Scoundrel

by Bernard Cornwell

  I rapped on the driver’s door, startling Marty who had evidently been fast asleep. He unlocked the door. “Is that you, Seamus? Jesus, I must have dropped off.”

  I ripped the door open and dragged Marty out of the seat. He yelped in panic as I spun him round to the dark side of the van, away from the road, and he screamed as I slung him down on to the gravel where I rammed my knee into his belly and the muzzle of the pistol into his throat. “Say a prayer, Marty.”

  “Jesus! Is it you, Paulie?”

  “No, it’s Cardinal Bernard Law, you shithead. This is our new way of making converts. Who the hell do you think I am?”

  “Where’s Seamus?”

  “He’s dead, Marty.”

  “Oh, Mother of God.” He tried to cross himself.

  “Now listen, you fuck.” I thrust the gun’s cold barrel hard into his Adam’s apple. “You’re not going to give me any trouble or else Mrs Doyle will be collecting the life insurance and moving to a Century Village in Florida and you’ll be nothing but a framed photograph on top of the television set. Is that what you want, Marty?”

  “No, Paulie, no! I’ll do whatever you want!”

  “Then get in the back of the van.”

  I dragged him up, hustled him round, and pushed him through the van’s rear door. The body of the van was filled with flower boxes fastened with lengths of green wire which I used to pinion Marty’s wrists and ankles. I gagged him with a strip of cloth I cut from his sweater, then felt through his pockets till I came up with some small change. “Now just wait here, Marty, and don’t make a peep or I’ll use you for target practice.”

  There was a telephone beside the frozen yoghurt shop. I pulled a visiting card from my pocket and punched in the numbers. It was an 800 number, a free call, but when it was over I needed Marty’s quarters to call Johnny who sounded pissed off at being woken in the middle of the night, but he recovered quickly enough when I told him what I wanted. “I’ll meet you by the dinghy,” he told me, “in half an hour, OK?”

  “I’m sorry, Johnny,” I told him.

  “Who needs sleep?”

  I went back to the van. Marty mumbled something through his gag, but I told him to shut up, then slammed the van’s rear door and went back to my pick-up. I drove south on Route 28. It began to sleet as I arrived at Stage Harbor where I parked beside a trap-shed and switched off the pick-up’s engine. I waited.

  Johnny arrived ten minutes later and I followed him down to where his dinghy was tethered. “Give me the boat keys,” I said.

  “Forget it, Paulie, I’m coming with you.”

  I did not argue. Everything had gone wrong this night and I needed help. So we rowed out to Johnny’s trawler, the Julie-Anne, started her up, and went to sea.

  We motored westward, guided through the shoals of Nantucket Sound by the winking lights of the buoys in the glassy-wet darkness. The big diesel motor throbbed comfortingly away. It was warm in the wheelhouse. Johnny steered with one hand and held a coffee mug with the other. “So what’s it about?” he asked.

  I did not answer. I just stared through the glow of the Julie-Anne’s navigation lights and I thought how many had died. Liam, Gerry, Gillespie, Callaghan, Seamus. And they were probably just the beginning.

  “At least tell me whose side I’m on?” Johnny insisted.

  “The angels. But don’t go near my house for a few days.”

  “It isn’t drugs?” Johnny asked.

  “I swear to God, Johnny, it isn’t drugs. Someone wanted to punish me for taking the gold.”

  “I thought you said the IRA had got their gold back?”

  “I guess they wanted me dead as an example to anyone else who had a mind to rip them off. But just stay clear of the house, Johnny.”

  We travelled on in silence. Rain slicked the deck and spat past the glow of the red and green lamps. The fishfinder’s dial glowed in the wheelhouse dark. About three hours after we had left Stage Harbor I watched the lights of a small plane drop from the clouds and descend towards Martha’s Vineyard. Johnny turned on his radar and the familiar shape of Cape Poge formed on the green screen. The eastern horizon was just hinting at the dawn as we slid past Chappaquidick Point. The water was smooth and slick, pocked with the rain and skeined with a thin mist that hazed the lights of Edgartown as Johnny, with a careless skill, nudged his huge trawler towards a pier. “They’ll probably charge me a hundred bucks just to land someone, let alone breathe their precious air. Greediest town in America, this one. Do you want me to wait for you?”

  “No. But thanks.”

  “Look after yourself, Paulie.”

  “I’ve not been very good at that, but I’ll do my best.”

  I jumped ashore, then walked into town. I was looking for a big house with a Nautor Swan called Nancy parked on jackstands in her front yard. I had come for van Stryker’s help, because everything had gone wrong.

  “Shanahan.” Simon van Stryker opened his door to me, grimaced at the weather, then ushered me inside. He was dressed in an Aran sweater, corduroy trousers and fleece-lined sea-boots, but he looked every inch as distinguished as the last time we had met when he had been rigged out to dine at the White House. “I’ve got a team heading for your house.” The 800 number I had called had been the number on the card van Stryker had given me in the Poconoes. The call had been answered by a young man who had calmly listened to my description of three dead bodies and my desperate appeal for help. I had held on while he called van Stryker who, in turn, had ordered me to meet him at his summer house where he now opened a closet to reveal a shelf of bottles. “Laphroaig?”

  “Please.”

  He took the seal off a new bottle, poured me a generous slug, then placed glass and bottle beside me. “So tell me exactly what happened.” I told him the story of the night, of my coming home, of Gillespie and Callaghan dying, of Seamus bleeding to death. While I talked van Stryker emptied the contents of a canvas sailing-bag on to the kitchen worktop. He had brought eggs, ham, cheese, milk and tomatoes. “Nancy thought we’d be hungry,” he explained, “and this looks like being a long discussion. Do go on.”

  “There isn’t much more to tell,” I finished lamely. “I left the bodies there and called for help.”

  He found a bowl and whisk. “That was wise of you, Paul.” He began breaking eggs, while I looked through his windows across the rain-stippled harbour to the low dull heathland of Chappaquiddick. Dawn was seeping across the cloudy sky, making the harbour’s water look like dull gun metal. “So tell me,” van Stryker ordered, “what you think this is all about.”

  “It’s about Stingers,” I said firmly. “It’s about men at the end of runways. Men hidden in the woods near Washington’s Dulles Airport or on boats in Jamaica Bay near JFK’s runways. Men in vans near Boston’s Logan Airport or in the warehouses near Miami International. It’s about dead airliners. II Hayaween loves to kill jumbo jets. He wants bodies floating in Boston Harbor, and on the Interstates and across the perimeter roads of a dozen airports. He wants one day of revenge, one day of slaughter, one day to make America pay for Saddam Hussein’s humiliation.”

  “You don’t believe the Stingers were meant for Ireland?”

  “Some, yes, but only a few. Those few were the IRA’s reward for negotiating the purchase. It would have been impossible for the Palestinians to come to America and negotiate the sale, so Flynn did it for them.”

  “And the money in Rebel Lady,” van Stryker suggested, “was the purchase price of the Stingers?”

  I coloured slightly, but nodded. “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us about Rebel Lady?”

  “Because I planned to steal the money. That was my pension plan and my health insurance and my future income all wrapped up in one Arab package.” I paused, sipped his good whisky, then looked up at van Stryker’s thin, clever face. “How did you find out about Rebel Lady?”

  “Gillespie found out.”

  “How?”

  He stirred the eggs. �
��A wiretap, of course. Good old-fashioned illegal bugging.” Van Stryker smiled at me.

  “Oh God, of course. You had my house bugged before I even left Europe?” I suddenly realised that of course van Stryker would have taken that precaution, which meant that the very first time I had talked to Johnny Riordan about collecting Rebel Lady the hidden microphones must have been hearing every word I spoke.

  “No,” van Stryker said.

  “No?”

  “Your house is certainly wiretapped. My guess is that there are microphones covering the downstairs, and a voice-activated tape recorder concealed in the attic. That’s how they usually do it if they’ve got access to the premises.”

  “They?”

  “We prefer using the telephone to carry the wiretapped signal away” –van Stryker ignored my question – “but that’s difficult if you’re not operating legally. So I suspect your eavesdroppers used a tape recorder. Which means, of course, that they must have had access to your house to collect the tapes.”

  “Sarah Sing Tennyson,” I said, and felt as a blind man must feel when given sight or, much more aptly, like a fool given reason. “Jesus Christ!”

  “The first is the more likely culprit, though in fact her name isn’t Tennyson. It’s Ko, Sally Ko. Her father is Hong Kong Chinese and her mother’s from London. Miss Ko is British Intelligence, though naturally the British say she’s a cultural attaché, but that’s what all the spooks say these days. It’s a harmless convention, we do it too.”

  “Oh, God,” I said, “oh, Christ,” and I thought what a fool I had been, what an utter, Goddamn, stupid fool. “And she wasn’t even after me,” I said, “but after Patrick and his friends?”

  “Your brother-in-law? Yes. I’m told he sometimes used your house to plot arms shipments, which the Brits rather gratefully intercepted. Gillespie only discovered all this when his people went to put in their own wiretaps and found the British microphones in place.”

  My God, but what a fool I had been. Why else would a tenant pay to have a telephone and electricity installed? The phone system probably disguised the basic wiretap while the electricity powered the hidden tape recorder, and every time my dumb-ass brother-in-law plotted another arms shipment to Ireland, British Intelligence had gleefully listened in. Then they must have heard me talking to Johnny about a shipment of gold, and suddenly their humdrum intelligence operation had turned into a triumph. And what a triumph it had proved for the Goddamn Brits! Five million in gold and fifty-three Stingers neutralised, and all for the price of a few hidden microphones and a voice-activated tape recorder. “The bastards,” I said feelingly, “the bastards.”

  Van Stryker took two plates from a dresser. “It was clever of them to use Congressman O’Shaughnessy’s house!” He laughed. “That’s a very elegant touch, Paul. I shall congratulate them on that.”

  “Elegant like hell. I thought they were going to kill me!”

  “I’m sure Gillespie warned them against anything so drastic.”

  And of course it was Gillespie who had set me up for the Brit bastards. They had snatched me on my first morning back home, and how had they known I would be there if Gillespie had not told them? And that would also explain why the FBI had told Sergeant Nickerson not to worry when Kathleen Donovan had made her nervous protest at my kidnapping, because Gillespie had known all along who had snatched me, and why, and what they were probably doing to me. “The bastards,” I said again, remembering my humiliation. And remembering too how I had spilled so much information about Belfast to my Irish questioner. Who was he? A Protestant? I looked at van Stryker. “You set them on to me, didn’t you?”

  “Gillespie felt you had been less than honest with him at the debriefing,” van Stryker admitted, “and your tale of Stinger missiles just didn’t make sense, Paul. I could have made things much tougher for you, but we all thought this way would be much quicker. And so it proved. You were right about the Stingers all the time, you just didn’t think to tell us that you’d fouled il Hayaween’s plans by stealing his money.”

  “But the Brits,” I said bitterly.

  “Better them than the Libyans, and better them than Brendan Flynn’s men.” Van Stryker was bland. “Was it a bad beating they gave you?”

  “Like having a root-canal without an anaesthetic.”

  “I’m sorry, truly. But if I’m dealing with a creature like il Hayaween then I can’t take chances. I needed to know what you were hiding, and I found out. You were hiding one million dollars.”

  “Is that what Miss Ko told you?” I asked.

  “She did more than tell us. She even shared the million with us, or rather we permitted them to take one half. Thanks to you, Paul, Her Majesty’s Secret Service is now richer to the tune of half-a-million dollars.”

  “No,” I said, and relished thus puncturing his equanimity. “They’re richer to the tune of four and a half million dollars. Miss Ko lied to you. There were five million bucks on that boat, van Stryker, all in gold. Your Goddamn allies have screwed you.”

  “Five?” He was astonished, shocked, incredulous. “Five!”

  “Five million,” I said, “in krugerrands and maple leaves. One thousand pounds gross weight of fine gold. I know! I glassed the coins into the boat. She was a brute before the gold went in and after it she sailed like a pregnant pig. Five million. The Brits lied to you.”

  “Oh, dear God,” he said, then turned away to concentrate on the omelette. He was not really thinking about the eggs or the skillet, but about the money. He was adding it to the equation, thinking, trying to discern his enemy’s mind. “Isn’t five million dollars rather a lot of money for fifty-three missiles?” he asked me after a while; then, suspiciously, “If the missiles even exist?”

  “I saw one of them.”

  “Just one?” Van Stryker turned the heat down under the omelette pan, suggesting that our hunger must wait on his puzzlement. “I don’t like that one Stinger. It all sounds too convenient. So just tell me everything, Paul, and this time make it the truth.”

  So I told him the truth, the whole truth. I spoke of Brendan Flynn, Michael Herlihy, Shafig, il Hayaween, Liam, Gerry, Rebel Lady, Sarah Sing Tennyson, the British interrogators, the gold and Seamus Geoghegan. I described my act of murder in the Mediterranean, I told him about Teodor, I told him everything. Van Stryker listened to it all in silence and, when I had no more to tell, he said nothing, but just stared at me, thinking, when suddenly the telephone rang, startling us both. Van Stryker answered it, spoke softly for a few moments, then put it down. “Your house is secure. My people are there.”

  “What will you do with the bodies?”

  “We’ll take Gillespie and Callaghan a long way away and fashion a car accident.”

  “And Seamus?”

  “He will disappear.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.” Van Stryker tipped the omelettes on to the plates. “I rather suspect the British will be blamed. Now, eat.” He put an omelette in front of me and I devoured it as though I had not eaten in weeks. Van Stryker ate his more fastidiously, then wiped the skillet with a paper towel before hanging it from an overhead rack. “I wish you’d told me about the five million dollars at the very beginning, Paul.” He was not reproving me. I think van Stryker understood human cupidity well enough not to blame me. He had gone to the window from where he stared at a fishing boat that was throbbing towards the sea leaving a wake to ripple across the grey harbour water like widening bands of crimson light. “It’s simply too much money!” van Stryker protested, “and I don’t like the idea of Stingers being launched at the end of American runways. It’s too complicated. For a start, where would il Hayaween find the men to fire the weapons? And why gold? Why not a simple bank transfer?”

  I thought about it. “Maybe Herlihy demanded gold?”

  “And why send two punks to guard you? Why not use two or three of their top men? Were Liam and Gerry the very best that the Provisionals could find?”

/>   “No way.”

  “So why them? And why involve you? And why Stingers?” He turned to me as he asked that question, then he repeated it forcefully, as though the clue to everything lay in the choice of weapon. “Why Stingers?”

  “Because they’re the best.”

  “But you don’t need the best to knock down an airliner. Airliners are lumbering great targets that wallow around the sky without so much as a single counter-measure on board. They’re not agile like a ground-support helicopter or fast like a low-level fighter-bomber. A cobbled-together Russian Red Star could knock out a Boeing 747, and the Palestinians must have hundreds of Red Stars! So why Stingers? And why you?”

  He had utterly confused me now. “What do you mean? Why me?”

  “Why did they want you?”

  “To bring the boat across”– I spoke as if the answer was obvious to the meanest intellect –“of course.”

  Van Stryker shook his head. “No!” he protested fiercely, “no! Why would they bring a boat to America with five million gold dollars they don’t need, to buy fifty-three Stingers they don’t want, and which probably never even existed? For God’s sake, Paul, the FBI have spent weeks looking for those missiles and there isn’t even a whisper of confirmation that they exist! So forget the missiles, think about why they wanted you.”

  “To bring the boat across,” I said again, but this time in quite a different tone; a tone of slow revelation.

  “Because the boat is hiding something,” van Stryker carried on the thought. “And they showed you a Stinger and they showed you money because they knew you’d buy that story because you of all people know just how the IRA has been lusting after Stingers for years, but this isn’t about Stingers, Paul, it never was! This is about the boat!”