The Insider (29 page)

“But what about EZ Travel and the pub in South Boston? What were they all about?”

McCarthy drew himself up in the chair. “Once McCarthy and Lloyd began making serious money, my partners wanted to start taking cash out of it to fund their war, particularly as the peace accord became more real.”

“You mean they wanted to start purchasing weapons?” Jay asked.

“Of course that’s what I mean,” McCarthy snapped. “We actually own five other businesses, including a string of service stations and some grocery stores, all cash-intensive businesses that we can flush money through before it goes to Antigua, then to Europe.”

“How does a travel agency fit?”

“The Donegall Volunteers send individuals all over the world to procure arms. Individuals the international law enforcement community would love to get their hands on. Travel agencies can make it very easy for an individual to get around without having to give away his identity.”

“But why send the money through a bar in South Boston?”

McCarthy looked at his watch. It was time for him to head out. “A great deal of the money that has flowed from this country to Northern Ireland to support the war effort has been funneled through Boston. And I’m not talking about just the Donegall Volunteers now. The total amount is in the hundreds of millions over the past two decades, maybe more. There is quite a contingent of sympathizers up there. Lots of splinter groups. The Donegall Volunteers are no different. From a group of one hundred people five years ago, it has grown to almost five thousand members today. Half of those members are in Northern Ireland, and the other half are in this country, many in Boston. It’s a force to be reckoned with. I’ll admit that having the main office of your U.S. operation on the second floor of a pub may seem a little crude, but it worked for them, and for many other crews. Maggie’s Place is far from a unique setup.”

“Do you think Oliver ever knew what was really going on at McCarthy and Lloyd?” Jay asked.

“No. He was too focused on himself to take even a cursory look around.” McCarthy took one last puff, then tossed the cigar stub into the water. “Jay, it’s been great, but I have to—” He broke off as he gazed down at the revolver.

Jay had purchased the gun for two hundred dollars from a dealer in Jefferson Parish the previous afternoon before driving to Lafitte. He had traveled to New Orleans on business several times, and was aware that anything you wanted was available on a couple of streets in the parish west of the city, as long as you had cash.

He clasped the weapon tightly. “Bill, put your hands behind your head and turn around slowly.”

McCarthy chuckled. “You think I’m going to go quietly with you to the authorities, boy? Just like that?”

“You don’t have much choice.”

“He’s got a few options left.” Carter Bullock rose up slowly from the bow of the Boston Whaler, a twelve-gauge shotgun aimed at Jay. “Throw your gun in the water,” he ordered.

Jay hesitated.

“Now!” Bullock shouted.

The gun splashed on the water’s surface, then sank quickly to the bottom of the bayou.

McCarthy smiled as he watched the revolver disappear. Even with Bullock aiming the shotgun at Jay from only a few feet away, he hadn’t felt completely comfortable. The kid might have had something up his sleeve. “Jay, meet Seamus Dunn, also known as Carter Bullock,” he said. “Seamus is the commander of the Done-gall Volunteers’ U.S. operation. And my on-site partner at McCarthy and Lloyd.”

Bullock stepped onto the dock and stood beside McCarthy. “Hello, Jay. Best of the morning to you,” he said sarcastically. “Okay, men,” he yelled. Four men in camouflage uniforms stepped out of the lodge, automatic weapons slung over their shoulders.

Jay felt the breath sucked from his lungs at the sight of the soldiers. This wasn’t some kind of half-assed paramilitary effort. He had unwittingly stepped into a professional operation, and suddenly his expectation of making it out of the situation nose-dived. He glanced into Bullock’s eyes. “What was the farm in Virginia all about? Who are you planning to kill, Badger?”

Bullock grinned. “The British prime minister as he sits in front of Manhattan’s City Hall tomorrow,” he answered proudly. “Northern Ireland will never be the same. The British and the fuckin’ Protestants will declare war on us.” His grin broadened. “But we’ll be ready.”

“You’ve already gotten quite a bit of money out of the United States, haven’t you?”

“Absolutely,” Bullock confirmed. “Enough to finance a hell of a war.”

“And provide me a very comfortable life for as long as I need it,” McCarthy reminded Bullock.

“Yeah, sure,” Bullock said. McCarthy was going to be alligator bait very soon.

“Sooner or later someone will figure out McCarthy and Lloyd’s involvement and the U.S. government will shut the firm down,” Jay pointed out.

“They would have done that soon anyway,” McCarthy said ruefully. “It was only a matter of time.”

“We’ve gotten as much money as we could out of it,” Bullock added. “We’ve fooled the regulators for the last month by playing shell games with its capital. The firm is on the verge of collapse. We wanted to keep the operation going a little longer, but the investigation accelerated a shutdown plan we already had in place.” He nodded over his shoulder to the men standing in front of the lodge door.

Incredible,
Jay thought, watching the men move toward the dock. In five years the Donegall Volunteers had grown a three-million-dollar investment into hun dreds of millions. Enough money to sustain a significant guerrilla warfare effort for the foreseeable future. They could easily tear apart the uneasy Irish peace that had taken years to bring about. “Did you kill Abby Cooper?” he asked bluntly.

Bullock walked to where Jay stood. “Yes, I did. Oliver had told Abby all about the insider-trading ring during one of their cocaine sessions at the Plaza. He never could keep his damn mouth shut, and he always thought she was absolutely loyal to him. I was never as naïve as Oliver. I couldn’t take a chance on her loyalty. Abby could have fucked up everything if she’d gotten pissed off at him and gone to law enforcement officials. We could control O’Shea, but not necessarily someone outside the circle. I killed her, then sent the resignation letter to Oliver.” He hesitated. “By the way, I really was trying to push Oliver over the wall that day on the roof.” Bullock smiled. “And this is for that day last week on the trading floor.” He slammed Jay in the stomach with the butt of the gun.

Jay dropped to the wooden slats of the dock instantly, clutching his stomach, unable to breathe. Despite the intense pain, he still heard the helicopters tearing over the bayou, skimming across the treetops, and—as he had been instructed—he managed to roll into the water.

He had been rudely awakened the night before in his motel room at two o’clock, aware of nothing at first but chaos. People dressed in navy blue windbreakers and matching baseball caps were pouring into the small room, guns drawn. Then Jay had noticed Kevin O’Shea and Sally Lane—or, as O’Shea had explained, Victoria Marshall, a senior operative of a joint FBI-CIA cell working closely with British intelligence. The woman he had known as Sally Lane wasn’t just some junior assistant in the Justice Department assisting O’Shea. Vicky was a high-ranking intelligence agent working on an even more important mission.

As it turned out, Jay hadn’t been as shrewd about evading the authorities as he had thought. Oliver’s estate was bugged, and they’d listened to the tapes of the conversations in the study and realized where Jay was headed. As Vicky had explained, it hadn’t been difficult to find him in Lafitte. In fact, several FBI agents had already made it to town before he arrived. They’d watched him rent the boat and temporarily disabled it while he was sitting at the Henry’s Landing bar in case he’d decided to do something stupid like head out across the bay at night.

Now Jay struggled to swim beneath the ski boat. Bullock’s punch had knocked the wind out of him, and he swam with one arm while he held his gut with the other. Lungs screaming for air, he pulled himself along the smooth hull and burst through the surface on the far side, gasping for breath. Automatic gunfire, shouts, and the deafening roar of helicopter rotors directly overhead filled the air. With spray pelting his face, he took a huge gulp of air, ducked beneath the surface again, and pulled himself forward.

His fingers touched muddy bottom and he propelled himself to the surface once more. He was only a few feet from the bank and he struggled forward, running in slow motion in the mire and waist-deep water, grasping wildly at branches hanging over the water. Finally he scrambled up the bank and pulled himself onto land, then took a step toward the thick woods. But Bullock was there, directly in front of him, clutching the shotgun, blood pouring from a bullet wound in his shoulder.

“I can’t let you live!” Bullock shouted through the deafening din and blinding spray. “You know too much,” he yelled, lifting the shotgun’s barrel and squeezing the trigger.

Jay felt the heat of the blast blow by his arm, but sensed no pain. Then he saw Bullock down on the ground, writhing in his death agony.

Vicky Marshall sprinted to where Bullock lay, Beretta 9-mm drawn, and touched his neck. There was no pulse. She picked up the shotgun and hurled it into the water, then ran to Jay. “Are you all right?” she yelled. She was dripping wet, having jumped into the water near the bank from one of the army helicopters.

Jay nodded, still dazed.

“Did they talk?” she shouted.

“They didn’t shut up.”

“Good.” Vicky handed him her weapon, then reached down, pulled up his shirt, and tore off the tiny waterproof tape recorder taped to his chest. “Good job.” She grabbed the Beretta and slogged back down the muddy bank toward the lodge.

Jay sank to a sitting position against a huge tree, watching her go. “Thanks,” he whispered.

CHAPTER 28

As the dignitaries took their seats, he carefully checked the photographs he’d been provided, then gazed through the binoculars from the fifty-fourth floor of One Chase Manhattan Plaza. That was the mayor on the left side of the area in front of City Hall, and beside him sat the governor. According to what he’d been told, the secretary of state would be next to appear, followed by the British prime minister, who would be accompanied by the president of the United States. He took several quick breaths to calm his nerves. He had killed people before, but never a world leader.

The assassin pressed the electronic listening device further into his ear, then turned, picked up his rifle, wrapped the leather strap around his left arm, and aimed through a tiny opening in the window that he had cut a few minutes before. Affixed to the top of the rifle was a powerful telescopic sight through which he would aim at the second button of the prime minister’s dark blue chalk-stripe suit coat. The prime minister would be over eight hundred yards away, yet the assassin was confident of putting the first shot directly through his target’s heart. He’d done it several times in Virginia from even greater distances.

He was so focused on his task he never heard them. The rifle was torn from his hands and he was hurled to the floor, his face pressed into the coarse carpet of the empty office.

Vicky Marshall smiled as the men of her joint FBI-CIA command hustled the would-be assassin out of the room. It had taken her team less than four minutes of interrogation to break Bill McCarthy and ascertain exactly what was happening. The tape from the recorder Jay had worn alerted them to Bullock’s admission that the British prime minister was the target. But they wanted details, and McCarthy had been quick to provide them. The poor son of a bitch had no tolerance for pain.

Savoy stood on the running board and waved to the convoy of four trucks behind him, motors running as they waited on the wet sand in the mist. The weapons were loaded and the boats were already heading back out into the North Sea. He glanced up at the cliffs overlooking this remote section of the Irish coast, then sat down and slammed the door shut. “Let’s go,” he said gruffly to the driver.

The truck’s engine roared and the convoy began climbing the narrow gravel road leading from the beach up into the hills. They were almost home, Savoy thought.

The driver saw the roadblock first—manned not by police but by regular British Army troops—and slammed on the brakes. Savoy followed the driver’s gaze. There were hundreds of troops, armed with automatic weapons. He clenched his jaw and made a conscious decision. He would not be taken alive.

He shoved the door open with his shoulder and ran. He was cut down less than ten feet from the truck.

EPILOGUE

Jay sat on the Central Park bench, enjoying the warmth of the late afternoon. “I’d like to ask a few questions, Sally—I mean Vicky.” He grinned, letting her know that the slip had been intentional.

Vicky took a sip of Coke. “I’ll answer what I can. If it’s classified, I’ll simply say ‘next.’” She was trying to be tough, trying not to think ahead.

“Okay.” Jay nodded. “Is Kevin O’Shea part of your FBI-CIA cell?” He was aware that this was one of those questions she probably shouldn’t answer.

“No. He really is with the U.S. attorney’s office.”

“But you and he were working together.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand.”

Vicky finished what was left of her Coke. “Six months ago British intelligence alerted the Central Intelligence Agency that the New York investment banking firm of McCarthy and Lloyd had turned up in several communiqués that their national security people had intercepted. The usual informants were queried, and several interesting facts emerged about M and L—but not enough to allow us to move against them,” she explained. “At that point the higher-ups decided to go covert and put someone inside the firm under deep cover.”

“You.”

“Me,” she confirmed. “But of course we needed to make certain I would definitely get into the firm, and that I’d have access to senior people. We ascertained that a preliminary insider-trading investigation was going on, and we contacted the Justice Department to arrange the deception. The president was informed, and we went to work.”

“But you didn’t know exactly what you were looking for.”

“We had an idea, but that was all. We tried for a short time to figure out what was going on from the outside, but that didn’t work.” Vicky gazed out across the Sheep Meadow, a large grassy area of the park stretching out before them. “A senior White House official approached Bill McCarthy to let him know that Justice was initiating an insider-trading investigation, but that an agreement could be reached that would make the investigation go away without too much pain. McCarthy readily agreed.”

“Of course he did,” Jay said, laughing.

Vicky paused, gazing at Jay’s handsome face. “I like it when you laugh.”

Jay took her hand. They had spent the last three days together sharing everything New York City had to offer—and sharing each other as well. And though it made him uncomfortable to admit it, he had fallen for her very hard.

She glanced away. “You know most of the rest. We made McCarthy and Oliver think that Kevin O’Shea was in charge of an insider-trading investigation that would end up taking you down. Both of them believed I was with the DOJ. They bought the whole thing hook, line, and sinker. But you broke things wide open before I had a chance to,” she admitted.

“You took the computer disk from my apartment. And made the phone calls to the treasurer of Bell Chemical.”

“Yes.”

“But the treasurer would have heard your voice, and I doubt you would have sounded masculine to him,” Jay pointed out. “Definitely nothing like the voice he would have heard on my answering machine at the apartment when he called back.”

“I never actually left a message for the treasurer when I called from your apartment. I had his direct line and I simply stayed on the line long enough for a record to register at the telephone company. The actual threats were made by an associate of mine at the agency who sounds very much like you. And he made those calls from a phone that blocked Caller ID.”

Jay grinned. They had worked it all out. “I assume you really did have something on that poor treasurer from Bell Chemical.”

It was Vicky’s turn to laugh. “Oh, yeah.”

“What was it?”

“Next.”

“Come on,” Jay protested, “that can’t be classified.”

“I really can’t tell you,” she said firmly. “We did those things to make the whole deception seem more real, to get McCarthy and Oliver to believe the insider-trading investigation story was absolutely true. It worked perfectly. But as I already said, you tore the whole thing wide open.”

Jay smiled, proud of himself. “I did, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Then I was never really going to jail.”

“No. We would have hidden you away for a while and explained most of what was going on. But you wouldn’t have gone to jail.” She tried to stop herself, but it was impossible. She leaned over and kissed him.

“Is that legal?” Jay asked when she pulled away. “What with your being intelligence and all.”

“It’s fine.” She tried to smile, but it was difficult. They had become so close in the last few days. “What other questions do you have?”

“I want to know about Bullock. I did some digging while I was interviewing for the job at McCarthy and Lloyd, and I found out that he was raised in Pennsylvania, in a town near where I grew up.”

“It was just his cover. Some of the terrorist groups we deal with are very good at that sort of thing.” She reached over and caressed the back of his neck.

“Bullock killed Graham Lloyd.” Jay caught her hand and kissed her fingers.

“Yes. He killed Lloyd outside New Orleans in 1994 and threw him to the alligators near McCarthy’s lodge.” The feeling of his lips on her fingers was arousing. “Then he sailed Lloyd’s boat out to sea and set it adrift. He was picked up by an associate. The Coast Guard found the boat capsized after a storm.” She pulled her hand away. She couldn’t take it anymore. “You were very brave at McCarthy’s lodge,” she said quietly. “You didn’t have to go in there wearing the wire.”

“It seemed like the only thing to do. You told me there were lives at stake.”

“Many,” she said.

“I hope it helped.”

“Your actions helped a great deal. I talked to my superiors this morning and—”

“I assume that was when you went down to the street to get coffee.” They had stayed at the Four Seasons the past three nights. “Even though room service could have brought it up to us.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling self-consciously. “Anyway, British intelligence has already taken the Donegall Volunteer leaders into custody and shut down their weapons supply line. Yesterday they intercepted an arms shipment on a remote part of the Northern Island coast and took a man named Victor Savoy into custody. We’ve been trying to catch up to him for years.”

“Great.” He’d been holding this question for the end. “Were you and Oliver ever…” His voice drifted off.

“Ever what?”

“You know.”

“How could you possibly think that?” she asked.

“A maid at the Plaza identified you as having been there with him. I showed the woman that picture of the three of us on the sailboat.”

“I met him there one night,” Vicky explained. “But that was just to go over the details of my new ‘job’ at M and L.” She moved close to Jay, slipped her arms around him, and kissed him again. “I promise.”

“You saved my life,” Jay said, holding her tightly. “Bullock could have killed me.”

“I would never have let anything happen to you,” she whispered.

“Somehow I don’t doubt that for an instant.”

“You shouldn’t.”

He kissed her soft cheek. “What happens now?”

She had known he was going to ask that question sooner or later, but she still wasn’t prepared for it. “We give the real Sally Lane her life back,” she said hoarsely.

“What?” He looked at her curiously.

“She’s been down in Argentina for six months while we used her as cover.”

“Really?”

Vicky nodded.

“Why did you use her?” Jay asked.

Vicky knew she should reply by saying “next,” but Jay deserved answers. “Sally’s father operated a fleet of fishing vessels.”

“Right. It was the family business.”

“It was also a cutout. The business was legitimate, but his boats were occasionally used by the United States intelligence community.”

Jay nodded. What the elderly woman on the Gloucester beach had said now made perfect sense.

“Joe Lane was extremely patriotic, as is Sally,” Vicky explained. “We asked if we could use her as a cover six months ago because she and I had such a strong resemblance. She agreed immediately.”

“You dodged my question,” Jay pointed out. “What I meant by what happens next was, what happens to us?”

Vicky pressed a finger to his lips. “I’m going to get another Coke. I’ll be right back.”

“Another one? You’re going to float away if you keep drinking.”

She kissed him once more, then took his hands and kissed them, too. “I really do love you, Jay West.” For a long time she stared into his eyes. “See you in a minute.”

“Hurry back.” He lay down on the bench. The sun felt good, and he was exhausted. That night they were going to dinner and a Broadway show. And the next day it would be out to the Hamptons for a day at the beach. If only life could go on like that forever.

The sun had dipped below the buildings on the west side of Central Park when Jay finally awoke. He rubbed his eyes and checked his watch. Almost eight o’clock. They were going to be late for the show. Still groggy, he rose unsteadily from the bench and looked around. She was nowhere in sight. For a few moments he stared straight ahead, then slowly sank onto the bench as it hit him. She wasn’t coming back.

Jay glanced down at his hands. She’d kissed them as she bid him good-bye.

He took a long breath and looked up at the sun setting behind the buildings on Central Park West. Somehow he’d always expected her to go. He just hadn’t known when.