‘That was then,’ admitted Kavanagh. ‘I thought it was a good idea because I didn’t think he’d know about the farm. But now that he does know I think we should go back to Belfast. All yez need there is me and Christy, maybe a couple of others. Now that we know who he is he won’t be able to get close to ye. He’ll stick out like a sore thumb in Belfast.’ He held up his hands. ‘I know what yez going to say, that he managed to blow up yez office while we were there, but yer’ve got to remember that when he did that we didn’t know what a threat he was then. It won’t happen again.’
Hennessy took a long, thoughtful swig from his glass.
‘I don’t know, Jim. He got to the car, didn’t he? And he’s obviously a patient bastard. He’ll just wait until he gets another chance, sure enough.’
‘Yeah, but he’ll be waiting in Belfast, not hiding in a wood. In the city we can search for him without worrying where we’re stepping all the time.’
The two men sat in silence for a while as Hennessy considered his options. He knew that Kavanagh was talking sense, but he knew too that there were advantages in keeping The Chinaman away from Belfast. God knows what it would do to his reputation if it became known that he was being stalked by a maniac with home-made bombs. The Press would have a field day. And so would his enemies within the organisation. Damn The Chinaman. Damn him for ever.
‘There is something else yez should think about,’ said Kavanagh, interrupting Hennessy’s thoughts. Hennessy raised his eyebrows quizzically. ‘The reason he’s after yez,’ Kavanagh continued. ‘He wants the names of the team who’re planting the bombs in London.’
‘We don’t know who they are.’
‘No, but yer trying to find out. And yer’ll find out eventually, they can’t keep going for ever. Either we’ll find out who they are or they’ll make a mistake and the fucking Brits will get them. Either way that’ll be the end of yez problem. All we have to do is to keep him off yez back until then. Liam, I know you’re handling this yezself, but how close are ye to identifying them?’
Hennessy looked levelly at Kavanagh. He trusted the man sitting in front of him, but it was crucial that only Sean Morrison knew what he had planned. ‘At the moment we’re no closer than we were a week ago,’ he said. ‘But if everything works out it shouldn’t be much longer. Days rather than weeks. That’s all I can say.’
‘That’s good enough for me, Liam,’ said Kavanagh. The kettle began to shriek and he stood up and poured boiling water into the teapot. ‘Until then, we’ll stick to yez like glue. When is Christy back?’
‘I told him to take Mary all the way to London and to hang around for a while to make sure that she isn’t followed. He should be back tomorrow night.’
There was a scrabbling at the door and Jackie bounded in, her tongue lolling and her coat damp. She careered over to Hennessy and put her head in his lap; he stroked her absent-mindedly.
‘I hear what you’re saying,’ Hennessy said to Kavanagh. ‘Let’s wait until Christy gets back until we decide what to do.’
‘It’s yer call, Liam. But if I were ye I’d get a few more men around – not from Belfast but locals, workers from nearby farms maybe, fellahs yez can trust. They’ll be used to dealing with poachers and the like and at least they’ll be careful where they put their feet.’
‘That’s a good idea, Jim. I’ll make a few calls. It shouldn’t be a problem.’
Jackie growled softly, seeking attention.
Woody had the mother and father of all hangovers. His head felt twice its normal size, his mouth was dry and bitter and every time he moved his stomach lurched and only an intense effort of will kept him from throwing up. It was a normal Sunday morning. Saturday was always the paper’s busiest day and once the presses started running and they’d checked that the opposition papers didn’t have any earth-shattering exclusives then all the paper’s journalists headed for the pub. The Saturday-night sessions in the King’s Head were legendary, but Woody didn’t just go for the alcohol and the company, he went because he had to keep in with the news desk and the paper’s executives. The paper, along with most of Fleet Street, was cutting back all round, slashing a red pen through expense claims and reducing the number of casual shifts. It was like a game of musical chairs and Woody was fighting like hell to ensure that when the music stopped he’d be one of those left sitting at a desk. The hangover was a small price to pay.
He heard the phone ring on the floor below and one of the other tenants answered it and then he heard his name being called.
Woody groaned and pulled a pillow over his head. Footsteps clattered up the stairs and a hand hammered on his door and the student who lived in the bedsit directly below his yelled that the office was on the phone. If it had been anyone else Woody wouldn’t have bothered answering, but a call from the paper probably meant there was a shift going so he coughed and forced himself to sit up, feeling waves of nausea ripple through his stomach. He breathed deeply and groped for a pair of jeans before padding slowly down the stairs, holding his head in his hands.
The phone was hanging down by the wall and he pulled it up and put it against his ear. His head swam and he closed his eyes.
‘Ian Wood,’ he said, flinching as the words echoed around his skull.
‘Woody?’said a voice. It was a man, but Woody couldn’t place it.
‘Yes?’
‘Woody, it’s Pat. Pat Quigley. I didn’t get you out of bed, did I?’
Woody moaned and leant against the wall. ‘What the fuck do you want, Pat?’
‘Jesus, Woody, you sound terrible. Are you sick or something?’
‘Pat, you have exactly ten seconds before I go back to my pit. It’s Sunday morning, you should be in church and I should be in bed.’
‘Got you, Woody. OK, listen. Do you remember those Sinn Fein guys you were asking me about a while back?’ Woody grunted, but said nothing, so Quigley continued. ‘Well, there’s something funny going on here. I’ve been told that someone has started some sort of vendetta against one of the men I told you about, Liam Hennessy. He’s one of Sinn Fein’s top advisers, and a leading lawyer here.’
‘A vendetta? What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘Someone set off a bomb in his office. Just a small one, a chemical bomb I’m told, not high explosive. A warning, maybe. No one was hurt. It seems like a coincidence, you know, happening so soon after we spoke. That’s all.’
‘I still don’t see what you want from me, Pat.’ Actually Woody had a pretty good idea what was going on. As well as stringing for the Sunday World, Quigley filed copy for one of the daily heavies and they were probably pushing him for a Sunday for Monday story, what with it being a quiet news week and all.
‘I was thinking that perhaps you passed Hennessy’s name on to someone, someone who might want to, I don’t know, put pressure on him, maybe. I mean, I’m told the attack wasn’t sectarian, it was too amateurish for that. Come on Woody, what’s going on?’
‘Fucked if I know, Pat. Honest. Anyway, my notebooks are all in the office, I can’t do anything now. But I’m sure you’re barking up the wrong tree, mate. It was just a reader who wanted to contact someone in Sinn Fein, that was all.’
‘OK, Woody. I thought it was worth a try. Maybe I’ll call you in the office during the week.’ He sounded disappointed, but Woody felt no urge to help him, not in his present weakened state. Besides, Woody could smell a possible story. What was The Chinaman’s name? He couldn’t remember so he stopped trying and instead concentrated on getting back to his room without throwing up over the threadbare carpet.
The taxi dropped Morrison close to the South African embassy in Trafalgar Square. A group of half a dozen demonstrators were outside, standing on the pavement close to the road. They were dressed like students, pale-faced girls with straggly hair and men with beards and John Lennon glasses. One of the women had a megaphone and she harangued two policemen who stood either side of the door to the building. ‘End Apartheid now!’ she yelled,
the electronically amplified shriek echoing off the stone walls of the embassy. Morrison wondered why they bothered. You didn’t change things by standing on street corners with faded banners and shouting slogans. You changed things by taking action, by hurting those in power, and then by negotiating from strength. And by being committed to change. The anti-Apartheid movement in the UK had never really learnt that lesson, mainly because they had never experienced the discrimination they were protesting about. The vast bulk of them were from comfortable middleclass backgrounds or were working-class kids with chips on their shoulders. Most of them weren’t even black. They’d be a hell of a lot more effective if they couldn’t get work because they followed the wrong religion, if they didn’t have a fair say in the running of their own lives, and if they and their friends and family could be beaten and tortured by the soldiers of an oppressive regime in a country that didn’t even belong to them. The IRA was effective because its members cared and because they all stood to benefit if they were ultimately successful and the British pulled out of Ireland.
He crossed over the road and walked by one of the huge, majestic lions. It was surrounded by a group of Asian tourists laden with designer shoulder-bags and expensive camera equipment. A crocodile of Scandinavian sightseers were following a tour guide and Morrison stopped to let them go by. There were pigeons everywhere, fluttering through the air, sitting around the fountains and waddling along the floor. They had grown fat and lazy and had no fear of humans. On the contrary, they gathered in noisy flocks around the tourists who had paid for little tubs of bird seed and sat on arms and wrists while they fed.
Morrison looked around the square. He normally had a nose for plain-clothes policemen or off-duty soldiers, a sixth sense honed by years of surviving in Belfast. He tagged a man in his forties in a brown leather bomber jacket as one possibility, and he paid close attention to a balding man in a fawn overcoat, but both left the square eventually. Bromley got to within a dozen paces before Morrison realised he was the man he was there to see. Tallish with horn-rimmed spectacles and a well-trimmed black beard, Bromley looked more like a history professor than a Detective Chief Inspector with the Anti-Terrorist Branch. He was wearing a greenish jacket of some indeterminate material with baggy corduroy trousers and a brown wool tie. He was smoking a pipe. Morrison thought the pipe could be cover because it looked brand new, but the man appeared to have no problems inhaling and blew out a cloud of bluish smoke as he drew near.
‘Detective Chief Inspector Bromley, I presume,’ said Morrison. He made no move to shake hands, and neither did the inspector. Each was highly suspicious of the other. Both knew that they could be under observation and whereas a clandestine meeting could possibly be explained, a handshake or any other sign of friendliness would be damning. And in Morrison’s case, possibly fatal.
‘How can I help you, Mr Morrison?’ said Bromley with exaggerated politeness.
Morrison began walking slowly around the perimeter of the square. ‘It’s about the bombs, the bombs on the mainland,’ he said. ‘We’re not responsible.’
‘By we, who do you mean?’
‘The organisation.’
‘Well, Mr Morrison, there appears to be some confusion here. The forensic evidence we have suggests that the devices are standard IRA type, and each time responsibility has been claimed they’ve given the correct codeword. Can you explain that?’ Bromley shook his head and puffed on his pipe.
‘We think there’s a renegade unit behind it. We don’t know who.’
‘Are you trying to tell me there’s an active service unit on the loose and you don’t even know who it is? Where are they getting their explosives from?’
‘They’ve managed to gain access to several arms dumps in and around London. They have explosives, detonators and firearms. But they haven’t been sanctioned by us. We’re as keen as you are to see them stopped.’
‘And the codewords?’
Morrison nodded. ‘We think they’re being helped by someone high up in Belfast or Dublin. But again, we don’t know who.’
Bromley thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his corduroy trousers and studied the ground as he walked. ‘You know they’ve taken explosives, but you don’t know who they are?’
‘We’ve checked out all our caches. Some ordnance was missing.’ Morrison chose his words carefully because he couldn’t afford to give away any more information than was absolutely necessary. The IRA was still at war with the British Government, when all was said and done.
‘Can’t you just identify which IRA members are unaccounted for?’
‘It’s a big organisation. We’re working on it.’
‘It’s a big organisation but I doubt if you’ve that many bombmakers.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ said Morrison. ‘But with the organisation structured the way it is, it’s harder than it used to be to get in touch with people. You of all people should know that.’
Bromley grunted around the stem of his pipe. He knew what Morrison meant. Following several much publicised coups by the intelligence services in the late seventies and early eighties, the IRA had undergone a transformation, doing away with the old brigade command structure in favour of a more complex network of cells, each with different but often overlapping functions. Most of the units in Northern Ireland reported to the high command in Belfast, but in the countryside the chain of command was a great deal more flexible, harder to pin down. The cells were graded into four levels. The most important were active service units responsible for fund-raising robberies, assassinations, bombings and weaponry, numbering about one hundred of the organisation’s most trusted members. At any one time at least half of them could be found in the H-blocks of Long Kesh.
The second level consisted of about three hundred and fifty men and women divided into small cells, all of them trained and ready to go into action but held in reserve until needed. They were generally less well-known to the security forces and it was members of the second level who were often sent into active service on the mainland or the Continent.
The third level comprised a small number of cells, mainly Dublin-based terrorists who were active during the sixties but who had effectively disappeared from the political scene and who did not appear on any current intelligence files.
The fourth level was made up of what Morrison thought of as the enthusiastic amateurs, usually Belfast teenagers who’d graduated from street fighting or youngsters from Catholic farming families helping with the organisation’s smuggling operations. They were useful as couriers or lookouts, or for causing disturbances, but not sufficiently trained for anything more sophisticated. Most were expendable and would rise no higher in the organisation.
The structure had been set up so that if any one cell were exposed, its links with the rest of the organisation would be minimal. The system made the IRA much more secure, but it also made it difficult to run checks on who was doing what. Each cell had to be contacted individually, and that would take a great deal of time. And that wasn’t allowing for the IRA members like Morrison who weren’t even members of a cell but who worked alone.
‘So what are you saying, Mr Morrison?’
‘We have a plan,’ said Morrison quietly.
‘We?’
That, realised Morrison, was the problem. ‘We’ meant Hennessy and Morrison and nobody else, so he was going to have an uphill struggle to persuade Bromley to help. And it was made even more difficult by virtue of the fact that the policeman would also have to be sworn to secrecy. It was, whichever way you looked at it, an unholy alliance.
‘The Provisional IRA is not responsible for the bombings, that I can promise you. They’re using our ordnance and our codewords, but they are acting without official sanction. We plan to change the codeword, but different codes will be given to each member of the high command. When they claim responsibility for the next bombing, we should know who their link is.’
Bromley bit down on the pipe, his brow furrowed. ‘You mean you want
the police to tell you which codeword we get?’
Morrison nodded. ‘That’s all you have to do. Give us the word, we’ll do the rest.’
‘That’s all I have to do!’ exclaimed the policeman. ‘All I have to do is to co-operate with the IRA! Can you imagine what would happen if that ever got out?’
Morrison stopped walking and confronted Bromley, putting his face close up to the policeman’s. ‘And can you imagine, Detective Chief Inspector Bromley, how long I’d have to live if anyone in the organisation knew what I was proposing? My life is on the line here, so don’t give me any crap about your reputation being at risk.’
‘You’re asking me to co-operate with you in a bombing campaign. You’re asking me to give you confidential information on an investigation.’ A pigeon fluttered noisily over Bromley’s head, saw he had no seed and flapped away.
‘The bomb will go off anyway, whether or not you decide to help, Bromley. I don’t know when, I don’t know where, but there will be another bomb and people will probably die. There’s nothing we can do to stop it, but maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to stop the one after that.’
Bromley returned Morrison’s gaze with steady, hard eyes.
‘Who else, Mr Morrison? Who else is involved?’
Morrison swallowed. He had hoped to persuade the policeman without bringing Hennessy’s name into it, but he could see that it would not be possible. Bromley wouldn’t believe this was a serious operation unless he knew who was running it. ‘Liam Hennessy,’ he said slowly. He was rewarded by the sight of Bromley’s eyes widening with surprise.
Bromley turned away and Morrison walked with him. They passed a line of tourists queuing up to buy seed to feed the pigeons and neither of the men spoke. Two uniformed policewomen walked by, a blonde and a brunette, and Morrison wondered how they’d react if they knew that a member of the IRA and a Detective Chief Inspector from the Anti-Terrorist Branch were considering working together. Bromley waited until they were some distance from the policewomen before speaking again.
The Chinaman Page 18