“Why?”

Quinn smiled. “Because they’re here.”

At 7:31 the man standing thirty feet from Christopher Keller removed his right hand from the AK-47 and used it to remove a mobile phone from his pocket. The phone flared briefly, and in the glow of its screen Keller glimpsed the face of the man who would soon be dead. He was Keller’s age, Keller’s height and build. He might have been a farmer. He might have driven a lorry or done odd jobs. In another lifetime he had been Keller’s enemy. Now he was his enemy again.

Like all veterans of the South Armagh Brigade, the man standing thirty feet from Keller knew every inch of the blood-soaked land. He knew every ditch, every patch of bramble, every hole where a gun was hidden or a booby-trap bomb was buried. He knew, too, the difference between the sound of an animal and the sound of a man. Too late, he looked up from his phone and saw Keller bearing down on him, a knife in one hand, a gun in the other. Keller forced the man to the ground. Then he drove the knife into his throat and held it until the man’s hands released their grip on the phone and the AK-47. Keller seized the gun; Gabriel, the phone. Then they moved silently forward across the field, toward the shed of corrugated metal, twenty feet by forty, where Keller should have died a long time ago.

“Everyone check in?” asked Quinn.

“Everyone but Brendan Magill.”

“Where’s he posted?”

“West side of the property, against the border.”

“Hit him again.”

Jimmy Fagan sent Magill a direct text. After ninety seconds there was still no response.

“Looks like we found them,” said Quinn.

“What now?”

“Kill the bait. And then bring me Keller and Allon alive.”

Fagan typed the message and hit SEND. Quinn carried the Makarov outside to watch the fireworks.

Thirty yards beyond the spot where Brendan Magill lay dead was a rock wall running on a north-south axis. Gabriel took cover behind it after a 7.62x39mm round shredded the air a few inches from his right ear. Keller hit the ground next to him as rounds exploded against the stones of the wall, sending sparks and fragments flying. The source of the fire was silenced, so Gabriel had only a vague idea of the direction from which it was coming. He poked his head above the wall to search for a muzzle flash, but another burst of rounds drove him downward. Keller was now crawling northward along the base of the wall. Gabriel followed after him, but stopped when Keller suddenly opened up with the dead man’s AK-47. A distant scream indicated that Keller’s rounds had found their mark, but in an instant they were taking fire from several directions. Gabriel flattened himself on the ground at Keller’s side, the Glock in one hand, the dead man’s phone in the other. After a few seconds he realized it was pulsing with an incoming text. The text was apparently from Eamon Quinn. It read KILL THE GIRL . . .

79

CROSSMAGLEN, SOUTH ARMAGH

A MID THE HEAP OF BROKEN and dismembered farm implements in Jimmy Fagan’s shed, Katerina had found a scythe, rusted and caked in mud, a museum piece, perhaps the last scythe in the whole of Ireland, north or south. She held it tightly in her hands and listened to the sound of men pounding up the track at a sprint. Two men, she thought, perhaps three. She positioned herself against the shed’s sliding door. Madeline was at the opposite end of the space, hooded, hands bound, her back to the bales of hay. She was the first and only thing the men would see upon entry.

The latch gave way, the door slid open, a gun intruded. Katerina recognized its silhouette: an AK-47 with a suppressor attached to the barrel. She knew it well. It was the first weapon she had ever fired at the camp. The great AK-47! Liberator of the oppressed! The gun was pointed upward at a forty-five-degree angle. Katerina had no choice but to wait until the barrel sank toward Madeline. Then she raised the scythe and swung it with every ounce of strength she had left in her body.

Two hundred yards away, crouched behind a stone wall at the western edge of Jimmy Fagan’s property, Gabriel showed the text message to Christopher Keller. Keller immediately poked his head above the wall and saw muzzle flashes in the doorway of the shed. Four flashes, four shots, more than enough to obliterate two lives. A burst of AK-47 fire drove him downward again. Eyes wild, he grabbed Gabriel savagely by the front of his coat and shouted, “Stay here!”

Keller hauled himself over the wall and vanished from sight. Gabriel lay there for a few seconds as the rounds rained down on his position. Then suddenly he was on his feet and running across the darkened pasture. Running toward a car in a snowy square in Vienna. Running toward death.

The blow that Katerina delivered to the neck of the man holding the AK-47 resulted in a partial decapitation. Even so, he had managed to squeeze off a shot before she wrenched the gun from his grasp—a shot that struck the hay bales a few inches from Madeline’s head. Katerina shoved the dying man aside and quickly fired two shots into the chest of the second man. The fourth shot she fired into the partially decapitated creature twitching at her feet. In the lexicon of the SVR, it was a control shot. It was also a shot of mercy.

When the gunfire ended, Madeline tore away the serge-cloth hood. Her hands were still bound. Katerina cut away the duct tape and helped her to her feet. Outside, a battle raged. From their vantage point at the center of the rolling property, the lines were clearly drawn in streaks of white tracer fire. Two figures were working their way across the pastures from the west, under heavy fire from several positions. Another man stood motionless on the porch of the distant farmhouse, watching the spectacle as though it had been arranged for his private amusement. Katerina suspected the two men approaching from the west were Gabriel Allon and Christopher Keller. And the man on the porch was Quinn.

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

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

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