League of Terror

by Bill Granger

  She didn’t speak, didn’t move. The pain was going down but it was still there, glittering inside her like the eyes of this man.

  “Halloween Heaven.”

  Maureen stared.

  “They were showing that movie on Flight One forty-seven when the Arabs blew up the plane. You know. The plane that crashed a few weeks ago.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “The man runs the fucking airline. His name is Trevor Armstrong, sounds like a fuckin’ Brit but he’s a New Yawk boy, Groton and Harvard, doncha know. We’re sending him a copy of the book. That’s the message. The important thing right now is the messenger. Matthew is doing this because of his expertise in bombs. He’s confused but he thinks it might be a bomb. He’s working for me, for us. He sold you all when he blew up that police car outside the pub on Galway Bay. He got fifty thousand dollars for that one. I’m sure he never told you that. And we also gave him Brian Parnell’s dick. Don’t you get it? He wanted that, he wanted us to mutilate him. Bloody, isn’t he? But you know that, Maureen, you worked with him.”

  Silence. She thought about it. She stared at the hard man and the silence ticked along. When she spoke, her voice was cold and low and the brogue was broader than it had been.

  “And what’s this about then?”

  “Aren’t you paying attention? What the fuck do we want with the IRA except terror? We’re hardly hiring you for your expertise in folk singing. About terror, honey. We’re going to wring a little money out of an American businessman who can’t afford to have another one of his airplanes blown up. Not right before Christmas and not with that other plane still in everyone’s mind.”

  “Are you gonna blow up a plane then?”

  Henry smiled. It was a dreamy smile, as though he saw something that no one else in the world could see.

  “Not at all, honey. I’m not a terrorist. I don’t have any cause. I just need a fall guy and a little time and a little luck.”

  “That bastard,” Maureen said finally, beginning to see it, beginning to see the betrayal that Matthew was capable of, beginning to see why Brian’s body had been mutilated, beginning to see everything that Henry McGee had been trying to get her to see. “That bastard,” she said again.

  And Henry saw that he had her.

  23

  Matthew O’Day delivered the envelope at 10:23 A.M. The housekeeper took it and signed for it.

  The entire transaction took ten seconds and in that time, Marie Dreiser managed to click off nineteen frames. She used a Minolta A2 autofocus with machine drive and ASA 400 black-and-white Kodak film. The camera was practically foolproof, which was just as well because Marie had never used one before in her life.

  She stood at a new-style phone booth wearing a tan raincoat and black jumpsuit. Matthew O’Day never saw her. His eye was on the housekeeper and the package, which he was still certain was a bomb.

  He hurried down the street away from Marie and toward an enclosed park. She finished the roll of film by clicking shots of his retreat. When the roll was finished, the camera rewound the film automatically. She popped the back, took out the film, and slipped it into her pocket.

  The whole thing was exciting; it made her blood run faster. She felt very alive. It was too bad about the one killing but Parnell was a terrorist and Henry said she shouldn’t feel sympathy for terrorists.

  When the news had flashed on the television set in the Buswell Hotel in Dublin about the explosion outside the public house, she had thought of Henry and she had thought of running away. There was murder—didn’t she want to kill the old priest in Rome who had a hand in the death of her Michael?—but this was slaughter, this was beyond revenge or even anger.

  She had waited to see the truth of the thing in Henry McGee. He had come back to her at midnight, his clothes dirty, his face wild. She had accused him of the bombing and he had smiled at that. He said the bombing was “just serendipity,” just a coincidence.

  Henry had not blown up the people in the public house. Henry had told her that. “I can’t be in two fucking places at the same time,” he had said to her when she had asked him. “But I’m fucking going to use it. Let ’em think we’re omnipotent. That’s the point. Let ’em think we got a gang here instead of just a crazy German girl and one old man.”

  He wasn’t an innocent and she didn’t have to worry about him as she had worried about the one innocent she had ever met in her life. Michael. She still thought of him. She had tried to save him and she could not and then Henry had come along and he was good enough, he was warmth in winter in bed, he was pleasure; and if he caused her pain at times, well, what of it? Her life was pain, and pain was existence, wasn’t it? People got their pleasure through the pain of others. When she stole sausages from the delicatessen, the old man in the straw hat behind the counter knew, he knew her pain; he had put his hand under her skirt for a long time, he had molested her—how many times was it?—just touching her and exciting himself in the process and putting his fingers all over her. Was she going to feel ashamed of herself because of what he did? Hell no, they could all go straight to hell if they thought she was going to be ashamed or was going to be afraid of them because of what they could do to her. She’d do it to them first.

  So Henry had only killed a terrorist named Brian Parnell, and around the same time, some other mad group had blown a police car to smithereens. What did it matter to her? Henry was there and still full of warmth and life and she had lived too long as a little rat girl alone in the depths of Berlin and she needed him because she needed warmth. She had accepted Henry’s lie about the public house bombing because she needed to believe in someone, not to end the pain of existence but to make it endurable.

  Michael.

  When she thought of Michael, a whole universe of déjà vu came upon her to disorient her to the world around her. Thoughts of her lamb, of poor dead Michael triggered thoughts of the night they had made love in a cheap Paris hotel, which triggered the thoughts of his death on the Tiber River bridge in Rome, which triggered so many things. She suddenly remembered Devereaux, who had saved her life. Devereaux had no gentleness either, he was as hard as Henry McGee except there was a quality of pity in him that mitigated all the hardness. He knew what life was, just as Marie did, they saw it in each other and they saw the quality of pity in each other, too. Life was agony, just one long scream from the moment of birth to the final silence.

  She realized she was crying.

  She usually didn’t cry but sometimes there was a mixture of things, thoughts of Michael, thoughts of what could have been—oh the hell with it, it could never have been like that for her because she was nothing, just a dirty little survivor of the streets of her mother, Berlin, just a girl to be used and to use, just a slut and a whore and feel me up, mister?

  Henry had explained it carefully. They were going to steal five million dollars from the man who ran the airline. Trevor Armstrong. They were going to terrorize him first. Part of the terrorism was using this Matthew O’Day to deliver an innocent package to the house and then sending photographs of Matthew O’Day to the SAS. A known IRA terrorist like Matthew O’Day was in London, delivering packages to a respected American businessman named Trevor Armstrong, president and chief operating officer of Euro-American Airlines, which now traded at seventy-six and was on the verge of being leveraged into a takeover by a group led by Carl Greengold. The IRA was going to threaten to blow up Euro-American Airlines. The way it would work, Henry explained to her, was that British intelligence, in the form of the dreaded SAS, would authenticate the threat and where it came from. Only Henry would know the truth, and Trevor Armstrong, who would agree to the blackmail. Marie didn’t understand all of it but she had nodded agreement to Henry that night in the Buswell Hotel in Dublin.

  Henry was clever and he wasn’t too concerned with rough edges. That suited Marie. She had never become accustomed to gentleness so she didn’t know what it was.

  That was a lie. Yes she did. She had known o
ne lamb in the world and he was dead because the world was too hard for innocence to survive.

  Damn her tears. She wiped at her eyes roughly with her hand and her eyes hurt her. Everything she knew was hurt and pain. Why shouldn’t she be rich with Henry? Damn the world and tears.

  The photo shop was on the Edgware Road and it was one of those places where the photographs could be had in less than a day. She told the boy behind the counter what she wanted. Henry had explained it: one set of prints as soon as possible. It was all part of his plan and he never explained all the parts of it. Henry said she didn’t need to know everything, it was just important that she trusted him and did what he told her to do.

  No. Henry didn’t blow up that police car outside that pub in Ireland and he didn’t have the blood of all those dead people on his hands. Yes, he’d killed a few people in the service of his country—depending on which country it was—but he didn’t take any pleasure in it and he had only killed Brian Parnell who was nothing but a fucking terrorist anyway. Oh, yes. She believed him and held him and let him plunge into her lap with his body and impale her with his lovemaking and, yes, she believed him as she closed her eyes and felt him in her and, yes, she had to believe him and hold him and feel his warmth, even if it was roughly given and full of deceit and lies. Yes, yes, yes.

  “And how many prints, miss?”

  She thought about it.

  “Two,” she said in her accented English. “Two sets of prints will be fine.”

  24

  Henry McGee broke into the cellar of the house in Mayfair at 11:31 A.M. He placed the small vial on the wooden workbench and dropped in two large tablets. The chemical reaction began immediately. The liquid was turning to gas.

  He wore a gas mask.

  The gas rose quickly and was at the level of the floorboards of the first floor when Henry made it out of the cellar through the back door. He rushed along the path that led to the alley behind the buildings. There were brick walls between the individual plots of backyards and all the properties had high wooden gates on the alley, to provide privacy and security.

  The housekeeper saw him from the kitchen window and thought to call the police.

  It was the last thought of her life.

  There were three other servants in the house on that final morning of their lives.

  25

  Hanley did not drive and did not have a chauffeured automobile. It was a perk of office he deserved as director of operations for R Section but he had a curious, populist distaste for the idea of public servants riding in limousines. He was from Nebraska and entering his final years of government service. He had been with R Section since the beginning and had climbed slowly and more or less honestly through the ranks. He had never been “in the field” and had an odd sense of having lost something because of that lack. He had never married; his relatives were all dead; he had his job in R Section and his friendship with the director of R Section, Lydia Neumann; and he had some men he could relate to and even have lunch with at times. He never took a vacation because there was no place to go and a vacation would merely have meant separation from his real life.

  No. He was not a friend of the former agent, Devereaux, known in files as November. No, not at all.

  The taxi swept through the rain down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol. Thunder clapped across the boulevards of the city and filled the circle parks where the dope dealers and homeless mingled under the Southern trees. Hanley studied the beaded seat of the driver.

  “What is that thing you’re sitting on?” he said.

  “Beads, man. Help you stay cool in summer. Help your back. Sit on beads good for you when you driving.”

  “They don’t look comfortable.”

  “They are,” the driver said, challenging him in the rearview mirror.

  Hanley sighed. He settled back into the discomfort of the dirty vinyl interior. Everything about the day was full of discomfort. Irritation. Damn Devereaux. The man was bound to cause this trouble and Hanley should have seen it coming.

  The taxi swept into the square before the Capitol and skidded to a stop in front of the Irish saloon. An Irish saloon, Hanley thought: how appropriate.

  Twenty-seven hours before, all hell had broken loose. And it was still loose in the streets. It was all Devereaux’s fault.

  Hanley paid and demanded a receipt. He kept his accounts regular; he was probably the most honest employee in the United States government, including the president.

  He crossed the sidewalk and pushed into the saloon. It was 11:30 in the morning and only a few drinkers had slipped away from their offices to begin another day with the bottle.

  Devereaux stood at the bar. A glass of beer sat on a cardboard coaster in front of him. Hanley came up.

  “I don’t know why I’m here.”

  Devereaux looked at him. There was no mercy today for anyone. “Because you have to be here. Because you need me.”

  “You kidnapped Miss Macklin.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a criminal act, even for an intelligence officer who has involved himself in criminal acts before and been exonerated by his long-suffering government.”

  “Drug dealing is also a crime. The jails and the parks are full of dealers.”

  “Dr. Krueger was found in his study. He was hallucinating. He is now in Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, in the psychiatric ward. They say he took LSD, they don’t say how much, they don’t even know if his sanity will return. He stabbed himself, they said, he stabbed himself in the palm of his left hand with some kind of spike, the sort they use in offices. The police found that in his study as well.”

  “Those who live by the sword,” Devereaux said.

  “You’ve become a philosopher. The director of the sanitarium where you… abducted Miss Macklin… he identified you.”

  “And Dr. Krueger. We did it together.”

  “And Dr. Krueger then decides to OD on LSD.”

  “Did they find drugs in his house?”

  “A lot of them. A cornucopia of pharmaceuticals. But he is a doctor.”

  “He’s a drugstore with two feet,” Devereaux said.

  “God, you are a bastard, a murderous bastard,” Hanley said. “It’s good we’ve separated you from Section. You’ve gone too far.”

  “Too many times.”

  There was frustration in Hanley’s voice and in the tremble of his hand.

  The barman came up.

  Hanley said, “Beefeater martini, straight up. With an olive,” he said.

  The barman turned away.

  “It’s not even noon yet,” Devereaux said.

  “You’ve interrupted my lunch hour.”

  “No. It’s your turn.”

  “We’ve cleaned up the mess you’ve made. You knew we would.”

  “Yes.”

  “We can’t be caught in a scandal. You’re blackmailing Section.”

  “My loyalty is unquestioned,” Devereaux said.

  Hanley frowned at the sarcasm.

  The martini came and Hanley sipped it. It wasn’t the same as the martini he had every day at lunch in his usual place where they always made him a well-done cheeseburger with onion and a martini and a little kosher dill on the side. He had taken to onions in recent years. Hanley loved his routine and felt lost without it today.

  “Where is Miss Macklin?”

  “Safe.”

  “But where?”

  Devereaux stared at him. “It’s none of your business. Your business is giving me a trail to Henry McGee.”

  “I told you yesterday that he didn’t exist.”

  “That was yesterday.”

  That was the morning when the police found the raving Dr. Krueger in the study of his home. That was the morning of inquiries from police about a former patient of Dr. Krueger’s named Devereaux who had been released the day before from hospital and who had appeared with Dr. Krueger at a private sanitarium about eight P.M. the previous evening and secured the release o
f another of Dr. Krueger’s patients. The police wanted to question someone in authority inside R Section and Hanley had pulled strings and blown whistles until the lower-level cops were squelched by the higher levels. There would be no inquiry; there would be no pursuit at any level. Until and unless Dr. Krueger recovered his senses and could tell coherently and believably how it was that he ingested a controlled substance at home and why his house was full of other controlled substances, including cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and even a small quantity of crack.

  “I made a scan,” Hanley said.

  “I don’t understand the term.”

  “We’re in the computer age. There is too much information. It floats around the world like a cloud. A scan is the act of penetrating the cloud for a specific raindrop.”

  “You’ve become poetic in your declining years.”

  “The Irish special branch made known to the SAS in Britain the description of a suspected terrorist who killed another suspected terrorist in a public house in the west of Ireland. It was a ghastly crime in its details, involving sexual mutilation.”

  “Why did it become a matter big enough to circulate to England?”

  “Because of what happened two hours after this murder. Two hours later, a public house was damaged when a police car parked outside it was bombed. In the Republic of Ireland, not the north. Two policemen were killed and a number of people in the public house. Yes, the inevitable eyewitnesses said they saw a man who had visited the public house earlier. An American, they thought. They described him. Guess who he looks like? The man who had killed the terrorist earlier. And guess who they both looked like?”

  “Henry McGee.”

  “They don’t have a name because they don’t know he exists. They think he might be Irish or English. Being an American doesn’t seem to fit for them; apparently, Americans are supposed to be the victims of terrorism, never the perpetrators. But they routinely put the description on the scan for American eyes. I picked the description out of the scan. We should inform them.”