Page 51

JAMIE

The rain in Inverness smells like wet peat, diesel exhaust, and rotten heather.

I stand on the ridge overlooking Loch Ness, the cold Highland wind slicing straight through the waxed cotton of my Barbour coat. Below me, tucked into a ravine of ancient Scots pines, sits Saint Ninian's Priory: a crumbling fourteenth-century monastery of rough gray granite and leaded glass windows.

To the locals, it is an abandoned historical ruin where the mist swallows hikers. To the Irish Catholic syndicate, it has been the laundering vault for sixty million pounds in dirty port revenue every year since my great great grandfather was a boy running bootlegged whiskey out of Belfast.

I take a slow drag off my cigarette, shielding the cherry against the misting rain with a cupped, calloused hand. Beside me in the wet heather crouches Callum, my second-in-command from the Edinburgh docks, holding a thermal imaging scanner against his cheek.

"Six heat signatures in the refectory, boss," Callum whispers in his thick brogue. "Two sentries on the parapet with submachine guns. Father Alistair's armored Rover is parked behind the old tithe barn. And there is another signature in the east tower rooms. Someone is moving around with an iron tool.

"Father Alistair," I murmur, blowing a thin plume of gray smoke into the damp air. "The holy man who signed the check for the bishop's shooters in Queens."

My knuckles tighten around the synthetic stock of my Benelli M4 shotgun.

When Father Donald and his Scottish council decided to put a bounty on Iris's head, they thought they were dealing with a scattered Irish mob with no spine left. They thought because Romeo Messina took my sister to Sicily, the northern channel was wide open for the church to seize.

They forgot that Danny had a son.

"Callum," I say, dropping my cigarette butt into the wet mud and crushing it beneath the heel of my combat boot. "Take the perimeter guards out quietly. Silencers only. I want the reverend in the refectory alive for five minutes."

"Aye, boss," Callum grins, showing two gold teeth, and slips backward into the pines like a ghost.

I check the magazine tube of the Benelli with a crisp metallic click. Eight rounds of double-aught buckshot. On my left hip rests a nine-millimeter Glock with three extended magazines; tucked into my right boot is an eight-inch pig sticker with a serrated back.

I jog down the rocky slope, my boots biting into the slick mud.

Two muffled coughs spit from the tree line: Callum's suppressed sniper rifle doing its work. Up on the stone parapet, both sentries collapse forward over the low granite wall, their bodies thudding heavily into the brambles below.

Clear.

I cross the courtyard at a sprint, taking the heavy oak door of the priory in two strides. I don't bother picking the lock. I raise my right leg and slam the steel-toed sole of my boot directly against the latch.

The ancient wood splinters with a deafening crack that echoes through the stone-vaulted foyer like a cannon blast.

I step through the splintered frame with the Benelli leveled at chest height.

The refectory smells of burning wood, unwashed wool, and cheap communion port. Four men in dark tactical sweaters leap up from a gambling table stacked with open satellite laptops and leather courier satchels.

"O'Connor!" one of them shouts, lunging for a submachine gun resting on the table.

I squeeze the trigger.

The roar of the twelve-gauge shatters the quiet of the monastery. A wall of lead pellets catches the shooter dead center in the sternum, lifting him off his feet and slamming his shattered ribcage into the stone fireplace in a spray of bone and burning embers.

I rack the slide with a heavy clack-clack and fire again.

The second man catches the spread in his hip, screaming in agony as his pelvis shatters and he drops into a heap on the flagstones. The other two throw their hands into the air, falling to their knees, their faces as white as the dead.

"Don't shoot! God have mercy, don't shoot!" one of them babbles in a terrified Glasgow rasp.

"God isn't taking confessions tonight, lads," I say calmly, racking another shell into the chamber and aiming the smoking barrel between the eyes of the man on the left. "Where is Father Alistair?"

Before the terrified bastard can answer, the heavy arched door at the end of the stone hall flies open.

A tall, gaunt man in a priest's black cassock and white Roman collar stumbles backward into the refectory, blood pouring from a gash across his temple. Father Alistair. He drops a metal briefcase onto the floor, clutching his bleeding face, shrieking in pure panic.

Right behind him stalks a woman holding a heavy iron fire poker.