The White House Connection Read Online Free PDF Page A

"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 whiskey. 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 ind 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