The English Spy (12 page)

At the eastern end of Killary Harbor, Keller turned onto an unpaved track and followed it into a dense patch of heather and gorse. He stopped in a small clearing, killed the lights and the engine, and popped the interior trunk release. Gabriel reached for the latch, but Keller stopped him. “Stay,” was all he said before opening the door and stepping into the rain.

By then, Walsh had regained consciousness. Gabriel listened as Keller explained what was about to transpire. Because Walsh had cooperated, he would be released with no further harm. Under no circumstances was he to discuss his interrogation with his associates. Nor was he to make any attempt to pass a message of warning to Quinn. If he did, said Keller, he was dead.

“Are we clear, Liam?”

Gabriel overheard Walsh murmuring something in the affirmative. Then he felt the rear end of the Škoda rise slightly as Keller helped the Irishman from the boot. The lid closed; Walsh shuffled blindfolded into the heather, Keller clutching one elbow. For a moment there was only the wind and the rain. Then from deep in the heather came two muted flashes of light.

Keller soon reappeared. He slid behind the wheel, started the engine, and reversed back to the road. Gabriel stared out the window as news from a troubled world issued softly from the radio. This time, he didn’t bother to ask how Keller felt. It was personal. He closed his eyes and slept. And when he woke it was daylight and they were crossing the border into Northern Ireland.

T
HE FIRST TOWN ON THE
other side of the border was Aughnacloy. Keller stopped for gas next to a pretty flint church and then followed the A5 north to Omagh, just as Quinn and Liam Walsh had done on the afternoon of August 15, 1998. It was a few minutes after nine when they breached the town’s southern outskirts; the rain had ended and a bright orange sun shone through a slit in the clouds. They left the car near the courthouse and walked to a café on Lower Market Street. Keller ordered a traditional Irish breakfast but Gabriel asked for only tea and bread. He glimpsed his reflection in the window and was dismayed by his appearance. Keller, he decided, looked worse. His eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot, and his face was sorely in need of a razor. Nowhere in his expression, however, was there any suggestion he had recently killed a man in a patch of heather and gorse in County Mayo.

“Why are we here?” asked Gabriel as he watched the first pedestrians of the morning, shopkeepers mainly, moving purposefully along the shimmering pavements.

“It’s a nice place.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“On several occasions, actually.”

“What brought you to town?”

“I used to meet a source here.”

“IRA?”

“More or less.”

“Where’s the source now?”

“Greenhill Cemetery.”

“What happened?”

Keller fashioned his hand into the shape of a gun and placed the barrel against his temple.

“IRA?” asked Gabriel.

Keller shrugged. “More or less.”

The food arrived. Keller devoured his as though he had not eaten in many days, but Gabriel picked at his bread without appetite. Outside, the clouds were playing tricks with the light. It was morning one minute, dusk the next. Gabriel imagined the street littered with shattered glass and human limbs. He looked at Keller and again asked why they had come to Omagh.

“In case you were having second thoughts.”

“About what?”

Keller looked down at the remnants of his breakfast and said, “Liam Walsh.”

Gabriel made no reply. On the opposite side of the street, a woman with one arm and burns on her face was attempting to unlock the door of a dress shop. Gabriel supposed she was one of the wounded. There were more than two hundred that day: men,
women, teenagers, small children. The politicians and the press always seemed to focus on the dead after a bombing, but the wounded were soon forgotten—the ones with scorched flesh, the ones with memories so terrible that no amount of therapy or medication could put their minds at rest. Such were the accomplishments of a man like Eamon Quinn, a man who could make a ball of fire travel one thousand feet per second.

“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.”

T
HEY 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.”