24

New York City

In his room at the Essex House Ivor McInnes stared at the TV.

A man named Lawrence W. Childes was speaking from the small coloured screen. The President’s Press Officer, he was a solemn figure whose gatherings with the press were reminiscent of a convention of undertakers. He told the assembled journalists that the Government had learned of the presence of the Irish assassin Jig in the United States. That Jig, working either alone or with a group of fellow IRA terrorists, had been responsible for the bombing of the Memorial Church in White Plains. That Irish terrorism, so long contained within the borders of the United Kingdom, had come to the U.S.A. He spoke of an extensive ongoing investigation being conducted by the FBI in association with a variety of local law enforcement agencies. He was convinced that Jig would soon be apprehended and brought to justice.

After the introductory remarks, Childes was besieged by questions. Hands were upraised, papers clutched and shaken, cameras thrust forward, as journalists vied for attention: Lawrence W. Childes accepted a question from a fat woman with an Irish name. She represented a wire service. She wanted to know why the Irish were operating within the continental United States, a question Childes hummed at but couldn’t answer.

McInnes had been packing his suitcase on the bed. He stopped, moving a little closer to the TV. The fat woman was still pursuing her line of inquiry despite the protests of other journalists who, like hopeful adolescent suitors, had claims of their own to press for Childes’ attention.

I have no information, Ms McClanahan.

All of a sudden Irish terrorists start operations inside our borders and you don’t know why? What exactly is this Administration hiding, Mr. Childes?

McInnes smiled. He folded a shirt, put it inside the suitcase. He knew that this press conference was going absolutely nowhere, no matter how shrill were the hyenas of the media in their full-blooded curiosity. He rolled a necktie, placed it neatly beside the shirt. The radio clock on the bedside table said it was 6:39. Since Houlihan had already called, McInnes knew the big man had succeeded in the afternoon’s endeavour and had made his call to the FBI on schedule. Which meant that either Lawrence W. Childes wasn’t being entirely open with the press or else the information about the school bus hadn’t reached him yet. Maybe it had been decided, at levels above and beyond Childes, that an attack on school-kids wasn’t something the American public was geared as yet to hear. What difference did it make? McInnes asked himself. Sooner or later news of the latest outrage would reach them, because a thing like that couldn’t be contained forever.

McInnes adjusted the volume control.

A man with a florid face, a boozer’s face, was asking if there were any important political figures in the congregation of Memorial Church at the time of the bombing.

So far as we can tell, the answer is negative, Childes replied.

Then what we’re talking about is plain random violence and destruction?

It would appear that way.

McInnes placed a pair of pants on top of the shirt. Then he picked up the folder that contained the notes he’d made on the history of Ulster workers in the construction of the railroad and put it inside a side-pocket of the suitcase. He went into the bathroom and splashed some cold water on his face, and when he returned the press conference was still in progress.

Graf, Detroit Free Press. Is there any evidence to suggest that the IRA plans future attacks?

We have no such evidence at this time, Mr. Graf.

But why would they come into this country just to blow up one church and then leave again?

As I said, we have no evidence to support the view that the IRA plans further terrorist activities.

McInnes sat on the edge of the bed. He saw Lawrence W. Childes move away from the podium, and he gathered that the press conference had come to an abrupt end. There was one of those uncertain moments when the cameraman loses his focus and the camera swings wildly, shooting a ceiling, an empty doorway, the faces of flustered journalists – but then Childes was back behind the podium again, holding a sheet of paper in one hand. He was calling for quiet and the picture was steady now.

McInnes leaned towards the TV.

Lawrence W. Childes said that he had just learned of a new development. He cleared his throat and read.

At approximately two fifty this afternoon a school bus was attacked outside New Rockford, Connecticut, by gunmen who claim to be members of the Irish Republican Army.

On board this bus were the nieces of The President of the United States. The President has no statement to make at this time.

There was a long silence. Then the questions, held in check a moment by the fragile sea-wall of concern and decency and outright shock, came bursting forward. Were the Dawson girls injured? How many were on board the bus? What was the number of casualties? Was this the same group that had destroyed the church in White Plains? Was this the work of Jig? Lawrence Childes, face drained and voice shaking, clasped his hands and said that he had no information to add to what he’d already said. Tracked by reporters, who now showed all the demeanour of crazed ladies at a hat sale, he moved away from the podium. Security officers blocked the newsmen as Lawrence Childes vanished down a hallway without looking back.

McInnes turned the TV off.

There. It was out now. It was common knowledge.

And McInnes experienced a feeling that was jubilation suffused with relief. The road had been mapped and travelled and was behind him now. He had won. He zipped up his suitcase, then turned the small key in its lock. He tossed the key in the air and snapped it up in his hand as it fell back down. He uttered a small whoop of exhilaration.

It was out now and all America knew it. The Irish Republican Army had blown up a church and then attacked a schoolbus. The IRA had sunk to a level that defied description. Already, McInnes was anticipating the next day’s headlines and editorials, the anger and dismay that would yield to the call for blood, for violent responses to violent men, an eye for an eye. He could hear the knives being released from their sheaths and sharpened. Revenge, when it came, would be devastating.

He didn’t hear the knock on his door at first. Even when he became conscious of it, it barely registered. An intrusion from another world. He turned. Whatever it was, whoever, he could handle it. He could handle anything now. There was nothing that was beyond his capabilities.

He opened the door. Somehow he wasn’t altogether astonished to see Frank Pagan. The presence of a second man, somebody McInnes had never seen before, did surprise him, but he quickly took it in his stride. He was in a place where even Frank Pagan couldn’t harm him.

‘Why, Frank,’ he said. ‘And you’ve brought a friend. How very nice.’

Pagan’s face was dark. His forehead was broken into deep ridges and his jaw was set at a belligerent angle. His large hands were clenched and they hung at his sides, as if restraining them required effort. The other man had drawn a gun. Curiously, though, he didn’t aim it directly at McInnes. Instead, he seemed to point into the space between Pagan and McInnes as if he wanted to cover both men. McInnes stepped back.

‘Talk to me,’ Pagan said. ‘Start at the beginning and talk to me.’

‘We’ve talked already,’ McInnes replied. He glanced at his suitcase.

‘Packed, are we? Ready to leave?’ Pagan asked.

‘Quite ready.’ McInnes looked briefly at the gun in the young man’s hand. ‘There’s nothing left for me to do here.’

‘Wrong, Ivor. You’ve got unfinished business.’

McInnes shook his head. ‘Tell your friend to put his gun away, Frank.’

‘I can’t tell him anything like that,’ Pagan said. He widened his eyes and smiled. ‘Bad manners on my part. I forgot to introduce you. Ivor McInnes meet Jig.’

McInnes felt a pulse throb at the back of his throat. He looked into the young man’s eyes, which were harder even than Pagan’s, and had an odd sideways quality, a shiftiness. McInnes wondered how this state of affairs added up. Pagan and Jig. Now there was a combination that God and Scotland Yard and the FBI hadn’t exactly intended. How had it come about that Frank Pagan and Jig were together? How had this pair managed to find one another, and who was the quarry, who the hunter now? It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Not at all.

‘Jig isn’t pleased, Ivor,’ Pagan said. ‘He isn’t pleased at all. Which goes for me too.’

McInnes saw a narrowing of Jig’s eyes. It was hardly perceptible, but it was as obvious as a neon to McInnes.

‘I’m sure you’re making some kind of sense, Frank,’ he said. ‘But it escapes me.’

Jig spoke for the first time. ‘Tell us about the church, McInnes. Tell us about the schoolbus.’

‘Terrible things,’ McInnes said, shaking his head.

‘We’re all agreed that they’re terrible things,’ Pagan said. ‘But we haven’t come here to make little sympathetic noises, McInnes.’

‘What do you know?’ Jig asked.

‘What do I know?’ McInnes smiled. ‘Only what I see on TV.’

‘Try again,’ Pagan said.

There was a smell of violence about both Pagan and the other man, and nothing quickened the brain quite like that odour. McInnes stepped to the window and looked out at the park. The ghost of a decision was beginning to take shape at the back of his mind. Sometimes, from out of nowhere, he had an inspiration, a flash, an insight that seemed to transcend the usual laboured workings of logical thought. He had one now.

Pagan stepped closer to him. And then one of Pagan’s hands was clamped on his shoulder, turning McInnes around as if he were nothing more than a sack of frail kindling.

McInnes hated violence. On one broad level it was a political tool of some use, but when it descended to the personal arena it was loathsome. It wasn’t even cowardice on his part either. He’d boxed one year when he’d been a university student in Liverpool, accumulating a fair record, but something about crunching his glove into an opponent’s face had repelled him. As indeed he was repelled now by the way Pagan was holding him.

‘We’re reduced to this, are we?’ he asked.

Pagan held a fist beneath McInnes’s jaw. ‘This is nothing,’ Pagan said. ‘I haven’t even worked up a sweat yet, Ivor.’

‘I don’t think there’s any need for this, Frank.’

Before McInnes could say anything, Pagan had swung the fist in a low trajectory. It dug into the fleshy lower part of McInnes’s belly, doubling him over, expelling all the air from his lungs and causing his eyes to register fiery sparks.

McInnes gasped and sat down on the bed and blinked up at Frank Pagan.

‘It’s like I said, Ivor. We don’t have time for any further bullshit. It’s pain and more pain from here on in.’

Through layers of pain, McInnes realised he had perceived the outline of a plan that would serve two purposes at once. It would get Pagan off his back, which was admittedly a priority right now. But more than that, it would rid him of Seamus Houlihan, whose work was finished and whose continued existence could easily become an embarrassment over the long run. Besides, Seamus had shown a tendency to take the initiative in situations where intervention on his part wasn’t needed. The man was a thug, a cold-blooded killer, and McInnes perceived no kind of future for such a man in his scheme of things. Houlihan was like some kind of primitive weapon that Ivor McInnes had no further use for.

Frank Pagan reached down and grabbed the lapels of McInnes’s jacket.

‘Easy,’ McInnes said.

‘Don’t stop me, Ivor. Not unless you’ve got something sensible to say.’

McInnes raised a hand defensively.

‘Do we talk, Ivor?’ Pagan asked.

McInnes nodded. He was struggling to catch his breath. The lie that had presented itself to him was ingenious, all the more so since it would contain elements of truth. All the best lies had fragments of truth in them.

‘We talk,’ he said.

Pagan folded his arms against his body. Jig, who had been observing this situation without comment, still had his gun trained in front of him.

McInnes rubbed his stomach where it hurt. He turned the lie around in his mind, preparing to float it in front of these two hostile men. ‘I heard a story in Belfast,’ he said. ‘I have my sources, you know.’

‘Go on,’ Pagan urged. His tone was sceptical.

‘Give me a minute, Frank. Breathless.’ McInnes stood up now, just a little unsteady. He took a couple of deep breaths. ‘I heard an interesting little yarn about a group of disaffected IRA men who were planning an action in America.’ McInnes paused, looking first at Pagan, then at Jig. Both of them were bloody poker-players, he decided.

‘It appears that this IRA cell, unhappy because money wasn’t coming down the pipeline as fast as they wanted it, decided to branch out. Well, you have some idea of how the IRA is, don’t you? They’re forever splitting into factions. They’re always squabbling and going for each other’s throats. Anyhow, this group, which needed finances for various projects – presumably of a criminal nature – came up with the notion of doing a couple of outlandish things in America. The idea behind their thinking was quite simple. They felt that if they went off at a tangent in America, they’d be making a point with the powers back in Ireland. It would be a form of blackmail, you see. They’d come here and make a mess, which would be like holding a pistol to the head of the people in the IRA who mind the purse. Are you with me?’

Frank Pagan didn’t move a muscle. No nod, no expression. McInnes swallowed and continued. ‘This little group of the disaffected decided on outrages. Human outrages. Acts that would alienate public opinion. A church would be first. What’s more innocent than a church after all? Then they thought of the answer to that one, didn’t they? They came up with something even more vile. A schoolbus. Better yet, what if that particular bus carried two rather important children? You see the wicked way some people think.’

‘Spare me the moral judgments, Ivor.’

‘Well, apparently they’ve come here and they succeeded in doing what they set out to do. Now they think they’ll go home and suddenly the purse-strings will be wide open for them because if they’re not then it’s an easy matter to come back to the United States and do something else.’ McInnes paused. He wished he had a litmus paper he could dip into Frank Pagan’s brain to check the effect of his story on the man. ‘You understand what I’m telling you, don’t you?’

Pagan said nothing.

McInnes went on, ‘Blackmail, Pagan. Blackmail on a terrible scale. You and I might not understand that way of thinking, but certain people come to it quite naturally. And the people responsible for these horrors are quite capable of anything. As you well know.’

‘Where do you fit in, Ivor?’

McInnes stood up, a little shaky. A lie was always more convincing if it involved a detail that cast the liar himself in a bad light. And this was the tactic McInnes pursued now. ‘I know how many people perceive me, Frank. They think that because I’m socially and philosophically opposed to Catholicism, that I’m behind Protestant violence.’

‘Get on with it, Ivor.’

‘You’re an impatient man, Frank Pagan.’

‘You have that effect on me.’

McInnes smiled slightly. ‘Well, to be perfectly honest, I saw an opportunity to do myself some good. Call it selfish thinking. I’m not without a certain vanity, after all. Most people have some. What I genuinely believed was that I could come here, make contact with these people and perhaps negotiate something that wouldn’t involve the violence we’ve seen in the last few days. In other words, I misled myself into thinking I could contact these men and reason with them. It didn’t matter that I was on a different side from them. The point was, I thought I could sway them, I thought I could make a gesture that had nothing to do with the partisan nature of life in Ireland. I believed I could spare the United States a taste of the strife that has torn Ireland apart for so long.’

McInnes paused. He stared at Frank Pagan with a look of grief and misery in his eyes.

‘I failed, obviously.’

‘You thought you could be a saint, did you?’

‘Not a saint, Frank. Just the voice of reason.’

‘The voice of reason,’ Pagan said flatly. ‘Do I applaud now?’

‘Applaud?’

‘Quite a little performance, Ivor.’

‘You don’t believe me?’

‘In another world I might. In a world where cows played bagpipes and money grew on trees, I might be convinced.’

McInnes shrugged. ‘I’m telling you the truth.’ He looked at Jig, who had been listening motionlessly to the story.

Pagan said, ‘Let me see if I can get this straight, Ivor. You came after these men, without telling anyone in authority, because you imagined you could do your Henry Kissinger bit and get them to sit down like reasonable men at a table? You imagined some bloodthirsty IRA characters were going to pay attention to the man they think of as the Protestant anti-Christ?’

‘I thought I could do myself some good,’ McInnes said. ‘Call me vain. Call me egocentric. Call it a normal human response.’

‘Call it bullshit,’ Frank Pagan said.

McInnes looked down at the floor. He felt suddenly very calm, in control of things. Even the sight of Frank Pagan’s incredulous face didn’t trouble him.

‘You asked for the truth,’ McInnes said.

‘And what did I get? Tripe.’

‘Have it your own way, Frank.’

Pagan glanced at Jig, then said, ‘What about Fitzjohn? How does he fit into this fable of yours?’

McInnes looked sheepish. ‘I’m afraid I lied to you there, Frank.’

‘Well, knock me down with a feather,’ Pagan said.

‘Fitzjohn was acting on my instructions to arrange a meeting between myself and this IRA faction.’

‘Your personal emissary.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And?’

‘They killed him. They aren’t reasonable men. I thought they were. But I was wrong again. Poor Fitzjohn.’

Frank Pagan sat down on the bed now. ‘If any of what you’re telling us is true, you’re covered in blood. You’re up to your thick neck in blood. You claim you knew in advance of situations that could have been prevented if you’d gone to the authorities. Jesus Christ; we’re talking about innocent kids here! We’re talking about kids travelling home on a schoolbus.’

‘Ask yourself this. Would the authorities have listened to me?’

‘I don’t believe a word of this. That’s the problem I’m having, Ivor.’

Jig moved slowly across the floor. McInnes imagined that the gun in the young man’s hand was going to come up through the air and smack him straight across the face and he braced himself for it. But it didn’t happen.

Jig asked, ‘How did your source happen to come upon all this information in the first place?’

McInnes’s mind was like a needle laying threads across what had already been embroidered. He knew how he could convince Jig of his story at least. He knew which name to drop into the conversation for maximum effect. He said, ‘I can’t reveal that. But I can tell you this much. A man called Padraic Finn was in control of finances, which didn’t please certain people. It obviously didn’t please the faction I’m talking about, the ones who are here in America right now.’

‘Finn?’ Jig asked.

‘That’s right.’

Jig stared at McInnes. There was a flicker of interest in his eyes now. ‘How did your source know about Finn?’

McInnes smiled in a weary way. ‘There’s a very old craft called infiltration, Jig. No doubt you’re familiar with it.’

Jig absently fiddled with the tuner of the bedside radio. ‘What do you know about the missing money?’

‘Money?’ McInnes replied.

‘Money from the Connie O’Mara,’ Pagan said.

‘I’m a couple of steps behind you,’ McInnes said in a puzzled way. ‘You’re talking in another language.’

There was silence inside the room.

‘I don’t believe Finn was infiltrated,’ Jig said finally.

McInnes gazed down at his suitcase. ‘He wasn’t just infiltrated, my friend. No, it was more than that.’

Jig stared at McInnes. ‘What more?’

‘This same IRA faction murdered Padraic Finn at his home near Dun Laoghaire.’

Jig didn’t move. McInnes saw the face change. He saw the lips open and the skin turn white. He saw all the light sucked from the eyes, drawn backwards into some unfathomable area of the skull. McInnes had never seen a face alter so quickly, so profoundly.

Jig shoved his gun directly at McInnes’s head, the barrel pressing in a spot just above McInnes’s ear.

‘You lying bastard, McInnes.’

McInnes tried to move away from the weapon, but Jig was pressing it hard.

‘I’m not lying,’ McInnes said.

‘They couldn’t infiltrate Finn. They couldn’t murder him.’

‘But they did. They went at night to his house. They’d already bribed the watchman, George Scully. With nobody to protect the house, it must have been easy for them.’

Jig took the gun from McInnes’s head as suddenly as he’d placed it there. He opened his mouth to say something, but no words came. He was like a man trying to still some awful internal turmoil to which he was totally unaccustomed. A man experiencing some new and terrifying sensation that he couldn’t name, couldn’t identify, didn’t want to believe.

‘No,’ Jig said, and his voice was hollow.

McInnes said, ‘I know where these killers are. Their leader is somebody called Houlihan. There are four in this group, so far as I know. They travel in a rented Ryder truck. And they’re presently staying at a place called The River View Motel near Hastings.’ McInnes paused. He could see that Jig was absorbing this information quietly, but Frank Pagan – ah, always the sceptic – was looking incredulous, a big frown distorting his features.

McInnes thought a moment about Houlihan and the others. It was perfect. If there was a confrontation in the course of which Houlihan and his pals were killed, it would be splendid. What did it matter if they were later discovered, after fingerprints were run through computers, to be Free Ulster Volunteers and not IRA? He’d simply say he was mistaken, if Pagan asked. He’d simply say he’d received the wrong information and had passed it along in good faith, that he’d believed the men in The River View Motel were IRA. Pagan couldn’t prove otherwise. He could interrogate until doomsday, but he couldn’t prove a damn thing. There was just no way. And, since Houlihan had dumped the guns and the remote-control devices that triggered the explosives, there was absolutely nothing to tie some dead FUV men into the barbarism in New Rockford or the bombing in White Plains. All anybody would ever know was that four men from Ulster, their purpose in America mysterious, had been killed in a motel in Hastings, New York.

The weakness in this scheme was the possibility of Pagan taking prisoners – the slight chance that Houlihan or one of the others might talk. But it was such an unlikely possibility that McInnes dismissed it. For one thing, Houlihan and the others would never talk. Houlihan’s strange moral code precluded betrayal, no matter the circumstances. He’d never give anything away. He was a miser when it came to revealing information. He’d never say anything about his reason for being in the U.S.A. Even if he wanted to talk, was he likely to admit that he’d gunned a schoolbus and bombed a church?

But it would never come to that, because McInnes knew Houlihan well enough to guess that Seamus, even though he’d dumped the incriminating automatic weapons, wasn’t going to discard his beloved handgun quite so promptly – he’d never go anywhere without his pistol. Which was fine. The handgun had played no part in the attack on the schoolbus. And if the pistol was all he had, Seamus would gladly go into battle. He’d never turn his back on a good fight, especially if he still had his precious handgun. And Seamus would never be captured because he’d rather blow out his own brains than go back to jail again. Anyhow, if the expression on Jig’s face meant anything, the possibility of prisoners being taken was remote, a courtesy that Jig in his present mood wouldn’t entertain. The young man had a desperate killing look. He was ready to do violence. He was ready to kill. The battle was inevitable and, to McInnes’s way of thinking, a neat solution to his problems with Seamus Houlihan and the FUV. But it would be the last one. After this, he thought, there would be no more violence.

Jig picked up the telephone. McInnes watched him. The hand that held the receiver was tense, skin drawn, knuckles bleached. McInnes heard the young man ask for a phone number in Ireland.

After about thirty seconds Jig hung up.

‘No answer?’ McInnes asked. He thought Dead men don’t answer telephones.

Jig appeared not to have heard the question. He once more picked up the telephone and asked for the number of the River View Motel.

McInnes smiled. ‘You don’t think Houlihan registered under his own name, do you?’

Jig said, ‘It’s easy to find out if a party of men arrived in a Ryder truck.’ His voice was clipped, shorn of intonation, like that of a deaf person who has never learned the nuances of speech.

McInnes stretched out one hand. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘You’ll find out I’ve been telling the truth.’

Frank Pagan stared at Jig. ‘You can’t be giving serious consideration to any of this shit,’ he said in dismay.

Jig said nothing. He dialled the number.

McInnes smiled at Pagan, who had the look of a man chewing on fragments of an electric lightbulb, a trick he’d never master no matter how long and hard he worked at it.

New Rockford, Connecticut

Artie Zuboric had very little experience of handling grief, his own or anyone else’s. Now, as he stood in the living room of Kevin Dawson’s house in the company of Tyson Bruno and the two Secret Servicemen, he was conscious of a tide of grief flowing throughout this large house.

Upstairs, in a darkened bedroom, Kevin Dawson was standing at the bedside of his sedated wife, Martha, holding her hand and muttering something unintelligible over and over. Earlier, Zuboric had looked inside the bedroom through the open door, but his awareness of pain was too much for him.

In the hallway outside the living room people came and went. Physicians. Family members. Employees in one or other of the Dawson industries. There was word that Thomas Dawson himself was on his way here. Zuboric went over to the fireplace and looked at the framed photographs of the two Dawson girls on the mantelpiece, but he couldn’t bring himself to look for long. He stepped out into the hallway and stood at the foot of the stairs. Tyson Bruno came out to join him.

Neither man spoke for a very long time. Grief, Zuboric noticed, imposed silences, made you speak only when you had to and then in hushed whispers. Grief was like sitting in the reading-room of a large library. He glanced up the long staircase a moment. He was anxious to be out of this place, out in the cold night air, but instructions had come directly from Korn that he was to stay where he was until The Director himself had arrived. Already, the site of the attack was being combed thoroughly by a dozen FBI agents and a score of State cops, all feverishly working under floodlights. Forensic experts were going over the bus in punctilious detail. But what could that tell them except what they already knew – that twelve children out of a total of eighteen on the wretched bus had been murdered, including the daughters of Kevin and Martha Dawson?

‘It’s a fucking nightmare,’ Tyson Bruno said.

Zuboric wandered to the front door of the house. He pushed it open. It was a nightmare all right, and it made him horribly impatient. Somewhere in the darkness was the man responsible for it all. Somewhere there was Jig. Zuboric wondered what kind of man was capable of an act like the massacre of school-kids. He knew terrorists courted indecency with a passion. He knew they understood no limits. But this. This was something else.

Tyson Bruno came and stood beside him. ‘I’m thinking,’ he said quietly, ‘I’m thinking Korn’s going to be a very angry man, Artie. He sends us up here to keep an eye on Dawson, and what happens?’ Bruno made a sweeping gesture with one plump hand.

‘He can hardly blame us for this,’ Zuboric answered. ‘Christ, we weren’t responsible for looking after that school bus. That wasn’t our brief, Ty.’

‘Tell that to Korn,’ Bruno said. ‘He’s going to be looking for heads to roll. And we’re the most convenient ones.’

Zuboric drew a fingertip through his moustache. He felt most uneasy. It was more than the grief that eddied through this house. It was more than the wall-to-wall misery of this place. There was an element of truth in what Tyson Bruno said. The Director, who took every dent in the FBI armour personally. It didn’t matter in the long run that guarding a school bus hadn’t even been mentioned. The Director had one of those selective memories that could reach back and revise any conversation. The Director could say that he’d told Zuboric to protect the bus. Zuboric wouldn’t put that kind of thing beyond the man. The Bureau was everything. People didn’t matter. They were nothing more than fuses that burned out and could be replaced.

Zuboric stepped out of the house. He scanned the bleak darkness and the cars parked outside. ‘It’s the wrong time to start thinking about our own skins,’ he said.

‘It’s never the wrong time for that,’ Tyson Bruno replied.

Zuboric made an impatient gesture with his hand. That was something else about grief. It precluded all other matters and feelings, regardless of their importance. You went into a state of suspended animation. Everything was put on hold. You couldn’t act. Couldn’t think.

A sound by the living room door made him turn around. He saw the two Secret Servicemen coming out of the room. They moved almost in unison, like a married couple who have become attuned to one another’s vibrations over the years. They carried with them a scent of cologne, somewhat stale, as if it had been trapped in their suits for a very long time. Without their dark glasses, their faces looked strange and blank, a pair of unfinished masks.

The one called Marco stepped outside the house and lit a cigarette. Zuboric had to move aside to let him pass. The other, Chuckie, remained just inside the door, drawing the night air deeply into his lungs.

‘It’s a hell of a thing,’ Marco said.

There was a muted murmur of agreement among the four men.

Then silence. Marco pulled on his cigarette and said, ‘They were the prettiest kids. Given the fact they were Dawsons and got a lot of attention, they were damned nice. Jesus.’ He dropped his cigarette and crushed it with unrestrained energy. ‘I’d like to get the guy that did this.’

Zuboric looked away. There was a half moon over the hills.

Marco said, ‘It’s sickening. That’s what it is. It’s like somebody kicked me in the gut. I can’t get over the feeling.’ He blinked out at the sky. ‘Some motherfucker comes here and shoots up a bus. I keep thinking, what the fuck has Ireland got to do with those two kids, huh? What did they know from Ireland, for fuck’s sake? And not just those two. A whole gang of kids.’

Chuckie blew his nose into a big white handkerchief. Zuboric thought the moon was the saddest he’d ever seen.

‘Poor Jack Martyns,’ Chuckie said, referring to his dead Secret Service colleague. ‘He thought he had it easy. Went to school every day. Came home at three every afternoon. What a schedule. Nothing to do but look after a couple of kids.’

Marco furrowed his brow and sighed. ‘Jack was a good man.’

Zuboric now caught another scent on the air. It was that of cognac, and it came over strongly on Chuckie’s breath. This pair had been drinking on the sly. That’s why they were suddenly loose and communicative and open.

Marco smoked a second cigarette. Two people came down the stairs and went silently out in the direction of their car. Zuboric recognised the woman as Kevin Dawson’s younger sister, Elaine, who was always in the newspapers because of her celebrated boy-friends. He didn’t recognise the guy who went with her, though. Tinted glasses, silver hair, prosperous. He looked just like all of Elaine’s other boy-friends.

Zuboric watched the beige Rolls Royce slide softly down the driveway. Marco was still puffing furiously on his cigarette and Chuckie was studying the center of his large handkerchief. They put Zuboric in mind of two uncles at the funeral of nieces they’d never known very well. They had been drinking to accelerate their feelings and open their pores up in general.

Marco said, ‘Yeah, it’s a kick in the gut okay.’

Chuckie agreed. He folded his handkerchief. ‘I was wondering about that guy who came this afternoon.’

Marco made a loose little gesture with his shoulders. ‘What about him?’

‘Well, it was kinda coincidental,’ Chuckie said. ‘He comes here, talks to Kevin Dawson. Next thing we know, the bus is attacked. Who the hell was he? I mean, what the hell did he want anyhow?’

‘Okay, I’m with you,’ Marco said in the unfocused way of a man who has drunk one small glass too many. ‘The Englishman.’

‘Englishman?’ Zuboric asked. He had a strange feeling, almost as if a hat-pin had been pushed into his heart. ‘What Englishman?’

Both Chuckie and Marco surveyed Zuboric coolly. They appeared to have forgotten his existence and now, forcibly reminded of it, weren’t altogether pleased by the fact.

Marco stubbed his half-smoked cigarette underfoot. ‘Okay. An English guy comes here. Shows us some fancy ID. Wants to see Mr. Dawson on urgent business. Mr. Dawson says it’s fine. They talk in private for a while. Then the limey leaves.’

‘What Englishman?’ Zuboric asked.

‘The name was Pagan,’ Chuckie said.

‘Pagan?’ Zuboric asked. ‘Frank Pagan?’

‘Friend of yours?’ Chuckie asked.

‘What did he talk about with Dawson?’

‘Don’t know,’ Chuckie said. ‘It was behind closed doors. Seemed like it was urgent, though.’

Zuboric looked at Tyson Bruno. Then he studied the flight of stairs that led up to the other rooms of the house.

Bruno shook his head. ‘I don’t think you should, Artie. Bad timing.’

Zuboric barely listened to his colleague. He was already moving quickly towards the stairs, wondering how he could approach Kevin Dawson, how he could get to a man who was totally lost in grief, how he could find out what Frank Pagan had been doing here only a few hours ago and whether there was any kind of information on the face of the whole planet that might redeem him in the thunderous eyes of Leonard M. Korn.

Grief or no grief, it was worth a shot.

New York City

Ivor McInnes stood in the lobby of the Essex House and dialled the telehone number of the River View Motel in Hastings-on-the-Hudson.

A man’s surly voice came on the line. ‘River View.’

‘Connect me with Mr. Houlihan please.’

“Momento.”

McInnes waited. When he heard Houlihan’s harsh accent he said, ‘This is the last call I’ll make until we meet in Canada, Seamus. I have to be absolutely sure you’ve followed all my instructions to the letter.’

‘Don’t I always follow your bloody instructions?’ Houlihan asked.

‘Not always.’ McInnes saw a lovely girl in a knee-length fur coat wander down the lobby. He watched the loose motion of her body under the folds of the coat. He imagined the bareness of her back and the way her spine would fall in diminishing ridges to her buttocks. She smiled at him in an absent fashion. He was reminded of another smile, another face.

‘This is important, Seamus,’ he said.

Houlihan sighed but said nothing.

‘You’ve dumped everything I told you to dump?’

‘We got rid of the remote control devices yesterday. Nobody’s ever going to find them. Nobody’s ever going to pin that church on us.’

‘I’m talking about the guns, Seamus.’

Houlihan paused before answering. ‘They’re gone,’ he said.

‘Every gun?’

‘Every last one.’

‘Are you absolutely positive?’

‘Is there a point to this conversation?’ Houlihan asked.

‘Did you toss your handgun as well?’

‘I did. With great regret.’

McInnes caught it then. The lie in the big man’s voice. Seamus still had his pistol. Therefore he’d fight. ‘You’re clean then.’

‘As a fucking penny-whistle.’

‘There’s absolutely nothing left that can connect you with any of your recent activities?’

‘Not a damn thing,’ Houlihan said.

McInnes was quiet for a moment. Then he said, ‘You did a wonderful job, Seamus. See you in Canada.’

He hung up, smiling. The girl had gone now. The lobby was empty. McInnes felt a deep glow of anticipation. He had almost reached the end of it all now. Only the final pieces remained to be put in place.

In the rear seat of the helicopter Thomas Dawson sat huddled inside his overcoat. Below, there was one of those staggering views of Manhattan, all lights, like a huge cathedral of electricity. He closed his eyes and sat with his head tipped back. He wasn’t looking forward to an encounter with his brother’s anguish. He patted his gloved hands against his knees and sighed and gazed out of the window again as the chopper banked abruptly, swinging away from the canyons of the city.

There had been a great deal of sorrow in the Dawson family history. His older brother Joseph, to take one example, had shot himself through the head with a revolver at the age of twenty-three because he’d been depressed over some affair of the heart that hadn’t worked out. And his youngest sister, Sarah, had died in a sanatorium from an overdose of heroin. But there had never been anything quite like this, the deaths of two small children in the most violent way imaginable. Sarah and Joseph had been neurotic, highly strung, the kind of people who perceived every slight in the most magnified fashion and perhaps their self-inflicted deaths were not so terribly surprising.

But the two girls –

Dear Christ, they’d been nothing but innocent children! What had they ever done to deserve such deaths? Dawson, not unnaturally, searched his mind for somebody he might blame for this tragedy. It was easy to say that he might have done more personally, could have been more persistent in forcing Kevin to take his family out of the country. He might also have acted more decisively in dealing with the presence of Jig. By the same token, the FBI could have been more vigilant, worked a little harder at bringing Jig to justice. When you started down the blame trail, it was hard to stop. Kevin himself – for God’s sake, he should have seen the danger in his involvement with the Irish. Now, if he understood that at all, it was just too damned late. Goddammit. You could lay blame all over the place with thick brushstrokes, but nothing would ever restore those two small girls to life.

Thomas Dawson took out a cigarette and lit it. He exhaled the smoke slowly in the direction of his fellow passenger, Leonard M. Korn, who’d come aboard in Manhattan.

‘We could have done more,’ Dawson said. He couldn’t keep a certain quiver out of his voice. ‘God, we should have done more.’

Korn said nothing. He nodded his shaven head. He wasn’t a man who felt the kind of pity most human beings do, but in the presence of Thomas Dawson’s obvious grief, he was touched a little. It wasn’t his main concern at this moment, however. He was also thinking of ways in which he might perform some damage control. Admittedly, the Secret Service had been directly responsible for the two children, but there had been an FBI presence in the vicinity, and that was bad. He’d have the scalps of the two agents, of course. He’d nail them to a wall in public. But this kind of blood-letting would only go so far to protect the Bureau from charges of negligence. There was really only one thing that might turn the situation around somewhat.

And that was the death of Jig.

Korn looked at The President. ‘We haven’t prepared for terrorism from this quarter,’ he said. ‘From the Libyans, of course. From some of the Arab countries, certainly. We routinely keep such people under scrutiny. But the Irish …’ And he flapped one of his small white hands.

Thomas Dawson wasn’t interested in what Korn had to say. He was remembering the previous summer when he’d taken his nieces out on the Presidential yacht and they’d cruised Chesapeake Bay. He was remembering a quality in those girls which had struck him as rather unDawson-like. They were without guile, that’s what it was. You couldn’t imagine them conspiring about anything. This had to be on account of Martha’s influence. Dawson gulped down more smoke, which was harsh at the back of his throat. He wondered how Martha was doing. She was a steadfast little woman, one with reserves of strength, but how could anybody pull out of a situation like this?

The Dawsons would survive. They always did. They had their own shock-absorbers for family tragedies. They retrenched, regrouped, and came out stronger in the end. But there was a very bad time ahead. He stared from the window. The lights of Manhattan had gone and there were stretches of black landscape below.

‘We could have done more,’ he said again. He wasn’t really speaking to Leonard Korn, but rather to himself. As far as he was concerned, Korn’s career was coming dangerously close to an end.

Korn could see, even in the darkened cabin, that Thomas Dawson had all the mannerisms of a shellshocked man. The tremor in the fingers, the toneless voice, the way his eyes were quite without life.

‘I give you my solemn vow, Mr. President,’ Korn said, ‘that we’ll settle this Irish business –’

Thomas Dawson interrupted. ‘The British have been saying the same thing for centuries, Korn. And what have they actually achieved?’ Dawson turned so that the instrument lights around the pilot’s seat threw eerie little colours, stark reds and chill greens, against his face. ‘The answer is nothing. In several centuries, the British have accomplished absolutely nothing.’

Korn chewed on a fingernail. It was hard to talk to a man in Thomas Dawson’s present distraught condition.

The President put out his cigarette and continued to speak in the same unemotional voice. ‘Tomorrow, the next day, I’ll meet with the British and Irish ambassadors. I won’t push the matter too strongly – at least not yet – but I’m coming very close to recommending that they consider some form of American assistance in combating the IRA.’

‘An American presence?’ Korn asked. ‘In Ireland?’

Thomas Dawson nodded. ‘A handful of advisors, in the beginning. People with some expertise in counterterrorist tactics. Twenty, say. Twenty-five. Whatever the situation calls for. Later, of course, we could add to that number if need be.’

Korn asked, ‘Will the Irish and the British accept this?’

Dawson shrugged. ‘Who knows? It’s a friendly suggestion. One ally to a couple of others. They haven’t exactly handled it well on their own, have they? Besides, I’m not talking about sending in armed forces. Advisors only. There’s a big difference.’

Korn sat back in his seat. He wasn’t interested in the President’s plans for Ireland.

Thomas Dawson said nothing more on the subject. He was conscious of the helicopter losing height. He looked out of the window and saw, like a submarine rising on an empty dark sea, the pale lights of an isolated dwelling. And then he was dropping towards it, down and down to his brother’s house of sorrow.