The Angel Tapes

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-one

By the same author

Copyright

 

To the men and women of the Garda Síochána, the Guardians of the Peace

 

The author gratefully acknowledges the following, whose kindness, assistance, and inspiration made this book possible:

Paschal Anders, Neal Bascomb, John Conlon, William Dillon, Derek Guildea, Michael Kelleher, Vere Lenox-Conyngham, Freeman and Geraldine Lynn, Paula Kane, Mary McCarthy, Monika Riethmüller, Rachel Serpico, and Jonathan Williams.

One

The searing flash took the beggar-woman by surprise. She shut her eyes and clutched her baby hard to her breast. Then the shock wave rolled.

The bomb went off on O'Connell Street, a major thoroughfare at the heart of Dublin city. The street is broad enough to accommodate three lanes of traffic on either side and a very wide traffic island in the middle. Some of its buildings date from the eighteenth century. They are stately and imposing—when you can see them properly, when their neoclassic façades aren't hidden behind the bright lights and primary-colored signboards of fast-food outlets and movie theaters.

At eight in the morning on Friday, July 3, 1998, there was already much activity on the traffic island. A street cleaner was fishing empty beer cans and other jetsam out of the filthy waters of the Anna Livia Fountain; the early morning drunks had assembled around the reclining bronze nude, and they toasted one another and life in general with the cans that would shortly replace those dredged out by the cleaner.

Gatherings of sharply dressed commuters waited at the curb for the lights to change. The waiting was long, for this is not a pedestrian-friendly city. The traffic was building up; even now the haze of pollution, mingled with the heat haze of this sultry morning, was blurring the outlines of the statue of Daniel O'Connell at the southern end of the street.

The panhandlers were out in great numbers, too, knowing that Dublin's tourists like to make an early start. Most of those asking for handouts were women and children; if you thought to detect a family resemblance between the beggars and the drunks at the fountain, then you would not have been mistaken.

The beggars were of nomadic stock—Ireland's traveling people. Their grubby garments were carefully chosen to maximize the wearers' chances of separating both commuters and tourists from their small change. One of the beggar-women had an infant at her breast, swathed in a thick, plaid shawl, though the morning temperature had reached the high seventies by eight o'clock. She squatted on the paving stones of the traffic island, with her back to the fountain, facing south.

And so she'd a clear view of the explosion.

Eyewitnesses who were closer to the blast said later that it was as though the earth had suddenly opened, as though all hell had—“quite literally”—broken loose. Others described the detonation in the language of the cinema: they spoke of glass and other flying objects sailing past in slow motion; of human beings lifted off their feet as if by an invisible hand, and set down again—battered, bloodied, and incomplete—many yards distant. Of a roar like Krakatoa.

The comparison with an angry volcano was a valid one. The asphalted roadway erupted directly beneath a black taxicab traveling in the middle traffic lane. The vehicle disintegrated. The cabdriver's death took place in the time needed for flesh and bone and blood to atomize.

The other deaths—four in all—took a little longer.

But not much.

*   *   *

Blade Macken woke as his buzzer sounded a third time, more insistent than before. Whoever was at the front door was holding his finger on the button.

He sat up in bed—and wished he hadn't. Somebody was crushing his head in a vise; he could feel his brain being forced out through the sockets of his eyes. He could hardly breathe; his torturers appeared to have sealed off the route to his windpipe with a Velcro strip. There wasn't so much as a lungful of oxygen in the room; he'd left the windows shut and the curtains open. The light was blinding; even when he closed his eyes, it still burned pinkly through the lids.

“Oh shit, oh Christ, oh Jesus,” Blade moaned, as the buzzer buzzed once more. He shut his eyes again and cupped his palms in front of them. He didn't know what time it was, what day it was. He barely knew
who
he was. Hangovers, he reflected, used not to be like this.

Macken sat on the edge of the bed, and that made things worse. His vision grew faulty, his head pounded, his stomach started to heave. He was still wearing all his clothes, he saw now. Even his shoes. He staggered from the bed, stumbled to the window that faced the backyard, raised it to let in some air. Then he went to the other one, the one that looked out on the street, that allowed in the morning sunlight, and raised that as well. The draft caused the net curtains to flutter and Blade to shiver, though the air was warm and moist.

The buzzer sounded again.

“Oh, my fuck,” he said with feeling, left the bedroom, shutting the door behind him, and went to the front door of the apartment. The judas gave him a fisheye-lens view of the back of a woman's head. There was dark brown hair, worn shoulder-length. Blade opened the door.

“God, you look terrible,” Orla Sweetman said.

She didn't wait to be invited in but walked on past him. She was almost as tall as Macken, five feet and nine inches in her low-heeled shoes. He hadn't chosen her as his assistant for her striking looks, though that had been whispered throughout the department at the time of her appointment. She'd simply been the best damn detective sergeant the Special Branch could field.

“Did you stay on or what?” she asked.

“Stay on … stay on where?” What was she was talking about?

Sweetman didn't reply because her cellular phone, switched to silent mode, began to pulsate.

Macken waited awkwardly in his tiny hallway, smoothing his tousled hair, sick as a dog, throat dry as the Sahara, as she spoke quietly into the instrument, waited, listened, spoke again, broke the connection. Then she frowned and went to the place where Blade's house phone lay in disarray, under the little table in the hall. He heard faintly the busy signal before she replaced the receiver and returned the unit to its rightful place. He saw that his mother's painting, the one she'd done all those years ago for his twenty-first birthday, was hanging askew above the table—and wondered about that.

“God, I've only been trying to reach you for the past hour,” Sweetman said. “They want us in O'Connell Street”—she looked at her watch—“in ten minutes.”

He shook his head in incomprehension; a bad mistake—he swore he felt something drift loose.

“Duffy and the deputy commissioner. Ten minutes. Do you think we can make that—sir?”

He glanced at his own watch. It was a little before nine; he wasn't scheduled for duty until eleven today—that much he
could
remember.

Sweetman saw his troubled look.

“The bomb,” she said.

“Bomb?”

“The car bomb.” Something resembling pity crossed her face. “You really haven't heard, have you, sir?”

Blade hated it when she called him “sir” when there was no one else present. He knew she did it for the same reason others prefaced a scathing remark with the words, “With all due respect…” He knew very well that Detective Sergeant Sweet-man's “sir” meant: “Macken, you're a slob, and if I outranked you or if I was a detective superintendent, too, I'd be only too pleased to tell you just what a clapped-out, drink-sodden slob I think you are.” Sweetman's “sir” made him feel guilty, as if in some way he'd betrayed her trust, broken a promise he'd never made.

“Somebody's after putting a bomb under a taxi in O'Connell Street.”

“Jesus.”

“There's feck all left of the taxi—or the driver. We think there may be at least five people dead; God knows how many injured. The morning rush hour, Blade—in O'Connell Street. Feeney says there were arms and legs and bits of bodies everywhere. Can you imagine?”

Macken could—all too clearly, and he wished then that he didn't have such a vivid imagination. His stomach heaved again; he tasted sour whiskey in his mouth and felt his face go white. Sweetman was at the door of the bathroom before him, had the handle turned as he came charging through. Tactfully, she shut the door as he headed for the toilet.

When he was finished, he brushed his teeth with a liberal worm of toothpaste and it tasted much sweeter than usual, in contrast with the acid bitterness of the bile that was still in his mouth. He swallowed cold water, threw some more in his face, and raised his eyes to the mirror.

Blade saw a stranger. Agreed, the retching had caused his eyes to turn even redder than they had been. Nevertheless, the face in the mirror belonged to a man fourteen or fifteen years his senior, someone pushing sixty. He was horrified by that image because it bore no relation to the one he carried within him. He was accustomed to thinking of himself as a young man—late twenties, say. A young man who was aging at a rate far slower than that which governed the rest of the human race. Small wonder, then, that he was always surprised to see himself in photographs; he'd to do a double take on recognizing himself, so at odds with reality was his self-image.

Did mirrors lie? He thought they did. For some reason the man in his shaving mirror never seemed to have so much gray at the temples; nor were his cheeks and chin so flabby as photographs claimed they were; the skin of the man in the shaving mirror possessed far fewer wrinkles about the eyes and mouth. And as for those dangerous-looking liver spots: surely they were caused by flaws in the photographic emulsion?

Blade Macken had begun thinking more and more about mortality ever since he'd turned forty-four.
Forty-four.
It was no longer middle age; thirty-five was middle age, halfway to three score years and ten. Maybe, just maybe, he would make seventy, if he cut down on his drinking and gave his throat a rest from the Hamlets. But ninety? No bloody way. His grandmother-in-law was all of ninety-two, and looked it. She also sounded it, smelled it, behaved it, and that was one road Blade didn't want to travel down.