Kruger shrugged. It never paid to examine these things too closely.
Major Martin put on his topcoat. “Sir Harold was a good sort. Played a good game of bridge. Anyway, you see, Flynn went back on his word. Now they’ll want to kill poor Harry as soon as things don’t go their way.”
Kruger glanced out the window. “I think you planned on Baxter getting kidnapped.”
Major Martin moved toward the door. “I planned nothing, Kruger. I only provided the opportunity and the wherewithal. Most of this is as much a surprise to me as it is to you and the police.” Martin looked at his watch. “My consulate will be looking for me, and your people will be looking for you. Remember, Kruger, the first requirement of a successful liar is a good memory. Don’t forget what you’re not supposed to know, and please remember the things you are supposed to know.” He pulled on his gloves as he left.
Megan Fitzgerald motioned to the three men and two women with her and moved quickly toward the front of the Cathedral. The five of them followed her, burdened with suitcases, slung rifles, and rocket tubes. They entered the vestibule of the north tower, rode up the small elevator, and stepped off into the choir practice room in the tower. Megan moved into the choir loft.
Jack Leary was standing at the end of the loft, some distance from Flynn and Hickey, establishing his fields of fire. Megan said curtly, “Leary, you understand your orders?”
The sniper turned and stared at her.
Megan stared back into his pale, watery eyes. Soft eyes, she thought, but she knew how they hardened as the rifle traveled up to his shoulder. Eyes that saw things not in fluid motion but in a series of still pictures, like a camera lens. She had watched him in practice many times. Perfect eye-hand coordination—“muscle memory” he had called it on the one occasion he had spoken to her. Muscle memory— a step below instinct, as though the brain wasn’t even involved in the process— optic nerves and motor nerves, bypassing the brain, controlled by some primitive bundle of fibers found only in the lower forms of life. The others stayed away from Leary, but Megan was fascinated by him. “Answer me, Leary. Do you know your orders, man?”
He nodded almost imperceptibly as his eyes took in the young woman standing in front of him.
Megan walked along the rail and came up beside Flynn and Hickey. She placed the field phone on the railing and looked at the outside telephone on the organ. “Call the police.”
Flynn didn’t look up from the blueprints. “They’ll call us.”
Hickey said to her, “I’d advise you not to upset Mr. Leary. He seems incapable of witty bantering, and he’d probably shoot you if he couldn’t think of anything to say.”
Megan looked back at Leary, then said to Hickey, “We understand each other.”
Hickey smiled. “Yes, I’ve noticed a silent communication between you—but what other type could there be with a man who has a vocabulary of fourteen words, eight of which have to do with rifles?”
Megan turned and walked back to the entrance of the choir practice room where the others were waiting, and she led them up a spiral iron staircase. At a level above the choir practice room she found a door and kicked it open, motioning to Abby Boland. “Come with me,” she said.
The long triforium stretched out along the north side of the Cathedral, an unlit gallery of dusty stone and airconditioning ducts. A flagpole of about twenty feet in length jutted out from the parapet over the nave, flying the white and yellow Papal flag.
Megan turned to Abby Boland, who was dressed in the short skirt and blue blouse of a twirler from Mother Cabrini High School, a place neither of them had heard of until a week before. “This is your post,” said Megan. “Remember, the rocket is to use if you see a Saracen—or whatever they call them here—coming through your assigned door. The sniper rifle is for close-in defense, if they come through the tower door there—and for blowing your own brains out if you’ve a mind to. Any questions? No?” She looked the girl up and down. “You should have thought to bring some clothes with you. It’ll be cold up here tonight.” Megan returned to the tower.
Abby Boland unslung her rifles and put them down beside the rocket. She slipped off her tight-fitting shoes, unbuttoned her constricting blouse, and sighted through the scope of the sniper rifle, then lowered it and looked around. It occurred to her that rather than freeing her husband, Jonathan, she might very well end up in jail herself, on this side of the Atlantic, too long a distance to intertwine their fingers through the mesh wire of Long Kesh. She might also end up dead, of course, which might be better for both of them.
Megan Fitzgerald continued up the stairs of the bell tower and turned into a side passage. She found a pull chain and lit a small bulb revealing a section of the huge attic. Wooden catwalks ran over the plaster lathing of the vaulted ceiling below and stretched back into the darkness. The four people with her walked quickly over the catwalks, turning on lights in the cold, musty attic.
Megan could see the ten dormered hatches overhead that led to the slate roof above. On the floor, at intervals, were small winches that lowered the chandeliers to the floors below for maintenance. She turned and moved to the big arched window at the front peak of the attic. Stone tracery on the outside of the Cathedral partially blocked the view, and grime covered the small panes in front of her. She wiped a section with her hand and stared down into Fifth Avenue. The block in front of the Cathedral was nearly deserted, but the police had not yet cleared the crowds out of the intersections on either side. Falling sleet was visible against the streetlights, and ice covered the streets and sidewalks and collected on the shoulders of Atlas.
Megan looked up at the International Building in Rockefeller Center directly across from her. The two side wings of the building were lower than the attic, and she could see people moving through the ice, people sitting huddled on the big concrete tubs that held bare plants and trees. The uniformed police had no rifles, and she knew that the Cathedral was not yet surrounded by the SWAT teams euphemistically called the Emergency Services Division in New York. She saw no soldiers, either, and remembered that Americans rarely called on them.
She turned back to the attic. The four people had opened the suitcases and deposited piles of votive candles at intervals along the catwalks. Megan called out to Jean Kearney and Arthur Nulty. “Find the fire axes, chop wood from the catwalks, and build pyres around the candles. Cut the fire hoses up here and string the wire for the field telephone. Be quick about it. Mullins and Devane, grab an ax and come with me.”
Megan Fitzgerald retraced her steps out of the attic, followed by the two men who had posed as BSS Security, Donald Mullins and Rory Devane. She continued her climb up to the bell tower. Mullins carried a roll of communication wire, which he played out behind him. Devane carried the weapons and axes.
Arthur Nulty offered Jean Kearney a cigarette. He looked over her Kelly-green Aer Lingus stewardess uniform. “You look very sexy, lass. Would it be a sacrilege to do it up here, do you think?”
“We’ll not have time for that.”
“Time is all we’ve got up here. God, but it’s cold. We’ll need some warming and there’s no spirits allowed, so that leaves …”
“We’ll see. Jesus, Arthur, if your wife—what happens to us if we get her out of Armagh?”
Arthur Nulty let go of her arm and looked away. “Well … now … let’s take things one a time.” He picked up an ax and swung it, shattering a wooden railing, then ripped the railing from its post and threw it atop a pile of votive candles. “Whole place is wood up here. Never thought I’d be burning a church. If Father Flannery could see me now.” He took another swing with the ax. “Jesus, I hope it doesn’t come to that. They’ll give in before they see this Cathedral burned. In twenty-four hours your brothers will be in Dublin. Your old dad will be pleased, Jean. He thought he’d never see the boys again.” He threw a post on the woodpile. “She called them pyres, Megan did. Doesn’t she know that pyres refer only to places to burn corpses?”