Pray for Us Sinners by Patrick Taylor Read Free Book Online Page B

Kathleen ni Houlihan. Ireland was in Davy’s soul like Jesus Christ in the heart of a Carmelite nun.
    He heard her footsteps on the stair. Owned? He had never owned Fiona Kavanagh, he corrected himself. She had given herself, and now he had returned the gift he cherished above all. For the Cause.

 
    TEN
    MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11
    As Marcus Richardson had known in theory and discovered nine days earlier in practice, a motor vehicle loaded with explosives is a powerful weapon. The concept was the brainchild of Seamus Twomey, a bookmaker who had been involved in the IRA’s Operation Harvest. He, like Davy, had quit in the early sixties but returned to offer his services in 1969. He had been one of the group that had met to consider splitting from the Official IRA and founding the Provisionals, and he became one of the Provos’ leaders when the schism occurred.
    In 1970 Twomey was adjutant of the Belfast Brigade, Provisional IRA—the post now held by Sean Conlon—and second in command to Billy McKee. He rose to become Officer Commanding. In March 1973 Twomey moved to Provisional IRA General Headquarters in Dublin.
    Twomey’s gift to the PIRA, the car bomb, had allowed them to score a number of successes, but sometimes the Provos miscalculated. On July 31, 1972, three car bombs were placed in the main street of the village of Claudy. The Provos had intended to limit the number of casualties by telephoning a warning. The telephone booth they’d counted on using had been vandalized. No warning was given and the village was devastated. Nine people were killed at once and two died later.
    The Security Forces countered by making it illegal to park an automobile within town limits unless someone remained in the vehicle. They reasoned that, while the Provos may have been fanatics, they were not a bunch of kamikaze pilots. But even such measures did not prevent devices being ferried by car for delivery into the heart of Belfast.
    On the night of Monday, November 6, 1972, the army erected an eight-foot-high wire fence with forty-one gates around the centre of the city. No vehicles were permitted to pass except in emergencies.
    Behind the fence, the department stores—Robinson and Cleavers, the Athletic Stores, and Brands and Norman’s—and such smaller businesses as travel agents, jewelers, bookstores, tobacconists’, cafés, and restaurants, cowered.
    This Monday morning, as he did every day, a blind man had come to sit on a folding stool outside Robinson and Cleavers, cloth cap on the pavement before him. With a fiddler’s bow he drew sweet, melancholy tunes from a saw grasped between his knees. The shoppers and the businessmen, students and labourers, nurses, and all whose lawful pursuits took them to the city core strode by him, hiding in their own thoughts, all pretending that there was no danger, all wishing fervently to get away from Belfast. A few—a very few—dropped coins in the saw player’s cap as they hurried by. None lingered to listen.
    And over all, behind the barricade, the green-domed City Hall towered silently, brooding like the commander of the besieged garrison of a veldt town in the Boer War who wondered not if, but when, the next assault would come.
    A young, fair-haired woman, smartly dressed in a cashmere sweater and plaid miniskirt beneath a lightweight, reversible raincoat, waited until one of the RUC constables at a gate in the fence finished rummaging through her handbag. There was nothing inside to raise anyone’s suspicions. A wallet, dark glasses, several tissues, some elastic bands, powder, mascara, keys, loose change, a rosary, a Saint Christopher medallion, and a lipstick. Max Factor’s “Coral Pink.”
    Nothing out of the ordinary at all, and yet, as Moira Ryan waited, she could feel the moisture in her armpits, on the palms of her hands. But Brendan had said it would be all right. And Moira trusted Brendan