“Why?”
Ruckles shook his head. His hands buried his face. He suddenly spit out blood and bits of teeth.
“Policy. I don’t know.… North Sea oil… use the IRA…” Ruckles was babbling.
Devereaux began to understand. They had sent agents to kill him because they thought he had gotten Hastings’ secret. And Hastings — clever, dead Hastings — combining information from O’Neill and from someone still in British Intelligence and from a third source — was it the CIA itself? — understood about Operation Mirror and about the CIA plot on the Prime Minister. That was why Hastings had wanted exit money — because the game would be over then; the CIA would come to kill him. Well, they had killed him.
And they thought Devereaux knew — until Sunday, when he had told Hanley about Operation Mirror and Hanley had gone to the CIA with it and the CIA had eagerly agreed to drop the operation. They knew then that Devereaux had not uncovered the real secret — the real plot — which was to murder the Prime Minister of Britain.
Devereaux thought he understood everything in that moment. Slough was not in danger; the Prime Minister was to be killed. And the IRA would do it for the Agency and would be blamed for it.
Just like the CIA game in Chile when they got Allende. And the game against Castro in Cuba — except Castro was too smart for them. And now a game against the leftist Prime Minister who already showed signs of using the North Sea oil riches to forge an independent British policy in Europe, out from under the American thumb.
“You are bastards,” Devereaux said finally.
“No—” said Ruckles. He pulled down his hands now and stared at Devereaux with his broken face. “No more than you.” He even managed to grin — a broken-toothed grin, his mouth filled with blood. “It’s all the same—”
Devereaux fired once. Ruckles was thrown hard against the marble wall behind the toilet and then slumped to the floor.
Ruckles stared at Devereaux in death; blood ran on his face as though he were still alive, still in pain.
Splatters of blood dotted the brown corduroy coat Devereaux wore. They were wet spots but they would not be noticed when they dried. There were spots of blood on his hands as well.
Devereaux replaced the gun in his belt. His face was frozen as he stared for a moment at the body of Ruckles wedged between the toilet and a compartment wall.
He opened the door and walked quickly out of the now empty washroom. He walked across the concourse and left the station. He walked until he was too tired to walk, and then he stopped and looked around and found himself at London Bridge on the east side of the immense city. He felt tired and numb. He looked at the dried spots of blood on the backs of his hands and rubbed at them.
His eyes were old and vacant in that instant. His face was bloodless and cold.
The gray Thames surged below the place where he stood on the bridge, looking at it and at the barges on the river.
He knew that it was not useful to think of Ruckles as a human being he had just killed. He understood that death was a means or an answer to a problem, a setback in the game for one side or the other. He understood that and so did Ruckles; he knew Ruckles would have killed him just as easily. He had to kill Ruckles because the CIA must not know that Devereaux knew the game, and so that Devereaux could find a way to survive.
It was all logical and very simple and Devereaux had accepted the logic of the game a long time before, when he had joined the Section.
A cockney woman, crossing from north to south across the span, saw the man on the sidewalk suddenly vomit onto the pavement. She thought he was drunk and wondered for a moment what pub would be open this early on a London morning.
24
Chief Inspector Cashel of Special Branch, Dublin, had been quite wrong about the size of the crowd expected for the benefit match between the Glasgow Celtics football club and the Glasgow Rangers football club. He had told Devereaux fifty thousand would be there.
In fact, at the start of the match, 104,000 Glaswegians had crammed the stands at Ibrox Park in the middle of the old city.
But if Cashel had been wrong about the size of the crowd for Tuesday’s match, he had not been wrong about the threat of violence.
As usual, the city was divided by police lines into two parts along a street running through the center of Ibrox Park.
The Celtics fans, with their green-and-white scarves, caps, jackets, and flags, came to the park from one side; the Rangers fans, with blue-and-white adornments, came from the other side. Glasgow was for the moment a city in siege. Hundreds of policemen surrounded the field; detachments of police from other boroughs and cities filled the stands. From the start of the game, there was no sound but the constant, rumbling, threatening roar of 104,000 people caught up in a frenzy of ancient rivalries and old hatreds.
The CID man assigned as liaison to Cashel had explained it (he was from Arbroath on the eastern Scottish coast but he understood the ways of Glaswegians): The Celtics were more than the Catholic team and the Rangers more than the Protestant club. For years, no Protestant dared dream of playing for the Celtics (and vice versa) and the city had been divided on match days as a security measure so that no hapless supporter of either team would find himself suddenly confronted by a mob from the other side. In which case, it was quite likely he would be stomped to death.
Cashel, when he saw the crowd streaming into the old stadium, thought it was hopeless. And when he saw Lord Slough and his daughter — surrounded by members of the Royal Cancer Society and Glasgow city officials — enter the arena and take seats prominently at midfield, he knew it was hopeless.
He had informed his own superiors Sunday night. On Monday, the special branch of the Criminal Investigation Division of Scotland Yard had detached six men to serve as liaison in setting up a plan for protection of Lord Slough. But they explained there was only so much they could do — Glasgow on match day between the two old rival teams was a bad security risk.
The game began shortly after two P.M., and by 2:34 P.M. Tommy Kedvale of the Celtics had scored a goal.
A roar like the sound of the western ocean in a gale rolled across the field.
Cashel felt useless; felt a tension that was unbearable and yet without meaning. One rifle in that crowd was all it would take to kill Slough; one killer out of all those people.
They had tried to search the crowd at the entrances and largely succeeded. They found thirty-four sets of brass knuckles, ninety-three razor knives, twelve stilletos, a hundred seventy-six coshes, and one genuine ancient medieval mace that had been stolen two years previously from the Glasgow Museum.
But no rifles and no pistols. And, near the end of the search, with the game about to start, the frantic crowd — fearful lest it miss one moment of the game — had stormed the gate, overwhelmed the search party, and seriously injured six constables.
“You see, Mr. Cashel,” explained the young CID man from Arbroath, “The lads take it very seriously here.” He meant the game, of course.
All during the long game, Cashel searched the hundred thousand faces of the crowd, looking for the man with glittering eyes who had been so close to him on that Saturday in Innisbally. He saw the face many times, but each time, as he rushed through the crowds toward it, the face would change — it would turn out to be just a young boy or a drunk with a dock worker’s cap or someone else. Never Faolin, never the face Cashel remembered.
The match ended in late afternoon with an unsatisfactory one-to-one tie, and several fights began in the stands. Lord Slough and his party — at Cashel’s urging — was hurried out of the stadium in the final minutes, to a waiting car at the special entrance.