“Is that rhetorical, Hanley? Are you really that dense?”
“I had to dance carefully with Mrs. Neumann. I needed her help but I couldn’t explain the thing fully. About you. I signed the mission directive myself. She wouldn’t have approved.”
“No. She wouldn’t have,” Devereaux said. He took the piece of paper, unfolded it, read it, and folded it again. He put it in his breast pocket.
“Terrorism. I don’t understand it,” Hanley said. “There has to be some profit motive.”
“Keep on checking Trevor Armstrong and anything else to do with stock purchase at EAA,” Devereaux said. “Maybe that’s what it’s about. Maybe the airline is being targeted by Henry.”
“But why kill a houseful of servants of the CEO?”
“To terrorize him,” Devereaux said. “To shake a money tree.”
“I’ll have to tell Mrs. Neumann in time—”
Devereaux said, “How much time?”
Hanley said, “Damnit. When I tell her I authorized a mission, she’ll—”
“She’ll jump all over you. Wear rubber clothing. You could tell the Brits now and they’d pick Henry up and make him sing. We don’t want that, do we?”
“No.”
“But would Mrs. Neumann be able to see it through? Leave it alone, Hanley, leave me alone. I can get you out of this.”
“By killing Henry McGee.”
“And everyone else who was in it with him,” Devereaux said.
33
“Hello,” Henry McGee said.
“Where are you?” Marie said. She was sitting at the kitchen table in the back of the rented apartment off Maida Vale. She wore a robe and she had smoked half a package of Marlboro cigarettes. Her voice was husky from the smoke.
“Up to no good,” Henry said, putting a smile in his voice. “You did good, honey, the pictures turned out nice. The thing is that in the next forty-eight hours, we got to put the setup nicely, nicely. In an hour or so, the girl from the IRA cell, Maureen, she’s gonna show up at the flat. Let her in and then the two of you wait. I should be able to hit the target before noon if I get any luck at all.”
“What does she look like?”
“Got real dark red hair. Irish-looking.”
“Sure,” Marie said.
“Bye, honey, I gotta run,” Henry said, like any harried businessman on the ride to the commuter station.
She heard the click.
She got up and stretched. Then she thought about the girl who was coming to this flat. She went down the hall into a bathroom and took a quick shower. She dressed again in her black jumpsuit. She brushed her short, tough-bristled hair and looked at herself. She wasn’t very pretty but what the hell.
She went into the hall back to the kitchen.
She turned on the electric kettle to make tea. The kitchen was deadly white, very clean and ugly like a hospital room. She moved around the kitchen doing things while the water heated. When it was boiling, the kettle clicked sharply. She poured the water over tea bags in a porcelain pot called a Brown Betty. The morning was coming slowly because this was November and London was very far north in the world.
She hummed to herself, she didn’t know what the song was.
She opened a cupboard and took out the envelope again. The second set of prints. She studied her handiwork and then put the prints back in the envelope. She didn’t know why she had done this, made another set of prints. Henry McGee had killed all those people in the public house that day he went to the west of Ireland. She had known it a moment before she ordered the prints. She suddenly was sure that Henry McGee was insane and that it would be a great danger to her to be close to him.
She went to the refrigerator and opened it, looking for milk. And then she saw it.
A bottle of Smirnoff vodka.
This was very strange.
Henry McGee had purchased a bottle of Smirnoff vodka sometime during the day yesterday when she was out taking photographs of Matthew O’Day. And then he had opened it because the seal was broken.
She stood very still and looked at the bottle and remembered she had seen this bottle before, when they had stayed in the Excelsior in Rome, when she had noticed it in his suitcase. It hadn’t been there before he went to Naples and then it was there. She said she wanted a drink and he had gotten very angry and said she was to keep her fucking hands off that bottle and he had slapped her for good measure.
The same bottle.
She stared at it for minutes. And then she saw the second thing.
A small glass jar full of caviar. Black and rich. She loved caviar. Vodka and caviar.
Except it wouldn’t be caviar.
She opened the caviar jar and smelled it and she had smelled that before, it was something, something…
She spooned the caviar on a plate and saw the small radio, as small as a nine-volt battery, concealed in the bottom of it. Caviar and vodka.
She took out the bottle of vodka and opened it. She sniffed it. It was odorless and vodka is not odorless.
Marie was very afraid now. Henry had killed all those people and he was going to kill her. She didn’t know how but she knew it now.
34
Henry McGee sat with the transmitter in his left hand and the steering wheel in his right. The car was a Peugeot with the steering wheel on the English side. He was on a side street in Maida Vale. He had dropped off Maureen a couple of minutes earlier. Maureen would be edging her way around Marie now, thinking about how she was going to do it. Maureen had a knife and she said it was all she needed because she was very strong and it sounded like this German girl was small and not strong.
Henry chuckled at that and pushed the transmitter button. The receiver would ignite the pearls of gelignite dyed black in a caviar jar and available from a merchant in Paris who dealt in such things. Matthew O’Day had gotten that for him. Matthew was proving to be very, very handy for Henry. A good terrorist with good sources could be extremely useful, Henry thought.
By now, the interior of the refrigerator would be around sixteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit and the bottle of nerve gas would have been transformed from a liquid to a gas. It would be filling the apartment while the two girls danced around each other and decided about each other. Shit. There was nothing to decide. They were both dead now. And when their bodies were found in five or six or seven days, the cops would be just as puzzled as they were by the deaths in Mayfair, but by then they would have their suspect. The usual suspect. The stage Irishman in the form of Matthew O’Day with photographs and murder written all over his face.
Damnit. He was clever. He needed the girl Maureen to link the dead bodies in Mayfair with the dead bodies they’d find here with Matthew O’Day. And that would link back to the bombings in the west of Ireland. It might take the authorities some weeks to figure it all out but they’d figure it out. Matthew O’Day had one final mission to do for Henry. And he didn’t know it yet. But the cops would link everything to O’Day finally, the dead servants, the dead girls, everything. It all went back to the photographs. And it might take them a while longer to figure out about how all this linked to Trevor Armstrong and EAA but they would. By then, it wouldn’t matter. Trevor couldn’t tell them anything without compromising himself and Henry would be fucking Polynesian girls in Tahiti.
He dropped the transmitter on the seat and put the car in gear.
In the cold morning light, the Peugeot crept away, down the street that was still waiting to wake up.