Secret Asset

14

This is more like it, thought Liz, as she booked into the Culloden Hotel. With its acres of gardens, spa, pool and rosetted restaurant it was a cut above her normal overnight accommodation, but she had got an excellent deal on the Internet and, unusually for her, she had decided to indulge herself.

Though I won’t get to enjoy any of it, she thought, as she went upstairs and ordered a room-service sandwich, kicked off her shoes, and opened her laptop. As it booted, she called her voicemail at Thames House but there were no messages.

Liz wondered if Marzipan had made any progress in identifying the photos that had come from Holland, then she forced herself to stop speculating—it’s not your business now, she told herself firmly, turning her mind instead to writing up her interview with O’Phelan.

There was something not quite right about that man. What was it? He had given a polished performance, but it was just that—a performance. But why? Was it simply that he resented anything and anyone to do with the security forces? Behind the jokey front and slightly camp demeanour, she could detect there was something else going on—she could sense it. He was clocking the effect he was making. All the time giving out only what he wanted her to know.

Yes, the interview had been a performance. Liz could tell that he was a man of very strong convictions. She recalled the intensity of his voice when he talked about Parnell. On impressionable students, surely he must be a powerful influence. Though not, it seemed clear, on her colleague Michael Binding.

Liz had arranged to have dinner with Jimmy Fergus, an old RUC Special Branch acquaintance, and an expert in the Loyalist paramilitary groups. She had called him from London, to let him know she was coming onto his turf, and the meal had been his idea.

Waiting for him in the lobby, she glanced at a copy of the local evening paper and saw that a prominent Republican had come forward claiming to have been an agent of the security forces. I wonder what’s behind that, thought Liz. Ten years earlier no one would have dared to make such a claim publicly for fear of being found dead on the border with a bag over his head.

She saw Fergus across the lobby. He was a big man, with a pock-marked face and a confident grin that Liz had always found infectious. In his private life Fergus was a bit of a lad, what was known in Belfast as a “chaser”—he had been married so many times that, when asked about his current marital status, he liked to say he was “between divorces.” There had never been anything between him and Liz, and never would be, though Fergus always liked to make a ritualistic pass.

He came from Protestant farming stock in Antrim (“Honest bigots to a man” he’d once declared). As she had got to know him a decade before, she discovered that much of his bluster was a defence—part of a hard man’s carapace erected around a sharp intelligence. He was also discreet, which meant that within obvious limits, she could level with him tonight, pick his brain and, if it seemed useful, ask for his help.

“You’ve come up in the world,” he teased as he ambled towards her, indicating the hotel’s ornate lobby, a mix of marble columns, panelled walls and chandeliers. “I thought of giving you dinner at your hotel,” he said, “but when I heard which one it was, I decided we’d go somewhere with a little more local colour.”

They drove in his old blue Rover to a fashionably revamped pub, with large open rooms, wooden floors, and a brick fireplace. The noise of music and raucous voices hit them as they went in. No chance to talk here, thought Liz. From the welcome Fergus received it was obviously one of his regular hangouts. “Have faith,” said Fergus, as they were shown through the bar to a quiet table in an alcove at the back.

Over drinks, they spent time catching up. It had been four years since they’d seen each other, during a trip Fergus had made to London. Liz had been working on organised crime then, though shortly afterwards she’d been transferred to the counter-terrorism branch.

Fergus raised an eyebrow. “It’s ironic that just as life has calmed down here, it’s heated up for you.”

“So,” said Liz, “if you’re not chasing the UVF these days, what are you working on?”

“Who says I’m not chasing the UVF?” he said with a grin. “Same people, different crimes. Murdering Catholics out, extortion, prostitution and gambling in. Standard stuff really.”

As the waiter brought their food, Fergus asked what she was doing in Northern Ireland. Liz gave him her cover story about the new vetting procedures. “I’ve been sent to interview someone who gave a reference for one of my colleagues fifteen years ago,” she said, hoping her tone suggested a bureaucratic interference she could have done without.

Fergus grinned. “I’m glad we’re not the only ones with intrusive bosses,” he said. “Who did you see?”

“A lecturer at Queen’s. We used him as a referee for one of his pupils. He taught History at Oxford for a while, then came here about ten years ago to teach Irish Studies. He had strong views. If Ireland had only stuck with Parnell, the country would be unified today.”

Fergus gave a hollow laugh as he cut into his sirloin. “He probably thinks Gerry Adams has sold out. He sounds what my father used to call an ‘armchair Fenian.’ What’s his name?”

Liz leaned forward before she spoke. “Liam O’Phelan.”

“I’ve heard of him,” he said, musing. “Didn’t he originally come from Dublin?”

“I don’t know much about him,” Liz admitted. “But I don’t think he was being straight with me.”

“About his ex-pupil?”

“No, that rang true. A few other things didn’t though.” She didn’t want to go into too much detail about the interview.

Fergus speared a chip and stared at it for a moment as he answered. “I could check and see if we have a file on him. We may well do. At one point during the height of the violence we were very concerned about Queen’s.”

“Would you mind? I’d appreciate it.”

“Sure,” said Fergus easily, “but use me while you can. I won’t be doing this forever.”

Was Fergus going to retire? It seemed inconceivable. Liz said so, sitting back in her chair, looking at him with affectionate scepticism.

“I’m older than you think,” said Fergus. “I’ll have done twenty-five years this autumn.”

“What would you do next?” asked Liz. She couldn’t envisage him back in Antrim, bringing in the wheat crop.

Fergus shrugged, a little dolefully, and Liz wished she hadn’t asked. He’d already explained, regretfully, that he was single again, and she knew it was a sadness that he had never had children.

Wanting to change the subject, Liz remarked, “I saw in the paper that another former agent has gone public.”

“I’m sure there will be more,” said Fergus seriously. “It’s hard now for some of those people who worked as secret assets, sources, agents, whatever you like to call them, during the Troubles—for us, you lot, and particularly for the Army. As politics brings old enemies together, they’ve got difficult decisions to make. Partly, they’re afraid they’ll get blown anyway as more and more information comes out through enquiries, freedom of information, or whatever. They won’t probably, but they’re not sure of that. For some of them, I think, there’s a sort of crisis of conscience. They have a need for understanding what they did and why—after all, they don’t see themselves as traitors. They’ll be feeling they made a contribution to peace in their own way and they’d like some recognition for it. Going public is a dangerous route—but some will go on taking it, even though the peace process won’t protect them.”

“They weren’t all so high-minded,” said Liz. “Some of them worked for us for much more selfish reasons—like money. I don’t suppose anyone will ever hear from them.”

“No, you’re right. They’ll just take their grievance somewhere else.”

“Anyway,” said Liz, “it’s not as though the intelligence war is over, is it? Infiltration must be easier now, for the paramilitaries. How many Catholics are there in Special Branch?”

“More than before,” said Fergus, adding cynically, “not that that’s saying much. The new recruiting guidelines call for fifty-fifty overall in the Northern Ireland Police Force. You can imagine how popular that is with some of my colleagues. But infiltration was a worry even when there were no Catholics in the Force at all; it’s just that it came from the Loyalists.

“Look, like most of Special Branch, I’m a policeman first and a Protestant second. But once in a while someone gets his priorities reversed. Of course there’ve been leaks to the Loyalist paramilitaries. When it happens it does a lot of damage. But the greatest damage is the distrust it creates. The damage to the reputation of the Force, if you want to put it that way. You’re lucky not to have that problem.”

“How do you know we don’t?” said Liz. “We certainly did once. Remember Philby and Anthony Blunt?”

But Fergus had said his say and was busy signalling to the waiter.

After dinner, Fergus drove Liz back to the Culloden. They sat in the bar on a sofa of plush red velvet while Fergus drank a large brandy and explained what had happened to wife number three. After a while, Liz called for the bill, explaining she had an early flight back in the morning.

“I don’t suppose you want help packing,” said Fergus, as they walked back out into the lobby.

Liz laughed. “You never give up.” Then shaking hands she kissed his cheek and said goodnight, adding, “You won’t forget about O’Phelan, will you?”

She gave a great yawn as she walked to the lift, but by the time she reached her room her eyes were sharp and alert.

Two hours later Liz was still wide awake, sitting at the desk in her room. A glass of mineral water from the minibar sat next to her, untouched, as she looked, deep in thought, at the notes she had been writing.

What she had written were speculations rather than facts, but they were troubling ones, set off by Fergus’s offhand mention of infiltration in the Northern Ireland Special Branch. “You’re lucky not to have that problem,” he’d said.

But what about the mole? She wondered, not for the first time, what the IRA had expected of an infiltrator. Suppose they were posted to Counter-Terrorism, possibly even to the Northern Ireland desk. What exactly were they going to do?

What could they do, working alone inside MI5? Well, for one thing, they could alert the IRA to the identity of informers in its midst. That’s what Philby and Blake had done in the Cold War. They could tip them off if one of their operations was blown, and warn them of impending arrests, and even more, they could reassure them when one of their operations wasn’t blown.

Yet she could imagine something even more damaging. An infiltrator in the right place might be able to feed targeting information that would help the IRA mount a damaging attack. Even if they were not working on the Northern Irish terrorist target and not able directly to help their masters, they could make up false intelligence that could waste valuable resources and harm the Service’s credibility. Think of the Iraq dossier and the damage that did to the reputation of the whole of British Intelligence.

Yet wasn’t it all academic? In Sean Keaney’s time frame, there hadn’t been any IRA terrorist activities for the mole to assist. And MI5 hadn’t lost any informers. Its reputation had not been damaged. So did that mean the mole had simply retired from business, having never been activated? Perhaps he had just quietly left the Service.

She tried imagining the situation from the mole’s point of view. There he was, all primed and ready to go, when the message came from his masters: we don’t need you anymore. Or, perhaps worse, no message came at all.

What would that have felt like? How frustrating would that have been? Did our friend the mole cheerfully accept the order, and spend the next decade loyally doing his best in MI5? Was he just one of us, no different from everyone else?

It didn’t seem likely.

Liz swallowed a mouthful of tepid mineral water. Time for bed, she thought. As she brushed her teeth, she thought how nothing in the last ten years indicated the mole had done anything—for the IRA. But what if the mole had done something else?

Arranging the over-stuffed pillows, she undressed and got into bed. Could the mole have been placed in MI6? She didn’t think so. Surely the original idea had to have been to place him in MI5, where he could subvert the Service’s work against the IRA. The fact remained that the original recruitment of the mole had an Irish lynchpin—Sean Keaney’s idea to put a mole in place. But as it turned out, the idea had lost its value, like currency taken out of circulation.

She lay back and thought again, uneasily, of O’Phelan. What was it that bothered her about the interview? It wasn’t just a feeling that he hadn’t told her the truth. There was something else.

Why hadn’t she focused on it before? It was obvious: she’d known it all along. When O’Phelan had got up, gone over to the door and spoken to Ryan, the so-called student waiting in the hallway, no other voice had spoken. Because, of course, there wasn’t anyone there.

O’Phelan had got up to create a diversion. To disguise his reaction to something she’d said. What had they been discussing that made him do that? They hadn’t been discussing anything, she realised—she had been reciting the names on her list. Patrick Dobson, Judith Spratt, Tom Dartmouth, etc. That was clearly what bothered O’Phelan, enough for him to try and distract her.

O’Phelan knew one of the names.

She closed her eyes but her mind went on churning all the images of the day. But she was too tired to focus on any of them. She would start again in the morning.

And only then did she remember. She had forgotten to ring her mother.