Too much of a coincidence, Jack told himself. The idea of Soviet training for the hard-core members of the PIRA and INLA had been bandied about so much that it had lost credibility. Besides, it didn't have to be something that dramatic. They might just have figured out the proper tactics for themselves, or read them in books. There were plenty of books on the subject of how to be an urban guerrilla. Jack had read several of them.
He flipped forward in time to O'Donnell's second disappearance. Here the information from British sources was fairly complete for once. O'Donnell had been remarkably effective as chief of internal security. Nearly half the people he'd killed really had been informers of one sort or another, not a bad percentage in this sort of business. He found a couple of new pages at the end of the report, and read the information that David Ashley had gathered a few months before in Dublin… He got a little carried away… O'Donnell had used his position to eliminate Provos whose politics didn't quite agree with his. It had been discovered, and he'd vanished for a second time. Again the data was speculative, but it tracked with what Murray had told him in London. O'Donnell had gone somewhere.
Surely he'd convinced someone to provide his nascent organization with financing, training, and support. His nascent organization, Ryan thought. Where had it come from? There was a lapse of two years before O'Donnell's disappearance from Ulster and the first positively identified operation of the ULA. Two complete years. The Brit intel data suggested plastic surgery. Where? Who paid for it? He didn't do that in some jerkwater third-world country, Ryan told himself. He wondered if Cathy could ask her colleagues at Hopkins about the availability of good face-cutters. Two years to change his face, get financial backing, recruit his troops, establish a base of operations, and begin to make his impact… Not bad, Ryan thought with grudging admiration. All that in two years.
Another year before the name of the outfit surfaces…
Ryan turned when he heard someone working the lock on his office door. It was Marty Cantor.
"I thought you stopped smoking." He pointed at the cigarette.
Ryan crushed it out. "So does my wife. Have you seen all this stuff?"
"Yeah." Cantor nodded. "The boss had me run through it over the weekend. What do you think?"
"I think this O'Donnell character is one formidable son of a bitch. He's got his outfit organized and trained like a real army. It's small enough that he knows every one of them. His ideological background tells me he's a careful recruiter. He has an unusually high degree of trust in his troops. He's a political animal, but he knows how to think and plan like a soldier. Who trained him?"
"Nobody knows," Cantor replied. "I think you can overestimate that factor, though."
"I know that," Ryan agreed. "What I'm looking for is… flavor, I guess. I'm trying to get a feel for how he thinks. It would also be nice to know who's bankrolling him." Ryan paused, and something else leaped into his mind. "What are the chances that he has people inside the PIRA?"
"What do you mean?"
"He runs for his life when he finds out that the PIRA leadership is out for his ass. Two years later, he's back in business with his own organization. Where did the troops come from?"
"Some pals from inside the PIRA, obviously," Cantor said.
"Sure." Jack nodded. "People he knew to be reliable. But we also know that he's a counterintelligence type, right?"
"What do you mean?" Cantor hadn't been down this road yet.
"Who's the main threat to O'Donnell?"
"Everybody wants him—"
"Who wants to kill him?" Jack refocused the question. "The Brits don't have capital punishment—but the PIRA does."
"So?"
"So if you were O'Donnell, and you recruited people from inside the PIRA, and you knew that the PIRA was interested in having your head on a wall plaque, you think you'd leave people inside to cue you in?"
"Makes sense," Cantor said thoughtfully.
"Next, who is the ULA's political target?"
"We don't know that."
"Don't give me that crap, Marty!" Ryan snapped. "Most of the information in these documents comes from inside the Provos, doesn't it? How the hell do these people know what the ULA is up to? How does the data get to them?"
"You're pushing, Jack," Cantor warned. "I've seen the data, too. It's mainly negative. The Provos who had the information sweated out of them mainly said that certain operations weren't theirs. The conclusion that ULA did 'em is inferential—circumstantial. I don't think that this stuff is as clear as you do."
"No, the two guys who did this report make a good case for putting the ULA fingerprint on these ops. What the ULA has is its own style, Marty! We can identify that, can't we?"
"You've constructed a circular argument," Cantor pointed out. "O'Donnell comes from the Provos, therefore he must have recruited from there, therefore he must have people in there, et cetera. Your basic arguments are logical, but try to remember that they're based on a very shaky foundation. What if the ULA really is a special-action group of the Provisionals? Isn't it in their interest to have something like that?" Cantor was a splendid devil's advocate, one of the reasons he was Greer's executive assistant.
"Okay, there is some truth to that," Ryan admitted. "Still, everything I say makes sense, assuming that the ULA is real."
"Granted that it's logical. But not proven."
"So it's the first logical thing we have for these characters. What else does that tell us?"
Cantor grinned. "Let me know when you figure it out."
"Can I talk to anybody about this?"
"Like who—I just want to ask before I say no."
"The Legal Attache in London—Dan Murray," Ryan said. "He's supposed to be cleared all the way on this material, isn't he?"
"Yeah, he is, and he works with our people, too. Okay, you can talk with him. That keeps it in the family."
"Thanks."
Five minutes later Cantor was sitting across from Admiral Greer's desk. "He really knows how to ask the right questions."
"So what did he tumble to?" the Admiral asked.
"The same questions that Emil Jacobs and his team have been asking: What's O'Donnell up to? Does he have the PIRA infiltrated? If so, why?"
"And Jack says…?"
"Same as Jacobs and the FBI evaluation: O'Donnell is a counterintelligence type by training. The Provos want his hide on the barn door, and the best way to keep his hide where it belongs is to have people inside to warn him if they get too close."
The Admiral nodded agreement, then looked away for a moment. That was only part of an answer, his instincts told him. There had to be more. "Anything else?"
"The training stuff. He hasn't sifted through all the data yet. I think we should give him some time. But you were right, sir. He's pretty sharp."
Murray lifted his phone and pushed the right button without paying much attention. "Yeah?"
"Dan? This is Jack Ryan," the voice on the phone said.
"How's it going, teacher?"
"Not bad. Something I want to talk over with you."
"Shoot."
"I think the ULA has the PIRA infiltrated."