He heard a rattle and, turning, saw the door of Tommy O’Boyle’s opening slowly. Standing in the narrow breach was a small, thin man in his late fifties, with gray stubble on his face and a bit more on his head. He looked as though he had just seen a ghost. In a way, he had.

“Hello, Billy,” said Keller genially. “Good to see you again.”

“I thought you were dead.”

“I am dead.” Keller put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Take a walk with me, Billy. We need to talk.”

19

GREAT VICTORIA STREET, BELFAST

THEY HAD TO GO SOMEWHERE no one would recognize them. Billy Conway suggested an American doughnut shop on Great Victoria Street; no IRA man, he said, would ever be caught dead there. He ordered two large coffees and pounced on an empty table in the back corner, next to the fire exit. It was the Belfast disease. Don’t sit too close to glass windows in case a bomb goes off in the street. Always leave yourself an escape route if the wrong sort comes through the front door. Keller sat with his back to the room. Conway eyed the other patrons over the rim of his cup.

“You should have called first,” he said. “You nearly gave me a coronary.”

“Would you have agreed to see me?”

“No,” said Billy Conway. “I don’t reckon I would’ve.”

Keller smiled. “You were always honest, Billy.”

“Too honest. I helped you put a lot of men into the Maze.” Conway paused, then added, “Into the ground, too.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Not that long.” Conway’s eyes flickered around the interior of the shop. “They gave me quite a going-over after you left town. They said you gave them my name in that farmhouse down in South Armagh.”

“I didn’t.”

“I know,” Conway said. “I wouldn’t be alive if you’d given me up, would I?”

“Not a chance, Billy.”

Conway’s eyes were on the move again. He had helped to save countless lives and prevent untold millions in property damage. And his reward, thought Keller, was to spend the rest of his life waiting for an IRA bullet. The IRA was like an elephant. It never forgot. And it surely never forgave an informant.

“How’s business?” asked Keller.

“Fine. You?”

Keller gave a noncommittal shrug of his shoulders.

“What business are you in these days, Michael Connelly?”

“It’s not important.”

“I assume that wasn’t your real name.”

Keller made a face to say that it wasn’t.

“How did you learn to speak like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like one of us,” said Conway.

“I suppose it’s a gift.”

“You’ve other gifts as well,” said Conway. “It was four against one in that farmhouse, and even then it wasn’t a fair fight.”

“Actually,” said Keller, “it was five against one.”

“Who was the fifth?”

“Quinn.”

A silence fell between them.