The Marching Season (12 page)

“How long is this going to last?” he asked.

“How long is
what
going to last?”

“You know what, Elizabeth. I want to know how long you’re going to treat me like a pariah.”

“I can’t pretend that I’m happy about this, Michael. I can’t pretend that I’m not overwhelmed by my job and the children, and now my husband is commuting to Washington.” She lit a cigarette, snapping the lighter with too much force. “I hate that place. I hate what it does to you. I hate what it does to
us.”

“Your father presents his credentials to the Queen next week in London. I need to go to London for a couple of days. Why don’t you come with me so we can spend some time together?”

“Because I can’t go jetting off to London just now,” she snapped. “I have a trial coming up. I have children.
You
have children, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“Of course I haven’t forgotten.”

“You just went to London. Why do you have to go back so soon?”

“I need to renew some old contacts.”

“In London?”

“No, in Belfast.”

CHAPTER 16

LONDON

The official residence of the American ambassador to Great Britain is Winfield House, a redbrick Georgian mansion located on twelve acres in the middle of London’s Regent’s Park. Barbara Hutton, the heiress to the Wool worth fortune, built the house in 1934, when she came to London with her husband, the Danish aristocrat Count Haugwitz-Reventlow. She divorced the count in 1938 and returned home to the United States, where she married Cary Grant. After the war she sold Winfield House to the U.S. government for the sum of one dollar, and Ambassador Winthrop Aldrich took up residence there in 1955.

Douglas Cannon had stayed at Winfield House twice before, during official trips to London, yet, settling in that first day, he was again overwhelmed by its elegance and size. As he surveyed the grand, airy rooms of the ground floor, he found it hard to believe that Barbara Hutton had built Winfield House as a private home.

When Michael arrived two days later, Douglas escorted him from one vast room to the next, showing off the furnishings and decorations as though he had selected and paid for each himself. His favorite room was the Green Room, a large light-splashed space overlooking the side garden, with hand-painted Chinese wallpaper meticulously pillaged from the walls of an Irish castle. There, he could sit next to the fire, beneath the giant Chippendale mirrors, and watch peacocks and rabbits wandering through the dells and willows of the garden.

The enormous house was so quiet that, on the morning of Douglas’s credentialing ceremony, Michael awakened to the distant toll of Big Ben. As he dressed in white tie and tails in the window of his upstairs guest room, he watched a red fox stalking a white swan across the half-lit lawn.

They rode to the embassy in Douglas’s official car, shepherded by a team of Special Branch bodyguards. Shortly before eleven o’clock, Grosvenor Square was filled with the clatter of horses. Michael looked out and spotted the marshal of the diplomatic corps, arriving in the first of three carriages. The embassy staff broke into applause as Douglas stepped off the elevator and made his way through a gauntlet of marine guards.

Douglas rode in the first carriage, next to the marshal. Michael rode in the third with three senior staff members. One of them was the CIA London Station chief, David Wheaton. Wheaton was an unabashed Anglophile; with his morning coat and head of oiled gray hair, he looked as though he were auditioning for a part in
Brideshead Revisited.
Wheaton had never made a secret of the fact he detested Michael. A hundred years ago Wheaton had worked for Michael’s father, recruiting Russian spies. Michael’s father believed Wheaton lacked the social skills and street smarts to be a good agent-runner and gave him a devastating fitness report that nearly derailed his career.

The Agency decided to give Wheaton another chance; men like Wheaton, men with the right pedigree, the right education, and the right rabbis, were always given a second chance. He was packed off to southern Africa to be the chief of station in Luanda. Six months later he was stopped at a police checkpoint on his way to a meeting with an agent. In the glove box was his “black book”—the names, contact procedures, and pay schedules for every CIA asset in Angola. Wheaton was declared persona non grata and an entire network of agents was arrested, tortured, and executed. The loss of fourteen men never seemed to weigh too heavily on Wheaton’s conscience. In his own report on the disaster, he faulted his agents for failing to hold up under interrogation.

The Agency finally pulled Wheaton from the clandestine service and assigned him to the Soviet desk at Headquarters, where he thrived in the backbiting, pipe-smoking bureaucracy. London was a victory lap for an altogether unremarkable—and sometimes disastrous—career. He ran the station as though it were his private fiefdom. Michael had heard rumblings of a rebellion in the ranks. The Agency abbreviation for chief of station is COS, but among the officers in London, COS stood for “COckSucker.”

“Well, if it isn’t the hero of Heathrow,” Wheaton said, as Michael climbed into the carriage and sat down on the wooden seat. During the attack at Heathrow, Michael had subdued one gunman and killed another. The Agency awarded him a citation for bravery. Wheaton had never forgiven him for it.

“How have you been, David?”

“I thought you retired.”

“I did, but I missed you, so I came back.”

“We need to talk.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

“I’m certain you are.”

Tourists and pedestrians gawked as the carriages moved through the thick midday traffic from Grosvenor Square to Park Lane, around Hyde Park Corner, and down Constitution Hill. They seemed disappointed it was only a group of middle-aged diplomats and not some exciting member of the royal family.

As the carriages drew inside the gates of Buckingham Palace, a small band—the same band that accompanies the changing of the guard—burst into a spirited rendition of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Douglas stepped from his carriage and was greeted by the Queen’s private secretary and the Foreign Office chief of protocol.

They ushered him inside the palace, up the grand staircase, and through a series of gilded rooms that made Winfield House seem like a fixer-upper. Michael and the senior embassy staff followed a few paces behind. Finally, they came to a set of double doors. They waited for a moment until somewhere a secret signal was flashed and the doors drew back.

Queen Elizabeth II stood in the middle of a cavernous room. She wore a dark blue suit with the ever-present handbag dangling from her wrist. The permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Patrick Wright, waited at her side. Douglas walked the length of the room, a little too quickly, and bowed correctly before her. He held out the envelope containing his credentials and recited the prescribed line: “I have the honor, Your Majesty, to present the letter of recall of my predecessor and my letter of credential.” Queen Elizabeth took the envelope and casually handed it to Sir Patrick without looking at the contents.

“I’m so pleased President Beckwith had the foresight and good sense to appoint someone of your stature to London at a time like this,” the Queen said. “If I may speak bluntly Ambassador Cannon, I don’t understand why your presidents usually appoint their political supporters to London rather than professionals like you.”

“Well, Your Majesty, I’m not a professional either. I’m a politician at heart. To my knowledge there’s only been one professional Foreign Service officer to serve as ambassador in London: Raymond Seitz, who represented President Bush.”

“He was a lovely man,” the Queen said. “But we look forward to working with you. You’re very experienced when it comes to international affairs. If I recall correctly, you were the chairman of that committee in the Senate—oh, Patrick, help me—”

“The Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” Sir Patrick put in.

“Yes, I was.”

“Well, the situation in Northern Ireland is very tense now, and we need the support of your government if we are going to see this peace process through to its conclusion.”

“I look forward to being your partner, Your Majesty.”

“As do I,” she said.

Douglas could sense the Queen was restless; the conversation had reached its natural conclusion.

“May I present the senior members of my staff, Your Majesty?”

The Queen nodded. The doors opened and ten diplomats strode into the room. Douglas introduced each of them. When he described Wheaton as his political liaison officer, the Queen eyed Douglas dubiously.

Douglas said, “I’m a widower, Your Majesty. My wife died several years ago. My daughter couldn’t be here with me today, but may I introduce you to my son-in-law, Michael Osbourne?”

She nodded, and Michael entered the room. A look of recognition flashed in Queen Elizabeth’s eyes. She leaned close to him and said softly, “Aren’t you the one who was involved in that business at Heathrow Airport last year?”

Michael nodded. “Yes, Your Majesty, but—”

“You don’t have to worry, Mr. Osbourne,” the Queen whispered conspiratorially. “You’d be surprised the things they tell me. I assure you I can be trusted with a secret.”

Michael smiled. “I’m sure that’s true, Your Majesty.”

“If the day ever comes that you put this business behind you, I’d like to honor you properly for what you did that day. Your actions saved countless lives. I’m sorry we haven’t had a chance to meet until now.”

“We have a deal, Your Majesty.”

“We do indeed.”

Michael stepped back and stood next to the embassy staff. He looked at Wheaton and smiled, but Wheaton grimaced slightly, as though he had just swallowed his cuff link.

They retraced their path through Buckingham Palace. Wheaton appeared at Michael’s side and grabbed the back of his elbow. Wheaton was a tennis player; he had a powerful right hand from squeezing a tennis ball to relieve the anxiety of command. Michael resisted the impulse to pull away. Wheaton was a bully, probably because he had been bullied himself.

“I want to go on the record with you, Michael,” Wheaton said pleasantly. Wheaton was always going “on the record” and “off the record,” which Michael thought was absurd for an intelligence officer. “I think your little day trip to Belfast is a lousy goddamn idea.”

“Do you really think it’s appropriate to use language like that in here, David?”

“Fuck you, Michael,” he whispered.

Michael pulled his elbow from Wheaton’s grasp.

“Kevin Maguire is no longer your asset,” Wheaton said. Michael shot Wheaton a glance of disapproval for committing the death-penalty offense of speaking an agent’s name aloud in an unsecured room. Wheaton regarded intelligence work as a game to be played and won. Conducting a sotto voce discussion of an agent while strolling the rooms of Buckingham Palace fit nicely with his own image of himself. “If you want him debriefed for the purposes of the task force, his control officer from London Station should handle it.”

“Harbinger was my agent,” Michael said, using Maguire’s code name. “I recruited him and I ran him. I was the one who coaxed him into giving us information that saved countless lives. I’m going to meet with him.”

“Now is not the time for taking a stroll down memory lane, especially not in a town like Belfast. Why don’t you brief Harbinger’s control officer on what you need? He can go in and make the meeting.”

“Because I want to do it myself”

“Michael, I know we’ve had our disagreements, but I offer this counsel very sincerely. You’re a desk man now, not a field officer. You’re forty-eight years old, and you were nearly killed a year ago. Even the best of us would lose a step. Let me send my man in to meet with Harbinger.”

“I haven’t lost a step,” Michael said. “And as for Northern Ireland, it hasn’t changed in four hundred years. I think I’ll be able to take care of myself while I’m there.”

They stepped outside into the bright sunlight of the courtyard.

Wheaton said, “Harbinger wants to use your old procedures for the meeting. If he doesn’t decide to make a meeting in two days, he wants you out of Belfast. You read me?”

“I read you, David.”

“And if you fuck this up, I’ll have your ass.”

CHAPTER 17

BELFAST

Flights for Northern Ireland depart from a separate section of Heathrow’s Terminal One, where passengers negotiate a gauntlet of security before boarding. Michael posed as a travel writer doing a piece for a magazine about the beauties of the Ulster countryside. During the flight he read guidebooks and maps. The English businessman seated next to him asked if Michael had been to Belfast before. Michael smiled stupidly and said it was his first time. The plane passed Liverpool and headed over the Irish Sea. The pilot announced that they had just left the airspace of the United Kingdom and would be touching down in Belfast in twenty-five minutes. Michael laughed to himself; even the British had trouble remembering Northern Ireland is actually part of the United Kingdom.

The plane descended through broken cloud. Northern Ireland is rather like a vast farm interrupted by a couple of large cities, Belfast and Londonderry, and hundreds of small towns, villages, and hamlets. The countryside is carved into thousands of square plots—some emerald, some the color of limes and olives, some fallow and brown. To the east, where the waters of Belfast Lough opened onto the Irish Sea, Michael glimpsed the castle at Carrickfergus. Belfast lay at the foot of Black Mountain, straddling the lough. Once it had been a thriving linen and shipbuilding center—the
Titanic
was built in the shipyards of Belfast—but now it looked like any other British industrial city fallen on hard times, a low smoking labyrinth of redbrick terraces.

The plane touched down at Aldergrove Airport. Michael dawdled in the arrival lounge for a while to see if he could spot any surveillance. He bought tea in a cafe and browsed in the gift shop. One wall was covered with books on the conflict. There were brightly colored souvenir shirts and hats that perversely shouted northern Ireland! as if it were Cannes or Jamaica.

The wind nearly tore Michael’s coat from his body as he stepped outside. He passed the taxi stand and boarded an Ulster Bus coach for the city center. Belfast conjures images of civil conflict, of gunsmoke and cordite, but the first smell that greeted Michael was the stench of manure. The bus passed through a checkpoint, where a pair of RUC officers was tearing apart a van. Fifteen minutes later it reached the city center.

Downtown Belfast is a charmless place—cold and neat, too new in some spots, too old in others. It was bombed countless times by the IRA, twenty-two times alone on July 21, 1972, Bloody Friday. Northern Ireland was the one place on earth that made Michael uncomfortable. There was a viciousness, an incoherence and medieval quality to the violence, that unsettled him. It was one of the few cities where Michael struggled with language. He could speak Italian, Spanish, French, Arabic, reasonable Hebrew, and passable German and Greek, but English spoken with the hard-edged accent of West Belfast bewildered him. And Gaelic, which many Catholics speak fluently, was meaningless gibberish; to Michael it sounded a bit like a shovel blade plunging into gravel. Still, he found the people remarkably friendly, especially to outsiders, quick to buy you a drink or offer you a cigarette, with a black sense of humor derived from living in a world gone mad.

He checked into his room at the Europa Hotel and spent ten minutes searching for bugs. He managed to sleep but was awakened by a siren and a recorded voice telling him to evacuate the hotel immediately. He telephoned the front desk, and the girl cheerfully informed him it was only a test. He ordered coffee from room service, showered and dressed, and went downstairs. He had ordered a rental car from the concierge. It was waiting outside in the small circular drive, a bright-red Ford Escort. Michael went back inside the hotel and asked the concierge if the rental company had something in a subtler color.

“I’m afraid that’s all they have now, sir.”

Michael got in the car and drove north along Great Victoria Street. He turned into a small side street, pulled over, and climbed out. He opened the hood and loosened wires until the engine stopped. He closed the hood, removed the keys from the ignition, and walked back to the Europa. He informed the concierge the Escort had broken down and told him where he could find it.

Twenty minutes later a new car arrived, a Vauxhall, dark blue.

Kevin Maguire, code name Harbinger, had used a dozen different rendezvous sequences over the years, but he had asked to use his original pattern tonight, three sites scattered around Belfast city center at one-hour intervals. Both men were to proceed to the first site. If either spotted surveillance or felt uncomfortable for any reason, they would try again at the second. If the second was no good they would try the third. If the third site was bad, they would call it a night and try to make the meeting the next evening at three new sites.

Michael drove toward the first site: the Donegall Quay near the Queen Elizabeth Bridge, over the River Lagan. He knew the streets of Belfast well, and for twenty minutes he engaged in a standard SDR, the Agency abbreviation for a surveillance detection run. He wove his way through the streets of the city center, checking his tail constantly. He went to Donegall Quay, intending to make the meeting, but there was no sign of Maguire, so Michael drove on without stopping. It was not like Maguire to pass on a meeting; he was a seasoned professional terrorist, not the kind of agent to see danger when it wasn’t there.

Kevin Maguire had grown up in the Ballymurphy housing estates during the 1970s, the son of an unemployed shipyard worker and a seamstress. At night he had gone into the streets with the other boys and fought the British army and the RUC with stones and petrol bombs. Once he had shown Michael a childhood photograph, a ragamuffin with cropped hair, a leather jacket, and a necklace of spent shell casings. He had been something of a hero in the Ballymurphy because he was expert at upending army saracens with empty beer barrels. Like most Catholics in West Belfast he admired and feared the men of the IRA—admired them because they protected the population from the Protestant killer squads of the UVF and the UDA, feared them because they kneecapped or brutally beat anyone that stepped out of line. Maguire’s father had been kneecapped for selling stolen goods door to door to supplement the family’s monthly payment from the dole.

Maguire had been a member of Na Fianna Eirean—a sort of Republican Boy Scouts—and his father had insisted he stay in despite the kneecapping. When he was twenty-two he volunteered for the IRA. He took the IRA’s secret oath during a ceremony in the living room of his parents’ house in the Ballymurphy. Maguire never would forget the look on his father’s face, the strange mixture of pride and humiliation that his son was now a member of the organization that had taken his legs. He was assigned to the Belfast Brigade and eventually became part of an elite active service unit in Britain. Maguire developed good contacts inside the Army Council, the IRA’s military command, and the IRA’s Belfast Intelligence Unit, which proved invaluable when he crossed over and became a spy.

The event that pushed Maguire into betrayal was the IRA bombing of a Remembrance Day parade at Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, on November 8, 1987. Eleven people were killed and sixty-three wounded when a massive bomb exploded with no warning. The IRA tried to defuse public outrage over the massacre by saying it was a mistake. Maguire knew the truth; he had been part of the unit that carried out the attack.

Maguire was furious with the Army Council for attacking a “soft” civilian target. He privately vowed he would prevent the IRA from carrying out similar attacks in the future. His hatred and mistrust of the British ruled out working for British Intelligence or the RUC’s Special Branch, so on his next trip to London he contacted the CIA. Michael was sent to Belfast to establish contact with him. Maguire refused to take money—”your thirty pieces of silver,” as he called it—and despite the fact he was an IRA terrorist, Michael came to regard him as a decent man.

The CIA and its British counterparts have an implicit agreement: The Agency does not “collect” on British soil, meaning it does not attempt to penetrate the IRA or recruit assets inside British Intelligence. After Michael had established contact with Maguire, the Agency went to the British. MI5 was dubious at first, but it agreed to allow Michael to continue meeting with Maguire as long as it received the intelligence simultaneously with Langley. Over the next several years, Maguire fed Michael a steady stream of information on IRA operations, giving the Agency and the British a window on the high command of the organization. Maguire became the most important IRA informer in the history of the conflict. When Michael was pulled from the field, a new American case officer was assigned to Maguire, a man named Jack Buchanan from London Station. Michael had not seen or spoken to Maguire since.

Michael drove south on the Ormeau Road. The second rendezvous point was the Botanic Gardens, at the intersection of the Stranmills Road and the University Road. Once again, Michael felt confident he was not being followed. But once again Maguire didn’t make the rendezvous.

The last site was a rugby pitch in a section of Belfast known as Newtownbreda, and it was there, an hour later, that Michael found Kevin Maguire, standing beneath a goal.

“Why did you pass on the first two?” Michael asked, as Maguire climbed in and closed the door.

“Nothing I could see—just bad vibes.” Maguire lit a cigarette. He looked more like a coffeehouse revolutionary than the real thing. He wore a dark raincoat, black sweater, and black jeans. Belfast had aged Maguire since Michael had seen him last. His short-cropped black hair was shot with gray, and there were lines around his eyes. He wore fashionable European eyeglasses now, round metal-rimmed spectacles, too small for his face.

“Where’d you get the car?” Maguire asked.

“The concierge at the Europa. I pulled the engine cables on the first one, and they sent this twenty minutes later. It’s clean.”

“I don’t talk in closed rooms or cars, or have you forgotten everything since they brought you inside?”

“I haven’t forgotten. Where do you want to go?”

“How about the mountain, just like the old days? Pull over so I can get us some beer.”

Michael drove north through Belfast, then followed a narrow road up the side of Black Mountain. The rain had ended by the time he pulled into a turnout and killed the engine. They climbed out and sat on the hood of the Vauxhall, drinking warm beer, listening to the ticking of the engine. Belfast spread below them. Clouds lay over the city like a silk scarf thrown over a lampshade. It was a dark city at night. Yellow sodium light burned in the city center, but in the west, in the Falls, the Shankill, and the Ardoyne, it looked like a blackout. Maguire usually felt peace in this place—he had lost his virginity here, as had half the boys of the Ballymurphy—but tonight he was on edge. He was smoking too much, gulping his lager, sweating in spite of the cold.

He talked. He told Michael old stories. He talked about growing up in the Ballymurphy, about fighting the Brits and torching their “pigs.” He told Michael about making love on Black Mountain for the first time. “Her name was Catherine, a Catholic girl. I was so guilty I went to confession the next day and spilled my guts to Father Seamus,” he said. “I spilled my guts to Father Seamus quite a few other times over the years, every time I popped a British soldier or an RUC man, every time I planted a bomb in city center or London.”

He told Michael about an affair that he had had with a Protestant girl from the Shankill just before he joined the IRA. She became pregnant, and both sets of parents forbade them to ever see each other again.

“We knew it was for the best,” he said. “We would have been outcasts in both communities. We would have had to leave Northern Ireland, live in fucking England or emigrate to America. She had the baby, a boy. I’ve never seen him.” He paused. “You know, Michael, I never planted a bomb in the Shankill.”

“Because you were afraid you might kill your own son.”

“Yeah, because I was afraid I might kill my son, a son I’ve never seen.” He pulled the top off another beer. “I don’t know what the fuck we’ve been doing here for the last thirty years. I don’t know what it was for. I’ve given twenty years of my life to the IRA, twenty years to the fucking cause. I’m forty-five years old. I’ve no wife. I’ve no real family. And for what? A deal that could have been reached a dozen times since ‘sixty-nine?”

“It was the best the IRA could hope for,” Michael said. “There’s nothing wrong with compromise.”

“And now Gerry Adams has a wonderful idea,” Maguire said, ignoring Michael. “He wants to turn the Falls into a tourist area. Start up a bed-and-breakfast or two. Can you imagine it? Come see the streets where the Prods and the Micks fought an ugly little war for three decades. Jesus fucking Christ, but I never thought I’d live to see the day! Three thousand dead so we can make the travel section of
The New York Times.”

He finished his beer and threw the empty can down the side of the mountain.

“The thing you Americans don’t understand is that there’ll never be peace here. We may stop slaughtering each other for a while, but nothing’s ever going to change in this place. Nothing’s going to change.” He tossed his cigarette over the edge of the hillside and watched the ember disappear into the darkness. “Anyway, you didn’t come all the way here to listen to me babble about politics and the failures of the Irish Republican Army.”

“No, I didn’t. I want to know who killed Eamonn Dillon.”

“So does the fucking IRA.”

“What do you know?”

“We suspect Dillon had been targeted for assassination for a very long time.”

“Why?”

“As soon as Dillon was killed, the boys from the Intelligence Unit went to work. They suspected someone inside Sinn Fein had betrayed him because the killer appeared at precisely the right spot at precisely the right time. It was possible the Loyalists followed him around the Falls, watched him, but not very likely. It’s difficult for them to operate in a place like the Falls without being identified, and Dillon was careful about his routine.”