Scoundrel

hundred thousand? You can make a new start with that.”

“Yes.” I sounded sour. “But it isn’t five million, is it?”

“Which the Brits have suddenly agreed to turn over to us,” van Stryker said grimly. “I have spoken sternly to Miss Ko.” A telephone suddenly buzzed, cutting off van Stryker’s tale of how he had dealt with the perfidious British. He answered the phone and I saw one of the protectively clothed figures beside the gutted Rebel Lady speaking into the other handset. Van Stryker grunted a few times, thanked the man, then put the telephone down. “July 4,” he said slowly. “The timer was set for noon on Independence Day. It’s a fair bet Washington will be crowded that day. Maybe a victory parade for Desert Storm? Maybe a nation’s street party?” Van Stryker sounded angry, and no wonder, for who among the crowd celebrating America’s independence would have thought twice about a plume of smoke across the river, or would have sensed the invisible fall of deadly isotopes seeping across the Mall and Pennsylvania Avenue?

“I very nearly brought it about, didn’t I?” I spoke in bitter recrimination.

“Did you?” van Stryker asked in a tone of mild disbelief. He was again staring at the crippled boat and the bright flask.

“By not telling you about Rebel Lady.”

“Oh, we knew something was up, and I suppose we’d have discovered the boat eventually.” He still spoke mildly, and I remembered his stricture that everything should be done according to the rules, unless, of course, a man was outside the rules, and that surely included the British team that had abducted me? And how could terrorism be fought strictly within the rules? Due process was a feeble weapon compared with a firebomb laced with soap-flakes or a Kalashnikov in the hands of a bitter youth. I remembered an IRA man complaining in a Lifford pub how he had just lost two men to an SAS ambush. “There used to be rules,” he had told me bitterly, “but now the focking Brits are fighting just like us.” Could terrorism only be defeated by terror? That was a horrid question, as horrid as the scene in the brightly lit hangar where a small crane was lowering a pallet loaded with what looked like mounds of dull silver powder into the flask. “A toxic nuclear cocktail,” van Stryker explained.

“But it isn’t over, is it?” I said. “Il Hayaween won’t stop with this failure.”

“But he’s lost the initiative, Paul, and we’ll be setting traps for him and, thanks to the Gulf war, he’s lost some of his old hiding places. This is a victory, Paul.” He gestured at the broken boat. “It isn’t the last victory, because you can’t beat terrorism, only contain it, but my God this feels good, and maybe it will feel better soon? We’re going to make the bastards who sent us that present dance to Uncle Sam’s tune for a little while, and who knows? We might even dance them into an early grave.”

“I suppose,” I said slowly, “that I should thank you for keeping me out of an early grave?”

“You don’t have to thank me.” Van Stryker did not look at me as he spoke, but instead watched as men uncoiled hoses with which to wash down the hangar. “When I sent you out fourteen years ago I never expected to see you again. We sent others, don’t ask who, and so far you’re the only one to come back. Two others certainly won’t return and a third might have joined our enemies. It wasn’t an easy job you did, and I don’t suppose you feel clean about it, but you served your country, Paul. You have preserved the republic from evil, and for that it is my duty to thank you.” He turned and held out his hand. “So, as far as I am concerned, you can go with a clear conscience.”

It was a bright night, the sky ablaze with stars above a clean country that was safe from harm. I walked to the car, breathing a cold air, and I wondered what the hell would happen now.

“The airport, sir?” the driver asked.

“Please,” I said, and we drove away, leaving behind us the bright facility with its parked helicopters and low loaders and armed men and yellow lamps and warning signs. The sentries waved us through the guardpost, and the brilliant lights disappeared behind as we drove through the dark woods toward the small safe towns of America. The small towns of decent folk who are so hated by the terrorists.

I would go home now to my own small town, but I guessed, after all, that I would not stay there. There would be no peace for me, not yet, for ghosts still stalked my world and I did not know how to exorcise them; nor would il Hayaween abandon me, for I had made a fool of him and he would want me dead. I thought of Roisin’s eyes in the instant before I had pulled the trigger. Oh dear God, but the paths we choose so heedlessly. The lights of Washington smeared the sky ahead, and I thought of a fire blossoming in a city, of death dropping soft as snowflakes across wide avenues. I closed my eyes. In the spring, I thought, I would go to Ireland, and I would take my boat to sea and I would let her take me somewhere, I did not know where, I did not care where, just anywhere that a scoundrel might find refuge.