Veil of Civility

Chapter Forty-Two

"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.