The Deceiver

Father Dermot O’Brien received the message from Libya by the normal route for such first communications—by mail.

It was a perfectly ordinary letter, and had anyone opened it—which they had not, because the Republic of Ireland does not intercept mail—they would have found nothing of interest in it. The postmark said that it came from Geneva, as indeed it had, and the return address indicated the writer worked for the World Council of Churches, which he did not.

Father O’Brien found it in his pigeonhole in the main hall beside the refectory one morning in the early spring of 1987 as he emerged from taking his breakfast. He glanced through the other four letters addressed to him, but his gaze returned to the one from Geneva. It bore the slight pencil mark on the rear flap that told him it should not be opened in public or left lying around.

The priest nodded amiably to two colleagues about to enter the refectory and went back to his bedroom on the first floor.

The letter had been typed on the usual onionskin airmail paper. The text was warm and friendly, beginning “My dear Dermot ... ,” and was written in the tone of one old friend involved in pastoral work to another. Even though the World Council of Churches is a Protestant organization, no casual observer would have seen anything strange in a Lutheran clergyman writing to a friend who happened to be a Catholic priest. These were the days of cautious ecumenism, especially in the international field.

The friend in Geneva wished him well, trusted he was in good health and chatted about the work of the WCC in the Third World. The meat was in the third paragraph of the script. The writer said that his bishop recalled with pleasure a previous meeting with Father O’Brien and would be delighted to meet him again. The signoff was simply, “Your good friend Harry.”

Father O’Brien laid the letter down thoughtfully and gazed from his window across the green fields of County Wicklow toward Bray and, beyond it, the gray waters of the Irish Sea. The waters were hidden by the roll of the hills, and even the spires of Bray were dim and distant from the old manor house at Sandymount that contained the headquarters of his Order. But the sun shone brightly on the green meadows that he loved so dearly, as dearly indeed as he hated the great enemy that lay beyond the sea.

The letter intrigued him. It had been so long, almost two years, since he had visited Tripoli for a personal audience with Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the Great Leader of the Libyan Jamahariya, Keeper of Allah’s Word, the man referred to as “the bishop” in the letter.

It had been a rare and privileged occasion, but despite the flowery language, the soft voice, and the extravant promises, nothing had finally been forthcoming. No money, no arms for the Irish Cause. Finally, it had been a disappointment and the man who had arranged the meeting, Hakim al-Mansour, head of the foreign arm of the Libyan Secret Service, the Moukhabarat, who now signed himself “Harry,” had been apologetic.

And now this, a summons, for that was what it was. Though no time had been suggested for the meeting with the bishop, Father O’Brien knew none was necessary. Harry meant “without delay.” Although the Arabs can delay for years when they are so minded, when Qaddafi summoned in this manner, one went—if one wanted his largesse.

Father O’Brien knew that his trusted friends in the Cause did indeed want that largesse. Funds from America were down; the constant appeals from the Dublin government—men Father O’Brien regarded as traitors—not to send arms and money to Ireland had had their effect. It would not be wise to ignore the summons from Tripoli. The snag would be to find a good excuse to travel again so soon.

In a perfect world, Father O’Brien could have done with a few weeks’ break. He had but three days earlier returned from Amsterdam, ostensibly from a seminar of the War on Want.

During his time in Europe he had been able to slip away from Amsterdam and, using funds he had earlier salted away in Utrecht, take two long-term leases in false names for one apartment in Roermond, Holland, and another in Münster, West Germany. These would later become safe houses for the young heroes who would go over there to carry the war to the enemy where they least expected it.

Traveling was, for Dermot O’Brien, a constant part of his life. His Order busied itself with missionary and ecumenical work, and he was its International Secretary. It was the perfect cover for the war. Not the War on Want, but the war against the English, which had been his calling and his life since he had held the broken head of the dying young man in Derry all those years ago and seen the British paratroopers running down the street, and spoken the last rites, and made his other, personal vow, of which his Order and his bishop knew nothing.

Since then, he had nurtured and honed his visceral loathing of the people across the water and had offered his services to the Cause. They had been welcomed, and for ten years he had been the principal international “fixer” for the Provi­sional IRA. He had raised the funds, moved the money from one deep-cover bank account to another, secured false pass­ports, and arranged for the safe arrival and storage of the Semtex and the detonators.

With his help, the bombs in Regent’s Park and Hyde Park had torn apart the young bandsmen and the horses; through his assistance, the sharpened coach bolts had scythed through the street outside Harrods, ripping out entrails and severing limbs. He regretted that it was necessary, but he knew it was just. He read the reports in the newspapers and watched beside his horrified colleagues in the television room at the manor; and he would go, when invited by a colleague in parish work, and take the Mass with a calm soul.

His problem that spring morning was fortuitously solved by a small announcement in the Dublin Press, a copy of which was still lying across his bed where he had read it while drinking his morning tea.

His room also served as his office, and he had his own telephone. He made two calls, and during the second he received a warm welcome to join the group whose forthcom­ing pilgrimage had been announced in the paper. Then he went to see his Superior.

“I need the experience, Frank,” he said. “If I stay in the office the phone never stops ringing. I need the peace, and the time to pray. If you can spare me, I would like to go.”

The Superior glanced at the itinerary and nodded.

“Go with my blessing, Dermot. Pray for us all while you are there.”

The pilgrimage was one week away. Father O’Brien knew he did not need to contact the Army Council to ask them also for permission. If he had news when he returned, so much the better. If not, no need to trouble the Army Council. He sent a letter to London, paying the extra to guarantee twenty-four-hour delivery, knowing it would reach the Libyan People’s Bureau—the Libyan government’s term for its embassies— within three days. That would give Tripoli time to make their arrangements.

A week later, the pilgrimage began with Mass and prayers at the Irish shrine of Knock. Thence it moved to Shannon Airport and a chartered jet to Lourdes, in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. There Father O’Brien slipped away from the crowd of lay men and women, nuns and priests, who made up the pilgrims, and boarded the small charter plane waiting for him at the Lourdes airport. It deposited him four hours later at Valletta, Malta, where the Libyans took him over. Their unmarked executive jet landed at a small military base outside Sirte just twenty-four hours after the Irish priest had departed from Shannon. Hakim al-Mansour, urbane and gra­cious as ever, was there to meet him.

Because of the urgency of getting back to Lourdes and rejoining the group of pilgrims, there was no meeting with Colonel Qaddafi. In fact, it had never even been envisaged. This was an operation al-Mansour had been charged to handle alone. The two men talked in a room at the base set aside for them and ringed by al-Mansour’s personal guards. When they had finished and the Irishman had snatched a few hours’ sleep, he left again for Malta and Lourdes. He was excited. What he had learned, if it came to fruition, would constitute a huge breakthrough for his Cause.

Hakim al-Mansour secured his personal interview with the Great Leader three days later. He was summoned, as always, at a moment’s notice to present himself at the place where Qaddafi was staying that day. Since the bombing of the previous year, the Libyan leader had taken more than ever to shifting his quarters from place to place, spending more and more time out in the desert, an hour’s drive from Tripoli.

He was in what al-Mansour privately called “the Bedouin mood” that day, lounging at ease on a pile of cushions in a large and ornate tent at his desert encampment, dressed in a white kaftan. He appeared as languid as ever as he listened to the reports of the two nervous ministers who sat cross-legged before him. The ministers, townsmen by birth, would clearly have preferred to be seated behind their desks. But if the Great Leader’s whim was that they squat on cushions on the carpet, they would squat on cushions.

Qaddafi acknowledged al-Mansour’s entry with a gesture of the hand to be seated to one side and await his turn. When the ministers had been dismissed, Qaddafi took a sip of water and asked for a report on progress.

The younger officer gave his report without frills or exag­gerations. Like all those around the Libyan leader, he was somewhat in awe of Muammar Qaddafi. The man was an enigma, and men are always in awe of an enigma, especially one who, with a wave of his hand, could require your imme­diate execution.

Al-Mansour knew that many foreigners, particularly the Americans, including those at the highest level, believed Qad­dafi to be mad. He, al-Mansour, knew there was nothing mad about Muammar Qaddafi. The man would not have survived eighteen years of supreme and unquestioned mastery of this turbulent, fragmented, and violent land if he had been de­ranged.

He was in fact a subtle and skilled political operator. He had made his mistakes, and he entertained his illusions—notably about the world outside his own country and his status in that world. He genuinely believed he was a lonely superstar, occupying the center of the world stage. He really believed that his long, rambling speeches were received with reverence by millions of “the masses” beyond his own bor­ders as he encouraged them to overthrow their own leaders and accept his inevitable supremacy in the cause of the purification of Islam according to the message he had person­ally received to accomplish this task. No one in his personal entourage dared to contradict this.

But within Libya he was unchallenged and virtually unchal­lengeable. He relied for advice upon a small circle of trusted intimates. Ministers would come and go, but his personal inner circle, unless he suspected one of them of treachery, had his ear and wielded the real power. Few of them knew anything about that strange place “abroad.” On this, Hakim al-Mansour, raised in a British public school, was the expert. Al-Mansour knew Qaddafi had a soft spot for him. It was justified—the head of the foreign arm of the Mukhabarat had, in younger days, proved his loyalty by personally executing three of Qaddafi’s political opponents in their European bolt-holes.

Still, the Bedouin dictator needed careful handling. Some did this with flowery flattery. Al-Mansour suspected Qaddafi accepted the flattery but took it with a pinch of salt. Al-Mansour’s own approach was respectful, but he did not varnish the truth. Rather, he phrased the truth carefully and certainly did not offer all of it—that would have been suicidal. But he suspected that behind the dreamy smile and the almost effeminate gestures, Muammar Qaddafi wanted to be told the truth.

That day, in April 1987, Hakim al-Mansour told his leader of the visit of the Irish priest and of their discussions. As he talked, one of Qaddafi’s personal team of doctors, who had been mixing a potion at a table in the corner, approached and offered the small cup to Qaddafi. The Libyan leader swal­lowed the draught and waved the doctor away. The man packed up his medicaments and a few minutes later left the tent.

Although a year had passed since the American bombers had devastated his personal living quarters, Muammar Qaddafi had not completely recovered. He still suffered occa­sional nightmares and the effects of hypertension. The doctor had given him a mild sedative.

“The fifty-fifty split of the material—it is accepted?” he asked now.

“The priest will report that condition,” said al-Mansour. “I am confident the Army Council will agree.”

“And the matter of the American ambassador?”

“That, too.”

Qaddafi sighed, in the manner of one on whose shoulders too many of the world’s burdens are placed. “Not enough,” he said dreamily. “There must be more. On mainland Amer­ica.”

“The search goes on, Excellency. The problem remains the same. In Britain, the Provisional IRA will exact your just revenge for you. The infidels will destroy the infidels at your behest. It was a brilliant idea.”

The idea of using the Provisional IRA as the conduit and tool of Qaddafi’s revenge on Britain had actually come from the brain of al-Mansour, but Qaddafi now believed the notion had been his, inspired by Allah.

Al-Mansour went on: “In America there is, alas, no in-place partisan network that can be used in the same way. The search goes on. The tools of your vengeance will be found.”

Qaddafi nodded several times, then gestured that the inter­view was over. “See to it,” he murmured softly.

The gathering of intelligence is a strange business. Rarely does one single coup provide all the answers, let alone solve all the problems. The search for the single, wonderful solution is a particularly American trait. Mostly, the picture appears as if a jigsaw puzzle is being carefully assembled, piece by piece. Usually, the last dozen pieces never appear at all; a good intelligence analyst will discern the picture from a col­lection of fragments.

Sometimes the pieces themselves do not come from the jigsaw picture under study at all, but from another one. Sometimes the pieces are themselves untrue. And they never lock together quite as neatly as in a real jigsaw puzzle, with the fretted edges of each and every piece matched.

There are men at Century House, home of the British Secret Intelligence Service, who are experts at jigsaw puz­zles. They seldom leave their desks; the gatherers—the field agents—are the ones who bring in the pieces. The analysts try to assemble them. Before the end of April, two pieces of a new puzzle had arrived at Century House.

One came from the Libyan doctor who had given Qaddafi his medicine in the tent. The man had once had a son whom he dearly loved. The student had been in England trying to become an engineer when the Mukhabarat had approached him and suggested that if he loved his father, he should carry out a task for the Great Leader. The bomb they had given him to plant had gone off prematurely. The father had hidden his grief well and had accepted the condolences, but his heart had turned to hatred, and he passed what information he could glean from his position at the court of Muammar Qad­dafi to the British.

His report of half a conversation, which he had heard in the tent before he was dismissed, was not sent via the British Embassy in Tripoli, for this was watched night and day. Instead, it went to Cairo, arriving a week later. From Cairo it was flashed to London, where it was considered important enough to go straight to the top.

“He’s going to do what?” asked the Chief, when he was told.

“It seems he has offered a gift of explosives and weaponry to the IRA,” said Timothy Edwards, who had that month been promoted from Assistant Chief to Deputy Chief. “That, at least, seems to be the only interpretation of the overheard conversation.”

“How was the offer made?”

“Apparently via an Irish priest flown in to Libya.”

“Do we know which one?”

“No, sir. Might not be a real priest at all. Could be a cover for an Army Council man. But the offer seems to have originated with Qaddafi.”

“Right. Well, we must find out who this mysterious cleric is. I’ll tell the Box and see if they have anything. If he’s in the North, he’s theirs. If he’s in the South or elsewhere, we take him.”

“Box Five Hundred” is the in-house slang term for MI-5, the British Security Service, the internal counterintelligence arm that has the task of counterterrorism in Northern Ireland, as British territory. The SIS had the mandate for intelligence and offensive counterintelligence operations outside Britain, including the Republic of Ireland, the “South.”

The Chief lunched with his colleague, the Director General of MI-5 that same day. The third man at the table was the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee; it would be his job to alert the Cabinet Office.

Two days later, an MI-5 operation came up with the second piece of the jigsaw puzzle.

There was nothing foreseen about it; it was just one of those flukes that occasionally make life easier. A young IRA man, driving a car with an Armalite in the trunk, came up against an unexpected roadblock manned by the Royal Ulster Con­stabulary. The teenager hesitated, thought of the rifle in his car—which would guarantee him several years imprisonment in the Maze jail—and tried to crash the roadblock.

He almost made it. Had he been more experienced, he might have. The sergeant and two constables at the roadblock had to throw themselves to one side as the stolen car suddenly surged ahead. But a third officer, standing well back, brought up his rifle and fired four shots into the accelerating car. One of them took off the top of the teenager’s head.

He was only a messenger boy, but the IRA decided he merited a full funeral with military honors. It took place in Bollycrane, the dead youth’s native village, a small place in South Armagh. The grieving family was comforted by Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams and asked for a favor. Would they allow a visiting priest, presented as a longtime friend of the family, to conduct the funeral service in place of the parish priest? The family, hardline Republicans all, with an­other son serving life for murder, agreed without hesitation. The service was duly conducted by Father Dermot O’Brien.

A little-known fact about the funerals of IRA men buried in Northern Ireland is that they provide a constant and useful venue for IRA leaders to get together and confer. The cere­monies are extremely tightly controlled by IRA “hard men.”

* * *

Usually, every single person among the mourners—men, women, and children—is a staunch supporter of the IRA. In some of the small villages of South Armagh and Fermanagh and South Tyrone, entire villages down to the last inhabitant are fanatic supporters.

The TV cameras are often fixed upon the ceremony, and the IRA chiefs, shielded by the crowd even from lip-reading, can hold muttered conferences, plan, decide, relay informa­tion, or set up future operations—not always an easy task for men under constant surveillance. For a British soldier or a Royal Ulster Constabulary man even to approach a funeral party would be a signal for a riot or even the murder of the soldier, as has been proved.

So a watch is kept with Long Tom cameras, but these usually cannot detect a muttered conversation from the side of the mouth. Thus, the IRA uses the supposed sanctity of death to plan further slaughter.

When the British first learned of this, they were not slow to catch up. It was once said that the most important thing an English gentleman ever learns is precisely when to stop being one.

So the British bug the coffins.

On the night before the funeral at Ballycrane, two Special Air Service soldiers, acting under cover in civilian clothes, broke into the funeral parlor where the empty coffin stood waiting for the morrow. The body, in Irish tradition, was still laid out in the family’s front parlor down the street. One of the soldiers was an electronics expert, the other a skilled French polisher and carpenter. Within an hour they implanted the bug in the woodwork of the coffin. It would have a short life, since before noon the next day it would be under six feet of earth.

From their deep cover on a hillside above the village the next day, the SAS soldiers kept watch on the funeral, photo­graphing every face present with a camera whose lens resem­bled a bazooka tube. Another man monitored the sounds emanating from the device in the wood of the coffin as it came through the village street and into the church. The device recorded the entire funeral service, and the soldiers watched the coffin re-emerge and move toward the open grave.

The priest, his cassock billowing in the morning breeze, intoned the last words and scattered a little earth on the coffin as it went down. The sound of the earth hitting the woodwork caused the listening soldier to wince, it was so loud. Above the open grave, Father Dermot O’Brien stood beside a man known by the British to be the deputy Chief of Staff of the IRA Army Council. Heads down, lips hidden, they began to mutter.

What they said went onto the tape on the hillside. From there it went to Lurgan, thence to Aldergrove airport, and thence to London. It had been only a routine operation, but it had come up with pure gold. Father O’Brien had reported to the Army Council the full details of Colonel Qaddafi’s offer.

“How much?” asked Sir Anthony, the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, two days later in London.

“Twenty tons, Tony. That’s the offer.”

The Director General of MI-5 closed the file that his col­leagues had just finished reading and returned it to his brief­case. The actual tape was not present. Sir Anthony was a busy man; a written synopsis was all he needed.

The tape had been with MI-5 in London for over a day, and they had been working fast. The sound quality, inevitably, had not been good. For one thing, the bugging device had been straining to hear the words through half a centimeter of wood, and it was being lowered downward into the grave as the conversation began. For another, there were extraneous sounds: the wailing of the young terrorist’s mother nearby, the rustle of the brisk wind across the open grave and through the priest’s flowing robes, the crack of the IRA honor guard in black balaclava woolen masks firing three rounds of blanks into the air.

A radio producer would have thought the tape a mess. But this tape was never intended for broadcast. Moreover, the technology of electronic sound-enhancement is very ad­vanced. Carefully, sound engineers had phased out the back­ground noises, “lifting” the spoken words into a different frequency mode and separating them from everything else. The voices of the officiating priest and the Army Council man beside him would never win prizes for elocution, but what they had said was clear enough.

“And the conditions?” asked Sir Anthony. “No doubt about them?”

“None,” said the DG. “Within the twenty tons will be the usual machine guns, rifles, grenades, launchers, mortars, pistols, timers, and bazookas—probably the Czech RPG-7. Plus two metric tons of Semtex-H. Of this, half must be used for a bombing campaign on mainland Britain, to include selective assassinations, including that of the American am­bassador. Apparently the Libyans were very insistent on that.”

“Bobby, I want you to take it all to the SIS,” said Sir Anthony at last. “No interservice rivalry, if you please. Total cooperation, all the way. It looks as if this will be an overseas operation—their pigeon. From Libya right up to some godfor­saken bay on the coast of Ireland, it’ll be a foreign operation. I want you to give them your absolute cooperation, from you downward.”

“No question,” said the DG. “They’ll have it.”

Before nightfall, the Chief of the SIS and his Deputy Timothy Edwards attended a full and lengthy briefing at the Curzon Street headquarters of their sister service. Exceptionally, the Chief was prepared to admit that he could, in part, corrobo­rate the Ulster information from the report of the Libyan doctor. Normally, wild horses would not drag from him the slightest admission concerning SIS assets abroad, but this was not a normal situation.

He asked for, and was given, the cooperation he wanted. MI-5 would increase surveillance, both physical and elec­tronic, on the IRA Army Council man. So long as Father O’Brien remained in the North, the same would apply to him. When he returned to the Irish Republic, the SIS would take over. Surveillance would also be doubled on the one other man mentioned in the graveside conversation, a man well known to British security forces but who had never yet been charged or imprisoned.

The Chief ordered his own networks in the Irish Republic to keep watch for the return of Father O’Brien, to tail him, and above all else, to alert London if he left by air or sea for foreign parts. A pickup would be much easier on the continent of Europe.

When he returned to Century House, the Chief summoned Sam McCready.

“Stop it, Sam,” he said finally. “Stop it at its source in Libya or in transit. Those twenty tons must not get through.”

Sam McCready sat for hours in a darkened viewing room watching the film of the funeral. As the tape played through the entire service inside the church, the camera roamed over the graveyard outside, picking up the handful of IRA guards placed there to ensure no one came near. They were all unrecognizable in black balaclava woolen masks.

When the cortege reemerged from the portico of the church to proceed to the open grave, with six masked pall-bearers carrying the coffin, McCready asked the technicians to syn­chronize sound and vision. Nothing remotely suspicious was said until the priest stood, his head bowed, by the grave with the IRA Army Council man beside him. The priest raised his head once to offer words of comfort to the teenager’s weeping mother.

“Freeze frame. Close-up. Enhance.”

When the face of Father O’Brien filled the screen, Mc­Cready stared at it for twenty minutes, memorizing every feature until he would know the face anywhere.

He read the transcript of the section of the tape in which the priest reported on his Libyan visit, over and over again. Later he sat alone and stared at photographs in his office.

One of the photographs was of Muammar Qaddafi, his bouffant black hair bulging from beneath his army cap, mouth half open as he spoke. Another was of Hakim al-Mansour, stepping out of a car in Paris, exquisitely tailored by Savile Row, smooth, urbane, bilingual in English, fluent in French, educated, charming, cosmopolitan, and utterly lethal. A third was the Chief of Staff, IRA Army Council, addressing a public meeting in Belfast in his other role as a law-abiding and responsible local government councilor of the Sinn Fein polit­ical party. There was a fourth picture: that of the man men­tioned by the graveside as the one the Army Council would probably choose to take over and run the operation, the one Father O’Brien would have to introduce and recommend by letter to Hakim al-Mansour. The British knew he was a former commander of the IRA’s South Armagh Brigade, now re­moved from local tasks to head up Special Projects, a very intelligent, highly experienced, and ruthless killer. His name was Kevin Mahoney.

McCready stared at the photographs for hours, trying to glean some knowledge of the brains behind the faces. If he was to win, he would have to match his mind with theirs. So far, they had the edge. They knew, presumably, not only what they were going to do, but how they were going to do it. And when. He knew the first, but not the second or the third.

He had two advantages. One, he knew what they had in mind, but they did not know he knew. And two, he could recognize them, but they did not know him. Or did al-Mansour know his face? The Libyan had worked with the KGB; the Russians knew McCready. Had they briefed the Libyan on the face of the Deceiver?

The Chief was not prepared to take the risk.

“I’m sorry, Sam. You are absolutely not going in yourself. I don’t care if there’s only a one-percent chance they have your face on file, the answer is no. Nothing personal. But you are not, under any circumstances, being taken alive. I will not contemplate another Buckley affair.”

William Buckley, the CIA chief of station in Beirut, had been taken alive by the Hezbollah. He had died slowly and hideously. The zealots had finally sent the CIA a videotape, complete with soundtrack, as they skinned him alive. And of course he had talked, told it all.

“You’ll have to find someone else,” said the Chief. “And may the Lord look after him.”

So McCready went through the files, day after day, back­ward and forward, sifting and sorting, considering and reject­ing. Eventually he came up with a name, a “possible.” And he took it to Timothy Edwards.

“You’re crazy, Sam,” said Edwards. “You know he’s absolutely unacceptable. MI-5 hate his guts. We’re trying to cooperate with them, and you produce this—turncoat. Dam­mit, he’s a literary renegade, a biter of the hand that fed him. We’d never employ him.”

“That’s the point,” said Sam quietly. Edwards shifted his ground.

“Anyway, he’d never work for us.”

“He might.”

“Give me one good reason why.”

McCready gave it.

“Well,” said Edwards, “as far as the record goes, the man’s an outsider. Use of him is forbidden. Absolutely forbid­den. Is that clear?”

“Completely,” said McCready.

“On the other hand,” added Edwards, “you’ll probably follow your own instincts anyway.”

As McCready left the office, Edwards reached under the desk to flick off the hidden tape deck. Without the last sentence, he was covered. Thus are long and glittering careers created.

McCready, who had been tipped off about the tape machine by an old friend, the engineer who had installed it, muttered as he walked down the corridor, “All right, arsehole, you can start editing now.”

McCready had no illusions about the Provisional IRA. The journalists in the tabloid press who designated the Irish terror­ist group as a bunch of dense idiots who occasionally got it right simply did not know what they were talking about.

It might have been like that in the old days, the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the IRA leadership was composed of a bunch of middle-aged ideologues in trenchcoats, carrying small-caliber handguns and making bombs in back-street ga­rages from garden fertilizer. Those were the days when they could have been “taken out” and stopped in their tracks. But as usual, the politicians had got it wrong, underestimated the danger, accepted that the bombers were just an extension of the civil rights movement. Now, those days were long gone. By the mid-1980s, the IRA had graduated, becoming arguably the most efficient terrorist group in the world.

They had four qualities without which no terrorist group can survive for twenty years, as they had. First, they had a pool of tribal support, from whose youth a constant stream of new recruits could step in to fill the shoes of the dead and the “gone away”—those in prison. Although they had never had more than 150 active terrorists deployed at once and probably no more than twice that number of “active” supporters ready to offer safe houses, locations for arms caches, and technical backup, and although they had lost well over one hundred dead and several hundred gone away, the new young recruits constantly came forward from the die-hard Republican com­munity in the North and the South to take their places. The recruit pool would never dry up.

Second, they had the safe refuge of the South, the Irish Republic, from which to mount operations into the British-ruled North. Though many lived permanently in the North, the South was always available, and into it a wanted terrorist could slip away and disappear. Had the six counties of North­ern Ireland been an island, the IRA would have been coped with years ago.

Third, they had dedication and ruthlessness; there was no threshold of atrocity beyond which they would not go. Over the years, the old men of the late 1960s had been eased out, still nursing their idealistic fervor for the reunification of their island into a single United Ireland under democratic rule. In their place had come hard-nosed zealots of skill and cunning, whose education and good brains masked their cruelty. The new breed were dedicated to a United Ireland all right—but under their rule, and according to the principles of Marx, a dedication that still had to be kept hidden from their American cash-donors.

Last, they had established a constant supply of money, the real lifeblood of a terrorist or revolutionary campaign. In the early days, it had been a question of donations from the bars of Boston or the occasional local bank raid. By the mid-1980s, the Provisionals controlled a nationwide network of drinking clubs, protection rackets, and “normal” criminal enterprises that yielded a huge annual income with which to underpin the terror campaign. As they had learned about money, they had learned too about internal security, the need-to-know rule, and strict compartmentalization. The old days when they talked too much and drank too much had long gone.

Their Achilles’ heel was in the area of arms. Having the money to buy weapons was one thing. Parlaying money into M-60 machine guns, mortars, bazookas, or ground-to-air mis­siles was another. They had had their successes—and their failures. They had tried many operations to bring the arms from America, but usually the FBI got them first. They had had weapons from the Communist bloc, via Czechoslovakia, with a nod from the KGB. But since the arrival of Mr. Gorbachev, the Soviet preparedness to sanction terror in the West had waned and was finally disappearing.

The IRA needed arms, McCready knew; and if these were an offer, they would send in the best and the brightest to get them. Such were his thoughts as he steered his car out of the small town of Cricklade and across the unmarked county line into Gloucestershire.

The converted barn was where he had been told it would be, tucked down a side road, an old Cotswold stone affair that had once housed cattle and hay. Whoever had done the conversion to a quiet country house had worked hard and well. It was surrounded by a stone wall set with wagon wheels, and the garden was bright with late spring flowers. McCready drove through the gate and drew up outside the timber door. A pretty young woman, weeding a flowered border, put down her trowel and stood up.

“Hello,” she said. “Have you come about a rug?”

So, he thought, he’s selling rugs as a sideline. Perhaps the information about the books not selling too well was true.

“No, ’fraid not,” he said. “Actually, I’ve come to see Tom.”

Her smile faded, and an element of suspicion entered her eyes, as if she had seen men like him enter her husband’s life before and knew they meant trouble.

“He’s writing. In his shed at the bottom of the garden. He finishes in about an hour. Can you wait?”

“Certainly.”

She gave him coffee in the bright, chintz-curtained sitting room, and they waited. Conversation wilted. At last they heard the tramp of feet coming through the kitchen. She jumped up.

“Nikki—”

Tom Rowse appeared in the door and stopped. His smile did not flicker, but his eyes took in McCready and became very watchful.

“Darling, this gentleman has come to see you. We’ve been waiting. Would you like a coffee?”

He did not look at her, just kept his eyes on his visitor. “Sure, love a coffee.”

She left. McCready introduced himself. Rowse sat down. The records had said he was thirty-three. They did not say that he looked extremely fit. They did not need to.

Tom Rowse had been a captain in the Special Air Service regiment. Three years earlier, he had left the army, married Nikki, and bought a decrepit barn west of Cricklade. He had done the conversion himself, working out his rage through the long days of bricks and mortar, beams and rafters, windows and water pipes. He had hacked the rough meadow into smooth lawn, laid the flower beds, built the wall. That was by day; by night, he had written.

It had to be a novel, of course; a nonfiction work would have been banned under the Official Secrets Act. But even as a novel, his first book had caused outrage in the Curzon Street headquarters of MI-5. The book was about Northern Ireland, seen from the point of view of an undercover soldier, and it had mocked the counterintelligence efforts of MI-5.

The British Establishment can be very vindictive toward those it sees to have turned against it. Tom Rowse’s novel eventually found a publisher and came out to a modest suc­cess for a first novel by an unknown writer. The publishers had since commissioned a second book, on which he was now working. But the word had gone out from Curzon Street that Tom Rowse, former captain in the SAS, was an outsider, beyond the pale—not to be touched, approached, or helped in any way. He knew it, and he did not give a damn. He had built himself a new world with his new house and his new wife.

Nikki served coffee, absorbed the atmosphere, and left. She was Rowse’s first wife, but Rowse was not her first husband.

Four years earlier, Rowse, crouched behind a van in a mean street in West Belfast, had watched his friend Nigel Quaid move slowly forward like a giant armored crab toward a red Ford Sierra a hundred yards down the road.

Rowse and Quaid suspected there was a bomb in the trunk of the car. A controlled explosion would have disposed of it. The senior brass wanted the bomb defused if possible. The British know the identity of just about every IRA bomb-maker in Ireland. Each one of them leaves a personal signature in the way the bomb is assembled. That signature is blown apart if the bomb goes off, but if the bomb can be defused and retrieved, it provides a harvest of information: where the explosive came from, the source of the primer, the detonator, maybe even fingerprints. And even without fingerprints, usu­ally the identity of the hands that put it together.

So Quaid, his friend since school days, had gone forward, swathed in body armor till he could hardly walk, to open the trunk and try to dismantle the antihandling devices. He had failed. The trunk lid had come open, but the device was taped on the underside of the lid. Quaid was looking downward, half a second too long. When daylight hit the photosensitive cell, the bomb went off. Despite Quaid’s armor, it removed his head.

Rowse had comforted the young widow, Nikki Quaid. The comfort had turned to affection, and affection to love. When he asked her to marry him, she had one condition: Leave Ireland, leave the Army. When she saw McCready today, she had suspected something, for she had seen men like him before. They were the quiet ones, always the quiet ones. It had been a quiet one who had come to Nigel that day and asked him to go to the mean street in West Belfast. Outside in the garden she dug angrily into the weeds while her man talked with the quiet one.

McCready spoke for ten minutes. Rowse listened. When the older man had finished, the ex-soldier said, “Look out­side.”

McCready did so. The rich farming land stretched away to the horizon. A bird sang.

“I have made a new life here. Far away from that filth, from those scum. I’m out, McCready. Right out. Didn’t Curzon Street tell you that? I’ve made myself untouchable. A new life, a wife, a home that isn’t a soaking scrape in an Irish bog, even a modest living from the books. Why the hell should I go back?”

“I need a man, Tom. A man in on the ground. Inside. Able to move through the Middle East with a good cover. A face they don’t know.”

“Find another.”

“If that metric ton of Semtex-H goes off here in England, divided into five hundred two-kilo packages, there’ll be an­other hundred Nigel Quaids. Another thousand Mary Feeneys. I’m trying to stop it arriving, Tom.”

“No, McCready. Not me. Why the hell should I?”

“They’re putting a man in charge, from their side. Someone I think you know. Kevin Mahoney.”

Rowse stiffened as if he had been hit.

“He will be there?” he asked.

“We believe he will be in charge. If he fails, it will destroy him.”

Rowse stared out at the landscape for a long time. But now he saw a different countryside, one that was a deeper green but less well tended; and a garage forecourt; and a small body by the roadside that had once been a little girl called Mary Feeney.

He rose and went outside. McCready heard low voices and the sound of Nikki crying. Rowse came back and went to pack a suitcase.

Rowse’s briefing took a week, and McCready handled it personally. There was no question of bringing Rowse to the environs of Century House, let alone to Curzon Street. Mc­Cready borrowed one of the three quiet country houses not an hour’s drive from London that the SIS keeps for such purposes, and he had the briefing materials sent from Century House.

There was written material and movie film, much of the latter rather indistinct, having been shot from great distance or through a hole in the side of a van, or from between the branches of a bush at long range. But the faces were clear enough.

Rowse saw the film and heard the tape from the graveyard scene at Ballycrane a week earlier. He studied the face of the Irish priest who had acted as messenger, and that of the Army Council man beside him. But when the still photographs were laid side by side, his gaze always came back to the cold, handsome features of Kevin Mahoney.

Four years earlier, Rowse had almost killed the IRA gun­man. Mahoney was on the run, and the operation to track him down had taken weeks of patient undercover work. Finally, he had been suckered by a deception operation into venturing into Northern Ireland from his hideout near Dundalk in the South. He was being driven by another IRA man, and they stopped for petrol at a filling station near Moira. Rowse had been driving behind him, well back, receiving radio briefings from the watchers along the route and in the sky. When he heard that Mahoney had stopped for fuel, he decided to close in.

By the time he reached the forecourt of the filling station, the IRA driver had filled his tank and was back in the car. No one was with him yet. For a moment Rowse thought he had lost the quarry. He told his partner to cover the IRA driver and got out. It was while he was busying himself with the petrol pump that the door of the men’s room opened and Mahoney came out.

Rowse was carrying his SAS-issue Browning 13-shot in his waistband at the back, under his blue duffle jacket. A scruffy woolen cap covered most of his head, and several days of stubble obscured his face. He looked like an Irish workman, which was his cover.

As Mahoney emerged, Rowse dropped into a crouch beside the petrol pump, pulled his gun, took up the double-handed aim position, and yelled, “Mahoney—freeze!”

Mahoney was fast. Even as Rowse was drawing, he was reaching for his own gun. By law, Rowse could have finished him there and then. Later, he wished he had. But he shouted again, “Drop it, or you’re dead!”

Mahoney had his gun out, but it was still by his side. He looked at the man half-hidden by the pump, saw the Brown­ing, and knew he could not win. He dropped his Colt.

At that moment, two old ladies in a Volkswagen pulled onto the concrete apron of the filling station. They had no idea what was going on, but they drove straight between Rowse by the petrol pump and Mahoney by the wall. That was enough for the IRA man. He dropped like a stone and retrieved his gun. His partner tried to drive to his rescue, but Rowse’s backup man was beside him, a gun stuck straight through the car window into the man’s temple.

Rowse could not fire because of the two women, who had now stalled their engine and were sitting in their Volkswagen screaming. Mahoney came out from behind the Volkswagen, dodged around the back of a parked lorry, and ran out into the road. By the time Rowse cleared the lorry, Mahoney was in the middle of the highway.

At that moment, a Morris Minor drove by. The elderly driver of the Morris jammed on his brakes to avoid hitting the running man. Mahoney kept the Morris between himself and Rowse, hauled the old man out by the jacket, clubbed him to the ground with the Colt, jumped into the driving seat, and was off.

There was a passenger in the car. The old man had been taking his granddaughter to the circus in the Morris. Rowse, in the road, watched as the passenger door flew open and the child was thrown out. He heard her thin scream from down the road, saw her small body hit the road, then saw her body struck by an oncoming van.

“Yes,” said McCready softly, “we know it was him. De­spite the eighteen witnesses who said he was at a bar in Dundalk at that hour.”

“I still write to her mother,” said Rowse.

“The Army Council wrote, too,” said McCready. “They expressed regret. Said she fell accidentally.”

“She was thrown,” said Rowse. “I saw his arm. He’s really going to be in charge of this?”

“We think so. We don’t know whether the transshipment will be by land, sea, or air, or where he’ll show up. But we think he’ll command the operation. You heard the tape.”

McCready briefed Rowse on his cover stories. He would have two, not one. The first would be reasonably transparent. With luck, those investigating it would penetrate the lie and discover the second story. With luck (again), they would be satisfied with the second cover.

“Where do I start?” asked Rowse as the week neared its end.

“Where would you like to start?” asked McCready.

“Anyone researching international arms traffic for his next novel would soon find out that the two European bases for that traffic are Antwerp and Hamburg,” said Rowse.

“True,” said McCready. “Do you have any contacts in either city?”

“There’s a man I know in Hamburg,” said Rowse. “He’s dangerous, crazy, but he may have contacts in the interna­tional underworld.”

“His name?”

“Kleist. Ulrich Kleist.”

“Jesus, you know some strange bastards, Tom.”

“I saved his butt once,” said Rowse. “At Mogadishu. He wasn’t crazy then. That came later, when someone turned his son into a druggie. The boy died.”

“Ah, yes,” said McCready, “that can have an effect. Right, Hamburg it is. I’ll be with you all the time. You won’t see me, and neither will the bad guys. But I’ll be there, somewhere nearby. If things turn sour, I’ll be close, with two of your former colleagues from the SAS Regiment. You’ll be okay— we’ll come for you if things get rough. I’ll need to contact you now and again for regular updates on progress.”

Rowse nodded. He knew it was a lie, but it was a nice one. McCready would need his regular updates so that if Rowse abruptly departed this planet, the SIS would know how far he had got. For Rowse possessed that quality so beloved of spymasters: He was quite dispensable.

Rowse arrived in Hamburg in the middle of May. He was unannounced, and he came alone. He knew McCready and the two “minders” had gone ahead of him. He did not see them, and he did not look. He realized he would probably know the two SAS men with McCready, but he did not have their names. It did not matter; they knew him, and their job was to stay close but invisible. It was their specialty. Both would be fluent German speakers. They would be at Hamburg Airport, in the streets, near his hotel, just watching and reporting to McCready, who would be farther back.

Rowse avoided the luxury hotels like the Vier Jahrzeiten and the Atlantik, choosing a more unpretentious hotel near the railway station. He had hired a small car from Avis and stuck to his modest budget, in keeping with the limitations of a moderately successful novelist trying to research his next book. After two days he found Ulrich Kleist, who was work­ing as a forklift driver on the docks.

The big German had switched off his machine and was climbing down from the cab when Rowse called to him. For a second Kleist spun around, prepared to defend himself, then recognized Rowse. His craggy face broke into a grin.

“Tom. Tom, my old friend.”

Rowse was embraced in a crushing bear hug. When he was released, he stood back and looked at the former Special Forces soldier whom he had first met in a baking Somali airport in 1977 and had last seen four years ago. Rowse had been twenty-four then, and Kleist was six years his senior. But he looked as if he were older than forty now, much older.

On October 13, 1977, four Palestinian terrorists had hi­jacked a Lufthansa flight from Mallorca to Frankfurt, with eighty-six passengers and a crew of five. Tracked by the authorities, the captive jet had landed in succession at Rome, Larnaca, Bahrain, Dubai, and Aden before finally coming to rest, out of fuel, at Mogadishu, the bleak capital of Somalia.

Here, a few minutes after midnight on the night of October 17, the jet had been stormed by the West German special force, the GSG 9, which modeled itself on, and had been largely trained by, the British SAS. It had been the first foreign “outing” for Colonel Ulrich Wegener’s crack troops. They were good, very good, but two SAS sergeants had come along anyway. One was Tom Rowse—that was before he was commissioned.

The reason for the presence of the British was twofold. One, they were very experienced at taking off sealed airliner doors in a fraction of a second; two, they knew how to handle the British-developed stun grenades. These grenades pro­duced three things designed to paralyze a terrorist for two vital seconds. One was the flash, which blinded the naked eye; one was the shock wave, which caused disorientation; the third was the bang, which rattled the brain through the eardrums and paralyzed reaction.

After the successful liberation of the Lufthansa airline, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt lined up the warriors and gave them all medals on behalf of a grateful nation. The two Britishers had vaporized before the politicians and the press could appear.

Although the two SAS sergeants had been there only as technical advisers—the British Labour government had been adamant on that—what had really happened was this: The British had gone up the ladder first in order to take off the rear passenger door. They had approached the airliner from behind and beneath to avoid detection by the terrorists.

Because it was impossible to change position at the top of an aluminium ladder in pitch darkness, the SAS men had gone through the gaping hole before the Germans and had thrown their stun grenades. Then they stepped aside to let the GSG 9 team pass them and finish the job. The first two Germans were Uli Kleist and another trooper. They entered the center aisle and dropped flat as ordered, their guns trained forward toward where they had been told the terrorists would be.

And they were there, up by the forward bulkhead, recover­ing from the blast. Zohair Yussef Akache, alias Captain Mahmoud, who had already murdered the Lufthansa captain, Jürgen Schumann, was rising with a submachine gun in his hands. Beside him, one of the two women, Nadia Hind Alameh, was climbing to her feet with a grenade in one hand, her other hand reaching for the pin. Uli Kleist had never done it at point-blank range before, so Rowse stepped into the aisle from the lavatory bay and did it for him. Then the GSG 9 team finished the job, blowing away the second male terrorist, Nabi Ibrahim Harb, and wounding the other female, Suheila Saleh. In all, it had taken eight seconds.

Ten years later, Uli Kleist now stood in the sun on a Hamburg quayside and grinned at the slim young man who had fired those two shots over his head in the cramped airliner cabin so long ago.

“What brings you to Hamburg, Tom?”

“Let me buy you dinner, and I’ll tell you.”

They ate spicy Hungarian food at a csarda in one of the back streets of Sankt Pauli, well away from the bright lights and high prices of the Reeperbahn, and washed it down with Bull’s Blood. Rowse talked, Kleist listened.

“Ja, sounds like a good plot,” he said eventually. “I didn’t read your books yet. They are translated into German?”

“Not yet,” said Rowse. “My agent’s hoping to get a German contract. It would help—Germany’s a big market.”

“So, there is a living to be made from writing this thriller fiction?”

Rowse shrugged. “It pays the rent.”

“And this new one, the one about terrorists and arms dealers and the White House—you have a title for it?”

“Not yet.”

The German considered. “I will try and get you some information—research purposes only, yes?” He laughed and tapped his nose, as if to say, Of course, there’s more to it than that, but we all have to make a living.

“Give me twenty-four hours. I’ll talk with some friends, see if they know where you could get this sort of stuff. So, you have done well since leaving the Army. I—not so well.”

“I heard about your troubles,” said Rowse.

“Ach, two years in Hamburg jail. A piece of cake. Another two, and I could have been running the place. Anyway, it was worth it.”

Kleist, although divorced, had had a son. He had been only sixteen when someone turned him on to cocaine, then crack. The boy overdosed and died. Rage had made Uli Kleist rather unsubtle. He had found out the names of the Colombian wholesaler and the German distributor of the consignment that had killed his son, walked into a restaurant where they were dining, and blown both their heads off. When the police came, Kleist did not even resist. An old-school judge who shared his personal views about drug traffickers listened to the defense plea of provocation and gave Kleist four years. He served two, and had come out six months before. Word was, there was a contract on him. Kleist did not give a damn. Some said he was crazy.

They parted at midnight, and Rowse took a cab back to his hotel. A single man on a motorcycle followed all the way. The motorcyclist spoke twice into a hand-communicator. When Rowse paid off the taxi, McCready emerged from the shad­ows.

“You haven’t got a tail,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. Feel like a nightcap?”

They drank beer in an all-night bar near the station, and Rowse filled him in.

“He believes your tale of researching a novel is poppy­cock?” McCready asked.

“He suspects it.”

“Good—let’s hope he puts it about. I doubt if you’ll get to the real bad guys in this scenario. I’m rather hoping they’ll come to you.”

Rowse made a remark about feeling like the cheese in a mousetrap and climbed off his bar stool.

“In a successful mousetrap,” remarked McCready as he followed Rowse out of the bar, “the cheese does not get touched.”

“I know it, and you know it, but tell that to the cheese,” said Rowse, and retired to bed.

Rowse met Kleist the following evening. The German shook his head.

“I have asked around,” he said, “but what you mentioned is too sophisticated for Hamburg. That kind of material is made in government-owned laboratories and arms factories. It is not on the black market. But there is a man, or so is the whisper.”

“Here in Hamburg?”

“No, Vienna. The Russian military attaché there is a cer­tain Major Vitali Kariagin. As you no doubt know, Vienna is the main outlet for the Czech manufacturer Omnipol. The broad mass of their exports they are allowed to make on their own account, but some stuff and some buyers have to be cleared out of Moscow. The channeling agent for these per­missions is Kariagin.”

“Why should he help?”

“Word is, he has a taste for the good things of life. He’s GRU, of course, but even Soviet military intelligence officers have private tastes. It appears he likes girls—expensive girls, the sort to whom you have to give expensive presents. So he himself takes presents, cash presents, in envelopes.”

Rowse thought it over. He knew that corruption was more the rule than the exception in Soviet society, but a GRU major on the take? The arms world is very bizarre; anything is possible.

“By the way,” said Kleist, “in this ... novel of yours. Would there be any IRA in it?”

“Why do you ask?” said Rowse. He had not mentioned the IRA.

Kleist shrugged. “They have a unit here. Based in a bar run by Palestinians. They do liaison with other terror groups in the international community, and arms-buying. You want to see them?”

“In God’s name, why?”

Kleist laughed, a mite too loud. “Might be fun,” he said.

“These Palestinians—they know you once blew away four of their number?” asked Rowse.

“Probably. In our world everyone knows everyone. Espe­cially their enemies. But I still go to drink in their bar.”

“Why?”

“Fun. Pulling the tiger’s tail.”

“You really are crazy,” thought Rowse.

“I think you should go,” said McCready later that night. “You might learn something, see something. Or they might see you and wonder why you are here. If they inquire, they’ll come up with the novel-researching story. They won’t believe it, and they’ll deduce you really are out buying weapons for use in America. Word gets around. We want it to get around. Just have a few beers, and stay cool. Then distance yourself from that mad German.”

McCready did not feel it necessary to mention that he knew of the bar in question. It was called the Mausehöhle, or Mousehole, and the rumor persisted that a German under­cover agent, working for the British, had been unmasked and shot in an upstairs room there a year earlier. Certainly the man had disappeared without a trace. But there was not enough for the German police to raid the place, and German counterintelligence preferred to leave the Palestinians and the Irish where they were. Smashing up their headquarters would simply mean they would reestablish somewhere else. Still, the rumors persisted.

The following evening Uli Kleist paid off their cab on the Reeperbahn. He led Rowse up the Davidstrasse, past the steel-gated entrance to Herbertstrasse, where the whores sat night and day in their windows; past the brewery gates; and down to the far end where the Elbe glittered under the moon. He turned right into Bernhard Nochtstrasse and after two hundred yards stopped at a studded timber door.

He rang the discreet bell by its side, and a small grill slid back. An eye looked at him, there was a whispered conference inside, and the door opened. The doorman and the dinner-jacketed man beside him were both Arabs.

“Evening, Mr. Abdallah,” Kleist said cheerfully in Ger­man. “I’m thirsty, and I’d like a drink.”

Abdallah glanced at Rowse.

“Oh, he’s all right, he’s a friend,” said Kleist. The Arab nodded at the doorman, who opened the door wide to let them in. Kleist was big, but the doorman was massive, shaven-headed, and not to be trifled with. Years earlier, back in the camps in Lebanon, he had been an enforcer for the PLO. In a way, he still was.

Abdallah led them both to a table, summoned a waiter with a flick of the hand, and ordered in Arabic that his guests be looked after. Two busty bar-girls, both German, left the bar and sat at their table.

Kleist grinned. “I told you. No problem.”

They sat and drank. Now and then, Kleist danced with one of the girls. Rowse toyed with his drink and surveyed the room. Despite the sleazy street in which it was situated, the Mousehole was lushly decorated, the music was live, and the drink was unwatered. Even the girls were pretty and well dressed.

Some of the clientele were Arabs from abroad, others Germans. They seemed prosperous and concerned only with having a good time. Rowse had put on a suit; only Kleist remained in his brown leather bomber jacket over an open-neck shirt. Had he not been who he was, with the reputation he had, Mr. Abdallah might well have excluded him on grounds of dress.

Apart from the redoubtable doorman, Rowse could see no sign that this was a hangout for anything other than business­men who were prepared to be parted from a lot of money in the hope, almost certainly to be dashed, of taking one of the bar-girls home. Most drank champagne; Kleist had ordered beer.

Above the bar, a large mirror dominated the seating area. It was a one-way mirror; behind it was the manager’s office. Two men stood and looked down,

“Who’s your man?” one asked softly in the harsh burr of Belfast.

“German called Kleist. Comes in occasionally. Once GSG 9. Not anymore—he’s on the outside. Did two years for mur­der.”

“Not him,” said the first man, “the other, the one with him. The Brit.”

“No idea, Seamus. Just came in.”

“Find out,” said the first man. “I think I’ve seen him somewhere before.”

They came in when Rowse was visiting the men’s room. He had used the urinal and was washing his hands when the two men entered. One approached the urinal, stood in front of it, and jiggled with his fly. He was the big one. The slimmer, good-looking Irishman stayed by the door. He slipped a small wooden wedge out of his jacket pocket, dropped it to the floor, and with the side of one foot eased it under the rest-room’s entrance door. There would be no distractions.

Rowse caught sight of the gesture in the mirror but pre­tended not to notice. When the big man turned away from the urinal, he was ready. He turned, ducked the first hammer blow from the big fist that came at his head, and lashed a toe-kick into the sensitive tendon beneath the man’s left knee­cap.

The big man was taken by surprise and grunted in pain. His left leg buckled, bringing his head down to waist-level. Rowse’s knee came up hard, finding the point of the jaw. There was a crunch of breaking teeth and a spray of fine blood from the broken mouth in front of him. He felt pain running up his thigh from his bruised knee. The fight was stopped by his third blow—four rigid knuckles into the base of the big man’s throat. Then he turned to the man by the door.

“Easy now, friend,” said the man called Seamus. “He only wanted to talk to you.”

He had a wide, broth-of-a-boy smile that must have worked wonders with the girls. The eyes stayed cold and watchful.

“Qu’est-ce qui se passe?” asked Rowse. On entering the club, he had passed himself as a visiting Swiss.

“Drop it, Mr. Rowse,” said Seamus. “For one thing, you have Brit written all over you. For another, your picture was on the back of your book, which I read with great interest. For a third, you were an SAS man in Belfast years ago. Now I remember where I’ve seen you before.”

“So what?” said Rowse. “I’m out, well out. I write novels for a living now. That’s all.”

Seamus O’Keefe thought it over. “Could be,” he admitted. “If the Brits were sending undercover men into my pub, they’d hardly use a man with his face plastered all over so many books. Or would they?”

“They might,” said Rowse, “but not me. ‘Cause I wouldn’t work for them anymore. We had quite a parting of the ways.”

“So I heard, to be sure. Well then, SAS man, come and have a drink. A real drink. For old times’ sake.”

He kicked the wedge away from the door and held it open. On the tiles, the big man hauled himself to his hands and knees. Rowse passed through the door. O’Keefe paused to whisper in the big man’s ear.

In the bar Uli Kleist was still at his table. The girls had gone. The manager and the enormous doorman stood by his table. As Rowse passed, he raised an eyebrow. If Rowse had said so, he would have fought, even though the odds were impossible.

Rowse shook his head. “It’s all right, Uli,” he said. “Stay cool. Go home. I’ll see you.”

O’Keefe took Rowse to his own apartment. They drank Jame­sons with water.

“Tell me about this ‘research,’ SAS man,” said O’Keefe quietly.

Rowse knew there were two others in the passage within call. No need for any more violence. He told O’Keefe the outline of the plot of his intended next novel.

“Not about the lads in Belfast, then?” said O’Keefe.

“Can’t use the same plot twice,” said Rowse. “The pub­lishers wouldn’t have it. This one’s about America.”

They talked through the night. And drank. Rowse had a rock-hard head for whiskey, which was just as well. O’Keefe let him go at dawn. He walked back to his hotel to blow away the whiskey fumes.

The others worked on Kleist in the abandoned warehouse to which they had taken him after Rowse left the club. The big doorman held him down, and another Palestinian used the instruments.

Uli Kleist was very tough, but the Palestinians had learned about pain in South Beirut. Kleist took all he could, but he talked before dawn. They let him die as the sun rose. It was a welcome release.

The big Irishman from the men’s room watched and listened, occasionally dabbing his bleeding mouth. His orders from O’Keefe were to find out what the German knew about Rowse’s presence in Hamburg. When it was over, he reported what he had learned. The IRA station head nodded.

“I thought there was more to it than a novel,” he said. Later, he sent a cable to a man in Vienna. It was carefully worded.

When Rowse left O’Keefe’s flat and walked back through the waking city to the railway station hotel, one of his minders moved quietly in behind him. The other kept watch on the abandoned warehouse but did not interfere.

In the lunch hour, Rowse ate a large bratwürst, heavily laced with sweet German mustard. He bought it from a Schnellimbiss, one of those stands on streetcorners that pre­pare the delicious sausages as snacks for those in a hurry. As he ate, he talked out of the side of his mouth to the man beside him.

“Do you think O’Keefe believed you?” asked McCready.

“He may have done. It’s a plausible enough explanation. Thriller writers, after all, have to research some odd things in some strange places. But he may have had doubts. He’s no fool.”

“Do you think Kleist believed you?”

Rowse laughed. “No, not Uli. He’s convinced I’m some sort of renegade turned mercenary, looking for arms on behalf of a client. He was too polite to say so, but the novel-research story didn’t fool him.”

“Ah,” said McCready. “Well, perhaps last night was an added bonus. You’re certainly getting yourself noticed. Let’s see if Vienna gets you farther down the trail. By the way, you booked yourself on a flight tomorrow morning. Pay cash at the airport.”

The Vienna flight was via Frankfurt and took off on time. Rowse was in business class. After takeoff, the stewardess distributed newspapers. As it was an internal flight, there were no English ones. Rowse could speak halting German and decipher headlines. The one covering much of the lower half of the front page of the Morgenpost did not need deciphering.

The face in the picture had its eyes closed and was sur­rounded by garbage. The headline read, SLAYER OF DRUG BARONS FOUND DEAD. The text below said two garbage col­lectors had found the body near a rubbish bin close to the docks. The police were treating the case as a gangland revenge killing.

Rowse, however, knew better. He suspected that an inter­vention by his SAS minders could have saved his German friend. He rose and walked through the curtains down the aisle to the economy-class toilets. Near the rear of the plane, he dropped the newspaper into the lap of a rumpled-looking man reading the in-flight magazine.

“You bastard,” he hissed.

Somewhat to Rowse’s surprise, Major Kariagin took his call at the Soviet Embassy at his first attempt. Rowse spoke in Russian.

SAS soldiers—most especially the officers—have to be multitalented creatures. As the basic SAS fighting unit has only four men, a wide spectrum of proficiencies is necessary. Within the four-man group, all will have advanced medical training, and all will be able to handle a radio. They will have several languages among them, apart from their varied fighting skills. As the SAS has operated in Malaya, Indonesia, Oman, and Central and South America, apart from its NATO role, the favored languages have always been Malay, Arabic, and Spanish. For the NATO role, the preferred proficiencies have been Russian (of course) and one or two Allied languages. Rowse spoke French, Russian, and Irish Gaelic.

For a complete stranger to telephone Major Kariagin at the embassy was not so odd, bearing in mind the major’s second­ary task of keeping an eye on the stream of applications made to the Czech arms outlet, Omnipol.

Intergovernmental applications were made to the Husak government in Prague. They did not concern him. Others, from more dubious sources, came to the external office of Omnipol, based in neutral Vienna. Kariagin saw them all. Some he approved, some he referred to Moscow for a deci­sion, others he vetoed out of hand. What he did not tell Moscow was that his judgment could be influenced by a generous tip. He agreed to meet Rowse that evening at Sacher’s.

Kariagin did not look like a caricature Russian. He was smooth, groomed, barbered, and well tailored. He was known at the famous restaurant. The headwaiter showed him to a corner table away from the orchestra and the babble of the voices of the other diners. The two men sat and ordered Schnitzel with a dry, light Austrian red wine.

Rowse explained his need for information for his next novel.

Kariagin listened politely. “These American terrorists ...” he said when Rowse had finished.

“Fictional terrorists,” said Rowse.

“Of course. These fictional American terrorists—what would they be looking for?”

Rowse passed over a typed sheet that he took from his breast pocket. The Russian read the list, raised an eyebrow, and passed it back.

“Impossible,” he said. “You are talking to the wrong man. Why did you come to see me?”

“A friend in Hamburg said you were extremely well in­formed.”

“Let me change the question: Why come to see anyone? Why not make it up? It is for a novel, after all.”

“Authenticity,” said Rowse. “The modern novelist cannot get things hopelessly wrong. Too many readers today are not fooled by schoolboy howlers in the text.”

“I’m afraid you are still in the wrong place, Mr. Rowse. That list contains some items that simply do not come under the heading of conventional weaponry. Booby-trapped brief­cases, Claymore mines—these are simply not provided by the Socialist bloc. Why not use simpler weaponry in your ... novel?”

“Because the terrorists—”

“Fictional terrorists,” murmured Kariagin.

“Of course. The fictional terrorists apparently—that is, as I intend them in the book ... wish to carry out an outrage involving the White House. Mere rifles obtainable in a Texan gunshop will not do.”

“I cannot help you,” said the Russian, wiping his lips. “These are the days of glasnost. Weaponry of the type of the Claymore mine, which in any case is American and unobtain­able—”

“There is an East Bloc copy,” said Rowse.

“—are simply not provided, except between government and government, and only then for legitimate defense pur­poses. My country would never dream of supplying such materiel or sanctioning its supply by a friendly state.”

“Like Czechoslovakia.”

“As you say, like Czechoslovakia.”

“And yet these weapons do appear in the hands of certain terrorist groups,” said Rowse. “The Palestinians, for example.”

“Possibly, but I have not the faintest idea how,” said the Russian. He made to rise. “And now, if you will excuse me—”

“I know it’s a lot to ask,” said Rowse, “but in the pursuit of authenticity, I do have a modest research fund.”

He lifted the corner of his folded newspaper, which lay on the third chair at the table. A slim white envelope rested between the pages. Kariagin sat down again, extracted the envelope, and glanced at the Deutschmark bills inside. He looked thoughtful, then slipped the envelope into his breast pocket.

“If I were you, and wished to acquire certain kinds of materiel to sell on to a group of American terrorists—all fictional, of course—I think I might go to Tripoli and try to seek an interview with a certain Colonel Hakim al-Mansour. And now, I really must rush. Good night, Mr. Rowse.”

“So far, so good,” McCready said as they stood side by side in the men’s room of a sleazy bar near the river. The two SAS sergeants had confirmed that neither man was being tailed, or the meeting could not have taken place. “I think you should go there.”

“What about a visa?”

“The Libyan People’s Bureau at Valletta would be your best chance. If they grant a visa without delay, it will mean you have been preannounced.”

“You think Kariagin will tip off Tripoli?” asked Rowse.

“Oh, I think so. Otherwise, why advise you to go there? Yes, Kariagin was offering his friend al-Mansour the chance to have a look at you and check out your ridiculous story a bit more deeply. At least no one believes the novel-research story anymore. You have crossed the first hurdle. The bad guys really are beginning to think you’re a renegade trying to make a fast buck by working for some shadowy group of American madmen. Al-Mansour will want a lot more than that, of course.”

Rowse flew from Vienna to Rome and thence to the capital of Malta. Two days later—no need to rush them off their feet, said McCready—he made his application to the People’s Bureau for a visa to visit Tripoli. The reason he gave was a desire to do research for a book on the amazing progress of the People’s Jamahariya. The visa came through in twenty-four hours.

The following morning, Rowse took the Libyan Airways flight from Valletta to Tripoli. As the ochre-brown coast of Tripolitania came into view across the glittering blue Mediter­ranean, he thought of Colonel David Stirling and the others, Paddy Mayne, Jock Lewis, Reilly, Almonds, Cooper, and the rest, the first of the SAS men, just after the group’s formation, who had raided and blasted German bases along this coast more than a decade before he was born.

And he thought of McCready’s words in the Valletta airport as the two minders waited in the car: “I’m afraid Tripoli is one place I cannot follow you. This is where you lose your backup. When you go in there, you will be alone.”

Like his predecessors in 1941, some of whom were still buried down there in the desert, he would find that in Libya, he was completely alone.

The airliner tipped one wing and began to drop toward the Tripoli airport.

At first, there seemed to be no problem. Rowse had been sitting in economy class and was one of the last out of the airliner. He followed the other passengers down the steps into the blazing sun of a Libyan morning.

From the observation terrace of the modern white airport building, a pair of impassive eyes picked him out, and binoc­ulars trained briefly on him as he crossed the tarmac toward the Arrivals door. After several seconds the binoculars were laid aside, and a few calm words were muttered in Arabic.

Rowse entered the air-conditioned cool of the terminal and took his place at the end of the queue waiting for passport clearance. The sloe-eyed immigration officers took their time, scanning every page of each passport, gazing at each passen­ger’s face, comparing it lengthily with the passport photo, and consulting a manual that was kept out of sight beneath their desks. Libyan passport holders were in a separate queue.

Two American oil engineers who had been in the smoking section and were behind Rowse made up the rear of the queue. It took twenty minutes for Rowse to reach the passport desk.

The green-uniformed officer took his passport, opened it, and glanced down at a note beneath the grill. Without expression, he raised his gaze and nodded to someone behind Rowse. There was a tug at Rowse’s elbow. He turned. An­other green uniform—younger, courteous but firm. Two armed soldiers stood farther back.

“Would you please come with me?” the young officer said in passable English.

“Is there something wrong?” asked Rowse. The two Amer­icans had gone silent. In a dictatorship the removal of a passenger from the passport queue is a great conversation-stopper.

The young officer at his elbow reached under the grill and retrieved Rowse’s passport.

“This way, if you please,” he said. The two soldiers closed up from behind, one at each elbow. The officer walked, Rowse followed, the soldiers came behind. They turned out of the main concourse and down a long white passage. At the far end, on the left, the officer opened a door and gestured to Rowse to enter. The soldiers took up position at either side of the door.

The officer followed Rowse inside and closed the door. It was a bare white room with barred windows. A table and two facing chairs stood in the center, nothing else. A portrait of Muammar Qaddafi hung on one wall. Rowse took one of the chairs; the officer sat down facing him and began to study the passport.

“I don’t understand what is wrong,” said Rowse. “My visa was issued yesterday by your People’s Bureau in Valletta. Surely it is in order?”

The officer simply made a gesture with one languid hand to suggest that Rowse should be quiet. He was. A fly buzzed. Five minutes elapsed.

From behind him, Rowse heard the door open. The young officer glanced up, shot to his feet, and saluted. Then without a word, he left the room.

“So, Mr. Rowse, here you are at last.”

The voice was deep and modulated, the English of a kind that can only be learned in one of Britain’s better public schools. Rowse turned. He allowed no trace of recognition to cross his face, but he had studied pictures of this man for hours in McCready’s briefing sessions.

“He’s slick and highly educated—by us,” McCready had said. “He’s also utterly ruthless and quite deadly. Be careful of Hakim al-Mansour.”

The Libyan head of external intelligence was more youthful than his pictures had suggested, barely older than Rowse himself. Thirty-three, the dossier had said.

In 1969, Hakim al-Mansour had been a fifteen-year-old schoolboy attending Harrow public school outside London, the son and heir of an extremely wealthy courtier and close confidant of Libyan King Idris.

It was in that year that a group of radical young officers headed by an unknown colonel of Bedouin origin called Qaddafi had carried out a coup d’état while the King was abroad, and had toppled him. They immediately announced the formation of the People’s Jamahariyah, the socialist re­public. The King and his court took refuge with their consid­erable wealth in Geneva and appealed to the West for help in their own restoration. None came.

Unknown to his father, the young Hakim was entranced by the turn of events in his own country. He had already repudi­ated his father and all his politics, for only a year earlier his young imagination had been fired by the riots and near-revolution of the radical students and workers in Paris. It is not unknown for the impassioned young to turn to radical politics, and the Harrow schoolboy had converted in body and soul. Rashly, he bombarded the Libyan Embassy in London with requests to be allowed to leave Harrow and return to his homeland to join the socialist revolution.

His letters were noted and rejected. But one diplomat, a supporter of the old regime, tipped off al-Mansour Senior in Geneva. There was a blazing row between father and son. The boy refused to recant. At seventeen, his funds cut off, Hakim al-Mansour left Harrow prematurely. For a year he moved around Europe, trying to persuade Tripoli of his loyalty and always rejected. In 1972 he pretended to reform his views, made peace with his father, and joined the court-in-exile in Geneva.

While he was there, he learned details of a plot by a number of former British Special Forces officers, funded by King Idris’s financial chancellor, to create a countercoup against Qaddafi. They intended to mount a commando raid against the Libyan coastline in a ship called the Leonardo da Vinci, out of Genoa. The aim was to break open Tripoli’s main jail, the so-called Tripoli Hilton, and release all the desert clan chiefs who supported King Idris and detested Muammar Qaddafi. They would then scatter, raise the tribes, and topple the usurper. Hakim al-Mansour immediately revealed the entire plan to the Libyan Embassy in Paris.

In fact, the plan had already been “blown away” by the CIA, who later regretted it, and it was dismantled by the Italian security forces at America’s request. But al-Mansour’s gesture earned him a long interview at the Paris embassy.

He had already memorized most of Qaddafi’s rambling speeches and zany ideas, and his enthusiasm impressed the interviewing officer enough to earn the young firebrand a journey home. Two years after he was seconded to the Intel­ligence Corps, the Mukhabarat.

Qaddafi himself met and took to the younger man, promot­ing him beyond his years. Between 1974 and 1984, al-Mansour carried out a series of “wet affairs” for Qaddafi abroad, passing effortlessly through Britain, America, and France, where his fluency and urbanity were much appreciated, and through the terrorist nests of the Middle East, where he could become totally Arab. He carried out three personal assassi­nations of Qaddafi’s political opponents abroad, and he liaised extensively with the PLO, becoming a close friend and ad­mirer of the Black September planner and mastermind Abu Hassan Salameh, whom he much resembled.

Only a head cold had prevented him from joining Salameh for his dawn game of squash that day in 1979, when the Israeli Mossad finally closed on the man who had planned the butch­ery of their athletes at the Munich Olympics and blown him to bits. Tel Aviv’s kidon team never knew how close they had come to taking two similar birds with one bomb.

In 1984, Qaddafi had promoted him to direct all foreign terror operations. Two years later, Qaddafi was reduced to a nervous wreck by American bombs and rockets. He wanted revenge, and it was al-Mansour’s job to deliver it—quickly. The British angle was not a problem—the men of the IRA, whom al-Mansour privately regarded as animals, would leave a trail of blood and death across Britain if they were given the wherewithal. The problem was finding a group that would do the same thing inside America. And here was this young Britisher, who might or might not be a renegade. ...

“My visa, I repeat, is in perfect order,” Rowse said indig­nantly. “So may I ask what is going on?”

“Certainly, Mr. Rowse. The answer is simple. You are being denied entry into Libya.”

Al-Mansour strolled across the room to stare out of the windows at the airline-maintenance hangars beyond.

“But why?” asked Rowse. “My visa was issued in Valletta yesterday. It is in order. All I want to do is try to research some passages for my next novel.”

“Please, Mr. Rowse, spare me the bewildered innocence. You are a former soldier of the British Special Forces, appar­ently turned novelist. Now you turn up here saying you want to describe our country in your next book. Frankly, I doubt that your description of my country would be particularly flattering, and the Libyan people, alas, do not share your British taste for self-mockery. No, Mr. Rowse, you cannot stay. Come, I will escort you back to the plane to Malta.”

He called an order in Arabic, and the door opened. The two soldiers entered. One took Rowse’s grip. Al-Mansour picked up the passport from the table. The other soldier stood aside to let the two civilians pass.

Al-Mansour led Rowse down a different passage and out into the sunlight. The Libyan airliner stood ready for takeoff.

“My suitcase,” said Rowse.

“Already back onboard, Mr. Rowse.”

“May I know who I have been speaking to?” asked Rowse.

“Not for the moment, my dear fellow. Just call me ... Mr. Aziz. Now, where will you go from here for your research?”

“I don’t know,” said Rowse. “I seem to have reached the end of the line.”

“Then take a break,” said al-Mansour. “Have a brief holiday. Why not fly on to Cyprus? A lovely island. Person­ally, I always favor the cool air of the Troodos Mountains at this time of year. Just outside Pedhoulas in the Marathassa Valley is a charming old hostelry called the Apollonia. I recommend it. Such interesting people tend to stay there. Safe journey, Mr. Rowse.”

* * *

It was a lucky coincidence that one of the SAS sergeants spotted Rowse coming through the Valletta airport. They had not expected him back so soon. Both men were sharing a room at the airport hotel, spelling each other in the Arrivals hall on a four-hours-on, four-hours-off basis. The duty man was reading a sports magazine when he spotted Rowse emerg­ing from customs, his suitcase in one hand and his grip in the other. Without raising his head, he let Rowse pass and watched him approach the desk beneath the logo for Cyprus Airways. Then he used a wall phone to rouse his colleague in the hotel. The colleague raised McCready in central Valletta.

“Damn,” swore McCready. “What the hell’s he doing back so fast?”

“Dunno, boss,” said the sergeant, “but according to Danny, he’s inquiring at the Cyprus Airways desk.”

McCready thought furiously. He had hoped Rowse would stay in Tripoli for several days and that his cover story of seeking sophisticated weaponry for a bunch of fictional Amer­ican terrorists would eventually lead to his arrest and interro­gation by al-Mansour himself. Now it looked as if he had been thrown out. But why Cyprus? Had Rowse gone out of control?

McCready needed to get to him and find out what had happened in Tripoli. But Rowse was not checking into a hotel, where he could be covertly approached for a situation report. He was moving on. Perhaps he thought he was now under surveillance by the bad guys.

“Bill,” he said down the line, “tell Danny to stay with him. When the coast is clear, get to the Cyprus Airways desk and try to find where they went. Then book us two on the same flight, and two more on the next flight, in case I can’t get there on time. I’ll be out there as soon as I can.”

The traffic in downtown Valletta is fierce at sundown, and by the time McCready reached the airport, the evening flight for Nicosia had gone—with Rowse and Danny onboard. The next flight was not till the following day.

McCready checked into the airport hotel. At midnight, a call came in from Danny.

“Hallo, Uncle. I’m at the Nicosia airport hotel. Auntie’s gone to bed.”

“She must be tired,” said McCready. “Is it a nice hotel?”

“Yes, it’s lovely. We’ve got a super room. Six ten.”

“I’m so glad. I’ll probably stay there myself when I arrive. How’s the holiday so far?”

“Great. Auntie’s rented a car for tomorrow. I think we’re going up into the mountains.”

“That’ll be lovely,” McCready said jovially to his “nephew” across the eastern Mediterranean. “Why don’t you reserve that room for me? I’ll join you and Auntie as soon as I can. Good night, dear boy.”

He put the phone down. “Bugger’s going up into the mountains tomorrow,” he said gloomily. “What the hell did he learn in that stopover in Tripoli?”

“We’ll know tomorrow, boss,” said Bill. “Danny’ll leave a message in the usual place.”

Never seeing the point of wasting good sleeping time, Bill rolled over, and in thirty seconds he was fast asleep. In his profession, one never knew when one would sleep next.

McCready’s plane from Valletta touched down at the airport of the Cypriot capital just after eleven, having lost an hour because of the change of time zone. He was well separated from Bill, although they emerged from the same plane and took the same courtesy shuttle to the airport hotel. McCready settled into the lobby bar while Bill went up to room 610.

There was a maid cleaning it. Bill nodded and smiled, explained he had forgotten his razor, and went into the bathroom. Danny had left his situation report taped to the underside of the lavatory cistern lid. He emerged from the bathroom, nodded again to the maid, held up the razor he had produced from his pocket, was rewarded with an answering smile, and went back downstairs.

They made the exchange in the men’s toilet off the lobby. McCready retired to a cubicle and read the sitrep.

It was just as well that Rowse had not tried to make contact. According to Danny, shortly after Rowse had appeared from the customs hall at Valletta, his tail had followed, a sallow young man in a fawn suit. The Libyan agent had shadowed Rowse until the Cyprus Airways plane took off for Nicosia, but he had not joined the flight. Another tail, presumably called up from the Libyan People’s Bureau in Nicosia, had been waiting at the Nicosia airport and had shadowed Rowse to the hotel, where he had spent the night in the lobby. Rowse might have spotted either man, but he had given no sign. Danny had spotted both and stayed well back.

Rowse had asked the reception desk to order him a hired car for seven the following morning. Much later, Danny had done the same. Rowse had also asked for a map of the island and had consulted the reception manager on the best route to the Troodos Mountains.

In the last passage of the sitrep, Danny had said he would leave the hotel at five, park at a place where he could see the only route out of the car park, and wait for Rowse to emerge. He could not know whether the resident Libyan would follow Rowse all the way into the mountains or just see him off. He, Danny, would stay as close as he could and would call the hotel lobby when he had run Rowse to earth and could find a public phone. He would ask for Mr. Meldrum.

McCready returned to the lobby and made a brief call from one of the public phones to the British Embassy. Minutes later, he was speaking to the SIS Head of Station, an impor­tant post, bearing in mind Britain’s bases on Cyprus and its proximity to Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and the Palestinian strongholds across the sea. McCready knew his colleague from their days in London, and he soon got what he wanted— an unmarked car with a driver who spoke fluent Greek. It would arrive within the hour.

The call for Mr. Meldrum came at ten past two. McCready took the phone from the hand of the reception manager. Once again it was the uncle-and-nephew routine.

“Hallo, dear boy. How are you? How nice to hear from you.”

“Hallo, Uncle. Auntie and I have stopped for lunch at a lovely hotel high in the mountains outside the village of Pedhoulas. It’s called the Apollonia. I think she may stay here, it’s so lovely. The car gave a bit of problem at the end, so I’ve brought it to a garage in Pedhoulas run by a Mr. Demetriou.”

“Never mind. How are the olives?”

“There are no olives up here, Uncle. Just apple and cherry orchards. Olives only grow down in the plain.”

McCready put the phone down and headed for the men’s room. Bill followed him. They waited till the only other occupant had left, checked the cubicles, and talked.

“Is Danny all right, boss?”

“Sure. He tailed Rowse to a hotel high in the Troodos Mountains. Seems Rowse has checked in. Danny’s in the village at a garage called Demetriou’s. He’ll wait for us there. The Libyan tail, the olive-skinned one, remained down here, apparently satisfied that Rowse would go where he was sup­posed to go.

“The car will be here shortly. I want you to take your grip and leave. Wait for us half a mile down the road.”

Thirty minutes later, Mr. Meldrum’s car indeed appeared—a Ford Orion with several dents, the only true sign of an “unmarked” car in Cyprus. The driver was an alert young staffer from the Nicosia Station. His name was Bertie Marks, and he spoke fluent Greek. They picked up Bill from under the shade of a tree by the wayside and headed for the mountains to the southwest. It was a long drive. It was dusk before they entered the picturesque village of Pedhoulas, heart of the Troodos Mountains cherry industry.

Danny was waiting for them in a café opposite the garage. Poor Mr. Demetriou had still not mended the rented car—Danny had ensured when he sabotaged it that it would take at least half the day to fix.

He pointed out the Hotel Apollonia, and he and Bill sur­veyed the surrounding countryside in the darkening light with professional eyes. They fixed on the mountain slope across the valley from the hotel’s splendid dining terrace, hefted their grips, and disappeared silently into the cherry orchards. One of them carried the hand-held communicator that Marks had brought from Nicosia. The other communicator stayed with McCready. The two SIS men found a smaller and less pretentious taverna in the village and checked in.

Rowse had arrived during the lunch hour, after a pleasant and leisurely drive from the airport hotel. He assumed he was being tailed by his SAS minders—and he certainly hoped he was.

The previous evening at Malta, he had deliberately dawdled through the passport and customs formalities. All the other passengers but one had cleared the formalities before him. Only the sallow young man from the Libyan Mukhabarat had hung back. That was when he knew “Mr. Aziz”—Hakim al-Mansour—had given him a tail. He did not look around for the SAS sergeants in the Malta concourse, hoping they would not try to approach him.

The Tripoli tail had not joined the flight to Nicosia, so he assumed another would be waiting for him there. And he was. Rowse had behaved perfectly naturally and had slept well. He had seen the Libyan leave him on the road out of the Nicosia airport complex, and he hoped there was an SAS man some­where behind him. He took his time, but he never looked around or tried to make contact. There might be another Libyan posted in the hills.

There was a room available at the Apollonia, so he took it. Perhaps al-Mansour had arranged for it to be available—perhaps not. It was a pleasant room with stunning views over the valley to a hillside covered with cherry trees, which were now just beyond their bloom.

He lunched lightly but well off a local lamb casserole, washed down by a light Omhodos red wine, followed by fresh fruit. The hotel was an old taverna, well refurbished and modernized with added features such as a dining terrace built on piles out over the valley; the tables were set well apart under striped awnings. Whoever else was staying there, few had turned up for lunch. There was an elderly man with jet-black hair at a corner table on his own, who addressed the waiter in mumbled English, and several couples who were clearly Cypriots and might have simply come for lunch. When he entered the terrace, a very pretty younger woman had been leaving. Rowse had turned to look at her; she was quite a head-turner, and with her mane of corn-gold hair, she was almost certainly not Cypriot. All three admiring waiters had bowed her out of the restaurant before one of them showed him to his table.

After lunch he went to his room and took a nap. If al-Mansour’s laborious hint meant that he was now “in play,” there was nothing further he could do but watch and wait. He had done what he had been advised to do. The next move, if any, was in the Libyan’s court. He only hoped, if the going got rough, that he still had some backup out there somewhere.

The backup was indeed in place, by the time Rowse awoke from his nap. The two sergeants had found a small stone hut among the cherry trees on the mountainside opposite the hotel terrace. They had carefully removed one of the stones of the wall facing across the valley, which gave them a nice aperture from which to observe the hotel at a range of seven hundred yards. Their high-powered field glasses brought the dining terrace to a range that appeared to be twenty feet.

Dusk was deepening when they called up McCready and gave him directions to approach their hideout from the other side of the mountain. Bertie Marks drove according to the instructions, out of Pedhoulas and down two tracks, until they saw Danny standing in their way.

Abandoning the car, McCready followed Danny around the curve of the mountain. They disappeared into the cherry orchard and made the hut without being perceived from across the valley. There, Bill handed McCready his image-intensifying night glasses.

On the dining terrace the lights were coming on, a ring of colored bulbs strung around the perimeter of the dining area, with candles in sconces on each table.

“We’ll need Cypriot peasant clothes tomorrow, boss,” murmured Danny. “Can’t move around this hillside dressed as we are for long.”

McCready made a mental note to have Marks go to a village some miles away in the morning and buy the sort of canvas smocks and trousers they had seen farm workers by the wayside wearing. With luck, the hut would remain undis­turbed; in May it was too late for the spraying of the blossom and too early for the harvest. The hut was clearly abandoned, its roof half-collapsed. Dust was everywhere; a few broken-hafted hoes and mattocks stood against one wall. For the SAS sergeants, who had lain for weeks among soaking scrapes on the hillsides of Ulster, it was like a four-star hotel.

“Hallo,” muttered Bill, who had taken back the night glasses. “Tasty.” He passed the glasses to McCready.

A young woman had entered the terrace from the recesses of the hotel. A beaming waiter was showing her to a table. She wore a simple but elegant white dress over a golden suntan. Blonde hair hung about her shoulders. She sat down and apparently ordered a drink.

“Keep your minds on your work,” grumbled McCready. “Where’s Rowse?”

The sergeants grinned. “Oh yeah, him. One line of windows above the terrace. Third window to the right.”

McCready swiveled his glasses. None of the windows had their curtains drawn. Several had lights on. McCready saw a figure, naked but for a towel around his waist, emerge from the shower room and cross the floor of the bedroom. It was Rowse. So far, so good.

But none of the bad guys had shown up. Two other guests took their places on the terrace: a plump Levantine business­man with flashing rings on both hands, and an elderly man who sat alone at one corner of the terrace and studied the menu. He sighed. His life had involved a hell of a lot of waiting, and he still hated it. He handed back the glasses and checked his watch. Seven-fifteen. He would give it two hours before he took Marks back to the village for supper. The sergeants would keep the vigil through the night. It was what they were best at—apart from violent physical action.

Rowse dressed and checked his watch: seven-twenty. He locked his room and went down to the terrace for a drink before dinner. Beyond the terrace the sun had dropped below the mountains, bathing the far side of the valley in thick gloom while the silhouette of the hills was brilliantly back-lit. On the western coast, Paphos would still be enjoying a warm late-spring evening with another hour of sunshine to go.

There were three people on the dining terrace: a fat man of Mediterranean look, an old fellow with unlikely black hair, and the woman. She had her back to him, staring at the view across the valley. A waiter approached. Rowse nodded to the table next to the woman’s, up against the terrace balustrade. The waiter grinned and hastened to show him to it. Rowse ordered ouzo and a carafe of local spring water.

As he took his seat, she glanced sideways. He nodded and murmured, “Evening.” She nodded back and continued to gaze at the view of the darkening valley. His ouzo arrived. He too looked at the valley.

After a while he said, “May I propose a toast?”

She was startled. “A toast?”

He gestured with his glass to the shadow-shrouded sentinels of the mountains all around them and the wash of blazing orange sunset behind them.

“To tranquility. And spectacular beauty.”

She gave a half-smile. “To tranquility,” she said, and drank a sip of her dry white wine. The waiter brought two menus. At separate tables they studied their cards. She ordered mountain trout.

“I can’t better that. The same for me, please,” Rowse told the waiter, who left.

“Are you dining alone?” asked Rowse quietly.

“Yes, I am,” she said carefully.

“So am I,” he said. “And it worries me, for I’m a God­-fearing man.”

She frowned in puzzlement. “What’s God got to do with it?”

He realized her accent was not British. There was a husky twang; American? He gestured beyond the terrace. “The view, the peace, the hills, the dying sun, the evening. He created all of this, but surely not for dining alone.”

She laughed, a flash of clear white teeth in a sun-golden face. Try to make them laugh, his dad had told him. They like to be made to laugh.

“May I join you? Just for dinner?”

“Why not? Just for dinner.”

He took his glass and crossed to sit opposite her. “Tom Rowse,” he said.

“Monica Browne,” she replied.

They talked, the usual small talk. He explained that he was the writer of a moderately successful novel and had been doing some research in the area for his next book, which would involve Levantine and Middle East politics. He had decided to end his tour of the eastern Mediterranean with a brief break at this hotel, recommended by a friend for its good food and restfulness.

“And you?” he asked.

“Nothing so exciting. I breed horses. I’ve been in the area buying three thoroughbred stallions. It takes time for the shipment papers to come through. So”—she shrugged— “time to kill. I thought it would be nicer here than stewing on the dock side.”

“Stallions? In Cyprus?” he asked.

“No, Syria. The yearling sales at Hama. Pure Arabs, the finest. Did you know that every race horse in Britain is ultimately descended from three Arabian horses?”

“Just three? No, I didn’t.”

She was enthused by her horses. He learned that she was married to the much older Major Eric Browne and that to­gether they owned and ran a breeding stud at Ashford. Origi­nally she was from Kentucky, which was where she had gained her knowledge of bloodstock and horse-racing. He knew Ashford vaguely—it was a small town in Kent, on the road from London to Dover.

The trout arrived, deliciously grilled over a charcoal bra­zier. It was served with a local dry white wine from up the Marathassa Valley.

Inside the hotel, beyond the patio doors open to the terrace, a group of three men had moved into the bar.

“How long will you have to wait?” asked Rowse. “For the stallions?”

“Any day now, I hope. I worry about them. Maybe I should have stayed with them in Syria. They’re terribly mettlesome. Get nervous in transit. But my shipping agent here is very good. He’ll call me when they arrive, and I’ll ship them out personally.”

The men in the bar finished their whiskey and were shown out onto the terrace to a table. Rowse caught a hint of their accents. He raised a steady hand to his mouth with a forkful of trout.

“Ask yer man to bring another round of the same,” said one of the men.

Across the valley, Danny said quietly, “Boss.”

McCready jackknifed to his feet and came to the small aperture in the stone wall. Danny handed him the glasses and stood back. McCready adjusted focus and let out a long sigh.

“Bingo,” he said. He handed the glasses back. “Keep it up. I’m going back with Marks to watch the front of the hotel. Bill, come with me.”

By then, it was so dark on the mountainside that they could walk around to where the car was still waiting without fear of being seen from across the valley.

On the terrace, Rowse kept his attention fixed entirely on Monica Browne. One glance had told him all he needed to know. Two of the Irishmen he had never seen before. The third—clearly leader of the group—was Kevin Mahoney.

Rowse and Monica Browne declined desserts and took coffee. Small sticky sweetmeats came with it. Monica shook her head.

“No good for the figure—no good at all,” she said.

“And yours should in no way be harmed, for it is quite stunning,” said Rowse. She laughed away the compliment, but not with displeasure. She leaned forward. By the candle­light Rowse caught a brief but dizzying glance of the channel between her full breasts.

“Do you know those men?” she asked earnestly.

“No, never seen ’em before,” said Rowse.

“One of them seems to be staring at you a lot.”

Rowse did not want to turn and look at them, but after that remark it would have been suspicious not to. The dark hand­some features of Kevin Mahoney were fixed on him. As he turned, Mahoney did not bother to glance away. Their eyes met. Rowse knew the glance: puzzlement. Unease. As of someone who thinks he has seen a person somewhere before but cannot place him.

Rowse turned back. “Nope. Total strangers.”

“Then they are very rude strangers.”

“Can you recognize their accent?” asked Rowse.

“Irish,” she said. “Northern Irish.”

“Where did you learn to detect Irish accents?” he asked.

“Horse racing, of course. The sport is full of them. And now, it’s been lovely, Tom, but if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to turn in.”

She rose. Rowse followed, his fleeting suspicion allayed.

“I agree,” he said. “It was a wonderful dinner. I hope we can eat together again.”

He looked for a hint that she might want him to accompany her, but there was none. She was in her early thirties, her own woman, and not stupid. If she wanted that, she would indicate it in some small way. If not, it would be foolish to spoil things. She gave him a radiant smile and swept off the terrace. Rowse took another coffee and turned away from the Irish trio to look out across the dark mountains. Soon he heard them retire back to the bar and their whiskey.

“I told you it was a charming place,” said a deep, cultured voice behind him.

Hakim al-Mansour, as beautifully tailored as ever, slipped into the vacant chair and gestured for coffee.

Across the valley, Danny laid down his glasses and muttered urgently into his communicator. In the Ford Orion, parked up the road from the Apollonia’s main entrance, McCready lis­tened. He had not seen the Libyan enter the hotel, but he might have been there for hours.

“Keep me posted,” he told Danny.

“You did indeed, Mr. Aziz,” said Rowse calmly. “And it is. But if you wanted to talk to me, why did you expel me from Libya?”

“Oh, please—not expel,” drawled al-Mansour. “Just de­cline to admit. And well, the reason was that I wished to talk to you in complete privacy. Even in my homeland there are formalities, records to be kept, the curiosity of superiors to satisfy. Here—nothing but peace and quiet.”

“And the facility,” thought Rowse, “to carry out a quiet liquidation and leave the Cypriot authorities with a British body to explain.”

“So,” he said aloud, “I must thank you for your courtesy in agreeing to help me with my research.”

Hakim al-Mansour laughed softly. “I think the time for that particular foolishness is over, Mr. Rowse. You see, before certain—animals—put him out of his misery, your late friend Herr Kleist was quite communicative.”

Rowse spun around on him, bitterly angry. “The papers said he was killed by the drug people, in revenge for what he did to them.”

“Alas, no. The people who did to him what was done do indeed deal in drugs. But their principal enthusiasm is for planting bombs in public places, principally in Britain.”

“But why? Why should those bloody Paddies have been interested in Ulrich?”

“They weren’t, my dear Rowse. They were interested in finding out what you were really up to in Hamburg, and they thought your friend might know. Or suspect. And he did. He seemed to believe your tarradiddle about “fictional” American terrorists masked a quite different purpose. That infor­mation, coupled with further messages received from Vienna, brought me to the view that you might be an interesting man to talk to. I hope you are, Mr. Rowse; for your sake, I sincerely hope you are. And the time has come to talk. But not here.”

Two men had appeared behind Rowse. They were big and olive-skinned.

“I think we should go for a little ride,” said al-Mansour.

“Is this the sort of ride from which one returns?” asked Rowse.

Hakim al-Mansour rose. “That depends very much on whether you are able to answer a few simple questions to my satisfaction,” he said.

McCready was waiting for the car when it emerged from the portico of the Apollonia onto the road, having been tipped off by Danny across the valley. He saw the Libyans’ car—with Rowse in the back seat between the two heavies—turn away from the hotel.

“Do we follow, boss?” asked Bill from the rear seat of the Orion.

“No,” said McCready. To try and follow without lights would have been suicide on those hairpin curves. To put on headlights would give the game away. Al-Mansour had chosen his terrain well. “If he comes back, he’ll tell us what went on. If not ... well, at least he’s in play at last. The bait is being examined. We’ll know by morning whether it has been taken or rejected. By the way, Bill, can you enter that hotel un­seen?”

Bill looked as if he had been grievously insulted.

“Slip that under Rowse’s door,” said McCready, and he passed the sergeant a tourist brochure.

The drive took an hour. Rowse forced himself not to look around. But twice, after the Libyan driver had negotiated hairpin bends, Rowse could look back the way they had come. There was no moving wash of another car’s headlights behind them. Twice the driver pulled to the side of the road, doused his lights, and waited for five minutes. No one came past them. Just before midnight, they arrived at a substantial villa and drove through wrought-iron gates. Rowse was decanted and pushed through the door, which was opened by another heavyweight Libyan. With al-Mansour himself, that made five. Too heavy odds.

And there was another man waiting for them in the large drawing room into which he was pushed, a heavy-set, jowly, big-bellied man in his late forties with a brutal, coarsened face and big red hands. He was clearly not a Libyan. In fact, Rowse easily recognized him though he gave no sign. The face had been in McCready’s rogue’s gallery, shown to him as a face he might one day see if he agreed to plunge into the world of terrorism and the Middle East.

Frank Terpil was a CIA renegade, fired by the Agency in 1971. Soon after, he had gravitated to his true and very lucrative vocation in life—supplying torture equipment, ter­rorist tricks, and expertise to Uganda’s Idi Amin. Before the Ugandan monster was toppled and his hideous State Research Bureau broken up, he had introduced the American to Muammar Qaddafi. Since then Terpil, sometimes in association with another renegade, Edwin Wilson, had specialized in providing a vast range of terrorist equipment and technology to the most extreme groups around the Middle East, always remaining the servitor of the Libyan dictator.

Even by then, Terpil had been well out of the Western intelligence community for fifteen years, but he was still regarded in Libya as the “American” expert. It suited him well to hide the fact that by the late 1980s, he was completely out of touch.

Rowse was told to take a chair in the middle of the room. The furniture was almost entirely shrouded in dust sheets. Clearly, the villa was a holiday home for a wealthy family who had shut it up for the winter. The Libyans had simply taken it over for the night, which was why Rowse had not been blindfolded.

Al-Mansour removed a dust sheet and fastidiously seated himself in a brocade high-back chair. A single bulb hung over Rowse. Terpil took a nod from al-Mansour and lumbered over.

“Okay, boy, let’s talk. You’ve been going around Europe looking for arms. Very special weapons. What the hell are you really up to?”

“Researching a new novel. I’ve tried to explain that a dozen times. It’s a novel. That’s my job, that’s what I do. I write thriller novels. About soldiers, spies, terrorists—fictional ter­rorists.”

Terpil hit him once on the side of the face—not hard, but enough to indicate there was more where that came from and plenty of it.

“Cut the shit,” he said without animosity. “I’m going to get the truth anyway, one way or the other. Might as well keep it painless—all the same to me. Who are you really working for?”

Rowse let the story come out slowly, as he had been briefed, sometimes recalling things exactly, sometimes having to search his memory.

“Which magazine?”

“Soldier of Fortune.”

“Which edition?”

“April ... May, last year. No, May, not April.”

“What did the ad say?”

“ ‘Weapons expert needed, European area, for interesting assignment’ ... something like that. A box number.”

“Bullshit. I take that magazine every month. There was no such ad.”

“There was. You can check.”

“Oh, we will,” murmured al-Mansour from the corner of the room. He was making notes with a slim gold pen on a Gucci pad.

Rowse knew Terpil was bluffing. There had been such an ad in the columns of Soldier of Fortune. McCready had found it, and a few calls to his friends in the CIA and the FBI had ensured—or so Rowse fervently hoped—that the placer of the ad would not be available to deny he had ever received a reply from Mr. Thomas Rowse of England.

“So you wrote back.”

“Yep. Plain paper. Accommodation address. Giving my background, areas of expertise. Instructions for a reply, if any.”

“Which were?”

“Small ad in the London Daily Telegraph.” He recited the wording. He had memorized it.

“The ad appeared? They made contact?”

“Yep.”

“What date?”

Rowse gave it. Previous October. McCready had found that ad as well. It had been chosen at random, a perfectly genuine small advertisement from an innocent British citizen, but with wording that would suit. The Telegraph staff had agreed to alter the records to show it had been placed by someone in America and paid for in cash.

The interrogation went on. The phone call he had taken from America after placing a further ad in The New York Times. (That too had been found after hours of searching—a real ad listing a British phone number. Rowse’s own unlisted number had been changed to tally with it.)

“Why the roundabout way of getting in touch?”

“I figured I needed discretion in case the placer of the original ad was crazy. Also that my secretiveness might impress whoever it was.”

“And did it?”

“Apparently. The speaker said he liked it. Set up a meet.”

When? Last November. Where? The Georges Cinq in Paris. What was he like?

“Youngish, well dressed, well spoken. Not registered at the hotel. I checked. Called himself Galvin Pollard. Certainly phony. A yuppie type.”

“A what?”

“Young, upwardly mobile professional,” drawled al-Mansour. “You’re out of touch.”

Terpil went red. Of course. He had seen the term but forgotten it.

What did he say? He said he represented a group of ultra-radical people, Rowse replied, who were sick and tired of the Reagan Administration, of its hostility to the Soviet and Third Worlds, and particularly of the use of American planes and taxpayer money to bomb women and children in Tripoli the previous April.

“And he produced a list of what he wanted?”

“Yes.”

“This list?”

Rowse glanced at it. It was a copy of the list he had shown Kariagin in Vienna. The Russian must have a superb memory.

“Yes.”

“Claymore mines, for God’s sake. Semtex-H. Booby-trapped briefcases. This is high-tech stuff. What the hell did they want all that for?”

“He said his people wanted to strike a blow. A real blow. He mentioned the White House, and the Senate. He seemed particularly keen on the Senate.”

He allowed the money side of it to be dragged out of him. The account at the Kreditanstalt in Aachen with half a million dollars in it. (Thanks to McCready, there really was such an account, backdated to the appropriate period. And bank secrecy is not really all that good. The Libyans could confirm it if they wanted to.)

“So what did you get involved for?”

“There was a twenty percent commission. A hundred thou­sand dollars.”

“Peanuts.”

“Not to me.”

“You write thriller novels, remember.”

“Which don’t sell all that well. Despite the publisher’s blurb. I wanted to make a few bob.”

“Bob?”

“Shillings,” murmured al-Mansour. “British equivalent for “greenbacks” or “dough.”

At four in the morning, Terpil and al-Mansour went into a huddle. They talked quietly in an adjacent room.

“Could there really be a radical group in the States pre­pared to carry out a major outrage at the White House and the Senate?” asked al-Mansour.

“Sure,” said the burly American who hated his homeland. “In a country that size, you get all kinds of weirdos. Jesus, one Claymore mine in a briefcase on the lawn of the White House. Can you imagine it?”

Al-Mansour could. The Claymore is one of the most devas­tating antipersonnel weapons ever invented. Shaped like a disk, it leaps into the air when detonated, then sends thou­sands of ball-bearings outward from the perimeter of the disk at waist-height. A moving sheet of these missiles will slice through hundreds of human beings. Loosed in an average railway concourse, a Claymore will leave few of the thousands of commuters in the area alive. For this reason, the sale of the Claymore is fiercely vetted by America. But there are always replicas. ...

At half-past four, the two men returned to the sitting room. Although Rowse did not know it, the gods were smiling on him that night. Al-Mansour needed to bring something to his Leader without further delay to satisfy the insistent pressure for revenge against America; Terpil needed to prove to his hosts that he was still the man they needed to advise them about America and the West. Finally, both men believed Rowse for the reason that most men believe: because they wanted to.

“You may go, Mr. Rowse,” said al-Mansour mildly. “We will check, of course, and I will be in touch. Stay at the Apollonia until I or someone sent by me gets in touch.”

The two heavies who had brought him drove him back and dropped him at the hotel doorway before driving off. When he entered his room, he switched on the light, for the dawn was not yet bright enough to fill his west-facing room. Across the valley, Bill, who was on the shift, activated his communi­cator and awoke McCready in his hotel room in Pedhoulas.

Rowse stooped to pick something from the carpet inside his room. It was a brochure inviting visitors to visit the historic Kykko Monastery and admire the Golden Icon of the Virgin. A single script in pencil beside the paragraph said “Ten A.M.”

Rowse set his alarm for three hours’ sleep. “Screw Mc­Cready,” he said as he drifted off.

Kykko, the largest monastery in Cyprus, was founded in the twelfth century by the Byzantine emperors. They chose their spot well, bearing in mind that the lives of monks are sup­posed to be spent in isolation, meditation, and solitude.

The vast edifice stands high on a peak west of the Marathassa Valley in a situation so remote that only two roads lead to it, one from each side. Finally, below the monastery, the two roads blend into one, and a single lane leads upward to the monastery gate.

Like the emperors of Byzantium, McCready, too, chose his spot well. Danny had stayed behind in the stone hut across the valley from the hotel, watching the curtained windows of the room where Rowse slept, while Bill, on a motorcycle acquired for him locally by the Greek-speaking Marks, had ridden ahead to Kykko. At dawn, the SAS sergeant was well hidden in the pines above the single track to the monastery.

He saw McCready himself arrive, driven by Marks, and he watched to see who else came. Had any of the Irish trio appeared, or the Libyan car (they had noted its number), McCready would have been alerted by three warning blips on the communicator and would have vaporized. But only the usual stream of tourists—most of them Greek and Cypriot—trundled up the track on that May morning.

During the night the head of station in Nicosia had sent one of his young staffers up to Pedhoulas with several messages from London and a third communicator. Each sergeant now had one, aside from McCready.

At half-past eight Danny reported that Rowse had appeared on the terrace and taken a light breakfast of rolls and coffee. There was no sign of Mahoney and his two friends, or Rowse’s girl from the evening before, or any of the other guests at the hotel.

“He’s looking tired,” said Danny.

“No one said this would be a holiday for any of us,” snapped McCready from his seat in the courtyard of the monastery twenty miles away.

At twenty-past nine Rowse left. Danny reported it. Rowse drove out of Pedhoulas, past the great painted church of the Archangel Michael that dominated the mountain village, and turned northwest on the road to Kykko. Danny continued his watch on the hotel. At half-past nine the maid entered Rowse’s room and drew the curtains back. That made life easier for Danny. Other curtains were withdrawn on the facade of the hotel facing the valley. Despite the rising sun in his eyes, the sergeant was rewarded by the sight of Monica Browne doing ten minutes of deep-breathing exercises quite naked in front of her window.

“Beats South Armagh,” murmured the appreciative vet­eran.

At ten to ten, Bill reported that Rowse had come into sight, climbing the steep and winding track to Kykko. McCready rose and went inside, wondering at the labor that had brought these massive stones so high into the mountain peaks, and at the skill of the masters who had painted the frescoes in the gold leaf, scarlet, and blue that decorated the incense-sweet interior.

Rowse found McCready in front of the famous Golden Icon of the Virgin. Outside, Bill insured that Rowse had not grown a tail, and he gave McCready two double-blips on the com­municator in the senior agent’s breast pocket.

“It seems you’re clean,” murmured McCready as Rowse appeared beside him. There was no strangeness in talking in a low voice; all around them, the other tourists conversed in whispers, too, as if afraid to disturb the calm of the shrine.

“So shall we start at the beginning?” said McCready. “I remember seeing you off at the Valletta airport on your very brief visit to Tripoli. Since then, if you please, every detail.” Rowse started at the beginning.

“Ah, so you met the notorious Hakim al-Mansour,” said McCready after a few minutes. “I hardly dared hope he’d turn up at the airport himself. Kariagin’s message from Vi­enna must have tickled his fancy. Go on.”

Part of Rowse’s narrative McCready could confirm from his own and the sergeants’ observations—the sallow-faced young agent who had followed Rowse back to Valletta and seen him on the Cyprus flight, the second agent at Nicosia who had tailed him until he left for the mountains.

“Did you see my two sergeants? Your two former col­leagues?”

“No, never. I remain to be convinced they’re even there,” said Rowse. Together they stared up at the Madonna who, with calm and pitying eyes, stared back down at them.

“Oh, they’re here, all right,” said McCready.“One’s out­side at the moment, just to see that neither you nor I was followed. Actually, they’re taking quite a lot of pleasure in your adventures. When this is all over, you can have a drink together. Not yet. So ... after you arrived at the hotel?”

Rowse skipped through to the moment he first saw Mahoney and his two cronies.

“Wait a minute, the girl. Who is she?”

“Just a vacation pickup. An American race-horse breeder waiting for the arrival of three Arab stallions she bought last week at the Hama yearling sales in Syria. Monica Browne. With an “e.” No problem, just a dining companion.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Sam. Quite sure. Just a civilian. And a very pretty one, as it happens.”

“So we noticed,” muttered McCready. “Go on.”

Rowse narrated the arrival of Mahoney and the suspicious glances his companion had intercepted across the terrace.

“You think he recognized you? From that filling station forecourt?”

“He couldn’t have done,” said Rowse. “I had a wool cap down to my eyes and stubble all over my face, and I was half-hidden by the petrol pumps. No, he’d stare like that at any Englishman as soon as he heard the accent. You know how much he hates us all.”

“Maybe. Go on.”

It was the sudden appearance of Hakim al-Mansour and the nightlong interrogation by Frank Terpil that really interested McCready. He made Rowse stop a dozen times to clarify tiny points. The Deceiver was carrying a hard-cover book on Cypriot Byzantine churches and monasteries. As Rowse talked, he made copious notes in the book, writing over the Greek text. No mark appeared from the point of his pencil—that would only come later when the chemicals were applied. To any bystander, he was just a tourist making notes on what he saw around him.

“So far, so good,” mused McCready. “Their arms ship­ment operation seems to be on hold, ready for some “go” order. Mahoney and al-Mansour turning up at the same hotel in Cyprus is too much to mean anything else. What we have to know is when, where, and how. Land, sea, or air? From where and to where? And the carrier—truck, air freight or cargo ship?”

“You’re still sure they’ll go ahead? Not call the whole thing off?”

“I’m sure.”

There was no need to tell Rowse why he was sure. Rowse had no need to know. But there had been another message from the Libyan doctor who attended Muammar Qaddafi. It would be a multipackage shipment, when it came. Some of the weapons would be for the Basque separatists, the ETA. More would be for the French ultra-Left group, the Action Directe. Another consignment for the small but lethal Belgian terrorists, the CCC. A large present for the German Red Army Faction—at least half, no doubt, to be used on bars frequented by U.S. servicemen. More than half the shipment was for the IRA.

It was reported that one of the IRA’s tasks would be the assassination of the American ambassador to London. Mc­Cready suspected that the IRA, mindful of its fund-raising operations in America, would farm that job out—probably to the Germans of the Faction, successors to the Baader-Meinhof gang, who were diminished in numbers but still deadly and prepared to take contract work in exchange for arms.

“Did they ask where you would want the shipment for the American terror group, if they agree to sell?” McCready asked Rowse.

“Yes.”

“And you told them?”

“Anywhere in Western Europe.”

“Plans for getting it to the States?”

“Told them what you said. I’d remove the consignment, which is quite small in bulk, from wherever they delivered it to a rented garage known only to me. I’d return with a camper van or mobile home, with hidden compartments behind the walls. Drive the van north through Denmark, on the ferry to Sweden, up to Norway and take it on one of the many freighters crossing to Canada. Just another tourist on a wild­life-watching vacation.”

“They like that?”

“Terpil did. Said it was neat and clean. Al-Mansour ob­jected that it would mean crossing several national frontiers. I pointed out that in the holiday season, camper vans pour across Europe, and that at each stage I would say I was picking up my wife and kids at the next capital’s airport after they flew in. He nodded several times.”

“All right. We’ve made our pitch. Now we have to wait and see if you’ve convinced them. Or if their greed for revenge against the White House will outweigh natural caution. It has been known.”

“What happens next?” asked Rowse.

“You go back to the hotel. If they swallow the American scheme and include your package in the shipment, al-Mansour will contact you, either personally or by courier. Follow his instructions to the letter. I’ll only close in on you for a situation report when the coast is clear.”

“And if they don’t swallow it?”

“Then they’ll try to silence you. Probably ask Mahoney and his boys to do the job as a sign of good faith. That’ll give you your chance at Mahoney. And the sergeants will be close by. They’ll move in to pull you out alive.”

“The hell they will,” thought Rowse. That would blow away London’s awareness of the plot. The Irish would scatter, and the whole shipment would reach them by another route at another time and place. If al-Mansour came for him directly or indirectly, he would be on his own.

“Do you want a warning bleeper?” asked McCready. “Something to bring us running?”

“No,” said Rowse shortly. There was no point in having one. No one would come.

“Then go back to the hotel and wait,” said McCready. “And try not to tire yourself to exhaustion with the pretty Mrs. Browne. With an ‘e.’ You might need your strength later.”

McCready then drifted away into the throng. He too knew he could not intervene if the Libyans or the Irish came for Rowse. What he had decided to do, in case the Libyan fox had not believed Rowse, was to bring in a far larger team of watchers and to keep an eye on Mahoney. When he moved, the Irish arms consignment would be moving. Now that he had found Mahoney, the IRA man was the better bet as a trace to the shipment.

Rowse completed his tour of the monastery and emerged into the brilliant sunshine to find his car. Bill, from his cover under the pines up on the hill below the tomb of the late President Makarios, watched him go and alerted Danny that their man was on his way back. Ten minutes later, McCready left, driven by Marks. On the way down the hill they gave a lift to a Cypriot peasant standing by the roadside and thus brought Bill back to Pedhoulas.

Fifteen minutes into the forty-minute drive, McCready’s communicator crackled into life. It was Danny.

“Mahoney and his men have just entered our man’s room. They’re ransacking it. Giving it a right going over. Shall I get out on the road and warn him?”

“No,” said McCready. “Stay put and keep in touch.”

“If I speed up, we might be able to overtake him,” sug­gested Marks.

McCready glanced at his watch. An empty gesture. He was not even calculating the miles and the speed to Pedhoulas.

“Too late,” he said. “We’d never catch him.”

“Poor old Tom,” said Bill from the back.

Unusually with subordinates, Sam McCready lost his tem­per. “If we fail, if that load of shit gets through, poor old shoppers at Harrods, poor old tourists in Hyde Park, poor old women and children all over our bloody country,” he snapped.

There was silence all the way to Pedhoulas.

Rowse’s key was still hanging on its hook in the reception lobby. He took it himself—there was no one behind the desk—and walked upstairs. The lock to his room was unda­maged; Mahoney had used the key and replaced it in the lobby. But the door was unlocked. Rowse thought the maid might still be bed-making, so he walked right in.

As he entered, a powerful shove from the man behind the door sent him staggering forward. The door slammed shut, access to it barred by the stocky one. Danny’s long-range photographs had been sent down to Nicosia with the courier before dawn, faxed to London, and identified. The stocky one was Tim O’Herlihy, a killer from the Derry Brigade; the beefy ginger-haired one by the fireplace Eamonn Kane, an enforcer from West Belfast. Mahoney sat in the room’s only armchair, his back to the window, whose curtains had been drawn to filter the brilliant daylight.

Without a word Kane grabbed the staggering Englishman, spun him around, and flattened him against the wall. Skilled hands ran quickly over Rowse’s short-sleeved shirt and down each leg of his trousers. If he had been carrying McCready’s offered bleeper, it would have been discovered and ended the game there and then.

The room was a mess, every drawer opened and emptied, the contents of the wardrobe scattered all over. Rowse’s only consolation was that he carried nothing that an author on a research trip would not have had—notebooks, story outline, tourist maps, brochures, portable typewriter, clothes, and washkit. His passport was in his back trouser pocket. Kane fished it out and tossed it to Mahoney. Mahoney flicked through it, but it told him nothing he did not already know.

“So, Sass-man, now perhaps you’ll tell me just what the fuck you’re doing here.”

There was the usual charming smile on his face, but it did not reach the eyes.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” said Rowse indignantly.

Kane swung a fist that caught Rowse in the solar plexus. He could have avoided it, but O’Herlihy was behind him and Kane was to one side. The odds were loaded, even without Mahoney. These men were not Sunday-school teachers. Rowse grunted and doubled, leaning against the wall and breathing heavily.

“Don’t you now? Don’t you now?” said Mahoney without rising. “Well, normally I have other ways than words of explaining myself, but for you, Sass-man, I’ll make an excep­tion. A friend of mine in Hamburg identified you there a couple of weeks back. Tom Rowse, former captain in the Special Air Service Regiment, well-known fan club of the Irish people, asking some very funny questions. Two tours in the Emerald Isle behind him, and now he turns up in the middle of Cyprus just when my friends and I are trying to have a nice quiet holiday. So once again, what are you doing here?”

“Look,” said Rowse. “Okay, I was in the regiment. But I quit. Couldn’t take any more of it. Denounced them all, the bastards, three years ago. I’m out, well out. The British Establishment wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire. Now I write novels for a living. Thriller novels. That’s it.”

Mahoney nodded to O’Herlihy. The punch from behind caught him in the kidneys. He cried out and dropped to his knees. Despite the odds, he could have fought back and finished at least one of them, maybe two, before going down himself for the last time. But he took the pain and slumped to his knees.

Despite Mahoney’s arrogance, Rowse suspected the terror­ist chief was puzzled. He must have noticed Rowse and Hakim al-Mansour in conversation on the terrace last night, before driving off. Rowse had returned from that all-night session, and Mahoney was on the point of receiving a very big favor from al-Mansour. No, the IRA man had not turned lethal—yet. He was just having fun.

“You’re lying to me, Sass-man, and I don’t like it. I’ve heard this just-doing-my-research story before. You see, we Irish are a very literary people. And some of the questions you have been asking are not literary at all. So what are you doing here?”

“Thrillers,” wheezed Rowse. “Thrillers nowadays have to be accurate. Can’t get away with vague generalizations. Look at le Carré, Clancy—you think they don’t research every last detail? It’s the only way nowadays.”

“Is it now? And a certain gentleman from across the water that you were talking with last night—he one of your co-writers?”

“That’s between us. You’d better ask him.”

“Oh, I did, Sass-man. This morning, by phone. And he asked me to keep an eye on you. If it were left to me, I’d have the lads drop you off a very tall mountain. But my friend asked me to keep an eye on you. Which I will do, day and night, until you leave. But that was all he asked me. So just between us, here’s a little something for the old times.”

Kane and O’Herlihy waded in. Mahoney watched. When Rowse’s legs gave way, he went down to the floor, doubling up, protecting the lower stomach and genitals. He was too low for a good punch, so they used the feet. He rolled his head away to avoid brain damage, feeling the toecaps thud into his back, shoulders, chest, and ribs, choking on the wave of pain until the merciful blackness came after a kick on the back of the head.

He came to in the manner of people who have been in a road accident: first gingerly aware that he was not dead, and then conscious of the pain. Beneath his shirt and trousers, his body was one large ache.

He was lying on his face, and for a while he studied the pattern of the carpet. Then he rolled over: a mistake. He ran a hand to his face. There was one lump on the cheek below the left eye; otherwise it was more or less the same face he had been shaving for years. He tried to sit up and winced. An arm went behind his shoulders and eased him into a sitting position.

“What the hell happened here?” she asked.

Monica Browne was on her knees beside him, one arm around his shoulders. The cool fingers of her right hand touched the lump below his left eye.

“I was passing, saw the door ajar. ...”

Quite a coincidence, he thought, then dismissed the idea.

“I must have fainted and thumped myself as I went down,” he said.

“Was that before or after you wrecked the room?”

He glanced around. He had forgotten about the tumbled drawers and the scattered clothes.

She unbuttoned his shirt front. “Jesus, that was some fall,” was all she said. Then she helped him up and led him to the bed. He sat on it. She pushed him backward, lifted his legs, and rolled him onto the mattress.

“Don’t go away,” she said unnecessarily. “I have some liniment in my room.”

She was back in minutes, closing the door behind her and giving the key a swift turn. She unbuttoned his Sea Island cotton shirt and slipped it from his shoulders, tut-tutting at the sight of the four bruises, now turning a fetching blue, that adorned his torso and ribs.

He felt helpless, but she seemed to know what she was doing. A small bottle was uncorked, and gentle fingers rubbed liniment into the bruised areas. It stung. He said, “Ow.”

“It’ll do you good, take the swelling down, help the discol­oration. Roll over.”

She eased more liniment into the bruises on his shoulders and back.

“How come you carry liniment around?” he mumbled. “Do all your dining partners end up like this?”

“It’s for horses,” she said.

“Thanks a lot.”

“Stop fussing—it has the same effect on stupid men. Roll back.”

He did so.

She stood over him, her golden hair falling about her shoulders. “They hit you in the legs as well?”

“All over.”

She unbuttoned the waistband of his trousers, unzipped them, and eased them down and off without a fuss. It was no strange task for a young wife with a husband who drank too much. Apart from one lump on the right shin, there were another half-dozen bluish areas on the thighs. She massaged the liniment into them. After the sting, the sensation was of pure pleasure. The odor reminded him of the days when he played Rugby at school. She paused and set the bottle down.

“Is that a bruise?” she asked.

He glanced down toward his jockey shorts. No, it was not a bruise.

“Thank God,” she murmured. She turned away and reached for the zipper at the back of her cream shantung dress. The filtered light from the curtains gave the room a low, cool glow.

“Where did you learn about bruises?” he asked.

After the beating and the massage, he was feeling drowsy. His head was drowsy, anyway.

“Back in Kentucky, my kid brother was an amateur jockey,” she said. “I patched him up a few times.”

Her cream dress slid to the floor in a pool. She wore tiny Janet Reger panties. No bra strap crossed her back. Despite the fullness of her breasts, she needed none. She turned around. Rowse swallowed.

“But this,” she said, “I did not learn from any brother.”

He thought fleetingly about Nikki back in Gloucestershire. He had not done this before, not since marrying Nikki. But, he reasoned, a warrior occasionally needs solace, and if it is offered, he would be less than human to refuse.

He reached up for her as she straddled him, but she took his wrists and pressed them back on the pillow.

“Lie still,” she whispered. “You’re far too ill to partici­pate.”

But for the next hour or so she seemed quite content to be proved wrong.

Just before four she rose and crossed the room to open the curtains. The sun had passed its azimuth and was moving toward the mountains.

Across the valley Danny the sergeant adjusted his focus and said, “Cor, you dirty bastard, Tom.”

The affair lasted for three days. The horses did not arrive from Syria, nor any message for Rowse from Hakim al-Mansour. She checked with her agent on the coast regularly, but always the answer was “Tomorrow.” So they walked through the mountains, took picnics high above the cherry orchards where the conifers grow, and made love among the pine needles.

They breakfasted and dined on the terrace, while Danny and Bill watched in silence from across the valley and Mahoney and his colleagues glowered from the bar.

McCready and Marks stayed at their pension in Pedhoulas village while McCready organized more men from Nicosia Station and a few from Malta. As long as Hakim al-Mansour made no contact with Rowse to indicate that their prepared story had, or had not, been accepted, the key was the Irish­man Mahoney and his two colleagues. They were running the IRA enterprise; so long as they stayed, the operation would not move into the shipment phase.

The two SAS sergeants were to give backup to Rowse; the rest would keep the IRA men under surveillance at all times.

On the second day after Rowse and Monica first made love, McCready’s team was in place, scattered through the hills covering every road in and out of the area from observation posts in the hills.

The telephone line to the hotel had been intercepted and tapped. The monitoring listeners were ensconced in another nearby hotel. Few of the newcomers could speak Greek, but fortunately tourists were common enough for another dozen not to arouse suspicions.

Mahoney and his men never left the hotel. They, too, were waiting for something: a visit, or a phone call, or a hand-delivered message.

On the third day Rowse was up as usual just after dawn broke. Monica slept on, and it was Rowse who took the tray of morning coffee from the waiter at the door. When he lifted the coffee pot to pour his first cup, he saw a folded wafer of paper beneath it. He put the wafer between the cup and the saucer, poured the coffee, and walked with it into the bath­room.

The message said simply, “Club Rosalina, Paphos, 11 P.M. Aziz.”

That posed a problem, Rowse mused as he flushed the fragments of the message down the toilet. Easing Monica out of the picture for the few hours it would take to get to Paphos and back in the middle of the night would not be easy.

The problem was solved at midday, when fate intervened in the form of Monica’s shipping agent, who called to say that the three stallions would be arriving from Latakia in the port of Limassol that evening, and could she please be present to see them signed for and settled in their stables outside the port?

She left at four o’clock, and Rowse made life easier for his backup team by walking up to Pedhoulas village and ringing the manager of the Apollonia to say that he had to go to Paphos that evening for dinner and what, please, was the best route? The message was picked up by the listeners and passed to McCready.

The Rosalina Club turned out to be a casino in the heart of the Old Town. Rowse entered it just before eleven and soon saw the slim, elegant figure of Hakim al-Mansour seated at one of the roulette tables. There was a chair vacant next to him. Rowse slid into it.

“Good evening, Mr. Aziz. What a pleasant surprise.”

Al-Mansour inclined his head gravely. “Faites vos jeux,” called the croupier.

The Libyan placed several high-denomination chips on a combination of the higher numbers. The wheel spun, and the dancing white ball elected to fall into the slot number four. The Libyan showed no annoyance as his chips were swept away. That single throw would have kept a Libyan farmer and his family for a month.

“Nice of you to come,” said al-Mansour as gravely. “I have news for you. Good news, you will be pleased to hear. It is always so agreeable to impart good news.”

Rowse felt relieved. That morning, the fact that the Libyan had sent the message to him instead of an order to Mahoney to lose the Englishman forever among the mountains had been hopeful. Now, it looked even better.

Rowse watched as the Libyan lost another pile of chips. He was inured to the temptation of gambling, regarding the rou­lette wheel as the most stupid and boring artifact ever in­vented. But the Arabs compare only with the Chinese as gamblers, and even the cool al-Mansour was entranced by the spinning wheel.

“I am happy to tell you,” said al-Mansour as he placed more chips, “that our glorious Leader has acceded to your request. The equipment you seek will be provided—in full. There. What is your reaction?”

“I’m delighted,” said Rowse. “I’m sure my principals will put it to ... good use.”

“We must all fervently hope so. That is, as you British soldiers say, the object of the exercise.”

“How would you like payment?” asked Rowse.

The Libyan waved a deprecatory hand. “Accept it as a gift from the People’s Jamahariya, Mr. Rowse.”

“I am very grateful. I am sure my principals will be, too.”

“I doubt it, for you would be a fool ever to tell them. And you are not a fool. A mercenary, perhaps, but not a fool. So as you will now be making a commission of not one hundred thousand dollars but half a million, perhaps you will split that with me? Shall we say, fifty-fifty?”

“For the fighting funds, of course.”

“Of course.”

Retirement fund, more like, Rowse thought, then said aloud, “Mr. Aziz, sir, you have a deal. When I can pry the money out of the clients, half will come to you.”

“I do hope so,” murmured al-Mansour. This time he won, and a pile of chips was pushed toward him. Despite his urbanity, he was delighted. “My arm is very long.”

“Trust me,” said Rowse.

“Now that, my dear chap, would be insulting ... in our world.”

“I need to know about shipment. Where to collect, when.”

“And so you shall. Soon. You asked for a port in Europe. I think that can be arranged. Return to the Apollonia, and I will be in touch very soon.”

He rose and handed Rowse his remaining pile of chips. “Do not leave the casino for another fifteen minutes,” he said. “Here—enjoy yourself.”

Rowse waited for fifteen minutes, then cashed in the chips. He preferred to buy Nikki something nice.

He left the casino and strolled toward his car. Because of the narrow streets of the Old Town, parking was at a premium even late at night. His car was two streets away. He never saw Danny or Bill, who were in doorways up and down the road.

As he approached his car, an old man in blue denim and a forage cap was brushing the garbage from the gutters with a yard-broom.

“Kali spera,” croaked the old road-sweeper.

“Kali spera,” replied Rowse. He paused. The old man was one of those, finally beaten by life, who do the menial jobs all over the world. He remembered the wad of money from al-Mansour’s winnings, pulled out a large-denomination note, and tucked it into the old man’s top pocket.

“My dear Tom,” said the road-sweeper, “I always knew you had a good heart.”

“What the hell are you doing here, McCready?”

“Just keep jiggling with your car keys and tell me what happened,” said McCready as he pushed his broom.

Rowse told him.

“Good,” said McCready. “It looks like a ship. That prob­ably means they’re tacking your small cargo onto the much larger one for the IRA. We must hope so. If yours is simply sent as a one-shot by a different route in a different container, we’re back to where we started. Left with Mahoney. But as your load is only a van-full, they may pack them all together. Any idea which port?”

“No, just Europe.”

“Go back to the hotel, and do what the man says,” ordered McCready.

Rowse drove off. Danny, on a motorcycle, went after him to ensure that Rowse had no follower other than himself. Ten minutes later, Marks arrived with the car and Bill to pick up McCready.

On the drive back, McCready sat in the rear and thought. The ship, if ship it was, would not be Libyan registered. That would be too obvious. Probably a chartered freighter, with a no-questions-asked captain and crew. There were scores of such to be found all over the eastern Mediterranean, and Cyprus was a favored country of registry.

If it was chartered locally, it would have to go to a Libyan port to take on the arms, probably to be buried beneath a perfectly normal cargo like crated olives or dates. The IRA team would probably go with it. When they left the hotel, it was vital that they be followed to the loading dock so the name of the ship could be noted for later interception.

Once noted, the plan was for the vessel to be tracked by a submarine at periscope depth. The submarine was on standby under the waters off Malta. A Royal Air Force Nimrod from the British air base at Akrotiri on Cyprus would guide the sub toward the steaming freighter, then make itself scarce. The sub would do the rest until Royal Navy surface vessels could make the intercept in the English Channel.

McCready needed the ship’s name, or at least the port of destination. With the name of the port, he could have his friends at Lloyds Shipping Intelligence find out what vessels had reserved berthings in that port and for which days. That would narrow the choice down. It could be he no longer needed Mahoney, if only the Libyans would tell Rowse.

The message to Rowse came twenty-four hours later by telephone. It was not al-Mansour’s voice but another. Later, McCready’s engineers traced it to the Libyan People’s Bureau in Nicosia.

“Go home, Mr. Rowse. You will be contacted there shortly. Your olives will arrive by ship at a European port. You will be contacted personally with arrival and collection details.”

McCready studied the intercept in his hotel room. Did al-Mansour suspect something? Had he seen through Rowse but decided on a double-bluff? If he suspected Rowse’s real employers, he would know that Mahoney and his group were also under surveillance. So was he ordering Rowse to England in order to take the watchers off Mahoney? Possibly.

In case it was not only possible but true, McCready decided to play both ends. He would leave with Rowse for London, but the watchers would stay with Mahoney.

Rowse decided to tell Monica the next morning. He had got back to the hotel from Paphos before her. She arrived from Limassol at three A.M., flushed and excited. Her stallions were in beautiful condition, now stabled outside Limassol, she told him as she undressed. She only needed the transit formalities to be completed to bring them to England.

Rowse awoke early, but she was ahead of him. He glanced at the empty space in the bed, then went down the corridor to check her room. They gave him a message at the reception desk, a brief note in one of the hotel’s envelopes.

Dear Tom,

It was beautiful but it’s over. I’m gone, back to my husband and my life and my horses. Think kindly of me, as I will of you.

Monica.

He sighed. Twice he had briefly thought she might be something other than she seemed. Reading her note, he realized he had been right at the beginning—she was just a civilian. He also had his life—with his country home and his writing career and his Nikki. Suddenly he wanted to see Nikki very badly.

As he drove back to the Nicosia Airport, Rowse guessed his two sergeants were somewhere behind him. They were. But McCready was not. Using the Head of Station in Nicosia, he had found a Royal Air Force communications flight heading for Lyneham, Wiltshire, that would get in ahead of the sched­uled British Airways flight. McCready was already on it.

Just before midday, Rowse glanced out of the porthole of the plane and saw the green mass of the Troodos Mountains slipping away beneath the wing. He thought of Monica, and Mahoney still propping up the bar, and al-Mansour, and he was glad to be going home. For one thing, the green fields of Gloucestershire were a good deal safer than the caldron of the Levant.

Rowse’s flight touched down just after lunch, with the time gained from flying west from Cyprus. McCready had preceded him by an hour, though Rowse did not know it. As he emerged from the airplane cabin into the jetway connecting to the terminal, a trim young woman in a British Airways uniform was holding up a sign saying, MR. ROWSE.

He identified himself.

“Ah, there’s a message for you at the Airport Information desk, just outside the customs hall,” she said.

He thanked her, puzzled, and walked on toward passport control. He had not told Nikki he was coming, wishing to surprise her. When he got to the information desk, the mes­sage said, “Scott’s. Eight P.M. Lobsters on me!”

He cursed. That meant he would not get home to Glouces­tershire and Nikki until morning.

His car was in the long-term car park—no doubt, if he had not returned, the ever-efficient Firm would have had it re­moved and returned to his widow. He took the courtesy shuttle, retrieved his car, and checked into one of the airport hotels. It gave him time for a bath, a shave, sleep, and to change into a suit. Since he intended to drink a lot of fine wine if the Firm was paying, he decided to take a taxi to and from the West End of London.

First he rang Nikki. She was ecstatic, her voice shrill with a mixture of relief and delight. “Are you all right, darling?”

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“And is it over?”

“Yes, the research is finished, all bar a couple of extra details that I can sort out here in England. How have you been?”

“Oh, great. Everything’s great. Guess what happened?”

“Surprise me.”

“Two days after you left, a man came. Said he was furnish­ing a large company flat in London, looking for carpets and rugs. He bought the lot, all our stock. Paid cash. Sixteen thousand pounds. Darling, we’re flush!”

Rowse held the receiver and stared at the Degas print on the wall.

“This buyer, where was he from?”

“Mr. Da Costa? Portugal. Why?”

“Dark-haired, olive-skinned?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

Arab, Rowse thought. Libyan. That meant that while Nikki was out in the barn where they kept the stock of carpets and rugs that they sold as a sideline, someone had been in the house and probably bugged the phone. Al-Mansour certainly liked to cover all the angles. Had he made a single ill-judged phone call to Nikki from Vienna or Malta or Cyprus, as he had been tempted to do, he would have blown away himself and the mission.

“Well,” he said cheerfully, “I don’t care where he was from. If he paid cash, he’s wonderful.”

“When are you coming home?” she asked excitedly.

“Tomorrow morning. Be there about nine.”

He presented himself at the superb fish restaurant in Mount Street at ten past eight and was shown to where Sam McCready already sat at a corner table. McCready liked corner tables. That way, each diner could sit with his back to a wall, at right angles to each other. It was easier to converse that way than sitting side by side, yet each was able to see the restaurant. “Never take it in the back,” one of his training officers had told him years ago. The same man was later betrayed by George Blake and “took it” in a KGB interroga­tion cell. McCready had spent much of his life with his back to the wall.

Rowse ordered lobster and asked for it Newberg. McCready had his cold, with mayonnaise. Rowse waited until a glass of Meursault had been poured for each and the sommelier had departed before he mentioned the mysterious buyer of the rugs. McCready chewed on a mouthful of Benbecula lobster, swallowed, and said, “Damn. Did you phone Nikki from Cyprus anytime before I tapped the hotel phone?”

“Not at all,” said Rowse. “My first call was from the Post House Hotel, a few hours ago.”

“Good. Good and bad. Good that there were no inadvertent slipups. Bad that al-Mansour is going to such lengths.”

“He’s going a bloody sight farther than that,” said Rowse. “I can’t be sure, but I think there was a motorcycle, a Honda, both at the long-term car park when I got my car back, and at the Post House. Never saw it from the taxi into London, but the traffic was very thick.”

“Damn and blast!” said McCready with feeling. “I think you’re right. There’s a couple at the end of the bar who keep peering through the gap. And they’re looking at us. Don’t turn around—keep eating.”

“Man and woman, youngish?”

“Yes.”

“Recognize either?”

“I think so. The man, anyway. Turn your head and call the wine waiter. See if you can spot him. Lank hair, downturned moustache.”

Rowse turned to beckon the waiter. The couple were at the end of the bar, separated from the main dining area by a screen.

Rowse had once done intensive antiterrorist training. It had meant scouring hundreds of photographs, not only of the IRA. He turned back to McCready.

“Got him. A German lawyer. Ultraradical. Used to defend the Baader-Meinhof crowd, later became one of them.”

“Of course. Wolfgang Ruetter. And the woman?”

“No. But the Red Army Faction uses a lot of groupies. A new face. More watchers from al-Mansour?”

“Not this time. He’d use his own people, not German radicals. Sorry, Tom, I could kick myself. Since al-Mansour didn’t have a tail on you in Cyprus, and since I was so busy ensuring that you passed all of the Libyan’s tests, I momen­tarily took my eye off that bloody paranoid psycho Mahoney. If those two at the bar are Red Army Faction, they’ll be on an errand from him. I thought there’d be no heat on you once you got back here. I’m afraid I was wrong.”

“So what do we do?” asked Rowse.

“They’ve already seen us together. If that gets out, the operation’s finished, and so are you.”

“Couldn’t you be my agent, my publisher?”

McCready shook his head. “Won’t work,” he said. “If I leave by the back door, it’ll be all they need. If I go by the front like a normal diner, it’s short odds I’ll be photographed. Somewhere in Eastern Europe that photo will be identified. Keep talking naturally, but listen. Here’s what I want you to do.”

During the coffee, Rowse summoned the waiter and asked for directions to the men’s room. It was staffed, as McCready knew it would be. The tip he gave the attendant was more than generous—it was outrageous.

“Just for a phone call? You got it, guv’nor.”

The call to the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police, a personal call to a friend of McCready’s, was placed while McCready was signing the slip for his credit card. The woman had left the restaurant as soon as he called for the bill.

When Rowse and McCready emerged under the illuminated portico, the woman was half-hidden in the alley beside the poultry shop just down the street. Her camera lens picked up McCready’s face, and she ran off two quick shots. There was no flash; the portico lights were enough. McCready caught the movement, but he gave no sign.

The pair walked slowly to McCready’s parked Jaguar. Ruetter emerged from the restaurant and crossed to his motorcy­cle. He took his helmet from the pannier and put it on, visor down. The woman left the alley and straddled the machine behind him.

“They’ve got what they want,” said McCready. “They may peel off anytime. Let’s just hope their curiosity keeps them there for a short while.”

McCready’s car phone trilled. On the other end was his friend in the Special Branch.

McCready filled him in. “Terrorists, probably armed. Battersea Park, near the Pagoda.” He replaced the receiver and glanced in his mirror. “Two hundred yards—still with us.”

Apart from the tension, it was an uneventful drive to the sprawl of Battersea Park, which was normally closed and locked at sundown. As they approached the Pagoda, Mc­Cready glanced up and down the road. Nothing. Not surpris­ing—the park had been reopened by Rowse’s telephone call.

“Diplomatic protection drill—remember it?”

“Yep,” said Rowse, and reached for the handbrake.

“Go.”

Rowse yanked hard on the brake as McCready pulled the Jaguar into a savage turn. The rear end of the car slid around, tires screaming in protest. In two seconds, the sedan turned around and was heading the other way. McCready drove straight at the oncoming single headlight of the motorcycle. Two unmarked parked cars nearby put on their headlights, and their engines came to life.

Ruetter swerved to avoid the Jaguar and succeeded. The powerful Honda veered off the road, over the curb, and onto the parkland. It almost missed the bench, but not quite. Rowse, in the passenger seat, caught a glimpse of the motor­cycle somersaulting over, its passengers spilling onto the grass. The other cars drew up and decanted three men.

Ruetter was winded but unharmed. He sat up and reached under his jacket.

“Armed police. Freeze,” said a voice beside him. Ruetter turned and looked into the barrel of a service-issue Webley .38. The face above it was smiling. Ruetter had seen the film Dirty Harry and decided not to make anyone’s day. He withdrew his hand. The Special Branch sergeant stood back, the Webley pointed double-handed at the German’s forehead. A colleague removed the Walther P38 Parabellum from inside the motorcycle jacket.

The woman was unconscious. A large man in a light gray coat walked from one of the cars toward McCready. Com­mander Benson, Special Branch.

“What have you got, Sam?” he asked.

“Red Army Faction. Armed, dangerous.”

“The woman is not armed,” said Ruetter clearly, in En­glish. “This is an outrage.”

The Special Branch Commander took a small handgun from his pocket, walked over to the woman, pressed the automatic into her right hand, then dropped it in a plastic bag.

“She is now,” he said mildly.

“I protest!” said Ruetter. “This is in flagrant breach of our civil rights.”

“How true,” said the Commander sadly. “What do you want, Sam?”

“They have my picture, they know my name. And they saw me with him.” He jerked his head at Rowse. “If that gets out, there’ll be an awful lot of grief on the streets of London. I need them held incommunicado. No trace, no appearances. They must be badly hurt after that crash—a secure hospital, perhaps?”

“Isolation ward, I shouldn’t wonder. What with the poor darlings being in a coma and no papers on them, it’ll take me weeks even to identify them.”

“My name is Wolfgang Ruetter,” said the German. “I am a lawyer from Frankfurt and I demand to see my ambassa­dor.”

“Funny how deaf you can get in middle age,” complained the Commander. “Into the car with them, lads. As soon as I can identify them, of course, I’ll bring them to court. But it could take a long time. Keep in touch, Sam.”

In Britain, as a rule, even when an armed and identified member of a terrorist group is arrested, he or she cannot be held without a court appearance for longer than seven days, under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. But all rules occasion­ally have their exceptions, even in a democracy.

The two unmarked police cars drove away. McCready and Rowse climbed into the Jaguar. They had to get out of the park so it could be locked up again.

“When this is over,” asked Rowse, “will they come for me or Nikki?”

“They’ve never done that yet,” said McCready. “Hakim al-Mansour is a pro. Like me, he accepts that in our game, you win some and you lose some. He’ll shrug and get on with his next operation. Mahoney is trickier, I know, but for twenty years the IRA has targeted only their own informers and holders of high office. I’m convinced he’ll go back to Ireland to make his peace with the IRA Army Council. They, at least, will warn him off personal vengeance missions. So hang on in there for just a few more days. It’ll be okay after that.”

Rowse drove back to Gloucestershire the following morning to take up the reins of his life again and await the promised contact from Hakim al-Mansour. As he saw it, when he received the information concerning the docking of the arms ship, he would pass the tip to McCready. The SIS would trace the ship backward from that, identify it in the Mediterranean, and pick it up in the Eastern Atlantic or in the English Channel, with Mahoney and his team on board. It was as simple as that.

The contact came seven days later. A black Porsche crept into the courtyard of Rowse’s home, and a young man climbed out. He looked around at the green grass and beds of flowers in the late May sunshine. He was dark-haired and saturnine, and he came from a drier, harsher land.

“Tom,” called Nikki. “Someone to see you.”

Rowse came around from the rear garden. He let no trace of expression mask the polite inquiry on his face, but he recognized the man: It was the tail who had followed him from Tripoli to Valletta, then seen him off on the flight to Cyprus two weeks earlier.

“Yes?” he said.

“Mr. Rowse?”

“Yes.”

“I have a message from Mr. Aziz.” His English was reason­able but careful, too careful to be fluent. He recited his message as he had learned it.

“Your cargo will arrive at Bremerhaven. Three crates, all marked as office machinery. Your normal signature will se­cure release. Bay Zero Nine, Warehouse Neuberg. Rossmannstrasse. You must remove them within twenty-four hours of their arrival date, otherwise they will disappear. Is that clear?”

Rowse repeated the exact address, fixing it in his mind. The young man climbed back into his car.

“One thing. When? Which day?”

“Ah, yes. The twenty-fourth. They arrive at noon of the twenty-fourth.”

He drove away, leaving Rowse with his mouth open. Min­utes later he was racing to the village to use the public phone, having ensured he was still clean of a tail. His own phone was still tapped, the experts had confirmed, and it would have to stay that way for a while longer.

“What the hell can they mean, the twenty-fourth?” raged McCready for the tenth time. “That’s in three days! Three bloody days!”

“Mahoney’s still in place?” asked Rowse. He had just driven up to London at McCready’s insistence, and they were meeting at one of the Firm’s safe houses, an apartment in Chelsea. It was still not safe to bring Rowse to Century House—officially, he was persona non grata there.

“Yes, still propping up the bar at the Apollonia, still sur­rounded by his team, still waiting for a word from al-Mansour, still surrounded by my watchers.”

McCready had already worked out that there were only two choices. Either the Libyans were lying about the twenty-fourth—another test for Rowse, to see if the police would raid the Neuberg warehouse. In which case al-Mansour would have time to divert his ship somewhere else. Or else he, McCready, had been duped—Mahoney and his team were decoys and probably did not know it themselves.

Of one thing he was certain: No ship could get from Cyprus to Bremerhaven via Tripoli or Sirte in three days. While Rowse was motoring to London, McCready had consulted his friend at Dibben Place, Colchester, home of Lloyds Shipping Intelligence. The man was adamant. First, it would take one day to sail from, say, Paphos to Tripoli or Sirte. Allow another day for loading, more likely a night. Two days to Gibraltar, and four or five more to northern Germany. Seven days minimum, more likely eight.

So either it was a test for Rowse, or the arms ship was already at sea. According to the man from Lloyds, to dock at Bremerhaven on the twenty-fourth, it would now be some­where west of Lisbon, heading north to clear Finisterre.

Checks were being made by Lloyds as to the names of ships expected in Bremerhaven on the twenty-fourth with a Mediterranean port of departure. The phone rang. It was the Lloyds expert on a patch-through to the Chelsea safe house.

“There aren’t any,” he said. “Nothing from the Mediter­ranean is expected on the twenty-fourth. You must have been misinformed.”

With a vengeance, thought McCready. In Hakim al-Mansour, he had come up against a master of the game.

He turned to Rowse.

“Apart from Mahoney and his crew, was there anyone in that hotel who even smelted of IRA?”

Rowse shook his head.

“I’m afraid it’s back to the photograph albums,” said McCready. “Go through them over and over again. If there’s any face—anything at all—that you spotted in your time in Tripoli, Malta, or Cyprus, let me know. I’ll leave you with them. I have some errands to run.”

McCready did not even consult Century House about asking for American help. Time was too short to go through chan­nels. He went to see the CIA Station Head in Grosvenor Square, Bill Carver.

“Well, Sam, I don’t know. Diverting a satellite isn’t that easy. Can’t you use a Nimrod?”

Royal Air Force Nimrods can take high-definition pictures of ships at sea, but they tend to fly so low that they are seen themselves. Without added altitude, they have to make many passes to cover a large area of ocean.

McCready considered long and hard. If he knew the con­signment had gotten through and was firmly in the hands of the IRA, he would have wasted no time alerting the CIA to the threat to their ambassador in London, as reported by the Libyan doctor in Qaddafi’s tent.

But for weeks his concern had been just to stop the arms shipment from getting through to the final destination. Now, needing CIA help, he produced his bombshell—he told Carver of the threat.

Carver came out of his chair as if jet-propelled. “Jesus H. Christ, Sam!” he exploded. Both men knew that apart from the catastrophe of a U.S. ambassador being slaughtered on British soil, Charles and Carol Price had proved the most popular American emissaries in decades. Mrs. Thatcher would not easily forgive an organization that allowed anything to happen to Charlie Price.

“You’ll get your fucking satellite,” said Carver. “But next time you damned well better tell me earlier than this.”

It was almost midnight before Rowse went wearily back to Album One, the old days. He was sitting with a photo expert brought over from Century House. A projector and screen had been installed so that photographs could be thrown onto the screen and alterations made to the faces.

Just before one o’clock, Rowse paused.

“This one,” he said. “Can you put it on the screen?”

The face filled almost one wall.

“Don’t be daft,” said McCready. “He’s been out of it for years. A has-been, over the hill.”

The face stared back, tired eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, iron-gray hair over the creased brow.

“Lose the glasses,” Rowse said to the photo expert. “Give him brown contact lenses.”

The technician made adjustments. The glasses vanished, and the eyes went from blue to brown.

“How old is this photo?”

“About ten years,” said the technician.

“Age him ten years. Thin the hair, more lines, dewlaps under the chin.”

The technician did as he was told. The man looked about seventy now.

“Turn the hair jet black. Hair dye.”

The thin gray hair turned deep black. Rowse whistled.

“Sitting alone in the corner of the terrace,” he said, “at the Apollonia. Talking to no one, keeping himself to himself.”

“Stephen Johnson was Chief of Staff of the IRA—the old IRA—twenty years ago,” said McCready. “Quit the whole organization ten years ago, after a blazing row with the new generation over policy. He’s now sixty-five. Sells agricultural machinery in County Clare, for heaven’s sake.”

Rowse grinned. “Used to be an ace, had a row, quit in disgust, known to be out in the cold, untouchable by those inside the Establishment—remind you of anyone you know?”

“Sometimes, young Master Rowse, you can even be half­way smart,” admitted McCready.

He called up a friend in the Irish police, the Garda Siochana. Officially, contacts between the Irish Garda and their British counterparts in the fight against terrorism are sup­posed to be formal but at arm’s length. In fact, between professionals, those contacts are often warmer and closer than some of the more hardline politicians would wish.

This time it was a man in the Irish Special Branch, awak­ened at his home in Ranelagh, who came up trumps around the breakfast hour.

“He’s on holiday,” said McCready. “According to the local Garda, he’s taken up golf and departs occasionally for a golfing holiday, usually in Spain.”

“Southern Spain?”

“Possibly. Why?”

“Remember the Gibraltar affair?”

They both remembered it all too well. Three IRA killers, planning to plant a huge bomb in Gibraltar, had been “taken out” by an SAS team—prematurely but permanently. The terrorists had arrived on the Rock as tourists from the Costa del Sol and the Spanish police and counterintelligence force had been extremely helpful.

“There was always rumored to be a fourth in the party, onewho stayed in Spain,” recalled Rowse. “And the Marbellaarea is stiff with golf courses.”

“The bugger,” breathed McCready. “The old bugger. He’s gone active again.”

In the middle of the morning, McCready took a call from Bill Carver, and they went over to the American Embassy. Carver received them in the main hall, signed them in, and took them to his office in the basement, where he too had a room all set up for viewing photographs.

The satellite had done its job well, rolling gently high in space over the eastern Atlantic, pointing its Long Tom cam­eras downward to cover a strip of water from the Portuguese, Spanish, and French coasts to more than one hundred miles out into the ocean in a single pass.

Acting on a suggestion from his Lloyds contact, McCready had asked for a study of a rectangle of water from Lisbon north to the Bay of Biscay. The continuous welter of photo­graphs that had poured back to the receiving station of the National Reconnaissance Office outside Washington had been broken down into individual snaps of every ship afloat in that rectangle.

“The bird photographed everything bigger than a floating Coke can,” remarked Carver proudly. “You want to start?”

There were more than a hundred and twenty ships in that rectangle of water. Nearly half were fishing vessels. McCready discounted them, though he might wish to return to them later. Bremerhaven had a port for fishing vessels, too, but they would be of German registry, and a stranger showing up to unload not fish but general cargo would look odd. He concentrated on the freighters and a few large and luxurious private yachts, also ignoring the four passenger liners. His reduced list numbered fifty-three.

One by one, he asked that the small slivers of metal on the great expanse of water be blown up until each filled the screen. Detail by detail, the men in the room examined them. Some were heading the wrong way. Those heading north for the English Channel numbered thirty-one.

At half-past two, McCready called a halt.

“That man,” he said to Bill Carver’s technician, “the one standing on the wing of the bridge. Can you come in closer?”

“You got it,” said the American.

The freighter had been photographed off Finisterre just before sundown on the previous day. A crewman was busying himself with a routine task on the foredeck, while another man stood on the wing of the bridge looking at him. As McCready and Rowse watched, the ship grew bigger and bigger on the screen, and still the definition held. The fore-peak and stern of the vessel disappeared offscreen and the figure of the man standing alone grew larger.

“How high is that bird?” asked Rowse.

“Hundred and ten miles,” said the technician.

“Boy, that’s some technology,” said Rowse.

“Pick up a license plate, clearly readable,” said the Amer­ican proudly.

There were more than twenty frames of that particular freighter. When the man on the bridge-wing filled most of the wall, Rowse asked for all of them to be screened with the same magnification. As the images flashed, the man seemed to move, like one of those stick figures in a Victorian biograph.

The figure turned from looking at the seaman and stared out to sea. Then he removed his peaked cap to run a hand through his thin hair. Perhaps a seabird called above him. Whatever, he raised his face.

“Freeze,” called Rowse. “Closer.”

The technician magnified the face until finally it began to blur.

“Bingo,” McCready whispered over Rowse’s shoulder. “That’s him. Johnson.”

The tired old eyes beneath the thin jet-black hair stared out at them from the screen. The old man from the corner of the Apollonia dining terrace. The has-been.

“The name of the ship,” said McCready. “We need the name of the ship.”

It was on her bow, and the satellite, as she dropped over the horizon to the north, had still been filming. A single, low-angle shot caught the words beside the anchor: Regina IV. McCready reached for the phone and called his man at Lloyds Shipping Intelligence.

“Can’t be,” said the man when he called back thirty minutes later. “Regina IV is over ten thousand tons, and she’s off the coast of Venezuela. You must have got it wrong.”

“No mistake,” said McCready. “She’s about two thousand tons, and she’s steaming north, by now off Bordeaux.”

“Hang about,” said the cheerful voice from Colchester. “Is she up to something naughty?”

“Almost certainly,” said McCready.

“I’ll call you back,” said the Lloyds man. He did, almost an hour later. McCready had spent most of that time on the telephone to some people based at Poole, in Dorset.

“Regina,” said the man from Lloyds, “is a very common name. Like Stella Marts. That’s why they have letters or Roman numerals after the name. To distinguish one from another. It happens there’s a Regina VI registered at Limassol, now believed to be berthed at Paphos. About two thou­sand tons. German skipper, Greek Cypriot crew. New own­ers—a shell company registered in Luxembourg.”

“The Libyan government,” thought McCready. It would be a simple ruse. Leave the Mediterranean as the Regina VI; out in the Atlantic, paint out the single numeral after the V and paint another in before it. Skilled hands could alter the ship’s papers to match. The agents would book the thoroughly reputable Regina IV into Bremerhaven with a cargo of office machinery and general cargo from Canada, and who would know that the real Regina IV was off Venezuela?

At dawn of the third day, Captain Holst stared out of the forward windows of his bridge at the slowly lightening sea. There was no mistaking the flare that had burst into the sky straight ahead of him, hung for a moment, then fluttered back to the water. Maroon. A distress flare. Peering through the half-light, he could make out something else a mile or two ahead of him: the yellow fluttering of a flame. He ordered his engine room to make half-speed, lifted a handset, and called one of his passengers in his bunk below. The man joined him less than a minute later.

Captain Holst pointed silently through the windshield. On the calm water ahead of them, a forty-foot motor fishing vessel rolled drunkenly. She had clearly suffered an explosion in her engine area; a black smudge of smoke drifted up from below her deck, mingling with a flicker of orange flame. Her topsides were scorched and blackened.

“Where are we?” asked Stephen Johnson.

“In the North Sea, between Yorkshire and the Dutch coast,” said Holst.

Johnson took the Captain’s binoculars and focused on the small fishing boat ahead. Fair Maid, Whitby, could be made out on her bow.

“We have to stop and give them help,” Holst said in English. “It is the law of the sea.”

He did not know what his own vessel was carrying, and he did not want to know. His employers had given him their orders and an extremely extravagant bonus. His crew had also been taken care of financially. The crated olives from Cyprus had come onboard at Paphos and were totally legiti­mate. During the two-day stopover in Sirte, on the coast of Libya, part of the cargo had been removed and then returned. It looked the same. He knew there must be illicit cargo in there somewhere, but he could not spot it and did not want to try.

The proof that his cargo was extremely dangerous lay in the six passengers—two were from Cyprus, and four more were from Sirte. And the changing of the numerals as soon as he had passed the Pillars of Hercules. In twelve hours, he expected to be rid of them all. He would sail back through the North Sea, convert again to the Regina VI at sea, and return calmly to his home port of Limassol, a much richer man.

Then he would retire. The years of running strange cargoes of men and crates into West Africa, the bizarre orders now coming to him from his new Luxembourg-based owners—all would be a thing of the past. He would retire at fifty with his savings enough for him and his Greek wife, Maria, to open their little restaurant in the Greek islands and live out their days in peace.

Johnson looked dubious. “We can’t stop,” he said.

“We have to.”

The light was getting better. They saw a figure, scorched and blackened, emerge from the wheelhouse of the fishing vessel, stagger to the forward deck, make a pain-wracked attempt to wave, then fall forward onto his face.

Another IRA officer came up behind Holst. He felt the muzzle of a gun in his ribs.

“Sail on by,” said a flat voice.

Holst did not ignore the gun, but he looked at Johnson. “If we do, and they are rescued by another ship, as they will be sooner or later, they will report us. We will be stopped and asked why we did that.”

Johnson nodded.

“Then ram them,” said the one with the gun. “We don’t stop.”

“We can give first aid and call up the Dutch coast guard,” said Holst. “No one comes aboard. When the Dutch cutter appears, we continue. They will wave their thanks and think no more of it. It will cost us thirty minutes.”

Johnson was persuaded. He nodded. “Put up your gun,” he said.

Holst moved his speed control to “full astern,” and the Regina slowed rapidly. Giving an order in Greek to his helms­man, he left the bridge and went down to the waist before moving up to the foredeck. He looked down at the approach­ing fishing vessel, then waved a hand to the helmsman. The engines went to “midships,” and the momentum of the Regina carried her slowly up to the stricken fisherman.

“Ahoy, Fair Maid!” called Holst, peering down as the fishing boat came under the bow. They saw the fallen man on the foredeck try to stir, then faint again. The Fair Maid bobbed along the side of the larger Regina until she came to the Regina’s waist, where the deck rail was lower. Holst walked down his ship and shouted an order in Greek for one of his crew to throw a line aboard the Fair Maid.

There was no need. As the fisherman slid past the waist of the Regina, the man on the foredeck came to, jumped up with remarkable agility for one so badly burned, seized a grappling hook beside him, and hurled it over the rail of the Regina, securing it fast to a cleat on the Fair Maid’s bow. A second man ran out of the fishing boat’s cabin and did the same at the stern. The Fair Maid stopped drifting.

Four more men ran from the cabin, vaulted to the roof, and jumped straight over the rail of the Regina. It happened so fast and with such coordination that Captain Holst had only time to shout, “Was zum Teufel ist denn das?”

The men were all dressed alike: black one-piece overalls, cleated rubber boots, and black woolen caps. Their faces were blackened, too, but not by soot. A very hard hand took Captain Holst in the solar plexus, and he went down on his knees. He would later say that he had never seen the men of the SBS, the Special Boat Squadron, the seaborne equivalent of the Special Air Service, in action before, and he never wished to again.

By now, there were four Cypriot crewmen on the main deck. One of the men in black shouted a single order to them, in Greek, and they obeyed. They went flat onto the deck, face down, and stayed there. Not so the four IRA members, who came pouring out of the side door of the superstructure. They all had handguns.

Two had the sense to see quickly that a handgun is a poor bargain when faced with a Heckler and Koch MP5 subma­chine carbine. They threw their hands up and tossed their pistols to the deck. Two tried to use their guns. One was lucky: He took the brief burst in the legs and survived to spend his life in a wheelchair. The fourth was not so lucky and collected four bullets in the chest.

There were now six black-clad men swarming over the deck area of the Regina. The third to come aboard had been Tom Rowse. He ran for the companionway that led upward to the bridge. As he reached the wing, Stephen Johnson emerged from the interior. Seeing Rowse, he threw his hands in the air.

“Don’t shoot, Sass-man. It’s over!” he shouted.

Rowse stood aside and jerked the barrel of his machine pistol toward the staircase.

“Down,” he said.

The old IRA man began to descend to the main deck. There was a movement behind Rowse, someone in the door of the wheelhouse. He sensed the movement, half turned, and caught the crash of the handgun. The bullet plucked at the shoulder of his cloth overall. There was no time to pause or shout. He fired as they had taught him, the quick double-burst, then another, loosing two pairs of nine-millimeter slugs in less than half a second.

He had an image of the figure in the doorway that had taken four bullets in the chest, being thrown back into the doorjamb, cannoning forward again—the wild swing of the corn-blond hair. Then she had been on the steel deck, quite dead, a thin trickle of blood seeping from the mouth he had kissed.

“Well, well,” said a voice at his elbow. “Monica Browne. With an ‘e.’ ”

Rowse turned. “You bastard,” he said slowly. “You knew, didn’t you?”

“Not knew. Suspected,” McCready said gently. In civilian clothes, he had come at a more sedate pace out of the fishing vessel when the shooting was over.

“We had to check her out, you see, Tom, after she made contact with you. She is—was—indeed Monica Browne, but Dublin-born and bred. Her first marriage, at twenty, took her to Kentucky for eight years. After the divorce, she married Major Eric Browne, much older but rich. Through his alco­holic haze, he no doubt had not a whit of suspicion of his young wife’s fanatical devotion to the IRA. And yes, she did run a stud farm, but not at Ashford, Kent, England. It was at Ashford, County Wicklow, Ireland.”

The team spent two hours tidying up. Captain Holst proved keen to cooperate. He admitted there had been an open-sea transfer of crates, to a fishing boat off Finisterre. He gave the name, and McCready passed it to London for the Spanish authorities. With speed, they would intercept the arms for the ETA while still on board the trawler—a way for the SIS to say thank you for the Spanish help over the Gibraltar affair.

Captain Holst also agreed that he had been just within British territorial waters when the boarding took place. After that, it would be a matter for the lawyers, so long as Britain had jurisdiction. McCready did not want the IRA men re­moved to Belgium and promptly liberated, like Father Ryan.

The two bodies were brought to the main deck and laid side by side, covered in sheets from the cabins below. With the aid of the Greek-Cypriot crewmen, the covers were taken from the holds, and the cargo searched. The commandos of the SBS team did that. After two hours, the lieutenant who commanded them reported to McCready.

“Nothing, sir.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“A lot of olives, sir.”

“Nothing but olives?”

“Some crates marked office machinery.”

“Containing?”

“Office machinery, sir. And the three stallions. They’re pretty upset, sir.”

“Bugger the horses—so am I,” said McCready grimly. “Show me.”

He and Rowse followed the officer below. The lieutenant gave them a tour of the ship’s four holds. In one, copying machines and typewriters from Japan were visible through the sides of their smashed crates. In the second and third holds, tins of Cypriot olives spilled from broken boxes. No crate or carton had been left untouched. The fourth hold contained three substantial horse boxes. In each of them a stallion whinnied and shied in fear.

There was a feeling in McCready’s stomach, that awful feeling that comes with knowing you have been duped, have taken the wrong course of action, and that there will be the devil to pay. If all he could come up with was a cargo of olives and typewriters, London would nail his hide to a barn door.

A young SBS man was standing with the horses in their hold. He seemed to know about animals; he was talking to them quietly, calming them down.

“Sir?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“Why are they being shipped?”

“Oh. They’re Arabs. Thoroughbreds, destined for a stud farm,” said Rowse.

“No, they’re not,” said the young commando. “They’re riding-school hacks. Stallions, but hacks.”

Between the inner and outer walls of the specially con­structed transport boxes, there was a good foot of space. With crowbars they hacked at the planks of the first loose box. As the shattered timber fell away, the search was over. The watching men saw piled blocks of Semtex-H, serried ranks of RPG-7 rocket launchers, and rows of shoulder-borne surface-to-air missiles. The other horse boxes yielded heavy machine guns, ammunition, grenades, mines, and mortars.