“Does the boat have registration papers?”
“Yes.”
“Well, where are they!” A hint of impatience, promising pain.
“They’re at my house.” I told the lie because I could not expose Johnny to these bastards. Then I screamed, because something thumped hard and sharp in my tender kidneys, and I was falling as another slash of pain seared down from my neck. I hit the wet concrete, whimpering.
“Get up.”
I slowly struggled up. A small, red, atavistic part of my brain counselled a sudden counter-attack, a whirling slash at the tormentors behind me, but I knew such an assault would be doomed. They were ready for me, they were fitter than me, they were better than me, and I was weakened, slow, shivering and so horribly vulnerable.
“Lies will be met with pain,” the man said in a bored voice. “The boat’s papers are with Johnny Riordan, yes?”
So they had known all along and had just been testing me. “Yes.”
“How much money did you give Riordan?”
I had almost forgotten giving Johnny any money, and I had to think quickly before anyone hit me. “About a thousand bucks.”
“Why?”
“To hire a crane to get the boat off the truck. Or in case the longshoremen at Boston need a bribe.”
“Who’s the importer?”
“I don’t know. Exportación Layetano decide that.”
“The name of your contact at Exportación Layetano?”
“Roberto Lazarraga.”
The questioner had been holding the black hood that had covered my eyes. He now tossed it to me, but I was so feeble and shaking that I muffed the catch.
“Pick it up.”
I picked it up.
“Put it on.”
I obeyed.
“Stand still. Hands at your sides!”
The blindness and my nakedness combined to make me feel horribly vulnerable. I could hear my four captors moving about in the cellar. Footsteps climbed the stairs, then came back. Something scraped on the floor, filling me with the terror of apprehension. There was silence for a few seconds, then feet banged hollowly on the wooden stairs again.
“Take the hood off,” the voice ordered, and as I did so the door at the top of the stairs slammed shut and I found myself alone. The scraps of my clothes had been taken away and the scraping sound had been merely the noise of a metal camp bed being placed by a wall. Three blankets were folded on the camp bed and a zinc bucket stood at its foot. I just had time to notice those amenities when the light went out.
I staggered to the cot bed, pulled the blankets about me, and lay down. I curled up. I was wet, cold and shaking.
God alone knows how long I stayed there. I was no weakling, but I could not fight these men. Their silence and their discipline spoke of their professionalism. I had watched an interrogation in Belfast once; sharing with Seamus Geoghegan a privileged view of some poor bastard being questioned about the betrayal of a bombing mission. The questioners wanted the name of the boy’s contact in the security forces and, in their desperate attempts to get it, had beaten the lad into a raw, red, sodden horror. The interrogators had argued amongst themselves as they worked, daring each other to inflict more hurt, accusing each other of being counter-productive, and finally they had abandoned their attempts with nothing to show for their work but blood-bubbling denials from the crippled twenty-year-old. He had lost one eye, most of his teeth and was sheeted with blood. He never recovered his full sight, and would never again walk without a dipping limp, and the IRA later learned it was the boy’s sister who had telephoned the security forces. By then she had moved to England and had married her soldier lover, while her lacerated, dribbling, stammering brother still declared his pathetic allegiance to the Provisional IRA and their heroic freedom fighters.
But my questioners were different. This team had been trained to give pain in measured doses and to reward answers by granting freedom from that pain. This team worked as a disciplined unit, without hesitation and without any need to speak. The only words used were those addressed to me, and those I offered back. There was no fuss or noise to distract me from the main business of the proceedings, which was to elicit what poor Gillespie had so signally failed to discover; the whereabouts of the gold.
But their very knowledge of the gold’s existence told me who they were. They believed that their anonymity conferred menace, and so it did, but as I lay in the shivering dark I retained enough sense to realize that the only people who knew about the gold were those who had dispatched it. The CIA did not know, the Brits did not know, only the IRA and the Libyans and the Iraqis knew.
So either I was in the hands of il Hayaween’s men or in the grip of the Provisionals, and the evidence was overwhelming that it was the latter. No Palestinian or Libyan terrorist would dare try to enter the United States while the war in the Gulf raged, but any number of Irish could have come here. I had defied Michael Herlihy, and now he was striking back. I had underestimated him and I had misunderstood Sarah Sing Tennyson. She had to be a terrorist groupie, a hanger-on to the movement. I knew she was an acquaintance of my brother-in-law, who in turn was associated with Herlihy, which tied her in neatly with the Provos. Had she been left in my house expressly to raise the alarm when I came home? And she had met Johnny, which would explain their knowledge of his involvement. God, I thought, but let these bastards spare Johnny. And what had they done to Kathleen? Or was she a part of it? Had she been sent to lure me out of the house while they prepared their ambush? That thought was the worst, the last straw of despair, yet why should I be surprised? I had lied to her in Belgium, so what possible consideration did Kathleen owe me?
I shuddered in the dark. I had taken a risk, a vast risk, five million dollars’ worth of risk, and it had left me in the hands of the Provisionals’ trained interrogators. Professionally trained interrogators. Colonel Qaddafi had seen to that; dreaming of the days when his pet Irishmen would make some Englishman or Scotsman or Welshman shriek in a Belfast cellar in repayment for the American bombers screaming over Tripoli.
I shivered under the thin blankets. By staying very still I could somehow hide from the pain. A small, brave voice nagged me to struggle off the camp bed and crawl up the wooden stairs to see if the door at the top would open, but I did not want to move, nor draw any attention to myself. I just wanted to huddle under the blanket. I wanted to shudder by myself in the dark womb of the cellar listening to the heartlike rhythm of the sea.
My God, I thought, but it was the sea I could hear. It was not the thunder of huge ocean rollers, but the susurration of smaller waves breaking on a soft beach which suggested I was held in a house either close to Nantucket Sound or on Cape Cod Bay. Weymouth, perhaps? The town, south of Boston and nicknamed the Irish Riviera, would be a good place for a Provisional IRA interrogation team to hide.
And the fact that this team was from the Provisionals was good for me. I did not for one moment believe my questioner’s seemingly earnest promise that I would live if I told the truth. Every interrogator holds out that hope, but when these people heard my truth they would let me live, simply because they would not dare kill me. They thought I was a renegade and thief, and they were about to discover I was something far more dangerous; a legitimate American agent.
And if I was wrong, then my best hope lay in my trust that professionals like these did not inflict a slow death, but would want to be rid of me quickly.
And so I lay in the dark, shivering, trying to remember prayers.
The door at the top of the stairs crashed open. There was no light. I shouted, expecting pain, still half asleep. I had been dreaming of Roisin. “Hood on! Now!” the Northern Irish voice shouted from the stairhead. “Put it on! Put it on! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” Feet clattered on the stairtreads. “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!”