The rifle, the stock folded back against the mechanism, was in the pouch pocket of his coat.
Bren came out of the front door. It had been Ronnie's idea. Ronnie had said that it would be no problem for him to get away for five hours.
Two hours driving each way, and an hour in the small house in the Filton district of Bristol. Ronnie had said that the backing of a strong family helped a man enduring stress.
So little that he, their son, could say to Art and Sadie Brennard. His father had cancelled his evening out at the horticulture group, and his mother had missed Friday evening Bingo.
He wished to God that he hadn't come
They had eaten a high tea, scones and cakes, and when it was nearly time for him to take off again, head away out of their lives, he had said that he would be gone some time. That was a sick joke, because it was more than four months since he had last been home. He'd the impression, when they had all sat down, that his mother had expected some momentous announcement, like he'd met a girl. He told them that he was posted to Belfast. His mother, Sadie, had looked as though she might cry. His father, Art, he'd just munched at his food and lowered his head nearer his plate.
The way Bren told it, what he would be doing would be just pretty boring, pushing paper round desks. Of course, nothing about ".source units or surveillance hides, firearms or playing with men's lives or being looked after and having his hand held by Parker, of course not. He left when he could see that neither of them believed a word he said. HIS
mother kissed him on the doorstep, and his father held his hand and shook it, and the voices of both of them were lost in their throats.
He tried to smile back at them. He waved from his car. Should have told them, shouldn't he, that across in Bellast there was a man called Parker who was reckoned the superstar So patronising they all were, Wilkins and Ronnie and P.T.I Terry and Jocelyn. All playing the bloody Parker tune. By the time that he had reached the motorway, joined the great horde of his fellow countrymen who gave not a toss about Northern Ireland and its war, Bren had made himself a very binding promise. He would not be bloody Parker's passenger. He was not going to be any man's bag carrier.
One more night and he would be travelling.
Siobhan Nugent stood at her kitchen window and looked out and across at the farmhouse. She was like a widow, that Attracta Donnelly, and widows gathered men to them.
Siobhan Nugent wondered if her Mossie was there, at the widow feckin' Donnelly's. If he was not there then he would be out with the wild boys, bad boys, of the mountain. She knew, certain. All of the wives and the mothers on Altmore knew if their men were involved.
Below her bungalow, below the Donnelly farm, were the scattered lights of the homes of the Altmore people. To so many of those homes, before dawn had broken, the priest had come. It was always the priest who was sent to break the news of the shooting dead of another man.
They all ended dead, or locked away.
Perhaps it were better if her Mossie
were
at the widow feckin' I Donnelly's.
"Where is he now?"
"Mrs Ferguson's giving him his tea, Mr Wilkins. Then he's just to pack his things, upstairs," Ronnie said.
"I'm going to get his car back to the garage in London," P.T.I. Terry said.
"She's a soft old thing, that Mrs Ferguson. I suppose because of Six, she's used to seeing heroes packed off overseas. She's a bit sentimental," Jocelyn said.
Wilkins put down his whisky and walked quietly across the hall to the dining-room door. Bren's back was to him. Mrs Ferguson sat opposite him and was refilling his mug with tea. George sat beside him and was telling some gory tale from his soldiering in Cyprus. The Rottweiler was crouched on its haunches, saliva at its jaws, love in its eyes, and delicately took the half slice of bacon that Bren offered it.
Wilkins knew that Mrs Ferguson was a shrew whose services should have been dispensed with when the Ark beached, and that George was obstinate and stupid and hadn't a civil tongue in his head, and the dog was potentially vicious and a liability. The young man had been there for barely four days and he had captivated all three of them.
He walked back into the Library.
"Well, what's he been like?"
Ronnie said, "He's raw, but he wants to learn. He'll be fine. He's actually rather tough."
P.T.I. Terry said, "The Provisionals are in for rather a nasty surprise, if you want my opinion, sir. That's a very fit gentleman. Nice long stint in Ulster should suit very well."
Jocelyn said, "He doesn't shoot very straight, and he has no sense of humour. In another three weeks I think I could give you a reasonably competent ..."
"I haven't got three weeks, Jocelyn. I have got about three minutes."
Ronnie shrugged, "Well, it's only a short stay, isn't it?"
Wilkins had had the fax back from Nairobi that morning. Ferdie bloody Penn was fighting his corner. Halfway through the course in Nairobi, expensive effort wasted and there would be a right squawk of anger in the Ministry of the Interior if he was pulled out, job not completed.
"I'm not so sure. Your reports of him are rather promising. I think we'll have to regard the posting as open-ended, , for the time being anyway . .
."
Mrs Ferguson came out onto the front step and stood huddled against the cold as they loaded Wilkins' car with Bren's suitcase and grip.
Ronnie and P.T.I. Terry and Jocelyn wished Bren well, slapped his back, shook his hand. George waved at them as they pulled away. The dog ran the length of the drive barking hoarsely at the car's tyres.
"It's so easy to lose sight of the big picture, Bren. The Provisionals are under enormous pressure at the moment. Arrests are up and their attacks are down. We know that a number of their political end would like to sit at some sort of conference table. What's holding back any substantial advance to political dialogue are the hard men, the military activists.
Our most important work of the moment is to penetrate the core of their killers. Destroy them, lock them away, and then peace might just get the tiny chance to breathe. It's a critical time."
They were late at Heathrow because Ernest Wilkins never drove beyond the speed limit.
"Don't think about the majority. The majority are decent people, excessively friendly, hard working and law abiding. You concentrate on the minority, the one in a hundred or maybe even the one in a thousand, the lethal minority ..."Bren grabbed his case and his grip and ran.
Wilkins had missed the chance to wish him God speed.
4
The aircraft was continually smacked by Force 8 winds. Bren barely noticed. He sat strapped in his seat, very still, refusing food and declining a drink. His mind was running over and over what Ronnie had told h i m . . . He was headed for a war in which dinosaur traditions governed and destroyed a gentler and more reasoning age. A pitiless war, unremarkable in the context of what had gone before. It was as always; the gravediggers stayed busy, and every time they paused for breath the war would erupt again to bring new soldiers, new patriots and new innocents to the cemeteries. The war was terrifying to the stranger, not least because it was incomprehensible in its brutality and its apparent irrelevance to the twentieth century. He thought only a native might be able to understand it, slim chance for the stranger drafted in to try to help to put a stop to it.
Bren jolted in his seat as the aircraft banged down onto the Aldergrove runway.
The aircraft taxied. He felt a swift thrill of exhilaration. He was a junior Executive Officer of the Security Service. More than anything he wanted to be worthy of the posting. One step at a time . . . and first step was Parker. Parker, he had been told, would meet him at the airport.
He unclipped the belt. He stood and stretched his cramped knees. He had not the faintest idea when he would next see the inside of an aircraft that was heading back to London. He was breathing hard. He walked down the aisle.
A l l so normal.
H e walked in a cavalcade of grannies and carried babies and collapsed pushchairs and young men who had been to a soccer match in London. The life of any other small airport, anywhere, swam around him. Ordinary and happy and relieved and excited people flowed by him, past the armed policemen and the anti- terrorist posters, the same as in any other small airport. But he was different, because he was a junior Executive Officer of Five and from now on a man's life depended on
him
, and from this moment onwards his own life was on the line. He felt the gush of pleasured excitement, enjoyed it.
She wasn't really a girl, she was more of a woman. It was probably a photograph that she had hidden in her palm. She looked down and then up again at the surge of the passengers. She came forward. She had singled him out. He stopped, put down his suitcase.
"It's Gary, yes?"
"I'm called Bren," he said brusquely.
"Please yourself."
"I was told Parker would meet me."
He thought she laughed at him. She wasn't pretty, certainly wasn't beautiful. The only brightness was in her eyes. He reckoned her accent was money, class.
"I'm Cathy - it's a God awful flight over, right?"
"They said it would be Parker." He heard the snap in his voice, wondered how he could be such an idiot.
"Did they now?"
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be rude."
She wore trainers and jeans that were threadbare at the knees, and a quilted anorak that was scuffed at the elbows.
"Lets be on the
on the move then."
"Right ." Bren bent to pick up his suitcase. She had beaten him to it, He knew it was heavy. She gave him a withering look. She walked away carrying the suitcase and he followed her.
Her head barely came up to his shoulder. There was a pale blue scarf at her throat. She had small hands and he thought that under the anorak there was only a slight body. She had no make-up, and her cheeks glowed with a weathered colour. Her hair was golden red and cut short.
She led the way out through the doors. When he had run for the flight at Heathrow he had had to change hands on the suitcase because of its weight. She didn't change hands. They threaded their way through the car park.
She unlocked an old Astra. The sides and the wheels were mud-spattered. She tossed his suitcase into the hatch. Presumably the people she collected for Parker wouldn't have been expected to bring with them their bone china. She unlocked the passenger door for him. He laid his grip on the back seat.
She settled in the driver's seat. Bren was belting himself in. She unzipped her anorak and took a radio from an inside pocket. Bren didn't understand a word she said into the microphone. Then she drew a Browning automatic from the tight waist of her jeans. She put the pistol on her seat, between her legs, then shrugged out of her anorak and draped it across her lap to hide the weapon. She drove out of the car park and away from the lights.
He saw her grin in the lights of a passing lorry. "I'm Parker," she said. "And since you are so bloody status-conscious, you can call me ma'am. Otherwise I'm just Cathy."
The messenger was glad to be gone.
The O.C. watched young Patsy Riordan run into the darkness and away from the house, and there was the frantic revving of his low-powered motorcycle. He came back inside, slamming the front door behind him. His wife was still in the kitchen, and the baby started to bawl at the hammer of the front door closing, and she did not dare to complain.
He had known by mid-morning that the policeman, hitting his feckin'
golf balls, had not been shot. He had been told by lunch- time that his volunteers had made it back to the safety of the mountain. It was not until now, late in the evening, that he had heard the reasons for the failure.
It was the third time in as many months that young Patsy had brought him news of an aborted mission.
The front car, clean, without weapons on board, as was usual, had been a quarter of a mile ahead of the A.S.U.'s vehicle. They had seen the first roadblock, and called back on the C.B. radio. There were two routes to the target. They had tried the second.
Again
a vehicle checkpoint. They'd quit. The first car had driven the narrow lanes all through the small communities close to the Lough. Well, it could just have been chance. The whole bloody area had been stiff with bastards, not just around the police inspector's home.
Why, that morning, the morning he was to be attacked, had the way not been open to the Chief Inspector's house?
That night, when his wife had gone upstairs to quieten the baby and then to bed, the O.C. sat in front of the dying fire, and the anger whipped his mind.
The congregation spilled out from the chapel. Ten o'clock Mass was no longer the centrepiece of community life, not as it once had been, though the cars and vans were parked for fully 200 yards, both sides of the road. There were gaps among his flock, the Father had noticed, at the very front and the very back. His sermon had been aimed at those very missing teenagers and young people; he had spoken of a youth in their society that was numbed by television, corrupted by the pursuit of material goals. It was a favourite theme of the Father's. He never spoke of violence. The war, the Provos, the consequences of their actions, were never a part of his Sunday sermons. He was a heavy man with a penetrating voice, but he never used his stature to preach against the war. Had he been challenged on the substance of his sermons, he would have said that his parishioners were intelligent, they could make up their own minds on the morality of the campaign of the Active Service units. And in the privacy of his bishop's study, he would have said that his work in the mountain parish made for a lonely life, one that would be lonelier still if he denounced the Provisionals. He married the hard men, he baptised their children, .and if thay were ambushed by the army he buried them in the Republicanl plot in the cemetery field. He had already told his bishop that it was only his study of French Renaissance painting and the companionship of his books on the subject that kept him his sanity and his faith.