Private Dublin

Chapter 82

I crouched beside her, but I knew her wound would be bad even before I’d examined it. Her skin had turned pallid, gray-looking in the darkness. Her breathing was rapid and shallow, and her expression full of shock and fear. I was familiar with that look, having seen it before on the faces of others who were realizing the dividing line between life and death was wafer-thin.

“Jack,” she gasped. “Jack, please don’t let me die.”

I ignored the irony of this conspirator in my attempted murder pleading with me to save her, and the fact that like Justine she had suffered a stomach wound. I lifted her shirt to find dark blood oozing from the bullet hole. It looked like an oil slick spreading across her pale skin.

“Jack,” she said faintly. “Please.”

I found her phone and used her thumb to unlock it before calling the emergency services. I gave the operator our location and stressed the urgency of the situation. I could patch up an arm or leg, but a gunshot wound to the stomach would almost certainly require surgery, which was well beyond my field medicine skills.

“Jack, will you hold my hand?” she asked, her voice weak, her breathing growing shallow.

I wrapped my fingers around her cold, delicate hand and squeezed gently.

She smiled. “Thank you. I don’t want to make this journey alone.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” I told her, but my words sounded false even as I uttered them. It’s always a struggle for me to lie convincingly

Her smile faltered and her eyes brimmed as she winced with pain. She took a series of rapid breaths and recovered something like composure.

“After Monaco, we lost the Chalmont Casino,” she said. She was gasping for air now, trying to hold enough life within her to pass on the information she knew I was seeking. “We needed a way to launder funds, so Lawrence has been coercing other racehorse owners into manipulating results so we can launder cash from our illegal operations through gambling. He runs a network of online accounts through the many proxies we have working for us overseas.”

It suddenly made sense. The intimidation of the Kearneys was about getting them to throw races. I reflected on my role in causing this by shutting down the Monaco operation and forcing Propaganda Tre to establish another means of cleaning the money it made from its illegal operations, selling drugs on the streets of Dublin and quite probably across all of Europe. Billions were gambled on Irish racing each year and it was an international concern with massive online betting markets. It would be easy to conceal huge sums in illegal gains within the sea of legitimate stakes.

“The cash is used to fund our political objectives,” Andi said between gasps. “We want an end to liberalism — to bring about cultural and political disintegration. Then we can step in and establish a new order, a return to traditional values, where people stay where they belong.”

I shook my head slowly, wondering how someone so smart could become so twisted by hate.

“I’m sorry. I was a fool. It’s only now I see the truth,” she said, before her breathing became very labored. “Help me, Jack. Please,” she cried before she began to shudder. Her eyes filled with terror, and the breath rasped in her throat with an ugly choking sound. “Jack...”

She fell still and I felt the life leave her. Her eyes glazed over and stared beyond me at the dark sky above.

Andi was dead.