Scoundrel

by Bernard Cornwell

  “You have a conscience about what you did?” Carole Adamson asked me.

  “I was doing it for America, wasn’t I?” I slid away from her inquiry.

  And for America I had triumphed when, in 1980, the IRA asked me to be their liaison officer with other terrorist groups. They saw me as a man who could move about the world without attracting suspicion, and even suggested I move to Europe where my existence would provoke even less attention. I took the marine business to Nieuwpoort where I hired Hannah as my part-time secretary, rescued the cat from the alleyway opposite my house, and began trawling the dark seas for van Stryker’s profit.

  “What sort of business did you conduct with these other terrorist groups?” Gillespie asked in his mild monotonous voice.

  I spread my hands as if to suggest the answer could go on for ever, but then offered a short version. “The Basques were after our bombing expertise, especially our electronic timers, while the Palestinians got a kick out of providing us with weaponry. I was a kind of procurement officer with them.”

  “And the weaponry is all of Communist origin?”

  I nodded. “Most of the weapons came from Russia and the explosives from Czechoslovakia, but the Kremlin didn’t want their involvement to be too obvious so they used Muammar al-Qaddafi as a middleman.”

  “And that was the extent of Qaddafi’s involvement? He was just a middleman?”

  I shook my head. “He’s the IRA’s Godfather.”

  “Godfather?”

  “Whatever the IRA wants, Qaddafi will give them. Not because he cares about Ireland, he probably doesn’t even know where Ireland is, but because he hates Britain.” Qaddafi’s hatred had intensified following Margaret Thatcher’s permission for the American bombers to use British bases for their attack on Tripoli. After that raid nothing had been too good for the Provisional IRA. They had become the beloved of Allah, warriors of the Prophet, Qaddafi’s chosen instruments of vengeance.

  “He gives more than weapons?” Gillespie asked.

  “Weapons, advice, training, refuge.”

  “Weapons training?”

  “The Provisionals don’t need that. But I know they’ve sent at least two guys to Tripoli to learn interrogation techniques. Up till then, if they thought there was a traitor, they simply punched the poor bastard rotten and as often as not they killed the fellow before they got a squeak out of him. Nowadays, though, they use Libyan techniques. They’re much more painful and much more certain.” I paused as a great slough of snow slid off the roof and plummeted on to the walk outside the window.

  “You arranged for this training?” Gillespie asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And the names of the trainees?”

  “I wasn’t given their names. They were simply codenamed John and Michael.” Later Gillespie showed me photographs of IRA men, but I found neither of the two I had escorted to Tripoli.

  The first experts arrived from Langley. There was a small and excitable man with pebble-glasses who knew an extraordinary amount about how illegal immigrants were smuggled into the south of France, and wanted to know whether terrorist groups used the same routes. I gave him what help I could. Another man, dry as a stick, tried to trace the financial links between Libya and the various groups, while a third came to ask me about the East German training camp at Tantow which I had visited twice. Every day there were more photograph albums, more pictures, more dull hours turning stiff pages of expressionless faces.

  A dark-haired woman arrived to talk about Libya and its support of terrorism. She showed me a photograph of Shafiq and I told her about his taste for pomade and his lust for French women, and about his grey elegant suits and his penchant for cachous and Gauloise cigarettes. She wanted to know about the methods Shafiq had used to contact me, and the places we had met and the codes we had devised for our telephone conversations. I talked about the Centre to Resist Imperialism, Racism, Backwardness and Fascism, then gave the name of the whorehouse in Marseilles that Shafiq thought was his private domain, and I wondered how long it would be before some Western agent dragged Shafiq from the brothel’s front steps and into a waiting car. The car would have had the locks of its back doors removed so there could be no fatal last-second fumbling. Instead the doors would be tensioned with bungee cords that would swing shut as the car accelerated away. Or perhaps Shafiq would be seduced by some thin-boned French blonde who would suck him dry before releasing him to Qaddafi’s vengeance.

  “You met Qaddafi?” the woman asked. She was attractive, with a quick face and a sharp mind. It was she who told me about Shafiq’s wife and three daughters in their Tripoli apartment. I never knew her name, nor those of any of the other experts who flew in from the CIA’s Langley headquarters.

  “I met Qaddafi,” I said, and described his bitter anger after the American air raid on Tripoli. “He was especially mad at the Brits because Thatcher had allowed the bombers to take off from British airbases.”

  “So you negotiated the arms shipments he sent to the IRA as revenge?” she asked.

  “I didn’t have to negotiate. I had to stop him from shipping his whole arsenal. He would have sent everything he had.”

  “What about his plans for revenge on the Americans?”

  “I suspect he brought down the jumbo jet over Lockerbie,” I suggested, “but he didn’t talk to me about that, only about the IRA.”

  “Now let us talk about il Hayaween,” the CIA woman said vengefully. “God, but I’d like his hide nailed to my barn door.”

  I dutifully described his face, his clothes, his mastery of English, his sunglasses, his Blancpain watch, his injured right hand and his taste for American cigarettes. I had revealed most of those details in previous sessions with Gillespie, and the woman had come prepared with photographs of Blancpain watches so I could identify which exact model I had bought in Vienna. She also wanted some confirmation of the legends about him, but I had no knowledge of his sins. I had only heard rumours, such as the stories of his massacre of Israeli schoolchildren. “You believe that?” the woman asked.

  “Yes, I think I do.”

  Gillespie, who sat in on all the sessions, shuddered. “How does a man live with the knowledge of a deed like that?”

  “Maybe he has no imagination?” Carole Adamson suggested from her customary seat in the window.

  I shook my head. “The best killers have imagination. To be as cunning as il Hayaween you must have imagination. That’s what makes him so good. But he also thinks he’s doing God’s work.”

  “Do the IRA think they’re doing God’s work?” Gillespie asked without a trace of irony.

  I laughed. “There’s an old tale, Gillespie, of the aeroplane flying into Belfast and the pilot switches on his microphone and welcomes the passengers to Aldergrove Airport and says that the temperature is fifty-five degrees and there’s a light rain coming out of the north and if they’d like to turn their watches to local time then they should wind them back three hundred years.” The joke belly-flopped like a pregnant pole-vaulter. Gillespie and the CIA expert both frowned while Carole Adamson just shook her head to show she did not understand. “Three hundred years ago,” I explained, “Europe was being torn apart by the wars of religion. Protestant against Catholic. Try and imagine a small island, three hundred years from now, where the natives will still be knocking technicolour shit out of each other in the name of communism versus the free market.”

  “So you do think the troubles in Ireland are about religion?” Gillespie asked. He was genuinely trying to understand. Terrorism, after all, was a very strange phenomenon to most Americans. It was a disease inflicted on the first world by crazed creatures from the slums of the old world and the refugee camps of the third, and Gillespie wanted me to explain the disease’s origin.

  I shook my head. “Religion in Ireland just defines which side you’re on. The Troubles are about people who feel they have no control over their own lives, about people who live in public housing and have no jobs and eat bad
food and smoke themselves to death and see their kids born to the same hopelessness and they just want to hit back against someone, almost anyone.”

  “So you’re saying it’s an economic problem?” the smart dark-haired woman asked earnestly.

  “It isn’t economic, but the Troubles are bound to feed off a bad economy. The IRA campaign of the 1950s collapsed because there was full employment, because no one felt deprived, because people were too busy paying off the instalments on their cars and television sets, but nowadays there are no jobs in Belfast, there’s no future, there’s no hope, so all that’s left is the pleasure of revenge. What else can the poor bastards do? They know the south doesn’t like them, and that the Brits would like nothing better than to get the hell out, and that in truth no one really wants anything to do with them at all, and so they fight back the only way they can; with bullets and bombs and the pleasure of knowing they’re reducing other people to their own level of misery.”

  There was silence for a while. Outside the window the snow fell.

  “Is there no conscience there?” Gillespie asked at last.

  “The clever ones pickle it in alcohol, and the stupid ones put their trust in the clever ones.” I gave the answer glibly, but I was thinking of Seamus Geoghegan and how I had once asked him if he felt the pangs of conscience, and he had thought about it for a long time and in the end he had just shaken his head. “I don’t give a rat’s toss,” he had told me, “not a rat’s toss.” What he had meant was that it was best not to think about it, for thinking would only make him unhappy.

  “I think perhaps conscience is over-rated by the West,” the woman said musingly.

  Gillespie seemed about to reply, but suddenly, shockingly, a telephone rang in the library. I had not even been aware that there was a telephone in the room and I jumped like a guilty thing, and even Gillespie seemed astonished by the bell’s sudden shrill. He scrambled to his feet and hurried to a recess at the back of the room where he tentatively lifted the instrument. He spoke a couple of words, then put the phone down before coming slowly back to the table with a look of surprise on his face. “It’s the war,” he said aloud and to no one in particular. “It started last night. We’re at war.”

  American and allied bombers were flying over the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar. Tomahawk cruise missiles were hissing above the Land of the Two Rivers where Eden had once flourished and Babylon, the flower of all cities, had blossomed. “Dear God,” Gillespie had murmured at the news, then he suggested we break off the debriefing to watch the television in the dining room. The news seemed impossibly optimistic, telling of incredibly accurate allied bombing, remarkably light aircraft losses, and burgeoning allied hopes.

  There was no word yet of an Iraqi response, and certainly no news of terrorist attacks. I half expected to hear of civilian airliners falling from the sky or of dreadful bombs ripping open Western city centres, but instead, over and over, the screen showed the flickering of tracer rounds above Baghdad being punctuated by the sheet lightning of bombs exploding on the horizon. There were pictures of fighterbombers screaming off Saudi runways, their wheels folding as the afterburners hurled the warplanes north towards the enemy.

  I sat furthest from the screen. I was watching the allied planes attack Iraq but I was remembering the Israeli fighterbombers over Hasbaiya. Usually their bombs or rockets struck before the Palestinians even knew the enemy was above them. There would be quick glints in the sky, a roll of wings and a billow of thunder, then the warplanes would vanish in the sky’s hot brightness as their burning flares, voided to decoy the defenders’ missiles, drifted slowly to earth. Afterwards, out of the smoke and rock-dust, a few stunned survivors stumbled.

  I knew that sooner or later Gillespie would want me to talk about Hasbaiya. I wished he would spare me that. I half expected him to raise the subject after lunch, but instead, and after courteously asking the dark-haired woman if she would mind waiting a few moments before resuming her questioning, he asked me one more time about the fiftythree Stingers.

  Gillespie’s problem was that neither the FBI nor the CIA could find a single substantiating fact for my story of the meeting in Miami and the sale of the missiles. Gillespie brought me photographs of warehouses close to the Hialeah racecourse, but even when I identified the building in which I had seen the Stinger it had done no good. A search of the warehouse discovered nothing, and its records betrayed no Cubans called Alvarez or Carlos. Now, as Gillespie took me back to the library for the afternoon session, he told me that the telephone number in Ireland had proved to belong to an Enniskillen shop owned by a sixty-eight-year-old spinster who dealt in religious statuettes, while Brendan Flynn, taxed by the Irish police with my story of a meeting in Miami, blithely retorted that he had been attending a conference on the future of Ireland at the University of Utrecht. Gillespie told me that two distinguished professors of International Law and a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church had signed affidavits supporting Brendan’s alibi. I had to laugh. Brendan had style.

  “Such people wouldn’t lie!” Gillespie reproved me.

  “Those bastards will lie through their teeth. Come on, Gillespie! Academics and churchmen? They love terrorists! They get their rocks off pretending that terrorists are doing God’s work. And especially the Dutch! I’ve been to those damn conferences in Holland. The Dutch are dull, so they love being on the side of the wicked. Say you’re a terrorist in Utrecht and you’ll have half a dozen priests and six academics all begging to lick your ass. That alibi’s a piece of crap.”

  “And Michael Herlihy? He has two Boston lawyers willing to testify that he was taking depositions on that day.”

  “You trust American attorneys? What about Marty Doyle? Did you question him?”

  “He claims to have been driving Michael Herlihy all day. In and around Boston.”

  “He’s lying! He drove me to the warehouse, then he drove Brendan Flynn and me to Miami Airport. So pull the bastard in and slap him about. He’ll tell you everything.”

  Gillespie sighed. “This is America. We have to use due process.” He looked at me with silent reproof for a few seconds. “I also have to tell you,” he went on, “that the British and Irish authorities have heard nothing about Stingers. Nothing at all.”

  “I saw one.”

  “So you say, so you say.” But it was plain he did not believe me. “We’ll keep looking,” he said, though without enthusiasm, and then he turned to the dark-haired woman, who had waited patiently throughout the discussion of Stingers and alibis. “You wanted to raise a particular matter with Mr Shanahan?”

  “Hasbaiya,” she said bluntly.

  I turned to her. The fire was snapping and hissing. “I’m sorry?”

  “Hasbaiya.”

  Of course they wanted to know about Hasbaiya, but the very thought of the place made me go tense. I was very aware of Carole Adamson’s scrutiny. “I’ve been to Hasbaiya,” I said as easily as I could.

  “How often?”

  “Often enough.”

  “Twice? Ten times? Twenty?” The woman frowned at my generalisation.

  “Eight times. My first visit was in ’82 and the last in ’86.”

  “You were attending training courses?”

  Hasbaiya was the most notorious of the Palestinian training camps, a graduate school of death. It was not the only terrorist-training camp in the world, and not even the biggest. Indeed, in the old days, before their system collapsed, the Soviets ran a half-dozen such facilities, but Hasbaiya was the star in that dark firmament of evil.

  “Did you train there?” the woman asked hopefully.

  “No. My visits were just to introduce trainees.”

  I explained that no one could attend Hasbaiya, or any of the other Palestinian training camps for that matter, without being vouched for by someone the Palestinians trusted, and I had been the person who verified that the trainees I took to the camp were who they claimed to be and not some American or Israeli agent.

  “A
nd you introduced eight IRA men to the camp?” the woman asked.

  “Four IRA men, one woman, and three Basques. The IRA didn’t really think their guys needed outside training, but every now and then they’d send someone.”

  “So how long did it take you to make these introductions?” the woman asked. “A day?”

  “Five minutes. I’d take the person to the commandant’s office, say hello, and that was that.”

  “And then you’d leave?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes they invited me to stay a few days.”

  “Tell us about the camp.”

  I described it. Hasbaiya was built in the grounds of an old winery on the upper slopes of the Lebanon’s Beka’a Valley. Most of its territory was used as a training ground to turn Palestinian refugees into storm-troopers, but at the top of the camp was a more secret area where terrorists came to perfect their skills of ambush, assassination and destruction. Hasbaiya’s creed preached that death was the ultimate deterrent and that so long as the world feared death, so long was killing the terrorist’s best friend, but for death to be useful it also had to be familiar, and so Hasbaiya used death as an integral part of its syllabus. Every trainee went there knowing that men and women died there, and that to be squeamish in the face of that slaughter was to demonstrate an unworthiness of the cause.

  Gillespie broke in. “Let me clarify this. You’re saying trainees died?”

  “Sometimes, yes.” I paused, and I was thinking of Roisin, but when I spoke again I talked of another American girl who had gone to Hasbaiya full of the fervour of one who would change the world. “Her name was Kimberley Sissons,” I said, “and she came from Connecticut. I think she said her father was a corporate lawyer. She had a degree from Harvard.”