Define need, Jeremy sent as he walked from the call center.
Since he’d quit Strategic, he had rarely met Wright, but now Wright wanted to choose a loud bar where they wouldn’t be heard. A nightclub would be best. Sloppy dancers would let them alloy with strangers, and in splintering green strobes, most cameras would fail.
Month of fools ’92 on our hands again.
Jeremy deduced Wright was referring to April 1992, when every headline was a failure. On the day Gerry Adams lost his West Belfast seat and a bomb detonated by the IRA at the Baltic Exchange sent scenes of stained-glass angels spraying, there were three dead, ninety-one injured by the blast. “Not by the blast. By the Provos,” One Rock had told Jeremy.
Impossible now, Jeremy responded to Wright. Or implored, perhaps.
He chose a long route by foot. He’d take the way down Bayswater Road past Hyde Park through the wakening city. There was something to watching the earth wind around past a rotation, the day unfurling into the moody quiet of night listening, and the sky softening again dark to light. You can believe then that time revises trouble.
Is it her? Wright wanted to know.
It’s history repeating is always too clever by half.
Because already in 1992 it had become difficult to remember where sides cut. In theory, the Intelligence Corps’ FRU worked to support the RUC Special Branch. De facto, Jeremy had seen that sometimes what they gave RUC were cursory scraps, and suspicion rooted beneath intel companies. Language had ceased to mean what it meant. Silence evidenced guilt in the Diplock Courts. Faith, Hope, and Charity tracked suspects. Radiation from British Army watchtower antennae had poisoned South Armagh locals, Sinn Féin claimed, and maybe it had been true.
Hence requisite rendezvous.
Jeremy let his hand skim hedges. He was already sweating, halfway home. The sun was being sucked up slow into the sky. He supposed it was only a meeting, an instance of logistics.
The fourteenth then, Jeremy thumbed, while she’s away.