22

New Rockford, Connecticut

Frank Pagan drove through the business district of New Rockford, noticing banks and insurance offices and real estate brokers as well as the usual fastfood franchises with signs that created an ungodly jumble along the road. The sign that welcomed you said New Rockford had a population of some 57,540 souls.

Beyond the business district were suburbs of frame houses. Here and there a flagpole protruded from a house or stood unadorned in the middle of a lawn. There was a sense of neatness and quiet patriotism here, an orderly world well-preserved. But then appearances changed, and the grids of the streets yielded to pockmarked dead ends, alleys, abandoned warehouses, weeds, after which woodland stretched away for mile after mile.

Pagan parked the Cutlass outside an industrial park and studied the streetmap he’d bought in the town. He made a circle with a ballpoint pen, folded the map, drove the car on to the thruway and continued until he came to Leaf Road, which was the exit he wanted. It began promisingly enough, then dwindled to a one-vehicle thoroughfare with a barbed-wire fence running along one side. Beyond, punctuated by the occasional meadow, were tree-covered hills, which seemed to gather all the available sunlight and squander it, so that the prevalent impression was of shadows and dank places. It wasn’t an encouraging landscape.

When a house came in view, Pagan slowed the car. It was a large, ungainly house, set some way from the road at the end of a driveway. It was overlooked by a series of small hills. There was no number anywhere, no name. If this was the wrong house, then he would simply ask directions and leave.

He turned the car into the driveway.

Before he had gone twenty feet a man wearing a dark suit and black glasses emerged from a clump of shrubbery and waved him to stop. Pagan braked. He had an uncomfortable moment when it crossed his mind that the man might be associated with the FBI – but then he realised he was being paranoid. Zuboric couldn’t have traced him here. How could he?

Pagan rolled his window down and smiled. He was about to ask if somebody called Dawson lived here when he saw a gun in the man’s hand. A very large gun, trained directly on Pagan’s forehead.

The man, who was built like a weightlifter, reached for the car door and opened it and Pagan got out with absolutely no reluctance at all. A second figure, somewhat taller than the first but with exactly the same kind of shades, appeared at Pagan’s side. Pagan was expertly frisked, then pushed face first against the side of the Olds. Whoever they were, these characters had done a certain amount of frisking in their time. Pagan wondered how long it might take him to reach his own gun, if the situation called for it. His pistol was in the glove compartment and too far away. It was a maxim of his that a gun was only useful in direct proportion to its proximity. And his was presently redundant.

‘Get his ID,’ the taller man said.

The other, waving the gun near Pagan’s face, plunged his hand inside Pagan’s jacket and took out his wallet.

The taller man reached for the wallet and flipped it open. ‘He’s a long way from home,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ the other man said. ‘You ever seen ID like this before, Marco?’

Marco stepped so close Pagan could smell his aftershave. ‘Never did,’ he said.

‘Me neither.’ The wallet was flipped shut. ‘We got absolutely no way of knowing if it’s authentic.’

‘I came to see Dawson,’ Pagan said.

Marco laughed. ‘They all say that, don’t they, Chuckie?’

‘Mr. Dawson doesn’t just see people who wander in off the street, fella,’ Chuckie said.

‘Unhappily, I didn’t have time to make an appointment.’

‘Call the cops,’ Marco said.

‘Before you call anybody, you better tell Dawson I’m here, because he’s going to be damned unhappy with you if he doesn’t get to hear what I have to say.’

Marco came closer. He pushed his knee into the back of Pagan’s leg, pressing deep into the crook. Pagan was obliged to bend under the pressure. He loathed being shoved around, and if it had been Marco alone he might have taken a swing.

‘I don’t have the time nor the inclination for this kind of intimacy, Marco.’ Pagan spoke in his best accent, trying hard to sound the way Foxie did. He wasn’t very good with upper-class accents and he wouldn’t have convinced anyone in the gentlemen’s clubs along Pall Mall or Piccadilly, but neither Chuckie nor Marco could tell he was faking it. It was a strange thing about Americans. They had a kind of self-imposed sense of inferiority, possibly some old colonial hangover, that put them in awe of Oxford tones, as if the accent of a BBC newscaster were the way God talked. Pagan had noticed this phenomenon before. It worked now, at least to the extent of Marco removing the pressure from Pagan’s leg.

‘Buddy, you and a thousand other guys come here wanting to see Mister Dawson,’ Chuckie said. ‘Your fancy ID isn’t going to cut it here, bozo.’

Pagan turned around and faced the pair. ‘Look. Take my ID card. Show it to him. Tell him it has to do with certain Irish funds. Do that for me.’

‘Irish funds?’

‘You heard me.’

Marco reached out and took Pagan’s ID. He flexed the powder-blue plastic card between thumb and forefinger, as if he meant to snap it in half. Then he glanced at Chuckie, who shrugged. It was a bad moment for Pagan. If either of these characters took the trouble to run his name through a computer, and if he was already imprisoned in the complicated circuitry of the FBI’s electronic brain, then he was in deep trouble. The only thing to do was to be insistent with Marco and Chuckie. And authoritative, if he could summon the dignity for a decent performance.

‘If Dawson doesn’t want to see me, I’ll be happy to let you turn me over to any cops you like,’ he said. He sounded as if he had a plum in his throat. ‘But I know he’ll want to talk to me. It’s up to you.’

Marco hummed. He looked at Chuckie again. The black glasses glinted, four sombre discs.

‘I’ll take your card inside, fella,’ he said. ‘But Chuckie here is going to keep his gun pointed right at your brain, understand?’

Pagan nodded. Marco, who obviously didn’t want Pagan to think he was a softie just because he’d consented to something, performed his knee trick again, only this time he pressed so hard that Pagan had to go down on all fours.

‘Understand?’ Marco asked.

‘I understand,’ Pagan replied. He felt like a barnyard animal pawing earth.

‘If he moves shoot him, Chuckie.’

Chuckie said he’d be glad to. Pagan rose slowly, watching Marco go off in the direction of the house, which was very still, silent, the windows reflecting the glacial sun. He moved his feet in an uneasy manner. Marco could at this very moment be running his name across the telephone wires and into the ear of a computer operator. That would be the end of this solo performance, Pagan thought. He brushed little streaks of mud from his overcoat and waited.

Marco appeared in the doorway of the house. He waved an arm. Chuckie, who still had his gun trained on Pagan, jerked his head.

‘Move,’ Chuckie said.

Pagan moved. Chuckie walked behind him. When they reached the house Marco said, ‘He’ll see you.’

Pagan smiled. Marco ushered him inside and across the hallway with a great show of reluctance. Outside a closed door Marco paused and slipped off his black glasses and stared at Pagan with eyes that were almost the same colour as the lenses.

‘We’ll be right here, Pagan,’ he said. ‘Right on this spot.’

‘Of course,’ Pagan said.

‘Go in.’

Pagan pushed the door open and stepped inside a large sitting-room which was furnished in a fussy Victorian way, heavy furniture and belljars, and which was scented with violets. Children’s toys and books were scattered on the floor, as if there had been small untidy intruders in the museum. A blind was drawn halfway down on a window, tinting the room a faint yellow. The man who stood by the fireplace cleared his throat and looked at Pagan unsmilingly. Kevin Dawson was taller than his photographs suggested. He held Pagan’s ID card in one hand.

‘Let’s get one thing straight. I don’t know anything about any Irish funds,’ Dawson said.

The defence of ignorance. Kevin Dawson talked like a man conscious of a hidden tape-recorder, somebody who wanted to leave an exonerating cassette for posterity. He understood Dawson’s attitude – after all, the brother of the President of the United States couldn’t confess to a complete stranger that he had any involvement with the finances of the IRA. There were laws against the unreported export of huge sums of cash. And Kevin Dawson couldn’t be seen to break the law.

‘So why did you agree to see me?’ Pagan asked.

‘Your ID made me curious,’ Dawson said. ‘But if you’ve come here to question me, I think you’re going to be very frustrated.’

‘I’m not the one who’s going to be frustrated,’ Pagan said. He moved to the window and looked out beyond the trees at the surrounding hills. It was a view he found depressing and somehow fascinating in a melancholic way. He rapped his fingertips on the pane of glass. ‘I don’t give a damn one way or another about IRA money or the misguided people who collect the stuff. I’m only interested in Jig, who is either going to come here looking for you, or else is on his way to a place called Roscommon to see Harry Cairney. I’m guessing here, but I may be completely wrong. If he does come here, I want to be somewhere nearby. I don’t want your buffoons out there getting him first.’

‘Hold on, Pagan. You’re losing me. I don’t know anything about the IRA. I don’t know who Jig is. The only connection I have with Ireland is that I’m third-generation American–Irish. That and the fact I’ve visited the place a couple of times. Nothing more.’

Pagan smiled. Dawson’s deadpan expression wasn’t very successful. The man was palpably uneasy. If he was in control of himself, it was only with a great effort. There was sweat on his upper lip.

‘Regardless of what you say, Jig’s going to get here sooner or later. He wants his money back, and he’s not going to be in the most pleasant frame of mind by this time,’ Pagan said.

Kevin Dawson made a small gesture with one hand, a flutter. ‘I don’t know anything about any money.’

‘That’s what you say. But Jig isn’t going to believe that one.’ Pagan glanced through the window again. This whole side of the house was exposed to the hills. And something about those hills kept drawing him. The shaded pockets in the landscape, the sunlight. They had a certain mysterious quality, similar to the landscape of the English Lake District which Pagan had always found brooding and hostile. A landscape for poets and manic depressives.

But it wasn’t just those qualities that made him keep looking up there. He was thinking about something else. He placed an index-finger on the glass and drew a tiny circle, which he peered through as if it were the sight of a gun.

‘Good view,’ he said.

‘Some people think it’s too severe,’ Dawson remarked.

Dawson moved to the mantelpiece and adjusted a photograph. Pagan saw that it was of two girls, presumably Dawson’s daughters. Dawson turned around, faced Pagan. ‘This Jig,’ he said, then paused a moment. ‘Do you have any hard evidence he’s in this vicinity? Or is it only guesswork?’

‘Nicholas Linney wouldn’t think it was guesswork,’ Pagan said.

‘Who?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Pagan glanced back up into the hills. Sunlight turned to deep shadow in the high hollows. Dawson was a very poor liar. He didn’t have the flair for it. Therefore he had no future in politics, Pagan thought. ‘How did you get into it in the first place?’

‘Into what?’

‘You know what I’m talking about. How did you get into the patriot game?’

‘When did I stop beating my wife?’ Dawson said. ‘It’s that kind of a question.’

Pagan felt a small flare of anger. People like Dawson played at being Irish. They bought their way into it from the safety of their big houses in America. They sent money as if they were investing in offshore developments. Well, their houses just weren’t so safe any more. ‘Do you have any idea of the sheer human misery your money can buy in Ireland? Do you know what explosive devices can do to a person? Have you ever seen the victim of a machine-gun? Or did you just get caught up in the romance of it all?’ And Pagan made the word ‘romance’ sound obscene. ‘If people like you didn’t send money there in the first place, maybe there wouldn’t be weapons, and maybe we’d be moving in the direction of some kind of peace. Who knows?’

‘There are always going to be weapons,’ Dawson said.

Pagan shrugged. ‘Here’s the funny consequence of it all, Dawson. If you run into Jig, you’ll be looking directly down the barrel of a gun that you probably paid for yourself. How does that thought grab you?’

‘Is your lecture over?’ Dawson asked.

‘It’s over,’ Pagan replied. Ease off, he told himself. You’re here looking for Jig, not to moralise on terror in Ireland. He felt a cord of tension at the side of his head. There was stress in him, and fatigue, and he felt like a traveller who wasn’t sure he’d come to the right place anyway. No, he couldn’t afford to go off at tangents like that. He’d come too far and he had the feeling, that astonishing lightbulb of intuition, that he was on the right track.

‘I’m sorry if I can’t help you,’ Dawson said. ‘Maybe you’ll have better luck at the other place you mentioned.’

‘You mean Roscommon?’ Pagan asked.

‘I believe that’s what you said. Roscommon.’

‘Where Harry Cairney lives. But you don’t know that name either, do you?’

Dawson shook his head. ‘I know it in a political context. That’s all.’

‘And I suppose Jock Mulhaney means nothing to you?’

‘He’s some kind of union figure,’ Dawson said.

‘You might say that.’

Dawson stepped towards the door. He pulled it open, looked at Pagan with a smile that was almost all desperation. He couldn’t be honest, couldn’t admit his connections. Denials were vouchers for limited amounts, valid for limited durations. And no matter how hard Dawson denied his involvement, it wasn’t going to make a damn bit of difference to Jig. If Jig came here and somehow sneaked past Mannie and Moe outside, if he got into the house and confronted Dawson, he wasn’t going to be even remotely convinced by Dawson’s squeaky claims of innocence.

‘Good luck, Pagan,’ Kevin Dawson said.

‘I wish you the same, only more of it.’

Pagan stepped out into the hallway where the two bodyguards were waiting for him. Behind him, the door of the room closed, and Kevin Dawson was gone.

‘We’ll see you out,’ Marco said.

‘No need.’ Pagan headed to the door. Chuckie and Marco tailed him anyhow.

Outside in the thin light Pagan studied the view of the hills again. They seemed to him the most interesting aspect of his visit to this place.

From the place where he lay concealed in the hills, Patrick Cairney stared down at the house below. He saw Frank Pagan walk to his car.

Frank Pagan. Always Frank Pagan. Always one step behind him. He wondered where Pagan’s information came from. Maybe Mulhaney had talked. Maybe Mulhaney had told Pagan the same thing as he’d told Cairney. Kevin Dawson took the money. Dawson is the one.

Ten minutes ago he’d seen Pagan arrive. There had been a confrontation with the two men who guarded the house, then Pagan had gone indoors. Had he come to warn Kevin Dawson about Jig? Was that it?

Now he saw Pagan get inside the car, then drive along the narrow road. Cairney followed him with the binoculars until he was out of sight. He swung the glasses back towards the house and tried to concentrate on how he was going to get inside. He had to get past the two guards. How, though? And how long was it until nightfall now? His body was cold, and he felt cramped. He lowered the binoculars and looked along the ridge, his eye sweeping the wintry trees and the dead grass that swayed limply in the wind. He couldn’t concentrate. His mind kept slipping away from him and the wind made him shiver.

There were spectral images. His father trapped under an oxygen tent like something immersed in ectoplasm. He couldn’t shake this one loose. Harry Cairney, close to the end of his life, propped up inside an oxygen tent with tubes attached like tendrils to his body. There was a terrifying sadness inside Patrick Cairney, and a sense of loss – it came from the thought that he might never see Harry again. It didn’t matter whether he loved his father or not. It didn’t matter whether he even respected the man. Like any son facing the imminent death of his father, he felt he was about to lose some essential part of himself.

One of the men below stood against the hood of the car and smoked a cigarette. The other wandered round the side of the house, then returned. They stood together, both now leaning against the car, and they presented an impenetrable obstacle between Cairney and the house. Cairney rubbed his eyes. He focused on the house, the two men, but still the landscape wouldn’t yield up an easy way to get inside that place down there.

Think. Think hard. The money might be inside that house and you’re lying up here wondering about your father and your thoughts won’t make a damn bit of difference whether he lives or dies.

His truant attention strayed again, and he was thinking about Roscommon once more, seeing Celestine sit by the sick bed of his father. Maybe she spoke softly to the old man. Maybe she was reading to him. Or perhaps she just sat there watching him motionlessly, her hands in her lap and her lovely face expressionless and her hair pulled back so that she looked gaunt and distressed and prepared for the ultimate grief.

Cairney focused on the men below. His head pounded now, and his hands, when he lowered the binoculars, shook visibly. He sat back against the side of the hollow, wondering at the responses of his own body. It was as if strange blood flowed in his veins and the heart that pumped so loudly in his chest were not his own. He was seized with the feeling that he shouldn’t be here in this place at all, that he should never have been sent from Ireland unless it was to kill a specific target, a certain individual. Unless it was to do the very thing he did best, better than anyone else.

Why didn’t you send somebody else, Finn? Was your precious Jig the only candidate?

He crawled to the lip of the hollow. From where he stood he could see almost the whole length of the hills. Slopes swooped down into shadows where the sun didn’t go. These shadowy places, like sudden pools of unexpected water, troubled him. He wasn’t quite sure why.

And then, because he understood how to read landscapes, how to tell human movement from the motion of the wind, how to feel when a landscape had been subtly altered, he knew.

New York City

At ten minutes past two, the Reverend Ivor McInnes entered the office of a car rental company on East 38th Street. He spoke to the clerk at the desk, a young man with red hair arranged around his skull like a corona. McInnes reserved a 1986 Continental because he liked the idea of travelling in some comfort. He looked at the desk-clock as the clerk filled out the various papers. He was glad it was one of those digital affairs. He didn’t think he could tolerate the idea of watching the agonising movements of a second hand. It was twenty past two by the time the young man completed the copious paperwork. McInnes said he’d pick the car up around six. He had to return to his hotel first and pack.

He left the agency at approximately two-thirty. He thought of Seamus Houlihan and the others as he stepped out on the street. They’d be taking up their positions by this time.

He walked slowly along the street, looking now and then in the windows of stores. He felt the way he had done before White Plains, except it was heightened somehow.

In about twenty minutes, if the information he had received was correct – and he had absolutely no reason to doubt it, because of its reliable source – the vehicle would be making a turn into the isolated stretch of road where Houlihan and his men were waiting.

Twenty minutes.

Twenty long minutes.

McInnes reached the intersection of Thirty-Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue. He looked in the window of a jewellery store. Rings, necklaces, bracelets. It would take his mind off it all if he went inside and lost himself in browsing through the glittering array. Nineteen minutes. He wandered between the glass cases, tracked by a sales clerk who insisted on pointing out the merits of this or that stone.

McInnes stopped in front of an emerald ring. He asked the clerk to bring it out and show it to him. The clerk said it was an excellent piece and any woman would be delirious to have it. Ivor McInnes held the stone up to the light. Its greenness was stunning and deep. McInnes closed his hand over the ring. The stone felt very cool against his skin.

‘I’ll have it,’ he said. Eighteen minutes.

‘Excellent choice,’ the clerk said. ‘Cash or credit card?’

‘Cash.’

The clerk, who was a small man with eyes that themselves resembled gems, smiled. ‘Is it a gift, sir? Shall I gift-wrap it?’

‘Why don’t you,’ McInnes said. As he watched the clerk cut gift-paper with long scissors, he stared across the floor to where there was a clock display. All kinds of timepieces hung on the wall, every last one of them showing a different time. The effect was of stepping outside the real world and into one where the passage of seconds and minutes and hours couldn’t be measured with any semblance of accuracy. McInnes had to look away. Real time was important to him now.

Seventeen minutes.

He tried not to think about time. He tried to put it out of his mind. But it kept returning to him and his nervousness increased. Sixteen minutes.

Sixteen minutes and it would all be over. And by tomorrow, if everything went as planned, he’d be out of the country entirely.

New Rockford, Connecticut

John Waddell crouched in the shrubbery. He held an M-16 against his side. He glanced out across the clearing at the place where Rorke and McGrath were concealed, but he couldn’t see them. He felt Houlihan tap him lightly on the shoulder and he turned. The big man was offering him something, and it took Waddell a moment to realise it was a stick of chewing gum. Waddell shook his head.

‘Helps you relax,’ Houlihan said.

Waddell looked through the barren trees. He had the odd feeling that he wasn’t here, that some other entity had been substituted for him and that the real John Waddell was back in Belfast, strolling across Donegal Square and wondering where he’d stop for a pint of Smithy’s. But Houlihan nudged him, and the illusion disintegrated.

‘Are you all right, Waddy?’ the big man asked.

‘Fine,’ John Waddell said.

‘Gun loaded?’

Waddell nodded. He looked down at the M-16 in his hands.

Seamus Houlihan, who also held an M-16, tapped his fingers against the stock. This drumming increased Waddell’s anxiety. He looked up at the sky. Clouds drifted in the region of the sun.

Houlihan looked at his wristwatch. ‘Two forty,’ he said. ‘Ten minutes.’

Waddell tightened his grip on his gun. What he hoped for was that something unexpected might happen and that the exercise would have to be postponed. A freak storm, for example. Or the appearance of other people. But this was such a damned lonely place he couldn’t imagine anybody coming here by choice. And what kind of vehicle could it possibly be that made a stop here anyhow? He tried to slacken his grip on the gun but his fingers remained tight and stiff.

Houlihan made a sniffing sound. He wiped the back of his sleeve over the tip of his nose and cleared his throat. Waddell thought for a moment that he detected a certain jumpiness in Seamus, but he decided he was wrong. The big man never showed any unease at times like this. He was always cool. Always in control. Chewing gum, looking composed – Jesus, Seamus might be contemplating a stroll on a Sunday afternoon. Waddell felt a branch brush his face, and he was startled.

‘You’re a twitchy wee fucker,’ Houlihan said.

‘I’m okay,’ Waddell replied.

‘Look, there’s nothing to be nervous about. Point the bloody gun when I tell you, and fire. That’s all. Nothing to it.’

Ten minutes, Houlihan had said.

Waddell wondered how long ten minutes could be. He glanced at Seamus, then he looked through the trees. ‘I wish to God we were out of here,’ he said. ‘Out of this whole bloody country.’

‘Soon.’ Houlihan removed his chewing-gum and flicked it away.

‘How soon?’

Seamus Houlihan, keeper of secrets, didn’t answer. He checked his gun, traced a finger along the barrel. What did it take to be that relaxed? Waddell wondered. What kind of ice-water ran in Seamus’s veins?

‘Five more minutes,’ Houlihan said.

Eternity. Waddell wanted to urinate. He concentrated on his weapon, wishing it was lighter, less of a burden. The weight of the thing made it all the more menacing.

‘Four,’ Houlihan said.

By Jesus, he was going to count the bloody minutes down! Waddell tried not to listen. Houlihan could keep his countdown to himself. Waddell preferred to hear nothing.

‘Three.’

Waddell saw McGrath’s face briefly across the clearing. Then it was gone. Momentarily a cloud masked the sun.

Two.

In the distance there was the sound of a vehicle.

‘It’s early,’ Houlihan said, swinging his weapon into a firing position. ‘Get ready.’

The sound grew. Waddell held his gun at his side and waited. The vehicle seemed to strain, gears clanking and grinding, as it came closer. Waddell stared beyond the clearing but he couldn’t see the vehicle yet because there was a bend in the road. As the motor laboured and whined, the noise grew. Waddell gripped his gun tightly.

‘Ready,’ Houlihan said.

Waddell shook his head. No, he thought.

No.

‘Ready,’ Houlihan said again.

Waddell – baffled by the sense of unreality he suddenly felt, almost as if time and motion had ceased to exist and the whole world had frozen in its flight-path and he was the only person left alive – stared at the vehicle as it appeared in front of him. It was a big yellow schoolbus, and it was coming to a dead stop in the clearing, and the faces pressed to the windows were those of children, and they were smiling even as Houlihan stood up in the shrubbery and levelled his weapon at them.

Frank Pagan drove two miles from the house of Kevin Dawson, then turned the Oldsmobile off the road and down a dirt track that led between the wooded hills. When the car would go no further, when the track had become too narrow and rutted and overgrown with weeds, he got out, taking his gun from the glove compartment. It had been a long time since he’d climbed any hills and he wasn’t sure his physical condition was terrific, but he was going up anyway. He went between the trees, straining over fallen logs and mounds of wet, dead leaves that had been buried under snow since fall. Here and there patches of old snow, hard as clay, still clung to the ground.

Halfway up the hill Pagan had to stop and catch his breath. He leaned against a tree trunk. The sun, trapped between spidery branches, was a frozen, listless globe. When he’d been staring at these hills from the window of Kevin Dawson’s living-room, Pagan had imagined that this landscape was the perfect one for Jig. There were pockets in which to hide, trees and shrubbery for cover. If Jig wanted to observe the Dawson household, what more suitable place from which to do it? He knew that if he were Jig, this was the kind of spot he’d have come to without hesitation. But that was only a guess. Just the same, Pagan felt he had nothing to lose by climbing up here, save perhaps the future use of lungs and legs.

He climbed again. There were no tracks, no pathways, only the sullen trees pressing against him and crisp twigs cracking underfoot. His breath hung on the air like cobwebs. Up and up and up. Any higher, he thought, and he’d need an oxygen mask, a Tibetan guide, and dried food for a week. He could see the road below and, off to his left about a mile, Kevin Dawson’s house, which looked isolated in the landscape. Ahead of him, running the entire length of the range, was more woodland. He paused, looking down the slopes. There were a thousand places where Jig could hide and wait for the right time to make a move on Dawson’s house.

Pagan blew on his hands for warmth. A gnawing wind had begun to rush across the slopes, carrying smells of moss and dead-wood and rotted leaves. He moved through the trees, gazing down every so often. From certain places the Dawson house couldn’t be seen because trees obscured the view. But here and there, in clearings, every detail of the structure could be observed in miniature. Windows, eaves, smoke rising from a chimney.

It was a lifeless landscape, almost morbid in its quiet and lack of colour. He walked a little further, then stopped again, wishing he had paid more attention to the art of tracking and reading signs when he’d been a Boy Scout. How many stories could a crushed leaf or a broken branch tell you if you knew how to interpret the damn things? A decent Boy Scout could find a whole bloody library of information in this place. But Pagan, a city boy, had never had any great affinity for rustic places.

He kept moving. The wind came up, blowing directly into his face and shaking all kinds of sounds out of the trees. Pagan turned his face away from the fullness of the blast, which whipped his hair and his coat.

Then the wind died and the place was still again.

Pagan moved quietly. Underfoot, dead leaves crackled, frail wood popped. It was impossible to stir in these woods without announcing yourself.

He came now to a hollow in the land, a scoop masked by crisscrossing branches. Somebody could conceal himself successfully in such a place. Pagan looked beyond the hollow. There, immediately below on the other side of the road, was Kevin Dawson’s house. The perfect view. But the hollow was empty and still.

He went down carefully, his gun held forward.

He didn’t register the noise he heard. It was a whisper on the far edges of his awareness. He thought it might have been an animal, a rabbit emerging from a thicket. He was about to turn his face around when he heard the voice say, ‘Toss the gun a few feet to your side, Pagan. If you don’t, you get a bullet in the back of your head.’

Pagan threw the gun a couple of feet away. He saw Jig come forward to pick it up.

‘I heard you coming. I heard you coming for the last twenty minutes.’

Pagan stared at his own gun in the man’s hand. Fool, he thought. You should have finished reading Baden-Powell’s Scouting For Boys. You should have studied tracking and bent blades of grass and little heelmarks in the soil and all the rest of it.

Jig said, ‘A brass band would have made less noise. Put your hands in the air where I can see them, then have a seat.’

Pagan did as he was told. He sat down inside the hollow and stared at Jig, who had a gun in either hand. Pagan wondered if this were the place, this lonely ridge overlooking a lonely house, where he would die.

Until he saw the yellow school bus rolling towards the clearing and understood he was meant to open fire on the vehicle as soon as it stopped, John Waddell had never thought of himself as a terrorist. In his world, terrorists were always Arabs who blew up airports and planes, or IRA fanatics who planted bombs inside supermarkets and pubs. But suddenly, as if he had been given a stunning insight into his own condition, he realised he was no better than any of the thugs who committed these outrages. He wasn’t a soldier in a credible struggle, he wasn’t in the glorious vanguard of Ulster freedom, he wasn’t even a man, because a man didn’t fire an automatic weapon at a crowd of kids in a school bus. It was a monster’s work. All the sensations that had been depressing him since White Plains became more strident, more compelling. What business did he have firing a fucking gun at a bunch of kids?

He watched the bus pull into the clearing and stop, and he heard the hiss of the automatic door as it slid open. He was conscious of a light blue car behind the bus, smoke from its exhaust rising into the frigid air. There was a man inside the car although Waddell hardly registered this fact because he was drawn to the faces of the children at the windows. A boy of about eleven appeared in the door of the bus, satchel over his shoulder. He was about to step down from the doorway but he hesitated, turning to say something to a friend. There was laughter and a good-natured insult and somebody tossed a rolled-up ball of paper at the boy’s head.

Houlihan, thus far unseen by the kids in the bus or the driver of the blue car, was standing with the M-16 in firing position. Waddell was screaming inside. He wanted to stop this whole thing before it started, but now Seamus Houlihan was snapping at him to stand up and start firing, and the hell of it was he couldn’t move, didn’t want to move, wanted to remain crouched in the damned shrubbery and make believe this was all a nightmare. The kids all had the same face, and it was the face of John Waddell’s own dead son, and he couldn’t bear the image.

He looked up at Houlihan, and he shook his head.

‘Get up. Get up on your fucking feet, God damn you.’

Waddell stared at the big man with his mouth open.

‘Fucking eedjit,’ Houlihan said. He poked Waddell in the chest with the barrel of the weapon and John Waddell understood that Seamus, his friend, his avenging angel, his mentor, would blow him away without even thinking about it.

Houlihan pulled the gun back, swung around, and opened fire. From the bushes at the other side of the clearing Rorke and McGrath began their volley as well. Waddell watched in white terror as the windows of the yellow bus exploded. He heard the shrieks of children and saw the boy in the doorway fall forward, lying half-in and half-out of the vehicle. He saw the driver of the vehicle slide out of her seat and disappear in a sudden spray of blood. The firing continued, on and on and on, until there wasn’t a window remaining on the bus and the yellow panels had been riddled with holes. But now Waddell understood something else. The man in the light blue car was shooting back. He’d crawled out of the car and was concealed now behind the vehicle, a pistol in his hand, and every so often he’d send a shot into the trees. Houlihan changed his magazine and started firing again. Waddell stared at the bus. It was shattered, a great yellow shell, and now there were no faces at the windows, only jagged slices of glass hanging in frames at angles that defied gravity.

Houlihan made a roaring sound. A battle-cry. He was firing at the blue car with a savage determination. Waddell heard the shots ricochet off the metal. Then he stared down at the gun in his hands. He realised he should have shot Houlihan. It was the sane thing to do. He should have turned the weapon on the big man before all this started, but now it was too damned late.

Houlihan grunted, fired, his whole body shaking from the relentless kick of the gun. Waddell saw the blue car catch fire and explode all of a sudden. One moment it was there, the next it had gone up in a cloud of flame and smoke. And then there was a secondary explosion, louder than the first, and the clearing was showered with glass and plastic. The driver of the car lay face down some yards from the yellow bus.

It was over.

The clearing was silent. The whole afternoon, so sulphuric and cold, was terribly silent.

John Waddell dropped his weapon. He felt Houlihan grab him and pull him to a standing position. He was cuffed roughly by the big man, stinging blows that made his eyes water and brought blood into his mouth.

‘You’re a dead man, Waddy,’ Houlihan said.

John Waddell said nothing.

Houlihan had an odd little grin on his face. ‘It’s war, John. It’s this bloody war. And I can’t have a man beside me who doesn’t have the guts for it. You understand that, don’t you?’

John Waddell nodded his head slowly. He looked in the direction of the dead boy who lay in the doorway of the yellow bus. His satchel had burst open and sheets of coloured paper spilled from it. Waddell thought he’d never seen anything as sad as that. He turned back to look at Houlihan, and he understood, in the final moments of his life, that Seamus was fighting a war that he never wanted to see finished. For as long as he lived, Seamus Houlihan would never be able to liberate himself from this conflict. He was trapped in violence because he was consumed by his love for it.

‘Maybe you’ll go to heaven,’ Houlihan said. He’d taken his pistol from his belt, and he pressed it against John Waddell’s heart, and he pulled the trigger quickly. Waddell fell into the shrubbery, where he lay with his face turned up towards the sun.