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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."
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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
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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.
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