The Wolf at the Door

by Jack Higgins

  “Which is why I’m going to call our two pilots now. We’re leaving instantly.”

  “Well, don’t let me hold you, gentlemen. I’ll stay in touch.”

  Perhaps an hour and a half later, their Gulfstream lifted out into the Atlantic, leaving the lights of New York behind, and rose to thirty thousand feet and headed east. Miller and Dillon sat on either side of the cabin in wide, comfortable seats, and Parry, one of the pilots, entered the cabin.

  “If there’s anything you want, it’s in the kitchen area. You know where the drinks cabinet is, Sean.”

  “You’re too kind,” Dillon told him. “How long?”

  “The weather in the mid-Atlantic isn’t perfect, but, at the worst, I’d say we’ll make Farley Field in six hours.”

  He went out, and Dillon’s Codex sounded. It was Clancy. “Have I got news for you.”

  Dillon put his phone on speaker and leaned towards Miller.

  “I traced Barry to Mercy Hospital, and get this. He was waiting to go into the operating room when some guy in scrubs turned up and stuck a hypodermic in him. A nurse discovered him, and he knocked her out and ran for it. Long gone, my friends.”

  “Whoever was behind Barry didn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut,” Dillon said. “But how did they find out where he was so quickly?”

  “I’ve seen the nurse’s statement. When he was in great pain and waiting to be prepped, she heard him call somebody on his mobile, very worked up, very agitated. He said, ‘It’s me, you bastard. I’m in Mercy Hospital with a bullet in my knee, and you’d better do something about it or else.’ She said she took the phone from him and put it on the bedside table.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Dillon said. “It’s gone.”

  “So no way of tracing who his employer was. No point in showing the nurse any faces. The guy was in green scrubs, a face mask, skullcap, the works. Oh, the police will go through the motions, but I’d say that’s it. You’re still out of it, Major, which is the main thing. Stay in touch. And if you make any sense out of the prayer card thing, let me know.”

  Dillon switched off his phone. Got up, went to the kitchen, found a half bottle of Krug champagne in the icebox, thumbed off the cork, took two glasses, and returned to his seat. He filled one glass and handed it to Miller, then filled the other.

  “Are we celebrating something?” Miller asked.

  “Not exactly, It’s just that champagne always concentrates my mind wonderfully. Drink up, and we’ll decide who’s going to call Roper.”

  Roper listened with considerable calm, under the circumstances. But, then, as the man constantly at the center of the storm at the Holland Park safe house communications center, he had long since stopped being surprised at anything.

  “So one prayer card is certainly interesting, and two, more than a coincidence.”

  “Exactly,” Dillon said. “And three would be enemy action.”

  “George Langley’s doing the postmortem now on Pool, so Ferguson’s still at Rosedene. I’ll give him a call and ask him to have a look in Pool’s wallet. I’ll be back.”

  “There you go,” Dillon said to Miller. “Mystery piles on mystery.”

  “We’ll wait and see,” Miller told him. “What about a little shut-eye?”

  “On a plane? Never.” Dillon rose and picked up the empty half bottle of Krug. “I’m sure there was another half bottle in the kitchen. I’ll go and see.”

  At Rosedene, Maggie Duncan, the matron, a no-nonsense Scot, produced Pool’s ravaged and bloodstained suit in the anteroom next to the operating room where Professor George Langley was performing the postmortem on the corpse of the unfortunate chauffeur. She wore latex gloves, as did Ferguson, and gingerly emptied the pockets and laid the contents on a towel spread on a table.

  A half-empty pack of cigarettes, a plastic lighter, what looked like house keys on a ring, a comb, a car key with a plastic black-and-gold tab with a telephone number on it but no name.

  “Do you want to examine the wallet, General?” she asked.

  “No, just take out what you find.”

  She did. There was cash, forty-five pounds in banknotes, a driver’s license, a national insurance card, a Premier credit card, and a cheaply printed business card that she found in one of the pockets and handed over.

  Ferguson examined the business card. “‘Henry Pool, Private Hire, 15 Green Street, Kilburn.’ ” He put it down on the towel, and, as he did, she extracted another card from the wallet.

  “This is interesting,” she said. “‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, we who are ourselves alone.’” Ferguson took it from her. “Is it important?” she asked.

  “It certainly is, my dear.” Ferguson put the card down, took out his Codex, and called Roper. “It’s here,” he said when the Major answered. “Also a business card: ‘Henry Pool, Private Hire, 15 Green Street, Kilburn.’ Check it out, and let Dillon and Miller know. And here’s an interesting point that I just remembered. Pool had a slight cockney accent, but when I was following him along the pavement from the Garrick and a limousine drove past and splashed him, he got very angry and abused them. I remember what he said because his accent suddenly sounded a little Irish. He said, ‘Holy Mother of God, you’ve soaked me, you bastards.’ Then he turned to me as if embarrassed and said he was sorry—but with the cockney back again.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser, especially since his address is in Kilburn, the Irish quarter of our city since time immemorial. I’ll see you soon.”

  Doyle brought Roper a mug of tea as the man in the wheelchair worked his keyboard. “Making progress, Major?”

  “I think so. Look at this: Henry Pool, born in London in 1946, mother Irish, Mary Kennedy. She came to England in the Second World War, worked as a cook, married a Londoner named Ernest Pool, who served in the army, was wounded in April ’forty-five, and received a medical discharge plus pension. They moved to 15 Green Street, Kilburn.”

  “He must have got down to work sharpish, old Ernest, for the baby to be produced in 1946.”

  “The bad news is, he died of a stroke two years later,” Roper said. “The wound had been in the head.”

  “Poor sod,” Tony said.

  “The mother never remarried. According to her Social Security records, she continued as a cook until her late sixties. Died four years ago, aged eighty. Lung cancer.”

  “And Henry?”

  “Worked as a driver of some sort, delivery vans, trucks, was a black-cab driver for years, then started being referred to as ‘a chauffeur. ’ Continued to live at the same address through all the years.”

  “Wife . . . family?”

  “No evidence of a marriage.”

  “It sounds like a bad play, if you ask me,” Tony said. “The old woman, widowed all those years, and the son—a right cozy couple, just like Norman Bates and his mum in the movie.”

  “Could be.” Roper’s fingers moved over the keys again. “So he’s been in the private-hire business for twelve years. On the Ministry’s approved list for the last six. Owned a first-class Amara limousine, approved by the Cabinet Office at Grade A level.”

  “Which explains somebody as important as the General getting him.”

  “And yet it just doesn’t add up. How long have you been in the military police, Tony?”

  “Seventeen years, you know that.”

  “Well, you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes . . . What’s the most interesting thing here?”

  “Yes, tell us, Sergeant.” They both glanced around and found Ferguson leaning in the doorway.

  “Aside from the cards, the nature of the targets,” Doyle said. “Blake Johnson, Major Miller, and you, General—you’ve all worked together on some very rough cases in the past.”

  “I agree, which means, Major,” Ferguson said to Roper, “we need to take a look at the various matters we’ve been involved in recently.”

  “As you say, General. I’m still intrigued by the reli
gious element in the prayer cards, though, and the IRA element.”

  His fingers moved over the keys again. The borough of Kilburn appeared on the screen, drifted into an enlargement. “There we are, Green Street,” Roper said. “And the nearest Roman Catholic church would appear to be Holy Name, only three streets away, the priest in charge, Monsignor James Murphy. I think we should pay him a visit. It might be rewarding.”

  “In what way?” said Ferguson.

  “Pool would have been a parishioner at this Holy Name place. The priest might be able to tell us where he comes into it.”

  “All right, go talk to him, but you know what Catholic priests are like. Seal of the Confessional and all that stuff. He’ll never tell you anything.”

  “True,” Roper said, “but he might talk to a fellow Irishman.”

  “Dillon? Yes, as I recall, he lived in Kilburn for a while in his youth, didn’t he? Have you spoken to him about what you just found out about Pool?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, get on with it, for heaven’s sake.” Ferguson turned to Doyle. “Lead on to the kitchen, Sergeant. I need a pot of coffee, very hot and very strong.”

  “As you say, General.”

  They went out and Roper sat there thinking about it, then called Dillon, who answered at once. “Any progress to report?”

  “I’m afraid you’ve got enemy action,” Roper said. “Ferguson found a prayer card in the driver Pool’s wallet.”

  Dillon reached over and shook Miller awake. “You’d better listen to this.”

  Miller came awake instantly and listened to the call on speaker. “Can you explain anything more? I mean, the driver and so on.”

  Roper went straight into Henry Pool, his background, the facts as known. When he was finished, Dillon said, “This notion you have about seeing the priest at Holy Name, I’ll handle that. I agree it could be useful.”

  “On the other hand, Pool was only half Irish, through his mother.”

  “They’re sometimes the worst. De Valera had a Spanish father and was born in New York, but his Irish mother was the making of him. We’ll be seeing you round breakfast time. We’d better have words with Clancy Smith, I promised to call him back.”

  He switched off, and Miller said, “Sean, you were a top enforcer with the IRA and you never got your collar felt once. Do you really think this is some kind of IRA hit?”

  “Not really. Most men of influence in the Provisional IRA are now serving in government and the community in one way or the other. Of course, there are splinter groups still in existence—that bunch called the Real IRA, and rumors that the Irish National Liberation Army still waits.”

  “INLA,” Miller said. “The ones who probably killed Mountbatten and certainly assassinated Airey Neave coming out of the underground car park in the House of Commons.”

  “True,” Dillon said. “And they were the great ones for using sleepers. Middle-class professional men, sometimes university educated, accountants, lawyers, even doctors. People think there’s something new in the fact that Islamic terror is able to recruit from the professions, but the IRA was there long before them.”

  “Do you believe IRA sleepers still exist?” Miller asked.

  “I guess we can’t take the chance they don’t. I’m going to call Clancy.”

  Clancy said, “This really raises the game,” once they reached him. “I’m sitting at Blake’s bedside now. I’ll let you talk to him, but don’t talk too long. By the way, we’ve established that Flynn’s American passport was a first-class forgery.”

  Blake said, “That you, Sean?”

  “It sure is, old stick,” Dillon said.

  “Clancy filled me in about Miller and me and some sort of possible IRA link with these prayer cards.”

  “And we’ve now discovered the same card in Ferguson’s driver’s wallet, and I hear the guy who tried to waste you, Flynn, had a false American passport.”

  Blake laughed weakly. “I’ll tell you something funny about him, Sean. When I had him covered and told him to give up, he didn’t say ‘Fuck you.’ He said ‘Fug you.’ I only ever heard that when I was in Northern Ireland.”

  “Which shows you what gentlemen we are over there. Take care, old son, and sleep well.” Dillon switched off, and turned to Miller. “You heard all that, so there we are.”

  Miller glanced at his watch. “Two hours to go. I’ll try to get some sleep.” He closed his eyes and turned his head against the pillow behind him, reaching to switch off the light.

  Dillon simply sat there, staring into the shadows, the verse from the prayer card repeating endlessly in his brain, remembering a nineteen-year-old actor who had walked out of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art to accept an offer to work with the National Theatre, and the night when the local priest in Kilburn called to break the news to him that his father, on a visit to Belfast, had been caught in a firefight between PIRA activists and British troops and killed.

  “A casualty of war, Sean,” Father James Murphy of the Holy Name church had said. “You must say your prayers, not only the Hail Mary, but this special one on the prayer card I give you now. It is a comfort for all victims of a great cause. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, we who are ourselves alone.’ ”

  He tried closing his eyes, but it still went around and around in his brain, and he opened them again, filled with despair, just as he had felt it that day, desolation turning into rage, a need for revenge that had taken the nineteen-year-old on a violent path which had shaped his whole life, a path from which there could be no turning back. Yet, as always, he was saved by that dark streak of gallows humor in him.

  “Jesus, Sean,” he told himself softly. “What are you going to do, cut your throat? Well, you don’t have a razor, so let’s have a drink on it.”

  They landed at Farley just past six in the morning, bad winter weather, gray and rainy. Miller and Dillon went their separate ways, for Miller had a Mercedes provided by the Cabinet Office, his driver, Arthur Fox, waiting. Tony Doyle had driven down from Holland Park, under Roper’s orders, in Dillon’s own Mini Cooper.

  “I’m going home, Sean, to see to my mail, knock out a report on my impressions of Putin and the Russian delegation at the UN, then take it to Downing Street. The Prime Minister will want to see me personally, but he likes things on paper, he’s very precise.”

  “Will you tell him of your exploits in Central Park?”

  “I’ve no reason not to. It happened to me, Sean, I didn’t happen to it, if you follow me. The way it’s being handled, there is no story, not for the press anyway. The whole thing is an intelligence matter that needs to be solved. He’ll understand. He’s a moralist by nature but also very practical. He won’t be pleased at what’s happened, and he’ll expect a result.”

  “Well, let’s see how quickly we can give him one.”

  Dillon got in the Mini beside Tony Doyle, and they drove away. Miller got in the back of the Mercedes and discovered a bunch of mail.

  “Good man, Arthur.” He opened the first letter.

  “Thought you’d like to get started, Major. Traffic’s building up already. Could take us an hour to get to Dover Street.”

  “No problem. I can save a lot of time here due to your usual efficiency.”

  Dillon arrived at Holland Park just after seven. “I’m going to shower and change, and then I’m going to partake of Maggie Hall’s Jamaican version of the great British breakfast.”

  “Hey, I could give you that,” Doyle said, for he was of Jamaican stock, born in the East End of London.

  Dillon went into the computer room, but there was no sign of Roper, and then Henderson, the other sergeant, entered wearing a tracksuit.

  “Good to see you back, sir. Major Roper’s in the wet room having a good soak. We’re also hosting General Ferguson. He’s in one of the second-floor suites, no sign of movement. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to the Major.”

  “Fine, I’m
going to my room. Tell him I’ll join him for breakfast.”

  At Dover Street, Miller told Arthur to get a breakfast at the local café and come back in an hour. Once inside the house, he went straight upstairs to the spare bedroom, which was now his. It was a decent size for an eighteenth-century town house and had its own shower room. The magnificent master bedroom suite at the end of the landing, once shared with his wife, he had kept exactly as it was before her murder, but the door was locked and opened only once a week by the housekeeper, seeing to the room and keeping it fresh.

  He stripped his clothes off, left them in the laundry basket, showered and shaved, pulled on a terry-cloth robe, and went down to the kitchen. He ate two bananas, drank a glass of cold milk from the refrigerator, went into his study, sat at his computer, and produced his report. Satisfied, he went upstairs and changed, ready for Arthur exactly on time as ordered.

  He called in at Downing Street, showing his face at the Cabinet Office, where he was greeted with enthusiasm by Henry Frankel, a good friend who had smoothed the way for Miller in many ways in the terrible days following the death of his wife.

  “You look well, Harry. How was Vladimir?”

  “Worrying, Henry. To be honest, I think I find him rather impressive on occasion, and I’m not supposed to.”

  “Certainly not.”

  Miller handed him his report. “All there, but I expect the PM saw it on television.”

  “Not the same, sweetheart,” said Henry, his gayness breaking through occasionally. “Who believes in TV anymore? You’ve got a genius for seeing things as they really are.”

  “Lermov was with Putin. I hear he’s the new Head of Station in Kensington.”

  “I believe he’s expected this weekend. I wonder what they’ve done with Boris Luzhkov?”