PART FOUR

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SOUTH ARMAGH–LONDON

IT WAS THE KIND OF night they used to write songs about. Eight men dead in the green hills of South Armagh, six by the gun, two by the sword. Their names were an honor roll of the IRA’s most notorious unit: Maguire, Magill, Callahan, O’Donnell, Ryan, Kelly, Collins, Fagan . . . Eight men dead in the green hills of South Armagh, six by the gun, two by the sword. It was the kind of night they used to write songs about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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