Harry's Game (24 page)

That message, closely written on two sheets of notepaper, remained in a safe house in the communication chain while the Third Battalian worked round to an appointment for the vacant position. The clogging in the system lasted more than a week, and when the new man came to sort through the backlog he had a table covered widi reports and documents to wade through.

He was into his second day before he got to the paper written by the waiter.

He was sharp enough to sense immediately the importance of what was in front of him. He read it carefully.

The man with the thin moustache looked like an army man, and from the kitchens I could see the big Ford out in the car park with the uniformed escort sitting there in the front. The other one was talking when the music stopped. He was a policeman, I think. That's when I heard him say, "Special operator on the ground without telling." He must have realized I was standing there, and he just stopped and didn't say anything else until I was right away from him. He looked very bothered...

That was the guts of the message. The intelligence officer had read it once, gone slightly beyond and then rapidly coursed his eyes back over it. He could imagine the situation. Military and police, not taken in on the act, and feeding their bloody faces, weeping on each other's shoulders, stuffing the food in far away from the "Careless Talk Costs Lives" bit. It was the sort of place you'd expect to hear a major indiscretion uttered, when they couldn't keep their big mouths shut. That was why the waiter had been introduced on to the staff of the hotel.

Undercover men working for the army or D16 were the particular

dislike of the Provisionals. They believed there was a much greater secret intelligence and surveillance operation against them than in fact existed. Their traditional hatred was for the plain‐clothes army squads who cruised at night round the back streets of the ghettos in unmarked cars, looking for the top men in the movement. But this had a more important ring 125

about it to the intelligence officer than squaddies out in jeans and sweaters and armed. If a Brigadier and top copper were not in on the act, and thought they ought to have been, it meant first it was top secret, and second that they considered it important enough for them to have been briefed. Something of critical value to those English swine, so sensitive that top-ranking men had been left out in the cold.

Farther down the waiter's report was a paragraph explaining that the tone of the exchange across the lunch table had been critical.

The officer wrote a three‐line covering note on a separate piece of paper, clipped it to the original report and sealed it in a plain brown envelope. A courier would take it that night to the next man up the chain, someone on the Brigade staff.

Twenty‐two hours later he met Seamus Duffryn for the first time. Duffryn had originally intended that his message should go by hand, but the combination of the new appointment and the nagging worry about this man, Harry McEvoy, had led to the direct meeting, risky as it was.

They met in a pub in the heart of the broken‐up and ravaged triangle of the Lower Falls. Taking their pints of beer with them, Duffryn led the other to a corner table. With their heads huddled together he spoke of the stranger that had come to the guest house farther up the Falls.

Looking for work. Said he'd been away a long time. Had this strange accent that was noted by those when he first came, but which his latest reports said was not so pronounced. When Dufiryn mentioned the accent, the Battalion officer looked at him intrigued, and the junior man explained the apparent lapses in speech. Duffryn said that his men who followed McEvoy and heard him talk in the pubs, said the oddness about the speech was something very much of the past. Ironed out, muttered Duffryn. He had come to the end of his patience on the matter and wanted a decision. Either the man should be cleared or there would have to be authorization for more surveillance with all its problems of manpower. Duffryn himself had personally tried to observe McEvoy by spending three successive evenings in the pub on the corner where it was reported that the stranger came to drink, but he'd stayed alone those evenings, and the man he wanted to see had not shown himself.

Tm not that sure what it means," said the man from Battalion. 'You never know with these things. It could mean he's a man put in to infiltrate us. It could be nothing. It counts against the bugger that his accent is improving. Would do, wouldn't it? With each day he spends here, it would improve. There's something else we have that indicated a few days ago that they could have put an undercover man in. He'll be a big bloody fish if it's right. He'll be a bloody whale if what we think about him is right.'

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He hesitated as to whether he should bring the young Duffryn further into the web of reports and information that was forming in his mind. He dismissed it. The golden rule of the movement was 'need to know'. Duffryn needed to know no more than he already knew.

'That's enough. From now on‐‐and this is important‐‐and I want it bloody well obeyed to the letter‐‐no more following this McEvoy. Let him ride on his own a bit. I don't want the bugger flushed before we're ready for him. We'll just leave him alone for a bit, and if we have to we'll move when it's all nice and relaxed. I want it taken gently, very gently, you see? Just log him in and out of the guest house, and that's the lot.'

Harry had not been aware of the watchers before they were called off, and therefore had no idea that he had thrown off a trail when he had gone through the city centre shopping crowds to a telephone kiosk to call Davidson. On the Friday night when he had been in the city nearly three weeks he came down past the cemetery towards Broadway with his wage packet in his

hip pocket, and the knowledge that there seemed to be no sign of suspicion towards him from the men he was working with. He had a hired car booked for Saturday for his date with Josephine.

There was a Sinn Fein meeting that Friday night up on the junction of the Falls, and after he'd had his tea Harry wandered up to listen to the speeches. There were some familiar faces on the lorry that was being used as a speaker's platform. The oratory was simple and effective and the message brutally clear. Amongst the committed there would be no easing in the struggle, the war would go on till the British were gone. The crimes of the British army, the Stormont administration and the Free State government were catalogued, but the crowd of three or four hundred seemed lukewarm to it all. They'd been listening to this stuff for five years or so now, Harry reflected. He'd be a bloody good orator to give them something new at this stage. The army stayed away and after hearing the first four speeches Harry left. He'd clapped with the rest, and cheered by consensus, but no one spoke to him. He was just there, ignored. God, how do you get into this bloody mob? How does it all happen like Davidson said, in that magic three weeks? It'll take months, till the face is known and the background and every other bloody thing.

A long haul. He wouldn't call Davidson this weekend. Nothing to say. Those buggers had sent him here, they could sit and stew for a bit and wonder what was going on. The trail of the man he sought was well chilled now. It would be very slow, and his own survival would take some thinking about. But there'd be no coming out, no trotting up to Aldergrove. One‐way to Heathrow please, my nerve's gone and so has that of the controller, thank you very much.

No way. You stay in for the whole way, Harry boy.

THIRTEEN

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She was waiting at the lights at the junction of Grosvenor and the Falls when he pulled up in the hired Cortina. Tall in the brittle sunlight, her hair blown round her face, and shivering in the mock sheepskin coat over the sweaters and jeans he'd told her to wear.

'Come on, get that door open. I'm frozen out here." A bit distant, perhaps too off‐hand, but not the clamouring alarm bells Harry had steeled himself to face.

He was laughing as he reached across the passenger seat and unlocked the near‐side door, and pushed the handle across to open it. She came inside, a bundle of coat and cold air, stealing the warmth he had built up since he had collected the car.

'All right then, sunshine?" He leaned over to kiss her, but she turned her head away presenting her cheek for what he hadn't intended to be the brotherly peck they ended up with.

'Enough of that. Where are we going?" she said. She straightened her back in the seat, and began to fasten her seat belt.

'You said you wanted some country. Somewhere we can stretch ourselves a bit, walk around.

Where do you suggest?'

'Let's off to the Sperrins. About an hour down the Derry and Dungiven road. That's wild country, real Ulster stock. You've seen the slogans on the Proddy walls before the troubles started, "We will not exchange the blue skies of Ulster for the grey mists of the Republic," well, the blue skies are over the Sperrins.'

'Well, if it's okay for the Prods it'll do for us second‐class Micks.'

'I was brought up down there. My Dad had a bit of land. Not much but enough for a living. It's a hard living down there. It's yourself and that's all, to do the work. We cut peat down there and had some cows and sheep. Stupid bloody creatures. We were always losing the little buggers.

There was no mains, no gas, no electricity, no water when I was born. He's dead, now, the old man, and my Mam came to Belfast.'

'Were you involved at all, with the politics? Was the old man?'

'Not at all. Not a flicker. Most of the farmers round were Prods but that didn't make much difference.

The

market

was

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sectarian", as they'd say these days. Different schools, different dances. I couldn't walk out with Prod boys when I lived at home. But that's years back now. There was no politics down there, just hard work.'

He drove slowly out of town, on to the M2 motorway which runs within minutes into the open countryside, leaving the city with its smoke and its gibbet‐like cranes and its grey slate roofs away behind the Black Mountain that dominates the south of the city. It was the first time Harry had seen the fields and hedgerows, farms and cottages since he came in on the airport bus. The starkness of the contrast staggered him. It was near‐impossible to believe that this was a country ravaged by what some called civil war. For a moment the impressions were tarnished by the rock‐filled petrol drums outside a pub, but that was a flash of the eye, near-subliminal, and then was gone in favour of the hills and the green of well‐grassed winter fields.

Josephine slept in her seat, head back against the column dividing the front and rear doors, her seat belt like some pompous decoration strapped across her breasts. Harry let his eyes stray from the endless, empty road to her.

'just follow the Derry road, and wake me up when we get to the top of the Glenshane," she'd said.

The road slipped economically through the countryside till Harry reached Toome, where the Bann came through, high and flooded from the winter rain, forcing its strength against the medieval eel trapping cages that were the life‐blood of the town. He slowed almost to a halt as he gingerly took the car over the ramps set across the road in front of the small, whitewashed police station. Yards of bright corrugated iron sheeting and mounds of sandbags surrounded the buildings. It looked deserted. No bulbs showing at the top. After Toome he began to pick up speed. The road was straight again, and there was no other traffic. In front was the long climb up to Glenshane in the heart of the Sperrins. The rain gathered on the windscreen, horizontal when it came but light and occasional.

As he came to the hills that divided the Protestant farmlands of the Ulster hinterland from Catholic Dungiven and Derry, Harry spotted a damp, out‐of‐season picnic site on his right, and pulled into the car park. There was a sign marking the Pass and its altitude, a thousand feet above sea level. He stopped and shook Josephine's shoulder.

'Not so much of the blue skies and the promised land here. Looks

more like it's going to tip down," he said.

'Doesn't matter. Come on, Mr McEvoy, we're going to do some walking and talking. Walking first. Up there." She pointed far out to the right of the road where the hill's squat summit merged towards the dark clouds.

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'It's a hell of a way," he said, pulling on a heavy anorak.

'Won't do you any harm. Come on.'

She led the way across the road and then up the bank and through the gap in the cheap wire fence where a succession of walkers had made a way.

Farther on there was a path of sorts to the top of the hill, made by the peat cutters at first and then carried on by the rabbits and the sheep. The wind picked up from the open ground and surged against them. Josephine had pushed her arm through the crook of his elbow and walked in step half a pace behind him, using him part as shelter and part as battering ram as they forced their way forward into the near gale. High above, a buzzard with an awesome dignity allowed itself to be carried on the thrusts and flows of the currents. Its huge wings moved with only a minimum of effort, holding position one hundred and fifty feet or so above the tiny runs fashioned by the creatures the bird lived off. The wind stung across Harry's face, pulling his hair back over his ears and slashing at his nose and eyes.

'I haven't been anywhere in a wind like this in years," he shouted across the few inches that separated them.