“This is a palace,” he said.
“It belongs to a client,” Meyers said.
The man, who was known to Meyers only as Kurt, stood quietly as if waiting to be asked into the house. But Meyers said, “We’ll do our business outside. What do you have with you?”
Kurt led him to the back of the wagon and lifted a cloth wrap from a pair of shiny, oiled, and deadly-looking pieces of military equipment.
“The automatic rifle is a Heckler and Koch G.3, much better than the Belgian FAL, I assure you. West German. And this, the sub-machine gun, is Swiss-made.” He spoke with pride. “A SIG MP .310. Nine hundred rounds per minute. They are in short supply, now. But I have the contacts, of course.”
Meyers picked it up and cradled it in his arms, feeling its weight.
“Made with traditional Swiss attention to detail,” said Kurt.
Meyers fondled it, turned it about. He would have loved to fire a few rounds into the swamp, but there were neighbors half a mile away.
“A hundred of these,” he said. “Two hundred of the other. I have already looked at the specifications.”
“And arrangements for payment?”
“Cash on delivery.”
***
Looking over his shoulder, Kerrivan saw the two men on the RCMP launch scramble wildly to their stations, turn the engines over, winch up the anchor. The Alta Mar, recalled from the dead, grunted heavily forward.
Billy Lee Tinker’s longboat was in the water, and its outboard engine, cold, coughed several times before Tinker, with a frantic heave on the cord, brought it alive with a burst of smoke, and began racing away into the mist, towards the shoreline.
“Come on, my darling,” Kerrivan whispered to his ship. “Give it some juice.” The Alta Mar took on speed before a churning white wake.
There was a rolling hump of fog by the pass, between the sunkers. He would be taking the Devil’s Coffin at full speed on a dropping tide with a foot of water in the bilges.
The patrol boat was coming now. It fired a warning shot from its seventy-six-millimeter cannon, and a green fountain burst a hundred feet to starboard of the freighter.
Kerrivan took the Alta Mar hard in, close to the northern horn of the Coffin, and prayed, glancing at the fathometer. The floor of the sea climbed towards the ship like a rising giant, and the rocks were only a few feet from the keel. The tide was pouring through the gap like a river after spring breakup.
Not quite through the pass, not quite into the fog bank, Kerrivan heeled the ship hard to port, tacking it like a sailboat, and the old coaster rolled so hard that Kerrivan almost lost his sea legs.
We had one chance: that the operator of the patrol boat, lacking local knowledge, being too eager to glance at the charts, would cut too quickly to port in his effort to shorten the angle between him and the Alta Mar. That, at any event, was what Kerrivan was inviting him to do.
It worked.
A scream of metal on rock. A snap like a thunderclap. A wild churning and gushing and frothing of water.
The cutter had been sweeping through the sea at close to thirty knots when it impaled itself on the left horn of the Devil.
The Alta Mar began to slide into the rolling mists and Kerrivan looked back and saw the patrol boat listing gradually to its side. Two men were in the water and a third was throwing life jackets and ropes to them.
Nighthawk came aloft.
“Wasn’t my fault,” Kerrivan said. But he wasn’t smiling. He felt drained and light in the head — all the tension, and the many sleepless days and nights. “Get the other dinghy ready, John,” he said.
Nighthawk didn’t move. He was staring at the radar screen.
“Pete, either that’s an iceberg, or the Île de France is out here, lost in the fog.”
Kerrivan’s eyes bugged.
The Alta Mar emerged from the fog and found herself dwarfed beneath the towering guns of the HMCS Mackenzie King, 426-meter DD-280-Class destroyer, flagship of Her Majesty’s Royal Canadian Navy in the Atlantic fleet.
A voice bellowed at them through a bullhorn.
“Welcome to Canada, you poor mother-fuckers.”
***
James Peddigrew, on a day free of trials, was studying the weekly newsletter from his investment adviser. He had asked his secretary not to disturb him, and he scowled when the door clicked open and a woman slid inside and closed it softly behind her. He did not recognize her at first.
“James,” she said, “this is the shits.” She took off a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and slipped them into the pocket of a bulky, ill-fitting coat. It was Marianne Larochelle, and she was a brunette.
“What in hell are you doing here?” he said, getting up.
“How did I let you talk me into this thing?” she asked.
Peddigrew locked the door. “Why didn’t you phone? How do you know they haven’t followed you?”
“Don’t be stupid. I’ve been holed up in the Laurentians for the last ten days, in a little ski cabin.” She cleared a space on the corner of his desk and perched on it, shrugging off her coat. She had lost weight and looked drawn. “I finally ran out of nose powder. I had to get out. Do you have any idea what has been going on? Any idea?”
“They’ve picked up the ship. Busted Pete and Nighthawk.”
“This morning, yes. It was on the news.”
“But they don’t have the dope.”
“Never mind the dope, what’s going to happen to me, James? You had better start thinking about saving my ass.” There was a threat in her voice.
“Your ass is in pretty good shape.”
“Only figuratively, James.”
“There’s nothing they can do to you. They don’t know you were a part of this.”
“Oh, but they do. They had undercover on us the whole way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you know what’s been going on? They killed Kevin, for God’s sake!”
Peddigrew went white. “Maybe you’d better fill me in,” he said slowly.
“Act like a lawyer,” she said. “Give me some damn advice. I’ve had some dealings with a Canadian cop. Cute but dumb. He says they can’t charge me with anything. Is he right?”
“A cop? Maybe you better stay in hiding a while longer.”
“Is he right? If he’s not, I’m leaving this country on a rocket.”
“Keep calm, Marianne. Give me a little time. I have to figure out what’s been going down.”
“What about the guys? What are you going to do?”
“I already have a plane reservation to St. John’s.” Peddigrew managed a stiff smile. “Things could be worse. I guess we’ve got the cargo, and we’ve got the ship.”
“They’ve got the ship. The cops.”
“We can get everything released to us by court order, like the last time.”
“Don’t you think you should get things into gear, James? And go and see Pete before Mitchell takes a turn at him?”
“Let’s not worry about Pete. Let’s worry about us. Now start from the beginning.”
When Peddigrew showed her to the door twenty minutes later, a young woman and man in the waiting room stood up to meet them. The woman showed a badge and handed Larochelle a blue sheet of paper entitled Warrant.
“My name is Constable Ewers,” she said. “This is Constable Daniels. Miss Larochelle, you are under arrest upon a charge of conspiring to import marijuana into Canada. You need not say anything, but anything you do say may be used as evidence at your trial. Do you understand?”
Larochelle seemed to go limp, and she staggered back a step.
“What’s all this about?” Peddigrew said. His throat had gone dry; his voice sounded frayed.
Ewers looked at him with a bland smile. “They told us you were her lawyer. We’ve been staking o
ut your office building in case she showed up here. We’re taking her to St. John’s.”
“Staking out a lawyer’s office — this is outrageous!”
Ewers shrugged. “I have a message for you, Mr. Peddigrew. Before you go out to Newfoundland to see your clients, you are to call Mr. Knowlton Bishop in his office in Ottawa. Collect, he said. He wants to meet with you.” She smiled again. “Come along, Marianne.”
***
Flaherty was in Detective Braithwaite’s office in the Miami police building. She was making a pitch to extend the deadline.
“You still got no word?” Braithwaite said, glowering. “You really screwed it up, didn’t you?”
Flaherty tried to look apologetic. “Just give me a few more days.”
“No.” Braithwaite sat behind his desk with his arms folded. He wondered why he had listened to this broad in the first place.
“Four more days. That’s all I’ll ask.”
“It ain’t going to be you who’s going to be caught in the wringer, Jessica.”
“Four more days.”
“Two.”
“Three?” She stuck out her hand to shake on the bargain. Braithwaite kept his arms folded.
“Get out of here,” he said. “All right, three. Three. Period. That’s it.”
Chapter Forty-Three
“Hullo, Theo,” Kerrivan said, looking up at O’Doull through glasses that were broken at the stem and hung cockeyed across his face. His face was a mat of bruises.
The guard let O’Doull into the cell and left.
“We got fighters in the Navy, boy,” Kerrivan said. “We can be proud of them. I guess I’m lucky. Two hundred years ago, they’d have hanged Peter Kerrivan from the yardarm.”
“I heard you started it, Pete.”
“So they claim. How’s Johnny? I hear he lasted nearly ten rounds out there.”
“One broken jaw, a ruptured spleen, five cracked ribs, a broken right hand.”
Kerrivan groaned. “Is he in hospital?”
“Those are the Navy casualty figures,” O’Doull said. “All except for the right hand. Nighthawk is getting a cast put on that. We think Tinker has gone for a hike in the bush somewhere. He’ll give himself up after a few cold nights in the Newfoundland wilderness. By the way, Inspector Mitchell will be coming to see you. He wants to talk about the pot.”
None of this was really what O’Doull had come to talk to Kerrivan about.
“So, Theo, are you part of this rat’s nest? This nato military exercise, or whatever it is?”
“Operation Potship. I’m a technical adviser.” O’Doull, uncomfortable, wanted to say what he had come to say, and he was having trouble getting it out.
“I don’t hold it against you, boy. I guess you had no choice.”
“That’s about it.”
“You always wanted to be a cop, Theo. It’s a curious type of obsession, I’m thinking. You get if from your dad?”
“I’ve been depressed about this whole thing, Pete. Really down.” Come on, he told himself. Get it out.
“I feel for you. I get that way myself sometimes. Especially looking down a fifteen-year-long tunnel, and you can’t see the light. They haven’t sent you out here to do a number on me, Theo? You’re not playing the friendly cop to soften me up for the hard-nose who’s going to work me over?”
“I’m not here to play cop at all.” O’Doull nervously rubbed his palms together, and wet his lips. “Pete, they tell me you don’t know about Kevin.” Kerrivan’s face went dark. Blurt it out, hard and fast. “He’s dead.”
Kerrivan was on his feet, clutching O’Doull by his lapels. “What? How? Who?”
O’Doull backed up a step. “I think he was murdered.”
“Goddamnit, how?” It was a shout that echoed down the jail corridor.
“Meyers. In Miami.”
“Meyers . . . Miami.” Kerrivan blinked, and his pupils fuzzed over.
O’Doull put his arm around his shoulders and eased him down to the bench. They were both shaking badly.
A shadow fell through the bars.
O’Doull, his arm still around Kerrivan, looked up to see Mitchell glaring at him.
“Get out of there,” Mitchell said.
“Fuck off,” O’Doull said softly. “Sir.”
“I’ll have them drag you out, O’Doull.”
Kerrivan looked up at Mitchell with red eyes. “If you want to talk with me, Inspector, I want a witness. I want Theo to stay.”
“Where was the drop?” Mitchell asked. “You know we’ll find it. We have boats going inch by inch along sixty miles of coastline. We already found Tinker’s longboat. On a rock, near the road at Hermitage, under some broken boughs.”
Kerrivan glared malevolently at him. “Are you going to offer me a deal, Inspector? I help you find some marijuana, you drop the charges against me. Is that it? Haven’t I heard that before some place? Wasn’t that the deal you offered Kevin the last time? And what a wonderful grand deal it was that Kevin just bought from you this time! I’ll tell you where I hid the pot, Inspector. I stuffed it up my anus, and you can stick Operation Potship up yours!” He flew at the bars, screaming. “You hear me? You can stick it, you bastard, you whoremother, you cocksucker!”
Mitchell didn’t back up. Their noses were eight inches apart. “Kerrivan, this time we’re going to throw away the keys. Dope or no dope. We’ve got you photographed and tape-recorded forwards, backwards, upside down, a thousand ways to Sunday.”
“Meyers better be hoping I get nailed with a lot of years,” Kerrivan hissed. “Because every year I’m in the box is one more year he’ll live.”
“I didn’t hear that, Kerrivan. Now listen to me, I am going to make you a deal, and O’Doull is your witness, and you listen to me carefully. You tell me where the drop was, we’ll stay the importing charge and take a plea to something less. Conspiracy to traffic. You’ve got exactly one minute to decide.”
“Where’s my lawyer? He was supposed to be here this afternoon.”
“He’s got other business this afternoon,” Mitchell said. “That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”
Kerrivan looked at O’Doull.
“Don’t take it,” O’Doull said. “Talk to your lawyer.”
Mitchell’s voice was icy. “Get back to the lab, O’Doull. Clean out your desk. Close everything down. You’re suspended indefinitely from the force.”
Just then, a voice came to them from down the hall.
“End of the road for you, old man.”
Two uniformed RCMP came smiling down the corridor. Between them, handcuffed to one of them, was Captain Pike.
“Inspector,” one of them called, “what do we do with fifty tons of grass?”
Mitchell’s face stretched wide into a gleeful smile.
“You take it somewhere and burn it, Constable.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Peddigrew had to shout into the telephone. Kerrivan was in a screaming rage.
“Calm down, damnit!” Peddigrew yelled. “I’m in Ottawa. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’m with the government’s number-one man, and I’ll be doing some fast talking. I’ll have their heads spinning before I’m through.”
Peddigrew was making his call from the lobby of Ottawa’s Renfrew Club, a refuge for the wealthy and for the mandarins of the civil service.
Knowlton Bishop, who had arranged to have the call put through for Peddigrew, had decided on his club for the meeting because it represented a home-field advantage in what promised to be a hard-fought match. Peddigrew was known to him as a wily advocate and, worse, a headline-hunter.
And Bishop was going in there with the worst of handicaps. He had no weapons and no protective gear. No trial, the minister had said. No publicity. Jean-Louis Lessard was worried about his job. And maybe he had reason to w
orry.
What price would Peddigrew exact? Fortunately, the man had no idea of how far down the page the government had drawn its bottom line. The bottom line was simply this: no bodies. Take no prisoners if it came down to it. It was almost a no-win proposition for the government — there would be as much hell to pay if the prosecution came out of this imbroglio without a single conviction as there would be if the press picked up the stink of Mitchell’s overdone operation. And the smell of Rudy Meyers, which seemed to pervade this whole thing.
The dilemma was compounded by Mitchell’s having hinted that if Kerrivan was not sentenced hard, the inspector himself would raise an uproar to embarrass the minister. Somehow Mitchell would have to be paid off with a big jail term for Kerrivan.
So Bishop would have to bluff it out. He would do what he could: wheel and deal, trade bodies, move whom he could through the courts, prepackaged and stamped. But in the end — no trial. If Peddigrew called the bluff, Bishop would have to retreat in ignominious defeat, fold the government’s hand, give up the chips, drop all charges.
He watched Peddigrew walk towards him, looking jaunty and confident, decorated like Christmas with diamonds on fingers and tie pin. Bishop felt stuffy and unkempt in a worn English wool suit that had fit him ten years ago.
Peddigrew took a cue from the martini glass sitting on the table in front of the old lawyer.
“Dry martini with a twist,” he said to the waiter.
“Gin or vodka, sir?”
Peddigrew laughed. “Gin, of course.” He smiled at Bishop, who would appreciate Peddigrew’s knowing that vodka in the Renfrew Club was not quite correct.
“I’ll take another, Fred,” Bishop said.
“One gin martini,” said the waiter. “One vodka martini.”
“Can’t stand gin,” Bishop said. “That lingering sweetness.”
Round One.
“I hope you don’t mind this little side trip to stuffy Ottawa,” Bishop said. “I would have gone to Toronto, but that city is too fast for an old man like me.”
The waiter brought the drinks.
“To your health,” Bishop said.
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