Page 45 of Hang on St. Christopher

“Brendan O’Roarke lives on Point Road,” he said, pausing to see what reaction the name had on us.

I knew who Brendan O’Roarke was, because I’d spent much of the past three years running John Strong. The IRA Army Council thought that Strong was their highest-placed mole within the RUC, but in fact we had turned him and he was a double agent, giving the IRA largely worthless intel while gleaning what he could about the Army Council’s future plans.

The latest info we had was that the IRA was split evenly down the middle. O’Roarke was one of the leaders of the “ultra” faction, who brooked no compromise at all with the British. Other prominent figures within the IRA were more amenable to talks with the UK government, especially in light of the recent electoral successes of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, in Northern Ireland. Many in the IRA were coming around to the viewpoint that the way to get the British out of Ireland for good was to win the moral argument for withdrawal as Gandhi had successfully done with the British Empire in India. But Brendan O’Roarke was an old-school hardman whose model was not Gandhi’s campaign in India but the campaign of the Irgun in Israel, which, with quite different tactics, had also defeated the British Empire. O’Roarke felt that the IRA didn’t need to put out peace feelers; they needed to redouble their efforts to force a weary British public into an immediate withdrawal from the six counties of Northern Ireland.

That was only the beginning of the ultras’ plans. Once the British left Ireland, the IRA was to take control of Dublin and form a true people’s revolutionary government in Ireland on the Cuban model. Heady stuff and not remotely feasible. O’Roarke and his equally scary brothers were that most dangerous of things in Ireland: romantics.

“Brendan O’Roarke?” Crabbie asked.

“You don’t know who he is?” O’Neill asked.

“Never heard of him,” Crabbie said.

“Me neither,” I said because without John Strong’s intel, I probably wouldn’t have known the names of any of the current members of the IRA Army Council. Crabbie and I were just ordinary working peelers, not privy to what was going on at the higher levels of the game...

“He’s the biggest IRA man in town, commander of the north Leinster brigade, on the Army Council for the last ten years.”

“Big shit, then?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. He’s been to Libya three times in the last five years, if that means anything to you.”

I nodded vaguely, although I knew exactly what that meant. Nearly every IRA bomb of the past decade had been made with Semtex from the private stores of Colonel Gaddafi. Libyan Semtex had been found in dozens of bombs all over Northern Ireland, and it was Libyan Semtex that the IRA had used in their assassination attempt on Mrs. Thatcher and that Libyan agents used to bring down Pan Am 235. But I wasn’t supposed to know any of that either.

“Have you got the number for that phone box?” O’Neill asked. “And I’ll see if it’s one of the ones near Brendan’s house.”

I handed over the phone box number while he went to check.

“Sounds like we’ve stumbled into a solid lead,” Crabbie said.

“Aye, it could be,” I agreed.

O’Neill came back less than a minute later.

“As I thought, it’s the phone box outside the bowling club.”

“Have you tapped it? I’d love to hear what our victim was talking about with this O’Roarke bloke,” I said.

O’Neill laughed. “No, no, you wouldn’t get a warrant to tap a public phone box down here. It’s just not done.”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed. We RUC men could tap any bloody phone box we wanted—and, thanks to friendly judges, pretty much any home phone too. Down here, though, it was apparently a different story.

“You haven’t tapped O’Roarke’s phone?”

“No. We haven’t, but he can’t be sure of that, so he uses several public phone boxes around town.”

“And he goes to this bowling club, does he?”

“Almost every day. And he sometimes uses the phone box to call a minicab to take him home from the bowling or into town. Or at least, that’s what we surmise because a minicab shows up a few minutes later.”

“What sort of bowling? Tenpin?”

“Lawn.”

“I thought only genteel old folks played that game.”

“Well, Brendan, for one, is not exactly a genteel guy.”

“Is he a killer, or more of a man behind the man?” Crabbie asked.