“They couldn’t be allowed to enter into this.” Redman scowled at the Serpentine. “As of this morning, I’ve been left in no doubt that, to pick up on something you said earlier, an example has to be made. A very dramatic example that can be broadcast to our allies as a warning they can’t ignore.”
“Shape up or ship out?”
“Exactly.” He paused. “But thirty grand … you know, don’t you, that we don’t operate the same system as you Brits? When your people want somebody blown away, they pay you to do it. But the CIA could always have a staffer kill Lescombe for free.”
“You’re conveniently overlooking one thing: the law doesn’t allow you to have a staffer do that. But if my finger’s on the trigger, there’s no way either Congress or your European allies can nail you for unauthorized covert action. Your hands would be clean, I’d see to that.”
Redman pursed his lips. “If we choose the right man from the list at our disposal, he won’t get caught.”
“Why even risk it?” Albert knew that time was running out; he had to ram the message home. “I’m available, I’m disclaimable—”
“You’re pretty damned expensive!”
“Louis, come on! You wouldn’t even miss thirty thousand out of the petty cash. And I’m worth it. You know my track record.”
The other man stopped walking and stared at the ground. “I’ll tell you what,” he said at last. “Someone has to waste Lescombe. If, if you get to him first … well, we know your terms.”
“You mean, you won’t give me exclusivity?” Albert was incredulous.
“I can’t afford to. In several senses.”
Somehow Albert managed to control his features. “Suppose I get to do the job,” he said sulkily. “What then?”
“Like I say, we know the terms you’re operating on.” Redman smiled briefly. “I guess we’d have to sell that missile, after all.”
Not far from where they stood, a brace of magpies were pecking ferociously at some morsel of food, flung down, Albert supposed, by one of the oicks who populated England nowadays. Now Redman nodded his head at them and said, “English is such a rich language. I love the old sayings. Do you know that saw ‘one for sorrow, two for joy’?”
Albert had to think about that. “Right,” he said at last, relief sounding in his voice. “Two for joy. Right.”
Redman stared at him, his face expressionless, and Albert wondered what he was thinking.
“Don’t know about you, colonel,” the American said at last. “But I could really murder a large scotch.”
CHAPTER
34
David Lescombe knew he was eight miles high over the Atlantic, but beyond that he could perceive only the dazzle enveloping the British Airways Concorde. Supersonic flight, he’d soon discovered, held no allure for him. Everything aboard appeared to be the same drear gray color, even down to the menus and the headsets—the latter being useless, in David’s case, because he was sitting so far back that the noise of the engines drowned out everything else. The famed curvature of the earth lay concealed behind a yellow-white glow, and anyway he found it impossible to see out the portholes that passed for windows. The cabin felt stiflingly hot. He took little pleasure in traveling at—he glanced up at the green fluorescent screen—twice the speed of sound, in the high-tech equivalent of a wood-burning stove.
David and Tom sat close but apart, wanting to avoid giving the impression that they knew each other. Awareness of his companion behind him brought David great comfort.
This morning, a Sunday, the plane was nearly empty; the dozen or so passengers had scattered themselves around the two double banks of leather-covered seats. For the most part they sat quietly, except a couple in the row across the aisle and immediately behind David, opposite Tom, young, American, and, it would seem, on their honeymoon. They had spent the entire flight so far swilling champagne, cuddling, kissing, and exchanging some of the most ridiculous dialogue David had ever endured. He felt that if he heard the word “Smoochums” again, once this flight was over, he would throw something at the speaker. But when he tried to change seats the chief purser demurred, making unctuous noises about payload distribution that made no sense to the uninitiated.
David was half aware that Tom kept looking at this ridiculous couple. Did that mean he suspected them? Surely not … but then why did the FBI agent spend so much time keeping them under surveillance?
David pushed his feeling of unease to the back of his mind and tried to plan. He loved just one thing about the Concorde: its speed. His only complaint on that score was that it couldn’t fly fast enough.
He didn’t want to eat. He tried to sleep and could not. He realized that somewhere aboard, perhaps in the cockpit, it was a certain time; this plane, supersonic or not, could no more divorce itself from the world of which it formed part than it could travel back through the centuries. But in his seat there was no time. They were chasing the day’s end. So far it had eluded them.
David sought truth. It was as elusive as the sunset.
He tried to remember why he had gone to New York in the first place, to understand the nature of his pursuit.
He’d wanted to find his wife, knowing in his heart that she would not be there, which seemed in retrospect an odd thing to do. Perhaps he had merely gone to find out about her. So what had he learned?
She’d once had an affair with her analyst. She might be with Kleist now. He couldn’t avoid it any longer: she might have betrayed both him and her country. A lot of evidence suggested that this conclusion was the right one.
But David’s recent experiences had affected him strangely, he was more in love with Anna than on the day he’d married her. He did not believe that she was a traitor. He wanted to save her from whatever peril threatened her, and then, because he loved this woman so much, he would help her to become whole again. Become what she once had been.
Which was what?
A businessman in the row of seats opposite stood up, adjusted his shirt cuffs and walked back along the aisle in search of the lavatory. David eyed him warily, sensing that Tom Burroughs was doing the same. But the man passed by without so much as a glance in their direction. Moments later he returned. As he drew level, the plane gave a lurch and he fell awkwardly against David’s seat, putting out a hand to steady himself. David flinched as if the man had tried to stab him.
“Sorry, old boy. Sorry about that … can be a bit rough, the last hour. Do this often, do you?”
“No.” David heard Tom’s restless movements in the seat behind him and resolved to be extra careful.
“Wish I didn’t have to. Ninth time this year and it’s still only April. What line are you in?”
Fortunately, at that moment the plane gave another leap across the sky, flinging his tormentor back into his seat. The FASTEN SEATBELT sign came on, once again enabling David to pursue his thoughts.
Why had Anna sought therapy in the first place? That was the one question Robyn had ducked. What had been her last straw? Why had she never discussed any of it with him?
David raised the blind and stared into a seamlessly domed sky. Beneath him, a little to one side, he could make out the beginnings of a white blade, and he shook his head. A wing but no prayer …
Did he still love her? Of course. Even though she may be with Kleist, may be in love with him …?
It was not too late. He could get back to London, seek out Fox, say, “Look, I realize I’ve been pigheaded about this one. Anna’s a bitch, I see that now. How can I help? Let me tell you what I’ve managed to discover about her so far. She’s a lush. She’s been in therapy for years—bet there’s a few red faces about that with you MI5 chaps, eh?—and she had an affair with the therapist, and by the way, can I have my career back, still not too late to hitch a ride to Vancouver, is it …?”
The businessman across the aisle looked up in surprise to see what had made his fellow traveler laugh out loud, but David was sitting bolt upright with both hands clenched, staring at the seat in front of h
im.
David glanced over his shoulder to find Tom still intent on the honeymooners, lips slightly parted. The FBI man’s forehead creased in a frown, he seemed tense, edgy.
David tried to ignore the implications of his companion’s behavior, but felt his heartbeat quicken nonetheless. Surely the sozzled couple couldn’t represent genuine danger? Surely?
Everyone was dangerous. Everyone. No, don’t think about that, plan ahead, use the time….
When he’d gone down to Yarmouth, that first day of life with Anna, he had been in search of a bracing weekend and had found love instead. It came late, unlooked for, and was rich. He could choose, if he wanted, to put it all behind him. It would require a supreme act of will, but he could do that. He could turn his back on love, preferring not to know.
Perhaps that blindness was genetic, for there was, he realized, a precedent.
His grandfather had been a mean, cold-spirited man, a hospital porter who hoarded money in tobacco tins and stuck them under the mattress of the bed he shared with Gran. They possessed only a thin mattress, Gran was bony, she did not have to be the princess in the fairytale about the pea to suffer from those tins. She was a gifted woman, artistic before the lower classes had been allowed to think of themselves in such terms, so the neighbors were reduced to calling her “clever with her needle,” or someone “who’s got a real way with painting a room, you should see it.”
She died on that bed, with the tins grinding her wasted body into eternity, one February, the bedroom hearth without a fire because Gramps didn’t believe in throwing money away needlessly. She died insane.
After her death, grandfather had changed. In addition to being cold and mean, he began to suffer from a profound, cancer-of-the bone-style remorse. He missed his dead wife. For the first time he realized that she had been a treasure, a woman beyond all price, who had loved him fiercely. The pangs of this horror began to wear him down, just as his tins with their rounded, hard edges and comers had ground her into nothing. In the end it killed him. The doctors called his disease cancer too, but David knew that for a lie. Remorse had killed his grandfather, as surely and as slowly as arsenic self-administered over a long period. David felt glad when he died. Mentally he consigned him to a hell of his own mind, for the sin of choosing not to know.
Later today he would be in London and, all being well, in Corfu by the following afternoon. Then, with Tom’s help, he could go to the island, following Robyn’s directions. By the time the sun went down on Monday, he could know.
If he wanted to.
David dozed for a while. He was wakened by the chief purser walking down the center aisle, checking seat belts and chair positions for landing. Almost before David knew what was happening they had hit the runway and begun to hurtle along it without any sign of slowing. The engines reversed thrust, the brakes went on, he was thrown violently against his belt. The noise level inside the stuffy cabin became intolerable. Behind him, female Smoochums was uttering whoops of delight.
As the plane turned off the runway, David saw that the pilot had only ten yards to spare, and he wiped the sweat from his face with a handkerchief that came away soaked.
The honeymoon couple were keen to disembark. David sat in his seat gathering his wits while they and the boorish businessman who had pestered him earlier busied themselves with hand luggage. Male Smoochums escaped first, leaving the female of the species to wrestle with her Gucci bag. She could not stop giggling. “I can’t get the strap right,” David heard her say. “I can’t fix it … you go on ahead.”
“I won’t leave you,” the man said, throwing his arms around her.
“Lissenname … we wanna cart, right?”
“Righ…”
“Go get one, then. Go on.” She shoved his shoulder. “Go on!”
Her husband reeled away toward the front of the plane. David rose to a half-crouch and slid sideways, ready to step into the aisle, when he felt a discreet tap on the shoulder. He looked back to find Tom on his feet, lips tightly compressed as he tried to keep both members of the young pair firmly in view. David hesitated, unsure what Tom wanted. There were very few passengers left now, just him, Tom, the businessman opposite, and the vile couple.
Something about their configuration spelt danger. David, feeling the onset of panic, took a pace backward.
When Mr. Smoochums was already some yards away, his wife managed to disentangle her bag. She tripped, still giggling. As she did so, Tom came smoothly out of his seat to take her by the arm, maneuvering himself between the woman and David. His jacket sleeve brushed David’s own. In his right hand he held what looked like a leather wallet.
The boorish businessman chose that moment to stand up, reaching for the overhead locker. Because he had been sitting in an aisle seat, the effect was to bring him into the line of the drunken woman’s awkward stumble, throwing Tom Burroughs off balance.
David saw the look on the FBI agent’s face and for a second could not understand his rage. Then Tom’s own words came back to him, count cents! and he knew why he was angry, just as he knew why the businessman’s face had turned blue and he was now staggering back into his seat, fighting for breath…. So David grabbed the businessman’s briefcase and, holding it in front of him like a shield, yelled at the top of his voice, “Steward! Emergency! There’s a dead man back here! He’s been murdered. Help!”
Disjointed realizations flooded through his mind. Burroughs had been working for the enemy all along. He’d somehow managed to dispose of Pattmore and then come to the bar, intending to go to London right from the start. But before David could analyze the knowledge, he remembered, just in time, that he was still hemmed into the row of seats. Now he retreated as far as he could, until his back came up against the hull. “Murder, murder!” he shouted again. Tom Burroughs turned on the balls of his feet and lunged at him, holding out his wallet. After a second of disbelief, David’s brain alerted him to the truth: somewhere in the leather there had to be a poisoned pin, maybe a blade, his only chance was to stay out of range.
“Stop!” he heard a voice shout from the front of the plane, but he dared not be distracted from his assailant. “Security!” the same voice shouted. “Stop or I shoot.”
David parried Burroughs’ next thrust with the briefcase, pushing him aside. Burroughs lowered his right hand; David caught a flash of something metal as the American prepared to lunge up, beneath his guard, but as he did so, from somewhere near the front of the cabin came a loud “plop!” The woman screamed in pain and fell across Burroughs, bearing him down, and he sank to the floor, where he stayed, pinned by her weight, until stewards dragged him away, leaving David with a drunk and a corpse for company in the world’s most prestigious aircraft.
David could not move. He felt full of toxins and aches and pains. There was this voice, but he couldn’t focus on it. At last he hauled himself into the aisle, to be met by a man he vaguely recognized as a fellow passenger who’d been sitting up front throughout the flight; he was in the act of holstering his pistol. “You’ve killed her,” David muttered. Even as he spoke he was angered by the knowledge of how feeble he must sound.
“I doubt it. The bullet’s just a bag full of sand, you see. Safe to fire even while we’re flying.” The speaker bent down to check. “Yes, she’s only stunned.” He stood up again. “What was all that about, anyway?”
David, still too shocked to speak, merely shook his head.
“From where I stood, it looked as if someone was trying to kill you.”
Yes, that was right. They meant to stop him, and Burroughs had been part of it. Who was he working for, really?
The security guard turned his attention to the businessman, who now sat white-faced with his eyes closed. “Got the wrong chap, by the look of it. Now he is dead, if you like. Can I have your name and address, please, sir?”
David complied. They’ll do anything to stop you. Anything at all. Your faith, against their force.
“Occupation?”
&n
bsp; “Uh … civil servant. Actually …”
Faith? Do you have faith in Anna!
The security guard had been writing details in a notebook. Now, hearing hesitation in David’s voice, he paused. “Yes?”
They will do whatever they have to, to prevent you from reaching the woman you love.
David realized why he felt so uncomfortable: he had been holding his breath. “I’m about to resign,” he said.
CHAPTER
35
Albert cut up steak for boeuf bourgignon while he planned his assault on Kleist’s Hampstead house.
He liked dealing with raw meat, its sogginess, its moisture, above all, the smell, which lingered on the skin long afterward. These views Montgomery shared. The stout tortoiseshell sat on the drainboard, eyeballing his master in the hope of a tidbit. Albert grinned at him. “Hypnotic puss,” he murmured. “You’d be a match for our Gerhard any day, wouldn’t you? Stop looking at me like that.”
But he tossed Montgomery a piece of prime steak anyway. He could afford such extravagant generosity now, or at least he would soon be able to.
He’d just begun to mix the steak with seasoned flour, taking his time over it, relishing the way the blood supped up gluten to make his fingers sticky, when the phone rang. He gave his hands a cursory wipe with a piece of paper towel and glared at Montgomery, “Don’t you daze!”
Albert lifted the receiver from its wall-mounted rest.
“Go now, right this minute.”
Fox, in a phone booth, urgent, panicking.
“What’s—?”
“M Center’s gone berserk. Their cipher traffic’s splitting our machines apart. Redland’s on the warpath.”
A long breath escaped Albert’s lips. “When?”
“Eight o’clock. There’s a connection. Tell you what it is later. And for the love of God, be careful.”
“Don’t forget to warn off the police.”
“Sorry, can’t. Security overload.”
“Shit!”
Fortunately he had dressed for the occasion earlier, so he did not even have to think, just lights off, car keys, out.
Krysalis: Krysalis Page 32