and cigarettes.’
‘Yes, isn’t life hell?’
He was doing exactly what Ferguson had said he was. He put the telephone system on speaker, ran his hands over his bomb-scarred face, poured a generous measure of Scotch into a glass, and tossed it down.
‘How were things at the United Nations?’
‘Just what you’d expect – the Russians are stirring the pot.’
‘Well, they would, wouldn’t they? I thought you’d be back today. Where are you, Washington?’
‘I was. Briefed the Ambassador here and bumped into Blake Johnson just back from a fact-finding mission to Kosovo. He brought me down to Nantucket to see Cazalet.’
‘And?’
‘And Kosovo turned out to be rather interesting for our good friend Blake. Let me tell you.’
When Ferguson was finished, he said, ‘What do you think?’
‘That it’s a hell of a good story to enliven a rather dull London morning. But what do you want me to do with it? Miller’s a trouble shooter for the Prime Minister, and you’ve always said to avoid politicians like the plague. They stick their noses in where they aren’t wanted and ask too many questions.’
‘I agree, but I don’t like being in the dark. Miller’s supposed to have spent most of his career behind a desk, but that doesn’t fit the man Blake described in this Banu place.’
‘You have a point,’ Roper admitted.
‘So see what you can come up with. If that means breaking a few rules, do so.’
‘When do you want it, on your return?’
‘You’ve got until tomorrow morning, American time. That’s when I’m having breakfast with the President.’
‘Then I’d better get on with it,’ Roper said.
He clicked off, poured another whisky, drank it, lit a cigarette, then entered Harry Miller’s details. He found the basic stuff without difficulty, but after that it was rather thin on the ground.
The outer door opened and Doyle, the Military Police sergeant who was on night duty, peered in. A soldier for twenty years, Doyle was of Jamaican ancestry although born in the East End of London, with six tours of duty in Northern Ireland and two in Iraq. He was a fervent admirer of Roper, the greatest bomb disposal expert in the business during the Troubles, a true hero in his eyes.
‘I heard the speaker, sir. You aren’t at it again, are you? It’s four o’clock in the bleeding morning.’
‘Actually it’s four thirty and I’ve just had the General on. Would you believe he’s with the President in Nantucket?’
‘He certainly gets around.’
‘Yes, well, he’s given me a request for information he wants to have available for breakfast.’
‘Anything special, sir?’
‘He wants a background on a Major Harry Miller, a general fixer for the Prime Minister.’
Doyle suddenly stopped smiling. ‘A bit more than that, I’d have thought.’
‘Why do you say that? How would you know him? You don’t exactly get to Downing Street much these days.’
‘No, of course not, sir. I’m sorry if I’m speaking out of turn.’
‘He looks pretty straightforward to me. Sandhurst, saw what war was like in the Falklands for a few months, then spent the rest of his career in Army Intelligence Corps headquarters in London.’
Doyle looked uncomfortable. ‘Yes, of course, sir, if you say so. I’ll get your breakfast. Bacon and egg sandwich coming up.’
He turned and Roper said, ‘Don’t go, Tony. We’ve known each other a long time, so don’t mess around. You’ve known him somewhere. Come on – tell me.’
Doyle said, ‘Okay, it was over the water in Derry during my third tour.’ Funny how the old hands never called it Londonderry, just like the IRA.
‘What were you up to?’
‘Part of a team manning a safe house down by the docks. We weren’t supposed to know what it was all about, but you know how things leak. You did enough tours over there.’
‘So tell me.’
‘Operation Titan.’
‘God in heaven,’ Roper said. ‘Unit 16. The ultimate disposal outfit.’ He shook his head. ‘And you met him? When was this?’
‘Fourteen years ago. He was received, that’s what we called it, plus a younger officer badly wounded. Their motor was riddled. An SAS snatch squad came in within the hour and took them away.’
‘They weren’t in uniform?’
‘Unit 16 didn’t operate in uniform.’
‘And you don’t know what happened?’
‘Four Provos shot dead on River Street is what happened. It hit the news the following day. The IRA said it was an SAS atrocity.’
‘Well, they would.’ Roper nodded. ‘And when did you see him again?’
‘Years later on television when he became an MP and was working for the Northern Ireland Office.’
‘It gets worse.’ Roper nodded. ‘So, a bacon and egg sandwich and a pot of tea and bring me another bottle of Scotch. Be prepared to hang around. I may need your expertise on this one.’
Harry Miller had been born in Stokely in Kent in the country house in which the family had lived since the eighteenth century. His father, George, had served in the Grenadier Guards in the Second World War, there was family money, and after the war he became a barrister and eventually Member of Parliament for Stokely and the general area. Harry was born in 1962, his sister Monica five years later, and tragically her mother had died giving birth to her.
George Miller’s sister Mary, a widow, moved in to hold the fort, as it were. It worked well enough, particularly as the two children went to boarding school at an early age, Winchester for Harry and Sedgefield for Monica, who was only fourteen when he went to Sandhurst. She was a scholar by nature, which eventually took her to New Hall college at Cambridge to study archaeology, and when Roper checked on her, he found she was still there, a lecturer and a Fellow of the college, married to a professor, Sir John Starling, who had died of cancer the previous year.
According to the screen, Miller’s career with the Intelligence Corps had been a non-event, and yet the Prime Minister had made him an Under-Secretary of State at the Northern Ireland Office, which obviously meant that the PM was aware of Miller’s past and was making use of his expertise.
Roper was starting to go to town on Unit 16 and Operation Titan, when Doyle came in with a tray.
‘Smells good,’ Roper said. ‘Draw up a chair, Tony, pour me a nice cup of tea and I’ll show you what genius can do to a computer.’
His first probings produced a perfect hearts-and-minds operation out of Intelligence Headquarters in London, in which Miller was heavily involved, full of visits to committees, appeals to common sense and an effort to provide the things that it seemed the nationalists wanted. It was a civilized discussion, providing the possibility of seeing each others’ points of view, and physical force didn’t figure in to the agenda.
Miller met and discussed with Sinn Fein and the Provos, everything sweetly reasonable. Then came a Remembrance Day, with assembled Army veterans and their families, and a bomb which killed fourteen people and injured many more. A few days later, a hit squad ambushed a local authority van carrying ten Protestant labourers who were there to do a road repair. They were lined up on the edge of a ditch and machine-gunned.
Finally, a roadside bomb