‘O’Farroll and one unknown male static on main outside the obvious having a chat,’ Spinks whispered.
A strange noise came from his hidden wireless earpiece deep inside his ear, like a garbled human voice underwater. After a second the words became clear. It was the secure communications system that chopped up the sender’s transmission and then sent it through the airwaves all jumbled up to be un-jumbled at the receiver’s end. It was said the most sophisticated code-breaking computers would take a month to piece together just one sentence.
‘One three kilo, roger that,’ said a female voice in answer to Spinks’s message.
Spinks kept an unblinking watch on the two men.
The female voice was that of Agatha, who preferred to be called Aggy even though she didn’t like either name. In fact, anyone calling her Agatha would generally be ignored, unless that person was a senior officer, of course. Neither name was her real one though. No operators used their real names in case they were ever captured and tortured. It seemed odd to have a truncation of a false name but she hadn’t known she would need a secret identity until the day she arrived at the clandestine selection camp. It was all so top secret. Only during that initial processing when her bags and clothes were confiscated and she was stripped and searched did they ask her for a cover name that she would use from that moment on, before she met any of the other recruits, whose identities were also secret, and then for the rest of her time as an undercover operative. If she passed the gruelling four- month selection process, that is. The impatient intelligence officer had given her seconds to come up with a name and she quickly chose Agatha because it was the name of a favourite aunt and then immediately decided she didn’t like it. By then it was too late. He had recorded it and gone into the next room where another recruit was being stripped and identity checked. It was Agatha, or Aggy, from that moment on.
Aggy was pretty and in her early twenties. Her face, specifically her eyes, was distinctly feline but everything else about her, her mannerisms and clothes, was masculine. She didn’t own a dress and always slouched in an unladylike way; a foot up on her seat or hung over the armrest. Her hands were nearly always in her trouser pockets and she could hardly stand still without leaning on anything close enough that could support her. During selection she kept her hair short and was known as the kid because she was like a pretty young boy. After arriving at the detachment her nickname, behind her back, was much less kind and threw into question her sexual preferences. Considering the profession she had chosen, what she went through to get selected, and what she was required to do, her tomboy qualities were as much an advantage as they were a disadvantage. She was expected to be as tough as any man, do a job that was at one time considered to be exclusively male, but do it as a woman. She was taught and tested as if she were a man, treated with the same level of harshness and brutality one expected of an undercover operative on a selection course famed for its toughness, without any respect for her less robust physique. Then at the end of it she was asked to cultivate her feminine side and was sent out to do the same job as the men but looking and acting like a woman. Her marked failure in the feminine department might have drawn more criticism from some of the hard-line operatives if she did not have such a pretty face. Women were recruited into the job because of a specific need for female undercover operatives; there was no point having one that looked like a man. In fact, many regarded it as manifestly dangerous.
Aggy sat in her dark brown Audi four-door in baggy jeans and black ski-jacket with her trainers up on the dash either side of the steering wheel. The car was tucked into a clearing in a small Scots pine wood just off the road a couple of miles from the church. Beside her was Ed, the crusty, worn-out operative who had dropped off Spinks early that morning. They were waiting for Spinks to cover the meeting, tell them his task was complete and that the church area was clear so that Ed could go back and pick him up. Aggy would drive up the road, drop off Ed a few hundred yards from the church, out of sight of persons or habitats, then he would walk up the road alone, pick up the car with Spinks inside and drive it back to the detachment headquarters.
It was one of those typical ‘long wait’ jobs and Aggy was peeved with it, not because of the job per se but with the team selection - or to be precise, Ed. The cover for a male and female operative waiting in a secluded area in a car was usually of the romantic nature. If anyone should happen past they could kiss and cuddle to avoid suspicion: car sex was a very common pastime in Northern Ireland. Ed could not have looked more unlikely as her boyfriend and on close inspection their little off-the-road tryst would have convinced few that they were anything remotely close to passionate about each other. He was gaunt with a potbelly, had a scruffy hombre moustache, and chain-smoked Woodbine roll-ups, a habit since he was thirteen that no doubt contributed to his dried and haggard face, which looked much older than his forty years. Ed abhorred any form of physical training. The last time he ran anywhere was on his selection course eighteen years previously.
As if the differences between him and Aggy were not great enough she found him to be the most boring and obnoxious moaner she had ever met. Out of those eighteen years in the military he had been in the actual field as an operative for six of them. The other twelve had been spent in various administrative posts in the Intelligence Corps, his parent unit. Ed had achieved the rank of sergeant simply because of his seniority in years. It had nothing to do with his abilities, which were limited. In fact, his move through the ranks could be solely attributed to the undercover unit: since he was often away he was assessed
Ed was as peeved with this particular assignment as Aggy. He was one of the main complainers about women operatives and it did not help matters that he was referred to by other operatives during this particular partnership as the paedophile. This no doubt contributed to his reluctance to cuddle her when the situation required it. They had been forced to embrace three times since arriving just after four a.m. Ed was unshaved, stunk of cigarettes, his moustache was wet with the coffee he continually sipped from his flask, and he held her like she had an infectious rash. One of their cuddles lasted a gruesome fifteen minutes because of a horny couple that had turned up in two cars for an early morning shag.
‘They probably think I’m a bloody homosexual,’ he moaned as he held her. He offered his standard complaint more than once that day. ‘Weren’t any women when I first started this job eighteen years ago,’ he would say in his thick Yorkshire accent. ‘We made do wi’ wigs when we ’ad to . . . Any’ow, I don’t know any bloody women ooh sit in a car with their bloody feet up on the dashboard.’
Aggy would simply roll her eyes. It was pointless to even try to argue with him. Spinks’s communication was therefore a welcome sign that the task was nearly over and they could dump each other.
‘I confirm O’Farroll and one unknown male,’ Spinks whispered into his lapel, O’Farroll being the older man. He pushed a button fitted into the rear light module.The shutter of a camera, built into another light, silently clicked, capturing O’Farroll in the wide-frame shot talking with the stranger, and the film rolled on to the next frame. The other man was undoubtedly inferior in rank to O’Farroll, who was the Real IRA’s quartermaster and second in command of the War Council. That was a fair assumption since all of the RIRA godfathers were known and it was unlikely a new and superior one would have arrived on the scene without military intelligence finding out.
The stranger laughed at a comment O’Farroll made and then did something that unnerved Spinks. He looked directly towards the rear of Spinks’s car for what he felt was a little too long. Every undercover operative had a well-developed sense of paranoia, which they have to learn to control. The two men looked relaxed and jocular as if just passing the time of day, but Spinks, an experienced watcher of people, sensed a definite edge between them.
A few minutes later the stranger did it again. His eyes wandered away from O’Farroll to snatch a glance directly at the back of Spinks’s car. Spinks took another photograph and stared at the stranger, trying to think of anything he could possibly be looking at. A car then pulled up and stopped in the road, blocking Spinks’s view of the two men. It stayed for half a minute, its engine running, and when it drove away O’Farroll had gone, leaving the stranger by himself in the road. The man paused for a moment, sliding his hands into his coat pockets. Then as he turned to move away, once again he looked directly towards Spinks before moving out of sight.
A troubled feeling rippled through Spinks. Something inside was tapping out a warning on his nervous system. Experience in this deadly game had taught him to make allowances for his imagination, but there was a limit. He tried to stem the trickle of concern, reasoning that there was nothing he could do that would not blow his cover. Since the lid of the boot was locked, his only way out was to push the back seat forward and climb into the car. If he gave into his paranoia and there was nothing nefarious going on outside, he would blow the mission. If his fears were justified his actions would be validated. If he was wrong, the detachment’s bosses would understand but then
