launch a very special Active Service Unit into the field—which meant the U.K. mainland—and could not deny their knowledge should anything go wrong; those who had the same information but, for one reason or another, would deny they knew it if there were some mishap; lastly, those who knew, whose real names would never come out but who were in very definite danger by way of their enlightenment. These latter were now joined by a fourth contingent—Tony Worboys’s Dirty Twelve: several police officers who came in at the last minute and the four members of the Special Air Service who knew details only a few hours before they went to do what they did best.
In the here and now, in the late Gus Keene’s study in the Dower House, Big Herbie Kruger turned the page and saw the documents giving the records of the four members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who had been chosen to carry out what they called Kingmaker . In his head he saw them on videotape and during the final terrible moment in the West End of London, not a stone’s throw from Oxford and Regent streets.
He looked down the pages and did not even have to read the dossiers, for the facts surrounding the quartet were engraved on his memory like the songs he had learned in childhood.
All four were in their early thirties, children of the revolution, confirmed in the idea that the British Security Forces in Northern Ireland—brought in during the late 1960s to stop Protestant and Catholic from tearing out each other’s throats—were an illegal occupying army, and the British public fair game for death, as they tried to pressure world opinion into the common cry of Brits Out.
Mary Frances Duggan. A lucid, vocal young woman whose quest for the ideal had made her a courier for the Provos at the age of ten, and almost certainly a bomb maker of terrifying expertise by the age of twenty-two, for she had won a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, and crossed the border to read physics. A credit to her respectable family.
John Michael Connor. Born 1953. Intelligent, but with little schooling. Arrested as a teenage rock hurler. Known killer. Shrewd and practiced in the art of guerrilla warfare Provo style.
Patrick Sean Glass. Schoolmate and cellmate to Connor. Suspected bomb planter. Known, but unprovable, close-up killer with knife and gun.
Anne Bridget Bolan. Provo groupie, father in banking and almost certainly one of the Provos’ accountants.
These were the Gang of Four, as they came to be known among that little group of cognoscenti who had the ball of destiny in their hands. The quartet had everything going for them, except the fact that some long-playing traitor had already shopped them, and, through the miracle of electronic eavesdropping, they had also incriminated themselves.
Enter Tony Worboys’s Dirty Twelve. Worboys’s own private army of watchers and followers, none of whom realized they were in the pay of the British Secret Intelligence Service. They latched on to the members of the Gang of Four on the day after the Office gave Tony the thumbs-up, and stuck with each of them, individually, either by stand-off eyeballing or by the more sophisticated microwave electronics: spiking houses, directing mikes at windows, using the current Star Wars Technology, as it was known in the trade.
So, they had the lot; then Herbie’s people waited for their arrival, well primed and with malice aforethought. In one case—Patrick Glass’s—they knew so far in advance that the two-man team assigned to him had time for another beer before driving lazily to Heathrow and still had to cool their heels waiting for the arrival of the plane from Paris.
There was a lot of tradecraft employed by the Gang of Four. Too much, many said. Take Glass for a start. Out of Belfast to Orly. Whoring around Paris for two days, then a direct flight into Heathrow with a German passport.
Anne Bolan and Michael Connor arrived as a honeymoon couple from the Republic,
In the here and now, in the late Gus Keene’s study in the Dower House, Big Herbie Kruger turned the page and saw the documents giving the records of the four members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who had been chosen to carry out what they called Kingmaker . In his head he saw them on videotape and during the final terrible moment in the West End of London, not a stone’s throw from Oxford and Regent streets.
He looked down the pages and did not even have to read the dossiers, for the facts surrounding the quartet were engraved on his memory like the songs he had learned in childhood.
All four were in their early thirties, children of the revolution, confirmed in the idea that the British Security Forces in Northern Ireland—brought in during the late 1960s to stop Protestant and Catholic from tearing out each other’s throats—were an illegal occupying army, and the British public fair game for death, as they tried to pressure world opinion into the common cry of Brits Out.
Mary Frances Duggan. A lucid, vocal young woman whose quest for the ideal had made her a courier for the Provos at the age of ten, and almost certainly a bomb maker of terrifying expertise by the age of twenty-two, for she had won a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, and crossed the border to read physics. A credit to her respectable family.
John Michael Connor. Born 1953. Intelligent, but with little schooling. Arrested as a teenage rock hurler. Known killer. Shrewd and practiced in the art of guerrilla warfare Provo style.
Patrick Sean Glass. Schoolmate and cellmate to Connor. Suspected bomb planter. Known, but unprovable, close-up killer with knife and gun.
Anne Bridget Bolan. Provo groupie, father in banking and almost certainly one of the Provos’ accountants.
These were the Gang of Four, as they came to be known among that little group of cognoscenti who had the ball of destiny in their hands. The quartet had everything going for them, except the fact that some long-playing traitor had already shopped them, and, through the miracle of electronic eavesdropping, they had also incriminated themselves.
Enter Tony Worboys’s Dirty Twelve. Worboys’s own private army of watchers and followers, none of whom realized they were in the pay of the British Secret Intelligence Service. They latched on to the members of the Gang of Four on the day after the Office gave Tony the thumbs-up, and stuck with each of them, individually, either by stand-off eyeballing or by the more sophisticated microwave electronics: spiking houses, directing mikes at windows, using the current Star Wars Technology, as it was known in the trade.
So, they had the lot; then Herbie’s people waited for their arrival, well primed and with malice aforethought. In one case—Patrick Glass’s—they knew so far in advance that the two-man team assigned to him had time for another beer before driving lazily to Heathrow and still had to cool their heels waiting for the arrival of the plane from Paris.
There was a lot of tradecraft employed by the Gang of Four. Too much, many said. Take Glass for a start. Out of Belfast to Orly. Whoring around Paris for two days, then a direct flight into Heathrow with a German passport.
Anne Bolan and Michael Connor arrived as a honeymoon couple from the Republic,
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