Veil of Civility: A Black Shuck Thriller (Declan McIver Series) (23 page)

"I'm sorry, plucked out of the Atlantic Ocean?"

"That's right, boyo. McIver's an immigrant, and not the legal kind, at least not originally. He came to the States aboard a freighter that originated in Ireland. That freighter was carrying, well, we'll call it undeclared cargo, and when we offloaded it onto our own boat, McIver came with it. We used to get a lot of guys like him in the late eighties and nineties, all running from the British Army or the Royal Ulster Constabulary or some damn agency or another over there."

"Running? Why?"

"Three words, boyo: Irish—Republican—Army."

"The IRA?" Castellano said rhetorically.

"Yeah, the IRA, revolutionaries, terrorists, whatever you want to call them. My point is, Declan McIver was one of them, and if I was looking for a man close to Abaddon Kafni who was capable of the kind of violence that happened Friday night, I'd be looking right at this man. Do some digging and you'll see what I mean. And when you do...I want you to jam him up really hard and tell him Lorcan O'Rourke sends a hearty up yours."

The caller hung up with a laugh that quickly turned into a wheezing cough. Agent Kelly picked up the receiver and hung it up again to turn off the speaker system. "Sorry, sir, I guess he was a nut after all."

"Maybe," Castellano said with a shrug, "maybe not."

"I don't see how that could help our current investigation, sir."

"Well, it's a bit of possible background on McIver, which has been hard to come by, but no, you're right. It doesn't help us much at the moment. Good effort though, Agent Kelly. Keep it up. I'll be in my office for a while before heading out if you find anything else."

"Yes, sir."

Castellano stood from the chair he'd been sitting in near a wall mounted map of the Western Virginia area. He walked into the office he had commandeered and closed the door behind him. The caller hadn't given them anything that was really pertinent to the official investigation, but that didn't matter. Whatever the guy's angle was, three words that he'd uttered were more than helpful to the goals that Castellano wanted to accomplish.

7:27 a.m. Eastern Time – Sunday

Graemont Lane

Charlottesville, Virginia

David Kemiss turned up the collar on his black wool overcoat as he stepped onto the concrete porch of his house; he expelled several short breaths, which quickly evaporated into the cold air. Placing his hands in the oversized pockets of the coat, he suppressed a shiver as he strolled quickly down a brick walkway that led to a circular motor court, about twenty yards in front of the three story Georgian mansion.

He turned and looked back at the house as he arrived in the motor court. Four gray pilasters held up a triangular gable, under which stood his front door. That there were many rooms in the brick-built industrial era house was evident from the eight windows that studded the front elevation on each of the two lower levels, with four more sitting just below the roof line. He looked over each of the windows for any sign that he'd woken his family and saw none. He himself hadn't slept more than a few hours, and even that had been sporadic. He had tossed and turned and slept for only brief periods, his troubled mind unwilling to let go of his problems.

He tried to distract himself with thoughts of the beautiful landscape surrounding his home as he plodded along the narrow gravel driveway: rolling hills that looked out over the tall peaks of the Shenandoah Mountains to the west and a sloping valley to the south overlooking the Revolutionary era city of Charlottesville, glimpses of the Rivanna River trickling down the wooded expanse toward the city's many brick-fronted institutions. The nearly one hundred acres around him had been in his family since the 1950s when his father had moved to the area and opened the law firm of Kemiss, Cronk and Caulfield. Since then the Kemiss name had been synonymous with the area and both he and his father had served as the elected representative for what was known politically as the 5
th
District of Virginia. In 1992, he'd given up that seat to run for the more influential position of senator and had held it in each of the three elections since.

Kemiss' heart leapt as a familiar buzzing sounded from inside the left breast pocket of his coat, and he reached inside to retrieve his cell phone, hoping this was the call he'd been waiting most of the night for.

He looked at the 410 area code and took a deep breath. The caller was from the Fort Meade area of Maryland, which meant that it was indeed the man he'd been waiting for.

"What do you have, Allan?"

"Not much, I'm afraid. I've had my entire class at it since ten o'clock last night and the only thing I've got for you is a few GPS pings off the woman's cell phone. They came in shortly after we started our search, but we've had nothing since."

"But we know where they're at, right?" Kemiss felt his stomach tighten. The NSA had to have a location. That's what they did.

"No. We have no idea where they're at."

"What do you mean
no
?" Kemiss snapped. "Isn't locating people what you do?"

"Yes," Ayers said dryly, "but sometimes our work can take days or even weeks to find an actionable location. The pings came from a cell tower in the Lewisburg, West Virginia area. Now the satellite can trace the location, but unfortunately they were stationary at the time and then the signal disappeared, which means they either turned the phone off or lost service."

"Well, where were they?"

"In the parking lot of a gas station in White Sulphur Springs, but that isn't going to help you much. There's a major east-west interstate going right past there so they literally could have been going anywhere."

"Why didn't you call me sooner? We could have had someone in the area on the lookout!"

"We've been on the lookout and found nothing. No more pings in any direction for two hundred miles and we've been checking every airport, bus station and train terminal within the region continually. More than likely they turned the phone off and continued on. This class is over at ten and I'm pulling the plug. I'll keep the search parameters open for another twenty four hours and see if the system returns anything. I'll let you know if anything comes back, but I'm not risking my head any further for this."

"Fine, maybe I'll pull the plug on you, too." Kemiss slapped the phone closed. He'd let Ayers twist in the wind for a while and see what the gnawing idea of being fired motivated the man to do, but for now it was time to move onto another plan. If they couldn't find Declan McIver then they couldn't kill him. But maybe they didn't need to kill him. The idea of discrediting him somehow had been tossed around, but had been ditched in favor of dealing with the problem more permanently. Since that idea had obviously failed, it was time to revisit the other options.

He flipped open his phone again and dialed Castellano's number. "It's time to move on to Plan B. What do you have?" he said as Castellano picked up the call.

He could practically hear the smile in the agent's voice as he answered. "I've got four bodies, each near a piece of property belonging to our man. That's enough probable cause for me to get search warrants and to open up an official investigation, which will put a lot more resources at our command. As far as I'm concerned, Declan McIver just did us a big favor and eliminated four witnesses to Friday night's events. And I'm going to paint it to look like he eliminated four witnesses to
his
involvement."

"That's good—"

"That's not all I've got, either."

"Well? Don't keep me in suspense."

"What was going on in Ireland sixteen years ago when this guy first showed up in the U.S.?" Castellano didn't wait for an answer. "Terrorism," he continued, "the Irish Republican Army. We tie this guy to the car bombing, which the IRA had a proclivity for, and we brand him a terrorist."

"How the hell are you going to tie him to the IRA?"

"We got a tip from a man who knew McIver in the mid-nineties before he hooked up with Kafni. He gave me a name and I did a little checking. He was a smuggler out of Boston who operated a ship called the Saint Malachy's Revenge. He was involved in the first assassination attempt on Abaddon Kafni in ninety-seven, the one I told you about yesterday? The one that our man McIver did a prison stint for, before Kafni sprung him? This guy who called, this Captain O'Rourke, was arrested for a whole host of charges after that and spent a decade in prison himself. He's probably just trying to get a bit of revenge by muddying the waters for McIver, but I don't care about that. What I do care about is how he said McIver got to the States and why."

"Go on."

"He was running from the British because of his involvement with the IRA."

Kemiss stood in silence as he let the information sink in.

"This will take some connections to pull off," Castellano continued, "but you need to see these bodies to understand exactly what I mean. The shorthand version is that there's no way this guy is just a fisherman from Galway. Two of these guys have been shot and the other two look like they were mauled by a bear. It's just like I thought. There's a lot more to Declan McIver than what's on the surface and it lines up very well with what O'Rourke said about the IRA."

"I'll start making some calls right away," Kemiss said. "With this becoming an official inquiry it's like you said, we have more resources. I'm sure somewhere in my Rolodex I can come up with someone that can help us sort out this guy's past. If he's a goddamn terrorist we need to know. In this situation that kind of information could prove very useful."

"In the meantime, we should leak it to the press and get them stirred up about the possible connection."

"No, no. Not yet. Let me see what I can come up with first. We don't want a flock of reporters combing over every inch of this guy's life just yet. If at all possible we want to keep him out of the public eye, so when he's eliminated there's not as many questions. We'll keep this IRA thing to ourselves for now, an ace up our sleeve, if you will."

"Fine, good idea. I'm heading to the McIver house now," Castellano said. "I'll make sure everything needed to connect him to the bomb is found on the property when my men search it later on. I've already put in a call for the warrants."

"Keep me posted."

Kemiss closed the phone and returned it to his pocket. Sometimes when a door closed, a window was opened. All you had to do was find it. Mentally he began cycling through the names of people he'd had contact with over the years that might be able to help. Having been a sitting Senator for twenty years his list of contacts was long and included a number of influential people, but the person he needed was someone who would have access to classified information in the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. Soon a name came to mind and as he arrived at the end of his driveway and turned to walk back to his house, he dispelled a frozen breath and hit the call button next to a contact listed in his phone.

11:23 a.m. Eastern Time – Sunday

County Route 141

Lake Sherwood, West Virginia

"It's a 280SE," Declan said, pulling a gray canvas cover off a Mercedes Benz. The slate blue four door sedan sat parked on a concrete pad in a narrow space between the rear wall of the cabin and two tall piles of firewood, effectively hiding the vehicle from the view of anyone who might be passing by in the winter months while the leaves were off the trees.

"And you've had it stored here for how long?" Constance asked, as she folded her arms across her chest in an attempt to stay warm. "How do you know it's going to start?"

"Oh, it'll start. My da' had one just like it. With the exception of my mum and me, I think that car was his favorite thing in the world."

Constance flashed a brief smile and Declan suddenly realized that he'd never spoken openly about his family in front of her. It was a new experience and it felt absolutely liberating. He leaned against the hood of the Mercedes and looked at her as she stood there in the same green knit sweater and blue jeans that she'd been wearing the night before. Her auburn hair was tied behind her head and instead of meeting his gaze, she looked down at her feet and flexed her toes up and down inside the brown sandals she was wearing.