Eastman sat back in the chair. “There you go again, blundering about in the dark.”
“Then perhaps you’d care to enlighten us?” Whitlock said.
“I have never worked for the IRA.”
“Then let me rephrase the question,” Whitlock said. “How long has the IRA been paying you to pass information on to them?”
“I have never worked for, passed any information on to, or ever received any money from, the IRA. This whole operation was set up to discredit the IRA, not assist them.”
“So who exactly was behind this operation?” Whitlock asked.
“There were three of us. Patrick Gorman, Fiona Gallagher and myself.”
“Gorman, the undercover cop who was murdered in Belfast last year?” Sabrina asked.
“The same. The plan has always been to discredit the IRA. At the time we didn’t have a particular target in mind. Pat was murdered before we could finalize the details. That meant Fiona and I had to rethink our strategy. We decided to put the operation on ice until we found the right target. And when Scoby announced that he was coming over to the UK we knew we’d found it.”
“Gallagher’s still the mystery figure in this case,” Whitlock said. “Commander Palmer claims she’d never been a member of the anti-terrorist squad and yet she obviously worked closely with the two of you, both senior officers in the unit. Where exactly did she fit into all this?”
“Palmer’s right. She’d been a Provo since Mullen recruited her at Bristol University. But after a few years she became disillusioned with the movement. That’s when Pat turned her. When I first met her I suggested she take up with Farrell because he was then the blue-eyed boy of the movement. She reeled him in perfectly. He was absolutely besotted with her. And all the time she was with him she was passing info back to us. Then Pat was killed. She took it badly. Not that she ever showed it in front of Farrell or any of his cronies. She was every inch the professional. The best.”
“Did Marsh know about her?” Whitlock asked.
“Only Pat and I knew about her. It was vital for her own protection.”
“So where does Marsh come into it?” Graham asked.
“John?” Eastman managed a faint smile. “John was what you Americans would call a patsy.”
“So you set him up?” Whitlock said.
“It wasn’t very difficult. Fiona managed to get Brady’s thumb print on a tenner when she last saw him. And I got the combination to John’s safe when I went over to his house a couple of weeks ago on the pretext of borrowing one of his disks. Not the one that was used to trap him, mind. That would have been too obvious. I planted the evidence a couple of days before he was arrested.”
“You knew he’d be arrested?” Sabrina said.
“I knew we were going to be investigated. That was obvious. So I had to make sure John took the fall.”
“Let’s turn now to McGuire,” Whitlock said. “How did he find out about the plot to assassinate Senator Scoby?”
“He overheard Fiona talking to me on the phone. But he obviously thought she was talking to someone in the IRA because she also mentioned that Farrell was returning to the UK after meeting with a cell in Germany. He then tipped you off that Farrell was due back in the UK and you, in turn, told Palmer. But that suited us perfectly: if Farrell hadn’t been put behind bars when he was, we’d have had to kill him. It was absolutely essential for our plan to have any chance of succeeding, that Fiona be put in temporary charge of the cell so that Mullen and Kerrigan would think that she was taking her orders directly from the Army Council.”
“Did the IRA sanction McGuire’s murder?” Whitlock asked.
“Yes. When Fiona realized that McGuire had overheard her and was planning to meet with Swain she told the Army Council that McGuire was a tout. They gave her instructions to kill him. And by doing that she could then introduce the second part of the plan: to assassinate Scoby, without raising any suspicion amongst either the members of her cell, who would automatically have assumed that it was another IRA directive, or amongst the Army Council, who would still think she was tidying up the McGuire affair.”
“And you had Grogan silenced because he could have led us to McGuire?” Sabrina deduced.
“At the time we didn’t know how much Grogan knew for the simple reason we didn’t know where he was. That’s why I had Mike get the information from Roche. The car was bugged so when he told me the address, Fiona was able to get there before us. I removed the bug before I brought the car back here.”
“And presumably it was you who also made the hoax bomb call to the airport?” Whitlock said.
Eastman nodded. “I had to give her time to get to McGuire first and take him out. It was touch and go for a while because of the weather. But Mullen did an unbelievable job to get them to the chalet just ahead of us. It was certainly a close call.”
“Why did she kill Lynch?” Whitlock asked.
“Two reasons. Lynch and Kerrigan had hatched a plan to tell the Army Council that she wasn’t capable of running the cell in Farrell’s absence. If she’d been relieved of her command, that would have ruined everything. Secondly, Lynch was one of the senior Provos in Europe. Kill him and you damage the network. Which it’s done by all accounts.”
“Why did she kill Kerrigan and Mullen?” Whitlock asked.
“Kerrigan was becoming increasingly rebellious. It came to a head at the chalet where they were hiding out after the hit on McGuire. He pulled a gun on her and she shot him. She killed Mullen for the simple reason that she didn’t need him after the botched attempt on the Merry Dancer. She needed to operate alone at the church. And with both of them dead, there would be no witnesses to contradict her in court.”
Whitlock nodded to himself. “I get it now. You intended to arrest her after she’d killed Mike, then when she appeared in court she’d have claimed that she shot Scoby on the orders of the IRA. That would have caused an international outcry and the IRA would have been discredited publicly. That alone would have seriously damaged their image abroad.”
“It’s already damaged their image abroad,” Eastman corrected him. “They’re sure to regroup and rebuild again from within but you can still bet that heads are going to roll. And the first head to roll will be Brady’s. And that will be a major coup in itself.”
“How can you be so sure?” Sabrina asked.
“Because Brady was Fiona’s superior. And the IRA are going to need a scapegoat if they’re going to win back their supporters. He knew that when he came up with that idea to edit the tape for public release. It was the one ace he still had up his sleeve. But Whitlock outwitted him. Probably the only person who ever has.
“You must understand that when we originally devised this plan, we had Brady very much in mind. He’s been responsible for the deaths, either directly or indirectly, of more British soldiers in Ireland than any other Chief-of-Staff in the history of the organization. And this was one way of getting him. Discredit him in the eyes of his superiors. Let them deal with him.”
“She’d have got life if she’d ever stood trial,” Sabrina said. “Didn’t that bother her?”
“She’d have got several life sentences,” Eastman corrected her. “But that doesn’t mean she’d have spent long in jail. There was a contingency plan to spring her after a few weeks. She’d have left the country and started a new life somewhere out of the reach of the IRA.”
“And I suppose it doesn’t bother you that three of our colleagues and an innocent American senator were murdered as a result of your vigilante operation?” Graham snapped.
“Scoby’s death was an essential part of the operation. I make no excuses for that. But your colleagues–” Eastman trailed off and shook his head. “That wasn’t part of the operation. Fiona specifically gave orders to hit only McGuire but Kerrigan overstepped the mark. There was nothing she could do about it. I know she was just as gutted about their deaths as I was. As we were when Mullen shot that chopper down over the Thames.”