Jig Read Online Free Page B

he kept in the same apartment, had been walking back to the House of Commons after lunch at his club. One shot had been fired from a passing car, piercing Connaught’s heart.
    And then Sir Edward Shackleton, chief of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a man of known paranoia concerning his personal safety, had been blown up in his bed in suburban Belfast one night by means of a high-tech explosive device triggered long distance, a sophisticated piece of equipment which, according to Pagan’s analysts, had been manufactured in East Germany.
    The list was growing long and it was going to grow longer still.
    Frank Pagan shut his eyes. He thought about the phone calls after the killings. The taped voice. The accent seemed almost impossible to place, even though some of the best experts in dialects had analysed it over and over.
    This is Jig. I have just killed Walter Whiteford in the name of freedom for the people of Ireland .
    I am not finished yet. I have a long way to go …
    It was always that simple, always that deadly, the same dry, terrifying delivery. Pagan had listened to the tapes a hundred times. He had listened to the words and the silences between them, the quick intakes of breath, the pauses, as if he might one day be capable of imagining the man’s face on the basis of his voice alone. The voice had sometimes even intruded on his dreams, where it echoed and reverberated like the sound of a man whispering in a large empty cathedral.
    The door of his office opened and he looked up to see Foxworth there.
    Robbie Foxworth – Foxie – was Pagan’s assistant, a young man with a scalp of bright red hair, which gave some substance to his nickname. Foxie had been to Eton and Cambridge, and he talked with ball bearings in his mouth. What Pagan didn’t know about Foxie was that the young man did a wicked impersonation of him at parties, right down to the South London accent and the way Pagan walked – his back straight and his long legs taking great strides. Foxie called this the Pagan Strut.
    â€˜Burning the old midnight oil?’ Pagan asked.
    Foxie smiled. He had one of those sly little smiles you can never quite recall later with any certainty. He sat down in the chair that faced Pagan. He had been with Pagan’s section, which dealt exclusively with terrorism (Irish, or related thereto), for about eighteen months. On paper this section was supposed to work with Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, but Pagan had eased his own people out from under the men at the Yard, whom he publicly called ‘good civil servants’ and privately ‘all-round arseholes’.
    Consequently, the section operated with considerable freedom, answerable only to the secretary whose office was responsible for Irish affairs. Foxie was related to the secretary in a minor way – a fifteenth cousin three times removed, or something equally farfetched that Pagan had trouble remembering. (The English were obsessed with bloodlines, to a point that lay somewhere off the coast of reason.)
    Foxie said, ‘I have an item of some interest, Frank.’
    Pagan saw a slip of telex paper come across the desk towards him. He picked it up, scanned it, then read it a second time more slowly. He put the telex down and tipped his chair back. ‘Well, well,’ he said quietly.
    Foxie gazed at his superior. There were moments when he thought Frank Pagan represented a triumph of incongruity. Pagan didn’t talk the way anyone else in the section did because he hadn’t been to an expensive public school. Pagan didn’t dress like his colleagues either. He dispensed with three-piece pinstripe suits in favour of trendy loose-fitting clothes that seemed to have been purchased off the rack in secondhand stores, where they might have been hanging since the middle of the 1950s. Now and then Pagan even wore Hawaiian shirts that lit up a room like a light bulb. An odd bird, Foxie thought, with his tennis