Free The President's Daughter by Jack Higgins Page B

microphones were a wonderful invention. He said you could be in the street and still hear what went on in a house.”
    “The BT van in the mews,” Dillon said. “The clever bastards.”
    “I’m sorry, Sean, but you’ve got to see it from my point of view. All those years facing me in prison. Brown’s offer was something I couldn’t refuse.”
    “Oh, shut up,” Dillon told him, “and get out my wallet.”
    Dermot did as he was told. “And what am I supposed to do with this?”
    “You’ll find five thousand dollars in assorted bills in there and you’re going to need it, old son. It was my operating money.”
    “But they’re paying me twenty thousand pounds,” Riley said. “I don’t need it.”
    “Oh, yes, you do, you poor bloody fool,” Dillon told him.
     
    • • •
     
    Hannah was shown to a bedroom by the woman who had brought the food on the tray. It was small and simple, a window open to the night so that she could see the harbor. There was a single bed, and a toilet and shower in what was little more than a cupboard. She put her overnight bag on the bed. She was wearing a traveler’s purse on a belt around her waist. It carried her operating money and a Walther, which she took out and checked expertly. Then she went downstairs.
    She felt restless and strangely unsure of herself, thinking of Dillon and the job in hand. She didn’t approve of Dillon, never had. All that killing for the IRA and the work he’d done for just about every terrorist group there was. Of course since working for Ferguson, he’d compensated. But her knowledge of his earlier misdeeds simply wouldn’t go away.
    She did an unusual thing for her, went to the bar and ordered a cognac, then she went outside and sat at the small corner table.
    “Damn you, Dillon!” she said softly.
    Something cold nudged her in the nape of the neck and the man who had called himself Carter said softly, “Don’t turn around, Chief Inspector. I should imagine you’re carrying, so take the weapon from your bag in your left hand and hold it up.”
    She did as she was told. “What is this?”
    He took the gun from her. “Let’s say all is not what it seems. By the way, we got Hakim for you. Consider that a bonus, but everything else was a means to an end. Poor Dermot, his conscience is killing him, but he did as he was told simply to get out of Wandsworth.”
    “But to what purpose?”
    “We needed Dillon. Oh, we’ll send him back quitesoon and all will be revealed. Tell Ferguson we’ll be in touch and he’ll have to manage without him for a while. Now put your hands on your head.”
    There was a short silence. She said, “But why? And what happened to the real Carter and his men?”
    There was no reply, and when she turned cautiously he had gone. She went down the steps and hurried along the waterfront, but as she reached the jetty she heard an engine start and then the boat eased away. There was one man in the wheelhouse, another coiling lines in the stern. Nothing to be done, and she turned and hurried along the waterfront.
     
    Carter went down the companionway and found Dillon seated on a bench seat, Riley with a glass in his hand, sitting morosely on the other side of the table.
    “Ah, you found the whiskey,” Carter said.
    “You saw the Chief Inspector?”
    “Yes, and gave her a message for Ferguson.”
    “That was kind of you. You were talking Hebrew earlier. I don’t speak it, but I recognize the language. If you’re Israeli, that’s the grand English public-school accent you’ve got.”
    “My father was a diplomat in London. I went to St. Paul’s.”
    “Not bad. Dermot has revealed all, by the way. So Hakim was just a fantasy?”
    “Not at all. The villa exists and Hakim was in residence.”
    “You say was?”
    “We did you a favor. I dropped in with my boys last night and knocked him off.”
    “Just him?”
    At that moment, the engines rumbled into life. “Oh, no, we killed all of them.”
    “Including