Tested by Fire by David Costa (the little red hen read aloud TXT) 📗

flow of unaccounted cash to spend. A good handler taught the agent well at every aspect of the game as they arose. The handler also needed to study the agent. Know their personal background and habits through and through. What makes them tick? Do they have a drink or drug problem? Are they a gambler? Do they have problems at home? And most important: do they really listen? Can they do this without bringing suspicion on themselves by their actions or what they say? But above all, can they be trusted?

Thinking back on the agents course Reece would laugh to himself when he remembered the room of trainees being asked by the instructor, if they looked at all the instructors on the course were there any of them they would target for recruitment? The whole room including Reece agreed on one of the MI5 Instructor’s being ideal material as he drank too much when in company and wanted to be everyone’s friend. A few weeks after the course Reece was not too surprised when he saw media reports that the same MI5 officer had been arrested and charged with trying to pass secrets to the Russians.

Reece had always lived by the only trust that really mattered, to trust no one but himself. Mary McAuley came a close second. She also fell into the only remaining type of agent. The one who had been true to their cause but then the cause she aspired to had changed, had died as far as the agent was concerned. In Mary’s case, fighting the British, fighting a war against soldiers and police who represented the oppression she’d grown up with, was a war she could put her name to. But when that war resulted in the deaths of more and more innocent men, women, and children, she’d changed. The men and women who had carried out her war had changed from patriotic Irishmen to a bunch of cruel terrorists, like Sean Costello, who killed for the fun of it. The cause was a banner they hid behind.

They didn’t bring the Brits to the Peace Table Talks because they were winning, it was more the opposite, the Provisional IRA had been beaten by the Brits mainly by their intelligence organisations. The British had worked on recruiting good agents like Mike and using high tech surveillance methods to bring the terrorist group to its knees. The Republican leadership had, in general, seen this coming. Each year the security forces had taken out more of their top people who were ending up either dead or serving long terms of imprisonment. The dregs that remained were not of the same calibre and therefore even easier for the security forces to pick off. When the talks came about, lowlifes like Sean Costello formed their own killing groups, making Costello a big fish in a small pond. This was the agent bracket Mary McAuley fell into. The agent who, despite still wanting a United Ireland in her heart and was willing to fight the forces of oppression, wasn’t willing to kill innocent fellow Irishmen and women to achieve it.

Reece had run many agents in his time and took great pride that his tradecraft training had paid off when it came to teaching his agents how to stay alive. A number of these agents had been lifted for interrogation by the Provisional IRA Nutting Squad. Reece knew of the techniques used by this brutal group to extract confessions of collusion with the security forces from its members. There were no Human Rights or Geneva Convention rules when it came to getting the answers they wanted, so the training from Reece had saved many of his agents from the inevitable hole in the back of the head. They had tortured one lad so badly and taped his so-called confession that he’d been an informer despite the fact he’d never worked for the security forces. The lad had confessed to stop the beatings he was getting and had ended up with two Armalite rounds in the back of his head, before he was dumped in a field in South Armagh. His interrogators sent his taped confession to his parents which only added to the horror and misery they were going through at the death of their son. To add to their trials, they couldn’t recognise their own son when his body was brought to the hospital because of the damage done by the Armalite rounds and the brutal beatings he’d received.

Reece understood the world his agents lived in and thought he’d left all that in the past. When he’d left Special Branch, he’d introduced his agents to their new handlers. Everyone except Mary. She’d remained steadfast in her resolve that she’d only work with him and would only stop when one of them was dead.

A long way off, thought Reece. The starter and main course had come and gone, washed down with the cool tasting Chablis, iced water, and a strong coffee. The restaurant had filled and now began to empty again.

‘I like this place,’ she said as she watched people leaving. ‘It always has good memories for me.’ Looking at Reece she said, ‘You don’t know how close I came to asking you up to my room when you walked me back the last time we dined here.’

Reece had thought about that night many times; he knew she was looking for a reaction.

‘I’ve often thought about that night too. After two bottles of wine and being in the company of a beautiful woman, the man in me would have accepted your invitation. But, being the professional and knowing you had travelled over with a party of people from Belfast, the risk of being seen together would have been too great. Now, we have to be professional again, but when this is all over, I would like to see you when we could get to know that other side of our lives outside all