He finished his whiskey and looked at the bottle. It was the same bottle he’d started a few nights earlier, hadn’t touched since, and there were still a good two shots in it. He decided against it; it never helped. And the cigarette tasted dry and foul in his mouth.
But the taste in his mouth really had nothing to do with the cigarette.
He leaned over and stubbed it out, and suddenly realized why the image of that bitch of a lost love had come into his mind.
Whoever had succeeded him in her life had it coming too, sooner or later. The next victim. There are some people in the world who have a gene missing, a vital part of the machinery that makes a human being work properly – the gene that controls conscience. They use other
people, then they throw them away, and find their own way of telling themselves that the shit wasn’t down to them.
People incapable of expressing or experiencing normal emotions, normal humanity. People like her. Like one hell of a lot of politicians. Like criminals. Like spies.
Like the people he was up against now.
He snapped out of it and solved the chess problem. Later, after another two hours’ work, he wandered into sleep, for he was shaken out of a bad dream – dead fish floating in dark water – by his phone.
He looked at his watch. Four a.m. The city was silent. He pushed himself out of his chair and grabbed the phone. The INTERSEC night commander’s voice.
‘Sir?’
‘Yes?’
‘You’d better get over here now.’
There was no sign of a struggle. Ben Duff had been hit hard once, on the back of the head, with something spiked. His cranium had one deep, neat hole in it. There wasn’t much blood, but a little had trickled down on to the carpet. He was dressed in a bathrobe and looked, somehow, pathetic.
‘Must have heard something, gone to the rescue,’ said the night commander.
‘Where were your guys?’ asked Marlow. He was thinking of the bottle of champagne Duff had brought that other time, and of another possible reason for him to have been there, dressed only in a bathrobe.
‘Everything was in place. But someone had cut the sensors, so Monitoring saw nothing. They raised the alarm immediately. I called you.’
‘Took her out through a window in Duff’s quarters. Unbarred there,’ Marlow said. ‘That your reading?’
The man was sweating. This could cost him his job. Demotion, certainly. Transfer to a desk at the Analysis Centre in Dayton. Or worse.
There was a cup of lemon tea on the coffee table. Untouched. Marlow touched it. Still warm. An hour? No more. ‘Blanket search, fifteen kilometre radius. Airports, too. Don’t involve the locals. Get one of our doctors over here,’ he said.
‘Already on his way. As for the rest, consider it done, sir.’ The night commander withdrew at the double.
Marlow walked quickly along the corridor to the cubbyhole Duff had called home for the last couple of weeks. Matchbox office, bedroom, shower, kitchenette; nothing else. But it was round an angle of the building, and one window opened on to the rue Pernelle, the narrow street which flanked the block.
He looked around. It was possible they’d got in through the main entrance; he’d look at the CCTV tapes soonest. How they’d got any further would be up to Ops. to investigate, but how they’d got out was clear: down below a
monte-meubles
was parked, one of the crane-mounted flat-tops Parisians use to get furniture in and out of the windows of apartments in tall buildings when they move house. Must have had another car for their getaway. Pros. Had they drugged her? She was small, slight, easy to overpower.
He flipped out his phone, called Graves.
There was no reply for a long time. He was about to give up, send someone to see what had happened, break the door down if necessary, when finally, just before the call timed out, she picked up.
Relief undid the knot of stress that had been tightening in his chest.
‘Get over here. The Centre. Now.’ His voice was harsher than he’d intended it to be.
Now came the waiting. Doing nothing is the hardest thing
to
do, but Marlow had no alternative. Graves arrived dishevelled, apologetic. She looked dead beat. Had she
even been to bed? Why had it taken her so long to answer her phone?
The call came at 5 a.m. Orly Airport. Iberia flight to Barcelona. INTERSEC fieldmen were in place.
The traffic was still light, so it took them less than fifteen minutes to get there, breaking every speed restriction in the book and outrunning one hysterical cop-car which pursued them down the avenue d’Italie but gave up soon after the Porte. Marlow knew there was no chance of the
flics
radioing ahead to colleagues, since their 5.5-litre, V8 AMG Merc CLS had unidentifiable plates. The driver only became law abiding when they reached the airport outskirts, but there was little traffic here either, the airport was just waking up, and in the terminal at Orly itself few people were about, most of them tired and grey under the dismal, draining light – lighting which airports specialize in worldwide.
Graves and Marlow moved carefully through the concourse, pistols loose in their holsters, and joined the leader of the team-in-place at a prearranged vantage point. They clipped on mics and earphones as they spoke.
‘Where?’ said Marlow.
‘Three of them. Thin man, plump woman. Our subject with them, pliant, probably drugged. Row of seats near the Relay shop. Move in?’
‘Let’s have a look at them. See if we can do it without making a noise.’ Marlow knew from the moment they’d got the call that something was wrong here, but he hadn’t yet identified it.
He moved stealthily towards the spot identified by his
fieldman, and saw Su-Lin, empty-eyed, seated between a man and woman who answered the fieldman’s description.
Their appearance struck a chord in his memory.
The man was reading a copy of an English tabloid newspaper, the
Daily Mail
, and the woman – who looked like she’d escaped from an Alan Aldridge album cover – was eating croissants from a Paul paper bag. Both were absorbed in their separate tasks, though the man occasionally glanced at the departures board, squinting as though he needed glasses to see it properly.
There was a soft leather bag at his feet. The woman’s shoulder bag was at her side. Su-Lin, in black, and looking as if she’d dressed – or been dressed – hastily, continued to stare into space. At one point, when it looked as if he was in danger of her catching his eye, Marlow ducked out of sight, uncertain, but then Su-Lin half stood, with a little involuntary cry.
She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking past him. She had seen Graves, who hadn’t been as quick as he had.
Her two guardians were instantly alert. Moving quickly, they each took one of Su-Lin’s arms and propelled her away from the seats towards the departure gates. The woman now held an automatic, a matt-white subcompact gun, a Glock, not easy to spot, maybe plastic-coated, looked like a toy. She’d conjured it up from nowhere, but she’d dropped her Paul bag. The gun must have been in there with the croissants. Marlow spoke tersely into his mic to alert the fieldmen, some of whom he could see out of the corner of his eye, gliding into new positions.
Graves had disappeared from view – she’d had the sense to get out of sight, at least.
None of the airport staff and none of the other travellers, now increasing in number, was aware of anything. Marlow saw that the field commander’s men – five of them – had deployed themselves in a semicircle containing the target group from both flanks and from the rear. The man and the woman were corralled, and they knew it, but they showed no sign of losing their nerve, though up towards Departures the security people at the X-ray machines, even with their two-bit training, were becoming aware that something was going on. One of them, more zealous than her colleagues, started to approach, full of the power her job invested her with. You could see she’d just love to be in the police. Then she saw the gun in the hippie-woman’s hand, and froze.
The man and the woman seemed amused. The man half turned his head, to look behind him, then looked at his companion and said one word, not loud, but loud enough for Marlow to catch:
‘Abort.’
The thin man let go of Su-Lin with one hand, and of his bag with the other. But left in that hand was a Steyr TMP machine pistol, black and deadly.
The woman released Su-Lin’s other arm and started to move, fast, through the travellers pushing trolleys. The man did the same on the other side. They made difficult targets in the crowd as they made their way back the way they’d come, outflanking the fieldmen. Su-Lin collapsed where she stood.
Graves rushed over to Su-Lin and picked her up, flashing a French DGSE card at the approaching security guards, and bundled Su-Lin away, out of sight, into the gathering crowd.
Not a shot had been fired. A dull silence, the silence of snow, had fallen on the concourse.
‘There’s your proof,’ said Marlow, later. They’d taken Su-Lin back to his apartment. She was in the bedroom, sedated, being treated by an INTERSEC medic. They’d question her as soon as they got the OK.
‘Proof of what?’
‘That they want her as much as we do. We can’t afford to let her back into the wild.’
Graves was silent a moment, pursed her lips.
‘I almost screwed up.’
‘Almost?’ replied Marlow. But, seeing her expression, he relented. ‘Everyone does, Laura. Nothing happened this time. And if she’d been killed, who knows? No good to anyone then. Neutralized.’ But he thought about what they might have done to her if they’d got her away. He thought of Adkins and Taylor.
‘Do you really think she’s got any more to offer?’
‘Yes. If they wanted her so badly.’
‘They’ve got to the core of us. How?’
Marlow shook his head, then changed tack. ‘Now let’s get back to your translation of that inscription.’ He looked at her admiringly. ‘Incredibly good work, by the way.’ He admitted to himself that Graves’s standing in his eyes had climbed several tall ladders.
She smiled, pleased almost in spite of herself. ‘Still
sounds unbelievable. The secret of total control. What does that mean?’
‘Means, in the wrong hands, goodbye, cruel world. Means in any hands. If this thing is the key to absolute power, who isn’t going to be corrupted by it?’
‘What now?’ she asked.
‘You follow up on the inscription. Whatever background you can get. I’ll organize a replacement for Duff. We need to know how far this experience has set her back.’
‘If at all.’
Marlow didn’t want to hear that. He went on: ‘But we don’t want a replacement here.’
‘Where then?’
‘New York. I’ll get Leon on to it.’
‘New York?’
‘That’s where we’re going. Fast. Paris isn’t the healthiest place to be any more.’
‘Got you.’
‘Pack your bags. Get the people at Centre to pack hers too. Bring them over here. And send everything new encrypted to yourself at your own place in NY. Not INTERSEC.’
‘They’ll want to see something.’
‘Throw them a bone.’
She was on the point of pursuing that, but asked instead, ‘What’ll we do with de Montferrat until NY?’
‘She stays here.’
Marlow looked in at the door of his bedroom after Graves had gone, but the doctor waved him away.
Marlow nodded and went back up the rickety spiral staircase.
The doubt still nagged him. He made coffee and found the makings of something to eat, a day-old
pain-au-chocolat
and some grapes. He drank the espresso, ignored the food, picked up a copy of the book he was reading, Alison Weir’s life of Henry VIII – what a bastard he was – and flicked through it without being able to concentrate. He reached for
Le Monde
instead and found nothing but sombre articles about the unrest bursting out all over the developing world – but what else was there to write about? Sooner or later, Western Europe and the USA would find themselves in the same situation the Romans had, two thousand years ago, when the Goths and Visigoths, Vandals and Huns began to migrate into the fertile territories of the empire in search of food.
It had already started. An inexorable invasion. A colonization of the privileged by the desperate. History rolling over in its sleep. There’d come a day, Marlow thought, when the battles he was fighting now would look like the antics of a bunch of kids with peashooters.
He looked ruefully at the whiskey bottle. But no. He wasn’t going down that path again. He turned to his chess board, but that didn’t work either. He noticed that his shirt was buttoned out of synch, and redid it.
He heard the doctor climbing the stairs ten minutes later.
‘She’s OK. Awake, a bit groggy. No psychological damage that I can see. After all this time, they didn’t get away with it. Give her one of these if she gets distressed.’ He
tapped a plastic container and placed it on the coffee table near Marlow. ‘Do you want a nurse to stay over, or do you want to keep it tight?’
‘Keep it tight.’
‘You’ll be OK?’
‘Backup downstairs and next door.’
‘I’ll be back at 16.00 hours. Call me if you need me before then.’
‘Can she talk?’
‘You can try. Give her an hour.’
‘When can we move her?’
‘Tell you at four.’
Marlow worked on his computer until ten, and was about to descend to the bedroom when he heard movement below. Nothing suspicious. She was awake. He heard the faint sounds of her showering. It had been a long time since he’d listened to someone else getting up in the same place as him.
It was comforting. It told him that he didn’t have to be alone for ever. When the sounds ceased, he imagined that she’d be waiting, wondering, uncertain.
He called her name and went down the stairs to the bedroom.
She was sitting on the bed, wearing a black T-shirt a couple of sizes too big. She looked up at his approach.
‘Hello, Jack,’ she said, smiling.
New York City, the Present
‘Adler’s got vast resources,’ Sir Richard Hudson was saying. ‘An international communications company, one of the big contenders. Damn it, he’s got governments in the palm of his hand.’