The White House Connection

‘There’s a man called Blake Johnson at the White House, around fifty, a Vietnam veteran, lawyer, ex-FBI. He’s Director of the General Affairs Department at the White House. Because it’s downstairs, it’s known as the Basement. It’s one of the most closely guarded secrets of the administration, passed from one President to another. It’s totally separate from the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service. Answers only to the President. The whispers are so faint people don’t believe it exists.’

‘But it does?’

‘Oh, yes, and the British Prime Minister has his own version. It’s there in the file. Brigadier Charles Ferguson runs it.’

‘Charles Ferguson? But I’ve known him for years.’

‘Well, I don’t know what you thought he was, but his outfit is known in the trade as the Prime Minister’s private army. It’s given the IRA a bad time for years. Ferguson has a sizeable setup at the Ministry of Defence and is responsible only to the PM, which is why the other intelligence outfits loathe him. His right hand is an ex-IRA enforcer named Sean Dillon; his left, a Detective Chief Inspector named Hannah Bernstein, grand-daughter of a rabbi, if you can believe it. Quite a bunch, huh?’

‘But what has this to do with anything?’

‘Simply, that the Secret Intelligence Service didn’t want Ferguson and company involved, because Ferguson might have told the Prime Minister, and Ferguson has a private contact with Blake Johnson, which meant the President would have been informed and SIS couldn’t have that.’

‘So what happened?’

‘SIS started to send the White House mild and useless information and disinformation. There was no way of implicating the members of the Sons of Erin. And then the file was lost.’ He reached for the folder and held it up. ‘Except for my copy. I don’t know why I took it at the time. Self-disgust, I suppose. Now, I think you should have it.’

He started to cough; she passed him a napkin. He spat into it and she saw blood. ‘Should I get the doctor?’

‘He’s calling in later. Not that it’ll make any difference.’ He gave her a ghastly smile. ‘That’s it then, now you know. I’d better lie down.’

He rose, picked up the stick and walked slowly into the hall. ‘I’m sorry, Helen, desperately sorry.’

‘It’s not your fault, Tony.’

He heaved himself up the stairs and she watched him go. Hedley appeared behind her, holding the file. ‘I figured you’d want this.’

‘I surely do.’ She took it from him. ‘Let’s move on, Hedley. There’s only death here.’

Back in the Mercedes, as they drove through the narrow lanes, she read through the file, every detail, every photo. Strangely enough, she dwelt on Sean Dillon longer than anyone: the fair hair, the self-containment, the look of a man who had found life a bad joke. She closed the file and leaned back.

‘You okay, Lady Helen?’ Hedley asked.

‘Oh, fine. You can read the file yourself when we’re back at South Audley Street.’

She felt a flutter in her chest, opened her purse, shook two pills into her hand, and swallowed them. ‘Whisky, please, Hedley,’ she said.

He passed back the silver flask. ‘What’s going on? Are you okay?’

‘Just some pills the doctor gave me.’ She leaned back and closed her eyes. ‘No big deal. Just get me to South Audley Street.’

But Hedley didn’t believe her for a moment and drove on, his face troubled.

2 (#u5dcfa7e0-f5db-59f7-922d-ffcce773fe42)

At South Audley Street, she sat in the study and worked her way through the file again, studying the text, the photos.

The composition of the Sons of Erin was interesting. There was Senator Michael Cohan, aged fifty, a family fortune behind him derived from supermarkets and shopping malls; Martin Brady, fifty-two, an important official in the Teamsters’ Union; Patrick Kelly, forty-eight, a construction millionaire; and Thomas Cassidy, forty-five, who had made a fortune from Irish theme pubs. All Irish-Americans, but there was one surprise, a well-known London gangster named Tim Pat Ryan.

She passed the file to Hedley in the kitchen, got a pot of tea, returned to the study and started on her computer, a recent acquisition and something with which she’d become surprisingly expert, thanks to help from an unexpected source.

She’d asked for advice from the London office of her corporation, and their computer department had jumped to attention and recommended the best. She’d mastered the basics quickly, but soon wanted more and had consulted the corporation again. The result was the arrival in South Audley Street of a strange young man in a very high-tech electric wheelchair. She’d seen him from the drawing-room window, but when she went into the hall, Hedley already had the door open.

The young man on the sidewalk had hair to his shoulders, bright blue eyes and hollow cheeks. He also had scar tissue all over his face, the kind you got from bad burns.

‘Lady Helen?’ he said cheerfully as she appeared behind Hedley. ‘My name’s Roper. I’m told you’d like your computer to sit up and do a few tricks.’ He gave Hedley a twisted smile. ‘Turn me around, there’s a good chap, and pull me up the two steps. That’s the one thing these gadgets can’t manage.’

In the hall, Hedley turned him and she said, ‘The study.’

When they reached it, he looked at her computer setup and nodded. ‘Ah, PK800. Excellent.’ He glanced up at Hedley. ‘I’m not allowed to eat lunch, but I’d love a pot of tea to wash my pills down, Sergeant Major.’

Hedley smiled slowly. ‘Do I say “sir”?’

‘Well, I did make captain in the Royal Engineers. Bomb disposal.’ He held up his hands. They saw more scar tissue.

Hedley nodded and went out. Helen said, ‘IRA?’

Roper nodded. ‘I handled all those bombs so slickly, and then a small one caught me by surprise in a car in Belfast.’ He shook his head. ‘Very careless. Still, it did lead me to a further career, fatherhood being out.’ He eased his wheelchair to the computer bank. ‘I do love these things. They can do anything, if you know what to ask them.’ He turned and looked up at her. ‘Is that what you want, Lady Helen, for them to do anything?’

‘Oh, I think so.’

‘Good. Well, give me a cigarette and let’s see what you know, then we’ll see what I can teach you.’

Which he did. Every dirty trick in the computer book. By the time he’d finished, she was capable of hacking into the Ministry of Defence itself. And she continued to be an apt pupil until the morning she got yet another phone call – that was three, she thought; these things always seemed to travel in threes – the phone call that said Roper was in the hospital with kidney failure. They’d managed to save him, but he’d gone to a clinic in Switzerland and she’d never heard from him again.

Now, typing from memory, she started trawling through files, entering names as she went. Some were readily available. Others, such as Ferguson, Dillon, Hannah Bernstein and Blake Johnson, were not. On the other hand, when she cut into Scotland Yard’s most wanted list, there was Jack Barry, complete with a numbered black-and-white photo.

‘They got you once, you bastard,’ she mused. ‘Maybe we can do it again.’

Hedley came in from the kitchen with the file and put it on the desk. ‘The new barbarians.’

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Very old stuff, except that in other days we did something about it.’

‘Can I get you anything?’

‘No. Go to bed, Hedley. I’ll be okay.’

He went reluctantly. She poured another whisky. It seemed to be keeping her going. She opened the bottom drawer in the desk in search of a notepad and found the Colt .25 Peter had brought back from Bosnia, along with the box of fifty hollow-point cartridges and the silencer. It had been a highly illegal present, but Peter had known she liked shooting, both handgun and shotgun, and often practised in the improvised shooting range in the barn at Compton Place. She reached down and, almost absentmindedly, picked it up, then opened the box of cartridges, loaded the gun and screwed the silencer on the end. For a while, she held it in her hand, then put it on the desk and started on the file again.

Ferguson fascinated her. To have known him for so many years and yet not to have known him at all. And the Bernstein woman – so calm to look at in her horn-rimmed spectacles, yet a woman who had killed four times, the file said, had even killed another woman, a Protestant terrorist who had deserved to die.

And then there was Sean Dillon. Born in Ulster, raised by his father in London. An actor by profession, who had attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. When Dillon was nineteen, his father had gone on a visit to Belfast and been killed accidentally in a firefight with British paratroopers. Dillon had gone home and joined the IRA.

‘The kind of thing a nineteen-year-old would do,’ she said softly. ‘He took to the theatre of the street.’

Dillon had become the most feared enforcer the IRA ever had. He had killed many times. The man of a thousand faces, intelligence sources had named him, with typical originality. His saving grace had been that he would have no truck with the bombing and the slaughter of the innocent. He’d never been arrested until the day he had ended up in a Serb prison for flying in medicine for children (although Stinger missiles had also apparently been involved). It was Ferguson who had saved him from a firing squad, had blackmailed Dillon into working for him.

She went back to the Sons of Erin and finally came to Tim Pat Ryan. His record was foul. Drugs, prostitution, protection. Suspected of supplying arms and explosives to IRA active service units in London, but nothing proved. He had a pub in Wapping called The Sailor by the river on China Wharf. She took a London street guide from a shelf, leafed through it and located China Wharf on the relevant map.