League of Terror

by Bill Granger

  There was rain against the windowpanes. Washington shivered at the end of fall. The fall was so long and soft and lingering in Washington that you began to believe sometimes that the fall would never end, that there would just be this falling and falling through the colors on the trees in the Virginia hills all around, that fall would be like life and go on and on despite the common belief that all things ended. And then there was rain like this and it reminded you of the end of things and made you lonely.

  He said, “I don’t want to hurt you, Rita. I really love you. I would do anything for you.”

  “You’ve done everything,” she said.

  “You. And him,” he said. He shook his head.

  “No,” she whispered. “Me. Me.”

  “I thought of her. I thought of a time when she wore that dress at a party. The magazine or something. We were in the ballroom at the Willard. It was a cocktail party and I hurried over from work and when I saw her, it was a new dress, I just loved her and we didn’t even go home, we went upstairs to the corporate suite and we made love on the bed, in our clothes, made love without even taking the sheets out, just as if we were young.”

  “Then make love to me,” Rita Macklin said.

  “No. That would be wrong—”

  “No. It would be wrong the other way,” she said. “I love you, Mac, I really do.”

  “You love him.”

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t—”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes I can.”

  “Rita,” he protested one last time. But she took his hand and he had to rise with her and follow her. In the morning bedroom where the bed lay unmade, she turned and kissed him again, sure of herself, pulling his head to her lips and letting the smell of herself fill this room and empty space in him. He touched her as she wanted to be touched. He slipped his hand down the satiny flesh of the dress to her lower back and lower and held her and she pressed against him, gaunt and bony and not sick at all anymore but filled with sunshine and pity for the world that endured darkness and hardness.

  “Rita,” he said to catch his breath.

  “Do it now,” she said, pulling him to the sheets. She opened her legs for him and the dress rode up her thighs and he fumbled and found her and he fell upon her, consumed her with his kisses. Touches. Love.

  32

  But he didn’t go to Dublin after all.

  Hanley told him the morning scan as they rode to Dulles for the Concorde Air France flight to Paris. It would be faster to reach Ireland from Paris than to wait for the usual nighttime flight of Aer Lingus.

  “Tell me.”

  “British intelligence has a murder on their hands. Actually, four murders. Four people all struck dead in a town house in Mayfair yesterday. But the Brits can’t figure out why or how and don’t want to panic the public by saying there might be a secret nerve gas or something being used to kill innocent people in the heart of London.”

  The Lincoln limousine was not to Hanley’s style or liking but this was a matter of security. The driver behind the partition was cleared to the level of N inside Section. The automobile was secured against eavesdropping devices by constant static produced by three amplifiers around the passenger compartments. The tires were puncture proof.

  “And this links to Henry McGee?”

  “I remembered something. I spent two hours going back through computers and I really am not that expert at it. I brought in Mrs. Neumann and told her what I thought I had remembered. There is so much to remember and most of it is junk and it just piles up in the brain and—”

  “Tell me,” Devereaux said. They were in the sprawl of Virginia suburbia now; there were signs of Dulles International flashing by.

  “Four weeks ago. In Naples. Our naval intelligence people have been helping on the investigation of the bombing of Flight One forty-seven. You remember, you were conscious then, it was in the papers—”

  “The Euro-American Airlines plane,” Devereaux said. “That’s a cheerful thought to bring up on the way to the airport.”

  Hanley frowned. “The point is, they were eyeballing a Mediterranean arms dealer who goes by the name of Juno. Juno has all kinds of contacts, all kinds of people he deals with. He’s strictly For Sale. Well, the NI people were eye-balling him constantly and they happened to record a meeting he had with an American. They put out the description on him but it zipped right by me. I didn’t connect. They had a photograph even but if you didn’t call it up on computer, you didn’t get it. Today, I called it up. NI wasn’t interested in the man Juno was talking to; they were interested in getting as much information about Juno as they could to see if he was involved in the terror bombing of Flight One forty-seven.”

  “Was he?”

  “Nobody knows. I think it’s a case of nobody wanting to know very much. If it’s Libya, what are we going to do again, bomb Khaddafi or his children?”

  “Who was Juno meeting in Naples?”

  “Henry McGee.”

  “And what transpired?”

  “Juno gave him a bottle of vodka. Smirnoff.”

  “Is that what they think?”

  “They saw it with their own eyes.”

  “And four people were killed in a house in London with no apparent causes.”

  “You didn’t ask me whose house it was.”

  Devereaux smiled at Hanley. “You’re getting interested in this finally.”

  Hanley had betrayed eagerness. He shook it off. It wasn’t like him to have enthusiasm. “Trevor Armstrong. Chief executive for Euro-American Airlines. I ran him through the routine and they’re still looking at him in New York. The point is, what is the connection between the IRA terrorism and the murder in that pub and the blowing-up of a Euro-American plane? I mean, what’s the connection?”

  “Is that rhetorical, Hanley? Are you really that dense?”

  “I had to dance carefully with Mrs. Neumann. I needed her help but I couldn’t explain the thing fully. About you. I signed the mission directive myself. She wouldn’t have approved.”

  “No. She wouldn’t have,” Devereaux said. He took the piece of paper, unfolded it, read it, and folded it again. He put it in his breast pocket.

  “Terrorism. I don’t understand it,” Hanley said. “There has to be some profit motive.”

  “Keep on checking Trevor Armstrong and anything else to do with stock purchase at EAA,” Devereaux said. “Maybe that’s what it’s about. Maybe the airline is being targeted by Henry.”

  “But why kill a houseful of servants of the CEO?”

  “To terrorize him,” Devereaux said. “To shake a money tree.”

  “I’ll have to tell Mrs. Neumann in time—”

  Devereaux said, “How much time?”

  Hanley said, “Damnit. When I tell her I authorized a mission, she’ll—”

  “She’ll jump all over you. Wear rubber clothing. You could tell the Brits now and they’d pick Henry up and make him sing. We don’t want that, do we?”

  “No.”

  “But would Mrs. Neumann be able to see it through? Leave it alone, Hanley, leave me alone. I can get you out of this.”

  “By killing Henry McGee.”

  “And everyone else who was in it with him,” Devereaux said.

  33

  “Hello,” Henry McGee said.

  “Where are you?” Marie said. She was sitting at the kitchen table in the back of the rented apartment off Maida Vale. She wore a robe and she had smoked half a package of Marlboro cigarettes. Her voice was husky from the smoke.

  “Up to no good,” Henry said, putting a smile in his voice. “You did good, honey, the pictures turned out nice. The thing is that in the next forty-eight hours, we got to put the setup nicely, nicely. In an hour or so, the girl from the IRA cell, Maureen, she’s gonna show up at the flat. Let her in and then the two of you wait. I should be able to hit the target before noon if I get any luck at all.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “Got real da
rk red hair. Irish-looking.”

  “Sure,” Marie said.

  “Bye, honey, I gotta run,” Henry said, like any harried businessman on the ride to the commuter station.

  She heard the click.

  She got up and stretched. Then she thought about the girl who was coming to this flat. She went down the hall into a bathroom and took a quick shower. She dressed again in her black jumpsuit. She brushed her short, tough-bristled hair and looked at herself. She wasn’t very pretty but what the hell.

  She went into the hall back to the kitchen.

  She turned on the electric kettle to make tea. The kitchen was deadly white, very clean and ugly like a hospital room. She moved around the kitchen doing things while the water heated. When it was boiling, the kettle clicked sharply. She poured the water over tea bags in a porcelain pot called a Brown Betty. The morning was coming slowly because this was November and London was very far north in the world.

  She hummed to herself, she didn’t know what the song was.

  She opened a cupboard and took out the envelope again. The second set of prints. She studied her handiwork and then put the prints back in the envelope. She didn’t know why she had done this, made another set of prints. Henry McGee had killed all those people in the public house that day he went to the west of Ireland. She had known it a moment before she ordered the prints. She suddenly was sure that Henry McGee was insane and that it would be a great danger to her to be close to him.

  She went to the refrigerator and opened it, looking for milk. And then she saw it.

  A bottle of Smirnoff vodka.

  This was very strange.

  Henry McGee had purchased a bottle of Smirnoff vodka sometime during the day yesterday when she was out taking photographs of Matthew O’Day. And then he had opened it because the seal was broken.

  She stood very still and looked at the bottle and remembered she had seen this bottle before, when they had stayed in the Excelsior in Rome, when she had noticed it in his suitcase. It hadn’t been there before he went to Naples and then it was there. She said she wanted a drink and he had gotten very angry and said she was to keep her fucking hands off that bottle and he had slapped her for good measure.

  The same bottle.

  She stared at it for minutes. And then she saw the second thing.

  A small glass jar full of caviar. Black and rich. She loved caviar. Vodka and caviar.

  Except it wouldn’t be caviar.

  She opened the caviar jar and smelled it and she had smelled that before, it was something, something…

  She spooned the caviar on a plate and saw the small radio, as small as a nine-volt battery, concealed in the bottom of it. Caviar and vodka.

  She took out the bottle of vodka and opened it. She sniffed it. It was odorless and vodka is not odorless.

  Marie was very afraid now. Henry had killed all those people and he was going to kill her. She didn’t know how but she knew it now.

  34

  Henry McGee sat with the transmitter in his left hand and the steering wheel in his right. The car was a Peugeot with the steering wheel on the English side. He was on a side street in Maida Vale. He had dropped off Maureen a couple of minutes earlier. Maureen would be edging her way around Marie now, thinking about how she was going to do it. Maureen had a knife and she said it was all she needed because she was very strong and it sounded like this German girl was small and not strong.

  Henry chuckled at that and pushed the transmitter button. The receiver would ignite the pearls of gelignite dyed black in a caviar jar and available from a merchant in Paris who dealt in such things. Matthew O’Day had gotten that for him. Matthew was proving to be very, very handy for Henry. A good terrorist with good sources could be extremely useful, Henry thought.

  By now, the interior of the refrigerator would be around sixteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit and the bottle of nerve gas would have been transformed from a liquid to a gas. It would be filling the apartment while the two girls danced around each other and decided about each other. Shit. There was nothing to decide. They were both dead now. And when their bodies were found in five or six or seven days, the cops would be just as puzzled as they were by the deaths in Mayfair, but by then they would have their suspect. The usual suspect. The stage Irishman in the form of Matthew O’Day with photographs and murder written all over his face.

  Damnit. He was clever. He needed the girl Maureen to link the dead bodies in Mayfair with the dead bodies they’d find here with Matthew O’Day. And that would link back to the bombings in the west of Ireland. It might take the authorities some weeks to figure it all out but they’d figure it out. Matthew O’Day had one final mission to do for Henry. And he didn’t know it yet. But the cops would link everything to O’Day finally, the dead servants, the dead girls, everything. It all went back to the photographs. And it might take them a while longer to figure out about how all this linked to Trevor Armstrong and EAA but they would. By then, it wouldn’t matter. Trevor couldn’t tell them anything without compromising himself and Henry would be fucking Polynesian girls in Tahiti.

  He dropped the transmitter on the seat and put the car in gear.

  In the cold morning light, the Peugeot crept away, down the street that was still waiting to wake up.

  35

  Devereaux walked through the green line that had a sign reading Nothing to Declare. A customs officer stopped him anyway.

  “Will you open that bag, sir?”

  Devereaux opened it.

  He was in London at last and he was tired. It was night already, as though daylight had been an afterthought or a momentary illusion.

  The customs officer, wearing British blue and a stiff, starched collar, plumped through the clothing as though feeling his way around a woman. He ran his hands along the sidewalls of the bag with a sensual, even lascivious gesture. He smiled at Devereaux as he did this and Devereaux did not return the smile.

  “Are you here on pleasure, sir?”

  “My lifelong dream was to be in London in November,” Devereaux said.

  The agent frowned.

  “Business. I’m a stockbroker.” He took out a card and showed him. The agent read the card. He frowned again but had lost interest in the matter.

  “Will you be here long, sir?”

  “Three days, I think.”

  “All right, sir. You can close the bag.”

  Like all competent customs officials, he had managed to disarrange the contents of the bag just enough to make instant closure impossible. Devereaux struggled briefly and the customs official frowned at him for holding up the line. He finally snapped the bag shut and carried it through.

  Heathrow was its throbbing, messy self, full of announcements, people of every color, and the din of travel noise that is the most tiresome thing in the world. He found a bank of public phones and went to them. He punched in numbers that connected him to a telephone in a town house in Washington.

  “Yes,” Mac said.

  “Me.”

  “Do you want her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just a moment.”

  Devereaux wondered what he had just heard in Mac’s voice. Or in her’s, now that she picked up the receiver and spoke into it.

  “Dev.”

  “I’m in London. I think you’ll meet me here. And I don’t think there’s as much time as we thought there would be.”

  She caught her breath.

  “Rita?”

  “I’ll come on the night plane from Dulles. British Air is seven P.M. I think.”

  “All right. Check in at Connaught’s; I’ll contact you. I might not be able to wait. There’s been a change. Henry is in London if we’re close enough to getting him as I think. It complicates things. I have to set it up differently.”

  “Dev.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  He waited.

  “I love you,” Rita said.

  He waited.

  “Dev?”
/>   “What?”

  “Dev. I… I can’t kill him. Not like this. Not in the way it has to be done.”

  He let his breath out slowly.

  “Dev?”

  “I know,” he said.

  “Are you going to kill him?”

  “Yes.”

  “For us?”

  “Yes.”

  “For R Section. You’re doing it because it’s a thing you’ve done before. For R Section. You couldn’t kill to protect me that once.”

  He waited some more. The din of Heathrow took the heart out of him. It came on him so suddenly that he felt a pain across his chest that fell into his belly. So tired, so goddamned tired. The pains of his body fell away. It wasn’t pain but just this overwhelming fatigue. He might even let the telephone receiver drop from his hand. He might lie down and never rise. He might sleep and never awake. He was suddenly so tired of everything. The man who was tired of London and was tired of life. Was he that man?

  He opened his eyes and looked around him and felt sick to his stomach in the same way he had felt sick to his stomach all the time in the hospital when the drugs took over his body and put his mind on the shelf to watch his body from afar.

  He was holding a telephone. He wondered why.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “I thought we were disconnected.”

  He blinked. He knew that voice.

  “Hello?”

  “Dev. Are you all right?”

  “Rita?”

  “Dev? Where are you?”

  He looked around him. Two Indian gentlemen, their heads wrapped with scarves, passed in Western dress, carrying briefcases and followed like children by two plump Indian ladies in veils and jewels. A gaggle of Japanese businessmen, dressed in identical navy blue suits, followed their leader, who was as lost as they were. Everyone was very lost and time was not on any side but its own. It was like a bazaar of the world.

  “I don’t know,” Devereaux said.

  “You’re in London.”