A Different War

CHAPTER SIX

Summer Lightning The lights from the town of Tammisaari glowed as fitfully and hopelessly as distress maroons through the summer thunderstorm that enraged the Gulf of Finland around the tiny islet on which they hunched against the howling wind.

Burton felt his whole body numbed by the aftershock of the accident, as if he had been hurried to this place by plane, limousine, motorboat only to collide with the debris of his airliner his entire airline.

Below the small, naked promontory on which he was standing, men scurried like crabs across sharp rocks and around the wreckage of the 494. Somewhere down there was Gant, authorised by himself and Alan Vance, who stood mutely stunned beside him, his daughter clinging to him as to an uncertain rock. The behaviour of the inspectors, the floating crane, the other vessels, bobbing and jolting in the waves, all seemed not only insignificant but desperate the activity of a team of surgeons around an operating table when all the monitors showed flat, unvarying lines; no heartbeat, no brain activity, no pulse or breath. Forty-odd people had died, together with the crew, in that mockery of wreckage. Newspapers from Europe and the States he had seen in the arrivals lounge while waiting for Vance to fly in from Phoenix in his private jet showed another wreck. Headlines crying killer airplane, deadly airliner and the like… and stock market reports, graphs and indicators describing the terminal decline of Vance Aircraft and Artemis Airways.

The storm tugged at his long hair like a vindictive housemaster confronting him with wrongdoing… Look at it, Burton, look at it, this is your doing. He wanted Vance to say something, to assist by sharing the responsibility… but Vance, with Barbara clutched against his side like a spar, was contained within an iron maiden of failure. The FAA had immediately ordered all 494s grounded and a greatest urgency enquiry into the safety of the aircraft. The banks and the DOW had responded by ditching Vance Aircraft. The company died that morning, in the press and on TV… and the creditors would distance themselves, call in the loans, pick among the rags of the few small subsidiary businesses for something to salvage. Vance and his company were finished.

Which made the activity down there on the shoreline, where the whale-like bulk of the main fuselage ground and screamed against rocks and one wing half-saluted from the rough water and the tailplane wearing Diana the Huntress stuck up to taunt him… futile, all of it.

He could see men in diving gear, others in orange waistcoats, yellow waterproofs, all as small and pointlessly active as insects.

He had asked begged Vance to bring Gant, the pilot who had appeared to save them, like a phantom bugle-call now so obviously unreal. He had suffered a round of television and radio interviews and phone calls, newspaper assaults, with a weary and defiant determination, a black time in which Gant had appeared to be some kind of distant, but real, beacon. Confronted now with the wreckage, the body-count they had already recovered at least two dozen bodies, including that of the pilot and the howling, light-flashing storm, he knew that he had clung to the illusion of rescue.

It was a pathetic irony that Gant had been able to come, collected by Vance at Dulles airport in Washington, because he had resigned from the NTSB and was available for freelance work. The force of the wind made Burton's eyes water.

The floating crane, rolling awkwardly, lowered one of the big Pratt & Whitney engines on to its flat deck, and men secured it as gently as they might have fussed around a stretcher, tucking in a red blanket that covered a body. He glanced away from the scene, but Vance appeared still to inhabit another world, some inner nightmare.

Gant, glancing up at the low headland of the islet where the 494 had come down, saw two figures Burton and the composite individual that was Vance and Barbara clinging to his side like an infant monkey. The sea roared around the rocks along the shore, sending another wave over him.

Water ran off him, leaving his face and hands icily chilled, his waterproofs streaming. The noises of the airliner grinding against the rocks were deafening. The airplane had come down steeply, like the 494 towards the runway at Vance Aircraft, and tried to level too late to make a landing on the water. It had broken up on the shore of the tiny island off the Finnish coast, two miles out from the town of Tammisaari. The island was a nature reserve for wildfowl. He imagined their panic in the early morning as the plane had crashed and disintegrated.

Vance's private jet had gotten into Helsinki's Vantaa airport just ahead of the summer storm coming down from the Gulf of Bothnia. The sky had been luridly discoloured and threatening as they had driven west. He had been walking the pebbled, narrow beach studying the line of impact of the 494 when the storm broke, lightning all along the horizon and the waves rearing like grey cloud only fifty yards from him. The local investigation team seemed not to resent his presence.

He was accredited as the technical expert representing the airplane manufacturer, and that seemed sufficient.

The flight recorders and the cockpit voice recorder had been recovered.

He had listened to a cassette tape of the latter, chilled by more than the wind and the glare of the lightning. It had been like listening to Hollis die, like reliving the airplane's own attempt to kill him.

Instability, growing like cardiac pains at a frightening rate, the airplane convulsing then dropping, its altitude spouting away from it like blood from a severed artery.

The sea rushed at him again from an angry cleft in the rocky shore, and he flinched away from the spume. Along the pebbled shoreline, across the rocks to the edge of the tide, there were gouges, splintered rock, great scars… small scorch marks There had been virtually no fire.

The fuselage he had leapt from a small boat into the main fuselage as it had wallowed in the tide was crushed, broken, but hardly burned.

The 494 had been out of fuel, tanks virtually empty and the instability had been because the fuel flow had not been computer controlled… and there had been no panic and no realisation because the flight engineer's panel had assured the crew that everything was normal, normal. But it had happened again, with a different computerised fuel management system. It had happened to an airplane that had encountered no problems with fuel management. Instead, it had been racking up the kind of fuel economy figures that both Vance and Burton required.

Better than Boeing, cheaper than any other airliner… Gant glanced up again at the fuselage, tilted drunkenly towards the angry sea. The floating crane was limping away towards the harbour at Tammisaari with one of the big engines aboard. Smaller craft nipped and huddled between the surges of the sea, two of them marked with red crosses.

Floating morgue wagons. The divers, now that most of the bodies had been located and marked with little bobbing flags anchored to them, were waiting for better weather, exhausted. The scene was already an aftermath, just a day after the crash.

Nothing but the fuel management computer could have gone wrong, would have caused the same sudden loss of altitude, the same disaster without fire. He had hardly needed the accounts of eye-witnesses to confirm his analysis. No, there was some flame, but not a big fire… No, there was no explosion. One man, an ornithologist camped on the islet, had video camera footage of the crash and its immediate aftermath…

His eyes had been a good enough account. And his nose.

No overpowering scent of aviation fuel.

Unless the routine overnight servicing of the airplane had created a fault, then there was no other explanation. Unless he or Alan Vance's technical people could find something wrong with the computer that controlled the fuel flow, then there would be no answer at all. He looked behind him, back along the track the plane had made along the shoreline, at the fragments of metal and perspex it had shed like old, flaking skin. He needed to talk to the Norwegian engineers who'd worked on the 494. And study the flight recorder readouts and computer realisations… like watching a movie he had seen before, one that had terrified.

He experienced a strange, new pity for Vance, and avoided looking up again towards the low headland on which he knew Vance would still be standing, immobile as if suffering paralysis. This broken machine was, quite literally, a broken dream; Vance's only dream during the years he had known him, had been his son-in-law, his pilot. Not money, not fame just the plane, flying. The sea soaked him again, and the scene was once more lit with vivid, garish lightning.

Gant shivered, as if the emotion he experienced made him weak, sickly.

It was finished, for good. Vance, standing up there facing the storm like some old Indian chief calling on the Great Spirit in the face of his people's massacre, knew with a chilling, final certainty that it was over. The newspapers, the TV had pronounced. Wall Street would foreclose. Vance was bankrupt. The whole world was a repo man knocking at his door.

But, for God's sake, why? Airplanes were safe, they didn't fall out of the sky easily, regularly. Of all the accidents he had investigated, no two no almost three, he reminded himself, in the space of a week died in exactly the same way, unless it was during a war. Or unless

… He shivered violently at the magnified, shattering noise of the fuselage grating on rock. It was impossible. Only terrorists did things like Almost three in a week.

The idea could not be blown from his imagination by the wind or burned out by the lightning.

Gant felt very cold.

Ray Banks' Mercedes, a vivid petrol blue in colour, was parked beside a large hoarding which proclaimed the Millennium Urban Regeneration Project. Beneath the grandiose boast were the gold stars on blue ground of the European Union and a list of the principal contractors and architects for what had become known in the region as the Venice of the Midlands. The larva of a marina scheme based around the city's old, polluted or derelict canal system had become the gigantic butterfly of the regeneration of perhaps a quarter of the entire city.

Marian brought the Escort Cabriolet to a halt beside Banks' car and tugged on the hand brake Banks appeared gloomy as he got out of the Mercedes. He waved his arm to indicate the empty, half-renovated warehouses and the stretch of recovered canal that was the site of Banks Construction's contribution to the project.

This is it," he said.

Thanks for agreeing to show me round. On a Bank Holiday, as well."

The site, partially ring-fenced, was silent. She could hear the distant sound of traffic on the breeze. Dust moved softly across the acres of concrete and earth seemed to lightly coat the buildings, too, as if they were already part of some failed business investment.

These three warehouses they're my bit. Turn 'em into shops, offices, apartments. We're only a half-mile from the canal basin and the main part of the marina oh, you'd better put one of these on. Mtf that any thing's likely to drop on your head 'cause no one's working here any day of the week!"

He pulled two hard hats from the parcel shelf of the Mercedes and handed her one of them. She collected her blonde hair, worn loose that morning, and heaped it into the hat as she jammed it on her head.

"Dressing the part, I see," he added and she caught the glint of attraction in his look, felt the study of his eyes.

"Don't all workmen wear denims?" she enquired innocently.

"My blokes don't look like you do in jeans."

Thank you, kind sir." Her smile defused something that was a squib rather than a grenade. There were tiny black insects already settled on the bright yellow of her cotton shirt. She glanced at the hoarding.

Euro-Construction were the principal contractors. Banks' small firm did not rate a mention. There were other names, European and even American… and she recognised two of them as familiar. They, like Euro-Construction Plc, belonged under the umbrella of Winterborne Holdings, David's conglomerate. She rubbed her arms as if cold.

"All right?" he asked solicitously.

"Just these tiny flies, or whatever they are."

"Oh, right. Well, you'd better follow me, then." He glanced at his watch.

She had rung him a little after nine and had immediately made herself sound eager to be of assistance to Banks. Kenneth had agreed, during their discussion at Uffingham, that she must be allowed to pursue her instincts… that the appalling suspicion that David Winterborne was some kind of crook must either be satisfied or dismissed. Besides, Kenneth Aubrey's legendary curiosity had, she had realised almost at once, been aroused, and it was fiercer than sexual desire and unabated by age. Behold, I show you a mystery she, like everyone who knew Aubrey, knew his motto. It had not been difficult to persuade him that the danger was minimal, the possible outcome momentous.

She and Banks walked past a Portakabin with dusty windows, two of them broken.

Concrete-mixers, a parked bulldozer, a dredging crane leaning over the canal like a still heron. Fishing a large bunch of keys from the pocket of his dark blazer, he unlocked the fresh-painted doors of the first warehouse.

"You'll see how far we've got and what's still to do. There's no good reason why we're not getting on with it."

It seemed no more cool in the shadow of the building. Perhaps it was the heat of the morning, but she felt a sudden and unexpected diffidence; the conspiratorial feverishness of her conversation with Aubrey had worn off, vanished like a headache. The shadow of the warehouse over the towpath and the canal was sharply black. Banks ushered her through the door.

A film set, she thought at first; then, merely a building site.

Scaffolding, the smell of fresh plaster, dusty bootprints across the floor, hardened concrete on a board, a crumpled crisp packet that scuttled like a crab in the breeze that had entered with them. Sunlight burned through dirty windows and made the dust in the air glow.

"See?" said Banks, almost bullying her into sympathy.

"Nothing behind the bloody facade! And no money to go on…" His voice faded before her continuing silence.

His imminent bankruptcy had been the goad her concern required.

"Are the other two like this?" He nodded fiercely.

"And this is to be what, offices?" She waved her hand.

That's it. Thousands of square feet of office space around a central atrium. See?

Keep the tall windows that way—" He gestured towards the beginnings of flooring and a gallery.

"One of the others is supposed to become apartments, the third more offices. The other two are even less forward than this one."

"How long have they been like this?"

"Stopped work a month ago completely. Paid off the last few blokes, my best, out of my own pocket, too. Haven't had a bloody penny out of the main contractors since then or for another six months before I had to down tools!"

His face was brick red with remembered arguments, recollected outrage and growing paranoia and anxiety.

"And they just keep saying the cheque's in the post, is that roughly it?"

"Exactly it. Euro-Construction with the other fat cats backing them because they don't have any cash-flow problems just smile like my mother-in-law does when you try to persuade her that white is white and black black against her better judgement-!" He could not avoid grinning at his own waving arms, deep frustration.

"Honest, Marian it's a right Fred Karno's army setup…" His eyes wandered the warehouse as intently as if he were studying a home that had burned down, then he snapped: "Come on, I can't stand looking at this any longer!"

The shadow was cooler outside, at least for the first moments. Gnats swirled like smoke above the still water of the canal. Empty paint tins, the occasional condom, sodden cardboard and the inevitable mattress littered the towpath or stuck up out of the stagnant water.

"I even asked that bloody Euro MP of ours toffee-nosed pillock! to make a few enquiries. I never heard from him again, and his secretary can never get hold of him."

"Ben Campbell, you mean?"

That's him. Not much good for anything, is he?"

"I don't think he'd like to hear you say that." She heard the bell ring of a collar dove, startled by their presence, as its wings lifted it up to the roof of the warehouse. They passed beneath a narrow road bridge over the canal. She smelt the heavy, unappetising scent of cooking on the breeze.

The nearest streets aren't they to be redeveloped or something?" She'd had letters and phone calls of protest, but had been able to do nothing other than make soothing noises. The city's councillors and planners had decided the old back-to-backs must go not in favour of tower blocks, which was at least something, but to be replaced by a prettified, faked village-style development.

"Oh, the cooking smells. Sure they are but no one's been moved out yet. The compulsory purchase orders have been served, the prices agreed… but that's the council, mean buggers. They haven't paid up yet because no one's ready to develop the place. I think they've pulled down two houses and a pub so far."

"Are you—?"

He shook his head.

"Egan Construction are down for that redevelopment."

"Indeed."

The other warehouses were on the opposite bank of the canal. A pair of new moorings had been excavated beside one of the buildings, there were even brass rails. A mattress floated where a cruiser should have been berthed, or a fashionably old-fashioned narrow boat. They turned a slow bend in the canal and she saw it stretching into the distance between other warehouses, beneath low bridges, amid the canyons of red-brick buildings, towards the canal basin.

"Are they working on the basin?" she asked. Banks' work was, after all, on the periphery, at the flippant edge of the whole project once it had moved its epic entre from the marina towards the regeneration of a quarter of the city. If money was in the least tight, then he'd be the first to suffer. She had, as yet, no sense of the scale of delay.

"Sort of one or two blokes dithering about. A lot of it was completed with local funding private and council before the whole thing expanded.

Not much lately, though," he added.

"Most of this section of the development has shut up shop."

She recalled the opening ceremony and the very public steering of a JCB by the PM digging out the first rubble rather than cutting the first turf two years before. The PM possessed a gravitational attraction towards the grandiose; a building site was a newly discovered country, virgin territory for his classless society. Some colleagues referred to his fatal attraction for such schemes, and the hope that Glenn Close might spring up from the bath and stab him to death. He had made one of his characteristically lame speeches regarding the redevelopment as the largest urban regeneration scheme in Europe, perhaps the world.

This part of it seemed to retain his fingerprints, she reflected sourly. Two weeks' enthusiasm followed by the remaining evidence of something in which interest had been lost. It was still a building site.

She deflected her thoughts from the familiar with a conscious effort. A figure dressed in a cap and uniform shirt and trousers was emerging from a small Portakabin sited on a stretch of weedy concrete. Beyond it, she could see the tired, cramped streets scheduled to disappear and hear the noise of thudding music and the screams of children. The man was in his late fifties, short, bow-legged, a mobile phone slung at his waist like a cowboy's gun.

"Oh, it's you, Mr. Banks," he offered, studying Marian with an intensity that belied his casual greeting.

"Hello, Stan." On the man's cap and shoulder badges, Marian saw the blazon Complete Security. The surprise of memory must have been evident in her face.

"Anything wrong, Mr. Banks?" He did not look at Banks as he spoke.

"Only the usual. I'm just showing—"

"I'm a relative!" Marian gushed.

"An MP in the family, Mr. Banks? You never said."

"I apologise," Marian offered quickly.

"We didn't want you to attach any importance to… You were saying, Ray funding?" She glanced at her watch.

"I need to be back for lunch, Ray. Sorry and all that. Could we—?"

Snotty bitch. It was as if he had spoken the words, so clear was the sentiment in his eyes. Nice one, Marian after your classic Piece of stupidity.

"Oh, yes take care, Stan."

They moved away, turning back to where their cars were parked. She sensed the security man's study of her as sharply as a lust. Bow legs do not a slow wit make, she recited, angry at her inept, unthinking lie. Complete Security… coincidence? The firm belonged to the Winterborne Holdings Group. Effectively, David owned the company that employed Fraser, who had, almost certainly, killed Michael Lloyd.

Not coincidence… She resisted the temptation to turn and look back.

The security guard would be watching, without the shadow of a doubt.

And knew she had tried to lie to him, and wore a mobile phone on his belt like a pistol.

"I want to see more," she announced, surprising Banks.

"I want to know how much is not being done. Did you bring the plans?"

He nodded.

"Everything. Each site, the whole overview. What do you want them for?" His words were uttered with the kind of childish, resentful whine that attempted to wheedle adults about to redirect their attentions.

"Because… if you want my help, Ray, I want to know what is really going on!"

Or do I…? She could not prevent the question. Conjuring images that mocked the PM, the grandiosity of this urban regeneration scheme, no longer seemed anything more than an insider's game, the irritating chuckles and giggles of people sharing an unimportant joke or piece of gossip.

"OK, OK what do you want to see?"

What do I want to see? Evidence that David is a crook and one of his employees is a murderer or evidence that Banks is paranoid and bitter and probably deserves to go out of business? Damn Kenneth's curiosity, she decided, it's infectious.

The heart of the matter," she announced. The biggest bits — are they dragging their heels on those as well? That's what I want to know, Ray."

Because here, with these three warehouses and stretch of canal to be rejuvenated, she could only count in hundreds of thousands, perhaps one or two million. David could have easily sold one of his small companies, floated a minor share issue, cashed in some stock, if that was the size of the stake. There was no evidence that tens, hundreds of millions were disappearing.

The video camera footage shot in the moments after the crash was replaying on a TV screen. The instruments that had thus far been removed from the flight deck were spread, like bones or runes, on a trestle table in front of Gant and Blakey from Vance Aircraft. As were photographs, weighted down with pebbles against the howling wind that blew through the frail canvas tent. Outside, the rescue and salvage work had been postponed until the storm abated. It lurched and bullied like an enraged drunk against the tent, which was erected in a hollow of sand and tussocky grass behind the low headland of the island.

"See?" Gant was saying, his finger pointing at the TV screen, where the video film flickered and swayed as if affected by the squall.

There's little or no kerosene. The tanks must have been empty when she hit. You agree, don't you?" he added angrily. It was as if the storm had gotten inside him somehow, and was shaking his stomach and heart with great buffeting blows. Or maybe he was possessed by an idea he couldn't rid himself of — that the 494 had suffered sabotage.

Out of politeness, because he was already convinced, Blakey leaned towards the screen, removing his glasses, his bearlike frame looming over Gant, his thick fingers scratching at his beard.

"Confirmed. No kerosene. The lack of fire damage backs that theory up. She was running on fresh air… How?" he added sharply, plucking at the greying beard, his damp-looking eyes doubtful.

"We've been through that, Mitchell.

There's nothing here…"

Ron Blakey had checked the fuel computer system on sophisticated portable monitors, and then rechecked on his instructions, angrily patient. And nothing… The fuel computer system, every last chip of it, worked. Gant knew there had to be something wrong with the fuel computer… instability, manual control, the uneven struggle against the pitching and yawing of the plane, the final loss of control and engine power when there wasn't enough fuel any more. It was all on the cockpit voice recorder, and what ne had experienced with Vance.

More gently, Blakey said: "I could have that system in the lab for a month and it would still read out the same. Sorry, Mitchell—" Gant pointed at the littered table.

"Except that," he said.

"I've explained what it does—" Blakey responded.

"But not why it's there," Gant snapped.

"No…"

"It's not standard it's not like the other components with the Microlite brand name. It's not like chips that I've seen that do the same job."

"No, it isn't but there's nothing peculiar about it except its looks.

It's just another dumb microprocessor carrying out simple tasks, taking orders, passing them on."

Blakey shrugged.

"So, why is it different?" Gant persisted.

"Why is it handmade — your word?"

"Maybe it's a prototype we can check with Microlite. It didn't cause the accident—"

"You say."

' You say it did. The only thing that looks any different from normal, and that's your answer? That it's that chip? It isn't. I did the tests you asked."

Gant looked up at Blakey.

"Ron please do the tests. However many, however long it takes. Take this back to Phoenix and find out why it dresses up different from the rest of the guys."

Blakey nodded.

"OK it's your call. And the old fella's desperate, right?" he added.

"Right."

They looked away from one another. Both Vance and Burton had been frantically engaged, by means of their mobile phones, in fending off armies of bankers, other creditors, the press, lobbyists, stockbrokers, the TV networks. The voices coming out of the ether were another storm, like the one outside, paralleling the one inside Gant himself.

Gant turned back to Blakey. When he had last glimpsed Vance he had looked ashen, buckled, Barbara at his side somehow drawing strength from him rather than supporting him. Lightning glared through the opacity of the canvas, then the thunder burst around them.

"Jesus," Blakey muttered, and shivered with reaction.

Gant stared down at the trodden sand beneath his feet, the flattened tussocks of grass. The tent was as frail and insubstantial as the 494 would have felt to the pilot. Gant's head jerked up and he stared malevolently at the chip on the table, dwarfed by the fuel flow gauge with its lying needle. It was that unexpected chip, he knew it was The flap of the tent was dragged aside. Flying sand scoured across the instruments, the photographs, ageing them. Gant looked up and saw Vance posed for a moment, the storm behind him. Vivid lightning struck down from the heavy cloud towards the sea. Yet Vance's face seemed more thunderous, incandescently angry.

Blakey assiduously dusted sand from the table. Barbara, her dark hair wild, was at Vance's side, pulling vainly at his arm like a child.

Vance lurched like a drunk to the table, leaning heavily on Blakey, a large hand clasping Gant's shoulder.

"Well? What have you got? What is it?" His breathing sounded hoarse as the rolling thunder died away. The storm was moving slowly away along the Gulf of Finland.

"Ron tell me what went wrong."

Blakey, almost as bulky as Vance, seemed to shy from the older man, his hands gesturing vainly, as if in supplication. Vance's features became ever more virulent, maddened.

"You?" He glared at Gant.

"Come on, boy wonder, tell me what happened to my airplane!"

"Alan, we don't know—" The hell you don't! I'm paying you way over the odds, Gant — and for answers, not apologies!"

Gant clenched his hands in the pockets of his anorak. Burton, dishevelled by the storm and his collapsed business, was standing in the opening of the tent, a stranger who had inadvertently walked in on some family crisis.

"Alan, I can't give you an answer there isn't an answer. Not yet—"

"You told me it was sabotage, Gant! You sounded like you were swearing on your mother's life, for Christ's sake! Now you got nothing?" He turned contemptuously towards Blakey.

"And you, Ron you got nothing, either? You still going along with this guy's theory?"

"We can't find anything. Not yet. But the odds against—"

"Fuck odds!

I have had odds up to here! The company's dead in the water. I know the odds!"

"Daddy calm down, for God's sake!"

"Barbara?" Vance seemed bemused, or stunned. Lightning made the canvas of the tent glow, as if there was some great conflagration outside. Then the thunder.

Vance yelled above it: "You taking his side? Something new for you, Barbara!"

"Alan," Gant said levelly, 'it has to be sabotage. I don't know why and I don't know how but it has to be."

Then prove it!" He banged his fist on the table. The instruments rattled, jumped, the malicious chip sliding across the surface.

"If you can't prove it, and prove it now, then you're no damn' use to me, Gant no damn' use at all!" He was leaning heavily on the table, the litter on the surface quivering with the pressure of his rage and weariness. His face was shiny with sweat, his eyes protruding, his breathing loud and difficult. He seemed to be suffocating on his own rage.

"I will prove it, Alan—"

"But you'll prove it too late!" He waved a lurching arm towards Burton behind him.

The Englishman's features were without optimism, expressing a withdrawn defeat.

"You think he and I have got the time to wait for you to prove anything? We ain't got shit?

The man's entire career had subsided within him, Gant realised. The supremely focused, narrowly defiant ego had slid like a collapsing levee into the river of his rage. The 494 had been his dream, and it had turned on him like a wastrel child and betrayed him, leaving his whole business in ruins. He had clung to Gant's theory not because it was a way of surviving, but because it would keep the airplane pure, triumphant. It would justify the 494 and Vance himself. Now, the theory was unprovable and to Vance it had become untenable.

"I'll get something on the move!" he growled, dragging his mobile phone from the pocket of his waterproof and consulting its memory. Then he dialled a number and waited.

"Yes who's that? It's Vance —!" His face was freshly slick with sweat, his eyes and cheeks swollen.

"Is Olssen there? Olssen, your fucking chief engineer—?

Burton seemed to awake from a light trance, eager to cling to his realisation of the purpose of the call. Gant presumed it was Oslo the maintenance company who had performed the overnight service.

"Get that asshole Olssen to the phone, for Christ's sake! I know the guy is avoiding me! I want to talk to Olssen now!"

He remained leaning heavily on the table, which continued to shudder under the pressure, the chips and screws and smaller instruments responding as to a distant earth tremor.

"What do you think might have—?" Burton began with the eagerness of desperation, then fell silent.

Gant remained watching Barbara, who stood near Blakey as if she had retreated from the epic entre and regarded her helplessness, her lack of influence over her father's rage, with evident guilt. Then:

"Olssen — Vance. I want to talk to you!" Vance was fiercely stroking his left arm as it held the mobile phone to his flushed cheek.

"Listen to me you screwed up, Olssen! Your crummy little asshole company screwed up! My airplane fell out of the sky because of you!"

Gant shook his head angrily, but remained silent. Vance's lips were blue with rage, his face brick red.

"I'm going to sue the ass off you and your bosses, Olssen. You ruined me! ruin you! Understand understand…?"

Gant did, catching Vance's weight as it lurched, one hand sweeping aside the litter on the table, the other dropping the phone to clutch at his chest, twist the waterproof down like a tourniquet that might stop the pain. Gant faltered under the weight, then Blakey held Vance, lowering him on to a folding chair.

For a moment his features drained of colour and his eyes stared wildly.

Then, as if a huge current had been passed through his big frame, he seemed to staggeringly leap from the chair towards the tent flap, then subside to his knees. Another jolting shock and he lay stretched on his stomach, Blakey and Barbara bending over him, gently turning him over, loosening his clothing. His eyes were open and staring, his mouth wet and working loosely, as if with a foreign language of pain and dread.

Gant snatched up the mobile phone from the sand and dusted it brusquely. Burton retained shock like an anaesthetic. Barbara was murmuring, drying Vance's face with a handkerchief while Blakey placed a folded garment beneath his head, then glanced at Gant.

'… man from your own factory, your own expert, checked the fuel computer, where your trouble was supposed to have been…"

Gant's thumb remained on the off button.

"Wait," he snapped. Then to Burton: "Call for an air ambulance — do it now!" He realised that their shock was turning to puzzled contempt.

Vance's heart attack had to be that had altered the tent's small universe, the physical and psychological laws that governed it. How could he, their eyes said, want to talk to Olssen now? He waited until Burton had begun dialling, then he turned his back on them.

"OK. Mr. Vance wants me to talk to you. I'm FAA, got it? Please repeat what you just said what man from Vance Aircraft? When?

Where?"

'-did not wish to listen to what I had to—"

"I don't have time for all that, Mr. Olssen. Just tell me about this man." Vance was still breathing, struggling to swallow air like a fish drowning in it. Gant ignored the small, tight pain of pity in his chest.

"You claim there was someone from Vance Aircraft in Oslo two nights ago. What was his name? Who was he supposed to be?"

There was a groan from Vance, though it might have been some incoherent protest from Barbara or Blakey. Burton was talking urgently into his phone, describing symptoms.

"He called himself Massey. But, you mean he was not' He was not," Gant affirmed.

"Massey? There's no Massey at Vance Aircraft. What did he do? Why did he say he had come?"

He felt icily cold now, utterly detached from the scrabbling of feet in the trodden sand, the chirruping of alarm and comfort. He knew he was right.

"He had been sent to check the fuel computer system, because of the first accident, he said. It was not necessary, since the system was a different one, but he had been asked by Mr. Vance to make certain."

"Sure. You saw him working?"

"No. Jorgensen did, for a while one of the engineers. He was with us an hour. He was an expert- I spoke to him myself, he was definitely from Vance Aircraft, there was no reason to think otherwise."

The slight singsong of the Norwegian accent was beginning to grate, as if it was the aural equivalent of the naivety of Olssen's opinions. The guy was an expert. He'd have had to be, to doctor the fuel computer… with another of those. Gant glared malevolently at the chip, which remained on the table even though the floor of the tent was littered with the stuff Vance had swept away with his hand. He had to speak to Olssen, face to face he needed a description, a verbatim account of what the expert had said, how he had spoken, his nationality.

And question this guy Jorgensen, who had also spoken to the expert.

"We'll need to talk, Mr. Olssen. I'll drop by. My name is Gant — my real name."

"But you are—?" The tone was at once conciliatory, even ingratiating, then immediately defensive.

"But, how could we have known—?"

Gant flicked the off button and put the phone in his pocket.

Reluctantly, he turned to look at Vance, a mixture of sensations invading him, making demands on him.

The image was appalling, cold. Vance's mouth was open, loose, gulping air slowly. Burton waggled his phone, shaping with his lips, They're on their way.

Barbara was sitting in the sand beside her father, holding his hand, murmuring continually. Blakey was seated on the chair as if studying a map drawn in the distressed sand. Gant stepped outside the tent without speaking to any of them.

Vance might get over the coronary, he might not. He looked awful.

The sky was less lurid, the temperature after the humid claustrophobia of the tent surprisingly low. He shivered and hunched against the wind, watching the lightning, distant and toylike now, flickering over the tiny dark specks of other islets. The gap before the thunder was seconds long. The wind made his eyes water.

The man in Oslo, the unknown expert, had probably killed Alan Vance, along with fifty other people, and Hollis and his crew. Gant looked westward, out beyond the long, low headland on which Hanko perched, towards the Baltic. The grey sea was lightening, beginning to become fish-scale silver as the clouds broke. Over there somewhere was Oslo.

The expert would be long gone, back into the shadows by now, leaving no trace. The wreckage down there held no clues, either. He stared at the fuselage as lightning seared on the edge of his retinae. It was almost dragged off the rocks by the storm, upended in suddenly deep water, like a damaged fish.

He would find him, the expert. For his own reasons, he had to find him

… for being shafted by the NTSB and having to resign… for Vance… for the sake of having been right too late to make a difference. He hated that bleak, accusing thought.

"Ray, stop looking at your watch and worrying about your lunch!" Marian snapped, swiping a hand at hovering flies.

"Sorry," Banks murmured insincerely. He was bored, truculently discomfited because she seemed no longer to be concentrating on his problems, his little patch of delayed work.

"We shouldn't be here," he added.

"Oh, dear!" she mocked.

They had followed the canal as closely as possible towards the basin that had half mutated into a vast marina. Crowded on to the banks were renewed warehouses, slip ways rows of shop-fronts, cafes, blocks of flats, iron-gated developments of new housing. It was a scene that was incomplete, like a child's puzzle where one compared two sketches and tried to decide what alterations had been made from one to the other ladybirds now with six spots not five, a tree with a branch missing.

They had played with such puzzle drawings at Uffingham, on rain swamped days during school holidays.

Here, the marina was presented to her in a series of artists' impressions and computer images in a glossy brochure Banks had retrieved from the boot of the Mercedes, together with the map-like architect's drawings which now rested across her lap. There, around them, was the actual marina, and she had to glance from sketches to actuality several times before the huge site began to reveal its unfinished state. What had been a dazzling smile had missing teeth, plaque, carious decay. There was a warehouse still dilapidated there, intended as an office block. Farther over, across the still water that remained feet lower than it would eventually be, the wrought iron of high gates, behind which was little more than a building site rather than expensive executive homes.

There was millions in unfinished work around the canal basin, beyond which towered the blocks of two new hotels, built for American chains and completed on schedule. In the distance was the new symphony hall and the conference centre, the exhibition complex, the metro system's hub station and the new railway above it… and on and on, stretching west and south towards the present centre of the city.

And yet, this all looked no more completed, even if as substantial, than Bruegel's painting of Babel except for the holiday absence of human activity. The dust around the spot where they had parked seemed unprinted, oddly settled. Babel… She always remembered that painting in Vienna whenever some particularly grandiose European scheme passed across her desk or her television screen.

Vanity, vanity, saith the Preacher… But here, it might be crockery, crookery, she reminded herself.

"Seen enough?" Banks asked hopefully, unabashedly patting his stomach.

There's an even bigger slowdown than I'd thought," he added helpfully and in order to hurry.

"Is there?" she replied archly.

The signs of it were everywhere. A village-green project, surrounded by cheaper, cottagey housing, had not begun two miles away… two tall office blocks were merely empty boxes turned on end. Around their emptiness, more endlessly recurring building sites.

She slipped from the car seat and walked the few paces to the high fence that surrounded the marina, pressing her face close to its trelliswork of wire. Less than fifty yards away, vandals had pulled a short length of the fencing away from its stanchions. The metro station's entrance was on her side of the canal basin. It seemed dusty but complete, even to its City Metro blazon atop a flagstaff-like steel pole. Banks began sighing impatiently behind her.

"I'd like to have a look at the metro station, Ray. There's a gap in the fencing just along there." She pointed exaggeratedly.

"Didn't you mention that, according to rumour, work on the tunnelling had been slowed down?"

That's mostly the council's money, and private investment," he replied, feigning boredom.

"And perhaps twenty million from Brussels," she murmured. They like underground trains in Europe."

"Look," Banks began, 'we've seen enough, haven't we? I mean—"

"Ray, what do you think is going to happen if we engage in trespass? The canal basin isn't MoD property, so far as I'm aware. Come on let's see how advanced this advanced urban passenger transport system is, shall we?"

She strode eagerly along the fence, a broad smile on her face. It was as if the calculations she had made were of profits from her own investments… Someone is counting just like that, she told herself.

David…?

She ducked down and eased herself through the gap torn in the fence.

There were paw prints in the dusty earth. Behind her, Banks puffed and wriggled his way in pursuit. Millions, she kept reminding herself, millions of pounds. To have kept everything on schedule would have cost millions more than was evidently being spent. And Phases One, Two and Three were, she remembered from the PM's un ringing words at the opening ceremony, and from the architects' glossy handouts, intended to progress at the same pace. Now, large parts of those phases had seriously lagged, others had not even seen a sod turned in earnest.

Of course there were, dotted around the development, completed projects, new roads or stretches of road, whole new estates of houses, one of the shopping centres. She herself had been to concerts in the new symphony hall, addressed a gathering at the conference centre next door to it. But, like a city at night, seen from the air, the glaring blotches of light were balanced by areas of darkness.

There were great pieces of the entire jigsaw missing.

And no one had noticed.

"You'll need this," Banks announced smugly, holding up a heavy-duty lamp.

"Us women so impractical," she murmured.

"And you should have brought a camera."

"Why, Ray? You imagine I could force people to tell me the truth by showing them a few snaps of building sites?" She immediately sensed the intemperateness of her response.

"Sorry," she apologised.

"Right, let's have a look, shall we—?"

She hurried down the steps out of the sunlight, into a warm gloom then a subtle change of temperature. The lamp's beam became stronger, more necessary for a moment or two, then the light, dusty as it was and somehow unused, increased as they reached the ticket barriers and a glimpse of the platform. There was a huge, greenhouse-like glass roof over the station's two platforms. The barriers were open, and she walked into disappointment. The station, beneath its light coating of dust, boasted tiled walls, mosaiced platforms, large steel notices. It was complete, awaiting its first train.

"I–I thought they hadn't got on this quick," Banks faltered. Marian glared at him, as if he had been a subtle enemy, persuading her of David's guilt.

Marian's disappointment was vivid and ridiculous, even embarrassing. It reminded her of the mockery of some of her most complacent colleagues in the House who referred to her as Rent-a-Moral, because they easily tired of her obsessive, always challenged sense of justice. She had sometimes made herself ridiculous, her perennial outrage manipulated on sundry occasions by people who had no real claim upon it. As now, apparently.

The finished metro station, entire even to the awaiting, empty advertising hoardings. The succession of building sites through which she had travelled, and on which she had erected a castle of venality and fraud, had ended here, in these pristine, functional, completed surroundings.

"I—" She cleared her throat.

"I'm just going to have a look down the tunnel," she announced. I'll borrow your lamp, Ray, if I may."

"But it's all finished," he grumbled.

"Nevertheless…"

"Oh, I'll come with you."

"Good."

She strode off along the platform. The hard hat was making her forehead damp; a headache encroached, but its cause was sheer bloody frustration, she decided. Her shoes clicked along the platform. She almost expected a sleek, blazoned train to sweep from the tunnel. She hesitated, staring into its darkness. The dry breeze of every underground station. The scent of concrete and dust, as the rails ran into the darkness.

"It's not live, is it?"

Banks chuckled, his masculine superiority comfortably worn once more.

"I shouldn't think so. Come on, then, let's get it over with."

A sparrow fluttered against the glass roof, as if intent upon damaging itself rather than on freedom. The sight pained her.

"Right. Shine that lamp—" A noise startled her, filtering down the steps and along the platform, echoing in the empty station. A car engine approaching, then the silence as it was switched off then the slamming of a door… He and Burton seemed the only heated and animate things in the aseptic hospital corridor off which were the doors to the intensive care unit. Windows looked out over Helsinki, now bathed in early-afternoon sunshine, appearing like a pallid ghost of Venice, with white buildings and open stretches of green and the grey sea beyond.

"If your theory's correct," Burton was arguing once more, 'then you're making suppositions about motive and instigation that don't hold up and I should know!

These people ruin, they don't needlessly kill they work by means of the rumour, the dawn raid… it's the letter that killeth." He surprised Gant with a boyish smile.

Gant merely shook his head, holding his hands together in front of his knees as if to still them. He felt himself becoming more impatient; a truant listening to a homily while his adventure waited outside for him. Vance had suffered a second, and more massive heart attack in the air ambulance. Barbara's reaction had been a pallidity, an ashen ness that suggested she had suffered the coronary. Vance had been unconscious for the remainder of the short flight. Mocking first sunlight had glared on his white face through the helicopter window.

They had rushed him to intensive care… an hour ago. Gant believed that Vance must be dead. Twice in the helicopter they'd tried to jump-start his heart, as if he was a car with a drained battery. The body had shown the feeblest response, to which Barbara had clung as to the spars of a life raft Her grief washed her sunken cheeks and dead eyes with tears.

"It isn't like that not anymore," he said softly. They do what they have to… and the kind of people I know, who I've worked for in the past, they're looking for work now." He looked up bleakly.

"You just don't get it, do you? You think yours is the world of grown-ups and you know the rules. It's the world I come from which has the adults in it people who think nothing of walking through other people to be where they want to be. Not just walking over."

"You're suggesting that intelligence people are involved herein my business?"

"Why not?" Gant shrugged.

"Your membership rules say they can't join the country club?"

Burton glowered and was about to reply when his mobile phone trilled, as it had done a half-dozen times during the hour they had been seated in that corridor. He snatched it from his pocket. Gant stared down the narrowing perspective of the corridor, its walls and floor gleaming from the sun coming in through the glass.

"Yes?" Burton snapped wearily.

It was Stuart, his MD. He turned away from Gant towards the windows and the view of the city, which rendered the hospital corridor the comfortable anonymity of a hotel room. Gant's slumped, still form on the hard chair was too suggestive of defeat, of impotence.

Tim when are you flying back?" he heard.

"I think the sky's fallen in on us, sorry to have to—"

"What's wrong now?"

"We're being deserted in droves by passengers. Booking cancellations are into thousands for the Atlantic flights. Doesn't seem to matter which aircraft type it's just having Artemis painted on the tailplane.

And the big European carriers and the Yanks are making the most of it fly safely, was one slogan in today's papers. I've managed to get that retracted by threats of legal action… Sorry to sound such a Job's comforter, but—"

"It's all right, Stuart," Burton answered mechanically. Even to himself, his voice sounded remote, belonging to someone in the hunched, defeated-looking posture of Gant.

"We can't give tickets away, right?"

"Not without a lot of effort."

"OK, I'm coming back as soon as I can get a flight." He sensed Gant look up at him, but ignored the tightness between his shoulder blades.

"Sure. Yes no, I don't know what we can salvage… No, nothing here that helps us." He paused, then added: "It's gone to hell in a handcart, Stuart. But don't quote me."

There was no rally in his voice.

"See you—" He switched off the phone and turned back to Gant, as if expecting his decision to be challenged.

There's nothing you can do," Gant said.

"Can you do anything?"

"Not fast enough to make a difference."

Think I'm finished correct?"

"So is he in there maybe permanently." Gant's eyes were bleak, his cheekbones prominent, as if he was facing a hard, chill wind. Burton recognised an empathy with Vance, a remote kind of pity, emotions written in a tiny, minimalist handwriting on his features. There's nothing you can do. I'll tell her you had to leave."

Thanks—" Burton hesitated.

"I if there's anything you can do… I mean, I'm employing you, in a way. I'll go on doing that, if you'll pursue—" Gant smiled wintrily.

I'll pursue. Someone did this to his airplane just for money. The guy who planted the device got paid, and the guy paying him expects to turn a profit. That's all it is… I'll pursue."

Burton nodded.

"Good. Let me know what you decide to do, what you need—"

"Sure."

"Goodbye, Major." Gant smiled.

"I must hurry—" Gant watched him stride down the corridor, his steps threatening to become a fleeing run at any moment. When he had disappeared, Gant settled back on the hard moulded plastic of the chair and stared out towards the city. There were golden roofs down there, and neat parks, afternoon traffic, all of which remained ordinary.

It was almost two when Barbara emerged from the intensive care unit, the door swishing behind her, then sucking shut. When she told him that Vance had not regained consciousness and that they could not restart his heart and that she had given the instruction to switch off the life support, he did not look at her, but held her hand loosely, since she seemed to wish him to do so.

After an unmeasured time of sobbing and racked breathing as Barbara stared out of the windows down at the city, she quietly subsided into the chair beside him.

Tentatively, he put his arm around her shoulder and she slid like a child against him, her head pressed into his chest. He felt her grief beat in her cheek and forehead like his own pulse.

As he held her, he stared at a perspective beyond the crashes of the

494, beyond the ruins of Vance Aircraft, and the sabotage that had murdered Hollis and Alan.

The former had tried to be his friend and the latter his enemy, and both of them had failed. Just as neither of them had deserved to die so someone could turn an extra buck.

Out there, somewhere, was a man who doctored microprocessors so that they caused airplanes to crash. And beyond him, there was someone very, very remote, who had ordered it done. Someone with planes to sell, someone with planes to fill and fly… Someone he wanted very badly to find.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Economic Recovery There were footsteps and voices from the platform which sidled into the hot darkness of the tunnel. They were out of sight of the platform because of a slow bend in the tunnel to the point where the construction work had ceased. The track, the tiling of the walls, the lighting all petered out only hundreds of yards from the dusty newness of the metro station. Before Ray had extinguished the lamp, they had seen the roughly excavated workings, as incomplete and inhospitable as a coal mine

To Marian it seemed too sudden, too decided. Petered out was the wrong expression. Work had been suddenly, quickly suspended… three months before by the date on the tattered, dusty copy of The Sun she had found. The newspaper had flapped against her feet as if alive, startling her until the light of the lamp had revealed a bare-breasted female and two lurid headlines expressing moral outrage at pornography on television and violence in films. Twelve weeks ago, work had stopped completely on this stretch of the metro line and probably on the entire system.

"What do we do?" Banks asked breathily, his lips close to her ear.

"Who do you think it is security?"

"Probably. Not day-trippers, anyway."

Weak torchlight fell on the floor and walls of the tunnel. The footsteps were louder, the voices like murmured threats.

"What are we supposed to be doing down here?" Banks asked more urgently. They were standing in darkness, close together. She smelt the tense increase in the overpowering scent of his expensive aftershave, heard his breathing.

"Come on out of there," she heard.

"Come on we know someone's in there." A looming shadow was washed along the tunnel towards them, as if it were pouncing. The voice was suspicious, but hesitant, too. The parked cars would not suggest local yobs, but would mystify.

"Come on-!" more impatiently, confidently.

"What are we going to—? What are you doing?" Banks was startled by the noise of the zipper of her jeans, the rustle of the blouse as she tugged it free, unbuttoned it.

"Just follow my lead!" she hissed, grabbing hold of him. Turn on the lamp!"

She pulled Banks against her, feeling the pressure of his stomach.

Their coupled shadows sprang out on the wall. The beast with two backs… Oh, dear, the things I do for England. She felt, with a curious repellence, his arousal. Hurry up, she thought, disliking the aftershave, the good-living rounded ness of his jowl pressed against her cheek.

"Sorry—" he began to apologise.

"What the bloody hell are you—?" she heard as her cue and pushed Banks away.

His foot moved the lamp and their parting shadows danced on the walls.

At once she began pulling up her jeans.

"Jesus Christ-!"

"I told you I didn't want to!" she snapped loudly at Banks in a passably local accent, her tone harsh with experience.

"Not bloody down here!" She buttoned her shirt as Banks ostentatiously re zipped his flies. Torchlight washed their faces, dazzled them.

"Christ, Ray-! I didn't expect an audience! You and your bloody sex-drive!"

Banks' features were stunned, half-amused, perspiring.

"Who the hell are you, mate?" one of the two figures asked.

They were no more than a few yards away. In the glow of the torch, she could make out the uniforms of security guards. Complete Security?

"You like watching, do you?" she challenged brazenly, tossing her hair away from her face.

"You're trespassing—"

"Ray hasn't got enough puff to do any damage!"

she retorted, making as if to brush past the security men. Complete Security again, she realised. One of them grabbed her arm, restraining her. She smelt onions on his breath, and beer. She shrugged his grip away.

"Come on, fair's fair," Banks began, dropping his voice, so that she only caught snatches of the male-camaraderie bawdiness of his explanation. She turned her back contemptuously on them.

"My secretary… down here just wondering about one of the flats, you know hot day… just seemed, took my fancy…" She wondered, so convincing was the performance as it reached her, whether Banks had experience in such matters. The wife was, at best, dowdy… Cat, she told herself.

"I mean, it's not a crime, is it?"

Banks had already begun moving them all towards the end of the tunnel and the platform. She snorted and tossed her head, more like a colt than a woman, and lit a cigarette; surprised at the ease with which she could adopt brassiness, the accent, the exaggerated walk as she went ahead of them.

"See what you mean but you're still trespassing."

"Look, I don't want any trouble, mate—" His accent, too, was thickly local now.

"I mean, you wouldn't be insulted if I offered—" She glanced at the two men only once, to confirm their uniforms. Complete Security. Then kept ahead of them, her face averted. Stan at the building site of Banks Construction had recognised her, after all. These two one in his thirties, the other middle-aged didn't seem to know Banks, but just in case… And wiggle your hips, she cajoled herself. Her shoes clicked along the platform. Banks' tone was almost that of repartee now. She felt herself beginning to shiver with relief and stilled her body by an effort of will, wearing her new, brazen, adulterous self like a straitjacket.

The sun was hotter, it seemed. She ducked through the fence where it was damaged and hurried to her car. Hot leather seats, the hot paintwork. She dragged her sunglasses out of the glove compartment and put them on to mask her features. Then she sat on the uncomfortable heated leather, turning her face away from the two security men, who watched her for a moment, as if in recognition as much as desire, and one of them announced to Banks:

"You're getting too old to do it in railway tunnels, mate! I should put your name down for one of these flats, if I were you!"

"Ask him when they'll be finished!" she whispered urgently, as they walked off, laughing.

"When when are they going to start selling them, then?" Banks called out.

The older of the two men, the one who had joked about the flats, turned back. His features were cloudy with a sense of having made some slip.

"It'll be in the papers, mate!" he snapped and the two seemed suddenly more reluctant to leave.

That's it," Banks admitted, his hand resting on the door of the Escort, the other waving acknowledgement to the two security guards. Time to bugger off!"

"Agreed… I'll see you then, Ray at the office!" she called out, and started the engine.

Banks seemed nonplussed.

"Have you, er—?"

"Seen enough? Yes, thanks I'll call you. Don't hang around." His sudden grin was lascivious, filled with memory.

"And that's the end of that, too!" she laughed.

"Well done the character-acting, I mean!"

She waved her hand and accelerated away from Banks, hearing one of the security men call out something in a voice brimming with lewdness. The marina retreated in the driving mirrors, Banks becoming a stranded, tiny figure, the two security men ambling away, satisfied. She was sweating profusely, not merely because of the heat of the upholstery, not merely because they had been surprised. She felt dizzied with the success of her gambit, her personation of Banks' fictitious secretary.

Tanya, she thought, would have been her name. She was hotter than the car, the day. The station was there but there was no metro system.

Just the excavated tunnels.

Millions… absolutely millions of pounds ecus, rather unaccounted for. As she drove along a new stretch of dual carriage way raising the dust of disuse, the gaps in the jigsaw, the succession of unfinished, un started pieces of the urban regeneration project, struck more forcibly, imprinting themselves with the clarity of photographs on her memory. She was irritated and impatient that she would not be able to speak to Aubrey until he returned to London that evening. Because now she could not risk calling him at Uffingham, not with David there… David what are you up to?

Lunch was to be late, by David's request. He remained ensconced in the library with his coterie of the great and the possibly-not-good the two European Commissioners, Rogier and Laxton, the local Euro MR Campbell, Bryan Coulthard and Jean-Paul Bressier, chairman of Balzac-Stendhal, the French partners of Aero UK in the Skyliner project, who had arrived the previous afternoon. Which, as Aubrey reflected once more as he sat on a comfortably cushioned painted chair on the terrace of Uffingham, rather narrowed the field of suspicion. Whatever David was up to, it had to be connected with Aero UK and its disastrous recent experiences at the hands of MoD and the world's airlines. The whole gang of them had spent most of Sunday ensconced in the library.

Incommunicado.

He was engaged in a second small Scotch and in conversation with his old friend, Clive Winterborne; and in the immensely pleasurable activity, now that he was well into his old age, of watching other people labour under a hot sun. The giant marquee was only now being dismantled, falling to the ground an hour since with the erotic grace of a woman's clothing. Clive had held a party inside it for the estate workers and their families on the Sunday. There was a rowing boat on the lake, with the swans and ducks, and two figures patiently fishing out spent fireworks. Volunteers, under the direction of the head gardener, were combing the lawns for the same spent bodies and the detritus of Saturday's festivities. The vomit count was low, thank goodness, Clive had remarked, his eyes bright with success and his habitual kind sense of mischief. Broken glass tally minimal, he had added.

Inside the house, Clive's secretary and a small team of volunteers were item ising the expenditure, the pledges, the cheques and the cash. The grand auction had been a success, after the gambit of the fireworks had increased the general sense of well-being and generosity. Swallows swooped and sewed the air around the house's eaves as they sipped their drinks and tasted their ease in each other's company. An ease which all but disguised from Aubrey his suspicions of Clive's son.

In Clive's company, on a grand terrace behind a boastful stone balustrade and overlooking a lake and hazy parkland, it was difficult to think of fraud on a giant scale, the misappropriation of European Union funds by anyone, let alone David Winterborne.

"You're thoughtful," Clive murmured.

"Something wrong?"

Aubrey carefully shook his head.

"Just looking back over my long life," he replied.

"It seems I can't achieve the trick of doing so without evoking a touch of melancholy." Which was true, if not of the moment. An interrogator's ploy, he reminded himself, employing truth like a lockpick.

"You've never had that trouble," he added with a smile.

"No. My melancholic memories are quite specific, old friend — quite specific." The death of his beloved Eurasian wife, the death of his charming, feckless younger son in a car accident… perhaps other occasions of which Aubrey did not know.

Otherwise, Clive's army career and his later career in MIS were a catalogue of success and esteem, as was his subsequent role as squire of Uffingham.

Winterborne Straits had passed directly into David's hands while Clive continued his uninterrupted indifference to commerce.

And, in fifteen years, David had expanded it into Winterborne Holdings, breaking out of Singapore with the ferocity of an infantry assault, investing, acquiring, defeating competition, diversifying… creating a monstrous business behemoth.

Clive had whispered, soon after Aubrey's arrival, that David was assiduously seeking US citizenship to facilitate the further expansion of Winterborne Holdings. Under David's stewardship, a trading house in the East had become a tentacular conglomerate in the West, something uniquely twentieth — rather than nineteenth century.

Clive glanced at his watch.

"I've told David two is the latest I'm prepared to contemplate my lunch," he announced gruffly but without irritation.

"It's almost that now."

"So," Aubrey sighed, 'you're well pleased with Saturday's junket?"

"Didn't you enjoy the fireworks, Kenneth?" Winterborne replied archly.

"Splendid. Marian thought so, too."

"Ah, our shining girl."

"Indeed."

Aubrey felt uncomfortable beneath his panama hat, as if hotter within his oldfashioned cream flannel suit. The shining girl almost as much his own child and that of Clive as she was Giles' daughter troubled him; at least her suspicions did, plucking at his mental vision of things like a stye or mote. David's rapid, even cavalier expansion into aerospace, in Europe and the US alike, had exposed him to the banks and other lenders and investors. The recent history of Aerospace UK and its French counterpart Aubrey glanced towards the tall windows of the library threatened the various subcontracting businesses that Winterborne Holdings owned or controlled. The recession had afflicted his construction companies in every world market he had succeeded in penetrating. Winterborne Holdings, Aubrey had learned by a process of interrogation and compilation, was unsteady if not unstable; weaker than anyone liked, except its enemies.

The rowing boat had returned to the shore of the lake and was tied up at a pergolaed jetty, splashed with the pink climbing roses planted in ornamental urns that lined the small pier.

"Are you free for lunch on Thursday?" Clive asked.

"I'm up in town on some charity business. Shall we meet?"

"Naturally. I'll call Giles. Indeed, we can be his guests, since he so ungraciously failed to attend your fireworks party."

"Good idea." The lorry on to which the marquee supports had been loaded moved away along the drive and rounded the corner of the house.

Clive sighed, as if he had that moment rid himself of unwelcome guests.

"Regimental reunions are all very well—" '-but cannot be compared with fireworks!" Aubrey completed, chuckling.

"Giles probably had a precognition of Marian's encounter with George, our local party chairman," Clive added.

"From all I hear, he would have been mightily embarrassed—" He grinned, his hawklike features softening, their leatheriness warming.

"She really does take all life head-on, doesn't she?" His admiration was undisguised. Though I shall have to have a quiet word with her about the height of her profile. Central Office is, I have it on the best authority, gunning for her."

They'll never manage her de selection

"Of course not. She could gain re-election in this constituency with an illegitimate child being breast-fed on the hustings!" When their laugher had diminished, Winterborne added more gravely: "But it's this sometimes needless upsetting of people, her urge to trample on pretensions they have cultivated as carefully as rare orchids. Even someone with lights as dim as those possessed by dear George often knows when he's being patronised or mocked. It doesn't achieve anything so why does she go in for it with such enthusiasm?" He threw his hands in the air in mock despair.

"Just consider the inordinate amount of time she must spend with the dim, the venal, the unprincipled and the boring," Aubrey observed, enjoying their patrician dialogue.

"When she returns from the Mother of Parliaments, that choicest Palace of Westminster, you can't really blame her for bridling at a great deal more of the same."

"I ask only for a little common sense," Winterborne offered with a smile.

"Ah, our dear Marian was born not so much with common sense but with an ethical sense a more combustible property altogether."

"Exactly. It could blow her sky-high some fine day and I would hate that to happen."

"Quite," Aubrey murmured, masking his features with the whisky tumbler.

Clive glanced away towards the library windows and the door again thankfully.

For Marian was engaged in one of her explosive experiments. Light the blue touch paper and retire. It served as a warning against Marian's curiosity as much as against the combustibility of fireworks. Her notion of the kind of fraud in which David could be involved if it bore fruit would indeed undermine her as well as David and Clive, and blow them all at the moon. Did she understand how dangerous her enquiries were… to her past, her sense of well-being, to some of the scaffolding of her personality?

He knew Marian well enough to experience a slight, unnerved nausea which he could not blame on the sun's strength or the second whisky.

More immediately, there was a very real personal danger in her pursuing her investigation. Which was why he had told her little of what he had discovered since their last meeting. To have stilled her ardent intelligence would have been beyond him. He would have had to lie to her, and she would have known it. Nevertheless, she had little idea how close his own suspicions now were to those she held.

And that weakened him, in front of Clive, because the truth would destroy their friendship, would alienate Marian and her father from Clive and Uffingham.

Marian, given free rein, would pull the whole edifice of their various relationships down. Aubrey's concern perhaps his sole concern was how he might mitigate the blow.

His nerves were startled as David and his guests emerged from the door on to the terrace, blinking in the sunlight like conspirators. Clive waved a lazy arm, then stood up, calling out: "At last, gentlemen! Not a single healthy appetite among you, by the look of it!" The butler, as at a given signal, emerged to take their drinks order.

"Champagne, I think, Russell," Aubrey heard David announce.

"Not premature, I feel." He was smiling broadly, confidently. It was like sunlight after cloud, a sense of better weather; how could there be any villainy here?

Easily… In Aubrey's perspective remained something Marian's eager moral nose had scented then forgotten Fraser worked for David, or at least he probably did, and there was a young man being buried in Somerset whom Fraser had probably killed.

"Champagne, Kenneth?" David called to him. He rose with an awkward hurry, waggling his hand in refusal.

"Not after Scotch, dear boy thank you."

David shrugged, his mood undisturbed. There was an ease among the group of men that had not been Aubrey's sense of them previously. There had been strain, an edginess. Perhaps Bressier, the chairman of the French aerospace company, had brought saving news? There was now tentative, and accumulating, interest in the Skyliner, albeit they were practically giving the aircraft away with boxes of cereal in their leasing arrangements. So someone had informed him at the Club, a leading economic journalist. Whatever had occurred, there was now the scent of relief, even success.

"Beautiful day, Kenneth," David announced, raising his champagne flute in an ironic toast. The swans glided on the still, glittering lake as if nothing could ever disturb them.

"Absolutely. I gather your self-satisfaction quotient is higher today than yesterday," he murmured, watching the swans glide in and out of focus amid the gleam of the water.

"Ah trust you to notice," David replied carefully.

"I can admit to you, Kenneth, that things haven't been good the past few weeks and months. Culminating in the helicopter fiasco," he added with deep vehemence.

"But Aero UK and BalzacStendhal have adopted my leasing policy and the planes are beginning to move out of the two factories. Once they're flying well, who knows?"

"Indeed who knows?"

"Come and meet everyone most of them you already know, I should imagine."

"Some, certainly."

Aubrey shook hands with Rogier and Bressier, addressing them in his correct but fluent French. In their own language, he could detect more easily and certainly their relief, a certain new lightness of mood.

Bryan Coulthard was bluffly, openly confident. Laxton, with all the assiduity of someone who learned nothing and forgot less, especially every petty enmity of his long and undistinguished career, was patronising; amused at Aubrey's old-fashioned suit and his remittance-man status at Uffingham. As a mere house guest of Clive, he did not merit the rank accorded to those who came to do business with David. Laxton glowed with the fleshiness of seized opportunities in Brussels, though drink seemed to be re mapping his features as a chart of his veins. He perspired freely, but even that seemed suggestive of confidence.

Aubrey murmured of mutual acquaintances and recent deaths and the importance of Europe with Laxton, much to the amusement of Clive over the man's padded shoulder. A little business with Coulthard, whose replies suggested that he had emerged into a clearing. There was minimal sense of the pressure of creditors, of the stock market…

Shares in Aero UK had climbed back slightly with news of Skyliners being leased. Aubrey, in his selfish wish to dissuade Marian and avoid the conflagration the truth would bring, began to feel more comfortable, affable even towards Laxton. If the necessity for villainy had ceased, if whatever they had been doing was an episode now closed, then perhaps, just perhaps, Marian would be satisfied with knowledge without action.

He found himself once more beside Rogier, who leaned deferentially over him.

The man was well over six feet, still slim, groomed, narrow-featured, the gold framed spectacles and bow tie making him seem more academic than his reputation suggested, less the skilful politician; a form of disguise, then. Europe, of course, moved from strength to strength, and Aubrey did not demur, largely indifferent as he was to Europhilia and Europhobia alike. He anticipated that the bureaucrats would, as bureaucrats always manage to do in situations where they do not possess the freedom to do wrong, make an unholy, scrappy mess of federalism. He nodded and smiled and allowed the Euro-blandishments to vanish beyond his ears, towards the lake.

Then he said, as a sense of ennui assailed him, and almost to deflect the conversation: "I imagine the suicide of that young man in your department was most embarrassing, Commissioner? I didn't know him personally, but a friend of mine did…"

Rogier's features were blanched. Aubrey made a huge effort of will to render his own face bland.

The real truth of the thing was murder and this man knew it for what it was and all possibility of dissuading Marian vanished in that hard light. Lloyd had been murdered by Fraser on David Winterborne's direct order, in all probability.

Russell, the butler, announced lunch.

"Ah!" Aubrey chirruped brightly. Thank God' Something wrong?" David asked sharply, seeing the expression on his face.

Aubrey shook his head, perhaps too emphatically.

"No, no — dear boy. A little giddy spell hot sun, I expect." David appeared not quite to believe.

"Shall we go in?"

Aubrey pressed, mopping his brow not entirely in pretence.

"Is something wrong, Kenneth?" David insisted.

"No!" Aubrey snapped.

"Fine, fine…" He waved David towards his guests.

The heat of his body would not lessen, despite his effort of will. His thoughts, too, seemed heated. It was truly dreadful, dreadful, he realised. He glanced at Clive, whose expression was of concern. He smiled in a watery, assuring way and they walked together towards the house, away from the terrace and its now elusive and somehow darkened view of the lake's tranquillity. Clive took his elbow, as he had so often done, and Aubrey was grateful for the support. The group of confident men, their fraud probably already behind them, sauntered ahead of himself and his dear friend. It was utterly hateful to him, the knowledge he possessed and the frightening sense of what he must do with it… or how, for perhaps even deeper reasons, he must ensure that it remained hidden.

He must either help Marian destroy David Winterborne, and Clive into the bargain, or he must become an accessory after the fact of murder.

Vance's private jet waited on the tarmac, poised on the apron, nose towards the taxiway as if it had caught Barbara's mood of flight. A coroner's station wagon nuzzled beside it, and the metal casket which contained Vance was ceremoniously removed from its rear and loaded on to the airplane. Gant watched from a slight distance the results of Barbara's blackmail, string-pulling, desperation. Someone from the US Consulate in Helsinki stood with her now, watching the casket as if it contained the victim of some foreign war… Maybe it did, at that.

Barbara wanted out and the Consulate had smoothed her way to that object. There'd be a proper post-mortem examination in Phoenix.

The evening was clear, high and light cloud goldened by the lowering sun. A Finnan Boeing rose from the runway and almost at once caught the sun, gleamed like a star. Kerosene on the breeze.

Reluctantly, Gant walked towards the plane. The diplomat was shaking hands with Barbara with official solemnity. She was nodding mechanically until he released her hand. Once he had done so, she turned and climbed the three steps into the fuselage of the airplane that had been the small dream of Vance's early years, his first ambition. It was now what Barbara thought he should have gone on doing, making executive jets for rich men.

In the hospital corridor, she had said to the air: "Poppa, you should have gone on building toys for rich boys."

"He couldn't," Gant had replied.

Then he was wrong!" she had raged against his death. Then, like a frightened, lost child: "I want to get out of here."

He really didn't want to board the plane with her. She had already returned to the idea of sabotage and what he would do about it. It was not, yet, a plea or an effort at blackmail, but it would become so. And it had made him at once reluctant, recreating as it did a sense of obligation for the failure of their briefly shared past. She loaded him with guilt, with the sense that he needed to atone for something.

What he had so easily promised Burton seemed impossible to offer Barbara. If he agreed to go on with it for the sake of her devotion to the dead idol he could never exorcise, then he would have to complete it, it would have to be finished.

He boarded the plane behind her. The casket was stowed in the cargo compartment. He thought of the co-pilot's seat as an escape, but the eager grief of her features dissuaded him. He was unable to abandon her. So he sat across the narrow aisle from her and fastened his seatbelt. She seemed satisfied, though it was no more than a moment before she blurted:

"You will go on with it?"

I'll take it as far as I can," he replied levelly. At once in her eyes there was the sense of someone else who would have promised except he was dead.

"You don't owe him anything?" she asked scornfully.

The flight deck door opened, but Jimmy, Gant's successor as Vance's personal pilot, assessed the situation in a moment and retreated.

"Nothing," Gant felt impelled to reply.

"You were close to him. You believed, too."

Then we got divorced."

After a long silence, where her hands twisted together and untwisted repeatedly and her features appeared thinned by some wasting disease, she said:

"I turned Poppa against you. I wanted all his support, his love. I had to make you the bad guy."

"You must have wanted out very badly."

"I did. I couldn't live with you, Mitchell. There's no living with in your case. I'm sorry I had to do—"

"It doesn't matter."

And it didn't. It was like discovering that a teacher had marked down an exam paper in high school. How could you resent something so far in the past? They were, he realised, like two people in an Edward Hopper painting, almost devoid of colour and vitality, staring into the end of a situation in immobile helplessness, their bodies admitting it was long over.

"It doesn't matter," he repeated more gently.

Vance had done what Barbara had asked of him, played the role of the wounded and outraged father. He and Barbara had been the figures in the Hopper painting long before Vance had badmouthed him. And it was he, Gant, who had put them there. In that, Barbara was right.

He didn't think there were any amends to be made any longer. But there was, he recognised, a dispassionate anger, a need to satisfy his suspicions. He felt disquiet, even disbelief, at Vance's death, but more urgently he could not live with the sense that he had been duped.

Tell Jimmy to file a new flight plan to Oslo," he began. Her immediate sigh sounded almost sexual, climactic.

"Make a stopover. I'll look into this guy who posed as one of Alan's people. Maybe there'll be something—"

"Will it help?"

"It won't save the company. Who'd listen? Who'd want to listen?"

She could not hide her disappointment, her expression arranging itself in lines and planes that had so often expressed an easy, habitual contempt.

Then I need to be back in Phoenix as soon as possible," Barbara announced, rearranging her posture into an imitation of purpose. There are things to be closed out' She was dismissive of him, suddenly. He couldn't save jobs, stock prices, investment not even her father's reputation.

"You'll do what you have to. Just drop me off in Oslo."

"Do you think—?" she began, but the light faded from her eyes. To her, his surroundings were a kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, patio anywhere they had quarrelled. He possessed no skill other than truculent, defeated argument.

"Hopeless, isn't it? You're right. Who would believe enough for it to matter?" Then, as if he were still wearing a last rag of the hero's uniform in which she had first seen him, she added: "I would like to know. For his sake."

"Whatever I know, you'll know."

He seemed about to add something, but the flight deck door opened again, distracting her. Gant watched her turn to Jimmy as if to the future.

"File the flight plan to Oslo, then on to the States," she ordered.

Jimmy glanced momentarily at Gant, who stared at his hands.

"Sure, Ms Vance. Won't be more than a few minutes, they're not too busy right now." He closed the door behind him.

Barbara settled back in her seat, ostentatiously taking a laptop from the empty seat beside her, frowning at once at the screen's response to her impatient touch. Gant watched a stranger, studying her as he might have studied a map of some place he had once visited but suspicious that he might only have dreamed the journey, the experience.

Oslo… Charlotte Burton watched her husband put down the telephone and slump into an armchair in as slovenly and relaxed a manner as one of their sons might have done. It was nearly dark outside. Time to draw the curtains. She discovered herself more attentive to such matters from the moment the first 494 had crashed in the desert while Tim was in the States. She was almost eager to shut out Holland Park not merely because of the occasional press encampment on the pavement but because the reporters and cameramen reminded her of her neighbours, even passing strangers, who would be mentally prying into their affairs.

Tim, only hours after he got back from Finland, had agreed to a visit from David Winterborne and Bryan Coulthard. They were messengers who need not be executed, they were bringing good news.

"Well?"

Burton was biting at his thumb.

"What—? Oh… They want to put a deal to me. David says he wants to save Artemis." He raised his arms in a huge, disbelieving, mystified shrug.

"A takeover a buy out, what?" she insisted, sitting forward in her chair, hands gripping each other on her lap. Tim what is it?" She was angry with him, almost as her mother would have been at her father for answering the door to visitors without donning his jacket. It wasn't the sweater and jeans he was wearing, though it was the defeat they symbolised, the retirement from the whirl of meetings and suits and desperate efforts to save the business.

"I'm not sure. It's not investment they haven't got the money!" He brightened, but it was a retreat into humour. He was afraid to believe the conversation he had just had.

"Maybe he wants to offer me some cheap leases on Skyliners…?

It sounded as if it could be that. Our mutual advantage, that sort of thing."

"Will you? If that's what it is? Take his offer, I mean?"

They'll have to be bloody cheap!" he announced loudly.

"But I suppose they might be interested in a deal like that. Mightn't they?" He was afraid to hope.

"Possibly. You're very high-profile at the moment for all the wrong reasons. If you agreed to fly Skyliners across the Pond—"

"I could have them this summer at least for July and August, catch some of the heaviest traffic. There'd be a lot of fuss about it, all the positive kind…" He rubbed his hands through his long hair, then looked up.

"Are there any drawbacks, Charley?"

"Not immediate ones. You'll have to be patient grovel, I shouldn't wonder."

"David likes that grovelling."

"You'll be dependent on Aero UK and the French for almost the entire fleet, for medium- and long-haul…" She plucked at her chin with finger and thumb.

"Pricing policy could be difficult, they'd be the tail wagging the dog, Winterborne and Coulthard… It could take years, Tim," she concluded, looking up.

"But it could save the company, mm?" He almost pleaded for her concurrence.

"I mean, if you think it's all right—" She smiled.

"Look at it this way, husband of mine, light of my life… The Skyliner was way too expensive for Artemis, so you plumped for the 494.

Now, the 494 is no more and the Skyliner is or should be comparatively cheap. You could, if the deal is properly structured and you can beat the price down far enough, still undercut the competition, even with the most expensive aeroplane in the world!"

"Stuff BA and the European carriers, you mean! Corf" He was grinning broadly, prompting the return of her own smile. It all sounded much too good to be true to someone not as eternally optimistic as Tim… not quite as convincing to her as to her husband, who had been plunged into gloom and all but silent since his return from Helsinki. Guilt and self-pity had battled for possession of his mood.

"I wonder', he continued, 'I just wonder…"

He had made a few desultory phone calls, refused possible meetings, wanted to skulk in hiding at home. For the past few hours he had plucked at the sleeve of her sympathy, her identity with his mood, like an increasingly importunate child. He was a child, in so many ways as now, with his mood elated. In moments, he would suggest opening champagne! Charlotte wondered at David Winterborne's true intent. Aero UK's own problems made Tim's suspicion feasible. Two men clinging to the same life belt — using each other as a life belt more likely. It was possible-She surrendered to his mood. She wouldn't draw the curtains, not yet.

"When are they coming?"

"An hour's time."

Then I need to change, make-up… And you, get out of that sweater and into some of the clothes I keep buying for you that you never wear!

Come on, come on Roman triumph or tumbril ride, you're going to be dressed for the occasion!"

The Rolls Royce drew to a halt in Holland Park, the evening sky holding a retinal afterimage of daylight. Bryan Coulthard got out of the car and Winterborne made to follow him when the car telephone began ringing. He waved a hand at Coulthard.

"Go ahead, Bryan I'll just take this." Coulthard nodded, closing the passenger door behind him. He stood on the pavement, hands on his hips, studying the elegant facade of Burton's house. Warm light fell on him from the first-floor drawing room.

"Yes?" Winterborne asked brusquely.

It was Eraser's voice, like an unpleasant reminiscence from a past acquaintance, recalling experiences he no longer admitted as his.

"Funny kind of reports on your friend," Fraser announced without preamble.

"She's been visiting some parts of the Midlands you might not want her to."

It was, at that moment, irritating to be the recipient of Fraser's clandestine humour.

"Do you mean Marian? What has she been doing?" he snapped. Coulthard glanced back into the Rolls as if impatient. Someone had opened Burton's front door; a door opening on to the future.

"I have an important meeting, Fraser — don't play games."

"Sorry sir." The insolence was evident.

"She was with that guy Banks, the twopenny-halfpenny builder who's been getting uppity. They drove around the canal development, the marina

… Two people who must have been them were surprised in the marina metro tunnel. She's cool, your friend. Pretended they'd gone down there for a shag—"

"What are you talking about?" But he knew. Why else had he instructed Fraser to be on the lookout for her? Egan's panic on Saturday evening, Marian's conversations with one or two other guests involved in the regeneration project… Aubrey?

"You're certain it was Marian?"

"As certain as one of our security men could be. He says he recognised her, and Banks. They were looking over Banks' site."

"I see."

Aubrey and Marian had been in some kind of collusion at Uffingham, he was certain. At lunch, Aubrey's questioning of his guests had appeared bland, conversational… but he had alarmed Rogier when he referred to Lloyd's death.

Why would he have done so, other than deliberately? Aubrey had no connection with Lloyd, other than through Marian. And Lloyd must have been Marian's source inside the Commission. It would be his death that was spurring her on, not Banks' whingeing, and Aubrey was following her lead.

"Why must she persist?" he asked exasperatedly.

"What in God's name does she think she's doing?"

"She can smell something's gone off, that's for sure."

Winterborne experienced a mockery of moral affront. Marian and Aubrey had no right, digging into his affairs. The matter was closed. Lloyd's death had been no more than an expedient necessity. It was in the past, over with.

"I–I'm not certain what should be done," he admitted. Coulthard had already climbed the steps to Burton's front door and was waiting for him. Burton himself appeared, shaking hands with Coulthard. The moment of success was being made visible.

"What needs to be done?" he asked heavily.

"Can she still be warned off? You've always said she couldn't be bought—"

"No. How do you mean warned?"

"Banks needs attention, too. That would cut off all corroboration…

The security man saw no camera. She won't be able to get back on site.

Would she go to people with what she's seen, suspects?"

"I no, I don't think so. It's not much, at the moment. Clues, nothing more.

She'll go on asking questions for some time yet. Talk to Aubrey—"

"I don't like that," Fraser offered. That old bastard having his finger in the pie."

"I agree. I don't think we have any alternative there but to await his becoming bored. He'll come to see me, I suspect. Look, I have to go, Fraser have you any suggestion as to what we can do about Marian?"

"Surveillance tightened. Proper surveillance."

"Anything else?"

It was as if he were prompting Fraser, nudging him into uttering the unthinkable, one child taunting another into hurting a cat, starting a small fire.

"Aubrey's hands are tied by his friendship with my father," he announced with sudden, certain clarity.

"He's in a dilemma. I'm sure he would prefer nothing to emerge. But Marian—"

"Can she be frightened? Lots of the most unlikely people can be moral crusaders quite often become easily unnerved."

"Very well," Winterborne replied after a silence. He sighed.

"If you think she could be frightened off, try it. But no harm to her."

To Banks?"

"I don't care what you do to keep Banks quiet!" Then he added: "I must go. Handle this carefully, Fraser—"

"I always do." Again, the professional insolence, the quasi-military contempt for the civilian, the man whose hands remained clean.

"One other thing—"

"What?"

"Roussillon. Keeping an eye on the pilot, Gant."

"Well?"

"Vance's pilot filed a flight plan for Oslo, then on to the States.

That just came in."

"Has Roussillon people he can use in Oslo?"

"Yes."

"Then keep Gant under surveillance. You're sure there are no leads to Strickland?"

"None."

Then he matters less than Marian. Good night, Fraser."

Winterborne put down the telephone. It had been discomfitingly clammy against his ear. He paused for a moment to compose his expression, then got out of the car, waving instantly to Burton at the top of the house steps.

Tim!" he called, taking the steps as eagerly as a lover. Thank you for seeing us at such short notice."

They shook hands. He and Coulthard were ushered into the house.

Everything was as it should be… The past had no authority, no right or claim to intrude.

She realised that she had fallen asleep in the armchair and that the notepad and the papers she had been studying had fallen from her lap on to the floor. She saw that it was after one in the morning and sensed her exhausted tiredness. She did not realise what it was that had awoken her. Perhaps just her leaden hand and arm slipping from the chair, tugging her awake.

She yawned and stretched. More papers fell from her lap. She vaguely glimpsed scrawled columns of figures, like a child's arithmetic, on the floor near her feet her estimate of the vastness of the sums diverted from the regeneration project to Aero UK, Winterborne Holdings, dozens of eager pockets — she held her head, which ached. Her vision was blurred; the room seemed filled with thick white smoke. She smelt something. As she tried to stand, she fell back in the armchair. Struggled upright again, pushing with her arms smell? Burning She formed the thought gradually, and was shocked into wakefulness by her realisation.

Burning- she could smell burning. The room was grey with weblike smoke she coughed. A noise, low down on the scale like a tape-hiss played back in slow motion. She opened the door to the kitchen and flame roared at her, striking with the speed of a snake towards her head and arms.

"Are you sure about this?" Cobb asked.

The rear windows of the flat glowed with a lurid light. Behind them, the cathedral was massive against the stars and the minster pool reflected the string of lamps along its banks.

"What—?" Jessop replied, adding: "Sure I'm sure. I vos only obeying orders." He chuckled. Fraser was told to frighten her. This should do it vandals, someone cheesed off with her politics or the way she treated their whining, chucked a home-made firebomb through her window.

Standard issue on most council estates these days, everyone knows how to make them." Jessop studied the spread of the fire and nodded in satisfaction.

"If it kills her, so much the better. Fraser takes the blame if it isn't liked, anyway."

"She will be frightened off, then?" Cobb asked.

"Wouldn't you be if you were just a civilian, I mean?"

"Yes. Never did like fire."

"Neither does she. She's still got the evidence of a skin graft on her right arm, so the file says, from a childhood accident with a fire…"

He paused, inspecting his handiwork, then he said: "She doesn't seem to be coming out, does she?"

The fact that you jammed the front door shut wouldn't help, would it?"

"I suppose not."

"Shouldn't we—?"

"Yes, I suppose so. Some member of the clergy might already have rung for the fire brigade. Come on, then let's go and tell Fraser what good little Boy Scouts we've been. We should get our Firelighter's badges for this." As he turned away, he murmured: "She still hasn't come out shame!"

CHAPTER EIGHT

Fire, Lies and Videotape He stood in the passenger doorway of the small jet more as a gesture towards their past than anything else, in case she wanted to say something more, required further reassurance. When he was certain, by her expression, that all she desired was the continuation of the flight her flight from the scene of the destruction of Vance Aircraft he nodded to her and descended the passenger steps.

That late at night, Vance's aircraft was cleared for almost immediate takeoff. He waved his hand at the smudge of white in the cockpit window that was the pilot's face. Then he walked away from the plane.

The engines wound up once more and he sensed rather than saw the plane move away towards the taxiway and the threshold. He deliberately did not turn back or pause in order to watch its departure, but continued walking towards the opendoored maintenance hangar. Oslo's airport was little more than a garishly lit island above the subdued glow of the city and the darkness of the Oslof jord and the Skagerrak beyond it.

His sports bag brushed gently against his leg. He could already see the tailplane of an airliner being serviced, just as two nights before the

494 had been.

And, just like him, someone had walked into this hangar and announced he was from Vance Aircraft and had been sent to check out the fuel computer system. One of maybe a dozen men, most of whose identities he did not know, with the dark talent to create a computer-generated piece of sabotage.

Behind him, he heard a four-engined airliner lift into the night. Jimmy would have put Vance's jet on to the end of the runway by now. He glimpsed in his mind Barbara's face at one of the windows, the features of a stranger seen on a passing train, drained, weary, tragic like those of a woman in a Hopper painting. Out of which he had again walked, probably forever. He blinked in the lights of the huge hangar.

The dock gantry girdled the airliner like a whalebone corset. At once, but perhaps for no more than display, he was approached by a security guard. The man was in his early sixties, overweight, wary, the armpits of his uniform shirt stained by the perspiration of a hot night and nerves.

"What do you want?" he repeated in English as Gant shrugged at the Norwegian.

Slowly, Gant reached into his pocket and flapped Barbara's letter in the small breeze.

"I'm Gant. I'm here to see Olssen. I'll wait until you find him or can you take me to him? It doesn't matter which."

The security guard puzzled over the letter Gant had asked Barbara to write — just in case, he had said, I need to enlist some official help

…I lost my job, remember?

Probably because it assisted the man in unpacking his responsibility, the guard said:

"Olssen told me you would be coming I'll take you to him." He handed back the letter. Gant took it and then turned quickly, alarming the man.

Vance's private jet the one he had built and which now carried his casket rose above the glow of the airport, into the night, navigation lights brighter than the stars. He watched it until it banked slightly out over the fjord, then dismissed it from his mind. The sense of Alan Vance's body on board the plane depressed him with obligation, and promises given.

"Sure. Lead on," he murmured.

The scent of heated metal, fuel, oils restored an awareness of the immediate, the superficial. Work was evidently all but complete on the Sabena Boeing. Men were moving with the crispness of home going or loitering to gossip.

"Mr. Olssen Mr. Olssen!" the security guard called, waving to an overalled figure near the Boeing. This man has come to see you you expected him!" His was the eagerness to pass something that burned.

Olssen was at once studying Gant as he approached, as if matching his frame and gaunt features to some mental photograph. He held out an oil-stained hand, having wiped it on a rag.

"You're Gant," he confirmed.

"Sorry you had to come, that we meet like this."

"Sure." It was hotter in the hangar or perhaps it was the remembered heat of Arizona, and that other hangar where the first 494 had lain like the rubble of a condemned building.

"Thanks for seeing me."

"I understand that it is necessary. You must inspect our schedule, our records, on behalf of the FAA and the NTSB. I am not offended, it is routine."

"Yes."

"You will want to talk to others here, those who worked on the aircraft? They are about finished for the night…"

' I won't keep them — just those who saw the guy who claimed he was from Vance Aircraft. Then I'd like to talk to you you spent time with him, I guess?"

Olssen nodded.

"Yes, of course. And Jorgensen probably no one else. Like you, he came late, when we were almost finished on the aircraft—" His voice tailed away, as if he had suddenly become cautious, or perhaps merely reflective. His eyes suggested that he recollected their telephone call, his own protestations of innocence over the identity of Massey, as he had called himself. He blurted: There is no Massey, you said.

Have you checked with Vance Aircraft? Perhaps—" There's no mistake on my part, Mr. Olssen. Vance Aircraft never employed a deputy chief engineer called Massey. I have that from a man called Blakey, who is the chief design engineer."

Blakey had remained in Helsinki to oversee the further recovery of the wreckage, its investigation by the Finns, its eventual transportation, like the body of Vance, back to Phoenix.

"I am sorry, but I do not see that it is any of my—" Patiently, but with a flavour of threat, Gant said:

"No one is blaming you, Mr. Olssen, not right now. The man who called himself Massey let's talk about him, uh? While you introduce me to your schedule, the other paperwork on the 494 service job you carried out."

"Vance threatened me, this company! We have a good record, this hasn't happened-!"

"Sure," Gant soothed.

"Vance was angry. His company collapsed around his head.

He needed to blame someone."

They were walking towards Olssen's office. Olssen was about the same height, slightly stockier, running to the first fat of middle age. His eyes kept furtively glancing at Gant, who appeared oblivious of his attention.

"Mr. Vance did not come with you?"

"No." Why tell this man, when he could read it in tomorrow's paper?

"He didn't.

Now, Massey…?"

Olssen opened the door of his glass-walled office. The old desk was littered with forms, other papers. Grey filing cabinets, a rickety table piled with books and manuals, the scent of dust, oil. Gant found the cramped place comfortable, familiar.

Olssen dumped a file in front of him as he sat down on the single hard chair on the visitor's side of the desk. The gesture was one of self-satisfaction as well as ingratiation.

"Here is the schedule for servicing on the aircraft. I dug it out when you told me you would be coming. You want some coffee?"

"Mm oh, thanks." He unzipped the sports bag and drew out a small tape recorder.

"First, just describe this guy Massey for me, would you? What did he look like?

His accent, size, manner — take your time…" He placed the recorder on the desk between them. A family photograph lay on its back like a stranded insect amid the foliage of forms, regulations, a calendar.

Take your time," he repeated.

As Olssen cleared his throat, Gant leant forward with an eagerness that seemed to unnerve, even threaten the Norwegian. This man had seen him, the guy who had downed two aircraft and almost killed him in the third.

This man had seen Massey, who had killed Vance and over fifty others

She was alone in the toolshed again, and her arm where the skin graft still showed was burning. She had been trying one of Mummy's cigarettes. The toolshed, in a hot, dry summer, had caught fire from the matches she had dropped when the cigarette made her cough violently. She couldn't open the door and her throat was too raw and choked for her to scream. Daddy… Marian sat slumped into a foetal ball in the hallway of the flat, unable to open the door… She crouched in the farthest corner of the toolshed, her arm filled with pain so badly hurt that she could not relieve the pain by clutching it watching the flames lick up around old seed bags, dry canes, terra cotta plant pots, herself. Under the workbench, there were spiders but their clinging webs, filled with dead moths and flies, had to be ignored. Through a cracked windowpane, she could see the sunlight, the blue sky… The flames from the kitchen had reached the living room and flared garishly, orange-red, on the pale walls. The door wouldn't open, it was jammed somehow.

The sound of breaking glass must have been what had woken her, when something burning had been thrown into the kitchen. She had seen the broken window in the moment before she had recoiled in sudden, recollected panic from the flames. Her arm ached deeply, to the bone.

She could not move, could not get out of the flat.

There was no one else in the building, the other occupants were away on long weekends or business. The burglar alarm was shrilling because of the rise in temperature. Someone would come, would come… She began coughing.

In the toolshed, she was coughing and her eyes were watering and she was screaming so loudly that someone must hear her, must, it was only the back garden of the army house they occupied on one of Daddy's postings somewhere… Someone must come, the burglar alarm was so loud. Someone had to come, she couldn't move, her legs and arms and whole body were frozen with panic. She knew what was happening to her, the past coming like a massive injection of something that attacked the motor muscles, the nervous system. The panic was so enveloping it was no longer fear but paralysis.

Someone must come, Mummy would… was shopping, she had taken the car… Daddy would… was somewhere else, there was a barracks inspection she had heard at breakfast… someone must come… The spell of the past, the straitjacket in which it held her, was too strong to be broken. She was helpless, the pain in her arm, remembered, overpowering her.

The flames crept into the hall and up to the workbench. Grass seed spilled from a bag being consumed by the fire, the smoke from her smouldering furniture made her retch… Someone, someone — rough material, the smell of tobacco as when her mother pressed her against a blouse or cardigan she was wearing. Big hands clutching her up and out of the spiders' webs. The low mutter of constant cursing. The smell of soap pressed into her nose from the cheek against which her face was thrust, the sensation of bristles. Then the jolting passage through the flames and smoke, the squeezing of the hands and arms that did not allow her to breathe as she seemed buried in rough khaki cloth. Then the sunlight, the blue sky, and the scent of dry grass mingling with the smouldering smell of her clothes as she was pummelled. A big hand struck her burnt arm and she screamed again and then lost consciousness. To wake up still on the grass, with big adult faces pressing chokingly close to her and among them, Daddy-woke up. The carpet in the hallway of the flat was smouldering, the living room was an inferno the flame seen through boiling grey smoke. Woke up.

She squeezed herself upright against the wall and grabbed the door handle, tugging at it until she remembered, with great, precise clarity, that it was jammed. By someone… She shook her head, the past nightmare slipping from her.

She blundered through the door of the spare bedroom at the rear of the flat, quite certain of her movements, her direction. Moonlight was coming through the window. The cathedral loomed across the Close. She thrust up the window and peeling paint flew off like white sparks. The glass reflected the fire inside.

Lance Corporal Davies had rescued her from that childhood fire… Just as he had rescued her every time the nightmare had come back, every time she had been terrified by fire. She climbed over the windowsill on to the fire escape… Corporal Davies, looking down at her, his face as white as Daddy's… Her feet touched the rung of the fire escape and she stumbled down it to the lawn behind the flats, coughing hard enough to make her want to retch. She slipped and fell on the dewy grass. Rolling on to her stomach, then rising to her knees, she looked back at the flat. The fire was visible at every window. She could hear the burglar alarm, and the noise of an approaching siren.

Its noise gradually drowned the alarm. Her arm hurt.

It was almost two in the morning. Olssen's patience was gauze-thin, Jorgensen's indifferent contempt undisguised. His own tiredness was hard to conceal. The tape recorder remained amid the litter of the desk as if part of it and of no immediate concern to any of them.

Olssen's team of service engineers had long abandoned the hangar and the Boeing to the security guard. Gant had examined the service schedule with Olssen, out of routine rather than anticipation. Unless one of his people had screwed up, the answer didn't lie in the documents or their computer-stored duplicates. But he'd known that anyway.

All that he had was the vague description of a tall, well-built man with an American accent would two Norwegians know whether it was genuine or assumed? who claimed his name was Massey and that he worked for Vance Aircraft. He had been wearing a check shirt, denims, a leather jacket, heeled boots.

His hair was greying, he had a moustache, and maybe he was around forty.

It wasn't enough… not nearly enough.

"Can I go now?" Jorgensen asked Olssen, deliberately ignoring Gant but speaking in English so that he would understand his exasperation.

Olssen looked obsequiously, and with some impatience, at Gant.

"Sure. You're no help anyway, buddy," Gant sneered.

"Maybe you'll do more good at home." He smiled without meaning, other than a frustration of his own.

"You want to get some sleep, too, Mr. Olssen? You want to leave me here—?"

He wanted to rid himself of them now. They could be of no more assistance to him. Only these two had taken any notice, held any conversation with the saboteur, and neither of them could give him enough to recognise the man, or to be able to trace him. A stranger had walked in off the street, committed the crime, walked out of their lives.

"Look, I can hand over any keys, papers to the security guy. I may be some time yet."

Olssen seemed relieved of caution and authority equally. Standing up, he said:

Very well, Mr. Gant I will leave you the office keys, and you can lock up behind you. Hand them to Halvesson when you have finished. Come on, Jorgensen oh, you know how to work the coffee machine?" Gant nodded. Then, good night, Mr. Gant. I'm sorry we had to meet under—"

"Yeah. Me, too. Thank you for your help."

"Do you think you will be able to identify this man? To think that it was a sabotage—" Jorgensen was already out of the door and had begun whistling as he walked away.

"I don't think we have any evidence for saying that right now, Mr.

Olssen. Let's just keep that between us, OK?"

"OK. I well, I wish you the best of luck. And thank you for understanding that there was no way that I could—"

"Sure. You couldn't have known. The guy had what looked like authority. I don't think anyone's blaming you." He shook the man's hand quickly and sat down again, at once picking up a sheaf of papers. Keys rattled on to the desk, and he heard himself wished good night once more."

"Night," he murmured. The door closed behind Olssen and Gant breathed deeply with relief, dismissing the last hours… But the disappointment leaked into the vacuum he created.

He was angry at the distractions of obligations, people, debts. Barbara had played on that. He had made easy promises as a consequence. Worse than that was the sense he had of being so easily reduced to impotence almost the moment he had begun something on his own initiative. He banged his fist on to the littered desk. The photograph frame jumped and the tape recorder moved; switched itself on. The button must have struck against something hard. He listened, as if transfixed, to the description of Massey with a fierce, renewed concentration.

But there was no sense of anyone he recognised. Presumably the man calling himself Massey was an American. Height, weight, features, dress… He switched off the recorder because it angered him like the buzzing of a wasp; it threatened his ego. Involuntarily, he got up from the chair and walked out of the office into the hangar. The Boeing sat like a promise on the oil-stained concrete. There weren't many men who could cause a plane like that to fall out of the sky without using a bomb. It was evident that the second 494 should have fallen into the sea and been lost, so the calculations were precise, the technology advanced. It was exactly the same pattern as the one he had encountered, instability succeeded by fuel starvation to the engines… He didn't know who, and he didn't know who had enough to gain. None of the big airplane manufacturers in the States would have sanctioned sabotage. The idea was crazy. So, who? The why had to be rivalry between manufacturers, not carriers. The 494 was flying only with Artemis and a half-assed company in New Mexico. But Artemis was small, too small to worry the big carriers except with insect-stings.

Irritation, not ruin. Vance was small, he couldn't have rivalled a big

US plane maker Was it an ex-employee gone crazy, seeking revenge? Someone Vance had teed off even more than himself? He rubbed his hands through his hair angrily, lifting his face to the gantries, struts, metal beams of the hangar's roof. Was it just his intelligence experience that sought a strategy, a carefully organised operation in this, rather than a human motive?

Something at the edge of eyesight, high up among the metal bones of the hangar… Then the voice of the security guard distracted him.

Irritated, he turned on Halvesson. The man was sweating, flustered.

"I… the telephone. My wife, she has been… I must go to the hospital, she is ill!" His terror was vivid, intense, as hard as a strong light suddenly shone into Gant's eyes.

"I cannot the company does not have a replacement, I must wait!"

The woman might be dying or simply dizzy. Halvesson's shock could distinguish nothing except fear.

The company won't let you go to the hospital, right?"

"No. I must stay here. My wife. I have just had a telephone call from the doctor who has seen her. He said I should hurry' The man had aged, lost all volition, as if he had collided with the doctor's injunction.

His hands flapped at his sides, his shirt was damp-stained across his chest, as well as beneath the arms. His face chalk white rather than flushed.

"I'm here," Gant said. I'll be here most of the night. You'd better go. Nothing's going to happen here."

"But you you can't, you don't have authority…"

"Olssen left me his keys. He thinks I can be trusted. You want to see your wife, fella, you take off." The quick sympathy he had felt was already evaporating. Halvesson was indecisive for perhaps half a minute, then he blurted:

"Yes, yes, I must go to her. She is not strong she is often very depressed, you know—?" He feared an attempted suicide. Thank you, thank you!"

He hurried away, scuttling rather than running. Moments after his stubby form disappeared from the hangar, Gant heard a car engine fire and then the noise of acceleration and the squeal of tyres. Then silence. He returned his attention to the Boeing, then-something… up above. He recalled an embryonic sensation of excitement, the moment before Halvesson distracted him. What—? He scanned the ribs and shoulder blades of the hangar for something that had moved but had not been a bird. A slow, mechanical, routine movement, something swinging from side to-camera. Security camera. Monitoring the hangar, its images projected on a screen in Halvesson's office, its images stored there. A second camera, then a third. Routine, the dead, forgettable routine of machines.

Massey had walked into the hangar just as he had done. Into the camera's field of vision. Massey was stored, recorded, somewhere in Halvesson's office. Gant hurried.

"OK, I'll ask him what he wants done. Good move, mon ami — ' It was not, on this occasion, meant to irritate Roussillon. Fraser rolled off the bed. Through the window, London's night-glow outlined Tower Bridge.

"No, I approve. Gant must be after Strick-land. He knows it was sabotage he survived it." Fraser lit a cigarette, then blew smoke towards the open window. Two-thirty by the bedside clock. This was worth being woken for.

"He could easily have worked out the same trick was used in Oslo as Phoenix. How long's he been there?… That long? Talked to Olssen, yes… What's he doing now? You can't see. OK, hang on — I'll get back to you. Neat, Michel, I like it. The old hospital call to remove the only witness. I think the man will go for it. Gant's disappearance won't cause a ripple. Call you back—" He switched off the cordless phone, then dialled the number of Winterborne's mobile, still smiling.

Gant was a smart-arse, he needed taking out. He waited as the phone continued to ring. This was already turning into a tidying operation, its main phase already long completed his only involvement had been surveillance, a bit of frightening, hiring Strickland. At least this way they could turn Gant off, another of Aubrey's fond memories. Marian Pyott well, she was either dead, burned or terrified. Whichever would at least slow her down, probably stop her… and shitty little whingeing Banks was in for a surprise in the morning when his daughter walked to school.

"Sir," without irony or insolence, "Fraser. Just had a call from Oslo.

Can you talk freely?"

"I've just got home. What is it?" The man's mood was easily identifiable; as satiated with self-admiration as if he had just come from a flattering mistress.

"Gant, sir. Roussillon's opinion and I agree is that Gant could become a problem. He's after some trace of Strickland, without doubt."

"You don't know where Strickland is, Fraser. How is Gant going to find him?"

Fraser grimaced sourly and thrust the two fingers that held the cigarette savagely in the air.

"Maybe not, sir. But he must know it was sabotage. And he knows Strickland knew him anyway. At least, Strickland knew Gant at one time."

"Where is he?"

The hangar at Oslo airport. Roussillon is on the spot, has him under close surveillance. He's even got the security guard out of the way.

Gant is alone," he added seductively. He listened to the silence at the other end of the line.

Eventually, Winterborne said, irritatedly:

"What about Marian?"

"Jessop and Cobb a petrol bomb through her kitchen window."

"And?"

They didn't remain at the scene. Her file suggested it as the best way to make the biggest impact. Some childhood accident—"

"I know about her accident as a child!" Winterborne hissed.

"I want to know what happened to her!"

It was as if Winterborne was expressing regret for something he was certain had occurred. Mea culpa. All the guilt crap had infected him like a disease he had not expected to catch. He was afraid that the woman was dead; something was suddenly and surprisingly persuading him that he had never meant it to happen. Fraser mocked silently.

Winterborne would get over it. It wasn't much more than a slight cold in his case, conscience — otherwise he would never have begun this, never have acquired Complete Security, staffed it with people like himself, gone as far as he had. In a couple of days, a week at most, he'd have persuaded himself of the necessity of the woman's removal. If it had already happened in the house fire, he'd soon see the sense of it.

I'll find out, sir," he replied obsequiously.

"But, Gant I think I must emphasise that he poses the more immediate danger. A risk that is unacceptably high." He added the last in deference to the evident self-satisfaction that seeped down the line.

"Agreed, then. Get rid of Gant. And do it quietly, with no traces.

Tell Roussillon. Good night, Fraser."

The connection was severed.

"And good night to you sir." Fraser scowled at the receiver. He switched it off and threw it on the bed.

One down for certain. There'd be tantrums if the woman was already dead, or lying in an emergency bed, roasted to a crisp that much was obvious. But none over Gant's demise. That was death at a safe distance… Made you sick, the ease with which they could order the disposal of human beings. Look, my hands are clean. Businessmen and politicos took to that easy kind of gangsterism with alacrity. The end of the Cold War had left people like himself lying around like weapons, ready to be acquired, ready to go off. The likes of Winterborne enjoyed an arm's-length relationship with people like him, it gave them a buzz. It provided them with simple solutions to problems. It was easier than most other ways of doing business.

He picked up the telephone and dialled Roussillon's number. As he had remarked to the Frog, his lot had always been up for the kind of thing the Brits were just learning… that you can run a conglomerate with the same methods and means as an intelligence operation.

So, good night, Mr. Gant and I mean good night.

It was a half-assed security firm. He'd known that after ten minutes of fastforwarding the videotapes from the security cameras in

Halvesson's cramped, dusty, somehow deliberately littered office. The tapes weren't labelled or dated.

There appeared to be gaps in the recording, by the light and dark spilling through the open doors, by the identities of the airliners being serviced and their carriers' blazons. A heap of cassettes had fallen like a joke from a metal cupboard as he had tugged open the door.

It was three-fifteen in the morning and the bright inspiration of checking the security camera videotapes had evaporated like water in the desert sun. Gant rubbed his hands tiredly through his hair as the manic jerks and rushes of overalled men — like figures in a cartoon which no longer amused passed on the television screen. There were four cameras covering the hangar, one of which he had already realised was unserviceable. Of the other three, Halvesson seemed to operate them more by whim than routine. Maybe he watched hired movies on his little bank of four screens, rather than the hangar. Maybe he was just a dead-end in a dead-end job. There was a bitter kind of life, or at least its after-images, in the airless office; photographs of a younger Halvesson wearing the kind of well-cut suit he couldn't afford on a security man's pay, beside an elegant wife. Children, too a series of snapshots either framed or pinned to the wall which measured the ordinary suburban changes of any family anywhere. The measure of disillusion, loss of prospects. Children growing sullen and apart, the houses in front of which they were captured becoming smaller, less well tended. Scrubby lawns.

Halvesson didn't care any longer, maybe not about anything except the wife whose illness had caused him to panic.

Gant yawned. Halvesson's failed life was like a grubbiness on his clothing and skin. He rubbed his arms. He wasn't going to find anything, except by luck.

Olssen's figure dashed dementedly across another unlabelled videotape, gesticulating like a puppet in conversation with Jorgensen and another man. Often, Halvesson didn't switch on the timer and the recordings didn't always carry a date or time. Daylight became darkness once again, as on a speeded-up film of clouds or plants growing. A Boeing became, almost suddenly, a McDonnell Douglas, then an Airbus. The timer came back into operation and Gant slowed the replay.

The day before yesterday, darkness-something alerted him, a noise beyond the airless cubbyhole of the office. The skittering of something. A rat, probably. Two nights ago, and the Vance 494 was at the corner of the screen, undergoing its service. His finger paused at the buttons of the video machine. Too early, too late…? The camera swung robotically and the airplane was displayed. He stopped the tape. Jorgensen climbing into the electrics bay. The gantry hugging the 494's waist like an old-fashioned corset. The time in the bottom corner of the screen read a little after eleven. Olssen walked out of view, towards his office. Gant's chair squeaked as he became more tensely interested in the silent movie of the recording. Outside the office somewhere, he heard rat noises again.

Ignored them… The camera's perspective included the entrance to the hangar.

Through those doors… "What's he doing now?" Roussillon whispered.

Behind him, Oslo airport was silent, lit like a deserted sports stadium. He waited, then heard:

"Security office. He's watching the security screens. Could be replaying the tapes—?"

"Keep secure. Wait for my order."

Roussillon switched off the RT. He had two men already inside the hangar.

Gant was alone. He brushed his long hair away from his forehead. The night was pleasantly cool, outside. He turned and leaned his elbows on the high bonnet of the four-wheel-drive hydraulic platform, a Land Rover with a bent arm ending in the fist of the cage behind the driver's cabin. Through the night glasses, the hangar doors, wide open, were sheened with light.

Then he murmured to the remaining two members of the team: "OK move in.

No noise. Kill him in there if you must and bring the body out."

The two men slipped away, their dark overalls like assault garb in the night, their faces newly smeared with black. Roussillon watched them, as if they were moving across a monochrome television screen, dodging and scuttling towards the hangar. In another minute, they had disappeared inside. Was Gant armed?

Unlikely. Roussillon smiled. There was something pleasurable, something one could taste on one's tongue, about the known identity of the target that it was familiar by name, by repute, within the shadow pool of the intelligence community. Something satisfying, too, in that the body would be weighted and dropped into the Oslofjord as perfunctorily as they would have done any anonymous victim.

His own service, DST, had given him carte blanche. He could concur with instructions from Fraser, from Winterborne. That was the nature of his freedom, that his actions could always be denied with utter conviction by his superiors, by the minister, the Elysee. The business of the state in this matter lay solely in preventing revelation.

Balzac-Stendhal's dealings with Aerospace UK, the subornation of EU Commissioners, one of whom was a Frenchman and a possible future Prime Minister of France, the diversion of EU funds, must not be allowed to become public. There was no question of the moral rectitude or otherwise of the actions of a French conglomerate or a French politician.

Roussillon lit a cigarette and savoured the acrid smoke, sweet-smelling on the faint night wind.

A figure in the hangar doorway, his shadow falling darkly behind him as the lights caught him. Tall, broad-shouldered, a heavy face thickly moustached. The man was wearing a leather jacket, a check shirt and denims above high-heeled boots.

He was evidently, somehow theatrically, American. What would be expected, looked for.

Gant watched the man move in slow-motion, watched Olssen approach him.

Eleven-twenty, two nights ago. Olssen and the American-dressed figure spoke to one another. Gant leaned forward until the figures became grainy and unfocused as they slipped to one corner of the screen and then regained its centre as the camera followed its arc. Halvesson hadn't bothered with a close-up, maybe he hadn't even been watching the monitor. Gant pressed the button to halt the tape.

American…? An easy walk, the man's bag swinging loosely at his side. A confident actor already commanding his stage. Gant continued to stare at the screen for perhaps two minutes.

That was the saboteur, the man who called himself Massey. The frozen image caught him in half-profile an anonymous grey face above a well-muscled body.

He didn't know the man. He knew of maybe three or four people who had the skill to bring down the 494s in the way this stranger had, but he had no idea how many there really were. How many had been shown the door by the Company or the Bureau and who were out there, working for private companies and corporations, Vice-Presidents in charge of Industrial Espionage, V-Ps for Sabotaging Rivals.

That was this guy's game.

Angry that the elation of discovering the right stretch of videotape had so easily vanished into the sand of the man's anonymity, Gant stood up and stretched. He'd have to take the tape with him who'd miss it? and watch it over and over, ask around, get still shots printed off it.

His hand gripped the back of Halvesson's swivel chair and he leaned towards the screen, letting the images move in slow motion once more, then in real time, then slow motion… He caught, like the trace of cigarette smoke in an empty room, something familiar about the man's posture, his movements, but it was just like trying to grab at the dissipating smoke. He turned away from the screen as he returned the tape to real time, and looked at his watch. Three-forty. He was bushed, his body leadenly remembering that he had slept little or not at all for forty-eight hours. The littered office, the photographic measurement of Halvesson's subsidence into failure, the TV screen, all irritated him.

He turned towards the windowed wall of the office that overlooked the hangar-movement. A flicker as if someone's shadow had entered the edge of eyesight so that he wasn't certain he'd seen anything.

He had. A darkly dressed figure hurrying, bent almost double like someone ill or wounded, vanishing beyond the Boeing. Rat noises…

He'd heard, hadn't listened.

He turned accusingly to stare at the screen and at Massey and Olssen walking side by side, slipping away and back through the camera's arc.

Massey… Who the hell was he?

He shook the puzzle of the man's identity away like heavy, dragging bedclothes.

Stared out across the hangar, tensed against sudden darkness or the glimpse of others. He heard his own breathing, then the quick patter of what had to be rubber soled boots, but saw nothing. Two, at least.

Massey… was being protected, the tidy-crew had come to make certain there was nothing left lying around-himself.

Lights… He stared wildly around the grubby, cramped space, aware of himself framed in the windows, backlit as if on a screen. Switch darkness for an instant, "then the hangar lights came flowing in as if on a breeze. Cord in his left hand. He jerked it and the dusty blinds rattled down across the scene. He stifled a cough as he crouched with his back to Halvesson's desk, seemingly mesmerised by the TV screen and the images of Massey, moving in real time, walking away from the camera — stopping. Gant listened intently, as if he expected Massey to whisper, expected he might just catch his words as his lips moved.

Olssen must have called out to him. The office was hotter. He embraced his knees as he sat, his back pressed against the desk, the shirt dampening.

Rat noises again… Yes. His breath was loud as he exhaled. They knew where he was… Lights? The office was illuminated from outside, but the images on the screen shone out more vividly, in an etched, outlined way. He had to move. Take the videotape out of the machine, damn you, and move… Massey, facing the camera, Gant's heartbeat raised, senses heightened, sweat on his forehead in a narrow, cold line Strickland. Behind the moustache, the greyed hair, the leather jacket and the boots. Something in the smile, the angle of the head as he paused, the whole posture. The Preacherman had been his code name, his soubriquet, his means of being known and insulted. The psychopath with the gentle voice and manners of a pastor… Strickland. He knew him, knew what he was Gant turned his head as the window-wall shattered and the blinds swelled inwards for a moment to allow something to roll across the floor, something that smoked comically like a bomb in a cartoon. It burst even as he turned his gaze from the blinding flash. The smoke was suddenly everywhere in the room and he was coughing. He lurched forward and on to his knees, head bent to the floor.

He rolled away from the shattered window towards the door. He crouched behind it, the videotape images still flickering, shining in his head.

Strickland. They were here to protect Strickland. The smoke from the grenade obliterated the TV screen.

His eyes watered, blinding him, and he could not stop coughing.

Door…? His back was against the door. Other door through…? He scrabbled across the floor towards the door which led into the next office. He opened it and blundered against heaped boxes which smelt of metal and protective grease. He slammed the door to the storeroom. An identical windowed wall with a blind, a desk, filing cabinets… He had left the videotape behind. He glanced wildly back but it was already too late. He heard a voice shouting.

AII the rooms were connected… He couldn't open the door to the third of the offices. Something was stacked against it. He realised it was blocked by the filing cabinet in Olssen's office… The smoke had followed him into the second office, slipping beneath the door. His throat rasped with it.

He gripped the handle of the door out into the hangar. They'd be watching the other door only feet away only chance.

He ran, crouching, hearing a shout and a reply. He hunched his body against the first shot.

"No! Do not open fire under no circumstances!" Roussillon shouted into the RT, his whole body tensed as if he were on the point of running wildly towards the hangar. The grenade was unnecessary, Lucien who fired it?" They had wanted to make a game of it, startle him out of the security man's office like a rabbit blinking in the light. The grenade must be recovered, every fragment — no shooting!" Gant must simply disappear, there must be no sense in which his death was declared or his vanishing a police matter. Gunshot scars would be like fingerprints.

"Is he armed? You don't think so make certain! When you know, close in on him-!"

He flung the arm holding the RT aside, as if discarding the instrument.

His hand banged achingly against the flank of the Land Rover. For the sake of God, how difficult is it to take one unarmed man by surprise?

Don't let him get out of the hangar, don't'Lucien what is he doing?

Where is he?" he snapped into the RT.

"Sorry, boss can't see him at the moment. There are vehicles parked down at the far end of the hangar. Pascal and Edouard are moving in on him from different sides—"

"Until they can be certain that they can hit him and the slug won't pass right through his body, no shooting. You understand me, Lucien?"

"Yes, boss I've given the order."

"A fucking smoke grenade! There was no need—"

"No, boss—"

"Can you see him?"

"No, boss—" He crouched in the lee of a parked aerial platform, squashed down on its hydraulics like an abandoned concertina, smelling its small rubber tyres. He listened to their movements, their urgency.

It was almost as if they were the ones panicked by danger, not himself except that his breathing was ragged, trapped as he was. There had been no shots. They didn't want evidence left behind, shell cases, spent bullets. The smoke grenade had been to startle him into the open.

Lights… He slid back from the parked platform to the corrugated wall as if only that moment remembering why he had bolted for this far end of the hangar. Red box on the wall. Main f use box His skin crawled with the anticipation of his exposure, the impact of a bullet. He reached above his head as he remained crouching against the wall, his hand scrabbling for the lever. Threw it — darkness.

Then the breath was knocked from his body, the noise of the collision rumbling through the corrugated wall. He rolled over, a heavier body pressing against his, hands gripping his arms. He gasped, the air expelled again as he collided with one wheel of the aerial platform. A hand over his mouth, his own hands striking as ineffectually as those of a baby as the dark-clothed, black-faced man sat astride him, his other hand against Gant's windpipe, pressing down with damaging force.

Gant struck out at the black-streaked face with his hands, trying to hit, trying to hold. The man's breath smelt of food and triumph, sickly-sweet.

"Edouard got him?" he heard someone call. English with a heavy European accent.

"Oui-! I'd-!" His breath failed, gargled out, as the edge of Gant's hand struck across his throat. The pressure on Gant's windpipe was released.

He bucked his body, twisting it out from beneath the man as eager hands reached for his eyes. Gant struck sideways and upwards with his forearm, catching his assailant across the cheek and nose. He heard a muffled explosion of breath and the man's body jerked away from him, his hands feeling for his own face now.

Gant rose to his knees, then into a crouch. Kicked twice, jaw, side of head as the man went down.

"Edouard-!" he heard, then: "Where are the lights!"

"Fusebox they're not working!" came a voice from near the hangar doors.

He hit the fallen man again as he struggled to get to his feet, bruising his knuckles against the man's temple. Something had skittered away in the darkness gun? He stared wildly round but could not see it, then scrabbled at the man's pockets, looking for a weapon, an identity. Took what felt like a leather wallet.

"Edouard! Christ find the fuse box Claude stay by the doors!"

Gant hesitated, trying to recall the dimensions, the points of the hangar's compass doors, windows, equipment. Then he moved along the wall, away from the doors and the man who was guarding them, away from the man who had been calling for Edouard. French names, and the assailant had called in French, even though the language of the operation was English. Gant felt the angle of the wall with his hands, his back, continued to move away from the doors. A parked truck, passenger steps, a forklift… piled boxes and crates, then an open space. He could see the outlines of the vehicles now in the seeped lights of the airport. He could see well enough to know that they would see him.

"Here!" he heard.

"Bastard! Here it's Edouard! He's alive—" Gant saw someone move towards the aerial platform, and ran, his footsteps audible even above the racing of his pulse in his ears, above his loudening heartbeat…

The shadow of the Boeing's nose wheel He clung to the tyre as to a life belt He could see Claude's form framed by the open doors.

In moments, one of them would locate the fuse box and the lights would come on.

They were edgy, shocked into error, panic. That edginess meant they'd start shooting when the lights came on and he was exposed, even if their orders were to dispose of him elsewhere.

Gant looked up. The nose wheel undercarriage rose above the huge tyres like an Indian rope trick… He began climbing, inching his way up, squeezing the undercarriage strut against his body, between his thighs.

Then he clambered into the nose-wheel bay as the lights flashed on bright as lightning. Claude moved a few steps from the doorway, the others he couldn't see… Yes, he could just glimpse the aerial platform shunted into the corner of the hangar, the man he had hit and the one who had found him. He couldn't see the fourth man as he hung from the bay, head down, arms already aching, his feet scissor-gripping the undercarriage strut at its root.

The fourth man walked beneath him. If he even glanced up, he would see Gant hanging like a paper kite above him.

"Lucien — I thought I saw something near the aircraft!" he called.

"Pascal, could he have got aboard?"

"Maybe. The passenger door's wide open but there are no steps up to it. I can't see how." Like a bad actor attempting the sinister, he surveyed the underbelly of the Boeing.

Gant stilled his breathing, sensing sweat drop from his forehead towards the man, like rain… Taking his weight with one arm, he savagely wiped at his forehead. His renewed grip was slippery. Lucien and the injured Edouard emerged from the shadow of the aerial platform.

"Where the hell are you, Mr. Gant?" Lucien shouted.

His voice echoed around the hangar. Into the silence which followed, the rat scratches of an RT and a tinny, indecipherable voice sharp with orders. The man below him, Pascal, seemed to take a firmer grip on the pistol he held, mocking decisiveness, determination. Don't look up…

Even if he dropped on the man the instant his head lifted, there would be time for one shot at least.

"You can't get out, Mr. Gant!" Lucien shouted. In the ensuing silence, the RT again. How many more of them?

"Give yourself up!"

He could see Lucien vigorously gesticulating. He heard the scuttle of footsteps.

The doorway was empty now, presumably covered from outside. Pascal remained beneath him, alertly to attention beside the nose wheel Again, sweat dropped from Gant's forehead. They'd be slipping along the walls of the hangar, waiting for him to move, wild fowlers beating up a bird into their waiting guns. They would have been told they could kill him on sight now, too much time had passed and they would have started to fear their own discovery.

Pascal would move in another moment… Shadow of another man in the hangar doorway. Just one.

No, Pascal wouldn't move, not yet. He was holding the sight-line position. They were the beaters, he the sportsman. The pistol gleamed in his hand. Gant wiped at his forehead, his grip slipping, arms aching, legs beginning to numb. Pascal was rotating like a fairground sideshow toy, swivelling body and gaze across the expanse of concrete.

He could hear the others moving in rapid, scurrying movements, almost hear their pauses as they checked equipment, machines, crates and pallets. They knew they still had him. Sweat dropped-the man's cheek flinched, his head turned almost in curiously slowly. Gant dropped.

His numbed legs buckled under him and his grip was slippery on Pascal's gun hand. The Frenchman's breathing was hot, surprised against his cheek as Gant lay on him, the gun waving at arm's-length as if taunting both his grip and Pascal's.

Gant felt himself heaved away, his grip loosening on the man's arm.

Felt himself struck numbingly across the shoulder with the pistol, heard Pascal shout. Butted at the face that was open-mouthed, feeling his neck go hot with the jarring impact.

Sensed himself climbing Pascal's struggling body legs kicking out at him, hips twisting towards the gun. Explosion-deafness, a submerged roaring, distant, tinny shouts like a telephone ringing while taking a shower. He realised the pistol was in his hand, which then seemed of its own accord to strike down across the bridge of Pascal's already bloodied nose. Heard running footsteps, the first shot-lee of the nose wheel momentary shelter, breathing stentorous. Two shots loosed off quickly towards men who suddenly realised they were exposed on a coverless killing ground. Shots from the direction of the doors of the hangar, the spitting snake noise of a silenced weapon. He was crouched behind the wheels, protected from them only until they encircled him.

Pascal lay unconscious, his blood masked face staring at the hangar roof.

The desire for survival was as urgent as his heartbeat. His mind raced French professionals… protecting Strickland… videotape evidence in the office… He loosed off another two shots. The gun was a Beretta M092 fifteen rounds. He fired once more, suddenly cautious, then ducked out of the lee of the nose-wheel, darting across the lit, grease-stained concrete towards what he had seen as a slowly approaching shadow but which became the man who had last entered the hangar.

He saw, in his joggling vision, surprise, hesitation, the close of the gap between them. Then the initial movement of the hand that had to be holding the gun, and the other arm jerking up in protective instinct.

He launched himself sideways, cannoning into and off the man, stunning the breath from his body as he landed, rolling — they fired now because the man they might hit, their field director, was down and they had a clear sight of Gant. One bullet whined off the hangar wall just above his head as he reached the doorway, where the night air struck with unexpected cold. The side of his body was bruised and aching. He lurched to a halt against the open door and fired back at them. Three shots, scattering them.

Time gained. He ran towards their parked vehicle, away from the hangar lights, into the darkness, scrubby grass beneath his feet, the pattern of the airport's thousands of lights dazzling and disorientating him and them, and them… He heard a couple of futile shots, then only his own blood. He was invisible to them now. Safe-for how long?

CHAPTER NINE

All My Sons Giles Pyott, waiting beside the empty ticket collector's box at the end of the platform, glimpsed Marian coming towards him, briefcase at her side. She appeared worn, shocked. His customary elation at seeing her became a sudden terror of recognition; always she reminded him of Anne, but now her hesitant, slightly lost progress was too similar to that of his wife during her last illness.

Giles felt enfeebled, even afraid, seeing Marian's haggard, weary features.

Marian halted, still without having seen him, and seemed to struggle with her handbag. Then he saw she was answering her mobile phone.

"Yes Ray?" There was something breathlessly excited, deeply angry about Banks' voice. She felt physically assailed and weakened by its outrage.

'-nothing more to do with it or you!" he stormed.

"My family comes first-!" It was the whine of a man who had been compromised by another, led into danger.

"She was on her way to school! Their bloody car just climbed the pavement and knocked her against the wall!" There was breathing, but no pauses; the anger was one fearful, long exhalation.

"She's all right, just concussed and shocked, a few scratches no thanks to you!" His own guilt was evident, he was beating it towards her as if fighting off a swarm of bees that tormented him.

"Besides, the whole thing's been cleared up! They've paid most of the money. Cheque came this morning from the biggest firm I supplied… plus a cheque for the site work!" He did pause then, knowing he had admitted the nature of the stick, the nature of the carrot. She could not despise him.

"I'm glad she's all right, Ray, I really am," she managed to offer. He seized on it like an admission of culpability.

"I shouldn't have listened to you in the first place!"

"No… probably not."

"Just don't try to involve me again in anything? he threatened guiltily.

No' Ray…"

Banks broke the connection. She felt dizzied.

Giles Pyott saw her sway with weakness and hurried to her, grasping her to her shock, until she recognised him and leaned against him like a drunk needing support.

"Are you hurt?" he asked as she looked up at him. They must, he thought, have looked like lovers he ridiculously old, but certainly to be envied.

Marian shook her head.

"No. Just delayed shock or something," she murmured vaguely. Then, the soldier's daughter, forcing a smile, she added: "Corporal Davies always rescues me!"

She tried to mock the gravity of his expression, but he ignored her attempt at humour.

"What happened, Marian?" he asked sternly.

"Daddy," she warned: "Nothinghappened!"

"Someone tried to kill you. You were more confiding from hospital."

"Must have been shock didn't know what I was saying."

Giles tossed his head. It did not serve to clear his features or shake off concern.

Tell me what happened. Shall we go now?"

"Mm."

He picked up her briefcase and ushered her towards the concourse. The other passengers on the InterCity Shuttle had vanished towards Euston's taxi-ranks or the tube, they were virtually alone on the platform, except for a clattering, towed caravan of parcel skips. Their noise startled her unreasonably.

"What happened?"

"Someone set fire to the flat I told you." He sensed her frightened attempt at secrecy.

"Who did it? Listen, my girl' he ignored the arch, mocking glance she gave him 'you weren't the almost-victim of an attempted lesson in smoking this time. Quite possibly, someone wanted you dead." It seemed ridiculous, saying that to his daughter, crossing the crowded Euston concourse, amid baggage and the announcement of delays.

Tell me what happened."

She seemed to revive in the fresh morning air as they reached Melton Street and he pointed out the Jaguar parked near the corner of Euston Street. They crossed as gingerly as two pensioners on the zebra stripes.

"It was a petrol bomb, through the kitchen window. The fire officer told me that."

She was concentrating intensely as she spoke. Or perhaps simply studying her uncertain footsteps, he could not be sure.

"It took them no more than fifteen minutes to bring it under control saved the bedrooms, the office… I wasn't burned," she added with a perceptible shudder.

Thank God," he murmured involuntarily, unlocking the car, throwing her briefcase on the back seat amid newspapers and books.

He watched her brush her hair away from her face with a gesture that was defiant, but saw the almost cringing sense of fear in her eyes. As if she guessed his response, she said:

"Yes, they did frighten me, Daddy they frightened me very much. If that was what they wanted and not, not—"

"Get in the car, Tig," he said, and she immediately brightened at the use of his childhood name for her short for the Tiger he always claimed she was. Giles remembered murmuring the pet-name over and over again as she lay on the grass, her arm burnt, her eyes filled with stunned, traumatic terror.

As the car pulled away from the kerb, up Euston Street towards Gower Street, she sniffed loudly and said:

"I must talk to Kenneth about it."

She lit a cigarette. He wanted to disapprove of it, in his car.

"Why?"

She turned violently to him as he halted in traffic.

"Because only he can explain it!" Her voice cracked with strain. There were dark stains under her wide eyes. She stabbed at the air with the cigarette.

"It seems to be Kenneth's world, invading mine doesn't it? It doesn't seem to be casual, does it?"

"Marian," Giles said heavily, "I don't know what this is, but I blame you and I blame Kenneth in equal measure." Suddenly, in his fear for her, he could not control his parental anger.

"How can you have stirred all this up? What the devil did you think you were doing, and on whose behalf? My God, you could have been killed!

Marian stared ahead, her lower lip quivering. He was wrenched by guilt. She knew she could have died. Perhaps it was better to take her to Kenneth. Damnable Kenneth, who had no child to lose… Unfair, he corrected himself. Nevertheless, he could vent his anger more justly on Kenneth than on his daughter.

"Sorry, Tig," he murmured.

Her hand covered his as it rested on the gear lever. He tried to ignore the hot waves of terrified gratitude at her safety which seemed to rise in his body like lava.

His complete lack of any luggage stirred the vague and momentary interest of a young Customs officer as he walked through the green channel. It was a small rehearsal which sharpened his senses so that when he emerged into the concourse of Terminal 2, he was almost immediately aware that they had already picked him up two of them.

Midday, Heathrow, and one of them was no more than ten yards from him, moving parallel and without concealing his interest, even signalling to the other man. They wanted him to know they were close.

Gant had shaken them off in Oslo by raising the alarm, swamping the maintenance hangar with airport police. It had cleared the area around him, giving him the time and space to catch the morning flight to London. He needed to see Burton, explain Strickland and the-pausing to catch their reflections in the windows of the bookstall, he felt as if struck by a fist. The newspaper headlines, the pink Financial Times bearing a picture of Burton and someone who looked Eurasian celebrating a new transatlantic leasing partnership between Artemis Airways and the Skyliner.

Disorientated, he could not be certain if it was the headline that disturbed him most, or the smaller item on the front page of the Herald Tribune… Hero's Arrest Sought, and himself staring back at him from the newspaper.

In the reflecting window, one of the two men tailing him waved at him with a rolled newspaper, the briefest gesture, the clearest meaning. We know you, we have you… Gant suppressed a shiver. He felt rocked by tiredness and the news item, so that he snatched clumsily at the Herald Tribune and began reading it as if oblivious to the immediate danger.

FBI warrant Mclntyre, then former Vietnam hero… It was Vance's financial affairs, and the accusation that he had left America to avoid interrogation; charges of conspiracy, bribes… Yes, Agent Mclntyre added that Gant was… He thrust the newspaper untidily back into the rack and turned away. The Burton story was emblazoned in other headlines Whiz-Kid Bounces Back… Delighted with Deal… Great Future Ensured… Burton and his lovely wife, Charlotte, pictured last night… Turning away, he felt himself already struggling in deep water against a riptide, even before he glimpsed the tail who had waved his newspaper grinning at him.

Angrily, he snatched Vance's mobile phone from his pocket, swivelling on his heel as he did so yes, the second man, no attempt at indifference, they were determined to pressure him, like another bill falling on his doormat the moment he was declared bankrupt… He punched out the number Burton had given him and waited. The concourse seemed airless, its crowds devouring his oxygen.

Thanks for screwing Vance's airplane!" he snapped even before Burton spoke.

"Who is this?" he heard, but Burton already knew.

"It was sabotage, Burton. I know the guy, I saw him on security videotape. The name Strickland mean anything to you?"

"Gant? No, it doesn't who is he?"

"One of the guys who's ridden off into the Badlands, Burton — just a nobody who downed two of Alan's airplanes. Maybe he was supposed to set you up for the deal you've just done? I wouldn't know!"

"What the hell do you mean by that?"

"Listen to me, Burton. You said you wanted answers. You were there when the guy died. I got the answer. The guy was screwed. Is that really what you wanted to know?"

"You mean… it was deliberate? It was—?" Burton seemed winded. The two surveillance men had moved, but remained easily visible, unnerving Gant.

"It can't have been sabotage—"

"I'm telling you it was!"

"Look, Gant, I'm sorry you've had to read it in the papers I don't want you to think I turned my back on Alan easily. I didn't. But, as you said, Alan is dead, his company and his airliner are finished. I had to do what I've done. I have thousands of people depending on me. I did what was for the best."

After a long silence, Gant murmured: "Sure."

"Are you continuing to pursue this?" Burton asked.

The two men were still plainly visible. Did they belong to French counterintelligence, like the team in the hangar, like the man whose ID he now carried in his pocket? Edouard St. Cloud, agent ofDST. DST was it a French government thing?

"Yes," he snapped, as if challenged.

"Very well I'll pay your expenses, whatever they are. And I will listen to what you have to say, anything you discover. I — er, I must cut you off now, Gant. I have a waiting room full of people—"

"OK-I'll get back to you."

He cut the connection, continuing for a moment to stare at Vance's mobile phone, the one he had picked up from the sand on that headland overlooking the second crashed 494. The two-man team continued to hover about him like wasps.

Taxis. He saw the sign, a black arrow pointing the way. He moved they followed.

French counter-intelligence. He had tried to think it through on the flight from Oslo, but the ego had fought him, insisting on his scope for solitary action. The surveillance team, the newspaper headlines, had stripped him of that shallow confidence, and what he had entertained on the aircraft was now an imperative. This was local, it was European. He needed to talk to Aubrey, even if the old guy had retired along with Reagan and Thatcher, and the people who had run him in the Company. He needed advice and maybe hard to admit an operational controller. Hero's Arrest Sought… Screw you, Jack.

He followed the arrows, the two men behind but not moving in, content to wait, watch. He had made one call from Oslo, to someone who owed him favours who was still in Archives at Langley. Where can I find

Strickland?… Don 'tgive me that, they always keep tabs By midday, British time.

He hadn't called him yet. Maybe he had been warned off, or was just dismissive because he, too, had read the headlines. Mclntyre had, on the surface, a watertight case against him. Vance had, damn him, wired him money. A Federal employee was on the take from big business. The Post would have put a half-dozen reporters on the story by now. He was news.

Gant grimaced as he emerged into the cool midday light. A queue of tourists and businessmen at the taxi rank, a line of black cabs. The two men kept their distance, unhurried in their movements. The place was too public for them to try anything… Maybe they just wanted to see what he did, where he went, who he saw. The roar of a big jet taking off, the slamming of taxi doors.

He joined the queue. The men hesitated, then hung back, as if they were determined to show him he was under no immediate physical threat.

Just contained, controlled.

He had to locate Strickland, he was the key. The bomb maker for whoever. Could Aubrey help? He shook his head, not knowing.

The passenger in front of him, freshened with aftershave but with the back of his jacket deeply creased, got into a taxi, then it was his turn. He paused, his hand on the cab door. The two men smiled but did not move. He got into the taxi, a chilly sensation between his shoulder blades.

"Central London I'll tell you where."

The driver nodded and the taxi drew away from the kerb. He glanced back through the rear window. The tail-men were getting into the next cab. They'd follow him into London. He would have to lose them there before he made for Aubrey's place.

Aubrey an old man, retired. What could he do? The people following Gant wanted him dead The signals of his success littered the ornately inlaid side table, one or two of them scattered on the intricate Persian carpet. And yet he was unable to suppress a fury that he knew originated in anxiety, in the possibility of failure.

"Whichever shadowy master you are serving in the Elysee or the Quai d'Orsai or wherever, Roussillon, exposure is equally damaging to everyone involved in this affair!" David Winter-borne stormed.

The Frenchman was seated uncomfortably, primly on a Sheraton chair.

Fraser, Winterborne knew, was enjoying his discomfiture, even though he suppressed the signs of his pleasure.

Twice twice!" Winterborne continued.

"You let an amateur evade you even as you assure me that you believe Gant knows Strickland was involved!" The videotapes lay near the newspapers that blazoned the deal between Aero UK, Balzac-Stendhal and Artemis Airways. His own photograph was beneath many of the headlines, standing alongside Tim Burton and Bryan Coulthard. Early copies of the French press were equally enthusiastic, chauvinistic. Boeing was already mounting a counter-campaign in conjunction with the big American carriers. A transatlantic price war was in the offing and Skyliner was in the forefront of it.

"And where is Strickland?" he continued, turning to Fraser, whose lolling posture on the chaise became the bolt-uprightness of a chastened schoolboy.

"You must find Strickland he can't have just disappeared' "We're looking for him, sir."

"Look harder' He turned his back on them, as if preparing for an appearance on the balcony overlooking Eaton Square.

He had won. The daring of the fraud had kept Aero UK afloat for long enough, the sabotage had killed Vance Aircraft. Skyliner had saved Tim Burton, Europe's grand project had leasing orders beginning to flow in.

Now these people Gant and Strickland and perhaps Marian threatened him.

Somehow, Fraser and Roussillon had produced a whirlpool effect, drawing in people from their secret world. People opposed to him.

"Fraser, you say there is an FBI warrant for Gant's arrest can that be used?"

"I've made some enquiries, sir. The agent of the Bureau most closely involved is a man called Mclntyre. I've met him. He's dim and vindictive former Company man. He's persecuting Gant, not to put too fine a point—"

"Can it beusecf?"

"If Gant returns to the States, Mclntyre will put him out of harm's way. I'd bet on' He turned on them.

"Why has Gant involved himself?"

"Vance, probably. He was married to the daughter. He has a farm boy's view of the world. You know the Yanks, sir. They all hate big government, big business, out in the boondocks."

"And he's dangerous?"

"He has no proof of anything," Roussillon offered, brushing a dark lock of hair from his forehead.

"Hardly thanks to you!"

The Frenchman's cheeks reddened with affront.

"I do not work for you, M'sieur Winterborne. I am not your paid man!"

"You would find it hard to persuade your service or your government that their interests differ from mine, Roussillon. Effectively, you take my instruction." The Frenchman's eyes were polished with hatred.

"If Gant has no proof, then he can do little harm. Especially as a convict. But meanwhile, Gant is in London, not Washington. Can he find Strickland, Fraser? How well does he know him?"

"Not well. I don't think he knows where to start."

"Not good enough. We do not know Gant well enough." He was suddenly tired of his anger. In his study and his secretary's office, his calls were being held, his business suspended. He should not have to be concerned with this menial and degrading litter-collection. Gant and Marian and Strickland, blowing like infuriating bits of paper in the breeze of the affair, eluding his pointed stick.

"What do you suggest Fraser?"

"Gant's still under surveillance even if he thinks he evaded us using the taxi-dodge in Piccadilly. There'll be plenty of opportunity to settle—" The ringing of a mobile phone interrupted Fraser.

Disconcerted, he removed it from his pocket.

"Fraser." He listened. Winterborne watched his features feign a retention of the easy confidence with which he had spoken. Then, his cheekbones slightly reddened, he looked up as he switched off the phone.

"Well?"

"Gant. He he's arrived at Aubrey's place."

"Aubrey? What does he want with that damned old man? Eh, Fraser what does he want with him?" Like the two men in the room, Aubrey came to him in the moment of his triumph to remind him of something that already seemed as distant and unimportant as a childhood misdemeanour.

"Aubrey can't do anything, sir—"

"You have that in writing?" he snapped.

"You have it from Aubrey himself?"

He turned away. Aubrey would learn of the sabotage… What could or would he attempt, armed with that knowledge? Surely the forces of inertia, euphoria, government would all weigh on him, rendering him silent. No one, no one at all, saving Gant and perhaps Marian, would act. And Marian was hobbled by the same pressures that would constrain Aubrey. She had to be… which left Gant. Only Gant. Looking for Strickland, just as they were. If the two found each other… "Don't lose Gant," he warned.

"Not for a moment. At the first chance, make certain you kill him."

Aubrey's mood was almost that of a diarist, comfortable amid the flickering quarrel between Marian and her father. He was no more than intrigued by Marian's drama once the initial shock at her appearance, her weariness, had diminished.

She herself had shaken off trauma by means of defiant anger.

"Do you realise what you're saying, Tig!" Giles growled.

"You're talking about David Winterborne, for heaven's sake! Why for what possible reason would David take such risks, go to such lengths?

Good God, you're practically accusing him of attempted murder with this story of some builder's daughter!"

"Daddy they are behaving like gangsters! Is that what you would tolerate?" Marian threw back, her cheeks flushed, her hands flinging her hair away from her face. Her forehead was pale, the skin beneath her eyes dark. To Aubrey, she looked like some wild prophetess.

Perhaps she was… And yet Giles must be correct, surely, despite his own suspicions and David's wariness of him and the clandestine meetings at Uffingham. Once one brought it all under Giles' honest, direct gaze, it did seem tinged with the fantastical.

"Well, Daddy?" Marian asked again, all but taunting her father. She had inherited all his moral sense and more; in her it had led to scepticism, rather than Giles' optimism.

"Children…" Aubrey murmured good-humouredly.

"I blame you, Kenneth, for much of this," Giles snapped at him.

"You've always encouraged Tig's capacity for suspicion, for lifting up stones. And I think you're doing it now!" His features broke into a smile and he waggled his hand to fend off any witty riposte.

"You know what I mean, Kenneth. And I'm right, however pompous I might sound."

"Is he?" Marian challenged.

"Are you about to dismiss Banks' daughter, the cheque in the post Michael Lloyd's murder?"

"And Fraser," Aubrey murmured soberly.

Giles, probably as an antidote to reflection, helped them to more coffee, then took his cup to the window, where he remained, looking out, statue like Marian's smile towards his back was warm, grateful.

"Well?" she queried.

"And Fraser, indeed. And me." At the window, Giles' shoulders flinched.

"Yes, Daddy," she could not help triumphing.

"Even you think I've stirred something up

"But not David," he protested without turning.

Aubrey waved her to silence, then said: "We can't go that far, I agree." Marian frowned, shaking her head. Giles visibly relaxed his posture.

"But there are all the signs of—" He broke off in irritation as the doorbell sounded.

"All the signs of a gigantic swindle for some purpose or other." His voice sharpened, quelling Marian's contemplated outburst. He heard

Mrs. Grey's voice answering the video entry phone A moment later, she entered the drawing room.

"I'm sorry to interrupt, Sir Kenneth." She glanced deferentially towards Giles Pyott, her attention slipping at once to the cafetiere which, against her better judgement, she had been requested to use. There's a gentleman, an American by his voice, who wishes to see you urgently. He's at the door now a Mr. Gant. Do you—?" She paused, ambushed by Aubrey's surprise and by the evidence that Giles' astonishment was as great.

"I — er, Mrs. Grey, you'd better show him up," Aubrey flustered.

"Yes, please let him in at once."

"Very well, Sir Kenneth." She was already suspicious of anyone who could ruffle the calm waters in which she habitually swam.

"Kenneth—?" Giles began apprehensively.

"None of my doing. A coincidence worthy of a Victorian novel, perhaps?"

"Kenneth, the man is in very great trouble. This isn't coincidence. If you had read your Times assiduously, you'd know there's an FBI warrant for his arrest on charges of—" '-being on the payroll," Gant murmured from the doorway.

"Hi, General Sir Kenneth." He shrugged childishly, self-deprecatingly, so that Aubrey saw him as a caricature of some prodigal son disclaiming any part in the wasting of the family fortune. He struggled to his feet with the aid of his stick. Marian's amusement was the equal of her curiosity, her glance studying Gant.

"Mitchell, my dear boy!" Aubrey's effusiveness was overdone. Gant's stare hardened.

"You look comfortable here, sir I'm interrupting…" There was an edge of sarcasm to the remark. Gant turned to Pyott.

"It's just bullshit, sir. I wasn't on the take."

"Just helping your former father-in-law?" He turned to Marian, whose arch expression disarmed.

"Yes, I was," he replied with studied, affected politeness.

"He was being screwed, begging your pardon, ma'am."

"I apologise, Major." Marian stood up.

"I don't think you need score any more baskets Marian Pyott," she added, holding out her hand. He shook it perfunctorily but warmly.

"My daughter," Giles murmured.

"Pleased to meet you, ma'am."

"I take it this is not a social call, Mitchell sit down. Mrs. Grey, more coffee, please. Sit down, sit down—" Aubrey showed Gant to an armchair, on which he perched like some quiescent but alert hunting bird. He looked out of place, yet somehow self possessed.

"You're looking well if tired," Aubrey added gauchely, as if he had forgotten his own self-assurance in Gant's presence.

Interesting, Marian thought. Intriguing. It was, in a strange way, rather like being shown Daddy's medals as a girl, romantic and also a potent reminder that her father had a past that stretched back for years before her birth. This was Aubreys equally real past, personified by this confident American in his weekend clothes.

Aubrey studied Gant. It was as if the man rendered what had been, for Aubrey, a dispassionate debate into something altogether more interesting. He shook the thought aside. The sense of his professional life was uncomfortable, like a waistcoat become too tight or old-fashioned.

"I need your advice your expertise," Gant said. His shrug indicated an awareness of Marian as an intruder. Aubrey knew Gant required his peculiar skills. In connection with the Vance airliner, its spectacular failure, Vance's subsequent death…?

"Marian is not an outsider, Mitchell."

Gant glanced at her, then nodded.

"OK. I it's this…" He drew something from the pocket of his jacket. Aubrey realised how dishevelled Gant's clothing appeared, stained and crumpled.

"Is it genuine?" He passed the folded piece of card to Aubrey, who immediately admitted surprise.

"Yes, I think it is." EdouardSt. Cloud, DST.

"How did you come by it?" He handed the card to Giles, who nodded his agreement. Marian leant forward in her chair.

"Oslo. I went looking for a guy I found him. Part of a team. They weren't waiting for me, but they found me fast enough."

"Does this involve Vance Aircraft?"

Gant nodded. The second 494 to crash was serviced overnight in Oslo.

There was a guy there who claimed Vance sent him, after the first crash, after Alan and I—" Again, he shrugged. Then he looked up bleakly.

"I need to know why the French security service is involved in this."

"What was their interest?" Aubrey asked.

Mrs. Grey brought the refreshed cafetiere, another Crown Derby cup. In an exaggerated politeness, Gant stood up. Mrs.

Grey at once warmed to him, poured him coffee. When she had gone, Gant said:

"Hostile action. They tried to take me out."

"Why?" There was a tremor of excitement in Aubrey's voice. It was another moment like that on the terrace at Uffingham, or when he had discovered Marian in the hall of the house, having overheard David.

Marian's moral outrage, Gant's intrusion, even Giles' protective fluttering, all like breezes exciting the calm lake of his old age.

"It was sabotage each time," Gant announced.

Aubrey heard Marian's easy, immediate shock in her breathing and the rumble of Giles' disbelief. For himself, the past had bullied its way in.

"You're certain of this?" he said.

"Yes."

"And you know who?" Aubrey blurted, realising an angry excitement about Gant.

"A guy called Strickland. Former Company man. It's his career. I recognised him on videotape they have it now, I guess. I didn't retrieve it."

"You mean' Marian burst out "Alan Vance was the victim of sabotage, that someone employed this man Strickland to make certain the 494 was a disaster?"

Her eyes were drug-bright.

That's about the size of it."

"Who?"

"I don't have the answer. French security is protecting Strickland in some way. It's a cover-up."

"Kenneth!" she exclaimed.

"Kenneth…?" Her voice tailed away into sombre reflection. Her hands were agitated in her lap, amid the huge flowers of her full skirt.

"Wait, Marian, wait," he urged.

"Mitchell tell us what happened to the first aircraft, then to you…

Please. Take your time."

As Gant's brief narrative concluded, Giles was the first to speak.

"You're certain of everything you've told us?"

"I am, General. Burton wants me to follow up, but I don't think it's anything but polite interest. He doesn't want to know what's really going on—"

"Do we?" Aubrey asked sharply.

"Not you, Mitchell, not you we three?" Gant's sense of wrong was primitive. His motive had been evident in the way he spoke of Vance, or perhaps more accurately, of his aircraft and his ambition. But this

…?

He was afraid of Marian's keen intuition. It was much like his own.

Would it lead her to—?

"You think this effort to discredit ruin the Vance 494 originates in Europe, don't you, Major?"

"I'm not sure. Does the French security service freelance, sir?"

"Infrequently," Aubrey admitted.

"Kenneth stop dragging your feet," Marian said, her brow creased, her eyes staring at the carpet as if reading some hieroglyphic text. Her hands made small, decisive chopping motions as she spoke. The two things have to fit together. The consequences of what the major has discovered have been of the greatest benefit to Aero UK, to David."

Gant's attention was hungry, fixed.

"No, don't interrupt me Tim Burton has been won over, Skyliner is on the brink of worldwide acceptance when it was a dead duck only a couple of weeks ago. Aero UK flourishes, when a fortnight ago it was about to collapse." She looked up, her eyes hot. Two plane crashes have made all the difference in the world!"

"You mean you know—?" Gant began. Marian nodded, but Aubrey protested.

"We know absolutely nothing, Mitchell nothing!"

"Kenneth, that's just obfuscation—"

"Marian, you're letting your imagination run away with you," Giles warned. He glimpsed the realities, but they made him only more determined to avoid them for his daughter's sake.

"Am I? Well, Kenneth, am I?" she challenged.

"We know Aero UK has been kept afloat by fraud. Perhaps it needed murder to make certain of the eventual outcome!"

"You're talking about business rivalry, not some vendetta!" Giles objected angrily.

This is all nonsense."

"Well, Kenneth?" she asked again. Aubrey merely shook his head. He appeared old, somehow uncomprehending, and her disappointment with him was mirrored in Gant's expression. She added: They killed Michael Lloyd for the sake of his silence. What would a few aircrew and some passengers all total strangers matter?"

To Marian, Aubrey's complacency seemed little more than slowness of mind, her father's defensive tactics and dismissal of what was so glaringly obvious merely tiresome; even Gant was no more than a messenger bringing confirmation of her own insight. The French security service was involved because of BalzacStendhal, obviously. The sabotage had been a kind of violent asset-stripping, a dawn raid with real weapons. She fumbled her cigarettes from her handbag and lit one, puffing furiously, waving her hands as she continued to berate the men in the room.

There are just too many coincidences, too many common factors. There's Fraser and the death of Michael there's my lucky escape there's Tim Burton changing sides, if you like the two sabotaged 494s the attempt on the major's life everything! If you can't see that it all forms one design, not two, then you're being wilfully complacent, Kenneth!"

The silence that followed was charged. Aubrey dissembled, she realised, in maintaining his lack of expression. Her father's nervousness was apparent, an admission that he agreed with her and was afraid of the consequences of the truth.

Gant asked:

"Can you explain what's the problem over here?"

Leaning intently forward, Marian jabbed her cigarette in his direction in accompaniment to her hurried explanation. She felt her cheeks flush, her body quiver with her unsuppressed anger. She had been right all along! David had planned this, he had employed a professional saboteur to remove the rival to Skyliner. Following the collapse of the helicopter project, it had been ever more urgent that he display some kind of success. He had had to bring down a second494 to make certain.

And he'd done it, just as easily as he might have ordered dinner in a restaurant.

"I'm certain the fraud and the sabotage are linked," she repeated.

"Both companies would have been ruined, the fraud would have come to light, if Artemis had bought 494s and then other airlines had followed suit. The helicopter cancellation was the last straw. They had to act, and act quickly!"

She sat back, stubbed out her cigarette and immediately lit another.

She poured herself more coffee, her gestures as theatrical and calculated as those of an actress.

She had to persuade Gant and Aubrey and her father that this must be pursued. Its scope, its daring, its moral vacuum affronted her. Her father and Kenneth could have all the comforts of claiming that it was none of their concern, that it was civvy street to them and bore no relation to the battlefield or the intelligence world of the Cold War but not at the price of denying the facts. Her father's expression pleaded with her, as if she could will a self-imposed amnesia. Kenneth was owl-like, patricianly dismissive.

"Nothing to do with you, Kenneth?" she taunted waspishly.

"Other side of the street, someone else's concern?"

"Marian!" her father snapped in the voice with which he had upbraided lapses of good manners during her childhood.

Gant's expression was thoughtful. She suspected that he was more than half convinced Looking challengingly at Aubrey, she asked: "What do we doT After a long silence, Aubrey sighed heavily.

"Very well," he admitted with as bad a grace as he could muster.

"Very well."

He was irritated, as if woken from a nap, having missed the fall of two wickets after a too-good lunch. Marian realised that she had hooked his curiosity like a fish. Her father appeared infuriated that Kenneth had been won over. He wanted nothing more than her safety… Marian suppressed the shiver that threatened to reveal her nerves. That fire

… they had tried to kill her. She breathed slowly, deeply. Even so, Giles was aware of her disquiet. His expression pleaded with her to give it up.

"Kenneth—" he warned.

"Yes, old friend, I understand," Aubrey murmured.

"But these two young people have already excited the curiosity of interested parties, even their counter-activity.

We cannot now leave things as they are. Twice they have tried to kill

Mitchell and—" '-once in Marian's case," Giles said heavily, and then immediately burst out: "But we're talking about Davidherel How can we be discussing the son of our oldest friend in this way?"

Ungenerously, deliberately, Marian snapped: "Who else could be behind it, Daddy?"

The French Coulthard…?"

"Hasn't the brains for it," she retorted.

Then the French."

"It isn't primarily an intelligence operation, Giles," Aubrey smoothed, waving Marian to silence with an angry little flap of his hand. They would do it for la France or la gloireor reasons of state, even for business… but they don't appear to be the prime movers here. They have no direct involvement with the city regeneration scheme and the massive fraud. David's companies do. David is involved in Aero UK, David has met the European Commissioners Marian suspects Lloyd's former superior among them and David is concerned at any and every interest shown, whether by myself or Marian. David…" He shook his head, more sorrowful than enraged.

"You mustn't, Kenneth," Pyott pleaded.

"Giles, I must help if I can." He assayed an ingratiating smile.

"You, after all, couldn't forbid her."

"Clive must never, never be involved, Marian. Or know that any of us are involved." He turned his back on them the moment he finished speaking, as if to disown them, and stared out at Regent's Park in the midday sunshine.

Aubrey asked quickly: "Why do you wish to pursue this, Mitchell? Why are you here, precisely?"

"Are you asking me why I need to do it, or if I can do it?"

"Perhaps both."

Marian was shocked by Aubrey's bluntness, his sudden recovery of concentration.

Gant was aware of her surveillance of him, more challenged by her than by Aubrey.

"Vance built a good airplane. Someone decided they couldn't compete and changed the odds by killing people. Some of them were friends of mine." His admission, to Marian at least, seemed more like a duty than an affection. Then Gant added:

The pilot of the first airplane, Hollis… I couldn't be at the funeral. I should have."

He looked up at Aubrey, his eyes hard.

"When you've taken the bones out of that, yes, I can do it. I know Strickland. He's just one of the psychopaths I've run across. He did these things. For big business, right? So the stockholders aren't disappointed at end of year." Marian saw the utter contempt, his narrow, upright suspicion of politicians and businessmen in suits with manicured hands and dead eyes.

"I can find him. I called a guy in Langley, someone who owed me. They always keep records, especially on people like Strick-land. He called me back when I was on my way here. I have an address in France."

"If you have the address, so do they," Aubrey remarked.

"I guess so."

"I'd like Strickland alive."

I'll try for that." Gant seemed to dislike the idea.

"Strickland is like someone off religious TV. Big business would like him. He would make it easy for them to go down his road. Any suit who needs an edge can have Strickland call by his office, in a jacket and tie, and the arrangements are easy."

Marian realised there was something compulsively moral about his disdain, and it strangely thrilled her, such was its lack of compromise.

"You think your man is using Strickland, right?"

Heavily, Aubrey replied: "Possibly. It does seem so."

"If I bring you the proof you need, you'll just do the English thing, you and the general, and tell him to lay off. Right?"

There isn't another way, Mitchell. This hasn't entirely crossed the border into our country. There are different priorities—"

"Your man crossed over."

"Yes, I think he probably has." He felt suddenly invigorated. He clapped his hands together, startling them, eyes alight. He cleared the fug of moral and emotional considerations as quickly as Mrs. Grey would clear away the crockery that lay on the coffee table.

To work then," he beamed.

"You, my lady, are to maintain a low profile no, I mean that. David is already suspicious of you he must not be alarmed."

"I'm not going to sit on my backside, Kenneth—"

"You must!" he snapped.

"Mitchell, where is Strickland now?"

"He has some place in France a farmhouse. The Dordogne?" He evidently did not know the area.

"You know exactly?" Gant nodded.

"Very well. We'll discuss the details in a moment. Will he be there?"

"He's owned it for some time."

"I remind you again tfieywill know that."

"Sure."

Then we must prepare. I think—"

"Kenneth," Giles said quietly, "I am quite sure your flat is under surveillance." He turned casually from the window. They must have followed Gant here. What do you recommend we do, in the circumstances?"

CHAPTER TEN

Festung Europa "Well, where's the charabanc?" she called with an attempt at gaiety that was utterly at odds with the last, draining effects of shock.

The members of the Commons Select Committee for European Affairs were gathered near St. Stephen's Porch like school-children, awaiting the transport that would take them on their eagerly anticipated outing.

Indeed, there were two members of the Committee old enough to remember having been evacuated as children during the war. They were the ones whose smiles were broadest at the joke she intended to lighten her own mood.

Cromwell's statue seemed to frown at the little group in Old Palace

Yard as they waited for the liveried minibus that would transport them to Waterloo and the Eurostar high-speed train. The air of holiday that hung about the party of ten two researchers had managed to wangle their way on to the junket to Brussels failed to infect her. Her colleagues had murmured soothing, anodyne sympathies regarding the fire and her escape from it. Remembering it was still like touching at new, painful skin over the childhood burns.

It was not the fire, however, that preoccupied her. There was another terror, more slow and acidic, that she wished she could put at a distance. Only a few minutes before leaving her London flat, she had discovered that it had been expertly burgled while she was in the constituency. Someone had broken in without leaving any trace and stolen the scribbled notes and the photographs that Michael Lloyd had sent her. Her computer had been wiped clean of everything she had transferred to it concerning-David… the fraud… her suspicions…

Michael Lloyd. No shred of proof, or evidence, had been left behind.

She wished she had not checked the hiding-place before leaving for the Commons, for then she would not have known how completely and expertly they were moving against her… Her long fingernails were hurting her palms as she squeezed her hands into fists. Pull yourself together, she instructed herself sternly. But all the proof's gone… Then you'd better find some more.

She shivered, alerting the attention of a senior Opposition MR a Eurosceptic ally on the Committee. She smiled disarmingly at him. He was as unpopular with his party's leadership as she was with the government. The old man turned away and she felt the memory of the burglary press at her again… This time, she was able to fend it off.

She breathed deeply, calmingly.

Another sceptic from her own party was very obviously consulting his watch.

Typical! I don't doubt the champagne will be too cold, too!" His adopted squirearchical manner was a better joke; his parents had been teachers, he an estate agent in one of the larger London firms.

Typical of you, Roger," offered one of HM Opposition's most vociferous and unquestioning Europhiles. His nom-de-guerre throughout Westminster was Ethelred the Undoubting. Some — the irredeemable called him Euro-Jew. A darkness passed over Roger's narrow features. An irredeemable? She rarely made common cause with Roger, even over Europe.

The familiarity of the company, the mere prospect of the trip to Brussels, was working on her like a restorative. She did feel calmer.

"Settle down, children," she offered, smiling with an almost polished brightness. The time for squabbles is on the way back, when you're all tired out ah, here we are!"

Suitcases were at once snatched up with that eagerness she only ever witnessed among Honourable Members when they were travelling first-class and without payment and heading towards a fleshpot or a trough. Brussels offered almost everything your average MP could desire, except a permanent posting! That had not been one of her jokes. The Eurostar livery gleamed in the morning sunshine on the flanks of the stretched minibus as it pulled up in Old Palace Yard as near to the group as was respectful.

She picked up her own small suitcase and, as she straightened and was saying in an ironic tone:

"I see the boys are pushing to the front as usual-!"

— saw David Winterborne crossing the cobbles in the company of the Minister of State at the Department of Trade and Industry. Her suitcase felt awkward, heavy in her grip. The members of the Committee pressed on to the minibus, their cases loaded at the back by the uniformed driver, the bright, empty chatter of the hostess merely bird noises. David's features darkened stormily for just a moment, then his carefully nurtured aplomb was recovered.

"Marian! How wonderful-!" His hand was extended towards her. The junior minister, knowing their long acquaintance, noticed no tension between them. She took his cool, slim hand.

"David as you see, you've just caught me off on a jolly. Another freebie Aubrey's last words to her were in her mind. There has been no crime because the reason for the crime no longer exists. Such matters are known by the soubriquet of business ethics. But they will be all the more determined to act against anyone who even threatens to remind them of the fact that there was a crime, that people died Be careful, I beg you. He had addressed Gant as earnestly as herself.

"David," she repeated with a great deal more self-confidence.

"How nice to see you and to see you have the time to spend cultivating business in our little banana republic!"

David was forced to chuckle. The minister, whose gravity was that of an undertaker rather than born of confidence or sincerity, scowled at her levity. As if in further rebuke, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, emerging from the official limousine, waved to David before brushing his tie straight across his ample stomach and flicking a cowlick of hair away from his forehead.

"Flavour of the month," she murmured.

"Ready, David?" the junior minister intruded.

Marian was relieved rather than irritated with the man's pompous assumption of superiority. David's unwavering gaze was a withering light beating on her nerves.

"What? Oh, yes… Marian, have a wonderful time in Brussels, I presume? You're all right? I mean, after that fire—?"

The question was dazzling in its innocence.

"Fine!" she replied with as much ingenuousness.

He leaned forward and pecked at her suddenly cold cheek. She held herself rigid so that she would not flinch away from his kiss. He was smiling as he drew back from her, then his attention immediately embraced the junior minister. At St. Stephen's Porch, the Chancellor still loitered, waiting for a word with Winterborne. There has been no crime, Aubrey had said. Damn you for being so right, Kenneth!

She felt bewildered until the elderly Member took her arm and began to guide her towards the minibus with its ridiculously grinning hostess.

She was unable to suppress the shiver of nerves, alarming the Opposition MP "All right, lass?" he asked in his broad Yorkshire accent.

"You're not sickening for sum mat are you?"

She smiled. His tone was as normal and reassuring as the traffic as it jerked from light to light along St. Margaret's Street; as familiar as Parliament at her back.

Marian shook her head.

"I'm fine, Henry fine. Wrong time of the month you know."

"Aye. And I've heard that excuse cover a multitude of sins in my time, too."

They had reached the bus and she patted the hand that still lay, gnarled and blue veined from coal, on her arm.

"I doubt it was ever used to resist your advances, Henry. Thanks."

Shaking her hair away from her face, she climbed aboard the minibus and plumped aggressively into a vacant seat. The male MPs seemed infected with the atmosphere of a holiday. What else was it? She kept her briefcase on her lap, opening it determinedly to remove Private Eye. She turned to its parliamentary gossip, "HP Sauce', and almost at once called out:

"I see you're in the Eye, Roger again!"

Roger appeared mortally offended, but knowledgeable.

"Everything there is already declared on the Register," he snapped.

"You hope!" someone else called. Another commented good-humouredly:

"I see Marian's up to mischief as usual."

And she was… She had left Aubrey's flat late in the afternoon, with Giles, having promised to be a good girl. Giles had taken her at her solemn, pretended word, but Kenneth had been suspiciously anxious on her behalf… And now she knew why.

She frowned as she scanned Private Eye's already widespread gossip. She even knew the source of most of it.

Gant had stayed behind with Aubrey for some kind of briefing; perhaps he had stayed overnight. He seemed contained, but like a pressure cooker filled with boiling water and steam. She understood his motives, even though his intent had a primitive, violent end in view.

Strickland had caused a chaos in his world, just as David Winterborne had done in hers. The minibus pulled out of Old Palace Yard into traffic, towards Waterloo and the train to Brussels… where Michael had been murdered.

Her briefcase was full of the morning papers, each of which celebrated, in its own particular manner, Aero UK's success, Tim Burton's expansion plans and the coming transatlantic price war. Boeing was already engaged in furious counter hype Air France was about to lease a dozen Skyliners, with a promise to buy at least six of them by the end of the year. Europe was vigorously thumbing its nose at the States and its plane makers She looked up as Ben Campbell sat himself next to her. His smile was engaging, self-regarding. His Times, as he unfolded it, observed in a headline Success for Skyliner at eleventh hour. It had been close, the line between success and failure, threadlike. David had merely tilted the balance a little, slightly moved the goalposts, so that he, Aero UK and Balzac-Stendhal were now standing on the other side of the narrow line. Success and failure all it had required was a few instructions given in a high office overlooking the City after receiving best advice and the consequence had been one murder in another country and two remote aircraft accidents. For those small and obscure events, the reward could be a difference of hundreds of millions, eventually billions. How could David not have taken the course he had?

"You all right?" Ben Campbell asked.

"You looked a bit off-colour out there." The Euro MP's enquiry was brightly, in curiously made.

"Fine," she replied, glancing up then quickly down again as she met the hot penetration of his stare, sensed the weighing, the judging that was occurring behind it.

"No, I'm fine, Ben," she repeated. Thanks for asking."

That fire business, I suppose?" he murmured.

"I suppose," she snapped ungraciously, then added: "Sorry it was a bit unsettling… You know."

"Yes, I'm sure."

Campbell, a Euro MP for the last three years, a Commission functionary before that, was their duenna for the junket to Brussels. It was a PR role he seemed formed by destiny to fulfill, his thick hair, white teeth, firm jawline offering the necessary assurances concerning the rectitude of everything European. Campbell's Eurosoup, many Members unkindly called him.

"We will be out to change your mind, Marian, I give you fair warning," he announced with an ingratiating smile. Throw off our ogre's clothes for something more attractive to you."

"I don't doubt it."

His eyes seemed filled with a piercing enquiry, but she could not be certain that it was not her own nerves that made his proximity and interest suspicious. There seemed to be another role, besides that of expert PR man. Of course, Ben Campbell had long been a lobbyist for Aero UK and Balzac-Stendhal… and an associate of Winterborne. With surprising ease, she could imagine herself and Campbell as prisoner and escort. She rubbed her arms involuntarily. Ben Campbell was a professional, fully employed smoothie… it was just his manner.

Wasn't it…?

"Did your mum make you up some sandwiches for the train?" she managed.

His smile was warm, reassuring: it disarmed. Yet his presence discomfited.

London slipped past the window of the minibus, but despite herself, she could not help feeling once more that she was under threat; even from Campbell.

The minibus crossed Westminster Bridge. She glanced back towards Parliament as if expecting David to be standing there, monstrously enlarged. The sunlight made the Palace of Westminster a gingerbread house, biscuit-coloured. The Thames was flecked with pleasure craft other junkets, corporate entertainments, business as usual. Had it been at some cocktail party or reception that David had first decided that Michael Lloyd must be silenced… that she should be burned alive?

She shivered and Campbell noticed the involuntary spasm. Waterloo loomed as darkly as some Victorian prison-house. Come on, come on, she told herself, but there seemed no defiance available.

His eyes moved from the map strapped to his knee to the landscape four thousand feet below the Cessna. He was above Perigueux, Limoges behind him, Brive a smudge away to the east. The land ahead of the aircraft was beginning to crumple like a suddenly ageing face into the worn folds and creases of the Dordogne. Soon he would need to find somewhere quiet to land.

He had walked out to the plane Aubrey had hired for him, into a glad-to-be-alive summer morning through which he had had to pass as if it was no more than a stage set. Dew still on the grass. A young woman in the office had completed his paperwork and glanced casually at his pilot's licence. There had been no more to it than that before he had unlocked the Cessna, done his external checks, climbed in, started the engine. Even the name of the place, Biggin Hill, had impinged without any sense of its history. The hours he had spent with Aubrey, after the general and his daughter had left and before he had briefly slept in the old man's spare bedroom, had sapped like leeches. Until this flight over southern England, the Channel, then northern France had seemed no more than a getaway, some kind of temporary escape.

The woman had grasped at him like feverish hands, her determination greater than his, her sense of urgency more vivid.

His search for Strickland wasn't just a wild card to her, it was something like a solemn promise. He felt the weight of her indignation, her demand for the truth, press at his back. She was uncomfortable to be around, even to remember.

The Channel had been filled with shipping and white wakes, an impression of slow, inexorable purpose and of certainty and destination. His flight was more empty than that, the plane's unfamiliar slowness suggesting drift, aimlessness.

He checked the map again. The clock on the instrument panel showed ten-forty.

French air traffic control was on a go-slow, not answering his calls since he had first contacted Paris. An Air Algerie flight, picking up one of his calls, had offered to relay to Paris Control on his behalf, but that hadn't been what he wanted. There was an airfield at Perigueux, already behind him, another at Brive and a third at Sarlat about eighteen miles south of his position. Sarlat was ideal had he wanted to use an airfield. He didn't. Almost certain that he had left Aubrey's apartment without detection, and that his taxi hadn't been followed out of London, he still sensed that they would be waiting for him — French Intelligence, the people from Oslo at Bordeaux, which his flight plan claimed was his destination. Any diversion to another airfield was traceable and a matter of no more than an hour's drive from Bordeaux. He needed to disappear, temporarily, and to have a secure, undiscovered airplane to return to… with Strickland.

Strickland was at his farmhouse-Doubt was pointless. He cut it off and eased the throttles back and put the Cessna into a gentle, descending turn. His altitude was four thousand feet above sea level, the country was three thousand feet below him. He had seen narrow river valleys that were possible landing sites, but hedges and clumps of trees were scattered across their slopes like traps. Most of them were narrow gorges anyway too narrow for him to ensure a safe landing. It should only look like a forced landing, the airplane had to stay in one piece, its flimsy undercarriage usable for take-off.

He dropped lower still in a left-hand orbit. His right hand reached out to grasp the fuel mixture control. He made the mixture leaner, his fingers almost stroking the control, until the engine banged, popped, became fragile and insufficient to support the weight of the Cessna against the air. The wind noise intruded into the engine's coughing.

Nodding, he returned the mixture to normal running.

Someone would have heard the first failing notes of the engine. When he repeated it and seemed to drop more quickly out of the sky, eye-witnesses as they invariably did would embroider what they saw.

Smoke, maybe an engine fire, a wing coming off… People did that, trying to help the investigation. He smiled briefly.

The land was dotted with villages, some of them clamped like mussels on to rock outcrops, the roofs of the buildings biscuit-brown. Dark paint-spills of forest and cultivated orchards and groves. The threads of rivers like bright woollen strands accidentally plucked from a complex tapestry. He continued to toy with the mixture control, producing a rough-running engine note. Fifteen hundred feet below, a tractor, seemingly immobile, was tilted on a sloping field, earth crimped darkly behind its plough. The field looked free of fences, ditches, bushes. Dotted with old, broad trees, it sloped in such a way that it would provide sufficient approach and landing distance. He allowed the Cessna to sink leaflike towards the field, as if the plane was turned only by the wind. The engine continued to cough and bang convincingly. The man on the tractor seemed to be staring skywards, the vehicle unmoving on the slope of the field. A few sheep were grazing on part of it, but already seeking the shade of the trees against the heat of midmorning.

Eight hundred feet… A double bang, felt through the controls as much as heard.

He pushed the mixture to fully rich, alerted the pitch of the aircraft, as it seemed to wobble for an instant, as if about to tumble from a cliff-edge of air; levelled the wings. He checked the instruments furiously, unnerved. The controls responded normally. What in hell—?

There was a crimson and white stain on the starboard wing strut.

A bird strike. A bird had flown into the propeller. There were dark specks on the cockpit windscreen, a smear on the starboard wing. The engine coughed and choked now without his interference. The Cessna sank towards the trees and the sloping field. The man on the tractor watched him, posed in imperturbability. The wind direction was right.

He reduced power and lowered the undercarriage. A rabbit hole would be enough to fling the light aircraft violently tail over cockpit, send it tumbling to fragments down the slope of the field. He lowered the flaps a notch, his attention focused on a point perhaps two hundred yards beyond a small knot of trees and resting sheep. He closed the throttle.

He dropped the flaps fully and tensed himself against the first touch of the wheels now. The plane seemed to float for an instant, as if it had encountered water which buoyed it up. The wheels thumped, bounced, began to roll. He switched off the fuel. The engine's noise was replaced by the clatter of running over the rough pasture. He passed the tractor, glimpsing the driver's surprised expression. The plane slowed as if running through mud. Then it came to a gradual stop, the gradient of the field rising in front of the nose, the tractor in the mirrors abandoned by the farmer, who was stalking towards him.

The engine ticked as it cooled. He opened the cockpit door. The gyros whined down into silence. He heard birdsong and then the shouts of the farmer. The sheep had bolted from the shade out into the sunlight.

Gant waited for the Frenchman to reach the plane. Looking down at his reddened, perspiring features, his evident outrage, he shrugged and said:

"Sorry, fella. Engine trouble—" He climbed out beneath the wing, tugging at a rucksack, and dropped to the grass. The Frenchman was gesticulating angrily at the Cessna, at his field, at the already nibbling sheep even at the sky and the country around them.

"Sorry can't parlez Franqais, fella." A shrug of incomprehension as he continued: "Engine trouble." He spoke as if to an idiot child.

"I need a garage got to make some repairs… Understand?"

His relief had become amusement.

"Garage?" the Frenchman replied in heavily accented English. The aircraft your engine? I heard—" He pointed at the sky, at his ears.

Gant nodded.

That's right—" He looked at his watch, already possessed by a sense of the small scene as an interlude, something put in a Hitchcock movie, just before someone got killed or the audience, taken off-guard, was shocked in some other way.

Strickland's farmhouse was no more than a couple of miles from where he stood.

"I can leave the plane here While I go for spare parts?" He banged his hand on the engine cowling.

"Repairs? Can I leave the plane here?"

The farmer nodded furiously.

"Mais oui, m'sieur… You are OK?"

He should be making final approach to Bordeaux's Merignac airport in another ten minutes. He was overdue to contact them. Time was already being wasted, evaporating in the morning heat.

Thanks, fella I'm fine." He locked the door of the Cessna.

"Where's the nearest garage?"

"St. Amand-de-Coly, maybe." He shrugged.

"What do you need, m'sieur?"

"Just a couple of parts." He studied the map, pointing out the village the farmer had named. It lay in the same direction as Strickland's farmhouse, maybe a couple of miles farther southwest. He wouldn't create any suspicion by suddenly heading off in the wrong direction.

The farmer's blunt, earth-browned finger tapped the map in agreement.

St. Amand-de-Coly. I'll be maybe two hours, three—?"

"No one will steal your aircraft, m'sieur!" The farmer laughed. Gant slung the rucksack across his back, waved to the farmer, and began walking towards the gate of the field. Time began to hurry in his head. They would be waiting at Bordeaux airport, they would soon realise he wasn't going to show… There was more champagne, more canapes, then the sudden harsh lighting of the Channel Tunnel as the train sped into it like someone dashing for shelter from the rain clouds gathering in the blue Kent sky. Marian concentrated with a deliberate effort on the remnants of her constituency post bag the tickle of her claustrophobia raising her temperature, making her body wriggle uncomfortably in her seat. The table in front of her was littered with the ordinariness, the seductions of Parliament; submissions from researchers on half a dozen matters, her tape recorder and notepad. Roger and one or two others had already mocked her Goody-Twoshoes attention to Commons business as they wolfed the canapes, downed the champagne. Attentive stewards glided and poured and offered as brazenly as hoardings. Come to sunny Brussels for the Good Life… She rubbed her eyes, and looked up as Campbell slipped into the seat opposite her.

Ben Campbell again, as if to dispel the comfortable talismans she had drawn around her. The lights of the Tunnel flashed past the windows like some hypnotic and virtual reality.

"Looks fast, mm?" he murmured, nodding at the window.

"Wait 'til you try Skyliner you've never flown on her, have you?"

"No looking forward to it." Was it his presence or simply the nag of claustrophobia that made her feel heated, almost menopausal?

"Something to celebrate," she added.

"Too true! To think that a couple of weeks ago—" He shook his head.

"Skin of their teeth, Aero UK and the Froggies not to overstate the case."

"Are they all out of the wood?"

He waggled his hand.

"Let's say the Commission is still uttering collective sighs of relief." He grinned.

"Grandiose project back on the rails? Almost Napoleonic, one might say."

He seemed puzzled for a moment, then: "Ah, you're grinding your axe, Marian."

It was her turn to shake her head. Her hair fell across her face.

There was a moment of purely sexual interest in Campbell's brown eyes, then their interrogative, assessing expression was back. She brushed her hair back ostentatiously, teasingly, but he remained unaffected.

"Not really. I'm pleased that Skyliner has a future. So are a lot of my constituents not to mention the shareholders… people like David who must have stood to lose a fortune. He is a major investor in Aero UK, isn't he? And he's a subcontractor in a dozen ways…" She expelled a relieved-sounding breath.

"A damned close-run thing, as someone else once said in Brussels."

"Quite." Archly, he added: "Does this signal a change of heart. You'll go easy on poor Bryan Coulthard in future?"

"I was always keen for Skyliner to succeed, Ben. It was the cost that was close to being obscene, nothing else. Not even the dreams of bureaucrats, however wet."

He smiled a moment later.

"A hit. But you'll see it's a wonderful aircraft. More luxurious than this train, business-class level of comfort for every passenger, first-class sleeping compartments… and the food's out of this world!"

"I'm not in the market for one of my own," she murmured.

He seemed suddenly irritated by her mockery, and snapped:

"Perhaps you should try giving it a rest, Marian! Let people who care have a say for a change." His dark complexion was suffused with irritation. It was as if his role discomfited him, attached him to a stubborn, recalcitrant child he detested.

"Ben, I didn't know you cared—"

"Marian, yours isn't the only commitment in town." Then, with an effort: "Sorry… But it is important for Skyliner to succeed. The whole future of European plane making was at stake, you know."

"I know. Apart from millions, even billions government fundings, private fortunes."

His eyes narrowed momentarily and she was angry at her overconfidence.

Campbell only looked like a male model, she should not underestimate his intelligence. He was a highly attuned political animal.

Their glasses were topped up once more. Marian refused yet another tiny sandwich or sliver of toast and caviare. Around them, the noise of their companions was entirely convivial, the laughter hearty and uninhibited by party or personal antagonism. It was as if the scene had been arranged as a temptation. Why not join in, have fun, ignore the dark corners? It's all over and done with now why make a fuss?

If only it were that simple, she answered herself and the joviality.

"Did you know Michael Lloyd, Ben? Ever work with him at the

Commission?" It was asked carefully, almost gently, yet it startled him like blatant honesty might have done.

"Er yes. Couple of years back, when he first arrived. We were together in the Transport Commissioner's office. I — heard about his overdose." There was a slight emphasis upon the word, the shadowy mark left by an eraser. He shook his head.

"Great shame. Bright young man. Bit independent-minded, leftish where the Commission wasn't. Still, I'm sure he'd have gone far. Did you know him, Marian?"

"A little. Mutual acquaintances, interests. You know."

"Ah, I see. I thought you were closer than that."

"No…"

Campbell glanced at his watch, then along the aisle of the compartment.

She felt he seemed satisfied with the assiduity with which other Euro MPs and one or two Commission functionaries were soothing and smoothing, flattering and flannel ling

He murmured: "His current partner seems to have been at a loss to explain it I mean, it must have been a terrible shock." The embarrassment was almost instantly drained from his features by an effort of will. He leaned back.

"I heard she was in a terrible state, poor thing."

In her notebook, on a disk, they had been Marian's own words at a loss to explain it… There was no reason on earth why Campbell should have knowledge of the young woman, or have taken anything but the most cursory interest in Lloyd's death. Michael and he, she knew, had never liked each other. Campbell had either read, or been told of, the jottings from her PC. After the burglary.

"I expect she was. It's always so difficult to deal with that sort of death. Such a waste. Almost as if Michael was rejecting her. And she had no idea he had a heroin habit… Strange, that."

"I — er, I suppose so."

The lights of the Tunnel sped past. Her awareness of the train's bullet like velocity increased. It seemed to be rushing her headlong towards risk.

"And my girl is safe?" Giles Pyott asked from his position at the window, from where he had already announced the renewed presence of the surveillance on Aubrey's flat.

Aubrey wanted to be open with Pyott. Instead, his busy fears closed him like a mussel's shell, separating him from his oldest friend. What was there, after all, to make David stop now? Marian had not told Giles of the burglary, and now he could not do so, either. David had proof of her certain knowledge. He should not have allowed her to travel to Brussels, not without taking many more precautions than merely a repeated Take care, be careful… "Yes, Giles. Public places, in constant company I'm sure," he answered sweetly, almost with conviction.

Giles, for the stilling of his own fears and perhaps out of a pride in his daughter's competence, seemed to accept his reassurance.

"Very well. But Gant? He is our agent, but can he do anything?"

"I hope so."

Gant had left unseen at dawn. A light aircraft had been hired, a flight plan to Bordeaux filed. He had papers other than his own. Even so, it did not seem adequate, to pit one man against Fraser, French security, David. With no certainty that Strickland, the saboteur, was sitting calmly in the Dordogne, just waiting for Mitchell to collect him like a parcel.

"Very well, then," Giles announced.

"Us? What do we do?" The old man who turned from the window with grave impatience was as erect as ever he had been as a serving soldier.

This," Aubrey sighed, gesturing at the littered desk behind which he was seated, wedged into one corner of the flat's drawing room. He had, he realised, been sitting there, almost without stirring, since six-thirty.

"I think we might make a start here."

Pyott picked up the file and wandered nearer to the window, at once an old man again as he slipped on his reading glasses.

After Gant had left, Aubrey had attempted to sleep, but the effort had been futile.

Instead, he had risen, dressed and sat at his desk as the early-morning joggers had passed beneath the windows and pigeons and crows had busily inspected the grass beyond the railings of Regent's Park. He had heard mockery in the bird calls, out of which had arisen an anger at his age, his lack of office. And a fear that he had sent Gant on a mission that might prove fatal… and failed to prevent Marian from sailing off towards the reefs and disaster in her characteristic mood of utter selfconfidence and moral invulnerability. He had written the bitter thoughts in his diary, something he rarely did in recent, retired years. The exercise had not helped to calm or reassure.

"We shan't have much time, Kenneth Johnny Laxton's flying to Brussels today.

Marian told me. The European Commissioner for Urban Development has to show his face at the various bashes Tig's attending. Stands to reason." The last phrase was delivered with the snort of a soldier contemptuous of civilians and their petty corruptions.

"Yes I anticipated that. I've invited him to lunch with us at the Club, as a consequence. I have a brief board meeting one of David's companies, I have to confess," he added with a kind of soiled shame.

"But I shall be there before one."

"Fine. I'll be waiting for the two of you." He smiled in a hard, anticipatory expression.

"I don't want to pour cold water, Kenneth but are we likely to get anything from Johnny Laxton? The man was so stupid as a Cabinet minister I have to wonder whether he knows anything at all that would be useful to us."

Aubrey laughed, the sharp barking noise of a fox.

"Oh, I think Laxton knows, Giles. I think Laxton's allowed a great deal of the money to pass through his hands, across his desk." He hefted himself upright from the chair with audible noises of breath and old joints, but his step was firm and urgent across the carpet.

"Come on, old friend. We must frighten Johnny Laxton as he has never been frightened before!"

He grabbed Pyott's arm with an eager, young man's grip, as if to sweep him, girl like on to some imagined dance floor. Pyott, looking down at Aubrey, grinned.

"To horse," he murmured.

"And towards the sound of the guns."

Aubrey watched Giles' fears for Marian swallowed by his awakened enthusiasm.

His own for her and for Gant alike — remained bubbling like volcanic hot springs.

The track up to the farmhouse and its single barn was deserted. The house itself seemed even more silent and lifeless. From the knoll where he lay, studying it through field glasses, he was certain Strickland had gone. Not merely to the local store in the nearest village but gone, period. The previous evening and night, and the hours of the flight, collapsed behind him like a derelict building, leaving an empty lot. The mission was rubble. He had just the one address, this single lead to Strickland. There wouldn't be any more, not for him, not for a fugitive from justice. The Dordogne noon was heavy with the noises of insects. A small tractor inched across a distant field, and cattle were dotted like specks of soot on sloping meadows. There was the high contrail of an airliner that had taken off from Bordeaux's Merignac airport, where his flight plan had claimed he would land. He was overdue… He could make up the lost time by leaving now, there was nothing down there for him.

He swung the glasses impatiently across the landscape. Dotted farmhouses and barns, scattered villages in folds of the land or on limestone outcrops, the buildings brown as coins in the noon sunlight.

Stretches of dark holm-oak forest, groves of walnut trees, open fields of yellowing cereal crops. Chateaux and hunched, brooding castles like watchtowers marked the Dordogne valley to the south of him. His gaze moved back to Strickland's farmhouse.

Stillness… He waited another half-hour, then slung the rucksack across his shoulders, rose to his feet and began jogging gently down the slope towards the grey-white track leading up to the house. Nothing moving… nothing. He climbed one fence, then another. Butterflies rose from the long grass, he startled a bird but nothing human.

The midday was hot. He slowed to a cautious walk as he reached the track a hundred yards from the house. His shoulders slumped to casualness, his gait suggested he had already walked some distance.

Strickland might have recognised him… but then, Strickland wasn't home.

The shutters, small rectangles of peeling green paint set in the golden limestone block of the farmhouse, were closed on each of the ground-floor windows as well as the first floor. Three smaller windows jutted like snouts from the steeply pitched roof of flat brown tiles.

Beyond the house, the weather-peeled doors of the barn were similarly closed. The place didn't seem out of keeping with Strickland's personality. The Preacherman possessed a diffident, hermit like introversion he was the man who had been the boy who spent day after day in his bedroom, building, dismantling, reading, brooding. Gant halted, studying the house and his reflections on Strickland.

The guy was mad, certifiable… and too much like himself. He shrugged but the recognition would not be dismissed. Another lonely, maybe brutalised kid who had retreated into himself, kept out of sight of parents, neighbours, the whole world. And finally poured everything bottled up and unused into flying. ocn Gant shook his head. It didn't matter, except that this was just the kind of place Strickland would have chosen.

He reached the door of the house and knocked innocently, checking the pistol Aubrey had given him, thrust into his waistband in the small of his back. The sound of his knocking died away somewhere inside the empty house. He tried the handle of the door. The place must be locked up-the door opened slightly. As if the worn, clumsy door handle had burned him, he shut the door, moving away from it towards the nearest window, perspiration breaking out on his forehead.

The door shouldn't be unlocked… It was unlocked deliberately.

Strickland made bombs… Roussillon closed the flap of his mobile phone and turned in the front passenger seat of the big Citroen estate car.

"He's reached the farmhouse. For a moment, they thought he was going in through the front door—"

"But no such luck?" Fraser interrupted, a lack of surprise on his features.

"I told you it wouldn't do our job for us, Strickland's booby-trap device."

"You did indeed, my friend."

Roussillon shrugged. His men had searched the farmhouse early that morning. A minute visual inspection had revealed the front door rigged to explode a small bomb when pushed open. He had ordered the device left in place and the farmhouse put under close surveillance. There had been the chance that Strickland who had obviously disappeared would take care of his fellow-American for them. Now, they would have to do the job themselves.

He flicked a lock of dark hair away from his forehead. Through the rear window, he could see the small town of Beynac huddling at the foot of the hill on which its castle stood. The second car was fifty yards behind the Citroen. They were half an hour, at most, from Strickland's place.

Gant would find no clues as to Strickland's whereabouts. The place looked like a gite awaiting the first tourists of the season rather than a place where someone had lived until very recently.

The main road followed a loop of the Dordogne River.

Limestone cliffs, dark oak and chestnut trees crowded down to the road.

Sunlight gleamed on the river.

Fraser's manner and tone had been lacking in affability. He was imitating, like the good messenger he was, the displeasure of his master that Gant had escaped his hit-team in Oslo. Beyond his irritation with failure and Fraser alike, Roussillon felt a resentment at his increasing collusion with the former SIS agent and Winterborne.

His immediate superiors had instructed him to continue the association.

Balzac-Stendhal, wrapping themselves in the tri colore had borrowed him and certain elements of his service, the DST, until such time as all possibility of scandal had receded. Effectively, he was taking his orders directly from Winterborne rather than from Paris. What had begun as the protection of secret funding to the French plane maker in contradiction of EU principles, had become a manhunt for an American agent, the concealment of two acts of sabotage, the hunt for the bomber. The affaire Winterborne had become distasteful, demeaning. Le diable was always in the world, at one's elbow… The devils with which he was forced to consort because of this operation were not those he would have chosen.

The road dropped once more towards the river as it slid between limestone outcrops like a silver snake slipping into a crevice between boulders. The village of Domme stared down at the car from its crag.

Pour la France did not seem an adequate or satisfying description of what Roussillon was being called upon to perform. It was a bandage around his eyes that was becoming threadbare. The trees lining the road became mesmerising, flickering dappled light on the windscreen.

"How did he get here?" Fraser asked in curiously

"A light aircraft was seen earlier in the area. He may have landed it somewhere close to the farmhouse," Roussillon replied, adding with a certain, relished malice:

"You have no idea how he left England this morning?"

"If it was his plane they saw flying around, get your people to look for it. It'll need putting out of action. How much bloody further is it, anyway?"

Twenty minutes."

"Let's hope he's still there when we arrive."

"He can't leave again without being seen and stopped."

"Good."

"I think this Gant is not M'sieur Winterborne's big headache, mon ami.

I think he has to decide how he can dispose of an English MP if he is to feel secure.

Don't you agree?"

The shutter was loose and he angrily dragged it open. He squinted into gloom, his breathing hard and dry, the blood still quick in his ears.

Strickland made bombs… He fumbled at his waistband, locating the Smith & Wesson revolver Aubrey had removed from a small wall safe and handed to him as he might have presented a dead rat to a hotel manager.

He could make out the lifeless outlines of furniture. He moved further along the wall, turning the corner to another shuttered window. The shutter resisted his efforts, but its neighbour did not. There were flecks of green paint and dust on his fingers. He looked into the same big room, this time towards the door.

He adjusted the field glasses, focused them against the glass of the window and studied the door frame. Eventually, as his eyes became accustomed to the dim light, he discovered the snail-trail of wire and the small box that had to be the trigger mechanism. Open the door, trigger the device wherever it was hidden, maybe up on one of the exposed beams? and by the time it took a man to walk carefully to the centre of the big room, his head would have been blown off, his torso ripped to shreds. It would need only an ordinary frag grenade with a substituted time-trigger for a pin… Strickland could do that in minutes, with his eyes closed and his hands in mittens.

He studied the window and then broke the small pane nearest the catch.

Pushed it open, then eased it up on the sash, holding his breath.

Waited-exhaled loudly. There could be a dozen devices, a dozen ways to set off one device… Gant climbed slowly over the windowsill and stepped into the room.

He listened to the undisturbed, unalarming silence, then crossed to the door.

Another six inches open and the wire would have parted from its contact and… yes, the tiny box was a transmitter. He looked up, towards the beamed ceiling, low and near his head. Taped to one of the beams was a short tube. Six steps into the room from the door, perhaps a five-second fuse, or even ten to account for any intruder's caution, then the detonation.

He stood for a moment studying the dull metal of the tube, the colourless tape, the grain and knots of the beam to which the device was attached. Strickland might have assumed that no one local, no one innocent, would push open his door but it didn't matter anyway. The message would have remained the same even if French security or anyone else had read the item in a newspaper. Don't come after me, stay out of my back yard.

He looked around the room. The sunlight through the two sets of shutters he had opened revealed an orderliness, a contentment. An old dresser, better than the one in the house in Iowa he had waited years to escape from, was vivid with heavily decorated plates, china cups.

There were paintings on the whitewashed walls that bulged pregnantly with the history of the old building. Sofas covered with bold, stylish cloth, a deeply polished dining table.

He moved warily through to the kitchen… found an animal's bowl, empty of food, the crocks washed and slotted into a plastic drainer, little dust. A neatly folded newspaper in the trash can, no wiring on the rear door. NoIR boxes, no wires that disappeared beneath rugs.

Strickland had left just the one clear message. Where was the animal?

He looked through the window towards the barn, then returned to the big room, out of which a staircase creaked to the first floor. He climbed the worn treads carefully, pausing at each one.

A narrow corridor, two bedrooms, neat in the gloom of shutters, a bathroom.

There was nothing in the bathroom cabinet or the shower cubicle.

He returned downstairs, checked his watch, listened to the continuing silence.

Then he began his search, turning out each of the kitchen drawers, opening all the cupboards. A packet of sugar, coffee the icebox was empty. No calendar, no notepad. He searched the big, gnarled dresser, polished almost to dullness, removing each of the drawers, emptying the cupboards. Strickland evaded him like a wraith, like smoke. Either there had never been anything personal that wasn't on a laptop or it had been methodically cleared from the house before Strickland had left. Check the garbage

A sideboard yielded nothing. He heard the ticking of an old, thick-wasted, big hipped clock that stood against one wall. It became louder and louder, mocking him. Time going, time wasted. Clock—?

He opened the door in its belly and checked the weights. The pendulum flashed dull brass, the lead weights were near the floor. The key, shaped like a pump handle, was inside the door on a string, but there was nothing else. Had Strickland come back here after Oslo?

He opened a small desk using a kitchen knife to break the toy-like lock. It was empty. He opened each drawer and replaced it, his frustration a hot anger. He thrust the last drawer back violently, meeting a small resistance. He pushed again, and something crackled, like stiff card being folded by the thrust of the drawer. He yanked it out and bent to look into the shadowy space. Carefully, he withdrew the small obstruction… a creased snapshot. He smoothed it on the inlaid leather of the desk.

Strickland stared out at him, a severe, hardly permitted smile on his face, his eyes narrowed against the sun. It was some years old, by his appearance. He was the age he had been when the Company still employed him. He was standing with one foot raised on a fence no, it was the railing of some kind of jetty. There were mountains, still snow-tipped, in the distance, and the water of a river or lake rather than the ocean blearily behind the figure.

It was the only tangible indication that Strickland had ever been in the house. Gant put the snapshot in the pocket of his windcheater. The clock ticked, the only other sign of recent habitation.

He looked around the room again. He had been there for almost a half-hour. He listened to the silence that stretched away into the distance, interrupted only by the noises of birds, the occasional lowing of cows. There was nothing else downstairs, except maybe a garbage can in the yard. He'd better check upstairs first.

Fifteen minutes later, he knew that the snapshot was the only thing Strickland had overlooked, except some hair in the drain hole of the shower. He'd either had little there that was personal, or he'd been as thorough in removing all trace of himself as he was when bomb-making. Again, the sensation that the man was lost to him assailed Gant, maddening him as hornets would have done. He crashed a fist against the old plaster of the bedroom wall, hearing its thick hollowness, sensing the blow's force die away in the heavy stones of the house. He'd returned to this room, the larger of the two with the better view over the countryside, after checking the cramped rooms in the roof-space. Dust, dead insects, the rustle of swallows building or feeding young. Nothing else.

He leaned back against the wall, his face raised to the beamed ceiling.

The room smelt of old plaster and abandonment. The bed was neatly made, with the mocking suggestion that Strickland planned to return. He opened the window. Gradually, the scent of grass and flowers and the afternoon heat wafted towards him. Gant's breathing calmed. It was impossible now. Strickland was gone, period… Eventually, his hands pushed him away from the wall and his line of sight fell across the window. The land dropped away from the house towards the Dordogne valley where limestone outcrops were raised like a ragged dyke against the afternoon sky. The specks of cattle, the orderliness of walnut groves, golden houses… For a moment, the dark clothing made Gant believe he was seeing a scarecrow. A figure was walking towards the farmhouse, moving with a caution and slowness that was not entirely caused by the slope of the land. He crouched beside the window. The figure came on, unaware of him, almost bent double at moments, frequently pausing. Then one arm was waved and Gant saw a second figure rise above some sudden contour of the land. As he watched, the two figures began scurrying the last hundred yards or so towards the house. White faces, hands… He made out the shapes of weapons.

Gant hurried towards the door, across the corridor into the second bedroom.

Pressing against the wall, he peered round the window frame. Another figure was on one knee, weapon trained, two hundred yards away.

Three at least. They knew he was there. The house had been under surveillance and he'd failed to spot it. He'd walked right into the trap.