It had been ten hours since his daughter-in-law left him standing in his driveway, and he’d spent the majority of the time since then sitting at his simple wooden kitchen table, looking out his back window. Past his sheep, out into the neighbor’s pasture, into the sunny afternoon, then the evening sky, and finally the darkness.
All this time he thought of his son, of his father, of his grandfather and his grandson.
And now and then he’d even thought a little about his own life.
Young Deirdre had been right about a great many things. Most things. The more he pondered over all she’d said, he wasn’t sure she’d been wrong about a word of it.
There was no getting around it. Just as Deirdre had asserted this afternoon, Campbell Coyle was a very bad man.
He was a bad man with a dark history, and he came from a long line of men with dark histories.
Campbell had hoped his dark days were behind him, but somehow he’d always had an inkling that this day would come.
The day when he stopped being Jon Jo Sheehan and once again became Campbell Finley Coyle.
He continued digging his hole, his body using all his muscles for the work but his mind occupied, as well.
Back before Campbell Coyle had moved to Camlough, back before he’d changed his name to Jon Jo Sheehan, back before he’d spent four years living off-grid after ten years traveling the world as a hired assassin, back before his time in Libya and Lebanon, even back before his teens and very early twenties, fighting in the French Foreign Legion.
Back before all that.
Back before he was born, Campbell Coyle was being made into the man he would someday become.
Campbell’s father, Rory Coyle, had grown up in Belfast, a member of the IRA. He’d been trusted by Provisional leadership; they trained him, they turned him into a killer, they sent him abroad to assassinate with guns and bombs. He’d worked in London and in Dublin and in Newcastle and in Liverpool. He ran an Active Service Unit—a small team of Provos—was chased across the UK, across the European continent, by the Brits, by Interpol, but they couldn’t catch Rory.
In the end, it seemed it was his own people that got him. Called back to Belfast in the mid-nineties, he went to a meeting late one afternoon and did not return.
Campbell was fifteen at the time. He remembered that his father seemed to know and trust the two men who came for him; he went willingly, said he’d be back in an hour, and Campbell heard laughter out in thestreet as the three IRA men, his da and the two others, bundled into a black hatchback, then drove off.
An hour later his family sat at the dinner table looking at the door; stayed there till evening turned to night.
Rory Coyle turned up dead in an oil drum in an alleyway culvert the next morning.
He’d been shot in the back of the neck.
Campbell told himself he was going to find those who killed him, and he would make them pay.
He joined the French Foreign Legion when he was seventeen; they taught him how to fight and to kill, to live with the utmost austerity, and they gave him an outlet for his rage. In Africa he fought wars. He learned to be comfortable being miserable, and to understand the world as a dark place where primal forces reigned supreme.
He was twenty when he left the Legion; he went back to Belfast and, with some help, he eventually tracked down those who had killed his father.
There had been five of them involved, he’d learned, an Active Service Unit who murdered Rory because of a personal beef having to do with missing money, and Campbell killed every last one of them.
When Campbell was done, he was just twenty-three. By now he had a young wife and a baby; he took work at a factory in Derry, but soon he realized he could not leave his old life behind. He was a fighter. He was a killer.
So he began killing for money. Campbell worked for the British, the sworn enemy of his father, but he didn’t care. His da had been killed by the IRA; the British were no better and no worse, and their money spent the same.
He’d continued his training in Libya, in East Africa, in the Middle East, and he’d killed men in Asia and America and Europe.
And then, before he turned forty years old, he’d retired from it all. He had more money than a simple man could spend, and he’d lost his taste for killing.
Mostly estranged from his ex-wife and his young son, he moved back to Northern Ireland, but to a village far away from Derry, down south,where no one knew of his family, and he’d started his life over. His ex-wife died of a stroke, and he’d tried to reconcile with his son, more than once, but Charlie eventually became a Legionnaire himself, now fighting France’s international battles, and he’d wanted nothing to do with his da.
Campbell Coyle became Jon Jo Sheehan. Part-time shepherd, full-time security camera installer and locksmith, and regular churchgoer.
Campbell Coyle had been a very, very bad man in his past, but he had worked so hard to put his past behind him, to erase any vestige of what he’d been, that now, now that everything had fucking changed with the murder of Charlie in some coastal town down in Bulgaria, he had to ask himself if he could possibly be a killer again.
Physically, it wasn’t a problem. He was still strong from the rigors of his life. His eyes were good and sharp at distance, though he used readers for small print up close.
