Touch The Devil

by Jack Higgins

  “Nineteen seventy-six, sir.”

  Ferguson nodded. “So much has happened, so much water under the bridge, that the first wild years of the Troubles must seem like ancient history to people like you. So many names, faces.” He sighed and sat down. “During Brosnan’s visit, Orange mobs led by ‘B’ Specials, an organization now happily defunct, went on the rampage. They burned down Brosnan’s uncle’s church. In fact, the old man was so badly beaten he lost an eye.”

  “I see,” Fox said soberly.

  “No you don’t, Harry. I once had an agent called Vaughan—Major Simon Vaughan. Won’t work for me now, but that’s another story. He really did see, because, like Brosnan, he had an Irish mother. Oh, the IRA has its fair share of thugs and mad bombers and too many men like Frank Barry, perhaps, but it also has its Liam Devlins and its Martin Brosnans—genuine idealists in the Pearse and Connolly and Michael Collins tradition. Whether you agree with them or not, they are men who believe passionately that they’re engaged in a struggle for which the stake is nothing less than the freedom of their country.”

  Fox raised his gloved hand. “Sorry, sir, but I’ve seen women and kids run screaming from a bombing too many times to believe that one anymore.”

  “Exactly,” Ferguson said. “Men like Devlin and Brosnan want to be able to fight with clean hands and a little honor. Their tragedy is that in this kind of war that just is not possible.”

  He got up again and paced the room restlessly. “You see, I can’t blame Brosnan for what happened in Belfast that night in August, sixty-nine. A handful of Republicans, no more than six in all—led by Liam Devlin—took to the streets. They had three rifles, two revolvers, and a rather antiquated Thompson submachine gun. Brosnan found himself caught up in the thick of it during the defense of the church, and when one of them was shot dead at Devlin’s side he picked up the man’s rifle instinctively. He was far and away the most experienced fighting man there, remember. From then on he was caught up in the PIRA cause. Devlin’s righthand man during the period Devlin was chief of staff in Ulster.”

  “Then what?”

  “During the first couple of years or so, it was fine. Men like Devlin and Brosnan were able to take on the army, fight the good old-fashioned guerrilla kind of war that would have delighted Michael Collins’s heart. No bombs—they left that to men like Frank Barry. Taking on the army was the way Devlin saw it. He believed that was the way to gain world sympathy for his cause. By the way, how would you feel if you were the officer commanding Northern Ireland and you went into the private office of your headquarters at Lisburn one fine morning and found a rose on your desk?”

  “Good God.”

  “Yes, Brosnan loved that sort of nonsensical and foolhardy gesture, The rose was a play on his own name, of course. Not only did he do it to the top general, he also left one for the Ulster Prime Minister and for the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The implication was clear enough.”

  “He could have killed and didn’t.”

  “That’s right. Brosnan’s rose.” Ferguson laughed. “We had to make it classified to keep it out of the papers, not that they’d have believed it. Who would?”

  “What happened later?”

  “All changed, didn’t it? An escalation of the worst kind of bloodshed, and the bombers gained the ascendancy in the movement. Devlin became chief intelligence officer in Dublin, and Brosnan worked with him as a kind of roving aide.”

  Reading on through the file, Fox said, “It says here he’s got Irish nationality. How’s that, sir?”

  “Well, the American government was not exactly delighted with his activities, and then in nineteen seventy-four, Devlin sent him to New York to execute an informer who’d been helped to seek refuge in America by the Ulster Constabulary, after selling them information that had led to the arrest of nearly every member of the North Belfast Brigade. Brosnan accomplished his task with his usual ruthless efficiency and got out of New York by the skin of his teeth. When the American State Department tried to extradite him, he claimed Irish nationality, which he was entitled to do under Irish law because his mother was born there. If you’re interested, Harry, I could do the same. My grandmother was born in Cork.”

  Fox quickly glanced through the rest of the file. “And then the French business.”

  “That’s right. Devlin sent him to France in nineteen seventy-five to negotiate an arms consignment. The middleman turned out to be a police informer. When Brosnan arrived at a fishing village on the Brittany coast to take delivery, a rather large consignment of riot police was waiting for him. In the ensuing fracas, he wounded two and shot one dead, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment on Belle Isle.”

  “Belle Isle, sir?”

  “The French don’t have Devil’s Island anymore, Harry. They just have Belle Isle. In the Mediterranean, of course, which sounds pleasanter, but it isn’t.”

  Fox closed the files. “All right, sir, but where is all this getting us?”

  “Set a thief to catch a thief, Harry. You said it.”

  Fox gazed at him in astonishment. “But he’s in prison, sir. You said so yourself.”

  “For the past four years,” Ferguson said. “But what if we could do something about that?”

  The internal phone rang, and Ferguson picked it up. “Fine,” he said. “Tell him we’ll be straight down.” He turned to Fox. “Right, Harry, grab your coat and let’s get moving. We haven’t got much time.”

  He moved to the door and Fox followed him. “With respect, sir, where to?”

  “Bradbury Lines Barracks at Hereford, Harry. Headquarters of Twenty-second Special Air Service, to be precise. I’ll explain it on the way,” and he hustled on through the door like a strong wind.

  It was cold in the street outside, rain reflecting on the black asphalt, and as the big black Bentley pulled away Harry Fox leaned back against the seat and buttoned his old cavalry overcoat one-handed. So many things circling in his mind, so much had happened. Thoughts of Brosnan simply wouldn’t go away—this man he had never met, and yet he felt he knew him as intimately as a brother. He closed his eyes and wondered what Brosnan was doing now.

  Belle Isle is a rock situated forty miles to the east of Marseilles and some ten miles from the coast. The fortress, an eighteenth-century anachronism, seems to grow out of the very cliffs themselves, one of the grimmest sights in the whole Mediterranean. There is the fortress, there is the granite quarry, and there are some six hundred prisoners, political offenders or criminals of the most dangerous kind. Most of them are serving life sentences and, the French authorities taking the term seriously, most of them will die there. One thing is certain. No one has ever escaped from Belle Isle.

  The reasons are simple. No vessel may approach closer than four miles, and the designated clear area around the island is closely monitored by an excellent approach-radar system. And Belle Isle has another highly efficient protection system provided by nature itself, a phenomenon known to local fishermen as the Mill Race, a ferocious ten-knot current that churns the water into white foam even on a calm day. It is hell on earth in a storm.

  Martin Brosnan lay on his bed in a cell on the upper tier, reading, head pillowed on his hands. He was stripped to the waist, strong and muscular, his body toughened by hard labor in the granite quarry. There were the ugly puckered sears of two old bullet wounds in his left breast. His dark hair was too long, almost shoulder-length. In such matters, the authorities were surprisingly civilized, as the books on the wooden shelf above the bed indicated.

  The man on the opposite bed tossed a pack of Gitanes across. “Have a smoke, Martin,” he said in French.

  He looked about sixty-five, with very white hair and eyes a vivid blue in a wrinkled humorous face. His name was Jacques Savary, a Union Corse godfather and one of the most famous gangsters in Marseilles in his day. He had been a prisoner in Belle Isle since 1965, would remain there until he died, an unusual circumstance for one of his background. Usually the Unio
n Corse, the largest organized crime syndicate in France, was able to use its formidable influence with the judiciary to pull strings on behalf of members of Jacques Savary’s standing who found themselves in trouble.

  But Savary was different. He had chosen to ally himself to the cause of the OAS. It has been said that Charles de Gaulle survived at least thirty attempts on his life, but he had never been closer to death than during the attack masterminded by Jacques Savary in March 1965. The Union had at least saved him from execution, settling instead for a life sentence on Belle Isle, mistakenly assuming that his release could be arranged at some future date.

  Rain lashed the window, the wind howled. Savary said, “What are you reading?”

  “Eliot,” Brosnan told him. “ ‘What we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.’”

  “The Four Quartets. Little Gidding,” Savary said.

  “Good man,” Brosnan told him. “See, all the benefits of an expensive education, Jacques, and you’re getting it for free.”

  “And you also, my friend, have learned many things. Can you still open the door the way I showed you?”

  Brosnan shrugged, swung his legs to the floor, picked up a spoon from his bedside locker, and went to the door. The lock was covered by a steel plate, and he quickly forced the handle of the spoon between the edge of the plate and the jamb. He worked it across for a few seconds, there was a click, and he opened the door a few inches.

  “The same locks since eighteen fifty-two or something like that,” Savary said.

  “So what? It doesn’t get me anywhere, only to the landing,” Brosnan said. “I never told you this before, but I once worked out a way to get out. A little climbing, a certain amount of wading through the central sewer system, and I could be outside. Found that out three years ago.”

  Savary sat up, his face pale. “Then why have you never done anything about it?”

  “Because it gets you nothing. You’re still on the rock, and there’s nowhere to go.”

  There was the sound of footsteps ascending the steel steps at the far end of the tier, and Brosnan quickly closed the door and worked the spoon around again. There was a slight click, and he hurried across to the bed and lay down.

  The footsteps halted outside, a key turned in the lock, the door opened. The uniformed guard who looked in was an amiable looking, walrus-mustached man named Lebel. He wore an oilskin.

  “Stir it you two, I need your services.”

  “And what have we done to deserve the honor, Pierre?” Savary demanded.

  “When I suffer, you suffer. You know I like you,” Lebel said as they walked past him onto the landing. “The bastards have just given me the burial detail for the next month, and you know the regulations. When they take their last swim, it must be at night.”

  They paused for Lebel to unlock the door in the great steel-mesh barrier at the end of the landing, and Brosnan peered through it to the central hall below.

  “Who’s dead?” Savary asked.

  Lebel looked at the paper in his hand. “67824―Bouvier. Served thirty-two years. Cancer of the bowel.”

  It was a sobering enough thought to kill any further conversation as they descended to the hall, crossed to the outer door where the judas gate was unlocked for them by another officer. They crossed the courtyard outside and went up the steps to the mortuary.

  It was a simple enough room, with white-washed walls and lit by a single naked light. There were several well-scrubbed wooden benches in a neat row. The corpse waited on one of them, strapped in a canvas body bag. An old convict in overalls that were too large for him, shoulders bent with age, scrubbed carbolic across the floor. He paused, leaning on his broom.

  “All ready for you, sir.”

  Brosnan knew the form. He had performed the task many times before. Against one wall there was a simple wooden cart, which he trundled across, and he and Savary got the body onto it.

  “Right,” Lebel said. “Let’s go.”

  “What about the chaplain?” Savary demanded as they maneuvered the cart down the steps.

  “Said he didn’t want one. An atheist.”

  Savary was shocked. “Hell, everybody should be entitled to a priest when he goes.” He glanced sideways at Brosnan. “You make sure they do things right for me.”

  “You won’t die, you old bastard,” Brosnan said. “You’ll live forever.”

  The guard on duty at the gatehouse emerged to open the gates, and they went outside and followed the road, not down toward the harbor but curving up to the left. It was hard work, pushing uphill. Finally, they came out onto a small plateau on the edge of the cliffs.

  There was no moon, and the rock dropped sheer, a good forty feet into the water. There was an impression of waves out there, broken water, white foam, and Brosnan could feel salt on his lips like the taste of freedom.

  Behind them, Lebel switched on a light above a wooden door and unlocked it. “All right, let’s get the weights on him.”

  The small room had a wooden bench in the center on which Brosnan and Savary placed the body. One of the walls was hung with a selection of oilskins and orange life jackets. The most interesting feature was the piles of heavy steel chain coiled neatly on the floor, each one in a different weight category, according to a painted sign on the wall behind it.

  “Right.” Lebel consulted his document. “He weighed a hundred and five pounds at death. Christ, we can’t have that. He’ll float like a cork on that current.” He consulted a chart on the wall. “Ninety pounds of chain according to this. Get it on him.”

  Brosnan took a chain from the correct pile, and they proceeded to pass it through the loops specially provided for that purpose on the body bag.

  “Why all this fuss over the weights, Pierre?” Savary asked. “The way you change it, according to the body weight?”

  Lebel produced a pack of Gauloises and offered them each one. “Simple. The Mill Race isn’t one current, as most people imagine. It’s two. Stay on the surface, you’d end on the rocks at St. Denis ten miles up the coast, and bodies drifting in as regularly as that would scare old ladies walking their dogs. But drop the body down to thirty fathoms, the current takes it out to sea. So, the weight factor is critical. Anyway, let’s get this over with.”

  Brosnan and Savary carried the body between them to the edge of the cliff. They stood there for a moment, and Savary said, “I still say he should have a priest. This isn’t right.”

  Lebel, his essential decency coming to the surface, removed his cap and said, “All right. Lord, into thy hands we commend the spirit of 67824―Jean Bouvier. He didn’t get much out of this life. Maybe you can do more for him in the next.” He replaced his cap. “Okay, over with him.”

  Brosnan and Savary swung a couple of times then let go. The body turned over once, plunged into white foam below, and disappeared. They stood staring down at the water.

  Savary whispered, “The only way I’m ever going to get off this rock. I’m going to die here, Martin.”

  There was total desolation in his voice, total despair, and Brosnan put a hand on his shoulder. “Maybe—on the other hand, maybe not.”

  Savary stared at him, frowning, while Lebel closed and locked the door and switched off the light. “Okay, let’s go.”

  They followed him back down the track, heads bowed against the rain.

  * * *

  At six A.M. Ferguson and Harry Fox were having breakfast in a truck drivers cafe on the A40 just outside Cheltenham. The bacon and eggs were the best Fox could remember enjoying since the officers’ mess at Combermere barracks in Windsor. Ferguson was obviously just as impressed.

  “What about Devlin, sir?”

  “Remarkable man. He must be sixty-one now. An Ulsterman, County Down, I believe. His father was executed during the Anglo-Irish war in nineteen twenty-one for serving in a flying column. He was educated by Jesuits and took a first class honors degree in English Literatu
re at Trinity College. He is a scholar, writer, poet, and was a highly dangerous gunman for the IRA during the thirties. He went to Spain in nineteen thirty-six and fought against Franco. He was captured by Italian troops and imprisoned in Spain until nineteen forty when the Abwehr had him freed and brought to Berlin to see if he could be of any use to German intelligence.”

  “And was he, sir?”

  “The trouble was, from their point of view, he was a bad risk. Very antifascist, you see. The Abwehr’s Irish section did use him once. They’d sent an agent to Ireland, a Captain Goertz. When he got stuck, they parachuted Devlin in to get him out for them. Unfortunately Goertz was caught, and Devlin spent several months on the run before he managed to make it back to Berlin via Portugal. From then on, Ireland was a dead end as far as the Abwehr was concerned, and Devlin took a job lecturing at the University of Berlin. Until the autumn of nineteen forty-three.” Ferguson reached for the marmalade. “This really is very good. I think I’ll ask him for a jar.”

  “The autumn of nineteen forty-three,” Fox said patiently.

  “How much do you know about the German attempt on Churchill’s life in November of that year, Harry?”

  Fox laughed out loud. “Come on, sir, an old wives’ tale, that one.” And then, continuing to watch Ferguson’s face, he stopped laughing. “Isn’t it, sir?”

  “Well, let’s assume it’s just a good story, Harry. The scenario would run something like this. Devlin, bored to tears at the University of Berlin, is offered, a job by the Abwehr. He’s to parachute into Ireland, then make his way to Norfolk to act as middleman between the most successful woman agent the Abwehr had in the entire war and a crack force of German paratroopers, led by a Colonel Kurt Steiner, the object of the exercise being to apprehend Churchill, who was staying at a country house outside the village of Studley Constable.”

  “Go on, sir.”

  “All for nothing, of course. It wasn’t even Churchill, just a stand-in while the great man was going to Tehran. They died anyway, Steiner and his men. Well, all except one, and Devlin, with his usual Irish deviousness, got away.”