“You just made a friend for life, Mr. Murray, even without the beer.”
“Dan.”
“Jack.” Ryan was tempted to wolf down the burger for fear of having a nurse come through the door and throw an immediate institutional fit. No, he decided, I’ll enjoy this one. He selected the vanilla shake. “The local guys say you broke records identifying me.”
“No big deal.” Murray poked a straw into the chocolate one. “By the way, I bring you greetings from the Ambassador — he wanted to come over, but they have a big-time party for later tonight. And my friends down the hall send their regards, too.”
“Who down the hall?”
“The people you have never worked for.” The FBI agent raised his eyebrows.
“Oh.” Jack swallowed a few fries. “Who the hell broke that story?”
“Washington. Some reporter was having lunch with somebody’s aide — doesn’t really matter whose, does it? They all talk too much. Evidently he remembered your name in the back of the final report and couldn’t keep his trap shut. Apologies from Langley, they told me to tell you. I saw the TV stuff. You dodged that pretty good.”
“I told the truth — barely. All my checks came through Mitre Corporation. Some sort of bookkeeping thing, and Mitre had the consulting contract.”
“I understand all your time was at Langley, though.”
“Yeah, a little cubbyhole on the third floor with a desk, a computer terminal, and a scratchpad. Ever been there?”
Murray smiled. “Once or twice. I’m in the terrorism business, too. The Bureau has a much nicer decorator. Helps to have a PR department, don’t you know?” Murray affected a caricatured London accent. “I saw a copy of the report. Nice work. How much of it did you do?”
“Most. It wasn’t all that hard. I just came up with a new angle to look at it from.”
“It’s been passed along to the Brits — I mean, it came over here two months ago for the Secret Intelligence Service. I understand they liked it.”
“So their cops know.”
“I’m not sure — well, you can probably assume they do now. Owens is cleared all the way on this stuff.”
“And so’s Ashley.”
“He’s a little on the snotty side, but he’s damned smart. He’s ‘Five.’ ”
“What?” Ryan didn’t know that one.
“He’s in MI-5, the Security Service. We just call it Five. Has a nice insider feel that way.” Murray chuckled.
“I figured him for something like that. The other two started as street cops. It shows.”
“It struck a few people as slightly curious — the guy who wrote Agents and Agencies gets stuck in the middle of a terrorist op. That’s why Ashley showed up.” Murray shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe all the coincidences you run into in my business. Like you and me.”
“I know you come from New England — oh, don’t tell me. Boston College?”
“Hey, I always wanted to be an FBI agent. It was either BC or Holy Cross, right?” Murray grinned. That in-house FBI joke went back two generations, and was not without a few grains of truth. Ryan leaned back and sucked the shake up the straw. It tasted wonderful.
“How much do we know about these ULA guys?” Jack asked. “I never saw very much at Langley.”
“Not a hell of a lot. The boss-man’s a chap named Kevin O’Donnell. He used to be in the PIRA. He started throwing rocks in the streets and supposedly worked his way up to head counterintelligence man. The Provos are pretty good at that. Have to be. The Brits are always working to infiltrate the Organization. The word is that he got a little carried away cleansing the ranks, and barely managed to skip out before they gave him Excedrin Headache number three-five-seven. Just plain disappeared and hasn’t been spotted since. A few sketchy reports, like maybe he spent some time in Libya, like maybe he’s back in Ulster with a new face, like maybe he has a lot of money — want to guess where from? — to throw around. All we know for sure is that he’s one malignant son of a bitch.
“His organization?” Murray set the milkshake down. “It’s gotta be small, probably less than thirty. We think he had part of the breakout from Long Kesh last summer. Eleven hard-core Provos got out. The RUC bagged one of ’em two days later and he said that six of the eleven went south, probably to Kevin’s outfit. He was a little pissed by that. They were supposed to come back to the PIRA fold, but somebody convinced them to try something different. Some very bad boys — they had a total of fifteen murders among them. The one you killed is the only one to show up since.”
“Are they that good?” Ryan asked.
“Hey, the PIRA are the best terrorists in the world, unless you count those bastards in Lebanon, and those are mostly family groups. Hell of a way to describe them, isn’t it? But they are the best. Well organized, well trained, and they believe, if you know what I mean. They really care about what they’re doing. The level of commitment these characters have to the Cause is something you have to see to believe.”
“You’ve been in on it?”
“Some. I’ve been able to sit in on interrogations — the other side of the two-way mirror, I mean. One of these guys wouldn’t talk — wouldn’t even give ’em his name! — for a week. Just sat there like a sphinx. Hey, I’ve chased after bank robbers, kidnappers, mob guys, spies, you name it. These fellows are real pros — and that’s the PIRA, maybe five hundred real members, not even as big as a New York Mafia family, and the RUC — that’s the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the local cops — is lucky to convict a handful in a year. They have a law of omerta up there that would impress the old-time Sicilians. But at least the cops have a handle on who the bastards are. The ULA — we got a couple of names, a few pictures, and that’s it. It’s almost like the Islamic Jihad bums. You only know them from what they do.”
“What do they do?” Ryan asked.
“They seem to specialize in high-risk, high-profile operations. It took over a year to confirm that they exist at all; we thought they were a special-action group of the PIRA. They’re an anomaly within the terrorist community. They don’t make press releases, they don’t take public credit for what they do. They go for the big-time stuff and they cover their tracks like you wouldn’t believe. It takes resources to do that. Somebody is bankrolling them in a pretty big way. They’ve been identified for nine jobs we’re sure of, maybe two others. They’ve only had three operations go bad — quite a track record. They missed killing a judge in Londonderry because the RPG round was a dud — it still took his bodyguard out. They tried to hit a police barracks last February. Somebody saw them setting up and phoned in — but the bastards must have been monitoring the police radio. They skipped before the cavalry arrived. The cops found an eighty-two-millimeter mortar and a box of rounds — high-explosive and white phosphorus, to be exact. And you got in the way of the last one.
“These suckers are getting pretty bold,” Murray said. “On the other hand, we got one now.”
“We?” Ryan said curiously. “It’s not our fight.”
“We’re talking terrorists. Jack. Everybody wants them. We swap information back and forth with the Yard every day. Anyway, the guy they have in the can right now, they’ll keep talking at him. They have a hook on this one. The ULA is an outcast outfit. He is going to be a pariah and he knows it. His colleagues from PIRA and INLA won’t circle wagons around him. He’ll go to a maximum-security prison, probably to one on the Isle of Wight, populated with some real bad boys. Not all of them are political types, and the ordinary robbers and murderers will probably — well, it’s funny how patriotic these guys are. Spies, for example, have about as much fun in the joint as child molesters. This guy went after the Royal Family, the one thing over here that everybody loves. We’re talking some serious hard time with this kid. You think the guards are going to bust their ass looking out for his well-being? He’s going to learn a whole new sport. It’s called survival. After he has a taste of it, people will talk to him. Sooner or later that kid’s going to have to decide just how committed he is. He just might break down a little. Some have. That’s what we play for, anyway. The bad guys have the initiative, we have organization and procedures. If they make a mistake, give us an opportunity, we can act on it.”