“Nah,” he said. “Get back in on your back and spread out your arms, honey. There. There and there.”
The bonds were brutally tight. When he had finished trussing her to the bed, she began to feel her hands grow numb.
“They’re too tight,” she started to say.
“So your hands and feet are going to get numb. You think this is some sex game? You’re tied down to stay down until your lover man comes to get you. And you won’t like this gag either.”
When he was finished, Henry said, “Now, see the way it is, you and loverboy are going to get killed together. Isn’t that romantic? You and him going off to eternity, hand in hand. Sort of.” He was working on the bomb again on the front door, positioning the triggering device in the jamb. He opened the door after applying the Plastique to the doorframe at eye level.
“Now, honey, adieu. When your friend comes tripping down the hall to find the love of his life in his bed, he’s gonna have about a quarter of a second to appreciate the gift I wrapped for him before you and him are history. Understand what I’m saying, honey? This is a bomb and this time, it’s gonna take both of you out. I like bombs, always have, always like to use them for the delayed effect. I know I won’t be there when it goes but I can read all about it in the papers next day. Read all about the grievin’ widows and perplexed police and all the rest of that good shit. So, so long, honey, you got time to think about it while you wait for him. Too bad I ain’t got time to give you a good one but that’s the way it goes.” And he blew her a kiss at the door and slowly closed it on the triggering device.
47
Friday.
Matthew O’Day was standing at a magazine counter staring at the cover of Time magazine. It was a shot of the ruined public house in County Clare where nineteen had died in Henry McGee’s act of terror and the headline said: Why Ireland Still Weeps.
He glanced at the English papers arrayed on a counter beneath the magazine rack. The headlines were all about a bomb blast the day before in the Hilton Hotel. The world was full of bombs and sudden, certain acts of death and it was becoming just too much to understand and even know. Terror was beginning to seep into the fabric of society so deeply that acts of terror — like acts of murder or suicide or drug use — were numbing the public sensibility. Terror was beginning not to terrorize. Matthew O’Day was beginning to see that and see that there would have to be another way for him. Perhaps, when he came back from Chicago, he would recruit a force of assassins who would change the face of terror more along the lines suggested by this crazy American. Terror for profit and then assassination for political purpose. He thought of the botched bombing of the British government a decade earlier. You had to be sure and certain and nothing was more sure and certain than a bullet in the head. That was terror that made sense.
He looked around him at the hordes shuffling through the noise-filled terminal to gates and waiting planes. The world did not stop because a plane fell out of the sky. The government did not fall because a bomb made life just that little bit more untenable in Belfast. Matthew saw the way it was and saw the only way to go now was to make sense out of terror.
“I got your bag,” Henry McGee said. It was a plain brown suitcase with brass-fitted locks. “And your tickets.”
“I’ll use me Eire passport in the name of Powers,” Matthew said. “You’ve got the money now, and no tricks?”
“The money and no tricks. I want you to contact this number when you’re in Chicago,” Henry said, handing him a piece of paper.
Matthew looked warily at him and at the suitcase. “Like you said, I’ll check it out meself,” Matthew said.
“Like I said. Check it out and I’ll wait until you go through ticketing. I’ll be watching you, Matthew, so don’t think you’re going to do a duck on me with this money. You fuck me up and it’s strip steak time, only you’re the stripped steak.”
Matthew took the bag into the men’s room at the far end of the magazine kiosk. Henry stood outside and smiled. It was all going along the way it was supposed to. Even the bombing in the Hilton had worked out; Devereaux was now history and there was no one on Henry’s trail. Unless Trevor Armstrong decided to turn him in and he couldn’t do that without turning in himself. No. Everything had worked just fine.
Matthew O’Day came out of the gray-doored room and looked right into Henry’s face.
“Like you said,” he said.
“I’m a man of my word,” Henry McGee said. “Have a nice trip, Matthew. And when you’re in Chicago…”
“Yeah?”
“You know. Rat-a-tat.” He made a sudden machine-gun gesture. “Watch out for the gangsters.”
48
This is what had happened at the hotel before the bomb explosion.
Devereaux called Hanley from the lobby. He always used lobby telephones because of their anonymity and because it gave him a chance to survey his setting. The agent acts with suspicion so long that he develops a sense that everything at all times is suspicious.
It was early afternoon Thursday.
The telephone sounded at the other end and then Hanley’s voice, so clear he might have been in the next room.
“I need authorization for some things. There are changes in the plan,” Devereaux began.
Hanley said, “Miss Macklin. She would be there by now. I told her… your room. You’re going to have to talk to her, Devereaux; she thinks you’re in danger and she threatens Section.”
Devereaux said, “What’s the threat?”
“To tell things. If you’re hurt.”
“I won’t be hurt,” Devereaux said. “I’m a footstep behind Henry McGee and whatever is going down, it goes down in a matter of hours. I need some things. Ordnance.”
“What are you going to do? Start a war?”
“Complete a mission.”
“Mrs. Neumann is very upset.”
“She’s paid to be upset. Someone has to have a conscience.”
“But not you.”
“No. I was paid all these years never to question certain things.”
“Where are you now?”
“In the lobby of the hotel.”
“Where’s Henry McGee?”
“I don’t know exactly. I do know who he’s making contact with and I know — I think I know — something of the deal that has to be going down. Tomorrow. It’ll go down tomorrow.”
“What kind of ordnance?”
And Devereaux described it exactly.
Rita Macklin cracked the pressed wood of the footboard and her legs were more or less free. But her arms were numb now and the headboard was much larger and that much harder to work against.
Sweat beaded her face and covered it with a fine sheen. Her eyes were desperate and something else they had not been for all the days since the bombing: They were alive.
She grunted beneath the sour dry taste of the gag across her mouth. The gag was tight and parted her lips and teeth and pressed her tongue down on the floor of her mouth. The gag also made it difficult to hear because it was pressed against her ears.
She pushed and pushed and she would never break this headboard. In her frustrated fury, she twisted around and her feet struck the floor at the side of the bed.
Leverage.
She stopped a moment to think about it. She tried to remember the principles from drawings in a high school textbook studied long ago.
She knelt on the floor and pushed her knees under the box spring as far as they would go. Her arms felt as though they were being pulled out of their sockets. The tingling numbness extended back to her shoulders and burned across her back.
She pushed against the box spring with her knees and pulled the headboard with her bonds and the pain almost knocked her out but now she felt something. The bed was shifting, confused by these two pressures on it. The bed was pulling away. An inch. Maybe two inches. Maybe a third inch. Each time she pulled at the headboard, she wanted to scream because of the pain but the dry gag stifled even that act of rage and frustration.
She pulled and pulled and pushed and pushed and now the bed was twisting itself sideways; the support of the broken footboard and rail was gone and the mattress and box spring touched the floor on the foot end of the bed. The headboard began to bend against the under rails and she could feel another four inches and then the headboard made a terrible sound that was almost human and it collapsed against the mattress. Yes. Yes. In her fury, her absolute certainty of the rightness of her hatred for the man who had tried to kill her and kill Devereaux, she was stronger than three men and the headboard bowed to her in honor of her strength. She got off her knees and dragged the headboard behind her to the door and she rubbed her back against the Plastique.
It fell from the doorframe onto the carpet, breaking the connection with the armed trigger in the doorjamb.
She kicked it away and then it was over and she fell, unconscious in her exhaustion, onto the remains of the bed strewn on the floor. She was still bound and gagged but she had done it and now the fury fell out of her in the obliteration of sleep.
This is the way Devereaux found her and the way Rita Macklin saved their lives.