The Killing Ground by Jack Higgins

together by the window, listening, and Roper, in his chair, was at the far end of the table.

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J A C K H I G G I N S
    “I’ll come directly to the point,” Ferguson said. “There was a bargain between you and my people.”
    “Which was not fulfilled,” Rashid said. “I don’t see my daughter here.”
    “That was due to circumstances,” Dillon said. “The body count makes that clear. The point now is what comes next.”
    “Comes next?” Rashid asked.
    “Of course,” Ferguson told him. “Nothing has changed fundamentally. You want your daughter back, and so do we. And we know her destination, Hazar. It’s a place we’ve all worked in before.”
    “You were there yourself recently,” Dillon said. “What for?”
    Rashid didn’t reply, his face showing great emotion. It was his wife who intervened.“For God’s sake, Caspar, talk to them. What happened wasn’t their fault. We’re not playing games here. People died. I want my daughter back, so tell them what they need to know to make that happen.”
    Caspar sighed. “I was fooled into believing that my uncle Jemal in Hazar would act as a middleman between my father and me.”
    “What made you think that?”
    “Not what, but who. It was the Broker. He first spoke to me over a year ago when I was being pressured by Army of God fanatics to join their organization. A colleague at the university, Professor Dreq Khan, was the chief mover and shaker behind the Army of God, and at first they seemed harmless, just a charitable organization, but then, on my world travels, I started receiving approaches from a number of extreme groups. When I tried to withdraw from my involvement, Dreq Khan warned me that I would be considered a traitor, that I would be targeted by Muslim extremists. And then came my daughter’s abduction.
    “The Broker told me that if I did what they told me, he would arrange for Jemal to act as a go-between with my father, so I felt I had no choice.
    I mainly acted as a bagman under orders, passing highly technical information on various matters to Khan, who obviously passed it on.
    Then the Broker told me I should come to Hazar, that they were ready to talk to me, but it was all a lie. They just wanted me to take a look at

T H E K I L L I N G G R O U N D
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    an old railway that al-Qaeda wanted to update. I was near to despair—and that’s when you found me.”
    “So here we are,” Ferguson said.
    “Here we are. And the Mideast wasn’t the only place they sent me.
    They sent me to Ireland, too. I’m a visiting professor at Trinity College, Dublin.”
    “Good God,” Ferguson said. “Are you going to tell us that’s a center of Muslim radicalism?”
    “Not at all, but in my bagman identity, I had to act as a go-between for certain organizations there.”
    “Such as?” Ferguson asked.
    “Outfits claiming to be security firms. It’s an open secret that with peace in Northern Ireland, many former members of the Provisional IRA have found themselves on the scrapheap and don’t much care for it. One way out for them is crime. I believe that in the last year there have been at least seventy shootings in the Dublin area that show evidence of having been committed by professionals.”
    “So what?” Dillon said. “What do you expect after thirty-odd years of their own war?”
    “I accept that, but what I’m talking about are firms claiming legiti-macy in security affairs, but actually supplying what can only be described as mercenaries. People hired as instructors for terrorist training camps in North Africa, Algeria. One of them, for instance, is called Scamrock Security, run by a man named Michael Flynn.”
    “And you have details of these camps?” Roper asked.
    “Of some of them—yes. There are one or two in the Empty Quarter as well.”
    There was a long silence while Ferguson drummed his fingers on the table. Finally, he said, “You’ve given us a lot to digest. While Roper’s working on this information, we have to