Scoundrel

by Bernard Cornwell

“Fifty-three,” I answered. They knew the answers, but they did not know I knew who they were and so they would ask me questions to which they knew the answers just to keep me from guessing their identity. A game of mazes and mirrors. Of undoing knots while blindfolded.

  “Who was selling the missiles?”

  “A Cuban consortium in Miami.”

  “Describe the Cubans.”

  I had little to tell, but did my best.

  “The missiles were meant for Ulster?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was the trade arranged in America or Ireland?” The Ulster accent was toneless, suggesting that the questioning would go on and on and that nothing I could do would stop it. It was all a part of the well-planned interrogatory technique. They wanted me to feel I was trapped in an unstoppable process that was beyond the control of anyone, and that the only way out was to give the machine what it wanted; the truth.

  “Both, I think.”

  “Explain.”

  I assumed the questioner was running over known ground to test my responses and lull my suspicions as he moved imperceptibly towards the questions he really wanted answered. I told him about Brendan Flynn and Michael Herlihy, and even about little Marty Doyle. I described Shafiq’s part in the arrangements, and how il Hayaween had taken over the mission. I admitted that I had deliberately broken il Hayaween’s instructions by renaming Corsaire and shipping her to America as deck cargo.

  “Why did you break those instructions?”

  “Because I wanted to return to America quickly to report on the missile sale to my superiors.”

  “Your superiors?” Was there a hint of puzzlement in my interrogator’s voice? “Explain.”

  I kept my voice dull and listless. “Van Stryker and his people.”

  “Who is van Stryker?”

  “CIA, Department of Counter-Terrorism.” I inserted an edge of desperation in my voice, as though I was aware of revealing things that were truly secret and sensitively dangerous.

  There was a measurable pause, and a detectable uncertainty when my interrogator spoke again. “You’re CIA?”

  A half-second of hesitation as though I was reluctant to answer, then, “Yes.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since 1977.”

  I could see Sarah Sing Tennyson’s reaction clearly enough. Till now she had done nothing but keep a supercilious and careless expression, but now there was a genuine worry on her face.

  “Describe your mission in the CIA.” I sensed my interrogator was off his script. He was winging it, wondering where my surprising admissions would lead.

  “To penetrate Middle Eastern terrorist groups.” I spoke dully, mouthing the words I had rehearsed in the cellar’s creeping dark. “I was instructed to use the credentials of IRA membership as an introduction to such groups.”

  “The CIA ordered you to join the IRA?”

  “Yes.”

  “How were you to achieve that?”

  “I was already collecting money for Ireland and sending weapons from Boston, so the IRA knew of me and trusted me.”

  “How did the CIA discover you?”

  “I was arrested for running drugs into Florida.”

  “And the CIA ordered you to spy on the IRA?”

  “No. They didn’t need me for that.”

  Silence. There was a soft explosion nearby, making me jump, before I realised that the noise had come from an adjoining cellar in which a heating boiler had just ignited with a thump of expanding gases.

  “Why would the CIA not be interested in the IRA?”

  “I’m sure they are, but I was ordered to concentrate on the Middle Eastern groups, and my standing with those groups depended on my being totally trusted by the Provos, so I was ordered not to risk that trust by informing on them.” This was the story that Roisin had told in Hasbaiya, and which had so terrified the Palestinians. Now, four years later, I was using its truth for my survival.

  “Have you reported back to van Stryker?” the interrogator asked.

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “The whole of last month. I was being debriefed in the Pocono Mountains.”

  “So van Stryker will collect the boat from Boston.”

  I hesitated, and a foot shifted menacingly behind me. “No!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I was going to collect it.”

  “You planned to steal the money?” My questioner sounded amused.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell van Stryker about the boat at all?”

  “No. I just told him that money was being telexed from Europe.”

  “And how much money does van Stryker think is involved?”

  “One and a half million, of which a half-million has been paid.”

  “Is Herlihy looking for the boat?”

  “Of course he is.”

  “Put the hood on.”

  They had left me holding the black bag which I now pulled obediently over my face. I heard them go upstairs and the cellar door scrape shut. I dragged the hood off my head, feeling a sudden exultation. I had worried them! I had unbalanced them! I had unbalanced them so much that on this visit they had not laid a finger on me. The truth was making me free. It had changed the script and altered their reality!

  I turned to see a paper bag had been left on the floor by my bed. The bag contained a cold cheeseburger in a styrofoam container along with a cardboard cup of tepid coffee. I ate hungrily. The light had been left on and I could see that the cellar seemed to have been cleared out recently; there were dust-free spaces on the floors and walls that suggested boxes and furniture had been stored down here and had recently been taken away to make room for my interrogation.

  Then, suddenly, the lights went out. In the next-door cellar the dull roar of the boiler was switched off, to be replaced by the softer sound of the sea. I lay down. I waited. I dared to think I had won. I dared to think I might live. I dared to feel hope.

  I stayed in the cellar for days. I lost track of the time. I tried to keep a tally by scratching marks on the wall by my cot, but the meals came irregularly and my sleep periods were broken by sudden insistent demands that I put the hood on, stand up, stand still, answer, and so I had no regular measure by which to judge the passage of the days.

  At first I had pissed blood in my urine, but the blood stopped coming as the days passed and I received no more beatings. The questions went on, mostly now about my debriefing and just what I had told the CIA about the IRA. They even asked me about men I had never mentioned to Gillespie, and I hid nothing from them for there was always the threat of violence behind the questioning, but even so I knew I had driven a deep wedge to widen the great chasm of loyalties that besieged the Provisional IRA. The Provos, like all terrorist organisations, wanted the respectability of external support and though like every other leftist guerilla movement they could count on the endorsement of socialist academics and liberal churchmen, they wanted more, much more. The twin endorsements that the Provos craved were those of America and the Middle East; that of America because it endowed them with respectability, and that of the Middle East because it provided them with their most lethal toys; but their quandary was that their two supporters hated each other, which made it even more important that each should be decried to the other. The Provos never boasted of their Libyan connections to the Americans, but rather painted that connection as a sporadic, unwanted and unimportant acquaintanceship, while to the Libyans, who were now their main sponsors, they declared that the donations of the American-Irish were the gifts of fools who did not understand the Marxist imperatives of revolution, but who could nevertheless be constantly gulled into supporting Libyan aims.

  My interrogators, who had begun by assuming I was a traitor to the Provisionals, had now learned I was something far more dangerous, an agent of the United States, and that to kill me might risk the enmity of the United States. There was a chance my death could be publicised, provoking a dangerous drop in fin
ancial support from America. Thus, in fear of that exposure, they were treating me with a delicate caution. They had already abandoned hurting me and, as the days passed, they brought me better food, though never served with metal knives and forks or on china plates that could be broken to make a weapon. I drank from the garden hose, or else from the cardboard cups of coffee. I was given a pillow and thicker blankets, and my interrogators even let me ask a question of them without rewarding me with pain. What happened, I asked them, to the girl who had been with me when they abducted me?

  “Nothing. She merely agreed to help us by taking you away from the house while we set up your reception committee.”

  “She’s with you?” I could not hide my disappointment.

  “Of course, and why shouldn’t she be, considering who her sister was? Tell us about Roisin, now.”

  So I told the wretched story once again, and as I told it I thought what a fool Kathleen had made of me and I almost blushed when I remembered the hopes I had dared to make in my mind as we walked back from the beach. I had seen her as Roisin’s replacement and all the time Kathleen had been a part of Michael Herlihy’s attempt to get even with me. Christ, I thought, but how I had underestimated that garbage lawyer!

  The days passed. My initial euphoria at having changed the rules of the interrogation gave way to a quiet despair. I might be spared the pain, but I became convinced that the easiest way the Provos could dispose of any possible embarrassment was by killing me secretly, and thus the best I could hope for was a swift bullet in the back of my skull. I had long given up any hope of opening the locked door at the top of the cellar steps. I had explored that option only to discover that the door was made from thick pieces of timber, and my only house-breaking equipment was the feeble legs of the camping cot that would have buckled under the smallest strain.

  So I waited. My mind became numb. I tried to exercise, but there seemed such small hope of continued living that I invariably abandoned my efforts and crawled back to the small warmth of the cot and its blankets. I began to welcome the noisy irruption of my interrogators because talking to them was at least better than staring at the stone cellar walls or gazing into the impenetrable blackness when the light was off. They even began to let me talk sitting on the cot, wrapped in the blankets. My masked questioner stayed for hours one day, talking of Belfast and its familiar streets and the people we had both known and for a time that day I felt a real warm bond with the man because of the love we shared for that decried, battered and rain-sodden city.

  Then came a day, or at least a long period, when I was awake and listening alternately to the sea and the central heating boiler and during which no one came to question me. The house, it seemed, was oddly silent. The cellar light was off.

  I rolled off the cot and crouched on the floor. There was something unusual, something unsettling in the silence. I had become accustomed to the small sounds of the house; the squeak of a door, the scrape of a foot, the chink of metal against a plate, the distant noise of a toilet flushing; but now there was just a profound silence in which, with a horrid trepidation, I edged my way to the stairs and then climbed slowly upwards. I was naked and the small hairs on my arms and legs prickled. I had goose-bumps.

  I reached the top step. I stopped there, listening, but there was nothing to be heard. I groped for the door lever, pressed it down and, to my astonishment, the door swung easily open.

  Light flooded into the cellar. It was a dim light, like daylight enshrouded by curtains.

  I stepped out of the door to find myself in a long, beautifully furnished and deeply carpeted hallway. A brass chandelier hung in the centre of the hallway, while a balustraded staircase curved away to my left. There was a lovely oil painting of a barquentine on one wall and a nineteenth-century portrait of a man dressed in a high wing collar hanging on the opposite wall. The wallpaper was a Chinese design showing birds of paradise among leafy fronds. Beside the front door was a wind gauge that flickered as an anemometer on the house roof gusted in the breeze. The only incongruous feature of the elegant entrance hall was a stack of boxes and bikes piled against a washer and a dryer; all the things, I guessed, that had been taken from the cellar to make space for my bare prison.

  To my right an open door led into a vast airy kitchen, tiled white, with a massive fridge humming in one corner. Copper pans hung from a steel rack. Two paper plates had been discarded on a work-top along with a pot of cold coffee. I went back into the hallway, selected a random door and found myself inside a lavishly appointed living room. The room was hung with delicate watercolours, the sofas were deep and soft while the occasional tables gleamed with the burnish of ancient polished wood. Old magazines lay discarded on the tables and, more incongruously, a pile of empty hamburger boxes was stacked in the marble fireplace, suggesting my kidnappers had sometimes eaten in this lavish room. The shuttered windows were framed by plush drapes of antique tapestry corded with red velvet. An old-fashioned brass-tubed spyglass stood on an elegant tripod before one of the windows. I crossed the deep-carpeted room and pulled back the wooden shutters.

  “Christ!” I was suddenly, wonderfully dazzled by the reflection of a full winter sun streaming from a glittering winter sea. This house, so lavish and rich and huge, was built on a mound almost at the sea’s edge. The small waves flopped tiredly on to a private beach not twenty paces from my window. There was a tarpaulin-covered swimming pool to my left, a balustraded timber deck in front of me, and a boathouse and an ice-slicked private dock to my right. A yacht was berthed at the dock while out to sea there was a red buoy with a number 9 painted on its flank. I guessed I was in one of the big estates near Hyannisport or Centerville, or perhaps I was further west in one of the great beach-houses of Osterville.

  Then I forgot all that speculation for I had suddenly noticed what name was painted on the sugar-scoop stern of the yacht berthed at the private dock.

  I had last seen her in Barcelona, stowed safe in an open-topped container. Before that, in a lumbering winter sea, I had committed murder in her saloon. Now she was here, docile and tame, in the deep winter’s sun.

  She was the Rebel Lady.

  I stumbled upstairs, flinging open closet doors as I searched for clothes. In the master bedroom, where the rumpled sheets suggested at least one of my interrogators had slept, I found a walk-in wardrobe filled with summer clothes. There were checked trousers, and trousers embroidered with spouting whales, and trousers bright with golfing motifs, and three pairs of trousers printed with emerald shamrocks, but at the back of the closet I found a plain, undecorated pair of jeans which fitted me well enough. I pulled on a shirt decorated with a polo player, a white sweater that purported to be the livery of an English cricket club, and a pair of blue and white boat shoes. There was a slicker in the wardrobe. I grabbed it and ran downstairs.

  Then, before going out to explore Rebel Lady, I spotted a telephone on the kitchen wall.

  For a second I hesitated, torn between my desire to search the boat and my worries about Johnny, then I picked up the phone and punched in his number. I could scarcely believe that the phone worked, but suddenly it rang and Johnny himself answered and I felt a great wash of relief pour through me. “Oh, Christ,” I said, and slid down the wall to sit on the tiled kitchen floor.

  “Paulie?” Johnny’s voice was tentative, worried.

  I was crying with sheer relief. “Johnny? Are you all right?”

  “Of course I’m all right. I’ve been trying to reach you for two weeks!”

  “Two weeks?” I gazed around the kitchen. My mind was in slow gear, stumbling and lurching. “What day is it, Johnny?”

  He paused. “Are you drunk, Paulie?”

  “Tell me. Please.”

  “Sunday.”

  “Christ,” I said. “Who’s winning the war?”

  “That finished days ago! It was a walkover.” Johnny paused. “What the hell’s happened to you, Paulie?”

  “Did someone come for the boat papers?” I aske
d him.

  “The girl, of course. You know? The pretty Chinese girl?” He chuckled. “You dog.”

  I climbed to my feet and leaned my forehead on the cold window glass and stared out at the berthed yacht. “She told you that we were lovers?” I guessed that was what his chuckle meant.

  “I can’t blame you. She’s a real hot one.” Johnny must have sensed that something was wrong, for his tone suddenly changed. “Are you saying you didn’t send her?”

  “In a way I did.” Not that it mattered now, I thought. The main thing was that the bastards had not snatched Johnny and given him the treatment in some raw cellar.

  “Are you OK, Paulie?” Johnny asked.

  “Not really.”

  “So where the hell are you?”

  “Big house, I’m guessing it’s somewhere on the Cape shore of Nantucket Sound. Does a red buoy with a number nine mean anything?”

  “Not off the top of my head.”

  “Hold on, Johnny.” I had spotted a pile of junk mail that someone must have collected from the mail-box and piled indiscriminately on a work surface.

  I pulled the top piece towards me and saw it was addressed to ‘The Occupier’. I read the address to Johnny, who whistled. “You’re keeping rich company. Centerville, eh? That number nine buoy must mark the Spindle Rock. I’ll come and get you in the truck. Be there in forty-five minutes, OK?”

  I put the phone down, pulled on the slicker, and tugged open the kitchen door. I saw that the alarm system which should have been triggered by the door’s opening had been ripped out. I pulled the thin slicker round my shoulders and stepped into the brisk and freezing wind. I shivered as I walked gingerly along the frozen path to the private dock which had pilings fringed with thick ruffs of ice left by the falling tide. A gull screamed a protest as I approached the dock, then flapped slowly away across the glittering sea. I paused beside the boathouse, scrubbed frost from a window pane, then peered inside to see a beautiful speedboat suspended on slings above the frozen water. The sleek boat’s name was painted clear down her flank in huge green letters, Quick Colleen. She had a pair of monstrous two-hundred-horsepower engines at her stern, making her into a pretty, overpowered toy for the summer; a fitting accessory to this pretty, overpriced summer home that my captors had used as their temporary base. I walked on to where Rebel Lady fretted at her lines.