“I’ll find us a drink.” Dillon went into the galley and searched the cupboards. When he came back with a bottle of red wine and two glasses, he found the American looking at a faded newspaper clipping.
“I found this on the floor. The Prime Minister. It’s from the London Times, but I can’t make out the date.”
“Good old John Major. Must have slipped down the back of the desk when I cleared the rest of the material. February nineteen ninety-one, the mortar attack on Downing Street.”
“So it really is true and you were responsible for that. You nearly brought it off, you bastard.”
“That’s true. It was a rush job, no time to weld guidance fins to the mortars, so they weren’t quite accurate enough. Come up this way.”
He had been very calm, very matter-of-fact as he had spoken. He opened another door that gave access to the aft deck. There was an awning, rain dripping from the edges, a small table and two chairs in wicker. Dillon poured claret into the glasses.
“There you go.”
Blake sat down and savored it. “Excellent. I’m supposed to have stopped, but I could use a cigarette.”
“Sure.” Dillon gave him one and a light and took another himself. He stood by the rail, sipping the wine and looking toward Notre Dame.
“Why, Sean?” Blake said. “Hell, I know your record backwards, but I still don’t understand. All those hits, all those jobs for people like the PLO, the KGB. Okay, so your father was caught in the crossfire in some Belfast street battle and you blamed the British Army and joined the IRA. You were what, nineteen? I understand that, but afterwards.”
Dillon turned, leaning on the rail. “Remember your American Civil War history. People like Jesse and Frank James? Raiding, fighting, and killing for the glorious cause and that was all they knew, so what came afterwards, when the war was over? They robbed banks and trains.”
“And when you left the IRA, you offered yourself as a gun for hire.”
“Something like that.”
“But when the Serbs shot you down in Bosnia, you were flying in medical supplies for children.”
“A good deed in a naughty world, isn’t that what Shakespeare said?”
“And Ferguson saved you from yourself, pulled you in on the side of right.”
“What a load of cobblers.” Dillon laughed out loud. “I do exactly what I was doing before, only now I do it for Ferguson.”
Blake nodded, serious. “I take your point, but isn’t anything serious business to you?”
“Certainly. Saving Marie de Brissac and Hannah from Judas, for instance.”
“But nothing else?”
“Like I’ve said before, sometimes situations need a public executioner and it happens to be something I’m good at.”
“And otherwise?”
“Just passing through, Blake, just passing through,” and Dillon turned and looked along the Seine.
At the same moment and six hours back in time, Teddy boarded an Air Force Lear jet at Andrews. They took off, climbed to thirty thousand feet, and the senior pilot came over the speaker.
“Just over an hour, Mr. Grant, and it should be pretty smooth. We’ll put down at Mitchell Field. That’s about forty minutes by road to Fort Lansing.”
He switched off and Teddy tried to read the Washington Post but couldn’t take it in. He was on too big a high. He had the strangest feeling about this. There was something waiting for him at Fort Lansing. There had to be, but what? He reached to the bar, made a cup of instant coffee, and sat there, thinking about things as he drank it.
• • •
Marie de Brissac was doing a charcoal sketch of Hannah. “You’ve got good bone structure,” she said. “That always helps. Were you and Dillon lovers?”
“That’s a leading question.”
“I’m half French. We’re very direct. Were you?”
Hannah Bernstein was careful to stay in the past tense where Dillon was concerned, just in case. “Good God, no. He was the most infuriating man I ever knew.”
“But you liked him in spite of that?”
“There was plenty to like. He had a ready wit, bags of charm, enormous intelligence. There was only one flaw. He killed too easily.”