there was a crisis that he wasn't prepared to share, and Portadown was the sort of place to dump a bored kid. he did as he was told. He drove to Portadown, and the barracks in Mahon Road, and all the way down the motorway he sought to obliterate Cathy Parker from his mind, and the failure hurt him.
High fencing of rusting steel. Black painted watchtowers. Screens of chicken-wire netting that would prematurely detonate an armour-piercing missile. A call on ahead from the taciturn police at the gate check.
It was indicated to him where he should park.
The parking area where he went was separate from the main mass of vehicles. The big area held the shined, washed Cavaliers and Sierras and Escorts, policemen's cars for driving to and from work. Where Bren parked was a junkyard. Old vans without side windows and with convenient mud masking the number plates, and beaten Fords that were scraped and dented, and what might have doubled as a removal lorry, and a Telecom van and another that had the logo of a bakery with a home delivery service. He went to the weapons pit and cleared his Browning and pocketed it again. From the gate, the two-storey building, dull brickwork, had been pointed out to him.
Bren went inside the outer door. He was stopped. The man was younger than himself and dressed casually and there was a short-barrel machine pistol on the table. Identification… Another phone call through… Passed on.
He went up the stairs, past bare walls. He walked into the big open area. He gazed around him. Half a dozen men and three women bowed over computer consoles. Two men and two women at banks of radio equipment, smoking and reading newspapers and talking quietly and with head sets over their ears. Five's place, Five's back room.
'Hello there…'
A quiet voice close to him. Bren spun on his heel.
He saw the cardboard city man.
'Hello again.'
'Jimmy's had to pop out, I said I'd field you.'
'Oh, I see…'
There were two others sitting with the cardboard city man. They were all three sprawled on chairs at the far side of the big room to the consoles and the radio and their ashtray was filled and a low table near them was cluttered with their boots and their used coffee beakers.
Bren saw the weapons laid on the floor. They'd have done for farm workers, any of them.
There was a printed sign on the wall above their chairs and their table.
‘Hereford Gub Club. No Entry. Trespassers Will Be Shot'.
Bren could smell them from five paces.
‘’I ll do the introductions. The ugly one's Jocko, the really ugly one's Herbie… Don't bloody eat him, guys, he's Cathy's latest
…'
' Pleased to meet you all, I'm Bren.'
He felt the pillock. He stood in his slacks and his jacket and he looked down at three men who wore the mud on their jeans and the dirt on their shirts. He felt the daftness of the name he had given himself, could have crawled away
The cardboard city man said, 'Jimmy'll be an hour or so. It's a bad time for him, this, tends to pop off out for a drop of nookie in the middle of the day. How long have you?'
'I've a clear afternoon…'
'When's Cathy picking you up ''
'I'm not meeting her.'
He saw the puzzlement cross the face of the cardboard city man. 'You don't…'
'I don't know where she is.'
After the puzzlement, the frown. Bren saw the hardening of the face.
'She was here four hours ago, half drowned from being out all night.
Changed, and pushed off again… You're not meeting her?'
'That's what I said.' He should have stayed in the office in Belfast. He should have pushed paper.
'And you don't know where she is?'
'She hasn't told me,' Bren said, tried to closet the humiliation.
'I thought you were minding her.'
'When I'm allowed to.'
'Christ, old sunshine, you don't stand on bloody ceremony with her.
You don't let her just bloody wander off alone out there. You bloody handcuff yourself to her. You're here to mind that woman…'
The two others, the one called Jocko and the one called Herbie, gazed up at Bren, like he was beneath contempt.
The cardboard city man said, 'When Jimmy's shown you round his box of tricks, we'll take you for a drive round, show you the sights, Cathy'll be back by then. Like I said, you tie yourself to her. You don't put up with her shit. You mind her. You don't allow her out there on her own, not ever.'
I'd like the drive round,' Bren said.
The O.C. had been and gone the previous evening.
The four men and the woman stayed on in Cavan town, slept on what had been proposed, met again in the morning, thrashed round the proposal that had been brought them from County Tyrone,
'He's a major asset where he is, he should be let be,' the woman said.
'Be harder for him back in the North, but it's where he knows.'
'To be charitable would be to say that he's done his time over there, and done it well.'
'Not done as well recent as before, my thought is that he's slipping.'
'If he's slipping then he needs out, it's what we'd owe him.'
'Was never said it would be easy over there, why he was chosen, take months to get another in place,' the woman said.
'Jon Jo's not one to shout, never complain, but the strain on him'd have to be fierce.'
'You keep a man in place too long, and you burn him out, gone for ever.'
'Leave him there much longer, so's he burned, and he'll be lifted too.'
'He'd have had the colonel if he'd been fresh, not have had the kiddies if he'd not gone stale.'
'If you pull him out then you chuck away what he's won,' the woman said.
'I say he's ready for out.'
' The railway bomb, that's the last.'
‘’Let him back.'
'Worth gold to have him hitting where he knows.'
She fought it to the end. She had never met Jon Jo Donnelly. She had a sociology degree gained from University College, Cork. She came from wealth, a prominent Galway legal family. She had never been accepted quite totally. She was a woman. The organization was of men. She had the intellect and the fervour and she had climbed in rank on the back of the quality of her planning She was credited with setting up a gun team in the German city of Hannover that could roam the autobahns in search if off duty British soldiers. She had seen the vulnerability of a Special Branch computer installed in the Monaghan police station and rented the house on the opposite side of the street and found the man with the design skill to build the scanning equipment that could monitor the computer's transmissions. She possessed the ruthlessness to travel to Belfast, take a bedsitter, search out a soldiers' bar, bring a squaddie on a promise back with her, and shoot him dead between the eyes. But, she was a woman, and the Organisation was of men.
'Jon Jo's done his time.'
'There'll be hell after the railway.'
'Too hot for him, better for him to cool.'
'He should be let to rest, after the railway.'
The woman said, 'You're frightened, you're scared of real war. So, you have Jon Jo back… So, it'll be the Brits that are thanking you…
There'd not be any of you, I hope, looking for the soft way, talks and conversation and dialogue? There'd not
