A Taste for Vengeance

by Martin Walker

  “I see.” The mayor nodded sagely. “But knowing you, Bruno, I imagine you will do so anyway.”

  “I thought I might consult Florence when school gets out today and see what she says.”

  “That’s exactly what I was going to recommend. We can’t let this young girl’s future be derailed because of some adulterous drama teacher. He sounds like a real jerk.”

  Bruno nodded in agreement, and at the back of his mind he wondered how he might report this particular aspect of the work of a country policeman to his colleagues. “Routine patrols” would have to cover it.

  Chapter 9

  Bruno always enjoyed his visits to Jack Crimson’s home, and not only because of the genial hospitality, the customary glass of single malt whisky and the excellent wines Crimson offered his friends. The house itself was charming, a gentilhommerie of the kind ambitious real estate agents would call a small château. It was built of well-weathered golden stone with a noble, pillared porch and symmetrical windows, approached through an avenue of roses that had been allowed to grow and spread. The view from the rear terrace, which Bruno knew well, fell away to a gentle valley and then rose again to a sloping plateau dotted with grazing cows and then a ridge that led down to the River Vézère.

  This visit, however, was more duty than pleasure. Bruno was no innocent. He had obeyed orders as a soldier, served the interests of France in secret wars in Chad and Libya, and seen comrades die knowing that their extinction would be listed as “a training accident.” But Jack Crimson and the brigadier were of a different kind, men who had lived and made their careers in that murky terrain of national interest and ruthless intrigue. They were two lifelong captains of the dark forces of the secret world of intelligence, and Bruno expected he was now, on this gentle and sunny afternoon with his dog sniffing playfully at the rosebushes, to be given a brief glimpse into its shadows.

  He had his own suspicions. McBride, probably an Englishman, had been a combat soldier, living quietly in a foreign land under an assumed name, and enjoying a romantic liaison with the wife of a former director of British military intelligence. Iraq and Afghanistan were possible battlefields for such a man, and Northern Ireland perhaps more likely, given that false Irish passport. Crimson had probably worked with and doubtless would have known General Felder, and he may well have come across the dead man once known as McBride.

  Bruno had even worked out why he was to be the conduit for whatever information Crimson was now ready to impart. For Crimson to speak directly to his old friend the brigadier would be too formal, a meeting too difficult to be subsequently denied. Crimson would like to be able to say, in all honesty, that he had spoken to no intelligence official, or to any representative of the French state. Bruno was a friend, a fellow member of the tennis club, so meeting him was but passing the time of day with an old acquaintance over a welcoming drink. An encounter with Bruno was, in that favorite word of intelligence agencies, deniable.

  “Good to see you, Bruno, and you, Balzac,” said the former chairman of Her Majesty’s Joint Intelligence Committee, opening the door while Bruno was still halfway down the path. Crimson must have been watching for Bruno’s arrival. “Come through onto the terrace and enjoy this fine day over a glass of scotch while Balzac makes his usual patrol of the garden.”

  Crimson picked up a loaded tray from the kitchen, with plates, bread, cheese, pâté and cherry tomatoes, and asked Bruno to bring a smaller tray with glasses, a carafe of wine and a bottle of scotch. On the terrace, Bruno was surprised to see that the table had been moved so that the view over the countryside was blocked by shrubbery. Why would his friend do that, Bruno wondered, when he took such pleasure in the view?

  A glass of Bowmore in his hand, softened with a splash of the Malvern water that Crimson favored, Bruno asked why Jack wanted to see him so urgently.

  “Glad you could make it so soon because I have to leave,” Crimson began. “I’m on the afternoon train to Paris, and then the Eurostar to London. I’ll sleep at my club tonight and then head north to spend a few days at a very pleasant country house belonging to an old friend and colleague. We haven’t that much time so it will be a makeshift lunch.”

  “This is very sudden,” said Bruno, although he had noticed a small suitcase standing in Crimson’s hallway. “You’re supposed to be giving Miranda’s clients a guided tour of the Bergerac vineyards later this week and you’ve been looking forward to that.”

  Crimson shrugged and began to slice the bread. “I don’t have much choice. The powers that be in London think I’ll be safer out of this country. Even if I doubted their advice, and I’m not sure that I do, I’d rather not take the risk, or see any unpleasantness happening to Miranda and the children.”

  “Your friends in England think you are not safe here in the Périgord?” Bruno asked, surprised.

  “They think it’s better to be safe than sorry when they believe an IRA killer squad is operating around here,” Crimson said, almost casually.

  “An IRA killer squad, here?” said Bruno, sitting up in alarm. He suddenly understood why the table on the terrace had been moved behind a screen of bushes. “You are worried about a sniper?”

  “It’s a routine precaution. And I spent half an hour trying to find my old mirror on a stick to check the underside of my car, something I used to have to do every day when the IRA was planting car bombs. It’s rather depressing, going back to all that. Here, have some of this excellent pâté that Miranda made for me. And help yourself to more scotch, or try the wine. It’s a rather good Montravel from Daniel Hecquet at Château Puy Servain.

  “My old colleagues in London are assuming that McBride was murdered by some IRA hard-liners in a revenge killing,” Crimson went on, pouring out two glasses of wine. “So they are now worried about some other British potential targets in the region. That means a couple of retired ambassadors, and me.”

  “Do you think they’re right?”

  “It’s very possible. People like me have been IRA targets before,” Crimson replied, sniffing at his glass of wine. “And given these two latest deaths, it’s one of the few explanations that makes sense to my former colleagues. I’m sure it won’t take you long to work out why they have reached that conclusion.”

  Crimson was avoiding Bruno’s gaze, focusing on his food and then looking out over the garden to watch Balzac sniff his way around the flower beds.

  “I suppose that means McBride was a British intelligence man who was using his false Irish identity to work undercover against the IRA,” Bruno said slowly, almost as if thinking aloud. “And it would also mean that he had been doing so in such an effective or perhaps brutal way that the IRA still want to kill him, nearly twenty years after you reached a political settlement in Northern Ireland. Either this is personal revenge upon him or this man we know as McBride is a symbol of something for them.”

  “That sums it up, Bruno,” Crimson replied and turned his gaze back to Bruno. “You’re right on both counts, personal revenge and symbolism. Have you ever heard of Operation Flavius?”

  Bruno shook his head, his mouth full of bread and cheese.

  “It was in Gibraltar in March 1988,” Crimson began. “Three members of a Provisional IRA active service unit—Sean Savage, Danny McCann and Mairead Farrell—had planned a bomb attack on the changing of the guard outside the governor’s mansion. As British soldiers, the troops on guard were seen by the IRA as a legitimate target. Thanks to good intelligence, we knew they were coming. The three of them were shot dead in circumstances which remain disputed.”

  Crimson leaned forward, put his hand on Bruno’s arm and looked at him intently.

  “There’s no doubt what they planned. Farrell had the keys in her handbag to a rental car that contained over sixty kilos of Semtex explosive, enough to make a very big bang indeed. Detonators and timers were also found in the car. The explosives were stuffed with two h
undred bullets. That was vicious, Bruno. It would have been carnage, not only an explosion that would have blown off the front of the governor’s building and demolished half the town but bullets flying everywhere. What’s more, Savage was an explosives expert and a known killer who had shot dead two police officers in an ambush in the Belfast docks. McCann and Farrell had already been in prison for explosives offenses. Mairead Farrell served eight years for planting a bomb at the Conway Hotel, hoping to kill British soldiers who sometimes drank there.

  “These were hardened terrorists, probably the top team of the Provisional IRA.” Crimson’s grip on Bruno’s arm tightened. “There is no doubt what they planned, but at the time they were killed they were unarmed and some eyewitnesses said on camera to British TV reporters that they were shot in cold blood as they lay on the ground.

  “The official inquest in Gibraltar found that the SAS members who had laid the ambush and killed them had acted lawfully,” Crimson went on after a long sip of his wine. “A subsequent judgment by the European Court of Human Rights said there had been no plot to kill the three Provos out of hand, but the operation had been so poorly planned and full of flaws it was likely to end badly.”

  “The Provos, were they the people who tried to kill Prime Minister Thatcher with a bomb in her hotel room?” Bruno asked. He took a final portion of Cantal cheese and sipped at the dry white wine.

  “Indeed they were. They were the hard-line wing of the IRA who broke away when we started to cooperate seriously with the Irish government in Dublin and began secret peace talks with the official IRA. The Provos said the official IRA were traitors and they tried to stop all the talks by killing Thatcher’s successor, John Major, with a mortar bomb attack on Downing Street in 1991. That time they failed, thank God. It was war, Bruno, a very dirty and bloody little war with no holds barred.”

  “I understand,” said Bruno. “I think after the terrorist attacks we have seen in France in recent years, any French citizen would understand.”

  “The reason why we think they may have been hunting this man known as McBride is that for the Provos, the Gibraltar operation was never really over. They did their best to make propaganda out of it but the fact is that their operation had failed. They had lost some of their best militants and they wanted revenge. Two years after the event, the governor of Gibraltar they had targeted, a retired senior Royal Air Force officer called Sir Peter Terry, was shot, along with his wife, in front of their daughter at their home in Staffordshire. For the Provos, anything to do with Operation Flavius was personal, and that’s why my old colleagues want me back in a safe place in Britain while this inquiry unfolds.”

  “And this man McBride was one of those SAS men in Gibraltar?”

  “Not exactly, although he was in Gibraltar at the time and worked closely with the SAS. He was a career soldier in military intelligence, and he was in a special unit known as Fourteen. It stands for Fourteenth Intelligence Company. They specialized in reconnaissance, concealed observation posts and taking endless photographs of known IRA members. He was one of the planners of Operation Flavius but his name never emerged and he never gave evidence to any inquiry. But he’d been undercover in Northern Ireland long enough to know two of the bombers by sight.”

  “And he had the false passport?”

  “It wasn’t false!” Crimson exclaimed with a barking laugh and a wide smile, as though proud of what he was saying. “That was the beauty of it.”

  He went on to explain that McBride had possessed a genuine Irish passport, printed and issued by the Irish government, thanks to a corrupt employee working in the Irish passport office. McBride’s passport was renewed several times because the backup documents were equally good. British Intelligence had even devised what looked like a real Irish birth certificate to justify it.

  But the Provos had some very good counterintelligence people and a lot of sympathizers in Dublin. They mounted a counteroperation of their own. Assuming that the British had someone in the passport office, they gambled that a clerk who’d take pay from the British to steal blank passports might do the same for a foreigner who needed a new identity. They found the clerk, bribed him to issue a passport to an Indian for a thousand pounds and then passed the information to the Irish authorities. The clerk went to prison, where other friends of the IRA went to work on him. He gave them a number of names, but they all seemed—thanks to the birth certificates—to be real Irishmen.

  “We got wind of their work and got the endangered men out of Ireland,” Crimson went on. “But lately, the remnants of the Provos recruited an ex-priest who realized that although we might be able to forge the birth certificates we could never fake the baptismal certificates in the churches. They checked the Catholic church records and found nothing. After worrying where he’d gone wrong, the ex-priest realized they ought to be looking at the Protestant churches. And that’s when our scheme began to unravel. Still, it had been good while it lasted.”

  “And you never got back the fake passport from McBride?”

  “You were in the military, Bruno, so you know how these things work. It was listed as lost in action and no questions were asked. And by that time we were working so closely with the Dublin government that we were told to stop the false passport game. We let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “So who was McBride?”

  “This is where it gets complicated,” said Crimson, pouring himself another glass of wine. Bruno declined. He wanted to remember all this.

  “His real name was Rentoul, Richard Rentoul, and he retired as a captain after the first Gulf War in 1991 and went into the private security business with his old commander, Felder, and they began to make money. Rentoul became a specialist in working kidnap cases; setting up personal security systems, burglar alarms, bodyguards; training drivers in evasion techniques and so on. He was also a very good shot, top of his class at sniper school. I believe he also made arrangements to pay ransoms which on a couple of occasions led to the arrest of the kidnappers. But after the Iraq War, Felder’s company had so many contracts with the British and American occupation forces that they were in urgent need of trained men. Felder brought Rentoul into Iraq to help run the company and recruit more ex-army types. They were desperate for trained manpower, offering them two and three thousand dollars a week. It was like an El Dorado for those old soldiers. We and the Americans even had problems with serving soldiers resigning to take up the jobs.”

  “How long was Rentoul in Iraq?”

  “Not that long, a little more than a year, and then in 2004, Rentoul was killed in an ambush outside Baghdad while escorting an American convoy that was carrying cash. A lot of cash, nearly twenty million dollars. The ambushers got away with the money.”

  “So if Rentoul is dead, who is using the McBride passport now?” Bruno asked. “And how did he get hold of it?”

  “That’s the question, but I don’t have to tell you that someone who knew both Rentoul and Felder’s wife would very probably either have served with them in the British army, whether in Germany or Northern Ireland, or worked for Felder’s company.”

  “An investigation into all of them would have been done by the British police, who are not being very helpful,” Bruno said.

  Crimson shrugged. “I’m retired. There are limits to my influence but I will do what I can. And I’m confident that the British authorities will do anything they can to help round up this Provo murder squad—if that’s who it was that killed Monika Felder and the man known as McBride.”

  “Do you have any reason to think there might have been another motive for the killings?”

  “No,” Crimson replied. “And since Felder had been running an intelligence unit when an ambush in County Tyrone saw three IRA men shot dead, it is entirely possible that Monika Felder was the target.”

  Bruno nodded thoughtfully. The investigation had not yet really focused on motives for the murder o
f Madame Felder. Perhaps it should. He made a mental note.

  “Was any official inquiry made into the ambush that killed Rentoul?” Bruno then asked.

  “Not by us. Felder’s was a private company, nothing to do with us. And there were a lot of ambushes in Iraq in those days. I think the Americans did an investigation, but I imagine they were more concerned with the money than with a handful of dead mercenaries.”

  “Did they get any of the money back?”

  “Not to my knowledge. You’d have to ask the Americans. Maybe they’d let you take a look at their report.” Crimson shrugged again.

  Bruno nodded, trying to think of what else Crimson might be able to tell him before disappearing off to Britain.

  “Did Rentoul have a wife or next of kin?” he asked, suddenly struck by the thought that there might be a trail to Rentoul. “In the French army, we have to name someone to receive any personal effects or pension rights.”

  “So do we. Rentoul named his mother, a widow, and she died ten years ago. His pension rights died with her. That’s all I know, except for one bit of bad news about those fingerprints you sent me. I asked an old friend in army records to see if we had any records of the prints, with particular reference to Fourteen, Rentoul’s old unit. All damaged in an accidental fire, said the report. Believe that if you will, or conclude as I do that they were deliberately destroyed to stop any old IRA men getting hold of them. Filing clerks tend to be poorly paid and easily corrupted.”

  Crimson looked at his watch, evidently worrying about catching his train. “Is there anything else you can tell me that might be helpful when I’m debriefed back in London?” he asked.

  “Both Rentoul and Madame Felder had taken a drug called GHB,” Bruno said. “It can be dangerous when taken with alcohol and they’d been drinking a fair amount. But your police will get that in our interim report, along with what we have so far about his finances, his car and so on. But he was a secretive man. I think we’re still not sure how he got onto the internet.”