Black Market

Caitlin tried to twist and turn away. That urgent, paramount thought stuck in her mind: Get away now! Get away! Get away! Get away!

Only she couldn't seem to move.

Caitlin Dillon simply fell.

“Get out of my way! Get out of the way, you bastards!”

Carroll screamed wildly at the three Belfast men standing squarely in his path. The Irish hoods were stubbornly posted between him and the tenement house stairway. They were viciously waving Gaelic football bats in the dimly lit hallway.

“Why don'tcha make us move, mate? Come on now. Make us move. See if you can?”

The tracking beeper was singing desperately, actually vibrating in his jacket pocket. Caitlin had to be upstairs. She was somewhere in this building.

Police sirens and emergency army sirens were shrieking everywhere. Steady sniper gunfire was still raining and ricocheting down on Falls Road. Move! Now! Move!

Carroll leapt between the three surprised Irish youths. They wisely sidestepped the charging, bull-shouldered American. Carroll crashed two and three steps at a time, up a twisty flight of dusty, darkened stairs. Please, God, no!

He was fighting against furious rage and an even worse fear building inside him. He kept the machine gun clipped off automatic fire. There were too many civilians swarming inside the tenement.

Apartment doors kept opening, then slamming shut. There were dangerously hostile looks and abusive screams in every direction as he charged upward.

As Carroll finally reached the top landing, the fourth floor of the dismal building, he saw the dingy yellow door to an apartment thrown open.

His brain was going to explode. Suddenly he knew what he was going to find there. He just knew.

He could already see inside the grubby doorway. Then he could see Caitlin lying there, still in her coat. Her gaily striped muffler was off casually to one side. She lay against a fallen wooden chair.

The IRA henchmen were gone, up to the roof, up over other roofs, gone, escaped somewhere.

“Oh, God, no.” Carroll choked back a horrible sob, a desperate, hopeless prayer. He experienced that awful, hollow bitterness of death all over again. He felt a terrible hurt, an infinite pain.

Very slowly, then, Caitlin rolled over. She rolled just a few inches and struggled to sit up. Her face was a blank… but she was alive.

Carroll ran to her and cradled her gently like an injured child against his broad chest.

Then she suddenly drew away from him; she stared at something across the room that obviously terrified her. Carroll followed the line of her eyes to an inert shape that lay on the other side of the barren room. The body seemed to be that of a young man, but you couldn't tell. Half his head had been blown away. The darkish hair was matted with blood. The figure was dressed in the dark blue uniform of a Belfast policeman.

“Who is he?” Carroll asked.

Caitlin weakly shook her head. “I don't know. I only know that if he hadn't come when he did, I'd be dead. He came through that doorway and started shooting at them.”

Carroll couldn't take his eyes away from the murdered Irish policeman. A hero, Carroll thought. A hero with no name or face anymore. Police work in all of its glory.

Caitlin was sobbing quietly.

“Shhh, now, shhh,” Carroll whispered.

Caitlin couldn't control herself anymore. She sobbed into Arch Carroll's chest. She held him with all of her remaining strength.

They were still enfolded that way, holding each other tightly, when the teams of British Special Branch men and Irish police arrived. Once again, Green Band had disappeared.

21

By the evening of December 12, the letters, all stuffed inside nine-by-twelve manila envelopes, had finally arrived. More than three thousand bulky letters had been mailed to every region across the United States.

The letters had come to the strangest and most unlikely places: Sedona, Arizona; Dohren, Alabama; Totowa, New Jersey; Buena Vista, California; Iowa City, Iowa; Stowe, Vermont; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Boulder, Colorado.

Ke

Sherwood stayed home from work that day because if he went to the mill, he'd just say something dumb and either get his ass royally chewed out or be fired. For nine years he'd been a machine operator with Hammond Tool and Die.

He made almost twenty-four thousand now, thirty-five hundred of which went for shrink sessions with a psychologist in Pittsburgh -little goateed fellow who treated him for his recurrent war dreams.

There was a neatly typed cover letter inside the envelope; it looked government official, a little scary, even.

Dear Mr. Sherwood:

During the years 1968 to 1972, you served your country proudly as a specialist in the U.S. Army. You were a POW from January 1970 to June of 1972. You received two Purple Hearts in Vietnam.

Please consider the enclosed a token of our appreciation for your services, a chance for your country to serve you.

Ke

There was some kind of chained woman holding a globe of the world at the top of the paper. Farther down, the certificate clearly read “General Motors common stock.”

The legend went on: “This certifies Ke

Part Two. Black Market

22

Manhattan

Colonel David Hudson woke with a headache in his room in the Washington-Jefferson Hotel. It was snowing lightly outside, the satiny whiteness evenly blanketing West Fifty-first Street.

Hudson pinched his wristwatch off the wobbling night-stand. It was just past two. He sat up and yielded to an uncharacteristic moment of panic. His throat was dry, his hands clammy. His whole body felt feverish.

It wasn't Green Band troubling him this time.

Green Band was hurtling along without an apparent hitch. Even at its psychological core, Green Band was moving beautifully, creating uncertainty in all the places where Hudson wanted to create it.

It wasn't the time he'd spent in a North Vietnamese prison camp, either. The memories of the shrieking, taunting Lizard Man had stayed out of his dreams that night, at least.

None of these things bothered David Hudson right now. It was something else… something completely unexpected and unpla

It was Billie Bogan…

Like the poet, Louise.

He was angry with himself, disappointed that he'd let the Englishwoman affect him. It was unlike him; it was so undisciplined and out of character for Hudson to permit such a distraction before his mission was complete. Yet somehow he felt he could handle it, that he could keep everything in perspective…

Or was he fooling himself? Or was she going to ruin everything? The one serious slipup, the one fatal flaw?

Would he allow himself to blow Green Band because of Billie Bogan? This woman he barely knew, this expensive escort.

He needed to see her at least once more, he decided. Now, if he could. The most vivid images of Billie suddenly drifted past his eyes in the darkened West Side room.

Hudson was aroused. He threw on an old mufti shirt and trousers and went down to the Washington-Jefferson lobby, where he prowled around nervously, watched by a suspicious clerk at the desk. Finally he called Vintage Service, not wanting to use the phone in his room again.

“I'd like to see Billie. Would that be possible? This is David. Number three twenty-three.”