Confessor (10 page)

His return would be easier and even more illegal, for a military helicopter would dubiously nip across and lift him from a field.

Here and now, Tony walked into Bewley’s, looking like a visiting farmer, hailing Herbie in a brogue you could have cut with a pair of blunt scissors.

They ordered from a cheeky waitress who was bent on telling them that she had seen that lovable little ET only the night before—and she did not mean at the “filums,” as she would have pronounced it. Bewley’s employed a number of fey waitresses to supply atmosphere.

The huge plates of double fish and chips arrived, followed by the pots of tea and the piles of bread and butter. Tony spoke very low as they ate.

“This isn’t a whisper, Herb. This is for real and it’s bloody urgent.” He slid an envelope under the table. “In case I get disintegrated.”

His story came from a source deep within the Provos; a source so secret that he lived in constant terror, but always came back for more, because the money was good and he really did not believe in the Cause. From this source, plus what they called ELINT—gee-whiz electronics that plucked conversations out of the air without the aid of wires and bugs.

“A new, specially recruited Active Service Unit,” Tony said in almost a whisper. “Details in the envelope. Two men and two women. Hard as nails, and all with a lot of experience.”

“We know when?”

“Within the month is all, but they
are
specialists, each one of them, and their operation is called
Kingmaker
—work that one out for size.”

“Shouldn’t I pass it to our sisters?” Herb meant the Security Service.

“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.

John 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.