Bandit Country

by Andrew Turpin

  At least two senior politicians had already called for an inquiry and accused MI5 of an intelligence failure, which they said was clearly the root cause of Eric Simonson’s death. The news journalist covering the story mentioned that this had happened despite MI5 employing more than a thousand people in Belfast.

  The senior policeman who had been given the difficult task of fronting up for media interviews was Assistant Chief Constable Norman Arnside, who gave journalists a brief description of what had happened based on his firsthand experience on the helicopter that had been shot down.

  However, Arnside refused to speculate on exactly who had been responsible, other than to say that the incident had all the hallmarks of an attack by dissident Republicans. He confirmed that a major inquiry had been launched and that more detail would be available in due course.

  “I don’t think anybody saw that one coming,” O’Neill said. He coughed, as he often did when feeling stressed. “Not that they’d take out the chief constable. Neither GRANITE nor any of the other agents have given me anything that would’ve pointed to that.” He brushed his hand across his forehead, which was already covered in droplets of sweat, hoping that Beattie wouldn’t notice.

  Beattie turned around and faced O’Neill. “You’re looking like you’ve just seen a ghost. Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, just came as a shock, frankly.”

  Beattie exhaled noisily. “You could say that. That lot had a bloody Dashka by all accounts; that’s what got the chopper into trouble. A big machine gun. They sprayed it with bullets. Then a .50-caliber sniper’s rifle got Simonson. Somebody knew those guns were being moved around.”

  Beattie shook his head. “The whole of Holywood is going to come under scrutiny over this. We’ll cop a ton of flak. You know how the police take every chance to throw shit at us. They’ll be briefing every journalist this side of Westminster. Those guns are huge pieces of kit. We’re not talking dinky handguns you can slip in your pocket, are we?”

  O’Neill tried to focus on what Beattie was saying. As usual, he was right. Someone must have retrieved the weapons from a cache and probably driven them to a pickup point. From there they would have been taken to the site of the shooting and back again afterward. They had probably come from over the border; that was his guess.

  “That’s a big operation,” Beattie said. “And we don’t hear a word. How did they know about Simonson and the secretary of state visiting Crossmaglen, anyway? It was all kept confidential. They must have someone planted in there, at police headquarters somehow.”

  O’Neill winced and soaked up the tirade. To say MI5 would cop a ton of flak was probably the understatement of the year.

  “We’ve had a good run, right? You know that,” O’Neill said. “The past few months especially. There’s been the pipe bomb at the police station down near Portadown. Got that one and stopped it. There was the Semtex down in Lisburn. We got that. All from good intel and all from GRANITE.”

  “Yeah, but we’ve missed a few, too,” Beattie said. “And the people who’ve been nicked are all low level—none of the top guys. We need to pull in the brigade chiefs, not the small-fry volunteers and the message boys.”

  He jerked with his thumb toward a large handwritten chart stuck to the wall behind him, showing the hierarchy in the south Armagh brigade. There were several gaps, partly because of changes in personnel but also partly because it was notoriously difficult to get information from members of a traditionally tight-knit organization, even including those who had been jailed.

  O’Neill paused and twisted around in his chair. “It’ll come, it’ll come. The one I’d like to nail is the OC. There’s been the odd chance, but . . .”

  “But what?” Beattie demanded.

  “Well, it’s the same problem we’ve always had and always will have,” O’Neill said. “We can’t put our agents in jeopardy, otherwise we’re finished. Nobody will talk to us. We’ve always agreed that’s the last thing we’d do.” He could almost feel the guilt creeping across his face like a rash.

  Beattie stared at him. “What do you mean? You’re trying to tell me you did know something?” He walked over to within a couple of feet of O’Neill, bent down, and put his head close.

  “It was GRANITE, wasn’t it?” Beattie demanded. “You had something about a hit on Simonson. Was it from him?”

  “Look, there was nothing about Simonson, nothing. Believe me,” O’Neill said. “But three days ago I did have a vague word from him about some arms being moved over the border. The thing was, GRANITE would be three feet under by now if we’d done anything. It was kept very tight. Four of them knew, apparently: him, the OC, the quartermaster, and the IO. It’d have been obvious who had leaked it. I think he was the driver.”

  “A vague word? Shit, man.” Beattie signed heavily and put his hands on his hips.

  O’Neill stared at the ceiling. “Oh, bollocks, this job’s impossible. It’s like playing God. Who lives or dies.”

  It had always been hard to know exactly how much risk informants were at from their IRA colleagues when passing on intelligence to police, given the lack of subsequent control over what police might do with it. A heavy-handed approach to stopping an IRA operation might easily see the agent end up the victim of a reprisal killing instead.

  Sometimes it was easier and safer not to say anything, despite clear and strict guidelines from senior leaders in both organizations that intelligence and information should be shared between MI5 and police—in both directions.

  The issue had always existed but had become more complicated in 2007, when MI5 took over responsibility for agent handling from the police.

  O’Neill often imagined the police weren’t that sorry to lose their intelligence-gathering function. It was a tough job. The IRA operational structure, with small cells of maybe four or five people who were given information on only a need-to-know basis, was designed to prevent touts leaking details and blowing operations. It worked, mostly. And when intelligence did come through, O’Neill often felt it placed him in the nightmarish situation of taking responsibility for either the target’s life on one hand or his agent’s on the other.

  Beattie walked around the table. “We can’t say anything, not on this one. They’ll kill us. Seriously.”

  “Well, yeah. Both sides would,” O’Neill said.

  “Did you put anything in GRANITE’s file on this?”

  “Obviously not.”

  Beattie breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay, we keep it quiet. We point to the intelligence we’ve passed over in recent months that has saved lives and leave it at that.”

  A knock came at the door and the deputy director walked in. “Phil, sorry to interrupt, but the director needs to speak to you urgently,” he said, looking alternately at Beattie and then O’Neill. “He’s got a conference call with Downing Street in twenty minutes. The prime minister’s going to be on the call, and the home secretary. He needs a briefing—says they’re going nuts over in London. Nobody can understand how this could have happened without some sort of heads-up on it. Sounds like the PM’s going to have to make a statement in Parliament sometime soon. The director’s shitting himself, thinks his head’s on the block.”

  Beattie swore loudly. “Okay, tell him I’m coming.”

  It was never a good move to irritate Jeff Riordan, who headed MI5’s operation in Northern Ireland.

  “Also, I’ve had a call from Norman Arnside,” the deputy director said. “He wants to speak to you.”

  “Okay, tell him I’ll call him back after I’ve finished with the director,” Beattie said.

  Once the man had gone, he turned to O’Neill. “We need to talk to GRANITE. Both of us. And we need to sort this out. I’m really minded to drop him right in it over this one. We can’t be seen as soft. We’ve got to send a message out to the rest of ’em: these touts can’t have their cake and eat it.”

  Chapter Five

  Friday, January 4, 2013

  Belfast

>   Johnson came out of the newsstand, stuffed a fresh pack of Marlboros into his coat pocket, and continued along the busy Falls Road until he came to St. Paul’s Catholic Church on the corner.

  There he turned right onto Cavendish Street, all neatly terraced houses with tiny front gardens bordered with low brick walls.

  There were a couple of large republican murals painted on the end walls of some terraced homes, and Irish flags were draped in several upstairs windows.

  Johnson stopped, looked around, and tried to imagine the scenes in the 1970s, when the British army, with its riot shields and CS gas, ended up in long-running gun battles with IRA paramilitaries in the streets around that area.

  Now the only evidence of scuffling was a couple of teenage boys pushing each other and fighting over possession of a mountain bike.

  A couple of women pushing strollers made their way toward Falls Road, lined with shops and busy with the flow of cars, buses, and taxis.

  Johnson walked on, checking the house numbers as he went, until he found the one he was looking for. He continued straight past and turned the corner, where he found a bench to sit on.

  He mentally rehearsed his planned doorstep strategy one more time. He also took the opportunity to double-check that he wasn’t being followed.

  Despite being tired by the long journey from his home in Portland, he’d struggled to fall asleep in Michael Donovan’s apartment. It was two o’clock before he finally overcame the effects of jet lag and tuned out the periodic bouts of singing outside in the street, and a stream of busy thoughts.

  Johnson took out the Marlboros, ripped off the wrapping, and lit one. The nicotine flowed through his veins and perked him up.

  The job that Donovan wanted him to do still seemed to be more of a police investigation, not something in which he could really use his experience to add value. Or was he just trying to talk himself out of it?

  At heart, Johnson was a flag-waving American. Although he liked international assignments and was thoroughly committed to achieving justice and righting wrongs, he lost a little of his enthusiasm if there were no links to his homeland.

  His sister, Amy Wilde, was looking after his teenage children, Carrie and Peter, as well as Cocoa, the family dog, while he was away. She often said jokingly that he was a glory hunter. Maybe there was a grain of truth in what she said. He did, admittedly, enjoy basking in the US media coverage when he pulled off a successful investigation with an American angle that won him headlines and plaudits at home.

  Maybe that was the problem here, he mused.

  He finished the cigarette, ground out the stub on the pavement, and stood up. Enough thinking, time for action.

  Johnson strolled back toward the front door of the house he had pinpointed earlier, pushed open the gate, which had decorative wrought iron work, and rang the doorbell.

  A man wearing a cloth cap, who was raking dead leaves in the postage stamp–size front garden next door on the left, straightened up and stared.

  The door in front of Johnson opened, and a woman in her thirties peered out. A crying toddler clung to her right knee, and a dog barked somewhere inside the house.

  “Hello, don’t know if you can help,” Johnson said. “It’s a bit of a long shot. I’m over here from America on holiday—my family used to live down the other end of this street before I was born, and my mother often talked about the Duggans, who she said used to live next door to you here.” Johnson gestured to his right. “Do you know what happened to them?”

  The woman looked at Johnson. “No idea. Only lived here for a couple of years. Sorry.” She shook her head.

  “Okay,” Johnson said. “No problem. Is there anyone else nearby, other neighbors, who have spoken of them or might know them?”

  The dog inside the house yelped, then barked, and the toddler’s wailing stepped up a few decibels.

  “No, sorry,” she said and shut the door.

  Johnson pulled the gate open again and walked out onto the sidewalk. He had gone about ten yards back up the road when he heard her calling after him. “Mister, you should try Ryan, the old man, lives on the other side. He’s been here for decades.”

  Johnson turned around and smiled at her. “Thanks. I’ll do that.”

  He retraced his steps, nodded at the man in the cloth cap, who was still staring at him, and went up to the brown door with peeling paint on the other side of the Duggan family’s old house. There were two windows upstairs, while downstairs there was a bay window and the front door.

  An old man with white hair and hunched shoulders answered the door. His feet pointed out at forty-five degrees and a small terrier hovered quietly behind him.

  Johnson introduced himself as Philip Wilkinson, which was one of the two aliases he adopted when required, the other being Don Thiele. Both legends encompassed completely false and thoroughly backstopped identities, including US passports, credit cards, bank cards, driver’s licenses and birth certificates. He even had fake LinkedIn and Facebook accounts. Everything checked out.

  All the papers and cards were linked to the addresses of two different uninhabited houses in the middle of rural New Hampshire. The whole arrangement had been made through a contact who was a former police officer. As long as Johnson paid off the credit card bills and the bank accounts stayed in the black, he never encountered a problem.

  His preferred option was the Wilkinson legend—that of a single man with no dependents who was a sales representative for an American industrial pumps business. Thiele was a reserve. However, this was the first time he had used Wilkinson operationally since his search for an old Nazi in 2011.

  Johnson carefully shook the slightly trembling hand that was held out toward him.

  “Ryan’s the name. Ryan Worrall,” the man said.

  Johnson ran through his carefully crafted explanation for the second time.

  “The Duggans? You’ve come all this way looking for the Duggans? From America?” Ryan croaked.

  “Er, yes, guess so.”

  “They’re long gone from around here, long gone. Years and years ago. Probably in the ’70s. Come in, it’s freezing out. I can’t stand here and pay to heat the street.”

  Ryan stepped back and held his door open. Out of the corner of his eye, Johnson could see the man in the cloth cap still looking. He stepped through the door and Ryan closed it.

  “I’ll make you a cup of tea, seeing as you’ve come all this way. Come through here.”

  Ryan led the way through to his kitchen, which seemed to Johnson like a museum piece. The electric cooker had coiled ring elements, the fridge was yellowed and rusty, and the glass fronts on three of the four overhead cupboards were missing. The kitchen countertop, made of some kind of laminated chipboard, was swollen and cracked where water had seeped into it.

  But Ryan’s stainless steel kettle worked, and within a few minutes, he pressed a mug of tea into Johnson’s hand.

  “Philip Wilkinson, did you say? Which number did your family live at?” Ryan asked.

  “It was 120 something, down the other end. Or was it 130? My mother did tell me, but I’ve forgotten exactly. Stupid. I wrote it down, then forgot to bring the piece of paper.”

  “But you remembered the Duggans’ old number?” Ryan said. He put his tea on the table and glanced at Johnson over the top of his metal-rimmed spectacles.

  “Yes, I did, somehow. So the Duggans moved away. You lost touch with them?”

  “Yes, I lost touch.” He ran through the family members. There was Alfie, a quiet man but a hotshot with a rifle, who’d ended up in Long Kesh, and his wife, Megan. Then there was the son, Dessie, who’d been just a youngster when they moved.

  “Is there any word on what happened to them?” Johnson asked.

  “Any word? Yes, last year I spoke to an old friend in the pub up on the Falls Road who knew the Duggans. He said he’d heard from another friend that Dessie had a daughter, called Moira. Actually, she might have been his stepdaughter. Anyway, she was trai
ning to be a nurse at Queen’s.”

  “Queen’s?” Johnson asked.

  “Yes, the university. Sorry, that’s all I know. That was the only thing I’ve heard about them in years.” Ryan finished his tea and put his mug down.

  “Well, if I can’t find Dessie, then maybe I could try and find her,” Johnson said.

  “Give it a try, give it a try. Send my wishes if you ever find them. Tell them old Ryan Worrall says hello, down on Cavendish Street.”

  Johnson nodded. He would do that, he promised, and thanked Ryan.

  On the way out five minutes later, Johnson walked past the man in the cloth cap, who was sitting on his garden wall, a cigarette in his mouth. He was holding up his cell phone and tapping away at the screen as Johnson walked by.

  Friday, January 4, 2013

  Belfast

  Half an hour after the American left, Ryan Worrall made himself another cup of tea, gave his dog a biscuit, and sat at his kitchen table to read his copy of the Belfast Telegraph.

  The doorbell rang.

  Ryan was surprised to see his near neighbor, Donal Wilson, standing on the doorstep. The two men spoke only rarely.

  Wilson peered at Ryan from beneath his cloth cap. “I’m sorry to bother you and all that, but I heard that American guy’s story. Looking for the Duggans, right?”

  “Yep. He was. His family used to live down this road, years back. He wanted to know about the Duggans, where he might find Dessie, and Dessie’s daughter, or might be his stepdaughter.”

  “You know who the Duggans are, don’t you? Don’t you think we should report him?”

  Ryan felt a little confused. “Report him? What for, and to whom?”

  “Are you completely out of touch, Ryan? Report him to the brigade, who d’you think? To intelligence. If he’s looking for Duggan, then I think they need to know. Might just be coincidence, but then again it might not be.”

  “Sorry, I don’t follow you,” Ryan said. “I would have done twenty years ago but—”