Jack Higgins - Dillon 07 - The White House Connection

by The White House Connection(lit)

  'But it does?'

  'Oh, yes, and the British Prime Minister has his own version. It's there in the file. Brigadier Charles Ferguson runs it.'

  'Charles Ferguson? But I've known him for yean.'

  'Well, I don't know what you thought he was, but his outfit is known in the trade as the Prime Minister's private army. It's given the IRA a bad time for years. Ferguson has a sizeable setup at the Ministry of Defence and is responsible only to the PM, which is why the other intelligence outfits loathe him. His nght hand is an ex-IRA enforcer named Sean Dillon; his left, a Detective Chief Inspector named Hannah Bernstein, granddaughter of a rabbi, if you can believe it. Quite a bunch, huh?'

  'But what has this to do with anything?'

  'Simply, that the Secret Intelligence Service didn't want Ferguson and company involved, because Ferguson might have told the Prime Minister, and Ferguson has a private contact with Blake Johnson, which meant the President would have been informed and SIS couldn't have that.'

  'So what happened?'

  'SIS started to send the White House mild and useless information and disinformation. There was no way of implicating the members of the Sons of Erin. And then the file was lost.' He reached for the folder and held it up. 'Except for my copy. I don't know why I took it at the time. Self-disgust, I suppose. Now, I think you should have it.'

  He started to cough; she passed him a napkin. He spat into it and she saw blood. 'Should I get the doctor?'

  'He's calling in later. Not that it'll make any difference.' He gave her a ghastly smile. 'That's it then, now you know. I'd better lie down.'

  He rose, picked up the stick and walked slowly into the hall. 'I'm sorry, Helen, desperately sorry.'

  'It's not your fault, Tony.'

  He heaved himself up the stairs and she watched him go. Hedley appeared behind her, holding the file. 'I figured you'd want this.'

  'I surely do.' She took it from him. 'Let's move on, Hedley. There's only death here.'

  Back in the Mercedes, as they drove through the narrow lanes, she read through the file, every detail, every photo. Strangely enough, she dwelt on Sean Dillon longer than anyone: the fair hair, the self-containment, the look of a man who had found life a bad joke. She closed the file and leaned back.

  'You okay, Lady Helen?' Hedley asked.

  'Oh, fine. You can read the file yourself when we're back at South Audley Street.'

  She felt a flutter in her chest, opened her purse, shook two pills into her hand, and swallowed them. 'Whiskey, please, Hedley,' she said.

  He passed back the silver flask. 'What's going on? Are you okay?'

  'Just some pills the doctor gave me.' She leaned back and closed her eyes. 'No big deal. Just get me to South Audley Street.'

  But Hedley didn't believe her for a moment and drove on, his face troubled.

  TWO

  At South Audley Street, she sat in the study and worked her way through the file again, studying the text, the photos.

  The composition of the Sons of Erin was interesting. There was Senator Michael Cohan, aged fifty, a family fortune behind him derived from supermarkets and shopping malls; Martin Brady, fifty-two, an important official in the Teamsters' Union; Patrick Kelly, forty-eight, a construction millionaire; and Thomas Cassidy, forty-five, who had made a fortune from Irish theme pubs. All Irish-Americans, but there was one surprise, a well-known London gangster named Tim Pat Ryan.

  She passed the file to Hedley in the kitchen, got a pot of tea, returned to the study and started on her computer, a recent acquisition and something with which she'd become surprisingly expert, thanks to help from an unexpected source.

  She'd asked for advice from the London office of her corporation, and their computer department had jumped to attention and recommended the best. She'd mastered the basics quickly, but soon wanted more and had consulted the corporation again. The result was the arrival in South Audley Street of a strange young man in a very high-tech electric wheelchair. She'd seen him from the drawing-room window, but when she went into the hall, Hedley already had the door open.

  The young man on the sidewalk had hair to his shoulders,

  bright blue eyes and hollow cheeks. He also had scar tissue all over his face, the kind you got from bad burns.

  'Lady Helen?' he said cheerfully as she appeared behind Hedley. 'My name's Roper. I'm told you'd like your computer to sit up and do a few tricks.' He gave Hedley a twisted smile. 'Turn me around, there's a good chap, and pull me up the two steps. That's the one thing these gadgets can't manage.'

  In the hall, Hedley turned him and she said, 'The study.'

  When they reached it, he looked at her computer setup and nodded. 'Ah, PK800. Excellent.' He glanced up at Hedley. 'I'm not allowed to eat lunch, but I'd love a pot of tea to wash my pills down, Sergeant Major.'

  Hedley smiled slowly. 'Do I say "sir"?'

  'Well, I did make captain in the Royal Engineers. Bomb disposal.' He held up his hands. They saw more scar tissue.

  Hedley nodded and went out. Helen said, 'IRA?'

  Roper nodded. 'I handled all those bombs so slickly, and then a small one caught me by surprise in a car in Belfast.' He shook his head. 'Very careless. Still, it did lead me to a further career, fatherhood being out.' He eased his wheelchair to the computer bank. 'I do love these things. They can do anything, if you know what to ask them.' He turned and looked up at her. 'Is that what you want, Lady Helen, for them to do anything?'

  'Oh, I think so.'

  'Good. Well, give me a cigarette and let's see what you know, then we'll see what I can teach you.'

  Which he did. Every dirty trick in the computer book. By the time he'd finished, she was capable of hacking into the Ministry of Defence itself. And she continued to be an apt pupil until the morning she got yet another phone call - that was three, she thought; these things always seemed to travel in threes — the phone call that said Roper was in the hospital with kidney failure.

  They'd managed to save him, but he'd gone to a clinic in Switzerland and she'd never heard from him again.

  Now, typing from memory, she started trawling through files, entering names as she went. Some were readily available. Others, such as Ferguson, Dillon, Hannah Bernstein and Blake Johnson, were not. On the other hand, when she cut into Scotland Yard's most wanted list, there was Jack Barry, complete with a numbered black and white photo.

  'They got you once, you bastard,' she mused. 'Maybe we can do it again.'

  Hedley came in from the kitchen with the file and put it on the desk. 'The new barbarians.'

  'Not really,' she said. 'Very old stuff, except that in other days we did something about it.'

  'Can I get you anything?'

  'No. Go to bed, Hedley. I'll be okay.'

  He went reluctantly. She poured another whiskey. It seemed to be keeping her going. She opened the bottom drawer in the desk in search of a notepad and found the Colt.25 Peter had brought back from Bosnia, along with the box of fifty hollow-point cartridges and the silencer. It had been a highly illegal present, but Peter had known she liked shooting, both handgun ind shotgun, and often practised in the improvised shooting range in the barn at Compton Place. She reached down and, almost absentmindedly, picked it up, then opened the box of cartridges, loaded the gun and screwed the silencer on the end. For a while, she held it in her hand, then put it on the desk and started on the file again.

  Ferguson fascinated her. To have known him for so many years and yet not to have known him at all. And the Bernstein woman - so calm to look at in her horn-rimmed spectacles, yet a woman who had killed four times, the file said, had even killed

  another woman, a Protestant terrorist who had deserved to die.

  And then there was Sean Dillon. Born in Ulster, raised by his father in London. An actor by profession, who had attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. When Dillon was nineteen, his father had gone on a visit to Belfast and been killed accidentally in a firefight with British paratroopers. Dillon had gone
home and joined the IRA.

  'The kind of thing a nineteen-year-old would do,' she said softly. 'He took to the theatre of the street.'

  Dillon had become the most feared enforcer the IRA ever had. He had killed many times. The man of a thousand faces, intelligence sources had named him, with typical originality. His saving grace had been that he would have no truck with the bombing and the slaughter of the innocent. He'd never been arrested until the day he had ended up in a Serb prison for flying in medicine for children (although Stinger missiles had also apparently been involved). It was Ferguson who had saved him from a firing squad, had blackmailed Dillon into working for him.

  She went back to the Sons of Erin and finally came to Tim Pat Ryan. His record was foul. Drugs, prostitution, protection. Suspected of supplying arms and explosives to IRA active service units in London, but nothing proved. He had a pub in Wapping called the Sailor by the river on China Wharf. She took a London street guide from a shelf, leafed through it and located China Wharf on the relevant map.

  She lit a cigarette and sat back. He was an animal, Ryan, just like Barry and the others, guilty at least by association, and the thought of what had happened to her son wouldn't go away. She stubbed out her cigarette, went to the couch and lay down.

  The great psychologist Carl Jung spoke of a thing called synchron-icity, the suggestion that certain happenings are so profound that

  they go beyond mere coincidence and argue a deeper meaning and possibly a hidden agenda. Such a thing was happening at that very moment at Charles Ferguson's flat in Cavendish Square. The Brigadier sat beside the fireplace in his elegant drawing room. Chief Inspector Hannah Bernstein was opposite, a file open on her knees. Dillon was helping himself to a Bushmills at the sideboard. He wore a black leather bomber jacket, a white scarf at his neck.

  'Feel free with my whiskey,' Ferguson told him.

  'And don't I always,' Dillon grinned. 'I wouldn't want to disappoint you, Brigadier.'

  Hannah Bernstein closed the file. 'That's it, then, sir. No IRA active service units operating in London at the present time.'

  'I accept that with reluctance,' he told her. 'And of course our political masters want us to play it all down anyway.' He sighed. 'I sometimes long for the old days before this damn peace process made things so difficult.' Hannah frowned and he smiled. 'Yes, my dear, I know that offends that fine morality of yours. Anyway, I accept your findings and will so report to the Prime Minister. No active service units in London.'

  Dillon poured another Bushmills. 'Not as far as we know.'

  'You don't agree?'

  'Just because we can't see them doesn't mean they're not there. On the Loyalist side, we have the paramilitaries like the UVF, and then the LVF, who've been responsible for all those attacks and assassinations, we know that.'

  'Murders,' Hannah said.

  'A point of view. They see themselves as gallant freedom fighters, just like the Stern Gang in Jerusalem in forty-eight,' Dillon reminded her. 'And then on the Republican side, we have the INLA and Jack Barry's Sons of Erin.'

  'That bastard again,' Ferguson nodded. 'I'd give my pension to put my hands on him.'

  'Splinter groups on both sides. God knows how many,' Dillon told them.

  'And not much we can do about it at the moment,' Hannah Bernstein said. 'As the Brigadier says, the powers that be say hands off.'

  Dillon went to the terrace window and peered out. It was raining hard. 'Well, in spite of all that, there are bastards out there waiting to create bloody mayhem. Tim Pat Ryan, for example.'

  'How many times have we turned that one over,' Hannah reminded him. 'He's got the best lawyers in London. We'd have difficulty getting a result even if we caught him with a block of Semtex in his hand.'

  'Oh, sure,' Dillon said. 'But he's definitely supplied active service units with material in the past, we know that.'

  'And can't prove it.'

  Ferguson said, 'You'd like to play executioner again, wouldn't you?'

  Dillon shrugged. 'He wouldn't be missed. Scotland Yard would break out the champagne.'

  'You can forget it.' Ferguson stood up. 'I feel like an early night. Off you go, children. My driver's waiting for you in the Daimler, Chief Inspector. Good night to you.'

  When they opened the door, it was raining hard. Dillon took an umbrella from the hall stand, opened it and took her down to the Daimler. She got in the rear and put the window down a little.

  'I worry about you when things get quiet. You're at your most dangerous.'

  'Be off with you before I begin to think you care.' He grinned. 'I'll see you at the office in the morning.'

  He kept the umbrella and walked rapidly away. He had a small house in Stable Mews only five minutes away and as he walked

  in the front door, he felt strangely restless. The place was small, very Victorian: Oriental rugs, polished woodblock floors, a fireplace with an oil painting by Atkinson Grimshaw, the great Victorian artist, above it, for Dillon was not without money, mostly nefariously obtained over the years.

  He poured another Bushmills, stood with it in his hand, gazing up at the Grimshaw, thinking of Tim Pat Ryan. He had too much nervous energy to sleep and he checked his watch. Eleven-thirty. He walked to the sideboard, took the stopper out of the decanter and poured the glass of whiskey back.

  He went to the shelves of books in an alcove, took three out and opened a flap behind, removing a Walther PPK with a silencer already fitted. He replaced the books, checked the weapon and put it into the waistband of his jeans, snug against the small of his back.

  He took the umbrella when he left the house, for the rain was relentless, and lifted the garage door, where an old Mini Cooper in British racing green waited. The perfect town car, so small and yet capable of over a hundred with the foot down. He got in, drove to the end of the mews and paused to light a cigarette.

  'Right, you bastard, let's see how you're doing,' and he drove away.

  At the same moment, Helen Lang, dozing on the couch, came awake, aware of Tim Pat Ryan's face, the last photo she had looked at in the file. She sat up, face damp with sweat, aware that in the dream he had been hurting her, laughing sarcastically. She stood up, went to the desk and stared down at the open file, and Tim Pat Ryan looked back at her.

  She picked up the Colt and weighed it in her hand. There was an inevitability to things now. She stood in the hall, pulled on a trenchcoat and rain hat, opened the shoulder bag that hung

  on the hall stand, found some cash, then put the Colt in her pocket, took down her umbrella and let herself out.

  She hurried along South Audley Street, the umbrella protecting her from the driving rain, intending to go to the Dorchester nearby. There were always cabs there, but as it happened, one came along on the other side of the road. She waved him down and darted across.

  'Wapping High Street,' she said, as she climbed inside. 'You can drop me by the George,' and she sat back, tense and excited.

  Hedley had retired with no intention of sleeping, had simply sat in an armchair in the basement flat in the darkness, for some reason afraid for her. He had heard her footsteps in the hall, was up and waiting at the foot of the stairs. As the front door opened and closed, he grabbed his jacket, went up and had the door open. He saw her hurrying along the pavement, the umbrella bobbing, the wave of the hand for the cab. He'd left the Mercedes at the kerb, and was at it in an instant and switched it on. As the cab passed on the other side of the road, he went after it.

  Dillon reached the Tower of London, St Katherine's Way, and moved into Wapping High Street. He passed the George Hotel, turning into a maze of side streets and finally parked on a deadend turning. He got out, locked the door and walked rapidly between the tall decaying warehouses, finally turning on to China Wharf. There were few ships now, only the occasional barge, long disused cranes looming into the sky.

  The Sailor was at the end beyond the old quay. He checked his watch. Midnight. Long past closing time. When he paused in the
shadows, the kitchen door at one side opened, light flooding out. Tim Pat Ryan and a woman.

  'See you tomorrow, Rosie.'

  He kissed her cheek and she walked away rapidly, passing

  Dillon safe in the shadows. He moved to the nearest window and peered in. Ryan was sitting at the bar with a glass of beer, reading a newspaper, totally alone. Dillon eased open the kitchen door and entered.

  The saloon was very old-fashioned and ornate with a mahogany bar and gilded angels on either side of a great mirror, for the Sailor dated from Victorian times, when sailing ships had moved up the Thames by the dozen each day to tie up and unload at the quay. There were rows of bottles on glass shelves, beer pumps with ivory handles. Ryan was proud of it and kept it in apple-pie order. He loved it like this at night, all alone, reading the Standard in the quiet. There was a slight eerie creaking of a door hinge, a draught of air that lifted the paper. He turned and Dillon entered the bar.