Mitchell shook his head and put his foot down.
'Nope. Or, at least, I didn't know you were working until I saw you just now ... and from our past acquaintance I'm assuming that you don't normally spend your free time dressed like a two-bit dolly-bird. Not that it doesn't suit you - '
'Don't be offensive.'
'I wasn't being offensive. I was just admiring the skilful way you have thrown yourself into your cover, whatever it may be, respectable Mrs Fitzgibbon. In fact, if I hadn't known you, I wouldn't have known you, if you see what I mean - even apart from the smell, that is.'
Frances took hold of her temper, recalling Paul's technique of old. Once upon a time he had fancied his chances, and this was his juvenile response to being brushed off; but she must not let it blind her to the knowledge that he was clever and efficient, and ambitious with it.
The effort of exercising will-power was steadying and soothing. They hadn't pulled her out of British-American because anything had gone wrong there, but because something more important had come up elsewhere. And, by the same logic, they wouldn't have wasted Paul on a chauffeur's job without good reason when he was involved in that same more important something.
'Are you supposed to be briefing me - is that the idea, Paul?'
He grinned at her. 'Good on you, Frances! That's Jack Butler's idea exactly.'
'Colonel Butler?'
'He asked for me?' Frances frowned at the road ahead. She knew Colonel Butler by sight, and a little by reputation, but had never worked under him.
'No-o-o. Fighting Jack did not ask for you.' This time he grinned privately. 'Not for this little lark, he wouldn't.'
'What lark?'
'What lark...' Paul tailed off as he waited to leave the slip-road for the motorway proper. The Rover coasted for a moment, then surged forward across the slow and fast lanes straight into the overtaking one. Frances watched the needle build up far beyond the speed limit.
'What lark.' Paul settled back comfortably. 'I take it you've heard of O'Leary, Frances?'
'Michael O'Leary?'
'The one and only. Ireland's answer to Carlos the Jackal.'
'The Irish Freedom Fighters, you mean?'
'Sure and begorrah, I do. De Oirish Fraydom Foighfers - yes.'
Frances swallowed. 'But I'm not cleared for Irish assignments, even in England.'
Paul nodded. 'So I gather. But apparently there's a Papal dispensation in the case of Michael O'Leary and his boyos. And on the very best of grounds, too, I'm telling you, to be sure.'
'On what grounds?'
There was a Jaguar ahead hogging the overtaking lane - far ahead a moment ago, but not far ahead now. Paul flashed his lights fiercely.
'Get over, you bastard! Make way for Her Majesty's Servants, by God!' Paul murmured. 'You're breaking the bloody law, that's what you're doing.'
The Jaguar moved over, and flashed back angrily as they swept past him.
'On what grounds? ... Well, for a guess, on the grounds that O'Leary is about as Irish as - say - the Russian ambassador in Dublin. Or if, by any remote chance, there is a drop or two of the old Emerald Isle stuff in his veins ... then because he's not really concerned with foightin' fer Oirish fraydom - at a guess, quite the reverse, if you take my point.'
Frances took his point. It was what her poor romantic Robbie had always maintained, she recalled with a dull ache of memory: to him the Irish had always been more victims than villains, even the psychos whom he hunted, and who had hunted him
- hog-tied by ancient history which was no longer relevant, financed by Irish Americans who had no idea what was really happening to their dollars, but ultimately manipulated by some of the very best trained KGB cover-men in the business. It didn't help the ache to recall that she hadn't believed him, because he found Reds under every bed; though at least she hadn't argued with him, because it helped him to fight more in sorrow than in anger, even after three beastly tours of duty; she'd even been oddly relieved, that last time, to learn that they hadn't been responsible, his victims - at least not directly - for what had happened to him.
'It's not surprising, really,' mused Paul, taking it for granted that she had taken his point. 'Whenever there's trouble in Ireland, someone else has to cash in - you can't blame the buggers. The Spaniards did, and then the French, and the Germans. The KGB's only bowing to history.'
Frances thrust Robbie back into his filing cabinet in the furthest corner of her memory, where he belonged. 'We know that for sure?'
'Not for sure. Nothing Irish is for sure. But it was the IRA that told us.'
Frances waited. Because she wasn't cleared for Ireland she didn't know much about the tangle of Irish security beyond what she had read in the weekly sheets in the department in her secretarial days, when she had had to type them out. But ion those days the IFF had amounted to little more than an abbreviation for Michael O'Leary's expertise with the booby-trap and the high-velocity rifle.
'They don't quite know what to make of O'Leary. They smell sulphur, if not Vodka -
though Vodka doesn't smell, does it! Say caviare, then...' He nodded to himself, watching the road. 'They've been prepared to take the credit for his hits - in Ulster.'
