I nudged out onto the N5 checking for blue flashing lights. None. So pedal to the metal and off to Knock Airport. Twenty minutes later (the BMW was running well) I was on the tarmac boarding a shuttle to Dublin under the name of John Forde (ironic eh?). Just in case they would want to see my passport at Knock for security reasons I had donned a ‘moustache’ and put on a pair of non-prescription glasses. I had stuck my lip-fungus on using some glue in front of a mirror in the wash room at the airport. Checking that it was straight I could only think, "Marx Brothers meets the Archway Stores"! It looked just like something out of a lucky bag. Still the fake passport put together by an acquaintance wasn’t a bad job at all. I had once given this ‘acquaintance’ a character reference in order to keep him out of jail so he owed me one, no questions asked. To the casual eye the passport looked pretty OK - even if the reason he had been nicked before was for poor workmanship! But I had no choice really but to go to him, as there wasn’t exactly a proliferation of passport forgers in Castlebar. So now my passport photograph and I made a perfect match – glasses and moustache. The check-in girl flicked her mascara at me but didn’t ask for the passport – after all my trouble. It would be tougher leaving Dublin for Budapest tomorrow morning especially as I had to route through Heathrow which meant an extra security and passport check. But I reckoned that arriving into Hungary itself shouldn’t be a problem. Since it had become an accession country the border controls were much easier than they used to be – I had landed in Budapest many times in the past 10 years.

Budapest was my home from home from home. Well actually… I had a business accommodation address there that I am quite proud of. Looking down at the Roscommon roads in the growing darkness as we flew towards Dublin I picked out what I thought were car headlights streaming along the N5 or perhaps heading from Frenchpark to Boyle or Lanesboro – hard to get your bearings from the air. Did they have airbags I wondered – just in case they came to abrupt T-junctions? Ahem! I laughed to myself.

I was still on a high after my little crash. To think that I had done it – crashed a car into a wall and survived all because of an eency weensy airbag that deployed just on time. Tough on poor old Forde though eh? No passenger seat airbag in the older models! Poor Forde? Yeah, right! It was good enough for the black bastard who was responsible for me having to leg it in the first place. All that stuff I had to cash in: my sites, my business interests and my contacts – a whole network that was priceless really. But now it was all liquidated into cash. Probably only a fraction of what they were really worth – definitely only a tiny fraction even if it did amount to what seemed at first like a nice tidy sum. And all those friends that I would probably never see again – seeing as how I was now officially dead – all his fault too.

Actually, come to think of it I didn’t really want to bump into many of those ‘friends’ again. Most of them were a pain anyway; just hangers-on hoping to catch some of the floating bits after the big boys had gone in for the kill. It would be embarrassing though to bump into one of the Cumann members on the beach in Torremolinos. It would have to be them or me for sure in that situation! Plastic surgery? I suppose I could go under the knife for a new face and then I wouldn’t even have to worry about being identified by some casual holidaymaker? I had heard there was a really good guy in Singapore and had actually made some enquiries already. It was a difficult decision though and I still wasn’t quite sure.

Clouds got in the way of my view of the Roscommon Roads as the plane reached cruising altitude. I settled back for the rest of the short hop to Dublin thinking about my nifty little Eastern European arrangement with its great tax benefits. My own outfit was called the Eastern European Trading Company Ltd. or EETC for short. The minute I saw the TV coverage way back in 1989 – or was it 1988 when the Wall went down - I realised that there were opportunities in Eastern Europe. What was once communist would now be capitalist and anybody with an eye for a bit of property could make a killing.

Now that I was financially embarrassed I needed to get there fast. I had the small stash of cash from under the floorboards at Forde’s House in Turlough but everything else was in drafts and bearer bonds. I had liquidated all my assets pretty much at this stage. It’s just as well I had had a month or so to rustle up a few bob and complete so many transactions. The original judge that took the first court-hearing had temporarily frozen all my bank accounts in Ireland and confiscated my passport. This was the day after the little Round Tower Inn episode masterminded by the black bastard Forde. How on earth had the late Mr. Forde stumbled into the ‘hemp’ field in the first place? That was where it all gone wrong. But of course Murphy had pointed his shotgun at him the day before that, so maybe he had become a little bit curious and gone exploring to see what Murphy was trying to hide? That field of nearly ripe cannabis plants had been destroyed by the Gardai – they had actually doused it with petrol and set fire to it! Criminal in the extreme! That was next year’s income as far as I was concerned – well, some of it anyway. Anyway no more worries about the late traitor Murphy or the late Mr Forde – the black bastard!

I would have been penniless and trapped if hadn’t been for my EETC credit card. A platinum card. I obviously didn’t want the Irish taxman to know all my business so an offshore credit card was your only man.

But unfortunately the damned thing had just passed its expiry date so my vunder-plastic had turned to dust. I had almost used it to buy petrol for the Merc when I was making sure that it had a good full tank of petrol. (You know what I mean – a near fill leaving just that a little bit of air space above the petrol to give that extra bit of kick when it was ignited so that Forde and Murphy got a good hot send-off?). But for some reason I checked the expiry date – sheer chance or perhaps just my innate carefulness when it comes to money matters? Who knows? But I had checked the expiry date and realised in the nick of time that it was past its buy-by date.

I still had some cash on me at that stage, luckily enough. If they had cut it up on me I could have been sussed immediately as the out of date card number was flagged automatically. If it started popping up in databases across the globe or in call centres in India or South Africa it would have alerted merchants and computers everywhere to my out-of-date Hungarian platinum card. I didn’t want my name being added to the local fraud list for Irish merchants to watch out for? I don’t know if an out of date card would trigger off security alerts but I wasn’t taking any chances. Of course the platinum card belonged to my wholly-owned but entirely genuine offshore company and the new replacement card would have already been posted to Budapest to my EETC office.

All I had to do was collect it. The card was, hopefully, sitting on the door mat under the letterbox of my Budapest apartment waiting for me to sign the back with a plain ballpoint pen – or should I say my Budapest ‘office’. But none of your glass and chrome offices for me. The HQ for EETC was an olde-world apartment on the Buda side of the Danube – the more fashionable side. The Buda side of Budapest had been bombed into oblivion during the Second World War but reconstructed afterwards so that I’m told you wouldn’t know the difference before and after. Very clever these commie bastards. The Pest side of the river was much duller. But having said that if you wanted a restaurant or needed a shop you really had to take the long walk across one of the bridges over the Danube and then hop on a train/underground to get where you wanted to go to. It’s a creaky enough system. But everywhere I went when I first arrived to set up my little enterprise, auctioneers and bankers kept telling me quite proudly that Budapest has the oldest underground in the world. It was dug out long before the London Underground or the Metro in Paris or the NY subway they boasted – but who gives a shit really?

I bought the apartment for a snip at 20k punts a few years back and now already they are selling for nearly 200k euros. The apartment was my business HQ for Eastern Europe. It looks down from the top of the hill right out over the Danube – dirty smelly river – but people seem to be prepared to pay for ‘da view’ – just like at home! When you cross the Szechenyi Chain Bridge to the Buda side of Budapest you have a choice – either take a little funicular railway up to the top of the hill – either that or take the 50,000 steps up! The real advantage of setting up my little offshore EETC Ltd. though was the tax advantage. None of your old bogus non-resident accounts type deal. This was genuine. I had a company registered in Hungary – the real McCoy. When I started into Eastern Europe the concept of income tax and corporation tax hadn’t even dawned on the commie bastards running the place. Charlie McCreevy would have had a heart attack if he had known how they ran their finances. Of course you had to travel back and forward every so often but old Micky O’Leary, God bless him and RyanAir, meant that it didn’t cost you an arm and a leg every time I wanted to make a deposit or collect an envelope from the doormat in the hall!

I hate the place though - depressing and dull. Terrible food – paprika and goulash – revolting stuff. I normally brought a packet of sausages and rashers with me whenever I went to make a pickup. This time was different though – no time to shop. All I wanted to do there now was to collect my credit card and be able to tap into my cash reserves once again. I was even thinking about selling the damn place and moving to somewhere sunnier and warmer in the winter. I needed a new place. I couldn’t go back to Castlebar or Ireland as myself of course. I was dead and that complicated things back home. The plastic surgery idea was maybe not a bad idea come to think of it. I had been dithering one day yes next day no but Singapore was already seeming like a good option and the place to go to.

Before I sold off the apartment though I had to get to my Swiss Bank and make a ‘small deposit’. But before all that of course I had to clear Dublin Airport without my dodgy passport being sussed and get on a flight to Budapest. I had booked a few days previously using Forde as my name so I just had to present myself a the desk with a passport matching the name Forde.

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