‘Hell, I was born there. I got out by the time I was old enough to run away. I’m a city boy at heart. The bright lights for me.’ He hummed a phrase of
Broadway Melody
and reached forward and took a pack of cards from the dash shelf. ‘I’ll be going back, too, so I’d better keep in practice.’
Warren heard the crisp flick of the cards and glanced sideways to see Follet riffle-shuffle with unbelievable dexterity, something far removed from the amateur’s awkwardness. ‘I thought you said you didn’t cheat.’
‘I don’t—but I can if I have to. I’m a pretty fair card mechanic when I want to be.’ He grinned engagingly. It’s like this; if you have a piece of a casino like I have back in London, you don’t have to cheat—as long as the house has an edge. It’s the edge that counts, you see. You don’t suppose Monte Carlo gets by because of cheating, do you?’
It’s supposed to be an honest game.’
‘It’s one hundred per cent honest,’ said Follet stoutly. ‘As long as you have the percentages going for you then you’re all right and cheating isn’t necessary. I’ll show you what I mean because right now I feel lucky. On this road we’ve been meeting about twenty cars an hour—I’ll give you even money that in the next hour two of those cars will have the same last two digits in the registration number. Just a game to pass the time.’
Warren thought it out. There were a hundred possible numbers—00 to 99. If Follet restricted it to twenty cars then it seemed that the odds were on Warren’s side. He said carefully, ‘For the first twenty cars you’re on.’
‘For a hundred pounds,’ said Follet calmly. ‘If I win you can add it to my bonus—if and when. Okay?’
Warren breathed hard, then said, ‘All right.’
The quiet hum from the loudspeaker altered as a carrier wave came on, and then Ben Bryan said, ‘Calling Regent Two. Our man is getting ready to move. Over.’
Warren unhooked the microphone. ‘Thanks, Regent One. We’ll get moving slowly and let him catch up. The grub was pretty good, Ben; you’re elected caterer for the duration. Over.’
The loudspeaker made a rude squawk and lapsed into silence. Warren grinned and pressed the self-starter. ‘Keep an eye to the rear, Johnny, and tell me when Speering shows up.’
Follet produced a pen. ‘You call the numbers—I’ll write them down. Don’t worry; I’ll keep an eye on Speering.’
The game served to while away the time. It was a monotonous drive on a monotonous road and it was something for Warren to do. With Follet keeping watch to the rear there was nothing for him to do except drive and to speed up or slow down at Follet’s instruction so as to keep a safe distance ahead of Speering. Besides he was tending to become sleepy and the game kept him awake.
He called out the numbers as the oncoming cars passed, and Follet scribbled them down. Although Follet’s attention was, in the main, directed towards Speering, Warren noticed that once in a while he would do a spot check of a number called. He smiled—Follet would never trust anyone. When fifteen numbers had been called without duplication Warren had high hopes of winning his hundred pounds and he became more interested—this was more than a way of passing the time.
On the eighteenth number Follet suddenly said, ‘That’s it—number five and number eighteen are the same—thirty-nine. You lose, Warren. You’ve just raised my bonus by a hundred.’ He put the pen back into his shirt pocket. ‘That was what is known as a proposition. Another name for it is a sucker bet. You didn’t have much of a chance.’
‘I don’t see it,’ said Warren.
Follet laughed. ‘That’s because you’re a mathematical ignoramus. You figured that because there were a hundred possibles and only twenty chances that the odds were four to one in your favour, and that I was a chump for offering evens. You were the chump because the odds were actually in my favour—no less than seven to one. It pays to understand mathematics.’
Warren thought it over. ‘I still don’t see it.’
‘Look at it this way. If I’d bet that a
specific
number would come up twice in the first twenty then I would have been a chump. But I didn’t. I said
any two numbers
in the first twenty would match.’
Warren frowned. He still did not get the point, but he had always been weak in mathematics. Follet said, ‘A proposition can be defined as a bet which looks good to the sucker but which is actually in favour of the smart guy who offers it. You dig into the holes and corners of mathematics—especially probability theory—and you’ll find dozens of propositions which the suckers fall for every time.’
‘You won’t catch me again,’ said Warren.
Follet chuckled. ‘Want to bet on it? It’s surprising how often a sucker comes back for more. Andy Tozier fell for that one, too. He’ll fall again—I’ll take the whole of his bonus from him before we’re through with this caper.’ He glanced at the mirror. ‘Slow down, will you? This road’s becoming twisty.’
They drove on and on until they came to Zanjan, and Follet said, ‘I see the jeep—I think he’s coming through.’ Two minutes later he said, ‘I’ve lost him.’
The radio broke into life with a crackle of mid-afternoon static caused, presumably, by the stormy weather over the mountains to the west. ‘…turned off to left…hotel…follow…Got that? Over.’
Follet clicked a switch ‘Speering turned off to the left by the hotel and you want us to follow. Is that it, Andy? Over.’
‘That’s it…quickly…out.’
Warren pulled to a halt, and Follet said, ‘I’ll take over—you look a bit beat.’
‘All right,’ said Warren. They changed seats and Warren stretched his shoulders and slumped in the passenger seat. He had been driving all day and the Land-Rover was a bit harder to handle than his saloon car. They went back into Zanjan and by the hotel found a road leading off to the west; it was signposted in Arabic script which Warren could make no sense of. Follet wheeled around and Warren grabbed the maps.
The new road deteriorated rapidly and, because it was heading into the mountains, became more sinuous and
tricky. Follet drove a shade faster than was absolutely safe in an effort to catch up with Tozier and Bryan, and the vehicle bumped and shuddered. At last they caught a glimpse of a dust cloud ahead. ‘That should be Andy.’ After a while he said, ‘It’s Andy, all right.’ He eased the speed a little. ‘I’ll drop back a bit—we don’t want to eat his dust from here to hell-and-gone.’
As they drove deeper into the mountains their speed dropped. The road surface was very bad, ridged in bonejarring corrugations and washed out in places where stormswelled freshets had swept across. The gradients became steeper and the bends tighter, so much so that Follet was forced to use the extra-low gearing that is the speciality of the Land-Rover. The day wore on to its end.
Warren had the maps on his knee attached to a clipboard and kept his eye on the compass. They were heading westward all the time and, after checking the map again, he said, ‘We’re heading into Kurdistan.’ He knew that this was the traditional route for smuggling opium out of Iran into Syria and Jordan, and again he felt confident that he was right—this was more than a coincidence.
Follet turned another corner and drove down one of the few straight stretches of road. At this point the road clung to the side of a mountain with a sheer cliff on the right and an equally sheer drop on the left. ‘Look at that,’ he said jerkily and nodded across the valley.
The road crossed the valley and rose again to climb the side of the mountain on the other side. In the far distance a cloud of brick-red dust picked out by the sun indicated a speeding car. ‘That’s Speering,’ said Follet. ‘Andy is still in the valley bottom. If we can see Speering then he can see us. If he doesn’t know we’re following him then he’s blind or dead drunk.’
‘It can’t be helped,’ said Warren grimly. ‘That’s the way it is.’
‘You can tell me something,’ said Follet. ‘What the hell happens at sunset? Have you thought of that?’
Warren had thought of it and it had been worrying him. He looked at his watch and estimated that there was less than an hour to go. ‘We’ll keep going as far as we can,’ he said with no expression in his voice.
Which was not very far. Within half an hour they came upon the other Land-Rover parked by the roadside with Ben Bryan flagging them down. Just beyond him Tozier was standing, looking over the mountains. Follet halted and Warren leaned from the window. ‘What’s up, Ben?’
Bryan’s teeth showed white against his dusty face and the mountain wind whipped his hair. ‘He’s beaten us, Nick. Take a look over there where Andy is.’
Warren stepped down and followed him towards Tozier who turned and said, ‘You tell me which way he went.’
There were five possible exits from the rocky area on top of the plateau. ‘Five roads,’ said Tozier. ‘You tell me which one he picked.’
‘No tracks?’
‘The ground is hard where it isn’t naked rock.’ Tozier looked about. ‘This seems to be a main junction, but it isn’t on the map.’
‘The road we’ve been travelling on isn’t on the map, either,’ said Warren. He squatted and balanced the clipboard on his knee. ‘I reckon we’re about there.’ He made a small cross on the map. ‘About thirty miles inside Kurdistan.’ He stood up and walked to the edge of the road and gazed westward to where the setting sun fitfully illumined the storm clouds over the red mountains. ‘Speering could be heading clear to the Iraqi border.’
‘He won’t make it tonight,’ said Tozier. ‘Not on these roads in these mountains. What do we do, Nick?’
‘What the devil can we do?’ said Warren violently.
‘We’ve lost him right at the start of the game. It’s four to one
against us that we pick the right road—a sucker bet.’ He suppressed his futile rage. ‘We can’t do much now. It’s nearly dark so we’d better make camp.’
Tozier nodded. ‘All right; but let’s do it out of sight of any of these roads.’
‘Why? What’s the point?’
‘No point, really.’ Tozier shrugged. ‘Just on general security principles. It gets to be a habit in my game.’
He walked towards the trucks leaving Warren in a depressed mood. We’ve blown it at this end, he thought; I hope to God that Mike and Dan have better luck. But he did not feel like betting on it—that would be another sucker bet.
‘This is the life,’ said Michael Abbot. He sipped from a tall frosted glass and watched with more than idle interest as a nubile girl clad in the briefest of brief bikinis stepped on to the diving-board. She flexed her knees, stood poised for a moment, and then cleft the air in a perfect swallow dive to plunge with minimum splash into the Mediterranean.
Dan Parker was unimpressed. ‘We’re wastin’ time.’
‘It can’t be hurried,’ said Abbot. He had talked this over with Parker before, and Dan had reluctantly agreed that this was the best way. There were two possible approaches that could be made; the approach direct, which was to introduce themselves to the Delorme woman as potential allies. The trouble with that was that if it failed then it was a complete failure with nothing to fall back upon. The approach indirect was to somehow make Delorme come to them. If it did not work within a reasonable period of time then the direct approach was indicated.
Abbot leaned forward to watch the girl who was now climbing out of the water. ‘We’ll get there in time.’
‘So we sit around in this fancy hotel while you get pissed on those fancy drinks. Is that it?’ Parker was feeling edgy. He was out of place in the Hotel Saint-Georges and he knew it.
‘Take it easy, Dan,’ said Abbot calmly. ‘It’s early days. If we can’t approach her then we have to find out who her friends are—and that’s what we’re doing now.’
Jeanette Delorme moved in the highest Lebanese society; she lived in a de luxe villa in the mountains at Hammana, and she could afford to eat two days running at the Hotel Saint-Georges. Getting close to her was the problem. Somehow they had to snuggle up to her and that, thought Abbot, was like snuggling up to a rattlesnake. He had read the dossier on her.
The only approach, as he saw it, was to find out who her associates were—her more disreputable associates—and then to lay out some ground bait. It was going to be very slow—much too slow for the liking of Dan Parker—but it was the only way. And so they were sitting in a discreet corner of the Hotel Saint-Georges while Delorme lunched with an unknown friend who would be checked on as soon as they parted. The previous day had been a repetition—and a bust. Her companion then had proved to be a paunchy Lebanese banker of pristine reputation and decidedly not disreputable enough for their purpose.
Abbot watched the girl step on to the diving-board again. He said suddenly, ‘Do you know why this hotel is called the Saint-Georges, Dan?’
‘No,’ said Parker briefly in a tone which indicated that he could not care less.
Abbot waved his glass largely. ‘Saint George killed the dragon right here in Beirut. So they tell me. Probably here in Saint George’s Bay. But I’ve always thought the Christians pinched that bit from Greek mythology—Perseus and Andromeda, you know.’ He gestured towards the girl on the diving-board. ‘I wouldn’t mind slaying a dragon myself if she were the prize.’
Parker moved restlessly in his chair, and Abbot thought he would have to do something about him. Dan would be
all right once he had something to do with his hands, but this alien environment tended to unnerve him. He said, ‘What’s on your mind, Dan?’
‘I still think this is a waste o’ time.’ Parker took out a handkerchief and mopped his brow. ‘I wish I could have a beer. What wouldn’t I give for a pint?’
‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t have that,’ said Abbot, and looked about for a waiter. ‘Why didn’t you order one?’
‘What! In this place?’ Parker was surprised. He associated English beer with the Edwardian glass of a London pub or the low beams of a country inn. ‘I didn’t think they’d serve it in a place as posh as this.’
‘They make a living by serving what people want,’ said Abbot drily. ‘There’s a Yank behind us drinking his Budweiser, so I don’t see why you shouldn’t have your pint.’ He caught the eye of a waiter who responded immediately. ‘Have you any English beer?’
‘Certainly, sair, what would you like? Bass, Worthington, Watney’s…’
‘Watney’s’ll do fine,’ said Parker.
‘And I’ll have another of these.’ Abbot watched the waiter depart. ‘See, Dan, it’s easy.’
‘I’d never ‘a’ thought it,’ said Dan in wonder.
Abbot said, ‘If an English millionaire comes here and can’t get his favourite tipple he raises the roof, and that’s bad for business. We’ll probably have to pay a millionaire’s price, but it’s on the old expense account.’
Dan’s wonder increased even more when he was presented with a pewter tankard into which he promptly disappeared. He came up for air with froth on his upper lip. ‘It’s a bit o’ right stuff,’ he said. ‘Cold but in good condition.’
‘Maybe it’ll lighten your day,’ said Abbot. He glanced at the bar check, winced, and turned it over so Dan would not see it. That would certainly take the edge off his simple pleasure, even though Hellier was paying for it. He slid his
eyes sideways at Parker and saw that the familiar taste of the beer had eased him. ‘Are you sure you’re right about this torpedo thing? I mean, it can be done.’
‘Oh, aye; I can do it. I can make those fish do tricks.’
‘We don’t want it to do tricks. We just want it to go a hell of a long way—five times further than it was designed to go.’
‘Don’t you worry yourself about that,’ said Dan comfortably. ‘I can do it. What I want to know is, can these people find a torpedo? They’re not the easiest thing to come by, you know.’
That had been worrying Abbot, too, although he had not admitted it. It was one thing for Warren to come up with the nutty idea of smuggling by torpedo and another thing to implement it. If Delorme could not lay her hands on a torpedo then the whole scheme was a bust. He said, ‘We’ll worry about that when we come to it.’
They indulged in idle conversation while Abbot surveyed the procession to the diving-board with the air of a caliph at the slave market. But he still kept an eye on the restaurant entrance, and after half an hour had passed, he said quietly, ‘Here she is. Drink up, Dan.’
Parker knocked back his second pint with the ease of long practice. ‘Same as yesterday, then?’
‘That’s right. We follow the man—we know where we can pick her up.’ Abbot paid the check while Parker sauntered out in the wake of Jeanette Delorme and her companion. He caught up just as Parker was unlocking the car.
‘Fourth car along,’ said Parker. ‘It should be a doddle. But I hope this isn’t another bloody banker.’
‘I’ll drive,’ said Abbot, and slid behind the wheel. He watched the big Mercedes pull away, then engaged gear and drifted into the traffic stream three cars behind. ‘I don’t think this one’s a banker. He has no paunch, for one thing; and he certainly doesn’t look Lebanese.’
‘I noticed you watchin’ all those naked popsies paradin’ up an’ down in front of the hotel,’ said Parker. ‘But what do you think of that one ahead of us?’
‘Our Jeanette?’ Abbot concentrated on piloting the car out of the Rue Minet El Hosn. ‘I’ve never thought of her in
that way
,’ he said satirically. ‘Come to think of it, she’s not bad-looking but I’ve never had the chance of giving her a real slow and loving once-over. It’s a bit hard to assess a woman when you’re not supposed to be looking at her.’
‘Come off it,’ scoffed Parker.
‘Oh, all right. She’s a bit long in the tooth for me.’ Abbot was twenty-six. ‘But trim—very trim—very beddable.’ He grimaced. ‘But I think it would be like getting into bed with a spider.’
‘What the hell are you talkin’ about?’
‘Didn’t you know—female spiders eat their mates after they’ve had their bit of fun.’ He turned into the Avenue Bliss, following the Mercedes at a discreet distance. As they passed the American University he said, ‘I wonder why they’re going this way; there’s nothing at the end of here but the sea.’
‘We’ll see soon enough,’ said Parker stolidly.
The Avenue Bliss gave way to the Rue Manarah and still the Mercedes carried on. As they rounded a bend the sea came into view, and Parker said warningly, ‘Watch it! He’s pullin’ in.’
Abbot went by and rigidly prevented himself from looking sideways. He turned the corner and parked on the Corniche. ‘That was a hotel,’ he said, and pondered. He made up his mind. ‘I’m going in there. As soon as that Mercedes takes off you follow it if the man is in it. Don’t wait for me.’
‘All right,’ said Parker.
‘And, Dan; be unobtrusive.’
‘That goes for you too,’ said Parker. He watched Abbot turn the corner into the Rue Manarah and then swung the
car round to where he could get a view of the hotel entrance and still be in a position to follow the Mercedes which was still parked outside. Presently Delorme and the man came out together with a page who packed a lot of luggage in the boot.
The Mercedes took off smoothly and he followed, and soon found himself going along a familiar road—past the Lebanese University and Khaldeh Airport on the way to Hammana. He was almost tempted to turn back but he went on all the way until he saw Jeanette Delorme safely home with her guest. Then he drove back to Beirut, running into heavy traffic on the way back to the hotel.
Abbot was taking it easy when Parker walked in. ‘Where the devil have you been, Dan?’
‘The traffic’s bloody awful at this time o’ day,’ said Parker irascibly. ‘She took him home an’ you know what the road out o’ town is like. She took him home—bags an’ all. Stayin’ with her as a house guest, like.’ He grinned. ‘If he disappears then you’ll know she really is a bloody spider. Did you get anythin’?’
‘I did,’ said Abbot. ‘By exerting my famous charm on a popsy in that hotel I found that he is an American, his name is John Eastman, and he flew in from Tehran yesterday. Did you hear that, Dan?
Tehran
. It’s the first link.’
It may have been the first link but it wasn’t the last because Eastman proved to be almost as inaccessible as Delorme herself. ‘A snooty lot, these heroin smugglers,’ observed Abbot. ‘They don’t mix with the common herd.’
So they applied the same technique to Eastman. It was a painfully slow task to keep him under observation and then to tag his associates and they would have given up had they
not known with certainty that they were on the right track. For Abbot received a letter from Hellier who was acting as a clearing house for information.
‘Good news and bad,’ said Abbot after he had read it.
‘Let’s have the bad news first,’ said Parker. ‘I might need to be cheered up after hearin’ it.’
‘Warren has lost Speering. He disappeared into the blue in the middle of Kurdistan. It’s up to us now, Dan. I bet Nick’s climbing the wall,’ he said reflectively.
‘We’re not much forrarder,’ said Parker gloomily.
‘Oh, but we are. That’s the good news. Eastman saw Speering the day before he gave Nick the slip. That directly links Speering with Delorme. This is the first bit of concrete evidence we’ve had yet. Everything else was just one of Nick Warren’s hunches.’
Parker brightened. ‘Aye, that’s so. Well, let’s get on wi’ it.’
So they got on with it, but it was a long time before Abbot made the decision. ‘This is the man,’ he said. ‘This is where we cast our bread upon the waters and hope it’ll come back buttered on both sides.’
‘Picot?’
Picot was a long way down the line. He knew a man who knew a man who knew Eastman. He was accessible and, Abbot hoped, receptive to new ideas if they were cast his way. He was also, to a keen and observant eye, a crook, which further raised Abbot’s hopes.
‘How do we tackle him?’ asked Parker.
‘The first thing is to move into a cheaper hotel.’ He looked at Parker consideringly. ‘We’re not rolling in cash—but we’re not dead broke. We’re hungry for loot, but careful. We have something to sell and we want the best price, so we’re cagey. Got the picture?’
Parker smiled sombrely. ‘That bit about not rollin’ in cash’ll come easy to me; I’ve never had much money. How do we broach the subject to Picot?’
‘We play it by ear,’ said Abbot easily.
Picot frequented a cafe in the old town near the Port, and when Abbot and Parker strolled in the next evening he was sitting at a table reading a newspaper. Abbot selected a table just in front and to the side of him, and they sat down. Abbot wrinkled his nose as he looked at the food-spotted menu and ordered for both of them.
Parker looked about the place and said in a low voice, ‘What now?’
‘Take it easy,’ said Abbot softly. ‘Let it come naturally.’ He turned and looked at the little pile of newspapers and magazines on Picot’s table, obviously there for the use of the customers. In English, he said, ‘Excuse me, monsieur; do you mind?’
Picot looked up and nodded shortly. ‘Okay with me.’ His English was incongruously tinged with a mixed French and American accent.
Abbot took a magazine and flipped the pages idly until the waiter served them, putting down many plates, two drinks and a jug of water. Abbot poured a little water into his glass and there was a swirl of milkiness. ‘Cheers, Dan.’
Hesitantly Parker did the same, drank and spluttered. He banged down the glass. ‘What is this stuff? Cough mixture?’
‘The local white lightning—arak.’
Parker investigated his palate with his tongue. ‘I haven’t tasted anything like this since I were a boy.’ He looked surprised as he made the discovery. ‘Aniseed balls!’ He sniffed the glass. ‘It’s no drink for a grown man. Any chance of a Watney’s in here?’
Abbot grinned. ‘I doubt it. If you want beer you have a choice of Lebanese French and Lebanese German.’
‘Make it the German,’ said Parker, so Abbot ordered him a Henninger Byblos and turned back to find him regarding the contents of the plates with deep suspicion.
‘For God’s sake, stop acting like a tourist, Dan,’ he said with irritation. ‘What do you expect here—fish and chips?’
‘I like to know what I’m eatin’,’ said Parker, unmoved.
‘It’s
mezza
, said Abbot loudly. ‘It’s filling and it’s cheap. If you want anything better go to the Saint-Georges—but I’m not paying. I’m getting fed up with you. I have a good mind to call the whole thing off.’
Parker looked startled but subsided as Abbot winked. The beer arrived and Parker tasted it and put down the glass. ‘It’ll do, I suppose.’