Killer Instincts v5 (29 page)

Jamie gave me an amused smile, taking a long drink from his glass.

"Did my brother tell you anything else?"

"Not that I can recall."

"Fucking typical," Jamie snorted. "Revisionist bullshit from my little brother. Just like Mom."

"I'm not following you," I said, frustrated.

"Your grandfather, Thomas Lynch, was a member of the British Commandos during the war. Did you ever hear that from Michael?"

I shook my head.

"I figured. Your grandfather tore shit up all across Europe for the whole duration of the war. At one point he even joined the SOE, the Special Operations Executive. That's the British version of the American OSS, what became our CIA after the war. He performed covert raids, assassinated German officers, planted bombs, hunted spies - he was a fucking war hero. And after the war, when he came to the States and started playing house, I think he couldn't take it anymore."

"Do you think he killed himself?" I asked.

"His body was never found. His car went over an embankment and into a river, but they never found him. Everyone assumed he was washed downriver, went out into the ocean."

"But you think something else."

Jamie nodded. "I think he staged it. I think he was asked to go back, to fight the Cold War, and he couldn't resist. After his supposed death, we learned that a massive insurance policy had been established, enough to make sure the rest of us would be able to survive. Mom got remarried a few years later, and that was that."

"Sounds like a real asshole move on Granddad's part,” I said.

"It's what we do,” Jamie replied.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

“After Vietnam, I did some digging about our family history. We go back a long way, the Lynch name, back to Ireland of course, and we have always fought. My grandfather, your great-grandfather, Liam, was in the Great War, going over the top in the mud and blood of the Somme. Later, he fought against the English during the Irish Rebellion, when he was killed. His father fought in the Boer War, and his grandfather in India and Afghanistan, and it goes back generation after generation. At least one Lynch, Killian, fought against the regiments of Napoleon. Before that I don’t know, but I firmly believe we are a family of soldiers, of warriors, part of a legacy going back centuries. I imagine we fought the Normans, and the Vikings, and the Britons, and who knows who else, the Picts maybe. Fighting is in our blood, William, it is our family’s destiny."

"That's why you weren't the least bit surprised when I told you I wanted revenge."

"After seeing what Vietnam did to me, or what he thought it did to me, Michael didn't want you to join the army or do anything to follow in my footsteps, or his father's footsteps. I think you've got the old blood in you, the strong blood, the fighting blood. But your generation, your age, doesn't have a war to fight. You all fell into a pocket of peace, and now the closest thing to a war for men your age is on a Playstation."

I finished off my second pint, throwing the last of it back down my throat and holding the glass up, signaling for more. This time it was Jamie who played catch-up.

"But now, " I said, "now I've got my own war."

Jamie nodded, a cold smile coming to his lips.

"That's right. And Lynches don't lose wars. We finish them."

TWENTY-ONE

We closed the bar that night, and I'm still fuzzy on how we made it back to the Fens and my apartment. I determined that somehow, some way, Jamie not only managed to get us back to where he left his Jeep, but he was able to drive us back to my apartment building. I remember scrawling some kind of note and leaving it on the dashboard, hoping the Jeep wouldn't get towed. Jamie offered to sleep in the cab of his Jeep with a gun drawn to make sure "no one fucked with his ride", but what little sense remained, prevailed, and he crashed on my couch around 3:30 or 4 in the morning.

I marveled at Jamie’s ability to function stumble-slurring drunk like that. Jamie reminded me that "Back in 'Nam" being able to keep your shit together while on R&R, just you and a handful of other white guys carrying money - and ripe for the picking if you made a wrong turn - was literally a life-saving skill.

"Compared to Shanghai, Bangkok, or Saigon, Boston is a city of pussies!" Jamie declared at the top of his lungs, as we made our way down Broad Street around 2 AM.

I was convinced someone was going to pick a fight, and Jamie would wind up unloading his pistol in the middle of downtown. Actually, looking back on it, I was drunkenly convinced that someone would notice my weapons, or Jamie's, and that we'd wind up getting arrested, the whole game lost at the eleventh hour.

Despite all the drinking, we were both up and awake by nine the next morning. I put breakfast together, coffee and OJ, toast and eggs and ham and some fruit. We were both ravenous, and everything disappeared in a shockingly short amount of time. I followed my breakfast with eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen; my face and ribs ached where Julian had worked me over, my hip throbbed where it had slammed into the Volvo's bumper, and my head pounded like a kettle drum from all our drinking.

"I've never gotten my ass kicked before,” I told Jamie while I examined the blooming bruises across my ribs, “and this hangover isn’t helping my recovery.”

"Every grown man should get his ass kicked at least once. Puts a little humility into him. The hangover is just for seasoning."

"I can say with some authority, it was indeed a humiliating experience," I replied.

"Stop it please, now you're beginning to sound like a complete fairy."

After making sure the Jeep was still untowed and in its parking spot, we packed a lunch and decided to drive up to Swampscott for the morning. Winding our way up along Route 1 and 1A, we eventually found ourselves cruising along the Atlantic coastline, driving past tourists and beachcombers down below the road along the rocks and sand.

Swampscott seemed like a comfortable little coastal town, cozy even, with inviting seafood shacks and ice cream stands, sub shops and pizza joints. We passed through the middle of town and continued on, further up the coast and into the nicer residential areas, where the lawns began to spread out and push the houses further and further apart, and the houses grew proportionately.

Eventually we found the Paggiano estate. The street-side property was enclosed with a heavy wrought-iron fence topped with sharp decorative spikes. The driveway itself was gated, operated with an electric motor and complete with a surveillance camera and intercom. Right inside the fence, next to the gate, stood the groundskeeper's cottage, home to the two bodyguards who manned the gate at all times. The windows were curtained, the lawn immaculate. No one was visible as we drove past, but we both got a brief glimpse of a chain-link fence further inside the property, presumably where the guard dogs lived during the day.

"Looks pretty, if you didn't know better," I said.

"Even if you did, it still looks pretty. Pretty can be a cruel fucking bitch when she sets her mind to it."

The area was deceptively quiet; not a lot of traffic, no kids playing in the yards, only the occasional dog-walking pedestrian. We made two passes through the neighborhood, cutting up streets one way and then coming back the other. Jamie drove while I took note of homes near the Paggiano estate that appeared unoccupied at the moment, without cars in the driveway or other signs of habitation. We found three possible candidates within a five minute walk of the estate, and a couple more further away. Not ideal, but acceptable if given no other choice in the matter.

We found a place along the shore to park and eat lunch. We didn't say anything while we ate. Rather, we just looked out over the ocean, watching the gulls swoop along the rocks and the sand, the occasional beachcomber wandering past. I thought back to our meal along the beach in Calais a lifetime ago, remembered how I imagined looking across the Atlantic Ocean somehow to gaze on the Paggiano estate, and now I turned that telescope in the other direction, looking back in time and across the water to see my uncle and I sitting there looking at us.

"At no point in my life, " I said, "did my father ever sit on a shoreline with me and share a packed lunch."

"Does that bother you?" Jamie asked.

"I don't know. I guess my dad just wasn't that kind of person. He was always so formal, so meticulous in everything he did. This would be too outside the lines for him to be comfortable."

Jamie nodded and took a bite of his sandwich.

"Michael was a serious child. He was very little when our father supposedly died, and your grandfather, Thomas, well from what I gather I'm much more like him, while Michael was raised by our stepfather. He was a banker and was all about etiquette and decorum. I couldn't stand it, and maybe that's half the reason I signed up for the Army when I turned eighteen. He never really treated us like his own children, and we never would have gone on a seaside picnic, either."

"So I guess his brand of parenting rubbed off on my dad?" I asked.

"Yeah, and you have my sympathies, " Jamie smiled. "My brother was never a really fun guy to hang out with, anyway."

On the way back into Boston, we pulled into a gas station in Chelsea and used the payphone to contact Richard. After a couple of minutes being routed to wherever he was, I finally got him on the line, filled him in on the details of the last twenty-four hours.

"Glad to hear everything worked out in the end," Richard said.

"Everything didn't work out, at least not for everybody," I replied.

"I would have thought by now you understand that winning and losing in this game have very real and permanent consequences. She got dealt a bad hand and she lost out. She was in the game, and - "

"She was in the game because of you. She knew you'd be the death of her, and she was right. I suppose you can sleep with that knowledge, but it's wearing me a little thin."

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Finally Richard spoke.

"Son, you need to get one fact real straight in your mind. That little girl, she was a professional. She worked for me because I paid her well, and she took risks because I paid her
very
well. If she had called me up five minutes before Julian found her and told me she was done working for me, forever, I would have wished her the best, told her to keep the advance fee I'd given her, and then shredded her file the moment I hung up the phone. You can go on and believe whatever you want, but that's the truth."

I stood there silently contemplating his words for a long moment.

"We're going to finish this business tonight. I just wanted you to know," I said.

"Do you need anything from me?" Richard asked.

"Just wish me luck, and have the apartment dealt with by tomorrow morning. We're not going to be going back there."

"Asking for luck is just an excuse for poor planning, but I'll wish you luck regardless. Someone will take care of the apartment by 5 AM."

"If we don't speak again..."

"Just aim low and keep moving, and you'll do fine."

"Goodbye, Richard."

"Be seeing you, William."

We got back to the apartment around three in the afternoon. Jamie recommended we settle in and take a nap. Throughout the day I had marveled at how well I was holding up considering the drinking and lack of sleep the night before, but as I considered tonight's agenda, sleep made sense. We set the alarm for eleven that night, and although I feared I'd not get to sleep, I must have nodded off moments after hitting the pillow.

When we awoke, we both took a quick shower and ate a small dinner, packing sandwiches and sports drinks into our travel cooler as provisions for the next day. After eating, we broke out my weapons trunk and the hardware Jamie had brought with him, and spread it all out on the bed.

Each of us would carry a suppressed Uzi submachine gun, and we would wear Kevlar tactical vests holding six spare magazines apiece, just like I wore when Richard and I attacked the meth lab. We'd each have a gunbelt with a suppressed Glock 19 automatic and two spare magazines, a small LED tactical flashlight, and a tanto-bladed fighting knife, just in case.

Rather than anything overly dramatic, we both wore dark blue jeans, dark long-sleeved shirts (mine was green, Jamie's was gray), and we each had a windbreaker we could wear over our tactical gear just in case we were seen moving to or from the estate. Rather than any kind of combat boot, we wore dark-colored trail shoes, sturdy enough for the job but with soles that allowed for a quiet step. With our windbreakers zipped up, at a casual glance no one would think twice about us.

In the last few minutes before we left, Jamie and I gave the apartment a final sweep, making sure that nothing of a criminal nature remained. I used the de-gausser to wipe the laptop's hard drive, and I packed up any of the documents Sophia had provided me. By the time we went out the door, the apartment looked no different than when I had first walked in weeks ago.

We pulled out of the parking lot at 1:15 AM.

TWENTY-TWO

By two in the morning, we were driving past the Paggiano estate, lights on, normal speed, just another neighbor coming home late. I used a pair of night-vision binoculars Jamie kept in the Jeep to scan the residences nearby, and we settled on one of the three homes we'd earmarked earlier as being uninhabited. A single light was left on visible through a downstairs window, but there was no garage and no car in the driveway. The light was simply a poor deterrent against burglars, and of course we weren't looking to break in, just use the driveway as a place to park the Jeep so it was out of sight.

We pulled into the driveway slow and with the lights turned off. Once we parked, I let myself out of the car, very carefully closed the door, and gave the house a quick once-over around the perimeter with the night vision binoculars. Satisfied that no one was home, I came back to the Jeep and gave Jamie the thumbs up. Time to get dressed.