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let’s get down to it and work out how we’re going to handle this thing.”
     
     
    It was just after eleven at the Europa Hotel when Grace Browning and Tom Curry finished late supper in the dining room and went into the bar. It was quite deserted, and the barman, watching television, came round to serve them.
    “What can I get you, Miss Browning?”
    “Brandy, I think, two brandies.”
    He went away and Tom Curry said, “You were splendid tonight.”
    She took out a cigarette and he lit it for her. “To which performance are you alluding?”
    He shook his head. “That’s all it is to you, isn’t it? Another performance.” He nodded. “I’ve never really seen it before, but I think I do now. On stage or before the camera, it’s fantasy, but roaring up to Garth Dock on that bike — that was real.”
    “And in those few moments of action, I live more, feel more, and with an intensity that just can’t be imagined.”
    “You really are an extraordinary person,” he said.
    The barman, pouring the drinks, called, “I’ve just seen the late-night news flash. A real bloodbath. Three men shot dead at Garth Dock and three more not far away at some warehouse. January 30 has claimed. That’s Bloody Sunday, so the dead men must be Loyalists. The Prods will want to retaliate for that.”
    Grace said, “Dillon certainly doesn’t take prisoners.”
    “You can say that again.”
    The barman brought the brandies and served them with a flourish. “There you go.” He shook his head. “Terrible, all this killing. I mean, what kind of people want to do that kind of thing?” and he walked away.
    Grace Browning turned to Curry, a slight smile on her face, and toasted him. “Well?” she said.
     

LONDON
BELFAST
DEVON

1972–1992
     
THREE
     
    If it began anywhere, it began with Tom Curry, who was professor of Political Philosophy at London University, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and had in his time been a visiting professor at both Yale and Harvard. He was also a major in the GRU, Russian Military Intelligence.
    Born in 1949 in Dublin into a Protestant Anglo-Irish family, his father, a surgeon, had died of cancer when Curry was five, leaving the boy and his mother in comfortable circumstances. A fierce, proud, arrogant woman whose father had fought under Michael Collins in the original Irish Troubles, she had been raised to blame everyone for the mess Ireland had been left in after the English had partitioned the country and left. She blamed the Free State Government as much as the IRA.
    Like many wealthy young women of intellect at that period, she saw Communism as the only answer, and as part of her brilliant son’s education taught him that there was only one true faith, the doctrine according to Karl Marx.
    In 1966 at seventeen, Curry went to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study Political Philosophy, where he met Rupert Lang, an apparently effete aristocrat who never took anything seriously, except Tom Curry, for the bond was instant and for a lifetime and they enjoyed a homosexual relationship which lasted throughout their period at university.
    They went their separate ways, of course — Lang to Sandhurst and the Army, following the family tradition, and Curry to the University of Moscow to research for a Ph.D. on aspects of modern politics, where he was promptly recruited by the GRU.
    They gave him the usual training in weaponry, how to handle himself in the field and so on, but told him that he would be regarded as a sleeper once back in England, someone to be called on when needed, no more than that.
    On 30 of January, 1972, Rupert Lang, having transferred from the Grenadier Guards, was serving as a lieutenant in the Parachute Regiment in Londonderry in Northern Ireland, a day that would be long remembered as Bloody Sunday. By the time the paratroopers had stopped firing, thirteen people lay dead and there were many wounded, including Rupert Lang, who took a bullet in the arm, whether from his