League of Terror

by Bill Granger

“What does he want from you? What’s the threat?”

  “I don’t know who you are or what you want,” Trevor said. “This house has police around it, as you know. How do you propose to get out of here? I think you should be concerned with that more than anything else.”

  “I didn’t expect you to lie,” Devereaux said. It was the truth. Something here went beyond the fact of Henry McGee and the fact that Henry was a terrorist.

  He wasn’t prepared to do anything about it. There were police outside. He had hidden in the car to get close to Trevor, to see him alone, to let him know he had a gun and had managed to penetrate the security around the house. But what could he do now?

  “Henry McGee is his name,” Devereaux said. “Did you know that? He’s wanted by the United States government. He broke out of prison nearly two years ago. He’s wanted for espionage against the government. He’s a terrorist and a killer.”

  “And who are you?”

  “My name is Devereaux. I’m a field intelligence agent for R Section.”

  “I never heard of it.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It exists. I’m sorry I didn’t have business cards printed up.”

  “Even if I believe you, I can’t help you. I mean, I never saw that man before in my life.” It was easier now; the other man had a name, shape, form, and purpose. He was nothing but a cop of some sort.

  “Tell me why you deny you know Henry.” Quietly.

  The sound of full Westminster echoed into the dark room. Sixteen notes in solemn procession followed by the tolling of the chimes. Nine chimes for the hours.

  Devereaux said, “You should tell me.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m a citizen of the United States.”

  “I know. The government appreciates your cooperation.”

  “The government has no right to break into my house and violate my privacy. Will you put that pistol away?”

  Devereaux did. He still waited and stared at the other man.

  Trevor said, “If I had any information, I’d help you.”

  “Four people were killed in this house. Why do you suppose it would matter to Henry if you were one more? You can’t deal with terrorism the way you want to deal with it.”

  “I don’t know anything about ‘terrorism,’ as you put it.”

  “Except for Flight One forty-seven.”

  “The authorities are investigating that. The British have narrowed the circle of suspects. You must know all this. What did you call this fellow? Henry McGee? Is he one of the suspects? I don’t recall that name or that face.”

  “Will Henry blow up one of your aircraft if you don’t pay him? How much does he want?”

  It was very close and it began to worry Trevor. The worry began to show in the eyes because the pupils moved back and forth, trying to find focus either on the man in the shadows or in the flames behind him.

  “How much does he want?” Devereaux said again.

  “I really don’t think I can help you,” Trevor said. “I’m sorry. Obviously something—some person or persons—has attempted some sort of terrorism here in my home but I don’t honestly know for what purpose. It’s the reason the police are following me everywhere—”

  “Yes. Everywhere,” Devereaux said. He decided then and sighed. He stood up. “Good night, Mr. Armstrong.”

  “You needn’t have hidden yourself in my automobile to see me. I’m in the offices every day. My door is open.”

  “Yes,” Devereaux said. “Perhaps I’ll come around and show this photograph to your staff. Perhaps they’ve seen this man.”

  Devereaux stood very close to Trevor and saw the effect of his words.

  “Well, we can arrange something, I suppose,” Trevor said. “I don’t like my staff bothered by the police. They have nothing to do with this.”

  “But what is this, Trevor?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What is this really about, Trevor?”

  “You break into my house and put rude questions to me. By what authority, Mr. Devereaux?”

  Devereaux waited a moment longer to let him at least feel the intimidation in his presence. And then he turned.

  “How will you get out of here?”

  “With your permission,” Devereaux said. “Whatever it is you’re doing, Trevor, you don’t want to draw the attention of the London police to yourself. In case I am who I say I am.”

  “And if you are an… agent of this… whatever it is, a legitimate representative of the United States, why aren’t you cooperating with the police in the first place? Hiding in the trunk of my car like that?”

  Devereaux smiled. His smile lighted the wan, gray face in a strange way that unnerved Trevor. He felt the beginning of a tremor in his left hand, the one that held his drink.

  “Yes. That’s the problem. We make decisions all the time. I’ll leave by the front door and it’ll be your decision, whether to call the police guard on me. And on yourself. Good night, Trevor.”

  He walked to the front entry hall and opened the front door. The policeman on the sidewalk turned to look at him and at Trevor standing behind him in the door.

  “Good night, Trevor,” Devereaux said. He started down the three steps to the walkway. He turned again, standing in front of the policeman, and said, “I’ll see you soon.”

  Trevor said, “Yes.”

  Devereaux said to the policeman, “Good evening.”

  “Good evening, sir,” the policeman said.

  And Devereaux knew then that Trevor Armstrong was going to complicate the matter of getting Henry McGee.

  43

  Maureen pushed the barrel against his ear. The street lamp was out because she had seen to that. They were scarcely a hundred feet from Trevor’s front door and she could see the policeman there, although he could not see her.

  “Good evenin’, fella, and don’t say a word in reply or you’ll lose your hearing and a few other faculties.”

  Devereaux stood still.

  “Walk round the corner with me, love, and don’t even think of running away.”

  Devereaux walked around the corner and they were out of sight of the town house. A blue Ford Escort sat on the curb in a yellow-striped no-parking zone. A ticket was affixed to the windshield wiper.

  “Open the boot, fella,” she said in her throaty voice.

  “You could have picked a bigger car,” Devereaux said.

  “I told you about talkin’.” She slapped the side of his head with the pistol barrel and he crumpled half into the trunk. She put the pistol in her raincoat and picked up his legs and crammed him into the rest of the trunk. She closed the lid.

  Maureen drove out to Maida Vale and then down the Edgware Road to the street where Marie Dreiser waited for her. It was part one of the plan, to get the money and to get Henry McGee at the same time, and it had worked so smoothly that Maureen was sure the rest would work as well. Henry had been right about one thing: You couldn’t go on with a person like Marie, she was crazy as a bedbug, and once they had fixed matters with Trevor Armstrong and with Henry, there’d be no splitting of the five million. Five million cash and she’d have no trouble financing the revolution and finding the volunteers. Only this time, they’d follow her plans and her way of thinking. There was only one enemy and the way to get that enemy was to target them, not pub crawlers in Belfast. Kill the English bastards and start at the top with the governors of the state, the ministers and toadies and MPs who voted the wrong way consistently on the question of Ulster. Oh, she had some big ideas all right and Marie wouldn’t figure in them so she’d have to be a victim. And what did it matter anyway? She was just a terrorist-for-profit, corrupting Matthew O’Day in his greed to betray the farm and the cause.

  By the time she reached the flat, she had justified herself to herself completely.

  The street was dark, gloomier than the average residential block in London because of the excess of trees and the absence of street lamps, all knocked out b
y Maureen.

  She opened the trunk and held the pistol against his head. He was awake.

  “D’ya see, fella, the way it is?”

  “I see.”

  “Then crawl out careful like and we’ll go inside.”

  They went up the steps to the door. “Ring the bell,” Maureen said, putting the prod of the revolver in his back.

  He rang the bell.

  Marie opened the door. She stared at him.

  Maureen grinned viciously. “Mister Trevor Armstrong, at your service,” she said.

  Devereaux looked at the girl he had known in Rome more than a year before. The woman whose life he had saved. She stared back at him.

  “Well, ain’t ya gonna say nothin’?”

  Devereaux’s cheek was bruised. His eyes were terrible and gray and sick.

  “What should I say?” Marie said. “You got the wrong man, Maureen. You stupid bitch, you got the wrong man.”

  Maureen’s face fell.

  Devereaux stood between the two women.

  “He come out of that house, he talked to the copper on the walk, he—”

  “He’s the wrong man. He isn’t Trevor Armstrong,” she said.

  “Then who the hell is he then?” She prodded him with the pistol and reached into his pocket. She found the automatic.

  “A fookin’ gun? He’s from the fookin’ police then? I picked me up a fookin’ copper,” Maureen said. The smile began again and it wasn’t very nice. “A fookin’ pig, love, I got me a pig to make squeal—”

  “Be quiet, Maureen, are you crazy, you want to fire that thing in here?”

  “Then I’ll cut his throat—”

  “And we’ll walk around a corpse for the next week? Get rid of him someplace else, I don’t care.”

  Devereaux looked at her. Her eyes were tough. What did she owe him? Another fucking policeman, the world had too many to start with. What had he done for her?

  But save her life.

  “I don’t owe you anything,” she said to him.

  Maureen pulled back the gun. “You know him? You know this copper?”

  “He’s no copper,” Marie said. “I knew him in Berlin. Ein volk, eh?”

  “Ein volk,” Devereaux said.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “He was in the American consulate there. He picked me up and gave me candy, didn’t you, lamb? We were all the same, eh? Ein volk.”

  “Yes,” Devereaux said.

  “Then he’s a fookin’ American diplomat? Is that it?”

  “That’s it,” Marie said.

  “And he’s carrying a pistol?”

  “He carried a pistol in Berlin. I suppose it’s the same here, eh? You never know when you’re going to be kidnapped.” And Marie laughed. “You never know where and when and by whom. Us, lamb, it was a couple of girls that did it.”

  “The point is, what do you do now?”

  “Why were ya talkin’ with Armstrong?”

  “That’s obvious, isn’t it? The matter of Flight One forty-seven. The plane that went down.”

  “Jesus,” Maureen said. She had fucked up. “Jesus,” was all she could think to say.

  “Oh, no,” Marie said. “Maybe we can turn this thing around for us.”

  Maureen said, “We’re gonna have to off him, no matter what.”

  “Yes,” Marie said. “No matter what. But if we off him right away, we’ll screw up the rest of the plan. The city will be crawling with coppers, SAS men, army people; they’ll stop everyone and especially foreigners. That’s you, love, and me. So let’s not do this thing right away.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Tie him up first and decide later about it. We got things to do first,” Marie said. She was staring at Devereaux and smiling at him in a mean way. “Would you like a little bondage, mister? I remember you liked bondage in Berlin. You liked to tie me up and spank me; would you like it the other way around?”

  “I’d never let a man do that to me,” Maureen said.

  “Oh,” Marie said, coming out of a reverie of events that never happened. “It’s not so bad. It’s not the worst thing. When you get hungry enough, nothing is that bad anymore.”

  Devereaux said nothing. This was all Marie’s game, her fantasy and her show. She had just saved his life but not promised not to take it in the long run. Was she just giving him a little time or was she giving herself time to decide something?

  “Get down the hall, lamb,” Marie said. She had one pistol, the one taken from him, and Maureen had the other. The women were dressed alike, in black and without makeup, and their faces were cold and murderous. They might have been sisters.

  They made him strip to his underwear. There was kitchen clothesline and Marie cut it into pieces just long enough to tie his wrists to the headboards and his feet to the footboard. And then she wrapped a scarf around his eyes and around his mouth.

  Marie sat down on the bed next to him then. She ran her hand on his chest. She had seen the scars of the operations, still healing and angry.

  “Let me alone with him, I want to play with him,” she said to Maureen.

  The other woman left the room and closed the door.

  Marie came very close to his ear. “Who hurt you, lamb? You’re all scars. They hurt you bad, didn’t they, whoever it was?”

  She took the gag out of his mouth.

  She waited.

  “Henry,” he said.

  “Why did you come here?”

  “To kill him.”

  “You didn’t kill him before. Why now?”

  “Because I had no reason.”

  “Why do you have a reason now, lamb?” And she stroked his naked chest with her hand in a soft, sensuous way.

  “Where is he, Marie?”

  “The other one knows. We don’t trust each other too much so we’re waiting on each other. On Henry’s game.”

  “What’s the game, Marie?”

  “What’s it always, love? It’s money.” And she kissed him, a long and lingering kiss, and he received it and returned it. And when she was finished, she pulled her head back and laughed in a low voice. “Do you want to seduce me, lamb? Make me untie you?”

  “Untie me,” he said.

  “I can’t do that, lamb. I owe Henry McGee too much to let you get him. The other one. She’s insane, you know, a patriot. An Irish patriot. She wants to get the money to save Ireland from England. If that isn’t insane, tell me what is.”

  “What’s the money, Marie? Is it from Trevor? What’s it for, Marie?”

  “To stop the terror, love,” she said, stroking his chest again. She traced the line of a scar. “Henry did all this to you? How did he do it?”

  “A bomb,” Devereaux said.

  “He killed those people in Trevor’s house. You knew that.”

  “I guessed that.”

  “But does everyone else know?”

  “No.”

  “Who sent you, Devereaux?”

  “I sent myself,” Devereaux said.

  “A pure matter of revenge. Well, don’t worry, love. I’ll take care of Henry McGee and he won’t get away and there won’t be any second thoughts from me. Henry is dead and that crazy girl out there is going to be dead and I’m going to live. The only problem is you, Devereaux. You did save my life and that was important to me. Maybe not then but it is now. Now that Henry wants to take it. He could have left my life, I didn’t expect anything out of the bastard but he could have left me a shred of life. So much the worse for him.”

  “And what about me, Marie?”

  “That’s the problem. If I save your life this time, you’ll turn on me when you get the chance. You’re just a policeman underneath everything and policemen are scum and they are the enemy all the time.”

  “I won’t turn on you.”

  She kissed him again, very hungry and wet, and he let himself be kissed. And when she pulled back, her eyes were wild. “You won’t huh? You promise, lamb? You truly promise? Wil
l you take an oath on it? I’m sorry I don’t have a Bible with me but then, this isn’t a hotel room. If we were lying together in a hotel room all naked and sweating, I could go and get a Bible out of the dresser and have you make an oath while you’re screwing me.”

  She laughed at him then. He couldn’t see her but he felt her weight shift on the bed and then she was off the mattress and she wasn’t touching him anymore. “I’ll think about it, lamb, while I’m doing what has to be done. I’ll think about killing you or not killing you. I really will. But I think I know what I’m going to do and I want to apologize for it now because you did save my life. But that’s the way it is, love. That’s just the way of the rotten fucking world.”

  44

  “Good morning, Mr. Armstrong. Cassidy here.” The absolutely terrible British accent was back with the familiar voice and Armstrong was waiting for it this time. It was Thursday morning. He had assembled four of the five million dollars and Dwyer was in Zurich at this very moment making the final withdrawal. But Trevor felt more in control than he had before.

  “Good morning, Henry McGee. You can drop the accent.”

  A long silence followed and Trevor smiled. He was alone in his big office on the sixth floor off Oxford Circus.

  “Who gave you the name?”

  “A man named Devereaux. Do you know a man by that name?”

  Another long silence.

  When Henry spoke again, his voice was careful. “It can’t be,” Henry said.

  “He said that was his name. He was from some section with the letter of the alphabet as a name. I don’t believe in that but I do believe you’re a wanted criminal. A known felon, as it were. At least, he showed me your arrest photograph.”

  “Devereaux is dead.”

  “He didn’t look well but I can assure you he wasn’t dead.”

  “Describe him.”

  He did.

  Yet another pause. This time Trevor broke the silence: “Are you there, Henry? Hope I haven’t given you too much of a shock.”

  “Nothing shocks me,” Henry said in his old voice. “So Devereaux’s here. That don’t change nothing. You got the money?”

  “I got the money. You got the other thing?”

  “Matthew will be on the plane at two P.M. I thought we might watch him from the departure lounge.”