League of Terror

by Bill Granger

  47

  Friday.

  Matthew O’Day was standing at a magazine counter staring at the cover of Time magazine. It was a shot of the ruined public house in County Clare where nineteen had died in Henry McGee’s act of terror and the headline said: Why Ireland Still Weeps.

  He glanced at the English papers arrayed on a counter beneath the magazine rack. The headlines were all about a bomb blast the day before in the Hilton Hotel. The world was full of bombs and sudden, certain acts of death and it was becoming just too much to understand and even know. Terror was beginning to seep into the fabric of society so deeply that acts of terror—like acts of murder or suicide or drug use—were numbing the public sensibility. Terror was beginning not to terrorize. Matthew O’Day was beginning to see that and see that there would have to be another way for him. Perhaps, when he came back from Chicago, he would recruit a force of assassins who would change the face of terror more along the lines suggested by this crazy American. Terror for profit and then assassination for political purpose. He thought of the botched bombing of the British government a decade earlier. You had to be sure and certain and nothing was more sure and certain than a bullet in the head. That was terror that made sense.

  He looked around him at the hordes shuffling through the noise-filled terminal to gates and waiting planes. The world did not stop because a plane fell out of the sky. The government did not fall because a bomb made life just that little bit more untenable in Belfast. Matthew saw the way it was and saw the only way to go now was to make sense out of terror.

  “I got your bag,” Henry McGee said. It was a plain brown suitcase with brass-fitted locks. “And your tickets.”

  “I’ll use me Eire passport in the name of Powers,” Matthew said. “You’ve got the money now, and no tricks?”

  “The money and no tricks. I want you to contact this number when you’re in Chicago,” Henry said, handing him a piece of paper.

  Matthew looked warily at him and at the suitcase. “Like you said, I’ll check it out meself,” Matthew said.

  “Like I said. Check it out and I’ll wait until you go through ticketing. I’ll be watching you, Matthew, so don’t think you’re going to do a duck on me with this money. You fuck me up and it’s strip steak time, only you’re the stripped steak.”

  Matthew took the bag into the men’s room at the far end of the magazine kiosk. Henry stood outside and smiled. It was all going along the way it was supposed to. Even the bombing in the Hilton had worked out; Devereaux was now history and there was no one on Henry’s trail. Unless Trevor Armstrong decided to turn him in and he couldn’t do that without turning in himself. No. Everything had worked just fine.

  Matthew O’Day came out of the gray-doored room and looked right into Henry’s face.

  “Like you said,” he said.

  “I’m a man of my word,” Henry McGee said. “Have a nice trip, Matthew. And when you’re in Chicago…”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know. Rat-a-tat.” He made a sudden machine-gun gesture. “Watch out for the gangsters.”

  48

  This is what had happened at the hotel before the bomb explosion.

  Devereaux called Hanley from the lobby. He always used lobby telephones because of their anonymity and because it gave him a chance to survey his setting. The agent acts with suspicion so long that he develops a sense that everything at all times is suspicious.

  It was early afternoon Thursday.

  The telephone sounded at the other end and then Hanley’s voice, so clear he might have been in the next room.

  “I need authorization for some things. There are changes in the plan,” Devereaux began.

  Hanley said, “Miss Macklin. She would be there by now. I told her… your room. You’re going to have to talk to her, Devereaux; she thinks you’re in danger and she threatens Section.”

  Devereaux said, “What’s the threat?”

  “To tell things. If you’re hurt.”

  “I won’t be hurt,” Devereaux said. “I’m a footstep behind Henry McGee and whatever is going down, it goes down in a matter of hours. I need some things. Ordnance.”

  “What are you going to do? Start a war?”

  “Complete a mission.”

  “Mrs. Neumann is very upset.”

  “She’s paid to be upset. Someone has to have a conscience.”

  “But not you.”

  “No. I was paid all these years never to question certain things.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “In the lobby of the hotel.”

  “Where’s Henry McGee?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I do know who he’s making contact with and I know—I think I know—something of the deal that has to be going down. Tomorrow. It’ll go down tomorrow.”

  “What kind of ordnance?”

  And Devereaux described it exactly.

  Rita Macklin cracked the pressed wood of the footboard and her legs were more or less free. But her arms were numb now and the headboard was much larger and that much harder to work against.

  Sweat beaded her face and covered it with a fine sheen. Her eyes were desperate and something else they had not been for all the days since the bombing: They were alive.

  She grunted beneath the sour dry taste of the gag across her mouth. The gag was tight and parted her lips and teeth and pressed her tongue down on the floor of her mouth. The gag also made it difficult to hear because it was pressed against her ears.

  She pushed and pushed and she would never break this headboard. In her frustrated fury, she twisted around and her feet struck the floor at the side of the bed.

  Leverage.

  She stopped a moment to think about it. She tried to remember the principles from drawings in a high school textbook studied long ago.

  She knelt on the floor and pushed her knees under the box spring as far as they would go. Her arms felt as though they were being pulled out of their sockets. The tingling numbness extended back to her shoulders and burned across her back.

  She pushed against the box spring with her knees and pulled the headboard with her bonds and the pain almost knocked her out but now she felt something. The bed was shifting, confused by these two pressures on it. The bed was pulling away. An inch. Maybe two inches. Maybe a third inch. Each time she pulled at the headboard, she wanted to scream because of the pain but the dry gag stifled even that act of rage and frustration.

  She pulled and pulled and pushed and pushed and now the bed was twisting itself sideways; the support of the broken footboard and rail was gone and the mattress and box spring touched the floor on the foot end of the bed. The headboard began to bend against the under rails and she could feel another four inches and then the headboard made a terrible sound that was almost human and it collapsed against the mattress. Yes. Yes. In her fury, her absolute certainty of the rightness of her hatred for the man who had tried to kill her and kill Devereaux, she was stronger than three men and the headboard bowed to her in honor of her strength. She got off her knees and dragged the headboard behind her to the door and she rubbed her back against the Plastique.

  It fell from the doorframe onto the carpet, breaking the connection with the armed trigger in the doorjamb.

  She kicked it away and then it was over and she fell, unconscious in her exhaustion, onto the remains of the bed strewn on the floor. She was still bound and gagged but she had done it and now the fury fell out of her in the obliteration of sleep.

  This is the way Devereaux found her and the way Rita Macklin saved their lives.

  49

  Dwyer was armed with an old-fashioned 45 Colt army automatic, the type of weapon called a horse-killer because it had been developed for the army after the turn of the century to allow the shooter to bring down a cavalry horse. Dwyer did not intend to bring down any horses today. He intended to get the boss’s money back from Henry McGee, and if Henry McGee didn’t like it, he would blow Henry McGee to kingdom come. And if Henry McGee did li
ke it, Dwyer was going to do the same thing because you can’t make a deal with a terrorist, not ever. The terrorist is a coward, Dwyer had told the boss, and like all cowards, he keeps coming back for more as soon as he thinks your back is turned. The thing to do, unless you want to cover your ass for the rest of your life, is to finish the threat once and for all.

  Dwyer wore a light tan camel hair coat and a hat. He always wore a hat. He was an old-fashioned kind of natty New York–type dresser who appreciates sharp creases, starched collars, diamond rings, and silk scarves. Dwyer had the great fortune of knowing exactly who he was and what he wanted to invent.

  The boss was one hundred feet away, near the departure lounge, and he had a bag on his lap. Five million dollars in Swiss francs and British pounds and American dollars. It was a colorful payoff. Dwyer had helped him pack the case just as Dwyer had gone to the necessary banks in Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Luxembourg to get the money.

  Him and the boss. Together. Just like at the beginning when he had hitched himself to the boss’s star. Because Dwyer intended to be a rich man at fifty-five and take a very long retirement in the Caribbean, surrounded by beautiful black girls.

  He saw the boss get up and walk across to Henry McGee and he saw Henry point to a third man. It had to be the terrorist, Matthew O’Day, who was shuffling along in the line that led to the jetway. The plane was boarding, as the loudspeaker said over and over. This was final boarding.

  Henry McGee stood a moment with the boss and said something and the boss nodded and handed over the suitcase full of money. Dwyer pushed the safety on the horse-killer in his pocket. Henry McGee looked small and tough and Dwyer was small and tough and not afraid of anyone in the world.

  Matthew O’Day settled down in the first-class seat and sighed. It was a pleasure to be away from the madness of the last two weeks. He buckled his seat belt and stared out the window. London was beginning to drizzle and the rain beaded on the thick glass that separated him from the rest of the world. The plane was filling, there were bumps and murmurs of “excuse me” in the narrow aisles and Matthew folded his hands over his belly. He closed his eyes. He thought he might just sleep his way across the Atlantic Ocean unless the movie was any good.

  The baggage was loaded on a string of carts being tractored across the tarmac to the belly of the 747. Guard dogs had sniffed at the bags for drugs and anything else that might have threatened the safety of the flight. The dogs did not sniff the explosive plastic in the lining of the bag O’Day checked through because they had not been trained for that purpose.

  Examination of the luggage, as usual, was cursory. The airline had not been warned to expect any terrorist act; the death of Flight 147 of a rival airline had not been forgotten but had been tucked away back in the collective memory in the corner reserved for remembrances of past acts of terror. It was just between the assassination of John Kennedy and the death of hundreds of marines in Beirut; somewhere in that area.

  In a few moments, the airplane would lumber out to the runway and wait its turn in the line of planes heading for America and Asia. The foggy, rainy day of a little corner of the world would be shrugged off as the plane climbed through the clouds to the eternal clarity of the sky, where sunlight and moonlight are unfettered by mere weather.

  And Matthew O’Day was already asleep, so that he did not hear the stewardess ask him if he wanted a cocktail before the flight began.

  50

  Trevor entered the limousine with his flesh-colored copy of the Financial Times tucked under his arm. He might be having a usual day. He said, “office,” to the driver and opened the paper. The Rolls-Royce purred into drive and he began by burying himself in another of the interminable cycle of articles about the power of Europe after 1992 and what would pass for economic union in the Old World.

  Dwyer would meet him back at the offices with bloody hands and five million dollars. Don’t worry, Dwyer had said. Dwyer was as good as his word. Dwyer was as good as a dog. Funny he had never thought to name one of his dogs after Dwyer when he accorded that singular honor to his secretary. Funny. Because Jameson was today’s driver.

  These thoughts dimly filtered through his head. The car picked its way through traffic around the airport to the M4 for London. The drizzle enhanced the closed feeling.

  “Turn up the heat, Jameson,” Trevor Armstrong said. His face was buried in the paper and his thoughts were on France and the French insistence that any united Europe would have France at its head. He shook his head. The French. They just didn’t get it.

  The automobile was picking up speed and something about this disturbed Trevor. The route to London was usually clogged. He looked up from the paper and looked around him and saw the wet, November farms of Middlesex streaming past the rain-beaded windows. Then he looked at the back of Jameson’s head for the first time.

  “Who are you?”

  “Just the driver, lamb.”

  “Where’s Jameson? What the hell is going on?”

  “He was given the day off.”

  “Who the hell are you? I want you to stop the car—”

  “On the M4? Do you want to get killed?” The chuckle was from the back of the throat. “Or maybe I shouldn’t ask that question just now.”

  The traffic, murderous and pounding and very fast, created valleys of tire tracks in the flood of water on the roadway. Bleak November pressed at the windows and Trevor felt cold. The paper fell from his hands.

  “I want you to stop the car,” he said again.

  “In a little while. We’ll stop soon enough,” Marie said. “I thought you wouldn’t notice the driver. People don’t. People like you. I thought about it but he wasn’t so sure. I told him it would be all right because if you had noticed the driver, I would still have the gun.”

  “This is kidnapping—”

  “If you were a kid. But it isn’t. It’s just a little ride into the countryside. A nice day for a ride to Oxford. Don’t you think it’s a nice day for a ride?”

  Trevor summoned up his control. These things did not happen to people like him. Unless, of course, this was a final cross by the man called Henry McGee. Yes, that was it.

  “I gave him the money. There’s no point to this. He has all the money.”

  And he thought of Dwyer. What if there had been an arranged signal with some unknown confederate? And what if Dwyer managed to kill Henry McGee before the signal?

  The clammy day had crawled into the car and was stroking him. He felt so very cold.

  Dwyer felt the rain bake into his thick coat. The rain beaded on his hat brim. He watched Henry McGee cross the parking lot to his car. A remote parking lot was as good a place as any. He felt for the pistol in his pocket.

  Heathrow was in mourning. The clouds yielded pitiful light rain, the kind that glazes roadways and makes all sorry creatures sodden refugees from God. The rain did not hush the rumble of traffic but made it seem more hideous because it was unrelenting when it should have ceased and waited for the clouds to part.

  He did not even see the gray man until he felt the pistol barrel in his right ear.

  He stood still. He knew exactly what this was. In 1957, he had felt a pistol barrel in his right ear while standing on a midnight platform of the Flushing elevated, waiting for a train to the city. He had offered a pistol barrel himself by way of explanation of his purpose three or four times in his life and he knew exactly how serious this was. They were between a red Ford Escort and a blue BMW and the world was all around them, rumbling and crowded, but they might have been the only creatures left on earth.

  “Get in the blue car,” the voice said. He could not clearly see the man until he was in the backseat of the car.

  There was a red-haired girl at the wheel. The man with the pistol was gray, gray in eye and hair and face. He might have been the weather incarnate.

  “This robbery?” Dwyer said.

  “This is about your life,” Devereaux said.

  “What the hell do you wan
t?”

  “Do you have enough money? I mean, to retire on?”

  “What the hell do you want?”

  “Tell me about Trevor.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you want.”

  “Open your mouth.”

  Dwyer looked at him. The man was murder without passion. Dwyer opened his lips and the man put the pistol on his tongue so that he could taste the astringency of the barrel. Dwyer absolutely understood and to hell with everything, he was no martyr; he had a chance to go to Vietnam when he was drafted and he bought an MOS to get out of it, five thousand bucks to the levy sergeant to get transferred to Fort Benning, Georgia, instead and clerk for an infantry company, better to sell weekend passes on the side as a clerk than get his fucking ass shot off in some fucking jungle somewhere with fucking assholes in black pajamas creeping around him. No sir, he was no martyr and the beautiful black girls who awaited him on Saint Martin had never been so far away.

  “Whaddaya want?” But it came out garbled. That was because of the pistol in his mouth.

  “I want to know everything. If I find out everything, you can live.”

  The red-haired girl looked at him across the back of the front seat. She was absolutely cold in her green eyes. She was as much death as this one. The death in them had filled the car to the temperature of freezing. Dwyer knew he was going to die and he didn’t much care for the thought.

  He made another strangled reply and the gray man took the pistol out of his mouth and put it between his eyes. He tried to see the pistol. He could see the hand of the stranger and see that the index finger was curled into the trigger guard.

  “Boss was being set up. Extortion. Man wanted five million. Boss set up a deal.”

  “What was the deal?”

  He was talking very fast, in case the gray man was in a hurry.

  “Boss said to put the bomb on another plane. Man made the deal.”

  “What man?”