Provo. Gordon Stevens

car or van with the two people in the front seat – then drove the eight miles to the house where she had been raised. The tea was laid – Sunday linen and china, cucumber sandwiches and fruit cake. The French windows to the garden were open and the children were playing croquet on the lawn.

      She kissed her father and her mother on the cheek and sat by her brother.

1

      In the end, McKendrick knew, it would all depend on the man called Reardon: whether he followed the pattern of the past weeks, whether his wife was at home when they called, whether his son and daughter had gone out to play.

      He woke at five, the sound of the pipes and the drums rattling through his mind and the details of the next eighteen hours weaving their apparently separate journeys through his brain. For thirty minutes he lay still, staring at the ceiling, the pipes and drums still haunting him and the Walther on his right side, beneath the sheet where he had placed it five hours before, even in what he considered a safe house, his hand resting on it all night and his fingers wrapped around it.

      Belfast, 12 July.

      The day the Orangemen marched with their rolled umbrellas and their bowler hats and banners. The day the Protestants stirred their blood to the beat of the drums and the echo of the bugles in commemoration of William’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne 300 years before. The day the Brits and the RUC kept the Catholics at bay so that the Ulstermen could claim the Six Counties as their own.

      The sun touched the window. He rolled off the bed, washed, shaved and dressed, and went to the rear door, not waking the family in the bedrooms at the front. Even though it was not yet twenty minutes to six, McKendrick waited till he saw Rorke in the alleyway at the rear, and even then he did not leave the house. Rorke was 23, thinner than McKendrick, with longer hair, and had been his minder for the past two years. He checked quickly and efficiently, then nodded. McKendrick left the house and walked behind him to the Granada parked at the end. The car was silver-grey and inconspicuous, registered to a baker in Springfield who was not on the security checklist. The driver was smoking and the engine idling. McKendrick slipped into the back seat, Rorke beside him, and the car pulled away.

      It was still quiet, the first warmth seeping into the morning and the first security forces on the streets, the first surveillance helicopter chattering across the sky. When the patrols were out everything was normal, McKendrick knew. It was only when there were no patrols, no eyes in the sky, that you began to worry. It was then that they were clearing an area for the shoot-to-kill bastards from E4A or 14th Int or the SAS.

      They turned into Beechwood Street. The houses were terraced with small gardens in front, the majority consisting of a square of grass surrounded by flowers but some of them paved. Most of the cars were second-hand and the curtains of the bedrooms were still drawn. In front of them the street curved slightly to the left, then straightened just before the point where Reardon lived. It was eight minutes past six, twelve minutes to wait. McKendrick tucked lower into the rear seat and wound down the window. The driver moved slowly along Beechwood Street, turned left at the end and stopped twenty yards from the junction so that they could see the van which came to pick up Tommy Reardon but would not be noticed themselves.

      The planning had been immaculate, of course, the policy objective approved by the Army Council in Dublin and the military details agreed by the Northern Command. Knowledge of it had been restricted to those who would take part, and even then each section had been briefed only on the part it would play, unaware not only of the overall plan, but even unaware that an overall plan existed. Each of the North Belfast companies would be involved in the riots and bombings that day, each action soaking up more of the security forces, the timings and locations precise and vital, until the moment came when McKendrick and his people would take over. And seventy men coiled like springs in the Crum – the bleak and God-forsaken prison on the Crumlin Road. Seventy battle-hardened Provisional IRA men – bombers, gunmen and activists – with the explosives they would use to break their way to the main gate already smuggled in and only the gate between them and freedom. And all on Orange Day, all depending on the little bastard called Tommy Reardon. In the still of the morning – perhaps in the years of hatred captured and swirling in his mind – McKendrick heard the faintest sound of the pipes and the drums.

      It was twenty minutes past six.

      The Transit came down the road in front of them. The workmen were packed inside it and the vehicle had been sprayed blue, covering the name of the building company which had once been printed on its sides. Rorke left the Granada and walked casually to the junction, cigarette in hand. Sixty yards away Reardon left the house, climbed into the Transit, and the vehicle pulled away, the exhaust rattling and a thin line of blue smoke drifting from it.

      Even though McKendrick had been baptized into the faith, it was of no concern to him that Reardon and his wife were also Catholic, or that their son and daughter were of the age where they would make their first Holy Communion. Reardon was a digger driver and the company for whom he worked did the occasional job for what might loosely be called the security forces. Both had been warned. Reardon was therefore a legitimate means to an even more legitimate end.

      Rorke turned the corner, ground the cigarette on the pavement, and climbed into the car. McKendrick sat up and looked across at him. The minder nodded and the driver pulled away.

      *

      The site was surrounded by six-foot-high chain fencing and illuminated at night by spotlights. The Transit bumped across the ruts at the entrance and stopped by the Portacabin at the side of the agent’s office. Reardon left his bag in the hut and collected the keys to the digger. The cab door was padlocked. He knelt down and examined the axle and undercarriage, his fingers searching delicately in the places where a bomb might have been concealed. The routine was as automatic as changing the Transit route to and from work each day when the job was outside Belfast. Only when he was satisfied did he unlock the door, climb in, wedge the photograph of his wife and children in the corner of the windscreen, and start the engine.

      Tommy Reardon was 32 years old. He and Marie had married when he was twenty and she was nineteen. Their children were eight and seven, and there was a possibility – not yet confirmed – of a third. Reardon had left school at fifteen and served his apprenticeship at Harland and Wolff, losing his job when the yard cut back on its labour force. A year later he had begun work at the De Lorean car plant, leaving when it closed. After his second term of unemployment he had found work with the building firm of Ellis and Knight. Ten months later he had received his first threat. Six months ago an uncle in England had secured him a job at the Ford plant in Eastleigh, near Southampton. Two weeks before he was due to leave, the company had announced major cutbacks and voluntary redundancies for 500 of its existing workforce.

      The morning was hot and the site busy. At eleven he stopped for ten minutes, pouring himself a coffee from the flask Marie had made that morning. At one he sat in the Portacabin with the other men from the Transit.

      ‘So how’s the Pope today?’ The man who asked was a Protestant.

      ‘Still blessing the world.’ Reardon opened his sandwiches. ‘Where’s the umbrella? Thought you’d be carrying one.’

      The conversation was quiet but cutting, each directing his words not at the symbols of the other’s religion but at the bigotry of his own.

      The Protestant looked back at him. ‘Typical Taig.’ He sniffed and looked out the window. ‘No point carrying an umbrella unless it’s raining, is there?’

      The marching began just before nine, the surveillance helicopters in the sky above the Catholic areas of the city, the VCPs – vehicle checkpoints – suddenly and swiftly in place for fifteen minutes, then switched to another area of the Catholic heartland, and the army and RUC patrols sweeping the Catholic areas on the so-called census patrols, knocking on doors and checking on the whereabouts of males listed on the census reports, checking if known or suspected IRA activists or sympathizers were on the move. At one in the afternoon the first incident occurred – an apparently random attack on a security vehicle by a group of Catholic