The nurse hurried in with the tea. “I’ve spoken to Matron and she’s seeing to the pain relief.”
She went out, and Monica poured. “My God,” Miller said, “You’re going to go with them.”
“Perhaps I can be useful. I’ll damn well try. Three days, at the most. You’ll be well looked after here.”
He held the plastic cup of tea awkwardly with the uninjured fingers of his left hand. “What’s happened to you? You’re a different person. It’s as if I never knew you.”
She laughed. “My darling Harry, I must say that’s a bit rich coming from you.”
The door opened again and Maggie Duncan entered, a nurse carrying a hypodermic and morphine on a tray. “Not feeling too good, are we?”
Monica stood up. “I’ve got something very important to take care of for the next few days, Matron, so look after him for me.” She leaned over and kissed Miller on the forehead. “God bless, darling, see you soon.”
“Mad,” Miller said. “Out of her mind,” but Monica was away, the door closed firmly behind her.
Maggie Duncan found a patch on his right arm that hadn’t been bandaged and the nurse passed her the hypodermic.
“This will help, Major, then you can have a nice sleep.”
AT FARLEY,
just before noon, Harry Salter delivered Billy. The quartermaster and Parry were handling a box into the plane between them, Dillon supervising. Ferguson was standing outside the office, talking to Lacey, with Monica and Helen to one side, heads together. Harry Salter joined them, and Billy went to Dillon.
“What’s Monica doing here?”
“She’s decided to go for it, wants to help pay the bastards back for Harry. He’ll be okay at Rosedene for a few days.”
“If you say so. What have we got?”
The quartermaster said, “Uzi machine pistols with silencers, five Walthers with silencers, Colt .25s with silencers, stun grenades, some of the fragmentation variety. It’s all close-quarter stuff, so I’ve left out rifles. You’re going to war, Mr. Dillon?”
“We could be, Sergeant Major.”
“More than twenty years ago, I was chasing you in South Armagh.”
“And never caught the bugger,” Billy remarked.
“Well, I don’t hold it against you, Mr. Dillon, best forgotten. Bring back what you can and I’ll put it in store. Oh, by the way, you’ll find a double-barreled sawn-off as you requested, steel-ball shot.”
He walked back toward the office, paused by the women, and said to Helen, “Nice to see you again. I remember you from Derry.”
“A long time ago, Sergeant Major.”
He went inside, and Ferguson said, “Let’s get moving, then.”
They walked toward the Gulfstream, and Harry Salter called, “Bring him back in one piece, Dillon.”
“Don’t I always!”
“No, actually.”
He waited, watching them go up the steps and Parry close the Airstairs door. Lacey had already started up, so there was no delay. They taxied across to the runway and roared along it and lifted into a leaden gray March sky.
“Give the bastards hell,” Harry murmured. “That’s what I say.” He went back to his Bentley, got in, and drove away.
LACEY HAD THE CONTROLS,
but half an hour into the flight, Parry took over and the squadron leader came back. “Everyone okay?” he said. “Sandwiches, salad in the fridges, plus everything from champagne on down. Coffee and tea makers in the cupboard. Getting on for four hundred miles from Farley to Oban. Allowing for adverse wind on occasion, we’ll still manage it in this plane in a couple of hours.”
“That’s good,” Ferguson said. “Have you arranged quarters for yourselves with the CO at RAF, Oban?”
“Oh, yes, they’ll look after us.”
He went back to the cockpit, and Helen made coffee. Dillon was already opening a half-bottle of scotch from the bar.
Billy, sitting across from him, said, “Amazing differences in people. I was a streetwise young bastard, even though Harry sent me to St. Paul’s School.”
“Some might say the best in London,” Dillon said.
“Well, he wanted to make a toff out of me. Anyway, I remember a guy producing half a bottle of rum he’d nicked from somewhere. There were four of us and it was a test-of-manhood thing. One sip, Dillon, that’s all I took, one little sip. Alcohol was the worst thing I’d ever tasted in my life. It’s never touched my lips again, and I mean not ever.”
“What about your chums?”
“Finished the bottle, and sick as pigs for it. It was in the games room. The sports master found them and they all got a flogging.” He smiled back into the past. “Served the buggers right. But you, Dillon. Ever since I’ve known you, you put that stuff away like nobody I ever knew—and I’ve never seen you drunk.”
“It’s my liver, you see, Billy.” Dillon grinned. “We’re on very good terms.”
Ferguson was in front of them, drinking the coffee that Helen had passed to him, and Dillon moved to sit across from him.
“Has it ever occurred to you that you’re possibly getting a little too old for this kind of game?” he asked Ferguson.
“Frequently, but then it’s a wicked old world we live in, and getting worse. I can’t stop it, the curse of the suicide bomber, ordered by people like Al Qaeda to commit mass murder. What upsets me about it is the lack of any moral viewpoint. In other times, people at least tried to devise rules for the way wars were fought. There was a concept of honor, but all that changed when revolutionaries discarded the idea of uniform, and suddenly, you couldn’t recognize who your enemy was, just like your lot in Ulster.”
“The IRA didn’t invent it,” Dillon pointed out. “What about the Boers?”
“Yes, but it was Michael Collins in 1920 who created the concept of assassins in civilian clothes operating on a regular basis.”
“You have a point, but then, as I’ve pointed out before, his favorite saying was: The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize. It’s the only way a small country can take on a larger one with any hope of success.”
“Lenin said that first, and a hard prospect it’s been for the world for years,” Ferguson said. “And still is.”
“Then let’s have a drink and cheer ourselves up,” Dillon suggested.
“An excellent idea.”
Helen leaned across and murmured to Monica, “Funny people you meet on a plane sometimes, don’t you agree?”
“Absolutely.”
They started to laugh.
IN LONDON,
the Broker sat at his desk, finally facing the fact that his scheme of the night before had obviously failed. It had been a crazy idea, and ill thought out, as he now acknowledged to himself, a symptom of his increasing desperation at the way his fortunes had sunk so low. It was silly to leave a message hoping it would tempt Miller to investigate. After all, such a man, a proven killer, backed by political power and supported by Charles Ferguson’s people, had to be treated with care. It was for this reason he hadn’t ordered sweepers to spy on the house or follow Miller. With a man like that, it could be suicide.
On the other hand, it appeared that the wretched girl he had selected so carefully, brainwashed over time, and supplied with drugs, had vanished. Such was the information he had received from Army of God sources.
So all it proved was his desperation, he who had been so powerful. He switched on his computer and checked the
Serious Crime
data for the Central London area, hoping against hope, but the cupboard was bare.
As he had done many times in the past, he called in details of Belov International plane departures in Moscow and noted the slot booked by the Falcon, but the names meant nothing to him, and the Belov facility in Louth was often used on Belov general business. He moved to Farley, but nothing there. What he didn’t know was that Ferguson had put a block on any report of the Gulfstream’s movements.
He switched off and sat there morosely, the man who had once had everything, power in every country in the world, even to the level of Putin himself, and now kicked out, denied any contact at all. The truth was he was afraid—afraid what this might mean to him when the news reached Al Qaeda and, through them, Osama.
MARCH IN OBAN
and the Scottish Highlands meant rain, and rain it was. They landed a little later than Lacey had envisaged, transferred to a van driven by an RAF sergeant, and left Lacey and Parry in the aircraft.
The sergeant said, “General Ferguson, sir?”
“That’s me.”
“Duty officer’s compliments, and I’m to take you straight down to the harbor, where you’ll find your boat waiting. It was delivered by two gentlemen a couple of hours ago, who phoned in as ordered and just managed to catch the Glasgow train. The boat is anchored out in the harbor, and they’ve left a large inflatable at the jetty. It’s stenciled
Tender to Avenger.
”
“Excellent, Sergeant.” Ferguson settled back to view the scenery.
“A trifle grim, I would have thought,” Helen said.
“Well, it is the Highlands in March,” Monica told her. “I’ve done archaeological digs in the islands when it’s been something else. On the other hand, it’s not exactly the weather for cocktails on the flybridge.”
Billy laughed. “Too right, Lady Starling.”
Ferguson said testily, “No need to be a spoilsport at this stage. The rain falls just as much on the rich as the poor. It won’t make the slightest difference to our plans. The Avenger will still look as imposing as it is, even if the heavens open on it at Drumore.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it.”
In fact, she soon changed her tune when they passed through Oban town and along the waterfront backed by houses and buildings in Highland granite, and turned onto the jetty.
It was obvious which craft was the Avenger. She was anchored two hundred yards out, and Billy said, “That’s got to be it. It certainly makes an impression.”
“You can say that again,” Dillon said. “Look at the lines on her.”
She was snow white with a navy blue trim, and breathed style, beauty, and class. The sergeant said, “By God, that’s a thoroughbred, sir.”
“It certainly is,” Ferguson agreed. “But we’re going to get soaked getting out to her.”
“I can help there, sir. I’ve got a couple of big golfing umbrellas in the luggage compartment. I’ll leave them with you.”
So it was that the two women went down the steps to the tender first, Billy in front to hold the line. They stepped in and each got an umbrella up. They waited, and Ferguson said good-bye to the sergeant and found them. Dillon and Billy handled the weapons box and the luggage and were soon on board. Ferguson tried the outboard, which fired instantly, took the tiller, and they were on their way.
They bumped alongside the stern. Billy scrambled to the deck, held out his hand, and had Helen and Monica aboard into the shelter of the stern canopy. They folded the umbrellas and went through a door into the saloon. Ferguson followed, and Billy and Dillon wrested the weapons box and luggage up. Eventually, they joined the others.
“Magnificent,” Ferguson said. The saloon was mahogany, with a center table, swivel chairs on either side. There was a fully equipped kitchen at one end, a stairway dropping down to a shower room and toilet, and a long corridor linking several cabins.
A companionway led into the wheelhouse, although it was like no wheelhouse Ferguson had ever been in. Again, mahogany everywhere, wraparound vision, a very futuristic control panel, and double leather swing seats in front of the wheel.
“It must feel like you’re driving a racing car,” Billy said. He and Dillon moved in to examine everything, but now Dillon went up another companionway and called from above, “It’s fantastic up here, but get me one of the umbrellas, it’s pouring.”
Billy passed one, and Dillon had it up when he joined him. “This is amazing,” Dillon said. “The flybridge—you can drive the boat from here if you want, and what a place to entertain. It’s perfection, but not today.” He huddled under the umbrella.
“Look at it,” Billy told him. “Just the same as the first time you brought me here. Bleeding awful.”
Oban was enveloped in mist and rain, wind pushing across the water of the harbor. Above on the land, the clouds draped across the mountains, and the waters of the Firth of Lorn looked troubled.
“What a place,” Billy said. “I’m going below and see what there is to eat.”
AT HOLLAND PARK,
Roper listened to Ferguson’s description of the boat and noted his obvious enthusiasm. “Ah, what it is to be rich,” he said.
“That’s my friend, not me,” Ferguson reminded him.
“The same thing, since you’re getting the benefit. I’ve checked the weather forecast for the next few days, and I hope the ladies appreciate that any hope of an Irish version of Monaco is out.”
“It’s been discussed,” Ferguson told him. “The boat is still what it appears to be, a rich man’s toy, and that’s the impression it will give, whatever the weather. Anything to report from your end?”
“I’m still trying searching for the Broker, to no avail. I’ve also checked with Maggie Duncan. Harry is fine, but heavily sedated.”
“I’ll tell Monica. She can speak to Rosedene a little later. Of course, we know from Chekhov that all contact with the Broker has been banned—”
Roper interrupted, “And apparently by Volkov, speaking under Putin’s orders.”
“A president who seems to be making it plain he’s no longer willing to be swayed by Al Qaeda.” Ferguson chuckled. “Wonderful what Harry Salter’s offer to pick up Max Chekhov has produced. Such useful information.”
“Always accepting that Quinn does as he’s told and cuts all contact with the Broker. The most important thing Chekhov told us was Volkov’s strict instruction not to warn Quinn of Volkov’s arrival. I presume that if he feels like that, he’ll order the people at the controls to keep quiet as well.”
“Interesting to see how that works, Quinn caught on the hop, as it were,” Ferguson said.