Ryan took stock. He rolled his shoulders, felt the cotton of his shirt against his skin. Whoever had taken him had not removed his clothing. He shifted his limbs as best he could, wriggled each toe and finger in turn, and none reported injury, other than a tenderness on his palms, that hot sting of grazing one’s skin on the ground.
He moved his head, and it met something solid, he guessed the high back of a chair. His scalp stung where it touched. The blow before he fell.
His tongue moved freely behind his teeth. He opened his mouth. No gag. He swallowed. His throat gritty from thirst.
Should he speak? He decided against it.
He heard a constant soft hiss from his left, felt warmth against his shoulder and thigh. A gas heater, burning.
Water dripped, a steady rhythm, each plink reverberating in an empty space. He raised the toe of his shoe off the ground, brought it down, a sharp tap of the sole on hard floor. Not a large room, but high ceilinged.
He strained to hear. Muffled voices in another room. Men’s voices, he couldn’t tell how many.
The voices ceased. A door opened.
Footsteps, two pairs of feet, approaching across the hard surface.
Something tugged at his head, the blindfold lifted away. Light speared his vision. He closed his eyes against it, turned his head.
“Easy now,” a man said.
Ryan knew the voice.
He heard the squeak of a tap turning, water running for a few seconds. Footsteps came near.
“Here, drink this.”
Something pressed against Ryan’s lips, the hard edge of a cup. He opened his mouth, allowed the water in, swallowed, coughed. The ache in his head shifted, burrowed its way from the base of his skull to his crown.
Ryan let his eyes open to a squint. The man from the pub toilet, his dark hair combed flat and sleek to his head, his jacket and tie removed, shirtsleeves rolled up. He returned the cup to the sink in the corner. Another man beside the sink, shorter, heavier set, casually dressed. A pistol gripped in his right hand.
“How do you feel?” the man from the bathroom asked. “Your head hurts, right? Chloroform will do that to you. Please accept my apology. I hope you understand it was the only safe way to transport you here.”
Ryan craned his neck to take in as much of his surroundings as he could. Cement block walls, concrete floor, oil stains, a pit large enough for a man to stand upright. A tall and wide roller door at one end. A windowed office at the other.
“I’m guessing you want to know where you are,” the man said. “Of course, I can’t tell you our exact location, but a car mechanic owned this place. He went out of business, so we’re making temporary use of it.”
The man took a chair from the corner, placed it in front of Ryan, and sat down. He crossed his legs, twined his fingers in his lap.
“Who are you?” Ryan asked, his voice rasping in his throat.
“My name is Goren Weiss. Major, as it happens, back in my army days.”
“Mossad?” Ryan asked.
“Of course.” Weiss indicated the man with the pistol. “Though my colleague Captain Remak here is actually Aman, Directorate of Military Intelligence, not unlike the Irish G2, of which I believe you are a member. Unlike mine, his rank actually means something.”
Weiss’s smile, his tone, would have been friendly if not for the handcuffs that held Ryan’s wrists to the chair.
“What do you want?”
“A chat, that’s all.”
“What if I don’t want to chat?”
Weiss held his hands up. “Please, let’s not be confrontational. I really don’t see any need for this conversation to be hostile, so let’s not begin that way. Don’t assume I’m your enemy, Albert. May I call you Albert?”
Ryan rattled the handcuffs. “You look like an enemy from here.”
Weiss shrugged. “Given the company you’ve been keeping, I think your character judgement might be a little, shall we say, flawed.”
“The company I keep is none of your business.”
“Well, actually, it is.” Weiss leaned forward, his forearms on his knees. “You see, our professional interests somewhat overlap.”
“In what way?”
“In several ways. Primarily, our interest in foreign nationals currently residing in Ireland. Helmut Krauss was one of them, another was Johan Hambro. Do I need to go on?”
“No,” Ryan said.
“And of course there’s Colonel Skorzeny. A remarkable man, wouldn’t you say?”
Ryan did not reply.
“Remarkable for many reasons. His military innovations, his amazing feats of daring in the war — sorry, the Emergency, as you folks call it — and his quite extraordinary ability to influence those around him. But do you know what I find most remarkable about him?”
“No,” Ryan said.
Weiss grinned. “What I find most remarkable about Otto Skorzeny is that he came to be a fucking sheep farmer in the rolling green hills of this fair land.” His smile faded. He raised a finger. “But we’ll come back to that. First, if you don’t mind, I’d like to talk about Catherine Beauchamp.”
Ryan moistened his lips. “She’s dead.”
“Oh, I know she is, Albert. I know she is. Just this afternoon, I saw her lying on the floor in her cottage, a neat little hole in the roof of her mouth. I found her just the way you left her.”
“I didn’t kill her. She committed suicide.”
“Is that so? I guess we’ll just have to take your word for that, won’t we? We’ve been keeping an eye on you, Albert. Not constant surveillance, a two man team couldn’t do that, but enough to know what you’ve been up to. When Captain Remak saw you were heading for the estuary today, he got in touch with me. We thought we’d better check in on Catherine once you’d left. I have to say, it was a shock to find her like that. I was most upset.”
“Upset?” Ryan couldn’t keep the sneer from his lips. “You seemed happy enough to kill three of her friends.”
Weiss raised his eyebrows, laughed. “You mean Krauss and the rest? Oh no, Albert, you misunderstand. We didn’t kill them.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You believe what you like, Albert, but I tell you with all honesty, we did not harm those men.”
Ryan shook his head. “The woman, she told me she was your informant. The one I was looking for.”
“Yes, Catherine was working for us, passing on information about her associates, but we didn’t use that information to target anyone for termination.”
“Then what did you want the information for?”
Weiss stood up, put his hands in his pockets. “Let me tell you a little about Catherine Beauchamp. She was a nationalist. She was a socialist. But she was not a Nazi. She made some bad judgements in her youth, aligned herself with people she perhaps shouldn’t have, but she was not of the same ideology as others in the Bezon Perrot. You spoke with her. You must have seen that she was a sensitive and intelligent woman.”
“She was terrified,” Ryan said. “She killed herself out of fear.”
“Not of us,” Weiss said. “She understood the wrong she’d done. So when I first approached her, she had no reservations about talking to me, giving me information.”
“She told me you showed her photographs. Dead children. You manipulated her.”
“Look at it that way if you want. I think of it as showing her the truth. If truth is manipulation, then so be it.”
“What did you want from her?”
Weiss paced. “We wanted information on Skorzeny. Who his friends were, who he associated with, who visited him at that big country house of his.”
Ryan watched Weiss stroll the length of the room and back again. “So you could target him and his people. Kill them.”