James Benn - Evil for evil

A photo was attached. A man I assumed was Jenkins held open the door of Bennett's Pub for a young woman. Although it was a grainy black-and-white photo, I knew her hair was red. It was a mass of curls, pulled back to reveal her face, which was turned back to the street, as if she was checking whether anyone had seen her. Slaine O'Brien, entering a Portadown pub with Andrew Jenkins, leader of the Red Hand.

I sat with the photo in my hand, trying to understand what it meant. Two days after the theft and the killing of an IRA man, Slaine O'Brien meets with Andrew Jenkins. Three days later, she's sitting in a Jerusalem hotel room, telling me he's some sort of big wheel with the Protestant secret militia, engaged in reprisal killings. Was this a setup? No, I couldn't see how that would work. If she were working with Jenkins, taking down IRA men, why travel to the Middle East and bring me in? Unless it was the other way around, and Jenkins was working for her. Was the head of the Red Hand part of MI-5? They were practically hand in glove with the Brits already, so what good would that do?

Plenty, I realized. Although wartime powers gave MI-5 enough muscle to do whatever they wanted, sometimes there was no substitute for cold-blooded killing. British forces could kill all the Germans they wanted by whatever means. But if someone from a neutral country, like Ireland, or a British subject from Northern Ireland, needed to be put in the ground, then who better for the job than one of Andrew Jenkins's Red Hand boys?

I moved on to day three of the surveillance, which ended abruptly when Heck's man was spotted following Jenkins on his way to work in Armagh. One hour later, with Jenkins at work in his office, an alibi confirmed by half a dozen employees, persons unknown assaulted Heck's man and put him in traction. End of surveillance.

The report detailed the follow-up to Thornton's reported sighting of Eddie Mahoney at the pub in Annalong. I realized I hadn't told Carrick about Pete Brennan's possible meeting with Mahoney in Ardglass. Redheaded Irishmen weren't exactly in short supply but it was something to go on. The barman at the Harbor Bar in Annalong remembered Mahoney, who had called himself Eamonn. That, combined with his red top, made him memorable during the week or so he frequented the place. The barman hadn't recalled who Eamonn had been with, he said, until an American, a civilian, had come around with a picture, asking if the man in it had been in the pub recently. The American matched the description Carrick had given me: about forty or so, wearing a trench coat and fedora hat. The barman had remembered the man who'd been with Eamonn: He'd had receding dark brown hair and a sharp chin. That fit Red Jack Taggart to a T.

But that was not a surprise. I knew Mahoney had been in on the theft, and obviously so had Red Jack, since I'd seen his handiwork with the BAR. The report noted that no other investigator from the provost marshal's office had been detailed to investigate the matter. So who was the Yank with the picture of Red Jack, and how did this mystery man know he'd recently been in Annalong?

Heck had included a copy of a memorandum sent to various other commands, inquiring if anyone had initiated an investigation in the Annalong area, without mentioning any names. He'd come up empty.

I was beginning to wish I hadn't thought up this deal. Now I knew I couldn't trust Slaine O'Brien, and that an unknown person was tracking Red Jack Taggart, for an unknown reason. Great.

There was a knock at the door, two tentative, light raps.

"Yeah?" I said, rubbing my eyes and wishing I was someplace else.

"Uh, can I have my office back, if it's convenient, I mean?" The door opened an inch or two and the guy on the other side barely spoke above a whisper.

"Yeah, come on in. What's going on across the hall?"

"Captain Heck took Colonel Warrenton away," said a chubby captain, wearing glasses and clutching a pile of papers. "What's going on anyway? Who are you? No, never mind, I don't want to know." He stood against the door, holding his papers even closer to his chest as if they might protect him.

"Captain," I said as I gathered up my files, "that's about the smartest thing I've heard anybody say in the past few days. You can have your office back now, and thanks. Is there a mess hall in this joint where I can get a cup of joe?"

"Ask at the duty desk. I still get lost in this place." With that, he dumped the paperwork onto the desk and sat down as soon as I got out of his way. As I walked out, I noticed the sign on his door. G-2. Intelligence. Sometimes all you can do is laugh.

IT WAS THE fanciest damn mess hall I'd ever been in. Two huge fireplaces opposite each other, big enough to stand in. Four long tables that could seat fifty each, with portraits high up on the walls, stiff-necked men all looking down on us colonials. I ate my cheese sandwich and drank good strong coffee with sugar. I wondered how much sugar went for on the black market, and how much of the stuff Thornton had pinched. I'd heard there were regular smuggling routes over the border into the Republic, where butter and sugar weren't rationed. I wondered how hard the RUC or the Garda Siochana, the Republic's police force, worked to stop smuggling. I added a touch more sugar to my coffee and stirred it in, thankful at least that the army had first dibs on the stuff.

"Billy, right?" a voice said from behind me. "Mind if I sit with you?"

"No, have a seat," I said, trying to place the lieutenant setting down a tray of food.

"You probably don't recognize me all cleaned up. Bob Masters. I amp;R Platoon."

"Sorry, Bob, you look different without all the mud. How are you doing? Still running your men up and down the mountain?"

"Up, down, and around. What brings you here?"

"Paperwork," I said. "How about you?"

"Briefing on infiltration tactics. I'll be glad to get out of here; this place gives me the willies."

"What do you mean?"

"You don't know about Brownlow House? And you, one of the true Irish rebels?" He smiled as he gobbled down some sort of stew.

"Except that it's ugly as all get-out? No."

"Billy, this building is the headquarters of the Royal Black Knights of the British Commonwealth. That's a very exclusive Protestant society."

"Never heard of them."

"Exactly. They're more orange than the Orange Society. And twice as secretive."

"You're kidding, right?"

"Nope. I've seen their rooms in the south wing. The Ulster government took over the building for the duration, but let the Black Knights keep a section. They meet here every month. They even say there's a secret tunnel somewhere that the original Lord Brownlow had dug so he could sneak out at night without his wife knowing."

"I'm still trying to get the Black Knight thing straight, so never mind about the secret tunnel tall tales, OK?"

"It's true, one of the chaplains told me. It's more of a religious thing; they're not into politics as much as the Orange Society. More like the Masons back home maybe. Pretty hard to get admitted, the padre said."

"Why?"

"I forget. Basically you have to be Protestant every which way and never have had any family connected with the Roman Catholic Church."

"Was it a priest who told you this?"

"No, a Methodist minister. Said he was studying up on the local religious customs."

"He'll need a scorecard for that."

I LEFT BOB Masters to his stew, glad to escape the gloom of Brownlow House and visions of Black Knight rituals held within its rooms. I walked down a staircase to the third floor and along a corridor lit by tall windows along the outside wall, which I was fairly sure led to the way out. I looked into the courtyard below to make sure I was on the right side of the building. Below me, leaning against a wall that angled off to the left, was a guy in a trench coat, wearing a gray fedora. He flicked a cigarette and jammed his hands into his pockets. He was too close beneath me to get a look at his face, but he moved like an American. Too casual for a Brit. Was this the mystery Yank?