call. You’re a brave man, Father Coulter, but are you that brave?”
“I . . . I . . . I . . .” Father Coulter stammered. Something forced his stare to the ground. “Oh, Christ.”
“Please,” one of the Brits hissed, tugging at the priest’s trouser leg, blood trickling from his ears, his helmet gone. “Help me,” he whispered through blackened lips.
Father Coulter jerked his leg away and took a step back. Fegan chambered a round and pressed the pistol to the back of the soldier’s skull. “Your choice, Father.”
“Jesus, Gerry, quit it,” Coyle said.
“Shut your fucking mouth,” Fegan said. “If he wants to judge me he better be ready to go all the way.”
He turned back to the priest. “You hear that, Father? You stand there in chapel every Saturday night, every Sunday morning, telling us to turn from sin. All the time you’re taking handouts from McGinty to keep your mouth shut, to see nothing, to hear nothing, to turn away and be quiet. And the next Saturday, the next Sunday, you’re telling us to take the other way. There’s always another way, right? Now’s your chance to prove it. Tell me to take the other way and I’ll do it. But you better be ready to stand over it. You better be ready to answer to the boys who run these streets.”
Father Coulter blinked at him. “Please, this isn’t . . . it’s not . . .”
Fegan pressed his pistol’s muzzle harder against the back of the soldier’s head. “What’s it to be, Father? Have you the guts to practise what you preach? Or will you shut your eyes and say nothing like you always do?”
As the Brit held out his hands, as he whimpered on the ground, the priest’s face went slack. He looked to Fegan once, and then looked to the ground. He turned and started walking.
“No!” The soldier tried to crawl after him. “No! No, no, please! Help!”
Father Coulter’s stride was broken only slightly by the booming discharge as it resonated through the street.
Fegan kept his eyes closed until McGinty’s speech was finished. When he opened them, she was there, facing him.
“Hello,” Marie McKenna said.
Fegan blinked, unable to respond. The followers lost themselves amongst the thinning crowd.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said.
“It’s okay.” He scrambled for something else to say but could find nothing.
“Are you going to the house?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Just for a while.”
“Do you need a lift?”
“No, I’m all right,” he lied.
“Oh. Well, I’ll maybe see you there.” Marie smiled and left him among the gravestones.
Fegan stood in the May heat, waiting for the crowd to dissolve. When he was sure she had left, he began walking to the cemetery gates.
In his younger days Fegan had been glad of women, and the ease with which he could work his way into their beds. Some of the lads, like McKenna, had the words to charm them. But Fegan had never needed that; his reputation was enough. He knew they relished the danger of it, and he was happy to use them. Since leaving the Maze he’d had only a few encounters, moments here and there to scratch the itch, but that was all.
Marie McKenna troubled him. She was clearly not to be toyed with, but he didn’t know how else to deal with women.
“What’s happening to me?” Fegan asked himself. The isolation of his voice sounded strange among the gravestones. He swallowed his questions, put his head down, and kept walking. He stopped at the gates. A long silver car waited there, its engine running.
The tinted rear window rolled down and Paul McGinty, smooth-skinned and handsome, smiled out at him. “Hop in, Gerry,” he said.
14
When the Northern Ireland Office and the security forces worked in unison, they could be impressively efficient.
, Campbell thought as he tossed the holdall on the bed. They’d organised a flat in the Holylands, the warren of streets called so in honor of their names - Palestine Street, Jerusalem Street, Damascus Street - not their inhabitants. It was a smart move, putting him here. The area was almost entirely populated by students attending Queen’s University, the sprawling complex of Victorian and modern buildings at the bottom of the Malone Road. The students came and went at all hours of the day and night. They were noisy and careless of their environment. Campbell could slip in and out without drawing attention.
He went to the window of the small living room. He was on the top floor of a house on University Street, just off Botanic Avenue, overlooking a church. Students, shoppers and workers slipped past one another on the pavement below. His rusted Ford Focus sat at the curb across the way. He’d picked it up in a retail park just south of the city. An extra mobile phone and a Glock 23 were waiting for him in the glove box, the phone never to leave the flat and only to be used to dial one number.
It had almost broken his heart to swap his BMW for the Focus. The journey from Dundalk to Armagh, then up the motorway, was the first time he’d driven the Z4 in a month. He had to remind himself it was this work that paid for the car. But then, why do it if he never got to enjoy the spoils?
That was a good question, one he asked himself constantly. He was thirty-eight years old and had been an impostor for the last fifteen. He could admit a perverse pleasure in living a lie. The permanent risk of discovery had a strange sweetness. There was certainly a dark thrill in watching those around him accept a counterfeit, but surely
