Northern Spy(26)

“Why did they choose you?”

“They wanted to recruit women,” she says. “We’re less likely to be searched.”

“There were other women.”

“But I would have done anything. I loved them.”

“Do you still?”

“Yes.”

I stare across the water while she tells me the names of the three men in her active service unit. Seamus Malone, Damian Hughes, and Niall O’Faolain. She says they’re like her brothers. They’d die for her.

“You’ve all been brainwashed.”

“It’s not that simple,” she says. “Should Kenya still be a British colony? Or India? It’s meant to be for the greater good.”

“No one asked you to do this for us.”

“Because they were scared of reprisals.”

“No, Marian. Everyone’s scared of you.” I feel suddenly exhausted. My head seems too heavy to hold up. “Are you saying you don’t regret joining?”

“I’m saying it’s complicated. I want a free Ireland.”

“What have you done?”

“We bombed power stations.”

That was her unit’s specialty, she says. They bombed power stations in Armagh, Tyrone, and Antrim, causing blackouts, the lights blinking off for miles around each one. The power firms had to spend millions on repairs.

“What was your role?”

“I built the bombs.”

Of course she did. Marian would be good at it, for the same reason she wasn’t good at school—her absorption, her cautiousness, her ability to go down a rabbit hole for hours. Seamus might have understood that from the beginning, it might have been part of why he chose her, because he knew her better than I did.

Each bomb took about eight hours to assemble, she says. She used Semtex, mostly. Sometimes gelignite. She worked out of a farmhouse on the River Bann. When I thought she was in Belfast, she was often at the farmhouse. It doesn’t seem possible that she could have kept up the lie all this time. The River Bann isn’t particularly close.

In the farmhouse, she built bombs for six power stations. It’s still there, of course. The dining table where she worked, the kitchen where she took breaks, the patio where she talked with Seamus, Damian, and Niall. Tea of hers might be in the cupboard, one of her cardigans might be draped from a hook.

The wet fabric of my swimsuit has absorbed the cold, and I start to shiver. I think of all the times I’ve told Marian how scared I am for Finn, how terrified that he’s not safe growing up here. She always told me not to worry.

“Did you ever consider what you were doing?”

“No one was hurt,” she says. “The point was to damage commercial property.”

The power firms were all English. If they were forced to leave, the reasoning went, the British government might eventually leave, too.

“You left a bomb at St. George’s. Would no one be hurt there?”

“Nothing was going to happen,” she says.

“How do you know?”

“Because I made it. It wasn’t a viable device.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Someone from the government approached me in the spring. He asked how I’d feel about a cease-fire.”

He asked her about peace, about progress. Marian makes it sound like a conversation, not a recruitment.

“Are you saying you’re an informer now?”

“Yes.”

Since the spring, Marian has been meeting with him about once a week. Mostly, she says, a car will pull up beside her on a quiet road, and her handler will be inside. He will drive for a few minutes while she tells him about her unit’s plans. She knows that the government has others like her inside the IRA, maybe a dozen.

“I thought you loved them.”

“I do,” she says.

“But you became an informer.”

“We’re having peace talks,” she says, and the hairs stand at the back of my neck. I’ve been waiting to hear that for so long.

Marian tells me that a handful of IRA leaders are in secret talks with the government. The leaders won’t tell the rest of the IRA about the talks until they reach a deal, to avoid causing a split in the movement. Some of the hard-liners won’t want to abandon the armed struggle.

For now, IRA operations are continuing as usual, while Marian and other informers work in secret to protect the peace process. A major attack at this stage would make the talks collapse. The government would walk away. All the informers and their handlers are trying to make sure that doesn’t happen.

“Does anyone in the IRA know what you’re doing?”

“No.”

She tells me about the IRA’s internal security team, which reviews every failed operation to determine if a mole was involved. “They investigated St. George’s,” she says.

“You need to leave. We can drive to Ardglass.” The lobster boats will be leaving soon, I can pay one of the men to bring her over to Scotland.

“I’m not leaving,” she says.

“They’re going to kill you.”

“I’ve already had my interview,” she says. The internal security team gave her a polygraph test. She assumes that she passed, since they wouldn’t have let her leave otherwise. “It was fine. I practiced polygraphs with Eamonn.”