The Storm Protocol (53 page)

‘Back in a minute, boss,’ he shouted.

Black Swan heard the car start and then the Mercedes shot through the doors and screeched to a halt.

‘Don’t want to lose it now, do we,’ said Dave with a smile.

Black Swan stood
admiring the table. The weapons were laid out like tempting treats in a shop window. Dave selected an automatic pistol and three ammunition clips. He loaded one and pocketed the others, then noticed that Black Swan was watching him curiously.

‘Can I have one?’ asked Black Swan
, almost shyly.

Dave didn't know what to say.

‘Well, they are all yours,’ he said. ‘Have you shot a gun before?’

Black Swan picked up a similar automatic pistol and clip. He slammed the clip home and made sure the safety was off. He chambered a round and then turned to the rear wall where there was an old Pirelli calendar hanging on a bent nail.
He aimed almost casually.

The bang was deafening in the confined space, and Dave jumped; he hadn't been expecting it. He recovered his composure and walked over to the calendar. He was sure the model had been an attractive girl, but it was impossible to tell now. The area where her face
should have been was obliterated.

‘Where did you learn to shoot like that?’ asked Dave breathlessly.

‘Years ago, the Bull made me do a week’s shooting in the Czech Republic; mainly handguns, one of those fake Stag weekends. It seems I was a natural.’

‘Do you know what boss?
’ said Dave, smiling. ‘You really are full of surprises.’

#

I sat on a dry stone wall next to Roussel and Dale, unaware that almost the exact spot had been occupied only the previous evening. We’d acquired some binoculars from a fishing tackle shop, but we had no night vision. Once the darkness closed in, we would have to get close. Still it was May; we were heading towards the longest day with a vengeance. It was a calm clear night. I smiled as I remembered that night back in Louisiana; it seemed like a lifetime ago. A storm was on the rise tonight too, it was just not of God’s making this time.

‘So what do we do now?’ asked Roussel.

‘Now we wait,’ I said, focussing my glasses on the large grey building ahead of us. ‘‘Now we wait.’

23
rd
May 2011 – Thirteen days after the Storm.

Generally speaking, the way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death. – Miyamoto Musashi.

The consultant emerged from the doorway of his consulting room. He was wearing a shiny grey suit, last fashionable about twenty years ago. David was strangely reassured; surely someone as badly dressed as this could only be the bearer of good news.

The consultant
’s face was inscrutable as he searched the waiting room, before a tiny glimmer of recognition lit up his features. He looked like a caricature of the puppet Punch, with his large beaked nose and full fleshy lips. The image was completed by the wisps of blonde hair, which were receding badly on the top and at the temples.

‘Mr. McCabe!’ he called sharply
.

A glimmer of relief showed
as David stood up; another exorbitant fee banked. He nodded curtly as David moved inside.

The consultant walked around to the other side of his large mahogany desk as David settled himself into the small uncomfortable G-plan cast off; obviously a plan to keep consultations to a minimum time. They sat in silence as the consultant read silently through the file. He made the odd grunt as he read, peering over the top of his glasses, an action that made David silently question why he was wearing them. After about five minutes of reading, his lips stopped moving and he closed the file with a slap, making David jump.

‘Mr. McCabe,’ he said. ‘The cancer is end stage. There is absolutely nothing we can do. You’re dying. Go home and someone will be in touch about respite care.’

He got up, staring at David in irritation, as if wondering why he was still there. He pointed at the door, indicating that the consultation was over. As David stumbled out into the waiting room, bewildered
, his mind in turmoil, he heard the consultant utter one last word.

‘Next!’

David got into his car and dried his tears on his sleeve. The enormity of what he had just been told would not sink in. He lay back in the seat and closed his eyes. He stroked his chin, feeling the day’s worth of stubble. It felt good; at least there was still testosterone in his system. The cancer had not robbed him of his manhood. It was starting to feel that way. It had not robbed him of the last shreds of his humanity either. That’s why he couldn’t focus on anything.

His brain refused to accept the information it was being asked to process and he slipped into a fitful sleep.

His body started twitching as he dreamed. He saw the street corners in his subconscious; the ones that his drug runners stood on to sell their wares. He patted the pockets of his own hand-tailored leather jacket. They were bulging with the little plastic bags full of white powder. The kids sidled up to him with money at the ready, some of them as young as twelve years old. He didn’t care. He wasn’t their fucking guardian. He was just fulfilling a demand; he didn’t make the rules, he just lived by them. And no bad life it was either.

In his dream, the kids surrounded him, jostling him
. They were fighting each other; trying to outdo all the others as they pushed their money toward him like autograph hunters at a boy band concert. They all wore the same uniform; Addidas three stripe track suits with the hoods up. David was annoyed because he could not see their faces, so he told them to pull their hoods down or they’d get no gear. The hoods all came down and he stifled a scream; they had no eyes, just dark bottomless pits of despair.

He woke, bathed in sweat, silently screaming. As he slowly recovered, he
knew with utter conviction that he would continue to have that same dream; every time a little bit more vivid. Maybe the clarity would be defined by his mortality; the clearer the dream, the nearer the end.

He
’d never previously thought about what he was doing in terms of morality, but the past day or so had made him wake up. For him, it had all been about the here and now. Money equals power, power equals prestige and respect. Fuck spirituality.

He got out of the car, oblivious to the sweat soaking through his immaculately tailored clothes. Sartorial elegance was not currently high on his list of priorities.

The clinic was on the south side of Cork. He had driven himself over to give Tony a break and instead of going straight home, he started walking through his domain, his kingdom, the poorer parts of the south city. He visited the actual reality; the street corners of his dream, and looked at them through different eyes. He saw poverty and deprivation, he saw emptiness and desolation. He saw the flotsam and jetsam of society, rejects cast aside and cultivated by demonic agents of capitalism. He saw pale imitations of his younger self; callow youths obsessed only with material wealth, pedalling junk to anyone with the money. Is this what he wanted to do with the remainder of his life; trade off the misery of others? Did he have a chance to repent, especially when his mortality was defined in weeks rather than years?

He didn’t know why, but as he headed back to the car, he felt his feet stray across the threshold of the old church; the first time he had entered one since his communion. The feelings were strangely familiar and somehow comforting because of it. He had a sense of foreboding; fear and trepidation of the known and the unknown. He dragged himself toward the confessional booths and ducked inside the nearest one. It had a sign similar to the one you see at supermarkets when the checkout lane is open, which made him smile weakly.

As the curtain dropped behind him, he was assaulted by the unmistakable smell of alcohol and cigarettes; the twin vices, it seemed, of any aged priest. Not that David blamed them; with a vow of celibacy, there was fuck all else for them to do. The hatch was slammed back, and the priest waited for the opening words.

‘Forgive me father
, for I have sinned,’ David stated softly. ‘It is fifteen years since my last confession.’

‘Go on, my son,’ the priest prompted
.

So David did. He told him the whole story of his life and in the telling realized that forgiveness was beyond the bounds of the time that he had left. As David finished his tale,
he pondered the forces that had driven his feet through the door, as the priest sat in silence; his nasal breathing the only indication that someone else was there.

‘Nobody is beyond redemption,’ he said eventually. ‘But before God can forgive someone, they need to forgive themselves.’

He paused for a minute.

‘I fear this is where you will find the most resistance. Say five
Hail Mary’s
and twenty decades of the rosary.’

‘Thank you, father,’ David replied
.

He’d never given much thought to confession before. It was just an instinctive church thing, like making the sign of the cross. It was only when he needed it now, that he realized how powerful it was. On paper, it seemed to be the most unfair system in the world. You got to unburden yourself to a complete stranger; transferring the enormous weight of your guilt to someone else, and while maybe not relieving you completely, it certainly made that burden feel much lighter. As David lifted the heavy velvet curtain
, a shaft of sunlight invaded the booth and he felt a lightness of being that he had not felt in months.

It was
then that he heard a new sound. The priest was crying; very softly, but crying nonetheless. David wanted to go back and apologise but he couldn’t. He didn’t blame the priest; it wasn’t much of an epitaph on a life really.

When he got back to the house, he dropped the keys of the car back to Tony. He asked him to head off and collect Ben and then come back to pick him up for his date w
ith destiny.

Ordinarily, he would have been unable to th
ink of anything else, but at that moment, the knowledge of the impending journey was merely a slight disturbance deep in his subconscious. It was like the itch of a mosquito bite while you're reading; a vague irritation which you more or less ignore. No, he had more important things that he needed to resolve before he left. He sat in the armchair and as the leather creaked under his backside, he smiled for probably the first time that afternoon. Sam looked up from the book she was reading and noticed that he was watching her.

‘What?’ she
asked, self consciously.

‘Just admiring the view,’ he said.

She laughed.

‘I don't know about that,’ she said
, and went back to her book.

David strained his eyes to see if he could discern the title of the book she was reading. She had squealed with delight when she’d d
iscovered the library. David’s dad had developed a huge passion for books during his lifetime, and had created a large library to house his collection.

There was very little furniture in the room. Two easy chairs facing the fireplace, with every other wall lined floor-to-ceiling with glass fronted bookcases. Sam had run from cabinet to cabinet, chattering excitedly to herself.

‘What is it about books that you love?’ he asked her now.

He maintained his father’s collection lovingly
, but he’d never understood the obsession.

‘
They’re like friends,’ she said, looking up. ‘If you have a book you are never alone. They’re a barometer of emotions. If you’re feeling sad, you can read a favourite chapter and your mood lifts.’

‘Doesn’t that get boring?’ asked David.

‘Are memories boring?’ asked Sam. ‘It’s the same thing really, isn’t it?’

David thought about his own turbulent maelstrom of memories.

‘Yeah, you’re right,’ he conceded. ‘Mine are certainly never boring.’

At last his vision focused properly and he managed to read the title of the book.

‘Aldous Huxley,’ he repeated. ‘Brave New World; what's that all about?’

‘It's about a utopian society where children are no longer brought up in families, they’re fertilised and grown in bottles. Where drugs are legal and encouraged and pretty much everything is done in the pursuit of pleasure.’

David thought about it for a couple of minutes.

‘That sounds pretty horrible actually,’ he said seriously, thinking about his dream.

‘The pursuit of pleasure for the sake of pleasure,’ agreed Sam. ‘I see it in the faces of my own clients; morally corrupt and bereft.’

‘Isn't that what I'm trying to accomplish?’ asked David quietly.

‘Maybe so,’ said Sam. ‘But by the same token, some people just can't do real life. They need to have their senses dulled.’

‘I don't want to live like that anymore,’ said David suddenly.

Sam blinked.

‘If I asked you to stay with me, would you do it?’ asked David.

‘What's the catch?’ asked Sam.

‘No catch,’ said David. ‘It’s just with you I feel human, and I want to keep feeling human.’

‘You know that Ben is paying me for this,’ she blurted out suddenly.

The guilt had been eating away at her. She wanted their conversations to be rooted in foundations of honesty. She felt at home with David; an emotion she had not expected.

‘I don’t care,’ said David. ‘I’ll pay you double what he’s paying if you’ll stay; triple or quadruple even.’

‘It doesn't work like that, David,’ she said gently. ‘You can’t buy everything you want, no matter how much money you have’

She looked over at him. He looked crestfallen and defeated.

‘But
yes, I will stay,’ she continued, ‘on one condition. I don’t want payment, all I want is bed and board and we’ll see how it goes.’

There was a loud
single knock on the front door.

‘That’ll be Ben,’ she said.

‘Will you still be here when I get back?’ he asked, making no move to get up.

She got up and placed the book deliberately to one side. He waited expectantly as she crossed the divide between them. She bent down and kissed him on the cheek.

‘You’re not a bad person David,’ she said. ‘Even though everyone has told you that and you’ve tried to convince yourself. Just remember that. Try and reach back and grab onto the person you used to be. So go and do your deal. We can talk about things when you get back.’

He smiled, and this time it extended to his eyes. She could see a renewed sparkle in them as he walked backwards slowly and then turned and virt
ually skipped through the door.

A shadow passed across her face, and she shivered; like someone had just run roughshod over her grave. She went back to her chair and settled down with the book, but she couldn’t shake the feeling, no matter how deeply she tried to bury herself in the words.
Eventually, after about half an hour she gave up and went into the sitting room.

She snuggled into the corner of the couch, David’s corner, and switched on the large screen. As she watched the flickering images, she tried to force them to blot out the sinking feeling in her stomach.

#

David stopped at the end of the corridor. Even though he was out of earshot
, he stifled the sobs, crying silently for a minute or so. Then he quickly walked to the bathroom, doused some water on his face and forced a smile to rearrange his features. He opened the door and replaced the mask. The Bullock was back; for this evening anyway.