“Do you know what happened to him?”
Fitzroy hesitated once again, then spoke energetically. “Of course I do. January of 1994, his bullet-riddled body was found in an oil drum in central Belfast, in a little alley called Murray Street, to be more precise.”
Court sniffed. “Seeing as how that was thirty years ago, you seem to remember the details especially well.”
“Like it was yesterday, lad.”
“You did it?”
“If by ‘it’ you mean put the bullets in him, no, I didn’t do it. But…” Hetook a beat, then gave a little sniff before continuing. “You ever roll a two-hundred-pound oil drum out the back of a van by yourself? Could have applied for disability after that. Threw my back out for a week. Old Rory got the last laugh, he did.”
Court tried to picture the event. It had nothing to do with him, but he’d always been fascinated with Fitzroy’s past. Finally, he understood. “Could this be the father of the guy I’m asking about?”
Fitzroy said nothing. Court registered the pause, noticed it was followed by a shuffle noise and he discerned something from Fitzroy’s actions.
“Yes. Rory Coyle, in fact,didhave a son.”
“What do you know about the son?”
“What I know about him has been buried in the back of my brain for a long time.”
“Dig it up, Fitz,” Court demanded.
“Campbell was the boy’s name.” Sir Donald Fitzroy added, “Whetstone was the name we gave him.”
Court just breathed into the phone for a long moment, then said, “Holy shit. Youranhim?”
“At first, we did. But at the end of the day, I’d sayheranus.” The older man said, “Rory Coyle’s boy was a teenager when his father died, and the lad believed the story that we sold to the media.”
“What story?”
“That his father had been killed by a rival splinter Provo unit. Rory had personally ended the lives and livelihood of a lot of Irish Catholics, touts and suspected touts. It was hardly difficult to convince the IRA, and the world at large, that one of their own had a quarrel with him.”
“And what did his son do?”
“Funny enough, he came to us. We sent him away at first. He was too young to be of any use. A couple years after, he ran away from home, joined the Foreign Legion.
“He came back our way after that, every bit as eager as before, if not more so. But he’d grown big, strong, smart, trained.
“We ran him as an asset against his own people. He assassinated dissident Irish Catholics, as well as others who’d long since gotten out of thegame. Terrorists with English blood on their hands. We sent Whetstone to the continent, and to America. He did jobs in Boston and New York, in Frankfurt, in Madrid. All that in addition to the work he did in Ulster, and down in Ireland. He was an efficient, bloody killer.”
Court said, “And he killed because you guys made him think his targets had been involved in his dad’s murder, when you guys actually were the ones who killed his father.”
Defensively, the Englishman said, “Exactly that. It was the dirtiest of wars. I don’t want any moralizing from you on what went on back then, because you weren’t there, and you’ve got your own dirt under your nails, and your own stench on your breath.”
“Did I say anything?”
Fitzroy took a beat, then seemed to calm a little. “After a few years, it got tougher to convince him there were others involved in his father’s death, and he had no interest in continuing to work for us. He did a couple of jobs we did not sanction. Contract work, including against some of England’s friends over there.
“Ultimately, we cut him loose. He went off, trained in Libya, fought across Africa, did work as a hit man all over the world.”
“He ever work for you when he was a contract killer? Like I did?”
“Good lord, no! He didn’t trust me, and I didn’t trust him not to turn on me. Very few people terrify me, lad, but nightmares of the son of Rory Coyle used to scare me out of my bloody wits.”
“Any idea where he is now?”
“I haven’t heard his name spoken in decades, lad. I’m bloody surprised he’s still living, and more surprised you know about him.
