Scoundrel

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Not that we hope you’ll have much time for reading,” Gillespie said. “We expect to be holding conversations with you most days and for quite long hours, though there will be some evenings when you will be unoccupied. The refrigerator is stocked, but let us know, within reason, if there is any particular food you’d like added to the stock. There’s beer, but no spirits. The television works.”

  “And the telephone?” I gestured at the phone beside the bed.

  “Of course.”

  “And it isn’t bugged?” I teased him.

  “I couldn’t truthfully tell you either way.” Gillespie actually blushed as he half admitted I was under surveillance, but only a complete fool would have assumed otherwise. He ushered me towards the door. “We have a lot to do, Mr Shanahan, so shall we go downstairs and begin?”

  To unpick the past. To tell a tale of bombers and gunners, girls and boys, heroes and lovers. Confession time.

  I was tired, dog tired. “We won’t take a lot of time today,” Gillespie promised, “but your messages to our people in Brussels were kind of intriguing.” He was being very tactful, not asking why I had appeared in America when I had promised to walk into the Brussels Embassy, nor asking why I had used a false name. “You talked about Stingers? About a meeting in Miami? You suggested a connection with Saddam Hussein? With il Hayaween?”

  That was the urgent need; to discover just what evil Iraq had planned, and so I told Gillespie everything about the meeting in Florida where Michael Herlihy and Brendan Flynn had introduced me to the two Cubans named Alvarez and Carlos though I suspected they might as well have called themselves Tweedledum and Tweedledee for all those names signified. I described how the Provisional IRA had negotiated the purchase of fifty-three Stinger missiles for one and a half million dollars.

  Gillespie wrote the sum down. I was certain that the library must be wired for sound, and that somewhere in the mansion tape recorders were spooling down my every word, but Gillespie was the kind of man who liked to make notes. “And why were you invited to the meeting?” he asked.

  “Because I used to be the Provisionals’ liaison officer with outside terrorist organisations. I was the guy who fetched them their goodies. I was their money-man.”

  Gillespie’s head came up from his notebook and for a second or two I thought he was actually going to whistle with astonishment, but he managed to suppress the urge. Nevertheless my words, if I could back them up with chapter and verse, meant that the CIA’s Stringless Programme could chalk up one stunning success. “You liaised with all outside terrorist organisations?” he asked.

  “So far as I know, yes, although in effect that was mainly the Palestinians and the Libyans. We did some business with the Basques as well, but they were never as important as the Middle Eastern guys.”

  “Red Army Faction? The Baader-Meinhof people?” Gillespie asked.

  “Never saw them.”

  “The South Americans?” he asked hopefully.

  I shook my head. “The IRA used to receive fraternal greetings from Cuba and Nicaragua, but no material support. We didn’t need it. We were getting enough weapons from the Libyans and enough money from America, so why should we bother with a bunch of half-crazy Nicaraguans?”

  “Even so!” Gillespie was impressed by the Middle-Eastern connections, though I rather deflated the good impression by telling him how the IRA had ceased to trust me four years before which meant that much of my information was out of date.

  “Why did they stop trusting you?”

  “That’s kind of a long story.”

  “We’ll get to it, I promise.” He tapped his notebook with the eraser end of his pencil. “If you’ve been inactive for four years, why did you stay? Why didn’t you come home?”

  “Because I always hoped they’d reactivate me. They never cut me off entirely.”

  “We’re fortunate they didn’t.” We were sitting in the lavish library, either side of the massive oak table. It was a comfortable room, supplied with a fire and a drinks cabinet and enough oak mouldings to have hidden a thousand microphones. Despite Gillespie’s notebook I knew the surveillance devices existed, not just in this room but in my bedroom as well, for the Agency would want to analyse my answers for the slightest indication of stress. Gillespie was chasing a commodity as rare as rainbow’s gold, the truth, and he wanted to make sure I was not bringing him fool’s gold. Maybe my return at this critical time had happened because the enemy had turned me? Maybe I was telling lies to make them look in one direction while il Hayaween attacked from another? I might be a hero of the Stringless Programme come back from the world’s darkness, but that did not mean they would trust me.

  Nor did I intend to trust them. I had my secrets, chief of which was the existence of five million dollars in a renamed yacht. The five million dollars were my pension, my security, and I had no intention of ever letting the government know that such a sum had even been discussed. The money was not important. What was important were the Stingers, and il Hayaween, and Saddam Hussein’s plans to spread terror world-wide.

  “You say il Hayaween talked about bringing down an airliner at Heathrow with a Red Star?” Gillespie asked.

  I nodded. “It’s much easier than trying to smuggle a bomb aboard.”

  “But why a Russian missile? Why not the Stingers?”

  “Because the Stingers are in America. I’m guessing that they never did mean to send all the Stingers to Ireland, but to deploy them in the States.”

  “You mean…” Gillespie stared at me.

  “I mean that if we attack Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait then he’ll bring down planes in Washington and Miami and New York and anywhere else he can.”

  Gillespie blanched at the thought of guarding the vicinity of every major civilian airport in North America. “And do you believe the Provisional IRA would co-operate with such an action?”

  “No,” I said firmly, “because the IRA wants American support. Part of their income and a lot of their respectability depends on Americans thinking of the Irish as harmless little leprechauns inhabiting an idyllic little island which is being unjustly treated by the nasty English, and blowing up American civilians with IRA weapons tends to sour that fairy-tale image. So I suspect the IRA are being used by il Hayaween. The Palestinians aren’t in a position to travel to Miami to buy the missiles, but the Irish are. However, once the missiles are paid for, then God knows what il Hayaween has in mind.”

  “How were the Stingers paid for?”

  “The usual method,” I said, “is electronic transfer. I never handled the money itself, just the request, but I know the Libyans liked to use a bank called BCCI…”

  “We know about those bastards,” Gillespie said meaningfully, then shrugged an apology for interrupting me. “Go on, please.”

  “There isn’t much more to tell. I requested the payment from Shafiq, he told me it was all OKed, and then I telephoned a number in Ireland to say that everything was on line and their money would be coming. They’d already paid a half-million deposit, so I only asked Shafiq for the one million.”

  “You have the telephone number in Ireland?”

  I gave him the number that had been in Gerry’s suit pocket, but warned him that it would almost certainly belong to a message-taker who would have no inkling of what the messages were about.

  Stuart Callaghan, whose bodyguard duties seemed exhausted now that we had arrived at the safe mansion, had lit a fire in the library’s big hearth. Now, at Gillespie’s bidding, he took away the new details of the Stinger trade, doubtless to telephone them through to Langley so that the search for the missiles could be intensified. Gillespie still worried at my story. “What about the two Cubans. Were they Cuban-Americans? Or Cuban-Cubans?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  Gillespie tapped the pencil softly on the table. “Comrade Fidel must be itching to do his bit for Brother Saddam, mustn’t he?”

  “I guess so. I don’t know.”

  “BCCI.
” He drew a pencil round the bank’s initials. “You say the Libyans usually transferred money by wire?”

  “Almost always. It’s heavy stuff to carry around in a suitcase.”

  He half smiled at my half-jest. “So there should be a record of the transaction?”

  “Bound to be.”

  “And of the half-million dollar deposit. Where would that have come from?”

  “Boston, I guess, but I don’t know. Herlihy must use a dozen banks.”

  “Look for the money,” Gillespie said softly, “it’s always the same. Look for the money.” He looked up at me. “One last question before we break. Why did you use a false passport to enter the country?”

  “How do you know I did?”

  “Because we had an all-ports watch alerted for you.”

  “Maybe I walked across the Canadian border?”

  “The Canadians co-operate with our all-ports watch alerts,” Gillespie said softly. “And what about your hire-car? You used a French name and credit card? But it seems the card really belongs to a prisoner?”

  “Habit,” I said, “just old habit. I guess I wanted to use false papers one last time. A whim.”

  “You still have the passport and credit card?”

  “I tossed them. I told you, it was my last time. I won’t need false papers again, will I?”

  “No, you won’t.” Gillespie pretended to believe me. He closed his notebook and carefully snapped a rubber band around its leather covers. “I guess that’s the immediate business taken care of. What I’d like you to do now, Paul, is take a rest. You look bushed. Maybe we’ll pick up this afternoon? There’ll be someone with me by then.”

  “Van Stryker?” Simon van Stryker had recruited me into the Stringless Programme and I had liked him. I had spent years looking forward to meeting him again, hearing his congratulations.

  “Van Stryker’s rather exalted these days. But you will meet him in due course. He takes an interest in you.” Gillespie paused and had the grace to look somewhat embarrassed. “We’ve asked one of the Agency’s psychiatrists to sit in on future sessions. It’s normal practice.”

  “To find out if I’ve gone mad?” I asked lightly.

  “Something like that, yes,” he replied just as lightly. In fact the shrink would be there to detect my lies.

  “Fine by me!” I said.

  “Great.” Gillespie smiled. I smiled. Just great.

  The psychiatrist surprised me because her appearance suggested someone who ought to have been knitting baby socks for a grandchild rather than monitoring a debriefing about terrorism, but doubtless she was a lot shrewder than her motherly, plump exterior suggested. She was a middle-aged black woman who smiled pleasantly at me, then shook the snow off her overshoes and settled in the bay window at the far end of the long library table. “Terrible weather,” she said cosily, “just terrible. Do you mind if I call you Paul? I’m Carole, Carole Adamson.”

  “Paul’s fine.”

  “Don’t you mind me, Paul. I’m just here to listen.” She was wearing a thick wool cardigan, wooden beads, and had a comfortable smile. She also frightened me for I was only too ready to believe that psychiatrists possessed arcane powers, and that my every little lie and evasion would telegraph themselves to Carole Adamson’s shrewd and watchful eyes. I could not see her without turning in my chair, but I was very aware of her scrutiny.

  Gillespie began the afternoon session by saying FBI agents had begun their search for the Stinger missiles and for their Cuban vendors. In the meantime, he said, he wanted to explore my history of terrorist connections. “I want to go back to the very beginning,” he said. “Who introduced you to the IRA?”

  “A guy called Joey Grogan.”

  “Was that in America?” Gillespie asked. “Or in Ireland?”

  “In Boston,” I said, and felt a flicker of annoyance. I had come here to talk of il Hayaween and Stingers and the Palestinian training camps, and instead Gillespie wanted to plough this old field. “Why don’t you just look up the file?” I asked.

  “Because the Stringless Programme keeps no files,” Gillespie said in a tone which suggested I should have known that. “All we know about you is what we can read in police records, but as far as the agency is concerned, Mr Shanahan, you have never existed. So we have to begin at the beginning. Where does Mr Grogan live?”

  “He’s dead.” Poor Joey had died of emphysema in 1986 and Peggy, his widow, had immediately absconded to a trailer park in Florida with sixteen thousand dollars collected from Boston’s Irish bars by the Friends of Free Ireland. The Friends ostensibly collected money to support the widows and orphans of IRA soldiers, which was hardly necessary considering the generosity of the British government’s social security system, but everyone assumed the donations were for buying guns anyway. In practice much of the cash never went further than Boston’s Irish bars, and what little did reach Ireland was a hundred times more likely to end up in a pub’s cash-till than in the hands of a gunman’s widow.

  “You were recruited into the IRA before you met us?” Gillespie asked. “Before you met van Stryker?”

  “I was supporting them, sure, but I didn’t join the IRA proper till I went to live in Ireland.”

  “But you’re confirming you were a long-time supporter? Was that for ideological reasons?”

  “Ideological?”

  Gillespie shrugged. “The Provisional IRA is a self-professed Marxist organisation, is it not?” He was being very prim.

  I laughed. “Come on. Get real!”

  “Well, isn’t it?” He had very pale blue eyes that were not quite as friendly as his diffident manner suggested.

  I shook my head. “The IRA says it’s Marxist when they’re dealing with socialist supporters like Colonel Qaddafi, and they say they’re good Catholic boys when they’re treating with the American-Irish in Boston. Most of them wouldn’t know a Marxist if one raped them with a hammer and a blunt sickle. Two or three of the Army Council are probably Party members, but the IRA itself is either just a good old-fashioned patriotic liberation movement, or else a more than usually ruthless criminal organisation, depending on just how close to it you happen to live.”

  “So why did you join?”

  “Because the Irish are my tribe! Because I learned about Wolfe Tone and Patrick Pearse long before anyone in my family thought to tell me about George Washington. Because I swallowed stories of the famine with my mother’s milk. There probably isn’t a family in South Boston that doesn’t claim ancestors who were put to the sword by Cromwell, or massacred in the rising of ’98, or starved in the famine, or beaten up by the Black and Tans. Those claims are our tribal badges!”

  Gillespie wanted to know about my childhood, but there were no dark secrets there. I had been a happy child, dividing my time between our family’s Boston house, my father’s Cape Cod retreat, and his various business premises. Those premises ranged from the Green Harp Bar in Charlestown to a marina in Weymouth, but my father’s real fortune was made from his brothels in Scollay Square.

  “Brothels?” Gillespie asked painfully.

  “They pulled them down,” I said, “to build the new City Hall. Some people haven’t noticed any difference.”

  “And your mother? What was her attitude to your father’s businesses?”

  “My mother worshipped the Virgin Mary. She believed every mother was born to suffer, and she wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. She endured my father and adored her three children.”

  “But you must have been a trial to her?” Gillespie smiled to show he meant no offence. “We took the trouble to find your old police records.”

  “I told you, Mom believed women were born to suffer. That’s what the priest and the nuns told her, and that’s how she wanted it.” Not that my police record held anything more sinister than the usual juvenile indiscretions. I had first been in court for beating ten kinds of living hell out of a man who had insulted my sister, and two years after that I did four months for recei
ving stolen goods.

  “And your father died while you were in prison?” Gillespie observed.

  “Yes.”

  “How did he die?”

  “He was in the back room of a Southie Bar when some bastards decided to burn the place down. They shot him first.”

  “Why?”

  “We were told it was an insurance scam.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Maybe they didn’t like his beer?” I smiled.

  Gillespie stared thoughtfully at me. “It must have been upsetting for you.”

  “What?”

  “Your father’s death. You were only twenty-one, that’s too young to lose a parent.”

  “What are you trying to prove?” I challenged him. “I thought I was here to help you guys, and instead you’re trying to make out that I’m some kind of basket-case because my pa died? I don’t need your counselling, Gillespie, or some crappy male-bonding session. I had a happy childhood, I thought Boston was a wonderful playground, and I think it’s sad that my parents are both dead, but I don’t suck my thumb or go in for pederasty or whimper in the night, so shall we move the fuck on?”

  Carole Adamson tried to reassure me. “It’s important that we understand where you’re coming from, Paul. Your life is the context for the answers you give us.”