“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.
Chapter 2
Rowse’s briefing took a week, and Mc