League of Terror

by Bill Granger

  Die and put an end to it, said the floating Devereaux to the man in the bed.

  I love you, said the comely thighs. Red hair. Red-haired lover with milky breath and milky breasts and milky thighs, milked hard until his red head poked his redheaded lover, spreading her lap beneath him, feeling all that rage turned into a single tool of lovemaking, enveloped wetly by her purse. Spent himself into her purse. No change? He held out his hand and looked down and saw the woman in the hospital bed, nose and arm penetrated by tubes, eyes closed, breathing, breast heaving softly, unlapped, slapped down, unloved because he had no words and no love, comely, thighs and whispers… Rita. Rita was dying and he was helpless. He could not save her or himself. This was stupid and intolerable.

  Devereaux disappeared.

  Devereaux, the man in the bed, opened his eyes and saw palpable half darkness. Felt no pain at all. They had dosed him again and the same goddamned heroin dream had come and he had tripped a thousand levers in memory, remembering words, poems, vignettes of a wasted life.

  Goddamnit, Devereaux thought.

  “Goddamnit.”

  He pushed the button beside the bed.

  A woman appeared. She stared at him. “What do you want?”

  He smiled but she did not see it. He wanted it to do over again. He fixed his mind to make his thoughts words.

  “I want to talk to someone about getting out of here.”

  She smiled insanely. The woman had blood on her lips. She was a vampire and would bite his neck and he would have to sleep in a box with Lon Chaney or Bela Lugosi. He wasn’t queer, he wasn’t going to get into a box with one of them, he wanted his girlfriend and wanted it to do over again, to make love as they made love in the Baie des Anges on the Côte d’Azur that time, lying on the balcony of the hideous Le Corbusier–style building, making love in the Mediterranean sunshine, fondling her bare breasts, her hands pulling him toward her… yes, exactly what he wished again: yes.

  The nurse looked up from her People magazine and looked at the other one returning from the half-darkened hall that led to the intensive care units.

  “What did he want?”

  “He said he wanted to talk to someone about getting out of here,” the second nurse said. She smiled. “I suppose that’s a good sign.”

  “I’m amazed. He’s got enough dope in him to tranquilize a horse.”

  “Well, maybe he’s going to make it.”

  It was a thing they never talked about, the odds of someone making it. There was too much death to talk about it all the time. You had to make life seem normal and apart from these sick people. The nurse seated at the station desk looked hard at the second one. The second nurse had black hair and pretty doll-like features and too much softness for the job. Her name was Lu Ann Palmer and she was a Baptist. She actually told people she was a Baptist.

  The first nurse turned back to her magazine. The story was about the crash of Flight 147 over the North Atlantic last week. A Palestinian terrorist. Well, it happened all the time. What were you going to do about it? Briefly, she remembered her vacation in August in Hawaii. Terrorists were a fact of life but the odds of being blown up on an airplane were still incredible.

  She turned the page and settled in. The brief piece was about plans for Halloween Heaven II and it passed the time of night, reading about it.

  11

  The big man had been in the Horseshoe Bar in the venerable Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin for an hour. He had finished two whiskeys and was working on his third. His manner was deliberate and unhurried. He wore a tweed jacket and a white shirt and tie. He had sandy hair and freckles across his wide nose. His eyes were merry and green and he looked like anything in the world except a terrorist. He had been a terrorist for thirty of his forty-five years.

  The girl came in as he sipped at the third whiskey. She sat across the glittering bar from him and watched him. When the elderly barman came to her, she asked for beer. He brought her a foaming glass and picked up the five-pound note she had left on the bar.

  The room was crowded with the usual lunchtime mix of businessmen and writers, horse breeders and country squires and visiting Englishmen and vague personalities identified with radio or television. It was a glamorous but faded place, like the hotel itself.

  He watched her. She wore a simple white blouse and no jewelry. Her face was sharp, her eyes were cynical. Her brown hair was short and swept back from her face.

  The big man was surprised it was a girl. They hadn’t said it would be a girl. Not that he didn’t know girls usually made better terrorists than men, once they were committed to the cause. He thought of Maureen Kilkenny, waiting back at the farm in Clare. She’d terrorize the devil, the big man thought. There was such unreserved wildness in Maureen that he realized the quality was in every woman and he sometimes felt like he was the only man in the world who understood that.

  And smiled at the girl across the bar because the girl was watching him.

  He picked up his whiskey and carried it around the polished metal bar to her side. He stood next to her for a moment and let her look up at him.

  “And who are you?” he said.

  “That doesn’t matter; you can call me what you want,” Marie Dreiser said. “The important thing is you came.”

  “I came because I am always available to opportunity,” Matthew O’Day said. He had a soft Irish voice for a man so large; it was a tenor’s voice, and when he was little, he had sung in the parish choir. He didn’t sing anymore now and he had not been in a church except to attend the inevitable funerals for thirty years.

  “Then sit down and listen,” Marie Dreiser said. She wasn’t at all nervous. Henry McGee knew she wouldn’t have been. They had gone over it, gone over what she would say and what her response would be if the big man said the wrong thing.

  “I still want your name,” he said.

  “Call me what you want. I told you,” she said.

  “Nobody’s that hard,” he said. He sat down, the smile still fixed to his broad features.

  “Maybe I am,” she said.

  “All right.” Still smiling. “Maybe you are. Let it go for the sake of argument, girl.”

  “We want a job. It’ll involve three people, two men and a woman. Presentable people, not children, not people who can’t be trusted.”

  “What makes you think—”

  “Terror,” she said. So soft and calm that it amazed him. She turned her eyes on him and he saw that it really didn’t matter what he called her, what he thought of her. A moment before, he had felt a vague stirring between his legs. He liked the wild thing you found in nearly all women, the place in them that was too hot and too hard and too wet all at the same time, the thing that was revealed when all the layers of civilization impressed on women were stripped away and they became what they always were. He had seen it in her eyes watching him. But now he saw something else. That wild thing in her was covered with ice a thousand feet thick, and nothing could penetrate it.

  “You need money to exist,” she said. “For your cause.” The last word was very precise; she had put it in italics and surrounded it with quotation marks. “We offer you one hundred thousand English pounds with payment upon completion.”

  “We’re not criminals. What you want is criminals. The city is full of them. You can hold out your hand and grab a bunch of them.”

  She held out her thin hand and draped it on his lapel. Her eyes mocked him in that moment. “I know what I’m touching,” she said. “You’re quite right about criminals. We don’t have any need for them. We want what you have to offer.” She let her hand slide up the lapel of his Irish tweed jacket until it rested on his neck.

  “I’ve got a room here,” he said.

  “We know,” she said.

  “Are you interested?”

  She smiled then. It was a small smile. “Perhaps. Later. We’ve got business, Mr. O’Day. It’s better to attend to business.”

  “I might want to make it part of the business,
” he said.

  “Payment in sex?” She was smiling and that bothered him. “All right, why not? Are you any good at it or would I have to pretend that you were?”

  “You’ve got a mouth on you,” he said. He sat up straight on the bar stool and she still held him by the neck. He might be ten years old and she might be the nun in the parish school, holding him by the neck until he spelled the word correctly.

  “Oh yes,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “A mouth and a sex. A tongue and teeth and there isn’t anything I couldn’t do or haven’t done, so when I say that, Matthew, I only am being honest. I don’t mean to insult you. I can pretend if I have to. I can make you feel like the biggest man in the world. I can do anything, Matthew, I just wanted you to understand that.”

  “You’re a bloody bitch,” he said.

  They were utterly silent. They were surrounded by sound. There might have been no one else in the world in that moment.

  “Matthew. You have terrorists and we want the use of them. Of their services—”

  “We’re not terrorists for hire—”

  “But you are.” The voice was still soft. The conversations in the room formed a roar around them. There had been drinking since eleven in the morning and some of the voices were louder than they should have been. A woman laughed and her voice screeched until it subsided into a giggle. Everyone was damned amusing all of a sudden. “You became that when we contacted you. When you accepted our offer to come to Dublin.”

  “Who are you?”

  “People in business,” she said.

  “You act like spies, like the goddamned SAS.”

  “The SAS would not have been subtle. We contacted you through the Czech broker. You know him. We know all about you and your group. About the farm in County Clare and the business you did in Antrim last July. You killed fourteen men in a public house.” She smiled. He wanted to pull away from her. “You blew them apart. You and Maureen and what was the boy’s name? Was it Brian Parnell? Yes, we know, and if we were SAS, we wouldn’t be sitting in the Horseshoe Bar in Dublin talking, would we? SAS would have you in one of their safe houses, wouldn’t they? They’d have a noose around your neck and another around your balls, Matthew, and they’d be pulling and tearing just to hear you scream. We aren’t hurting you, are we, Matthew?”

  Jesus Christ. There was ice and shards of ice were prickling his flesh. He hadn’t ever felt this way about a woman.

  He pulled back and she let her hand drop onto her lap. She stared at him but didn’t speak now.

  “I want a hundred thousand pounds. Up front.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t have it.”

  “Then you’ve wasted my time.”

  “Sit down,” she said.

  “I don’t think you’d be a very good fuck. I think you just like to fantasize about it,” he said.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m being honest. You should appreciate honesty,” she said. “We’re in the business of terror and so are you.”

  “Is that right?”

  “The Czech connection,” she began. She paused and waited for him to sit down. “The arms trade has been interrupted.”

  “You know everything, do you?”

  “The IRA factions have been supplied by Czech armament makers for twenty years. The events—in Prague and elsewhere—have… interrupted your supplies, Mr. O’Day. You’re becoming terrorists without bombs, without automatic weapons, back to slingshots and street fighting. You don’t terrify many people that way. One hundred thousand pounds is a lot of money. On completion of the business.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “Why shouldn’t you? Would we go through all this ceremony as a joke?” In that moment, the veneer over her English words fell away and she was revealed as a German, as one of the cynical street people of a place like Berlin who think the world is a joke and only the fools don’t get it. “We’ve taken the time to contact you in a way you trust. We’ve arranged to meet you on neutral ground, in your own capital city. What do you suppose this is about?”

  “You still haven’t told me why I should trust you. About the money, about anything.”

  “You have no choice.”

  “Ach,” he said. He started to get up again.

  “If you walk away from me, you’ll regret it.” She shrugged and turned to her glass of beer. “I was told to tell you that. If you started to walk away. I don’t know why you’ll regret it but I believe it and so should you. I’m only the messenger but I believe everything I tell you. You’ll be paid, and paid when the job is finished. I believed it when I was told we need you.” She glanced at him. “You should believe everything as well.”

  “I don’t go to church anymore.”

  “This has nothing to do with church.”

  “I need payment in advance,” Matthew O’Day said.

  “Twenty-five,” she said.

  He shook his head.

  “Don’t regret it,” she said.

  “Listen, girlie,” he began. He got very close to her face. His fine tenor voice dropped a note and was grouchy around the edges of the words. “It makes no difference to me, girl or boy. If you got to be killed, you’re dead. I’m not a sadist, the business has to be done and sometimes it’s rougher than I might like it. So don’t threaten me about regrets.”

  “All right.” Soft. “This is Tuesday. You’ll want to make contact with me Thursday. This place again, it seems a good place for us to meet and not make stupid threats to each other.”

  “I won’t want to contact you ever again, girlie,” he said.

  She blinked.

  He saw the change in her eyes in that moment.

  They weren’t cynical at all.

  He thought they were full of regret.

  12

  “Rehabilitation,” Hanley said. “Dr. Krueger says it will have to be extensive.”

  “The operative word is expensive, not extensive,” Devereaux said. “I want to get out of here. I don’t have access to a telephone, I can’t even call Rita—”

  “Miss Macklin doesn’t know about you,” Hanley said. The smell of the hospital room overwhelmed him. It brought back the horrible memories of Saint Catherine’s in Maryland where a high-placed Soviet mole in the intelligence service had committed Hanley long before and where he had nearly lost his mind. Devereaux had saved him from that fate. He didn’t want to think about it. “Dr. Krueger says it would do her no good in her present state to know that you had been injured. Besides, he advised that your access to a telephone be limited, for fear you would do exactly what you intended, to call Miss Macklin.”

  “Dr. Krueger gets around,” Devereaux said.

  “He’s one of the finest neurologists—”

  “—money can buy,” Devereaux said. “He’s a very strange man.”

  “The explosion that caused you other injuries also caused trauma to your head severe enough to count as a concussion. You suffered brain damage, to what extent it’s up to Dr. Krueger to learn,” Hanley said. He fell back on the words he uttered with the abandon of a tired man flinging himself on a bed.

  Devereaux waited a moment. The silence of the hospital was a palpable buzz. “Do you believe any of that or are you just comforting yourself?”

  “We have to face unpleasant facts,” Hanley said, turning toward the window. “You’ve been injured before. That time in Bruges.… The scars of previous traumas are evident on your body. But what about the scars on your mind?”

  “What has that got to do with getting out of here?”

  “Dr. Krueger is a fine neurologist, one of the best. We wanted the best,” Hanley said.

  Devereaux said, “I’ve concluded a neurologist is roughly a psychologist with a machine to back him up.”

  “You were… damaged. Your brain suffered injuries that cannot be healed. The brain cells do not regenerate.”
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  “Then let’s not worry about them,” Devereaux said. “I can’t recover if they keep me on dope twenty-four hours a day. I don’t want any more dope. I’d rather learn to live with the pain.”

  Hanley said, “I want to assure you that you will be taken care of. That we don’t intend—”

  “Henry McGee,” Devereaux said for the first time.

  Hanley blinked.

  “Henry McGee,” Devereaux said. “He called me in the hotel before he blew up my room. He shot Rita Macklin. I want you to find out about him. Is he still in the country?”

  Hanley wiped his hand across his mouth.

  “Devereaux. This borders on obsession. Henry McGee is dead or gone. KGB went after him. We gave them all the clues they needed on that matter of the translator.”

  “It was Henry McGee,” Devereaux said. “What does Section want to do about it?”

  “Section has no interest in chasing ghosts,” Hanley said. “Do you see what I mean? You bring up a dead man’s name to explain something that you can’t explain otherwise. In all these weeks, you never mentioned that name. Why do it now?”

  Devereaux tried a smile. There was absolutely no mirth in it. “Are you saying I’m wrong? I’m one of your agents. I don’t guess about things. I thought Section had an unwritten rule about dealing with acts of terror against its own. It kept the balance in the cold war, one side knowing what the other side would do about a wet contract on one of its own.”

  “Devereaux.”

  “Of course, perhaps there’s no cold war anymore. I haven’t read the papers lately.”

  “The papers assure us we have come through apocalypse unsinged,” Hanley said in the same tone of sarcasm. “These are difficult times in intelligence. We have no need for spies when the world is suddenly so open and honest.”

  “It’s the Santa Claus factor,” Devereaux said.

  Hanley blinked.

  “All the adults thought he really didn’t exist and now they say they were wrong.”