Authors: Jack Higgins
Finally the intrusions stopped and the waiter took a half bottle of champagne over and uncorked it. Dillon swallowed his Bushmills, crossed the room, and paused.
“Not only a great actress, but a woman of taste and discernment, I see. Krug nonvintage, the best champagne in the world.”
She laughed. “Really?”
“It’s the grape mix.”
She hesitated, then said, “This is my friend Professor Tom Curry, and you . . . ?”
“God save us, that doesn’t matter one damn bit. Our only connection is that like you I went to RADA and did the odd thing for the National.” He laughed. “About a thousand years ago. I just wanted to say thank you. You were magnificent tonight.”
He walked out. She said, “What a charmer.”
“He’s that all right,” Curry said. “Just have a look at the color fax Belov sent me.”
He opened an envelope, took out a sheet, and passed it across. Her eyes widened as she examined it. “Good God.”
“Yes, staying here under the name of Friar, but in actuality Sean Dillon, a thoroughly dangerous man. Let me tell you about him and, more to the point, what we’re going to do.”
The following evening just after Half-five Dillon stood at the window of his suite drinking tea and looking out across the city. Rain was driving in and it was already dusk, lights gleaming out there. There was a knock on the door and he went and opened it. Hannah Bernstein entered.
“How are you?”
“Fine. The grand cup of tea they give you here.”
“Can’t you ever take anything seriously?”
“I could never see the point, girl dear.” He opened a drawer, took out a 9-millimeter Browning pistol with a silencer on the muzzle, and slammed in a twenty-round magazine.
“Dear God, Dillon, you really are going to war.”
“Exactly.”
He slipped the Browning into the waistband of his slacks at the rear, pulled on a tweed jacket and his rain hat, took another twenty-round clip from the drawer, and put it in his pocket. He smiled and put his hands on her shoulders.
“We who are about to die salute you. A fella called Suetonius wrote that about two thousand years ago.”
“You’re forgetting I went to Cambridge, Dillon. I could give you the quote in Latin.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Try and come back in one piece.”
“Jesus,” he said. “You mean you care? There’s still hope for me?”
She punched him in the chest. “Get out of here.”
He walked to the door, opened it, and went out.
The rush-hour traffic was already in place as he turned out of the Europa car park and moved along Victoria Avenue. He expected to be followed, although monitored would be a better description. It was difficult, of course, with all those cars, but he’d seen the motorcyclist in the black helmet and leathers turn out of the car park quite close behind him, noticed the same machine keeping well back. It was only when he turned down toward the waterfront through deserted streets of warehouses that he realized he was on his own. Ah, well, perhaps he’d been mistaken.
“You sometimes are, old son,” he said and then a Rover saloon turned out of a side turning and followed him.
“Here we go, then,” Dillon said softly.
At that moment, a Toyota saloon emerged from a lane in front of him and blocked the way. Dillon braked to a halt. The man at the wheel of the Rover stayed where he was. The two men in the Toyota jumped out carrying Armalites.
“Out, Friar, out!” one of them shouted.
Dillon’s hand slipped under his coat and found the butt of the Browning. “Isn’t that you, Martin McGurk?” he said, getting out of the car. “Jesus, and haven’t you got the wrong man? Remember me from Derry in the old days?” He pulled off the rain hat to reveal his blond hair. “Dillon — Sean Dillon.”
McGurk looked stunned. “It can’t be.”
“Oh yes it can, old son,” Dillon told him, bringing up the Browning and firing through the open door, knocking McGurk on his back, then swinging and shooting the man beside him through the head.
The man at the wheel of the Rover pulled forward, drew a pistol and fired through the open passenger window, then put his head down and took off. Dillon fired twice at him, shattering the rear window, but the Rover turned the corner and was gone.
There was quiet, except for the steady splashing of the rain. Dillon walked round to the two men he had shot and examined them. They were both dead. There was a burst of Armalite fire from somewhere above. As he ducked, an engine roared and the motorcycle he had noticed earlier passed him, sliding sideways on the cobbles.
As it came to a halt, he saw the black-suited rider raise some sort of weapon. He recognized the distinctive muted crack of a silenced AK-47. A man fell from a platform high up in a warehouse on the other side of the street and bounced on the pavement. The rider raised an arm in a kind of salute and rode off.
Dillon stood there for only a moment, then got in behind the wheel of his car and drove away, leaving the carnage behind him.
He parked near the warehouse with the sign Murphy & Son, where he had first met Daley. As he turned the corner, he saw the Rover at the curb. The big man, Jack Mullin, was standing by the Judas gate, peering inside. As Dillon watched, Mullin went into the warehouse.
Dillon followed, opening the gate cautiously, the Browning ready. He could hear Jack Mullin’s agitated voice. “He’s dead, Curtis, shot twice in the back.”
Dillon moved quickly toward the office, the door of which stood open. He was almost there when Mullin turned and saw him. “It’s Friar,” he said and reached inside his coat.
Dillon shot him, knocking him back against the desk. He slumped to the floor and Daley got to his feet, total panic on his face.
“No Daniel Quinn,” Dillon told him. “Naughty, that, and you made another mistake. It’s not Barry Friar, it’s Sean Dillon.”
“Dear God!” Daley said.
“So let’s get down to business. Quinn — where is he?”
“I can’t tell you that. It’s more than my life is worth.”
“I see.” Dillon nodded. “All right, I want you to watch something.” He reached and pulled Mullin up a little. The big man moaned. “Are you watching?” Dillon asked and shot him through the heart.
“No, for God’s sake no!” Daley cried.
“You want to live, then you’ll tell me where Quinn is.”
“He’s on his way to Beirut,” Daley gabbled. “ Francis Callaghan’s been there for a while setting up a deal. Some Arab group called The Party of God and the KGB are going to start supplying us.”
“With arms?”
Daley shook his head. “Plutonium. Daniel says we’ll be able to cause the biggest bang Ireland’s ever seen. Really show those Fenian bastards we mean business.”
“I see. And where does all this take place?”
“I don’t know.” Dillon raised the Browning and Daley screamed. “It’s the truth, I swear it. Daniel said he’d be in touch. All I know is Callaghan is staying at a hotel called Al Bustan.”
He was obviously telling the truth. Dillon said, “There, that wasn’t too hard, old son, was it?”
He raised the Browning very quickly and shot him between the eyes, tumbling him back out of the chair, then he turned and walked away.
No more than a mile away from Garth Dock where the shootings had taken place, the motorcycle turned into a narrow side street and entered a yard, driving straight into an open garage. Professor Tom Curry closed and barred the gate to the street, then went into the garage. The black-clad rider pushed the motorcycle up on its stand, then turned and took off the helmet.
Grace Browning smiled, pale and excited. “Quite a night. A good job. I was there.”
She unzipped her leather jacket and took out the AK-47, butt folded.
“What happened?” Curry asked.
“They’d set him up. Quite a man, our Mr. Dillon. He killed two and shot up the second car. They had an extra man up on a platform with an Armalite. He tried to shoot Dillon, I shot him. End of story, so I cleared off.”
She was taking off the leathers as she spoke, revealing jeans and a jumper. She draped the leathers over the motorcycle.
“Just leave everything,” Curry told her. “Belov’s people will clear up.”
“You’ve got my bag?”
“Sure.” He handed her a hold-all and she opened it and took out a light raincoat.
“The car’s parked not too far away in the main road,” he told her as he opened the side gate and left the yard.
“Do we claim credit for January 30 on this?” Curry asked.
“Well, we’re entitled to one, so why not the lot? Somehow I don’t think Dillon and the Prime Minister’s private army would be happy to go public.”
“Right. I’ll phone the news desk at the
Belfast Telegraph
.”
“Good.” She checked her watch. “Just after seven. We’ll have to hurry. Curtain up at eight.”
The Lear Jet with two RAF pilots at the controls climbed steadily after lifting from Aldergrove, leveling off at thirty thousand feet. Hannah Bernstein sat on one side of the aisle facing Dillon, who sat on the other. He found the drawer containing the bar box, the thermos of hot water. He made coffee for her and tea for himself, then took a miniature of Scotch from the selection of drinks provided and poured it into his tea. He drank it slowly and lit a cigarette.
All this had been done in silence. Now he spoke. “You haven’t said much.”
“It’s a lot to take in. Plutonium? Do they mean it?”
“It’s been available on the black market in Russia for a while now. It was always only a matter of time before some terrorist group or other had a go.”
“God help us all.” She sighed. “Anyway, how about you? Are you all right?”
“Fine.”
“Who do you think it was on the motorcycle?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea, but they saved my bacon, as we used to say in County Down.”
“I wonder what gave you away?”
“Oh, that was me. I told Daley I’d known of Quinn when he was on the run in Londonderry, but Quinn used an alias there. Frank Kelly. I wanted to draw their fire.”
She shook her head. “You’re quite mad, and this man Mullin and Curtis Daley. Did you have to kill them?”
“It’s the business we’re in, girl dear. Twenty-five years of war.”
“And for many of those years you fought for the IRA yourself.”
“True. I wasn’t much more than a boy when my father was killed by British soldiers. Joining made sense to me then, but the years go by, Hannah, long, weary years of slaughter, and to what end? That was then and this is now. Something clicked in my head one day. Put it any way you want.” He found himself another miniature of Scotch. “As for Daley, three months ago he and Quinn stopped a truckload of Catholic roadworkers at Glasshill. Lined them up on the edge of a ditch, all twelve of them, and machine-gunned them.”
“So an eye for an eye?”
He smiled gently. “Straight out of the Old Testament. I’d have thought a nice Jewish girl like you would have approved.” He reached for the phone. “And now I’d better report in on the secure line. Ferguson always likes to hear bad news as soon as possible.”
It was no more than an hour and a half later that Ferguson was ushered into the Prime Minister’s study at Downing Street. Simon Carter and Rupert Lang were already seated.
“You used words like
urgent
and
gravest national importance
, Brigadier, so what have you got for us?” John Major demanded.
So Ferguson told them in finest detail. When he was finished, there was silence. It was Rupert Lang who spoke first.
“How extraordinary that January 30 have claimed responsibility.”
“Terrorist groups habitually claim credit for someone else’s hit,” Ferguson said. “And there is the business of the gunman on the motorcycle.”
“Yes, strange, that,” Carter said. “And yet you had no backup whatsoever, did you?”
“Absolutely not,” Ferguson told him.
“None of which is relevant now,” the Prime Minister said. “The really important thing that Dillon has come up with is this possibility of the Sons of Ulster getting their hands on plutonium.”
“With the greatest respect, Prime Minister,” Simon Carter said, “having plutonium is one thing, producing some sort of nuclear device from it is quite another.”
“Perhaps, but if you have the money and the right kind of connections, anything is possible.” Ferguson shrugged. “You know as well as I that terrorist groups on the international circuit help each other out, and since the breakdown of things in Russia there’s plenty of the right kind of technical assistance available on the world market.”
There was another silence, the Prime Minister drumming on the desk with his fingers. Finally he said, “The Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Downing Street Declaration are achieving results, and President Clinton is behind us fully. Twenty-five years of bloodshed, gentlemen. It’s time to stop.”
“If I may be a devil’s advocate,” Rupert Lang said, “that’s all very well for Sinn Fein and the IRA, but the Protestant Loyalist factions will feel they’ve been sold out.”
“I know that, but they’ll have to make some sort of accommodation like everyone else.”
“They’ll continue the fight, Prime Minister,” Carter said gravely.
“I accept that. We’ll just have to do our best to handle it. Machine guns by night are one thing, even the Semtex bomb, but not plutonium. That would add a totally new dimension.”
“I’m afraid you’re right,” Carter said.
The Prime Minister turned to Ferguson. “So it would appear to be Beirut next stop for Dillon, Brigadier.”
“So it would.”
“If I recall the details on his file, Arabic was one of the numerous languages he speaks. He should feel quite at home there.” He stood up. “That’s all for now, gentlemen. Keep me posted, Brigadier.”
When Ferguson reached his Cavendish Square flat, the door was opened by his manservant Kim, an ex–Ghurka Corporal who had been with him for years.
“Mr. Dillon and the Chief Inspector have just arrived, Brigadier.”
Ferguson went into the elegant drawing room and found Hannah Bernstein sitting by the fire drinking coffee. Dillon was helping himself to a Bushmills from the drinks tray on the sideboard.