‘It’s very unusual.’
‘As I said, matters of importance. Ring me back to confirm this evening’s meeting.’
Cherny was definitely worried. Dun Street was a code name for a disused warehouse on City Quay which he had leased under a company name some years previously, but that wasn’t the point. What was really important was the fact that he, Cussane and Lubov had never all met together in the same
place before. He phoned Cussane at the cottage without success, so he tried the Catholic Secretariat offices in Dublin. Cussane answered at once.
‘Thank God,’ said Cherny. ‘I tried the cottage.’
‘Yes, I’ve just got in,’ Cussane told him. ‘Is there a problem?’
‘I’m not sure. I feel uneasy. Can I speak freely?’
‘You usually do on this line.’
‘Our friend Costello has been in touch. Asked me to meet him at three-thirty.’
‘Usual place?’
‘Yes, but he’s also asked me to arrange for the three of us to meet at Dun Street tonight.’
‘Thatis unusual.’
‘I know. I don’t like it.’
‘Perhaps he has instructions for us to pull out,’ Cussane said. ‘Did he say anything about the girl?’
‘No. Should he have done?’
‘I just wondered what was happening there, that’s all. Tell him I’ll see you at Dun Street at six-thirty. Don’t worry, Paul. I’ll handle things.’
He rang off and Cherny got straight back to Lubov. ‘Six-thirty, is that all right?’
‘Fine,’ Lubov told him.
‘He asked me if you’d heard anything about the girl in Paris.’
‘No, not a word,’ Lubov lied. Til see you at three-thirty.’ He rang off, poured himself a drink, then unlocked the top drawer of his desk, took out a case and opened it. It contained a Stechkin automatic pistol and a silencer. Gingerly, he started fitting them together.
In his office at the Secretariat, Harry Cussane stood at the window, looking down into the street. He had listened in to Devlin’s conversations with Ferguson before leaving the cottage and knew that Tanya Voroninova was due that evening. It was inconceivable that Lubov would not have heard, either from Moscow or Paris, so why hadn’t he mentioned it?
The meeting at Dun Street was unusual enough in itself, but in view of that meeting, why meet Cherny in the usual back row at the cinema first? What could possibly be the need? It didn’t fit, any of it, and every instinct that Cussane possessed, honed by his years in the trenches, told him so. Whatever Lubov wanted to see them for, it was not conversation.
Paul Cherny was reaching for his raincoat when there was a knock at the door of his rooms. When he opened it, Harry Cussane was standing outside. He wore a dark trilby hat and raincoat of the kind affected by priests and looked agitated.
‘Paul, thank God I caught you.’
‘Why, what is it?’ Cherny demanded.
‘The IRA man who followed you, the one I disposed of the other day. They’ve set another one on. This way.’
Cherny’s rooms were on the first floor of the old greystone college building. Cussane went up the stairs quickly to the next floor and turned at once up another flight of stairs.
‘Where are we going?’ Cherny called.
Til show you.’
On the top landing, the tall Georgian window at the end had its bottom half pushed up. Cussane peered out. ‘Over there,’ he said. ‘On the other side of the quad.’
Cherny looked down to the stone flags and the green grass of the quadrangle. ‘Where?’ he asked.
There was the hand in the small of his back, a sudden violent push. He managed to cry out, but only just as he overbalanced across the low windowsill and plunged head first towards the stone flags eighty-feet below.
Cussane ran along the corridor and descended the back stairs hurriedly. In a sense, he had been telling the truth. McGuiness had indeed replaced Murphy with a new watchdog, in fact two of them this time, sitting in a green Ford Escort near the main entrance, not that it was going to do them much good now.
Lubov had the back row to himself. In fact, there were only five or six people in the cinema at all as far as he could see in the dim light. He was early, but that was by intention, and he fingered the silenced Stechkin in his pocket, his palms damp with sweat. He’d brought a flask with him and took it out now and swallowed deep. More Scotch to give him the courage he needed. First Cherny and then Cussane, but that should be easier if he was at the warehouse first and waiting in ambush. He took another swig at the flask, had just replaced it in his pocket when there was a movement in the darkness and someone sat down beside him.