In the Morning I'll Be Gone (6 page)

I’d never liked helicopters: hills looming out of the fog/engine failures/surface-to-air missiles—especially the latter. RAF choppers in Ulster flew with magnesium-flare countermeasures streaming constantly from the back of the aircraft, but for bureaucratic reasons the army had not yet adopted this sensible precaution. Fortunately the flight from Belfast was short and I could soon see our destination.

Bessbrook Army Barracks had grown up around a converted mill built by Quakers in the nineteenth century. It was now the regional headquarters of the British Army in Armagh and the busiest heliport in Europe. Hundreds of soldiers were ferried from here all over the border region and it was here that many of the intelligence agencies and the military police had their command centers.

Within the coils of razor wire and blast-proof perimeter walls there were squaddies of every stripe: infantrymen, chopper pilots, SAS, engineers, signals, Royal Marines, you name it. Bessbrook was a bundling of all the British Army’s best assets in one basket. It was surrounded on all sides by unfriendlies, and if the IRA ever got its shit together for a big push Bessbrook would make a nice little Dien Bien Phu.

We dropped to five hundred feet. Everywhere arc lights, spotlights, red flares. The town of Newry just two klicks to the left; the border to the Irish Republic only a stone’s throw to the right in a patch of forbidding darkness.

“Brace yourself! We do a hard landing. You get out, we take off,” the gunner explained.

“What do you mean by hard landing?” I asked, but by this stage we were in a rapid descent. The Wessex touched down on a huge white H.

“This is you! Get out!” the gunner yelled.

I nodded, undid my harness, and took off my headphones. I ran out of the chopper and as soon I was safely out of the way the Wessex took off again.

A young military policeman with a clipboard walked toward me.

“Inspector Duffy?”

Inspector?

“I’m Duffy.”

“This way.”

We went through a metal blast door and I followed him deep into the concrete labyrinth. We had gone two levels down and through several different security zones when we reached the lowest level of all: a dank, grim sub-basement.

“It’s like Hitler’s last days down here.”

The MP had clearly heard that one before but he smiled anyway.

I was taken to an interview room and left with a jug of water, a chair, an ashtray, and the
Daily Mirror
. I read the
Mirror
and smoked a tab.

The headline was about magician/comedian Tommy Cooper, who’d had a heart attack the previous night and died live on TV. Everyone thought it was part of his act and continued laughing while he struggled for breath on the stage floor. “It was the way he would have wanted to go,” many of Cooper’s friends were quoted as saying, but you couldn’t really believe that.

Tom and Kate entered ten minutes later. Tom was wearing a black polo-neck sweater over a pair of brown slacks and brown tasseled loafers. He was trying hard to be casual but there were bags under his eyes and his face was ashy. Kate was wearing a white shirt and faded blue jeans. Tom was carrying a tape recorder, she a briefcase. He set up the tape recorder, hooked it to a microphone, and pressed record.

“8:01 p.m., 16 April 1984, Bessbrook, County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Interview with Sean Duffy, formerly of the Royal Ulster Constabulary,” he said.

“Still formerly, eh?”

Kate opened her briefcase and passed me a sheet of paper. It was a legal document temporarily reinstating me into the RUC until December 31, 1984, with the rank of detective inspector.

I looked at it and then at her. She could tell that I wasn’t pleased.

“What’s this 31 December bullshit?”

“I’m afraid it was the best we could squeeze out of the Chief Constable,” Kate replied.

“He really doesn’t like you,” Tom added.

“Where’s my letter from Thatcher?”

“The prime minister was apprised of your request and declined to sign a letter of apology or regret at your allegedly unfair treatment by Her Majesty’s government,” Kate said with an attempt at a sympathetic smile.

“Did you even ask?”

“Yes, we did ask.”

“That sour old bitch!”

I looked at her and at Tom and at the black tape spinning round on the recorder.

“Sean,” Kate said softly. There was something odd about her face, something difficult to explain. Under that severe brown bob she was attractive and intelligent, but you couldn’t tell what she was thinking or where she was from or even how old she really was—I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she was twenty-two and fresh out of Oxford or fifty and a long-standing veteran of the Cold War.

“This is the best we can do, for now,” she continued.

“It’s not good enough. I want full reinstatement and an apology. Those goons called me a “Fenian bastard,” practically to my face. Do you have any idea what it’s been like putting up with bollocks like that over the years?”

Of course they didn’t. Not really. Their religious wars were done. The English had got over all this hundreds of years ago.

Tom drummed his fingers on the table.

I looked up at the ceiling. What
was
I going to do? Go to bloody Spain? Eat tapas and listen to frigging flamenco?

“I’m willing to drop my demand for a letter of apology but I’m not going to compromise on anything else,” I said.

Tom shook his head at Kate, as if saying,
I told you so, he’s a fucking prima donna.

“Sean, look, this is the best deal we were able to get. A temporary reinstatement, a return to the CID. Your old rank back! It took a lot of haggling to get just this through the RUC hierarchy.”

“It’s worthless. All this means is that come 31 December I’ll be chucked out again on my ear,” I said, waving the paper like a sadder and wiser Neville Chamberlain.

“No, that’s not the case,” Kate insisted.

“So what
does
it mean?”

“It means that you’ll be temporarily reinstated with a proviso that at the end of the year the reinstatement will be made permanent . . . if certain conditions are met.”

“And what are those conditions?”

“That you do no harm to the reputation of the RUC, that you don’t violate any direct orders from senior RUC officers, and, finally, that MI5 gives the Chief Constable a favorable report on your activities with this service.”

I wrinkled my nose in disgust. “So I’m back on probation and effectively I’ll be serving two masters. Trying to keep the cops happy and MI5 happy at the same time?”

“I suppose so,” Kate said.

But restoration to the police? To my former rank? To be a detective again? The old thrill was coming back . . .

“I’d like to see all this in writing.”

“Don’t push it, Duffy,” Tom muttered.

I leaned back in the plastic chair, looking at poor Tommy Cooper’s grinning face under his red fez.

“What are you thinking, Sean?” Kate asked.

“
Albion perfide
is what I’m thinking.”

“Yes. You’re right to be cautious of the service but wrong to distrust me. I make it a point of giving my word only when I know I can keep it.”

“Oh, you’re good,” I told her, but in truth her words were strangely reassuring.

“And if you really want me to, I can write you a note explaining the conditions and provisos of your full reinstatement,” Kate added with a smile.

I nodded.

“Well then,” she said, opened her briefcase and passed me several forms to read and sign. There was no drama. We all knew what I was going to do.

I put my signature to two different versions of the Official Secrets Act and a form indemnifying the Home Office from death or injury that might happen in the line of duty. When I was done Kate carefully took the forms and put them back in her briefcase.

“Jolly good. Now, you must understand that what we’re about to tell you is highly confidential . . .” Kate began.

“OK.”

She cleared her throat. “All right, then . . . We’ve known for a few years that the IRA has been receiving weapons training in Libya. Following the mass break-out from the Maze prison last September we were able to track nine or possibly ten IRA escapees to Tripoli. Through the work of our sister agency we have been able to identify most of those individuals, one of whom, as you correctly guessed, is Dermot McCann.”

“He’s quite the lad, isn’t he? You really should have kept a better eye on him.”

“Indeed. Now, relations between Colonel Gaddafi and the IRA have been somewhat complicated, fraught, one could even say, and in the late autumn of last year our sister service managed to plant a story with the Gaddafi regime that the IRA men were in fact agents of the Mossad. Gaddafi had all of them arrested and thrown in one of his dungeons.”

“Nice work.”

She shook her head. “As is typical of the somewhat baroque schemes of the SIS this disinformation created only a short-term gain and may actually have hurt our cause. Gaddafi has since released all of the IRA personnel and has redoubled his efforts to equip and school them.”

Tom took up the story: “SIS did do us one favor, though. They were able to get a copy of McCann’s prison journal. Unfortunately it’s not terribly helpful, but we’d still like you to read it.”

He passed me two dozen photocopied pages in a black binder. I flipped it open and saw it contained doodles, political commentary, drawings, poems, and a potted attempt at an autobiography.

“You’ve read this already?” I asked.

“Yes, and I’m afraid that McCann was not foolish enough to write anything incriminating.”

“Do you have the original?”

“We do.”

“I’d rather read that, if you don’t mind.”

Kate nodded and Tom passed me a little notebook covered with candle wax and which smelled of sand and sweat and
ful medames
.

“What else have you got on Dermot?”

“We’ve been able to gather precious little information about the IRA’s activities in Libya but evidently the men were given bomb-making and weapons training. And we think they were split into two or three separate cells.”

“These cells have the money and operational capability to subsist completely independently of the IRA Army Council when they return to the British Isles,” Kate continued.

“That must have made you nervous. You’ve got a mole in the IRA Army Council, haven’t you?”

The blood drained from Tom’s face. Kate reached across the table and stopped the tape recorder. “Inspector Duffy, you really shouldn’t speculate about things like that,” she said tersely with an unattractive but oddly fascinating furrow between her eyebrows.

She rewound the tape to the point where she had said “British Isles” and hit the “Record” switch again.

“Last week we received the somewhat alarming information from SIS that the IRA teams were given false passports and some of them may have already departed Libya.”

“Brilliant. So they’re long gone.”

“Yes.”

She folded her hands together on the tabletop and looked at Tom. He had nothing to add.

“Go on,” I said.

“Go on with what?” Kate asked.

“That’s it? You’ve no more intel?”

“I’m afraid that’s it,” Tom said with a sheepish grin.

I lit myself a cigarette and let the nicotine dissolve into my bloodstream for a minute or so before beginning my spiel.

“Let me see if I understand you correctly. Up to ten IRA men have received sophisticated bomb-making and weapons training in Libya. Some of them were escapees from the Maze prison and those boys were already highly skilled explosive engineers. Gaddafi’s secret service has given them false passports, money, and material, and many of them are probably already in the UK plotting a major IRA bombing campaign. Is that about the size of it?”

“That’s about the size of it,” Kate said.

“I think,” Tom began, but before he could tell us these thoughts the lights went off and we heard muffled thumping sounds all around the base. Some sort of attack? If so it was a half-hearted affair and after two minutes the lights came back on again. I noticed that Tom had puffed my cigarette to a stub.

“So what exactly is my role to be in all this?” I asked Kate.

“We’d like you to help locate Dermot McCann for us. He’ll almost certainly be the leader of one of the cells, perhaps of the whole unit.”

“Dermot’s been on the run for a while now. Presumably you’ve already tried the conventional approach.”

“Special Branch, the prison service, MI5, and even the SAS have been looking for him,” Kate replied.

“Phone taps? Mail diversion . . .”

“All that and a couple of ground teams.”

“Who exactly are you tapping? I know that Annie divorced him a few years ago.”

“Annie’s living at home with her mother and father, but we’ve tapped that phone anyway just to be on the safe side.”

“Who else?”

“I can assure you that we tap the phones and intercept the post of every known family member and associate.”

“And you’ve heard nothing?” I said.

Tom shook his head.

It was my turn to shrug. “I’m not surprised. Dermot’s extremely disciplined. He’ll never contact his family or friends, not while his cell is operational. Dermot’s no mug. It’ll be a tough gig.”

“We caught him once before,” Tom offered.

“No, you didn’t catch him. The police fitted him up. Dermot would never have left a fingerprint anywhere, certainly not on one of his own bombs. Special Branch planted that print,” I said.

Kate smiled at me. “Perhaps we’ll have to take more extreme measures this time.”

I didn’t like her tone.

“Well, I certainly won’t be your assassin,” I told her coldly.

“We don’t need you to be. We just need you to do what you do best,” she replied.

I lit another fag, threw the match at the ashtray, and it landed on Tommy Cooper’s big chin.

“I’ll need a list of Dermot’s friends, relatives, old prison buddies and acquaintances. Basically every person that you’re wire-tapping and the circle beyond that.“

“We can do some of that.”

“And I’ll need an office. I was thinking Carrick police station. It’s handy and I know the score. They’ve got some tight-arsed new boss there, a chief super from Derry. You’ll have to square it with him.”