League of Terror

by Bill Granger

  He remembered that now.

  “Dev. Come home. Come home. I need you, you need a doctor now, we’re both ill and—”

  “Rita. Where are you?”

  “I’m at Mac’s house. You remember that.”

  Mac. He had to remember that. M. A. C. There might be questions later. Will this be on the exam? My God, an exam is nothing more than self-knowledge. God, he was tired of them and their empty minds refusing to be filled and he longed to fill himself with the honeycomb of Asian fields beneath the sweltering Asian sky that always warmed him, always filled the fields with rain in monsoon and the fine, hard rain falling warmly down his skin as he walked the muddy tracks through the jungle, endless jungle, sounds of endless gunfire and endless chops of choppers clotting the sky and chopping at nothing…

  “Dev!”

  Rita sounded hysterical.

  “What’s wrong, Rita?”

  “Dev. Dev. You blanked out on me there. You just blanked out. Are you all right? Dev, come back, it’s not worth it.”

  “I’m going to kill Henry McGee. Wait for me, Rita. It’ll be just a little time and then I’ll come back and I’ll never leave you—”

  “Love, you just blanked out. What if you do that when you’re against Henry? Come back to me, you promised me—”

  “Just a little while, Rita. I love you. I always did,” he said.

  “Dev.”

  “I love you,” he whispered, to silence her.

  “Dev.”

  But he had to leave her now, even though he had promised never to do it.

  36

  “Yes, Miss Turnbull?”

  “Mr. Cassidy on the telephone, sir.”

  Trevor punched button five.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Mr. Cassidy. Regarding our previous conversation, I wonder if we could have a bit of a chin-wag, say, round about noonish.”

  “Yes.” Dull voice, dull eyes. He’d have to cancel his luncheon. “Where?”

  The preposterous British accent continued, “Say, my club. No. Come to think of it, they’re closed for remodeling. Say, noon at Chester’s in the City, do you know it?”

  “Noon,” Trevor Armstrong said.

  “Splendid. And do try to be alone, old bean. Ta-ta then.” Click.

  For a long moment, Trevor sat alone in the world. Then the world intruded and Jameson said, “Something?”

  “No. Cancel my luncheon with Lord Asbury; a… private matter has come up. And send in Dwyer.”

  Jameson permitted himself the trace of a frown. His employer had any number of “private matters” that would occur during the day and invariably they involved discreet women who were suddenly available for a slap and tickle. Trevor would suddenly put the business on hold for a couple of hours in the Connaught or Dorset with a Miss or Mrs. or Lady and Jameson was expected to provide a suitable cover. He was a man who endured humiliations for the sake of employment, a latter-day Cratchit, but it galled him nonetheless. And sending for the toady Dwyer proved the nature of the something that had come up.

  Thirty seconds later, Dwyer was alone in the big room with the boss. Dwyer was fifty, born and raised in Queens, a sharp-faced Irishman with heavy eyebrows and ruddy cheeks. He looked like he was made to wear a green suit and play the leprechaun in a New York Saint Patrick’s Day parade.

  “Are the police still following me?” Trevor began.

  “Yeah. Two of them. They’re downstairs now, one in the lobby and one in a car.”

  “I have a luncheon meeting. I don’t want to be followed.”

  Dwyer knew about Trevor’s luncheons. This wife or that one and they’d have tea and sympathy in the Dorset for a nooner with the boss. Sometimes Dwyer would pick them up afterward and take them to their cars or homes and he would judge the success of the boss’s courtship on the look on their faces. When they looked dizzy and disheveled and happy, Dwyer figured the boss did good.

  “I’ll bring the car around to the mews entrance at eleven twenty,” Dwyer began. “We goin’ to the Dorset?”

  “No.” Trevor smiled. “A real luncheon this time. At Chester’s in the City. I just don’t want to be followed. But I want you to mark who I have luncheon with. He’s a man I don’t like.”

  Dwyer found a toothpick in his shirt pocket and slipped it between his lips.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Follow him afterward. I’ll make it back to the office on my own. I want to know about this man. And be careful, Dwyer.”

  “I’m always careful,” Dwyer said. “What’s it about? Allison and the divorce?”

  Trevor nodded. “Yes. About that.” He was already thinking about the strange thing he would tell the man who called himself Cassidy.

  The dining room was crowded, elbow to elbow, across white tablecloths. Men in livery moved about the place, and ceiling fans shoved the air back and forth. This was lunch at the highest level and no more pleasant than eating Scotch eggs in a Wapping public house over a pint of beer. In fact, considerably less pleasant.

  Henry McGee smiled at Trevor Armstrong as he sat down.

  “I’m followed everywhere by the police. Ostensibly for my protection. They’ll take a look in here and see you.”

  “Who gives a fuck,” Henry McGee said. His mean, dark face showed enjoyment. “I just wanted to see if you were as smart as everyone says you are. I guess you are.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I don’t have to kill you. Make a mess on the tablecloth. If you’d walked in here with cops, I’d have killed you. Funny thing about getting killed by someone, sometimes you don’t figure you’re only a gesture away from getting it.” Grinned.

  “Why did you kill those people in my home?”

  “Get your attention. How many were there?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “Story didn’t get into the papers. Not yet anyway. Sort of thought that would happen.”

  “Four servants. And my dog, Jameson.”

  “Funny name for a dog.”

  “Look. I don’t have five million. Not even close.”

  “That’s too bad. I guess the next thing is to kill your entourage. Or maybe take out the next flight to New York. Two crashes in two months is two too many.”

  Henry was still grinning, the waiters were rushing around on crepe soles, the dining room hummed with voices pitched at the low, confidential level of the City, and Trevor Armstrong knew his face had turned white.

  “Can I deal with you or are you just crazy?” Trevor said at last. The voice was steady; it was borrowed from a reserve that he would have to pay back later in the form of six double whiskeys or two lines of cocaine.

  “What’s the deal?”

  “You can ruin EAA. I admit it.” He sighed. He wiped his hands on the napkin on his lap. “Look here. For five million dollars, I’d want more than to be left alone.”

  “Being left alone after what’s happened ought to be enough,” Henry McGee said. “Like the surgeon who does a triple bypass. All he guarantees for all that pain and agony is that you’re going to be able to take a walk, something you took for granted before.”

  “Jesus.”

  Henry was enjoying himself. “Jesus reminds me of what Lazarus said when Christ raised him from the dead. ‘Jesus. Why the hell did you do that?’ ”

  “I can get you two million by Friday. And the three million if you’ll perform a service.”

  Henry stared at Trevor. He waited.

  “The service is simple. In your line. To get the police away from me and onto another target.”

  Henry let the silence drift in a sea of voices between them. The waiter came up. They both ordered whiskeys as aperitifs. The waiter announced the special of the day and departed. The din continued around them like perpetual ringing in the ears.

  “What do you want?” Henry McGee said.

  Trevor had been thinking about it all morning. It was linked with thoughts of Carl Greengold and what eventua
l effect the deaths in his house would have on the price of EAA. The police would leak the story eventually; there were always leaks. And would it be before or after Carl Greengold made his move and the price of EAA started going through the ceiling? It was all about money, the money borrowed to buy stock and the volatile price of the stock itself.

  “A bombing,” Trevor Armstrong said. He stared at Henry with steady eyes. “We have strong rivals for this market.”

  Henry said, “You are a murderous bastard.” Grinned again. “You got anyone in mind? Or is this just spin the bottle?”

  “Another airline. It’ll work to your advantage as well.” The words were rushing up and Trevor couldn’t stop them. “Muddy the trail. You know the police will eventually settle on you and your… colleagues. Wouldn’t it serve to your advantage to diffuse the trail by diffusing the target?”

  Henry accepted his whiskey. They ordered salads without enthusiasm and the waiter departed.

  “Cheers,” Henry said and sipped.

  Trevor did not touch his whiskey. He stared at Henry McGee.

  “The thing is, that’s more work than I intended to do.”

  “And you never believed you’d get five million dollars either,” Trevor said. He was very cold now, sure of himself, negotiating with the head of the pilots’ union or facing down a hostile board member. His manner had altered because he had proposed a deal and a deal was something he could understand. Everything before—the mindless terrorism—had panicked him.

  Henry sipped the whiskey again. He rarely drank and almost never in the middle of the day but he was coming to the end of something and this was a celebratory moment. The deal was concrete, something to touch and figure out about. Trevor was a little more man than he had expected.

  “I don’t know why I have to agree to anything,” Henry said.

  “Nor I.”

  “Because you’re up to your asshole in debt.”

  “How the hell do you know so much about me?”

  “Because I do my homework, Trev. Because I spent some money and time finding out about you and your buying all that EAA stock. You don’t have that kind of money so it stands to reason you borrowed it. And if EAA starts dropping its planes out of the sky, the stock will go down the toilet and you’ll be drowning in your own shit. Is that clear to you? It is to me.”

  “I want a deal and I need a deal. You’ve put the police on me, they watch me, they want to know what it is about me that someone wanted to murder my household staff. You have to give me room to breathe. If EAA gets hit again, certain… people might get panicked and pull out of the market. That wouldn’t be a good thing. A good thing would be to have someone else blown up in the way EAA was blown up and shift the cops onto another trail. And it’s more than police, I can assure you. A man from a ministry I never heard of was there to question me the night I found… those bodies.”

  Henry looked at his fingertips on the tablecloth. There was a certain amount of sense in all this. Trevor was in a bad spot and he might just be stubborn enough to hold back on the blackmail if Henry didn’t go along with his deal. Henry really didn’t have time; the whole thing was a matter of exquisite timing and so far it had worked, right down to setting off the remainder of the poison gas in his own flat and killing the two girls.

  “I want the money in fifties and hundreds,” Henry McGee said. “In a suitcase.”

  “My God, do you know how much money that is?”

  “Divide it this way: a million and a half in American green; a million and a half in pounds sterling; the rest in Swiss francs. Nothing else. And don’t cheat me because I won’t count it until later and if you cheat me, I’ll kill you. Just kill you. And you know that I will.”

  “It’ll take me time—”

  “Sell some of your stock. Take wire transfers from your bank account in New York. Get cash out of the corporation. If it comes down to it, put the tap on your chauffeur, just get the money. I don’t want paper, I don’t want big bills, and I don’t take American Express.”

  “But time. I need time.”

  “Seventy-two hours. Noon on Friday,” Henry McGee said. “You’re a bright man. You’ll figure out how to do it.”

  “Noon on Friday? That’s impossible.”

  “There’s a plane out of Heathrow at two P.M. for Chicago nonstop. On your friendly rival airline. Is that right, Trevor?”

  It was exactly right. Despite himself, he felt drawn to the other man in that moment. The deal was that much closer.

  “Now what if I had a passenger aboard that plane who was carrying a parcel? Unknown to him, of course?”

  “Who would it be?”

  And Henry drew a photograph from his pocket. It was a photograph he had intended to turn in to the SAS but this way was even better. Even neater. Henry prided himself on thinking fast.

  It was a photograph of Matthew O’Day delivering a parcel to the house in Mayfair.

  Trevor held his breath a moment.

  “D’you remember the parcel? A copy of the novel that the movie Halloween Heaven was based on? That’s Matthew O’Day. He’s your friendly neighborhood IRA terrorist and if the British thought this was all about the IRA, it would steer them in a very different direction, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” Trevor managed.

  “Matthew can be on that two P.M. flight to Chicago. I can arrange that. I can even arrange a reason why. The point is, when you see Matthew go through the boarding gate, you’re gonna be carrying a bag yourself, one for me with five million beans in it. If there’s a fuckup, any kind of double cross from you, then the photographs—including the one you just put your fingerprints on—go to SAS and you’ll be up shit creek.”

  “Matthew O’Day is working for you?”

  “Reluctantly, but then, good help is hard to find these days.”

  “But what if I do see Matthew O’Day get on that plane? I only have your word that something is going to happen. What if you cross me?”

  Henry smiled. “Now we’re getting somewhere, Trevor. A Mexican standoff. I want the bag and you want the bomb to go off on the other guy’s plane. But in this case, you got to trust me because you got nothing else. I don’t even have to agree to this deal except I can see the logic of it from your point of view. If I push you too far, then you just turn into an ole porcupine and roll up into a ball. I ain’t stupid, Trevor, I see that. But if you push me too far, I’ll just have to fuck you so you walk funny for the rest of your life. See the way it is? A certain amount of trust has to go on.”

  “The police are always following me—”

  “Shit. You must think I got shit for brains. I was outside the EAA office this morning at eleven twenty when you left out the back way, down that mews with your driver. I know the cops ain’t following you. You think I leave everything to chance?”

  “You called me. They might have tapped my phone—”

  “You know and I know you’re too smart a businessman to have your phones tapped by the cops. You probably swept them the next morning to make sure. You don’t want the cops knowing all your secrets.”

  “You really mean this, don’t you?” Trevor stared at the other man as though seeing him for the first time. His instincts as a man of business and finance took over; he saw the depth of Henry McGee, even if he still did not know his name.

  “Nothing complicated, Trevor. I don’t want to leave a trail. The only guy I’m leaving behind is you and you’re not gonna tell anyone anything because you got your own secrets. So at the end of the world or the war, you and me are the only guys standing. What do you say?”

  “Friday at two P.M.”

  “That’s it. We’ll wave our Irish friend good-bye as he heads toward America and you and me will check out your luggage.”

  “And the photographs. I want the photographs. And the negatives.”

  “That sounds fair,” Henry McGee said.

  “This is a very delicate moment,” Trevor said in a cool voice. His voice was soft but it
was there, in all the modulated tones, the voice of a hard man. “I don’t want a misstep. I can’t afford it.”

  “You can’t and I can’t. I think that’s the way it goes. Reminds me of a story about this guy hit by the cardinal’s limousine. Archbishop of New York. He goes to a hospital, he gets well, but he says he’s paralyzed.”

  “I really think we’ve concluded this conversation—”

  Henry touched his sleeve, then leaned forward across the table and spoke barely above a whisper. “I wanna finish my story.”

  Henry held his sleeve. His hand weighed a thousand pounds.

  Trevor felt pinned to the tablecloth at the wrist. He was staring at terror, pure and simple. He knew Henry could do it, could send a man aboard an airplane carrying a bomb he didn’t know about.

  “So he sues the archdiocese and it goes to court and the lawyers for the cardinal can’t get anything on the guy, even though they know he’s faking his paralysis. They hire detectives and everything. The jury finally awards the guy fifty million dollars and there he is, strapped to a board in the courtroom. So the lawyer for the cardinal says to him, ‘You won the fifty mill but we’re gonna watch you all the time, day and night, and if you slip, we’ll put you in jail. So what good is the fifty mill to you, strapped to this board? What are you gonna do with it?’ ”

  “I have to—”

  Henry said, “The guy says, ‘I’m gonna get a flight to Paris and then charter a car to Lourdes. And when I get there,’ he says to the cardinal’s lawyer, ‘I’m gonna pray for a miracle.’ ”

  Henry removed his hand from Trevor’s sleeve. The waiter brought the salads and stood with an enormous pepper grinder under one arm, ready for service.

  “Please,” Trevor said, and the waiter ground black specks over the creamy sauce.

  The waiter looked at Henry McGee.

  Henry shook his head. “You got any horseradish?”

  The waiter stared at him for a moment before going to fetch the horseradish.

  “I like that story,” Henry said. He stared hard at Trevor. “Haven’t told it for years. You see the point, Trevor? Story should have a point. The delicate moment here is on both sides. You don’t want to fail because of what I can do and I don’t want to fail because it would complicate things for me. I don’t want to push you too far. So I’m giving you a way out and you’re giving me what I want and everyone is going to be happy.”