Northern Spy

by Flynn Berry

  “What if it doesn’t happen? What if I never meet anyone else?”

  “You’ll have tried, Tessa.”

  So we separated. He’s still with Briony, which seems like proof that it was the right decision. I’ve tried not to hate him. Tom was at the hospital for the birth, and he has Finn every Sunday. This long weekend is a special occasion, his mother’s seventy-fifth birthday.

  When Tom arrives, I hand him the overnight bag and the folded travel crib. “Do you have a bottle for the drive?” he asks.

  “In the fridge.” I hold Finn on my hip, dreading his leaving. From the window over the sink, I can see the gash in the field. “Do you see that?” I ask Tom. “They had an arms drop out there. I watched them come to dig it up.”

  “When?”

  “Last night.”

  “Did you ring the police?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was scared.” There are only a few houses bordering the field. It wouldn’t have been difficult for them to learn who had reported them.

  “Have you heard anything from Marian?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “But she’s in the IRA, isn’t she?”

  “Of course not.”

  “She robbed a service station, Tessa. The simplest explanation is usually right.”

  I turn away from him, moving into the other room to pack Finn’s favorite blanket.

  “Are you okay?” asks Tom.

  “I’m fine.” Once Finn is buckled into the car seat, I wave goodbye from the street until they turn the corner, my throat tight.

  A part of me had been looking forward to having some time on my own. I’d planned to read the weekend papers, go to the cinema, meet Colette for dinner, none of which is an option anymore, under the circumstances. Instead I’ve been knocking around the house, picking things up and putting them down again, staring into the fridge. I bring the rubbish out to the bins, surprised at the heat in the air.

  It’s Saturday morning. Marian was supposed to work today. Her ambulance will be out in the city now without her.

  I wonder if that’s how those men first found her. If one of them opened his door to her in an emergency, and Marian was standing there in her paramedic’s uniform, a badge pinned to her waterproof jacket. If he watched her work and thought she might be useful for them, this bright, competent woman, speaking in her lilting voice.

  The police should be checking. They should be driving out to every address Marian has attended recently. I call her phone again, and it rings before going to voice mail. Her battery should have died by now. Has someone charged her phone? I imagine someone watching my name appear on the screen and throw my phone at the wall. For a while I stand there, panting, drawing the back of my hand across my mouth, then I gather my keys and the phone, its screen shattered, and drive to her house.

  * * *

  —

  You can see the Black Mountain from her street in south Belfast. She’s just far enough for the mountain to disappear in a heavy fog, for Andersonstown, on its slope, to disappear.

  Marian lives only two miles from where we grew up, but this part of the city is different. The paint on her neighbors’ front doors is different, and the sort of bottles in their recycling bins, and the bicycles locked to their fences.

  I take out my spare key, and the door swings open onto a narrow, tiled front hall, a yellow paper lantern suspended from the ceiling. The flat smells the same as always, like rose oil.

  It seems to have been cleanly, efficiently burgled. The police have taken away her laptop as evidence, and her old phones, the boxes of papers under her desk. They’ve left behind her coats, though, her tubes of lipstick, her coffee cups, and I move around the flat running my hands over them.

  Her clothes are all hanging in the closet. She might have been wearing the same jeans and shirt for the past three days. They would be filthy by now, darkened with sweat and grime.

  A light shines under the bathroom door. The police left it on, probably. I slowly push open the door, and feel almost disappointed when no one is standing behind it.

  Her fridge is empty. She eats takeaways most nights. I nag her about the cost, though to be fair, she does work twelve-hour shifts. Usually she’ll order a delivery as she leaves the ambulance station, timing it to arrive right after she returns home.

  Sometimes Marian helps me cook, on weekends or holidays, which usually ends in an argument. I’ll be trying to get something in the oven, while Marian very slowly peels a potato. “It doesn’t have to be perfect,” I’ll say, and she’ll say, “You asked me to help,” and then we will argue until one of us storms out. We never learn, though, we always expect it to go smoothly. We attempt to make our own ravioli, and homemade pastry, and soufflés. One Christmas Eve, we made lobster pot pies with our mam, and by the time they were finally ready near midnight, the three of us were so hungry that we ate them standing at the kitchen counter, drunk on prosecco and weepy with laughter.

  I sit in the velvet armchair by the window. I’ve done this so many times—sat in this chair, with my feet on the windowsill—that the moment seems about to jump, like I’m on skis that might be pulled onto previous tracks laid in the snow. At any minute I’ll hear Marian’s voice.

  A key turns in the lock. From behind the door, a woman clears her throat. Relief flashes through me. I rush toward my sister, then stagger back.

  “I’m sorry for startling you,” the woman says. “I’m Detective Sergeant Cairn. I work in counter-terrorism with DI Fenton. Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” I say. The sergeant’s name sounds familiar. She might have read statements from the police before. She’d be good at a press conference, with her composure, her stillness. I find it unnerving, in this confined space. Her eyes haven’t left mine.

  “Why are you here?” I ask.

  “To speak with you,” she says crisply. The police must have the building under surveillance, they must have watched me come inside. “Can I ask what you’re doing here yourself?”

  “Nothing. I came because I miss my sister.”

  In a soft voice, she asks, “Are you a member of the IRA, Tessa?”

  “No.”

  “Has your sister ever tried to recruit you?”

  “My sister’s not in the IRA.”

  “Are you familiar with the name Cillian Burke?” she asks, and I nod. “Burke was placed under audio surveillance after the attack in Castlerock. At the moment, he’s on trial for directing terrorism.”

  “I know. We’ve been covering his case at my work.”

  The sergeant sets her phone on the table and says, “This is a recording from the twelfth of March. The man speaking is Cillian Burke, and you should recognize the other voice.”

  My legs start to shake. On the tape, Cillian says, “How was your trip, then?”

  “Grand,” says Marian, and a buzzing starts at the base of my skull. “Belgrade didn’t work out but Kruševac did.”

  “How many have they got?”

  “Twenty,” she says. “For six hundred thousand dinar.”

  “They’re having a laugh.”

  “That’s market rate,” she says. “They can easily get that much for Makarovs.”

  The sergeant stops the recording. It’s like a pin is being slowly slid out from a hole in a dam. I feel distant from the room, but like I can see everything inside it very clearly. “Play the rest,” I say. “They weren’t done talking.”

  “The rest of their conversation touches on an open inquiry into another IRA member,” she says. “I can’t play it for you.”

  “Where were they?”

  “Knockbracken reservoir.”

  Cillian must have thought he couldn’t be heard by surveillance in such an open space. I wonder how the security service managed to catch it.

  Th
e sergeant says, “They were discussing the import of guns from a criminal organization in Serbia.”

  “Marian has never been to Serbia.”

  “In March, she flew to Belgrade airport with another IRA member and spent four days traveling around the country.”

  I don’t want to start crying in front of this woman, but it’s too late, my chin is already trembling.

  “I’m sorry, Tessa.”

  “What if she wants to come back?”

  “Back?” says the sergeant. “Where has she been?”

  “You know what I mean. She made a mistake. Will you let her come home?”

  “Your sister participated in a plan to import automatic rifles.”

  “She hasn’t hurt anyone.”

  “To your knowledge,” says the sergeant. “And how do you think the IRA would use those guns? Do you think no one would be hurt?”

  “She’s still a victim. They must have brainwashed her.”

  “The IRA began grooming the Grafton Road bomber when he was fourteen. They brought him to McDonald’s. Should he not be punished either?”

  I drop my head, pressing my eyes shut. My sister will never come home. She will be killed along with her unit or sent to prison for the rest of her life.

  * * *

  —

  Two bouncers stand outside the Rock bar. We grew up together. Both of them are from Andersonstown, both of them are IRA sympathizers, if not members themselves. They watch me walking up to them, as singing comes from inside the bar, drunken men shouting along to “Four Green Fields.”

  “Where’s my sister?”

  “We’ve not seen Marian in tonight,” says Danny.

  “I need to talk to her.”

  Without looking at me, Danny fixes his glove, pulling it higher on his wrist. “I’m sure she’ll be giving you a shout when she wants.”

  12

  I open a kitchen drawer the next morning and consider the objects inside, like I’ve forgotten what they’re for. Marian has used all the cooking tools in this kitchen, or I’ve used them to cook for her. On her last birthday, I made a sponge layer cake with rose frosting. I spent hours preparing the base and the filling, assembling the layers, spreading thick frosting down the sides with a cake knife. In the other room our friends turned off the lights. I remember carrying the cake into the room, with its lit candles, and setting it down in front of her. She was a terrorist then. She’d already been one for years.

  There might still be an explanation. She might have joined the IRA for protection, or been forced into joining.

  Finn won’t be back from Donegal until tomorrow morning, and the house feels flat without him. Being alone in it for one more minute might do my head in. I shove my feet into plimsolls and open the sliding door.

  When I reach the top of the hill, six helicopters are hanging above the city in the distance. I freeze, searching for a line of smoke rising between the buildings. The helicopters are spaced apart in the powder-blue sky, which might mean that different locations have been attacked simultaneously.

  I dial Tom’s number. “Where are you? Where’s Finn?”

  “At the house.”

  “In Ardara?”

  “Yes. What’s wrong?”

  “Do you know what’s happened? There are helicopters over the city.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Nothing’s happened yet. The threat level has been raised again.”

  “Did they say why?”

  “No.” I can hear Finn cooing in the background, and I press the phone to my ear, wishing myself toward him.

  After we hang up, I stand on the hill reading the news on my phone. An attack is believed to be imminent. Police snipers are lying with their rifles on rooftops around the city center. Barricades have been built outside Stormont, Great Victoria Station, and Belfast Castle, and every bridge over the Lagan has been closed. Hospitals have told their staff to be on call, and a blood drive at St. Anne’s has a queue of people down the road waiting to donate.

  All of these preparations—the barricades, snipers, helicopters—are only the visible end of the security measures. At a certain level, they might be theater, a distraction from the real response to the threat, the snatch jobs, the enhanced interrogations, the bribes. They pay some informers. How much would they pay to stop a large-scale attack?

  There’s a lot of money to be made. Some people apparently work within the IRA for years with an eye toward a trade, an exfiltration. Marian might be one of them. I try to picture her negotiating her conditions. A certain sum, a new home abroad. She might wake up tomorrow in a flat with a view of the Parthenon. I’m desperate for this to be true, for any explanation that means she’s not about to walk into a train station or market hall with an automatic rifle.

  * * *

  —

  For the rest of the morning, I listen to interviews on the radio with government ministers. I move around the house, cleaning, cooking, folding laundry, while thinking, I need to speak with her, I need to stop her from doing something appalling. The fact that I can’t contact her is unbearable.

  On the radio, one of our presenters, Orla, is interviewing the chief constable. “Do you plan to evacuate the city center?” she asks.

  “No,” says the chief constable. “Not at this time.”

  Orla sounds ready to erupt. “You’re telling us there’s going to be an attack, but not where.”

  “We don’t know where.”

  “Should we just wait and see?”

  The chief constable starts to answer, but Orla cuts him off. “The IRA has announced that they intend to escalate the conflict. How will this campaign be different? Will their targets be different?”

  “We’re working with the intelligence services and the army to understand the exact nature of the current threat.”

  “Are they going to target a primary school?”

  I stop with my hands in the sink. “We aren’t aware of threats against any specific locations,” says the chief constable. “We don’t have cause to shut schools at this time.”

  Orla makes a sound of disbelief, and my mouth turns dry. She keeps questioning the chief constable about schools, asking if parents should make the decision themselves to keep their children at home this week.

  “That would be up to them,” he says, implacable. Before she can ask another question, he says, “To everyone listening, we need your help. We all know that the IRA relies on its community for protection. I believe there are people listening who have seen the preparations for a large-scale attack. They still have time to stop it.”

  Marian, I think. Marian.

  * * *

  —

  I finally switch off the radio and leave to buy aspirin for my headache. On the path into town, a boat idles in the cove below me, water dripping from the blades of its outboard motor. From here, I can’t see the city, or the helicopters above it. Greyabbey remains untouched. Brigadoon, Marian called it. I hadn’t wondered at the time if that was an insult.

  I could do this with any of our conversations. None of them are stable anymore, they could all mean something entirely different than what I’d thought at the time. I must have seemed so stupid to her.

  Marian went to Serbia in March to buy guns. She also came to my house in March. Finn was in his reflux phase then, only ten weeks old, and barely sleeping. Marian brought me two freezer bags of prepared dishes from an expensive deli on the Malone Road. Wild mushroom risotto, chicken pie, butternut squash lasagna, fish cakes, spanakopita. What was that? A sop to her conscience?

  Had she wanted to tell me about Serbia, or was she relieved to find me so easily misdirected? All of my concerns—about colic, bottles, swaddling—must have seemed so trivial after where she had been. I wonder if she found me boring, domestic. Not a gunrunner like her.

  I walk past a wooden gate spotted with whit
e moss. It grows quickly here in the humid air from the sea, across roof slates and fences and the branches of apple trees. I look at the moss, the rosehips, the spindly pines. Marian might think I’m a traitor, or a collaborator, for living here, in a mostly Protestant village, but I won’t feel ashamed for deciding to live here, for wanting this more than Rebel Sunday at the Rock bar. She hasn’t taken the more righteous path.

  Past the open windows of the dance studio on the main street, a children’s ballet class is rehearsing, their slippers scratching across the floor. I step inside the chemist’s. Down the aisle, a woman holds up two boxes of cough syrup for her son and says, “Which do you fancy, grape or cherry?”

  At the back, Martin is ringing up a customer. “Right, Johnny, how are you?”

  “Not too bad,” says the old man, and they start talking about a singer on The Graham Norton Show last night. Neither of them can remember his name. Martin says, “He’d be your man in Traviata.”

  I consider the different strengths of aspirin. “Oh,” says the old man. “Bocelli?”

  “He’s the very one,” says Martin, and then behind me an explosion erupts.

  I throw myself toward the floor, catching my forehead on the sharp corner of a shelf. Someone on the road is shouting, and a shape races past the window. Next to me, the other woman is also on the floor, shielding her son with her body. Outside, a voice screams a name. The sunlight on the window makes my eyes water. It might be only a bomb, or a bomb and gunmen.

  The boy is whining now, and his mother wraps her arms around him, trying to keep him still. We need to get away from the window. I move in a crouch down the aisle, and the woman follows me, crawling with her son clasped to her chest. We shelter behind the till with Martin and the old man.

  “Is there a back exit?” I ask, and Martin shakes his head, wheezing too hard to speak. The bell over the door chimes. Someone is coming inside. I stare down at the carpet with my mouth hanging open, then close my eyes. Footsteps move toward us, and I hold Finn’s face in my mind.