Day of Reckoning

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000

Copyright © Jack Higgins 2000

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover photograph © Lawson Wood/Ocean Eye Film

Harry Patterson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008124892

Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780007373970

Version: 2015-07-20

When you have sinned grievously,

the Devil is waiting.

Sicilian Proverb

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

HELLSMOUTH

Chapter 1

NEW YORK IN THE BEGINNING

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

LONDON

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

LEBANON AL SHARIZ

Chapter 9

LONDON

Chapter 10

SCOTLAND IRELAND

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

LONDON

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

HELLSMOUTH

Chapter 15

LONDON

Chapter 16

About the Author

ALSO BY JACK HIGGINS

Further Reading

About the Publisher

It was the rat, in a way, which brought Blake Johnson not only awake, but back to life. Sitting on the stone seat in the darkness, up to his waist in water, it was astonishing that he’d drifted into sleep at all, and then he’d come awake, aware of something on his neck, and had sat up.

The light in the grilled entrance behind him gave enough illumination for him to see what it was that slid from his left shoulder. It splashed into the water, surfaced, and turned to look at him, nose pointing, eyes unwinking.

It took Blake back more than twenty-five years to when he’d been a young Special Forces sergeant at the end of the Vietnam War, up to his neck in a tidal swamp in the Mekong Delta, trying to avoid sudden death at the hands of the Vietcong. There had been rats there, too, especially because of the bodies.

No bodies here. Just the grille entrance with the faint light showing through, the rough stone walls of the tunnel, the strong, dank sewer smell, and the grille forty yards the other way, the grille that meant there was nowhere to go, as he’d found when they had first put him into this place.

The rat floated, watching him, strangely friendly. Blake said softly, ‘Now you behave yourself. Be off with you.’

He stirred the water, and the rat fled. He leaned back, intensely cold, and tried to think straight. He remembered coming to a kind of half-life in the Range Rover, the effects of the drugs wearing off. They’d come over a hill, in heavy rain, some sort of storm, and then in the lightning he’d seen cliffs below, a cruel sea, and above the cliffs a castle like something out of a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm.

When Blake had groaned and tried to sit up, Falcone, the one sitting beside the driver, had turned and smiled.

‘There you are. Back in the land of the living.’

And Blake, trying hard to return to some kind of reality, had said, ‘Where am I?’

And Falcone had smiled. ‘The end of the world, my friend. There’s nowhere else but the Atlantic Ocean all the way to America. Hellsmouth, that’s what they call this place.’

He’d started to laugh as Blake lapsed back into semi-consciousness.

Time really had no meaning. His bandaged right shoulder hurt as he sat on the seat, arms tightly folded to try and preserve some kind of body heat, and yet his senses were alert and strangely sharp so that when there was a clang behind him and the grille opened, he sat up.

‘Hey, there you are, Dottore. Still with us,’ Falcone said.

‘And fuck you, too,’ Blake managed.

‘Excellent. Signs of life. I like that. Out you come.’

Falcone got a hand on the collar of Blake’s shirt and pulled. Blake went through the opening and landed on his hands and knees in the corridor. Russo was there, a smile on his ugly face.

‘He don’t look too good.’

‘Well, he sure as hell stinks. Wash him down.’

There was a hose fastened to a brass tap in the wall. Russo turned it on and directed the spray all over Blake’s body. It was ice cold and he fought for breath. Russo finally switched off and draped a blanket round Blake’s shoulders.

‘The boss wants to see you, so be good.’

‘Sure, he’ll be good,’ Falcone said. ‘Just like that nice little wife of his in Brooklyn was good.’