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" 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. He had arrived on the island at the height of hurricane season and settled into the clapboard cottage at the far end of the beach at Lorient. He had no possessions other than a canvas duffel bag, a stack of well-read books, a shortwave radio, and a rattletrap motor scooter that he’d acquired in Gustavia for a few grimy banknotes and a smile. The books were thick, weighty, and learned; the radio was of a quality "
― Daniel Silva , The English Spy (Gabriel Allon, #15)
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" carried the Makarov outside to watch the fireworks. Thirty yards beyond the spot where Brendan Magill lay dead was a rock wall running on a north-south axis. Gabriel took cover behind it after a 7.62x39mm round shredded the air a few inches from his right ear. Keller hit the ground next to him as rounds exploded against the stones of the wall, sending sparks and fragments flying. The source of the fire was silenced, so Gabriel had only a vague idea of the direction from which it was coming. He poked his head above the wall to search for a muzzle flash, but another burst of rounds drove him downward. Keller was now crawling northward along the base of the wall. Gabriel followed after him, but stopped when Keller suddenly opened up with the dead man’s AK-47. A distant scream indicated that Keller’s rounds had found their mark, but in an instant they were taking fire from several directions. Gabriel flattened himself on the ground at Keller’s side, the Glock in one hand, the dead man’s phone in the other. After a few seconds he realized it was pulsing with an incoming text. The text was apparently from Eamon Quinn. It read KILL THE GIRL . . . 79 CROSSMAGLEN, SOUTH ARMAGH A MID THE HEAP OF BROKEN and dismembered farm implements in Jimmy Fagan’s shed, Katerina had found a scythe, rusted and caked in mud, a museum piece, perhaps the last scythe in the whole of Ireland, north or south. She held it tightly in her hands and listened to the sound of men pounding up the track at a sprint. Two men, she thought, perhaps three. She positioned herself against the shed’s sliding door. Madeline was at the opposite end of the space, hooded, hands bound, her back to the bales of hay. She was the first and only thing the men would see upon entry. The latch gave way, the door slid open, a gun intruded. Katerina recognized its silhouette: an AK-47 with a suppressor attached to the barrel. She knew it well. It was the first weapon she had ever fired at the camp. The great AK-47! Liberator of the oppressed! The gun was pointed upward at a forty-five-degree angle. Katerina had no choice but to wait until the barrel sank toward Madeline. Then she raised the scythe and swung it with every ounce of strength she had left in her body. Two hundred yards away, crouched behind a stone wall at the western edge of Jimmy Fagan’s property, Gabriel showed the text message to Christopher Keller. Keller immediately poked his head above the wall and saw muzzle flashes in the doorway of the shed. Four flashes, four shots, more than enough to obliterate two lives. A burst of AK-47 fire drove him downward again. Eyes wild, he grabbed Gabriel savagely by the front of his coat and shouted, “Stay here!” Keller hauled himself over the wall and vanished from sight. Gabriel lay there for a few seconds as the rounds rained down on his position. Then suddenly he was on his feet and running across the darkened pasture. Running toward a car in a snowy square in Vienna. Running toward death. The blow that Katerina delivered to the neck of the man holding the AK-47 resulted in a partial decapitation. Even so, he had managed to squeeze off a shot before she wrenched the gun from his grasp—a shot that struck the hay bales a few inches from Madeline’s head. Katerina shoved the dying man aside and quickly fired two shots into the chest of the second man. The fourth shot she fired into the partially decapitated creature twitching at her feet. In the lexicon of the SVR, it was a control shot. It was also a shot of "
― Daniel Silva , The English Spy (Gabriel Allon, #15)
