Touch the Devil. Jack Higgins
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that sort of nonsensical and foolhardy gesture. The rose was a play on his own name of course. Not only did he do it to the G.O.C., he also left one for the then Ulster Prime Minister and for the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The implication was clear enough.’
‘He could have killed and didn’t.’
‘That’s right. Brosnan’s rose.’ Ferguson laughed. ‘We had to make it classified to keep it out of the papers, not that they’d have believed it. Who would?’
‘What happened later?’
‘All changed, didn’t it? An escalation of the worst kind of bloodshed, the bombers gained the ascendancy in the movement. Devlin became Chief Intelligence Officer in Dublin. Brosnan worked with him as a kind of roving aide.’
Reading on through the file, Fox said, ‘It says here he’s got Irish Nationality. How’s that, sir?’
‘Well, the American Government was not exactly delighted with his activities. Then in nineteen seventy-four, Devlin sent him to New York to execute an informer who’d been helped to seek refuge in America by the Ulster Constabulary after selling information which had led to the arrest of nearly every member of the North Belfast Brigade. Brosnan accomplished his task with his usual ruthless efficiency, got out of New York by the skin of his teeth. When the American State Department tried to extradite him, he claimed Irish Nationality, which he was entitled to do under Irish law because his mother was born there. If you’re interested, Harry, I could do the same. My grandmother was born in Cork.’
Fox quickly glanced through the rest of the file. ‘And then the French business.’
‘That’s right. Devlin sent him to France in nineteen seventy-five to negotiate an arms consignment. The middle man concerned turned out to be a police informer. When Brosnan arrived at a fishing village on the Brittany coast to take delivery, a large consignment of riot police was waiting for him. In the ensuing fracas, he wounded two and shot one dead, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment on Belle Isle.’
‘Belle Isle, sir?’
‘The French don’t have Devil’s Island any more, Harry. They just have Belle Isle. In the Mediterranean, of course, which sounds pleasanter, but it isn’t.’
Fox closed the files. ‘All right, sir, but where is all this getting us?’
‘Set a thief to catch a thief, Harry. You said it.’
Fox gazed at him in astonishment. ‘But he’s in prison, sir. You said so yourself.’
‘For the past four years,’ Ferguson said. ‘But what if we could do something about that?’
The internal ’phone rang and Ferguson went to it and picked it up. He nodded. ‘Fine. Tell him we’ll be straight down.’ He turned to Fox. ‘Right, Harry, grab your coat and let’s get moving. We haven’t got much time.’
He moved to the door and Fox followed him. ‘With respect, sir, where to?’
‘Bradbury Lines Barracks at Hereford, Harry. Headquarters of Twenty-second Special Air Service, to be precise. I’ll explain it on the way,’ and he hustled on through the door like a strong wind.
It was cold in the street outside, rain reflecting on the black asphalt, and as the big black Bentley pulled away, Harry Fox leaned back against the seat and buttoned his old cavalry overcoat one-handed. So many things circling in his mind, so much had happened and Brosnan simply wouldn’t go away, this man he had never met and yet felt he knew as intimately as a brother. He closed his eyes and wondered what Brosnan was doing now.
Belle Isle is a rock situated forty miles to the east of Marseilles and some ten miles from the coast. The fortress, an eighteenth century anachronism, seems to grow out of the very cliffs themselves, one of the grimmest sights in the whole of the Mediterranean. There is the fortress, there is the granite quarry, and there are some six hundred prisoners, political offenders or criminals of the most dangerous kind. Most of them are serving life sentences and, the French authorities taking the term seriously, most of them will die there. One thing is certain. No one has ever escaped from Belle Isle.
The reasons are simple. No vessel may approach closer than four miles and the designated clear area around the island is closely monitored by an excellent approach radar system. And Belle Isle has another highly efficient protection system provided by nature itself, a phenomenom known to local fishermen as the Mill Race, a ferocious ten knot current that churns the water into white foam on even a calm day. Hell on earth in a storm.
Martin Brosnan lay on his bed in a cell on the upper landing, reading, head pillowed on his hands. He was stripped to the waist, strong and muscular, his body toughened by hard labour in the granite quarry. There were the ugly puckered scars of two old bullet wounds in his left breast. His dark hair was too long, almost shoulder-length. In such matters the authorities were surprisingly civilised, as the books on the wooden shelf above the bed indicated.
The man on the opposite bed, tossed a pack of Gitanes across. ‘Have a smoke, Martin,’ he said in French.
He looked about sixty-five with very white hair and eyes a vivid blue in a wrinkled humorous face. His name was Jacques Savary, a Union Corse godfather and one of the most famous gangsters in Marseilles in his day. He had been a prisoner in Belle Isle since 1965, would remain there until he died, an unusual circumstance in one of his background for usually the Union Corse, the largest organised crime syndicate in France, was able to use its formidable influence with the judiciary to pull strings on behalf of members of Jacques Savary’s standing who found themselves in trouble.
But Savary was different. He had chosen to ally himself to the cause of the OAS. It has been said that Charles de Gaulle survived at least thirty attempts on his life, but he had never been closer to death than during the attack masterminded by Jacques Savary in March, 1965. The Union had at least saved him from execution, settling instead for a life sentence on Belle Isle, mistakenly assuming that his release could be arranged at some future date.
Rain lashed the window, the wind howled. Savary said, ‘What are you reading?’
‘Eliot,’ Brosnan told him. ‘“What we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”’
‘The Four Quartets. “Little Gidding”,’ Savary said.
‘Good man,’ Brosnan told him. ‘See, all the benefits of an expensive education, Jacques, and you’re getting it for free.’
‘And you also, my friend, have learnt many things. Can you still open the door the way I showed you?’
Brosnan shrugged, swung his legs to the floor, picked up a spoon from his bedside locker and went to the door. The lock was covered by a steel plate and he quickly forced the handle of the spoon between the edge of the plate and the jamb. He worked it across for a few seconds, there was a click and he opened the door a few inches.
‘The same locks since eighteen fifty-two or something like that,’ Savary said.
‘So what, it doesn’t get me anywhere, only to the landing,’ Brosnan said. ‘I never told you this before, but I once worked out a way to get out. A little climbing, a certain amount of wading through the central sewage system and I could be outside. Found that out three years ago.’
Savary sat up, his face pale. ‘Then why have you never done anything about it?’
‘Because it gets you nothing. You’re still on the rock and nowhere to go.’
There was the sound of footsteps ascending the steel steps at the far end of the landing and Brosnan quickly closed the door and worked the spoon around again. There was a slight click and he hurried across to the bed and lay down.
The footsteps halted outside, a key turned in the lock, the door opened. The uniformed guard who looked in was an amiable looking man named Lebel with a heavy Walrus moustache. He wore an oilskin.
‘Stir it you two, I need your