FORTY-SIX

The Good Life

What took place in the next hour or so remains a blur to me, even now, and I’ve had some coaching on the matter.

The Italians swept in, with Penn and Teller and their compatriots – the ones who were still standing, anyway – performing quick checks of the dead, the wounded, the physically unmarred, and making command decisions, allowing Elmore and Leonard little say in the proceedings.

I also suspect that Penn and Teller had help from high places.

I’m fairly sure that I saw Sal and Sol there, though I wouldn’t swear to it. When I spotted a man in combat fatigues who looked a great deal like Liam Gallacher, keeping his distance as we were herded away, I figured that I was delusional.

Caeli has no recollection of the mystery man at all.

The sale that was made to us at the time, and Penn was quite convincing, was that we needed to get off the island, and quickly – before the Irish authorities showed up, demanding an accounting ahead of throwing us all into Long Kesh, the infamous Maze prison in Ulster, far away in the north, for years to come.

It was easy enough to believe.

Think about it: We were foreign nationals who comprised a military strike force, complete with automatic weapons and accompanying sidearms, all of which were highly illegal, bounding about in a nation that didn’t tolerate gun ownership, with any number of dead bodies strewn about in our wake. 

“Simply put, we all need to get out of here – right away,” Penn had said in his perfect English.

Teller, ever at Penn’s side, though mute, vigorously nodded his head up and down in agreement, a silent proclamation of assent. No question that he understood far more than he ever let on.

It’s true that I was unsteady and lightheaded from the loss of blood, leaning on Elmore as the conversation took place. But I was still sharp enough to pay attention to the at-times heated exchange that followed.

“What about the bodies?” Elmore asked Penn. “You aren’t suggesting we cart them back to the mainland, are you?”

“Cart them? No … not if I understand the meaning of the word,” Penn said. “We could dump them into the sea, I suppose, but that would require hauling them to the water’s edge, or into the rafts. We do not have the space or the time, and they would just … wash up on shore anyway. No. We must go.”

Elmore sputtered a line of disagreement.

Penn gave it some additional thought, eventually shaking his head emphatically.

“No. We leave the bodies,” he said. “The authorities can deal with the bodies when they get here. We have to be … long gone. Yes?”

Caeli grabbed Penn’s arm forcefully.

“We aren’t leaving my uncle behind,” she said. “I won’t allow it.”

“I’m afraid you have no choice, miss,” he said. “I’ve just explained. We must …”

“You’re in no position to tell me what to do,” Caeli said. “You can’t tell any of us what to do.”

“I’m sorry, miss. I have my orders,” Penn said. “Things will go better if only you would …”

“What – do what I’m told?” Caeli demanded, cutting him off. She was as irate as I’d ever seen her, and I had to smile, if for no other reason than I wasn’t the focus of her ire this time around. “Let me make this clear: I’m not leaving without my uncle.”

“You have to make a choice then, miss,” Penn said. “It’s either your dead uncle or your alive-for-now fiancé and your friends.”

It must have been the concerted effort I’d made to produce that smile seconds earlier, but I chose that moment to collapse into Leonard, and he latched onto me, getting help from Elmore and then from Caeli, saving me from pitching hard into the rocks.

“Easy there, Professor B,” Elmore whispered.

Despite the butterfly bandages that Caeli and Elmore had so expertly applied earlier, I was still bleeding – enough so that when Teller moved in to help, he reached into his rucksack and pulled out what appeared to be a bottle of water. He handed it to me without a word, and I mumbled some thanks and cranked off the cap and took a swig, thinking that the water would perk me up.

I don’t remember a great deal after that, at least not in sequence. Bits and snatches and occasional lucid moments were the best I could muster for the next couple of hours. I vaguely recall falling, getting back on my feet with help from Elmore and Caeli, stumbling unsteadily across the rocks, and waking up in one of the rafts that the Italians had used to launch their assault. I vaguely remember Mickey O’Halpin and the Mary Kate, trailing us from a distance, and Caeli getting on the sat-phone and urging him to stay clear.

I recall Caeli whispering to me while we were in the raft, and I passed out again, god only knows for how long, and came to as we landed on a beach south of Quilty, where one of the big Denali SUVs was waiting.

The feel of the cold ocean water soaking into my hiking boots brought me around momentarily, and I was pulled from the raft by Elmore and Leonard, each man grasping an arm and half-walking, half-dragging me through the sand.

“Careful, Signore Blake,” Penn told me as he helped me into the rig.

“You drugged me,” I mumbled.

“We helped you,” he said. “It was better this way – for all of us. No?”

“No. Hell no.”

Caeli joined me in the middle seat, whispering soothingly, and I got the impression – perhaps from something she said; perhaps from something that either Elmore or Leonard mentioned – that Vinny Fierro’s jet wasn’t due to land at Shannon for another four hours, which prompted us to return to the Bed & Breakfast in Quilty.

Caeli stitched my wounds after removing the various butterfly bandages and the Superglue the Italians covered me with before loading me into the raft. I was told that the Italians somehow obtained enough plasma to get me over the rough patch and out of immediate danger. But how they did it, or how they attached the plasma drip to my arm, or even how I made it across the island to the cove, I can’t say with certainty … even to this day. I have my suspicions about at least some of this, based on later events, but suspicions are the best I can do here.

I’ve asked Caeli about those specific moments and what she remembers. But she has been reluctant to discuss them in any detail, for reasons that have nothing to do with me, or the narrative that you are reading here, or much of anything else that would make sense in a perfect world.

We don’t live in a perfect world. And the events that took place on Mutton Island on that wind-blown day, months ago, were far from perfect.

By the time we got to Shannon, again traveling with the Italians, I was lucid enough to ask questions, to pay attention to what was happening around me, to engage in some fundamental dialogue, and to make some notes about it afterward, when we were safely aboard the jet and winging our back home. 

But the damnedest thing happened when we left the relative safety of the Denali and were slowly making our way across the short stretch of tarmac to Vinny Fierro’s waiting jet.

Three black SUVs and a stretch limo screeched and squealed across the runway, racing headlong toward us, and I figured that Maze prison was no longer a passing flight of fancy and nightmares but rather was something that was all too real, waiting to welcome us home for our role in the proceedings. Elmore and Leonard tensed, as did Caeli, right along with me, and we all reached for our handguns.

“Hurry,” Elmore hollered as he shuffled us along. “We can still make it.”

“You go,” Leonard yelled. “I’ll hold them off.”

He dropped to one knee and aimed his Beretta at the lead SUV, which was rapidly approaching.

But Penn, who along with Teller had driven us to Shannon, called out to us in true alarm.

“No, my friends – it’s all right,” he yelled. “These are the good guys, coming to see you off … to offer their thanks.”

“They don’t look like good guys to me,” Elmore shouted.

“Trust me,” Penn said. “You must trust me one more time.”

I could feel Caeli stiffen at the suggestion. She held Penn personally responsible for killing her uncle; trust didn’t enter into her thinking.

Penn instantly spotted the accusing look in her eye, and he held out his hand to her … a gesture of honesty and decency, I thought.

“You can trust me, miss,” he said. “I promise you … no harm will come to you or your friends.”

“If this goes south, you’re the first one to get it,” Leonard said, and he trained his pistol on Penn while Elmore moved in close to me and to Caeli, his eyes sweeping the tarmac, searching for escape routes or cover or an advantage of any kind that he could use to help keep us safe.

I can’t fully explain, even now, how much I appreciated Elmore and Leonard in that moment. They moved in to shield us in the same way that they would protect the boss. You can’t ask for more.

I’ll also admit that I was shaky from my close call with flying bullets on Mutton Island, but I damn near dropped to the tarmac when Liam Gallacher, wearing military fatigues, stepped out of the stretch limo with a handful of military personnel at his side.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I managed to call out. “You’re the last man I’d expect to see …”

And then it hit me.

Nothing was as it seemed … certainly not Gallacher.

“So nice to see you again, Professor Blake,” he called out cheerily. “I trust you’re feeling better.”

So he was on the island … he knows it all, I thought.

What else don’t we know about this guy?

“And you, Miss Brown,” he said, his eyes sweeping past me and finding Caeli’s. “I am deeply sorry for your loss, as is the entire Irish government – on both sides of the border. Speaking for the Taoiseach, the prime minister, and the president, you have our heartfelt sympathies.”

I was struck by the proficient demeanor that Gallacher now presented. He was no longer the shuffling, unconvincing, lilting host of Castle Ballygarvan we’d first met outside of Cork City. This was a man who was very much in charge of his demeanor and the men who had accompanied him and the environment he moved through and the situation at hand.

Caeli said nothing, and the silence grew uncomfortable.

“We kept running into your men,” I eventually offered. “Not all of them fared well.”

“And each will be honored by their country for meritorious service,” he said, grateful that someone had spoken. “They were carefully recruited, and they knew the stakes when they signed on. Still, it’s hard … those last three in the cave especially. We’d hoped they could head it off – all of it. Before you … before you got to the island.”

He stared into Caeli’s eyes once more.

“You have my deepest sympathies,” he said.

Caeli’s expressive face indicated her growing confusion.

“So you knew about this … you knew about Corbin, and my uncle?”

“Aye. We knew about much of it, Miss Brown, and we tried to mitigate the damage, starting well before you first came to Ireland,” he said. “I can’t go into all the details, but we’ve been keeping an eye on things for some time now, stepping in when necessary.”

“We, being … who, exactly?” she asked.

“Yes. Well, let’s just say that a great many intelligence agencies operate in Ireland today, including my own, which is G2, Special Branch,” he said. “You’ll find cooperation with 14INT; MI5 and MI6 on occasion; the FBI and CIA, of course … along with your NSA and DHS and a couple of other American operations I don’t pretend to understand and am told don’t officially exist.”

He smiled, a simple self-deprecating grin that disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared.

“We also work with other groups at times – when the situation is desperate,” he said, and this time he nodded toward Penn and Teller, who were standing close by, listening attentively, perhaps because they were as interested in the details as we were, perhaps because they needed verification of their own role.

Or perhaps something else was at play. Hell, in that moment, damn near anything seemed possible.

I tugged at Penn’s sleeve.

“I thought the two of you worked for …”

“We do, Professor Blake,” he said, before I could get there. “Don Vincenzo remains closest to our heart, even if we are asked to perform other tasks from time to time – with his blessing, of course. Always with his blessing. We are here now because he asked us to be here … to help keep you safe.”

The more that we were told, it seemed, the more confusing the situation became – at least for me.

Caeli, however, was focused on a single item.

“With all this subterfuge and inter-agency cooperation, and all the resources you control, you couldn’t find a way to save my uncle?” she said, her words heart-breaking in their simplicity.

Penn and Teller both turned their heads away from her at the question, as though they were ashamed of their roles in what took place on the island.

Gallacher, if that was even his name (and I have my doubts; remember that Bill Kohlmeyer couldn’t find any record of his existence), did not turn away. He stepped toward her, his face serene and sincere, his manner as calm as you’d expect from someone who deals in life and death on a daily basis.

“Again, Miss Brown, the Irish government is sincerely sorry for your loss,” he said. “I can assure you that the archbishop’s good name will not be sullied in any way during the official inquiries to come.”

“His good name?” Caeli said, exasperated. “Do you think I care about his good name? What I cared about was the man, regardless of what he did or what he planned, for whatever reason, or who he was working with, or why.”

She stopped, taking a deep breath, and I could sense the weight of Uncle Jack’s death striking her in that instant, a vicious slap to the face, and she wanted to lash out at the only target at hand.

But Caeli is not easily given to anger, even when it’s warranted, and she struggled with the words she wanted to speak but knew she’d regret if she allowed her emotions to overwhelm her.

Gallacher waited stoically for her to continue. When she did not, he nodded his head a single time,

“Your uncle is in a better place, Miss Brown – even if that’s something you don’t want to hear right now, or something you don’t believe in,” he said. “Perhaps in time …”

He let the words drift away, and one of his aides approached him and whispered into his ear. He turned his head slightly, muttered a curt response, and the aide moved swiftly away, gesturing to the others who were standing guard nearby. 

“We have to go,” he said. “Again, Ireland feels your loss, Miss Brown, and we also thank you – we thank each of you – for the service you all unknowingly provided us these past days. We are in your debt, and Ireland always pays its debts.”

“Wait,” I said, and what prompted me to ask this, in that grave situation, I’ll never understand. “Before you go … that drunk at the castle?”

He needed a nudge, judging by the look I got.

“The one who was asking about Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.”

“Not one of mine,” he said, frowning at the memory. “Good god, boyo. I had to keep a few of the castle’s staff around. But too much drink will be the death of this country.”

He fired off a snappy salute, though his eyes never left Caeli’s, and he spun about in true military fashion and, surrounded by three of his men, was soon swallowed up inside the limo and racing at breakneck speed down the tarmac.

“You wanna tell me what the hell just happened?” Leonard said as we watched the taillights disappear into the darkness.

“Tell me, too,” Elmore said.

“I mean, I heard it all,” Leonard said, “just like you did. But I don’t get it – I don’t get any of it.”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I muttered, for want of something better to say.

Caeli was more direct.

“It doesn’t matter – not any more,” she said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

We learned later that other personnel, most likely Gallacher’s Special Branch operatives, were busy on Mutton Island immediately after we left. But we never were able to identify with certainty who they were, exactly, or whether, as some press reports later hinted, they may have been working with various American and British intelligence agencies.

We suspected that this was the case, of course – well after our conversation, however tantalizing, with the man who’d called himself Liam Gallacher. But if it’s specific details you want, I’m sad to report that I can’t deliver them … and nobody is filing FOI requests on the matter.

Hell, nobody would honor them anyway.