Scoundrel

“I don’t like Sarah Tennyson,” I told Gillespie, “but someone should warn her that she’s in danger if she stays in that house.”

“I’ll look after it.” Gillespie made a note in a small book, then glanced out of the airplane window at the monotonous cloudscape that unreeled beneath us. We had driven to the small municipal airport at Hyannis where our six-seater plane had taken off into a sudden flurry of wet snow. Gillespie had already told me that the agency intended to keep me out of harm’s way for as many weeks as it would take to empty me of secrets. “We’re kind of excited to have you back,” he had coyly confided as the plane had climbed through the clouds over Hyannis. “Not everyone thought that the Stringless Program would work.”

“It’s still called that? The Stringless Program?”

Gillespie glanced at the pilot, fearing that he could overhear our conversation, but the man was insulated with heavy earphones. “It’s still called that.”

“And you reckon it will take weeks to debrief me?”

“I’m sure you have a lot to tell us.”

I thought of Rebel Lady and hoped to God that Johnny had no difficulties with her. Gillespie had gone back to his notebook, Callaghan was snoozing and the plane was droning through a winter bright sky high above the gray clouds. At Hyannis Airport I had bought a newspaper that told of war preparations on either side of the Kuwaiti frontier. The paper also reported on last-minute bids to prevent the fighting. Congressman O’Shaughnessy’s house bill forbidding the use of American armed forces for one year had failed, yet the Congressman still preached his message of doom; he claimed now that the Pentagon had shipped fifty thousand body bags to the Gulf and said yet more were on order, and he was urging the President one last time to give economic sanctions a chance to bite. On an inside page was an article about the world-wide precautions against Iraq’s expected terrorist onslaught; there were armored vehicles patrolling European airports, air-passenger numbers had fallen drastically, and Western embassies throughout the world were mounting special guards. Saddam Hussein, happy to be in the spotlight of the world’s nervousness, swore that he would never surrender, but would instead swamp the coalition forces and their homelands in infidel blood.

“Strap in!” the pilot called back as the plane suddenly banked and dropped. Raindrops streamed sternward on the windows as we sliced into the clouds. The plane buffeted, dropped hard in an air-pocket, then reared back on a vicious up-current. An alarm beeped, then the servo-motors whined as the flaps extruded. “A bit rough, fellas!” the pilot apologized. “Sorry!”

Another lurch, another beep of the alarm, then we were out of the clouds and flying just feet above a dun- black and snow-streaked countryside. For a second I thought we were going to crash, then wet tarmac appeared beneath us, the wheels bounced, smoked and squealed, and we had come to earth. “Wilkes-Barre Scranton welcomes you,” the pilot said facetiously. “Hell of a Goddamned day to fly.”

The aircraft did not go near the small terminal, but instead taxied to where two cars waited. One was a limousine with black tinted windows and the other a police car. Two State Troopers wearing Smokey Bear hats and black rain-slickers stood by the limousine. Both troopers held rifles. The CIA clearly believed il Hayaween had a long reach.

We took Interstate 84 eastward into the snow-streaked forests of the Pocono Mountains. The bare trees had been splintered by ice-storms and the rock embankments which edged the road were thickly hung with icicles. We drove fast, our way cleared by the State Troopers. Deep in the mountains we turned off the Interstate and twisted our way up ever narrower roads until we reached a big painted sign that read “US Department of Agriculture, Rabies Research Station, Absolutely NO Unauthorised Entry.” The State Troopers, their siren at last turned off, pulled on to the road’s shoulder and waved the limo through.

I grinned. “I’m your mad dog, am I?”

Gillespie shrugged. “It keeps out the inquisitive.”

The limousine stopped at a checkpoint manned by uniformed guards. A high fieldstone wall topped with coils of razor wire stretched into the forests either side of the gates. The guards peered at me, examined Gillespie’s credentials, then the steel gates were mechanically opened and the limousine accelerated into a wide parkland studded with snow-shrouded rhododendrons. We passed between plowed snow-banks, across a stone bridge that spanned an ice-locked stream, and into view of a massive, steep-roofed house that looked like some French mansion unaccountably marooned in a North American wilderness.

This was evidently to be my home for the foreseeable future. Here, under the mansion’s coppered roof, I would be emptied of secrets, and it was not a bad place to be so emptied. The grand portico led into a palatial entrance hall that was furnished with a massive carved table, leather upholstered chairs, and a stone fireplace. Three stuffed mooseheads peered down from the dark panelled walls. A wooden staircase curled round three sides of the hall, embracing an intricate brass chandelier. I suspected the house had been donated to the government by the bewhiskered magnate whose varnished portrait hung gilt-framed above the stone mantel. It was the house of a nineteenth-century robber-baron; lavish, comfortable and bitterly cold. “Don’t say the central heating’s failed again!” Gillespie complained peevishly as he closed the heavy front doors.

“I’ll find out,” Callaghan said, and dived through a side-door.

Leading off the entrance hall was a library, its shelves, I later discovered, crammed with the collected writings of the founding fathers which was just the sort of dutiful yet unreadable collection one would expect of a patriotic millionaire. There was also a dining room, a kitchen, and an exercise room. The mansion’s scores of other rooms were locked away. Other activities were conducted in the house, for during my stay I would sometimes see strangers walking in the grounds, and once I heard women’s laughter coming from the other side of the bolted door in our dining room, but my interrogation was conducted in the isolation of the few rooms opening off the main hall and its immediate landing upstairs. My quarters were on that second floor; a private bathroom, a small kitchenette and a lavish bedroom which held a wide bed, a sofa, a desk, rugs, a bookcase full of thrillers, a reproduction of a drab Corot landscape and a television set. Unlike the downstairs rooms the heat here was working only too well. In my bedroom a steam radiator hissed and clanked under a barred window that could not be opened. I stooped to the thriller-packed bookcase. “A nice collection.”

“Not that we hope you’ll have much time for reading,” Gillespie said. “We expect to be holding conversations with you most days and for quite long hours, though there will be some evenings when you will be unoccupied. The refrigerator is stocked, but let us know, within reason, if there is any particular food you’d like added to the stock. There’s beer, but no spirits. The television works.”

“And the telephone?” I gestured at the phone beside the bed.

“Of course.”

“And it isn’t bugged?” I teased him.

“I couldn’t truthfully tell you either way.” Gillespie actually blushed as he half admitted I was under surveillance, but only a complete fool would have assumed otherwise. He ushered me toward the door. “We have a lot to do, Mr. Shanahan, so shall we go downstairs and begin?”

To unpick the past. To tell a tale of bombers and gunners, girls and boys, heroes and lovers. Confession time.

I WAS TIRED, DOG TIRED. “WE WON’T TAKE A LOT OF TIME today,” Gillespie promised, “but your messages to our people in Brussels were kind of intriguing.” He was being very tactful, not asking why I had appeared in America when I had promised to walk into the Brussels Embassy, nor asking why I had used a false name. “You talked about Stingers? About a meeting in Miami? You suggested a connection with Saddam Hussein? With il Hayaween?”

That was the urgent need; to discover just what evil Iraq had planned, and so I told Gillespie everything about the meeting in Florida where Michael Herlihy and Brendan Flynn had introduced me to the two Cubans named Alvarez and Carlos though I suspected they might as well have called themselves Tweedledum and Tweedledee for all those names signified. I described how the Provisional IRA had negotiated the purchase of fifty-three Stinger missiles for one and a half million dollars.

Gillespie wrote the sum down. I was certain that the library must be wired for sound, and that somewhere in the mansion tape recorders were spooling down my every word, but Gillespie was the kind of man who liked to