Language has been edited to meet forum standards. The unblipped version can be read here on fanfiction.net.
Six: DistractionPete could hear Kathleen’s voice well before he entered her operations room; her tirade was rising steadily in tone and volume as he approached the doorway.
“We are given ample notice of just which neighbourhoods have been slated for civic rearrangement – we even know,
well in advance, which streets are due to be ripped out and bogged up, and when, and how far behind schedule each project is – can anyone give me one
damned excuse as to
why my f---ing operational map isn’t up to date! Grant! We’ve got half of Belfast pouring into the streets and this
bloody map doesn’t even show all the streets correctly! And
don’t tell me the march won’t spill into the Catholic neighbourhoods – if you’re going to believe that for one moment I’ll send you off to chase the Good Folk instead of the paramilitaries.”
In the bustle, Pete’s return to the ops centre had so far gone unnoticed, and he took the opportunity to watch Walsh alternate between directing the activity and berating anyone who lagged behind her own breathlessly driven pace. Her intensity was eerily familiar; he could recall any number of times when he’d thrown himself into the grip of that high-pitched fever, focusing on the immediate crises of coordinating an operation while some intense lurking worry crouched just off to the side. Ignoring the worry never got rid of it, but there was rarely any other option.
That was the hidden price to the priceless treasure of having a friend and colleague like MacGyver. Pete often wondered which was worse, the long weeks when Mac was off on assignment under someone else’s purview, when Pete had no idea where he was or what dangers he was surviving, or not; or the missions when Pete knew the dangers in detail and had to shoulder the responsibility of sending Mac out to face them.
Kathleen had certainly landed herself in the centre of a whirlwind of distraction. Pete had been out of the ops room for fifteen minutes at the most, but something had erupted in that time that seemed to have caught the attention of the entire British Army contingent stationed in Belfast. He waited until she finished rattling off orders and walked up beside her as she bent over the large-scale map of Belfast that covered the centre table, angrily making changes in red pen to the blue lines of the streets.
“I leave to take a phone call and come back to find you deploying the troops. If I take a lunch break, are you going to start a war while I’m gone? What’s up?” He glanced at the map. “I heard you mention a march – is the IRA holding a parade?”
“Worse. It’s the Loyalists.” She glanced up at Pete’s face in time to see his expression become reflective, and smiled mirthlessly. “I know that look, Yank. You’re trying to remember which side is which.”
“Um, yeah – I’m afraid so.”
“The Loyalists are our side. Supposedly. Loyalist, Unionist – ” her voice took on a mincing tone – “the pro-British Protestant majority, who are now solidly unified indeed in their common sense of self-righteous rage, all terminally pis-ed at the Crown that has rewarded their loyalty by signing a pact to sell them all out to the Devil and his IRA minions.”
“They’re not buying into this new Agreement.”
She shook her head. “A hundred thousand or so of them are going to march up to Belfast City Hall this very day and demand cash back on their purchase – with a dozen or so Members of Parliament leading the way, and God knows who else.”
Pete winced at the implications that leaped into mind. “That many? Are you sure?”
“Dead sure.” The irony hung in the air.
“Are the MPs and march leaders planning on wearing targets on their coats?”
“They might as well.”
He leaned over the map beside her. “Any intelligence on what the IRA has in mind for an answer?”
“Damned little, and I’m having trouble believing what I’ve got.” She glanced up as Grant materialised beside her and handed her a new report. “By God, if ever I needed Máire and her contacts . . . ” Kathleen broke off and looked sharply at Pete. “Just what was that phone call of yours, then?”
“MacGyver. He found time for a quick call-in.”
She focused on him fully for the first time since he’d returned, her eyes searching his face. “You’re never telling me your man’s actually
found her!”
“He isn’t certain. He’s got a lead and he’s checking it out.”
Grant was also staring at Pete. “How the
hell did he pull that off? It generally takes a crowbar to get the time of day out of a Taig!”
Kathleen whirled on him. “By
God, Grant, I’ve told you before I’ll have you seconded to the RUC for a month’s worth of foot patrols if you can’t scratch that word out of your vocabulary!”
The man spluttered. “But it’s – ”
“Did you think I was joking?” At a peremptory gesture of hers, he retreated, stiff-backed, silent and uncontrite. She turned back to Pete at the ops room emptied, her staff scattering to carry out their assignments out of range of the tornado’s centre. Pete caught more than one satisfied smirk at Grant’s rout. “I’ll have a squad put together in ten minutes. Where are we meeting him?”
“We aren’t.”
Kathleen’s eyes narrowed. “You’re surely not thinking you’ll go out there alone?”
Pete sighed explosively, letting the frustration and bottled-up tension show for once. “No,
I’m not, either! I don’t even know just where he is or where he’s headed.” He leaned his hands on the table and stared at the map. “He wouldn’t have told me, and I didn’t ask. In situations like this, he generally works alone.”
She spoke more softly. “You don’t like that one whit, do you now?”
Pete shrugged. “He gets results.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He gave Kathleen a long look. “Máire does the same thing to you, doesn’t she?”
“Fair drives me up the wall in screaming fits, you mean?”
“Well, yeah, more or less.”
Kathleen sighed, and the mask crumbled at the edges. “Peter, I worked my arse off to get
out of this hell-hole of a province. I was well and truly planted at my dream posting in Geneva, spending my days keeping
good people
alive while they actually tried to keep more souls from dying – and Máire’s husband went and got himself shot.”
Pete laid a hand on her shoulder. He expected her to stiffen and shrug it off, but she was looking blindly at the map, not seeing it or anything else for a few quiet moments. He took a chance and slid his arm around her. “There’s something I’ve been wondering – you said you’ve been friends for a long time. But Máire’s Catholic, isn’t she? And you’re, well – ”
“Not Catholic? Sometimes I had to remind her of that myself – they had asked me to be the godmother to their child, can you believe it?”
Pete’s voice was gentle and encouraging. He suspected she didn’t have many opportunities to speak her real thoughts. “If she’s the same age as you, wasn’t that pretty late to start a family?”
“She always said the Pope be damned, but she would never bring a child into such a hate-filled world – and then suddenly she was pregnant at last, and they were so happy in spite of it all. When she lost Padraig and the baby both, she nearly went mad.”
As Kathleen continued to speak, her shoulders had gradually begun to relax under Pete’s arm, and she leaned slightly towards him, apparently unaware of the source of the support
“God knows the work she’s been doing is dangerous, but it’s what keeps her going. Whilst I try to keep it from killing her . . . or killing me from the worry. I pulled strings to get reassigned here so I could run her, and try not to let her run into a hail of bullets.”
Pete tightened his grip very slightly, and thought about the invitation that had brought him, an expendable stranger, halfway around the world – as it now seemed likely, on a flimsy pretext so he could be propped up as a shield to keep a friend alive. He should have been angry at the charade, but somehow, it didn’t seem particularly important at the moment.
The advancing years hadn’t dulled Pete’s hearing or his reflexes; he heard the footsteps approaching in the hallway while Kathleen still seemed unaware that anyone was nearby. With a mental curse, he dropped his arm from her shoulders just before Grant entered the ops centre – mouth-first, as always. Pete briefly imagined shooting the man on the spot and passing it off as an IRA assassination.
“Major, still nothing new on IRA movements. Or lack thereof.”
“Are you telling me that with a hundred thousand potential targets packing the streets from corner to curbstone, IRA Brigade Command are going to be sitting on their arses watching the show? Is that the best Stewart can do?”
Grant shrugged.
“Well, go roust Campbell out and see if he’s got his men to Belfast City Hall yet. We need them in place well before the marchers arrive.” She turned back to Pete as Grant hurried out.
“No news is good news?”
“I wish I could believe it, but it’s like trusting in the Good Folk. I just can’t. Stewart’s got a good ear to the ground, but nothing like Máire . . . ”
They stood together, not quite touching, staring at the map of Belfast and silently wondering where Máire Ui Súilleabháin and MacGyver were.
If Noreen hadn’t had a pub to run and her family to look after, it might’ve been a lot harder to convince her that she couldn’t come with me.
And if she’d come, it might’ve been a lot easier to find Séan O’Boyle’s home. I thought I’d spent enough time with the maps, not to mention just tooling around Belfast on the motorbike, to know how to get from one place to another; but there were streets torn up and changed in funny places. It wasn’t just those ‘peace walls’: thoroughfares had been turned into cul-de-sacs, as if parts of Belfast were being rearranged to make it harder for folks to get together . . . and maybe that’s just what was intended. And, of course, you always run into the worst obstacles and roadblocks when you’re in a hurry.
When I finally did find the place, it gave me a real bad moment – I landed at the front door instead of the back, which wasn’t what I’d planned at all, and I thought I’d blown it. But after a few minutes of watching, I realised there weren’t any signs of traffic around the front at all. There were lights in back, and a good deal of noise, and plenty of traces of activity . . . but it was like the front and back doors had switched places.
Nobody at all passed in the street while I was picking the lock, and the front hallway was dark and silent. There was a kitchen towards the back, and I could hear quite a party going on in there – at least four or five men, I figured, although they were making enough noise for a dozen. Best as I could see from the hallway, they were sitting around a table, playing cards and drinking and horsing around. I could hear the loud voices and the jokes, and there was nothing funny about it, although they were laughing enough themselves.The stairway leading up to the second floor was narrow, steep, and dark; cat-soft in tennis shoes, Mac stole up the stairs and carefully peered around the edge of the doorway at the top. Luck was with him – the kind of luck he preferred, which owed more to calculation than to chance. MacGyver didn’t like simple luck; its unreliability always made him nervous.
There
was a guard in the hallway, sitting by a closed door some twenty feet away; but he wasn’t watching the stairwell. He wasn’t watching anything in particular – he had tilted the plain wooden chair back against the wall and was leaning back, eyes half closed, humming a tune that sounded vaguely familiar from the bellicose session at the pub the night before. If the tune had actually been on key, Mac thought he might have managed to recognise it.
He did recognise the guard: Patrick Shanahan, identified in Walsh’s files as one of Connor’s followers. And it didn’t take any local knowledge to recognise the large brown glass bottle on the floor by Shanahan’s chair – not when he’d heard the tones of the raucous conversation in the kitchen downstairs as he’d slipped past. That was the first piece of calculated luck.
His next piece of luck he was going to have to manufacture himself; the guard was inattentive and at least half drunk, but there was still a tidy stretch of hallway between the stairway and the chair, too long to cross before an alarm could be raised.
Gotta get him closer – but not coming right at me . . . memory nudged him, and Mac checked his pockets – and pulled out the forgotten slingshot he’d confiscated from Bobby Gallagher that morning.
A quick check of the remaining pockets didn’t turn up much in the way of ammunition, but he did have one of the small boxes of matches he tried never to be without, and a handful of miscellaneous nuts and washers from repairing Noreen’s taps.
The biggest problem was going to be the twang of the slingshot; he wanted to divert Shanahan, not lure him into a head-on confrontation. He’d have one shot at creating a distraction bigger than the slingshot itself, but not so large as to rouse the men downstairs. Mac studied the hallway: the bottle was a tempting target, but it looked too sturdy to shatter easily, and he thought there was still too much liquid in it for its balance to be unstable. He made his decision and readied his shot.
The twang wasn’t as loud as he’d feared, just enough to make Shanahan sit up in puzzlement and glance down the hallway as the rattling began. It had been tricky, getting the angle right to send the loaded matchbox into the only open doorway in the hall, where the dimly reflected gleam on tile meant a bathroom full of nice hard surfaces that made plenty of noise and echoes when the matchbox ricocheted, burst open, and scattered bolts and washers all over. As a bonus, there was an extra thump and crash that meant that MacGyver must have knocked over something larger, and probably fragile. Shanahan staggered to his feet, picked up the bottle and took an extra swig, then set it down and lumbered into the bathroom to investigate the racket.
MacGyver pocketed the slingshot, slipped out from his hiding place in the stairwell and took the extra few steps he needed to grab the bottle before he closed on the befuddled guard from behind. The bottle made a satisfying thump when it connected; the liquid inside sloshed violently, but the cap held and the glass didn’t break, and Shanahan gave an even more satisfying grunt and crumpled to the floor in a limp heap.
Mac shoved him farther inside until his legs were clear of the door, reached around to the inside knob and set the lock, and closed the door softly and firmly before hurrying down the hall to the now unguarded far door.
The room was no larger than the cramped back bedroom at Noreen’s, but it was nearly empty: there was nothing in it except a bare mattress on a bedframe and a cheap deal dresser. For a moment Mac’s throat clenched; Máire Ui Súilleabháin lay sprawled on the bed, her nude body bruised and streaked with blood, and MacGyver thought that he was too late and wondered how Kathleen Walsh would take the news.
Then he realised that Máire wasn’t lying limply: she was tied spread-eagle to the bedframe, while above a duct tape gag, her eyes were blazing furiously at him as if she could hold a hostile world at bay just by glaring at it.
“Um, don’t – ” MacGyver started to say
Don’t be afraid and thought,
Who am I kidding? She doesn’t look scared, she looks mad enough to chew old nails and spit out the rusty bits. “Don’t worry – I’m a friend. I’m here to get you out.”
He could feel heat starting to rise at the back of his neck, but her glare had softened when he started to speak. “Um, you look kinda cold.” There was no blanket on the bed, or even a sheet to be seen anywhere in the room; he shrugged out of his jacket and covered as much of her as he could with it.
“First things first – ” He knew from experience how quickly shoulder and leg muscles stiffened and cramped in that position, stretched out into unnatural immobility; but the gag would be the worst. “Let’s get that tape off of you.”
Mac stepped back to the door and glanced down the hall quickly as he retrieved Patrick Shanahan’s brown glass bottle; there was no sign of any disturbance and he could still dimly hear the noisy party below. He closed and locked the door behind him and opened the bottle – as he’d guessed, it contained some kind of potent raw liquor, and the fumes that oozed out were nearly visible.
When he’d first entered the room, some indefatigable part of his mind had automatically observed and indexed its contents – it was a short enough list, but when he glanced around he already knew there was a pile of rags in one corner, although there was almost nothing else.
That half-unconscious catalogue didn’t prepare him for when he bent and picked up the rags and realised he was holding a woman’s clothes, or rather, the shredded ruins of them, ragged from innumerable knife slashes. Mac’s stomach twisted, and his too-nimble mind ran ahead of where he wanted it to go, matching the rents in the garments he held to the pattern of bleeding cuts and gashes on Máire’s skin. The lacerations were shallow and the blood was already drying, but the implied brutality hung in the air like a rancid aftertaste.
Mac shook off the images and tore a piece of cloth from the tattered remains of the blouse. He could feel Máire’s puzzled gaze on him as he saturated the fabric: but whatever the home-brewed rotgut was, it had a nice high alcohol content, and once he’d thoroughly soaked down the duct tape, it peeled away from her face easily and painlessly. She coughed and breathed deeply. When she spoke, her voice was hoarse and strained.
“You must be one of Kathleen’s Yanks.”
“Uh, yeah.” His American accent – that must be why she had stopped looking so ferocious as soon as he’d started to speak. “The name’s MacGyver.”
“Well, ‘tis glad I am to be meetin’ you, MacGyver. And if there’s any potcheen left in that bottle, I’d thank you to give us a drink.”
“Um, are you sure? It smells like pretty foul stuff.”
“And ‘tis a pretty foul day I’ve been havin’.” The uncompromising glint in her eye suddenly reminded Mac of his grandfather. “Don’t you be pratin’ temperance at me now.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
He helped her drink, careful not to let her choke, feeling somehow awkward. She coughed again, violently, but when she spoke again her voice was much stronger. “Jaysus, but our Seanachie always did make the worst f---in’ potcheen in all the Falls.”
MacGyver’s Swiss Army knife made short work of the ropes on Máire’s ankles, and she sighed with relief and pulled her legs up as the taut strain was taken off. But he checked when he reached the head of the bed; her wrists were locked separately to the bedframe with two sets of handcuffs of a type he’d never seen before.
“Huh.” He frowned as he worked over the first lock. “I’m not familiar with this kinda handcuffs.”
“They’re dead men’s bracelets.”
“What?”
“Sorry. Dead peelers’ cuffs – I mean, they’re from RUC men that Connor or his mates have killed. They take the handcuffs as trophies.”
Royal Ulster Constabulary – right. Dead cops. No wonder I haven’t seen this type before. A little practice would’ve helped . . . if I’d known I could’ve asked Walsh for a set. Mac bit his tongue in concentration; something about the locking mechanism was resisting his usual bag of tricks.
Máire was studying his upside-down face. “Will ye be needin’ the key?”
MacGyver tried not to glare or snap at her. “You got it somewhere handy?”
“It’ll be walkin’ in that door inside of ten minutes. Can ye be ready?”
Mac’s frustrated scowl softened to a puzzled frown. “What do you mean?”
“Connor’s got the key.”
“And he’ll just hand it over?”
“They were all in the scullery gettin’ jarred and playin’ at cards when ye came up, weren’t they now?”
“Yeah . . . ”
“They’re playin’ to see who goes first.”
“You mean . . . ” MacGyver gestured at the room and the bed vaguely, and felt the heat on his neck again.
“I do that. They’ve done nothin’ worse than rough me up a bit . . . so far.” Máire tried to shrug; she seemed a good deal calmer about it than Mac felt. “Then they started to quarrel over it and, well, Paddy Shanahan lost the first hand and that’s why he was at the door. The winner of the next hand . . . will be gettin’ it started.”
“So why are you so sure it’ll be Connor?”
“He’ll cheat.”
There didn’t seem to be much to say to that. MacGyver straightened up and put his knife away. “O-kay.” He looked around the room and checked the dresser drawers – empty except for some oddments of old clothes – then stepped to the one thing he hadn’t examined yet, a closet door tucked into one corner; but the closet was empty also. “Not much here. Didn’t O’Boyle use this room for anything?”
“He lived alone, our Seanachie did, but he’d’ve used this for a box room.”
Mac was studying the patterns of dust on the closet floor. “You mean for storage?
Something was kept in here – and it was moved recently.” Careful of splinters, he walked exploratory fingers along one side of the closet, where a long hole gaped in the rough board framing.
“Connor and his boys must’ve cleared out everything that wasn’t nailed down, the b-stards. Connor plays by his own rules and Liam doesn’t give a f--- who Connor pis-es off.”
Something in her tone made Mac glance at her. “Which one’s in charge?”
“Connor thinks he is.”
”And Liam likes it that way?”
“You catch on quick, Yank. That he does.”
“Huh.” MacGyver squatted down to peer under the bed, but found his view blocked. It almost looked as if the bed was resting on a wooden platform, but when he reached underneath, felt for a handhold and tugged, he was able to slide aside a long board – the board from the closet wall – to reveal a dark cache behind.
“You’re surely not after findin’ anything, are you?”
“I sure am.” In the shadows, he couldn’t quite make out the lines of the irregularly shaped objects stashed under the bed, but he reached under and pulled out first a fiddle case and then a large round wood-framed hand drum.
“Sweet Mother Mary.” Máire’s face had lit up with a surprising joy. “That’s Noreen’s bodhran!”
“Her what?”
“Her drum. Séan’s often letting the musicians store their instruments here – I thought the b-stards must have taken the lot! Is that all?”
“No – ” MacGyver could make out the familiar curve of a guitar case, and several other smaller shapes.
“Matty must have hidden them. There’s hope for the boy yet, so there is.”
They both felt rather than heard the tramp of heavy feet mounting the stairs. Mac shoved the fiddle case back under the bed, slid the long board out of sight again, and hurried to unlock the door to the hallway. He was about to slip into the closet when he heard Máire hiss, “MacGyver!” He shot her a look, wondering if she’d lost her nerve at the sound of Connor’s approach.
“Your jacket! Take your jacket!”
Guess not. She had stretched her legs out again to look as if she was still tied down. Mac snatched his jacket and ducked into the closet, still holding the bodhran, as the knob on the hall door turned.
With the closet door pulled nearly to, he could see a good deal of the room’s interior through the crack between the hinges, but it was hardly needed; he could place Connor precisely by sound alone. The door was shoved open, then slammed closed with a crash, and the heavy footsteps were nearly drowned out by a voice snarling, “Where the f--- are ye now, Paddy? By God, if you’re in here already I’ll beat your f---in’ brains into a bleedin' jelly, so I will.”
Connor glared around the small room suspiciously. MacGyver saw him narrow his eyes in the direction of the closet and take a step towards it, and braced himself; but Máire called out to Connor in a scathing tone.
“He’s in the loo, ye f---in’ eejit.” Connor whirled and advanced on her, and she barked at him and laughed mockingly.
As Mac took a firmer grip on the drum and slipped out of the closet, he could see the back of the big man’s neck flush red with rage. ‘Barking’ Connor had forgotten everything but the woman in front of him, naked but defiant. “I thought we’d shut your flappin’ gob for you already, ye f---in’ informer b-tch – ” Mac felt his own face getting hot with anger at the sound of the blow that followed, but the diversion covered his own footsteps as he closed on Connor.
The drum he’d found under the bed had surprised him with its weight and heft when he’d first picked it up; it was a good eighteen inches across and had a sturdy frame braced with cross-pieces, all solid hardwood – oak, he thought. The cross-pieces provided a nice firm grip, and when Mac swung it backhand where Connor’s head met the thick neck, the big man shuddered and grunted, staggered, and turned partway around, exposing his jaw in clean profile. MacGyver reversed his swing and brought the drum around again in an uppercut. Connor went down, hard, and Mac felt the wood frame splinter and crack in his hand, transmitting the shock to his fingers in a stinging wave.
“Ow, dang it.” Mac shifted the bodhran to his left hand, flexing the sore fingers of his right as he studied the damage. The hardwood frame had split under the blows, and one of the cross-pieces had come loose.
Oh, great. I can’t even pronounce it and now I’m gonna have to tell Noreen I broke it.The key to the handcuffs was in Connor’s pocket, as Máire had said. Mac freed her wrists and pocketed one set of cuffs for later study, then went back to where Connor lay sprawled on the floor and started to tug the man’s shirt off. “You’ll need some clothes if we’re gonna get out of here – ” He paused at the expression on her face. “What’s up?”
Máire was rubbing her scraped wrists and staring at him as if he’d grown an extra head. “Ye didn’t shoot him.”
MacGyver shrugged. “Nope.”
“But whyever not?”
“Well, for starters, I don’t have a gun.” There was a gun tucked into Connor’s waistband; Mac picked it up, pulled the clip, cleared the round from the chamber, and dropped the empty gun onto the floor. “I don’t like guns.”
“I thought . . . I thought all Yanks fancied guns.”
“Yeah? Well, I thought all Irish folks had red hair and kept pet leprechauns.”
“Are you away in the head, then?” Her voice was becoming shrill, but Mac recognised the elemental tension behind it. “Are you tellin’ me you came walkin’ into this house armed with nothin’ more than your
wits?”
He grinned and handed her Connor’s shirt. “Well, thanks to O’Boyle’s Best Bottled Bravado, it looks like everyone else here is half-armed.”
Máire’s eyes sparked at him. “Catch yourself on, Yank! Don’t ye be makin’ any assumptions. Liam could drink the cellar dry and still put a bullet through your eye at a hundred paces.”
“Who’s making assumptions? Didn’t
you assume I was packing a gun and all ready to shoot anything that moves?”
She shrugged into the shirt, rolling up the long sleeves. Most of the Irish women MacGyver had seen so far were shorter than Americans; Connor’s shirt hung on her like a sack, and the shirt-tails reached nearly to her knees. “Wherever
is Paddy then? How did ye ever get past him so?”
“Like you said, he’s in the bathroom . . . I knocked him out and left him locked in. You thought I’d killed him, didn’t you?”
Máire nodded, absently dabbing with a sleeve at her lip where Connor’s last blow had left her bleeding. Mac studied her, trying to read the expression on her face, pensive and troubled and somehow bewildered. “We need to get you out of here. How many more are there downstairs?”
“It’s just Connor’s own unit – he and Roddy fell out last week, and Devil Mike’s stickin’ by Roddy; so there’s Kevin and Liam still down there, and Prater Tommy, and – and I suppose young Matty’s here as well?”
“Yeah, he’s here.” Mac’s stomach knotted at the memory of their argument that morning. “Is he . . . um, would he . . . that is, will he be in on the card game?”
“You mean, would a fifteen-year-old boy from a nice Catholic family be party to gang-rapin’ a woman old enough to be his own mother?” Máire looked Mac squarely in the eye as she spoke, then glanced away before he could answer. “Normally, I’d say yes, but Matty . . . maybe not. Not yet. I was hopin’ . . . ”
“What?”
“Well, I thought that with two down for starters, ye might have been up til takin’ out the lot.”
Mac’s expression turned hard. “Look, I know they’ve got plenty to answer for after how they treated you, but I’m not here to carry out
anyone’s revenge for them.”
Máire looked at him in confusion and shook her head vigourously. “Do you think I’m after wantin’ blood, then? ’Tisn’t that at all!” She pointed towards a tiny window in the back wall. “If we could just keep them from leavin’ this house the day . . . can you not hear that sound?”
The window was too begrimed to let in any light, but a dull murmur outside had been growing for some time, too slowly to be consciously noticed. “Half of Belfast is takin’ til the streets,” she continued. “The Unionists are marchin’. Thousands of them. I heard Liam and Connor talkin’ about the protests – I was tryin’ to hear more when they caught me last night.”
“Hang on,” MacGyver said. “Unionists – that’s the
other side, right? The pro-British folks?” He glanced towards the window. “What’s Liam got up his sleeve – it
is Liam doing the real planning, right?” Máire nodded. “So taking Connor out of commission won’t even slow them down.”
“No more it won’t. The Loyalists – the Unionists, Yank, ‘tis the same thing – they aren’t
plannin’ to riot, but they’re set to catch fire at any spark.”
“Lemme guess. Connor and Liam have a whole fistful of fireworks ready.”
She nodded. “They’ve staked out rooftops along the protest route, and they mean to shoot into the crowds. Most of the biggest names in Unionist politics will be in the march, right out in front where they can be targeted.”
MacGyver was frowning absently at nothing in particular, his mind racing. “Four of them left, if you count Matt . . . there’s gotta be some way . . . ” His mind hummed, racing forward in leaps that reviewed everything in the room and then mentally checked for corners where some other potentially useful item might have been overlooked.
“You could skip Matty and count Liam twice. Either way, it’s four.” Máire sat down on the bed and picked up Connor’s empty gun from where it lay on the floor. “Even if we can sneak past them and get out of here, they’ll be long gone before Kathleen can get back here with the troops.” She turned the gun over in her hands. “My whole life I’ve hated these things. And when I lost Padraig . . . ” She looked desperately at MacGyver. “
Is there another way?”
Mac took the gun from her hands and set it on the dresser. “I got an idea.”
I TOTALLY forgot about the slingshot!! Oooo! you did that on purpose, didn't you?! 
