The Shankill Road Contract

By Philip Atlee

In Northern Ireland, it takes an assassin to catch one, in this thriller by “the John D. MacDonald of espionage fiction” (Larry McMurtry, The New York Times).
 
As the Troubles rage in Northern Ireland, a mysterious killer has been putting bullets in victims’ heads one by one—with no apparent pattern or logic. Now Joe Gall has been tasked with quietly looking into the matter by a high-ranking American cabinet official who fears his son may be involved. Gall sets out to find the boy and bring him home alive—if possible. But the story behind the murders may be more complicated than it seems . . .
 
“I admire Philip Atlee’s writing tremendously.” —Raymond Chandler

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Mar 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781504065894

Philip Atlee

Philip Atlee (1915–1991) was the creator of the long-running Joe Gall Mysteries, which is comprised of twenty-two novels published in the 1960s and 70s. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Atlee wrote several novels and screenplays—including Thunder Road starring Robert Mitchum, and Big Jim McLain starring John Wayne—before producing the series for which he is known. An avid flyer, he was a member of the Flying Tigers before World War II and joined the Marines after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Book preview

The Shankill Road Contract

A Joe Gall Mystery

Philip Atlee

1

It was a summer midnight, and moonlight flooded the cupolas and turrets of my clapboard castle. Wind sighing through tall pines held the thrumming of cicadas and the tumbling rush of the waterfall beyond the old house. Something splashed into the mirrored lagoon; the bowing fronds of the black-bamboo grove clattered at the edge of the formal Edo garden.

I was kneeling at the top of the run, which made two curves down through the pine grove, coating my skis with oil from a hand roller. The twisting white path below me was steeply banked but the moonlight struck no sparks from it. Since the temperature, even at midnight, was nearly eighty degrees there could be no glittering of snow. The run was coated with white polyethylene triangles and circles.

Dropping the roller, I pushed up to a crouch and poled my way over the precipitous lip of the hilltop. Plunging downward, I gathered speed into the first bank, and startled birds exploded from the neighboring pines as I accelerated. They were not used to such an intrusion; there are few ski runs in the southern United States.

In the last straightaway of the thousand-foot run, I was up to sixty miles-an-hour before I veered, stemming to a halt. A solitary figure, lengthened by moonlight.

Kneeling again, I unsnapped the skis, threw them over my shoulders and went trudging back up the trail beside the synthetic ski run. I had bought its components from Santini in Garibaldi, Brazil, and installed it myself. The course would not rival even a beginner’s Alpine run and smelled more of oil and plastic than snow and edelweiss, but in my small kingdom in the Ozark Mountains, it was a pleasant swoop.

Back up on the hilltop starting ledge, I stood staring across my hundred-odd acres of forested slopes and ravines. A silvered domain now, broken to the southeast by the reflected radiance of the small village that was the nearest inhabited place. Only the glow; I could see nothing of the village itself, and that was one of the reasons I had bought the place and restored the old wooden mansion on the highest crest.

This remove from my neighbors was cheering. I could also see, at intervals, the triple-stranded barbed wire fence, electrified, which enclosed my small estate. Good fences make good neighbors, and if that doesn’t work, barbecued neighbors are even better.…

You would be on firm ground if you suspected there was something odd here. A solitary man, skiing at midnight in midsummer on ersatz snow.… Quite right. To compound the curiosity the formal garden on the other side of my house, beyond the waterfall, was Japanese. And the weathered, life-sized limestone figure of the Korean bodhisattva framed by black bamboos, smiling benignly, could only increase the suspicion that there was something to hide in these secluded acres.

Foreign idols in the garden? When I could surely have erected a plaster statue to Reddy Kilowatt, a monster phallic Coca-Cola bottle, or some other more suitable adornment…

As I knelt at the top of the run, oiling the skis again, I saw the headlights of an approaching car slant up the winding dirt road that passed my front gate. First the twin beams lancing, then the headlights themselves, sweeping level. I waited to see if the car would pass my gate. Nearly all the cars that climbed that road did go by; there was not even a rural mailbox down there.

This car stopped. As I buckled the skis on, I saw the driver get out and walk toward my electrified front gate. When he touched the button, a spotlight on the east side of my house flashed on. Crouching again, I poled off the top of the run and started downward. Thinking that if it was a courier from the agency, he must be bringing an emergency contract. Over the years, the timetable of Washington through St. Louis or Tulsa had been well worked out.

At the bottom of the run, I kicked off the skis and walked up through the cathedral stillness of the pines to the eastern door of the house. In the pantry, where the control panel was, I flipped the gate switch and said, So?

Apologize for the late intrusion, said a pleasant voice, burred by fatigue, but I was wondering about property values around here. Could you talk to me for a few minutes?

I snapped the intercom off and looked at the courier code book. He hadn’t been exact, but it was close enough. If I had known the voice, I would have said okay and flipped the switch that opened the gate and lighted the path. But I didn’t recognize it. Pull your car off the road, I said, after flipping the intercom on, and park it parallel on the west side of the gate.

I walked down through the pine grove to the gate and after covering him with my flashlight asked who had sent him. He didn’t look like a courier; they came in all shapes but were invariably brisk and efficient. They delivered their classified documents, cadged a few drinks, and took off as soon as possible. The only exceptions had been a few who had heard of my restored wooden mansion, the sauna hut in the cavern under the waterfall, and my supply of triple-run moonshine whiskey.

This one, staring through the metal gate, didn’t pass the test. He was too old, for one thing, and too expensively dressed. His suit looked like it had been Poole-cut in London, with five fittings. A balding, anxious man, impatient, who seemed privy to facial massages and manicures while minions scuttled.

He held the requisite attaché case, but it was in his left hand and I could see the space between it and his French cuff. No small chain linked it to his wrist.

Who sent you to see me?

Neal Pearsall.

Okay. But it wasn’t, because Neal was director of the action division. He would not have sent someone who was more important than a courier without letting me know. I told my affluent visitor to step back three paces. When I opened the gate, he was to toss the attaché case through it. He nodded, stepped backward, and when I swung the gate open the case thudded at my feet.

I slammed the gate, and it latched again. Then, by the light of the flashlight beam, I began to study the blue-backed documents contained in the attaché case. It didn’t take long, and they were easy to understand. By trade, I was a counterintelligence agent, and had been for a long time. Now I was being asked to go to Belfast, in the British section of Northern Ireland, and remove someone.

Not an ordinary man, either. The précis stated that, although there had been incredibly chaotic conditions in the Six Counties of Northern Ireland, with murders, bombings, and the most savage confrontations between Ulster Protestants and their Roman Catholic neighbors, a new element had been introduced. In the neighborhood warfare, many random murders had occurred. Stray out of your locality after dark, and you could get killed.

Our agency, said the précis, had no direct interest in this savage bloodletting. Until two months ago; in that period, over fifty assassinations had been carried out in a pattern that linked them all together. A contract sniper had been at work in Northern Ireland, from Derry to Belfast. His victims seemed to have no special connection with political violence.

The victims had been killed with an Armalite rifle, shot through the back of the head. After death, they had all been hooded and dumped out on side roads somewhere in the Six Counties. A few had been mutilated, some of the male victims emasculated, and one body had held thirty-odd stab wounds. The agency had kept a watching brief on the troubled area and had deep plants in the British Military, the UDA (militant Protestant defense force), the Irish Republican Army Provisionals (who did the actual Catholic violence), and the official IRA in Dublin.

All these groups swore that they had had no part in the random slaughterings by the sniper with the Armalite rifle. And that none of the victims had been included on their vengeance lists.

That left you with a private killer operating inside a large area of extreme political turbulence. The contract I had been offered requested me to move into the stricken Six Counties still ruled by Her Majesty, and bring out the seemingly unaffiliated sniper. Out of an area where homes, shops, pubs, and everything else were being systematically bombed.

The interesting thing was that I was being asked to bring the sniper out. Not to terminate his activities, but, in effect, to rescue him. For two decades, as a counterintelligence agent, I had been instructed to nullify such activities, but this was the first time I had been asked to handle an assassin like an Easter egg.

After reading all the classified papers twice, I replaced them in the attaché case, opened the tall metal gate, and tossed the case at the feet of the man waiting outside.

Sir, I said, since you’ve delivered these papers, you probably know that I have the right to refuse any contract offered me. I want no part of this one.

Oh? The affluent-looking courier picked up the attaché case and stared at me. Pearsall told me you were the best man he had, for a job like this.

I am. But the thought of working in Belfast frightens me. Turns my guts to water. You can get killed by mistake in the Six Counties while sitting quietly and bothering nobody. Even in a hotel suite. So I pass.

He took two steps toward the gate.

Mr. Gall, he said hesitantly, the reason I brought the documents myself is that I believe the Belfast sniper is my son, Quentin.

That made a difference. We stared at each other through the heavy steel mesh. I had known from the moment I played the flashlight beam over him that he was not an ordinary courier. He was, in fact, a member of the President’s Cabinet.

I opened the gate. Please come in. And after I had latched the gate again and was leading him up through the pine grove to the towering house, wondered why Pearsall had let him come at me so directly.

2

Howard Armbruster Elgin was a chunky man of medium height, rumpled now by the effort of driving from the Tulsa airport to see me. His square face looked tended and familiar, as indeed it was to millions of Americans. Now in his early sixties, Elgin had once been executive vice-president of a major automobile manufacturing company. Until he was in his fifties, he had followed the mindless pursuit of ramming as many millions of car units through his assembly lines as possible, with no other evaluation of the process than to boost continually the number of dollars earned.

Then one day, he had toted up the proceeds of his stock-option purchases and other assets and had departed the private sector of business with a roar. Campaigning on fairly extreme left-wing ideas, he had been elected governor of his state for one term and been narrowly defeated for reelection. His wife, a poised socialite with that slightly equine look that strips many American housewife-sportswomen of feminine charm, had been helpful. She had been brave enough, in artfully simple tailored suits, to invade the various American ghettos and enclaves: Polish, Jewish, black, and there to munch delightedly on food specialties that had not previously come her way.

Both Howard and Henrietta Elgin were effective on television, and it nearly worked. In the US, seventh decade of the twentieth century, winning elections depends on having plenty of money and the control or support of political machines, labor unions, and minorities, and the El-gins qualified on all counts. Here was a highly successful man of the Establishment who had become evangelical about women’s lib, abortion and sex laws, and the usual sweeping obeisance to youth groups.

When he got dumped in his