Daniel Silva - The English Spy

“You know,” he said finally, “you really should find somewhere else to stay when you’re in Rome. The entire world knows about this safe flat, which means it isn’t a safe flat at all.”

“I like the view.”

“I can see why.”

Seymour returned his gaze to the darkened rooftops. Gabriel sensed there was something troubling him. He would get around to it eventually. He always did.

“I hear your wife left town today,” he said at last.

“What other privileged information did the chief of my service share with you?”

“He mentioned something about a painting.”

“It’s not just any painting, Graham. It’s the—”

“Caravaggio,” said Seymour, finishing Gabriel’s sentence for him. Then he smiled and added, “You do have a knack for finding things, don’t you?”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“I suppose it was.”

Seymour drank. Gabriel asked why Uzi Navot had come to London.

“He had a piece of intelligence he wanted me to see. I have to admit,” Seymour added, “he seemed in good spirits for a man in his position.”

“What position is that?”

“Everyone in the business knows Uzi is on his way out,” answered Seymour. “And he’s leaving behind a terrible mess. The entire Middle East is in flames, and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”

“Uzi wasn’t the one who made the mess.”

“No,” agreed Seymour, “the Americans did that. The president and his advisers were too quick to part ways with the Arab strongmen. Now the president’s confronted with a world gone mad, and he doesn’t have a clue as to what to do about it.”

“And if you were advising the president, Graham?”

“I’d tell him to resurrect the strongmen. It worked before, it can work again.”

“All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men.”

“Your point?”

“The old order is broken, and it can’t be put back together. Besides,” added Gabriel, “the old order is what brought us Bin Laden and the jihadists in the first place.”

“And when the jihadists try to evict the Jewish state from the House of Islam?”

“They are trying, Graham. And in case you haven’t noticed, they don’t have much use for the United Kingdom, either. Like it or not, we’re in this together.”

Gabriel’s BlackBerry vibrated. He looked at the screen and frowned.

“What is it?” asked Seymour.

“Another cease-fire.”

“How long will this one last?”

“I suppose until Hamas decides to break it.” Gabriel placed the BlackBerry on the coffee table and regarded Seymour curiously. “You were about to tell me what you’re doing in my apartment.”

“I have a problem.”

“What’s his name?”

“Quinn,” answered Seymour. “Eamon Quinn.”

Gabriel ran the name through the database of his memory but found no match. “Irish?” he asked.

Seymour nodded.

“Republican?”

“Of the worst kind.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“A long time ago, I made a mistake and people died.”

“And Quinn was responsible?”

“Quinn lit the fuse, but ultimately I was responsible. That’s the wonderful thing about our business. Our mistakes always come back to haunt us, and eventually all debts come due.” Seymour raised his glass toward Gabriel. “Can we drink to that?”

THE SKIES HAD BEEN THREATENING all afternoon. Finally, at half past ten, a torrential downpour briefly turned the Via Gregoriana into a Venetian canal. Graham Seymour stood at the window watching fat gobbets of rain hammering against the terrace, but in his thoughts it was the hopeful summer of 1998. The Soviet Union was a memory. The economies of Europe and America were roaring. The jihadists of al-Qaeda were the stuff of white papers and terminally boring seminars about future threats. “We fooled ourselves into thinking we had reached the end of history,” he was saying. “There were some in Parliament who actually proposed disbanding the Security Service and MI6 and burning us all at the stake.” He glanced over his shoulder. “They were days of wine and roses. They were days of delusion.”

“Not for me, Graham. I was out of the business at the time.”

“I remember.” Seymour turned away from Gabriel and watched the rain beating against the glass. “You were living in Cornwall then, weren’t you? In that little cottage on the Helford River. Your first wife was at the psychiatric hospital in Stafford, and you were supporting her by cleaning paintings for Julian Isherwood. And there was that boy who lived in the cottage next door. His name escapes me.”

“Peel,” said Gabriel. “His name was Timothy Peel.”

“Ah, yes, young Master Peel. We could never figure out why you were spending so much time with him. And then we realized he was exactly the same age as the son you lost to the bomb in Vienna.”

“I thought we were talking about you, Graham.”

“We are,” replied Seymour.

He then reminded Gabriel, needlessly, that in the summer of 1998 he was the chief of counterterrorism at MI5. As such, he was responsible for protecting the British homeland from the terrorists of the Irish Republican Army. And yet even in Ulster, scene of a centuries-old conflict between Protestants and Catholics, there were signs of hope. The voters of Northern Ireland had ratified the Good Friday peace accords, and the Provisional IRA was adhering to the terms of the cease-fire. Only the Real IRA, a small band of hard-line dissidents, carried on the armed struggle. Its leader was Michael McKevitt, the former quartermaster general of the IRA. His common-law wife, Bernadette Sands-McKevitt, ran the political wing: the 32 County Sovereignty Movement. She was the sister of Bobby Sands, the Provisional IRA member who starved himself to death in the Maze prison in 1981.

“And then,” said Seymour, “there was Eamon Quinn. Quinn planned the operations. Quinn built the bombs. Unfortunately, he was good. Very good.”

A heavy thunderclap shook the building. Seymour gave an involuntary flinch before continuing.

“Quinn had a certain genius for building highly effective bombs and delivering them to their targets. But what he didn’t know,” Seymour added, “was that I had an agent watching over his shoulder.”

“How long was he there?”

“My agent was a woman,” answered Seymour. “And she was there from the beginning.”

Managing the agent and her intelligence, Seymour continued, proved to be a delicate balancing act. Because the agent was highly placed within the organization, she often had advance knowledge of attacks, including the target, the time, and the size of the bomb.

“What were we to do?” asked Seymour. “Disrupt the attacks and put the agent at risk? Or allow the attacks to go forward and try to make sure no one gets killed in the process?”

“The latter,” replied Gabriel.

“Spoken like a true spy.”

“We’re not policemen, Graham.”

“Thank God for that.”

For the most part, said Seymour, the strategy worked. Several large car bombs were defused, and several others exploded with minimal casualties, though one virtually leveled the High Street of Portadown, a loyalist stronghold, in February 1998. Then, six months later, MI5’s spy reported the group was plotting a major attack. Something big, she warned. Something that would blow the Good Friday peace process to bits.

“What were we supposed to do?” asked Seymour.

Outside, the sky exploded with lightning. Seymour emptied his glass and told Gabriel the rest of it.

On the evening of August 13, 1998, a maroon Vauxhall Cavalier, registration number 91 DL 2554, vanished from a housing estate in Carrickmacross, in the Republic of Ireland. It was driven to an isolated farm along the border and fitted with a set of false Northern Ireland plates. Then Quinn fitted it with the bomb: five hundred pounds of fertilizer, a machine-tooled booster rod filled with high explosive, a detonator, a power source hidden in a plastic food container, an arming switch in the glove box. On the morning of Sunday, August 15, he drove the car across the border to Omagh and parked it outside the S.D. Kells department store on Lower Market Street.