I stumbled upstairs, flinging open closet doors as I searched for clothes. In the master bedroom, where the rumpled sheets suggested at least one of my interrogators had slept, I found a walk-in wardrobe filled with summer clothes. There were checked trousers, and trousers embroidered with spouting whales, and trousers bright with golfing motifs, and three pairs of trousers printed with emerald shamrocks, but at the back of the closet I found a plain, undecorated pair of jeans which fitted me well enough. I pulled on a shirt decorated with a polo player, a white sweater that purported to be the livery of an English cricket club, and a pair of blue and white boat shoes. There was a slicker in the wardrobe. I grabbed it and ran downstairs.
Then, before going out to explore Rebel Lady, I spotted a telephone on the kitchen wall.
For a second I hesitated, torn between my desire to search the boat and my worries about Johnny, then I picked up the phone and punched in his number. I could scarcely believe that the phone worked, but suddenly it rang and Johnny himself answered and I felt a great wash of relief pour through me. “Oh, Christ,” I said, and slid down the wall to sit on the tiled kitchen floor.
“Paulie?” Johnny’s voice was tentative, worried.
I was crying with sheer relief. “Johnny? Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right. I’ve been trying to reach you for two weeks!”
“Two weeks?” I gazed around the kitchen. My mind was in slow gear, stumbling and lurching. “What day is it, Johnny?”
He paused. “Are you drunk, Paulie?”
“Tell me. Please.”
“Sunday.”
“Christ,” I said. “Who’s winning the war?”
“That finished days ago! It was a walkover.” Johnny paused. “What the hell’s happened to you, Paulie?”
“Did someone come for the boat papers?” I asked him.
“The girl, of course. You know? The pretty Chinese girl?” He chuckled. “You dog.”
I climbed to my feet and leaned my forehead on the cold window glass and stared out at the berthed yacht. “She told you that we were lovers?” I guessed that was what his chuckle meant.
“I can’t blame you. She’s real hot one.” Johnny must have sensed that something was wrong, for his tone suddenly changed. “Are you saying you didn’t send her?”
“In a way I did.” Not that it mattered now, I thought. The main thing was that the bastards had not snatched Johnny and given him the treatment in some raw cellar.
“Are you OK, Paulie?” Johnny asked.
“Not really.”
“So where the hell are you?”
“Big house, I’m guessing it’s somewhere on the Cape shore of Nantucket Sound. Does a red buoy with a number nine mean anything?”
“Not off the top of my head.”
“Hold on, Johnny.” I had spotted a pile of junk mail that someone must have collected from the mail-box and piled indiscriminately on a work surface.
I pulled the top piece toward me and saw it was addressed to “The Occupier.” I read the address to Johnny, who whistled. “You’re keeping rich company. Centerville, eh? That number nine buoy must mark the Spindle Rock. I’ll come and get you in the truck. Be there in forty-five minutes, OK?”
I put the phone down, pulled on the slicker, and tugged open the kitchen door. I saw that the alarm system which should have been triggered by the door’s opening had been ripped out. I pulled the thin slicker round my shoulders and stepped into the brisk and freezing wind. I shivered as I walked gingerly along the frozen path to the private dock which had pilings fringed with thick ruffs of ice left by the falling tide. A gull screamed a protest as I approached the dock, then flapped slowly away across the glittering sea. I paused beside the boathouse, scrubbed frost from a window pane, then peered inside to see a beautiful speedboat suspended on slings above the frozen water. The sleek boat’s name was painted clear down her flank in huge green letters, Quick Colleen. She had a pair of monstrous two-hundred-horsepower engines at her stern, making her into a pretty, overpowered toy for the summer; a fitting accessory to this pretty, overpriced summer home that my captors had used as their temporary base. I walked on to where Rebel Lady fretted at her lines.
Those docklines, like the yacht’s rigging, were thick with ice. The wind stirred Rebel Lady, jarring her against her frozen ropes and quivering her long hull. I stepped cautiously down into her cockpit and found that her companionway was unlocked. I pulled the boards free, slid back her main hatch, and ducked inside out of the wind.
To find the gold was gone. I had not really expected anything else, but a mad optimism had lurked at the back of my thoughts ever since I had glimpsed Rebel Lady at the wintry dock.
The saloon was a shambles. My interrogators had taken axes to the false floor, ripping and tearing away the fiberglass to expose the gold beneath. Then they had taken my hoard. Five million dollars’ worth of gold, all gone, or all but one krugerrand that I found lost in a heap of sand and fiberglass chippings. I picked the coin up, spun it on my palm, then pushed it into a pocket as a souvenir of a wasted voyage. I thought I saw another coin glinting in the rubble, but when I cleared the sand and shreds aside I saw it was just the shiny head of one of the keel-bolts.
I went back to the cockpit. My interrogators had done well. They had got exactly what they wanted. The gold would pay for the Stingers, and I did not doubt that some of the Stingers would stay in America to be used for Saddam Hussein’s revenge against the United States. That revenge was the true purpose of il Hayaween’s operation. The Brits would lose some helicopters over South Armagh, but the real targets were the great lumbering wide-body passenger jets struggling up from American airports with their cargoes of innocence.
I climbed back to the dock and walked slowly back toward the house.
Then I stopped because I heard a car’s tires grating on the gravel drive. Voices sounded happy and loud. “Let’s use the back door!”
There was nowhere to hide, so I stayed still.
First around the corner was a pretty slim young woman in a long fur coat. She was running and her breath was misting in the cold air. She had golden hair, a wide mouth and blue eyes. She saw me and suddenly stopped. “Darling?” She was not speaking to me, but to Congressman Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third who followed the woman around the side of the house. He just stopped and gaped at me.
Then two men appeared. One was the Congressman’s waspish aide, Robert Stitch, the other was Michael Herlihy.
Congressman O’Shaughnessy still gaped at me, but Stitch was much quicker on the uptake. “Shall I call the police, Congressman?”
“I wouldn’t, Congressman, I really wouldn’t,” I advised Tommy the Turd.
The Congressman suddenly recognized me. “You’re Shannon, isn’t that right?”
“Shanahan,” I corrected him, “Paul Shanahan.”
“This is my wife, Duffy.” Tommy, playing as usual without his full deck, resorted to his inbred courtesy.
The pretty Duffy smiled at me. “Hello.”
“You already know Mr. Herlihy?” O’Shaughnessy inquired of me as though this was a pleasant meeting in his golf club. “Mr. Herlihy is the Treasurer of my Re-election Campaign Committee.”
I ignored Herlihy. “Nice house, Congressman.” I nodded at the huge mansion.
“Thank you,” he said happily. “Really, thank you.”
“Just what the hell are you doing here?” Stitch intervened in the pleasantries.
“Do we really need to have this conversation in the yard?” Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, who looked horribly wasted on the Congressman, asked plaintively. “I’m freezing!”