1999 Read Online Free

served only to give luxury to those who neither toil nor spin.
    Accept our most grateful acknowledgments for the friendly disposition you have already shown toward us. We know that you are not without your grievances. We sympathize with you in your distress, and are pleased to find that the design of subjugating us has persuaded the English Government to dispense to Ireland some vagrant rays of ministerial sunshine. The tender mercies of the British Government have long been cruel toward you. God grant that the iniquitous schemes of extirpating liberty may soon be defeated.”
    July 28, 1775
    (Signed) John Hancock

Chapter One
    Like candles blown out by a celestial wind, the last stars vanished.
    The beam of headlamps swung wildly as the Austin Healey skidded on a patch of black ice. Barry Halloran turned into the skid and kept his foot on the accelerator. The green car fishtailed, teetered on the brink of a ditch, recovered and raced on.
    Barry’s anger was unstoppable.
    He hardly saw the road. Other images clouded his vision like a double exposure. Unarmed civilians being shot down in the street. An injured man shot in the back at point-blank range as he lay writhing on the pavement. An old woman battered to the ground with the butt of a rifle. British soldiers sniggering while the still-bleeding bodies of their victims were tossed into trucks like sides of beef.
    On the screen of Barry’s mind the cinematic horror ran over and over again.
    His knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
    He had taken advantage of the better roads in Northern Ireland by driving south from Derry through Tyrone and Fermanagh. Avoiding the manned border crossing west of Enniskillen, he had entered the Republic of Ireland by a neglected byway, then angled southward again across Leitrim and Roscommon. Even when he reached County Galway very few lights were visible from the road. Much of the region was all but deserted. In the west of Ireland unemployment was endemic. Thousands of young men and women had “taken the boat” to England in search of jobs.
    Signposts were notoriously unreliable. With nothing better to do, the local youngsters who remained behind often turned road signs to point in the wrong direction. The unwary driver could go miles out of his way before discovering his mistake.
    Finbar Lewis Halloran needed no signposts to County Clare. The map was imprinted on the marrow of his bones.
    By the time he turned into the country lane leading off the Ennis Road dawn was breaking. A sullen crimson dawn for the last day of January 1972. “Red sky at night, farmers’ delight,” Barry muttered to himself. “Red sky at morning, farmers take warning.”
    Take warning, his tired brain echoed
    Ancient hedgerows of furze and whitethorn rose like walls on either side of the laneway. Deep ruts held automobile tyres to the track. Once committed, a driver had no choice but to follow the lane to the end.
    After a few hundred yards it came to a substantial farmhouse flanked by barns and outbuildings. Within easy sight from the house a large paddock waited to receive the broodmares, heavy with foal, who would be turned out later in the morning.
    Everything looks the same. Thank God, it always looks the same. Barry could feel knots loosening in the pit of his stomach.
    Built of local stone in the eighteenth century, the original tiny cottage had been altered repeatedly by successive generations of Hallorans. The house now comprised two full storeys with a steeply pitched slate roof bracketed by brick chimneys. In a rare fit of domesticity, Ursula Halloran had built an extension off the kitchen to hold an array of modern appliances, such as a washing machine and a freezer chest. She never got around to buying them. The space had become a catchall for muddy boots and a haven for orphaned farm animals.
    Ursula referred to it as “the nursery.”
    Barry slammed on the brakes and hurled himself from the car like a