It was quiet in the corridor as the young nurse Dillon had spoken to earlier pushed her trolley along. Her name was Mary Killane. And he’d been right. Her accent was Dublin, although she was born in Londonderry in the north of Ireland in 1980. She’d been taken to Dublin at an early age because her father, an IRA activist, had been condemned to the Maze Prison on five life sentences for murder and had died there of cancer, something for which she had never forgiven the British government. At the earliest opportunity, she had joined the Provisional IRA and in spite of a respectable professional life, remained a sleeper, available when required.

The call to her present assignment had been out of the blue. It had come from Liam Bell, once chief of staff of the Provisional IRA, now retired to Dublin to lecture in English at the university, and write a book or two, for after all, things were different with the Peace Process – except that nothing had really changed. That was the fault of the bloody Brits, and people like Liam Bell were still needed to carry on the fight, just in a different way.

She was instructed to book with a nursing agency in London, where a friend to the organization would see that she was allocated to the Rosedene in St. John’s Wood. There she would await orders.

But she didn’t have to wait long. Returning to her small flat in Kilburn one night, she’d unlocked the door, walked in and to her astonishment found Liam Bell himself sitting, smoking a cigarette, and a hard young man in a black bomber jacket, dark hair curling down to his neck, lounging by the window. He was a dangerous-looking man, with the air of a medieval bravo about him. The shock she experienced was sexual in its intensity.

“No need to worry, girl dear,” Bell reassured her. “There’s work to be done of great importance to the Movement, and I know you can be relied on to do it. No one has a greater right than you to strike back.”