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Dillon said, ‘He isn’t the kind to commit suicide, so he wouldn’t walk up to him in the crowd.’ He looked up at the wheelhouse perched on top of the ship, three levels of decks below it. ‘That’s it. It has to be.’
He ran for the steps leading up, Hannah at his heels, Ferguson struggling behind. He looked along the first deck, which was deserted, and started up the steps to the next. As he reached it, the Prime Minister said over the Tannoy, ‘I’m proud to present to you the President of the United States.’
At the same moment as Dillon reached the deck he saw Michael Ahern open the saloon door at the far end and enter, followed by Norah Bell carrying a tray covered by a white napkin.
The saloon was deserted. Ahern moved forward and looked down through the windows to the forward deck where the President stood at the microphone, the British and Israeli Prime Ministers beside him. Ahern eased one of the windows open and took out his gun.
The door opened gently behind him and Dillon moved in, his Walther ready. ‘Jesus, Michael, but you never give up, do you?’
Ahern turned, the gun against his thigh. ‘Sean Dillon, you old bastard,’ and then his hand swung up.
Dillon shot him twice in the heart, a double thud of the silenced pistol that drove him back against the bulkhead. Norah Bell stood there, frozen, clutching the tray.
Dillon said, ‘Now, if there was a pistol under that napkin and you were thinking about reaching for it, I’d have to kill you, Norah, and neither of us would like that, you being a decent Irish girl. Just put the tray down.’
Very slowly, Norah Bell did as she was told and placed the tray on the nearest table. Dillon turned, the Walther swinging from his right hand, and said to Ferguson and Hannah, ‘There you go, all’s well that ends well.’
Behind him Norah hitched up her skirt, pulled the flick knife from her stocking and sprang the blade, plunging it into his back. Dillon reared up in agony and dropped his Walther.
‘Bastard!’ Norah cried, pulled out the knife and thrust it into him again.
Dillon lurched against the table and hung there for a moment. Norah raised the knife to strike a third blow and Hannah Bernstein dropped to one knee, picked up Dillon’s Walther and shot her in the centre of the forehead. At the same moment Dillon slipped from the table and rolled on to his back.
It was around midnight at the London Clinic, one of the world’s greatest hospitals, and Hannah Bernstein sat in the first-floor reception area close to Dillon’s room. She was tired, which in the circumstances was hardly surprising, but a diet of black coffee and cigarettes had kept her going. The door at the end of the corridor swung open and, to her astonishment, Ferguson entered followed by the President and Colonel Candy.
‘The President was returning to the American Embassy,’ Ferguson told her.
‘But in the circumstances I felt I should look in. You’re Chief Inspector Bernstein, I understand.’ The President took her hand. ‘I’m eternally grateful.’
‘You owe more to Dillon, sir. He was the one who thought it through, he was the one who knew they were on board.’
The President moved to the window and peered in. Dillon, festooned with wires, lay on a hospital bed, a nurse beside him.
‘How is he?’
‘Intensive care, sir,’ she said. ‘A four-hour operation. She stabbed him twice.’
‘I brought in Professor Henry Bellamy of Guy’s Hospital, Mr President,’ Ferguson said. ‘The best surgeon in London.’
‘Good.’ The President nodded. ‘I owe you and your people for this, Brigadier, I’ll never forget.’
He walked away and Colonel Candy said, ‘Thank God it worked out the way it did; that way we can keep it under wraps.’
‘I know,’ Ferguson said. ‘It never happened.’
Candy walked away and Hannah Bernstein said, ‘I saw Professor Bellamy half an hour ago. He came to check on him.’
‘And what did he say?’ Ferguson frowned. ‘He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?’
‘Oh, he’ll live, sir, if that’s what you mean. The trouble is Bellamy doesn’t think he’ll ever be the same again. She almost gutted him.’
Ferguson put an arm round her shoulder. ‘Are you all right, my dear?’
‘You mean am I upset because I killed someone tonight? Not at all, Brigadier. I’m really not the nice Jewish girl Dillon imagines. I’m a rather Old Testament Jewish girl. She was a murderous bitch. She deserved to die.’ She took out a cigarette and lit it. ‘No, it’s Dillon I’m sorry for. He did a good job. He deserved better.’
‘I thought you didn’t like him,’ Ferguson said.
‘Then you were wrong, Brigadier.’ She looked in through the window at Dillon. ‘The trouble is I liked him too much and that never pays in our line of work.’
She turned and walked away. Ferguson hesitated, glanced once more at Dillon, then went after her.
3 (#udcedcd13-98ec-50bd-af08-ea68a46400a2)
And two months later in another hospital, Our Lady of Mercy in New York, on the other side of the Atlantic as darkness fell, young Tony Jackson clocked in for night duty. He was a tall, handsome man of twenty-three who had qualified as a doctor at Harvard Medical School the year before. Our Lady of Mercy, a charity hospital mainly staffed by nuns, was not many young doctors’ idea of the ideal place to be an intern.
But Tony Jackson was an idealist. He wanted to practise real medicine and he could certainly do that at Our Lady of Mercy, who could not believe their luck at getting their hands on such a brilliant young man. He loved the nuns, found the vast range of patients fascinating. The money was poor, but in his case money was no object. His father, a successful Manhattan attorney, had died far too early from cancer, but he had left them well provided for. In any case, his mother, Rosa, was from the Little Italy district of New York with a doting father big in the construction business.
Tony liked the night shift, that atmosphere peculiar to hospitals all over the world, and it gave him the opportunity to be in charge. For the first part of the evening he worked on the casualty shift, dealing with a variety of patients, stitching slashed faces, handling as best he could junkies who were coming apart because they couldn’t afford a fix. It was all pretty demanding, but slackened off after midnight.
He was alone in the small canteen having coffee and a sandwich when the door opened and a young priest looked in. ‘I’m Father O’Brien from St Mark’s. I had a call to come and see a Mr Tanner, a Scottish gentleman. I understand he needs the last rites.’
‘Sorry, Father, I only came on tonight, I wouldn’t know. Let me look at the schedule.’ He checked it briefly then nodded. ‘Jack Tanner, that must be him. Admitted this afternoon. Age seventy-five, British citizen. Collapsed at his daughter’s house in Queens. He’s in a private room on level three, number eight.’
‘Thank you,’ the priest said and disappeared.
Jackson finished his coffee and idly glanced through the New York Times. There wasn’t much news, an IRA bomb in London in the city’s financial centre, an item about Hong Kong, the British colony in China which was to revert to Chinese control on 1 July 1997. It seemed that the British governor of the colony was introducing a thoroughly democratic voting system while he had the chance and the Chinese government in Peking were annoyed, which didn’t look good for Hong Kong when the change took place.
He threw the paper down, bored and restless, got up and went outside. The elevator doors opened and Father O’Brien emerged. ‘Ah, there you are, Doctor. I’ve done what I could for the poor man, but he’s not long for this world. He’s from the Highlands of Scotland, would you believe? His daughter is married to an American.’
‘That’s interesting,’ said Jackson. ‘I always imagined the Scots as Protestant.’
‘My dear lad, not in the Highlands,’ Father O’Brien told him. ‘The Catholic tradition is very strong.’ He smiled. ‘Well, I’ll be on my way. Good night to you.’
Jackson watched him go then got in the elevator and rose to the third level. As he emerged, he saw Sister Agnes, the night duty nurse, come out of room eight and go to her desk.
Jackson said, ‘I’ve just seen Father O’Brien. He tells me this Mr Tanner doesn’t look good.’
‘There’s his chart, Doctor. Chronic bronchitis and severe emphysema.’
Jackson examined the notes. ‘Lung capacity only twelve per cent and the blood pressure is unbelievable.’
‘I just checked his heart, Doctor. Very irregular.’
‘Let’s take a look at him.’
Jack Tanner’s face was drawn and wasted, the sparse hair snow white. His eyes were closed as he breathed in short gasps, a rattling sound in his throat at intervals.
‘Oxygen?’ Jackson asked.
‘Administered an hour ago. I gave it to him myself.’
‘Aye, but she wouldn’t give me a cigarette.’ Jack Tanner opened his eyes. ‘Is that no the terrible thing, Doctor?’
‘Now, Mr Tanner,’ Sister Agnes reproved him gently. ‘You know that’s not allowed.’
Jackson leaned over to check the tube connections and noticed the scar on the right side of the chest. ‘Would that have been a bullet wound?’ he asked.
‘Aye, it was so. Shot in the lung while I was serving in the Highland Light Infantry. That was before Dunkirk in nineteen forty. I’d have died if the Laird hadn’t got me out, and him wounded so bad he lost an eye.’
‘The Laird, you say?’ Jackson was suddenly interested, but Tanner started to cough so harshly that he almost had a convulsion. Jackson grabbed for the oxygen mask. ‘Breathe nice and slowly. That’s it.’ He removed it after a while and Tanner smiled weakly. ‘I’ll be back,’ Jackson told him and went out.
‘You said the daughter lives in Queens?’
‘That’s right, Doctor.’
‘Don’t let’s waste time. Send a cab for her now and put it on my account. I don’t think he’s got long. I’ll go back and sit with him.’
Jackson pulled a chair forward. ‘Now, what were you saying about the Laird?’
‘That was Major Ian Campbell, Military Cross and Bar, the bravest man I ever knew. Laird of Loch Dhu Castle in the Western Highlands of Scotland, as his ancestors had been for centuries before him.’
‘Loch Dhu?’
‘That’s Gaelic. The black loch. To us who grew up there it was always the Place of Dark Waters.’
‘So you knew the Laird as a boy?’
‘We were boys together. Learned to shoot grouse, deer, and the fishing was the best in the world, and then the war came. We’d both served in the reserve before it all started, so we went out to France straightaway.’
‘That must have been exciting stuff?’
‘Nearly the end of us, but afterwards they gave the Laird the staff job working for Mountbatten. You’ve heard of him?’
‘Earl Mountbatten, the one the IRA blew up?’
‘The bastards, and after all he did in the war. He was Supreme Commander in Southeast Asia with the Laird as one of his aides and he took me with him.’
‘That must have been interesting.’
Tanner managed a smile. ‘Isn’t it customary to offer a condemned man a cigarette?’
‘That’s true.’
‘And I am condemned, aren’t I?’
Jackson hesitated then took out a pack of cigarettes. ‘Just as we all are, Mr Tanner.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ Tanner said. ‘Give me one of those and I’ll tell you about the Chungking Covenant. All those years ago I gave the Laird my oath, but it doesn’t seem to matter now.’
‘The what?’ Jackson asked.
‘Just one, Doc, it’s a good story.’
Jackson lit a cigarette and held it to Tanner’s lips. The old man inhaled, coughed then inhaled again. ‘Christ, that’s wonderful.’ He lay back. ‘Now, let’s see, when did it all start?’
Tanner lay with his eyes closed, very weak now. ‘What happened after the crash?’ Jackson asked.
The old man opened his eyes. ‘The Laird was hurt bad. The brain, you see. He was in a coma in a Delhi hospital for three months and I stayed with him as his batman. They sent us back to London by sea and by then the end of the war was in sight. He spent months in the brain-damage unit for servicemen at Guy’s Hospital, but he never really recovered and he had burns from the crash as well and almost total loss of memory. He came so close to death early in forty-six that I packed his things and sent them home to Castle Dhu.’
‘And did he die?’
‘Not for another twenty years. Back home we went to the estate. He wandered the place like a child. I tended his every want.’
‘What about family?’
‘Oh, he never married. He was engaged to a lassie who was killed in the London blitz in forty. There was his sister, Lady Rose, although everybody calls her Lady Katherine. Her husband was a baronet killed in the desert campaign. She ran the estate then and still does, though she’s eighty now. She lives in the gate lodge. Sometimes, she rents the big house for the shooting season to rich Yanks or Arabs.’
‘And the Chungking Covenant?’
‘Nothing came of that. Lord Louis and Mao never managed to get together again.’
‘But the fourth copy in the Laird’s Bible; you saved that. Wasn’t it handed over to the authorities?’
‘It stayed where it was in his Bible. The Laird’s affair after all and he not up to telling anyone much of anything.’ He shrugged. ‘And then the years had rolled by and it didn’t seem to matter.’
‘Did Lady Katherine ever come to know of it?’
‘I never told her. I never spoke of it to anyone and he was not capable and, as I said, it didn’t seem to matter any longer.’
‘But you’ve told me?’
Tanner smiled weakly. ‘That’s because you’re a nice boy who talked to me and gave me a cigarette. A long time ago, Chungking in the rain and Mountbatten and your General Stilwell.’
‘And the Bible?’ Jackson asked.
‘Like I told you, I sent all his belongings home when I thought he was going to die.’
‘So the Bible went back to Loch Dhu?’
‘You could say that.’ For some reason Tanner started to laugh and that led to him choking again.
Jackson got the oxygen mask and the door opened and Sister Agnes ushered in a middle-aged couple. ‘Mr and Mrs Grant.’
The woman hurried forward to take Tanner’s hand. He managed a smile, breathing deeply, and she started to talk to him in a low voice and in a language totally unfamiliar to Jackson.
He turned to her husband, a large amiable looking man. ‘It’s Gaelic, Doctor; they always spoke Gaelic together. He was on a visit. His wife died of cancer last year back in Scotland.’
At that moment Tanner stopped breathing. His daughter cried out and Jackson passed her gently to her husband and bent over the patient. After a while he turned to face them. ‘I’m sorry, but he’s gone,’ he said simply.
