Free Angel of Death by Jack Higgins

with it?” Curry asked.
    “Not really. Looking back it seems to have been like a performance in a play or film and it merges into all my other performances.” She shook her head. “Heaven knows what a psychiatrist would make of that, and anyway, those men were scum.”
    “Exactly,” Lang said. “There was, as the courts put it, reasonable cause.”
    “A good point,” she said. “I got all the press cuttings on January 30. There was Ali Hamid, an Arab terrorist, a KGB Colonel called Ashimov, two IRA bombers some silly judge released, an American here in London reputed to be a CIA agent, and now our two friends in Belfast. I’d say the one weak link would be the American.”
    “I see,” Curry said. “You accept the killing of the KGB Colonel, but the CIA man is a different proposition.”
    “I see the logic in what you’re saying. I suppose it’s a question of your point of view.” She finished her champagne and put the glass down on a side table. “Of course, it didn’t take the authorities long to work out that January 30 was the date of Bloody Sunday in Londonderry and you were there, Mr. Lang. Interesting coincidence.”
    “Rupert,” he said. “Please. Yes, I was there along with a couple of thousand soldiers and large numbers of IRA supporters.”
    There was a long silence. She opened a silver cigarette box and took one out. Lang gave her a light and she blew out a feather of smoke. “Why do you do it?”
    “Do what exactly?” Lang asked. “I mean, just because we arrived in that alley at an opportune moment and as a Minister of the Crown on service in Ulster I do have a permit to carry a weapon.”
    “A silenced Beretta 9-millimeter Parabellum,” she said. “In all the newspaper reports they constantly mention the fact that all January 30 hits have been committed with the same weapon.”
    “Many people think of it as the best handgun in the world these days,” Lang said. “The American Army uses it — thousands of them around.”
    She opened a drawer in the side table and took out a newspaper clipping. “This is the
Belfast Telegraph
report on the deaths of those two animals in Carrick Lane. They state that the credit for the killings claimed by January 30 is substantiated by the forensic tests on the rounds removed from the bodies indicating that they were killed by the same weapon used to assassinate the other victims, a Beretta 9 millimeter, silenced version.”
    “Amazing what they can do these days,” Lang said. “The scientific people, I mean.”
    Curry emptied his glass. “What are you going to do? Turn us in?”
    “Don’t be stupid, Tom. I’d be turning myself in, however much a good lawyer tried to argue my case. No, I haven’t the slightest intention of doing that, but one thing I would like to know. Why do you do it?”
    “For me it’s simple,” Curry said. “I’ve been a Marxist-Leninist since boyhood. It’s my faith, my religion if you like. I think the world needs to change.”
    “And Communism is the answer?”
    “Yes, but change comes out of chaos and anarchy, which is where we come in.”
    “And you?” she said to Lang.
    “Well life can be such a bloody bore. Helps to have a little excitement once in a while.”
    “Rupert never takes anything seriously,” Curry told her.
    Lang smiled. “All right, Father.
She
can play good women or bad, great queens, murderers, the worst harlot in the world. Now that’s really getting your rocks off.” He turned to Grace. “But it isn’t enough, is it, and never will be.”
    “You bastard,” she said. “You clever, clever bastard.”
    “But I’m right. You’d like to join in.”
    She sat there looking at him and, for a moment, had a quick glimpse of that shadowy figure in Washington, gun raised high, and her stomach crawled with excitement.
     
     
    It was two weeks later that Curry turned up at the Old Red Lion, a pub fringe theatre where she was doing her one-woman show for a week. She was sharing a