Sullivan called out from the far end of the triforium, “The view is marvelous. How’s the food?”
Megan turned to him. “If you’ve no qualms about feasting on blood, it’s good and ample.”
Sullivan sighted through his rifle. “Don’t be a beast, Megan.” He raised the rifle and focused the scope on Abby Boland, noticing her open blouse. She saw him and waved. He waved back. “So near, yet so far.”
“Give it a rest, George,” said Megan impatiently. “You’ll not be using it for much but peeing for yet a while.” She looked at him closely. George Sullivan was not easily intimidated by her. He had that combination of smugness and devil-may-care personality that came with handling high explosives, a special gift of the gods, he had called it. Maybe. “Are you certain Hickey knows how to rig the bombs?”
Sullivan picked up his bagpipe and began blowing into it. He looked up. “Oh, yes. He’s very good. World War Two techniques, but that’s all right, and he’s got the nerve for it.”
“I’m interested in his skill, not his nerve. I’m to be his assistant.”
“Good for you. Best to be close by if it goes wrong. Never feel a thing. It’ll be us poor bastards up here who’ll be slowly crushed by falling stone. Picture it, Megan. Like Samson and Delilah, the temple falling about our heads, tons of stone quivering, falling…. Someone should have brought a movie camera.”
“Next time. All right, George, the north transept is your sector of fire if they break in. But if they use armor through that door, Boland will lean over the north triforium and launch a rocket directly down at it. Your responsibility for armor is the south transept door below you. She’ll cover you and you’ll cover her with rifle fire.”
“What if one of us is dead?”
“Then the other two, Gallagher and Farrell, will divide up the sector of the dead party.”
“What if we’re all dead?”
“Then it doesn’t matter, does it, George? Besides, there’s always Leary. Leary is immortal, you know.”
“I’ve heard.” He put the blowpipe to his mouth.
“Can you play ‘Come Back to Erin’?”
He nodded as he puffed.
“Then play it for us, George.”
He took a long breath and said, “To use an expression, Megan, you’ve not paid the piper, and you’ll not call the tune. I’ll play ‘The Minstrel Boy’ and you’ll damn well like it. Go on, now, and leave me alone.”
Megan looked at him, turned abruptly, and entered the small door that led down to the spiral stairs.
Sullivan finished inflating the bagpipe, bounced a few notes off the wall behind him, made the necessary tuning, then turned, bellied up to the stone parapet, and began to play. The haunting melody carried into every corner of the Cathedral and echoed off the stone. Acoustically bad for an organ or choir, Sullivan thought, but for a bagpipe it was lovely, sounding like the old Celtic warpipes echoing through the rocky glens of Antrim. The pipes were designed to echo from stone, he thought, and now that he heard his pipes in here, he would recommend their use in place of organs in Ireland. He had never sounded better.
He saw Abby Boland leaning across the parapet, looking at him, and he played to her, then turned east and played to his wife in Armagh prison, then turned to the wall behind him and played softly for himself.
CHAPTER 18
Brian Flynn listened to Sullivan for a few seconds. “The lad’s not bad.”
Hickey found his briar pipe and began filling it. “Reminds me of those Scottish and Irish regiments in the First War. Used to go into battle with pipes skirling. Jerry’s machine guns ripped them up. Never missed a note, though—good morale-builder.” He looked down at the blueprints. “I’m beginning to think whoever designed this place designed Tut’s tomb.”
“Same mentality. Tricks with stone. Fellow named Renwick in this case. There’s a likeness of him on one of those stained-glass windows. Over there. Looks shifty.”
“Even God looks shifty in stained glass, Brian.”
Flynn consulted the blueprints. “Look, there are six large supporting piers— they’re towers, actually. They all have doors either on the inside or outside of the Cathedral, and they all have spiral staircases that go into the triforia…. All except this one, which passes through Farrell’s triforium. It has no doors, either on the blueprints or in actuality.”
“How did he get up there?”
“From the next tower which has an outside door.” Flynn looked up at Eamon Farrell. “I told him to look for the way into this tower, but he hasn’t found it.”
“Aye, and probably never will. Maybe that’s where they burn heretics. Or hide the gold.”
“Well, you may joke about it, but it bothers me. Not even a church architect wastes time and money building a tower from basement to roof without putting it to some use. I’m certain there’s a staircase in there, and entrances as well. We’ll have to find out where.”
“We may find out quite unexpectedly,” said Hickey.
“That we may.”
“Later,” said Hickey, “perhaps I’ll call on Renwick’s ghost for help.”
“I’d settle for the present architect. Stillway.” Flynn tapped his finger on the blueprints. “I think there are more hollow spaces here than even Renwick knew. Passages made by masons and workmen—not unusual in a cathedral of this size and style.”
“Anyway, you’ve done a superb job, Brian. It will take the police some time to formulate an attack.”
“Unless they get hold of Stillway and his set of blueprints before our people on the outside find him.” He turned and looked at the telephone mounted on the organ. “What’s taking the police so long to call?”
Hickey picked up the telephone. “It’s working.” He came back to the rail. “They’re still confused. You’ve disrupted their chain of command. They’ll be more angry with you for that than for this.”
“Aye. It’s like a huge machine that has malfunctioned. But when they get it going again, they’ll start to grind away at us. And there’s no way to shut it down again once it starts.”
Eamon Farrell, a middle-aged man and the oldest of the Fenians, except for Hickey, looked down from the six-story-high northeast triforium, watching Flynn and Hickey as they came out of the bell-tower lobby. Flynn wore the black suit of a priest, Hickey an old tweed jacket. They looked for all the world like a priest and an architect talking over renovations. Farrell shifted his gaze to the four hostages sitting in the sanctuary, waiting for some indication as to their fate. He felt sorry for them. But he also felt sorry for his only son, Eamon, Jr., in Long Kesh. The boy was in the second week of a hunger strike and wouldn’t last much longer.
Farrell slipped his police tunic off and hung it over the parapet, then turned and walked back to the wooden kneewall behind him. In the wall was a small door, and he opened it, knelt, and shone his flashlight at the plaster lathing of the ceiling of the bride’s room below him. He walked carefully in a crouch onto a rafter, and played the light around the dark recess, moving farther out onto the wooden beam. There was a fairly large space around him, a sort of lower attic below the main attic, formed by the downward pitch of the triforium roof before it met the outside wall of stone buttresses.