Chapter 18

Stepping off the plane at Dublin Airport, I sniffed the air, expecting to smell the ocean. In spite of being only a few miles from the Irish Sea, my nose detected only verdant vegetation and jet fuel.

Once the taxi took me beyond the airport, I could see why. Everything was so green. Not just the green of Toronto or Vancouver, but every shade of green I could imagine. Bushes and trees were trimmed away from the roadway, but hung over the top of us. It looked as if we drove through a green tunnel.

Dublin had never built skyscrapers, so the churches had been the tallest buildings. It made me sad to see the spires of the old cathedrals poking up through the waters of the bay. Half-submerged buildings—houses, hotels, office buildings, and shops—lined both shores of the River Liffey and the bay.

Much of old Dublin was gone. The city had escaped the nuclear destruction of so many of the world’s major metropolises, but the oceans’ rise drowned most of the major Irish cities. Scientists projected that in another two or three hundred years, if the rest of the Antarctic and Greenland ice melted, Ireland would be more of an archipelago than an island.

I met the landlady at the home I rented online and got the key code. The end-of-group townhouse dated to the mid-twenty-first century, and though it needed some maintenance and updating, it otherwise met the advertisement, and it was clean. It was near bus and train lines, as well as downtown and the university. I paid three months’ rent in advance.

After talking with Wil, I decided to skip renting a car. The Irish still maintained the antiquated habit of driving on the wrong side of the road. I figured it would be simpler and less stressful to rent a motorcycle. A bus line passed a block from the flat, so I took the bus to the motorcycle store.

The balding guy with a beer belly I had to deal with didn’t seem to think women knew how to ride one of his precious machines.

“Hi. I’m Jasmine Keller. I arranged to lease an ElectroRocket.”

He eyed me, spending a little too long on my chest. “Well, now, that’s a very powerful motorcycle,” he said. “I think you’d probably find it easier to handle one of those TownScooters.”

“Thank you for your concern, but I own an older model of the ElectroRocket, and that’s what I want.”

He asked for a deposit equal to the sales price of the bike and smirked at me.

I wanted to wipe the smirk off his face, but he had Jasmine’s identification, and I really wanted to keep that identity unspoiled. A bus ride to the suburbs south of the city took an hour and a half, but the shop there rented me a bike without giving me a hassle.

Driving on the left wasn’t a problem on the motorway, but I figured out quickly that the Irish seemed to have missed the invention of the stop sign. They were absolutely in love with roundabouts.

By the time I got back to the house, I needed a drink. Unfortunately, I hadn’t had time to visit any food or liquor stores. Luckily, there was some kind of law about always having a pub within walking distance.

The next morning, I called my dad’s contact and arranged to have my equipment delivered. That happened around noon, and I spent the afternoon setting up the security system, file server, and network. With that taken care of, I started looking for O’Bannon.

It had been almost two months since I shot the assassin. I didn’t know the extent of his injuries, but I figured that he was probably close to being healed. A search online showed that he owned a townhouse in Dublin and a country house near Cork. The other obvious places to look for him would be at Reagan’s Castletown House estate near Celbridge, or Reagan’s mansion in North Dublin. The Dublin house was Reagan’s main home. From what I could determine, Castletown was used primarily for entertaining.

O’Bannon’s neighborhood in Dublin was several steps up from the neighborhood where I rented. Lots of hip pubs and restaurants, boutique shops, and a young, well-to-do crowd. It was easy to find his house, and I scouted it as much as I could during the day.

My dad’s research said that O’Bannon liked fine foods—especially Italian and French—expensive wines, and women of a particular physical type. Adopting a form of a woman that matched his taste, I checked out a couple of wine bars, and then had dinner at a very expensive French restaurant only a block away from his house.

Cruising the pubs in the neighborhood that night didn’t turn him up, so when the hour grew late and the crowds thinned, I slipped into an alley, blurred my form, and snuck up on his house.

There didn’t appear to be anyone home, so I bypassed the security system and entered through the back door. It didn’t take long to learn that he wasn’t in residence, and hadn’t been for a while. Nothing in the refrigerator, no dirty laundry. The only thing of interest was the gun safe in the basement.

The electronic lock took only a moment. The safe held two rifles and three pistols. One of the rifles was of a type used for competitive target shooting. The other was a fifty-caliber sniper rifle with a high-powered telescope. The kind of gun used for extremely long-range shots. I left everything where it was and closed the safe.

As I let myself out, I reflected that if I were recuperating, I’d probably choose a house in the country rather than a noisy part of the city.

The following day, I drove out to Celbridge, the town nearest to Reagan’s Castletown House. I acted like a completely clueless tourist, pretending I thought the manor was still accessible to the public. I soon learned that Reagan wasn’t on the best of terms with his neighbors. Basically, no one had anything good to say about anyone associated with Castletown.

I rode out to the residential area that abutted the estate and found a place to park the bike. Slipping into the woods, I quickly reached the fence around the property. It was the kind of fence I hated—fifteen-foot wrought-iron bars topped with spikes. Brick pillars every twelve feet anchored the wrought iron, but the pillars were twelve feet tall with razor wire stretched between the wrought iron on either side. It was clear that Reagan wanted his visitors to use the gates.

CCTV and motion sensors were installed at intervals on the house, but I didn’t see any motion sensors around the horse stables or the servants’ quarters and the kitchen.

It took a couple of hours to walk around the perimeter, but it turned out that Reagan used the same fencing even far away from the house. I couldn’t see any good ways to approach the place.

I spent the next week staking out the house, watching through binoculars, hoping to catch a glimpse of O’Bannon. Neither he nor the nurse from the Vancouver compound made any appearances, though I saw a lot of other people. The landscape crew was extensive, as were men who I assumed were part of the security force. Plus, I counted at least twenty people who appeared to be household staff.

After two days of rain and wind, I took advantage of the first nice day. The bike ride took five hours to reach O’Bannon’s country cottage west of Cork. The countryside was as beautiful and tranquil as all the pictures. Since The Fall and the global increase in temperatures, Ireland had warmed up, but the climate continued to be wetter and cooler than in Canada.

I would never have found O’Bannon’s place without a GPS. It was two miles from the nearest village and a quarter-mile from a road barely wide enough for one car. I parked the bike in a copse of trees and followed a low stone wall to get within sight of his house.

It didn’t look any different than the other farmhouses in the area. Two stories, and about the same size as his Dublin townhouse. A two-car garage and a ramshackle barn were the only other structures. Other than motion-triggered lights in the front and back, I couldn’t spot any evidence of a security system.

On the other hand, a huge pasture of open lawn surrounding the house provided no cover to approach the place. From what I’d seen on my drive down from Dublin, a lot of Ireland’s land consisted of low, rolling hills, but O’Bannon’s house sat in a very flat part of the country. I ruled out finding a place to hide and stake out the house, or even to use as a sniper’s perch.

The place looked deserted. After spending an hour watching for some activity, I rode back to the village I’d passed through and hit the pub across the street from the church. The proprietor served me a bowl of lamb stew and a glass of stout that renewed my faith in the world.

“American?” he asked when he brought my second beer.

“Sort of. Canadian, North American.”

“On holiday?”

“Yes. Holiday and business. My firm posted me to Dublin for a project. But on my own time, I want to see the country. A man I met one time told me about this part of Ireland, so here I am.”

“And what do you think?”

“It’s absolutely beautiful. The only problem is, if people keep feeding me like this, I’ll have to buy a new wardrobe.”

He beamed. “Was it a local man?”

“I think so. He said he lived northwest of Blarney. I can’t remember exactly where. I do remember that he mentioned Ballyandreen, which confused the hell out of me because there are two towns with that name near Cork.”

He roared with laughter. “What was this bloke’s name?”

“Gavin. I never did get his last name. Tall, burley man, head shaved bald, with a fat nose. Probably in his forties.”

The innkeeper tilted his head to the side, obviously thinking. “That would seem to fit a man I know. Gavin O’Bannon. His place is north of here. It’s a small world, isn’t it?”

“Really? You know him? Does he come in here often?”

“He was away for a while. He travels on business. He’s back now, though he seems to stick close to home. Had an accident sometime back. Told me he had a rough time of it.”

“That’s too bad. Do you think he’ll recover?”

“Can’t use his left arm very well. Said he crushed the shoulder, broke some ribs, and punctured his lung. Said he’s coming back from it, but it’s a slow process. If I see him, who should I say?”

I thought furiously. My first temptation was to say Danielle Kincaid, but I bit my tongue. “Jasmine,” I said. “Tell him Jasmine from Vancouver asked about him. I doubt he remembers me. We just met in a bar one night.”

I used Jasmine’s credit card to pay for my meal. “Are there any places that rent rooms near here?”

“Back toward Blarney would be the closest,” he said.

I thanked him and left. When I got outside and walked around the side to get my bike, I pumped my fist in the air and screamed, “Yes!”

I checked into a hotel near Blarney using my real name and form, then went shopping in the village near Blarney castle. I bought a couple of warm sweaters and a long black woolen cloak. The Irish weather was starting to get to me. The natives were walking around in shorts and t-shirts, but the temperatures were barely in the eighties on a nice day.

I found a lovely restaurant touting locally-sourced food, guaranteed non-toxic. I found that easy to believe, as southern Ireland had never been a major polluter. The local salmon I ordered was probably the best I’d ever tasted.

Halfway through my meal, I saw O’Bannon come in. I turned my head away, keeping track of him out of the corner of my eye. As he walked to his table, he glanced my way, and I thought I saw him hesitate. Maybe it was just my imagination, as he recovered quickly. He did, however, take a seat where he could watch me.

I got up and went to the ladies’ room. I thought about what O’Bannon might know about me. He had tried to kill Danielle Kincaid. I had shot him, but he never saw me. On the other hand, Kieran Murphy knew me as Libby Nelson in my natural form, and knew I was an insurance investigator. The bartender in Vicarstown also knew me in my natural form, but as Jasmine Keller. I rented the townhouse in Dublin as Jasmine and in the form that matched her identification pictures.

All this made me a little dizzy and I had to sit down. I usually wasn’t that careless. Before I went back to my table, I darkened my hair slightly, lengthened it a few inches, and altered its part and style. I also shortened my stature about four inches, modified my facial features, and turned my eyes green. The woman in the mirror resembled Libby Nelson, but wasn’t her. It was the best I could do to try to salvage the situation.

O’Bannon watched me as I walked back to my table, but I thought I could see puzzlement, or perhaps uncertainty, in his face. I ignored him, never looking directly at him. I did note that all he ordered was an appetizer and a single glass of wine, then I saw him paying and leaving as I prepared to go.

That made me nervous. I went to the ladies’ room again and completely altered my appearance. The woman who walked out of the restaurant was a foot shorter than I was, with a dark complexion, dark hair, and wearing a different color dress. I walked down the street to a hotel and checked in as Suri Selvaskanen.

So, there I was, without a change of clothes or even a toothbrush. My rented motorcycle was parked at the restaurant. And as far as I knew, a homicidal maniac was hanging around the village hoping to end my life.

I waited a few minutes, then blurred my form and took the back stairs out of the hotel. I really wasn’t dressed for wandering around in the dark trying to stalk an assassin. I could imagine myself dressed in a black cat suit, but that didn’t change the reality that I had put on a dress and two-inch heels to go out to dinner.

Circling around to the restaurant, I scouted the area, hoping to spot O’Bannon. I didn’t see him in any of the hiding places that would allow him to watch the restaurant’s front door. He might have climbed to a roof, but the bartender’s description of O’Bannon’s arm caused me to dismiss the idea. Besides, I wasn’t dressed for wall climbing.

An hour of searching didn’t turn up anything, so I went to get my bike. I froze as I saw it. Both tires had been slashed with a large knife. O’Bannon knew that the woman in the pub and the woman in the restaurant were the same. If he had known I was Danielle Kincaid, I would probably have been dead.