by Bill Granger
“Slough is not important to the CIA. He is important to the IRA, and the CIA must help them. Their gunmen are too well known by us to get into the country, let alone get close to Lord Slough. So we reason they will have a man from your agency to do the job. A killer from the CIA.”
It was mad, she thought; but what choice did she have?
“What do we do then?”
“Good,” said Mr. Dennis. “Good for you, Elizabeth. You choose a chance. You do not give up. We go to Euston Station now and take the train to Liverpool and we see the place where Lord Slough will be. And then we go to Glasgow for tomorrow. And we see a football match-up.”
She sat for a moment and considered it. She felt cornered—by all the man had said and by all she knew was true.
This wasn’t a matter of being a traitor.
It was a matter of survival.
Devereaux purchased a ticket for Liverpool at the counter and heard the agent say he had just missed the Liverpool express. The next train left in two hours.
Devereaux put the ticket stub in his pocket and slowly walked across the crowded concourse towards the sign marked Gentlemen.
He pushed through the door and went inside. One middle-aged man in a heavy coat stood at the end of a line of urinals. Beyond, there were six water closets. Casually, Devereaux walked along the six closets, gently pushing at the doors. They were all empty.
Devereaux opened the door of the last closet and went inside and closed it and locked it. He sat down on the closed toilet lid.
He removed the black gun from his belt and let the safety fall.
He heard water flushing in the urinals and then the door to the concourse opened. He heard a public-address announcement as the door to the concourse swung shut.
There was a step on the tiles. A cautious step.
Devereaux noisily flushed the toilet and stood up. He could not see over the top of the compartment. He turned his back on the door and put one foot and then the other on the toilet lid.
He peered over the top of the door.
Ruckles was about ten feet away, staring at the closed door with a gun in his hand.
“I’ll blow the top of your head off,” Devereaux began quietly. “Don’t look up—keep staring at the door. Now put the gun in your pocket and walk to the door slowly. Slowly, Ruckles. Keep your hands away from your body.”
Devereaux flicked off the door lock with the toe of his foot.
“Now push into the stall,” said Devereaux.
It was a comic sight: Ruckles stood in the compartment, staring at Devereaux perched on the toilet lid, who was, in turn, staring down at him. The black gun was pointed at the top of Ruckles’ head.
“It’s crowded, old stick,” said Ruckles.
Devereaux suddenly jumped down, striking Ruckles a glancing blow on the side of the head. Ruckles fell back against the door, blood on his ear.
Devereaux grabbed the lapel of his suit and spun Ruckles around, throwing him down on the toilet lid. He pushed the barrel of the black gun to the ridge between the agent’s eyes.
“Why do you want to kill Lord Slough—”
“There’s—”
With a slight movement, Devereaux slapped the bridge of Ruckles’ nose with the gun barrel. He heard the bone crunch and blood welled at the nostrils. Ruckles instinctively moved to protect his face.
“Get your goddam hands down.”
“You broke my nose.”
Devereaux slapped the gun barrel at the back of one of Ruckles’ hands. Again, he heard a bone break. Ruckles cried out then and tried to reach for the gun barrel. Devereaux flicked it again, this time smashing the barrel across Ruckles’ mouth. Teeth cracked.
“Why does the Agency want Slough dead?”
“We don’t.…”
“You killed Hastings, you followed me to Ireland, you sent three agents after me—you bastards know about the plot on Slough. Now I want to know—”
“I don’t know.…”
Devereaux hit him again with the gun barrel, bringing it sharply down on the cheekbone below the right eye. This time, Ruckles could not keep from crying out.
“You have five seconds to live, Ruckles,” said Devereaux. “Four. Three.”
“The Prime Minister—”
Devereaux stopped counting.
“Tell me again.”
Ruckles was crying; tears mixed with the blood ran down his face. His voice was drowned in blood.
“The Prime Minister—”
“When—”
“With Slough… blame the IRA… I—”
Wednesday. At the launch of the Brianna from Liverpool. The target wasn’t the English lord, it was the Prime Minister of Great Britain.
“Why?”
Ruckles shook his head. His hands buried his face. He suddenly spit out blood and bits of teeth.
“Policy. I don’t know.… North Sea oil… use the IRA…” Ruckles was babbling.
Devereaux began to understand. They had sent agents to kill him because they thought he had gotten Hastings’ secret. And Hastings—clever, dead Hastings—combining information from O’Neill and from someone still in British Intelligence and from a third source—was it the CIA itself?—understood about Operation Mirror and about the CIA plot on the Prime Minister. That was why Hastings had wanted exit money—because the game would be over then; the CIA would come to kill him. Well, they had killed him.
And they thought Devereaux knew—until Sunday, when he had told Hanley about Operation Mirror and Hanley had gone to the CIA with it and the CIA had eagerly agreed to drop the operation. They knew then that Devereaux had not uncovered the real secret—the real plot—which was to murder the Prime Minister of Britain.
Devereaux thought he understood everything in that moment. Slough was not in danger; the Prime Minister was to be killed. And the IRA would do it for the Agency and would be blamed for it.
Just like the CIA game in Chile when they got Allende. And the game against Castro in Cuba—except Castro was too smart for them. And now a game against the leftist Prime Minister who already showed signs of using the North Sea oil riches to forge an independent British policy in Europe, out from under the American thumb.
“You are bastards,” Devereaux said finally.
“No—” said Ruckles. He pulled down his hands now and stared at Devereaux with his broken face. “No more than you.” He even managed to grin—a broken-toothed grin, his mouth filled with blood. “It’s all the same—”
Devereaux fired once. Ruckles was thrown hard against the marble wall behind the toilet and then slumped to the floor.
Ruckles stared at Devereaux in death; blood ran on his face as though he were still alive, still in pain.
Splatters of blood dotted the brown corduroy coat Devereaux wore. They were wet spots but they would not be noticed when they dried. There were spots of blood on his hands as well.
Devereaux replaced the gun in his belt. His face was frozen as he stared for a moment at the body of Ruckles wedged between the toilet and a compartment wall.
He opened the door and walked quickly out of the now empty washroom. He walked across the concourse and left the station. He walked until he was too tired to walk, and then he stopped and looked around and found himself at London Bridge on the east side of the immense city. He felt tired and numb. He looked at the dried spots of blood on the backs of his hands and rubbed at them.
His eyes were old and vacant in that instant. His face was bloodless and cold.
The gray Thames surged below the place where he stood on the bridge, looking at it and at the barges on the river.
He knew that it was not useful to think of Ruckles as a human being he had just killed. He understood that death was a means or an answer to a problem, a setback in the game for one side or the other. He understood that and so did Ruckles; he knew Ruckles would have killed him just as easily. He had to kill Ruckles because the CIA must not know that Devereaux knew the game, and so that Devereaux could f
ind a way to survive.
It was all logical and very simple and Devereaux had accepted the logic of the game a long time before, when he had joined the Section.
A cockney woman, crossing from north to south across the span, saw the man on the sidewalk suddenly vomit onto the pavement. She thought he was drunk and wondered for a moment what pub would be open this early on a London morning.
24
GLASGOW
Chief Inspector Cashel of Special Branch, Dublin, had been quite wrong about the size of the crowd expected for the benefit match between the Glasgow Celtics football club and the Glasgow Rangers football club. He had told Devereaux fifty thousand would be there.
In fact, at the start of the match, 104,000 Glaswegians had crammed the stands at Ibrox Park in the middle of the old city.
But if Cashel had been wrong about the size of the crowd for Tuesday’s match, he had not been wrong about the threat of violence.
As usual, the city was divided by police lines into two parts along a street running through the center of Ibrox Park.
The Celtics fans, with their green-and-white scarves, caps, jackets, and flags, came to the park from one side; the Rangers fans, with blue-and-white adornments, came from the other side. Glasgow was for the moment a city in siege. Hundreds of policemen surrounded the field; detachments of police from other boroughs and cities filled the stands. From the start of the game, there was no sound but the constant, rumbling, threatening roar of 104,000 people caught up in a frenzy of ancient rivalries and old hatreds.
The CID man assigned as liaison to Cashel had explained it (he was from Arbroath on the eastern Scottish coast but he understood the ways of Glaswegians): The Celtics were more than the Catholic team and the Rangers more than the Protestant club. For years, no Protestant dared dream of playing for the Celtics (and vice versa) and the city had been divided on match days as a security measure so that no hapless supporter of either team would find himself suddenly confronted by a mob from the other side. In which case, it was quite likely he would be stomped to death.
Cashel, when he saw the crowd streaming into the old stadium, thought it was hopeless. And when he saw Lord Slough and his daughter—surrounded by members of the Royal Cancer Society and Glasgow city officials—enter the arena and take seats prominently at midfield, he knew it was hopeless.
He had informed his own superiors Sunday night. On Monday, the special branch of the Criminal Investigation Division of Scotland Yard had detached six men to serve as liaison in setting up a plan for protection of Lord Slough. But they explained there was only so much they could do—Glasgow on match day between the two old rival teams was a bad security risk.
The game began shortly after two P.M., and by 2:34 P.M. Tommy Kedvale of the Celtics had scored a goal.
A roar like the sound of the western ocean in a gale rolled across the field.
Cashel felt useless; felt a tension that was unbearable and yet without meaning. One rifle in that crowd was all it would take to kill Slough; one killer out of all those people.
They had tried to search the crowd at the entrances and largely succeeded. They found thirty-four sets of brass knuckles, ninety-three razor knives, twelve stilletos, a hundred seventy-six coshes, and one genuine ancient medieval mace that had been stolen two years previously from the Glasgow Museum.
But no rifles and no pistols. And, near the end of the search, with the game about to start, the frantic crowd—fearful lest it miss one moment of the game—had stormed the gate, overwhelmed the search party, and seriously injured six constables.
“You see, Mr. Cashel,” explained the young CID man from Arbroath, “The lads take it very seriously here.” He meant the game, of course.
All during the long game, Cashel searched the hundred thousand faces of the crowd, looking for the man with glittering eyes who had been so close to him on that Saturday in Innisbally. He saw the face many times, but each time, as he rushed through the crowds toward it, the face would change—it would turn out to be just a young boy or a drunk with a dock worker’s cap or someone else. Never Faolin, never the face Cashel remembered.
The match ended in late afternoon with an unsatisfactory one-to-one tie, and several fights began in the stands. Lord Slough and his party—at Cashel’s urging—was hurried out of the stadium in the final minutes, to a waiting car at the special entrance.
They were a mile away when Jimmy MacLaughlin, a supporter of the Rangers for all of his sixteen years, was beaten blind by nine young men wearing the green and white of the Celtics.
Actually, the violence was very mild and there was some discussion in the Glasgow police department about instituting a weapons search as a regular feature of Celtics–Rangers match-ups.
In the evening, in the dining room of the Glasgow Grand Hotel, Denisov glanced again at his watch. “I really think we must to be in Liverpool tonight. The next train is in forty minutes.”
“This is hopeless,” Elizabeth said for the fourth time during the meal. Actually, she felt far from hopeless: Mr. Dennis had arranged to have her arm treated, and, though she still felt the pain of the wound, she could move it and color had returned to her fingers. She had eaten well and slept well.
“Not hopeless,” said Denisov. He and Elizabeth had both been stunned by the size, noise, and general fury of the football crowd during the afternoon game. When he had dutifully asked Elizabeth to search the crowd for faces, she had even laughed.
But there had been no attempt on Lord Slough, just as Denisov predicted.
Elizabeth repeated the word “hopeless” and it was beginning to annoy him. From the start—from the moment he had followed Blatchford to Belfast—Denisov had not liked the mission. It went against everything in his nature, as though he had become Alice through the looking glass and everything had been turned upside down.
“Will there be a large crowd tomorrow morning?”
He didn’t know; they had told him nothing about it. Only “complete the mission.” But it was a mission incapable of completion: Devereaux had given him the slip in Belfast and no one knew where he was—though this morning the embassy had reported that three R Section agents had been dispatched from European bases to chase down Devereaux in London. If only they had been more open with him in the beginning, had given him more authority to deal with Devereaux as he wanted.
Angrily, he bit a piece of bread. His blue eyes clouded. Stupid bureaucrats. What did they know about the field? About conducting a mission where the rules changed moment by moment?
“Aren’t you ever going to speak, Mr. Dennis?”
Looking up, Denisov regarded the pale woman across the white table from him. Mata Hari. If the worst thing happened—if the IRA assassinated Slough and the others—then Mata Hari would die, too. And be found, complete with her identity as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, as evidence of their involvement.
“I am thinking about tomorrow, Elizabeth. You must not fail.” He took his glass of wine and sipped at it and looked at her.
They had put him in this position. He did not want to harm Elizabeth. Wasn’t she like Nasha, his younger sister? Why did they want Denisov to kill women? Even a spy.
He made a face.
Bureaucrats. They had botched it at the embassy from the beginning. Now they tell him they knew about the mirror operation from the first. How typical of the Russian mind not to trust anyone, even one’s own agent. And so Denisov had blundered in his contacts with Devereaux and O’Neill; they had wandered around Belfast like blind sheep, playing at a game none of them understood.
Denisov threw his bread down on the tablecloth. “There will not be too many people, Elizabeth. It is for the press. Who wants to see a boat go in the water? That is what boats always do. Very much in Liverpool.”
“Perhaps they won’t kill him. There,” she finished it. “Perhaps you’re wrong.”
No, Elizabeth. No more perhaps. They had been very specific about that at the embassy. The assassination of Lo
rd Slough and the Prime Minister was set for tomorrow morning by the CIA; somehow, it must be prevented, and at the same time, blame still placed on the CIA. How was Denisov to do that? They didn’t know, but he must.
So there would be shots. Perhaps. And Elizabeth Campbell would die, too, and when they found her, with the pistol, they would know she had come to kill Lord Slough and there would be a problem for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Did they think Denisov was a tightrope walker?
Prevent the assassination. If you cannot prevent it, be certain the CIA is blamed.
He could not prevent it, he was sure of that. One cannot prevent such things.
But the CIA would be blamed and perhaps that would be enough for them at the embassy.
He glanced at his watch again. They would be late for the train. He looked up and Elizabeth was now hurriedly sipping her coffee.
His eyes looked on her softly, almost fondly.
“No, Elizabeth,” he said in a gentle voice. “I am sorry to be rude. Do not hurry. Enjoy your meal. Have wine. Here, let me pour another glass for you. There will be another train. We will get to Liverpool.”
It was the least he could do.
At nine P.M., Devereaux—certain that Green was alone—made a signal to him by tapping at the glass window of the buffet.
Green had changed in two days on the run. His face was thinner, his hair wildly combed, his eyes staring and frightened. He grabbed his small valise and left the buffet.
For a moment, the two men stood on the grimy concourse of Lime Street Station and confronted each other in silence. Devereaux gazed steadily at Green until the latter’s eyes looked away.
“Did you talk to anyone?”
“No.”
“No one?”
Green looked again at him. “No.”
“All right, then. There’s still a chance.”
“For what? I didn’t think you’d be here. I—”
“Shut up.” Devereaux glanced up and down the nearly empty concourse. “There’s a room registered in the name of Andrew Cummings in the Adelphi Hotel. I want you to go there and wait. Sleep if you can. You’ll have visitors before morning.”
