In the Morning I'll Be Gone by Adrian McKinty Read Free Book Online

in disgust. “So I’m back on probation and effectively I’ll be serving two masters. Trying to keep the cops happy and MI5 happy at the same time?”
    “I suppose so,” Kate said.
    But restoration to the police? To my former rank? To be a detective again? The old thrill was coming back . . .
    “I’d like to see all this in writing.”
    “Don’t push it, Duffy,” Tom muttered.
    I leaned back in the plastic chair, looking at poor Tommy Cooper’s grinning face under his red fez.
    “What are you thinking, Sean?” Kate asked.
    “ Albion perfide is what I’m thinking.”
    “Yes. You’re right to be cautious of the service but wrong to distrust me. I make it a point of giving my word only when I know I can keep it.”
    “Oh, you’re good,” I told her, but in truth her words were strangely reassuring.
    “And if you really want me to, I can write you a note explaining the conditions and provisos of your full reinstatement,” Kate added with a smile.
    I nodded.
    “Well then,” she said, opened her briefcase and passed me several forms to read and sign. There was no drama. We all knew what I was going to do.
    I put my signature to two different versions of the Official Secrets Act and a form indemnifying the Home Office from death or injury that might happen in the line of duty. When I was done Kate carefully took the forms and put them back in her briefcase.
    “Jolly good. Now, you must understand that what we’re about to tell you is highly confidential . . .” Kate began.
    “OK.”
    She cleared her throat. “All right, then . . . We’ve known for a few years that the IRA has been receiving weapons training in Libya. Following the mass break-out from the Maze prison last September we were able to track nine or possibly ten IRA escapees to Tripoli. Through the work of our sister agency we have been able to identify most of those individuals, one of whom, as you correctly guessed, is Dermot McCann.”
    “He’s quite the lad, isn’t he? You really should have kept a better eye on him.”
    “Indeed. Now, relations between Colonel Gaddafi and the IRA have been somewhat complicated, fraught, one could even say, and in the late autumn of last year our sister service managed to plant a story with the Gaddafi regime that the IRA men were in fact agents of the Mossad. Gaddafi had all of them arrested and thrown in one of his dungeons.”
    “Nice work.”
    She shook her head. “As is typical of the somewhat baroque schemes of the SIS this disinformation created only a short-term gain and may actually have hurt our cause. Gaddafi has since released all of the IRA personnel and has redoubled his efforts to equip and school them.”
    Tom took up the story: “SIS did do us one favor, though. They were able to get a copy of McCann’s prison journal. Unfortunately it’s not terribly helpful, but we’d still like you to read it.”
    He passed me two dozen photocopied pages in a black binder. I flipped it open and saw it contained doodles, political commentary, drawings, poems, and a potted attempt at an autobiography.
    “You’ve read this already?” I asked.
    “Yes, and I’m afraid that McCann was not foolish enough to write anything incriminating.”
    “Do you have the original?”
    “We do.”
    “I’d rather read that, if you don’t mind.”
    Kate nodded and Tom passed me a little notebook covered with candle wax and which smelled of sand and sweat and ful medames .
    “What else have you got on Dermot?”
    “We’ve been able to gather precious little information about the IRA’s activities in Libya but evidently the men were given bomb-making and weapons training. And we think they were split into two or three separate cells.”
    “These cells have the money and operational capability to subsist completely independently of the IRA Army Council when they return to the British Isles,” Kate continued.
    “That must have made you nervous. You’ve got a mole in the IRA Army Council, haven’t