The Storm Protocol (42 page)

As he moaned and shifted around on the ground, I went to the car and extracted three or four cheap
, clean T-shirts from our stash. I walked back and dumped them on the ground next to his prone body. I refilled the bucket with water and I uncoiled the remainder of the tow ropes and set them beside him. I also extracted his phone from his inside pocket, and placed it on his uninjured side within easy reach of his good hand.

As I turned to leave, I accidentally caught his leg a glancing blow with my foot, causing him to wince in pain.

‘Sorry,’ I mumbled.

I bent down, re-holstered my knife and then walked back to the car. I waited in silence for Dale and Roussel to join me. I could see the two of them in my rear view mirror. They were heatedly debating something. I couldn't hear what they were saying
, but I had a fair idea what it was about.

Eventually
, they seemed to come to a decision. As they got in, they slammed the doors so hard behind them, that the car rocked on its suspension.

‘What the fuck was all that about? Do you not think that was slightly over the top?’ Roussel asked, hi
s voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘You could have got the answers you wanted without half killing him. Or was that for our benefit; to prove what a big man you are?’

‘I didn't kill him, did I?’ I protested. ‘And no, I’m not trying to prove what a big man I am; I don't need to, especially to either of you.’

The steel was evident in my voice.

‘I needed answers, he could give them to me, he gave them to me; job done, simple as that.’

‘You could have made us accessories to murder,’ protested Dale.

‘Could have
, but didn't,’ I said. ‘I had no intention of killing him. I’ve left him with water, material for bandages, rope for tourniquets, and a phone to call his friends. If he dies, it’s not on my conscience.’

‘Jesus, you can be a cold hearted bastard sometimes,’ said Roussel.

I laughed humourlessly.

‘You’re only learning that now,’ I said. ‘I kill people for a living, remember?’

‘So, was all that violence worth it?’ asked Dale.

‘Then or now,’ I asked, but it was a rhetorical question and he looked at me with a puzzled expression.

‘Well, point number one, I resent the implication of
all that violence
,’ I said sharply. ‘I shot him through muscle and fat. The only lasting effects he’ll have will be the scars; something to boast about to his future girlfriends. And point number two; yes; in answer to your actual question, I do think it was worth it, because before, we were guessing at the relevance. Now we know for certain.’

‘What do we know though?’ asked Dale.

I could see he wasn’t convinced.

‘Well, we definitely know that Scott Mitchell is connected to Black Swan and we now definitely know that Black Swan has a thing about me.’

‘Richard O'Neill is the key to it all,’ said Dale. ‘We need to find out more about Richard O'Neill.’

‘Well, I told you what the solicitor said,’ I answered. ‘He was playing a part; probably just a pseudonym.’

‘Maybe, but the solicitor also said that he was probably a relative of your mother, and that is the key here, I think. Identify him and we potentially have some real answers. Does she have any living cousins, brothers, sisters?’

I shook my head.

‘All her siblings are dead.’

‘In fairness, she never told you about your father. She could have kept other things from you,’ said Dale gently.

I could feel my anger rising, but before it reached the point of no return, the reasonable side of my brain, the logical part, took over and I acknowledged silently that Dale could well be right.

‘So
, I could have relatives still around that I don't know about?’ I stated flatly, as if acknowledging it to myself for the first time, which in a sense I was.

‘Yes you could.’

‘So, how do we make headway on that?’ I asked, as I fired the car into life.

Dale and Roussel looked at each other. They simultaneously removed their phones and dialled, smiling at each other as they did so.

‘Hey Dodds, it’s me,’ said Dale. ‘Do you have a pen handy? I need you to check some details for me.’

‘Hey James, it’s me,’ said Roussel. ‘What? Yeah, Kinsale is lovely. But a few things came up while I was here. Can you do me a big favour? I need to trace down a couple of leads.’

I smiled and engaged drive, accelerating smoothly back onto the road to Kinsale.

22
nd
May 2011 – Twelve days after the Storm.

Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears. – Marcus Aurelius.

Black Swan hated waiting. He never had to wait for anything; he was always the one in control. He was the director, constantly giving the orders and deciding on the strategy. Other people had to defer to him. That was the way it was.

He smiled broadly as the next song came on the radio.

‘Huey Lewis and the news, folks with – I want a new drug.’

How ironic. He didn't need a new drug; he had his old one, and he was well and truly addicted. The only drug he'd ever craved was power. But craving it and attaining it were two different things. Soci
ety would judge him differently, if they knew the truth about his rise to the top; or maybe they wouldn’t. He was a drug dealer after all, whichever way you sliced it.

He remembered his initial interview with
Bull
McCabe.

‘I like you,’ Bull had said. ‘There is something thoroughly engaging and honourable about you. But there’s something scary about you too. There’s a rod of iron running through you boy. Don’t ever lose that, not for anybody.’

He thought about David McCabe, his nemesis. It was probably just as well that things had turned out the way they had. They were too alike.

Still, he couldn’t help wondering
what would have happened if they had united instead of splintering apart. Strangely, he didn’t think either of them would have been quite so successful.

As he knew well, nothing m
otivated like rage. Nothing got you out of bed in the morning like a good healthy dollop of hate.

It was truly ironic really. The reason David hated Eoin was utterly and entirely
without premise. The truth was; Bull McCabe had intentionally stepped down in favour of Black Swan. He had been getting older and slower, and had early on recognised the steel that ran through Eoin; like letters through a stick of rock. The Bull felt he could temper and forge the steel from afar, in his own image.

The twins were too young to take over; they did not yet fully realise what would be expected of them in the family business. The Bull did not know
which way they would go; it would be tough initially, finding out exactly what misery and suffering was perpetuated, just so that you could live in luxury. It took an unusual kind of person to overlook the despair and misfortune that other people were required to endure.

Because of that,
Eoin had been the one initially tasked with growth and development, making sure the boys had something worthy of their inheritance, should they have chosen to accept it.

Bull
took discrete steps to keep hidden, but he was always in the background, watching, directing and approving.

The sheer irony of it all was that in the end, the Bull had been the architect of his own demise. After years as a widower, he’d started an illicit affair with a married woman. Her husband had been an accountant, as meek and mild as they came, but when he’d found out about the affair
, something inside him had snapped.

He’d bought a gun, illegally of course, and in a delicious irony, had acquired it through an associate of the Bull himself. He didn’t care who Bull was. In truth, he didn’t know who Bull was, nor would it have made a difference if he had.

Like all cuckolded husbands, he wanted revenge. From the testosterone fuelled depths of his bitterness and failure, the rage and hate had festered and heightened. He followed the Bull home one day after an assignation with his wife. He then sat outside, day after day, watching and waiting while the rage got stronger. One day, the inevitable happened; he snapped and trailed Bull to his favourite pub. He waited outside for an hour, allowing the resentment and hostility to build unabated, until he reached the point of no return. He calmly walked in and emptied the entire clip into an astonished and helpless Bull, in front of an incredulous and horrified clientele.

The police never found out about the affair or the accountant
assassin. The investigating officers were told to keep it short and sweet and to make no waves. Eoin had paid a lot of money to keep it quiet, and then had paid a lot more money to commission his own discrete investigation.

There was obviously no way he was letting the police know the real story; it suited him at the time to let the police think it was a drug feud, little realising, although he should have done, that the spotlight would eventually alight upon him.

The accountant had become overwhelmed with guilt, so one week after the killing, when his maudlin and depressed wife was out shopping, he’d run a pipe from the exhaust through the window of his car. As it had idled in his garage, he’d simply opted out of life and gone into a deep and never ending sleep.

The police had put it down to pressures of work. The company
that the accountant had worked for had been going through very hard times, so it was not seen as an unusual or out of character act. In another strange and bizarre twist of fate, he was buried in the same Clonakilty graveyard as the Bull, only two plots away.

When Eoin had joined the company, the twins had initially loved him. They were not too distant from Eoin in years
, and had very similar tastes and very similar personalities. Love did not figure large on any of their agendas.

David had regarded Eoin’s accession to the McCabe throne with deep suspicion. Whenever David asked his father what
had happened, the Bull refused to be drawn on it.

‘It’s none of your
business boy; at least not yet, it’s not.’

The Bull was a proud man
. David wrongly interpreted his silence as a refusal to acknowledge his failure to hold onto his own company; a stubborn denial of the loss of his empire to a suave and ruthless interloper.

The truth was; Eoin had been targeted with building and expanding the business, specifically for the twins to some
day inherit. Unfortunately the accountant, along with his own short sightedness and stupidity, had scuppered Bull’s plans.

The first part of the exercise had been executed flawlessly. All of the company incorporation documents had been signed over to Eoin as per their gentleman's agreement. Bull had insisted that the only way it would work was if Eoin had absolute authority.

However, all of the documents pertaining to the second phase, the inheritance rights of John and David, were still in the middle of being drafted, when Bull died in a hail of bullets. So when the will was read, it came as a complete shock and surprise for the twins to discover that the true and rightful heir to their company was Eoin Morrison.

David had continually refused to believe that Eoin had nothing to do with his father's death and when John died, the gulf between them became insurmountable. It still made Eoin sad, especially when he knew the police had the same subtly different version of their feud; one that was just plain wrong.

But Eoin did not hate David McCabe.

The same could not be said in reverse.

David despised Eoin Morrison.

Who was Eoin to judge
though? Eoin hated Thomas O’Neill with the same ruthless and passionate intensity. Did the chain end there, or was the circle of hate as strong as ever?

Black Swan shivered. He was only wearing slacks and a shirt
, and the problem with most of the old Georgian houses was that they tended to retain the cold and block out the heat, the reverse of what was required. The insulation he had installed was ineffectual against the massive heat sink of the large stone walls.

Even though the house had been rebuilt with a sophisticated under floor heating system, Eoin preferred the honesty and integrity of a real open fire. He ambled over to the fireplace, and from the ornate brass bucket that was set to one side of the large slate hearth
, he started picking out one of the free local papers.

He ripped out the pages and balled them to create kindling. He was just about to ball his fifth sheet, when something caught his eye. He smoothed out the page and read the information slowly. He took it back to his desk, oblivious now to the cold, and placed it centrally on the large leather bound blotter. Pieces of the puzzle started flying in from left and right, like well rehearsed stagehands in a theatre production.

The first thing that had struck him upon finishing the Storm dossier had been the sheer scale of operation that would be required to house such an undertaking. This could not be hidden in attics and garden sheds. His keen intelligence had identified the intrinsic scale of the production process. That information had obviously stayed in his subconscious, and his brain had been picking at it like a sore. When he saw the article about the new pharmaceutical investment in Clonakilty, the dots had immediately connected themselves, especially as he already suspected who one of the main investors was.

He pulled his laptop from his desk drawer and flipped it open. A rudimentary web search on ADXR returned millions of hits. He would have expected nothing less. ADXR were a publicly traded company. All of their information was in the public domain, especially if you knew where to look.

One of Eoin’s hobbies was the stock market. When you had millions of Euro in the bank, you could afford to indulge yourself. Eoin clicked open his company search program. Pretty soon, he had a listing of the ADXR board, all of their curriculum vitae’s, and copies of their last three quarterly financial statements. It was not new information to him. He always did an in-depth analysis of any potential investment and coincidentally, ADXR were one of the stocks he held in quite large numbers. He smiled.

The other company mentioned in the news release; they were something different again. There were only a co
uple of dozen hits related to G&E Chemicals themselves, most of which were cached copies of the same media statement, just located on differing news media websites. This company was definitely worthy of investigation.

Eoin had long ago recognised the power of networking. His softly spoken manner and fearsome reputation combined to ensure he was never ignored when he wanted something, and his network extended to every sphere of local and central government. He also made sure his information sources were well looked after.

He flicked through the Rolodex on his desk. Even though he had all his numbers in his smart phone, he didn’t have one hundred percent confidence in them. Some things he just wouldn't trust to technology. He dialled the number.

‘Hey Graham, its Eoin,’ he said as the phone was answered. ‘Eoin Morrison. I need you to do me a favour and I need the information very quickly, do you understand?’

He smiled.

‘Good, now listen carefully....’

Ten minutes later, the phone on his desk rang, startling him out of his semi-slumber.

‘Morrison,’ he said.

He listened closely and waited for the pregnant pause to indicate the information had been delivered. He hung up without saying anything. There was nothing that needed to be said. He made a mental note. Graham would be a grand richer by the end of the day.

Eoin pulled his writing pad towards him and scribbled down everything the caller had told him. Eoin’s short-term memory was almost flawless
, and for anything up to a page, he could recall it letter for letter.

Only when he had finished writing it all down, did he start trying to analyse and understand what it was he had been told.

He looked at the list of companies that his contact had given him. It never ceased to amaze him how governments made it so easy to facilitate the evasion of tax. Granted, you had to be a very good company lawyer, or at the very least, have a solid understanding of company law, but once you had that, your tax bill rapidly declined.

Eoin was the latter, self taught and sharp as a steel blade, and even without a degree, there were few in the country who understood company law as well as he did.

He started from the top, from G&E Chemicals, as he knew from experience that it was like playing a game of
pass the parcel
. For every layer you stripped away, the closer you got to the prize. And sure enough, by the time he was down to the last layer of the onion, he was not in the least bit surprised to find out who the company was and who controlled it.

West Cork Bull Investments Ltd, through a convoluted series of holding companies
, held a thirty three percent stake in G&E Chemicals. The directors of the company were David McCabe and Ben Collins.

Black Swan dialled the number from memory. His desk mounted speakerphone echoed the ring tone and then as it turned to white noise, he started speaking. He didn't even give the other party the chance to introduce themselves.

‘Dave, I’m e-mailing you some details,’ he said curtly. ‘I want you to put all of our resources on this and let me know as soon as you can if there is anything further you can find out?’

Eoin had been about to hang up, when he heard the entreaty.

‘Boss?’

‘W
hat is it?’ Eoin asked.

‘Maybe nothing,’ he said. ‘But I’m hearing a lot of noise from the Clonakilty area. I know West Cork wouldn’t be a major base for us, but just wanted you to be aware. Something is definitely afoot in the reeds down there.’