The English Spy (37 page)

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 and 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.

Katerina forced Madeline to the ground. Then she dropped to one knee and fired four rounds toward one of Quinn’s men. Instantly, the tracer fire from that position ceased. Four more rounds eliminated a second member of Quinn’s team, and a single well-placed shot eradicated a third. Quinn’s pose was no longer so dispassionate. Katerina fired several shots at him, driving him back into the farmhouse. Then she turned for Madeline, but Madeline was gone.

She was stumbling down the slope of the hill toward Allon and Keller, weary and unbalanced, like a ragdoll come to life. Katerina shouted at her to get down, but it was no use; fear and gravity held Madeline in an unbreakable grip. Katerina turned to look for Quinn, and it was then the shot hit her. A perfect shot, square in the breastbone, through and through. Katerina scarcely felt its impact, nor did she feel pain. She dropped to her knees, her hands hanging limply at her sides, her face tilted toward the black sky. As she fell to the damp earth of South Armagh, she imagined she was drowning in a lake of blood. A hand tried to pull her to the surface. Then the hand released her and she was dead.

The gunfire had ended by the time Madeline collapsed into Gabriel’s arms. Keller left behind the AK-47 and, armed only with the Glock, sprinted down the pasture toward Jimmy Fagan’s house. Bullet holes pocked the rear facade, and a curtain billowed from the open door. Keller pressed his cheek against the bricks, listening for any sound from within, and then pivoted inside with the gun in his outstretched hands. He was about to fire upon Jimmy Fagan, but stopped when he noticed the lifeless stare in his eyes and the neat bullet hole in the center of his forehead. Keller quickly searched the house, but Quinn was nowhere present. Once again, Quinn had wisely fled the field of battle. Quinn, thought Keller, would die another day.

I
T WAS THE KIND OF
night they used to write songs about. Eight men dead in the green hills of South Armagh, six by the gun, two by the sword. Their names were an honor roll of the IRA’s most notorious unit: Maguire, Magill, Callahan, O’Donnell, Ryan, Kelly, Collins, Fagan . . . Eight men dead in the green hills of South Armagh, six by the gun, two by the sword. It was the kind of night they used to write songs about.

In the immediate aftermath, however, there were no ballads, only questions. Among the facts never firmly established, for example, was who had telephoned the police or why. Even the commissioner of the PSNI, when pressed by reporters, could not produce a log that showed the time or origin of the emergency call. As for the motive behind the bloodletting in Crossmaglen, he could only speculate. The most likely explanation, he said, was that it was the result
of a long-simmering dispute between rival dissident factions of the republican movement—though he could not rule out the possibility that illegal drugs had played a role. He even suggested there might be a link between the massacre in Crossmaglen and the unsolved disappearance of Liam Walsh, a drug dealer with known ties to the Real IRA. And though he did not know it, on that point the commissioner was entirely and unquestionably correct.

His theories as to the origin of the massacre played reasonably well in the wider world, but not in the clannish communities of South Armagh. In the bars where they did their drinking, and in the black boxes where they confessed their sins, all was known. The killings had had nothing to do with feuds or drugs. It was Quinn’s doing. They knew other things as well, things the commissioner never mentioned to the press. They knew that two women had been present that night. So had a former SAS man named Christopher Keller. One of the women had been killed, shot through the heart at nearly a hundred yards by none other than Quinn himself. Afterward, Quinn had vanished without a trace. They were going to find him and give him the bullet he so richly deserved, the bullet they should have given him after Omagh. And then they were going to find the SAS man named Keller and kill him, too.

They kept this to themselves, as they kept most things, and went about their business. Eight names were added to the IRA memorial in Cross Square, eight graves were dug in St. Patrick’s cemetery. At the funeral mass the priest spoke of resurrection, but afterward, in the dark corners of the Emerald bar, they spoke only of revenge. Eight men dead in the green hills of South Armagh, six by the gun, two by the sword. It was Quinn’s doing. And Quinn was going to pay.

On that same day in London, the director-general of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, Graham Seymour, announced that
four MI6 security officers had been killed at a cottage in a remote section of West Cornwall. Additionally, said Seymour, an employee of MI6’s personnel department had committed suicide by jumping from the upper terrace of Vauxhall Cross. Seymour refused to say whether the two events were linked, but the press saw the timing of his announcement as proof they were. It was one of the blackest days in the proud history of the service, and the fallout soon overwhelmed developments across the Irish Sea. The British press barely noticed when the body of a Belfast publican named Billy Conway was found at the edge of a forest in County Antrim—or, three days after that, when a hiker stumbled on the partially decomposed corpse of Liam Walsh across the border in County Mayo. Nine-millimeter slugs were recovered from both victims, though ballistics analysis determined they had been fired by two different weapons. The Garda Síochána and the PSNI investigated the killings as separate incidents. No link was ever found.

In Germany the police had made a troubling discovery of their own: another body, another 9mm bullet. The body belonged to a man who would later be identified as a Russian intelligence officer named Alexei Rozanov. Who had fired the bullet was anyone’s guess. Presumably he was linked to the team of operatives who had killed the Russian’s driver and bodyguard in Hamburg. Among the more disturbing aspects of the discovery was the fact that the Russian’s passport was found shoved into his mouth. Clearly, someone had wanted to send a message. And by all accounts, the message had been received. The BfV, Germany’s domestic security service, detected a distinct increase in the level of Russian activity. The BfV’s British counterpart, MI5, noticed a similar change in the Russian profile in London. In Moscow the Kremlin made no secret about its feelings. The Russian president vowed that the killers of Alexei Rozanov would receive the “highest measure” of punishment possible.
Students of Russian intelligence knew what that meant. In all likelihood, another body would soon be turning up.

But was there a link between the events in Germany, Britain, and the thirty-two counties of Ireland and Ulster? An uncharted star around which they moved in a finely grooved orbit? A few of the lesser news outlets thought so, and before long some of the more reputable organizations came to the same conclusion. Germany’s
Der Spiegel
, long a beacon of investigative journalism, linked Israel to the killing of Alexei Rozanov and his security team—a link the Israeli prime minister’s office, in a rare comment on intelligence matters, flatly denied. Soon after, the
Irish Times
suggested a British hand in the abduction and murder of Liam Walsh, while RTÉ explored Walsh’s alleged role in the bombing of Omagh in August 1998. The
Daily Mail
then weighed in with a rumor-filled exclusive that the MI6 employee who had leapt to his death was in fact a spy for Russia.

The British Foreign Office denied the report unequivocally, though its credibility was called into question two days later when Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster announced a draconian set of economic and diplomatic sanctions aimed at Russia and the cabal of former KGB officers who controlled the Kremlin. His stated reason was “a pattern of Russian behavior on British soil and elsewhere.” Included in the sanctions were a freeze on the London-based assets of several pro-Kremlin oligarchs and restrictions on their travel to Britain. With great fanfare, the Russian president announced a package of retaliatory sanctions. Russian stocks plummeted on the news. The ruble sank to an all-time low against major Western currencies.

But why had the British prime minister acted so harshly? And why now? The chattering classes found his initial explanation wanting. Surely, they said, there had to be more to it than bad Russian behavior. After all, the Russians had been behaving badly for years. And so the reporters dug, and the columnists opined, and the television
analysts speculated and spun theories, some plausible, others not so. A few managed to land a glancing blow on the truth, but not one would ever find the faint pencil line, partially erased, that ran from a killing by the shore of a frozen Russian lake, to the murder of a princess, to the bloodletting in the green hills of South Armagh. Nor would they link the seemingly unconnected series of events to the legendary Israeli intelligence officer who had died in the car bombing on London’s Brompton Road.

But he was not dead, of course. In fact, with a bit of luck, the British press might have caught a glimpse of him in London during the tense forty-eight hours immediately following the killings in Crossmaglen. His movements were swift and his time was tightly budgeted, for he had pressing personal matters to attend to at home. He cleared up a few outstanding affairs at Vauxhall Cross and mended fences across the river at Thames House. He had a working dinner with the staff of the Office’s London Station, and late the next morning he appeared unannounced at an art gallery in St. James’s to tell a trusted old friend he was still very much among the living. The old friend was relieved to see him alive but angry that he had been among those deceived. It was, thought Gabriel remorsefully, a heartless thing to have done.

From St. James’s he traveled to a redbrick Victorian manor house in rural Hertfordshire. It had once served as a training facility for new MI6 recruits. Now Madeline Hart was its only occupant. Gabriel walked with her across the fog-shrouded grounds, trailed by a team of bodyguards. They were four in number—the same number who had died at the hands of Quinn and Katerina in Cornwall.

“Will you ever go back there again?” she asked.

“To Cornwall?”

Madeline nodded slowly.

“No,” said Gabriel. “I don’t think I will.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It seems I’ve ruined everything. None of this would have happened if you’d left me in St. Petersburg.”

“If you want to blame someone,” said Gabriel, “blame the Russian president. He sent your friend to kill you.”

“Where’s her body?”

“Graham Seymour has offered it to the SVR
rezident
in London.”

“And?”

“It seems the SVR isn’t interested. They claim not to know who she is.”

“Where will she end up?”

“An unmarked grave in a potter’s field.”

“A typically Russian ending,” said Madeline darkly.

“Better her than you.”

“She saved my life.” Madeline glanced at Gabriel and added, “Yours, too.”

He left Madeline in midafternoon and traveled to Highgate, where he repaid an outstanding debt to one of London’s most prominent political reporters. By the time the meeting concluded, it was approaching five o’clock. His flight home was at ten thirty. He hurried down the front walk and climbed into the back of his embassy car. He had one more errand to run. One last restoration.