Provo. Gordon Stevens

has been activated, and is engaged upon preliminary research. I anticipate the project will take another three to six months.’ He spoke for another two minutes only, deliberately vague about timings and other details, withholding as much as he could and knowing the direction the discussion would take when he had finished.

      ‘Do we know which member of the royal family will be the target?’ Quin stared at him through the cigarette smoke.

      ‘Not yet.’ Conlan wondered why he considered it necessary to lie.

      ‘Assassination or kidnapping?’ It was Quin again.

      For the next two hours they discussed the range of alternatives and the various options within each, including the short-, medium- and long-term implications of whatever decision they reached. If assassination, what would be the effect on world opinion, including the Movement’s supporters in the United States? How would the Catholic population in Northern Ireland react? What would be the response in the Republic? If kidnapping, what demands? Would the British try to hush it up? Would the Council let them? The discussion circled back on itself. What was the long-term aim, how would the various reactions further that aim?

      Doherty had discussed it with Conlan the night before, Quin suddenly realized. Doherty knew who the target was and how it was to be done. Doherty dying – he looked into the man’s eyes and knew for certain. Doherty on his way out and Conlan about to give him his footnote in history.

      ‘I suggest we vote.’

      Quin knows, Conlan suddenly realized: that he and Doherty had done the deal, that he enjoyed Doherty’s full support.

      The vote was unanimous. Outside it was already dark.

      The following morning Conlan activated those he had already placed on stand-by.

      McGuire, from Belfast. In his mid-thirties, lean and thin-faced, short dark curly hair. Married with two children. A good operator, one of the best.

      McGinty, whose priest’s collar and gentle manner gave him the perfect cover. Who loved fishing and who so matched Conlan in age and build that from a distance he could pass for him. Especially when he was wrapped in oilskins, woollen cap or dark glasses against the glare of the sun or the bite of the wind on the shores of Lough Corrib.

      Plus the foot soldiers, the expendables. Clarke and Milligan, Black and Lynch. Hoolihan and Lynan.

      But not Logan. Not yet. Logan was to come.

      The morning was bright but cold, the white of the first snow lying on Divis Hill to the south-west of the city. When McGuire returned to the house his wife was in the kitchen.

      ‘I’ll be away a few days.’

      Eileen McGuire was small, with bright eyes that hid her fear. She bit her lip and nodded.

      ‘Don’t worry. No problems this time.’

      At least he was honest, she thought, at least he didn’t say that every time he went away. He went upstairs to the bedroom at the front of the house. One day they would get him, the fear was always coiled in her. One day a shoot-to-kill unit from the RUC or the SAS would lie in wait for him and gun him down like a dog. One day the UFF would find out about him and slaughter him in his own front room. And in the meantime she would tell the children he was going away to work, a building site in Derry or wherever, and that he would soon be home again. She followed him upstairs and watched him pack the handful of clothes. When he finished she. put the small bag into the large plastic laundry bag she used for shopping, went to the Sportsman’s, dropped his bag in the back room, then returned to the house and carried on cooking.

      At seven McGuire left the house and walked the three hundred yards to the bar. If he was under observation – from undercover motor vehicles, informants, OPs concealed in the roof spaces of surrounding houses, or high-altitude surveillance helicopters – there was nothing to suggest that he was doing anything other than going for a drink.

      The Sportsman’s was busy. After thirty minutes he muttered his excuses and went to the toilets at the rear, collected his bag and stepped into the alleyway behind. The car was waiting.

      The shooting took place shortly after five the following day, outside a betting shop at the top of the Crumlin Road, on the edge of the Catholic Ardoyne area and close to the Protestant Shankill. The victim was a 32-year-old Sinn Fein politician whom the UFF alleged was a member of the Provisional IRA. The planning for the shooting which followed it took place the following evening and was led by the officer commanding the North Belfast Brigade of the Provisional IRA. The first part of the discussion was strategic – whether or not a shooting of a UFF activist was not only necessary but politically and militarily sound at that point in time; whether the UFF reaction to the execution of a member of its ranks would be counterproductive. The second part, which followed once the decision had been made, was tactical. The target would be a man known to be a planning officer for the UFF. The location and timing would be confirmed by the intelligence officer, the details to be supplied to the team assigned to the killing, and the weapon would be an AK47 supplied from one of the Provisionals’ arms dumps in Myrtle Field Park, a middle-class street in a non-sectarian area of the city. The execution, as the Provisionals would describe it in the communiqué they would release later, would take place from a car stolen from the city centre. The driver would pick up the man carrying the gun fifteen minutes before the hit and the gunman himself ten minutes before. The gunman would leave the car as soon as they were clear of the area and in a neighbourhood considered safe; the man carrying the weapon immediately after, and the driver would abandon and torch the vehicle as soon as he could after that.

      They came to those who would carry out the shooting, the gunman first.

      ‘Clarke or Milligan.’ The intelligence officer’s suggestion was straightforward and logical.

      ‘Out of circulation.’ The OC – officer commanding – had not been told why.

      ‘Black.’

      The Bossman shook his head. Something happening, he had assumed when he had been informed by the Northern Command; something big if it required his three most experienced gunmen.

      ‘Lynch.’

      ‘Out of town.’

      ‘Hoolihan?’

      ‘Out as well.’

      Five of the most experienced IRA gunmen in North Belfast suddenly out of circulation.

      ‘Lynan?’ The intelligence officer knew the answer before he suggested the name.

      The OC shook his head.

      Six out of six. ‘Who then?’ Douglas, he knew, except that Douglas was young and still slightly brash, and the officer commanding would only use him if the rest of the team were older and more experienced.

      ‘Frank.’ Frank Hanrahan had been one of the best, but was now in his late thirties. He had begun his Provo career as a teenager, done his time in Long Kesh without complaint; he had been on the Blanket then the Dirty Protest and – though he had denied it at the time, though he had volunteered for active service immediately he had been released – the years of confinement and hardship had taken their toll. He had married young, his boy and girl were now in their mid-teens, the boy coming up seventeen, but still Frank did the occasional job. Only when no one else was available, however, and only when they wanted an older hand to rein in the recklessness of the youngsters.

      ‘Freddie’s picking up the gun, Mickey’s driving.’ Both were young and both would be good. If they survived that long. But send them out with the gunman called Douglas and they would either wipe out half the Shankill or crash the car on the way.

      Frank Hanrahan, they agreed.

      Lisburn was quiet. Nolan sat back in the chair and looked again at the reports from the various agents which it was part of her job to analyse. She had returned to Northern Ireland four weeks before. When former colleagues recognized her she said simply that she was on a secure task, and no further questions were asked.

      Perhaps something was running,