Scoundrel

stared up at me, a terrible look on his pale face, then shook his head as if to tell me he had taken enough torment.

I cut the throttles, letting Quick Colleen idle in the cold, gentle water. “So where’s Rebel Lady?” I asked him.

“In Washington, DC.”

“Where?”

“At the Virginia Shore Marine Depot.”

“Where’s that?”

He heaved, brought up a trickle of mucus, then groaned. Even the small rocking of the boat was murder to him.

“Where’s that?” I asked him again.

“It’s at the northern end of Washington National Airport. Go into the city from the airport and it’s the first turning off the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway. Now, please, Paul! Take me back! Please!”

“Who took her there?”

“I hired a delivery firm in Cotuit.”

I gave the engines a tad of power, throwing Michael back on to the fouled cushions. His face had a green tinge now.

“What’s hidden inside her, Michael?”

“I don’t know. Truly! Nothing perhaps. You were bringing the money, that’s all! Then she was to be left at that yard.”

“Il Hayaween ordered her taken to that particular yard, yes?”

“Yes!”

“And he sent you more money?”

“Yes!”

“How much?”

He was reluctant to say, but I gunned the throttles slightly and he yielded immediately. “Five million again.” He slid sideways, heaving and retching.

“He wired it, right? To where, the Caymans?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“And the five million is for you and Brendan to share, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And no one else knows about this, do they?” I suddenly saw it clearly. That was why Brendan had sent me two punks, because he dared not ask the Army Council to allocate good men. “This operation was never cleared by the Army Council, was it?” I accused him.

Michael gazed up at me. That question scared him, but he was too cowed, too miserable and too wretched to dare tell a lie and so he shook his head.

Which meant he was freelancing. He and Brendan. None of this had been approved by the Provisional IRA’s Army Council. The whole thing was an unsanctioned operation. “There never were any Stingers, were there?” I asked.

“There would have been!” Michael pleaded. “We could have bought every Stinger on the market! That’s what we were going to do, Paul! Don’t you understand? We had to make money! I wanted Boston to be more important than Tripoli again! I wanted to see Ireland free!” The last word was a despairing cry as another spasm of illness wrenched him forward.

“So who were those Cubans?”

“The Arabs provided them. We had to convince you that there really were Stingers.”

Oh Christ, I thought, but Carlos and Alvarez had probably been the genuine articles; straight out of Cuba with Fidel’s cigar-smoke reeking in their nostrils. “Bastard,” I told Herlihy, then I gave Quick Colleen’s throttles a thrust, driving her fast on to the plane before whipping her into some fast S-turns, spinning and flogging her through the merciless sea. Herlihy was screaming and sobbing. I had never known the exquisite punishment of seasickness, but I had seen enough sufferers to know that its misery could prise the truth out of the most secretive of sinners.

I cut the throttles again, letting the sleek hull settle into the small waves. The shore was a mile away now. Michael was gagging and moaning; a man in anguish. “Tell me,” I demanded, “what is in that boat and worth ten million dollars of Saddam Hussein’s money?”

“I don’t know. They just asked us to deliver the boat to Washington.”

“And what were you to do with me?”

“Nothing.” He looked up at me, tendrils of vomit trailing from his blue lips. “Honest!”

I put a hand to the throttles.

“You were to be killed!” He said it pathetically, begging me not to touch the throttle levers. “You and the two boys.”

“Because the Rebel Lady,” I said, “was never to be associated with the IRA, is that it?”

“Yes!” He gazed beseechingly at me. His rumpled suit was flecked with vomit and seawater.

“And you and Brendan were willing to help Saddam Hussein attack America?”

“We didn’t know what it was about!” he protested.

“Oh, you did, Michael. You may not know what’s inside Rebel Lady, but you knew damn well she isn’t carrying a goodwill card for the President.”

“She brought us money,” he said, “and I’ll give the money toward the cause. Ireland will be free!”

“Oh it will,” I said, “I promise you that, but it won’t need your help, because Ireland doesn’t need traitors like you.”

“I’m not a traitor.”

“You’re a piece of shit, Michael, a piece of legal shit.” And I pushed the throttles forward, gave the boat two punishing and gut-wrenching turns, then headed hard for the shore.

And wondered just what lay in the dark belly of the Rebel Lady.

Washington, DC lies ninety-five miles from the mouth of the Potomac River. Rebel Lady would probably have done most of those miles under power after her delivery crew had sailed her south from Cape Cod. The weather had been kind, so they had probably taken the outside route to Sandy Hook, then down to Cape May where they would have taken her by canal and river into the Chesapeake Bay. Then, once into the Potomac, they would have motored her up to the nation’s capital and, if they had remembered the old tradition that honored George Washington, they would have sounded the ship’s bell as they passed Mount Vernon.

Once in the city itself they would have taken the Virginia Channel where, just south of the Pentagon and north of the airport, the Virginia Shore Marine Depot lay. In winter the dilapidated yard was a storage place for cruisers and dismasted yachts. It was a dispiriting place, nothing but a mucky run-down yard hedged behind by the expressway looping off the river bridges and in front by the gantries and pylons that stood in a bay of the Potomac to hold the approach lights for Washington National Airport’s main runway. The big jets screamed overhead.

“Of course we’re not as well known as the Sailing Marina to the south of the airport,” the yard’s manager shouted to me as a passenger jet thundered above us, “but we’ve got more depth of water than the Pentagon Lagoon.” The smell of kerosene settled around us in the wake of the huge plane. I could see the Washington Monument across the river and beyond it, to my right, the last gleams of reflected sunlight from the Capitol Dome. The Capitol, like the White House, was a little over two miles away while the Pentagon was just one mile north. Rebel Lady had been brought like a plague bacillus right into the very heart of the Republic. “So what’s all this about?” the manager asked and, when I said nothing, he tried to prompt me. “They paid good money for her storage. Cash!”

“I’m sure they did.”

Once she had reached the yard Rebel Lady had been craned out of the water and cradled among a score of plastic-wrapped yachts. Her hull had been supported by metal jackstands and her thick