Hang on St. Christopher (The Sean Duffy #8)

11. The Break-In

CHAPTER 11

THE brEAK-IN

Next morning. Quality time with the fam. The good stuff. Kid being cute at breakfast. Making the missus her sandwiches for lunch. Listening to the chitchat and the craic while Scottish people burbled away in the background on the radio.

Ever read Epicurus? You should. Meaning-of-life stuff. Appreciating the little things isn’t the road to happiness. It is happiness itself. The best we’re going to get in this world, anyway.

“Joke,” Emma said.

“Go on, then.”

“Why don’t dinosaurs clap?”

“Why?”

“’Cause they’re dead.”

“Okay, then, here’s one for you. What's yellow and hurts when it gets in your eye?”

“What?”

“A bulldozer.”

And this time, thankfully, she did laugh.

Good old Sean Duffy. Intimidating skinheads, solving a case, and doing dad jokes over breakfast. This was the good life. Right here. Right now. Didn’t need to think about Rachel Melville’s hair curling between her?—

Walk kid to nursery school.

Hit the bricks.

Ferry terminal.

Toast and a coffee overlooking the cold north water. Ferry up Belfast Lough to the Belfast docks. Back to Carrick, upstairs to office.

Shattered.

Crabbie seeing me screech in, in the Beemer and bringing me a cup of joe.

“Cheers, mate. Any breaks in our case while I was away?”

“Were you away?”

“Aye, wee trip back over the sheugh.”

“Glad to hear that, Sean. Family’s the most important thing.”

“It is. Anything on the case?”

“Nope. Nothing on the car or from forensics or about that bike or anything.”

“What has been happening?”

“We had an interesting call this morning from a lawyer at the NIO. The Crown Office is asserting its right to Mr. Locke’s property in light of the fact that no next of kin or a will is asserting itself.”

“No will has been found?”

“Nope, and no one has come out of the woodwork claiming to be a long-lost cousin. At least not yet.”

“What about Mr. O’Roarke? Locke’s good buddy in Dundalk?”

“Hasn’t taken any notice at all. Officially. Yet.”

“But unofficially, he was up here with his gang, taking all his guns back.”

“That’s certainly a possibility,” Crabbie agreed.

“The NIO want those bloody Picassos, don’t they?”

“I imagine they do.”

“They’ll end up in some bloated civil servant’s office in London, you mark my words,” I grumbled.

“Where are they now?”

“I took them home. I found them on the bloody floor of the incident room. Someone had knocked them over.”

“If they get nicked out of your home, Sean, the NIO is going to have your guts for garters.”

“I know.”

The chief inspector was at a conference, so in his absence we didn’t have to present a case progress report and could get some real work done.

I called Detective O’Neill in Dundalk. He was a good lad who’d followed through on our conversation. He’d been around to Brendan O’Roarke’s house and apprised him of my desire to have a chat. O’Roarke had said he’d think about it.

“Can’t we just arrest him and drag him down to an interview room?”

“On what charge?”

“Make something up.”

“We don’t do that down here,” O’Neill said somewhat sniffily.

“All right, mate. Well, thanks.”

Another day waned.

Time strayed into the offices and nooks and crannies of Carrickfergus RUC and lingered there. Early 1990s time that hadn’t quite shaken off the vibe of the 1980s yet. The Tories still ruled in London, the Republicans still owned the White House, Fianna Fáil still ruled in Dublin, and in Belfast those loudmouthed demagogues Paisley and Adams still represented the people of Ulster.

At five o’clock, I said goodbye to McCrabban and drove home to Coronation Road. The sun was out, and kids were playing kerby in the middle of the street.

Yeah, what I’d told Rachel was kosher. Coronation Road was a safe street now. There had been two attacks on my house in seven years, and that was two too many for Bobby Cameron, the local paramilitary commander. This was his neighborhood, and assassins didn’t come onto his street without his say-so. He had pulled strings, and one day the council had shown to set up speed bumps every few hundred yards on Coronation Road. No more boy racers or potential drive-bys now. And after the speed bumps came the new one-way system. You could enter the street only at Victoria Primary School and you could leave it only at the top of Victoria Road. It was a lot more secure, but no system was ever foolproof. When I was staying here, I still looked under my car every morning for mercury tilt switch bombs, and I still left a thin sliver of paper wedged in the bottom of the front and back doors to see if anyone had opened one without my knowledge and was waiting for me inside.

When the paper in the front door wasn’t there, I would immediately ask Mrs. Campbell if she’d been over to leave off a parcel, and the like. The five or six times I’d come back to find the sliver of paper missing from the front door had always coincided with Mrs. Campbell letting in a delivery man or the gas man or answering a persistent telephone caller.

Mrs. Campbell, however, never came in the back door. Her key was to the front, and she had no need or interest in coming in around the back. Since I’d been living here by myself on my part-time days, I’d always come back to Coronation Road and always found that little sliver of paper stuck in the bottom of the back door.

But not tonight.

Tonight, when I went into the washhouse at the back of the house to get some turf for the fire, the little sliver of paper I’d wedged in the door wasn’t there.

“What the hell?”

I tried the back door. The door was locked, but the sliver of paper was gone. I examined the washhouse floor.

Nope.

The precautions you take to get you through life: always check under your car, embed a lock pick in your jacket sleeve, never sit with your back to a door or a window, and always check the house for break-ins.

I opened the back door, and sure enough, the paper was lying there in the garden. You wouldn’t notice it if you weren’t looking for it, but I noticed it because I was looking for it. I picked it up and examined the piece of paper. Just a random strip pulled from the Belfast Telegraph . Could a dog somehow have gotten into the back garden and worried out the paper from the doorjamb?

No, it bloody couldn’t. And there were no bite marks.

I went next door and rang the doorbell.

Mrs. Campbell answering it in a housecoat with rollers in her hair.

“Oh, Mr. Duffy! I had no idea it was going to be you,” she said, alarmed. “I’m not decent.”

“You look lovely, Mrs. C. Look, I was wondering, you weren’t over at the house today, were you?”

“No, not I. Why, has someone been in there? Is it the Gypsies? There’s a group of Gypsies going ’round, stealing stuff. When you’re out at the rag-and-bone cart, their wee boy comes down your chimney and makes off with your TV.”

“How do they get the TV up the ch... Never mind. So you weren’t over today, were you?”

“Not at all.”

“Thank you.”

I jumped over the fence.

“They have ropes and a pulley, Mr. Duffy. It happened to old Mrs. Anderson at the?—”

“See you, Mrs. C,” I said. Then I closed the front door, took the Glock out of the shoulder holster, and held it two-handed in front of me while I checked the downstairs rooms. Living room, dining room, kitchen, washhouse... all clear.

I went upstairs and checked the bedrooms. Those were clear too. I went into the back bedroom, which served as my office. I looked at the papers on the desk.

Apple PowerBook. Printer. The novel I’d been reading ( Oscar and Lucinda ) upside down next to the computer. From the patterns of dust on the table, it was evident that it had all been moved and then put meticulously (but not 100 percent faithfully) back.

I thought about that skinhead eejit. No, if he had come over to my house to fuck with me, he’d have smashed everything up. Shat on the living room table—that was their style.

I opened the drawer next to the desk. Someone had been through that too.

I stood up and walked away from the desk.

It was the Gene Hackman crapping himself in his apartment moment from The Conversation .

Someone had been in here, had gone through all my stuff, and had tried to leave as light a step as possible—and would have succeeded were I not a paranoid git. They were pros, not the usual clumsy, inept local hoods. If I hadn’t been looking, I wouldn’t have seen hide or hair of them.

Who were they, and what did they want?

Was it related to the case I was working on right now?

Breaking into my house had been a hell of a thing to do.

Over the back fence and in through the back door when it was obvious I wasn’t coming home.

Hmmm.

Ballsy.

What would be their next move?

You wouldn’t go through my stuff, read the files on my computer, look through my books and records, and then just leave, would you? No, you wouldn’t do that if you were a professional. No, you’d leave a bug, wouldn’t you? Possibly on the computer or in the telephone. The computer, I’d be clueless to figure out. If he had introduced a new piece of hardware or a malicious piece of code, I’d never be able to sort that. But the phone was a different matter.

I walked downstairs and unscrewed the plastic mouthpiece from the phone. I pulled out the microphone, and there between the copper wires was a shiny new transmitter the size of a AAA battery.

A bug.

I stared at it for a while, wondering what to do.

If I took it out, they’d realize that it was missing, and they might try a more invasive way of getting me. Whoever they were. If they weren’t after me personally (and if they were, why not just shoot me?), presumably they wanted to know about the current case I was working on. And a bug in the phone could perhaps lead them on a merry dance of disinformation.

I went into the living room and put on the radio loud to cover the sound of the Polaroid camera as I took a photograph of the bug. I put the camera down and carefully put the bug back into the phone and screwed the plastic mouthpiece back on.

I’d show the pic to Jill Dumont from RUC Special Branch Research, and maybe she’d be able to identify the device and let me know which agency or terrorist organization thought that I was worthwhile bugging.

It was odd. I’d been out of the spook game for almost a year. I had no intel, no secrets that my superiors didn’t know. These days, I was a simple part-time policeman with an entirely uninteresting life. I wasn’t even CID anymore.

Until this week, that was.

Until Mr. Townes.

Mr. Locke.

Yeah, talk to Jill Dumont.

I walked out to the BMW, looked underneath it for bombs, and got inside. I drove up to Belfast and out to Holywood, where the RUC Special Branch Advanced Intel Branch was headquartered. AIB for short, although all the wags called it the Allied Irish Bank.

I drove carefully and slowly, looking for tails, looking for Norton motorbikes, but there was nothing. Nick Drake was on the radio, but I couldn’t even appreciate it I was so worked up.

I showed my ID at the AIB gate and got ushered through several layers of security before getting to Jill Dumont’s office. I asked to see Jill, and a secretary told me to wait outside.

I looked at my watch. It was 5:05, and if this were an ordinary RUC department, everyone would have fucked off home by now. But these were Special Branch intel types, and they were used to burning the midnight oil.

Jill and I had come up together in the same class as Dan Harkness, but she and Dan had made the proper prostrations and kowtowed to all the right people, and now she was a chief superintendent in charge of intelligence and strategy. In a couple of years, they’d make her assistant chief constable, and assistant chief constables in the RUC were exactly the sort of people who got made chief constables of the smaller police forces over the water. Knighthood, 200K a year, home in Surrey, pension.

Nice.

Wait a minute: is that what you wanted, Duffy?

No, an easy life in Scotland and my 25K a year pension would do me fine. Would have to do me.

Her office was fantastic. Big L-shaped one overlooking the water, and outside it she had a secretary to do her typing. On the desk was a photograph of her and some skinny eejit in a suit, and three blond-haired children.

We shook hands. She’d kept herself trim, and her hair was still a vibrant golden blond cut short and styled into a wave. She was wearing her dark-green chief-super uniform with the pip and crown on both shoulders. Although she didn’t want me to see it, I could see the edge of what was clearly a personnel file under some papers in front of her. My personnel file, which would make for some complicated reading. The disciplinary stuff, the lack of big arrests, but also Brighton in ’84, the Harland and Wolff missiles in ’85, and turning that fucker John Strong to work for us...

“Thank you for seeing me. I know you’re very busy these days,” I said.

“It’s been a long time, Sean.”

“You’ve done well for yourself,” I said, looking about me again.

“Hard labor,” she said perhaps a little bit defensively.

“I know that.”

“You’re looking...”

“Like I fell off a motorbike?”

“So what can I do for you today?” she asked.

“It’s about that case I’m working on.”

“The joyriders?”

“The IRA assassin.”

“I hope you’re not going to ask for confidential information, Sean.”

“If I ask, you’ll give it to me.”

“Why would we do that?”

“Special Branch bloody owes me. You owe me for Thatcher, and you owe me for Strong,” I said bluntly.

She sighed. “You’ve been told—repeatedly, I imagine—never to mention those two cases,” she said.

“I didn’t mention any cases. I just mentioned names: Thatcher and Strong.”

“What is it that you want, Duffy?”

“I’m being surveilled.”

“I often have that feeling too.”

“No, I’m really being surveilled.”

She sat up in her chair. “An IRA hit team?”

“My gut tells me it’s maybe something more serious.”

“Something more serious than an IRA hit team?”

“They broke into my house. They were very, very good about breaking into my house. I would never have noticed it in a million years except for the piece of paper I stick in the jamb at the bottom of the back door. It had moved. It had fluttered out into the back garden.”

“The wind.”

“It wasn’t the wind. They’ve been through my stuff.”

“Was anything taken?”

“Nothing was taken. They moved some of my papers.”

“Who did, exactly?”

“That’s what I want you to find out for me.”

“You need the Ghostbusters, not me, Sean.”

“How do you explain this, then?” I said, showing her the Polaroid I’d taken of the bug in my phone. “I was wondering if you or one of your minions would know what this is.”

She looked at the picture. “Where did you find this?” she asked.

“In my telephone.”

“This is in your telephone in your house?”

“That’s right.”

“What have you done, Sean?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re always pissing people off. Who have you pissed off this time?”

“Nobody. Look, what is this? Do you know what it is?”

“I know what it is. It’s called a CELD-33.”

“Catchy.”

“It looks like a brand-new one. Brand-new. See that dirty metal bit at the top of it?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“That’s platinum. These things are expensive. A grand each.”

“So... what? Beyond the capacity of local terrorists?”

Jill shook her head. “Dunno. Probably. And if so, you’ve been got at by much more dangerous customers than the local terrorists.”

“MI5? I think I know how to deal with them.”

“I don’t think it’s MI5. This particular bug...”

“Who, then?”

She bit her lip.

“Who?”

“Sean, you have the capacity for getting into deeper waters than you can swim in. My advice to you is to?—”

“Strong. Thatcher. A lippy, aggrieved, drunken copper spilling his guts out to the Scottish papers...”

“Tell me that’s not a threat.”

“Not a threat, just something that might happen to a jaded middle-aged copper with a story to tell.”

She frowned and then sighed. “The only people I know of that have this type of bug are the Special Activities Division of the CIA.”

I waited to see if she was kidding, but she wasn’t bloody kidding.

“I’m being bugged by the CIA?”

“Or someone who has gotten access to CIA equipment.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. What have you done?”

“I haven’t done anything. Not lately. The agent who I was running in the IRA is dead.”

She subconsciously tapped my personnel file.

“Yes. I know. I think it’s unlikely that the CIA would be interested in your agent unless there was an American dimension. Was there an American dimension in that particular case?”

“No.”

“Well, then, I doubt that’s it. And a lot of water has passed under the bridge in the last year.”

“Why would the CIA be interested in what I’m doing now?”

“What are you doing now?”

“It’s this case, Jill. You know it’s something to do with this case.”

I suddenly wondered if I could quite trust her. We went back, but I hadn’t seen her for years, and if Sean Duffy suddenly became a problematic issue in her career path, then Sean Duffy would be gleefully tossed under the next double-decker bus.

“Tell me about the dead guy again.”

“He was here under an alias, but we found out that he is a man called Alan Locke, who might be an IRA assassin.”

“Yes. That’s most unfortunate,” she said, and added nothing further.

I stared into her gray, cold, ambitious eyes. “What’s the range on one of those bugs?” I asked.

“About eight hundred meters.”

“So somebody will be listening in on my phones. And that someone will need to be within an eight-hundred-meter radius of the house?”

“No. Not necessarily. It’ll probably transmit to a recording device or a booster. Every time you use your phone, this will transmit the conversation to a tape recorder. The receiving equipment and the tape recorder need to be within eight hundred meters of your house, but the agent could be anywhere. The recording machine might be in the boot of a parked car two streets away from where you live. He comes along once a day, removes the tape, puts in a blank tape, and then goes back to wherever he lives. If it’s a booster, he can listen live from anywhere on the shortwave band.”

“So chances are, I’ll never find the receiving equipment?”

“No. On the old bugs, you could use telemetry to pinpoint where the message was being received. But on these, it’s not possible. The signal is broadcast over the shortwave band to anyone with the right equipment within the radius.”

“What is this Special Activities Division of the CIA? I’ve never heard of them.”

“Oh, you don’t want to mess with those guys.”

“Who are they?”

“It’s the CIA’s paramilitary arm. Very bad guys indeed. Sometimes morally questionable too. I wonder if perhaps one of them has gone rogue and...”

“Given high-tech surveillance equipment to the IRA to further the cause?”

“I never said that.”

“No, I did.”

“Look, Duffy, are you having me on here? Did you really find this in your phone?”

“I really did.”

“Well, then, you should report it.”

“To whom?”

“To your superior officer. To your divisional officer.”

I considered that and shook my head. “You know what they’d do. They’d take the bug out and analyze and tell me what you’ve told me.”

“And by not reporting it?”

“I can lead the person or people bugging me a merry dance if I want. No, not yet. I don’t want to jeopardize an ongoing investigation.”

“If the IRA has stolen a batch of CIA surveillance equipment, this is something that should be investigated at the highest levels!” Jill insisted.

“And if the CIA gave them the surveillance equipment?”

She said nothing and shuffled her papers. I picked up the Polaroid and put it back in my jacket pocket.

“If you’re not going to say anything about this, I will,” she said.

“No. You won’t. If this case fucks up because you blabbed, I’ll make sure everybody knows about it.”

“If it fucks up and you get killed because the IRA have access to new technology, then what?”

“You can say I told you so to me at my wake.”

She shook her head. “You have one week, Duffy, and then I’m calling you on this.”

I nodded. “Okay. A week. A man can do a lot in a week. Now, do me a favor and tell me what you know about Brendan O’Roarke.”

“Like what?”

“Like everything. I’ll wait while you get the files.”

“I don’t need the files. O’Roarke is a major player. Real hardliner. The realest of the hardliners. His father and mother were both old Republicans. His father fought the British and then Michael Collins and then DeValera. He was interned during World War Two, so he was probably hot and heavy with the Nazis too. Brendan and his older brother, Jim, were the only two boys out of a family of seven. The girls all married and had normal lives, but Jim and Brendan were IRA lifers. Jim is in France somewhere, we think. On the run for a bank robbery in Wexford that resulted in the death of a Garda officer and a civilian. Raising money for the cause, mind you, not for himself.”

“And what does Brendan do?”

“Brendan is in the building trade by day, and he’s the IRA’s north Leinster commandant by night.”

“Brendan wasn’t in the Army Council a year ago,” I said, stating this plain fact that I knew from my agent-handling days with John Strong. John had had to brief the Army Council once a month on what he knew about the latest RUC operational intelligence. But since we—I—turned him, John had been giving them the chickenshit and trying to get actionable intelligence in return. Jill clearly knew all about that, because she didn’t bring it up but again subconsciously touched my file.

“Things have been moving very quickly in the last six months,” she said. “Big shake-up in the movement. No one really knows why. Or if they do, they’re not telling us in Special Branch. Old guard out, new guard in. New guard primarily from the north. Belfast, Derry, and Dundalk men pushing out the old Dublin players.”

“A more hardline approach to the war?”

Jill was warming to her theme and becoming a little less tight-lipped. Get anyone on one of their hobbyhorses and they couldn’t help but ride that subject...

“You’d think that, Sean,” she said. “But actually, it looks like the opposite is happening. Again, I’m not privy to all the facts, but it looks like northern moderates have taken over the IRA Army Council. Brendan O’Roarke has been given the job of chief of staff to assure the old guard that the new boys haven’t gone completely soft. Brendan’s solid. Brendan, everyone knows, is the man who will never compromise.”

“Is he a killer?”

“Not him personally. Not since the early seventies. Not his style. He’s not a button man, he’s an organizer. It was Brendan who cemented the IRA’s valuable links to Libya, traveling to Tripoli many times in the early 1980s and securing at least five big weapons shipments from Gaddafi. I don’t have to remind you that it was Gaddafi’s Semtex that was used in the Brighton bomb, at Enniskillen, and so on.”

“Would Brendan have a personal hit man that he was keeping off the books?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“To what end?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Brendan O’Roarke is known to be ruthless. Clinical. And now that he’s at the top of the food chain, he can pretty much have anyone in Ireland killed at any time.”

“As long as the IRA Army Council gives the go-ahead.”

“I imagine they would. Brendan is a very persuasive and scary man.”

“But they’d still have to vote on it.”

“Yes... What are you thinking, Sean?”

“I’m thinking what if Brendan wasn’t happy with these new peace feelers? What if Brendan wanted to cement his control of the IRA Army Council and take it over completely? He’d have to eliminate a lot of troublesome people in the north, wouldn’t he?”

“It would be very difficult. People like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are very cautious and?—”

“He’d have to kill them all at once. Night of the Long Knives–style. He would need hit men in situ ready to go at a moment’s notice.”

“Hit men like your murder victim?”

“Exactly.”

Jill shook her head. “No, I don’t see it. And why bug you? Why not just kill you?”

“They want to know how much I know first.”

“Hmmm. I’ll have to think about all of this.”

I got to my feet. “You do that.”

She tapped my personnel file a third time. “You’re just a couple of years from your pension, Sean. Perhaps consider letting sleeping dogs lie, go back to Scotland and?—”

“You’re all the same, aren’t you? Sleeping dogs. Don’t kick up a fuss. Read that personnel file again. Does that sound like me?”