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“Then she’d have killed you. She was that kind of person.”
Two seamen unlocked the IRA men and led them toward the frigate. Two orderlies under the supervision of a surgeon lifted the wounded one onto a stretcher and carried him away.
“What happens now?” asked Rowse.
McCready stared at the sea and the sky and sighed. “Now, Tom, the lawyers take over. The lawyers always take over, reducing all of life and death, passion, greed, courage, lust, and glory to the desiccated vernacular of their trade.”
“And you?”
“Oh, I will go back to Century House and start again. And go back each night to my small flat and listen to my music and eat my baked beans. And you will go back to Nikki, my friend, and hold her very tight, and write your books and forget all this. Hamburg, Vienna, Malta, Tripoli, Cyprus—forget it. It’s all over.”
Stephen Johnson was led past. He paused to look down at the two Englishmen. His accent was as thick as the heather of the west coast.
“Our day will come,” he said. It was the slogan of the Provisional IRA.
McCready looked up and shook his head. “No, Mr. Johnson, your day has long gone.”
Two orderlies loaded the body of the dead IRA man onto a stretcher and removed it.
“Why did she do it, Sam? Why the hell did she do it?” asked Rowse.
McCready leaned forward and drew the sheet back over the face of Monica Browne. The orderlies returned to take her away.
“Because she believed, Tom. In the wrong thing, of course. But she believed.”
He rose, pulling Rowse up with him.
“Come on, lad, we’re going home. Let it be, Tom. Let it be. She’s gone the way she wanted, by her own wish. Now she’s just another casualty of war. Like you, Tom. Like all of us.”
Interlude
Thursday, when the hearing began for its fourth day, was the day that Timothy Edwards had determined would be its last. Before Denis Gaunt could begin, Edwards decided to preempt him.
Edwards had become aware that his two colleagues behind the table, the Controllers for Domestic Operations and Western Hemisphere, had indicated a softening of their attitudes and were prepared to make an exception in the case of Sam McCready and retain him by some ruse or other. After the close of the Wednesday hearing, his two colleagues had taken Edwards to a quiet corner of the Century House bar and made their feelings more than plain, proposing that somehow the old Deceiver be retained within the Service.
That was emphatically not in Edwards’s scenario. Unlike the others, he knew that the decision to make a class action out of the case for the early retirement of the Deceiver stemmed from the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office, a man who one day would sit in conclave with four others and decide the identity of the next Chief of the SIS. It would be foolish to antagonize such a man.
“Denis, we have all listened with the greatest interest to your recall of Sam’s many services, and we are all mightily impressed. The fact is, however, that we now have to face the challenge of the nineties, a period when certain—how shall I put it?—active measures, riding roughshod over agreed procedures, will have no place. Must I remind you of the brouhaha occasioned by Sam’s chosen course of action in the Caribbean last winter?”
“Not in the slightest, Timothy,” said Gaunt. “I had in mind to recall the episode myself, as my last instance of Sam’s continuing value to the Service.”
“Then please do so,” invited Edwards, relieved that this was the last plea he would have to listen to before proceeding to his unavoidable judgment. Besides, he reasoned, this episode would surely sway his two colleagues to the view that McCready’s actions had been more those of a cowboy than of a local representative of her Gracious Majesty. It was all very well for the juniors to give Sam a round of applause when he walked into the Hole in the Wall bar on his return, just before the New Year, but it was he, Edwards, who had had to interrupt his festivities to smooth the ruffled feathers of Scotland Yard, the Home Office, and the outraged Foreign Office, an interlude he still recalled with intense exasperation.
Denis Gaunt reluctantly crossed the room to the desk of the Records clerk and took the proffered folder. Despite what he had said, the Caribbean affair was the one he would most have liked to avoid. Deep though his admiration for his desk chief ran, he knew that Sam had really taken the bit between his teeth on that one.
He recalled only too well the memoranda that had rained on Century House early in the New Year, and the lengthy one-on-one meeting with the Chief to which McCready had been summoned in mid-January.
The new Chief had taken over the Service only a fortnight earlier, and his New Year present had been to have details of Sam’s Caribbean exploits land on his desk. Fortunately, Sir Mark and the Deceiver went back a long way, and after the official fireworks the Chief had, apparently, produced a six-pack of McCready’s favorite ale for a New Year toast and a promise—no more rule-bending.
Six months later, for reasons McCready could only guess at, the Chief had been much less accessible to him.
Gaunt assumed, wrongly, that Sir Mark had bided his time and waited until the summer t
o ease McCready out. He had no idea from how high a level the order had really come.
McCready knew. He did not need to be told, had no requirement of proof. But he knew the Chief. Like a good commanding officer, Sir Mark would tell you to your face if you were out of line, chew you off if he felt you deserved it, even fire you if things were that bad. But he would do it personally. Otherwise, he would fight like a tiger for his own people against the outsiders. So this business had come from higher up, and the Chief himself had been overruled.
As Denis Gaunt returned to his own side of the room with the file, Timothy Edwards caught McCready’s eye and smiled.
