where my surprising admissions would lead.
“To penetrate Middle Eastern terrorist groups.” I spoke dully, mouthing the words I had rehearsed in the cellar’s creeping dark. “I was instructed to use the credentials of IRA membership as an introduction to such groups.”
“The CIA ordered you to join the IRA?”
“Yes.”
“How were you to achieve that?”
“I was already collecting money for Ireland and sending weapons from Boston, so the IRA knew of me and trusted me.”
“How did the CIA discover you?”
“I was arrested for running drugs into Florida.”
“And the CIA ordered you to spy on the IRA?”
“No. They didn’t need me for that.”
Silence. There was a soft explosion nearby, making me jump, before I realized that the noise had come from an adjoining cellar in which a heating boiler had just ignited with a thump of expanding gases.
“Why would the CIA not be interested in the IRA?”
“I’m sure they are, but I was ordered to concentrate on the Middle Eastern groups, and my standing with those groups depended on my being totally trusted by the Provos, so I was ordered not to risk that trust by informing on them.” This was the story that Roisin had told in Hasbaiya, and which had so terrified the Palestinians. Now, four years later, I was using its truth for my survival.
“Have you reported back to van Stryker?” the interrogator asked.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“The whole of last month. I was being debriefed in the Pocono Mountains.”
“So van Stryker will collect the boat from Boston.”
I hesitated, and a foot shifted menacingly behind me. “No!”
“Why not?”
“Because I was going to collect it.”
“You planned to steal the money?” My questioner sounded amused.
“Yes.”
“Did you tell van Stryker about the boat at all?”
“No. I just told him that money was being telexed from Europe.”
“And how much money does van Stryker think is involved?”
“One and a half million, of which a half-million has been paid.”
“Is Herlihy looking for the boat?”
“Of course he is.”
“Put the hood on.”
They had left me holding the black bag which I now pulled obediently over my face. I heard them go upstairs and the cellar door scrape shut. I dragged the hood off my head, feeling a sudden exultation. I had worried them! I had unbalanced them! I had unbalanced them so much that on this visit they had not laid a finger on me. The truth was making me free. It had changed the script and altered their reality!
I turned to see a paper bag had been left on the floor by my bed. The bag contained a cold cheeseburger in a styro-foam container along with a cardboard cup of tepid coffee. I ate hungrily. The light had been left on and I could see that the cellar seemed to have been cleared out recently; there were dust-free spaces on the floors and walls that suggested boxes and furniture had been stored down here and had recently been taken away to make room for my interrogation.
Then, suddenly, the lights went out. In the next-door cellar the dull roar of the boiler was switched off, to be replaced by the softer sound of the sea. I lay down. I waited. I dared to think I had won. I dared to think I might live. I dared to feel hope.
I stayed in the cellar for days. I lost track of the time. I tried to keep a tally by scratching marks on the wall by my cot, but the meals came irregularly and my sleep periods were broken by sudden insistent demands that I put the hood on, stand up, stand still, answer, and so I had no regular measure by which to judge the passage of the days.
At first I had pissed blood in my urine, but the blood stopped coming as the days passed and I received no more beatings. The questions went on, mostly now about my debriefing and just what I had told the CIA about the IRA. They even asked me about men I had never mentioned to Gillespie, and I hid nothing from them for there was always the threat of violence behind the questioning, but even so I knew I had driven a deep wedge to widen the great chasm of loyalties that besieged the Provisional IRA. The Provos, like all terrorist organizations, wanted the respectability of external support and though like every other leftist guerrilla movement they could count on the endorsement of socialist academics and liberal churchmen, they wanted more, much more. The twin endorsements that the Provos craved were those of America and the Middle East; that of America because it endowed them with respectability, and that of the Middle East because it provided them with their most lethal toys; but their quandary was that their two supporters hated each other, which made it even more important that each should be decried to the other. The Provos never boasted of their Libyan connections to the Americans, but rather painted that connection as a sporadic, unwanted and unimportant acquaintanceship, while to the Libyans, who were now their main sponsors, they declared that the donations of the American-Irish were the gifts of fools who did not understand the Marxist imperatives of revolution, but who could nevertheless be constantly gulled into supporting Libyan aims.
My interrogators, who had begun by assuming I was a traitor to the Provisionals, had now learned I was something far more dangerous, an agent of the United States, and that to kill me might risk the enmity of the United States. There was a chance my death could be publicized, provoking a dangerous drop in financial support from America. Thus, in fear of that exposure, they were treating me with a delicate caution. They had already abandoned hurting me and, as the days passed, they brought me better food, though never served with metal knives and forks or on china plates that could be broken to make a weapon. I drank from the garden hose, or else from the cardboard cups of coffee. I was given a pillow and thicker blankets, and my interrogators even let me ask a question of them without rewarding me with pain. What happened, I asked them, to the girl who had been with me when they abducted me?
“Nothing. She merely agreed to help us by taking you away from the house while we set up your reception committee.”
“She’s with you?” I could not hide my disappointment.
“Of course, and why shouldn’t she be, considering who her sister was? Tell us about Roisin, now.”
So I told the wretched story once again, and as I told it I thought what a fool Kathleen had made of me and I almost blushed when I remembered the hopes I had dared to make in my mind as we walked back from the beach. I had seen her as Roisin’s replacement and all the time Kathleen had been a part of Michael Herlihy’s attempt to get even with me. Christ, I thought, but how I had underestimated that garbage lawyer!
The days passed. My initial euphoria at having changed the rules of the interrogation gave way to a quiet despair. I might be spared the pain, but I became convinced that the easiest way the Provos could dispose of any possible embarrassment was by killing me secretly, and thus the best I could hope for was a swift bullet in the back of my skull. I had long given up any hope of opening the locked door at the top of the cellar steps. I had explored that option only to discover that the door was made from thick pieces of timber, and my only house-breaking equipment was the feeble legs of the camping cot that would have buckled under the smallest strain.
So I waited. My mind became numb. I tried to exercise, but there seemed such small hope of continued living that I invariably abandoned my efforts and crawled back to the small warmth of the cot and its blankets. I began to welcome the noisy irruption of my interrogators because talking to them was at least better than staring at the stone cellar walls or gazing into the impenetrable blackness when the light was off. They even began to let me talk sitting on the cot, wrapped in the blankets. My masked questioner stayed for hours one day, talking of Belfast and its familiar streets and the people we had both known and for a time that day I felt a real warm bond with the man
