First Ryan looked for the van, saw it in the alley, then he crawled away from his hiding place to make his toilet. That done, he took the last of the bread and the nub of cheese from the backpack and ate his breakfast. The coffee had long since gone cold. He grimaced at the taste. Stubble abraded his fingers as he scratched his chin.
Sunday morning stretched on, few residents venturing onto the street to break the monotony of Ryan’s vigil. He yawned, flexed his fingers and toes, made up games to pass the time. Naming the birds he saw, laying bets on the colours of any cars he heard approaching.
No one came or went from the house.
His small supply of food had gone, and by the time noon crawled towards one o’clock, his stomach growled. For hours he had endured the smell of frying bacon, eggs and bread drifting from the houses all around. Had the corner shop opened, he might have risked leaving his position to buy something, but it remained stubbornly closed for the day.
Then something began to happen.
A trickle of men and boys, walking along Fitzroy Avenue and Jones’s Road, drawing to the stadium. Some carried flags and banners, blue in colour.
Of course, Sunday, a football match at Croke Park. Ryan did not follow sports, including those governed by the Gaelic Athletic Association, but he knew the season was under way, and the National Football League was gathering pace. Dublin must be playing at home.
The streams of men and boys swelled, became rivers. Hundreds gathered around the stadium, filtering through the entrances, waiting shoulder to shoulder in the streets for their turn to go into the grounds.
By two o’clock, the crowds had mostly been absorbed by the stadium, and their noise boomed within, the voices raised and expectant. A sudden hush, then an explosion of cheers, and Ryan knew the game had begun.
He listened to the waves, a sea of voices, falling and rising with the currents of the match. Ryan imagined he lay on a beach, ivy for sand, the water lapping at the shore of his mind. His eyelids grew heavy, his head leaden with tiredness. He fought it, pushing the slumber back, but still it came, as inevitable as the tides.
Ryan drifted, found himself on the tiny cove he had discovered on the Sicilian island of Ortigia, the smooth stones and pebbles warm beneath his body, the glassy shallows reflecting brilliant sunlight.
The sound of the van’s doors closing shocked him awake. His eyes struggled for focus. He lifted the field glasses.
All three of them in the van, Carter driving again.
Ryan shrank back into the ivy as the van reached the end of the alleyway below him. Carter pulled out onto the road, turned right, heading north. The engine strained as the van gathered speed. Soon, its clatter and thrum faded, drowned in the noise from the stadium.
Now, Ryan thought.
He stashed his belongings into the backpack, tucked it beneath the ivy, and climbed out of his hiding place. His joints and muscles protested, affronted at being asked to move after remaining still for so long. He crossed the tracks, descended the embankment on the other side, and dropped down from the wall onto the footpath. Checking for witnesses, he walked under the bridge and into the mouth of the alley.
Ryan kept tight to the yard walls, hidden from the rear windows of the houses as he approached the patch of oil-stained ground, the cigarette butts scattered.
He reached the gate, tried it, found it locked as he expected. It stood only a few inches taller than him. He reached up, grabbed the top edge, jammed his foot against the wood, and hauled himself up and over.
Dropping to the concrete on the other side, he saw an empty yard, too clean to belong to a house that civilians lived in. None of the detritus of family life cluttered the corners, no old prams left out to rot, no bicycles propped on the walls.
Ryan crossed to the outside toilet and pushed back the door. It smelled like it had been used not long before, but it was clean, squares of newspaper hanging from a peg by the bowl, a bottle of bleach on the floor.
He went to the back of the house. Like the upstairs windows, both the kitchen window and the glass pane in the door had been covered over by newspaper on the inside. He tried the door handle, knowing it was pointless, then attempted to squeeze his fingertips under the kitchen’s sash window. It wouldn’t shift, solid in its frame. Nailed shut, he guessed.
Ryan stood back, studied the building, thinking through his options. There was no way to force entry into the house without leaving a trace of himself. So why bother being subtle?
He took the Walther from its holster and slammed the butt against the pane. The fragments cut through the newspaper, fell inside. He used the pistol’s muzzle to clear the rest of the glass and newspaper away from the wood before returning it to its holster and gripping the sides of the opening.
Ryan hauled himself up and in, climbed over the sink, and lowered his feet to the tiled floor. The small kitchen smelled of stale food, the odours of meals long past. A selection of pots stood on the cooker, mismatched plates stacked on a small table, a cardboard box packed with potatoes, onions, cabbages, and carrots.
No pictures hung from the painted over nails on the walls. The floor had been swept, the surfaces wiped down, but dust clung to the cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling. The kind of clean that would not satisfy a woman.
Ryan opened the cupboards and drawers in turn and found them empty, save for a handful of utensils and a supply of tinned food.
He went to the door that led to the lounge, opened it, and stood there, taking it in.
In the light edging around the blanket suspended across the window, Ryan’s eyes were drawn first to the corkboard mounted above the fireplace, and the photographs pinned to it. From the threshold he could make out several black and white images of Otto Skorzeny, two of them portraits, the rest taken from a distance, candid shots of the Austrian in the city or on his farm.
Ryan stepped into the room and approached the board. He scanned the rest of the photographs, some he recognised, others he didn’t, but each image carried the name of its subject. Hakon Foss, Célestin Lainé, Catherine Beauchamp, Johan Hambro, Alex Renders.
All of them dead except for Skorzeny and Lainé.
In the top corner, a hand-drawn map of the land surrounding Skorzeny’s home, lines of attack drawn in red, each marked with a name: Carter, Wallace, Gracey, MacAuliffe.
Four names.
He had only seen three men enter or leave the house. Where was the fourth?
Ryan held his breath and listened.
Nothing stirred. If anyone was here, they would have been alerted by the breaking glass. They would have already come to investigate.
He let the air out of his lungs and continued exploring the items pinned to the board.
At the bottom, to the right, a sheet of notepaper.
Alain Borringer
Heidegger Bank
A/C 50664
Beneath the account digits, a telephone number written in a thicker pencil. Ryan guessed it to be Swiss.
The same bank Skorzeny held his funds in.
Ryan thought of Weiss. Was he everything he said he was? Or more? Could Haughey be right? Could the Mossad have some hand in this?
He toured the rest of the room. Bare floorboards. A couch facing the corkboard, two armchairs that did not match, and an upturned crate for a table in the centre, an old typewriter resting on it. A transistor radio sat on the floor in the corner. No telephone.
Ryan exited into the small hallway, no more than a yard square between the front door and the bottom of the stairs. He mounted the steps and climbed. Three doors at the top. One stood open, showing a pair of cots, thin mattresses on low metal-framed beds, the kind Ryan had slept on for much of his career.