Ratlines

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

Skorzeny watched Hakon Foss eat the pork schnitzel with a side of potatoes in a cheese sauce. Frau Tiernan had prepared the meal before Skorzeny sent her home with her husband.

Lainé picked at his food. He had smelled of wine and tobacco when he came down to supper. Skorzeny made a point of placing a glass of water in front of him, alongside the glass of beer the Breton poured for himself from the pitcher at the centre of the table.

The dining room with its patio doors overlooking the gardens seemed far too large for the three men who ate there, Skorzeny at the head of the table, Lainé at the far end, the Norwegian midway between them. Foss downed another swallow of beer, mopped up cheese sauce with a chunk of bread.

Lainé cut off a slice of schnitzel, wrapped it in a napkin, and stuffed it into his pocket. He noticed Skorzeny’s attention on him.

“For the puppy,” he said.

Skorzeny gave him a hard stare, then turned his gaze to Foss. “Did you enjoy your meal?”

Foss nodded, his mouth full of bread, cheese sauce dripping from his lip. He sat in his socks. Frau Tiernan had insisted he remove his boots before she would permit him entry to the house.

“Perhaps you would join me for my evening walk. I like to stroll around the gardens after dinner.”

Foss looked towards the patio doors. “It’s raining.”

“Come, a little rain won’t hurt you.”

Foss shrugged.

“Good,” Skorzeny said. He reached for the hand bell, rang it.

Esteban appeared from the hall.

“My coat,” Skorzeny said. “And Mr. Foss’s shoes.”

Esteban fetched them, opened the patio doors, placed Foss’s boots outside, and brought Skorzeny’s coat to him.

As Foss tied his bootlaces, the telephone rang. Esteban left to answer it. He returned a few moments later.

“Is Mr. Haughey,” the boy said. He pronounced it hoy.

Skorzeny buttoned his coat. “Tell the minister I’m unavailable, and I’ll return his call in the morning.”

Esteban bowed and left the room.

Skorzeny nodded to Lainé and followed Foss out into the drizzle and the dark.

Gravel crunched under their shoes as they walked along the path towards the outbuildings. The rain, fine and cold, caused Skorzeny to blink as the drops wet his eyelids. From the corners of his vision, he saw a guard on either side, keeping to the black pools of darkness, shrouded by trees. They kept pace, watching.

Skorzeny asked, “Are you a happy man, Hakon?”

Foss grunted as he pulled up the collar of his overalls. “Yes, I am happy. Sometimes, I miss home. I miss Norge. I want snow, not rain. But here is not bad. Here, they won’t put me in jail. In Norge, they jail me. I don’t want to go to jail.”

They passed the boundary of the garden, the barns and sheds visible ahead, the light from a powerful halogen lamp bleaching the grounds to whites and greys. Rain slashed lines through the light, like comet trails falling to earth. The guards stayed beyond its reach.

Skorzeny asked, “Would you ever betray me?”

Foss stopped walking. Skorzeny turned to regard him and the small quick movements of his eyes. Foss shifted his weight between his feet, soles scraping on the loose earth and stones.

“Why do you ask this?”

Skorzeny smiled, patted Foss’s shoulder. “No reason. You’re a good man. Of course you wouldn’t betray me.”

“No,” Foss said, his shuffling intensifying. “I need for …”

He pointed to his groin. Skorzeny said, “Very well,” and turned his back.

The rustling of clothing, a guttural sigh, then water pouring on the ground. Skorzeny smelled the sour-sweet odour.

“Have men ever come to you, asked you questions? About me, or any of our friends?”

The flow stuttered along with Foss’s breathing.

“What men?”

Skorzeny turned his head, saw Foss’s back, the rise and fall of his shoulders, the splashing on the ground. “Perhaps they offered you money.”

“No,” Foss said. Even though he hadn’t finished, he tucked himself away, urine spilling over his thick fingers.

“Perhaps they said to you, tell us these things, and we will pay you. Did that happen?”

Foss stood for a moment, hands by his sides, liquid dripping from his fingertips.

Then he ran.

Skorzeny watched him barrel into the darkness, whimpering, arms flailing. He could barely make out the shape of a guard stepping into the Norwegian’s path, knocking him to the ground. Foss grunted as he landed and struggled back to his feet. He made off again, but the guard fired a warning shot into the treetops.

Foss threw himself down, his hands over his head. The trees rustled with startled night creatures. Somewhere in the outbuildings, Tiernan’s dogs barked.

The guard grabbed Foss’s collar and pulled him upright, led him back to the light and Skorzeny.

Lainé approached from the house, bag in hand. Foss closed his eyes and muttered a prayer to whichever God he worshipped.

Skorzeny said, “Let’s begin.”

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

Ryan listened.

His consciousness had ebbed and flowed for time immeasurable, but now, at last, he was able to remain awake. A sickening ache still swelled inside his skull, pressing at the back of his eyes, and that cold sweetness still lingered in his throat and nasal passages. He knew what chloroform felt like, had recognised it as the rag had been pressed to his nose and mouth, but had been unable to fight it.

The climb to wakefulness had been arduous, the constant struggle against the warm pit of sleep. And when he had first opened his eyes, he saw nothing, felt his eyelids rub on fabric. He moved his wrists, found them bound, a metallic clanking as he pulled the cuffs tight. His ankles also.

Ryan took stock. He rolled his shoulders, felt the cotton of his shirt against his skin. Whoever had taken him had not removed his clothing. He shifted his limbs as best he could, wriggled each toe and finger in turn, and none reported injury, other than a tenderness on his palms, that hot sting of grazing one’s skin on the ground.

He moved his head, and it met something solid, he guessed the high back of a chair. His scalp stung where it touched. The blow before he fell.

His tongue moved freely behind his teeth. He opened his mouth. No gag. He swallowed. His throat gritty from thirst.

Should he speak? He decided against it.

He heard a constant soft hiss from his left, felt warmth against his shoulder and thigh. A gas heater, burning.

Water dripped, a steady rhythm, each plink reverberating in an empty space. He raised the toe of his shoe off the ground, brought it down, a sharp tap of the sole on hard floor. Not a large room, but high ceilinged.

He strained to hear. Muffled voices in another room. Men’s voices, he couldn’t tell how many.

The voices ceased. A door opened.

Footsteps, two pairs of feet, approaching across the hard surface.

Something tugged at his head, the blindfold lifted away. Light speared his vision. He closed his eyes against it, turned his head.

“Easy now,” a man said.

Ryan knew the voice.

He heard the squeak of a tap turning, water running for a few seconds. Footsteps came near.

“Here, drink this.”

Something pressed against Ryan’s lips, the hard edge of a cup. He opened his mouth, allowed the water in, swallowed, coughed. The ache in his head shifted, burrowed its way from the base of his skull to his crown.

Ryan let his eyes open to a squint. The man from the pub toilet, his dark hair combed flat and sleek to his head, his jacket and tie removed, shirtsleeves rolled up. He returned the cup to the sink in the corner. Another man beside the sink, shorter, heavier set, casually dressed. A pistol gripped in his right hand.

“How do you feel?” the man from the bathroom asked. “Your head hurts, right? Chloroform will do that to you. Please accept my apology. I hope you understand it was the only safe way to transport you here.”

Ryan craned his neck to take in as much of his surroundings as he could. Cement block walls, concrete floor, oil stains, a pit large enough for a man to stand upright. A tall and wide roller door at one end. A windowed office at the other.

“I’m guessing you want to know where you are,” the man said. “Of course, I can’t tell you our exact location, but a car mechanic owned this place. He went out of business, so we’re making temporary use of it.”

The man took a chair from the corner, placed it in front of Ryan, and sat down. He crossed his legs, twined his fingers in his lap.

“Who are you?” Ryan asked, his voice rasping in his throat.

“My name is Goren Weiss. Major, as it happens, back in my army days.”

“Mossad?” Ryan asked.

“Of course.” Weiss indicated the man with the pistol. “Though my colleague Captain Remak here is actually Aman, Directorate of Military Intelligence, not unlike the Irish G2, of which I believe you are a member. Unlike mine, his rank actually means something.”

Weiss’s smile, his tone, would have been friendly if not for the handcuffs that held Ryan’s wrists to the chair.

“What do you want?”

“A chat, that’s all.”

“What if I don’t want to chat?”

Weiss held his hands up. “Please, let’s not be confrontational. I really don’t see any need for this conversation to be hostile, so let’s not begin that way. Don’t assume I’m your enemy, Albert. May I call you Albert?”

Ryan rattled the handcuffs. “You look like an enemy from here.”

Weiss shrugged. “Given the company you’ve been keeping, I think your character judgement might be a little, shall we say, flawed.”

“The company I keep is none of your business.”

“Well, actually, it is.” Weiss leaned forward, his forearms on his knees. “You see, our professional interests somewhat overlap.”

“In what way?”

“In several ways. Primarily, our interest in foreign nationals currently residing in Ireland. Helmut Krauss was one of them, another was Johan Hambro. Do I need to go on?”

“No,” Ryan said.

“And of course there’s Colonel Skorzeny. A remarkable man, wouldn’t you say?”

Ryan did not reply.

“Remarkable for many reasons. His military innovations, his amazing feats of daring in the war — sorry, the Emergency, as you folks call it — and his quite extraordinary ability to influence those around him. But do you know what I find most remarkable about him?”

“No,” Ryan said.

Weiss grinned. “What I find most remarkable about Otto Skorzeny is that he came to be a fucking sheep farmer in the rolling green hills of this fair land.” His smile faded. He raised a finger. “But we’ll come back to that. First, if you don’t mind, I’d like to talk about Catherine Beauchamp.”

Ryan moistened his lips. “She’s dead.”

“Oh, I know she is, Albert. I know she is. Just this afternoon, I saw her lying on the floor in her cottage, a neat little hole in the roof of her mouth. I found her just the way you left her.”

“I didn’t kill her. She committed suicide.”

“Is that so? I guess we’ll just have to take your word for that, won’t we? We’ve been keeping an eye on you, Albert. Not constant surveillance, a two man team couldn’t do that, but enough to know what you’ve been up to. When Captain Remak saw you were heading for the estuary today, he got in touch with me. We thought we’d better check in on Catherine once you’d left. I have to say, it was a shock to find her like that. I was most upset.”

“Upset?” Ryan couldn’t keep the sneer from his lips. “You seemed happy enough to kill three of her friends.”

Weiss raised his eyebrows, laughed. “You mean Krauss and the rest? Oh no, Albert, you misunderstand. We didn’t kill them.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You believe what you like, Albert, but I tell you with all honesty, we did not harm those men.”

Ryan shook his head. “The woman, she told me she was your informant. The one I was looking for.”

“Yes, Catherine was working for us, passing on information about her associates, but we didn’t use that information to target anyone for termination.”

“Then what did you want the information for?”

Weiss stood up, put his hands in his pockets. “Let me tell you a little about Catherine Beauchamp. She was a nationalist. She was a socialist. But she was not a Nazi. She made some bad judgements in her youth, aligned herself with people she perhaps shouldn’t have, but she was not of the same ideology as others in the Bezon Perrot. You spoke with her. You must have seen that she was a sensitive and intelligent woman.”

“She was terrified,” Ryan said. “She killed herself out of fear.”

“Not of us,” Weiss said. “She understood the wrong she’d done. So when I first approached her, she had no reservations about talking to me, giving me information.”

“She told me you showed her photographs. Dead children. You manipulated her.”

“Look at it that way if you want. I think of it as showing her the truth. If truth is manipulation, then so be it.”

“What did you want from her?”

Weiss paced. “We wanted information on Skorzeny. Who his friends were, who he associated with, who visited him at that big country house of his.”

Ryan watched Weiss stroll the length of the room and back again. “So you could target him and his people. Kill them.”

Weiss stopped. “Oh come, Albert, I thought you were smarter than that.”

“I don’t have to be that smart to see three men have been killed.”

Weiss leaned over Ryan like a patient schoolteacher. “But not by us. I told you already. No, we don’t want Otto Skorzeny dead. He’s no use to us dead.”

“Then what?”

“Doesn’t it strike you as odd that a Lieutenant Colonel of the SS should have sufficient funds to live the way Skorzeny does? He is, by any measure, a very wealthy man, wouldn’t you say? How does a man escape from custody less than fifteen years ago, nothing to his name, then turn up just a few years later a multimillionaire? How does that work?”

“I don’t know.”

Weiss put a hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “You seem like a calm and rational man, Albert. I think if I take those cuffs off your wrists and ankles, you won’t try anything stupid. Am I right?”

Ryan stayed silent.

Weiss took a set of keys from his pocket and unfastened each of Ryan’s limbs in turn.

“Go on,” Weiss said. “Stand up if you want. Stretch your legs.”

Ryan gripped the chair’s armrests, pushed himself up. His knees buckled, and Weiss seized him in a bear hug.

“Easy, my friend. Put your hand on my shoulder. There you go.”

Ryan stood quite still for a time, breathing hard, before lowering himself back into the chair. Weiss took his seat once more.

“So, we were talking about Colonel Skorzeny’s money. The story is he set up a concrete business in Buenos Aires and got rich. Now, call me an old cynic, but I don’t buy that explanation for one second. If you scrape around in the dirt a little, you dig up all sorts of stories. We know, for example, that Martin Bormann siphoned off a huge fortune right out of Hitler’s pockets. In 1945, when the end came, as far as we know, Bormann never made it out of Berlin. But the money did. Eight hundred million dollars wound up in Eva Perón’s bank account, not to mention the gold bullion and the diamonds. We’re talking enough money to run a small country on. And who do you think was right there, whispering sweet nothings to Evita?”

Ryan remembered what Catherine Beauchamp had told him. “Skorzeny.”

“That’s right. And that’s just the start. Cash, precious metals, diamonds and every other kind of stone, paintings and sculptures. Every damn thing he and his friends could steal and smuggle out of Europe. Given what we know of the funds Otto Skorzeny has access to, it’s a wonder he lives as modestly as he does.”

“So what do you want from him?”

“Well, it’s how he uses this money that concerns us. We wouldn’t mind so much if he blew it on racehorses and sports cars and women, all the stuff the average ageing millionaire entertains himself with. But that isn’t what Skorzeny does. You see, strictly speaking, the money isn’t his. He’s more of a caretaker, a trustee if you like. Have you heard of ratlines?”

“No,” Ryan said.

“Most people haven’t. See, right at the end of the war, some Nazis, guys like Skorzeny and Bormann, they saw it coming. They knew that even if they escaped, hundreds of others wouldn’t. They needed to set up routes, channels, ways out for their friends. Ratlines. You know what Europe was like in the couple years after the war. A passport was worth shit. The borders were meaningless. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of displaced people wandering around with no place to go, and no way to prove their nationality. And Skorzeny’s kind exploited that. They’d just swap their uniforms for pants and a shirt, walk up to some GI and say, ‘Hey, I’m Hans, and my town got burned to the ground. Show me where to go.’ And they’re home free. Except once they find a place to settle, they need money.”

“Skorzeny’s money,” Ryan said.

“That’s right.” Weiss leaned over and patted Ryan’s thigh. “Well, the money he looks after, at any rate. I could tell you a dozen German and Austrian companies, million dollar international enterprises that were bankrolled by the funds Skorzeny controls. Companies you’ve heard of, companies whose products you’ve bought, household names. Of course, the free-for-all couldn’t last forever. Once the borders firmed up, once the European nations got the passport problem under control, then those routes, those ratlines needed to come into play. A lot of times through the church, or some government official or other. A letter of introduction, a little currency to ease the way, cash to set up a new life. Again, Skorzeny’s money.

“Since the end of the war, Otto Skorzeny and that fund have helped hundreds of murdering bastards escape Europe. And they aren’t all glorified office boys like Helmut Krauss. We’re talking about Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, the worst pieces of filth who ever walked this earth. Now, do you see why Otto Skorzeny is of so much interest to me?”

Ryan held his gaze. “Then why didn’t you go after him instead of those others? How did killing Helmut Krauss help you?”

“Albert, I’ve told you twice already, but let me tell you again. We did not kill Helmut Krauss, Johan Hambro or Alex Renders. Their deaths have rather compromised us, in fact. This business has spooked Skorzeny. If he wasn’t such a stubborn bastard, he’d have cleared out by now, gone back to Madrid and his buddy Franco. And our mission would be over. A failure.”

“So what is your mission?”

“We want those ratlines.”

Ryan smiled. “It seems to me the quickest way to close them down would be to kill Skorzeny.”

Weiss cringed. “You disappoint me, Albert. If Skorzeny died, control of the money and the ratlines would simply pass to someone else. No, I didn’t say we wanted to close down the ratlines. We want control of them. We want Skorzeny under our thumb, and we want to know every single person who tries to escape through the network, and everyone who got through in the past. We can let most of them go, the nobodies, but we can grab the big fish. We want them on trial. Failing that, we want them dead. Either way, we want justice to be done.”

“Why would Skorzeny ever give them up? You’ve got nothing to threaten him with.”

“Ah, but I do.” Weiss’s grin spread so wide it seemed to glow. “Skorzeny lives damn well on what he draws from the fund for himself. His friends gave him a pretty good allowance, plus he earned some on the side, running those mercenary training courses in Spain and so on. A CIA friend of mine attended one, said he learned a lot.

“But Skorzeny got greedy. We acquired some paperwork from Heidegger Bank, a little family-run institution just outside of Zurich. Some statements that were mislaid and found their way to me. You see, about seven or eight years ago, Skorzeny started channelling a little of his Kameraden’s money away. Not much at any one time, a few thousand from an interest dividend here, a hundred thousand from a lodgement there. Pretty soon, he’s got a few million stacking up in a little side account that his buddies don’t know about. He’s been skimming off the top, as they call it in Las Vegas.”

“You’re going to blackmail him?”

“Exactly. Now, we’ve spent a lot of time and resources on this mission, and we don’t want it destroyed by some hotheads with a grudge. Is that unreasonable?”

“No,” Ryan said.

“No, indeed. Some gang of rogues comes along and starts picking off Skorzeny’s friends. Skorzeny gets worried, involves the government, and here you are. Right in the middle of it all.”

“So what do you want from me?”

“The same thing your friend the Minister for Justice wants. I want it stopped.”

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Célestin Lainé knew Hakon Foss was strong, but still, he was shocked at the Norwegian’s resilience.

The guards had brought Foss to the barn and sat him down at an old wooden table, holes drilled in its top to allow the leather straps to be passed through and hold his wrists in place, fingers splayed on the surface. Skorzeny had sat opposite and talked to Foss in his calmest, softest voice while Lainé readied the kerosene blowtorch.

“Please speak honestly,” Skorzeny said. He enunciated slowly, clearly. “It would be best for all of us, but most especially for you. We can avoid any unpleasantness if you answer my questions truthfully.”

Foss’s fingers twitched on the tabletop. He watched as Lainé lit the small reserve of fuel in the blowtorch’s drip pan.

“What do you want?” he asked.

Lainé left the torch to heat and began arranging his tools on the table. A sturdy penknife, a pair of sharpened secateurs, a scalpel, a set of dental pliers.

The pliers were mostly for effect, to frighten the subject under interrogation. Lainé had only resorted to using them on a subject’s teeth on a handful of occasions. It was far too difficult to hold the head in place, and his or her jaw open, to make an extraction worthwhile under all but the most extreme circumstances.

Often, and to Lainé’s disappointment, the subject would offer up the required information the moment he or she saw the tools and the blowtorch. The anticipation of pain is a far greater torment than pain itself. All skilled interrogators know this.

Skorzeny said, “I want to know who you have been talking to.”

Foss shook his head. “I talk to no one. Who says I talk?”

Lainé opened the blowtorch’s fuel valve. The blue flame burst to life with a pop and a hiss. Foss jumped in his seat, a high yelp escaping him. Lainé lifted his penknife, opened its blade, and held the steel to the flame.

“How long?” Skorzeny asked.

“A minute, no more,” Lainé said.

Skorzeny turned his attention back to Foss. “A minute. You have this time to tell me the truth, Hakon. Who have you talked to about me?”

The Norwegian’s face creased with fear. “No one. I talk to no one. Why do you ask this?”

“I ask this because I know someone close has betrayed me. I know someone has passed on information to others. Information about me, about my associates. My friends, Hakon. Your friends.”

“Not me,” Hakon said. “I talk to no one.”

“If you have not talked to anyone, then why did you run?”

Foss had no other response to offer than to open his mouth, the corners turned down, the rapid blinks of his glistening eyes.

“I will ask you once more. If you do not answer truthfully, Célestin will cause you great pain.”

“I talk to no—”

“Who have you talked to about me?”

“No one. I talk to no one.”

Skorzeny gave a small nod, and Lainé seized Foss’s thumb. He took the glowing blade from the flame and began his work.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

Weiss handed Ryan two photographs. One was a grainy head-and-shoulders image of a man, mid to late twenties, a beret on his head, the collar of his combat uniform open. He had the hard-jawed expression of a man uncomfortable with having his portrait taken. Ryan looked at the second photograph. A group picture, a dozen uniformed men, one of them circled: the same image, blown up.

“Who is this?” Ryan asked.

“This is Captain John Carter,” Weiss said. “He wasn’t a captain at the time that photograph was taken, but he was by the time he left the British Army.”

Ryan studied the group picture. The men lined up against a rough wall, short sleeves and trousers, some with handkerchiefs held in place by their hats to protect their necks from the sun. Sand dusted their boots.

“Special Air Services,” Weiss said, completing Ryan’s thought for him. “Deployed in North Africa. Covert operations, behind enemy lines. The dirty stuff.”

Ryan looked again at the blown up photograph of Carter, the hard features, the cold stare.

“Is he …?”

Weiss nodded. “Yes, I believe he leads the band of merry men who’ve been dealing with Ireland’s Nazi problem.”

“How do you know this?”

“A South African information broker. He let me know that a certain Captain John Carter, quite by coincidence, had been showing an interest in Otto Skorzeny. He had procured some small arms through a mutual contact in the Netherlands. At the same time, Carter let it be known that he had a spot to fill on a small team of former comrades he had gathered. He wouldn’t be drawn on the nature of the team’s work, other than it would be most interesting.”

Ryan traced a fingertip across the image. “It has to be him.”

“Of course. I couldn’t expose my own mission by going to either the British or Irish intelligence services about this. Thus the rather elaborate means of getting you here.”

“Well, you got me here. What now?”

“Now we each set about finding Captain Carter and his men. We’ll continue to keep an eye on you. If you want to make contact, place a copy of the Irish Times on the dashboard of your car wherever you have it parked. I’d appreciate it if you share anything you discover. I will do likewise. But one thing.”

“What?”

“Don’t let Skorzeny know about me, or what I’ve told you. Don’t let him know about Carter, or anything we’ve discussed here. If you tell him, he’ll want to know how you found out. If he suspects you’re holding anything back, then believe me, the discussion you have with him will not be as cordial as this one.”

“And what if I don’t want to cooperate with you? What if I tell Skorzeny everything?”

Weiss leaned forward, the broad grin returning to his lips. “Then I’ll kill you and everyone you love.”

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

Foss would not break.

Even as his second thumbnail peeled away, he resisted. He cried, babbling in his native tongue, the dogs across the yard replying with their own howls. He bucked and writhed until the guards had to hold him down. But still he would say nothing. Always the same denial.

Two more fingernails, more screaming, more writhing, and no confession.

“This is going nowhere,” Skorzeny said. “Take a finger.”

Lainé suppressed a smile and placed the penknife back on the table. He lifted the secateurs, gripped the little finger of Foss’s left hand between the blades, just below the knuckle, and squeezed the handle.

Foss opened his mouth, a high whine from his throat, as the blades closed on bone. Lainé applied more pressure until the bone gave way. The amputated finger rolled away from the spray of blood.

Lainé returned the penknife’s blade to the jet of the blowtorch. When it glowed, he pressed it to the stump on Foss’s hand, ignored the smell as it cauterised the wound.

Foss’s head sagged back, his shoulders slumped.

“Have we lost him?” Skorzeny asked.

“I don’t know,” Lainé said. “He is strong, but he is tired. Let me see.”

He rummaged in his bag until he found a small brown glass vial. The ammonia stench made him recoil as he undid the stopper. He held the vial under Foss’s nose.

The Norwegian’s head jerked away from the smelling salts. He gasped, snorted, coughed. A thin stream of bile spilled from his lips, beer and undigested cheese sauce.

Skorzeny stood and walked away from the table, the corners of his mouth downturned in abhorrence.

“Enough,” he said. “We will continue tomorrow. Give him the night to think about his fate.” He addressed the guards. “Don’t let him leave this room. If he tries anything, wound him, but keep him alive.”

The guards nodded their acknowledgement, and Skorzeny marched to the door. Outside, Lainé caught up to him.

“Are you sure it’s him?”

“Of course,” Skorzeny said. “He pissed on himself and ran. He is guilty. And you will make him talk.”

“I’ll try,” Lainé said. “But he’s strong.”

“Even the strongest man has a breaking point. You will find that point. Good night.”

Lainé watched Skorzeny stride towards the house, the Austrian’s head held high, his shoulders back, his coat-tails billowing behind him. Lainé hated and admired his arrogance in equal measure.

He went back to the outbuilding and found one of the guards giving Foss water. The Norwegian pulled his head away from the cup.

“Célestin,” he said. “Please, Célestin.”

Lainé ignored him as he washed the penknife in the bucket of water that sat on the ground. He scraped the blade on the bucket’s lip, charred flesh falling away.

“Célestin, help. Help. My friend. Help.”

Lainé rinsed the secateurs clean of Foss’s blood. He gathered the tools and returned them to the leather bag, then extinguished the blowtorch’s flame.

“Help, Célestin. I talk to no one. Tell him. Célestin.”

Lainé set the blowtorch on a shelf and carried his bag to the door.

“Célestin, please.”

He walked from the light to the darkness, back to the house. The kitchen stood dark and empty. He lifted a small plate from the drainer on his way to the cellar. He emerged a few minutes later with a 195 °Charmes-Chambertin under his arm. He carried the wine, the plate and his bag upstairs to his small room.

The puppy pawed at Lainé’s shins when he entered. It had messed in the corner, but he didn’t mind the smell. It would do until morning. He set the plate on the floor, then placed the piece of schnitzel he had saved from dinner upon it. The puppy sniffed and licked the meat.

Lainé used the corkscrew he kept in the top drawer of his bedside locker to open the bottle. Perhaps he should have let it breathe, but thirst insisted that he drink now. As he did so, he noticed the puppy struggling with the pork, the piece too large for it.

He reached down, lifted the schnitzel, bit off a piece of grey meat and breadcrumb, and chewed. When the meat had turned to a warm mush, he spat it onto his fingers and lowered it to the puppy.

Lainé smiled as it ate.

He hardly thought of Hakon Foss at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

Ryan checked the time as he entered his hotel room. Half past one in the morning. He didn’t undress, just removed his tie and lay down on the bed.

Weiss had reapplied the blindfold, guided Ryan outside and into the van. They had driven for at least forty minutes, but Ryan had felt his weight shift from side to side with constant turns, so he guessed the garage to which they’d brought him was much closer to the city centre.

When the van stopped, the blindfold was removed. Weiss crouched beside Ryan.

“Remember what we agreed, Albert. You help me, I’ll help you.”

Ryan did not reply. They left him in an alley off Grafton Street, a few minutes’ walk from Buswells.

The night porter opened the locked doors of the hotel for him. Ryan gave him the room number, and the porter fetched the key from behind the desk.

“Rough night, was it?” the porter asked.

Now Ryan lay in the dark, his head throbbing, the room swaying around him in sickly waves. He tried to think only of Celia, but sleep crept up on him like a thief, and he dreamed of children and the flies on their dead lips.

Bathed and shaved, but weary — he had been woken by the light from his window not long after seven — Ryan walked the paths of St. Stephen’s Green, thinking. He found a quiet spot, a bench shaded by trees, overlooking the pond and the ducks swimming there.

Weiss had let him keep the photographs. He studied them now. The men in the group portrait — were any of them part of Colonel John Carter’s team? Ryan looked at each man in turn, committing their faces to his memory. The photograph was marked June 1943 on the back. Carter, all of them, would be twenty years older than in this picture.

He had spent the morning turning it over in his mind. How to find one man who could be hiding anywhere in the entire country?

Carter had left the military two years ago, Weiss said. He had married a woman from Liverpool, fathered a boy, but the mother and child had perished in a car accident. The last twenty years of his duty had been as part of the Special Air Service, the most secretive branch of the British Army. Any attempt to trace him through his service record would be futile.

But Weiss had dropped a thread for Ryan, something to tug at. The Isreali had made it appear incidental, a throw away comment, so that it would plant a seed in Ryan’s mind. But Ryan knew it had been deliberate. When he drove to Otto Skorzeny’s country home this evening, he would see whether or not the thread led to the destination he imagined.

“Albert.”

Celia’s voice startled him, first in the fright it lit in him, then the pleasure it brought. He looked up, saw her approach from the western end of the park, dressed in a manner that would have seemed businesslike on any other woman. She had been placed in one of the nearby government offices while she awaited a new foreign posting. Practically a secretary, she’d said, and deathly dull.

Ryan tucked the photographs into his pocket and got to his feet. Celia stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek, her hand on his arm for balance, warm and delicate.

“You were looking terribly thoughtful,” she said.

“Was I?”

“What were you thinking about?”

Ryan smiled. “You.”

Celia blushed.

She ordered eggs Benedict. When the waiter reminded her that the Shelbourne Hotel’s breakfast service ended at ten o’clock, Celia pouted.

The waiter crumbled. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “And for you, sir?”

Ryan ordered the salmon, and the waiter left.

She sipped her gin and tonic. He took a mouthful of Guinness.

Celia asked, “Really, what were you thinking about in the park?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Work, that’s all.”

“You looked troubled.”

Ryan couldn’t hold her gaze. He studied the fibres of the tablecloth.

“Tell me,” she said.

“I don’t like the job I’m doing.”

She laughed. “Nobody likes their job. Apart from me, but I’m an exception. Everybody hates getting up in the morning and going to work.”

“I don’t mean it that way,” Ryan said. “I can’t talk about it.”

“Not even to me?”

“The job I’ve been ordered to do. It’s wrong.”

“How?”

“I can’t say any more.”

She reached out and placed her hand on top of his. The slenderness of her fingers made them appear brittle, fragile things. He turned his palm upwards, let her fingers slip between his.

“If it’s in service of your country, how can it be wrong?” she asked.

Ryan met her eyes. “You’re not that naive.”

“No, I suppose not. If you really can’t bear it, then tell them no, you won’t do it.”

“I have no choice. Not now. It’s gone too far.”

“Albert, stop talking in riddles.”

He ran his thumb across her fingernails, felt the smooth polish, the sharp edges.

“Yesterday, I watched a woman commit suicide.”

Celia’s fingers left his. Her hands retreated to her lap. She sat back.

“Where?”

“The other side of Swords,” Ryan said. “In her home. She did it out of fear.”

“Fear of who? You?”

“I tell myself no, not of me, but the people I’m working for. But then I remember, if I work for them, I am one of them.”

Celia shook her head. Her eyes stayed on him, but her gaze elsewhere. “No. That’s not true. We do things for people. It doesn’t mean we like it. It doesn’t make us the same as them.”

Ryan watched as she returned to herself. “Even if you know it’s wrong?”

Celia turned away, looked towards the kitchen. “I wonder where the food is.”

“We only just ordered. What’s the matter?”

She turned back to him. “Nothing. Albert, I shan’t be able to come to the dinner party tonight.”

Ryan felt something fall away inside him. “Why not?”

“Mrs. Highland needs help around the house. I promised I’d do it for her.”

“When did you promise her?”

“Last week. I forgot. I’m sorry.”

“All right. Maybe we can do something else tomorrow evening.”

“Maybe,” she said with a flicker of a smile.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

Skorzeny was eating alone in the dining room when he heard the telephone ring, followed by Esteban’s soft knock at the door.

“Enter,” Skorzeny said.

“Is Miss Hume,” Esteban said. He pronounced it joom.

Skorzeny wiped his lips with a napkin, then followed the boy out to the hallway where the telephone waited. He lifted the receiver. He heard the distorted noise of a street.

“Miss Hume?”

“Sir, I need to speak with you.”

Her voice resonated in the telephone box.

“Go on,” he said.

“I no longer wish to carry out the assignment you gave me.”

“Why not?”

“I met with Albert Ryan for lunch today. He told me someone has died because of what he’s doing for you. I don’t want to be a part of that.”

Skorzeny lowered himself into the chair that stood beside the telephone table. “Who died?”

“A woman. Near Swords, he said. She committed suicide.”

Skorzeny thought of Catherine Beauchamp, her fine and delicate features, the hard intelligence of her eyes.

“What else did Lieutenant Ryan tell you?”

“Nothing. Only that he’s unhappy doing whatever work it is he’s doing for you. He feels it’s wrong.”

“Lieutenant Ryan is confused. He is protecting people in his work. Saving lives. Perhaps you could remind him of that.”

“No. I won’t see him again.”

“But you must. There’s the dinner tonight.”

“I told him I wasn’t able to come.”

Skorzeny kept his voice even. “That was foolish.”

“I only took this assignment as a favour for Mr. Waugh. I’ve let men take me to dinner before, drinks and such, to find out things about them. But they were diplomats or businessmen; all they talked about were negotiations and deals. Never anything like this. I won’t be a part of it.”

“My dear, you are a part of it whether you wish to be or not. You will carry out the orders you were given.”

“No. You’ll have to find some—”

“Young lady, you misunderstand. You will accompany Lieutenant Ryan to my home this evening. You will continue to see him and report his conversations to me. Do I make myself clear?”

“Sir, you are not my employer. You have no right to—”

“What right do you think I need? What authority?”

“You can’t—”

“Yes, I can. Now listen to me very carefully. You will do as I have instructed or the consequences will be most serious.”

She paused. “In what way?”

“In any way you can imagine.”

Silence for a time, then, “Sir, are you threatening me?”

“Yes.”

A click, and she was gone.

Skorzeny stood, replaced the handset, and became aware of a presence above him. He turned, saw Lainé sitting on the stairs, watching. The pup in his lap, on its back, wriggling as he scratched its belly.

“There is trouble?” Lainé asked.

Skorzeny walked to the foot of the stairs. “No trouble. But there is news you should know. The girl I placed with Ryan. He told her he’d seen a woman commit suicide. A woman near Swords.”

Lainé’s fingers ceased their scratching. “Catherine?”

“I believe so.”

Lainé got to his feet, the pup held close to his chest, turned to go.

Skorzeny said, “Ryan must have suspected her as the informant.”

“No.” Lainé shook his head. “Not Catherine.”

“Foss still denies it. It’s possible I was mistaken.”

Lainé looked back over his shoulder. “No. It is Foss. He will talk. I will make him talk.”

The Breton climbed from Skorzeny’s view.

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

Ryan slept hard, stretches of black punctuated by ragged and bloody dreams. The telephone kicked him awake, consciousness flooding in, nausea in its wake. He rolled across the bed, lifted the receiver.

“Hello?”

“A call from a Miss Hume. Shall I put her through?”

Ryan sat up, rubbed his face, fresh stubble scratching his palm. “Yes.”

“Albert?” she said.

“Celia. What’s wrong?”

“I was thinking,” she said, a waver in her voice. “I’d very much like to go with you to that dinner this evening.”

In his heart, Ryan rejoiced.

Celia held the map on her knees, navigating for him. She offered little conversation other than the directions. As they passed through Naas, Ryan asked if everything was all right.

She turned to him, her smile prim and polite, and said, “Yes, everything’s fine.”

He did not believe her.

“It’s not too late to turn around,” he said. “I can bring you back to Dublin.”

Celia turned her eyes back to the map. “No. I want to go. Really.”

“If you’re sure.”

“I am.”

Time and silence lay thick upon them until she spoke again.

“Up here, I think.” She pointed to the curve ahead, and the stone wall, the map held in her other hand. A gateway came into view. “There.”

Ryan slowed and steered the Vauxhall towards the gateway. Two broad-shouldered men blocked his way. Ryan braked and halted.

One of the men approached the driver’s window. Ryan wound it down.

“Your names,” the man said, his accent thick.

Ryan told him. The man nodded to his colleague, who stepped back. Ryan put the car in gear and moved off, through to a long driveway lined by trees. Among them, he saw another man. Watching from his dark cover, he made no attempt to conceal his weapon.

From the corner of his eye, Ryan saw Celia turn her head, looking at the man as they passed. She touched the fingertips of her left hand to her lips, clenched the right into a fist in her lap.

Ryan realised with a hard certainty that he should not have brought her here. He tried to push the feeling away, dismiss it as a fretful notion, but it lingered in his stomach.

The house rose up ahead, the pitched roofs of its wings, its arched windows, the gardens all around. Other cars lined up beside Skorzeny’s white Mercedes. Two Rovers, a Jaguar, a Bentley. Ryan pulled the Vauxhall alongside them, the other vehicles dwarfing his.

He got out, opened Celia’s door, guided her towards the house. A young olive-skinned boy waited for them in the open doorway. He took Celia’s coat and showed them to the drawing room.

The four couples who stood there, drinks in hand, turned to watch them enter. Ryan recognised one of the men as a prominent solicitor, another as a senior civil servant, something in the Department of Finance, and yet another as the owner of a department store. And there, watching, Charles J. Haughey with the girl who’d been his companion at the restaurant, the girl who was not his wife. In fact, none of the men here looked well matched in age to their partners. The women eyed Celia with dagger glares.

Celia seemed to shrink from their gaze, her shoulders hunched. She gripped Ryan’s forearm tight as she smiled back at them.

“There’s the man,” Haughey said.

Ryan nodded. “Good evening, Minister.”

The politician crossed the room to him, studied Ryan from head to foot, the hawk eyes picking over his clothing.

Haughey cleared his throat and winked, said, “Nice tie.”

They were seated around the dining table when Skorzeny appeared. All stood, Ryan and Celia following their lead. The Austrian circled the room, shaking hands, accepting chaste kisses on his scarred cheek. Haughey gripped Skorzeny’s hand the hardest, shook it with the most vigour, slapped the big man’s shoulder.

Ryan said nothing as Skorzeny took his hand, did not wince as the Austrian squeezed it tight. Skorzeny leaned in to Celia, offered his cheek to her. She closed her eyes, obliged him, left a faint red circle on the scar. Ryan saw something move across her face, fear or disgust, he could not be sure.

Skorzeny went to the head of the table. He rested his hands on the chair back.

“Welcome, my friends,” he said. “My home is yours. I offer you my hospitality as your noble nation has offered me its hospitality. Please sit. Eat. Enjoy.”

The guests took their seats, laughter and good cheer between them all.

Ryan turned his attention to Celia, saw a tear escape her eye. She caught it, wiped it on her cheek, and then he wasn’t sure if he’d seen it at all.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Célestin Lainé sat on the edge of the bed, a tray on his lap, eating pheasant and roast vegetables with a red wine reduction. Esteban had also delivered a bottle of red wine, a 1960 Pontet-Canet, along with a note from Skorzeny requesting that Lainé remain in his room for the duration of the evening.

The puppy circled his feet, sometimes resting its front paws on his shins as it sniffed at the tray. Lainé tore off occasional scraps of meat, dipped them in the reduction, held them out for the puppy. Already it had learned to sit in anticipation of a treat.

Lainé tried not to think of Catherine Beauchamp, or what fear drove her to suicide. He tried not to think of the last time he’d seen her, when they’d met in a small hotel in Skerries, overlooking the harbour.

Weariness had drawn on her features, sharpening them, deepening the hollows. They had drunk the piss they served for coffee in Ireland and talked about home and how they could never return.

Fishing boats lay stranded on the sand flats beyond the harbour wall. Wind threw spray and rain against the windowpanes, and cold draughts snaked beneath the tables and chairs, chilling Lainé’s ankles despite the peat fire that glowed red and orange in the corner.

Their passion had died years ago, back when she softened in her heart, turned her back on the actions they had undertaken together. She might hate him now. He thought it likely, but still they met to speak to each other in the language of their land, to listen to the melody and rhythm of it. It was the only time either of them heard Breton spoken beyond the walls of their own minds.

“Do you sleep at night?” Catherine asked.

Lainé shrugged. “Depends where I am. Give me a comfortable bed, and I’ll sleep sound as a baby.”

“I don’t.” She took two cigarettes from the packet of Gitanes on the table, offered him one. He accepted. “If I can keep my eyes closed for a couple of hours, I consider myself lucky.”

“You did nothing wrong. There’s no reason for you to lose sleep over someone else’s sins.”

She smiled. “You see, that’s where we differ. You think what they did, the Nazis, had nothing to do with you. But it did. Once you took arms at their side, you became one of them. So did I.”

“No. We had a common enemy. The French oppressor. It didn’t make me a Jew killer.”

“You would have killed anyone they asked you to. Jews, Frenchmen, women, children.”

Now Lainé smiled. “If you despise me so much, why don’t you leave?”

“Who else could I speak my own language with?”

Lainé believed he loved her then, and he still believed it now. He watched drops of water splash on the tray and plate for long seconds before he realised they were his own tears. He sniffed and wiped them away.

His appetite gone, he set the tray aside and took a swallow of wine from the bottle. He lifted the puppy, set it in his lap, turned it on its back, scratched its pink belly.

From downstairs he heard the laughter of the guests. Bourgeoisie, Catherine would have called them. And she’d have been right. Politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen, men of wealth and influence. All while Lainé was banished to this small room like a deformed child the parents kept secret from their neighbours.

And Ryan was among them. Ryan, who had watched Catherine Beauchamp die the day before, now ate pheasant and drank good wine with Skorzeny and the rest.

Lainé decided that before the evening was done, he would have a private discussion with Lieutenant Albert Ryan.

CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

A dessert of Rote Grütze with custard finished the meal, a gelatinous stew of berries, tangy and bitter on the tongue. Skorzeny held the guests enraptured with stories of daring and danger. He told them of Operation Greif, how he commanded Panzerbrigade 150 as its men donned American uniforms, moved behind enemy lines, and spread misinformation, including a fabricated plan to kidnap Eisenhower and his staff. The punch line of the General’s unhappiness at being forced to remain indoors for the duration of Christmas 1944 caused a ripple of approving laughter to roll through the room.

Neither Lieutenant Ryan nor his companion joined in the laughter. The young woman raised a polite smile, but no more, and Ryan could not allow even that much.

Skorzeny fixed Ryan with a stare. “Come, Lieutenant, don’t you enjoy stories of my exploits? Perhaps you have your own tales to tell.”

Haughey chimed in. “Come on, big fella. What did you get up to?”

Ryan looked from the minister to Skorzeny. “I don’t like to talk about my time in service.”

Haughey smiled his lizard smile. “In service to the Brits.”

The men chuckled. Ryan said nothing. The young woman Celia blushed, redness creeping down to the fair skin of her chest, glowing above the line of her dress.

“Minister,” Skorzeny said, “We don’t always fight for the nation of our birth. That isn’t always where one’s heart lies. After all, I am an Austrian, as was the Führer. Yet I took part in the Anschluss. I gave my country to the Germans, because at heart, I am German.”

“Is that you, Ryan?” Haughey asked. “Are you a Brit at heart?”

Ryan dropped his spoon into his bowl with a loud clank that made Celia flinch. “No, Minister. I’m no less an Irishman than you.”

“What about you, Minister?”

Haughey turned to face Skorzeny’s question, his smile faltering.

“If we had invaded Ireland, would you have resisted? Or would you have welcomed us like the IRA promised to? Would Britain’s enemy have been your friend?”

Haughey waved a finger. “I would’ve fought on one side, and one side only: Ireland’s side.”

“And yet the story persists about you leading a march on Trinity College on VE day, carrying swastikas and burning the Union Jack on the college gates.”

Haughey’s face reddened. “Now look here, that lie has gone on long enough. I never saw a swastika that day. Some yahoos might have been flying them, but my hand never touched one, I’ll tell you that for nothing. Those Prod bastards in Trinity were flying a Union Jack on the roof. The nerve of them, bloody drunken Orangemen. Then they had the gall to set light to a Tricolour. So I burned a Union Jack on the gates, I did that all right, just to show them you can’t disrespect our flag, not while Charlie Haughey’s around.”

“Prod bastards?” Skorzeny asked. “You mean Protestants?”

Haughey nodded, his cheeks florid with anger. “That’s right, Protestants. Orange bastards, the lot of them.”

“Like Lieutenant Ryan here?”

Haughey paled, glanced at Ryan, then cleared his throat. “Well, I suppose I can’t tar everyone with the same brush. Wouldn’t be fair. No offence, Ryan.”

“None taken, Minister,” Ryan said, his eyes hard.

As Esteban and Frau Tiernan began clearing plates from the table, Skorzeny watched Haughey lift a glass, drink from it, his anger choked by the wine. He considered taunting the politician some more, but thought better of it.

The guests made their way to the drawing room for coffee and brandy. In the hall, Ryan approached Skorzeny.

“I hoped I might have a word with Célestin Lainé tonight.”

“Not at the moment,” Skorzeny said.

“He’s still here, isn’t he? I haven’t had a chance to speak with him alone yet.”

“Yes, he’s here, but you may not speak with him. I’ve asked him to stay in his room while my guests are here. Perhaps later.”

Skorzeny guided Ryan towards the drawing room, where cigar smoke and coffee aroma mingled in the air. The guests played the roles that were expected of them, the men telling lewd jokes, the women gossiping and comparing dresses.

Skorzeny didn’t know how long had passed before he realised Ryan and his companion were missing.

CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

Celia had left first, not a word as she edged towards the open patio doors and slipped out. Ryan followed and found her standing in the shadows beneath the eaves of the house, shivering.

“What’s wrong? Why did you sneak out here?”

In the blue darkness, he saw her diaphanous smile. “It was too smoky for me, that’s all. I wanted a little fresh air.”

“You don’t want to be here, do you? I could hear it in your voice when you called. I could see it on you in the car. Tell me what the matter is.”

“Nothing,” she said, but her exhalation turned to a sob. She brought her hand to her lips, sealed her mouth tight.

Ryan stood with his hands at his sides, awkward, useless, an infant in a world of men. Then he raised his hands up to her shoulders, gripped them.

“Tell me.”

He felt her tremble.

She sniffed back tears. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’m afraid.”

He slipped his arms around her, brought her close. Her breath warmed his throat.

“You’ve nothing to be afraid of. Not when I’m here.”

She said, “Oh God,” and pressed her eyes against the side of his neck. He felt the movements and the heat of her eyelids, the lashes prickling his skin, the wetness.

“Please tell me.”

Celia pulled her head away from him, sniffed, her shoulders hardening in his arms.

“He sent me to you,” she said.

“Who?” Ryan asked, but he already knew. “Skorzeny.”

“He wanted me to make friends with you, talk with you, tell him if you said anything about the job, to tell him what you were thinking, to make sure he could trust you.”

Ryan’s hands slipped away from her. He stepped back. His heart raced. He leaned against the wall for balance.

“I’m sorry.” She found a tissue and wiped at her cheeks, cutting through the mascara smears. “Please don’t tell him I told you. He’ll …”

“He’ll what?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say exactly.”

The storm at Ryan’s core intensified. “You mean he threatened you?”

She turned away as if it shamed her. “Yes. I think so. I mean, I’m not sure. But yes. It was never like this before. I don’t belong here.” she said. Celia told him of the man she’d accompanied to dinner, how she’s acted impressed with them, encouraged them to tell her their banal secrets. “Can we leave?”

Ryan took her in his arms once more. “Of course we can. We’ll go right now. And don’t worry, I won’t say anything. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

He guided her back towards the patio doors and the laughter and smoke within.

Skorzeny blocked their path.

“Are the young lovers seeking the shadows?” he asked.

“Celia wanted some air,” Ryan said, an arm around her waist, keeping her close.

Skorzeny eyed her from head to toe, letting his gaze linger where it shouldn’t. “Aren’t you feeling well, my dear?”

Celia gave him a weak smile. “The food was a little rich for me, I think. And the smoke.”

Skorzeny nodded, his eyes wary. “I see. I’ll have Esteban fetch you some water.”

“Actually,” Ryan said, “I was about to bring Celia home. But thank you for your hospitality.”

“Leave? Now? Absolutely not. Have you forgotten, Lieutenant Ryan?”

“Forgotten what?”

Skorzeny smiled.

CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

The dining room table had been pushed to the wall, the rug rolled up, leaving the polished wooden floorboards. A selection of swords lay on the tabletop along with two jackets, one white, one black. The chairs had been lined up along the opposite wall. The men and women took their seats, drinks in their hands.

“You’re not serious,” Ryan said.

Skorzeny grinned, his eyes flashing. “Of course I am. Épée or sabre? Foil is for women and little boys.”

Celia stood in the corner, biting her nail.

Ryan felt the gaze of the room on him. “Neither. I won’t do this.”

Haughey laughed. “What’s the matter, Ryan? Where’s your fighting spirit?”

Ryan gave him a hard stare. “Would you like to take my place?”

Haughey choked on his brandy, guffawed. “Holy Christ, big fella, do I look like a fighter?”

“No, Minister. You don’t.”

Haughey’s smile dimmed, his eyes narrowed.

“Choose,” Skorzeny said. “Épée or sabre?”

Ryan looked at the swords lined up on the table. The two sabres had French grips, the épées had pistol grips. He lifted one of each, tested their weight, their balance. The épées were old fashioned pieces, large cupped hand guards, three-pronged tips rather than the buttons used for modern electronic scoring. Ryan chose.

“Épée,” he said.

Skorzeny lifted the black long-sleeved jacket, the master’s colour. “Good. Five touches. Agreed?”

“Agreed.” Ryan lifted the white jacket. “Where are the masks?”

“No masks.” Skorzeny took the other sword for himself. “We are not children.”

Ryan slipped his arms into the thick cotton sleeves and fastened the jacket at his side, shortening the straps until the fabric gripped him tight around the midsection. He reached between and behind his legs, fastened the groin strap to the small of his back.

Skorzeny moved to one end of the cleared area of floor, his jacket snug on his barrel torso, his sword ready. “You will keep score, Minister.”

“Right you are,” Haughey said.

Ryan took up his position facing Skorzeny. Each adopted the En Garde stance, swords raised, knees bent, feet aligned.

The room hushed.

Skorzeny nodded. Ryan echoed the gesture.

They began, small movements, the épée tips circling inches apart. Skorzeny advanced, testing Ryan’s reflexes with threatened lunges. Ryan responded with his own lunge, committed to the move, but Skorzeny tapped his blade against the other, a beat to throw its aim, and followed through with a jab to Ryan’s hip. The pronged tip tugged on his jacket. He felt the sharp points through the thick fabric.

“Touch,” Ryan said.

They resumed their positions.

“Fifty on Colonel Skorzeny,” Haughey said.

“I’ll take that,” the man from Finance said.

Again Skorzeny came on the offensive, beating and parrying, until Ryan took the blade, circling it, and connected with Skorzeny’s chest.

“Touch,” Skorzeny said.

“A hundred on Ryan,” the store owner said.

This time Ryan led, pushing Skorzeny back, forcing the Austrian to parry until Ryan found an opening. He took it, the tip of his blade landing on Skorzeny’s shoulder.

Skorzeny’s eyes darkened. “Touch.”

He came back hard, one lunge after another, Ryan blocking each, but unable to riposte. Finally, Skorzeny made a violent downward beat, followed through, and the tip of his blade caught the inside of Ryan’s thigh, the prongs piercing the flesh beneath his trousers. He cried out.

Skorzeny stepped back. “Touch, I assume?”

“Yes,” Ryan said.

Heat tricked down his thigh. He took his position, waited for Skorzeny to do the same, then he advanced. Skorzeny met each attack with a parry, three, four, five, then a riposte, coming in at Ryan’s flank, but Ryan sidestepped and caught him beneath the arm.

“Touch,” Skorzeny said.

Now Ryan retreated, Skorzeny pressing hard, allowing him no room to form an attack. Ryan planted his feet firm on the ground, forcing his opponent to come in close. Skorzeny’s forearm slammed into Ryan’s chest, sending him staggering back. Before Ryan could recover, Skorzeny jabbed at the centre of his stomach, the blade twisting.

The prongs scraped at skin beneath the cotton. Ryan hissed through his teeth, said, “Touch.”

“Here now,” Haughey said, standing. “Is that allowed?”

“Épée allows for body contact.” Skorzeny smiled. “That makes three points each, I think.”

“That’s right,” Haughey said as he lowered himself back into his seat.

Ryan looked to Celia. She could not return his gaze. He turned his attention back to Skorzeny.

The Austrian came at him fast and low, using his bulk to power through the attack. Ryan feinted a sidestep. When Skorzeny’s blade followed, Ryan turned his body, and his blade made contact high on Skorzeny’s chest.

“Schwein! Touch.”

Skorzeny rubbed at the spot the blade had caught.

“That’s four to Ryan,” Haughey said. “One more and he wins.”

Skorzeny glared at the minister, then retook his position.

They each inched forward, blades touching, scraping. Skorzeny swept his downward, taking Ryan’s with it, tried to come back up with an attack, but Ryan was ready, blocked it, responded with his own lunge. It missed its target, and Skorzeny jabbed forward.

Ryan felt pressure then heat beneath his ear.

The women gasped. The men swore.

Celia said, “Oh, Albert.”

Skorzeny smiled and backed away.

Ryan put his left hand to his neck, felt the slick skin, the sting as his fingertips brushed the cut.

“Touch,” he said.

“Do you wish to concede?” Skorzeny asked.

Celia took a step forward. “Albert, please.”

“No,” Ryan said, taking his position. “I don’t.”

Skorzeny mirrored Ryan’s stance, a smirk on his lips, his eyes blazing.

Ryan wondered for a moment if the Austrian had that same smirk when he had threatened Celia earlier that day. Then he attacked.

Skorzeny parried, tried to take the blade with a circular sweep, but Ryan countered, beating Skorzeny’s blade down before lunging at the big man’s thigh. He missed, his body carrying too much momentum to halt his forward movement. Their swords crossed between them, they came chest to chest.

Skorzeny pushed. Ryan pushed back. Skorzeny rammed his elbow into Ryan’s ribs. Ryan slammed his knee into Skorzeny’s thigh.

They stayed like that, a jerking, jarring dance, their blades locked, until Ryan heaved once more, throwing Skorzeny’s balance. Ryan brought his blade down, aiming for Skorzeny’s midsection, but he saw the Austrian’s left hand rising up to him, clenched in a fist.

His head rocked with the blow, and his legs buckled. He sprawled on the floorboards, the épée clattering away to stop at Haughey’s feet.

Skorzeny stabbed hard at Ryan’s chest with his own sword, bright points of pain above his heart as the prongs speared through the cotton.

“I believe that makes five,” Skorzeny said.

CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

Ryan watched his reflection in the bathroom mirror as he dabbed at his reddened lip. The graze on his neck still bled, but the one on his thigh had stopped.

He hadn’t been able to look Celia — or anyone else — in the eye as he left the dining room. He had crept upstairs alone and tried doors until he found this room.

Red swirls circled the plughole. He spat more discoloured sputum into the water and pressed the facecloth to the wound on his neck. The shirt collar bore a dark stain. Ryan wondered if it could be cleaned.

No matter. He hadn’t paid for it.

A small hole had been torn in the trousers, another dark stain spreading from the loose threads. The sad ache this caused in his heart surprised Ryan. It was only a garment, albeit more expensive than any he’d owned before. Money had never mattered a great deal to him, yet he mourned the loss of this sign of wealth, even if it was someone else’s.

Ryan checked the cut on his neck once more. Still a trickle of red. He pressed the facecloth harder against the wound and let himself out of the bathroom.

Célestin Lainé waited in the hallway, leaning against the wall, an almost empty wine bottle clutched to his chest.

“Monsieur Ryan,” he said. “Albert.”

“Célestin.”

“What happen?” Lainé waved his fingers in front of his face. The wine seemed to have blunted his English.

“Colonel Skorzeny challenged me to a duel.”

Lainé smiled. “He beat you?”

“Yes,” Ryan said.

Lainé’s laughter resonated in the hallway as it rose in pitch. It died away as suddenly as it had erupted.

“You see Catherine die.”

“I was there, yes.”

“You did not stop her.”

“I couldn’t. She moved too quickly.”

Lainé raised a finger, pointed it at Ryan. “She do it because of you.”

Ryan resisted the urge to slap Lainé’s hand aside. “No. She did it because she was afraid of Skorzeny.”

“She had not to fear from him.”

“She was suspected as an informant. Skorzeny would have questioned her if I hadn’t.”

Lainé dropped the bottle, lurched forward, shoved Ryan against the wall, the facecloth fluttering to the floor. “Catherine was not informant.”

Ryan did not react. “I know that now.”

“But still she is dead,” Lainé said, his breath sour with wine. “For nothing.”

“I know who the informant is.”

Lainé’s face slackened. “Is Hakon Foss. I question him. He does not confess, but he will.”

“No,” Ryan said. “The informant is you.”

Weiss had first put it in Ryan’s mind. In that workshop, the smell of oil and sweat and chloroform clinging to Ryan’s nostrils, Weiss had dismissed Ryan’s suspicions of Hakon Foss.

“He’s a gardener,” Weiss had said. “He’s a handyman. He trims hedges and repairs broken windows. What kind of information do you think he can give to anybody?”

“There’s no one else so close to them,” Ryan had said. “No one with a reason to turn on them.”

“Yes there is, Albert. Don’t you see?”

“Who?”

“Think, Albert. He’s as close to Skorzeny as anyone right now.”

Ryan’s mouth struggled to keep up with his thoughts. “You mean … Lainé?”

Weiss held his hands up, palms towards the ceiling.

Ryan shook his head. “But he was there when they killed Groix and Murthagh.”

“And yet he lives.”

“He told us what happened. They wanted him to deliver the message.”

“Célestin Lainé has tortured and killed many, many people. What makes you think he’s above telling a lie?”

The logic had grown in Ryan’s mind in the hours since then until he couldn’t avoid its glare. Now Lainé’s eyes widened, his mouth opened, and Ryan knew it was the truth even as he denied it.

“Non,” Lainé said, backing away.

Ryan locked his gaze on him. “I know, Célestin. You’re the informant. What did they pay you?”

Lainé slapped Ryan hard across the cheek. “You lie.”

Ryan closed his eyes, savoured the heat and the sting. “You hate Skorzeny and everything he has. His money, his car, this house. You hate him for it. So you sold him out.”

Lainé’s hand lashed out again. Ryan’s head lightened.

“How much, Célestin? Hundreds? Thousands?”

Once more, Lainé’s hand slashed at Ryan’s face, but this time Ryan blocked it, grabbed Lainé’s throat, pushed him back towards the far wall. Lainé croaked as Ryan applied pressure to his windpipe.

“You know what Skorzeny will do to you when he finds out.”

Lainé struggled in Ryan’s grip, tried to throw him off. Ryan increased the pressure on Lainé’s throat until he stilled.

“You know what he’ll do. He’ll tear you to pieces. That’s why Catherine killed herself, because she knew he’d torture her. He’ll do the same to you.”

Once more, Lainé bucked in Ryan’s grasp. He tried to spit in Ryan’s face, but the saliva only dribbled down his chin.

Ryan pushed him again, harder against the wall. “Listen to me. Skorzeny doesn’t have to know.”

Lainé’s body softened.

“You do as I say, Skorzeny will never find out you betrayed him. Do you understand?”

Ryan loosened his grip on the Breton’s throat enough for him to take a breath.

“How to I believe you?”

“You have no choice,” Ryan said. “Either you tell me what I want to know, or I go to Skorzeny with the truth. And you will suffer.”

“I do not trust you.”

“All right, I’ll give you something. I’ll tell you something Skorzeny doesn’t know. Their leader is Captain John Carter.”

Lainé’s eyes widened.

Voices came from downstairs, the guests milling in the hall.

Ryan stepped back, releasing his hold on Lainé.

“I want to know where they are. And what they want.”

The sound of laughter just below, a door opening, a cool draught.

“I’ll give you the night to think about it. I’m staying at Buswells Hotel. Call me there tomorrow or Skorzeny will know everything. Understood?”

Lainé’s teeth glittered as he smiled. “Why should I not kill you?”

Ryan returned the smile. “Because then you’ll never know why I didn’t hand you over to Skorzeny.”

Ryan descended the stairs to find Haughey and his companion standing with Celia and Skorzeny by the open door.

“My guests are saying goodnight,” Skorzeny said, “but you will stay. We have business to discuss.”

Ryan looked to Celia. “I need to drive Celia home.”

“The minister will take care of your friend.”

A shadow of fear crossed her face.

“I’ll take her,” Haughey said. “Come on, sweetheart.”

Haughey draped Celia’s coat around her shoulders.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Ryan said.

Celia gave him a resigned smile and allowed Haughey to lead her outside. Ryan and Skorzeny watched from the doorway as the three of them climbed into Haughey’s Jaguar, Celia in the back, his companion in the front, and drove away into the darkness.

Skorzeny handed Ryan his jacket and tie. Ryan pulled the jacket on and stuffed the tie into his pocket.

“You gave a good match,” Skorzeny said. “The best I’ve had in this country.”

Ryan said, “What do you want to discuss?”

“Our informant.” Skorzeny turned to the boy who stood half sleeping against the wall. “Esteban, go upstairs and fetch Monsieur Lainé.”

The boy stirred, nodded, and ran up the staircase. He returned two minutes later, Lainé coming behind, buttoning his overcoat. His eyes met Ryan’s as he reached the hallway.

“Come,” Skorzeny said, and led them out into the night.

Ryan and Lainé followed in silence, across the gardens towards the outbuildings and the halogen lamp that burned there.

As they walked, something tugged at Ryan’s mind. He looked at the trees around them, searching the pools of darkness.

“Colonel,” he said.

Skorzeny halted, looked back to him.

Ryan asked, “Where are your guards?”

CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

Otto Skorzeny had never submitted to fear or threat. Not as a boy, and certainly not as a man. Even as a student, duelling with sabres at the University of Vienna, his padded tunic stained deep red, he had fought on long after others had conceded. He recalled a photograph, his smile broad and bloodied alongside those of his brethren, a tankard of beer in his hand, all of them toasting yet another brutal tournament.

So when Luca Impelliteri made his threat, Skorzeny did not retreat.

Standing over the table outside a Tarragona cafe, he had held his ground, listened, his face expressionless.

“I will tell the Generalissimo everything,” Impelliteri had said, smiling up at him. “I will tell him you are a liar and a fraud, that your fearsome reputation is built on a propagandist’s story, and that he should not court your company.”

“And why should he believe you?”

“Francisco Franco is a careful man. He is always suspicious. He has not held his position for decades by being reckless. If there is doubt, he will remove you from his circle of friends rather than risk being made to appear foolish. Don’t you agree?”

“I do not,” Skorzeny said.

Impelliteri shrugged. “Even so, that’s how I see things. Of course, the Generalissimo need never know any of this. I am open to persuasion.”

Skorzeny waited for a moment, then said, “How much?”

“Fifty thousand American dollars to start with. After that, well, we’ll see.”

Skorzeny did not reply. He turned his back on the Italian and walked to the hotel. Once inside his room, he lifted the telephone receiver and asked for an international line. Within thirty minutes, he had made all the necessary arrangements.

Now this new threat, these murderous barbarians seeking to frighten him with the corpses of men he barely considered acquaintances. Whatever they sought, they would not take it from him by fear.

The absence of his guardsmen on this dark night did, however, cause him a moment of concern.

Skorzeny turned in a circle, scanning the tree line. His kept his expression calm, his voice flat. He said, “They’re patrolling the grounds, probably. Come.”

He set off towards the outbuildings again, unease slithering around his stomach with the pheasant and the Rote Grütze. The others followed.

He had seen the look Lainé and Ryan had exchanged. The G2 officer had been gone for some time. Had he and Lainé spoken while he was upstairs? Lainé had made his dislike of Ryan clear to Skorzeny. Had they had some sort of confrontation?

No matter, there were more immediate concerns.

Such as why no one guarded the building that held Hakon Foss.

As he drew closer, Skorzeny saw the door stood ajar, a slash of light from within. And the toe of a boot lying inside the gap. He quickened his step.

“What’s that?” Ryan asked.

Skorzeny reached the door, pushed, found it blocked. He pushed harder, and again, forcing the dead man’s legs away from the opening.

“Merde,” Lainé said.

One of the guards, a neat hole at the centre of his forehead, two more in his chest. Skorzeny stepped over his body, avoiding the blood that pooled around him.

The rage in Skorzeny’s belly threatened to rise up like a dragon, burn all reason from his mind. He quelled it.

Hakon Foss remained in his seat, hands still strapped to the table, feet awash with his own urine. He reeked of faeces and sweat. But he was alive.

Skorzeny approached the table, mindful of the foulness on the floor.

“What happened here?”

Foss cried. “Men came. They shoot.”

Skorzeny leaned on the table. Ryan and Lainé kept their distance.

“Who?”

Foss shook his head, mucus dribbling from his nose and lips. “I don’t know. I ask them to let me go. They don’t answer.”

Skorzeny slammed his fist down on Foss’s splayed right hand, felt the metacarpals give under the force.

Foss screamed.

“Who were they?”

Foss swung his head from side to side, saliva and mucus spilling from him.

Skorzeny brought his fist down again. Foss’s voice cracked, turned from a scream to a whine.

“Tell me who they were.”

Foss’s lips moved, mouthing words no one would ever hear.

Skorzeny reached down, grabbed Foss’s devastated hand in his own, squeezed, felt the bones grind within the flesh.

Foss’s eyes fluttered, his consciousness failing. Lainé appeared at his side, a knife in his hand, plunged it into Foss’s neck, tore it across his throat.

Skorzeny stepped back as the deep red fountain burst from the Norwegian, splashing across the table. “What are you doing?” he asked.

Lainé tossed the knife onto the tabletop. It skittered through the red. “He should die.”

Foss choked, his eyes dimming.

Skorzeny’s rage bubbled up. “Not before he told me what he knew.”

“He would not talk.” Lainé wiped his hands on his coat. “He was more strong than that.”

Ryan’s voice from behind. “He knew almost nothing, anyway.”

Skorzeny turned to the Irishman. “What do you mean?”

“He was the informant,” Ryan said, a new hollowness in his eyes. “Catherine Beauchamp told me before she died. He knew nothing about them. He never saw their faces. They gave him money. He gave them information. That was all.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

Ryan put his hands in his pockets. “I would have if you’d given me the chance. Besides, don’t you have bigger things to worry about right now?”

Skorzeny looked to the body on the floor. He pushed past Ryan, stepped over the corpse, and kicked the door aside.

The light from the halogen lamp scorched everything within its reach. Fire all around him. The rage coming up like a shark from the deep.

“Come!” His mighty voice echoed through the trees. “Come for me now! If you have the courage, come for me now! If you are men, come and face me!”

He roared at the night until his voice could bear the force of his anger no more.

CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

The sky edged from black to deep blue as Ryan found himself outside Buswells Hotel. A bristling hush hung over the city, like a breath before a word, the streets about to wake.

The night porter opened the door. Ryan told him the room number and waited for his key. As the porter handed it over, he gave Ryan a sly smile and a wink. Had it not been for the fatigue, Ryan might have wondered why.

He climbed the stairs, each step dragging at his feet, his body getting heavier as he rose. It seemed an age between the key settling in his palm and slotting into the hole in his door. He turned it, let the door swing inward, saw the warm light the bedside lamp cast around the room.

Seconds passed before he made sense of the shape curled on the bed.

“Celia?”

She jerked awake, fear and surprise followed by recognition. “Albert. What time is it?”

Celia turned to the window, saw the creeping dawn. She had used her coat for a blanket. It fell away, revealing bare freckled shoulders. The pale smooth skin, the lamplight reflected like a halo.

“It’s early.” Ryan closed the door. “What are you doing here?”

She propped herself up on her elbow and rubbed mascara across her cheeks. “I wanted to see you. The night porter let me in.”

Ryan wanted to cross the room to her, but his feet seemed locked in place.

“Won’t Mrs. Highland be worried?”

Celia smiled, lazy creases on her face. “She’ll be having kittens. I didn’t think you’d be so long.”

“There were … problems.”

“I don’t want to know,” she said. “Come and sit.”

Ryan hesitated, then walked to the bed, sat down. Her body swayed with his weight. He saw the shape of her as the dress stretched across her breasts, indecent and beautiful. Her faded perfume laced with her own scent, flowers and spices and the faint warm tang of woman.

She turned her eyes to the window. “I don’t know what you must think of me.”

A dozen answers flitted through Ryan’s mind, not one he could utter without shaming himself. Instead, he kept his silence.

“I was never a pretty girl,” she said.

He swallowed, a loud click in his throat. “That’s not true.”

“Oh, it is,” she said, the seriousness of her expression denying any other notion. “I was skinny and awkward and gangly, and this frightful ginger hair. Like a lanky boy. Then one day, all of a sudden, I was different. And men noticed me, like I’d been hiding in plain sight. My father’s friends, their sons, all saying, my, how you’ve grown, and aren’t you blossoming. But when I looked in the mirror, I still saw the same gangly girl, all elbows and knees and buck teeth.

“I told you about Paris, and that artist coming up and asking me to model. I acted offended when I told him no, but I went back to the little apartment I shared with the other girls, and I looked at myself in the mirror, and I asked, am I pretty?

“That very same week, a man came to see me in the consulate and asked if I would do something very special. He asked if I would go to a party and strike up a conversation with a particular gentleman. An attaché at the British embassy. See if I could get him to ask me to dinner. And he did. And he was dreadfully dull, talking about trade missions, and policies, and which countries had the most to invest, and I thought I’d fall asleep in my soup.

“But the man came back to the consulate — Mr. Waugh, his name was — and I told him what had been said, and he was very pleased, and I got a weekend in a very swanky hotel in Nice and a very, very generous bonus. And so it went. A clerk, a diplomat, a businessman. Sometimes even an Irishman. No one got hurt, the gentlemen had a pleasant time, and I was terribly well paid. Mr. Waugh always took care of things.”

Celia sat up, put a hand on Ryan’s shoulder.

“What I’m trying to tell you is, I thought this would be the same. We’d have a nice time, we’d talk, and I’d tell Skorzeny what you’d said. I never thought there would be anything more to it than that. Anything … bad.”

Ryan was certain he should be angry at her. He couldn’t be sure if it was the fatigue or the low heat in his belly that prevented it. His mind should have seized on the betrayal, but instead it dwelled on the pressure of her fingers against his arm.

“Who asked you to do the job?” he asked.

“Charlie Haughey by way of Mr. Waugh.”

“You should contact this Mr. Waugh as soon as you can. Tell him you can’t continue this assignment. It’s too dangerous.”

Her eyes hardened, told him not to lie. “How dangerous?”

“Dangerous,” Ryan said. “Six men died tonight.”

Skorzeny had barrelled into the trees, his voice torn up by anger. Ryan had followed, leaving Lainé in the harsh glow of the halogen lamp.

The curses in the dark made waypoints for Ryan to navigate by, roots snagging his toes, bushes grabbing at his thighs.

“Here!”

Skorzeny’s voice cut through the night. Ryan headed towards it.

He found the Austrian in a clearing, crouched, his cigarette lighter in one hand, the other cupping the flame. A man lay dead in the moss and rotten leaves, an AK-47 at his side. The flickering of the lighter seemed to animate his face, the expression turning from surprise to terror and back again.

Skorzeny hauled himself to his feet and set off again. Ryan tailed him, following the sounds of his crashing through the trees. They rounded the house, walked circles around clearings and thickets. Time stretched, the sound of Skorzeny’s breath a metronome, a rhythm to trace in the dark.

Ryan tripped on something heavy and pliant. He landed on the moist cold earth, his feet tangling in something he knew to be human.

“Over here,” he called.

The answer from a dozen yards away. “Where? Talk. I’ll find you.”

Ryan spoke to the darkness, words of no meaning, sounds to guide Skorzeny in.

He knelt down beside Ryan and flicked the lighter. The flame stuttered and caught. The dead man stared at the sky, a piece of his cheek gone.

They stumbled down towards the gateway that opened on to the road. A few minutes’ searching found the bodies, dragged from the driveway to the black places behind the wall.

Skorzeny stood panting like a beaten dog, smaller than he’d been before.

“What do they want?” he asked.

Ryan knew the question was not for him. He answered it anyway. “You.”

Skorzeny grabbed Ryan’s shirt front. The fabric stung him where the sword’s tip had pierced his skin. “Then why don’t they come for me? Why this?”

“Because they want you afraid.”

Skorzeny released his grip. “Never.”

Ryan thought of Weiss and his mission. Only one logical thought would stay in his mind, and he knew Weiss would kill him for it.

“You should leave,” Ryan said.

“What?”

“Get out of here. You have friends in Spain. You’ll be safe there.”

Skorzeny’s laugh echoed through the trees. “Run?”

“I don’t see any other choice.”

“Never.” Skorzeny pushed Ryan hard, sending him sprawling in the weeds. “I have never run from anyone. Do you take me for a coward?”

Ryan got to his feet, dusted off his trousers, careful of the wound on his thigh. “No, I don’t.”

Skorzeny came close. Ryan smelled brandy on his breath. “Would you run? Would you show them your tail as you fled?”

Ryan stepped back. “I don’t know.”

“Are you a coward?”

“No, sir.”

“Then why do you talk like one? You talk of running. Like a woman. Like a child. Where are your balls?”

“Sir, I—”

“And why haven’t you fucked that redheaded girl?”

Ryan turned his back on Skorzeny, walked towards the gravel of the driveway, ignored the taunts.

“Why not? She’s there for you, a gift. And you haven’t the balls to take her. What kind of man are you?”

Ryan left him ranting in the darkness.

Celia’s fingertip brushed the graze on Ryan’s neck, already dry and scabbing.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

She rested her chin on his shoulder. Her breath on his skin.

“You’re a strange man, Albert Ryan.” She touched his cheek, skimmed his jowl with the backs of her fingers. “Such a saggy face. If I saw you on the street, I’d think, there’s a nice man. A quiet man. He’s got a job in a bank, or maybe a department store, and he’s going home to kiss his wife and play with his children.”

Her words caught like splinters.

“And here you are, bleeding, telling me about all the dead men and how they died.”

Ryan turned his face to her, every intention to speak, but she silenced him with her lips.

Soft and warm on his, her fingers woven in his hair, her body pressed against his shoulder. No air, he pushed her away, gasped, fell on her, hands hungry and seeking.

She guided them away from her breasts, said, “No,” and he obeyed. The bed seemed too small for them both. Her body moved beneath his, her thigh between his legs, shying from the hardness it found there, her teeth grazing his lips.

“God,” she said. “Sweet Jesus.”

She pushed him away.

Ryan leaned back on his knees, breathless, confused.

She shook her head. “I want to. But I won’t. I’m …”

He understood. “I know.”

Celia took his hand, brought him down to her. She turned on her side, her back to him, and he nestled there, his mouth against the heat of her neck, his chest against her bare shoulder blades, his arm wrapped around her.

She did not pull away from the hardness of him now, allowed him to press against her. Her foot hooked around his ankle.

They lay there, knotted and breathless. Ryan felt her ribcage expand and contract, the rhythm steadying, her body loosening. He closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, it was light, and she was gone.

CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

Lainé did not sleep. When Ryan and Skorzeny had disappeared into the trees, he had gone back to the house, taken another bottle from the cellar, and climbed the stairs to his room.

He listened to the hoarse shouting in the distance, then the sound of Ryan’s car starting and pulling away, and finally Skorzeny entering the house and barking orders into the telephone downstairs. An hour later, perhaps more, two engines approached and stopped outside. Big, coarse engines, like Land Rovers, farmers’ vehicles, built for carrying their loads across fields and streams. The voices of men, instructions issued, commands accepted.

IRA men, probably, tasked with cleaning up whatever mess had been left among the trees surrounding Skorzeny’s property.

Lainé lay on his bed, taking the last swallows from the bottle, the puppy dozing at his feet. He pictured the dead being ferried away into the night, buried in the corner of some barren field, or in the dark channels of a forest, or weighed down in the deepest part of a cold lake.

Among them Hakon Foss, poor innocent idiot, now to be fed upon by foxes or fish.

The wine turned sour like vinegar in Lainé’s mouth, but he finished it anyway, dropped the empty bottle on the carpet. The puppy woke, stirred by the noise, and came up to nestle in the V between Lainé’s body and arm.

He thought of Catherine Beauchamp. Had anyone gone to a telephone box, placed a call to the police, told them she waited on the floor of her cottage? Had anyone come to investigate the distressed whinnying of her horse, alone, hungry and afraid in its stable?

Ryan had lied about what she’d said, putting the blame on Foss, and Lainé knew why: to take his trust, to thieve it by deception, to let him think Ryan was on his side. Lainé was smarter than that, and he believed Ryan knew it, but he would play the Irishman’s game. He had no other choice.

No, that was untrue. Had never been true. Back when he had taken up arms alongside the occupying Nazis, he had a choice, just as he did now, and he chose to follow Ryan’s path.

If he had dared to wonder why, his conscience would have told him it was because he had grown to hate Skorzeny. His greed for money and power and influence. His vanity, his desire to be admired and feared. At one time, Lainé had seen the Nazis’ ideals as being in line with his own: the assertion of nationhood. But ideals wither in the glare of money and power, until greed is all that survives.

And why shouldn’t he, Célestin Lainé, share in that greed?

So when those men came to him, pressed that thick, greasy paper into his hand in return for his tongue, he offered it gladly. They had promised more, a fortune he’d never thought he could possess, and he had believed them.

But when he had told them all he knew, the money ceased to fill his palm, and he knew they had used him, just like the Nazis had. Made him a traitor to himself with no reward but the guilt that lay rotting in his breast.

Yes, they had made Célestin Lainé a traitor, and a traitor he would be.

He lay silent and still as the hours to daylight passed, only leaving his room to bring the puppy outside for its toilet. Later still, as the morning lengthened, he heard the noise of the big Mercedes engine coughing into life and roaring as Skorzeny sped away.

Lainé went downstairs, quiet and secret, and took his bicycle from under the tarpaulin at the back of the house. He rode the few miles to the tiny village of Cut Bush. There a telephone box stood outside a small public house. Breathless, he propped the bicycle against the wall and went inside for a whiskey while he recovered from the effort. When his chest and his heart stopped their heaving and battering, he finished the drink and went to the bar to ask for change.

A light drizzle made dark spots on the road outside. Lainé stepped inside the telephone box. He asked the operator for Buswells Hotel, Dublin, inserted coins, pushed the button when instructed, and waited. The hotel’s receptionist asked him to hold, and he listened to clicks and a hiss.

“Yes?”

“Ryan. It is me. Célestin.”

A pause, then, “Tell me about Captain John Carter.”

Lainé talked.

CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

Within thirty minutes of Ryan leaving a copy of the Irish Times on the dashboard of the Vauxhall, the telephone in his hotel room jangled.

“The University Church, southern end of St. Stephen’s Green,” Weiss said. “I’ll wait inside.”

Ten minutes later, Ryan approached the church’s ornate facade, red brick and short stone columns, a belfry above, seemingly suspended in mid air. It stood sandwiched between taller buildings, creating the illusion of a chapel in miniature, but stepping through its double doors revealed the truth. A small porch opened into the atrium beyond. A tall vaulted ceiling, high white walls decorated by granite plaques dedicated to scholars and philanthropists. The chill on the air crept beneath Ryan’s clothing. A short flight of stone steps lead down to the floor where Goren Weiss waited, smartly dressed as before.

“What’s the news, Albert?” His voice echoed between the walls.

Ryan looked to the gap between the double doors leading to the church itself, the glowing light from within. He saw no one inside.

“Six men died last night,” he said.

Weiss emptied his lungs, a despairing exhalation. “Go on.”

Ryan told him about the body in the outbuilding, about the killing of Foss, about the dead guards in the trees. He did not mention Lainé’s tattling or Skorzeny’s shoving and baiting.

“Fuck,” Weiss said. “Audacious, wouldn’t you say?”

“Or stupid.”

“Maybe. What confuses me, and I imagine Colonel Skorzeny more so, is why they didn’t come for him while they were at it. They’ve proved they can get to him if they want to. They’ve got the noose around his neck, so why not kick the chair from under him?”

The doors leading to the porch and the street beyond opened, and an elderly man entered the atrium. He went to one of the fonts that were mounted on each wall. He dipped his fingers in the holy water and made the sign of the cross before descending the steps. He nodded at Ryan and Weiss as he passed on his way to the church.

When the doors closed behind the old man, Weiss asked, “How come you didn’t do that? The water and the cross thing.”

“I’m not Catholic,” Ryan said.

“I see. Then I guess neither of us belongs here, do we?”

Ryan wondered for a moment if Weiss meant the church or something other. “This isn’t a good place to meet,” he said. “It’s too close to Merrion Street.”

“The government buildings? What, you think Mr. Haughey’s going to swing by to say a prayer for Skorzeny? Does he strike you as a man who likes to get his knees dirty?”

“No, he doesn’t.”

For the first time, if only for an instant, Weiss’s smile reached his eyes. “So, why didn’t Carter and his men kill Skorzeny last night?”

“Because they want him scared,” Ryan said.

“And is he?”

“Not on the surface, but underneath, yes, I think he is.”

“Scared enough to go running to Franco?”

“No, he won’t run. He’s got too much pride.”

“Good. But that doesn’t answer the question. They’ve got him nervous, but that’s not their goal. What is it they really want? Figure that out and we might be closer to tracking the sons of bitches down.”

“I have a lead,” Ryan said. “A solid one.”

Weiss tilted his head, looked hard at him. “What?”

“You’ll know if it works out.”

“I’ll know it now.” Weiss leaned in, his face darkening. “Don’t hold anything back from me, Albert. That would make me very unhappy.”

“I want to follow it up, but I can’t have you breathing down my neck. Call off any tails you’ve got on me. When I need to talk, my car will be at the hotel along with the newspaper on the dashboard. I’ll be in touch if I’ve got something.”

Weiss chewed his lip. “Damn it, Albert, you’re putting me in a difficult position.”

“If you want my cooperation, then you’ll leave me alone. That’s your only choice.”

Weiss curled his hands into fists, turned in a circle, his gaze far away. Eventually, he said, “All right.” He extended a finger towards Ryan. “But listen to me, Albert. If you cross me …”

He let the threat hang in the cool air between them.

Ryan walked away, saying, “I’ll be in touch.”

CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

Ryan toured the streets around Fitzroy Avenue, travelled north and south along Jones’s Road, skirted Croke Park stadium, passed under the railway line and back again. Few cars lined the pavements in front of the small red-brick terraced houses.

Lainé’s description had been far from precise, but close enough. The first time the Breton had talked to them, he had taken a train to Amiens Street Station where Carter and another man had met him. They had bundled him into the back of a van with no windows and driven for only a few minutes. When the van halted, they slipped a pillowcase over his head and led him out. They put him against a wall as they locked their vehicle, and a train passed overhead, shaking the ground beneath his feet. He heard the clack and rumble of the wheels, felt the force of it through the brickwork at his shoulder.

One man grabbed his elbow and led him through a gate and into a house. Once inside, they removed the pillowcase from his head and questioned him for two hours before putting it back on and leading him out to the van.

On the third visit, Lainé had seen the rickety stands of the stadium through a small gap between the van doors and heard the roar of the throng as a match played out. When the questioning was done, they made him wait for almost an hour. Let the crowds disperse, the other man had said.

Afterwards, Lainé had checked a street map, piecing together what he knew, and had established that the house they took him to stood on the most easterly block of Fitzroy Avenue, backing on to the railway line. He couldn’t be sure which house, but he judged it to be closer to the stadium end.

Ryan parked north of the railway line beneath the trees on Holy Cross Avenue. Spring growth had scattered thick bright greens throughout the boughs even as the winter’s dead leaves still gathered in the gutters.

He walked south, through the crossing with Clonliffe Road, and on towards the railway bridge. He lingered in the shadow beneath the line, watching Fitzroy Avenue. No pedestrians, the only sound the chirping of birds and barking of dogs.

An entry on the other side of the bridge opened onto the alleyway that ran along the back of the block Lainé believed he’d been taken to. Ryan passed it, glanced in as he did so, saw a Bedford van, and kept walking towards the corner shop at the junction of Fitzroy Avenue.

He turned left and kept a casual pace, glancing at the parlour windows, all of them shaded by net curtains, the glints of mirrors and glows of hearths from within.

Except for one.

Ryan barely slowed his step when he saw the blanket that had been hung on the other side of the net curtain. He walked to the end of the street, counted houses as he went, turned left again, and found the opposite end of the alleyway he had passed a few minutes before.

He paused there and found the back of the house, just visible from the street. Newspapers covered the insides of the windows. A small walled and gated yard separated by the alley from the bricked-up arches of the railway. A secret place, Ryan thought, a place of hiding.

He moved closer to the wall, out of sight of the windows, and thought. The rumble and hiss of a train approached along the elevated line above, the deep churning of its diesel engine swelling. The smell of oil lingered as it passed. Ryan edged along the yard walls and gates, deeper into the alley, closer to the van. As he reached it, he looked up towards the railway track. At the other end of the block, beyond the arch of the bridge, was a green verge at the edge of the line, higher than the roofs of the houses, overgrown with bushes and weeds.

Ryan turned his attention back to the van. Burgundy in colour, rusted and battered, probably bought from someone’s yard, not through an auto dealer. He worked his way along its length, keeping out of view of the house it stood behind. Trampled cigarette butts littered the ground around the passenger door. The cabin contained only a folded newspaper and a thermos flask. Through the glass, Ryan could see the newspaper was weeks out of date. A ruse, camouflage to make the van appear as if it belonged to workmen.

He made his way to the far end of the alley and slipped into the shadow under the bridge. The grey stone wall extended out perhaps six feet further than the line itself. Ivy clung to the stones, reared up in bushes at the top of the wall, formed a platform sheltered by thick foliage.

Ryan crossed under the bridge and came to the grassy embankment on the other side, bordered by the wall that followed its downward slope to the street beyond. He took a brief look in every direction then reached up, grabbed the wall’s upper edge, and hauled himself onto the grass.

He scaled the embankment and reached the tracks. Another train approached, heading for Amiens Street Station. Ryan crossed the tracks onto the patch of green on the other side. He crouched down in the ivy and scrambled to the edge of the wall. Lying down, he had a clear view along the alleyway below, and the Bedford van. He couldn’t see the front of the house, but the junction of Fitzroy Avenue and Jones’s Road, and the stadium, were visible beyond. No one could pass either end of the block without him seeing. Besides, if they kept their van in the alleyway rather than in a street with ample parking, that meant they came and went by the back of the house. Out of view of their neighbours as they went about their work.

A rush of displaced air swept over Ryan as the train roared and clattered past. When its rumble had receded, he crossed over the tracks, descended the embankment, and made his way back to the car.

Ryan asked Mrs. Highland if he could speak with Celia. He pictured her grinding her teeth at the other end of the line before agreeing to his request.

“Hello?”

“Celia, it’s me. Albert.”

“Hello,” she said. He hoped he heard a smile in her voice.

“I didn’t get to say goodbye to you this morning.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want to wake you. You looked so tired when you came in. Shall we meet tonight? We could talk.”

“I can’t.”

“Oh,” she said, her voice falling.

“I mean, I have to go away for a day or two. For work.”

“I see. Will you call me when you come back? I hope so.”

“Of course I will.”

“Good. And, Albert?”

“Yes?”

“Whatever you’re going away for, whatever work you’re doing, be careful.”

“I will.”

Ryan returned at dusk and parked once more on Holy Cross Avenue. He slung his leather backpack across his shoulders and made his way down to the embankment. He wore a khaki canvas jacket and trousers and a black woollen cap on his head. The backpack contained bread and cheese along with a bottle of water and a thermos of strong coffee, a small set of field glasses, a notepad and a pencil. He had also taken the Walther P38 from its hiding place in the bottom of the wardrobe in his hotel room. It sat snug in its holster against his ribs.

A two minute walk took him to the wall and the embankment rising above it. One more glance around for curious pedestrians and twitching curtains, and he hauled himself up onto the grass. He ran at a low crouch up the slope, across the train tracks, and dropped into the ivy nest he’d found that afternoon.

Ryan lay down on his belly. A feeling crept up and surprised him: the familiarity of lying hidden in the green. He remembered his time dug into hedgerows in the Irish countryside, watching the comings and goings of men who couldn’t accept their war was over. Or the foliage of the Korean mountainsides, scoping out positions, noting down numbers of men and weapons.

Ryan had stayed in Korea long after the armistice of July 1953, escorting shipments of the enemy’s dead, bodies exchanged with the North Koreans as part of Operation Glory. He arrived back in Ireland in time to spend Christmas 1954 with his parents before reporting to St. Patrick’s Barracks in Ballymena on the first day of 1955. He spent four years there training recruits from all over the British Isles, many of them destined for posts in Germany where the army’s role had turned from occupation to defence.

When Ryan received his discharge book in 1959, he spent a month in Belfast, sitting in a cramped bedsit near the city centre, scouring the jobs sections of the local newspapers. It took those thirty days to realise he held no qualifications of any use to the outside world, had no experience, had nothing to offer any employer.

He was ready to go back to the barracks in Ballymena, admit he couldn’t hack civilian life, when he received a letter from an old friend in the Royal Ulster Rifles. Major Colm Hughes, like Ryan, had travelled north across the border from County Monaghan to join the British Army. They had promised to stay in touch when Ryan left the service, but he had doubted they ever would. The letter suggested they meet in the Rotterdam Bar in Sailortown, close to Belfast’s docks.

Hughes sat at the bar, nursing a pint of Bass when Ryan entered. They shook hands, the warmth between them muted by the unfamiliarity of their civilian dress. Ryan realised he had never seen Hughes in anything but a uniform.

They took a table in a dark corner, exchanged a few stories about old comrades, some still alive, some not.

“So what have you been up to?” Hughes asked.

“Nothing,” Ryan said. “That’s the problem. Outside of the army, I’m no use to anyone.”

“Are you thinking of re-enlisting?”

“I don’t know. What else is there for me?”

“How about settling down?” Hughes asked. “Get married. Have some kids. Get fat and grow vegetables in your garden.”

Ryan couldn’t help but smile at the image. “Can you see me up to my ankles in fertiliser?”

Hughes laughed. “I’ve seen you in worse.”

They sat quiet for a time, listening to the coarse jokes of the dock and shipyard workers who drifted in as their shifts ended. Hard, wiry men, tattoos of girls’ names on their forearms, swollen knuckles and mighty thirsts.

“There is one way I could point you,” Hughes said.

Ryan leaned forward. “What’s that?”

“I was contacted a while back, when I was home visiting my mother in Monaghan. A fella in a suit came up to me in the pub near our old house, started talking all casual, acting like he knew me. He starts asking what I thought I might do when I left the army. I never talk about the job much back home. You know what it’s like, some aren’t too keen on Irish lads fighting for the Brits. So I didn’t say much back to him.

“Anyway, after talking around it for half an hour, he says he works for the government. Says they’re looking for Irish boys who’ve come out of the British Army, boys who’ve seen action. The lads in the Irish Army do plenty of square bashing and exercises, but most of them’s never slept in a trench or shot at anything but a paper target. He says they need boys like us for his department.”

“Which department?” Ryan asked.

“The Directorate of Intelligence,” Hughes said. “G2, they call it.”

“So he was trying to recruit you?”

“No,” Hughes said. “He knew I was in for life. But he wanted me to whisper in a few ears, talk to any lads that might be good material for them.”

“Like me,” Ryan said.

Hughes smiled, took a swig of ale, and fetched a pencil from his jacket pocket. He scribbled a name and a telephone number on a beer mat, slid it across the table.

“Think about it,” Hughes said.

Ryan hardly thought about it at all. He called the number the very next morning.

CHAPTER FORTY

Skorzeny woke early, bathed, and ate a stout breakfast with good coffee. He walked in the fields for an hour or so, watched the sheep graze, observed Tiernan working on exercises with his dogs.

Lainé had kept himself out of sight since the night before last, holed up in his room, empty bottles gathering by the kitchen door the only visible sign of his presence. Skorzeny occasionally heard the pup’s mewling, but little else.

In truth, he was glad of it. He did not find Célestin Lainé at all agreeable, but the Breton was useful, so he tolerated his presence in the house. Frau Tiernan found him less tolerable, had complained about Lainé several times since his arrival, but Skorzeny assured her he would move on before long, and she wouldn’t have to worry about the messes he and that damned pup left behind.

Skorzeny had spent much of the last thirty six hours in thought, considering options, entertaining suspicions. Of course Ryan was correct; Skorzeny should simply board a flight to Madrid and stay there enjoying the sunshine until this foolishness was over. But if he had been the type to back down, to flee when danger thundered in the distance, he would not be Otto Skorzeny. He would never have tasted the glory, or the women, or enjoyed the power and the riches at his disposal. He would still be an engineer, toiling at a desk in Vienna, waiting for a pension or a heart attack, whichever came first.

Whoever these terrorists — yes, terrorists was the correct word — whoever they were, and whatever they wanted, he would stand here on his land, would not be dislodged by threat or action. If they wanted to come at him, they had better be prepared for a fight.

And Otto Skorzeny had never lost a fight.

Besides, Madrid might not be that welcoming for the time being, given recent events.

In Tarragona, Luca Impelliteri had sat across the table from Skorzeny eight hours after making his demands, smiling that damned smile of his as the rest of Franco’s guests chattered around them. A young Spanish woman had sat by the Italian’s side, her hand constantly brushing the tanned skin of his forearm.

Occasionally, Impelliteri spoke into her ear, causing her to smile and blush. Then he glanced up at Skorzeny, his looks a barbed reminder of the prize he believed he had won from the older man.

But he had won nothing other than the fate he deserved.

In the small hours of the following morning, Skorzeny was woken by a telephone call to his hotel room.

“SS-Obersturmbannführer Skorzeny?”

A woman’s voice.

“Who is this?” he asked, though he knew the answer.

“I have come at the request of your old friend.”

“Good,” Skorzeny said. “Where are you?”

“In a hotel at the far end of the Rambla Nova.”

“Do you know what I want from you?”

“I know what, but not who.”

As the Mediterranean lapped at the rocks beneath his window, Skorzeny gave her a name.

He made his way back to the house, cleaned his boots outside the door, and entered through the kitchen.

Frau Tiernan stood at the sink washing the breakfast things.

“I would like some coffee in my study,” he said in German. “Have Esteban bring it to me when it’s ready.”

She looked up from her scrubbing. “Yes, sir. The post is on your desk.”

Skorzeny went to the study, sat behind his desk, and lit a cigarette. He leafed through the five envelopes. A letter from Pieter Menten in Holland, one from a bishop in Portugal, two from old Kameraden in Argentina.

And one with a Dublin postmark, the address typewritten to SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny.

His mouth dried. He drew hard on the cigarette, placed it in the ashtray, and opened the envelope.

One page, typewritten.

He read. Anger simmered in his gut. He clenched a fist, read the letter once more.

Then he laughed.

CHAPTER FORTY ONE

Ryan read through his notes from the night before, though there had been little to write about as the dark hours dragged on. Somewhere he had heard a baby cry every few hours, demanding its feed. A couple had argued loud and fierce on past midnight. A dog barked every so often. In the house closest to him, Ryan heard the rattle of a headboard through the open bedroom window, the grunts of a man’s climax, the closing of a door, a woman’s tears.

Ryan moved a few feet away from his nest when he needed to relieve his bladder, crawling slow and careful through the ivy.

As the night deepened, Ryan fought sleep with coffee. Still it slipped over him. He awoke from a nightmare, walls collapsing around him, burying him, as the dawn train screamed past. Once he’d gathered his senses, he checked his wristwatch. Not quite six thirty.

Life stirred in the houses around him. The baby crying, dogs barking, mothers shouting at their children. Soon he spotted men leaving for work, trudging along the street, their jackets held tight around them against the early chill, cigarettes hanging from their lips, lunches wrapped in newspaper beneath their arms.

A milk float hummed onto the street. Ryan lost it behind the houses, but he heard the clinking of bottles and the milkman’s whistling.

The corner shop below Ryan’s vantage point opened not long past seven thirty. The proprietor wiped down the windows and swept the floor.

A movement at the house caught Ryan’s attention. He checked his watch: just past eight. A short, stocky man stepped out of the gated yard. He walked along the alleyway, coming directly towards Ryan. A soldier, there could be no question, with that hair, that gait. One who’d seen action. Ryan guessed him at around thirty years old, too young to have been in the Second World War, but very likely Korea.

The man rounded the corner and entered the shop. Barely visible through the glass, Ryan saw him nod at the shopkeeper, speaking as few words as he could get away with. He emerged with a packet of cigarettes and a box of kitchen matches, stuffing his change into his pocket, and jogged back up the alley to the gate.

Ryan had been correct about one thing: he came and went by the rear of the house, not the front.

Ten minutes later, two more men emerged. Ryan brought the field glasses to his eyes. He recognised one of them as Captain John Carter. Fuller in the face, his hair thinner on top, but it was him. The other stood a good five or six inches taller, and gave sharp deferential nods as Carter spoke. The face triggered Ryan’s memory: one of the men standing alongside Carter in the photograph Weiss had given him. Carter went to the driver’s side, unlocked the door, slid it back, and climbed into the cabin. He reached across and unlocked the passenger door. The other man finished his cigarette before getting in.

The clatter of the Bedford’s engine echoed between the houses and the railway arches. Carter watched his side mirrors, the alleyway barely wide enough to allow the van to pass.

Ryan shrank back into the ivy as it approached. Through the vines and leaves he could make out the lines on Carter’s face, and the other’s. The tall man looked a similar age to his leader, around forty five.

The van pulled out of the alley, and rounded the corner onto the avenue. The engine puttered and barked as it gathered speed on its way to Jones’s Road and turned right towards the city centre.

Ryan noted the time.

All remained still until eleven thirty when the shorter man left the house once more, again via the rear gate. He walked in the direction of Ryan’s position, turned towards the corner shop, and came out a minute later with a bottle of lemonade.

Ryan held his breath as the man paused in the street below and unscrewed the cap. He brought the bottle to his lips, threw his head back, and gulped the fizzy liquid down. Wiping his chin, he let out a long belch. He went to the alleyway’s entrance and leaned against the wall. There, he fished a packet of cigarettes from his pocket — the same one he’d bought earlier — and lit one.

The man remained at the end of the alley, sipping at his lemonade, long enough to smoke three cigarettes. All the while, he cast his gaze around, along the alley, up and down the street.

Ryan recognised the behaviour of a man not dealing well with being cooped up in his quarters. He had seen it everywhere he’d served, men finding any excuse they could to get outdoors, even if it meant simply walking circles around their barracks.

Finally, the man trudged back towards the house, taking his lemonade with him, and let himself through the gate.

More than two hours passed before the van reappeared at the far end of the alleyway. It halted at the rear of the house, and the two men alighted without speaking to each other. They entered through the gate.

Three men in total. Ryan scribbled a brief description of each on his notepad. Height, build, hair colour.

The sun came out, warming Ryan’s back.

On the street below, a group of five young boys rounded the corner, one of them carrying a soccer ball and a piece of chalk. He came to the gable wall of the house next to Ryan and disappeared from view. Ryan heard the scratching of the chalk on the wall, pictured the boy drawing a goal mouth.

One boy volunteered as goalkeeper, and the others split into pairs. Soon the sound of panting, kicking, leather scuffing on tarmac. Ryan watched them shove one another, their feet tangling over the ball. Every minute or two he heard the hard slap of its leather against the wall, the hollow ring as it bounced away, and one of the pairs would cheer.

Now and then the shopkeeper came to his window, glared out at them, shook his head, and retreated back to his counter.

They played for more than an hour without a break, each pair’s score reaching the dozens, before they stopped, breathless and sweating.

“I’m sitting down for a minute,” the boy who owned the ball said.

“Me too,” another said. “I’m fucking knackered.”

The five sat on the footpath, in the shade, their backs against the red-brick gable wall opposite Ryan. They talked about school, and which of the Christian Brothers was the biggest bastard, and what they’d do when they were older and bigger and found one of the worst Brothers alone on the street. They talked about their mothers and fathers, and the girls they knew.

“Did you hear about Sheila McCabe and Paddy Gorman?”

“No, what?”

“She showed him her tits.”

“Fuck off. Sure, she’s got no tits to show.”

“Yeah, she has, I saw her in town with her ma, they were buying her a bra.”

“Aw, shite, no you didn’t.”

“I did. Anyway, she showed ’em to Paddy. He told me she let him have a suck on ’em and everything.”

The boys roared with laughter.

The shopkeeper came out onto the street. “Here now, lads, I won’t have that dirty talk outside my shop. Go on, the lot of you, before I go and tell your mothers what you were mouthing about.”

The boys stood, dropped their gazes to the ground, shuffled their feet. The shopkeeper went back inside. The boys laughed and recommenced their game.

They hadn’t been playing long when the shorter man emerged from the house and walked down the alleyway. The boys glanced at him as he walked to the shop, and again when he left, a chocolate bar in his fingers. He went back to the mouth of the alley, unwrapped the bar, and ate. When the chocolate was done, he took his cigarettes from his pocket.

The boys paused their play. They huddled around their leader, then parted.

The leader said, “Here, mister.”

The man lit his cigarette, drew on it. The breeze carried away the smoke as he exhaled.

“Here, mister.”

He looked at the boy.

“Give us a couple of them, will you?”

The man hesitated then took two cigarettes from the packet and held them out. The boy approached and took them from his fingers.

“Thanks, mister.”

The boys ran off, taking their ball with them, their footsteps reverberating underneath the bridge as they went.

“What was that?”

The voice took Ryan by surprise as much as it did the man below.

Carter stood behind the man, his face hard with anger.

“Just some kids,” the man said, his accent Rhodesian or South African, Ryan couldn’t tell which.

“We talked about this, Wallace.” Carter spoke through tight lips. “Didn’t we talk about this?”

“They’re only kids. I didn’t—”

Carter slapped Wallace’s forehead with his open palm. “I don’t care if they’re fucking leprechauns. You’re drawing attention. How many times have you been at that shop today?”

Wallace scowled. “A couple, that’s all. I’m sick of sitting around that bloody house all day.”

“You’ll sit wherever I fucking tell you to sit. Understand?”

Wallace sighed and nodded.

Carter leaned in close. “Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right.” Carter stepped away. “Now get back in the house. Go on, double.”

Wallace trotted away towards the gate.

Carter stood with his hands on his hips, watching him go. Then he looked in each direction along the street.

Ryan froze when Carter’s gaze settled on the cluster of ivy at the top of the wall above. The Englishman stepped onto the road, squinting. Ryan held his breath.

Carter shook his head, spat on the ground, and followed Wallace towards the house. Ryan let the air out of his lungs.

CHAPTER FORTY TWO

“I can’t reach him,” Haughey said, his voice crackling in the telephone’s earpiece.

A soft ache settled behind Skorzeny’s forehead. “What do you mean?”

“What I mean is he hasn’t been at the hotel since yesterday. Fitzpatrick, his boss, tried Gormanston Camp, and he hasn’t been back there since all this started. I even had my secretary call that shop his father owns in Carrickmacree, she pretended to be his sweetheart, and they’ve seen no sign of him. In short, I don’t have a baldy notion where the fucker is.”

Skorzeny drummed his fingers on the desktop. “Minister, I don’t believe I can stress the urgency of speaking with Lieutenant Ryan enough. This letter changes the nature of the work he is doing for us, and more importantly, the nature of the enemy we face.”

“You face, Colonel.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“We don’t face any enemy,” Haughey said. “That letter was addressed to you and nobody else. Your enemies are your own.”

“Trust me, Minister, you do not want to be one of them.”

“Likewise, Colonel. Think twice before threatening me. I can make Ireland a very cold house for you and your kind. But let’s not go down that road just yet. No need to fall out over Lieutenant Ryan. I’m sure he’ll turn up before too long.”

Skorzeny returned the receiver to its cradle and rang the hand bell.

Esteban entered and lifted the telephone. He went to leave, but Skorzeny said, “Wait.”

He sat silent for a few seconds, thinking, before he said, “Fetch my coat, Esteban. I need to drive to the city.”

The woman asked, “Is Celia expecting you?”

“No, madame,” Skorzeny said.

She smiled at the courtesy. “Well, you’d better come in. You can wait in the parlour.”

He followed her through the hall and into the room.

“I won’t be a minute,” she said, and left him there.

She returned two minutes later. “Here she is.”

Celia entered. She stopped, one foot in front of the other, when she saw Skorzeny.

“Miss Hume,” he said.

Celia did not reply.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” the landlady said.

“No,” Celia said. “I’d rather you stayed.”

The landlady hesitated.

“It is a private matter,” Skorzeny said.

Celia gave a polite smile. “Even so, I’d rather Mrs. Highland stayed. Please sit down.”

The girl sat in the armchair opposite. Mrs. Highland took the other chair. Skorzeny remained standing.

After seconds of silence, Mrs. Highland asked, “Would you like a cup of tea, mister … Pardon me, I didn’t quite get your name.”

“No thank you,” Celia said. “Colonel Skorzeny doesn’t need anything.”

“Oh.” Mrs. Highland folded her hands in her lap. When no one else spoke, she said, “Changeable weather we’re having, isn’t it?”

They both ignored her.

“What did you want to see me about, Colonel Skorzeny?”

“Our mutual friend,” he said, taking a seat on the couch. “Lieutenant Ryan. I need to speak with him urgently, but I have been unable to reach him. I hoped you might know of his whereabouts.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t.”

Skorzeny fixed his gaze on the girl. “I must stress, Miss Hume, how important my business with Lieutenant Ryan is.”

“Again, I don’t know where he is. I am sorry, but that’s all I can tell you.”

He pinned her with his eyes. She looked to her lap. “Miss Hume, I will spare no effort — no effort at all — in finding Lieutenant Ryan. Do you understand my meaning?”

He watched her throat tighten, her hands tremble.

“I spoke with Albert yesterday. He told me he had to go away for a day or two. For work. He wouldn’t tell me where or what for. That’s all I know.”

Mrs. Highland watched the girl’s fingers knotting together.

Skorzeny leaned forward. “Miss Hume, if you have neglected to tell me something, I will be most disappointed.”

Mrs. Highland stood. She spoke with a tremor in her voice. “Mister … I’m sorry, what was your name?”

“Skorzeny,” he said, also standing. “Colonel Otto Skorzeny.”

“Mr. Skorzeny, I don’t think I like your tone. I don’t know what your business here really is, but Miss Hume is under my care, and I can see you have made her nervous. I don’t like it, and you are not welcome in my house. I would very much appreciate it if you would leave now.”

Skorzeny could not keep the smile from his lips.

“Of course, madame. Please forgive my intrusion. I will see myself out.”

He walked to the parlour door, turned, spoke to Celia. “Miss Hume, please do call me if you should realise you know where Lieutenant Ryan is after all. I would be most grateful.”

She stared ahead, silent and still, save for the sharp rise and fall of her chest.

Skorzeny exited through the hall onto the street. He checked his watch and decided to head to one of the better hotels for dinner.

Perhaps the Shelbourne or the Royal Hibernian. Their food was at least tolerable.

His appetite roused.

CHAPTER FORTY THREE

The van left again just before seven in the evening, this time with the three men on board, Carter at the wheel. When they returned, darkness had come, and the streetlights glowed.

Ryan reached for his field glasses.

The men smiled and laughed, even Carter. Wallace grinned as he talked, his hands telling stories.

Saturday night. Ryan guessed they had gone out for dinner and a few pints. Even when stationed in a combat zone, men needed to unwind. Perhaps the excursion would ease Wallace’s itch. But Ryan also knew Carter would keep them in check, not let a relaxing drink become anything more.

The men entered the house, and Ryan saw lights come on behind the newspaper that covered the insides of the windows. Within fifteen minutes, they had been extinguished, and the house stood in darkness.

Ryan checked his watch.

Eleven o’clock.

He burrowed into his nest, confident the men he watched had settled for the night. He tightened his jacket around him, placed the backpack beneath his head for a pillow. The sounds of the streets soothed him, the dogs barking, the distant shouting of drunken men, the begrudged lovemaking of the couple in the house nearest to him.

Ryan closed his eyes.

The early train woke him again, the roar pulling him from his dreams like a greasy tentacle, throwing him down in the ivy, a disorienting sense of weightlessness as his consciousness reassembled.

First Ryan looked for the van, saw it in the alley, then he crawled away from his hiding place to make his toilet. That done, he took the last of the bread and the nub of cheese from the backpack and ate his breakfast. The coffee had long since gone cold. He grimaced at the taste. Stubble abraded his fingers as he scratched his chin.

Sunday morning stretched on, few residents venturing onto the street to break the monotony of Ryan’s vigil. He yawned, flexed his fingers and toes, made up games to pass the time. Naming the birds he saw, laying bets on the colours of any cars he heard approaching.

No one came or went from the house.

His small supply of food had gone, and by the time noon crawled towards one o’clock, his stomach growled. For hours he had endured the smell of frying bacon, eggs and bread drifting from the houses all around. Had the corner shop opened, he might have risked leaving his position to buy something, but it remained stubbornly closed for the day.

Then something began to happen.

A trickle of men and boys, walking along Fitzroy Avenue and Jones’s Road, drawing to the stadium. Some carried flags and banners, blue in colour.

Of course, Sunday, a football match at Croke Park. Ryan did not follow sports, including those governed by the Gaelic Athletic Association, but he knew the season was under way, and the National Football League was gathering pace. Dublin must be playing at home.

The streams of men and boys swelled, became rivers. Hundreds gathered around the stadium, filtering through the entrances, waiting shoulder to shoulder in the streets for their turn to go into the grounds.

By two o’clock, the crowds had mostly been absorbed by the stadium, and their noise boomed within, the voices raised and expectant. A sudden hush, then an explosion of cheers, and Ryan knew the game had begun.

He listened to the waves, a sea of voices, falling and rising with the currents of the match. Ryan imagined he lay on a beach, ivy for sand, the water lapping at the shore of his mind. His eyelids grew heavy, his head leaden with tiredness. He fought it, pushing the slumber back, but still it came, as inevitable as the tides.

Ryan drifted, found himself on the tiny cove he had discovered on the Sicilian island of Ortigia, the smooth stones and pebbles warm beneath his body, the glassy shallows reflecting brilliant sunlight.

The sound of the van’s doors closing shocked him awake. His eyes struggled for focus. He lifted the field glasses.

All three of them in the van, Carter driving again.

Ryan shrank back into the ivy as the van reached the end of the alleyway below him. Carter pulled out onto the road, turned right, heading north. The engine strained as the van gathered speed. Soon, its clatter and thrum faded, drowned in the noise from the stadium.

Now, Ryan thought.

He stashed his belongings into the backpack, tucked it beneath the ivy, and climbed out of his hiding place. His joints and muscles protested, affronted at being asked to move after remaining still for so long. He crossed the tracks, descended the embankment on the other side, and dropped down from the wall onto the footpath. Checking for witnesses, he walked under the bridge and into the mouth of the alley.

Ryan kept tight to the yard walls, hidden from the rear windows of the houses as he approached the patch of oil-stained ground, the cigarette butts scattered.

He reached the gate, tried it, found it locked as he expected. It stood only a few inches taller than him. He reached up, grabbed the top edge, jammed his foot against the wood, and hauled himself up and over.

Dropping to the concrete on the other side, he saw an empty yard, too clean to belong to a house that civilians lived in. None of the detritus of family life cluttered the corners, no old prams left out to rot, no bicycles propped on the walls.

Ryan crossed to the outside toilet and pushed back the door. It smelled like it had been used not long before, but it was clean, squares of newspaper hanging from a peg by the bowl, a bottle of bleach on the floor.

He went to the back of the house. Like the upstairs windows, both the kitchen window and the glass pane in the door had been covered over by newspaper on the inside. He tried the door handle, knowing it was pointless, then attempted to squeeze his fingertips under the kitchen’s sash window. It wouldn’t shift, solid in its frame. Nailed shut, he guessed.

Ryan stood back, studied the building, thinking through his options. There was no way to force entry into the house without leaving a trace of himself. So why bother being subtle?

He took the Walther from its holster and slammed the butt against the pane. The fragments cut through the newspaper, fell inside. He used the pistol’s muzzle to clear the rest of the glass and newspaper away from the wood before returning it to its holster and gripping the sides of the opening.

Ryan hauled himself up and in, climbed over the sink, and lowered his feet to the tiled floor. The small kitchen smelled of stale food, the odours of meals long past. A selection of pots stood on the cooker, mismatched plates stacked on a small table, a cardboard box packed with potatoes, onions, cabbages, and carrots.

No pictures hung from the painted over nails on the walls. The floor had been swept, the surfaces wiped down, but dust clung to the cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling. The kind of clean that would not satisfy a woman.

Ryan opened the cupboards and drawers in turn and found them empty, save for a handful of utensils and a supply of tinned food.

He went to the door that led to the lounge, opened it, and stood there, taking it in.

In the light edging around the blanket suspended across the window, Ryan’s eyes were drawn first to the corkboard mounted above the fireplace, and the photographs pinned to it. From the threshold he could make out several black and white images of Otto Skorzeny, two of them portraits, the rest taken from a distance, candid shots of the Austrian in the city or on his farm.

Ryan stepped into the room and approached the board. He scanned the rest of the photographs, some he recognised, others he didn’t, but each image carried the name of its subject. Hakon Foss, Célestin Lainé, Catherine Beauchamp, Johan Hambro, Alex Renders.

All of them dead except for Skorzeny and Lainé.

In the top corner, a hand-drawn map of the land surrounding Skorzeny’s home, lines of attack drawn in red, each marked with a name: Carter, Wallace, Gracey, MacAuliffe.

Four names.

He had only seen three men enter or leave the house. Where was the fourth?

Ryan held his breath and listened.

Nothing stirred. If anyone was here, they would have been alerted by the breaking glass. They would have already come to investigate.

He let the air out of his lungs and continued exploring the items pinned to the board.

At the bottom, to the right, a sheet of notepaper.

Beneath the account digits, a telephone number written in a thicker pencil. Ryan guessed it to be Swiss.

The same bank Skorzeny held his funds in.

Ryan thought of Weiss. Was he everything he said he was? Or more? Could Haughey be right? Could the Mossad have some hand in this?

He toured the rest of the room. Bare floorboards. A couch facing the corkboard, two armchairs that did not match, and an upturned crate for a table in the centre, an old typewriter resting on it. A transistor radio sat on the floor in the corner. No telephone.

Ryan exited into the small hallway, no more than a yard square between the front door and the bottom of the stairs. He mounted the steps and climbed. Three doors at the top. One stood open, showing a pair of cots, thin mattresses on low metal-framed beds, the kind Ryan had slept on for much of his career.

He stepped inside onto the bare floor. The room, like downstairs, was clean, but it had the stale and bitter odour of men. Each bed’s blankets lay neatly folded at the foot, a wash bag placed on top. A photograph of a naked girl, cut from a magazine, was taped to the wall above one. Another crate served as a table between the cots. Two duffel bags sat propped in the corner.

The place felt and smelled like a barracks. Ryan wished it were untrue, but it made him homesick for his quarters in Gormanston Camp.

He left the room, crossed the small landing to the first closed door. It opened outward to reveal an airing cupboard containing towels and bedclothing.

And four automatic rifles, a Smith & Wesson revolver, and two Browning HP semi-automatic pistols, both of which had been adapted for the suppressors that lay beside them, nestled in an oily cloth.

“Jesus,” Ryan said.

He closed the cupboard and turned to the last door. It creaked as it opened. This bedroom was much like the other, except for the man lying on the farthest cot, sweat forming a glossy sheen on his skin, his right arm tied in a splint, his fingers stained deep red with blood.

The man stared at Ryan, his eyes struggling for focus, his mouth open.

Ryan saw the first aid kit on the crate by the bed, the small brown bottle, the syringe.

Morphine.

“Hallo,” the man said, the consonant L soft like cotton.

He lay naked from the waist up, skinny, two days stubble on his chin, no more than thirty five years old. A tiny spot of blood on the inside of his left forearm, a needle track.

Ryan took the Walther from its holster, held it at his side.

The man laughed, drool bubbling on his lip. “What’s that for?”

He had a Scottish accent, maybe Glasgow, it was too blunted by the morphine to be sure.

“Just in case,” Ryan said. “Are you Gracey or MacAullife?”

His brow creased. “What’s going on? Who … Where’s my …”

Ryan entered the room and sat down on the bed opposite the man. “What’s your name?”

“Tommy,” he said. “My mam wanted to call me James, but my old man said, naw, he’s Tommy. I’m thirsty.”

A half-full mug of water sat on the crate. Ryan lifted it, brought the rim to Tommy’s lips, let him drink until he coughed. He splattered water over his bare chest.

Ryan returned the cup to the crate. “What happened to your arm?”

Tommy looked down at the splint, the purple and yellow skin, the blood. His eyes widened as if he had not been aware of his injury.

“I fell,” he said.

“Where?”

“In the trees. I was running. I fell. It fucking hurts.”

“At Otto Skorzeny’s farm?”

Tommy grinned. “We’ll scare the shite out of him.”

Ryan returned his smile. “That’s right.”

“We’re going to be rich, boys.”

Ryan felt the smile crumble on his lips. “Yes, we are.”

He thought of the account number scrawled on the notepaper downstairs.

Tommy tried to sit up. “Did you send the letter?”

“Yes.”

“What’d he say?”

Ryan wondered if he should push the limits of Tommy’s delusions any further. “He hasn’t answered yet. What was in the letter?”

Tommy smiled, waved the forefinger of his left hand at Ryan. “Ah, you know.” He tapped the side of his nose with the same finger. “You know, boy.”

“No, I don’t. Tell me.”

“The gold.” Tommy scowled as if talking to a wilfully stupid child. “The fucking gold.”

“How much gold?”

“Fucking millions, boy. We’ll all be rich.”

Ryan stood, his mind churning. Outside, the roar of the stadium rolling through the street.

When the other three men returned, they would see the broken window, know their lair had been discovered. They would surely clear out. What few belongings they had would fit into their van. They would simply load it up and leave. Ryan guessed they could clear the house within five minutes, probably less.

And go where?

They would not abandon their mission and flee the country, Ryan was positive of that. Too much blood had been shed to quit now.

Think, think, think.

If Ryan had been running this mission, he’d have had a backup place, another house in another part of the city. He would get there as fast as he could.

A wave of nauseous fear washed over him. He was out of his depth. He should have told Weiss what he knew, allowed the Mossad agent to take over.

Ryan knew full well what the Isreali would have done if he were here. He would have executed the injured man, lain in wait for the others, and killed them when they returned. That would have been the end of it. Ryan could tell Skorzeny and Haughey the threat has disappeared.

All over, just like that.

Could Ryan do such a thing? He had killed men before. More than he could count. But that had been war. Could he kill men for their greed?

No, he could not.

Yes, he could.

Ryan grabbed the Walther’s slide assembly and chambered a round. He aimed at the centre of Tommy’s forehead.

Tommy stared up at him, his eyes suddenly clear.

“No,” he said, his voice dry and thin like paper.

Ryan put pressure on the trigger, felt its resistance.

“No. Please.”

Dizziness swept over Ryan’s forehead. He blinked it away. Breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth. Another rush of noise from the stadium.

“God, please, don’t.”

Ryan thought of Celia and the warmth of her body against his. “Christ,” he said.

He lowered the pistol, his hand shaking.

Tommy’s chest rose and fell, his gaze locked on Ryan’s. “Thank you,” he said.

Ryan went to reply, though he did not know what words he had for this man, but the sound of a key in a lock trapped the breath in his lungs.

The opening of a door below, its banging against a wall.

A harsh whisper, a demand for silence.

Ryan looked back down at Tommy, put his fingers to his lips, shush.

He moved towards the bedroom door, mindful of creaks from the bare floorboards. Stepping out onto the landing, he peered over the banister and listened. He could hear nothing but the noise of the crowds echoing down the street outside.

Then he saw a shadow move on the patch of floor visible inside the lounge.

Ryan stepped back into the bedroom.

Tommy called, “Here! He’s up here!”

Ryan closed the door, slid the small bolt across.

Quick footsteps on the stairs.

Ryan smashed the window pane with the butt of the pistol, swept the muzzle around the frame to clear the fragments, and holstered the Walther as he slipped one leg through.

The door rattled in its frame, once, twice.

Ryan forced his other leg through, let his body follow. He saw the door burst inward, Carter barrelling through, as he let go of the ledge and dropped to the ground.

The pavement slammed into him hard, jarring first his ankles, then his shoulder as he landed on his side. Ryan cried out, rolled onto his belly, clambered to his feet as he heard a key working the lock of the front door.

He ran.

Behind him, the door opened, and footsteps thudded on the road. Ryan ducked left and right, keeping his head low.

“There!” he heard. “Get him!”

The footsteps hammered the road surface. Ryan skidded right and dived towards the shadow under the railway bridge.

Up ahead, Holy Cross Avenue, and his car.

He pushed with his legs, harder than before, his arms churning. A glance over his shoulder — no sign of his pursuers.

The leafy greens of the avenue within reach, he ran.

Now he heard the feet — one pair, he thought — beating the tarmac behind him. He ignored them, kept his pace, crossed Clonliffe Road and into the avenue, the car there, yards away.

Ryan skidded to the side of the Vauxhall, the key already in his hand, unlocked the door, in. He jammed the key into the ignition, turned, held it as the engine sputtered and finally kicked in. A dead end ahead, he jerked the gearstick into reverse, slammed his foot into the accelerator.

The pursuer, Wallace, sidestepped out of Ryan’s path, made a grab for the door handle as he passed. Ryan fought the steering as he gathered speed towards the end of the avenue, straining his neck as he peered out the rear windscreen.

By instinct, he jammed his foot onto the brake pedal as the Bedford van swung into the mouth of the avenue, blocking him. The car’s chassis groaned as it halted.

Wallace was there, at the driver’s window, a Browning in his hand. He hammered at the glass until it shattered, fragments spilling over Ryan. The pistol’s muzzle pressed against Ryan’s temple.

“Don’t fucking move,” Wallace said.

CHAPTER FORTY FOUR

Haughey’s tongue slipped across his lips as he read the letter, a deep line between his thin eyebrows. He let out a short crackle of a laugh.

“Cheeky fuckers,” he said.

Skorzeny had driven to the city first thing. The traffic had been light despite it being a Monday morning, and he had made good time. Even so, he had waited close to forty minutes for Haughey to appear in his office. The minister’s eyes looked heavy, and he had made a poor job of shaving, as if in a hurry.

“Are they serious?”

Skorzeny suppressed a sigh. “Minister, they have killed very many men to arrive at this stage in their plan. So yes, I think we can assume they are serious.”

“Holy Jesus.” Haughey snorted, shook his head. “The brass balls on them. One and a half million dollars in gold. How much is that in pounds? Christ, don’t tell me, you’ll make me cry.”

Skorzeny lifted the coffee from the desk, took a bitter sip, returned the cup to its place. “It is a considerable sum.”

Haughey looked over the top of the paper, his eyes narrow. “Can you really put your hands on that much?”

“That is hardly the question, Minister.”

“Fuck, then what is?” Haughey dropped the letter onto the desktop.

Skorzeny reached for the page. “Please mind your language, Minister. It offends me.”

“Fuck yourself,” Haughey said, the consonants wet. “This is my office. If you don’t like how I talk, you can fuck off.”

The fibres of the paper rasped against Skorzeny’s fingertips, the weight of it, the ink heavy on the page. He read it for the hundredth time.

A large hand-drawn X criss-crossed the paper, a mockery of a signature.

“So?” Haughey leaned forward, his elbows on the desk. “Are you going to pay them?”

“Perhaps.” Skorzeny folded the page along its creases and set it on the desk next to the coffee cup. “Perhaps not.”

“You can’t be thinking of saying no, can you? My office has done all it can to protect you, but there’s a limit. These boys come after you, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Skorzeny took another sip of coffee. “Minister, you must understand, this letter changes the nature of our situation.”

Haughey’s eyebrows climbed the folds of his forehead. “I’ll say it does.”

“But perhaps not the way in which you think.”

The minister raised his palms. “Then tell me.”

“Until I received this letter we believed we were dealing with fanatics, zealots, men driven by some misguided ideal. Now we know they are driven by greed. Now we know they are thieves.”

Haughey shrugged. “So?”

Skorzeny had predicted the politician would not understand. Because Charles J. Haughey spoke of ideas, dreams, noble goals, but — as is the case with most men who seek power — those words were a shroud, camouflage for the man’s true nature.

“A fanatic cannot be reasoned with,” Skorzeny said in slow, measured words, making sure their meaning penetrated Haughey’s skull. “A zealot has no concern for his own skin. He cannot be bargained with. He cannot be bought. He will have what he wants, or he will die, there is no other outcome. But a thief can be bargained with. A thief can be bought. A thief values his life above his honour.”

“So you’re going to bargain with them? You’re telling me you’re going to haggle with these fuckers?”

“No, Minister. They have shown their weakness. I will use it to destroy them.”

Haughey’s face stilled, became blank, as if he had slipped on a mask moulded from his own features.

“Colonel Skorzeny, there is a limit to my indulgence. I won’t have you starting some fucking war in my country. If you intend on taking these boys on, if you’re going to fight them, then you’d best get on a plane to Madrid and see if Franco feels like putting up with you. Because I won’t put up with it, I’ll tell you that for sweet fuck all.”

Skorzeny smiled. “Come, Minister, there’s no need to talk in such terms. This problem can be resolved with your help. And that of your man Lieutenant Ryan.”

Haughey shifted in his seat, his face mobile once more. “Yes. Ryan. He hasn’t turned up yet.”

“Of course not.”

“I’ll have a few words to say to the bastard when I get my hands on him. I’ll bury my toe up his hole.”

Skorzeny stood, lifted the letter from the desk, slipped it into his pocket. “Lieutenant Ryan will return in good time. He knows more than he has told us. A clever man, and dangerous. I will question him myself.”

Haughey leaned back in his chair. “Question him?”

“Good day, Minister.”

Skorzeny walked towards the door. He gripped the handle, turned it, smiled at the secretary in the outer office.

Haughey called from behind. “Colonel.”

Skorzeny turned. “Yes, Minister?”

“A zealot or a thief.” The politician smiled, his lips thin and slick. “Which are you?”

Skorzeny returned the smile.

“Both,” he said.

CHAPTER FORTY FIVE

Ryan blinked in the darkness, jarred awake by something, his eyelids clicking wetly. The floor’s chill crept through his skin and into his cheekbone. His bare shoulder and hip ached with the coldness of the packed earth. The fingers of his right hand traced the lines of his face, as if the assurance of touch might confirm that he yet lived.

How long?

The stubble on his chin scratched at his fingertips, heavier than before.

At least a day, maybe thirty six hours.

Ryan searched his mind for the pieces, gathered them, set them in order.

Wallace had dragged him from the car, the Browning’s muzzle jammed hard against his neck. The van’s rear doors had opened, swallowed him, then darkness as something slipped over his head.

They beat him.

First in the back of the van, clumsy blows, angry fists and feet landing on his body, his head, his thighs, his gut. He had tasted blood. He had gagged as it welled in his throat, coughed, felt the hot wetness on the material that covered his face.

Something, someone, had locked his hands behind his back. A bomb had landed on his temple. Buzzing, floating, suspended on the sickly wave of pain. Another explosion, then black nothing for a time that stretched out like spit clinging to a wall.

Vague smears of memories connected then to now. Being dragged from the van, his head still covered, across grass, into a building with wooden floors.

His clothes pulled from his body. A leather strap, maybe a belt, whipping across his naked shoulders and buttocks.

Then falling, weightless for a moment before the floor knocked all the air and sense from him.

He had woken where he fell. He had pulled the canvas sack from his head, looked around, saw nothing he could distinguish from the sea of black. On his hands and knees, he had explored the limits of the room, the dirt floor, the slimy damp of the brickwork.

But no door.

Eventually, it could have been minutes or hours, he slept. Until now, woken by a sound he could not remember. There, a key turning in a lock.

Ryan’s gaze darted left and right, searching for the door he had been unable to find with his hands.

A creak, and light trickled in.

He struggled through the confusion, the disorientation, until he looked up and saw the open doorway strangely suspended eight feet above the floor. In the feeble light, he made out the zig-zag that cut down through the wall’s faded whitewash, the remnants of a staircase that had been removed to make this cellar a pit.

“He’s awake.”

Ryan recognised Wallace’s southern African accent.

A ladder descended until its feet rested on the floor in front of him. He looked back up to the doorway. Wallace held the Browning pistol, levelled the suppressor at Ryan.

“On your feet.”

Ryan pushed himself up onto his knees. Nausea rolled up from his belly and through his head. He retched and spat on the floor.

“Up,” Wallace said.

Ryan hauled himself upright, listed to the side, found his balance. He placed his left hand over his genitals, feeling like a child caught in some shameful act.

“Back against the far wall.”

Ryan did as he was told, keeping his eyes on Wallace, until the cold damp brickwork pressed against his shoulders. He coughed and shivered.

Wallace kept the pistol’s aim on Ryan as he stepped back to allow Carter to pass, turn, and climb down the ladder. The tall man followed, then finally Wallace slipped the Browning into his waistband and joined them in the cellar.

The three men faced Ryan, each staring hard.

Wallace took the pistol in his grip once more, brought it up two-handed, finger on the trigger.

Carter said, “Take one step forward.”

Ryan obeyed.

“Put your hands on your head.”

Ryan breathed what little air the room had left in it. He placed his fingers on his scalp, felt his testicles retreat from the chill.

Wallace smirked. The tall man kept his gaze on Ryan’s face.

“Legs apart,” Carter said.

Ryan shuffled his feet on the packed earth, his stomach already tightening against what he knew was coming.

Carter made him wait for it, the only sound in the room the air ripping in and out of Ryan’s chest. Then Carter took one long stride and swung his boot upwards.

A fleshy slap followed by numbness in Ryan’s groin. The heavy heat came after, the pressure in his bowel, the molten lead in his stomach. His knees folded and he sprawled on the floor. His gut clenched, sending bile into his mouth and nostrils. He coughed it out. A long groan rose from the hot pit of his abdomen and gurgled in his throat.

Carter and the tall man went to work. Not the florid rage of the beatings they had given him before, but precise blows, sharp knuckles and booted toes delivering pain to the most tender parts of Ryan’s body.

They asked no questions and he screamed until his voice cracked. After a time, Ryan’s consciousness withdrew so that the pain belonged to someone else, some other man crawling and bleeding in the dirt of some other cellar.

Ryan drifted into waking, back to darkness again, the tide ebbing to reveal the pain that had sunk beneath the surface. He lay still, listening to his own heart, the thudding in his ears. When he could resist no longer, he inhaled.

His sides and his back shrieked. The clamour of it reached his mouth as a whimper, and his mind retreated to the darkness.

Time dissolved and reformed, the sediment of minutes and hours settling on the cellar floor. Ryan became dimly aware of lying in a cold wetness, and a sour odour. He knew it was his own urine tainted by the smell of blood. The thought of lying in his own waste got him moving. He fought to bring his elbows and knees under him, every movement punished by a new stab of pain in his midsection.

Three feet of crawling and he lay flat on the floor, his shaking limbs unable to carry him further. When the tremors and the nausea eased, he moved again, kept crawling until he felt the wall with his fingertips. He rested there, he had no idea how long, before tracing the brickwork to the corner.

Once there, Ryan squatted, his back pressed into the angle formed by the meeting of the walls. He hissed through his teeth as the stinging heat sputtered between his legs, gagged when the smell rose to him. As dizziness rushed over him, he placed his hands on the walls to steady himself, desperate not to pass out and collapse in his own foulness.

Empty, drained, Ryan crawled as far away from it as he could before his arms and legs gave out. The coarse floor grazed his cheek. He sank into it, let it swallow him whole.

As his mind fell into blackness, Ryan swore he would kill them all.

The light stirred him.

“Jesus, he stinks.”

Ryan looked up, saw Wallace blurred in the doorway. The squat man held something in his hand, not a pistol, something else.

“Stand up,” Wallace said.

Ryan got to his feet, trapping his cries behind his teeth as pain shot through his groin and midsection. He blinked, tried to focus on what lay in Wallace’s hand. His mind grasped what he saw just as the stream of cold water hit him.

A howl escaped him as the shock coursed through his body. He fell and scrambled back.

“Get back here,” Wallace said, flicking the hose so the water lashed at Ryan.

Ryan crawled forward and got to his feet. He hunched his shoulders against the cold as Wallace ran the water over his body.

“Turn around.”

Ryan did so and felt the freezing punch of the water against his back. Wallace focused the stream on Ryan’s buttocks and thighs, washing away the stench.

“Dirty bastard,” he said. “Take a drink if you want it.”

Ryan turned back to the doorway. He opened his mouth and lapped at the stream, swallowing more air than water. He coughed, and doubled over as the spasm seemed to tear him in two.

The flow of water died and a tin bucket clattered to the floor, rolled across the sodden earth.

“Use that next time.”

Something small and solid struck Ryan’s chest and bounced away. He looked for it in the puddles at his bare feet. There, a chocolate bar.

“Eat that. It’s all you’re getting.”

The door closed, sealing out the light, locking in the darkness. Shivers rippled through Ryan’s torso. He dropped to his knees on the wet earth, ran his fingers over the slick floor, found the chocolate bar.

He ate in the blackness, blinded, swallowing despite the pain it caused.

They beat him again, Carter and the tall man, as Wallace kept the pistol trained on him.

Every time the light faded, a hard slap dragged Ryan back to its harsh glow. Carter’s open hand left stinging shadows on Ryan’s cheek. An anchor in the waking world, mooring him to the pain.

When they were done, Carter crouched over Ryan’s shaking body. He reached out and grabbed a handful of Ryan’s hair.

“Get some rest, son. Tomorrow, you and me are going to have a talk. And we’ll settle this. Now, you have a good long think about what you’re going to tell me. Because if you don’t tell me what I want to know, you’re going to think everything up to now was just a tickle fight. Understand?”

With his free hand, Carter gave Ryan one last slap to the cheek.

“Good boy,” he said, and released his grip on Ryan’s hair.

He stood and went to the ladder. Wallace and the tall man followed him up to the doorway. The tall man pulled the ladder up behind them and closed the door.

In the darkness, Ryan wept.

CHAPTER FORTY SIX

Skorzeny finished the cigarette and stubbed it out in the crystal ashtray. He heard the rustling of a newspaper at the other end of the line.

“Here it is,” Haughey said. “Exactly like you wrote it.”

“It’s done, then,” Skorzeny said.

“I don’t like it. These boys are dangerous, and you’re goading them.”

“I am simply playing them at their own game. Their weakness is greed. It will destroy them.”

“I pray you’re right,” Haughey said.

Skorzeny smiled. “Minister, I have never been wrong.”

He returned the receiver to its cradle.

It was as if Haughey believed no one had ever attempted to blackmail Skorzeny before. Several had tried over the eighteen years since the war had ended, and none had succeeded. Indeed, none had survived.

Though Luca Impelliteri had almost escaped death. Almost, but not quite.

A tour of Tarragona’s Roman amphitheatre, undergoing restorations since the previous decade, had been arranged for Skorzeny and the rest of Franco’s guests, with the mayor himself acting as guide. The guests clambered across the arced stone seating, built eighteen hundred years ago, where the region’s wealthy would have watched gladiators spar or Christians burn.

The ruins of the amphitheatre clung to the edge of a cliff not far from the hotel where Franco’s guests stayed, a sheer drop to the sea beyond its eastern walls.

The mayor stopped his lecture on the sins and virtues of the Romans, pointed, and cried, “You! Yes, you!”

A young woman, petite and full-bosomed, bare-legged in shorts, turned to his voice. “Me?”

“Yes, you,” the mayor called to her. “Who let you in? This area is not open to the public.”

A frown broke on her face. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

She spoke her Spanish with an accent that might have been French.

“Well, now you do,” the mayor said. “Out you go.”

Skorzeny watched as she descended the rows of stone seats, dropping from one to the next, her arms held out for balance. As she passed Luca Impelliteri, she slipped. He caught her before she could fall into the gladiatorial pit below, his hands at her slender waist, pushing up beneath her breasts.

She smiled up at him, said thank you, brought her hands to his.

“My pleasure,” he said.

Skorzeny turned his attention back to the mayor, whose lecture droned on.

At that night’s dinner, the girl with the French accent replaced the young Spanish woman at Impelliteri’s side. She laughed at his jokes, let her hands wander beneath the table, and made no eye contact with Skorzeny.

As midnight passed, Skorzeny stood on the small balcony of his hotel room, his shirt open, enjoying the breeze on his bare chest and belly. He drew on his cigarette, wondering if Luca Impelliteri still lived. A crash and a scream from the floor above stopped his thoughts dead.

He remained still and listened.

Shouting, glass breaking. A door slamming.

More voices. Alarm, cries for help, calls for someone to stop her, she’s escaping.

Skorzeny’s throat tightened. He flicked the cigarette over the balcony and buttoned his shirt before going to the door. Opening it, he found other guests peering into the corridor, drink and sleep clouding their eyes.

“What’s going on?” a man asked in English.

“I don’t know,” Skorzeny said. “Perhaps someone had too much champagne.”

The Englishman smiled and nodded.

Then the voices from the stairwell at the end of the corridor, and the gunfire, and the girl’s dying cry.

CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN

“Back against the wall,” Wallace said.

Ryan obeyed, taking careful steps, his innards seeming to writhe with each one. He kept his genitals, still tender, cupped in his hand.

The ladder touched the floor.

Ryan waited, ready to strike at any man who came near him. None did.

Carter appeared in the doorway.

“Up you come,” he said.

Ryan blinked at him.

“Come on, let’s have you.”

Ryan shook his head. “No.”

Carter nodded to Wallace. Wallace raised the Browning and took aim. The pistol spat, the report deadened by the suppressor. The earth by Ryan’s toes exploded. By reflex, he hopped aside. Wallace giggled.

“No messing about,” Carter said. “Up here. Now.”

Ryan shuffled towards the ladder. He gripped the stiles with his hands, placed a foot on the second rung, and hauled upwards. Another rung, and another, and more until he had to stop, the effort tearing through his body. His head lightened, and he hugged the ladder close to keep from falling back to the floor.

Carter leaned out from the doorway. “Move it.”

Ryan climbed until he could crawl out into the hall. He stayed there, hands and knees on the wooden floorboards, as he recovered his breath.

Wallace stayed back, the Browning up and ready.

Carter grabbed Ryan’s hair and pulled. Ryan hissed at the stinging of his scalp. He followed it up until his feet were under him, reached out to the walls to steady himself.

Something cold and hard pressed against the skin beneath his ear. Slowly, he turned his head and saw the tall man, a pistol in his hand.

“Come on.” Carter walked through a doorway into a small room. The tall man jabbed the suppressor against Ryan’s ear, telling him to follow.

The room dripped with damp, the wallpaper long rotted and blackened. Through the tiny square of a window, Ryan saw overgrown hedges and shrubs, heard the singing of birds. A cottage somewhere out of the city.

A wooden chair had been fixed to the floor with nails.

“Sit down,” Carter said.

Ryan did so. Carter set about binding his wrists and ankles to the chair’s arms and legs with rope. Ryan smelled his sweat. The hard base of the seat chilled Ryan’s thighs and testicles.

Wallace and the tall man took up their positions, one at each side of the room, weapons held loose at their sides. Carter walked to another door, exited through it, and re-emerged a moment later carrying a metallic block and something that looked like a wand made from aluminium and bright orange rubber. Two cables joined the wand to the block.

Ryan’s heart raced. He steadied his breathing.

Carter set the block on the floor. Ryan felt the impact of its weight on the floorboards through the soles of his feet. He saw the terminals, and the wires wrapped around them, and knew it was a car battery. A small black box with a knurled dial was fixed to the battery with sturdy tape. The wires joined the box to the terminals, and two more wires led from the box to the wand in Carter’s hand.

“Tell me what you want,” Ryan said.

The wand consisted of a rubber handle, a metallic shaft, and a rubber tip that bore two copper-coloured prongs. Carter set it on the floor. He went back to the other room then returned carrying a bucket of water in one hand, and a packet of table salt in the other. He placed them both next to the battery.

Ryan asked, “What do you want?”

Carter crouched and poured salt from the packet into the water. He lifted an enamel mug from the bucket and used it to stir the solution. When he was satisfied, he stood and splashed salted water across Ryan’s torso. He dipped the mug into the bucket once more, and again threw the liquid over Ryan’s body.

That done, he returned the mug to the bucket. He reached for the dial on the small black box and turned it.

Ryan’s bladder ached. His chest rose and fell in a rhythm he could not master. “Please tell me what—”

Carter lifted the wand and touched its tip to Ryan’s chest. It sparked like a cap gun and felt like a fist rammed into Ryan’s ribcage. His jaw muscles bunched and ached as he held back the cry that tried to escape him.

Carter smiled. “Hurts, doesn’t it?”

Ryan closed his eyes tight. He growled deep in his throat then fought his lungs, slow breaths, even breaths.

Carter touched the prong to Ryan’s belly.

His abdominal muscles flexed of their own accord, a spasm that might have been a knife piercing the flesh. Ryan cried out.

Carter nodded. “That’s more like it. You’ll answer me when I ask you a question. Is that clear?”

Ryan would have answered had there been enough air in the world. Instead he coughed out what little he had left, a string of bile and saliva spilling from his lip.

Carter brought the tip to the billow of hair above Ryan’s groin. Ryan doubled over, his chin almost to his knees, as the pain swelled in his abdomen. He smelled the singed hair as his bladder let go.

Carter stepped back to avoid the weak trickle as it pattered on the floor. Wallace sniggered.

“Now, the question I asked was: It hurts, doesn’t it?”

Ryan forced himself upright in the chair, pushing against the sickening torrents that thundered through his head. Carter tapped his shin with the toe of his boot.

“Answer me.”

“Yes,” Ryan said, the word seeping out through his lips.

“That’s better.” Carter held the wand up before Ryan’s eyes. “You seen one of these before?”

Ryan could not answer.

Carter brought the pronged tip close to Ryan’s face.

Ryan jerked his head back. “No.”

“Didn’t think you would have.” Carter withdrew the wand, took a step away. “First time I saw one was in Korea. The bastards strung me upside down from the pipes in the ceiling. It was a bigger one than this, more power. They didn’t mess about, went straight for my goolies. I lasted twenty minutes before I told them everything. Not that I knew much. I didn’t find out till after it was called a picana eléctrica. They’re popular in South America, places like Argentina and Paraguay, the kinds of places your friend Otto Skorzeny and his sort like to hang out.”

Ryan spat a glob of reddened sputum on the floor. “Skorzeny is not my friend.”

“Really? So you were just sneaking around my house for the good of your health?”

“I was given a job to do.”

“By who?”

Ryan scrambled through his thoughts. They had guessed he worked for Skorzeny, but what else did they know?

“By Skorzeny.”

Carter smiled. “So he just put an ad in a shop window, help wanted, something like that?”

Ryan nodded. “Something like that.”

The smile on Carter’s lips flicked off like a light. He took a wallet from his pocket, let it flap open. Ryan recognised it as his own.

Carter read the identity card aloud. “Lieutenant Albert Ryan, G2, Directorate of Intelligence.” He returned the wallet to his pocket. “So I can assume you were ordered by your superiors to intervene.”

“Yes.”

“How much have you learned?”

“Your name. Captain John Carter. You were SAS. I know his name is Wallace.” Ryan nodded towards the tall man. “He’s either MacAuliffe or Gracey.”

“Tommy MacAuliffe is no longer part of this team,” Carter said.

“He was hurt. He needed a doctor.”

“MacAuliffe was a good lad, but he was no more use to us.”

Ryan looked up at Carter, saw the blank expression in his face. “What did you do with him?”

Carter didn’t reply. He scooped another cupful of salt water from the bucket and splashed it onto Ryan’s groin. He brought the prongs to Ryan’s scrotum.

Ryan screamed and writhed, twisting his body, pulling at the ropes that bound him to the chair. When the pain receded, he slumped, gasping for breath.

Carter leaned over him. “Let’s be clear about one thing. I’m asking the questions, not you. Do you understand me?”

When Ryan did not respond, Carter slapped him hard across the ear, rocking his head to the side.

“Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Ryan said.

Carter moved away. “Good. So you know who we are. What else?”

“I know you’re after money. Gold. MacAuliffe told me.”

Carter paced. “How much of this have you passed back to Skorzeny?”

“None,” Ryan said. “I haven’t reported to him since I found your house. The rest I held back.”

“Why?” Carter stopped.

“I told you, Skorzeny is not my friend.”

“But you’re working for him. What’s your angle?”

“No angle. I don’t trust him. I wanted to know everything before I decided whether I’d tell him or not.”

“I don’t believe you.” Carter watched him from across the room. “There’s something else. How did you find us?”

Ryan did not hesitate. “Célestin Lainé. He told me where to find you.”

The three men exchanged glances.

“How did he know?” Carter asked.

“He worked it out,” Ryan said. “The railway line and the stadium.”

Carter nodded. “He’s smarter than he looks. So why did he talk to you?”

“I said I’d tell Skorzeny he was the informant. He’s terrified of Skorzeny.”

“With good reason. And how did you figure out it was Lainé?”

Ryan searched for a lie. “Because you let him live. When you killed Elouan Groix and the other man. There was no other reason to let him go. It had to be him.”

“All right,” Carter said. “I’ll accept that. But there’s more. You’re holding something back.”

Ryan closed his eyes, thought of Goren Weiss. “There’s nothing.”

Quick footsteps on the floorboards as Carter approached, then pain exploded in Ryan’s groin, and again before he could scream, and a third blast. The smell of burning skin reached his nostrils. He coughed and gagged, his stomach clenching tight. Pressure ballooned inside his head, pushing against the walls of his skull, the backs of his eyes.

The world tilted, pitching Ryan to the side. The ropes held him to the chair, and the nails held the chair to the floor. A sharp slap to the cheek brought his mind back within reach.

“Who put you in contact with Skorzeny?”

Ryan let his chin sag down onto his chest.

Carter grabbed his hair, pulled his head back up.

“Who put you in contact with Skorzeny?”

“Charles Haughey,” Ryan said.

“The politician? How much does he know?”

“Less than Skorzeny.”

Carter hunkered down, looked into Ryan’s eyes. “Who are you protecting? There’s someone else, isn’t there?”

All Ryan had to do was speak the Mossad agent’s name. Tell Carter about the talk they had, and the newspaper on the Vauxhall’s dashboard. And it would be over.

Over.

They would kill him once they had what they wanted. Ryan knew the only thing keeping him alive was the truth he hid from them. If he talked, he would die.

“No one,” Ryan said.

Carter sighed and took another scoop of water from the bucket and threw it in Ryan’s face.

Ryan spat salty water, said, “No,” but the lightning struck beneath his eye, throwing his head back to crack against the wood of the chair. Another bolt of pain in his groin, another in his belly.

Consciousness shook and crumbled, dissolved, then reformed. Ryan saw the men as stretched figures, like a fairground hall of mirrors, colours bleeding together.

“Who are you protecting?”

“No one.”

Another blast beneath Ryan’s naval, another to his chest, another beneath his eye. A slap across his cheek, more water thrown over his torso.

“Who are you protecting?”

Ryan’s tongue seemed to swell inside his mouth, blunting the words. “No … one.”

Carter held the wand’s pronged tip against Ryan’s belly, kept it there, sparking, as Ryan’s abdominal muscles flexed and clenched through no will of his own, each spasm like a wild animal’s teeth sinking deep into his flesh, tearing at the meat.

It came clear in his mind, a lion, a wolf, whatever it was, snarling and snapping at his midsection. Feasting on him, eating him alive, watched by men who seemed to tower up to the heavens, and then all was darkness, the sound of a hurricane in the distance, and someone screaming who could not possibly have been Albert Ryan.

He stayed there, in the swirling black and greys, until he felt them dragging him down, deeper into the dark. Ryan fought his way up and out of it, dragging himself towards consciousness. And there, the pain, muscles still convulsing, his skin burning. He opened his eyes, strained for focus.

Carter spoke to Wallace, said, “That’s all he’s got. Finish him off.”

Wallace nodded, smirked, and stepped forwards. He raised the Browning.

Ryan saw the suppressor’s mouth opening before his eye, seeming to suck all the air from his lungs and the light from the room. He saw Wallace’s finger on the trigger, the knuckle whitening.

“Wait,” a voice said.

Wallace looked somewhere behind Ryan. “Why? We’ve wasted enough time on him already.”

“Step away,” the voice said. “Now.”

Wallace hesitated for a moment, then exhaled and shook his head. He lowered the pistol and moved back to his position across the room.

The owner of the voice stepped into Ryan’s vision. One hand in his pocket, the other holding a newspaper.

Goren Weiss said, “Hello, Albert.”