Jig (52 page)

Leonard Korn had the black sensation that he'd overstepped the mark. He turned to the President with a small insincere smile on his face. ‘I spoke out of turn,' he said.

‘Damn right you did.'

‘Sorry.'

Dawson smiled back with an equal lack of warmth. ‘Too much tension, Len. Too much stress. And stress kills.'

‘So they say, Mr. President.'

When Korn had gone, Thomas Dawson did something he never did in public. He lit a cigarette, a Winston, and sucked the smoke deeply inside his lungs. It was the most satisfying thing he'd done in a long time. He put the cigarette out carefully, dropped the butt in a wastebasket, then sprayed the air with a small can of Ozium he kept in his desk. He sat back and shut his eyes. It wasn't just the violence done against the Memorial Presbyterian Church in White Plains that troubled him. It was also the old Irish thread, that dark green bloodsoaked thread, linking the late Nicholas Linney to brother Kevin.

He tried to get Kevin on the telephone again, only to learn from Agatha Bates that the family hadn't returned yet from their cabin at Lake Candlewood. And no, she wasn't precisely sure when to expect them either. What was this goddam urge Kevin felt every now and again to take his family into inaccessible places? This fondness for the rough outdoors and kerosene lights and dried foods?

Thomas Dawson hung up, frustrated, tense and, for the first time in his entire Presidency, truly afraid. Kevin, he felt, was going to be okay because he had the Secret Servicemen around him. But as for himself and his Presidency – that could be quite another matter.

New York City

It was the pounding on the door of his room that woke Frank Pagan at five minutes past nine. He hadn't meant to sleep this late. Last night, when he'd walked away from Tyson Bruno, he had intended to sleep four hours, maybe even less, but he still hadn't quite recovered from the ravages of jet-lag. He pulled on a robe, opened the door, saw Artie Zuboric outside. Zuboric swept inside the room immediately. Pagan saw at once that something was up. Artie looked both driven and yet rather pleased with himself. The agent drifted to the window, pulled back the drape, let the room fill with wintry sunlight. Pagan wondered if he was about to be lectured for slipping the leash last night and leaving Tyson Bruno stranded. But it wasn't that.

‘A church has been bombed,' Artie said at once. ‘A Presbyterian church in White Plains, New York.'

‘Bombed? With a b?'

‘With a big b,' Zuboric said. ‘Somebody planted explosives in the place. Seventy-eight people are dead. The explosives went off in the middle of the sunrise service. Nice timing, huh?'

Pagan absorbed this information, feeling tense as he did so. Zuboric wasn't telling him this for nothing. There was something else coming. Pagan waited, seeing how Zuboric enjoyed dispensing this information.

‘The bombing happened around seven-twenty this morning. At approximately eight thirty a man called my office in New York City and claimed responsibility on behalf of the Irish Republican Army.'

Pagan licked his lips, suddenly dry. ‘Which you attributed to Jig, of course.'

Zuboric eased into sarcasm. ‘I don't see a whole busload of Irish terrorists running around New York State, do you?'

‘It's damned convenient to blame Jig,' Pagan replied. ‘It's so nicely packaged and wrapped for you. It's so fucking American. If you can wrap it, you can also buy it. And I don't buy it any more than I buy the incident at Bridgehampton.'

‘Why? Because you think you've got Jig pegged as a Boy Scout? The honourable terrorist? Helps old ladies cross streets before he blows them up? Grow up, Pagan. He doesn't have any scruples. He doesn't give a shit whom he hurts.'

Pagan sat on the bed. He could tell Zuboric that Jig operated differently, that Jig was a new refinement in a very old conflict, that there was no way in the world, given Jig's past acts of terrorism, he was going to blow up a whole church and the people in it. He could tell Zuboric that Jig wasn't in the habit of murdering the innocent. But he saw no point in saying such things because he could smell the lust for blood, Jig's blood, coming from Zuboric. He could smell the sweat of the lynch-mob eager to hang a victim in a public place for the intense gratification of the masses. Hang first, ask questions later. People in Zuboric's frame of mind were notoriously narrow in their vision, and decidedly uncharitable.

‘Face it, Frank,' Zuboric said. ‘Your man's an animal. And the sooner you realise this, the sooner we can catch him. You've been playing it as if this cocksucker was civilised, which he isn't. He's a fucking
beast
. He ought to be shot on sight.'

Pagan looked for a calm controlled corner of himself, and found it. He had the thought that if only he'd captured Jig last night in Brooklyn, if only that chase through mean streets had ended differently, then Jig would be in custody now and beyond suspicion of any terrorism in White Plains. If. Pagan had a very bad relationship with conditionals. He considered them the lepers of English grammar. He hadn't caught Jig, and it was pointless now to have regrets.

‘What exactly did the caller say?'

‘You can hear the tape.'

‘I'd like that,' Pagan said. He remembered all the hours he'd spent in London listening to Jig's voice, that strange flat drone which announced each new assassination in a cold detached way. He'd even brought in two professors of dialect to analyse the accent. One said it was British West Country, the other that Jig had obviously spent time in America but was working to disguise the fact. Academic dispute, and totally useless.

‘I'll come down to your office,' Pagan said.

‘Be my guest.' Zuboric had gloves on his hands and he rubbed them together. He watched Pagan step towards the bathroom and he said, ‘I also hear you split last night.'

Pagan nodded.

‘Like to tell me where you went?'

‘No,' Pagan said.

Zuboric raised one of his fingers in the air, shaking it from side to side. ‘I'm fucking sick of you, Frank. I'm fucking sick and tired of the way you want to do things.'

‘It's mutual,' Pagan replied.

‘You think you can go after this Irish moron on your own. You think your way's the only way. Let me remind you, Pagan. This isn't your country. You don't have any jurisdiction here except what we choose to give you. If we withdrew our support, you'd be nothing. And if we want to kick you out unceremoniously and go after this Jig ourselves, what the hell can you do about it?'

Pagan stood in the bathroom doorway, flicking a towel idly against the wall. He wondered if there was any sense in getting angry. At whom would it be directed anyway? Artie and the FBI? Furry Jake and the butchers of Scotland Yard? Or at the barbaric nature of those who set off explosives in a church? He decided to say nothing. Zuboric's head was a Ziploc bag, deeply refrigerated and impossible to open and colder than hell once you managed to tear it apart. He went inside the bathroom, closing the door quietly.

He looked at his pale face in the mirror. Eyes slightly bloodshot. Small dark circles.
The IRA blows up a church in White Plains, New York. The IRA kills a man called Fitzjohn in Albany. Fitzjohn almost certainly had a connection with Ivor McInnes, though not one that would stand up in a court of law
. What was going on? He brushed his teeth and made a horrible face at himself, mouth open and jaw thrust forward and tongue sticking out. You look your age, Frankie, he thought. This morning, finally, you can see the effects of Old Father Time's facial. Even inside the body, in the places you couldn't see, his organs felt ancient and sluggish and all used-up.

Roscommon, New York

Harry Cairney answered the telephone on the second ring. He heard the familiar voice of Jock Mulhaney.

‘He was here, Harry. Last night,' Mulhaney said.

Cairney didn't ask who. He knew. He gazed silently out of the window, seeing the security jeep move between stands of bare trees. He felt a small tic under his eye and he put a hand to the place.

‘He came right here, Harry,' Mulhaney was saying. ‘Are you listening?'

‘Yes,' Cairney said. ‘I'm listening.' If the man sent from Ireland could get inside Mulhaney's headquarters, how could one small jeep keep him at bay if he found his way here? It was an appalling thought.

‘He killed one of my people,' Big Jock said. ‘He threatened me.'

‘What did you tell him?'

‘Harry, what the fuck you think I told him? Nothing, for Christ's sake.'

Nothing, the old man thought. He wondered about that. ‘And he left? He just left after you said you had nothing to tell him?'

‘That was when he shot Keefe.'

‘Keefe?'

‘A bodyguard.'

Cairney watched the jeep along the shore of Roscommon Lake, then it was gone.

‘Then another guy showed up. An English guy. He was looking for our crazy Irish friend.'

An Englishman. Harry Cairney looked at his wife, who was sitting cross-legged before the fire. By firelight she seemed frail, composed of porcelain. He hated the idea of anyone coming here and putting her in a situation of menace because of something that he himself was responsible for. He couldn't stand the notion of that. He watched Celestine stretch her legs, reach for her toes, absent-minded exercise. Cairney observed this fluid gesture with the expression of a connoisseur absorbing a particularly lovely painting, then opened the centre drawer of his desk. He looked inside at the handgun, an old Browning. He might not be a young man any more, but by God he hadn't forgotten how to fight. And he would, if it came to that.

Mulhaney was still talking. ‘This English character asked some questions, Harry. He mentioned your name.'

‘My name?' Harry Cairney's heart skipped one small telling beat. ‘Who was this man?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Have you any idea where he is now?'

‘Uh-huh.'

Cairney was silent. ‘Do you think he might be coming this way?'

Mulhaney didn't answer at once.

‘I don't know if he knows about you, Harry. I really don't.'

‘Does he know Linney?'

‘He mentioned Nick's name.'

‘Dawson?'

‘He knows about Dawson too.'

Cairney closed the drawer. Celestine was watching him. Cairney turned his back to her and quietly said, ‘Then I imagine there's a damn good chance he knows about me.'

Mulhaney said, ‘I don't know what he knows, Harry. All I can say is he's young and he's quick and he's ruthless.'

‘It's a ruthless business.' Cairney turned once more to his wife and smiled. ‘Thanks for calling, Jock.'

He put the receiver down. It was over, then. The secrecy had been more fragile than he'd ever realised. He went towards his wife, laid his hand on her scalp.

‘What was all that about?' Celestine asked. ‘What's a ruthless business?'

Cairney didn't answer. He didn't want her involved. He couldn't bring himself to make up a lie either.

‘I'd like a drink,' he said. ‘Am I allowed one?'

‘Very tiny.'

She kissed his cheek as she went out of the room. Downstairs in the kitchen she poured a small shot of brandy and mixed a vodka martini for herself. She glanced at the kitchen clock. It was just after noon. She sampled her drink, arranged the glasses on a tray, then headed back upstairs. She didn't go inside the study at once. Instead she entered Patrick's room, set the tray on the bedside table, and looked at the various photographs of Cairney as a boy. There was one that depicted him at thirteen, maybe fourteen, sitting crosslegged among other members of a school football team. He had a helmet in his lap. Another showed him in shorts and sweatshirt, poised to release a discus. He was well-muscled and taut even then, but it was the face she stared at. She saw only that eager open quality of youth, the smile of innocence, nothing of the secret darkness in the eyes he had as a man. What do you know? she asked the face. What do you really know?

Old pictures yielded nothing. They were interesting only as history, mileposts on the road to somewhere else. She touched the surface of a photograph with her fingertips, imagining she felt Cairney's skin under glass. Some hours ago, when the telephone had rung and nobody had talked, she was convinced that the person on the other end of the line was Patrick. Now she wasn't so sure. Some instinct had suggested it at the time, but now she wondered if it were just the blindly hopeful reaction of a woman intrigued. Intrigued, she thought. There was a word belonging to the cheap romances. Intrigue was for lady librarians vacationing in Corsica or swanning about the Taj Mahal by moonlight. Intrigue wasn't a good word when it came to serious business. And what else was all this but serious?

She heard Harry coughing along the landing. She switched off the bedside lamp, picked up the tray, left Patrick's room quickly. Harry was standing in the door of the study, watching her.

‘Wrong room,' he said.

She laughed his remark away. She kissed him and together they went inside the study. She sat in front of the fire and sipped her drink and listened to a log slip in the flames. Harry sat down beside her eventually, and she laid her head in his lap, closing her eyes.

‘He was quite a sportsman,' she said lazily.

He looked at her in a puzzled way. His mind was elsewhere.

She opened her eyes, looking up at him. ‘Your son.'

‘Oh.' Cairney, held captive in his wife's blue eyes, made a small mental adjustment. The curse of age, this difficulty in focusing. ‘He had one year, I remember, when sports became an obsession. He slept and dreamed sports. He had the makings of a fair quarterback. You were looking at the old photographs?'

She nodded. Firelight made her hair very gold.

Cairney stared at the window. ‘He was always like that, always picking up on something. Then he'd become obsessed with it for a while, before he moved along to something else. He wouldn't stick with a thing. He'd overdose on it when he was interested, but when the interest went flat he'd just move on. Compulsive behaviour. Always searching.'