Confessor

by John Gardner

  “Doubt it. These lads and lasses need stopping before they start. If our sisters get it, they’ll put the Plod onto them and that means the usual bloody tie-down. Years in court trying to prove the impossible. These people’ve got to be stopped dead, if you follow me.”

  “We do this off our own cricket bats? Pin them down, then bring in the Plod?”

  “No, you idiot. I’m suggesting that we take care of it quietly. Maybe a case of terminal accident. The last thing anyone wants is some cockeyed arrest followed by indignant shouts and demos. Take it high up the chain but nowhere near the top if you can help it. This is very serious and we have an early warning, so we should make use of it. Could be done before they leave the North if necessary.”

  They talked for the best part of two hours, then parted right there in Bewley’s, with Tony leaving first, Herb ordering two fairy cakes, eating them, then paying the bill and pushing outside into the rain to get a cab back to the airport, where he waited for two hours for a flight to Heathrow.

  On the following morning, having examined everything in Tony’s envelope in the privacy of St. John’s Wood, Herbie met with the group known as Coordination A. He had telephoned Head Office and used the word Amber, which was the way you did things in those days. The top brass were always careful not to get involved with an Amber operation for they were usually what the Americans called Black—an operation that almost certainly broke the law.

  Coordination A—one of those permanent committees always around to deal with things like this—consisted of Apted, a bellicose former field officer who knew the North and its troubles from way back, and Archie Blount-Wilson, known in the trade as the Whizzer, a man with a penchant for splendidly tailored gray suits, and striped shirts with lots of cuff showing off gold links. The Whizzer sported iron gray hair, and his contacts in Whitehall and government were legendary. He was their link with the mandarins of Whitehall. Last, there were two fixers, by name Parsons and Deacon, called for obvious reasons the Church Militants, for they always worked together and had a dual reputation of taking shortcuts but always coming up smelling of roses.

  They met in a very secure basement room and Big Herbie told the story, showed the pictures and brought forth the worried looks.

  “Should really go to the sisters,” Apted began. “But I can see why Tony’s shy of that.”

  “By all that’s holy, we should bypass the sisters and go straight to the Minister, who will probably seek refuge with the PM, then heaven knows what’ll happen.”

  The Church Militants remained silent, though their looks spoke of cutting corners and of death by any possible means.

  “Personally, if the target’s as big as this”—Apted was off on a short monologue—“we should just get some of Tony’s thugs to kill them where they are. The trouble is, though, that the Provos are bloody hydra-headed. Cut off an arm and they grow a more dangerous claw. Object of the exercise is really to let them get in, lay their plans, then take ’em out. More tricky, but the best solution.”

  “We don’t know exactly where or when?” the Whizzer asked.

  “We know a lot, including the names.” Herbie touched the grainy prints. “Names and records. These guys are dangerous.”

  “Might I suggest the JIC …?” The Whizzer began, and was howled down. Give it to the Joint Intelligence Committee and they would still be arguing come Doomsday.

  “Look, Whizz.” Herbie’s eyes became shifty. “Whizz, old sheep, this is real-world stuff. The target’s clear enough and they’re out for what they call a spectacular. Got to be stopped.”

  “Then how if I idle along to the Minister and get the green light?”

  “You mean do it ourselves?”

  “Well, not exactly ourselves. I mean nothing on paper, but a nice nod from the Minister and a wink from the PM’s office.”

  So it was decided. Wrongly, as it turned out, but it seemed to be for the best at the time. From that moment on, they all spoke of the target as Rich and Famous. The real name was never mentioned, not even in the dramas that followed.

  From what little came out at a much later date, the Whizzer went to the Minister, who immediately, in a careful moment of watching his own back and making sure that he would never take the fall—mixed, of course, with personal panic—decided that COBRA had to be informed. This was too serious a matter to be left to him.

  COBRA, as everyone knows, is the acronym for Cabinet Office Briefing Room Annex and is the place where the government’s own crisis control committee meets to decide action when there is a national state of emergency.

  COBRA had first shot itself into the consciousness of the general public in 1980 during the infamous siege of the Iranian Embassy, which ended in an effective bloodbath: the blood coming from terrorists who had held hostages within the Embassy for six days; the blood brought forth by members of the SAS, who negotiated only with Heckler & Koch machine pistols, 9mm automatics and stun grenades; the blood called out by COBRA.

  It was noted at the time that the SAS looked strangely like terrorists themselves in their black ski masks and nondescript uniforms. There was no doubt, on that occasion, that COBRA had ordered the assault, just as the public were told exactly who sat and made the final decisions in the Cabinet Office Briefing Room Annex.

  On this occasion, people could only presume, later of course, that men and women in very high places had authorized what became known as Cataract. No names ever appeared in the press, nothing came out regarding who sat on COBRA, but authorization was undoubtedly given to the members of Coordination A, who were also never named—“Thank God for political ambition,” as the Whizzer put it.

  The green light came within twenty-four hours, though under the strange compartmentalism of the Office as it operated at the time, not even the Chief was told what might, and eventually did, happen. There were odd whispers that something was in the wind, but details were kept locked in certain people’s heads, or in safes with particularly sensitive combinations.

  So, now there were three definite kinds of performers in the drama: those who officially knew that the Provos were about to launch a very special Active Service Unit into the field—which meant the U.K. mainland—and could not deny their knowledge should anything go wrong; those who had the same information but, for one reason or another, would deny they knew it if there were some mishap; lastly, those who knew, whose real names would never come out but who were in very definite danger by way of their enlightenment. These latter were now joined by a fourth contingent—Tony Worboys’s Dirty Twelve: several police officers who came in at the last minute and the four members of the Special Air Service who knew details only a few hours before they went to do what they did best.

  In the here and now, in the late Gus Keene’s study in the Dower House, Big Herbie Kruger turned the page and saw the documents giving the records of the four members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who had been chosen to carry out what they called Kingmaker. In his head he saw them on videotape and during the final terrible moment in the West End of London, not a stone’s throw from Oxford and Regent streets.

  He looked down the pages and did not even have to read the dossiers, for the facts surrounding the quartet were engraved on his memory like the songs he had learned in childhood.

  All four were in their early thirties, children of the revolution, confirmed in the idea that the British Security Forces in Northern Ireland—brought in during the late 1960s to stop Protestant and Catholic from tearing out each other’s throats—were an illegal occupying army, and the British public fair game for death, as they tried to pressure world opinion into the common cry of Brits Out.

  Mary Frances Duggan. A lucid, vocal young woman whose quest for the ideal had made her a courier for the Provos at the age of ten, and almost certainly a bomb maker of terrifying expertise by the age of twenty-two, for she had won a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, and crossed the border to read physics. A credit to her respectable family.

  Joh
n Michael Connor. Born 1953. Intelligent, but with little schooling. Arrested as a teenage rock hurler. Known killer. Shrewd and practiced in the art of guerrilla warfare Provo style.

  Patrick Sean Glass. Schoolmate and cellmate to Connor. Suspected bomb planter. Known, but unprovable, close-up killer with knife and gun.

  Anne Bridget Bolan. Provo groupie, father in banking and almost certainly one of the Provos’ accountants.

  These were the Gang of Four, as they came to be known among that little group of cognoscenti who had the ball of destiny in their hands. The quartet had everything going for them, except the fact that some long-playing traitor had already shopped them, and, through the miracle of electronic eavesdropping, they had also incriminated themselves.

  Enter Tony Worboys’s Dirty Twelve. Worboys’s own private army of watchers and followers, none of whom realized they were in the pay of the British Secret Intelligence Service. They latched on to the members of the Gang of Four on the day after the Office gave Tony the thumbs-up, and stuck with each of them, individually, either by stand-off eyeballing or by the more sophisticated microwave electronics: spiking houses, directing mikes at windows, using the current Star Wars Technology, as it was known in the trade.

  So, they had the lot; then Herbie’s people waited for their arrival, well primed and with malice aforethought. In one case—Patrick Glass’s—they knew so far in advance that the two-man team assigned to him had time for another beer before driving lazily to Heathrow and still had to cool their heels waiting for the arrival of the plane from Paris.

  There was a lot of tradecraft employed by the Gang of Four. Too much, many said. Take Glass for a start. Out of Belfast to Orly. Whoring around Paris for two days, then a direct flight into Heathrow with a German passport.

  Anne Bolan and Michael Connor arrived as a honeymoon couple from the Republic, straight out of Dublin and into Heathrow with the confetti in their hair and a first night of unbridled pleasure at the Post House Hotel, Heathrow.

  Only the most dangerous, Mary Duggan, bomb maker and zealot, almost had them snookered, for she disappeared altogether on the third day of watching. There one minute and gone the next. Tony was screaming and blaspheming at his private army, but that did no good and it was not until Mary Frances Duggan turned up at the house in the little cul-de-sac that everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

  The team was there, gathered together in this tributary among the maze of streets running between Oxford and Regent streets, in this house which, Herbie’s people maintained, was obviously the bomb factory. They had listened, they said; they had used their sophisticated equipment, they said. Lethal stuff was inside the building and it was too close for comfort, in the center of London’s West End. The clock was ticking and Coordination A sat down in its bug-proof, soundproof shelter to decide when and how they should strike.

  The sooner the better, the Whizz said, as they had the thumbs up and the complete cooperation of the Met. Apted advised killing the buggers there and then, within the next ten minutes, and was backed up by the Church Militants with hard faces and chopping motions.

  Herb wanted everything aboveboard and insisted that the Whizz go to the Minister, and the Minister to COBRA, just to get the final nod.

  The Whizz adjusted the cuffs on his Turnbull & Asser white-and-blue-striped shirt, straightened his plain silk tie and went off into the night to get the final go-ahead by word of mouth. “Nothing in writing, Whizz,” the Minister was supposed to have said. “Just do it, and let’s all pray the press applaud saving the target.” He did not use the code words Rich and Famous, or the true name, which—even after the event—did not appear in any official document.

  It took three hours for the Whizz to talk with the Minister, and the Minister to alert COBRA, then give the Whizz the okay, so that when he returned to the little committee it was almost one in the morning. At one-thirty Cataract came into being. By one thirty-five it was up and running. Four members of the SAS were flying down from their base at Stirling Lines, just outside Hereford. The final briefing took place at 4:30 A.M.

  Herbie remembered the tension, and recalled being surprised that one of the young soldiers, the Captain in charge, smoked throughout. A Colonel came with them, and he became, together with a Commander of the Metropolitan Police, the eventual villain. It was stressed that the four SAS men should resort to “termination,” as they called it, only if their lives were in danger, and, only then, if they had been given the code word Bailiff by either the Colonel or the Commander.

  The area close by the West End cul-de-sac was owned by the police at around six in the morning, and Herbie sat, with Apted and the Whizz, in a communications and control van parked with police protection close to Liberty’s in Regent Street, a quarter of a mile from the actual site of the bomb factory, yet with full color and sound on monitors fed by three cameras brought in by what the Office euphemistically called Technical Support.

  At just after nine the door to the narrow little three-story house opened and the Gang of Four came out into the raw, cold morning air without a care in the world. The door was hardly closed behind them when the first two SAS men came into the picture, seeming to materialize from the far end of the cul-de-sac. At the time, Apted whispered, “Christ, they can walk through walls.”

  There was a moment of indecision. Of all the dramatis personae, Herb remembered young Anne Bolan’s face running through a series of emotions ranging from surprise to puzzlement and, finally, to terror as a voice, off camera, shouted, “Police! Stop! Stand still!”

  The owner of the voice, in fact the SAS Captain himself, came into view a moment later, blocking the camera angle for a couple of seconds but allowing a full view on camera and tape of Mary Duggan reaching for her shoulder bag. Everyone heard the word “Bailiff!” very clearly in their headphones, though during the later hassle nobody identified the voice.

  On-screen it was sickening and almost in slow motion. Mary Duggan was lifted off her feet, her chest exploding crimson and the shots hurting eardrums—the noise, in fact, blew out one of the mikes. The other three had all moved: Anne Bolan in panic, hands moving towards Patrick Glass, who seemed, in a reflex, to go for a gun that was not there; Michael Connor trying to run towards the only possible exit, blocked by the SAS Captain and the fourth soldier. He ran two steps forward and then slid six steps back, his body whirling like a dancer’s, spinning in the crisp winter air to land, blood-soaked, across the body of Patrick Glass.

  There were nine shots. Counted, heard and logged. Nine shots, four bodies. Then the SAS team disappeared, literally like magic, whisked away in police cars, while other cars and a pair of ambulances came haring in, sirens screaming.

  One hour later, sitting in the Annex, with Vicki Grismer typing away as Herbie dictated and Apted sat looking grim-faced, the telephone rang.

  “We’re going to need some damage control,” the Whizz said, and Herbie felt, rather than heard, the disquiet in his voice. “There’s nothing in the house.”

  There was nothing: not a gun, not even a marble-sized piece of explosive; no primers, no wire, no batteries, no electronics, not even a child’s cap pistol. The Minister and COBRA were busy denying everything, while the politicos—from the opposition to highly placed members of the government—were screaming for a complete, in-depth investigation by an outside team.

  THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS? one hypocritical newspaper headline brayed that very afternoon, while by the following morning solicitors had already been retained by the families of the deceased Gang of Four. They were out to sue the British authorities for collective murder, and there was not even time or means to plant Semtex or weapons at the supposed bomb factory. The first press release actually called it a bomb factory and referred to the Gang of Four as known armed terrorists.

  So, for the first time in that particular story, Gus Keene walked on, stage left—a sinister—and gave the performance of a lifetime.

  Herbie riffled through the thick pages of documents th
at gave the true and complete story, and realized that this was only one small job in Gus the Confessor’s life. Yet it was the one that, presumably, gave the IRA—or any of their successors—the right to make him a prime target even ten years later.

  He heard the outer door slam, and physically jumped, trying to make himself smaller, hearing again the terrible thud of bullets on that cold morning.

  Bitsy Williams was back with the news that the Coroner had ruled on Gus’s death. Murder by person or persons unknown. Probably members of an unnamed terrorist organization.

  “That make sense to you, Herb?” she asked. He nodded, and she then asked if he had heard the news from the States.

  “What news?”

  She related the three news stories they had heard in the car on the way back from the inquest. The car bomb in Manhattan, the explosion in the New York subway and the awful tale of a Boeing 737 blowing up in midair.

  “It’s getting like Beirut and Bosnia,” he muttered. Then, as it suddenly struck him: “I wonder if they’re the same crew that did the London Underground?”

  “Hardly.” Bitsy looked toffee-nosed. “Look at the time factor.”

  “You ever been on Concorde?” Herbie sounded like a man who had scored a good point.

  7

  HERBIE RECALLED THAT AFTERNOON in 1984 as clearly as he could remember the conversation during dinner at the Indian on the previous night. He could smell the coffee, and Vicki’s scent as she bent to the IBM typewriter, taking his dictation straight onto paper. Then there was Apted, and he realized that it was at some point during the long wait, getting a prepared statement down on paper, that he discovered Apted’s first name—Cyril. Cyril Apted, who, it turned out, knew more about the Provos than any of them, for he had watched the danger of the North from the beginning of the present troubles. That was 1969, when Protestant and Catholic met head-on in the streets of Belfast and Derry and the blood lust began again, for Ireland had been the U.K.’s Vietnam since Good Queen Bess’s Golden Days, and long before that. In 1969, August 14 to be exact, the Protestants tried to give the bum’s rush to the Catholics. Tried to burn them from their homes. Tried to smash into their communities. Cyril told Herb that he had been there that afternoon when it began, about teatime.