I rolled down the car window to catch, on the surge of freezing air, the shifting sound of the distant ocean breakers. The sound brought with it a sudden rush of love for this place. It was home, it was safety, it was mine. My father had bought this house fifty years before as a refuge from the whores and pimps and lawyers who plagued his business, and now it would become my refuge. Here, I told myself, I could at last live honestly. No more secrets. I had come home.
Home. I sat there for a long time, letting the cold fill the car, thinking. Thinking and watching. Nothing moved in the salt marsh; I did not expect any of my enemies to be here, but old habits keep a man alive, and so I watched and waited.
I watched the house and listened to the sea. I felt no instinct of fear. This place was too far from the hatreds of the Middle East or the bitterness of Ulster to bear danger. This was the refuge where I would hide until Rebel Lady reached America, then I would give myself up to the government for questioning. My telephone calls to Brussels had merely been to warn them of Stinger missiles, il Hayaween and my conviction that a terrible series of airliner massacres was planned as a revenge for America’s thwarting of Saddam Hussein’s plans. I had given the CIA as much information as they needed to stop the Stingers being deployed, but they would want more. They would want all the information I had gathered and remembered since first they had sent me out, as an agent without strings and without provenance, twelve years before.
For Roisin had been right. I was one of the agents who did not exist. I was one of the CIA’s secrets. I had been turned out into the world and told to stay out until I had something worth bringing home. I was one of the agents who would leave no tracks and make no footprints. I would be paid nothing, offered nothing, and my name would appear on no government list, no computer record, and no file. I did not exist. Simon van Stryker, who had recruited me to the programme, called us his ‘Stringless Agents’ because there would be no apron strings or puppet strings to lead our enemies back to Langley, Virginia. Now I was going back there of my own accord, but in my own time and I would not give them everything. Rebel Lady and her cargo were mine. Saddam Hussein’s gold would not go towards paying off America’s deficit, but to keep me in my old age.
What old age? I sat in the freezing, dark car and gazed at the moonlit marsh and I remembered how I had once dreamed of bringing Roisin to this house; I had even dreamed, God help me, of raising her children on this shore, but she had scorned that dream as the sentimental witterings of a dull and unimaginative fool. I remembered her eyes after her execution, all fierceness gone, then I thought of Liam’s eyes that had been so accusing in the green lamplight. Poor Liam. After I had wrestled the sleeping bag about his corpse I had found his dried vomit on my hands and I had panicked as if I had been touched by a foul contagion. I remembered my childhood, and how Father Sifflard had told us of the one sin against the Holy Ghost that could never be forgiven, which sin no one seemed able to define, and I wondered if we all defined it for ourselves and if I was already guilty and thus doomed to the horrors of eternal punishment.
I rolled up the window, let in the clutch, and drove towards my house, which had been built 150 years before by a Captain Alexander Starbuck who, retiring from the profitable pursuit of whales in the Southern Ocean and quarrelling with his family on Nantucket, had come to this Cape Cod marsh and built himself a home snug against the Atlantic winds. My father had bought The Starbuck House from the estate of the Captain’s great-granddaughter and had dreamed of retiring to it, but the dream had never come true. Now I would make it home. I drove slowly up the driveway of crushed clam shells that splintered loudly under the tyres, and stopped on the big turnaround in front of the house where my headlights shone stark on the silver-grey cedar shingles. It was a classic Cape Cod house: a simple low building with two windows either side of its front door, a steep staircase in the hallway and a snug dormer upstairs that must have reminded old Captain Starbuck of a whaling ship’s cabins. The house’s only addition since 1840 was the garage, which had been clad in the same cedar shingles as the house itself and thus looked as old as the rest of the building. It was a home as simple as a child’s drawing, a home at peace with its surroundings, and it was mine, and that thought was wondrously comforting as I killed the headlights and climbed out of the car. I took the sea-bag from the boot and found the house keys that I had kept safe these seven years, then walked to the front door.
My key scraped in the lock as it turned. There had never been electricity in the house, and I had no flashlight, but the moon shone brightly enough to illuminate the hallway. My sister Maureen, who used the house as a holiday home, had left some yellow rain-slickers hanging on the pegs by the door, but otherwise the shadowed hall looked just as I had left it seven years before. The antique wooden sea-trunk with its rope handles that I had bought in Provincetown still stood under the steep-pitched stairway, and on its painted lid was a candle in a pewter holder. I fumbled in the holder’s dish, hoping to find a book of matches.
At which point an electric light blazed about and dazzled me. I started back, but before I could escape something terrible struck my face and I was blinded. The pain made me want to scream, but I could not even breathe, and, vainly gasping for air and with my hands scrabbling like claws at my scorching eyes, I collapsed.
PART TWO
The police arrived five minutes later; their two cars rocking and wailing down the dirt track, then skidding ferociously as they braked on the clam-shell turnaround. A young excited officer, his pistol drawn, burst through the open front door and shouted at me not to move.
“Oh, go away and grow up,” I said wearily. “Do I look as if I’m about to run away?”
My sight had half returned and, through the painful tears, I could just see that the girl who had attacked me was now sitting on the stairs holding an antique whaling harpoon that used to hang on my bedroom wall. She had not used the vicious harpoon to cripple me, but a squeegee bottle which now stood beside her on the steep stairway. “He broke in,” the girl explained laconically to the three policemen who now piled excitedly into the hallway. “He says his name is O’Neill. Dr O’Neill.” She sounded scornful. In the last few moments I had learned that this was one very tough lady.
“Do you want me to call the rescue squad?” the first policeman asked, while an older officer knelt beside me and gently pulled my hands from my face.
“What did you do to him?” The older man asked the girl.
“Ammonia.”
“Jesus. Did you dilute it?”
“No way!”
“Jesus! Get some water, Ted. Can we use your kitchen, ma’am?”
“Through there.”
“You used ammonia?” the first policeman asked in awed disbelief.
“Squirted him good.” The girl showed the officers the liquid soap bottle that she had used to lacerate me through the banister rails. “I used to know a policeman in Los Angeles,” the girl explained, “and he taught me never to piss a psychopath off, just to put the bastard down fast. Ammonia does that, and it’s legal.” The last three words were added defensively.
“Sure is.” One of the policemen had fetched a saucepan of water from the kitchen. My breath was more or less normal now, but the pain in my eyes was atrocious. The officer poured water on my face while outside the house the police radios sounded unnaturally loud in the still, cold night air.
“We’ll take him away in a moment, ma’am,” the older policeman, a sergeant, reassured the girl.
“Then bury the bastard,” the girl said vindictively.
“What did you say your name was, mister?” the sergeant asked.
“My name,” I said as grandly as I could, “is Dr James O’Neill,” and I fumbled in an inside pocket for my false passport.
“Careful!” The sergeant moved to restrain me, then relaxed as he saw I was not pulling a gun. “I know you!” he said suddenly.
I blinked at him. My sight was still foully blurred, but I recognised the se
rgeant as Ted Nickerson, a guy I had last seen in twelfth grade. Damn it, I thought, but this was not what I had planned! I had planned to disappear in Cape Cod for a few weeks, hidden from sight while my ship came home, and the last thing I needed was for the word to spread that I had returned to America as bait for Michael Herlihy or il Hayaween.
“You’re Paul Shanahan!” Ted exclaimed. “Which means–” He stopped, glancing at the girl.
“Which means this is my house,” I confirmed.
“It’s not his house,” the girl insisted. “I rent this place! I’ve got a five-year lease!” She was shivering in a nightdress and an old woollen bath robe. My old woollen bath robe. She had bare feet, long black hair, and an Oriental face.
“This is the Shanahan house.” Ted Nickerson confirmed the ownership uncomfortably. He was still frowning at me. “You are Paul, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Bullshit!” the girl said with an explosively indignant force on the second syllable. “The house belongs to a guy in Boston, a guy called Patrick McPhee.”
“McPhee’s my brother-in-law,” I told her. “He’s married to my sister Maureen. Maureen holds the keys to the place while I’m away, that’s all! She uses it for summer vacations and odd weekends, nothing more.”
The girl stared at me. I guessed that by using Maureen’s name I had convinced her I was not your usual rapist breaking and entering, but might in fact be telling the truth. Ted Nickerson was still frowning, perhaps thinking about my false name. “How’s your face, Paul?”
“Hurts like hell.”
“Ammonia’s bad stuff,” he said sympathetically, “real bad.”
“How was I to know?” The girl was on the defensive now. “He doesn’t knock, he just comes into the house…”
“Like he owns it?” I finished for her.
“Oh, shit!” she said angrily. “Then why the hell are you calling yourself Dr O’Neill?”
“None of your damned business,” I snarled, then struggled to my feet. My eyes were still streaming with tears and my throat felt as if I had gargled with undiluted sulphuric acid, but I was recovering. “Who the hell put electric light in here?”
“I did,” the girl said defiantly. “I’m a painter. I need decent light to work.”
“Did you put in the telephone as well?” Ted Nickerson asked her.
“Sure did.”
“Mind if I use it?”
“Help yourself. In the kitchen.”
The girl edged tentatively down the stairs that Captain Starbuck had built as steep as the companionways on his old whaling ships. One policeman was out in the car, and the other two were hovering nervously by the open front door. “Can we close the front door?” the girl demanded. “I’m kind of chilly.”
“Sure, ma’am.”
I went through into the living room from where I could hear Sergeant Nickerson grunting into the telephone in the kitchen. I found the new light switch and, in the glow of a lamp, saw a box of tissues on a table by the low sofa and plucked out a handful which I used to scrub my eyes. The tissues helped, though the remnants of the ammonia still stung like the devil.
The room, except for the electric light and the paintings, had not changed much. It was panelled in old pale oak and its low beamed ceiling was formed by the pine planks of the dormer storey upstairs. It was a shipwright’s house with a main floor of pegged oak that the girl had thoughtfully protected from paint drips with a dropcloth. The wide stone hearth was filled with ash on which I threw the crumpled tissues.
“Do you really own the house?” The girl had followed me into the living room.
“Yes.”
“Hell!” She said angrily, then, with her arms protectively folded across her breasts, she walked to one of the small windows that stared eastwards towards the ocean. “The mailman told me he didn’t think Patrick McPhee was the owner, but I thought that was just troublemaking gossip.”
“McPhee’s always been full of shit,” I said savagely. “Marrying him was the worst day’s work Maureen ever did. So how long have you been here?”
“Three years, but I don’t live here permanently. I come here whenever I need to, but I’ve got a place of my own in New York.”
“Manhattan?”
“Sure, where else?” She turned to glare at me, as though the night’s misadventures were all my fault. “I’m sorry about your eyes.” She spoke grudgingly.
“Blame Patrick,” I said. I dislike my brother-in-law intensely.
“But I’ve invested in this place! I put in the electricity, and the phone!” She spoke accusingly. “I even had an estimate for central heating, but Maureen said I shouldn’t waste my money. I thought that was kind of weird, but I didn’t ask any questions. I was dumb, right? But I like this place too much. It’s the light.” She waved a peremptory hand at the window to explain herself.
“I know,” I said, and I did know. In fall and winter the light on the Cape is so clear and sharp that it seems like the world is newly minted. Thousands of painters had been drawn by that light, though most of them merely wasted good paint and canvas trying to capture it. Whether the girl was good or not I could not tell, for my eyesight was still smeared. In the dim electric light her canvases seemed full of anger and jaggedness, but that could just have been my mood.
“My name’s Sarah,” she said in a placatory tone, “Sarah Sing Tennyson.”
“Paul Shanahan,” I said, and almost added that it was nice to meet her, but that courtesy seemed inappropriate, so I left it out. “Sing?” I asked instead. “That’s a odd name.”
“My mother was Chinese.” Sarah Sing Tennyson was tall with very long, very straight and very black hair that framed a narrow, almost feral face. She had dark slanted eyes above high cheekbones. A good-looking trespasser, I thought sourly, if indeed she was a trespasser, for God only knew what the lawyers would make of this situation.
“When did you put the electricity in?” I asked lamely, supposing that at the very least I should have to reimburse her for that expense.
“Two summers ago.”
“I didn’t see any wires outside.”
“I had to bury the cables because this is all National Seashore land so you’re not allowed to string wires off poles. It was the same with the phone line.” She gave me a very hostile look. “It was expensive.”
More fool you, I thought. “And how much rent are you paying Patrick?”
“Is it your business?” She bridled.
“It’s my Goddamn house,” I bridled back. “And if my Goddamn brother-in-law lets my Goddamn house to some Goddamn girl, then it is my Goddamn business.”
“I am not a girl!” Sarah Sing Tennyson flared into instant and indignant hostility. I could allow her some irritation for being woken in the middle of the night, but even so she seemed to have an extraordinarily prickly character. “I am a woman, Mr Shanahan, unless you wish to accept the appellation of ‘boy’?”
Oh sweet Jesus, I thought, the insanities that old Europe was spared, then I was saved from further linguistic tedium when the kitchen door opened and Ted Nickerson, still holding the telephone handset, stared at me. “Paul?”
“Ted.”
“I’m talking to a guy named Gillespie. Peter Gillespie. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“Nothing at all,” I said truthfully.
Nickerson had been staring oddly at me ever since he recognised me, and now his puzzlement only seemed to deepen. “He says he expected to see you in Europe. Does that make sense?”
Christ, I thought, but the CIA had been far quicker than I had expected. They had responded to my warning calls by putting out an alert. “We got a warning to look out for you two days ago, Paul,” Ted Nickerson said.
“Tell Gillespie I’ll call him in a few weeks.”
Ted shook his head. “I’ve got orders to hold you, Paul. Protective custody.” He moved his free hand to his holstered pistol, making Sarah Sing Tennyson gasp.
I half raise
d my hands in a gesture of supplication. “OK, Ted, no need for drama.”
“You’re not under arrest, Paul,” Ted said carefully, “just under police protection.” He spoke into the phone, telling whoever was at the other end that I was safely in the bag.
Which meant I had screwed up.
I met Peter Gillespie next morning. He came to the police station with an agent called Stuart Callaghan who was to be my bodyguard. “We guessed people might want to stop you talking?” Gillespie explained the bodyguard’s presence. “The guys with the missiles, right?”
“I guess they might too,” I said, though I suspected the people who wanted to stop me talking were more worried about the five million bucks in gold that should have paid for the Stinger missiles.
“You’ve had breakfast, Mr Shanahan?” Gillespie had very punctiliously shown me his identification.
“Sure.”
“Then if you’re ready?” Gillespie was plainly eager to begin my debriefing. I was carrying, after all, over a decade of secrets that would feed the agency’s data banks. “We have a plane waiting at Hyannis Airport.” Gillespie tried to usher me towards the door.