Patriots & Tyrants (6 page)

"Picked a place far enough from home, didn't ya?" Regan said as he slid his biggish body into the booth, sucking in his gut as he did so and taking hold of the bottle of Guinness in front of Declan. "I see you got me a beer. Thanks."

"Don't mention it," Declan said with a short laugh. Despite the man's obnoxious nature, there was something likeable about him. Like himself, Regan was a decent enough person who was just trying to get by in a world that threatened to leave him behind. Several brushes with the law as a younger man had left the gentle giant with little in the way of employability and with his physical shape not being good for much of anything besides a human shield; the highest pay he could obtain was from the likes of O'Rourke.

"What did you find?" Declan asked.

Regan put down the beer bottle and looked across the table. "Look man, I'm not sure why you care about this stuff. I mean you're poking into stuff you shouldn't be. I know O'Rourke's a scumbag but you should try doing what I do; don't think about it and go to church on Sundays. I always feel better come pay day."

Declan didn't respond.

"You got a good thing going here, even if you don't know it. You know how hard it is to find a job in your situation if you're not a Mexican willing to work for three pesos an hour?"

"I care because I know what these guys are capable of," Declan answered. "The wild man of Borneo that got off the boat? He was a Chechen. I've dealt with these guys before and I'm telling you there's no amount of life that means anything to them. Men, women, children, they don't care who they kill and with the amount of weaponry they brought along I'd say they're planning something a lot bigger than a simple hit and run. Now what did you find?"

Regan took another long sip of Guinness before answering. "Jesus man, you've dealt with these guys? What the hell does that mean? I thought you were from Ireland and I ain't ever seen anything like what got off that boat in Ireland."

"I am from Ireland, but I left there and got here the roundabout way." Declan said giving only the briefest hint of his past. In fact, he'd spent nearly two years during the Soviet-Afghan war in the mountains of Afghanistan training alongside a unit of Spetsnaz soldiers who had been paid handsomely by his superiors in the Provisional IRA to train a top secret terror team codenamed Black Shuck.

"Alright, whatever man." Regan said finishing off the beer and signaling the bartender for another one. "If you're that hell bent on this do me a favor and leave my name out of it when O'Rourke and Reid come to fry your ass, will ya?"

Declan nodded. "Aye, no problem."

"Fine then, I've been talkin' to everyone on board with at least one good ear. The crates were taken to a warehouse on Caspian Way near the docks and the men are holed up in some fleabag motels nearby. Apparently they don't trust O'Rourke not to sell their stuff to the highest bidder," Regan laughed.

"What about the target?"

"Yeah, the target, if you only knew what I had to do to try and find that out," Regan laughed holding up his left hand which was sporting a heavy bandage. "Had to near cut my thumb off. I ran for the bridge and got into the first-aid kit while we were docked, stole a few peeks around. Apparently Boyle and Kelly have been tailin' someone for a week now… that's why they ain't been on board. I can only assume it's the target and that they're using Boyle and Kelly 'cause they blend in better around here."

"Yeah, that much I figured. Did you find a name?" Declan asked.

Regan grimaced. "You're getting in over your head here, man."

"Save me the sanctimonious routine, Brendan. Neither of us wants to get caught up in this type of thing. O'Rourke's a fool. If he goes through with this we're all likely to end up in a bad way. Do you really think these terrorists are just going to let anyone who knows what they've done walk away? 1 doubt it. More than likely the run we make to get O'Rourke's second payment will be when both the Revenge and its crew end up on the bottom of the Atlantic."

Regan's face flickered with fear and his child like eyes examined the graffiti on the pitted table in front of him. "Never thought of that I guess, you say these are some bad dudes, huh?"

"The worst."

"All I got was a last name. Some guy named Kafni. He's some sort of Jewish writer or something."

Declan recognized the name immediately and felt like he'd been punched in the stomach.

"Thanks," he said as he got up from the table. "Food's on the way. I'll take it from here."

Slipping on his black pea coat, he withdrew a small roll of bills from the pocket. After peeling off a fifty and placing it on the table for the tab, he handed the rest of it to Regan as the agreed upon payment for the man's spy work.

"Keep it," Regan said gruffly. "If what you said is true you may have just saved my life. I think I'll see about finding a new job."

Declan slid the bills back into his pocket and clapped Regan on the shoulder. "Sounds like a grand idea to me."

"Hey," Regan said catching him by the arm before he could leave the table. "You be careful you hear me? I've been with O'Rourke for ten years now and I've seen a lot of people come and go… some of them in some not very nice ways. I'd hate to see you end up like that."

Declan nodded and walked out.

Outside, a cold wind blew straight down Adams Street and onto Dorchester Avenue like a getaway car running a red light. Turning the collar on his coat up, Declan walked away from the bar in the direction of Carney Hospital where he knew he could find a cab ride back to his two room haunt in South Boston. A thousand things sped through his mind as he walked. "Abaddon Kafni," he repeated to himself several times, his mind flooding with memories from the not-so-distant past.

On the streets of Belfast life had been cheap, every shadow hiding a man looking for a way to get a knife between the ribs of another. For a man to take the risk of helping another marked for execution showed an incredible degree of honor and decency that up until that point Declan hadn't thought existed. Abaddon Kafni, an agent with the Israeli Mossad operating illegally in Northern Ireland, had saved his life. The question burning through his mind as he entered a cab parked along the curb of the five story hospital was whether or not he was going to try to return the favor.

"There's our old pal
Brendan
leaving now," Rory McLeish said as he watched his cousin Mickey shift uncomfortably in the driver's seat of the Cadillac. The two were parked in an alley one block from Barr's Bar. "I told you the fat man was battin' for both teams, didn't I?"

"Yup," Mickey said.

Mickey was a large role of a man whose vocabulary was as short as the stubby little fingers that stuck out of the mass of flesh he called a hand like the extremities of a balloon animal. Rory hated being stuck in the car next to him but together they'd been given the assignment of following Brendan Regan by Sean Reid. According to Reid, Regan had been asking far too many questions over the past week and Reid wanted to know who he was talking to. Five minutes earlier, they'd watched as another member of the Revenge's crew, the brooding Irishman called Declan, had left the bar.

"I guess we solved Reid's little mystery. We should be rollin' up on 'em and doing some damage. I hate these sit and do nothing jobs. I'm not a damn private eye. Watch this. Find this. This is crap," Rory complained. He was a man of action, or at least he fancied himself a man of action. In reality he mostly talked about action that had happened a decade ago when he and Mickey had still been in the good graces of Alan Byrne, the now imprisoned crime boss who had ruled South Boston's Irish neighborhoods unchallenged for nearly a decade.

"I don't know, but we'd best do what Mr. Reid says." Mickey offered, his slow wit evident in his speech.

"Shut up you lap dog. If I wanted your opinion I'd give it to you. Now let's go before he gets too far ahead of us and we lose him. The last thing I need after being stuck in the car with you all night is Reid pissed at me. That guy's got a few screws loose if you ask me."

Mickey gripped the gear shift on the side of the steering wheel with five meaty digits and methodically pulled the sedan into gear as if he had to think about each step in the process to keep from screwing it up. The Caddy's suspension groaned under his weight as he piloted it over the concrete drainage decline between the alleyway and the pavement of Adams Street.

Rory shook his head in embarrassment feeling like he was sitting higher than Mickey, the car's suspension not having given way under his short and skinny frame. "We'll follow him back to his house and then call Reid," he said as the vehicle moved north after Brendan Regan who was stepping into a taxi one block ahead of them. "Maybe we'll get to break some legs after all."

Declan placed the black journal he was reading on the night stand beside his bed and stared at the ceiling in the tiny bedroom of his apartment. Thinking about his conversation with Brendan Regan the previous night, he had decided that Regan had been right. He shouldn't care about what these Iranians or Chechens were up to. He should just keep his head down and stay out of the line of fire. He could warn the few members of the Revenge's crew that he respected and then find himself a new job somewhere else. That's why he had come to America, to work and to build a new life as far from his bloody past as possible. But as the seasoned floor joists of the apartment above him creaked under their occupant's weight, he reminded himself why he cared.

As a participant in the Northern Ireland conflict, known as The Troubles, that was slowly coming to a conclusion after nearly thirty years of bloodshed, he'd seen too many men like those aboard the Zarin vessel operate. When men like that were about, people were going to die and those people were usually innocent. He hadn't known Kafni for very long or very well but he remembered the man speaking glowingly of a family that he hoped to rejoin once his duties with the Israeli Government were finished. As the Israeli had helped him board a freighter in Galway bound for the United States, they'd shook hands and looked across the wide Atlantic, each sharing their desire for a better life away from the conflicts that had defined both their lives to date.

He could only assume that Kafni's presence in America meant that he had immigrated along with his family and the thought of children getting caught in the crossfire of an assassination attempt filled Declan's mind with dread. He'd watched as his own parents had been murdered by members of a loyalist paramilitary known as the Ulster Volunteer Force and wouldn't wish the experience on his worst enemy. He looked over at the black book he'd been reading, it was his father's journal and the only physical item he had that belonged to either his mother or father.

Standing from the bed, he walked into the living area and took a seat on an aging recliner. Rubbing his face with his hands and brushing his blonde hair out of eyes, he looked around the third floor apartment that was made up of his bedroom, a bathroom barely big enough to turn around in, and a slightly larger living area with a stove and dwarfed refrigerator shoved into one corner, his landlady's idea of a kitchenette. The peeling wallpaper, torn vinyl flooring, stained carpet, ragged furniture and barely consumable water along with an excessive amount of rent were the best he could do given his situation and if he were being honest, it was better than some of the places he'd slept over the years. At times, he felt doomed to a life in the company of people like O'Rourke, people who had only their own best interest at heart and who cared nothing for the people they hurt along the way to whatever ends they had in mind, if they actually planned that far ahead.

Since he'd learned from Brendan Regan that the target was Kafni he'd been reading every newspaper and tuning into every local news channel his antiquated television would pick up in hopes of finding some mention of what Kafni was doing in Boston. On the boat in Provincetown he remembered O'Rourke promising to get the target's schedule and in the bar, Regan had mentioned he was some kind of writer. Maybe he was here on a book tour and didn't even have his family with him. Declan could only hope.

Spreading a piece of newspaper across a small coffee table in front of his recliner and opening it to the events section, he stopped and looked up suddenly as the front door of the apartment vibrated with the sound of a pounding fist. He jumped up from the recliner and moved to the nightstand beside his bed, withdrawing a black Walther PP. Releasing the single stack magazine, he checked to be sure it was fully loaded and slapped it back into the grip before chambering a round and tucking the pistol into the rear waistband of his jeans. The door vibrated again loudly.

"Declan, it's Regan. Are ya there?"

The voice sounded tired and Declan knew it meant trouble. He'd never told anyone aboard the Revenge where he lived and he'd been very careful to make sure no one had ever followed him. He purposely varied the routes and methods he used to arrive at the property and never received mail there, not that anyone ever sent him any. "Damn," he said under his breath as he considered his options. Outside of the apartments only window was a fire escape and he'd made sure the window operated properly. If Regan was alone, which he seriously doubted, the alleyway that ran along the backside of the apartment buildings would be free and clear. Moving over to his recliner and pulling back the olive green curtain behind it, he looked down the alley onto East 5th Street. Just as he had suspected, two men were parked in a beat up blue Chevrolet Cavalier directly across from the entrance to the alley. Despite doing their best to seem innocuous by leaning back in the seats and smoking cigarettes, Declan knew they were lookouts.