In the dream, her father’s face had been covered with blood. His eyes were open and he was not yet dead. He had tried to speak to her but she could not hear his voice.
In the other part of the dream, she saw Deirdre Monahan as she had been. Deirdre had smiled to her from across the great lawn at Clare House, and beckoned to her.
When Brianna began to run across the lawn, Deirdre had run away from her. Everything was silent in the dream. There was no wind and the time of day was in the brilliant twilight of summer that covered the Clare hills.
“I love you,” she had cried in the dream to Deirdre.
Then she had seen her father’s face, covered in blood; she had screamed in the dream, actually screamed aloud; it had awakened her.
Her hands were wet; her face felt flushed. The room, however, was cool and dark and without sound, except for the white noise of all the thousand parts of the hotel.
She had had the same dream since they had tried to kill her father.
Elizabeth dozed in the comfortable seat in the first-class compartment. When she awoke — for no reason — she saw Denisov across from her, staring at her. He looked sad and a little tired.
“Why don’t you sleep, Mr. Dennis?” she asked. She felt the tiredness of the wine come over her again.
“Because I do not sleep,” he said.
There was an intense clarity to the air on the last night of November that was rare for early winter in England. The moon was fine and full and voluptuous; the light of the moon was clear and shivery on the city.
In the intense silence, the Mersey meekly lapped at the concrete apron.
In the white, ghostly light of the moon, the immense form of the hovercraft sat still; the light cast a giant shadow in the half-darkness. Six propellers were poised on their shafts on the upper deck; three fore and three aft. They looked like Dutch windmills lined up for parade.
Cashel paced from the front of the dignitaries’ stand with its separate British and Irish flags to the ship and back. Even in the darkness, he could see how it would be in the morning.
Lord Slough would stand alone, speaking; beside him, Brianna Devon; next to them, the Taoiseach peering through his gold-rimmed spectacles; and next to him the Prime Minister of Great Britain.
All behind the bulletproof plastic shields that now circled the platform.
Everything that could be done had been done. There could not be an assassination; yet, assassination was so easy in a disordered society.
Cashel puffed his pipe and stepped again across the apron as he had paced so many times around the perimeter of old St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin. He paced to consider the possibilities, to find a flaw in the scheme in his thoughts.
He had been foolishly wrong about Glasgow.
Pray God he was wrong about tomorrow.
He heard a footstep on the apron behind him; suddenly, he turned. A man came towards him; a sailor by his walk.
Cashel waited and watched him.
“What are ye doin’ round this place?” the man asked. His voice snarled; he sounded a little drunk.
“What are ye doing?” Cashel returned. “I’m the police.”
“Ah. I’m with the engineering section, comin’ t’see me Brianna.”
“Yer are?” Cashel removed the pipe from his mouth and knocked out the ashes on the side of his palm. Sparks flew from the bowl like sparks from a dying rocket.
“I been here since the first. Since she was launched for trials. She’s a grand ship, isn’t she?”
The drunken man weaved and spread his arms in the moonlight. The extent of his arms encompassed the Brianna sitting moodily in the gray light.
“She is,” said Cashel.
“Me ship,” said Donovan, not looking at him.
Cashel did not speak.
“Ah, well. I’m t’bed now. I’ve had me bit of fun. T’morrow is the day, eh?”
“It is that.”
Donovan weaved near him. “Yer Irish.”
“I am.”
“Ah,” said Donovan. “Yer didn’t speak like a bloody Sassenach.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Cashel smiled, watching as Donovan weaved away, across the apron and into the street leading down the road back to the center of Liverpool.
Cashel turned to look back at the bulk of the ship.
In eleven hours, she would be at sea, beyond the breakwater; then it would be safe and he could go back home to Dublin and his old bed.
Pray God.
25
“God save ourrrr gracious Queen—”
The old woman’s thin voice croaked the words as the first notes of the British anthem — ponderous and slow — boomed across the concrete apron to the waiting throng. Though the police band was not precise in instrumentation, it contained a full complement of strong young lungs and every note sounded loudly enough to be heard above the whine of the high wind.
The calm of the night before had changed at dawn. Now, a force-six wind, wet and cold, swept down the Mersey from the Irish Sea and sent stinging droplets of spray onto the launch site. The river Mersey’s waters were black and troubled and they roiled and slapped against the concrete pier.
“Send herrrr victorious—”
The old woman’s voice was lost in the wind; she sang with her hand over her heart and her eyes glistened. She was a little drunk. The others in the small crowd of less than a hundred persons did not join her but stood silently while the anthem boomed on, the sounds of the band waxing and waning as the wind shifted.
It was fit weather for the first of December, which is to say it was not fit at all.
Predictably, the ceremony started fifteen minutes late. There were all the usual problems — the police band lost the music for the Irish anthem and then found it; the Taoiseach’s flight from Dublin was delayed by bad weather on that side of the sea; the Prime Minister’s driver got lost in the spider’s web of streets in central Liverpool; and there was a minor arrest at the edge of the crowd twenty minutes before the ceremonies were due to begin.
It was a footnote, really, to what would happen in the next sixty minutes. Though none of them knew it at the time.
Two men from British Intelligence — now called the Ministry for Internal Affairs (Extraordinary) — seized a young man with light red hair as he entered a two-story warehouse building six hundred yards from the dock site. The man protested his arrest until the agents discovered the broken-down parts of an M16-A rifle strapped to the inside of his thighs. Whereupon he refused to speak further.
(In fact, it was nearly twelve hours before he was identified as Michael Pendurst, twenty-six, from Hamburg, West Germany, a wanted terrorist last seen in Copenhagen. Two days later — after further examination and extreme questioning — he admitted he had been a contract employee of the Central Intelligence Agency for eighteen months, specializing in waste disposal, the CIA term for hit jobs.)
The British anthem ended and the last notes were blown away in the wind. For a moment, the trumpets hesitated and then — band music cards secured — the Liverpool police band began the strains of the anthem of Eire.
They all stood on the platform and waited politely for the music to end — Lord Slough and his daughter, Brianna Devon; the Taoiseach of Eire; the Prime Minister of Britain; the Duke of Kensington (and second cousin to the Queen); and the Secretary of the powerful Trades Union Council.
The people in the throng could not see them clearly because of the flecks of spray on the bulletproof plastic shield around the platform. The press contingent — especially the cameramen from BBC — had complained about the plastic shield around the dignitaries from the first but, even with the arrest of a gunman entering the warehouse a quarter-mile away, the police refused to remove it.