DEDICATION

For Betsy and Andy Lack.

And, as always, for my wife, Jamie,

and my children, Lily and Nicholas.

CONTENTS

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

Part One: Death of a Princess

1. Gustavia, Saint Barthélemy

2. Off the Leeward Islands

3. The Caribbean–London

4. Vauxhall Cross, London

5. Fiumicino Airport, Rome

6 . Via Gregoriana, Rome

7. Via Gregoriana, Rome

8. Via Gregoriana, Rome

9. Berlin–Corsica

10. Corsica

11. Corsica

12. Dublin

13. Ballyfermot, Dublin

14. Clifden, County Galway

15. Thames House, London

16. Clifden, County Galway

17. Clifden, County Galway

18. Omagh, Northern Ireland

19. Great Victoria Street, Belfast

20. The Ardoyne, West Belfast

21. The Ardoyne, West Belfast

22. Warring Street, Belfast

23. Belfast–Lisbon

24. Bairro Alto, Lisbon

25. Bairro Alto, Lisbon

26. Heathrow Airport, London

27. Brompton Road, London

Part Two: Death of a Spy

28. London

29. Dartmoor, Devon

30. Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor

31. Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor

32. Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor

33. Gunwalloe Cove, Cornwall

34. Gunwalloe Cove, Cornwall

35. Gunwalloe Cove, Cornwall

36. Highgate, London

37. Wormwood Cottage, Dartmoor

38. London–The Kremlin

39. London–Vienna

40. InterContinental Hotel, Vienna

41. Lower Austria

42. Lower Austria

43. Lower Austria

44. Sparrow Hills, Moscow

45. Copenhagen, Denmark

46. Vienna

47. Vienna

48. Vienna

49. Rotterdam, the Netherlands

50. Vienna–Hamburg

51. Piccadilly, London

52. Fleetwood, England

53. Thames House, London

54. Lord Street, Fleetwood

55. Hamburg

56. Neustadt, Hamburg

57. Hamburg

58. Hamburg

59. Northern Germany

Part Three: Bandit Country

60. Vauxhall Cross, London

61. Bristol, England

62. 10 Downing Street

63. Cornwall, England

64. Guy’s Hospital, London

65. Gunwalloe Cove, Cornwall

66. Thames House, London

67. West Cornwall

68. Gunwalloe Cove, Cornwall

69. Gunwalloe Cove, Cornwall

70. County Down, Northern Ireland

71. The Ardoyne, West Belfast

72. Crossmaglen, County Armagh

73. The Ardoyne, West Belfast

74. Crossmaglen, County Armagh

75. Union Street, Belfast

76. Creggan Forest, County Antrim

77. Randalstown, County Antrim

78. Crossmaglen, South Armagh

79. Crossmaglen, South Armagh

Part Four: Home

80. South Armagh–London

81. Victoria Road, South Kensington

82. Narkiss Street, Jerusalem

83. Narkiss Street, Jerusalem

84. Mount Herzl, Jerusalem

85. Buenos Aires

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Daniel Silva

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

EPIGRAPH

When a man rubs out a pencil-mark, he should be careful to see

that the line is quite obliterated. For if a secret is to be kept,

no precautions are too great.

—GRAHAM GREENE, THE MINISTRY OF FEAR

No more tears now; I will think upon revenge.

—MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS

MAP

PART ONE

DEATH OF A PRINCESS

1

GUSTAVIA, SAINT BARTHÉLEMY

NONE OF IT WOULD HAVE happened if Spider Barnes hadn’t tied one on at Eddy’s two nights before the Aurora was due to set sail. Spider was regarded as the finest waterborne chef in the entire Caribbean, irascible but altogether irreplaceable, a mad genius in a starched white jacket and apron. Spider, you see, was classically trained. Spider had done a stint in Paris. Spider had done London. Spider had done New York, San Francisco, and an unhappy layover in Miami before leaving the restaurant biz for good and taking to the freedom of the sea. He worked the big charters now, the kind of boats the film stars, rappers, moguls, and poseurs rented whenever they wanted to impress. And when Spider wasn’t behind his stove, he was invariably propped atop one of the better bar stools on dry land. Eddy’s was in his top five in the Caribbean Basin, perhaps his top five worldwide. He started at seven o’clock that evening with a few beers, blew a reefer in the shadowed garden at nine, and at ten was contemplating his first glass of vanilla rum. All seemed right with the world. Spider Barnes was buzzed and in paradise.

But then he spotted Veronica, and the evening took a dangerous turn. She was new to the island, a lost girl, a European of uncertain provenance who served drinks to day-trippers at the dive bar next door. She was pretty, though—pretty as a floral garnish, Spider remarked to his nameless drinking companion—and he lost his heart to her in ten seconds flat. He proposed marriage, which was Spider’s favorite approach, and when she turned him down he suggested a roll in the sheets instead. Somehow it worked, and the two were seen teetering into a torrential downpour at midnight. And that was the last time anyone laid eyes on him, at 12:03 a.m. on a wet night in Gustavia, soaked to the skin, drunk and in love yet again.

The captain of the Aurora, a 154-foot luxury motor yacht based out of Nassau, was a man called Ogilvy—Reginald Ogilvy, ex–Royal Navy, a benevolent dictator who slept with a copy of the rulebook on his bedside table, along with his grandfather’s King James Bible. He had never cared for Spider Barnes, never less so than at nine the next morning when Spider failed to appear at the regular meeting of the crew and cabin staff. It was no ordinary meeting, for the Aurora was being made ready for a very important guest. Only Ogilvy knew her identity. He also knew that her party would include a team of security men and that she was demanding, to say the least, which explained why he was alarmed by the absence of his renowned chef.

Ogilvy informed the Gustavia harbormaster of the situation, and the harbormaster duly informed the local gendarmerie. A pair of officers knocked on the door of Veronica’s little hillside cottage, but there was no sign of her either. Next they undertook a search of the various spots on the island where the drunken and brokenhearted typically washed ashore after a night of debauchery. A red-faced Swede at Le Select claimed to have bought Spider a Heineken that very morning. Someone else said he saw him stalking the beach at Colombier, and there was a report, never confirmed, of an inconsolable creature baying at the moon in the wilds of Toiny.

The gendarmes faithfully followed each lead. Then they scoured the island from north to south, stem to stern, all to no avail. A few minutes after sundown, Reginald Ogilvy informed the crew of the Aurora that Spider Barnes had vanished and that a suitable replacement would have to be found in short order. The crew fanned out across the island, from the waterside eateries of Gustavia to the beach shacks of the Grand Cul-de-Sac. And by nine that evening, in the unlikeliest of places, they had found their man.