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final end, Michael, whatever comes.”
    “Good girl.” He put an arm round her and squeezed. “Now could we go and get something to eat? I’m starving.”
     
TWO
     
    “A STRANGE MAN, SEAN DILLON,” FERGUSON SAID.
    “I’d say that was an understatement, sir,” Hannah Bernstein told him.
    They were sitting in the rear of Ferguson’s Daimler threading their way through the West End traffic.
    “He was born in Belfast, but his mother died in childbirth. His father came to work in London, so the boy went to school here. Incredible talent for acting. He did a year at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and one or two roles at the National Theatre. He also has a flair for languages, everything from Irish to Russian.”
    “All very impressive, sir, but he still ended up shooting people for the Provisional IRA.”
    “Yes, well that was because his father, on a trip home to Belfast, got caught in some crossfire and was killed by a British Army patrol. Dillon took the oath, did a fast course on weaponry in Libya, and never looked back.”
    “Why the switch from the IRA to the international scene?”
    “Disenchantment with the glorious cause. Dillon is a thoroughly ruthless man when he has to be. He’s killed many times in his career, but the random bomb that kills women and children? Let’s say that’s not his style.”
    “Are you trying to tell me he actually has some notion of morality?”
    Ferguson laughed. “Well he certainly never played favorites. Worked for the PLO, but also as an underwater specialist for the Israelis.”
    “For money, of course.”
    “Naturally. Our Sean does like the good things in life. The attempt to blow up Downing Street, that was for money. Saddam Hussein was behind that. And yet eighteen months later he flies a light plane loaded with medical supplies for children into Bosnia and no payment involved.”
    “What happened, did God speak down through the clouds to him or something?”
    “Does it matter? The Serbs had him, and his prospects, to put it mildly, looked bleak. I did a deal with them which saved him from a firing squad. In return he came to work for me, slate wiped clean.”
    “Excuse me, sir, but that’s a slate that will never wipe clean.”
    “My dear Chief Inspector, there are many occasions in this line of work when it’s useful to be able to set a thief to catch one. If you are to continue to work for me, you’ll have to get used to the idea.” He peered out as they turned into Grafton Street. “Are you sure he’s at this place?”
    “So they tell me, sir. His favorite restaurant.”
    “Excellent,” Ferguson said. “I could do with a bite to eat myself.”
     
     
    Sean Dillon sat in the upstairs bar of Mulligan’s Irish Restaurant and worked his way through a dozen oysters and half a bottle of Krug champagne to help things along as he read the evening paper. He was a small man, no more than five-feet-five, with hair so fair that it was almost white. He wore dark cord jeans, an old black leather flying jacket, a white scarf at his throat. The eyes were his strangest feature, like water over a stone, clear, no color, and there was a permanent, slight ironic quirk to the corner of his mouth, the look of a man who no longer took life too seriously.
    “So there you are,” Charles Ferguson said and Dillon glanced up and groaned. “No place to hide, not tonight. I’ll have a dozen of those and a pint of Guinness.”
    A young waitress standing by had heard. Dillon said to her in Irish, “A fine lordly Englishman, a colleen , but his mother, God rest her, was Irish, so give him what he wants.”
    The girl gave him a smile of true devotion and went away. Ferguson sat down and Dillon looked up at Hannah Bernstein. “And who might you be, girl?”
    “This is Detective Chief Inspector Hannah Bernstein, Special Branch, my new assistant, and I don’t want you corrupting her. Now where’s my Guinness?”
    It was then that she received her first shock, for as