I’ve slept for eleven hours straight, and my mind feels cold and clear. Downstairs, I wrap an ice pack in a cloth and carry it out to the back patio. The air brushes against me, sweet and mild, with mourning doves cooing from the roofs.
Someday I will need to consider what happened to me on Sunday. For now, though, I have to act as if those hours in the bungalow, with the lace curtains and the smell of gravy, happened a long, long time ago, and like I’ve already recovered from them, which doesn’t seem difficult, somehow. Those hours don’t exist in normal time anyway. They’re deep in the past and waiting in my future. They’re not tied to Sunday, by any means, or to this week, to the month of August, they’re not lashed down to a calendar date. They’re much too large for that.
Sitting down on the back step, I hold the ice pack against my side and think about Eamonn. I’m ready for it this morning, the long hours of sleep sharpening my mind like a knife.
Eamonn used to meet me on the beach at Ardglass. I’d pass along whatever information Marian had told me, about arms drops, robberies, targets, then he’d leave and I’d swim in the sea, my cover for being at the beach at that hour. When I think about those meetings, I think about the shock of cold water pressing against my eyes.
I adjust the ice pack, listening to it crackle. Eamonn told me he was born in Northern Ireland, but his family moved to England when he was twelve. He worked in counter-terrorism for MI5, with a posting in Hong Kong before he was sent to Belfast. Nothing else, nothing about his personal life. Once, he did up the zip on my wetsuit, but I’m embarrassed that I even remember that, years later.
I shift the ice pack higher on my ribs, and feel the cold tingling in my bones. Eamonn swore the security service would protect us. Marian had a tracker hidden on her, and Eamonn promised that if we were caught, if anything went wrong, they’d send in an extraction team for us. I believed him. When the IRA caught me and Marian, I expected a special-forces team to storm the building. I remember listening for tactical officers to surround the farmhouse where we were being held, waiting for them to appear from behind the trees. But no one came.
My ribs are fully numb now. I breathe in and feel nothing, only an icy shimmer where the pain had been.
Six months of meetings, of risk, of trusting him, and Eamonn left me to be shot in the head by the IRA and dumped on the side of a road. Which, you could say, means I owe Eamonn nothing, absolutely fuck all.
When I walk into the office, the new fans are going at full tilt, rotating on their stands, rifling the papers on the desks. “Jesus, the actual sound of them,” says Aisling, dropping her bag under her chair.
“White noise,” says Oisín brightly. “It’s been doing wonders for my focus, actually.”
“Piss off, Oisín,” says Aisling.
For her office wear today, Emer has chosen a pair of long, silky rugby shorts and a nylon shirt, and the sight of her gladdens my heart.
I carry an iced coffee to my desk, watching the cream attack the glass. At half ten, I start a software update on my computer, leaving it open on the monitor for anyone to see. Then I take the lift down to the basement. The basement is original to the building, a warren of old cellars and tunnels. One tunnel supposedly leads to a bomb shelter under Merrion Square, though I’ve yet to find it.
The ceilings are low, the light dim, and you can tell from the damp air that you’re far underground. We’ve had flooding down here, and some of the others have seen rats. I listen, but no one’s coming behind me.
I take the few short steps down toward our archive, and continue past it, and the first storerooms. I step into the third storage room, switching on the light to illuminate metal shelving units of old electrical equipment. Broken printers, mostly, and projectors, and a few shelves of old loaner laptops.
I carry one of the loaners back up to an empty conference room. Editions of the paper are delivered here at dawn every morning, and the whole room smells like newsprint.
Using a proxy server, I set to work like I’m fact-checking copy, like someone has written a feature on traitors in the British security service. The stories about defectors don’t appear easily. Someone from MI5 has tried to make them disappear, burying them far down in the search results. They can’t whitewash all the stories, though, and soon a list starts to grow. I don’t know what to call them all, exactly. Whistle-blowers, moles, defectors, some incompetents. People who did one on the security service, basically.
By the time I finish, MI5 seems about as impenetrable as a colander. I’d always thought of the security service as a fortress, but now the place seems rotted through, filled with employees with the same petty issues as in any office, plus other more grievous ones besides. I make a list in my head of reasons MI5 agents have given up their secrets. Ideology, bribery, love, revenge.
At five o’clock, I rush to Marian’s house, and start talking before she has even closed the door behind me. “It’s not easy, working at MI5,” I say.
“Right,” says Marian warily. She lowers herself to the rug, where Saoirse is lying on her play mat.
“The work’s isolating, the pay’s shite, and it’s corrupt. They kept secret files on the committee who oversaw them, can you believe that? They were ready to blackmail any politician who tried to rein them in,” I say. “And they do mad things. They spy on students, and environmentalists. They tried to assassinate Gaddafi, all on their own, no one in the government even approved it. They ended up killing three civilians instead.”
Marian leans over to hand Saoirse her rattle. “Eamonn never seemed disillusioned to me. Did he seem that way to you?” she asks.
“I don’t know. Maybe not back then, but maybe he is now, after three more years of being undercover in Belfast. Maybe he hates MI5 now.” After everything I’ve read today, I’ve convinced myself that Eamonn will be grateful for the chance to stick two fingers up at them.
“Then he’d quit. Go work in a bank or something.”
“Not necessarily. Other handlers have defected to the enemy instead. This one handler sold secrets to the Russians because he was so upset at not getting a promotion. Another did because he was having an affair with his coworker in MI5, and she dumped him,” I say, and Marian tilts her head, listening. “Another sold classified information to four different buyers, because he needed the cash. And one handler started working for the Stasi, but he was an alcoholic, so he might have been too much of a mess to even realize he was being a double agent—”
“Eamonn doesn’t have a drink problem,” Marian interrupts.
“Will you just listen to me for a minute? This other handler leaked stories to a journalist, because he thought his bosses were incompetent.”
“Grand,” says Marian. “So, what, you’ll sing ‘Four Green Fields’ to him until he decides to volunteer for the IRA off his own bat?”
“It worked on you,” I say quietly. “I’m not trying to start a fight here, I’m just saying, it worked on you.”
Marian seems to shrink in on herself. She hates talking about this, about her recruitment. “I was twenty-one, Tessa. Eamonn’s, what, forty years old?”
“Exactly. Plenty of time to get disappointed with his life. On balance, your average forty-year-old man is much angrier than some young lad. He’s just better at hiding that, until it erupts.”
Marian frowns. “Are we talking about Tom here? Because Seb’s not like that.”
“No, Seb’s lovely. He’d also cut off his own arm before joining MI5, so he’s not relevant,” I say, my voice rising in frustration. “Maybe Eamonn’s lonely.”
“And you can convince him the IRA are his mates?”
“Why not? Eamonn’s from Northern Ireland. He was born in Strabane.”
“No, he told you he was born in Strabane. He’s probably actually English.”
“Come here to me, Marian. No one would have thought grooming would work on you, either.”
“When will you meet him?” she asks, her voice brisk.
“I’m going to signal tonight and drive to Ardglass tomorrow morning,” I say. Finn’s still away in Donegal with his father, and I can call in sick to work.
“What if Eamonn doesn’t show up?” she asks.
“Then I’ll go to the British embassy and offer to inform,” I say. “And we’ll do all this with whoever they assign me as a handler.”
“Maybe we won’t actually have to do any of this. Maybe things are about to change,” says Marian. “Did you see the news today?”
“About the priest?” I ask, and she nods. Some unnamed priest from west Belfast told a journalist that he is working with an Anglican priest from east Belfast as mediators between the IRA and the UVF. “And you believe him? He’s a priest.”
“Maybe you can find out more from Eamonn,” she says.
“No. I don’t care about their talks, I care about surviving this.”
“Okay,” says Marian, finally. “So you’ll meet with Eamonn, offer to inform again, and try to work out if he’s disillusioned or not. We can start with that, and if it doesn’t work we’ll try my way.”
“Which is what?”
“Blackmail.”