Read Harry's Game for Free Online

reckon with. The army are bad news for policemen,

    the only way for a counter‐terrorist operation to be successful

    or the Special Branch to be in there, infiltrating, extracting knowledge at ground level.'

    And they'd been right. Rennie could see that now. He and his colleagues didn't poke their noses into the corners and crannies of the Provisional heartland. They let the army do that with their fire

    power and their armour plating, while the detectives sat back and contented themselves with the interrogation of the flow of arrested men. It was next best thing, but not good enough.

    He'd never been much for the cloak and dagger stuff himself. Too big, too heavy, too conspicuous, not a man to flake his way into a i crowd, not ordinary enough. But there were others who had been Good at it, till the funerals became too frequent, and the Chief ('.unstable had called a halt.

    19

    One man, for instance, had been the king of the Branch men till he died up the Crumlin in a hail of automatic fire. Just watching the nightly riot when the sniper spotted him, and gone was a card‐index memory, a walking filing system.

    Rennie's report turned out to be a drab document. A succession of negatives after a score of calls and a search through the big tin drawers that carried the buff folders and the photographs and case histories. The Chief Constable came into the room as Rennie was pushing the typewriter back across the table.

    'Nothing?'

    'Nothing at all, sir. It's a blind alley so far. No one saying anything. Not a word.'

    'I told them in London that it'll come at this end, the man they're looking for. His equipment was too good for anyone based in London. He'll be here. How many do we know who've capable of it, capable of the discipline, of that sort of training?'

    'There are quite a few," said Rennie, "but none of them out. I mid name half a dozen in Long Kesh who we would be looking for if they were free. But, taking them out of the game, I can't see anyone. A bit ago, yes, but not now.'

    'I'm calling for a very big effort, maximum effort," the Chief Constable had walked away from the table and was talking half to himself, half out into the darkness beyond the shatterproof taped windows. "London have said in the past that they don't get the cooperation they're looking for when there's a big one in England, and they come here for our help. I don't want them saying that this time. God, it's a damned nuisance. All the manpower, all the effort, everything

    thing that has to be dropped for a thing like this. But we have to have him.'

    He looked a long time into the black distance beyond the floodlit perimeter fence. Then swung on his heel. "Good night," he said, and closed the door carefully behind him.

    It'll go on a bit now, thought Rennie, every night here for the next few weeks, typing away, and with little to show for it, unless we're just lucky. Just lucky, and that doesn't happen often.

    But just before midnight came the first positive identification of the killer back in the city. The duty major in intelligence section at Lisburn military headquarters, leafing through the situation reports of the evening, read that a patrol of the Lifeguards had for fifteen minutes closed the Hillsborough to Banbridge road while they investigated a package at the side of the road. It was cleared after the bomb disposal expert arrived and found the bag contained a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of Scotch, duty free and bought at Schipol airport. He hurriedly phoned his chief at home, and the RUG control centre. But, nagging at him, was the 20

    question of how such an operation as the Danby killing could have been mounted, with no word coming out.

    The man was asleep now, in the spare back bedroom of a small terraced house off the Ballymurphy Bull Ring. He'd come at 11.25 up from Whiterock where he had stayed since arriving in Belfast. Round him a safety system was building, with the arrangement that he'd sleep till 5.30, then