‘Yes, Patrick, you do. If you want to stay alive. Listen, I’ve been putting the pieces of this thing together.’
‘And?’
‘A few weeks ago, we intercepted a signal from a Soviet AGI ship off Malin Head. When I say “we”, I mean the radio intercept station at Hacklaw in Scotland, run by the British. They passed it on among a pile of routine stuff to the NSA’s liaison office at Benhall Park. Benhall passed it to us.’
He had heard about AGIs - Auxiliary General Intelligence vessels, Okean-class ships the Soviets kept moored off the coast of Donegal. Their main function was to keep track of US nuclear submarines using Holy Loch as home base.
‘Usually,’ Ruth went on, ‘these are low-grade signals intended for their agents in Ireland. Routine stuff, usually something to do with the IRA. But this one had taken Benhall three days to crack. I got to see it the day it arrived. If I’d known then...’ She paused. A gust of wind caught her scarf. It flew across the marble face like a multi-coloured veil, before she caught it and wound it round her neck again.
‘The message came from the very top, Patrick -from Moscow Centre, from General Kurakin, Chief of the First Directorate. It was addressed to the rezidentura in Dublin. It began with apologies for sending the message by such an insecure route, but there had been no time to arrange for anything better. Dublin station was to drop everything it was doing and get ready for the arrival of somebody very important. The code-name was unfamiliar to us. He was known as “Obelisk”.’
Patrick had been watching a bird preening itself on a nearby bush, a robin escaped from a Christmas card. He turned and took Ruth’s arm tightly, drawing her away from the marble figure down the path.
‘It’s cold,’ he said, ‘let’s go back.’
They headed for the bridge over the little lakes.
‘You know who I’m talking about, don’t you, Patrick? You know who “Obelisk” was.’
‘Of course. Chekulayev. It’s his old name, it’s always been his name.’
‘We didn’t know that. Not then. No one thought to check on their Middle East agents. It didn’t seem obvious, not then.’
They came out onto the street, into the mid-afternoon traffic, and headed up towards Baggot Street.
‘There were no more messages from Centre after that, not through the AGIs anyway. We notified Irish intelligence, kept a look-out for ourselves, but he slipped through. We think he was dropped off the coast from a sub one dark night. Or maybe he just flew into Dublin airport, God knows. Patrick, we didn’t think about the Middle East. Maybe I should have guessed - knowing you were in Dublin.’
‘You weren’t the only one who knew I was here.’
‘No, but... I had more reason to think about you.’
They were walking arm in arm now. Away from the open spaces of the park, she seemed smaller. Her breath hung white and momentary on the frozen air. He could feel it burn his cheek when she turned to speak.
We knew he’d arrived,’ she continued, ‘because a few days later we picked up a signal from the rezidentura using the same code as the earlier message. That was careless. The signal was signed “Obelisk” and referred to something called “Passover”. He’d started work, he said. Two days later, you disappeared.’
She held him more tightly, as though frightened he would vanish again, like smoke, like warm breath on cold air, like a thought started but not completed. An elderly nun smiled at them in complicity as she hurried past. Only the celibate truly understand the meaning of passion.
‘Even then I failed to make the connection. “Obelisk”, “Passover” - Jesus, Patrick, it should have been obvious.’
‘Nothing’s obvious in this business. Look, what’s so worrying about all this? Dublin station knew Chekulayev was here, nobody warned me, I found out the hard way. So, why the sudden panic?’
‘No panic, Patrick. Just sensible precautions.’ She paused. ‘I haven’t told you everything. We got the NSA to feed the code-name into their computer system at Fort Meade. They carry records of all diplomatic and SIGINT traffic in and out of Ireland. That includes all their own intercepts from Menwith Hill and Morwenstow in England, which covers all Intelsat V communications through Elfordstown, as well as anything GCHQ feeds in. They use a word-recognition programme that can handle four million characters a second. We asked them to track the word “Passover” in about a dozen languages over the past month.’
‘And?’
We got nothing. Not a damn thing. We tried “Obelisk” and “Chekulayev” - still nothing. Somebody suggested “Easter”, but all that gave us was a couple of routine messages from the Vatican to their nunciature. Then the penny dropped. I fed your name in.’
As though by mutual accord, they stopped. They were just crossing the bridge over the Grand Canal between Lower and Upper Baggot Street. Like half-finished wire casings, frozen trees flanked the water’s edge, stretching into the distance in either direction. He let her speak.
‘You got three mentions. Number one was from somebody in Tel Aviv to a friend in the Israeli embassy, wanting to know what the hell you were doing in Dublin. The second was peculiar. It was a radio message using a diplomatic wavelength and a standard code, but the transmitter was located somewhere on the west coast, near Galway. It was beamed somewhere towards southern Europe - northern Italy or Yugoslavia, perhaps. You’d been seen visiting Eamonn De Faoite. Someone had run a check on you and discovered you were with the Company. They thought you still were.’
She turned and looked down the canal, in the direction of Mount Street. Trees like guttered candles, lifeless, without flame. Water like base metal, flowing silently between grass and concrete.
‘You said there were three. Three messages.’
‘Yes.’ She hesitated. He noticed how she bit her lower lip, small white teeth on the red flesh. We think it was the reply to the second, a telephone call.
All the NSA can tell us is that the call originated in Venice, Italy. The number’s untraceable. It went to a number outside Oughterard, a little place not far from Lake Corrib, to a holiday cottage. It was taken by an answering device.’ She paused.
‘Yes?’
‘The cottage has been empty all winter, Patrick. Locked up. Or so the owner says. We sent someone to check. There was no answering machine. The telephone was disconnected.’
‘What was the message?’
‘It was in Italian. The speaker left instructions that you were to be eliminated along with Eamonn De Faoite. Your house was to be searched for papers, papers De Faoite might have given you.’
‘When was it sent?’
‘Three weeks ago. About twenty-four hours before you found De Faoite murdered.’ She turned to him, tense, angry, almost weeping. ‘For God’s sake, Patrick, the cottage wasn’t empty when our people got out there. There was a child, a boy of ten. What was left of him. The heart had been cut out: they found some of it later in a garbage can. It had been burned. He ... The doctor thought he’d been dead about a week. We got an ID on him yesterday.’
All about them the world seemed ordinary. Traffic passed in a constant stream. Only yards away, a small queue had formed at the Bank of Ireland cash machine on the corner of Haddington Road. And they stood on the bridge talking of children with their hearts ripped out.
‘His name was Alessandro Clemente, the son of Paolo Clemente, the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs. The boy had been kidnapped from outside his private school off the Via Galvani in Rome. That was about two weeks before the body was found. The
Italians were keeping the whole thing quiet. It was hard enough finding out what we did.’
“What about this guy Clemente, the father. Is he speaking? Does he know what all this is about?’
‘He isn’t speaking to anybody, Patrick. He’s dead. His wife found him in his study with a shotgun rammed down his throat and most of his head decorating the wall. This was about ten hours after the report of the boy’s death reached him. We did discover one thing, though. There was a note on his desk. Not in his own handwriting, so his wife says. It was just one line. I’m told it’s from the book of Leviticus. “He hath given of his seed unto Molech, to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name.”
‘Just what the hell is going on here, Patrick?’ She was crying, hot, stinging tears that lined her cheeks. Not for the boy, not for Patrick, but for herself. She had lifted a stone of marble and seen the horrors that slithered to and
