The White Plague (31 page)

“How sure are you?” Wycombe-Finch could feel his heart beating rapidly. No telling who might be listening to this conversation. Very dangerous. Doheny had to answer that question correctly.

“We’re not positive, Wye. But I tell you, he tickles my neck hairs. We’ve one of our best men clinging to him like a leech, a priest ready at hand should he wish to confess, and a poor bereaved young boy in the party so he can see constantly what he’s done.”

Wycombe-Finch shook his head slowly from side to side. “Doe, you are a bloody awful man. You set this up.”

“I took advantage of a situation that was handed to us.”

“You’re still bloody clever, Doe. Conscience, that’ll be the key to the fellow, that is if we’re to believe that profile the Americans produced. My God! This does take a little thinking. I confess I doubted it when our cloak-and-dagger boys told me.”

“We’re not getting our hopes up too high, but it is something to tell your man Stonar.”

“He probably already knows. I suggest you be very careful, Doe. O’Neill may have some new nastiness up his sleeve… that is, if it’s the Madman.”

“Kid gloves, that’s the way we’re doing it.”

“Terribly muddy waters, Doe.”

This referred to a joke they had exchanged at a conference, muddy waters being the most fertile for new growth.

Doheny picked up on it immediately. “Very roiled, indeed. I’ll let you know if they get muddier.”

“Quite. Are the Americans helping?”

“We haven’t said anything to them for the obvious reasons, Wye. Earlier, they did send us some material… just in case, but it’s very scanty. No fingerprints, no dental records. They blame the Panic Fire, which may be the actual case.”

“And if this… O’Donnell, you say? If he’s just what he says he is?”

“We’re going to give him the mental thumbscrews: a triple approach, all adding up to one thing – he must come up with a brilliant new approach to our researches.”

“Triple approach? Ahh, you mean in case he’s actually O’Neill and you’re unable to prove it.”

“Damned right. He could give us a real clue, or try artful concealment or a diversion.”

“Or actual sabotage.”

“As good as a confession, that.” A burst of static, painfully loud, intruded on the line. When it passed, Doheny could be heard saying “. . . Beckett’s group is doing.”

Wycombe-Finch took it as a question. “I think the fellow to watch there is the little frog, Hupp. Got a devious mind. He feeds things to Beckett, almost as though he were playing Beckett, using the man as a personal computer.”

“Blimey! As you Brits say.”

“We say nothing of the kind, you Irish potato-eater.”

Both chuckled. It was a weak enough chiggering, Wycombe-Finch thought, not enough to fool the listeners, but it had become almost ritual between them now, signaling that they were near the end of the conversation.

“If we ever meet face to face again, I’ll whip your ears with my shillelagh – if I can find one of the blasted things,” Doheny said.

A tear slid down Wycombe-Finch’s left cheek. The stereotypes had been laid out to be chuckled at, but could they be discarded? Perhaps they played this game to keep the mistakes of the past fresh in their minds – brolly against shillelagh, the ridiculous against the ridiculous. A sigh shook Wycombe-Finch and he thought he heard its echo from Doheny.

“I’ll fill Stonar with visions of sugarplum faeries from Ireland,” Wycombe-Finch said, “but your man O’Donnell is probably just what he says.”

“A molecular biologist is a molecular biologist,” Doheny said. “We’d use Jesus, Mary and Joseph themselves if they showed up.”

“Didn’t O’Donnell carry any identification?” Wycombe-Finch asked, speaking as the thought hit him.

“A thick-head in command of the party that met him threw away the man’s passport.”

“Threw it away?”

“Over his shoulder into the sea. No chance to scrutinize it now and determine if it was a forgery.”

“Doe, I think sometimes we are the victims of a deliberately malign fate.”

“Let’s pray there is a balancing benevolent fate. Perhaps it’s Beckett’s team.”

“By the by, Doe, Beckett and his people think the zipper theory may be confusing us, leading us down the garden path, so to speak.”

“Interesting. I’ll pass it along.”

“Sorry I’ve nothing more substantial for you.”

“Wye, a thought just occurs to me. Why don’t you put Stonar together with Beckett? Brilliant Yank explaining the intricacies of marvelous scientific research to uninformed politician.”

“Might be interesting,” Wycombe-Finch agreed.

“It could even spark some new ideas in Beckett,” Doheny said. “Explaining things to the uninitiated sometimes does that.”

“I’ll give it a think. Beckett, when he gets going, can be quite fluent.”

“I’d like to talk to Beckett myself. Could he join us for one of these confabs?”

“I’ll arrange it. Hupp, too?”

“No… just Beckett. Perhaps Hupp later. And please prime Beckett for heavy interrogation, would you, Wye.”

“As I say, he is quite fluent, Doe.”

There was silence filled with static for a moment, then Wycombe-Finch said: “I’ll put together a report on their ideas about the zipper theory. We’ll fax it to you first thing. Might be something in it, although I’m not giving ground.”

“Beckett needs resistance, eh?”

“It primes him well. Keep that in mind when you talk.”

“Does he get angry?”

“Never shows it, but it’s there.”

“Fine! Fine! I’ll be at my Yankee-baiting best. And as far as this possible Madman is concerned, I’ll let you know if the waters get muddier.”

Wycombe-Finch nodded to himself. Totally muddy, of course, would mean they had confirmed the man as O’Neill. He said: “There is one thing more, Doe. Stonar may be coming here to dismiss me.”

“Tell him to cut the phone lines to us if he does.”

“Now, Doe, don’t burn any bridges.”

“I mean it! We Irish don’t take naturally to you Brits. I’ll not waste my time breaking in another contact at Huddersfield. You tell him.”

“It only took us a week to get on a solid footing.”

“Nowadays, a week is forever. The politicians haven’t figured that out yet. They need us, we don’t need them.”

“Oh, I think we do, Doe.”

“We stand together, Wye, or the whole bloody edifice comes crashing down. You tell that Stonar I said so. Until next time, then?”

“As you say, Doe.”

Wycombe-Finch heard the click of the connection being broken. The static stopped. He replaced his telephone in its cradle and stared at his cold pipe beside it. Well, the listeners had been told.

Doheny was right in his own way, of course. Scientists had created this awful mess. Contributed to it, anyway, and no denying that. Bad communication, bad liaison with governments, failure to exercise what power we had or even to recognize the real nature of power. When we did move, we played the same old political games.

He glanced up at the wall of books on his left without really seeing them. What if it was Madman O’Neill over there in Ireland? Should there prove to be a way of using him, Doheny was sly enough to find it. But God help us all if the wrong people learned about it on the Outside.

Wycombe-Finch shook his head. Good thing the man was in Doheny’s hands. He picked up his pipe and relighted it, thinking about this. Not until this moment had he realized how much faith he had developed in Doheny’s crafty ways.

If there is one principle clearer than any other it is this: that in any business, whether of government or mere merchandising, somebody must be trusted.

– Woodrow Wilson

All this time with the damned Yank and not a clue!
Herity thought.

It was midafternoon and they were plodding upward out of another shallow valley, the boy and the priest walking a bit ahead. The boy had been even more withdrawn since the fight in the bath house, his silence a deeper thing. Father Michael was accusatory. It was all Herity’s fault.

It’s all that damned Yank’s fault!

And the priest isn’t helping.

A Yank did it to us – made a ghetto of Ireland.

Herity had never thought of himself as a super-patriot – only a typical Irishman, bitter over the centuries of British oppression. He felt a tribal loyalty to his people and the land, a kinship of the rath.
There was a pulling force in the Irish earth
, he thought. It was a memory that lived in the soil itself. It remembered and always had. Even if there were no more people, there would be something here, an essence that would tell how the Gaels had passed this way once.

Father Michael was talking to the Yank, not probing, not doing what he should to see if it was a mask the man wore and the Madman himself underneath. Black thoughts in his mind, Herity listened.

“There are more ruins now,” Father Michael said. “You noticed that?”

“Destruction, it seems,” John said. “But plenty of food.”

“More that’s falling down. We’ve lost the look of the picaresque that really great ruins sometimes have. Now… it’s just tumbledown.”

They fell silent, passing another burned cottage whose walls butted up against the road. The blank windows exposed ashed tatters of curtains like wounded eyelids.

Someone will answer for that,
Herity thought.

He felt the long Irish memory barbed like a spear. Offend it and someday you would feel the thrust and see your life welling from the wound.

They crested the top of the hill then and paused for breath, looking ahead to the long curve of another valley stretched out into mists at the upper end where a stream cascaded off black rocks, making its mark on the air with a moist screen that hid the farther hills. A hen cackled nearby.

Herity cocked an ear, hearing the gurgle of water; a brook or a spring.

“I hear water,” John said.

“We could do with a bit of rest and some food,” Father Michael said.

He crossed to the lower side of the road where tall grass covered a long slope into trees. Finding a spot in the stone wall where he could swing himself across, he went a few paces out into the tall grass. The boy leaped the wall and joined the priest.

John looked up at the sky. Clouds were coming in, filling the western horizon. He glanced at Herity, who waved for him to join the priest and boy. John climbed onto the wall and stood there looking across the open land before jumping down. The landscape had been defined by gray rock walls into green rectangles with a few cottages, all black and roofless, sprinkled among them. He heard Herity cross the wall and come up beside him.

“There’s a beauty to it yet,” Herity said.

John glanced at him, then returned his attention to the view. The thin mist reduced the middle distances to muted pastels, a rolling meadowland with a river winding through it, tall trees and darker greens on the far side.

“Are you thirsty, Mister O’Donnell?” Herity asked. But he looked at O’Neill as he spoke.

“I could do with a cool drink of spring water,” John agreed.

“I’m thinking you have no knowledge of thirst,” Herity said. “A cool glass of Guinness with foam as white as a virgin’s panties flowing over the edges. Now there’s a vision to raise a man’s thirst!”

Father Michael and the boy began walking toward the trees below the meadow.

“I heard you and the priest talking about the ruins,” Herity said. “It’s not ruins. Decay! That’s the word. Hope destroyed finally.”

The priest and the boy stopped short of the trees near a granite outcropping. Looking after them, Herity said, “A fine man, the priest. Wouldn’t you agree, Mister O’Donnell?”

At the jibing question, John felt O’Neill-Within begin to rise. Panic threatened him, then rage. “Others have suffered as much as you, Herity! You’re not alone!” 

A flush of blood darkened Herity’s face. His lips tightened into a thin line and his right hand went toward the pistol under his jacket but hesitated and lifted instead to scratch the beard stubble on his chin.

“Would you listen to us now?” he asked. “We’re like a couple of wains in…”

He broke off, stopped by the loud report of a shot from down in the trees below them. In one motion, Herity knocked John off his feet into the grass, rolled away with one hand in his pack, and before he stopped rolling had a small machine gun in his hands and was scrambling down to the shelter of the granite outcropping. He stopped there, peering down into the trees. John was right behind him, leaning up against the cold stone.

John peered around his edge of the rock, looking for the priest and the boy. Were they hurt? Who had shot and where had it been aimed? A limb cracked below him and Father Michael’s pale and hatless head poked out of covering bushes under the trees. He was a wide-eyed blob of white against the green-and-brown background, the scar on his forehead very plain against the pale skin. He was staring directly up at John.

“Get your face back in here!” Herity said. He yanked John back into the rock’s cover.

“I saw Father Michael. He seems to be all right.”

“And the boy?”

“I didn’t see him.”

“We’ll be patient a bit,” Herity said. “That was a rifle shot.” He cradled the machine gun against his chest and leaned back, scanning the rock wall bordering the road above them.

John looked at the weapon in Herity’s hands.

Seeing John’s attention, Herity said: “The Jews make fine guns, now don’t they?” He whirled at the sound of swishing grass below them.

John looked up to see Father Michael peering down at them. The black felt hat once more covered the brand-scarred forehead.

Herity scrambled to his feet and peered past the priest toward the trees. “Where’s the boy?”

“Safe behind some more boulders down there in the trees.”

“Only the one rifle shot,” Herity said.

“Likely someone shooting a cow or a pig.”

“Or himself, that being the more common thing nowadays.”

“You’re a man full of evil,” Father Michael said. He pointed at the machine gun. “Where did you get that terrible weapon?”