"Which shows you what gentlemen we are over there. Take care, old son, and sleep well." Dillon switched off, and turned to Miller. "You heard all that, so there we are."

Miller glanced at his watch. "Two hours to go. I'll try to get some sleep." He closed his eyes and turned his head against the pillow behind him, reaching to switch off the light.

Dillon simply sat there, staring into the shadows, the verse from the prayer card repeating endlessly in his brain, remembering a nineteen-year-old actor who had walked out of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art to accept an offer to work with the National Theatre, and the night when the local priest in Kilburn called to break the news to him that his father, on a visit to Belfast, had been caught in a firefight between PIRA activists and British troops and killed.

"A casualty of war, Sean," Father James Murphy of the Holy Name church had said. "You must say your prayers, not only the Hail Mary, but this special one on the prayer card I give you now. It is a comfort for all victims of a great cause. 'Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, we who are ourselves alone.' "

He tried closing his eyes, but it still went around and around in his brain, and he opened them again, filled with despair, just as he had felt it that day, desolation turning into rage, a need for revenge that had taken the nineteen-year-old on a violent path which had shaped his whole life, a path from which there could be no turning back. Yet, as always, he was saved by that dark streak of gallows humor in him.

"Jesus, Sean," he told himself softly. "What are you going to do, cut your throat? Well, you don't have a razor, so let's have a drink on it."

They landed at Farley just past six in the morning, bad winter weather, gray and rainy. Miller and Dillon went their separate ways, for Miller had a Mercedes provided by the Cabinet Office, his driver, Arthur Fox, waiting. Tony Doyle had driven down from Holland Park, under Roper's orders, in Dillon's own Mini Cooper.