McCready did not even consult Century House about asking for American help. Time was too short to go through channels. He went to see the CIA Station Head in Grosvenor Square, Bill Carver.
“Well, Sam, I don’t know. Diverting a satellite isn’t that easy. Can’t you use a Nimrod?”
Royal Air Force Nimrods can take high-definition pictures of ships at sea, but they tend to fly so low that they are seen themselves. Without added altitude, they have to make many passes to cover a large area of ocean.
McCready considered long and hard. If he knew the consignment had gotten through and was firmly in the hands of the IRA, he would have wasted no time alerting the CIA to the threat to their ambassador in London, as reported by the Libyan doctor in Qaddafi’s tent.
But for weeks his concern had been just to stop the arms shipment from getting through to the final destination. Now, needing CIA help, he produced his bombshell—he told Carver of the threat.
Carver came out of his chair as if jet-propelled. “Jesus H. Christ, Sam!” he exploded. Both men knew that apart from the catastrophe of a U.S. ambassador being slaughtered on British soil, Charles and Carol Price had proved the most popular American emissaries in decades. Mrs. Thatcher would not easily forgive an organization that allowed anything to happen to Charlie Price.
“You’ll get your fucking satellite,” said Carver. “But next time you damned well better tell me earlier than this.”
It was almost midnight before Rowse went wearily back to Album One, the old days. He was sitting with a photo expert brought over from Century House. A projector and screen had been installed so that photographs could be thrown onto the screen and alterations made to the faces.
Just before one o’clock, Rowse paused.
“This one,” he said. “Can you put it on the screen?”
The face filled almost one wall.
“Don’t be daft,” said McCready. “He’s been out of it for years. A has-been, over the hill.”
The face stared back, tired eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, iron-gray hair over the creased brow.
“Lose the glasses,” Rowse said to the photo expert. “Give him brown contact lenses.”
The technician made adjustments. The glasses vanished, and the eyes went from blue to brown.
“How old is this photo?”
“About ten years,” said the technician.
“Age him ten years. Thin the hair, more lines, dewlaps under the chin.”
The technician did as he was told. The man looked about seventy now.
“Turn the hair jet black. Hair dye.”
The thin gray hair turned deep black. Rowse whistled.
“Sitting alone in the corner of the terrace,” he said, “at the Apollonia. Talking to no one, keeping himself to himself.”
“Stephen Johnson was Chief of Staff of the IRA—the old IRA—twenty years ago,” said McCready. “Quit the whole organization ten years ago, after a blazing row with the new generation over policy. He’s now sixty-five. Sells agricultural machinery in County Clare, for heaven’s sake.”
Rowse grinned. “Used to be an ace, had a row, quit in disgust, known to be out in the cold, untouchable by those inside the Establishment—remind you of anyone you know?”
“Sometimes, young Master Rowse, you can even be halfway smart,” admitted McCready.
He called up a friend in the Irish police, the Garda Siochana. Officially, contacts between the Irish Garda and their British counterparts in the fight against terrorism are supposed to be formal but at arm’s length. In fact, between professionals, those contacts are often warmer and closer than some of the more hardline politicians would wish.
This time it was a man in the Irish Special Branch, awakened at his home in Ranelagh, who came up trumps around the breakfast hour.
“He’s on holiday,” said McCready. “According to the local Garda, he’s taken up golf and departs occasionally for a golfing holiday, usually in Spain.”
“Southern Spain?”
“Possibly. Why?”
“Remember the Gibraltar affair?”
They both remembered it all too well. Three IRA killers, planning to plant a huge bomb in Gibraltar, had been “taken out” by an SAS team—prematurely but permanently. The terrorists had arrived on the Rock as tourists from the Costa del Sol and the Spanish police and counterintelligence force had been extremely helpful.
“There was always rumored to be a fourth in the party, one who stayed in Spain,” recalled Rowse. “And the Marbella area is stiff with golf courses.”
“The bugger,” breathed McCready. “The old bugger. He’s gone active again.”
In the middle of the morning, McCready took a call from Bill Carver, and they went over to the American Embassy. Carver received them in the main hall, signed them in, and took them to his office in the basement, where he too had a room all set up for viewing photographs.
The satellite had done its job well, rolling gently high in space over the eastern Atlantic, pointing its Long Tom cameras downward to cover a strip of water from the Portuguese, Spanish, and French coasts to more than one hundred miles out into the ocean in a single pass.
Acting on a suggestion from his Lloyds contact, McCready had asked for a study of a rectangle of water from Lisbon north to the Bay of Biscay. The continuous welter of photographs that had poured back to the receiving station of the National Reconnaissance Office outside Washington had been broken down into individual snaps of every ship afloat in that rectangle.
“The bird photographed everything bigger than a floating Coke can,” remarked Carver proudly. “You want to start?”
There were more than a hundred and twenty ships in that rectangle of water. Nearly half were fishing vessels. McCready discounted them, though he might wish to return to them later. Bremerhaven had a port for fishing vessels, too, but they would be of German registry, and a stranger showing up to unload not fish but general cargo would look odd. He concentrated on the freighters and a few large and luxurious private yachts, also ignoring the four passenger liners. His reduced list numbered fifty-three.
One by one, he asked that the small slivers of metal on the great expanse of water be blown up until each filled the screen. Detail by detail, the men in the room examined them. Some were heading the wrong way. Those heading north for the English Channel numbered thirty-one.
At half-past two, McCready called a halt.
“That man,” he said to Bill Carver’s technician, “the one standing on the wing of the bridge. Can you come in closer?”
“You got it,” said the American.
The freighter had been photographed off Finisterre just before sundown on the previous day. A crewman was busying himself with a routine task on the foredeck, while another man stood on the wing of the bridge looking at him. As McCready and Rowse watched, the ship grew bigger and bigger on the screen, and still the definition held. The fore-peak and stern of the vessel disappeared offscreen and the figure of the man standing alone grew larger.
“How high is that bird?” asked Rowse.
“Hundred and ten miles,” said the technician.
“Boy, that’s some technology,” said Rowse.
“Pick up a license plate, clearly readable,” said the American proudly.
There were more than twenty frames of that particular freighter. When the man on the bridge-wing filled most of the wall, Rowse asked for all of them to be screened with the same magnification. As the images flashed, the man seemed to move, like one of those stick figures in a Victorian biograph.
The figure turned from looking at the seaman and stared out to sea. Then he removed his peaked cap to run a hand through his thin hair. Perhaps a seabird called above him. Whatever, he raised his face.
“Freeze,” called Rowse. “Closer.”