Another passage from ‘Return of the Wolf’:
Olga thought of the child she had miscarried, to her longest lover, a patriot of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, a native of Belfast.
It was this lover who had sewed her own ties with Libya. Were it not for his connection to North Africa, she thought it doubtful it was an initiative she could undergo herself. This was true of much of her vocational journey.
Her parents and inner circle of loved ones were not steeped in the Basque nationalism of ETA. When she traced her steps, Séamus was her catalyst, or James, which he insisted she call him. He was of the firm belief the wider world outside the Emerald Isle needn’t anymore Séamus’ to perpetuate Irish jokes.
The Basque suspected he never had the nerve to tease outright. A healthy part of his insistence was due to an affection for the Dubliner James Joyce. The Basque was fluent enough in English to read and attempt to appreciate Séamus’ prose and poetry, and to know he was no Joyce. Séamus’ writing followed a stream of consciousness, yet to an external reader it was difficult to derive meaning from. The Basque didn't even know what the fuss was about with Joyce anyhow. She had vague recollection of flicking through Ulysses, but found it too abstruse and esoteric for the mood she picked it up in.
Séamus was a peculiar mixture of esoteric, yet also of the earth, grounded and simple. Though The Basque now, with decades of posterity, thought better of it, she knew this had been one of the strongest strains of attraction to him for her.
Foremost, she found his fervour sexy. She had grown up in Euskadi, steeped in both men and women like this. But in her teens, she found such ardour embarrassing. It was distant from her preoccupation at the time of young men with motorbikes, and the sense of mischief which came with it. She sensed this gravitation toward men with mobility represented an opportunity to spirit her from Euskadi.
The irony now, in middle age, was after a life teeming with lost comrades, lovers and a miscarried child late in term. Now, Euskadi attracted her with a vigour her teenage self couldn’t have anticipated.
Of even sadder irony was to risk a homecoming would in great likelihood result in court arrest and indefinite imprisonment. Even throughout the Continent, she lived in the angst of a Europol-issued warrant for her arrest. One never knew whether an encounter with an immigration official, risked arrest, or was a figment of her justified paranoia.
Of greatest value as a resource to The Basque was the whereabouts of targets. The fonts of such value were those able to get such information.
Her first port of call was a former contact in Bilbao, occupied by the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the West German far-left militants active in the 1970s. The Basque was too young to have been a contemporary of the Baader-Meinhof, also known as the Red Army Faction.
The Basque had only known her contact, Stefan, in the context of proffering information relating to locations of targets. How Stefan obtained this information was beyond The Basque. On a handful of occasions, she had tried her hand at developing this intelligence herself, with laughable results. To her mind, it didn’t seem such a challenging task, but somehow it proved to be.
More than a target’s physical coordinates on any given occasion, Stefan had the knack of identifying where a mark would be in a space accessible to her. Stefan could preempt where someone would be in a way optimising The Basque’s aim.
She had a couple different intelligence sources. Each carried differing qualities of risk, with varying degrees of trust.
The Basque city of Bilbao was overcast. On the heels of a summery day, a fine veil of shower refreshed the city, a welcome pall counterweighting the previous day’s expansive sun.
Little kept the two from meeting in a vibrant cafe in the city centre. They could talk above hushed tones, eschewing unnecessary feigning of cloak-and-dagger.
It was clear at least two or three, targets would centre around Paris. Another two in London. Her preferences were targets in teeming Continental metropolises. It afforded more anonymity, the ability to disappear among a crowd, than might be clear.
It wasn’t as though she’d coordinate to carry out a job in Trafalgar Square or the Champs-Élysées. Big cities offered many opportunities to hedge risk. yet Sleepier locations attracted interlopers passing through, attracting unwanted attention.
She apprehended some of her targets from the Mideast would pose a hindrance. It was her overwhelming preference to keep fingers crossed for their visitation to Europe. There, she felt secure in her knowledge of the landscape. In contrast, she knew her intelligence would be a liability to the local denizens in the Mideast.
The same went for a Russian mark. It didn’t seem beyond the pale to take the opportunity of their holidaying within the EU. The environment of Russia, or any of the former Soviet states, was an inscrutable cipher to her, which she wasn’t willing to ally with.
What if circumstances forced her, she anticipated? What if targets were keeping to the home base outside Europe? Could she venture out? It was her vast preference not to, but she’d have to see how events developed.
Stefan confirmed her doubts around corralling certain targets to a preferable Continental location.