The Death Trade by Jack Higgins Read Free Book Online Page A

“I’ll say good night.”
    â€”
    W hile waiting for the lift, he considered what had happened. In rage, anything Rasoul said was likely to be the truth, for he was that sort of person, so what did his slip of the tongue mean? And Emza Khan’s angry dressing-down of Rasoul had been a little over the top, or had it? Declan shook his head. Any suggestion that Khan could treat the memory of Osama bin Laden seriously was patently absurd. Making money had been the ruling obsession in his life. He was hardly likely to change now, not with the government and the Council of Guardians to contend with in Tehran. The last thing
they
wanted getting its hands on power was al-Qaeda.
    He dismissed it from his mind and a few minutes later was driving his car out of the underground garage, joining the two-o’clock-in-the-morning traffic and thinking, somewhat to his surprise, of Sara Gideon.
    â€”
    E mza Khan read the details about Ferguson and his people that Declan had provided. When he was finished, he thought about it for a while. Charles Ferguson and his people had been a considerable nuisance to al-Qaeda, foiling many carefully planned enterprises over the past few years, and Dillon was something else again, murdering many of their best people. Now there was the Jewish woman of untold wealth, which offended him. How many decent Muslim men had she killed? She deserved to die, and so did her friends.
    So he went to his study, fed the report Declan had given him through the coded transcriber, punched a button and sent it on its way to room 13 at Pound Street Methodist Chapel, now the headquarters of the Army of God charity, where it was received by Ali Saif, an Egyptian with an English grandmother, which under familial law granted him a United Kingdom passport.
    Saif was senior lecturer in archaeology at London University. Specializing in the four-hundred-year occupation of Britain by the Romans was his passion. Involvement with the Army of God and belief in the gospel of Osama bin Laden was his religion, which in itself contained enough excitement for any man.
    His study room was packed with three state-of-the-art computers, a transcriber, and various other gadgets, no expense spared, for one thing al-Qaeda was not short of was money.
    He sat behind a Victorian desk in a swing chair, twenty-five years of age and already a Ph.D. He wore a khaki summer suit, tinted horn-rimmed glasses that suited his aquiline face, and long black hair that almost reached his shoulders. Just now he was drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette, leaning back in his chair, looking at two computer screens. One showed Declan Rashid’s background list of Ferguson’s people. Based on this, he had used his skill to pull out the original information, which was now on his second screen, pictures of all the protagonists included.
    And what an interesting lot they were, particularly Sean Dillon, the man who’d tried to blow up the British War Cabinet during the Gulf War and almost succeeded. A top IRA enforcer for many years, who ended up in the hands of Serbs and was saved by Ferguson from execution on the understanding that he would serve under him as a member of the Prime Minister’s private security squad.
    Dillon’s score was remarkable. He seemed to have killed anybody and everybody, without fear or favor. One week an assassination, the next, flying some old turboprop plane loaded with medical drugs for children into a war zone.
    Some guilt there perhaps, but the important fact was they had all been a considerable nuisance for some years to al-Qaeda. Obviously, punishment was what Emza Khan wanted, and considering the size of his contribution to the war chest, he was entitled to see it duly administered.
    As regards the trip to Paris, he would alert the right people there, but obviously what Khan was seeking here in London was something more immediate and certainly more final. The Army of God had assets employed in