Gunner Kelly

“Fair enough.” Audley’s flash of irritability was gone. “No one could blame you for that. So ... we’ll just forget Debreczen—it’s something else that never existed. Right? And Aloysius Kelly too!”

Debreczen?

The Debreczen meetings? Benedikt frowned as the meetings fixed Debreczen for him. But what would an Irish veteran of the Spanish Civil War be doing in a nowhere-town in eastern Hungary, which—

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so far as he could recall—lay somewhere just on the better side of the Carpathians, almost equidistant from the borders of Slovakia and Rumania and the Ukraine?

The Irishman looked at Audley wordlessly, and Benedikt could see that Audley friendly frightened him more than Audley hostile. But then, perhaps that was what Audley intended.

“It’s Michael Kelly—our very own Gunner Kelly—who interests us, Mr Smith, you see?” Audley smiled, first at the Irishman, and then transferred the smile to Benedikt for confirmation. “Correct, Captain?”

Benedikt nodded. “That is correct.” If anything, he thought, a smiling Audley was more disturbing.

“And we left him taking the King’s shilling . . . forty years ago? No

—forty-five, it must be . . .” Audley carried the nod back to Mr Smith. “Which is a long time ago, when you think about it.”

A long time, indeed! Benedikt tried, and failed, to conjure up pictures of the Ireland of their time—the two Irish youths, one a butcher’s boy, the other a young seminarian . . . one to become a British soldier, the other to travel a very different road, serving under a newer flag and exchanging the true God for a false one.

But both of them had grown old since then, over those long years . . . and yet now one was mysteriously dead, and the other plotted murderous vengeance, when they both ought to have been drowsing in front of the television sets by their firesides among grandchildren.

“So when did they meet again, Michael and Aloysius?” Audley dummy1

prodded the Irishman gently. “Because they did meet again, didn’t they?”

As a guess, it was nothing extraordinary, really: it was the only computation of the possibilities which made any sense of what was happening now.

“They met.” The hand resting on the tank clenched.

“Four years ago?”

“Ten years ago.”

“So long as that?” Audley frowned, and fell silent for a moment.

“Well now . . . ten years . . . and not by chance?”

The Irishman didn’t reply.

“Not by chance, let’s assume. And it was Aloysius who sought out Michael—right?” Audley nodded, but more to himself than to Mr Smith, and then turned to the American. “It was about ten years ago that they put the word out on him, wasn’t it?”

The American stared into space for a couple of seconds. “No. Not so long—more like seven . . . ‘75—not earlier than that, David.”

“Hmm . . . But then he could have seen the writing on the wall before they did. So he could have been setting up his bolt-holes in advance . . . That’s what I’d have done in his place.”

‘They’ . . . ? Both because Audley was who he was and because Aloysius Kelly had been who he had been, they were not the IRA, estimated Benedikt coldly. The long hunt for him— which now seemed to have extended to a pursuit of Gunner Kelly—sounded much more like the KGB’s Special Bureau No 1 on both accounts.

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“So how did Aloysius trace Michael?” Audley came round to Mr Smith again, and beamed suddenly at him. “Ah! He’d go about it just like you did, wouldn’t he!” He nodded at Benedikt. “There now

—that’s a lesson for both of us: the computer gives back only what it’s already been given, and if it lacks that one special bit of knowledge ...” He switched back quickly to the Irishman. “And that’s what’s bothering you at the moment, isn’t it?”

The man’s source—of course! Because once Audley had that, the man himself was superfluous.

“The old auntie.” This time Audley didn’t bother to smile, because he no longer needed to do so.

“No—”

“Yes. You slipped, and now you’re kicking yourself for it—

although it’s easily done, and we all do it when we’re scared . . .

And I could be charitable, and assume that you don’t want the old lady bothered by great gallumphing Britishers with Irish accents . . . Or I could be uncharitable, and suspect that you’re more worried about someone remembering that you’d been to see her just recently, and putting one and one together to make two—

eh?”

The Irishman had composed his features, but the knuckles on his fist betrayed him to Benedikt. “No. I was just thinking . . . word of an Irishman—that’s all.”

“And quite properly.” Audley looked down his nose. “She’s your contact. But you don’t exist, so she doesn’t exist either.” He shrugged. “Simple.”

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“Your word on it?” Apart from the knuckles Mr Smith was steady now.