Special Air Service

The Special Air Service is mentioned as the force expected to carry out a planned killing of an Irish bishop during a visit to another bishop in Londonderry. The operation never proceeds: information gathered by the Institute for External Works helps make it unnecessary, and the bishop’s nationalist activism is restrained through exposure rather than physical force.

The planned operation

The novel introduces the Special Air Service through Lorenzo Quart’s earlier investigation of Bishop Mulcahy, an Irish prelate whose correspondence with Irish Republican Army activists had been concealed behind volumes of the Summa Theologica in his library. Quart obtained photographic copies of the letters, which Monsignor Spada later showed to Mulcahy in Rome. The discovery persuaded the bishop to exercise caution in his nationalist activity.

The same intelligence revealed that the Special Air Service was expected to kill Mulcahy during a forthcoming visit to his colleague, the Bishop of Londonderry. The proposed operation carried a covert political dimension: English planners intended to make the killing appear to have been the work of Ulster unionist paramilitaries. The account presents the assassination as a plan known through informants, not as an operation carried out by the force.

Intelligence and prevention

The Institute for External Works’ intervention changes the circumstances around the planned killing. By uncovering and preserving evidence of Mulcahy’s clandestine correspondence, Quart gives Spada a means to confront him and curb the risks associated with his activism. The episode states that this exposure convinced the Special Air Service’s special units that a drastic physical elimination was unnecessary.

The force therefore enters the story as a contemplated instrument of state violence, while the Institute for External Works operates through surveillance, informants, and disclosure. The contrast is consequential: the threat is not resolved by a direct confrontation between armed units, but by information that makes the proposed killing dispensable. The novel provides no account of the Special Air Service carrying out an action in the present-day investigation.