The afternoon trade was light except for four men in the corner booth, and a fifth alongside. Harry Salter, his nephew Billy, his minders, Joe Baxter and Sam Hall, and Major Roper in his wheelchair.

Harry Salter looked up, saw Dillon first. “You little Irish bastard. And you, General. What’s going on?”

“Oh, a great deal, Harry.” Ferguson squeezed in. “We’ve got trouble and it affects all of us. How are you, Roper?”

The man in the state-of-the-art wheelchair smiled. He wore a reefer coat, his hair down to his shoulders, and his face was a taut mass of the scar tissue associated with burns. A Royal Engineers’ bomb disposal expert, decorated with the George Cross, his extraordinary career had been terminated by what he called a “silly little bomb” in a family car in Belfast.

He’d survived and discovered a whole new career in computers. Now, if you wanted to find out anything in cyberspace, it was Roper you called.

“I’m fine, General.”

“And you have the file?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Excellent.”

“Here, what goes on?” Harry Salter asked.

Ferguson said, “You see to the drinks, Dillon, and I’ll fill them in.”

Afterward, Harry Salter said, “So we’re back with Kate Rashid. She was going to knock us all off, and now this geezer has taken over.”

Dillon, standing at the bar, was joined by Billy, who said, “What do you think, Dillon?”

“I think he’s serious business, Billy.”

“Well, we’ve handled serious business before.”

“Yes, and it got you a bullet through your neck, eighteen stitches in your face and two bullets through the pelvis.”

“Dillon, I’m fit now. I work with a personal trainer every day.”

“Billy, you jumped out of an airplane for me at four hundred feet, twice. It’s over, that kind of thing.”

“So, I’m still good on the street.”

“We’ll see, younger brother.”

Behind them, Ferguson had finished. Harry Salter said, “A right bastard, this one. Just as bad as her.”

“So it would appear. What do you think, Roper?”

“Well, the coming together of Rashid and Berger does make them one of the most powerful corporations in the world. It’s the apotheosis of capitalism – if that doesn’t sound too Marxist.”

Ferguson nodded. “It’s like a bad novel, the whole thing.” He turned to Harry Salter. “I’ve had a trying morning, Harry. Could I have your famous shepherd’s pie and an indifferent red wine? I’m in need of comfort.”

6.

AT THE RASHID house in South Audley Street the Baron sat in the drawing room with Marco.

“So what’s our game plan?” Marco asked.

“Let’s start by taking some action against the small fry, these gangsters, the Salters.”

“I’ll work something out. I have Newton and Cook keeping Dillon’s place under surveillance.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Just to keep an eye on him, see where he goes, what contacts he makes. I’ve given Newton the addresses of those involved on a regular basis with him, also computer photos.”

“Where did you get those?”

“From the computer right here in the study. There’s a mass of information there – details of various schemes and operations Kate Rashid has put into play.”

“Business?”

“Of a sort.”

“I’ll leave it all to you, for the moment, Marco. With the merger of the two companies, I have enough on my hands. Just keep me informed.”

“Of course, Father,” Marco said and went out.

The next morning, the “council of war” had moved to Roper’s apartment in Regency Square. It was on the ground floor, with its own entrance and a slope to aid wheelchair users. Roper insisted on looking after himself and had had the apartment, from bathroom to kitchen, specially designed to take care of his problems.

His sitting room had been turned into a state-of-the-art computer laboratory, including some highly classified equipment, which was there mainly because it suited Charles Ferguson. Over the years since his disaster in Belfast, Roper had become a legend in the world of computers. He had broken every kind of system from Moscow to Washington and he had proved his worth to Ferguson and the Prime Minister on more than one occasion.

On that morning, Sean Dillon arrived first in his Mini Cooper, parked and pressed the doorbell. The voice box crackled and Roper said, “Who is it?”

“Sean, you idiot, let me in.”

The door swung open and he went through into the sitting room and found Roper in his wheelchair at the bank of computers. He crossed to a sideboard, found a bottle of Irish whiskey and poured one.

“Paddy? Okay, well, it’s not Bushmills, but you’re improving.”

“I’m on a pension, Dillon. The Ministry of Defence being as parsimonious as it is, I have to watch my pennies.”

“You could always sell your medals. The Military Cross would do okay, but the George Cross would make a fortune.”

“You’re always so amusing.” Roper tried a smile, always difficult with that ravaged, burned face.

“Don’t start feeling sorry for yourself. Ferguson said you had found something?”

“Yes, but let’s wait for them.” The front doorbell went and he pressed the remote control. “Here they are.”

A moment later, Ferguson appeared, and with him a woman in her late thirties, with red hair, wearing an Armani trouser suit. She looked like some high-level business executive, but she was Ferguson’s assistant, Detective Superintendent Hannah Bernstein, on loan to him from Special Branch. She had an M.A. in psychology from Oxford, but she had killed more than once in the line of duty.

“Ah, Dillon,” the general said, “we can get straight on with it. What have you got for us, Major?”

“You wanted me to have a look at von Berger in general, the way he’s been able to take over Rashid? Well, I discovered something interesting. A couple of years ago, he hiked two billion into Rashid for their oil exploration in Hazar and the Empty Quarter.”

There was silence. Hannah said, “Where on earth would he get that sort of money?”

“Swiss banks. And it made me smell a rather large rat.”

It was Dillon who said, “Let me guess. We’re into Nazi gold.”

“And not only that,” said Roper. “I got this story from an Israeli intelligence source. Von Berger was in Baghdad to see Saddam on some arms deal – and he was attacked by a mob in the old city. They were going to lynch him, when Kate Rashid came on the scene with a few Bedus, pistol in hand, and saved his life.”

“I can see it now,” Dillon said.

“Not being able to sleep at two-thirty in the morning, as often happens,” Roper went on, “I decided to go back even further on von Berger. You know that story that he left Berlin in a Storch that happened to be there as a backup in case von Greim’s Arado had problems? He told American and British intelligence that it was simply opportunistic. He knew it was waiting in Goebbels’s garage and commandeered it.”

“Only you don’t buy it,” Dillon put in.

“Not for a moment. It was all too convenient. So I decided to access the Führer Bunker on my computer. I worked through the Records Office, the accounts of his interrogations, then I got into the University of Berlin’s stuff on the Bunker, all the people there, those who died, those who faded away, those who rushed into the night in a mostly vain attempt to escape the Russians. Von Berger’s escape was obviously logged.”

“Where is this getting us?” Hannah asked.

“They’ve kept their records updated. Would you like to know how many people who were in the Führer Bunker in 1945 are still in the land of the living now?”

Ferguson said, “Other than eighty-year-old Max von Berger?”

“Yes. How would you like Sara Hesser, an SS auxiliary, who was used by the Führer as a relief secretary for his last six months in the Bunker? She was twenty-two years old in April 1945. That makes her seventy-nine now.”