Chapter 17

During the train ride back to Toronto, I asked my father to do some in-depth research on Michael Reagan.

Upon my arrival, Dad picked me and the paintings up, and we drove to his house. I carried the artwork into the house and showed it to him, then carried it all down to the vault in the subbasement.

While he cooked dinner, he told me about Reagan.

“You know he’s the head of the organized crime family in Ireland, right? His father and grandfather were in the business. His father also was an amateur painter with some talent, and Michael gained an appreciation for art.”

He turned on a blender and made a lot of noise for a little while, poking at whatever he was blending with a long wooden spoon and then blending it again. He nodded and pored the contents into a bowl.

“Michael was considerably more ambitious than his father, and when he inherited the business, he consolidated the other Irish gangs. Word on the street is that after observing his methods of consolidating his main rival, the rest of the gangs were only too glad to join him.”

A cutting board, knife, and bowl of vegetables appeared on the table in front of me. “I know you can’t cook worth a damn, but you do know how to use a knife. Slice those up.”

I dutifully began slicing vegetables while he went back to whatever he was stirring on the stove and continued his story.

“His ambition extended to art collecting. A couple of my informants tell me that he has a real passion for art. Unfortunately, his tastes and his bank account were at odds. So, he began commissioning works that he wanted. That also led him to brokering some pieces.”

Commissioning was parlance for paying someone like me a million credits to steal a fifty million-credit artwork.

“And then he found a talented forger,” I said.

“So it seems. It’s brilliant, actually,” Dad said. “Commission a high-value piece, make a copy of it, sell the copy, and you make money while adding to your collection.”

He took the chopped vegetables and put them in a pot on the stove. The kitchen was starting to smell really good and my mouth began to water.

“Anyway,” Dad said, “He was making billions, spread into Scotland, and then ran into some resistance. A couple of years ago, he barely escaped an assassination attempt and decided to hide out in Vancouver for a while.”

“What are his main businesses?”

“The usual. Drugs, human trafficking, arms. His cover business to give him legitimacy is the same as yours—security. He provides men as security guards, short and long term, in addition to installing and monitoring security systems. If gives him an excuse to keep a private army.”

 “And now he’s back in Ireland.”

“Not yet, or at least, not that anyone knows. But his rivals in Scotland and Northern England suffered unexpected accidents recently, shortly before your friend O’Bannon turned up in Vancouver.”

“So, if he does go back to Ireland, where would he go?” I asked.

Dad chuckled, and a screen on the kitchen wall came to life. Some of the billionaire corporate executives built incredibly luxurious houses, but what I saw on the screen surpassed anything I had seen in Canada.

“Castletown House,” Dad said. “One of the largest palaces ever built in Ireland. Completed around 1729 and remodeled about thirty years later. It was owned by the government in the twentieth century, but when the Irish government collapsed in 2087, a corporate executive bought it. It’s changed hands a couple of times, and Reagan bought it about fifteen years ago. The interesting thing about the house is the legend that it’s haunted.”

“Ghosts?” I wondered what kind of mutant might imitate a ghost.

“No, the devil himself. The legend goes back hundreds of years.”

“Where is it?”

“A little less than an hour west of Dublin. Maybe thirty or forty minutes from the airport on the main cross-country highway. He also has a place in Dublin, but it’s not as showy.”

“Wife? Kids?”

“Acknowledged children by three different women. Two sons and a daughter. The oldest son is a vice president of his security business. The daughter spends her time partying in Europe. The younger son is a teenager at a boarding school. I found evidence of a wife, but that was thirty years ago and no mention of her since. Reagan doesn’t mix with the corporate crowd, but he does socialize with the arts set.” He handed me a chip. “Everything I turned up is here.”

Wil flew in two days later and took me to dinner.

“I’ve put out a world-wide watch for Reagan, Murphy and O’Bannon,” he said as we waited to be seated at my favorite restaurant. “The yacht docked in Vietnam, and Murphy was spotted on deck. No telling where they’ll go next.”

The hostess escorted us to our table. Wil ordered wine, then said, “No comment?”

“I’m thinking. Can’t you hear the gears grinding together?”

He smiled and waited. After our meals came, I said, “It wouldn’t hurt to go to Ireland before they get there. I can scout things out and make some contacts. But it doesn’t make sense to go there if they don’t. Maybe when we have a better idea about where they’re going and when they’re going to get there.”

I called Dad the next day. “It looks like my trip to Ireland will be delayed. Reagan is taking the long way around to get home.”

With time on my hands, I checked with Dad and found seven backed-up orders for security system installations. Figuring that Vietnam was a long way from Ireland, I took the largest job first. At that point, I remembered why I had been so willing to jump at Myron’s offer, other than the money, of course. Work was a lot of work. And while I was good at all the ordering of equipment, tracking invoices, and keeping the books straight, I didn’t enjoy it. For the first time, I thought about hiring someone.

I did enjoy the design work, and there was something soothing about the physical part of the work. It didn’t take long to fall back into the pattern of my pre-Vancouver life.

The thing I did enjoy the most was seeing my friend Nellie and hearing her sing. The night I got into town, after I had dinner with Dad, I went down to The Pinnacle. When I walked in, Nellie was on stage belting out an Ella Fitzgerald song. I strolled over to the bar, and Paul Renard, my other best friend, gave out a whoop. He rushed around the bar and scooped me up in a hug.

“Damn, Libby. I never thought I’d say it, but I missed you.”

I kissed him on the forehead. “No one to give you a hard time?”

“Oh, just the usual, but things have been kind of boring around here. No one getting blown up, no mass murders,” he dropped his voice and whispered in my ear, “no uber-rich corporate types wailing about their toys disappearing.”

He pulled back and smiled. “What are you drinking?”

I heard Nellie’s voice falter. Both Paul and I looked toward the stage, and saw her staring back at us with a huge smile on her face. She picked up the lyrics again, but her gaze was locked on me, as mine was locked on her.

She finished the song and jumped off the stage just as I was taking the first sip of my drink. Dark hair flying behind her, she skipped across the room on stiletto heels like a ballerina. Paul’s hug had been very tight, but I thought little Nellie would crush my ribs. Absolutely uninhibited, she buried her face between my breasts and inhaled deeply.

“Oh, God, I have missed you,” she said. She pulled my head down and kissed me with a lot of tongue.

When she finally let me up for air, I managed to gasp, “I missed you, too.”

I didn’t get much sleep that night, so I was fairly fuzzy when we arrived at my mom’s restaurant for brunch the next day. Mom knew I was coming into town, so I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when Glenda, the street urchin I had semi-adopted, came flying out of the kitchen.

“Miz Libby!” she squealed, giving my poor ribs one more crushing squeeze. There was a lot more of her than when she first came to live with Mom. It was more like hugging a girl than a little kid.

“Are you working?” I asked. Mom and Dominick, her partner, had given Glenda a job in the kitchen.

“No, not until later,” she said.

“Have you had breakfast yet?”

She said she had eaten earlier, but didn’t argue when I urged her to sit down with Nellie and me. Glenda spent most of her first fifteen years on the verge of starvation, and it seemed like you could never fill her up.

We ordered, and then I asked, “So, how are your studies going?” Teaching her to read and write and do arithmetic was a project shared by Nellie and me along with just about everyone who worked for Mom.

“I’m reading a book,” Glenda announced. The pride on her face brought tears to my eyes.

“What’s it about?” Nellie asked.

“It’s not about anything. It’s a made-up story.”

“Oh? What’s the story about?” I asked.

“A kid named Harry Potter. He’s a wizard.” Her face screwed up in concentration. “I think a wizard is a kind of mutant. But it’s just make believe. You know? I seen a lotta mutants, and I never seen anyone wave a magic wand to make things happen. I have to look a lot of the words up in the dictionary, but it’s a lotta fun. Betsy gave it to me.”

Betsy was Nellie’s younger sister.

While we were eating, Mom came in and sat with us. It felt good to be with family. I hadn’t realized that I’d missed them so much.

Wil’s contacts helped us track Reagan’s progress around the world. A Chamber operative managed to sneak onto the yacht in the Mediterranean, and reported that Reagan and Murphy were on board, but O’Bannon was not. I booked my ticket to Ireland the next day.

“You don’t even know he’s in Ireland,” Wil protested as he watched me pack.

“No, but I’ll bet Reagan shipped him out to a hospital, if not in Ireland, then in Switzerland or someplace else in Europe.”

“If Reagan didn’t decide he was a liability and dump him in the ocean somewhere.”

“Possible, but I doubt it. If he wanted to get rid of O’Bannon, the time to do it was when he first got shot. Dump the body in the Strait of Georgia and walk away.”

I finished packing the second of the two boxes with equipment I couldn’t take on an airplane. My dad had set up shipping for them through an old friend of his at MegaTech, the company he worked for before he retired. Hauling my suitcases out, I began pulling clothes from my closet.

“You’ll call me if you find O’Bannon, right?” Wil asked.

Surprised, I turned to him. “Why?”

“I can’t worry about you all the time,” he said, “it’s just too exhausting. But if you find O’Bannon, or Reagan gets to Ireland, I’ll know it’s time to start.”

Walking over to him, I took his face in my hands and kissed him. “If it makes you happy, then I’ll call you.”

“Promise? Or are you lying to me?”

“Promise.”