“Aw, I was starting to like the beard,” a co-worker said.
“Damned thing itched too much.” Alexander Constantine Dobbens was back at his job. “I was spending half my time just scratching my face.”
“Yeah, same thing when I was on subs,” his roommate agreed. “Different when you’re young.”
“Speak for yourself, grandpop!” Dobbens laughed. “You old married turkey. Just because you’re chained doesn’t mean I have to be.”
“You oughta settle down, Alex.”
“The world is full of interesting things to do, and I haven’t done them all yet.” Not hardly. He was a field engineer for Baltimore Gas and Electric Company and usually worked nights. The job forced him to spend much of his time on the road, checking equipment and supervising line crews. Alex was a popular fellow who didn’t mind getting his hands dirty, who actually enjoyed the physical work that many engineers were too proud to do. A man of the people, he called himself. His pro-union stance was a source of irritation to management, but he was a good engineer, and being black didn’t hurt either. A man who was a good engineer, popular with his people, and black was fireproof. He’d done a good deal of minority recruiting, moreover, having brought a dozen good workers into the company. A few of them had shaky backgrounds, but Alex had brought them around.
It was often quiet working nights, and as was usually the case, Alex got the first edition of the Baltimore Sun. The case was already off the front page, now back in the local news section. The FBI and State Police, he read, were continuing to investigate the case. He was still amazed that the woman and kid had survived — testimony, his training told him, to the efficacy of seat belts, not to mention the work of the Porsche engineers. Well, he decided, that’s okay. Killing a little kid and a pregnant woman wasn’t exactly something to brag about. They had wasted the state trooper, and that was enough for him. Losing that Clark boy to the cops continued to rankle Dobbens, though. I told the dumb fuck that the man was too exposed there, but no, he wanted to waste the whole family at once. Alex knew why that was so, but saw it as a case of zeal overcoming realism. Damned political-science majors, they think you can make something happen if you wish hard enough. Engineers knew different.
Dobbens took comfort from the fact that all the known suspects were white. Waving to the helicopter had been his mistake. Bravado had no place in revolutionary activity. It was his own lesson to be learned, but this one hadn’t hurt anyone. The gloves and hat had denied the pigs a description. The really funny thing was that despite all the screwups, the operation had been a success. That IRA punk, O-something, had been booted out of Boston with his honky tail between his legs. At least the operation had been politically sound. And that, he told himself, was the real measure of success.
From his point of view, success meant earning his spurs. He and his people had provided expert assistance to an established revolutionary group. He could now look to his African friends for funding. They really weren’t African to his way of thinking, but they liked to call themselves that. There were ways to hurt America, to get attention in a way that no revolutionary group ever had. What, for example, if he could turn out the lights in fifteen states at once? Alex Dobbens knew how. The revolutionary had to know a way of hitting people where they lived, and what better way, he thought, than to make unreliable something that they took for granted? If he could demonstrate that the corrupt government could not even keep their lights on reliably, what doubts might he put in people’s heads next? America was a society of things, he thought. What if those things stopped working? What then would people think? He didn’t know the answer to that, but he knew that something would change, and change was what he was after.
Chapter 19
Tests and Passing Grades
“He is an odd duck,” Owens observed. The dossier was the result of three weeks of work. It could have gone faster, of course, but when you don’t want the news of an inquiry to reach its subject, you had to be more circumspect.
Dennis Cooley was a Belfast native, born to a middle-class Catholic family, although neither of his deceased parents had been churchgoers, something decidedly odd in a region where religion defines both life and death. Dennis had attended church — a necessity for one who’d been educated at the parish school — until university, then stopped at once and never gone back. No criminal record at all. None. Not even a place in a suspected associates file. As a university student he’d hung around the fringes of a few activist groups, but never joined, evidently preferring his studies in literature. He’d graduated with the highest honors. A few courses in Marxism, a few more in economics, always with a teacher whose leanings were decidedly left of center, Owens saw. The police commander snorted to himself. There were enough of those at the London School of Economics, weren’t there?
For two years all they had were tax records. He’d worked in his father’s bookshop, and so far as the police were concerned, simply did not exist. That was a problem with police work — you noticed only the criminals. A few very discreet inquiries made in Belfast hadn’t turned up anything. All sorts of people had visited the shop, even soldiers of the British Army, who’d arrived there about the time Cooley had graduated university. The shop’s window had been smashed once or twice by marauding bands of Protestants — the reason the Army had been called in in the first place — but nothing more serious than that. Young Dennis hadn’t frequented the local pubs enough that anyone had noticed, hadn’t belonged to any church organization, nor any political club, nor any sports association. “He was always reading something,” someone had told one of the detectives. There’s a bloody revelation, Owens told himself. A bookshop owner who reads . . .
Then his parents had died in an auto accident.
Owens was struck by the fact that they’d died in a completely ordinary way. A lorry’s brakes had failed and smashed into their Mini one Saturday afternoon. It was hard to remember that some people in Ulster actually died “normally,” and were just as dead as those blown up or shot by the terrorists who prowled the night. Dennis Cooley had taken the insurance settlement and continued to operate the store as before after the quiet, ill-attended funeral ceremony at the local church. Some years later he’d sold out and moved to London, first setting up a shop in Knightsbridge and soon thereafter taking over a shop in the arcade where he continued to do business.
Tax records showed that he made a comfortable living. A check of his flat showed that he lived within his means. He was well regarded by his fellow dealers. His one employee, Beatrix, evidently liked working with him part-time. Cooley had no friends, still didn’t frequent local pubs — rarely drank at all, it seemed — lived alone, had no known sexual preferences, and traveled a good deal on business.
“He’s a bloody cipher, a zero,” Owens said.
“Yes,” Ashley replied. “At least it explains where Geoff met him — he was a lieutenant with one of the first regiments to go over, and probably wandered into the shop once or twice. You know what a talker Geoff Watkins is. They probably started talking books — can’t have been much else. I doubt that Cooley has any interest beyond that.”
“Yes, I believe he’s what the Yanks call a nerd. Or at least it’s an image he’s cultivating. What about his parents?”
Ashley smiled. “They are remembered as the local Communists. Nothing serious, but decidedly bolshie until the Hungarian uprising of 1956. That seems to have disenchanted them. They remained outspokenly left-wing, but their political activities effectively ended then. Actually they’re remembered as rather pleasant people, but a little odd. Evidently they encouraged the local children to read — made good business sense, if nothing else. Paid their bills on time. Other than that, nothing.”
“This girl Beatrix?”
“Somehow she got an education from our state schools. Didn’t attend university, but self-taught in literature and the history of publishing. Lives with her elderly father — he’s a retired RAF sergeant. She has no social life. She probably spends her evenings watching the telly and sipping Dubonnet. She rather intensely dislikes the Irish, but doesn’t mind working with ‘Mr. Dennis’ because he’s an expert in his field. Nothing there at all.”
“So, we have a dealer in rare books with a Marxist family, but no known ties with any terrorist group,” Owens summarized. “He was in university about the same time as our friend O’Donnell, wasn’t he?”