The English Spy

Seymour nodded.

“Republican?”

“Of the worst kind.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“A long time ago, I made a mistake and people died.”

“And Qui

“Qui

7

VIA GREGORIANA, ROME

THE SKIES HAD BEEN THREATENING all afternoon. Finally, at half past ten, a torrential downpour briefly turned the Via Gregoriana into a Venetian canal. Graham Seymour stood at the window watching fat gobbets of rain hammering against the terrace, but in his thoughts it was the hopeful summer of 1998. The Soviet Union was a memory. The economies of Europe and America were roaring. The jihadists of al-Qaeda were the stuff of white papers and terminally boring seminars about future threats. “We fooled ourselves into thinking we had reached the end of history,” he was saying. “There were some in Parliament who actually proposed disbanding the Security Service and MI6 and burning us all at the stake.” He glanced over his shoulder. “They were days of wine and roses. They were days of delusion.”

“Not for me, Graham. I was out of the business at the time.”

“I remember.” Seymour turned away from Gabriel and watched the rain beating against the glass. “You were living in Cornwall then, weren’t you? In that little cottage on the Helford River. Your first wife was at the psychiatric hospital in Stafford, and you were supporting her by cleaning paintings for Julian Isherwood. And there was that boy who lived in the cottage next door. His name escapes me.”

“Peel,” said Gabriel. “His name was Timothy Peel.”

“Ah, yes, young Master Peel. We could never figure out why you were spending so much time with him. And then we realized he was exactly the same age as the son you lost to the bomb in Vie

“I thought we were talking about you, Graham.”

“We are,” replied Seymour.

He then reminded Gabriel, needlessly, that in the summer of 1998 he was the chief of counterterrorism at MI5. As such, he was responsible for protecting the British homeland from the terrorists of the Irish Republican Army. And yet even in Ulster, scene of a centuries-old conflict between Protestants and Catholics, there were signs of hope. The voters of Northern Ireland had ratified the Good Friday peace accords, and the Provisional IRA was adhering to the terms of the cease-fire. Only the Real IRA, a small band of hard-line dissidents, carried on the armed struggle. Its leader was Michael McKevitt, the former quartermaster general of the IRA. His common-law wife, Bernadette Sands-McKevitt, ran the political wing: the 32 County Sovereignty Movement. She was the sister of Bobby Sands, the Provisional IRA member who starved himself to death in the Maze prison in 1981.

“And then,” said Seymour, “there was Eamon Qui

A heavy thunderclap shook the building. Seymour gave an involuntary flinch before continuing.

“Qui

“How long was he there?”

“My agent was a woman,” answered Seymour. “And she was there from the begi

Managing the agent and her intelligence, Seymour continued, proved to be a delicate balancing act. Because the agent was highly placed within the organization, she often had advance knowledge of attacks, including the target, the time, and the size of the bomb.

“What were we to do?” asked Seymour. “Disrupt the attacks and put the agent at risk? Or allow the attacks to go forward and try to make sure no one gets killed in the process?”

“The latter,” replied Gabriel.

“Spoken like a true spy.”

“We’re not policemen, Graham.”

“Thank God for that.”

For the most part, said Seymour, the strategy worked. Several large car bombs were defused, and several others exploded with minimal casualties, though one virtually leveled the High Street of Portadown, a loyalist stronghold, in February 1998. Then, six months later, MI5’s spy reported the group was plotting a major attack. Something big, she warned. Something that would blow the Good Friday peace process to bits.

“What were we supposed to do?” asked Seymour.

Outside, the sky exploded with lightning. Seymour emptied his glass and told Gabriel the rest of it.

On the evening of August 13, 1998, a maroon Vauxhall Cavalier, registration number 91 DL 2554, vanished from a housing estate in Carrickmacross, in the Republic of Ireland. It was driven to an isolated farm along the border and fitted with a set of false Northern Ireland plates. Then Qui

“Obviously,” said Seymour, “Qui

“The Security Service?”

“No,” replied Seymour. “Our ability to monitor phone calls didn’t extend beyond the borders of the United Kingdom. The Omagh plot originated in the Irish Republic, so we had to rely on GCHQ to do the eavesdropping for us.”

The Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, was Britain’s version of the NSA. At 2:20 p.m. it intercepted a call from a man who sounded like Eamon Qui

“The telephone warning was incorrect,” said Gabriel.

Seymour nodded slowly. “The Vauxhall wasn’t anywhere near the courthouse. It was several hundred yards farther down Lower Market Street. When the RUC began the evacuation, they unwittingly drove people toward the bomb rather than away from it.” Seymour paused, then added, “But that’s exactly what Qui

At ten minutes past three the bomb detonated. Twenty-nine people were killed, another two hundred were wounded. It was the deadliest act of terrorism in the history of the conflict. So powerful was the revulsion that the Real IRA felt compelled to issue an apology. Somehow, the peace process held. After thirty years of blood and bombs, the people of Northern Ireland had finally had enough.

“And then the press and the families of the victims started to ask uncomfortable questions,” said Seymour. “How did the Real IRA manage to plant a bomb in the middle of Omagh without the knowledge of the police and the security services? And why were there no arrests?”

“What did you do?”

“We did what we always do. We closed ranks, burned our files, and waited for the storm to pass.”