I start to understand. Understand what is going to be asked of me.

‘It’s a guy who knows things – and it’s better you don’t even have his name or he yours. He knows bad stuff, Mikey, really bad stuff. And the country needs to hear what he has to say, needs to know what’s being done in our name. They’re looking for him – he can’t stay here much longer. He’s going north and on again – you don’t need to know where. All you have to do is drive him to a place where others will pick him up and take him onwards. A day’s drive – that’s all.’

In all the times Donovan had asked me to do things the voice he used had commanded and been marked by a latent aggression. Now I hear none of that. And if he told me he needed me to stand up straight and true I would hightail it out that door, but he hasn’t and when he speaks again it is to plead. I would be doing a good thing, a right thing, and he believes I will do it because that is the person I am. A better person than any of them. He makes it sound as if I am going to ring the Liberty Bell. And when I tell him I’m not prepared to be an accessory to a crime, and a serious crime at that, he tells me that I have no knowledge a crime has been committed. None of them have. That nothing has been made known to me or shared with me. And it will stay that way.

I need to try and explain what happens next, but it still doesn’t make full sense to me and it always comes out differently so I’m not sure what is afterthought and what passed through my mind at the time. It isn’t anything to do with Donovan any more because I finally know I don’t need his approval or carry any obligation to him and I tell myself that, setting aside some shameful private moments that are sadly part of any human life, I’ve observed the accepted rules of whatever game I found myself playing. Observed them pretty strictly. The fears I have now about where my country is heading had not then grown into what they were soon to become. So why, then, do I find myself even considering Donovan’s request? A request that goes against every concept of service I have ever harboured, an action tainted by the word ‘treason’ – one of those seemingly antiquated words but whose intimidating weight reaches into the modern world – and not just to my country but to the very ideals I thought my life had been built upon. I don’t know but just maybe a lifetime of service allows you a sense of your debt being paid, of entitling you to a new freedom of thought and action once that indentured service comes to an end. I truly don’t know, even though a day rarely passes without me trying to unravel its mystery and construct different paths that I might have followed.