A Fool for a Client (4 page)

It would be especially dangerous if his face appeared in pictures from several of the incidents.
So a chang
e of appeara
nce was in order, and he
’
d make himself look different in each attack.
He smiled with wry amusement as he recalled the old Irish phrase “to be sure.”
It wasn
’
t just the phrase that made him smile, it was the memory of a joke his wife had once told him about a Catholic woman taking the pill.

“She took
two
,” his had explained.
“
To be sure!
To be sure!”

But the amusement gave way to bitterness as he remembered his purpose, and remembered also that his wife was no longer with him.
He was here to fire another salvo in the long-running dispute between the Irish people and the British, a dispute which had claimed so many.

Sean Murphy
’
s wife had been just one of the more recent victims, and now Murphy was all set to become one more of the victimizers.
But that was not how he thought of himself.
He was a fighter in a war which others had started.

*
    
*

"Can I play with the trains?"

"Not now.
If you
’
re a good boy, I
’
ll buy you one
next
Christmas.

She regretted saying it as soon as the words were out of her mouth.
With another one on the way, she didn
’
t know how she could even think of train sets, especially with Roger out of the picture, and contributing the minimum.
But Tommy had a way of mellowing the heart with his lovely bright smile and big blue eyes.
It was almost a pleasure to give in to him.
And now with Roger shacked up with that tart from the beauty salon, Tommy was all she had. Why
shouldn
’
t
she spoil him?

Of course, Tommy could be quite a handful.
He
’
d just got over the "terrible twos" and now here he was at three starting to assert himself.
She hoped he
’
d get on with his brother and not be jealous when the little one came along and started getting some of the attention that he had got used to monopolizing.

Play it by ear
, her mother had said, and on these things her mother was usually right, just like she
’
d been right all along about Roger.

"But I want to play with it
now
," he started to cry.
It wasn
’
t loud, not the attention seeking whining of a manipulative child.
These were real tears, silently streaming down his cheeks.
It wasn
’
t the gift that he wanted, it was the reassurance.
After the divorce, Pauline Robson had got into the habit of using small gifts a way of letting Tommy knew that she still loved him.
It was a form of overcompensating for her husband
’
s absence. He had started blaming himself for the fact that "daddy isn
’
t here" and she had responded by giving him presents as well as the usual hugs and kisses.

But it was a method of reassurance that she could ill afford.
And like a drug, it produced diminishing returns.
Now, for good or for ill, Tommy had come to look at presents and gifts as the measure of his mother
’
s love for him.
And to him, the refusal to buy a present was a sign not of financial hardship but that the precarious love of his only remaining parent was slipping away.

Pauline stopped and knelt down in front of Tommy and held him gently in her arms.

"I
’
ll tell you what," she said.
"How would you like me to make your favourite strawberry jelly sponge cake when we get back home.

His face lit up through his tears and he smiled and nodded gently.

"OK," he said, in that cute little voice of his that melted her heart yet again.
She dried away his tears gently with the tips of her fingers, then took his little hand in hers and walked on.
She knew that she
’
d have to let him ride the toy horse before leaving.
At least, she told herself, it
’
s the one thing the shopping centre provided that was free.

*
    
*

In the shopping centre Sean Murphy went to work quickly.
He had two devices, and clear instructions: one in a place where it would cause maximum panic and the other near an exit, timed to catch the fleeing crowds.

The "devices" each consisted of five hundred grams of Semtex, a detonator, a battery and a timer.
He hadn
’
t made the circuit, but he had tested it.
This was how the Irish National Liberation Army worked: one soldier makes the circuit and the other checks it.
They were a disciplined organization, like the IRA from which they had split, even going so far as to use standard military ranks.
The last thing they needed was a bomb blowing up in the hands of the delivery man.
There were enough Irish jokes in circulation already!
There was no requirement that the circuit had to be checked by the delivery man, but it did have to be checked by some one other than the person who made it.

When the Irish Republican Socialist Party first split from the official IRA, Sean Murphy hadn
’
t taken them seriously.
It had seemed like the formation of one more talk shop, like Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA.
But when they set up INLA, their own secret militia, and sent out a recruitment agent to persuade him to join, he was intrigued by their agenda. They wanted not just a United Ireland, but a United
Socialist
Ireland
, one in which the spoils and wealth would be shared out among the poor and not just hoarded by the rich.
In their methods, they were not so different from the IRA, they believed in using a mixture of violence against
British
soldiers and bombings of public houses and shopping centres on the British mainland.
But their broader and more future-oriented agenda appealed to the revolutionary in Murphy.
So he joined the Irish National Liberation army, coming in with the rank of lieutenant because of his experience in the IRA.

He noted, when they first introduced themselves, that they didn
’
t use the word "republican" in their name.
The recruitment agent told him that this was because they didn
’
t want to cause confusion in
America
with the Republican party.
But he suspected that another reason was subconsciously involved.
It had finally dawned on them that republicanism versus monarchy wasn
’
t really the issue: it was freedom versus tyranny.
After all, Oliver Cromwell, their historical arch-enemy, had also been a republican, he was the man who had overthrown King Charles the First and had him beheaded. Yet he had crushed the fighting spirit of the proud sons and daughters of
Ireland
with the same savagery and brutality as the most arrogant of kings.

Murphy
’
s own baptism of fire was well in the past.
But he nevertheless felt that tinge of apprehension that preceded every mission.
Each mission was new and there were always things that could go wrong.

His previous bombings had all been directed against soldiers in the six counties of
Northern Ireland
.
They entailed placing huge 200-500 pound bombs by the roadside
and detonating them when British soldiers drove by in armoured trucks or troop carriers. For reasons of frugality, the British government preferred not to buy troop carriers made of the strongest armour plating available and opted instead for a compromise between price and strength that offered their soldiers very little protection against the huge roadside bombs of
the IRA.

These bombs were made from nitrogen-based explosives rather than Semtex, supplied in the form of animal droppings by the local farmers who in many cases sympathized with their cause and their methods.
This was the oldest explosive of all, the one that the Chinese had invented a thousand years ago.

The danger with these bombs was that unlike, the smaller Semtex bombs, they were relatively unstable.
Also they were to be radio-detonated and it only took one hobbyist with a remote-controlled aeroplane to send the delivery man to an early martyrdom.
The usual precaution was to sweep the frequency band with a radio receiver and survey the area visually before inserting the blasting cap and arming the device.
But an undetected hobbyist could still break the radio silence before the delivery man got clear.

With Semtex bombs it was different.
The explosive was somewhat more stable than urea/nitrate-based explosive and the bombs were detonated either by a timer or mercury switch rather than a radio-controlled pulse and blasting cap.
He had activated the timer in the car and now had less than twenty five minutes to place them and get clear.

Placing bombs in a shopping centre is not easy.
In addition to the security cameras, there is a dearth of places to plant bombs.
For security reasons, there were no garbage bins and even if he could get an attendant
’
s uniform, he could hardly plant a bomb in one of the flower pots in front of the hundreds of shoppers milling about.
He could plant it in a toilet tank but it would cause minimal damage in both material and human terms.

It used to be possible to plant small incendiary devices in the pockets of clothes.
But now the clothes retailers sewed up the pockets of their display garments making it rather more difficult to drop such IRA or INLA gift bombs into them.
An unattended package left in the open would attract attention faster than one could walk away from it.
So Murphy made his way over to a large bookshop.
From the entrance
he proceeded to a section which sold school exam revision books.
He figured that at this time of year they would be the slowes
t moving item in the bookshop.

This section of the bookshop was almost empty, tending to confirm his assumption.
Spreading his fingers wide, he pulled three books from a shelf with one hand and inserted the bomb with the shorter time setting at the back of the bookshelf, placing it on its side so that it stood and occupied a minimum of space.
He returned the books quickly in front of it and then made his way out of the bookshop and the shopping centre.

Although there were no garbage bins inside the shopping centre, there were several in the forecourt outside.
Under the guise of disposing of an old evening newspaper, he deposited the second bomb in the bin closest to the entrance.

*
    
*

Srini Shankar was just coming out of the bank.
He was a light-skinned man, and to look at him you couldn
’
t tell that he had been born in
Bombay
.
He worked at the nearby hospital and had slipped out during his lunch break to withdraw some cash.
Now he remembered that he also wanted a book on crossword puzzles.
He was an avid enthusiast for the famous
Times
crossword puzzle and enjoyed doing crosswords on the evening train home.

The front of the bookshop was stacked with the latest bestsellers
But he wasn
’
t interested in them.
He made his way to a quiet section at the back of he bookshop where that he found the crossword puzzle books, between chess books and high school examination revision books.
There was quite a wide selection.
He decided to browse.

In the dawn light
Central Park
always looked tranquil.
When the muggers and rapists and innocent merry-makers finally went to sleep, the natural
tranquillity
of this island of trees and grass in an ocean of glass and concrete finally prevailed.
Not that all muggers were night owls.
Some were early birds who set out to catch the worm
–
the worm in question being the joggers whom the muggers regarded as easy prey.
Most of the joggers were now resigned to the risk and relied on police decoys to keep the threat in check. Guns were outlawed in
New York
and those who carried mace or pepper spray or electric shockers knew that these were virtually useless, as the muggers were always on their guard against them.