‘My idea of roughing it is to watch black and white TV,’ the President said. ‘One Boy Scout to a family is okay. Two would be a travesty of genetic theory.’
Kevin Dawson heard the sounds of his daughters from the foot of the stairs. They were involved in a game of what they’d described as ‘cut-throat poker’, which they played to rules of their own random making. It was altogether incomprehensible.
Thomas Dawson said, ‘It’s been a long winter.’
Puzzled, Kevin reached out and closed the door of his office with his knee. ‘You didn’t call to discuss the length of the seasons,’ he said.
‘True.’
Another pause.
Kevin sat down, tilting his chair back against the wall. With one hand he managed to pour himself a scotch. He heard the door of the Secret Service vehicle open and close in the driveway below. Both agents, whom the kids had christened Cisco and Pancho, had spent the weekend in obvious discomfort, sleeping in a two-man tent because there was no extra room in the small cabin. They took their meals alone, laboriously burning things over a Coleman stove and filling the cold, sharp air with a dark brown pollution that smelled, Kitty said, like a skunk on a spit.
‘It’s been a long winter, and you’re about ready for a vacation,’ Thomas Dawson said.
‘It’s that bad, huh?’
‘It’s that bad. Nicholas Linney has been murdered.’
‘Linney?’ Kevin felt an odd tightness in his throat. His voice sounded very high, even to himself.
‘I don’t have to spell out the implications.’
‘Was it Jig?’ Kevin asked.
‘Almost certainly. By the way, I don’t want this news bruited about, Kev. You understand me?’
Kevin Dawson drained his glass. He reached for the bottle, poured himself a second shot. All the invigoration he’d brought back with him from Candlewood was draining away. He had the very strange feeling he’d just been kicked in the stomach and couldn’t breathe properly. How in God’s name had Jig managed to track Linney down? Kevin curled the telephone cord tightly around his wrist.
He heard Martha and the kids coming up the stairs. Their voices echoed in this great sprawling house.
‘I don’t think you’re seriously in danger, Kevin. You’ve got protection there. But why take any needless chances?’
Protection, Kevin thought. What it came down to was the fact that all the security in the world couldn’t prevent somebody getting to you, if he was determined enough, and crazy enough, to find a way.
‘What do you suggest?’ Kevin asked.
‘Hawaii. Make it a business trip with a little R & R on the side. Check into the family interests out there, but take Martha and the kids as well. Stay until Jig’s been caught. How soon can you get out of there?’
Kevin Dawson wasn’t sure. There were business meetings of one kind or another on Monday morning and Martha was the guest of honour at a breakfast in Stamford sponsored by the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which was her favourite charity. It would take more than a terrorist threat to make her cancel. ‘Tomorrow afternoon,’ he said. ‘I can’t see getting away from here before that.’
‘I’d like it if you left earlier, Kevin.’
‘I don’t see how.’
Kevin heard his brother light up one of his infrequent cigarettes.
‘I’ve just been talking with what the press always calls “my closest advisors”, Kevin. Terrorists are the new bogeymen. They’ve replaced Communists in the American nightmare. If I lose some of the Irish vote by sticking the full fury of the FBI on somebody as famous as Jig, I’m advised I’ll pick it up again with the rednecks who have orgasms when they know there’s a firm Presidential hand on the old helm of state. The Law and Order Ticket. The Jerry Falwell Brigade. Imagine a Catholic climbing into bed beside those polyester gangsters!’
Kevin Dawson couldn’t imagine anything like that. But his brother had gone so far into cynicism that nothing was surprising these days. Thomas Dawson, human being, was almost a lost cause. Not quite gone, but fading fast. Tom would climb into bed with any group that could deliver votes. He was less a President than a calculating machine. If the Irish couldn’t be counted on, you dumped them and looked around for substitutes. The politics of expediency, of numbers. Tommy would have sat down to supper with a consortium of the KKK, the John Birchers, the Posse Comitatus and The Unification Church, if he thought this crew could deliver.
‘We were weak on law and order during the campaign,’ Thomas Dawson said. ‘I know it lost us the Mid-West and the South. Maybe my advisors are smarter than I think.’
‘Maybe,’ Kevin said.
‘Call me from Hawaii.’
‘I’ll do that.’
‘Goodnight, Kevin.’
Kevin Dawson put the telephone down. The door of his office swung open and Martha stood there. She was dressed in faded blue jeans and an old red parka. There were streaks of mud on her hiking boots. Her Candlewood Collection. Kevin loved it.
‘The girls and I are going to watch some Disney thing on TV,’ she said. ‘Wanna join us?’
Kevin Dawson nodded. He reached for his wife, held her wrists in his hands. ‘Later,’ he said.
Martha smiled. ‘I want you to know I had a wonderful weekend. I didn’t even mind Pancho and Cisco and their awful cooking. I just had a terrific time.’
‘Me too.’
Kevin wondered how to approach the subject of a trip to Hawaii. Martha hated to travel very far from her home. A day trip to Stamford was as far as she liked to go.
‘Why don’t you watch your movie, then we’ll put the kids to bed as early as possible. You can slip, as they say, into something more comfortable, and I’ll open a bottle of wine.’ Kevin thought that a couple of glasses of burgundy would make the notion of Hawaii palatable to her. She might not cancel her luncheon in Stamford, but she might be persuaded that Waikiki was a good idea. Sometimes you had to coax Martha along, seduce her into acceptance. Besides, nothing was more pleasurable in Kevin Dawson’s world than the act of making love to his own wife.
‘You’ve got a funny look in your eyes,’ she said.
‘Don’t I.’
‘I know that look, Kevin Dawson.’
‘You should. You’re the one that put it there.’
She raised her face up and kissed him, standing on tiptoes. ‘I look like somebody from the combat zone,’ she said. She went to the door, turned back to him. ‘Next time you see me I’ll be gorgeous.’
‘You always are,’ Kevin Dawson said, but his wife had already gone.
He sat alone in his room, staring absently at a pile of business papers. He couldn’t keep Nicholas Linney out of his mind. He kept seeing Nick as he’d seen him last at Roscommon, kept hearing Linney say he could take care of himself. Well, he hadn’t. He hadn’t taken care of himself at all. He thought now of Harry Cairney and Mulhaney and he considered calling them. But what was there to say? And neither of them had troubled to call him, which meant they had nothing to say either.
Kevin Dawson walked to the window. He looked down at the Secret Servicemen. One of them – Cisco, Pancho, Kevin wasn’t sure – stared up at him and smiled. A fleeting little expression, then it was gone. Kevin stared across the meadowlands that stretched all the way from his house to the road. Beyond the ribbon of concrete the hills rose up, pocked with mysterious shadows and dark trees. It was a landscape he had been familiar with all his life, except that now it appeared strange to him, and threatening, as if it might conceal the Irishman somewhere in its crevices.
New York City
The voice on the tape said: I’m claiming responsibility on behalf of the Irish Republican Army for the explosions in the Memorial Church at White Plains. Have you got that, shithead? I don’t intend to repeat it. And then the tape went silent, the line dead. Frank Pagan pressed the rewind button on the Grundig and listened for the third time. Zuboric drummed a lead pencil on the surface of his desk, watching Pagan carefully. You couldn’t tell,
from the surfaces of the Englishman’s face, what he might be thinking.
The voice filled the room again. Pagan pushed the stop button. He looked at Zuboric.
‘It’s Irish. There’s no mistaking that,’ Pagan said.
Zuboric stroked his moustache. There was something in Pagan’s eyes he didn’t like. He wasn’t quite sure what it was, but a strange little film had appeared in the ashen greyness. A sneaky quality. It was as if Pagan’s eyes were being bleached of what colour they possessed. Zuboric wished he had a passport valid for entry into the Englishman’s mind.
‘Is it Jig?’ the FBI agent asked.
Pagan stared down at the reels of the Grundig. ‘It could be,’ he said.
‘You’re not convinced, naturally.’
‘I’m just not sure. There’s distortion. And maybe he’s disguising the voice. It could be Jig.’
Zuboric appeared satisfied with this. Frank Pagan walked up and down the office and then returned to the Grundig, as if he needed to hear the voice one last time to be absolutely sure. He pushed the play button, listened, killed the machine.
‘I’m still not one hundred per cent certain,’ Pagan said.
‘We don’t need one hundred per cent certainty, Frank.’
No, Pagan thought. You don’t. He looked at Zuboric’s college diploma which hung just over his head and wondered what institution of Higher Learning had been so foolish as to bestow any kind of degree on Zuboric. Obviously it was one that didn’t specialise in imaginative pursuits.
‘I’d like to have the original Jig tapes relayed from England,’ Pagan said. ‘A comparison would erase any doubt.’
Zuboric was about to make an answer to this when the telephone rang. Pagan watched the agent pick up the receiver. Zuboric’s body was suddenly tense, at attention, which meant only one thing. Leonard M. Korn was on the other end of the line. Pagan listened to the occasional ‘Yes sir’ which Zuboric dropped into a conversation that was otherwise one-sided. Yessir, yes-sir, three bags full, sir.
Zuboric put the receiver down. ‘Well well.’ He was positively beaming. Pagan thought ships could guide themselves by the beacon that was Zuboric’s face right then.
‘As of eight o’clock tonight,’ Zuboric said, glancing at his wristwatch, ‘The Director is placing himself in charge of the Jig operation.’
‘Ah,’ Pagan said. ‘Divine intervention.’
Zuboric rubbed his hands together. ‘Tomorrow morning, one hundred agents will be working fulltime on Jig. One hundred.’ Zuboric laughed in an excited way. He was like a lottery winner, Pagan thought. Blue-collar, worked hard all his days, liked the occasional sixer of Schlitz, a game of bowling Fridays – and lo and behold! His number has just come up and he doesn’t know what to say. I’m happy for you, Artie, Pagan thought. Spend it wisely.
‘The Director estimates we’ll have Jig in a matter of days.’
Pagan said nothing. He mistrusted the optimism of law enforcement officers, especially those who dwelt on Olympian heights the way Korn did. Probably the guy in charge of the Jack the Ripper investigation had said much the same kind of thing a hundred years ago, and he was still searching.
‘I’m going back to my hotel,’ Pagan said. ‘I’m tired.’
‘I’ll keep you company, Frank.’
‘Of course you will.’
Pagan did up the buttons of his overcoat. He glanced once at the Grundig machine. He thought again of repeating his proposal to have the original tapes of Jig relayed from London, but suddenly it was redundant, suddenly those tapes wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. The hunt was on and the night was filled with baying hounds. And there was going to be noise, so much noise that nobody was going to stop and listen to tapes of the real Jig. Even if they did, they wouldn’t hear them anyway because blood had a way of singing into your ears, making you deaf. The hunt mentality, whether it was Federal agents thrashing around for Jig or plum-rumped English squires intent on diminishing the evil fox population, was akin to insanity. It was blinded, and restricted, and obsessive.
Whoever had called the FBI about White Plains wasn’t Jig. He didn’t sound remotely like Jig. There was no way in the world Jig had made that phone call. Pagan had hoped to use his apparent uncertainty as a ploy, a way of winning a little time and getting the real tapes played. But he saw further manoeuvres as totally useless now. There was no future in arguing, in trying to convince Zuboric. For his own part, he knew what he was going to do. It wasn’t the smartest move he’d ever contemplated, but at the same time he couldn’t see any alternatives. He had tried to play this whole thing by FBI rules and regulations, but that time was long past. He hadn’t come all this way to America to have his quarry trapped in some bloody corner by morons like Zuboric. He hadn’t made this trip to see that kind of travesty happen. He wanted Jig, but not on the sort of terms dictated by the hangmen of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Pagan locked the door of his room at the Parker Meridien. He sat for a time on the edge of the bed. He was motionless, like a man in the still centre of meditation. Then, when he moved, he did so with the economy of somebody driven by a solitary purpose. He checked his gun, stuck it in the waistband of his pants at the back. He left the room. It was all movement now. Down in the elevator. Out into the lobby. Heading for the street.
Tyson Bruno came across the lobby towards him.
Pagan swept past the agent into the street, but Bruno came after him swiftly. It was interesting, Pagan thought. There was no effort on Bruno’s part to conceal himself, no shadow-work going on. It was out in the open. Maybe Bruno had been surprised by Pagan’s sudden appearance and the quickness of his stride and hadn’t had time to hide himself. What the hell, it was completely academic now.
Pagan stopped, turned around, waited until Bruno was level with him. Tyson Bruno, who was built like an outhouse, looked very solid in the dusk of Fifty-Seventh Street.
‘Before you even ask me one question, Bruno old boy, the answer is dead simple. I’m going for a walk and I don’t want you on my arse. Is that clear enough for you?’
Tyson Bruno grinned. He was a man who enjoyed adversity. If he hadn’t stepped inside the labyrinthine clasp of the FBI, he would have been a happy bouncer in a sleazy strip-joint. ‘I go where you go, Pagan. This time, you don’t take a hike on me.’
Pagan turned, continued to walk. Bruno was still coming up behind him. On Fifth Avenue, Pagan made a right. Bruno was still behind him.
‘Your last warning, Ty,’ Pagan said, looking back at the man.
‘You shouldn’t be doing this,’ Bruno said.
Pagan moved away. He was tired of boxes. Tired of restrictions. Tired by fools who, left to their own devices, courted lunacy. He paused at a stoplight. Bruno was right behind him, still grinning. Pagan glanced at him.
‘I just keep coming,’ Bruno said.
Pagan made as if to step off the sidewalk and cross the street. He moved an inch or two then stopped abruptly, bunching his hands together and swinging them as if he held a hammer. The connection with Bruno’s jaw made a delicious crunching sound. Reverberations created ripples, like tiny springs, all the way up Pagan’s arms to his shoulders. Tyson, off balance, hopeless, sat down on the edge of the kerb and said, ‘Hey!’ He was bleeding from the lip, and his eyes looked like two glazed pinballs under the bleak glow of the streetlamps.
Pagan didn’t stop. He ran to the other side of the street and began to move along Fifty-Sixth, past the windows of closed restaurants and travel agencies, past the plastic sacks of garbage and a solitary sleeping wino, a failed candidate for St. Finbar’s Mission. Pagan stopped running only when he had reached Fifty-Fifth and Broadway and was certain that Tyson Bruno was nowhere near him. Winded, he paused in the doorway of a closed Greek sandwich shop, where the scent of yesterday’s fried lamb filled his nostrils.
It occurred to him that he had done more than burn his bridges. He had exploded them in such a way that the whole bloody river was on fire.
New York City
With a newspaper rolled up under his arm Ivor McInnes stepped into Central Park. It was barely dawn and the sky above Manhattan was the colour of milk. McInnes followed a narrow pathway between the trees until he came to an unoccupied bench. He wiped a layer of thin frost from the wooden slats, then sat down and unfolded his newspaper.
Photographs, headlines. They leaped out at him. For a moment he couldn’t read because his eyes watered and his hand trembled. But there it was! McInnes had the feeling, given to very few men, that something he’d long dreamed was finally taking form in reality.
He stared at the newspaper again. He didn’t see what other men might see there, a story of outrageous vandalism. He saw glory instead. He looked at the pictures of the smoking church, the tight little crowds of people gathered on the sidewalk, the shots of firemen aiming their hoses into the carnage. He felt for the victims, of course. It was only natural. A man without feelings was a dead man. But these feelings were small considerations compared with the balance of history. And it was history, or rather his personal piece of it, that enthralled Ivor McInnes.
He folded the newspaper over. For a while he stared into the trees. There was a breath of spring in the chill early morning around him. A sense of fresh breakthroughs, newness. He spread the newspaper flat on the bench and read the story through, unable to control the excitement that overcame him.
There was of course no mention yet of the IRA. Nobody was going to release that information to the public so soon. There hadn’t been time to analyse Houlihan’s call, there hadn’t been time in Washington to prepare a public face or concoct a feasible story to cover this incident. A church had blown up. Why? What had caused it? The paper didn’t say. The reporter didn’t know. There wasn’t even speculation. McInnes smiled and rubbed his face with the palm of a hand. The powers of law and order could sit on this one, he realised. They could stall and prevaricate, if they didn’t want to alarm the public with the news that IRA terrorists were suddenly operating within the continental United States. But they couldn’t stall forever.
Jig Page 41