Noah seized the spidery man’s shirt front and banged his head against the window frame two or three times.
‘OK,’ he panted, ‘I want to know who you are, and I want to know who you work for, and I want to know exactly why you’ve been trying so goddamned hard to kill us.’
The spidery man looked up at him with concussed, unfocussed eyes, but said nothing. Noah reached down into the man’s belt and hoicked out his gun, a dull grey Ruger automatic. He also pulled up the legs of his pants to make sure that he wasn’t carrying any back-up weapons strapped to his ankles.
‘Come on,’ he repeated. ‘I want to know who you are, you toads, and I want to know now.’
The spidery man shook his head and coughed but still didn’t speak. Noah went across to the blond man, who was lying face down with Leon’s red-and-white baseball boot pressed against his left ear. He gave the man a heel kick in the side of the ribs, and then another, and then said, ‘How about you, scum? You killed my girlfriend right in front of my eyes. Any reason why I shouldn’t cut your nuts off and stuff them down your throat?’
‘Up yours, asshole,’ the blond man snarled back at him.
‘I think maybe now we should call the police,’ said Silja. ‘What are we going to do with them, otherwise? And if this is the man who killed your Jenna—’
‘Let me call Rick first, see what he says. Leon – want to go into the living room and bring me the phone?’
‘Sure thing,’ said Leon. But he was only halfway across the terrace when there was a deep, soft explosion, and a huge ball of dirty orange fire came rolling out of the living-room doors. Noah felt a wave of compressed heat, and raised his hand to shield his face.
Silja said, ‘My God! My God, what’s happened?’
‘Leon?’ shouted Noah, above the funnelling roar of the flames. ‘Leon, are you OK?’
Leon turned around, his face flushed with heat. ‘They had a briefcase,’ he gasped. ‘When they came in the door, one of them had a briefcase.’
There was another explosion, much louder this time. The living-room windows were blown across the terrace in a glittering shower of glass, and the flaming drapes were blown out after them, waving and burning like dragons’ tongues.
Noah gave the blond man another furious kick and looked round at the spidery man. ‘What the hell was that? What the hell did you do?’
The spidery man painfully climbed to his feet, holding on to a chair for support. Blood was sliding out of both nostrils and into his mouth. ‘Destroying the evidence, of course, Mr Flynn, once we’d disposed of you. Three unfortunate people burned beyond recognition in Laurel Canyon house conflagration. Pity it didn’t work out that way, but you don’t always get what you want.’
Noah’s house was now burning fiercely, with flames pouring out of every window and dark grey smoke teeming out from underneath the shingles.
‘I swear I’m going to kill you for this,’ said Noah. Everything that he and Jenna had built up together, every fabric that she had chosen, every drape that she had hung up, it was all whirling around him in a storm of black ashes.
‘You won’t kill me, Mr Flynn,’ said the spidery man, his voice barely audible over the popping and crackling of timber. ‘If I fail, there are others who will get to me first. But not you.’
Without warning, he turned and limped across the terrace, towards the railing. Before Noah could reach him, he had rolled himself over the top of it, and dropped down into the canyon. Noah glimpsed his grey-suited body bouncing and cartwheeling between the tree trunks. There was a faint crash of underbrush, and then he was gone.
‘Noah!’ shouted Silja – and, as he turned around, the blond man was struggling to his feet, violently pushing Leon to one side. Noah tried to block him off, but the blond man feinted and sidestepped, and dodged around to the far side of the dining table.
Noah pointed the Ruger at him and released the safety catch. ‘On your knees,’ he ordered him. ‘Hands behind your head.’
‘On my knees? What do you want me to do for you?’
‘I said, on your knees, you bastard!’
But the blond man ignored him, and took three surging strides towards the railing. He vaulted over it, his arms waving and his legs pedalling, and disappeared with a splintering of branches amongst the pines. Noah swung the gun after him but he didn’t shoot. He and Silja went to the railing and looked over. They could still hear branches breaking, but they couldn’t see the blond man at all.
‘Jesus,’ said Noah. ‘Even I wouldn’t try a stunt like that.’
There was another smaller explosion inside the house, and a bang as Noah’s pc imploded. Flames were beginning to lick up under the shingles now, and there was no question of them trying to put out the fire themselves. In the distance, they could hear the wailing and honking of fire trucks.
Noah looked down at the burgundy towel around his waist. ‘I’ll be ten seconds,’ he said. He took off the towel and quickly drenched it in water from the brass faucet at the side of the terrace. He splashed his body with water, too. Then he wrapped the towel around his head and ducked back into the house.
‘For God’s sake, be careful!’ called Silja.
‘Don’t worry! Done this a hundred times before!’
‘In a Nomex suit, not naked!’
It was fiercely hot inside the house, and filling with acrid smoke, but Noah kept low as he hurried along the corridor to the bedroom. He opened the door, went straight across to his closet and pulled out shirt, pants and shoes. He also went to the dressing table and collected his wristwatch, his wallet, his car keys and his cellphone.
Coughing, he scurried back out again. Silja looked at the red-and-purple Hawaiian shirt he had retrieved and said, ‘You nearly died for that?’
‘Come on,’ he told her. He went over to Marilyn’s perch and unchained the parrot’s leg. Marilyn flapped and squawked and protested, but he kept his grip on her. Then he led Silja and Leon around the side of the house to the parking area in front. They were just coming through the ivy-entangled gate when the first fire truck arrived, its lights flashing and its klaxon blasting.
Two firefighters dropped out of the fire truck and came hurrying towards them, their rubbers making a loud wobbling noise.
‘Anybody still in there?’
‘No, everybody’s safe.’
‘Anything else we should know about? Do you have any photographic chemicals in there? Any movie stock, anything explosive?’
Noah shook his head. ‘Only my entire life, that’s all.’
Sixteen
They had to wait for over an hour, sitting on the low stone wall under the bougainvillea, while two police officers took a statement from each of them. One police officer was short and Hispanic, with black furry forearms, his face beaded all over with perspiration. The other was tall and gingery with a large nose and close-set eyes. To Noah, they looked more like movie extras than real police officers. The officer with the close-set eyes kept asking the same questions over and over, in a flat, expressionless drawl, and writing the answers down with childish slowness, with the tip of his tongue clenched between his teeth.
‘Before the fire started, did you hear an explosion of any nature?’
‘An explosion, yes. Like, boofff.’
‘Boofff?’
‘Well, it could have been softer, you know. More like woofff.’
‘Which was it, then? Boofff or woofff?’
‘Woofff, I’d say. But not quite as drawn-out as that. More like whoof!’
The Hispanic officer wiped his forehead with the fur on his arm. ‘You didn’t notice any individuals acting at all suspicious around here, any time before the fire started?’
Noah shook his head. ‘I was out on the terrace. You can’t see the front of the house from the terrace.’
‘Only reason I ask, sir, is that there’s a grey sedan illegally parked up the road a ways, with no license plates and so far as I can see, no VIN number.’
‘Haven�
�t seen a soul,’ said Noah.
‘Nobody come to your door or nothing, asking to call the auto club?’
‘Nope. Nobody.’
Noah had never liked lying. His father always used to slap him on the back of the head if he caught him out in a lie, hard. Apart from that, this whole situation was getting way too dangerous. Jenna had died, Mo had died, Trina had died, and now he and Silja and Leon had come close to being killed. Maybe it was time to tell the police about the medallions and the men in grey suits.
‘There’s one thing—’ he began.
‘What’s that?’ asked the gingery police officer, but Silja narrowed her eyes at Noah, and gave him the briefest shake of her head.
‘No, nothing,’ said Noah. ‘Forget it.’
Once the police officers had moved out of earshot, Silja came and stood close beside him. Without looking at him, she said, ‘Adeola warned us not to trust anybody at all, remember? Even the police.’
‘I know. But we could have had our throats cut, for Christ’s sake. And look at my goddamned house. I mean, look at my goddamned house.’
‘It’s terrible. I’m so sorry. But the safest thing for now is to act like we know nothing, and saw nothing.’
‘Screw you,’ said Marilyn, and then imitated the warbling of Noah’s cellphone.
In fact, his cellphone was warbling. He answered it, and it was Rick.
‘Noah? Can you meet us at the Bel Air? I think we might be making some progress.’
‘OK . . . but you’ll have to give us twenty minutes or so. We’ve had a slight problem.’
‘What’s the matter? You sound upset.’
‘Oh, I’m upset. We were paid a visit by a couple of unwelcome friends this morning. Friends in grey suits.’
‘Same people? What happened?’
‘Can’t tell you now, cops are still here. But mayhem isn’t the word for it.’
‘You’re all safe, though?’
‘Shaken, for sure, but not stirred.’
‘OK, come down as soon as you can. A guy called Ted Armstrong will meet you when you get to the entrance. Tell him that you want to speak to Mr and Mrs Trebuchet.’
Noah went over to the police officers and asked them if he and Silja could leave. The gingery one said, ‘We’re going to need a location, sir, where you’ll be staying for the rest of the day.’
‘With friends. Guy called Mo Speller, 548 Lincoln Boulevard, Santa Monica.’
‘OK, sir. We’ll probably need to talk to you again.’
‘Not sure if I can tell you any more than I’ve told you already. I was taking a shower and the whole goddamn house went up, that’s all. If you ask me, it was a natural gas leak. Can’t think what else.’
‘Sir – you’d be surprised what people know without them knowing that they know it.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Witnesses, that’s what I’m talking about, sir. They see things happen, but at first they don’t understand the significance of what they’re looking at. A little while later, though, when they’ve had time to think it over, it all fits together. Like, bing! a light bulb switches on, right over their heads.’
‘Bing?’ said Noah.
‘That’s right, bing! We call it “delayed interpretation”.’
There was a slow, interrogative quality in the officer’s tone of voice that made Noah feel uncomfortable, as if the officer suspected that he hadn’t been telling him the whole truth. He’d said ‘delayed inter-pre-tation’ as if it were a question. There was something in the way that the officer was staring at him, too, with those close-set eyes.
Come on, Noah, he told himself, you’re being paranoid. He lifted his hand and said, ‘So long, then, fellas.’ He was trying to look nonchalant, but he was acutely conscious of how stiffly he was acting it.
Adeola said, ‘My God, they do mean business, don’t they? Your house! You were so lucky you managed to escape.’
‘I don’t think luck had much to do with it,’ said Noah. ‘It was Silja. Never saw anything like that. One swing round that flagstaff and wham! The guy was knocked flat.’
Adeola reached her hand out and took hold of Silja’s hand. Two tall women, one the colour of burnished bronze, the other as white as milk. ‘You must teach me how to swing round flagstaffs. Think how much I could impress the diplomats at those UN conferences in New York.’
They were sitting in one of the newly-refurbished Spanish cottages in the grounds of the Bel Air Hotel. The walls and ceiling were panelled in pale yellow and the furniture was gilded and ornate. A huge spray of fresh flowers stood in the centre of the coffee table, filling the room with the fragrance of sweet peas and roses.
The back door to the garden was open, but a solid-looking man with cropped white hair was sitting in an armchair, keeping an eye on it, while an even more solid-looking man with a bald head was sitting by the front door, reading the sports pages.
‘I heard from Bill Pringle around eleven thirty this morning,’ said Rick. ‘He had breakfast at The Watergate with his old friend from the Secret Service Archive. His friend is almost one hundred per cent sure that there’s another medallion in the archive, exactly the same as the others.’
‘Did he tell you who it used to belong to?’
‘No. But he said that his friend was going to go round to the archive later this afternoon, to check on the medallion and make sure that it is identical. Then he’ll call me again.’
‘OK,’ said Noah. ‘So what do we do in the meantime?’
‘There’s very little we can do,’ said Adeola. ‘I intend to ring around some of my Middle Eastern contacts, to see if I can find out any more about those two attempts on my life. It’s possible that one of them has heard something on the diplomatic grapevine. Leon – you might use my computer to do some more research into what the medallions might actually mean.’
‘Sure,’ said Leon. ‘And I’ll see if there’s any more dope on Professor Halflight, too. I mean – if he turns out to be some secret terrorist mastermind – how cool would that be?’
‘Question is,’ Noah put in, ‘what happens if we find out who these people are? If we can’t even trust the cops, who’s going to help us?’
‘What does an animal do, when it is cornered?’ asked Adeola.
‘It takes a dump?’
‘It turns around, and it attacks its attackers. And that is exactly what we are going to do. We have no choice. We have to find out who these people really are. We have to hunt them down before they hunt us down.’
‘And then what?’ asked Noah.
‘I don’t know. It depends who they turn out to be, how influential they are. It depends if they have friends in high places. If necessary, we will have to kill them.’
Noah looked at Silja uneasily. Adeola caught his look and said, ‘Noah – you have seen what they are capable of doing. Obviously they have no compunction whatsoever about killing us. For them, human lives have no value, not even their own. We may be faced with no alternative.’
‘So we’re forming ourselves into a hit squad?’ said Noah. He turned from Silja to Leon to Rick to Adeola. ‘Some fricking hit squad! Look at us!’
The solid-looking man sitting by the garden door turned to Rick and said, ‘Hey – you’re forming a hit squad? We’ll join your hit squad, Ted and me. Life’s been pretty damned boring, since we retired. Let’s face it, one human being can only play so many games of double-deck pinochle in his lifetime, without going loopy.’
‘Thanks, Steve.’
The rest of the day passed slowly and quietly. Adeola closeted herself in her bedroom so that she could make phone calls to her contacts in Egypt, Iran, Syria and Palestine. One of her friends in the government offices in Qatar told her that, two or three weeks before the Dubai explosion, he had picked up rumours that DOVE negotiators might be the target of terror attacks. But the information had been so sketchy that he hadn’t thought it worth passing on. After all, DOVE received death threats from dozens of different terrori
sts and political pressure groups, on almost a daily basis.
Noah played double-deck pinochle with Rick and Ted and Steve, while Silja gave herself a pedicure and polished her nails. Leon sat on the couch, frowning at Adeola’s laptop, and occasionally making notes.
At lunchtime they ordered room service: club sandwiches and shrimp salad, and a bagel with cream cheese and lox for Leon.
In the middle of the afternoon, Leon said, ‘I can’t find anything more about the medallions. But this Emu Ki Ilani thing keeps on coming up. Back in the days of King Nebuchadnezzar, in 605 BC, it was like a whole political and religious concept – “to become like the gods”. Nebuchadnezzar wanted to keep every nation in turmoil, always struggling against each other, so that mankind would never become complacent and lazy.’
‘What’s wrong with complacent and lazy?’ asked Steve. ‘I like complacent and lazy.’
‘Anything about Professor Halflight?’ asked Noah.
‘Some. But it’s not very consistent. One website says he was born in Munich in November of 1938, and that his name was originally Julius Halblicht. But Wikipedia says he was born in Queens, New York, in August of 1937 and his name was originally Julius Halbrecht.
‘Whichever it was, he was educated at the Solomon Schechter High School in New York, and then the Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv. He graduated in 1961 but after that there’s nothing about him at all, where he went or what he did. He just kind of surfaces in 1984 as professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, and in 1993 as professor of Jewish history at UCLA.
‘I did find a picture of him, though, in 1993, on Google Image. Here, look.’
Leon clicked on to the Google image library and showed them a blurry black-and-white photograph of Professor Halflight sitting in a wheelchair. He must have been at a convention or a conference somewhere, because there were several square tables visible in the background, each with a flag on them, and name cards. He was much thinner than he was now, and he was wearing dark glasses and a neatly-trimmed beard. He was leaning forward and listening attentively to a man of about forty-five with black slicked-back hair, but the man’s face was completely obscured by the flag in front of him.
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