by James Adams
But it was the attack where she had been shot that Dickens went back to again and again.
“All I can say, Rita, is if you’d been a member of my family, I would never have sent you out that night,” he would explain. “No training, no reconnaissance, no one of any experience leading. They were sending you out to get killed. And that is not the way any member of my family would behave.”
When the leadership called off the hunger strike, the bond had been forged. Between them Rita and Bryan had seen it through together. For Dickens the difficulty was to build on the trust that had been established without alerting the other members of the IRA. The hospital stay was easy to fix and extend and it was six months before Rita was finally out of the doctor’s hands, and by then parole was an option.
They had never discussed spying but they had discussed peace and in a strange way had evolved boundaries to their relationship. She had begun by passing fragments of information, small details that he said just helped to fill in a few gaps. In fact, for two years there had been nothing of value. But gradually, as she moved up the IRA hierarchy, she knew more and the information became more significant. Always she talked of plans and never of people. Always she talked of likely targets but never of timing. This way lives were saved but her own loyalties to the Movement were not fatally compromised.
She had come to think of the spying as a way of carrying her father’s torch. This was not the revolution they had talked about but she believed that he would approve of her fighting in her own way for change. He was a loner and she, too, had taken an independent road but she was convinced that her course was more likely to succeed than his.
She and Bryan had become lovers, of course. It was both inevitable and essential. Bryan had taken her to bed one night in a safe house on Galwally Avenue in New-townbreda overlooking the Belvoir Park Golf Course. He had expected a sordid evening but had, in fact, been charmed by her innocence and captivated by her body. She had filled out by then but there was still no real fat. Her breasts were small and tight against her chest, her stomach flat, thighs firm and strong. Her pubis was covered in thick, dark hair and the folds within were constantly, unaccountably, wet, which he found tremendously stimulating. He was a kind, careful lover and for a time he forgot the microphones and the cameras that recorded the words and the action.
It seemed to seal their bargain and they had been lovers ever since. As they had grown closer, he had let some of his own barriers down, bringing out the pipe he preferred. She now called him Bryan. In their own way they were like a married couple, comfortable with a familiar relationship that gave both sides what they wanted.
He had called her using the code of two rings and then hanging up so that she knew to meet at their rendezvous in four hours’ time. They had met in a Val’s Video in Sydenham, across the river from Greencastle where she still lived. The IRA had recently diversified into video hire stores but then so had Army Intelligence. It gave them unparalleled access to the local community and, by careful analysis, it was possible to discover who was home when by what videos were rented. It also had its virtues as a place to meet because the Army could control the opening and closing of the shop, so Rita would arrive just before lunch and immediately she came through the door, the “Closed For Lunch” sign was posted.
Bryan kissed her on the lips and her hand slipped into his as they sat together on a sofa in the room behind the store.
His eyes seldom smiled now although the crinkles had deepened to continue to give the impression of good humour. Northern Ireland more than anything else had changed his personality. He had first arrived at the end of the 1980s at the end of Tom King’s turn as Secretary of State. There was talk of progress then, a widely held belief that Catholics and Protestants were weary of the struggle, that compromise might be possible. Then Peter Brooke had arrived with his strangled upper-class vowels, his Farmer Giles manner and his brilliant diplomacy, which had managed to move the stone up the hill a few feet.
The rock rolled down again when the Nelson case surfaced. Brian Nelson was the intelligence officer for the Ulster Defence Association, the Protestant terrorist group, who had been recruited by Dickens in 1987. For nearly three years he had filed over 700 reports producing a stunning amount of timely, and accurate intelligence. The Nelson files had allowed the Army to stop the sectarian murders that had plagued Northern Ireland and prevented the assassination of a number of prominent politicians.
Then John Stevens, the Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire, had been appointed by the government to investigate collusion between the security forces and the Loyalists. Before the Army were aware of what was happening, Nelson had been questioned and arrested by Stevens. For Dickens, the arrest meant the end of what had been perhaps his most successful intelligence operation. That was bad enough, but then Stevens insisted that Nelson be tried for his involvement in murder. Despite intensive lobbying, Stevens refused to make an exception, showing what Dickens considered to be extraordinary ignorance of the compromises that were necessary in the fight against terrorism.
Nelson was tried and convicted. Dickens was allowed to make a plea for leniency behind the cloak of anonymity in the court. But it was no use. Nelson, a man who had exhibited enormous courage in fighting terrorism on the government’s behalf and whose information had saved perhaps 200 lives, was jailed for life. The travesty of such a miscarriage of justice convinced Dickens that there was little he could do to alter the course of Ireland’s painful history.
In the aftermath of the Nelson case he watched as the murders mounted — forty-one tit-for-tat killings in the six months after his arrest compared with none in the preceding six. With the deaths, the political climate changed and both sides once again withdrew to their previous positions which even the affable Peter Brooke was unable to change before he, too, was moved on.
Dickens had lowered his sights now to try and prevent some of the killings. Like so many who tried to solve the Northern Ireland problem, Dickens had been broken by the complexity of the issues and the sheer stubborn bloody-mindedness of the people who insisted that every discussion in the 1990s had a relevance to events that happened four hundred years earlier. He no longer believed that he could provide a solution. His goal, like so many Brits, was containment. He was determined to limit the damage done by both sides so that the majority could live something approaching a normal life. That, too, was a goal which many shared but few had achieved. It was with this limited idea in mind that he had called Rita to the meeting.
“You’ve heard about the latest attack in England?” She nodded. “Well, that was ten innocent civilians dead. And I am not interested in the Adams argument that they were government people engaged in the war. You and I both know that’s just crap for the media and even if they buy it, I certainly don’t.”
“Well, why don’t you catch whoever it is that’s doing it?” she asked. “You must have enough people on the trail by now. Surely the Boys aren’t that good?”
The sarcasm annoyed Dickens but he bit back the sharp retort. Instead he said, “You know it’s not that easy. Since the reorganization at the end of the eighties the cells are virtually impossible to penetrate. To be honest, we haven’t a lead worth bothering with. We either need luck or hard intelligence. We’ve clearly run out of the former so I’m coming to you for the latter.”
“I haven’t been involved in this operation. These days I’m running liaison between Danny and the leadership, keeping lines clear. I’m just a messenger and I don’t get involved in the planning.”
“I know all that,” Dickens replied. “But there must be something — anything — that will give us an indication of just who the people are and where they plan to strike next.”
He saw Rita shake her head slightly and when he spoke again there was a note of impatience in his voice. “Look, we know that even Adams and Murray are getting nervous about the killings. Too many civilians. It’s bad for PR at home and abroad and Adams can’t afford that right now.”
/>
“Well, you know more than me,” she responded.
“I doubt it.” He paused, taking a few moments to tamp down the tobacco in his pipe. “What about your friend Morrison? Aren’t you due for a visit soon?”
Since her release from jail she had moved into the IRA’s organizational structure, first working for An Phoblacht, the Republican newspaper, then for Iris, the monthly Provo magazine, and then joined Danny Morrison’s staff as deputy head of public affairs for the Movement. Like so many positions in the IRA, this had a dual purpose. On the one hand public affairs meant dealing with the media and on the other it meant advising Adams and others on the General Council about tactics and their effect on public perceptions.
Morrison is one of the Movement’s key strategists. At the Sinn Fein annual convention in Dublin in 1981 he had first articulated what became known as “the bullet and the ballot box” strategy: “Will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in this hand, we take power in Ireland?”
Since then, the IRA had fought elections in the north and south while encouraging terrorism. But with the loss of Gerry Adams’s seat in West Belfast in the 1992 election, the political wing of the IRA gave way to those who favoured a military solution. This suited Morrison, who in recent years had fallen out with Adams; he thought Adams was too willing to compromise with the British.
A short, slim, feisty figure, Morrison is known to his friends in the Movement as Bangers, IRA slang for nerves. It is a perfect description of the man who chain-smokes Benson and Hedges cigarettes and drinks large amounts of Guinness with a Jameson whiskey chaser, known to locals as a Wee One. There are plenty of people who smoke and drink in Northern Ireland; what sets Morrison apart is his apparently inexhaustible energy. Adams once described Morrison as a “Duracell Drummer”, referring to a TV advertisement that showed a soldier marching in endless circles beating a tin drum. Morrison has a similar habit of pacing and smoking while talking, which everyone in the Movement finds very unsettling. In fact, Morrison’s nerves are no worse than anyone else’s. He is just less able to disguise the fact.
As the flag carrier for the militants, the end of the 1980s saw a rise in his prestige which was sharply curtailed after he was arrested for falsely imprisoning Sandy Lynch, a police informer who was about to be executed by the IRA. It was a stupid mistake by a normally careful man which could have removed him from the scene altogether. But, certain he would end up in jail, he laid his plans carefully.
All high-risk IRA prisoners are held in Long Kesh prison eight miles from Belfast, where there is different access for the families of prisoners than for ordinary prison visitors. Divorced from his first wife, Sandra, Morrison saw an opportunity to keep up contact with the outside world and looked for a willing member of the Movement to marry. Rita was volunteered — much to the fury of his then girlfriend who worked for the BBC in Belfast. It had been truly a marriage of convenience. Rita did not even like Morrison — she found his smarmy way with women and his sexist jokes repugnant. Certainly they had never slept together, although she had been obliged to get used to an enforced intimacy which she hated.
But the arrangement had worked well and Morrison was able to maintain his influence in the Movement through Rita and the complex network of IRA terrorists who use their families to pass messages in and out of the jail. This link had made Rita even more valuable because, as the conduit, she was able to intercept both sides of any correspondence. Thus Bryan had a reasonable hope that she might produce some useful intelligence from the forthcoming visit.
“I’m going out to the Kesh this afternoon,” she said.
“I’m to see Gerry first so I suppose there’ll be a message in and maybe Danny will have one for me to pass on.”
“Well, we’d like to know if there is anything relating to England.” He held up his hand to ward off the protest he saw forming on her lips. “I know. I know. Look, we’ve known each other long enough. I understand how far you can go and you understand what 1 want. I’m not asking you to betray your people. I’m not even asking for details on a bombing of an Army barracks. What I want is to save any more civilians from being killed. It was innocent businessmen last time. It could be innocent women and children the next.”
He paused to allow her to protest, to argue with his interpretation, but she said nothing. He reached out a hand to touch hers, hoping the brief intimacy might help bridge the gap between hope and reality.
“I know you’ll do what is right,” he said and was relieved to see Rita give a slight nod.
CHAPTER VIII
Sean thought it funny that he should have ended up in Waterloo Road, a Southampton street named to commemorate one of the great British victories. He hoped it was not an omen.
He had arrived two days earlier, two hours after the success at Winchester. He had dropped the car behind the railway station, just next to the Spitfire Museum, hoping that the police might think he had taken the train out of the area. Actually, he doubted that they fell for such an obvious ruse these days but you used every opportunity there was available.
Then he had walked north up Hill Lane towards the football club, following the memorized directions that had been given to him over the telephone just after he had left the previous safe house on his way to Winchester. After twenty minutes he had turned left into one of those 1930s British housing estates built for the working classes that have become quite fashionable in London but remain stubbornly lower middle class elsewhere in the country.
Waterloo Road was identical to Inkerman Place which was identical to Omdurman Road. It was this sameness that gave Sean the anonymity he needed. There was nothing to distinguish No. 23 from the rest of the road. But when he walked up the small front path with the pansies and the last of the daffodils sealing the peaceful suburban atmosphere he knew that once more he had come home — or what he had come to accept as home, which in reality was simply another place to sleep and to hide. But when he thought about it, he always referred to these places as “home”, which he supposed was his subconscious trying to hold on to some semblance of stability in the increasingly fractured world where he struggled to survive.
When he turned up at the safe houses he never knew what to expect. Sometimes it might be an old-guard Republican, some lonely old man reliving the memories of youthful Republican activism. These days, such people were rare because the planners in Belfast and Dublin believed that most of them were on some British list somewhere, and also old age had taken its inevitable toll. Instead, they were more like the occupants of No. 23, innocents who had at some time pledged allegiance to the cause and now after years of inactivity had been summoned to the flag.
Like the sleeper agents planted by the former Soviet Union, the reaction of the people to the call to serve was mixed. Sometimes they were thrilled at finally having their chance to do something. Others were reluctant participants, too frightened to refuse but regretting a promise made in a flush of romantic enthusiasm years before. Sean had learned to judge just where he stood and for the first couple of hours he tried to decide between further flight or trust.
He had been told to ask for Judith Peters and it was she who answered the door. He was her cousin from Bath, travelling the country looking for work as a steeplejack, a profession that had fallen on hard times recently. It was thin but it would be enough. The British public rarely asked questions and only showed enough interest to cover the unavoidable social pleasantries. So it was with Tony Peters, a round, sociable man who worked in the Monkey House at the nearby zoo.
It was Judith who knew his real identity. She had originally come from Ireland just before the Second World War as Irish Prime Minister Eamon De Valera launched a purge against the Movement in a gesture designed to appease the British and ensure Ireland’s neutrality in the forthcoming conflict. She had married Tony soon after the war, her Irish heritage subsumed by English suburbia. But she was one of those who had never forgotten, and when a stranger from the logist
ics cell came to her home three months earlier, she’d had no hesitation in accepting the challenge.
Sean lay watching the curl of smoke from his first cigarette of the morning waft towards the ceiling to fragment into a thousand tendrils. The two days had done him some good, but already this home was looking dangerous. The problem was neither Tony nor Judith but their young daughter. As a general rule, he stayed clear of women while on active service. They were nothing but a damn nuisance. Either you got attached to them or they to you. Either way the road led to mistakes and betrayal and he could afford neither.
It had been a long time but this was not the moment to break his enforced celibacy. He had known from the instant he had met Sally that she was trouble. Small, with short dark hair and enormous brown eyes, her face was almost perfectly round with a pair of lips that had not yet decided whether to form a bad-tempered pout or a sensual Monroe moue. She had been wearing the uniform of the young: baggy jeans, T-shirt and a blouson jacket that effectively disguised her figure. He had examined her not as a woman but as a potential threat and then quickly dismissed her. Although he had noticed her eyeing him speculatively, he had dismissed the question in her gaze.
He had asked Judith about her that afternoon as they walked along the banks of the Itchen. Sally had been an afterthought, explained Judith, a very late arrival after they had both given up all thought of having children.
The story that unfolded was a familiar one of older parents struggling to bridge a generation gap that was even wider than normal, and a child/woman of sixteen with knowledge she couldn’t understand and parents who no longer had the words to help her.
The damage was done when they all sat watching News at Ten that first evening. The lead item was the shooting at Winchester station. Sean was used to hearing about himself and was sure he showed no reaction. For Judith, the graphic account and the footage of grieving families and the blood-stained platform were horrifying. She could not resist looking at Sean to see if the results of his work that day produced some sign of emotion. She saw none, but Sally noticed the look, registered its intensity. Her mother had never made any secret of her sympathies for the Republican Movement but Sally had never had any reason to believe that sympathy would be translated into action. Then Sean had arrived, a cousin she had never heard of who seemed to do nothing much for a man supposed to be looking for work. In one of those intuitive leaps, Sally made the link between the onscreen drama and Sean’s appearance.
