It took just under an hour to reach the private driveway marked by a pair of stone pillars, and another five minutes to reach the house over the sea. Like any common man, O’Donnell parked his car in the open; the carriage house that was attached to the manor had been converted to offices by a local contractor. He went at once to his study. McKenney was waiting for him there, reading a recent edition of Yeats’ poetry. Another bookish lad, though he did not share Cooley’s aversion to the sight of blood. His quiet, disciplined demeanor concealed an explosive capacity for action. A man very like O’Donnell himself, Michael was. Like the O’Donnell often or twelve years before, his youth needed tempering; hence his assignment as chief of intelligence so that he could learn the value of deliberation, of gathering all the information he could get before he committed himself to action. The Proves never really did that. They used tactical intelligence, but not the strategic kind — a fine explanation, O’Donnell thought, for the mindlessness of their overall strategy. Another of the reasons he had left the Provisionals — but he would return to the fold. Or more properly, the fold would return to him. Then he would have his army. Kevin already had his plan, though not even his closest associates knew it — at least not all of it.
O’Donnell sat in the leather chair behind the desk and took the envelope from his coat pocket. McKenney discreetly went to the corner bar and got his superior a glass of whiskey. With ice, a taste Kevin had acquired in hotter climes several years before. He set the glass on the desk, and O’Donnell took it, sipping off a tiny bit without a word.
There were six pages to the document, and O’Donnell read through the single-spaced pages as slowly and deliberately as McKenney had just been doing with the words of Yeats. The younger man marveled at the man’s patience. For all his reputation as a fighter capable of ruthless action, the chief of the ULA often seemed a creature made of stone, the way he would assemble and process data. Like a computer, but a malignant one. He took fully twenty minutes to go through the six pages.
“Well, our friend Ryan is back in America, where he belongs. Flew the Concorde home, and his wife arranged for a friend to meet them at the airport. Next Monday I expect he’ll be back teaching those fine young men and women at their Naval Academy.” O’Donnell smiled at the humor of his words. “His Highness and his lovely bride will be back home two days late. It seems that their aircraft developed electrical problems, and a new instrument had to be flown in all the way from England — or so the public story will go. In reality, it would seem that they like New Zealand so much that they wanted some additional time to enjoy their privacy. Security on their arrival will be impressive.
“In fact, looking this over, it would seem that their security for the next few months at least will be impenetrable.”
McKenney snorted. “No security’s impenetrable. We’ve proven that ourselves.”
“Michael, we do not wish to kill them. Any fool can do that,” he said patiently. “Our objective demands that we take them alive.”
“But –”
Would they never learn? “No buts, Michael. If I wanted to kill them, they would already be dead, and this Ryan bastard along with them. It is easy to kill, but that will not achieve what we wish.”
“Yes, sir.” McKenney nodded his submission. “And Sean?”
“They will be processing him in Brixton Prison for another two weeks or so — our friends in C-13 don’t want him far from their reach for the moment.”
“Does that mean that Sean –”
“Most unlikely,” O’Donnell cut him off. “Still and all, I think the Organization is stronger with him than without him, don’t you?”
“But how will we know?”
“There is a great deal of high-level interest in our comrade,” O’Donnell half-explained.
McKenney nodded thoughtfully. He concealed his annoyance that the Commander would not share his intelligence source with his own intelligence chief. McKenney knew how valuable the information was, but where it came from was the deepest of all the ULA’s secrets. The younger man shrugged it off. He had his own information sources, and his skill at using their information was growing on a daily basis. Having always to wait so long to act on it chafed on him, but he admitted to himself — grudgingly at first, but with increasing conviction — that full preparation had allowed several tricky operations to go perfectly. Another operation that had not gone so well had landed him in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh prison. The lesson he’d learned from this miscued op was that the revolution needed more competent hands. He’d come to hate the PIRA leadership’s ineffectiveness even more than he did the British Army. The revolutionary often had more to fear from friends than enemies.
“Anything new with our colleagues?” O’Donnell asked.
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” McKenney answered brightly. Our colleagues were the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army. “One of the cells of the Belfast Brigade is going to go after a pub, day after tomorrow. Some UVF chaps have been using it of late — not very smart of them, is it?”
“I think we can let that one pass,” O’Donnell judged. It would be a bomb, of course, and it would kill a number of people, some of whom might be members of the Ulster Volunteer Force, whom he regarded as the reactionary forces of the ruling bourgeoisie — no more than thugs, since they lacked any ideology at all. So much the better that some UVF would be killed, but really any prod would suffice, since then other UVF gunmen would slink into a Catholic neighborhood and kill one or two people on the street. And the detectives of the RUC’s Criminal Investigation Division would investigate, as always, and no one would admit to having seen much of anything, as usual, and the Catholic neighborhoods would retain their state of revolutionary instability. Hate was such a useful asset. Even more than fear, hate was what sustained the Cause. “Anything else?”
“The bombmaker, Dwyer, has dropped out of sight again,” McKenney went on.
“The last time that happened . . . yes, England, wasn’t it? Another campaign?”
“Our man doesn’t know. He’s working on it, but I have told him to be careful.”
“Very good.” O’Donnell would think about this one. Dwyer was one of the best PIRA bombers, a genius with delayed fuses, someone Scotland Yard’s C-13 branch wanted as badly as they wanted anyone. Dwyer’s capture would be a serious blow to the PIRA leadership . . . “We want our chap to be very careful indeed, but it would be useful to know where Dwyer is.”
McKenney got the message loud and clear. It was too bad about Dwyer, but that colleague had picked the wrong side. “And the Belfast brigadier?”
“No.” The chief shook his head.
“But he’ll slip away again. We needed a month to –”
“No, Michael. Timing — remember the importance of timing. The operation is an integrated whole, not a mere collection of events.” The commander of the PIRA’s Belfast Brigade — Brigade, less than two hundred men, O’Donnell thought wryly — was the most wanted man in Ulster. Wanted by more than one side, though for the moment the Commander perforce had to let the Brits have him. Too bad. I will dearly love to make you pay personally for casting me out, Johnny Doyle, for putting a price on my head. But on this I, too, must be patient. After all, I want more than your head. “You might also keep in mind that our chaps have their own skins to protect. The reason timing is so important is that what we have planned can only work once. That is why we must be patient. We must wait for exactly the right moment.”
What right moment? What plan? McKenney wanted to know. Only weeks before, O’Donnell had announced that “the moment” was at hand, only to call things off with a last-second telephone call from London. Sean Miller knew, as did one or two others, but McKenney didn’t even know who those privileged fellows were. If there was anything the Commander believed in, it was security. The intelligence officer acknowledged its importance, but his youth chafed at the frustration of knowing the importance of what was happening without knowing what it was.
“Difficult, isn’t it, Mike?”
“Yes, sir, it is,” McKenney admitted with a smile.
“Just keep in mind where impatience has gotten us,” the leader said.
Chapter 8
Information
“I guess that about covers it, Jimmy. Thanks from the Bureau for tracking that guy down.”
“I really don’t think he’s the sort of tourist we need, Dan,” Owens replied. A Floridian who’d embezzled three million dollars from an Orlando bank had made the mistake of stopping off in Britain on his way to another European country, one with slightly different banking laws. “I think the next time we’ll let him do some shopping on Bond Street before we arrest him, though. You can call that a fee — a fee for apprehending him.”