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“I’m sorry, Sam. You are absolutely not going in yourself. I don’t care if there’s only a one-percent chance they have your face on file, the answer is no. Nothing personal. But you are not, under any circumstances, being taken alive. I will not contemplate another Buckley affair.”
William Buckley, the CIA chief of station in Beirut, had been taken alive by the Hezbollah. He had died slowly and hideously. The zealots had finally sent the CIA a videotape, complete with soundtrack, as they skinned him alive. And of course he had talked, told it all.
“You’ll have to find someone else,” said the Chief. “And may the Lord look after him.”
So McCready went through the files, day after day, backward and forward, sifting and sorting, considering and rejecting. Eventually he came up with a name, a “possible.” And he took it to Timothy Edwards.
“You’re crazy, Sam,” said Edwards. “You know he’s absolutely unacceptable. MI-5 hate his guts. We’re trying to cooperate with them, and you produce this—turncoat. Dammit, he’s a literary renegade, a biter of the hand that fed him. We’d never employ him.”
“That’s the point,” said Sam quietly. Edwards shifted his ground.
“Anyway, he’d never work for us.”
“He might.”
“Give me one good reason why.”
McCready gave it.
“Well,” said Edwards, “as far as the record goes, the man’s an outsider. Use of him is forbidden. Absolutely forbidden. Is that clear?”
“Completely,” said McCready.
“On the other hand,” added Edwards, “you’ll probably follow your own instincts anyway.”
As McCready left the office, Edwards reached under the desk to flick off the hidden tape deck. Without the last sentence, he was covered. Thus are long and glittering careers created.
McCready, who had been tipped off about the tape machine by an old friend, the engineer who had installed it, muttered as he walked down the corridor, “All right, arsehole, you can start editing now.”
McCready had no illusions about the Provisional IRA. The journalists in the tabloid press who designated the Irish terrorist group as a bunch of dense idiots who occasionally got it right simply did not know what they were talking about.
It might have been like that in the old days, the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the IRA leadership was composed of a bunch of middle-aged ideologues in trenchcoats, carrying small-caliber handguns and making bombs in back-street garages from garden fertilizer. Those were the days when they could have been “taken out” and stopped in their tracks. But as usual, the politicians had got it wrong, underestimated the danger, accepted that the bombers were just an extension of the civil rights movement. Now, those days were long gone. By the mid-1980s, the IRA had graduated, becoming arguably the most efficient terrorist group in the world.
They had four qualities without which no terrorist group can survive for twenty years, as they had. First, they had a pool of tribal support, from whose youth a constant stream of new recruits could step in to fill the shoes of the dead and the “gone away”—those in prison. Although they had never had more than 150 active terrorists deployed at once and probably no more than twice that number of “active” supporters ready to offer safe houses, locations for arms caches, and technical backup, and although they had lost well over one hundred dead and several hundred gone away, the new young recruits constantly came forward from the die-hard Republican community in the North and the South to take their places. The recruit pool would never dry up.
Second, they had the safe refuge of the South, the Irish Republic, from which to mount operations into the British-ruled North. Though many lived permanently in the North, the South was always available, and into it a wanted terrorist could slip away and disappear. Had the six counties of Northern Ireland been an island, the IRA would have been coped with years ago.
Third, they had dedication and ruthlessness; there was no threshold of atrocity beyond which they would not go. Over the years, the old men of the late 1960s had been eased out, still nursing their idealistic fervor for the reunification of their island into a single United Ireland under democratic rule. In their place had come hard-nosed zealots of skill and cunning, whose education and good brains masked their cruelty. The new breed were dedicated to a United Ireland all right—but under their rule, and according to the principles of Mar
x, a dedication that still had to be kept hidden from their American cash-donors.
Last, they had established a constant supply of money, the real lifeblood of a terrorist or revolutionary campaign. In the early days, it had been a question of donations from the bars of Boston or the occasional local bank raid. By the mid-1980s, the Provisionals controlled a nationwide network of drinking clubs, protection rackets, and “normal” criminal enterprises that yielded a huge annual income with which to underpin the terror campaign. As they had learned about money, they had learned too about internal security, the need-to-know rule, and strict compartmentalization. The old days when they talked too much and drank too much had long gone.
Their Achilles’ heel was in the area of arms. Having the money to buy weapons was one thing. Parlaying money into M-60 machine guns, mortars, bazookas, or ground-to-air missiles was another. They had had their successes—and their failures. They had tried many operations to bring the arms from America, but usually the FBI got them first. They had had weapons from the Communist bloc, via Czechoslovakia, with a nod from the KGB. But since the arrival of Mr. Gorbachev, the Soviet preparedness to sanction terror in the West had waned and was finally disappearing.
The IRA needed arms, McCready knew; and if these were an offer, they would send in the best and the brightest to get them. Such were his thoughts as he steered his car out of the small town of Cricklade and across the unmarked county line into Gloucestershire.
The converted barn was where he had been told it would be, tucked down a side road, an old Cotswold stone affair that had once housed cattle and hay. Whoever had done the conversion to a quiet country house had worked hard and well. It was surrounded by a stone wall set with wagon wheels, and the garden was bright with late spring flowers. McCready drove through the gate and drew up outside the timber door. A pretty young woman, weeding a flowered border, put down her trowel and stood up.
“Hello,” she said. “Have you come about a rug?”
So, he thought, he’s selling rugs as a sideline. Perhaps the information about the books not selling too well was true.
“No, ’fraid not,” he said. “Actually, I’ve come to see Tom.”
Her smile faded, and an element of suspicion entered her eyes, as if she had seen men like him enter her husband’s life before and knew they meant trouble.
“He’s writing. In his shed at the bottom of the garden. He finishes in about an hour. Can you wait?”