Once outside, he walked quickly to the parking lot, stowed his gear in the trunk, and drove down to the harbor. In this fabled fishing port, Patrick O’Grady was history, Jeffery Simpson had been seen but not recorded at the hotel, but Gunther was marching around large as life, the way Mack wanted it.
He drove down to the harbor and found a small town parking lot. It was positioned right next to the jetties, separated by a three-foot-high wall. There was no gate, but there was a charge for remaining there up to two hours. At least there would have been, had the attendant been on duty, but he was not scheduled to show up until eight o’clock.
Mack parked in the corner, locked the car, and took a walk around the harbor. There was some activity, trawlers unloading, boxes of fresh fish packed on ice. He could see a couple of guys with clipboards, talking to the fishermen, making notes, signaling for a couple of truck drivers to start loading. Buying agents for the big supermarkets. They’d been here since midnight, since the fleet began to arrive back from its nightly labors out there in the Channel.
Mack could see the old skipper he’d spoken to earlier, and he looked busy, talking to the agents, pointing back at his boat. Mack hoped his luck had turned. He walked past the harbor master’s office, nodded a greeting, and then strolled to the end of the harbor wall.
He made notes of the boats he thought had come in during the small hours, about seven of them. For the moment he was assuming they went out to the fishing grounds most nights. Four of them were far too big for his purposes; two of them were still busy with at least four men working. But one of them had unloaded, and the crew, probably just two men, had gone home.
Their boat was a sixty-five-foot trawler, with a dark-red hull in need of a coat of paint. The name
Eagle
was painted in faded black lettering on her bow. She was already being gassed up, which Mack took as a sure sign she’d be going out tonight. With diesel at its current prices, no one filled up until they needed to.
He walked back past the harbor master, who was standing outside his office. “Good morning,” said Mack, trying to sound Swiss, but doing a fair imitation of Papa Doc, the president of Haiti.
“Hello, sir,” replied the harbor master, not knowing whether he was speaking to the owner of a one-hundred-foot oceangoing yacht. “Nice morning.”
“Did they have much luck last night?”
“Some of ’em did. That big trawler there ran over a shoal of cod about twenty miles offshore. And cod’s fetching a lot of money just now. We’ll be busy tonight.”
“How about that boat there,
Eagle
? I met the owners a couple of nights ago. Did they do okay?”
“They found the cod as well, but they’re usually first out in the summer. Old Fred Carter don’t miss much. He’s fourth generation out of Brixham.”
“I see they’re fueled and ready to go again.”
“They’ll clear the harbor wall by ten o’clock tonight. You see if they don’t. Rest of the boats aim for eleven.”
Mack wandered off up to the street that runs along the harbor. He found a small café that opened at eight o’clock, five minutes from now, and then he walked farther to find a newspaper shop. That was open, and he picked up a
London Daily Telegraph
plus a copy of Monday’s
Le Monde.
Armed with his reading, he went back to the café and ordered breakfast from the menu—poached eggs, Devonshire smoked ham, and buttered brown toast. Mack liked it here; he liked the people, and he definitely liked the breakfast.
He noticed that within twenty minutes the café was quite full, which was good. He ordered more coffee and sat reading until around nine thirty. He paid his bill and walked up to the town’s main street, where he spent his time looking at the shops.
Once he was absolutely stunned at his bearded appearance, which, with his tweed jacket, made him look like a vacationing college professor. He actually thought it was someone else and turned around to check who might be looking over his shoulder. As disguises go, this one was sensational.
By eleven o’clock the sun was climbing high to the southeast. The sky was very blue, and so was the sea. Mack could see what they meant by the Devon Riviera. He found an empty bench overlooking the water, took off his jacket, and decided to tackle
Le Monde,
brushing up on his French as he went.
On page 5 there was another major article on Henri Foche, with a picture. He translated the headline to mean:
GAULLIST LEADER APPALLED AT
NEW DIAMONDHEAD MISSILE ATROCITY
DESCRIBES LATEST HITS ON AMERICAN TROOPS AS “OUTRAGEOUS”
“You little bastard,” muttered Mack under his breath. Though it was difficult for him to translate word for word, he got the drift of the story—that Foche had no idea how these illicit missiles were finding their way to Iraq. And he fervently hoped the illegal manufacture of the “inhuman” Diamondhead would swiftly be stopped.
His United Nations Security Council partners, the USA, had all of his sympathy. They could count on him, as president of France, to remove the suspicion that any factory in his country would ever stoop to such criminally dishonest behavior.
“Jesus Christ,” said Mack to a passing fish truck. “Is this guy something or what?”
He tossed
Le Monde
into a trash bin and walked on to find a small local supermarket, and there he bought a high-squirting, medium-sized plastic carton of Great Britain’s most powerful window cleaning fluid. He had once been told that if you want something really cleaned spotless, this was the stuff. It had the same name in America, so he knew what he was looking for. He also purchased a packet of soft dusters.
At this point just before midday, he returned to the parking lot to find the attendant about to issue him an official town fine. Mack did not wish that to happen, and he walked swiftly over to the man and told him, in a foreign accent that no nation in the world could possibly have recognized, how sorry he was, but his wife had been taken ill at the hotel.
The attendant was sympathetic, and Mack told him he would have to go back and forth to the hotel all day, and would these two 50-pound notes pay for the day’s parking? This was, without question, the biggest cash payment, or quasi tip, the Brixham parking lot chief had ever seen. He stared at the banknotes for a few seconds and allowed thoughts to cascade through his mind before he said, “Why yes, sir. I think that will take care of it very nicely.” He then asked the question that separated an honest council employee from a dishonest one: “Will you be requiring change, sir?”
“Certainly not. I’d like you to give special attention to the safety of this car. I’ll probably be around for the next couple of days. Same payment tomorrow be okay?”
“Oh, very much, sir. That would be very much in order.”
Once more Mack wandered away, but he watched the parking lot, and at 12:45 he saw the man walk across the street to a pub, probably for a beer and a sandwich.
Mack moved quickly back into the parking lot, unlocked the car, and went to work with the high-squirting window cleaning liquid. He shot it everywhere, especially on the steering wheel, gear stick, hand brake, door handles, window buttons, and leather(ish) driver’s seat. He hit the center console and the windshield. He hit the driver’s side windows and the armrests. He power-squirted it all over the backseat, and on all the dashboard controls, radio, and air vents. Men cleaning New York skyscrapers have used less window fluid.
And then he rubbed and polished, destroying every semblance of a trace that he had ever been inside that car. By the time he finished, if there had somehow been a tiny smudged suggestion of a fingerprint, it would have died of loneliness. But Mack knew there was nothing, not one single clue that he had ever driven the McArdle-guaranteed Ford Fiesta.
He would leave the outside work until later, and now he shoved open the passenger door with his elbow, made his exit, and pushed it shut with his knee, locking it with the remote-control key. The attendant was not yet back, and Mack walked up to the main street and found a “menswear” store that sold thin leather driving gloves. He purchased a pair of these, and also a top-of-the-line pair of Reebok trainers. Then he crossed the street to a hardware store and purchased a screwdriver.
It was a very warm day now, and he strolled back down to the harborside bench, which was still unoccupied. He decided to skip lunch but to have an early dinner, because he was uncertain when he would have an opportunity to eat again.
For the next hour he just sat and stared at the ocean, thinking about Tommy and Anne, knowing he could not dare risk a call. He could risk nothing that might at some time be traced and betray the information that Lt. Cdr. Mackenzie Bedford had left Maine and had come to England. Nothing.
At four o’clock he walked back to the newspaper shop in search of a better guidebook to France. The one he had bought in the hotel near Heathrow was okay, but not sufficiently detailed for his mission. At the back of the store he found a shelf with several guides to European countries, and right in the middle was a thousand-page tome,
The Lonely Planet Guide to France,
the traveler’s bible, containing enough information to conquer France, never mind visit it.
Hardly a city, town, or village in the entire country escapes its scrutiny. There are vast area maps, local maps, street maps, hotels, restaurants, train stations, bus stations, airports, cathedrals, churches, post offices, shrines, government buildings, and God knows what else. It was probably the easiest sale that Brixham store ever made. And Mack was reading before he stepped back out into the street:
Rennes, Brittany’s capital, is a hive of activity . . . a crossroads since Roman times . . . sits at the junction of highways linking Northwest France’s major cities. . . .
He took the book back to his still-vacant bench and combed through the section on Brittany, the great westernmost promontory of France, jutting defiantly into the Atlantic, with thunderous rollers crashing onto its granite coast, its back to the rest of the country. In a sense, a lot like Maine.
Mack checked out the big shipbuilding area around the French Naval port of Brest and wondered whether Foche might be planning a political speech somewhere along those vast dockyards. Then he came south to the Atlantic Coast and checked out Saint-Nazaire, another huge shipbuilding center in France. He’d read somewhere that Foche had major holdings in one of the yards.
His
Lonely Planet
revealed that Great Britain’s massive new transatlantic cruise ship,
Queen Mary II,
was built there, and the mighty plane maker Airbus had a factory in Saint-Nazaire.
Sounds like Foche’s kind of place,
he muttered.
But this perusal through the industrial and military strongholds on the French coast was the lightest possible piece of reconnaissance. The part with which he was most concerned was the southern shore of the Gulf of Saint-Malo, that yachtsman’s paradise stretching from the mast-filled twelfth-century walled seaport of Saint-Malo itself, east through Dinard, beloved of Picasso, and then past the headland of Cap Frehel, down to Saint-Brieuc.
This was the other side of the English Channel, around 135 miles due south of this particular Devonshire bench upon which Mack sat and studied. As the afternoon wore on, his lifelong association with the sea kicked in, and he sensed a change in the weather. There was just a little coolness to the gentle southwesterly breeze. He could sense it on the back of his neck, and he had not noticed it before.
Mack stared ahead to the horizon, and the crystal-clear line, which all day had separated sea from sky, was now less defined, as if someone had run a misty gray paintbrush along the far edge of the ocean.
He glanced at his watch: half past five. And he checked again the parking lot where the Ford Fiesta was still standing. The attendant was back, just placing a ticket on the windshield of a Jaguar that had remained there too long without paying.
Carrying his book, he walked again onto the harbor jetty and checked for activity. A couple of the trawlers were being fueled, but this was a quiet time in the fishermen’s day. He could see
Eagle
still moored in the same spot. Her decks were deserted.
At six the parking attendant, wearing a light red windbreaker, came out of his kiosk and locked the door behind him. He walked up toward the town, and Mack immediately came over to finish wiping off the Fiesta. He pulled on his driving gloves and took the cleaning fluid off the floor in front of the driver’s seat. Then he hit the area all around the door lock and handle, rubbed hard, and removed all traces. He did the same to the rear door and the driver’s side; remembering his check in the wing mirror the previous night, he attended to that, too. He knew he had never opened the doors on the passenger side, nor had he touched the other wing mirror.