Four years earlier, Rowse, crouched behind a van in a mean street in West Belfast, had watched his friend Nigel Quaid move slowly forward like a giant armored crab toward a red Ford Sierra a hundred yards down the road.
Rowse and Quaid suspected there was a bomb in the trunk of the car. A controlled explosion would have disposed of it. The senior brass wanted the bomb defused if possible. The British know the identity of just about every IRA bomb-maker in Ireland. Each one of them leaves a personal signature in the way the bomb is assembled. That signature is blown apart if the bomb goes off, but if the bomb can be defused and retrieved, it provides a harvest of information: where the explosive came from, the source of the primer, the detonator, maybe even fingerprints. And even without fingerprints, usually the identity of the hands that put it together.
So Quaid, his friend since school days, had gone forward, swathed in body armor till he could hardly walk, to open the trunk and try to dismantle the antihandling devices. He had failed. The trunk lid had come open, but the device was taped on the underside of the lid. Quaid was looking downward, half a second too long. When daylight hit the photosensitive cell, the bomb went off. Despite Quaid’s armor, it removed his head.
Rowse had comforted the young widow, Nikki Quaid. The comfort had turned to affection, and affection to love. When he asked her to marry him, she had one condition: Leave Ireland, leave the Army. When she saw McCready today, she had suspected something, for she had seen men like him before. They were the quiet ones, always the quiet ones. It had been a quiet one who had come to Nigel that day and asked him to go to the mean street in West Belfast. Outside in the garden she dug angrily into the weeds while her man talked with the quiet one.
McCready spoke for ten minutes. Rowse listened. When the older man had finished, the ex-soldier said, “Look outside.”
McCready did so. The rich farming land stretched away to the horizon. A bird sang.
“I have made a new life here. Far away from that filth, from those scum. I’m out, McCready. Right out. Didn’t Curzon Street tell you that? I’ve made myself untouchable. A new life, a wife, a home that isn’t a soaking scrape in an Irish bog, even a modest living from the books. Why the hell should I go back?”
“I need a man, Tom. A man in on the ground. Inside. Able to move through the Middle East with a good cover. A face they don’t know.”
“Find another.”
“If that metric ton of Semtex-H goes off here in England, divided into five hundred two-kilo packages, there’ll be another hundred Nigel Quaids. Another thousand Mary Feeneys. I’m trying to stop it arriving, Tom.”
“No, McCready. Not me. Why the hell should I?”
“They’re putting a man in charge, from their side. Someone I think you know. Kevin Mahoney.”
Rowse stiffened as if he had been hit.
“He will be there?” he asked.
“We believe he will be in charge. If he fails, it will destroy him.”
Rowse stared out at the landscape for a long time. But now he saw a different countryside, one that was a deeper green but less well tended; and a garage forecourt; and a small body by the roadside that had once been a little girl called Mary Feeney.
He rose and went outside. McCready heard low voices and the sound of Nikki crying. Rowse came back and went to pack a suitcase.
Rowse’s briefing took a week, and McCready handled it personally. There was no question of bringing Rowse to the environs of Century House, let alone to Curzon Street. McCready borrowed one of the three quiet country houses not an hour’s drive from London that the SIS keeps for such purposes, and he had the briefing materials sent from Century House.
There was written material and movie film, much of the latter rather indistinct, having been shot from great distance or through a hole in the side of a van, or from between the branches of a bush at long range. But the faces were clear enough.
Rowse saw the film and heard the tape from the graveyard scene at Ballycrane a week earlier. He studied the face of the Irish priest who had acted as messenger, and that of the Army Council man beside him. But when the still photographs were laid side by side, his gaze always came back to the cold, handsome features of Kevin Mahoney.
Four years earlier, Rowse had almost killed the IRA gunman. Mahoney was on the run, and the operation to track him down had taken weeks of patient undercover work. Finally, he had been suckered by a deception operation into venturing into Northern Ireland from his hideout near Dundalk in the South. He was being driven by another IRA man, and they stopped for petrol at a filling station near Moira. Rowse had been driving behind him, well back, receiving radio briefings from the watchers along the route and in the sky. When he heard that Mahoney had stopped for fuel, he decided to close in.
By the time he reached the forecourt of the filling station, the IRA driver had filled his tank and was back in the car. No one was with him yet. For a moment Rowse thought he had lost the quarry. He told his partner to cover the IRA driver and got out. It was while he was busying himself with the petrol pump that the door of the men’s room opened and Mahoney came out.
Rowse was carrying his SAS-issue Browning 13-shot in his waistband at the back, under his blue duffle jacket. A scruffy woolen cap covered most of his head, and several days of stubble obscured his face. He looked like an Irish workman, which was his cover.
As Mahoney emerged, Rowse dropped into a crouch beside the petrol pump, pulled his gun, took up the double-handed aim position, and yelled, “Mahoney—freeze!”
Mahoney was fast. Even as Rowse was drawing, he was reaching for his own gun. By law, Rowse could have finished him there and then. Later, he wished he had. But he shouted again, “Drop it, or you’re dead!”
Mahoney had his gun out, but it was still by his side. He looked at the man half-hidden by the pump, saw the Browning, and knew he could not win. He dropped his Colt.
At that moment, two old ladies in a Volkswagen pulled onto the concrete apron of the filling station. They had no idea what was going on, but they drove straight between Rowse by the petrol pump and Mahoney by the wall. That was enough for the IRA man. He dropped like a stone and retrieved his gun. His partner tried to drive to his rescue, but Rowse’s backup man was beside him, a gun stuck straight through the car window into the man’s temple.
Rowse could not fire because of the two women, who had now stalled their engine and were sitting in their Volkswagen screaming. Mahoney came out from behind the Volkswagen, dodged around the back of a parked lorry, and ran out into the road. By the time Rowse cleared the lorry, Mahoney was in the middle of the highway.
At that moment, a Morris Minor drove by. The elderly driver of the Morris jammed on his brakes to avoid hitting the running man. Mahoney kept the Morris between himself and Rowse, hauled the old man out by the jacket, clubbed him to the ground with the Colt, jumped into the driving seat, and was off.
There was a passenger in the car. The old man had been taking his granddaughter to the circus in the Morris. Rowse, in the road, watched as the passenger door flew open and the child was thrown out. He heard her thin scream from down the road, saw her small body hit the road, then saw her body struck by an oncoming van.
“Yes,” said McCready softly, “we know it was him. Despite the eighteen witnesses who said he was at a bar in Dundalk at that hour.”
“I still write to her mother,” said Rowse.
“The Army Council wrote, too,” said McCready. “They expressed regret. Said she fell accidentally.”
“She was thrown,” said Rowse. “I saw his arm. He’s really going to be in charge of this?”
“We think so. We don’t know whether the transshipment will be by land, sea, or air, or where he’ll show up. But we think he’ll command the operation. You heard the tape.”
McCready briefed Rowse on his cover stories. He would have two, not one. The first would be reasonably transparent. With luck, those investigating it would penetrate the lie and discover the second story. With luck (again), they would be satisfied with the second cover.
“Where do I start?” asked Rowse as the week neared its end.
