south, nearer France, who speak French. Belgium is a two-language country.
“Both, really,” said Hayman after consulting his screen. “But it says here it started and was always strongest in the city of Antwerp. So, Flemish, I suppose.”
Quinn left him and returned to the café. Any other woman would have been spitting angry at being kept waiting for four and a half hours. Fortunately for Quinn, Sam was a trained agent, and had been through her apprenticeship in stakeout duties, than which nothing is more boring. She was nursing her fifth cup of awful coffee.
“When do you check your car in?” he asked.
“Due tonight. I could extend it.”
“Can you hand it back at the airport?”
“Sure. Why?”
“We’re flying to Brussels.”
She looked unhappy.
“Please, Quinn, do we have to fly? I do it if I really have to, but if I can avoid it I chicken out, and I’ve had too much flying lately.”
“Okay,” he said. “Check the car in London. We’ll take the train and the hovercraft. We’ll have to rent a Belgian car anyway. Might as well be Ostende. And we’ll need money. I have no credit cards.”
“You what?” She had never heard anyone say that.
“I don’t need them in Alcántara del Rio.”
“Okay, we’ll go to the bank. I’ll use a check and hope I have enough in the account back home.”
On the way to the bank she turned on the radio. The music was somber. It was four on a London afternoon and getting dark. Far away across the Atlantic, the Cormack family was burying their son.
Chapter 12
They laid him down on Prospect Hill, the cemetery on the island of Nantucket, and the chill November wind keened out of the north across the Sound.
The service was in the small Episcopalian church on Fair Street, far too small to hold all who wanted to attend. The First Family was in the front two rows of pews, with the Cabinet behind them and a variety of other dignitaries in the rear. At the family’s request it was a small and private service—foreign ambassadors and delegates were asked to attend a memorial service in Washington to be held later.
The President had asked for privacy from the media, but a number had turned up anyway. The islanders—there were no vacationers on the island in that season—took his wish very literally. Even the Secret Service men, not known for their exquisite manners, were surprised to be upstaged by the grim and silent Nantucketers, who quietly lifted several cameramen physically out of the way and left two of them protesting the ruin of their exposed film rolls.
The casket was brought to the church from the island’s only funeral parlor on Union Street, where it had rested during the time between its arrival by military C-130—the small airfield could not take the Boeing 747—and the start of the service.
Halfway through the ceremony the first rains came, glittering on the gray slate roof of the church, washing down the stained-glass windows and the pink and gray stone blocks of the building.
When it was over, the casket was placed in a hearse, which proceeded at walking pace the half mile to the Hill; out of Fair Street, over the bumpy cobblestones of Main Street, and up New Mill Street to Cato Lane. The mourners walked in the rain, headed by the President, whose eyes were fixed on the flag-draped coffin a few feet in front of him. His younger brother supported a weeping Myra Cormack.
The way was flanked by the people of Nantucket, bareheaded and silent. There were the tradesmen who had sold the family fish, meat, eggs, and vegetables; restaurateurs who had served them in the scores of good eating houses around the island. There were the walnut faces of the old fishermen who had once taught the tow-haired youngster from New Haven to swim and dive and fish, or taken him scalloping off the Sankaty Light.
The caretaker and the gardener stood weeping on the corner of Fair Street and Main, to take a last look at the boy who had learned to run on those hard, tide-washed beaches from Coatue up to Great Point and back to Siasconset Beach. But bomb victims are not for the eyes of the living and the casket was sealed.
At Prospect Hill they turned into the Protestant half of the cemetery, past hundred-year-old graves of men who had hunted whales in small open boats and carved scrimshaw by oil lamps through the long winter nights. They came to the new section where the grave had been prepared.
The people filed in behind and filled the ground, row on row, and in that high open place the wind tore across the Sound and through the town to tug at hair and scarves. No shop was open that day, no garage, no bar. No planes landed, no ferries docked. The islanders had locked out the world to mourn one of their own, even by adoption. The minister began to intone the old words, his voice carried away on the wind.
High above, a single gyrfalcon, drifting down from the Arctic like a snowflake on the blast, looked down, saw every detail with his incredible eyes, and his single lost-soul scream was pulled away down the wind.
The rain, which had held off since the church service, resumed again, coming in flurries and squalls. The locked sails of the Old Mill creaked down the road. The men from Washington shivered and huddled into their heavy coats. The President stood immobile and stared down at what was left of his son, immune to the cold and the rain.
A yard from him stood the First Lady, her face streaked with rain and tears. When the preacher reached “the Resurrection and the Life,” she seemed to sway as if she might fall.
By her side a Secret Service man, open-coated to reach the handgun beneath his left armpit, crew-cut and built like a linebacker, overlooked protocol and training to wrap his right arm around her shoulders. She leaned against him and wept into his soaked jacket.