A Darker Place by Jack Higgins Read Free Book Online Page B

woman who’d moved away. The girl’s name was Jean Murray, and she was from a Protestant Orange background.
    Roper’s room was on the list, and she was resolutely cheerful from the moment she started and knew all his business within two days. Her mother had been killed in a bombing four years earlier, for which she blamed the fugging Fenians, as she called them. Her father was a member of the local Orange Lodge and had a plum job at the Port Authority. There was also a brother of twenty-one named Kenny, in his final year at Queens University.
    She extracted as much personal information from Roper as she could. As long as it wasn’t military, he didn’t mind. The truth was that to a certain extent he rather fancied her, which gave him pause for thought, because it meant the defensive wall he’d built around himself was weakening.
    “What’s it get yer, Captain, the hero bit? You’re a lonely man, that’s the truth of it, and you’ve stared death in the face for so long, it’s dried up any juice that’s in you.”
    “Well, thank you, Dr. Freud,” he said. “I mean, you would know.”
    “Why do you do it? It’s a known fact in this dump that you’re well fixed financially.”
    “Okay, look at it this way. When the Troubles started in ’sixty-nine, the bomb thing was in its infancy. Very crude, no big deal. Over the years, as the Provisional IRA has grown in power, bombs have become very sophisticated indeed. The public image of the IRA as a bunch of shaven-headed yobs off a building site is well off the mark. Plenty of solid middle-class professionals are in the movement. Schoolteachers, lawyers, accountants, a whole range of ordinary people.”
    “So what are you saying?”
    “That the bomb makers these days have got university degrees and they’re very clever and sophisticated. Consider the Portland bomb. I’m an expert and I’ve dealt with hundreds of bombs over the years, but that one took me nine hours, and shall I tell you something? He’ll be back, that bomb maker. He’ll come with something just a little bit different, just for me. He can’t afford to have me beat him. It’s as simple as that.”
    She stared at him, pretty and rumpled in her blue uniform dress, leaning on her broom, no makeup on at all, and there was something in her eyes that could have been pity.
    “That’s terrible, what you say. Still, it can’t go on—things change.”
    “What do you mean, things change?”
    “The whole system. My Kenny says the bombs won’t need people like you soon. He’s read about you in the papers. He knows I work for you.”
    “What does he mean, things change?”
    “He’s taking his finals in his degree soon. Electronics. He makes gadgets. These days you have a hand control to work your television, open your garage doors, unlock your car, switch on security systems in your house. We’ve only got an ordinary terrace, but the gadgets he’s created in it are brilliant.”
    “Very interesting, but what’s this got to do with bombs?”
    “Well, it’s too technical for me, but he’s been working on a thing he calls a Howler. It looks like a standard television control, but it’s really different. He can turn off security systems, and I mean really important ones. He demonstrated on our local bank. He kept locking the doors as we walked past. They didn’t know whether they were coming or going. Does it to people’s cars as we go by, turns on store alarms, even big shops in town.”
    “Very interesting,” Roper said. “Fascinating, but I still don’t see the relevance to bombs.”
    “Well, that’s what he’s really been working on. He said he can maybe adapt the Howler so that even a big sophisticated bomb like your Portland Hotel job could simply be switched off. That’s the only way I can describe it.” She smiled. “Anyway, I can’t stand around here chattering. I’ve got five other rooms to do.”
    “No, just a minute,” Roper said. “Let me get this straight. Has