gold?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” But whatever it was, I had given it back to them. “Oh, God,” I said, “oh, God,” because it wasn’t over, not by a long way.
“We’ll find the boat.” Van Stryker snatched up the phone. “We’ll search the whole damned coast and we’ll find it. Give me the description again?”
“Find Herlihy first,” I suggested, “because he’ll know where
“I told you, Herlihy’s vanished.”
“I can find him.”
“You can?”
I would have to. Because Saddam Hussein had sent America a present, and I had lost it, so now I would find it again.
Herlihy was still not at his home. FBI agents broke in to find his apartment empty. Neither was he in his office, the Parish, or in the back room behind Tully’s Tavern. He had disappeared.
“The money was never important!” van Stryker shouted at me. “The gold was a blind to dazzle you! To disguise the truth! And that’s why Herlihy sent Geoghegan to kill you, to protect that truth. He’s retrieved the boat, after all, and your telling tales was the one danger left. Is that it?” He pointed down.
He was shouting because we were in a coast guard helicopter that had been summoned to Martha’s Vineyard on van Stryker’s authority. Once on board we had flown fast and low across the wintry waters of Nantucket Sound and were now hovering above the shopping precinct where I had left Marty Doyle.
“That’s it!” I could still see the white Shamrock Flower Shoppe van. With any luck Marty would still be in the van, undiscovered by an inquisitive policeman. I reckoned that if anyone knew where Herlihy was hiding, then it had to be Marty Doyle.
“Down!” Van Stryker gestured the order at the crew chief who passed it on to the pilot. We were in the rescue compartment, a cavernous metal space behind and below the control cabin. A winch and a rescue basket filled one side of the rescue chamber where van Stryker and I, muffled against the cold, sat on a metal bench. The pilot returned a message protesting that a federal regulation prohibited landing on unapproved sites unless it was an emergency. “Tell him this is an emergency! To his career!” The machine settled slowly down. Shingles blew off the frozen-yoghurt shop’s roof and a passing motorist almost swerved into the woods as the vast helicopter threaded its precarious way between the electricity and telephone wires to settle in a swirl of dust on the empty parking lot. “Be quick!” van Stryker ordered me.
I ran to the flower van, yanked the back door open, and there discovered a terrified and half-frozen Marty Doyle. I dragged him out and, because his ankles were still tied with the green wire, I carried him like a child to the throbbing helicopter. I slung him on to the metal floor, then clambered in after him.
“Up!” van Stryker shouted.
As we rose into the air I saw the first blue flicker of a police car’s light coming south to discover why a helicopter was disturbing the Cape’s frosty morning, but the patrolman was arriving too late for the helicopter was already tilting over and racing out toward the open Atlantic. We passed over my house, and over the iced puddles in the marsh, and out across the dunes where I had sat with Kathleen Donovan, and out across the tumultuous smoking rollers that hammered incessantly on the frozen sand.
I pulled the woollen gag off Marty’s face. “Morning, Marty.”
“I’m so fucking cold, Paulie!” He was shivering. Both doors of the big helicopter were wide open and the morning was freezing. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“To find Michael Herlihy,” I told him. “So where is he?”
“I don’t know, Paul. Honest!”
I smiled at him, then cut off his wire bonds. “Put this on, Marty.” It was a safety harness. The poor wee man was shaking with cold, but he managed to get his arms into the harness which I buckled tight across his chest. “So where’s Herlihy?” I asked again.
Marty looked at me with his doglike gaze. “As God is my witness, Paul, and on my own dear mother’s grave, I swear I don’t know.”
I pushed him out of the door.
He screamed and flailed, then jerked as the safety line I had attached to the back of his harness caught hold. He hung twenty feet beneath the helicopter and three hundred feet above the heaving gray seas that were being lashed into a spume as the freezing wind whipped their tops frantic.
I hauled him back into the helicopter’s belly. “I don’t think you heard me, Marty. Where’s Herlihy?”
“He’s at the Congressman’s summer home. Oh, God, please don’t do it again! Please! For the love of God, Paulie! Please!”
I gave him a cup of coffee instead, but he spilt most of it as the big rescue helicopter tilted its rotors west and sped us back toward Nantucket Sound and toward the last dark secrets of the
“I am constrained by rules,” van Stryker reprimanded me. “If I’d known you were going to pull that stunt in the helicopter, I’d have stopped you, and if we interrogate Herlihy then it has to be done according to regulations. If we arrest him, we must have a warrant and he must have his rights read. If he wants to have a lawyer present during the interview, then he must have one.”
“No footprints, you said, no apron strings. I’m still running free, van Stryker. You turned the Brits on me to avoid the rules, so now turn me on to Herlihy.”
His thin face betrayed a flicker of a smile, then he offered me a raised hand in mock blessing. “No bruises, no broken bones, no cuts, no evidence of violence. Can you keep those rules?”
“Better than the Brits, believe me.”
“Then go.” He waved me out of the car. We had flown to Otis Air Force base at the inner end of the Cape, then driven through the early traffic to Centerville. It was still not yet nine o’clock and we were already parked close to Congressman O’Shaughnessy’s beach house.
I opened the car door. “I’ll be back by eleven.”
“It takes longer than that to squeeze the truth out of a man.”
“Not really.” I smiled, and climbed out of the car.
The wind was cold. The street had the joyless, deserted feel of a resort out of season. Nearly all of these houses were the vacation homes of the very rich who needed sea-front “cottages” to escape from the stifling summer heat of Boston or New York. It was a good lair for Michael Herlihy, for who would dream that a US Congressman would shelter an enemy of the people? Even a Congressman as moronic as Tommy the Turd could usually be reckoned above such foolishness.
I clicked open the gate. The house appeared shuttered and empty. I walked round to the back, bruising the frosted grass beneath my boots. There was no one in the kitchen and, as I had expected, the door was locked. I knew there was an alarm system that the Brits had circumvented and which I assumed the Congressman would have had repaired, but so long as there was someone in the house then there seemed a good chance that the system would be switched off. In which hopeful belief I rammed my oilskin-padded elbow hard against a pane of the door’s glass. Nothing. I rammed again, but only succeeded in bruising my elbow through the thick layers of oilskin. They made windows tough these days.
I picked a big rock from among the stones which edged the border of a flower bed and smashed through both layers of glass. The noise seemed appalling, but no bell shrilled its hammer tone into the dawn. I reached through the hole, found the latch, and let myself in. The heat was on in the house and a dirty plate lay unwashed in the kitchen sink.
I still had Callaghan’s gun. I took it from the oilskin’s deep pocket and stalked into the main hallway, which had been emptied of the cellar’s encumbrances. I stopped and listened at the foot of the stairway, but heard nothing. The living room was deserted and its tall windows securely shuttered. I edged through another half-open door into a huge dining room which held a table that could seat twenty guests. Silver shone on the shelves of a
