It was the moment the music died.
It was the moment between the laughter bursts.
It was the moment that the gap in the bodies had opened and he could see across the bar. He could see her face quite clearly and there were the pouch bags at her eyes and her shoulders were hunched, like she hadn't slept.
It was the moment that Bernie, from the bar, shouted across at her,
"Heh, Miss, no sign of the mechanic you're waiting on…"
Mossie sat with his pint glass in front of him and not more than an inch of it drunk. The O.C. was at the bar, and along from him was the Quartermaster, and on a stool was Hegarty with the dog curled at his feet.
Mossie saw her. She looked up. She seemed to blink, like she'd been far away.
"… No sign of him."
She called back, "Never mind, he'll be…"
Eyes turning to her, snaking at her, and the rich English cut of her accent hanging in the bar.
Her voice, like the record had changed, like she'd bitten her tongue, like she was awake and alert. Her voice like the Australians from the television. "Yeah, well, won't be much longer. He said he'd come, but thanks…"
And the music played. The machine belted Country and Western from the speakers. But no laughter to go with the music. No one in the bar looking at her, not even Mossie who dared not stare across at her. He saw the O.C. move. The O.C. was at the side of the Quartermaster. The O.C. whispered urgently into the Quartermaster's ear. The Quartermaster was slipping from the bar, drink abandoned, and had his hand on the arm of a young fellow and was talking at him urgently. And Hegarty was tugging at the O.C.'s sleeve and his sharp finger stabbed in her direction.
Mossie quiet and into the hair that fell over Siobhan's ear. "Don't say nothing, don't do nothing."
"Does they know?"
"Just shut your face."
The O.C. was moving. He was drifting along the bar. Short exchanges, fast unheard orders. Shit, and why didn't she move? He watched the O.C. Christ's sake, why didn't she go? He looked to the door. Two of the men that the O.C. had spoken with stood across the door. Her knees would have been locked and her mind would have blanked out, too feckin' scared to move or to think. He felt the pulse of his heart. The O.C. spoke only to the men he could rely on, the men who took his orders. See nothing and hear nothing and know nothing, the creed of Altmore. All the others, who would see and hear and know nothing, backed from the floor of the bar to the walls and the tables and benches and chairs at the side, and all that could had their backs to the young woman with the gold red hair…
The O.C. was bent over Mossie's shoulder. "She's Brit army, surveillance, Hegarty's seen her on the mountain."
Mossie said, shrugged, "Hegarty's not the full shilling. I wouldn't break anyone's neck on that daft bugger's say so."
The O.C. insisted, "Saw her up on Logue's Hill, with a weapon, and a soldier with her."
Mossie said, anxious, "Be careful. If she's a Brit, she'll have backup."
Bernie behind the bar was bawling that it was time when it was twenty minutes to closing, and draping the cloths that dried the glasses over the pump handles of the beer, and yelling that it was time for good folks to be getting home, and reaching up to throw the switch that killed the music. The quiet in the bar, and the O.C. looked back to Mossie and jerked his head for Mossie to follow him. It happened fast.. . The O.C. and the Quartermaster and two of the young fellows that the O.C. had spoken to, strong and hard, round the table where she sat.
Mossie couldn't see her. The crash of a glass and the scrape of a table tipping over. Mossie saw Hegarty leaning on the bar and his face was expressionless, and the dog slept at his feet as as if nothing would wke it. Fifty men and women in the bar, crouched over tables at the walls and seeing nothing and hearing nothing and knowing nothing. He saw the gold red of her hair amongst the mass of them and they dragged her towards the door.
Bren paced.
A telephone rang. Jocko languidly lifted it, jnst gave his name and listened. He replaced the telephone.
Jocko said, "The governor down in Duugannon. She should have cleared out of his area by now, hasn't called through. That's all."
The cardboard city man lounged, his chair tilted, his boots on the table. "We'll stay on…"
There was the O.C. and the Quartermaster holding her, and two of the young fellows. She seemed to go easily.
Siobhan was sheet-white beside him. "What's you going to do?"
"Wait here, love. Don't move."
It was automatic to Mossie. His life was compartments. On the mountain he was the man of the Organisation. He was her man, Cathy Parker's, he was Song Bird, in the darkness of car parks off the area, in the night blackness of farm gateways and road lay-bys away from his home. He had been called. He started to push himself up from the seat and there was the strength of Siobhan's hand on his knee as if she tried to hold him down. It was necessary for him to belong, it was his survival that he was a part of them. He knew that he hurt his Siobhan but he pulled her fist from his thigh. There was the pleading in her face and the pain screwed her mouth. Nothing said. When he had her hand off his thigh then it was limp. The palm of his hand scratched on the single small diamond of the ring he had given his Siobhan for their engagement. She would never understand. He stepped forward. He edged past the men and the women who would see and hear and know nothing. She grabbed at his coat and he broke her hold, he went toward the door. The prayer was in his mind, that it would be fast. If it were not fast… If it were not fast then Cathy Parker, Miss Parker, the bitch, would talk… If she talked… He swung his poor leg. He passed old Hegarty, sitting on his stool, supping his beer, dropping crisp flakes down to his dog.
He walked out into the night.
They were at the back of the parking place… There was no backup. Christ. Now he could only pray that it would be fast… They were behind the cars and near to the shadow shape of a tractor, grotesque shapes, dancing in the high light thrown from the gable end of the bar.
The Quartermaster and one of the lads held her, and Mossie saw the whip of her head going back as the O.C. punched her. Where in God's name was the young man, the one that minded her and didn't speak?
Her arms were pulled back and the punches were going into her. They didn't shout questions, like she was not softened enough, and she didn't scream her cover back at them, like there was no point. He stood by the door of the bar. It was where the compartments of his life merged. He was Mossie Nugent, Intelligence Officer, and he was Mossie Nugent, Song Bird, and he knew he would lift not a finger, nor raise his voice, to aid her.
"Are you not going to help the boys?" the grate of old Hegarty's voice behind him.
Mossie said, "They're not needing help. It's four of them, and a bit of a girl."
"She's a Brit spy."
"So you've said…"
Blows going into her, and a boot onto her knee or her shin. He wondered if she'd seen him. He was rooted. There was old Hegarty's sharp whistle and the dog came back off the grass to heel. He knew that the Hegarty house had been searched more often over the last twenty years, and in the campaign before that, than any other house on Altmore, and he knew that fifteen years back Hegarty had taken a bad, bad, beating from the police and been an old man then.
"She was just an idiot to be here," old Hegarty said, and was away up the road, not waiting for the end.
Mossie watched. He thought she was about to go down. If she went down, she was done for. There was the punch into the stomach that seemed to bend her and he thought that if she had not been held then she would have gone down. He told himself that there was nothing he could do. She should never have been there… It was when he knew that she was about to go down that she seemed to pull the Quartermaster's arm across her face. His shout slashed the night air.
The Quartermaster lost his grip on her, staggered away clutching his bitten hand. So fast, the movements. Her free hand swinging the short hook into the throat of the one who held her other arm. The O.C. threw himself at her. The beam of the high light caught them. They thrashed, rolled, struggled, on the ground, and all the time the O.C. was swinging at her to beat her head back onto the gravel. Again, so fast… The O.C. was pitched onto his stomach. Her knee was into the small of his back.
His right arm was twisted up towards his shoulder, and there was the crack of his wrist breaking and then his moan of pain.
The crowd was behind Mossie. They had spilled from the door. They would have seen what he saw. There was a young man backing away from her and the fear of her glistened in his eye. There was the O.C. writhing. There was a man down and with his legs flailing haphazard strikes into the gravel. There was the Quartermaster bent over the pain of his hand and hugging the shadow safety of the fringe of the light.
The young man, backing away, shouted which was her car, and he had the power over the crowd, and there was a slow surge towards the green Astra, until it was surrounded. She rocked on her feet. Mossie thought her strength had gone. He stood with Siobhan beside him and he watched her. She reached inside her coat, and pulled at her sweater and there was the glimpse of her white skin and suddenly the dark outline of a pistol.
Mossie saw the petrol cap of the car thrown up over the heads of the crowd, and there was the flash of a match and the crowd started back, and the flames burst across the car, shafted through the interior of the green Astra.
He could see her face, he could see the set of her chin.
She walked towards him and she held the pistol loosely against the seam of her jeans. The car burned behind her. No one blocked her way.
There was blood dribbling from her lip. She was silhouetted against the flames. He thought it was only the will-power that kept her on her feet.
She walked deliberately, as if each step was a challenge. She looked into the face of each man and woman that confronted her. She looked through Mossie. He saw the blood running down her jaw and the pain in her face and the strength that carried her on, and out into the road.
She walked, slowly, never hurrying, away down the road and into the night.
The radio operator's head ducked, the concentration immediate. The woman scribbled on her pad.
Earphones off. "Emergency, 242's signal…"
The man behind her on the radio racks swinging the dials in front of him.
Jocko and Herbie grabbing weapons from the floor, running for the door. Feet pounding on the staircase.
The second operator hurrying across the area, thrusting the paper with the co-ordinates into the cardboard city man's hand.
Bren dragged, then pushed, down the stairs, out into the night sprinting for the car where the engine already roared.
A helicopter scrambled from the Dungannon barracks pad.
A meal left unfinished by the crewman. A poem left unread by a Lynx pilot. A plate abandoned and a book discarded open on the Mess table.
An officer should never be seen to run by the men he commanded.
Colonel Johnny strode the corridor from his office to the Operations Room.
Herbie drove. He was expert. Along the motorway and overtaking on the outside and the inside. Through the town, past the darkened shops up Church Street, skirting the square, plunging down into Irish street, and then away through the housing estate and out past the town's golf course, and climbing for the mountain. Bren didn't speak. The cardboard city man was beside him, and Jocko in the front had plugged a headphone into the equipment in the glove compartment, and occasionally he muttered the code signals to Herbie that were gibberish to Bren. Short of Donaghmore they screamed on a corner and raced past a man out walking his greyhounds and the dogs stampeded for the verge, and through Donaghmore they had to swerve to avoid a staggering drunk and were close enough to hitting him for Bren to shield his eyes. The car bucked, rolled, at the speed… He thought of her. She was the young woman who was closed, secret, hidden from him. He would have said that he could understand, after a fashion, every man and woman that he had worked with in the Service. He could spot greed, vanity, ambition; he could locale motivation; he could identify courage and cowardice. Greed, vanity, ambition, were perpetually in the show cases of the office in Curzon Sireet. Motivation was what he thought that he had bred for himself, and he had seen others at the recruits' seminars who had more of it than himself, men and women that he sometimes passed in the corridors, sometimes sat with in the canteen. Cowardice and courage he had seen on the endurance courses that the new intake had been subjected to.. . She had no greed, vanity, ambition, that he had seen. Her motivation was hidden from him. He reckoned her without cowardice and courage was what she would have sneered at… He wondered if she were dead… He wondered il she were captured.
Fear tumbling in his mind. If she were dead, if she were cap- tured, they would skin him, the cardboard city man and Colonel johnny and Hobbes and Mr Wilkins, even Rennie who had cold- shouldered her.
The man who lost Cathy Parker. Fear for her an at him. The car surged on the road. Jocko held the earphone light against his head, then swung round and gestured for the cardboard city man to look ahead. They were both bent down, the cardboard city man and Bren, heads together and peering through the windscreen.
He saw the helicopter. The helicopter was high above them and there was the the beam of its searchlight powering down, and the red flashes of the navigation lights.
No word said in the car, and there was the clatter of the cardboard city man and Jocko arming their weapons.
Herbie had slowed. The windows were down, the weapons jutted out into the night air. There was the battering roar of the helicopter's engine splashing the interior of the car.
The road wound. A rabbit ducked to safety in front of their wheels.
Bren saw her.
She was on the forward edge of the light that shone down in a narrow cone from the hovering helicopter.
She was walking in the centre of the road. The white light was behind her. The light caught the road and the hedges and petered away in the fields. A crowd walked in step with her seemingly held back by the furthest edge of the light. It was as if the crowd shepherded her away from their homes and their mountain. The voice, staccato, amplified, beat at Bren's ears. "… Keep back. Do not go closer. If you go closer I will open fire. Keep back…" Behind her was the helicopter's light and behind the light was the crowd. Bren understood.
The light would dazzle the crowd, burn out their eyes, she would be only a vague shape to the crowd that followed her. "… Keep back. You have been warned. I shall open fire. Keep back…", the metallic resonance of the voice above. None of them in the car spoke as they closed on her. Once her knees seemed to sink under her and she half pitched forward and then had to push herself up. Her face was shadow but the light caught at her hair. The car stopped. Herbie reversed hard into a gateway and the wheels spun on mud as he powered the three-point turn. She was thirty yards from them. There was the grunt from Jocko, and then he was speaking, hushed, into the radio microphone.
The cardboard city man out, and Bren scrambling to follow.
He ran to her.
There was blood at her mouth. Her right eye was almost closed. Her mouth was bruised, a scraped graze on her temple. He took the pistol from her. The cardboard city man on one side and Bren on the other, and tugging her away, running with her back towards the waiting car.
Bren had his arm round her waist to take the weight of her, and it was nothing.
She fell into the back of the car. Bren on one side and the cardboard city man on the other. She was sandwiched between them, head down.
Bren looked back once. He could see the shape of the crowd, held against the light barrier. They went away fast, and before he wound up the window he heard the helicopter's engine gaining power for altitude. He felt the shiver of her body against his. Dear God… he had thought lie might have found her dead.
The cardboard city man said, "Nothing serious r'"
She shook her head.
"You're a bit of a mess…"
The grin cracked her face. "Some of them are worse."
Bren held her hand, as if he hoped that would give her comfort.
Herbie drove, like there was no tomorrow, for the military hospital at Musgrave Park on the outskirts of Belfast.
Word spread in the night of an incident on the mountain.
Hobbes was told. "Right, thank you. Tell her that I'll speak to her in the morning…"
Colonel Johnny was told. "The Good Lord smiles on her. Tell her we're so pleased."
Rennie was told. "Getting too old, starting to be sentimental. Tell her not to be so bloody stupid again."
Word spread in the night of an escape from the mountain.
The Quartermaster dabbed antiseptic on his bitten hand. "Wasn’t me to blame… but credit to the wee cow, credit the hardness of her."
The O.C. felt the rivers of the pain as the doctor from Omagh bound the broken wrist. "Was our fault because we bloody played with her, like she was just a bloody woman."
The young man lay in Casualty in Monaghan town and the words whistled from deep in his bruised throat. "Why didn't they bring the gun faster? You's has to shoot a woman like that.’’
Mossie sat with Siobhan in front ol the guttering fire. ‘’It was like they were all frightened ol her. Even before the helicopter came, it was like they didn't dare go close to her. She'd have shot them down, right to the last bullet…"
She slept on her back.
Bren was beside the bed on the hard-backed chair and all the time, through the night, he held the small hand in his.
He held her hand even when the nurses and the doctor came into the small room to check her. He ignored the disapproval of their glances, and their hostility when their eyes lighted on the pistol that he had placed on the low table beside him.
The first grey light smeared through the window blinds. He heard the coughing spit of the Military Policeman on the door. He looked down at her face, cleaned and calm. Her hand rested in his, unresponding.
He had thought he had lost her.
The afternoon paper said that anti-terrorist squad detectives were swooping on known haunts of Irishmen. More than twenty Irishmen had been taken into custody for questioning. All over the country, it said, landladies and the owners of boarding and guest houses were being quizzed about Irish lodgers. According to police sources, the identity of a prime suspect was known and the biggest manhunt ever mounted in the present terrorist campaign was under way. The newspaper said that a school soccer match had been cancelled in respect for a pupil, dead. A secretary on her way to her elderly mother's birthday party was dead; a man, his wife seven months pregnant, was dead. The flag at London's Cavalry Club hung at half-mast in tribute to a one-time Desert Rat, a many times decorated veteran, dead; a 22 year-old West Indian social worker, in intensive care, fought for his life.
Jon Jo turned the pages of the newspaper.
Photographs of the wrecked concourse. Condemnation of th e killings from political and religious leaders in Britain and in the Republic.
He always read the newspapers after an attack. He heard the slap of her feet on the pavement. There was the grate of her key in the door.
The whine voice of her neighbour.
"The police were here. I said you were at your basket class."
Jon Jo moving on stockinged feet to the window.
"What for?"
"It was on the radio yesterday, they want to know where all the Irish are. I rang them about your lodger…?’’
"You'd no call to do that '
"But you wern’t here when they came. I told them he was| here, gone, here again. They waited an hour in my kitchen.
They said I was to tell you to ring them as soon as you were in’’
‘’I’m ringing no one.’’
‘They’ll be back,"
He heard the front door slammed.
He peeled back the carpet and lifted the loose plank in the flooring and took everything out, his lists, his passports, the weopon, the ammunition. He emptied each drawer, and the wardrobe. He worked as silently as he could because he listened for the brake of a car and the ringing of the bell. He filled his suitcase and his tool bag. She would have been too lightly built for him to hear her coming up her thick-carpeted stairs. They were all oiled, all the door fittings in the house. When the door opened behind him, he was aware of the light from the landing, he was on his knees in front of the chest of drawers and the gloves were on his hands and he was wiping every inch of wood with the cloth that he kept in his tool bag to clean his hands, he turned.
"Time I was gone, missus."
"Going without telling me?"
The wide and bright smile that she loved, that she spoke of. Thinking fast. "Heard from a mate, over on the Continent, says it’s all played out in London. The plan for work is Germany or Holland."
The police called, they're checking everywhere there are Irish lodgers. What do I tell them?"
"Just doing their job, you tell them what you know.’’
She looked at him, and at the packed bags, and then at the newspaper on the bed, the photograph of a happy schoolboy.
"If I were to go downstairs, ring the police..,"
"You've no cause to be afraid of me, missus I'd not touch a hair on your head."
"Why should a schoolboy have had cause to be afraid?’’
"Because… because… how long's a piece of string, missus? Where does it start? It's like when you walk in a bog field. It sucks at you.
First it's the ankles, then the knees, then the thighs, then your waist. It takes you down."
She kneeled on the floor beside him. His head was against his shoulder. The tears ran from his eyes and onto her blouse.
His voice choked, he asked her would she make him a cup of tea.
He finished the wiping of the room.
The kettle was whistling on her stove as he let himself out through the front door. He walked down the pavement with his grip and his suitcase and his tool bag, not looking back.
The Secretary of State blustered, "But you gave me your word."
The Prime Minister flushed, "I gave you, a preliminary opinion."
"You swore to me that you'd toast them’’
I've learned of a new world that you cared not to inform me of."
"You've reneged on your…"
"Before you put yourself irrevocably on the road to resignation, you will be so patient as to allow Mr Wilkins to give you the benefit of some recent intelligence, some other aspects of the whole picture. Mr Wilkins."
So Ernest Wilkins had his turn.
'There were a few brush strokes of embellishment. Started with Jon Jo Donnelly. All justified by the capture of Jon Jo Donnelly, or if capture were not possible… a dropped voice, a matter not necessary to be explained. The story of a young woman. Oh yes, women had a role to play. A young woman who had been through all all of the endurance courses on the Brecon mountain range, pushed to the same limits as any male A young woman who had been subjected to the same tests of marksmanship at Aldershot and close-quarters unarmed combat as any man. A young woman who had been trained to the highest levels of surveillance and counter-surveillance procedures. A young woman who had nurtured the most valuable player in the Source Programme
… He explained, going slowly as if talking to fools, that a young woman could move in areas where it would be suicidal for a man to attempt to follow. He listed the Service pedigree of a young woman.
Recruitment, proven experience, bravery that would not and should not ever be acknowledged. A young woman who would within the next two hours be released from hospital. He listed wounds, injuries, abrasions. He spoke of the rumour that the vine carried, a bitten hand and a broken wrist and a battered windpipe, and a crowd that had been held back by a single young woman, half kicked to death, who weighed 8 stone 3 pounds and measured 5 foot 4 inches in height.
Ernest Wilkins, hands held in diffidence, said, "It's your decision, gentlemen. Do you want Jon Jo Donnelly, or do you not?"
The Secretary of State, doubt in his voice, said, "I have warned you. .."
The Prime Minister said, "Unleash the pack on him. Run him to ground."
Ernest Wilkins hurried back to Curzon Street to send the necessary signals in confirmation of a programme now authorised.
Called back. Ordered home.
The tang of the mountain in his nose. The touch of his wife against his body. The feel of the hand of his boy.
Jon Jo took the train west, to Plymouth, for the early sailing of the ferry to the Spanish port of Santander.
A gun dumped, a parcel of explosive ditched, a carton of wires and timers and detonators and papers discarded, called home. Ordered back.
The trail of his trade was behind him, scattered when he ha d replaced the telephone at the station call box. Joy enough for him to have shouted… Going back to Altmore…
She sat primly at the edge of her seat. She was shown the photograph, as she had been shown it by the constable when he had called. She confirmed that the photograph and her lodger were the same. It was easier than she had thought it would be. She wore a close-knit woollen cardigan and she had buttoned it to her throat so that there would be no sign to the detectives who questioned her of the damp stain of the tears that had been wept against her shoulder. She repeated what he had told her, that he would go to London, fly to Holland or Germany, look for work. They told her his name, and they told her what he had done. He had been a fine man to her, and he could have killed her, and she tried to sweep from her mind the image of a smiling schoolboy as photographed in the first edition of the afternoon newspaper… It was like it had been yesterday, the clear and recent memory to her, but it had been five weeks before, and he had been in the bathroom and she had come to the room to bring clean bedding and the photographs had been on the table beside the bed. A handsome woman and a small boy.
The boy in the photograph Was younger than the boy in the newspaper, and there was the stretch of a mountainscape behind the woman and the boy. She kept her question until the end, until the detectives were about to leave.
"Such a good and decent man, so helpful to me, and so cheerful How could he hate so much?"
And no answer given her.
‘’She should go home," Bren said.
Gerald Seymour
The Journeyman Tailor
‘’That’s out of the question."
‘’She’s exhausted. She was exhausted before this happened. She made a mistake."
‘’There’s a job to finish," Hobbes said.
"She's not in a fit state. She was damn near killed."
‘’Brennard, when I need your advice running my department I'll seek it out. And it might help you to know that London's latest has Jon Jo on the move."
"There's a whole bloody army here, it doesn't have to be her.. ."
The flare of anger from Hobbes. "You don't understand anything, do you? We did the work – not the army, not the Branch, not E4 – and we'll finish it. Have you got me?"
Bren played the prime card. "She has to go home, she's compromised."
Hobbes put his hand on Bren's shoulder, like a father. He said calmly, "It's me that has to decide who's compromised. It's my decision as to when the risk becomes intolerable. I can't change the jockey in mid-race. Just be thankful the big decisions aren't yours."
They were in the corridor and away from the door to her room. They were beyond earshot. She came out of the door, past the Military Police guard. There were two nurses with her and the doctor. Bren saw it: the nurse touched her elbow as if to support her and the help was shrugged off. Vintage Parker. She was in the same clothes they had found her in on the road under Altmore mountain. She walked stiffly. Hobbes went to her, Bren hung back. Hobbes kissed her lightly on the cheek, as if he were a distant relation. She didn't say goodbye to the doctor, she didn't offer her thanks to the nurses. Hobbes led, Bren followed. She slumped awkwardly between them towards the front door of the building. She was paler than usual and the colouring round her eve was brightening.
He saw the mud on her jeans and the dirt on her T-shirt and the rips in her anorak. They walked outside. In the late afternoon light they stood in the car park and she asked about her car and was told it had been recovered during the night, that the radio had been destroyed by the fire, no problem. Hobbes told her that London believed that Donnelly was on his way back. Bren didn’t see any pleasure on her face, only the tiredness and the pallor and the colour ol the bruising. Hobbes told Bren to drive Cathy home and went his way.
He took her back to her flat,
He stood at the open door.
She walked across her living room to her bedroom.
He wondered if she had known, while she slept through the night and the morning, that he had held her hand. He could feel still the gentleness of her sleeping hand.
"Pick me up in the morning," she said, and the bedroom door closed behind-her.