Jack Higgins · 1985 · thriller

Jack Higgins's 1985 thriller. In a Soviet training village built to look like an Ulster town, an agent is made word-perfect as an Irish Catholic priest and sent west to sleep until called. Twenty years later the operation is reactivated for the Pope's visit to Britain, and the only man who can identify him is a Russian defector nobody quite trusts.

1. 1
   Kiev

   At a KGB training establishment in Ukraine, a replica Ulster village makes agents indistinguishable from the people they will live among - and one, codenamed Cuchulain, is finished to the standard of a parish priest.

2. 2
   Dublin

   He is inserted into Ireland to wait, taking a real parish and a real congregation, and killing to order at long intervals in ways that keep the Troubles usefully alight without ever pointing back to Moscow.

3. 3
   London

   In London, British intelligence learns from a defector that the man exists, has been running for twenty years and is about to be used again - and that the only living description of him is in the defector's memory.

4. 4
   Canterbury

   The target is the Pope's visit to Canterbury in 1982, and the last act is the hunt through a crowded cathedral city for a priest whom everybody trusts and nobody can pick out.