Who might want to kill Jerry O’Connell? Did they mean to kill him? Was it mistaken identity? Or was this a homicidal maniac who might strike again? Either way, the pressure is on McDwyer to come up with something.

Ravi put down his newspaper and turned to the television news, which was making an even bigger meal of it. There was a camera crew in Crookhaven, reporting “direct from this heartbroken community.” There was a crew in Skibbereen awaiting news from “the murder inquiry headquarters.” There were pictures of the harbor, pictures of the cliffs, pictures of Seaview Farm, interviews with Mary O’Connell, wedding photographs of the couple, an interview with Mary’s aging father.

Ravi pulled some clean clothes out of his bag and began to dress. His new T-shirt was white. He skipped through the remainder of the newspaper, pausing only to look at a story which told of a gigantic bomb blast that had knocked out all the windows in the American embassy in Tel Aviv.

“Well done, Ahmed,” he muttered.

He stuffed a pile of euros into his pocket, picked up his bag, and went downstairs to check out. He paid the 190-euro bill with four fifties. Outside, he jumped into a cab and asked for the Mosque at Clonskeagh, which stands on the south side, next to University College Dublin.

The Mosque, which was opened by President Mary Robinson in 1996 and backed by the great Dubai statesman and racehorse breeder Sheik Hamdan al Maktoum, is one of the finest buildings in Dublin, a massive brick-and-steel edifice with a minaret tower and a breathtaking metallic dome. It is built within a giant square, a total of nine buildings including a prayer hall of majestic beauty. The Mosque is surrounded by perfectly kept lawns. It is the Mecca of the Emerald Isle.

Ravi had heard much about it and had been wanting to visit for several years. Now, however, it was an irrelevance, for within its precincts today was the only reason Ravi had to live, his beloved Shakira, the Palestinian girl for whom he had laid down his life and career.

The taxi swung into the wide entrance to the Mosque and headed for the main building. He could see Shakira leaning on the wall, dressed in jeans, sandals, and a white blouse. There she was, waiting for him, longing for him, and entirely oblivious of the fact that he had left behind in County Cork a manhunt as big as the one she had left behind in Virginia.

Should he tell her? Perhaps not. She had quite enough to worry about, without burdening her with yet another preoccupation. Still, she would have to be aware of the need for the utmost caution, even if he did not quite tell her the full details of the murder of Jerry O’Connell.

Ravi permitted the driver to stop about fifty yards from where Shakira stood. He paid, climbed out, and walked slowly back toward her. She was looking the other way, and he put his arms around her from behind; without seeing, she knew it was him. She twisted and flung her arms around him as if she would never let go, and he held her close and told her over and over that he loved her above all else.

But then he broke away from her embrace and said sternly, “Nothing in public that would ever attract attention. Not in our business.”

“I know, I know,” she said, a shade petulantly. “But it’s been so long and I miss you every day. Where are we going now?”

“We are leaving Ireland as fast as we can,” he said. “This was just a port of entry for us. We have to get to London as fast as we can.”

“How do we do that?”

“We get a taxi to a place called Dun Laoghaire. It’s right on the coast, and it’s not far from here. That’s the ferry port to England.”

“I can’t see any taxis.”

“No, I’m going to call for one. I arranged it this morning. I have the number.”

Ravi dialed a number on his cell. Shakira heard him say, “Hello, Robert Bamford here. Taxi to pick me up at the Mosque. I ordered it this morning. Yes, that’s correct. I’m right at the main entrance… to Dun Laoghaire, cash. Okay, five minutes.”

Jimmy Ramshawe was fielding a succession of catastrophically depressing E-mails, all of them confirming that Carla Martin had most definitely vanished. The Maureen Carson lead came to nothing. The passport was forged; the only Maureen Carson of Michigan with correlating numbers was dead. The Jordanian embassy in Paris said they had never heard of Miss Carson, which was, Jimmy guessed, unsurprising since she did not appear to exist.

The Jordanian attaché had told the FBI that since Miss Carson appeared to have a forged passport, she probably had forged her American Express application as well. Worse yet, the Shelbourne Hotel had not the slightest idea where she had gone after leaving them.

The Kilo had not shown up anywhere along the route from Ireland to Gibraltar. And yet the Ireland connection continued to bother Jimmy. He still believed Maureen Carson was Carla Martin. Who the hell else buys a pricey one-way first-class ticket to Dublin at an hour’s notice, unless they’re on the bloody run?

And all the bloody documents are forged, for Christ’s sake. Something’s going on, and I can’t understand for the life of me why nobody can see it except for me. And what in the name of Christ are the fucking Iranians doing frigging around in a submarine, a drive and a nine iron from Kinsale Golf Club? Tell me that. Jimmy, all alone in his office, was working himself into a lather about Ireland.

So much so that he opened his computer and Googled the Irish Times just to see what the hell was going on over there. And what greeted him was that whacking great front-page headline announcing the brutal murder of the Irish dairy farmer Jerry O’Connell.

Jimmy wrote down Crookhaven and checked the distance along the coast to Kinsale Old Head-forty-two miles along the shore. He then compared the GPS numbers; not the numbers that separated Kinsale from Crookhaven, but the ones that separated Crookhaven from the submarine when the Brits detected her. The latitudes were submarine 51.15, Crookhaven 51.32, about seventeen miles different. Longitude, submarine 08.29, Crookhaven 09.34. About the same forty-odd miles, with the submarine running predictably south.

She’d been running all day. It was 4 o’clock in the bloody afternoon. I don’t know what happened to the Irish farmer. But something’s really weird here. Bloody great headlines, murder, Maureen Carson, towelhead submarines. All concerning Ireland. Give me a break. They’ve got to be connected.

And this is where Jimmy Ramshawe parted company, mentally, with Admiral Morgan, who told him bluntly, “Kid, you still lack the one truth that might bind all this together. Right now they’re all floating coincidences.

“Nothing’s connected to anything else. Nothing puts Carla or Maureen on the submarine. Nothing connects either woman with the other. Nothing suggests the submarine was doing anything except a training exercise. As for this murder, no one knows who committed it, and there is not one shred of evidence to indicate that one of the Iranians got off and then kicked an Irish pig farmer to death.”

“Dairy.”

“What?”

“Dairy farmer, not pig.”

“Oh, thank God. That makes all the difference.”

“Arnie, I agree nothing quite adds up. But something’s going on, and I don’t think you should go to England…”

“Bullshit.”

General Rashood bought two first-class passenger tickets for the two o’clock ferry to Holyhead in North Wales, a journey of sixty-five miles across the Irish Sea. This was unusual, because the Stena Line fast ferry is essentially for cars and trucks, roll on, roll off. The vast majority of passengers were planning to drive through Wales, England, or Scotland, either vacationing or going home. There were some passengers without cars, but mostly students, backpackers, and hitchhikers. Ravi and Shakira did not fit the pattern.