The English Spy (10 page)

T
HE COTTAGE STOOD ON
D
OONEN
R
OAD
, perched atop a high rocky bluff overlooking the dark waters of Salt Lake. It had three bedrooms, a large kitchen with modern appliances, a formal dining room, a small library and study, and a cellar with walls of stone. The owner, a successful Dublin lawyer, had wanted a thousand euros for a week. Housekeeping had countered with fifteen hundred for two, and the lawyer, who rarely received offers in winter, accepted the deal. The money appeared in his bank account the next morning. It came from something called Taurus Global Entertainment, a television production company based in the Swiss city of Montreux. The lawyer was told the two men who would be staying in his cottage were Taurus executives who were coming to Ireland to work on a project that was sensitive in nature. That much, at least, was true.

The cottage was set back from Doonen Road by approximately
a hundred meters. There was a flimsy aluminum gate that had to be opened and closed by hand and a gravel drive that wound its way steeply up the bluff through the gorse and the heather. On the highest point of the land stood three ancient trees bowed by the wind that blew from the North Atlantic and up the narrows of Clifden Bay. The wind was cold and without remorse. It rattled the windows of the cottage, clawed at the tiles of the roof, and prowled the rooms each time a door opened. The small terrace was uninhabitable, a no-man’s-land. Even the gulls did not stay there long.

Doonen Road was not a real road but a narrow strip of pavement, scarcely wide enough for a single car, with a ribbon of green grass down the center. Holidaymakers traveled it occasionally, but mainly it served as the back door to Clifden village. It was a young town by Irish standards, founded in 1814 by a landowner and sheriff named John d’Arcy who wished to create an island of order within the violent and lawless wilds of Connemara. D’Arcy built a castle for himself, and for the villagers a lovely town with paved streets and squares and a pair of churches with steeples that could be seen for miles. The castle was now a ruin, but the village, once virtually depopulated by the Great Famine, was among the most vibrant in the west of Ireland.

One of the men staying in the rented cottage, the smaller of the two, hiked to the village each day, usually in late morning, dressed in a dark green oilskin coat with a rucksack over his shoulder and a flat cap pulled low over his brow. He would purchase a few things at the supermarket and snare a bottle or two from Ferguson Fine Wines, Italian usually, sometimes French. And then, having acquired his provisions, he would wander past the shop windows along Main Street with the air of a man who was preoccupied by weightier matters. On one occasion he popped into the Lavelle Art Gallery to have a quick peek at the stock. The proprietor would later recall that he seemed unusually knowledgeable about paintings. His accent was
hard to place. Maybe German, maybe something else. It didn’t matter; to the people of Connemara, everyone else had an accent.

On the fourth day his stroll along Main Street was more perfunctory than usual. He entered only a single shop, the newsagent, and purchased four packets of American cigarettes and a copy of the
Independent
. The front page was filled with the news from Dublin, where three members of the Real IRA had been found slain in a house in Ballyfermot. Another man was missing and presumed abducted. The Garda was searching for him. So, too, were elements of the Real IRA.

“Drug gangs,” muttered the man behind the counter.

“Terrible,” agreed the visitor with the accent no one could quite place.

He inserted the newspaper into his rucksack and, with some reluctance, the cigarettes. Then he hiked back to the cottage owned by the lawyer from Dublin, who, as it turned out, was deeply loathed by the full-time residents of Clifden. The other man, the one with skin like leather, was listening intently to the midday news on RTÉ.

“We’re close,” was all he said.

“When?”

“Maybe tonight.”

The smaller of the two men went onto the terrace while the other man smoked. A black storm was pushing up Clifden Bay, and the wind felt as though it were filled with shrapnel. Five minutes was all he could stand. Then he went back inside, into the smoke and the tension of the wait. He felt no shame. Even the gulls did not stay on the terrace for long.

Throughout his long career, Gabriel had had the misfortune of meeting many terrorists: Palestinian terrorists, Egyptian terrorists, Saudi terrorists,
terrorists motivated by faith, terrorists motivated by loss, terrorists who had been born in the worst slums of the Arab world, terrorists who had been raised in the material comfort of the West. Oftentimes, he imagined what these men might have achieved had they chosen another path. Many were highly intelligent, and in their unforgiving eyes he saw lifesaving cures never found, software never devised, music never composed, and poems never written. Liam Walsh, however, made no such impression. Walsh was a killer without remorse or proper education who had no ambition in life other than the destruction of life and property. In his case a career in terrorism, even by the reduced standards of the diehard Irish republicans, was about the best he could have hoped for.

He was without physical fear, however, and possessed a natural obduracy that made him difficult to break. For the first forty-eight hours he was left in total isolation in the damp chill of the cellar, blindfolded, gagged, deafened by earplugs, immobilized by duct tape. He was offered no food, only water, which he refused. Keller saw to his bathroom needs, which were minimal given his dietary restrictions. When necessary, he addressed Walsh in the accent of a Protestant of the working classes from East Belfast. The Irishman was offered no way out of his predicament, and he did not ask for one. Having seen three of his mates killed in the blink of an eye, he seemed resigned to his fate. Like the SAS, Irish terrorists and drug gangsters played by big boys’ rules.

On the morning of the third day, maddened by thirst, he partook of a few ounces of room-temperature water. At midday he drank tea with milk and sugar, and in the evening he was given more tea and a single slice of toasted bread. It was then that Keller addressed him for the first time at any length. “You’re in a shitload of trouble, Liam,” he said in his East Belfast accent. “And the only way out is to tell me what I want to know.”

“Who are you?” asked Walsh through the pain of his broken jaw.

“That depends entirely on you,” replied Keller. “If you talk to me, I’ll be your best friend in the world. If you don’t, you’re going to end up like your three friends.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Omagh,” was all Keller said.

On the morning of the fourth day, Keller removed the plugs from Walsh’s ears and the gag from his mouth and elaborated on the situation in which the Irishman now found himself. Keller claimed to be a member of a small Protestant vigilante group seeking justice for the victims of republican terrorism. He suggested it had ties to the Ulster Volunteer Force, the loyalist paramilitary group that had killed at least five hundred people, mainly Roman Catholic civilians, during the worst of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The UVF accepted a cease-fire in 1994, but its murals, with their images of armed masked men, still adorned walls in Protestant neighborhoods and towns in Ulster. Many of the murals bore the same slogan: “Prepared for peace, ready for war.” The same could have been said for Keller.

“I’m looking for the one who built the bomb,” he explained. “You know the bomb I’m talking about, Liam. The bomb that killed twenty-nine innocent people in Omagh. You were there that day. You were in the car with him.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You were there, Liam,” Keller repeated. “And you were in contact with him after the movement went to shit. He came down here to Dublin. You looked after him until it got too hot.”

“It’s not true. None of it’s true.”

“He’s back in circulation, Liam. Tell me where I can find him.”

Walsh said nothing for a moment. “And if I tell you?” he asked finally.

“You’ll spend some time in captivity, a long time, but you’ll live.”

“Bullshit,” spat Walsh.

“We’re not interested in you, Liam,” answered Keller calmly. “Only him. Tell us where we can find him, and we’ll let you live. Play dumb, and I’m going to kill you. And it won’t be with a nice neat bullet to the head. It’ll hurt, Liam. It’ll hurt badly.”

That afternoon a storm laid siege to the length and breadth of Connemara. Gabriel sat by the fire reading from a volume of Fitzgerald while Keller drove the windblown countryside looking for unusual Garda activity. Liam Walsh remained in isolation in the cellar, bound, gagged, blinded, deafened. He was given no liquid or food. By that evening he was so weakened by hunger and dehydration that Keller almost had to carry him to the toilet.

“How long?” asked Gabriel over dinner.

“We’re close,” said Keller.

“That’s what you said earlier.”

Keller was silent.

“Is there anything we can do to hurry things along? I’d like to be out of here before the Garda come knocking on the door.”

“Or the Real IRA,” added Keller.

“Well?”

“He’s immune to pain at this point.”

“What about water?”

“Water’s always good.”

“Does he know?”

“He knows.”

“Do you need help?”

“No,” said Keller, rising. “It’s personal.”

When Keller was gone, Gabriel went onto the terrace and stood in the ball-bearing rain. Five minutes was all it took. Even a hard man like Liam Walsh couldn’t stand the water for long.

E
ACH
F
RIDAY EVENING
, usually at six o’clock but sometimes a bit later if London or the wider world were in crisis, Graham Seymour had drinks with Amanda Wallace, the director-general of MI5. It was, without doubt, his least favorite appointment of the week. Wallace was Seymour’s former boss. They had entered MI5 the same year and had risen through the ranks along parallel tracks, Seymour in the counterterrorism department, Wallace in counterespionage. In the end it was Amanda who had won the race to the DG’s suite. But now, quite unexpectedly and in the twilight of his career, Seymour had been handed the biggest prize of all. Amanda hated him for it, for he was now London’s most powerful spy. Quietly, she worked to undermine him at every turn.

Like Seymour, Amanda Wallace had espionage in her DNA. Her mother had toiled in the file rooms of MI5’s Registry during the war,
and upon graduation from Cambridge, Amanda had considered no career other than intelligence. Their common lineage should have made them allies. Instead, Amanda had instantly cast Seymour in the role of rival. He was the handsome scoundrel to whom success came too easily, and she was the awkward, rather shy girl who would run him off his feet. They had known each other thirty years and together had reached the twin peaks of British intelligence, and yet the basic dynamics of their relationship had never changed.

On the previous Friday, Amanda had come to Vauxhall Cross, which meant that under the rules of their relationship it was Seymour’s turn to travel. He saw it as no imposition; he always liked going back to Thames House. His official Jaguar was cleared into the underground car park at 5:55 p.m., and two minutes later Amanda’s elevator deposited him on the uppermost floor. The main corridor was as quiet as a night ward. Seymour supposed the senior staff were mixing with the troops at one of the building’s two private bars. As always, he stopped to have a look inside his old office. Miles Kent, his successor as deputy, was staring blankly into his computer terminal. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in a week.

“How is she?” asked Seymour warily.

“Fit to be tied. But you’d better hurry,” Kent added. “Mustn’t keep the queen bee waiting.”

Seymour continued along the corridor to the DG’s suite. A member of Amanda’s all-male staff greeted him in the anteroom and showed him immediately into her large office. She was standing contemplatively in a window overlooking the Houses of Parliament. Turning, she consulted her wristwatch. Amanda valued punctuality above all other attributes.

“Graham,” she said evenly, as though she were reading his name from one of the dense briefing books her staff always prepared before an important meeting. Then she gave an efficient smile. It looked as
though she had taught herself the gesture by practicing in front of a mirror. “So good of you to come.”

A drinks tray had been left on Amanda’s long, gleaming conference table. She prepared a gin and tonic for Seymour and for herself a bone-dry martini with olives and cocktail onions. She prided herself on her ability to hold her liquor, a skill that, in her opinion, was obligatory for a spy. It was one of her few endearing qualities.

“Cheers,” said Seymour, raising his glass a fraction of an inch, but again Amanda only smiled. The BBC played silently on a large flat-panel television. A senior officer of the Garda Síochána was standing outside a small house in Ballyfermot where three men, all members of a Real IRA drug gang, had been found dead.

“Rather nasty,” said Amanda.

“A turf war, apparently,” murmured Seymour over the rim of his glass.

“Our friends in the Garda have their doubts about that.”

“What have they got?”

“Nothing, actually, which is why they’re concerned. The phones usually light up with chatter after a big gangland assassination, but not this time. And then,” she added, “there’s the manner in which they were killed. Usually, these mobsters hose down the entire room with automatic-weapons fire. But whoever did this was very precise. Three shots, three dead bodies. The Garda are convinced they’re dealing with professionals.”

“Do they have any idea where Liam Walsh is?”

“They’re operating under the assumption he’s somewhere in the Republic, but they haven’t a clue where.” She looked at Seymour and raised an eyebrow. “He’s not strapped to a chair in some MI6 safe house, is he, Graham?”

“No such luck.”

Seymour looked at the television. The BBC had moved on to the
next story. Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster was in Washington for a meeting with the American president. It had not gone as well as he had hoped. Britain was not terribly in vogue in Washington at the moment, at least not at the White House.

“Your friend,” said Amanda coolly.

“The American president?”

“Jonathan.”

“Yours, too,” replied Seymour.

“My relationship with the prime minister is cordial,” said Amanda deliberately, “but it’s nothing like yours. You and Jonathan are thick as thieves.”

It was clear Amanda wanted to say more about Seymour’s unique bond with the prime minister. Instead, she freshened his drink while sharing a piece of naughty gossip about the wife of a certain ambassador from an oil-rich Arab emirate. Seymour reciprocated with a report he’d received about a man with a British accent who was shopping for shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles at an arms bazaar in Libya. After that, with the ice having been broken, they fell into an easy conversation of the sort that only two senior spymasters could have. They shared, they divulged, they advised, and on two occasions they actually laughed. Indeed, for a few minutes it seemed their rivalry did not exist. They talked about the situation in Iraq and Syria, they talked about China, they talked about the global economy and its impact on security, and they talked about the American president, whom they blamed for many of the world’s problems. Eventually, they talked about the Russians. These days, they always did.

“Their cyberwarriors,” said Amanda, “are blasting away at our financial institutions with everything they’ve got in their nasty little toolbox. They’re also targeting our government systems and the computer networks of our biggest defense contractors.”

“Are they after something specific?”

“Actually,” she replied, “they don’t seem to be looking for much of anything. They’re just trying to inflict as much damage as possible. There’s a recklessness we’ve never seen before.”

“Any change in their posture here in London?”

“D4 has noticed a distinct increase in activity at the London
rezidentura
. We’re not sure what it means, but it’s clear they’re involved in something big.”

“Bigger than planting a Russian illegal in the prime minister’s bed?”

Amanda raised an eyebrow and traced an olive around the rim of her glass. The face of the princess appeared on the television. Her family had announced the creation of a fund to support causes she held dear. Jonathan Lancaster had been allowed to make the first donation.

“Hear anything new?” asked Amanda.

“About the princess?”

She nodded.

“Nothing. You?”

She set down her drink and considered Seymour for a moment in silence. Finally, she asked, “Why didn’t you tell me it was Eamon Quinn?”

She tapped her nail on the arm of the chair while she awaited a response, never a good sign. Seymour decided he had no choice but to tell her the truth, or at least a version of it.

“I didn’t tell you,” he said at last, “because I didn’t want to involve you.”

“Because you don’t trust me?”

“Because I don’t want you to be tainted in any way.”

“Why would I be tainted? After all, Graham,
you
were the head of counterterrorism at the time of the Omagh bombing, not me.”

“Which is why you became the DG of the Security Service.” He paused, then added, “And not me.”

A strained silence fell between them. Seymour longed to leave but could not. The matter had to have some resolution.

“Was Quinn acting on behalf of the Real IRA,” asked Amanda finally, “or someone else?”

“We should have an answer to that in a few hours.”

“As soon as Liam Walsh breaks?”

Seymour offered no reply.

“Is it an authorized MI6 operation?”

“Off the books.”

“Your specialty,” said Amanda caustically. “I suppose you’re working with the Israelis. After all, they wanted to take Quinn out of circulation a long time ago.”

“And we should have taken them up on the offer.”

“How much does Jonathan know?”

“Nothing.”

She swore softly, something she rarely did. “I’m going to give you a great deal of latitude on this,” she said finally. “Not for your sake, mind you, but for the sake of the Security Service. But I expect advance warning if your operation spills onto British soil. And if anything goes boom, I’ll make certain it’s your neck on the block, not mine.” She smiled. “Just so there’s no misunderstanding.”

“I would have expected nothing else.”

“Very well, then.” She looked at her watch. “I’m afraid I’ve got to run, Graham. Next week at your place?”

“I’m looking forward to it.” Seymour rose and extended his hand. “Always a pleasure, Amanda.”