The Marching Season

tennis ball to relieve the anxiety of command. Michael resisted the impulse to pull away. Wheaton was a bully, probably because he had been bullied himself.
    "I want to go on the record with you, Michael," Wheaton said pleasantly. Wheaton was always going "on the record" and "off the record," which Michael thought was absurd for an intelligence
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    officer. "I think your little day trip to Belfast is a lousy goddamn idea."
    "Do you really think it's appropriate to use language like that in here, David?"
    "Fuck you, Michael," he whispered.
    Michael pulled his elbow from Wheaton's grasp.
    "Kevin Maguire is no longer your asset," Wheaton said. Michael shot Wheaton a glance of disapproval for committing the death-penalty offense of speaking an agent's name aloud in an unsecured room. Wheaton regarded intelligence work as a game to be played and won. Conducting a sotto voce discussion of an agent while strolling the rooms of Buckingham Palace fit nicely with his own image of himself. "If you want him debriefed for the purposes of the task force, his control officer from London Station should handle it."
    "Harbinger was my agent," Michael said, using Maguire's code name. "I recruited him and I ran him. I was the one who coaxed him into giving us information that saved countless lives. I'm going to meet with him."
    "Now is not the time for taking a stroll down memory lane, especially not in a town like Belfast. Why don't you brief Harbinger's control officer on what you need? He can go in and make the meeting."
    "Because I want to do it myself"
    "Michael, I know we've had our disagreements, but I offer this counsel very sincerely. You're a desk man now, not a field officer. You're forty-eight years old, and you were nearly killed a year ago. Even the best of us would lose a step. Let me send my man in to meet with Harbinger."
    "I haven't lost a step," Michael said. "And as for Northern Ireland, it hasn't changed in four hundred years. I think I'll be able to take care of myself while I'm there."
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    They stepped outside into the bright sunlight of the courtyard.
    Wheaton said, "Harbinger wants to use your old procedures for the meeting. If he doesn't decide to make a meeting in two days, he wants you out of Belfast. You read me?"
    "I read you, David."
    "And if you fuck this up, I'll have your ass."
    17
    BELFAST
    Flights for Northern Ireland depart from a separate sec-tion of Heathrow's Terminal One, where passengers negotiate a gauntlet of security before boarding. Michael posed as a travel writer doing a piece for a magazine about the beauties of the Ulster countryside. During the flight he read guidebooks and maps. The English businessman seated next to him asked if Michael had been to Belfast before. Michael smiled stupidly and said it was his first time. The plane passed Liverpool and headed over the Irish Sea. The pilot announced that they had just left the airspace of the United Kingdom and would be touching down in Belfast in twenty-five minutes. Michael laughed to himself; even the British had trouble remembering Northern Ireland is actually part of the United Kingdom.
    The plane descended through broken cloud. Northern Ireland is rather like a vast farm interrupted by a couple of large cities, Belfast and Londonderry, and hundreds of small towns,
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    villages, and hamlets. The countryside is carved into thousands of square plots—some emerald, some the color of limes and olives, some fallow and brown. To the east, where the waters of Belfast Lough opened onto the Irish Sea, Michael glimpsed the castle at Carrickfergus. Belfast lay at the foot of Black Mountain, straddling the lough. Once it had been a thriving linen and shipbuilding center—the Titanic was built in the shipyards of Belfast— but now it looked like any other British industrial city fallen on hard times, a low smoking labyrinth of redbrick terraces.
    The plane touched down at Aldergrove Airport. Michael dawdled in the arrival lounge for a while to see if he could spot any surveillance. He bought tea in a cafe and browsed in the gift shop. One wall was covered with books on the conflict. There were brightly colored souvenir shirts and hats that perversely shouted northern Ireland! as if it were Cannes or Jamaica.
    The wind nearly tore Michael's coat from his body as he stepped outside. He passed the taxi stand and boarded an Ulster Bus coach for the city center. Belfast conjures images of civil