Then Georgi Timko slapped Jack on the back.
“Once you have handed over your weapon, we will sit down together, share strong tea, and talk like civilized men.”
The black Mercedes moved along a dark stretch of Roosevelt Avenue under the elevated subway tracks. Steel support beams encased in crumbling concrete moved monotonously past the tinted windows. Though traffic was minimal at this time of night, cars were parked and double-parked along both sides of the busy commercial thoroughfare, making navigation tricky. Shamus Lynch skirted every obstacle.
He pressed the gas to beat a yellow light. The car hit a pothole and Shamus heard — or imagined he heard — the heavy missile launcher bounce in the trunk. Reflexively he glanced in the rearview, caught a glimpse of his ruddy, clean-shaven jaw, his fiery red hair, neatly cut — a professional look to go with the professional suit, the professional act.
For as long as he could remember, Shamus had despised looking younger than his years. Now, at thirty-five, crow’s feet clawed his eyes. Creases gouged his brow. Shamus hadn’t noticed the exact year, month, and hour his boyish face had fled — when the lines around his thin lips had deepened, his cheeks had become lean and angular like his brother’s, his brown eyes as hard — but he was lately beginning to wonder if he’d been daft to ever long for it.
He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t admired Griff, ten years older, ten years wiser, the one to follow without hesitation. A stop sign compelled Shamus to tap the brake and consider with a glance the man sitting beside him, staring intensely into the shadows between the streetlights.
In his beige, summer-weight suit, gold Windsorknotted tie, and polished loafers, Griff could easily pass for your typical harried New York businessman. The handsome young freedom fighter was long gone. Not a strand of black Irish hair was left on his silver head and his normally pale features were looking downright ghostly. There was nothing faint, however, about Griff’s resolve. For as long as Shamus could remember, he’d displayed more than enough raging certainty for the two of them, along with a vague paternal contempt toward any questioning of his decisions or plans. Not that Shamus had ever really challenged his brother.
Their father’s death in ’72, at the hands of the British Army had ignited Griff’s sense of injustice. He’d spoken in church basements, organized civil rights protests, lobbied local politicians. Then their mother was murdered in a pub bombing. Gasoline on Griff’s fire, that was. The IRA was Griff’s family after that, vengeance his propeller. Shamus had been too young to sustain true hatred. He’d functioned mainly on need — need for his brother’s affection and, eventually, his respect.
Even as a ruddy-cheeked child, he’d found a way to make Griff see his value. The cherubic freckles, which Shamus had always detested, allowed him to plant plastique unnoticed — at a bus stop near a Royal Ulster Constabulary post, a pub frequented by loyalist paramilitary groups, a British Army checkpoint. It had become a thing of pride for him, a measure of accomplishment to hide the thing and get away, to watch the explosion, to gain the approval of his brothers in arms.
They were fighting to free their countrymen, weren’t they? From repressive, imperial, colonial rule. Human rights commissions were on their side. Hadn’t the British allowed their army to detain and “question” his countrymen for as long as seven days without charges? Allowed their courts to convict based on confessions obtained through abusive treatment during that questioning? Taken away their right to a fair jury trial? Griff had made things clear for him back then, made things right.
“Ours is a justified war, and we’re soldiers in it. The Brits…they try to label us ‘terrorists,’ but if that’s so, then what are they, eh? Weren’t the RAF ‘terrorists’ when they dropped two thousand tons of bombs on Dresden civilians? Weren’t they guilty of ‘terrorism’ when they forced civilians into concentration camps in South Africa where thousands of ’em died?”
Whether their war was justified or not, in the end, Griff and Shamus both realized they’d been the losers. What was supposed to have been the highest achievement of their lives, the most important accomplishment for the Cause, had left them barely escaping the British Army, hiding on a tanker bound for North Africa. Everything had changed after that spring of ’81. They could never again return to their homeland, never go back to using their real names. Yet Shamus had trusted Griff and he’d come through — found a way for them to continue the fight.
“Don’t our brothers need arms?” Griff had told him. “Don’t they need explosives and weapons? That’s what we’ll provide. The Cause is still ours. Now we’ll just be fightin’ it another way …”
Of course, Griff had said all that a long time go, almost seventeen years. Since then, their homeland— what they could remember of it — had changed its outlook. Peace agreements renouncing violence were now being struck by the IRA’s political arm. While their comrades were rotting in hellishly long sentences in British prisons, the thrust of their people’s will was being spent on disarmament.
Griff’s cell phone rang. He pulled it out, flipped it open. Shamus’s eyes were drawn to the twisted blast scars on his brother’s hands, wrists, the callused knob that was once a finger. The wounds went deeper, spidering up his arms. The extent of their reach was hidden beneath the neatly tailored suit. For years, Shamus had seen them as badges of honor. Only in the past few weeks had he begun to ask.
“What are we doing, Griff? This job has nothing to do with the Cause.”
“We didn’t leave the Cause, Shea. It left us.”
Griff had said the writing was on the wall. Adjustments were necessary. Shamus had disagreed. Weren’t there still splinter factions like the real IRA who were still fighting the good fight? The Omagh bombing alone had proved the fight was still on. Wasn’t a five-hundred-pound bomb tearing through a small town, killing twenty-eight and injuring hundreds, enough proof that peace under British rule was not a certainty?
But Griff was unyielding. He claimed the real money for arms had dried up. And Shamus realized the real money was all he seemed to be after now.
“Chin up, lad,” he’d told Shamus. “With our new employer, we can ply our trade and get rich doin’ it. We both know this is better than babysitting a stinking warlord in that stinking weapons market in Somalia.”
The red light blinked to green and Shamus gave the Mercedes gas. Listening in on his brother’s cell phone conversation, he maneuvered the sedan along the narrow, congested streets. From what Shamus could deduce, there was some kind of snag — bad news, coming less than twenty-four hours before the whole operation was supposed to go down. By the deferential tone in Griff’s voice, Shamus concluded their associate was not happy, and his brother was trying to fix the problem.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. Just like I took care of Dante and his Posse. Tell Taj the delivery will be there by morning. I guarantee it.”
Griff ended the conversation, closed the cell, and stared straight ahead. “There’s been a complication.”
“Is that so?”
“Did you hear our boy Dante mention a lost memory stick?”
“Not a word,” Shamus replied. “I figured it was blown up with the missile launcher.”
Griff sighed in disgust. “That’s the story he told our associate, but I think he has doubts and so do I. I’ll be thinking the Feds got hold of that stick. Not the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but CTU.”