The Journeyman Tailor (32 page)

The cardboard city man said, "Jimmy'll be an hour or so. It's a bad time for him, this, tends to pop off out for a drop of nookie in the middle of the day. How long have you?"

"I've a clear afternoon . . ."

"When's Cathy picking you up '"

"I'm not meeting her."

He saw the puzzlement cross the face of the cardboard city man. "You don't ..."

"I don't know where she is."

After the puzzlement, the frown. Bren saw the hardening of the face.

"She was here four hours ago, half drowned from being out all night.

Changed, and pushed off again . . . You're not meeting her?"

"That's what I said." He should have stayed in the office in Belfast. He should have pushed paper.

"And you don't know where she is?"

"She hasn't told me," Bren said, tried to closet the humiliation.

"I thought you were minding her."

"When I'm allowed to."

"Christ, old sunshine, you don't stand on bloody ceremony with her.

You don't let her just bloody wander off alone out there. You bloody handcuff yourself to her. You're here to mind that woman ..."

The two others, the one called Jocko and the one called Herbie, gazed up at Bren, like he was beneath contempt.

The cardboard city man said, "When Jimmy's shown you round his box of tricks, we'll take you for a drive round, show you the sights, Cathy'll be back by then. Like I said, you tie yourself to her. You don't put up with her shit. You mind her. You don't allow her out there on her own, not ever."

I'd like the drive round," Bren said.

The O.C. had been and gone the previous evening.

The four men and the woman stayed on in Cavan town, slept on what had been proposed, met again in the morning, thrashed round the proposal that had been brought them from County Tyrone,

"He's a major asset where he is, he should be let be," the woman said.

"Be harder for him back in the North, but it's where he knows."

"To be charitable would be to say that he's done his time over there, and done it well."

"Not done as well recent as before, my thought is that he's slipping."

"If he's slipping then he needs out, it's what we'd owe him."

"Was never said it would be easy over there, why he was chosen, take months to get another in place," the woman said.

"Jon Jo's not one to shout, never complain, but the strain on him'd have to be fierce."

"You keep a man in place too long, and you burn him out, gone for ever."

"Leave him there much longer, so's he burned, and he'll be lifted too."

"He'd have had the colonel if he'd been fresh, not have had the kiddies if he'd not gone stale."

"If you pull him out then you chuck away what he's won," the woman said.

"I say he's ready for out."

" The railway bomb, that's the last."

‘’Let him back."

"Worth gold to have him hitting where he knows."

She fought it to the end. She had never met Jon Jo Donnelly. She had a sociology degree gained from University College, Cork. She came from wealth, a prominent Galway legal family. She had never been accepted quite totally. She was a woman. The organization was of men. She had the intellect and the fervour and she had climbed in rank on the back of the quality of her planning She was credited with setting up a gun team in the German city of Hannover that could roam the autobahns in search if off duty British soldiers. She had seen the vulnerability of a Special Branch computer installed in the Monaghan police station and rented the house on the opposite side of the street and found the man with the design skill to build the scanning equipment that could monitor the computer's transmissions. She possessed the ruthlessness to travel to Belfast, take a bedsitter, search out a soldiers' bar, bring a squaddie on a promise back with her, and shoot him dead between the eyes. But, she was a woman, and the Organisation was of men.

"Jon Jo's done his time."

"There'll be hell after the railway."

"Too hot for him, better for him to cool."

"He should be let to rest, after the railway."

The woman said, "You're frightened, you're scared of real war. So, you have Jon Jo back . . . So, it'll be the Brits that are thanking you . . .

There'd not be any of you, I hope, looking for the soft way, talks and conversation and dialogue? There'd not be any of you thinking bombings in London block crap negotiation? There'd not be any of you that's weakened . . . ?"

"That's treason talk."

"No call for it."

"We're strong as we ever was, to fight on."

"It's owed to Jon Jo."

He sat in the coffee shop. He nursed the mug in his hands. He could see right across the concourse where the crowds flowed. There were two uniformed policemen on the concourse and he watched them.

They walked and they stood and they answered tourists' questions and they checked a youth who Jon Jo thought might have run from home to the capital. He waited for them to he gone. He could see the rubbish bin, and he could see the crowds that swelled near the ticket hatch as the afternoon wore on closer towards the evening rush.

He felt at peace.

There was a plastic bag on the floor, held upright tight between his ankles.

A woman asked him if he would be so kind as to pass her the salt and pepper that was on his table, for her sandwich, and he smiled and obliged her.

They split at Cavan town.

The woman travelled west for the wild Sligo shoreline that was her home.

Two of the men went due south for the Irish midlands.

The remaining two drove on the Dublin road. It was the way of the Organisation that age counted for little. The youngest at the meeting had been a Belfast man, not yet past his twenty-fourth birthday. He had laid bombs in his home city and in Holland, and he had twice travelled to the eastern states of the U.S.A. to obtain more sophisticated and advanced electronic equipment. The youngest was the passenger in the car headed for Dublin ... He had loathed the woman at the meeting since he had first realised that she wanted to bed him, and he thought her hair hideous, and her underwear dirty because he could smell it, and her breath foul, and her politics patronising . . . Jon Jo was gone from his mind. Jon Jo would telephone after the railway bomb, and would be given the decision of the meeting. A greater problem concerned him.

Under his guidance the Organisation had known months of success.

The success had come because they had used for the detonation of bombs the combination of the radar gun that was standard issue to the highway police in the United States, along with the detection devices that warned motorists of the use of the gun and that could be purchased at any Radio Shack store, good and cheap. The army could block them now ... It was the laser that was wanted. The army could match the wavelengths; two men dead, their car blown up, to prove it, and the crowing of the Lisburn H.Q. Press Desk for another 'own goal'. A laser signal from the command hide to the bomb, instant detonation ... A real problem, and the one that concerned him now that the matter of Jon Jo Donnelly was settled.

His view, the war at home mattered. His opinion, the war in London was a sideshow. His intention, if that bitch from Sligo ever again accused him of running frightened, going scared, he'd smack the gob off her, break her jaw. His doubt, that the war, wherever, could be won, any time ... he dozed. That a bomb rested between Jon Jo Donnelly's ankles in the coffee shop of a

London station was not enough to keep him from his sleep.

*

'Ernest, the Prime Minister will see you at 4.45 p.m. today. I understand Sec. of State N I bent his ear this morning. Probably tin hat required. No concessions., please, D.G.'

The Director General of the Security Service usually sent men such as Ernest Wilkins to face Downing Street flak. He seldom attended himself. Not cowardice, of course not. He believed, and he was right, that the operations of Curzon Street were best defended by those who knew most about them. The Prime Minister would know nothing, the Secretary of State would have rehashed a brief given him. Ernest Wilkins would baffle them with detail, perhaps. There was a difficulty, the matter of Miss Parker and a boy tortured to death was most certainly a difficulty. But then, Wilkins was so accomplished in the art of plausible deniability. Accomplished enough? It would depend on the Prime Minister's mood, and it was a pity that the man had as yet shown no recognisable sign of steel.

And if Wilkins failed? Well, time then for further consideration. His brother knew Miss Parker's parents, good landowners. He would stand and fight on the future deployment of Five in Northern Ireland, but the young woman . . . There was always a good home for Miss Parker to go back to.

He buzzed for his secretary, asked her to take the folded note down to Wilkins, Irish Desk.

Jimmy was bald with a monk's ruff of hair sandwiched between his shined scalp and his ears. He wore thick glasses and Bren would have expected him to be working in a university laboratory. Not the ,sort of man that Bren had met in Curzon Street. Jimmy rattled through a brief precis of the work on the second floor of the detached building on Mahon Road as if it were unsatisfactory to be sharing secrets with a mere handler. The computers logged ‘traces’. Traces came from police and uniformed military. Who had been seen, with whom and when and where. Jimmy said that the computers built patterns of behaviour and associates and routines. The radios controlled the bleeps that were issued. The bleeps were carried by informers and by operatives. The channels were monitored twenty-four hours a day and an emergency transmission would be acted on immediately, the necessary information flashed to police and army barracks for Quick Reaction back-up.

Jimmy said that in another area they controlled remote cameras and also the listening bugs that were planted in known arms caches and where it was thought meetings might take place; he didn't seem to want to take Bren to that area, and Bren didn't push. It was the world of back-room men. Bren asked Jimmy if he ever went out into the field and was left with the impression that it would take half a troop of the Special Air Service to be in position as escort before this academic and vague creature would even consider getting cow shit on his shoes. He had gazed around the room. He had wondered which of the technicians monitored Cathy Parker's emergency bleep . . .

He left with the cardboard city man and the others who were Jocko and Herbie.

The bodywork of the car was dirty, rusted, dented and scraped. The engine purred, ran smooth.

He was given a flat cap to wear and it was pointed out to him that the sooner he got his hair growing long then the happier they would be. He pulled off his tie and buried it in his pocket and wrapped himself in his anorak. Herbie drove and had armed his pistol and laid it on the seat under his thighs. The cardboard city man and the big fellow, Jocko, had Heckler and Kochs.

They drove out onto the street.

Jocko said, North-Country burr, "We're not used to passengers, we don't do the guide book bit. You don't talk unless you're asked to, and what you don't do is anything that might distract us . . ."

They skirted the shore of Lough Neagh.

They drove flat and straight lanes. They passed small hedged fields that sprouted bog reeds. They went by little and isolated communities of bungalows and Housing Executive homes. They had the rain wipers clearing water from the windscreen . . .

The cardboard city man said, "We get called to a stake-out, but we may not have time to do the recce the way we'd like. Ideal world, we'd have three, four, days to know the land. Most times we don't get what we'd like, it's hassle and hum". We spend as much time as possible cruising, getting familiar with the ground. It's what we're at today ..."

Going by a pair of semi-detached bungalows, each with a cattle barn at the back.

Jocko said, "Right-hand home, two boys, one's doing fifteen and the other's got eight years. Next door's two decent kids, no trouble, never.

Left-hand side won't touch violence, but they wouldn't interfere, wouldn't even consider picking up the Confidential phone ..."

Going by a woman driving a speeding Mini car, seeing fast the throw of her fine black hair to her shoulders.

"... Bloody hard case, that one. Started as a teenie bop at the barracks gates collecting detectives' car registrations, moved up to running messages, on to shifting hardware. She'll kill. She's bad and going to get worse. She'll take stopping, that one ..."

Going by a big house, new, white painted rendering, double garage.

Jocko said, "Six times in the last ten years they've had a car pinched for a P.I.R.A. hit. Rings the Organisation to ask for it back, gives 'em hell, wouldn't ever ring the police. If he rang the police and the car was stopped and the boys lifted then he'd be dubbed a collaborator.

Collaborators get nutted. Who'd blame him . . ."

Going by a young man who drove a cow and three calves on the lane, and who didn't look up at the car as it waited for the road to clear.

Jocko said, "He did nine years, Attempted Murder and Possession of Explosives, served his time and came home. He's one of the best in the community now, does a hell of a good job with handicapped kids. He's never been involved again. They leave him alone because they know he hates them for what he went through in their name, but he wouldn't cross the road for you, me, or a policeman if we were half dead in a ditch with gunshot wounds ..."

Going by a bar with a Harp sign above the door and a security camera and big rocks in the forecourt to prevent cars driving against the outer wall and heavy mesh on the windows.

Jocko said, "It got hit by the Protestants, went in and shot two Provos. The Scenes of Crime guys and the detectives weren't allowed inside. A U.D.R. man was shot in retaliation. They did it their own way. They'll remember for ever that two ol their blokes were killed here, they'd have forgotten the day after that a U.D.R. man was killed . .

."

Going through a crossroads, where the high-hedged lanes met.