Reaper

by Hurley, Graham

  “Cat Two …” he said.

  “Yeah. You and Kee.” The Inspector paused. “You read the bit about trips abroad?”

  “Yeah. If he goes to the airport, we stay on the ground.”

  “But phone.”

  “Yeah. Phone.”

  “With the flight number and the destination.” He paused again. “You’ve got their number?”

  Ingle peered at the form again. There was a contact number in the box beneath the carefully typed name. He recognized the Newry STD code. Bessbrook, he thought. Definitely Nineteenth.

  “Yeah,” he said briefly, “I have the number.” He hesitated a moment. “What are we in for?” he said at last. “Only I’m due some leave.”

  There was a pause at the other end. The board, Ingle thought. He’s turning round and looking at the fucking board, The Inspector came back, the ever-patient voice in his ear.

  “A week?” he said. “A fortnight? You tell me.”

  “Thanks.” Ingle frowned. “I hate these bastards. You know I do. They think they’re in the movies. They’re totally out of order.”

  “You’re jealous.”

  In spite of himself, Ingle grinned. It was the first time in a year he’d heard the Inspector say anything remotely perceptive.

  “You’re right,” he said, “I am.”

  “Don’t be. It’s a doddle. The bloke stays in most of the time. He’s bent, by the way.”

  “Oh?” Ingle eyed the form again. “Been there before, have we?”

  There was a moment’s silence. Then the Inspector was back again, yet another chuckle in his voice.

  “Had the haircut yet?” he said. “This month’s bath?”

  Ingle grinned again. “No,” he said, checking his appearance in the window, “gays love a bit of rough.”

  He put the phone down and stood up. Category Two surveillance was the grimmest news, himself and the new boy, Kee, hours in freezing cars, nothing to read but the paper, nothing to listen to but Radio One. He walked across to the window and stared down the street, wondering about the recent flurry of activity over the water. On the grapevine, he’d heard of other surveillance requests, other agonized conversations about overtime allocations and budgetary constraints. Somewhere along the line, in some way or other, he assumed it was to do with the latest bomb they’d found, down in Basingstoke, the one they’d dug out of the brickwork in the factory she was due to open. He’d read some of the reports. It had been a real stroke, though quite what it might have to do with Miller’s lot he didn’t know.

  He paused, thinking about Nineteenth again. The freedoms they’d acquired were legendary. Ditto, their arrogance. One day, he thought, they’ll hit the wall. One day, they’ll push it too far. He hesitated a moment longer, thinking about the factory again, how neat it had been, then he shook his head and returned to the desk, lifting the phone and dialling Kee’s home number. The number took a full minute to answer. When Ingle asked why, Kee said he’d been asleep.

  “I’m on nights,” he said drily, “as you know.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Ingle yawned, “I forgot.” He paused, reaching for Miller’s request form, looking for the target’s name again. “We copped the big one,” he said at last. “Faggot called Leeson.”

  Buddy made the call from the pay phone in the hospital lobby. He’d found the number from Directory Enquiries, and worked out more or less what he wanted to say. The number rang a couple of times. Then a woman’s voice, on a switchboard.

  “Features Department, please,” Buddy said briskly. “The people who write the longer pieces.”

  There was a crackle on the line, more ringing. Then another woman, younger, a little impatient. Buddy introduced himself and explained the situation. His wife was paralysed. Local girl. Ran a riding stables. The medics said she’d never walk again. He’d found a way of proving them wrong. To get her back on her feet, he needed publicity. The right article, in the right hands, might sort out all his problems. Time was short. He needed to get her across pretty soon. Would someone be willing, at least, to listen?

  There was a silence at the other end. Buddy had kept it brief, but there was passion in his voice, and anger, and he knew it. He closed his eyes a moment, trying to picture the scene at the other end. He’d never been in a newspaper office in his life. He supposed they got calls like this all the time. Nutters, mostly. Or blokes on the make. The woman came back. She asked him to repeat his name. He did so.

  “Buddy?” she said. “As in B-U-D …?”

  “Yeah.”

  Another silence. The whisper of conversation in the background. Then the voice again, the woman.

  “Maybe we should meet,” she said. “Can you make it into the office?”

  Buddy grinned into the middle distance. A man in a passing wheelchair grinned back.

  “You bet,” Buddy said. “Whenever you like.”

  NINE

  Miller met Charlie, late afternoon, in a car-park in Newry.

  Miller had spent the day at Army HQ in Lisburn, attending a debrief on another E4A incident the previous evening. E4A was a specialized RUC unit, current jewel in the Unionist crown, tasked to confront terrorism on its own terms. The RUC guarded its secrets with a passionate jealousy, and the potential for conflicts with outfits like Nineteenth Intelligence were obvious. All too frequently, they found themselves competing for the same touts, running the same agents, and the opposition was becoming ever more skilful at setting the various Intelligence agencies at each other’s throats.

  The previous evening, a hurried E4A operation had gunned down a youth in the Markets area of Belfast. There was some concern that the youth may well have been on a job for MI5. Miller, with a current operation to protect, had been obliged to attend a council of war. Four hours of argument round a table in a hot, stuffy room at Lisburn had done nothing but confirm his own conviction that the best hits were the ones you kept good and tight, that the real danger lay in inviting other people to your party, that you’d best keep your mouth shut, and your fingers crossed, and your powder dry.

  Charlie was waiting by the ticket machine in the car-park. In ten minutes or so he was off down to Dublin to recce the target house, take a quiet selection of surveillance shots, and weigh the chances of implanting a listening device. The latter, a spike microphone of some description, would enable them to monitor conversations inside the house. They’d done it on a number of previous occasions, and it enabled them to gauge exactly where everyone was, at any given moment. More than helpful, if they expected any kind of welcome.

  Miller parked his car beside the ticket machine, and got out. Charlie went through the usual motions.

  “Change?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Pound.”

  “Pound?”

  Miller fumbled in his pockets. Routines like this were costing him a fortune. He found a pound and gave it to Charlie. Charlie put twenty pence of his own in the machine, and extracted a ticket. He pocketed the pound, claiming that Miller owed it to him anyway.

  Miller looked at him, saying nothing. He’d liked the quiet young Irishman on sight. The boy had begun service life in a regular unit, the Irish Fusiliers. Then, a year back, he’d taken the six-month course at Hereford, and had acquired a generous helping of the usual SAS skills. At this point, Charlie had opted for promotion and a return to his regiment in BAOR, but the MoD, impressed by the end-of-course reports from Hereford, had invited him to London for a chat.

  As far as possible, the Army tried to keep serving Irishmen out of Northern Ireland but there were talents in this young captain which deserved, in their estimation, specialist application. For one thing, he had the perfect Republican camouflage: an Irish childhood, a soft Galway accent, even a modest command of Gaelic. For another, he had a real gift for acting, the kind of personal diffidence that made it easy to shrug on another man’s clothes, another man’s accent, another man’s beliefs. For a third, he was – as far as anyone could reasonably determine – en
tirely without fear. At Hereford, in the end, they put it down to physiology. Charlie, wrote the training sergeant, had the lowest blood pressure of anyone he’d ever met.

  For Miller, the boy was already irreplaceable. He had brains, and limitless courage, and a real talent for the war of shadows they fought every day of their working lives. Charlie’s appearance and his manner – the roll-ups, the pony tail, the drawers full of T-shirts – suggested a refugee from the late sixties. But all of that was a blind. Because Charlie had come up with a stream of ideas, and the best of them – the counselling clinic in West Belfast – had tapped a very rich seam indeed. He now commuted to the city twice a week. He rented a small, bare room over a launderette in a street off the Springfield Road. He’d befriended the local GPs, and showed them his CV, his degree in psychology from London University, and offered them a service they could no longer provide themselves. He would be available, he said, simply to listen. Patients for whom medication was a waste of time. Housewives who were simply at their wits’ end. Teenagers who couldn’t cope any more. Men whom the Troubles were turning inside out. These people he could offer an hour or so each week, no charge, total privacy. He could give them sympathy, and attention, and try and return them to their families a little stronger, a little more intact. The doctors, most of them, had leapt at it. It was, they said, a wonderful initiative. Charlie was accessible. He was the right age. He had the right qualifications. The right temperament. Even the right religion. They called him a Counsellor, and with a glad heart they sent him patient after patient, the richest source of raw intelligence anyone had yet had the wit to locate.

  Thus, through one of his patients, the first warning about Leeson. Charlie had spotted the potential there, straight off. He’d seen what use the man might be in the right hands, and he’d run the operation ever since. That was how they’d got to Reaper. That was how they’d flushed the man out.

  Now, Charlie looked at Miller and smiled. “Well, sir?” he said. “You’ve news?”

  Miller shook his head. Moments before leaving Lisburn and driving south, he’d checked again, by phone. “Nothing,” he said.

  “No booking?”

  “No.”

  “Not even provisional?”

  “I’ve told you. There’s nothing on the computer. The BA people have checked twice. Same for Aer Lingus.”

  Charlie nodded. “It’s Thursday,” he pointed out. “Leeson’s due Saturday.”

  “I know,” Miller smiled. “He’ll turn up. I know he will.”

  Charlie looked at him a moment, then shrugged. “OK,” he said, “as long as you’re sure.”

  He hesitated a moment, then peeled the sticky grip from the back of the parking ticket, and stuck it on the front of Miller’s raincoat. What could, in most armies, have been insolence, was – instead – a gesture of quiet affection.

  “They’ve a fierce wee warden here,” he said, “you’ll best not get caught.”

  Connolly sat in the back of the plane, waiting for the stewardess to answer his call. They’d been airborne now for nearly ten minutes. The coast of County Down was behind them, the BAC I-II still climbing through heavy cloud, the rain beating on the windows, Ulster’s eternal farewell. In an hour, they’d be landing at Gatwick. From Gatwick, he’d take a series of trains to Carshalton, his parents’ house, his neat little suburban childhood, shelter from the growing storm. He’d phoned them from Aldergrove Airport. His mother, surprised and delighted, said she’d find something special for supper.

  The stewardess walked down the aisle towards him. On midday flights, he knew, they didn’t automatically serve alcohol. Oblivion was strictly on request. He asked for a large Scotch and soda. The stewardess reached over and cancelled his call button. He watched her walking back down the aisle, bodychecking slightly as the plane hit turbulence. A woman in the next row reached for her husband’s hand. His head turned towards her, and Connolly could lip-read the conversation, the husband reassuring his wife that everything was OK. He wondered, for a moment, whether it was true. And if it wasn’t, then whether or not he really cared.

  He’d spent two days sharing his life with a brown envelope full of twenty-pound notes, and the growing conviction that events were fast spooling out of control. His academic work had all but ceased, his lectures delivered from the remains of last year’s notes, his voice barely rising above a mumble, the essays of his small tutorial group returned late, scarcely marked. Evenings, when normally he’d take the bus up to Mairead’s, help with the supper, put the kids to bed, watch telly together, stay over, he now spent by himself, locked inside the bare, empty flat, dreading the footsteps that paused on the pavement outside, the shadow falling over his curtains, the brisk tap-tap at the door.

  A prisoner of his own making, he retired early, creeping into the tiny bedroom at the back, climbing into the narrow iron bed, listening for hours to the steady drip-drip of the cistern overflow outside his window. From time to time, down towards the City Centre, there’d come the familiar howl of the police sirens, or the ambulance, or the fire brigade, and he’d close his eyes, and picture the buses overturned in the road, the flames licking up round the big, fat tyres, the litter of half-bricks and broken milk bottles. Images from the early seventies, images he knew were largely out of date, were returning to haunt him. Kids with Armalites. Hooded faces over open graves. Belfast, once the perfect setting for an ambitious young historian with an interest in the twilight of Empire, was fast becoming a nightmare.

  The stewardess returned with a miniature of Scotch and a tin of soda. He decanted the whisky over the ice cubes in the clear plastic beaker, and added a similar measure of soda. The whisky torched the back of his throat, making his eyes water. Tasting it, he thought once again of Leeson.

  He’d tried to phone him twice during the day, home number, but there’d never been a reply. In the evening, once, he’d ventured down the street, using the pay phone in a busy bar on the corner, preferring the swirl of other people’s conversation to the terrible isolation of the phone box on the Ormeau Road. Using the phone box, after dark, was an open invitation. He’d be exposed, perfectly lit, the easiest target of all. Whoever they were, they’d get him.

  But Leeson hadn’t been in the night he’d phoned, and hugging the shadows on his way back to the flat he began to wonder whether he’d already left for Washington. It was possible, certainly, some sudden change of plan, an earlier summons than he’d been expecting. But Connolly knew as well that the results of his medical tests were due any time, and even Leeson would see the merits of waiting to find out exactly what was wrong with him. Those results might mean a great deal to Connolly, too, and so in the end he’d decided to fly anyway, blowing sixty quid on a one-way ticket to Gatwick.

  He sipped the whisky, rehearsing it all in his mind again. Travelling on a Thursday would give him two nights and a day to get Leeson to Dublin. Quite how he was going to do it, he didn’t know. Maybe he’d dress the thing up, pretend it was a trip to see an old friend, appeal to his sense of adventure. That, of course, would hardly prepare the man for the meeting itself, for an hour or so with the cold, pale face he’d met across the table, but it would at least discharge his own obligations. His duty done, Leeson delivered, he could safely return to Belfast, and Mairead, and the oh-so-simple life he dimly remembered from last year, before Christmas, before Danny’s alleged friends shattered the fantasy, and everything had gone black.

  He pondered the plan. He’d no idea what would happen to Leeson, what they’d do to him, but he didn’t anticipate violence. Whatever they had in mind presumably depended on Leeson remaining in one piece. Who knows? Maybe he’d even enjoy it.

  He gazed out of the window. They were up at cruising height now, the late afternoon sun slanting down on the tops of the clouds beneath them. He felt better with the whisky inside him, warmer, more optimistic. Maybe he’d simply tell Leeson the truth. Tell him everything. Tell him what had happened, Mairead, her dead husband, their own long courtship
, his need for her, his longing, the way she made him feel. Maybe that was the answer. He considered the proposition for a moment or two then shook the memories away. Leeson, he knew, was a realist. He had no use for fairy-tales.

  The plane dipped a wing, and began a long, slow descent, in towards London. Connolly glanced out of the window, as the cloud reached out for them, parting in a blur of white. For the first time, he wondered whether he’d ever go back to Belfast again, whether it might not be wiser to simply draw a line and rule it out of his life. Then he remembered the man in the front of the Cortina, inspecting his driving licence in the light from the glove box. He’d made a note of the Carshalton address. And he’d smiled, handing the licence back.

  Connolly shook his head slowly, draining the last of the Scotch. The rain was smearing the window again, and the turbulence was back.

  Leeson sat in the clinic, one leg crossed over the other, waiting for a verdict.

  He’d taken the tests ten days earlier, largely at Connolly’s prompting. They’d helped themselves to two separate blood samples, the inner surfaces of both forearms. They’d excised tiny chunks of skin from the raised, purplish blotches on his chest. They’d poked around the glands in his neck and armpits where he’d complained of pain. And they’d taken a careful history of his sexual encounters, partner by partner, covering half a dozen sheets of foolscap paper with the answers to their endless questions.

  Now, alone in the consulting room, he waited. He had no idea what had been wrong with him, and a week of feeling much better had quickly persuaded him that he was probably cured. But the purple rash was still there, the strange blotches, and the last couple of days he’d begun to suspect that they were spreading. What that meant, God only knew, but he’d had another call from his American friend, and the news was far from cheerful. The poor man was back in hospital. By the sound of his voice, he’d aged a decade. The doctors had stopped answering his questions. They said they’d done everything they could. At the end of the call, he’d begun to cry. “I’m dying,” he told Leeson, “I know it.” At the time, Leeson had put the tears down to stress and the man’s appetite for dramatic gestures. Later in the day, though, he’d been sufficiently alarmed to phone the clinic and remind them of the phone number of the New York hospital where his friend was being treated.