Provo

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Who was handling the informant? Was the handler Special Branch or MI5? Who was the informant who told them about Beechwood Street? Was he being run from Lisburn? What about the FRU, was he working for them? Where did the orders come from? Someone must have said something, someone from SB or MI5 or the FRU must have let a name slip.

It was late afternoon, going into evening. They tossed her in the corner again, left her with one guard. The pangs racked her body and she wanted to die. Do it, she told herself, now while there’s just one of them. But they could still be SAS, the thought held her back, it could still be part of the Hereford refresher. The bastards seeing how far they could push her before she cracked.

The interrogator returned and the questioning continued. Why were you in Beechwood Street? Who told you? What time did the orders come in? Who was the leak? Next time they pushed her in the corner, she told herself. But suppose they weren’t Provos, suppose they had fixed it for her to arrive late at The Fort. Suppose they were SAS. She couldn’t kill one if he was SAS, if he really was a Brit. The interrogator hit her again, the questions spinning through her head and confusing her. Kill them or don’t kill them, the other question was like a vortex in her mind. Who the hell are they, what are they? Up to her, she told herself, whether she could do it or not. If she got the chance again. Should have done it before. The interrogation ended and she was pushed into the corner, two guards remaining. No chance to do it now, she told herself.

So what is it? she asked herself. What was she afraid of, why had she delayed before?

She was back in the stake-out car, McKendrick at the driver’s window and Rorke in front, Brady’s trouser zip undone and the Browning in his waist holster. She couldn’t do it, she was thinking, was slowing down, telling herself she was stalling to give the SAS boys in Tommy Reardon’s house a chance. She was in the car after, on patrol in the days and weeks that followed, was lying awake at night or walking along the beach on the west coast. The knowledge was deep in her subconscious, unavailable to her; the security block she had imposed upon it protecting her.

Beechwood Street, she made herself admit; she shouldn’t have hesitated. Even now, even with the Provo guards ten yards from her, it was impossible to come to terms with. She had told herself she was delaying to give the men in the house a chance, but all the time she didn’t want to do it.

Didn’t want to do what, she asked herself.

She had to go down on Brady to get to the back-up gun, she knew the answer she had been giving herself. And ever since she had told herself that that was the thing she had been afraid to do.

But . . . she took herself on, pushed herself to the brink. But that had not been what she was afraid of. The sex wasn’t relevant, wasn’t even sex. It wasn’t even a penis. It was just a way of getting to the gun. All the time it wasn’t the sex that she had been afraid of, that she had known she couldn’t do. All the time what she had been afraid of was actually killing someone.

One of the guards had left, the other sitting eating the supper they had brought for him, sitting with his back to her. The rope round her wrists had worked loose and she slid her hands from it. Do it, she told herself, do it now. These men aren’t SAS, these men are Provisional IRA. If you don’t talk soon they’ll kill you. So kill them first.

There was no point. Even if she dealt with one gunman there were four, perhaps five more. Even if she got outside they would hunt her down. What you’re saying is an excuse, she told herself. Nobody likes killing, but sometimes it’s necessary. Sometimes it’s you or them. The gunman’s back was still towards her, the man seated on a bale and crouched over the plate. She picked up the pitchfork and rose, stepped towards him. No noise, not even a rustling of the straw. She was four feet from him. Three feet. Two. His back was still towards her. Him or her. Him not her. She began to bring the pitchfork down.

‘ENDEX.’

She heard the voice and froze. English. End exercise, the words pounded through her brain. The Provo gunmen stepped forward from the shadows; no balaclavas over their faces. Phillips turned round and looked at her.

Put her through it, Haslam had told him. String her out and see what happens. Take her down to hell and see if she comes back. Go down with her if you have to. Not for himself, not because it was Haslam who’d run the course in Germany where the talent-spotters had first picked her up, who’d drunk and talked with her and the others in the evenings, who’d taken her aside at the end and suggested that she might like to volunteer for Special Duties. But for her. Because at the end of the day she was worth it. And he couldn’t do it because she would recognize him; then she would realize and throw up her defences; then she wouldn’t admit what she needed to admit to herself. Then she would be lost for ever.

Unofficial of course, nothing to go on the record.

You . . . Nolan almost said to the man she had been about to kill . . . You were one of the men in the house on Beechwood Street.

Philipa Walker left the flat and took the Northern Line to the Newspaper Library at Colindale. Something about a photograph, she had been aware. At least one photograph, possibly two. Not something about PinMan, something about herself.

There were those who might have preferred to shrug off such a feeling, to let it slip away as if it had never existed. She herself did not subscribe to such a philosophy. If an item or detail existed she should face up to it even though she might not wish to. Control it, control herself, rather than allow things or events to control her.

The first photograph was in the diary column of the Mail – she remembered the type around it and the position on the page. The second, following the same logic, was in the Sunday Times.

She ordered the Mail for the years 1988 to 1990 – it was only possible to order three volumes at any one time – and settled down to wait in the microfiche section at the rear. The boxes of film were delivered to her ten minutes later. She inserted the ’88 cassette in the viewer and began her search. An hour and a half later she handed the boxes back and ordered the Mail for the three years beginning 1991. The photograph was in the Mail of April 1992. She recognized the page immediately – the headline and the layout triggering the subconscious layers of her memory. The picture spanned the middle two columns – the group at the restaurant table, the woman in the centre and the vague faces behind. When Walker had first seen it, it had been at the Press Association library and all the faces had been clearly defined. On microfiche, however, she could barely make out the faces of the two men behind the women. She noted the date of the newspaper, handed the cassettes back, and booked the Sunday Times beginning 1991.

The woman seemed asleep, the reading-room porter thought. He gave her the boxes of microfiche and was startled by the way she suddenly appeared to wake. Almost like an animal.

The story had been written before the separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales. It was trailed on the front page of the main section of the newspaper and dealt with in full in the News Review. Its theme was the distinct sets of friends enjoyed by the couple and the way in which this represented a crossroads in their life together. Again, however, the faces in the photographs which accompanied the article were indistinct. She read through the piece once, then went to the pay phone on the landing outside the reading room, telephoned the Daily Mail and Sunday Times, and confirmed that back copies of the relevant dates of each were available. Then she collected her coat and bag, walked to the tube station, and caught the Northern Line to Chalk Farm.

That evening she dined with Patrick Saunders at the White Tower restaurant in Percy Street. The relationship was developing as she had anticipated, indeed planned. In the almost twisted manner of the hunt, she even enjoyed it, enjoyed his company but also enjoyed the razor edge which came with the knowledge of why she was seeing him. As long as he was the key, as long as his source into the royal family was the one she needed. As long as she herself could access that source without Saunders or the source knowing.

At eleven next morning she collected the back copy of the Mail, then went to a café two hundred yards away, ordered a cappuccino, and turned to the photograph on the diary page, ignoring the faces of the women at the table and concentrating on the taller of the two men standing behind them.

An hour later she collected the copy of the Sunday Times, returned to St Katharine’s Dock, and ordered a Bloody Mary in the Thames Bar of the Tower Hotel. In the main, the article said, the Di and Charles camps were not compatible; the Prince thought his wife’s friends too frivolous, and the Princess considered her husband’s circle too serious, even boring. Only one person was welcomed in both camps. Major R.E.F. Fairfax of the Grenadier Guards, known to the royal couple as Roddy. Originally it had been the Princess of Wales who had welcomed Fairfax into her inner circle, the newspaper said. Charles, however, also thought highly of him, partly because he was a military man and had seen service in Northern Ireland, and had personally invited him to the royal home at Highgrove.

Of course Fairfax was a military man. Walker looked again at the photographs in the two papers and the name in the Sunday Times, felt the ice spreading. Of course the bastard had seen service in Northern Ireland.

Haslam had left Belfast ten days before, spending two days at Hereford and a further two checking airport security at Heathrow. He spent the night in London, left at 5.30 and liaised with the other men who would take part in the exercise at seven. At eight the three took the ferry to the island, enjoyed an hour-long breakfast, then caught the 10.30 return ferry as instructed.

The watchers from Five were waiting. Men and women. Fat ones, thin ones. Some looking fit as hell and others as if they could barely make it to the bar to get another drink. Double-sided coats, different colours each side to confuse the targets, wigs, bags, all the works. Spot them a mile off if you were expecting them and knew what you were looking for. Never see them in a month of Sundays if you didn’t.

The latest graduates from the Firm’s school at The Fort, SAS men playing the suspects they would tail in the end-of-course close-surveillance exercise.

He stepped off the ferry and turned up Lime Street.

‘Charlie One Five. Green One.’ The first tail picked him up, the streets already coded. Dead letter drops and pickups, contact with another suspect – it was all in the day’s exercise.

Haslam reached the top of the street and turned left.

‘Charlie One Five. Green Four.’ The first tail dropped back.

‘Charlie One Six. Green Five.’ The second picked Haslam up from the other side of the road. Surveillance teams in front and behind. Vehicles on stand-by.

‘One Six. Green Three.’ The bus stop was seventy yards ahead and the tail thirty yards behind. Haslam glanced back and saw the bus; as it passed him he slowed and allowed it to stop at the stop, then sprinted for it as it pulled away.

‘Charlie One Two. Blue Two.’ The woman who had been waiting at the stop took the third seat in, downstairs, and watched as he went up the stairs to the top deck. ‘Blue Three.’ . . . Silver Street. ‘Blue Four.’ . . . Rodney Street. ‘Blue Five.’ She called the stops as the bus passed them. One car staying behind, the others moving ahead, dropping tails where the target might leave the bus.

This was their patch, Nolan thought; they’d practised on it and knew the streets backwards. Christ help them if the target decided to go AWOL, took the train to Bournemouth and got off at Southampton, left them spread like confetti over the south of England. She slid from the car and looked in the window of the tobacconist next to the bus stop.

‘Charlie One Three. Green Ten to Green Eleven.’ . . . The suspect on foot in Vesta Road going towards Queens Road.

‘Charlie Two One.’ The next tail in position. ‘Affirmative.’ The tail slid in behind Haslam.

Bramshaw Road then Pembury Street, the railway line across the top and the footbridge to Marshall Place – the area map was imprinted on her mind. Cul de sacs at Bolsover Street and Duncan Road.

Haslam turned into the newsagents and waited for the tail to follow him in. ‘Box of matches.’ He paid, then browsed along the magazine shelves as the tail asked for a packet of cigarettes. It was time to start playing games, time to give them a run for their money. He left the shop and turned first right. The street was seventy yards long, turnings to the right and left at the top.

‘Charlie Two Three. Green Eight.’

The tail was thirty yards behind and afraid to go too close. Haslam slowed and made the tail drop even further back, so that when he reached the corner the man was almost forty yards behind him. He turned the corner and ran. Thirty yards, left; another forty, right. Left again and over the railway footbridge. The tail rounded the corner. ‘Green Eight.’ He looked right, left. Didn’t know what to do or say.

Nolan heard, knew what the bastard had done. The pavement was lined with stalls. She pushed through them and slid into the back-up car. ‘Marshall Place, quick, he’s gone over the footbridge.’

The car accelerated, went through the lights on amber, and skidded across the level crossing at Fore Street as the barrier came down.

‘One Three. Blue Two towards Black Four.’ Haslam was fifty yards in front, walking away from them. The car pulled into a side street; she left it and followed him. ‘One Three. Black Ten.’ She turned right after him and realized. Bolsover Street, a cul-de-sac. He’s going to sideline me, the thought screamed through her head, the bastard’s going to eyeball me. Standard anti-surveillance if a target thought he was being shadowed – one of several. Turn, walk back past the shadow, stare him in the face. Let him know that you know. Put him out of the game.

Haslam turned and she saw his face for the first time. Understood.

Long time since Germany – he didn’t need to say it. Long time since the adventure training course and the talk about Special Duties.

You – she was still walking towards him. You were the second man in the house on Beechwood Street. You were the one who pulled the strings and got me off the desk assignment and into the Firm. You were the bastard who arranged the little session at Hereford. You waited till it was me behind you before you turned in here.

Haslam was twenty yards from her, on the outside of the pavement, eyes straight ahead. They were ten yards apart, five. Both staring straight ahead. Good girl, the instructor whispered to himself, don’t let him phase you. Just keep walking. Haslam was three yards from her, face set, Nolan still staring straight ahead.

As she passed him she winked.

4 (#ulink_86e8078b-d1f9-5027-8feb-2255120d263a)

The Army Council met at ten. Outside there was sleet in the wind; inside the air was mixed with cigarette smoke and the aroma of fresh coffee. Doherty was looking older, Conlan thought, the first cobweb of dark and wrinkled skin beneath his eyes and the eyes themselves darting as he had never seen them before. The evening before the doctor had confirmed what the Chief of Staff already assumed.

For the major part of the morning they discussed general issues – the escalating rounds of shootings and bombings, the income from the various fund-raising activities operated by the Movement and the laundering of that money through front companies on the British mainland. It was only as they approached midday that Doherty moved them to the item they had all anticipated.

‘Sleeper and PinMan.’

Doherty had organized it well, Conlan thought, had guided the previous discussions so that the Council was already predisposed to agree to the PinMan project. Had added his weight only when necessary, and then merely to divert the tide of opinion in the direction he wished. Doherty was dying: he had suspected before but now he knew for certain, now he understood. Doherty wanted PinMan and what PinMan would give them as much as he himself did.

Doherty indicated that Conlan should brief the meeting. So what would Quin do, he wondered, how would Quin seek to counter Conlan?

‘Sleeper has been activated, and is engaged upon preliminary research. I anticipate the project will take another three to six months.’ He spoke for another two minutes only, deliberately vague about timings and other details, withholding as much as he could and knowing the direction the discussion would take when he had finished.

‘Do we know which member of the royal family will be the target?’ Quin stared at him through the cigarette smoke.

‘Not yet.’ Conlan wondered why he considered it necessary to lie.

‘Assassination or kidnapping?’ It was Quin again.

For the next two hours they discussed the range of alternatives and the various options within each, including the short-, medium- and long-term implications of whatever decision they reached. If assassination, what would be the effect on world opinion, including the Movement’s supporters in the United States? How would the Catholic population in Northern Ireland react? What would be the response in the Republic? If kidnapping, what demands? Would the British try to hush it up? Would the Council let them? The discussion circled back on itself. What was the long-term aim, how would the various reactions further that aim?

Doherty had discussed it with Conlan the night before, Quin suddenly realized. Doherty knew who the target was and how it was to be done. Doherty dying – he looked into the man’s eyes and knew for certain. Doherty on his way out and Conlan about to give him his footnote in history.

‘I suggest we vote.’

Quin knows, Conlan suddenly realized: that he and Doherty had done the deal, that he enjoyed Doherty’s full support.

The vote was unanimous. Outside it was already dark.

The following morning Conlan activated those he had already placed on stand-by.

McGuire, from Belfast. In his mid-thirties, lean and thin-faced, short dark curly hair. Married with two children. A good operator, one of the best.

McGinty, whose priest’s collar and gentle manner gave him the perfect cover. Who loved fishing and who so matched Conlan in age and build that from a distance he could pass for him. Especially when he was wrapped in oilskins, woollen cap or dark glasses against the glare of the sun or the bite of the wind on the shores of Lough Corrib.

Plus the foot soldiers, the expendables. Clarke and Milligan, Black and Lynch. Hoolihan and Lynan.

But not Logan. Not yet. Logan was to come.

The morning was bright but cold, the white of the first snow lying on Divis Hill to the south-west of the city. When McGuire returned to the house his wife was in the kitchen.

‘I’ll be away a few days.’

Eileen McGuire was small, with bright eyes that hid her fear. She bit her lip and nodded.

‘Don’t worry. No problems this time.’

At least he was honest, she thought, at least he didn’t say that every time he went away. He went upstairs to the bedroom at the front of the house. One day they would get him, the fear was always coiled in her. One day a shoot-to-kill unit from the RUC or the SAS would lie in wait for him and gun him down like a dog. One day the UFF would find out about him and slaughter him in his own front room. And in the meantime she would tell the children he was going away to work, a building site in Derry or wherever, and that he would soon be home again. She followed him upstairs and watched him pack the handful of clothes. When he finished she. put the small bag into the large plastic laundry bag she used for shopping, went to the Sportsman’s, dropped his bag in the back room, then returned to the house and carried on cooking.

At seven McGuire left the house and walked the three hundred yards to the bar. If he was under observation – from undercover motor vehicles, informants, OPs concealed in the roof spaces of surrounding houses, or high-altitude surveillance helicopters – there was nothing to suggest that he was doing anything other than going for a drink.

The Sportsman’s was busy. After thirty minutes he muttered his excuses and went to the toilets at the rear, collected his bag and stepped into the alleyway behind. The car was waiting.

The shooting took place shortly after five the following day, outside a betting shop at the top of the Crumlin Road, on the edge of the Catholic Ardoyne area and close to the Protestant Shankill. The victim was a 32-year-old Sinn Fein politician whom the UFF alleged was a member of the Provisional IRA. The planning for the shooting which followed it took place the following evening and was led by the officer commanding the North Belfast Brigade of the Provisional IRA. The first part of the discussion was strategic – whether or not a shooting of a UFF activist was not only necessary but politically and militarily sound at that point in time; whether the UFF reaction to the execution of a member of its ranks would be counterproductive. The second part, which followed once the decision had been made, was tactical. The target would be a man known to be a planning officer for the UFF. The location and timing would be confirmed by the intelligence officer, the details to be supplied to the team assigned to the killing, and the weapon would be an AK47 supplied from one of the Provisionals’ arms dumps in Myrtle Field Park, a middle-class street in a non-sectarian area of the city. The execution, as the Provisionals would describe it in the communiqué they would release later, would take place from a car stolen from the city centre. The driver would pick up the man carrying the gun fifteen minutes before the hit and the gunman himself ten minutes before. The gunman would leave the car as soon as they were clear of the area and in a neighbourhood considered safe; the man carrying the weapon immediately after, and the driver would abandon and torch the vehicle as soon as he could after that.

They came to those who would carry out the shooting, the gunman first.

‘Clarke or Milligan.’ The intelligence officer’s suggestion was straightforward and logical.

‘Out of circulation.’ The OC – officer commanding – had not been told why.

‘Black.’

The Bossman shook his head. Something happening, he had assumed when he had been informed by the Northern Command; something big if it required his three most experienced gunmen.

‘Lynch.’

‘Out of town.’

‘Hoolihan?’

‘Out as well.’

Five of the most experienced IRA gunmen in North Belfast suddenly out of circulation.

‘Lynan?’ The intelligence officer knew the answer before he suggested the name.

The OC shook his head.

Six out of six. ‘Who then?’ Douglas, he knew, except that Douglas was young and still slightly brash, and the officer commanding would only use him if the rest of the team were older and more experienced.

‘Frank.’ Frank Hanrahan had been one of the best, but was now in his late thirties. He had begun his Provo career as a teenager, done his time in Long Kesh without complaint; he had been on the Blanket then the Dirty Protest and – though he had denied it at the time, though he had volunteered for active service immediately he had been released – the years of confinement and hardship had taken their toll. He had married young, his boy and girl were now in their mid-teens, the boy coming up seventeen, but still Frank did the occasional job. Only when no one else was available, however, and only when they wanted an older hand to rein in the recklessness of the youngsters.

‘Freddie’s picking up the gun, Mickey’s driving.’ Both were young and both would be good. If they survived that long. But send them out with the gunman called Douglas and they would either wipe out half the Shankill or crash the car on the way.

Frank Hanrahan, they agreed.

Lisburn was quiet. Nolan sat back in the chair and looked again at the reports from the various agents which it was part of her job to analyse. She had returned to Northern Ireland four weeks before. When former colleagues recognized her she said simply that she was on a secure task, and no further questions were asked.

Perhaps something was running, perhaps not.

Clarke on the move. On the gallop, as the Provos called it. The information from E4A, the RUC undercover surveillance division.

Milligan on the move. From an informant in the FRU, the Forward Reconnaissance Unit, the wing of Military Intelligence dealing with agents and informants in the Catholic and Protestant paramilitary organizations.

She punched the names into the computer, checked on the background of each, and read through the reports for the third time. Nothing concrete yet, but something to keep her eye on. She left Lisburn and took one of the five alternative routes she had established to the flat she had rented in Malone Park in the south of the city.