Jack Higgins - Eye of the Storm

‘Ferguson,’ he said, immediately wide awake, knowing it had to be important.

‘Paris, Brigadier,’ an anonymous voice said. ‘Priority one. Colonel Hernu.’

‘Put him through and scramble.’

Ferguson sat up, a large, untidy man of sixty-five with rumpled grey hair and a double chin.

‘Charles?’ Hernu said in English.

‘My dear Max. What brings you on the line at such a disgusting hour? You’re lucky I’m still on the phone. The powers that be are trying to make me redundant along with Group Four.’

‘What nonsense.’

‘I know, but the Director General was never happy with my freebooter status all these years. What can I do for you?’

‘Mrs Thatcher overnighting at Choisy. We’ve details of a plot to hit her on the way to the airfield at Valenton tomorrow.’

‘Good God!’

‘All taken care of. The lady will now take a different route home. We’re still hoping the man concerned will show up, though I doubt it. We’ll be waiting though, this afternoon.’

‘Who is it? Anyone we know?’

‘From what our informants say, we suspect he’s Irish though his French is good enough to pass as a native. The thing is, the people involved have looked through all our IRA pictures with no success.’

‘Have you a description?’

Hernu gave it to him. ‘Not much to go on, I’m afraid.’

‘I’ll have a computer check done and get back to you. Tell me the story.’ Which Hernu did. When he was finished Ferguson said, ‘You’ve lost him, old chap. I’ll bet you dinner on it at the Savoy Grill next time you’re over.’

‘I’ve a feeling about this one. I think he’s special,’ Hernu said.

‘And yet not on your books and we always keep you up to date.’

‘I know,’ Hernu said. ‘And you’re the expert on the IRA, so what do we do?’

‘You’re wrong there,’ Ferguson said. ‘The greatest expert on the IRA is right there in Paris, Martin Brosnan, our Irish-American friend. After all, he carried a gun for them till nineteen seventy-five. I heard he was a Professor of Political Philosophy at the Sorbonne.’

‘You’re right,’ Hernu said. ‘I’d forgotten about him.’

‘Very respectable these days. Writes books and lives rather well on all that money his mother left him when she died in Boston five years ago. If you’ve a mystery on your hands he might be the man to solve it.’

‘Thanks for the suggestion,’ Hernu said. ‘But first we’ll see what happens at Valenton. I’ll be in touch.’

Ferguson put down the phone, pressed a button on the wall and got out of bed. A moment later the door opened and his manservant, an ex-Gurkha came in, putting a dressing-gown over his pyjamas.

‘Emergency, Kim. I’ll ring Captain Tanner and tell her to get round here, then I’ll have a bath. Breakfast when she arrives.’

The Gurkha withdrew. Ferguson picked up the phone and dialled a number. ‘Mary? Ferguson here. Something big. I want you at Cavendish Square within the hour. Oh, better wear your uniform. We’ve got that thing at the Ministry of Defence at eleven. You always impress them in full war paint.’

He put the phone down and went into the bathroom feeling wide awake and extremely cheerful.

It was six-thirty when the taxi picked up Mary Tanner on the steps of her Lowndes Square flat. The driver was impressed, but then most people were. She wore the uniform of a captain in the Women’s Royal Army Corps, the wings of an Army Air Corps pilot on her left breast. Below them the ribbon of the George Medal, a gallantry award of considerable distinction and campaign ribbons for Ireland and for service with the United Nations peacekeeping force in Cyprus.

She was a small girl, black hair cropped short, twenty-nine years of age and a lot of service under the belt. A doctor’s daughter who’d taken an English degree at London University, tried teaching and hated it. After that came the army. A great deal of her service had been with the Military Police. Cyprus for a while, but three tours of duty in Ulster. It had been the affair in Derry that had earned her the George Medal and left her with the scar on her left cheek which had brought her to Ferguson’s attention. She’d been his aide for two years now.

She paid off the taxi, hurried up the stairs to the flat on the first floor and let herself in with her own key. Ferguson was sitting on the sofa beside the fireplace in the elegant drawing room, a napkin under his chin while Kim served his poached eggs.

‘Just in time,’ he said. ‘What would you like?’

‘Tea, please. Earl Grey, Kim, and toast and honey.’

‘Got to watch our figure.’

‘Rather early in the day for sexist cracks, even for you, Brigadier. Now what have we got?’

He told her while he ate and Kim brought her tea and toast and she sat opposite, listening.

When he finished she said, ‘This Brosnan, I’ve never heard of him.’

‘Before your time, my love. He must be about forty-five now. You’ll find a file on him in my study. He was born in Boston. One of those filthy rich American families. Very high society. His mother was a Dubliner. He did all the right things, went to Princeton, took his degree then went and spoiled it all by volunteering for Viet Nam and as an enlisted man. I believe that was nineteen sixty-six. Airborne Rangers. He was discharged a sergeant and heavily decorated.’

‘So what makes him so special?’

‘He could have avoided Viet Nam by staying at university, but he didn’t. He also enlisted in the ranks. Quite something for someone with his social standing.’

‘You’re just an old snob. What happened to him after that?’

‘He went to Trinity College, Dublin, to work on a doctorate. He’s a Protestant, by the way, but his mother was a devout Catholic. In August sixty-nine, he was visiting an uncle on his mother’s side, a priest in Belfast. Remember what happened? How it all started?’

‘Orange mobs burning Catholics out?’ she said.

‘And the police not doing too much about it. The mob burned down Brosnan’s uncle’s church and started on the Falls Road. A handful of old IRA hands with a few rifles and handguns held them off and when one of them was shot, Brosnan picked up his rifle. Instinctive, I suppose. I mean Viet Nam and all that.’

‘And from then on he was committed?’

‘Very much so. You’ve got to remember that in those early days, there were plenty of men like him in the movement. Believers in Irish freedom and all that sort of thing.’

‘Sorry, sir, I’ve seen too much blood on the streets of Derry to go for that one.’

‘Yes, well I’m not trying to whitewash him. He’s killed a few in his time, but always up front, I’ll say that for him. He became quite famous. There was a French war photographer called Anne-Marie Audin. He saved her life in Viet Nam after a helicopter crash. Quite a romantic story. She turned up in Belfast and Brosnan took her underground for a week. She got a series out of it for Life magazine. The gallant Irish struggle. You know the sort of thing.’

‘What happened after that?’

‘In nineteen seventy-five he went to France to negotiate an arms deal. As it turned out it was a set-up and the police were waiting. Unfortunately he shot one of them dead. They gave him life. He escaped from prison in seventy-nine, at my instigation, I might add.’

‘But why?’

‘Someone else before your time, a terrorist called Frank Barry. Started off in Ulster with a splinter group called the Sons of Erin, then joined the European terrorist circuit, an evil genius if ever there was one. Tried to get Lord Carrington on a trip to France when he was Foreign Secretary. The French hushed it up, but the Prime Minister was furious. Gave me direct orders to hunt Barry down whatever the cost.’