by Daniel Silva
“Well?” asked Keller.
“No,” said Gabriel. “No second thoughts.”
A red Vauxhall sedan pulled to the curb outside the café and two men climbed out. Gabriel felt a rush of blood to his face as he watched the men move off down the street. Then he stared at the car as though he were waiting for the timer in the glove box to reach zero.
“What would you have done?” he asked suddenly.
“About what?”
“If you’d known where the bomb was that day.”
“I would have tried to warn them.”
“And if the bomb were about to explode? Would you have risked your life?”
The waitress placed the check on the table before Keller could answer. Gabriel paid the bill in cash, pocketed the receipt, and followed Keller into the street. The courthouse was to the right. Keller turned left instead and led Gabriel past the brightly colored shops and storefronts, to a tower of blue-green glass rising from the pavement like a gravestone. It was the memorial for the victims of the Omagh bombing, placed on the very spot where the car had exploded. Gabriel and Keller stood there for a moment, neither man speaking, as pedestrians hurried past. Most averted their eyes. On the opposite side of the street a woman with pale hair and sunglasses lifted a smartphone to her face, as if to take a photograph. Keller quickly turned his back to her. So did Gabriel.
“What would you have done, Christopher?”
“About the bomb?”
Gabriel nodded.
“I would have done everything in my power to move the people to safety.”
“Even if you died?”
“Even if I died.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.”
Gabriel was silent for a moment. Then he said quietly, “You’re going to make a fine MI6 officer, Christopher.”
“MI6 officers don’t kill terrorists and leave their bodies in the countryside.”
“No,” said Gabriel. “Only the good ones.”
He looked over his shoulder. The woman with the smartphone was gone.
Twenty-five years had passed since Christopher Keller last set foot in Belfast, and the city center had changed much in his absence. Indeed, were it not for a few landmarks like the Opera House and the Europa Hotel, he scarcely would have recognized it. There were no British soldiers patrolling the streets, no army surveillance posts atop the taller buildings, and no fear on the faces of the pedestrians walking along Great Victoria Street. The city’s geography remained sharply divided along sectarian lines, and there were still paramilitary murals in some of the rougher neighborhoods. But for the most part, evidence of the long and bloody war had been erased. Belfast promoted itself as a tourist mecca. And for some reason, thought Keller, the tourists actually came.
One of the city’s main attractions was a vibrant Celtic music scene that had reappeared in the absence of war. Most of the bars and pubs that featured live music were located in the streets around St. Anne’s Cathedral. Tommy O’Boyle’s was on Union Street, on the ground floor of an old redbrick Victorian factory. It was not yet noon, and the door was locked. Keller thumbed the button on the intercom and quickly turned his back to the security camera. Greeted by silence, he pressed the button a second time.
“We’re closed,” a voice said.
“I can read,” Keller replied in his Belfast accent.
“What do you want?”
“A word with Billy Conway.”
A few seconds of silence, then, “He’s busy.”
“I’m sure he can make time for me.”
“What’s your name?”
“Michael Connelly.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Tell him I used to work for the Sparkle Clean laundry service on the Road back in the day.”
“That place closed down years ago.”
“We’re thinking about going back into business.”
There was another silence. Then the voice said, “Be a good lad and let me have a look at your face.”
Keller hesitated before glancing into the lens of the security camera. Ten seconds later the deadbolts of the door popped open.
“Come inside,” the voice instructed.
“I prefer it out here.”
“Suit yourself.”
A wad of newsprint somersaulted along the shadowed pavement, driven by a cold wind from the River Lagan. Keller turned up his coat collar. He thought of his sunlit terrace overlooking his valley in Corsica. It seemed alien to him now, a place he had visited once in his childhood. He could no longer conjure the aroma of the hills or a clear image of the don’s face. He was Christopher Keller again. He was back in the game.
He heard a rattle and, turning, saw the door of Tommy O’Boyle’s opening slowly. Standing in the narrow breach was a small, thin man in his late fifties, with gray stubble on his face and a bit more on his head. He looked as though he had just seen a ghost. In a way, he had.
“Hello, Billy,” said Keller genially. “Good to see you again.”
“I thought you were dead.”
“I am dead.” Keller put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Take a walk with me, Billy. We need to talk.”
19
GREAT VICTORIA STREET, BELFAST
THEY HAD TO GO SOMEWHERE no one would recognize them. Billy Conway suggested an American doughnut shop on Great Victoria Street; no IRA man, he said, would ever be caught dead there. He ordered two large coffees and pounced on an empty table in the back corner, next to the fire exit. It was the Belfast disease. Don’t sit too close to glass windows in case a bomb goes off in the street. Always leave yourself an escape route if the wrong sort comes through the front door. Keller sat with his back to the room. Conway eyed the other patrons over the rim of his cup.
“You should have called first,” he said. “You nearly gave me a coronary.”
“Would you have agreed to see me?”
“No,” said Billy Conway. “I don’t reckon I would’ve.”
Keller smiled. “You were always honest, Billy.”
“Too honest. I helped you put a lot of men into the Maze.” Conway paused, then added, “Into the ground, too.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Not that long.” Conway’s eyes flickered around the interior of the shop. “They gave me quite a going-over after you left town. They said you gave them my name in that farmhouse down in South Armagh.”
“I didn’t.”
“I know,” Conway said. “I wouldn’t be alive if you’d given me up, would I?”
“Not a chance, Billy.”
Conway’s eyes were on the move again. He had helped to save countless lives and prevent untold millions in property damage. And his reward, thought Keller, was to spend the rest of his life waiting for an IRA bullet. The IRA was like an elephant. It never forgot. And it surely never forgave an informant.
“How’s business?” asked Keller.
“Fine. You?”
Keller gave a noncommittal shrug of his shoulders.
“What business are you in these days, Michael Connelly?”
“It’s not important.”
“I assume that wasn’t your real name.”
Keller made a face to say that it wasn’t.
“How did you learn to speak like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like one of us,” said Conway.
“I suppose it’s a gift.”
“You’ve other gifts as well,” said Conway. “It was four against one in that farmhouse, and even then it wasn’t a fair fight.”
“Actually,” said Keller, “it was five against one.”
“Who was the fifth?”
“Quinn.”
A silence fell between them.
“You’re a brave man to come back after all these years,” Conway said after a moment. “If they find out you’re in town, you’re a dead man. Peace accord or no peace accord.”
The door of the shop opened and several tourists—Danes or Swedes, Keller could not decide—came in from the street. Conway frowned and drank his coffee.
“The tour guides take them into the neighborhoods and show them where the worst atrocities happened. And then they bring them to Tommy O’Boyle’s to hear the music.”
“It’s good for business.”
“I suppose.” He looked at Keller. “Is that why you came back? To take a tour of the Troubles?”
Keller watched the tourists file into the street. Then he looked at Conway and asked, “Who was the one who interrogated you after I left Belfast?”
“It was Quinn.”
“Where’d he do it?”
“I’m not sure. I really don’t remember much except for the knife. He told me he was going to cut out my eyes if I didn’t admit to being a spy for the British.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Obviously, I denied it. And I might have begged for my life a little, too. He seemed to like that. He was always a cruel bastard.”
Keller nodded slowly, as though Conway had spoken words of great insight.
“You hear about Liam Walsh?” Conway asked.
“Hard not to.”
“Who do you suppose was behind it?”
“The Garda says it was drugs.”
“The Garda,” said Conway, “are completely full of shit.”
“What do you know?”
“I know that someone walked into Walsh’s house in Dublin and killed three very hard men without breaking a sweat.” Conway paused, then asked, “Sound familiar?”
Keller said nothing.
“Why’d you come back here?”
“Quinn.”
“You’re not going to find him in Belfast.”
“Did you know he had a wife and daughter here?”
“I’d heard rumors to that effect, but I was never able to come up with a name.”
“Maggie Donahue.”
Conway lifted his eyes thoughtfully toward the ceiling. “Makes sense.”
“Know her?”
“Everybody knows Maggie.”
“Work?”
“Across the street at the Europa. In fact,” Conway added with a glance at his watch, “she’s probably there now.”
“What about the kid?”
“Goes to school at Our Lady of Mercy. Must be sixteen by now.”
“Know where they live?”
“Just off the Crumlin Road in the Ardoyne.”
“I need the address, Billy.”
“No problem.”
20
THE ARDOYNE, WEST BELFAST
IT TOOK BILLY CONWAY LESS than thirty minutes to establish that Maggie Donahue lived at 8 Stratford Gardens with her only child, a daughter who was called Catherine, after Quinn’s sainted mother. The neighbors were unaware of the source of the child’s name, though most suspected that Maggie Donahue’s absent husband, be he dead or alive, was an IRA man of some sort, quite possibly a dissident who had rejected the tenets of the Good Friday Agreement. Such sentiments ran deep in the Ardoyne. During the worst of the Troubles, the Royal Ulster Constabulary regarded the neighborhood as a no-go area, too dangerous to patrol or even enter. More than a decade after the peace accords, it was the scene of rioting and clashes between Catholics and Protestants.
To supplement the cash payments she received from her husband, Maggie Donahue worked as a waitress in the Lobby Bar of the Europa Hotel, the most bombed hotel in the world. That afternoon she had the misfortune of attending to the particular needs of a guest named Herr Johannes Klemp. His hotel registration card listed a Munich address, but his work—apparently it had something to do with interior design—required him to spend a great deal of time away from home. Like many frequent travelers, he was somewhat difficult to please. His lunch, it seemed, was a catastrophe. His salad was too limp, his sandwich too cold, the milk for his coffee had gone bad. Worse still, he had taken a liking to the poor creature whose job it was to make him happy. She did not find his attempts at small talk appealing. Few women did.
“Long day?” he asked as she refilled his cup with coffee.
“Just beginning.”
She smiled wearily. She had hair the color of a raven’s wing, pale skin, and large blue eyes over wide cheekbones. She had been pretty once, but her face had taken on a hard edge. He supposed Belfast had aged her. Or perhaps, he thought, it was Quinn who had ruined her looks.
“You’re from here?” he asked.
“Everyone’s from here.”
“East or West?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
“I’m just curious.”
“About what?”
“Belfast,” he said.
“Is that why you came here? Because you’re curious?”
“Work, I’m afraid. But I have the rest of the day to myself, so I thought I’d see a bit of the city.”
“Why don’t you hire a tour guide? They’re very knowledgeable.”
“I’d rather slit my wrists.”
“I know how you feel.” Her irony seemed to bounce off him like a pebble thrown at a bullet train. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“You can take the rest of the day off and show me around the city.”
“Can’t,” was all she said.
“What time do you get off work?”
“Eight.”
“I’ll stop by for a drink and tell you about my day.”
She smiled sadly and said, “I’ll be here.”
He paid the bill in cash and headed out to Great Victoria Street, where Keller waited behind the wheel of the Škoda. Lying on the backseat, wrapped in clear cellophane, was a bouquet of flowers. The small envelope was neatly addressed MAGGIE DONAHUE.
“What time does she get off work?” asked Keller.
“She said eight o’clock, but she might have been trying to avoid me.”
“I told you to play nice.”
“It’s not in my DNA to be nice to the wife of a terrorist.”
“It’s possible she doesn’t know.”
“Where did her husband get a hundred thousand pounds in used bills?”
Keller had no answer.
“What about the girl?” asked Gabriel.
“She’s in class until three.”
“And then?”
“A field hockey game against Belfast Model School.”
“Protestant?”
“Mostly.”
“Should be interesting.”
Keller was silent.
“So what do we do?”
“We deliver some flowers to Eight Stratford Gardens.”
“And then?”
“We have a look inside.”
But first they decided to take a detour through Keller’s violent past. There was the old Divis Tower, where he had lived among the IRA as Michael Connelly, and the abandoned cleaning service on the Falls Road, where the same Michael Connelly had tested the household laundry of the IRA for evidence of explosives. Farther down the Road was the iron gate of Milltown Cemetery, where Elizabeth Conlin, the woman Keller had loved in secret, lay buried in a grave that Eamon Quinn had dug for her.
“You’ve never been?” asked Gabriel.
“It’s too dangerous,” said Keller, shaking his head. “The IRA keep watch over the graves.”
From Milltown they drove past the Ballymurphy housing estates to Springfield Road. Along its northern flank rose a barricade separating a Protestant enclave from a neighboring Catholic district. The first of the so-called peace lines appeared in Belfast in 1969 as a temporary solution to the city’s sectarian bloodletting. Now they were a permanent feature of its geography—indeed, their number, length, and scale had actually increased since the signing of the Good Friday accords. On Springfield Road the barricade was a transparent green fence about ten meters in height. But on Cupar Way, a particularly tense part of the Ardoyne, it was a Berlin Wall–like structure topped by razor wire. Resid
ents on both sides had covered it in murals. One likened it to the separation fence between Israel and the West Bank.
“Does this look like peace to you?” asked Keller.
“No,” answered Gabriel. “It looks like home.”
Finally, at half past one, Keller turned into Stratford Gardens. Number 8, like its neighbors, was a two-level redbrick house with a white door and a single window on each floor. Weeds flourished in the forecourt; a green rubbish bin lay toppled by the wind. Keller pulled to the curb and switched off the engine.
“One wonders,” said Gabriel, “why Quinn decided to live in a luxury villa in Venezuela instead of here.”
“Did you get a look at the door?”
“A single lock, no deadbolt.”
“How long will it take you to unbutton it?”
“Thirty seconds,” said Gabriel. “Less than that if you let me leave those stupid flowers behind.”
“You have to take the flowers.”
“I’d rather take the gun.”
“I’ll keep the gun.”
“What happens if I run into a couple of Quinn’s friends in there?”
“Pretend to be a Catholic from West Belfast.”
“I’m not sure they’ll believe me.”
“They’d better,” said Keller. “Otherwise, you’re dead.”
“Any other helpful advice?”
“Five minutes, and not a minute more.”
Gabriel opened the door and stepped into the street. Keller swore softly. The flowers were still in the backseat.
21
THE ARDOYNE, WEST BELFAST
A SMALL IRISH TRICOLOR HUNG LIMPLY from an oxidized mount in the door frame. Like the dream of a united Ireland, it was faded and tattered. Gabriel tried the latch and, as expected, found it was locked. Then he drew a thin metal tool from his pocket and, using the technique taught to him in his youth, worked it carefully in the mechanism. A few seconds was all it took for the lock to surrender. When he tried the latch a second time, it invited him to enter. He stepped inside and closed the door quietly behind him. No alarm sounded, no dog barked.
