“This is kidnapping—”
“If you were a kid. But it isn’t. It’s just a little ride into the countryside. A nice day for a ride to Oxford. Don’t you think it’s a nice day for a ride?”
Trevor summoned up his control. These things did not happen to people like him. Unless, of course, this was a final cross by the man called Henry McGee. Yes, that was it.
“I gave him the money. There’s no point to this. He has all the money.”
And he thought of Dwyer. What if there had been an arranged signal with some unknown confederate? And what if Dwyer managed to kill Henry McGee before the signal?
The clammy day had crawled into the car and was stroking him. He felt so very cold.
Dwyer felt the rain bake into his thick coat. The rain beaded on his hat brim. He watched Henry McGee cross the parking lot to his car. A remote parking lot was as good a place as any. He felt for the pistol in his pocket.
Heathrow was in mourning. The clouds yielded pitiful light rain, the kind that glazes roadways and makes all sorry creatures sodden refugees from God. The rain did not hush the rumble of traffic but made it seem more hideous because it was unrelenting when it should have ceased and waited for the clouds to part.
He did not even see the gray man until he felt the pistol barrel in his right ear.
He stood still. He knew exactly what this was. In 1957, he had felt a pistol barrel in his right ear while standing on a midnight platform of the Flushing elevated, waiting for a train to the city. He had offered a pistol barrel himself by way of explanation of his purpose three or four times in his life and he knew exactly how serious this was. They were between a red Ford Escort and a blue BMW and the world was all around them, rumbling and crowded, but they might have been the only creatures left on earth.
“Get in the blue car,” the voice said. He could not clearly see the man until he was in the backseat of the car.
There was a red-haired girl at the wheel. The man with the pistol was gray, gray in eye and hair and face. He might have been the weather incarnate.
“This robbery?” Dwyer said.
“This is about your life,” Devereaux said.
“What the hell do you want?”
“Do you have enough money? I mean, to retire on?”
“What the hell do you want?”
“Tell me about Trevor.”
“I don’t know what the hell you want.”
“Open your mouth.”
Dwyer looked at him. The man was murder without passion. Dwyer opened his lips and the man put the pistol on his tongue so that he could taste the astringency of the barrel. Dwyer absolutely understood and to hell with everything, he was no martyr; he had a chance to go to Vietnam when he was drafted and he bought an MOS to get out of it, five thousand bucks to the levy sergeant to get transferred to Fort Benning, Georgia, instead and clerk for an infantry company, better to sell weekend passes on the side as a clerk than get his fucking ass shot off in some fucking jungle somewhere with fucking assholes in black pajamas creeping around him. No sir, he was no martyr and the beautiful black girls who awaited him on Saint Martin had never been so far away.
“Whaddaya want?” But it came out garbled. That was because of the pistol in his mouth.
“I want to know everything. If I find out everything, you can live.”
The red-haired girl looked at him across the back of the front seat. She was absolutely cold in her green eyes. She was as much death as this one. The death in them had filled the car to the temperature of freezing. Dwyer knew he was going to die and he didn’t much care for the thought.
He made another strangled reply and the gray man took the pistol out of his mouth and put it between his eyes. He tried to see the pistol. He could see the hand of the stranger and see that the index finger was curled into the trigger guard.
“Boss was being set up. Extortion. Man wanted five million. Boss set up a deal.”
“What was the deal?”
He was talking very fast, in case the gray man was in a hurry.
“Boss said to put the bomb on another plane. Man made the deal.”
“What man?”
“Henry McGee.”
“What plane?”
“Plane for Chicago. Takes off in ten minutes.”
“And what were you going to do?”
“Get the money.”
“Kill Henry McGee?”
“Jesus Christ. I don’t wanna be set up.”
“Nobody’s going to set you up. You’re going to become an honest man for a change. Trevor takes the fall.”
“The boss?”
“Not anymore,” Devereaux said.
“Kill him,” Rita Macklin said.
“No. He can be useful.”
“Kill him,” she said.
Devereaux looked at her. “If you want me to.”
Jesus Christ.
“Get the fuckin’ bomb,” Dwyer said. “Get the bomb off the plane. Get the fuckin’ guy, this Irish guy that carried the bomb on the plane. Let him take the fall. Shit, let the boss take the fall, I give a shit.”
“You’re a loyal bastard.”
“I don’t wanna die,” Dwyer said.
Devereaux looked at him closely as though he might be examining a butterfly pinned to a board.
“No,” Devereaux said. “No one does.”
Matthew O’Day opened his eyes.
The man in the aisle wore the expression of someone who knew everything and had seen everything. He didn’t wear a uniform but Matthew could smell a man who was used to uniforms.
“Would you be kind enough to come this way, sir?”
Behind the man was the stewardess who had tried to wake him for a drink. He blinked. He looked out the window. He should have been thirty thousand feet in the air. He was still in the plastic cocoon of the aircraft and it was still parked on the tarmac, engines running to cool the interior. It seemed very cold.
“Sir?”
“Is there something wrong?”
“No, sir. Just a matter of some formalities,” said the Englishman. He had a broad accent. Might have been Liverpool Irish. But this was crazy.
“I really don’t understand.”
And the large, moon-shaped face bent close. “Come this way, sir, we have to return to the terminal.”
“Why?”
“There’s the report of a bomb on the plane,” the moon-faced man said. The eyes were hazel, without depth, barely opaque.
“I don’t understand,” Matthew O’Day said.
“It will all be made plain,” the moon-faced man said.
51
Henry McGee parked the Peugeot in a no-parking zone on the side street off Maida Vale and walked down the block to the apartment building. The girls might be starting to stink but he thought he could stand the smell for a couple of hours of sleep. The flight to Tahiti wouldn’t take off until nine P.M.
The thing about it was how fucking easy it was, once you figured it out. Everyone expects to be given a pass; it comes with being alive and living on hope. Everyone figures that there are limits to cruelty and inhumanity when there aren’t any. Everyone can be terrified because they don’t really expect the worst thing to happen. Like Trevor. Like poor little Marie lying dead in the flat. Like Maureen, who was really a great lay. Like Devereaux and his girlfriend. Like the whole fucking world that thinks everything is figured out and that terror is something you read about in Time magazine or something, something that happens to a bunch of ragheads in the Middle East or somewhere.
Henry had checked the money. If he was a man given to quibbling, he might have even counted it but it looked right, all those smiling and colorful Swiss francs with the money amount stamped out in plain English or German or whatever the fuck it was, the numbers were plain to see; and the pounds with the old queen ensuring that old Britain stood behind all this; and the dollars, the wonderful and small dollars with their quaint pictures of Capitol Hill and Independence Hall, dollar wasn’t worth what it was in 1920 but what the hell, it was only money.