I frantically fumbled for the black hood, discovering it on the floor beside the cot. I pulled it on.
“Stand up! Move! Move! Move!”
I scrambled in agony off the cot. Light suffused the black weave of the hood.
More footsteps hurried loudly down the stairs. I thought I detected all four of my tormentors, but I could not be certain. I wondered how long I had been asleep. I sensed it was now nighttime, but I guessed my sensations were quite useless as a gauge of the passing hours.
“Drop the blanket,” the voice snapped.
I dropped it.
“Step forward. Stop there! Hood off.”
I pulled the hood off, blinking in the light.
“Hands to your side!”
I obeyed, exposing my vulnerable nakedness. As before the unmasked Sarah Sing Tennyson faced me while, to her left, my questioner stood in his sinister head-to-foot black. I guessed the other two men had taken their positions behind me.
“What was the purpose of the five million dollars?”
“To buy Stingers.” My speech was thick with sleep.
“How many Stingers?”
“Fifty-three,” I answered. They knew the answers, but they did not know I knew who they were and so they would ask me questions to which they knew the answers just to keep me from guessing their identity. A game of mazes and mirrors. Of undoing knots while blindfolded.
“Who was selling the missiles?”
“A Cuban consortium in Miami.”
“Describe the Cubans.”
I had little to tell, but did my best.
“The missiles were meant for Ulster?”
“Yes.”
“Was the trade arranged in America or Ireland?” The Ulster accent was toneless, suggesting that the questioning would go on and on and that nothing I could do would stop it. It was all a part of the well-planned interrogatory technique. They wanted me to feel I was trapped in an unstoppable process that was beyond the control of anyone, and that the only way out was to give the machine what it wanted; the truth.
“Both, I think.”
“Explain.”
I assumed the questioner was running over known ground to test my responses and lull my suspicions as he moved imperceptibly toward the questions he really wanted answered. I told him about Brendan Flynn and Michael Herlihy, and even about little Marty Doyle. I described Shafiq’s part in the arrangements, and how il Hayaween had taken over the mission. I admitted that I had deliberately broken il Hayaween’s instructions by renaming Corsaire and shipping her to America as deck cargo.
“Why did you break those instructions?”
“Because I wanted to return to America quickly to report on the missile sale to my superiors.”
“Your superiors?” Was there a hint of puzzlement in my interrogator’s voice? “Explain.”
I kept my voice dull and listless. “Van Stryker and his people.”
“Who is van Stryker?”
“CIA, Department of Counter-Terrorism.” I inserted an edge of desperation in my voice, as though I was aware of revealing things that were truly secret and sensitively dangerous.
There was a measurable pause, and a detectable uncertainty when my interrogator spoke again. “You’re CIA?”
A half-second of hesitation as though I was reluctant to answer, then, “Yes.”
“Since when?”
“Since 1977.”
I could see Sarah Sing Tennyson’s reaction clearly enough. Till now she had done nothing but keep a supercilious and careless expression, but now there was a genuine worry on her face.
“Describe your mission in the CIA.” I sensed my interrogator was off his script. He was winging it, wondering where my surprising admissions would lead.
“To penetrate Middle Eastern terrorist groups.” I spoke dully, mouthing the words I had rehearsed in the cellar’s creeping dark. “I was instructed to use the credentials of IRA membership as an introduction to such groups.”
“The CIA ordered you to join the IRA?”
“Yes.”
“How were you to achieve that?”
“I was already collecting money for Ireland and sending weapons from Boston, so the IRA knew of me and trusted me.”
“How did the CIA discover you?”
“I was arrested for running drugs into Florida.”
“And the CIA ordered you to spy on the IRA?”
“No. They didn’t need me for that.”
Silence. There was a soft explosion nearby, making me jump, before I realized that the noise had come from an adjoining cellar in which a heating boiler had just ignited with a thump of expanding gases.
“Why would the CIA not be interested in the IRA?”
“I’m sure they are, but I was ordered to concentrate on the Middle Eastern groups, and my standing with those groups depended on my being totally trusted by the Provos, so I was ordered not to risk that trust by informing on them.” This was the story that Roisin had told in Hasbaiya, and which had so terrified the Palestinians. Now, four years later, I was using its truth for my survival.
“Have you reported back to van Stryker?” the interrogator asked.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“The whole of last month. I was being debriefed in the Pocono Mountains.”
“So van Stryker will collect the boat from Boston.”
I hesitated, and a foot shifted menacingly behind me. “No!”
“Why not?”
“Because I was going to collect it.”
“You planned to steal the money?” My questioner sounded amused.
“Yes.”
“Did you tell van Stryker about the boat at all?”
“No. I just told him that money was being telexed from Europe.”
“And how much money does van Stryker think is involved?”
“One and a half million, of which a half-million has been paid.”
“Is Herlihy looking for the boat?”
“Of course he is.”
“Put the hood on.”
They had left me holding the black bag which I now pulled obediently over my face. I heard them go upstairs and the cellar door scrape shut. I dragged the hood off my head, feeling a sudden exultation. I had worried them! I had unbalanced them! I had unbalanced them so much that on this visit they had not laid a finger on me. The truth was making me free. It had changed the script and altered their reality!
I turned to see a paper bag had been left on the floor by my bed. The bag contained a cold cheeseburger in a styro-foam container along with a cardboard cup of tepid coffee. I ate hungrily. The light had been left on and I could see that the cellar seemed to have been cleared out recently; there were dust-free spaces on the floors and walls that suggested boxes and furniture had been stored down here and had recently been taken away to make room for my interrogation.
Then, suddenly, the lights went out. In the next-door cellar the dull roar of the boiler was switched off, to be replaced by the softer sound of the sea. I lay down. I waited. I dared to think I had won. I dared to think I might live. I dared to feel hope.
I stayed in the cellar for days. I lost track of the time. I tried to keep a tally by scratching marks on the wall by my cot, but the meals came irregularly and my sleep periods were broken by sudden insistent demands that I put the hood on, stand up, stand still, answer, and so I had no regular measure by which to judge the passage of the days.
At first I had pissed blood in my urine, but the blood stopped coming as the days passed and I received no more beatings. The questions went on, mostly now about my debriefing and just what I had told the CIA about the IRA. They even asked me about men I had never mentioned to Gillespie, and I hid nothing from them for there was always the threat of violence behind the questioning, but even so I knew I had driven a deep wedge to widen the great chasm of loyalties that besieged the Provisional IRA. The Provos, like all terrorist organizations, wanted the respectability of external support and though like every other leftist guerrilla movement they could count on the endorsement of socialist academics and liberal churchmen, they wanted more, much more. The twin endorsements that the Provos craved were those of America and the Middle East; that of America because it endowed them with respectability, and that of the Middle East because it provided them with their most lethal toys; but their quandary was that their two supporters hated each other, which made it even more important that each should be decried to the other. The Provos never boasted of their Libyan connections to the Americans, but rather painted that connection as a sporadic, unwanted and unimportant acquaintanceship, while to the Libyans, who were now their main sponsors, they declared that the donations of the American-Irish were the gifts of fools who did not understand the Marxist imperatives of revolution, but who could nevertheless be constantly gulled into supporting Libyan aims.