McGinty’s hand lashed out so quickly, Campbell felt the sting on his cheek before he knew it had moved.
McGinty cleared his throat and smoothed his jacket. He took a cautious look around to make sure no cameras had caught the slap. He leaned in close to Campbell.
“Watch your mouth,” he said. “You don’t tell me anything; I tell you. Got that?”
Campbell fought back rage as he brought his fingers to the heat on his bearded cheek. Blood rushed in his ears and his head seemed to float above his shoulders. “I’m sorry, Mr. McGinty,” he said. “But with all due respect, think about this: he hasn’t taken too kindly to Marie McKenna being strong-armed. What if he comes after you next?”
McGinty snorted, but his eyes gave him away. “He’d never get to me. There’s boys have been trying to get to me since 1972, and nobody’s even come close, even Delaney and those two UFF boys you fingered. Why do you think Fegan could do it?”
Campbell locked eyes with McGinty. “Because I think he’d die trying.”
McGinty’s stare fell away and he cleared his throat. He set off towards the car again. Campbell followed.
“All right, I’ll tell you what,” McGinty said as they neared the Lincoln. “The cops will let Fegan go in an hour or so. You follow him and make sure he goes home. Get into the house and do him there. Lock the place up good and tight. With a bit of luck nobody’ll find him for a day or two. That’ll give me time to get what I can out of the press coverage.”
“What about the woman?” Campbell asked. “She might twig if she tries to reach him.”
McGinty lowered himself into the back of the Lincoln as his driver held the door. “Don’t worry about her,” he said. “She’s already taken care of.”
Campbell hunched down in the rusting Ford Focus and watched Fegan clamber out of a taxi and pay the driver. As the cab pulled away, Fegan took delicate steps towards his front door, his hand pressed to his abdomen. Campbell’s Focus sat at the far end of Calcutta Street. He sucked air through his teeth when his quarry stooped to spit blood on the pavement. Fegan straightened, wiped his mouth clean, and let himself into his house.
, Campbell thought,
.
A part of Campbell wished Fegan would have a crack at McGinty. His skin still tingled where the politician had slapped him. The world would be no poorer for that bastard’s passing, just as it was no worse off without McKenna or Caffola. In fact, Campbell would have been delighted to help Fegan in a cull of the party. But for every politician like McGinty there were ten thugs who would gladly take his place and guide the party away from weapons like newspapers and television cameras, and back to AK47s and mortar bombs. It was sad, but true: Paul McGinty was the lesser of many evils.
The greatest of those evils was the Bull.
Terrance Plunkett O’Kane, a thickset man who stood six foot four, had risen to prominence as the Seventies became the Eighties, that turbulent time when the party’s political wing began to branch away from the paramilitary side. Campbell had never met the Bull, but the old man’s reputation travelled far and wide. When Campbell was still a corporal in the Black Watch he heard stories of O’Kane’s bloody ways. And when he left the barracks for the back streets of Belfast the stories grew more horrific.
As the political process had gathered momentum, it seemed the Bull’s time had come and gone. The twenty- first century belonged to men like McGinty and his nose for a headline. Thus, as his sixties edged towards his seventies, the Bull seemed content to retire and let McGinty and his political colleagues take the reins.
, Campbell thought.
McGinty and O’Kane were two sides of the same coin. O’Kane still commanded the loyalty of the old foot soldiers, the Eddie Coyles, and McGinty and the party leadership relied on them for their power on the street. At the same time, the party’s political influence had allowed the Bull to operate his fuel-laundering plants in relative peace for the last ten years. Each needed the other, and it was a precarious balance between the old ways and the new.
Now Fegan was tipping that balance. Whatever insane vendetta he was bent on had the potential to wrest the wheel from the politicians’ control altogether. If Campbell’s hunch was right, and Fegan managed to get to McGinty, it could tear the party wide open. The party could fill his position, all right - in fact, rumor had it they had someone lined up to take his place if they could find a way to sideline him - but McGinty’s crew wouldn’t stand for it. A feud would almost certainly follow. Stormont was fragile enough as it stood; losing McGinty would leave it on a knife-edge.
There was no question: Fegan had to disappear.
And after that?
Campbell thought about the handler’s words. He couldn’t imagine quitting. When he closed his eyes and pictured leaving this life, it was like walking off a cliff. A long drop into nothing. It made him dizzy just to picture it.
When Campbell first came to Belfast with the Black Watch, everyone said it would never end. The divisions and hatreds were too deep-rooted. The dirty war would roll on and on, bomb upon bomb, body upon body. The politicians were too busy pandering to the bigotry of their constituents to solve the issues, and the paramilitaries were making too much money to consider any other way.
But, in spite of every apparently insurmountable obstacle, it looked like they had finally done it. Campbell still couldn’t quite believe it. It didn’t seem real. The politicians had been cajoled, blackmailed and bullied by the British and Irish governments into figuring it out. After eighty-odd years, this tiny country finally had a future.
And Campbell did not.
He remembered an ancient Chinese curse as he opened the car door.
, he thought.
