“Oh, Christ,” I said. “Where’s the boat?”
He shrugged. “The damned Brits said it was empty, finished, useless. We believed them.”
“Oh, Christ,” I said again. “I gave the boat back to them!”
“Gave it back to who?”
“Herlihy.”
“Who has disappeared,” van Stryker said. “So what’s in it, Paul? What were they hiding under a coat of 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 Rebel Lady’s hidden.”
“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 Coastguard 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 towards 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 grey 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 towards Nantucket Sound and towards the last dark secrets of the Rebel Lady.
“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 s
talked 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 mahogany hutch. Another door led from the dining room’s far end. It was ajar and I edged it further open to see that it led into a leather-furnished and book-lined den with one wall smothered in framed diplomas and awards. This was evidently the room where Tommy the Turd came to pretend he was educated, and it was also the room where Michael Herlihy, still fully dressed, was fast asleep.
I put the gun barrel under his nose. “Morning, Michael.”
“God! What! No!” The last syllable was prompted by the pain he had felt as I rammed the gun into his upper lip.
“Be very still, Michael,” I said, “and very quiet.”
“Paul?”
“Be quiet, Michael!”
He had clearly waited in this comfortable room for news from Seamus. He had waited in the Congressman’s leather recliner, drinking the Congressman’s whiskey out of the Congressman’s crystal tumbler. Now, woken to a bad dream, he was shaking.
“Seamus is dead, Michael.”
“I don’t know anything. Nothing!” He tried to get out of the chair, but the gun persuaded him to stay still. I ran a hand over his rumpled clothes and found a small automatic in one pocket.
I took his gun and put it into my pocket. “You sent Seamus to kill me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Paul.”
“Marty Doyle told me.”
Michael stiffened. “I have no knowledge of these matters.”
“That’s very formal, Michael, very legalistic. Where’s the boat?”
“What boat?”
“Rebel Lady.”
“I don’t know. The Congressman arranged to have her towed away from his property. Why don’t you ask him yourself? He’s in Washington.” He pulled a telephone towards him, then gasped as I slashed the gun barrel across his bony nose.
“No telephones, Michael. So where’s Rebel Lady?”
“I told you, Paul, I do not know!”
“Then let’s find out if you’re telling the truth, shall we?” I reached down and yanked him out of the chair. I tripped him as he lurched forward, throwing him face down on to the room’s Oriental rug. I folded the rug over his head so he could see nothing. “If you move,” I said loudly enough for him to hear, “I’ll blow your fucking brains out.”
The room’s heavy velvet drapes were tethered by tasselled silk cords. I slashed the cords free, then tied Michael’s hands behind his back. That done I pulled him to his feet, picked a sturdy poker from the collection in the hearth, then pushed Michael out of the den and into the luxurious dining room. “This is a comfortable hiding place, Michael.”
“I’m not hiding,” he protested. “This is where I’m planning O’Shaughnessy’s re-election campaign.”
“Don’t take me for a fool, Michael. The Congressman is always re-elected. Daddy’s money sees to that. If the Congressman was a pox-ridden baboon and his opponent was the Archangel Gabriel, he’d still be re-elected. You don’t have to work at Tommy’s re-election, you just have to wheel him out and point him towards Washington. No, Michael, you were hiding here, that’s what you were doing. Tell me, have the Arabs sent you more money?”
“You’ll regret these allegations!”
“The five million was your price, wasn’t it? You and Brendan?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I demand that you release me! I demand it!” He turned and shouted the words into my face.
“As we non-lawyers say” – I smiled sweetly at him – “fuck away off.” I rammed him with the poker, forcing him to stumble on down the hallway into the kitchen, then out through the broken kitchen door and down the brick path to the locked boathouse. Michael was dressed in his lawyer’s three-piece suit and began to shiver in the bitter wind. “Please?” he said.
“Where’s Rebel Lady?”
“I have no idea where the boat is. Can’t we talk about this inside?”
“Why not in here, Michael?” The boathouse door was secured by a padlocked hasp that yielded to the leverage of the poker. I kicked the broken door open, then pushed Herlihy inside and tethered him to a stanchion with the free end of the curtain cord.
“No, please!” He suddenly understood exactly what I intended doing.
“Where’s Rebel Lady?” I asked in a very reasonable tone.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“I think you do, Counsellor, I really think you do.” I went to the far wall where two control boxes operated the twin hoists holding Quick Colleen. I pressed the green buttons and the machinery hummed smoothly as it lowered the sharp-prowed boat into the frozen dock. The ice splintered noisily under the hull’s weight, then the speedboat settled in the water, her bow inwards.
Herlihy made a futile lunge for freedom, but his tether held. “Paul! Be sensible!”
“But I am being sensible. It’s a nice calm day, the waves aren’t more than a foot high, so think of this as a treat! Do you remember when we were teenagers and I took you out for a boat ride?”
“Please, Paul!” He was shaking.
“Where’s Rebel Lady?”
“We sank her, out there!” He jerked his head towards the frigid waters of Nantucket Sound.
“I wonder why I don’t believe you? But we’ll soon see if you’re telling the truth.” I stepped on to Quick Colleen’s foredeck, unbuckled the forward hoist strap and unclipped her cockpit cover to discover her ignition key was still in the dashboard. I tossed the cover on to the dock, released the second hoist, then pressed the switches that tilted the big two-hundred-horsepower engines into the water. The batteries still had power and the twin engines whined down into the icy waves that lapped soft against the low racing transom. I checked the big fuel tank and found it full, primed the engines, advanced the chokes, and turned the key.
The cold engines coughed a couple of times, then, one after the other, they caught and fired. I ran the throttles up so that an ear-shattering bellow reverberated in the boathouse, then let the twin beasts idle. Smoke hazed the boathouse entrance.
“Fun time,” I said happily as I climbed back on to the dock.
“No!” Michael clung desperately to the stanchion. I slapped his hands free, kicked his feet out from under him, then hurled him on to the white leather seats of Quick Colleen. “No!” he protested again. His face had already turned a deathly pallor. “Please, Paul!”
“Where’s Rebel Lady?”
“I told you! We sank her.”
“Then let’s go look for her!” I rammed the throttles into reverse and the expensive boat slashed backwards. I swivelled her, rammed the twin levers forward, and screamed straight out to sea. Within yards the hull was planing and before we had even reached the Spindle Rock Quick Colleen was splintering the wintry sea at fifty miles an hour. At that speed even the smallest wave banged and shook the lightweight racing hull. She crashed across the grey waters, quivering and hammering like a live beast and leaving behind her a twin cock’s comb of high white water that glittered in the early sunlight.
“Isn’t this fun!” I spun the wheel, forcing Quick Colleen to turn like a jet-fighter. She skidded sideways as the huge engines tried to counteract the centrifugal force, then I wrenched her back, gave her full throttle, and let her run loose and fast towards far Nantucket. “I said, isn’t this fun!”
Herlihy had vomited on the leather seat. He was retching and heaving, bringing up nothing but a mixture of bile and water. The boat thumped on the waves, banging like a demented hammer. A fishing boat had left a long gelid wake a mile ahead and I steered straight for it, slamming into the bigger waves at full speed. The sound of the seas hitting Quick Colleen’s hull was like the crack of doom. The boat bounced in the a
ir, came down in an explosion of white water, slammed up again, shook down once more, and Michael was grovelling and sliding around in his own vomit as he desperately tried to keep his balance.
I turned the boat hard, accelerated again, and rammed her back through the fishing boat’s wake. Michael stared up at me, a terrible look on his pale face, then shook his head as if to tell me he had taken enough torment.
I cut the throttles, letting Quick Colleen idle in the cold, gentle water. “So where’s Rebel Lady?” I asked him.
“In Washington, DC.”
“Where?”
“At the Virginia Shore Marine Depot.”
“Where’s that?”
He heaved, brought up a trickle of mucus, then groaned. Even the small rocking of the boat was murder to him.
“Where’s that?” I asked him again.
“It’s at the northern end of Washington National Airport. Go into the city from the airport and it’s the first turning off the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway. Now, please, Paul! Take me back! Please!”
“Who took her there?”
“I hired a delivery firm in Cotuit.”
I gave the engines a tad of power, throwing Michael back on to the fouled cushions. His face had a green tinge now.
“What’s hidden inside her, Michael?”
“I don’t know. Truly! Nothing perhaps. You were bringing the money, that’s all! Then she was to be left at that yard.”
“Il Hayaween ordered her taken to that particular yard, yes?”
“Yes!”
“And he sent you more money?”
“Yes!”
“How much?”
He was reluctant to say, but I gunned the throttles slightly and he yielded immediately. “Five million again.” He slid sideways, heaving and retching.
“He wired it, right? To where, the Caymans?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“And the five million is for you and Brendan to share, yes?”
“Yes.”
“And no one else knows about this, do they?” I suddenly saw it clearly. That was why Brendan had sent me two punks, because he dared not ask the Army Council to allocate good men. “This operation was never cleared by the Army Council, was it?” I accused him.