Disclaimer: Unfortunately we do not own Burn Notice; we're just borrowing these wonderful characters.
A/N: We are Purdy's Pal and Jedi Skysinger and, if you're here reading this, we thank you for your interest and promise the chapters will get much longer with each successive offering. This is the story of a hardcore Irish Republican family realistically portrayed against the backdrop of Northern Ireland in the mid-90's, using Purdy's Pal's exquisite knowledge of all things Irish during the Troubles and all the hints and threads woven throughout the show. Though much of Fiona's dark past was glossed over in BN, we have tried to make this as true to Irish history, as well as BN canon, as we can.
A special thanks goes out to our wonderful friends: Amanda Hawthorn, who has read thru, found time for BETA's and gave us a wonderful plug in her brilliant story, Paying the Consequences, and Daisy Day, who keeps us laughing every Sunday. Much love to all the Burner girls on FB and Twitter who are keeping the faith. Sadly, Burn Notice the TV show may be ending soon, but there's nothing stopping Burn Notice fan fiction from carrying on as long as we want it to!
Thank you all for your support!
VICTIMS of WAR
A Fear Searbh
Miami, July 2012
Sitting in his sparsely decorated office in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland's temporary consulate in Miami, MI6 operative Arthur Meyers pulled out a faded and worn beige-colored folder from his brown leather briefcase. Placing the aged thick cardboard folder on top of his desk, he stared at it with reverence as one hand gently brushed over the greasy creased surface.
The tattered, yet precious, object held together the pages of his life. It held the reasons behind his quitting a degree course in politics during his final year at Oxford University. It explained why, even though his parents had begged and pleaded with him not to go, he had insisted on joining the army and it held all his excuses for every single thing he had done since leaving home: three tours of duty in Northern Ireland, a peacekeeping posting in Bosnia and six months in Iraq, followed by five years in the SAS before being recruited into MI6.
With a shuddering sigh, he closed his eyes and slowly drew back the cover. Running the tip of his tongue over suddenly dry lips, he opened his eyes and stared at the first page. Two photographs lay side by side, one was of a young man twenty five years old wearing his dress uniform. The photograph had been taken on Boxing Day, the 26th of December 1995, just hours before he had left home to start his second tour of duty in Northern Ireland. The other photograph was of a young woman with reddish blond hair framing a delicately featured face. It had been taken on the 3rd of January 1996 by a CCTV camera covering Chichester Street in the center of Belfast.
Arthur Meyers's long slender fingers skimmed over both pictures, two young people with absolutely nothing in common and yet they were joined together forever by death.
Pursing his lips, his expression hardened. At least her family had a body to bury, a gravestone to visit and, most importantly, they had been given closure.
Her death had been a dreadful waste of a young life, an awful mistake, a terrible accident caused by a mixture of fear and mindless violence. Her death had been a catalyst, a spark which ignited a fire which nearly burned down an entire city.
Meyers took a moment to calm his breathing. Turning the page, he closed his eyes preparing himself for the multitude of reports and statements which tried to give meaning to what had occurred in the first weeks of 1996. He knew every single word printed on each and every page by heart. Yet those words still held the power to tear him apart. Blinking, he cleared his vision and began to read.
Her name had been Claire Bridgitte Glenanne. She had been twenty one years old and she had been out shopping, picking up bargains in the January sales. Two large plastic carrier bags had been found at her side; one had held two silk blouses, the other contained a blue dress and a light green woolen sweater.
She had been walking past House of Frasers department store on Chichester Street in the center of Belfast when a passing army patrol had come under attack from a group of youths throwing bricks and stones. Within minutes, the street was in chaos and that was when a seventeen year old private on his very first patrol since arriving in Belfast lost his nerve and opened fire on the hostile crowd.
Claire Glenanne had bled to death on that Belfast street without even a comforting presence at her side. All because of the actions of the crowd who started to riot. It had been all the eight man patrol could do to hold back the angry mob while they waited for an ambulance and back up from the nearby barracks to arrive.
The news of the shooting had traveled like wildfire and, when it was discovered who had died, it had instigated a week of bloody violence on the streets of West Belfast. On the day of her funeral, six days after her death, crowds of mourners filled the streets, bringing the city to a stand still.
Meanwhile the army, the Ulster police and the British government all braced themselves for the bloody retaliation they were sure was to follow.
In life, Claire Bridgitte Glenanne had been no ordinary girl. She came from a family of hardcore Republicans and even though she had never been in trouble with the law herself, nearly every one of her surviving older siblings had been arrested and faced criminal charges at one time or another, most of them more than once.
Meyers forced himself to read through the coroner's report which detailed the damage done to Ms. Glenanne's body by the stray bullet, the witness statements of the troopers involved telling how they had valiantly held back a mob baying for their blood and the military police reports of the officers who had examined the scene and taken charge of all the CCTV footage of the area. Each and every document exonerated the soldiers from blame. Ms. Glenanne died because she bled to death before the paramedics could reach her.
Next, Meyers turned his attention to the Glenanne family, laying out surveillance photographs taken at the funeral of each of the five remaining siblings.
Liam Glenanne was deemed a dangerous sociopath by an army psychologist who'd had the pleasure of interviewing the man during one of his stays in Long Kesh gaol. Back in 1996, he had already been suspected of being responsible for at least fifteen murders in Northern and Southern Ireland, the UK and further a field in France and Spain.
Seamus, an international gunrunner, was on the travel watch list of Interpol and the UK Coastguard.
Colin had only ever been arrested once in 1986. His crime was hacking the Ulster Constabulary computers. He was handed a paltry sentence of sixty days in prison for the offense.
Sean was a brawler, a street-fighter, who had been charged twice for actual bodily harm, once for grievous bodily harm and twice for intimidating witnesses. But for all that, he had never served a single day in prison.
Lastly, there was the only other girl, Fiona, who just like her little sister had at that time no criminal record, though she was known to Interpol because of a long term association with a French merchant of war, Armand Andreani.
Of course, now Ms. Fiona Glenanne sat inside a federal prison cell facing charges of multiple murders and hopefully in the near future he would get the pleasure of watching her expression as she was handed a death sentence.
Meyers stared at each face in turn, their features burned into his memory. One or more of these people were responsible for destroying his hopes, dreams, and possibly his soul. Because while they got to bury their sister, to grieve at her graveside, to have the peace of knowing what happened to her and where her body was laid to rest...
His family had been left with nothing.
Arthur Henry Meyers let the ice cold hatred build until it filled his mind and flowed through his veins. Then, with fingers which shook with a powerful need to hurt somebody, he neatly returned the papers to their place in the file before turning his attention to the details of the other victim.
Captain George Neville Meyers... His only sibling, his big brother, his hero, the man he had most wanted to emulate.
He took hold of a photograph, his expression softening as he stared at the faces of two boys. It was a picture of George and himself at a family wedding. They were dressed in matching grey morning suits with similar hair styles and the same slightly bored expressions. Everybody said how much alike they looked and that, if he had been a little taller and a little broader in the shoulder, they could've been twins.
Arthur Meyers turned the photo over, not wanting to look at it any more. It was bad enough that whenever he looked in the mirror he saw his brother's face staring back at him.
Captain Meyers had only been officially declared dead six years ago, even though he had been missing for the previous ten years. He had been the officer in charge of the patrol which had come under attack from a mob of over thirty howling, jeering men, women and youths. He had been an honorable man and a decorated infantry officer, who had been doing his job to the very best of his ability, when in a moment of panic one of his men made a terrible mistake and a woman had died.
Because of the high profile of the family involved, the coroner's office had acted swiftly and, in a closed hearing, the patrol had quickly been found innocent of all charges. The ruling stated that the eight man patrol, when faced by overwhelming odds had, in the eyes of the law, done the best they could in difficult circumstances and only acted in self defense.
However, the soldier who had fired the fatal shot had been sent home to Norwich, in Norfolk England, on extended medical leave with orders not to talk to anybody about what happened, while the rest of the troop were to be shipped back to their barracks in Kent as soon as a replacement troop could be deployed.
Swallowing thickly, Meyers pushed down the feeling of nausea that always rose whenever he thought about that dreadful time after his brother's disappearance.
He remembered sitting in his parents living room, listening to his brother's commanding officer explain that George had disobeyed an order to stay on the base. He had last been seen alive on the 24th of January walking along a busy Belfast street.
General Hersham had gone on to say that the whole battalion had been turned out and they had torn Belfast apart searching for their missing officer. They had dragged in every known member of the IRA they could find and subjected them all to hours of questioning. They had even sent SAS teams into Southern Ireland to extract the Glenannes. But the whole family had gone into hiding, with the exception of the head of the family who had already been taken into custody well prior to the raids.
The General had repeatedly said how he was dreadfully sorry, but as there had been no ransom demand, George was most likely already dead, killed by either Liam or Sean Glenanne or by somebody else acting on their orders. But regrettably as there was no body, no evidence and, as not one of the three hundred people brought in for questioning could be made to talk about the Glenannes, nothing more could be done.
At twenty two years of age, he had been a callow youth. Brought up in a world of class and privilege, the second son of an old and wealthy family, his life up to that moment in time had been laid out in an orderly fashion before him. He had attended the best schools money could buy, gone on to study at Oxford University. He'd had expectations of a career in the city, of marriage to a suitable girl from another wealthy family and in time children would follow. Later on in life there would be a directorship in one of the banks or other financial institutions.
But, in the course of a few hours, his life changed forever. It was ironic really. He could trace his ancestors back to the Norman conquest to the very ship that had brought his earliest relative to the British shores, yet he would never know what had become of his older brother or where his bones were laid to rest.
Stuck in the south east of England, there had been little he could do other than try to manage his grief as best he could while his world fell apart around him. He had contacted his tutor to explain he would not be returning for his final semester due to family problems and then spent his days brooding in his bedroom.
Meanwhile, his beautiful, if rather fragile, mother had taken to drowning her own sorrow in champagne and wild society parties and his father had retreated into the countryside to take his anger out on the local wildlife during the various hunting seasons.
But the disappearance of his brother had not been the end of it.
For on the 8th of February, seventeen year old Private Keith Crammer was out with his friends in Norwich City when he suddenly dropped to the ground as a high calibre bullet shattered his skull.
The death of an off-duty soldier killed by a sniper should have provoked a mass of media attention lasting for days, if not weeks. But the following day, just after 7 pm, a large bomb containing 500kg of explosives ripped apart Canary Wharf in London's Docklands, marking the end of the IRA ceasefire and giving the police and MI5 something far more important to investigate than the disappearance of an army captain and the death of a young man who had made a stupid mistake.
Meyers couldn't look at the file any longer. He placed everything back into the folder and closed the well worn cover. Canary Wharf had been followed by ten more bombings in the capital, though none of them as big or as destructive as the first. Then came the Manchester bombing, decimating a large part of the northern city. Everybody wanted the ceasefire reinstated, sacrifices had to be made for the bigger picture.
The phone sitting on his desk rang and Meyers sat up straight and touched his fingers to his regimental tie as he quickly composed himself. Lifting the hand set, he raised it to his ear.
"Meyers," he answered in the crisp, slightly bored drawl of an English aristocrat.
"It's been agreed. You can have your time with Glenanne... I'll be sending two men from the State Department to escort you out to Allarod."
Meyers smiled, his anger and hatred locked away behind a thin veneer of civility and good manners.
"Thank you. I won't forget this."
Placing the handset back on it's base, Meyers laid one hand on top of the folder, his long elegant fingers tapped a beat on the well worn cover of the file that held all the details of the tragedy that had ruined his life. They were all victims of war in a sense, but that didn't change the burning hatred he felt.
"And I'll make damn sure she won't forget it either."