Death in Dublin - Peter McGarr 16 by Bartholomew Gill Page A

In A. D . 863, Christian Ireland allowed a Viking force to sack Newgrange and other nearby megalithic tombs in the Boyne Valley.
    “For over thirty-fi?ve hundred years, those tombs and religious relics of former greatness—the very gat e ways to the Celtic Otherworld—had been revered by the Irish people and kept sacrosanct. Having wit h drawn to its many stone keeps with its own booty, Christianity simply allowed those treasures of Ir e land’s ancient past to be plundered.
    “The remains and artifacts interred there were not relics of the Christian past—the past of their prophet from the deserts of the Middle East. No. Oenghus, to whom the site was sacred, was an indigenous god of the older religion. Therefore, Newgrange was deemed expendable and valueless.”
    After showing photos of Newgrange before its restoration in the 1990s—when it was a near ruin in a wet pasture with boulders strewn about—the screen presented a collage of the tall medieval keeps that monastic communities had built as sanctuaries. During Viking raids, the monks had retreated there with wha t ever precious objects they could carry or had stored there, drawing up the ladder after them.
    “Even more than four hundred years after the initial Viking attacks, Christian Ireland remained so weak that the country was easily overrun by their coreligio n ists, the Normans, beginning in A. D . 1169. It ushered in over eight hundred years of foreign domination that has not ceased to this day.
    “Question—what is the most divisive and destru c tive issue in this country today?”
    A pastiche of rioting crowds, bomb-related destru c tion, and corpses appeared, along with clips of grie v ing families at funeral processions and gravesides.
    “What might Ireland have become, had she cleaved to her culture? Had Christianity not displaced the older Celtic verities of life and Druidism?”
    Suddenly, the picture on the screen began rotating and diminishing in a spin-fade, as though being drawn down a drain.
    The drain—replete with circular drain holes—rea p peared, glowing and reddish as though made from some fi?ery chrome. “Which makes this book what?” a deep, gravelly, and disembodied voice asked.
    As the camera panned back, it revealed that the drainlike covering was obscuring the mouth of a pe r son dressed in black with a black balaclava over a hooded face and what looked like blue-tinted welder’s goggles wrapped around his eyes. Strapped to his for e head was a bright red light that cast a fi?lm of red glare over the lens of the camera, further obscuring the i m age of the fi?gure and book.
    “A Judas book.” The fi?gure was holding up a book with the pages turned to the camera. The voice was one of the voices from the Trinity security tape, one of Raymond Sloane’s killers. “And expendable.”
    The picture on the screen then broke to a shot of the same black-gloved hands in some other setting, hol d ing the blue fl?ame of a gas torch to what appeared to be a page of the Kells book. After only a few seconds of smoldering, it burst into fl?ame, curling up into a roll as it was consumed.
    “Like your fookin’ Christ, you have three days to come up with fi?fty million Euros. On the fourth, we’ll contact you with the drop. If you balk, on the fi?fth we burn a page and another every day until you do. Pu b licly.” The screen went black.
    McGarr’s fi?rst thought: Was it genuine? Or a ruse by Sweeney to...what? To enrich himself by 50 million. Why had the thieves chosen to go through him? B e cause they knew Sweeney was certain to copy it and make the entire matter public if the government were to balk?
    And how could its authenticity be established? Mc-Garr thought of Kara Kennedy upstairs in the lounge— perhaps she could tell from the look of it on the screen. Or the way it burned. While the tape was rewinding, he climbed the stairs two at a time, but she seemed to be gone. “She still here?” he asked the barman who had served