20

New York City

Patrick Cairney woke in a hotel on Eighth Avenue. It was called The Hotel Glasgow, a peeling old crone of a place with murky hallways and dampness. When he checked his watch he saw that it was almost eight thirty in the morning, and a frigid New York spring sun was streaming through the brown window blind. He’d come to this place very late last night, after Brooklyn, and fallen asleep immediately on the narrow bed, a long sleep filled towards its end with a dream.

He’d dreamed he was back in the Libyan desert where he was trying to dismantle and clean an automatic rifle. An odd weapon Cairney had never seen before. It was composed of parts that didn’t fit. Once you had the gun stripped down, you couldn’t put it back together again no matter how much you pushed and manoeuvred and tried to force things. The damn gun, a trick weapon, wouldn’t be reassembled. It was a distressing dream, panicky, inexact, one of those insanely catered affairs of the unconscious when streams of incongruous people gatecrash.

Celestine had been in there somewhere towards the end. She’d picked up the befuddling gun, and with three or four quick movements of her hands she had the whole thing snapped back together again. There, she kept saying to him. There, there, there. What the hell was she doing in his dream anyhow?

Cairney got out of the hard little bed. He dismissed dreams as messages from nowhere, sediment stirred by the uncontrolled brain. He didn’t see in dreams the things soothsayers did, prophecies and portents, future disasters. He went inside the small showerstall and drummed tepid water all over his body. When he was finished he dressed quickly. He packed his canvas bag, locked it, left the room. But the dream, as if it were a narrative in a seductive tongue, still whispered in his mind.

He travelled down to the lobby by the stairs because elevators were always too claustrophobic for him. Outside, where the sun was cold, he crossed the street and walked in the direction of the garage where he’d parked the Dodge. It was a sleazy stretch of Eighth Avenue, pawnshops and fastfood places and porno stores. He entered the dimly lit garage cautiously, distrustful of dark places. He found the car on the second level exactly as he’d left it. Unmolested, unvandalised. He unlocked it, drove it past the ticket booth, paid his fee, and then he was out into harsh white sunshine, heading north. By the time he reached Columbus Circle he was hungry but he didn’t want to stop until he was clear of the city.

Finally, when he was close to Yonkers, he pulled into a twenty-four hour place that served the whole staggering array of American roadside cuisine. He took a table near a window and chewed on a strange red hot-dog, which he left half-eaten. He drank two cups of coffee, and for the first time that day his brain, which had been numb and unresponsive, kicked into gear. Low gear.

You’ll have times when you can do nothing but abort, boy. You’ll have times when circumstances are stacked up against you. The trick then is to step away without despair.

Without despair, Cairney thought. But he could feel a certain sickness in his heart. Ever since he’d entered the United States, he’d encountered one set of circumstances after another that provoked nothing but despair in him. But he wouldn’t abort. Not now. Not ever. Was it his fault that Tumulty had been playing both ends against the middle? Was it his fault that Linney had turned out to be some kind of frantic madman? Was it his fault that Mulhaney’s bodyguard had chosen to come through the door of the restroom when he did and then draw his goddam gun? You were sometimes faced with extremely limited choices. And sometimes you had no choices at all, because events narrowed all around you and went off at their own uncontrollable speed, and the only thing you could do was follow the track of chaos and make the best of what you had.

Finn’s money, the Cause’s money, had taken on a grail-like quality in his mind. It shimmered and tantalised and then, as though it were a mirage, vanished even as you thought you were close to it. He had moments now when he wondered if it even existed or, if it did, whether it was buried forever in some inaccessible place beyond human reach. All he knew was that the money was surrounded by accusations and treacheries and suspicions. People told lies. They made up stories. Linney had been sure that Mulhaney was responsible for the theft. Mulhaney had pointed to Kevin Dawson. And he’d also mentioned somebody enigmatically known as The Old Man, who appeared to occupy a position of authority that put him in a place beyond suspicion.

What Cairney suddenly wondered was how a man like Frank Pagan would have gone about the task of searching for the money. Pagan, presumably, had been trained in investigative skills, quietly gathering data, knowing the questions to ask, knowing how to assess the answers. Frank Pagan, perhaps, had insights that were denied Jig, a deeper human understanding, an ability to cut through lies and deceptions and misleading statements. Frank Pagan understood people because he lived in their midsts. Jig didn’t. Jig didn’t know people. Jig had cut himself off from ordinary society by his own choice. Cairney could imagine Pagan operating on some intuitive level, knowing when he was hearing bullshit and when he was hearing the truth. Cairney, trained to assassinate, trained to track, to plant explosive devices, to use rifles, to survive in extreme conditions, in arctic cold and desert heat – Cairney had never learned a goddam thing, in all his training, about the puzzlingly intricate clockwork of the human heart. And it was hurting him now.

He picked up the half-eaten hot dog and shredded it surgically into fragments between his fingers. It was useless to speculate on what gifts he had and didn’t have. It was the wrong time. It was the wrong time to entertain even the smallest kind of doubt. To think that Finn – in his anger and frustration – had sent the wrong kind of man to America.

Cairney pushed the dissected hot-dog aside.

I’ll get the money, he thought.

I’ll get it and take it back to Finn and say There, there’s your money. And Finn would receive it with a small smile of pleasure, the smile Cairney liked, the one that made him feel as if he were basking in his own private sunlight. The kind of smile he’d never seen on his own father’s face. I knew you’d do it, boy. I never had any doubt. And the Cause is forever grateful to you.

Kevin Dawson. He had to concentrate on Kevin Dawson. Given the amount of documentation on the private lives of the Dawson clan, given all the reams of publicity so loved by the tabloids, it wasn’t going to be very difficult to locate the Dawson home. But Cairney knew that Dawson was going to be surrounded by the kind of protection afforded brothers of The President. Which meant extreme caution. And then there was always Frank Pagan to consider.

Cairney stared through the window at a stream of traffic sliding north. Hundreds of Sunday afternoon travellers, whole families complete with dogs, hurrying to dinners with in-laws or visits to the zoo or places of worship. He watched them with solemn detachment for a time.

He stood up, paid for his food, then moved in the direction of the door. There was a payphone in the lobby. He stopped. Glancing through the glass door at his small red Dodge, he was seized by an impulse to pick up the receiver. He dialled a number, punched in coins.

Celestine’s voice was thin when she answered. ‘Hello?’

Cairney listened. Didn’t speak. Why the hell had he made this call? It wasn’t as if he needed to hear his father’s voice, was it? It was something else, something he didn’t want to think about.

‘Hello?’

Cairney opened his mouth, but he remained silent.

‘Is anyone there?’ she asked.

He took the receiver away from his ear. He pictured her standing with the telephone pressed to the side of her face, perhaps a lock of fair hair hanging falling across a cheekbone, her slim legs set slightly apart. The image was strong in his mind, and teasing, and desirable. The sound of her voice brought back to him the night she’d come to his bedroom, and he trembled very slightly.

‘Patrick? Is that you?’

Now why would she think that? Why would she think of his name? He replaced the receiver and went outside to the parking-lot. He unlocked his car, stepped in behind the wheel. He drove away from the restaurant, the sun laying a white film over his rear window.

The White House, Washington

Shortly after Seamus Houlihan’s anonymous phone call had been logged by the FBI in New York City, Leonard M. Korn stepped inside the Oval office like a man with a mission in life. Thomas Dawson saw this at once. Magoo had fire in his myopic eyes. If it were any hotter there, his contact lenses would melt. The President understood Korn’s manner. The man had come here looking for a free hand. He wanted to hear Dawson say that the wolves could be released now, the pack liberated, the time was ripe. The FBI could tear apart the whole goddam Eastern seaboard, if that’s what it took to catch one Irish terrorist.

Korn saw indecision in Thomas Dawson. Indecision and subterfuge. But how could Dawson explain away the bombing of a church in White Plains to the soothed satisfaction of the public? A faulty boiler? Or would he go with some natural phenomenon, like spontaneous combustion? Korn’s Bureau, his agency, his love, was like a caged leopard clawing bars, ready to pounce. This time it wasn’t four casualties in a house in Bridgehampton. This one couldn’t be kept under wraps.

Dawson ran a fingertip over his lower lip and said, ‘It doesn’t make any sense to me, Len. Why come to the United States and blow up a goddam church, for Christ’s sake?’

Korn enjoyed Dawson’s discomfort. The changing currents of international terrorist policy meant nothing to The Director. He was interested only in apprehending the culprit. More specifically, he was interested in being seen to do it.

‘I can understand the death of Linney,’ Dawson continued. ‘He was involved in these clandestine Irish affairs. But a whole churchload of people? Come on. Why the hell this escalation?’

‘Jig may have been after just one person in that church,’ Korn suggested. ‘It’s possible.’

Dawson sighed. ‘If it was Jig,’ he said. ‘Do we have any really hard evidence that he’s responsible?’

Korn considered this a naïve question. ‘He’s our only candidate, Mr. President.’

Thomas Dawson stood up. He could hear Korn panting at the leash.

‘Jig only came here to recover money,’ the President said. ‘I don’t see where bombing churches fits on his agenda.’

‘Terrorists aren’t like you and me,’ Korn said. ‘They don’t function with normal motives. They aren’t driven by normal impulses. We know absolutely nothing about Jig, so how can we say what he is or isn’t capable of doing?’

Dawson poked his blotting-pad with the tip of a silver letter-knife. ‘The latest count is seventy-eight,’ he said. ‘Seventy-eight, for Christ’s sake!’

‘It may rise,’ Korn said.

Dawson ignored what he felt was a rather distasteful eagerness in Korn’s voice. Seventy-eight people was a hell of a tally. What was he going to tell America? What would he announce into that great ear out there? So far, the only information it had received was of an explosion inside a church. No explanation given, a simple headline on news programmes. But by this time the journalists would be scavenging the disaster-site like vultures. Sometimes Dawson thought that freedom of the press was the enemy of democracy. Why couldn’t it be muzzled?

All at once he felt a real need to draw people around him, cabinet members, image-makers, advisors, counsellors, poll-takers, speechwriters, he wanted every possible scenario thoroughly analysed before he did anything. Would this act of Jig’s alienate the Irish from their hero when – and if – they learned about it? Would there be outrage? Or would it somehow draw the clans tighter together? Imponderable questions.

He stared at Korn who gazed back at him with expectation.

The American public could wait, the journalists could dig, the rumours could fly and multiply with the speed of maggots in a rancid stew, Korn could pop some bloodcells. But Thomas Dawson wasn’t going to drop the starter’s flag for the FBI until he’d consulted with his own policy-makers.

He saw he had savaged his blotter with the letter-opener. ‘It’s not my decision alone, Len. I can’t tell you to go ahead with this manhunt of yours until I’ve talked with my Cabinet.’

Korn was annoyed, but not absolutely surprised. He’d always thought Tom Dawson the wrong man for number 1600. He was in too many people’s pockets, for one thing. This whole love affair he conducted with the Irish–Americans was way out of whack. There was one group that had him by the balls. And the Irish–Americans weren’t the only ones. He was in deep with the Italians, the Puerto-Ricans, the farmers. If it moved in sufficient numbers, if it had the capability to organise itself and knew how to pull a voting-lever, then Tommy Dawson was probably obligated to it.

‘While you consult, Mr. President, an Irish terrorist is out there, planning God knows what next move, and we have a total of four men on the case – four, count them – one of whom is an Englishman that two of the remaining three spend most of their time watching, for God’s sake.’

Dawson held a hand in the air. ‘You’ll have a decision soon.’

‘How soon is soon?’ Korn asked. ‘And will it be soon enough?’

Korn moved to the door. He had a flair at times for melodramatic exit lines. He enjoyed the one he left hanging on the air as he reached for the door handle.

Dawson was damned if he was going to give Korn the satisfaction of the last word. Angered by Korn’s manner, he said, ‘If your goddam Bureau wasn’t like some goddam elephant that hollers because it fears extinction, if it knew how to conduct an investigation with any kind of tact and discretion, if it wasn’t manned by so many fuck-ups and psychopaths, I’d say go ahead. I’d give you my blessing. But we know what it would really be like, don’t we, Len? There would be inexplicable leaks to the press. There would be interviews with Len Korn, master of counter-terrorist tactics. It would become a full-blown media circus for the glorification of King Korn and his personal adversary, Jig. Black and white! Good guys and bad guys! All the lines of conflict nicely drawn for the masses to understand! God bless the FBI and goodnight!’

Leonard Korn had the black sensation that he’d overstepped the mark. He turned to the President with a small insincere smile on his face. ‘I spoke out of turn,’ he said.

‘Damn right you did.’

‘Sorry.’

Dawson smiled back with an equal lack of warmth. ‘Too much tension, Len. Too much stress. And stress kills.’

‘So they say, Mr. President.’

When Korn had gone, Thomas Dawson did something he never did in public. He lit a cigarette, a Winston, and sucked the smoke deeply inside his lungs. It was the most satisfying thing he’d done in a long time. He put the cigarette out carefully, dropped the butt in a wastebasket, then sprayed the air with a small can of Ozium he kept in his desk. He sat back and shut his eyes. It wasn’t just the violence done against the Memorial Presbyterian Church in White Plains that troubled him. It was also the old Irish thread, that dark green bloodsoaked thread, linking the late Nicholas Linney to brother Kevin.

He tried to get Kevin on the telephone again, only to learn from Agatha Bates that the family hadn’t returned yet from their cabin at Lake Candlewood. And no, she wasn’t precisely sure when to expect them either. What was this goddam urge Kevin felt every now and again to take his family into inaccessible places? This fondness for the rough outdoors and kerosene lights and dried foods?

Thomas Dawson hung up, frustrated, tense and, for the first time in his entire Presidency, truly afraid. Kevin, he felt, was going to be okay because he had the Secret Servicemen around him. But as for himself and his Presidency – that could be quite another matter.

New York City

It was the pounding on the door of his room that woke Frank Pagan at five minutes past nine. He hadn’t meant to sleep this late. Last night, when he’d walked away from Tyson Bruno, he had intended to sleep four hours, maybe even less, but he still hadn’t quite recovered from the ravages of jet-lag. He pulled on a robe, opened the door, saw Artie Zuboric outside. Zuboric swept inside the room immediately. Pagan saw at once that something was up. Artie looked both driven and yet rather pleased with himself. The agent drifted to the window, pulled back the drape, let the room fill with wintry sunlight. Pagan wondered if he was about to be lectured for slipping the leash last night and leaving Tyson Bruno stranded. But it wasn’t that.

‘A church has been bombed,’ Artie said at once. ‘A Presbyterian church in White Plains, New York.’

‘Bombed? With a b?’

‘With a big b,’ Zuboric said. ‘Somebody planted explosives in the place. Seventy-eight people are dead. The explosives went off in the middle of the sunrise service. Nice timing, huh?’

Pagan absorbed this information, feeling tense as he did so. Zuboric wasn’t telling him this for nothing. There was something else coming. Pagan waited, seeing how Zuboric enjoyed dispensing this information.

‘The bombing happened around seven-twenty this morning. At approximately eight thirty a man called my office in New York City and claimed responsibility on behalf of the Irish Republican Army.’

Pagan licked his lips, suddenly dry. ‘Which you attributed to Jig, of course.’

Zuboric eased into sarcasm. ‘I don’t see a whole busload of Irish terrorists running around New York State, do you?’

‘It’s damned convenient to blame Jig,’ Pagan replied. ‘It’s so nicely packaged and wrapped for you. It’s so fucking American. If you can wrap it, you can also buy it. And I don’t buy it any more than I buy the incident at Bridgehampton.’

‘Why? Because you think you’ve got Jig pegged as a Boy Scout? The honourable terrorist? Helps old ladies cross streets before he blows them up? Grow up, Pagan. He doesn’t have any scruples. He doesn’t give a shit whom he hurts.’

Pagan sat on the bed. He could tell Zuboric that Jig operated differently, that Jig was a new refinement in a very old conflict, that there was no way in the world, given Jig’s past acts of terrorism, he was going to blow up a whole church and the people in it. He could tell Zuboric that Jig wasn’t in the habit of murdering the innocent. But he saw no point in saying such things because he could smell the lust for blood, Jig’s blood, coming from Zuboric. He could smell the sweat of the lynch-mob eager to hang a victim in a public place for the intense gratification of the masses. Hang first, ask questions later. People in Zuboric’s frame of mind were notoriously narrow in their vision, and decidedly uncharitable.

‘Face it, Frank,’ Zuboric said. ‘Your man’s an animal. And the sooner you realise this, the sooner we can catch him. You’ve been playing it as if this cocksucker was civilised, which he isn’t. He’s a fucking beast. He ought to be shot on sight.’

Pagan looked for a calm controlled corner of himself, and found it. He had the thought that if only he’d captured Jig last night in Brooklyn, if only that chase through mean streets had ended differently, then Jig would be in custody now and beyond suspicion of any terrorism in White Plains. If. Pagan had a very bad relationship with conditionals. He considered them the lepers of English grammar. He hadn’t caught Jig, and it was pointless now to have regrets.

‘What exactly did the caller say?’

‘You can hear the tape.’

‘I’d like that,’ Pagan said. He remembered all the hours he’d spent in London listening to Jig’s voice, that strange flat drone which announced each new assassination in a cold detached way. He’d even brought in two professors of dialect to analyse the accent. One said it was British West Country, the other that Jig had obviously spent time in America but was working to disguise the fact. Academic dispute, and totally useless.

‘I’ll come down to your office,’ Pagan said.

‘Be my guest.’ Zuboric had gloves on his hands and he rubbed them together. He watched Pagan step towards the bathroom and he said, ‘I also hear you split last night.’

Pagan nodded.

‘Like to tell me where you went?’

‘No,’ Pagan said.

Zuboric raised one of his fingers in the air, shaking it from side to side. ‘I’m fucking sick of you, Frank. I’m fucking sick and tired of the way you want to do things.’

‘It’s mutual,’ Pagan replied.

‘You think you can go after this Irish moron on your own. You think your way’s the only way. Let me remind you, Pagan. This isn’t your country. You don’t have any jurisdiction here except what we choose to give you. If we withdrew our support, you’d be nothing. And if we want to kick you out unceremoniously and go after this Jig ourselves, what the hell can you do about it?’

Pagan stood in the bathroom doorway, flicking a towel idly against the wall. He wondered if there was any sense in getting angry. At whom would it be directed anyway? Artie and the FBI? Furry Jake and the butchers of Scotland Yard? Or at the barbaric nature of those who set off explosives in a church? He decided to say nothing. Zuboric’s head was a Ziploc bag, deeply refrigerated and impossible to open and colder than hell once you managed to tear it apart. He went inside the bathroom, closing the door quietly.

He looked at his pale face in the mirror. Eyes slightly bloodshot. Small dark circles. The IRA blows up a church in White Plains, New York. The IRA kills a man called Fitzjohn in Albany. Fitzjohn almost certainly had a connection with Ivor McInnes, though not one that would stand up in a court of law. What was going on? He brushed his teeth and made a horrible face at himself, mouth open and jaw thrust forward and tongue sticking out. You look your age, Frankie, he thought. This morning, finally, you can see the effects of Old Father Time’s facial. Even inside the body, in the places you couldn’t see, his organs felt ancient and sluggish and all used-up.

Roscommon, New York

Harry Cairney answered the telephone on the second ring. He heard the familiar voice of Jock Mulhaney.

‘He was here, Harry. Last night,’ Mulhaney said.

Cairney didn’t ask who. He knew. He gazed silently out of the window, seeing the security jeep move between stands of bare trees. He felt a small tic under his eye and he put a hand to the place.

‘He came right here, Harry,’ Mulhaney was saying. ‘Are you listening?’

‘Yes,’ Cairney said. ‘I’m listening.’ If the man sent from Ireland could get inside Mulhaney’s headquarters, how could one small jeep keep him at bay if he found his way here? It was an appalling thought.

‘He killed one of my people,’ Big Jock said. ‘He threatened me.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘Harry, what the fuck you think I told him? Nothing, for Christ’s sake.’

Nothing, the old man thought. He wondered about that. ‘And he left? He just left after you said you had nothing to tell him?’

‘That was when he shot Keefe.’

‘Keefe?’

‘A bodyguard.’

Cairney watched the jeep along the shore of Roscommon Lake, then it was gone.

‘Then another guy showed up. An English guy. He was looking for our crazy Irish friend.’

An Englishman. Harry Cairney looked at his wife, who was sitting cross-legged before the fire. By firelight she seemed frail, composed of porcelain. He hated the idea of anyone coming here and putting her in a situation of menace because of something that he himself was responsible for. He couldn’t stand the notion of that. He watched Celestine stretch her legs, reach for her toes, absent-minded exercise. Cairney observed this fluid gesture with the expression of a connoisseur absorbing a particularly lovely painting, then opened the centre drawer of his desk. He looked inside at the handgun, an old Browning. He might not be a young man any more, but by God he hadn’t forgotten how to fight. And he would, if it came to that.

Mulhaney was still talking. ‘This English character asked some questions, Harry. He mentioned your name.’

‘My name?’ Harry Cairney’s heart skipped one small telling beat. ‘Who was this man?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Have you any idea where he is now?’

‘Uh-huh.’

Cairney was silent. ‘Do you think he might be coming this way?’

Mulhaney didn’t answer at once.

‘I don’t know if he knows about you, Harry. I really don’t.’

‘Does he know Linney?’

‘He mentioned Nick’s name.’

‘Dawson?’

‘He knows about Dawson too.’

Cairney closed the drawer. Celestine was watching him. Cairney turned his back to her and quietly said, ‘Then I imagine there’s a damn good chance he knows about me.’

Mulhaney said, ‘I don’t know what he knows, Harry. All I can say is he’s young and he’s quick and he’s ruthless.’

‘It’s a ruthless business.’ Cairney turned once more to his wife and smiled. ‘Thanks for calling, Jock.’

He put the receiver down. It was over, then. The secrecy had been more fragile than he’d ever realised. He went towards his wife, laid his hand on her scalp.

‘What was all that about?’ Celestine asked. ‘What’s a ruthless business?’

Cairney didn’t answer. He didn’t want her involved. He couldn’t bring himself to make up a lie either.

‘I’d like a drink,’ he said. ‘Am I allowed one?’

‘Very tiny.’

She kissed his cheek as she went out of the room. Downstairs in the kitchen she poured a small shot of brandy and mixed a vodka martini for herself. She glanced at the kitchen clock. It was just after noon. She sampled her drink, arranged the glasses on a tray, then headed back upstairs. She didn’t go inside the study at once. Instead she entered Patrick’s room, set the tray on the bedside table, and looked at the various photographs of Cairney as a boy. There was one that depicted him at thirteen, maybe fourteen, sitting crosslegged among other members of a school football team. He had a helmet in his lap. Another showed him in shorts and sweatshirt, poised to release a discus. He was well-muscled and taut even then, but it was the face she stared at. She saw only that eager open quality of youth, the smile of innocence, nothing of the secret darkness in the eyes he had as a man. What do you know? she asked the face. What do you really know?

Old pictures yielded nothing. They were interesting only as history, mileposts on the road to somewhere else. She touched the surface of a photograph with her fingertips, imagining she felt Cairney’s skin under glass. Some hours ago, when the telephone had rung and nobody had talked, she was convinced that the person on the other end of the line was Patrick. Now she wasn’t so sure. Some instinct had suggested it at the time, but now she wondered if it were just the blindly hopeful reaction of a woman intrigued. Intrigued, she thought. There was a word belonging to the cheap romances. Intrigue was for lady librarians vacationing in Corsica or swanning about the Taj Mahal by moonlight. Intrigue wasn’t a good word when it came to serious business. And what else was all this but serious?

She heard Harry coughing along the landing. She switched off the bedside lamp, picked up the tray, left Patrick’s room quickly. Harry was standing in the door of the study, watching her.

‘Wrong room,’ he said.

She laughed his remark away. She kissed him and together they went inside the study. She sat in front of the fire and sipped her drink and listened to a log slip in the flames. Harry sat down beside her eventually, and she laid her head in his lap, closing her eyes.

‘He was quite a sportsman,’ she said lazily.

He looked at her in a puzzled way. His mind was elsewhere.

She opened her eyes, looking up at him. ‘Your son.’

‘Oh.’ Cairney, held captive in his wife’s blue eyes, made a small mental adjustment. The curse of age, this difficulty in focusing. ‘He had one year, I remember, when sports became an obsession. He slept and dreamed sports. He had the makings of a fair quarterback. You were looking at the old photographs?’

She nodded. Firelight made her hair very gold.

Cairney stared at the window. ‘He was always like that, always picking up on something. Then he’d become obsessed with it for a while, before he moved along to something else. He wouldn’t stick with a thing. He’d overdose on it when he was interested, but when the interest went flat he’d just move on. Compulsive behaviour. Always searching.’

‘Archaeology must have been different for him then,’ she said. ‘He’s been doing it for years now, hasn’t he?’

‘It’s the damnedest thing,’ the old man said. ‘I sent him to Yale. He was going to do law, he said. He spent a year at Yale, then suddenly I received a postcard from him. He’s in Ireland, for God’s sake!’

‘Just like that?’

‘Dropped law. Dropped Yale. Wanted to learn more about the past, he said. Wanted to enroll in Trinity College. I didn’t mind that. After all, I suppose I’m the one that gave him a taste of the past in the first place – but archaeology!’

Harry gazed into firelight. There was an ache inside him. He realised he was hurting from the way Patrick had so abruptly left. When you were old, even small emotional slights became exaggerated inside you. You wanted to look towards death without that kind of pain.

‘He went overseas a lot,’ he continued. ‘This desert. That desert. He was always sending me postcards from strange places.’

Celestine was very quiet for a time. She was trying to imagine Patrick Cairney turning brown under a desert sun. It was a fine image and it was exact. Where else would he have gone but to the deserts of the Middle East?

‘For long periods, I’d hear absolutely nothing from him. Then there’d be a flurry of postcards from places with Arab names. I worried at first, but then I had to let go of that. He was grown-up. It was his life. I couldn’t influence him any more.’

‘Did you ever influence him?’

Harry laughed quietly. ‘He’s the only one who could answer that.’

Celestine raised her head, sipped some of her drink. She wanted to know more about Patrick Cairney. Tomorrow morning, first thing. That’s when she’d know something Harry couldn’t possibly tell her. Maybe. Or maybe she was simply tracking a mystery that didn’t exist, a construct of her own mind, something to pass the time with the way people whittled on sticks or took up water-colours. No. She was sure. Damned sure.

‘Are you proud of him?’ she asked.

‘Proud?’ Harry Cairney smiled. ‘I never asked myself that.’

Celestine pressed the palms of her hands against her thighs. The loose-fitting cotton robe she wore slipped up to her knees and she could feel the heat from the fire lay a band of warmth against her calves.

‘Why all these questions?’ the old man asked.

‘He’s my stepson, don’t forget. You don’t have a monopoly on him. I want to know him better, that’s all.’

Cairney looked suddenly rather solemn. ‘Be warned,’ he said. ‘He’s not so easy to know.’

Celestine closed her eyes again. ‘I don’t believe he’s as difficult as you suggest,’ she answered.

Cairney patted the back of her hand. It was all right to talk about Patrick, it was fine, but finally it only produced in him an illusion of normality. Sitting here by firelight, his wife’s head in his lap. The surfaces of the very ordinary. The taste of brandy. Family chatter. He turned his face back towards the window. Out there the world was quite a different place. But he would maintain a front of calm because he was good at that. He had a lifetime of self-control in public office behind him, a decent support-system. He wasn’t given to easy panic or impulsive acts. Everything would go on as it had done before the Connie was stricken at sea. Life, marriage, love.

‘We need music,’ he said, starting to rise.

She shook her head. ‘Let’s enjoy the peace, Harry.’

He rose anyhow. He walked to his desk and looked at the Browning once more. It was years since he’d fired the gun.

Celestine, propped up on her elbows, was watching him. ‘What’s the big attraction there, Harry?’

He closed the drawer slowly.

He came back across the room and sat down beside her. ‘Nothing will ever happen to you,’ he said. ‘I want you to know that.’

Celestine looked surprised. ‘Why would anything happen to me, Harry? This is Roscommon. And nothing ever happens here.’

Harry Cairney closed his eyes. He thought he felt it in the very air around him, a shiver, as if the atmosphere of this house had changed with Mulhaney’s phone call. It was a sinister feeling, and he didn’t like it. It resembled those disquieting moments when you felt that somebody, somewhere, was walking on your grave.

New Rockford, Connecticut

It was two o’clock in the afternoon when Kevin Dawson received a telephone call from his brother in the White House. Thomas Dawson sounded very weary when he spoke.

‘How was Candlewood?’

‘Candlewood was terrific,’ Kevin Dawson replied. ‘You ought to try it some time. That place never lets me down. I always come back feeling refreshed.’

‘My idea of roughing it is to watch black and white TV,’ the President said. ‘One Boy Scout to a family is okay. Two would be a travesty of genetic theory.’

Kevin Dawson heard the sounds of his daughters from the foot of the stairs. They were involved in a game of what they’d described as ‘cut-throat poker’, which they played to rules of their own random making. It was altogether incomprehensible.

Thomas Dawson said, ‘It’s been a long winter.’

Puzzled, Kevin reached out and closed the door of his office with his knee. ‘You didn’t call to discuss the length of the seasons,’ he said.

‘True.’

Another pause.

Kevin sat down, tilting his chair back against the wall. With one hand he managed to pour himself a scotch. He heard the door of the Secret Service vehicle open and close in the driveway below. Both agents, whom the kids had christened Cisco and Pancho, had spent the weekend in obvious discomfort, sleeping in a two-man tent because there was no extra room in the small cabin. They took their meals alone, laboriously burning things over a Coleman stove and filling the cold, sharp air with a dark brown pollution that smelled, Kitty said, like a skunk on a spit.

‘It’s been a long winter, and you’re about ready for a vacation,’ Thomas Dawson said.

‘It’s that bad, huh?’

‘It’s that bad. Nicholas Linney has been murdered.’

‘Linney?’ Kevin felt an odd tightness in his throat. His voice sounded very high, even to himself.

‘I don’t have to spell out the implications.’

‘Was it Jig?’ Kevin asked.

‘Almost certainly. By the way, I don’t want this news bruited about, Kev. You understand me?’

Kevin Dawson drained his glass. He reached for the bottle, poured himself a second shot. All the invigoration he’d brought back with him from Candlewood was draining away. He had the very strange feeling he’d just been kicked in the stomach and couldn’t breathe properly. How in God’s name had Jig managed to track Linney down? Kevin curled the telephone cord tightly around his wrist.

He heard Martha and the kids coming up the stairs. Their voices echoed in this great sprawling house.

‘I don’t think you’re seriously in danger, Kevin. You’ve got protection there. But why take any needless chances?’

Protection, Kevin thought. What it came down to was the fact that all the security in the world couldn’t prevent somebody getting to you, if he was determined enough, and crazy enough, to find a way.

‘What do you suggest?’ Kevin asked.

‘Hawaii. Make it a business trip with a little R & R on the side. Check into the family interests out there, but take Martha and the kids as well. Stay until Jig’s been caught. How soon can you get out of there?’

Kevin Dawson wasn’t sure. There were business meetings of one kind or another on Monday morning and Martha was the guest of honour at a breakfast in Stamford sponsored by the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which was her favourite charity. It would take more than a terrorist threat to make her cancel. ‘Tomorrow afternoon,’ he said. ‘I can’t see getting away from here before that.’

‘I’d like it if you left earlier, Kevin.’

‘I don’t see how.’

Kevin heard his brother light up one of his infrequent cigarettes.

‘I’ve just been talking with what the press always calls “my closest advisors”, Kevin. Terrorists are the new bogeymen. They’ve replaced Communists in the American nightmare. If I lose some of the Irish vote by sticking the full fury of the FBI on somebody as famous as Jig, I’m advised I’ll pick it up again with the rednecks who have orgasms when they know there’s a firm Presidential hand on the old helm of state. The Law and Order Ticket. The Jerry Falwell Brigade. Imagine a Catholic climbing into bed beside those polyester gangsters!’

Kevin Dawson couldn’t imagine anything like that. But his brother had gone so far into cynicism that nothing was surprising these days. Thomas Dawson, human being, was almost a lost cause. Not quite gone, but fading fast. Tom would climb into bed with any group that could deliver votes. He was less a President than a calculating machine. If the Irish couldn’t be counted on, you dumped them and looked around for substitutes. The politics of expediency, of numbers. Tommy would have sat down to supper with a consortium of the KKK, the John Birchers, the Posse Comitatus and The Unification Church, if he thought this crew could deliver.

‘We were weak on law and order during the campaign,’ Thomas Dawson said. ‘I know it lost us the Mid-West and the South. Maybe my advisors are smarter than I think.’

‘Maybe,’ Kevin said.

‘Call me from Hawaii.’

‘I’ll do that.’

‘Goodnight, Kevin.’

Kevin Dawson put the telephone down. The door of his office swung open and Martha stood there. She was dressed in faded blue jeans and an old red parka. There were streaks of mud on her hiking boots. Her Candlewood Collection. Kevin loved it.

‘The girls and I are going to watch some Disney thing on TV,’ she said. ‘Wanna join us?’

Kevin Dawson nodded. He reached for his wife, held her wrists in his hands. ‘Later,’ he said.

Martha smiled. ‘I want you to know I had a wonderful weekend. I didn’t even mind Pancho and Cisco and their awful cooking. I just had a terrific time.’

‘Me too.’

Kevin wondered how to approach the subject of a trip to Hawaii. Martha hated to travel very far from her home. A day trip to Stamford was as far as she liked to go.

‘Why don’t you watch your movie, then we’ll put the kids to bed as early as possible. You can slip, as they say, into something more comfortable, and I’ll open a bottle of wine.’ Kevin thought that a couple of glasses of burgundy would make the notion of Hawaii palatable to her. She might not cancel her luncheon in Stamford, but she might be persuaded that Waikiki was a good idea. Sometimes you had to coax Martha along, seduce her into acceptance. Besides, nothing was more pleasurable in Kevin Dawson’s world than the act of making love to his own wife.

‘You’ve got a funny look in your eyes,’ she said.

‘Don’t I.’

‘I know that look, Kevin Dawson.’

‘You should. You’re the one that put it there.’

She raised her face up and kissed him, standing on tiptoes. ‘I look like somebody from the combat zone,’ she said. She went to the door, turned back to him. ‘Next time you see me I’ll be gorgeous.’

‘You always are,’ Kevin Dawson said, but his wife had already gone.

He sat alone in his room, staring absently at a pile of business papers. He couldn’t keep Nicholas Linney out of his mind. He kept seeing Nick as he’d seen him last at Roscommon, kept hearing Linney say he could take care of himself. Well, he hadn’t. He hadn’t taken care of himself at all. He thought now of Harry Cairney and Mulhaney and he considered calling them. But what was there to say? And neither of them had troubled to call him, which meant they had nothing to say either.

Kevin Dawson walked to the window. He looked down at the Secret Servicemen. One of them – Cisco, Pancho, Kevin wasn’t sure – stared up at him and smiled. A fleeting little expression, then it was gone. Kevin stared across the meadowlands that stretched all the way from his house to the road. Beyond the ribbon of concrete the hills rose up, pocked with mysterious shadows and dark trees. It was a landscape he had been familiar with all his life, except that now it appeared strange to him, and threatening, as if it might conceal the Irishman somewhere in its crevices.

New York City

The voice on the tape said: I’m claiming responsibility on behalf of the Irish Republican Army for the explosions in the Memorial Church at White Plains. Have you got that, shithead? I don’t intend to repeat it. And then the tape went silent, the line dead. Frank Pagan pressed the rewind button on the Grundig and listened for the third time. Zuboric drummed a lead pencil on the surface of his desk, watching Pagan carefully. You couldn’t tell, from the surfaces of the Englishman’s face, what he might be thinking.

The voice filled the room again. Pagan pushed the stop button. He looked at Zuboric.

‘It’s Irish. There’s no mistaking that,’ Pagan said.

Zuboric stroked his moustache. There was something in Pagan’s eyes he didn’t like. He wasn’t quite sure what it was, but a strange little film had appeared in the ashen greyness. A sneaky quality. It was as if Pagan’s eyes were being bleached of what colour they possessed. Zuboric wished he had a passport valid for entry into the Englishman’s mind.

‘Is it Jig?’ the FBI agent asked.

Pagan stared down at the reels of the Grundig. ‘It could be,’ he said.

‘You’re not convinced, naturally.’

‘I’m just not sure. There’s distortion. And maybe he’s disguising the voice. It could be Jig.’

Zuboric appeared satisfied with this. Frank Pagan walked up and down the office and then returned to the Grundig, as if he needed to hear the voice one last time to be absolutely sure. He pushed the play button, listened, killed the machine.

‘I’m still not one hundred per cent certain,’ Pagan said.

‘We don’t need one hundred per cent certainty, Frank.’

No, Pagan thought. You don’t. He looked at Zuboric’s college diploma which hung just over his head and wondered what institution of Higher Learning had been so foolish as to bestow any kind of degree on Zuboric. Obviously it was one that didn’t specialise in imaginative pursuits.

‘I’d like to have the original Jig tapes relayed from England,’ Pagan said. ‘A comparison would erase any doubt.’

Zuboric was about to make an answer to this when the telephone rang. Pagan watched the agent pick up the receiver. Zuboric’s body was suddenly tense, at attention, which meant only one thing. Leonard M. Korn was on the other end of the line. Pagan listened to the occasional ‘Yes sir’ which Zuboric dropped into a conversation that was otherwise one-sided. Yessir, yes-sir, three bags full, sir.

Zuboric put the receiver down. ‘Well well.’ He was positively beaming. Pagan thought ships could guide themselves by the beacon that was Zuboric’s face right then.

‘As of eight o’clock tonight,’ Zuboric said, glancing at his wristwatch, ‘The Director is placing himself in charge of the Jig operation.’

‘Ah,’ Pagan said. ‘Divine intervention.’

Zuboric rubbed his hands together. ‘Tomorrow morning, one hundred agents will be working fulltime on Jig. One hundred.’ Zuboric laughed in an excited way. He was like a lottery winner, Pagan thought. Blue-collar, worked hard all his days, liked the occasional sixer of Schlitz, a game of bowling Fridays – and lo and behold! His number has just come up and he doesn’t know what to say. I’m happy for you, Artie, Pagan thought. Spend it wisely.

‘The Director estimates we’ll have Jig in a matter of days.’

Pagan said nothing. He mistrusted the optimism of law enforcement officers, especially those who dwelt on Olympian heights the way Korn did. Probably the guy in charge of the Jack the Ripper investigation had said much the same kind of thing a hundred years ago, and he was still searching.

‘I’m going back to my hotel,’ Pagan said. ‘I’m tired.’

‘I’ll keep you company, Frank.’

‘Of course you will.’

Pagan did up the buttons of his overcoat. He glanced once at the Grundig machine. He thought again of repeating his proposal to have the original tapes of Jig relayed from London, but suddenly it was redundant, suddenly those tapes wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. The hunt was on and the night was filled with baying hounds. And there was going to be noise, so much noise that nobody was going to stop and listen to tapes of the real Jig. Even if they did, they wouldn’t hear them anyway because blood had a way of singing into your ears, making you deaf. The hunt mentality, whether it was Federal agents thrashing around for Jig or plum-rumped English squires intent on diminishing the evil fox population, was akin to insanity. It was blinded, and restricted, and obsessive.

Whoever had called the FBI about White Plains wasn’t Jig. He didn’t sound remotely like Jig. There was no way in the world Jig had made that phone call. Pagan had hoped to use his apparent uncertainty as a ploy, a way of winning a little time and getting the real tapes played. But he saw further manoeuvres as totally useless now. There was no future in arguing, in trying to convince Zuboric. For his own part, he knew what he was going to do. It wasn’t the smartest move he’d ever contemplated, but at the same time he couldn’t see any alternatives. He had tried to play this whole thing by FBI rules and regulations, but that time was long past. He hadn’t come all this way to America to have his quarry trapped in some bloody corner by morons like Zuboric. He hadn’t made this trip to see that kind of travesty happen. He wanted Jig, but not on the sort of terms dictated by the hangmen of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Pagan locked the door of his room at the Parker Meridien. He sat for a time on the edge of the bed. He was motionless, like a man in the still centre of meditation. Then, when he moved, he did so with the economy of somebody driven by a solitary purpose. He checked his gun, stuck it in the waistband of his pants at the back. He left the room. It was all movement now. Down in the elevator. Out into the lobby. Heading for the street.

Tyson Bruno came across the lobby towards him.

Pagan swept past the agent into the street, but Bruno came after him swiftly. It was interesting, Pagan thought. There was no effort on Bruno’s part to conceal himself, no shadow-work going on. It was out in the open. Maybe Bruno had been surprised by Pagan’s sudden appearance and the quickness of his stride and hadn’t had time to hide himself. What the hell, it was completely academic now.

Pagan stopped, turned around, waited until Bruno was level with him. Tyson Bruno, who was built like an outhouse, looked very solid in the dusk of Fifty-Seventh Street.

‘Before you even ask me one question, Bruno old boy, the answer is dead simple. I’m going for a walk and I don’t want you on my arse. Is that clear enough for you?’

Tyson Bruno grinned. He was a man who enjoyed adversity. If he hadn’t stepped inside the labyrinthine clasp of the FBI, he would have been a happy bouncer in a sleazy strip-joint. ‘I go where you go, Pagan. This time, you don’t take a hike on me.’

Pagan turned, continued to walk. Bruno was still coming up behind him. On Fifth Avenue, Pagan made a right. Bruno was still behind him.

‘Your last warning, Ty,’ Pagan said, looking back at the man.

‘You shouldn’t be doing this,’ Bruno said.

Pagan moved away. He was tired of boxes. Tired of restrictions. Tired by fools who, left to their own devices, courted lunacy. He paused at a stoplight. Bruno was right behind him, still grinning. Pagan glanced at him.

‘I just keep coming,’ Bruno said.

Pagan made as if to step off the sidewalk and cross the street. He moved an inch or two then stopped abruptly, bunching his hands together and swinging them as if he held a hammer. The connection with Bruno’s jaw made a delicious crunching sound. Reverberations created ripples, like tiny springs, all the way up Pagan’s arms to his shoulders. Tyson, off balance, hopeless, sat down on the edge of the kerb and said, ‘Hey!’ He was bleeding from the lip, and his eyes looked like two glazed pinballs under the bleak glow of the streetlamps.

Pagan didn’t stop. He ran to the other side of the street and began to move along Fifty-Sixth, past the windows of closed restaurants and travel agencies, past the plastic sacks of garbage and a solitary sleeping wino, a failed candidate for St. Finbar’s Mission. Pagan stopped running only when he had reached Fifty-Fifth and Broadway and was certain that Tyson Bruno was nowhere near him. Winded, he paused in the doorway of a closed Greek sandwich shop, where the scent of yesterday’s fried lamb filled his nostrils.

It occurred to him that he had done more than burn his bridges. He had exploded them in such a way that the whole bloody river was on fire.