“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 neutralized, 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,
“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 toward the sea leaving a wake to ripple across the gray harbor 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!”
“Oh, Christ,” I said. “Where’s the boat?”
He shrugged. “The damned Brits said it was empty, finished, useless. We believed them.”
“Oh, Christ,” I said again. “I gave the boat back to them!”
“Gave it back to who?”
“Herlihy.”
“Who has disappeared,” van Stryker said. “So what’s in it, Paul? What were they hiding under a coat of
