Pray for Us Sinners Read Online Free Page A

the traffic and crossed the road to the entrance of the Belfast and County Down Railway station. A throng of commuters spilled from the portals. The man jostled his way through the crowd into the concourse. Before him a diesel locomotive stood at one platform, its engine leaking greasy exhaust fumes. He glanced up to the overhead clock. 8:17. The next commuter train would arrive at the other platform in fifteen minutes.
    He looked to his right. The porter’s trolley was where he had been told to expect it, parked beside a glass-fronted news kiosk. The kiosk was close to the gate where the passengers would be funneled to hand over their tickets to the ticket collector. There was no sign of the porter whose job it had been to leave the loaded trolley where it stood. The man smiled. The porter was a sensible lad. Very sensible.
    He slipped his case among the heap of luggage on the trolley, bent, opened the leather lid, straightened, and lit a smoke. He touched the lit cigarette to another bound to a clothes peg inside the case, closed the lid, shoved the case farther onto the trolley, and walked away.
    The ticket collector lounged, back turned to his gate, staring along the track.
    At 8:35, as the last of the disembarking passengers queued at the ticket gate and those who had been allowed through hurried past the kiosk, the smouldering tobacco burnt through the string, and the words “High explosive. TNT. 1 pound net. Dangerous” vanished in an inferno of incandescent gas.
    The ticket collector was impaled on the broken cast-iron railings of his gate. He died before the jagged metal ripped into his chest. A woman was thrown ten feet to slam into a child pushing a toy pram. The girl’s arm was snapped by the force of the collision. She screamed for her mother, who struggled to stand, trying to ignore the grating agony in her three crushed ribs.
    The blast shattered the kiosk’s panes and hurled glass shards while torn pieces of magazines and comics— Tit-Bits and Woman’s Own, Beano and Dandy —fluttered in the smoke-filled air like demented confetti.
    And through the acrid fumes, the shrieks and curses, pleas and groans joined in a lamentation for a province torn by hatred and sectarian war.
    *   *   *
    The Ford Prefect crossed the Upper Falls Road. Its passenger grunted, “Let me off here.” Carrying no suitcase this time, he walked easily, making his way to a street corner.
    Another man leaned against a wall. He carried his right shoulder higher than his left, and the left lens of his National Health Service granny glasses had been replaced by an opaque leather disc. He barely nodded as the pedestrian passed, rubbed his finger under his nose, and strolled on.
    Brendan McGuinness smiled. The mission he had planned had gone off smoothly. He poked a finger under his leather patch and scratched the eye socket.
    McGuinness turned and opened a front door. He let himself into a dingy hall. He shrugged. Four pounds of TNT was small beans. One of Sean Conlon’s men’s efforts. Sean was fiercely protective of his men. McGuinness, commanding officer of 1st Battalion, had little time for Conlon and his 2nd Battalion volunteers. The man had a soft spot. That hadn’t mattered yet, as long as they could work together smoothly on brigade staff, Sean as adjutant and Brendan as information officer. This morning’s job showed how they could cooperate. First Battalion had needed a bomb delivered to a safe house, and Sean had readily agreed to have his 2nd Battalion bomb makers provide it.
    McGuinness entered a scruffy kitchen. He ignored the pile of pots and a grease-encrusted frying pan lying in a pool of scummy water in the kitchen sink.
    It was one thing for Sean Conlon to help out with little things, but had he the stomach for something really big? He’d better have.
    McGuinness’s job as Brigade IO was to sift incoming information and use it to ensure the