The aircraft did not go near the small terminal, but instead taxied to where two cars waited. One was a limousine with black tinted windows and the other a police car. Two State Troopers wearing Smokey Bear hats and black rain-slickers stood by the limousine. Both troopers held rifles. The CIA clearly believed il Hayaween had a long reach.
We took Interstate 84 eastward into the snow-streaked forests of the Pocono Mountains. The bare trees had been splintered by ice-storms and the rock embankments which edged the road were thickly hung with icicles. We drove fast, our way cleared by the State Troopers. Deep in the mountains we turned off the Interstate and twisted our way up ever narrower roads until we reached a big painted sign that read “US Department of Agriculture, Rabies Research Station, Absolutely NO Unauthorised Entry.” The State Troopers, their siren at last turned off, pulled on to the road’s shoulder and waved the limo through.
I grinned. “I’m your mad dog, am I?”
Gillespie shrugged. “It keeps out the inquisitive.”
The limousine stopped at a checkpoint manned by uniformed guards. A high fieldstone wall topped with coils of razor wire stretched into the forests either side of the gates. The guards peered at me, examined Gillespie’s credentials, then the steel gates were mechanically opened and the limousine accelerated into a wide parkland studded with snow-shrouded rhododendrons. We passed between plowed snow-banks, across a stone bridge that spanned an ice-locked stream, and into view of a massive, steep-roofed house that looked like some French mansion unaccountably marooned in a North American wilderness.
This was evidently to be my home for the foreseeable future. Here, under the mansion’s coppered roof, I would be emptied of secrets, and it was not a bad place to be so emptied. The grand portico led into a palatial entrance hall that was furnished with a massive carved table, leather upholstered chairs, and a stone fireplace. Three stuffed mooseheads peered down from the dark panelled walls. A wooden staircase curled round three sides of the hall, embracing an intricate brass chandelier. I suspected the house had been donated to the government by the bewhiskered magnate whose varnished portrait hung gilt-framed above the stone mantel. It was the house of a nineteenth-century robber-baron; lavish, comfortable and bitterly cold. “Don’t say the central heating’s failed again!” Gillespie complained peevishly as he closed the heavy front doors.
“I’ll find out,” Callaghan said, and dived through a side-door.
Leading off the entrance hall was a library, its shelves, I later discovered, crammed with the collected writings of the founding fathers which was just the sort of dutiful yet unreadable collection one would expect of a patriotic millionaire. There was also a dining room, a kitchen, and an exercise room. The mansion’s scores of other rooms were locked away. Other activities were conducted in the house, for during my stay I would sometimes see strangers walking in the grounds, and once I heard women’s laughter coming from the other side of the bolted door in our dining room, but my interrogation was conducted in the isolation of the few rooms opening off the main hall and its immediate landing upstairs. My quarters were on that second floor; a private bathroom, a small kitchenette and a lavish bedroom which held a wide bed, a sofa, a desk, rugs, a bookcase full of thrillers, a reproduction of a drab Corot landscape and a television set. Unlike the downstairs rooms the heat here was working only too well. In my bedroom a steam radiator hissed and clanked under a barred window that could not be opened. I stooped to the thriller-packed bookcase. “A nice collection.”
“Not that we hope you’ll have much time for reading,” Gillespie said. “We expect to be holding conversations with you most days and for quite long hours, though there will be some evenings when you will be unoccupied. The refrigerator is stocked, but let us know, within reason, if there is any particular food you’d like added to the stock. There’s beer, but no spirits. The television works.”
“And the telephone?” I gestured at the phone beside the bed.
“Of course.”
“And it isn’t bugged?” I teased him.
“I couldn’t truthfully tell you either way.” Gillespie actually blushed as he half admitted I was under surveillance, but only a complete fool would have assumed otherwise. He ushered me toward the door. “We have a lot to do, Mr. Shanahan, so shall we go downstairs and begin?”
To unpick the past. To tell a tale of bombers and gunners, girls and boys, heroes and lovers. Confession time.
I WAS TIRED, DOG TIRED. “WE WON’T TAKE A LOT OF TIME today,” Gillespie promised, “but your messages to our people in Brussels were kind of intriguing.” He was being very tactful, not asking why I had appeared in America when I had promised to walk into the Brussels Embassy, nor asking why I had used a false name. “You talked about Stingers? About a meeting in Miami? You suggested a connection with Saddam Hussein? With il Hayaween?”
That was the urgent need; to discover just what evil Iraq had planned, and so I told Gillespie everything about the meeting in Florida where Michael Herlihy and Brendan Flynn had introduced me to the two Cubans named Alvarez and Carlos though I suspected they might as well have called themselves Tweedledum and Tweedledee for all those names signified. I described how the Provisional IRA had negotiated the purchase of fifty-three Stinger missiles for one and a half million dollars.
Gillespie wrote the sum down. I was certain that the library must be wired for sound, and that somewhere in the mansion tape recorders were spooling down my every word, but Gillespie was the kind of man who liked to make notes. “And why were you invited to the meeting?” he asked.
“Because I used to be the Provisionals’ liaison officer with outside terrorist organizations. I was the guy who fetched them their goodies. I was their money-man.”
Gillespie’s head came up from his notebook and for a second or two I thought he was actually going to whistle with astonishment, but he managed to suppress the urge. Nevertheless my words, if I could back them up with chapter and verse, meant that the CIA’s Stringless Program could chalk up one stunning success. “You liaised with all outside terrorist organizations?” he asked.
“So far as I know, yes, although in effect that was mainly the Palestinians and the Libyans. We did some business with the Basques as well, but they were never as important as the Middle Eastern guys.”
“Red Army Faction? The Baader-Meinhof people?” Gillespie asked.
“Never saw them.”
“The South Americans?” he asked hopefully.
I shook my head. “The IRA used to receive fraternal greetings from Cuba and Nicaragua, but no material support. We didn’t need it. We were getting enough weapons from the Libyans and enough money from America, so why should we bother with a bunch of half-crazy Nicaraguans?”
“Even so!” Gillespie was impressed by the Middle-Eastern connections, though I rather deflated the good impression by telling him how the IRA had ceased to trust me four years before which meant that much of my information was out of date.
“Why did they stop trusting you?”
“That’s kind of a long story.”
“We’ll get to it, I promise.” He tapped his notebook with the eraser end of his pencil. “If you’ve been inactive for four years, why did you stay? Why didn’t you come home?”
“Because I always hoped they’d reactivate me. They never cut me off entirely.”
“We’re fortunate they didn’t.” We were sitting in the lavish library, either side of the massive oak table. It was a comfortable room, supplied with a fire and a drinks cabinet and enough oak mouldings to have hidden a thousand microphones. Despite Gillespie’s notebook I knew the surveillance devices existed, not just in this room but in my bedroom as well, for the Agency would want to analyze my answers for the slightest indication of stress. Gillespie was chasing a commodity as rare as rainbow’s gold, the truth, and he wanted to make sure I was not bringing him fool’s gold. Maybe my return at this critical time had happened because the enemy had turned me? Maybe I was telling lies to make them look in one direction while il Hayaween attacked from another? I might be a hero of the Stringless Program come back from the world’s darkness, but that did not mean they would trust me.