Scoundrel

BERNARD CORNWELL

SCOUNDREL

SCOUNDREL is for Jackie and Jimmy Lynch

PART ONE

AUGUST 1, 1990 WAS MY FORTIETH BIRTHDAY. SOPHIE, MY lover for the past three years, left me for a younger man, the cat fell sick, and the next morning Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

Welcome to the best years of my life.

Three weeks later Shafiq asked if I could deliver a boat from the Mediterranean to America. Hannah, my part-time secretary, had taken Shafiq’s telephone call and late that afternoon she came to the fishing harbor to give me the day’s news.

“Who called?” At first I thought I must have misheard her. I was working in a trawler’s engine room with the motor going. “Who called?” I shouted up through the open hatch again.

“Shafiq.” Hannah shrugged. “No other name, just Shafiq. He said you know him.”

I knew him all right, knew him well enough to wonder just what the hell was coming next. Shafiq! For God’s sake! “He wanted what?”

“He wants a boat delivered.”

“When?”

“He doesn’t know.”

“From where in the Mediterranean? France? Spain? Italy? Cyprus? Greece?”

“Just the Mediterranean. He said he couldn’t be more specific.”

“And I’m to deliver it where?”

Hannah smiled. “Just America.”

I shut off the engine. I had been testing the trawler’s hydraulic pumps, making sure that some scumbag hadn’t lowered the pressure by half a ton to disguise a bad valve or a weak hose. I waited for the noise to die away, then looked up at Hannah. “What kind of boat?”

“He doesn’t know.” She laughed. Hannah had a nice laugh, but since Sophie had taken off every woman seemed to have a nice laugh. “I shall tell him no,” she said, “yes?”

“Tell him yes, yes.”

“What?”

“Tell him yes.”

Hannah adopted the patient look she used when she was trying to save me from myself. “Yes?”

“Yes, oui, ja, sí. That’s what we’re in business for.” Or at least that was what my letterhead said: Nordsee Yacht Delivery, Services and Surveying, Sole Proprietor, Paul Shanahan, Nieuwpoort, Belgium; though in the last few years the servicing and surveying had taken over from the delivery.

“But, Paul! You don’t know when or how or what or where! How can I commit you to something so stupid!”

“When he phones back, tell him the answer is yes.”

Hannah uttered a very Flemish noise, a kind of glottal grunt which I had learned denoted a practical person’s scorn for an impractical fool. She turned a page in her notebook. “And a woman called Kathleen Donovan called. An American. She wants to see you. She sounds nice.”

Oh, Christ, I thought, but what is this? A man turns forty and suddenly his past comes back to haunt him, and I had a swift filthy image of Roisin’s blood on the yellow stone, and I thought of betrayal and of unhappiness and of love, and I hoped to God that if Roisin’s sister was looking for me that she never, ever found me. “Tell her no,” I said.

“But she says—”

“I don’t care what she says. I’ve never heard of her and I don’t want to see her.” I could not explain any of it to Hannah who was so very practical and so very married to her plump policeman. “And tell Shafiq I want to know why.”

“You want to know why?” Hannah frowned at me. “Why what?”

“Ask him why.”

“But…”

“Just why!”

“OK! I’ll ask!” She threw up her hands, turned, and walked along the quay. “I think the cat has worms!” she called back.

“Give it a pill!”

“It’s your cat!”

“Please give it a pill.”

“OK!” She gave the finger, not to me, but to one of the fishermen who had whistled at her. Then she waved to me and walked out of sight.

I went back to work, surveying a trawler that was being sold across the North Sea to Scotland, but my mind was hardly on the boat’s hull or its engine or its hydraulics, instead I was wondering why, out of nowhere and on the very same day, the ghosts of danger past and love betrayed had come back to haunt me. And, if I was honest, to excite me too. Life had become dull, predictable, placid, but now the ghosts had stirred.

I had waited four years for Shafiq to remember me, to summon me back to the darker paths. Four years. And I was ready.

“It has been four years, Paul! Four years!” Shafiq, indolent, thin, kind, sly and middle-aged, sat on a deep, cushion-rich sofa. He had taken a suite in the Georges V in Paris and wanted me to admire his opulence. He was also in an ebullient mood, and no wonder, for Shafiq loved Paris, loved France, and the more the French hated the Arabs, the more Shafiq approved of Gallic good taste. Shafiq was a Palestinian who lived in Libya where he worked for Colonel Qaddafi’s Centre to Resist Imperialism, Racism, Backwardness and Fascism. At first I had refused to believe any such organization existed, but it did, and Shafiq was on its staff, which was doubtless why he had such a taste for European decadence.

“So what do you want?” I asked him sourly.

“I have never known Paris so hot! Thank God for the invention of air-conditioning.” As usual we spoke in French. “Have a cake, please. The mille-feuille is exquisite.”

“What do you want?”

Shafiq ignored the question, instead opening a small, brightly enamelled tin of cachous and slipping one under his tongue. “I am pretending to be a Greek. I have a diplomatic passport even, look!”

I ignored both the fake passport and Shafiq’s delight in possessing it. Shafiq’s contribution to resisting imperialism, racism, backwardness and fascism was to act as a messenger between Libya and whatever terrorist groups were the flavor of Colonel Qaddafi’s month. At first sight he seemed an unlikely secret agent for he was too childlike, too flamboyant and too likeable, but they were perhaps the very qualities that had let him survive so long, because it was impossible to imagine a man as risible as Shafiq being associated with the polluted wellsprings of political evil. “What do you want of me?” I asked him again. Whatever he wanted I would probably give him, but after four years I had to play a reluctant role.

“You would like a Gauloise? Here! Take the pack, Paul.” He tossed the cigarettes to me.

“I’ve given up. What the hell do you want?”

“You’ve given up smoking! That’s wonderful, Paul, really wonderful! The doctors say I should give up, but what do they know? My brother-in-law is a doctor, did I ever tell you that? He smokes forty a day, sometimes fifty, and he’s fit as, what do you say? A fiddle! As a fiddle! You’d like some tea?”

“What the hell do you want, Shafiq?”

“I want you to deliver a boat to America, of course, just as I told your secretary. Is she beautiful?”

“As a rose in morning dew, as a peach blossom, as a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader. What kind of a boat? From where? To where? When?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Oh, great! That’s really helpful, Shafiq.” I leaned back in my overstuffed armchair. “It’s your boat?”

“It is not mine, no.” He lit a cigarette, then waved it vaguely about as if to indicate that the national boat belonged to someone else, anyone else, no one of importance. “How is your love life?”

“It doesn’t exist. I’ve just been junked for a married French pharmacist. I got custody of the cat. Whose boat is it?”

“You lost your girlfriend?” Shafiq was instantly concerned for me.

“Whose boat is it, Shafiq?”

“It belongs to friends.” Again he gestured with the cigarette to show that the ownership was unimportant. “How long will it take you?”

“How long will what take me?”

“To deliver the boat to America, of course.”

“That depends on what kind of a boat it is and how far it’s going and at what time of year you want it delivered.”

“A sailboat,” he said, “and soon, I think.”

“How big a sailboat?”

“With a big lead keel.” He smiled, as though that detail answered all my queries.

“How big?” I insisted.

He sucked on the cigarette, frowned. “I don’t know how big, so give me, what do you Americans call it? A ballpark guess? Give me a ballpark guess.”

I cast a beseeching look toward the ceiling’s ornamental plasterwork. “Three months? Four? How the hell do I know? The bigger the boat, the quicker. Maybe.”

“Three months? Four?” He sounded neither pleased nor displeased with my ballpark guess. “Is she blonde?”

“Is what blonde?”

“Your secretary.”

“She’s got brown hair.”

“All over?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ah.” He was sad for my ignorance. “Why did your lover leave you?”

“Because I want to retire to America one day and she doesn’t, because she says I’m too secretive, because she finds life in Nieuwpoort dull, and because her Frenchman gave her a Mercedes.”

“You want to live in America?” Shafiq asked in a tone of shock.

“Yes. It’s home.”

“No wonder you are unhappy.” Shafiq shook his head, I think because Sophie had walked out on me rather than because I was an American.

“If I’m unhappy about anything,” I assured him, “it’s because of this meeting. For Christ’s sake, Shafiq, you ignore me for four years, then you drag me to Paris to tell me you want me to deliver a boat, and now you can’t give me a single Goddamn detail of the job.”

“But it’s business!” he pleaded.

“After four years?” I sounded hurt.

He shrugged, tapped his cigarette ash into a crystal bowl, then shrugged again. “You know why, Paul, you know why.” He would not look at me.

“You didn’t like my deodorant, Shafiq?” I mocked him.

He raised his eyes to meet mine. He did not want to articulate the old accusation, but I was putting him through the wringer and he knew he would have to endure the ordeal. “They said you were CIA, Paul.”

“Oh, shit.” I leaned back in the chair, disgust in my voice.

“We know it isn’t true, of course.” Shafiq tried to reassure me.

“It’s taken you four years to make up your minds?”

“We can’t be too careful, you know that.” He sucked on the cigarette, making its tip glow bright. “Our business is like modern sex, isn’t it? Practice it safely or not at all, isn’t that right, Paul?” He laughed, inviting me to join in his amusement, but my face did not change and he shook his head sadly. “It wasn’t our side that accused you, Paul, it was the girl! Your girl! What was her name? Roisin?” He even pronounced it properly, Rosh-been, proving that he remembered her well enough. “She was your girl, Paul.”

“My girl? She was the office bicycle, Shafiq. Anyone could ride her.”

“That’s good, Paul, I like it! The office bicycle!” He chuckled, then made a dismissive gesture. “So you understand, eh? You see why we could not trust you? Not me, of course! I never believed you were CIA! I defended you! I told them it was a ridiculous notion! Cretinous! But they wanted to make sure. They said wait, wait and see if he runs home to America. I guess you didn’t run home, eh?” He smiled at me. “It’s good to see you again, Paul. It’s been too long.”

“So this sailboat,” I asked coldly, “what kind of business is it?”

“Just business.”

“Is it to do with Iraq?”

“Iraq?” Shafiq spread hands as big as oarblades in a gesture suggesting he had never heard of Iraq or its invasion of Kuwait.

“Is this to do with Iraq?” I asked again.

He gave me a smile of yellowed teeth. “It’s just business.”

“The business of smuggling?” I asked.

“Maybe?” He offered me a conspiratorial smile.

“Then the answer is no.” It was not, of course it was not, but if I yielded too easily the price would be low, and I wanted the price for this job to be very high, so I laid on the objections. “I don’t smuggle things, Shafiq, unless I know what I’m smuggling, and how it’s hidden, and why it’s being smuggled, and where it’s going, and who it’s going to, and how much, and when, and who benefits, and who might be trying to stop it, and how much they propose paying me to get it past them.”

“I told them you’d say that!” Shafiq sounded triumphant.

“They?” I challenged him.

“The people who want you to go to Miami tomorrow,” he answered coyly, hoping that the mention of Miami would sidetrack my question.

“They?” I said again.

“your old friends,” he said, confirming what I had suspected.

“They’re in Miami?” That did surprise me.

“They want you there tomorrow.” He stuffed a slice of almond cake into his mouth, then mumbled, “They’re expecting you, and I have your ticket. First class even!” He made it sound like a treat, like a red carpet into the lion’s den. Not that I needed such an enticement. I had waited four years for someone to rescue me from hydraulic systems and fiberglass osmosis and rotted keel-bolts.

So I telephoned Hannah at her Nieuwpoort home. It was a Sunday afternoon and she sounded sleepily warm and I wondered if I had interrupted the plump policemen’s revels. “Cancel this week’s appointments,” I told her.

“But, Paul…”

“Everything,” I insisted, “is cancelled.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to Miami,” I said, as though it was something I did every month and thus no occasion for her surprise.

Hannah sighed. “Kathleen Donovan phoned again. She says she’s visiting Europe and she promises she doesn’t need much of your time, and I told her you would be—”

“Hannah! Hannah! Hannah!” I interrupted her.

“Paul?”

“Make sure the cat takes its damn pills, will you?” I asked, then I put the telephone gently down and, next morning, flew to Miami.

Little Marty Doyle was waiting for me at Miami International where, despite the heat, he was jumping up and down like an excited poodle. “It’s just great to see you, Paulie! Just great! It’s been years, hasn’t it? Years! I was saying as much to Michael last night. Years!”

Marty is a nothing, a lickspittle, an errand boy. Officially he works for the Boston School Committee, while unofficially he gophers and chauffeurs for Michael Herlihy. Herlihy never learned to drive because he suffers from motion sickness and his mother always insisted he had to sit in the back of the family car, and ever since he’s ridden about like Lord Muck. These days Marty is his dogsbody and driver. “So what the hell are you doing in Miami?” I asked him.

“Looking after Michael. He’s not happy because of the heat. He’s never liked the heat. Makes him itch. Is that all your luggage?” He gestured at my sea-bag.

“How much do you want me to have?”

“I’ll carry it for you.”

I lifted the sea-bag out of his reach. “Just shut up and lead on.”

“It’s been years since I seen you, Paulie! Years! You don’t look any older, not a day! That beard suits you. I tried to grow a beard once, but it wouldn’t come. Made me look like that Chinaman in the movie. Fu-Manchu, know who I mean? So how are you, Paulie? The car’s this way. Have you heard the news?” He was skipping around me like an excited child.

“The war has started?” I guessed.

“War?” Marty seemed oblivious to the American-led build-up of forces in Saudi Arabia. “It’s about Larry,” he finally said, “they reckon it’s healed, see? He’ll be as good as new!”

“What’s healed?”

“His heel! He had surgery on it.” Marty giggled at a sudden dawning of wit. “His heel’s healed. Get it?”

I stopped in the middle of the terminal and looked down at Marty’s bald head. I was tired, I was hot, and Marty was yapping at me like a poodle in heat. “Who the hell is Larry,” I asked, “and what the hell are you talking about?”

“Larry Bird!” Marty was astonished at my obtuseness. “He missed the end of last season because of his heel. It had a growth on the bone, or something like that.”

“Oh, Christ.” I started walking again. I might have known that the most important thing in Marty’s world would be the Boston Celtics. The Celts were a religion in Boston, but somehow, perhaps because I now lived in a small harbor town on the Belgian coast, my devotions to the old hometown religion had lapsed.

Yet it felt good to be back on American soil, even in Florida’s unfamiliar tropical heat. I had been away seven years. I had never meant the time to stretch so, but somehow there had always been a reason not to fly the Atlantic. I had bought tickets once, only to have the lucrative chance of delivering a brand-new boat from Finland to Monaco change my plans. Nor did I have family reasons to go home for my parents were dead and my sister was married to a buffoon I could not stand, and so, these last years, I had worked in Nieuwpoort and nursed my dreams of one day going home and living a long, easy retirement in the Cape Cod cottage I had inherited from my father. I was saving up for that retirement, and that savings account had been another reason for not spending money on expensive transatlantic air fares. But I had still been away for too long.

“Michael’s waiting for us.” Marty held the back door of the limousine open for me. “And there’s a fellow come over from Ireland to meet you. Brendan, his name is. Brendan Flynn. He arrived yesterday.”

“Brendan Flynn?” That did surprise me, and it chilled me. Brendan was one of the Provisional IRA’s top men, maybe third or fourth in the movement’s hierarchy, and such men did not travel abroad for trivial reasons. But nothing about this odd deal smelled trivial; it was transatlantic air tickets, suites in the Georges V, a white limousine at Miami International. I had walked into it eagerly enough, but the mention of Brendan’s name gave the whole business a real blood smell of danger.

“It must be something big, Paulie, for a fellow to fly all the way from Ireland. And you’ve travelled a few miles too, eh? From Paris!” Marty was fishing for news. “So what do you think it’s all about?” he asked as we swung clear of the airport traffic.

“How the hell would I know?”

“But you must have an idea!”

“Just shut up, Marty.”

But Marty was incapable of silence and, as he drove north, he told me how he had seen my sister just the week before, and that Maureen was looking good, and how here boys were growing up, but that was the way of boys, wasn’t it? And had I heard about the New England Patriots? They had been bought by the electric razor man, but they were still playing football like amateurs. A convent school could play better, so they could. And who did I think would be up for the Super Bowl this season? The Forty-Niners again?

Marty paused in his stream of chatter as we neared the Hialeah Racetrack. He was looking for a turn-off among a tangle of warehouses and small machine shops. “Here we are,” he announced, and the softly sprung car wallowed over a rough patch of road, turned into a rusting gate that led through a chain link fence topped with razor-wire, and stopped in the shade of a white-painted warehouse that had no identifying name or number painted on its blank anonymous façade. A stone-faced man sitting in a guard shed beside the warehouse’s main door must have recognized Marty for I was casually waved forward without any query or inspection. “You’re to go straight in,” Marty called after me, “and I’m to wait.”

I stepped through the door into the warehouse’s shadowed, vast interior. Two forklift trucks stood just inside the door, but otherwise I could see nothing except tower blocks of stacked cardboard boxes. The air smelt of machine oil and of the newly sawn timber used for the pallets, or like machine-gun oil and coffin wood. I was nervous. Any man summoned by Brendan Flynn did well to be nervous.

“Is that you, Shanahan?” Michael Herlihy’s disapproving voice sounded from the darkness at the far end of the huge shed.

“It’s me.”

“Come and join us!” It was a command. Michael Herlihy had little time for the niceties of life, only for the dictates of work and duty. He was a scrawny little runt of a man, nothing but sinew and cold resolve, whose idea of a good time was to compete in the Boston marathon. By trade he was an attorney and, like me, he came from among Boston’s “two-toilet Irish”; the wealthy American-Irish who had houses on the Point and summer homes on the South Shore or on Cape Cod. Not that Michael was what I would call a proper attorney, not like his father who, pickled in bourbon and tobacco, could have persuaded a jury of Presbyterian spinsters to acquit the Scarlet Whore of Babylon herself, but old Joe was long dead, and his only son was now a meticulous Massachusetts lawyer who negotiated trash-disposal contracts between city administrations and garbage hauliers. In his spare time he was the Chairperson of Congressman O’Shaughnessy’s Re-election Committee and President of the New England Chapter of the Friends of Free Ireland. Michael preferred to describe himself as the Commander of the Provisional IRA’s Boston Brigade, which was stretching a point for there was no formally established Boston Brigade, but Michael nevertheless fancied himself as a freedom fighter and kept a pair of black gloves and a black beret folded in tissue paper and ready to be placed on his funeral casket. He had never married, never wanted to, he said.

Now, in Miami’s oppressive heat, he was waiting for me with three other men. Two were strangers, while the third, who came to greet me with outstretched arms, was Brendan Flynn himself. “Is it you yourself, Paulie? My God, but it is! It’s grand to see you, just grand! It’s been too long.” His Belfast accent was sour as a pickle. “You’re looking good in yourself! It must be all that Belgian beer. Or the girls? My God, but it’s a treat to find you alive, so it is!” He half crushed me in a welcoming embrace, then stepped back and gave my shoulder a friendly thump that might have felled a bullock. It was rumored that Brendan had once killed an IRA informer with a single flat-handed blow straight down on the man’s skull, and I could believe it. He was a tall man, built like an ox, with a bristling beard and a voice that erupted from deep in his beer-fed belly. “And how are you, Paulie? Doing all right, are you?”

“I’m just fine.” I had meant to reward four years of silence with a harsh reserve, but I found myself warming to Brendan’s enthusiasm. “And yourself?” I asked him.

“There’s gray in my beard! Do you see it? I’m getting old, Paulie, I’m getting old. I’ll be pissing in my bed next and having the nuns slap my wrist for being a bad boy. God, but it’s grand to see you!”

“You should see me more often, Brendan.”

“None of that now! We’re all friends.” He put an arm round my shoulders and squeezed and I felt as though a hydraulic press was tightening across my chest. “But, my God, this heat! How the hell is a man supposed to stay alive in a heat like this? Sweet Mother of God, but it’s like living in a bread oven.” It was no wonder that Brendan was feeling the heat for he was wearing a tweed jacket and a woollen waistcoat over a flannel shirt, just as if Miami had a climate like Dublin. Brendan had lived in Dublin ever since he had planted one bomb too many in Belfast. Now he dragged me enthusiastically toward an opened crate. “Come and look at the toys Michael has found us!”

Michael Herlihy sidled alongside me. “Paul?” That was his idea of a greeting. We had known each other since second grade, yet he could not bring himself to say hello.

“How are you, Michael?” I asked him. No one ever called him Mick, Micky or Mike. He was Michael, nothing else. When we had been kids all the local boys had nicknames: Ox, King, Beef, Four-Eyes, Dink, Twister; all of us except for Michael X. Herlihy, who had never been anything except Michael. The X stood for his baptismal name, Xavier.

“I’m good, Paul, thank you.” He spoke seriously, as if my question had been earnestly meant. “You had no problems in reaching us?”

“Why should I have problems? No police force is watching me.” I had aimed the remark at Brendan who was a noisy and notorious beast, not given to reticence, and if he had travelled here with his usual flamboyance then it would be a miracle if the FBI and the Miami police were not inspecting us at this very moment.

“Stop your fretting, Paulie.” Brendan dismissed my criticism. “You sound like an old woman, so you do. The Garda think I’m at another of those Dutch conferences where we discuss the future of Ireland.” He mocked the last three words with a portentous irony, then began excavating mounds of corrugated cardboard and foam packing from inside an opened crate. “I took a flight to Holland, a train to Switzerland, a flight to Rio, and then another plane up here. The bastards will have lost my footprints days ago.” His echoing voice filled the warehouse’s huge dusty space, which was lit only by what small daylight filtered past the roof’s ventilator fans. “Besides, it’s worth the risk for this, eh?” He turned, lifting from the opened crate a plastic-wrapped bundle which he handled with the piety of a priest elevating the Host. Even Michael Herlihy, who was not given to expressing enthusiasm, looked excited.

“There!” Brendan laid the bundle on a crate and pulled back its wrapping. “For the love of a merciful God, Paulie, but would you just look at that wee darling?”

“A Stinger,” I said, and could not keep the reverence from my own voice.

“A Stinger,” Michael Herlihy confirmed softly.

“One of fifty-three Stingers,” Brendan amended, “all of them in prime working order, still in their factory packing, and all with carrying slings and full instructions. Not bad, eh? You see now why I took the risk of coming here?”

I saw exactly why he had risked coming here, because I knew just how highly the IRA valued these weapons, and just what risks the movement would take to acquire a good supply. The Stinger is an American-made, shoulder-fired, ground-to-air missile armed with a heat-seeking high-explosive warhead. The missile and its launcher weigh a mere thirty pounds, and the missile itself is quick, accurate and deadly to any aircraft within four miles of its launch point. Brendan was gazing at the unwrapped weapon with a dreamy expression and I knew that in his mind’s eye he was already seeing the British helicopters tumbling in flames from the skies above occupied Ireland. “Oh, sweet darling God,” he said softly as the beauty of the vision overwhelmed him.

The Provos had tried other shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles. They had used Blowpipes stolen from the Short Brothers factory in Belfast, and Russian-made Red Stars donated by Libya, but neither the Blowpipe nor the Red Star was a patch on the Stinger. The big difference, as Brendan had once told me, was that the Stinger worked. It worked just about every time. Fire a Stinger and there is a multimillion-pound British helicopter turned into instant scrap metal. Fire a Stinger and the Brits cannot supply their outlaying garrisons in South Armagh. Fire a Stinger and the Brits have to take away their surveillance helicopters from above the Creggan or over Ballymurphy. Fire a Stinger and every newspaper in Britain, Ireland and America sits up and takes notice of the IRA. Fire enough Stingers, Michael Herlihy believed, and there would be a bronze statue of a scrawny Boston garbage lawyer strutting his way across St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin.

“It will be the most significant arms shipment in the history of the Irish struggle,” Michael Herlihy said softly as he gazed at the unwrapped weapon, and if his words were something of an exaggeration, it was forgivable. The Libyans had sent the IRA tons of explosives and crates of rifles, but neither bombs nor bullets, nor even the green graveyards full of the innocent dead, had yet budged the Brits one inch from Ulster’s soil. Yet Stingers, Herlihy and Brendan fervently believed, would scour the skies of their enemies and so shock the forces of occupation that, just as glorious day follows darkest night, Ireland would be freed.

There seemed just one snag. Or rather two: both of them thin, both tall, both dressed in pale linen suits and both with dark smooth faces. Michael Herlihy made the introductions. “Juan Alvarez and Miguel Carlos.” They were not names to be taken seriously, merely convenient labels for this meeting in an anonymous Hialeah warehouse under the clattering exhaust fans that flickered the dusty sunlight. “Mr. Alvarez and Mr. Carlos represent the consortium that acquired the missiles,” Michael said unhappily.

“Consortium?” I asked.

The one who called himself Alvarez answered. “The fifty-three missiles are currently listed as US Government property.” He spoke without irony, as though I would be grateful for the information.

“God, but it’s beautiful,” Brendan muttered. He stroked the Stinger; caressing its olive-green firing tube and folded acquisition array. The missile itself was invisible behind the membrane that sealed the firing tube.

“And the consortium’s price?” I asked Alvarez.

“For fifty-three weapons, señor, five million dollars.”

“Jesus Christ!” I could not resist the blasphemy for the price had to be extortionate. I had been away from the illegal arms business for four years, but I could not believe the cost of a Stinger had escalated so high, not since the United States had been giving Stinger missiles to the Afghan mujaheddin, which surely meant there had to be other Stingers available on the black market. Yet these men expected five million bucks for fifty-three missiles?

Alvarez shrugged. “Of course, señor, if you are able to buy the same quality for less elsewhere, then we shall understand. But our price remains five million dollars.” He paused, knowing just how deeply the Provisional IRA lusted after these weapons. “The five million dollars must be paid in gold coins, here, in Miami.”

“Oh, naturally,” I scoffed.

“And naturally, señor,” Alvarez went smoothly on, “a small deposit will be required.”

“Oh! A small deposit now?” I sneered.

“The cost isn’t your business, Paul, so shut up,” Brendan snarled. He was in love with the missiles and thought them worth any price. He took me by the arm and steered me out of the Cubans’ earshot. “The point of this, Paul, is that we already have the gold. It’s all agreed. All we need do is bring the gold here.”

I understood at last. “In a boat? From the Mediterranean?”

“That’s right.”

“The Arabs are giving you the gold?”

“And why not? Considering how rich the buggers are? They’ve got all that oil and all poor Ireland has is a bogful of wet peat. What’s gold to them, Paulie?” Brendan’s grip on my arm was hurting. “But the point of bringing you here was so you could see the Stingers for yourself. Shafiq said you’d not help us unless you knew just what it was all about, so now we’re showing you. You always were a careful man, Paulie, were you not?”

“Except in women, Brendan?” I asked the question sarcastically, probing a four-year-old wound.

“She was more trouble than she was worth, that one.” He spoke of Roisin, but his casual tone did not entirely disguise the old hurt. He let go his bone-crushing grip and slapped my back instead. “So will you fetch the boat over? Will you do it now? Because it’ll be just like the old days! Just like the old days.”

“Sure,” I said, “sure.” Because it would be just like the old days.

In the old days I had been the Provisional IRA’s liaison man with the Middle East. I was the guy who made the deals with the Palestinians and who listened for hours to Muammar al-Qaddafi’s plans for world-wide revolution. I was the Provos’ sugar daddy who brought them millions in money, guns and bombs until, suddenly, they decided I could not be trusted. There was a whisper that I was CIA, and the whisper had finished me, but at least they had left me alive, unlike Roisin who had been executed on the yellow hillside under the blazing Lebanese sun.

The Provisional IRA’s leaders claimed that Roisin had betrayed a man. Roisin had tried to shift the blame on to me, and that brush of suspicion had been enough to cut me off from the IRA’s trust. They had let me run the odd errand in the past four years, and once or twice they had used my apartment as a hiding place for men on the run, but they had not shown me any of their old confidence—until now, when suddenly they wanted a boat delivered and I was the only man remotely connected to the movement who understood the intricacies of bringing a boat across the Atlantic.

“We would have asked Michael to bring the boat over,” Brendan explained, “but he gets sick just looking at the sea!” He laughed, and Herlihy gave him his thin, unamused smile. Michael did not like being teased about his chronic motion sickness, which seemed an unsuitable affliction for a black-gloved soldier.

Brendan poured me a whiskey. We had gone back to his room in a waterfront Miami hotel where, bathed in blissful air-conditioning and with a bottle of Jameson Whiskey standing on the low coffee table, Brendan was explaining to me why it was necessary to bring the yacht from Europe to America. “The Cuban bastards insist on gold, so they do, and Michael tells me it would be next to impossible to find the gold over here.”

“Treasury regulations,” Herlihy explained. He was not drinking the whiskey, but had a bottle of mineral water instead. “Any transactions involving more than ten thousand dollars must be reported to the Treasury Department. The legislation was enacted to track down drug dealers.”

“So your old pals the Libyans obliged us,” Brendan took up the tale again. He was standing at the window, puffing at a cigarette and staring down at the pelicans perched on the sea-front pilings below. “I’ve seen them in the Phoenix Park zoo, so I have, but it’s not the same, is it?”

“The Libyans, are giving you the gold?” I wanted to make sure it was Libya, and not Iraq.

“We don’t have that kind of scratch ourselves,” Brendan said happily, “but we did manage to raise the deposit. Or Michael did.”

“You raised half a million bucks?” I asked Herlihy in astonishment. The folks in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and the other cities where the Irish-Americans lived could all be generous, but they were not usually wealthy and their donations were mostly small. And those small donations had been shrinking thanks to the politicians from the Irish Republic who had been touring America to preach that the IRA was an enemy of the south just as much as it was an enemy to Britain. Now, suddenly, Michael Herlihy had raised half a million dollars? “How the hell did you do it?”

“It’s none of your business,” Herlihy told me sourly.

“Your business, Paulie,” Brendan said, “is the five million in gold. The Libyans are putting it up, God bless them, but they’re insisting we make the arrangements for moving the gold from there to here, and that’s when we thought of you.” He smiled happily at me. “Can you do it now?”

He sounded genial enough, but Brendan always sounded genial. Many men had died misunderstanding Brendan’s open, happy face and bluff, cheerful manner. Beneath it he was implacable, a man consumed by hatred, a man whose every moment was devoted to the cause. If I turned down this job he would probably kill me, and to the very last moment he would smile at me, appear to confide in me, call me “Paulie,” hug me, and at the end, murder me.

I took a sip of whiskey. “Has anyone found out how much five million bucks in gold weighs?”

“A thousand pounds, near enough,” Brendan said, then waited for my response. “Say three big suitcases?” I was not worried about the space such an amount of gold would take up, but what its weight would do to a sailboat. However, a thousand pounds of extra ballast would be nothing to a decent-sized cruiser. “Well?” Brendan prompted me.

“I can carry a thousand pounds of gold,” I said.

“How?” Herlihy snapped.

“None of your business.”

Brendan laughed at the hostility between us. “And of course, Paulie, there’ll be a good wee fee in this for you.”

“How much?”

“The half-million deposit that we’ll get back when the gold arrives. Does that sound good to you?” Brendan glanced at Herlihy as though seeking confirmation and I sensed that the two of them had not agreed on that fee beforehand. I also saw Michael Herlihy blench at the amount and for a second I thought he was going to protest; then, reluctantly, he nodded.

“The point being”—Brendan beamed at me—“that I know a boat filled with gold could be a hell of a temptation, even to a man as honest as yourself, Paulie, but I look at it this way. If you try to steal the gold then you’ll have made an enemy of me, and one day I’ll find you and I’ll make your death harder and slower than your worst nightmares. Or you can keep the faith and walk away at the end of the job with a half-million dollars, and I reckoned that half a million should be enough to keep any man honest.” He smiled, as if pleased with his reasoning, then turned back to the sun-bright sea beyond the tinted glass. “Look at the size of those fowl! Can you eat them now?”

“Half a million sounds good to me,” I said as equably as I could.

“Not that we’re utter fools, Paulie”—Brendan was still staring at the pelicans—“because we’ll be giving you some company on the trip. Just to help you along, so to speak.”

“To be my guards, you mean?” I asked sourly.

“To be your crew.” Brendan turned back to me. He was keeping the tone of the conversation light, but that was because he knew I could not turn him down. By just coming to Miami I had agreed to whatever he wanted. “Say two of my lads to be your crew?” he went on. “Work them hard, eh?”

I shrugged. “Fine.” And why, I was wondering, if the Libyans had insisted that the Provisional IRA transport the gold, had Shafiq approached me first? And why had Brendan and Michael not agreed on my fee before they met me? Or perhaps they had agreed, but Brendan, with his usual enthusiasm, had suddenly decided to quote a much higher figure because he wanted to tempt me. But that suggested he also had no intention of letting me live long enough to collect the money. I suspected the half-million-dollar fee was nothing but a bait to make me take the job, and that Brendan’s two guards would chop me down the moment the voyage was done.

Indeed, the whole affair seemed oddly ragged. The Provisional IRA had learned from too many past mistakes and these days they did not launch half-baked schemes, and they certainly did not leave details like an unagreed fee dangling in the wind, which suggested that this operation was being planned hastily, perhaps in the single short month since an Iraqi army had stormed across the defenseless frontier of Kuwait. “The important thing now,” Brendan went blithely on, “is to choose the right boat, and you’re the best fellow to do that.”

“If I’m going to sail it across the pond,” I agreed, “then I want to choose it.”

“So would you mind flying right back to Europe?” Brendan asked. “The Libyans are in a hurry to ship the gold, so they are.”

“We’re in a hurry,” Michael Herlihy amended the explanation, then added a reason for the haste. “Next April is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Easter Rising and we’d like to give the British a bloody memorial to mark the occasion, and we can’t ship the Stingers to Ireland till you’ve brought us the gold.”

“You want me to fly back tomorrow?” I asked Brendan, and sounded surprised. I had hoped for a chance to fly north and visit the Cape Cod house that I had not seen in seven years, and maybe to visit my parents’ grave in Boston, but Michael and Brendan were in too much of a hurry.

They were in even more of a hurry than I suspected. “Not tomorrow,” Brendan said, “tonight,” and, like a conjurer, he produced the air ticket from a pocket of his tweed jacket.

“To Paris, then on to Tunisia. First class, Paul!”

They were trying too hard, I thought. They did not need to entice me with first-class tickets. It smelled as though they were persuading me to do something I did not want to do, and surely they should be treating me like a volunteer? The discrepancy was just another unlikely ragged edge to add to my disquiet, but also to my curiosity. A lot of people were going to a lot of trouble to make me accept this job, and that much effort suggested there could be a huge reward hidden among the details, so I said I would fly out that night.

Brendan went with me to Miami Airport. “It’s grand to be working with you again, Paulie, just grand.”

I ignored the blarney. “You couldn’t find anyone else with the right qualifications, was that it?”

For a half-second he looked blank, then laughed. “Aye, that’s the truth of it.”

“So you’re being forced to trust me again?” I could not keep the bitterness from my voice. Little Marty Doyle was driving us and I could see his ears pricking with interest at our conversation.

“You know the rules, Paul,” Brendan said awkwardly. “It only takes a touch of suspicion to make us wary.”

“Wary!” I protested. “Four years of silence because some bitch accuses me of being in the CIA? Come off it, Brendan. Roisin invented fairy stories like other women make up headaches.”

“We know the girl lied about you,” he admitted sombrely. “You’ve proved it. You could have betrayed us any time in the last four years and you haven’t. And besides, Herlihy had a word with his people in Boston and they said the girl was fantasizing. There was no way the Yanks were running an operation like she said. All moonshine, they said. It was a good wee story, though. She could tell a good wee story, that girl. She was good crack.”

I wondered who Herlihy’s people were, and supposed they were Boston police who could tap the FBI who, in turn, could call in a favor from the Central Intelligence Agency. So someone had run a check on Roisin’s allegations, and I had come up snow-white. “Did Herlihy’s people check on Roisin as well?” I asked.

“She was a one!” Brendan said in admiration, carefully not answering my question. “Jesus, she was a one. She had a tongue on her like a focking flamethrower. You could have used her to strip varnish!”

“But was she CIA?” I asked.

“Just a troublemaking bitch, that’s all.” He was silent for a few seconds. “But she was a lass, wasn’t she?”

I had always thought that Roisin and Brendan had been lovers, and the wistfulness of his last words brought the old jealousy surging back. Roisin had been a gunman’s groupie, a worshipper of death. She would have bedded the devil, yet still I would have loved her. I had been besotted by her. I had thought the world revolved about her, that the sun was dimmed by her, the moon darkened by her and the stars dazzled by her. And she was dead.

I caught the night flight to Paris.

SHAFIQ WAS WAITING FOR ME AT THE SKANES-MONASTIR Airport. He was wearing a suit of silver-gray linen with a pink rose buttonhole which on closer inspection turned out to be plastic. I was a shabby contrast in my crumpled, much-travelled clothes. “So how was Miami?” Shafiq asked me.

“Hot.”

“And the girls?”

“Exquisite. Ravishing. Limpid.”

That was the answer Shafiq wanted. The poor man dreamed of Western girls, especially French girls and, in the old days, he had insisted on making our summer rendezvous on the Riviera so he could stroll the promenades and stare down at the serried rows of naked French breasts displayed on the beach. It never bored him, he could gaze for hours. The casual display of nudity fed Shafiq’s fantasies and once, sitting in the café of the Negresco, he had shyly told me his ambition of finding a French bride. “Not a whore, you understand, Paul? Not a whore. I have enough whores.” He had paused to cut into a Napoleon-kake, then carefully scooped the creamy custard which had oozed from between the pastry layers on to his teaspoon. Shafiq loved sweet things, yet stayed skeletally thin. “I am tired of whores,” he said when he had licked the spoon dry. “I want a fragile Parisian girl, with white skin, and small bones, and short golden hair, who will smile when I come through the door. She will play to me on the piano and we shall walk our dog beside the Seine.” I later discovered that Shafiq had a fat dark wife and three moustached daughters who squabbled in a small Tripoli apartment.

Now he escorted me to the parking lot where his rented white Peugeot waited. Out of sailing habit I cocked an eye at the weather. The day was cloudless, while the wind was in the north and cool enough to make me glad I had brought a sweater. “Where are we going?”

“The marina at Monastir.” Shafiq unlocked the car. “There are boats for sale there, Western boats. You should see them, Paul! They sail into the harbor and the women wear bikinis so small that they might as well not have got dressed at all. They are, how do you say it? Almost in their birthday clothes?”

Shafiq was filled with an irrepressible verve, like a lover in the first freshness of passion. I had seen other men thus animated, men going on their first bombing mission to make a new Ireland out of dead bodies; but I could not understand why Shafiq, who had grown middle-aged in the service of violence, should find buying a western yacht such an energizing experience. He accelerated out of the parking lot, spitting a stream of Arab profanities at a taxi driver who had dared to sound a protesting horn at the Peugeot’s irruption into the traffic stream. “We are going to meet someone,” Shafiq announced, as though he had arranged a great treat.

“I thought we were buying a boat?”

“We are, we are, but you are going to meet someone first. His name is Halil!”

“Halil.” I repeated the name with none of the enthusiasm with which Shafiq had invested the two plain syllables. “So who is Halil?”

“He is in charge of this end of the operation. Just as Mr. Herlihy is in charge of the other.”

Herlihy was in charge? Not Brendan Flynn? I tucked that oddity away as just another slight dissonance that made this whole affair so strange. “So who’s Halil?” I asked. The name was clearly a pseudonym, but in the past, with a little pushing, Shafiq had often been ready to betray such confidences.

But not this time. “Just Halil!” Shafiq laughed, then raced past a truck loaded with piled crates of squawking chickens. “But Halil is a great man, you should know that before you meet him.” Shafiq’s words, friendly enough, were nevertheless a warning.

“Is the gold ready?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe? Maybe not. I don’t know.” There were chicken feathers stuck under the Peugeot’s windscreen wipers. Shafiq tried to shift them by flicking the wipers on and off, but the feathers obstinately stayed. Abandoning the attempt he lit a cigarette and grinned conspiratorially at me. “You saw the Stingers?”

“I saw one.”

“What a weapon! What a weapon! Now you understand about the boat, yes?”

“No.”

“Paul! You don’t want the heroic fighters of Ireland to have Stingers?”

“I’d like them to have battle-tanks and rocket artillery, but I don’t think it makes sense to pay for the weapons by stuffing a boat with gold and sailing it across the Atlantic. Haven’t your people heard of checks? Or bank drafts? Or wire transfers?”

Shafiq laughed. “Paul! Paul!” He spoke as though he were chiding me for a familiar and lovable cantankerousness, then he fell silent as the Peugeot threaded the traffic close to the harbor. Above us towered the turrets and castellated walls of the Ribat fortress, while next to it, from loudspeakers installed in the minaret of the Grand Mosque, a tape recording called the faithful to prayer. We turned a corner and there, spread beneath us in the October sunshine, was the marina. The Mediterranean sailing season had not yet ended and so the pontoons were thick with boats, many of them flying big elaborate race flags so that the ancient harbor looked as if a fleet of medieval war vessels had gathered under its gaudy banners. “Halil is waiting on the boat,” Shafiq said, suddenly nervous.

“The boat? I thought I was choosing the boat?”

“Halil has found something he thinks is suitable. It might be best if you agreed with him.” Shafiq was palpably anxious. Clearly Halil, whoever he was, had the power of life and death and Shafiq was trying to impress that fact on me.

I was determined not to be impressed. “Halil is an expert on crossing the Atlantic?” I asked sarcastically.

“He is an expert on whatever he chooses to be,” Shafiq squashed me. “So come.”

We walked past the security men and down one of the long floating pontoons. Shafiq was so apprehensive that he scarcely spared a glance for the sun-tanned women in the cockpits of the moored boats. Instead he led me toward the pontoon’s far end where a handsome sloop was moored. “That’s the boat!” Shafiq had paused to light a cigarette. “You like her?”

“How can I tell?” I said irritably, yet in truth I did like the white-hulled Corsaire. The name was painted across the swimming platform of her sugar-scoop stern above her hailing port, Port Vendres, which was the French Mediterranean harbor nearest to the Spanish frontier. Corsaire looked a handsome boat, expensive and well equipped, effortlessly dominating the smaller and scruffier yachts further down the pontoon. She was not the product of any boatyard I knew, making me suspect that she had been custom designed and specially built for a wealthy owner who had his own particular ideas of what made a good cruising boat. This man had wanted a fractional rig, a center cockpit, and a long low free-board on a boat some forty-four feet long. The design, I grudgingly admitted to myself, did not look like a bad choice for a transatlantic voyage. So long as she was in good condition.

“Why is she for sale?” I asked Shafiq.

“Her owner left her here last winter. Tunisia’s winter rates are cheaper, you understand, than in France? But he’s since fallen ill and he needs to sell her.” Shafiq raised a hand in greeting to the two young men who sat in Corsaire’s cockpit beneath a white cotton awning that had been rigged over her boom. He spoke to them in Arabic, gesturing at me, and they grunted back brief replies. I had seen such men before: thugs plucked from the Palestinian refugee camps, trained to kill, then given guns, girls and the license to strut like heroes among their exiled people.

“Is one of them Halil?” I muttered.

“They’re his bodyguard.” Shafiq replied in a low voice, then smiled obsequiously as the two young men gestured us to climb aboard. Then, while one stood guard, the other ran quick hands across our bodies to make certain neither of us was armed. If any of the Western yacht crews saw the intrusive body search, they ignored it, for Tunisia, despite its Western trappings, was still a Muslim and Arab country and a man did well to leave its customs and barbarities unremarked. One of the bodyguards relieved me of my sea-bag, then pointed me toward the main companionway. “Be respectful, Paul!” Shafiq hissed at me. “Please!”

I ducked down the steep stairs. To my right was the chart table and instrument array, to my left the galley, while ahead was the spacious saloon with its comfortable sofas and fiddled shelves. The saloon seemed very dark after the bright sunlight, but I could just see a young man sprawled on the furthest sofa. At first glance he looked no more prepossessing than the two brutes in the cockpit, and I assumed he must be a third bodyguard protecting his master who would be in the forward sleeping cabin, but then the young man took off his sunglasses and leaned his elbows on the saloon table.

“I am Halil.”

“I’m Shanahan.”

“Sit.” It was a command rather than an invitation. Behind us the washboards were slammed into place and the hatch slid shut, imprisoning me in the Corsaire’s belly with the man called Halil. It was stuffy and humid in the boat, and something in the closed-up hull reeked of decay.

I sat on the starboard settle. My eyes were slowly adjusting to the gloom, yet I could still see nothing noteworthy about the man who raised such fears in Shafiq. Halil looked to be in his middle thirties and had a dark-skinned, unremarkable face. His black hair was thick and brushed straight back, and his only idiosyncrasy was a thin moustache like a 1940s bandleader. He was wearing a white shirt, no tie and a black suit. He looked strongly built, like a peasant, while his left hand, the only one visible, had short square fingers. A burning cigarette rested in an ashtray on the table and beside it was a packet of Camels and an expensive gold lighter. “The owner wants 650,000 French francs for this boat,” Halil said unceremoniously. “Is that a fair price?”

“If she’s in good condition,” I said, “she’s a bargain.”

“She is frivolous.” Halil brought his right hand into view to lift the cigarette. He sucked deep on the smoke, then restored the cigarette to the ashtray. His right hand, I noticed, had been shaking so that the cigarette smoke trembled.

“Frivolous?” I asked.

The dark eyes flicked toward me and I began to understand Shafiq’s nervousness, for there was something almost reptilian in the blankness of this man’s eyes. “Boats, Shanahan,” he lectured me, “should serve noble purposes. They can be used to bring fish from the sea, or to carry goods, or to be gun platforms for fighting, but only a frivolous people would build boats for pleasure.” He spoke English in a deep-toned voice that invested his words with authority. “You think such a frivolous boat is worth 650,000 francs?”

“I think she’s worth more.”

“I shall offer 600,000,” he said flatly. But why was he making the offer, I wondered, and not the Provisional IRA? Brendan Flynn had insisted that the Irish were responsible for transferring the gold, yet this dark-voiced man was quibbling over Corsaire’s price as though it would come from his budget and not the IRA’s.

“You’d best make no offer till I’ve inspected the boat,” I told him, “and I’ll want her hauled out of the water so I can see her hull.”

I could have been speaking to the wind for all the notice Halil took of me. “She has already been inspected,” he said, “and declared fit for your journey. She is thirteen and a half meters long, four and a quarter meters wide, and has an underwater depth of one and three-quarter meters. Her keel contains 3,500 kilos of lead. What more do you need to know?”

“A lot,” I said, noting how heavily Corsaire was ballasted, which suggested her builder had been a cautious man.

“There is no time to be particular.” Halil spoke very softly, but there was an unmistakable menace in his voice. I wanted to argue with him, but felt curiously inhibited by a sense that any opposition to this man could provoke an instant and overwhelming physical counterattack. He seemed so utterly sure of himself, so much so that, even though his vocabulary had proved he knew nothing of boats, he nevertheless had spoken of Corsaire’s sea-going qualities as though his opinion was final. Yet his next question showed how much he still needed my expertise. “How long will it take you to cross the Atlantic with her?”

“Leaving from here?”

He paused, as if unwilling to admit anything. “From near here.”

“Going where?”

Again the pause. “She will go to Miami.” Where, I thought, her delivery skipper would be murdered; one more anonymous body which would be ascribed to the drug trade’s carnage.

“When will the voyage be made?” I asked.

“That does not matter,” Halil said disparagingly, though in fact it mattered like hell. Any Atlantic passage undertaken before the trade winds had established themselves would take much longer than if I waited till the new year, but I sensed this man was not amenable to detail and so I made a crude guess.

“Three months.”

“That long?” He sounded horrified and, when I did not modify the answer, he frowned. “Why not use the engine? Can’t you put extra fuel on board and motor across?”

“A boat like this one will only go as fast as her waterline allows.” Again I spared him the detail, and instead offered him a helpful suggestion. “Why not buy a big motor-yacht? One of those will cross much faster.”

He made no reply, but just lifted the cigarette to his lips and this time I saw that the fingers of his right hand seemed crooked, as though the hand had been injured and never healed properly. The hand shook, so much so that he had difficulty in putting the cigarette between his lips. Water slapped at Corsaire’s hull and reflected the sunlight up through the portholes to make a rippling pattern on the saloon’s ceiling. I was soaked with sweat, though Halil seemed immune to the close humidity inside the boat. He lowered the trembling cigarette. I thought he was considering my suggestion of using a motor-yacht to transport the gold, but instead he suddenly changed the subject, asking me whether I believed America would fight to liberate Kuwait. It seemed an odd question in the context, but I nodded and said I was sure America would fight.

“I hope so,” Halil said, “I hope so.” He spoke softly, but I sensed how badly this man wanted to see a great Arab victory in the desert. Was that why he had asked me the question, simply to satisfy his curiosity? Or was his query somehow related to this boat, and to my recruitment, and to a Stinger missile in a Miami warehouse? Those were questions I dared not ask. The truth of this operation, if it ever emerged at all, would appear in grudging increments.

Halil was still worrying that America would not give the Iraqi army its chance of immortal glory for he suddenly took a folded sheet of newsprint from his suit pocket. “Your politicians are already trying to escape the horrors of defeat,” he said. “Look for yourself!” He pushed the scrap of newspaper across the saloon table. It was a recent front page story from The New York Times which told how House Representative Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third had introduced a bill to Congress which, if it passed, would forbid the employment of American military forces in the Gulf for one whole year. O’Shaughnessy was quoted as wanting to give economic sanctions a chance to work before force was used. “You see!” Halil’s voice was mocking. “Even your legislators want peace. They have no courage, Shanahan.”

I shook my head. “You know what they call O’Shaughnessy in Boston? They call him Tommy the Turd. They say he’s too dumb to succeed, but too rich to fail. He’s a clown, Halil. He’s in Congress because his daddy is rich.”

Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third was less than thirty years old, yet he was already serving his second term in Congress. Michael Herlihy was one of O’Shaughnessy’s staff, helping the Congressman cultivate the IRA sympathizers in his Boston constituency. I suspected Michael had been behind one of Tommy’s early crusades which demanded that the British government treat IRA prisoners according to the Geneva Convention. The campaign had collapsed in ridicule when it was pointed out that the Geneva Convention permitted combatant governments to execute enemy soldiers captured out of uniform, which meant Tommy’s bill would have given American sanction for the Brits to slaughter every IRA man they took prisoner, but the proposal had never been seriously meant, only a proof to his constituents that Tommy’s heart was in the right place, even if his brain was lost somewhere in outer space.

I offered the cutting back to Halil. “Congressmen like O’Shaughnessy will make a lot of feeble noises, but the American public will listen to the President and, if Saddam Hussein stays in Kuwait, you’ll get your war.”

“May God prove you right,” Halil said, “because I want to see the bodies of the American army feeding the desert jackals for years to come. In the sands of Kuwait, Shanahan, we shall see the humbling of America and the glory of Islam.”

I said nothing; just held the cutting across the table until Halil leaned forward for it. He reached with his good left hand and, as he did, I suddenly knew exactly who this man was and why Shafiq was so terrified of him, and I felt the same terror, because this man, this unremarkable man, this ignorant stubborn man, this hater of America and self-proclaimed expert on boats, was wearing a woman’s Blancpain wristwatch.

He was il Hayaween.

The Blancpain watch was an expensive timepiece enshrined in a miraculously thin case of gold and platinum. Except for its small size the watch did not appear particularly feminine; instead it looked what it was: a delicate and exquisitely elegant wristwatch. It was also a very expensive wristwatch. I knew, for I had bought it myself.

I had bought it five years before in Vienna where Shafiq had met me in the café of the Sacher Hotel. It had been an early spring afternoon and Shafiq was lingering over a sachertorte until it was time for him to leave for the airport. We were probably talking about Shafiq’s favorite subject, women, when he had suddenly dropped his fork and cursed in Arabic. Then he switched to panicked French. “I am supposed to buy a gift! Oh God, I forgot. Paul, help me, please!” He had gone quite pale.

There had followed a desperate few hours as we searched Vienna for a jeweller who might stock Blancpain watches. I had derided Shafiq’s urgency until he explained that it was the legendary il Hayaween who had demanded the watch, and Colonel Qaddafi himself who wanted to be the watch’s giver, and then I understood just what the price of failure might entail for Shafiq. Yet our search seemed hopeless. Blancpains were not like other watches, but were genuine old-fashioned hand-made Swiss watches, powered by clockwork and without a scrap of contaminating quartz or battery acid, and such rare timepieces needed to be specially ordered. The shops began to close and Shafiq was nearing despair until, in one of the little streets close to St. Stephen’s Cathedral, we found a single specimen of a Blancpain watch. It was a rare specimen, it was expensive and it was beautiful, but it was also a woman’s watch. “Do you think he’ll know?” Shafiq asked me nervously.

“It doesn’t look especially feminine,” I said, “just a bit on the small side.”

“Oh, dear sweet Christ!” Shafiq liked to use Christian blasphemies, which he thought were more sophisticated than Islamic imprecations. “If it’s the wrong watch, Paul, he’ll kill me!”

“And if you take him no watch at all?”

“Then Qaddafi will cut off my balls!”

“We’ll take the watch,” I had told the shopkeeper, and proffered him my credit card.

Now I had seen that same watch on Halil’s wrist, and I knew who he was: il Hayaween. Not that il Hayaween was his real name, any more than Halil was, or even Daoud Malif, which was the name usually ascribed to him by the Western press when they did not use the nickname. Il Hayaween was an Arabic insult meaning “the animal” and its first syllable was pronounced as an explosive breath, but on one would dare explode the word into Halil’s face for, in all the shadowy world of terror, he was reckoned the most famous and the most lethal and the most daring of all the deadly men who had ever graduated from the refugee camps of the Palestinian exiles. In the pantheon of death il Hayaween was the Godhead, a ruthless killer who gave hope to his dispossessed people. In the gutters of Gaza and the ghettos of Hebron he was the leveller, the man who frightened the Israelis and terrified the Americans. Children in refugee camps learned the tales of il Hayaween’s fame; how he had shot the Israeli Ambassador in a tea garden in Geneva, how he had bombed American soldiers in a Frankfurt night club, how he had ambushed an Israeli schoolbus and slaughtered its occupants, and how he had freed Palestinian prisoners from the jails of Oman. Whenever a misfortune struck an enemy of Palestine, he was reputed to be its author; thus when the jumbo jet fell from the flaming skies over Scotland the Palestinians chuckled and said that he had been at work again. Some Western journalists doubted his very existence, postulating that anyone as omnipotent as il Hayaween had to be a mythical figure constructed from the lusts of a frustrated people, but he lived all right, and I was talking to him in the saloon of a French yacht in Monastir’s marina.

Where I was not thinking straight; not yet. Terrorists live in a skewed world. Their view is dominated and overshadowed by the cause, and every single thing that moves or creeps or swarms on earth is seen in its relation to the cause, and nothing is too far away or too trivial or too innocent to escape the cause. Thus, to a man like il Hayaween, a game of baseball is not an irrelevant pastime, but evidence that the American public does not care about the monstrous crime committed against the Palestinian people; worse, it is evidence that the American people deliberately do not want to consider that crime, preferring to watch a game of bat and ball. Therefore a scheme to kill baseball spectators would be a justifiable act because it could jolt the rest of America into an understanding of the truth. Terrorists believe they have been vouchsafed a unique glimpse of truth, and everything in the world is seen through the distorting lenses of that revelation.

So perhaps, in such a skewed world, paying for weapons with a boatload of gold makes sense.

And risking the gold by sailing the boat across the Atlantic makes sense.

And allowing a Palestinian terrorist to choose the sailboat makes sense.

And involving the Palestinian’s most notorious killer in the purchase of Stinger missiles destined for Northern Ireland makes sense.

Or maybe not.

Halil pushed the folded newspaper cutting into his pocket. The cigarette had gone out, so now he lit another before staring into my eyes again. “Shanahan,” he said with a tinge of distaste. “You moved to Ireland when you were twenty-seven. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“You lived in Dublin for one year and in Belfast for two.”

“Yes.”

“You joined the Provisional IRA?”

“That was why I went to Ireland.”

“And the Provisional IRA asked you to live on mainland Europe?”

“Because it would be easier to liaise with foreign groups from mainland Europe than from Ireland.”

“Yet six years later they ceased to use you for such liaison. Why?”

I understood that this man already knew the answers and that the catechism was not for Haiti’s information, but to make me feel uncomfortable. “Because of a woman,” I told him.

“Roisin Donovan.” He let the name hang in the stifling air. “An American agent.”

“So they say,” I said very neutrally.

“Do you believe she was CIA?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I assume the CIA choose their operatives more carefully. Roisin was impulsive and angry. She had a hair-trigger temper. She was not a person you would choose to keep secrets.”

“And you?” Halil asked.

I laughed. “No government would trust me to keep a secret. I’m a rogue. Civil servants choose people like themselves; dull and predictable and safe.”

Halil raised the trembling cigarette. His hand quivered as he inhaled the comforting smoke and again as he rested the cigarette. “But these agents she spoke of, they were different. They were not predictable.”

I said nothing.

He watched me. I could hear the halyards beating on the metal mast, I could even hear the slight noise of the chronometer’s second hand ticking away above the chart table behind me.

“These agents”—Halil broke the long silence—“would be sent from America and would have no ties to home. They would stay away for years, never talking to their headquarters, never reporting to an embassy, never behaving like an agent, but just watching and listening until, one day, they would disappear.” He made an abrupt gesture with his good hand. “They would go home with all their secrets and never be seen again.”

“That was Roisin’s fantasy,” I said.

“Fantasy?” He made the word sinister.

“She made things up. She was good at it.”

“She accused you of being such an agent…” He paused, searching for a definition. “An agent who does not exist,” he finally said.

“I told you, she made it up.” Roisin had indeed accused me of being one of the secret secret agents. It had been a clever and compelling idea. She claimed that the CIA had sent agents abroad who had no links with home. There would be no threads leading back to America, no footprints, no codenames even, no apron strings. They were one-shot agents, untraceable, secret, the agents who did not exist.

“She made it up,” I said again. “She made the whole thing up.”

Halil watched me, judging me. I could understand the terror that such a concept would hold for a terrorist. Terrorism works because it breaks the rules, but when the authorities break the rules it turns the terror back on the terrorists. When the British shot the three IRA members in Gibraltar a shudder went through the whole movement because the Brits were not supposed to shoot first and ask questions later, they were supposed to use due process, to make arrests and offer court-appointed defense lawyers. But instead the Brits had acted like terrorists and it scared the IRA, just as il Hayaween was scared that there might be traitorous members of his organizations who could never be caught because they would never make contact with their real employers. The agents that did not exist would behave like terrorists, think like terrorists, look like, smell like, be like terrorists, until the fatal day when they simply vanished and took all their secrets home with them.

Now il Hayaween worried at that old accusation. “Your woman claimed the CIA had infiltrated a long-term agent into the Provisional IRA with the specific intent of exploring the IRA’s links with other terrorist groups.” He paused. “That could be you.”

“She was desperate. She was ready to accuse anyone of anything. She wanted to blind her own accusers with a smokescreen. And how the hell would she know these things anyway?” I saw that question make an impression on Halil, so I pressed it harder. “You think the CIA told her about the agents who don’t exist? You think maybe she read it in Newsweek?”

“Maybe you told her in bed.”

I laughed. There was nothing to say to that.

He considered my laughter for a few heartbeats. It was not wise to laugh at Halil because he was a man whose pride was easily hurt, and a man who repaid hurt with death, but this time he let it pass. “She blamed you for the man’s betrayal.”

That was an easy accusation to rebut. “I didn’t know where Seamus Geoghegan was, so I couldn’t have betrayed him. I was in Lebanon when it happened, and he was captured in Belfast.” Seamus was the Provisional IRA’s star, the il Hayaween of Ireland, and Roisin had given him to the British. Or so the Brits had said, and that accusation had finished Roisin. Her response had been to blame me, but she was the one who died.

Yet still her accusation echoed down the years. These men needed me, or rather they needed my sailing skills, yet still they worried that I might not be what I seemed. I tried to reassure Halil. “I’ve held my secrets for four years, even though I had no prospect of being fully trusted again, so surely, if I was one of those CIA agents, I would have given up and gone home long ago?”

“So the girl was lying?” Halil wanted to believe my denials. Not that I would have been allowed within ten miles of him if he seriously believed the old story, but he wanted to make sure.

“Roisin saw plots everywhere. She was also a very destructive woman, and that was why she betrayed Seamus Geoghegan.”

He frowned. “I don’t understand.”

Dear God, I thought, but now I had to try and explain psychology to a terrorist? “Seamus is frightened of women. He’s the bravest man ever born in Ireland, but he doesn’t have the courage to ask a girl for a dance because he thinks all women are perfect. He thinks all women are the Virgin Mary. I suspect Roisin tried to seduce Seamus, failed, and so she punished him.” I could think of no other explanation. Seamus had been one of my closest friends—and perhaps still was, though it had been four years since I had last seen him. He was now in America, a fugitive from British vengeance. He had been betrayed, arrested, tried and sentenced, but a year later, in a brilliantly staged IRA coup, he had escaped from the Long Kesh prison camp. By then Roisin was dead, for her betrayal of Seamus had earned her a bullet in the skull.

“You saw her die?” Halil asked.

“Yes.” She had died in Lebanon where she had been attending the Hasbaiya terrorist training camp. It had been Roisin’s keenest ambition to have the IRA send her on that course, and her eagerness had been transmuted by suspicion into an accusation that she planned to betray Hasbaiya as well as Seamus. Thus, as a favor to their Irish allies as well as to themselves, the Palestinians had arranged her execution.

“You didn’t try to stop the killing?” Halil asked me.

“Why should I have done?” I even managed a small callous laugh.

“Because you loved her.”

“But she betrayed my friend,” I said, and I saw, in the sudden poisonous recurrence of memory, the split second when the vivid blood had spurted from Roisin’s punctured skull to splash among the yellow stones. I had been wearing a red-and-white checked keffiyeh which I had wrapped about my face because the hot wind was blowing gusts of powdery sand off the hill’s crest. The keffiyeh had prevented Roisin from recognizing me, a small mercy. For a few moments, as the flies had gathered thick on the bloody margin of her death wound, I had suspected that I too was about to be shot for the heinous crime of being an American, but instead I had been curtly ordered to bury her. Afterward the Palestinians had questioned me about Roisin, trying to determine how much she had known and how much she might have betrayed to her masters in Washington. I had given them what reassurances I could, and then, shriven of her accusations but still not wholly trusted, I was cast into the outer darkness and given nothing but trifling jobs.

Till now, when it was Halil’s turn to assay my guilt or innocence in the shadowy scales of an old suspicion and, as he stared at me, I wondered once again why a man of his reputation was caught up in such a small matter as the six occupied counties of Northern Ireland. The death of a few Brits in that wild damp island could hardly count for much in il Hayaween’s wider world, and certainly not at a time when the Arab world had found a new champion to flaunt Islam’s banner in the face of the hated Americans.

And perhaps Halil sensed his interest was raising an unhealthy curiosity in me for he suddenly waved a dismissive hand. “Look at the boat,” he said off-handedly, “and tell me your opinion.” It seemed my suggestion of using a power-boat had not met his approval and so, under the silent gaze of Shafiq, Halil and his two bodyguards, I clambered about Corsaire. I did not have nearly enough time to make a proper survey, but I decided she was a handy craft, well made and well maintained. Her mainsail was furled inside her aluminium mast, while her vast genoa was stored below to keep it from the ravages of sunlight. Her hull was fiberglass and her deck was teak. A sturdy inflatable dinghy was folded away in an aft locker, together with an electric-powered pump to inflate it. She was a sensibly designed boat, and the only feature I disliked was her engine which, though capable enough at sixty horsepower, was fuelled by gasoline, but at least the motor banged into healthy life as soon as I connected the batteries and turned the ignition key.

I poked and pried through the accommodations below. Many of the French owner’s belongings were still aboard; thus in the aft cabin I discovered a sweater, a half-bottle of brandy hidden behind the pilot books, a copy of Playboy, two tins of sardines, a can of sugar, a sleeping bag, the top half of a bikini and a broken pair of sunglasses. I lifted the main cabin sole to find the bilge filled with flexible water tanks between which was the decaying body of a rat; clearly the source of the boat’s foul stench. Rat poison lay in white chunks on top of the shiny keel-bolts. I lifted the stinking remains of the rat and, to Shafiq’s shuddering disgust, carried it topside where I chucked it into the harbor.

“You like the boat?” Halil asked me.

“I’d prefer a diesel engine.”

“Why?”

“Gasoline fumes explode. Diesel is safer. But she’ll do.” The engine compartment was well ventilated and equipped with an automatic fire-extinguisher slaved to a gas-alarm so that, even in the unlikely event of a fuel-fire, Corsaire would probably survive. “She’s not a bad boat.” I spoke unfairly for she was better than that; she was an elegant, nicely built craft and, judging from her broad beam and deep cabin, she would probably prove a stable sea boat. She had clearly been equipped for long voyages because she had a single sideband radio mounted with the expensive instruments above her chart table.

“You can take her to America?” Halil asked me. He was sitting in the center cockpit, close to the big destroyer wheel.

“Sure,” I said cheerfully, “as long as she’s prepared properly.”

“Meaning what?” Halil was suspicious.

“For a start I need to get her out of the water and have her hull scrubbed down. She’ll want a couple of layers of good anti-fouling paint. Then she’s got to be equipped and stocked for a three-month voyage. I’m told there are two Irish lads going with me, so I’ll need food for them and—”

“Make a list,” Halil interrupted me.

“She needs a liferaft, charts…”

“Make a list,” he said impatiently.

“And there’s paperwork!” I warned him. “I’ll need a bill of sale, a Tunisian clearance permit, insurance papers—”

“Make a list!” he snapped at me again.

Shafiq laid a tremulous hand on my arm. “Paul. It might be wisest if you just made the list? And we shall send for you when the boat is ready.”

“Why can’t I prepare the boat?” I asked. “I’m sailing it!”

“We shall prepare it,” Halil answered, flat and unyielding. “Make a list, Mr. Shanahan.”

So that night I slept on board Corsaire and next morning made the list. It was a huge one, encompassing not just the victuals needed to carry three men across the Atlantic, but also the safety equipment and chandlery that would complete Corsaire’s inventory. Halil came at sunset and glanced through my handwritten pages. Most of the items were obvious: food, water, fuel, sleeping bags and navigational equipment; but some of the items made him frown. “Glassfiber mats? Resin? White paint?”

“That’s how I hide the gold. By making a false floor under the cabin sole.”

“Water tanks? Three-inch flexible piping?”

“We’ll be hiding the gold where the present water tanks are placed, so we’ll need new ones specially shaped for their areas. You don’t want a customs agent wondering why we’ve got tube tanks in a square locker. And I need the tubing to run the water aft.”

“Lead weights?”

“We’re altering the boat’s trim, so she’ll need rebalancing.” I had mixed the lies with the truth so easily, but then I was as practiced at that game as il Hayaween, maybe more so. We all have our secrets, which is why trust is such a rare coin.

“It will all be ready,” he promised carelessly.

I slept on board Corsaire one more night. Next morning I again offered to stay and help prepare the boat, but Halil was adamant that my presence in Monastir would arouse suspicion. It would be better, he insisted, if I waited at my home in Belgium. “I shall send you a message when the shipment is ready.”

“How long will that be?”

“It might take a month to collect the coins. Maybe more, maybe less.” He spoke carelessly, yet I remembered Brendan Flynn assuring me that the gold was already safely collected, and Michael Herlihy enjoining haste on me so that the deadly Stinger missiles could be deployed in Ireland as an Easter present for the Brits. Halil’s offhand words only added more dissonance to the cacophony of strange noises that surrounded the Stingers.

Yet the nervous world was already full of discordant sounds. In Iraq and Saudi Arabia the sabers rattled, and on the West Bank and in Jordan the Palestinians ululated for their coming victory beneath the crescent flags of Islam, while in Northern Ireland the drab-green helicopters clattered through the wet gray skies. Everywhere, it seemed, the world was preparing for war. I flew home to Nieuwpoort.

ONCE BACK IN BELGIUM I SLEPT OFF THE JETLAG OF TWO Atlantic flights, then told Hannah that I was closing down Nordsee Yacht Delivery, Services and Surveying.

“You’re doing what?” Hannah asked.

“I’m tired of working, Hannah. I need a rest. I’ve decided I’ll buy a sailboat and become a sea-gypsy.”

“This is Sophie’s doing, yes?” Hannah had never approved of Sophie and clearly believed my ex-lover had left me with addled brains. “But what of the Rotterdam surveys?” The Flemish mind could hardly encompass such irresponsibility. To abandon work for pleasure!

“I’ll do the trawlers.” They were two boats in Rotterdam that I had agreed to survey, and I needed such work while I was waiting for Halil’s summons, but once that summons arrived I wanted to be ready to leave instantly.

“And what about that Mr. Shafiq?” Hannah asked suspiciously.

“If you mean will I do his delivery job? Yes.”

“You’ll want me to send him an estimate? Put dates in the diary?” She waited with pencil poised, though really her efficiency was a mask for curiosity. Hannah was dying to know who Shafiq was, and why I had flown halfway round the world for him, but I could explain none of it to Hannah. That old world of IRA men and Libyans and midnight boat deliveries and gunfire in dry valleys was something she knew nothing about, and I intended to keep it that way. I also intended to make my fortune in these next few weeks, but that too must stay secret from her. I really was retiring, I really was going out of business, but I could not tell Hannah any of it.

Instead I gave her custody of the cat, closed down my bank accounts and began searching for my boat. I was looking for something very specific, a forty-four-foot boat which was registered in America but for sale in Europe, and to find her I faxed messages to yacht brokers in half a dozen countries and searched the small advertisements in the back pages of every European yachting magazine. I dared not specify American ownership for fear of prompting an unwelcome curiosity about my motives, but by asking the boat’s hailing port I was able to weed out every nationality except the American vessels. I thought I had found what I wanted in the German port of Langeoog, but the boat, though owned by an American, lacked either a State Registration Certificate or any Coastguard documentation. “Does it really matter?” the broker, a stout Frisian, asked me. “Over here we’re not so particular.”

But I was being very particular, and so I went on searching until, just before Halloween, a brokerage in Cork, Ireland, sent me details of an American cutter moored in Ardgroom Harbour off the Kenmare River.

I gave Hannah my apartment keys and made her promise to check the fax and the telephone answering machine each day, then I flew to Cork where I hired a car and drove west to Ardgroom Harbour. I borrowed a fisherman’s dinghy and sculled myself out to the yacht.

She was called Rebel Lady and I almost dared not inspect her in case my first impression turned out to be false. My first impression was that she was perfect.

Rebel Lady was an American-built, American-owned, forty-four-foot cutter with a double-ended dark green hull that had been battered by rough seas and streaked with an ocean’s dirt. She had clearly been designed for long voyages for a windmill generator whirled at her stern beside an elaborate self-steering vane. Gulls had streaked her with their droppings and weed grew at her black-painted bootline, yet, despite her shabby condition, she looked almost brand new. A pathetic hand-lettered “For Sale” sign was attached to her starboard shrouds, while her hailing port, lettered like her defiant name in elegant black and gold, was Boston, Mass. Rebel Lady even had her Massachusetts registration number still painted on her bows, which meant that if her papers were intact then, for my purposes, she would be ideal.

I found her keys hidden in the locker where the broker had told me to look and let myself into her saloon, which smelt of stale air, sour clothes and salt. The boat appeared to have been momentarily deserted by her crew, for a kettle stood on the galley stove and two plastic plates had been abandoned in a sink half full of water. A sneaker lay on its side by the portside bunk while a sweatshirt advertising a restaurant in Scituate, Massachusetts, had been discarded on the cabin table. Arched across the coachroof’s main beam was a row of handsome brass instruments: a chronometer still ticking obediently away to Greenwich Mean Time, a barometer, a thermometer, and a hygrometer for measuring the air’s humidity as a gauge of the likelihood of fog. There was a depth sounder over the chart table, a VHF radio, a log, a wind-speed and direction indicator, a fluxgate compass and an expensive Loran receiver. Also above the chart table, among a row of books, I saw the traditional yellow jacket of Eldridge’s Tide and Pilot Book and the sight gave me an almost overwhelming pang of homesickness. I could not resist taking down the well-thumbed book and turning the familiar pages with their tables of high and low water at Boston, the current table for the Cape Cod Canal and the charts of the tidal currents in Buzzards Bay and Nantucket Sound. The book reminded me that I had been away from my home waters for much too long; seven years too long.

I sat in the swivel chair of Rebel Lady’s chart table and thought how she would make a fine boat for Cape Cod; a good boat to sail down east to Maine or hard south to the Chesapeake Bay. I closed my eyes and heard the water splash and ripple down her flanks, and the sound somehow reminded me that this would also be a lonely boat. God damn Roisin, I thought, for all the dreams she had broken, because forty-four feet was too long a boat for a lonely man. All I needed was a small shoal-draft cat-boat to sail single-handed around Nantucket Sound, but Rebel Lady was the boat I would buy and Rebel Lady would one day be my retirement boat, my lonely home away from my Cape Cod house.

I called the broker from the public telephone of a bar in Ardgroom and learned that Rebel Lady belonged to an American doctor who, taking a summer’s sabbatical, had sailed with his three sons to search for their family’s Irish roots. Instead he had learned that the summer pastime of sailing in sun-drenched Boston Harbor did not easily translate into enduring a stinging force-nine gale in the mid-Atlantic. Seasick, shaking, terrified and with a broken wrist and a fractured rib, the good doctor had made his Irish landfall and sworn he would never again set foot on a small boat. He and his sons had flown home in the comfort of an Aer Lingus Boeing 747 and left the Rebel Lady swinging to a mooring in Ardgroom Harbour. “He’ll take whatever you’ve a mind to give,” the Cork broker told me with a refreshing honesty, “but it would be a criminal shame to give the man less than seventy-five thousand punt. She’s a fine boat, is she not? But it’s a pity she’s green.” He was lamenting her color for, in Irish superstition, green was an unlucky color for a boat.

I did not care about Irish superstition, only about American bureaucracy. “You’re sure you’ve got all her papers?”

“As I said before, I’ve got every last one of them. They certainly like their paperwork in America, do they not? I’ve even got the original bill of sale, so I have. The boat’s a mere two years old, and she’s only ever had the one owner.”

“What’s the owner’s name?”

“O’Neill. A Dr. James O’Neill. A grand man is the doctor, but a better physician than a sailor, I should think.” It was a delicate judgment, very Irish in its balancing of a criticism with a compliment.

“I’ll be paying you cash,” I said, “if that suits you.”

“I think it might,” he said cautiously. My God, of course it suited him. Tax evasion is Ireland’s national sport and I had just given him a championship year. “Say seventy thousand?” I said, just to spoil it a little.

He paused for just a second, then accepted. “It’s a bargain, Mr. Stanley.” I had given my name as Henry Stanley.

I drove back to the harbor where a sudden west wind was flicking whitecaps across the sheltered gray water and slanting a sharp rain off the ocean. I sculled myself back to Rebel Lady, chucked the pathetic “For Sale” sign overboard and, using my rigging knife, prised away the manufacturer’s plate from the side of her coachroof. I copied the hull identification number from her transom and the serial number from the engine, then, my oilskin drenched from the sudden cold rain, I drove back to Cork where, in a smoky bar, I treated the broker to a pint of stout and paid him seventy thousand Irish pounds for the boat. It was a steal, but undoubtedly Dr. James O’Neill would be well pleased to be rid of the cause of so much of his discomfort. It was an old story; men bought boats as a fulfillment of their dreams, only to have a single ocean passage turn the dreams into nightmare. Atlantic islands like the Azores or the Canaries were notorious for the bargains their harbors offered; yachts abandoned after just one leg of a long-planned voyage.

The broker, who was doubtless on a generous commission, counted the pile of notes happily. “You’ve bought yourself a good vessel, Mr. Stanley,” he said as he forced the folded pile of banknotes into a jacket pocket, then he watched hopefully as I counted another stack of punt bills on to the table. “And what would they be for, Mr. Stanley, if I might ask?”

“I’m paying you to look after her. I want the mast off her, and I’d like her brought ashore and scrubbed down. Then cover her with tarpaulins. I’ll send you word when I want her launched and rigged again, but it may not be till next summer.”

“No problems there.” The broker eyed the punt bills.

“And I want a new name painted on her stern,” I said.

“Changing a boat’s name?” He sipped his stout, then wiped the froth from his moustache with the back of his hand. “That means bad luck, Mr. Stanley.”

“Not where I come from.” I pulled a beer mat toward me and wrote the new name in big block capitals on its margin. “Roisin,” I said the name aloud, “and she needs a new hailing port, Stage Harbor. And no ‘u’ in harbor. You can do that? I want it in Gaelic script, black and gold.”

“It shouldn’t be a problem.” He thumbed the edge of the punt bills. “But if there is a snag with the work, then how can I reach you?”

“That money’s my guarantee that you won’t have any snags.”

“So it is, so it is.” The notes vanished into a pocket.

As I left the bar I scorned myself as a sentimental fool for painting a dead girl’s name on the backside of a green boat. I caught a glimpse of my bearded face in a hatstand’s mirror in the hallway of the bar and, for a change, I did not look quickly away. Instead I frowned at the reflection as though I was looking at a stranger. I did not like what I saw, I never had. The face was hag-ridden, redolent of too much bad conscience. I remembered Seamus Geoghegan sitting in a car with me on some wet dawn; after a long silence, he had sighed and said that thinking never made a man happy. He was right, and mirrors made me think of myself, which was why I owned so few of them. It was better not to think, not to remember, and not to wonder what I had made of a life in forty years.

That night I phoned Namur in Belgium and left a message for an old friend called Teodor, and the following morning, with Rebel Lady’s papers safe in my sea-bag, I flew to Barcelona. My business there took two days. I telephoned Hannah, as I had on every night of my trip, to discover if any summons had come from Tunisia, but there was no message. “Except that American girl is still trying to reach you,” Hannah said.

“Kathleen Donovan? I’ve told you I don’t want to meet her.”

Hannah sniffed her disapproval. “So when will you be back?”

“Late tomorrow. Real late. I’ll see you on Thursday.”

Next morning I flew north to Brussels, collected my car from the long-term car park, then drove to Namur where Teodor was waiting for me. He needed to take photographs; one for the false Massachusetts driving license and another, with different clothes and subtly different lighting, for the false American passport. Teodor was the finest counterfeiter in the Low Countries and had been supplying me with false papers for over ten years. He insisted he would only work for people he liked, which I took as a compliment. He was an old man now and, as he worked in his shirtsleeves under a bright magnifying lamp, I saw the concentration camp number tattooed on his forearm. He would talk about anything except that wartime experience, though once he had told me that he dreamed about the camp at least three times a week. “You’re going on a journey, Paul?” he asked me now.

“Yes.”

He reached for tweezers and a can of spray adhesive. “Why do I sense this is the last time I’ll see you?”

“Because you’re an emotional and maudlin old fool.”

He chuckled, then held his breath as he sprayed a tiny jet of adhesive on to one of the photographs. “There’s gray in your beard. You’re growing old, Paul, like me. Ah, good!” He pressed the photograph into place. “You’re going home, aren’t you?”

“Am I?”

“You’ve had enough, Paul, I can tell. You’re like an athlete facing his last and biggest race. You want to win, but you want to stop competing even more. Is it a woman?”

“Mine just left me. She went off with a rich married frog who promised to give her an apartment in Antibes.”

“You need a woman, Paul. You’re a very private man, but you can’t be so different from the rest of us. What do you plan to do? Settle in America and learn to play golf?”

“I’m too young to play golf.” That made him laugh. “Besides,” I went on, “who says I’m retiring?”

“I do. I know these things.” He bent close over his work. He had once told me that he had been a fine soccer player in his youth, but now Teodor had a withered right foot, a hump back, and a pencil drawing of his wife. She had died in Treblinka and all the photographs ever taken of her had been destroyed by the Germans. Teodor, years after the war, had gone to a police identikit artist and had patiently assembled a picture of his lovely Ruth which now hung framed above his work bench. “Of course she was not so pretty,” he had confessed to me, “but I remember her as even more beautiful.” Now he shot me a glance from under his thick white eyebrows. “You’ve been in Europe how long now? Almost ten years? Not many people last ten years, not in your kind of work.”

“You don’t know what kind of work I do, Teodor.”

He laughed softly. “I have deduced you are not an accountant. Nor are you one of those bureaucratic shits who live in Brussels off the taxes I take care not to pay. And despite what this passport says, Paul, I do not think you are a doctor. No, you are a man who keeps secrets, and that can be a very tiring profession. Not that it’s any of my business.” He straightened up. “Now come here, I need Dr. O’Neill’s signature. Three times, and with different pens. I have even made you a Visa card as a parting gift, see?”

I peered at the card under Teodor’s strong worklamp. “How the hell did you manage the hologram?” I asked in genuine admiration.

“Mere genius, Paul, mere genius. But it will all be for nothing unless you collect a few items to support the fiction. Buy some medical journals and send yourself a couple of letters addressed to Dr. O’Neill.” He held up a defensive hand. “I know! I know! I am teaching you to suck eggs. And let me give you this.” He fumbled through a drawer to find a pasteboard card printed with the American telephone number of an Alcoholics Anonymous group. “That always helps a doctor’s disguise, Paul. I use Alcoholics Anonymous for medical men and policemen, but if you were pretending to be a lawyer I would supply you with the business cards of massage parlors. These details count. Now, practise the signature before you sign. You’re a doctor, remember, so you scribble, you don’t write. Good. Again. Again. Better! Again.” Teodor was a perfectionist. “I can sell you a real credit card that will be good for nine months?” he offered. “Its owner is in a French prison and will take fifty thousand francs?”

I left him two hours later with a whole new identity safe in my pocket, then, in a rainy darkness, I drove across country to Nieuwpoort. The autumn wind had gone into the north-east to bring the Low Countries a foretaste of winter. I drove fast, but even so it was almost midnight before I reached home and parked the Opel in the alleyway opposite my apartment house. When I switched off the engine I could hear the clatter of metal halyards beating on the masts of the yachts berthed in the South Basin. It was such a familiar sound, and one I would miss when I left Nieuwpoort. The wind gusted down the street, bringing the smell of sea and shellfish. I locked the car, ran across the road, and pushed open the apartment block’s unlocked front door.

“Is that Mr. Shanahan?”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” I reeled back from the shadow which suddenly rose inside the dark hall. Someone was waiting for me, someone who knew my name, someone who spoke in English, and I remembered my old training which had taught that, before making a kill, it was prudent to make the victim identify himself just to make certain it was the right person who was about to die.

“Mr. Shanahan?” It was a girl’s voice, American and unthreatening, which lack of menace did not mean she was not holding a silenced gun in the shadowed hallway.

“Who the hell are you?” I was crouched in the porch, holding my sea-bag as a shield to protect my chest from the half-expected bullet.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. It’s just that the light bulb was broken in here, so I had to wait in the dark.”

“Who are you?” I straightened up, sensing I was not to be shot.

“Your secretary said you’d be back tonight. She’s real nice. Gee, I’m sorry. I really am. It’s just that I had to see you because I’ve got an Apex ticket and I can’t afford the penalty to change it, so I have to fly back to the States tomorrow and this was my last chance. I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m real sorry.” The girl seemed to be more upset than I was. She had come to the doorway so that the streetlamp lit her face and I knew who she was, oh God, I knew who she was, and the venomous memories whipped into my consciousness. She looked so like Roisin, so achingly like the dead Roisin.

“Who are you?” I asked again.

“My name’s Kathleen,” she said, and thrust out a tentative hand as though to shake mine. “Kathleen Donovan.” Even her voice was like her sister’s, like enough to bring a mocking ghost to shadow the rainswept darkness. I did not shake her hand. “I just wanted to see you,” she explained weakly, and took her hand back.

“What about?” I asked the question harshly for, though I knew the answer, I had to pretend otherwise. “Christ! Do you know what time it is?”

“It’s late, I know. I’m sorry. It’s just that…”

“You’ve got an Apex ticket.” I finished the sentence, then pushed past her into the hallway. “If you want to talk to me, Miss, what did you say your name was?”

“Donovan. Kathleen Donovan.”

“Miss Donovan. If you want to talk to me, then let’s talk where it’s warm.”

I did not want to talk to her, but she looked so like Roisin that I could not say no. I wanted to probe the old wound. Christ, I thought, but why did it happen? How could a woman turn a man’s blood to smoke and leave him forever miserable?

Kathleen Donovan followed me up the uncarpeted stairs and edged nervously into my apartment. She looked tentatively around, as if judging my soul from the bare furniture, scraped linoleum, and half-empty shelves. “Coffee?” I asked her. “Or something stronger?”

“Do you have decaffeinated?”

“No.”

“Then just a glass of water, please.”

I fetched her a glass of water and poured myself a whiskey. I took my time in the kitchen, for I needed to reestablish my equilibrium. God damn it! Why now, of all times?

I carried the two tumblers back to the living room where I gave her the water, put down my whiskey, then drew the curtains against the chill Belgian night. I lit the gas fire. “Sit down.” I spoke more gruffly than I intended, but I did not want her to know how she was unsettling me. She took off her coat and folded it over the sofa’s arm, then nervously perched herself on the sofa’s edge. She looked to be in her late twenties and was dressed in a sober tweed suit, a high-necked blouse and a string of plain blue beads. She wore no other jewellery, and I remembered how Roisin had hated glittering baubles. Kathleen had the same dark red hair as Roisin and the same long jawline and the same hesitant expression that suggested she was perpetually puzzled by the world. Indeed, Kathleen looked so horribly like her sister that it hurt just to be in the same room. “If you want me to make a marine survey,” I told her carelessly, “then you’re too late. I’m closing down the business.”

“No.” She shook her head vigorously. “I don’t want to see you about boats.” She hesitated. “Doesn’t my name mean anything?”

“Donovan?” I shook my head. “I’m sorry, no. The only Donovan I ever knew was a priest in Fort Lauderdale, and the whiskey killed him twelve years ago.”

She looked stricken, almost as though I had struck her hard about the face. “I had an older sister,” she explained to me, then corrected her tense, “I have an older sister called Roisin. I think you knew her. In fact I’m sure you knew her.”

Knew her? My God, but they were hardly the adequate words. The first moment I had ever seen Roisin was in a Dublin pub and I had known I would never be happy until I loved her, and when I loved her I suspected I would never be happy again. After she had left me a friend said there was such a woman for every man, but most men were lucky and never met their fate. But I had, and Roisin and I had loved in a sudden incandescent blaze of lust, until, just as suddenly, she had stalked away from me for another man. Later, months later, I had watched her die, and her ghost had haunted my life ever since. Now her younger sister was asking if I had ever known her. “I’m very sorry,” I said calmly, “but I’ve never even heard of her. What did you say her name was? Rosheen? How do you spell it?”

Kathleen Donovan ignored my questions. Instead, for a few seconds, she just stared at me as she tried to gauge the innocence in my voice, then she tried to jog my memory. “She lived in Ireland for a while,” she said, “in Belfast. Just off the Malone Road.”

“She was a student?” I asked. Lots of students lived near the Malone Road.

“No, not really.” Kathleen began searching through her handbag and I watched her, marveling at the resemblance. Roisin had been thinner than Kathleen, and had harbored a pent-up energy that could be terrifying in its intensity, but the two sisters had the same Irish green eyes and the same pale, vulnerable skin, though Kathleen seemed much calmer, more at peace with herself. Her eyes seemed to hold wisdom where Roisin’s had held nothing but an unpredictable wildness. Indeed, I suddenly thought with a pang of dread, Kathleen was just what I had hoped Roisin might become, and I uttered a silent prayer to a merciful God that he would keep me form falling in love. Especially now, for this was a time when I needed to be like Michael Herlihy, a sexless monk, devoted to the cause and to death; but I knew my weakness, and no one had exposed that weakness more ruthlessly than Roisin Donovan. “Here’s a picture of her.” Kathleen held a snapshot toward me.

I glanced down at the photograph, forced my gaze away and sipped whiskey. “I’m sorry,” I tried to sound careless, “but I’ve never seen her.”

“You lived in Belfast, didn’t you?” Kathleen asked me.

“Yes, but that was ten years ago.”

“In Malone Avenue?” she asked.

“Near enough,” I said vaguely, “but so what? People were always coming and going in that area. It was a place for students, nurses, itinerants. I didn’t live there long, but I do assure you I lived there alone.” I forced myself to pick up the photograph. It showed a younger Roisin than I remembered, but the camera had perfectly caught the blazing intensity of her hunter’s eyes. “Sorry,” I said again, and tossed the picture down. I found I had finished my whiskey so poured myself another.

Kathleen momentarily closed her eyes as though what she was about to say was very difficult and needed all her concentration if she were to articulate it properly. “Mr. Shanahan,” she said at last, “I know it must be hard, because I know what Roisin was, is, and that means you can’t tell me everything, but I want you to understand that our mother is dying and she wants to know if Roisin is alive or dead. That’s all.” She stared at me with her huge green eyes that were sheened with tears. “Is it so very much to ask?”

I swallowed whiskey. A car sped down the street outside, its tires splashing on the wet tarmac. I was feeling foully uncomfortable and wishing that I had never given up smoking. “Tell me about your sister,” I said, “and I’ll see if anything jogs my memory.” I knew I should dismiss this girl, that I should send her unhappy and dissatisfied into the rain, but another part of me, the insidious part, wanted to keep her here so that I could torture myself with this revenant of Roisin.

Kathleen bit her lip, took a breath, talked. “We grew up in Baltimore, but our parents were born in Ireland. In County Kerry. They emigrated in 1950. My father’s a plasterer, a good one, but there wasn’t work in Ireland.” She hesitated, as if knowing that she was straying off the subject. “Mom and Dad never regretted moving to the States. They wanted to forget Ireland, really, but Roisin was obsessed by it. I mean, really obsessed. I don’t know when it started, back in high school, I guess, but she was really mad at Mom and Dad for living in America. She wanted to be Irish, you see.”

“I know the syndrome,” I said.

“She learned Gaelic, she learned Irish history, and she learned Irish hatreds. Then she went to live in Ireland.” Kathleen hesitated and frowned up at me. A tear showed at the corner of one eye. “You know all this, don’t you?”

I shook my head. “I told you. I know nothing.”

Kathleen began to cry very softly. She made no noise, the tears simply brimmed from her eyes and ran down her cheeks. She fished in her coat pocket, found a shred of tissue, and angrily cuffed the tears away. “I’m so tired,” she said, “and I just want to know what happened to her. I want to know if she’s alive.”

I tried to sound sympathetic. “I wish I could help.”

“You can help!” Kathleen insisted. “She mentioned you in her letters! She said you had a house on Cape Cod! She said you were a yachtsman!” She sniffed and wiped away her tears. “I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”

“Paul Shanahan isn’t such an unusual name,” I said.

She dismissed that feeble evasion with an abrupt shake of her head. “I’ve spent three weeks in Ireland, talking to people who knew Roisin. They kept mentioning you. They said—” She checked.

“They said what?” I encouraged her.

“They said you might have had links with the IRA.” She spoke defiantly, challenging me with her unlikely truth. “They said that’s why Roisin wanted to be with you, because you were her introduction to the IRA.”

“Me?” I sounded wonderfully astonished.

“And one person I spoke with,” Kathleen pressed nobly on against my obduracy, “said you were in the IRA for sure. He said you were one of their best-kept secrets.”

“Oh, Lord help us.” I turned to pull the drapes aside and to stare down into the wet street. “The Irish do like their stories. They love to gossip, Miss Donovan, and they do it better than anyone in the world, but it’s only in Dublin bars and bad novels that Americans play heroic roles in the IRA. I went to Ireland to learn about traditional boatbuilding skills, and I stayed there because I liked the country, but I moved on here because I couldn’t make a living in Ireland.” I let the drapes fall and turned back to her. “I’m a marine engineer and surveyor. I’m not in the IRA, I never was, and I never knew your sister.”

Kathleen stared at me, her eyes huge, and I wanted to cross the room and hold her tight and tell her all the truth and beg her forgiveness for that truth, but instead I stayed where I was. I could see the struggle on her face, the struggle of belief and disbelief. On the one hand I had sounded so very convincing, while on the other she had a mass of evidence that contradicted me. “I heard another story,” she said.

“Go on,” I said carelessly, implying that all the stories in creation would not jog my memory.

“I heard a rumor that Roisin is dead. That she was executed for betraying the IRA. I spoke to a policeman in Dublin and he said he’d heard she was working for American intelligence and that she’d been sent to Ireland to discover who in America was sending guns to the IRA. He’d heard that she’d been shot in the head and buried in Ravensdale Forest.”

I shrugged. “I’m sorry. None of it means a thing.”

My denial had no effect. “The policeman told me it was Roisin who betrayed Seamus Geoghegan. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?”

“He’s the fellow the British are trying to extradite from America, right?”

“He’s friend of yours,” Kathleen accused me.

I laughed. “Let’s be serious? I’m a boat surveyor!”

“I met Seamus Geoghegan’s brother, Mr. Shanahan, in Derry. He was the one who told me about you and the IRA, and that wasn’t bar gossip. He told me his brother stayed in your apartment in Belfast once, and he said his brother met Roisin at your apartment. He told me!” The last three words were a protest at my obduracy.

I shook my head wearily. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I don’t know Seamus Geoghegan and I’ve never met his brother and I don’t know your sister, and I’m really sorry.”

Kathleen dismissed my denials with an abrupt gesture. “Maybe it’s all true, Mr. Shanahan! Maybe she was in American intelligence and did betray Geoghegan! But does that make you a member of American intelligence too? Is that why you can’t talk to me?” She paused, eyes bright, desperate for an answer. “For God’s sake,” she went on, “my mother’s got a year to live! Maybe less! All she wants is to know the truth, that’s all! To be certain. Do you know what it’s like to grieve for a child, but not even to know if you need to grieve? Mom keeps thinking Roisin will come home, that she’s alive somewhere. For the love of God, Mr. Shanahan, I’m not a security risk! I just want to know, that’s all! You don’t even have to tell me anything! Just give me a nod, that’s all!”

The gas fire hissed. Kathleen stared up at me. I took a deep breath. “I really can’t help you,” I said.

“Oh, you bastard!” Kathleen Donovan said tiredly.

“I think you should go,” I said gently. “Can I drive you somewhere?”

“You can burn in hell.” She snatched up her coat and stood. For a moment I thought she was going to spit at me, then she turned and walked away. The front door of the apartment banged as she stormed out and, a moment later, I heard her footsteps clatter away on the pavement outside.

Oh dear Christ. I sat on the sofa, leaned my head back and closed my eyes. Roisin, Roisin, Roisin. God damn it. I remembered her smile, her laughter, her moments of tenderness, but she was dead, and I was a bastard. I could have told Kathleen the truth, all the truth, but I had long schooled myself against the truth. The truth makes a man vulnerable. The truth betrays. Lies are a shield, a fog, a maze in which to lose the curious. I told myself Kathleen Donovan could have been a stooge for British Intelligence, or even for the Provisional IRA. Maybe Brendan Flynn had sent Kathleen to see if I would betray my membership of the IRA, thus marking myself as a security risk and not to be trusted with the Libyan gold. And if I had so betrayed myself then Brendan would never have dared leave me alive with my knowledge of a missile in a Miami warehouse, and soon a Prove hit squad would have come to Nieuwpoort to leave my bullet-ridden body floating in the River Yser.

So, I reassured myself, I had been right to tell Kathleen nothing, because the first rule was to trust no one and the second rule was never to tell the truth, ever, for the truth is like gold. They were good rules, even if they did mean having to send a girl away in tears into a wet windy night, and even if it did mean drinking the rest of the bottle of Jameson to smear away the memory of Kathleen’s hurt face, and even if it did mean adding another sin to the tally of rotten sins.

Oh dear sweet God, I thought, but let the memories go away.

I heard nothing from Tunisia in November. December came and in the streets of Nieuwpoort the Christmas lights struggled to shine through the winter rains. I lived frugally and wondered if the whole deal had collapsed. Perhaps the Cubans had found other buyers for the Stingers, or perhaps Halil had found another yachtsman to deliver Corsaire to Miami. When Shafiq had first contacted me everything about the Stinger deal had been urgent and exciting, while now the whole scheme had slowed to a crawl, if not to utter immobility. Perhaps, after all, this was proving to be just another operation gone sour in the planning, only to be abandoned. Most operations ended like that. They began with a rush of enthusiasm that was slowly eroded by reality, but I did not break security by contacting Dublin to find out. Instead I just waited patiently and hoped that I had not destroyed my business for nothing.

Kathleen Donovan did not try to contact me again. Some nights, lying alone in the cold apartment, I regretted not telling her the truth, but took solace from my suspicion that she had been sent to prise me into indiscretion. Maybe, I told myself, the British had sent her, and maybe she had not been Roisin’s sister at all, but merely a lookalike recruited by the Brits. The British were ruthless bastards; too many IRA men had simply disappeared, vanished without trace from their homes on either side of the Irish border. I began to convince myself that British Intelligence, coming four years late on my cold trail, had sent the girl to trap me into indiscretion. And it had been a clever touch, I thought, to bring in Seamus Geoghegan’s name. Did Seamus have a brother? He had never mentioned one, but even if he had, would such a brother say I was in the IRA? I told myself Kathleen Doncovan’s story stank like rotting fish, but then I would recall her stricken eyes and my conviction of her falsity would waver. There had been an innocence about her that rang very true, yet I told myself that in the world of secrets the false always rang true.

The winter nights drew ever longer and still I heard nothing from either Tunisia or Dublin. If Michael Herlihy had paid the deposit on the Stingers then it was looking like a lost cause, unless, of course, the Libyans had found another way to deliver the five million dollars. That seemed the likeliest answer; that common sense had afflicted everyone involved and persuaded them of the stupidity of committing five million dollars to a small boat in a wide sea.

I eked out my own cash. I still made a little money surveying boats, but the waiting and the inactivity were eating into my savings and, as Christmas neared, I began to think of selling Rebel Lady. I had bought her for a song and, if I fetched her from Ireland to the stronger market of mainland Europe, I might be able to make a pretty profit on her even in a recession.

Then, just before Christmas, I was woken in the middle of a cold night by the chatter of the fax machine. I walked naked to the living room, switched on the light, and saw the message. I was requested to make a survey of a cruising yacht presently laid up in Marseilles. Would I please send an estimate of my travel costs and a statement of my usual fees to M. Jean Piguet. That name was the key, the ciphered message which meant Corsaire was ready, and that the golden voyage would happen after all.

I felt a pulse of excitement. I had not felt that surge of adrenalin for a long time. It was the seductive kick of danger and the anticipation of risk. The time had come to vanish.

I did not sleep any more that night. Instead I packed my sea-bag with what few belongings I wanted to carry into my new life, then waited for the winter dawn. At nine o’clock I went to one of the fishing harbor cafés and used its public phone to call Barcelona, then I made a long call to Brussels. Afterward, the dice thus irrevocably thrown, I threw my sea-bag into the back of the car and, just as Teodor had suspected, left Belgium for good.

SHAFIQ WAS AGAIN WAITING FOR ME AT THE SKANES-MONASTIR Airport. He was jittery with excitement, craning to catch a glimpse of me over the heads of the arriving passengers. “Did you think we had forgotten you?” he asked archly.

“I thought you’d found someone else to do the job,” I said.

“Paul! Paul!” he chided me. “It just took longer than we expected to assemble the gold, nothing else. Is that all your luggage?”

“I don’t need more.”

“One small bag to cross the world?” Shafiq laughed and led me out of the terminal. It was a brisk day with a north wind and a sky of high scudding clouds and Shafiq was in a mood to match the weather; capricious and nervous. He was doubtless relieved that the operation was at last beginning, but that beginning only increased his terror that something could now go wrong. “So what did you make of Halil, Paul?”

“A dangerous man.” I spoke with a careful neutrality.

“A dangerous man! Merely dangerous!” Shafiq threw my sea-bag and heavy yellow oilskin jacket into the boot of his hired car. “Is a tiger dangerous? Does a hawk kill? Ha! Dangerous.” He mocked the inadequacy of my description, then accelerated into the airport traffic. “He is a great man,” Shafiq said solemnly. “One day they will name a city for him in Palestine, a great city! Built on the bones of the Jews.”

“What happened to his right hand?”

Shafiq mimed a pistol being fired. “He was shot in the wrist. The bullet severed some nerves and tendons. He can still use the hand, but clumsily. It happened in Lebanon, near the Israeli border.”

“Thank Allah it was his right wrist”—I spoke in a very matter-of-fact voice—“and not his left. It would have been a shame to have lost that pretty watch.”

Shafiq glanced at me, smiled, then roared with laughter. “That’s good, Paul! Very good! You are not so blind, eh? But you will say nothing. You understand me? Nothing! Halil has a long reach and a lethal grip.” I noted how Shafiq still has a long reach and a lethal girl.” I noted how Shafiq still used the pseudonym “Halil” rather than the nickname il Hayaween. Both of us might know Halil’s identity, but it would be risking fate to admit it openly, even to each other.

“Am I going to meet Halil today?” I asked.

“Not here, not in Monastir, but he will bring you the gold.”

“Where?”

“At Ghar-el-Melh. It’s on the north coast and will be safer, much safer. Not so many eyes watching.”

“Do I pick up my crew there?”

“No. They came yesterday.” Shafiq sighed and I suspected he was glad that I was taking Brendan’s two gunmen off his hands.

“What are they like?” I asked.

“They are young,” he said grandly, and as if that quality forgave all their sins. “It is a pity,” he went on, “that we could not have sent Palestinians to help you, but such men would surely have raised suspicions on their arrival in America.”

“I think that’s a fair statement,” I said drily.

“So these two will suffice.” It was a grudging judgment.

“Have you met them before?”

“Never.” He looked more lugubrious than ever, then gave a brief shake of his head. “It isn’t like the old days, Paul. I don’t deal with Ireland any more, and I hear nothing from anyone. These days I just work at the Centre and run a few errands. I go to Marseilles sometimes, but never further north.” His mood had plunged as he made the sad confession and I supposed that poor Shafiq must have been tarred by Roisin’s accusation that I was one of the deep penetration CIA agents; the ones whom Halil had described as “the agents who did not exist.” What a clever story she had told! If an agent did not exist then he could not be detected, which meant anyone could be an agent, even Shafiq, so poor Shafiq had been relegated to the minor leagues, sowing discontent among French Arab immigrants by carrying messages to mad-eyed clerics in backstreet Marseilles mosques. Then, when it was decided that I was the perfect man to sail Halil’s gold across the Atlantic, Shafiq must have been reactivated as the person most likely to recruit me. No wonder he had seemed so pleased to be in Paris; it must have been Shafiq’s first visit to his dream city in four years. “Just errands,” he now added in a self-pitying echo.

“But you must be important, Shafiq,” I sounded him out, “if they trust you to work with Halil.”

“Ah, yes! They trust me.” He tried to sound confident, but failed. He shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Things change, Paul. Things always change.”

“What I don’t understand,” I said, looking away from Shafiq into the monotonous flicker of an orange grove, “is why a man as important as Halil, and a man as experienced as yourself,” I added that sliver of flattery to prime him, “should be dealing with a matter as trivial as Ireland. Nothing that Brendan Flynn is doing will bring the destruction of Israel one day nearer, yet your movement is devoting its best men to his ambitions! It is all so”—I paused as though searching for the exact word, then launched it like a killer blow—“so unsophisticated, Shafiq!”

I had known the accusation would goad Shafiq who, sure enough, shook his head angrily. “What we are doing is just one tiny part of a massive operation, Paul. You see only a, what do you call it? A cog! You only see a cog while all around us, unseen, great millwheels are turning.” He was pleased with the metaphor and embellished it by taking both hands off the wheel and churning them vigorously in the air. “Halil is the planning officer for the world-wide punishment of Iraq’s enemies! And the enemies of Iraq are the enemies of Palestine! And wherever those enemies might live, Halil’s work will be seen! That is not unsophisticated!”

I stared at him in silence, knowing I dared not ask the obvious questions, but would have to glean what scraps I could. “Stingers? In Ireland?”

Shafiq waved a dismissive hand. “Everyone knows that Britain does America’s bidding, and that America is Israel’s master, so Britain must be made to suffer. Your anti-aircraft missiles will hurt Britain, but they are only a small part of the pain the West will feel as a punishment for opposing the legitimate demands of Iraq and the Palestinians.” He had become quite angry as he trotted out the well-worn propaganda.

“Oh, I see now!” I said, in a tone that suggested I had been culpably obtuse. “We had to wait for the gold to arrive from Iraq! What is it? Gold captured in Kuwait?”

Shafiq waved a hand in a gesture that I could translate as an affirmative, but which also suggested he knew he had revealed too much.

“What I still don’t understand”—I was pushing my luck to see if I could tempt Shafiq into further indiscretion—“is why Halil sends money by boat when he might just as well send it electronically.”

“Ha!” Shafiq accompanied the scornful exhalation by once more throwing his hands into the air. The Peugeot wandered toward the oncoming traffic, provoking a chorus of horns. “Everyone knows,” Shafiq said when he had regained control of the car, “that the Americans can now monitor every electronic transfer of money in the world! It is the computer that does it! So instead we shall be old-fashioned. We shall smuggle gold like a pirate! I thought that would please you, Paul. Does it not please you?”

“Oh it does,” I said, “it truly does.” But it pleased me even more that I had been given a glimpse of the truth, il Hayaween’s truth, that the Stingers were not just meant to make Britain weep, but were a small part of the world-wide campaign of terror that Saddam Hussein had sworn to unleash on his enemies. And that il Hayaween was the coordinator of that threatened slaughter which had provoked governments across the world to guard their airports, harbors and military installations. So Brendan Flynn, I realized, had not been dealing with Tripoli, but with Baghdad, and Baghdad’s urgency would explain why the price of the Stingers had gone so high; because a world-wide terror campaign would hugely increase the demand for illicit weapons, and that increased demand would be reflected in inflated black-market prices. It all made sense, so much sense that I wondered why I had not understood the equation earlier.

Shafiq was suddenly scared that he had been far too indiscreet. “I have said nothing you can repeat, Paul! Nothing!”

“Shafiq!” I said earnestly and with a hurt expression in my voice. “Shafiq. You and I are old friends. We have endured much together. We have taken risks for each other and protected each other. We have trusted each other.” I was laying it on with a gold-plated trowel for I knew it would all be music to Shafiq’s ears and, sure enough, tears showed in his eyes as I went on. “We have been fellow soldiers, and do you think I am the kind of man to betray an old comrade? My dear friend, I have heard nothing today that I had not already guessed, and I have heard nothing today that I will ever repeat to another soul. May my mother die of worms if I tell you a lie.”

“Thank you, Paul, thank you.” Shafiq took a deep breath as if to contain his emotion.

We turned into Monastir’s marina. It was winter, and the pontoons looked drab. There were plenty of yachts, but most were under wraps, their sails unbent, waiting out the winter months until the Mediterranean spring fetched their owners south again. There were a handful of liveaboards in the harbor, but not as many as usual for the prospect of war in the Gulf had scared people away from Muslim countries. Only Corsaire looked fully ready for the sea, even to the extent of having two crewmen sprawled in her cockpit. “Are they my guards?” I asked Shafiq.

“Your crew.” He sounded hurt that I should be so distrustful. “I hope you like them.”

“I’m sure I will.” I plucked my oilskin and sea-bag from the boot, then went to meet the two men Brendan had sent to guard me and, I suspected, to kill me when my usefulness was done.

My God, I thought when I got aboard Corsaire, but was this the best the Provisional IRA could drag up? It was no wonder that Shafiq had sounded so unenthusiastic about Liam and Gerry, for they were hardly the stuff of legends.

Liam was a skinny youth with a starved wan face, red hair and jug ears. He had timid, furtive eyes, suggesting that for all his short life Liam had been surrounded by stronger people who had left him pinched, resentful and ratlike.

The only ratlike thing about his companion was a small pigtail that decorated the nape of his thick neck. Gerry was a beefy, red-faced man whose cheap shirt strained across his plump back and bulging stomach. He had a massive chin, small eyes, and cropped black hair. He greeted me with a surly nod, as though trying to establish a pecking order at our very first meeting.

I chucked my sea-bag into the after cabin and ordered them to tell me about themselves. “We can’t be strangers and shipmates,” I said cheerfully, “so tell me your stories. How old are you for a start?”

They were both twenty-three, both born and raised in Belfast, and both now living in Dublin. They pretended to be battle-hardened veterans of the Irish Troubles, but their boasting was uncomfortable and unconvincing. They had the restricted vocabulary of deprivation, the fouled lungs of chain-smokers and the thin minds of ignorance. Liam and Gerry were the cannon-fodder of riots and revolution, the spawn of decaying industrial cities, and they were supposed to be my shipmates for the next three months. I asked if either had ever sailed before. Liam shook his head, though Gerry claimed to have spent some time aboard an uncle’s lobster boat. He was vague on the details, but bridled indignantly when I asked if he was competent to steer a simple course. “I can look after myself, mister!”

Liam was far more apprehensive. “We’re crossing the Atlantic in this wee boat?”

“Yes.”

“Fock me.” He went pale.

“It’ll do you good,” I told him. “Put some color in your cheeks. By the time you reach Miami you’ll be a competent seaman.”

“But I get focking seasick, mister!” Liam said.

“You what?” I asked in horror. Flynn had sent me seasick crew?

“I told Mr. Flynn that, but he said it didn’t matter! He said this would be like a focking cruise, so he did.”

“The airplane was real good,” Gerry said accusingly, as though Corsaire’s accommodation was a real disappointment after their charter flight from Dublin. For both boys it had been their very first airplane flight, but neither was looking forward to their maiden yachting voyage with quite the same excitement.

Shafiq, relieved that I had taken responsibility for Liam and Gerry, gave me Halil’s written instructions. They were simple enough. I was to take Corsaire to the north Tunisian port of Ghar-el-Melh where we should wait for the gold. Once the coins were concealed aboard Corsaire we were to sail for Miami. “And who the hell do I contact when I reach Miami?” I demanded of Shafiq. I could not believe I was simply supposed to call Michael Herlihy’s Boston office and risk being overheard by the FBI.

“They know who to contact.” Shafiq pointed to the two Irish lads.

“You do?” I challenged them.

“Yes, mister,” Gerry said.

“What a way to run a revolution,” I said unhappily. “So let’s get on with it.”

I stowed my few belongings, put my sextant in a drawer of the chart table, then rummaged through the supplies which il Hayaween had arranged to be put aboard. It took me two hours to check the boat, but everything seemed to be present, including thirty feet of flexible plastic tubing that I thrust out of sight in a deep cockpit locker, then, with nothing to hold us under the battlements of Monastir, I started Corsaire’s engine and singled up her mooring lines. The Palestinian influence had ensured that there were none of the time-consuming bureaucratic procedures that usually accompanied a Tunisian departure; instead, after bidding Shafiq farewell and shouting at Liam and Gerry to stay out of harm’s way, I cast off, reversed from the pontoon and motored toward the open sea.

At the very first surge of the waves Liam belched, gripped his belly and his cheeks turned a whitish green. I told him to stay on deck, for the last thing I wanted was to have the boat’s interior stinking of his vomit. He lay flat, groaning and unhappy, as we plugged head on into the persistent north wind. “Have you ever heard of Michael Herlihy?” I asked Liam, who shook his head miserably. “He’s much worse than you,” I said cheerfully. “He gets seasick just looking at a boat.”

“Oh, Jesus.” But he could not have been feeling too unwell, for he managed to light himself a cigarette. “How long till we get to wherever we’re going?” he said miserably.

“Two days to Ghar-el-Melh,” I said cheerfully, “then two or three months across the Atlantic.”

“Months?” He stared at me, saw I was not joking, so crossed himself. “Christ help me.”

The morning turned cold as we headed north into the Gulf of Hammamet. Liam’s seasickness got no better, yet he insisted on sharing Gerry’s enormous midday meal of eggs and bread fried in bacon fat and washed down with the sweet cola they had bought in Monastir. Liam fetched the meal back up in seconds. Gerry frowned at the bucket I had managed to thrust on to his friend’s lap. “Waste of good food, that.”

I asked them more about themselves and heard the all-too-familiar Belfast story of children born into bleak housing estates and growing up into the hopelessness of chronic unemployment. In another society they might have found menial jobs, but there were not even floors for them to sweep in Ulster, and the pointlessness of their lives had scraped their souls to a bedrock of hate that could only be appeased by the twin pleasures of drink and reducing other people to their own level of misery. Uneducated, unskilled and bitter, they were good for nothing except to be the foot-soldiers for Ireland’s Troubles, but even that calling had turned sour. Somehow, they were vague about just how it had happened, their names had been given to the security forces. Warrants for their arrest had been issued and so Liam and Gerry had been forced to flee south across the unguarded border with the Republic of Ireland and there, in what they called the Free State, they had found a refuge in a Dublin housing estate every bit as bleak as the Belfast ghetto from which they had fled.

“How do you like Dublin?” I asked Gerry. Liam was almost comatose, but Gerry seemed to be enjoying the afternoon. We were under sail, chopping north and east into a steep head sea that threw up great fountains of salty spray. I was sailing to save gasoline, and planned to tack back toward Gap Bon after nightfall. I was still not used to the boat which seemed clumsier than her lines had suggested. She was riding low in the water and making heavy work of seas that a boat of her length should have soared across. Her previous owner had over-ballasted her, perhaps out of nervousness, and doubtless he had made her into what he wanted: a safe docile boat that would have been comfortable enough on a fine summer day, but Corsaire was ill suited to this choppy and windy winter work and I dreaded to think how she would behave with an extra thousand pounds of weight in her belly. Still, short of beaching her and cutting a chunk of lead out of her keel, there was nothing I could do, and better a too heavy boat lumping across the waves than a lightweight bouncing across.

“Dublin’s focking terrible,” Gerry answered my question about how he liked living in Ireland’s capital, and Liam groaned agreement.

“Why is it terrible?” I asked.

“Because no one focking cares about us in focking Dublin,” Gerry explained indignantly. Like Liam, he used the word “fock” as a modifier, an intensifier, and as an all-purpose replacement for any other word that momentarily escaped his restricted vocabulary. “Dubliners don’t focking care!” he went on. “I mean, Jasus, we’ve been risking our focking lives for Ireland, so we have, and the focking Dubliners couldn’t give a monkey’s toss what we’ve done! The focking Garda came round, didn’t they just, and they said they knew who we was and why we was in Dublin and if we so much as lifted a little finger they’d take us inside and beat the focking Jasus out of us. It’s your focking Ireland I’m fighting for, I told the focking policeman, and you should be focking grateful to me, but was he shit? He told me to fock away off!”

“It’s tough,” I said with careless sympathy. In my own Dublin days I had seen how IRA activists fleeing from northern arrests had come south expecting to be treated as heroes, only to find an utter indifference and even a distaste for their actions. One Dubliner, after listening to a northerner for a whole evening, had wearily told me that Britain’s best revenge on Ireland would be to give Ulster back to the Irish.

It took the lumbering Corsaire three days to reach Ghar-el-Melh, which turned out to be a small harbor surrounded by ancient fortifications. The harbor entrance was silting up so that I was forced to creep over the bar at what passed in the Mediterranean for a high tide. My pilot book told me that this dying port had once sheltered the feared Barbary pirates, but Liam and Gerry only cared to know whether or not the village under the deserted castle battlements might shelter a pub. “Probably not,” I said.

“No focking booze?” Liam, recovered from his seasickness by being safely anchored in port, asked in a horrified voice.

“Not a drop.”

“So how long are we going to be here?”

“Till the gold arrives,” I explained.

“Have you really got fock all to drink on board?” Gerry wheedled.

“Not a drop,” I lied. In fact I had hidden two bottles of Jameson Whiskey that I was saving for Christmas Day. I had hoped we would spend the day at sea, but Christmas came and the gold had still not arrived and so we just stayed at anchor in the deserted harbor.

Our Christmas dinner was Spam fritters, tinned peas and French fries. Afterward I brought out the surprise Jameson’s and the three of us sat in Corsaire’s saloon and, with their tongues freed up by the whiskey, Liam and Gerry told me the old and familiar Belfast tales. At first, trying to impress me, they spoke of their own heroic exploits; of bombs ripping British patrols apart or flattening whole sections of the city center, but the stories were lifeless and bereft of Belfast’s sharp wit, suggesting that the truth was somewhat less colorful. I finally punctured their bombast when I told them I had lived in Belfast myself, and that during those years I had given shelter to Seamus Geoghegan when he was first on the run from Derry.

“You know Seamus?” Liam asked incredulously.

“Sure. Very well.” I saw my reputation soar in their eyes. Liam and Gerry were already wary of me, for I was a very strange creature in their starved eyes. I was foreign, bearded, tall, competent and taciturn, but now that they had discovered I knew Seamus, I became almost as godlike as Seamus himself.

“You really know him?” Gerry asked.

I crossed two fingers. “Like that.”

“Jesus.” He half smiled at me, then frowned, and I wondered if he was contemplating the difficulty of eventually killing me. Killing a stranger is easy compared to killing a man you know, and neither Gerry nor Liam, for all their bombast, struck me as men who would find a cold-blooded killing easy. But perhaps their job was merely to escort me to Miami where my death, if it was indeed ordained, would come from the hands of others.

As Christmas night wore on the stories of Gerry and Liam’s prowess were replaced by better and funnier tales. Liam told the night’s best story, that of the young boy who threw the nail bomb. “He was only a wee thing”—Liam stubbed his cigarette into the mess of gravy, butt ends and cold peas on his plate—“he can’t have been more than ten or eleven. It happened up in Turf Lodge, so it did. There was a riot one evening, nothing special, just something to pass the time like, but the focking Brits had sent a focking patrol up there to break a few heads, so the lads took the wee boy aside and asked him did he want to throw a nail bomb?” Liam paused to light another cigarette. “He said yes, of course he did, because all the wee boys are just waiting for the chance to do their bit, like. You know what a nail bomb is, mister?”

“Of course he focking knows!” Gerry said. “He lived in Belfast, didn’t he?”

“I know what it is,” I assured Liam. A nail bomb was a length of metal pipe crammed with explosives and plugged at either end with four-inch nails. It was thrown like a stick grenade and, when it exploded, it scattered a lethal shower of nails among the enemy.

“So they take the wee fella behind a house, right, and he’s shown the bomb, and he’s told that if he throws it properly then he’ll be given other jobs, like more responsible jobs, know what I mean?” Liam was enjoying telling the tale. “So they give the wee boy the bomb, light the focking fuse for him, and tell him to run like fock. Go, boy, they tell him, go! So the wee kid, he runs like fock, so he does, and he throws the focking bomb at the focking Brits, then he turns and focking sprints away like the devil himself is up his arse. But he’s just forgotten one thing, so he has.” Liam paused to increase the suspense of the tale’s telling.

I was pretending not to have heard the story. “He’s forgotten something?” I asked innocently.

“His focking dog!” Gerry could not resist interfering with Liam’s story. “He’s forgotten his focking dog!”

“Who’s telling this focking tale?” Liam’s indignation overcame his timidity.

“Keep your focking hair on!”

“Dog?” I asked.

“Aye!” Liam looked back to me. “The wee fella’s got a dog, see, and the dog focking worships the wee fella, and the dog sees this bomb sailing away toward the focking Brits and the dog thinks, that’s a stick, so it is! He thinks it’s a game of fetch, see? So the dog runs after the bomb, because he thinks it’s a game. But it isn’t! It’s a focking bomb! And the fuse is smoking and even the focking Brits are laughing by now! And the crowd screams at the focking dog, leave it alone, fock away off, but the dog’s got the bomb in its teeth now, see, and it’s carrying the bomb back to its wee master, and the crowd is all running away, so they are, and the dog’s wee tail is wagging like mad, and the wee boy is running like fock, and his ma is screaming at him to get a focking move on before he’s blown to focking bits, and the harder the wee boy runs the quicker the dog runs after him.” Liam paused to cuff tears of laughter from his eyes. He was laughing so much he could hardly articulate the punch line. “And then the focking bomb goes bang!”

“Oh, Mother of God, but did it fock!” Gerry put in.

“There was focking dog-scraps everywhere!” Liam was still half helpless with laughter. “There was bits of dog on the focking roofs! There was dogmeat everywhere!”

“Oh Christ, but did we laugh!” Gerry slapped the saloon table in applause for his friend’s story.

“No one was hurt,” Liam said.

“Except the dog,” Gerry said, and started laughing again.

“The wee fella forgot about his dog, you see?” Liam wanted to make sure I had understood all the tale’s nuances. Above us the wind sighed in Corsaire’s rigging and stirred the ketch’s long white-painted hull and slapped a halyard in mournful clangor against the aluminium mast. The companionway hatch was open, giving me a view of the high stars and a single wisp of elongated, moonlit cloud.

Gerry took a long drink of whiskey, then poured himself another mugful. “It’s funny you being an American,” he said at last.

“Is it?”

“Aye, it is,” he said truculently. “I mean you going to live in Ireland and all that. Jasus, if I had the chance I wouldn’t leave America, not to go to Belfast! No way! I’d stay in America. Get a job, make some money, eh?” He seemed to realize that he had already destroyed any hopes he might ever have possessed of making a normal existence; hopes of a job, a wife, children, of the small happinesses that make the world go round.

“I had a cousin that moved to America.” Liam, emboldened by the success of his last story, spoke in the expectant tone of a man telling a joke. “Landed at the New York Airport, so he did, and his uncle met him off the plane, and they was walking out of the airport door and there was this hundred-dollar bill lying on the pavement. Just lying there, so it was! ‘Well, pick it up!’ his uncle says. ‘Go on, lad, pick it up!’ And my cousin looks him straight in the eye and he says, ‘I’ve only just got here and you expect me to start work already?’” Liam waited for me to laugh, then grinned proudly when I did.

Gerry flickered a dutiful smile, but the thought of America and all its bright hopes that were beyond his reach had depressed him. “We used to make a lot of money off the Yanks,” he said wistfully. “We used to sell them rubber bullets! They’d pay a lot of money for a rubber bullet to put on their mantelpiece.” The black bullets, thick phallic missiles designed to incapacitate rather than to kill, were fired by British troops on riot control duty and had become a prized souvenir of the Troubles. I remembered a canny man in Derry who had set up a useful garden-shed business carving fake rubber bullets from old truck tires. He claimed to have sold a couple of hundred of the counterfeits before the Provisionals, realizing they were losing market share, had threatened to put real bullets in his kneecaps if he did not stop his trade. “And there was a game we used to play with the Yanks,” Gerry said after a while.

“A game?” I asked.

“You know, mister, with the Yanks who used to visit Belfast to see a bit of the Troubles. I mean they were good fellas, so they were! They gave us money, but of course they wanted to see a bit of the action, didn’t they? There was no focking point in flying all the way to Northern Ireland not to see a wee bit of aggravation.”

“So what was the game?” I knew the answer, but they were enjoying their moment of telling me tales and it would have been churlish to deny them the pleasure.

Liam, the more articulate of the two, took up the story. “We used to meet them in a bar, right, and ask if they wanted to meet the IRA. They didn’t know we were the IRA, did they? How could they? I mean, if you told every stray Yank that you was in the movement then you might as well tell the focking Brits. So of course the Yanks would always say yes, I mean why else were they there? They’d come all the way from Boston or Chicago to give us a wee bit of support, to pat us on the back, like, and slip us a dollar or two, so of course they wanted to meet the Provisional IRA soldiers. So we used to tell them, go to such-and-such a house at ten o’clock next morning. We’d give them the address, it was always an abandoned house, one of those that had been half burned out like, and we’d say that some of the boys were meeting there before going off to plant a bomb or shoot a soldier.”

“You could tell a Yank anything,” Gerry put in. “They’d believe you!”

“They wanted to believe, you see,” Liam, who did not want me to feel slighted, explained helpfully.

“So what happened?” I asked, as if Seamus Geoghegan had not told me this exact same story ten years before.

“Well, they’d go, of course,” Liam said, “and sometimes their wives with them, because the women are just the same. They’d be all excited like! I mean they were going to meet the real IRA! They were going to meet the heroes! But what they didn’t know was that we’d phoned the focking Brits on the security line, you know what the security line is?”

“Of course he focking knows!” Gerry put in. The security line was a telephone number that anyone could call to lay anonymous information against the terrorists. A machine answered the call and no names were asked, which meant that more than a few personal scores were settled courtesy of the security forces.

Liam grinned. “So we’d phone the focking Brits and we’d say that some Provos were meeting at such-and-such a house at quarter past ten the next morning, and then we’d ring off. Well, you can imagine what happened!”

“Tell me.”

“The Yanks would turn up”—Liam was grinning at the sheer cleverness of the ploy—“and they’d wait there, and the next thing they’d know there was a focking patrol of focking Brits, all scared out of their focking wits because they thought it might be a focking ambush, and the focking Brits would hammer into the house like it was D-Day and all they’d find was the Yanks there! But the Brits wouldn’t know they were Yanks, not straight away! They thought they were our lads! So they’d knock them about a bit, you know, give them a focking good kicking!” Liam laughed and shook his head. “It always worked! The Brits fell for it every focking time, and of course the Yanks would go home and say how focking brutal the focking Brits was, and they’d never know it was the IRA that aranged the kicking for them! And when they got home they’d send us even more money! Especially if one of their womenfolk got a hammering! Jasus! It was like stealing sweets off a baby.” He chuckled, then looked wistful. “They were good times. The best.”

Gerry sloshed the whiskey round his mug. Despite the open companionway the cabin was foul with cigarette smoke and reeking of unwashed bodies, whiskey and stale food. Gerry leaned back on the berth cushions. “The Provos must have made focking thousands of pounds out of having the Yanks given a focking good kicking. And others too, of course. The Dutch, now, they always wanted to be in on the thick end of it. Especially the Protestant ministers, because they wanted to prove they loved Catholics, see? But it was mainly the Americans, so it was.” He fell silent, evidently remembering the good days of home and thuggery, then, as a sudden thought blew across his mind, he frowned at me. “Is it really five million dollars we’re waiting for?”

I nodded. “It truly is.”

“In gold?”

“In gold,” I said.

“Fock me,” Gerry said wonderingly, and I knew for a second or two he was thinking of stealing the money, but then the stern call of duty made him shake his head in self-reproof. “Brendan said it was the most important mission we’d ever perform. For the movement, like?”

“I’m sure it is,” I said, “I’m sure it is,” and, the very next morning, in a cold north wind, the gold arrived.

Il Hayaween arrived before the gold. He came in a black-windowed Mercedes and was accompanied by his two dark-suited bodyguards who commandeered a fisherman to ferry all three men out to Corsaire. Il Hayaween sharply ordered Gerry and Liam to stay out of earshot below then sent his two bodyguards to wait on the foredeck. He looked at his precious Blancpain watch. “The trawler should be here by noon.”

“Good.”

He sat on the cockpit thwart after fastidiously wiping it with a linen handkerchief. He seemed awkward, but I put that down to his unfamiliarity with boats. “Is she suitable?” He waved his good left hand around Corsaire.

“She’s a pig.”

“A pig?”

“She wallows like a pregnant sow. She’s too heavy. But I can get her to America, if that’s what you wanted to know.”

“And quickly,” he said in his harsh voice.

I shrugged. “There’s a chance the Stingers will reach Ireland by April 24, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Not unless someone makes arrangements to ship them before the gold gets to Miami.”

“April 24?” Il Hayaween frowned at me.

“The seventy-fifth anniversary of the Easter Rising. Isn’t that what Flynn and Herlihy want? To give the Brits an anniversary Easter egg?”

He blinked as if he did not really understand what I was talking about, then shook his head. “The war will come sooner than that.”

“In Kuwait?” I asked.

“Of course.” He paused, staring at the withies which served instead of buoys to mark the harbor’s uncertain entrance. “We shall be relying on your organization to support Iraq’s defense against the imperialist aggression.”

I wondered what the hell I was supposed to say. There had been a time when I would have been the main conduit for passing such a message to the Provisional IRA’s Army Council, but Roisin had ended that responsibility. Nevertheless il Hayaween seemed to expect some response, so I nodded and promised to pass the message on.

He angrily shook his head as though he did not need my help to communicate with the Army Council, then laboriously raised his maimed hand to light a cigarette. “We have already received pledges of support from Ireland. But will they keep their word?” He glared at me as he asked the question.

“I’m sure they will,” I said truthfully. I was hardly surprised that the Provisional IRA had promised to support Iraq with a campaign of violence because for many years now the Arabs had been the major supplier of the IRA’s needs, and the Army Council could hardly turn down such a request from so generous a benefactor. What did surprise me was that il Hayaween was telling me of the Army Council’s promise, but his next words went some way to answering my puzzlement.

“Reactionary forces in Damascus and Tehran have suggested we should wait and see how effective Iraq’s armed forces prove before we launch a world-wide campaign of terror, but we have refused to condone such timidity.” He sucked on the cigarette as though taking strength from its harsh smoke. “We expect action, Shanahan.”

“I’m sure you’ll get it,” I said, but inside I was noting the true import of il Hayaween’s message. If Damascus and Tehran were preaching caution then there had to be deep rifts within the Palestinian ranks. Some fighters must be siding with Syria, others with neutral Iran, while yet a third faction, which il Hayaween led, was sticking with Saddam Hussein. Yet the rift plainly threatened the success of his plans for a global campaign of terror and, as those plans collapsed, he was desperately trying to keep his surviving troops in line. He was even desperate enough to seek my opinion of whether the Provisional IRA would keep their word, but I doubted he really needed to worry. The IRA’s strongest Arab link was Libya, and Libya still seemed fully committed to Saddam Hussein’s ambitions. “You’ll get your big bang from the Irish,” I reassured him.

“I want more than bombs.” He paused. A catspaw of wind skittered over the harbor and whipped his cigarette smoke toward the shore. “What’s wrong with the Russian ground-to-air missiles that Libya supplied to the IRA?” he suddenly asked me.

“As I understand,” I said, “they’re too slow to accelerate, which gives the British helicopters time to drop decoy flares. Also their range is not very great and their launchers are too heavy, which makes them awkward to move about. They’re also unreliable, sometimes they don’t fire at all.”

“But even such an unsatisfactory missile, if it works, could destroy a jumbo jet as it climbed away from London Airport?”

Christ in his benighted heaven, I thought, but I dared not show my horror. Instead I just nodded. “Oh, sure, yes.”

“If it was fired from close to the airport? Maybe from a house nearby? Or from a parked truck? Is there a suitable launching place for such a missile? You have surely been to London Airport?” Il Hayaween’s questions sounded so banal, but evil so often did.

“I’m sure it’s feasible,” I said, and tried to sound enthusiastic.

“You’re saying there is such a launching place?” he insisted.

“There is, yes.” I was thinking of the industrial estates not far from Heathrow’s runways, and I imagined a rocket streaking up from a roofless truck to tear an engine from a jetliner’s wing and bring the great machine down to explode in sliding horror on the ground. “There are plenty of suitable places,” I said equably.

“Then I shall tell your Chief of Staff that a Jewish or a British jumbo jet would be an acceptable gift in exchange for all the weapons we’ve donated to your revolution. And I can say that an expert opinion tells me that such an attack is feasible, yes?”

“Oh, indeed yes,” I said warmly, though I doubted that the Army Council of the Provisional IRA would listen to my expert opinion. It was not that such men were squeamish about civilian deaths, indeed the visionary structure of their new Ireland was built on the graves of such dead, but men like Brendan Flynn were exquisitely sensitive to the effects of bad publicity in the United States, and they knew only too well that even a handful of slaughtered American airline passengers might cause a fatal dose of realism to infect the American-Irish. The dollars of American supporters had dwindled over the years, but they were not so paltry that anyone in Belfast or Dublin would willingly abandon those donations.

“You have been very helpful to me,” il Hayaween said with an awkward and seemingly unaccustomed courtesy, and I wondered why a man of his satanic reputation was taking the trouble to condescend to me, and I decided that it was a symptom of the real disaster threatening Iraq’s world terror plans. Il Hayaween’s reputation was threatened by dissension from Syria and Iran, maybe even Libya was having second thoughts about Iraq’s chances of victory, but he would not give up. He would press on to the bitter end, dreaming of airliners exploding, of all the undeserving dead whose corpses might balance the injustices of history.

Moments later a trawler crept across the harbor’s outer bar and anchored just inside the sheltering sandbank. She carried no flag and bore no identifying number on her bows, but il Hayaween confirmed that she was the vessel carrying the gold. I hoisted Corsaire’s anchor, went alongside the ancient, rusting fishing boat and put Gerry and Liam to work carrying the heavy bags of coin from one ship to the other. As the first bags arrived I cleared Corsaire’s cabin sole and lifted her floorboards to reveal the empty belly of the boat, which looked like an elongated fiberglass bowl studded with the chunky bolts holding her massive lead-filled keel in place. It was into that long bowl-like trough that we poured the gold coins, settling Corsaire even deeper into the water as the extra thousand pounds of ballast chinked into her shallow belly.

It took two hours to make the transfer. We needed no special precautions to hide our activities for there was no possibility of interference from the Tunisian authorities, but even so the trawler’s crew seemed relieved when their job was done. Perhaps it was il Hayaween’s baleful presence that unnerved them, or maybe it was the Uzi sub-machine-guns that his two bodyguards openly carried. Whatever, as soon as he decently could, the trawler’s skipper put back to sea.

Il Hayaween satisfied himself that the coins had been bedded down in Corsaire’s bilge. “They will be well hidden?”

“I’ve hidden a score of cargoes this way,” I reassured him. “I’ll glass the gold into the boat and no one will be able to tell the new floor from the old.”

“You promise?”

“I promise. Isn’t that why you’re using me? Because I’m good at this sort of thing? So stop worrying.”

“I am paid to worry,” he said, then snapped his fingers to summon his two bodyguards. Once they had reached the cockpit he held out his hands for their two sub-machine-guns. “These are for your crew.” He laid the guns down on the cockpit thwarts.

“Not for me?” I asked jocularly.

“Your job is to hide the gold and carry it to America. Their job is to guard it.” By which he meant that their job was to guard me. “Throw the guns overboard before you reach Miami,” he ordered Gerry and Liam.

“We will, sir, we will.” Even though there was nothing extraordinary in il Hayaween’s looks or manner, Gerry still seemed to realize that the Palestinian was a very Archangel of Satan while he himself, like his friend Liam, was at best only a minor imp.

“If you fail me,” il Hayaween said to the three of us, “then I shall pursue you to the last hiding place on earth, and when I find you I shall kill you, but not quickly, not quickly at all.” He grimaced at us, perhaps meaning it to be a smile, then turned toward the fisherman’s boat that had been summoned from the quay. None of us moved as he clambered over the gunwale. I was wondering how many men, women and children il Hayaween had killed. He raised his maimed hand in a gesture of farewell as the fisherman poled the bright-painted wooden skiff back to the quay.

I put Gerry and Liam to work again. I inflated Corsaire’s dinghy and sent Gerry ashore to collect buckets of fine sand that I poured to fill the voids between the gold coins. Then, when the sand and gold were riddled firm and smoothed over so that their top surface was a shallow reflection of the original curve of the bilge, I covered the mixture with layers of glassfiber mat and cloth strips. Liam helped me, but his capacity for even such a simple task was short-lived. “It’s focking boring,” he complained to me, then retreated to the cockpit where he lit a cigarette and stared balefully at the gray-green harbor water.

I finished the job myself; first mixing the resin and its foul-smelling hardener, then brushing the mixed liquid on to the prepared fiber mat. That job done I went back to the cockpit to wait as the fiberglass hardened and dried. I made idle chatter with Liam and Gerry, but my thoughts were elsewhere. I was being struck by the sheer amateurishness of this operation. How was it, with all the resources of Iraq and the Palestinians behind us, and with the cunning and practice of the IRA at our side, we were still reduced to this laborious method of smuggling gold? And were these two sour boys the best guardians that the IRA could find? And was Corsaire the most reliable transport at Iraq’s disposal?

“What are you thinking, mister?” Gerry flicked a cigarette butt into the water.

“I’m thinking that the resin should be dry soon,” I lied.

As darkness fell I mixed the white gelcoat with its hardener and brushed it on to the cabin sole. By midnight the new work had dried hard and the gold was thus hidden beneath a false floor. The white of the new floor was not the exact same shade as the rest of Corsaire’s interior fiberglass, but the new work would be hidden by the cabin flooring and any searcher might conclude that the shallow bilge had been left with a deliberately rough and discolored finish simply because it was out of sight. I laid down the wooden sole, covered it with the saloon carpet, then hoisted Corsaire’s anchor. I used a flashlight to steer a cautious course across the shallows of the harbor entrance until, at last, clear of the bar and with the weight of the gold making her even more sluggish than before, Corsaire plunged her bows into a short hard wave and made Liam dive for the starboard gunwale. His gun clattered on to the cockpit’s teak grating as he retched miserably into the sea.

I raised the yacht’s sails, shut off her motor, and took my ramshackle enterprise into the night.

WE SAILED INTO THE WINTER MEDITERRANEAN, A SEA OF short gray waves, spiteful winds, and busy sea lanes. I headed far north of the African coast, out beyond the busiest stretch of sea where the giant ships plunged blindly east and west between the Straits of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, but even in these less trafficked waters there was filth on every wave; mostly plastic bottles and bags. I remembered a friend claiming that it was possible to navigate the Mediterranean by understanding the sea’s currents and reading the town names from the plastic bags that floated out from every shore.

My two guards, realizing that their responsibilities involved wakefulness, had imposed a crude watch system on themselves which meant that on our first afternoon out from Tunisia Gerry was trying to sleep in the forecabin while the seasick Liam was slumped in the cockpit where, with an Uzi on his knee, he was trying not to show his abject misery. “If you ate less grease,” I told him, “you wouldn’t be so sick.”

“Fried food is good for you,” he said stubbornly. “It lines the belly, it does.”

“With what? Sump-oil? And you should give up smoking.”

“Oh, come on, mister! What do the focking doctors know?”

“You’re so eager to die young, Liam?”

“My grand-da, now, he smoked like a focking chimney, he did, and he had a proper fry-up every morning! Blood pudding, fried bread, bacon, eggs, ’taters, sausage, tomatoes, the works, and all of it fried in bacon fat, and he lived to be seventy-three!”

“That’s not old.”

“In this focking world it is.” Liam drew hard on his cigarette, then half choked as a spasm erupted in his gullet. He twisted round to vomit and the Uzi clattered on to the cockpit sole.

“I hope that gun’s safety catch is on,” I said when he’d finished retching.

“I’m not a focking amateur,” he moaned unhappily, then raised red tired eyes to the towering triangle of Corsaire’s mainsail. “I could murder someone for a piece of soda bread right now,” he said, and the thought of that Irish delicacy immediately sent another spasm of sickness bubbling up his throat and he gagged again, chucked away his cigarette and twisted over the gunwale to spew helplessly into the bubbling sea.

“I can cure your seasickness,” I said when the latest bout was over.

“How, for Christ’s sake?” He was crouching out of the wind to light a fresh cigarette.

“A bottle of cod liver oil and a bottle of whiskey, both drunk straight down, followed by thirty-six hours of absolute agony, but after that I promise you’ll never be seasick again.”

“Oh, my God. Oh fock.” He turned again. I had once made the same offer to Michael Herlihy, who had similarly turned it down. Michael and I had been teenagers and I had cruelly forced him into a small cat-boat and brought him ashore two hours later looking like a dead wet squirrel. I doubted he had ever forgiven me.

Liam flopped back on the thwart and watched as I opened the engine hatch and took a wrench to the boat’s exhaust system, disconnecting the outlet pipe from the muffler. We were under sail, so the engine was cold and quiet. Then I took the thirty feet of flexible tubing from the cockpit locker and connected it to the top of the muffler with a jubilee clip. I fed the pipe’s free end through the engine compartment’s forward bulkhead and thus into the starboard lockers of the saloon. Liam, recovering from his last spasm of sickness, frowned at the serpentine loops of tubing that filled the engine hatch and cockpit floor. “What are you doing?”

“Running a blower through the bilges to dry off the gelcoat we put on top of the gold.”

“Very wise,” he said, as if he knew what I had been talking about, “very wise.”

I put the boat under the command of the Autohelm, then went down to the saloon where I opened the lockers, pulled the hose through and introduced it into the boat’s bathroom where a shower tray had a water activated pump under its outflow. A grille in the bathroom door allowed fresh air to circulate from the saloon to keep mildew from growing too thickly in the shower stall, and the grille made the bathroom perfect for my purpose. I cut off the excess tubing which I carried back to the cockpit and tossed overboard to add to the Mediterranean’s pollution. “There,” I said comfortingly to Liam, “all done.”

“Will it take the stink out of the boat?” he asked. “Because it focking stinks down there, it does.”

“It’s the resin-hardener. It’ll pass.”

“Smells like a whore’s armpit.”

“You hire the wrong whores, Liam.”

He looked sour at the implied criticism, then freshened as he remembered what rewards were waiting at our destination. “They say American girls are real nice.”

“They’re clean!” I said encouragingly. “And they like their men to be clean too. They’re particular about that.”

“I had a swill off before we left home!” he said indignantly.

“You’ll slay the ladies,” I assured him. “Especially in Boston. They love their Irish heroes there. You’ll be the Grand Marshal of the St. Patrick’s Day parade and Congressman O’Shaughnessy will want his picture taken with you. It won’t be like Dublin, I promise you.”

“It’ll be grand, so it will.” Liam, his face pale as milk, watched in misery as I unfolded a chart. “Where the fock are we?” he asked.

“There.” I pointed to a spot just off the Tunisian coast.

He looked round the horizon, trying to spot land. “Can’t see a focking thing.”

“We’re just out of sight of the coast,” I explained. In fact we were much farther north, but Liam did not really care. I could have sailed the Corsaire down the throat of hell and he would have been too sick to notice.

My two guards ate sandwiches that night, washed down with sticky Tunisian cola and cheap instant coffee. I gave Liam four powerful sleeping pills to help his drowsiness overcome the stench of the hardener, then sent him to his bunk in the forecabin. Gerry sat with me in the cockpit for a while, but soon became bored with the darkness and the inactivity and so took his precious Uzi below. He loved the small gun. He caressed it and kept it always close. It gave him status. I watched him from the cockpit and saw him tracing the gun’s workings with his fingers. “I’m going to have to close the companionway,” I called down after a while.

“I need the fresh air,” he whined.

“The light’s wrecking my night vision. So either switch the damn lights off, or close the hatch.”

He chose to shut the companionway. I waited till my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, then went to the foredeck where I tripped the catch on the half-open forehatch. As I softly closed the hatch I could hear Liam’s rhythmic snores. I went back to the cockpit and waited.

I was beating north-west, taking Corsaire into the open waters between Sardinia and the Balearics. It was a chilly night, and dark. The heavy boat was sluggish, its extra weight making awfully hard work of the small seas, and the awkward, choppy motion seemed to reflect my mood. I was nervous. My heart felt raw and sick, an actual feeling in my chest which I suspected was the physical manifestation of conscience. I wondered if, over the years, I had become careless of death, and that sense of a skewed and wasted past made my whole future seem as bleak and dark as the seas ahead. The short waves thumped on Corsaire’s stem, smashing white over her bows and draining noisily from her scuppers. Just after ten o’clock I saw a container ship steaming eastwards, her stack of lights as bright and tall as an office block, but once she had sailed beneath the horizon we were again alone in the harsh darkness.

At midnight, with my heart thumping like a flabby bladder, I turned on the engine. The starter whirred, caught, and the motor steadied into a regular and muffled beat. I left it out of gear as though I was merely running it to charge the batteries. The sails hauled us into the seas. I heard nothing from the saloon and suspected that Gerry, like the half-drugged Liam, was asleep. After a while the water-activated pump beneath the shower tray clicked on and spewed water outboard for a while. Still no one woke below.

I let the motor run as Corsaire thumped and dipped into the Mediterranean night. Her bow wave shattered white against the dark waters, foamed briefly, then faded behind. The stars were shrouded by clouds and we were far from the powerful loom of the lighthouse on Cape Spartivento and so I steered by compass and kept a rough log, noting after each hour my estimate of miles run. Six, five and a half, six again, and each small increment of nautical miles carried Corsaire and her dying cargo north-west toward Europe. I was supposed to be racing along the Muslim North African coast to the Straits of Gibraltar, and from there south-east to the Canary Islands from where we were supposed to let the trade winds carry our cargo of gold across the Atlantic, but instead, in this choppy darkness, I was committing murder. I had routed the engine’s exhaust into the main cabin and now its fumes were filling the boat. The exhaust system’s cooling water was collecting in the shower tray and being expelled, but the poison gas was staying below.

At four in the morning, while it was still dark, I shut off the engine. It suddenly seemed very quiet.

I steeled myself to open the companionway and was greeted with a belch of foul, warm gaseous air. I gagged, coughed, and backed away. The smoky gas streamed and swirled out of the saloon to make a dissipating haze in the thin light. I could just see Gerry slumped on the table, his fingers curled either side of his cropped hair with its ridiculous pigtail. He was not moving.

I took a deep breath of fresh air, then went down into the choking saloon and put a finger on Gerry’s neck. He was still warm. There was no pulse. I went into the forecabin where Liam lay on his back with his open eyes staring sightlessly at the closed hatch. His sleeping bag stank of urine. His pale, pimpled skin had been reddened by the effects of the carbon monoxide, while a trail of vomit had hardened on his cheek and pillow. I put a finger to his neck to find that, just like Gerry, he was quite dead. I pushed the forehatch open to let a gust of welcome chill air stream into the boat’s fetid interior.

I tried to manhandle Liam back into the saloon, but his dead weight and the boat’s clumsy motion made the task impossible, so I spent an hour rigging a system of pulleys and lines with which I hoisted both dead men out of the boat’s reeking interior. I used the spare jib halyard to hang the twin corpses beside the mast where they hung like butcher’s meat, supported by cords I had looped under their armpits. Suspended like that it was a comparatively simple job to pull their sleeping bags up around their bodies. I worked by the light of the navigation lamps, ballasting the sleeping bags with the lead weights that il Hayaween had so thoughtfully provided, then I lashed the bags’ necks tight around the dead men’s throats. Liam’s aggrieved eyes reflected the green starboard light as I struggled to truss the cords tight. I wrapped yet more cord round and round the down-filled bags, expelling as much air as I could, then I lowered the halyard and draped the two bodies on the starboard rail. I untied the cords that had held the corpses, secured the halyard safely, then heaved the weighted sleeping bags overboard. There was a splash, a flurry of foam, then nothing. There was just enough wolfish gray light in the dawn sky to show that the two bodies sank instantly.

I fetched their two guns and hurled them into the sea, then disconnected the flexible tubing and threw it overboard. Afterward, exhausted, I made coffee and folded a slice of bread over a chunk of tinned ham. The breakfast made me feel sick.

I reconnected the exhaust, then, with the sunlight streaming between a watery chasm of the dissipating clouds, I began to jettison the boat’s supplies. Three months’ rations went into the sea, and with them went the materials I had used to hide the gold; the rest of the resin, the hardener, the mats and the brushes. I kept two brushes and the unused can of white paint, but everything else went overboard. A trail of garbage followed Corsaire as gulls fought over the packets of bread and biscuits.

I cleaned the filthy exhaust deposits from the shower tray, then searched the boat for every last trace of Gerry and Liam. I tossed overboard their tawdry plastic holdalls and their cheap changes of clothes and the brand-new tooth-brushes that neither had ever used, and their pathetic hoard of Cadbury’s chocolate bars and the empty lager can Gerry had saved as a souvenir of his very first airplane flight. I jettisoned their brand-new Irish passports and their postcards of Monastir that neither man had bothered to send home, though Liam had got as far as writing half a misspelled message on the back of one card: “Dear Mam, its great crack so far. Foods terribel. Give my love to Donna and Gran.”

I searched the pathetic relics before I threw them overboard, and found what I expected on a slip of cardboard that had been folded into the breast pocket of Gerry’s suit jacket. It was an Irish telephone number which Gerry had doubtless been told to call collect once he reached America. The number would probably belong to an IRA sympathizer whose home and telephone had never before been used by the Provos, thus minimizing the danger that the Garda Siochána, the Irish police, would be tapping the line. I memorized the number, then added the cardboard scrap to the sea’s filth. Afterward, with the boat rinsed clean, I stared behind and tried to frame a prayer to atone for my night’s work, but no prayer would come. I told myself that Liam and Gerry had died in the service of their new Ireland. It would never have occurred to either of them that an Ireland fashioned by their kind would not be an Ireland worth living in, but all they had ever known was an Ireland that they could not endure and so, crudely, they had tried to change it. Now their trussed bodies were on the ocean floor while I, with Saddam Hussein’s gold, sailed on.

I had murdered two men. I had done it in cold blood, with much planning and forethought, and solely for my own gain. I had not killed them to stop the slaughter of the innocents which il Hayaween’s questions about airliners and ground-to-air missiles had implied, but instead I had killed Liam and Gerry for five million dollars. I did plan to stop il Hayaween’s slaughter, but I also planned to steal the coins, indeed I had intended to right from the moment in Miami when I had first heard about the gold. The problem was not stealing the gold, but living to spend it. My story would be simple; that the badly overloaded boat, wallowing in rough seas, had been pooped by a bad wave. That she had sunk. That I had tried to rescue Liam and Gerry, but failed. That the gold, with the boat, was lost. That I had survived in a liferaft, alone. When I reached America I would hide for a few weeks, then, when the IRA found me, I would brazen the story out. Liam and Gerry would have destroyed my lie and so I had murdered them.

I tried to justify the murder by telling myself that they would have killed me if I had finished the voyage. Or if they were not to have been my killers, others would have killed all three of us. I told myself that if you sup with the devil you need a very long spoon, and that Gerry and Liam should have known what dinner table they were sitting at. I tried to justify their murder, but it remained murder and it was on my conscience as I sailed on to Barcelona. That too was part of the plan.

It was a hellish journey. I was single-handed in a busy sea, so I dared not leave the cockpit. Instead I catnapped at the helm and snatched the odd hour of sleep whenever it seemed safe or whenever sheer fatigue overwhelmed me. One night I was startled awake to hear the throbbing crash of a steamer’s engines pounding not far off in the darkness and, when I turned in panic, I saw the lights of a vast ship thundering past not a hundred yards away.

The next day, during a lull from the cold winter winds that were sweeping south from the French coast, I buckled on a lifeline and, with Corsaire safe under the control of her self-steering, I crouched on the swimming platform built into her sugar-scoop stern and, using the pot of white paint that I had listed as an essential part of the false floor’s disguise, I painted out the name Corsaire and the French hailing port, Port Vendres. I then took all Corsaire’s papers, shredded them, and committed them to the deep.

On the following day, when the second coat of white paint was dry and the old lettering completely hidden, I unrolled the transfer names I had ordered by mail in Belgium. Carefully, all the while balancing myself against the sluggish pitch of the overloaded boat, I rubbed the new names on to the fresh paint. Thus Corsaire became Rebel Lady, and Port Vendres became Boston, Mass. Then, using an epoxy glue, I fastened the old Rebel Lady maker’s plate on to the side of Corsaire’s coachroof and, leaning dangerously out under the pulpit’s lower rail and using commercial stick-on letters and numbers I had bought in Nieuwpoort, I put Rebel Lady’s Massachusetts registration number on either bow. I finally replaced the French tricolor with the Stars and Stripes, and thus Corsaire ceased to exist and in her place was Dr. O’Neill’s forty-four-foot boat, Rebel Lady, ready to go home.

Two days later I delivered Rebel Lady to the commercial docks in Barcelona. I spent a busy day knocking down her topworks; taking off her sails, craning out her mast. Then, with her spars safely lashed to her decks, she was hoisted out of the water. The crane driver slid open a window of his cab and shouted something through the thin dirty rain. I shrugged to show I did not understand, but the foreman translated into French for me. “He says she weighs as much as a sixty-footer!”

“I prefer heavy boats.”

“Like women, eh?” he laughed and repeated the joke in Catalan to his crane driver who, with an exquisite skill, was lowering Rebel Lady into an open-topped container.

Once she was safely cradled I borrowed an electric drill and, using templates I had brought from Nieuwpoort, I etched Rebel Lady’s Hull Identification Number on to her transom and, as American law required, in a concealed place below. I chose the new false floor for the hidden number, then, that last job completed, I locked her hatches, signed her over to the shipping company, paid the balance of my account in cash and walked out of the docks to find a taxi. In a day or so Rebel Lady would be loaded on to a container ship, then, as deck cargo and with her secret hidden deep in her dark belly, she would be carried west across the winter Atlantic, bound for America.

And I too was going to America, but not across the Atlantic. Fear of il Hayaween made me circumspect and so I took a train to Nice, another to Paris, then took the metro to the airport. I telephoned Brussels again, told a lie, and caught a plane for Singapore. I was vanishing, going east about the world, but running, just like the newly christened Rebel Lady, for the refuge of home.

I stayed one night in a hotel near Singapore’s Changi Airport, then, in a hot humid dawn and still groggy with sleeplessness and jetlag, I flew north to Hong Kong where I waited two hours before catching a plane to San Francisco. There, using my false American passport and carrying a stained sea-bag and my bright yellow oilskin jacket, I came home.

My flight to Boston was delayed so I bought a clutch of newspapers. The Iraqis were still refusing to withdraw from Kuwait despite the mass of coalition troops assembling in Saudi Arabia, and Saddam Hussein was still promising his enemies the mother of all battles. He sounded confident enough to make me wonder whether perhaps il Hayaween’s plans were not so ramshackle after all. Perhaps there were saboteurs in place throughout the world, preparing to slaughter and main and destroy in the names of Allah, Saddam and Palestine. I thought of fifty-three Stinger missiles and of a man with a maimed hand asking how easy it was to shoot down airliners, and I felt a tremor of fear at the thought of taking another plane, then told myself not to be so stupid. Whatever evil the Iraqis had planned would not be unleashed till after the shooting began in the desert.

The Boston plane should have left San Francisco at half past one in the afternoon, but it was nearer six in the evening before the aircraft at last climbed over the bay and headed east across the Sierra Nevada, which meant we did not land at Logan Airport till the small hours of the morning. It had been snowing and the temperature was way below zero. The last sleep I had enjoyed was somewhere over the western Pacific, and if I had been sensible I would have stayed the rest of that night in a Boston hotel, but by now the jetlag and adrenalin were combining to keep me awake and all I really wanted to do was reach my house on Cape Cod, so I rented a car and drove myself through the banked snow that lined the Massachusetts roads.

The drive took just over two hours. I was aching with tiredness, but the thought of the waiting house filled me with a feverish expectancy and, like a hunted beast seeking a secret lair, I wanted to recuperate in the safety and reassurance of home. There was a risk, a very small risk, that my enemies might be watching the Cape Cod house, but I doubted it for I had not seen the place in seven years, and Shafiq and his friends did not even know the house existed. As I crossed the Cape Cod Canal the clouds slid apart to reveal a clean-edged moon cut sharp as a whistle in a sky of ice-bright stars. The moonlight revealed yellow ribbons tied to trees and mailboxes and fences. A big illuminated sign outside a hardware store asked God to bless our troops. The radio, even at four in the morning, was filled with the threats of war, then it played “God Bless America” and I felt tears prick at my eyes. It had been so long since I had been home, so very long.

It was ten past four in the star-bright morning when I turned on to the dirt road that led east toward the ocean and, as I breasted the pine-clad sand ridge that edged the marsh, I could suddenly see for miles and it seemed that every frost-edged blade of grass was needle sharp in the winter air. The far Atlantic was silver and black while the nearer waters of the bay glistened like a sheet of burnished steel. The snow had hardly settled on the salt marshes, but there was just enough to streak the dark shadows with bands of white. I braked the car to a stop on the ridge’s crest and, with the radio and lights turned off, I sat and stared at the view in which, dead-center and ink-black under the scalpel moon, my waiting house lay silent. The house and the sweeping beams of the Cape’s lighthouses were the only new things in this view since the days when the Pilgrim Fathers had first stood on this ridge, or indeed, since the more ancient time when the wandering Indian tribes had dug for clams in the shoals of this sandy promontory that stuck so deep into the Atlantic.

I rolled down the car window to catch, on the surge of freezing air, the shifting sound of the distant ocean breakers. The sound brought with it a sudden rush of love for this place. It was home, it was safety, it was mine. My father had bought this house fifty years before as a refuge from the whores and pimps and lawyers who plagued his business, and now it would become my refuge. Here, I told myself, I could at last live honestly. No more secrets. I had come home.

Home. I sat there for a long time, letting the cold fill the car, thinking. Thinking and watching. Nothing moved in the salt marsh; I did not expect any of my enemies to be here, but old habits keep a man alive, and so I watched and waited.

I watched the house and listened to the sea. I felt no instinct of fear. This place was too far from the hatreds of the Middle East or the bitterness of Ulster to bear danger. This was the refuge where I would hide until Rebel Lady reached America, then I would give myself up to the government for questioning. My telephone calls to Brussels had merely been to warn them of Stringer missiles, il Hayaween and my conviction that a terrible series of airliner massacres was planned as a revenge for America’s thwarting of Saddam Hussein’s plans. I had given the CIA as much information as they needed to stop the Stingers being deployed, but they would want more. They would want all the information I had gathered and remembered since first they had sent me out, as an agent without strings and without provenance, twelve years before.

For Roisin had been right. I was one of the agents who did not exist. I was one of the CIA’s secrets. I had been turned out into the world and told to stay out until I had something worth bringing home. I was one of the agents who would leave no tracks and make no footprints. I would be paid nothing, offered nothing, and my name would appear on no government list, no computer record, and no file. I did not exist. Simon van Stryker, who had recruited me to the program, called us his “Stringless Agents” because there would be no apron strings or puppet strings to lead our enemies back to Langley, Virginia. Now I was going back there of my own accord, but in my own time and I would not give them everything. Rebel Lady and her cargo were mine. Saddam Hussein’s gold would not go toward paying off America’s deficit, but to keep me in my old age.

What old age? I sat in the freezing, dark car and gazed at the moonlit marsh and I remembered how I had once dreamed of bringing Roisin to this house; I had even dreamed, God help me, of raising her children on this shore, but she had scorned that dream as the sentimental witterings of a dull and unimaginative fool. I remembered her eyes after her execution, all fierceness gone, then I thought of Liam’s eyes that had been so accusing in the green lamplight. Poor Liam. After I had wrestled the sleeping bag about his corpse I had found his dried vomit on my hands and I had panicked as if I had been touched by a foul contagion. I remembered my childhood, and how Father Sifflard had told us of the one sin against the Holy Ghost that could never be forgiven, which sin no one seemed able to define, and I wondered if we all defined it for ourselves and if I was already guilty and thus doomed to the horrors of eternal punishment.