The Wolf at the Door Read Online Free PDF

useful.”
    “On the other hand, Pool was only half Irish, through his mother.”
    “They’re sometimes the worst. De Valera had a Spanish father and was born in New York, but his Irish mother was the making of him. We’ll be seeing you round breakfast time. We’d better have words with Clancy Smith, I promised to call him back.”
    He switched off, and Miller said, “Sean, you were a top enforcer with the IRA and you never got your collar felt once. Do you really think this is some kind of IRA hit?”
    “Not really. Most men of influence in the Provisional IRA are now serving in government and the community in one way or the other. Of course, there are splinter groups still in existence—that bunch called the Real IRA, and rumors that the Irish National Liberation Army still waits.”
    “INLA,” Miller said. “The ones who probably killed Mountbatten and certainly assassinated Airey Neave coming out of the underground car park in the House of Commons.”
    “True,” Dillon said. “And they were the great ones for using sleepers. Middle-class professional men, sometimes university educated, accountants, lawyers, even doctors. People think there’s something new in the fact that Islamic terror is able to recruit from the professions, but the IRA was there long before them.”
    “Do you believe IRA sleepers still exist?” Miller asked.
    “I guess we can’t take the chance they don’t. I’m going to call Clancy.”
    Clancy said, “This really raises the game,” once they reached him. “I’m sitting at Blake’s bedside now. I’ll let you talk to him, but don’t talk too long. By the way, we’ve established that Flynn’s American passport was a first-class forgery.”
    Blake said, “That you, Sean?”
    “It sure is, old stick,” Dillon said.
    “Clancy filled me in about Miller and me and some sort of possible IRA link with these prayer cards.”
    “And we’ve now discovered the same card in Ferguson’s driver’s wallet, and I hear the guy who tried to waste you, Flynn, had a false American passport.”
    Blake laughed weakly. “I’ll tell you something funny about him, Sean. When I had him covered and told him to give up, he didn’t say ‘Fuck you.’ He said ‘Fug you.’ I only ever heard that when I was in Northern Ireland.”
    “Which shows you what gentlemen we are over there. Take care, old son, and sleep well.” Dillon switched off, and turned to Miller. “You heard all that, so there we are.”
    Miller glanced at his watch. “Two hours to go. I’ll try to get some sleep.” He closed his eyes and turned his head against the pillow behind him, reaching to switch off the light.
    Dillon simply sat there, staring into the shadows, the verse from the prayer card repeating endlessly in his brain, remembering a nineteen-year-old actor who had walked out of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art to accept an offer to work with the National Theatre, and the night when the local priest in Kilburn called to break the news to him that his father, on a visit to Belfast, had been caught in a firefight between PIRA activists and British troops and killed.
    “A casualty of war, Sean,” Father James Murphy of the Holy Name church had said. “You must say your prayers, not only the Hail Mary, but this special one on the prayer card I give you now. It is a comfort for all victims of a great cause. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, we who are ourselves alone.’ ”
    He tried closing his eyes, but it still went around and around in his brain, and he opened them again, filled with despair, just as he had felt it that day, desolation turning into rage, a need for revenge that had taken the nineteen-year-old on a violent path which had shaped his whole life, a path from which there could be no turning back. Yet, as always, he was saved by that dark streak of gallows humor in him.
    “Jesus, Sean,” he told himself softly. “What are you going to do,