Chapter Fifty-Four #2
“Like I said…you shouldn’t have done it.”
Court said nothing. His hand was close to the Glock pistol on his hip. Even with the thick coat over it, he knew he could have it out and up in under five-tenths of a second.
His muscles were taut, his body ready for action.
“You know why I told you to meet me here?” Coyle asked.
Court looked around at the cemetery a moment. He gave a little shrug. “As good a place as any, I guess. You wanted to meet here at high noon. You’ve probably watched too many old Westerns, but whatever. I’ll play along if it means your death.”
When Campbell said nothing, Court said, “It’s quiet. You and I can fight. Nobody is going to get in the way.”
Still, Campbell did not speak.
A strong breeze blew Court’s coat open a little, revealing the butt of a semiautomatic pistol. Campbell looked down at it.
He said, “That’s an old-model Glock. You get that from an IRA cache?”
“Yep.”
“You know an old Provo, do ya?”
“Nope,” Court said. “I know somebody who knows where weapons are still hidden around here. He tried to talk me out of what’s about to happen, but when I pressed him, he gave me your daughter-in-law’s address, and then he told me where I could get this weapon.”
A rumbling old farm tractor rolled by; neither man took his eyes off the other to look at it.
Finally, Campbell Coyle said, “I’ll answer the question you can’t answer. Why here?”
“What’s to answer?” Court responded. “This is Church of Ireland. You and your family are Catholic. Your son isn’t here. I don’t know why the fuck we’re…”
Court stopped talking when he saw a pair of large buses appear through some trees on Ramoan Road, far in the distance. They rolled this way slowly.
His eyes flitted back to the Northern Irishman, and he saw a little smile on the man’s face.
Court brought his hand closer to his weapon, because Coyle’s eyes looked confident now, and his smile looked like danger.
—
The three vehicles containing the deputy director for operations of the CIA, the former deputy director for operations, and ten bodyguards rolled along Potomac Avenue heading for the exit to Reagan National Airport.
A plane passed by on the right, on final for Runway 1, flying just feet over the river.
Hanley had been looking at Watkins with mistrust for the past couple of minutes, wondering if Watkins could have somehow been sucked into a cabal in the American government responsible for the deaths of nearly two dozen in the past week.
Surely, Trey couldn’t have been with them from the beginning, but certainly, by his actions and by his words today, he’d implicated himself at the center of the conspiracy.
Hanley said, “Tell me one thing, Trey. Angela Lacy. If you were going to sell us out, why did you bring her into this?”
“I didn’t sell you out. I didn’t sell Angela out. I didn’t sell Jim Pace out.”
“Prove it.”
Now the DDO gave an annoyed sigh, then put his hands up in the air. “How on earth can I possibly prove a negative? What will it take to convince you that I’m not part of whatever you think might be going on around—”
When it happened, it happened in an instant.
The light and the sound and the motion.
The heat and the pain.
It was all one sensation. One experience.
The Navigator was armored, but it came apart as if it had been made of nothing but rusty tin.
A roar of an explosion, then the vehicle launched into the sky, flipped onto its side; crashed down to the street. A flash fire erupted throughout the interior, then the screams of men, then the screeching of metal.
Matt Hanley was thrown through the open roof, as was the bodyguard traveling in the rear of the vehicle next to him, and the two men tumbled along the road together, then off the road, then down a grassy hill and into the trees at the bank of the Potomac River.
Neither of the other two vehicles suffered any damage at all, but the DDO’s limo was completely destroyed, finally coming to rest in a ball of fire on the Potomac Yard Trail. Black smoke and yellow flames reached into the sky.
Hanley was forty yards away from the wreckage, on his back, on the wet ground in the trees. He was burned, broken, unconscious, unaware that anything had happened at all save for that first flash of light, that first roar of sound, and that first jarring motion.
Security men swarmed him and the other survivors of the vehicle; helicopters landed on the George Washington Parkway in minutes to begin life flights, and even the obviously dead were rushed to the hospital as if there was still some fleeting chance.
Later it would be said that something came out of the trees at the water’s edge, and a search by Metro PD would find a spent tube from an AT4 antitank rocket left nearby.
—
Court watched the two buses roll ever closer, and he took a single step back, as if he were preparing to retreat to his car.
There could be hundreds of people in the buses just ahead of him: Gauntlet operatives, a gang of football hooligans aligned with Coyle, ex–IRA Provo gunmen, bought-off heavies from a drug gang, a foreign entity of some sort.
Court had no idea what was heading his way, but of all the possibilities, what happened next came as a complete surprise.
As the buses stopped, the doors opened, and children in school uniforms under their heavy coats began pouring out, running through the little gate in the low stone wall of the cemetery, coming closer and closer.
Court looked back to Coyle for an explanation.
“They’re late today. Gave me a wee bit of a scare, if I’m being honest, chief.” As he nodded to some passing children, he looked back to Court. “The school kids come on Wednesdays for lunch if the weather isn’t too bad. Then they tidy up the tombstones.”
Now there had to have been one hundred kids on the church grounds, all in motion, moving around the older men, heading this way and that.
Court moved closer to Coyle. Spoke softly. “Then why the fuck did you set our showdown up for the same time?”
“You’re not going to fight me in the middle of these weans, chief.”
“These what?”
“Weans. Wee ones. Children, Gentry. I can’t say I know ya well, but I do know that. So while we’re standing here and not fighting, I ask ye to look down at yer feet, yeah?”
Court did as Coyle said. There, right in front of him, was a new tombstone in this forest of old markers.
And Court knew what it would say before he read it.
But he read it anyway.
“Charles Brendan Coyle.” Court noted that the man had been born in March, and he’d died in October. The years of his birth and his death seemed so impossibly close.
Twenty-four years apart.
Court looked back up to his intended target now, unsure.
Coyle said, “Church of Ireland allows for Catholic burials. Catholic Church allows for burials in Church of Ireland cemeteries.” He waved a hand.
“All these here, they’re Coyles. My da is just over there.
I’ll be laid between them and me boy, right here.
Whether that’s now, whether that’s not now… I suppose that one’s up to you.”
“What are you saying?”
“An eye for an eye. That’s some feudal shite, I think. I’m not for that. But I learned something in the death of me boy. I hope you learned something in the death of yer da.
“What I mean to say is, it doesn’t have to be like all this.
It is…but it shouldn’t be. Now…these kids will be gone in an hour.
The roads get busier in the afternoon, but at dusk, this place is empty.
The light is good, we’ve ourselves a full moon comin’.
You and I can get it on then, if yer so inclined.
But for now, I want ye to just look down at me family, at the boy ya killed, and I want ya to know I don’t blame ya anymore.
If killin’ me is yer wish, you can come back and ’ave at it.
I’ll give you a fight, I will. And we’ll see what the future holds. ”
Coyle looked down at the open space between his son and his da.
“If it’s my time tonight, I’ve no problem resting right there.
” He sighed. “But I had a long talk on the phone with Deirdre when she called. I believe her. I believe she won’t let her son, my grandson, turn into one of us.
She won’t let him be part of the hard line.
“He’ll have a chance. You and I…maybe we have to fight. But now, that’s on you.”
Coyle began walking away, through children still moving about the cemetery, their lunch boxes swinging in their hands.
He called out as he walked. “I’ll see ya tonight, chief. Or else I won’t. Sound like a plan?”
He headed for the car park without another word.
—
Court Gentry walked back among the schoolkids, towards his rented car. It was twelve twenty in the afternoon, and he shuffled along, unsure where he’d go now, unsure where he’d be at six p.m.
He still wanted to kill, to avenge his father.
But somehow, he did not want to kill this man.
He thought about going to a bar, having a few drinks, letting the whiskey tell him what to do.
As he drove off to the south, leaving the church and the man he’d sworn to kill, and the grave of a boy he had killed, he looked down at his phone.
He’d gotten several calls—he didn’t check them—and several texts on Signal. He ignored them all.
He was putting his phone away when he saw that he had one text that came through unencrypted. He looked down and saw it was from Zoya.
This was strange. Zoya never sent texts.
He opened it.
Call me. Now!!
He switched to Signal and dialed her number.