papers at the time. And people
Flynn looked at him. “Sounds like a mass hallucination of desperate men. When we start seeing angels here, we’ll know we’ve had it, and—” He broke off abruptly and looked at Hickey closely in the dim light. For a brief second he imagined he was back in Whitehorn Abbey, listening to the stories of the old priest.
“What is it, lad?”
“Nothing. I suppose one shouldn’t doubt the intervention of the supernatural. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”
Hickey laughed. “If you can tell it tomorrow, I’ll believe it.”
Flynn forced a smile in return. “I may be telling it to you in another place.”
“Then I’ll surely believe it.”
Megan Fitzgerald came up behind George Sullivan setting the last of the mines on the south transept door. “Finished?”
Sullivan turned abruptly. “Jesus, don’t do that, Megan, when I’m working with explosives.”
She looked at Sullivan, dressed splendidly in the kilts of a bagpiper of the New York Police Emerald Society. “Grab your gear and follow me. Bring your bagpipes.” She led him to a small door at the corner of the transept, and they walked up a spiral stone staircase, coming out onto the long south triforium. A flagpole with a huge American flag hanging from it pointed across the nave toward the Papal flag on the opposite triforium. Megan looked to the left, at the choir loft below, and watched Flynn and Hickey poring over their blueprints like two generals on the eve of battle. She found it odd that such different men seemed to be getting on well. She hadn’t liked the idea of bringing John Hickey in at the last moment. But the others felt they needed the old hero to legitimize themselves, a bona fide link with 1916, as though Hickey’s presence could make them something other than the outcasts they all were.
She saw no need to draw on the past. The world had taken form for her in 1973 when she had seen her first bomb casualties in downtown Belfast on the way home from school, and had taken meaning and purpose when her older brother Tommy had been wounded and captured trying to free Sheila Malone. The distant past didn’t exist, any more than the near future did. Her own personal memories were all the history she was concerned with.
She watched Flynn pointing and gesturing. He seemed not much different from the old man beside him. Yet he had been different once. To Tommy Fitzgerald, Brian Flynn was everything a man should be, and she had grown up seeing Brian Flynn, the legend in the making, through her older brother’s eyes. Then came Brian’s arrest and his release, suspicious at best. Then the break with the IRA, the forming of the new Fenian Army, his recruiting of her and her younger brother Pedar, and, finally, her inevitable involvement with him. She had not been disappointed in him as a lover, but as a revolutionary he had flaws. He would hesitate before destroying the Cathedral, but she would see to it that this decision was out of his hands.
Sullivan called out from the far end of the triforium, “The view is marvelous. How’s the food?”
Megan turned to him. “If you’ve no qualms about feasting on blood, it’s good and ample.”
Sullivan sighted through his rifle. “Don’t be a beast, Megan.” He raised the rifle and focused the scope on Abby Boland, noticing her open blouse. She saw him and waved. He waved back. “So near, yet so far.”
“Give it a rest, George,” said Megan impatiently. “You’ll not be using it for much but peeing for yet a while.” She looked at him closely. George Sullivan was not easily intimidated by her. He had that combination of smugness and devil-may-care personality that came with handling high explosives, a special gift of the gods, he had called it. Maybe. “Are you certain Hickey knows how to rig the bombs?”
Sullivan picked up his bagpipe and began blowing into it. He looked up. “Oh, yes. He’s very good. World War Two techniques, but that’s all right, and he’s got the nerve for it.”
“I’m interested in his skill, not his nerve. I’m to be his assistant.”
“Good for you. Best to be close by if it goes wrong. Never feel a thing. It’ll be us poor bastards up here who’ll be slowly crushed by falling stone. Picture it, Megan. Like Samson and Delilah, the temple falling about our heads, tons of stone quivering, falling…. Someone should have brought a movie camera.”
“Next time. All right, George, the north transept is your sector of fire if they break in. But if they use armor through that door, Boland will lean over the north triforium and launch a rocket directly down at it. Your responsibility for armor is the south transept door below you. She’ll cover you and you’ll cover her with rifle fire.”
“What if one of us is dead?”
“Then the other two, Gallagher and Farrell, will divide up the sector of the dead party.”
“What if we’re all dead?”
“Then it doesn’t matter, does it, George? Besides, there’s always Leary. Leary is immortal, you know.”
“I’ve heard.” He put the blowpipe to his mouth.
“Can you play ‘Come Back to Erin’?”
He nodded as he puffed.
“Then play it for us, George.”
He took a long breath and said, “To use an expression, Megan, you’ve not paid the piper, and you’ll not call the tune. I’ll play ‘The Minstrel Boy’ and you’ll damn well like it. Go on, now, and leave me alone.”
Megan looked at him, turned abruptly, and entered the small door that led down to the spiral stairs.
Sullivan finished inflating the bagpipe, bounced a few notes off the wall behind him, made the necessary tuning, then turned, bellied up to the stone parapet, and began to play. The haunting melody carried into every corner of the Cathedral and echoed off the stone. Acoustically bad for an organ or choir, Sullivan thought, but for a bagpipe it was lovely, sounding like the old Celtic warpipes echoing through the rocky glens of Antrim. The pipes were designed to echo from stone, he thought, and now that he heard his pipes in here, he would recommend their use in place of organs in Ireland. He had never sounded better.
He saw Abby Boland leaning across the parapet, looking at him, and he played to her, then turned east and played to his wife in Armagh prison, then turned to the wall behind him and played softly for himself.
CHAPTER 18
Brian Flynn listened to Sullivan for a few seconds. “The lad’s not bad.”
Hickey found his briar pipe and began filling it. “Reminds me of those Scottish and Irish regiments in the First War. Used to go into battle with pipes skirling. Jerry’s machine guns ripped them up. Never missed a note, though —good morale-builder.” He looked down at the blueprints. “I’m beginning to think whoever designed this place designed Tut’s tomb.”
“Same mentality. Tricks with stone. Fellow named Renwick in this case. There’s a likeness of him on one of those stained-glass windows. Over there. Looks shifty.”
“Even God looks shifty in stained glass, Brian.”
Flynn consulted the blueprints. “Look, there are six large supporting piers— they’re towers, actually. They all have doors either on the inside or outside of the Cathedral, and they all have spiral staircases that go into the triforia…. All except this one, which passes through Farrell’s triforium. It has no doors, either on the blueprints or in actuality.”
“How did he get up there?”
“From the next tower which has an outside door.” Flynn looked up at Eamon Farrell. “I told him to look for the way into this tower, but he hasn’t found it.”
“Aye, and probably never will. Maybe that’s where they burn heretics. Or hide the gold.”
“Well, you may joke about it, but it bothers me. Not even a church architect wastes time and money building a tower from basement to roof without putting it to some use. I’m certain there’s a staircase in there, and entrances as well. We’ll have to find out where.”
“We may find out quite unexpectedly,” said Hickey.
“That we may.”
“Later,” said Hickey, “perhaps I’ll call on Renwick’s ghost for help.”
“I’d settle for the present architect. Stillway.” Flynn tapped his finger on the blueprints. “I think there are
