Provo. Gordon Stevens

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      Tangiers. Couldn’t resist a day trip. Soukh amazing. Another world. To Patrick Saunders.

      The cards would be posted over the next few days, confirming her holiday in Spain, the mileage on the hired car would show she had travelled a total of 500 kilometres, and her passport would be stamped to confirm the trip to Morocco.

      At six the next morning she rose and showered, then dyed her hair blonde – including her pubic hair. At seven she left the house, picked up a bus into Puerto de Santa Maria, took the slow train to Seville and the AVE to Madrid. The Prado was ten minutes from the city’s Atocha railway station, and the Mercedes was parked on schedule by the Goya entrance, the driver waiting. Walker recce’d the area for thirty minutes then closed on the car. Forty-eight minutes after she had arrived in Madrid, and under the identity of Katerina Maher, cover for an unnamed member of the German Red Army Faction, she approached the driver, gave the code, received the reply, and began the next stage of her journey to the training ground in North Africa.

      The only thing she would not know, and Conlan could not have allowed for, was that on the day the postcard to Patrick Saunders was posted in Tangiers, whilst the main ferry service from the Spanish port of Algeciras sailed on schedule, the ferry from Tarifa, on the windswept northern promontory of the Straits of Gibraltar, was cancelled because of an engineering problem.

      * * *

      The sky was lead grey, Dublin waiting for the snow it had so far escaped. Quin parked at the side of the Post Office and waited for one of the telephone booths to become free.

      It was not that he opposed Conlan’s plan, the royal family was as legitimate a target as anything else British. Nor was it the first time one of them had been a target: Mountbatten had been blown up in his boat off Mullagh-more in 1979. And if a successful action against one of them was undertaken in central London, then the British and Protestant reaction against the Catholic population of Northern Ireland would be fearsome. That, in the long term, would serve the Cause far more than all the violence which had dominated the country for the past decades.

      It was Conlan he opposed, just as Conlan opposed him.

      Doherty was dying, and once Doherty went there would be a new Chief of Staff. If Conlan’s plan succeeded then the chances were that he would take Doherty’s place. And if that happened, then Quin was finished.

      It was as simple as that.

      Almost.

      If Conlan’s plan failed to give Doherty his place in history, then Doherty might even switch his support. Then his position would be up for grabs. Then it might well be he, Quin, who was in and Conlan who was out.

      He stepped out of the car and into the telephone kiosk. There were three numbers from the time before, he had committed them to memory then, not dared write them down, and even now he still remembered them. The chances were that one at least would have been changed, two and he would be unlucky. Three disconnected and the Devil himself would be against him.

      Nothing in life was ever straightforward, he supposed, yet in a way life repeated itself, the same pattern appearing time and time again. The conflict between the Provisionals and the Brits; the conflict in the Provisionals’ camp and, he assumed, among the British as well. Yet sometimes, not often and not for long, the sides changed, allies became enemies and enemies became allies.

      He lifted the receiver, inserted the phone card and dialled the Belfast code and the first number, cursed as he heard the unavailable tone. He dialled the second and heard the same tone. Even the Devil on the side of Conlan. He dialled the third and heard the ringing tone.

      ‘Yes.’ The voice was neutral.

      ‘Is Jacobson there?’

      Jacobson would not be there. Jacobson had been on the way up last time, would have moved on years ago.

      ‘Who wants him?’ There was no detail of the establishment he was calling and no confirmation that Jacobson existed. The same as last time, Quin thought, the alliance as unholy as they came, but something in it for both of them.

      All games were dangerous, but that on which he was about to embark was more dangerous than most.

      ‘Tell him Joseph wants to speak to him.’ The biblical reference had amused them both. ‘I’ll phone tomorrow for a number.’

      The telephone message from the man calling himself Joseph was logged at 3.56 PM, at 4.04 the codenames Jacobson and Joseph were run against the MI5 computer at Lisburn. Both files were blocked. At 4.18 it was passed to Farringdon and from Farringdon to Cutler. On the Dol’s instructions the names were run again through the computer and the files – if any files existed, other than as simple acknowledgements that the codewords had once been used – were confirmed as blocked. At 5.18 PM, one hour and twenty-two minutes after Quin had made the telephone call, his message was passed to London.

      In all except one detail, what had happened in MI5’s offices in Belfast was now repeated in Gower Street. The two words Jacobson and Joseph were computer-run, and both files – again if they existed as more than codenames – were found to be blocked, with the single additional point of information that any reference or enquiry concerning the two should be made to T Department. At 5.53 the duty officer in T was informed and ordered a check to be run against the department’s own computer system. The files were again blocked, with the instruction to refer any enquiry to the DDG.

      Michaelmass was informed at 6.17.

      John Petherington Michaelmass (Winchester and Balliol College, Oxford) was 53 years old, tall, dark hair with the first traces of silver. After Oxford he had spent two years in the States, then returned to Britain to work with ICI. Three years later he had been loaned to the security services to assist in an enquiry in an area in which he was considered a specialist, and had remained. Like all intelligence chiefs he had the ability not only to absorb a considerable quantity of information, but to identify the strands or themes which might run through it. He was married with two children, a daughter who had graduated the previous July, and a son now in his final year. He lived in Kensington, with a country house in Buckinghamshire, both afforded by family money on his and his wife’s side rather than his Security Service salary.