“You want to go to Leningrad. Why? To see Tomas Crohan?”
Now she could not speak. She rattled the door again.
“What I want to know is what the American game is, actually. You’re a journalist? Is it usual for a journalist to lie to acquire information from a dead man’s effects?”
“You do what you have to.”
“Is that correct? We have very good information, Miss Macklin, to indicate that you are an operative from Central Intelligence Agency. What we wish to know is what it is that you intend to do with Tomas Crohan.”
The cab stopped in front of a three-story building in a broken-down section of the city. Some of the windows were boarded up. No one was on the dark street; the lamps had been vandalized and they were enveloped in nearly total darkness.
Ely turned on his flashlight and splashed the light on the stairs of the old building. He opened the rear door and grasped Rita’s arm firmly. She struck him across the face, and he was so startled that he dropped the flashlight. Rita began to run down the street.
“My God, what a wallop,” Ely said softly and felt blood on his lips. He tasted the salty liquid for a moment, wiped again, and then closed the door of the car carefully. He picked up the flashlight and went to the driver’s door and got in. He started the car and flicked on the headlights. He could see Rita running half a block ahead.
He sped up suddenly and pulled the car ahead of her, and then jumped out and crossed the sidewalk.
Rita screamed the only word she could think of: “Rape! Rape!”
A light flashed on in a house down the street and a woman’s head peered through a yellow-lit pane of glass.
Ely had the pistol in one hand and the flashlight in the other.
“Miss Macklin, I don’t want to do you harm.”
“You wouldn’t shoot me.”
“Of course I would.” The voice was utterly calm.
She came close to him and saw the lazy calm in his eyes. She had known one man like that, a man with calm eyes and a quiet voice who could utterly convince her of the violence he was capable of.
She opened the rear door.
“What the hell is going on?” cried a voice from some window in some building somewhere. All the rest was silence in the bitter cold.
He led her up the stairs of the dark abandoned building. There was a flat on the second floor with a table, chairs, and a small lamp. He turned on the lamp — it was an oil lamp because the electricity had long been shut off in these houses — and they sat down. The lamp was warm, the only warmth in the place. A large gray rat watched them without curiosity from a ledge that ran along the wall between the boarded windows. Roaches covered the walls in the light of the flickering lamp.
Rita Macklin saw these things but turned her eyes away from them. She forced herself to stare directly into the blue eyes of the man who had kidnapped her.
“Well, Miss Macklin, I apologize for the surroundings but I’m a stranger to this city myself.”
“Who are you?”
“That’s not important. Let us say I am Ely.”
“It sounds made up.”
He blinked and stared sadly at her. He spoke with a gentle, calm voice. “I suppose it is in a way. You are with the Central Intelligence Agency and I—”
“I am not a goddamn spook for the CIA,” she said harshly.
Ely smiled. “You say. With, I note, some vehemence. Perhaps we were misinformed.”
“Why is British Intelligence interested in this?”
Ely looked surprised. “Who spoke of British Intelligence?”
“Who are you then? You don’t look Irish.”
“And you don’t look like an agent for the Americans. But appearances are deceiving at times. We snapped your photograph the first day you arrived — in time for the funeral of the priest.”
“You work for Auntie,” Rita Macklin said.
“So you do know the little secrets,” Ely said with a smile. “Now, the sooner we get this over with, the sooner we can get out of this wretched slum and back to our rooms. I’m quite willing to drop you at your hotel.”
“I thought that was your intention from the beginning.”
“First, the fare, Miss Macklin.”
“Or what?”
Ely stared at Rita for a moment and then smiled sadly.
He still held the pistol in his hand. He looked at it for a moment.
“You’re a British agent. Are you going to shoot me?” Rita said defiantly but with a nervous rapidity.
“Would that be absurd?” Ely asked.
“I’m an American.”
“Yes. An American agent. And you have some information that I wish to have. So what am I asked to do? Merely to get it, Miss Macklin. Without regard for you.”
“So you’re threatening me again?”
The smile was gone. Ely’s voice was cold. “If you can’t help me, I’m afraid I’ll turn you in.”
“To whom?”
“The Irish authorities. You’re a wanted woman, Miss Macklin.”
“I’ve never been in Ireland in my life.”
“You’re wanted for questioning in connection with a murder that involved a terrorist attack in a Liverpool public house two weeks ago.”
She stared at him as though he had suddenly gone mad.
Ely went on, calmly. “You are the suspected liaison between the IRA, which was responsible for the bombing in Liverpool, and the Northern Aid Society front in Washington.”
“This is so stupid,” she said. “You won’t be able to get away with that, I—”
“You’ll be held incommunicado in Dublin and transferred to our facilities in Liverpool where you shall be questioned.” He stared sadly at her. “Strenuous questioning, I should imagine. I won’t have anything to do with that.”
“You can’t do this to me,” Rita said. “Goddamnit, I am a newspaperman.”
“Yes. A journalist. So you say. I can assure you that you will tell the people in Liverpool everything they want to know. Which would make it so much better for both of us if you would tell me now.”
“We’re not in Russia—”
“And not in the United States,” Ely said. He slipped his pistol in his coat pocket.
Rita did not hesitate. She turned suddenly and ran to the door.
Surprisingly, Ely moved with equal agility. She was a step ahead of him but the door was stuck. He grabbed her thin shoulder and pulled her around. He did not expect her to be swinging as she turned.
The blow caught him on the temple and momentarily staggered him. A second blow fell on his right cheekbone.
Rita turned again to the door but this time he hit her very hard on the side of the head.
The blow made her feel sick for a moment. Again, he turned her toward him. This time he slapped her across her face. And again. And a third time.
“I’ll kill you,” she said, her face stinging with pain and tears.
“No, you will not, Miss Macklin,” Ely said. “You will sit down and you will tell me exactly what I wish to know.”
“Then you don’t have a fallback position,” she said. She smiled. “You either get the information from me or you let me go.”
“No, Miss Macklin, not at all,” Ely said. “I get what I need to know or I do not let you go. I cannot afford failure.”
“My God, you can’t—”
“Miss Macklin, I have grown gray in the service and I have no wish to be prematurely retired now because I have failed a rather straightforward operation to obtain rather unimportant information—”
“So unimportant that you kidnap me and now you threaten to kill me.”
Ely stared at her, at the involuntary tears in her green eyes, at her flushed face that bore marks of his hands. He was completely calm, completely without expression.
“All this because of someone who might be dead,” she said.
“Our permanent stationmaster at Dublin was a friend of the old priest,” Ely began.
“I know that. Parker.”