A Different War

by Craig Thomas

  Blood's clock eight thirty-five… "Oh, bugger!" she breathed aloud.

  David's fat black pen seemed to mock her like a complacent expression.

  The name almost vanished before it registered his name. Curious. Her forefinger hovered above the key, to be joined by other fingers, her other hand. Her breathing was very loud. Her temples throbbed, as if all thought was an effort. It was like finding an old love letter, written by a parent one had always thought incapable of love, when clearing out drawers after their death. David and Robbie. Perhaps there was some surviving sentimental element in David's nature, within the deep, suspicious tomb in which David had always buried feeling.

  Robbie had been dead for a decade, killed when he crashed his latest red Porsche. He had been a stranger to David for a long time before that R-o-b-b-i-e, she typed slowly, hesitantly. Then at once gasping with relief and success. Fraser, she read. Thenother names…

  Roussillon who? the chief executive of Balzac-Stendhal, Laxton, others… dates of meetings, sums of money, as if David had been intent on item ising some Dutch treat at an Indian restaurant.

  The camera clicked twice. She scrolled on… The Urban Regeneration Project, the EU funding… the beginnings of the careful, precise balance sheet of theft, of Aero UK's failure. The dates measured, like a financial ECG chart, the crucial cardiac arrests the company had suffered… and the injections of diverted EU funds into the company to keep it afloat. She was shivering with excitement, the camera's eyepiece was becoming fogged with her delighted tension.

  She was terribly hot. Steady the camera'I am sorry—" Marian straightened in the chair as if she had been electrocuted. Whirled around.

  The maid was standing in the doorway, apologetically surprised. Seeming not to recognise her. Marian clutched the camera against her stomach like a weapon designed to disembowel her.

  "I yes! Come in, yes I've finished. Come in-!"

  She exited the computer and shut the lid of the PC as if a snake was inside. She experienced almost a sense of bereavement as the keyboard slid out of sight and the screen disappeared. She closed the catches and stood up, hiding the camera at first then thrusting it into her handbag. She walked stiffly into the bedroom and replaced the leather case in the wardrobe. The arms of the empty suit attempted to arrest her. She brushed wildly at her hair. The maid watched her passage to the door with a dull, respectful stare, her eyes blinking once like camera shutters.

  Marian slammed the doors of the suite behind her, leant back against them. Eightforty-two… She was perspiring freely. Her whole body seemed to tremble with weakness… and for nothing, she castigated herself in a fury of frustrated failure. All for bugger-all!

  "Damn," she breathed aloud.

  "Damn, damn, damn?

  She had been panicked by the maid's appearance. Just like a silly girl at her first sight of an erect penis a stupid uirginl "Damn, damn, damn bugger!" she breathed.

  Her hands were slippery on the doorknobs. It had all been there, begging to be photographed. She could have simply told the maid to wait, that she mustn't be interrupted. She had had it all in her hands and had just thrown it away! She had nothing but some names, the first few snippets of the gigantic fraud… fish scales from David's leviathan crookedness, nothing more. She would have to try again… The idea appalled her.

  Winterborne listened to the scattered words, the tapping noises on the keyboard of his PC, her breathing, her shocked, delighted surprise none of them were able to shatter the deep pleasure of his mood. The breakfast meeting had been replete with the rich diet of deals, leasings, promises to purchase. It had been like arriving somewhere long desired after a strange and perilous journey. It had worked, the whole desperate strategy.

  '… Come in, yes I've finished," Winterborne heard.

  "Come in-!"

  The tiny, amplified noises of the PC being closed, the sound of the wardrobe door in the bedroom, the movements of the maid who had interrupted her. Winterborne stood at the window of the suite, staring blindly through the glass, as if rain had dissolved some magical vision.

  He turned and glowered at the tiny tape-recorder he had almost nonchalantly removed from the desk drawer, expecting to hear only the sound of a vacuum cleaner. The fat black pen, uncapped so that its noise-activated microphone could function, seemed to mock him. Such had been his eagerness for the breakfast meeting and his sense that it would go well, he had almost forgotten to uncap the pen. Habit had saved him-and condemned Marian. His features twisted in an expression of pain as much as rage. He silently cursed himself for continuing to use those old passwords that Robbie had discovered so long ago. No one else knew them except Robbie. How could Marian have known? From Robbie?

  It did not matter how, he told himself angrily. She knew. She had broken into his PC. She must know everything… He heard a snarling noise, strangled in someone's throat. His own, he slowly realised. He rubbed furiously at his throat as if he suffered a kind of moral laryngitis, an inability to curse her; then he rubbed his cheeks and eyes. Sunlight slanted across the desk, the recorder, the black pen.

  He punched his fist down against his thigh, hurting himself. Again and again.

  Then he began smoothing the bruised place rhythmically, as if using some healing ointment. Marian had sealed her fate, as a melodrama might have expressed it. She had engaged in enemy action, she had persisted after his warnings, refusing to let the matter rest. She had flouted their mutual past, the very thing that had held him back in front of a subordinate. Very well… He moved round the desk and thrust the recorder back in a drawer. Glanced at his watch. He needed to speak to Fraser immediately, before he left for America and to Roussillon. There must be some kind of accident…? At once, it was there as brilliantly and quickly as a light being switched on. A mugging that went terribly wrong, perhaps… Ben Campbell would be with her, he might even be injured. But Marian would be killed. A victim of mindless, motiveless street crime. Campbell's cooperation in the incident would silence him as effectively as Marian would be silenced.

  He snatched up the phone and dialled Eraser's room. He had ten minutes before he must leave for the Skyliner jaunt, for more success; the seal on the enterprise. He smiled.

  On board the plane, he would introduce Marian to Roussillon. She was a perceptive woman, perhaps she would even recognise her assassin.

  "Fraser come up at once. Find Roussillon for me and bring him, too.

  I've made up my mind."

  She concentrated on the traffic on the Brussels ring road, then on the interchange with the E10 autoroute to Antwerp, as if the ordinary, the meaningless, would remove all thought of David.

  Yet the knowledge that she had obtained no real shred of proof against David and that she must try again bobbed on the surface of her mind like a body she could not drown. Campbell's mood, as he sat beside her in the back of the chauffeur driven limousine, was strained, quiet.

  The ramps and twists of the motorway interchange were left behind and the panorama became a flat expanse dotted with buildings whose windows reflected the midmorning sun. The light gleamed from the tail planes and flanks of dozens of aircraft. One lifted from the runway as she stared from the window, almost lurching into the sky by an effort of will.

  Ben Campbell had been engaged in a brief, furious conversation with David in the foyer of the Amigo as she had come out of the lift. She was wearing her brightest clothes, a black and yellow spotted skirt and a bright-yellow jacket the insect-colours of warning and defence, a deliberate choice. However, she could hardly summon the willpower to sustain its defiant humour.

  Because David had known what she had done, she was certain of it. He had glowered at her in the moment before he had changed his expression to a bland smile and had pecked at her cheek. Somehow, he had discovered her interference with his PC. She could not dismiss her impression. Campbell, dumb with some weight and mood of his own, confirmed her sense that she had increased her danger.

  There she is," Campbell murmured as
the car ran beside the high perimeter fence.

  His hand pointed eagerly but his voice lagged, as if he were weary of his own enthusiasm.

  "Oh-yes."

  The Skyliner seemed bulbous, even ugly, beside the sleeker European and American airliners that surrounded it. A great bottle-nosed dolphin of a thing, its front section bulging like a deformed head, its waist thick, its wings and tailplane earth-bound. Then she lost sight of it as the car turned into the main gates, her last impression that it was liveried in the colours of the European Union, blue, white and gold-starred. The grandiose European dream that it represented seemed diminished by her sense of a small provincial airport, a cramped, dowdy collection of buildings. The new terminal, built to handle international flights, seemed inappropriate; a super store sprung up in a quiet residential district.

  "You'll be impressed," Campbell offered, his salesman's manner somehow crumpled, under pressure.

  "It's a very good airliner. It was just too expensive until now." He rallied more by habit than excitement.

  Marian nodded. The limousine drew up on the concrete apron in front of the terminal. Airliners in a dozen liveries nuzzled like piglets at the pier's air bridges She got out of the car, even thankful for the overpowering scent of aviation fuel on the warm breeze, and the sense of bustle, after Campbell's desultory, drizzling conversation in the car. As he began marshalling the occupants of the little fleet of limousines that had driven from the hotel to the airport, Marian studied him.

  Throughout the short journey, Campbell had seemed uncharacteristically preoccupied, even brooding. His talk was mere sound bites left out in the rain to spoil. He seemed wary of her. Nervous of being near her, as if she carried some raging infection. Amost as if she made him feel guilty.

  Another aircraft flashed in the sunlight as it lumbered into the air.

  Then, calming as a doctor, Henry was beside her.

  "All right, lass? You look pale." The elderly Opposition Member was a thankful distraction.

  "Bloody funny-looking aeroplane, has to be said!" His raised voice teased the smooth, ushering Commission civil servants. David, she saw, was watching her intently, until Tim Burton dragged at his arm like a small boy filled with enthusiasm, pulling him towards the airliner.

  She saw Bryan Coulthard, the chief executive of Balzac-Stendhal, Rogier and Laxton together, all of them supremely cheerful. A select band of European press figures, from the broad sheets and the tabloids, were marshalling their photographers, buttonholing MPs and EU officials alike. No one seemed to want to interview her, thankfully. Perhaps she was the skull at this particular banquet? It was David's day…

  There was a general movement towards the Skyliner, something as natural and irresistible as a tidal swell. It was sleekly fat close to, its girth Victorian-boastful, reeking of luxury.

  "You all right, Ben?" she asked waspishly as she found Campbell once more at her side.

  "What—?" He seemed uncertain for an instant, then he added: "Oh, yes just don't like flying all that much. Never really taken to it—" His sickly smile irritated her.

  David was surrounded by reporters and officials, his hand firmly grasping that of the President of the Commission. The smooth Belgian was inclining his head towards David in the manner of an obeisant or that of a fellow conspirator. The little tableau increased her annoyance.

  "Ready, Marian?" Campbell asked uncertainly. He had watched her studying David.

  "Yes!" she snapped.

  "Ready. Are you, Ben?"

  "What? Oh, yes. Let's go then." He gestured towards the passenger steps.

  Once they were in the first-class cabin, Campbell left her side, hurrying away into a sc rum of journalists. A glass of champagne appeared magically in her hand as she surveyed the lounge, spacious as a hotel foyer.

  "Big bugger, eh?" Henry said at her elbow.

  "Like a bloody cruise ship. But then, I suppose that's the idea, eh, lass?"

  She managed to nod in a mimicry of enthusiasm. That, after all, had been the principle on which the Skyliner had been created. First class as an imitation of a liner's stateroom, the seats scattered as casually as in a club's library. Business class, the remainder of the cabin space, was narrower, but still huge-seeming, stretching away from her.

  Wide aisles, groups of seats, computer workstations, desks… The carrier of choice for the global marketplace. Other cabin variants offered luxurious charter flight facilities, one even provided lounges and a cinema.

  The latest, or so she had heard, proposed seating in excess of the new Boeing, now that price was a factor. Tim Burton would put that type into operation on the Atlantic run.

  The aircraft seduced. There had been an unfairness about its previous lack of success. It was big, quiet, luxurious affordable, now and the logical next step beyond Airbus. It did indeed seduce… She shook her head.

  "Summat wrong?"

  "Ringing in my ears, Henry." She smiled.

  People had died for this occasion, this display. To place her here, with the influential, putting champagne to her lips amid the joviality of power and money.

  The innocent had died.

  "Hello, Marian!"

  It was Tim Burton, grinning like a boy with a new train set. She knew him as someone she had encountered at parties or occasionally scouring the House for a tame lobbyist.

  Tim your new toy? I like it." She raised her glass to the down lighters in the cabin's high ceiling. Henry had drifted away towards a knot of civil servants, bent on mischief.

  "Congratulations."

  "Damn close-run thing, Marian, I can admit that now."

  His grin was infectious, his too-long hair suggestive of innocence.

  "Poor Alan Vance, of course. You heard about that? Mm. Well, thanks to your friend David and Bryan Coulthard, I'm off the hook! My version won't be as luxurious as this, of course — hi, David!"

  He was as grateful and innocent as a puppy. Gant would not have wasted a moment suspecting his involvement. He had been all but ruined. Hi, David. It was what his computer had said to her and David, she was certain, knew of its infidelity.

  The man with David was in his late thirties, taller than David, slimly elegant, darkhaired, brown-eyed. Deeply attractive.

  "Marian my friend Michel asked to be introduced to you," David murmured. At the same moment, his hand was proprietorially on Tim Burton's shoulder.

  "Mizz Marian Pyott, one of our most colourful Members of Parliament…

  I warn you, Michel, Marian doesn't like foreigners. Michel Roussillon, who is in charge of our security."

  They shook hands.

  "David exaggerates my bigotry," she flirted.

  "My prejudices are capable of being disarmed." Her smile was dazzling.

  Roussillon was remarkably good-looking.

  Roussillon… Roussillon.

  She released his grip, too quickly not to alert him. His name had been in David's computer under the Robbie file-The lake was all but empty of canoes and tourist sailboats in the late afternoon. Anyway, it was too early in the season for there to be more than a few people renting cabins.

  Another's head broke the water thirty yards from the pebbled shore along which he was walking. When the scout camps and the fishermen and the playacting tourists came, the otters retreated to secluded pools.

  For the moment, trout and salmon were theirs for the taking.

  Smoke drifted above lodgepole pines from the invisible chimney of an occupied cabin. He heard the faint noises of children.

  He was walking to the store for supplies, and walking to think the thing through.

  In the lodge, even in the dense forest around it, it was difficult sometimes to see matters in any clear light. It was all too comfortable and familiar, too much a refuge; and it prompted his sense of control, suggested he accept the offer that had come via the e-mail.

  A fundamentalist splinter group wanted Arafat killed just as a fundamentalist Jew had killed Rabin last year. It seemed a simple, if ch
allenging, proposition, one which oughtn't to disconcert. It did, though.

  Strickland's large hands were thrust into the side pockets of his windcheater, as if he were attempting to imitate an even larger man.

  His head studied the pebbles along the narrow beach as if reading runes. The pines crowded towards the shore and the mountains were reflected in the still deep blue of the lake. He ignored the familiarity of the scene and its congenial sense of wilderness. He raised his head once, attracted by the puttering noise of the mail boat returning across the lake towards the jetty and the scramble of wooden cabins and lodges that were the only settlement for miles. Then he returned his attention to the pebbles, to his own long afternoon shadow, the images of snowcaps and glaciers fading from his retinae.

  The middleman had placed the asked-for, non-returnable deposit in his Swiss account. The bank had faxed him the confirmation two hours ago.

  Now a meeting had to be arranged. But he had come here, to the wilderness where he was known by another name, because he had been certain, after Oslo, that Winterborne would turn Fraser and the Frenchman on him, just to clean house. Only days later, an offer that challenged ego and invited greed had appeared out of the blue… because they'd lost track of him? Was it them, or was it genuine and coincidental? Even Winterborne or Fraser or Roussillon could have guessed that he'd find Arafat an irresistible target. Rabin had been a clay pigeon by comparison. One of the most difficult men in the world to eliminate, the e-mail had offered like a tempting menu. A traitor to the Palestinian cause, or something like that, had revealed the target's identity. Arafat.

  Winterborne could easily have discovered that he had been hired once before to kill Arafat in North Africa and had failed when Arafat left seconds before the device was detonated. And eueryoneknew how much he hated failure… a meeting, then. Could he risk it? And if he did, where? He paused in his stride, looking up. The familiar mountains, spilling frozen snow and ice; the still lake, the mail boat wake fading as it bobbed beside the jetty, its engine off. Another's head, then that of a second. A mule deer appeared confidently from the pines, maybe aware the tourists and sportsmen hadn't yet moved into the wilderness. The animal watched him, unafraid. A canoe rounded the flat, tiny, sparse-treed islet in the middle of the lake. Strickland breathed deeply.