imagine a small island, three hundred years from now, where the natives will still be knocking technicolor shit out of each other in the name of communism versus the free market.”
“So you do think the troubles in Ireland are about religion?” Gillespie asked. He was genuinely trying to understand. Terrorism, after all, was a very strange phenomenon to most Americans. It was a disease inflicted on the first world by crazed creatures from the slums of the old world and the refugee camps of the third, and Gillespie wanted me to explain the disease’s origin.
I shook my head. “Religion in Ireland just defines which side you’re on. The Troubles are about people who feel they have no control over their own lives, about people who live in public housing and have no jobs and eat bad food and smoke themselves to death and see their kids born to the same hopelessness and they just want to hit back against someone, almost anyone.”
“So you’re saying it’s an economic problem?” the smart dark-haired woman asked earnestly.
“It isn’t economic, but the Troubles are bound to feed off a bad economy. The IRA campaign of the 1950s collapsed because there was full employment, because no one felt deprived, because people were too busy paying off the instalments on their cars and television sets, but nowadays there are no jobs in Belfast, there’s no future, there’s no hope, so all that’s left is the pleasure of revenge. What else can the poor bastards do? They know the south doesn’t like them, and that the Brits would like nothing better than to get the hell out, and that in truth no one really wants anything to do with them at all, and so they fight back the only way they can; with bullets and bombs and the pleasure of knowing they’re reducing other people to their own level of misery.”
There was silence for a while. Outside the window the snow fell.
“Is there no conscience there?” Gillespie asked at last.
“The clever ones pickle it in alcohol, and the stupid ones put their trust in the clever ones.” I gave the answer glibly, but I was thinking of Seamus Geoghegan and how I had once asked him if he felt the pangs of conscience, and he had thought about it for a long time and in the end he had just shaken his head. “I don’t give a rat’s toss,” he had told me, “not a rat’s toss.” What he had meant was that it was best not to think about it, for thinking would only make him unhappy.
“I think perhaps conscience is overrated by the West,” the woman said musingly.
Gillespie seemed about to reply, but suddenly, shockingly, a telephone rang in the library. I had not even been aware that there was a telephone in the room and I jumped like a guilty thing, and even Gillespie seemed astonished by the bell’s sudden shrill. He scrambled to his feet and hurried to a recess at the back of the room where he tentatively lifted the instrument. He spoke a couple of words, then put the phone down before coming slowly back to the table with a look of surprise on his face. “It’s the war,” he said aloud and to no one in particular. “It started last night. We’re at war.”
AMERICAN AND ALLIED BOMBERS WERE FLYING OVER THE kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar. Tomahawk cruise missiles were hissing above the Land of the Two Rivers where Eden had once flourished and Babylon, the flower of all cities, had blossomed. “Dear God,” Gillespie had murmured at the news, then he suggested we break off the debriefing to watch the television in the dining room. The news seemed impossibly optimistic, telling of incredibly accurate allied bombing, remarkably light aircraft losses, and burgeoning allied hopes.
There was no word yet of an Iraqi response, and certainly no news of terrorist attacks. I half expected to hear of civilian airliners falling from the sky or of dreadful bombs ripping open Western city centers, but instead, over and over, the screen showed the flickering of tracer rounds above Baghdad being punctuated by the sheet lightning of bombs exploding on the horizon. There were pictures of fighter bombers screaming off Saudi runways, their wheels folding as the afterburners hurled the warplanes north toward the enemy.
I sat furthest from the screen. I was watching the allied planes attack Iraq but I was remembering the Israeli fighter-bombers over Hasbaiya. Usually their bombs or rockets struck before the Palestinians even knew the enemy was above them. There would be quick glints in the sky, a roll of wings and a billow of thunder, then the warplanes would vanish in the sky’s hot brightness as their burning flares, voided to decoy the defenders’ missiles, drifted slowly to earth. Afterward, out of the smoke and rock-dust, a few stunned survivors stumbled.
I knew that sooner or later Gillespie would want me to talk about Hasbaiya. I wished he would spare me that. I half expected him to raise the subject after lunch, but instead, and after courteously asking the dark-haired woman if she would mind waiting a few moments before resuming her questioning, he asked me one more time about the fifty three Stingers.
Gillespie’s problem was that neither the FBI nor the CIA could find a single substantiating fact for my story of the meeting in Miami and the sale of the missiles. Gillespie brought me photographs of warehouses close to the Hialeah racecourse, but even when I identified the building in which I had seen the Stinger it had done no good. A search of the warehouse discovered nothing, and its records betrayed no Cubans called Alvarez or Carlos. Now, as Gillespie took me back to the library for the afternoon session, he told me that the telephone number in Ireland had proved to belong to an Enniskillen shop owned by a sixty-eight-year-old spinster who dealt in religious statuettes, while Brendan Flynn, taxes by the Irish police with my story of a meeting in Miami, blithely retorted that he had been attending a conference on the future of Ireland at the University of Utrecht. Gillespie told me that two distinguished professors of International Law and a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church had signed affidavits supporting Brendan’s alibi. I had to laugh. Brendan had style.
“Such people wouldn’t lie!” Gillespie reproved me.
“Those bastards will lie through their teeth. Come on, Gillespie! Academics and churchmen? They love terrorists! They get their rocks off pretending that terrorists are doing God’s work. And especially the Dutch! I’ve been to those damn conferences in Holland. The Dutch are dull, so they love being on the side of the wicked. Say you’re a terrorist in Utrecht and you’ll have half a dozen priests and six academics all begging to lick your ass. That alibi’s a piece of crap.”
“And Michael Herlihy? He has two Boston lawyers willing to testify that he was taking depositions on that day.”
“You trust American attorneys? What about Marty Doyle? Did you question him?”
“He claims to have been driving Michael Herlihy all day. In and around Boston.”
“He’s lying! He drove me to the warehouse, then he drove Brendan Flynn and me to Miami Airport. So pull the bastard in and slap him about. He’ll tell you everything.”
Gillespie sighed. “This is America. We have to use due process.” He looked at me with silent reproof for a few seconds. “I also have to tell you,” he went on, “that the British and Irish authorities have heard nothing about Stingers. Nothing at all.”
“I saw one.”
“So you say, so you say.” But it was plain he did not believe me. “We’ll keep looking,” he said, though without enthusiasm, and then he turned to the dark-haired woman, who had waited patiently throughout the discussion of Stingers and alibis. “You wanted to raise a particular matter with Mr. Shanahan?”
“Hasbaiya,” she said bluntly.
I turned to her. The fire was snapping and hissing. “I’m sorry?”
“Hasbaiya.”
Of course they wanted to know about Hasbaiya, but the very thought of the place made me go tense. I was very aware of Carole Adamson’s scrutiny. “I’ve been to Hasbaiya,” I said as easily as I could.
“How often?”
“Often enough.”
“Twice? Ten times? Twenty?” The woman frowned at my generalization.
“Eight times. My first visit was in ’82 and the last in ’86.”
“You were attending training courses?”
Hasbaiya was the most notorious of the Palestinian training camps, a graduate school of death. It was not the only terrorist-training camp in the world, and not even the biggest. Indeed, in the old days, before their system collapsed, the Soviets ran a half-dozen such facilities, but Hasbaiya was the star in that dark firmament of evil.
“Did you train there?” the woman asked hopefully.
“No. My visits were just to introduce trainees.”
