lover, while her lacerated, dribbling, stammering brother still declared his pathetic allegiance to the Provisional IRA and their heroic freedom fighters.
But my questioners were different. This team had been trained to give pain in measured doses and to reward answers by granting freedom from that pain. This team worked as a disciplined unit, without hesitation and without any need to speak. The only words used were those addressed to me, and those I offered back. There was no fuss or noise to distract me from the main business of the proceedings, which was to elicit what poor Gillespie had so signally failed to discover; the whereabouts of the gold.
But their very knowledge of the gold’s existence told me who they were. They believed that their anonymity conferred menace, and so it did, but as I lay in the shivering dark I retained enough sense to realize that the only people who knew about the gold were those who had dispatched it. The CIA did not know, the Brits did not know, only the IRA and the Libyans and the Iraqis knew.
So either I was in the hands of il Hayaween’s men or in the grip of the Provisionals, and the evidence was overwhelming that it was the latter. No Palestinian or Libyan terrorist would dare try to enter the United States while the war in the Gulf raged, but any number of Irish could have come here. I had defied Michael Herlihy, and now he was striking back. I had underestimated him and I had misunderstood Sarah Sing Tennyson. She had to be a terrorist groupie, a hanger-on to the movement. I knew she was an acquaintance of my brother-in-law, who in turn was associated with Herlihy, which tied her in neatly with the Provos. Had she been left in my house expressly to raise the alarm when I came home? And she had met Johnny, which would explain their knowledge of his involvement. God, I thought, but let these bastards spare Johnny. And what had they done to Kathleen? Or was she a part of it? Had she been sent to lure me out of the house while they prepared their ambush? That thought was the worst, the last straw of despair, yet why should I be surprised? I had lied to her in Belgium, so what possible consideration did Kathleen owe me?
I shuddered in the dark. I had taken a risk, a vast risk, five million dollars’ worth of risk, and it had left me in the hands of the Provisionals’ trained interrogators. Professionally trained interrogators. Colonel Qaddafi had seen to that; dreaming of the days when his pet Irishmen would make some Englishman or Scotsman or Welshman shriek in a Belfast cellar in repayment for the American bombers screaming over Tripoli.
I shivered under the thin blankets. By staying very still I could somehow hide from the pain. A small, brave voice nagged me to struggle off the camp bed and crawl up the wooden stairs to see if the door at the top would open, but I did not want to move, nor draw any attention to myself. I just wanted to huddle under the blanket. I wanted to shudder by myself in the dark womb of the cellar listening to the heartlike rhythm of the sea.
My God, I thought, but it was the sea I could hear. It was not the thunder of huge ocean rollers, but the susurration of smaller waves breaking on a soft beach which suggested I was held in a house either close to Nantucket Sound or on Cape Cod Bay. Weymouth, perhaps? The town, south of Boston and nicknamed the Irish Riviera, would be a good place for a Provisional IRA interrogation team to hide.
And the fact that this team was from the Provisionals was good for me. I did not for one moment believe my questioner’s seemingly earnest promise that I would live if I told the truth. Every interrogator holds out that hope, but when these people heard my truth they would let me live, simply because they would not dare kill me. They thought I was a renegade and thief, and they were about to discover I was something far more dangerous; a legitimate American agent.
And if I was wrong, then my best hope lay in my trust that professionals like these did not inflict a slow death, but would want to be rid of me quickly.
And so I lay in the dark, shivering, trying to remember prayers.
The door at the top of the stairs crashed open. There was no light. I shouted, expecting pain, still half asleep. I had been dreaming of Roisin. “Hood on! Now!” the Northern Irish voice shouted from the stairhead. “Put it on! Put it on! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” Feet clattered on the stairtreads. “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!”
I frantically fumbled for the black hood, discovering it on the floor beside the cot. I pulled it on.
“Stand up! Move! Move! Move!”
I scrambled in agony off the cot. Light suffused the black weave of the hood.
More footsteps hurried loudly down the stairs. I thought I detected all four of my tormentors, but I could not be certain. I wondered how long I had been asleep. I sensed it was now nighttime, but I guessed my sensations were quite useless as a gauge of the passing hours.
“Drop the blanket,” the voice snapped.
I dropped it.
“Step forward. Stop there! Hood off.”
I pulled the hood off, blinking in the light.
“Hands to your side!”
I obeyed, exposing my vulnerable nakedness. As before the unmasked Sarah Sing Tennyson faced me while, to her left, my questioner stood in his sinister head-to-foot black. I guessed the other two men had taken their positions behind me.
“What was the purpose of the five million dollars?”
“To buy Stingers.” My speech was thick with sleep.
“How many Stingers?”
“Fifty-three,” I answered. They knew the answers, but they did not know I knew who they were and so they would ask me questions to which they knew the answers just to keep me from guessing their identity. A game of mazes and mirrors. Of undoing knots while blindfolded.
“Who was selling the missiles?”
“A Cuban consortium in Miami.”
“Describe the Cubans.”
I had little to tell, but did my best.
“The missiles were meant for Ulster?”
“Yes.”
“Was the trade arranged in America or Ireland?” The Ulster accent was toneless, suggesting that the questioning would go on and on and that nothing I could do would stop it. It was all a part of the well-planned interrogatory technique. They wanted me to feel I was trapped in an unstoppable process that was beyond the control of anyone, and that the only way out was to give the machine what it wanted; the truth.
“Both, I think.”
“Explain.”
I assumed the questioner was running over known ground to test my responses and lull my suspicions as he moved imperceptibly toward the questions he really wanted answered. I told him about Brendan Flynn and Michael Herlihy, and even about little Marty Doyle. I described Shafiq’s part in the arrangements, and how il Hayaween had taken over the mission. I admitted that I had deliberately broken il Hayaween’s instructions by renaming
“Why did you break those instructions?”
“Because I wanted to return to America quickly to report on the missile sale to my superiors.”
“Your superiors?” Was there a hint of puzzlement in my interrogator’s voice? “Explain.”
I kept my voice dull and listless. “Van Stryker and his people.”
“Who is van Stryker?”
“CIA, Department of Counter-Terrorism.” I inserted an edge of desperation in my voice, as though I was aware of revealing things that were truly secret and sensitively dangerous.
There was a measurable pause, and a detectable uncertainty when my interrogator spoke again. “You’re CIA?”
A half-second of hesitation as though I was reluctant to answer, then, “Yes.”
“Since when?”
“Since 1977.”
I could see Sarah Sing Tennyson’s reaction clearly enough. Till now she had done nothing but keep a supercilious and careless expression, but now there was a genuine worry on her face.
“Describe your mission in the CIA.” I sensed my interrogator was off his script. He was winging it, wondering
