by Craig Thomas
"Looks fast, mm?" he murmured, nodding at the window.
"Wait 'til you try Skyliner you've never flown on her, have you?"
"No looking forward to it." Was it his presence or simply the nag of claustrophobia that made her feel heated, almost menopausal?
"Something to celebrate," she added.
"Too true! To think that a couple of weeks ago—" He shook his head.
"Skin of their teeth, Aero UK and the Froggies not to overstate the case."
"Are they all out of the wood?"
He waggled his hand.
"Let's say the Commission is still uttering collective sighs of relief." He grinned.
"Grandiose project back on the rails? Almost Napoleonic, one might say."
He seemed puzzled for a moment, then: "Ah, you're grinding your axe, Marian."
It was her turn to shake her head. Her hair fell across her face.
There was a moment of purely sexual interest in Campbell's brown eyes, then their interrogative, assessing expression was back. She brushed her hair back ostentatiously, teasingly, but he remained unaffected.
"Not really. I'm pleased that Skyliner has a future. So are a lot of my constituents not to mention the shareholders… people like David who must have stood to lose a fortune. He is a major investor in Aero UK, isn't he? And he's a subcontractor in a dozen ways…" She expelled a relieved-sounding breath.
"A damned close-run thing, as someone else once said in Brussels."
"Quite." Archly, he added: "Does this signal a change of heart. You'll go easy on poor Bryan Coulthard in future?"
"I was always keen for Skyliner to succeed, Ben. It was the cost that was close to being obscene, nothing else. Not even the dreams of bureaucrats, however wet."
He smiled a moment later.
"A hit. But you'll see it's a wonderful aircraft. More luxurious than this train, business-class level of comfort for every passenger, first-class sleeping compartments… and the food's out of this world!"
"I'm not in the market for one of my own," she murmured.
He seemed suddenly irritated by her mockery, and snapped:
"Perhaps you should try giving it a rest, Marian! Let people who care have a say for a change." His dark complexion was suffused with irritation. It was as if his role discomfited him, attached him to a stubborn, recalcitrant child he detested.
"Ben, I didn't know you cared—"
"Marian, yours isn't the only commitment in town." Then, with an effort: "Sorry… But it is important for Skyliner to succeed. The whole future of European plane making was at stake, you know."
"I know. Apart from millions, even billions government fundings, private fortunes."
His eyes narrowed momentarily and she was angry at her overconfidence.
Campbell only looked like a male model, she should not underestimate his intelligence. He was a highly attuned political animal.
Their glasses were topped up once more. Marian refused yet another tiny sandwich or sliver of toast and caviare. Around them, the noise of their companions was entirely convivial, the laughter hearty and uninhibited by party or personal antagonism. It was as if the scene had been arranged as a temptation. Why not join in, have fun, ignore the dark corners? It's all over and done with now why make a fuss?
If only it were that simple, she answered herself and the joviality.
"Did you know Michael Lloyd, Ben? Ever work with him at the
Commission?" It was asked carefully, almost gently, yet it startled him like blatant honesty might have done.
"Er yes. Couple of years back, when he first arrived. We were together in the Transport Commissioner's office. I — heard about his overdose." There was a slight emphasis upon the word, the shadowy mark left by an eraser. He shook his head.
"Great shame. Bright young man. Bit independent-minded, leftish where the Commission wasn't. Still, I'm sure he'd have gone far. Did you know him, Marian?"
"A little. Mutual acquaintances, interests. You know."
"Ah, I see. I thought you were closer than that."
"No…"
Campbell glanced at his watch, then along the aisle of the compartment.
She felt he seemed satisfied with the assiduity with which other Euro MPs and one or two Commission functionaries were soothing and smoothing, flattering and flannel ling
He murmured: "His current partner seems to have been at a loss to explain it I mean, it must have been a terrible shock." The embarrassment was almost instantly drained from his features by an effort of will. He leaned back.
"I heard she was in a terrible state, poor thing."
In her notebook, on a disk, they had been Marian's own words at a loss to explain it… There was no reason on earth why Campbell should have knowledge of the young woman, or have taken anything but the most cursory interest in Lloyd's death. Michael and he, she knew, had never liked each other. Campbell had either read, or been told of, the jottings from her PC. After the burglary.
"I expect she was. It's always so difficult to deal with that sort of death. Such a waste. Almost as if Michael was rejecting her. And she had no idea he had a heroin habit… Strange, that."
"I — er, I suppose so."
The lights of the Tunnel sped past. Her awareness of the train's bullet like velocity increased. It seemed to be rushing her headlong towards risk.
"And my girl is safe?" Giles Pyott asked from his position at the window, from where he had already announced the renewed presence of the surveillance on Aubrey's flat.
Aubrey wanted to be open with Pyott. Instead, his busy fears closed him like a mussel's shell, separating him from his oldest friend. What was there, after all, to make David stop now? Marian had not told Giles of the burglary, and now he could not do so, either. David had proof of her certain knowledge. He should not have allowed her to travel to Brussels, not without taking many more precautions than merely a repeated Take care, be careful… "Yes, Giles. Public places, in constant company I'm sure," he answered sweetly, almost with conviction.
Giles, for the stilling of his own fears and perhaps out of a pride in his daughter's competence, seemed to accept his reassurance.
"Very well. But Gant? He is our agent, but can he do anything?"
"I hope so."
Gant had left unseen at dawn. A light aircraft had been hired, a flight plan to Bordeaux filed. He had papers other than his own. Even so, it did not seem adequate, to pit one man against Fraser, French security, David. With no certainty that Strickland, the saboteur, was sitting calmly in the Dordogne, just waiting for Mitchell to collect him like a parcel.
"Very well, then," Giles announced.
"Us? What do we do?" The old man who turned from the window with grave impatience was as erect as ever he had been as a serving soldier.
This," Aubrey sighed, gesturing at the littered desk behind which he was seated, wedged into one corner of the flat's drawing room. He had, he realised, been sitting there, almost without stirring, since six-thirty.
"I think we might make a start here."
Pyott picked up the file and wandered nearer to the window, at once an old man again as he slipped on his reading glasses.
After Gant had left, Aubrey had attempted to sleep, but the effort had been futile.
Instead, he had risen, dressed and sat at his desk as the early-morning joggers had passed beneath the windows and pigeons and crows had busily inspected the grass beyond the railings of Regent's Park. He had heard mockery in the bird calls, out of which had arisen an anger at his age, his lack of office. And a fear that he had sent Gant on a mission that might prove fatal… and failed to prevent Marian from sailing off towards the reefs and disaster in her characteristic mood of utter selfconfidence and moral invulnerability. He had written the bitter thoughts in his diary, something he rarely did in recent, retired years. The exercise had not helped to calm or reassure.
"We shan't have much time, Kenneth Johnny Laxton's flying to Brussels today.
Marian tol
d me. The European Commissioner for Urban Development has to show his face at the various bashes Tig's attending. Stands to reason." The last phrase was delivered with the snort of a soldier contemptuous of civilians and their petty corruptions.
"Yes I anticipated that. I've invited him to lunch with us at the Club, as a consequence. I have a brief board meeting one of David's companies, I have to confess," he added with a kind of soiled shame.
"But I shall be there before one."
"Fine. I'll be waiting for the two of you." He smiled in a hard, anticipatory expression.
"I don't want to pour cold water, Kenneth but are we likely to get anything from Johnny Laxton? The man was so stupid as a Cabinet minister I have to wonder whether he knows anything at all that would be useful to us."
Aubrey laughed, the sharp barking noise of a fox.
"Oh, I think Laxton knows, Giles. I think Laxton's allowed a great deal of the money to pass through his hands, across his desk." He hefted himself upright from the chair with audible noises of breath and old joints, but his step was firm and urgent across the carpet.
"Come on, old friend. We must frighten Johnny Laxton as he has never been frightened before!"
He grabbed Pyott's arm with an eager, young man's grip, as if to sweep him, girl like on to some imagined dance floor. Pyott, looking down at Aubrey, grinned.
"To horse," he murmured.
"And towards the sound of the guns."
Aubrey watched Giles' fears for Marian swallowed by his awakened enthusiasm.
His own for her and for Gant alike — remained bubbling like volcanic hot springs.
The track up to the farmhouse and its single barn was deserted. The house itself seemed even more silent and lifeless. From the knoll where he lay, studying it through field glasses, he was certain Strickland had gone. Not merely to the local store in the nearest village but gone, period. The previous evening and night, and the hours of the flight, collapsed behind him like a derelict building, leaving an empty lot. The mission was rubble. He had just the one address, this single lead to Strickland. There wouldn't be any more, not for him, not for a fugitive from justice. The Dordogne noon was heavy with the noises of insects. A small tractor inched across a distant field, and cattle were dotted like specks of soot on sloping meadows. There was the high contrail of an airliner that had taken off from Bordeaux's Merignac airport, where his flight plan had claimed he would land. He was overdue… He could make up the lost time by leaving now, there was nothing down there for him.
He swung the glasses impatiently across the landscape. Dotted farmhouses and barns, scattered villages in folds of the land or on limestone outcrops, the buildings brown as coins in the noon sunlight.
Stretches of dark holm-oak forest, groves of walnut trees, open fields of yellowing cereal crops. Chateaux and hunched, brooding castles like watchtowers marked the Dordogne valley to the south of him. His gaze moved back to Strickland's farmhouse.
Stillness… He waited another half-hour, then slung the rucksack across his shoulders, rose to his feet and began jogging gently down the slope towards the grey-white track leading up to the house. Nothing moving… nothing. He climbed one fence, then another. Butterflies rose from the long grass, he startled a bird but nothing human.
The midday was hot. He slowed to a cautious walk as he reached the track a hundred yards from the house. His shoulders slumped to casualness, his gait suggested he had already walked some distance.
Strickland might have recognised him… but then, Strickland wasn't home.
The shutters, small rectangles of peeling green paint set in the golden limestone block of the farmhouse, were closed on each of the ground-floor windows as well as the first floor. Three smaller windows jutted like snouts from the steeply pitched roof of flat brown tiles.
Beyond the house, the weather-peeled doors of the barn were similarly closed. The place didn't seem out of keeping with Strickland's personality. The Preacherman possessed a diffident, hermit like introversion he was the man who had been the boy who spent day after day in his bedroom, building, dismantling, reading, brooding. Gant halted, studying the house and his reflections on Strickland.
The guy was mad, certifiable… and too much like himself. He shrugged but the recognition would not be dismissed. Another lonely, maybe brutalised kid who had retreated into himself, kept out of sight of parents, neighbours, the whole world. And finally poured everything bottled up and unused into flying. ocn Gant shook his head. It didn't matter, except that this was just the kind of place Strickland would have chosen.
He reached the door of the house and knocked innocently, checking the pistol Aubrey had given him, thrust into his waistband in the small of his back. The sound of his knocking died away somewhere inside the empty house. He tried the handle of the door. The place must be locked up-the door opened slightly. As if the worn, clumsy door handle had burned him, he shut the door, moving away from it towards the nearest window, perspiration breaking out on his forehead.
The door shouldn't be unlocked… It was unlocked deliberately.
Strickland made bombs… Roussillon closed the flap of his mobile phone and turned in the front passenger seat of the big Citroen estate car.
"He's reached the farmhouse. For a moment, they thought he was going in through the front door—"
"But no such luck?" Fraser interrupted, a lack of surprise on his features.
"I told you it wouldn't do our job for us, Strickland's booby-trap device."
"You did indeed, my friend."
Roussillon shrugged. His men had searched the farmhouse early that morning. A minute visual inspection had revealed the front door rigged to explode a small bomb when pushed open. He had ordered the device left in place and the farmhouse put under close surveillance. There had been the chance that Strickland who had obviously disappeared would take care of his fellow-American for them. Now, they would have to do the job themselves.
He flicked a lock of dark hair away from his forehead. Through the rear window, he could see the small town of Beynac huddling at the foot of the hill on which its castle stood. The second car was fifty yards behind the Citroen. They were half an hour, at most, from Strickland's place.
Gant would find no clues as to Strickland's whereabouts. The place looked like a gite awaiting the first tourists of the season rather than a place where someone had lived until very recently.
The main road followed a loop of the Dordogne River.
Limestone cliffs, dark oak and chestnut trees crowded down to the road.
Sunlight gleamed on the river.
Fraser's manner and tone had been lacking in affability. He was imitating, like the good messenger he was, the displeasure of his master that Gant had escaped his hit-team in Oslo. Beyond his irritation with failure and Fraser alike, Roussillon felt a resentment at his increasing collusion with the former SIS agent and Winterborne.
His immediate superiors had instructed him to continue the association.
Balzac-Stendhal, wrapping themselves in the tri colore had borrowed him and certain elements of his service, the DST, until such time as all possibility of scandal had receded. Effectively, he was taking his orders directly from Winterborne rather than from Paris. What had begun as the protection of secret funding to the French plane maker in contradiction of EU principles, had become a manhunt for an American agent, the concealment of two acts of sabotage, the hunt for the bomber. The affaire Winterborne had become distasteful, demeaning. Le diable was always in the world, at one's elbow… The devils with which he was forced to consort because of this operation were not those he would have chosen.
The road dropped once more towards the river as it slid between limestone outcrops like a silver snake slipping into a crevice between boulders. The village of Domme stared down at the car from its crag.
Pour la France did not seem an adequate or satisfying description of what Roussillon was being called upon to perform. It was a bandage around his eyes that was becoming threadbar
e. The trees lining the road became mesmerising, flickering dappled light on the windscreen.
"How did he get here?" Fraser asked in curiously
"A light aircraft was seen earlier in the area. He may have landed it somewhere close to the farmhouse," Roussillon replied, adding with a certain, relished malice:
"You have no idea how he left England this morning?"
"If it was his plane they saw flying around, get your people to look for it. It'll need putting out of action. How much bloody further is it, anyway?"
Twenty minutes."
"Let's hope he's still there when we arrive."
"He can't leave again without being seen and stopped."
"Good."
"I think this Gant is not M'sieur Winterborne's big headache, mon ami.
I think he has to decide how he can dispose of an English MP if he is to feel secure.
Don't you agree?"
The shutter was loose and he angrily dragged it open. He squinted into gloom, his breathing hard and dry, the blood still quick in his ears.
Strickland made bombs… He fumbled at his waistband, locating the Smith & Wesson revolver Aubrey had removed from a small wall safe and handed to him as he might have presented a dead rat to a hotel manager.
He could make out the lifeless outlines of furniture. He moved further along the wall, turning the corner to another shuttered window. The shutter resisted his efforts, but its neighbour did not. There were flecks of green paint and dust on his fingers. He looked into the same big room, this time towards the door.
He adjusted the field glasses, focused them against the glass of the window and studied the door frame. Eventually, as his eyes became accustomed to the dim light, he discovered the snail-trail of wire and the small box that had to be the trigger mechanism. Open the door, trigger the device wherever it was hidden, maybe up on one of the exposed beams? and by the time it took a man to walk carefully to the centre of the big room, his head would have been blown off, his torso ripped to shreds. It would need only an ordinary frag grenade with a substituted time-trigger for a pin… Strickland could do that in minutes, with his eyes closed and his hands in mittens.