Conway lifted his face to the gray sky and spoke his own name. Keller’s vision blurred with rage and he felt his legs begin to buckle. The gun provided him a sense of balance. He never remembered pulling the trigger, only the controlled recoil of the weapon in his hand and a flash of pink vapor. He knelt with Billy Conway until he was certain he was dead. Then he rose to his feet and headed back to the car.
77
RANDALSTOWN, COUNTY ANTRIM
ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF RANDALSTOWN, Keller’s MI6 mobile phone vibrated. He drew it from his coat pocket and frowned at the screen.
“Graham Seymour.”
“What does he want?”
“He’s wondering why Billy Conway is no longer in the car.”
“They’re watching us.”
“Obviously.”
“What are you going to tell him?”
“I’m not sure. This is uncharted territory for me.” Keller held up the phone and asked, “Do you think this is acting as a transmitter?”
“Could be.”
“Maybe I should throw it out the window.”
“MI6 will dock your pay. Besides,” added Gabriel, “it might come in handy in Bandit Country.”
Keller placed the phone in the center console.
“What’s it like?” asked Gabriel.
“Bandit Country?”
“Crossmaglen.”
“It’s the kind of place they wrote songs about.” Keller stared out the window for a moment before continuing. “South Armagh was totally under the control of the Provos during the war, a de facto IRA state, and Crossmaglen was its holy city.” He glanced at Gabriel and added, “Its Jerusalem. The IRA never had to adopt a cell structure there. It operated as a battalion. An army,” added Keller. “They would spend their days plowing their fields and at night they would kill British soldiers. Before every patrol we were reminded that beneath every gorse bush or pile of stones there was probably a bomb or a sniper. South Armagh was a shooting gallery. And we were the targets.”
“Go on.”
“We referred to Crossmaglen as XMG,” Keller continued after a moment. “We had a watchtower in the main square called Golf Five Zero. You took your life in your hands every time you entered. The barracks were windowless and mortarproof. It was like serving on a submarine. When I escaped from Jimmy Fagan’s farm that night, I didn’t even try to get to XMG. I knew I would never make it alive. I went north to Newtownhamilton instead. We called it NTH.” Keller smiled and said, “We used to joke that it stood for ‘No Terrorists Here.’”
“Do you remember Fagan’s farm?”
“It’s not something I’ll ever forget,” replied Keller. “It’s on the Castleblayney Road. A portion of his land runs along the border. During the war it was a major smuggling route between the South Armagh Brigade and IRA elements in the Republic.”
“And the shed?”
“It’s situated at the edge of a large pasture, surrounded by stone walls and watchdogs. If the PSNI goes anywhere near that farm, Fagan and Quinn will know about it.”
“You’re assuming Madeline’s there.”
Keller said nothing.
“What if Conway was lying again? Or what if Quinn has already moved her?”
“He hasn’t.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because it’s Quinn’s way. The question is,” said Keller, “do we tell our friends at Vauxhall Cross and Thames House what we know?”
Gabriel glanced at the MI6 mobile and said, “Maybe we just did.”
They passed beneath a nest of CCTV cameras keeping watch on the M22. Keller removed a cigarette from his packet and twirled it unlit between his fingertips.
“There’s no way we can set foot in South Armagh without someone spotting us.”
“So we’ll go through the back door.”
“We have no night-vision capability or sound suppressors.”
“Or radios,” added Gabriel.
“How much ammunition do you have?”
“One full magazine and one spare.”
“I’m down a round,” said Keller.
“Pity.”
Keller’s MI6 phone vibrated a second time.
“What does he want?” asked Gabriel.
“He’s wondering where we’re going.”
“I guess they’re not listening after all.”
“What shall I tell him?”
“He’s your boss, not mine.”
Keller keyed in a message and returned the phone to the console.
“What did you say?”
“That we’re developing a piece of potentially vital intelligence.”
“You’re going to make a good MI6 officer, Christopher.”
“MI6 officers don’t operate in South Armagh without backup.” Keller paused, then added, “And neither does a man who’s about to be the chief of Israeli intelligence, not to mention a father of two.”
The motorway dwindled into a two-lane highway. It was half past two in the afternoon. Sunset was just ninety minutes away. Keller lit the cigarette and watched as Gabriel reflexively lowered his window to vent the smoke.
“You know,” said Keller, “none of this would have happened if you’d told Graham Seymour to take a hike when he came to see you in Rome. You’d be working on your Caravaggio, and I’d be drinking a glass of wine on my terrace in Corsica.”
“Any other pearls of wisdom, Christopher?”
“Just a question.”
“What’s that?”
“Who is Tariq al-Hourani?”
In London the same video image flickered in the op centers of Thames House and Vauxhall Cross—a winking blue light moving westward across Ulster on the A6. When the light reached Castledawson, it turned south toward Cookstown. Graham Seymour sent a third text to Keller’s mobile, but this time there was no reply, a fact he reluctantly shared with Amanda Wallace across the river at Thames House.
“Where do you think they’re going?” she asked.
“If I had to guess, they’re going back to the place where this all started.”
“Bandit Country?”
“Jimmy Fagan’s farm, to be precise.”
“They can’t go in there alone.”
“I’m not sure there’s much we can do to stop them at this point.”
“At least light up Keller’s mobile so we can hear what they’re saying.”
Seymour made eye contact with one of the techs and gave the order. A moment later he heard Gabriel explaining how Eamon Quinn, in a terrorist training camp in Libya, had made the acquaintance of a man named Tariq al-Hourani. No, thought Seymour. There was no stopping them now.
78
CROSSMAGLEN, SOUTH ARMAGH
THEY STOPPED IN COOKSTOWN LONG enough to purchase an Ordnance Survey map, a tin of black shoe polish, and two heavy-duty kitchen knives before driving into the setting sun to Omagh. A light rain fell as they moved south, enough so that Keller had to keep the wipers working all the way to Castleblayney on the Republic side of the border. Just outside the town was Lough Muckno. Keller followed a ribbon of a road around the southern shore of the lake, into a valley dotted with small farmhouses. Each of the houses represented a potential tripwire. Border or no border, they were now in Bandit Country.
Finally, Keller turned the car into a dense patch of blackthorn along the banks of the Clarebane River and killed the lights and the engine. The MI6 mobile lay on the center console, aglow with unread text messages from Vauxhall Cross. Gabriel handed it to Keller and said, “It might be time to let Graham know where we are.”
“Something tells me he already knows.”
Keller dialed Seymour’s number in London. Seymour came on the line instantly.
“It’s about time,” he snapped.
“Do you see where we are?”
“By my calculation, you’re less than a kilometer from the border.”
“Any chance you can give us a little covering fire?”
“It’s already in t
he works.”
“I haven’t told you what we need.”
“Yes, you have. And one more thing,” said Seymour. “I’ll need a receipt for those knives. The map and the shoe polish, too.”
By two that afternoon it had become apparent to Eamon Quinn that Billy Conway was in serious trouble. By four Quinn assumed that Conway was in British custody or, more likely, lying somewhere in the province with a bullet in his head. Surely, his death had not been a pleasant one. Before it, he would have divulged two pieces of information: the exact location of Madeline Hart and the truth about his role in the death of Elizabeth Conlin twenty-five years earlier. Quinn had no doubts as to how his old adversary would react. Keller was an SAS veteran turned professional assassin. He would come back to Jimmy Fagan’s farm. And Quinn would be waiting.
At half past four, as the sun was dropping into the hills, Quinn dispatched twelve men into the two hundred acres of the Fagan clan’s farm. Twelve veterans of the legendary South Armagh Brigade. Twelve hardened snipers with much British blood on their hands. Twelve men who wanted Christopher Keller dead as badly as Quinn did. In addition, Jimmy Fagan deployed another eight men at various spots around South Armagh to serve as scouts—including Francis McShane, who was sitting behind the wheel of a parked car outside the PSNI base in Crossmaglen.
Quinn and Fagan sat in the kitchen of the farmhouse, smoking, waiting. Quinn’s Makarov lay on the table, a suppressor screwed into the barrel. Next to it was the phone, and next to the phone lay the faded old map of what had once been the most dangerous two hundred square miles in the world. Quinn’s eyes traveled across it from east to west: JONESBOROUGH, FORKHILL, SILVERBRIDGE, CROSSMAGLEN . . . Places of glory, he thought. Places of death. Tonight he would write one more chapter in the legend.
Quinn looked down at his wristwatch, the watch that had been given to him by a man named Tariq al-Hourani, in a camp by the sea. It was seven fifteen. He removed the watch and read the inscription on the back.
No more timer failures . . .
After blackening their faces with the shoe polish, Gabriel and Keller struck out along the bank of the Clarebane River, Keller leading the way, Gabriel a step behind. The clouds obscured the moon and stars; the smack of the rain covered their footfalls. Keller flowed like water over the land, swiftly, without a sound. Gabriel, the secret soldier of the street, did his best to emulate his friend’s movements. Keller held his weapon in both hands and at eye level. Gabriel, behind him, pointed the barrel downward and to the right.
Five minutes after leaving the car, Keller paused and with the barrel of his Glock made a straight-line gesture toward the ground. It meant they had reached the Ulster border. He turned to the north and led Gabriel across a series of pastures, each divided by hedgerows of blackthorn. The border was a few yards to their right. Once, there would have been watchtowers manned by Grenadier Guards and Hussars, but now only grain silos and barns marked the horizon. Keller, the bloodstained survivor of South Armagh’s dirtiest fighting, moved slowly, planting each step as though a mine were beneath his foot, breaching each hedgerow as if his killer waited on the other side.
After moving about a kilometer in this laborious manner, Keller led Gabriel across a rocky patch of ground between a pair of ponds. Before them rose a stand of trees, and beyond the trees was Jimmy Fagan’s farm in Northern Ireland. Keller crept forward, tree to tree, and then froze. About thirty feet away, shrouded in darkness, stood a man with an AK-47 at the ready. The gun was fitted with a carbon-fiber over-barrel suppressor, a serious weapon for a serious predator. Keller carefully removed his MI6 mobile and sent a pre-typed text message to Vauxhall Cross. Then he drew the knife from his pocket and he waited.
Because it was a domestic matter, Graham Seymour allowed Amanda Wallace to make the actual call. It arrived at the Crossmaglen base of the PSNI at 7:27 p.m., and within a minute several units were rolling into Newry Street, lights blazing. By seven thirty Jimmy Fagan’s phone was buzzing with text messages from his scouts.
“How many units?” asked Quinn.
“Six at least, including some tactical boys.”
“Where are they headed?”
“Down the Dundalk Road.”
“The wrong way,” said Quinn.
“Not even close.”
Another text hit Fagan’s phone.
“What does it say?”
“They’re turning right on Foxfield.”
“Still the wrong way.”
“What do you think it means?”
“It means you should tell your boys to be on their toes, Jimmy.”
“Why?”
Quinn smiled. “Because they’re here.”
At 7:31 the man standing thirty feet from Christopher Keller removed his right hand from the AK-47 and used it to remove a mobile phone from his pocket. The phone flared briefly, and in the glow of its screen Keller glimpsed the face of the man who would soon be dead. He was Keller’s age, Keller’s height and build. He might have been a farmer. He might have driven a lorry or done odd jobs. In another lifetime he had been Keller’s enemy. Now he was his enemy again.
Like all veterans of the South Armagh Brigade, the man standing thirty feet from Keller knew every inch of the blood-soaked land. He knew every ditch, every patch of bramble, every hole where a gun was hidden or a booby-trap bomb was buried. He knew, too, the difference between the sound of an animal and the sound of a man. Too late, he looked up from his phone and saw Keller bearing down on him, a knife in one hand, a gun in the other. Keller forced the man to the ground. Then he drove the knife into his throat and held it until the man’s hands released their grip on the phone and the AK-47. Keller seized the gun; Gabriel, the phone. Then they moved silently forward across the field, toward the shed of corrugated metal, twenty feet by forty, where Keller should have died a long time ago.
“Everyone check in?” asked Quinn.
“Everyone but Brendan Magill.”
“Where’s he posted?”
“West side of the property, against the border.”
“Hit him again.”
Jimmy Fagan sent Magill a direct text. After ninety seconds there was still no response.
“Looks like we found them,” said Quinn.
“What now?”
“Kill the bait. And then bring me Keller and Allon alive.”
Fagan typed the message and hit SEND. Quinn carried the Makarov outside to watch the fireworks.
Thirty yards beyond the spot where Brendan Magill lay dead was a rock wall running on a north-south axis. Gabriel took cover behind it after a 7.62x39mm round shredded the air a few inches from his right ear. Keller hit the ground next to him as rounds exploded against the stones of the wall, sending sparks and fragments flying. The source of the fire was silenced, so Gabriel had only a vague idea of the direction from which it was coming. He poked his head above the wall to search for a muzzle flash, but another burst of rounds drove him downward. Keller was now crawling northward along the base of the wall. Gabriel followed after him, but stopped when Keller suddenly opened up with the dead man’s AK-47. A distant scream indicated that Keller’s rounds had found their mark, but in an instant they were taking fire from several directions. Gabriel flattened himself on the ground at Keller’s side, the Glock in one hand, the dead man’s phone in the other. After a few seconds he realized it was pulsing with an incoming text. The text was apparently from Eamon Quinn. It read KILL THE GIRL . . .
79
CROSSMAGLEN, SOUTH ARMAGH
A MID THE HEAP OF BROKEN and dismembered farm implements in Jimmy Fagan’s shed, Katerina had found a scythe, rusted and caked in mud, a museum piece, perhaps the last scythe in the whole of Ireland, north or south. She held it tightly in her hands and listened to the sound of men pounding up the track at a sprint. Two men, she thought, perhaps three. She positioned herself against the shed’s sliding door. Madeline was at the opposite end of the space, hooded, hands bound, her back to the bales of hay. She was the first an
d only thing the men would see upon entry.
The latch gave way, the door slid open, a gun intruded. Katerina recognized its silhouette: an AK-47 with a suppressor attached to the barrel. She knew it well. It was the first weapon she had ever fired at the camp. The great AK-47! Liberator of the oppressed! The gun was pointed upward at a forty-five-degree angle. Katerina had no choice but to wait until the barrel sank toward Madeline. Then she raised the scythe and swung it with every ounce of strength she had left in her body.
Two hundred yards away, crouched behind a stone wall at the western edge of Jimmy Fagan’s property, Gabriel showed the text message to Christopher Keller. Keller immediately poked his head above the wall and saw muzzle flashes in the doorway of the shed. Four flashes, four shots, more than enough to obliterate two lives. A burst of AK-47 fire drove him downward again. Eyes wild, he grabbed Gabriel savagely by the front of his coat and shouted, “Stay here!”
Keller hauled himself over the wall and vanished from sight. Gabriel lay there for a few seconds as the rounds rained down on his position. Then suddenly he was on his feet and running across the darkened pasture. Running toward a car in a snowy square in Vienna. Running toward death.
The blow that Katerina delivered to the neck of the man holding the AK-47 resulted in a partial decapitation. Even so, he had managed to squeeze off a shot before she wrenched the gun from his grasp—a shot that struck the hay bales a few inches from Madeline’s head. Katerina shoved the dying man aside and quickly fired two shots into the chest of the second man. The fourth shot she fired into the partially decapitated creature twitching at her feet. In the lexicon of the SVR, it was a control shot. It was also a shot of mercy.
When the gunfire ended, Madeline tore away the serge-cloth hood. Her hands were still bound. Katerina cut away the duct tape and helped her to her feet. Outside, a battle raged. From their vantage point at the center of the rolling property, the lines were clearly drawn in streaks of white tracer fire. Two figures were working their way across the pastures from the west, under heavy fire from several positions. Another man stood motionless on the porch of the distant farmhouse, watching the spectacle as though it had been arranged for his private amusement. Katerina suspected the two men approaching from the west were Gabriel Allon and Christopher Keller. And the man on the porch was Quinn.