by Craig Thomas
His eyes gloated. Gant knew his own posture was one of defeated truculence, that of the farm boy watching a storm flatten corn defiant only out of complete lack of expectation. Vance always had to prove he had offered you his thanks and you understood he had. The hundred thousand was just that, done without thought of consequence or propriety; a thank you that enabled you to buy things that would remind you of his gratitude.
Barbara's attempt to show concern for him, enquire into his present life, had been just as intrusive, but less damaging. It didn't look criminal. The payment did.
"What can I say?" he bluffed.
"Maybe I've got the lottery ticket somewhere in the apartment?"
"A real cure, like I said." Mclntyre's satisfaction was complete; he could, for once, adopt a moral superiority. Gant had screwed up with a bribe. The man could taste his pleasure. He shook his head.
"It's a long way to fall, hero to cheapskate. To being on the take."
He stood up.
"You can keep the statement. It's a Xerox. Oh, am I going to enjoy watching you fall, Gant!" he announced, his voice like his chest expanding with a kind of perverse pride.
"You'll land harder than you did two days ago and you won't walk away from the wreckage, boy you surely won't!"
He paused at the door, but there were no more words. His triumph was complete enough to ensure a grand exit. Gant watched the door close behind him, then slowly, gently lowered his head into his cupped, waiting hands. Between his resting elbows, the bank statement stared back at him.
"You stupid, stupid bastard," he murmured.
"You made-in-America, top-of-the-heap asshole, Vance…"
The remains of Mclntyre's cigarette smouldered in the tin ashtray which advertised Budweiser Lite, the smoke ascending in the still air of the room like a distress signal from a distant ship. Suddenly, the mummy's corpse of his present was not to be despised like a welfare cheque that would keep him going; help him subsist, together with the food stamps of football games and weekends in the mountains… They would even strip him of the remnants of this life; the job, the pay cheque the remaining reputation. It would all go. There would be nothing to hang on to, nothing… "Yes, I understand. No, it couldn't have been anticipated," David Winterborne concurred, the cordless phone against his cheek, Eaton Square below the balcony.
The French windows were open and the air was still fresh after the early-morning rain.
"Absolutely. No, I don't think the suit has much chance of success, but you'd better talk to the lawyers. Thank you, Al. Keep me informed."
He dropped the receiver on to the chaise-longue, richly carved and brocaded, against the back of which he was resting as he watched the traffic move through the square. One of his more elderly neighbours, the widow of a stockbroker, was walking her ridiculously small dog in the gardens; moving in and out of dappled shadow from the trees. He plucked at his smooth chin with one hand, the other arm folded across the chest of his dressing gown.
Des Moines Instruments, in which Winterborne Holdings was a majority stockholder and which had supplied the fuel computer system for Vance's aircraft, had been calling with angering frequency for the past two days and nights. The untraceable fault in the fuel computer's chips had been found. His eyes narrowed in contemptuous dislike. Vance's former son-in-law had just happened to be a remarkable pilot. Once Vance had survived the crash landing and they had discovered that the fuel was being jettisoned on the computer's command, even though the instruments revealed nothing, Vance had removed Des Moines Instruments from the board, gone to another supplier, exercised his considerable charm and air of authority through the national media and saved his company.
For the moment, at least.
Winterborne glanced at the maid who had brought his breakfast into the drawing room on a tray and was laying it on a table near the second pair of French windows. Beyond her was the door to the library and the fax machines and the VDUs on which, at the press of a few buttons on the keyboard, he could play the newest, the ultimate video game. He could sit before the screen and watch his fortune vanish. Stock in Des
Moines Instruments was down so far it might never recover. Shares in Aero UK were almost worthless and shares in Winterborne Holdings, his conglomerate, had been affected. Not merely scratched, but perhaps even fatally wounded. In forty-eight hours, the conglomerate's total worth had been diminished by seventy million, perhaps as much as a hundred million… and rising.
His aerospace interests in the UK, the US and Europe had, without exception, been damaged, perhaps beyond repair. Like some computer virus the doubts and the rumours had spread to contaminate the parent company and his other industrial and construction interests.
His hand shivered on his chin, but he stilled it through an effort of will.
Tim Burton's two 494s were still almost empty, shuttling around Scandinavia, but that was pitifully small comfort. His prospects were, albeit slowly, brightening.
The 494 was a largely rehabilitated aircraft and a cheap one, unlike Sky liner.
He recovered the telephone and dialled a number as he walked to the table. Fraser answered almost immediately.
"You'll need to speak to our man again," Winterborne announced.
"What he did for us with the fuel computer system was clever, but not clever enough."
"Agreed. Couldn't have anticipated—"
"Perhaps not. It's still not good enough. I think our man should be on site on the next occasion."
"Next? How-what?"
There are two aircraft of the same type still flying in Scandinavia."
They don't have the same system on board—"
"I don't want the same, Fraser. Rather, something that is in truth undetectable. Talk to our man."
"How long do I have? What kind of budget?"
Two days. And what it costs within reason."
"OK. I'll be in a position to report this evening."
Winterborne put down the telephone, already examining the exhilaration that had buoyed him as he spoke to Fraser. He was habitually nervous of the instinctual, as if such responses were immature or dangerous to himself. And yet there seemed he buttered a triangle of toast no other immediate solution. Another 494 had to fall from the sky, Vance had to be driven to bankruptcy… The shares he had recently acquired in two of the largest charter-flight companies would give him the necessary leverage to insist on their leasing a small fleet of Skyliners. Once the aircraft were in service, once the word-of-mouth spread, then Skyliner might yet be salvaged. If there was competition only with Boeing's new aircraft, due in another year or eighteen months, market share might mean something real, by then. If Vance's big, cheap plane had been removed from the board.
He crunched his teeth against the pleasant bitterness of thick marmalade as he sat himself before his kedgeree. The Chinky playing at English gentleman again… Another school taunt. They returned in his dreams, usually when he was stretched, uncertain, struggling.
He began the kedgeree the housekeeper had prepared. Opened the newspaper's pink, restrained pages. Prices had dipped further in Aero UK, Winterborne Holdings, a dozen other companies in which he had a heavy investment and a major influence. Events were a series of detonations under his fortifications ones to which he had reacted too slowly and indecisively. He should have bought into the charter market much earlier, to protect the Skyliner. He should not have believed the protestations of politicians regarding the MoD's choice of helicopter.
He had left himself dangerously exposed to the virus of lost confidence in the City and among the institutions.
Until now. Fraser must buy him the man who would buy him the time. And remove the 494, Vance and Burton from the game.
"Well?" She was as eager as a child, as he held up his hand in a mocking plea for patience." Come on, Kenneth what have you got for me on our Mr. Fraser?"
"My dear girl how your father ever coped with your impatience I shall never know!" Then, mischievously: "More coffee, Marian?"
/>
"Hand it over! Nottiie coffee pot."
"Ah." He lit the first of the half-dozen cigarettes he allowed himself each day and the first of the absolute maximum that Mrs. Grey would tolerate in competition with the summer air through open windows and the constantly renewed cut flowers then he opened a buff folder on his knees.
"Here we are. Everything to him who waits or her."
They were seated in two armchairs near the open French windows. Traffic noise was muted and there was, in reality or imagination, the scent of roses from the Park. Despite her impatience, she luxuriated in his company, in the room's familiarity and security.
"Our Mr. Fraser has been quite busy since he left the service just a little more than three years ago. Just before the redundancy notice
…" He ran his finger down the page.
"His positions have been among the usual ones," he continued, shaking his head. The Gulf States, body guarding and pandering to the paranoia of unelected sheiks swimming in oil… Cambodia… the expected kind of godless association with the Khmer Rouge and other unmentionables the Foreign Office has sometimes sanctioned, or at least ignored." His old features wrinkled more heavily in distaste.
"Were you always so moral?" she asked with some asperity.
"No. An old man's luxury with a lifetime's witness that immorality doesn't begin to solve the problem."
' Touche- a hit, a palpable hit."
"Anyway, seven or eight months in Cambodia and neighbouring Thailand, then a stretch in Singapore. Living a very sybaritic lifestyle while apparently spending his ill-gotten Cambodian gains. Then a return to Europe perhaps a year ago." He looked up, adjusting his glasses.
To do what, exactly?"
The usual. Contact or middleman for rather suspect arms deals, some industrial espionage…" He sighed.
"A man must go where the work is," he added acidly.
"Even if he is going to the bad by the same road."
"So, on the whole you're glad that Hyde's girlfriend came into money and saved him from this kind of thing?"
"On the whole, yes."
"Who employs Fraser at present? The Commission?"
"Not as far as I can tell." He smiled. Though it may be only a matter of time… No one seems to know. Obviously someone at that meeting. He is a director of a ne wish company, here in London Complete Security.
Industrial espionage, no doubt, and bodyguards to the rich, the crooked, the paranoid. Probably arms, too.
However, that is speculation. His sphere of operations seems to be the UK and Europe. At present."
"Who owns Complete Security?"
Aubrey shook his head.
"No one seems to know. In the main, it employs others of a like mind with Fraser." He paused, then said: These are not very pleasant people, Marian. I warn you to be careful. Very careful if, indeed, Fraser was responsible for your young man's death."
There aren't many people to suspect, are there?" Again, Aubrey shook his head, flicking the ash from his cigarette. The net curtains moved gently in the soft breeze from the Park. The illusion of flower scents again.
"So—? I ought to be able to discover which one it was without going anywhere near Fraser, shouldn't I?"
"Are you determined on this?"
"He was helping me."
"You did not cause his death."
"It's not that easy to dismiss. My theory got him killed, I think. Is that reasonable to you?"
"No. Fraser does not require a weighty reason before choosing to eliminate someone." She shivered.
"I'm sorry, my dear, but my past is my past the country's past in a small way. Things were done… Young Lloyd was merely there, that was enough—"
"But they must have had something very suspicious to hide — whoever employed him. Why not my version of what they're up to…?"
She paused, her mouth open.
"Exactly," Aubrey said coldly.
"A British company, a childhood friend of yours, a powerful French plane maker two senior European bureaucrats. One of them or more than one ordered a killing more ruthlessly than I ever would have done.
Now, perhaps, you see your dilemma, and your possible danger. The police report says accidental death, as do the newspapers. The incident is closed. You have no reason to make enquiries of any kind.
If you do, you will inform Eraser's employer that you possess information dangerous to him. Do I make myself clear?" He was leaning forward in his chair, his clawlike old hand gripping her wrist as fiercely as the talons of a hawk.
"I have no powers no people to watch out for your safety.
Because of that, I warn you not to give Eraser or his employer the slightest hint of your suspicions. Because, my dear, if you are right and there is massive corruption and misdirection of EU funds, then all the people at that meeting may be involved, including David Winterbornef He released her wrist. As she rubbed it soothingly, she nodded and said: "I'd already thought of that. But how can I stop?"
"I think you must, Marian. I really think you must. If it has been happening, it will soon end. The project is complete, even if a failure. This morning's Times expects Aero UK to collapse or be taken over—" That's no reason to stop!" she burst out.
"Not if they're crooks — surely?"
"Fraser is an actor in the drama. Stay away from Eraser, I beg you.
Whatever you do do nothing!"
It was late afternoon when Fraser halted the hired car a few hundred yards from the French farmhouse. He got out of the air-conditioned interior of the Renault into a balmy warmth that seemed to emanate from the small orchard, the slope of the land, the hills and dark, massed trees behind the house. There was no sign of Strickland.
"He is here, isn't he?" Fraser asked his companion.
The Frenchman nodded.
"I called him as soon as I finished speaking to you. He said he would be here all day."
"He's probably watching us through a telescopic rifle sight," Fraser muttered.
The youngish Frenchman brushed back his flopping, dark hair with one hand and laughed.
"Should he be quite as nervous as you suggest?"
"No. Come on, let's go and see him."
They opened the gate in the wooden post-and-rail fence that surrounded the two or so acres that belonged to the property. Fraser was still stiff from the flight to Bordeaux and the hour's car journey that followed. Resentful, too, of the imperious, dismissive manner in which Winterborne had issued his orders, demanded success. The Frenchman, Roussillon, had been waiting for him at Merignac airport, having flown down from Paris. In effect, both of them were simply obeying Winterborne's command. Even though Roussillon was employed by French counter-intelligence.
Around the property, the Dordogne stretched and heaped away abruptly.
The hills rose and pressed, the land fell away from them towards the thin streaks of meandering rivers. A litter of tiny villages was scattered across the landscape, nestling beneath hills crowded with dark trees, or hunched beside the rivers. There was the sense of gorges, of wilderness, too.
Then Strickland was in the doorway of the farmhouse, removing a pair of wire rimmed spectacles and squinting in the late-afternoon sunshine.
He was weaponless but alert, until his myopic eyes recognised Fraser.
The man's bulk was oddly at contrast with his patient silence and his mannerism of rubbing his eyes, head on one side, in a display of mild, innocuous curiosity. Then he stood aside, servant-like, gesturing them inside the house. The Frenchman's expensive leather shoes made clicking noises on the cool flagstones of the floor.
The scents of blossom, wood, polish. Strickland kept the farmhouse as neatly as any house proud woman might have done. He followed them in, again gesturing without words to tall-backed chairs in a stripped, plain wood around the heavy table. The kitchen area flowed smoothly into a sitting room lined with bookshelves and prints. A heavy, fringed carpet covered the flagstones; the windows, tall and narrow, looked towards the closest villa
ge perched on a hillside. Fraser sat down and Roussillon, his dark features still amused, sat opposite him.
"Coffee something stronger?" Strickland asked, already fussing to fill a cordless kettle on the kitchen work top His accent remained American, slightly southern in intonation, his voice as smooth and polite as a Mormon.
"Coffee for me," the Frenchman volunteered.
"Beer."
"Surely." Strickland bent his tall, muscular frame to the fridge. He poured the beer into a glass as the kettle began to bubble. When he turned back to his guests, he said half-apologetically: "I read the newspaper reports." His smile was boyish, selfdeprecating.
"I didn't take into account a pilot with that kind of insight. Well, truthfully, I didn't think of Gant at all."
He made coffee for himself and Roussillon and joined them at the table.
Fraser watched Strickland intently as if he might miss some sudden metamorphosis in the man. Yet Strickland continued to shrug apologetically, smile ingratiatingly.
Fraser's various meetings with the American had all, without exception, left him more puzzled than before. The man killed people but behaved like a pastor and there seemed no evident hypocrisy. Perhaps the explanation lay in the fact that Strickland always killed long-distance, removed people he had never even seen.
"What can I do for you?" he asked eventually, though not with any suggestion that he had tired of waiting for them to speak.
"A repeat performance," Fraser announced, finishing his beer.
"Another?"
Thanks." When Strickland returned with a second can, he said: "My employer needs another tragic accident."
"How soon does he need it?"
"Quickly."
"I don't usually follow the stock market, except as regards my own portfolio," Strickland explained, 'but your phone call didn't take me off-guard. The price is two hundred thousand. Non-negotiable."
"It has to be done on site."
Strickland appeared alarmed. A large black-and-white cat appeared through the open kitchen window and lowered its forelegs into the sink in order to drink, its back feet still on the windowsill.
That isn't the way I work."