“How’s it goin’, Skip?” Jack disengaged his hand from the grip of a former offensive tackle and mentally counted his fingers. Skip Tyler was a close friend who never fully appreciated his strength.
“Good. Hi, Cathy.” His wife got a kiss. “And how’s Sally?”
“Fine.” She held up her arms, and got herself picked up as desired. Only briefly, though; Sally wriggled free to get back to the luggage cart.
“What are you doing here?” Jack asked. Oh, Cathy must have called . . .
“Don’t worry about the car,” Dr. Tyler said. “Jean and I retrieved it for you, and dropped it off home. We decided we’d pick you up in ours — more room. She’s getting it now.”
“Taking a day off, eh?”
“Something like that. Hell, Jack, Billings has been covering your classes for a couple of weeks. Why can’t I take an afternoon off?” A skycap approached them, but Tyler waved him off.
“How’s Jean?” Cathy asked.
“Six more weeks.”
“It’ll be a little longer for us,” Cathy announced.
“Really?” Tyler’s face lit up. “Outstanding!”
It was cool, with a bright autumn sun, as they left the terminal. Jean Tyler was already pulling up with the Tyler family’s full-size Chevy wagon. Dark-haired, tall, and willowy, Jean was pregnant with their third and fourth children. The sonogram had confirmed the twins right before the Ryans had left for England. Her otherwise slender frame would have seemed grotesque with the bulge of the babies except for the glow on her face. Cathy went right to her as she got out of the car and said something. Jack knew what it was immediately — their wives immediately hugged: Me, too. Skip wrenched the tailgate open and tossed the luggage inside like so many sheets of paper.
“I gotta admire your timing. Jack. You made it back almost in time for Christmas break,” Skip observed as everyone got in the car.
“I didn’t exactly plan it that way,” Jack objected.
“How’s the shoulder?”
“Better’n it was, guy.”
“I believe it,” Tyler laughed as he pulled away from the terminal. “I was surprised they got you on the Concorde. How’d you like it?”
“It’s over a lot faster.”
“Yeah, that’s what they say.”
“How are things going at school?”
“Ah, nothing ever changes. You heard about The Game?” Tyler’s head came around.
“No, as a matter of fact.” How did I ever forget about that?
“Absolutely great. Five points down with three minutes left, we recover a fumble on our twelve. Thompson finally gets it untracked and starts hitting sideline patterns — boom, boom, boom, eight-ten yards a pop. Then he pulls a draw play that gets us to the thirty. Army changes its defense, right? So we go to a spread. I’m up in the press box, and I see their strong-side safety is favoring the outside — figures we gotta stop the clock — and we call a post for the tight end. Like a charm! Thompson couldn’t have handed him the ball any better! Twenty-one to nineteen. What a way to end the season.”
Tyler was an Annapolis graduate who’d made second-string All-American at offensive tackle before entering the submarine service. Three years before, when he’d been on the threshold of his own command a drunk driver had left him without half his leg. Amazingly, Skip hadn’t looked back. After taking his doctorate in engineering from MIT, he’d joined the faculty at Annapolis, where he was also able to scout and do a little coaching in the football program. Jack wondered how much happier Jean was now. A lovely girl who had once worked as a legal secretary, she must have resented Skip’s enforced absences on submarine duty. Now she had him home — surely he wasn’t straying far; it seemed that Jean was always pregnant — and they were rarely separated. Even when they walked in the shopping malls. Skip and Jean held hands. If anyone found it humorous, he kept his peace about it.
“What are you doing about a Christmas tree. Jack?”
“I haven’t thought about it,” Ryan admitted.
“I found a place where we can cut ’em fresh. I’m going over tomorrow. Wanna come?”
“Sure. We have some shopping to do, too,” he added quietly.
“Boy, you’ve really been out of it. Cathy called last week. Jean and I finished up the, uh, the important part. Didn’t she tell you?”
“No.” Ryan turned to see his wife smile at him. Gotcha! “Thanks, Skip.”
“Ah.” Tyler waved his hand as they pulled onto the D.C. beltway. “We’re going up to Jean’s family’s place — last chance for her to travel before the twins arrive. And Professor Billings says you have a little work waiting for you.”
A little, Ryan thought. More like two months’ worth.
“When are you going to be able to start back to work?”
“It’ll have to wait until he gets the cast off,” Cathy answered for Jack. “I’ll be taking Jack to Baltimore tomorrow to see about that. We’ll get Professor Hawley to check him out.”
“No sense hurrying with that kind of injury,” Skip acknowledged. He had ample personal experience with that sort of thing. “Robby says hi. He couldn’t make it. He’s down at Pax River today on a flight simulator, learning to be an airedale again. Rob and Sissy are doing fine, they were just over the house night before last. You picked a good weather day, too. Rained most of last week.”
Home, Jack told himself as he listened. Back to the mundane, day-to-day crap that grates on you so much — until somebody takes it away from you. It was so nice to be back to a situation where rain was a major annoyance, and one’s day was marked by waking up, working, eating, and going back to bed. Catching things on television, and football games. The comics in the daily paper. Helping his wife with the wash. Curling up with a book and a glass of wine after Sally was put to bed. Jack promised himself that he’d never find this a dull existence again. He’d just spent over a month on the fast track, and was grateful that he’d left it three thousand miles behind him.
“Good evening, Mr. Cooley.” Kevin O’Donnell looked up from his menu.
“Hello, Mr. Jameson. How nice to see you,” the book dealer replied with well-acted surprise.
“Won’t you join me?”
“Why, yes. Thank you.”
“What brings you into town?”
“Business. I’m staying overnight with friends at Cobh.” This was true; it also told O’Donnell — known locally as Michael Jameson — that he had the latest message with him.
“Care to look at the menu?” O’Donnell handed it over. Cooley inspected it briefly, closed it, and handed it back. No one could have seen the transfer. “Jameson” let the small envelope inside the folder drop to his lap. The conversation which ensued over the next hour drifted through various pleasantries. There were four Gardai in the next booth, and in any case Mr. Cooley did not concern himself with operational matters. His job was that of contact agent and cutout. A weak man, O’Donnell thought, though he’d never told this to anyone. Cooley didn’t have the right qualities for real operations; he was better suited to the role of intelligence. Not that he’d ever asked, and surely the smaller man had passed through training well enough. His ideology was sound, but O’Donnell had always sensed within him a weakness of character that accompanied his cleverness. No matter. Cooley was a man with no record in any police station. He’d never even thrown a rock, much less a cocktail, at a Saracen. He’d preferred to watch and let his hate fester without an emotional release. Quiet, bookish, and unobtrusive, Dennis was perfect for his job. If Cooley was unable to shed blood, O’Donnell knew, he was also unlikely to shed tears. You bland little fellow, you can organize a superb intelligence-gathering operation, and so long as you don’t have to do any of the wet-work yourself, you can — you have helped cause the death of . . . ten or twelve, wasn’t it? Did the man have any emotions at all? Probably not, the leader judged. Perfect. He had his own little Himmler, O’Donnell told himself — or maybe Dzerzhinsky would be a more apt role model. Yes, “Iron Feliks” Dzerzhinsky: that malignant, effective little man. It was only the round, puffy face that reminded him of the Nazi Himmler — and a man couldn’t choose his looks, could he? Cooley had a future in the Organization. When the time came, they’d need a real Dzerzhinsky.
They finished their talking over after-dinner coffee. Cooley picked up the check. He insisted: business was excellent. O’Donnell pocketed the envelope and left the restaurant. He resisted the urge to read the report. Kevin was a man to whom patience came hard, and as a consequence he forced himself to it. Impatience had ruined more operations than the British Army ever had, he knew. Another lesson from his early days with the Proves. He drove his BMW through the old streets at the legal limit, leaving the town behind as he entered the narrow country roads to his home on the headlands. He did not take a direct route, and kept an eye on his mirror. O’Donnell knew that his security was excellent. He also knew that continued vigilance was the reason it remained so. His expensive car was registered to his corporation’s head office in Dundalk. It was a real business, with nine blue-water trawlers that dragged purse-seine nets through the cold northern waters that surrounded the British Isles. The business had an excellent general manager, a man who had never been involved in the Troubles and whose skills allowed O’Donnell to live the life of a country gentleman far to the south. The tradition of absentee ownership was an old one in Ireland — like O’Donnell’s home, a legacy from the English.