“I’d rather not say.”

“Where was he hiding?”

“I’m getting to that.”

Keller was studying the front of the ticket again. “Because this gentleman had no car, he was by necessity a dedicated user of public transport. I followed him for a week before the hit, which meant that I had to be a dedicated user of public transport, too.”

“Do you recognize the ticket, Christopher?”

“I might.”

Keller picked up Gabriel’s BlackBerry, opened Google, and typed several characters into the search box. When the results appeared, he clicked one and smiled.

“Find it?” asked Gabriel.

Keller turned the BlackBerry around so Gabriel could see the screen. On it was a complete version of the ticket he had found in the home of Maggie Donahue.

“Where’s it from?” asked Gabriel.

“A city of hills and streetcars.”

“I take it you’re not referring to San Francisco.”

“No,” said Keller. “It’s Lisbon.”

“That doesn’t prove the photo was taken there,” Gabriel said after a moment.

“Agreed,” answered Keller. “But if we can prove that Catherine Donahue was there . . .”

Gabriel said nothing.

“You didn’t happen to see her passport when you were in that house, did you?”

“No such luck.”

“Then I suppose we’ll have to think of some other way to have a look at it.”

Gabriel picked up his BlackBerry and keyed in a brief message to Graham Seymour in London, requesting information on any and all foreign travel by Catherine Donahue of 8 Stratford Gardens, Belfast, Northern Ireland. One hour later, as darkness fell hard upon the city, they had their answer.

The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office issued the passport on November 10, 2013. One week later she boarded a British Airways flight in Belfast and flew to London’s Heathrow Airport where, ninety minutes later, she transferred to a second British Airways flight, bound for Lisbon. According to Portuguese immigration authorities, she remained in the country for just three days. It was her one and only foreign trip.

“None of which proves Quinn was living there at the time,” Keller pointed out.

“Why bring her to Lisbon of all places? Why not Monaco or Cannes or St. Moritz?”

“Maybe Quinn was on a budget.”

“Or maybe he keeps an apartment there, something in a charming old building in the kind of neighborhood where no one would notice a foreigner coming and going.”

“Know any places like that?”

“I’ve spent my life living in places like that.”

Keller was silent for a moment. “What now?” he asked finally.

“I suppose we could take the photo and my composite sketch to Lisbon and start knocking on doors.”

“Or?”

“We retain the services of someone who specializes in finding those who would rather not be found.”

“Any candidates?”

“Just one.”

Gabriel picked up his BlackBerry and dialed Eli Lavon.

23

BELFAST–LISBON

THEY DECIDED TO TAKE the long way down to Lisbon. Better to not hit town too quickly, said Gabriel. Better to take care with their travel arrangements and their tail. For the first time, Quinn was in their sights. He was no longer just a rumor. He was a man on a street, with a daughter at his side. He had flesh on his bones, blood in his veins. He could be found. And then he could be put out of his misery.

And so they left Belfast as they had entered it, quietly and under false pretenses. Monsieur LeBlanc told the clerk at the Premiere that he had a small personal crisis to attend to; Herr Klemp spun a similar tale at the Europa. Passing through the lobby he saw Maggie Donahue, secret wife of the murderer, serving a very large whiskey to an inebriated businessman. She avoided Herr Klemp’s gaze, and Herr Klemp avoided hers.

They drove to Dublin, abandoned the car at the airport, and checked into a pair of rooms at the Radisson. In the morning they ate breakfast like strangers in the hotel’s restaurant and then boarded separate flights to Paris, Gabriel on Aer Lingus, Keller on Air France. Gabriel’s flight arrived first. He collected a clean Citroën from the car park and was waiting in the arrivals lane as Keller emerged from the terminal.

They spent that night in Biarritz, where Gabriel had once taken a life in vengeance, and the next night in the Spanish city of Vitoria, where Keller, at the behest of Don Anton Orsati, had once killed a member of the Basque separatist group ETA. Gabriel could see that Keller’s ties to his old life were beginning to fray, that Keller, with each passing day, was growing more comfortable with the prospect of working for Graham Seymour at MI6. Quinn had unleashed the chain of events that had broken Keller’s bonds with England. And now, twenty-five years later, Quinn was leading Keller back home.

From Vitoria they moved on to Madrid, and from Madrid they drove to Badajoz along the Portuguese border. Keller was anxious to push on to Lisbon, but at Gabriel’s insistence they headed farther west and caught the season’s last faint rays of sun at Estoril. They stayed in separate hotels along the beach and led the separate lives of men without wives, without children, without care or responsibility. Gabriel spent several hours each day making certain they were not under surveillance. He was tempted to send a message to Chiara in Jerusalem but did not. Nor did he make contact with Eli Lavon. Lavon was one of the most experienced man-trackers in the world. In his youth he had hunted down the members of Black September, perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. Then, after leaving the Office, he had gone into private practice, tracking looted Holocaust assets and the occasional Nazi war criminal. If there were any trace of Quinn in Lisbon—a residence, an alias, another wife or child—Lavon would find it.

But when two more days passed without word, even Gabriel began to have doubts, not in Lavon’s ability but in his faith that Quinn was somehow linked to Lisbon. Perhaps Catherine Donahue had traveled to the city with friends or as part of a school trip. Perhaps the trousers Gabriel had found in Maggie Donahue’s closet had belonged to another man, as had the torn ticket for Lisbon’s streetcar system. They would have to search for him elsewhere, he thought—in Iran, or Lebanon, or Yemen, or Venezuela, or in any of the countless other places where Quinn had plied his deadly trade. Quinn was a man of the underworld. Quinn could be anywhere.

But on the third morning of their stay, Gabriel received a brief but promising message from Eli Lavon suggesting that the man in question was thought to be a frequent visitor to the city of interest. By midday Lavon was certain of it, and by late afternoon he had uncovered an address. Gabriel rang Keller at his hotel and told him they were ready to move. They left Estoril as they had entered it, quietly and under false pretenses, and headed for Lisbon.

“He calls himself Alvarez.”

“Portuguese or Spanish spelling?”

“That depends on his mood.”

Eli Lavon smiled. They were seated at a table in Café Brasileira, in the Chiado district of Lisbon. It was half past nine and the café was very crowded. No one seemed to take much notice of the two men of late middle age hunched over cups of coffee in the corner. They conversed in quiet German, one of several languages they had in common. Gabriel spoke in the Berlin accent of his mother, but Lavon’s German was decidedly Viennese. He wore a cardigan sweater beneath his crumpled tweed jacket and an ascot at his throat. His hair was wispy and unkempt; the features of his face were bland and easily forgotten. It was one of his greatest assets. Eli Lavon appeared to be one of life’s downtrodden. In truth, he was a natural predator who could follow a highly trained intelligence officer or hardened terrorist down any street in the world without attracting a flicker of interest.