The hotel retains a monastic atmosphere. They walk beneath an elaborate roodscreen, along cloisters, which open on to four courtyards, with trees and plants; there are benches along the walls. They take a lift to the fourth floor, the porter pushing their two small cases on a trolley ahead of them. The silence along with the dimly lit corridor is indeed ascetic, as is the darkened room to which he shows them, the curtains drawn against the hot afternoon sun.
        'Notice anything?' Eamon asks once the porter has gone. Mary scans the room, while he glances inside the bathroom, searching for anything obvious, another old ingrained habit. Not that it matters. As a matter of operational security, they will not discuss anything in here.
        'Just how wonderful this place is,' Mary says with a smile. 'And what a fantastic husband I have to bring me here.' She hugs him and kisses him full on the lips.
        While Eamon reads the note, Mary unscrews the phone, checks it for bugs, puts it back together, then on her hands and knees locates the junction box, where she painstakingly unscrews it, inspects it, looks at Eamon and shakes her head.
        The note is short and typewritten. Their car will be delivered to the hotel at six p.m. Will he please make himself available to meet their representative in the foyer? All this efficiency, Eamon thinks, is admirable.
        Except he has not ordered a hire car.
        Nor is it the message he was looking to receive.

        Outside in the Praza do Obradoiro, they play at being tourists. They admire the looming spires of the cathedral that seem to hang from the sky, as though suspended by some mystical puppet master, towering over the huge expanse of the Praza do Obradoiro and the city. Swarms of visitors stand around open-mouthed, staring up. Others, in order to get a better photograph, lie on their backs near to the buildings of the Xunta de Galicia, the council of Galicia. Everybody wants to have their photograph taken standing before the great edifice.
        Eamon smiles faintly, a shadow of a smile, as Mary takes a snap of him posed like all the other tourists with the cathedral in the background, but he is looking for minders, certain that Davin has not sent them here alone, he will have laid on somebody to watch and report back. He hopes that Davin has been responsible for getting a hire car for them. Eamon can't be sure there are not others who are also interested in their visit. How secure is Davin? Who was McAllister? Have the Garda Special Branch security picked him up in Dublin, alerted the British to follow him from Heathrow, and then again at Stansted airport? The French passport control waved them through when they drove into the tunnel at Folkestone, the car was not one of those pulled over and searched. On the return from Calais, they drove off the train and nobody asked for their passports. This run of good fortune does not reassure him, it brings all the fears that have beset him since his briefing to the surface, here, amidst the cacophony of voices and the four o'clock pealing of the bells. The foreignness of it all exacerbates Eamon's nerves.

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