Scoundrel

and walked out of the docks to find a taxi. In a day or so Rebel Lady would be loaded on to a container ship, then, as deck cargo and with her secret hidden deep in her dark belly, she would be carried west across the winter Atlantic, bound for America.

And I too was going to America, but not across the Atlantic. Fear of il Hayaween made me circumspect and so I took a train to Nice, another to Paris, then took the metro to the airport. I telephoned Brussels again, told a lie, and caught a plane for Singapore. I was vanishing, going east about the world, but running, just like the newly christened Rebel Lady, for the refuge of home.

I stayed one night in a hotel near Singapore’s Changi Airport, then, in a hot humid dawn and still groggy with sleeplessness and jetlag, I flew north to Hong Kong where I waited two hours before catching a plane to San Francisco. There, using my false American passport and carrying a stained sea-bag and my bright yellow oilskin jacket, I came home.

My flight to Boston was delayed so I bought a clutch of newspapers. The Iraqis were still refusing to withdraw from Kuwait despite the mass of coalition troops assembling in Saudi Arabia, and Saddam Hussein was still promising his enemies the mother of all battles. He sounded confident enough to make me wonder whether perhaps il Hayaween’s plans were not so ramshackle after all. Perhaps there were saboteurs in place throughout the world, preparing to slaughter and main and destroy in the names of Allah, Saddam and Palestine. I thought of fifty-three Stinger missiles and of a man with a maimed hand asking how easy it was to shoot down airliners, and I felt a tremor of fear at the thought of taking another plane, then told myself not to be so stupid. Whatever evil the Iraqis had planned would not be unleashed till after the shooting began in the desert.

The Boston plane should have left San Francisco at half past one in the afternoon, but it was nearer six in the evening before the aircraft at last climbed over the bay and headed east across the Sierra Nevada, which meant we did not land at Logan Airport till the small hours of the morning. It had been snowing and the temperature was way below zero. The last sleep I had enjoyed was somewhere over the western Pacific, and if I had been sensible I would have stayed the rest of that night in a Boston hotel, but by now the jetlag and adrenalin were combining to keep me awake and all I really wanted to do was reach my house on Cape Cod, so I rented a car and drove myself through the banked snow that lined the Massachusetts roads.

The drive took just over two hours. I was aching with tiredness, but the thought of the waiting house filled me with a feverish expectancy and, like a hunted beast seeking a secret lair, I wanted to recuperate in the safety and reassurance of home. There was a risk, a very small risk, that my enemies might be watching the Cape Cod house, but I doubted it for I had not seen the place in seven years, and Shafiq and his friends did not even know the house existed. As I crossed the Cape Cod Canal the clouds slid apart to reveal a clean-edged moon cut sharp as a whistle in a sky of ice-bright stars. The moonlight revealed yellow ribbons tied to trees and mailboxes and fences. A big illuminated sign outside a hardware store asked God to bless our troops. The radio, even at four in the morning, was filled with the threats of war, then it played “God Bless America” and I felt tears prick at my eyes. It had been so long since I had been home, so very long.

It was ten past four in the star-bright morning when I turned on to the dirt road that led east toward the ocean and, as I breasted the pine-clad sand ridge that edged the marsh, I could suddenly see for miles and it seemed that every frost-edged blade of grass was needle sharp in the winter air. The far Atlantic was silver and black while the nearer waters of the bay glistened like a sheet of burnished steel. The snow had hardly settled on the salt marshes, but there was just enough to streak the dark shadows with bands of white. I braked the car to a stop on the ridge’s crest and, with the radio and lights turned off, I sat and stared at the view in which, dead-center and ink-black under the scalpel moon, my waiting house lay silent. The house and the sweeping beams of the Cape’s lighthouses were the only new things in this view since the days when the Pilgrim Fathers had first stood on this ridge, or indeed, since the more ancient time when the wandering Indian tribes had dug for clams in the shoals of this sandy promontory that stuck so deep into the Atlantic.

I rolled down the car window to catch, on the surge of freezing air, the shifting sound of the distant ocean breakers. The sound brought with it a sudden rush of love for this place. It was home, it was safety, it was mine. My father had bought this house fifty years before as a refuge from the whores and pimps and lawyers who plagued his business, and now it would become my refuge. Here, I told myself, I could at last live honestly. No more secrets. I had come home.

Home. I sat there for a long time, letting the cold fill the car, thinking. Thinking and watching. Nothing moved in the salt marsh; I did not expect any of my enemies to be here, but old habits keep a man alive, and so I watched and waited.

I watched the house and listened to the sea. I felt no instinct of fear. This place was too far from the hatreds of the Middle East or the bitterness of Ulster to bear danger. This was the refuge where I would hide until Rebel Lady reached America, then I would give myself up to the government for questioning. My telephone calls to Brussels had merely been to warn them of Stringer missiles, il Hayaween and my conviction that a terrible series of airliner massacres was planned as a revenge for America’s thwarting of Saddam Hussein’s plans. I had given the CIA as much information as they needed to stop the Stingers being deployed, but they would want more. They would want all the information I had gathered and remembered since first they had sent me out, as an agent without strings and without provenance, twelve years before.

For Roisin had been right. I was one of the agents who did not exist. I was one of the CIA’s secrets. I had been turned out into the world and told to stay out until I had something worth bringing home. I was one of the agents who would leave no tracks and make no footprints. I would be paid nothing, offered nothing, and my name would appear on no government list, no computer record, and no file. I did not exist. Simon van Stryker, who had recruited me to the program, called us his “Stringless Agents” because there would be no apron strings or puppet strings to lead our enemies back to Langley, Virginia. Now I was going back there of my own accord, but in my own time and I would not give them everything. Rebel Lady and her cargo were mine. Saddam Hussein’s gold would not go toward paying off America’s deficit, but to keep me in my old age.

What old age? I sat in the freezing, dark car and gazed at the moonlit marsh and I remembered how I had once dreamed of bringing Roisin to this house; I had even dreamed, God help me, of raising her children on this shore, but she had scorned that dream as the sentimental witterings of a dull and unimaginative fool. I remembered her eyes after her execution, all fierceness gone, then I thought of Liam’s eyes that had been so accusing in the green lamplight. Poor Liam. After I had wrestled the sleeping bag about his corpse I had found his dried vomit on my hands and I had panicked as if I had been touched by a foul contagion. I remembered my childhood, and how Father Sifflard had told us of the one sin against the Holy Ghost that could never be forgiven, which sin no one seemed able to define, and I wondered if we all defined it for ourselves and if I was already guilty and thus doomed to the horrors of eternal punishment.

I rolled up the window, let in the clutch, and drove toward my house, which had been built 150 years before by a Captain Alexander Starbuck who, retiring from the profitable pursuit of whales in the Southern Ocean and quarrelling with his family on Nantucket, had come to this Cape Cod marsh and built himself a home snug against the Atlantic winds. My father had bought The Starbuck House from the estate of the Captain’s great-granddaughter and had dreamed of retiring to it, but the dream had never come true. Now I would make it home. I drove slowly up the driveway of crushed clam shells that splintered loudly under the tires, and stopped on the big turnaround in front of the house where my headlights shone stark on the silver-gray cedar shingles. It was a classic Cape Cod house: a simple low building with two windows either side of its front door, a steep staircase in the hallway and a snug dormer upstairs that must have reminded old Captain Starbuck of a whaling ship’s cabins. The house’s only addition since 1840 was the garage, which had been clad in the same cedar shingles as the house itself and thus looked as old as the rest of the building. It was a home as simple as a child’s drawing, a home at peace with its surroundings, and it was mine, and that thought was wondrously comforting as I killed the headlights and climbed out of the car. I took the sea-bag from the boot and found the house keys that I had kept safe these seven years, then walked to the front door.

My key scraped in the lock as it turned. There had never been electricity in the house, and I had no flashlight, but the moon shone brightly enough to illuminate the hallway. My sister Maureen, who used the house as a holiday home, had left some yellow rain-slickers hanging on the pegs by the door, but otherwise the shadowed hall looked just as I had left it seven years before. The antique wooden sea-trunk with its rope handles that I had bought in Provincetown still stood under the steep-pitched stairway, and on its painted lid was a candle in a pewter holder. I