Brotherhood of the Tomb

Brotherhood of the Tomb by Daniel Easterman

ONE

Giv’at ha-Mivtar, North Jerusalem October 1968

The tombs had always been there. Aloof at first, then hidden, then lost entirely - a secret place where death went about his business unseen and uninterrupted. For centuries, the city had been remote, almost irrelevant. The living had become the dead, their mourners had in turn been mourned, and always the fields of death had been left strictly to themselves. No one had built his house over them or set his plough to their earth or put his sheep to graze among them.

In the city, there had been fire and famine. Armies had passed by. High towers had fallen, the sun had turned to blood, ashes had drifted on the wind like black snow at the end of winter. And new gods had come to dwell on the ruins of the Temple.

A year ago, the old God had returned in battle. Israeli armies had taken East Jerusalem, hurling their Arab opponents back across the Jordan. The shofar had been blown beside the Temple Mount once more. Now bulldozers were nuzzling the ancient hills, digging out roads, clearing the ground to make way for houses and schools and hospitals. The descendants of the dead had come to claim their heritage.

In the previous month, a bulldozer had been nibbling its way into a hill called Giv’at ha-Mivtar, just to the west of the Nablus Road, when one of the workmen saw the first tomb. There were three in all, grouped together on separate levels. One was accessible only from the roof, its entrance having already been covered by the new road that was being laid.

A team of archaeologists from the Department of Museums and Antiquities had been given a month in which to examine the tombs and their contents. At the end of that period, in a few days’ time in fact, the bones were to be returned to their sarcophagi and reburied. Then the bulldozers and rollers would return, tar and concrete would be poured in molten streams, and the dead would sleep again.

Gershon Aharoni stumbled, swore beneath his breath, and turned to the man behind him.

‘Be careful, there’s a bit of a step here,’ he said, forcing a smile, holding a helping hand towards the Italian. He had to bite back his annoyance, his irritation at being here at all. There was urgent work to do back at the Museum, and little enough time to do it in. He could thump Kaplan for having given him this assignment.

Do your best, Gershon. Show him round. Get him interested. Let him poke about a bit, get his hands dirty, find an artefact. Plant something where he can stumble over it, make him feel involved. But for God’s sake, soften him up. If you need to, tell him we expect to find the remains of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and all twelve Apostles any day now. And John the Baptist’s head and Salome’s tits if he looks gullible enough.

But get him in the mood to spend some money. Big money: enough for a research foundation, a new museum. Let him use his imagination, if he’s got one. The Bishop Migliau Trust for Biblical Archaeology - let him try that on for size. He can have it in ten-foot-high letters if it turns him on. Just get him to my office tomorrow morning looking like a man who signs cheques for a living.

‘Thank you. It is darker here than I thought it would be,’ said the bishop, resting momentarily on Aharoni’s hand, like a reluctant dancer being led to the floor.

Aharoni swung the lamp high, shedding a sulphurous light across the loculi, long, narrow shafts cut deep into the walls of the chamber to serve as burial niches, some for whole bodies, others for limestone ossuaries that sometimes held the bones of an entire family.

‘We’ll have the generator working again in the morning. If you prefer, we can come back then.’ And let me get back to my pots for the rest of this evening.

It was dark outside. The workmen across the road had gone home. No one had been on the dig since four o’clock, when the generator that powered the lamps had packed up. Since there was in any case plenty of work to do back at the Institute, recording and measuring finds, photographing artefacts, and reconstructing pots, everyone had gone back there. A technician would be sent out early next morning to get the lights working again. In the meantime, Aharoni used a hurricane lamp to show their guest round the empty tombs.

‘No, I am very happy. I think perhaps it is more exciting like this, more ... authentic’

Bishop Giancarlo Migliau was a big man, over six feet tall, and all in all he made a presence in the tomb. He was in his mid-forties, a lean, sublimated man, all flesh without substance, heavy boned but light in his bearing, as though his body did not belong entirely in the space it occupied. He hung in the chamber, as it were, filling it, not by bulk but by the simple fact of being there. In Aharoni he awakened memories of a scarecrow standing in a field after a storm, its black arm casting a ragged shadow on rows of sodden corn.

He was a rich man, descended from a family of Venetian aristocrats, one of the few that had not faded into obscurity or died off entirely in the eighteenth century. His distant ancestors had been Jews, but from the time of their first ennoblement they had given offspring to the Church. Giancarlo’s brothers followed in that other family tradition of banking, dealing no longer from trestle tables on the Rialto, but out of astonishing marble office blocks in Mestre, Rome and Milan.

Giancarlo had for years now been a passionate amateur of Biblical archaeology. He attended conferences whenever he was able, contributed occasional papers to the more popular Catholic journals, and gave liberally from his personal fortune to endow research fellowships in the field. At least one month of every year he spent in Israel, visiting archaeological sites, touring museums and meeting scholars at the Franciscan Institute of Archaeology in Jerusalem.

On several occasions, he had helped out at digs, wielding a trowel and soft-bristled brush, uncovering fragments of pots and lamps to be handed over to the experts for cleaning and assessment. They had been in the main sites dating from New Testament times, places where he could lay his hands on an artefact as it came up out of the clay and think to himself: ‘This pot was here when Jesus lived on earth’, or put his feet on a stretch of pavement and whisper: ‘Perhaps Jesus walked here, on these very stones.’

His imagination had been stirred by the discovery of the tombs at Giv’at ha-Mivtar. As far as could be ascertained, they contained burials dating from between the first century BC and the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70. The work of clearing them had been too specialized and urgent to let amateur diggers take part, but he had received permission to pay this visit and to see the contents of the tombs currently being examined at the Israel Museum.

‘Is this where you found the bones of the man you think was crucified? The ones I saw back at the museum?’

They were in Tomb I, the largest of the four, in the lower burial chamber, a rectangular space off which radiated a total of eight loculi.

‘In here.’ Aharoni lifted the lamp towards a shaft on the right. ‘The bones were in an ossuary along with those of a child.’

Migliau remembered the bones: two heels transfixed by a large nail, shins that had been shattered by a heavy blow. They had made him giddy with a sort of recognition. The man might very well have been one of the two thieves crucified with Jesus, might have hung on the Mount of Golgotha inches away from the Son of God and the world’s redemption. He was close. He felt it in his bones.

What was he called? Was there a name?’

‘Jehohannon. The name was written on the side of the ossuary in Aramaic’

The bishop had touched the bone gently with a finger. There had been a fragment of wood between it and the head of the nail. Roman wood and Roman metal, God’s bane. It felt warm in the tomb and close, as though the air had not been changed in centuries.

Migliau sighed. The low-ceilinged chamber seemed to press down on him. The lamp flickered. Shadows wormed their way across the roughly-hewn rock walls. He had never been able to bear the thought of death, the knowledge of decay.

What’s over here?’ he asked, moving across to the southern wall. ‘They seem to have left a large space without any niches.’

‘Yes, we thought that was a little odd. But you have to remember that the tomb was far from full. They weren’t obliged to cut more niches. The limestone’s very hard in places.’

The bishop ran a hand along the wall.

‘I think someone was working here as well,’ he said. The wall was rough, and sharp in places, as though an adze or a chisel had been used on it. He let his fingers wander over the limestone.

Aharoni came across and swung the lamp upwards, shining its light on the wall.

‘Yes, I think you’re right,’ he said. It was peculiar. He had not noticed it before, in the harsher light supplied by the generator. But in the muted glow of the hurricane lamp the signs of rough work could be seen quite clearly across a section of wall.

Working together now, the two men traced the lines along which the tool had been worked.

‘The marks seem to stop about here,’ said the bishop, running his fingers along a narrow fissure at about waist level.

‘I’d say the cutting was confined to this central section,’ Aharoni added, marking out an area about three feet square. He ran a finger along the sides, first the left, then the right, on down to the floor. A few pieces of limestone fell to the ground. Bending down, he traced the bottom of the square, then straightened up and stepped away from the wall.

Migliau turned and looked at him. His face was in shadow, his eyes invisible.

‘This isn’t part of the wall at all,’ he said. His voice sounded hollow, insubstantial. The thick walls buried it like flesh and bones.

What do you mean?’ The Israeli felt a prickle of excitement stab at his spine.

‘It’s a block that’s been cut out and re-inserted,

then worked over to conceal the joins. I do not understand. Why have you not seen this before?’

Aharoni knew the answer to that. They had been under so much pressure, rushing against time to do all the obvious jobs: measure the chambers, remove the ossuaries from the loculi, gather up the pieces of lamps and piriform pots that littered the floor. There had been no time for subtleties. And these joins were subtle, very subtle. Even under normal conditions they might not have been noticed for a long time.

We’d better get back to the museum, let the Director know. There’s maybe just enough time to see what’s behind the block, if anything, and if necessary ask for an extension. We could start work on it in the morning.’

‘But we are here now. You have already told me time is pressing. I think we should at least look at it tonight.’

Migliau had never been this close to a discovery before. The digs he had assisted at had all been relatively mundane affairs, the main work already finished by the time he became involved. Now he had a chance to see a new find at first hand, even to rank as its discoverer. Who could tell what might lie behind the block? It might even be what he was looking for. He placed both hands against one edge of the block and began to push.

‘I don’t think we should...’ Aharoni fell silent as the sound of stone grating against stone echoed through the chamber.

‘Please help me,’ Migliau called. ‘The stone is very heavy.’

Let him poke about a bit, get his hands dirty, find an artefact. What the hell, thought Aharoni. The excitement of discovery was everything. He was an archaeologist, after all. Such moments came rarely,

if at all, in a lifetime. He put the lamp down carefully and stepped to Migliau’s side, laying his hands on the heavy stone.

They pushed together, straining their arms and backs, feeling the stone’s weight in their legs, a dense, trembling weight that belonged somehow to this place, beneath the earth. The stone moved, a little at first, then, as they got the measure of it, several inches at once. Suddenly, they felt it rock - a fraction only, but enough to show that it was beginning to come free. They pushed harder, veins standing out on their necks, muscles knotting with the strain.

Without warning, the rock flew from their hands and fell back into blackness. A split second later, there was a loud crash, followed by the most absolute of silences. Neither man breathed. A stale smell of long untasted air crept through the opening into the chamber where they stood. And deep beneath the surface flatness of the stagnant air, there lay another smell, an odour of spices, elusive, intangible, mournful. It seemed to touch them for a moment, then it was gone.

Aharoni lifted the lamp and held it into the dark aperture. A million shadows seemed to crowd round it. He leaned forward into the opening, squinting into the darkness. When he spoke at last, his voice was muffled and tense.

‘I think we’ve found another tomb.’

TWO

Aharoni was the first to enter. He trod carefully, holding the lamp nervously in front, anxious lest he disturb or break anything that might chance to be lying on the floor. The tomb was tiny - smaller than any of the others. But it seemed better finished and tidier. Parts of the walls had been plastered, and the floor had been carefully swept. There were no loculi, just three large limestone sarcophagi in the centre of the domed chamber. They were much longer and sturdier than any of the ossuaries found in the other tombs.

Migliau took longer to work his way through the narrow opening. His greater bulk made it a much tighter squeeze, but he made it in the end, very dusty, scraped raw in places, and breathing heavily. At once he sensed it: this was no ordinary tomb that they had stumbled upon. Correction, he thought: that he had stumbled upon.

He stood tensely by the entrance, watching the Israeli as he moved between the coffins, bending to read an inscription, then straightening again, the soft yellow light transforming the harsh limestone to the texture of butter. The bishop wanted to speak, but his mouth felt dry and his tongue hard and inarticulate.

Finally, Aharoni stood and turned to face the other man.

‘I think you should come here,’ he said. His voice was shaking, and Migliau noticed that the hand in which he held the lamp was also unsteady. The bishop felt something clutch at his heart and squeeze it like a wet sponge. This was no ordinary tomb, these were no ordinary coffins, they contained no ordinary bones. He was certain of it. And his certainty frightened him to the marrow. Something told him that he had found what he had been looking for.

It seemed to him that the distance between the wall and the sarcophagi was the longest he had ever traversed, that it was not mere feet and inches, and not even centuries, but something more tremendous and more internal than any of those.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. ‘Is something wrong?’

Aharoni’s face was pale in spite of the yellow light. Migliau wanted to laugh, to cry out, to strike something. His mood was fluctuating wildly. He felt confined in the tiny chamber.

The Israeli licked his lips. He could hear the faint hissing of the lamp. He could hear his own breathing, in and out. The rest was silence. He had not wanted this.

‘Can you read Aramaic?’ he asked.

‘A little ... Enough to get by on. I’m no scholar, I...’

‘No matter. I just want you to help me examine these inscriptions, that’s all.’

‘But you’ve examined them. What do they say?’

Aharoni did not answer. He looked at the Italian enigmatically.

‘I think you should take a look at them,’ he whispered.

The first sarcophagus was a long box with a gabled lid, ornamented with rosettes and incised lines. It was about six feet long and rather over two feet wide. A typical Jewish sarcophagus of the period. An inscription in Hebraic characters ran down one of the long sides.

‘Can you read it?’ asked Aharoni.

Migliau shook his head. It was nothing more than a box full of bones, he told himself. The flesh had been allowed to rot away, then the bones had been gathered together in a heap and placed in this box. Why should the sight of it disturb him so?

‘I’ll read it for you. Tell me if you think I’m wrong.’

Aharoni bent closer to the inscription, bringing the lamp nearer.

... Then there’s a couple of words I can’t make out, then As far as I can interpret it, it reads: “This is the tomb of James son of Joseph, master and shepherd ... the community which is in Jerusalem - killed at the command of Hananiah the high priest in the days after the death of Festus the governor.” ‘

Migliau said nothing. His breath caught tightly in his chest, but he was unable to breathe out. He was no scholar, but he knew enough to understand just what the inscription was about, whose bones it referred to. James, the brother of Jesus, first head of the Christian community in Jerusalem, had been stoned to death with some others in ad 62. By decree of the Sanhedrin. On the orders of Hananiah - Ananias.

The bishop did not know what to do. He wanted to weep or shout or find some other means of giving voice to the emotion he felt, but all he could manage was to stare at the stone as though the very sight had struck him dumb. He breathed out at last and reached for Aharoni, grabbing him hard by the upper arm.

‘Are you certain?’ he demanded.

The Israeli placed a hand on his, dislodging his fingers.

Aharoni paused. ‘No, I’m not certain. The lettering’s poor, this light is terrible. But I think I’m right. When you see the other two, you’ll understand.’

‘Understand? Understand what?’

‘You’ll see.’ The Israeli stood and went across to the second ossuary. It was simpler than the first, but otherwise of the same design and quality. The outline of a tree had been carved on the lid, but the sides bore no pattern, only a brief inscription. Migliau knew how it would read. He had known for years.

Aharoni read awkwardly, as though the words refused to surrender themselves to him.’ “The bones of Miryam, wife of Joseph, mother of Jesus and James. Peace be upon her.”’

The light made ghastly shadows all across the walls and ceiling. Migliau thought he could hear them as they moved, like vast black wings flapping in the enclosed space, the wings of blind, outraged birds. He raised a hand as though to ward them off, but they grew still and left him in a vast silence.

‘There’s one more,’ said Aharoni, and to Migliau the voice seemed to come from the other end of the universe.

Together, they walked the last few paces to the third and final sarcophagus. It was a thing drained of colour, white and delicately carved, yet very solid, as though it was not hollow at all but a single block hewn from living stone. Migliau watched as Aharoni ran a hand lightly along the lid.

On the side, among the rosettes and incised patterns, a circle stood out in sharp relief. Inside it there was carved a seven-branched menorah, the Temple candlestick, taken by the Romans when they destroyed Jerusalem in the year 70. This was not a normal menorah, however. The six side branches were the usual shape, but the middle column was shaped in the form of a cross. Beneath the circle, a row of sharply-cut characters struggled for expression in the light.

He read in a slow voice, meticulously pronouncing each word, not with the awkwardness of uncertainty, but with the precision of one who knows exactly what it is he is reading and what it signifies:

He fell silent. Migliau had understood. Not every word, not every syllable, perhaps, but as much as was needful. Aharoni could not bear to look up, to see him watching him. There was nothing he could do, nothing. He had read the inscription. It only remained to translate it.

“The body of Jesus, son of Joseph and Miryam, who was crucified at the command of Pontius Pilate, governor of Judaea, in the fourth year of his governorship. And he was the sacrifice which completes the offering of the Temple, and he is buried in this place to bring everything to fulfilment in our days. Peace be upon him.”

For a long time, neither man spoke. Words were inappropriate, dangerous. Neither man could bear to look the other in the eye, Jew and Gentile, believer and unbeliever. Two thousand years of misunderstandings stood between them.

Once, Migliau almost giggled out loud. A terrible tension had taken hold of him. He felt simultaneously

euphoric and appalled, like a child brought suddenly into the presence of adult matters. In an instant, a lifetime’s doubts had been resolved and transformed to certainty. What had been mere belief had become knowledge. His search was over. And his mission was about to begin.

Time passed as though it no longer had any meaning. Finally, Aharoni broke the silence.

‘Bishop Migliau,’ he whispered, ‘I think we should go. There may still be someone working late at the Museum. This will have to be reported. Arrangements will have to be made. You understand that this is ... monumental. We must take steps to ensure that news of this discovery is not leaked prematurely. You do understand? If word got out before there was time for a proper investigation ... I think there might be trouble. Newspapers, television - every newspaper, every television company in the world! We couldn’t cope with that, not without help.

‘And there may be political dimensions - do you understand me? Your church will naturally demand a say in what happens. No doubt it is exceptionally fortunate for them that you are here. But the Orthodox churches will want their say too. Then the Anglicans. The other Protestants. Everyone will want his pound of flesh.’ He winced, thinking he had chosen an unfortunate expression. ‘But look at the inscriptions, look at the sarcophagi: this is a Jewish tomb. Doesn’t it seem that way to you? You do understand, don’t you?’

Aharoni knew that a Catholic bishop was as big a complication as anyone in his position could possibly have feared. Another archaeologist would have appreciated the need for caution, for tact. But Migliau would want to milk this for all it was worth. Aharoni had heard that the bishop was ambitious, that he had expectations of being made a cardinal. To be associated with a discovery of this order would no doubt secure all that and more for him. And he would, of course, want to be sure that his own church had total control over the tombs: they would not want another Holy Sepulchre on their hands, divided among warring factions like a bone between packs of squabbling dogs.

‘No, Doctor Aharoni,’ said the Italian. He looked up. All his diffidence had evaporated. He was coming to terms with their discovery at a rapid pace. ‘I don’t understand you. I don’t see what you’re driving at.’

The big man took a step towards Aharoni. In the confined space, he seemed to tower over him. His tension was becoming anger. The Israeli could not understand it.

‘I merely meant...’

‘It seemed to me that you implied some sort of ownership for your people. “A Jewish tomb”, you said. Do you intend to take possession here as you have just taken control of the Temple Mount? You hold the third holiest shrine of Islam. Now, perhaps, you think you have some right to this.’

‘No. No, of course not. We just have to be careful. This is not a Christian country. If you think ...’

‘I have already thought. You want to make a fetish of your Jewishness. Isn’t that right? You want to wave it in front of me like a flag, until I nod and say, “Yes, this is yours. And this. And this. Take it all. Mea cul-pa. You have suffered enough. Take what you want in recompense.”’

Migliau’s voice was growing guttural and menacing. He felt hemmed in by the walls, and as much threatened as uplifted by what he had found. More than anything, he felt an obscure resentment against Aharoni building in him like a tide. It was irrational, he hardly knew the man, had no reason to fear or hate him, yet it rankled to have him here.

‘Your Excellency, please ... you misunderstand.’ Aharoni sensed the bishop’s anger. It frightened him, here in this confined space, with so little light.

‘I think you should leave.’

What...?’

‘I think you should get out of here. This is a holy place. I don’t expect you to understand that. But I do. You’ve no right to be here. No right at all.’

But that was no good. If the Jew left, he would only bring more back with him. They ran this city now. They would just march into God’s inner sanctum and claim it for their own. He hated them for their self-righteousness, for their sanctimonious possession of the land where his saviour had walked. A stiffnecked people, that’s what God had called them. And now, here they were, about to lay godless hands on the mortal remains of God’s son.

‘I think we should both leave,’ said Aharoni. The Italian was over-reacting to their discovery. Perhaps it was understandable. Aharoni, who wasn’t even a practising Jew, let alone a Christian, had been deeply moved by what they had found. He appreciated its emotional charge. That was why he wanted the whole thing handled properly, before the wreckers and sloganizers and opportunists had a chance to move in. With a shudder, he remembered how an American company had offered to market pieces from the wreck of the Titanic as paperweights. What would Jesus’s bones fetch on the Stock Exchange?

He took a step forward and put a hand on the big man’s arm. Migliau grabbed his wrist and pulled him towards himself.

Tour Messiah came and you crucified him. And now you want to turn his bones into some sort of political toy, something your politicians can use to bargain with. You...’

‘Please, I don’t want some sort of religious argument with you. That’s not my problem.’

All his life, Bishop Migliau had been waiting for this moment. He had never doubted that there would be a tomb, never doubted that he would be the one to find it. But in his imagination, he had always been alone at the moment of discovery. Aharoni had never figured in his calculations before this moment.

‘Please God,’ he thought, ‘tell me what to do. You have guided me here, you have given me this honour. I need your help. I can’t do this alone.’

He looked round, at Aharoni, at the tomb. His whole life had been rewritten here, on a limestone box in an unlit sepulchre - an imperfect inscription by an unknown hand. In that moment, he knew what he had to do. What God wanted him to do. It was God’s will. The Jew wanted to tell the unbelieving world of this place. He could not be allowed to do that. God would not let him.

Migliau looked once into Aharoni’s eyes.

‘Forgive me,’ he whispered. But he knew that God had already forgiven him.

He pushed the Israeli hard. Aharoni stumbled backwards, losing his balance. He tripped and fell, striking his head hard on the sharp corner of the middle sarcophagus. He did not even cry out. There was no time between push and crushing blow, between fall and final agony. Death was instantaneous. Blood streamed across the white stone, bright and gleaming.

Migliau watched the red stain spread and listened to his heart beating in the stillness. He felt the weight of the sepulchre all about him, and the air moving heavily through it without sound. He heard the rustle of shadowed wings again, harsh above the beating of his heart. Aharoni lay slumped where he had fallen, a scarlet pool forming beneath him among shadows on the floor.

He lifted the lamp and shone it on the coffins. Aharoni lay unmoving at the Saviour’s feet. The blood had stopped flowing. Migliau turned and looked at the little opening through which they had entered. There was plenty of time. It would not be too difficult to put the entrance slab back as it had been. He could push it along the floor, up into the first tomb, then tilt it back into the opening.

The generators would provide their harsh lighting again in the morning. No one would ever find the break in the wall. No one would ever know that another tomb existed. It had remained hidden all these years, it would remain hidden now.

In three days they would rebury the bones of the dead and seal the tomb again. The bulldozers and cement mixers would return to work. Houses would be built, and shops, and car parks. Next year, he would buy the entire development through one of his family’s holding companies. He had come into his true inheritance at last.

THREE

Trinity College Dublin October 1968

Her name was Francesca. His friend Liam had told him during Commons one evening. Francesca Contarini, an Italian. Her family lived in Venice, in a golden palace, so Liam said. With servants and painted rooms and a private gondola to go to Mass in. She had been sent to Dublin to improve her English, which was already fluent, and to study English and Italian literature. He had been madly in love with her for over two weeks now.

Patrick Canavan had arrived in Dublin five months earlier. He was eighteen, American, and in search of a heritage. Twenty years before, almost to the day, in the summer of 1948, his parents had said goodbye to the city and set off for a new life in America. They had sent him back alone, a sort of ambassador to the past.

He had found its frontiers and outposts everywhere: in the names of streets and theatres; in the river by night, ripening and spreading like a long, thin stain through the heart of the sleeping city; in the voices of beggars on O’Connell Bridge, young pale-faced women with paler babies wrapped in shawls, selling their poverty for the price of a wheaten farl.

The summer had passed like a dream. He had stayed and got drunk on Guinness and cheap red wine, and late one night in August found himself on the beach at Dalkey, kissing his first girl and dreaming that he had found his roots. At eighteen, the Celtic twilight seemed full of promise.

The girl had left two weeks later. Kissing on a beach and holding hands while the moon swept over a white sea had been fine enough for the time of year, she said. But those other things he was suggesting would only lead them both as sure as crikey to the fires of hell. He had yet to learn that virgins are Ireland’s oldest, largest and best-organized professional group.

In spite of his disappointment - and perhaps even because of it - he decided to stay. The city spoke to him in whispers of things he barely understood. It revealed itself to him slowly, nervously, in quiet, distracted gestures, in unexpected moments of intimacy. Suddenly, Brooklyn seemed a universe away, a noisy place full of noisy people.

Once, on a long afternoon as summer drew to its close, he lay on the cricket pitch at the back of Trinity and watched a student fly a red kite against a pale blue sky. The moment entranced him: at eighteen, a kite in the wind can seem as substantial as a kiss. At the beginning of September, he enrolled at the College to study Semitic languages.

Autumn was turning to winter now, and an elaborate stillness lay across the grey expanse of Trinity’s inner courts. Inside the 1937 Reading Room, a dim, academic light fell across endless rows of books. He sat two tables away from her, glancing up from time to time to catch a furtive glimpse of her face. Even when he looked away again, pretending to read, her image swam across the page: long, dark hair falling in a stream against her shoulder, grey eyes opening in the book-warm half-light, small white teeth pressed against her lower lip, the slope of tiny breasts against thin fabric.

Strictly speaking, he should not have been here but in the main library. The Reading Room was reserved for literature students, and it had no books on his own subject. But a large part of Ireland’s attraction for him lay in the country’s literature, which he had begun to discover. He had already become a regular theatregoer, attending performances at the Abbey, the Peacock and the Gate. On one occasion, he’d travelled up to Belfast to see a trilogy of plays by Yeats, directed by Mary O’Malley at the tiny Lyric Theatre.

Now he was reading Yeats’s collected poems, partly because they matched his romantic mood, but mainly because they gave him an excuse to sit in the 1937 Reading Room stealing glances at a girl he might never meet. He looked at the page.

O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes The poets labouring all their days To build a perfect beauty in rhyme Are overthrown by a woman’s gaze.

There was a play at the Abbey tonight, Yeats’s Deirdre. He had bought two tickets with the intention of asking her if she would like to come; but the longer he sat and watched her, intently reading in the pale green light, the more his resolution faltered.

Suddenly she closed her book and stood up. She had not been in the library more than half an hour, surely she could not be leaving already. He watched her guardedly, knowing he could never summon the courage to ask her out. She went upstairs to the balcony and began looking along the shelves. Five minutes later, she came down another set of stairs and began to make her way back to her table.

As she passed behind him, she glanced down at the book he was reading.

‘Scusi. Excuse me.’

She was standing beside him, speaking in a whisper. He looked up. His heart was beating disagreeably fast and his tongue had turned to lead. Cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes...

‘You are reading Yeats. Yes?’

‘I... I... Yes. Yes, Yeats. W.B. Yeats.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I was looking for a copy. I have one, but not with me. When you are finish, maybe I can borrow this one.’

What? Oh, no, it’s okay, you can have it. Really. I was just... sort of filling in time. I really should be reading something else.’

She hesitated, but he closed the volume and pressed it into her hand. She smiled and thanked him, then returned to her seat. For what seemed an age, he did not move. She had spoken to him. She had let him lend her a book. Not his own book, admittedly, but a book of poems he loved.

For the next hour he tried to concentrate on Deirdre, as though reading it might make it possible she would go with him tonight. But the mournful stanzas only saddened and distressed him.

What’s the merit in love-play, In the tumult of the limbs That dies out before ‘tis day, Heart on heart, or mouth on mouth, All that mingling of our breath, When love-longing is but drouth For the things come after death?

‘Thank you.’

She was standing beside him again, holding out the book, smiling. He took a deep breath. His mind had filled with palaces and gondolas and sheer, blind terror.

‘I ... I was going to go across to the buttery for a coffee. Would you like to come?’

She put the book down.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But I have an essay to finish. They take me a long time.’

He saw her turn to go and thought it was all over. But she hesitated and turned back.

‘Maybe tomorrow,’ she said. ‘If I finish my essay on time.’

She finished it and they went for coffee to Bewley’s instead, which was nicer anyway. By that evening, he had two fresh tickets for Deirdre. She met him outside the College gate and they walked down to Lower Abbey Street together. She was wearing a loose coat over a black cashmere dress, and in her ears were tiny jewels that he thought must be diamonds. He had never seen anything so lovely or so perfect.

He sat through the play like someone in a trance. He remembered only Deirdre’s words to Naoise, as they wait for Ring Conchubar to come for them:

Bend and kiss me now, For it may be the last before our death. And when that’s over, we’ll be different; Imperishable things, a cloud or a fire. And I know nothing but this body, nothing But that old vehement, bewildering kiss.

He walked her home that night through autumn-weary streets, thinking of vehement kisses, of breath on clouded breath, yet afraid even to hold her hand. They talked about the play, which she had found hard to follow, about Yeats, about their studies. She lived in Rathmines with an Italian family who thought she was at a girlfriend’s rooms at Trinity Hall.

‘Shall I see you again?’ he asked when they arrived.

‘Of course. You don’t think I borrowed that book just to read some old poetry?’

“You mean ...’

She smiled and reached up to kiss him. Not vehemently, but enough to bewilder him thoroughly.

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘I know.’ She smiled.

Was I that obvious?’

She shrugged.

‘Kiss me again, Patrick. And this time close your eyes.’

Autumn turned to winter, the sky over Trinity grew silent and heavy with snow. They were lovers now, both liberated and enslaved by the unexpected emotions that had come to rule their lives. Snow came, and rain, and days of bright, limpid sunshine when they walked for miles along Sandymount Strand or across the frosted solitudes of the Phoenix Park.

She did not live in a golden palace, though she admitted that ancestors of hers had indeed built the famous Ca’ d’Oro, the House of Gold, whose exquisitely gilded exterior had once made it the most famous of the many palazzi on the Grand Canal. He found a book on Venice in the library and discovered that the Contarinis had been the noblest of the city’s noble families. Eight of them had been Doges. They had owned palaces everywhere.

Her family now lived in what was, certainly, a palazzo, but not so grand as the Ca’ d’Oro. She promised to take him to Venice that summer, to meet her parents and the rest of the Contarinis. He wondered what she would make of Brooklyn or his uncle Seamus.

He wrote poems for her, atrocious things that filled him later with acute embarrassment and aching sadness. One commemorated a walk they had taken early one morning on a bright day in winter, along the beach at Sandymount. That had been the scene of their first quarrel, an event that had left him hurt and puzzled long afterwards.

Light lay on the sea like lozenges of silver. Far in the distance, beyond Dun Laoghaire, the Wicklow Mountains were veiled and elegant in an early morning haze. He held her hand. Above them, a seagull stooped through a world of violet and gold.

They sat side by side on the sand, looking out to sea.

When the summer comes,’ she said, ‘we’ll spend every day on the Lido, just gazing at the Adriatic. And in the evenings we’ll find somewhere to make love.’

‘It sounds perfect,’ he replied. ‘But not every day. I want to see St Mark’s. And Santa Maria della Salute. And...’

She put her finger over his lips, then bent and kissed him gently. He drew her to him, his right hand cupping one breast. As she lay against him, he unbuttoned her shirt, then bent down to kiss her skin. As he did so, he noticed a small pendant on a fine chain round her neck. Taking it between finger and thumb, he lifted it closer.

The pendant was made of gold. It was circular. One side was engraved with her name, ‘Francesca Contarini’, the other with a curious device: a seven-branched candlestick with a cross for the central column.

‘I haven’t noticed this before,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

Without warning, she snatched the pendant away from him and pulled it over her head. Angrily, she took it in her fist, then drew back her hand and flung it hard, into the sea.

‘Francesca! What’s wrong? What is it?’

She stood, trembling, buttoning her shirt with a shaking hand. He got up and tried to hold her, but she pulled away from him and started walking quickly along the beach. Bewildered, he ran after her, but she pushed him off. He could hear her crying.

He walked behind her until she tired. Her sobbing had grown softer. Behind them, their footprints were already being eaten by the encroaching waves. Finally she stopped and let him put his arm round her shoulders.

‘What is it, darling? I didn’t mean to upset you.’

She turned a tear-stained face to him.

‘Please, Patrick. Never ask me about this again. Promise me. Swear you will never mention it.’

‘I only ...’

‘Swear!’

He did as she asked and she seemed to grow calmer at once. She put her arms round his neck and kissed him on the forehead.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be angry with you. Don’t ask me to explain. It has nothing to do with us. Nothing.’

For a long time afterwards, he thought the pendant must have been the gift of another man, a lover left behind in Italy; though she had sworn to him that there had been no one serious before him, and he had believed her. The pendant tormented him from time to time in the years to come. But he never asked her about it again.

The Living

FOUR

And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon.

Exodus 12:29

Dalkey, Co. Dublin January, 1992

Three in the morning. The darkness inexplicably charged, the silence heavy and drugged. There would be another storm. It lay in his bones, like electricity, moving in a slow current. Outside, the cold chattered briskly, saying things he did not want to hear.

Light fell on light: across his desk, a tiny pool of yellow shining on ancient paper; through the window, a street lamp etching shadows out of the dim room. He could hear the sea in the distance, the tide coming in, small waves taking possession of the land. Or a single wave, repeating and repeating ceaselessly, until there was no more land, only water.

He had chosen the house for its view. It looked straight out onto Dublin Bay, and all last summer he had watched the sea perform its endless, slow ballet, as though it danced for him and him alone. Now, in mid-winter, he was no longer sure he had chosen wisely. The sound of waves made him restless, filling him with a terrible loneliness and a sense of foreboding. It was at moments such as this that he wondered if he had done the right thing in coming back to Ireland.

He rubbed his eyes. The crabbed and faded script was a strain to read, even with the help of a magnifying glass. Yellow light and ochre paper blurred. Fragmented letters ran across the page like frightened ants.

‘C’mon, Patrick. You hadn’t killed him, somebody else would’ve had to do it.’

Voices snagged at him, like branches sharp with thorns. The past was still angry and unforgiving.

‘He was coming in. He’d had enough. There was a signal: Damascus station intercepted it. Why wasn’t I told?’

‘There was a slip-up. It happens. You know it happens. What’s it matter? Wasn’t like he didn’t have it coming. Somebody would have done it sooner or later. Not you, then somebody else.’

In the distance, waves possessed the shore.

He stood and went to the window. At forty-two, Patrick Canavan possessed very little. He paid rent on a house overlooking the Irish Sea: what little there was of his CIA pension took care of that. No wife, no children, no memories he could share with friends, no friends to share them with.

He opened the window all the way, pushing the sash up hard. Out of the night, out of the padded and frozen darkness, the sounds of the world rose up to him in waves: the stark lapping of water on stone, a train in the distance, loud on frosted rails, a ship’s horn, the bell on a rocking buoy.

Far out on the abandoned waters of the bay, he saw lights: ships coming in from the dark sea, from France and Spain and Italy, headed for Dun Laoghaire or Dublin harbour, an armada of tiny lights on a wind-darkened tide. The fog that had kept them out at sea so late had lifted, leaving a vast and empty darkness rich with stars. Out on the final edges of the night, a small boat passed like a firefly and was suddenly lost.

His eyes travelled over the darkness, and he thought how complete it was, how everything was dipped in it. How could twenty years make such a difference? he asked himself. Times change, people change, people die; but it was more than that.

He saw Beirut again, as though the darkness had become a screen for memories. On his left, the Syrian guard-post plastered with posters of Asad, to his right the abandoned al-Saqi Hotel, now occupied by a Hezbollahi group from Bi’r al-‘Abd. He saw the jeep turn the corner, the boy from Amal firing, low from the hip. And, in slow motion, Hasan Abi Shaqra running from the alleyway towards him, his own gun lifting, pointing, firing, Hasan falling at his feet, blood turning to dust on the dry earth. ‘He was coming in. He’d had enough.’

‘Come back to bed, Patrick.’

Ruth stood in the doorway, naked, her eyes dim with sleep. He turned from the window, blinking away the sunshine and the blood, suddenly cold.

‘I was working,’ he said, wondering why he felt a need to explain himself to her.

‘It’s after three. I woke up and you weren’t there. Come back to bed.’

He felt irritated by her presence, by the demands she made on him. It was so long since he had shared anything with a woman. He closed the window, shutting the world out.

She took him back to bed, her nakedness futile against his indifference. They lay there for a long time, shivering between cold sheets. Light from the street lamp filtered through the thin bedroom curtains, staining the bed with its unnatural light. Her arm lay beside his, almost translucent, like alabaster.

‘Do you love me?’ he asked, but she was asleep again, and he had not really wanted an answer. There was a sort of love between them, he supposed; and a physical passion that could still make him cry out, as though in pain. He tried to convince himself that the gulf between them was merely one of age - she was more than ten years his junior - but he knew it was really something he had built inside himself out of all the little emptinesses of his life.

Getting involved with Ruth had been a big mistake. He thought he loved her, but that wasn’t the problem. Ruth belonged to the Agency, the way everyone did at first, the way he had at the beginning. That was the problem. Or part of it, at least.

They’d met at a party three, maybe four months earlier, not long after his arrival in Dublin. An old friend from Langley, Jim Allegro, was here on special attachment with the Irish Ranger Squad, liaising on anti-terrorist tactics. Jim had heard of Patrick’s arrival through the grapevine and contacted him. ‘I’m having a party tonight - come round and meet some people.’

The party had been dull: pieces of cheese and tinned pineapple on wooden cocktail sticks, stale French bread, cheap Australian red in boxes, wall to wall Dire Straits. The guests were the usual crowd: anaemic third secretaries from the embassy, a handful of spooks you could spot in a nudist colony, and awkward locals downing Guinness at a rate of knots. As usual, all the intelligence hounds were sniffing one another’s rears in a pack. She was sitting in a corner, going through Allegro’s bookcase like a censor looking for smut.

‘You won’t find anything in there,’ he said. ‘Jim’s cleaner than an operating table.’

‘On the contrary,’ she replied, ‘that’s precisely where all the messy things end up.’

How had he guessed she was in the trade? She didn’t look the type. Not that there was a type - but if there had been, she wouldn’t have been it. She was too well dressed for one thing. The sort of clothes that had their labels on the inside, if they had labels at

all. A single piece of discreet jewellery, a mere hint of expensive perfume. But for the accent, he would have taken her to be French. She was petite, with short blonde hair, a down-turned mouth, and tiny ears like shells.

Her next words had been, ‘Shall we get out of here?’ She had taken the initiative from the beginning, otherwise he would never have got as far as ‘Go’. They had driven down the coast in her small blue Mercedes. Everything was autumnal: the air, the sea, their mood. She drove too fast for the narrow Irish roads and too skilfully for it to matter. It was dawn when they arrived back at his house. ‘You have appalling taste’ was the last thing she said before leading him to bed.

After leaving the CIA, he had returned to Ireland to finish the doctorate he had abandoned eighteen years before. Coming back to Dublin had been like a physical blow: the old places, all the memories rushing at him, striking him deep in the pit of his stomach, and him helpless before their onslaught. Rathmines, Ranelagh, Donnybrook, Ballsbridge - the names had leapt out of maps and off the fronts of buses at him, each with its own sweet or bitter flavour, its own particular weight of memories and associations.

He had returned with such hopes, such expectations. Dublin would restore him to youth, or something like that. Dublin would revive in him the ideals of twenty-four years ago. Well, that had all been a fantasy, and he knew it now: even if the city had been preserved in aspic all these years, nothing of the past would have returned to him, or at the most a glimmer, a teasing reflection in a rusted mirror.

His years at Trinity had shaped his life. He had lived and worked in a palace of grey stone, surrounded by dreams and poetry. Not the past only, but a present that seemed not wholly real. It had been less the magic of the place than the enchantment of youth: he had come to understand that in time. But then he was aware only of snow falling on dark, pitted cobblestones, and sunlight on mullioned windows, and the bell in the campanile ringing out against the shadows at dusk as he walked through soft-lit courtyards to Commons. And Francesca. Always Francesca.

Now he was back, but the magic and the poetry had gone. He had tried to find them again in Ruth, but all that remained was a sense of bewilderment and shame. Pressed for a reason, he could have given a dozen. But at heart he knew there had only ever been one reason for his inability to love or be loved: Francesca’s death. But that was the past. He had to come to terms with that. In the dark, he lay listening to the sound of his own breathing, unable to surrender himself to sleep.

He slipped out of bed again, knowing sleep would not come. There had been so many nights like this: they just had to be endured. He crossed to the window, as though drawn by the pale lamplight. A man can resign from the Agency, but his mind and body never relax.

He heard the footstep just as his hand reached for the curtain. A single step followed by silence. He stiffened and lowered his hand. Silence. Cautiously, he eased back the edge of the curtain and bent his eye to the crack.

His dark-adjusted eyes found the man almost at once. On the opposite side of the street, away from the lamp. He was cold and restless and looked like someone who had been standing there a long time. Waiting for something. Or someone.

FIVE

Patrick let the curtain fall. For half a minute he stood by the window, forcing himself to be calm. Ruth was still asleep, her heavy breathing plainly audible to him across the room. Moving quietly in the darkness, he found his trousers and the thick sweater he had been wearing the day before. His shoes were beside the bed.

Downstairs, he paused in the kitchen. A row of gleaming, wooden-handled Sabatier knives hung on a magnetic rack. He selected one with a six-inch blade and slipped it into his belt. It was razor-sharp: he knew, because he had honed the entire set three days earlier.

The back door led into the garden, but he knew better than to go that way. There might be more than one watcher, and the odds were that a second man, if any, would be at the rear of the house.

A side window gave onto the drive. He unlocked the dead-bolt and opened it without a sound. A blast of cold air took him unawares. The wind was rising. There was a roll of thunder, very far away, moving behind unseen clouds. The storm was coming.

He dropped to the ground, poised against possible attack. Here, beside the house, the darkness was complete. Clouds came up fast, obscuring the stars. He crouched, listening. Beneath the pounding of his heart, he heard cold waves turning on the shore. Above him, branches shifted. His skin felt taut and nervous. In spite of the cold, he was sweating.

Crossing the gravel of the drive took an eternity. Then grass, then the fence dividing him from the next house. A frosted lawn led down to a low wall on the other side of which lay the road. From here he could still see the street lamp, but there was no sign of the watcher. Automatically, he checked the knife: the other man would carry a gun, he was sure of that.

Though he knew the darkness hid him, he felt utterly exposed as he sprinted across the road. On the other side, he vaulted the sea wall onto the path that wound along the beach. The tide was well in now, a heavy swell pushed by rising winds. The thunder sounded again, nearer this time, a low, animal growl threatening violence.

He kept to the sand, crouching low. The waves covered any sound. The man was still standing where Patrick had last seen him, in the shadows just beyond the lamp. His back was to the sea. He moved restlessly, trying to keep warm. About six foot, Patrick reckoned, and well built. There would be a car nearby, perhaps another man waiting in it.

Patrick removed his shoes. It was bitterly cold, but he had to be sure of silence. He slipped behind the wall, then over, never letting his eyes wander from his target. The frost felt like daggers on his bare skin. With his right hand he slipped the knife from his belt. Thunder like stones in the sky. Darkness closing in. The sea tormented, moving landward from the night.

He was behind the man now. Without a sound, he set his shoes down. Faint as gossamer, his breath hung in front of his face, trembling. He braced himself and reached with both hands at once. His left grabbed a clump of hair, pulling the man’s head back fiercely, while the right brought the knife round hard against his throat. He could feel the blade touch flesh, the Adam’s apple neat on steel.

‘Kneel.’

The old voice out of the darkness; his own voice, and yet not his voice.

The man grunted, about to scream, his throat bulging unseen against the blade. Then, slowly, his legs buckled and he lowered himself to his knees. Patrick moved hard behind him, a knee in his back, the knife well poised, the long throat taut. He could feel the stranger’s fear, acrid in the sea air, in the electric presence of the storm.

‘Take your gun and throw it to the ground. Please don’t force me to hurt you.’

The man struggled for words.

‘No ... gun ... I ... swear.’

‘Who are you?’

Silence. The wind moving, cold as death.

‘Who sent you?’

The knife again, a trickle of blood, frost on the blade. Silence. Death hovering breathless in the thin air. The man’s fear was rapidly giving way to something else: Defiance? Indifference? Transcendence?

‘Why are you watching me?’

Silence. Then a roll of thunder that echoed across the bay.

He switched to Arabic.

‘Min ayna ta’ti? Where are you from?’

No sign of comprehension.

He tried Persian.

‘Az koja amadi?

No answer.

Suddenly lightning flashed, turning the world to light for an instant. An image fixed itself in Patrick’s mind: a dark-haired man, his head held back, a knife against his throat, a thin line of blood across bruised flesh.

Patrick blinked, and in that instant the stranger made his move. His right hand came up, grabbing Patrick’s wrist, knocking the knife away. He swung in sideways, his hair twisting painfully in his captor’s grasp, his left arm pivoting, his fist striking out hard. Patrick rocked, loosening his grip. The man staggered with him, then dropped forward, using his head to butt Patrick, knocking him down. At that very moment, the storm broke. Like a river bursting through a dam, rain came flooding out of the sky, thick and cold and heavy.

Patrick heard the man’s feet ring out on the hard ground. He rolled onto his knees and started scrabbling for his shoes. The rain smothered and blinded him. His clothes were already soaking. Frantically, he passed his hands over the road. He found one shoe, then the other, and hurried to pull them on, leaving the laces untied.

The stranger had headed off to the right. Patrick followed, hampered by rain and darkness. Lightning flashed again, sheet upon sheet of it, white and cold like anger. Stencilled against the night, he saw a car and a man opening the door. He stumbled forward, desperate now.

There was the sound of an engine rasping, unwilling to ignite. He had a chance. Panting, he ran through the darkness. The engine turned again and died. A lace caught beneath his foot and sent him off balance, pitching forward in a heap, skinning his hands badly on the rough ground. He heard the engine cough then hold. Biting back the pain, he hauled himself to his feet, staggering across the last few yards.

He crashed into the car as it pulled away from the kerb, turned, ran, snatched for the handle. The door opened and he threw himself into the seat as the vehicle picked up speed. The driver had not yet switched on his lights. Rain and darkness flooded the windscreen.

Patrick reached for the wheel, pulling it towards him. The driver braked suddenly, sending them into a spin. The car mounted the kerb, tilted, and crumpled against the sea wall.

Panicking, the driver opened his door and stumbled into the road. He slipped, then picked himself up and began to run.

Patrick threw his own door open, but it stuck on the wall, leaving a gap too narrow for him to squeeze through. He wriggled across the gear-stick, then out through the driver’s door. Wind and rain grabbed him, tearing him back into their world. He spluttered, catching his breath, and broke into a run.

Another stroke of lightning raced down the sky, dragging behind it an angry roll of thunder. Out at sea, raging waves were frozen, as though the light had carved them in an instant out of raw ice. A ship appeared, running for harbour, hopeless and alone on crystal waves. He saw the man jump the wall, heading for the beach.

The sand was already filled with rain. His feet sank in it. It was like treacle, clawing at him, pulling him down. He moved as though in a dream, no longer certain why he was here. The world had vanished and been replaced by nightmare. He could hear waves crashing on rocks and wind tearing the sky to shreds. Jagged bands of lightning grew out of nowhere like the sudden branches of giant trees. The man was only yards ahead of him, scrambling among white spray at the edge of the rocks. A crash of thunder rolled across the void.

Patrick shouted, but the wind snatched the words from his mouth, leaving him breathless. The man was crazy. The rocks he was climbing on would soon be covered as the tide came further in: he could find no shelter there.

Waves were already dragging at his ankles. He pushed further out into the freezing water, unable to see a thing, his eyes blinded by the last flash of lightning. The water was already at his knees.

The first rock caught him unawares, striking him in the shin and almost sending him flying into the sea. He scrambled onto it, crouching down, finding his way to the next by touch. He was no longer sure which way the land lay and which way the sea. At any moment he might lose his grip and go spinning into deep water, at the mercy of cold currents, battered on dark rocks, pulled down into darkness.

He slipped on kelp and pitched forward into a freezing pool. A voice came to him out of the maelstrom, thin and anguished. The wind drove away all semblance of meaning. There was no way of knowing whether the words had been a threat or a cry for help. Out here, there was nothing but the wind and the sea.

Another rock, the rough edges of barnacles, rain and spray mingled in a single sheet of water, a wind like barbed wire against the skin. He saw a shadow darker than the rest, something crouching at the edge of the rocks, where they joined the sea. Scarcely balanced himself, he lunged forward and made a grab for the man.

They fell backwards onto a broad wrack-covered rock. He heard his opponent gasp as the breath was forced from his lungs.

Who are you?’ he shouted, anger forcing his voice above the storm. The man remained silent, struggling in his grasp.

Overhead, lightning tore the darkness away like a thin veil. Patrick saw a white face, the eyes opened in terror, and a hand across the face, as though to ward him off. A clap of thunder burst the sky open.

Suddenly, his opponent pushed him back, slipping out of his grip on the wet rock. He flopped down into a gap, twisted, and tried to stand. As he got to one foot, a huge wave crashed into him, throwing him off balance. He lost his footing completely. There was a loud cry, inhuman, passionate, past articulation. Patrick reached out. But there was nothing. Another bolt of lightning crossed the sky. The rock ahead was empty.

The tide was still rushing in. There was nothing Patrick could do for the stranger, not in a sea like that. He turned and started crawling back along the rocks. There were no lights on the shore to guide him. In the madness, he could have been moving away from the land, out to sea and certain death. He lost count of the number of times he slipped, crashing heavily onto the rocks. It would be so easy to break a leg and be trapped until the sea took possession of everything and dragged him out into its depths.

Lightning again. The world stark, insane. He got his bearings and dropped into the water, desperate for balance. Even here, the undertow was fierce, like ropes that tried to pull his legs from under him. The water rose up to his chest now. He felt tired suddenly, as though the sea had sapped him of all strength.

Aching, he gave himself to it, half swimming, half drowning. Salt water poured into his mouth, filling his stomach, weighing him down. His arms and legs moved sluggishly, as though he was swimming in another substance, in quicksand or mercury, thick and deadly, pulling him down.

Suddenly, he felt land beneath his feet. Coughing and spluttering, he threw himself forward. His head went under, then rose again. He fought to regain his balance. His feet found purchase on the sloping beach. Spewing up water, he staggered through the last few yards of angry waves, coming at last to rain-drenched sand. A few feet more and he threw himself to the ground.

All around him, the world was bedlam. But he scarcely noticed. All he could think of, all he could see polished on the darkness of the night was the white oval of the watcher’s face and his hand raised, pushing him away. And on the man’s inner wrist a tiny circle tattooed in black, and inside the circle a seven-branched candlestick crowned with a cross.

It was impossible, he thought. A nightmare from the past, a nightmare that could not possibly have followed him here, to this place, to this moment.

Behind him, in the darkness, the sea moved, rank and heavy with drowning men and the bodies of great fish sinking to its rotten bed. They were devouring one another down there, men and fish and all manner of swimming and crawling things.

SIX

He lost track of time, lying wet and out of breath at the foot of the sea wall, as though cast up there by nauseated waves. Slowly the rain subsided and the thunder became a distant rumbling as the storm passed on into the Wicklow Hills. Aching to his bones, he picked himself up and clambered back over the wall onto the road.

The car was still where he had left it, against the wall. Its engine had stalled. He had supposed someone would have heard the crash and come out to investigate or phoned for the Gardai, but the road was deserted. If any sleepers had been awakened, they must have imagined the crash a clap of thunder and gone back to sleep. He pulled the door open and slipped into the driver’s seat.

He knew he should rush back to the house for a hot shower and a change of clothes, but first he had to search the car. His mind was in turmoil. He had seen the symbol on the watcher’s wrist twice before. Once on the pendant round Francesca’s neck, the pendant she had thrown angrily into the sea, almost as a portent of tonight’s events.

The second time had been several years ago, during a mission in Egypt. To see it again here in Ireland filled him with the deepest foreboding. He had thought that episode buried forever: he should have known that sands shift and the buried past returns to life.

He switched on the interior lights and looked round. The car was a small Citroen hatchback, tidy and quite new-looking, probably rented. There was nothing on the rear seat or the shelf behind it.

Leaning across the passenger seat, he opened the glove compartment.

Inside, he found a map and a small book bound in black leather. The book was a copy of the New Testament in Greek with an interlinear English translation based on the Revised Version. Its pages were well thumbed, and here and there in the margins someone had made textual notes in pencil. He put the volume down and turned to the map. It was a standard Geographia map of Dublin, from Ballymun and Santry in the north to Tallaght and Glenageary in the south.

His own street, situated in the extreme bottom right-hand corner, had been ringed several times in red ink. There was a second set of rings round a spot in the Liberties, centred on Francis Street, about St Malachy’s parish church.

He felt his heart go cold. The connection between the two circles was unambiguous.

Taking the map and book, he got out into the rain. It was only a drizzle now, the storm’s rich anger spent or gone elsewhere. He only paused to check the boot, finding it empty as he had expected, then set off home.

Ruth was waiting up for him. She was crouched over the table in the kitchen, cradling a mug of tea, more for the comfort of it than from a need to drink. He sat down facing her, wordless, shivering, afraid of her gentleness more than anything.

‘The storm woke me,’ she said. ‘You were gone again. I thought you might be in the study. I looked everywhere for you.’

She did not ask where he had been, merely told her story and fell silent. In the half-light her shaded face seemed perhaps lovelier than a woman’s face had ever appeared to him. For that moment, in that place. He wanted to sit with her, hold her, talk with her. He thought he loved her after all: it was, at least, what he wanted. To love her, to be here with her. But there was no time tonight. The circles round St Malachy’s, like the circle on the stranger’s wrist, could mean only one thing: a man was in terrible danger. Patrick had no choice.

‘I have to go out again,’ he said.

She looked at him intently, understanding beginning to dawn.

What’s going on, Patrick? Whatever it is, it doesn’t concern you. You’re finished with that stuff.’

‘Come upstairs,’ he said, ‘I have to change.’

She followed him, clutching her dressing-gown about her as though it could ward off the sudden terrors of the night. The world pressed against her, heavy and cold, its saturated breath dank in her nostrils.

He made straight for the bedroom and picked up the telephone from the table by the bed. Ruth stood in the doorway, watching. It was bitterly cold.

The phone in St Malachy’s presbytery began to ring. De Faoite’s hearing was poor, and he would be asleep, unless wakened by the storm. Patrick felt his heart beating, keeping time with the burring of the telephone. He waited two minutes, then hung up.

‘Okay, Patrick - so, suppose you cut this out and tell me exactly what’s going on here?’

He tried to ignore her, starting to take off his wet clothes, but she grabbed him by the arm and forced him to look directly at her.

‘Don’t fuck about with me, Patrick! I have a right to know what’s happening. For Christ’s sake, you’re not even in the trade any longer.’

‘It has nothing to do with that.’

‘Oh no? Then why all the sudden mystery? Walks

in the middle of the night, mysterious phone calls. Come on, Patrick - I’ve been through all this. If you’re in danger, I’m in danger, so don’t play games.’

He held her clumsily, unable to respond, or perhaps afraid to do so. Outside, the sea still raged against the shore. Water lay against water, wave against wave, an unbroken ocean round the world, closing in on him, connecting him to his past. Beirut, Alexandria, Bandar Abbas - everywhere the sea, everywhere waves beating furiously against the land.

‘It has nothing to do with you, Ruth. Honestly. It’s something out of my own past. Something I have to handle myself.’

Who were you ringing?’

‘Eamonn De Faoite. He’s the parish priest at St Malachy’s in town. Sometimes he teaches Semitic studies at University College and Trinity. He was my teacher back in the sixties when I studied here. I think he’s in danger. I wanted to warn him.’

“Warn him? About what?’

Patrick shook his head.

‘I don’t know. I...’ He paused. ‘Listen,’ he resumed. ‘About eight years ago, I was in Egypt. The Agency was looking for support among the Coptic Christian population, as a sort of balance against the Muslim Brothers. There’d been anti-Coptic riots back in the early eighties; Sadat had exiled Pope Shenuda to Wadi Natrun; Islamic fundamentalism was spreading.

‘I was in a small village in the Delta. Myself and a local agent. The people we were staying with were Copts. They woke us very early one morning. Something had frightened them. They asked if I would go to the next village, a place called Sidi Ya’qub. They kept saying that something terrible had happened, that they wanted me to go to see if what they had heard was true. When I asked them to tell me what

it was, they just threw their hands up and shook their heads. Finally, I agreed. I took the jeep and drove over to Sidi Ya’qub.’

He paused. Outside, the troubled sea gave its voice to the storm.

‘It was one of the stupidest things I ever did. I very nearly got myself lynched. What had happened was this: Sidi Ya’qub had a school. The building was situated a short stretch outside the village proper, on a low ridge. Some men had come the previous afternoon and herded the children together, put them in a bus and driven them off. About thirty children altogether.

‘When I arrived, the village was frantic. They had been looking for the children all night. The police had been called in, the Muslim Brothers were there in force, everyone was acting crazy. Anyway, I stayed and gave a hand. I knew why the Copts in the next village were afraid: if anything had happened to the children, they would very likely be blamed. And if what had happened turned out to be unpleasant, they knew things could get very nasty.’

He hesitated.

‘Yes?’ she asked.

Well, it did turn out to be unpleasant. Very unpleasant indeed. They found the children shortly after noon, in an old temple about a mile from the village. It’s not much of a temple, not the sort of place that gets on the tourist trail. I went out there with everyone else after word came in that the children had been found.

‘There was a stone basin in the centre of the temple. Basalt, I think. And very large. It had been badly damaged, but it could still hold perhaps a hundred gallons or thereabouts.’

He closed his eyes. The memory of the temple and what had been found there was sharp in his mind now.

‘The ... the children were lying in a circle round the basin. Their throats had been cut and the basin filled with the blood. The basin wasn’t full, but the blood in it was deep. Their teacher was there as well. He had been drowned in the basin. The children had been stripped and tied with thongs. And someone had marked their foreheads with a circle, a circle containing a candlestick topped by a cross. That was when I had to get out, when they saw the cross.’ He paused. ‘I heard later that there was very nearly a massacre at the village where I’d been staying. They left just in time, before their neighbours got there. They’ve never gone back.’

Ruth stopped him.

‘I don’t understand what this has got to do with you and Eamonn De Faoite.’

‘I think they’re here,’ he said. ‘The people who killed those children. They’re here in Ireland. And I think they mean trouble. I’ve got to get to Eamonn. Now, tonight.’

‘How do you know they’re here? What happened?’

‘I saw one of them. I chased him.’

‘An Egyptian?’

Patrick shook his head.

‘No. That’s the strange thing. I don’t think he was an Egyptian. I think ... I’m sure he was Irish.’

What happened to him?’

He told her.

‘And you think they could be watching De Faoite?’

He shrugged. He had dressed now and was eager to be off.

‘It’s possible. Listen, Ruth, I’ve got to go.’

‘I’m coming with you.’

‘No, I’d rather you stayed here to watch the house. There may be another watcher.’

She stepped away from him. Behind her, the bed had grown cold.

‘That isn’t the reason is it?’

He had already turned towards the door.

‘I don’t want you involved, Ruth. I’m treating this as personal business: it has nothing to do with the Agency.’

‘You think so?’ She was growing angry again.

‘Okay, yes, I think so.’ But he was lying, desperate to avoid the thought that the past was drawing him in again, that no one ever truly escapes from that delicately fabricated world. ‘Don’t get involved, Ruth. Don’t get the Agency involved. I’ll be back when I’ve seen De Faoite.’

‘Suit yourself. But don’t expect me to be here when you return.’

It was still raining when he left.

SEVEN

He drove distracted through a world of lights and shadows, like a ghost passing through someone else’s dream. The final stages of his journey took him through a landscape of broken fanlights, rusted railings, and dark tenement walls on which someone had written ‘FUCK’ in foot-high letters, time and time again. It was an invocation of sorts. But who was listening?

The Liberties were the oldest part of the city, and not even the dark could cover the squalor and neglect on every side. As Patrick walked down Francis Street towards St Malachy’s, he could smell yeast from the nearby Guinness brewery, mixed with a rotting odour that came up from the quays. A thin, freezing mist had started to move in off the sea and was working its way slowly along the streets.

Above him, in a tenement, a curtain was twitched aside. Unseen eyes watched him pass, then the curtain fell back into place. A dog barked angrily on his left. Open doorways, stained and rotten, graffiti on the walls, a smell of urine from the hallways, broken windows, broken lights, broken lives.

Eamonn De Faoite had been parish priest of St Malachy’s as far back as anyone could remember. Every morning for almost sixty years he had left his scholarship upstairs and come down onto the streets to face his little world. The Liberties were his Calvary, he had told Patrick once: they had broken him and scourged him and nailed him to themselves, year in, year out, an eternal Easter. He had tended generations of the poor and the almost-poor: baptized them, married them, said Mass for them and their children, received their stammered confessions, administered the last rites, buried them in dealboard coffins. And still no resurrection.

He approached the presbytery carefully, his senses alert for any sign of a watcher: a parked car, a shadow that moved, a sound. There was nothing. Keeping himself close to the house walls, he reached the door. There was nothing for it now: if someone was watching, he would just have to let them see him.

He knocked on the presbytery door. His visits to De Faoite had not often brought him here. They normally met at Trinity College or the Chester Beatty Library in Ballsbridge: the old priest kept his worlds quite separate. Perhaps that was what kept him sane.

‘I’m not a good man,’ he had once told Patrick. ‘I find it hard to be a priest. I hate poverty. I loathe petty crime and the mess people make of their daily lives. If I had it to do over again, I don’t think I could face it. Do you know, if I believed in reincarnation like these Indian yogis, I think I’d go crazy. Imagine - having to come back again! Jesus, Patrick, doesn’t that give you the creeps now?’

Patrick knocked again. Perhaps hating his vocation was what made a man a saint. He didn’t know: he was one of the people who made messes of their lives. He suddenly realized that he had not been to confession in twenty years. There were a lot of messes to get off his chest. Mist swirled round the enamel-painted door. Why didn’t De Faoite answer? There was a light on in the upstairs room that served as the old man’s study.

There was no answer to his third knock. As he turned to go, he noticed that another light was burning in the church next door. He opened the iron gate and went through. The old church loomed out of the darkness, faintly menacing in a veil of mist.

It had been built in 1689, and much of it was now in a state of serious decay. De Faoite had started a restoration fund and issued appeals for money, but who was going to dig into his pocket to gild a church among the tenements?

Above the door, a weather-worn statue of the Virgin gazed down at him. The face was almost featureless, without nose or eyes or expression. On her head she wore a crown, and on her lap a deformed child, its limbs eroded by wind and dirt, stretched a fingerless hand towards a faintly delineated breast.

The door opened to his touch. There was a smell of wax and incense, mixed with an underlying odour of damp. Beneath an icon of the Sacred Heart, a red lamp flickered in the draught from the door. He slipped inside noiselessly, feeling alien and ill at ease. When had he last set foot inside a church?

Faint shadows moved beneath the ceiling. At the far end of the church, above the altar, a single lamp hung on a copper chain, shedding a dull sepia light to the top of the sanctuary steps. Nearby, half a dozen candles had burned to stubs at the foot of an alabaster statue of the Virgin.

He called De Faoite’s name, but there was no answer. Mist followed him into the church, rolling gently across the floor. He closed the door behind him.

‘Are you here, Father?’

A faint echo rang from the ceiling, hidden in darkness. Automatically, he dipped his fingers into the holy water stoup and crossed himself. The church was unheated, and tonight it felt like an ice-box.

Perhaps the priest had been called out to hear an urgent confession from one of his parishioners. There were three confessionals against the west wall. Patrick made his way to them. They were all empty.

He called again, but his voice was swallowed up in the damp, sacral silence. He was wasting his time here. Best to find a telephone and ring De Faoite again. He turned and started to go.

There was a low sound. It seemed to come from the direction of the transept, possibly the sanctuary. Patrick froze. In the shadows, nothing moved. A candle sputtered and went out. He took a cautious step forward.

‘Is there someone there?’ he called.

No one answered. He felt the hairs ripple on the backs of his hands and the nape of his neck. Why was he afraid?

The sound came again, a little louder. It was like a moan, scarcely human. An animal, perhaps. A dog or a wounded cat.

He padded through the darkness towards the transept. Above the host, a red flame shuddered. He strained to see in the gloom.

There was something on the altar. Something living. He felt his breath catch in his throat, sour and frightened.

‘Eamonn,’ he whispered, ‘is that you?’

The thing on the altar moved. Patrick climbed the steps, the scent of incense heavy in his nostrils. The air felt sickly, raddled with holiness. As he drew near, he saw that the white altar-cloth was stained. Like juice or wine, a long streak of red had soaked into the cloth. Memories rushed in from his childhood to dismay him, the horror of the chalice of blood, the horror of the flesh offered up as bread, the horror of Christ’s bleeding from seven wounds across the altar. The thing on the white table was a man.

They must have tied him before dragging him here. They could not have done what they had done while he was loose: he would have struggled, in spite of his age. He seemed unaware of Patrick’s presence, unaware of anything but the pain surrounding him. But he was conscious, that was the horror.

Patrick’s fingers fumbled with the ropes. He felt bile rise in his throat, burning him. They must have hacked out the eyes: the sockets had filled with blood, like rock pools after high tide. Like a basin of blood in an abandoned Egyptian temple.

‘Eamonn,’ he said, ‘it’s me, Patrick. Can you hear me?’

The old priest moaned again, but showed no other sign of recognition. The ropes were tight, lashing the frail body like the threads a spider uses to secure its prey. But they were not needed now. The old man had no strength left in him.

‘Who did this, Eamonn? Why? Why?’ He was crying. Tears touched the altar cloth. His hands trembled, loosening the knots. He looked up and saw the figure of Christ, suspended in semi-darkness, a wooden figure nailed with wooden nails. The old man groaned and tried to move.

‘It’s all right, Eamonn. Don’t try to speak. I’ll get an ambulance. We’ll get you out of here.’

The last knot came undone and he pulled the ropes loose. There was nothing more he could do here. He had to get an ambulance. Taking off his coat, he rolled it up and placed it under the priest’s head as a pillow. He knew he should wipe away the blood from De Faoite’s face, but he had a horror of the bleeding sockets.

‘You’ll be all right, Eamonn. We’re going to get you to hospital. I’ve got to go to ring for the ambulance. But I’ll be back soon.’

As he looked up, he caught sight of something on the back wall. Above the altar pyx, someone had scrawled a message in large black letters. There were two lines. The words meant nothing at first, then, with a shock of recognition, he saw that the letters of the First line were actually Hebrew and that the inscription was in the same language. The second line was in Greek.

The first line was easy to translate:

Eye for eye, it read, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.

He was less familiar with Greek, but the inscription was not difficult:

And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee.

The paint was still wet. It had run in places. The writer had been in a hurry. But not too much of a hurry. Underneath the lines of writing, the same hand had drawn a circle. In the centre of the circle was painted the outline of a candlestick. A candlestick with seven branches. A menorah with a cross.

‘Eamonn, if you can hear me, nod. I’d like to know if you’re aware I’m here.’

Suddenly, De Faoite’s hand reached out and grabbed Patrick by the wrist. He pulled him down towards him. His lips were moving, trying to form words. His breath came in jagged lumps. Saliva ran across his lips and chin.

‘Pass ...’ It was scarcely a whisper. Patrick bent his

head closer, his ear against the old man’s trembling lips.

‘I can hear you, Eamonn. What is it? What are you trying to say?’

Again the lips moved.

‘Pass ... Pass ... over...’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Soo ... soon ... Pass ... over ... soon. Find ... Balzarin ... Gave him papers ... Knows ... something ... Ask ... Balzarin ...’

De Faoite’s hand relaxed and let go of Patrick’s wrist. His body fell back limp. At the foot of the Virgin, another candle gave itself up to darkness.

EIGHT

The footstep was soft, but magnified in the stillness. Patrick whirled round. Shadows. Darkness that was not quite darkness. A sound high up in the ceiling: mice? bats?

‘Al-salam alaykum, Patrick. You’re a long way from home.’

The soft voice sounded exaggeratedly loud in the hushed emptiness. It had come from a clump of shadows in the central aisle. Patrick took a step back, almost tripping at the foot of the altar.

What’s wrong? Getting nervous? You were never nervous, old friend.’

The voice was so familiar. Familiar yet strange, as though someone had borrowed it. The greeting had been Arabic, but the speaker was not an Arab.

‘Alex? Is that you?’

‘Who were you expecting? Jesus Christ? That famous Jew who abandoned the working classes for...’ A figure stepped out of the shadows into a pool of weak light. He gestured vaguely with a gloved hand. ‘... for this.’ What did he mean, Patrick wondered. The wood? The plaster? The cheap candles? The silence?

What are you doing here, Alex?’ Patrick’s voice was stiff and unwelcoming.

We’re on neutral ground now, Patrick. Relax.’

The newcomer held out a hand, but Patrick stayed where he was. Aleksander Chekulayev had been RGB station chief in Beirut during Patrick’s last spell of duty there. They had met several times before that, twice in Cairo, often in Baghdad, once in Najm al-Sharq, a dirty cafe in Damascus where Patrick had contracted food poisoning. His stomach remembered the fat little Russian in the same mouthful as it did rancid hummus. According to the political winds, they had been rivals, enemies, friends, partners in crime - sometimes all at once. Alex had tried to have him killed on one occasion. There is no such thing as neutral ground.

‘What is it, Alex? What do you want?’ He was not prepared for Alex. His thoughts were still on the altar with Eamonn.

‘I was about to ask you just that myself.’

Chekulayev took a cautious step forward. Patrick could see him more clearly now. The Russian seemed greyer than he remembered. Beneath its natural pallor, his skin appeared as though covered in a fine grey dust, and his eyes were circled by darker lines, like the hair-thin cracks on a raku bowl. Patrick wondered if the greyness was the price or the reward for a lifetime of thought and lies and insinuation.

Glasnost had sniffed at Chekulayev’s edges and drawn back, perhaps more saddened than frightened. He was too old to change, too young to have learnt how. The system might mellow, but he could wait. In the end, it would grow grey like him. In a sense, he was the system.

The Russian nodded in the direction of the altar.

‘May I see?’

Patrick said nothing. At least he had no reason to think Chekulayev was responsible for this particular mess.

‘Don’t worry, Patrick, I’m quite alone.’ He came forward slowly, like a mourner approaching the bier to view the deceased. Patrick stood aside to let him pass. The Russian stepped up to the altar and stood for about a minute, his head bowed, as

though in prayer. When he turned, his face was grim.

‘Not a pretty sight. You knew him?’

‘Yes. He was the priest here. And he was my friend.’ Patrick still felt numb, unable to take in the horror of Eamonn’s death.

‘Yes, of course, the priest.’ Chekulayev looked round, as though aware for the first time he was in a church. ‘The letters on the wall. Hebrew and Greek. You understand them, of course.’

Word for word, yes. But why they were put there, who wrote them - I’ve no idea.’ High above, the mice moved slowly in the darkness. Or were they bats after all?

‘Oko za oko, zub za zub?

Patrick looked puzzled.

“An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth.” Someone wanted revenge. A spiritual revenge ... by very earthly means. What commandment had your priest sinned against, Patrick?’

‘Most of them, I should think. Or none. What difference does it make?’

‘To me, none at all. But perhaps it made a difference to someone. What’s this all about, Patrick?’

Patrick stared at the Russian, as though challenging him.

‘C’mon, Alex - what are you telling me? That you didn’t know what you’d find here, didn’t know I was here - is that it? I suppose you’re just in Dublin on holiday and dropped in here for an early-morning tour of one of the city’s less-visited churches.’

Chekulayev said nothing. It needed only a camera round his thick neck to transform him into the archetype of a certain type of tourist. His fawn coat and burgundy scarf were neatly pressed, his shoes reflected the light of the candles. He could have been a businessman on leave, meddling in holiness for his soul’s pleasure. But Alex Chekulayev did not have a soul.

‘Let’s sit down, Patrick. I feel exposed up here, like an actor on a stage. All those empty pews back there, all those shadows piled up behind the pillars - they make me nervous. Let’s sit down.’

Patrick shuddered and looked away. He remembered - how many years ago? - a performance of Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. Where had it been? St Patrick’s? Christchurch? He forgot. But he had not forgotten those final images: Becket by the altar, pierced and bleeding, the knights-tempters with their reddened swords, the chorus of the women of Canterbury chanting in the shadows:

‘The land is foul, the water is foul, our beasts and ourselves defiled with blood. A rain of blood has blinded my eyes.’

A rain of blood. An eye for an eye. And now Alex Chekulayev like a ghost come out of nowhere to haunt his present. Or a knight with a bloody sword, stepping forward to regale his audience with rational explanations for a bloody act.

They walked together to the back of the church and sat in the rear pew, like penitents come to wait their turn for confession, ringed by shadows.

‘If I believed in anything,’ said Chekulayev, ‘I would become a Muslim. Churches are such gloomy places, don’t you think? They give me the creeps. But mosques are all right. No statues, no memorials, no dead men nailed to crosses. It’s morbid, don’t you think, this religion of yours?’

Patrick thought of Eamonn. He had never been morbid. Patrick realized that he had always loved the old man, even throughout the long years when they had seldom met.

‘You were going to explain how you come to be here.’

Chekulayev reached inside his pocket and drew out a packet of cigarettes. He held them out to Patrick.

‘No thank you.’

The Russian shrugged and took one before returning the packet to his pocket. He jammed the cigarette into a small ebony holder ringed by a thin line of ivory and lit it. He used a match, cupping the flame in thick hands. For a brief moment, his face was lit up, like an icon in darkness, faded and grey and peeling. The face had matured, thought Patrick. Or perhaps just aged.

‘Russian,’ Chekulayev said, meaning the cigarette. ‘At my age, you get used to things. And my people get suspicious of agents who acquire a taste for Western comforts. Just as yours are wary of a man with a penchant for leftish ideology. We never ask what a man thinks - that’s far too abstract. It’s what he wants that makes him dangerous.’ He breathed out a thin pillar of smoke. Patrick wondered if there was still a Russian word for ‘sacrilege’.

‘A few weeks ago,’ Chekulayev began, ‘I came to Dublin from Egypt. I was following rumours, a lead I’d picked up in Alexandria. Perhaps you’ve heard the rumours yourself. Tell me or not, as you like -it’s your decision.

‘Anyway, tonight I followed a man to the coast. He drove a little Citroen. A very careful driver. A little slow: not easy to follow. He parked his car on a road by the sea. After a while, he got out and walked down the road a little; then he began to wait. I waited too. You understand, Patrick. In this business of ours, waiting is of such importance.

‘But our friend was not too clever. He let himself be seen. Someone attacked him.’ The Russian put the cigarette to his lips and inhaled slowly. He did not look at Patrick.

‘I think you know what happened after that,’ he continued. ‘When you came out the second time, I followed you. That’s the truth, Patrick. You led me here yourself.’

Patrick felt the pew beneath his thighs, cold and hard. It reminded him of long Masses he had sat through as a child, of the confessional’s dank odour, of guilt, remorse and tears. And of the terrible boredom of life.

What made you show yourself, Alex? Didn’t you want to follow me any more? Didn’t you want to see where I might lead you?’

‘I decided it was time we talked. Time we shared our thoughts. We can help one another. Don’t you agree?’

Patrick said nothing. Across the vanishing rows of silent pews, he could still make out the unmoving figure of Eamonn De Faoite, inexplicably murdered. In the early morning stillness, the small church filled with ghosts. Men he had killed or allowed to die. Men he had betrayed, men he had bought and sold, all dead or as good as dead, all unshriven, all unforgiving. Hasan Abi Shaqra coming to him for amnesty, his blood shattered across the dust like bright red shards of glass, abandoned eyes opening and closing in disbelief.

‘I’m no longer with the Agency, Alex. It’s true, whether or not you choose to believe me. I know nothing of your rumours, I never saw the man you followed before tonight. I’m not lying to you.’

Up aloft, tiny feet scratched on wood. Years ago, someone had seen a vision here, a statue moving or oozing blood, or perhaps the Virgin herself, pale in a blue veil - Patrick could not remember. What did it matter anyway? Nothing had changed. And a priest lay dead on the altar with his sins still heavy on his heart.

‘Please tell me what you know, Patrick. We aren’t children. I don’t believe in coincidence.’

‘I’ve told you. I’m no longer in circulation. If you don’t believe me, have it checked out. One phone call, that’s all it’ll take.’

Chekulayev lifted the cigarette from his lips. He did it without affectation or self-consciousness.

“You were always too trusting, Patrick. That’s a great fault in an agent. Perhaps you thought I was your friend. Some of us thrive on that conceit, that we are brothers beneath the skin, allies beneath our ideologies. It was easy to think that in Beirut. They hated us all without discrimination. They took us hostage, killed us. We were all unbelievers, all without salvation. And such a camaraderie that gave us: my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Such talk. Such foolishness.

‘People like us don’t have friends, Patrick. We can’t afford to. For me it would be the final luxury, something more insidious than American cigarettes or French perfume. Friendship has a smell of decadence, it lies on the skin longer than attar of roses. They would smell it on my body and whip the skin from my flesh and the flesh from my bones to exorcize it. So please don’t ask me to believe you. Tell me the truth instead. Tell me about Passover.’

Patrick started. Not ‘pass over’, but ‘Passover’. Was that what De Faoite had said? What did it mean? He said nothing. This was such a game. They were playing such a game. ‘Tell me what you know. Tell me the truth.’ Like children at charades, they mimed and signed to one another with grotesque gestures. But unlike children, they sought to confuse, to mislead, to pervert one another. In this world, truths became falsehoods, falsehoods truths, until all became a single, consuming lie.

Like a worshipper, rapt by the sight of God’s blood wine-like in a gold chalice, he stared ahead, saying nothing. Chekulayev made a small gesture with his cigarette, a little red gesture that pin-pricked the darkness. There was a footstep in the shadows behind them. Something hard and cold pressed against the nape of Patrick’s neck. He heard the unmistakable sound of a pistol bolt drawn back.

‘I think,’ Chekulayev whispered, as though in belated recognition of the dim sanctity of the place, ‘I think you had better come with us.’

NINE

The house looked like every safe house he had ever visited or lived in: a little shabby, a little damp, a little sad. They took his blindfold off once the car was safe inside the garage. A dull green door led into the house itself. Chekulayev went ahead, saying nothing. Cheap carpets patterned in lilac, flocked wallpaper, damp-stained cornices: a cut-price haven for the morally dispossessed. Safe houses are like railway platforms: not places but moments in time.

There had not yet been time to feel afraid. That, he knew, would come. Ordinarily, Chekulayev would never have dared pick him up and bring him here. There were unwritten rules, and abducting the opposition’s agents on neutral territory was one of the least bendable. The Russian must be worried. Worried about something big.

They followed a dingy wooden staircase to the top of the house, on the third floor. Chekulayev opened a door and preceded Patrick into a small, sparsely-furnished room. A couple of armchairs upholstered in drab green Dralon, a coffee table bearing the ring-marks left by hours of unrelieved boredom, a landscape print that might have represented anywhere from the Urals to the hills of Wicklow.

On the wall facing the door a little lamp burned on a copper bracket. Chekulayev took hold of it and pulled it towards him. A second door opened in the wall. The Russian stood back and ushered Patrick through the opening.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘After you.’

Patrick stepped inside. This was a smaller room, its walls soundproofed, like a radio studio. It held a metal table, bolted to the floor, and two uncomfortable wooden chairs. A bright bulb was screwed into the dead centre of the ceiling, protected from tampering by stout wire mesh. The floor was uncarpeted. In one corner sat a toilet bowl with a plain wooden seat. A large mirror had been built into one wall. There was nowhere to wash or shave. He turned just in time to see the door close heavily behind him.

Chekulayev shared the interrogation with a woman. Her full name was Natalya Pavlovna Nikitina, and Patrick noticed that Chekulayev, when addressing her, never omitted her patronymic. He guessed her age to be about forty and her rank in the RGB at least that of major. She and Chekulayev took turns through the days and nights that followed, leaving Patrick little time for rest.

Natalya Pavlovna, Patrick assumed, would have cover as a first secretary or assistant attache at the embassy on Orwell Road. She was thin, patient, and given to long silences. Her long black hair was always tied back in a bun, held in place by pins. She dressed plainly and always in black, as though in constant mourning. Her long pale neck gleamed like alabaster.

Patrick thought her anorexic at first, but in time revised his estimate: Natalya Pavlovna was an ascetic.

The pale limbs, the vestigial breasts, the alabaster neck reminded him of a ballerina. But this woman was dedicated to a different dance and moved to a different music. Where Chekulayev feared the lash that would open his skin and bring to light his inwardness, she welcomed its lacerations. Where he was sensual and used deprivation as a threat, she was abstinent and treated the rigours of interrogation as a discipline out of which truth, chastened and polished, would finally emerge.

Patrick had no way of telling how much time passed. No natural light entered the room. The powerful bulb in the ceiling was never extinguished. Patrick would waken from a broken, desperate sleep to see Natalya Pavlovna or Chekulayev standing by his side, ready to begin another session.

The worst were those with the woman. She had served her apprenticeship on the women’s block in Leningrad’s Kresty prison, before the block was turned into a psychiatric wing. There she had learned the rhythms of pain and the cadences of despair. She understood the finesse that left the skin unbroken and the mind in tatters. She spoke the language of betrayal in all its vernaculars. But the language of her heart was suffering: she knew it in herself and taught it to others, unselfconsciously.

From the Kresty, she had been transferred to Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, where she had worked on dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Bukovskii. She had talked at length about her experiences there. Above all, she remembered the great nets the authorities had stretched across the gaps between the landings, to prevent inmates from throwing themselves to their deaths.

‘Think of me as a net,’ she would say to Patrick. ‘I’m here to help you, to stop you falling. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

The room became a nightmare. Floor and walls and ceiling merged into a landscape without shape or dimension. The light never dimmed or flickered. Soon after Patrick’s arrival, an orderly had taken away his clothes and given him a long white shift to wear instead. No sounds reached him from outside. He knew he could not be heard, even if he screamed.

It was clear from the outset that the mirror was a one-way glass through which they kept him under constant surveillance. He would sit facing it for hours, like an animal in a zoo, staring at his captors. At other times, he turned his back on them and stared at the other wall.

Food was left for him in bowls while he slept. It came regularly enough to stave off real hunger pangs, but not often enough or in sufficient quantities to satisfy. It never varied: white rice, a few beans, cold black coffee. The empty bowls were removed while he slept again, which was seldom. The coffee kept him high and awake for long periods. When he did sleep, he was restless and easily wakened. He quickly became disorientated. He suffered from constipation, then bouts of severe diarrhoea that kept him huddled for hours over the toilet. He would wake from disturbed dreams, shaking and nauseous.

Sometimes they would let him sleep ten or fifteen minutes, then waken him by banging loudly on the door. That would continue for hours: each time he began to nod off, the banging would start, until he grew agitated and angry. By the tenth or eleventh time, he would be so tired and confused that he started weeping from sheer frustration. Afterwards, he would feel ashamed of his tears: he was determined to show his gaolers no signs of weakness. But the tears came, whether he wished them or not.

He dreamed of De Faoite incessantly, of the wounded and bleeding altar on which he lay, inarticulate, like a tortured animal. The priest would rise and open cracked lips and whisper a single word over and over: Passover, Passover. And in the dream flakes of plaster would crumble and fall from the high vaulted ceiling, white and sharp as snow, drifting across the bloody church, blanching its floor and walls, bleaching it of all corruption.

‘Talk to me, Patrick,’ Natalya Pavlovna would say in a hushed voice, like one of the nuns he had known as a child, praying, alone with God. ‘Tell me about yourself. Tell me about your past. We have plenty of time, all the time in the world.’

But he sensed an urgency in her voice, a frisson of alarm that belied the patience with which she approached her task. She never spoke of things directly, never asked leading questions. Her inquisition was roundabout, yet Patrick knew it hungered for a certain and sudden quarry.

At first, Patrick would not respond to these overtures. He kept a determined silence, as though vowed to it. That was his novitiate. But as time passed and he lost track of night and day, present and past, dream and reality, he came to crave Natalya Pavlovna’s visits more and more. In the end, he felt only gratitude for her presence and an overwhelming desire to please her.

At times he would wake out of some twisted dream or nightmare to find his mind preternaturally sharp, and in such moments he knew his gratitude to be no more than Natalya Pavlovna had contrived. But he could not wholly throw it aside. Lack of sleep and repeated caffeine buzzes kept him off balance. His resources were diminished, his resistance increasingly difficult to summon. There were moments when he felt he loved her, her soft, reassuring voice, her dark, questioning eyes.

It was not love, of course, but fear mixed with gratitude. And yet at times he could feel a shiver of sexuality pass between them. Even nuns on their hard beds wake with a shudder of desire. Often when she visited, he had the beginnings of an erection. Her subtlety was like a finger drawn along his flesh. They experienced a growing intimacy. Her questions were a lover’s hands, stripping him bare. He would wake up sweating, dreaming of betrayal. But who was left for him to betray?

On several occasions, she asked him about his sins, major and minor, old and new. It was a way into his soul, and from his soul to his heart, and thence to his mind, where he kept all his recollections of names and dates and places. Natalya Pavlovna cared nothing for theology. Sins were nothing to her, or at best keys with which to unlock the doors of Patrick’s mind.

‘Think of me as a priest,’ she would murmur, ‘as a father confessor. How long is it since your last confession?’

And Patrick - who had indeed been many years absent from the confessional, and who did indeed suffer from a guilty conscience and the creeping footsteps of unquiet ghosts - unburdened his spirit gladly and without remorse.

Natalya Pavlovna never rushed, never applied overt pressure, though it was becoming increasingly clear that she was working against time. From sins religious they passed to sins secular, from morals they ascended to pragmatism and the absolutism of the state.

The sessions with Chekulayev were more down to earth. Unlike the woman, he was not interested in the state of Patrick’s soul. After a session with Natalya, Patrick found it almost a relief to be faced with Chekulayev’s directness.

He knew the names of Patrick’s principal agents in Egypt and Lebanon, most of his contacts in the PLO and Hezbollah, and several of his agents of influence in Syria. He had details of CIA houses in Cairo and Port Said. He could recite details of several important cases in which Patrick had been involved, including some that had gone wrong, wrong enough to lead to unnecessary loss of life. He knew about Hasan Abi Shaqra.

What he sought, of course, were the gaps. The things he knew were nothing to those of which he was ignorant. But Patrick knew when to talk and when to keep silent.

‘Tell me about Shifrin.’ Chekulayev returned time and time again to Patrick’s old mentor, his station chief in Cairo. When did he tell you about Passover? What does he know about the Brotherhood?’ Patrick did not answer, for the simple reason that he had nothing to offer.

Natalya Pavlovna, however, possessed the skill to blur the difference between what she knew and what she did not. Each time they spoke, Patrick sensed his resistance weakening. He had talked and he wanted to talk more. He longed to confide in her. The white walls pressed in on him like the blocks of a hydraulic press. He thought they were growing closer. But he could not bring himself to measure them.

‘Tell me about Passover.’ Natalya Pavlovna returned to the subject with increasing frequency. She seemed almost nervous. Her thin hands lay on her lap like pale, crustless crabs, naked and exposed. ‘What do you know of Migliau? Is he here? In Ireland? What have you heard? Have they set a date?’

To all of these questions Patrick could only plead complete ignorance. His head ached and he longed for darkness. Even with his eyes closed, the bright light lanced his brain like a thin blade.

‘I’ve told you. All I know of “Passover” is that De Faoite mentioned it before he died.’

‘You mutter it in your sleep. I’ve heard you many times.’ This admission that she eavesdropped on Patrick’s moments of slumber did not seem to cause Natalya Pavlovna any awkwardness. She knew Patrick assumed it, expected it. Sleep was not sacrosanct. In the religion they shared, nothing was sacrosanct. They were like husband and wife now. Surely there could be no more secrets between them.

He woke three or four times to find himself alone. By the fifth he was sure something was wrong. He was starving: why did no one come? He shouted and banged the walls, but there was no response. Exhausted, he fell asleep again. When he awoke, nothing had changed.

He called out again. You can hear me, you bastards, you can hear me!

‘Where are you, Chekulayev? Where are you, Natalya? Why don’t you answer?’

But no one responded to his entreaties. A ball of fear settled in his stomach.

He crouched down by the wall, disorientated. So, they had changed tactics. Isolate him, deprive him of all human contact, starve him. He felt helpless and afraid. How long could he go on? His cupboard was bare, at least of those things Natalya Pavlovna really wanted to hear. Would lies suffice?

He thought of ways to pass the time, mind games to blot out his growing distress. First, he taught himself to recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards, first in English, then in Latin, as he had learnt it as a child. After that he composed elaborate, meaningless poems in Arabic, in which each word began with the same letter and each line ended with the same rhyme. And he wrote letters in his head to everyone he had ever known. Still no one came.

For a long time he stood defenceless at the mirror. He watched himself curiously, as he might have watched a monkey in a cage: his unshaven face, his red-rimmed eyes. Perhaps this was all there was

left: himself and his reflection. If he vanished, he wondered, would the reflection remain there, like a wound after the knife has gone? He banged hard on the glass, bruising his knuckles.

‘Chekulayev, you fucker! Stop playing games! Get your ass in here, I want to speak to you!’ His voice sounded cracked and hollow, crashing against the tight walls and falling to the floor. For the first time, he was gripped by a fearful claustrophobia. It took him by the throat, forcing him painfully onto his knees, pressing him in onto himself. He began to sob. Tears coursed down grimy cheeks into his beard.

Time passed. He grew calm and called again. Still no one came. There were no sounds. It was as if he had been buried alive. He pushed the thought out of his head. You’re still in the interrogation room. They’re out there, watching you. Hold on.

He used the toilet and cleaned himself with a strip torn from his thin garment. There was no more paper.

The fear grew more intense. More than ever, he had lost track of time and place. If he did not leave soon, this tiny chamber would become his tomb. He sank back on the floor, shaking. Surely now Chekulayev would decide that he had had enough. There was no need to continue the farce. He was broken. He would confess. Natalya Pavlovna would understand. There would be no gloating, no rebukes. Just relief that their ordeal was over. But no one came.

He was not sure when the thought first came to him that something was very wrong indeed. He had conducted interrogations himself, he knew the score. Isolation was a valuable tool: it could break a stubborn spirit. But there were limits to its usefulness. It could drive someone over the edge for days or even weeks. His captors did not have that sort of time: he was certain of it. They wanted answers now. Something was amiss.

He took a chair and stood with it for a long time in front of the mirror. His intention was clear. Still nobody came. Turning his head away, he lifted the chair by its back and swung it in a long arc. It crashed against the mirror with a roar of fragmenting glass. Something sharp flew against his cheek. He let the chair fall. The room beyond was empty.

TEN

Careful as glass, he stepped into the tiny room. There was an audio console on his right, fitted with two rows of tapes: one group to record, the other to play back. The console was illuminated as though someone had been there and gone a moment ago. A pad lay in front of the console, covered in Cyrillic longhand. On top of it someone had left a pen with the top unscrewed. A bank of green and red digital counters glowed like fairy lights against burnished metal. A single tape was spinning like a circus wheel, its free end flapping against the controls. On top of the console someone had left a half-finished cup of coffee. Patrick lifted it up. It was stone cold, days old.

As he set the cup down, his hand brushed the console. He heard the sound of breathing, then a voice, whispering, close by.

‘When will you understand? When will you believe me? I don’t know anything. I can’t help you. I can only tell you what I know.’

His own voice. He shuddered and switched off the toggle he had accidentally touched. Silence regained control.

He waited, tense, behind the door, expecting someone to come, holding the cup in his hand, the nearest thing he could find to a weapon. Cold coffee lay spilled on the floor, a dull, khaki pool soaking into the carpet. There was an electric clock above the console. It said twenty to ten: night or morning, he had no way of knowing. He let five minutes pass. No one came.

The door opened into the little anteroom through which he had passed on his arrival. Like the interrogation room, the monitoring cubicle was disguised behind the brown papered wall. The door closed behind him, and it was as though neither his cell nor the cubicle beside it had ever existed. He stood in an ordinary room, breathing ordinary air. He had only the white cotton shift to remind him of his ordeal.

He paused on the landing, uncertain what to do. Sense told him to go directly down the stairs: with luck he could make it to the front door and be on the street before anyone came. But a more deep-seated instinct told him that no one was going to come. To leave without knowing why could only be dangerous. If his instinct was wrong, at least he had the element of surprise.

In a junk-room on the third floor he found a long-handled hammer. It felt lethal in his hand and gave him renewed confidence. The other rooms - all bedrooms - were empty. A glance through one curtained window told him it was ten o’clock at night. Outside, the streets were endless, mocking, scarred with rain. There was no way down.

He descended the stairs to the second floor, willing himself to move slowly, fighting back an urge to run until he reached the street. He heard a sound like music, a muffled, almost ethereal sound. It was music, and yet not quite music.

On the landing, he hesitated, listening. Now he realized what the sound was: a gramophone needle stuck in a record groove was playing the same snatch of music over and over again.

The sound came from a room on his left. He opened the door. Here, as elsewhere, the light had been left on. A coffee table with English-language magazines, two easy chairs, an empty glass that had been knocked to the floor. In one corner, a cheap gramophone ground out its single phrase. He stepped across and lifted the needle. The sleeve stood on a shelf nearby: the Elmer Bernstein recording of Sean O’Riada’s Mise Eire, played by the RTE Concert Orchestra. Someone had been getting into the spirit of things.

Next door was a bathroom. Stainless steel and dingy porcelain, a toilet like the one upstairs, a razor on a shelf. He closed the door.

There were six people in the next room, five men and one woman, Natalya Pavlovna. They sat facing him in a row, their eyes fixed on the door. No one spoke. No one asked him to come in. He stood in the doorway for a long time, returning their stare. Such strange postures, such tortured expressions. No one moved a muscle. Patrick closed the door behind him.

Whoever had tied them had done a good job: not too tight, not too loose. Just right. Once they were firmly fastened in their chairs, of course the rest had been easy. They had probably bought the plastic bags and rubber bands in Quinnsworth’s. They could not have cost them more than a pound.

Behind the plastic, the faces were chalk white. Natalya Pavlovna’s alabaster neck was creased and swollen. A small patch of cerulean blue had appeared on her left cheek. Chekulayev’s tongue protruded like a rubber cork, black and ugly.

The heads had been shaven. Hair lay discarded on the floor, an innocent reminder of old barber shops. Patrick stepped up close. On each scalp three figures had been inscribed in ballpen: 666.

He looked up. On the wall behind, the same pen had been used to write a single line in Greek:

Patrick recognized it. The words came from the Book of Revelations:

Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him?

He glanced at the shaven heads and remembered another verse from the same chapter:

Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

‘666’: the number of the Beast. He prayed nobody he knew was behind all this.

ELEVEN

They were walking through St Stephen’s Green, a little like lovers, a little like strangers. Everywhere, sculpted faces watched them pass: Mangan and Markievicz, Emmet and Tone and Kettle - poets and freedom fighters turned to civic amenities. There was a little sunlight: not enough to send the clouds packing, but sufficient to lift people’s spirits an inch or two. Buskers had played for them at the top of Grafton Street, A Raibh Tu ag an gCarraig, the pipes muted, the tin whistle sweet and swollen with its painful melancholy. They had taken lunch at the Shelbourne, then crossed the road directly into the park.

Everything seemed normal here: children played or fed the ducks on the tiny lake, lovers embraced on benches, old men in shabby coats lingered by the bandstand, as though waiting for it to fill again with music. It was not yet spring, but the air held a promise of change. On Grafton Street, old Lord Mustard danced to jazz tunes in a silly hat.

Sometimes she held his hand, at others she folded her arms and walked ahead of him, as though impatient to be somewhere. She was wearing a long fur coat from Zwirn with Pancaldi shoes, and for the first time he thought she looked out of place. She wore them as a means of distancing herself from the squalor of her occupation, from the everyday demeaning acts she performed in the name of reason. He thought of her clothes more as symbols or guarantees of loyalty: Ruth Ehlers could not be bought. Not, at least, for money.

‘I want you to leave, Patrick,’ she said. Beside them, a fountain of green and bronze bulrushes threw water high into the February sky. ‘I mean it: don’t get involved in this thing any further.’

It was the first time she had referred to the subject all day. Oddly enough, it seemed to bring her closer, as though she felt easier dealing with an impersonal matter.

‘I am involved. I was involved from the beginning.’

‘But that’s as far as it goes. Let somebody else handle it now. You gave this all up, remember?’

‘I’ve been recommissioned, Ruth. You don’t just walk away from a friend’s body.’

They were standing beside the white marble relief of Roisin Dubh, beneath Mangan’s placid bust. Ruth stroked the pale face with a gloved hand.

‘Yes, Patrick, you do. If you want to stay alive. Listen, I’ve been putting the pieces of this thing together.’

‘And?’

‘A few weeks ago, we intercepted a signal from a Soviet AGI ship off Malin Head. When I say “we”, I mean the radio intercept station at Hacklaw in Scotland, run by the British. They passed it on among a pile of routine stuff to the NSA’s liaison office at Benhall Park. Benhall passed it to us.’

He had heard about AGIs - Auxiliary General Intelligence vessels, Okean-class ships the Soviets kept moored off the coast of Donegal. Their main function was to keep track of US nuclear submarines using Holy Loch as home base.

‘Usually,’ Ruth went on, ‘these are low-grade signals intended for their agents in Ireland. Routine stuff, usually something to do with the IRA. But this one had taken Benhall three days to crack. I got to see it the day it arrived. If I’d known then...’ She paused. A gust of wind caught her scarf. It flew across the marble face like a multi-coloured veil, before she caught it and wound it round her neck again.

‘The message came from the very top, Patrick -from Moscow Centre, from General Kurakin, Chief of the First Directorate. It was addressed to the rezidentura in Dublin. It began with apologies for sending the message by such an insecure route, but there had been no time to arrange for anything better. Dublin station was to drop everything it was doing and get ready for the arrival of somebody very important. The code-name was unfamiliar to us. He was known as “Obelisk”.’

Patrick had been watching a bird preening itself on a nearby bush, a robin escaped from a Christmas card. He turned and took Ruth’s arm tightly, drawing her away from the marble figure down the path.

‘It’s cold,’ he said, ‘let’s go back.’

They headed for the bridge over the little lakes.

‘You know who I’m talking about, don’t you, Patrick? You know who “Obelisk” was.’

‘Of course. Chekulayev. It’s his old name, it’s always been his name.’

‘We didn’t know that. Not then. No one thought to check on their Middle East agents. It didn’t seem obvious, not then.’

They came out onto the street, into the mid-afternoon traffic, and headed up towards Baggot Street.

‘There were no more messages from Centre after that, not through the AGIs anyway. We notified Irish intelligence, kept a look-out for ourselves, but he slipped through. We think he was dropped off the coast from a sub one dark night. Or maybe he just flew into Dublin airport, God knows. Patrick, we didn’t think about the Middle East. Maybe I should have guessed - knowing you were in Dublin.’

‘You weren’t the only one who knew I was here.’

‘No, but... I had more reason to think about you.’

They were walking arm in arm now. Away from the open spaces of the park, she seemed smaller. Her breath hung white and momentary on the frozen air. He could feel it burn his cheek when she turned to speak.

We knew he’d arrived,’ she continued, ‘because a few days later we picked up a signal from the rezidentura using the same code as the earlier message. That was careless. The signal was signed “Obelisk” and referred to something called “Passover”. He’d started work, he said. Two days later, you disappeared.’

She held him more tightly, as though frightened he would vanish again, like smoke, like warm breath on cold air, like a thought started but not completed. An elderly nun smiled at them in complicity as she hurried past. Only the celibate truly understand the meaning of passion.

‘Even then I failed to make the connection. “Obelisk”, “Passover” - Jesus, Patrick, it should have been obvious.’

‘Nothing’s obvious in this business. Look, what’s so worrying about all this? Dublin station knew Chekulayev was here, nobody warned me, I found out the hard way. So, why the sudden panic?’

‘No panic, Patrick. Just sensible precautions.’ She paused. ‘I haven’t told you everything. We got the NSA to feed the code-name into their computer system at Fort Meade. They carry records of all diplomatic and SIGINT traffic in and out of Ireland. That includes all their own intercepts from Menwith Hill and Morwenstow in England, which covers all Intelsat V communications through Elfordstown, as well as anything GCHQ feeds in. They use a word-recognition programme that can handle four million characters a second. We asked them to track the word “Passover” in about a dozen languages over the past month.’

‘And?’

We got nothing. Not a damn thing. We tried “Obelisk” and “Chekulayev” - still nothing. Somebody suggested “Easter”, but all that gave us was a couple of routine messages from the Vatican to their nunciature. Then the penny dropped. I fed your name in.’

As though by mutual accord, they stopped. They were just crossing the bridge over the Grand Canal between Lower and Upper Baggot Street. Like half-finished wire casings, frozen trees flanked the water’s edge, stretching into the distance in either direction. He let her speak.

‘You got three mentions. Number one was from somebody in Tel Aviv to a friend in the Israeli embassy, wanting to know what the hell you were doing in Dublin. The second was peculiar. It was a radio message using a diplomatic wavelength and a standard code, but the transmitter was located somewhere on the west coast, near Galway. It was beamed somewhere towards southern Europe - northern Italy or Yugoslavia, perhaps. You’d been seen visiting Eamonn De Faoite. Someone had run a check on you and discovered you were with the Company. They thought you still were.’

She turned and looked down the canal, in the direction of Mount Street. Trees like guttered candles, lifeless, without flame. Water like base metal, flowing silently between grass and concrete.

‘You said there were three. Three messages.’

‘Yes.’ She hesitated. He noticed how she bit her lower lip, small white teeth on the red flesh. We think it was the reply to the second, a telephone call.

All the NSA can tell us is that the call originated in Venice, Italy. The number’s untraceable. It went to a number outside Oughterard, a little place not far from Lake Corrib, to a holiday cottage. It was taken by an answering device.’ She paused.

‘Yes?’

‘The cottage has been empty all winter, Patrick. Locked up. Or so the owner says. We sent someone to check. There was no answering machine. The telephone was disconnected.’

‘What was the message?’

‘It was in Italian. The speaker left instructions that you were to be eliminated along with Eamonn De Faoite. Your house was to be searched for papers, papers De Faoite might have given you.’

‘When was it sent?’

‘Three weeks ago. About twenty-four hours before you found De Faoite murdered.’ She turned to him, tense, angry, almost weeping. ‘For God’s sake, Patrick, the cottage wasn’t empty when our people got out there. There was a child, a boy of ten. What was left of him. The heart had been cut out: they found some of it later in a garbage can. It had been burned. He ... The doctor thought he’d been dead about a week. We got an ID on him yesterday.’

All about them the world seemed ordinary. Traffic passed in a constant stream. Only yards away, a small queue had formed at the Bank of Ireland cash machine on the corner of Haddington Road. And they stood on the bridge talking of children with their hearts ripped out.

‘His name was Alessandro Clemente, the son of Paolo Clemente, the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs. The boy had been kidnapped from outside his private school off the Via Galvani in Rome. That was about two weeks before the body was found. The

Italians were keeping the whole thing quiet. It was hard enough finding out what we did.’

“What about this guy Clemente, the father. Is he speaking? Does he know what all this is about?’

‘He isn’t speaking to anybody, Patrick. He’s dead. His wife found him in his study with a shotgun rammed down his throat and most of his head decorating the wall. This was about ten hours after the report of the boy’s death reached him. We did discover one thing, though. There was a note on his desk. Not in his own handwriting, so his wife says. It was just one line. I’m told it’s from the book of Leviticus. “He hath given of his seed unto Molech, to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name.”

‘Just what the hell is going on here, Patrick?’ She was crying, hot, stinging tears that lined her cheeks. Not for the boy, not for Patrick, but for herself. She had lifted a stone of marble and seen the horrors that slithered to and fro beneath. ‘What the fuck is going on?’

TWELVE

Back in her flat on Pembroke Road, they sat on a long couch in front of the fire, close but not quite touching. Beneath high ceilings, shadows moved on Mondrians and van Doesburgs and Fontanas, line upon measured line, shadow upon shadow. In one corner, a painted sculpture by Dhruva Mistry, half man, half beast, kept careful watch. On the hi-fi, Klaus Nomi was singing an aria from Saint-Saens’ Samson and Delilah.

Only the fire seemed real. A fine odour of warm peat crept through the room. Red and yellow and gold flames cast bright reflections on brass and copper. Ruth had made mulled wine filled with heavy spices: cloves and cinnamon and aniseed, with orange and lemon peel. They sipped the wine and listened to the music, and Patrick thought how unnatural everything had become, how far removed from a world in which the bodies of pale children decayed in summer cottages, and priests, like Oedipus, were blinded on high altars.

‘It troubles me that God can allow such things,’ he said.

‘I thought you didn’t believe in God.’

He watched smoke spiral upwards, imagined it grey and nebulous on the darkening air outside.

‘I don’t,’ he replied. ‘But that’s just it, don’t you see? I can’t believe in a God who lets things like this go on. Oh, and things worse than this. Much, much worse. Any other god I could believe in, but not this one. To be omnipotent and hold back, to be capable and do nothing. Just watch. Watch and judge. I remember...’

She twisted a little towards him, her eyes fixed on his profile.

‘I remember,’ he continued, ‘something I once read. It was in a book of Islamic theology: “These to heaven, and I care not. These to hell, and I care not.” What sort of God is that? And the Christian God isn’t any better. He lets children die on the street in Calcutta just so people can say what a wonderful woman Mother Theresa is. At least Molech kept his depredations to a reasonable level.’

Who was Molech, Patrick? What did it mean, that verse they found on Clemente’s desk?’

‘Molech? He was a Canaanite god. Phoenician, if you prefer. He had a taste for children. Their parents used to take them up to his altar at a place called Topheth. That was where they did it - the burning, the sacrificial offering. To keep the crops from spoiling. To make their cattle fertile. For whatever reason - for whatever seemed important to them.’

She shuddered and looked aside.

‘They burned them?’

‘Yes. So the Old Testament says. Maybe it’s just biased, a load of propaganda about Canaanite atrocities - who knows? But I don’t remember anything about cutting hearts out.’

The fire in the hearth leaped and twisted, throwing a cloud of sparks high into the chimney. Ruth leaned against him, touching him for the first time since entering the apartment. He responded, putting his arm round her, drawing her to him.

‘My parents were enlightened,’ she said. ‘Or thought they were. Rich liberals with black friends, Jewish friends, intellectuals. No gay friends, of course: they weren’t that liberal. They had old money, so they could afford some eccentricities. They voted Democrat, donated to the AGCL, signed petitions to end the war in Vietnam. I was brought up to be nice to the maids and gardeners, and every Christmas I gave some of my toys to the local orphanage. They sent me to a succession of private schools, and Europe twice a year, and Vassar when I was old enough, because it had gone co-ed. And a year in Switzerland, to be “finished” as they put it.

‘The trouble is, where do you go from there? When I grew up, nobody was dropping out any longer. I was liberal all right, but I had my own trust fund. With a private income, you can afford to be liberal. Even with Ronald Reagan in the White House. Especially with Ronald Reagan in the White House.’

She put her head on his shoulder.

‘I got married, but that didn’t solve anything. I don’t suppose it ever does. Mr Ehlers was a nice guy, as nice guys go. But after you’ve fucked about seven hundred times in a row, and taken your fifteenth vacation in three years, and put this year’s finishing touches on top of last year’s finishing touches on the bidets in the guest bathrooms, even nice guys can pall a little.

‘So I dropped out. Since I couldn’t be a hippy any longer, I joined the Company. My parents were furious. But I wanted to prove something to them.’ She paused, biting her lip. ‘Funny, I’ve forgotten what it was.’ She pulled him to her, frightened, angry with her fear. ‘Tell me, Patrick, tell me what the fuck it was! It wasn’t this - so what was it?’

She was crying painfully now, her doubts grown inarticulate with rage. He kissed her eyes, tasting the bright, metallic tears. He knew the flavour well, it ran in his own veins, bitter, galling, cold as ice. His lips stumbled drunkenly down her cheeks, his hands fumbled across her breasts, clumsy, like a child’s. She pulled away briefly, then returned to him, her lips to his lips, her breath confused and harsh, mingling with his breath, with the heavy odour of wine and spices.

They had not made love since his return from the safe house. He had been distant, colder than usual, without response. Now, with a suddenness that dismayed him, the pent-up fears of his confinement focused on a raging physical need. To enter her would free him from everything. Like a prophet surprised in solitude by a sudden, tumultuous god, he cried out.

He closed his eyes and saw Natalya Pavlovna, the thin body, the piercing eyes. He thought of her naked beneath him, the small, flat breasts, the bruised nipples, the churning breath. She had come to him like a lover, seeking out his sins, and he had never touched her or been touched by her.

Twisting, he reached out a hand for Ruth, pulling her to the floor with him. Her eyes were closed, she could not bear to look at him or have him look at her, her heart was pounding, uncomfortable and fast. His fingers touched her, now light, now pressing urgently. Her breath came quickly, she wanted to cry out, to expel the awful thing that had lodged inside her: a dead child gutted and cast aside like an unwanted fish on a harbour wall.

He undressed her passionately, but as though in a dream: her top, her skirt, her underthings. Her skin felt hot and fevered to his desperate touch, he could not sense her presence in the room with him. Imperceptibly, they had begun to move to different rhythms. She made love to exorcize the ghost of a child she had never met, whose silent, ravaged heart had entered her dreams and wrought havoc there; he to find a dream that might make waking more bearable.

Her nakedness appalled him, her need to be touched, her vehemence in lovemaking. Her exorcism called for rage, his for forgetfulness. As she undressed him, he felt his sense of unreality deepen, as though the shedding of his clothes entailed in some fashion a loss of identity. His head felt light, almost detached from his body. And yet his thoughts were clear, almost unbearably so. He felt her hands, hot and restless, move across his back and chest.

What happened next was unpredicted and unrehearsed. It was rather as if he had been staring at one of those trick pictures, the sort psychologists use to test perception, in which a duck becomes a rabbit or a beautiful woman reveals herself as an old crone.

An almost imperceptible shift occurred between one breath and the next. He looked round to see that the fire had burnt low and the room was now bathed in candlelight. He could not even be sure it was the same room. There were heavy hangings on one wall where there had been none before. Outside, the sound of traffic had vanished. It was chillier than it had been a moment earlier.

He was still naked, still tumescent, still crouched above the form of a naked woman on the floor. But the woman was not Ruth. Her hair was jet black, tousled, in heavy braided folds across her face. She was small-breasted, with narrower hips and more abundant pubic hair. Even as he looked, she brushed back the hair from her face.

‘In ainm De, a Phddraig, lean ort! For God’s sake, Patrick, don’t stop now,’ she said.

He did not know how he knew, but the language was Irish, Leinster Irish of the eighteenth century. But that was impossible - she could not be speaking Irish. He knew her, knew her as well as he knew himself: it was Francesca. Only that was impossible too: Francesca was dead, she had been dead twenty years.

He stumbled back, slipping, then raised himself on one hand.

‘Cad ta ort, a Phddraig? Cad ta ort, a stor? Patrick, what’s wrong? What is it, darling?

Standing, he felt his head spin. The candles moved and the room lurched. He was falling, he could feel himself spinning through space, then the floor crashing against him and the breath pumped out of his body.

When he came round, Ruth was standing over him, a wet sponge in her hand, a look of deep concern on her face.

‘Patrick, what’s wrong? What is it, darling? How do you feel?’

He put his hand to his head. Out of nowhere he had a pounding headache. His stomach felt queer. It reminded him of migraines he had experienced in his teens.

‘I’m ... all right,’ he murmured. ‘Just ... blacked out. My head feels terrible: I think it’s a migraine.’

She raised him to a sitting position against the sofa.

‘Shall I get a doctor? Has this happened before?’

‘It’s all right. I’ll be okay. This used to happen when I was younger. I’ll be better after a sleep.’

But nothing like this had happened before: a hallucination, blacking out. His body was covered with sweat and he had started to shiver.

‘Stay there,’ Ruth said. ‘I’ll fetch a blanket.’

He shifted himself to a more comfortable position. As he did so, he noticed something on his stomach, a long, fine line. He took it between finger and thumb and lifted it. It was a hair, a black hair about two feet in length.

THIRTEEN

Archbishop Pasquale Balzarin stood at the window of his second-floor study, watching the shadows lengthen on the lawn. Sunlight lay plaited through blades of untrampled grass. A bird soared overhead, lost in circles of its own making. On the lawn, a peacock passed, precise and shadowless, its feathers warm against the twilight. It walked through its own world, untouched by the worries of the man who watched it, a thing of beauty merely.

Why now?’ he thought. ‘Why now?’ Arthritic fingers pressed nervously on the white beads of his rosary, investing the question with an element of prayer. Outside, the peacock screamed, turning its fan against the encroaching darkness.

Balzarin had been Papal Nuncio to the Republic of Ireland for three years now. During his last visit to Rome, he had heard whispers. Fazzini was certain to step down from his Curial office on his seventy-fifth birthday. If Balzarin sat tight a few months more, he would step into Fazzini’s shoes and, of course, his cardinal’s hat. He wanted that more than he had ever wanted anything.

Correction. What he wanted most of all in the world was to get out of Dublin. Out of its rain and mist and perpetual gloom. He was sixty now and wanted to spend his last days in the sun, preferably in his native Italy, best of all in Rome. After all, he did have fifteen years to go before he was officially expected to retire.

There were moments on the verge of sleep when he cursed Saint Patrick for ever having brought the faith to this place at all. It was all a horrible mistake.

Christianity was a Mediterranean religion: God’s son would never have volunteered to dwell among the cairns and cromlechs of this mist-soaked wasteland.

He returned to his desk. A copy of the most recent edition of the Annuario Pontificio, the Vatican Yearbook, lay open at the first of many pages dealing with the Secretariat of State. It did no harm to keep up to date on who did what, who had been moved, who had passed on to a higher service. Casually, he flicked over a few pages then, consulting the index, turned to the section devoted to the Archives. He studied the entry for a few moments, made an annotation in pencil on a pad, and closed the book.

There was a knock on the door.

‘Avanti!’

Fr. Assefa Makonnen stepped into the room. He was the nuncio’s addetto, roughly equivalent to a second secretary. An Ethiopian, he had been sent to Dublin a year ago, to encourage links between the Irish church and the Third World. It had taken him less than six months to learn that some of the church hierarchy in Ireland thought this was the Third World.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Your Excellency, but your visitor has arrived.’

Balzarin sighed and pursed his lips. He had forgotten that a visitor was due. He glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was fourteen minutes to four.

‘Show him in,’ he said.

As Makonnen turned to go, Balzarin called him back.

‘His name, Father, what is his name?’

‘Canavan, Your Excellency. Patrick Canavan. An American of Irish descent’

‘Ah, yes,’ Balzarin whispered. ‘The American.’

The clock whirred guiltily and struck the quarter hour.

It had taken Ruth over two hours this morning to fix up this interview with the nuncio. Strings had been pulled, favours promised. She was still unhappy about his pressing on with his inquiries, but had decided it was futile trying to dissuade him.

Makonnen introduced Patrick to the archbishop and saw him into a chair before seating himself nearby, pen and paper on his lap in readiness for note-taking.

Patrick hesitated. They no longer made them like Balzarin. The nuncio was a patriarch from his purple skullcap to his highly polished boots. He seemed to have borrowed the parts for his face from a range of Renaissance painters, but the overall effect was uniform: a look of aristocratic disdain that wore the holiness of his office with ill-disguised impatience.

‘I’m very grateful, Your Excellency,’ Patrick began, ‘that you found time to see me.’

Balzarin gestured briefly with his hand. Patrick was not sure whether the movement meant ‘Don’t mention it’ or ‘Get on with what you have to say’, but he rather thought the latter.

‘I’m not sure ... Has Father Makonnen explained to you the reason for my visit?’

The nuncio adjusted a photograph on his desk. On one finger, a ruby ring caught light from the fire.

‘You are a researcher in Semitic languages at Trinity College. You were a friend of the late Father Eamonn De Faoite, the parish priest of St Malachy’s, here in Dublin. You are ...’ He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, ‘... fifteen minutes late for your appointment. How can I help you?’

Patrick shifted awkwardly. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a reassuring smile from the secretary.

‘I’ll come straight to the point, Your Excellency. Before he died, Eamonn De Faoite told me he had given you some papers. I believe those papers relate in some way to his death. With your permission, I would like to examine them.’

Balzarin did not move. But Patrick sensed the effort he made to control his features. Shadows licked at his pale skin, cast by the flickering flames in the open hearth. The nuncio fixed his eyes on Patrick, as though he possessed a faculty beyond sight, that enabled him to read his visitor’s thoughts. He was nervous, but when he spoke, his voice betrayed nothing of his inner feelings.

‘I think you are mistaken, Signor ... ah, Canavan. I did not know Father De Faoite. He did not give any papers to me. If these were important papers, surely he would have given them to his own bishop. They would not concern me. I am the Papal Nuncio: parish affairs are no concern of mine.’

Patrick coughed. In spite of the blazing fire, he felt cold. It was growing dark outside. He glanced across the room at Makonnen. The Ethiopian’s smile had gone and been replaced by a searching look directed at Balzarin. Patrick tried again.

‘I have every reason to believe that Eamonn De Faoite’s death was no parish affair. To my certain knowledge, it already involves at least one national intelligence bureau. At a very high level.’ Just how high it went, he had no way of knowing: but Chekulayev was not someone they would waste on parish politics.

‘An intelligence bureau?’ Balzarin seemed disturbed and more than a little interested, in spite of himself. ‘Could you be more specific, Signor Canavan? You are referring to the CIA?’

Patrick shook his head.

‘At this stage, I think it’s better I don’t answer that.’

‘You are being deliberately mysterious, signore. Let me repeat, your friend left no papers with me, nor have I any other papers in my possession relating to his death. Father Makonnen tells me he died a little over two weeks ago. According to the bishop’s office, there was nothing unusual about his death. He was an old man who has now gone to his heavenly reward. I really cannot see what interest either his life or his death could hold for what you term a “national intelligence bureau”. I am a busy man, signore. You will excuse me if I ask Father Makonnen to help you out. Thank you for coming. I’m sorry I could not be of greater help.’

The Italian rose, intending to bring the interview to a close.

‘Please sit down, Your Excellency. I haven’t finished speaking.’

Patrick watched Balzarin’s face turn an episcopal purple. The nuncio remained standing, momentarily lost for words.

‘Eamonn De Faoite was murdered on the altar of his own church,’ whispered Patrick. ‘His eyes were gouged out and he was left to die in severe pain. His killers had daubed verses from the Bible on the walls. And you tell me there was “nothing unusual about his death”.’

Slowly, as though lowered there by a mechanism from above, Balzarin sank back into his chair.

‘Come ...? How ... did you obtain this information? All details of De Faoite’s death were kept from the public. The circumstances were much too ... disturbing. This is a Catholic country, signore.

There are some things that are better left unsaid. Do you understand me? This is not a matter of politics or scandals or reputations; it is a matter of faith. As representative of the Holy See in Ireland, it is my duty to ensure that the Church’s image is not harmed unnecessarily. The Church has many enemies in this country, both here and in the north. I have no intention of letting you or anyone else play into their hands.’

Balzarin talked himself back into a position of control. He leaned across the desk. The light was fading rapidly now, but nobody moved to turn on a lamp.

‘Let me ask you again,’ he said in a voice from which all signs of perturbation had been rigidly excluded. ‘How did you come by your information concerning the manner of Father De Faoite’s death?’

‘I found him. He died trying to tell me about something called “Passover”. He said you had papers that explained what it is about. I don’t care a damn if nobody ever knows a thing about his murder. That isn’t important. But those papers are.’

‘And I repeat I know nothing of any papers. Frankly, I think you may be making a mystery where there is none. You say Father De Faoite spoke of Passover to you. He was dying. Like yourself, he was an expert in Semitic languages. No doubt he had some papers referring to the Jewish festival of that name. Or to the Book of Exodus perhaps. His death was the work of a madman. If you were there, you will not need me to tell you that. I can understand that you are disturbed. But I cannot let your personal distress do damage to the Church. Do I make myself clear?’

Patrick knew the Archbishop was lying. He could see it in his eyes and in his manner. His assurance had turned to bluster. He knew something, something that he and others wanted to remain a secret.

From his pocket Patrick drew out a small slip of paper. He had drawn a circle on it, and in the circle inscribed a menorah and a cross. Gently, he laid it on the nuncio’s desk.

Will you please tell me if this means anything to you?’

Balzarin switched on a green-shaded desk lamp and reached for a pair of wire-framed spectacles on his blotter. Patrick noticed that his hands shook as he put the spectacles on. He watched him narrowly as he bent to look at the paper. In the corner, he could see Makonnen watching as well.

The colour drained from the nuncio’s face. His lips moved, whispering something inaudible. He looked up. In his eyes Patrick could see a haunted expression.

‘Please leave, Signor Canavan. You are meddling in things you have no knowledge of. Please do not come again or try to contact me. Forget about this business. It is essential for you to forget about it. Otherwise...’

Balzarin stood abruptly.

‘Father Makonnen will see you out. Goodbye, signore.’

Pausing only to remove his spectacles, the nuncio turned and left the room through a side door. His footsteps echoed briefly in the room beyond.

On the lawn, a peacock cried out. Suddenly, there was silence. And in the silence darkness ruffled the leafless trees.

FOURTEEN

Midnight. The world suspended, lightless, blind. Dawn was hours away, almost unbelievable in its remoteness. Assefa Makonnen woke out of an uneasy sleep. Had there been a sound? Above his bed, a red light flickered beneath a painting of the Sacred Heart. He lay listening to the wind as it circled the building, creeping in and out among the trees. It was very cold.

The priest switched on his bedside light. Out of the darkness, a stark white room emerged. He rubbed his eyes and sat up. What had woken him? The cold? The mental unease he had felt ever since the American’s visit? Or had it been a sound after all? He listened intently, but there was only the wind.

He turned out the light and tried to go back to sleep, but sleep would not come. His mind was troubled. Over his head, the red light flickered incessantly. He would open his eyes and see it, like a red eye glaring at him. As a child in Asmara he had taken comfort from it in the cold hours before dawn. It had watched over him throughout his years at the Ethiopian Seminary in the Vatican, and later at the Accademia Pontificia, where he had trained to be a papal diplomat. But tonight it seemed angry, almost accusing. He switched on the bedside light again.

Something was wrong. Why had Balzarin lied to the American? Makonnen knew he should tackle his superior about the matter. But he also knew that he did not possess the courage to do so. The archbishop was a powerful man. It was only a matter of time before the Holy Father elevated him to the rank of cardinal. Back in Rome, Balzarin would be in a position to make or break lesser men. To make matters worse, the nuncio’s father had been murdered in 1940 while serving as a provincial governor in Italian East Africa - in northern Ethiopia, to be precise. From his first day in Dublin, Makonnen had been aware that his presence was barely tolerated.

But a priest had died under dreadful circumstances and someone was trying to cover it up. Makonnen knew that not even the local police had been notified of a murder. As far as the Irish authorities knew, De Faoite’s death had been entirely natural. The bishop had gone directly to Balzarin, and the nuncio had taken the matter entirely into his own hands.

There had been papers. Makonnen had handled them: after De Faoite’s death, he had been instructed to take them to Rome in the diplomatic pouch. He had flown straight to Fiumicino airport on 25 January and headed directly to the Holy See. There he had handed them over personally to Cardinal Fazzini in the Secretariat of State. Fazzini had dismissed him with a wave of the hand and told him to take the next flight back to Dublin.

He had come back troubled. But until today, his training had retained the upper hand over his emotions. They had taught him obedience: at school, at the seminary, at the Pontifical Academy. Obedience had never irked or shamed him before this. But tonight he felt it like a gag across his mouth, choking him.

The American had spoken of interest on the part of a ‘national intelligence bureau’. In all likelihood he meant the CIA. The man at the US embassy who had arranged Canavan’s audience was reputed to be their chief intelligence officer. And the Agency had co-operated with the Holy See often enough in the past. Why, then, had Balzarin reacted as he had? Just what did the archbishop know? Makonnen thought he might find the answer in Balzarin’s office.

He took his spectacles from the bedside table and slipped them on. The bed was warm, and he was reluctant to venture out. The climate here was the only thing on which he saw eye to eye with Balzarin. He steeled himself and swung his feet out of the covers onto the cold floor. He slept in socks, a woollen vest, and a thick jumper given him in November by a Sacred Heart of Mary Sister from Tallaght. Sometimes he thought the only thing between him and abandoning his vocation was Sister Nuala’s jumper. That and the socks.

His soutane hung on the back of the door. Shivering, he pulled it over his head. This was the stupidest thing he had ever done.

As he opened the door, he glanced round. On the wall facing the bed hung a plain wooden crucifix he had brought from Ethiopia. The black Christ stared at him with burning eyes. Makonnen returned his gaze.

‘What would you do?’ he asked beneath his breath as he closed the door behind him.

The nunciature was plunged in darkness. The building was almost empty. Most of the staff had gone up to Armagh the day before to consult with Cardinal O’Fiaich on the latest Anglo-Irish debacle. The charge d’affaires, Father Rennealy, was attending a conference in Cork. Only the nuncio, Makonnen himself, and a visiting Jesuit from the Holy Office were sleeping on the premises tonight. The visitor was in a guest room near Makonnen’s.

Dublin’s Vatican outpost was a two-storey building constructed at the end of the 1970s, when the nuncio had moved out of his old residence in Phoenix Park. The style was conventional, but the fittings had been designed for comfort.

Balzarin’s study was at the other side of the long house, near the nuncio’s private apartment. Makonnen hesitated in the corridor, listening carefully. He wondered again if he had been woken by a sound. It was highly unlikely that someone would have broken in: the nunciature, situated just off the Navan Road in the north of Dublin, had been well protected by the Gardai ever since Balzarin’s arrival. Perhaps the wind had disturbed something in the grounds.

The carpeted passage muffled his footsteps. On the wall to his left, the portraits of former nuncios hung like a row of judges, their massive gilded frames barely visible in the darkness. Makonnen thought of his tiny home on the outskirts of Asmara, the ancient churches cut into the rock at Lalibela, the tattered vestments of the priests, God’s poverty, Christ’s poverty, the world’s poverty. And all around him in the dark, endless riches jostling for space. For the first time in years, he felt out of touch with the world and with himself. Did God walk in such silent corridors? He shuddered and continued along the passage.

There was a light under the door of the nuncio’s study. Balzarin must be working late, something he normally never did. Makonnen hesitated. Now he had come so far, he did not like to turn back.

His feelings in the passage had somehow hardened him. He remembered his arrival in Rome, fresh out of Africa, dark-skinned and alien, trying to find his way in a universal church run by white men. At first, the glamour of the place, its symbols of imperial and ecclesiastical might, its gilded cupolas and icy prelates had disturbed and compromised his faith. With time, he had grown a skin against such things. But underneath, close to his flesh, they were an irritation.

He would confront Balzarin and be damned. What was the worst they could do? Send him to some backwater without hope of promotion? There were worse things in life. He stepped up to the door and knocked hard.

There was no answer. He waited half a minute and knocked again. Still no reply. Hesitantly, he took hold of the handle and pressed it down. The door was unlocked. It swung open without a sound.

The nuncio was seated at his desk, his face partly hidden in shadow, eyes fixed on the door. Makonnen hesitated.

‘Your Excellency ... I ...’

Balzarin did not move.

‘I thought I ... heard ...’

Makonnen took a couple of steps into the room. Something was wrong. The nuncio’s face was twisted in a grimace, whether of pain or terror he could not tell. The eyes were wide open, unblinking, drained of life.

The addetto stepped up to the desk. Balzarin was unquestionably dead, a small glass phial clutched in his right hand. The desk lamp lay shattered on the floor. That must have been the noise that had woken Makonnen. He bent forward and felt the nuncio’s cheek. The flesh was still warm.

He closed the nuncio’s staring eyes and reached for his hand in order to take the phial. The hand was resting on the desk, on top of a pile of papers. Makonnen glanced down. A mauve-coloured file lay open, its papers scattered. Without thinking what he was doing, he began to gather them together. Carefully, he inserted them into the file and closed it. On the cover were two words: La Fratellanza, The

Brotherhood. Beside the word someone had drawn a circle, and in the circle a seven-branched candlestick. A candlestick whose stem formed the base of a cross.

FIFTEEN

He used the direct line. It would be almost two o’clock in Rome. The phone rang at the other end, giving no indication of the caller’s urgency. It was several minutes before anyone answered.

‘Pronto? Parlo col Vaticano?’

‘Si. Che cosa desidera?’

‘Sono padre Makonnen, l’addetto dalla nunziatura di Dublino. Vorrei parlare con il Cardinale Fazzini, per favore, interno 69.’

‘Ma guardi che a quest’ ora? Il cardinale dorme.’

‘E molto urgente. Per favore, provi.’

‘Mah, se proprio vuole. Attenda un momento.’

69 was the number for Fazzini’s private line, only to be used in extreme emergencies. Just as he thought the operator would cut in to tell him to try again in the morning, there was a click and a terse voice answered.

‘Pronto. Qui parla Fazzini.’

He hesitated for only a moment. This was important. Important enough to get a cardinal out of bed for.

Tour Eminence, this is Father Makonnen, addetto at the Dublin nunciature. I ... I’m sorry to disturb Your Eminence at this hour, but ... there has been a terrible tragedy.’

In spite of himself, he found his voice fading away. He glanced round at the still figure of Balzarin, stiffening in his chair. For the moment he had left aside his private worries. He was a diplomat again, his only wish to avoid a scandal that might harm the Church. The irony of his situation could wait till later.

‘It is two o’clock in the morning, Father.’ Fazzini’s voice was sharp, edged with sleep. ‘Whatever your tragedy, surely Archbishop Balzarin is capable of dealing with it until a more suitable hour.’

Makonnen took a deep breath.

‘I regret ... to tell Your Eminence ... that Archbishop Balzarin is dead. He ... I think he took his own life. Si e suicidato. I...’

‘Are you alone, Father?’

‘Yes, I ... The other staff are away. The present housekeeper chooses not to sleep in the nunciature. She is not expected until ten o’clock. The only other person here is Father Diotavelli from the Holy Office. He’s still asleep. If...’

‘Listen to me carefully, Father ... what did you say your name was?’

‘Makonnen.’

‘Listen carefully, Father Makonnen. If you are correct and the archbishop has indeed taken his own life, I am sure you understand the need for ... discretion. I take it you have informed no one else of this ... unfortunate discovery.’

‘Yes, Eminence.’

‘Fa bene. See to it that Father Diotavelli is kept in the dark. The last thing we want is those bastards from the Congregation for Doctrine getting wind of this. They poke their noses into everything and find excuses for endless investigations. Keep Diotavelli out of this at all costs.

‘Now, this is important. I do not wish to distress you further, Father, but you must tell me how the archbishop ... managed things.’

‘He ... I think he took poison, Eminence. There was a small container.’

‘Feleno? Bene. There is no blood, the body is not marked in any way? Nessun segno sul corpo?

‘No.’

‘Very good. The archbishop: you found him in bed?’

‘No, Eminence. In his study. I’m phoning from there.’

There was a pause. Makonnen glanced up. On the wall above the desk a crucifix hung on a single nail. The figure of Christ was small and pale and wounded, his body slumped in the resignation of death. In the chair beneath sat Balzarin, red-faced and irresolute, mocking the pale image.

‘Father Makonnen, you must somehow get the body of the archbishop to his bed. It is the best way. Remove all traces of the poison. When everything is straightened, telephone a private doctor, someone who has helped us avoid some ... scandals in the past. I will already have spoken to him: he will understand. There must be no autopsy. The certificate will say Archbishop Balzarin died in his sleep of natural causes. Morte naturale. Capisce?

‘I understand.’ It was standard procedure. Bishops did not commit suicide. Nuncios, like popes, died in their beds. Peacefully.

‘One thing more, Father. Did the archbishop leave a note of any kind? A letter, anything?’

Makonnen hesitated.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not in his study. Perhaps in his bedroom, I’ll take a look. But...’

He paused.

‘Yes?’

‘Eminence, there was a file. It was lying open on his desk when I found him.’

‘A file, yes. What sort of file?’

‘It...’ He remembered the papers he had couriered to Fazzini the previous month. The cardinal must know. He would explain everything. ‘It has a symbol on the front, Your Eminence. A Jewish candlestick, a ...’ He thought for a moment. ‘A menorah, but with a cross in the centre. Your Eminence - someone visited the archbishop today. An American. He asked about that symbol. About the papers that came from Father De Faoite. At the time I thought Archbishop Balzarin seemed distressed.’

There was a long silence at the other end. When Fazzini spoke again, his voice had changed.

‘Father Makonnen, I must tell you that this is not a matter to be discussed over the telephone. I am very grateful for this information. Until I see you in person, however, I cannot give you any details. All I will say is that the archbishop had become involved in ... certain matters not in keeping with his position. You must make sure the file is secure. The Church could be gravely damaged if any of this leaked out.

‘Wait where you are and I will send someone to help you. Do not telephone the doctor until they come. There may be other documents, we must be extremely careful. Do not touch anything else until help comes. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, Your Eminence.’

‘I shall wish to see you tomorrow in my office in Rome. Take the first flight. In the morning you will summon the other staff members back to Dublin. Do not contact them yet.’ There was a brief pause. ‘This American, Father. Did he give his name?’

‘His name? Yes, Eminence. It was Canavan. Patrick Canavan.’

‘Very good. He may have to be contacted as well. His life may be in danger. Did he leave an address?’

‘I’m not sure. Just a moment, Eminence, I’ll check.’ What did the cardinal mean, ‘His life may be in danger’?

Addresses were kept in a small filing cabinet in one corner. Makonnen opened it and started looking under ‘C. There it was: ‘Patrick Canavan,

104 Pembroke Road, Ballsbridge.’ He returned to the phone and gave the address to the Cardinal.

‘You have done very well, Father. Sono molto contento di te. Please be patient. Try not to worry, everything is being taken care of. Wait for help to arrive. And pray for the soul of Archbishop Balzarin. Try not to judge him. We are all human. We are all tempted. Satan is powerful.’

‘I understand, Your Eminence. I’ll do my best. Thank you for your help.’

‘Goodbye, Father Makonnen. Thank you for calling me.’

The phone went dead. Makonnen replaced the receiver with a shaking hand. Against his will, he was being drawn into dangerous waters.

Moving the archbishop’s body was not easy. With a shock, he realized that this was the first time he had ever handled a corpse. It took all his strength to drag Balzarin across the corridor into his private apartment. They were cheek to cheek, like lovers in a silent dance. The nuncio’s flesh lay cold and clammy against his skin, intimate and nauseating.

He lifted the body into bed and arranged the sheets. But try as he might, nothing could dispel the impression of unnatural death. Balzarin’s lips were curled back from his teeth in a tortured grimace. And Makonnen could not banish his fear that, at any moment, the dead eyes would open again in horror and outrage.

Makonnen looked in all the obvious places for a note, but there was nothing, not even a sign that the nuncio had started to write one. To avoid thinking of the silent bedroom, he busied himself checking that all was in order in the study. He pocketed the phial that had held the poison. The file he slipped into a large brown envelope, ready to take to Rome. He went carefully over the other papers on the desk, to be sure that there was nothing else that seemed out of place. As far as he could tell, all was in order.

He found himself restlessly pacing the floor of the study. Several times he started to pray, as the cardinal had asked him to, but the words came sterile to his lips, as though Balzarin’s death had killed something in him too. On his knees in the stillness of the study, he found himself bereft, without resources, impotent in the face of a darkness greater than any he had known. He felt as though something bestial had ravished his innocence.

Still restless, he decided to fill in the time packing for his journey to Rome. His best flight would be the 9.55 Aer Lingus departure, direct to Fiumicino, arriving at 1.35 that afternoon. He picked up the envelope containing the file and took it upstairs to his room.

There was little to pack. He had done this so often he had it down to a fine art. He did not know how long he would have to stay at the Vatican, but however long his visit everything would be supplied for his simple needs. He slipped the file into his overnight case and zipped it closed.

Back in Balzarin’s study, he checked each of the filing cabinets in turn, just to be sure there was nothing obviously missing. Satisfied that all seemed in order, he sat down to wait for the help Cardinal Fazzini had promised. And then he remembered the nuncio’s private safe. Fazzini would want to know the contents. But where was the key?

He looked through the drawers of the nuncio’s desk, but none of the keys he found fitted the safe. He found Balzarin’s key-ring in the pocket of his trousers, but the key he sought was not on it. He tried the housekeeper’s keys on a ring in the kitchen, but nothing matched. Just as he was about

to give up, he remembered feeling something round Balzarin’s neck as he carried him to his room. He returned to the bedroom: the key was on a chain, hanging beside a little gold crucifix.

The safe was packed solid with papers. Some seemed extremely old, others quite new. He carried them across to the desk, feeling a sense of guilt at this intrusion on a dead man’s privacy. And yet, not an hour earlier, had he not come down to this room for the express purpose of prying?

His attention was drawn at once by two large folders, their dark blue covers overprinted in gold. Each bore a golden circle inset with a candlestick, also in gold, and above it another symbol, two crossed keys, like those in the papal coat of arms. He took one to the desk. It contained about a dozen pages, on each of which several photographs had been pasted. Those at the front were old, many dating from the last century. As he got nearer the back, he came closer to the present day.

The photographs passed slowly through his hands: black and white butterflies pinned to a moment in time. They looked at him out of their rectangular cells: pale faces, dreaming eyes, opening and opened lips. He could not tear himself away. They willed him to look, to pass judgement, to remember.

The men in the photographs were, for the most part, senior clergy: bishops, archbishops, cardinals, the heads of seminaries, the chiefs of Curial Congregations. They were all Italian, all middle-aged or elderly, each one facing the camera disdainfully, mocking its trivial vanity with a chilling pride. Transfixed, he leafed through the pages, unable to find any pattern or meaning in them.

There was the sound of a car drawing up on the gravel path outside. Thank God, someone had come at last. He stood up, preparing to go to the door. As he did so, he let go of the folder. It shifted, opening at one of the later pages. He glanced down and paused, his attention drawn at once by the photograph at the top left corner. It was Balzarin, portentous, smiling, dressed in purple. Beside him, in red robes and virgin lace, he recognized the thin, unsmiling features of Cardinal Fazzini.

SIXTEEN

Makonnen felt his heart go cold. Though he was still unable to make sense of any of this, instinct told him he was in terrible danger. For all he knew, the folders and the photographs in them were entirely innocent. But something made him doubt it. Balzarin’s secrecy, Fazzini’s insistence that the nuncio’s death be hushed up, just as De Faoite’s had been, the cardinal’s request that he bring him the file, and now the discovery of his photograph among these others: Balzarin and Fazzini were both involved in something serious enough to push one of them to suicide.

Outside, the car engine was switched off. There was a sound of car doors opening and closing.

He ran to the window and looked out. Security lights illuminated the area around the entrance. Two men were walking towards the door. They were not priests, or were not, at least, dressed as such. There was something purposeful about their movements, something that reminded him of ... what? Undertakers?

Without even pausing to think, he snatched up the bundles of papers from the safe. The doorbell rang.

He looked round desperately for something to carry the papers in. His briefcase! It was in his own office down the corridor. Clutching the papers to his chest, he ran out of the room. The corridor was unlit save for the bar of light coming down from the open door behind him. His office was two doors down. He put the papers on the floor and went in. As he opened the door his chest heaved. Panic fluttered in his stomach. Downstairs, the bell rang a second time. What if it woke Diotavelli?

Hurriedly, he emptied his briefcase. There was something else he had to do, but for the life of him he could not remember. Blood pounded in his brain. Suddenly, it came to him. He ran across to his desk and opened the top drawer. Lying on top was his diplomatic passport. He snatched it out and thrust it into his soutane, then turned and dashed out of the room. He bundled the papers inside the case and snapped it shut. He heard the sound of a key turning in a lock, then the familiar creak of the front door opening.

The file! It was still in his bedroom. He ran along the corridor, his heart like lead in his chest, weighing him down. As he passed, dark portraits glared at him in disapproval. He could hear doors being opened below, footsteps on the stairs.

In his room, he unzipped the case and transferred the file to his briefcase. Hurriedly, he took his overcoat from its hook on the door and slipped it on. His hands were shaking with fear. And yet his mind was preternaturally clear: he had to escape and go with what he knew to someone he could trust, someone who had the authority to ask questions he could not. As he turned to go, his eyes fell on the wooden crucifix on the wall. He hesitated momentarily, snatched it down, and thrust it into his overcoat pocket.

He switched off the light and opened the bedroom door. Outside, the corridor was still shrouded in darkness. He turned right, away from the stairs, heading down another passage, in the direction of the fire escape. At that moment the lights flashed on. Like a badger trapped at the entrance to his hole by a man with a torch, Makonnen froze. Gripped by an agonizing fear, he turned to face his hunter.

Diotavelli was standing outside his bedroom door, dressed in a nightshirt.

‘Che succede, padre? he asked in a sleepy voice.

‘Niente, niente! Please, go back to bed.’

But Diotavelli was not to be so easily placated. It was three in the morning. He had heard a doorbell ringing. He was sure there were sounds of someone moving about downstairs. And here was a member of the nunciature staff, fully dressed and carrying a briefcase, sneaking about in the dark. The Jesuit took several steps towards Makonnen.

‘Che cosa sta succedendo? Che cosa state facendo qui?

‘An emergency, Father. I have to go out. Please be quiet: you’ll wake the archbishop.’

At that instant a man appeared at the end of the passage. He was dressed in black tight-fitting clothes, like a mountaineer. A tight hood was pulled over his head. In his right hand he carried a pistol fitted with a silencer.

Whatever Diotavelli may have lacked in physical courage, he made up for in self-confidence. He had served the Holy Office for over twenty years, hunting out heresy in all parts of the globe. He was accustomed to respect and obedience. Men with guns were nothing to a man who had faced down the minions of Satan.

‘Net nome di Dio! Chi...’

The stranger simply raised his gun and fired. He did not deliberate. He did not take aim. Makonnen watched in horror as Diotavelli bucked as though he had been punched hard in the chest. His feet left the ground, blood spurted from his chest. There was hardly any sound: a whisper from the gun, a broken cry, the smack of the bullet tearing flesh, then silence everywhere even before the body reached the ground.

The Ethiopian saw the killer move as though in slow motion. He watched the gun dip and turn, saw light reflected off the barrel, the man’s eyes reaching for him, snatching him, holding him, the gun lifting in an arc towards him. His body twisted heavily as if through treacle, and he threw himself sideways. He heard his voice cry out, saw the muted flash in the barrel of the silencer, felt the floor crash hard against his shoulder.

His hand moved without conscious direction to his pocket. He saw the gunman turn - slow, unhurrying, taking his time. His fingers gripped the crucifix, like a talisman to take with him into death. Hurried lips whispered Jesus - there was no time for prayer.

The killer raised his hand, aiming for a head shot. Makonnen jerked away from the bullet, crashing against the wall. He came up gasping, the crucifix in his hand now, as though to ward off evil. As the gun swivelled for his head a second time, he drew back his arm and hurled the cross at his attacker. The sharp edge caught the man on the forehead and fell to the floor. The gunman cried out and dropped his weapon.

By then Makonnen was on his feet. The light switch was a step away. He flicked it up and turned to run, his black skin and black clothes invisible in the sudden darkness. Someone shouted behind him and there was a low hissing sound, repeated and repeated. He kept on running.

The door at the end of the corridor gave onto the fire escape. The cold night air tore his breath away. A heavy gust of wind snatched at him, knocking him off balance. He stumbled and fell down the first flight of steps, winding himself further. A light came on in the corridor along which he had escaped. Behind him, he could hear feet pounding and a hoarse voice calling him to stop.

The briefcase had dropped somewhere in the course of his fall. He fumbled for it on the hard steps, in the unremitting darkness. There was a sound of feet on metal stairs. The wind howled round the corner of the building. His fingers found the briefcase. Lifting it, he half ran, half fell down the next flight. A metallic crash marked the path of another bullet.

At the foot of the stairs he paused only momentarily. The garage was to his right, by the side of the house. Rennealy had taken the Volvo, Stephens and Corcoran the Volkswagen. That left the nuncio’s Mercedes or his own bicycle. He had a key for the Mercedes on the ring in his pocket, but realized it would be foolish to take such an easily traced vehicle. The bicycle would be slower, but silent and almost invisible.

Keeping to the grass by the side of the house, he ran as fast as he could, the heavy briefcase dragging in his hand. Behind him, he heard his pursuer’s feet move from metal to gravel. Then the sound of a second pair of feet, moving round from the front of the house. The thin air slashed his lungs. He staggered, fell, picked himself up, and ran again. He had only feet to go. There was a shout to his rear, followed by the hiss of the gun firing. A window in the garage shattered with a brittle sound.

The bicycle was in its usual place by the garage wall. Here in the nunciature he always left it unlocked. He rammed the briefcase into one of the panniers and grabbed the handlebars, pushing the machine across the reluctant gravel, mounting as he ran. A man appeared in front of him, running. He swerved, missing him by inches. The bicycle was picking up speed. Gasping for breath, he pushed the pedals, knowing his life depended on it.

He was round at the front of the house. The running footsteps behind him were fading as he pulled away from them. Now he was on the drive. The ground rushed away beneath him like a dream of freedom. He glanced up and saw stars where the wind had sucked away the clouds.

With a sigh of relief he made out the figures of the two gardai manning the gate. He braked and stepped off the bicycle. The policemen turned and watched him approach. One of them switched on a powerful flashlight. The beam caught him in the eyes, dazzling him.

‘Father Makonnen, is that you?’

He nodded and the guard turned off the light.

What on earth are you doing out here at this time of night, Father?’

Makonnen recognized the voice as belonging to Sergeant Dunn. He had not remembered that the sergeant was on night duty this week.

‘Sergeant Dunn, I ... have ... to speak ... with you.’

‘Take it easy, Father. You’re all out of breath. Whatever is the matter?’ Dunn spoke in what Makonnen had been told was a country accent, Mayo or Limerick, he could not remember which.

Taking deep breaths between sentences, he tried to explain as well as he could, without sounding hysterical. The two policemen listened in silence. When he finished his story, he realized he was shaking. All around, the wind blew, shaking the trees on Navan Road.

Suddenly, there was a sound of feet approaching along the drive.

‘Sergeant,’ Makonnen began, ‘those men! Coming this way!’

‘It’s all right, Father, we’ll deal with this. You’re in safe hands. There’s nothing to worry about’

Wouldn’t it be better to call for help? They’re carrying guns.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about that, Father. Constable O’Driscoll here and myself are both well enough armed ourselves. Aren’t we, Sean?’

‘Right enough, we are, Padraig. Don’t go worrying, now, Father. We’ll talk to these lads.’

The first man came into sight. It was the man who had killed Diotavelli. He drew near. Makonnen noticed that he still held the gun in one hand.

Dunn was the first to speak.

‘Good morning, sir. It’s terrible windy, isn’t it? Would this be the man you’re after looking for, sir?’

Makonnen looked round. He felt the strength leave him all at once. O’Driscoll was pointing his Uzi straight at him. And Dunn had placed a large hand tightly around his arm.

SEVENTEEN

He stubbed out his cigarette on the bark of the tree. Above him, in the darkness, unseen branches shook in the wind. He shivered and pulled his collar up. From his vantage point behind the tree, he could just see the gate of the nunciature. His body tense, he craned forward, trying to get a better view without showing himself.

Since leaving the nuncio that afternoon, Patrick had been working on the assumption - or, rather, the certain knowledge - that the man had something to hide. From long experience, he knew that someone who has been rattled will take some sort of action. Balzarin had been rattled. Badly.

Patrick had taken up his position opposite the nunciature in order to watch who came and went. By now it was early morning, and he had decided that his stake-out was not going to pay off. He was close to throwing the towel in and going home: he felt cold and tired and hungry, and at the moment a telephone bug sounded like a much more pleasant proposition.

But then he had been stirred out of his lethargy by the arrival of the car, a Ford Sierra with military numberplates. The driver had stopped and spoken briefly with the gardai on duty at the gate, then driven on into the grounds. Patrick had still been trying to decide whether or not he should risk going in himself when Makonnen came out and started what looked like an earnest conversation with the two policemen.

But now things were hotting up considerably. The priest did not appear any too pleased by the arrival of the men in black. They smelled of military, and Patrick was willing to swear that at least one of them was carrying a gun.

He moved out from behind the tree, eager to get a better view. Nobody was looking in his direction anyway. Makonnen was arguing with the gardai about something: he could hear his voice between gusts of wind. One of the guards had the priest by the arm and seemed to be holding him against his will.

The second soldier - if that was what he was - spoke briefly to the first, then disappeared back up the drive. There was the sound of an engine being started. Moments later, the car reappeared and the first man began to bundle Makonnen into the back. There could be no question now: the priest was struggling desperately. He had a case of some sort, which his assailant dragged from his hand and threw onto the front seat. Makonnen was no match for his opponent: a heavy shove and he tumbled into the rear of the car like a broken doll.

Taking advantage of the confusion, Patrick dashed back to his own car, parked a few yards to his right. He had hardly seated himself behind the wheel when the Sierra emerged from the lane and turned sharp left onto the road. He threw himself flat a split second before the car’s headlights spilled across his window.

When he came up, the Sierra had already reached Nephin Road. As he watched, it turned left, heading north towards Finglas and the Tolka Valley. He rammed the key into his own ignition and turned it. By what seemed a miracle, the cold engine started. Keeping his lights off, he followed the other car.

Trailing someone without a back-up team is hard. At half past three in the morning, it is virtually impossible. Too close and you may as well walk up to your target and shake hands. Too far back and they get lost in a maze of streets.

As Patrick turned into Nephin Road, the Sierra had just passed the railing of the Bogies - more properly known as John Paul II Park. He kept his eyes firmly on the rear lights ahead, like a mariner steering by two red stars. Suddenly, he lost them. The car had turned left at a roundabout onto Ratoath Road, cutting back along the rear of the park. Where the hell were they heading? McRee, Clancy, and Collins Barracks were all a short drive south of here, the Department of Defence off to the north-east in Drumcondra.

He turned at the roundabout and caught sight of them again. Still hanging back, he wished he could guess their destination. He would rather take a different route and avoid the risk of being spotted. There was nothing out here but the Royal Canal and the Tolka River. It felt as though they were leaving the city already; the lights of the car in front caught trees and hedges as often as houses.

At that moment, the car ahead stopped. Automatically, Patrick stalled his own engine. The empty street filled with the sound of wind, sudden and desolate. Up ahead, the lights went out.

The Sierra had parked in front of a level crossing over the main Sligo railway line. The area round the crossing was lit by two street lamps, one on either side of the street. Patrick could see three men get out of the car. Makonnen, the smallest of the group, was in the middle, his arms pinned by the others.

Patrick opened the glove compartment and reached in. The gun felt cold and unfamiliar, like an old friend from whom one has grown distant after many years. He took it out, gripping it tightly, like a small animal he had brought to bay and conquered. It was a Heckler and Koch P7M8, his old handgun from Beirut.

He preferred it to the Brownings and Berettas he had previously used: he found it light, compact, and extremely accurate. It was permanently fitted with 310 Target Illuminator.

He stepped out of the car and was almost bowled over by a sudden blast. But the wind was an advantage: it would drown his footsteps, making it easier for him to get close to his quarry without being detected. From their behaviour, he was certain they had no idea they were being followed.

He saw them pass the level crossing, then vanish into shadows. Quickly, he made up the distance. For a moment he thought he had lost them. Then he saw the bridge. Immediately after the level crossing, the bridge took the road over the canal.

This was Long John Binns’s old waterway, a disastrous eighteenth-century rival to the Grand Canal in the south of the city. Its glories were long gone. Weeds and rushes grew tangled in its waters; its banks served for lovers’ walks and children’s races. Tonight, darkness lay stretched across it like a fine, unpatterned carpet. No lights flickered on its wind-tossed water. No night-birds skimmed above the towpath in search of prey.

He caught sight of them as they crossed the bridge and stepped onto the rough stone towpath. Patrick was much closer to them now. He could hear Makonnen arguing with his captors, his voice desperate and afraid. Patrick had no doubt why they had brought him here.

They did not go far. Patrick watched as the man on Makonnen’s right forced the priest to his knees, in a posture of prayer. He crept closer, concealed by bushes. Makonnen’s voice came to him with sudden clarity, brought to him on a gust of wind that blew across the canal. It was a prayer, though Patrick did not know the language. Yards away, an old lamp cast a soft yellow glow down the path, too little to read by, but enough to show Patrick what was happening. He fumbled beneath the barrel of his H & R and switched on the illuminator.

Makonnen finished his prayer and crossed himself. The man on his right raised the silenced pistol to his temple. Patrick was already targeted, the illuminator’s powerful laser beam dropping a sharp red dot on the killer’s cheek. He squeezed the cocking mechanism and pulled lightly on the trigger in a smoothly practised movement. The shot echoed across the open fields and was swallowed up in silence. A second later, there was a sound of splashing as the dead man plunged twenty feet down into the canal.

The second man spun round, one hand reaching inside his jacket for his gun, his eyes scanning the area from which he thought the shot had come. Patrick did not reveal himself. ‘Drop the gun,’ he shouted. The man tensed, as though about to run. We have you in our sights,’ Patrick added, shifting the odds. ‘Throw the gun down and put your hands on top of your head.’

Without warning, the man swung himself sideways out of Patrick’s line of fire, taking Makonnen with him. When he came up again, he held the trembling priest in front, his pistol hard against his head.

‘If you so much as fucking look at me,’ he shouted, ‘I’ll give the church another martyr!’

Patrick beaded him with the laser, but he did not dare fire: the mere reflex of death would be enough to blow Makonnen’s head off.

‘I want you out here,’ shouted the gunman. ‘Now! All of you! I want to see you!’

Patrick stood, keeping the pistol trained on his target.

‘There’s just myself,’ he said. He could sense the gunman’s uncertainty.

‘Don’t fuck with me!’ the man screamed. He was frightened and wound up, and Patrick knew the pressure on that trigger was already half a pound too much. He had seen more than one gun fired accidentally under stress.

‘I’m not screwing you,’ Patrick replied, shouting to make himself heard over the wind. ‘I’m alone. There’s no one else with me.’

‘Get rid of your gun!’ The man tightened his grip round the priest’s neck, pulling him closer to him. ‘I said, get rid of your fucking gun!’

‘You know I can’t do that. If I drop the gun, you still have the priest. You can still shoot him. Now, get this clear: he’s all I want. I’m not interested in you. Let him go and you walk out of this. Kill him and you’re a dead man. You can walk away from here or you can float, like your friend. It’s your choice.’

Tm giving the fucking orders here! I’m saying who walks out of this and who doesn’t. Whoever you are, just put your gun in your pocket and get the fuck out of here. Don’t get mixed up in this. You’re out of your depth. Do you understand? You’re in deep water.’

All this time, Makonnen had been mumbling prayers in a frightened voice, Hail Marys in a mixture of Latin, Italian, and Amharic - a babel of invocations to ward off the inevitable darkness. Suddenly, his voice broke off in mid-prayer and he began to turn his head, slowly, against the pressure of his captor’s arm, until his face looked directly at the gun, the barrel sleek and cold against his forehead, right between his eyes.

‘Now!’ he whispered. ‘Kill me now, quickly, while I’m ready. Hurry, do it for the love of God!’

Patrick saw the man hesitate.

‘No!’ he shouted.

The man struck Makonnen hard across the face with the end of the silencer, then swung the gun around, aiming at Patrick. He fired twice in quick succession: silent shots, wide of their mark.

Patrick’s bullet struck him in the teeth, an imperfect shot, but mortal. His head jerked back, his finger clenched the trigger, firing wild shots into the indifferent wind. Makonnen leapt away, leaving him to topple sideways into the canal. The dark waters broke and formed again. A ripple surged outwards from the point of impact and was erased by the wind. The silence that fell was absolute.