by Craig Thomas
The afternoon temperature had begun to drop. His indecision remained with him, a solid, indigestible lump in his stomach. He was challenged by the commission… and he was suspicious. The walk had resolved nothing.
The shuttle flight from Miami dropped towards Phoenix's Sky Harbor airport as the desert evening purpled. The ground was a sodium-lamp orange-yellow, scattered with the crucifixes of giant cactuses. Gant watched the ground rushing towards the airplane and Phoenix's lights spring out of the dusk, as if someone had just created the city. He was dog-weary, unshaven and unwashed. The wheels touched, skidded, settled and the whine of deceleration filled the cabin of the medium-haul Boeing. The terminal and the hangars slipped by as if half remembered The plane slowed, the airport became more real, the desert and the cactuses now unreal as the Boeing turned on to the taxi-way. It was darker amid the neon, a sudden night. He yawned behind his hand but even that small politeness seemed to irritate the blue-haired matron at the window seat, her permanent Sunbelt tan having worked on her skin like heat on old leather. His whole appearance, perhaps even his unwashed smell, had offended her throughout the flight from Miami.
He felt little or no anxiety as the aircraft came to a halt on the apron and the transfer bus rolled towards it. He had felt none when he had landed at Miami International, passed through the transfer lounge and eaten a meal while waiting for this flight. Perhaps he had left all such feelings behind him in France, of perhaps weariness had eroded them like rain on soft stone. He had reached the airport at Toulouse by backroads and without hindrance. By evening, an Airbus 320 had flown him on a shuttle service to Amsterdam, where he had spent the night in the departure lounge, attempting to sustain a sleep interrupted by the noises of tired children and worn adults. The first Stateside flight out of Schipol in the early morning had been a Delta tourist flight to Florida by Boeing 767. He had been lulled, amid the Dutch, German and British tourists, by the American accents of the flight attendants, the American movie. He felt he was the only one on the flight uninterested in Disney World as his destination.
He had thought, momentarily, of returning to London. But Aubrey's idea had gone down the toilet with Strickland's disappearance and the French counter-activity.
Aubrey wouldn't have any more ideas. It had been time to come home… like Strickland?
The snapshot was in his breast pocket like a talisman. If Strickland was running from the same people who'd tried to kill him and Gant was certain he was then maybe he, too, had come back to the States.
Besides, he needed to talk to Blakey, even to Barbara. There were resources at Vance Aircraft he could use. Just maybe he could find Strickland alone, he reaffirmed with a lack of conviction as he stood up and allowed the matron to drag her cabin bag from the overhead locker and to brush unapologetically past him.
He shrugged, pulling down his own sports bag, one he had bought at Schipol along with a clean shirt. It was just sufficient luggage not to arouse interest. He stepped through the passenger door behind two fractious children and a pregnant mother into the mobile lounge, scissor-lifted on its hydraulics. He stood at the far end of the vehicle, strap-hanging, idly watching his fellow-passengers. Then the lounge was lowered on to its chassis and accelerated towards the main terminal building.
The first stars gleamed high above the glass roof, and a sliver of moon seemed as abandoned and unnecessary as a nail-clipping low on the horizon.
The pregnant woman and her two children, were, he realised, Apache. The matron, seated a few feet from them, seemed to dissipate her disapproval between himself and the Native Americans. The Sunbelt had seen another land rush this time of new businesses and early retirement. There wasn't gold or cattle country out here now to take away from the Indians, just golf courses.
The doors of the mobile lounge sighed open at the terminal gate and he filed off behind the other passengers, hesitant for perhaps the first time. Then the automatic doors embraced him and he began to trek towards the exit and the cab rank.
He was unaware that, together with the other passengers on the flight, his photograph was taken as he had entered the concourse. The FBI agent was bored, impatient for his shift to end, and certain that Gant would not return to Phoenix. He was therefore uninterested in visually inspecting the passengers; but because Mclntyre in Washington had insisted, and he was a hard-nosed, unforgiving sonofabitch, he dutifully photographed all arriving passengers at Sky Harbor that night.
Gant walked out of the terminal into the fresh cool of the evening, confident of his continuing anonymity.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Accident and Design Reluctance remained on her wearied, drawn features like a mask. Blakey, too, seemed older, misplaced. It was as if both of them had moved on in time and resisted being drawn back into the situation. Gant stood in the doorway of the executive suite, sensing Alan Vance's absence from the big room like a visible, black hole.
Barbara watched him warily, as if he had declared some intention of reviving their marriage and of hurting her further.
Gant shrugged and said: "I didn't intend to cause trouble, Barbara."
Then he turned at once with evident relief to Blakey.
"Hi, Ron."
Blakey grumbled something into his unkempt beard, his dark eyes looking at a loss and aged, his whole manner that of an actor learning the role of a derelict.
Gant moved forward into the familiar pine-panelled room. Barbara was seated behind Vance's big redwood desk, Blakey on a long sofa against one wall.
"I need your help, Ron. Some computer stuff—" Then it was as if he, too, succumbed to the invisible nerve gas of defeat and bankruptcy that had replaced the room's habitual energy, its atmosphere of effort and confidence.
Through the windows, their blinds still raised, the dusk was uninterrupted by the glow of lights, the sense of business, the light-map of hangars, workshops, runways. Vance Aircraft, he had realised as the cab had approached it, had become a vacant lot. The banks and the other major creditors had foreclosed. The company had been declared bankrupt, without the benefit of Chapter Eleven or any other saving delay, as the business had been asset-stripped as effectively as if by locusts.
He'd read the obituary in Newsweek on the flight from Amsterdam. He could read it even more vividly on Barbara's face. For the first time in years, he felt an ache of sympathy for her.
"I had meetings, Mitchell, I didn't need to be interrupted," were her first accusing words. They were, however, delivered in a very worn, husky voice, as if she had finally tired even of insult and her dislike of him.
"Sure. I realise what's been happening."
"Do you?" Then her features softened; crumpled, rather.
"Maybe you do at that.
What is it you want?" She waved him to a seat.
"Drink?" He shook his head and she shrugged, sipping at her own large bourbon. There were stains of tiredness under her eyes, the make-up was disguisingly heavy.
He turned to Blakey, as if embarrassed. He took out the snapshot of Strickland, posed on a jetty of some kind, where there were mountains, pines, a lake; somewhere in the world. He, at least, felt refreshed after the shower he'd had in his motel and was determined to shake off the room's mood, its air of defeat.
Strickland was his sole concern.
This is the guy who made the rogue chip," he said.
"His name's Strickland. He's ex Company Blakey seemed nonplussed, his features with that empty concentration of a wino.
There's nothing more I can tell you about the chip, Mitchell. My guess is it reconfigured itself it's wearing a disguise, or maybe it's gotten amnesia after it did what it was intended to do."
"It's not the chip that matters, Ron," he replied with a patience that surprised him.
"I want to trace this guy."
"Can he make things come out right like in a story?" Barbara asked derisively.
He looked at his ex-wife and shook his head.
"No, he can't. Look, Barbara, there are people o
ut there who hired him—"
"Who?" she demanded.
"Not yet. There's no proof. It's to do with Europe, with airplane companies, even security services it's all still vague. Except for Strickland. I saw him on a video in Oslo. He was there. He did it.
And he'll know who hired him." His eyes hardened. They want him too.
I don't have a lot of time." He looked up, glowering at Barbara.
"I need this blown up, examined on a computer. There has to be a clue, somewhere in the photograph, as to where it was taken."
Blakey was turning the creased snapshot in the light from a lamp, squinting as he did so. Barbara seemed to move in and out of interest as she might have done a mild hypnotic state.
"Could be anywhere. You think it's America, somewhere?"
"Strickland is American it could be. Or Europe. He had a house there." He sniffed. Those buildings in the background. Maybe there's a signboard—" He became angry with himself.
"It's all I have. I can't go to Langley and ask at the door!"
"You took a risk, coming back at all," Barbara offered.
"I had to. They tried to kill me twice. I needed to lose them."
"And that's why you're here?" she mocked. Gant understood her vengeful frustration. Over the telephone, when he had eventually demanded and received her attention, he had sensed a desire being awoken that he could only disappoint; as in their marriage.
"Sorry," she added suddenly. He waved the apology aside. Failure was eating her away as surely as a cancer, and he could not avoid his empathy with her.
"I can scan this to transfer it to computer. We can maybe play with it, Mitchell… but don't hold your breath, fella. It doesn't look all that much to me."
"Nor to me," Gant replied without turning to Blakey, his gaze still on Barbara, who shifted uncomfortably under his intense, even unwelcome compassion.
"It's all there is, Ron all there is."
Then let's get started," Barbara announced, standing up with a jerky movement.
"It's getting late, and I have to go on supervising the disposal of what's been salvaged from this disaster — keep on running the fire sale." She managed a brief, wintry smile.
"What was left?" he asked.
"Oh, some small component work some of the avionics stuff." She shrugged her thin shoulders.
"We can maybe keep on five per cent of the workforce in cheaper premises. We won't be building any more airplanes!" Invigorated by something close to hatred, she snatched the snapshot from Blakey's fingers. This is him, is it?
The bastard who killed Alan?" Gant nodded.
"And you know who hired him?
Who?"
"Not yet," Gant replied.
"Not yet. First, I have to find him."
The air-conditioning needed fixing, forcing him to leave the windows open against the clammy warmth of the early-summer night. He could hear the noise of music from the Ethiopian restaurant two doors down the street, African drumming from another bar, the laughter of the ethnics and the noise of traffic. Adams-Morgan as a place to live was the antithesis of everything Mclntyre would have chosen.
His estranged wife, May, with ambitions to become an artist, had moved them there because the narrow old house's top-floor apartment possessed a studio. She'd enjoyed the bars, the bookstores, the galleries and the sense of the exotic that was the tourist impression of that district of Washington.
For a time. She couldn't paint or sculpt, despite all the lessons that had cost him so much hard-earned money. It might have been the discovery of her complete lack of talent that had caused her to run off with an Hispanic jazz musician two years earlier; on the rebound from the untidy, unused studio that mocked her every day.
Or maybe it had been from his ridicule, his conservatism, his smug certainty that she would never cut it in art like in everything else.
Mclntyre stared at the letter he had had from her a week before. She was bleating about the delay in the alimony. The African drums and the whining Ethiopian reed instrument reminded him forcibly of May, reinvoking his contempt and anger. The Hispanic jazzman wasn't getting gigs too bad. May was waiting table in a diner too bad… He threw the letter aside on the cluttered desk that occupied one corner of the studio. May's potter's wheel, her brushes and canvases, littered the remainder of the room. May had walked out on him and left him without the money to move out of a neighbour hood he despised and in which he felt an exile.
His blunt hands flicked at the heap of unpaid bills, then rubbed his broad face in a washing motion. He yawned, then lifted the bourbon to his mouth.
He stood up and walked to the tall windows of the studio. Beyond the streetlights of Columbia Road was the hard glow of Washington. May's letter was just another hassle. There was pressure from everywhere.
He'd forced Gant into a corner, making him a fugitive from justice, now the Bureau wanted to know why he hadn't caught up with him. Fuck Gant… fuck May and her Hispanic. Fuck his chief, who didn't like or trust him.
The telephone buzzed like a trapped bee and he snatched up the receiver. It was the English guy, Fraser. Fuck Fraser, too… "Ma?
Well, here I am in Washington just checked in to the Jefferson Hotel.
Very nice suite." It sounded like a come-on line. The guy was so obvious the fucking Jefferson Hotel, one of the best, for Chrissake!
"You've had a wasted journey, Fraser," he growled. The man had once been a kindred spirit. They'd cooperated on a couple of ops when he'd been Company and Fraser was in MI6, the British intelligence outfit.
But who did the guy think he was, calling him earlier in the day, flying all the way over here? His free hand rubbed his stub bled cheek.
"A wasted journey," he repeated sullenly.
"Just hear me out before you make that judgement," Fraser replied, his confidence undiminished.
"You don't pull any weight any more, Fraser. You're in the private sector. You talked horse shit this morning you woke me up, for Chrissake-!" Fraser's chuckle was angering.
"Private sector, I like that. You'd like it, too, Mac. We want the same things don't we…?"
Strickland's name was an itch he could not scratch. Gant was after Strickland. That much Fraser had told him… Why don't we pool resources, get together on this one? The guy had a real neck. All he wanted was the Bureau's cover and assistance while he went after Strickland on US soil. There was nothing in it for Mclntyre, personally.
"Do we?" he responded almost involuntarily. If Strickland talks to Gant, what else might he say about the Company, about you? Fraser had asked him when he rang. It hung in the air of the studio like a blackmail threat, like May's paint smells and her rage at her lack of talent.
"What in hell do you want, Fraser?"
To help you, Mac. To find Gant with you, to… find Strickland. That's all—" He broke off.
"Ah, room service. Champagne, canapes—" He laughed. There was no attempt to make the deception subtle or convincing. The bribe was as vulgar as soiled notes on the desk in front of him.
"Fuck you, Fraser," Mclntyre snarled, turning again to the window and raising the bourbon to his lips.
Drops of the liquor stained his shirt front. The humid night moved against his body like heavy, sullen drapes, smelling of memory and defeat. Strickland had been used in the Company's dirty campaigns in Latin America in the eighties.
Some friends were helped by having their opponents removed — car bombs, house fires, the usual range of wet solutions that had called for Strickland's special, psychotic skills. He'd run Strickland, given him his targets for two years. Neither the Bureau nor the government would touch him with anything but a long stick if any of it came out. They'd make him a leper to prevent themselves being tainted with the disease of the past.
His glass was empty and he refilled it with one hand, the glass making a wet ring on the scuffed leather top of the desk. Fraser seemed content to wait in silence; as if he expected a favourable decision.
It wasn't that e
asy, he thought, swallowing the bourbon. He returned to the window above the loathed thoroughfare.
May's letter flickered in his imagination like a mocking salute. If Strickland started shooting off his mouth, the Director would personally throw him out on the street outside the J. Edgar Hoover Building and his hat after him. He needed to think… But not dismiss Fraser out of hand. He could be useful.
"OK let's talk. In the morning. I'll call at your hotel, early."
I'll be waiting, Mac. Good to talk to you—" The receiver was at once replaced, leaving Mclntyre listening to the tone. He slapped his own receiver down.
He was in a bind, he admitted. He needed money May could take him to court for the back alimony and the Bureau's puritans would want him out for that reason… Strickland could blow his ship out of the water, or Fraser could spread the word anyway, if he didn't cooperate… The bourbon burned the back of his throat. If Gant got to talk to Strickland-fax machine. He turned at its fourth ring. Then the telephone rang.
"Mclntyre it's late."
"Sorry, sir." It was Chris, still at the office.
"I'm sending through a phpto we just received' there was an edge of excitement in his voice 'from Phoenix."
Mclntyre, his breath somehow lost or disregarded, stood over the fax machine as if he might bully or interrogate it. Slowly, like oil seeping out of the instrument, Gant's features, in three-quarter profile, emerged.
"Got it?"
"Sure." Mclntyre grinned.
"It's him. When was this?"
This evening early. Sky Harbor airport. He got off a shuttle from Miami International."
' Where is he?" Mclntyre breathed.
"I checked the surveillance at Vance Aircraft. Vance's daughter and the chief research engineer, Blakey, both arrived less than an hour ago out of the blue. He must be there, mustn't he?"