"What does dangerous mean?" Sue asked.

"Dangerous is bad, sweetie."

"Oh."

She lifted Sue back to her bed and climbed in beside her, stroking her forehead until Sue fell asleep. She went back to her own bed. Tried to sleep. Tossed, turned, finally drifted off.

The murmur of the lough water invaded her dreams.

The king of the lake was singing. An old song in the old tongue. Melancholy. The meaning eluded her.

She woke with a start, feeling that things were going horribly amiss. At this moment. Right now.

She checked that the house was locked and the girls were safe.

She still wasn't satisfied. She tried conjuring life into her mobile phone but that was a lost cause. She wanted to shout a warning but she didn't know who to warn or what to warn them about.

CHAPTER 9.

TWENTY MILES TO SLEMISH.

The secret of Tir na n g is no secret. The land to the west is here. Ireland is the holy place. Every field and meadow teems with significance. Every hill and brook and lough has its Platonic counterpoint in the dreamscape. It's like what you said to that guy in the bar in the Bronx. It was the Dreaming that took out us of Africa. The Dreaming named us and called us across the ocean. The birds had kept the secret of the land but the song of birds grew wearisome and casting out the Dreaming found us on the great savannah. The Dreaming sang to us in its loneliness. It summoned us and so began the march of man. A few made it to Ireland and the rest dispersed upon the world, perplexed forever by the necessity of the journey. That's why we wander. We Pavee. We travellers. We tinkers. We follow the ghost cattle of our ancestors. Ireland is our Promised Land. At the confluence of our histories. We live in the sacred. We live in mythology.

Do you see?

Killian.

If that is your name.

Do you see?

Wake up, I'm talking to you.

A breeze.

A breeze on your face from the open window.

The wind's long fingers cooling your lips.

You hear halyards. You smell salt water. You taste blood. You feel a dull heavy pain.

You bite into the duct tape that's been put clumsily over your mouth. You bite right through it and yell.

A nightjar pauses in its hunt.

"Help!" you croak. "Help, me! For G.o.d's sake!"

Like Homer you sing blind. "Help me! Help me!"

You try this for a minute and thirty seconds and black out.

Ellipses.

Moments.

The what in the mirror sea? The pearl. The sky is a mirror. The sky is a giant grey mirror reflecting pain back to Earth.

It is night.

And again everything pretending to be something else: those camp- fire stars, those clouds in the shape of a naked girl.

That river under your feet. A forgotten river, now part of greater Belfast's underworld of tunnels and storm drains, but previously a welcome stream for pilgrims, merchants going to the holy well at Carrick.

The holy well of Fergus Mor mac Ere. Fergus who drank from this same stream before setting out to found the kingdom of Scotland.

You know things like that because of who you are. What you are.

The water is emerald, filled with gold and chlorophyll.

Water.

Wind.

Thoughts.

You don't do well with your own thoughts. Your own thoughts hurt you in this world of nothingness. This world from the other side of the mirror. Here where the shadows fall inversely, where entropy reverses itself, where you watch yourself...

And there's something else: none of these thoughts have been in English. You have been thinking in Shelta.

You get to your knees.

Clear your throat, spit blood.

"You should have killed me, punk, whatever your orders were," you say in the language of the Saxon.

You struggle to your feet in the bathtub and step out onto the kitchen floor. The duct tape is still across your eyes and your hands are in the plastic cuffs behind your back.

You know what to do.

You walk to the sink, lean over it and grab the bathroom cabinet handle with your teeth. You pull open the cabinet, shove in your face, knock everything to the floor. You make sure the cabinet's empty and then you lie down on the floor and smoosh your face into every object that was in there: shaving foam, safety razor, soap, until you find the sewing kit from the Fairmont. You sit up, grab the sewing kit box in your fingers, slide across the plastic lid, tilt it. The needles come out. You grab one, hold it between thumb and finger and wedge it into the saw-socket lock of the plastic cuff. You wedge it carefully between the teeth.

Gently does it.

That's it.

Perfect.

Using the needle as a lever, you slide out one plastic rim of the cuff with your thumb. Centimetre by centimetre.

If the needle snaps and gets stuck in there...

But you've done this before.

A hundred times.

Your father taught it to you and the other boys.

Escape from handcuffs, the picking of locks, the untripping of alarms... tools of the trade.

Plastic handcuffs were after his time, but you'd learned their secret in an hour and a half from your Uncle Patrick: you create a lever, run the plastic tie over the lever and it slides completely out...

You have the lever and all you need now is patience.

A quarter inch, half an inch, an inch, an inch and a half...

You manoeuvre out the strip and wriggle your wrist loose until it's free.

"Yes!"

You stand, rip off the duct tape covering your eyes, run to the bedroom, call Sean.

Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Mary, put Sean on, this is an emergency."

"Who is this?

"Put Sean on now!"

Pause.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"It's Killian. The tail got me. Russian kid. Beat the s.h.i.t out of me, tied me up. And now he's gone to Ballymena to brace Rachel's parents."

"What? f.u.c.k. Okay. Okay. Well, that won't do any good. They don't know where she is. Tom's operatives have been tapping their phone, intercepting their mail, following them and she's wise to it. Doesn't even bother trying."

"Nope. She's been sending postcards to her da at the RAOB, the f.u.c.king Buffs lodge, in Ballymena. I found a letter from him to a place she was staying at in Donegal. She's skipped, gone somewhere new, but odds are that he knows her new address and now our tail knows he knows. He'll f.u.c.king brace them, get her location, get the drop on us and our f.u.c.king half mill."

"Jesus! How in the name of G.o.d did he get to you?"

"I don't know. He followed me. He's good, okay? He's must be Forsythe's. I told you something was f.u.c.king fishy about this operation. He's a f.u.c.king Russian. I'm playing with - at least - fractured ribs. He went easy on me. Could have killed me." "s.h.i.t."

"What time is it?"

"Two-thirty."

"Who do we know in Ballymena? UVF, UDA, must be somebody?"

"Rocky McGlinn, old stager for the UFF, I think he's up that way."

"Okay, find out the Andersons' address and tell Rocky to get over there right away. Ivan might not have found it yet. If he has we're f.u.c.ked. Regardless I'll be there in twenty minutes."

"From Carrick? No chance."

"Call me with the address on the road."

"I can believe this b.o.l.l.o.c.ks," Sean muttered.

"I told you it was too good to be true. You know we could call the peelers. They'd be over in ten minutes and if the b.a.s.t.a.r.d's in there torturing them they'd get him."

"Last resort, Killian. Get the peelers involved and there goes our dough."

"You're right. Okay, bye."

Action stations.

Second person to third.

Killian hung up and pulled on a jumper, jeans and sneakers. He grabbed a coat and ran outside. He got in the Ford Fiesta and turned the key.

The phone rang.

"Aye?"

"Are you sure about this, Killian? He sounds like a bad b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"Mary giving you the old eggy?"

"It's not about Mary, it's about you."

Just then Killian got a stab of pain from his left eye down to his toes. If he'd been driving he might have ended up in the b.l.o.o.d.y sheugh.

"Christ!" he said to himself and groaned.

He surfed the wave again.

Let the pain disperse.