Northern Spy

by Flynn Berry

  When I step back into my house, the man in my living room has his gun out. He raises it, and I look past the barrel into his eyes.

  “It’s fine. She thinks I’m going to see my aunt.” My voice is flat, almost disappointed. I sound like I’m telling the truth. He stares at me for a moment, then tucks the gun into the waistband of his jeans.

  As soon as we’re over the garden wall, both men lift their hoods. From the row of houses, we will look like three people out for a walk. No one is ahead of us to see that their faces are covered by ski masks. The field is empty, quiet except for the snow under our boots. The men move the same way, with their shoulders down, their backs straight. They’ve been trained.

  On the hill, the dizziness makes it hard to keep my balance. I’m desperate to turn around, to look toward Finn, though Sophie won’t have him anywhere near the window. Fenton will have told her what to do until the police arrive. To act normal, maybe. Or to lock herself in the bathroom with Poppy and Finn. I wince, thinking of how scared she must be.

  The branches of the oak tree on top of the hill creak in the wind. We’re in clear sight of all the houses, and then we’re on the far side of the hill, in shade now, and the change in temperature is like dropping into water. I’m alone with the two men, near enough to smell the wool of their masks, and their sweat.

  A red Renault Corso is parked in the lane behind the field. The shorter man opens the back door. “Lie down,” he says. I lie across the backseat and he covers me with a blanket.

  The two of them sit in front, and the automatic locks close with a metallic thud. The blanket is orange tartan wool, and it smells like a basement, the way sleeping bags often do. I can’t see through the fabric, though I can feel bars of sun and shade as they fall across the backseat.

  When we come to a stop, we must be at Ballywalter Road, and now we’re turning right, driving south down the peninsula. In the front, the men will have taken off their masks. No other drivers will notice anything wrong. People will be able to see us, a red car on a country road. My chest starts to convulse, like I’m laughing.

  Under the blanket, I reach my hand overhead to the door and find the lock. I try, slowly, to slide it back, my heart beating against my ribs, wondering if it will be this simple, if I’ll be able to open the door and drop to the road and run. Nothing happens, the lock won’t move, it’s on a childproof setting. I pull my knees into my chest, close my eyes and try to follow the turns. We’re still traveling south. After a few more turns, I lose track of our direction. It feels like we’re driving into a tunnel, farther and farther down, with the quiet and the pressure, but when I open my eyes, a few inches from my face, the wool fibers of the blanket are burning with sun.

  I remember Finn last week, turning his hand in a beam of sunlight filled with dust motes, watching them slowly revolve.

  I can see him very clearly, and calm comes over me. I know that I’m going to keep myself alive until the security service or the police find me. I’m going to talk my way out of this. Last week, Finn moved his hand, so the dust motes orbited away, and looked at me, his own hair bright. I’m going to come home for him.

  One of the men clears his throat. “You can sit up,” he says.

  We’re racing down a road between wide farm tracts. They must not be worried about traffic cameras out here. Through the back windscreen, I can see the Mournes. They take up most of the sky behind us. We’re somewhere in Armagh, then, southwest of Greyabbey.

  “What’re your names?” I ask. Neither of them answers. “My name’s Tessa.” Past the window, frozen wheat bristles through the snow. “Thank you for not hurting my son. Do you have children?”

  The passenger shifts in his seat. They’re listening, at least. “Do your children love their mam? That’s how it is in the beginning, right? In a few years I’ll probably have to tackle him for a hug.”

  The driver’s eyes lift to meet mine in the mirror. “Why is this happening?” I ask.

  Neither of them speaks. They don’t tell me not to worry, that everything will be fine, which is good. That would scare me more, if they were comfortable lying to me. They’re not sociopaths. Because of them, Finn will be with Fenton now, in a police convoy, being driven someplace safe.

  “Has someone told you to kill me?” I ask.

  The driver clears his throat. “No.”

  I look out the window, and the silence thickens in the car, growing uncomfortable. I force myself to wait, and finally the passenger says, “We’re bringing you to an interview.”

  “Will you be the ones interviewing me?”

  “No.”

  “Who will?” I ask, and the passenger taps his fingers on the door. “Can I trust them?”

  The farms are smaller now, broken by dense stands of trees. We’re farther in the countryside. A track appears ahead, and the driver downshifts. He follows the track through the woods until it ends at a farmhouse in a clearing. A river runs behind the house.

  When the car door opens, there’s this smell in the air, of snow and pines, and I can’t get enough of it, I can’t breathe it in fast enough. We walk across the clearing toward the farmhouse, the men on either side of me. I’m not shaking, it’s more continuous than that, like water shimmering. I try to force one of them to look me in the eye. They haven’t cuffed my hands, which is interesting. They aren’t expecting me to fight.

  The farmhouse has stone walls and a split red door. Something about it feels familiar, like I’ve been here before. Inside, a few waxed jackets hang from hooks by the door. They lead me across the house to an ordinary, old-fashioned kitchen, with a hanging basket of wrinkled apples, and a tea tin, and a row of chipped yellow mugs. The driver fills a glass with water from the tap for me.

  “Thank you.” I look him full in the face, and realize that I recognize him. He’s a bouncer at Sweet Afton, in the Linen Quarter, where our office sometimes goes for drinks after work. I can’t decide whether to mention that. It might help for him to remember me in a different scenario, or it might make him feel cornered.

  “Why did you join?” I ask.

  “Freedom,” he says.

  I nod. He’s younger than me. His eyes are hazel, with long lashes. “Not for this, though,” I say. “You didn’t sign up for this.”

  Before he can answer, the other man appears in the doorway. He’s older, and has one deep groove across his forehead, like it’s been scored in half. “Come on,” he says. I look at the bouncer, but he’s turning away from me, placing my empty water glass in the sink.

  “Please. Please don’t do this. Please let me go home.”

  They bring me to a room upstairs and lock the door from outside. The room is empty except for two single mattresses on the floor.

  I should have mentioned Sweet Afton, I should have described seeing him there, that might have made me more real to him. We’ve spoken before, though I can’t remember the specifics, if I asked him for a light, if we chatted about the weather. It seems impossible for me to have forgotten, that those encounters hadn’t seemed particularly significant at the time, when this man might be the difference between returning to my son or never seeing him again.

  I lie down on a mattress in the quiet. I’d rather have them threatening me, hurling abuse at me. It’s worse in here, the quiet is worse. In the silence, I think about how I might never hear my son say his own name. I might not find out his likes or interests, and I have some guesses, but I need to know what he chooses for himself. I might never have a conversation with him over dinner or on the phone. I might not introduce him to Roald Dahl or C. S. Lewis. I might not know him as a boy, or a teenager. He might never introduce me to someone he loves.

  Tom and Briony would do their best, and maybe that would be enough, or maybe he would always feel the gap of not having his mam.

  He cries sometimes when I leave his line of vision. He’s one year old. How could I l
eave behind a one-year-old? It’s not possible. Even if they shoot me, that can’t be the end. I’ll have to find a way to reach him. I’m his mam.

  39

  The door opens and Marian appears with the two men at her back. She startles when she sees me. “Why is Tessa here?” she asks the men.

  When they don’t answer, she flies at them. They manage to step back into the hall in time, and she shouts, then starts to throw herself against the door. She is, I realize, trying to break it down. Eventually she turns to me, panting. “Tessa—”

  “It’s all right, Marian. It’s not your fault.”

  “Where’s Finn?”

  “He’s safe.”

  She sits on the mattress facing mine. She has on her wool jumper, and her hair is held back in a gold clasp. “Are you hurt?” she asks. “Did they hurt you?”

  “No. Who are they? Do you know them?”

  “Not well,” she says. The bouncer’s name is Aidan, and the older one is Donal. “They’re waiting for someone to interview us. I don’t know how long that will be, it could be a few days.”

  “Have you signaled for help?” I ask, nodding at the tracker in her filling.

  “Yes.”

  “Then it’s fine. Eamonn will send in a team.”

  “They should have come by now,” she says.

  Maybe they’re already here. Officers might be in the woods at this moment, they might have the house surrounded.

  Marian moves around the room, studying the baseboards, the ceiling, the window, and the metal grate soldered to its frame. On the ceiling is a brass fixture, but they’ve removed the light bulb.

  “Where are we?” I ask.

  “I told you about this place,” she says. “This is the farmhouse.”

  The wooden table in the kitchen is where she built bombs. The tiled counter is where she stood, after being hunched over a device for hours, and stretched her back, and made tea.

  In the summer, she tells me, she often swam in the river behind the house. The river is frozen now, but in summer the water is warm, flowing slowly between grasses and overshot wildflowers. She’d paddle past dragonflies and kingfishers, with only her head above the surface.

  Marian is telling me this as a sort of punishment for herself, she’s allowing me to hate her, or that version of her, a terrorist swimming naked in the river behind the house where I might now be killed.

  But I can’t be angry with her. I don’t have the energy, not while I’m trying to work out how to escape.

  When the room grows dark, we lie down on the two single mattresses on the floor. The men dragged the mattresses up to this room. I want to know where I was while they prepared this room for us, how long I’ve been walking around with this place waiting for me.

  The sheets are new, the fabric stiff from never having been washed. One of the men went into a shop and picked them out. I picture him standing in front of a shelf, considering the different options, knowing what they would be used for. The ones he chose are sky blue.

  * * *

  —

  Marian has fallen asleep. Outside, the moon is bright enough to stain the sky around it green. On the other side of the clearing, wintry trees stretch away for miles. No lights. No pylons. I wonder how long we’d have to walk to reach the nearest house.

  Somewhere, people are trying to find us. The detective will have told my mam that I’ve been taken. I remember her one evening last week saying, “Do you and Finn want to take a walk with me?” and me saying, “Not tonight, mam, I can’t, I’m so tired from work.”

  I regretted it then, too. I pictured her going for a walk on her own, or staying at home on the sofa, carefully reading a catalogue, folding down the pages. I should have said yes.

  I lie on the mattress and consider the different rooms in the house, the different ways a raid might play out. Our guards have automatic rifles. If there is a raid, we might die.

  Though the operators MI5 sends in will be experienced. The Special Forces specialize in hostage rescue, their officers have two years of instruction before even deploying. They might have run hundreds of simulations in a house like this, with the same number of hostages and terrorists. They will know how to enter the rooms. We aren’t in a fortified compound, we’re in a farmhouse in South Armagh. I wish there were a way for me to talk to them, to tell them where we are in the house, to receive instructions.

  I try to picture us being hurried outside by officers after a siege, but can’t. If there is a raid, we might never leave this room.

  At some point in the night, I move to the floor. I have an image of the two of us lying on the mattresses, our blood soaking into the sky-blue sheets, so I kneel on the floor, like if I can change one part of the image, it won’t happen.

  I end up on Marian’s mattress eventually, and fall asleep with her arm tucked around me.

  * * *

  —

  At dawn, a man steps inside the room, holding a chair. It takes me a moment to recognize him. His faded red hair is brushed to the side, and he has on a tweed blazer over a blue shirt. He sets the chair on the floor and sits down facing us.

  “Seamus,” says Marian with relief. “You need to help us.”

  “Well,” he says. “That will depend on how this goes.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I need both of you to answer some questions.”

  “You’re not on internal security.”

  “I am, actually,” he says, and Marian’s face sags.

  “Fine,” she says. “You and I will talk, but Tessa shouldn’t be here.”

  “Oh, I disagree,” he says, rubbing the knuckles of his long hands. “We’ve a bit of a problem.” He rests his ankle on his knee and clasps his hands on his lap. “A sniper was meant to assassinate the justice minister during her speech, but someone warned her. We think you told Tessa, and she told Rebecca Main.”

  “This is the first I’m hearing of any of this, Seamus. You know we weren’t involved in that operation.”

  “No, but someone told you about it. I have their word.”

  “Who?”

  Seamus turns his attention to me. “You’ve been quiet, Tessa.”

  “Because this is mad.”

  “But you’ve met Rebecca Main, haven’t you? She was a guest on your program.”

  “Politicians come in every week. Do you think I’m friends with all of them?”

  “Do you have a personal phone number for Rebecca?”

  “No.”

  Seamus reaches down to brush some dust from his shoe. “Do you know how many of these interviews I’ve done?” he says. “Can I tell you something? Innocent people get restless. They move around. And neither of you has shifted an inch since I came in.”

  Marian laughs. “Is this a witchcraft trial? There’s a river back there, do you want to go see if we sink?”

  Seamus points at me. “I already know Tessa has lied to us.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You told your neighbor to call the police.”

  I nod. “You don’t get to threaten my son.”

  “But, you see, now I know that you’re a liar.”

  “No, I’m his mother. And you can fuck right off.”

  “Watch yourself,” he says.

  “Which speech?” asks Marian.

  “Sorry?”

  “At which speech were you planning to assassinate the justice minister?”

  “The one in Portrush on Friday.”

  Marian frowns. “We’re on cease-fire.”

  “Well, not all of us agree,” says Seamus. “We never voted on a cease-fire.”

  “So who ordered the assassination?” she asks. “Anyone from the army council? No? You lads just took it upon yourselves.”

  “We’re not here about me, love. H
ow did you contact Rebecca Main, Tessa?” he asks.

  “I didn’t.”

  Marian loosens her hair from the clasp and runs her hand through it. She smooths the hem of her jumper. “Seamus,” she says. “You’re right.”

  The room draws together. Seamus turns, pained, to Marian. She says, “I’m an informer. I’ve been working with a nice man from the government so idiots like you don’t get in the way of the talks. You’re in our road. Everyone at the top knows it. You’re terrified of a cease-fire, aren’t you? Because what the fuck is a poor show like you going to do when this ends?”

  His face burns red. Marian holds out her hand, looks at her nails. “Thanks for the books, though. I’ll be keeping them.”

  I sit rigid, watching him stare at Marian. He’s about to lose his head. Which would be good. Better to have him shouting and raving than calm, controlling the situation. If he loses himself, we might have a chance.

  Seamus doesn’t stand up, or throw his chair at her, though he looks like he wants to. Instead he points at me. “And Tessa?”

  “Nothing to do with it. She doesn’t have the nerve, to be honest. You know that well enough yourself, that’s why you never gave her more than scouting. You know she’s not like me.” Marian smiles at him. “Do you remember coming round for coffee, years ago? You chose me yourself, and now here we are. Funny old world.”

  “How long?” he asks through his teeth.

  “God, you must be dying to know. Did the Brits choose me even before you did?”

  Seamus waits across the room, a concentrated mass of fury, his eyes glittering.

  “I don’t mind telling you. I’ll explain when they recruited me, and what I’ve told them, and which operations I sabotaged and which failed on their own. You’ve spent years trying to figure out why some of them didn’t come off. Let Tessa leave, and I’ll tell you.”

  Seamus turns to me with a vague expression, like he forgot I was in the room. He doesn’t care about me. All of his attention is on Marian, on the girl he chose seven years ago, and what she has done. He wants to know the extent of her betrayal, to assess the level of rot in his unit. He has known me for a few weeks. Marian has been his life.