Scoundrel

“Who needs sleep?”

I went back to the van. Marty mumbled something through his gag, but I told him to shut up, then slammed the van’s rear door and went back to my pick-up. I drove south on Route 28. It began to sleet as I arrived at Stage Harbor where I parked beside a trap-shed and switched off the pick-up’s engine. I waited.

Johnny arrived ten minutes later and I followed him down to where his dinghy was tethered. “Give me the boat keys,” I said.

“Forget it, Paulie, I’m coming with you.”

I did not argue. Everything had gone wrong this night and I needed help. So we rowed out to Johnny’s trawler, the Julie-Anne, started her up, and went to sea.

We motored westward, guided through the shoals of Nantucket Sound by the winking lights of the buoys in the glassy-wet darkness. The big diesel motor throbbed comfortingly away. It was warm in the wheelhouse. Johnny steered with one hand and held a coffee mug with the other. “So what’s it about?” he asked.

I did not answer. I just stared through the glow of the Julie-Anne’s navigation lights and I thought how many had died. Liam, Gerry, Gillespie, Callaghan, Seamus. And they were probably just the beginning.

“At least tell me whose side I’m on?” Johnny insisted.

“The angels. But don’t go near my house for a few days.”

“It isn’t drugs?” Johnny asked.

“I swear to God, Johnny, it isn’t drugs. Someone wanted to punish me for taking the gold.”

“I thought you said the IRA had got their gold back?”

“I guess they wanted me dead as an example to anyone else who had a mind to rip them off. But just stay clear of the house, Johnny.”

We travelled on in silence. Rain slicked the deck and spat past the glow of the red and green lamps. The fishfinder’s dial glowed in the wheelhouse dark. About three hours after we had left Stage Harbor I watched the lights of a small plane drop from the clouds and descend toward Martha’s Vineyard. Johnny turned on his radar and the familiar shape of Cape Poge formed on the green screen. The eastern horizon was just hinting at the dawn as we slid past Chappaquidick Point. The water was smooth and slick, pocked with the rain and skeined with a thin mist that hazed the lights of Edgartown as Johnny, with a careless skill, nudged his huge trawler toward a pier. “They’ll probably charge me a hundred bucks just to land someone, let alone breathe their precious air. Greediest town in America, this one. Do you want me to wait for you?”

“No. But thanks.”

“Look after yourself, Paulie.”

“I’ve not been very good at that, but I’ll do my best.”

I jumped ashore, then walked into town. I was looking for a big house with a Nautor Swan called Nancy parked on jackstands in her front yard. I had come for van Stryker’s help, because everything had gone wrong.

“Shanahan.” Simon van Stryker opened his door to me, grimaced at the weather, then ushered me inside. He was dressed in an Aran sweater, corduroy trousers and fleece-lined sea-boots, but he looked every inch as distinguished as the last time we had met when he had been rigged out to dine at the White House. “I’ve got a team heading for your house.” The 800 number I had called had been the number on the card van Stryker had given me in the Poconoes. The call had been answered by a young man who had calmly listened to my description of three dead bodies and my desperate appeal for help. I had held on while he called van Stryker who, in turn, had ordered me to meet him at his summer house where he now opened a closet to reveal a shelf of bottles. “Laphroaig?”

“Please.”

He took the seal off a new bottle, poured me a generous slug, then placed glass and bottle beside me. “So tell me exactly what happened.” I told him the story of the night, of my coming home, of Gillespie and Callaghan dying, of Seamus bleeding to death. While I talked van Stryker emptied the contents of a canvas sailing-bag on to the kitchen work-top. He had brought eggs, ham, cheese, milk and tomatoes. “Nancy thought we’d be hungry,” he explained, “and this looks like being a long discussion. Do go on.”

“There isn’t much more to tell,” I finished lamely. “I left the bodies there and called for help.”

He found a bowl and whisk. “That was wise of you, Paul.” He began breaking eggs, while I looked through his windows across the rain-stippled harbor to the low dull heathland of Chappaquiddick. Dawn was seeping across the cloudy sky, making the harbor’s water look like dull gun metal. “So tell me,” van Stryker ordered, “what you think this is all about.”

“It’s about Stingers,” I said firmly. “It’s about men at the end of runways. Men hidden in the woods near Washington’s Dulles Airport or on boats in Jamaica Bay near JFK’s runways. Men in vans near Boston’s Logan Airport or in the warehouses near Miami International. It’s about dead airliners. Il Hayaween loves to kill jumbo jets. He wants bodies floating in Boston Harbor, and on the Interstates and across the perimeter roads of a dozen airports. He wants one day of revenge, one day of slaughter, one day to make America pay for Saddam Hussein’s humiliation.”

“You don’t believe the Stingers were meant for Ireland?”

“Some, yes, but only a few. Those few were the IRA’s reward for negotiating the purchase. It would have been impossible for the Palestinians to come to America and negotiate the sale, so Flynn did it for them.”

“And the money in Rebel Lady,” van Stryker suggested, “was the purchase price of the Stingers?”

I colored slightly, but nodded. “Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell us about Rebel Lady?”

“Because I planned to steal the money. That was my pension plan and my health insurance and my future income all wrapped up in one Arab package.” I paused, sipped his good whiskey, then looked up at van Stryker’s thin, clever face. “How did you find out about Rebel Lady?”

“Gillespie found out.”

“How?”

He stirred the eggs. “A wiretap, of course. Good old-fashioned illegal bugging.” Van Stryker smiled at me.

“Oh God, of course. You had my house bugged before I even left Europe?” I suddenly realized that of course van Stryker would have taken that precaution, which meant that the very first time I had talked to Johnny Riordan about collecting Rebel Lady the hidden microphones must have been hearing every word I spoke.

“No,” van Stryker said.

“No?”

“Your house is certainly wiretapped. My guess is that there are microphones covering the downstairs, and a voice-activated tape recorder concealed in the attic. That’s how they usually do it if they’ve got access to the premises.”

“They?”

“We prefer using the telephone to carry the wiretapped signal away”—van Stryker ignored my question—“but that’s difficult if you’re not operating legally. So I suspect your eavesdroppers used a tape recorder. Which means, of course, that they must have had access to your house to collect the tapes.”

“Sarah Sing Tennyson,” I said, and felt as a blind man must feel when given sight or, much more aptly, like a fool given reason. “Jesus Christ!”

“The first is the more likely culprit, though in fact her name isn’t Tennyson. It’s Ko, Sally Ko. Her father is Hong Kong Chinese and her mother’s from London. Miss Ko is British Intelligence, though naturally the British say she’s a cultural attache, but that’s what all the spooks say these days. It’s a harmless convention, we do it too.”

“Oh, God,” I said, “oh, Christ,” and I thought what a fool I had been, what an utter, Goddamn, stupid fool.