PROLOGUE

Sunday, 11 February 1996

Northern Ireland

There was a moment when Ray Bledsoe might have escaped with his life. If he had trusted his instincts at that moment – if he had reached for the Walther PPK and emptied the magazine through the side windows of the black taxi as it pulled into the parking bay alongside him – he might just have made it. He’d been an undercover soldier for three and a half years now, quite long enough to know bad trouble when he saw it, and a glance at the skinheads in the taxi had told him that this was the worst trouble of all. As he looked away he could feel their eyes lock on to him in icy, murderous anticipation.

But he had done nothing. The voice that whispered danger was drowned out by the voice screaming Yellow Card. If he opened fire on these men pre-emptively and without delivering the warnings specified on the Yellow Card he could find himself pensionless, dishonourably discharged and on trial for murder. The Rules of Engagement were bollocks, of course, and dangerous bollocks at that, but seventeen years in the Royal Military Police and a couple of well-publicised trials of British servicemen had instilled in Ray Bledsoe a deep-seated anxiety concerning the procedures of contact.

And so he had done nothing. Instead of reducing the taxi’s interior to a horror show of shattered glass, jetting blood and brain-sprayed upholstery he had sat tight and reached for the packet of Embassy and the lighter on the passenger seat. Then, lighting up, he had wound down his window an inch or two and allowed the cold February air to draw out the smoke. Played it innocent. You don’t gun down carloads of total strangers for no reason, Ray Bledsoe told himself, whatever your instincts. Whatever your misgivings.

But as the sharp air lanced at his face and the Embassy smoke hit his lungs he knew that emptying his Walther into the taxi was exactly what he should have done and that the moment in which he might have acted had passed. He sensed the purposeful exit of bodies from the taxi, saw his side window implode in a terrifying shower of sledgehammered glass, felt a gun barrel jammed cold to his head, smelt vinegared breath and knew himself as good as dead.

‘Out, soldier.’ The voice low, a Fermanagh accent, smooth as the cocking of a heavy automatic. ‘And don’t even think about …’

Talk, Bledsoe ordered himself, conscious that fear was freezing him, locking down his thought processes. Blag. Use your bloody gob. He turned to the glassless window but didn’t know what words he used. Might have shouted, might have whispered. Couldn’t hear himself.

‘I said out, yer focker. Now!’

The door opening, the honeycombed sheet of safety glass sagging inwards, a blur of shaved heads and tattooed arms, and the gulls screaming and wheeling above them. For all the chance of Bledsoe’s reaching the Walther PPK at that moment it might as well have been back in the armoury at Lisburn.

Think. Think SOPs. Think yourself past the fear. Think.

And then, as he indecisively half rose, came the smashing blow to the forehead – a 9mm Browning butt, full magazine – and the blood in his eyes and the cold air and the arms dragging him and what must have been the carpeted floor of the taxi’s boot rising to meet his face. He never saw the weapon’s second chopping descent.

After an hour he began to come to. He did not immediately understand that he was in a moving car, and did not at once connect the pain at the front and back of his head with a dimly remembered sequence of events involving a PIRA snatch squad. Then he did remember and prayed hard for unconsciousness to return, and when it wouldn’t return he lay there for the best part – or the worst part – of another hour. His hands were cuffed, he discovered, and he had been stripped naked. There was a smell of vomit, rubberised carpet and lubricating oil.

Please God, he thought, don’t let them take me over the border and out of the Crown jurisdiction. If they get me past the roadblocks and the border posts I’m a dead man.

At the time of his kidnap Ray Bledsoe had been preparing to drop off payment for a tout named Proinsas Deavey in a car park. It was a standard dead-letter drop – the routine being that Bledsoe stuffed £200 in used notes in the Embassy packet and dropped it into the left-hand of the two bins by the parking bays, and Deavey swung by a short time later with a soft-drink can to dispose of, surreptitiously pocketed the Embassy packet and made himself scarce. It wasn’t an arrangement that either party actively enjoyed, but it had worked well enough up to now.

Deavey was an associate of known Republican players, but a self-destructive mixture of greed and stupidity had put him in the pay of the British security services. Things had started going wrong for Deavey when he set up a small-scale business selling pills and blow in Central Belfast’s ‘Holy Lands’. Named after its principal arteries – Damascus Street, Jerusalem Street and Canterbury Street – the Holy Lands was the bedsitter enclave serving Queen’s University, and students from both sides of the political divide washed their socks, heated their beans and drank their beer there. It was Deavey’s bad fortune to have approached a group of ultra-nationalist eighteen-year-olds, who had shopped him the moment he left the bar. Later that evening he had been given a severe beating behind a Falls Road betting office. The punishment squad had identified themselves as members of Direct Action Against Drugs, a known cover organisation for the IRA.

Resentful, half-crippled and robbed of a useful source of income, Deavey had been a comparatively easy touch for the FRU, or Forces Research Unit. The FRU was a small and highly secretive unit set up by the British army for the purpose of cultivating and running touts. It was staffed by soldiers who didn’t look like soldiers. Most of them were middle-aged men like Bledsoe – long-serving ex-NCOs with pub bellies, thinning hair and anonymous faces.

Proinsas Deavey was one of half a dozen small-time players that Bledsoe and his colleagues were handling. The former dope dealer had never made contact with any really important players, but the scraps he provided – meeting places, unfaithful husbands, who drank with whom – all assisted in the piecing together of the Intelligence jigsaw. Deavey had sold his Republican soul to Ray Bledsoe in a fish and chip shop outside Carrickfergus for a down payment of £175.

Touts were the bane of the PIRA’s existence and their work with touts made FRU members highly desirable to terrorist snatch squads. When it came to his interrogation, Bledsoe knew, the first thing they would demand would be the identity of the touts he was running. The second would be the identity of the special forces personnel he was in contact with – the other FRU members, the Det (or Detachment) soldiers who made up the undercover surveillance teams, the Box (or MI5) teams and, of course, the SAS. Then they would want the radio codes and the rest of the intelligence baggage that he carried in his head.

The PIRA, Bledsoe thought, had almost certainly had him marked down as an FRU member for months. Lifting him now was partly expediency – they badly needed to know the answers he could give them – and partly the desire to raise two fingers to the British government. The larger symbol of that contempt had been the bombing, two days earlier, of South Quay in the Docklands area of London. Like everyone else at the barracks, Bledsoe had seen the pictures on TV, had stared open-mouthed at the devastated City landscape, at shattered office blocks, at streets inches deep in a glittering slush of broken glass. The lorry bomb had killed two people, injured many more and caused millions of pounds’ worth of damage. A statement had been issued by the IRA an hour before the explosion revoking the official ceasefire that had lasted for seventeen months and nine days.

It hadn’t felt like a ceasefire to Ray Bledsoe. More like business as usual and some of his colleagues said a fucking sight worse. But the bomb signalled a change. The bomb meant that the gloves were off publicly as well as privately. The FRU and the other special forces had been warned to exercise extra caution, to double-check sources, to watch their backs.

But there was only so much, finally, that you could do. Bledsoe’s reaction to the warnings had been to request back-up for his drop-off. At his previous meeting with Deavey, Bledsoe had found the tout so jumpy that he had begun to wonder if the little bastard was playing a double game. It wasn’t impossible that he’d decided despite everything that he was safer in PIRA’s pockets than the army’s and had bought his life by promising them an FRU agent on a plate. Or perhaps, even more extremely, Deavey had been PIRA’s man all along and had been feeding them false information from the start.

Bledsoe had considered both scenarios highly unlikely – the tout seemed just too solid between the ears to run a sophisticated intelligence scam – but just in case of any funny business he had requested that a second FRU member attend the drop-off in a separate car. Connor Wheen, Bledsoe knew, had parked his Mondeo three hundred yards away near the car park entrance and with any luck he would have witnessed the snatch.

Assuming that he had done so, Wheen would have put out an alert. Perhaps even now there was an SAS pursuit vehicle a mile behind them, showing no lights.

As he bumped and rolled on the floor of the taxi, however, Bledsoe found it difficult to think coherently. He had never thought of himself as a courageous man. If the car he was in broke through the cordon and escaped over the border there would be … what? The interrogation, the stomping kicks to the teeth and balls, the burning cigarettes to the eyeballs and … Stop it, he ordered himself. Get a fucking grip. You’re a soldier. Act like one. And, more importantly, think like one.

Think of the details. Think of the SAS team bomb-bursting out of the camp at Lisburn within seconds of the alert, all with kit and weapons packed for action. Think of them hammering out on to the roads in their big Beamers and Quattros.

The ground grew steadily rougher, severely testing the big vehicle’s suspension, and Bledsoe prayed for the grinding, rubber-flapping lurch that would signal that the car had punctured itself on an army spike chain. But there was no such lurch and then suddenly there was no movement at all. From far away came the heavy, squealing scrape of a sliding door. The car rumbled forward for a further few seconds and the sliding door rasped once more. A moment’s stillness, then the boot sprang open to reveal the hard white glare of strip lights and Bledsoe was hauled, blinking, on to a flattened earth floor. The floor was cold and damp beneath his bare feet, the cuffs cut into his wrists and he could feel his hair stiff with blood. There were voices all around him.

Things took shape before his dark-accustomed eyes. He was in a large, iron-sided rectangular barn, surrounded by expectant-looking men in dark-blue boiler suits. Vapour rose from their mouths, and the excited, contemptuous sound of their voices. In the corner to his left, mockingly normal, stood a John Deere tractor and an ordered pile of plastic fertiliser sacks. At the centre of the wall was a workshop area with pulleys and chains, and at the far end a stud-partitioned office. Ahead of him, parked along the right-hand wall, was an unloaded trailer.

He half-turned, still blinking. The entrance through which the car had come was barred by a pair of tall corrugated-iron doors hung from greased rails, in front of which waited two boiler-suited guards. One was fingering an automatic handgun, the other was pissing a steaming puddle on to the ground. Both were smirking at him with hate-filled, delinquent eyes.

Bledsoe stood there for a moment, swaying. Two thoughts hit him immediately. Where were the Regiment lads going to hit the place from? This was bad, but the other realisation was worse, so much worse that his chest began heaving involuntarily and he thought for a moment that he was going to pass out.

They were going to kill him and probably to blood some of the younger foot soldiers in the process. They were going to make it messy, to see who could do the business without flinching and who couldn’t.

The nearest man, a burly red-haired figure, sniggered.

Fuck you, Bledsoe thought, shaking badly now but attempting to rally himself. PIRA cunt. When the Regiment lads get here – and get here they will, blowing the doors off if they have to – I hope they blow your fucking head from your shoulders.

For a moment things seemed to coalesce in the icy air. Bledsoe was in pain, concussed and very frightened indeed, but he knew what he was going to do. Breathe, he told himself. Clear your head. Ignore the pain. Think.

And then a dark-blue figure came from one side, slammed a fist into Bledsoe’s stomach and brought his knee up hard into the FRU agent’s nose, splintering the bone. Blinded by the flash of his breaking nose, gagging for air, Bledsoe went down. They’re going to hit me again, he thought absently.

He was right. A steel toecap to the balls that froze his mouth into a silent scream followed by a crunching boot to the lower ribs. At least two of the ribs fractured now. His grasp on consciousness wavering, Bledsoe closed his eyes.

Hands took him under the arm, dragged him across to the trailer, slammed him against the iron tailgate and cuffed him to it, arms spread. His legs gave way for a moment and they let him hang there, drooling and half-suffocated, blood pouring down his face from his nose.

Finally he found his feet. Dragged icy farmyard air through his mouth. Opened his eyes a crack. Counted eight of them. Nine – there was one he hadn’t seen before, a pale-faced figure with depthless eyes who could have been any age between twenty-five and forty, and unlike the rest was not smiling.

‘Name?’ The speaker was the one who’d kicked him, a thin, broken-nosed guy.

Bledsoe dragged his head up. Spat blood. Cleared his throat. ‘I don’t know who the hell you think I am,’ he began blearily, ‘but …’

‘I’ll tell ye who ye are,’ the thin man said. ‘Ye’re Sergeant Raymond Bledsoe, formerly of the Royal Military Police, presently seconded to the so-called Forces Research Unit. There’s not a deal we don’t know about ye, cuntie, ye can thank yer Regimental magazine for that, sae don’t go gi’in us any crap.’

Silence. The older man from the car regarded him levelly.

‘Ye know what we want,’ the older man said, zipping himself into a pair of overalls with fastidious and terrifying care. ‘Radio codes, SAS names, tout names – everything. We can start with yer man Deavey if you like, though as ye’ve probably guessed by now he’s not quite the t’ick Paddy you took him for.’

Bledsoe said nothing. Stared up at the strip light, tried to distance himself from the pain of his nose and ribs.

The other man smiled. ‘Ye see, unlike yer occupying army, we’ll always be here. Deavey had the wit to realise that.’

Bledsoe struggled to keep his expression neutral, not to rise to the bait. Here we go, he thought. As rehearsed. ‘I’ll talk,’ he said. ‘But not to you. I’ll talk to Adams or McGuinness or any of the executive-level officers of Sinn Fein and I’ll give them everything they want to know. Or Padraig Byrne.’

Byrne, ostensibly a Sinn Fein councillor, was known to the security services as the chief of the PIRA’s Belfast Brigade. There was purpose and calculation in Bledsoe’s insistence on talking face to face with senior players: they were watched round the clock and in the event of a British agent being lifted, as Bledsoe had been lifted, this surveillance would be doubled. His trust in Connor Wheen was Bledsoe’s only hope of survival. One or other would come through for him. The alternative was quite literally unthinkable.

‘Ye’ll talk to Byrne?’

‘I will.’

His interrogator looked round the room. Everyone smiled.

‘Yer word on that, then, ye’ll talk to Byrne?’

Bledsoe hesitated, sensing a trap. Was it really going to be this easy?

The interrogator took a step closer. ‘Well?’

He nodded. ‘I’ll talk to Byrne. No one junior to him.’

The other man nodded and glanced round the assembled faces. The smiles were wider now, displaying contempt, amusement and bad dentistry in equal measure. The man from the car shook his head, pulled a cellophane pouch of Drum tobacco from his trouser pocket and began to roll a cigarette. As he licked the paper the thin, broken-nosed man turned away, took a 9mm Browning automatic from the pocket of his boiler suit, considered it for a moment, then swung the butt back-handed and with full force into Bledsoe’s broken ribs.

The pain was indescribable, an explosion of liquid fire in his chest that seemed, once again, to drain the FRU man of all coherent thought. He fell forward, hanging from the tailgate by his cuffed wrists, and for a moment saw himself as the young Provos surrounding him saw him – a pallid, bloody-faced, flabby-arsed forty-fags-a-day chancer, close to his pension and closer to tears. As an agent handler Bledsoe’s world had become that of his informers – a world of beer and bar-stools and clapped-out cars. He had fitted in well, but at the cost of his health and fitness. ‘There’s no disguise like a fat gut!’ the instructors had told them at Tregaron, and Bledsoe had laughed along with the others.

Now look at him. Pathetic.

Something still beat in his chest, however, even as he hung there wheezing and gagging. Some ghost of the bloody-minded squaddie he’d once been still hung grimly on. There’ll be a fuck of a bang when the lads blow that door. A fuck of a bang. And the killing spree of all time. None of these Provie cunts would live to …

A hand grabbed Bledsoe’s hair and pulled his head level. Through a film of pain he saw a short, square figure walking out of the office area, a figure whose reddened and bony features, slicked-back hair and carefully buttoned Aran cardigan he recognised instantly.

‘Would ye be knowing this gentleman?’ It was the gun-butt man again.

‘Yeah,’ said Bledsoe, attempting to sneer. ‘Val Doonican.’

That earned him another kick in the balls and this time, as a lurching despair became one with the pain, Bledsoe kept his eyes shut.

The man in the Aran cardigan was Padraig Byrne. No Det unit was about to follow the fucker anywhere. He was already here – wherever here was – and he had probably been here for days. When Bledsoe finally reopened his eyes it was to see Byrne pulling on a boiler suit.

‘Pleased to see me, Sergeant Bledsoe? You will be, that I promise.’ The voice was light and cultured, and somehow horribly at odds with the raw-boned features. The considered view in Lisburn barracks, Bledsoe remembered, was that Padraig Byrne took it up the arse.

‘You see, Sergeant, we’ve got something for you.’

A book hit the ground with a thump next to the FRU man’s feet. What the fuck?

‘Raymond John Bledsoe,’ Byrne continued in his soft wheedling brogue, ‘this is your Death!’

There was snigger of sycophantic laughter from the young Provo foot soldiers. Opening his eyes a fraction, Bledsoe saw that the book was a Yellow Pages directory for the Newry and Mourne area. He hadn’t crossed the border, then. There was still hope.

Please God, he thought, let Wheen have hooked a follow car on to that taxi. Let there be a Regiment team out there right now, taking out the sentries.

He hung on desperately to that hope. He suspected that the interrogation was about to start and he didn’t know if he had any courage left to bullshit them with. It was going to be very bad – he was certain of that from the number of young guys they’d assembled, and from the hunger and expectancy on their faces.

And then, with a blast of cold air, the sliding doors opened again and a mud-spattered white van drove into the barn, shuddered for a moment in a haze of exhaust and was still. The barn doors were quickly dragged shut, then a terrible high-pitched screaming issued from inside the van. The screaming seemed to go on and on, and ended in a sound that was halfway between a retch and a whimper.

‘Do you recognise that voice, Bledsoe?’ asked Byrne, continuing his Eamonn Andrews impersonation. ‘Yes, all the way from Lisburn barracks, Belfast, it’s your old friend …’

A second naked and plasticuffed figure was dragged from the back of the van by two more boiler-suited Provo foot soldiers. He had been severely beaten around the head and upper body, dirt and vomit smeared his chest and legs, and his face was a shapeless blood-smeared mask. In the middle of the room the foot soldiers kicked the new arrival’s feet from under him and he fell heavily to the ground.

Byrne looked on, enjoying the moment. ‘Good evening,’ he addressed the man on the ground. ‘And thank you for joining us on this special occasion.’

‘Fuck you!’ said the fallen man. At least that’s what Bledsoe guessed that he was trying to say, but something horrible had happened to his mouth and teeth, and all that came out was a bubbling, gutteral rasp.

Bledsoe stared. Tried to beat back the worst of the fear.

With an immense effort the battered figure squinted around him, found Bledsoe, and winked one blackened and swollen eyelid. As he did so his face took momentary shape and with a sullen jolt of recognition all hope died in Ray Bledsoe.

‘That’s right,’ crowed Byrne exultantly, resuming. ‘It’s your old mate Connor Wheen!’

I’m dead, Bledsoe thought dully. We’re both dead.

Byrne watched them, delighted with his coup. A chair was brought from the office and the two men hauled Wheen into it, forcing his cuffed hands behind the backrest.

‘I know what you’re wondering,’ said Byrne to Bledsoe with vast good humour. ‘You’re wondering if you’re still north of the border, so that your SAS pals can drop in on us. Well, you know something …’ Byrne shook his head at the sheer hilariousness of the situation. ‘You’re not!’

Bledsoe felt his sanity slipping away. All that remained now was terror, pain and death. His unhinged gaze found the pale-faced man, who stared back at him with ageless, unsmiling intensity. You are in hell, that gaze told him. Welcome.

Byrne turned to the pale-faced man. ‘Joseph, as we agreed earlier, I’d like it to be you that does the killing.’ His tone was casual, conversational.

‘Please,’ whispered Bledsoe. ‘I’ll tell you everything.’ His lips were papery and his voice was a submissive monotone. ‘You can have the Det list, the SAS list, the tout list, the codes …’

Padraig Byrne frowned and looked at him intently for a moment or two as if wrestling with some complex moral or intellectual issue. Then he smiled again and turned back to the pale-faced man he called Joseph.