“Right. Thanks, Roper.”

He turned as Dillon entered the wheelhouse and filled him in. Dillon had a look at the chart. “I’ve done this kind of run before, so I know what I’m doing, but the weather stinks. Look at it, Charles.”

The whole of Oban was draped in mist. “Bleeding awful,” Billy said.

“All right.” Dillon nodded. “Let’s allow for him landing at eleven, being driven across the island, and then some sort of boat running him five miles out to the Mona Lisa. It’s two o’clock at the earliest before he boards and she turns for Ulster, but with that weather…” He shook his head. “What do you think, Charles?”

“Three o’clock at the earliest.”

“All right. We’ll leave at two, then. For the moment, let’s get back ashore for a full Scots breakfast… and by the look of it, seasick pills for Billy.”

The flights from London to Ronaldsway had been bad enough. Rossi, the ex-Tornado pilot, always liked to take over the controls for a while, but it was rough and the crosswinds at the airport had been treacherous, although he’d managed the landing himself. A local Rashid employee met him with a car and took him across the island to a small village, where a motor cruiser waited.

It had a crew of two and set out to sea immediately, pushing out from the shelter of a small pier into the rough waves, obscured by fog. It took them an hour to find the Mona Lisa. They pulled alongside the Spanish trawler, its nets draped high over the stern. The two ships collided twice, and men leaned over with grappling lines. Rossi took his chance and jumped over to the other boat. He turned and waved to the motor cruiser, the captain waved back, and then he motored away.

Three or four men at the rail eyed Rossi up and down. He ignored them and went toward the wheelhouse. The door opened and a man emerged in a reefer coat and seaman’s cap, heavily unshaven, an unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

By any estimate, he would have been termed a nasty piece of work. He looked Rossi over with a kind of contempt. “I’m Martino, the captain.”

“And I’m Marco Rossi, your boss.”

A couple of the men laughed and Martino lit his cigarette. “Should I be impressed?”

Rossi reached, grabbed his left ear, his thumb well inside, and produced his Walther and rammed it hard under the chin.

“Now, you have the option of continuing to be employed by Rashid and make a lot of money, or I blow your brains out now, up through the mouth and into the brain. Explodes the back of the skull. Very messy.”

Martino tried to smile. “Eh, señor, there’s a mistake here.”

“Not mine, yours. Screw with me and you’re finished. Do we understand each other?”

“Perfectly, señor.”

“Good. Then let’s get on with it.”

He walked into the wheelhouse and the crew looked at Martino, who nodded, so they went about their tasks.

Around the middle of the afternoon the Highlander was ploughing through a turbulent sea, down from Oban, a couple of miles off the Isle of Man into the Irish Sea. Dillon was at the wheel, Billy at the chart table and Ferguson below.

The mist was so heavy, the driving rain so intense, that it was more like evening, a kind of early darkness, and Dillon could see one of the Irish ferries, red-and-green navigational lights already visible.

Ferguson came into the wheelhouse with three mugs of tea on a tray. He put the tray down on the table and looked at the chart, then switched the ship-to-shore radio to weather and listened.

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better. Better let me have the wheel, Dillon.”

Dillon didn’t even argue. Ferguson altered course a couple of points, then increased his speed, racing the heavy weather that threatened from the east. The waves grew rougher.

“Jesus,” Billy said. “I’m scared to death.”

“No need, Billy, he knows what he’s doing. I’ll go down to the galley and make some bacon sandwiches.”

“Not for me. I could throw up now.”

“Take another couple of pills,” Dillon said, and went below.

He came back half an hour later with sandwiches on a plate and found Ferguson alone.

“What happened to the boy wonder?”

“Took a couple of pills and retired to lie down. I say, those smell good.”

“Help yourself.”

Ferguson put the steering on automatic and took a bacon sandwich. Dillon splashed whiskey into two plastic cups and they ate together in a kind of companionable silence. It was getting really dark now, far earlier than normal, only a slight phosphorescence shining from the sea.

“You seem at home,” Dillon said.

“I always liked the sea, from boyhood. The West Sussex coast, down to the Isle of Wight, the Solent. Loved it.” He drank the whiskey. “I’ll have the other half.”

He helped himself to another sandwich. “That Browning with the twenty-shot magazine you’ve put in the flap there. It took me back.”

“Really?”

“Yes. In 1973, I took extended leave; I was an acting major then. Done rather well for my age. I did the Atlantic run single-handed, Portsmouth to Long Island. It had to be Long Island, because I had an old uncle living there. He was a general, too. The American connection in my family.”

“A remarkable achievement,” Dillon said.

“Therapy, Dillon, therapy.” He finished the last sandwich and took the wheel again.

“What for?”

“Well, I’d been shot in the shoulder, but it was more than that. It was psychological. Coming to terms with what I was capable of.”

Dillon poured two more whiskeys. “And what was that?”

“I was never SAS, Dillon. What you’ve never known was that I served with Code Nine Intelligence.”

He had just named one of the most infamous army units involved in the underground fight with the IRA.

“Jesus,” Dillon said.

“It was a hell of a way to earn a living in Londonderry in 1973, but there I was. Thirty years old, Oxford, Sandhurst, Malaya, Communist rebels in the Yemen, Eoka in Cyprus, and then along came Ireland. I couldn’t wait to switch from the Grenadier Guards to counterinsurgency work.”

“You wanted the smell of powder again?”

“Of war, Dillon. I’d been engaged for three years, a lovely girl called Mary. From an army family, only she could never see the point. Mind you, she hung in there until Cork Street.”

He was talking as if he was alone, taking some kind of solitary journey into the past.

“Cork Street?” Dillon said. “What was that?”

“That was where I earned the Military Cross, Dillon, one of those they handed out in Northern Ireland for unspecified reasons.”

Dillon said softly, “And what would that be, Charles?”

“Well, I was link man between two safehouses run by the SAS. One night, I was doing a run quite late. As we discovered later, my cover had been blown. Going through Cork Street down by the docks, I’d a car on my tail, then another car came out of a side and turned to block me.”

“Just a minute,” Dillon said. “July ’seventy-three, Derry – the Cork Street massacre, that’s what they called it. The SAS took out five Provos. A hell of a thing.”

“No, they didn’t. I took out five Provos.”

It was only then that Dillon was aware of a slight noise, turned and found Billy, the door half open, standing there, revealed.

Ferguson glanced over his shoulder. “Come in, Billy. Yes, Dillon, the second car blocked me, and the one in the rear was right up my backside. There were three Provos in front, two at my back. They just shouted, ‘Out, out, you Brit bastard.’ It always seemed ironic, being half-Irish. It’s the posh voice, you see.”

“So what did you do?”

“I had what you’ve got in there, a Browning with a twenty-round magazine, on the left-hand seat. One man wrenched open the driver’s door, so I shot him between the eyes, then shot his two friends through the door. I was using hollowpoint cartridges. Devastating.”