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Day of Reckoning
Jack Higgins
The incomparable Jack Higgins returns to the bestseller lists, launching undercover enforcer Sean Dillon into a most spectacular adventure – a no-holds-barred battle with a Mafia don.It’s all action and suspense as Sean Dillon and his secret intelligence colleagues seek to help American White House security insider Blake Johnson avenge the death of his ex-wife, a reporter murdered for getting too close to a Mafia story. In London, Beirut and Ireland, the daredevil friends are prepared to risk everything as they combine to thwart the ever more desperate ambition of Mafia frontman Jack Fox.Here in his eighth adventure, former IRA terrorist turned British Government enforcer Sean Dillon is established as one of the most popular characters in modern fiction, while Jack Higgins has an unrivalled position as the biggest name in thriller writing around the world.Widely hailed as an outstanding return to form, Day of Reckoning raced straight into 2011’s top ten of the Sunday Times bestseller list in hardback
Day of Reckoning
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000
Copyright © Jack Higgins 2000
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photograph © Lawson Wood/Ocean Eye Film
Harry Patterson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008124892
Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780007373970
Version: 2015-07-20
Epigraph (#ua2effdb7-c4e7-572f-b0b9-b5317ef5163a)
When you have sinned grievously,
the Devil is waiting.
Sicilian Proverb
Contents
Cover (#u89ccb97d-5744-5e60-a221-e54d24f02bdd)
Title Page (#u76d9a179-7c59-5afb-9574-9bfa05990934)
Copyright (#uec61a7b2-aa2e-54c8-b767-5f4ab01090cc)
Epigraph (#ubbde09c6-4040-554b-84df-bf063992e442)
HELLSMOUTH (#udaa9d677-b71e-59b5-b6bf-3597278159e1)
Chapter 1 (#u5560fb7f-4d03-57f1-8c21-d272b2cc9879)
NEW YORK IN THE BEGINNING (#u44c362d4-3087-569a-8c3d-392f0e6ee6f6)
Chapter 2 (#ud03fd2c8-3dd6-51f9-b710-d7417042cb85)
Chapter 3 (#ufc93dbc0-48af-5486-acc5-1ae7e18a4321)
Chapter 4 (#uffb2ddb4-6b75-5e10-b57c-01cc74084e3d)
LONDON (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
LEBANON AL SHARIZ (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
LONDON (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
SCOTLAND IRELAND (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
LONDON (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
HELLSMOUTH (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
LONDON (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
ALSO BY JACK HIGGINS (#litres_trial_promo)
Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
HELLSMOUTH (#ua2effdb7-c4e7-572f-b0b9-b5317ef5163a)
1 (#ua2effdb7-c4e7-572f-b0b9-b5317ef5163a)
It was the rat, in a way, which brought Blake Johnson not only awake, but back to life. Sitting on the stone seat in the darkness, up to his waist in water, it was astonishing that he’d drifted into sleep at all, and then he’d come awake, aware of something on his neck, and had sat up.
The light in the grilled entrance behind him gave enough illumination for him to see what it was that slid from his left shoulder. It splashed into the water, surfaced, and turned to look at him, nose pointing, eyes unwinking.
It took Blake back more than twenty-five years to when he’d been a young Special Forces sergeant at the end of the Vietnam War, up to his neck in a tidal swamp in the Mekong Delta, trying to avoid sudden death at the hands of the Vietcong. There had been rats there, too, especially because of the bodies.
No bodies here. Just the grille entrance with the faint light showing through, the rough stone walls of the tunnel, the strong, dank sewer smell, and the grille forty yards the other way, the grille that meant there was nowhere to go, as he’d found when they had first put him into this place.
The rat floated, watching him, strangely friendly. Blake said softly, ‘Now you behave yourself. Be off with you.’
He stirred the water, and the rat fled. He leaned back, intensely cold, and tried to think straight. He remembered coming to a kind of half-life in the Range Rover, the effects of the drugs wearing off. They’d come over a hill, in heavy rain, some sort of storm, and then in the lightning he’d seen cliffs below, a cruel sea, and above the cliffs a castle like something out of a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm.
When Blake had groaned and tried to sit up, Falcone, the one sitting beside the driver, had turned and smiled.
‘There you are. Back in the land of the living.’
And Blake, trying hard to return to some kind of reality, had said, ‘Where am I?’
And Falcone had smiled. ‘The end of the world, my friend. There’s nowhere else but the Atlantic Ocean all the way to America. Hellsmouth, that’s what they call this place.’
He’d started to laugh as Blake lapsed back into semi-consciousness.
Time really had no meaning. His bandaged right shoulder hurt as he sat on the seat, arms tightly folded to try and preserve some kind of body heat, and yet his senses were alert and strangely sharp so that when there was a clang behind him and the grille opened, he sat up.
‘Hey, there you are, Dottore. Still with us,’ Falcone said.
‘And fuck you, too,’ Blake managed.
‘Excellent. Signs of life. I like that. Out you come.’
Falcone got a hand on the collar of Blake’s shirt and pulled. Blake went through the opening and landed on his hands and knees in the corridor. Russo was there, a smile on his ugly face.
‘He don’t look too good.’
‘Well, he sure as hell stinks. Wash him down.’
There was a hose fastened to a brass tap in the wall. Russo turned it on and directed the spray all over Blake’s body. It was ice cold and he fought for breath. Russo finally switched off and draped a blanket round Blake’s shoulders.
‘The boss wants to see you, so be good.’
‘Sure, he’ll be good,’ Falcone said. ‘Just like that nice little wife of his in Brooklyn was good.’
Blake pulled the blanket around him and looked up. ‘You did that?’
‘Hey, business is business.’
‘I’ll kill you for that.’
‘Don’t be stupid. You’re on borrowed time as it is. Let’s move it, the man’s waiting,’ and he pushed Blake along the corridor.
They climbed two sets of stone steps and finally reached a black oak door bound in iron. Russo opened it, and Falcone pushed Blake through into a baronial hall, stone-flagged, with a staircase to the left and a log fire burning on a stone hearth. Suits of armour and ancient banners hung from poles. There was a slightly unreal touch to things, like a bad film set.
‘What happened to Dracula?’ Blake asked.
Russo frowned. ‘Dracula? What is this?’
‘Never mind.’ Two men were lounging by the fire. Rossi and Cameci; he’d seen their faces on the computer, more Solazzo family hoods.
Falcone pushed Blake forward. ‘Hey, I’m with you. Christopher Lee was the best. I loved those Hammer movies.’
Russo opened another black oak door. Inside was a room with a high ceiling, another log fire on a stone hearth, candlelight and shadows, and behind a large desk shrouded in darkness, a shadowy figure.
‘Bring Mr Johnson in, Aldo. By the fire. He must be cold.’
Falcone took Blake to the fire and pulled a chair forward. ‘Sit.’
The man in the shadows said, ‘Brandy, I think. A large one would seem to be in order.’
Blake sat there while Russo went to a side table and poured brandy from a decanter and brought it to him. It burned all the way down and Blake coughed.
‘Now give him a cigarette, Aldo. Like all of us, Mr Johnson is trying to stop, but life is short, art long, and experiment perilous. There’s Latin for that, but I forget how it goes.’
‘Oh, didn’t they teach you that at Harvard Law School?’
Blake took the cigarette and light from Falcone.
‘As a matter of fact, no. But clever of you. You obviously know who I am.’
‘Hell, why carry on like this? Of course I know who you are. Jack Fox, pride of the Solazzo family. So why don’t you turn up the light?’
A moment passed, and it did go up and Fox sat there; the dark hair, the devil’s wedge of a face, the mocking smile. He took a cigarette from a silver case and lit it.
‘And I know you, Blake Johnson. You came out of Vietnam with a chestful of medals, joined the FBI, and saved President Jake Cazalet from assassination when he was still a senator. Shot two bad guys and took a bullet. Now you run the Basement, downstairs at the White House, as a kind of private hit force for the President. But unfortunately, Blake’ – he paused to take a puff – ‘I don’t think Cazalet can save you now.’
