League of Terror

by Bill Granger

  Devereaux waited.

  “That was good,” she said in her soft, absent voice. Her voice had changed as well. “Then there’s murder. That’s always bad, Dev. I told you to kill a man once and you didn’t do it at first, not when I told you to kill him. I would have killed him myself. Instead you waited and he hurt me and hurt me and then you finally killed him. Is that it? Did you get some pleasure out of his hurting me that made it more pleasurable to kill him finally?”

  He still waited.

  She looked at him. Her eyes glittered in the moonlight and her voice was sure, low, coming from the back of her throat and from the pit of her belly. “Let’s kill him, Dev. Henry McGee. I want to kill him. You can kill him and I can kill him and then we’re really bound. We’ll be together, our hands will be dipped into the same pool of blood. Our bond.”

  He saw it, saw it in her voice, in her eyes in the moonlight. He saw everything in that moment.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, and squeezed his hand.

  “We’ll kill him.”

  29

  Trevor Armstrong trembled. He had been trembling all night. The police interrogation had made him tremble. The cold man from the government who was probably with SAS had made him tremble. They had penetrated him too roughly. They had taken him apart and left the pieces on a table.

  A wooden table in the cellar with an empty vial that smelled of nothing.

  “They died but we can’t tell how or why. Not yet. Just dead,” the government secret agent had said to him. He had a thin, pale face and pale eyes and there might not have been any blood beneath his skin. “The point is—who wanted to kill them? Or did whoever it was want to kill you?”

  It was the last thought that frightened him finally. He had expected a strike at the airline, not at himself. Were they insane? What would it profit them if he died? And then he thought of Carl Greengold.

  Carl Greengold wanted the airline and Trevor Armstrong was all for letting it happen. Not in so many words, but there it was. Carl Greengold specialized in the Wall Street business of taking companies over and then taking them apart and dispensing the pieces like bits of meat to various other dogs of business war.

  How much was Euro-American Airlines worth exactly? There were a certain number of planes, repair shops, real estate, a reservation system, slots in the form of gates owned at key airports in the world. London was key, so was New York. What was the business worth? Trevor Armstrong had figured it out at almost the same time Carl Greengold in New York figured it out: The company was worth more than it cost, in the form of price of shares on the New York Stock Exchange. Be quick in a buyout of the airline and the share prices would still rise but there would still be so much profit left over in taking the airline apart.

  But before you tear an airline apart, you milk it. You crush the unions, strip services, skip amenities, fake maintenance, and squeeze all the intangibles out of it. When you’ve made your money and more, then you make even more by tearing the airline apart.

  That’s as far as Trevor had gone. He owned forty-one million dollars’ worth of stock in EAA and he had borrowed nearly all of the money to buy the shares. He owed back nineteen million. Twenty-two million profit. On paper. At the moment. For the time being.

  He poured a glass of Glenlivet and drank it neat. He was sitting in the parlor of his home, which was now guarded by police. The ambulances were gone. The dead had been taken away to the place where the dead were taken. His dog had been personally buried by his secretary, Jameson, in the garden behind the house. Four dead. Five, counting the dog.

  “Have you had any threats, Mr. Armstrong?”

  He had shaken his head over and over. He had called Carl Greengold and then canceled the call when he thought about it—what could he tell Carl Greengold that wouldn’t drive down the price of EAA in the morning in New York? Terror against an airline, a shaky sort of thing but shaky things were always terrifying the stock market. Especially as Carl Greengold was waiting to buy up the final lots he needed to take the thing over. Wouldn’t Carl Greengold like the price of the shares to drop further, even if he lost a little change on the deal? After all, the net worth of the airline was still there. Still so much money. So many planes and jobs and slots to fill.

  The fire roared in the fireplace. He could hear the policemen outside his home. They exchanged muffled words with each other, they talked on squawky radios. It was surrealistic.

  He thought of his little dog. He would fire his security chief, Dennison, in the morning. No. He couldn’t do that. He had to lie low.

  Everyone was pledged to keeping this quiet. The secret agent from the British government emphasized this. No one wanted the general public to know that four people had been mysteriously killed in a house in Mayfair by methods not known to the police. Or the government. They suspected some sort of nerve gas but… where the hell did terrorists lay their hands on nerve gas? Bombs were so much cheaper and more plentiful. The secret agent didn’t say all these things to Trevor, just enough to make Trevor see there was no point in arousing the general public.

  Trevor, with trembling hand, again poured whiskey into a glass. He was dealing with a crazy man, he thought. Or he was dealing with Carl Greengold.

  He saw it then. Carl Greengold. “Ruthless” was a term overused on the Street but Carl Greengold had once killed a man in his offices in New York, a crazed and desperate man who had lost in a Carl Greengold deal, a fucking nobody and it had been called justifiable homicide before the corpse was cold. But still…

  Carl Greengold, forty-four years old, had killed a man. That was taking a life, not taking a risk or a contract or taking over a company. Dead was dead.

  If it was Carl, then why send a man like that ridiculous Cassidy fellow who pretended to be the FBI to give him a warning?

  Trevor saw the logic of his question. He got up from his leather wingback chair and crossed to the mantel and stared into the fire. Bits of oak from a tree that had reached its two hundredth year before being chopped down were burning. Four people had died in his house. He felt sick, sick from whiskey and from dread.

  After the police had cleared the house, he had snorted a line of cocaine through a plastic straw in the bathroom under the stairs and then thrown the straw into the fire. The police had been all through the house but they had not discovered the cocaine. Just as well, another fine mess of troubles. The cocaine alerted him to every nuance of the situation but in no way did it make him happy. The whiskey made him dull at the edges and that made him happy now, to have his thought processes slowed.

  Dead. People were dead. Servants, but still people.

  “Mr. Armstrong.”

  He turned too abruptly at the sound of the voice. Dennison, chief of security, his face as white as chalk, even in the fiery shadows of this room.

  “What do you want?”

  “I talked to Jameson when he was burying the dog. I’m sorry about the dog, sir.”

  “So am I.”

  “Sir, Jameson said you had a visitor to your office four days ago. An FBI man.”

  Trevor wished his hand would stop trembling. He wanted to cut it off because it betrayed him.

  “What about it?”

  “He said… the man acted in a peculiar manner and demanded an off-the-record conference with you. You didn’t tell me, sir.”

  “There was nothing to tell you.”

  “What did he say to you, sir?”

  Silence. The fire crackled. The room was alive with dancing ghosts made by shadows and flickering lights.

  “Sir?”

  “I don’t think it concerns you, Dennison.”

  “If it’s related to the security of the airline, sir…”

  Trevor Armstrong realized he would have to lie to this thick-necked Englishman who was his employee. It grated on him.

  “Dennison.”

  “Sir?”

  “What I am about to tell you is in the strictest confidence. I’ll relay
it to you because Jameson broke a rule about confidentiality and you deserve to be put in the picture. Now.”

  Trevor cleared his throat.

  Dennison waited like a policeman, back on his heels, his hands folded across his lower belly. Respectful and silent and waiting for an answer.

  Trevor turned to the fire so that his back was to Dennison.

  “My former wife. Allison. As you know, we had a… strained divorce. Allison is threatening me now with refusing to let our son visit me. She’s removed him from his home and I don’t know where he is. This is a painful private matter and I’ve consulted with the FBI about it. Cassidy from the FBI was… there to give me details.”

  “I see, sir. I’m sorry, sir. It didn’t relate to the airline at all.”

  “Not at all.” He turned back to Dennison. The trembling had stopped. “But you understand my wish to keep this matter as confidential as possible. You know now. Even Jameson doesn’t know. I appreciate your discretion.”

  “You have it, sir,” Dennison said.

  Trevor looked at him closely in the firelight. What did he detect there? A slight change in expression, a certain shifting of the center of the universe. Dennison knew something now that he had not known a moment before, and that gave him leverage suddenly with the boss. Him and the boss. They might have a pint together sometime. A moment before, Dennison thought he might lose his position at any moment; now he knew he wouldn’t and that made it different. Trevor saw this in an instant in the slight change of expression on Dennison’s potato face, a slightly different cast to his eyes. It angered Trevor but he held his anger. Not now, not now. Not with the world watching, with Carl Greengold watching in New York, not with a potential twenty-two-million-dollar profit waiting to be had. Not now.

  30

  There were two persons Maureen Kilkenny had to kill. Henry McGee explained it to her after sex.

  The sex was something new for her. Henry kept at it for a long time and she came and came and gulped and sobbed in her coming and dug her fingers into his back and arched her spine and almost screamed. Did scream.

  He made her weak with her wanting.

  And when it was over and she crawled across his chest to snuggle under his chin, he explained about the killings.

  The first was a girl named Marie Dreiser. She was nineteen years old or maybe older, it didn’t matter. He described her in loving detail.

  “What’s she to you then?” Maureen let a jealous note betray her voice.

  “A piece of ass,” Henry said. “Which is what you are at the moment. But you are a fine, fine piece of ass, the best I’ve had in a long time.”

  “You bastard,” she said, and pushed up, and he hit her. They fought across the bed and he pinned her down, kneeling on her arms. And she bit at his penis and nearly got it.

  He pulled back sharply but laughed at the same time.

  “Fire. You got belly fire, girl, I like a girl with that.”

  “I can kill ya,” she said.

  “I don’t want you to kill me, honey. I want to screw you and give you all the money in the world and put you up at the Savoy Hotel and take you out to Connaught’s. Or maybe we’ll go live in Paris for a while. Or Tahiti. I like Tahiti. It’s warm. Would you like to be warm?”

  “You’re crazy, whoever you are. You talk crazy.”

  Henry smiled. “I ain’t crazy, Maureen. I need you and that’s why you’re something to me. I didn’t know if Irish girls could fuck. You do nice work. I bet you had practice.”

  She snarled at him.

  Henry kept the grin. He was a naked, leering, dark-faced satyr and Maureen saw hellfire around him. For a moment, she cowered on the bed.

  “This Marie person is nothing to me,” Maureen said.

  “I know that, honey. I’ll pay for her. Ten thousand and do it neat and soon. The second person you’ll do for free.”

  “I will then?”

  “Matthew. Your supreme leader. The man who betrayed you.”

  “Ah. That’s different. That’s nothing to you—”

  “Honey, you still don’t get it. Terror pays. I am talking five million dollars, honey. It could buy you silk underwear thrown away every day. It could buy you any damned thing in the world. Are you so committed to the Irish struggle you wouldn’t like to buy your way across the world and ride in limousines and have servants to beat?”

  He talked so damned queer. But he kept coming back to the money. And to specifics. Like killing this girl.

  “Why don’t you kill her yourself?”

  Henry shook his head. The hotel room around them was full of dark oak furniture of the nineteenth century and it cost $325 a night. That had impressed Maureen right away, along with the brocaded lobby and the scraping bellboys. Yes. She could learn to live with wealth and power.

  “I’d like to. I really would.”

  She believed him.

  “But I got places to go and people to see in the morning. This thing is coming to the flashpoint. Either I get it done now or it don’t get done. You kill the bitch and I’ll be putting the seal on the deal. Then you kill Matthew O’Day. I want the bastard dead by tomorrow night. Timing is everything.”

  “Where’s this Marie then?”

  Henry saw it. He had her again.

  “She’s waiting for me in the house off Maida Vale where you interviewed this morning.” Henry stepped back to the bed and slipped into the sheet. He pulled her to him. He kissed her and it made her crazy again and made her belly start scratching again. God, he was a lover!

  And then he stopped just when she wanted him to go on. She rubbed herself against him.

  “Go over there and kill her first thing. And then you find Matthew back in that shithouse hotel and you finish him off. And then you come back here, honey, and take a nice bath and slip into bed and wait for me. I should be along around teatime.”

  “Then how am I supposed to kill this girl?”

  “I’ll give her a call. Tell her you’re coming and that you’re part of the plan. She doesn’t understand all of the plan, she thinks this is about using the IRA.”

  “Is it?”

  “Not at all. Matthew O’Day dropped a parcel for me this morning that had a book in it. You both thought it was a bomb. It isn’t. Matthew is the fall guy, I told you. I got a set of photographs of him delivering the parcel to a certain house in Mayfair. The thing is: Three or four or five folks in that house died shortly afterward.”

  “Then it was a bomb.”

  “Bomb, bomb, bomb. You Irish got bombs on the brain. It wasn’t a fucking bomb, you stupid cunt. It was a setup. I set up a terrorist named Matthew O’Day because I needed a dead fish to give to the cops when it’s time to blow. I don’t intend to leave a trail, honey.”

  She really didn’t understand. He suddenly mounted her and penetrated her and the sharpness of the act, the roughness, made her cry out. But that passed in a moment. They made sex again, urgent and demanding, and after a while, he pushed her out of bed and she went down on her knees and she wanted to do it exactly the way he wanted her to do it.

  When that was done again, she held him around the waist and looked up at his dark face.

  “Jesus, man, you’re a fookin’ bull,” she said.

  “I’ll fuck you three times a day,” he said.

  “Why’s this girl got to be killed then?”

  “She betrayed me,” Henry McGee said. “I can’t stand that.”

  “How did she?”

  “I can’t tell you. Not now. Are you with me, Maureen, or are you too stupid to see your chances?”

  He overwhelmed her. She shook her head but she couldn’t shake him loose from her. He crawled inside her skin and sat there, warming his hands on her belly fire.

  She shook her head again.

  “Yes,” she said, as she shook her head.

  31

  Devereaux left in the morning. Rita would meet him in three days in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin. He said he had to make contacts an
d move quickly but he said they would both kill Henry McGee, that he would not kill the man without her. It was a promise and she believed him.

  Rita felt so very strange.

  Mac sat across from her at the chess table in the living room and made a move. He moved his knight to the position where he could take the queen. She saw it and moved the queen away.

  Mac took a sip of his whiskey. He drank martinis out, whiskey in. He remembered it had to do with his wife, who liked a tot of whiskey now and then and who thought men should only drink whiskey because it was a man’s smell, it had been the smell of her father. He drank whiskey at home for her. Now she was gone and he drank it for her still.

  “You can’t get away,” he said.

  She looked at the queen and saw it was true. The rook was behind her, waiting to take her. The knight was before her.

  “I give up,” she said.

  Mac smiled at her. He was so sweet. He had always been so sweet. She had once thought she would let Mac make a pass at her and have her if he did. But he didn’t. She knew he had wanted to but he didn’t. When was it? The lonely night of her thirty-fifth birthday when she knew Devereaux would never come to see her again. She had loved Devereaux and he had still been able to walk out on her.

  She looked at Mac and smiled. “What are you thinking about?”

  Mac blinked his eyes to end his reverie. Then he blushed. He actually blushed. “It was nothing. I was thinking about something. Another time. Something about that dress reminded me of something.”

  “It’s a beautiful dress,” she said.

  “Yes. It is. It’s beautiful on you, Rita.”

  “Oh, Mac.”

  She understood. She felt so bad and she understood everything in the world, understood Devereaux and the way of all men and their bravenesses and deceits and vulnerabilities. It made her sad to think of it. It made her sad to see Mac blush and end his reverie.

  She got up and crossed the carpet to stand next to him. He looked up at her.

  She knelt down on the rug and held him and kissed him. She kissed him on the lips and kissed him gently but with wetness and with warmth and with all the wonderful things that a woman can keep in her belly to comfort men on lonely mornings.