Emerald Decision

'Haven't you heard of free will, Peter? He might even be right — the boys may leave him alone.'

Maureen looked up. 'Damn you, Michael.'

'Probably. Go and get your coat. Get some food from the shop — no, maybe not. Just get your coat.'

Maureen went out of the kitchen. McBride heard her climbing the stairs, then her footsteps on the boards of the room above them.

'Will you save us?' Gilliatt asked with an evident irony.

'Oh, if I can,' McBride replied with studied lightness. 'Yes, I'll save you if I can.' There was a combative, fierce light in his eyes that Gilliatt mistrusted and which disturbed him. McBride was a man obsessed and vengeful. Reckless. Gilliatt clamped down on a sense of panic, a feeling of the cosmic unfairness of his situation and a blind desire to blame, lash out. It was a question of staying alive in the company of a mad Irishman and his strange, tough wife.

McBride's head cocked, listening. Gilliatt was puzzled but even before that feeling seeped into his face he heard the car pulling up outside. McBride was on his feet, running through the narrow corridor even as the first bullets smashed the windows of the grocer's shop. Gilliatt went to the foot of the stairs, and blocked them against Maureen who came running from the upstairs room.

'Da!' he heard McBride shout. A sub-machine gun, spraying bullets, forced McBride back into the corridor. Maureen tried to push past Gilliatt, but he took hold of her. McBride ducked back towards them.

'The back way — come on!' Maureen was about to speak. 'He's dead. The only damn covenant the boys have is with death, Maureen. Only with death.' His eyes were wild, and there was spittle at the corners of his mouth. Maureen moaned. 'Get her outside!' he ordered Gilliatt as he drew the heavy revolver from his waistband. 'Get moving!'

Gilliatt dragged Maureen into the kitchen. Her head went back and a wail filled the corridor. Gilliatt clamped his hand over her mouth, heaved open the back door of the shop and dragged her out into the yard.

McBride watched them. Another burst of gunfire from in front of the shop, then silence. He wanted to wait, for the pleasurable outline in the shattered doorway, the first steps on the crunching glass, then the perfect target. He didn't. Reluctantly he turned and went back into the kitchen and out into the yard. Maureen was still in Gilliatt's grip, but didn't seem to be struggling. She was silent, appeared calmer.

They were running, and McBride was enjoying it.

October 198-

The relief and colours of the heraldic shields in the cloister roof were fading as the light failed. Goessler gave up studying them. Despite his overcoat, he was cold. There was a chill about all cloisters, and those at Canterbury cathedral were no different. Larger than some, more sombre than many, and perhaps colder than all. He regretted having had to agree to meet Moynihan and the woman, but he knew that unless he did their impatience might easily overreach itself, interfere with the operation that was proceeding so smoothly, and he therefore intended that they should now be fed a few morsels that would stave off their hunger a little longer. He began pacing because his feet were cold. For him there was no atmosphere of conspiracy seeping from the flagstones or lurking behind the pillars or in the arches. He was unaffected not so much by religion, which he rejected anyway, but by the past itself. His past was his own lifetime, the lifetime of his state and his rise within its security apparat. Canterbury cathedral had no weight for him. He had exorcized all the ghosts, rendered himself unable to sense or feel the past — any past — when he carefully buried and destroyed and burned and erased his own Nazi past. In 1946, he had been born. Nothing before that date had any meaning for him.

He saw Moynihan emerge into the cloisters on the east side, near the huge chapter house. He did not wave to him, but continued pacing, letting the Irishman walk round the cloisters to join him. The woman appeared from the door into the nave, closer to him. He enjoyed the fleeting impression that both she and Moynihan were engaged in an attempt to overtake him that would never succeed. Then he turned to wait for them at the north-west corner of the cloisters. Their footsteps were somehow chill and damp, echoing as they did. They reached him together.

'Good evening, my friends.' Moynihan merely nodded, but the woman spoke. She had hurried and was impatient but Goessler, as formerly, found her formidable, though dangerously unreliable. She was to him that most dangerous of species, the individual self-interpreter of Marx and Lenin. She did not surrender to ideology; rather, she had absorbed it and made it something that increased her individuality, her recognition of self.

'Herr Goessler. We summoned you here—' Goessler smiled a tight little smile in the gloom, hardly showing his dentures. She was challenging him, ' — because we're sick of being dragged around at your coat-tails. We want to know what evidence you already have to support a move against Guthrie.' There was a weight on the final syllables that was quite deliberate. Evidently, nothing was being kept from the woman by McBride. Silently, he complimented her.

'Ah, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Indeed.'

Moynihan spat on the flagstones, quite unnecessarily from Goessler's point of view. These Irish had so much wasteful, vengeful passion they were anathema to an intelligence operation. So many Pavlovian keys controlled their reactions and their behaviour — too many for one life or a dozen lives. 'What evidence, my dear?'

'Yes, Herr Goessler. Guthrie commanded one of the minelayers, didn't he? He helped to commit an act of war against a British convoy — was it sanctioned by the British government? Who — Churchill?'

She was hungry, greedy. Ideological nymphomania. Neither of them could receive, take enough history, comment, action or belief to slake their hatred. Goessler realized that this was the crucial moment of the operation. The British would be too slow to catch McBride before he had all the material, but the Irish could move too greedily, too swiftly — and spoil everything. He'd always known they'd try. Perhaps — he hoped not — he'd underestimated the woman?

He studied his words, then: 'Yes. Very well, my friends. Cards on the table. Just so long as you promise that you will not act precipitately, and without my consent—' He left the order hanging in the chill air. Moynihan shivered, probably because he was not wearing more than a thin sweater beneath his suede jacket. Perhaps, Goessler thought, for him the place does have ghosts. Then the Irishman spoke.

'People are beginning to disbelieve, Goessler. They're very impatient for results.'

Goessler had no intention of telling them that McBride would be theirs in no more than two or three days. The operation required now only McBride's acquisition of sufficient evidence of the sinking of the convoy for him to react strongly enough to want to make his knowledge public. Goessler believed that McBride would go public, preview his book's revelations. If Moynihan and the woman moved against him, tried to force him, he would remain silent. He must not sense he was being used.

'He must not sense he is being used,' he said aloud, almost involuntarily. Then he added: 'He will make the first move, and must be allowed to. You must not attempt to force him into going public.' Another order.

'The evidence is already available, he's seen it.'

'I agree, my dear. But he is an historian. He must have witnesses, documentation—'

'Who stole his papers?' Claire Drummond immediately regretted her question.

'When?'

'Days ago, from the hotel.'

'Everything?' She nodded. 'MI5 are closer than I thought. Walsingham has himself to protect, of course.' Goessler was thoughtful for a moment. 'Is he being followed at the moment?'

'I don't think so.'

'Then he may be.' Moynihan looked furtively round the darkened cloisters, suspecting eavesdroppers. Goessler himself felt suddenly insecure. The operation was slipping towards the IRA's greedy hands, acquiring their passionate haste. Regrettable, but perhaps not disastrous. He went on: 'Very well. Two more days. Then, my dear, you must persuade him he must publish. If not, then you will inform the newspapers yourself, and set those dogs on him. A cause celebre-vulgai but I'm afraid now unavoidable. Will that satisfy your friends in Belfast and Dublin?'

'I hope so,' Moynihan said with a candour that Claire Drummond resented with a contemptuous glance.

'Ah, they are wolves, my friend. They eat anything.' He studied them for a moment. The moment when he had resigned his operation to their tender mercies had come and gone, and left him deflated and anxious. 'Now,