Arkhangel : A Novel (2020) Read online

  When I was nineteen, he’d told me I’d been selected because I’d fulfilled his search for ‘a legally sane psychopath’. But you reap what you sow. So now we met in public. Neither of us was likely to shoot the other in broad daylight.

  His eyes flitted across the room and scanned the bar. He was unsettled. Anxious.

  ‘We don’t have much time,’ he pressed me. ‘Your check-in was incomprehensible and you look like shit.’ He smiled and took another swallow of stout. The Dublin in his accent thickened, taking the edge off his officer’s clip – the only clue he ever gave that his temper was about to blow. ‘So what the fuck happened?’

  ‘You never were one for small talk, I’ll give you that.’

  Frank sized me up and went to speak again, but thought better of it. I’d stretched my left forearm across the table. A trickle of blood had run down it and smudged the back of my hand red where it rubbed against my jacket cuff. I licked my right thumb and worried away at the stain. Beneath my sweater unsealed wounds leaked into my shirt.

  The first bullet to hit me – an armour-piercing 5.7 round – had grazed my left bicep. The shot that followed it had been slowed by the thick wooden chair I’d dived behind – burrowing into my left shoulder, and not through it. The lump of steel-tipped aluminium ground against my clavicle. Of the blood and mud that had fouled my face and clothes during the flight from the cottage, nothing remained. The hard, cold swim to the far shore had seen to that. I’d patched myself up as well as I could with the trauma kit in the Kia.

  As far as ambushes went, it had been spectacular. If I hadn’t bent over to pluck the note from the corpse’s fingers I’d have been shot dead then and there. The first rounds zipped over my neck. I’d launched myself over the cadaver and come up firing behind his chair, shooting directly into the flares of burning gas erupting from the end of the enemy pistol. I sent three massive lead slugs into … nothing.

  As I’d dived, my arm had been grazed. But it was as I came up again that I’d been hit in the shoulder – through the chair. I’d put my miss down to my wounds and kept firing. Shards of wood exploded from the frame and panels of the bedroom door. I’d fired again, high, low and wide, cutting a triangle of certain death in the darkness.

  But through the holes the SIG tore into the gloom of the other room had come a bright, deafening volley in reply. One round buzzed my ear. The other clipped my watch. Four more peppered the edges of my jacket. The bullets were streaking out of the holes I’d blasted. I’d turned side-on and fired again, trying to anticipate the movement of an assassin I couldn’t see but was almost close enough to touch. Yet the shots had kept coming.

  In the end I’d hurled myself towards the front door of the cottage, rolling and tumbling back on to the sodden turf, all the while pursued by a stream of armour-piercing pistol rounds.

  I’d made it to the car. But the drive from Donegal to County Mayo had not been a pleasant one – six hours at the wheel, changing cars first in Strabane and again in Monaghan. Of the other half-dozen rounds from the shooter’s little pistol that had drawn blood, only one had checked me at the time: a ricochet that had torn a neat furrow in my right thigh. Mercifully it hadn’t kneecapped me, or severed an artery.

  It was in Strabane, too, that I’d first looked properly at the banknote I’d pulled from the dead man’s fingers. The shock of unfolding it had been so unexpected that I’d sat and stared at it for a full five minutes before driving on. Crouched in the rain-soaked gully I’d imagined that, whatever the target might have been expecting, it wouldn’t have been me. But perhaps I was exactly whom they’d been expecting.

  I shivered at the thought of it.

  Frank couldn’t see the wounds, but I knew he’d already be calculating the blowback in London, and how to deal with it. I summoned my strength to play the game and lifted my glass.

  ‘Sláinte,’ I said. I drank deeply, gulping down the bittersweet black. As the alcohol relaxed me, I remembered I was exhausted. ‘Before “what happened” how about “who was he”?’

  Frank shifted in his chair.

  ‘You didn’t want to know who he was when you took the job.’ He picked up his pint again deliberately, holding it in front of his mouth. ‘So why do you want to know now?’

  ‘Cut the crap, can we? When I agreed, I didn’t know there’d be a one-man army waiting for me.’ Or a message, I thought. But I kept my mouth shut.

  Frank just shook his head like the ever-disappointed parent he pretended to be. It was a role he both loved and loathed in turn, mixing affection and admonishment as my father had done before he died.

  ‘Max,’ he hissed, ‘it’s your fucking job to know that. At least to anticipate that there might be. Anyway, he was hardly an army, was he? For Christ’s sake, what did you do – walk in whistling “Danny Boy”?’

  I took another slug of the stout.

  ‘Pretty much.’

  The barman topped off a pint for a tourist dripping in blue waterproofs at the bar. Outside it was, inevitably, still pouring down. There was no radio playing, but the rain and the river made their own music which filled the pub with a steady murmur. We could talk without being overheard or the fear of audio surveillance – which was why, I guessed, Frank had chosen it.

  He shifted in his seat – preparing, I knew, to give as many excuses as he was given.

  ‘OK,’ I conceded. ‘What happened is that I didn’t kill him.’ Frank put his glass down and leaned fractionally towards me. ‘I tried, but I couldn’t kill him.’ His eyes narrowed, as if by concentrating on my face he might discern the truth of what he was being told.

  ‘This is becoming somewhat of a speciality of yours, McLean.’

  ‘Oh, right. So it’s surnames now, is it, sir?’

  ‘Jesus, Max,’ he snapped, ‘you wanted the bloody job. You took the bloody job. And you agreed to do it on the information you had at the time. You turned down the command at Raven Hill. So, let me remind you what that means.’ He drew breath, reminding himself, perhaps, what it really did mean – for both of us. ‘You are given orders. By me. And you follow them. You aren’t a fucking boy scout. You’ve killed more people than most other operators have had hot dinners. So why is that piece of shit not dead?’ He breathed out hard and rolled his shoulders.

  I looked at him and smiled.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ He just about held on to his temper. ‘OK. His name was Chappie Connor. He was an Old IRA man. Pretty senior. Joined the Provos after Aldershot. He dropped off the radar in eighty-eight.’ Frank sat back in his chair and shook his head. ‘Max McLean getting his arse whipped by old fella like that. You daft cunt. Get you that desk to fly after all, shall I?’

  I didn’t rise to it. As messed up as the job looked, there was no way that Frank had sent me to kill a pensioner for something he did when I was still in short trousers. Almost no one even mentioned Operation Banner any more, no matter how hard it had been fought. Besides, half of PIRA’s commanders had been British agents. In the end we’d practically been fighting ourselves. I also knew Frank didn’t believe for a moment it was Connor who’d shot me. So the debrief game unfolds.

  ‘I’m the cunt? Jesus, what did he do – fuck your wife?’

  ‘What he did is need to know.’

  ‘And I don’t need to know.’

  ‘Bravo, Max. You’re getting the hang of this. And before you ask, it’s got nothing to do with the Troubles. He’s been out of that game as long as you’ve been in ours. He hasn’t even been back in the country for five fucking minutes.’

  I looked at Frank, but Frank was looking at the bar. The tourist sat and sipped his pint, lost in his phone.

  ‘Why me? Why task UKN? Why not give it to Grumpy Jock and the Wing?’ Frank turned his attention back to me and hesitated for a second. And then the bad penny dropped. ‘Because you couldn’t. No one knows, do they? Whitehall didn’t sanction it. And neither did DSF.’ Frank cocked his head to one side, which he always did when he was about to change th
e subject. When faced with anything he didn’t like, Frank either stepped on it or over it. True to form, he ignored me and ploughed on.

  ‘What do you mean that you tried to kill him but couldn’t? Stop enjoying yourself for a moment and explain to me why it is that Chappie Connor’s brains are not decorating a cottage in Cashel Glebe.’

  ‘They are,’ I said. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘But …’ Frank stopped short of demonstrating his ignorance. The nerves at the base of my skull tingled. I was getting the better of him, and it felt good. It almost made up for the grinding pain in my shoulder.

  ‘He was already dead, Frank. Someone had shot him through the heart, in the cottage at least a week ago.’ I put my right hand under my sweater; Frank’s jerked reflexively towards his open sports jacket. In this respect he’d never changed: threatened or confused, he reached, unfailingly, for his pistol. I removed my hand, slowly, and held it up. My index finger was bright red with blood. ‘There was another shooter. A very good shooter; probably the best I’ve gone up against. Ever gone up against.’

  Frank sat upright and put his hands where I could see them.

  ‘Go on.’

  I told him what had happened.

  ‘As I made it out the door, I threw in a Willy Pete. The thatch went up like a rocket.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Frank sighed. ‘You let off a phosphorus grenade? In the Republic? DSF is going to fucking love this. And outside?’

  ‘I made it to the skiff. The whole place was in flames but I was still taking fire from the side room.’

  ‘Second shooter?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. Whoever it was shot out the window and then shot up the skiff. Shredded it. I made it to the surf and swam from there.’

  Frank considered what I’d told him and fiddled with his pint glass.

  ‘Max, please tell me this shooter is dead and not about to join us for a drink.’

  ‘If he got out of that cottage, he’s a fucking magician. Check the sat feed. You’d see a runner clear as day. There’s no decent cover for miles. He fried.’

  ‘Huh,’ Frank grunted, and glanced towards the door. He looked suddenly defeated.

  ‘He had me pinned, Frank. Either I got in the water, or he got me. That simple.’

  ‘The hundred-dollar bill. You still got it?’ I’d been waiting for him to ask. My orders had been to terminate the target with extreme prejudice – and, specifically, to search the cottage – though for what, exactly, hadn’t been specified.

  ‘No,’ I answered immediately, putting my hands on the table and my eyes on Frank. ‘Lost it in the surf.’

  He wrinkled his nose and took the lie at face value. At Raven Hill we’d been taught subterfuge and sabotage in equal measure. We were all professional liars – though some of us forgot to remember we were no longer telling the truth.

  ‘OK. The bag. What was in the bag?’

  ‘Notes. Loose notes. US dollars. I only saw them for a second, but if they were all hundreds like the one in his hand? Ten grand? More, maybe.’

  ‘Well, there’s your answer,’ he said. ‘An answer, anyway. We … rather, I …’ he corrected himself, ‘have been following the money. That money.’

  ‘Yeah, well it looks like you weren’t the only one.’

  Frank ignored me and pressed on.

  ‘He arrived in the country nine days ago from Moscow, via Heathrow, and made a run for the cottage straight from Belfast City.’

  ‘Round and round the money goes, but where it starts only a Russian knows.’

  ‘That’s it. And now, thanks to you and Willy Pete, the only piece of evidence not burned to a crisp is currently floating to Iceland. So figuring out which Russian just got a whole lot harder.’

  ‘You know me,’ I said. ‘Always happy to help. Anyway, what’s special about it, the money?’ My stomach tightened.

  ‘It’s not the money that’s special. It’s what it’s being used for that’s special.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, though I didn’t. ‘What is it being used for?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘That makes it very special indeed, doesn’t it?’

  He cleared his throat and lowered his voice so that I could barely make out his words above the hiss of the rain.

  ‘All I know is that there’s rather a lot of it.’

  ‘How much is “a lot”?’

  ‘Well, if my calculations are correct, and this is back of a fag packet mathematics, you understand?’

  ‘Yeah, go on.’

  ‘It could be up to a billion dollars.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘To be honest, “fuck” doesn’t quite cover it.’

  ‘And no one knows what it’s for?’

  ‘Don’t be a bloody idiot. Of course someone knows.’

  ‘Best guess?’

  Frank shifted in his chair.

  ‘The money’s being handled by the Russians, but I don’t know where it’s from or who’s laundering it. Too big for the bratva.’ Frank took another sip of his drink. He was right: even if the Russian mafia’s ranks had been swollen by an oligarch, a billion dollars was out of their reach. ‘Could be a private bank. Could be a national bank, a government. All I know is that it’s being kept in cash and kept on the move.’

  Commander Frank Knight had talked himself into a brief, stunned silence. At the bar the tourist finished his drink and braved the rain. The chill of the downpour outside fanned into the saloon as the door banged shut behind him. The barman cleared away his empty glass and came over to ask if we’d be interested in something to eat. Frank smiled and shook his head, and ordered me a whiskey instead.

  ‘For the road. And make it a Jameson. I’m not wasting money on your Johnnie Walker rubbish.’ Then: ‘Get yourself sewn up and keep your bloody head down.’ Frank checked his phone and buttoned his jacket. ‘Seriously, Max, do what you’re best at. Go dark and stay dark. I mean it. No comms whatsoever. I’ll be in touch when I’ve worked out who Goldilocks is.’

  I touched my temple in a mock salute.

  ‘I’d concentrate on the bears if I were you, sir.’

  He snorted and stood up and shrugged himself into his trench coat. He made to leave, and then stopped.

  ‘Oh, and Max?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I don’t have a wife to fuck. The only people getting screwed here are you and me.’ And then he, too, disappeared through the door and into the deluge.

  I limped to the bar and drank the whiskey neat. It burned my throat but tasted good enough. There were a lot of questions to answer. Sure, I wanted to know about the cash. I wanted to know who the shooter was, too – and why he’d left the hundred-dollar bill behind. But, right then, there was only one question worth worrying about. If he was fast enough to sidestep every round I fired, and good enough to hit me through the holes my own bullets had opened up, why the fuck was I not already dead?

  3

  ‘You’re a bloody mess all right, Mac Ghill’ean.’

  I inhaled hard as Doc leaned across me and prodded the wound in my shoulder with a long metal grip.

  ‘What have you got yourself into this time?’ His tone was both concerned and offhand, talking to me as he always had done, with personal affection tempered by professional detachment. He was the only person I knew who could be simultaneously disdainful and caring. Maybe that went with the job. Or maybe he was just anticipating my lies.

  ‘Fishing accident,’ I said. I tried to smile as he probed further and ended up grimacing instead.

  ‘I see. Deep breaths now. That’s good …’ He trailed off – uninterested in my bullshit, distracted by the hunt for the little bullet still inside me.

  He’d been patching me up for more than half of his eighty years. My father, a military doctor, resolutely refused ever to treat me himself, though whether out of uncertainty at his own ability or in awe of Doc’s, I never knew. Either way, every sprained ankle, broken bone or bloodied nose was treated by Doct
or Jacob Levy.

  I’d never called him anything but ‘Doc’.

  His hands were neither as strong nor as steady as they’d once been, and the unruly mane of black hair that he’d once swept aside to wink at the officers’ wives had receded to a brilliant white fuzz cresting what was otherwise now a brown, bald pate. But his green eyes still flashed wickedly in the lamplight, and when he smiled you still could see why he’d left half a century of broken hearts behind him.

  And one inside him.

  He’d carried a torch for my mother until the day she died. The flame still burned, too, and all the more brightly now that time had erased the certainty of who she really was and blunted the truth of what he’d become. When she waded into the lake behind our house with stones in her pockets, he’d dived into the depths of the whiskey bottle. It was too much for his wife. After she left him, he’d retired from Wicklow to a Victorian pile teetering on the shores of Lough Conn. No phone, no electricity – but plenty of eau de vie. I’d been lucky to find him sober after sunset.

  I hadn’t seen him for three years. It had never been safe to visit and it wasn’t safe to be there, then – for either of us. But I could no more check myself into St Joseph’s Hospital in Ballina than I could leave the wounds I’d sustained in the cottage untreated. Just as he always had done, he helped me unconditionally. I supposed that keeping me alive kept the memory of my mother alive, too.

  ‘Nearly there, now. Tricky little beggar this one. Tiny, isn’t it?’ Doc probed deeper. I breathed out, hard.

  He knew I was putting us both at risk. All those years and my mother still ruled his heart. One day it would be at the cost of his head. I couldn’t decide if that was admirable or absurd – but the weakness it created worked to my own advantage: if anyone came looking for me, Doc would deny knowing me on pain of death.