A Devil is Waiting. Jack Higgins

      1

      It was late afternoon on Garrison Street, Brooklyn, as Daniel Holley sat at the wheel of an old Ford delivery truck, waiting for Dillon. There were parked vehicles, but little evidence of people.

      Rain drove in across the East River, clouding his view of the coastal ships tied up to the pier that stretched ahead. A policeman emerged from an alley a few yards away, his uniform coat running with water, cap pulled down over his eyes. He banged on the truck with his nightstick.

      Holley wound down the window. ‘Can I help you, Officer?’

      ‘I should imagine you could, you daft bastard,’ Sean Dillon told him. ‘Me being wet to the skin already.’

      He scrambled in and Holley said, ‘Why the fancy dress? Are we going to a party?’

      ‘Of a sort. You see that decaying warehouse down there with the sign saying “Murphy & Son – Import-Export”?’

      ‘How could I miss it? What about it?’ Holley took out an old silver case, extracted two cigarettes, lit them with a Zippo, and passed one over. ‘Get your lips round that, you’re shaking like a leaf. What’s the gig?’

      Dillon took a quick drag. ‘God help me, but that’s good. Ferguson called me from Washington and told me to check the place out, but not to do anything till I got a call from him.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Which I’m expecting just about now.’

      ‘How kind of him to think of us. Brooklyn in weather like this is such a joy,’ Holley told him, and at that moment, Dillon’s Codex sounded.

      He switched to speaker and General Charles Ferguson’s voice boomed out. ‘You’ve looked the place over, Dillon?’

      ‘As much as I could. Two cars outside it, that’s all. No sign of life.’

      ‘Well, life there undoubtedly is. I made an appointment by telephone for you, Daniel, with Patrick Murphy. Your name is Daniel Grimshaw, and you’re representing a Kosovo Muslim religious group seeking arms for defence purposes.’

      ‘And who exactly is Murphy and what’s it all about?’ Holley asked.

      ‘As you two well know, several dissident groups, all IRA in one way or another, have raised their ugly heads once again. The security services have managed to foil a number of potentially nasty incidents, but luck won’t always be on their side. You’ll remember the incident in Belfast not long ago when a bomb badly injured three policemen, one of whom lost his left arm. Since then another policeman has been killed by a car bomb.’

      ‘I heard about that,’ Dillon said.

      ‘Police officers are having to check under their cars again, just like in the bad old days, and some of them are finding explosive devices. We can’t have that. And there’s more. Attempts have started again to smuggle arms into Ulster. Last week, a trawler called the Amity tried to land a cargo on the County Down coast and was sighted by a Royal Navy gunboat. The crew did a runner and haven’t been caught, but I’ve firm evidence that the cargo of assorted weaponry originated with Murphy & Son.’