by Bill Granger
They had been reluctant to agree—until they had heard the second part of the plan.
Lord Slough, Faolin had said, the first cousin of Queen Elizabeth the Second. He would inaugurate the first hovercraft service uniting England and Ireland in the fall (the original date had been October first).
The council members had nodded. They knew this. Everyone in Britain knew it. Lord Slough had commissioned a new model of the jet-powered boat that rode above the waves and was already in operation in the English Channel between Dover and Calais. The new hovercraft would be a larger, faster, stronger vessel, capable of handling rougher seas than the early models and capable of making the tedious eight-hour crossing between Liverpool and Dublin in forty-five minutes.
In a long article in the Sunday Times, Lord Slough—identified by the papers as the richest man in Britain and one of the richest in the non-Arab world—said the rejuvenation of the Dublin-Liverpool run would be the first step in linking Britain and then Europe by these superhovercraft. In two years, he said, he would operate private hovercraft lines between London and Edinburgh, London and Glasgow, Belfast and Liverpool, and Belfast and Dublin. Pledges of cooperation and support from the governments of the Republic of Ireland and from Great Britain had already been offered.
They had all read it by the time Faolin met with them; Faolin had made sure of that. And made sure at the meeting that they all became heartily sick of Lord Slough and his wealth and power; of his oil interests in the North Sea and the firm he controlled which was at that moment drilling test holes in the murky Atlantic depths off Galway Bay on Ireland’s impoverished and beautiful west coast. Faolin recounted Lord Slough’s holdings in the biggest motorcar firm in Britain and of the factory in Northern Ireland where Irish workers—at below-scale pay—assembled the machines. What Lord Slough did not own outright, said Faolin, he could buy, including all the right politicians in the Irish Dáil and in the English House of Commons. It was common knowledge, said Faolin, and the council members had nodded their heads sagely.
Faolin built up Lord Slough in that meeting, and as he did so, he built up their resentment of him. Finally, almost eloquently, he had said;
“I said to you that our enemy is not the ordinary man and that is why y’must stop yer bombing. Is our enemy a mail clerk who opens a parcel for Lord Slough and has his hands blown off fer the trouble? Is it that woman and her child blown to kingdom come on Royal Avenue the other day because some fool decides to blow down the doors of the Belfast Telegraph? No, they are not; not any of them; not English or Irish or what. Our enemy is Lord Slough, but we let him alone. He starves Irishmen in his factories, accumulatin’ greedy wealth with the tears of orphans whose daddies have died in his Welsh mines. Our enemy is Slough as privilege and power and unaccountable wealth is our enemy.”
They had been silent. Folding their hands like students on the first day of class, they had listened.
“And what of our great political leaders? Of the Prime Minister of England who ruthlessly sends his soldiers to kill our wives and children in the streets of our broken old city? Or the Taoiseach of the Republic—a republic in name alone—who cynically sells out to the British at every opportunity and who betrays us and our comrades when told to do so by Whitehall? I don’t need to tell ya who our enemies really are—but I do so because you have been blinded by their wealth and power. Y’ve doffed yer caps like Clare farmers t’them. Y’ve deferred to them because they are yer betters—”
Oh, they had resented that. They had become angry. And Faolin had played on their anger.
“Yer children,” he hissed. “Children who play at revolution and war and then run away when yer old one comes t’get ya.”
“What’s yer plan, Faolin?” one finally asked angrily. “What’s yer bleedin’ plan?”
Faolin had turned on his bad leg, turned and fixed his questioner with a dark, withering eye. “Me plan, boyo, is to drive our enemies into the sea.”
Was he mad? They had stared at him and watched a smile slowly spread on that face which was not made to smile.
As his final argument, he read a piece from the Irish Times concerning the hovercraft aloud to them.
“ ‘The cost of the scheme, while not announced, is thought to be a hundred million pounds. However, it is only the first step in a network of hovercraft services to be operated by Lord Slough’s Anglo-Irish Lines linking major cities on both islands. Lord Slough said he had the full confidence and cooperation of the British government.
“ ‘The Taoiseach (of Ireland) said that Lord Slough’s scheme would provide two hundred fifty new jobs in the country, and that it was estimated that eight million pounds annually would be pumped into the economy. He praised what he called “the foresight and courage” of Lord Slough.
“ ‘It is expected that the Prime Ministers of both countries will accompany Lord Slough and his party on the inaugural run of the first superhovercraft, which Lord Slough said would be named for his daughter, Brianna.’ ”
Faolin let the clipping fall on the floor. He stared at the nine men before him.
“It is expected,” he said. “It is expected that Lord Slough and the Prime Ministers of England and Ireland will accompany him on this inaugural journey. It is expected.”
And he had given them the plan. Faolin and his men would seize the craft at Liverpool harbor and take it out into the middle of the Irish Sea with its precious cargo. And there they would broadcast to the world that the lives of Slough and the politicians—and whoever else accompanied him, perhaps even a member of the royal family—would be spared on two conditions—the payment of a ransom of one hundred million pounds and the release from Long Kesh and the other internment camps of all IRA prisoners.
The men of the council were stunned at first. They believed in the old ways of war—believed in bombs and sniping at soldiers and shooting informers down on dark streets; believed in terror. Faolin had been prepared for their intransigence: He talked all morning and into the afternoon and he beat down their conservatism. They realized that the IRA had fallen on bad days; they had no money and little support; the conduit of funds from America was drying up, although still strong by standards placed against funds from other places. The Palestinians had withdrawn their financial support. Worse, a peace movement had grown up spontaneously among a group of Catholic mothers who professed themselves sick of the killing in the North. Everything that Faolin said was true—a bold action was needed to recover the initiative in this war of attrition that the British were winning. Yet what he said was so radical—
The argument had raged in the council itself at that and subsequent meetings. But finally, they decided that Faolin’s plan was the bold move they needed; with the money, they could carry on the war indefinitely; with the hostages, they could redirect their energies against the men of wealth and power and win again the sympathies of the ordinary Irish worker, who was among the poorest-paid in Western Europe. Faolin was right, they agreed at last.
Only the money seemed to stagger the council—one hundred million pounds. Who would pay such a sum?
“That’s not our concern, is it?” asked Faolin then. “D’ya not think that Lord Slough himself—the great provider of Irish jobs—would not think his royal personage worth one hundred million?” And they had agreed.
From that first meeting in August, Faolin had gone forward, carefully constructing his net to catch Lord Slough and the rulers of Britain and Ireland. Two men had been critical: Donovan, who worked for Slough’s Anglo-Irish Lines as an engineer and was being trained to tend the machinery on the new superhovercraft; and Tatty, the quiet leader of the potent IRA operation in Liverpool. Liverpool—where the kidnapping would be effected—was a great seafaring city on the English west coast that contained so many Irish that it was often called “the largest city in Ireland.”
Donovan had not impressed Faolin; he was a slow but loyal man. Tatty, however, had become something of a confidant to a man who had rejected confidants all
his life. Tatty and Faolin pieced together the details of the operation. It was not terribly complex:
The Brianna would carry a full cargo on her first journey. In that cargo would be five hundred pounds of gelignite, which could be set off by radio transmitter.
Faolin would carry the transmitter aboard the Brianna. Once out into the Irish Sea, the craft would be hijacked. The demand would be made and the threat that the boat would be destroyed—along with all the important people aboard her—unless the demand was met. The money would be paid the IRA in Northern Ireland and the men of Portlaoish would be freed.
The Brianna would be taken then to Dublin. This was the best part of all. The Irish government would provide an airplane for the hijackers, to take them to Libya—Faolin said he had arranged that already—and they would keep their hostages aboard the Brianna until the plane took off. The transmitter which could set the gelignite off was good to a range of fifty miles.
“Libya,” said Tatty. “Why there?”
“Because they’ll have us,” said Faolin.
“Ah, it’s a far place. I believe we sailed there once, many years ago—”
“Far enough,” said Faolin.
“Oh, aye,” said Tatty. “But it’ll be hard to leave—”
“Only for a time, Tatty,” said Faolin. “We could go back—”
“No, there’s no returning,” said Tatty. “You’ll fool yerself if you think that, lad. You’ll be an exile then fer yer life.”
Faolin had been silent then. In only one respect had he been less than candid with Tatty.
On the getaway.
There would be no plane. There would be no Libya. There would be no exile. These hardened terrorists—even Tatty—were like children when it came to facing what Faolin saw as the unmistakable reality of the moment and the times. Did the IRA think the Irish would just go on to war with the English as before? They would never win—unless the English, in monumental rage at a heinous, irrational act—went berserk. Then Ireland would rally to itself and throw them finally from their shores.
You always had to give children hope, though, to tell them that morning would always follow night, that death was sleep.
Faolin was not a child.
He realized that the money was not enough; that the release of the prisoners was not enough. What was needed was a final, severing act of war from which the IRA could not retreat and which would turn the Irish from children into men.
Faolin would depress the button on his transmitter at the final moment.
And Lord Slough and the Prime Ministers and the entourage from the royal family—all of them, including Faolin and Tatty and Donovan—would be blown to kingdom come.
Elizabeth was in the shower when Devereaux awoke, and he lay in bed, waiting for her. She came out still naked, her head wrapped in one of the white towels that luxury hotels oversupply to mitigate the loneliness of the rooms. She looked at him and shared the smile of the morning after love.
Devereaux forgot to smile in return until hers began to fade.
“Is something wrong?” Elizabeth asked as she went to the edge of the bed. She stood and looked down at him. He looked up at her, up at the gently swelling breasts, at the curls of brownish hair between her legs. He touched her. She did not move. He explored.
“Elizabeth,” he said.
She stood and let him touch her.
“I wonder if it will be another fifteen years,” she said at last.
“No. Not that long again.” He wondered if he meant it. She closed her eyes. He felt her moistness. He pulled her down gently on the bed, next to him. He kissed her on the neck, slowly.
“Where do you live? I want to see you,” Elizabeth said as though there was hunger.
Devereaux smelled her hair, damp and like flowers. “Fifty miles west of the District of Columbia,” he began. “You come to Front Royal. It’s just a town, nothing special, except for the mountains. It’s at the start of Skyline Drive along the Blue Ridge Mountains. Have you ever been in Virginia?”
“Not beyond the suburbs,” she said. “You live there?”
Devereaux kissed her insistently. “On a mountain top. The complete hermit.”
“Can I come to your mountain?” she asked lightly, kissing him in return.
He took her then. Like a cold man reaching for the flame.
First they exchanged the code words and then the identification numbers of the telephone and then Hanley spoke:
“This is a delicate matter, Devereaux. I don’t have to tell you that.” But he did. “We have decided to play a lone hand at the moment.”
Devereaux waited. He did not feel as he had felt twelve hours before. He had been warmed.
“As we told you—” Why the pompous tone? Was the Chief in the same room with Hanley? “We have never established a dialogue with British Intelligence on the same footing as the Langley firm. This is a chance for us to do that and to give the Brits information they could not get from CIA.”
“Could not?”
There was a pause. What was Hanley saying?
“We want you to proceed to Belfast immediately and determine the details of the IRA plan. Get on this man O’Neill and his friends. If we are to make a present of our information to Brit Intell, it must be worth enough to convince them they can cooperate with us fully in other spheres. As you have said, we are not interested in the internal problems of Britain at the moment and we are most certainly not interested in the Irish Republican Army. But this is a chance to help Brit Intell and squeeze in line next to Langley at the English trough.”
Elegantly put, thought Devereaux.
“I raise the same objection I did yesterday,” said Devereaux. For the record. “We don’t know when the IRA plans to assassinate Lord Slough—in fact, we are not totally convinced that they will—and every minute we delay in this matter, it hangs heavier that the assassination will come off—”
“We considered that,” said Hanley. “We made discreet inquiries overnight and determined that Lord Slough is, at the moment, safely enjoying the pleasures of life in Detroit, Michigan. Where he is in negotiation with a major American company to distribute his autos in the U.S. He leaves in two days for an oil conference in Quebec City. That is to last two days as well, and then he flies home to his castle in County Clare. The danger starts then—”
“Where’s the conference in Quebec City?”
“At the Chateau Frontenac. He and his Saudi Arabian partners in the North Sea drillings and the new ones off the Irish coast—”
“This is hopeless,” said Devereaux. “I know nothing about him—”
Hanley went on unperturbed. “A coded cable follows. You’ll receive it in Belfast in a few hours. You’ll be in Belfast, then—”
“A logical place,” said Devereaux. “But not in code, please. I’m an agent of Central Press Service. Plain English backgrounder will suffice.”
“Good point,” Hanley muttered.
Devereaux smiled.
“So, in summary, you go to Belfast, find out the why and wherefore of the assassination of Lord Slough—and we present it to Brit Intell—”
“In Christmas wrapping,” said Devereaux.
“Sarcasm,” identified Hanley.
“And if Slough is hit in Detroit or Quebec despite his apparent safety there?”
There was a pause in Washington.
“Then it will all be wasted,” said Hanley.
“And so will Slough,” said Devereaux. “But, thy will be done.”
“Yes,” said Hanley.
“There are two other matters—”
“Can’t they wait for—”
“No, dammit. One, what about the American Express card? Has it been taken care of?”
“Yes, damn you. I didn’t forget. Is that all?”
“Two, I want to give you a name.” He paused. “Two names. One is Free The Prisoners. Cap F, cap T, cap P. Sort of like an Amnesty International. Working in London now. Headquarters in Bern. Can yo
u check it out?”
“Yes,” said Hanley. There were times when he did not question Devereaux too closely. For all his problems with him, Hanley respected Devereaux’s instincts and, rather than obscure those instincts with words requiring explanation, let Devereaux run free until he had tracked down whatever aroused his curiosity.
“Second name,” said Hanley.
Devereaux only hesitated for a moment while he remembered the long, caressing curve of her full body and the smooth innocence of her back. No one would have noticed the hesitation unless they knew Devereaux.
“Campbell,” he said, “Elizabeth.” And broke the connection. For a moment, he listened to the silence, and then he got up and walked out of the tight little room.
Two hours later, he was looking down at the rubble-strewn mass of Belfast still decorated with brave church spires. The plane banked sharply at three thousand feet and whined down to the landing strip.
Devereaux unbuckled his belt as the plane taxied to the terminal building. A misting rain fell, as usual.
Seven miles away, at that moment, a limping man came up to a little boy in the Crumlin Road. He touched the child and asked him what he had seen.
“Nothin’, sur,” said the boy.
He slipped a second coin into the childish hand.
“I woulda banged the dustbin if I had,” the boy said.
6
QUEBEC CITY
William Henry Christopher Devon, Lord Slough, ninth Earl of Slough in a line back to the time of George III, first cousin of the Hanoverian Queen Elizabeth of England, marched into the stately lobby of the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City with the conspicuous anonymity that all great men crave and seldom achieve.
He was, by good chance, exactly a day early for the conference with the Saudi Arabian oil ministers. He had not planned the unexpected schedule change but he had accepted it because it would allow time with Deirdre, and time for himself. Like all men who own the world and run it, Lord Slough had little time for himself. Not that every pleasure was denied; only postponed.
