League of Terror

by Bill Granger

  “Henry McGee.”

  “What plane?”

  “Plane for Chicago. Takes off in ten minutes.”

  “And what were you going to do?”

  “Get the money.”

  “Kill Henry McGee?”

  “Jesus Christ. I don’t wanna be set up.”

  “Nobody’s going to set you up. You’re going to become an honest man for a change. Trevor takes the fall.”

  “The boss?”

  “Not anymore,” Devereaux said.

  “Kill him,” Rita Macklin said.

  “No. He can be useful.”

  “Kill him,” she said.

  Devereaux looked at her. “If you want me to.”

  Jesus Christ.

  “Get the fuckin’ bomb,” Dwyer said. “Get the bomb off the plane. Get the fuckin’ guy, this Irish guy that carried the bomb on the plane. Let him take the fall. Shit, let the boss take the fall, I give a shit.”

  “You’re a loyal bastard.”

  “I don’t wanna die,” Dwyer said.

  Devereaux looked at him closely as though he might be examining a butterfly pinned to a board.

  “No,” Devereaux said. “No one does.”

  Matthew O’Day opened his eyes.

  The man in the aisle wore the expression of someone who knew everything and had seen everything. He didn’t wear a uniform but Matthew could smell a man who was used to uniforms.

  “Would you be kind enough to come this way, sir?”

  Behind the man was the stewardess who had tried to wake him for a drink. He blinked. He looked out the window. He should have been thirty thousand feet in the air. He was still in the plastic cocoon of the aircraft and it was still parked on the tarmac, engines running to cool the interior. It seemed very cold.

  “Sir?”

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “No, sir. Just a matter of some formalities,” said the Englishman. He had a broad accent. Might have been Liverpool Irish. But this was crazy.

  “I really don’t understand.”

  And the large, moon-shaped face bent close. “Come this way, sir, we have to return to the terminal.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s the report of a bomb on the plane,” the moon-faced man said. The eyes were hazel, without depth, barely opaque.

  “I don’t understand,” Matthew O’Day said.

  “It will all be made plain,” the moon-faced man said.

  51

  Henry McGee parked the Peugeot in a no-parking zone on the side street off Maida Vale and walked down the block to the apartment building. The girls might be starting to stink but he thought he could stand the smell for a couple of hours of sleep. The flight to Tahiti wouldn’t take off until nine P.M.

  The thing about it was how fucking easy it was, once you figured it out. Everyone expects to be given a pass; it comes with being alive and living on hope. Everyone figures that there are limits to cruelty and inhumanity when there aren’t any. Everyone can be terrified because they don’t really expect the worst thing to happen. Like Trevor. Like poor little Marie lying dead in the flat. Like Maureen, who was really a great lay. Like Devereaux and his girlfriend. Like the whole fucking world that thinks everything is figured out and that terror is something you read about in Time magazine or something, something that happens to a bunch of ragheads in the Middle East or somewhere.

  Henry had checked the money. If he was a man given to quibbling, he might have even counted it but it looked right, all those smiling and colorful Swiss francs with the money amount stamped out in plain English or German or whatever the fuck it was, the numbers were plain to see; and the pounds with the old queen ensuring that old Britain stood behind all this; and the dollars, the wonderful and small dollars with their quaint pictures of Capitol Hill and Independence Hall, dollar wasn’t worth what it was in 1920 but what the hell, it was only money.

  He turned the key in the lock to the flat.

  This armed the trigger.

  He heard the click and pushed the door.

  This activated the trigger. The electrical charge went into the phosphorus bomb, which had been inert to that moment. The bomb was designed to stun and not kill. The only really evil thing about the bomb was the light.

  The light was the light of a thousand suns exploding in a small room.

  Henry McGee stumbled and fell before the light. The light filled the universe and was the beginning of matter or the end of matter; it was the last judgment in any case.

  Henry felt his knees strike the floor and felt the bag fall from his fingers but, in that moment, he saw nothing at all. Heard the sound of the universe explode but did not feel it. Saw the whiteness of the world and the face of God.

  He cried out. It might even have been a word.

  52

  Hanley said to Mrs. Neumann, “I think this is satisfactory.”

  “Yes. But I don’t like it.”

  November smiled on the capital. The sunlight was bright and brittle and the shivering wind made everyone walk with quick steps and smile at being alive on such a day. God, that’s the way Hanley felt. Bleak years and memories were shrugged off. He stood at the window in the corner office that looked down on Fourteenth Street and thought he had never felt so good. He might have two martinis for lunch, by God.

  Only Mrs. Neumann sounded a note of gloom. Her voice was heavy and the weight on her shoulders had bowed them further. Each day, she was more and more bent until finally, someday, the weight of the world she lived in would crush her. Her husband saw it; those who loved her saw it; and none could do anything about it.

  “Devereaux gave us an international conspiracy. He gave us a corporate head actually involved in terrorism. He gave us a solution, Mrs. Neumann, and he managed to do it with all the credit going to R Section. You can wear that credit when the budget is gone over with the National Security Adviser.”

  “But where is Henry McGee?”

  “He’s dead,” Hanley said.

  “Is he dead? I mean, where is the body?”

  “A fire in that flat. They found a female body and they identified her finally through the IRA man they arrested on the plane. Maureen Kilkenny, shot in the chest. And Matthew O’Day, facing the rest of his life in Wormwood Scrubs. And Trevor Armstrong, indicted for conspiracy to commit mass murder. And—”

  “But where is Henry McGee?”

  “Henry McGee is dead. They found his body in the flat. Case closed.”

  “They were uncertain about the body, I read the scan.”

  Hanley just hated this woman at this moment. Her relentless gloom was beginning to infect his thoughts of lunch, of the giant cheeseburger with raw onion and the straight-up martini. Make that two martinis.

  He turned from the window. “If Devereaux is satisfied, I’m satisfied. Case closed.”

  “And where is Devereaux? And Miss Macklin? Dr. Krueger is still hallucinating and now he says Devereaux impaled his hand on that spike.”

  “Nonsense. The man is a drug addict. I think that’s been made clear.”

  Mrs. Neumann stared. She stared at the blank wall across from the windows. She stared into this world fabricated by bureaucracies and run by terror. She felt so very cold and bleak that she wondered if she might just kill herself.

  “Hanley,” she said.

  Hanley stared at her and saw the weight on her and was moved to pity. He touched her shoulder, a thing he thought he would never do.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I know.”

  “They want to give him an award. November. They want to give him an award. The Security Adviser told us. A secret ceremony, of course. No names revealed. Just an award to be put in his two-oh-one file.”

  “I know,” Hanley said, rubbing her shoulder to relieve her of the burden of office.

  “An award,” she said, staring at the wall.

  And, inexplicably, she began to laugh.

  And, just as inexplicably, so did Hanley.

  53 />
  Carl Greengold, who had once killed a man, sat behind the largest desk in the world and studied the dispatch. He had six young men in the room and everyone was devoted to him and his interests. New York screamed outside the window wall but he barely heard it. The continuous Dow ticker streamed across a second wall on a forty-foot-long lighted screen. The office was big enough so that the forty-foot-long screen still did not fill the second wall.

  He had watched EAA for three weeks. Paper profits he had made had vanished as the airline tumbled down through the web of trades on the New York exchange. On paper, millions were gone. But Carl Greengold knew that paper was worth exactly what it was written on, no more or less.

  The indictment of Trevor Armstrong and investigation of security lapses at the airline—the fact of the murder of four of Trevor Armstrong’s household staff, previously hushed up, now revealed to be a plot by the Irish Republican Army terrorist, Matthew O’Day—well, it had made cowards of a lot of people who held EAA.

  But not Carl Greengold.

  He saw what the others did not see. There was an underlying value to the airline that mere rumor or even terrorism could not eradicate. The stock was around 40 at the moment—no, 39⅞ as it just trotted across the lighted screen—but there was no panic, no panic at all.

  Carl Greengold looked up at Victor, one of his gang in the office.

  “All right, Vic,” he said. “It’s down far enough. I want you to buy everything at thirty-nine you can put your hands on and do it as discreetly as possible.”

  “It won’t last twenty-four hours,” Victor said, speaking of discretion.

  “I know,” Carl Greengold said. “Thanks to our Irish Republican Army friends—even though they don’t know it—I think I’ve just bought an airline.”

  Victor understood perfectly.

  54

  “You killed him,” Rita Macklin said.

  He stared at the fireplace. Oak logs crackled. The gloom of a Virginia evening surrounded the cabin. It wasn’t his own but a place he had purchased. In the spring, he would build a place of his own and spend his life raising timbers and making walls and stairs and rooms; he would fill out his life in this way. It would all be for her. It would be in her name and her soul, on deeds and on every record between them. He would marry her, he would court her, he would pledge himself to her, he would never lie to her and never leave her. He believed this.

  “You killed him,” she said again.

  He looked at Rita Macklin, whom he loved. He stared into her green eyes, which had retrieved life. He rubbed her cheek with his fingertips and his gray eyes were full of life as well and not the empty, dead things they had always been. The eyes of the soul, he thought, a strange, poetic thought that he believed he had grown incapable of thinking. The eyes are the windows of the soul.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “But you killed him.” She had said this before, said it in the same, flat voice, like a child who wishes her parent to banish a dream of goblins and ghosts, to promise her that they will never die.

  “Yes.”

  “You really did it. I can’t believe you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s so horrible. Because it’s like someone telling me that they have finally stopped wars or that the bad things of the world are finally over.”

  “There is no Henry McGee,” Devereaux said.

  “There was. God, I still get nightmares. Is that what you had all those years? When you’d be sleeping next to me and then suddenly start speaking? You never screamed, you spoke.”

  “What did I say? You never told me.”

  “You would say things like, ‘Yes, I’ll kill you and then I’ll kill your children.’ Horrible things I couldn’t believe. You would say things in such a clear, flat voice that I was afraid.”

  “Nightmares,” he said.

  “And now I have them, too.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He held her. They wore nightclothes because the cabin was cold despite the fire. She wore a flannel gown that could not be considered glamorous and he wore a large terry cloth robe that only hid his scarred body. Not glamorous and not at all sexy, either of them. Except they suddenly had an urgent need for each other and when they suddenly made love on the rug before the fire, when they moaned in delight and kissed each other to tears, it was not surprising at all. They were the only people in the world; they had finally found each other in the sharing of pain and in the sharing of the nightmares that now haunted both of them.

  55

  Deborah Cummings, forty-one, a lawyer for the Justice Department who met a guy named Mac in a bar at the Willard Hotel in December and thought he was the most fantastic talker she had ever met and who also thought, like Mencken, that marriage was nine-tenths talk anyway, told her parents she was marrying this old geezer and they were as shocked as everyone else in the world, Mac included.

  56

  They were in Berlin again.

  The day was clear and bright and Marie Dreiser had been shopping on the Ku’damm and she had been drinking a little, too, with one of the boys she met in the hotel bar on the Panserstrasse. The boy wanted to go to bed with her, and who wouldn’t, she looked better than she had ever looked, had even put on weight in the right places. That’s what money did for you.

  Devereaux had said she could only have a million dollars. Well, a million dollars was all right.

  Devereaux had killed Dwyer and the red-haired girl didn’t know anything about it. Dwyer had to die if the bargain was to be fulfilled because he was about the size and weight of Henry McGee. But Marie knew and that was all right, too. Devereaux and Marie had set the fire in the flat and the cops weren’t too particular when they found the bodies.

  “We’re both killers, lamb,” Marie had said to him.

  “Just so you understand that,” Devereaux had said.

  “It doesn’t matter to me, lamb.”

  The final act of terror had been played out just the way Devereaux had promised her in the flat that morning she had killed Maureen and saved his life. Terror for a life; revenge as a dish eaten cold. It was all right, everything was all right.

  Marie knew she was a little drunk going home but that was all right, too.

  They had a lovely apartment and it suited her. She loved to hear the trains rumble on the elevated tracks at night. It reminded her of the little rat girl she had been in Berlin, living in basements and coal cellars, amidst the rubble of progress, grabbing a few crumbs of comfort from this one or that one, prostituting her body to save it.

  She always wanted to remember because it kept her bitterness alive.

  The driver of the cab took her change and bid her a good day and she opened the door and walked up the steps. She carried a package that contained silk underclothes and another that contained pâté de foie gras. She might have champagne tonight and pressed toast. She might do anything she wanted tonight.

  She might let him make love to her.

  She still liked that. She still liked that strong body filling her.

  She entered the apartment and he stirred at the sound of her.

  He was really beautiful, she thought.

  “What time is it?” he said.

  “What do you care? You’re not concerned with time, are you, love?”

  “I just asked,” he said.

  “Time I decided to come home. Did you clean the bathroom?”

  He nodded at her.

  She came to him and kissed him. He raised his lips to her. He wore a robe because he had no other clothes. He had not been out of this flat for three months. All of winter had enclosed them in the fastness of Berlin and he had wondered and schemed and tried to figure out what he could do but it was still beyond him. Prison had not been so unyielding to him; but this was a prison of soft touches and plenty of food and nights spent thinking of all the days when the images of life were around him.

  Now there was only darkness. He had lived all of his life in sight and now there was
nothing and he was a child in the womb again, aching to be born into the world.

  But she would decide that. She decided everything.

  Henry McGee remembered the last moment of sight, when he had pushed open the door of the flat and been greeted by a blinding light, the light of God or death, a light that had filled his eyes until they were blinded to lesser visions.

  Blind.

  A man even without clothing. A fugitive from the world hidden by a mad girl who controlled all of his universe. Could he call the police? This is Henry McGee, I am a murderer and wanted by a dozen countries. I am the man who killed all those people in Ireland. I am… what, exactly? Would prison be kinder for a blind man? Or would they kill him?

  The problem was with killing himself. He could not do it. He had picked up a kitchen knife a hundred times and knew he could end it then but he could not. Too much of life remained in him to want to end his life. He hoped. He tried to figure a way. And he kissed his mad girl who was now only a sight remembered and was only touch and smell to him.

  She kissed him again.

  He wanted her, the life came to him again in a rush. He reached up for her to pull her face to his.

  And she pulled back and he groped the darkness with his fingertips.

  “Don’t,” she said. And she was laughing.

  NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

  The story of Henry McGee can be found in earlier books available from the publisher. They are: Henry McGee Is Not Dead and The Man Who Heard Too Much.

  The November Man chronicle has included the story of Marie Dreiser in The Man Who Heard Too Much.

  Rita Macklin has appeared in every book in the chronicle except the first, The November Man (now published under the title Code Name November).

  The Irish Republican Army was first part of the chronicle in The November Man (now published under the title Code Name November).

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  An award-winning novelist and reporter, Bill Granger was raised in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. He began his extraordinary career in 1963 when, while still in college, he joined the staff of United Press International. He later worked for the Chicago Tribune, writing about crime, cops, and politics, and covering such events as the race riots of the late 1960s and the 1968 Democratic Convention. In 1969, he joined the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times, where he won an Associated Press award for his story of a participant in the My Lai Massacre. He also wrote a series of stories on Northern Ireland for Newsday—and unwittingly added to a wealth of information and experiences that would form the foundations of future spy thrillers and mystery novels. By 1978, Bill Granger had contributed articles to Time, the New Republic, and other magazines; and become a daily columnist, television critic, and teacher of journalism at Columbia College in Chicago.