The English Spy (36 page)

T
HEY ASKED NO FURTHER QUESTIONS
of Billy Conway, and he asked none of them. Blood flowed freely from his broken nose during the ride north to Larne, but by the time they reached Glenarm a crust of black had formed around the rims of his nostrils. Keller directed Gabriel inland along the Carnlough Road, then north on Killycarn. They followed it until it turned to gravel and shed its name. Then they followed it a little farther, until the last farm had fallen away and the Creggan Forest rose from the land. Keller told Gabriel to stop and kill the engine. Then he looked at Billy Conway.

“Remember this place, Billy? We used to come up here in the old days when you had something important to tell me. We’d drive up here in that old Granada and have a few beers while we listened to the guns over at the Creggan Lodge. Remember, Billy?”

Keller’s voice had taken on a West Belfast accent, Falls Road with a touch of Ballymurphy. Billy Conway said nothing. He was staring straight ahead. A thousand-yard stare, thought Gabriel. A dead man’s stare.

“We always took good care of you, didn’t we, Billy? We paid you well. We protected you. But you didn’t need protection, did you, Billy? You were working for the IRA the whole time. Working for Eamon Quinn. You’re a tout, Billy. You’re a lousy fucking tout.” Keller placed the barrel of the Glock to the back of his head. “Aren’t you going to deny it, Billy?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Not so long,” said Keller. “Isn’t that what you told me the day we renewed our friendship in Belfast? The day you found Maggie Donahue for me. The day you set me up.” Keller pressed the barrel of the gun hard against Conway’s skull. “Aren’t you going to deny it, Billy?”

Billy Conway was silent.

“You were always honest, Billy.”

“You should have never come back here.”

“Thanks to Quinn, we didn’t have much choice. Quinn led me back here. And you made sure I found the things he wanted me to find. A wife and a daughter. A pile of money. A torn tram ticket. A photograph of a Lisbon Street. Maggie Donahue wanted no part of it. She was too busy trying to survive in a shithole like the Ardoyne without a husband. But you threatened her into doing it. You told her you’d kill her if she went to the police. Her daughter, too. And she believed you, Billy, because she knows what happens to touts in West Belfast.” Keller laid the barrel of the gun along Billy Conway’s cheek. “Deny it, Billy.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to swear that you’ll never go anywhere near that woman or her child again.”

“I swear it.”

“Wise boy, Billy. Now get out of the car.”

Conway sat motionless. Keller slammed the gun into his broken nose.

“I said get out!”

Conway pulled the latch and staggered from the car. Keller followed after him. “Start walking,” he said. “And while you’re walking, tell me where I can find Eamon Quinn.”

“I don’t know where he is.”

“Sure you do, Billy. You know everything.”

Keller shoved Conway along the track and fell in behind him. From the trees of the Creggan Forest came the crack of a hunter’s twelve-gauge. Conway froze. With a jab from the barrel of the Glock, Keller prodded him forward.

“How did Quinn get out of England?”

“The Delaneys.”

“Jack and Connor?”

“Aye.”

“He wasn’t alone, was he, Billy?”

“He had two women with him.”

“Where did the Delaneys drop them?”

“Shore Road, near the castle.”

“You were there?”

“I picked them up.”

“What kind of car did you have?”

“Peugeot.”

“Stolen, borrowed, or rented?”

“Stolen. False plates.”

“Quinn’s favorite.”

Two more shotgun blasts, closer. A brace of pheasants took flight from a field. Smart birds, thought Keller.

“Where is he, Billy? Where’s Quinn?”

“He’s in South Armagh,” said Conway after a moment.

“Where?”

“Crossmaglen.”

“Jimmy Fagan’s farm?”

Conway nodded. “The same place we took you that night. Quinn says he wants to nail you to the Cross for your sins.”

“We?” asked Keller.

There was silence.

“You were there, Billy?”

“For part of it,” admitted Conway. “The two women are in the same building where Quinn strapped you to that chair.”

“You’re sure?”

“I put them there myself.”

They had reached the edge of the trees. Billy Conway stumbled to a stop.

“Turn around, Billy. I have one more question.”

Billy Conway stood motionless for a long moment. Then slowly he turned to face Keller.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

“I want a name, Billy—the name of the man who told Eamon Quinn that I was in love with a girl from Ballymurphy.”

“I don’t know who did it.”

“Sure you do, Billy. You know everything.”

Conway said nothing.

“His name,” said Keller, pointing the gun at Conway’s face. “Tell me his name.”

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.

O
N THE OUTSKIRTS OF
R
ANDALSTOWN
, 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.

T
HEY STOPPED IN
C
OOKSTOWN 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 the 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: J
ONESBOROUGH,
F
ORKHILL,
S
ILVERBRIDGE,
C
ROSSMAGLEN
. . . 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
. . .