streets inches deep in a glittering slush of broken glass. The lorry bomb had killed two people, injured many more and caused millions of pounds' worth of damage. A statement had been issued by the IRA an hour before the explosion revoking the official cease fire that had lasted for seventeen months and nine days.
It hadn't felt like a cease fire to Ray Bledsoe. More like business as usual and some of his colleagues said a fucking sight worse. But the bomb signalled a change. The bomb meant that the gloves were off publicly as well as privately. The FRU and the other special forces had been warned to exercise extra caution, to double-check sources, to watch their backs.
But there was only so much, finally, that you could do. Bledsoe's reaction to the warnings had been to request back-up for his drop-off. At his previous meeting with Deavey, Bledsoe had found the tout so jumpy that he had begun to wonder if the little bastard was playing a double game. It wasn't impossible that he'd decided despite everything that he was safer in PIRA's pockets than the army's and had bought his life by promising them an FRU agent on a plate. Or perhaps, even more extremely, Deavey had been PIRA's man all along and had been feeding them false information from the start.
Bledsoe had considered both scenarios highly unlikely the tout seemed just too solid between the ears to run a sophisticated intelligence scam but just in case of any funny business he had requested that a second FRU member attend the drop-off in a separate car. Connor Wheen, Bledsoe knew, had parked his Mondeo three hundred yards away near the car park entrance and with any luck he would have witnessed the snatch.
Assuming that he had done so, Wheen would have put out an alert. Perhaps even now there was an SAS pursuit vehicle a mile behind them, showing no lights.
As he bumped and rolled on the floor of the taxi, however, Bledsoe found it difficult to think coherently. He had never thought of himself as a courageous man. If the car he was in broke through the cordon and escaped over the border there would be... what? The interrogation, the stomping kicks to the teeth and balls, the burning cigarettes to the eyeballs and.. . Stop it, he ordered himself. Get afucking grip. You're a soldier. Act like one. And, more importantly, think like one.
Think of the details. Think of the SAS team bomb bursting out of the camp at Lisburn within seconds of the alert, all with kit and weapons packed for action. Think of them hammering out on to the roads in their big Beamers and Quattros.
The ground grew steadily rougher, severely testing the big vehicle's suspension, and Bledsoe prayed for the grinding, rubber-flapping lurch that would signal that the car had punctured itself on an army spike chain. But there was no such lurch and then suddenly there was no movement at all. From far away came the heavy, squealing scrape of a sliding door. The car rumbled forward for a further few seconds and the sliding door rasped once more. A moment s stillness, then the boot sprang open to reveal the hard white glare of strip lights and Bledsoe was hauled, blinking, on to a flattened earth floor. The floor was cold and damp beneath his bare feet, the cuffs cut into his wrists and he could feel his hair stiff with blood.
There were voices all around him.
Things took shape before his dark-accustomed eyes. He was in a large, iron-sided rectangular barn, surrounded by expectant-looking men in dark-blue boiler suits. Vapour rose from their mouths, and the excited, contemptuous sound of their voices. In the corner to his left, mockingly normal, stood a John Deere tractor and an ordered pile of plastic fertiliser sacks. At the centre of the wall was a workshop area with pulleys and chains, and at the far end a stud partitioned office. Ahead of him, parked along the right-hand wall, was an unloaded trailer.
He half-turned, still blinking. The entrance through which the car had come was barred by a pair of tall cormgated-iron doors hung from greased rails, in front of which waited two boiler-suited guards. One was fingering an automatic handgun, the other was pissing a steaming puddle on to the ground. Both were smirking at him with hate-filled, delinquent eyes.
Bledsoe stood there for a moment, swaying. Two thoughts hit him immediately. Where were the Regiment lads going to hit the place from? This was bad, but the other realisation was worse, so much worse that his chest began heaving involuntarily and he thought for a moment that he was going to pass out.
They were going to kill him and probably to blood some of the younger foot soldiers in the process. They were going to make it messy, to see who could do the business without flinching and who couldn't.
The nearest man, a burly red-haired figure, sniggered.
Puck you, Bledsoe thought, shaking badly now but attempting to rally himself PIRA cunt. When the Regiment lads get here and get here they will, blowing the doors off ~f they have to I hope they blow your fucking head from your shoulders.
For a moment things seemed to coalesce in the icy air. Bledsoe was in pain, concussed and very frightened indeed, but he knew what he was going to do. Breathe, he told himself. Clear your head. Ignore the pain. Think.
And then a dark-blue figure came from one side, slammed a fist into Bledsoe's stomach and brought his knee up hard into the FRU agent's nose, splintering the bone. Blinded by the flash of his breaking nose, gagging for air, Bledsoe went down.
They're going to hit me again, he thought absently.
He was right. A steel toecap to the balls that froze his mouth into a silent scream followed by a crunching boot to the lower ribs. At least two of the ribs fractured now. His grasp on consciousness wavering, Bledsoe closed his eyes.
Hands took him under the arm, dragged him across to the trailer, slammed him against the iron tailgate and cuffed him to it, arms spread. His legs gave way for a moment and they let him hang there, drooling and half- suffocated, blood pouring down his face from his nose.
Finally he found his feet. Dragged icy farmyard air through his mouth. Opened his eyes a crack. Counted eight of them. Nine there was one he hadn't seen before, a pale-faced figure with depthless eyes who could have been any age between twenty-five and forty, and unlike the rest was not smiling.
'Name?' The speaker was the one who'd kicked him, a thin, broken-nosed guy.
Bledsoe dragged his head up. Spat blood. Cleared his throat.
'I don't know who the hell you think I am,' he began blearily, 'but...'
'I'll tell ye who ye are,' the thin man said.
'Ye're Sergeant Raymond Bledsoe, formerly of the Royal Military Police, presently seconded to the so-called Forces Research Unit. There's not a deal we don't know about ye, cuntie, ye can thank yer Regimental magazine for that, sae don't go gi'in us any crap.
Silence. The older man from the car regarded him levelly.
'Ye know what we want,' the older man said, zipping himself into a pair of overalls with fastidious and terrifying care.
'Radio codes, SAS names, tout names everything. We can start with yer man Deavey if you like, though as ye've probably guessed by now he's not quite the tick Paddy you took him for.'
Bledsoe said nothing. Stared up at the strip light, tried to distance himself from the pain of his nose and ribs.
The other man smiled.
'Ye see, unlike yer occupying army, we'll always be here. Deavey had the wit to realise that.'
Bledsoe struggled to keep his expression neutral, not to rise to the bait. Here we go, he thought. As rehearsed.
'I'll talk,' he said.
'But not to you. I'll talk to Adams or McGuinness or any of the executive level officers of Sinn Fein and I'll give them everything they want to know. Or Padraig Byrne.'
Byrne, ostensibly a Sinn Fein councillor, was known to the security services as the chief of the PIRA's Belfast Brigade. There was purpose and calculation in Bledsoe's insistence on talking face to face with senior players: they were watched round the clock and in the event of a British agent being lifted, as Bledsoe had been lifted, this surveillance would be doubled. His trust in Connor Wheen was Bledsoe's only hope of survival. One or other would come through for him. The alternative was quite literally unthinkable.
'Ye'll talk to Byrne?'
'I will.'
His interrogator looked round the room. Everyone smiled.
'Yer word on that, then, ye'll talk to Byrne?'
