The Dead Yard

2: AN ASSASSINATION IN REVERE

The lough was dead and across the water I could hear jets land on the baking runways of Logan airport. The day dwindling to an end in heat and the ugly noise of massive tunneling machines in the vast scar of Boston’s Big Dig.

Kids playing stickball. Old ladies in deck chairs on the sidewalk. Families heading back from the beach. It was August on Boston’s North Shore. The temperature was hitting ninety degrees outside. Even the elderly mafiosi with thin blood and poor circulation had shed their jackets for a stroll along the sidewalk of Revere Beach.

I threw away my unsmoked cigarette, walked into the bar.

An Italian neighborhood but an Irish pub: the Rebel Heart. Tough one, too. Posters of old IRA men. Bobby Sands, Gerry Adams. An Phoblacht propaganda sheets. Guinness merchandise. The usual slogans: “Brits Out,” “Thatcher Is a War Criminal,” “Give Ireland Back to the Irish.”

About a quarter full. Maybe thirty people. At least half a dozen of them, I assumed, were FBI men. I sat down at the bar. An aroma of spilled beer, body odor, and sunscreen.

The assassin came in two minutes after me and ordered a Schlitz Lite, which I took to be a sign of absolute evil. Anyone drinking lite beer is suspect to begin with, but this guy clearly had no depths to which he would not sink.

He was a hard bastard who’d entered with some kind of automatic weapon under his raincoat, which he kept buttoned despite the heat. A dead giveaway. His face was scarred, his hair jagged, and either he was from Belfast or he worked twelve hours a day in a warehouse that got no natural light. Tall, stooped, birdlike. About fifty. An old pro. The dangerous type. Sipping the urine-colored Schlitz. Not nervous. Calm. Smoking Embassy No. 1 cigarettes, which I don’t think you can get in this country, so that solved the nationality question. He caught me with my eye on him and I looked past him to the barman who said:

“There in a minute, mate,” in the high-pitched tones of County Cork.

I gazed about to see if I could ID the feds but it was difficult to scrutinize faces. Too dark, too smoky, too many ill-lit spots. Loud, too, for such a small crowd. Keeping their voices up to talk over a jukebox playing Black 47, House of Pain, and U2.

I bit my lip. I’d check the crowd again in ten minutes to see who hadn’t touched their beer, that would be a clue as to who was on a job or not.

Ten minutes.

Also my last chance to run for it. McCaghan was supposed to show up around six. ’Course, if I scarpered it would mean reneging on my agreement with Samantha. Undoubtedly she would see that I got shat on from a great height. They’d find me, eventually, and I’d be returned to Mexico to do serious time.

“What ya having?” the kid from Cork finally asked and he was so young, genuine, and nice I couldn’t help but dislike him.

“What doesn’t taste like piss in here?” I wondered.

“You’re from the north?” he asked. Except in that Cork accent it was like “Yeer fraa ta naar?”

“Belfast,” I said.

“Yeah, I recognized it,” he replied. “I wouldn’t try the Guinness if I were you. Get you a Sam Adams, so I will.”

“Ok,” I said.

The kid went off.

The assassin looked at me, nodded.

“You’re from Belfast?” he asked, his eyes narrowing to murderous slits.

“Aye,” I said, trying to keep the fear out of my voice.

“Me too,” he mumbled.

“Is that so?”

“Aye, it is,” he said. “Where ya from?”

“My ma was from Carrickfergus. I lived with my nan in-”

“Carrickfergus, like in the song?” he asked, suddenly interested.

“Like in the song,” I agreed.

“Thought that was a Proddy town,” he muttered, shaking his head.

“Not all of it is Protestant. Whereabouts you from?” I asked.

He put his glass of beer on the counter, lifted his finger slowly, and tapped it on his nose. In other words, mind your own bloody business. Which would have been fine if I had initiated the conversation, but he had, and now the big shite was making me look bad. Swallow it, I thought.

I adopted a génération perdue insouciance, which I think was rather lost on the hit man so I relented and grinned at him as my drink came.

“Slainte,” I said.

“Cheers,” he said and turned away from me to scope the bar.

Looking for Gerry McCaghan and his bodyguards. Not here yet, still only six minutes to six. When they did show and he had a good angle, I knew the assassin was going to open his coat and gun them with that big muscle job he had under there. Or at least he was going to try to. For what he didn’t know was that the man who had met him at Logan Airport two hours earlier was a stool pigeon working for the federales and had in fact supplied him with a weapon with its firing pin filed down, not enough to raise suspicion, but just enough to render it completely useless. Rules of evidence and lawyers being what they are, the FBI had to catch the assassin in the act and as soon as he brought out that gun with intent to murder, the peelers were going to order him to drop it and tell him that he was under arrest.

Samantha claimed it was all pretty simple. The gun didn’t work, the assassin would be nabbed immediately, the place was crawling with FBI. It would pan out perfectly.

As perfect as Waco. As perfect as Ruby Ridge. I fidgeted with my shirt and trousers. Jeremy had bought them for me at Portela Airport in Lisbon while I changed in the first-class lounge. The white shirt was fine but the trousers were too loose. I had the belt on the last hole and even then I feared that they would fall down at a crucial moment, projecting an unwelcome element of farce into the proceedings.

Jeremy hadn’t sat with us but I had gotten to know Samantha as well as one could on a transatlantic flight. She was surprisingly open. Born in Lincolnshire, her father a brigadier in one of those pretentious highland regiments. She’d read philosophy at Oxford and joined the civil service, before getting initially into MI5 and then MI6. She had never been married. No kids. But more important, I didn’t know if she’d ever been a field agent because she wasn’t allowed to talk about it. My hunch was no. As impressive as that little foot-stabbing incident had been, she should never have gotten herself into that situation in the first place. And it was a lucky stab, too; if she’d gotten my left foot-the plastic one-I’d be free on Pico de Teide and she’d be on her way to the indiscreet new MI6 building on the South Bank, trying to think of an explanation for the cock-up.

The flight was work, too. She’d passed me Gerry McCaghan’s and his daughter Kit’s police files, their FBI files, and the special file SUU had made for this op. Kit’s was only four pages long but Gerry’s could have been a PhD thesis.

I don’t know about Gerry, but Kit’s photograph didn’t do her justice. A blurry mug shot from an RUC station when she was bruised, tired, dirty, and a little unwell.

The real Kit looked nothing like this. I knew that because she was here already. Gerry had a half share in the Rebel Heart and Kit worked bar every once in a while. I hadn’t realized she’d look so young. Or so beautiful. Spotted her the moment I’d walked in. How could I not? Working with that big doofus from County Cork but not serving the likes of me, instead waiting tables with trays of drinks, from which she would get tips. Short spiky black hair. Big, wide, beautiful dark blue-green eyes. Pale cheeks, high cheekbones. Nose ring.

Full lips painted with black lipstick. Cargo pants. Slender waist, small breasts. A Newgrange Heel Stone-style tribal tattoo on her left shoulder, just peeking out from underneath a green USMC T-shirt. Very attractive piece of jailbait you would have thought, but actually she was nineteen, nearly twenty.

I had memorized her full bio. The USMC T-shirt was a fashion accessory, but apparently she had taken part in one wee military operation. Not in America, of course. The Old Country. Born in Boston, but she’d spent a summer in Belfast, where Gerry had blooded her. In 1995 she’d been arrested for throwing stones at the police during a riot on the Falls Road.

It wasn’t remotely serious and she was detained for a day and deported. Still, Gerry’s plans for her were clear-not exactly the crime of the century, but not a Swiss finishing school either.

She was Gerry’s adopted daughter, but that didn’t mean a thing, because she’d been raised in the cause and radicalized and if she was half as earnest as her da she was big trouble. For Gerry was an old-school hard man from the Bogside in Derry. He’d been interned by the British in the early seventies and had killed his way to the top of the North Antrim Brigade of the IRA. But Gerry was not as politically savvy as other brigade commanders and his bombings in Bushmills, Derry, and Ballymena had led to large numbers of civilian casualties, which did not play well in New York or Boston or indeed Libya, where the IRA’s Czech explosives and Russian guns were coming from. Gerry had been asked to tone down his approach, focus more on military targets; he refused, dissented, argued, and finally was asked to leave Ulster, under sentence.

In the early 1980s he had come to Boston, started working as an IRA quartermaster channeling funds from the Bay State to Belfast. The IRA preferred him in this role and permitted him to set up his own shadow organization-the Sons of Cuchulainn-who ran guns and harried British interests in New England. Gerry prospered in America, got married, adopted a little girl, set up a construction company that initially began as a slush fund but then did very well for itself. Gerry had become rich. Things were going swimmingly until about the last twelve months or so.

In the last year the IRA had been in negotiations with Gerry McCaghan and his Sons of Cuchulainn movement, asking him what his position would be if the IRA’s Army Council declared a renewal of its cease-fire. Gerry had said, in no uncertain terms, that he would not lay down his weapons for anyone.

But the Brits and Americans were close to a deal, a cease-fire was on the cards, and the IRA didn’t need a Gerry McCaghan embarrassing them in front of President Clinton, so a decision had been taken to kill him. Indeed, to kill all the recalcitrant types who would be opposed to a resumption of the cease-fire. It would be a Night of the Long Knives. As well as this hit in Boston there were going to be two hits in Belfast, one in Dundalk, and four in Dublin. All the serious hard-line opposition would be taken care of in one blow. The IRA could then announce a cease-fire without fear of disruption from the radical element.

A good plan, but what the IRA did not know was that their main weapons contact in Boston, a weaselly little shitkicker called Packie Quinlan, had a cocaine problem. Packie had been caught buying an entire klick by the FBI and as a get-out-of-jail-free card had sold them the information about the upcoming Boston hit on Gerry McCaghan.

If this had been a whack in Belfast or Dublin, the British and Irish police would probably have let the assassin kill the bad guy first and then lifted him on the way out of the bar, but the FBI weren’t like that. They wanted no violence at all, just a nice clean arrest. So some bright spark had come up with the idea of having Packie Quinlan give the hit man a doctored weapon.

Purely as a courtesy, the FBI had informed the British consulate about the operation; the consulate had told MI6; and Samantha had asked the FBI (at least I hope she had asked them) if she could append a little operation of her own on to theirs.

That’s where I came in.

The single most important part of any undercover operation is the insertion of an agent. The exit can be an extravaganza, hurried, broad, maybe involving helicopters, cops, or the bloody Green Berets, but an entry has to be of a different pitch. Clever. Subtle. Low-key.

Samantha’s plan was breathtaking in its simplicity.

The moment the assassin was to pull out his machine gun, Samantha wanted me to throw myself protectively on Kit.

End of story.

That was the whole goddamn plan.

When Samantha told me this I looked out the airplane window, pretending to be fascinated by the cloud formations over the Azores and wondering again how I was going to get the hell out of it. But she had shadowed me all the way to Revere and now here I was, either about to attempt to carry out her harebrained scheme or run out the back of the pub into a new set of problems.

Samantha saw the op playing like this: The assassin pulls out the gun. People scream, I jump on Kit, throw her to the ground, shield her with my body, the gun fails, the assassin gets arrested, and I get up off Kit, embarrassed.

But Kit’s impressed that someone has tried to save her life and asks my name and I say Sean McKenna from Belfast and she says she’ll remember it and me, so that a week from now when she accidentally runs into me again at the End of the State Bar in Salisbury, Massachusetts, she laughs and tells her father that this is the Irish hero that saved her life and he asks my name and what I’m doing in America and I say, “Well, to be frank, Mr. McCaghan, I’m looking for a job.”

And that would be that.

My way into their crew. Maybe first he’d put me in the construction company, but when he learned about my radical views he’d hopefully invite me into the Sons of Cuchulainn.

That’s why I had to be here tonight. A golden opportunity to take a big leap forward in credibility. How else could you break into a cell as small and tightly knit as the Sons of Cuchu-lainn? Normally you’d need years of work. But Samantha saw this as a shortcut on the trust stakes. A moment of tension, a moment of embarrassment, and the good part was I wasn’t going to try and ingratiate myself in one go. I wasn’t going to be pushy or forward. Not too keen. Better just to make an impression tonight and then the real op could begin again in a week or so.

Besides, since I had no MI6 training this would be all I could handle. Playing this kind of role took caution, caution, and more caution and I would have to be fully briefed and trained before the real insertion came later.

Tonight it would just be: neat, clean, clever, out.

Only one small problem.

What Samantha didn’t know, what I didn’t know, what the FBI didn’t know, what Packie Quinlan didn’t know, was that there was a second assassin.

The IRA believe in redundancy and if an op like this is to go down right, there has to be two shooters, two chains of causation, two ways of getting the job done. The assassins would be on different flights, meeting different contacts, not even acknowledging each other at all until the target appeared.

Yeah, two gunmen, one with a gun that didn’t work, but unfortunately one with a gun that did. None of us realized, not the feds, not Samantha, not me, that the arrest was not exactly going to be plain sailing.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder.

I turned round.

“I heard you were from Ireland.”

“That’s right,” I said to a short, bald-headed man with a bicycle messenger bag and a beer gut barely contained by a Star Trek T-shirt.

“Take a look at this,” he said and from his satchel he withdrew a plaster-cast Virgin Mary.

“Nice,” I said, not sure how I was supposed to respond.

“Are you going back to the Old Country soon?” he asked in a very heavy Boston accent.

“I might be,” I said.

“Look, would you be interested in buying a batch to take back with you, five bucks each. You can mark them up to twenty punts when you get there,” he said.

“I don’t think so.”

“What about a Jesus?”

He took a Jesus out of the bag. The problem with both votive statues was that they were incredibly lifelike. Thus his venture was doomed to failure because of the dark skin tone of both mother and son. I wouldn’t say I was a keen observer of Boston’s or Ireland’s Catholic community but I do know that only Aryan-looking aspects of the Divine appear in Ireland; weeping Virgin Marys popping up frequently in the west of the country, tears running down their porcelain white skin and over the end of their retroussé noses. Whoever thought they could sell Semitic-looking biblical characters in Ireland had to be out of their bloody minds. I was not the bloke to disillusion the poor bugger.

“Sorry, mate,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“Not my racket,” I told him.

“Ok.”

He took his bag over to the next person at the bar, who happened to be the IRA hit man.

“Fuck off,” the assassin said after listening to him for about three seconds.

The bald man got a bit intimidated by that and lucky for him he exited the pub only five minutes before the shooting started. Indeed, he left the bar after talking to only one more person, a short blond kid in the corner, who oddly enough wasn’t touching his pint of Bass.

The blond kid also refused to countenance the possibility of selling the holy family to the Micks.

I laughed when the bald guy shuffled out.

I should have known better, for he had spoken to both assassins now, letting them know that McCaghan was coming and that the job was on.

Kit came to the bar to pick up an order. She looked like a punk, but she smelled of-what was that?-sweet pea. I gazed at her and tried to figure out precisely how I was going to throw myself on top of her when the assassin was due to commence his work.

As soon as her da walked in, was I supposed to start following her around? What if the assassin took his time about it? Look a bit suspicious, me hanging off Kit’s bloody shoulder the whole night.

Samantha had given me zero instructions on this.

I would have to come up with something. I took a sip of my Sam Adams. Nah, couldn’t possibly tag behind her the whole evening. I’d just have to keep my eye on the door and when Gerry showed, I’d saunter over to wherever Kit happened to be. Until then, low profile, no fuss. If it didn’t work, it didn’t work. I could only tell Samantha I’d tried my best and she’d have to believe me. I looked at Kit. And really by now I wasn’t contemplating the stupid plan. Two minutes staring at her was enough to get you.

Think Winona Ryder in Heathers, Phoebe Cates in Gremlins, Sean Young in Blade Runner. That kind of vibe. The dark eyes, the tubercular pallor, the thing on her head that had once been a Louise Brooks bob but now was teased and hair-sprayed in all directions.

She leaned into the bar, picked up the order, and waltzed off with a tray full of black and tans.

Had she even noticed me? I wouldn’t blame her if she hadn’t. When we’d arrived that morning, Samantha and Jeremy had driven me to a safe house in Cambridge. A barber had shown up at four a.m. Obviously as annoyed about the hour as I was, he had savagely cut my hair to a number two and then dyed what was left a dark black. Previously, I’d had longish sandy-colored hair, and everyone in New York had certainly known me that way. Now I appeared quite different. Not a bad look for me. Little rougher, little tougher. But the jet-lagged eyes and nasty sunburn couldn’t help.

“Get ya another?” the kid from Cork asked.

“Nah, still working at this one,” I said.

“It’s all right, is it?” the kid asked.

“Aye, it’s fine,” I said.

“One of this country’s great patriots.”

“Who is?” I asked.

“Sam Adams. He rode from New York to Boston to warn the people the British were coming. And he was the third president of the United States.”

“And he made beer, too?”

“He certainly did now,” the keep said and walked back to the bottles.

I looked at my watch, three minutes to six. I couldn’t help but be a bit nervous. Quick time-out. I went to the bathroom and splashed some water on my face. Ok, take it easy, Forsythe, this is bloody nothing. Piece of piss, I told my reflection.

Nothing for you, buddy, remember you were in a riot a couple of days ago, my reflection said.

I splashed some more water and went back to the bar stool.

The assassin had ordered another Schlitz Lite. The blond kid in the corner hadn’t touched his drink at all. And neither had a bunch of clean-cut men wearing board shorts and Gap T-shirts, sitting together, at two tables by the door.

Ah, the federales, I thought.

“So what you do for a living?” the assassin asked me out of the blue.

“Me, oh, um, I was a postman back in Ireland,” I answered-the first thing that popped into my head.

“Fucking posties, bastards so they are, on the whole. Always bills, always fucking bills,” the assassin said bitterly. The kid from Cork came over.

“Pushkin said that postmen were monsters of the human race, a bit extreme perhaps but you could see his point of view,” he intoned, obviously attempting levity.

Both the assassin and myself turned the evil eye on him and he pissed off. We didn’t need some know-it-all student showing us up.

“The Commie with the dogs?” the assassin asked me when the kid had gone. For a sec I had no idea what he was talking about.

“No, no, you’re thinking of Pavlov, mate,” I said and was about to explain but got interrupted by the assassin, who turned his full pale face and intimidating eyes on me.

“Look, maybe you should make yourself scarce, mister Carrickfergus postman,” he whispered slowly, measuring out every word.

“I’m heading just as soon as I finish my beer,” I said.

“No, no, maybe you should split right now, if you know what’s good for ya,” the assassin said.

I was touched. Fair play of him to spare me the coming unpleasantness, but I couldn’t go.

“I’ll be heading soon,” I said.

The assassin opened his mouth to insist that maybe I should leave right now, but before he could the outside door opened.

In walked the bodyguards. The first one I noticed was “Big”

Mike McClennahan. Of course, Big Mike was about five foot five. Bald, skinny, wearing a black polo shirt and blue jeans. He was from Boston, ex-cop, gunrunner, bookie. Next, Seamus Hughes-fifty-two, five nine, sallow-faced, wearing a tan jacket and a 5-0 shirt. Another Bostonian, another ex-cop in fact, twenty-five years, full pension, tough nut.

A heartbeat behind them, Gerry McCaghan.

Fifty-five years old. Six foot, a good three hundred pounds, pale, ursine, red hair, a really nasty smear of scar tissue under his left eye where he’d gotten hit by a rubber bullet at a riot in Derry. He was wearing sunglasses, blue corduroys, a Hawaiian shirt like Seamus’s, black loafers, and rather surprisingly he had a gun showing in a holster on his left hip. The gun visible only for a moment as the draft from the door wafted up his shirttail.

“Mr. McCaghan, the usual?” the kid behind the bar shouted.

Kit looked over, smiled at her dad, and waved.

The feds tensed.

The assassin put down his pint. Too late now to warn his compatriot about the upcoming slaughter.

I got off the bar stool, began walking toward Kit.

Here goes, I thought. She was hovering over a table, clearing away the drinks. The table was between the exit and a toilet, so I could always say I’d been heading for the toilet if she ever asked why I had suddenly started walking toward her when all hell had broken loose.

About fifteen paces from me to her. How long did I have? A few seconds?

Three paces, four, five, six, seven.

I knew it was the wrong thing to do but I couldn’t help but half-turn and look at the assassin. His pint was on the bar now, his cigarette in the ashtray, both his hands free. He slid off the bar stool, stood, legs apart, steady.

Nine, ten, eleven…

Gerry, slightly behind Hughes and McClennahan, nodded at someone in the far corner of the room.

Kit picked up an empty glass, put it on her tray.

Twelve, thirteen, fourteen…

The assassin reached in his coat, pulled out a sawed-down AK-47 assault rifle. He hooked in that big curved magazine, lifted the gun, and aimed it. I leapt at Kit just as someone yelled:

“He’s got a gun.”

My hands reached Kit’s shoulders.

Seamus went for his revolver. McCaghan reached for his pistol.

The assassin leveled the AK at McCaghan, pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

A blank look on the assassin’s face.

I hauled Kit to the floor. Her body warm, slender, slight. A pint glass fell out of her hand and I pushed it away in midair before it smashed on top of her.

“What the fuck-” she began saying to me while her father ducked and the assassin, looking baffled, pulled the

AK’s trigger again.

Then a dozen people stood and yelled “Drop your weapon” and “Put the gun down” and “This is the FBI.”

And at the same time, the blond-haired kid in the corner took out a 9mm pistol, leveled his arm, took aim, and fired two quick rounds at Gerry McCaghan. Put off by all the noise, confusion, and yelling, he missed Gerry by ten feet and the bullets sailed through the upper windows and out into the back bay.

Panicking, one of the FBI agents fired his weapon, hitting the effectively unarmed assassin at the bar, nailing him in the left shoulder.

The blond-haired kid fired again, almost getting McCaghan this time, missing him by a few inches, hitting a bell hanging from the ceiling just above his head. Seamus spun round and shot twice at the kid in the corner. Bullets ripping up a Boston Celtics wall hanging above his booth. The kid shot back at Seamus and, seeing that the situation was untenable, began making a break for a side door. Underneath me, Kit writhed and called out, “Daddy, Daddy, oh Daddy”

while the FBI men were screaming: “Everyone drop your weapons, cease fire, this is the FBI.”

The kid shot a round that thumped into a Guinness mirror just to the left of us, shattering it. Three seconds of everything happening at once: Kit howling, the FBI yelling, Seamus shooting at the kid, the kid shoot-ing at Seamus, Gerry completely safe, crouching behind Seamus and McClennahan. The other patrons lying on the floor, absolutely terrified.

An FBI agent jumped unnecessarily onto the first gunman, crashing him over the bar and into the Cork barkeep. Two other agents fired at the blond assassin, missing but almost killing an innocent tourist who had wandered in off the street to see what all the commotion was. Smoke, cordite, chaos, and Gerry’s bodyguard, Seamus, keeping the coolest of everyone, crouching, taking good aim, firing just to the left of the kid’s determined face.

It had lasted almost fifteen seconds, but it couldn’t last much longer.

The kid fired the final bullet in his clip, hitting an FBI guy right in the center of his Kevlar vest.

And at that, a senior FBI man with a mustache stood on a table and screamed to make himself heard: “Everybody fuck-ing freeze. You’re all under arrest. This is the FBI. Stop shooting. Drop your guns, drop your guns, drop your goddamn guns.”

The blond-haired kid finally saw sense and put his hands up. Seamus dropped his gun and put his hands up too.

Kit, writhing, turned round to look at me.

“Let’s get out of here,” I whispered. “Away from the bloody peelers.”

“How?”

“Stairs to the basement and up through the barrel hatch,” I said, wildly improvising.

“My dad?” Kit whispered.

“Is going to be arrested, everybody is, let’s go,” I said. “We can slip out through the smoke.”

The senior FBI agent yelled commands over the ringing in our ears: “Drop those guns on the floor and put your hands on your heads. Everyone else freeze. This place is surrounded by the FBI.”

The blond kid put his hands on his head and two agents knocked him to the floor, pinning him. They grabbed Seamus and Gerry and attempted to render assistance to the injured assassin.

“This is our chance, in all the confusion,” I whispered.

“Ok,” Kit said.

We slipped down the steps into the basement. I didn’t know if they even had a hatchway for delivering the kegs, but Kit did.

“It’s over here,” she whispered. “There’s a stepladder against the wall.”

I grabbed the ladder, climbed it, and pushed open the hatch into the glare of the sun setting over Boston Harbor. I clambered onto the sidewalk and helped Kit up.

“What about my dad?” Kit asked.

“He’s fine, he’ll be going downtown for having that gun,

though,” I said.

“Who are you?”

“I only came for a bloody drink.”

“Who are you?”

“Sean McKenna.”

“You two, you better hold it right there,” a Boston cop yelled from behind one of the trash compactors.

“We’re FBI,” I said and reached in my pocket for my driving license, which I couldn’t let Kit see because it was still for Brian O’Nolan.

The cop walked over and when he was close, I lowered the license, let him bend down to look at it, smashed my fist into the side of his head, kicked his legs from under him, and kicked him twice on the ground, blows that probably hurt me more than him-with my stabbed foot-but which rendered him briefly unconscious.

Kit looked at me, appalled but also excited.

“Let’s go,” I yelled, and we ran down an alley into the back streets of Revere.

Within a minute we had disappeared into the holiday crowd, but just to be sure, Kit found a parked Toyota Camry, wrapped her jacket round her arm, broke the side window with her elbow, yelled in pain, opened the door, kicked the plastic off the ignition system, sparked the starter, turned to me, and said:

“I’m a little bit… um, can you drive?”

“Ok, honey,” I said and drive I did.

Route 1 out of Revere. Kit distracted, on the mobile phone, trying time and again to call her dad and her dad’s lawyer and finally getting through to Sonia, whoever Sonia was, explaining what had happened and asking Sonia to call her back.

Kit ignoring me completely. Not that I cared-I was focused on not getting us killed in the hellish evening traffic heading out of the city.

“Where are we going?” I asked when she finally seemed

done with her phone calls.

“Plum Island.”

“Can we drive there?” I asked, remembering that this was also the name of one of those islands in Long Island Sound.

“Of course. Forty-five minutes.”

“Where is it?”

“Route 1 to 133 to Route 1A, it’s at the mouth of the Mer-rimack River.”

Kit’s mobile rang.

“Dad, Daddy, is that you? Oh my God. Ohmygod. Oh my God.”

Apparently it was. Kit started to cry, and I gave her a tissue we’d found in the glove compartment. She blew her nose. Wiped her eyes.

“Daddy, where are you?” she asked into the phone.

Gerry told her and Kit seemed reassured.

“I’m going back to Newburyport; a nice boy called Sean is driving me, he sort of saved me, he’s from Ireland.”

Gerry must have been suspicious, because Kit gave me a winning smile.

“It’s ok, Daddy, I’m totally fine. He’s nice. We’re heading home. What about you, are you hurt? Did you tell them about your blood pressure?”

Gerry said something and Kit laughed. She put her hand over the receiver.

“He’s fine,” she told me.

“Good,” I replied.

Gerry said something else that sent her into hysterics. She put her hand over the mouthpiece again.

“He says he’ll be out tonight because he’s got something rarer than a tap-dancing dodo,” Kit explained, the tears gone from her eyes now.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A Massachusetts concealed carry permit,” Kit said and chuckled at her father’s unfunny remark.

Gerry gave her a few instructions and told her he loved her.

“I love you too, Dad,” Kit said and hung up.

Kit turned to me and smiled.

“They’re all ok,” she said.

“Ok, good. I’m glad,” I said and gave her a quizzical look.

“What’s that expression about?” she asked.

“Well, this may be a perfectly normal event to you but I’m a stranger in these parts, so you wanna tell me what the fuck happened in there?” I asked.

“I don’t know, I suppose it was a gang thing,” Kit lied.

“A gang thing? Jesus. Does that happen in Boston a lot?” I asked.

“No, not really, but sometimes it does. It doesn’t usually come down to violence.”

“How come your dad had a gun?”

“Oh, he, like, runs a construction company, gets a lot of threats from the mafia and stuff, he’s allowed. But I don’t think this was anything to do with him. Just wrong place, wrong time.”

“Well, I must say you’re taking it pretty well, been in anything like this before?” I asked.

Kit said nothing but her face was hard and wary.

“It’s certainly a first time for me,” I said, as gentle a probe as I dared.

“First time for me, too,” she said and patted me on the leg.

She was being comforting but also taking the piss. Still, the physical contact was welcome. A lot of attractive women were finding me extremely tactile these days. That unwashed combination of prison cell, banana plantation, riot, sunblock, and cheap beer must be an irresistible mix.

“Terrifying,” I said, and Kit nodded. “I mean, Jesus, it was terrible, oh my God, it was really terrible,” I added, hamming it up.

But Kit was bored with me. She didn’t want to pretend that this was her virgin encounter with serious violence. She tried to look away. Her lip began to quiver and she looked for her fags. No, not bored, it was all just too much to deal with right now.

A good idea to change the subject.

“Well, you’re not going to tell me that that was the first car you ever broke into,” I said.

Kit pressed the button to open the Camry’s sunroof.

The scent of pollen.

The night air smeared with stars.

“No, I’m not going to tell you that,” she said softly and with a nervous laugh. “Let’s talk about you, though. Why are you over from Ireland?”

I had to be quiet now as I exited Route 1 and joined the 1A, via the 133. The 1A was a narrow two-lane road, not much traffic, that made its way through little white clapboard towns, swampy grasslands, boggy woods, and big wet marshes near the tidal shore.

“What are you doing in America?” Kit asked me again.

“Apart from beating up cops and saving girls?”

“Yeah, unless you do that full-time? You’re not Superman, are you?”

“Superman digs the police. I’m here just the same as everybody. Looking for work. Someone told me this morning that I might have a job opening up in Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts,” I said, hastily recalling what Samantha had told me of the second part of the plan.

“Doing what?”

“I’m not sure what exactly, probably bar.”

“Salisbury? Well, I don’t think you’ll have a problem with gunplay up there, it’s not exactly the most happening of places.”

“Hope not. Christ, twenty-five years in Belfast and I’m safe as houses, a week in America and I’m in a bloody gun battle.”

Kit said nothing. She rummaged in her bag and found a cigarette.

“Smoke?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Filthy habit,” she agreed and lit herself one.

“Not so much that, I had a hard time quitting; I was addicted and I don’t want to start again,” I said.

“I’m just a social smoker. Addictions are for the weak,” Kit announced with condescension.

I grinned inwardly and said nothing.

“At least everyone’s ok,” Kit said more to herself than me, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed that now her hand was starting to shake.

Well, yes, it had been scary, and after all she was little more than just a kid. No Mexican prisons on her résumé.

“Yeah, everyone seemed fine,” I agreed.

The woods thinned and the road went over a narrow perfumed river winding its way uneasily into the black sea.

“The feds had it all staked out,” she muttered to herself.

“I suppose so,” I concurred, staring at her.

“I should have known those guys were feds, they didn’t tip,”

she said.

“And I was suspicious of that guy with the assault rifle from the start,” I said.

“Why?”

“He was drinking lite beer,” I said. “Don’t you find in your professional capacity that lite beer drinkers are generally wankers?”

“Now you come to mention it,” Kit said, drawing in the tobacco smoke and relaxing a little.

We drove in silence and she smoked her cig, lit another, and was soon chill enough to become the proud amateur tour guide.

“See the road to that beach?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s where they filmed a Steve McQueen movie, the one with Faye Dunaway and he’s a bank robber.”

“Don’t know it but it sounds good,” I said.

“And down there is where the famous writer John Updike lives.”

“John Updike? Sounds like a porn name,” I said.

“Joan Updike would be more appropriate… Oh, and see over there, that’s where Jackie did a hundred and five in the Porsche and got caught by the state police.”

“Who’s Jackie?”

“My boyfriend,” Kit said breezily.

“Nice boy?”

“Who cares about nice?” she said in her best Madonna.

“Well, I’m sure he’s perfectly charming, but I can tell you one thing about him that you don’t know.”

“What?”

“He isn’t good enough for you,” I said.

Kit turned her head slightly and looked at me.

“Are you making a pass?” she asked with a smile.

My lack of an answer was my answer and it unsettled her in a way I found I liked a lot.

At Ipswich we approached a well-lit place called the Clam Box, where you could smell fried fish through the Toyota’s sunroof and broken window. Dozens of cars. Perhaps fifty people waiting outside.

“Look at that place, it must be good,” I said. “I’m hungry.

You wanna pull in?”

“Best fried clams in New England,” she said.

“Really?”

“You ever have a fried clam?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s the best. Huge lines all summer. Ted Williams goes there.”

“You want me to stop the car?” I asked, slowing down.

Kit shook her head.

“I should get home,” she said.

We drove on and as we got closer to Newburyport, farther from Boston, she regained more of her composure and beamed at me.

“Not good enough for me,” she mused. “Who do you think you are, mister?”

She seemed happier. I patted her knee and she didn’t seem to mind. I was impressed. I mean, I don’t how I would have taken it if someone had tried to assassinate my da half an hour ago, but I doubt I could have been as cool as this. Clearly, a tough wee soul lived under the late-teen veneer.

“Where you living in Salisbury?” she asked.

“Not sure yet, everything’s a bit up in the air.”

“How old are you?” she asked.

“I’m twenty-five, twenty-six in a month or so.”

“Twenty-six? You’re, like, seven years older than me.”

“So?”

“You’re totally an old man,” she mocked.

It made me wince a little. No one wants to hear something like that from a pretty girl and this girl was very pretty.

“How old are you? Nineteen?”

“Nearly twenty,” she said.

“You’re a mere child,” I mocked back.

She looked at me with fake annoyance.

“What’s your name? I know you said it but I forgot.”

“Sean.”

“No, your second name, I remembered the Sean.”

“Sean McKenna. Oh my goodness, what’s yours? In all the excitement I forgot to ask.”

“Katherine, but everyone calls me Kitty, or Kit; I used to hate it, oh my God, I used to hate it, but I kind of like it now. Kit, I mean.”

“I suppose it’s because of Kitty O’Shea,” I said.

“Who was that again? The name’s familiar,” Kit asked.

“You don’t know who Kitty O’Shea is?”

“No.”

“That’s what I was about talking about when I said you were a mere child,” I said.

She wanted to ask but she was too pissed off and I enjoyed watching her fume. We came to a road junction in the small town of Rowley. We could either go left or straight on.

“Where to?” I asked.

“Straight on, oh wait, I can hardly bring you home, Dad wouldn’t like that. What are we going to do with you? Where are you staying, in Salisbury?”

“Nah, for the moment I’m still back at the youth hostel in Boston.”

“I’m sorry, Dad wouldn’t like me to bring you home. Do you want to drop me and then you can take the car back to the city?”

“I don’t want to drive a stolen car, it’s freaking me out a bit, to be honest. I don’t want to be deported after my first week in America.”

“Ok, then, we should go straight on, we’ll go to the bus station in Newburyport. I definitely can’t leave this car at Dad’s house. Sonia can pick me up and you can get the bus back to Boston. I can’t drive you, I’m pretty messed from when you fell on top of me,” she said and winced at her own lame excuse.

“You don’t have to say thanks or anything,” I said.

She fought the urge to thank me, her punky little pride unable to accept the fact that she had been in danger and I’d helped get her out of it. We drove in complete silence for the next couple of minutes. Dark now, but I could tell that the landscape had become swampy. It smelled of marsh gas and seawater.

Mosquitoes and a million types of fly bouncing into the windshield and a sign that said “Newburyport, Plum Island- 5 Miles.”

“So who’s Ted Williams?” I asked, to resume the conversation.

“Are you joking?”

“No.”

“Only the greatest baseball player ever. The last man to hit over.400, war hero, batting champion again and again.”

“I thought Babe Ruth was the greatest player,” I said innocently.

Kit looked at me as if she were having a fit. Her nose had wrinkled up and she was plucking at the pointy strands of hair over her forehead.

“Are you trying to rile me up?”

“No.”

“This is a Red Sox town,” she said.

“So?”

“You don’t know about the Red Sox and the curse of the Bambino?”

“No.”

“Well, anyway, it’s a long story, No, No, Nanette and all that, suffice to say, we don’t talk about Babe Ruth. We don’t, in Massachusetts, talk about any Yankees players. It’s a rule.”

“Sorry, I don’t know much about baseball, nothing actually. We don’t play it in Ireland. I’ve only heard of Babe Ruth, oh, and Joe DiMaggio of course, because of Simon and Gar-funkel, and yeah, Lou Gehrig because of the disease. Oh aye, and Yogi Berra, you know because of the cartoon.”

“What did I tell you about Yankees players?” Kit snapped, her face turning bright red. She was working herself up into a little bit of a state. More of a state than immediately after a man had tried to bloody kill her da. Odd but a good thing perhaps- you keep your calm for the dangerous things, you lose your cool over the trivial.

“They were all Yankees? Jesus. Sorry. Who are the famous Red Sox?” I asked.

“I don’t walk to talk about it now,” Kit said, still a little ticked off. Petulant and furious, she looked even more fetching.

“I was just asking,” I said.

“Obviously you’re, like, totally ignorant about the whole business,” she said.

“I just said I was,” I protested.

“And you fucking are.”

“But that’s what I said.”

“And you were right.”

She turned away from me, so that I couldn’t see that she was laughing. I wanted to pull the car over, grab her, and kiss her.

It was completely the wrong thing to do, but also…

“Why are you slowing down? The bus station is still a couple of miles, come on,” Kit said.

True enough, we were getting close to civilization. A big town. The trees giving way to houses. Old wooden homes, some with signs saying that they dated back to the 1630s. Traffic started to increase and I could definitely smell the sea. We stopped at a red light. A sign to the right pointed to Rolfe’s Lane, Plum Island, and Plum Island Airfield.

“This is where you’d turn to take me home but Daddy really wouldn’t approve of me bringing you to the house, he just wouldn’t. Sorry,” Kit said.

“It’s ok,” I said. “So what do I do?”

“Go straight through town and then turn right at the bus station. There’s a big parking lot, we can dump the car, you can get a bus back to Boston, I’ll phone Sonia.”

“Who’s Sonia?” I asked.

“My dad’s new wife. I guess my stepmom now. My mom died two years ago. Well, not my real mom, my real mom is out there somewhere, it’s complicated.”

“Is she a wicked stepmom?”

“No, she’s nice. She doesn’t like Jackie very much, though.”

“Jackie-the boyfriend, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I like Sonia, sounds like she has good horse sense. I want to meet her.”

“No way, Dad wouldn’t like it.”

We drove along High Street. Enormous mansions to the left and right built during Newburyport’s boom times in the nineteenth century on profits from the whaling and the China trade.

We turned into the parking lot at the bus station, got out of the car. I started walking away.

“You really are naive, aren’t you?” she said, took off her jacket, and wiped down the steering wheel, the gear stick, the dash.

“Can’t leave prints,” she said.

I nodded, slapped my forehead.

We walked to the bus station.

A lovely night. Warm and the heavens packed with constellations and a waxing moon. We walked in silence across the parking lot and she led me into the station entrance. Not much of a bus station, more of a halt, a desk, a guy, a phone, a Coke machine, half a dozen chairs. She phoned Sonia while I asked the man at the desk about the next bus to Boston.

“Ten minutes, Boston and Logan,” he said, though it was more like tea meen, bosson, logue.

We went outside. Moths bewitched by the big arc lights over the car park, crashing into them and falling stunned to the ground.

“Let’s get away from shere,” I said and led her away from the lights and under an oak tree. We sat on one of the enormous roots. Kit’s hand reached round to mine. Her fingers were cool and delicate. She turned me to look at her.

“I’m like totally dating someone, you know… Jackie, but, but I want to give you this in case I never see you again,” she said.

She pulled me toward her and kissed me on the lips. I opened her mouth with mine and I found her tongue and we kissed there in the night under the moon and the arc lights.

She was young and beautiful. So alive. I kissed her and held her and put my hands on her bum, squeezed her ass, and ran my hand up her back and leaned down and kissed her small pert breasts.

A car honked.

“Sonia,” she said, gasping.

She broke away and stood and then came over and kissed me again.

“I never thanked you,” she said.

“You just did.”

“Yes,” she said, blushing happily.

“Will I see you again?”

“Sean McKenna from Ireland, I’ll remember that.”

Sonia honked the car horn again.

“I have to go. Sonia’s not one to gossip, but Jackie, you know, he can be a bit jealous. And I don’t want him to go after you. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Don’t worry, I avoid hurt,” I said.

She kissed me on the cheek.

She signaled Sonia, ran to the car, climbed in. Waved at me as she drove past.

I avoid hurt, I said to myself with a thin smile. Of course.

I’m at the other end of the stick. I’m the hurter. I’m the goddamn nimrod that could destroy all of them. Jackie, Gerry, Sonia, Seamus, and even the famous Touched McGuigan.

And you too, Kit. You too.

Aye.

Stay young, stay beautiful, stay away if you know what’s good for you.

I walked into the bus station, put fifty cents in the pay phone, and called Samantha at the safe house. Jeremy answered and told me to hold on.

“Are you ok?” Samantha asked. “How did it go?”

“Better and worse than we could have hoped,” I said. “I drove Kit home, but the bar was a disaster. For a start there were two assass-”

“Not on the phone,” Samantha snapped. “Where are you?”

“I’m in Newburyport, at the bus station.”

“Newburyport. Ok, let me think. Ok, we want to get to New York. What’s the number there?”

“Let me see, Newburyport 555-9360, the area code’s 978.”

“I’ll call you back in five minutes.”

“There’s a bus going back to Boston right now, do you want me to get on it?”

“I’ll call you back,” she said.

The bus came and went and the man behind the desk gave me a hangdog look.

The phone rang. It was Samantha. I was pissed off.

“Yeah, well, now we’re screwed, I just missed the last bus to Boston,” I said.

“No, no. This is what I want you to do. Get a taxi to the airport at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. There’s an 11:50 flight to New York. I will meet you there. Is that clear?”

“It’s clear,” I said, rubbing the tiredness from my eyes and hanging up.

The cab ride took an hour and cost seventy bucks. Samantha arrived at the airport the same time that I did, landing in a helicopter.

She bought us tickets for the last flight out to New York.

She found a quiet corner of the almost deserted airport and debriefed me.

“I heard all about it,” she said, shaking her head. “The FBI cocked it up. But at least you met Kit? Didn’t you? Our plan worked.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “I drove with her all the way to New-buryport. I think she liked me.”

“Excellent, it’s our way in,” she said. “And as expected, take a look at this.”

She handed me a faxed copy of tomorrow’s Irish Times. The banner headline occupied the whole front page: “IRA Announce Unilateral Cease-fire. Protestant Groups to Follow.”

I gave her back the fax and frowned.

Something didn’t sit right. I examined my feelings and found that I resented her for making me use Kit in this way. Regardless of what her father represented or what he’d done, I liked the girl.

“Come on, then, we’re going to a bureau training facility in New York,” Samantha said.

We boarded the plane. A Short 360 with the two of us and a couple of tired businessmen as the only passengers.

First class was empty and I switched to the right-hand side of the aircraft so I could follow the coast as we headed back down the Atlantic.

We took off steeply. The plane reached ten thousand feet.

Portsmouth lit up and very clear.

The harbor, the river, the highways.

Below us, farther down the coast, a long barrier island. I found a stewardess.

“Is that Plum Island, Massachusetts, down there by any chance?”

She called the captain on her little phone.

“Yes, it is,” she told me.

That’s where she lived. And Samantha was right-she was the way in. But the way had a name and she was beautiful and quick and I doubted that she was and ever could be my enemy.