Chapter Six #2
It was past midnight; he worked in darkness, although he did not really think this security measure was crucial.
He dug behind his sheep pen; the nearest neighboring home was two hundred meters away, and Campbell doubted eighty-three-year-old Mrs. Brown’s cataract-clouded eyes would have noticed if he’d lit a bonfire on his roof and danced in front of it in a clown suit.
Still, Coyle continued digging in the darkness, remaining as quiet as possible.
It had been ten hours since his daughter-in-law left him standing in his driveway, and he’d spent the majority of the time since then sitting at his simple wooden kitchen table, looking out his back window.
Past his sheep, out into the neighbor’s pasture, into the sunny afternoon, then the evening sky, and finally the darkness.
All this time he thought of his son, of his father, of his grandfather and his grandson.
And now and then he’d even thought a little about his own life.
Young Deirdre had been right about a great many things. Most things. The more he pondered over all she’d said, he wasn’t sure she’d been wrong about a word of it.
There was no getting around it. Just as Deirdre had asserted this afternoon, Campbell Coyle was a very bad man.
He was a bad man with a dark history, and he came from a long line of men with dark histories.
Campbell had hoped his dark days were behind him, but somehow he’d always had an inkling that this day would come.
The day when he stopped being Jon Jo Sheehan and once again became Campbell Finley Coyle.
He continued digging his hole, his body using all his muscles for the work but his mind occupied, as well.
Back before Campbell Coyle had moved to Camlough, back before he’d changed his name to Jon Jo Sheehan, back before he’d spent four years living off-grid after ten years traveling the world as a hired assassin, back before his time in Libya and Lebanon, even back before his teens and very early twenties, fighting in the French Foreign Legion.
Back before all that.
Back before he was born, Campbell Coyle was being made into the man he would someday become.
Campbell’s father, Rory Coyle, had grown up in Belfast, a member of the IRA.
He’d been trusted by Provisional leadership; they trained him, they turned him into a killer, they sent him abroad to assassinate with guns and bombs.
He’d worked in London and in Dublin and in Newcastle and in Liverpool.
He ran an Active Service Unit—a small team of Provos—was chased across the UK, across the European continent, by the Brits, by Interpol, but they couldn’t catch Rory.
In the end, it seemed it was his own people that got him. Called back to Belfast in the mid-nineties, he went to a meeting late one afternoon and did not return.
Campbell was fifteen at the time. He remembered that his father seemed to know and trust the two men who came for him; he went willingly, said he’d be back in an hour, and Campbell heard laughter out in the street as the three IRA men, his da and the two others, bundled into a black hatchback, then drove off.
An hour later his family sat at the dinner table looking at the door; stayed there till evening turned to night.
Rory Coyle turned up dead in an oil drum in an alleyway culvert the next morning.
He’d been shot in the back of the neck.
Campbell told himself he was going to find those who killed him, and he would make them pay.
He joined the French Foreign Legion when he was seventeen; they taught him how to fight and to kill, to live with the utmost austerity, and they gave him an outlet for his rage.
In Africa he fought wars. He learned to be comfortable being miserable, and to understand the world as a dark place where primal forces reigned supreme.
He was twenty when he left the Legion; he went back to Belfast and, with some help, he eventually tracked down those who had killed his father.
There had been five of them involved, he’d learned, an Active Service Unit who murdered Rory because of a personal beef having to do with missing money, and Campbell killed every last one of them.
When Campbell was done, he was just twenty-three. By now he had a young wife and a baby; he took work at a factory in Derry, but soon he realized he could not leave his old life behind. He was a fighter. He was a killer.
So he began killing for money. Campbell worked for the British, the sworn enemy of his father, but he didn’t care. His da had been killed by the IRA; the British were no better and no worse, and their money spent the same.
He’d continued his training in Libya, in East Africa, in the Middle East, and he’d killed men in Asia and America and Europe.
And then, before he turned forty years old, he’d retired from it all. He had more money than a simple man could spend, and he’d lost his taste for killing.
Mostly estranged from his ex-wife and his young son, he moved back to Northern Ireland, but to a village far away from Derry, down south, where no one knew of his family, and he’d started his life over.
His ex-wife died of a stroke, and he’d tried to reconcile with his son, more than once, but Charlie eventually became a Legionnaire himself, now fighting France’s international battles, and he’d wanted nothing to do with his da.
Campbell Coyle became Jon Jo Sheehan. Part-time shepherd, full-time security camera installer and locksmith, and regular churchgoer.
Campbell Coyle had been a very, very bad man in his past, but he had worked so hard to put his past behind him, to erase any vestige of what he’d been, that now, now that everything had fucking changed with the murder of Charlie in some coastal town down in Bulgaria, he had to ask himself if he could possibly be a killer again.
Physically, it wasn’t a problem. He was still strong from the rigors of his life. His eyes were good and sharp at distance, though he used readers for small print up close.
Small print up close wasn’t crucial to an assassin’s trade.
Yes, he was physically better than he’d been when he was twenty-five, injured in a gunfight and recovering in a hospital in the Philippines, or thirty, in prison in Senegal and nearly starving on rotten rations. Or thirty-five, in hiding in France and barely seeing the sun and getting no exercise.
Now he was fit, fast, sharp, and capable.
Physically, he was all he needed to be to do what had to be done now.
But mentally? Did he still have what it took to look a man in the eyes and end his life?
The bad news was he did not know the answer to that question, but the good news was he did know exactly how to find out.
—
It took Campbell Coyle another five minutes before his spade struck what he was looking for, and a few minutes more to dig it out.
Three cases, each the size of a roll-aboard, and each covered in electrician’s tape and thick plastic tarp to keep them safe from decay.
He’d buried them here years ago, hoped he’d never need to retrieve them, but something that had always been ticking in the back of his brain told him that a day like this might come.
Finished with this stage of tonight’s work, he tossed the shovel out of the hole, climbed out with a plastic-wrapped case, and carried it back to a small equipment shed next to his house.
He retraced his steps twice more, and soon he had all three cases on a long simple table in his shed under the light of a single bare bulb.
Casting a long shadow as he worked, he used gardening shears to cut the plastic and tape away, then hung the shears back on the wall and looked at the hard plastic boxes that he had not laid eyes on for such a long time.
They were not numbered; he realized he should have numbered them, but he put that out of his mind and opened the one on the far left first.
It was full of cash. Euros and pounds sterling, U.S. dollars, wrapped in tight plastic bundles.
He retrieved a duffel bag from inside the cottage, then returned, pulled a pack of each, and tossed them into the bag.
He opened the next case and looked down at several handguns packed in foam along with extra magazines and three suppressors.
There were six pistols in all, but he chose only one. A Russian Makarov.
It was loaded with a magazine full of .380 rounds, and he pulled three more mags out of the case and put them on the table.
The gun would need cleaning, the extra mags would need loading. He retrieved the suppressor for the corresponding caliber of the weapon, and this went right into the duffel bag.
In the third case he found ammunition and small gold bars.
He was almost certain he would not need gold where he was going, but he was damn sure he would need the ammo. He took three hundred rounds of .380 ball ammunition and another hundred rounds of .380 hollow-point, and he put these on the table.
It was nearly two a.m. by now, but he had hours’ more work to do before the sun rose.
He cleaned the Makarov, screwed on a long suppressor, loaded his mags, and walked outside, again into the cold.
He’d do target practice under cover of darkness. Again tomorrow. During the day he would train in his cottage with his knives. He would run in the hills, pore over his false identities to rememorize everything on them.
He would train with the pistol, train with the knives, work his body as he worked his mind, because though he was still a very fit man, the muscle memory of his past life needed to be refired somehow, and that could only happen if he put himself through the paces of training.
And then, maybe in a month, maybe in two, he would reach out to a neighbor—not Mrs. Brown—about watching over his livestock and his home, and he would map out his plans for the next days, weeks, maybe months.
He did not know what the future would hold, but the drive to fulfill his objective had grown in him from the moment he had looked in the back of that Peugeot in his driveway twelve hours earlier, and each minute since.
He had spent nearly a decade playing the role of Jon Jo Sheehan. A kind man. A simple man.
But now he was Campbell Coyle again.
No longer kind, but still simple.
No longer kind, because he endeavored to cut a bloody swath across this earth to achieve his mission.
But still simple, because his one singular objective in life was to find and kill the man who had murdered his son.