The Deceiver

  “Lose the glasses,” Rowse said to the photo expert. “Give him brown contact lenses.”

  The technician made adjustments. The glasses vanished, and the eyes went from blue to brown.

  “How old is this photo?”

  “About ten years,” said the technician.

  “Age him ten years. Thin the hair, more lines, dewlaps under the chin.”

  The technician did as he was told. The man looked about seventy now.

  “Turn the hair jet black. Hair dye.”

  The thin gray hair turned deep black. Rowse whistled.

  “Sitting alone in the corner of the terrace,” he said, “at the Apollonia. Talking to no one, keeping himself to himself.”

  “Stephen Johnson was Chief of Staff of the IRA—the old IRA—twenty years ago,” said McCready. “Quit the whole organization ten years ago, after a blazing row with the new generation over policy. He’s now sixty-five. Sells agricultural machinery in County Clare, for heaven’s sake.”

  Rowse grinned. “Used to be an ace, had a row, quit in disgust, known to be out in the cold, untouchable by those inside the Establishment—remind you of anyone you know?”

  “Sometimes, young Master Rowse, you can even be halfway smart,” admitted McCready.

  He called up a friend in the Irish police, the Garda Siochana. Officially, contacts between the Irish Garda and their British counterparts in the fight against terrorism are supposed to be formal but at arm’s length. In fact, between professionals, those contacts are often warmer and closer than some of the more hardline politicians would wish.

  This time it was a man in the Irish Special Branch, awakened at his home in Ranelagh, who came up trumps around the breakfast hour.

  “He’s on holiday,” said McCready. “According to the local Garda, he’s taken up golf and departs occasionally for a golfing holiday, usually in Spain.”

  “Southern Spain?”

  “Possibly. Why?”

  “Remember the Gibraltar affair?”

  They both remembered it all too well. Three IRA killers, planning to plant a huge bomb in Gibraltar, had been “taken out” by an SAS team—prematurely but permanently. The terrorists had arrived on the Rock as tourists from the Costa del Sol and the Spanish police and counterintelligence force had been extremely helpful.

  “There was always rumored to be a fourth in the party, one who stayed in Spain,” recalled Rowse. “And the Marbella area is stiff with golf courses.”

  “The bugger,” breathed McCready. “The old bugger. He’s gone active again.”

  In the middle of the morning, McCready took a call from Bill Carver, and they went over to the American Embassy. Carver received them in the main hall, signed them in, and took them to his office in the basement, where he too had a room all set up for viewing photographs.

  The satellite had done its job well, rolling gently high in space over the eastern Atlantic, pointing its Long Tom cameras downward to cover a strip of water from the Portuguese, Spanish, and French coasts to more than one hundred miles out into the ocean in a single pass.

  Acting on a suggestion from his Lloyds contact, McCready had asked for a study of a rectangle of water from Lisbon north to the Bay of Biscay. The continuous welter of photographs that had poured back to the receiving station of the National Reconnaissance Office outside Washington had been broken down into individual snaps of every ship afloat in that rectangle.

  “The bird photographed everything bigger than a floating Coke can,” remarked Carver proudly. “You want to start?”

  There were more than a hundred and twenty ships in that rectangle of water. Nearly half were fishing vessels. McCready discounted them, though he might wish to return to them later. Bremerhaven had a port for fishing vessels, too, but they would be of German registry, and a stranger showing up to unload not fish but general cargo would look odd. He concentrated on the freighters and a few large and luxurious private yachts, also ignoring the four passenger liners. His reduced list numbered fifty-three.

  One by one, he asked that the small slivers of metal on the great expanse of water be blown up until each filled the screen. Detail by detail, the men in the room examined them. Some were heading the wrong way. Those heading north for the English Channel numbered thirty-one.

  At half-past two, McCready called a halt.

  “That man,” he said to Bill Carver’s technician, “the one standing on the wing of the bridge. Can you come in closer?”

  “You got it,” said the American.

  The freighter had been photographed off Finisterre just before sundown on the previous day. A crewman was busying himself with a routine task on the foredeck, while another man stood on the wing of the bridge looking at him. As McCready and Rowse watched, the ship grew bigger and bigger on the screen, and still the definition held. The fore-peak and stern of the vessel disappeared offscreen and the figure of the man standing alone grew larger.

  “How high is that bird?” asked Rowse.

  “Hundred and ten miles,” said the technician.

  “Boy, that’s some technology,” said Rowse.

  “Pick up a license plate, clearly readable,” said the American proudly.

  There were more than twenty frames of that particular freighter. When the man on the bridge-wing filled most of the wall, Rowse asked for all of them to be screened with the same magnification. As the images flashed, the man seemed to move, like one of those stick figures in a Victorian biograph.

  The figure turned from looking at the seaman and stared out to sea. Then he removed his peaked cap to run a hand through his thin hair. Perhaps a seabird called above him. Whatever, he raised his face.

  “Freeze,” called Rowse. “Closer.”

  The technician magnified the face until finally it began to blur.

  “Bingo,” McCready whispered over Rowse’s shoulder. “That’s him. Johnson.”

  The tired old eyes beneath the thin jet-black hair stared out at them from the screen. The old man from the corner of the Apollonia dining terrace. The has-been.

  “The name of the ship,” said McCready. “We need the name of the ship.”

  It was on her bow, and the satellite, as she dropped over the horizon to the north, had still been filming. A single, low-angle shot caught the words beside the anchor: Regina IV. McCready reached for the phone and called his man at Lloyds Shipping Intelligence.

  “Can’t be,” said the man when he called back thirty minutes later. “Regina IV is over ten thousand tons, and she’s off the coast of Venezuela. You must have got it wrong.”

  “No mistake,” said McCready. “She’s about two thousand tons, and she’s steaming north, by now off Bordeaux.”

  “Hang about,” said the cheerful voice from Colchester. “Is she up to something naughty?”

  “Almost certainly,” said McCready.

  “I’ll call you back,” said the Lloyds man. He did, almost an hour later. McCready had spent most of that time on the telephone to some people based at Poole, in Dorset.

  “Regina,” said the man from Lloyds, “is a very common name. Like Stella Marts. That’s why they have letters or Roman numerals after the name. To distinguish one from another. It happens there’s a Regina VI registered at Limassol, now believed to be berthed at Paphos. About two thousand tons. German skipper, Greek Cypriot crew. New owners—a shell company registered in Luxembourg.”

  “The Libyan government,” thought McCready. It would be a simple ruse. Leave the Mediterranean as the Regina VI; out in the Atlantic, paint out the single numeral after the V and paint another in before it. Skilled hands could alter the ship’s papers to match. The agents would book the thoroughly reputable Regina IV into Bremerhaven with a cargo of office machinery and general cargo from Canada, and who would know that the real Regina IV was off Venezuela?

  At dawn of the third day, Captain Holst stared out of the forward windows of his bridge at the slowly lightening sea. There was no mistaking the flare that had burst into the sky
straight ahead of him, hung for a moment, then fluttered back to the water. Maroon. A distress flare. Peering through the half-light, he could make out something else a mile or two ahead of him: the yellow fluttering of a flame. He ordered his engine room to make half-speed, lifted a handset, and called one of his passengers in his bunk below. The man joined him less than a minute later.

  Captain Holst pointed silently through the windshield. On the calm water ahead of them, a forty-foot motor fishing vessel rolled drunkenly. She had clearly suffered an explosion in her engine area; a black smudge of smoke drifted up from below her deck, mingling with a flicker of orange flame. Her topsides were scorched and blackened.

  “Where are we?” asked Stephen Johnson.

  “In the North Sea, between Yorkshire and the Dutch coast,” said Holst.

  Johnson took the Captain’s binoculars and focused on the small fishing boat ahead. Fair Maid, Whitby, could be made out on her bow.

  “We have to stop and give them help,” Holst said in English. “It is the law of the sea.”

  He did not know what his own vessel was carrying, and he did not want to know. His employers had given him their orders and an extremely extravagant bonus. His crew had also been taken care of financially. The crated olives from Cyprus had come onboard at Paphos and were totally legitimate. During the two-day stopover in Sirte, on the coast of Libya, part of the cargo had been removed and then returned. It looked the same. He knew there must be illicit cargo in there somewhere, but he could not spot it and did not want to try.

  The proof that his cargo was extremely dangerous lay in the six passengers—two were from Cyprus, and four more were from Sirte. And the changing of the numerals as soon as he had passed the Pillars of Hercules. In twelve hours, he expected to be rid of them all. He would sail back through the North Sea, convert again to the Regina VI at sea, and return calmly to his home port of Limassol, a much richer man.

  Then he would retire. The years of running strange cargoes of men and crates into West Africa, the bizarre orders now coming to him from his new Luxembourg-based owners—all would be a thing of the past. He would retire at fifty with his savings enough for him and his Greek wife, Maria, to open their little restaurant in the Greek islands and live out their days in peace.

  Johnson looked dubious. “We can’t stop,” he said.

  “We have to.”

  The light was getting better. They saw a figure, scorched and blackened, emerge from the wheelhouse of the fishing vessel, stagger to the forward deck, make a pain-wracked attempt to wave, then fall forward onto his face.

  Another IRA officer came up behind Holst. He felt the muzzle of a gun in his ribs.

  “Sail on by,” said a flat voice.

  Holst did not ignore the gun, but he looked at Johnson. “If we do, and they are rescued by another ship, as they will be sooner or later, they will report us. We will be stopped and asked why we did that.”

  Johnson nodded.

  “Then ram them,” said the one with the gun. “We don’t stop.”

  “We can give first aid and call up the Dutch coast guard,” said Holst. “No one comes aboard. When the Dutch cutter appears, we continue. They will wave their thanks and think no more of it. It will cost us thirty minutes.”

  Johnson was persuaded. He nodded. “Put up your gun,” he said.

  Holst moved his speed control to “full astern,” and the Regina slowed rapidly. Giving an order in Greek to his helmsman, he left the bridge and went down to the waist before moving up to the foredeck. He looked down at the approaching fishing vessel, then waved a hand to the helmsman. The engines went to “midships,” and the momentum of the Regina carried her slowly up to the stricken fisherman.

  “Ahoy, Fair Maid!” called Holst, peering down as the fishing boat came under the bow. They saw the fallen man on the foredeck try to stir, then faint again. The Fair Maid bobbed along the side of the larger Regina until she came to the Regina’s waist, where the deck rail was lower. Holst walked down his ship and shouted an order in Greek for one of his crew to throw a line aboard the Fair Maid.

  There was no need. As the fisherman slid past the waist of the Regina, the man on the foredeck came to, jumped up with remarkable agility for one so badly burned, seized a grappling hook beside him, and hurled it over the rail of the Regina, securing it fast to a cleat on the Fair Maid’s bow. A second man ran out of the fishing boat’s cabin and did the same at the stern. The Fair Maid stopped drifting.

  Four more men ran from the cabin, vaulted to the roof, and jumped straight over the rail of the Regina. It happened so fast and with such coordination that Captain Holst had only time to shout, “Was zum Teufel ist denn das?”

  The men were all dressed alike: black one-piece overalls, cleated rubber boots, and black woolen caps. Their faces were blackened, too, but not by soot. A very hard hand took Captain Holst in the solar plexus, and he went down on his knees. He would later say that he had never seen the men of the SBS, the Special Boat Squadron, the seaborne equivalent of the Special Air Service, in action before, and he never wished to again.

  By now, there were four Cypriot crewmen on the main deck. One of the men in black shouted a single order to them, in Greek, and they obeyed. They went flat onto the deck, face down, and stayed there. Not so the four IRA members, who came pouring out of the side door of the superstructure. They all had handguns.

  Two had the sense to see quickly that a handgun is a poor bargain when faced with a Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine carbine. They threw their hands up and tossed their pistols to the deck. Two tried to use their guns. One was lucky: He took the brief burst in the legs and survived to spend his life in a wheelchair. The fourth was not so lucky and collected four bullets in the chest.

  There were now six black-clad men swarming over the deck area of the Regina. The third to come aboard had been Tom Rowse. He ran for the companionway that led upward to the bridge. As he reached the wing, Stephen Johnson emerged from the interior. Seeing Rowse, he threw his hands in the air.

  “Don’t shoot, Sass-man. It’s over!” he shouted.

  Rowse stood aside and jerked the barrel of his machine pistol toward the staircase.

  “Down,” he said.

  The old IRA man began to descend to the main deck. There was a movement behind Rowse, someone in the door of the wheelhouse. He sensed the movement, half turned, and caught the crash of the handgun. The bullet plucked at the shoulder of his cloth overall. There was no time to pause or shout. He fired as they had taught him, the quick double-burst, then another, loosing two pairs of nine-millimeter slugs in less than half a second.

  He had an image of the figure in the doorway that had taken four bullets in the chest, being thrown back into the doorjamb, cannoning forward again—the wild swing of the corn-blond hair. Then she had been on the steel deck, quite dead, a thin trickle of blood seeping from the mouth he had kissed.

  “Well, well,” said a voice at his elbow. “Monica Browne. With an ‘e.’ ”

  Rowse turned. “You bastard,” he said slowly. “You knew, didn’t you?”

  “Not knew. Suspected,” McCready said gently. In civilian clothes, he had come at a more sedate pace out of the fishing vessel when the shooting was over.

  “We had to check her out, you see, Tom, after she made contact with you. She is—was—indeed Monica Browne, but Dublin-born and bred. Her first marriage, at twenty, took her to Kentucky for eight years. After the divorce, she married Major Eric Browne, much older but rich. Through his alcoholic haze, he no doubt had not a whit of suspicion of his young wife’s fanatical devotion to the IRA. And yes, she did run a stud farm, but not at Ashford, Kent, England. It was at Ashford, County Wicklow, Ireland.”

  The team spent two hours tidying up. Captain Holst proved keen to cooperate. He admitted there had been an open-sea transfer of crates, to a fishing boat off Finisterre. He gave the name, and McCready passed it to London for the Spanish authorities. With speed, they would intercept the arms for the ETA
while still on board the trawler—a way for the SIS to say thank you for the Spanish help over the Gibraltar affair.

  Captain Holst also agreed that he had been just within British territorial waters when the boarding took place. After that, it would be a matter for the lawyers, so long as Britain had jurisdiction. McCready did not want the IRA men removed to Belgium and promptly liberated, like Father Ryan.

  The two bodies were brought to the main deck and laid side by side, covered in sheets from the cabins below. With the aid of the Greek-Cypriot crewmen, the covers were taken from the holds, and the cargo searched. The commandos of the SBS team did that. After two hours, the lieutenant who commanded them reported to McCready.

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “A lot of olives, sir.”

  “Nothing but olives?”

  “Some crates marked office machinery.”

  “Containing?”

  “Office machinery, sir. And the three stallions. They’re pretty upset, sir.”

  “Bugger the horses—so am I,” said McCready grimly. “Show me.”

  He and Rowse followed the officer below. The lieutenant gave them a tour of the ship’s four holds. In one, copying machines and typewriters from Japan were visible through the sides of their smashed crates. In the second and third holds, tins of Cypriot olives spilled from broken boxes. No crate or carton had been left untouched. The fourth hold contained three substantial horse boxes. In each of them a stallion whinnied and shied in fear.

  There was a feeling in McCready’s stomach, that awful feeling that comes with knowing you have been duped, have taken the wrong course of action, and that there will be the devil to pay. If all he could come up with was a cargo of olives and typewriters, London would nail his hide to a barn door.

  A young SBS man was standing with the horses in their hold. He seemed to know about animals; he was talking to them quietly, calming them down.

  “Sir?” he asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Why are they being shipped?”