The Deceiver

“I think,” said McCready, “we can call in the Navy now.”

They left the hold and went back to the warm morning sunshine of the main deck. The Navy would take over the Regina and bring her to Harwich. There she would be for­mally seized and her crew and passengers arrested.

The Fair Maid had been pumped out to repair her wallowing list. The special-effects smoke grenades that had given her the appearance of being on fire had long been thrown into the sea.

For the IRA man with the shattered knee, the bleeding had been stopped by a rough but skillful tourniquet applied by the commandos. He now sat ashen-faced with his back against a bulkhead and waited for the naval surgeon-commander, who would come with the frigate, now only half a mile off the beam. The other two had been handcuffed to a stanchion farther down the deck, and McCready had the key to the cuffs.

Captain Holst and his crew had descended without demur into one of the holds—not the one containing the weaponry—and sat among the olives until the Navy men could drop them a ladder.

Stephen Johnson had been locked in his cabin belowdecks.

When they were ready, the five SBS men vaulted onto the cabin roof of the Fair Maid, then disappeared below. Her engine started. Two of the commandos reappeared and cast her loose. The lieutenant waved a last farewell to McCready, still on the Regina, and the fishing boat chugged away. These were the secret warriors; they had done their job, and there was no need for them to wait around.

Tom Rowse sat down, shoulders hunched, on the coaming of one of the holds, next to the supine body of Monica Browne. On the other side of the Regina’s deck, the frigate eased alongside, threw graplines, and sent the first of the boarding party across. They conferred with McCready.

A puff of wind blew a corner of the sheet away from the face beneath it. Rowse stared down at the beautiful face, so calm in death. The breeze blew a frond of corn-blond hair across the forehead. He reached down to push it back. Some­one sat down beside him, and an arm came round his shoul­ders.

“It’s over, Tom. You weren’t to know. You weren’t to blame. She knew what she was doing.”

“If I’d known she was here, I wouldn’t have killed her,” said Rowse, dully.

“Then she’d have killed you. She was that kind of person.”

Two seamen unlocked the IRA men and led them toward the frigate. Two orderlies under the supervision of a surgeon lifted the wounded one onto a stretcher and carried him away.

“What happens now?” asked Rowse.

McCready stared at the sea and the sky and sighed. “Now, Tom, the lawyers take over. The lawyers always take over, reducing all of life and death, passion, greed, courage, lust, and glory to the desiccated vernacular of their trade.”

“And you?”

“Oh, I will go back to Century House and start again. And go back each night to my small flat and listen to my music and eat my baked beans. And you will go back to Nikki, my friend, and hold her very tight, and write your books and forget all this. Hamburg, Vienna, Malta, Tripoli, Cyprus—forget it. It’s all over.”

Stephen Johnson was led past. He paused to look down at the two Englishmen. His accent was as thick as the heather of the west coast.

“Our day will come,” he said. It was the slogan of the Provisional IRA.

McCready looked up and shook his head. “No, Mr. John­son, your day has long gone.”

Two orderlies loaded the body of the dead IRA man onto a stretcher and removed it.

“Why did she do it, Sam? Why the hell did she do it?” asked Rowse.

McCready leaned forward and drew the sheet back over the face of Monica Browne. The orderlies returned to take her away.

“Because she believed, Tom. In the wrong thing, of course. But she believed.”

He rose, pulling Rowse up with him.

“Come on, lad, we’re going home. Let it be, Tom. Let it be. She’s gone the way she wanted, by her own wish. Now she’s just another casualty of war. Like you, Tom. Like all of us.”