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“Oh, she’s sleeping. It has been a terrible shock. She’s under sedation.” He paused. “You have been through this before, Mr. Quinn.”
“Many times, sir.”
“Well, as you see, behind the pomp and the circumstance is just a man, a very worried man.”
“Yes, sir. I know. Tell me about Simon, please.”
“Simon? What about him?”
“What he is like. How he will react to ... to this. Why did you have him so late in life?”
There was no one in the White House who would have dared ask that. John Cormack looked across the desk. He was tall himself, but this man matched him at six feet two inches. Neat gray suit, striped tie, white shirt—all borrowed, though he did not know that. Clean-shaven, deeply suntanned. A craggy face, calm gray eyes, an impression of strength and patience.
“So late? Well, I don’t know. I married when I was thirty; Myra was twenty-one. I was a young professor then. We thought we would start a family in two or three years. But it didn’t happen. We waited. The doctors said there was no reason ... Then, after ten years of marriage, Simon came. I was forty by then, Myra thirty-one. There was only ever the one child ... just Simon.”
“You love him very much, don’t you?”
President Cormack stared at Quinn in surprise. The question was so unexpected. He knew Odell was completely estranged from his own two grown-up offspring, but it had never occurred to him how much he loved his only son. He rose, came around the desk, and seated himself on the edge of an upright chair, much closer to Quinn.
“Mr. Quinn, he is the sun and the moon to me—to us both. Get him back for us.”
“Tell me about his childhood, when he was very young.”
The President jumped up.
“I have a picture,” he said triumphantly. He walked to a cabinet and returned with a framed snapshot. It showed a sturdy toddler of four or five, in swim trunks on a beach, holding a pail and shovel. A proud father was crouched behind him, grinning.
“That was taken at Nantucket in ’75. I had just been elected congressman from New Haven.”
“Tell me about Nantucket,” said Quinn gently.
President Cormack talked for an hour. It seemed to help him. When Quinn rose to leave, Cormack scribbled a number on a pad and handed it to Quinn.
“This is my private number. Very few people have it. It will reach me directly, night or day.” He held out his hand. “Good luck, Mr. Quinn. God go with you.” He was trying to control himself. Quinn nodded and left quickly. He had seen it before, the effect, the dreadful effect.
While Quinn was still in the washroom, Philip Kelly had driven back to the J. Edgar Hoover Building, where he knew his Deputy Assistant Director, CID, would be waiting for him. He and Kevin Brown had a lot in common, which was why he had pressed for Brown’s appointment.
When he entered his office his deputy was there, reading Quinn’s file. Kelly nodded toward it as he took his seat.
“So, that’s our hotshot. What do you think?”
“He was brave enough in combat,” conceded Brown. “Otherwise a smartass. About the only thing I like about the guy is his name.”
“Well,” said Kelly, “they’ve put him in there over the Bureau’s head. Don Edmonds didn’t object. Maybe he figures if it all turns out badly ... Still and all, the sleazeballs who did this thing have contravened at least three U.S. statutes. The Bureau still has jurisdiction, even though it happened on British territory. And I don’t want this yo-yo operating out on his own with no supervision, no matter who says so.”
“Right,” agreed Brown.
“The Bureau’s man in London, Patrick Seymour—do you know him?”
“Know of him,” grunted Brown. “Hear he’s very pally with the Brits. Maybe too much so.”
Kevin Brown had come out of the Boston police force, an Irishman like Kelly, whose admiration for Britain and the British could be written on the back of a postage stamp with room left over. Not that he was soft on the I.R.A.; he had pulled in two arms dealers trading with the I.R.A., who would have gone to jail but for the courts.
He was an old-style law-enforcement officer who had no truck with criminals of any ilk. He also remembered as a small boy in the slums of Boston listening wide-eyed to his grandmother’s tales of people dying with mouths green from grass-eating during the famine of 1848, and of the hangings and the shootings of 1916. He thought of Ireland, a place he had never visited, as a land of mists and gentle green hills, enlivened by the fiddle and the chaunter, where poets like Yeats and O’Faolain wandered and composed. He knew Dublin was full of friendly bars where peaceable folk sat over a stout in front of peat fires, immersed in the works of Joyce and O’Casey.
He had been told that Dublin had the worst teenage drug problem in Europe but knew it was just London’s propaganda. He had heard Irish Prime Ministers on American soil pleading for no more money to be sent to the I.R.A. Well, people were entitled to their views. And he had his. Being a crime-buster did not require him to like the people he saw as the timeless persecutors of the land of his forefathers. Across the desk, Kelly came to a decision.
“Seymour is close to Buck Revell, but Revell’s away sick. The Director has put me in charge of this from the Bureau’s point of view. And I don’t want this Quinn getting out of hand. I want you to get together a good team and take the midday flight and get over there. You’ll be behind the Concorde by a few hours, but no matter. Base yourself at the embassy—I’ll tell Seymour you’re in charge, just for the emergency.”
