“But did you enjoy it?” Gillespie probed.
“I got drunk after it. Both times.”
“Did you enjoy it?” He insisted on the question.
“It was exciting,” I allowed. “You take risks when you plant a bomb and you don’t want the excitement to end, so when the job’s done you go to a bar and drink. You boast. You listen to other men boasting.” That was true, but I could just as easily have said that we got drunk because we did not want to think about what we had just done. Because we knew that nothing had been achieved by the bomb and nothing ever would be achieved. The only believers in terrorism were the fanatics who led the movement and their very youngest and most stupid recruits. Everyone else was trapped in their roles. I remembered Seamus Geoghegan shaking like a leaf, not out of fear, but out of a kind of hopelessness. “It’s a terrible thing,” he had told me that day, “but if you and I had been born in Liverpool, Paulie, we’d be fighting for the focking Brits, wouldn’t we?” There was nothing ideological in the fight, nothing constructive, it was just a tribal rite, a scream, a habit, a protest. But it was also exciting, full of comradeship, full of jest and whiskey and daring. The cause gave our violence its license and it salved our consciences with its specious justifications.
“You have a conscience about what you did?” Carole Adamson asked me.
“I was doing it for America, wasn’t I?” I slid away from her inquiry.
And for America I had triumphed when, in 1980, the IRA asked me to be their liaison officer with other terrorist groups. They saw me as a man who could move about the world without attracting suspicion, and even suggested I move to Europe where my existence would provoke even less attention. I took the marine business to Nieuwpoort where I hired Hannah as my part-time secretary, rescued the cat from the alleyway opposite my house, and began trawling the dark seas for van Stryker’s profit.
“What sort of business did you conduct with these other terrorist groups?” Gillespie asked in his mild monotonous voice.
I spread my hands as if to suggest the answer could go on for ever, but then offered a short version. “The Basques were after our bombing expertise, especially our electronic timers, while the Palestinians got a kick out of providing us with weaponry. I was a kind of procurement officer with them.”
“And the weaponry is all of Communist origin?”
I nodded. “Most of the weapons came from Russia and the explosives from Czechoslovakia, but the Kremlin didn’t want their involvement to be too obvious so they used Muammar al-Qaddafi as a middleman.”
“And that was the extent of Qaddafi’s involvement? He was just a middleman?”
I shook my head. “He’s the IRA’s Godfather.”
“Godfather?”
“Whatever the IRA wants, Qaddafi will give them. Not because he cares about Ireland, he probably doesn’t even know where Ireland is, but because he hates Britain.” Qaddafi’s hatred had intensified following Margaret Thatcher’s permission for the American bombers to use British bases for their attack on Tripoli. After that raid nothing had been too good for the Provisional IRA. They had become the beloved of Allah, warriors of the Prophet, Qaddafi’s chosen instruments of vengeance.
“He gives more than weapons?” Gillespie asked.
“Weapons, advice, training, refuge.”
“Weapons training?”
“The Provisionals don’t need that. But I know they’ve sent at least two guys to Tripoli to learn interrogation techniques. Up till then, if they thought there was a traitor, they simply punched the poor bastard rotten and as often as not they killed the fellow before they got a squeak out of him. Nowadays, though, they use Libyan techniques. They’re much more painful and much more certain.” I paused as a great slough of snow slid off the roof and plummeted on to the walk outside the window.
“You arranged for this training?” Gillespie asked.
“Yes.”
“And the names of the trainees?”
“I wasn’t given their names. They were simply code named John and Michael.” Later Gillespie showed me photographs of IRA men, but I found neither of the two I had escorted to Tripoli.
The first experts arrived from Langley. There was a small and excitable man with pebble-glasses who knew an extraordinary amount about how illegal immigrants were smuggled into the south of France, and wanted to know whether terrorist groups used the same routes. I gave him what help I could. Another man, dry as a stick, tried to trace the financial links between Libya and the various groups, while a third came to ask me about the East German training camp at Tantow which I had visited twice. Every day there were more photograph albums, more pictures, more dull hours turning stiff pages of expressionless faces.
A dark-haired woman arrived to talk about Libya and its support of terrorism. She showed me a photograph of Shafiq and I told her about his taste for pomade and his lust for French women, and about his gray elegant suits and his penchant for cachous and Gauloise cigarettes. She wanted to know about the methods Shafiq had used to contact me, and the places we had met and the codes we had devised for our telephone conversations. I talked about the Centre to Resist Imperialism, Racism, Backwardness and Fascism, then gave the name of the whorehouse in Marseilles that Shafiq thought was his private domain, and I wondered how long it would be before some Western agent dragged Shafiq from the brothel’s front steps and into a waiting car. The car would have had the locks of its back doors removed so there could be no fatal last-second fumbling. Instead the doors would be tensioned with bungee cords that would swing shut as the car accelerated away. Or perhaps Shafiq would be seduced by some thin-boned French blonde who would suck him dry before releasing him to Qaddafi’s vengeance.
“You met Qaddafi?” the woman asked. She was attractive, with a quick face and a sharp mind. It was she who told me about Shafiq’s wife and three daughters in their Tripoli apartment. I never knew her name, nor those of any of the other experts who flew in from the CIA’s Langley headquarters.
“I met Qaddafi,” I said, and described his bitter anger after the American air raid on Tripoli. “He was especially mad at the Brits because Thatcher had allowed the bombers to take off from British airbases.”
“So you negotiated the arms shipments he sent to the IRA as revenge?” she asked.
“I didn’t have to negotiate. I had to stop him from shipping his whole arsenal. He would have sent everything he had.”
“What about his plans for revenge on the Americans?”
“I suspect he brought down the jumbo jet over Lockerbie,” I suggested, “but he didn’t talk to me about that, only about the IRA.”
“Now let us talk about il Hayaween,” the CIA woman said vengefully. “God, but I’d like his hide nailed to my barn door.”
I dutifully described his face, his clothes, his mastery of English, his sunglasses, his Blancpain watch, his injured right hand and his taste for American cigarettes. I had revealed most of those details in previous sessions with Gillespie, and the woman had come prepared with photographs of Blancpain watches so I could identify which exact model I had bought in Vienna. She also wanted some confirmation of the legends about him, but I had no knowledge of his sins. I had only heard rumors, such as the stories of his massacre of Israeli schoolchildren. “You believe that?” the woman asked.
“Yes, I think I do.”
Gillespie, who sat in on all the sessions, shuddered. “How does a man live with the knowledge of a deed like that?”
“Maybe he has no imagination?” Carole Adamson suggested from her customary seat in the window.
I shook my head. “The best killers have imagination. To be as cunning as il Hayaween you must have imagination. That’s what makes him so good. But he also thinks he’s doing God’s work.”
“Do the IRA think they’re doing God’s work?” Gillespie asked without a trace of irony.
I laughed. “There’s an old tale, Gillespie, of the airplane flying into Belfast and the pilot switches on his microphone and welcomes the passengers to Aldergrove Airport and says that the temperature is fifty-five degrees and there’s a light rain coming out of the north and if they’d like to turn their watches to local time then they should wind them back three hundred years.” The joke belly-flopped like a pregnant pole-vaulter. Gillespie and the CIA expert both frowned while Carole Adamson just shook her head to show she did not understand. “Three hundred years ago.” I explained, “Europe was being torn apart by the wars of religion. Protestant against Catholic. Try and
