Secret Asset Read Free Page B

small talk with the man they had known as the Commander. But Maddie could see that Keaney’s condition shocked them—once a barrel of a man, he had been reduced in his terminal illness to a small shrunken figure. Sensing his fatigue, most of his old associates kept their visits short, ending them with awkward but heartfelt final farewells. Downstairs, they stopped to talk briefly with Molly and Maddie’s sister, Kate; sometimes, if they had been especially close to Keaney, they drank a small whiskey.
    Maddie could see how much even these brief visits drained her father’s dwindling energy, and she was relieved when there was no one left on the visitors’ list they had drawn up. Which made her father’s subsequent request, uttered after a night of such pain she thought he would not see the dawn break, all the more astonishing.
    â€œHe wants to see James Maguire!” she announced as her sister and mother gathered for breakfast in the small kitchen downstairs.
    â€œYou can’t be serious,” Kate said incredulously. Even under the umbrella of Irish nationalism, James Maguire and Sean Keaney had at best coexisted edgily, their mutual antipathy held in check only by their devotion to the cause.
    â€œI thought it was morphine talk, but he’s asked twice now. I didn’t know what to say. We can’t turn down a request from our dying father, now can we?”
    Her sister looked at her grimly. “I’ll go upstairs and have a word. He must be confused.” But when she came down again, her face was sterner still. “He absolutely insists. I asked why he wanted to see Maguire, and he said, ‘Never you mind. Just get him here for me.’”
    And later that day, about an hour before the Keaneys had their tea, there was a knock on the door. A tall, lean man came into the house, and although he was much the same age as the dying man upstairs, there was nothing frail about him. He displayed none of the modesty shown by the other former associates of Sean Keaney, nor did he shake hands with any members of the family. When Kate took him upstairs, she later told Maddie, she found their father asleep—perhaps the bizarre meeting with a long-time enemy would not take place after all. But as she turned back to the visitor, the man said evenly, “Hello, Keaney.”
    â€œCome in, Maguire,” the weaker voice commanded, and Kate saw that her father’s eyes had opened. He raised a bony hand to dismiss her, which he had not done with his other visitors.
    Downstairs Maddie waited in the front parlour with her mother and sister, torn between curiosity and disbelief as the clock ticked and they could hear the low bass murmur of the voices upstairs for five, then ten, then fifteen minutes. Finally after half an hour they heard the bedroom door open, footsteps come down the staircase, and, without stopping for even the curtest farewell, Maguire walked out of the house.
    Afterwards, Maddie found her father so exhausted that she could not bring herself to ask about the visitor, and left him to sleep. Her sister, less patiently, waited only until after tea to go upstairs, determined to discover the reason for her father’s summoning Maguire. Yet she returned downstairs both dissatisfied and distraught. For sometime during tea their father, Sean Keaney, had died in his sleep.

4
    C harles Wetherby, Director of Counter-Terrorism, had been in the office since seven-thirty. Liz had briefed him by phone about her meetings with Marzipan the previous evening, as soon as he had got home from his dinner with Geoffrey Fane of MI6. Wetherby had called a 9:00 a.m. emergency meeting of the Counter-Terrorist Committee, the joint committee of MI5, MI6, GCHQ, the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office. It had been set up immediately after the Twin Towers atrocity of 11 September 2001 at the Prime Minister’s insistence, to ensure that all government agencies and departments