaddon Kafni had been friends for years and he'd seen these kinds of things happen before during the course of an investigation. In their haste to capture terrorists, someone had stumbled upon Declan's past and had simply drawn the wrong conclusions. But the damage done to Declan's life could be irrevocable. As the only remaining members of the IRA unit they had once belonged to, they'd made a promise to each other to take the necessary steps to ensure each other's safety and while he knew he was risking everything his life had been for the last seventeen years, a promise was a promise. He pulled a Blackberry from his pocket and typed in a web address. He knew that the Security Service had eyes and ears on just about every location within a few blocks of Thames House and that they were notorious for watching their own people as much as they watched everyone else. Making the transmission that he was about to make could amount to a charge of high crimes and misdemeanors, but then, technically, he wasn't sending anything. He punched in his login information to a subscription based Swiss mail server and opened the draft folder. Quickly, he typed out a message and hit the save button.