“We are not terribly interested in this Crohan fellow. It’s history. We are interested in attempting to discover who is playing a game with us. Americans? The Opposition? Even the Irish, though I should doubt strongly they have the requisite intelligence to penetrate our system.”
“Penetration of our security hasn’t been so very difficult in the past few years,” Ely said. Again, said gently but with some of the razor’s edge his words used to carry before the business in Vienna had shipwrecked him.
“Ely, I’m giving you a chance. I won’t bring up the Vienna business again. You have your friend Tompkins to thank for saving your hide when that blew up. I’m convinced my confidence will not be misplaced.”
Ely said nothing.
“Good luck, then.”
Ely got up. He stared at the old man who was Q for a moment and then decided to speak. “You want silence, isn’t that it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you really don’t want to get to the bottom of anything. You merely want this matter brushed away.”
Q regarded him through the rimless glasses and placed the tips of his fingers together in a tent in front of his lips. He thought a long moment before he replied.
“You’ve put it crudely, Ely.”
“Yes. I’m afraid I have to be blunt. I have to know.”
“Of course you do. The fixer has to know what the job is.” Another pause. “Fix it, Ely. Something is broken. Fix it, make it quiet again.”
“And if it can’t be fixed.”
Q managed a frosty smile. “Then sweep it away into the dustbin. Broken things are always thrown away in the end, aren’t they?”
5
The Aer Lingus 747 named St. Brendan swept low over the brown winter fields of County Wicklow and began the final approach to Dublin airport. The transatlantic flight had been typically tiring and Rita Macklin yawned now and stretched as the gray morning light of Ireland coated the windows of the immense, half-empty plane.
The night had been restless though the journey in the darkness had been smooth as usual. Because the plane was half-empty, she had slept across three seats but she had awakened again and again with fragments of bad dreams prodding her conscious mind.
Rita Macklin rubbed her green eyes and shook out her medium-length red hair and rubbed color into her cheeks. She looked younger than she was — she would be thirty in the fall — but there was a curious tough quality to her strong, angled face that made the judgment of her actual age not very important to most people. She was not beautiful by any common convention because her jaw was too strong and the slight overbite of her teeth made her seem too aggressive to be conventionally attractive; all the defects in her face and lean figure combined to make her seem quite beautiful to men who were not afraid of such women.
Like Devereaux.
“Damn,” she said to herself in a whisper and she reached for her purse tucked beneath the seat and fumbled it open for a brush.
Devereaux had been part of the bad dreams of the long night’s journey for no reason at all. He was not remotely involved in her present assignment; she had not seen him for nearly three years since he had brushed her off.
“Damn,” she said again for no reason, and a passing green-clad stewardess with a motherly figure and the face of a nun stopped and asked Rita if anything was wrong.
“No, I’m just thinking aloud,” she said and the stewardess went down the aisle to the back of the plane.
Why had she dreamed about Devereaux a half-dozen times? In one dream, she had slept with him as she had slept with him the first time in the motel room in Clearwater Beach, Florida, three years ago. She had thought he was a fellow journalist; before the dreadful night she was chased across the beach by two killers and she found out Devereaux was an intelligence agent using her to get the secret journal of an old priest named Leo Tunney.
That was it.
Spies and priests and it was all tied in intricate memory to the present assignment — to interview an old Irish priest in Dublin who might know something about a man named Tomas Crohan.
Devereaux. Damn him.
She realized she was angry. She pushed the brush roughly through her hair until she made tears in her eyes.
In the end, after she had known what Devereaux was, it had not mattered to her. But he wouldn’t speak to her, even though she was certain he had fallen in love with her. He had pushed her away at the last minute and she had cured herself of him in three years by working hard and by not mooning over him and by avoiding the temptation to wonder about him. After all, she worked in the same town he worked in and she was a magazine reporter with a lot of resources; she could have discovered his whereabouts anytime she wanted.
And he could have discovered hers as well. If he had wanted her. Priests and spies, she thought, dropping the brush back into her purse. The plane’s wheels locked down and tiny Dublin airport stretched into view on the north side of the old city below. Priests and spies and bad dreams on a long night’s crossing.
As soon as she passed through customs at Dublin airport, Rita Macklin changed money and found a pay telephone and put in a call to the priest she had come three thousand miles to interview.
Father Cunningham was retired now and lived in a room in St. Adrian’s rectory on the south side of Dublin, beyond the Ring Road.
A housekeeper answered and gave the telephone receiver to another priest who had a suspicious voice. No one ever called old Father Cunningham, he explained; was she a relative from America?
“Yes,” Rita lied easily. The phone was put down with a thump and there were background noises and then an old, quarrelsome Irish voice came on the line.
“Who be ye then?”
“Rita Macklin.”
“I’ve no such relation.”
“But Mrs. Fitzroy from Chicago wrote to you.”
“She did, did she?”
“She wanted me to come to see you.”
“She did, did she? And why d’ye come from America in the dead of winter to see an old man?”
“Because of her cousin. She says you can help her find her cousin.”
“Find Tomas Crohan, is it? Ye’ll find him with the angels. Or the devil.”
“Do you think he’s dead?” Rita asked calmly. Mrs. Fitzroy had said he would be difficult to get around.
“I’m an old man, Miss Macklin, and I don’t know a thing anymore and that’s the truth. Alive or dead it don’t matter; in a little while, I’ll be able to tell for meself.”
Rita bit her underlip and stared hard at the green telephone box in front of her. She wouldn’t take no from the old man; there was no question of that, but she hoped it would be easier to get to him. The story had grown and grown in her own mind since the day Mrs. Fitzroy sat down with her in the interview room at the magazine in Washington and began to tell her the long and fantastic story about her Irish cousin, Tomas Crohan.
“Father,” she began, softening the word like a respectful Catholic girl, “I’m a journalist in America. In Washington. You know Mrs. Fitzroy came to see me. She wrote you a letter, I have a copy of it. I tried to reach you a dozen times by phone but you wouldn’t speak to me.”
“And why do you suppose I’ll speak to ye now?”
“Because I’m here. I’ve come across an ocean to see you.”
“Is it that important to ye, Miss Macklin?”
“Yes. Important enough. Important to Mrs. Fitzroy—”
“Ah, Catherine Guilhoolie — that’s Mrs. Fitzroy to ye. A stubborn girl, always was, stubborn as a donkey blocking the creamery road and ye with a full load to get in before noon.” The pastoral reference went past Rita but she understood the sentiment.
“Miss Macklin, ye must be able to find all ye want to know about Tomas Crohan from ye own resources in yer own country. I don’t want to be bothered—”