Hang on St. Christopher (The Sean Duffy #8)

27. The Basement

CHAPTER 27

THE BASEMENT

I had no play. I walked downstairs and found that the door in the hallway leading to the cellar was open. I walked down the shaky wooden stairs into an unfinished basement: concrete floor, washer, dryer, boxes. He unfolded a garden chair and had me sit on it. He sat opposite.

He took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

“Smoke?” he asked.

“I’ve sort of given up.”

“No kidding?”

“Two years now.”

“I’ve been trying to give it up, but I can’t do it. What did you use? The patch? Gum?”

“Sheer tyranny of will,” I said.

He laughed and drew on the ciggie. He looked at my driver’s license, warrant card, and credit cards. None of it interested him. He knew who I was already.

“When did you make me?” I asked.

“On the very first morning you tailed me. What on earth possessed you to get a black Buick GNX?”

“I asked for a fast car and that’s what they suggested.”

“You stuck out like a sore thumb, man. I think they only ever made a couple of thousand of those things.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“You don’t do well when you’re not on your home turf, do you, Duffy?”

“I do okay.”

“The FBI practically deported you in ’eighty-two. What were you thinking coming back over here for anything more than a tourist jaunt?”

“I thought that was all water under the bridge.”

“No water under the bridge, Duffy. When you enter the country, all sorts of alarm bells go off. I probably would have made you anyway even if you hadn’t been driving a black Buick GNX.”

I nodded. “Maybe I will take one of those cigarettes.”

He lit one and put it in my mouth, and I breathed in the gorgeous, comforting Virginia tobacco of a Marlboro red.

“Why Iceland?” I asked.

“I always go there when I go to Europe. Reykjavik Station is one of our hubs. I change passports there. And then usually again in London. Is that how you found me? The hotel? You went to every hotel in Reykjavik with my photograph from the airport?”

“Something like that.”

“That’s good police work. I should have figured you’d do something like that... Well, now that that route’s blown, we’ll have to figure something else out.”

“Yes.”

“So what happened this morning? You doubled back when you got over the bridge?” I asked.

“Yeah. This is exactly what I figured you do. Either yesterday or today. You’re very predictable.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Don’t be depressed. These are very deep waters for the likes of you.”

“The likes of me?”

“A cop, even a maverick cop like yourself. This is way above your pay grade.”

“So let me ask you something, Mr. Wilson, if that is indeed your name, what gives you the right to go around killing Irishmen and women?” I asked.

“What gives me the right? That’s your question?”

“Yeah.”

“You followed me. You know where I work. You know who I work for.”

“That doesn’t answer my question. What gives you the right?—”

“Shut the fuck up,” he said, taking the cigarette out of my mouth and stubbing it on the floor. He shoved the barrel of the MP5 into my cheek.

I desperately fingered the secret pocket of my leather jacket, but I couldn’t pull back the Velcro patch covering the lock pick or the razor blade.

I had prepared for exactly this situation, but I hadn’t bloody practiced it.

Shite.

Oh, Duffy, what kind of eejit are you? Remember the seven “P’s”: proper preparation and planning prevents piss-poor performance. I gave it another go and another, but try as I might, it didn’t bloody work. I couldn’t get the Velcro off and I couldn’t get the lock pick out, which meant there was no play and he was going to be able to shoot me like a slab of meat. Bloody deserved it too. This was what came of sticking your nose in. Few, very few, coppers had the persistence or the money or the stupidity to follow a lead like this all the way to America. For what? Truth? What was that thing that Dr. Creery told us from Paradise Lost ? “Truth never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought its birth.” Ha! Yeah, that was it. Fancy me remembering that from thirty years ago. The most boring class in the school. Me sitting there next to the great Cormac McCann, who went on to become the IRA master bomber, me getting picked on for talking, and Cormac getting told to explain what our conversation was about, and him standing up and off the cuff talking about stressed and unstressed verse and the advantages of the Senecan and Ciceronian styles. The look on Dr. Creery’s face—priceless.

I smiled.

Wilson took a step away from me and lowered the MP5. He had me completely in his power, and he knew it. “What are you thinking about now, Duffy?” he asked triumphantly.

“Milton.”

“Milton who?”

“John Milton.”

“Where does he fit into all of this?”

“He doesn’t. He’s a dead poet.”

“I know that,” he said.

“Do you?”

“Yeah. English major.”

“Which college?”

“I’m asking the questions. I’m going to go upstairs to get something. Don’t move from the chair. If you move from the chair, I’ll consider it a breach of trust and I’ll have to shoot you immediately lest you do anything else to put me in jeopardy. Do you understand?”

“I won’t move.”

“Don’t,” he said, and went upstairs. I spent the next three hundred seconds trying to unhook the Velcro patch in the left sleeve of my leather jacket, to no avail whatever. I’d had it sewn too deep in the sleeve, and my fingers couldn’t reach it.

Wilson came back five minutes later with an ominous-looking sheet of black tarpaulin. He had changed weapons to a Glock, which had also been fitted with a suppressor. He spread the tarpaulin on the concrete floor around the chair. Blood can sometimes sink into concrete if it’s sufficiently porous. And then you’ll never get it out.

“Oh, I have to get one more thing,” he said, and went back to the basement stairs. He paused halfway up. “Remember, if you move a goddamn inch out of that chair, I’m going to kill you immediately.”

There was no play anyway. The basement was below ground. The only way out was up those noisy, creaky wooden stairs.

Shit, shit, shit.

I thought about Beth and Emma. Never seeing them again. This was the ultimate price of selfishness. This American adventure, this desire for closure, this desire to know. Curiosity/cat.

Wilson came back downstairs again with a mug of coffee and an ashtray. He lit another cigarette. “I won’t offer you another cigarette, Duffy. You weren’t lying. You’ve given up. Ever since your police medical in 1989—the medical where your doctor—Dr. Havercamp, I believe his name was—diagnosed you as asthmatic and, quote, borderline unfit for duty, unquote.”

I tried not to act surprised. Americans were always impressed with European sangfroid. “Were my files entertaining?”

“Extremely. For an amateur, you sure have the capacity to get yourself mixed up in a heap of shit.”

“Maybe I’m jinxed.”

“Well, I’m not the one handcuffed to a chair in someone else’s basement,” he said.

“No.”

He took a sip of his coffee.

“You could have made me a hot beverage.”

He shook his head. “Better safe than sorry. Can’t have you flinging it at me, breaking my good china.”

Good china . Americans didn’t say that. Maybe he’d spent a lot of time in the UK, or maybe he had a British mother or grandmother.

“‘The mind is its own place and of itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven.’ That John Milton,” he said.

I wondered why he was trying to impress me. What purpose would it serve if I was going to be food for worms in another five minutes? Maybe that was his thing. Let the guy know that not just anybody was taking him out. He was special. He was good. He studied your file beforehand. He had memorized a whole bunch of old poems at his Ivy League school.

“Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven,” I said, finishing the quote.

He nodded and took another sip of coffee. “I read that in your file too. You’re well educated and, it must be said, a bit of a showboat.”

“What else does it say?”

“Have you read it all?”

“Not allowed.”

“Lot of fascinating stuff... Well, until about a year or so ago, when you moved into the part-time police reserve, whatever that’s supposed to be, and then it goes mysteriously quiet. And I don’t like quiet. We don’t like quiet.”

“Who’s we?”

“I think you know who we is... Anyhoo, a few phone calls, a few emails, and eventually we get another file about Sean Patrick Duffy, semiretired policeman.”

“And what does that one tell you?”

He smiled and took another sip of his coffee. “You see, that one is the one that gives me pause. Because in that one, we’re almost colleagues, you and I.”

“This is no way to treat a colleague,” I said.

“ Almost colleagues. A true colleague would not have flown across the Atlantic Ocean and come into my home. A true colleague would have made a phone call, ascertained the fact that fundamentally we are all on the same side, and left it at that.”

“Are we all on the same side?”

“Yes, we are.”

“That’s a relief. I thought maybe you were going to kill me.”

“No, you’re right. I am probably going to kill you. I’ll certainly kill you if you don’t answer all my questions,” he said without cracking a smile.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why would you kill me?”

“You’re a rogue element, Duffy. Coming all the way here. Breaking into my house? You realize that the work I do cannot be jeopardized by someone like you.”

“What is the work you do?”

“Like I say, I’m asking the questions,” he said, pointing the gun at my forehead again.

“Take the handcuffs off, and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

He shook his head.

“You wouldn’t really kill me in cold blood.”

“As you can probably imagine, this basement is adequately soundproofed. I even improvised a range down here at one time. This wouldn’t make any noise at all.”

“If I start screaming...”

“I won’t let you start screaming. And one of the advantages of living in the country is that everyone lets you be.”

“I wondered what you were doing out here at the end of a long commute.”

He nodded. “Most everyone else lives within the Beltway. But I don’t like to hang out with everyone else. I like to be away from DC and Langley and all those flags at Arlington. When you drive past this house, you probably think retired schoolteacher or something like that.”

“You don’t think wet-work technician for the CIA’s Special Activities Division. ”

He shook his head. “No, you don’t think that. So no one bothers me and I can do what I like. If I kill you, no one will hear it, no one will know about it, no one will know you were ever here, and tonight I’ll take my boat out onto the water as I often do and no one will notice me drop a couple of garbage bags over the side in the darkness.”

“What about the car?”

“I’ll dump that in South Baltimore.”

“I told my sergeant back in Carrickfergus that I was coming here.”

He shook his head. “Not to this address,” he said in a let’s-not-play-stupid-games voice. “This is a classic Sean Duffy lone-wolf op. You’ve got form, buddy. And it wouldn’t even matter if you did tell him. There’s no evidence that you ever arrived here, and there won’t be any forensic evidence that you were ever in my house, I can assure you of that... Now that that’s settled, it’s question time. How, exactly, did you find me? I thought I’d been very careful.”

“A kid made you at Belfast Airport. An informant of mine. And I followed your trail from Knock to Inverness, to Iceland.”

He groaned. “I never thought anyone would go to all that trouble. Don’t you have anything better to do?”

“Not really.”

“Tell me precisely what you did, so I can make sure I never make that mistake again.”

“I showed your photograph to the receptionist at the Hotel Borg, and she recognized you immediately because you’d complained that the curtains didn’t close over all the way in your room.”

He groaned again. “Getting sloppy in my old age.”

“And she had your name and address. Your real name and address after a whole bunch of pseudonyms, which I then immediately shared with the RUC Special Branch.”

He shook his head. “No, Duffy. No, no, no. Everything was going well. You were telling me the truth and I was believing you and we were building rapport. And now you make me do this.”

He put the gun and the coffee cup on his table, walked behind me, locked my head in his left arm until it was rigid and unmoveable, and then he pushed a gloved thumb into my right eye. He knew exactly what he was doing. The pain was excruciating.

“And that’s only a taste,” he said, sitting back down and picking up the coffee cup again. “Now, just the facts, Duffy, just the facts and we don’t have to have any more unpleasantness.”

My eye was throbbing in pain.

I took a half minute to get my breath back.

“I can’t breathe. I need my inhaler. It’s in the inside pocket of my leather jacket.”

“I want you to breathe. At least until you answer all my questions,” he said, reaching into the pocket to get the inhaler. The shoulders unbunched and the sleeves rolled down my arm.

The secret pocket was now accessible.

He put the inhaler in my mouth and I sucked deep.

“Better?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Now, who else have you told?”

“Nobody. The Inverness police knew I was going to Iceland, and the Icelandic police knew I was looking for someone. But I didn’t name you. Your name is only on my notebook back in the motel,” I said, speaking loudly enough to cover the sound of Velcro ripping as I took the lock pick out of its secret compartment.

“That’s it? You haven’t told anyone else my name?”

“I haven’t.”

“That’s what I thought. That’s your MO. Lone fucking wolf. You know what happens to lone wolves in the wild?”

“They get really sad at the annual wolf picnic when it’s time for the wolf wheelbarrow races?”

He smiled at that one and then shook his head. “They starve to death, Duffy. Wolves need the pack, and without the pack they are nothing. I’m not a lone wolf. I have an entire organization, an entire country behind me,” he said.

I put the lock pick into the handcuff.

And this I had practiced. I had done this a thousand times. You can unpick a set of handcuffs with a paper clip if you practice hard enough. And with a dedicated lock pick?

I coughed to cover the sound of the cuff unclicking.

“So what’s the plan? Are you going to kill me?”

“That would certainly be the most straightforward solution,” he said. “You’re a very irritating man, and you’re going to cause us nothing but trou?—”

Before he could finish the sentence, I sprang forward, and with my left hand I tipped the coffee mug into his face and with my right hand I grabbed the Glock off the workbench. Wilson was Company, and not just Company but SAD and therefore trained in all sorts of dark arts; he’d be faster than I and sharper than I and he’d probably get the gun back off me if I didn’t act immediately, so I shot him in the left ankle and kicked him off his chair before he could do anything.

“The next bullet goes into your brain! Facedown on the floor, hands behind your back!”

He complied and I cuffed him with his own cuffs. I examined the ankle wound. He would need a screw or two in the subtalar joint, but I had missed the artery that runs down the front. He wouldn’t bleed to death, but he would be hurting. Good.

I took a wallet out of his pocket. His credit cards, CIA ID, and driver’s license all said that he was actually someone called Kevin Donnolly, aged thirty-three years. He tried to get up, but I wasn’t going to let him pull the same arsey-varsey shit on me.

“Just stay lying on the floor, pal. Get yourself really comfortable. I’ve got some questions of my own.”

“I’m not telling you anything,” he said between gritted teeth.

“You think I won’t kill you?”

“I know you won’t kill me .”

“Let me tell you about a case that wasn’t in my files,” I said, and explained how I had killed Freddie Scavanni in more or less cold blood.

“But he was a bad guy; we’re on the same side,” Donnolly protested.

“Are we? I’ll need to be convinced about that. And besides, there are other things apart from killing that could be done to you. Have you ever heard of a Belfast six-pack?”

I explained to him what a Belfast six-pack was. Bullets in the ankles, the kneecaps, and the elbows. It wouldn’t kill him, but he’d be a desk jockey for the rest of his days in the CIA. He was sufficiently convinced by the Belfast six-pack that I felt encouraged enough to press record on the Walkman. The blank tape spooled, and the light for the internal mic came on.

“Now, first of all, is Kevin Donnolly your real name?”

He didn’t answer.

“I’ve got your ID right in front of me.”

“Yes,” he grumbled.

“Where are you from, Kevin?”

“New York City.”

“DOB?”

“Seven/seven/sixty-nine.”

“And who do you work for?”

“What does it say there?”

“The CIA.”

“That’s who I work for.”

“What do the neighbors think you do?”

“They think I’m a bureaucrat in charge of fertilizer inspection at the Department of Agriculture.”

“That job is so boring that actually, I’ll bet you they all think you’re in the CIA.”

“Perhaps.”

“What were you doing in Ireland?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

I pressed Pause on the Walkman and shot the floor two inches from his face. When his yells had died down, I pressed record again.

“What were you doing in Ireland?”

“Wet work.”

“And in plain English?”

“I was contracted to take out a man and a woman.”

“What man and what woman?”

“Alan Locke and Eileen Cavanagh.”

“Which you did.”

“Which I did.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Try me.”

“You’re not authorized to know.”

“Maybe not, but you’re going to tell me anyway,” I said, shutting off the tape recorder and putting the barrel of the gun behind his kneecap.

“All right! All right! Put the gun away. I’ll tell you.”

I turned the tape on again.

“Speak.”

“Brendan O’Roarke,” Donnolly said.

“What about him?”

“Alan Locke and Eileen Cavanagh were assassins working for him.”

“So?”

Donnolly sighed. “For the last year, the British, Irish, and American governments have been in negotiation with the IRA Army Council about an end to the Troubles.”

I had to conceal a gasp. This was news to me. Not even a hint of such a thing had leaked into the press.

“Continue,” I said.

“In a few months or early next year, the IRA is going to announce a ceasefire and a cessation of military activities. In return, the British are going to set up a power-sharing assembly and begin the release of all IRA prisoners.”

“They’ve agreed to this?” This kind of offer had been on the table since the 1970s, but there had never been any traction before.

“The IRA Army Council is split. Seamus and Brendan O’Roarke are two of the most powerful hardline holdouts.”

I understood it all now.

“Brendan O’Roarke had been in the process of organizing a coup d’état in the Army Council, and the CIA was asked to stop him?” I asked.

“Not quite. We have not yet been given permission to operate on the soil of the Irish Republic, so we can’t hit O’Roarke directly...”

“But O’Roarke’s assassins in Northern Ireland were fair game?”

“O’Roarke set up a team in Northern Ireland in anticipation of taking out three of his rivals in the IRA Army Council. He was planning a midnight coup. The Brits and Irish couldn’t possibly be involved in taking out these assassins. Far too hot for them. So they asked us.”

“And you said yes.”

“The Agency said that it would look into it.”

“You did more than look, mate.”

“O’Roarke’s plan was a good one. With ***** ****, Liam Flaherty, and ****** ******** dead, the O’Roarke brothers and their followers would become the majority faction on the Army Council. Any deal with the British would be scuppered. Peace would be put off for twenty years at least.”

“The Troubles continue well into the next century.”

“Exactly. But we’ve taken out the assassins. O’Roarke’s enemies are safe. And now everything is in place for a successful conclusion to the negotiations. With O’Roarke’s three most trusted and dangerous hit men in Northern Ireland dead?—”

“Wait. Three?”

“One of my colleagues took out the final member of O’Roarke’s team last night in Derry.”

“Shit. So what happens next?”

“I can’t tell you the rest.”

“You can and you will. I’m not a blabber, and you know it. But I have to know it all.”

I put the gun in his ear. When that didn’t work, I kicked him in the ankle.

“All right! Stop!”

“Talk.”

“You can’t breathe a word of this, Duffy,” he said between gritted teeth.

“I won’t.”

“We have a team in situ in Paris who are on the trail of Seamus O’Roarke.”

“And another team for his little brother, Brendan?”

“It’s the only way.”

“Back to my original question. What gives you the right to go around killing Irishmen and Irishwomen?” I asked.

“We have the full cooperation of the British and Irish governments. At the highest levels.”

“How high a level? The Home Office?”

“Higher. On both sides of the Atlantic. And in France. Executive level.”

“Oh, I see.”

I was way out of my depth here.

I took a deep breath.

“Would you really have killed me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“These negotiations are too important. They cannot be jeopardized.”

“Why the trip to Knock, to the Marian shrine there?” I asked.

“What I’m doing is the right thing to do. But still, taking men’s lives?—”

“A woman’s life too.”

“You need to make penance, don’t you?” he said.

“And do you think you got forgiveness?”

“What I’m doing is for the greater good. You can see that.”

I took the tape player and stood up.

“Where do you keep the rope?” I asked.