Reaper

by Hurley, Graham

Miller nodded, checking his tie in the reflection in the window.

  “Nice theory,” he said, “but wrong.”

  Leeson looked at him a moment, wondering quite where the man’s connections began and ended.

  “You think she means it,” he said, “the PM?”

  Miller shepherded him towards the door. The tie was dark red. No patterns. No motif.

  “I know she does,” he said.

  Leeson began to answer, to parry the assertion, to enquire a little further, but then changed his mind. Instead, he retrieved his coat and extended a hand.

  “Goodbye …” he said. “If you’re ever in Washington …”

  Miller looked at him.

  “Yes?”

  “Drop in. South American section. Fourth floor.”

  Miller nodded, barely touching Leeson’s hand.

  “I will,” he said. “You bet.”

  He opened the door, and watched Leeson walk slowly away down the hall. Then he returned to the desk. Unzipping the holdall, he took out another file, mustard colour, and laid it carefully beside Leeson’s. On the cover of the mustard file, top left hand cover, was a stamp in black ink. It said “19th Intelligence. Eyes only.” He opened Leeson’s file, and removed two photographs, recent shots of Leeson, head and shoulders, specially commissioned by the security people in the Washington Embassy. He opened the other file. Paper-clipped inside the front cover was another photo. It showed a man in his forties, long, pale face, carefully parted hair, open-necked white shirt. The photo was slightly blurred, as if it had been taken through glass, or at speed. The man had his head back against some sort of rest. His face was quarter profile. He might have been travelling in a car. He eased the photo away from the file, and turned it over, looking for a detail, a date or a name. Across the back, in steady capitals, was the man’s name. Padraig Antony Scullen. B. Kiltyclogher, 13th January, 1934.

  Miller murmured the name to himself, took a final glance at the face on the other side, then sandwiched the print between the shots of Leeson, replacing all three photos in the mustard file. The phone on the desk began to trill. He picked it up. A voice on the other end said the cab was waiting. He glanced at his watch. Downing Street was ten minutes away. He smiled.

  “Terrific,” he said. “Spot on.”

  Scullen sipped tea from a white china mug, standing by the window, gazing out at the stone-grey waters of Lough Swilly. It was a cold day, windy, a single fishing boat butting in against the ebb tide, a cloud of seagulls at its stern. Directly beneath him, on the tiny forecourt, two men were unloading sawn timber from the back of a flatbed lorry, piling the planks, one on top of another, carrying them into the yard. Across the road, at the wheel of an old Mercedes, sat his bodyguard, McParland. He was sitting back, relaxed, one arm stretched across the top of the front seats, the other hand on the dashboard, fingers drumming along to the rhythm of some song or other on the car radio.

  Scullen watched him for a moment, taking another pull at the mug of tea. The steam clouded the cold glass. He moved back across the tiny cluttered office, looking down again at the desk. The scribbled message in his own handwriting on the pad by the phone was as puzzling as ever. “Qualitech not ours,” it read. “Beware.”

  He sat down, putting the mug carefully on a folded envelope, sparing what little was left of the varnish on the desk. He’d picked up the first clues from yesterday’s national papers, brought over the border from Derry. There’d been headlines about a bomb found in a new factory due to be opened by the Prime Minister, wafers of Semtex wrapped around a detonator and a timing device. The bomb had been hidden in a cavity behind a single layer of bricks. The cavity was next to the foundation stone. Had the Prime Minister opened the factory at 3 p.m., the time listed in the local paper, she’d have been killed. He’d read the report with a mixture of emotions. Admiration for the ASU that had dreamed the stunt up. Disappointment that the Brits had got there first.

  Now, though, it didn’t seem that way at all. He looked again at the message on the pad. The voice had been quite explicit, a thirty-second conversation, open line, direct contravention of Standing Orders, real emergency. “No way,” the voice had said, “not us.” Scullen had asked for more details, but the voice refused, simply repeating that the thing was black propaganda, or the work of some other group. Meanwhile, they needed more paint brushes, and more emulsion. Paint brushes meant mercury tilt detonators for the car bombs. Emulsion was code for money. Scullen had promised more of both, and the voice had hung up.

  Now, he thought through the conversation again, its implications. He’d recognized the voice at once. It belonged to O’Mahoney. The man had been with him now for a year, a difficult character, independent, mulish, deeply unforgiving, but a man with a great deal of mainland experience, a man he knew he could trust. O’Mahoney, like all his Commanders, had total freedom of action. He could select his own targets. He could choose when and how to attack. The Qualitech hit had the man’s fingerprints all over it. A brilliant concept, the boldest stroke. Yet here he was. Flatly denying it.

  Scullen leaned back in his chair, his fingertips circling the mole beneath his left ear. Since the effective transfer of command from Dublin to the North, he’d been charged with running the Provo Away Teams, the handful of men and women whose job it was to re-export the iniquities of British rule back to the mainland. One good bomb in Britain, went the argument, was worth a hundred in Belfast, and he knew it was true.

  Over the past three months, there’d been dozens of incidents over the border, in Derry, in Enniskillen, in Lurgan, in Belfast, many of them worth no more than a line or two in the British national press, barely penetrating the thick callus of indifference that separated Northern Ireland from the mainland. Yet four times, over there, his cells had struck – once outside Chelsea Barracks, once in Oxford Street, twice against key Establishment figures – and each of these incidents had sent the media into orbit. He kept the cuttings in a scrap book in the locked steel cabinet in the corner, modest battle honours in a war he knew would go on for decades. The headlines spoke of “outrage” and “carnage”. Leader writers wrung their hands at the hopelessness of it all. Backbenchers in Parliament bellowed for the return of the death penalty. Yet all the time, he knew, the man in the street was beginning to wonder not just if it was worth it, whether withdrawal from Northern Ireland wasn’t better than yet more deaths, but what strange colonial logic had put the border there in the first place. One day, without doubt, the penny would drop. One day, the obvious truth of it all would dawn. That Ireland, all Ireland, was Irish. And that the natives, left to their own devices, would sort the thing out.

  He reached for the last of the tea. He’d been running the Away Teams now for two years. At once, on the basis of his own experience, he’d abandoned the use of Irish communities on the mainland, the recruiting of second and third generation families to provide safe houses, and food, and shelter, and logistical support. The goodwill was there, for sure, and the willingness to run risks, but the Brits had quickly penetrated every corner of the Irish communities, using all the old tricks to turn Irishman against Irishman, throwing money at a man with gambling debts, drink at the alcoholics, threats at the easily frightened, anything to recruit a small army of touts, the eyes and ears of the security forces.

  The policy had worked. Nothing put a man away quicker, he knew, than sending him to the Irish quarter of a big English city. They’d be lifted in weeks, if not days, the victims of the man who knew the man who knew the wee quare fella that filled his glass and bellowed the old rebel songs while our friend here, the newcomer, the man from over the water, looked on. No, if the thing was to be done at all, then it had to be done properly. Tiny cells, ASUs, Active Service Units, four or five strong, each cell insulated from above and below, taking its orders from Belfast, or here in Buncrana, supplied by courier, living a life of quiet moderation behind the grey anonymity of rented flats and curtained windows.

  These men and women he’d s
ent out had learned their trade the hard way, the way he’d had to learn. They learned to lie low, and draw the minimum of attention to themselves. They looked ordinary. They never got drunk in public. They never fought, or sang, or spent maudlin afternoons at the bookie’s. Every time they went out, which was rarely, they gave the lie to their Irishness. They were simply another couple, or another threesome, or even a single fella on his own, having a quiet drink, or a meal, his nose in the paper, his table near the door.

  To date, it had worked well. It depended, of course, on money, and on a steady supply of material, but neither had been in short supply. In recent years, Belfast had become a cash till for the Republicans. Levies had been imposed on the drinking clubs, and the black taxis. Millions had been creamed from the huge re-housing programme. Scarcely a brick was laid, or a pint consumed, without the tinkle of a fresh coin into the movement’s coffers. Better still, the Hunger Strike had opened American wallets. Every time another man had died, there’d been a fresh flood of money into the Noraid offices in Boston, and New York, and the Midwest. The strike had been tragic, sure, but Brit intransigence – the refusal to even talk about concessions – had funded the armed struggle for years to come. For Scullen, it was a sweet irony, all the sweeter for his own sure knowledge that some of that money – enough to do the job – would be used to exact a personal revenge, a debt of blood. Qualitech, he had to admit, was a mystery, and there was something about the incident that bothered him, but the away teams were still out there, a fact of life, and sooner or later they’d get to her. The woman was responsible. The woman must be killed. And surprise was still the key.

  Scullen smiled. He had no personal taste for killing. As a religious man, he abhorred the waste of life. But his job was to make the occupation of the Six Counties intolerable for the Brits, to break the national will to stay, and that meant exporting violence on as grand and unexpected a scale as high technology and clever targeting would permit. It was a war they were fighting, a just war, and there’d be no true peace without due sacrifice.

  To date, he’d done well. But his particular brand of Republicanism – his reverence for the past, his respect for the old heroes, his rectitude, his insistence on strict discipline – was fast going out of fashion. The new breed of Volunteer, men like O’Mahoney, owed nothing to this world of his, and did little to hide their derision. In Belfast’s phrase, his shelf life was strictly limited, and he knew it. But before the tide of history swept on, leaving him finally beached, he wanted to make one last mark on the movement, a contribution so unique that his name would never be forgotten. This yearning for a kind of immortality was, he accepted, a weakness. It smacked of vanity, of showmanship, but that didn’t matter. History, after all, was his subject, and no one knew better than he did that history was written by the men who took the biggest risks.

  He gazed out of the window. When it was all over he’d retire. The place down in Kerry was nearly ready. The purchase had gone through, and the builders had the alterations well in hand, and by early summer the farmhouse should be ready for habitation. The upstairs room at the back, his favourite, was already designated as a study. It had a fine view of the valley, and plenty of space for his books. There, in years to come, he could finally turn his full attention to the project he’d been hatching for so long. Daniel O’Connell. The Great Liberator. The definitive biography.

  He smiled. O’Connell had been one of his earliest Republican heroes, a giant figure from the nineteenth century, a man of the law who’d taken the battle for Catholic Emancipation to Westminster, and won. Scullen had first read about him as a child at home in the tiny village of Kiltyclogher, and later – when he’d graduated from college and begun to teach at the little schools in County Leitrim – he’d devoted lesson after lesson to the man. Now, he shook his head, thinking about it. O’Connell had come from Kerry. His family home, at Derrynane, was only ten miles or so from the farmhouse he’d bought, yet another reason for choosing the place.

  He bent to the desk again. He kept a photograph of the farmhouse in his top drawer, and he looked at it now. He’d found it by chance. It was miles from anywhere. It would give him everything he’d ever wanted, the silence and the peace he’d grown up with. It would bring his life full circle, the perfect coda to the busy, dangerous years in the front line.

  There were three hoots from the Mercedes across the road, two short, one long, the agreed signal for a visitor. He heard voices outside, a brief conversation on the garage forecourt, then footsteps up the stairs. There was a knock at the door, a precautionary tap-tap, before the door opened. A man stepped in, blowing warmth into his cupped hands. He was in his thirties, small, dark, with a heavy sweater against the weather, and an almost permanent frown. He’d been the Organization’s Acting Quartermaster for more than a year, and had – said some – aged a decade.

  The two men nodded to each other. Scullen gestured at the message by the telephone. The Quartermaster read it.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I heard already. McParland told me. It’s a puzzle.”

  “Could have been worse. They could have done it. And been caught.”

  “Oh sure, sure. Are we bringing them back now? Is that the way it’s to be? Only— ”

  Scullen shook his head, cutting him off.

  “No,” he said shortly. “They need more tilts. And money.”

  The Quartermaster’s frown deepened. One of the reasons he’d got the job was a legendary meanness. A night out was a packet of crisps and a soda bread sandwich. Marge, not butter.

  “How much?” he said.

  “He didn’t say.” Scullen paused. “When’s Maura across?”

  “Next week. Out of Rosslare.”

  “Give her five. And tell her to tell them to ease up. Christmas is over. Times are hard.”

  “Sure.”

  The Quartermaster hesitated. He had the air of a man who always badly wanted to be elsewhere, regardless of the weather.

  “That’ll be all?” he enquired.

  Scullen fell silent for a moment, leaning back in his chair, just far enough to look down the street, out towards the quay. The fishing boat had berthed alongside. The men were stacking blue plastic boxes on the wet cobbles. He watched them for a moment, thinking about the morning’s news. Every new operation was a gambler’s throw, a bid against the odds, but the Qualitech hit, had it worked, would have been the perfect counter-stroke, an eye for an eye after the obscenities of the hunger strike. But it hadn’t happened that way. Instead, he was looking at a man offloading boxes of cod, and a scribbled note on a pad by the phone, and the struggle advanced not a single inch. Somehow, somewhere, there had to be an answer, the operation of his dreams, an operation so simple, so bold, so unexpected, that the world would hold its breath, and put its hands together, prayer and applause and an end – at last – to the old indifference. He sniffed. He had a cold coming on. He turned into the room.

  “There’s a fella called Leeson,” he said, “I think we need to talk.”

  SEVEN

  Buddy Little sat in the back of the big 747, buckling his seat belt, thinking, yet again, of Jude.

  Lately, the last week or so, he’d taken to carrying a photo of her in his wallet, a single print. It went everywhere with him. He’d selected it from the dozens he had of her. It showed her sitting on a diving board in a hotel pool in Morocco. It had been their first holiday together. She was wearing a tiny white bikini. She was very brown. She was smiling. She was in great shape. He’d chosen it because he remembered the dive she’d done for him seconds later. It was perfect, flawless, a tiny circle of ripples, her body still underwater, swimming the length of the pool. He looked at the photo now. It had been a brilliant holiday. One day, he told himself, they’d go back. Do it all again. The whole length. Underwater.

  Jude. He gazed out of the window. He’d said goodbye to her less than a day ago. She’d smiled up at him, whispering good luck, and he’d squeezed her dead hand, and said he’d phone as soon as
he had some news. Pascale, he told her for the umpteenth time, had been more than helpful. He’d talked to the man on the phone and given him the relevant details, and the man had said there was every chance of a positive outcome. That was the phrase he’d used. Positive outcome.

  On the phone, ever impatient, Buddy had pumped him. Could he guarantee a cure? Would his wife get better? Could they go back to square one? Start all over? Pascale had laughed, sympathy not derision, and said they had to discuss it. Not now, not on a telephone line, constant interruptions from his secretary, but face to face. Buddy, he’d said, should fly over. He’d show him the clinic. He could meet the team. They’d talk. The plane ticket, he’d said, would be the best investment he’d ever have the chance to make.

  Buddy liked the sound of that, optimism at last, and now – gazing down at the long curl of Cape Cod – he mused on the conversation. He’d been to Massachusetts before, an awkward demolitions job on a wreck near the main shipping lanes off Martha’s Vineyard, his first real break after leaving the Navy. He’d stayed three months, living aboard the dive ship, spending weekends on the Cape. He’d liked the place, the scale of it, the way everything worked, the attitudes of the men he’d worked with, their easy can-do enthusiasm. There was nothing they ever bitched about. Whenever they hit a problem, they sat down, and figured it all out, and spent whatever was necessary, and solved it. For a Brit, used to tight budgets and the usual weary resignation, it was a profound culture shock, proof that there was always another way. Buddy smiled. That an American-based neurosurgeon should have cracked paralysis – American know-how, American money – was, on reflection, no surprise.

  The plane banked steeply, and settled on its final descent. The brown waters of Boston Harbor flashed by beneath the wing. Then grass, and tarmac, and the rumble of the undercarriage as the big plane touched down. They taxied across to the terminal buildings, and the jumbo crawled to a halt. Buddy, travelling light, cabin baggage only, was through Immigration and looking for a cab within the hour.