Scoundrel

But now I would face my enemies here. Like a beast seeking refuge, I had come home, but only to play for the biggest stakes of all, gold and life. If I won I would be left here alone with all the money a man would ever need, and a deep-water sailing boat and a high-bowed fishing boat and what else? Bed-sheets losing their scent? A cat-boat no child would ever learn to sail? But they were just maudlin regrets for the long nights, and now, in this light-flooded morning, I had to think ahead and see where danger lay.

Brendan Flynn was dangerous. But Brendan was far away and he would be loath to set an operation on American soil, for the first commandment of the IRA was Thou Shalt Not Upset The Americans With The Truth. Brendan would therefore leave things to Michael.

Michael was angry, because I had stung him and a stung Michael Herlihy was a relentless enemy, but he was not a fool. I knew he would make some effort to retrieve the gold, but the effort would be subtle and, in the end, like the lawyer he was, he would probably agree to a settlement. Maybe one million? That seemed fair, and certainly I could make the price of all five million much too steep for Michael’s taste.

The Brits? I doubted they were in the game. Michael Herlihy liked to imagine that the British kept a team of killers on the American coast, but that was Michael’s wishful thinking. He did not like to think of other men facing danger each day in the slums of the Bogside or across the hedgerows of South Armagh while he lived easy in the New World, and so he wove a fantasy that he too, in his city office or in his bleak apartment near Boston Common, faced the horror of a knock on his door in the night’s black heart. But there were no SAS killers patrolling the streets of Boston looking for Michael. I could forget the Brits.

Which left the most dangerous enemy of all, il Hayaween, but would he really come for me in America? This was not his turf. There were no Palestinian slums to hide his men in America. America was an unknown land to il Hayaween, it was a glittering heaven that would dazzle a Satanic archangel. I dared not underestimate him, but I had come to the one place that would give him pause for, though the Palestinians understood Europe, America unnerved them. Besides, van Stryker would always help protect me if he thought there was the slightest chance of il Hayaween pursuing me into the New World and so, for the moment, I felt safe.

Then tires suddenly crunched loud on the clam-shell drive and I flung back the bedclothes, pulled the harpoon away from the door and, taking the safety catch off the loaded carbine, ran down the steep stairs. I was crouching behind the front door even before the approaching vehicle had come to a halt. My heart rate had doubled in just fifteen seconds.

I listened. The crunching sound of the tires stopped and I heard the ratchet of the parking brake. A click as the vehicle’s door opened, then I too ripped open the house door and aimed the carbine straight at the intruder’s chest.

Straight at Kathleen Donovan.

Who stared at me, and I suddenly knew there was no one else I had rather see, for I had so much unfinished business with her, and if my conscience was ever to be clear then she was as good a person as any to begin the process. Then I saw her eyes widening in alarm at the sight of the gun. “No!” she said. “No!”

“I’m sorry.” I made the gun safe, put it aside and straightened up. “I’m sorry,” I said again, for she was still looking horrified, and then I realized I had come downstairs stark naked. “It’s all right,” I said, “you just woke me. Come on in. I’ll get dressed. Come in. I’ll only be a minute,” and in that utter confusion I ran back upstairs and prayed to God that this time I would not miss my chance. Not this time, not now that I was home at last and so utterly alone.

She waited outside the house, refused my offer of coffee, refused even to come into the house, but instead asked to walk toward the sea. She was nervous, but perhaps that was hardly surprising for she must have known I had lied to her in Nieuwpoort and it must have taken real courage for her to come and accost me in my Cape Cod retreat. “How did you know I was here?” I asked her.

“I didn’t. I was just hoping.” She walked ahead of me on the narrow track, staring down as she walked. “If you must know”—she finally turned and looked defiantly back into my face—“I hired a private detective to discover more about you, and he found this address.”

“So you just came here?” I asked.

“Because I want to know why you lied about Roisin,” she said. “Or do you still insist you never knew her?”

“I knew her,” I admitted.

We walked on in silence. The sand on the path had been bleached white as bone by the dry winter air and by the day’s bright sun. Small streaks of snow lay in the shelter of the far dunes and shards of ice glinted at the margins of the small pools between the brittle pale grasses. The wind was light, coming cold from the north-east. Kathleen wore a black overcoat edged with red cuffs and a tall collar that stuck up to meet her tasselled woollen hat. “Is she dead?”

“Yes. Four years now.” We were speaking very stiffly.

“How?”

I could feel myself shaking, and I only trusted myself to answer with one word. “Shot.”

“In Ireland?”

“No.”

“Then where?”

I sighed. My breath misted in the air, blew away over the salt marsh. “She died,” I said, “in a Palestinian training camp called Hasbaiya. She’d gone there to learn about bombs and killing, but instead they killed her.”

“Why?” A terrible intensity in the voice.

“Because they thought she was a CIA agent.”

“Oh, my God.”

I thought for a second Kathleen was going to sit down on the path, and I held out a hand to steady her, but she shook my help away and walked on alone. We were threading the path that twisted erratically about the head of the bay between stands of reed and clumps of grass and which led eventually to the great stretch of beach where the Atlantic rollers crashed against the strand.

She turned after a few paces and raised her green eyes in a challenge. “Why didn’t you tell me this in Belgium?”

“Because…” I began, then faltered into silence. The truth would sound so stupid, but I had promised myself I would tell this girl the truth and so I launched myself into the lame excuses. “I know it’ll sound stupid, but I kind of thought you might be working for the Brits.”

She laughed. Not with amusement, but in bitter scorn. “First Roisin is the CIA, now I work for the British?”

I tried to explain. “Concealment’s a way of life. Lying is a response to any question. I’m sorry, I really am. I wanted to tell you, but I dared not.”

“So why tell me now?” She had begun walking again.

“Because I’m out of it now. It’s all over for me.”

“Out of what?” she asked derisively. “The IRA?”

“I was in the IRA,” I said carefully, “but only because this country asked me to join.” No, that was not true. I would have joined anyway because it was tribal, because it was adventure, but would I have stayed? Could I have stayed after seeing an adult shrunken to the size of a child by a bomb made from gasoline laced with soap-flakes that make the fire stick to flesh like blazing napalm? “I worked for the CIA,” I told her.

She glanced at me, looked away, and I saw that she did not believe me, although she was too polite to say as much. “And Roisin?” Kathleen asked. “Was she in the CIA as well as the IRA?”

“She wasn’t in the CIA.”

“Then why did they shoot her?”

So I told her about Seamus’s betrayal, and that too sounded lame, and I was beginning to wish Kathleen Donovan had not come to see me on this bright dry morning, but then I went back to the beginning, right to the very beginning in the smoky Dublin pub when Roisin had come in from the night with raindrops glistening in her hair, and on through to the day when I had piled the stones on her grave. I left Axel out of the tale, and I sketched over the end of our relationship, but the rest was truthful enough.

“So she has no gravestone?” Kathleen asked when I had finished the story. “No memorial?”

“I paid for masses to be said for her in Dublin,” I told her truthfully.

Kathleen shrugged, as if doubting that the masses would do a scrap of good. She walked in silence for a long time, then suddenly spoke of her elder sister, saying how even as a child Roisin had been obsessed by Ireland. “She didn’t go there till she was fourteen, but by then she already spoke Gaelic and she could tell you the name of every county, and the name of every street between St. Stephen’s Green and Phoenix Park.”

“I remember watching the television news from London with her once,” I said, “and at the end they would always give the weather forecast, and that day they said it was going to be a lovely sunny day over England, Scotland and Wales, but there’d be clouds and rain over Ireland, and Roisin got so angry because she thought the English meteorologists were just being anti-Irish.”

Kathleen smiled in recognition of the story and I thought how like Roisin she looked, and I turned away because I did not want to betray anything, not on this cold day when, at last, I was confessing most of my sins.

We walked on, heading south now. To my right I could see my house across the bay’s headwaters while to my left the ocean seethed beyond the dunes. “I always wanted Roisin to come and live here,” I confessed to Kathleen. “I had this dream of raising children and of going shopping on weekends and of sailing on the bay.”

Kathleen looked up at me, surprise on her face, and for a second I thought she was going to cry, but then she offered me a rueful smile instead. “Roisin was never very motherly, not unless she changed when she reached Ireland?”

I shook my head. “She never changed. She was Cathleen ni Houlihan till the very day she died.” Cathleen ni Houlihan was the great fighting heroine of Irish legend.

Once again Kathleen smiled in recognition. “When Roisin was eight she offered to pay me her allowance for the rest of her life, all her allowance, mind you, the whole weekly dollar, forever, if I would just change names with her. She so wanted to be called Kathleen.” We had reached the innermost dunes and now threaded them toward the sea. “She wanted me to sign our name-changing pact with drops of real blood. She even had one of Mom’s kitchen knives all ready.” Kathleen laughed at the memory, then gave me an accusing look. “Did Roisin join the IRA because of you?”

“Not because of me, no, but I introduced her.”

“Did she kill anyone?” It was a hostile question.

“Not directly, at least I never heard that she did.” I walked in silence for a few paces. “I tried to stop her getting involved, but it was no good. And after I left Belfast she stayed on by herself. I know she never shot anyone, but that was because she couldn’t use a gun. She used to shut her eyes before she pulled the trigger, and it made her a lousy shot. But she did what she could. She told me about going into a bar once, looking for a man, and she pretended to be an American journalist, and when she found the guy she went back and told the gunmen exactly where they could locate him. That way they were able to walk straight to his table and not risk drawing attention to themselves by asking questions. But she was frustrated too. They didn’t really trust her, not like their own people. They used outsiders like us when we could be useful, but they never really trusted us in Belfast. I think that’s why Roisin wanted to be trained at Hasbaiya, so she could equip herself for a campaign in London. An American doesn’t stand out in London the way they do in Belfast or Derry.”

Kathleen still walked with her head down. We crossed the sand track that led to the summer shacks at the far end of the beach, then climbed the last line of dunes before the sea. “Did you betray her?”

“Me?”

“You said you were CIA. So you must have informed on her along with everyone else.” Her voice was hostile, her accusations wild.

“It didn’t work like that.” I knew I dared not describe van Stryker’s Stringless Program. “I didn’t inform on her. I loved her.”

“Did you want her to live in Belgium with you?”

“More than I wanted anything else.” I walked past a dead gull’s feathered bones and I spoke of a love’s ending. “Roisin thought my job in Belgium would be dull. It was too far from the armed struggle, you see. I was still doing a job for the IRA, but it wasn’t a job she could help with, and she desperately wanted to be involved at the heart of things and I was going to be at the edge, and so she refused to come with me. We used to meet whenever we could, or whenever I could persuade her. Sometimes I’d fly to Dublin, and sometimes she’d come to Belgium. She once helped me deliver a yacht from Spain to Sweden, and I thought she was so happy during that voyage.” I stopped, remembering Roisin’s real happiness, the sound of her laughter, the gentleness that was surprising in her when she could be eased away from her hatreds. Except it had been her hatreds that made her feel alive. She had enjoyed the voyage, but felt guilty for being away from the fight. “I wanted to marry her,” I told Kathleen, “but she wasn’t interested.”

I stopped at the crest of the dunes to see a ragged sea breaking and foaming and spewing a winter’s spray along the endless sand.

“Was there another man?” Kathleen asked with a cruel acuity.

“Yes.” The great breakers crashed unending on to the cold deserted beach.

“Who?” Kathleen asked, and waited my silence out, so eventually I went on, even though I did not want to.

“The first I knew of was before I left Belfast. He was called John Macroon. He was younger than Roisin, a hot-head, a wild boy. God, he was wild. He would dare anything. And he was also a good Irish Catholic boy, scared witless of women, but I knew Roisin had broken his fears. I just knew from the way she talked and from the way he looked at me, but I never dared ask her, just in case she told me the truth. Once she came to me with a bruised face and I knew he’d hit her, but she wouldn’t tell me what the bruise was. And I didn’t want to believe she was being unfaithful, so I pretended everything was good between us. Then Macroon died, shot by a soldier in an ambush. He was on his way to plant a bomb at a country police station and the soldiers knew he was coming and they just shot him. No warning, no questions, just bang. And that night she was weeping fit to flood all Ireland with tears, and she told me about him.”

I crouched at the foot of the dunes on the beach’s edge. The sea was empty of boats. There were tears in my eyes and I blamed the wind that smelled of salt and shell. “Macroon was very rough with her, but she said that she did not want him to die without knowing a woman. Christ!” I blasphemed aloud, and Christ, but how I hated to remember, yet I remembered only too well. I remembered my pain, and my need to hear every last damned detail of what I saw as a betrayal and Roisin claimed was a gesture of comfort to a hero. I remembered her defiance, her anger at me, her hatred for my tenderness, though later, in the night’s tears, she had wanted my comfort.

“You say Macroon was the first?” Kathleen asked.

“There were others,” I said, then was silent for a long time, or for as long as it took for a dozen great waves to break and shatter along the empty shore. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you any of this in Belgium. I guess I should have written to your family when she died, but somehow Roisin wasn’t the kind of person you thought of as having family.”

Kathleen had found some tiny scraps of shell that she was lobbing idly on to the beach. “I think we all knew she was dead. You can sense it, can’t you? She’d usually remember to send a Christmas card, or a card for Mom’s birthday, but when we didn’t hear for so long…” She shrugged. “But we wanted to know, you understand? We wanted to be certain one way or the other. Mom doesn’t have too long, and Dad’s kind of frail too, so I promised I’d find out for them.” A gull screamed overhead and Kathleen pushed a strand of dark red hair out of her eyes.

“What will you tell your parents?”

She was silent for a long time, then shrugged again. “I guess I’ll lie to them. I’ll say she died in a car accident and that she was given the last rites and a proper Christian burial. I don’t think Mom and Dad want the truth. They don’t approve of terrorism. Nor do I.” She said the last three words very forcefully, then lobbed another scrap of shell that skittered along the sand. “I’ve had to think about terrorism,” Kathleen went on, “because of Roisin. Even before she went to Ireland she believed in violence. She collected money for the cause and she used to collect newspaper clippings about dead British soldiers and dead Irish policemen. Mom hated it. She thought Roisin was sick, but Dad said it was just the Irish sickness and a good reason to live in America.”

“But what if you can’t live in America?” I asked. “What if you’re a Catholic living in Protestant Ulster?”

“That’s not an excuse for murder,” Kathleen said firmly. “And if the IRA can’t wear a uniform and show themselves in battle, then they’re not real men, they’re just arrogant people who think they know better than the rest of Ireland, but the truth is they’ll burn in the same dreadful hell as whoever put that bomb on the Pan Am plane, or the men who shot the nuns in El Salvador, or the terrorists who killed our Marines in Lebanon.” She turned and looked defiantly at me. “I suppose you must think I’m very naive? Or very stupid?”

I stared at the sea. “The British did terrible things to the Irish.”

“And we did terrible things to the native Americans, so you think that the Cherokee or the Sioux should be able to bomb shopping malls or ambush American servicemen?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think that.”

“So what do you think?” she challenged me.

I knew that only an answer of the most rigorous honesty would serve my purpose here, and my purpose was not to feed a proud tribalism, nor to be defiant, but to match Kathleen’s truthfulness with a genuine response. “I think,” I spoke slowly, “that terrorism is wrong, but I also think it’s seductive because there’s a glamor in the men and women who fight a secret war, but at the very heart of it, and God I hate to admit it, but at the very heart of it we all know that the British would do almost anything to be free of Ireland. Yet everyone agrees there’d be a bloodbath if the Brits left, that the Catholics would set on the Protestants, or the Protestants on the Catholics, and that threat of violence is the only justification the British troops have for staying in Ireland, and so every bomb and every bullet the IRA uses only makes their justification stronger. So the IRA and the INLA and the UVF and the UDA are the only people keeping the British there, because the British sure as hell don’t want to be there. They hate the place! They quite like the Free State, but they dislike Ulster, and they detest Ulster’s Protestants! But who in the whole wide world does like the Northern Irish Protestants? Do you think Dublin wants to swallow those one million God-drunken stiff-necked bastards? And if the British won’t protect them, who will?” I paused, gazing at the gray horizon. “I don’t think any of it makes a blind scrap of sense, because I don’t think a single bomb has brought a free Ireland one day closer, but even so I still can’t see how any self-respecting lad growing up in Ballymurphy or Turf Lodge or the Bogside has any choice but to go on making the bombs. I think it’s a tragic, miserable, gut-wrenching mess. That’s what I think.”

“And the CIA wants to be involved in that mess?” she asked me, showing her incredulity at my claim to have worked for the American government.

“I don’t know.” I was feeling cold. “I was never a proper agent. I mean I didn’t take an oath or anything like that. They didn’t even pay me, but they asked me to find things out, and I did. But not about the IRA. They just used that as a kind of introduction.” It sounded lame, but it was the best I could do. “For me it was a kind of game, but not for Roisin. For her it was a cause. That was why she wanted to go to Hasbaiya. She wanted to learn how to kill without flinching. She wanted to win Ireland all by herself, and I just wanted to have a good time.” Which is why I had killed Liam and Gerry, because they stood between me and the gold. They had not died for Ireland or for America or for anything. Just for me. It made me feel shallow, but I did not know how to make myself profound. I remembered Liam’s eyes glazed with the green light and shuddered.

Kathleen stared at me for a long time. “Roisin really hurt you, didn’t she?”

How pale the sea was, I thought, and how cold. “More than I ever thought possible,” I admitted, “more than I ever thought possible.”

“I’ll take that coffee now,” she said in a small forced voice, “if it’s still on offer.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is.”

We walked away from the sea, our shadows long and dark against the white winter sand.

We did not talk much as we walked back around the head of the bay. I was nervous of Kathleen’s disapproval, while she had too much to think about. We made small talk; how good it was to live near the sea, that it was cold, but that the winter had nevertheless been mild. As we neared the house I asked where she lived, and she told me in Maryland not far from her parents. She said she had trained as a dental hygienist. “But I’m out of work right now.”

“I wouldn’t have thought teeth were affected by the recession?”

“They are, but that isn’t why I’m jobless. I was stupid enough to marry the dentist, you see, and now we’re divorced. It’s kind of messy.” She sounded resigned to the mess. “At least we didn’t have kids.”

“Ah,” I said, which was inadequate, but about as much as I could manage. I was nervous, because I so wanted Kathleen to like me. Indeed, I suddenly felt as though my whole future happiness depended on Kathleen’s approval of me. I saw in her a quieter, gentler Roisin.

“David ran off with one of his patients,” Kathleen went on, then shook her head. “I sometimes wonder why we all make each other so unhappy. It wasn’t meant to be that way, was it?”

I thought of my dreams of bringing up Roisin’s children beside the water. “No, it wasn’t meant to be that way.” And I thought of Johnny Riordan and knew that there was at least one happy person among my friends, then I remembered I had to telephone Johnny, though not from the telephone in my house, and I wondered if Kathleen would give me a lift up the road to the public phone booth in the small shopping complex. But first I had to make coffee. “I’ve only got caffeinated,” I said as we walked about the side of the house, “and it isn’t even my coffee. It belongs to someone who was squatting in the house.”

“Maybe I won’t have any then.” She stopped at the corner of the house and gave me a very nervous smile. “Maybe I’d just better be going.”

“That’s fine by me.” I hid my disappointment. “But can you give me a ride up to the main road?”

She nodded. “Sure.”

“I’ll just get some small change for the phone,” I told her, and I pushed open the kitchen door which I had left unlocked because Sarah Sing Tennyson had not thought to leave me a new key when she changed the locks, and there she was. Sarah Sing Tennyson was standing in my kitchen with a squeegee bottle in her right hand.

I began to twist away. I had the Colt .45 hidden in my oilskin pocket, but she was much faster than me. She squeezed, and my hands flew to my burning face and I half heard Kathleen scream with fear, then a figure ran out of the kitchen, past Sarah Tennyson, and told Kathleen not to worry, that I wasn’t being hurt, then something hit me viciously hard across the skull. My knees began to give way, a man’s voice grunted as he hit me again, then all went dark.

PART THREE

I RECOVERED CONSCIOUSNESS IN A MOVING VEHICLE. THAT IT was moving was about all I could tell for my head had been shrouded in a sack or bag and I had been thrust down into a fetal position on the carpeted floor of the van or car. My eyes were in terrible pain, my face was smarting and my nostrils filled with the stink of ammonia. I tried to stretch out, but discovered that I had been trussed into immobility. For some reason, though, I had not been gagged. “Who the hell—”

I had begun the question before I screamed. A terrible pain stabbed up from my kidneys. The pain was fearful; a sobbing, aching, dreadful lance of horror that seared through my abdomen. It seemed to take minutes for the pain to subside. I gasped for breath, half gagging on the bilelike taste of vomit in my mouth. I kept my eyes screwed shut for to open them was to invite a visitation of the stinging pain left by the ammonia. Then I remembered Kathleen and had a sudden terror that she would be hurt just because she had been visiting my house when these bastards ambushed me. “Please…” I spoke with a deliberate humility, but no sooner had I opened my mouth than the pain sliced into my back again and my screams sounded like the terror of a wounded animal.

The car, if it was a car, swerved round a corner, throwing me sideways against a pair of legs. Once the subsiding pain allowed me to think half clearly I decided I had to be in the back of a car, rather than in a van, and hard down on the car’s floor where I was wedged between the front and back seats. The sound of the transmission told me the car was an automatic. I knew one person was on the seat to my right, so now I edged to my left to discover whether a second person hedged me in, but as soon as I moved a hand slapped me hard round the head. They wanted me to be still and they wanted me to be quiet, and the pain already inflicted on me persuaded me that their wishes were best respected. I stayed very still and very quiet.

I was also very scared, if that word could do justice to the bowel-loosening terror that trembled in me. Whoever these people were, they were experts. They had taken me with a skill and efficiency that spoke of long practice. I had suspected nothing, but had simply walked into their ambush like a child. They had immobilized me in seconds and now they were carrying me away and I was helpless. If I moved, I was hurt. If I made a noise, I was hurt. They were training me like a dog, making me subject to their control, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Not one thing. And if these people decided to kill me, then I would die like a dog, because these people were good.

The car pulled off the road. I felt the vehicle sway as it crossed a curb-cut, then I heard the tires scrunch on gravel. I had no idea how long we had been driving. I had no idea if we were even on the Cape still.

The car seemed to drive into an enclosed space. I could hear its exhaust echoing loud, then the engine was switched off and I heard the doors open. Four doors.

A hand reached down, grabbed one of the ropes that pinioned me, and yanked me with extraordinary force out of the car and on to a cold hard floor.

I sensed someone kneeling beside me. Something cold touched my ankle, a knife blade I imagined, and I whimpered with fear, but the blade merely cut the bonds that trussed my legs.

A hand yanked me upright. I swayed, but managed to stand. My wrists were still bound and the thick sack was still over my head, but otherwise I had been freed of the ropes.

A hand pushed me forward. I stumbled, hardly able to walk. My feet were bare on the concrete floor. I had been wearing boots and socks when I had been ambushed, but they, like my oilskin jacket, had been stripped off me and, as far as I could tell, I was dressed only in jeans, underwear, a shirt and a sweater. My gun was gone, everything but those few items of clothing was gone. I was pushed again and I dutifully tried to hurry, but succeeded only in stubbing my bare toe against a stone step. I cried out, fell, then scrambled up before they could hit me again. I seemed to have entered a thickly carpeted passageway. It was warm suddenly.

A hand checked me. I heard a door open. The hand turned me to the right, pushed me slowly forward, very slowly, and I sensed I must use caution, and sure enough I found my foot stepping into thin air, and I gasped, thinking I was going to pitch forward into a terrible void, but a hand steadied me, and I realized they had simply steered me on to a flight of wooden steps.

I went down the steps into what had to be a cellar. The footsteps of my captors were loud on the wooden stairs, then echoed from the bare concrete floor. At the foot of the steps I was pushed a few paces forward, then checked again. They wanted me to stand still.

I obeyed. I was shivering. The cellar was cold. I could hear nothing.

Then, suddenly, a knife sawed at my wrists and the ropes fell away. I gasped, half expecting the knife to swing up at my belly, but nothing happened. I rubbed my wrists, then raised my hands toward the bag tied around my head.

A club or cosh hit my kidneys.

I screamed and half fell, but hands held me upright. I wanted to be sick again. The pain swelled in me, receded, swelled again; a pain that came in red waves. The pain reminded me that they wanted me to stand still.

So I stood still.

Hands gripped my sweater and jerked it upward. Without thinking I stepped back and immediately the pain whipped at me as I was hit again, expertly hit so that the agony slammed up my back. I half crouched to escape the pain, but the hands on my sweater pulled me upright.

They wanted my sweater off. Weeping, unable to resist, I raised my arms and they tugged the woollen sea-jersey off. The bag over my head had been tied at my throat and so stayed in place.

Fingers touched my throat. The touch of the fingers was warm, light and fluttering. The very lightness of the touch terrified me, then I realized that the fingers were merely undoing the buttons of my shirt. I was shaking with fear as the fingers slid down my chest and belly, then as they tugged the shirt-tails clear of my jeans and pulled the flannel sleeves off my arms.

I gasped as the fingers caressed my belly. Only it was not a caress, but rather the touch as the belt of my jeans was unbuckled, then the jeans were unbuttoned and unzipped. Hands pulled my jeans down, then my underpants. Obediently, eager to help, wanting these remorseless captors to like me and to stop hurting me, I stepped out of the clothes.

I was naked and I was cold. I was hurting and I was frightened.

Hands touched my throat again. I whimpered softly, then realized that the warm fingers were merely untying the lacing of the bag that shrouded my head. I sensed the person take a backward step, then the bag was whipped off and, though I was instantly dazzled and though my sight was still smeared and my eyes smarting from the ammonia. I could at last see where I was and who was with me.

Facing me was Sarah Sing Tennyson. She was holding my clothes. Standing beside her was a tall and well-built man wearing a black balaclava helmet like those which the IRA favor when they are photographed by journalists. The knitted cap hid all but his eyes and his mouth. I could see he had a moustache, and that his eyes were blue, but otherwise the man’s face was utterly masked. He also wore black leather gloves, a black sweater, black shoes, and black trousers. I sensed that there was at least one other person behind me, but I dared not turn round in case they hit me.

The cellar was stone-walled and completely bare of any furnishings except a coiled garden hose that had been attached to a tap which served a metal sink fixed to one wall. The ceiling was big, suggesting a large house, while its bareness spoke of an abandoned one. The wooden stairs were to my left, climbing steeply to a closed door. The cellar was lit by a single light bulb which, though dim, had been sufficient to dazzle me in those first seconds after the hood had been removed from my eyes. The cellar floor was a screed of bare cement with a single drain in its very center, a feature which, in these circumstances, was as menacing as the garden hose.

Sarah Sing Tennyson had my clothes draped over one arm. She was also holding a pair of shears. They were tailor’s shears with black handles and steel blades a foot long.

She said nothing, but, when she was certain that the sight of the shears had captured my attention, she began to slice my clothes into shreds. She first cut the shirt, then the jersey, then my underpants, then the jeans. She worked slowly, as if to emphasise the destruction, and looked up frequently as though to make sure that I was aware of what she was doing. One by one she reduced my clothes into a pile of frayed patchwork at her feet. The sound of the shear-blades sliding against each other made a sinister metallic sibilance in the echoing cellar. The message of that hiss, and of the dumb show that ruined my clothes, was to emphasize my vulnerability. I was naked, and I had no hope of escaping without the help of my captors. They had reduced me to a shivering, frightened, naked dependant. Each slice of the blades reminded me that I was totally at the questionable mercy of Sarah Tennyson and her companions and, as if to stress that dependence, when she was done with my clothes and the last cut scrap had fluttered down to her feet, she dropped her gaze to my shrunken groin and opened the shear-blades wide so that the light slashed off the steel in a glittering angle. I felt myself shrivel even further. She smiled, my humiliation assured and complete.

“You’re going to answer some questions,” the masked man beside Sarah Sing Tennyson said suddenly, and his voice gave me the first clue as to who my abductors were for he spoke in the sour accent of Northern Ireland, so harsh and ugly compared to the seductive cadence of the southern Irish voice. “Where’s the boat?”

I had to prevaricate. Christ, but I could not just give in! “What boat?” I asked, and then I screamed, because there was not one man behind me, but two, both of them masked like the first man, and both of them had hit me at once. I fell, and this time no one tried to hold me up, but instead the man who had asked the question kicked me, then all three were working me over, using short, sharp blows that pierced and shook and terrorized me with pain. I could control neither my bowels nor my bladder and, when they had finished, I was both weeping and filthy.

Sarah Sing Tennyson had not joined in the beating, but just watched with a half-smile on her face. The three men were all masked, all gloved, and all dressed in black. They were experts at pain and humiliation and I suspected they had not been trained by torturers, but by psychiatrists. I remembered the nameless men who had gone from Belfast to Libya to learn the modern techniques of interrogation, and I knew that I would have no choice but to tell them what they wanted to know. Of course I wanted to be brave. I wanted to emulate those men who claimed to have resisted the interrogations in the cellars of Castlereagh Police Station, but all Belfast had known that such stories were bombastic rot. They had all broken; the only difference being that some had told their secrets in awful pain and some had told them quickly to get the ordeal done.

“Stand up,” the man ordered me. There was no emotion in the voice, nothing but resigned tones suggesting that this was a man doing a routine job.

I staggered to my feet. I was weeping and moaning, because the pain was all over me like a second skin. One of the three men went to the wall and uncoiled the hose. He turned on the tap, then triggered the jet of water at me. The ice-cold soaking was not a part of their brutality, but designed to wash me down.

By the time I was clean, I was also shivering. My teeth chattered and my voice was moaning very softly.

“Be quiet!” the man next to Sarah Sing Tennyson said.

I went very quiet. The cellar stank of feces and urine.

“Let me lay down the rules of this interrogation,” the man said in his quiet, reasonable voice. “You’re going to tell us what we want to know. If you tell us, then you’ll live, and that’s a promise. If you don’t tell us, you’ll die, but you’ll suffer a lot in the dying. None of us enjoys inflicting pain, but pain has its uses. So where is the boat?”

“She’s travelling deck cargo.” My teeth were chattering and I could not finish the sentence.

“Going to Boston?”

“Yes,” I said eagerly, “that’s right, going to Boston.”

“When will it arrive?”

I hesitated, distracted by the small sounds of the two men behind me, but they were merely shifting their feet. “They didn’t give me a date, but they thought the voyage should take about six weeks!” I hurried the last words, not wanting to be hit.

“They?”

“The shippers.”

“Their name?”

“Exportatión Layetano.”

“In Barcelona?”

“Yes.”

A dozen rivulets of water trickled away from my shivering body toward the drain. There was no blood in the water. These men had hurt me, but without breaking my skin. They were experts.

“You arranged for the boat’s shipment?” The Ulster voice was curiously flat and neutral, as though he were a bored bank manager asking tedious details of a customer in order to determine whether or not a loan would be a wise investment for his bank.

“I arranged the shipment.”

“The boat’s name?”

“She used to be called Corsaire. I changed it to Rebel Lady.”

“Describe her.”

I stammered out the description: A forty-four-foot sloop, center cockpit, sugar-scoop stern, with a deep heavy keel, red anti-fouling under her bootline, white gelcoat above.

“How much gold is on board?”

“Five million dollars.”

Was there a second’s hesitation of surprise? Maybe, but then the metronome-like voice resumed. “Describe how the gold is stored aboard the boat.”

So I described the saloon’s false floor, and how the cabin sole lifted to reveal the slightly discolored fiberglass that needed to be chipped away to reveal the mix of sand and gold.

“Does the boat have registration papers?”

“Yes.”

“Well, where are they!” A hint of impatience, promising pain.

“They’re at my house.” I told the lie because I could not expose Johnny to these bastards. Then I screamed, because something thumped hard and sharp in my tender kidneys, and I was falling as another slash of pain seared down from my neck. I hit the wet concrete, whimpering.

“Get up.”

I slowly struggled up. A small, red, atavistic part of my brain counselled a sudden counter-attack, a whirling slash at the tormentors behind me, but I knew such an assault would be doomed. They were ready for me, they were fitter than me, they were better than me, and I was weakened, slow, shivering and so horribly vulnerable.

“Lies will be met with pain,” the man said in a bored voice. “The boat’s papers are with Johnny Riordan, yes?”

So they had known all along and had just been testing me. “Yes.”

“How much money did you give Riordan?”

I had almost forgotten giving Johnny any money, and I had to think quickly before anyone hit me. “About a thousand bucks.”

“Why?”

“To hire a crane to get the boat off the truck. Or in case the longshoremen at Boston need a bribe.”

“Who’s the importer?”

“I don’t know. Exportación Layetano decide that.”

“The name of your contact at Exportación Layetano?”

“Roberto Lazarraga.”

The questioner had been holding the black hood that had covered my eyes. He now tossed it to me, but I was so feeble and shaking that I muffed the catch.

“Pick it up.”

I picked it up.

“Put it on.”

I obeyed.

“Stand still. Hands at your sides!”

The blindness and my nakedness combined to make me feel horribly vulnerable. I could hear my four captors moving about in the cellar. Footsteps climbed the stairs, then came back. Something scraped on the floor, filling me with the terror of apprehension. There was silence for a few seconds, then feet banged hollowly on the wooden stairs again.

“Take the hood off,” the voice ordered, and as I did so the door at the top of the stairs slammed shut and I found myself alone. The scraps of my clothes had been taken away and the scraping sound had been merely the noise of a metal camp bed being placed by a wall. Three blankets were folded on the camp bed and a zinc bucket stood at its foot. I just had time to notice those amenities when the light went out.

I staggered to the cot bed, pulled the blankets about me, and lay down. I curled up. I was wet, cold and shaking.

God alone knows how long I stayed there. I was no weakling, but I could not fight these men. Their silence and their discipline spoke of their professionalism. I had watched an interrogation in Belfast once; sharing with Seamus Geoghegan a privileged view of some poor bastard being questioned about the betrayal of a bombing mission. The questioners wanted the name of the boy’s contact in the security forces and, in their desperate attempts to get it, had beaten the lad into a raw, red, sodden horror. The interrogators had argued amongst themselves as they worked, daring each other to inflict more hurt, accusing each other of being counter-productive, and finally they had abandoned their attempts with nothing to show for their work but blood-bubbling denials from the crippled twenty-year-old. He had lost one eye, most of his teeth and was sheeted with blood. He never recovered his full sight, and would never again walk without a dipping limp, and the IRA later learned it was the boy’s sister who had telephoned the security forces. By then she had moved to England and had married her soldier lover, while her lacerated, dribbling, stammering brother still declared his pathetic allegiance to the Provisional IRA and their heroic freedom fighters.

But my questioners were different. This team had been trained to give pain in measured doses and to reward answers by granting freedom from that pain. This team worked as a disciplined unit, without hesitation and without any need to speak. The only words used were those addressed to me, and those I offered back. There was no fuss or noise to distract me from the main business of the proceedings, which was to elicit what poor Gillespie had so signally failed to discover; the whereabouts of the gold.

But their very knowledge of the gold’s existence told me who they were. They believed that their anonymity conferred menace, and so it did, but as I lay in the shivering dark I retained enough sense to realize that the only people who knew about the gold were those who had dispatched it. The CIA did not know, the Brits did not know, only the IRA and the Libyans and the Iraqis knew.

So either I was in the hands of il Hayaween’s men or in the grip of the Provisionals, and the evidence was overwhelming that it was the latter. No Palestinian or Libyan terrorist would dare try to enter the United States while the war in the Gulf raged, but any number of Irish could have come here. I had defied Michael Herlihy, and now he was striking back. I had underestimated him and I had misunderstood Sarah Sing Tennyson. She had to be a terrorist groupie, a hanger-on to the movement. I knew she was an acquaintance of my brother-in-law, who in turn was associated with Herlihy, which tied her in neatly with the Provos. Had she been left in my house expressly to raise the alarm when I came home? And she had met Johnny, which would explain their knowledge of his involvement. God, I thought, but let these bastards spare Johnny. And what had they done to Kathleen? Or was she a part of it? Had she been sent to lure me out of the house while they prepared their ambush? That thought was the worst, the last straw of despair, yet why should I be surprised? I had lied to her in Belgium, so what possible consideration did Kathleen owe me?

I shuddered in the dark. I had taken a risk, a vast risk, five million dollars’ worth of risk, and it had left me in the hands of the Provisionals’ trained interrogators. Professionally trained interrogators. Colonel Qaddafi had seen to that; dreaming of the days when his pet Irishmen would make some Englishman or Scotsman or Welshman shriek in a Belfast cellar in repayment for the American bombers screaming over Tripoli.

I shivered under the thin blankets. By staying very still I could somehow hide from the pain. A small, brave voice nagged me to struggle off the camp bed and crawl up the wooden stairs to see if the door at the top would open, but I did not want to move, nor draw any attention to myself. I just wanted to huddle under the blanket. I wanted to shudder by myself in the dark womb of the cellar listening to the heartlike rhythm of the sea.

My God, I thought, but it was the sea I could hear. It was not the thunder of huge ocean rollers, but the susurration of smaller waves breaking on a soft beach which suggested I was held in a house either close to Nantucket Sound or on Cape Cod Bay. Weymouth, perhaps? The town, south of Boston and nicknamed the Irish Riviera, would be a good place for a Provisional IRA interrogation team to hide.

And the fact that this team was from the Provisionals was good for me. I did not for one moment believe my questioner’s seemingly earnest promise that I would live if I told the truth. Every interrogator holds out that hope, but when these people heard my truth they would let me live, simply because they would not dare kill me. They thought I was a renegade and thief, and they were about to discover I was something far more dangerous; a legitimate American agent.

And if I was wrong, then my best hope lay in my trust that professionals like these did not inflict a slow death, but would want to be rid of me quickly.

And so I lay in the dark, shivering, trying to remember prayers.

The door at the top of the stairs crashed open. There was no light. I shouted, expecting pain, still half asleep. I had been dreaming of Roisin. “Hood on! Now!” the Northern Irish voice shouted from the stairhead. “Put it on! Put it on! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” Feet clattered on the stairtreads. “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!”

I frantically fumbled for the black hood, discovering it on the floor beside the cot. I pulled it on.

“Stand up! Move! Move! Move!”

I scrambled in agony off the cot. Light suffused the black weave of the hood.

More footsteps hurried loudly down the stairs. I thought I detected all four of my tormentors, but I could not be certain. I wondered how long I had been asleep. I sensed it was now nighttime, but I guessed my sensations were quite useless as a gauge of the passing hours.

“Drop the blanket,” the voice snapped.

I dropped it.

“Step forward. Stop there! Hood off.”

I pulled the hood off, blinking in the light.

“Hands to your side!”

I obeyed, exposing my vulnerable nakedness. As before the unmasked Sarah Sing Tennyson faced me while, to her left, my questioner stood in his sinister head-to-foot black. I guessed the other two men had taken their positions behind me.

“What was the purpose of the five million dollars?”

“To buy Stingers.” My speech was thick with sleep.

“How many Stingers?”

“Fifty-three,” I answered. They knew the answers, but they did not know I knew who they were and so they would ask me questions to which they knew the answers just to keep me from guessing their identity. A game of mazes and mirrors. Of undoing knots while blindfolded.

“Who was selling the missiles?”

“A Cuban consortium in Miami.”

“Describe the Cubans.”

I had little to tell, but did my best.

“The missiles were meant for Ulster?”

“Yes.”

“Was the trade arranged in America or Ireland?” The Ulster accent was toneless, suggesting that the questioning would go on and on and that nothing I could do would stop it. It was all a part of the well-planned interrogatory technique. They wanted me to feel I was trapped in an unstoppable process that was beyond the control of anyone, and that the only way out was to give the machine what it wanted; the truth.

“Both, I think.”

“Explain.”

I assumed the questioner was running over known ground to test my responses and lull my suspicions as he moved imperceptibly toward the questions he really wanted answered. I told him about Brendan Flynn and Michael Herlihy, and even about little Marty Doyle. I described Shafiq’s part in the arrangements, and how il Hayaween had taken over the mission. I admitted that I had deliberately broken il Hayaween’s instructions by renaming Corsaire and shipping her to America as deck cargo.

“Why did you break those instructions?”

“Because I wanted to return to America quickly to report on the missile sale to my superiors.”

“Your superiors?” Was there a hint of puzzlement in my interrogator’s voice? “Explain.”

I kept my voice dull and listless. “Van Stryker and his people.”

“Who is van Stryker?”

“CIA, Department of Counter-Terrorism.” I inserted an edge of desperation in my voice, as though I was aware of revealing things that were truly secret and sensitively dangerous.

There was a measurable pause, and a detectable uncertainty when my interrogator spoke again. “You’re CIA?”

A half-second of hesitation as though I was reluctant to answer, then, “Yes.”

“Since when?”

“Since 1977.”

I could see Sarah Sing Tennyson’s reaction clearly enough. Till now she had done nothing but keep a supercilious and careless expression, but now there was a genuine worry on her face.

“Describe your mission in the CIA.” I sensed my interrogator was off his script. He was winging it, wondering where my surprising admissions would lead.

“To penetrate Middle Eastern terrorist groups.” I spoke dully, mouthing the words I had rehearsed in the cellar’s creeping dark. “I was instructed to use the credentials of IRA membership as an introduction to such groups.”

“The CIA ordered you to join the IRA?”

“Yes.”

“How were you to achieve that?”

“I was already collecting money for Ireland and sending weapons from Boston, so the IRA knew of me and trusted me.”

“How did the CIA discover you?”

“I was arrested for running drugs into Florida.”

“And the CIA ordered you to spy on the IRA?”

“No. They didn’t need me for that.”

Silence. There was a soft explosion nearby, making me jump, before I realized that the noise had come from an adjoining cellar in which a heating boiler had just ignited with a thump of expanding gases.

“Why would the CIA not be interested in the IRA?”

“I’m sure they are, but I was ordered to concentrate on the Middle Eastern groups, and my standing with those groups depended on my being totally trusted by the Provos, so I was ordered not to risk that trust by informing on them.” This was the story that Roisin had told in Hasbaiya, and which had so terrified the Palestinians. Now, four years later, I was using its truth for my survival.

“Have you reported back to van Stryker?” the interrogator asked.

“Yes.”

“When?”

“The whole of last month. I was being debriefed in the Pocono Mountains.”

“So van Stryker will collect the boat from Boston.”

I hesitated, and a foot shifted menacingly behind me. “No!”

“Why not?”

“Because I was going to collect it.”

“You planned to steal the money?” My questioner sounded amused.

“Yes.”

“Did you tell van Stryker about the boat at all?”

“No. I just told him that money was being telexed from Europe.”

“And how much money does van Stryker think is involved?”

“One and a half million, of which a half-million has been paid.”

“Is Herlihy looking for the boat?”

“Of course he is.”

“Put the hood on.”

They had left me holding the black bag which I now pulled obediently over my face. I heard them go upstairs and the cellar door scrape shut. I dragged the hood off my head, feeling a sudden exultation. I had worried them! I had unbalanced them! I had unbalanced them so much that on this visit they had not laid a finger on me. The truth was making me free. It had changed the script and altered their reality!

I turned to see a paper bag had been left on the floor by my bed. The bag contained a cold cheeseburger in a styro-foam container along with a cardboard cup of tepid coffee. I ate hungrily. The light had been left on and I could see that the cellar seemed to have been cleared out recently; there were dust-free spaces on the floors and walls that suggested boxes and furniture had been stored down here and had recently been taken away to make room for my interrogation.

Then, suddenly, the lights went out. In the next-door cellar the dull roar of the boiler was switched off, to be replaced by the softer sound of the sea. I lay down. I waited. I dared to think I had won. I dared to think I might live. I dared to feel hope.

I stayed in the cellar for days. I lost track of the time. I tried to keep a tally by scratching marks on the wall by my cot, but the meals came irregularly and my sleep periods were broken by sudden insistent demands that I put the hood on, stand up, stand still, answer, and so I had no regular measure by which to judge the passage of the days.

At first I had pissed blood in my urine, but the blood stopped coming as the days passed and I received no more beatings. The questions went on, mostly now about my debriefing and just what I had told the CIA about the IRA. They even asked me about men I had never mentioned to Gillespie, and I hid nothing from them for there was always the threat of violence behind the questioning, but even so I knew I had driven a deep wedge to widen the great chasm of loyalties that besieged the Provisional IRA. The Provos, like all terrorist organizations, wanted the respectability of external support and though like every other leftist guerrilla movement they could count on the endorsement of socialist academics and liberal churchmen, they wanted more, much more. The twin endorsements that the Provos craved were those of America and the Middle East; that of America because it endowed them with respectability, and that of the Middle East because it provided them with their most lethal toys; but their quandary was that their two supporters hated each other, which made it even more important that each should be decried to the other. The Provos never boasted of their Libyan connections to the Americans, but rather painted that connection as a sporadic, unwanted and unimportant acquaintanceship, while to the Libyans, who were now their main sponsors, they declared that the donations of the American-Irish were the gifts of fools who did not understand the Marxist imperatives of revolution, but who could nevertheless be constantly gulled into supporting Libyan aims.

My interrogators, who had begun by assuming I was a traitor to the Provisionals, had now learned I was something far more dangerous, an agent of the United States, and that to kill me might risk the enmity of the United States. There was a chance my death could be publicized, provoking a dangerous drop in financial support from America. Thus, in fear of that exposure, they were treating me with a delicate caution. They had already abandoned hurting me and, as the days passed, they brought me better food, though never served with metal knives and forks or on china plates that could be broken to make a weapon. I drank from the garden hose, or else from the cardboard cups of coffee. I was given a pillow and thicker blankets, and my interrogators even let me ask a question of them without rewarding me with pain. What happened, I asked them, to the girl who had been with me when they abducted me?

“Nothing. She merely agreed to help us by taking you away from the house while we set up your reception committee.”

“She’s with you?” I could not hide my disappointment.

“Of course, and why shouldn’t she be, considering who her sister was? Tell us about Roisin, now.”

So I told the wretched story once again, and as I told it I thought what a fool Kathleen had made of me and I almost blushed when I remembered the hopes I had dared to make in my mind as we walked back from the beach. I had seen her as Roisin’s replacement and all the time Kathleen had been a part of Michael Herlihy’s attempt to get even with me. Christ, I thought, but how I had underestimated that garbage lawyer!

The days passed. My initial euphoria at having changed the rules of the interrogation gave way to a quiet despair. I might be spared the pain, but I became convinced that the easiest way the Provos could dispose of any possible embarrassment was by killing me secretly, and thus the best I could hope for was a swift bullet in the back of my skull. I had long given up any hope of opening the locked door at the top of the cellar steps. I had explored that option only to discover that the door was made from thick pieces of timber, and my only house-breaking equipment was the feeble legs of the camping cot that would have buckled under the smallest strain.

So I waited. My mind became numb. I tried to exercise, but there seemed such small hope of continued living that I invariably abandoned my efforts and crawled back to the small warmth of the cot and its blankets. I began to welcome the noisy irruption of my interrogators because talking to them was at least better than staring at the stone cellar walls or gazing into the impenetrable blackness when the light was off. They even began to let me talk sitting on the cot, wrapped in the blankets. My masked questioner stayed for hours one day, talking of Belfast and its familiar streets and the people we had both known and for a time that day I felt a real warm bond with the man because of the love we shared for that decried, battered and rain-sodden city.

Then came a day, or at least a long period, when I was awake and listening alternately to the sea and the central heating boiler and during which no one came to question me. The house, it seemed, was oddly silent. The cellar light was off.

I rolled off the cot and crouched on the floor. There was something unusual, something unsettling in the silence. I had become accustomed to the small sounds of the house; the squeak of a door, the scrape of a foot, the chink of metal against a plate, the distant noise of a toilet flushing; but now there was just a profound silence in which, with a horrid trepidation, I edged my way to the stairs and then climbed slowly upwards. I was naked and the small hairs on my arms and legs prickled. I had goose-bumps.

I reached the top step. I stopped there, listening, but there was nothing to be heard. I groped for the door lever, pressed it down and, to my astonishment, the door swung easily open.

Light flooded into the cellar. It was a dim light, like daylight enshrouded by curtains.

I stepped out of the door to find myself in a long, beautifully furnished and deeply carpeted hallway. A brass chandelier hung in the center of the hallway, while a balustraded staircase curved away to my left. There was a lovely oil painting of a barquentine on one wall and a nineteenth-century portrait of a man dressed in a high wing collar hanging on the opposite wall. The wallpaper was a Chinese design showing birds of paradise among leafy fronds. Beside the front door was a wind gauge that flickered as an anemometer on the house roof gusted in the breeze. The only incongruous feature of the elegant entrance hall was a stack of boxes and bikes piled against a washer and a dryer; all the things, I guessed, that had been taken from the cellar to make space for my bare prison.

To my right an open door led into a vast airy kitchen, tiled white, with a massive fridge humming in one corner. Copper pans hung from a steel rack. Two paper plates had been discarded on a work-top along with a pot of cold coffee. I went back into the hallway, selected a random door and found myself inside a lavishly appointed living room. The room was hung with delicate watercolors, the sofas were deep and soft while the occasional tables gleamed with the burnish of ancient polished wood. Old magazines lay discarded on the tables and, more incongruously, a pile of empty hamburger boxes was stacked in the marble fireplace, suggesting my kidnappers had sometimes eaten in this lavish room. The shuttered windows were framed by plush drapes of antique tapestry corded with red velvet. An old-fashioned brass-tubed spyglass stood on an elegant tripod before one of the windows. I crossed the deep-carpeted room and pulled back the wooden shutters.

“Christ!” I was suddenly, wonderfully dazzled by the reflection of a full winter sun streaming from a glittering winter sea. This house, so lavish and rich and huge, was built on a mound almost at the sea’s edge. The small waves flopped tiredly on to a private beach not twenty paces from my window. There was a tarpaulin-covered swimming pool to my left, a balustraded timber deck in front of me, and a boathouse and an ice-slicked private dock to my right. A yacht was berthed at the dock while out to sea there was a red buoy with a number 9 painted on its flank. I guessed I was in one of the big estates near Hyannisport or Centerville, or perhaps I was further west in one of the great beach-houses of Osterville.

Then I forgot all that speculation for I had suddenly noticed what name was painted on the sugar-scoop stern of the yacht berthed at the private dock.

I had last seen her in Barcelona, stowed safe in an open-topped container. Before that, in a lumbering winter sea, I had committed murder in her saloon. Now she was here, docile and tame, in the deep winter’s sun.

She was the Rebel Lady.

I stumbled upstairs, flinging open closet doors as I searched for clothes. In the master bedroom, where the rumpled sheets suggested at least one of my interrogators had slept, I found a walk-in wardrobe filled with summer clothes. There were checked trousers, and trousers embroidered with spouting whales, and trousers bright with golfing motifs, and three pairs of trousers printed with emerald shamrocks, but at the back of the closet I found a plain, undecorated pair of jeans which fitted me well enough. I pulled on a shirt decorated with a polo player, a white sweater that purported to be the livery of an English cricket club, and a pair of blue and white boat shoes. There was a slicker in the wardrobe. I grabbed it and ran downstairs.

Then, before going out to explore Rebel Lady, I spotted a telephone on the kitchen wall.

For a second I hesitated, torn between my desire to search the boat and my worries about Johnny, then I picked up the phone and punched in his number. I could scarcely believe that the phone worked, but suddenly it rang and Johnny himself answered and I felt a great wash of relief pour through me. “Oh, Christ,” I said, and slid down the wall to sit on the tiled kitchen floor.

“Paulie?” Johnny’s voice was tentative, worried.

I was crying with sheer relief. “Johnny? Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right. I’ve been trying to reach you for two weeks!”

“Two weeks?” I gazed around the kitchen. My mind was in slow gear, stumbling and lurching. “What day is it, Johnny?”

He paused. “Are you drunk, Paulie?”

“Tell me. Please.”

“Sunday.”

“Christ,” I said. “Who’s winning the war?”

“That finished days ago! It was a walkover.” Johnny paused. “What the hell’s happened to you, Paulie?”

“Did someone come for the boat papers?” I asked him.

“The girl, of course. You know? The pretty Chinese girl?” He chuckled. “You dog.”

I climbed to my feet and leaned my forehead on the cold window glass and stared out at the berthed yacht. “She told you that we were lovers?” I guessed that was what his chuckle meant.

“I can’t blame you. She’s real hot one.” Johnny must have sensed that something was wrong, for his tone suddenly changed. “Are you saying you didn’t send her?”

“In a way I did.” Not that it mattered now, I thought. The main thing was that the bastards had not snatched Johnny and given him the treatment in some raw cellar.

“Are you OK, Paulie?” Johnny asked.

“Not really.”

“So where the hell are you?”

“Big house, I’m guessing it’s somewhere on the Cape shore of Nantucket Sound. Does a red buoy with a number nine mean anything?”

“Not off the top of my head.”

“Hold on, Johnny.” I had spotted a pile of junk mail that someone must have collected from the mail-box and piled indiscriminately on a work surface.

I pulled the top piece toward me and saw it was addressed to “The Occupier.” I read the address to Johnny, who whistled. “You’re keeping rich company. Centerville, eh? That number nine buoy must mark the Spindle Rock. I’ll come and get you in the truck. Be there in forty-five minutes, OK?”

I put the phone down, pulled on the slicker, and tugged open the kitchen door. I saw that the alarm system which should have been triggered by the door’s opening had been ripped out. I pulled the thin slicker round my shoulders and stepped into the brisk and freezing wind. I shivered as I walked gingerly along the frozen path to the private dock which had pilings fringed with thick ruffs of ice left by the falling tide. A gull screamed a protest as I approached the dock, then flapped slowly away across the glittering sea. I paused beside the boathouse, scrubbed frost from a window pane, then peered inside to see a beautiful speedboat suspended on slings above the frozen water. The sleek boat’s name was painted clear down her flank in huge green letters, Quick Colleen. She had a pair of monstrous two-hundred-horsepower engines at her stern, making her into a pretty, overpowered toy for the summer; a fitting accessory to this pretty, overpriced summer home that my captors had used as their temporary base. I walked on to where Rebel Lady fretted at her lines.

Those docklines, like the yacht’s rigging, were thick with ice. The wind stirred Rebel Lady, jarring her against her frozen ropes and quivering her long hull. I stepped cautiously down into her cockpit and found that her companionway was unlocked. I pulled the boards free, slid back her main hatch, and ducked inside out of the wind.

To find the gold was gone. I had not really expected anything else, but a mad optimism had lurked at the back of my thoughts ever since I had glimpsed Rebel Lady at the wintry dock.

The saloon was a shambles. My interrogators had taken axes to the false floor, ripping and tearing away the fiberglass to expose the gold beneath. Then they had taken my hoard. Five million dollars’ worth of gold, all gone, or all but one krugerrand that I found lost in a heap of sand and fiberglass chippings. I picked the coin up, spun it on my palm, then pushed it into a pocket as a souvenir of a wasted voyage. I thought I saw another coin glinting in the rubble, but when I cleared the sand and shreds aside I saw it was just the shiny head of one of the keel-bolts.

I went back to the cockpit. My interrogators had done well. They had got exactly what they wanted. The gold would pay for the Stingers, and I did not doubt that some of the Stingers would stay in America to be used for Saddam Hussein’s revenge against the United States. That revenge was the true purpose of il Hayaween’s operation. The Brits would lose some helicopters over South Armagh, but the real targets were the great lumbering wide-body passenger jets struggling up from American airports with their cargoes of innocence.

I climbed back to the dock and walked slowly back toward the house.

Then I stopped because I heard a car’s tires grating on the gravel drive. Voices sounded happy and loud. “Let’s use the back door!”

There was nowhere to hide, so I stayed still.

First around the corner was a pretty slim young woman in a long fur coat. She was running and her breath was misting in the cold air. She had golden hair, a wide mouth and blue eyes. She saw me and suddenly stopped. “Darling?” She was not speaking to me, but to Congressman Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third who followed the woman around the side of the house. He just stopped and gaped at me.

Then two men appeared. One was the Congressman’s waspish aide, Robert Stitch, the other was Michael Herlihy.

Congressman O’Shaughnessy still gaped at me, but Stitch was much quicker on the uptake. “Shall I call the police, Congressman?”

“I wouldn’t, Congressman, I really wouldn’t,” I advised Tommy the Turd.

The Congressman suddenly recognized me. “You’re Shannon, isn’t that right?”

“Shanahan,” I corrected him, “Paul Shanahan.”

“This is my wife, Duffy.” Tommy, playing as usual without his full deck, resorted to his inbred courtesy.

The pretty Duffy smiled at me. “Hello.”

“You already know Mr. Herlihy?” O’Shaughnessy inquired of me as though this was a pleasant meeting in his golf club. “Mr. Herlihy is the Treasurer of my Re-election Campaign Committee.”

I ignored Herlihy. “Nice house, Congressman.” I nodded at the huge mansion.

“Thank you,” he said happily. “Really, thank you.”

“Just what the hell are you doing here?” Stitch intervened in the pleasantries.

“Do we really need to have this conversation in the yard?” Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, who looked horribly wasted on the Congressman, asked plaintively. “I’m freezing!”

Herlihy walked toward me as Tommy the Turd escorted the delicious Duffy into the house. “What are you doing here, Shanahan?” Herlihy spat the question.

“There’s your boat,” I pointed at Rebel Lady. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“That?” He stared astonished at the yacht.

“That! You bastard!” I grabbed him by the collar of his coat, ran him along the dock and pushed him down into the cockpit. “There! Look! That was where your precious money was!”

A gust of wind shook the boat, and a sluggish wave heaved up the wounded hull and Michael Herlihy immediately paled, swore, and dived for the gunwale where, with a gut-heaving wrench, he voided his expensive brunch into the sea. “Oh, God,” he groaned, “oh, God.” The very smallest movement of Rebel Lady’s wind-stirred hull had instantly provoked his chronic seasickness. “Oh, my God,” he said again, and leaned over the sea to throw up once more.

I left him there. “Bastard,” I shouted at him, then stalked away.

Stitch moved to confront me. “Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the police?” he asked me nastily.

“Yes,” I said. “Try explaining to the police why the Congressman allowed his cellar to be used by a Provisional IRA hit squad for the last two weeks.”

“He did what?” He backed away from me, not sure I was telling the truth, then decided that he had better employ some quick damage control just in case I was. “It isn’t true! We’ve been researching the trade deal in Mexico. We haven’t been here.” He was scenting an appalling scandal and was already rehearsing the excuses that would leave his Congressman unscathed.

“Just bugger away off,” I told him.

“Who on earth moved the cellar things into the hall?” I heard the delectable Duffy O’Shaughnessy ask from inside the house. Robert Stitch, fearing some new mischief, ran through the open kitchen door, as Michael Herlihy, his face as white as the ice-slicked rigging, managed to clamber up from Rebel Lady’s cockpit on to the dock’s planking. I paused at the corner of the house and watched as Michael staggered feebly away from the sea. He was reeling. I had forgotten just what a terrible affliction his seasickness was.

“Herlihy!” I called.

He looked at me, but said nothing.

I fished the single gold coin from my pocket. “Here’s the rest of your money, you bastard.” I tossed it to him.

He let the bright coin fall and roll along the path. “Where are you going?” he called as I turned and walked away.

“Home. And leave me alone, you hear me?”

I walked down the long gravel drive and out through the high fence to the road. Johnny arrived twenty minutes later and we drove away.

Miraculously, I was alive.

“WHO STRUGGLES BY IN THAT LITTLE HOUSE?” JOHNNY asked as we drove away from the high-hedged mansion on the beach.

“House Representative Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third.”

“Tommy the Turd lives there!” Johnny sounded surprised, though he must have known that Tommy’s only qualification for high office was his inordinate wealth.

“And don’t forget the Back Bay mansion,” I said, “or the house in Georgetown, or the ski-lodge in Aspen.”

“I’d like someone to tell me one day,” Johnny said sourly, “why the bastards who want to put up my taxes are always so rich.” I offered no response and he shot me a sympathetic look. “So what happened to you back there?”

“I screwed up.”

“Meaning?”

“I thought I was cleverer than I am.” I hoped that evasion would suffice, but Johnny deserved better from me. “I guess I was falling out with the IRA.”

“You shouldn’t have had anything to do with them in the first place.”

“They have a good cause,” I said mildly.

“If it’s that good,” he demanded flatly, “then why do they need to murder for it? No one bombs people to solve world hunger. No one kills to save a kid from leukaemia, and those are good causes.”

“I won’t argue.”

“And the gold?”

“All gone.”

He laughed. To Johnny the only rewards worth having were those that had taken hard work, the rest was dishonest at worst and meretricious at best. Johnny and his kind were the backbone of America, the good heart of an honest country that somehow contrived to put men like Tommy the Turd into Congress. “You want the money back you gave me?” Johnny asked me. “I haven’t spent it.”

“Keep it,” I said. Christ, I thought, but I would have to get a job now. I would have to join the nine-to-five. I would have to become like the rest of the world, and that was one of the great terrors of the secret world, because belonging to a sanctioned organization of killers gave a man the feeling of being special, of being apart, of being above the petty cares and constricting rules that hampered other people, but now, after years of arrogance, I would have to earn my bread. I wondered how much money van Stryker planned to give me; not enough, I suspected, to pay for the years of lotus-eating idleness I had planned beside the Cape Cod waters. I wondered what the yacht-delivery business was like in the States and supposed it mainly consisted of taking plastic power boats up and down the Intracoastal Waterway either side of winter. I doubted it would be easy to break into such a business, but what else was I good for? “I had dreams of buying a tuna boat with that gold,” I confessed to Johnny. “Now I doubt I could even afford a can of tuna.”

He chuckled. “You don’t want a tuna boat. There are too many of them already, and they’re all using airplanes as spotters. When the fish are running it’s like the Battle of Midway out there. Ten years ago you could harpoon a big fish every week, but now you’re lucky if you see a decent sized fish all summer.”

Another dream dead, I thought, and I leaned my head on the window at the back of the cab. So what was I going to do? Had the last fourteen years been for nothing? “Is there much of a market for boat surveying?” I asked Johnny.

“Not that I know of.” Johnny drove placidly on. “But young Ernie Marriott’s met a girl in New Bedford, which means I need a crewman every so often.”

“Are you offering me a job?”

“I’m offering you freezing hands, a wet ass, hard nights, and maybe the chance of a penny or two if the government lets us catch a fish when we’re not filling in forms.”

“You’re on,” I said.

“But it isn’t a career,” Johnny warned me. “I can hardly keep my own family in bread. Still, it’s better than working in one of these places, right?” He waved his hand at a crazy-golf park which, though boarded up for the winter, still betrayed a drab gaudiness designed to bring in the summer customers. We were driving east on Route 18, the Cape’s southern artery and a showplace of shoddy businesses and cheap motels; proof that when mankind arrives in paradise he will down the glory of the angels with neon signs and honkytonk bars. “Another few years,” Johnny grumbled, “and this will all look like Florida.” He brooded on that sorry fate for a few miles, then turned a frown on me. “Did you really tell Sarah Tennyson to fetch the boat for you?”

I shook my head. “She lied to you, but I guess it doesn’t matter.”

“So there was nothing between you two?”

“Me and that ballbreaker? You’ve got to be joking.”

He laughed. “She was convincing to me. So who the hell was she?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, Johnny. She’s probably a terrorist groupie. Some girls get their kicks by hanging around killers.” And did that include Kathleen Donovan? God, that hurt, that she had set me up for the snatch.

“So she isn’t an artist?” Johnny sounded disappointed.

“Not with paint,” I said, “but I think the Provos put her in my house to act as a tripwire.” And she had played that part so cleverly! By acting shocked and being tough when I returned she had convinced me that she was an innocent bystander. Christ, I thought, but I had even asked Gillespie to warn her of trouble, and she was a part of that trouble all along.

“So did she get the gold?” Johnny asked.

“The Provos did. It was meant for them anyway.”

He shook his head in disapproval, then, being Johnny, he found a silver lining on the cloud. “But at least you got the electricity put into the house, didn’t you?”

“But why?” I asked that question aloud, suddenly struck by an incongruity. Sarah Sing Tennyson had been in my house three years already. That made no sense, not if she had merely been placed there as a tripwire for my return—for who could have foreseen the Gulf War three years ago?

“Why what?” Johnny asked.

“God knows.” I was suddenly disgusted with myself and with everything I had done in the last few weeks. What did it matter whether the girl had been in my house three months or three years? I had played the game and lost. It was over.

I stayed that night with Johnny, and next day went home and began clearing out my house. I took Sarah Tennyson’s daubs, piled them on a patch of sandy ground beyond the deck, splashed them with gasoline and slung a match at them. The oil paint burned well, making lovely colors in its flames as the black smoke plumed thin across the marshes.

I took the dust-sheet off the oak floor, then sanded and waxed the boards. I scrubbed the kitchen, dusted the stairways, and aired the bedrooms. I had lost the Colt .45 when I was snatched, but I found the carbine under the bed. I hid it away, then replaced the broken kitchen window and put new locks on the doors. When a telephone bill arrived addressed to Ms. Sing Tennyson I sent it to Herlihy’s law office, then had the telephone disconnected. I neither wanted it, nor could afford it.

I lived spare. What small supplies I needed I could buy every day at the convenience store. On the days when the tides were slack I went trawling for cod with Johnny and he paid me wages from the pile of money I had given him for Rebel Lady. I used a chunk of my own cash to buy myself a cheap pick-up truck and debated whether I should equip it with a golden retriever or a black labrador. I was one of at least a hundred people who applied for a mechanic’s job at an Upper Cape marina, but at forty I was reckoned too old for the position. My remaining cache of money dwindled and it was painful to remember that, just a year ago, I had been sole proprietor of Nordsee Yacht Delivery, Services and Surveying, with a handy cash flow and profit enough for my needs if not for those of the unlamented Sophie. Now, thanks to my own greed, I was down to my last few bucks, though I still owned the renamed Roisin in Ireland and, come the spring’s revival in the boat market, I decided I would order her sold and use the money to eke out a few more months on the Cape.

One fine March morning Sergeant Ted Nickerson, the policeman who had rescued me from Sarah Sing Tennyson’s ammonia on the night of my return to the Cape, dropped by the house. “Just keeping an eye on the place,” he explained as he climbed out of his cruiser. “So you’re home for good now, Paul?”

“Yes.”

“The CIA finished with you?”

“Ask them, Ted.” I was not feeling sociable.

“But you’re OK, Paul?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

Nickerson walked to the edge of the drive and stared southward across the bay. He noticed the remnants of the bonfire on which I had burned Sarah Tennyson’s canvases. “I could probably arrest you for lighting that fire. You must have broken at least a dozen federal regulations, not to mention the state laws and the national park rules and the town ordinances.” He spat in disgust. “A man can’t even piss over the side of his boat these days without breaking the law.” He took a cigarette from a pocket and shielded the lighter with his free hand. “We got a telephone call a while back. From a young lady called Kathleen Donovan. She was kind of distressed. Said she thought you were being kidnapped. Were you?”

“Yes,” I said, but did not add that she had been a part of it.

“But we had orders not to interfere with you. If anything happened we were to talk to a guy in the Washington office of the FBI. So we did, and he seemed to think you could look after yourself. And if you’re here now then I guess he was right?”

“I guess so, too.” The FBI, I surmised, had acted for the CIA who had sensibly not wanted a small-town police force to tangle with international terrorists. But I also noted that neither the CIA nor the FBI had seemed unduly worried by my disappearance. No one had inquired about me since, evidently no one had looked for me while I was gone, and I could only surmise that van Stryker or Gillespie considered that I deserved whatever mischief came my way. I had been useful to them, now I was useless and discarded.

“But I thought you ought to know about the young lady,” Ted went on, “especially as she sounded kind of upset. She particularly wanted me to let her know if you were OK.” He took a scrap of paper from a pocket. “That’s her phone number. Of course I could give her a call myself, but if you want to speak to her then you’ll be saving the police department the price of a long-distance phone call.” Nickerson held out the piece of paper.

I took it. “Thanks, Ted.”

“Just being neighborly, Paul.” He hesitated. “I suppose you’re not going to tell me what this is all about?”

“One day, maybe.”

“Yeah, and maybe one day the Red Sox will win the Series.” He climbed into his car and wound down the window. “The Goddamn town wants to declare police cars a public facility and therefore smoke free. Fuck ’em, I say.” He waved his cigarette at me, reversed the car, then drove away.

I stared at the piece of paper. It felt like one last chance. Or, of course, it could be another trap to snare a fool, just as Kathleen’s last visit had been, but my future was not so golden that I needed to take care of it and so I drove the truck up to the main road and, with my last few quarters, placed a call to Maryland.

Kathleen Donovan lived in a small house on the ragged outskirts of a one-street country town. The house had two storeys, a wide verandah, and a windbreak of scrub pine. Behind it was a meadow with an old tobacco drying shed decaying in its center. “None of it’s mine,” she said. “I just rent it.”

“It’s nice,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster.

“Not when the wind’s in the south. Then you can smell the chicken farm beyond the swamp.” She laughed suddenly, knowing I had lied out of politeness. “I just wanted to get away from Baltimore.”

“To be near your folks?”

She shook her head. “To get away from them. I spend three or four nights a week up there, and it’s good to get away. It’s real nice here in spring, you know, when the dogwood is out?”

“And in summer?”

“Hot. Too hot.” She sounded resigned. “I don’t know. I guess I won’t renew the lease. This was an experiment. I always wanted to live in the country, and I thought once David and I were divorced that it would be a real good time to do it, but it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Not one of my carrots came up, not one! And the deer ate all the lettuce and the bean bushes had bugs and there were worms in the tomatoes.”

“That’s why God made supermarkets.”

She laughed. Then looked up at me. “I’m sorry.”

“Why?” We were standing beside my pick-up. I had only just arrived, and we were both feeling awkward, and I guessed she was regretting her impulsive agreement to let me visit her. I was nervous, and the ten-hour drive from Cape Cod had given me too much time to anticipate the failure of this meeting. I wanted to fall in love with Kathleen, maybe I had half convinced myself that I was already in love with her, and I had even half convinced myself that it was not simply because she was her sister’s ghost. I had not been truthful about my reasons for visiting, but instead had told her I had business in Washington and could I perhaps take the chance of dropping by? She had hesitated, then agreed, and now I asked her once more why she was apologizing to me. “Why?”

“For agreeing to help those people. Who were they?”

“You didn’t know them?” I asked.

“Not really.” She turned away. “That’s why you came, right? To find out about them?”

“Yes,” I lied. I had come because I wanted to resurrect Roisin in her sister.

“You want to walk?” Kathleen asked.

“Sure.”

“If you go five miles down that track you come to the Chesapeake Bay.” She pointed eastwards. “I had this idea that in summer I’d bike down there and have lazy days on the water.”

“You and a million mosquitoes, right?”

She nodded. “And the ticks.” She led me to the road and we walked slowly toward the small town. The landscape was very flat, accentuating the sky and reminding me of Flanders. “It was the girl who came to me, Sarah Sing Tennyson?” Kathleen said. “She said you’d thrown her out of the house, and that she wanted to get inside to rescue her paintings, and that if I took you for a walk then she knew she’d be safe.” Kathleen blushed slightly. “She was very persuasive.”

“I can imagine.” I kicked a dry pine cone ahead of me. “I wonder how she found you?”

“That was easy. You remember I hired a private detective to find out about you? Well he visited the house when she was there, and I guess he and she talked. But she never told me she was taking men with her, or that they planned to beat you up. I couldn’t believe it!” Her voice rose in innocent protest as she remembered the violence. “I phoned the police!”

“I know, thank you.”

“So what happened?”

“They locked me up for a while.”

“Who were they?”

“They were from Ireland,” I told her.

“So what happened?”

I shrugged. “They were looking for something. And when I told them where it was, they let me go.”

She looked up at me. “I felt badly. I didn’t feel badly when I agreed to help Sarah Tennyson, because I thought she was being real straight and you’d been a pig to me in Belgium and I thought I’d enjoy getting back at you. But you were different on Cape Cod.”

I walked in silence for a few paces. The bushes beside the road looked dead and dry, the meadows were pale. “I wanted to tell someone the truth,” I said, “and I’d decided to trust you.”

She nodded, then laughed as she realized that I had trusted her when she had been deceiving me, and vice versa. She bit her lip. “What fools we all are.”

“I thought that after so many years of lies it would be a change to tell the truth,” I explained, “like giving up smoking, or going off the booze.”

“And is it a change?” she asked.

“It makes life less complicated.”

“Like I thought small-town life would be, only it isn’t really less complicated, there’s just less of it. This is it.” She nodded at the main street. “Two churches, a town office, a bank, feed store, convenience store, coffee shop, and a post office. The movie house closed down, the service station moved to Route Five, but you can buy gas from Ed’s feed store if he really likes you and his son isn’t watching.”

“What’s wrong with Ed’s son?”

“He’s in the State Police and he can’t stand his dad, not since his mom told him about his dad’s fling with Mary Hammond who used to deliver the mail before Bobby Evans’s dog bit her leg and it went septic. The leg not the dog.”

“And you like living here?” I asked.

“I hate it.”

We both laughed. “And you’re too stubborn to admit you’ve made a mistake,” I challenged her, “because you’re so like Roisin.”

“Am I like Roisin?” she asked. We had stopped in the main street and were facing each other. “Am I really?”

“Yes. In looks, anyway.”

She frowned. “Does that make it hard for you?”

I hesitated, then told the truth. “Yes.”

“Don’t,” she told me. She was frowning.

“Don’t?” It seemed the world trembled on an edge, and I knew it was not going to fall my way. I had built a dizzying scaffold impossibly high and had dared to think she would want to share it with me.

“I’ve got a guy, Paul,” Kathleen said gently. “He teaches school in Frederick.”

“I didn’t mean that,” I said, but I had meant it, and she knew I had meant it, and suddenly I felt such a fool and just wanted to be out of this damn chicken town.

“He’s a good man,” she went on.

“I’m sure he is.” I felt as though my dizzying scaffold was collapsing all around me in splintering poles.

“Let’s have a coffee,” she said, and we sat in the coffee shop and she told me about her trip to Europe, and about her adventures in Dublin and Belfast, but I was not really listening. I did a good job of pretending to listen; I smiled at the right places, made intelligible comments, but inside I was desolate. I was alone. Roisin was gone for ever. I had thought she could be clawed back from the past, out of her Beka’a grave, but it was not to be.

“I hope you found out what you wanted to know,” Kathleen told me when we walked back to the truck.

“I did, thanks.”

“I guess you won’t see Sarah Sing Tennyson again?”

“I guess not.”

She put her hand on my sleeve when we reached the truck. “I’m sorry, Paul.”

Me too, I thought, me too. “Good luck with the teacher.”

“Sure. Thanks.” She smiled. “Good luck in Washington, eh?”

“Sure,” I said, “sure,” and drove back to Cape Cod.

It was past one o’clock when I reached the house. It was a dark night and the moon was hidden by high flying clouds. I was too tired to open the garage so I just left the truck on the clam-shell turnabout then walked to the kitchen door. I was weary and I was disgusted with myself. I had made a fool of myself. Dear God, I thought, but I had really believed I could fall in love with a ghost. I unlocked the door, pushed into the kitchen, and froze. I could smell tea. It was not an overpowering smell, just an aroma, but unmistakable. Tea.

My M1 carbine was hidden in the living room so, for a weapon, I pulled out my fish-filleting knife that had a wicked sharp blade and then, very slowly, I edged toward the living-room door.

It was jet dark in the house. I could hear the wind and the eternal beat of the far waves, and I could still smell tea. Had Sarah Sing Tennyson dared come back here? I had an idea that women drank more tea than men, but the Irish also drank tea, so had Herlihy sent someone to kill me after all? I reached the living-room door. For a second I contemplated turning on the light, then decided that darkness was probably a better friend than the sudden dazzle of the electric bulb.

I pressed down the door lever, crouched, and pushed the door open. It swung into the living room’s darkness. I was crouched low, the knife in my right hand. The M1 was hidden four paces from me, held by strips of duct tape to the underside of the long table. I was gauging just how long it would take me to free the weapon when a man’s voice sleepily spoke my name. “Shanahan?” The voice came from my right.

My heart leaped in panic, but I managed to stay still and to say nothing.

“Shanahan?” the man said again, and this time I heard the fear in his voice. I suspected he had been dozing and was now scared of what the darkness had brought into this cold room. “I’m going to turn a light on, OK?” the man said, and I suddenly recognized the voice of my CIA interrogator.

“Oh, Christ. Gillespie? Is that you?”

“It’s me, yeah.”

I felt the tension flood out of me. “Jesus. Did you have to wait in the dark? I could have filleted you.”

“To be honest I fell asleep. But I didn’t want to leave a light on in case you got scared and thought the ungodly were waiting for you. Which is why we left our car up at the post office.”

“How the hell did you get in?” I was still crouched, but now leaned my back against the door jamb.

“Stuart Callaghan picked the lock of the front door. He’s good at things like that.” Gillespie was moving cautiously across the dark room. He had been sitting in the old settee in the bay window and now he shuffled toward the hall door beside which Sarah Sing Tennyson had put the main light switch.

“So what the hell are you doing here?” I eased the filleting knife back into its sheath.

“We need to know about the boat, Rebel Lady? And about the money on board her.” He sounded very disapproving, as though it was bitterly unfair of me to have deceived him.

“How the hell did you find out about Rebel Lady?” I asked.

“It’s our job to find things out,” he said in a pained voice, then he found the switch and suddenly the room was filled with light. Gillespie must have been cold for he was wearing one of the yellow plastic rain-slickers that had been hanging in the hallway.

“How did you know I’d be here?” I asked him.

“The police told us you were in residence. A guy called Ted Nickerson?”

“I assume you’re not alone?” I asked him.

“No. Callaghan is upstairs. I decided one of us would wait for you while the other slept. But I didn’t mean us both to fall asleep.” He yawned, then walked to the table where he had left his cellular telephone. “You look kind of bushed,” he said. “What happened?”

“I just drove ten hours there and ten hours back to be stiff-armed by a girl. I thought I was in love with her.”

“Ah.” He seemed embarrassed by my revelation and uncertain how to respond. “I’ll just report that you’ve surfaced,” he said and picked up his telephone.

I was still leaning against the kitchen door and Gillespie was pressing a number into the telephone when he suddenly coughed and looked up at me with a puzzled expression.

At least I think he coughed. It was hard to tell because at the same time the whole room was shockingly filled with the sound of a gunshot and the splintering crash as the bullet shattered a pane of the bow window behind Gillespie. The CIA man jerked forward and I realized the cough was the sound of the air being punched from his lungs by the violence of the bullet’s strike. He staggered, but managed to stay upright. The bullet which had hit him had been deflected and weakened by the window glass. He blinked. I was taking a breath to shout at him to get down when a second bullet, fired through the broken window and thus undetected and unchecked, struck him in the back, and this time Gillespie was hurled violently forward and I saw a vent of bright blood mist the room’s center, then he crashed to the floor and I heard the air sigh from his lungs as he slid forward on the polished oak boards. His cellular telephone spun into the kitchen where it lodged against the rubbish bin.

I edged back into the kitchen shadows. Gillespie was not moving. I could just see his back. Two bullet holes. The first shot had hit him high on the left shoulder, the second must have shattered his spine. There was the faintest trickle of blood; a surprisingly small amount considering the sudden spray that had reddened the living room’s air. I could see some blood on the floor, and more on the edge of the table that concealed my carbine.

Callaghan was surely awake now? Two bullets? The sound of the gunshots was reverberating in my ears. The marksman had to be in the marshes beyond my terrace. Should I stay where I was, or try to run into the dark? Or should I try to fetch the gun hidden under the table? But to reach the gun would mean going into the light that had made Gillespie a target. I slid the knife free again. It was a feeble weapon in the face of this night’s savagery, but the best to hand.

A footstep sounded outside the house. Not by the kitchen, but beyond the bow window. Someone was on the deck. Christ, I thought, but the bastard is coming inside to make sure of his work! I edged back out of the wash of light which came from the living room and I thought I saw a shadow at the far window. A black shadow. II Hayaween? Please God, I prayed, but let this not be il Hayaween. Maybe the shadow was just my imagination? Then the shadow moved, grunted. The gunman was looking through the window to see what his bullets had accomplished, but Gillespie’s body had slid across the floor and was half hidden from the window by the heavy table.

I gripped the filleting knife’s cord-wrapped handle. The killer was working with a high velocity rifle, so what chance did I have if he came indoors? None. What had Sarah Sing Tennyson said? Never piss a psychopath off, but put him down fast. I needed an ammonia squirt, not a damned fish-gutting knife.

The shadow had gone. Maybe I should run for it. No, not with the killer still outside. So wait, I told myself, wait.

Gillespie’s hands made small scratching noises as his fingers contracted into claws. That was not a sign of life, but a natural process as the body relaxed in death. The wind at the broken window stirred the brown drapes.

Footsteps sounded sudden and loud on the steep stairs from the bedrooms. The stairs, built in the nineteenth century, were pitched far more steeply than twentieth-century building regulations would allow and the hurrying Callaghan tripped on them, stumbled, then hit his shoulder against the wall at the bottom. “Shit!” he swore, then shouted. “Mr. Gillespie? Sir? Are you there, sir?”

I sat utterly still.

“Jesus Christ!” Callaghan had come into the living room. He could not see me for I was deep in the alcove beside the stove and Callaghan was staring at Gillespie. “Jesus Christ!” he said again, and whirled round, dragging his gun from his shoulder holster. He was wearing a shirt and trousers, but no jacket, tie or shoes. He must have been sleeping upstairs, and now he had woken to nightmare.

“Jesus!” He was in shock. He saw the broken window and ran toward it, then sensed that danger might lie on the other side so ran back to the room’s center, then he changed his mind again and went back to the window where, like a cop in a movie, he flattened himself against the drapes so he could peer round the corner into the salt darkness. He stood there, muttering to himself. I knew I would have to announce my presence, but I had to do it very carefully or else he would whirl round and shoot at my voice. He was twitchy as hell. I took a breath, readied myself to speak, when suddenly he turned, gasping, and I heard the rifle fire, its sound dreadfully loud in the confines of the house, and in the very same instant Callaghan fired back and I saw the muzzle flame of his pistol bright against the dark window.

Callaghan fired a second time, but the second pull on his trigger was merely a reflexive spasm of his fingers as he went down. He had been hit. I had seen the rifle bullet jar his chest like a seismic shock, and I saw the life flit out of him in that very instant and I knew that the gunman was a marksman of genius for he had exploded Callaghan’s heart with a single lethal shot.

Callaghan slumped to the floor. His second bullet had struck the ceiling to leave a bright splinter of raw wood protruding from a beam.

There was silence.

The killer was in the house. He had come into the house for what? Probably to determine the outcome of his night’s work. So in a second or two he would turn over Gillespie’s body and find he had killed the wrong man. He had surely been after me, no one else.

So what would he do? Flee? Or search the house? Either way I knew I should move. Get out! Into the dark wetlands where this lethal marksman could not see me. Yet to move would be to make a noise and attract his attention. Christ! Why had I not hidden the carbine in the truck? I tensed myself ready to move, but fear kept me still. If I gave the man a half-second to react I would be dead because this assassin was good, very good.

Then I heard an odd scraping noise from the far end of the living room. I was unsighted, nor did I intend to move and see just what was making the noise. Was the man dragging Callaghan’s body away?

Then there was a terrible splintering crash, and a moan, then silence. I waited. The cold wind sighed at the broken window and I could smell the bitter smell of propellant in the house.

“Oh, fock,” said the voice, and groaned.

I moved. Very slowly. First I stood, then I took a half-pace forward so I could see into the living room.

And there he was; slumped against the far wall. He had collapsed and his rifle had fallen a couple of feet from his right hand. He was wearing a black sweater, black trousers, black leather gloves, black shoes and a black balaclava helmet which showed only his eyes and mouth. The black sweater and trousers seemed to glisten at his belly, and I realized that Stuart Callaghan, with his first dying shot, had badly wounded the killer.

He saw me and his hand twitched toward the rifle, but the movement gave him a spasm of pain. He cursed, not in anger, but in resignation. “Oh, fock,” he said again.

“Hello, Seamus.” I crossed the room and kicked his rifle away, then stooped and picked up Callaghan’s fallen automatic.

“This is a focking mess, Paulie.” Seamus made an enormous effort to reach up with his right hand and pull off the black woollen balaclava helmet. It left his black hair rumpled. “Focker got me in the belly.”

“You were after me.”

“I thought that focker was you.” He jerked his chin toward the fallen Gillespie. From the outside, in the sudden light and with his back turned and wearing the yellow slicker he had found in my hallway, Gillespie must have looked very much like me. “Who the fock are they?” Seamus asked.

“The law. They came to question me.” I crouched in front of Seamus and tried to assess his injury. I was no expert, but it looked bad. The bullet, as best I could see, had struck Seamus low on his left hip, then must have ricocheted off the pelvic bone to splinter and mangle his guts. He was bleeding horribly. If I had used Gillespie’s cellular telephone to call an ambulance Seamus might have lived, but he understood why I did no such thing. Those who live by the sword must die by it.

I crossed to Callaghan, but without turning my back on Seamus. Callaghan lay on his back, his mouth brimming with glistening blood above which his teeth were bared in a feral snarl. “That was a good shot, Seamus.”

“I was always a good shot. I remember in Strabane once, waiting in a burned-out house, and a Brit soldier almost got me. Surprised me, he did. He came through the back door, see, and I was watching out the front, but I hit him the same way. Fired from the hip.” His speech was slow. Occasionally his breath would catch, interrupted by pain, but he was making sense. “I got away then.”

“You were only ever caught once,” I said.

“That was so focking ridiculous,” he said. “It was all a focking accident, Paulie, just bad focking luck. I’d left the flat not five minutes, and this wee girl jumped a red light, so she did, on the corner of Ormeau Avenue. You know, where the television place is? And I hit her smack on, and there was a bloody police Land-Rover right there and the fockers recognized me.” He had been heading south, making for Dublin with a stolen driving license in his pocket. The Army Council had reckoned he would have been safer in Dublin than in the north, even though he was wanted in both parts of Ireland. “The focking Brits said they were acting on information,” Seamus said bitterly, “but it was all an accident, nothing more. And that’s why she died, eh? Just because the focking Brits lied.”

“That’s why she died,” I agreed, but I did not want to talk about Roisin’s death. “Who ordered me killed?” I asked instead.

“Michael Herlihy, of course. He said you’d nicked the money, and you had to be punished.” Seamus drew in a terrible, shuddering breath. “I wouldn’t do it till I got confirmation, but it came, right enough.”

“From Brendan Flynn?” I guessed sourly.

“Aye.” Seamus tried to grin, but failed. “I’m sorry it had to be me, Paulie.”

“You’re not given much of a choice in these things.” I squatted in front of him. “Is it hurting, Seamus?”

“It’s sort of dull now, Paulie. Not so bad, really.” He sat in silence, his head against the wall. “Focking shame it had to be you. I always liked you.”

“I liked you, Seamus.” Already we were using the past tense.

“I remember Brendan Flynn telling me you were a dangerous one, but I reckoned you were all right.”

“I thought Brendan trusted me?”

“He wouldn’t trust the Pope, that one.” He sighed. “Why did you steal the money?”

“I didn’t. I wanted to, but I didn’t.”

“They say you did, but I suppose they’re nicking it for themselves. Just like they always do.” Blood was puddling under his buttocks. He was weakening so much that he could hardly lift his right hand. “There’s some ciggies in my shirt pocket,” he said. “Would you mind?”

I held the automatic close to his face as I groped under his sweater. I found the cigarettes and a lighter, put a cigarette between his lips and clicked a flame.

“You used to smoke, didn’t you?” Seamus asked.

“I gave it up.”

“Don’t you miss it, Paulie?”

“Smoking? Sure I do.” I eased away from him. “The day I get to heaven, Seamus, St. Peter’s going to be waiting at the Pearly Gate with a packet of twenty and a book of matches.”

“You think you’ll get to heaven?” The cigarette twitched in his lips as he spoke.

“We’ll all meet there, Seamus. You, me, all the boys. No Brits, though. And the hills will be green as emerald and the streams full of salmon and the sun ever shining.”

“Like Dunnamanagh, eh?” That was a dream that would never come true; the wee house in the fold of the good green hills of County Derry. Seamus blinked rapidly, maybe because the smoke was in his eyes. “There was even a girl in Lifford.”

“You? A girl?”

“I always wanted one. I was sweet on her. Her da said I could ask her out, so he did.”

“But you never did ask her?”

“Never had time, Paulie. I wasn’t like you. I wasn’t one for the girls.” He seemed to be aware that something had been amiss in his life, but he could never have articulated it, nor known how to correct it, and I wondered what demons, born of a mother’s fears and priestly spite, had chased him through the long dark corridors of his lonely nights. “You remember that fellow we shot in Dunmurry?” he asked.

“Of course I do.”

Seamus laughed. “So focking scared. You remember where he hid?”

“In the roof tank, you told me.”

“Like a drowning focking rat.” The boy had been accused of rape. He was twenty-one or -two, and there was no evidence that would have stood up in court, but the community had no doubts of his guilt and so the Provos had stepped in. Seamus had been staying with me and had been asked if he wanted to do the honors, and I had driven him up to the housing estate. It was a Sunday evening in November and there had been a hint of snow in the darkness. The boy’s mother knew why we were there and she begged us to go away, but the father growled at her to hold her peace. The other kids were crying. The boy ran up the stairs. “Watch the focking windows,” Seamus told me, then he had followed the boy into the attic. The panicked kid had taken refuge in the header tank where Seamus shot him. Seamus laughed again. “There must have been blood coming out of their focking taps for days!” He was silent for a few seconds. “Head shot, it was.”

“Do you remember them all?”

“Every one, Paulie. Like they was on films in my head.” He frowned, I thought with pain, then he chuckled again. “Did I ever tell you about Danny Noonan’s big bomb?”

“No.”

“So focking silly.” He was laughing, and I think the laughter was hurting him, but the tale was in his head now and he had to get it out. “It must have been the first or second bomb I ever saw set. In a big focking cardboard box, it was. Danny Noonan built the bomb. He’d just been made the explosives officer in the South Derry brigade and he wanted to make himself known. Wanted everyone in the world to know a new man was on the job like, so he put every scrap of focking explosive he could find into that damned box. I tell you, Paulie, that bomb would have blown the ceiling clean off Africa, it was so big. But Danny wanted it big, see? He wanted something that would make the papers, you know?” He paused to suppress a moan.

“Take your time,” I said stupidly. Time was the one thing that was fast running out for Seamus.

“So Danny decides we’ll take out the BBC transmitter. You know the one? That focking great mast outside Derry? Must be a thousand feet tall if it’s an inch! That would make the papers, Danny said, so we all get in the car and off we go, Big John MacAnally was our driver. Daft as a clock, he was, but he could drive right enough. So off we go and we get in the compound easy enough and there are all these engineers just pissing themselves with fright. There’s Danny, Big John and me, all masked up, two of us with guns, and Big John holding the focking bomb in a focking great cardboard box. So Danny tells Big John to put the bomb by the mast, right underneath it like, but Big John gets all worried. He asks your top engineer man how long it will take them to repair the damage if he sets the focking bomb off under the mast, and your man says it’ll be all of six months. And Big John says, ‘You mean if the bomb goes off I can’t see Kojak this Saturday night?’, and the fella says, ‘Ye’ll not be seeing Kojak for six months of Saturday nights!’” Seamus stopped, and his breath came in horrid rasping gasps for a few seconds. The cigarette fell from his lips, bounced off his thigh, and hissed to extinction in the blood puddling beside him. I thought he was not going to be able to finish the story, but he made a huge effort to take in a breath.

“So Danny’s going berserk, he is. Put the bomb down, he orders, but Big John won’t. He wants to know where he can put it so he can still see Kojak on Saturday night, so the engineer tells him to knock off the sub-station in the laneway. Danny’s screaming at Big John, but Big John tells Danny to shut the fock up because he wants to watch Kojak. In the end we put the focking bomb by the sub-station, down on the laneway like the man said, just to cut off the electricity like, and just so Big John could see his Kojak on Saturday night. Christ, but you should have seen that bang! Jasus, but we scared rooks out of the trees three counties away! There was smoke rising to the moon, so there was. We flattened a hundred yards of hedgerow, but it never made the newspapers. And that was Danny Noonan’s big bomb, just to knock out one focking sub-station in a focking hedge.” He tried to laugh, but was in too much pain. “And Big John got to see his Kojak, so he did.”

“It’s a good tale, Seamus.” That was why he had told it. He came from a race that still told tales and still took pride in the telling.

“So many good tales, Paulie.” He blinked a few times, then looked beseechingly at me. “I’m cold, Paulie.”

I wanted to tell him it would not be long now, but I said nothing. Out beyond the barrier beach the waves seethed and growled like the world’s heartbeat.

“They said they’d give me a medal,” Seamus said after a long silence. “They said there’s a Massachusetts medal of freedom. They said they’ve given it to other IRA men. They said they’d pin it on my chest on the State House steps.”

“Michael Herlihy told you that?”

“Aye, but I had to kill you first. He said you’d betrayed the movement and that he’d give me money if I killed you, but I told him I didn’t want any money. Then he said they’d give me the medal like, and all the newspapers would show it. My mam would have been pleased, Paulie, to see me with a medal. She was always nagging at me to do something in life, know what I mean? And she’d have liked a medal. And the Brits would have been pissed off.” He was quiet for a bit. He had gone very pale. His hands scrabbled and I thought for a second he had come to his moment of dying, then I realized he was trying to reach for his cigarettes. He abandoned the effort. “Give me another ciggie, Paulie.”

I lit one for him, resisting the sudden strong temptation to drag down a lungful of smoke. “There.” I put it between his lips.

He sucked on the smoke, then nodded at Gillespie’s corpse. “I thought that fellow was you.” The mistake clearly worried Seamus. It was a blot on his record. “It was the yellow coat that fooled me.”

“How long were you waiting for me?” I asked.

“Since teatime. Herlihy had Marty Doyle drive me out here.”

“Where’s Marty now?”

“Waiting up by the shops.” Seamus grinned weakly. “He’s driving a focking flower van. Can you believe it? It’s like the time we tried to take a focking hearse to put a bomb outside the Guildhall. Full of flowers, it was, and Malachy O’Brien had the focking hay fever. Can you believe it? He was sneezing so much he couldn’t drive! We had to abandon the focking bomb, so we did!” He laughed weakly. “Those were the days, Paulie.”

“Weren’t they just?”

Seamus drew deep on the cigarette. “You remember the big flats on Rossville Street. And William Street. I’ll never see them again, will I? And what was that pub on the Lecky Road?” He was asking about landmarks in Derry, a city I did not know. “And then we used to drink in that big bar off the Creggan Road. It was so focking cold in there in winter. That landlord was a mean bugger. Short arms and deep pockets, he had, so one night Big John MacAnally said he’d warm the place up and he lit a fire on the floor with focking newspapers. He was a focking mad bugger. They shot him, so they did.”

“The Brits shot him?”

He shook his head. “Our own fellows. Big John was a risk. Mad as a priest without a woman or a whiskey, so he was. Did you ever know Father Brady?”

“No.”

“He told me it would be a bad end.” He breathed hard. “Can you not get me a priest now, Paulie?”

“No, Seamus, I can’t.” Because what had happened this night had to be hidden, buried as Roisin was buried, which meant there could be no priests and no rescue squad and no local police. That was the rule of the secret world and Seamus knew it.

He nodded acceptance of my refusal. “Whose side are you on, Paulie?”

“Yours, Seamus.”

“You’re not a focking Brit, are you?”

“No.”

“Roisin always thought you grassed on Wild John Macroon.”

“I wish I had.” Macroon had been the boy she had slept with before we parted. “But I didn’t. I didn’t need to, he was always going to get himself killed.”

“That’s true enough.” Seamus pulled on the cigarette. “She was a fearful strong girl, so she was.”

“I know.”

“What was that record she was always playing? About Sandy Row and throwing pennies?”

“Van Morrison,” I said. When I had lived in Belfast it had sometimes seemed that Van Morrison’s album Astral Weeks was the city’s theme music. It was played everywhere, seeping subliminally through the city’s brickwork; sad anthems for wounded tribes.

“She got mad at me,” Seamus said sadly.

“Because you wouldn’t go to bed with her?”

“Aye.” He looked at me with astonishment, amazed that I had known such a thing. “I should have done, shouldn’t I?”

“Probably.”

“But it wasn’t her that betrayed me,” he said, “the Brits just said that to get us all worked up.” The British ploy had clearly rankled in him. He went quiet again. A half-inch of ash dropped down his sweater’s front. “So she was shot?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, knowing I could not avoid the subject.

“In that Arab place?”

“Yes.”

Seamus’s pale knowing eyes looked at me. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

“Me, Seamus?” A thousand acts of contrition had not let me deliver those two words with any conviction. “Me, Seamus?”

“It was you,” he said, “that shot her.”

I hesitated, not sure whether I even trusted a man on the lip of eternity, but then I nodded. “Yes. But she didn’t know it was me. I was wearing a head-dress, see, and they just gave me the gun.”

“And then you shot her?”

“Once through the head. Quick.” I wondered how Seamus had known, then guessed it was written on my soul for all the damned to read, and I wondered how I could ever have hoped for happiness with Kathleen after what I had done to her sister on that yellow hillside in Lebanon.

“You poor focker, Paulie,” Seamus said, then he suddenly tensed and his whole back arched with the onslaught of a terrible pain. “Oh, Jasus,” he wailed.

“Is it hurting?”

“Like the fock, it is.” He was crying now. “Oh, Jasus,” he said again, and the second cigarette rolled out of his mouth and I heard him muttering, and at first I thought he was saying a Hail Mary, but before I could decipher the prayer his voice had dribbled away into incoherence. I rescued the fallen cigarette from a fold of his sleeve and stubbed it on the floor. I thought he had died, but suddenly he opened his eyes and spoke with an awful clarity. “It’s hard to kill someone you know.”

“It is, yes.”

“But you don’t have much choice, do you?”

“No.” If I had not shot Roisin, then I would have been shot. But did that make it right?

Seamus had gone quiet. I rocked away from him, but he twitched a hand toward me as though he needed my proximity. “Just tell me it’s going to be all right, Paulie.”

“It is,” I said.

“Tell me.” His hand twitched toward me again.

I held his hand to give him the solace of human touch. He had known so little love, while his talent for rage had been used by lesser men.

“Tell me,” he demanded again.

“Ireland will be one,” I told him, “united under God, ruled from Dublin, and there’ll be no division left, and no more tears, and no more dying.”

“Oh, God, yes,” he breathed, then tried to speak again, and his tongue seemed to rattle in the back of his mouth, but his willpower overcame the spasm of death to let him quote a line of verse. “‘Life springs from death,’” he said, but he could go no further, and I waited and waited, and still he said nothing more, and so I edged even closer to him and put my face down by his face and there was no breath in him at all, nothing, and so I touched his eyes shut with my right hand and finished the words for him. “‘And from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations.’”

Seamus Geoghegan, the bright boy of Derry, was dead.

MY HOUSE WAS A DISASTER. IT HELD THE CORPSES OF TWO CIA men and an IRA gunman, and if the newspapers ever got hold of that poisonous stew then the fuss would never stop. What I needed now was a piece of efficient housekeeping.

I took Callaghan’s automatic, the money and the passport from the hiding place in the beam, then left through the kitchen door. I climbed into the pick-up. The engine started first time. I rammed it into gear, slewed the steering wheel round, and accelerated up the track. I flicked the headlights on, scaring a rabbit out of my path.

I turned left on to the main road. I could see the white-painted panel van in the parking lot of the abandoned shopping precinct. The main shop was a seasonal outlet for cheap beach accessories like inflatable dolphins, plastic buckets and parasols. Next door was a shed that used to sell good ice-cream but now advertised frozen yoghurt. I pulled up in front of the yoghurt shop where my pick-up’s headlights illuminated the legend on the van’s body: “Shamrock Flower Shoppe. Blooms for all Family Occasions. Weddings our Specialty”; then I killed the lights, left the engine running and ran across to the white van.

I rapped on the driver’s door, startling Marty who had evidently been fast asleep. He unlocked the door. “Is that you, Seamus? Jesus, I must have dropped off.”

I ripped the door open and dragged Marty out of the seat. He yelped in panic as I spun him round to the dark side of the van, away from the road, and he screamed as I slung him down on to the gravel where I rammed my knee into his belly and the muzzle of the pistol into his throat. “Say a prayer, Marty.”

“Jesus! Is it you, Paulie?”

“No, it’s Cardinal Bernard Law, you shithead. This is our new way of making converts. Who the hell do you think I am?”

“Where’s Seamus?”

“He’s dead, Marty.”

“Oh, Mother of God.” He tried to cross himself.

“Now listen, you fuck.” I thrust the gun’s cold barrel hard into his Adam’s apple. “You’re not going to give me any trouble or else Mrs. Doyle will be collecting the life insurance and moving to a Century Village in Florida and you’ll be nothing but a framed photograph on top of the television set. Is that what you want, Marty?”

“No, Paulie, no! I’ll do whatever you want!”

“Then get in the back of the van.”

I dragged him up, hustled him round, and pushed him through the van’s rear door. The body of the van was filled with flower boxes fastened with lengths of green wire which I used to pinion Marty’s wrists and ankles. I gagged him with a strip of cloth I cut from his sweater, then felt through his pockets till I came up with some small change. “Now just wait here, Marty, and don’t make a peep or I’ll use you for target practice.”

There was a telephone beside the frozen yoghurt shop. I pulled a visiting card from my pocket and punched in the numbers. It was an 800 number, a free call, but when it was over I needed Marty’s quarters to call Johnny who sounded pissed off at being woken in the middle of the night, but he recovered quickly enough when I told him what I wanted. “I’ll meet you by the dinghy,” he told me, “in half an hour, OK?”

“I’m sorry, Johnny,” I told him.

“Who needs sleep?”

I went back to the van. Marty mumbled something through his gag, but I told him to shut up, then slammed the van’s rear door and went back to my pick-up. I drove south on Route 28. It began to sleet as I arrived at Stage Harbor where I parked beside a trap-shed and switched off the pick-up’s engine. I waited.

Johnny arrived ten minutes later and I followed him down to where his dinghy was tethered. “Give me the boat keys,” I said.

“Forget it, Paulie, I’m coming with you.”

I did not argue. Everything had gone wrong this night and I needed help. So we rowed out to Johnny’s trawler, the Julie-Anne, started her up, and went to sea.

We motored westward, guided through the shoals of Nantucket Sound by the winking lights of the buoys in the glassy-wet darkness. The big diesel motor throbbed comfortingly away. It was warm in the wheelhouse. Johnny steered with one hand and held a coffee mug with the other. “So what’s it about?” he asked.

I did not answer. I just stared through the glow of the Julie-Anne’s navigation lights and I thought how many had died. Liam, Gerry, Gillespie, Callaghan, Seamus. And they were probably just the beginning.

“At least tell me whose side I’m on?” Johnny insisted.

“The angels. But don’t go near my house for a few days.”

“It isn’t drugs?” Johnny asked.

“I swear to God, Johnny, it isn’t drugs. Someone wanted to punish me for taking the gold.”

“I thought you said the IRA had got their gold back?”

“I guess they wanted me dead as an example to anyone else who had a mind to rip them off. But just stay clear of the house, Johnny.”

We travelled on in silence. Rain slicked the deck and spat past the glow of the red and green lamps. The fishfinder’s dial glowed in the wheelhouse dark. About three hours after we had left Stage Harbor I watched the lights of a small plane drop from the clouds and descend toward Martha’s Vineyard. Johnny turned on his radar and the familiar shape of Cape Poge formed on the green screen. The eastern horizon was just hinting at the dawn as we slid past Chappaquidick Point. The water was smooth and slick, pocked with the rain and skeined with a thin mist that hazed the lights of Edgartown as Johnny, with a careless skill, nudged his huge trawler toward a pier. “They’ll probably charge me a hundred bucks just to land someone, let alone breathe their precious air. Greediest town in America, this one. Do you want me to wait for you?”

“No. But thanks.”

“Look after yourself, Paulie.”

“I’ve not been very good at that, but I’ll do my best.”

I jumped ashore, then walked into town. I was looking for a big house with a Nautor Swan called Nancy parked on jackstands in her front yard. I had come for van Stryker’s help, because everything had gone wrong.

“Shanahan.” Simon van Stryker opened his door to me, grimaced at the weather, then ushered me inside. He was dressed in an Aran sweater, corduroy trousers and fleece-lined sea-boots, but he looked every inch as distinguished as the last time we had met when he had been rigged out to dine at the White House. “I’ve got a team heading for your house.” The 800 number I had called had been the number on the card van Stryker had given me in the Poconoes. The call had been answered by a young man who had calmly listened to my description of three dead bodies and my desperate appeal for help. I had held on while he called van Stryker who, in turn, had ordered me to meet him at his summer house where he now opened a closet to reveal a shelf of bottles. “Laphroaig?”

“Please.”

He took the seal off a new bottle, poured me a generous slug, then placed glass and bottle beside me. “So tell me exactly what happened.” I told him the story of the night, of my coming home, of Gillespie and Callaghan dying, of Seamus bleeding to death. While I talked van Stryker emptied the contents of a canvas sailing-bag on to the kitchen work-top. He had brought eggs, ham, cheese, milk and tomatoes. “Nancy thought we’d be hungry,” he explained, “and this looks like being a long discussion. Do go on.”

“There isn’t much more to tell,” I finished lamely. “I left the bodies there and called for help.”

He found a bowl and whisk. “That was wise of you, Paul.” He began breaking eggs, while I looked through his windows across the rain-stippled harbor to the low dull heathland of Chappaquiddick. Dawn was seeping across the cloudy sky, making the harbor’s water look like dull gun metal. “So tell me,” van Stryker ordered, “what you think this is all about.”

“It’s about Stingers,” I said firmly. “It’s about men at the end of runways. Men hidden in the woods near Washington’s Dulles Airport or on boats in Jamaica Bay near JFK’s runways. Men in vans near Boston’s Logan Airport or in the warehouses near Miami International. It’s about dead airliners. Il Hayaween loves to kill jumbo jets. He wants bodies floating in Boston Harbor, and on the Interstates and across the perimeter roads of a dozen airports. He wants one day of revenge, one day of slaughter, one day to make America pay for Saddam Hussein’s humiliation.”

“You don’t believe the Stingers were meant for Ireland?”

“Some, yes, but only a few. Those few were the IRA’s reward for negotiating the purchase. It would have been impossible for the Palestinians to come to America and negotiate the sale, so Flynn did it for them.”

“And the money in Rebel Lady,” van Stryker suggested, “was the purchase price of the Stingers?”

I colored slightly, but nodded. “Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell us about Rebel Lady?”

“Because I planned to steal the money. That was my pension plan and my health insurance and my future income all wrapped up in one Arab package.” I paused, sipped his good whiskey, then looked up at van Stryker’s thin, clever face. “How did you find out about Rebel Lady?”

“Gillespie found out.”

“How?”

He stirred the eggs. “A wiretap, of course. Good old-fashioned illegal bugging.” Van Stryker smiled at me.

“Oh God, of course. You had my house bugged before I even left Europe?” I suddenly realized that of course van Stryker would have taken that precaution, which meant that the very first time I had talked to Johnny Riordan about collecting Rebel Lady the hidden microphones must have been hearing every word I spoke.

“No,” van Stryker said.

“No?”

“Your house is certainly wiretapped. My guess is that there are microphones covering the downstairs, and a voice-activated tape recorder concealed in the attic. That’s how they usually do it if they’ve got access to the premises.”

“They?”

“We prefer using the telephone to carry the wiretapped signal away”—van Stryker ignored my question—“but that’s difficult if you’re not operating legally. So I suspect your eavesdroppers used a tape recorder. Which means, of course, that they must have had access to your house to collect the tapes.”

“Sarah Sing Tennyson,” I said, and felt as a blind man must feel when given sight or, much more aptly, like a fool given reason. “Jesus Christ!”

“The first is the more likely culprit, though in fact her name isn’t Tennyson. It’s Ko, Sally Ko. Her father is Hong Kong Chinese and her mother’s from London. Miss Ko is British Intelligence, though naturally the British say she’s a cultural attaché, but that’s what all the spooks say these days. It’s a harmless convention, we do it too.”

“Oh, God,” I said, “oh, Christ,” and I thought what a fool I had been, what an utter, Goddamn, stupid fool. “And she wasn’t even after me,” I said, “but after Patrick and his friends?”

“Your brother-in-law? Yes. I’m told he sometimes used your house to plot arms shipments, which the Brits rather gratefully intercepted. Gillespie only discovered all this when his people went to put in their own wiretaps and found the British microphones in place.”

My God, but what a fool I had been. Why else would a tenant pay to have a telephone and electricity installed? The phone system probably disguised the basic wiretap while the electricity powered the hidden tape recorder, and every time my dumb-ass brother-in-law plotted another arms shipment to Ireland, British Intelligence had gleefully listened in. Then they must have heard me talking to Johnny about a shipment of gold, and suddenly their humdrum intelligence operation had turned into a triumph. And what a triumph it had proved for the Goddamn Brits! Five million in gold and fifty-three Stingers neutralized, and all for the price of a few hidden microphones and a voice-activated tape recorder. “The bastards,” I said feelingly, “the bastards.”

Van Stryker took two plates from a dresser. “It was clever of them to use Congressman O’Shaughnessy’s house!” He laughed. “That’s a very elegant touch, Paul. I shall congratulate them on that.”

“Elegant like hell. I thought they were going to kill me!”

“I’m sure Gillespie warned them against anything so drastic.”

And of course it was Gillespie who had set me up for the Brit bastards. They had snatched me on my first morning back home, and how had they known I would be there if Gillespie had not told them? And that would also explain why the FBI had told Sergeant Nickerson not to worry when Kathleen Donovan had made her nervous protest at my kidnapping, because Gillespie had known all along who had snatched me, and why, and what they were probably doing to me. “The bastards,” I said again, remembering my humiliation. And remembering too how I had spilled so much information about Belfast to my Irish questioner. Who was he? A Protestant? I looked at van Stryker. “You set them on to me, didn’t you?”

“Gillespie felt you had been less than honest with him at the debriefing,” van Stryker admitted, “and your tale of Stinger missiles just didn’t make sense, Paul. I could have made things much tougher for you, but we all thought this way would be much quicker. And so it proved. You were right about the Stingers all the time, you just didn’t think to tell us that you’d fouled il Hayaween’s plans by stealing his money.”

“But the Brits,” I said bitterly.

“Better them than the Libyans, and better them than Brendan Flynn’s men.” Van Stryker was bland. “Was it a bad beating they gave you?”

“Like having a root-canal without an anaesthetic.”

“I’m sorry, truly. But if I’m dealing with a creature like il Hayaween then I can’t take chances. I needed to know what you were hiding, and I found out. You were hiding one million dollars.”

“Is that what Miss Ko told you?” I asked.

“She did more than tell us. She even shared the million with us, or rather we permitted them to take one half. Thanks to you, Paul, Her Majesty’s Secret Service is now richer to the tune of half-a-million dollars.”

“No,” I said, and relished thus puncturing his equanimity. “They’re richer to the tune of four and a half million dollars. Miss Ko lied to you. There were five million bucks on that boat, van Stryker, all in gold. Your Goddamn allies have screwed you.”

“Five?” He was astonished, shocked, incredulous. “Five!”

“Five million,” I said, “in krugerrands and maple leaves. One thousand pounds gross weight of fine gold. I know! I glassed the coins into the boat. She was a brute before the gold went in and after it she sailed like a pregnant pig. Five million. The Brits lied to you.”

“Oh, dear God,” he said, then turned away to concentrate on the omelette. He was not really thinking about the eggs or the skillet, but about the money. He was adding it to the equation, thinking, trying to discern his enemy’s mind. “Isn’t five million dollars rather a lot of money for fifty-three missiles?” he asked me after a while; then, suspiciously, “if the missiles even exist?”

“I saw one of them.”

“Just one?” Van Stryker turned the heat down under the omelette pan, suggesting that our hunger must wait on his puzzlement. “I don’t like that one Stinger. It all sounds too convenient. So just tell me everything, Paul, and this time make it the truth.”

So I told him the truth, the whole truth. I spoke of Brendan Flynn, Michael Herlihy, Shafig, il Hayaween, Liam, Gerry, Rebel Lady, Sarah Sing Tennyson, the British interrogators, the gold and Seamus Geoghegan. I described my act of murder in the Mediterranean, I told him about Teodor, I told him everything. Van Stryker listened to it all in silence and, when I had no more to tell, he said nothing, but just stared at me, thinking, when suddenly the telephone rang, startling us both. Van Stryker answered it, spoke softly for a few moments, then put it down. “Your house is secure. My people are there.”

“What will you do with the bodies?”

“We’ll take Gillespie and Callaghan a long way away and fashion a car accident.”

“And Seamus?”

“He will disappear.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.” Van Stryker tipped the omelettes on to the plates. “I rather suspect the British will be blamed. Now, eat.” He put an omelette in front of me and I devoured it as though I had not eaten in weeks. Van Stryker ate his more fastidiously, then wiped the skillet with a paper towel before hanging it from an overhead rack. “I wish you’d told me about the five million dollars at the very beginning, Paul.” He was not reproving me. I think van Stryker understood human cupidity well enough not to blame me. He had gone to the window from where he stared at a fishing boat that was throbbing toward the sea leaving a wake to ripple across the gray harbor water like widening bands of crimson light. “It’s simply too much money!” van Stryker protested, “and I don’t like the idea of Stingers being launched at the end of American runways. It’s too complicated. For a start, where would il Hayaween find the men to fire the weapons? And why gold? Why not a simple bank transfer?”

I thought about it. “Maybe Herlihy demanded gold?”

“And why send two punks to guard you? Why not use two or three of their top men? Were Liam and Gerry the very best that the Provisionals could find?”

“No way.”

“So why them? And why involve you? And why Stingers?” He turned to me as he asked that question, then he repeated it forcefully, as though the clue to everything lay in the choice of weapon. “Why Stingers?”

“Because they’re the best.”

“But you don’t need the best to knock down an airliner. Airliners are lumbering great targets that wallow around the sky without so much as a single counter-measure on board. They’re not agile like a ground-support helicopter or fast like a low-level fighter-bomber. A cobbled-together Russian Red Star could knock out a Boeing 747, and the Palestinians must have hundreds of Red Stars! So why Stingers? And why you?”

He had utterly confused me now. “What do you mean? Why me?”

“Why did they want you?”

“To bring the boat across”—I spoke as if the answer was obvious to the meanest intellect—“of course.”

Van Stryker shook his head. “No!” he protested fiercely, “no! Why would they bring a boat to America with five million gold dollars they don’t need, to buy fifty-three Stingers they don’t want, and which probably never even existed? For God’s sake, Paul, the FBI have spent weeks looking for those missiles and there isn’t even a whisper of confirmation that they exist! So forget the missiles, think about why they wanted you.”

“To bring the boat across,” I said again, but this time in quite a different tone; a tone of slow revelation.

“Because the boat is hiding something,” van Stryker carried on the thought. “And they showed you a Stinger and they showed you money because they knew you’d buy that story because you of all people know just how the IRA has been lusting after Stingers for years, but this isn’t about Stingers, Paul, it never was! This is about the boat!”

“Oh, Christ,” I said. “Where’s the boat?”

He shrugged. “The damned Brits said it was empty, finished, useless. We believed them.”

“Oh, Christ,” I said again. “I gave the boat back to them!”

“Gave it back to who?”

“Herlihy.”

“Who has disappeared,” van Stryker said. “So what’s in it, Paul? What were they hiding under a coat of gold?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.” But whatever it was, I had given it back to them. “Oh, God,” I said, “oh, God,” because it wasn’t over, not by a long way.

“We’ll find the boat.” Van Stryker snatched up the phone. “We’ll search the whole damned coast and we’ll find it. Give me the description again?”

“Find Herlihy first,” I suggested, “because he’ll know where Rebel Lady’s hidden.”

“I told you, Herlihy’s vanished.”

“I can find him.”

“You can?”

I would have to. Because Saddam Hussein had sent America a present, and I had lost it, so now I would find it again.

Herlihy was still not at his home. FBI agents broke in to find his apartment empty. Neither was he in his office, the Parish, or in the back room behind Tully’s Tavern. He had disappeared.

“The money was never important!” van Stryker shouted at me. “The gold was a blind to dazzle you! To disguise the truth! And that’s why Herlihy sent Geoghegan to kill you, to protect that truth. He’s retrieved the boat, after all, and your telling tales was the one danger left. Is that it?” He pointed down.

He was shouting because we were in a coast guard helicopter that had been summoned to Martha’s Vineyard on van Stryker’s authority. Once on board we had flown fast and low across the wintry waters of Nantucket Sound and were now hovering above the shopping precinct where I had left Marty Doyle.

“That’s it!” I could still see the white Shamrock Flower Shoppe van. With any luck Marty would still be in the van, undiscovered by an inquisitive policeman. I reckoned that if anyone knew where Herlihy was hiding, then it had to be Marty Doyle.

“Down!” Van Stryker gestured the order at the crew chief who passed it on to the pilot. We were in the rescue compartment, a cavernous metal space behind and below the control cabin. A winch and a rescue basket filled one side of the rescue chamber where van Stryker and I, muffled against the cold, sat on a metal bench. The pilot returned a message protesting that a federal regulation prohibited landing on unapproved sites unless it was an emergency. “Tell him this is an emergency! To his career!” The machine settled slowly down. Shingles blew off the frozen-yoghurt shop’s roof and a passing motorist almost swerved into the woods as the vast helicopter threaded its precarious way between the electricity and telephone wires to settle in a swirl of dust on the empty parking lot. “Be quick!” van Stryker ordered me.

I ran to the flower van, yanked the back door open, and there discovered a terrified and half-frozen Marty Doyle. I dragged him out and, because his ankles were still tied with the green wire, I carried him like a child to the throbbing helicopter. I slung him on to the metal floor, then clambered in after him.

“Up!” van Stryker shouted.

As we rose into the air I saw the first blue flicker of a police car’s light coming south to discover why a helicopter was disturbing the Cape’s frosty morning, but the patrolman was arriving too late for the helicopter was already tilting over and racing out toward the open Atlantic. We passed over my house, and over the iced puddles in the marsh, and out across the dunes where I had sat with Kathleen Donovan, and out across the tumultuous smoking rollers that hammered incessantly on the frozen sand.

I pulled the woollen gag off Marty’s face. “Morning, Marty.”

“I’m so fucking cold, Paulie!” He was shivering. Both doors of the big helicopter were wide open and the morning was freezing. “Where are we going?” he asked.

“To find Michael Herlihy,” I told him. “So where is he?”

“I don’t know, Paul. Honest!”

I smiled at him, then cut off his wire bonds. “Put this on, Marty.” It was a safety harness. The poor wee man was shaking with cold, but he managed to get his arms into the harness which I buckled tight across his chest. “So where’s Herlihy?” I asked again.

Marty looked at me with his doglike gaze. “As God is my witness, Paul, and on my own dear mother’s grave, I swear I don’t know.”

I pushed him out of the door.

He screamed and flailed, then jerked as the safety line I had attached to the back of his harness caught hold. He hung twenty feet beneath the helicopter and three hundred feet above the heaving gray seas that were being lashed into a spume as the freezing wind whipped their tops frantic.

I hauled him back into the helicopter’s belly. “I don’t think you heard me, Marty. Where’s Herlihy?”

“He’s at the Congressman’s summer home. Oh, God, please don’t do it again! Please! For the love of God, Paulie! Please!”

I gave him a cup of coffee instead, but he spilt most of it as the big rescue helicopter tilted its rotors west and sped us back toward Nantucket Sound and toward the last dark secrets of the Rebel Lady.

“I am constrained by rules,” van Stryker reprimanded me. “If I’d known you were going to pull that stunt in the helicopter, I’d have stopped you, and if we interrogate Herlihy then it has to be done according to regulations. If we arrest him, we must have a warrant and he must have his rights read. If he wants to have a lawyer present during the interview, then he must have one.”

“No footprints, you said, no apron strings. I’m still running free, van Stryker. You turned the Brits on me to avoid the rules, so now turn me on to Herlihy.”

His thin face betrayed a flicker of a smile, then he offered me a raised hand in mock blessing. “No bruises, no broken bones, no cuts, no evidence of violence. Can you keep those rules?”

“Better than the Brits, believe me.”

“Then go.” He waved me out of the car. We had flown to Otis Air Force base at the inner end of the Cape, then driven through the early traffic to Centerville. It was still not yet nine o’clock and we were already parked close to Congressman O’Shaughnessy’s beach house.

I opened the car door. “I’ll be back by eleven.”

“It takes longer than that to squeeze the truth out of a man.”

“Not really.” I smiled, and climbed out of the car.

The wind was cold. The street had the joyless, deserted feel of a resort out of season. Nearly all of these houses were the vacation homes of the very rich who needed sea-front “cottages” to escape from the stifling summer heat of Boston or New York. It was a good lair for Michael Herlihy, for who would dream that a US Congressman would shelter an enemy of the people? Even a Congressman as moronic as Tommy the Turd could usually be reckoned above such foolishness.

I clicked open the gate. The house appeared shuttered and empty. I walked round to the back, bruising the frosted grass beneath my boots. There was no one in the kitchen and, as I had expected, the door was locked. I knew there was an alarm system that the Brits had circumvented and which I assumed the Congressman would have had repaired, but so long as there was someone in the house then there seemed a good chance that the system would be switched off. In which hopeful belief I rammed my oilskin-padded elbow hard against a pane of the door’s glass. Nothing. I rammed again, but only succeeded in bruising my elbow through the thick layers of oilskin. They made windows tough these days.

I picked a big rock from among the stones which edged the border of a flower bed and smashed through both layers of glass. The noise seemed appalling, but no bell shrilled its hammer tone into the dawn. I reached through the hole, found the latch, and let myself in. The heat was on in the house and a dirty plate lay unwashed in the kitchen sink.

I still had Callaghan’s gun. I took it from the oilskin’s deep pocket and stalked into the main hallway, which had been emptied of the cellar’s encumbrances. I stopped and listened at the foot of the stairway, but heard nothing. The living room was deserted and its tall windows securely shuttered. I edged through another half-open door into a huge dining room which held a table that could seat twenty guests. Silver shone on the shelves of a mahogany hutch. Another door led from the dining room’s far end. It was ajar and I edged it further open to see that it led into a leather-furnished and book-lined den with one wall smothered in framed diplomas and awards. This was evidently the room where Tommy the Turd came to pretend he was educated, and it was also the room where Michael Herlihy, still fully dressed, was fast asleep.

I put the gun barrel under his nose. “Morning, Michael.”

“God! What! No!” The last syllable was prompted by the pain he had felt as I rammed the gun into his upper lip.

“Be very still, Michael,” I said, “and very quiet.”

“Paul?”

“Be quiet, Michael!”

He had clearly waited in this comfortable room for news from Seamus. He had waited in the Congressman’s leather recliner, drinking the Congressman’s whiskey out of the Congressman’s crystal tumbler. Now, woken to a bad dream, he was shaking.

“Seamus is dead, Michael.”

“I don’t know anything. Nothing!” He tried to get out of the chair, but the gun persuaded him to stay still. I ran a hand over his rumpled clothes and found a small automatic in one pocket.

I took his gun and put it into my pocket. “You sent Seamus to kill me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Paul.”

“Marty Doyle told me.”

Michael stiffened. “I have no knowledge of these matters.”

“That’s very formal, Michael, very legalistic. Where’s the boat?”

“What boat?”

“Rebel Lady.”

“I don’t know. The Congressman arranged to have her towed away from his property. Why don’t you ask him yourself? He’s in Washington.” He pulled a telephone toward him, then gasped as I slashed the gun barrel across his bony nose.

“No telephones, Michael. So where’s Rebel Lady?”

“I told you, Paul, I do not know!”

“Then let’s find out if you’re telling the truth, shall we?” I reached down and yanked him out of the chair. I tripped him as he lurched forward, throwing him face down on to the room’s Oriental rug. I folded the rug over his head so he could see nothing. “If you move,” I said loudly enough for him to hear, “I’ll blow your fucking brains out.”

The room’s heavy velvet drapes were tethered by tasselled silk cords. I slashed the cords free, then tied Michael’s hands behind his back. That done I pulled him to his feet, picked a sturdy poker from the collection in the hearth, then pushed Michael out of the den and into the luxurious dining room. “This is a comfortable hiding place, Michael.”

“I’m not hiding,” he protested. “This is where I’m planing O’Shaughnessy’s re-election campaign.”

“Don’t take me for a fool, Michael. The Congressman is always re-elected. Daddy’s money sees to that. If the Congressman was a pox-ridden baboon and his opponent was the Archangel Gabriel, he’d still be re-elected. You don’t have to work at Tommy’s re-election, you just have to wheel him out and point him toward Washington. No, Michael, you were hiding here, that’s what you were doing. Tell me, have the Arabs sent you more money?”

“You’ll regret these allegations!”

“The five million was your price, wasn’t it? You and Brendan?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I demand that you release me! I demand it!” He turned and shouted the words into my face.

“As we non-lawyers say”—I smiled sweetly at him—“fuck away off.” I rammed him with the poker, forcing him to stumble on down the hallway into the kitchen, then out through the broken kitchen door and down the brick path to the locked boathouse. Michael was dressed in his lawyer’s three-piece suit and began to shiver in the bitter wind. “Please?” he said.

“Where’s Rebel Lady?”

“I have no idea where the boat is. Can’t we talk about this inside?”

“Why not in here, Michael?” The boathouse door was secured by a padlocked hasp that yielded to the leverage of the poker. I kicked the broken door open, then pushed Herlihy inside and tethered him to a stanchion with the free end of the curtain cord.

“No, please!” He suddenly understood exactly what I intended doing.

“Where’s Rebel Lady?” I asked in a very reasonable tone.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“I think you do, Counsellor, I really think you do.” I went to the far wall where two control boxes operated the twin hoists holding Quick Colleen. I pressed the green buttons and the machinery hummed smoothly as it lowered the sharp-prowed boat into the frozen dock. The ice splintered noisily under the hull’s weight, then the speedboat settled in the water, her bow inwards.

Herlihy made a futile lunge for freedom, but his tether held. “Paul! Be sensible!”

“But I am being sensible. It’s a nice calm day, the waves aren’t more than a foot high, so think of this as a treat! Do you remember when we were teenagers and I took you out for a boat ride?”

“Please, Paul!” He was shaking.

“Where’s Rebel Lady?”

“We sank her, out there!” He jerked his head toward the frigid waters of Nantucket Sound.

“I wonder why I don’t believe you? But we’ll soon see if you’re telling the truth.” I stepped on to Quick Colleen’s foredeck, unbuckled the forward hoist strap and unclipped her cockpit cover to discover her ignition key was still in the dashboard. I tossed the cover on to the dock, released the second hoist, then pressed the switches that tilted the big two-hundred-horsepower engines into the water. The batteries still had power and the twin engines whined down into the icy waves that lapped soft against the low racing transom. I checked the big fuel tank and found it full, primed the engines, advanced the chokes, and turned the key.

The cold engines coughed a couple of times, then, one after the other, they caught and fired. I ran the throttles up so that an ear-shattering bellow reverberated in the boathouse, then let the twin beasts idle. Smoke hazed the boathouse entrance.

“Fun time,” I said happily as I climbed back on to the dock.

“No!” Michael clung desperately to the stanchion. I slapped his hands free, kicked his feet out from under him, then hurled him on to the white leather seats of Quick Colleen. “No!” he protested again. His face had already turned a deathly pallor. “Please, Paul!”

“Where’s Rebel Lady?”

“I told you! We sank her.”

“Then let’s go look for her!” I rammed the throttles into reverse and the expensive boat slashed backwards. I swivelled her, rammed the twin levers forward, and screamed straight out to sea. Within yards the hull was planing and before we had even reached the Spindle Rock Quick Colleen was splintering the wintry sea at fifty miles an hour. At that speed even the smallest wave banged and shook the lightweight racing hull. She crashed across the gray waters, quivering and hammering like a live beast and leaving behind her a twin cock’s comb of high white water that glittered in the early sunlight.

“Isn’t this fun!” I spun the wheel, forcing Quick Colleen to turn like a jet-fighter. She skidded sideways as the huge engines tried to counteract the centrifugal force, then I wrenched her back, gave her full throttle, and let her run loose and fast toward far Nantucket. “I said, isn’t this fun!”

Herlihy had vomited on the leather seat. He was retching and heaving, bringing up nothing but a mixture of bile and water. The boat thumped on the waves, banging like a demented hammer. A fishing boat had left a long gelid wake a mile ahead and I steered straight for it, slamming into the bigger waves at full speed. The sound of the seas hitting Quick Colleen’s hull was like the crack of doom. The boat bounced in the air, came down in an explosion of white water, slammed up again, shook down once more, and Michael was grovelling and sliding around in his own vomit as he desperately tried to keep his balance.

I turned the boat hard, accelerated again, and rammed her back through the fishing boat’s wake. Michael stared up at me, a terrible look on his pale face, then shook his head as if to tell me he had taken enough torment.

I cut the throttles, letting Quick Colleen idle in the cold, gentle water. “So where’s Rebel Lady?” I asked him.

“In Washington, DC.”

“Where?”

“At the Virginia Shore Marine Depot.”

“Where’s that?”

He heaved, brought up a trickle of mucus, then groaned. Even the small rocking of the boat was murder to him.

“Where’s that?” I asked him again.

“It’s at the northern end of Washington National Airport. Go into the city from the airport and it’s the first turning off the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway. Now, please, Paul! Take me back! Please!”

“Who took her there?”

“I hired a delivery firm in Cotuit.”

I gave the engines a tad of power, throwing Michael back on to the fouled cushions. His face had a green tinge now.

“What’s hidden inside her, Michael?”

“I don’t know. Truly! Nothing perhaps. You were bringing the money, that’s all! Then she was to be left at that yard.”

“Il Hayaween ordered her taken to that particular yard, yes?”

“Yes!”

“And he sent you more money?”

“Yes!”

“How much?”

He was reluctant to say, but I gunned the throttles slightly and he yielded immediately. “Five million again.” He slid sideways, heaving and retching.

“He wired it, right? To where, the Caymans?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“And the five million is for you and Brendan to share, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And no one else knows about this, do they?” I suddenly saw it clearly. That was why Brendan had sent me two punks, because he dared not ask the Army Council to allocate good men. “This operation was never cleared by the Army Council, was it?” I accused him.

Michael gazed up at me. That question scared him, but he was too cowed, too miserable and too wretched to dare tell a lie and so he shook his head.

Which meant he was freelancing. He and Brendan. None of this had been approved by the Provisional IRA’s Army Council. The whole thing was an unsanctioned operation. “There never were any Stingers, were there?” I asked.

“There would have been!” Michael pleaded. “We could have bought every Stinger on the market! That’s what we were going to do, Paul! Don’t you understand? We had to make money! I wanted Boston to be more important than Tripoli again! I wanted to see Ireland free!” The last word was a despairing cry as another spasm of illness wrenched him forward.

“So who were those Cubans?”

“The Arabs provided them. We had to convince you that there really were Stingers.”

Oh Christ, I thought, but Carlos and Alvarez had probably been the genuine articles; straight out of Cuba with Fidel’s cigar-smoke reeking in their nostrils. “Bastard,” I told Herlihy, then I gave Quick Colleen’s throttles a thrust, driving her fast on to the plane before whipping her into some fast S-turns, spinning and flogging her through the merciless sea. Herlihy was screaming and sobbing. I had never known the exquisite punishment of seasickness, but I had seen enough sufferers to know that its misery could prise the truth out of the most secretive of sinners.

I cut the throttles again, letting the sleek hull settle into the small waves. The shore was a mile away now. Michael was gagging and moaning; a man in anguish. “Tell me,” I demanded, “what is in that boat and worth ten million dollars of Saddam Hussein’s money?”

“I don’t know. They just asked us to deliver the boat to Washington.”

“And what were you to do with me?”

“Nothing.” He looked up at me, tendrils of vomit trailing from his blue lips. “Honest!”

I put a hand to the throttles.

“You were to be killed!” He said it pathetically, begging me not to touch the throttle levers. “You and the two boys.”

“Because the Rebel Lady,” I said, “was never to be associated with the IRA, is that it?”

“Yes!” He gazed beseechingly at me. His rumpled suit was flecked with vomit and seawater.

“And you and Brendan were willing to help Saddam Hussein attack America?”

“We didn’t know what it was about!” he protested.

“Oh, you did, Michael. You may not know what’s inside Rebel Lady, but you knew damn well she isn’t carrying a goodwill card for the President.”

“She brought us money,” he said, “and I’ll give the money toward the cause. Ireland will be free!”

“Oh it will,” I said, “I promise you that, but it won’t need your help, because Ireland doesn’t need traitors like you.”

“I’m not a traitor.”

“You’re a piece of shit, Michael, a piece of legal shit.” And I pushed the throttles forward, gave the boat two punishing and gut-wrenching turns, then headed hard for the shore.

And wondered just what lay in the dark belly of the Rebel Lady.

Washington, DC lies ninety-five miles from the mouth of the Potomac River. Rebel Lady would probably have done most of those miles under power after her delivery crew had sailed her south from Cape Cod. The weather had been kind, so they had probably taken the outside route to Sandy Hook, then down to Cape May where they would have taken her by canal and river into the Chesapeake Bay. Then, once into the Potomac, they would have motored her up to the nation’s capital and, if they had remembered the old tradition that honored George Washington, they would have sounded the ship’s bell as they passed Mount Vernon.

Once in the city itself they would have taken the Virginia Channel where, just south of the Pentagon and north of the airport, the Virginia Shore Marine Depot lay. In winter the dilapidated yard was a storage place for cruisers and dismasted yachts. It was a dispiriting place, nothing but a mucky run-down yard hedged behind by the expressway looping off the river bridges and in front by the gantries and pylons that stood in a bay of the Potomac to hold the approach lights for Washington National Airport’s main runway. The big jets screamed overhead.

“Of course we’re not as well known as the Sailing Marina to the south of the airport,” the yard’s manager shouted to me as a passenger jet thundered above us, “but we’ve got more depth of water than the Pentagon Lagoon.” The smell of kerosene settled around us in the wake of the huge plane. I could see the Washington Monument across the river and beyond it, to my right, the last gleams of reflected sunlight from the Capitol Dome. The Capitol, like the White House, was a little over two miles away while the Pentagon was just one mile north. Rebel Lady had been brought like a plague bacillus right into the very heart of the Republic. “So what’s all this about?” the manager asked and, when I said nothing, he tried to prompt me. “They paid good money for her storage. Cash!”

“I’m sure they did.”

Once she had reached the yard Rebel Lady had been craned out of the water and cradled among a score of plastic-wrapped yachts. Her hull had been supported by metal jackstands and her thick keel rested on big wooden blocks. On Herlihy’s orders her new name had been painted out, making her just one more anonymous boat among the hundreds of craft stored in Washington’s boatyards during the bitter winter months.

Now, at dusk on the day which had started with Quick Colleen in Nantucket Sound, I stood where Rebel Lady had been hidden away. Rebel Lady herself had already been taken away to have her secret excised, but I had wanted to come to the boatyard to see for myself just where Saddam Hussein’s revenge on America would have been triggered.

“Shame what they did to her,” the manager said. “Wrecking an interior like that.”

“Wicked,” I agreed.

“Funny thing, though. She had a Florida manufacturer’s nameplate on her coachroof, but she wasn’t built in the States.”

“No, she wasn’t.” The real Rebel Lady, now called Roisin, waited for me in Ardgroom. I had decided I did not like that new name. I would change it back. Or find another name. Scoundrel perhaps? Then I would go and claim my boat and sail her back across the Atlantic.

“One of my guys reckoned she was French-built,” the manager told me, “but she was a hell of a lot heavier than any French boat I’ve ever seen.”

“I know. I sailed her.” That crossing of the Mediterranean seemed so long ago now. I suddenly remembered Liam’s dead eyes gleaming emerald with the reflected lamplight.

“You sailed her? So what was it all about?” the manager asked eagerly.

“Smuggling. Cocaine.” I offered him the answer which he would find most believable.

“I reckoned as much. The stuff was hidden in that big keel, eh?”

“I guess so.”

“I know so!” he said happily. “I was here when they X-rayed her. They got excited, I can tell you! Excited!” He gestured toward the vacant hard-standing where Rebel Lady had been parked and where all that was now left of her presence were abandoned keel-blocks, jackstands, and the cumbersome X-ray equipment that was used to survey the health of hidden keel-bolts. “You think we’ll be on the TV news?” the manager asked me hopefully.

I shook my head. “You don’t want to be on the evening news, believe me, not with that boat. But thank you for letting me see the place.”

“You’re welcome.” He tried to hide his disappointment. “And if you ever need boat storage in the nation’s capital, Mr.…?” He hesitated, inviting my name, but I shook my head again and walked away. It was nearly dark and the runway’s approach lights shimmered their reflections in the river’s hurrying water. A plane roared close overhead as I climbed into the back seat of the government car and slammed the door.

It had all been so close. And so clever. Whatever it was, which now, in the city’s evening traffic, I went to find out.

Rebel Lady had been taken to one of the military reservations close to Washington where, in a great empty hangar, she stood forlorn under massive bright lights. I found van Stryker in a glass-walled booth from where he intently watched the white-garbed team that worked underneath the jacked-up hull. “It’s in the lead keel,” he told me without taking his eyes off the boat and without saying what “it” was.

The huge bulbous keel had already been taken off Rebel Lady. Like most ballast keels it had been secured to the fiberglass hull by long silicon-bronze stud bolts. Van Stryker’s team had loosened the bolts and gently lowered the keel to the hangar floor. Standing beside the exposed keel, which was now hidden from my view by the men and women in their protective clothing, was a bright yellow flask as big as a compact car and decorated with the three-leaved insignia of the nuclear industry. “It was a bomb?” I asked in horror as I recognized the symbol.

“No. He doesn’t have the technology to make a bomb, not yet.” Van Stryker looked tired. His job was to preserve the republic from the attacks of terrorists and he knew just how close this attack had come to success, and now he was thinking of the other attacks that would doubtless come in the future. “Someone’s going to make the bomb, Paul, someone who thinks they can change the world in their favor by setting it off. But not this time.”

“So what is it?”

“A small sliver of Chernobyl.”

“Chernobyl?”

Van Stryker sipped at a brown plastic mug of coffee. “We think the Iraqis hollowed out that keel and filled it with around four tons of uranium-dioxide. That’s the nuclear fuel you put in ordinary commercial power station like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. They chopped the fuel rods into pellets and mixed them up with powdered aluminum and what looks like ammonium nitrate. That means they mixed the uranium into a huge firebomb. Then they added a detonator and a timer. Simple, really, and comparatively cheap.”

“And what will that lot do?”

“The firebomb would have reached a temperature of over seven thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and once the nuclear fuel caught fire it would have spread a miniature plume of radioactivity just like the Chernobyl plume.” Van Stryker offered me a sudden sympathetic glance. “Don’t worry, Paul, my experts say you probably weren’t exposed to excessive radiation. By sheathing that horror in lead and keeping it under water they gave you protection. Then you made yourself even safer by piling the gold on top.”

I stared at the white-dressed figures. “What would the bomb have done to Washington?”

“If the wind had been southerly then their toxic bonfire might have made the Pentagon untenable for years to come, or even the White House. What a revenge for Baghdad that would have been.” Van Stryker fell silent for a few seconds. “Think of a city contaminated with radioactive isotopes; strontium and caesium. Think of the birth-defects, think of the cancers. That’s why they wanted the boat out of the water when the detonator triggered, so the fire could start properly. If she’d been floating it would have been snuffed out and at best just contaminated a few miles of river, but on dry land, and with a good wind, they might have smeared a hundred square miles with lethal poisons.”

“This wasn’t the IRA’s doing, you know that?” I told van Stryker.

“Your IRA,” he said flatly, “was the only organization to support Saddam Hussein with bombs. Don’t make excuses for terrorism. Don’t try to tell me they’re just misled heroes.”

“I just said…”

“I heard you what you said, Paul, and I understand your mixed loyalties.” He stared at the bright arc lights and the busy men and the bright yellow flask. “Did you know that when George Washington couldn’t find uniforms for his men he made them place scraps of white paper in their hats? He was saying, these are my warriors, these are your targets. He didn’t hide them, he didn’t send them home to hide behind women’s skirts at day’s end. He was a man.”

I said nothing, but just stared at Rebel Lady. A rope’s bitter end hung from her gunwale and I wondered if she would ever sail again. I doubted it, and I thought how unfair to a boat that her last voyage should be under such false pretences. She deserved one last romp through high seas with full sail and no unfair ballast slowing her down.

“The Garda arrested Flynn this afternoon,” van Stryker said.

“Will you extradite him?”

“No. The less the public know about this, the better. Nuclear matters seem to bring out the most hysterical aspects of the American people so I shall try very hard to keep all this secret. But Flynn will be taught that Uncle Sam is not easily mocked. The Garda will find something with which to charge him, and a few years in Portlaoise Jail should teach him to respect us.”

“And Herlihy?”

Van Stryker shook his head. “There’s too many lawyers round him to make a trumped-up charge stick, but I think the Internal Revenue Service could be persuaded to make his life a misery.”

“And what of me?” I asked.

“On the whole,” he said, “You’ve been on the side of the angels. We’ll give you some back pay, Paul. Say a hundred thousand? You can make a new start with that.”

“Yes.” I sounded sour. “But it isn’t five million, is it?”

“Which the Brits have suddenly agreed to turn over to us,” van Stryker said grimly. “I have spoken sternly to Miss Ko.” A telephone suddenly buzzed, cutting off van Stryker’s tale of how he had dealt with the perfidious British. He answered the phone and I saw one of the protectively clothed figures beside the gutted Rebel Lady speaking into the other handset. Van Stryker grunted a few times, thanked the man, then put the telephone down. “July 4,” he said slowly. “The timer was set for noon on Independence Day. It’s a fair bet Washington will be crowded that day. Maybe a victory parade for Desert Storm? Maybe a nation’s street party?” Van Stryker sounded angry, and no wonder, for who among the crowd celebrating America’s independence would have thought twice about a plume of smoke across the river, or would have sensed the invisible fall of deadly isotopes seeping across the Mall and Pennsylvania Avenue?

“I very nearly brought it about, didn’t I?” I spoke in bitter recrimination.

“Did you?” van Stryker asked in a tone of mild disbelief. He was again staring at the crippled boat and the bright flask.

“By not telling you about Rebel Lady.”

“Oh, we knew something was up, and I suppose we’d have discovered the boat eventually.” He still spoke mildly, and I remembered his stricture that everything should be done according to the rules, unless, of course, a man was outside the rules, and that surely included the British team that had abducted me? And how could terrorism be fought strictly within the rules? Due process was a feeble weapon compared with a firebomb laced with soap-flakes or a Kalashnikov in the hands of a bitter youth. I remembered an IRA man complaining in a Lifford pub how he had just lost two men to an SAS ambush. “There used to be rules,” he had told me bitterly, “but now the focking Brits are fighting just like us.” Could terrorism only be defeated by terror? That was a horrid question, as horrid as the scene in the brightly lit hangar where a small crane was lowering a pallet loaded with what looked like mounds of dull silver powder into the flask. “A toxic nuclear cocktail,” van Stryker explained.

“But it isn’t over, is it?” I said. “Il Hayaween won’t stop with this failure.”

“But he’s lost the initiative, Paul, and we’ll be setting traps for him and, thanks to the Gulf war, he’s lost some of his old hiding places. This is a victory, Paul.” He gestured at the broken boat. “It isn’t the last victory, because you can’t beat terrorism, only contain it, but my God this feels good, and maybe it will feel better soon? We’re going to make the bastards who sent us that present dance to Uncle Sam’s tune for a little while, and who knows? We might even dance them into an early grave.”

“I suppose,” I said slowly, “that I should thank you for keeping me out of an early grave?”

“You don’t have to thank me.” Van Stryker did not look at me as he spoke, but instead watched as men uncoiled hoses with which to wash down the hangar. “When I sent you out fourteen years ago I never expected to see you again. We sent others, don’t ask who, and so far you’re the only one to come back. Two others certainly won’t return and a third might have joined our enemies. It wasn’t an easy job you did, and I don’t suppose you feel clean about it, but you served your country, Paul. You have preserved the republic from evil, and for that it is my duty to thank you.” He turned and held out his hand. “So, as far as I am concerned, you can go with a clear conscience.”

It was a bright night, the sky ablaze with stars above a clean country that was safe from harm. I walked to the car, breathing a cold air, and I wondered what the hell would happen now.

“The airport, sir?” the driver asked.

“Please,” I said, and we drove away, leaving behind us the bright facility with its parked helicopters and low loaders and armed men and yellow lamps and warning signs. The sentries waved us through the guardpost, and the brilliant lights disappeared behind as we drove through the dark woods toward the small safe towns of America. The small towns of decent folk who are so hated by the terrorists.

I would go home now to my own small town, but I guessed, after all, that I would not stay there. There would be no peace for me, not yet, for ghosts still stalked my world and I did not know how to exorcise them; nor would il Hayaween abandon me, for I had made a fool of him and he would want me dead. I thought of Roisin’s eyes in the instant before I had pulled the trigger. Oh dear God, but the paths we choose so heedlessly. The lights of Washington smeared the sky ahead, and I thought of a fire blossoming in a city, of death dropping soft as snowflakes across wide avenues. I closed my eyes. In the spring, I thought, I would go to Ireland, and I would take my boat to sea and I would let her take me somewhere, I did not know where, I did not care where, just anywhere that a scoundrel might find refuge.