A Devil Is Waiting - Jack Higgins [5]
Holley turned to Dillon. “Okay?”
“It’ll have to be, won’t it?”
“You mean I’m in the clear?” Murphy asked.
“So it would appear,” Dillon told him. “Just try to cultivate a different class of friend in the future. That bastard Ivan was doing you no good at all.”
“That’s bloody marvelous.” Murphy hammered a fist on the desk and came round it. “You kept your word, Mr. Dillon, and I’m not used to that, so I’ll tell you something else.”
Dillon smiled beautifully and turned to Holley. “See, Daniel, Patrick wants to unburden himself. Isn’t that nice?”
But even he couldn’t have expected what came next.
“I was holding out on you on one thing. I actually did find out who Flynn really was. He wasn’t particularly nice to me, so I’ll tell you.”
Dillon wasn’t smiling now. “And how did you find that out?”
“He called round to see me one evening and discovered his mobile hadn’t charged up properly. He was upset about it, because he had a fixed time to call somebody in Northern Ireland. He was agitated, so it was obviously important. He asked if he could use my landline.”
Dillon shook his head. “And you listened in on an extension.”
Murphy nodded. “He said it was Jack Kelly from New York, confirming that Operation Amity is a go. Arriving on the night of the eighth, landfall north beach at Dundrum Bay, close to St. John’s Point.”
“That’s County Down,” Dillon said. “Anything else?”
“I put the phone down. I didn’t want to get caught. I had the number checked on my phone bill and found it was to a call box in Belfast on the Falls Road.”
Holley said, “Whoever they are, they’re being very careful. That would have been untraceable.” He paused. “Could Jack Kelly be who I think it is? It’s a common enough name in Ireland, God knows.”
“You mean the Jack Kelly we ran up against, working for our old friend Jean Talbot?”
“I know it doesn’t seem likely,” Holley began, and Dillon cut in.
“The same Jack Kelly who became an IRA volunteer at eighteen, was involved for over thirty years in the Troubles, and served on the Army Council?”
“And never too happy about the peace process,” Holley said. “So if it is him . . . I wonder what he’s up to.”
“That’s for Ferguson and Roper to decide.”
“Strange, us having a foot in both camps,” Holley said. “How do you think that happened?”
“Daniel, me boy, if I was of a religious turn of mind, I’d say God must have a purpose in mind for us, but for the life of me, I can’t imagine what it would be.”
“Well, I’m damned if I can,” Holley said. “Although I should imagine that the general will pay Kelly a call sooner rather than later.”
Dillon turned to Murphy. “Happy, are you, Patrick, now that you’ve come clean? I mean, as you did turn out to have lied, you must have thought I might take it the wrong way?”
“Of course not, Mr. Dillon,” Murphy said, but there was a gathering alarm on his face.
“Don’t worry,” Dillon carried on. “You’ve done us a good turn. Although it would help the situation, restore mutual trust, you might say, if you produced my friend’s Colt .25. It doesn’t seem to be on the spring clip, which I can see quite clearly inside the rain hat on the desk there.”
Murphy managed to look astonished. “But that’s nonsense,” he said, and then moved with lightning speed behind Holley, grabbed him by the collar, and produced the Colt.
“I don’t want trouble, I just want out, but if I have to, I’ll kill your friend. So just drop that Walther into the sewage, and then we’ll walk to the door and I’ll get into my car and vanish. Otherwise, your friend’s a dead man.”
“Now, we can’t have that, can we? Here we go, a perfectly good Walther down the toilet, in a manner of speaking.” Dillon dropped it in.
Murphy pushed Holley toward the entrance, the Colt against his skull, and as Dillon trailed them, cried, “Stay back or I’ll drop him.”
Holley said to Murphy, “Hey, take it easy. Just be careful, all right? I hope you’re familiar with the Colt .25. If you don’t have the plus button on, those hollow-point cartridges’ll blow up in your face.”
They were just reaching the door. Murphy