Bad Company (17 page)

It was Roper. “Ah, it’s you, General. Just updating you. Rossi’s plane lands at Ronaldsway on the Isle of Man at eleven this morning. The
Mona Lisa
is five miles out and scheduled to move to the Down coastal area later this afternoon. The weather isn’t good, so I’d say it wouldn’t be in the Drumgoole area until tonight. I don’t know. The weather makes it uncertain.”

“Right. Thanks, Roper.”

He turned as Dillon entered the wheelhouse and filled him in. Dillon had a look at the chart. “I’ve done this kind of run before, so I know what I’m doing, but the weather stinks. Look at it, Charles.”

The whole of Oban was draped in mist. “Bleeding awful,” Billy said.

“All right.” Dillon nodded. “Let’s allow for him landing at eleven, being driven across the island, and then some sort of boat running him five miles out to the
Mona Lisa.
It’s two o’clock at the earliest before he boards and she turns for Ulster, but with that weather…” He shook his head. “What do you think, Charles?”

“Three o’clock at the earliest.”

“All right. We’ll leave at two, then. For the moment, let’s get back ashore for a full Scots breakfast… and by the look of it, seasick pills for Billy.”

The flights from London to Ronaldsway had been bad enough. Rossi, the ex-Tornado pilot, always liked to take over the controls for a while, but it was rough and the crosswinds at the airport had been treacherous, although he’d managed the landing himself. A local Rashid employee met him with a car and took him across the island to a small village, where a motor cruiser waited.

It had a crew of two and set out to sea immediately, pushing out from the shelter of a small pier into the rough waves, obscured by fog. It took them an hour to find the
Mona Lisa.
They pulled alongside the Spanish trawler, its nets draped high over the stern. The two ships collided twice, and men leaned over with grappling lines. Rossi took his chance and jumped over to the other boat. He turned and waved to the motor cruiser, the captain waved back, and then he motored away.

Three or four men at the rail eyed Rossi up and down. He ignored them and went toward the wheelhouse. The door opened and a man emerged in a reefer coat and seaman’s cap, heavily unshaven, an unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

By any estimate, he would have been termed a nasty piece of work. He looked Rossi over with a kind of contempt. “I’m Martino, the captain.”

“And I’m Marco Rossi, your boss.”

A couple of the men laughed and Martino lit his cigarette. “Should I be impressed?”

Rossi reached, grabbed his left ear, his thumb well inside, and produced his Walther and rammed it hard under the chin.

“Now, you have the option of continuing to be employed by Rashid and make a lot of money, or I blow your brains out now, up through the mouth and into the brain. Explodes the back of the skull. Very messy.”

Martino tried to smile. “Eh, señor, there’s a mistake here.”

“Not mine, yours. Screw with me and you’re finished. Do we understand each other?”

“Perfectly, señor.”

“Good. Then let’s get on with it.”

He walked into the wheelhouse and the crew looked at Martino, who nodded, so they went about their tasks.

Around the middle of the afternoon the
Highlander
was ploughing through a turbulent sea, down from Oban, a couple of miles off the Isle of Man into the Irish Sea. Dillon was at the wheel, Billy at the chart table and Ferguson below.

The mist was so heavy, the driving rain so intense, that it was more like evening, a kind of early darkness, and Dillon could see one of the Irish ferries, red-and-green navigational lights already visible.

Ferguson came into the wheelhouse with three mugs of tea on a tray. He put the tray down on the table and looked at the chart, then switched the ship-to-shore radio to weather and listened.

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better. Better let me have the wheel, Dillon.”

Dillon didn’t even argue. Ferguson altered course a couple of points, then increased his speed, racing the heavy weather that threatened from the east. The waves grew rougher.

“Jesus,” Billy said. “I’m scared to death.”

“No need, Billy, he knows what he’s doing. I’ll go down to the galley and make some bacon sandwiches.”

“Not for me. I could throw up now.”

“Take another couple of pills,” Dillon said, and went below.

He came back half an hour later with sandwiches on a plate and found Ferguson alone.

“What happened to the boy wonder?”

“Took a couple of pills and retired to lie down. I say, those smell good.”

“Help yourself.”

Ferguson put the steering on automatic and took a bacon sandwich. Dillon splashed whiskey into two plastic cups and they ate together in a kind of companionable silence. It was getting really dark now, far earlier than normal, only a slight phosphorescence shining from the sea.

“You seem at home,” Dillon said.

“I always liked the sea, from boyhood. The West Sussex coast, down to the Isle of Wight, the Solent. Loved it.” He drank the whiskey. “I’ll have the other half.”

He helped himself to another sandwich. “That Browning with the twenty-shot magazine you’ve put in the flap there. It took me back.”

“Really?”

“Yes. In 1973, I took extended leave; I was an acting major then. Done rather well for my age. I did the Atlantic run single-handed, Portsmouth to Long Island. It had to be Long Island, because I had an old uncle living there. He was a general, too. The American connection in my family.”

“A remarkable achievement,” Dillon said.

“Therapy, Dillon, therapy.” He finished the last sandwich and took the wheel again.

“What for?”

“Well, I’d been shot in the shoulder, but it was more than that. It was psychological. Coming to terms with what I was capable of.”

Dillon poured two more whiskeys. “And what was that?”

“I was never SAS, Dillon. What you’ve never known was that I served with Code Nine Intelligence.”

He had just named one of the most infamous army units involved in the underground fight with the IRA.

“Jesus,” Dillon said.

“It was a hell of a way to earn a living in Londonderry in 1973, but there I was. Thirty years old, Oxford, Sandhurst, Malaya, Communist rebels in the Yemen, Eoka in Cyprus, and then along came Ireland. I couldn’t wait to switch from the Grenadier Guards to counterinsurgency work.”

“You wanted the smell of powder again?”

“Of war, Dillon. I’d been engaged for three years, a lovely girl called Mary. From an army family, only she could never see the point. Mind you, she hung in there until Cork Street.”

He was talking as if he was alone, taking some kind of solitary journey into the past.

“Cork Street?” Dillon said. “What was that?”

“That was where I earned the Military Cross, Dillon, one of those they handed out in Northern Ireland for unspecified reasons.”

Dillon said softly, “And what would that be, Charles?”

“Well, I was link man between two safehouses run by the SAS. One night, I was doing a run quite late. As we discovered later, my cover had been blown. Going through Cork Street down by the docks, I’d a car on my tail, then another car came out of a side and turned to block me.”

“Just a minute,” Dillon said. “July ’seventy-three, Derry – the Cork Street massacre, that’s what they called it. The SAS took out five Provos. A hell of a thing.”

“No, they didn’t.
I
took out five Provos.”

It was only then that Dillon was aware of a slight noise, turned and found Billy, the door half open, standing there, revealed.

Ferguson glanced over his shoulder. “Come in, Billy. Yes, Dillon, the second car blocked me, and the one in the rear was right up my backside. There were three Provos in front, two at my back. They just shouted, ‘Out, out, you Brit bastard.’ It always seemed ironic, being half-Irish. It’s the posh voice, you see.”

“So what did you do?”

“I had what you’ve got in there, a Browning with a twenty-round magazine, on the left-hand seat. One man wrenched open the driver’s door, so I shot him between the eyes, then shot his two friends through the door. I was using hollowpoint cartridges. Devastating.”

“And?”

“The two men in the rear car scrambled to get out. One of them fired wildly and was lucky. Hit me in the left shoulder. I riddled the car, a kind of reflex, killed him and the driver. Then I drove away, and made it to one of the safehouses, where the SAS patched me up and got me out the following morning.”

“Jesus,” Billy said. “You killed five.”

“All gone to that great IRA heaven in the sky, Billy, and the doctors put me together again and my masters gave me the Military Cross – had to, really. The loss of five members of the Londonderry Brigade was so mortifying that the Provos put it about as another SAS atrocity, and in the mythology of Irish Republicanism, that’s where it remains.”

It was Dillon who sensed more. “So what happened afterward?”

“Oh, I got a call to pick up the medal from Her Majesty at Buckingham Palace, and I asked Mary to go with me. She’d visited me in the hospital and naturally wanted to know how I’d come to be there, so I told her.”

“And what happened?”

“She sent the engagement ring back, and a letter explaining that she couldn’t possibly marry a man who’d killed five people.”

“Well, damn her eyes,” Billy said.

“That’s one point of view. So I went to the palace on my own. A nasty, wet day it was, too. The Regiment was proud of me. Gave me leave.”

“Which you used to sail to Long Island. You thought a hard sea voyage would blow the cobwebs away?” Dillon said.

“Something like that.”

“But in the end, you were still the man who shot five men dead, right?”

“That’s right.”

“General, they asked for it and they got it,” Billy said.

“True, Billy, I did my duty and it cost me Mary.” He said to Dillon, “God knows why I bothered to tell you after all these years. I think I’m getting maudlin in my old age. Take the wheel and I’ll go and have a rest,” and he went out.

Billy said, “My God, I said he was harder than Harry, but I never dreamed he was capable of a thing like that.”

“Oh, he probably killed before in all those rotten little wars, Billy. Cork Street was his spectacular.” He lit a cigarette. “Remember what I told you before, about the people who take care of the bad things that ordinary folk find impossible to handle? The soldiers? I’m a soldier, whether people approve of me or not, and so are you, and then we get Charles Ferguson, a decent, honorable man who could have been a banker or a lawyer. Instead he’s spent his life saving his country.”

Behind them, Ferguson said from the doorway, “That’s nice of you, Dillon, but don’t let’s overdo it, and as far as the steering goes, I’d say a couple of points west.”

In Drumgoole, in the back room of the pub, Derry Gibson ate bacon and eggs served by the local publican, one Keith Adair, his right-hand man in the little port.

“Is there anything else I can get you?” Adair asked.

“No, this is grand. It’s the weather I don’t like. It’s bad out there and getting worse. I’d hoped the
Mona Lisa
could come in to the jetty by the old stone quarry. If it gets worse, the skipper will have to drop his hook out in the bay.”

“That’ll make it more difficult to unload, Derry. Mind you, plenty of local fishermen have signed up for that.”

“Well, they would, wouldn’t they? What about the local Peelers?”

“They’ve closed the police station down, Derry. Some trouble up in Castleton, so they’ve gone up there to help out.”

“Excellent. They know which side their bread’s buttered on.”

At that moment, the phone sounded and Adair passed it to him.

“Mr. Gibson, it’s Janet from
The Orange George.
”

“I know who you are, Janet. What’s the problem?”

“Well, I was wondering if you knew where Patrick is? It’s been a couple of days. He phoned once and said his uncle Arthur had died unexpectedly and I was to carry on running the pub, only we got cut off and I’ve got bills coming in and I can’t write the checks, so I thought I’d speak to you, knowing you’re the real owner.”

“Just a minute,” Derry told her. “He doesn’t have an uncle Arthur.”

“Well, that’s what he said.”

And years of bad living made Derry Gibson sit up very straight. He nodded to Adair and switched the phone to speaker.

“When did you last see him, Janet?”

“Later in the morning when you went off for the plane to Belfast. I was doing breakfasts. This small man came in. Black bomber jacket, jeans and that funny kind of fair hair, almost white. He asked for Patrick, and at that moment Patrick came in by the rear door.”

“And what happened?”

“Well, the little guy said, ‘Patrick, my old son, it’s me, Sean Dillon.’ He had one of those kind of Belfast accents like yours, Mr. Gibson.”

Derry Gibson went cold. “And what happened?”

“That was it. Nothing until the phone call, and then today, I was talking to that old Kelly guy who sells the newspapers outside, and he said he was surprised to see Patrick getting in a Shogun with three guys, because he knew two of them well, Harry Salter and his nephew, Billy. Big gangsters.”

It was enough. Derry Gibson said, “There’s a lot going on here you don’t know about, Janet. Just keep things going. If you look in the right-hand top drawer of Patrick’s desk, you’ll find a company credit card. Use it to pay bills. I’ll be in touch.”

He switched off and turned to Adair. “Sean Dillon and those Salter guys. That means Ferguson.”

“Jesus, they’ll have squeezed Murphy dry,” Adair said. “We’re up the creek.”