"Dear God," Stirling whispered, staring into Mylonas' haunted eyes. "You're talking about the murder of billions of human souls!" He didn't know precisely how many people there were in the world, but it was an appalling number to snuff out in one fell swoop.
"Yes." Mylonas swallowed. "That is the reason the Home Office insisted on sending a chap who understands counterterrorism."
Stirling struggled to reorder his entire view of the tactical situation. Indeed, his view of the entire universe. He glanced around the table, finding stunned eyes and expressions of rising horror. Clearly, none of them had fully grasped the project's lethal potential until now. Unless, of course, one of them was a terrorist, someone who would have realized exactly what could be accomplished using this project. Getting himself—or herself—onto the team wouldn't have been easy, granted. But there was that fatal motor crack-up, which had killed two members of the senior research team. The realization left Stirling's insides shaking. Brenna McEgan was staring bleakly into her own ale glass, fingers clenched white. Her sapphire eyes were nearly as haunted as Zenon Mylonas'. How much death had she seen, coming up from a place like Londonderry, where explosive violence and terrorist murder was nearly as common as it was in Belfast?
Stirling cast back over those dossiers he'd read, both Colonel Ogilvie's and Marc Blundell's, trying to recall everything documented on Brenna McEgan. There hadn't been much, which left him cursing the incompleteness of the material. Dammit, he needed to know how many times the people at this table had wet themselves in their prams, and the Home Office handed him a synopsis measured in thirty-second sound bites. Was Brenna McEgan the evil djinn in the bottle? Or was she simply too obvious a candidate?
Whoever his terrorist proved to be, if there even was a terrorist, once the djinn was loose... Several billion souls, destroyed instantly. It was unthinkable.
Stirling shuddered.
Northern Ireland's madmen perpetrated the unthinkable every day.
Chapter Three
Brenna McEgan left the boisterous warmth of the Falkland Arms pub to enter to a cold and wet night. The rain and wind and scudding clouds were as full of foreboding as she herself was—not a pleasant feeling for a woman in her position. Her cover story would not stand up to the kind of scrutiny Captain Trevor Stirling would shortly bring to bear. The SAS, for God's own sake... As Brenna unlocked the driver's side door of her car, she was as close to blind terror as she'd been since leaving Londonderry, all those years ago. The phone call which had come, tracing her to her Dublin flat and her new life, had not frightened her precisely, only filled her with a nameless dread which had all too quickly found its familiar shape and hue.
Orange terror tactics. Again.
Indeed, what else?
It was the reason she'd left Londonderry, the reason she'd never married, unwilling to bring a child into the madness, to inherit the hate and the killing. She still woke up some nights, drenched in cold sweat, watching her older sister and niece dissolve into blasted bits of human flesh not a dozen paces in front of her, coming out of a little shop where she'd agreed to meet them, planning to lunch together after their shopping was done. She'd joined, right afterwards; and had left for almost exactly the same reason, five years later: a Protestant woman and her child caught by an IRA car bomb, with a young girl on her knees beside them, tearing at her hair and screaming.
"I left a long time ago," she'd told them over the phone lines. "I'm not active and you bloody well know it. And the reasons."
"There isn't anyone else."
"Don't give me that—"
"Brenna. At least hear us out. Arlyne is coming to Dublin to see you."
God and thunder, her own grandmother...
Worse and worse.
And it was, the worst news ever given a member of Cumann Na Mbann. The whole future of humanity at stake, if they were right, and she the only operative—former operative, she insisted forcefully—with the credentials to get inside, to trace the Orange mole, identify and stop him.
"Brenna," her grandmother had leaned close, holding her and rocking her slightly, "I know, child, why you left us and I respected that, you know I did. But we need you, child, and it isn't just Cumann Na Mbann or the Provos trying to stop it. The leadership of the Orangemen came to us, to the Provos, I mean, to say one of their own had gone off the deep end and disappeared, vowing to destroy Britain."
She stared at her grandmother, eyes wide.
"Aye, love, it's that serious. He doesn't want the elections to go forward, knows the Catholics have a majority this time around, and he's vowed to unleash genocide, not only against the Irish Catholics, but the British, as well, for betrayal. The Orangemen are frightened, love, and they can't find him."
"But you did?" Her voice came out whispery, little-girl frightened.
"We did. And, child, if there's truth in the rumors about the laboratory he's joined, he can destroy all of us, and I mean everybody on this bloody planet, billions of innocent lives."
She'd sat in her grandmother's arms for a long time, shaking, listening as her grandmother explained everything they'd learned, why they couldn't just hit the bastard with a standard IRA hit team. No publicity, not even the breath of publicity, nothing that would look even remotely like anything but pure accident—and before they could do even that much, they had to know. Was the threat real? Was the research viable? And if so, how far away was the team from success? And literally the only person in all of Ireland who could infiltrate that team as the Orangeman had done was Brenna McEgan.
"They'll pull strings, child, our own people and the Orangemen, both. They're afraid of him, Brenna, terrified of the man they've created and now must stop. They can't do it on their own. They've no one with the credentials to get close to him. And even if they did, he'd recognize them in a flash, drop them off a cliff somewhere. Together we'll get you inside that lab, Brenna. From there, it's you and no one else must discover the truth and stop him."
It was, ironically, the first time in the Catholic-Protestant history of the island that the Orangemen had voluntarily worked with the IRA Provisionals. All it had taken was the realization that they'd unleashed a creature so deadly, he would risk destroying the entire world—including the Orangemen who'd turned him into a weapon—to take his vengeance against Catholics and the British who'd "betrayed" him.
Cedric Banning—not his real name, but the name of his carefully constructed cover persona—was ruthless, brilliant, and utterly mad. To refuse the mission was unthinkable. He had to be stopped. So she'd come to Scotland, with no idea how many strings had been plucked to get her there, and she'd identified Banning, and she'd assessed the threat level—utterly deadly—and now she had an SAS captain on the job, who knew none of this, whose every glance tonight had shouted plain as daylight that she topped his suspect list.
How could she not? She was Irish, wasn't she? Reason enough for any self-respecting Brit to hate and distrust her, given the circumstances. By the end of Mylonas' hideous little lecture, every colleague at the table had been shooting her furtive, unhappy little glances. The IRA, those looks said, the IRA's threatening us and ours, and you're by-God Irish. It would have done no good to stand up and say, "You're absolutely right, mates, I'm IRA to my bones, and I'm the only thing standing between you and a disaster so enormous, you can't even comprehend it."