Read Online The Death of an Irish Consul by Bartholomew Gill - Free Book Online Page A

matter.”
    “So far,” said McGarr, “it has been all give and no take. Have you gotten the information I asked you for this afternoon?”
    “As a matter of fact, I have. But I must say I don’t care for your thinking you have to extort it from me.” In spite of his bluster, Cummings’s tone had changed. In back of it all, McGarr thought he could detect a little fright. If the assassination of SIS C.’s was following a pattern, he was next.
    “Well?” McGarr asked. “This call is costing me money.” They were no longer speaking to each other over lunch at the Proscenium Club and McGarr wanted to make that very plain. Any continuing relationship had to be mutually beneficial.
    “I’ve put together a list of our agents who have been issued the ketobemidone-base drug. We began using it only a year and two months ago so the list is not long.
    “I then cross-referred this list with that of former, disgruntled agents of SIS. I came up with one man who is now an ENI employee. His name is Moses Foster. Do you know that Browne was also working for ENI?”
    “What position?”
    “Security, deputy director and second-in-command after Hitchcock.” Cummings’s tone was becoming self-satisfied once more. “This Foster is quite competent. He spent eleven years in Havana during the Cuban revolution and later through the many purges. Castro sent him to their embassy in Moscow and then Peking. After he narrowly escaped being exposed, we offered him a desk job in London. That galled him. He demanded a large amount of cash, not just his pension, but what he called ‘combat pay for a Cold War hero,’ all of it in one lump sum and immediately. When we told him that was impossible, he ran amok in our offices, put several senior fellows in hospital, nearly killed a policeman.
    “In what I thought a surprising reversal some months later, Foster then accepted the post Browne—who was C. at the time the man was refused the lump sum payment—offered him with the security team at the ENI operations in Scotland. Browne felt he was the cause of Foster’s problems, since Browne should have known better than to have tried to put Foster behind a desk. Well, Foster took the job about two years ago. When I saw Browne at the club from time to time, he said Foster was working out just fine.”
    McGarr asked, “Is he black?”
    “Why, yes—he’s Jamaican.”
    “About six feet, sixteen or seventeen stone, wide forehead, and close-set eyes?”
    “Right again—how do you know this?”
    “I’m not sure that I do. Are any other of your former agents currently employed by ENI?”
    “I’ve checked that. None.”
    “What sort of operation is ENI running up in Scotland that it needs such high-caliber security?”
    “Oil exploration is a cutthroat business, Mr. McGarr. A man who knows where the oil is well may make his life’s fortune with that information. Hitchcock’s, Browne’s, and Foster’s job was to see that that information stayed in the company. They were being very well paid for their services.”
    “Does Foster now become head of the security operations for ENI?”
    “Yes.”
    “What about a former agent, a man about fifty withlots of curly white hair, a big, black moustache, and a sallow complexion? I should imagine he’s handsome in a Mediterranean way.”
    “Nobody I can recall. I’ll check, however. Any other details on him?”
    “No—he was sitting in a car when I saw him. What about Browne? Was he married? Can we trace his movements before he arrived here in Ireland?”
    “Not likely. He was a bachelor and necessarily rather secretive about his personal affairs. He employed an aged manservant. We’ve questioned him. He says Browne left for Scotland about a week ago, called twice to have certain letters read to him.”
    “Did you get a look at those?”
    “Of course not. I didn’t ask.”
    “Well, could you?”
    “I could but I wouldn’t. The poor man is dead.”
    “That’s precisely the point. The