‘Recently emigrated.’
‘I like your humour.’
‘Swiss-Germans have none.’
‘Is the fog going to damage you much?’
‘Damage?’
‘Upset your plans. You on business someplace? Holiday? Visiting?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sorry. It’s an American habit. We tell everything about us. You tell everything about you.’
‘You are Mr Franklin and you are American. What else?’ ‘Fire away.’
‘May I drink first?’
Franklin swung round and hit the bar hard with the fist of his hand. ‘God help me. Can somebody pour a drink, or do droughts follow fogs in this goddamned city?’ He banged his glassful of Scotch on the counter and ice cubes fell into her lap.
‘Christ, I’m sorry.’ He reached down to pick them up and she felt his hand move clumsily on her thigh. She brought her knees together quickly and trapped it.
Franklin looked up. ‘I was going after the ice, lady.’
‘It can do little damage there,’ she said, picking his hand up with both of hers and placing it back on the bar.
The Scotch and bourbon arrived immediately, the barman anxious to avoid noisy scenes with foreign strangers.
Franklin lifted her drink to her and chinked glasses. ‘Chow!’
‘Chow!’
‘If I ask you a direct question will you knock me off the stool?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you a hooker?’
‘Do you not usually talk to ladies in the bar?’
‘No. Are you?’
‘No. Disappointed?’
‘No. Encouraged.’
‘Because you might get it free?’
‘Christ! Are all Swiss-German-Australians like you?’
‘All of them. It’s just they travel so little it’s not known.’
‘Dinner and bed?’
‘Dinner and bed.’
‘I never thought it could be so easy.’
‘It may not be.’
‘You’re what we call a cock-teaser.’
‘It’s a nice idea.’
‘Christ again!’ He watched her forefinger and thumb move slowly up and down the neck of his bottle of soda. ‘Jesus! One helluva movie. Can we eat and bed before the lights go up again?’
She held out her hand to steady him as he got off the high stool and he was mildly astonished at her strength. He grinned. ‘There’s an American joke that ends: “Gee, that was great, what did you say your name was?”’
‘I know that joke too,’ she smiled back. ‘And you’re supposed to ask that afterwards.’
He held on to her elbow and pulled her closer. ‘Ma’am, no offence, but if I’m going to fuck you I ought to call you something.’
‘I’m sure you will, Mr Franklin. You will.’
Anna Schneider had her steak. And Franklin persuaded her to take one glass of champagne with it. The fillet was small and over-done and the Moët Chandon had lost its chill, but they were in no mood to trouble over such things. Franklin sat close to Schneider with many Scotches and most of the champagne inside him, her right hand in his left trouser pocket, and cared not at all.
Schneider found it pleasurable and felt safe in his company. She had broken a rule formerly cherished, one of many that had kept her safe. But at this time, in this place, she could persuade herself there was good reason for an exception to be made. Tonight she was marking time in fog. Tomorrow she would be on a flight to Dublin. She moved as time moved and stopped as it stopped. There was, she mused, sipping her champagne, a soothing inevitability about it.
She had made no other concession. She’d told him nothing, relying on any man’s assumption that a one-night stand values anonymity. He had called himself Franklin. She could have invented a name just as readily.
He knew nothing, suspected nothing. Afterwards he would remain behind long after she had left. At first she had thought that it might be better that he never left the hotel alive, but decided the risk did not match the convenience. So she would delay him, and he would only blame the drink.
When they finally came to wake him up he could remember very little. He didn’t recall her room number, only that she had insisted they went to hers. They had smoked pot, very strong and very good. She’d called it ‘Gold’. He remembered her sitting on the warm air vent smoking it, naked except for a thin twist of red silk around her neck. She’d joked about it but he couldn’t remember what or why he’d laughed, except that he had laughed for too long and she stopped him by sitting on his face and he’d thought that funny too but couldn’t laugh any more.
And then he’d been woken up fourteen hours later with why and what the hell! At first he’d blamed it on the fatigue of a middle-ageing man not used to it. And who the hell could ever get used to her and her enormous enthusiasm, whose contortions and appetite and sheer bloody strength had threatened to tear him apart!
They’d started by blaming the drink until they checked the glass she had given him and found the tiny deposits. And then they stopped blaming and started questioning. But what to tell? A one-night stand to end them all. Beautiful, blonde, green eyes, with a body you only see in make-believe. A Swiss-German—German-Swiss? Or an Australian emigrant. No. Certainly German or Austrian, about twenty- four years, 140 pounds, five feet ten. It was a pick-up, and you don’t ask for curriculum vitaes. Anyway, when she’d done she took him back to his room. How about that? And she knew as much about Franklin as Franklin knew about her. Drink or no drink.
So they’d left to go back to the American Embassy to write their report. And he’d been given orders, orders this time, to catch the 1730 hours flight to Dublin that evening. Their contact would be rearranged to rendezvous as before. Meet him, they’d said threateningly. This time meet him!
He went into the bathroom to shower. He washed and rinsed gingerly in cold water, and went to the mirror to shave. He saw his neck. In places it was red raw where she’d bitten him and sucked blood to the skin. Then he remembered her, provocative and naked, with the red twist of silk around her neck. And somewhere in the hung-over and drugged recesses of his memory he remembered in their convulsive orgasm his tongue reaching inside the silk and touching a ridge of skin that could have been a scar.
One hour and ten minutes later, with the capricious English winter sun making his forehead tingle with a slight sweat as it beamed into the departure lounge, Franklin was sitting exactly where he’d been ordered to sit, reading the book Cheaney had given him for the occasion: The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland by J. Theodore Bent. He was about to finish his seventh cup of coffee when the man sat down at the table. ‘Keen on African archaeology?’ he asked.
‘Not at all.’
‘You’re Franklin?’
‘That’s right.’
‘New York Times?’
‘And sometimes Washington.’
‘How d’you do. Your people have told us. My name’s Howard.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Franklin. ‘Is that your first or second name?’
‘Sorry. Surname. John Howard.’ They shook hands.
‘It’s warm,’ Franklin said.
‘Amazing December, really. Very warm. I’d loosen that scarf, old lad. Hate you to explode. You’re looking really rather all-in.’
‘It’s been quite a time,’ Franklin said, loosening the scarf he had bought at the hotel to hide his bruising. Her red silk twist plagued him. And again and again his tongue moved inside it to caress the ridge of hard scar from the wound she’d received at the shoot-out at Leipzig. And he’d remembered too late. Too late to stop her. Too late even to catch her. By the time he’d called the Embassy she would have been in Dublin for six hours and might well have flown out of it again. He had told Cheaney they should use a professional. Now they knew what he meant.
‘You flying with me?’ asked Franklin.
‘Only as far as Dublin.’
‘Then?’
‘You make it on your own to the Lakes. They’re expecting you.’
‘Why do I go to Dublin? Why not straight to Fahd?’
‘I want you to meet someone there. Won’t take long. He’s a . . . he’s a fellow terrorist, a Provisional from the north but very active internationally, a go-between, Gaddafi, the Palestinians, the Syrians. He’s been involved in gunrunning with the Red Army. We got some movements from him. We’re hoping to get more. We’ll know when we arrive. They’re still working on him.’
‘You made him talk?’
‘Not me, old man. We. Quite a lot, actually.’
‘And he’s still alive?’
The Englishman laughed. He brushed aside his blond straggling hair from his forehead.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘They’ll be calling our flight any minute.’ ‘Yes?’
‘May I pinch your coffee? It’ll take half an hour in that queue.’
‘It’s cold.’
‘Love it cold. Drives my wife mad. Once she poured cold water on to the Nescafe thinking I wouldn’t notice. Silly ass.’
‘I’m surprised you’re married.’
‘Good heavens. Why not? You mustn’t think the English are all gay. Not all of us.’
‘Kids?’
‘Yes. Two. Boys. May I show you?’
He pulled a wallet from his inside breast pocket and opened it to Franklin. Two small faces smiled from behind the square cellophane window.
‘They’re good lookers,’ said Franklin.
‘Thank you. Very nice to say so, I must say.’
He drank cold coffee.
‘You were telling me about the man you tortured,’ said Franklin.
The Englishman’s blue eyes twinkled over the rim of his coffee cup. Very bright eyes. Small pupils. His face was thin and his nose was long and very straight. He looked as if he had come straight from the Herrenvolk.
‘If I hadn’t been so punctual,’ he said, ‘this coffee would have been perfect. There’s our flight.’
The departure board clicked its computer way through the letters and numbers until it showed the Aer Lingus flight departing for Dublin at Gate 14.
The Englishman stood up from the table and watched Franklin gather his things together. He made the scarf more comfortable and then picked up a small shoulder bag, supplied by the Cairo Embassy, containing a shirt, a pair of socks and underpants. And Theodore Bent.
It was dark when they got to Dublin. The man they kept in the long squat grey building had talked some more, just as the Englishman Howard had expected. Irish Intelligence had had the most extraordinary luck—as they put it. Once the Americans in London had alerted them to Schneider they had checked with their airport watchmen who remembered a known and as yet unconvicted Provo at the airport about the time of the London flight. As far as they knew he met nobody and left on his own motorcycle. It was only after Schneider’s description reached them that one of the younger watchmen remembered the Provo stopping a tall blonde for a light. Innocent enough, until it was recalled that the young Provo didn’t smoke, and never had.
‘You did this?’ asked Franklin.
‘’Fraid so,’ said the Englishman. His blue eyes smiled.
‘You’ve crippled him.’
‘Apparently.’
‘Bastards!’
‘Don’t be absurd. Your people want Fahd back on his throne. We gather he’s rather vital, and we mean to keep him alive for you. With the help of young Kieran here I think we will.’
The Englishman raised his hand and the guard by the door switched off the ceiling light. For five seconds or more they stood in the dark. Then an intense beam of light from the Englishman’s torch shone into the prisoner’s eyes.
‘Good evening, Kieran,’ he said softly and pleasantly. ‘I’ve brought someone here to see you. From America. I am going to ask you some of my questions again and I want you to answer them just the way you’ve been doing. D’you understand, Kieran? Just the way you’ve been doing.’
The grey eyes looked into the beam of light, wide and unblinking. Morphine, injected to ease the enormous pain between his legs, had dilated the pupils and they were so grey and so empty it was like looking directly into the brain behind.
‘Kieran, you met Miss Schneider at Dublin airport?’
‘Yes.’ It was a whisper from the back of the throat. The eyes did not move.
‘And you took her back to your rooms. To meet others?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what did Schneider want from them? What did she ask for?’
‘A plane.’
‘To?’
‘Fly to Carlisle.’
‘To refuel?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then?’
‘Newcastle.’
‘Why?’
‘A ferry to Stavanger, Norway.’
‘Was she flying anywhere in between Carlisle and Newcastle?’
‘Ullswater.’
‘Why, Kieran? Why Ullswater?’
‘To drop a bomb.’
‘A bomb, Kieran? A bomb?’
‘Canister.’
‘And where did Schneider get this canister?’
‘Brought to my room.’
‘When?’
‘Two days ago.’
‘Who brought it?’
‘Arab.’
‘From? Where from, Kieran?’
‘Iraq.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Searched him.’
‘A passport?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the canister? What was in the canister?’
‘It was sealed.’
‘Made of?’
‘It was heavy.’
‘Metal?’
‘Lead.’
‘A canister made of lead, Kieran. And what was inside?’ ‘I don’t know.’
The grey eyes quickly closed and the young man squeezed his eyelids tight and held his breath.
‘Don’t be afraid, Kieran,’ said the Englishman softly and gently. ‘I believe you now. When you say you don’t know, I believe you. I didn’t before, did I? But I do now. Really I do.’ The grey unseeing face slowly relaxed again, and the grey eyes opened.
‘And the Arab, Kieran? What happened to the Iraqi?’
‘He stayed.’ The voice was so small that Franklin moved a step closer. He smelt the man’s sweat and his excreta smeared across the chair. And the clinical alcohol splashed across the man’s bruised genitals.
‘He stayed with the canister, Kieran, until Schneider came?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then he gave the canister to Schneider?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then you killed the Arab?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Schneider left?’
‘Yes.’
‘With the canister?’
‘Yes.’
‘But we don’t know where she went, do we Kieran?’
‘No.’
‘Thank you. Now you can sleep again. Goodnight, Kieran. Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight.’
‘Lights, please,’ said the Englishman loudly, suddenly, pleasantly.
In the sudden brightness Franklin held his hand to his eyes and turned away from the torture chair and the dull grey shape slumped in it. The guard held open the door and stood to one side for them to pass. The Englishman smiled to him.
‘You can clean him up now and put his trousers on.’ He stopped and touched the guard’s arm. ‘If the doctor agrees, of course. Only if the doctor agrees.’ He walked out into the corridor and Franklin followed.
The Englishman s
topped half-way down the narrow corridor and leant against the wall, hands in his trouser pockets. Everything was painted high gloss green and there was a strong smell of floor wax. There were no windows and no doors other than the one they had just left. It was like a long narrow prison cell.
The Englishman smiled. Franklin looked away to the blurred image of him reflected in the shine of the green wall opposite.
‘A lead canister, Franklin, stolen from the Al Ahrish laboratories in Baghdad, containing twenty grams of plutonium, highly radioactive and, you understand, a deadly contaminate. Schneider intends to deliver it to King Fahd. It’s a fantasy, Franklin, except the reality is that we know that canister was brought to Dublin and that it is now somewhere en route to Lake Ullswater.’
‘And Fahd dies.’
‘You miss the point. There are simpler ways to kill a king than plutonium. If that canister is opened, its radioactive contamination could spread twenty miles in every direction from its centre point . . . forty miles depending on the wind and weather. That’s an area of two thousand square miles. It will destroy the lakes and the land and every living thing. It would be a. biological desert for half a century or more. Schneider’s target is Fahd, but more than ten thousand people live inside that circle. Can you begin to imagine what would happen if it became known that the canister was somewhere in England? Can you? On its way to kill an Arab and every living English thing just because he had become their neighbour in exile?’
‘So either way Schneider gets Fahd.’
‘Exactly. Dead by her hand or that of any one of a million English. The threat would be enough to force the British Government to deport him. And where could he go with such an assassin for company?’ He went on, ‘I’m told flights between here and the British mainland have just been grounded, but I’ve a feeling the bird has already flown. Nothing goes within sixty miles of Ullswater, even the scheduled flights must detour. RAF Fighter Command is patrolling.’
‘She needn’t use a plane,’ said Franklin.
‘All roads are being sealed off. Everything, even the mountain tracks. And we’ll have special army units patrolling, And helicopters.’
‘She doesn’t have to go by automobile.’
‘Oh yes, she does. That canister weighs over thirty pounds and it’s three feet long. Schneider is young and strong, but not strong enough to carry thirty pounds of lead very far.’
December Ultimatum Page 13