“You chose the house well, Mary,” said Carlos. “It is perfect for our needs.”
“I had a lot to choose from,” said Mary. “The housing market all through Maryland is depressed, so many homeowners decide to rent rather than sell and take a loss.”
Carlos nodded and reached up to stroke his thick, black moustache. “The great American capitalist system is grinding to a halt,” he said.
“Why Ilich!” said Mary, in mock surprise, “I didn’t realise you were so political.”
Carlos narrowed his eyes and studied the woman by his side. He found Mary Hennessy a shrewd, intelligent woman with many admirable qualities, but he was frequently confused by her sense of humour and her use of irony and sarcasm. It was a very British trait even if it was delivered in her lilting Irish accent. She was joking, he decided, and he smiled. Despite his vocation, Carlos was not in the least bit political. He had served many masters during his career, from all points of the political spectrum, and had never considered himself aligned to one or the other. Carlos was a businessman, pure and simple, and he served only one political colour: green — the colour of money.
“What about you, Mary Hennessy, how political are you?”
Mary’s brow creased as if the question had caught her by surprise. Seagulls screeched and dived over the white-topped waves and high overhead a small plane banked and headed down towards Bay Bridge airfield. “Political?” she said, almost to herself. “I used to be, I suppose. Now, I’m not sure.”
They came to the end of the lawn and looked down onto a thin strip of stony beach which bordered the water. To their left a wooden pier stuck out into the bay like an accusing finger.
“You have family?” Carlos asked. He had known Mary Hennessy for almost six months, but this was the first time he’d ever spoken to her about something other than the operation they were planning. There had always been a hard shell around her that he’d never been able to penetrate, but he had the feeling that something about the water was evoking old memories and opening her up.
“I have a son and a daughter, in their twenties,” she said, almost wistfully. “I haven’t seen them for a long time.”
Carlos nodded. “I understand how you feel. I haven’t seen my wife or children for a long time.”
She turned to look at him. “But you’ll be going back to your children, Ilich. I’ll never see my family again. Ever. There’s a difference.”
She walked away, stepping off the grass and on to the beach. She was wearing a white linen shirt and pale green shorts and as she walked away Carlos admired her figure. It was hard to believe that she was the mother of two children, let alone two adults in their twenties. He’d already noticed that she wasn’t wearing a bra under the shirt, nor did she appear to need one. Carlos smiled as he realised he was ogling Mary in the same way that Lovell had been leering at Dina Rashid. Not that Carlos would ever make a move on the IRA activist. She was a beautiful, sexy woman, but she was almost one of the most professional operators he had ever come across and she commanded respect from everyone she came into contact with. Besides, thought Carlos, Magdalena would kill him if she ever found out. Kill him, or worse.
He followed Mary down the beach and soon caught up with her. She knelt down to pick up a stone. Her breasts pushed against the material of her shirt and Carlos admired her cleavage. She looked up, her eyes twinkling with amusement, and Carlos knew that he’d been trapped. He shook his head and walked on as she straightened up and skipped the stone over the waves.
“My husband was always the political one,” she said behind him. “He was a lawyer and an adviser to the IRA. He said that politics was the only way to succeed, that violence would provoke only intransigence. He was all talk, Ilich, and it got him killed.”
Carlos continued to walk down the beach and Mary followed him. “I was just a wife and mother then, but that changed when the UDA killed my brother. They gunned him down in front of his wife and children, at Christmas. I was there, I was covered in his blood.”
“Your brother was in the IRA?” asked Carlos.
“All the men in our family were,” she said. “It wasn’t something you thought about. You know how the Palestinians feel about Jewish settlements on the West Bank? Well that’s how the Catholics feel about the Protestants in Northern Ireland. They’ve no right to be there, it’s our country. The Protestants control everything in the north of Ireland: jobs, police, education, social services. Catholics are second-class citizens.”
“And you and your husband tried to change that?”
Mary drew level with Carlos. “He tried to persuade the IRA High Council to negotiate with the British Government. He believed that Thatcher and then Major would be prepared to make concessions and that they wanted to pull their troops out of Northern Ireland.”
“You sound as if you didn’t agree.”
She looked at him sharply. “I didn’t,” she said. “And I wasn’t alone. When Liam tried to stop the campaign of violence, we sent our own people to the mainland.”
Carlos said nothing. There was an intensity burning in her eyes that he had seen in zealots around the world. A conviction that they, and only they, knew what was best for the world. The sort of conviction that would lead her to betray her husband.
“It went wrong, badly wrong,” said Mary quietly. “A civilian airliner was bombed. In retaliation the British Government ordered the killing of the top two dozen or so of the movement’s leaders. Including my husband.”
Carlos stopped, stunned. “What are you saying?”
“They sent the SAS against us, with orders to make hard arrests.”
“Hard arrests?”
“Another name for assassination. Some were straightforward ambushes, others were made to look like suicides or accidents. They’re good at killing, the SAS. They’re the real professionals. My husband was gunned down as he sat in his car. The RUC said it was Protestant extremists, the same group that had killed my brother.” She reached up and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “They killed the men I loved, Ilich. This is my way of getting back at them.”
Revenge, thought Carlos. The strongest motivation of all, stronger even than money. She had said men, not man, Carlos noticed. Plural. He doubted that it was a slip, and he doubted too that she had meant her brother, but he knew better than to pry, despite the silent tears.
“We will succeed, Ilich, we have to.”
Carlos nodded. “I know. Though I’ll be honest, Mary, I do worry about this. There’s so much that could go wrong.”
“It’s been planned to perfection,” she said quickly. “But even if something goes wrong, we can wait and try again. The basic idea is sound, it’s just the opportunity we need. Everything is set to go, but it’s not written in stone. We have the team, we have the equipment.”
“Another time will mean another rehearsal.”
“So?” she said quickly. “So we rehearse again. Remember when the IRA almost killed Thatcher at the Conservative Party convention in Brighton. My husband then said that they have to always be lucky, but we only have to be lucky once.”
“He was right, of course. But after so much planning, I wouldn’t want to go through it all again.”
Mary looked at him slyly. “You miss your wife and children?” she said.
Carlos knew she was right. “It has been a long time,” he said. “That’s why I’m so keen that we succeed the first time. Then my family can have a home together.”
Mary sniffed. “That’s the difference between us,” she said. “If we do succeed, you get a safe haven for your family. But I will never be able to see mine again. I have been on the run for a long time, but it will be nothing compared with what lies ahead.”
“I know, I know,” said Carlos.
They walked together in silence for a while. The small plane which had been practising landing and taking off at the Bay Bridge airstrip climbed into the sky and headed back west, its single engine buzzing like an angry wasp.