He asked for, and was given, the cooperation he wanted. MI-5 would increase surveillance, both physical and electronic, on the IRA Army Council man. So long as Father O’Brien remained in the North, the same would apply to him. When he returned to the Irish Republic, the SIS would take over. Surveillance would also be doubled on the one other man mentioned in the graveside conversation, a man well known to British security forces but who had never yet been charged or imprisoned.
The Chief ordered his own networks in the Irish Republic to keep watch for the return of Father O’Brien, to tail him, and above all else, to alert London if he left by air or sea for foreign parts. A pickup would be much easier on the continent of Europe.
When he returned to Century House, the Chief summoned Sam McCready.
“Stop it, Sam,” he said finally. “Stop it at its source in Libya or in transit. Those twenty tons must not get through.”
Sam McCready sat for hours in a darkened viewing room watching the film of the funeral. As the tape played through the entire service inside the church, the camera roamed over the graveyard outside, picking up the handful of IRA guards placed there to ensure no one came near. They were all unrecognizable in black balaclava woolen masks.
When the cortege reemerged from the portico of the church to proceed to the open grave, with six masked pall-bearers carrying the coffin, McCready asked the technicians to synchronize sound and vision. Nothing remotely suspicious was said until the priest stood, his head bowed, by the grave with the IRA Army Council man beside him. The priest raised his head once to offer words of comfort to the teenager’s weeping mother.
“Freeze frame. Close-up. Enhance.”
When the face of Father O’Brien filled the screen, McCready stared at it for twenty minutes, memorizing every feature until he would know the face anywhere.
He read the transcript of the section of the tape in which the priest reported on his Libyan visit, over and over again. Later he sat alone and stared at photographs in his office.
One of the photographs was of Muammar Qaddafi, his bouffant black hair bulging from beneath his army cap, mouth half open as he spoke. Another was of Hakim al-Mansour, stepping out of a car in Paris, exquisitely tailored by Savile Row, smooth, urbane, bilingual in English, fluent in French, educated, charming, cosmopolitan, and utterly lethal. A third was the Chief of Staff, IRA Army Council, addressing a public meeting in Belfast in his other role as a law-abiding and responsible local government councilor of the Sinn Fein political party. There was a fourth picture: that of the man mentioned by the graveside as the one the Army Council would probably choose to take over and run the operation, the one Father O’Brien would have to introduce and recommend by letter to Hakim al-Mansour. The British knew he was a former commander of the IRA’s South Armagh Brigade, now removed from local tasks to head up Special Projects, a very intelligent, highly experienced, and ruthless killer. His name was Kevin Mahoney.
McCready stared at the photographs for hours, trying to glean some knowledge of the brains behind the faces. If he was to win, he would have to match his mind with theirs. So far, they had the edge. They knew, presumably, not only what they were going to do, but how they were going to do it. And when. He knew the first, but not the second or the third.
He had two advantages. One, he knew what they had in mind, but they did not know he knew. And two, he could recognize them, but they did not know him. Or did al-Mansour know his face? The Libyan had worked with the KGB; the Russians knew McCready. Had they briefed the Libyan on the face of the Deceiver?
The Chief was not prepared to take the risk.
“I’m sorry, Sam. You are absolutely not going in yourself. I don’t care if there’s only a one-percent chance they have your face on file, the answer is no. Nothing personal. But you are not, under any circumstances, being taken alive. I will not contemplate another Buckley affair.”
William Buckley, the CIA chief of station in Beirut, had been taken alive by the Hezbollah. He had died slowly and hideously. The zealots had finally sent the CIA a videotape, complete with soundtrack, as they skinned him alive. And of course he had talked, told it all.
“You’ll have to find someone else,” said the Chief. “And may the Lord look after him.”
So McCready went through the files, day after day, backward and forward, sifting and sorting, considering and rejecting. Eventually he came up with a name, a “possible.” And he took it to Timothy Edwards.
“You’re crazy, Sam,” said Edwards. “You know he’s absolutely unacceptable. MI-5 hate his guts. We’re trying to cooperate with them, and you produce this—turncoat. Dammit, he’s a literary renegade, a biter of the hand that fed him. We’d never employ him.”
“That’s the point,” said Sam quietly. Edwards shifted his ground.
“Anyway, he’d never work for us.”
“He might.”
“Give me one good reason why.”
McCready gave it.
“Well,” said Edwards, “as far as the record goes, the man’s an outsider. Use of him is forbidden. Absolutely forbidden. Is that clear?”
“Completely,” said McCready.
“On the other hand,” added Edwards, “you’ll probably follow your own instincts anyway.”
As McCready left the office, Edwards reached under the desk to flick off the hidden tape deck. Without the last sentence, he was covered. Thus are long and glittering careers created.
McCready, who had been tipped off about the tape machine by an old friend, the engineer who had installed it, muttered as he walked down the corridor, “All right, arsehole, you can start editing now.”
McCready had no illusions about the Provisional IRA. The journalists in the tabloid press who designated the Irish terrorist group as a bunch of dense idiots who occasionally got it right simply did not know what they were talking about.
It might have been like that in the old days, the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the IRA leadership was composed of a bunch of middle-aged ideologues in trenchcoats, carrying small-caliber handguns and making bombs in back-street garages from garden fertilizer. Those were the days when they could have been “taken out” and stopped in their tracks. But as usual, the politicians had got it wrong, underestimated the danger, accepted that the bombers were just an extension of the civil rights movement. Now, those days were long gone. By the mid-1980s, the IRA had graduated, becoming arguably the most efficient terrorist group in the world.
They had four qualities without which no terrorist group can survive for twenty years, as they had. First, they had a pool of tribal support, from whose youth a constant stream of new recruits could step in to fill the shoes of the dead and the “gone away”—those in prison. Although they had never had more than 150 active terrorists deployed at once and probably no more than twice that number of “active” supporters ready to offer safe houses, locations for arms caches, and technical backup, and although they had lost well over one hundred dead and several hundred gone away, the new young recruits constantly came forward from the die-hard Republican community in the North and the South to take their places. The recruit pool would never dry up.
Second, they had the safe refuge of the South, the Irish Republic, from which to mount operations into the British-ruled North. Though many lived permanently in the North, the South was always available, and into it a wanted terrorist could slip away and disappear. Had the six counties of Northern Ireland been an island, the IRA would have been coped with years ago.
Third, they had dedication and ruthlessness; there was no threshold of atrocity beyond which they would not go. Over the years, the old men of the late 1960s had been eased out, still nursing their idealistic fervor for the reunification of their island into a single United Ireland under democratic rule. In their place had come hard-nosed zealots of skill and cunning, whose education and good brains masked their cruelty. The new breed were dedicated to a United Ireland all right—but under their rule, and according to the principles of Mar
x, a dedication that still had to be kept hidden from their American cash-donors.
Last, they had established a constant supply of money, the real lifeblood of a terrorist or revolutionary campaign. In the early days, it had been a question of donations from the bars of Boston or the occasional local bank raid. By the mid-1980s, the Provisionals controlled a nationwide network of drinking clubs, protection rackets, and “normal” criminal enterprises that yielded a huge annual income with which to underpin the terror campaign. As they had learned about money, they had learned too about internal security, the need-to-know rule, and strict compartmentalization. The old days when they talked too much and drank too much had long gone.
Their Achilles’ heel was in the area of arms. Having the money to buy weapons was one thing. Parlaying money into M-60 machine guns, mortars, bazookas, or ground-to-air missiles was another. They had had their successes—and their failures. They had tried many operations to bring the arms from America, but usually the FBI got them first. They had had weapons from the Communist bloc, via Czechoslovakia, with a nod from the KGB. But since the arrival of Mr. Gorbachev, the Soviet preparedness to sanction terror in the West had waned and was finally disappearing.
The IRA needed arms, McCready knew; and if these were an offer, they would send in the best and the brightest to get them. Such were his thoughts as he steered his car out of the small town of Cricklade and across the unmarked county line into Gloucestershire.
The converted barn was where he had been told it would be, tucked down a side road, an old Cotswold stone affair that had once housed cattle and hay. Whoever had done the conversion to a quiet country house had worked hard and well. It was surrounded by a stone wall set with wagon wheels, and the garden was bright with late spring flowers. McCready drove through the gate and drew up outside the timber door. A pretty young woman, weeding a flowered border, put down her trowel and stood up.
“Hello,” she said. “Have you come about a rug?”
So, he thought, he’s selling rugs as a sideline. Perhaps the information about the books not selling too well was true.
“No, ’fraid not,” he said. “Actually, I’ve come to see Tom.”
Her smile faded, and an element of suspicion entered her eyes, as if she had seen men like him enter her husband’s life before and knew they meant trouble.
“He’s writing. In his shed at the bottom of the garden. He finishes in about an hour. Can you wait?”
“Certainly.”
She gave him coffee in the bright, chintz-curtained sitting room, and they waited. Conversation wilted. At last they heard the tramp of feet coming through the kitchen. She jumped up.
“Nikki—”
Tom Rowse appeared in the door and stopped. His smile did not flicker, but his eyes took in McCready and became very watchful.
“Darling, this gentleman has come to see you. We’ve been waiting. Would you like a coffee?”
He did not look at her, just kept his eyes on his visitor. “Sure, love a coffee.”
She left. McCready introduced himself. Rowse sat down. The records had said he was thirty-three. They did not say that he looked extremely fit. They did not need to.
Tom Rowse had been a captain in the Special Air Service regiment. Three years earlier, he had left the army, married Nikki, and bought a decrepit barn west of Cricklade. He had done the conversion himself, working out his rage through the long days of bricks and mortar, beams and rafters, windows and water pipes. He had hacked the rough meadow into smooth lawn, laid the flower beds, built the wall. That was by day; by night, he had written.
It had to be a novel, of course; a nonfiction work would have been banned under the Official Secrets Act. But even as a novel, his first book had caused outrage in the Curzon Street headquarters of MI-5. The book was about Northern Ireland, seen from the point of view of an undercover soldier, and it had mocked the counterintelligence efforts of MI-5.
The British Establishment can be very vindictive toward those it sees to have turned against it. Tom Rowse’s novel eventually found a publisher and came out to a modest success for a first novel by an unknown writer. The publishers had since commissioned a second book, on which he was now working. But the word had gone out from Curzon Street that Tom Rowse, former captain in the SAS, was an outsider, beyond the pale—not to be touched, approached, or helped in any way. He knew it, and he did not give a damn. He had built himself a new world with his new house and his new wife.
Nikki served coffee, absorbed the atmosphere, and left. She was Rowse’s first wife, but Rowse was not her first husband.
Four years earlier, Rowse, crouched behind a van in a mean street in West Belfast, had watched his friend Nigel Quaid move slowly forward like a giant armored crab toward a red Ford Sierra a hundred yards down the road.
Rowse and Quaid suspected there was a bomb in the trunk of the car. A controlled explosion would have disposed of it. The senior brass wanted the bomb defused if possible. The British know the identity of just about every IRA bomb-maker in Ireland. Each one of them leaves a personal signature in the way the bomb is assembled. That signature is blown apart if the bomb goes off, but if the bomb can be defused and retrieved, it provides a harvest of information: where the explosive came from, the source of the primer, the detonator, maybe even fingerprints. And even without fingerprints, usually the identity of the hands that put it together.
So Quaid, his friend since school days, had gone forward, swathed in body armor till he could hardly walk, to open the trunk and try to dismantle the antihandling devices. He had failed. The trunk lid had come open, but the device was taped on the underside of the lid. Quaid was looking downward, half a second too long. When daylight hit the photosensitive cell, the bomb went off. Despite Quaid’s armor, it removed his head.
Rowse had comforted the young widow, Nikki Quaid. The comfort had turned to affection, and affection to love. When he asked her to marry him, she had one condition: Leave Ireland, leave the Army. When she saw McCready today, she had suspected something, for she had seen men like him before. They were the quiet ones, always the quiet ones. It had been a quiet one who had come to Nigel that day and asked him to go to the mean street in West Belfast. Outside in the garden she dug angrily into the weeds while her man talked with the quiet one.
McCready spoke for ten minutes. Rowse listened. When the older man had finished, the ex-soldier said, “Look outside.”
McCready did so. The rich farming land stretched away to the horizon. A bird sang.
“I have made a new life here. Far away from that filth, from those scum. I’m out, McCready. Right out. Didn’t Curzon Street tell you that? I’ve made myself untouchable. A new life, a wife, a home that isn’t a soaking scrape in an Irish bog, even a modest living from the books. Why the hell should I go back?”
“I need a man, Tom. A man in on the ground. Inside. Able to move through the Middle East with a good cover. A face they don’t know.”
“Find another.”
“If that metric ton of Semtex-H goes off here in England, divided into five hundred two-kilo packages, there’ll be another hundred Nigel Quaids. Another thousand Mary Feeneys. I’m trying to stop it arriving, Tom.”
“No, McCready. Not me. Why the hell should I?”
“They’re putting a man in charge, from their side. Someone I think you know. Kevin Mahoney.”
Rowse stiffened as if he had been hit.
“He will be there?” he asked.
“We believe he will be in charge. If he fails, it will destroy him.”
Rowse stared out at the landscape for a long time. But now he saw a different countryside, one that was a deeper green but less well tended; and a garage forecourt; and a small body by the roadside that had once been a little girl called Mary Feeney.
He rose and went outside. McCready heard low voices and the sound of Nikki crying. Rowse came back and went to pack a suitcase.
Chapter 2
Rowse’s briefing took a week, and Mc
Cready handled it personally. There was no question of bringing Rowse to the environs of Century House, let alone to Curzon Street. McCready borrowed one of the three quiet country houses not an hour’s drive from London that the SIS keeps for such purposes, and he had the briefing materials sent from Century House.
There was written material and movie film, much of the latter rather indistinct, having been shot from great distance or through a hole in the side of a van, or from between the branches of a bush at long range. But the faces were clear enough.
Rowse saw the film and heard the tape from the graveyard scene at Ballycrane a week earlier. He studied the face of the Irish priest who had acted as messenger, and that of the Army Council man beside him. But when the still photographs were laid side by side, his gaze always came back to the cold, handsome features of Kevin Mahoney.
Four years earlier, Rowse had almost killed the IRA gunman. Mahoney was on the run, and the operation to track him down had taken weeks of patient undercover work. Finally, he had been suckered by a deception operation into venturing into Northern Ireland from his hideout near Dundalk in the South. He was being driven by another IRA man, and they stopped for petrol at a filling station near Moira. Rowse had been driving behind him, well back, receiving radio briefings from the watchers along the route and in the sky. When he heard that Mahoney had stopped for fuel, he decided to close in.
By the time he reached the forecourt of the filling station, the IRA driver had filled his tank and was back in the car. No one was with him yet. For a moment Rowse thought he had lost the quarry. He told his partner to cover the IRA driver and got out. It was while he was busying himself with the petrol pump that the door of the men’s room opened and Mahoney came out.