Nightwatch: The Peacekeeper
By John R. Murray
Nightwatch
created by Jeff Williams
Developed by Jeff Williams and Robert Moriyama
Jimmy
Sullivan took a long swallow of Guinness draft, savoring the thick,
dark taste of it. "Ah, now there's a pint the way it should be,"
he said. "You can't get it served proper-like on t'other side of
the pond. Even in so-called Irish pubs, it's always chilled a
little too much." His lean, angular face tilted back as he
inhaled the familiar scents of Guinness and kidney pies.
Kevin Brand shook his head. "Ye're risking a lot showing your
face here, Jimmy. They're still keeping a dark, dank cell for you
in Maghaberry."
Sullivan laughed, running his fingers through the soot-black hair
framing his face. "If this face was the one I was born with, I'd
be worried. But a little pain and a lot of money bought me a mug
that no computer can match with the old one. And they never had
me fingerprints, Saint Paddy be thanked. Besides, it's no safer
for me in Boston -- the Yanks are none too fond of us old Provos, nor
anyone else with a fondness for makin' political statements with a
bang."
The Sword and Shamrock was one of the newer bars in the narrow,
twisting laneways of The Entries, and had no reputation as a meeting
place for either of the factions in The Troubles. Brand had
recommended it for precisely that reason -- the likelihood of
surveillance by the Brits or the Ulster Defense Association or others
of the Orange Order was fairly low.
This was the new Belfast, a long way from the bad old days (or good
ones, depending on your sentiments) when explosions and gunfire had
served as a common political debating tactic. But rumblings of
closer links with the British government had brought old Provos out of
their retirement; bad enough to be a puppet of the English without
replacing the strings with stronger stuff. And that, in turn, had
brought Jimmy Sullivan back from exile.
Kevin Brand was one of those most likely to Make a Statement of the
explosive kind. He'd worked with Jimmy in the past, building and
placing little surprises that took the shine off Harrod's or leveled
hotels where Brit Lords and the like were resting their fat arses, and
he'd been happy to hear from him after so many years.
"So, Jimmy, will you be lending a hand in our current campaign?
We've a few locations in mind, and your talent for fitting the most in
the smallest package would be handy."
Sullivan sighed. "That's not why I'm here,
Kevin," he said. "I came to ask if you'd change your plans --"
"If ye've better ideas for targets, I'd be happy to --"
"I meant forgetting about packages and surprises," Sullivan said.
"They never really got us what we wanted, did they? Them in
power, they do what they want, surprises or not. Knock one down,
there's always another one waiting to take over. The only ones
who suffer --"
"Jimmy, what's happened to you? Ye were a soldier for the cause,
one of the best! Has living with the Yanks made you go soft?"
"The only ones who suffer are the innocents," Sullivan said. "Ye
can't hurt the ones who make the decisions -- lives don't matter to
them, even the lives of their own kind. So there's no point, no
point at all."
Brand shook his head in disbelief, his ruddy face contorting into a
goblin mask framed with red and silver hair. "So ye'd let the
Brits take us over for good and all. Ye'd just surrender to them
without a fight."
"Killin' randomly isn't fighting," Sullivan said. "Even taking
down High Lord Muckety-muck surrounded by half the Army isn't fighting
if ye kill women and children to do it."
"I can't believe my ears," Brand said.
"Believe this," Sullivan said, leaning forward. "Whatever the
cause, I don't believe in making innocents suffer for it. In fact
-- I've taken to protecting them. I'm a peacekeeper now, not a
soldier."
Brand shook his head again and tilted his head back to drain his glass of beer.
Sullivan lowered his eyes, moving his hand so the dregs of his beer
formed a dark whirlpool in the bottom of the pint glass.
"If
you'd seen the things I've seen -- in Africa, when I was there
playing teacher --"
"Back before you lost your nerve, you mean," Brand said, sneering.
"I was hoping -- I was hoping that you might join me, instead of t'other way around," Sullivan said.
"And do what? Kiss the arse of the first Brit I see? No thank you, Jimmy. No thank you."
"I'm sorry to hear that," Sullivan said. "I guess we've nothing more to talk about, then."
They stood and Brand strode toward the door, leaving Sullivan to pay
the bill. Sullivan rummaged in his pocket and dropped a ten-euro
note on the table -- overtipping to compensate for spoiling the jovial
atmosphere of the place -- and followed.
He reached the street in time to see Brand sliding his bulky body
behind the wheel of a (British small car?) -- an ironic choice given
the man's hatred of all things English -- and waved. Brand
responded by raising the middle finger of his right hand while he
fumbled to insert the key into the ignition.
Sullivan turned away and looked down at the small device in his own
hand. It could have been a keyless door lock transmitter, but it
wasn't. "Goodbye, Kevin," he said. Then he moved his thumb
over the larger of the two buttons and squeezed.
Brand vanished in a near-soundless ball of flame that seemed to emerge
from the doors and roof of the little car and move inward. The
windows shattered, not from the blast, but from the contraction of the
roof and side panels of the car as they collapsed like a punctured
balloon.
Sullivan turned back to survey the damage. He smiled.
Aside from the burning wreckage of the car, there was no sign that
anything unusual had happened. There was no debris scattered
around; there were no broken windows on the surrounding buildings; even
the alarms on cars parked only a few meters away from Brand's vehicle
hadn't been triggered.
Whistling softly, Sullivan walked briskly (but not too briskly)
away. It was several minutes later that a couple emerging from
the Sword and Shamrock noticed the burning mass (surely too small to be
a car) and called for help.
***
"Surely you're joking," Simon Litchfield said, peering at the image on
Callow's fold-out display screen. "There is no way in Hell that
was a car."
Callow smirked. "It was a car, all right. A small car, but
one of many thousands of its type puttering around Europe and the
U.K.--"
"Could you guys keep it down a bit? This is a library, you know."
Callow frowned and turned toward the speaker. "Hanson, isn't it? Logistical Support?"
Hanson, a slightly-pudgy man with reddish-blonde hair and tiny rimless
spectacles, cringed. "Er, sorry, Mr. Callow, I didn't know it was
you."
"The Popular Culture section of the Nightwatch Institute library hardly
seems like someplace you should be in the middle of the working day,
Mr. Hanson," Callow said.
"I -- er, I was in the Transportation section, looking up specs for a
Russian transport plane," Hanson said. "We're coordinating a
relief mission with --"
"Very well, Mr. Hanson, get on with it and leave us alone," Callow said.
Hanson withdrew, obviously terrified that Callow would retaliate for his intrusion in some unimaginably unpleasant way.
"How is it that someone from Logistical Support knows you -- and
apparently knows you well?" Simon asked. "Your official
title and function is rather unimpressive, however powerful you may be
in reality."
Callow sighed and smiled. "Apparently there are rumors that I am more important than I seem."
Simon snorted. "And we all know who starts and controls the spreading of rumors around here ..."
"C'est moi, c'est moi," Callow half-sang. "Life is much easier
when those around you offer you the respect you truly deserve.
You, for one, should try it sometime."
"Bollocks, as my dear mother would say," Simon said. "If
that smoldering ball of metal was a car, how did it end up like
that? Was it crushed in a wrecking yard and dropped off in the
street when no one was looking?"
Callow shook his head. "Review of traffic surveillance footage
showed this car -- identified from the license plates, which were
relatively intact -- was driven to that area less than an hour before
it was found in its rather unusual state. More to the point -- it
was occupied at the time of its -- collapse."
Simon winced. "The occupant's dead, I presume? He'd have to
be Tom Thumb to have survived having the car crushed around him like
that."
"If Tom Thumb was made of asbestos and titanium, he might have survived
such an incident," Callow said. "The driver, one Kevin Brand, was
made of flesh and blood. And I repeat, the car collapsed inward
-- it was not crushed from outside."
"An implosion bomb? I'd heard stories about some new vectored-force explosives -- but I never believed them."
"The next step beyond conventional shaped charges," Callow said.
"A substance that can be molded to conform to a surface, which when
activated -- 'detonated' doesn't seem like the appropriate word --
generates an expanding shell of extremely hot but low-density plasma on
the exposed surface only. The result -- in a relatively closed
space -- is the instantaneous consumption of oxygen and other volatile
substances, resulting in a near-vacuum."
Simon whistled. "If the poor sod had his windows rolled down, he
might have had a chance -- assuming he wasn't incinerated, that
is. But that brings us back to the usual question -- why is the
Institute interested? And why do you want me involved?"
"Several reasons," Callow said. "First, the substance used is
beyond top secret, and very rare. It was, in fact, being
considered for use in the matter that has occupied your Mr. Weldon's
attention of late, as a backup measure, at least. Second, the man
who was killed -- Kevin Brand -- was a known member of the dfafasfadsf
faction of the Irish Republican Army. MI6 has reported that there
have been rumors of some kind of violent and spectacular action by the
late Mr. Brand's group to protest plans to merge Northern Ireland more
completely with the U.K."
"That's not the sort of thing we deal with," Simon said. "We're not the police -- or MI6 -- or the bloody British Army."
"I wasn't finished," Callow said. "Where was I? Ah, yes --
third, Mr. Brand had just had an argument with this man." He slid
his fingertips over the control pad on his handheld computer, and the
image of the imploded car was replaced by a computer-generated sketch
of a man with dark, wavy hair and a narrow, angular face.
"I've never seen 'this man' before," Simon said. But then he
frowned and looked closer. "There is something about his eyes,
though, something familiar ..."
"Perhaps this will help," Callow said. A few quick keystrokes
brought up a photograph next to the sketch, and this face Simon
recognized immediately.
"Jerry Sullivan! I thought the bastard was dead!"
"You and every counterterrorism and intelligence agency in the world,"
Callow said. "We only made the identification by accident.
You see, we neglected to exclude the supposedly-deceased from the
database of known associates of Mr. Brand when looking for a match for
the man in the composite sketch. Mr. Sullivan must have had
an excellent facial reconstruction specialist -- even the spacing
between the eyes and the distance from the bridge of the nose to the
upper mandible has been changed. But when the two faces are seen
side by side, the eyes, as you noticed, have it."
"So I'm to be involved because I know -- I knew Sullivan years
ago. Bloody wonderful." Simon suppressed a shudder.
Darfur, he thought. Christ, I wish I could forget about that
place, the things I saw -- the things I did. But even if I could
forget, Callow would always have his files to remind me whenever it
suited him ...
"He is not the man you knew, and I do not mean only that his appearance
has changed," Callow said. "But your familiarity with the man he
was might still give you an edge in dealing with him."