Davin finishes the sausage roll. He wipes his mouth with a handkerchief and brushes some crumbs off his jacket. 'We have a problem,' he says, looking straight at Eamon. They sway slightly as the van pulls out and accelerates. 'A problem that you need to sort out.'
        Eamon feels his stomach contract and rumble, the symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, as his doctor insists on calling it. He takes a slow deep breath. 'We? Me? I was stood down years ago, Iggy. Remember? Pensioned off, put out to grass. “Go and read some books, Eamon,” you said. “Do some thinking, write some policy papers.”' Eamon hopes he has kept his tone neutral, that he has avoided any tinge of the bitterness he feels. He is not sure he succeeds. '“See the obstacles, the problems, as the paving stones on the path to success,” someone told me. Maybe not you.'
        Davin is silent. Eamon knows the technique. Let him speak without interruption and he will run out of things to say, let him vent his spleen and don't feed him anything.
        'I didn't say that, Eamon,' Davin says quietly. 'I wouldn't insult you with that sort of bollocks.'
        The camper van's windows are curtained. Eamon can't see where they are, but he guesses they have passed Magilligan prison by now, as they round a corner and pick up speed along the straight road to Benone. He knows the traffic is sparse along here, unlike across the border where the roads are busy, the prosperous towns clogged with new cars queuing for shopping centres. None of this calms his nerves or reduces the ache of his ulcer. He clenches his teeth and tries to take long slow breaths, the technique he uses when he is nervous before a talk.
        'You remember Flash Gordon?' Davin says suddenly.
        'Fernando Griffin?'
        'Him.'
        'A bit, yeah. Wasn't he in Cuba? Fluent Spanish speaker, liaison man with other groups in Latin America. Went out and set up the training camp.'
        'Very good,' Davin says dryly, so that Eamon can't make out if he's being sarcastic or complimentary about his memory. 'He took to his heels before they picked up his squad in Colombia.'
        Time to get a little retaliation in, Eamon decides. 'I didn't know, Iggy. I couldn't, could I? I'm no longer on the Council. I'm out of the loop.'
        'Need to know, Eamon,' Davin says sharply.
        But Eamon is not prepared to take it so easily. 'So now I need to know?'

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