A Different War

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Innocence and Experience Aubrey, Laxton and Pyott sat with their sherries near the great chimneypiece of coloured marbles in the Library of the Club. Three men of years, distinction and some renown who might have been taken by an observer to be comfortably at one with their surroundings. Intrinsic to the pageant of power, privilege and patronage in the high-ceilinged room; suitable additions to the lines of grand portraits or the murals of victories in foreign wars.

Yet to Aubrey's sharp, rather sour inner eye, they were simply three old men, two of whom were rendered ineffectual by lack of office and the third a political trimmer who had gone to the bad, dirtied his hands in a massive fraud.

A spy and a soldier pretending to the moral heights while their companion complacently walked the valley of the shadow of avarice… amusing, in another context. They were, perhaps, a frieze for the times.

"Your health, John," Aubrey proposed. Laxton smiled sleekly in response, with a glance at his watch suggestive of the preciousness of his own time.

Pyott sipped his sherry, frowning at the gesture.

"Kenneth," Laxton purred, looking around him, measuring the living against the portraits of the dead, against his own prestige. He seemed eager to exchange nods of familiarity, to give and receive deference.

"Very good of you to offer me lunch a light one, though, I think, in the circumstances." The smile appeared indelible, recently painted. As a politician, he had often seemed harassed on television or in the House. As a Commissioner, he was Olympian.

A present member of the Cabinet passed with a friendly nod. Laxton responded as eagerly as he might have done to a call-girl.

The trough is likely to be laden this evening, then, is it?" Pyott asked gruffly, as if the murals had suddenly reminded him of the sole relationship it was possible to have with Europe. Wellington on horseback, his army behind him, clashing with the French at Salamanca.

Laxton remained unperturbed.

"I heard your girl's not above accepting the Commissions hospitality, Giles," he murmured. Pyott's momentary scowl was as sharp as if Laxton's mention of Marian contained an open threat.

"Doubtless we shall all be treated to another seminar on the iniquities of Brussels, over the canapes."

"A hit, Giles," Aubrey soothed, smiling with a dazzling innocence.

"I suggest the sole, John, if you wish to preserve your appetite and I think a Corton Charlemagne to start. You can continue with the bottle while Giles, who so evidently feeds exclusively on red meat, will probably join me in sharing the claret." He leaned back in the deep, high-backed leather armchair, innocence becoming a look of limited intelligence and great complacency on his cherubic features.

Laxton sighed in anticipation.

"Do you know, Giles," Aubrey announced, "I found our old companion-in harness dear Gilbert, in rather liverish mood at the board meeting this morning."

"Liverish? That young wife of his hasn't upped and left, has she?"

Laxton's attention seemed satisfactorily drawn, as if Aubrey were opening a small leather moneybag which contained that most priceless of the metals of government, gossip. In this instance concerning a former Permanent Secretary at the Department of Trade and Industry.

"I think not. I merely enquired as to whether there had ever been any interest at the DTI, during his tenure, in Marian's suggestions of misplaced funds and dubious payments over this' — Laxton s features allowed a purplish suspicion to spread like a stain over his self-satisfaction 'urn, Millennium Regeneration Project, in the Midlands." The sherry at his lips seemed to tickle the back of Laxton's throat. Pyott glanced warningly at Aubrey, who persisted: "I just wanted to be clear whether there had been any form of internal enquiry into the rumours that were current in the House and the press—"

His eyes sharpened their glance the moment Laxton interrupted him.

"Surely that was just Private Eye — type nonsense, designed to embarrass?" he insisted, adding as he glanced at Pyott: "Just the sort of thing to get your daughter aerated!" His chuckle was thick with confidence.

"Exactly what Gilbert said, in much the same tone of voice — dismissive," Aubrey demurred. There you have it, you see. Anyone who so much as raises the subject is laughed at as a fool." He shook his head, as if reproving Pyott. The gesture deflected Laxton's suspicion.

"But surely the net was spread a little wider than Private Eye, John?"

A steward approached. Aubrey glanced at the lunch menu and the wine list on his lap, then closed the heavily leather bound volumes with a snap. Laxton stumbled his order to Aubrey.

'… and for General Pyott and myself, the smoked salmon to start, followed by the Beef Wellington. A Corton-Charlemagne and the '83 Chateau Palmer. Thank you, George." Aubrey rubbed his hands in anticipation.

"Splendid. Now, where were we—? Ah, yes. John's stout defence, echoing that of Gilbert, of the probity of the funding for the Millennium Regeneration Project—"

"What is your interest in this, Kenneth?" Laxton enquired, his eyes hooded, his sherry glass on the low table between them.

There curiosity?"

Aubrey shrugged expansively, smiling at a passing former Permanent

Secretary at the Foreign Office, a man affable by nature, seized with enmity in all his dealings with Aubrey and the intelligence services, until their mutual retirement. Apparently, a moral distaste for espionage and subterfuge — when not the private fiefdom of the diplomatic service had inspired his antagonism.

"Probably. You know how it is, the smell of the battle afar off, the old warhorse thing."

"You're wasting your time, Kenneth, you really are!" Laxton assured.

"As Gilbert affirmed."

"Seriously, Kenneth I am the Commissioner for Urban Development, after all. I would know!"

"Did you?" Pyott asked abruptly, exact in his timing. Laxton was disconcerted.

"DidlwhatT "Know."

There was nothing to know."

"When questions were asked? You did enquire?"

Laxton's features were blustery with suspicion.

The DTI felt that the press rumours ought to be confronted, and confounded. The then President of the Board of Trade—"

"Whose office is reputedly the largest in Whitehall!" Pyott barked.

'-contacted me. I was able to assure him that he could, with the utmost confidence, refute the allegations of—"

"Fraud? Misappropriation of funds?" Aubrey interjected.

"You're certain? There are all sorts of rumours, you know, John. We'd just like to be certain."

"You? Why should you require reassurance?" There was a cunning in Laxton's expression. His wave in response to the mouthed greeting of a former Cabinet colleague was perfunctory, distracted. Contempt for their superannuation mingled with a desire to probe the depth of their suspicion. Tell me that, Kenneth.

Whatever can it be to do with you?"

Aubrey's past confronted Laxton, giving birth to the suspicion that he might be on some kind of temporary assignment. His questions might be being asked on behalf of…? It had been the tactic which had suggested itself to Aubrey, and towards which he had guided Giles.

Laxton could not know, with any degree of certainty, who in reality was the originator of the questions put to him by a former Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee did old spies, after all, ever really retire? Laxton's confusion amused.

"I'm not at liberty to divulge," whispered Aubrey, leaning forward in his chair.

"You know how these things work."

' What things, precisely?"

"Word to the wise… could you just check something for us, that kind of thing," Aubrey murmured. Indeed, the Club was exactly suited to the conversation. The chimneypiece dwarfed even tall men, suggesting conspiratorial groupings, activities.

"Nothing to worry about, John. Just an assurance sought."

"Assurance of what?"

That there is nothing to come out no detonations to be anticipated."

Laxton evidently regarded Aubrey as a potential ally, Giles as an intruder.

"It's why Giles is here, principally," Aubrey explained.

"We want to be able to assure Marian quieten her. Soothe." Again, he leaned forward. There are some rather alarming instances of work curtailed, of late payments or no payments at all… and your department at the Commission, we know, provided the funding, passed on the grants… mm?"

There's nothing in all this, Kenneth!" Laxton protested, his forehead heated and pink. The money has been disbursed by Brussels by my authority, I suppose and the project is—" '-not on track!" Pyott snapped.

"No, it's no good soothing me, Kenneth. My girl's not the only one to have heard rumours. You may think you can cover up—" Aubrey raised his hand in warning.

"Giles, please? he demanded with mock exasperation.

"I'm sorry, John. You were saying—?"

The project's own complexities account for any delays there may have been, Kenneth. David has assured me—" He appeared to have startled himself.

"You'll see. Go and look for yourself, why not?" His confidence returned like blood-flow released from a tourniquet.

Aubrey felt disappointment like a stone in his chest. After a moment's insight, Laxton was sufficiently confident to become dismissive. He really did have nothing to fear. The diverted river of funding had been restored to its proper course towards the Millennium Regeneration Project.

"Was there a proper DTI investigation?"

"So far as I am aware, there was. As there was at the Commission."

Giles, still in character, harrumphed loudly. Aubrey's smile was bland, retentive.

Laxton, their best, weakest target, could not be shaken. The recent past held no ghosts that would come back to haunt him. He felt safe.

It depended, then, on Gant and Marian.

The line of perspiration along his forehead was like an old branding mark, claiming ownership. His palms were clammy against the old, whitewashed plaster as he pressed back against the wall of the smaller bedroom. A man kneeling, rifle raised, drawing a bead on the house, the slight movements of the barrel caused by his telescopic sight's surveillance of each of the house's windows.

With a great effort he pushed himself away from the wall and across the polished floorboards. A bright rug was disturbed by his clumsy steps.

He crossed the narrow landing and crouched his way to the window of the main bedroom. Slowly, he raised his head at the edge of the window.

His heart was pounding, like panicked footsteps hurrying away from there.

The two men were no more than forty yards from the house and only a few yards apart. Gant smelt the must, age, wood of the house. The afternoon was heady in the empty, closed farmhouse. Both men were dressed in black, accustomed to this kind of encounter. Gant's hand scrabbled for the loops of the rucksack and dragged it across the floor to his side. The two men, seeming to have communicated some silent decision to each other, came on quickly towards the shadow thrown by the house.

He heard the first of them collide gently with the wall beneath the bedroom window, then a further, softer detonation of flesh and clothing against the house.

They would know about the booby-trap, they'd come in via the window he had prised open. He wiped angrily at his forehead. He touched at the revolver Aubrey had supplied. Sweat under his arms, hands clammy. The stigmata of the old game, he realised, his lips parting across his teeth in a feral, threatening expression.

Three, four how many? He withdrew the revolver and checked the chamber, listening beyond the glass to the noises of birds, the rustle of a slight breeze, the sound of footsteps maybe along the wall of the farmhouse. He replaced the Smith & Wesson in his waistband, this time nestling it against his stomach. Its stubby barrel and no-snag front sight were unfamiliar only for a moment. Wood creaked in the afternoon silence.

There was no one between himself and the barn. If he dropped from the window and ran, he would be exposed for no more than thirty yards, a matter of a few seconds… while he ran headlong, enlarging all the while in a telescopic sight, falling away as if kicked by a horse when the first bullet struck. There was no one between him and the barn because they wanted him to go that way, if he had seen them at all.

Gant, still crouching, edged his way across the polished floor, sensing rather than hearing the tiny scuffs and irritations of his rubber-soled shoes against the wood.

Then he straightened on the landing and tiptoed towards the head of the stairs, aware of the dry, crumbling texture of the plaster as his left hand stretched out to steady his unnaturally slow movements. The rucksack was slung across his shoulders. On a table at the head of the stairs was an old oil lamp. Gant could smell the fuel, the burnt wick.

It rested on a clean, neat cloth of lacework, the kind his mother might have made. Strickland's mother, too… shadow across the room, short and stubby with the early-afternoon sun, pausing after having climbed through the window. He listened and could hear the unseen man breathing, and perhaps another's breaths beyond that. One still outside the window. He waited, reluctant to draw the gun, to fire it.

The shadow moved, precisely, carefully. It possessed a bunched hand from which a tiny, sticklike accompanying shadow protruded. They would even expect this one to get blown away, but it would serve to locate him exactly, narrow the field of fire… He was sweating profusely.

The revolver remained in his waistband, his hand instead touching against the polished brass of the old oil lamp, a pattern of leaves etched on its clouded glass bowl.

Three or four more steps and the shadow would be at the foot of the stairs, they would be visible to one another… His grandmother had worked by the light of lamps like this one, his mother had kept one as a memento… He had picked it up as the memory drifted through his awareness, had replaced it like a reluctant purchaser, had opened the box of matches that lay beside it on the lace, had watched the shadow take one step, then another… Had held his breath as he eased off the clouded glass and crooked it against his stomach with a bent arm, had turned up the wick, had struck the match, a loud, slowed-down sound, watched the wick flare up, before-foot of the stairs, the first man, his hand on the banister. Gant threw the flaring oil lamp towards the stocky, square-faced man, who ducked aside. The lamp broke, spilt its oil. The flame ran after it hungrily.

Even as the fire began behind him and the curtains burned as quickly as rags, his gun was aimed at Gant. He drew the Smith & Wesson and fired twice, ducking back against the plaster that splintered from his attacker's shots, stippling his cheek with fragments like small stones.

The man lay sprawled back across a flaming rug, his clothes already smouldering. The crackle of an RT stronger than the crackling of wood catching fire. The second man was still outside the window. Gant launched himself down the short flight of stairs, not pausing to glance at the window, turning instead towards the kitchen, running-colliding.

His breath deserted him, his body was shocked into vulnerability as he lurched back against the heavy table, seeing the man he had collided with arched against the sink, as if they were two fighters resting.

Through the window, a fuzzy image of men running. He thought he recognised the figure and stride of one of the team from Oslo. The man against the sink was coughing air back into his lungs. Gant struck him across the temple with the stubby barrel of the revolver, the foresight cutting the skin open. Even as the man fell aside, Gant was opening the door and running towards the barn.

His ears pounded. It was difficult to snatch air into his lungs, the knowledge that he was running towards a marksman compressing his chest.

Someone shouted as the first shot whined away near his shoulder. A window shattered behind him. He plunged through an open gate in a low stone wall into the dappled shadows of trees. A small orchard. Old nuts, empty shells, cracked beneath his feet. A tree was white-scarred by other shots as he surged through the orchard bent almost double. Sunlight, shadow, sunlight The land dropped sharp as a grassy cliff away from the orchard towards a grove of dark trees, towards fields dotted with animals and fringed with lines of holm-oak.

Beyond the nearest field, gleaming through the trees, the glint of water. He saw the immediate landscape like an aerial map, from the vantage of the Cessna.

He glanced back. Flame licked from a window, pale in the afternoon light. Puffs of smoke. Three men running after him into the orchard, the one he thought he had recognised from the hangar in Oslo waving his arms, directing the others into flanking movements.

He skittered down the steep slope, the long, lush meadow grass brushing against his knees. He stumbled, falling. Two shots whined over his head, the flat cracks of the rifle startling a grazing cow, which lumbered away from him. He scrabbled to his knees, looking back. They were already coming quickly down the slope. The trees and the water were still a hundred yards or more away.

Gant ran, weaving like some manic foot baller evading invisible tackles. There were two more shots. He swerved left, right, right again, left-crashed into a thin branch, then through tough, restraining bushes. Lost balance, stumbled forward, then rolled. Water drenched him. The banks of the stream were high and close, the water no more than a couple of feet deep. He was holding the revolver above his head as if frozen in a desperate waving action. Trees leaned heavily over the slow water. For moments only, he was hidden from them.

David Winterborne's office looked down on Poultry's narrow street, and across towards the Bank of England and the Mansion House. He could also see the Royal Exchange and St. Mary Woolnoth, the oblong Hawksmoor tower which struggled to symbolise faith, surrounded as it was by the high rises of banks. David had selected the location for his corporate headquarters years before, when the view from the windows had seemed more necessary; an attempt to suggest that Winterborne Holdings truly belonged in the City.

He looked now at the church, imagining its ornate, baroque interior, its columns and baldachino reredos. It was Marian who had first taken him inside, made him look properly, lectured him. Marian, naturally

… Irritated by the recollection, or even the pigeons on the windowsill, Winterborne turned to face his desk. The screen of his PC held the e-mail letter he had drafted to Strickland.

It could be sent anonymously, without trace. It contained a proposal for a commission. A target for one of Strickland's bombs. The letter purported to come from a third-party fixer on behalf of some shadowy, extremist Middle East group.

The target was not specific, but Strickland would be able to deduce that it was Arafat… The traitor to the dispossessed people and to God, the puppet of the Zionists Winter borne had enjoyed creating that description. Hamas and Hizbollah, or Islamic Jihad, were never subtle in their condemnations.

The proposed fee was half a million US dollars. Strickland would be tempted not by the money, but by the fact that he had once, years before, failed to kill Arafat.

He had probably been employed by the Israelis on that occasion. The Chairman of the PLO had left the bathroom in which the device had been placed ten seconds before it was remotely detonated. Strickland's failure had humiliated him. He would be unable to resist another chance. His pride in his infallibility was the glue that held him together.

Strickland would respond to the e-mail via his own PC. He would have no idea to whom his reply was being addressed. Even if he had a suspicion that it was a trick to draw him out into the open, he would still come. The prize was too tempting to resist, Winterborne was certain of that. Strickland would offer a meeting on neutral ground.

However careful he proved to be, he would come and then he would be eliminated.

Winterborne would transmit the enticement in another moment or two.

Meanwhile, there was the Bach on the CD player. The B minor Prelude and Fugue filled the office. The music seemed appropriate to Hawksmoor's church, to the elegant cornicing and ceiling rose of the room and the heavy bookshelves, and to his mood. Reflective intimacy in the prelude, the profound yet strict order of the fugue which followed. He listened for a few moments, remembering that it had been Marian who had given him his appreciation of music. Effortlessly clever Marian… He shook his head and scrabbled the remote control from his desk, switching off the music almost savagely.

He studied his desk, supporting his weight on his knuckles. His application for US citizenship moved smoothly, oiled by lobbyists and tame Congressmen… The leasing deals for Skyliner lay like raked leaves… Other businesses prospered. His staff, in other offices, busied themselves with sublime confidence, skating on newly thickened ice that bore no resemblance to the thin, dangerous crust on which he had been moving with so much caution only weeks ago.

Now, he was poised. Once the citizenship was settled, he could move on the microprocessor firms, the construction and other companies he needed to weld together to form the hull of what would become Winterborne Holdings in the US.

He would be raiding, soon. The US banks were now eager to lend and CEOs of companies were keen to sell out to him, for the appropriate golden balm.

It still unnerved, like a recollected nightmare, the thought that it might all have fallen into ruin because Aero UK could not sell Skyliner and Euro-funds had had to be diverted to prop the company up. The discovery of the fraud would have ended — everything.

What was necessary had been done. It was over.

He thought of Marian again and of a withering description she had offered of him after an early piece of stock manipulation had outraged her. You're a mixture of Buddhist fatalism and European imperialism, David, a contradiction. Because of the one you believe it doesn't matter what actions you take, and because of the other your actions are those of a bandit… Why?

He had answered her mockingly, quoting from one of the Chinese poems she had introduced him to when she was still a teenager. Li-Tai-Po, the drunk, the revelling hedonist… Dark is life, so is death. She had hated that because it had been true. Nothing really mattered.

Contempt for life made you a Buddhist or a bandit, OK, Marian?

That, perhaps, had been the day when they had finally seen the gulf between them, each on opposite sides of a deep canyon.

He smiled, re-reading the e-mail, then turned back to the window. A pigeon continued to strut aimlessly along the windowsill above the traffic, occasionally thrusting out its wings as if uncertain of its ability to fly or woo. He returned to his desk and abruptly pressed the transmit key, sending the e-mail to Strickland's PC, wherever it was on the planet. Days, perhaps a week, and Strickland would come out, blinking like a mole in the sunlight to be beaten on the head with a spade.

The still-green buds of rhododendrons were like spear points at the edge of his vision as he sat hunched in the concealment of the thick bushes that leaned out over the stream. He had moved upstream for perhaps half a mile. The bushes were dusty and old. Insects buzzed outside, suggesting that the rhododendrons were impenetrable, that he was safe. Sunlight dazzled beyond the outermost bushes, through the gold, red and pink of opened flowers.

He studied the map, checking the location of the Cessna. They would have found it, he insisted to himself. There'd be someone waiting for him… or, just to make certain, they would have emptied the fuel tank or damaged the controls. His finger traced the stream towards the nearest village. Maybe there—?

He recollected the tiny village from the air as the Cessna banked over it, a curl of water around it, the old lauze — roofed houses crouching beneath the abbey church, fortified and threateningly large in its surroundings. The slopes of the land, the narrow valley emptying into the Vezere, parked cars, hot sunlight and dark shadows in the cramped streets. Should he make for the village? Beyond the rhododendrons was a small copse of trees, then open fields dropping away towards the village. The Cessna sat in a field he would be able to see from the edge of the copse.

The dust from the bushes, the heat of the afternoon, irritated his throat. One man had passed noisily along the bank of the stream above him ten minutes before. The crackle of his RT and unheard instructions interrupting birdsong. Gant was becoming stiff in his hunched position, he needed to move. He listened beyond the hum of insects and the birds to the heavy afternoon silence. The distant noise of a cow, of a vehicle on some hidden road.

He turned on his stomach and began wriggling through the undergrowth, catching at his breath with each movement as a cough threatened. He emerged into the copse of holm-oak and poplar and rose to his knees, listening again as his heartbeat died back to quiet. Then, standing, he slung the rucksack across his shoulders and began moving through the shadows, avoiding the splashes of sunlight as if they were irradiated.

Crackle of an RT, an answering, harsh whisper. Off to his left, perhaps fifteen yards. He moved behind the hole of a tree. There was more sunlight, the ground was beginning to drop away. He moved his feet gently, gliding from the cover of one tree to another.

He raised the f ieldglasses to his eyes. The lenses misted, then cleared. He scanned the fields to the west of the village, where the Cessna's livery was suddenly bright and incongruous amid grass, near the shade of trees. He could see no one, not even the farmer to whom he had explained his engine fault, his need to seek parts, his return in no more than three hours… Around the Cessna, like an exaggeration of the afternoon heat, a haze he at once realised was evaporating fuel.

They'd drained the tank rather than more obviously damaging the airplane. To the left of the Cessna, no more than a hundred yards away from it, a momentary gleam of sunlight on metal.

Disappointment wrenched at his stomach. He leaned back against the rough bark of the tree, staring up at the canopy of leaves, letting his breath exhale in an expression of defeat. Sweat ran into his eyes…

Minutes whole minutes had been wasted. He felt drained, raising the glasses once more with weak arms. The Cessna, but only for an instant, then cows and sheep sweeping through the lenses, trees, and lines of willow and poplar that marked streams, ditches. To Gant the landscape became more covert, military; a map of trench works from a long-forgotten war, each hedge or screen of willow and poplar marking water or a ditch where he could move unobserved. He traced the lines carefully, fixing each stretch of cover, each exposed area.

A hundred yards to the first parade of poplars… another seventy yards before he had to break cover again… fifty yards to a belt of oak, then another long field, then more trees that had advanced like a besieging force up to the fortified walls of the abbey church. Two cars and a pickup moved like bright, carapaced insects along the winding, shadowy street of the village, sunlight flashed from windscreens on a minor road. He listened behind him. Someone was blundering with slow, elephantine caution away from him.

He tensed, then began hurtling down the slope towards the first line of poplars, which waited like a still troop of men for his assault. He heard shouting, and his blood racing. The grass was noisy with his passage, a cow veered away from him.

He ran brokenly at first, then in a straight line, despite the first shots away to his left. Sheep that had discovered the shade of the poplars moved away in truculent panic as he blundered into shadow, and reached the rivulet the trees had marked.

He jolted himself to a halt against the bank. The ditch was no more than four or five feet deep, the water just inches. He splashed along its slippery, stony bed, his breath roaring. He remained crouched as he scuttled rather than ran, hearing shouts of pursuit.

He collided with something, was struck. Then something grabbed him, even as it shouted for support. He smelt food on the man's breath, arms pushed him off balance his feet slipped, hands closed on his throat. A face, as distorted as if it were garbed in a stocking mask, pressed against his eyes. Gant struggled, shaking his head to rid his throat of the man's grip. His vehement denial seemed impossible to transmit to the rest of his body. The man pressed him back against the bank, his hands still tightening around Gant's throat. He tried to snatch at air, his mouth twisted wide, but he was unable to swallow.

Breathing became almost impossible Black lights flickered before his eyes, blocking out the sunlight streaming through the tracery of poplar branches. The man's stub bled rounded face was contorted with effort.

His hands were tight on Gant's throat, whose back was arched against the bank, his hands scrabbling with dirt and grass and roots as if he were frantic to escape underground. The RT was somewhere close, dropped into the water or in a pocket, and it was urgent with exhortations to hold him and with promises of immediate help.

He couldn't reach the revolver, didn't know where it was, dropped or still thrust into his belt… His hands still clawed the dirt of the bank, panicking at the encroaching loss of consciousness, his feet shuffling in the water. Scrabbling… as if he was being pulled into a narrow space… black lights, flecks big as fragments scrabbling… the man's face filled with effortful blood and triumph… His arms came up together, threading through the man's arms then flinging them wide, breaking the grip around his throat-breath… coughing breath

… He brought his arms together again as the man lunged back at him, striking with one forearm, then with the flat of his hand to the throat in what seemed a palsied effort. Coughing, he punched twice at the midriff, once to the head, then struck again with his flattened hand, then with a thrust of his knee, slipping on underwater stones. He hit the man again and again, beating him to his knees then into a prone lump, face down in the inches of clear water… No coughing. He staggered, leaning back against the bank… A shadow amid the dappling of the poplars, twenty yards along the ditch. He struggled for the revolver, still in his waistband, drawing it out exaggeratedly, like a drunk. The shadow glanced aside behind a narrow tree hole.

Gant struggled to run, one hand massaging his throat, the other holding the gun as if he wished only to drop it. He turned wildly and fired behind him, the weight of the rucksack across his shoulders unbalancing him. Then he staggered on before launching himself at the low bank of the ditch and scrambling out. Oaks next… oaks. Then another field, then trees… Shots. He dropped.

On one knee he watched a man in a check shirt and denims hurry from beneath the poplars into the afternoon sunlight. He fired twice, holding the revolver stiff armed his left hand clasping his right wrist. The target was clipped backwards, to lie prone, as quickly and non-humanly as on a practice range. Gant got to his feet and ran brokenly down the field towards the oaks, blundering into their shadow, hurrying through patches of sunlight and shade, out into the long, sloping field above which a skylark poured a song that rippled outwards to encompass the whole field. The song seemed to fill his ears.

More trees… He dragged himself to a halt, gripping the trunk of an oak, staring wildly back up the field towards the other clump of trees.

There was a figure kneeling beside an invisible something, and another man hovering at the edge of the oaks, uncertain now that he was exposed. He had, perhaps, two or three minutes. The noise of traffic, the hoot of a horn and the acceleration of an engine, urged him to move.

The ground rose in a hump, as if there was a mass grave beneath, then dropped towards the abbey church's squat, frowning tower. He realised he was walking over buried fortifications. He emerged from the trees at the end of the village street. Hot, shadowy normality. The yellow limestone wall of the church flung its afternoon shadow over him. Two men, unsurprised by his sudden appearance, were talking beside a Citroen pickup. One of them wore a beret, the other a black soutane — parishioner and priest. There was a smell of sun-warmed vegetables from the back of the truck. Its engine remained idling; the only noise of which he was aware. He glanced behind him. There was still no sign of his pursuers, the killing had slowed them, as if they were the next terrified cattle to enter an abattoir. He controlled his stride, walking with the casual dislocation and curiosity of a tourist.

The priest and the pickup's driver remained engaged in their own rapid conversation, aware of him, anticipating that they would have to struggle with English or German or some other language in order to set him on his course.

He half-raised his hand in polite enquiry, apologising for interrupting them. The young priest seemed less reluctant to acknowledge his existence… his face altering its expression as surprise seeped into it. Gant had climbed into the cab of the pickup. The gears clashed, harsh as the owner's cry of protest. He let off the brake and accelerated the Citroen, skidding as he over steered then righting the truck, its engine small-sounding as a sewing machine, the protests of its owner fading behind him, like his diminishing figure in the rearview mirror. The priest stood with his hands on black hips, bemused. Then there was a third figure beside the two, then a fourth-He wiped sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his windcheater. His hands were clammy on the steering wheel. Relief made him weak. He struggled the map from his breast pocket. He needed side roads, they knew what vehicle to look for Already champagne flutes together with the odd crumpled napkin or bone-china plate carelessly decorated the tops of the illuminated glass cases which displayed engravings. A little of modernity in the first-floor room of the Musee des Beaux Arts which austerely celebrated Bruegel.

Marian was standing in admiration before the painting known as Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. White, thrashing legs sticking out of the green water as a peasant ploughed unconcernedly at a stubborn headland's soil, a shepherd rested on his crook, and a third man fished, ignoring the tragedy. A ship sailed unaware towards a white port. She felt as if she had foolishly snatched a moment in which to reassert her bluestocking credentials amid a noisy, headlong party; and her vanity was making her parade her intellect and taste.

There was, of course, a fourth man in the picture, almost hidden by bushes, at the end of the ploughed land. His head, white-haired and balding, stuck out from the undergrowth; he was dead, unexplainedly so.

No one noticed him, either. She shivered, as if she had moved apart simply in order to be afraid. She rubbed her arms beneath the stuff of the scarlet jacket. That and her blouse ought to have been sufficiently warm the temperature at which one viewed priceless paintings in museums was stifling. Nevertheless, she felt very cold.

As she had tried to nap in the suite at the Amigo, take her shower, makeup carefully in the bedroom mirror, their faces had continued to appear to her like a troop of ghosts in a dream.

She, the soldier's daughter, could neither discipline nor defeat her fears. So, she continued to stare at the painting, the noise of the cocktail reception behind her solid as a wall, while the images of

David, Campbell, the lout Fraser, Rogier, Laxton, others, continued their effort to take form within the canvas. Her attention could be distracted only by the waving, drowning legs and the sticking-out head of the dead man.

Later, they would dine at the outrageously expensive La Maison du Cygne in the Grand' Place, but this preliminary was cultural Brussels almost as if designed solely to seduce her. Her colleagues, for the most part, glanced at the paintings as if they were passing through a room in a museum of anthropology amid the flotsam and potsherds of a lost civilization. To her, the room whispered Come and join us, we're civilised, too… but in the voice of the Commission.

The feeble joke palled. The dead man was still there in the painting, Icarus had still fallen into the sea for flying too high, not knowing his place and showing good sense. Just like her. Campbell and Rogier, the Commissioner who had been Michael Lloyd's superior, seemed aware of her unsettled fears, and too aware of their complicity to be quite natural in their manner. It was as if they were waiting for David to arrive to pull their puppets' strings. Icarus the boastful, his hybris punished in one small corner of the canvas, was surrounded by indifference… Her demise would be just like his.

She twitched visibly at the sound of a drawling voice beside her.

"I take it I was reading your habitual Leveller preoccupations again in last week's Economist, Marian? Fittingly anonymous, of course." Peter Cope, nudging at junior ministerial office head butting at the door, some preferred to observe.

Small, neat, expensively suited and coif fured; blameless, lifeless eyes. Someone had said of him that they had never known utter lack of ideas and beliefs could be engaging until they met Peter Cope.

"Yes, Peter, you were," she drawled in riposte.

"Mea culpa, I'm afraid again." Even Peter Cope had his uses. She rallied because of the banter. The article was one she had contributed to a continuing debate on the future of the British constitution, hers under the title Who is Represented? Even Peter Cope had heard of the seventeenth-century Levellers.

"You're becoming in need of a new tune, Marian," Cope ridiculed.

"No one's going to bring back the Civil War just to please you."

She smiled faintly, mockingly.

"And my father would certainly have been a King's man I know. But the party has to do something, Peter even the Barbours and the green wellies are deserting us in droves and at high speed in their off-road vehicles," she added.

"Drop it, Marian," he snapped in exasperated dislike, dimly sensing he was punching well above his weight and the effort was wearying.

"God, it's hot in here," he flung at the room and shuffled away.

Her cold stare had been little more than a further attempt to ward off her fears, Peter its unfortunate recipient. She felt a sudden desire to hurry back into the knots and cabals of the reception. Commission civil servants moved as assiduously as the waiters, topping up bonhomie, confidence, complicity, as quickly and certainly as the champagne flutes were refilled. Rogier still remained conspiratorially close to Campbell, beneath the canvas of The Fall of the Rebel Angels, a painting more like Bosch than Bruegel, filled with the energy of tangled limbs, great flying wings and damnation. Butterflies, birds and weird fish represented the metamorphosed damned while God's team flew above them, blowing great trumpets; above Rogier and Campbell too, though they seemed supremely unaware of the fact. Or perhaps they still numbered themselves among the un fallen righteous angels?

They were, however, curiously diminished by the painting above their heads, and she found herself able to breathe more easily. Rogier, especially, as Campbell was distracted from his side by his tour-guide's duties, seemed deflated, even guilty.

She watched Campbell dive into a small sc rum of her colleagues and Commission functionaries with the eagerness of a sportsman. Rogier's glass was refilled and he seemed self-consciously aware of his momentary isolation. She hurried towards him.

Her features must have declared her sudden, invigorated determination, for the tall, slightly stooping, elegantly slim Frenchman flinched from her approach as if she was armed.

"M'sieur Commissaire," she murmured.

"Marian Pyott." She thrust out her hand. He was reluctant to take it; his eyes revealed his anxious knowledge of her.

Nevertheless, he bowed formally.

"Of course, of course one of our most formidable opponents," he rallied.

"A pleasure to welcome you to Brussels on behalf of the Commission." His eyes seemed to seek support from the others in the room.

Marian pounced with: "We have a mutual acquaintance, M'sieur Rogier that is, until recently. Michael Lloyd. We spoke of him over the telephone after his death—"

"Yes, of course. So unfortunate tragic

…"

She felt her body heated with eagerness. She knew she must force the pace.

"I had a word with someone at the Police Judiciaire—" Marian offered.

Would Rogier recognise the lie at once? His eyes narrowed with calculation before adopting a purported concern.

"On the advice of someone in London in security You see, knowing Michael as I did, I just couldn't believe the overdose theory."

The police? I understood that they were satisfied with the cause of death, that it was not suspicious…?" Rogier murmured, stooping close to her face, his eyes darting once more over her shoulder, presumably towards Campbell.

Marian sipped her warm champagne.

"I think I managed to create a little doubt in that quarter."

They will re-open the case?"

"I hope so."

She was fiercely satisfied with his anxiety, the evidence that he was at a loss.

Rogier's features seemed burdened as well as furtive. He probably knew, and had diplomatically filed and forgotten, the cause of Lloyd's death. He remained silent, an actor who had dried on stage.

"Marian-!" It was Campbell, interposing himself like a bodyguard between them, one hand lightly on her shoulder, the other on Rogier's forearm, steadying the man.

"Not cornering the Commissioner, surely?"

Angered at the bluff emptiness of the tone, she snapped: "We were talking of Michael Lloyd, nothing controversial!" Exhilarated at his evident rebuff, she added wildly: "It was absolutely nothing to do with my dangerous theories on the subject of Aero UK, Ben no need to worry!"

She suppressed a shiver of tension. The charged atmosphere between them was like a cone of hot silence. At the edge of the painting, the frogs and fish gaped, tumbling from heaven. Then Campbell's features were lit with pleasure. His hand waved.

"David!" he called like a threat. Rogier's relief was shiny on his high forehead.

Marian turned.

Winterborne had entered the room accompanied by Laxton and the President of the Commission, the three of them trailing a comet-tail of minor functionaries and assorted businessmen.

She swallowed carefully. Winterborne's gaze focused on her. Rogier was whispering to Campbell, whose hand was making denying motions. The Commissioner was being assured she was bluffing. She moved away, smiling.

Winterborne and the President received champagne as reverently as the Host while acolytes seemed magnetically drawn towards their group from every part of the room. The President at once engaged the Chairman of the Select Committee, his hand cupping an elbow, his ear still half-bent to the aide who had identified the man. Henry, the senior Opposition MP was openly amused as their chairman actually blushed at whatever compliments his dignity was being paid. He grinned at Marian.

"We meet again," David murmured.

"You didn't expect me to be here?" she asked.

He raised his glass as if to toast her.

"I knew you'd be here, my little blue-stocking. The art is too good for you to miss."

True."

Campbell was with them, drawing David instantly aside with little pretence at subtlety, whispering urgently. Deliberately, she wandered away towards the napkin-littered glass cases which contained the engravings on loan to the musee from the Bibliotheque Royale. She peered down at The Festival of Fools, her neck tickling with the sense that Campbell was reporting her bluff. She shivered as she moved along the row of cases. Small landscapes, then The Poor Kitchen an dits companion, The Rich Kitchen.

David appropriately rejoined her as she pretended to study The Battle between the Money Banks and the Strongboxes. It suddenly seemed as dramatic as the painting of the angels in combat.

"Ah the perfect allegory for your taste, eh, Squirt?" His tone was warm and she hated the memories it at once evoked.

"You know me, Davey," she responded as innocently as she could.

"And look, a sleeping pedlar being robbed by monkeys — and there, Luxury, and here Justice and Prudence… I had no idea this trip would be so educational!"

"Marian," he sighed, shaking his head. His eyes glanced towards Campbell.

"Always stirring things up, Squirt. Twas ever thus…" His gaze hardened. He snatched at her arm and drew her to his side, huddling them away from seekers and purveyors of influence alike. Gales of laughter at a poor witticism, a mood of enjoyable sycophancy, and the mutual acknowledgement of elites.

"Marian, please," he whispered. She stopped, turning to him.

"What?" Her innocence was pronounced, provocative. His lips narrowed, his eyes flashed.

"For God's sake," he warned without disguise.

"Just stop whatever it is you think you're doing!"

"What am I doing?" I He had pleaded with her like this as a boy, in his better moments. Begged her to desist, to accept, to agree… before he hurt or excluded her. His hand was gripping her arm painfully, like pincers. She drew away, rubbing her arm.

"Will you stop?" he asked. There was the shadow of a plea in his voice.

After a long moment, she shook her head.

"I can't," she said softly, hoarsely. Ms computer, his computer, she heard in her head like the chanting of a mantra.

"I can't, Davey-!" she blurted as if in pain, remembering his childhood cruelty.

He nodded stiffly.

"I didn't think you could. I had to ask." Voices were demanding his presence. As he turned from her, she sensed his well-being at once restored, his awareness of his power seep back. They were adults again. Campbell hovered, waiting to direct his master towards the most necessary handshakes and pleasantries. David's shoulders were set, his expression evidently threatening, by the mirror that was Campbell's face.

You fool, you bloody, bloody fool, she told herself. She was, indeed, very frightened. However, she gradually calmed herself by concentrating on her mantra… Ms computer, his computer, his computer

… Tonight or tomorrow morning she must gain access to David's laptop. It would be in his suite. She had to get hold of it, there'd be proof abundant there… David, she tried to convince herself, was a superstitious creature, a character of habit and custom. He had to be he had to still be using those old passwords.

Robbie was long dead and he couldn't possibly know that she knew them too.

However stupid and far-fetched, she had to try.

CHAPTER TWELVE

In the Machine The morning sun haloed the Gothic turrets and spires, and the baroque roof statuary of the Grand' Place. From the windows of the suite's lounge, David Winterborne saw them as the back of a movie set. There was gold, pinked marble, stone, the flickering of birds.

The murmur of traffic was fended off by secondary glazing.

Seven-fifteen. Fraser sat on the sofa, an impatient, barely restrained machine.

Winterborne had chosen to sit at the desk, in the leather swivel chair, toying with his fat black pen with his long fingers, his bathrobe closed primly over his knees.

'… must have gone Stateside, on an early tourist flight. That's the best Roussillon's been able to do, trace him as far as Schipol. He's going home—"

"After Strickland?" Winterborne asked quickly.

Fraser shrugged.

"Could be."

The man's features were pinched with anticipation, and something like resentment.

For Winterborne, Fraser's presence obscured the vista of the day's anticipated successes. The Skyliner flight, the publicity that would attend it, the assiduousness of EC officials Fraser had come to his suite with dirty moral hands, informing him of Gant's escape, and demanding that he commit himself irrevocably regarding Marian.

Strick-land had not replied to the e-mail, had not taken the bait.

Fraser did not believe he would. He had another way' You positive that an approach to this man Mclntyre is the way to proceed?"

Fraser nodded, shifting slightly on the sofa, to greater comfort.

"Mclntyre is the man looking for Gant, just as seriously as we are.

Gant's gone home—"

"You think."

"I think we know. Sir…" Winterborne waved him to continue, the permission of a sultan.

"He's a vindictive sod… ex-CIA, joined the Bureau in the early nineties. I know him, sir. And he was Strickland's Case Officer in the field. They did a lot of dirty things for the Company and Washington, none of which Mclntyre would want seeing the light of day."

It was a rehearsed, carefully offered argument.

Persuasively complete.

"I'm certain he would help us, in order to keep Strickland quiet, if he thought he could get his hands on Gant by doing so. And keep his own nose clean… If not, you can offer him a security vice-presidency.

Fat salary, big title, key to the executive bog—" His nose wrinkled in contempt. They like that sort of thing, his sort of Yank."

"So you've reiterated."

"He'd be likely to know Strickland's bolt holes aliases, the sort of detail we don't have." It was seductive. The shadow of a flitting bird crossed the windows. The email stratagem might not work, this could be more certain. A pigeon settled on the windowsill.

"I see that." He leaned forward, adding: "You and Roussillon should have stopped Gant yesterday, Fraser."

There have been underestimations all round sir."

Winterborne could not keep the faint, momentary flush from his cheeks.

He snapped back: "Stopping a rogue accident investigator who's already wanted by the FBI is, I would have thought, easier than disposing of a high-profile MP!" He instantly regretted his loss of control.

"I still don't see how you avoid the danger of involving the FBI in this."

Fraser seemed mollified. The whiteness that had appeared at the sides of his nose vanished.

"Offer him the choice, sir. If Gant finds Strickland before Mclntyre finds Gant, then maybe all the dirty tricks will pop out of the box. To prevent that, and to secure a prosperous future… which would you choose, sir if you weren't already you?" His hands opened in a gesture of conclusion.

"You can get rid of Gant and Strickland at the same time and have the resources of the FBI to do it for you." It was the voice of a tempter.

Or was it simply that of a machine holding the recorded voice of inevitability?

Winterborne wrapped the bathrobe around his legs as he refolded them.

He sensed himself as shuffling indecisively before a subordinate, of having been dragooned into choice.

"Mclntyre isn't popular or liked maybe not even trusted by the Bureau.

He could be shaken out any time. And he's greedy…"

Tell him nothing!" Winterborne felt impelled to insist.

"Of course not, sir."

"Very well. Take the earliest flight to Washington you can get.

Persuade Mclntyre—" He stood up.

"I have a breakfast meeting at eight, I need to—"

"Sir the woman?" It was a demand rather than a question, and Winterborne was reduced to the sensation of himself as a boy about to leave the headmaster's study, half-escaped from punishment, and then called back to face more accusations.

"What?" he snapped.

"What about the woman?"

"You have to decide, sir you have to give a clear instruction."

"Now? Why now?" He felt heated, unnerved. He did not turn to face Fraser. The pigeon lifted away from the windowsill as if not wishing to become a coconspirator.

"Not now…" he murmured.

"I watched her, sir," Fraser insisted.

"Watched her deal with Jessop and Cobb when they put the f righteners on late last night. Dark street, a man following her… She won't be frightened off, sir!"

Winterborne whirled round on Fraser, his features compressed with a violent anger. Gant and Strickland yes. The situation had become unstable to the point of explosion, he must take a risk there… but this? Fraser was applying the perspective. The man thought Marian's death a simple matter, something expedient and hardly to be debated. But this is Marian.

"Strickland, Gant, Marian anyone else?" he attempted.

Eraser grinned.

"It's not much… It's not out of control," he soothed. Not yet, his eyes declared.

"But you need to watch Campbell, sir. She'll work on him and he's an invertebrate at the best of times—"

"Ben Campbell now! For God's sake, Fraser!"

"I'm not suggesting anything specific, sir. Just tell Roussillon to keep an eye on him. If you get rid of the woman, there'll be no need.

He'll have been involved.

The Judas-goat. That will shut him up. But you have to instruct Roussillon to eliminate her."

"Not now! I do not intend to be late for my meeting, Fraser. Make your arrangements regarding Washington. I'll talk to you before you leave."

He turned away, his body once more heated, quivery with a sense of being cornered. Marian was, indeed, his enemy yet how could he consign her to the dark? How could he—?

As he walked into the bedroom to begin dressing, he heard Fraser telephone the hotel desk to make his flight reservation.

Yes, that certainly would be achieved, the elimination of Strickland and Gant. But, Marian?

She woke in the old-fashioned hotel bedroom, startled; as if she had expected the comfortable familiarity of other old houses, Uffingham especially, only to find herself betrayed by memory. She felt shaken from thin, fitful sleep. Her dreams had been filled with faces peering down at her which did not quite disappear whenever she roused. Grey daylight struggled through the heavy curtains. Marian sat bolt upright, rubbing her right arm with her left hand… just as she had done after the light-footed man, his single breath hot against her cheek, had collided with her on the dark, cobbled pavement outside the hotel.

She had been walking back from the restaurant, replete, her fears and senses dulled with food, wine and bright conversation. He had appeared from a narrow, unlit doorway, clumsy as a drunk, and had lumbered into her. She had exhaled a small scream of surprise. She had been half-attending to the footsteps clicking in a magnified way off the high walls and facades of the Rue de Amigo, wondering if someone was following her, when the second man had blundered against her. His weight had been sharp, heavy, before he had staggered away and she stumbled into the hotel entrance.

There had been no more to it than that footsteps clicking out like the exaggerated ticking of an ominous clock, a momentary collision… but she had understood the message as clearly as if it had been delivered by hand to the door of her room.

She squinted at the illuminated bedside clock in the gloom.

Seven-twenty. In the night, too, there had been a drunk or purported drunk knocking at her door, demanding entry. She had, eventually, persuaded him hers was the wrong room, that he should go away… in somewhat obvious language. Reluctantly, she swung her legs out of the bed, at once lighting a cigarette, coughing, drawing the smoke in deeply, her hand shaking once she took the cigarette from her mouth.

"God…" she heard herself breathe as if there was someone else in the room with her. The cigarette began to relax her, working against the new buffeting of her nerves when she realised what she had decided to do. The thought made her queasy, even blundered against her like the man in the street, the other man against her door.

She thrust herself off the bed and dragged open the curtains. The unfamiliar, comforting nightdress swished with the anger of her movements. Traffic noise, the early summer morning blue after rain over the rooftops, the tower of the Hotel de Ville, the tiny minarets and up thrusts of the other heavy buildings of the Grand' Place.

David Winterborne his features flushed with drink and confidence seemed to stare into the room from just beyond the window. He would soon be at a power breakfast with EU officials, Aero UK and Balzac-Stendhal executives, and representatives from Sabena and other European carriers. She had overheard a time of eight bandied between table companions at the restaurant the previous evening. Already it was only a half-hour away. By ten-thirty, she and her colleagues, together with Winterborne and a tribe of officials and executives, would be at Brussels' Zaventem airport, boarding the Skyliner. The breakfast meeting would last for perhaps an hour. David's suite would be empty for no more than that.

His PC… Silly idea now. And yet the image tugged at her like a hangnail caught in cloth. David, creature of habit, the boy who avoided the cracks in the pavement, walked the borders of the carpet, checked the light switches obsessively… there was the slim chance that he would still, like touchstones, use the old passwords.

She began to hurry, stubbing out the cigarette in a cut-glass ashtray, scrubbing her face into wakefulness in the bathroom, dashing her make-up on, choosing her outfit. Eight… eight-five. They would be about to eat breakfast in the private room now, comfortable, assured, the windows slightly fogged with power, arrogance.

Snatching up her handbag and the camera she always carried on jaunts, she closed the door behind her and stood for a moment in the corridor that smelt of thick carpet and dry air. Her heart was thudding against her ribs; she was already jogging against time.

She went up two floors in the lift. There had been an open door on her own corridor, a maid bent over a bed, tugging off linen. She rounded the corridor-another housemaid, pinafored, tinily Oriental and almost hidden by the trolley of linen and cleaning materials she was pushing from one door to the next. David's suite was-two doors closer to her than the maid… Time, time. Eight-nine… A strange and ludicrous image of waiters clearing away grapefruit, melon, the scent of kedgeree, and bacon and eggs. David loved kedgeree, always had. The maid looked up with the shy, almost flinching in curiosity of her race and occupation. Marian clicked her fingers exaggeratedly, after fishing in her handbag, attempting to appear panicked. The maid seemed troubled on her behalf.

"Do you speak English?" God, I hope so… "English?"

The reply was precise. The girl was, on closer inspection, young enough to be a moonlighting student.

"Yes, madam." Not even the French appellation. Nevertheless, Marian continued her impersonation of Anglo-Saxon patronage towards foreigners, speaking slowly.

"I am Mr. Winterborne's personal assistant—" She gestured towards the suite's double doors.

"He needs something from his room. He didn't give me the key. It is urgent. Can you let me in?"

"Mr. Winterborne?" She consulted her list, nodding daintily, precisely.

"Yes," she confirmed, looking up at the doors. Then she studied Marian and seemed satisfied.

Her pass-key strained the material of the pinafore outwards as she tugged it towards the door on its brief chain. The lock clicked.

Furiously, before the girl could turn, Marian wiped her finger along the sudden wet line on her forehead.

Thank you thank you!" She lurched into the suite, still scented with David's aftershave. The maid remained in the doorway. Marian turned and said peremptorily: That's fine I won't be long. You can continue with your duties." It was insultingly dismissive and the maid turned away, letting the doors close behind her. Marian heard her own loud breathing in the spacious sitting room. The bedroom door remained half-open. A suit hung against the door of a dark old wardrobe like a hanged man.

Eight-twelve. Croissants, preserves, waiters gliding like un hearing ghosts between the extravagant dollars, the dates, the counter-proposals. David at the head of the table, his slim hands on the white cloth, patiently still, stirring only slightly whenever the discussion moved in his direction. His presence was almost real enough to be in the bedroom next door.

She was startled by the noise of a vacuum cleaner blurting awake in the next suite.

She had miscalculated, the maid was only one room away… Nothing on the writing desk, the armchairs or the chaise. Small items of David's a fat black pen, his cigarette case, silver and initialled, a comb.

Eight-eighteen.

The bedroom, then The vacuum cleaner growled like a dog beyond the wall, occasionally lurching softly into furniture. The unmade bed, the discarded shoes and underwear, the hanged suit. Files, the open suitcase, a guide book, rolled fax messages. She touched at them but did not read… Eight-twenty… The satisfied, male clatter of knives and forks against crockery, the more desultory conversation, as the power breakfast consumed its allotted time. Eight-twenty-one… The wet line was back across her forehead. Her hair flopped over her cheek and eyes and she brushed it violently aside. She glanced towards the bedroom window. A pigeon, staring back, shocked her like an enemy.

It must be in the wardrobe. She held the suit over her arm, removed the small, flat crocodile leather case which contained the PC, rehanged the suit against the wardrobe door. With harsh, thankful breaths, she carried the case to the writing desk and flipped the locks. They sprang open. Another pigeon — perhaps the same one watched her from the sitting room window with red-eyed surveillance. She opened the lid, exposing the screen of the PC, its keyboard sliding smoothly into place. Tiny, delicate… The handbag's strap seemed to bite into her shoulder. She would have to photograph the screen, once she gained access… Her fingers trembled as she poised over the keyboard. The pigeon's beak tapped on the thick glass of the window, as if to encourage her. David's fat black executive pen lay beside the cuff of her blouse. Oh, David, she couldn't help but think. He had pleaded with her in the Musee, there had been exaggerated glances of entreaty over dinner, as if she had wounded or disappointed him.

And a bleakness in his eyes.

The PC came to life under her fingers. Hello, please tell me your name, it ingratiated itself. She hesitated. The request disappeared, then reappeared. That would happen only once more.

Shadow, she typed.

Hi, David, the machine replied. Marian wrinkled her nose. Her own computer was severely English, restrained in its responses to her.

"Hi, David," she murmured, as if she was reading a headstone, and sighed.

The memory remained clear to her, ten years later. After Robbie's death, David had presented her with a battered cardboard box. His brother would have wanted you to have some of his books, he had offered with savage, tearless restraint. The gesture had, nevertheless, touched her and was meant to indicate emotion. In a moment of recollection a few days later, she had opened the box and examined the books from Robbie's childhood, adolescence, student days. Most of them unread, some of them even given to Robbie by herself.

And there was the well-thumbed copy of an anthology of Chinese poems of the eighth and ninth centuries in translation that she had given to David, not Robbie.

In his late teens, David had been reacting with unexpected, oversensitive ferocity to the prejudice of his fellow pupils, and she had bought him the book partly as a salve to wounded pride. A leaf of paper bearing Robbie's scrawl had fallen from between the pages. The poem it had marked was annotated in David's neater hand.

A poem by Tu Fu, To a Younger Brother. From the handwriting of the two brothers, she had worked out that David had evolved the passwords into his first computer by using lines from the poem and that Robbie had discovered the trick and had betrayed the tenderness implicit in David's choice by breaking into the computer.

She had never forgotten that small betrayal, nor the affection that had made David, years after she had bought the book, use that poem for his passwords.

Eight-twenty-eight. Time stunned. The way into the PC's menu was Rumours, the first English word of the poem. The Shadow might have been David himself, or Robbie. Now it was herself.

She felt very heated, her hands quivered. What did she want to know, what did she need? Wind in the dust prolongs our day of parting, the poem said, a metaphor for war. This was a different war, the one between her and David.

The menu unrolled on the screen. The vacuum cleaner, she realised, had ceased unnoticed in the next room. Towels changed, duster wiped over surfaces. She strained to hear, but there was only a murmur. Come on She summoned Millennium because it was obvious. The fraud was upon the Millennium Urban Regeneration Project. a list of charities? She had fumbled the camera from her handbag, but the screen seemed to mock her as she held it. She scrolled the information forward with a jabbing, angry forefinger. Contributions, schemes, the names of dignitaries…

Eight-thirty… The clearing of breakfast plates, the sense of coffee being served as sharply as if she had caught its aroma. The damp line across her forehead, at the roots of her hair… The Millennium file she had opened rolled to its engagingly innocent conclusion.

Ceremonies, fundraising, invitations, monetary gestures.

She returned the menu to the screen. Jabbed at Skyliner. She could hear the ticking of her blood's clock, accelerating. Investments, involvements, negotiations, the narrative of failure, the hurrah of recent success… innocent, all of it. Winterborne Holdings, she summoned. There was silence from the next-door room now.

Briefly, registered only subconsciously, there had been the noise of a radio or television. The maid would be entering David's suite any minute now. All the companies, the investments, the share holdings the details of boards, chief executives, salaries, pensions. Her finger jabbed the key endlessly, furiously, scrolling the useless, useless information up the grey-tinted screen and back into oblivion. It was as if she was reading some gangster's accounts, the ones prepared for the tax man. The other accounts were hidden somewhere in the computer but she had no idea, no inkling, where they might be. Filed under what?

She returned from the brief history and assessment of David's empire to the menu, hurrying through it more and more violently, carelessly.

Blood's clock eight thirty-five… "Oh, bugger!" she breathed aloud.

David's fat black pen seemed to mock her like a complacent expression.

The name almost vanished before it registered his name. Curious. Her forefinger hovered above the key, to be joined by other fingers, her other hand. Her breathing was very loud. Her temples throbbed, as if all thought was an effort. It was like finding an old love letter, written by a parent one had always thought incapable of love, when clearing out drawers after their death. David and Robbie. Perhaps there was some surviving sentimental element in David's nature, within the deep, suspicious tomb in which David had always buried feeling.

Robbie had been dead for a decade, killed when he crashed his latest red Porsche. He had been a stranger to David for a long time before that R-o-b-b-i-e, she typed slowly, hesitantly. Then at once gasping with relief and success. Fraser, she read. Thenother names…

Roussillon who? the chief executive of Balzac-Stendhal, Laxton, others… dates of meetings, sums of money, as if David had been intent on item ising some Dutch treat at an Indian restaurant.

The camera clicked twice. She scrolled on… The Urban Regeneration Project, the EU funding… the beginnings of the careful, precise balance sheet of theft, of Aero UK's failure. The dates measured, like a financial ECG chart, the crucial cardiac arrests the company had suffered… and the injections of diverted EU funds into the company to keep it afloat. She was shivering with excitement, the camera's eyepiece was becoming fogged with her delighted tension.

She was terribly hot. Steady the camera'I am sorry—" Marian straightened in the chair as if she had been electrocuted. Whirled around.

The maid was standing in the doorway, apologetically surprised. Seeming not to recognise her. Marian clutched the camera against her stomach like a weapon designed to disembowel her.

"I yes! Come in, yes I've finished. Come in-!"

She exited the computer and shut the lid of the PC as if a snake was inside. She experienced almost a sense of bereavement as the keyboard slid out of sight and the screen disappeared. She closed the catches and stood up, hiding the camera at first then thrusting it into her handbag. She walked stiffly into the bedroom and replaced the leather case in the wardrobe. The arms of the empty suit attempted to arrest her. She brushed wildly at her hair. The maid watched her passage to the door with a dull, respectful stare, her eyes blinking once like camera shutters.

Marian slammed the doors of the suite behind her, leant back against them. Eightforty-two… She was perspiring freely. Her whole body seemed to tremble with weakness… and for nothing, she castigated herself in a fury of frustrated failure. All for bugger-all!

"Damn," she breathed aloud.

"Damn, damn, damn?

She had been panicked by the maid's appearance. Just like a silly girl at her first sight of an erect penis a stupid uirginl "Damn, damn, damn bugger!" she breathed.

Her hands were slippery on the doorknobs. It had all been there, begging to be photographed. She could have simply told the maid to wait, that she mustn't be interrupted. She had had it all in her hands and had just thrown it away! She had nothing but some names, the first few snippets of the gigantic fraud… fish scales from David's leviathan crookedness, nothing more. She would have to try again… The idea appalled her.

Winterborne listened to the scattered words, the tapping noises on the keyboard of his PC, her breathing, her shocked, delighted surprise none of them were able to shatter the deep pleasure of his mood. The breakfast meeting had been replete with the rich diet of deals, leasings, promises to purchase. It had been like arriving somewhere long desired after a strange and perilous journey. It had worked, the whole desperate strategy.

'… Come in, yes I've finished," Winterborne heard.

"Come in-!"

The tiny, amplified noises of the PC being closed, the sound of the wardrobe door in the bedroom, the movements of the maid who had interrupted her. Winterborne stood at the window of the suite, staring blindly through the glass, as if rain had dissolved some magical vision.

He turned and glowered at the tiny tape-recorder he had almost nonchalantly removed from the desk drawer, expecting to hear only the sound of a vacuum cleaner. The fat black pen, uncapped so that its noise-activated microphone could function, seemed to mock him. Such had been his eagerness for the breakfast meeting and his sense that it would go well, he had almost forgotten to uncap the pen. Habit had saved him-and condemned Marian. His features twisted in an expression of pain as much as rage. He silently cursed himself for continuing to use those old passwords that Robbie had discovered so long ago. No one else knew them except Robbie. How could Marian have known? From Robbie?

It did not matter how, he told himself angrily. She knew. She had broken into his PC. She must know everything… He heard a snarling noise, strangled in someone's throat. His own, he slowly realised. He rubbed furiously at his throat as if he suffered a kind of moral laryngitis, an inability to curse her; then he rubbed his cheeks and eyes. Sunlight slanted across the desk, the recorder, the black pen.

He punched his fist down against his thigh, hurting himself. Again and again.

Then he began smoothing the bruised place rhythmically, as if using some healing ointment. Marian had sealed her fate, as a melodrama might have expressed it. She had engaged in enemy action, she had persisted after his warnings, refusing to let the matter rest. She had flouted their mutual past, the very thing that had held him back in front of a subordinate. Very well… He moved round the desk and thrust the recorder back in a drawer. Glanced at his watch. He needed to speak to Fraser immediately, before he left for America and to Roussillon. There must be some kind of accident…? At once, it was there as brilliantly and quickly as a light being switched on. A mugging that went terribly wrong, perhaps… Ben Campbell would be with her, he might even be injured. But Marian would be killed. A victim of mindless, motiveless street crime. Campbell's cooperation in the incident would silence him as effectively as Marian would be silenced.

He snatched up the phone and dialled Eraser's room. He had ten minutes before he must leave for the Skyliner jaunt, for more success; the seal on the enterprise. He smiled.

On board the plane, he would introduce Marian to Roussillon. She was a perceptive woman, perhaps she would even recognise her assassin.

"Fraser come up at once. Find Roussillon for me and bring him, too.

I've made up my mind."

She concentrated on the traffic on the Brussels ring road, then on the interchange with the E10 autoroute to Antwerp, as if the ordinary, the meaningless, would remove all thought of David.

Yet the knowledge that she had obtained no real shred of proof against David and that she must try again bobbed on the surface of her mind like a body she could not drown. Campbell's mood, as he sat beside her in the back of the chauffeur driven limousine, was strained, quiet.

The ramps and twists of the motorway interchange were left behind and the panorama became a flat expanse dotted with buildings whose windows reflected the midmorning sun. The light gleamed from the tail planes and flanks of dozens of aircraft. One lifted from the runway as she stared from the window, almost lurching into the sky by an effort of will.

Ben Campbell had been engaged in a brief, furious conversation with David in the foyer of the Amigo as she had come out of the lift. She was wearing her brightest clothes, a black and yellow spotted skirt and a bright-yellow jacket the insect-colours of warning and defence, a deliberate choice. However, she could hardly summon the willpower to sustain its defiant humour.

Because David had known what she had done, she was certain of it. He had glowered at her in the moment before he had changed his expression to a bland smile and had pecked at her cheek. Somehow, he had discovered her interference with his PC. She could not dismiss her impression. Campbell, dumb with some weight and mood of his own, confirmed her sense that she had increased her danger.

There she is," Campbell murmured as the car ran beside the high perimeter fence.

His hand pointed eagerly but his voice lagged, as if he were weary of his own enthusiasm.

"Oh-yes."

The Skyliner seemed bulbous, even ugly, beside the sleeker European and American airliners that surrounded it. A great bottle-nosed dolphin of a thing, its front section bulging like a deformed head, its waist thick, its wings and tailplane earth-bound. Then she lost sight of it as the car turned into the main gates, her last impression that it was liveried in the colours of the European Union, blue, white and gold-starred. The grandiose European dream that it represented seemed diminished by her sense of a small provincial airport, a cramped, dowdy collection of buildings. The new terminal, built to handle international flights, seemed inappropriate; a super store sprung up in a quiet residential district.

"You'll be impressed," Campbell offered, his salesman's manner somehow crumpled, under pressure.

"It's a very good airliner. It was just too expensive until now." He rallied more by habit than excitement.

Marian nodded. The limousine drew up on the concrete apron in front of the terminal. Airliners in a dozen liveries nuzzled like piglets at the pier's air bridges She got out of the car, even thankful for the overpowering scent of aviation fuel on the warm breeze, and the sense of bustle, after Campbell's desultory, drizzling conversation in the car. As he began marshalling the occupants of the little fleet of limousines that had driven from the hotel to the airport, Marian studied him.

Throughout the short journey, Campbell had seemed uncharacteristically preoccupied, even brooding. His talk was mere sound bites left out in the rain to spoil. He seemed wary of her. Nervous of being near her, as if she carried some raging infection. Amost as if she made him feel guilty.

Another aircraft flashed in the sunlight as it lumbered into the air.

Then, calming as a doctor, Henry was beside her.

"All right, lass? You look pale." The elderly Opposition Member was a thankful distraction.

"Bloody funny-looking aeroplane, has to be said!" His raised voice teased the smooth, ushering Commission civil servants. David, she saw, was watching her intently, until Tim Burton dragged at his arm like a small boy filled with enthusiasm, pulling him towards the airliner.

She saw Bryan Coulthard, the chief executive of Balzac-Stendhal, Rogier and Laxton together, all of them supremely cheerful. A select band of European press figures, from the broad sheets and the tabloids, were marshalling their photographers, buttonholing MPs and EU officials alike. No one seemed to want to interview her, thankfully. Perhaps she was the skull at this particular banquet? It was David's day…

There was a general movement towards the Skyliner, something as natural and irresistible as a tidal swell. It was sleekly fat close to, its girth Victorian-boastful, reeking of luxury.

"You all right, Ben?" she asked waspishly as she found Campbell once more at her side.

"What—?" He seemed uncertain for an instant, then he added: "Oh, yes just don't like flying all that much. Never really taken to it—" His sickly smile irritated her.

David was surrounded by reporters and officials, his hand firmly grasping that of the President of the Commission. The smooth Belgian was inclining his head towards David in the manner of an obeisant or that of a fellow conspirator. The little tableau increased her annoyance.

"Ready, Marian?" Campbell asked uncertainly. He had watched her studying David.

"Yes!" she snapped.

"Ready. Are you, Ben?"

"What? Oh, yes. Let's go then." He gestured towards the passenger steps.

Once they were in the first-class cabin, Campbell left her side, hurrying away into a sc rum of journalists. A glass of champagne appeared magically in her hand as she surveyed the lounge, spacious as a hotel foyer.

"Big bugger, eh?" Henry said at her elbow.

"Like a bloody cruise ship. But then, I suppose that's the idea, eh, lass?"

She managed to nod in a mimicry of enthusiasm. That, after all, had been the principle on which the Skyliner had been created. First class as an imitation of a liner's stateroom, the seats scattered as casually as in a club's library. Business class, the remainder of the cabin space, was narrower, but still huge-seeming, stretching away from her.

Wide aisles, groups of seats, computer workstations, desks… The carrier of choice for the global marketplace. Other cabin variants offered luxurious charter flight facilities, one even provided lounges and a cinema.

The latest, or so she had heard, proposed seating in excess of the new Boeing, now that price was a factor. Tim Burton would put that type into operation on the Atlantic run.

The aircraft seduced. There had been an unfairness about its previous lack of success. It was big, quiet, luxurious affordable, now and the logical next step beyond Airbus. It did indeed seduce… She shook her head.

"Summat wrong?"

"Ringing in my ears, Henry." She smiled.

People had died for this occasion, this display. To place her here, with the influential, putting champagne to her lips amid the joviality of power and money.

The innocent had died.

"Hello, Marian!"

It was Tim Burton, grinning like a boy with a new train set. She knew him as someone she had encountered at parties or occasionally scouring the House for a tame lobbyist.

Tim your new toy? I like it." She raised her glass to the down lighters in the cabin's high ceiling. Henry had drifted away towards a knot of civil servants, bent on mischief.

"Congratulations."

"Damn close-run thing, Marian, I can admit that now."

His grin was infectious, his too-long hair suggestive of innocence.

"Poor Alan Vance, of course. You heard about that? Mm. Well, thanks to your friend David and Bryan Coulthard, I'm off the hook! My version won't be as luxurious as this, of course — hi, David!"

He was as grateful and innocent as a puppy. Gant would not have wasted a moment suspecting his involvement. He had been all but ruined. Hi, David. It was what his computer had said to her and David, she was certain, knew of its infidelity.

The man with David was in his late thirties, taller than David, slimly elegant, darkhaired, brown-eyed. Deeply attractive.

"Marian my friend Michel asked to be introduced to you," David murmured. At the same moment, his hand was proprietorially on Tim Burton's shoulder.

"Mizz Marian Pyott, one of our most colourful Members of Parliament…

I warn you, Michel, Marian doesn't like foreigners. Michel Roussillon, who is in charge of our security."

They shook hands.

"David exaggerates my bigotry," she flirted.

"My prejudices are capable of being disarmed." Her smile was dazzling.

Roussillon was remarkably good-looking.

Roussillon… Roussillon.

She released his grip, too quickly not to alert him. His name had been in David's computer under the Robbie file-The lake was all but empty of canoes and tourist sailboats in the late afternoon. Anyway, it was too early in the season for there to be more than a few people renting cabins.

Another's head broke the water thirty yards from the pebbled shore along which he was walking. When the scout camps and the fishermen and the playacting tourists came, the otters retreated to secluded pools.

For the moment, trout and salmon were theirs for the taking.

Smoke drifted above lodgepole pines from the invisible chimney of an occupied cabin. He heard the faint noises of children.

He was walking to the store for supplies, and walking to think the thing through.

In the lodge, even in the dense forest around it, it was difficult sometimes to see matters in any clear light. It was all too comfortable and familiar, too much a refuge; and it prompted his sense of control, suggested he accept the offer that had come via the e-mail.

A fundamentalist splinter group wanted Arafat killed just as a fundamentalist Jew had killed Rabin last year. It seemed a simple, if challenging, proposition, one which oughtn't to disconcert. It did, though.

Strickland's large hands were thrust into the side pockets of his windcheater, as if he were attempting to imitate an even larger man.

His head studied the pebbles along the narrow beach as if reading runes. The pines crowded towards the shore and the mountains were reflected in the still deep blue of the lake. He ignored the familiarity of the scene and its congenial sense of wilderness. He raised his head once, attracted by the puttering noise of the mail boat returning across the lake towards the jetty and the scramble of wooden cabins and lodges that were the only settlement for miles. Then he returned his attention to the pebbles, to his own long afternoon shadow, the images of snowcaps and glaciers fading from his retinae.

The middleman had placed the asked-for, non-returnable deposit in his Swiss account. The bank had faxed him the confirmation two hours ago.

Now a meeting had to be arranged. But he had come here, to the wilderness where he was known by another name, because he had been certain, after Oslo, that Winterborne would turn Fraser and the Frenchman on him, just to clean house. Only days later, an offer that challenged ego and invited greed had appeared out of the blue… because they'd lost track of him? Was it them, or was it genuine and coincidental? Even Winterborne or Fraser or Roussillon could have guessed that he'd find Arafat an irresistible target. Rabin had been a clay pigeon by comparison. One of the most difficult men in the world to eliminate, the e-mail had offered like a tempting menu. A traitor to the Palestinian cause, or something like that, had revealed the target's identity. Arafat.

Winterborne could easily have discovered that he had been hired once before to kill Arafat in North Africa and had failed when Arafat left seconds before the device was detonated. And eueryoneknew how much he hated failure… a meeting, then. Could he risk it? And if he did, where? He paused in his stride, looking up. The familiar mountains, spilling frozen snow and ice; the still lake, the mail boat wake fading as it bobbed beside the jetty, its engine off. Another's head, then that of a second. A mule deer appeared confidently from the pines, maybe aware the tourists and sportsmen hadn't yet moved into the wilderness. The animal watched him, unafraid. A canoe rounded the flat, tiny, sparse-treed islet in the middle of the lake. Strickland breathed deeply.

The afternoon temperature had begun to drop. His indecision remained with him, a solid, indigestible lump in his stomach. He was challenged by the commission… and he was suspicious. The walk had resolved nothing.

The shuttle flight from Miami dropped towards Phoenix's Sky Harbor airport as the desert evening purpled. The ground was a sodium-lamp orange-yellow, scattered with the crucifixes of giant cactuses. Gant watched the ground rushing towards the airplane and Phoenix's lights spring out of the dusk, as if someone had just created the city. He was dog-weary, unshaven and unwashed. The wheels touched, skidded, settled and the whine of deceleration filled the cabin of the medium-haul Boeing. The terminal and the hangars slipped by as if half remembered The plane slowed, the airport became more real, the desert and the cactuses now unreal as the Boeing turned on to the taxi-way. It was darker amid the neon, a sudden night. He yawned behind his hand but even that small politeness seemed to irritate the blue-haired matron at the window seat, her permanent Sunbelt tan having worked on her skin like heat on old leather. His whole appearance, perhaps even his unwashed smell, had offended her throughout the flight from Miami.

He felt little or no anxiety as the aircraft came to a halt on the apron and the transfer bus rolled towards it. He had felt none when he had landed at Miami International, passed through the transfer lounge and eaten a meal while waiting for this flight. Perhaps he had left all such feelings behind him in France, of perhaps weariness had eroded them like rain on soft stone. He had reached the airport at Toulouse by backroads and without hindrance. By evening, an Airbus 320 had flown him on a shuttle service to Amsterdam, where he had spent the night in the departure lounge, attempting to sustain a sleep interrupted by the noises of tired children and worn adults. The first Stateside flight out of Schipol in the early morning had been a Delta tourist flight to Florida by Boeing 767. He had been lulled, amid the Dutch, German and British tourists, by the American accents of the flight attendants, the American movie. He felt he was the only one on the flight uninterested in Disney World as his destination.

He had thought, momentarily, of returning to London. But Aubrey's idea had gone down the toilet with Strickland's disappearance and the French counter-activity.

Aubrey wouldn't have any more ideas. It had been time to come home… like Strickland?

The snapshot was in his breast pocket like a talisman. If Strickland was running from the same people who'd tried to kill him and Gant was certain he was then maybe he, too, had come back to the States.

Besides, he needed to talk to Blakey, even to Barbara. There were resources at Vance Aircraft he could use. Just maybe he could find Strickland alone, he reaffirmed with a lack of conviction as he stood up and allowed the matron to drag her cabin bag from the overhead locker and to brush unapologetically past him.

He shrugged, pulling down his own sports bag, one he had bought at Schipol along with a clean shirt. It was just sufficient luggage not to arouse interest. He stepped through the passenger door behind two fractious children and a pregnant mother into the mobile lounge, scissor-lifted on its hydraulics. He stood at the far end of the vehicle, strap-hanging, idly watching his fellow-passengers. Then the lounge was lowered on to its chassis and accelerated towards the main terminal building.

The first stars gleamed high above the glass roof, and a sliver of moon seemed as abandoned and unnecessary as a nail-clipping low on the horizon.

The pregnant woman and her two children, were, he realised, Apache. The matron, seated a few feet from them, seemed to dissipate her disapproval between himself and the Native Americans. The Sunbelt had seen another land rush this time of new businesses and early retirement. There wasn't gold or cattle country out here now to take away from the Indians, just golf courses.

The doors of the mobile lounge sighed open at the terminal gate and he filed off behind the other passengers, hesitant for perhaps the first time. Then the automatic doors embraced him and he began to trek towards the exit and the cab rank.

He was unaware that, together with the other passengers on the flight, his photograph was taken as he had entered the concourse. The FBI agent was bored, impatient for his shift to end, and certain that Gant would not return to Phoenix. He was therefore uninterested in visually inspecting the passengers; but because Mclntyre in Washington had insisted, and he was a hard-nosed, unforgiving sonofabitch, he dutifully photographed all arriving passengers at Sky Harbor that night.

Gant walked out of the terminal into the fresh cool of the evening, confident of his continuing anonymity.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Accident and Design Reluctance remained on her wearied, drawn features like a mask. Blakey, too, seemed older, misplaced. It was as if both of them had moved on in time and resisted being drawn back into the situation. Gant stood in the doorway of the executive suite, sensing Alan Vance's absence from the big room like a visible, black hole.

Barbara watched him warily, as if he had declared some intention of reviving their marriage and of hurting her further.

Gant shrugged and said: "I didn't intend to cause trouble, Barbara."

Then he turned at once with evident relief to Blakey.

"Hi, Ron."

Blakey grumbled something into his unkempt beard, his dark eyes looking at a loss and aged, his whole manner that of an actor learning the role of a derelict.

Gant moved forward into the familiar pine-panelled room. Barbara was seated behind Vance's big redwood desk, Blakey on a long sofa against one wall.

"I need your help, Ron. Some computer stuff—" Then it was as if he, too, succumbed to the invisible nerve gas of defeat and bankruptcy that had replaced the room's habitual energy, its atmosphere of effort and confidence.

Through the windows, their blinds still raised, the dusk was uninterrupted by the glow of lights, the sense of business, the light-map of hangars, workshops, runways. Vance Aircraft, he had realised as the cab had approached it, had become a vacant lot. The banks and the other major creditors had foreclosed. The company had been declared bankrupt, without the benefit of Chapter Eleven or any other saving delay, as the business had been asset-stripped as effectively as if by locusts.

He'd read the obituary in Newsweek on the flight from Amsterdam. He could read it even more vividly on Barbara's face. For the first time in years, he felt an ache of sympathy for her.

"I had meetings, Mitchell, I didn't need to be interrupted," were her first accusing words. They were, however, delivered in a very worn, husky voice, as if she had finally tired even of insult and her dislike of him.

"Sure. I realise what's been happening."

"Do you?" Then her features softened; crumpled, rather.

"Maybe you do at that.

What is it you want?" She waved him to a seat.

"Drink?" He shook his head and she shrugged, sipping at her own large bourbon. There were stains of tiredness under her eyes, the make-up was disguisingly heavy.

He turned to Blakey, as if embarrassed. He took out the snapshot of Strickland, posed on a jetty of some kind, where there were mountains, pines, a lake; somewhere in the world. He, at least, felt refreshed after the shower he'd had in his motel and was determined to shake off the room's mood, its air of defeat.

Strickland was his sole concern.

This is the guy who made the rogue chip," he said.

"His name's Strickland. He's ex Company Blakey seemed nonplussed, his features with that empty concentration of a wino.

There's nothing more I can tell you about the chip, Mitchell. My guess is it reconfigured itself it's wearing a disguise, or maybe it's gotten amnesia after it did what it was intended to do."

"It's not the chip that matters, Ron," he replied with a patience that surprised him.

"I want to trace this guy."

"Can he make things come out right like in a story?" Barbara asked derisively.

He looked at his ex-wife and shook his head.

"No, he can't. Look, Barbara, there are people out there who hired him—"

"Who?" she demanded.

"Not yet. There's no proof. It's to do with Europe, with airplane companies, even security services it's all still vague. Except for Strickland. I saw him on a video in Oslo. He was there. He did it.

And he'll know who hired him." His eyes hardened. They want him too.

I don't have a lot of time." He looked up, glowering at Barbara.

"I need this blown up, examined on a computer. There has to be a clue, somewhere in the photograph, as to where it was taken."

Blakey was turning the creased snapshot in the light from a lamp, squinting as he did so. Barbara seemed to move in and out of interest as she might have done a mild hypnotic state.

"Could be anywhere. You think it's America, somewhere?"

"Strickland is American it could be. Or Europe. He had a house there." He sniffed. Those buildings in the background. Maybe there's a signboard—" He became angry with himself.

"It's all I have. I can't go to Langley and ask at the door!"

"You took a risk, coming back at all," Barbara offered.

"I had to. They tried to kill me twice. I needed to lose them."

"And that's why you're here?" she mocked. Gant understood her vengeful frustration. Over the telephone, when he had eventually demanded and received her attention, he had sensed a desire being awoken that he could only disappoint; as in their marriage.

"Sorry," she added suddenly. He waved the apology aside. Failure was eating her away as surely as a cancer, and he could not avoid his empathy with her.

"I can scan this to transfer it to computer. We can maybe play with it, Mitchell… but don't hold your breath, fella. It doesn't look all that much to me."

"Nor to me," Gant replied without turning to Blakey, his gaze still on Barbara, who shifted uncomfortably under his intense, even unwelcome compassion.

"It's all there is, Ron all there is."

Then let's get started," Barbara announced, standing up with a jerky movement.

"It's getting late, and I have to go on supervising the disposal of what's been salvaged from this disaster — keep on running the fire sale." She managed a brief, wintry smile.

"What was left?" he asked.

"Oh, some small component work some of the avionics stuff." She shrugged her thin shoulders.

"We can maybe keep on five per cent of the workforce in cheaper premises. We won't be building any more airplanes!" Invigorated by something close to hatred, she snatched the snapshot from Blakey's fingers. This is him, is it?

The bastard who killed Alan?" Gant nodded.

"And you know who hired him?

Who?"

"Not yet," Gant replied.

"Not yet. First, I have to find him."

The air-conditioning needed fixing, forcing him to leave the windows open against the clammy warmth of the early-summer night. He could hear the noise of music from the Ethiopian restaurant two doors down the street, African drumming from another bar, the laughter of the ethnics and the noise of traffic. Adams-Morgan as a place to live was the antithesis of everything Mclntyre would have chosen.

His estranged wife, May, with ambitions to become an artist, had moved them there because the narrow old house's top-floor apartment possessed a studio. She'd enjoyed the bars, the bookstores, the galleries and the sense of the exotic that was the tourist impression of that district of Washington.

For a time. She couldn't paint or sculpt, despite all the lessons that had cost him so much hard-earned money. It might have been the discovery of her complete lack of talent that had caused her to run off with an Hispanic jazz musician two years earlier; on the rebound from the untidy, unused studio that mocked her every day.

Or maybe it had been from his ridicule, his conservatism, his smug certainty that she would never cut it in art like in everything else.

Mclntyre stared at the letter he had had from her a week before. She was bleating about the delay in the alimony. The African drums and the whining Ethiopian reed instrument reminded him forcibly of May, reinvoking his contempt and anger. The Hispanic jazzman wasn't getting gigs too bad. May was waiting table in a diner too bad… He threw the letter aside on the cluttered desk that occupied one corner of the studio. May's potter's wheel, her brushes and canvases, littered the remainder of the room. May had walked out on him and left him without the money to move out of a neighbour hood he despised and in which he felt an exile.

His blunt hands flicked at the heap of unpaid bills, then rubbed his broad face in a washing motion. He yawned, then lifted the bourbon to his mouth.

He stood up and walked to the tall windows of the studio. Beyond the streetlights of Columbia Road was the hard glow of Washington. May's letter was just another hassle. There was pressure from everywhere.

He'd forced Gant into a corner, making him a fugitive from justice, now the Bureau wanted to know why he hadn't caught up with him. Fuck Gant… fuck May and her Hispanic. Fuck his chief, who didn't like or trust him.

The telephone buzzed like a trapped bee and he snatched up the receiver. It was the English guy, Fraser. Fuck Fraser, too… "Ma?

Well, here I am in Washington just checked in to the Jefferson Hotel.

Very nice suite." It sounded like a come-on line. The guy was so obvious the fucking Jefferson Hotel, one of the best, for Chrissake!

"You've had a wasted journey, Fraser," he growled. The man had once been a kindred spirit. They'd cooperated on a couple of ops when he'd been Company and Fraser was in MI6, the British intelligence outfit.

But who did the guy think he was, calling him earlier in the day, flying all the way over here? His free hand rubbed his stub bled cheek.

"A wasted journey," he repeated sullenly.

"Just hear me out before you make that judgement," Fraser replied, his confidence undiminished.

"You don't pull any weight any more, Fraser. You're in the private sector. You talked horse shit this morning you woke me up, for Chrissake-!" Fraser's chuckle was angering.

"Private sector, I like that. You'd like it, too, Mac. We want the same things don't we…?"

Strickland's name was an itch he could not scratch. Gant was after Strickland. That much Fraser had told him… Why don't we pool resources, get together on this one? The guy had a real neck. All he wanted was the Bureau's cover and assistance while he went after Strickland on US soil. There was nothing in it for Mclntyre, personally.

"Do we?" he responded almost involuntarily. If Strickland talks to Gant, what else might he say about the Company, about you? Fraser had asked him when he rang. It hung in the air of the studio like a blackmail threat, like May's paint smells and her rage at her lack of talent.

"What in hell do you want, Fraser?"

To help you, Mac. To find Gant with you, to… find Strickland. That's all—" He broke off.

"Ah, room service. Champagne, canapes—" He laughed. There was no attempt to make the deception subtle or convincing. The bribe was as vulgar as soiled notes on the desk in front of him.

"Fuck you, Fraser," Mclntyre snarled, turning again to the window and raising the bourbon to his lips.

Drops of the liquor stained his shirt front. The humid night moved against his body like heavy, sullen drapes, smelling of memory and defeat. Strickland had been used in the Company's dirty campaigns in Latin America in the eighties.

Some friends were helped by having their opponents removed — car bombs, house fires, the usual range of wet solutions that had called for Strickland's special, psychotic skills. He'd run Strickland, given him his targets for two years. Neither the Bureau nor the government would touch him with anything but a long stick if any of it came out. They'd make him a leper to prevent themselves being tainted with the disease of the past.

His glass was empty and he refilled it with one hand, the glass making a wet ring on the scuffed leather top of the desk. Fraser seemed content to wait in silence; as if he expected a favourable decision.

It wasn't that easy, he thought, swallowing the bourbon. He returned to the window above the loathed thoroughfare.

May's letter flickered in his imagination like a mocking salute. If Strickland started shooting off his mouth, the Director would personally throw him out on the street outside the J. Edgar Hoover Building and his hat after him. He needed to think… But not dismiss Fraser out of hand. He could be useful.

"OK let's talk. In the morning. I'll call at your hotel, early."

I'll be waiting, Mac. Good to talk to you—" The receiver was at once replaced, leaving Mclntyre listening to the tone. He slapped his own receiver down.

He was in a bind, he admitted. He needed money May could take him to court for the back alimony and the Bureau's puritans would want him out for that reason… Strickland could blow his ship out of the water, or Fraser could spread the word anyway, if he didn't cooperate… The bourbon burned the back of his throat. If Gant got to talk to Strickland-fax machine. He turned at its fourth ring. Then the telephone rang.

"Mclntyre it's late."

"Sorry, sir." It was Chris, still at the office.

"I'm sending through a phpto we just received' there was an edge of excitement in his voice 'from Phoenix."

Mclntyre, his breath somehow lost or disregarded, stood over the fax machine as if he might bully or interrogate it. Slowly, like oil seeping out of the instrument, Gant's features, in three-quarter profile, emerged.

"Got it?"

"Sure." Mclntyre grinned.

"It's him. When was this?"

This evening early. Sky Harbor airport. He got off a shuttle from Miami International."

' Where is he?" Mclntyre breathed.

"I checked the surveillance at Vance Aircraft. Vance's daughter and the chief research engineer, Blakey, both arrived less than an hour ago out of the blue. He must be there, mustn't he?"

"Maybe but why? Why come back? What does he want with his ex-wife?"

Gant must hate her like he hated May.

"OK tighten up surveillance. I'm coming by the office right away. Get yourself ready to take a trip and get a Bureau flight organised to Phoenix by the time I arrive." It was difficult to catch his breath, as if he had been running hard. The Ethiopian pipe and the African drumming seemed like his breathing, his heartbeat.

"Warn those hicks in Phoenix what they're dealing with no one leaves Vance Aircraft without being arrested!"

"Sir—" Mclntyre put the phone down on Chris's eager compliance and excitement, the latter like a theft of his own feelings. He whirled as if in triumph towards the studio's tall windows, glanced up at the glass roof. He had Gant he watched his hand close into a fist, fascinated. The guy had walked into a surveillance net like a four-year-old. Beautiful-He hurried into the bedroom and dragged the always packed suitcase from the back of the wardrobe. His sober suits hung to attention above his row of shoes. The wardrobe, despite all he could do, still smelt of May's perfume, which she had lavished on her clothes as well as herself.

He closed the studio windows on the street noises and locked them. He turned to the door and remembered Fraser. He hesitated for a moment, then picked up the telephone.

It wouldn't do any harm to take the guy along. He could be useful… there was a fix in, Fraser had offered him a brighter future. Maybe they could work something out. Meanwhile, why upset the guy…?

Out of the warm spread of the lights, he could look up through the glass roof of Blakey's office suite and see big stars hanging in the desert night. He felt no impatience. Blakey had put the snapshot through the computer, scanning its creased surface, and had then begun the process of blowing it up in sections. Mapmaking. There was a curious, angering sensation that lingered as the elements of Strickland's large, pale features grew, inflated, became more inscrutable. His one hand, resting on the rail of the jetty, was now the size of a baseball mitt, his shoulders huge, the brand name of his windcheater large as a neon sign above a diner.

Gant listened to the computer keyboard responding to Blakey's fingers like a small, excited bird; to the hum of machinery, the occasional purring regurgitations of the printer and photocopier. In a few more minutes, there'd be a composite enlargement, big as a map, to spread on a worktable and examine. The process of discovering where the picture had been taken was in the hands of machines, and that satisfied him.

The mountains behind Strickland were volcanic in origin, and there were three of them. From the shadows, the angle of the sun and Strickland's squint, the time of year was spring and the mountains stretched away north of the small lake into which the jetty thrust like a stick. There were pine trees in the background, on the slopes and around the tiny cuticle of shoreline that could be seen. Northern hemisphere or New Zealand not quite anywhere in the world, but you could still take your choice of the two hemispheres, outside the tropics… Gant still felt that Strickland had come home, that it was a snapshot taken in America.

The main computer at Vance Aircraft had produced, at Blakey's instructions, a relief map of the area in the background of the photograph, then a section outline of the landscape. There was a vague, newsreel-like familiarity about the rise and fall of the volcanic land, the lake, but nothing more concrete. The map and the section lay on the large table on whose edge he was perched, waiting.

"His clothing doesn't look new," Blakey called out without looking up from the huge image he was assembling delicately on the plate of the colour photocopier.

"Like he's worn it a lot. Maybe he wasn't a tourist at the time the picture was taken."

He seemed not to expect any reply. There was a high vapour trail at the edge of the sky in the snapshot. From its altitude, it was a civilian flight, Gant estimated. But then, most wilderness areas in the world were overflown by charter flights, red eyes shuttle services.

The clothing's American—"

"You can buy American in any part of the world," he replied to Blakey's observation.

"Yeah."

"Anything in writing? On the jetty, one of those huts or lodges or whatever they are?"

"Another few minutes…"

He sensed Barbara close beside him and turned to her. Her tiredness looked just as strained, less to do with the hour than with the defeat of dreams, the loss of Alan.

"You OK?"

She nodded.

"You?"

"It's going to come out right this, I mean. I feel it. Every picture tells a story and this one will tell us where Strickland lives."

Barbara seemed to dislike her eagerness.

"Is it dangerous I mean, how dangerous is it?" she asked huskily.

"Some. Maybe a lot. Strickland has killed plenty of people. He's been perfecting his talents for a long time."

"Could you, I mean, when you find him, can he be persuaded to talk? To tell you the truth?"

Gant shrugged. The machines continued to hum and chirp. Blakey was murmuring a tune as he concentrated.

"I can only ask the guy." He made as if to smile, but Barbara shuddered. He touched her arm, which jumped but she did not move away.

"I have to find him first."

The truth won't bring Alan or the company back to life." Her features arranged themselves into the now habitual grim planes that somehow sullenly refused to catch and reflect the warmth of the room's lights.

She was toying with a glass of whisky but not drinking it. Then, throwing her dark hair away from her face with her hand, she stared at him. She expected demanded? as she had so many times before, something she already doubted he could give.

"But it will save your career?" He realised there was no unkindness in the question.

"Maybe. That's not important. It will save Alan's reputation. It's the truth, that's all."

He was aware his gaze was bitter as he added: "Strickland killed innocent bystanders on the airplanes. He was hired to do that by big business." The contempt of his tone was venomous, embracing.

"For dollars and pounds and Dmarks." He studied his hands as he spoke.

The things I did, the things I was ordered to do…" He sighed.

"Well, they weren't for the dollar at least, they weren't supposed to be. There seemed to be some point in it." He looked up. I'll find him… then whoever hired him."

Her hand brushed his, then the moment was broken by Blakey's voice.

"You guys want to come see the Incredible Hulk?"

Barbara followed Gant to the long worktable where Blakey was smoothing the huge, photocopied enlargement of the snapshot, as if it was cloth-of-gold. The computer's jigsaw blowups had been made whole again. The creases in the original were like sword cuts across Strickland's body and the sky. Barbara hovered at a slight distance, as if threatened by the man in the photograph.

"He doesn't quite look the part," Blakey offered.

"He never did." Gant leaned forward over the photocopy the size of an airplane blueprint. His fingers traced, as if longingly, the faint vapour trail in the sky, the volcanic peaks retreating northwards, then the dark mass of pines and individual trees.

Blakey's blunt forefinger tapped at some point near Strickland's temple, against the brown squareness of a wooden building perhaps a hunting lodge, a rural motel.

"See?" Gant peered. It wasn't a place name, not even that of a person. On a shingle hung on the eaves of a verandah was the word TACKLE in capitals. Above it was a blurred sign. BUD LITE.

"Here, too," Blakey offered, his hands moving. On the corner of the building, which looked out over the lake from the shore end of the jetty, was a notice. All the print was illegible, even at that magnification, except for two headlining words. FISHING LICENCES.

"Back in the USA," Gant murmured.

"Got to be the Pacific North-West, somewhere Washington state, Oregon, northern California…"

"Can we narrow it down?"

Barbara's breath was warm against his cheek as she leaned between them to look, somehow emboldened by the identification of the place. It wasn't foreign, unknown which made Strickland less dangerous, less impervious.

Blakey, by way of response, collected the relief map and the section from the other table and placed them over the enlarged snapshot.

Three mountains in a kind of line, south to north," he muttered. This has to be a National Park or Wilderness Area, I guess. Give me time to run through the atlas on CD-ROM, see if I can pick out some likely locations. It could also be Canada I'd better check." He looked up at Gant, smiling.

"Hang loose just a little longer, Mitchell. I think we can put ourselves in this guy's back yard!"

"What if he was there on vacation, nothing more?" Barbara asked.

"Let's hope he wasn't."

"Does it seem like his sort of country? You said he had a house in France—"

"He did. That was out of the way, too, in the boondocks.

Strickland likes privacy."

He studied the enlargement once more. Blakey was already hunched over the computer keyboard, scrolling through the vivid images, the colours, contours, highways and mottled towns, of an atlas' computerised maps.

"I think he lives here, Barbara wherever here is."

"Where are we going, Ben?" she demanded.

The night air was cool on her cheeks after the heat, smoke and semi-darkness of the jazz club in a basement under a narrow row of shops. As they emerged from the quiet sidestreet on to the Boulevard

Anspach her patience, rubbed almost raw, vanished. Campbell looked at her as if stung.

"I — er… You didn't seem to be enjoying—" The jazz was fine, Ben. It was the company that was the problem." She positioned herself confrontation ally arms folded across her breasts, purse jutting like a flat weapon, feet planted squarely in the high-heeled shoes that were beginning to pinch. The care with which she had dressed for the reception seemed days earlier.

"Oh, that—" He assayed a grin that a streetlight made into a purpled rictus. His arms flapped in an approximated shrug, as if he had lost all orientation.

It was after one. He had collected her at the Amigo at seven-thirty to take her to the reception, during which he had whispered to her that they must talk, it was vitally important… dinner somewhere, after this? She had nodded vehemently, letting surprise and irritation form all her volition. She had excused herself from a group of colleagues intent on fleshpot-crawling and Campbell had taken her to a supper club, then the jazz cellar.

As they had left the reception together, she had seen David watching them, in company with Roussillon. Her anger had finally determined her. Campbell was the weak link, Campbell must aid her. Then nerve had failed her and she had drunk too much wine, as Campbell had, and they had both seemed to subside into a mutual gloom. The sense of her danger had been dulled. Now, the effects of the wine had gone as certainly as her patience.

"Where next, Ben? Somewhere preordained?" she challenged, her mouth dry with too much alcohol and too many cigarettes. She lit another and puffed angrily at it.

Then she refolded her arms belligerently.

"No…" he sighed. His eyes had seemed to throw back the denial more vehemently before he shrank into a kind of whining schoolboy slouch in front of her.

"What is it, Ben? Why did you ask me out for a date, for God's sake?"

"Don't be stupid!" he snapped, his hand waving her away from him. Cars passed, headlights washing over them and catching the gleam and sparkle of goods in grilled shop windows.

"Why do you have to always be so stupid?" It was the fearful rage of a parent who had recovered a child after hours of anguished absence. He moved closer, drink on his breath, his lips wet. His eyes were narrow, hateful.

"You're always right! You always have to be bloody right! Christ, you've really blown it this time, Marian, my God but you have!"

Candour seemed to momentarily exhaust him and he leaned against a darkened shop window like a sullen drunk. Behind the glass, weary fish swam slowly in a huge tank. Crayfish and bound-clawed lobsters, too.

Revolting and appropriate.

"What have I blown, Ben?" She felt a weakness move up her body.

Instinctively, she glanced around them. There were still a good number of pedestrians, a fair amount of traffic. The boulevard was alive with lights. Her hotel was a ten-minute walk away.

"What?"

"Everything, you stupid bitch!" His voice was a quiet scream.

"Everything… Why do you think I asked you to come to dinner? Because I fancied you?"

"I know the outfit's a bit creased and I'm showing every one of my thirty-eight years, Ben…" The forced humour vanished on her tongue.

"Why, then? Because you loathe me?"

"It's not you, it's the whole bloody thing, woman!"

"Whatthing?"

The traffic noises faded as she ground out her cigarette with the sole of her narrow black shoe. The fish continued to swim slowly, leadenly, the lobsters scrabbling at the bottom of the tank.

"The thing-!"

"What do they want you to do, Ben? When?"

"For Christ's sake, what will they do to me?" he murmured, seeming to catch sight of the captive shellfish for the first time. He rubbed his eyes and forehead furiously, as if he thought himself trapped in a dream. Perhaps he was.

"I wanted to say… couldn't—" He turned to face her, eyes gleaming, his handsome, assured features crumpled like a page torn from a priceless illuminated manuscript.

"I've kept you alive, you stupid bitch — alive!" He yelled it like an accusation. Then his hand covered his mouth as if he had been caught out.

Marian brushed slowly at the beaded jacket, feeling its roughness, then touched the pearls at her throat. She smoothed the hair at her temples; all as if anticipating being photographed.

"I see," she murmured.

A young couple passed, seemingly amused at their parody of some minor marital quarrel.

Campbell looked at her intently, as if he sought some kind of guidance.

His breathing was louder than the traffic. Changing lights turned his features from sickly green to shamed red. The masks he had discarded and replaced during the evening were all gone. His flesh was as white as bone as he moved his head.

"All right, Ben," she announced. Tell me what you're supposed to do for them, as far as I'm concerned."

"You don't think I wanted to, do you?"

"Probably not. But David owns you sorry, employs you, and this is just another of the favours you do for him. What, exactly, was it?"

"It doesn't matter… it's over now. It was supposed to be earlier."

"What do you mean, over?"

"I kept you off the streets, in company, away from dark places! Does that answer your question? I didn't do what I was supposed to do hours ago…" Again, the effort at something akin to truth seemed to exhaust him.

"I just oh, shit…"

Thank you whatever you did. Thanks for not being the Judas-goat, the one with the bell."

"I tried to warn you off before."

"I know."

Marian lit another cigarette and drew on it slowly. Traffic, pedestrians, the long street of shops beyond which jutted incongruous church spires. She felt sorry for Ben Campbell; for his weakness, his ambition, and his present violent fear. He had failed David.

"I can we get in the car, just drive?" he asked, as if he had become newly afraid of the open street, or of other people. His BMW was parked no more than a hundred yards away. He looked ill in the purpling light of the nearest streetlamp, as she must have done herself.

"Just drive for a bit…?"

"Yes," she nodded.

He walked like a quick marionette to the BMW and got in, slamming the door.

She got in beside him, fugging the interior with cigarette smoke and nerves almost immediately. He seemed to resent the intrusion of both.

He started the engine and pulled out with a squeal of tyres into the thin stream of vehicles, heading north.

Traffic lights were against them at the Boulevard Baudouin. Marian exhaled smoke that rolled back at her from the windscreen.

The misting of the screen was erased at once by the air-conditioning.

Her mind was clearing with much greater reluctance. Ben Campbell had colluded with David, then lost his nerve. Because of that, of him, she was alive, and for no other reason. The car moved away from the lights, across the intersection and along the Rue de Brabant, towards the port and the Laeken park.

The anger came back again, like a recurring bout of malaria, making her head ache, her body tense against her situation, against David. She had to do something, anything.

Traffic lights at the junction with the Avenue de la Reine. He had switched on his left indicator. He was heading for the park, it seemed, as if towards a wilderness where he might lose himself.

Suddenly, she flung open the passenger door. He turned a stunned face to her.

"I'm getting out now!" she snapped at him.

"David can find me for himself—"

"No, please-!"

The lights changed.

"I can't if you, Ben I have to watch out for myself! This could be a trick—"

"No!" he all but wailed, shaking his head. The first horns had started behind them, impatient even at that hour.

"Get in for God's sake, get in the car!" he bellowed, his features drained and desperate, pleading with her.

"Will you help me, Ben? Will you talk to me?"

His face was ashen, his eyes furtive, moving rapidly like those of a dreamer. The car horns were louder, like the sounds of threatening creatures in the dark. Ben Campbell was utterly unnerved. His lips were wet as he nodded.

Cars pulled out and passed them, faces glaring at the BMW. Campbell flinched at each one, as if seeing enemies he recognised.

She climbed back into her seat, closing the door.

"Will you tell me everything?" she asked quietly.

He continued to nod like an automaton, something clockwork. David had asked too much of him. Broken him, the butterfly on the wheel. She could feel no anger towards him, just pity' He shouldn't have asked me

… he shouldn't! Campbell muttered as he put the car into gear and the BMW screeched away from the lights.

"What do you know about the aircraft sabotage?"

He looked at her as if she had asked the question in an unknown language.

"I don't under—" She waved it dismissively away.

"It doesn't matter. Tell me about the fraud with the regional redevelopment funds. Everything you know."

"I know everything! he confessed mournfully.

She removed a tiny recorder from her purse and switched it on.

"Never mind, Ben," she sighed, exhausted.

"Just talk. The fraud. Begin at the beginning…"

It was probably because of his heightened, strained nerves, Winterborne decided.

His mood lit his imagination like a succession of flares over a battlefield at night.

He could not stop thinking about her. Marian kept coming out of the shadows of the large bedroom of the hotel suite, announcing in her careless way that he was wrong wrong to think, say, act as he did.

There were new leasings, firming-up purchase enquiries, acres of beneficial newsprint and television reportage. Skyliner and Artemis

Airways were in the process, like Hilary and Tensing, of planting the flag on the summit of the mountain they had had to climb. The banks were like eager children pursuing them, desperate to become part of the game with debt rescheduling and new loans alike. The European Commission was dining to bloating on the turnaround that he had achieved.

And yet there she was, in his imagination, her expression quizzically mocking and long familiar.

David Winterborne brushed his hair back with long fingers, then rested his hands once more on the duvet of the bed. He studied them, watching them curl involuntarily. They were like those end-of-pier machines, a pair of clawlike grabs which hovered over but hardly ever held small and useless presents. However many times you put pennies in the slot and the arms moved out and the claws grabbed, nothing ever seemed to be won, picked upHe smoothed the duvet with straightened fingers. That was an image Marian would have used and enjoyed. The cranes, the diggers and the grabs were working again on the Urban Regeneration Project sites. The parliamentary rumour machine was in high gear, whispering that no one was any longer making disapproving noises concerning Winterborne Holdings or European funds. Except Marian who would be warned off, told to keep her lips firmly together. The Whips' Office had promised-and if you could see your way to making a contribution to Party funds, with a General Election in the offing…?

The knighthood remained unmentioned but palpable. Unless it came soon, of course, it would never come. American citizens did not qualify. He smiled, as if a bout of indigestion had passed. The last General Election had cost him a quarter of a million. It had bought him much gratitude, latitude and influence. This one might well cost him a half-million in contributions. More if he hedged his bets and contributed to the Opposition's campaign. The money would buy him immunity-there again. Like a tormenting ghost, walking towards him across the litter of faxes, newsprint and notes that were the confetti of celebration. He had dined Coulthard, Tim Burton and a dozen movers and shakers after the formal reception.

It had gone well, spirits were high. It had been whispered to him that even the old irritant dear Kenneth had been warned off, his palm read for him by the Cabinet Secretary, no less… and at the Club, too. That news had especially delighted him. Aubrey, like some ancient Lear-figure, had been shown a kingdom of friends, influence and self-satisfaction in danger of forfeiture. He had been humbled — and yet Marian stood at the foot of the bed like one of Scrooge's ghosts, damn her, so palpable was the sense of what was to happen to her. Campbell had tried to thwart his intent, keeping her safely in public places. It had been wise to alter the strategy and include his demise. He glanced at his watch. Soon, very soon now The value of Winterborne Holdings had risen seven per cent in three days, and the conglomerate's worth was still climbing. And yet it was not that which ran through him like a sexual charge, it was what was imminent for Marian. The gold-strapped watch had been a crystal ball, showing the future, the point in time that was he looked again less than five minutes away. The smile she still smiled in his head would soon disappear for ever. Miss Priss the Puritan he had angrily called her when they had been children one summer afternoon of bickering and rain-clouds.

"Why is it so difficult!" he breathed aloud, startling himself and looking quickly round as if he feared discovery.

Campbell had to be got rid of. He would be just another accident victim to be added to the list of names that had appeared in the press when the two Vance 494s went down. Yet something in him kept reciting, like a prayer without content, but this is Marian… Roussillon had telephoned only minutes before. She and Campbell were in the car, heading towards the port and the Laeken park. Campbell, so the Frenchman seemed certain, was in poor shape. Winterborne looked at his watch again.

In two minutes, give or take, a truck would plough into Campbell's BMW while a van sandwiched it, providing the anvil against which the hammer would strike.

There would be few witnesses Campbell's delay had been both futile and helpful — but two people in a car would pull over and dash to assist… and ensure there were no survivors in the BMW.

Simplicity itself, the soul of efficiency.

He felt the dampness along his hairline, as if the pressure of the impact he envisaged so vividly had squeezed the cold droplets through the pores of his skin.

The seconds ticked precisely, steadily in his mind. In one minute, metal would tear, cry out and then crumple, glass would shatter, leather rip. The BMW would implode like a squashed beer can between the truck and the van.

He listened to his slow, deep breathing and felt his shoulders relax.

Kismet. It could not be undone, it was already almost accomplished, the vehicle's shrinkage to the proportions of a coffin-sized box. A road accident, a statistic this is Marian… It possessed a great deal less force. Her features had all but faded from his mind.

He looked at the gold watch.

Now She glanced out of the passenger window. A white anonymous van was beside them as the BMW crossed the Rue Marie-Christine, beyond which rose the Gothic Eglise Notre-Dame. They crossed the sea canal and she glimpsed long, dark barges as lifeless as oil spill ages on the flat black mirror of the water. Ahead of them were the beaded lights along the Avenue du Pare Royal.

Campbell's monotone had hardly varied or diverged, except to react to other vehicles or his own fears. The traffic was heavier, with trucks making for the port and its ocean-going ships. What she was recording seemed no more real, and offered no more excitement, than a description of a book he had read. Somehow, they were not things that had actually happened, his dead voice insinuated.

Perhaps he could only deal with it by making the whole account sound like a police statement in a courtroom; dry, matter-of-fact, uninflected, monotonous' Look out!" she cried, her throat tight, eyes wide.

"Ben, for God's sake, look out-!"

She heard the metal of the car begin to scream. Saw Campbell's terrified, betrayed face turn to her as the shadow of the truck blotted out all light, all other movement.

She felt the passenger door torn off and the impact of her body with There what did I tell you?" Blakey breathed, as if he had been present at the birth of his first child.

After a moment, Gant murmured: "Surf's up." Blakey chuckled in his beard.

The relief map that Blakey had produced on the computer, the guess worked map of the snapshot's scenery, had been transferred to a transparency. It lay over the printout from the CD-ROM atlas that

Blakey had chosen. Layers of geological strata, pages of a book. The relief map was almost a perfect twin of the atlas layout… the Three Sisters Wilderness Area, Oregon.

This lake's called' — Blakey raised his glasses away from his eyes

"Bonner Lake.

A couple of miles south of South Sister, right between that peak and Mount Bachelor." He let his breath whistle out between his teeth, as if someone else had performed the magical trick that had made the guess and the atlas match. Gant gripped Blakey's shoulder, the tremor of his hand displaying his excitement.

The snapshot is looking north, so…" Gant said, studying the map by peeling away the transparency,"… this place is Squaw Camp."

Tourist season place. Just a collection of necessary stores and accommodation.

Strickland if he's there probably has a lodge somewhere in the woods."

"It would suit him." Gant remembered the farmhouse in the Dordogne, its isolation, the sufficient proximity of the small village. Another tourist area. Strickland would be away off the backroads somewhere, a couple of miles or more from Squaw Camp-telephone. He needed a telephone, fax, computer link. To run his business.

"Ron, you got the telephone directory on computer?"

Blakey grinned.

"You'd better believe it. Oregon, right? Coming right up, sir!" He almost ran towards the keyboard.

Barbara came back into the room, carrying a tray with three coffee mugs on it, sugar and milk.

"What is it?" Her features struggled with disbelief, as if ashamed of her conscious choice of scepticism.

"Oregon. Strickland's in Oregon," Gant said, taking a coffee, sipping at it.

"Where? Three Sisters…" She sounded as if she had become lost in the Wilderness Area, plunged into some forest.

"What is it?"

"I went there once, on summer camp. I was just a kid. Alan sent me there when Momma died—" Her hand flailed at his movement of sympathy, and he retreated carefully. She shook her head violently.

"I'm sorry. Just surprised me the name, the place." She sniffed and looked up, brightly dry-eyed.

"Is he there — really there?

Now?"

"I think so—"

"You could be wrong, Mitchell. There's no Strickland listed," Blakey called out.

"It's no surprise," Gant murmured, apparently without any real sense of disappointment.

"But it was worth trying. His number's unlisted."

Blakey tugged at his beard.

"If it is, then no one's going to give it out."

Then I'll have to go up there and find him, won't I?"

To Barbara, he seemed suddenly filled with a nervous energy he could not expel.

Then his demanding eyes turned to her.

"You must have something on the plant that I can fly up to Oregon? To save time?"

There's…? Ron?" His demand angered her.

"For Christ's sake, Mitchell, we're bankrupt and now you want an air-taxi?"

There's the Vance Executive you used to fly the chief around in,"

Blakey offered apologetically. He was, Barbara realised, apologising for his continued enthusiasm.

Then call in a crew and get it ready, Barbara." It sounded like a threat.

' Your priorities-!"

"Look, Barbara it might take me days, a whole week, to locate this guy." His attempt at mollification was amateurish, unpractised.

"I need to get up there by the quickest means. I don't think I should take too many more civilian flights. Do you?" His features and his voice had altered. Reflection had shown him his own danger, flagged the FBI wanted posters in front of his eyes.

"OK, OK," she grumblingly agreed, as if they were enacting yet another of their interminable domestic squabbles. She brushed her hair away from her face. I'll get to it. Take care of the airplane!"

She moved away from them towards a telephone. Blakey shrugged conspiratorially with Gant, who waggled his hand.

Then he rubbed at his worn eyes. It would take a week, maybe more, combing the Three Sisters area, all of it wilderness, sparsely populated, poor roads, mountainous… Even then, he might never find Strickland, especially if the guy was living there under another name

… "Aliases," he said. Barbara was speaking into the telephone, obsessively businesslike, demanding in her own way.

"Strickland had aliases, maybe four or five…" He held his temples in his hands, applying pressure.

"When I ran into him he was called…?"

Barbara watched him retreat into an intense abstraction, trying to remember. All too often during their brief marriage when he had employed the same posture it had seemed more like absenting himself from their situation, a protective, defensive stance.

"Yes, Bill," she said into the telephone.

"It is urgent yes, the men will be paid a bonus… Thanks, Bill. A half-hour? Good." She put down the telephone and turned again to watch Gant. His face was chalky with the effort of recollection.

"He had various Op Names like Preacherman, Mechanic — Fireball was another one—" He clicked his fingers impatiently, as at some invisible waiter.

"His code names…" He reached for a notepad, scrabbled for a pencil.

Scribbled furiously, shaking his head, roughly scrubbing out whatever he was writing.

Barbara wandered towards Blakey, as if choosing his more comfortable, bearlike appearance. She stared casually at the printout of the Oregon map, and at the hugely enlarged sky and the man's forehead and eyes beneath it. Strickland seemed as distant as any stranger in other people's snapshots.

Try this-!" Gant offered urgently.

"It's one of his names, I'm sure… then this one."

The pencil tapped on the pad like insistent morse.

"Christianson," Blakey murmured.

"Ford—" They're based around Preacherman and Mechanic."

"OK-let's see."

At the command of Blakey's blunt, quick fingers, the telephone directory for Central Oregon scrolled up the computer's screen, the Cs flicking past as casually as an eye might glance across the columns of names of some war memorial… The Christiansons, dozens of them. Blakey slowed the movement to the speed of movie credits.

"No initial, given name?" he asked.

Gant shook his head, as if to loosen the tension that Barbara was feeling as they pressed at Blakey's shoulders, staring at the screen.

"I don't recall—" Blakey glanced quickly, repeatedly between map and screen, checking unfamiliar names, ignoring the towns like Bend, Redmond Oakwood… Eventually, shaking his head, he set the screen in flickering motion once more.

Then slowed it as Ford appeared. The list moved as sluggishly as diesel in the Arctic. A. Ford… Arthur J. Ford… Bob Ford.

Eventually, the screen became still, frozen. Peter Ford, Sun Bear Lodge, Squaw Camp, Three Sisters… "Well?" Blakey asked very softly.

Barbara listened to Gant's breathing. It was like that of a tense, roused animal.

Blakey's face expressed the pain he must have been experiencing from the ferocity of Gant's grip on his shoulder as he stared at the screen.

Blakey had isolated the name and address, so that it sat enlarged in the dead centre of the otherwise empty screen.

Eventually, Gant nodded.

"It's him. Hello, Strickland hello."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Flight and Rest He sat in the swivel chair that had been Vance's, his back to the large desk, watching the dawn begin to leak into the desert sky and dim the stars. The scratch ground crew that Barbara had gotten out of bed were almost finished now. He was just waiting for the ground engineer to call him down to the hangar. The ship was fuelled and had the range to reach Bend, Oregon, without landing. His flight plan had been filed in the name of the pilot who had taken over his job after he resigned; the guy who had flown Barbara back from Oslo after Alan died.

When the phone on the desk rang, he swivelled round in the chair and picked up the receiver.

"Mitchell? We're through down here. You want to take our baby for a drive? We can talk about the monthly repayment plan and the insurance

…?" The humour was tired but refreshing.

"OK, Bill just give me a minute." Barbara had been at the edge of eyesight when he picked up the phone. She was still there as he replaced the receiver. He shrugged at her in a way that he hoped would discourage talk.

"They're ready…"

She was poised like a rain cloud near the door of the executive suite.

Time to go," she replied. He felt her press against his temples like an ache.

She seemed reluctant to let him go, not out of anything that resembled affection, but as if she would be adrift once they parted.

Try to bring my airplane back in one piece, uh?"

He sensed a twisted well-wishing beneath the bluntness.

"OK. You need it to fly to DC next week." He grinned. She was subpoenaed to appear before the Senate Committee that was continuing its investigation of the affairs of Vance Aircraft, despite Alan's death and the company's collapse.

Whatever scams and frauds he had perpetrated weren't going to be allowed to die with him. There seemed a Federal vengefulness towards Vance much like that of Mclntyre towards himself. You stepped out of line, now you take the consequences, that kind of thing. Just one of the recurrent bouts of malarial righteousness they suffered on Capitol Hill. Screw them. It was all mostly irrelevant now, as far as Vance Aircraft was concerned just another shovelful of earth on the company's coffin.

He turned away to stare out of the windows. The dawn was purple along the horizon, the first crags and outcrops coming back to silhouetted life.

"Will you be able to find him? If you find him, can you—" Looking at the back of his head, his set shoulders, she remembered that he meant only to kill Strickland, not bring him back.

"For God's sake, Mitchell-!" she was impelled by desperation to shout at his back. His shoulders flinched.

"Help me! God, I need the sympathy vote his confession would give me!"

She could say no more. It hurt so much to have uttered the words at all.

Gant remained watching the slow seepage of the day, the first faint outlining of a small cloud with pink against a blue-black sky. He could begin to pick out the hanged-men silhouettes of cactuses beyond the perimeter fence. The taxiways and the main runway were the slightest difference of shading from the desert sand. He imagined a flicker of light for an instant, out beyond a clump of rocks. His chest felt tight, his shoulders cramped with too many muscles. Then he exhaled noisily.

"OK, Barbara OK. I promise I'll try and get him back alive." He sighed with what might have been disappointment, a sense of having been disinherited.

"I promise."

He sensed her about to say something else, then was aware, through his tense shoulders, that she had gone and the door had closed behind her.

Out beyond the fence, there was another glint, like that of sunlight on a piece of mica. Flickering like a signal. There was someone out there, he realised. He stood up awkwardly, quickly, and grabbed up the rucksack and the other equipment from the sofa. He had to hurry.

Fraser sat across the aisle of the Learjet from Mclntyre, his sense of being an unwelcome travelling companion undiminished by the hours of the flight. The FBI agent regarded him with a hostile suspicion that seemed to increase in proportion to the crumbling of his professional loyalties. Fraser was adept at patient silence and was prepared to wait Mclntyre out. Gant lay ahead of them, and Fraser was almost certain that Strickland was tied to Gant by an invisible thread. He was sure that Mclntyre knew Strickland well enough to be able to locate him. That was information that would have to be bought… Mclntyre had not yet opened his shop for business.

The great plains over which they had flown, sprinkled with the occasional lights of cities and towns, were giving way to the western mountain ranges; that bulldozed rim of the continent beyond which lay the fantasy of California. Kansas City's lights were long behind the aircraft and Colorado loomed, together with the deserts of the south-west. Chris, Mclntyre's young, naive assistant with the shining face and clear eyes, sat ahead of them, poring over maps, keeping in telephone contact with the surveillance team around the Vance Aircraft factory complex outside Phoenix. He was drinking prissily at a glass of 7-Up. Fraser was sharing Mclntyre's bottle of bourbon. The cramped passenger cabin was dim-lit.

Fraser glanced through the tiny porthole beside him, back towards the first faintness of dawn which seemed in pursuit of them. Ahead of the plane, the blackness was filled with bright, frozen stars.

He realised Mclntyre was studying him from beneath heavy eyebrows, his eyes narrowed, folded into the creases of flesh around them. Fraser had murmured the temptations of a large salary, a bright future… in exchange for Strickland, at the same time fending off Mclntyre's intense curiosity regarding his prospective employer Strickland's employer. He'd had to shrug in voiceless admission at Mclntyre's realisation that both he and Gant wanted Strickland because of the two downed 494s. Mclntyre's value and the price of the information he could supply had risen in moments, like some wild stock exchange barometer in response to rumours of tax cuts. Mclntyre had realised his true worth.

The man smiled conspiratorially. Greed was working in him like an acid. Fraser was satisfied.

The handset in Chris' armrest warbled and the young man snatched it up.

At once, his shoulders were tense with alarm and surprise, alerting Mclntyre. The melting ice in his glass spilt on to his lap as he lurched upright. He picked up his own telephone as Chris gestured earnestly.

"Mclntyre," he snapped.

"Sir we have kind of a problem here," he heard from the surveillance team's leader.

Tell me," he growled.

There's an airplane being prepared flight checks, that kind of thing, ref uell—"

"Where's Gant?" Mclntyre sensed his own shortwindedness, as if he had exhausted himself in a race, only to lose at the tape. He glanced heavily across at Fraser, who continued to sip like a woman at his bourbon and feign no more than mild interest.

"Where is the asshole!" Mclntyre bellowed.

"Sam picked him out, in the people around the airplane. He went aboard, we think—"

"Why didn't you call me?" This time the shock-wave of his rage seemed to unsettle Fraser. Chris was staring at him over the back of his seat, his phone still pressed to his cheek, like a man watching his house burn down. It was slipping away.

"You just watched while all this was happening?" Spilt 7-Up from Chris' glass bubbled like acid on the aisle carpet.

"While the guy just walked on to a plane?"

"Sir, we couldn't be sure what was going down! You ordered us to wait for your arrival—"

"Your ass is in the fireplace, Kennedy!" The asshole even had the right name to be a genuine, made-in-America prick!

"Get in there — now! Arrest Gant and anyone who gets in the way!"

"Sir." The response was pinched off by urgency and dislike.

Mclntyre slammed down the handset. He had wanted Gant to himself, had told them to hold off until he arrived. He'd wanted to grin into the asshole hero's shocked, defeated face as he read him his rights.

He quashed the perception of his error and the momentary flush of its possible enormity as if it had been a glimpse at a foreboding X-ray plate. Then glowered at Fraser, whose features at once settled into immobility. Chris turned away.

Mclntyre looked out of the window.

They had to stop Gant, stop him flying out, getting away The Learjet seemed, to his boiling impatience, to be suspended in some geostationary orbit between night and the pursuing day. There was nothing he could do… They had to stop Gant For Kennedy, sweeping the binoculars across the Vance Aircraft site, there remained a moment when Mclntyre's panic seemed unwarranted, even ridiculous.

The morning breeze whirled dust, the runway was empty, the first windows to catch the rising sun gleamed back innocent light.

Then the nose of the small jet sniffed out of the hangar below him.

Kennedy watched the airplane emerge, easing itself into the first dawn sunlight. Its movement mesmerised.

'-anyone who gets in the way!"

"Sir."

He heard Mclntyre break the connection. The sun was climbing into the wing mirror of the car against which he leant. Dazzled he flung the earphone away from him as if it burned his hand. Suddenly, the situation was slipping away from them, accelerating like the airplane below; it was fully visible now, turning on to the taxiway, making for the main runway.

A noise startled him into issuing orders. Someone shunted a round into a Bullpup shotgun close to his ear.

"Move it!" he shouted, plucking up the car intercom.

"Go, go, go! Biles, get your car down there, head him off block the runway!"

He climbed into the passenger seat of his car as it accelerated wildly over the lip of the outcrop from which the surveillance team had watched the Vance Aircraft site for most of the previous night. The windscreen in front of his eyes seemed to possess its own urgency, joggling and eager, breaking up the landscape as if he was seeing it reflected in the broken fragments of a mirror. The two other cars followed him down the slope.

He tugged the pistol from his shoulder holster and checked it. Don, the driver, was flinging the steering wheel from side to side like a kid playing a video game in an arcade. The executive jet was sliding as smoothly as if on ice towards the main runway. It seemed to be moving in a different element from the car, with greater confidence.

The mirrors were blind with dust. The car lurched and flew for an instant as it hit the road, then Don swung the wheel viciously again to right it, the tyres screeching. It was no more than a hundred yards and a few seconds before they turned into the open main gates of the site. If he screwed up here, he knew Mclntyre — a continentally renowned bastard would make him pay for the rest of his career.

The other two cars skidded and lurched through the gates behind them, and immediately Biles' car peeled away, making directly for the runway.

Don was heading their car towards the main administrative building.

It could all be too late' Head for the runway, Don!" he bellowed, changing his mind. Gant must be kept on the ground, the runway had to be blocked. The car swerved and then shimmied off the paved road on to desert sand. Ahead of them, Biles' car was streaking forward, seeming to tow behind it an impenetrable cloud of dust. Kennedy lost sight of the airplane's ghostly whiteness in the shadow of the surrounding mountains. His disappointment was as violent as if he had already seen it lift away from the ground.

"Come on, Don, for Christ's sake-!"

Had he seen it turn on to the end of the runway before the dust concealed it—?

The third car was invisible as it continued towards the office buildings. Then his car swung out of Biles' dust cloud and he saw the executive jet once more.

In the same instant, he heard Mclntyre's voice again over the earphone.

Kennedy pressed it to his ear and cheek as if it was the means of a self-inflicted wound.

"What's happening? Kennedy, have you stopped the airplane, dammit?"

Gant turned the executive jet on to the runway, nose pointing towards the two racing cars. Biles' sedan slewed on to the runway, maybe a little over halfway down.

'-almost!" he heard himself shouting back at Mclntyre.

"We got the runway blocked off- he's going nowhere!"

"Make sure of that!"

"I'm making sure dead sure!"

Biles had swung his car across the centre line of the runway. As the dust cleared in front of his windscreen, Kennedy saw the airplane clearly, and realised that it had begun to accelerate.

"Get across the runway!" he screamed at Don.

Biles and his driver were out of their sedan, shotguns sticking up, but their immobility suggested a growing fear rather than confidence as the executive jet roared towards them.

"Across the runway!" he wailed at the driver, the earphone still clamped against his cheek.

The white airplane was growing larger and outrunning them as the car seemed to move more and more slowly… Biles had parked too far down the runway… Then the whole scene froze for an instant, the only movement being the slow, very slow upward movement of the undercarriage

… Then there was a lurch of acceleration and the jet screamed away and over them, the dust enveloping him and the car, Biles' car…

Barbara saw the cloud of dust, anticipating the moment of impact between the plane and the cars. Then, as she heard his voice over Alan's intercom system, loud in the room, the Vance Exec lifted clear.

The plane seemed to stagger with the effort of retracting its undercarriage too soon and the severe angle of take-off.

'-up! Jesus…" she heard over the intercom, the relief evident in his voice.

Then there was only his breathing and the ether. The plane winking in the lightening sky. It was as if he remained in the room with her as the plane diminished; the dangerous, somehow cornered animal she had often felt him to be. The dust settled, exposing the two stranded, purposeless cars on the runway.

The plane was no bigger than a star, then it was gone.

The third car had already drawn up outside the administration block.

Bill and some of the ground crew were watching the disappearing plane from the gaping doors of the hangar. Beside her, Blakey only now seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. The throat-clearing that immediately followed was more like an anticipation of problems. Barbara impulsively patted his arm.

"Had to be," she murmured. Thanks, Ron."

"Sure."

The two cars on the runway had repossessed their occupants and had turned, like blind, squat insects, towards her and the buildings, as if they scented another source of sustenance. They accelerated in mutual frustration across the desert sand, throwing up dust that caught the sunlight and sparkled like cheap jewellery.

The plane had vanished southwards, towards the city and Mexico, as if fleeing.

Mitchell would turn north only when he was certain he was out of visual range.

Leaving her to answer their bullying questions, confront their anger

… even face arrest for assisting a fugitive from justice.

As the strange elation of his escape subsided, she recognised her own situation, for the first time. The other two cars joined their companion below her window. She was the one left hanging out to dry.

The phone rang on the desk and she snatched it up.

"Honey?" It was Tom, her husband.

"Yes?" She could not keep the impatience from her voice, and he was at once brittle and defensive.

"When are you coming home, Barbara or do I have to wait until the babysitter gets here? I have to meet important clients today!" Even the emphasis of his unpractised anger was wrong. She hated the cold judgement she made of him.

"I'm sorry, Tom, I may be tied up here for some time yet—" The men getting out of the cars below the window were grim-faced with failure.

That's not helpful, Barbara—"

"For God's sake!" she almost screamed.

Blaming Mitchell now, almost entirely.

"I'm busy, Tom OK? I can't just drop things!"

"OK, OK just be as quick as you can, uh? I'll try and reschedule—" The intercom buzzed.

"I have to go. Sorry…"

She put down the phone and answered the intercom. It was Bill, the ground engineer.

The FBI, Ms Vance. They want to talk to you…" The embers of self congratulation still smouldered in Bill's even tones.

"Right. Send them up, Bill."

"You want me to stay?"

She glanced around the room, shaking her head.

"No, Ron. Just take all the stuff you did for him, and shred it. Don't let them find it."

Blakey nodded and left the room. As Barbara sat down in Alan's swivel chair, she glimpsed the moon, hanging by forgetfulness above the desert in a pale-blue sky.

Carefully, she posed herself behind the large, impressive desk, the day lit window behind her.

She feared she would have to tell them, eventually. She did not want them sitting on her, along with everyone else. Mitchell would know that, it wouldn't be a betrayal of any kind… Guilt bubbled, but subsided as someone knocked at the door.

"Come in," she called, her voice calm.

"Put her on the line," Mclntyre snapped.

The early-morning New Mexico sun glared from the terminal building windows of Albuquerque's airport and the scent of aviation fuel was heavy on the air coming through the open door of the aircraft. Four or five miles away, the towers of the city huddled on bottom-land that, at that distance, appeared as arid as the airport's immediate surroundings. From the window beside Fraser's seat on the other side of the aisle, he could see dark-treed mountains thrusting up into an already leached sky. As he waited, he could hear the rush of fuel into the tanks from the bowser parked beside the airplane.

As Mclntyre gripped the receiver, his hand was clammy with tension rather than perspiration. His free hand clenched and unclenched in a fury of disappointment.

"Yes who is this?" he heard. Eraser's smirk, as he listened on his own handset, infuriated. Gant's wife, trying to tough it out. She knew the flight plan had to but it didn't matter whether or not she told him. Kennedy was checking it out.

He wanted to bruise her. He owed her some fear.

"Special Agent Mclntyre, Mrs. Gant," he ground out.

"My name is Barbara Vance," she replied, her voice tiredly challenging.

"Vance Gant, I'm not interested!" he growled. Chris' head and shoulders appeared in the doorway, blotting out the glare of concrete, but the young man ducked back as their eyes met.

"It's not you I want, lady it's the guy you used to be married to.

You've aided and abetted a fugitive from justice. I could and I will bring charges." The threat was heavy in the morning.

"You're in enough trouble as it is, Barbara Vance."

Her in taken breath was a source of immediate, sharp pleasure, as if he had aroused her.

"Why do you find it necessary to threaten me, Agent Mclntyre?" she managed.

"Is threat what you get off on?" Fraser snickered in the seat opposite.

"Don't make me really angry, lady. I just want him. You don't count but I can still make things bad for you. So cooperate. Tell me his flight plan."

Mclntyre glanced at his watch. It didn't have the right to be this hot before eight in the morning. Already, the hills seemed masked by a smog of heat and to have retreated to a greater distance. The terminal building was a single great mirror.

He listened to her silence which reminded him of a machine making noiseless but tangible and important calculations. Then he added:

"Listen to me, Ms Vance. I only have to instruct my agents who are with you, and I can have you arrested for harbouring a fugitive right now. But you realise that, I guess?"

The silence continued. Then, with a sigh of admission, the woman answered him.

"OK, you can make trouble for me, Agent Mclntyre. And I don't need any more problems right now. Mitchell is flying to Oregon, to the airfield at Redmond—"

He covered the mouthpiece of the receiver and gestured violently at the maps that lay unfolded on Chris' empty seat. Fraser moved, collected them and smoothed them out on his seat's folding table, which he jutted out into the aisle. Mclntyre tugged on his half-glasses.

"Why Oregon?" he asked.

For a moment, Fraser appeared both disappointed and on the point of asking him a question of his own.

"I–I'm not sure," Barbara replied.

"He didn't confide in me just borrowed the executive jet."

"How long will it take him to fly up there?"

"Most of the morning."

Mclntyre clicked his fingers impatiently at Fraser, who opened a map of the northwestern states and awkwardly tried to adjoin it to the one already spread out.

Mclntyre studied the distances voraciously, as if discovering a quarry's spoor.

"Why did you agree to loan him your jet, Barbara? You knew the situation—"

"Like you said, Mclntyre — I used to be married to the guy.

He deserved a break."

The last one he's going to get, Barbara." He grinned at Fraser.

"Put my man Kennedy back on the line. You showed good sense—" He realised that she had already gone, heard the murmur of her voice as she summoned Kennedy.

"Fraser call Chris and the pilot in here." Then: "Kennedy, you hear that? What's the confirmation on the flight plan?"

"We're still checking—"

"Five minutes is all you've got. Move ass—" He looked up from the map as a shadow fell across it. The pilot's shirt was already damp beneath his arms from the morning heat.

"Can we fly all the way up to Oregon from here without another refuelling?"

"Where in Oregon, sir?"

"Redmond."

"Sure."

"So, he won't have to refuel, either." His thick fingers made leaping, attacking movements on the map.

"How much longer before we can take off?"

"You want a change of flight plan maybe thirty minutes."

"Cut that time in half."

"Is he headed for Oregon?" Chris asked with due deference.

"Kennedy will confirm that in a couple of minutes. If he is, then that's where we need to be."

"Why Oregon?" Fraser asked.

"How should I know the guy's running scared."

"I don't think so, Mac. And neither do you."

Mclntyre shrugged. Looking up at the pilot, he said: "Get that new flight plan logged. I'll confirm when I hear from Phoenix." He grinned. The schmuck is running and we're right behind him. He's an hour ahead can we make that up?"

"We won't drop behind him. Depends what he's flying," the pilot answered from the doorway of the flight deck.

"Vance's personal jet."

"A Vance Executive is slower than this baby. We can maybe cut thirty minutes off his lead—"

"OK, let's get out of here as fast as we can."

As Chris moved away, Fraser whispered urgently:

Think, Mac for God's sake, think. Why is Gant so interested in Oregon?

Is Strickland in Oregon?"

"I don't know, Fraser but Gant's on his way there, and that's who I want!"

"Sure," Gant murmured into the receiver.

"No, you did right to protect yourself. It's OK, I understand." I counted on it, he added to himself.

Two hours into the flight, she had called via SELCAL. Like picking up the phone.

Vance's personal jet had had that facility installed. Satellite phone links to the entire planet. He had wondered whether she would call and now felt a tinge of guilt that he had doubted her. She would have had to inform the FBI, and he had known they would check his flight plan it couldn't have been kept secret.

Thanks," she murmured, as intimately as if she had been seated in the co-pilot's chair.

"What will you do?" There was an urgent, demanding interest in her voice.

"You don't need to know, Barbara."

"I have to go it's difficult."

"OK."

"Good luck."

"Yes."

He closed the channel, recognising as he did so the strange intimacy of their conversation.

Thirty thousand feet below the aircraft, northern California was beginning to lurch mountainously upwards. The peaks of the Sierra Nevada were to starboard, the Pacific too distant to port to recognise other than as an emptiness as large as the sky.

What will you do?

The question had plagued him for more than an hour after the draining tension of the violent take-off from Vance Aircraft. For a long time he hadn't been able to concentrate, had been incapable of making any decisions. He had turned, whole minutes after he should, on to his northern heading, passing west of Phoenix… crossing the Grand Canyon, lifting over the Sierra Nevada before the solution had come to him.

He couldn't land at Redmond, unless he wanted the FBI to arrest him moments after touchdown. If he declared a fake Mayday and diverted, he would reveal his eventual destination as surely as if he phoned Mclntyre to tell him. He needed somewhere to land and hide the airplane… somewhere secret.

Somewhere within driving distance of Three Sisters and Strickland.

Mclntyre was at Albuquerque had probably taken off by now, and was maybe only an hour or so behind him. Mclntyre could land at Redmond, just fifty road minutes from Squaw Camp and Strickland… The certainty that they would be there ahead of him narrowed the perspective of choice until it was a tunnel with no light at the end of it.

Los Angeles had been a sprawl to starboard, then the Sierra Nevada and the Coastal Range had formed the high perimeters of his flight path.

Somewhere amid the northern straggle of LA had been Burbank, masked in a morning haze. It had been ten minutes of flying time before the hazy recollection of the Skunk Works and the secret planes he had helped test for Lockheed reminded him. The flight path he was following he had flown before, tagging on behind commercial flights or flying above and below the commercial airways in ugly black Stealth airplanes, testing their radar invisibility. North from Los Angeles towards San Francisco and Oakland, then across northern California and southern Oregon to… Warner Lakes AFB. Long closed and abandoned. One of the airforce's secret facilities, linked to test flights of machines manufactured in the Skunk Works.

He hadn't needed the map. The topography and the distances had unrolled in his head like something on a Stealth fighter's navigational screens. It was tucked into the south-east corner of the state, amid salt lakes. It was nowhere. He had grinned, phrasing it like that.

Some comic based there had once erected a crude road sign beside the one that declared the identity of the airforce base Fort Nowhere.

It would take him hours by road from Warner Lakes after he had found a vehicle to hire or steal. But the Exec would be hidden and he would be lost. It was the only option even though it meant he wouldn't reach Strickland until late afternoon, and Mclntyre would be waiting for him.

It was too late now. He had already initiated the deception. On leaving LA Centre's control boundary and before he contacted Oakland Centre, he had faked poor radio transmission. When he tried to contact Oakland, the problem appeared to have worsened.

All he was doing was switching rapidly between the two radios, Box One and Box Two. It reduced his transmissions to interrupted phrases, broken contact. For the ground centres, it would appear that he had a real problem… one serious enough to have him diverted off the airways, drop his altitude, head for wherever they suggested he land.

He had entered the Warner Lakes coordinates into the inertial navigation system of the Vance Exec. He opened the channel.

"Oakland Centre Victor Bravo. Are you receiving me any clearer?" he enquired, flicking the transfer switch from one radio to the other.

He had to disappear-The Learjet lifted into the New Mexico morning sky, swinging out over the suddenly small city below, then across the narrow blue strip of the Rio Grande. Mclntyre's fingers, like those of a miser counting coins, pudged their measured way across the map, tracing their flight path. Fraser glanced at his watch. Five past nine.

Flying time to Redmond, two hours fifty minutes.

Fraser was careful to conceal the smile that so insistently folded the corners of his mouth. The bribes had worked even more easily than he had promised Winterborne they would.

A golden hello, the title of vice-president in charge of company security, the health care and pension schemes, the promises of frequent bonuses… He had agreed to everything, and had managed a stubborn, almost pained submission on his face when he'd said: OK, forty thousand down immediately… Fraser had realised, even as Mclntyre had been speaking to Gant's ex-wife, that the man knew why Gant was heading for Oregon and who he expected to find there.

He had asked for the alias, the location, and Mclntyre had immediately held them to his chest like high cards. They had negotiated in whispers for ten minutes. The price was a great deal below what Fraser had been prepared to pay.

Mclntyre had visited Strickland in Oregon once, years before, while he was still his CIA Case Officer. Strickland's hideout, not unlike the farmhouse in the Dordogne, was a lodge on a hillside. The place overlooked a lake Banner Lake, Mclntyre had pretended to remember with great difficulty. He eventually recalled Strickland's alias was Peter Ford.

Firm up the offer, make it real, Mclntyre had said. Fraser had done so. End of story. They'd get Gant and Strickland together, two birds with one stone. The price made it an excellent bargain.

Mclntyre looked up at him and Fraser adopted a warm smile.

The Santa Fe National Forest was below them, the shining ribbon of the river gleaming amid the darkness of trees.

Strickland and Gant… His own bonus, from a grateful Winterborne, would also be substantial. More than the forty thousand Mclntyre wanted up front, a lot more… From Warner Lakes AFB, where he had left the Exec abandoned in the shadow of a dilapidated hangar block, it had taken him two hours of walking in the morning heat to reach the few scattered dwellings of Plush, under Hart Mountain's western escarpment.

There had been no vehicle for hire, but a young mother, with two bored and restless children in the rear of her people carrier, had offered him a ride into Lakeview. She had spoken of it as some kind of metropolis. Gant knew it slightly from his air force days when he had been flying in and out of Warner Lakes.

It was a government agency town of maybe two and a half thousand people, dusty and bleached despite the Federal money. The Forest Service, the Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Bureau of Land Management all had regional headquarters in Lakeview. The town had a movie-house and no cable TV. It was the place he was born at least, the mirror-image of Clark-ville, Iowa; but he no longer hated such places.

The young woman her name was Betty and she had been unfailingly cheerful in the face of his own taciturnity dropped him in the town and headed with an aura of delighted anticipation, towards the market. He had thanked her, and hefted Alan Vance's rifle in its hunting case on to his shoulder and pulled his rucksack from the rear of the vehicle.

As he did so, one of the children, the boy, had stuck out his tongue at him.

Another hour had gotten him a four-wheel drive, a sheaf of maps, supplies and a rancher's soft hat against the day's glare and heat. He left Lakeview, diminishing in the driving mirror as if it was slowly drowning in the pale, oceanic air, and headed north on US 395, towards Riley and the junction with US 20, which would take him north-west to Bend and Three Sisters. As the town disappeared behind him, it was eleven in the morning. He had almost two hundred and fifty miles between himself and Strickland. Mclntyre would be no more than an hour away from his quarry.

He accelerated, making the rear-view mirror blind with dust, even though there was no possibility he could reach Strickland before Mclntyre.

It was difficult, almost as if he had regressed to early childhood, to make meaning from the hands of the big, white-faced clock high on the wall of the hospital corridor. Nine-fifteen…? Yes, a quarter past nine on the evening following the night Campbell had been killed in a car accident at the junction of the Avenue de la Reine and the Rue Marie-Christine. The night Marian had almost been killed Aubrey paused in his futile meandering beside the immobile, carved figure of Giles Pyott. His liver-spotted hand ceased its movement towards his friend's slumped shoulder, then regained the comfort of its companion. His hands clasped each other behind his back, as if he were posed to inspect the hospital. Two passing nuns, one carrying a bedpan under a white cloth as carefully as a relic, moved away down the corridor as if mounted on castors, their habits rustling, the faint click of rosary beads excited by their movement.

That Marian was alive, even though sedated, seemed to mean little to either of them. Their mutual terrors for her had exhausted both old men, from the first telephone calls to the taxis, Heathrow, the Belgian taxis, the warmth of the hospital. They had passed most of the day there, without eating, drinking coffee only occasionally, without much conversation. The X-rays and the soothing, accented English of the doctor had fallen heavy as blows, but on numbed senses.

A policeman a senior officer very evidently aware of their mutual, past authority had described what his people understood of the accident. Of which there was no doubt, of course… Marian had not been wearing her seatbelt as the truck had ploughed into the driver's side of the BMW into Campbell, buckling him even more easily than the door pillar, shattering him more easily than the side windows. At the moment of impact, Marian had been attempting to open her door and get out of the car. A white van had torn aside the door like a flimsy curtain and flung Marian over its bonnet, bull-like, towards the pavement… And shift-workers on their way home had crowded round her still form in a panicked, shocked instant — and had saved her life, Aubrey had no doubt whatever.

Neither of the drivers involved had fled the scene. With supreme confidence and great innocence, their stunned recollections agreed with one another. Campbell had jumped the lights, making the collision unavoidable. The pedestrians had been unaware until the noise and the moment of impact, they could not say, m'sieur it is true the lights had only just changed, and people do not notice until their attention is attracted… you understand?

Aubrey had given up at that point; quietened an enraged Giles and allowed the senior policeman to go his way. Four witnesses, the two drivers and two people in a car, had sworn it was nothing but a tragic accident, and they had not been contradicted. It would remain an accident. A young man from the British embassy had appeared some time in the early afternoon, but the enquiry he bore was unsolicitous and prompted by Central Office and the Party Chairman.

Would Marian have recovered sufficiently to vote in the House next week under a three-line Whip? Giles dismissal of the man would have abashed any of his old RSMs. After which outburst, his friend had sunk into a lethargy that would have suggested the numbness of bereavement to anyone passing him in the corridor.

Aubrey realised how much Marian was loved. Her accident, however traumatic for himself, had been as appalling as her death to Giles.

Aubrey cleared his throat softly. His mouth was dry. A small, pert Madonna observed him from a wall-niche. She might have aided Giles, had Marian died Giles' faith was cloudy but persistent but not himself.

He heard a door open, but it was not Marian's room. His chest seemed to slump lethargically once more.

Giles had not stirred.

Marian had sustained a broken arm, a broken pelvis and leg. A wound in her side had bled copiously, she had lost a great deal of blood before it was staunched in the ambulance. Three cracked ribs, bruising to most of her body, severe trauma.

Scalp wounds, other serious abrasions. A brain scan had been carried out.

Thankfully, there seemed nothing other than the concussion. Aubrey suppressed a shudder… a damned close-run thing. Too close-The tired anger was dismissed by the door of Marian's room opening. Giles at once looked up as the diminutive nun who was the hospital's chief surgeon came towards them, her habit rustling like a drift of leaves.

Giles stood up stiffly, towering over the doctor's slightness. His face remained ashen. The proud, bluff widower did not live his life through his child; she was, however, as much his life as she was her own.

"You will try, as her father and her friend not to disturb my patient."

It was not a question. Giles still appeared as if he were about to be asked to accompany the sister to the hospital mortuary.

"You may stay with her for five' something in his expression touched her 'no more than ten minutes. I insist. She must not be agitated—"

Giles' voice broke through his numbness like a thaw.

"She she will be alright, now? You have no reason to change your earlier assessment?"

The doctor shook her head. A small, serious face framed by her wimple.

"No. Her recovery will take a great deal of time. She must not be pressured into denying the seriousness of her accident." The young man from the embassy had sought reassurance that Marian's was a very temporary indisposition. The surgeon had banished his insouciance as witheringly as if by excommunication.

"We understand, Doctor," Aubrey murmured, smiling.

"May we—?" She nodded.

He took Giles' elbow and steered him towards the door, as if through a tight crowd of people. The doctor accompanied them, then allowed them to falter across the threshold.

Her head was bandaged. Her face was the colour of putty in places, raw liver in others Her arm was in plaster, a tent of raised bedclothes was over her lower body. Her eyes were preter-naturally bright.

Aubrey's smile faltered like an old bulb, then flickered on once more.

He gently thrust Giles towards the bed, on her free hand's side. It was lightly bandaged, badly scuffed like a worn shoe.

"Daddy—" she muttered thickly, as if her tongue had swollen.

"Oh, Tig-r Aubrey moved to the slatted blinds across the single window of the small, bright, warm room. The noise of tears did not distress him. It was politeness that moved him, the priorities of intimacy between father and daughter.

In a few moments, sniffing loudly, she said:

"Hello, Kenneth. Brought any grapes?"

He turned, chuckling, his eyes pricking. He shook his head. The shops were closed."

She winced as she blew out her cheeks in exaggerated, comic relief.

Giles blew his nose unselfconsciously loud. His eyes were damp and fierce, his mouth and jaw quivering with reaction.

"Are you alright, dear?" he asked.

"Hurts like hell everywhere," she replied. Her eyes glazed, perhaps remembering Campbell.

"God…" she breathed.

Giles' old hand lay on hers, still twice its size, even though Marion's was padded with gauze. It was the light, careful grip of a boy who had caught a butterfly.

"He—" she began, then: Tape recorder… You'll need that, Kenneth—"

She was tiring already, and he saw Giles resented his presence. He came between Giles' relief and a desired innocence. Accident without design. It would remove her from further danger.

Aubrey took from his pocket the list of Marian's personal effects that had been given him by the senior police officer. A second list described the contents of the car, Campbell's possessions. He scanned them, sensing his own lack of breathing, his utter stillness in the warm room. Eventually he nodded, then crossed towards the utilitarian cabinet in a corner of the room.

"Ben' Marian swallowed painfully 'confessed. The fraud — David's part in it."

Almost at once, she was half-asleep.

Aubrey rummaged in the black plastic bag in which Marian's possessions had been returned to her. Pulled out the tiny tape recorder and turned to Giles in triumph.

Pyott's expression was one of foreboding; then he became angry with Aubrey.

"Your confounded curiosity, Kenneth," he growled.

"Is this it, my dear?" Aubrey urged, moving close to the bed.

Her eyes fluttered open.

"Kenneth," Giles warned.

That's it…" Marian managed. She smiled briefly, as if someone had told her she had passed an examination. Then, in another moment, she was asleep.

Aubrey, despite Giles Pyott's irascible expression, switched on the tiny recorder. A youngish male voice, Campbell for sure… speaking from the mortuary.

'… the decision was David's, the planning was his… He needed people like me, Laxton he called us the European connection to shuffle the cheques from one envelope to another…" The voice was heavy with fear.

Aubrey continued to listen until Campbell's voice died away and there was a long, hissing tape noise which masked the small, distant noises of traffic. Realising the calm before the storm, he stopped the tape running.

Giles' hand gripped his wrist, the fingers of his other hand snatching the recorder from Aubrey's grasp. Angrily, his eyes glowering, he switched on the recorder.

"Look out! Ben, for God's sake, look out!' Then the screaming of the car's metal as the undoubtedly arranged accident occurred. Only then was the tape silent.

Giles looked up at him after staring at Marian for a long moment. His face was ashen, his eyes like last hot coals.

"Did he—?" he began, but his voice failed almost immediately, like a poor and distant radio signal.

"David?" Aubrey nodded gravely.

"Oh, yes, Giles he did' Giles had returned his hand to his daughter's, and pressed it ever more protectively.

"She's safe now, old friend. I promise you. David thinks he has closed the last gate behind him. He must be feeling secure. Until I confront him with this…"

Aubrey turned away from the bed. There would be nothing on the tape concerning the sabotage. Campbell wouldn't have known about it. David may have trusted people like Fraser, but never Campbell with that kind of knowledge. But… David had to pay the entire price.

It was as if he had written it on the wall of the room in huge black letters. For Marian's injuries, for Vance's ruin, for fifty and more deaths, David must pay in full. They had to prove the sabotage against him, not simply the fraud.

There had been no word from Gant. He was still out there, somewhere, like a perturbed spirit in pursuit of Strickland. He had to find him.

For fraud, David might receive a token sentence if he went to prison at all. Everyone, including most of the Cabinet and the European Commission, would want no fuss, would rather there was no evidence at all against David. Murder, however, they could neither excuse nor bury.

He turned to glance once more at Marian, pale as death, symbolising how close she had come to her demise. Mitchell, he thought, as if attempting some kind of telepathic contact… find me the proof.

Otherwise, David might yet slip through their hands. Marian would be safe, of course but David would, in all probability, just be reprimanded for fraud; he would be damned only for murder… Was Gant even alive—? The thought chilled him.

"Strickland, this is beautiful," Mclntyre said. The man's hand was heavily, unreassuringly on his shoulder for a moment, then he retreated to the armchair that had been dragged out of the sight lines of the two windows of the room.

The enthusiastic, ingratiating tone of his voice had been denied by the greedy stare of his eyes.

"A man has a right to protect himself, Mac. Even a duty," he replied studiedly.

"You take your duty seriously, Strickland." That was Fraser, who was more subtle and deliberate in his mockery. The ambient music that seeped from the speakers like an anaesthetic gas seemed to have no dulling effect on their anticipatory malevolence.

The electronic surveillance had been disarmed when the FBI arrived.

He'd been in the bedroom, packing for Vancouver the next day. Their guns had been drawn as he opened the door of the lodge, while his was still concealed behind his back, not wanting to cause alarm to a neighbour. Mclntyre and Fraser had arrived in the early afternoon, with the bustle of businessmen after a long flight. There were now a half-dozen of them in and surrounding the lodge.

The lights of the den made it full dark outside. Only he was visible from the windows to Gant, who they promised with malicious humour was coming. He sat before the surveillance console and its bank of monitors and screens. They wanted Gant to see him alone. From scraps of their conversation, Gant must know they had beaten him here his airplane had disappeared from radar. He'd been forewarned.

They promised him protection from Gant, assuring him that Gant wanted to kill him… as they did. Fraser was there as if deputised, but it must be he who was leading the parade. Mclntyre's pension could go up in pieces he, Strickland, held the grenade — because of the things they'd gotten away with in Latin America in the eighties. Mclntyre had to let Fraser run the show.

Strickland swallowed carefully. His mouth and throat were dry as he watched the screens. The low-light TV cameras showed him the small clearing, the grey washed trees, the flicker of a big owl between branches, the movements one of them made as he patrolled. But not Gant not yet. The ground-level radar he had installed swept its arm across the screen. Most evenings, it revealed the presence of bears, the occasional dog or cat, the quicker blips of night birds

He realised the very sophistication and thoroughness of the electronic surveillance would be his downfall. There was no way Gant could penetrate it undetected.

They knew that. The two armed men outside were surplus. Gant would appear on the TV monitors, the radar, and wouldn't be able to get to him. Strickland knew Gant was his only chance. Maybe he didn't want him dead, at least not right away.

Perhaps he wanted proof, a confession. A gap of time in which Strickland might turn the tables, kill Gant. Not like Fraser and Mclntyre. He was absolutely certain of their desire to eliminate him.

The bear lumbered away on the TV, remaining a shadow on the radar. The clearing was empty, the trees, massing like an army around the lodge, were a grey fence. Mclntyre scratched at his stubble. Fraser he listened intently, to be certain had begun checking his pistol. In anticipation.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Night Action Now, he was certain. The night-vision glasses wearied his eyes, the single, camera like lens heavy in his grip. But he was certain. Low-light TV cameras fenced the clearing around Strickland's lodge, moving slowly but ceaselessly, able to pick up anything that might come out of the surrounding forest.

He put down the binoculars and was shocked by the darkness. He could only make out a thin, last glow on the western horizon, with the closest of the mountains, South Sister, a ghostly snow-glow to the north.

The electronic surveillance was as he had anticipated. Strick-land protected himself as naturally as an animal; his claws and teeth were TV cameras and radar.

He returned the binoculars to his eyes. Maybe he didn't always use it, but it was operational now… Strickland-there. Framed like a painting in the window of the room on that side of the lodge, helpfully lit.

Watching his screens, waiting. Gant had seen no one with him.

Just one shadow moving in another darkened room, perhaps the kitchen.

He could not know how many there were other than the two outside and Mclntyre, who just had to be there.

Gant was seated with his back against the hole of a withered, storm struck pine, on an outcrop of rock only a few hundred yards from the lodge. He could look down like a raptor into the clearing, into the single lit room. The two patrolling men in the trees went about their business without imagination or variation.

A little after four, he had left the jeep two miles away around the shore of Bonner Lake, then skirted the tiny settlement of Squaw Camp.

Those were the cabins and lodges that had formed the background of the snapshot that had betrayed Strickland's location. He had climbed up to Strickland's lodge in its small clearing by means of a hiking trail that wound up the side of the mountain. Knowing all the time that Mclntyre would be ahead of him.

In the late afternoon, he'd caught the reflected light off what was, to all appearances, nothing more than a satellite TV dish. It hadn't been moving when he first saw it, then, just before dusk, it began swivelling on the low roof, back and forth. It was a radar dish used for military surveillance. Its one blind spot was the lodge's chimney

… which problem the low-light TV system cancelled. The four cameras covered every foot of open ground. They could just sit and wait for him to step out into the clearing.

He ate a bar of chocolate and listened to the rush of an owl's wings somewhere near, even heard the intensified rustling of its landing in undergrowth and its almost immediate takeoff. Heard beyond that the grumble of a bear, like the noise of a car that wouldn't start. Farther off, the dim noise of music from the little encampment of wooden buildings down by the shore. The lake seemed to hold the last light as if it was irradiated by a nuclear spillage.

Carefully, he checked the equipment he had removed from the rucksack.

Especially the stubby tube of the fifty-round helical feed magazine that belonged with the Smith & Wesson Calico 9mm pistol. Alan Vance had a collection of guns like so many Americans who had never seen anything that wasn't feathered or furred blown apart. It came in useful now, though… the Ruger rifle would even take the short-range thermal sight, big as a video camera that he had found. Barbara had told him where to look. It was a patented design of Vance's early years in electronics.

He silently slid it home on the mount and raised its surprising lightness to his eye, rifle butt against his shoulder. The eyepiece showed him the night trees on a miniature screen. Two minutes later, it showed him one of the patrolling FBI agents, walking cautiously, just inside the trees. Clear shot Gant put down the Ruger Mini-14 carefully. The air was still soft, the evening breeze hardly evident.

He smelt pine resin and the fainter scent of something frying. Soon, he would have to move again, try to discover how many of them there were. He pushed aside the thought that he was going up against the FBI. The body-count would be in Federal agents… Even if he could prove what Strickland had done to Vance Aircraft, and on whose behalf, there would still be charges that he had assaulted, wounded, even killed, FBI special agents.

The last of the light had gone and big stars had begun to appear in the moonless sky. It wouldn't be up until around midnight. South Sister was just an afterimage on the retinae; the other, more northerly volcanic peaks had vanished. The lit window in the clearing shone out more warmly. There were dotted lights down by the lake, the chug of a small motor as a boat slipped across Bonner Lake, its lights as much like specks as the stars.

He raised the binoculars to his eyes. There were two sedans and a four-wheel drive vehicle parked close to the lodge. That could mean as many as ten people or more in total, plus Strickland. It hadn't seemed that many, from whatever vantage he had observed the lodge during the last hours of daylight. Two men outside, Strickland posed at the one window, the blinds down or the lights not on in other rooms. Could there be as many as another eight he hadn't seen? The stars gleamed like silver. He studied the lodge, after glancing at his watch dial. A little after seven. He had to wait, maybe for most of the night, just wait… And count.

The room he had decided was the kitchen registered a tiny spillage of light a little after eight. To the infrared binoculars, there was a shadowy shape in the room, a human heat source… By nine-thirty, he was certain there were two more men in an upstairs room, its window jutting like a wedge from the steep slope of the roof.

Presumably, they were sleeping. In the trees, the two on patrol continued their routine. An occasional engine fired from the lakeside settlement, even laughter, raucous and abrupt, once. Then it was cut off as if a door had closed on it. The binoculars showed smoke in the starlit sky from a couple of tourist cabins. Faint noises from a small boat that had put out from the jetty on which Strickland had been photographed years before.

Ten-fifteen… There were six of them beside Strickland. Just before ten, an anonymous hand had passed him sandwiches and beer, the body to which it belonged kept carefully from view. Mclntyre would be in the room with him… just had to be.

Strickland had become increasingly restless as the evening had progressed. The lit window, the proximity of whoever was in the room with him, eroded him, made him begin yawning. His head had turned occasionally, at other times he appeared to be responding to someone, even challenging the man Gant couldn't see but who had to be Mclntyre.

The two men upstairs were still resting heat sources. There was, from time to time, another figure in the dark of the kitchen.

His surveillance gave him power, control rather than weariness. They were the ones really waiting, growing uncertain and edgy with heightened nerves. He glanced at his watch. Ten-twenty. They would believe he was outside. They had waited long enough to begin to imagine he must have some strategy, that he was waiting out of confidence in the darkness of the trees… They could wait some more.

He had all night. He was ready. Time was on his side, not theirs Eleven-thirty. The three minutes since Mclntyre had last looked at the big dial of his watch had dragged inordinately. The enforced silence of the lodge, the brightness of the lights in the room, the flicker of the monochrome TV screens, the wash of the arm of the radar screen unnerved. Fraser and Strickland had begun to irritate, like a rash on his arms and chest, then slowly, deeply anger him, as if they were three prisoners unwillingly flung together and confined, he the only innocent man.

The thought of Gant, who must be out there in the darkness, able to see Strickland, spotlit as he was, was a goad, prodding him out of confidence with sapping electric jolts to his calm and assurance.

Mclntyre chewed at the last uneaten sandwich on the plate that had been placed between himself and Fraser. The bottles of beer were empty.

Their chairs were squeezed into the angle of one of the room's corners, out of sight line from both windows. It was, this late in the evening, as if he was tied into his, unable to break out of biting restraints.

Eleven-thirty-one.

He heard soft footsteps from the bedroom above the den and shuffled restlessly in his chair. A few moments later, Chris opened the door.

The young man hovered, bleary-eyed, in the doorway.

"We Sam and me'll relieve the others now… sir." The respectful politeness was added like a tag from a dead language, strange-sounding.

Chris' tired blue eyes seemed troubled, uncertain. Scared of the dark, Mclntyre thought dismissively, and of who's out there.

"OK, keep alert, Chris. Keep moving, keep quiet, keep alive!" Fraser snorted derisively. Chris' cheeks reddened.

The young man glanced once at Strickland, as em pathetically as at a fellow prisoner then nodded.

"Sir."

Chris closed the door behind him on Fraser's brief laughter, the sound of nails scraping down a blackboard. He shivered, then reluctantly opened the lodge's main door and stepped furtively on to the verandah.

The stoop seemed betrayingly silvered with the first moonlight. Sam's breathing was laboured behind him. Chris fitted the earphone and checked his mike's throat strap to greater comfort. He adjusted the harness of the transceiver that hugged his left side like a poultice.

Then he murmured:

"OK, you guys, come on in. We'll cover you from the verandah—" Thank sweet Jesus," he heard in response.

The night was chilly or was it just the change of temperature from the warm tension of the lodge? Chris couldn't be sure, but his skin shivered at the touch of the cold. Sam remained to his left, an infrared monocular pocket scope clenched in his hand. It was as if he were giving some freedom-fighter's salute. He scanned the clearing in front of the lodge methodically, nervously. Chris knew he should be doing the same. Gant — everyone said was out there for certain, just waiting to get to Strickland. And he could only get to him through a half-dozen FBI agents.

So he was desperate. He wouldn't be stopped from even taking on the Federal authorities… The first of the two-man patrol emerged from the trees with exaggerated, comic caution, then began hurrying across the open ground, hunched as if against taunts rather than a bullet. But why was all this happening? It had no real shape. What was Strickland to Gant?

The second man came out of the trees. A night bird shocked him into rigidity, then he hurried for the lodge. The two men passed them with laboured breathing, their fear palpable. The door closed behind them with a dull, carrying noise and Chris whirled on his heel to remonstrate'Well?" Sam asked.

"OK here goes nothing…"

He walked off the stoop into the moonlight, senses alert, nerves stretched. They crossed the clearing with moonlight between them. On the hole of a tree, a low light camera swivelled like the nose of a scenting dog. Chris felt observed rather than reassured. His feet hurried him into the trees. Sam disappeared fifty yards to his left.

Moonlight filtered weakly, like some powder dusting his shoulders and hands. He gripped the Springfield carbine more tightly, pressing it across his stomach as he began his patrol.

Gant… The murmurings and asides of conversation between Mclntyre and the Englishman, Fraser, flitted through his thoughts, as alarming as the rustle of investigating wings above his head. Fraser was relying on Mclntyre using him?

There was a mutual, fierce determination to kill Gant rather than arrest him… and Strickland, too, was destined to be shown the end of the pier and invited to dive off… Gant?

He shook his head, making the infrared pocket scope image of the ghostly trees joggle like something in a child's toy. He almost expected snow. The trees massed again, white-grey, the darkness between them empty. He began circling the perimeter of the clearing, a hundred yards into the trees. A brief gap showed him the flanks of South Sister, gleaming with moonlit ice and snow. A glacier like an old man's beard. From a rise, another gap revealed the sheen of Bonner Lake below. Gant… was sitting out here somewhere, maybe even aware of him right now.

He flinched at an owl's delight in its ability to kill… In the silence of the lit room, the owl's cry intruded sufficiently to alarm them.

Strickland's shoulders twitched as his eyes automatically swept the bank of monitors. The four cameras revealed nothing. His stomach was cramped with sitting, with the effort of calm. It was hours now since he had begun to want Gant to be out there, his imagination describing the manner, the exact distances, the precise route by which Gant could fox the radar. Strickland knew Fraser wanted him dead. He had orders to that effect and no other. That much was obvious he'd traded Gant for himself, and the FBI agent had gone for it.

"He's not coming," he heard Fraser taunt Mclntyre in a whisper.

"Yes he is," Mclntyre snapped back.

Strickland watched the screens. Nothing. Fraser's next words surprised him.

"You would tell us, wouldn't you, son, if and when the man comes walking out of the trees? You wouldn't keep it to yourself, just for long enough to give him the smallest chance?"

"No," Strickland replied sullenly as a schoolboy.

"He wants to kill me, doesn't he?"

Fraser merely chuckled.

"Leave the guy alone," Mclntyre said.

"Christ, you'd give anyone the heebie-jeebies with that laugh of yours."

"Sorry, Mac I didn't realise you were so sensitive."

Fraser lit a cigarette. Strickland's inside knotted with a puritanical, angry revulsion.

"Eleven-forty. Is he waiting for midnight, do you reckon? It's when most suicides happen."

Mclntyre's stomach rumbled. There were faint noises from the kitchen as the two men relieved of patrol duty made them selves something to eat. His impatience bubbled and grumbled like indigestion.

Where in hell was Gant? Was he even coming?

"Anything?" he asked Strickland sharply.

"Nothing."

"He isn't coming," Fraser taunted, his features smug with assurance that Gant would come.

"You've screwed up, Mac."

"I'm right," Mclntyre replied, as if rehearsing some old and boring script… and so it had gone on, hour after hour, Strickland's hunched, aching shoulders reminded him. The window he could watch without attracting their attention was a black square, looking on nothing. It failed to promise Gant, who had become Strickland's only image of rescue. Listening to their pathetic banter during the last eight or nine hours had worn him down. He'd been so confined.

They could never, even with a psychological profiler on hand, have devised a better means of undoing him. Exposure at the lit windows was less wearing than the time-tunnel of their slow wrestling for dominance.

"Put money on it," Fraser mocked.

"Shove it," Mclntyre sulked in reply.

Cat-and-mouse, cat-and-mouse, endlessly… His temples tightened as the idea came to him… Expose them, make them move into the light.

Gant had better be watching' There he announced quickly.

They lurched together out of their chairs, towards the console and himself.

"Where?"

"I thought there was something…" But he could not keep them within the frame of the window any longer.

"Arsehole," Fraser concluded, but without suspicion. His breath was hot on Strickland's ear, his hand heavy on his shoulder. Strickland shivered with sudden, icy cold, at once regretting what he had done.

Eraser's intention had somehow communicated itself through the man's touch. If anything went wrong, if Fraser felt threatened, then his first move would be to kill him. If Gant looked remotely like succeeding, he knew Fraser wouldn't hesitate.

Mclntyre and Fraser sat down again, unaware that they had walked on to a stage.

Had Gant seen them? Strickland almost hoped not… The thermal sight was at his eye, the rifle butt resting against his shoulder. Two others were obviously in the room with Strickland. He recognised Mclntyre's blunt, thick-necked head and broad back. And the face that glanced sidelong at Strickland, with an evident sneer. It was Eraser

… he remembered the picture Aubrey had shown him… Winterborne's man. With Mclntyre and Strickland. They would see nothing on any of the screens, except their own two-man patrol moving in regular, undeviating progression.

The two men dropped quickly back out of sight. The screens had been blank.

Could it have been a signal from Strickland…? Gant was nervous of completing the idea. Strickland could just as well be working to their game plan. Even so, it had shown him not only who was in the room with Strickland but also that they couldn't see the screens for themselves if they remained concealed.

Eleven-fifty… The moon was reflected like a pale lantern in the smooth water of Bonner Lake. Time narrowed. The images through the thermal sight and binoculars, the sense of the Ruger and the Calico beside him, all fitted like the technology of a cockpit. The hours of waiting had drained him of Aubrey, Vance, Barbara, the general's daughter, the general even his own circumstances. He stood upright, away from the hole of the stunted tree, holding the Ruger in one hand.

The Calico was slung across his chest. There was a target and, like a missile, he locked on to it. He swung the rifle across the trees below him, picking up the first man then, after a few seconds, Chris.

The young man's features, white-on-grey, were distinct and recognisable. The map of the terrain in Gant's head began to unroll as clearly as on a screen he had just switched on. He began moving silently down the slope towards the first man, his awareness a receiver to be updated by his senses. An owl's cry, something rustling through the undergrowth, disturbed by his passage. Distances, time, location, all precise.

He stopped, using the binoculars now that he was closer to the first man. Waited-struck the man from behind with the butt of the Ruger, then squashed his limp form upright against a pine until he could safely let it slide soundlessly to the ground. He heard his own breathing, the FBI man's unconscious snores. The earpiece had flown from the man's ear as he'd struck him, his throat mike had risen above the collar of his shirt. Gant listened for Chris, for any noise. The light from the lodge was visible through the outlying trees. Chris-He slipped away from the unconscious man, towards the sound of dull, regimented footsteps. Their clockwork patrol brought them together at-this point.

Ten seconds. Chris' footsteps, the hoot of an owl, Chris' footsteps on the other side of the tree, his breathing. Gant raised the Ruger and-Chris' voice.

"Nothing, sir—" Chris' features half-turned to him, his shoulder and head already flinching away from the rifle butt. Mouth open, throat moving, struggling to shout. Chris' weapon half-parried the Ruger's swinging butt, jarring Gant's grip. His hand left the rifle, grabbing at the short-barrelled, folding-stock Springfield, twisting the barrel up and away from them as they plunged together like awkward bullies.

The Springfield flashed, deafened. Chris fell back with a groan, his only sound. Through the retinal flare of the gunshot, Gant could not locate the source of the noise. His boots touched something yielding and he bent down.

Blood on his fingers.

'-can't see," he heard.

"Can't see, Christ—" There was the tinniness of an urgent voice coming from the loosened earpiece.

Chris' curled, terrified body became an outline on the ground. The tiny voice squeaked like an injured mouse. They were alerted. Move He assessed his alignment with the lodge. Moved thirty yards farther. The cameras would pick him up, but he was in the radar's blind spot where the main chimney jutted from the deep rake of the roof. Ten seconds since Chris went down nearer fifteen his eyesight would be coming back by now, the muzzle flash clearing from his vision. No one on the verandah, Strick-land still at his console.

He placed the rucksack on the ground after removing the flare pistol he had taken from the aircraft. One hundred and twenty thousand candela, burn time five seconds. He raised the pistol and fired it into the air. Tension gripped his stomach like a steel band.

Starshell burst. The clearing seemed to be blanched, made lifeless by the exploding flare cartridge. Anyone watching would be dazzled, he no more than a guessed-at moving shadow on their retinae, and the low-light TV cameras would be glare-blind. He ran, head down and in a straight line, across the narrow clearing-Strickland knew Gant was there, coming straight out of the trees. There was something moving on two of the screens, insubstantial as a bird's wing that had fluttered too close to the cameras. He felt himself tense, as if the flare-wash in the room was a fire.

"Is he there?" Fraser demanded, almost thrusting him off his swivel chair, his large hands seizing the console as if to shake some confession from it. Already, the light from the flare or whatever it was was lessening.

"What's that—?" His finger jabbed at the betraying screen. On the radar, there was nothing. Gant was in the blind spot

"I can't see, dazzled—" Fraser didn't believe him. Mclntyre was on his other side, the material of his coat sleeve rubbing against Strickland's cheek. There was a gun in his hand, at the corner of eyesight.

"I can't see shit! Mclntyre bellowed as if in pain.

"Is there anyone there?"

"Maybe there is," Fraser grunted.

"Maybe—" He turned towards the windows, then glowered at Strickland.

"And where is…"

"He can't be trying to get in-."

There are two men down! He's stopped playing with us, you pillock!"

Do it now, Fraser told himself, as night returned beyond the windows.

Just in case.

He moved towards Strickland, drawing his pistol as he did so.

Winterborne's priority was the only one that mattered now, whatever deal he had with Mclntyre.

Strickland's eternal silence

"What the hell are you—?" Mclntyre began, but Fraser motioned him away with a waggle of the gun.

He moved on Strickland quickly, as if pouncing at the man, thrusting the pistol towards his head-Gant saw Fraser advancing across the garishly lit window towards Strickland. It was like a bleached photograph taken at the moment of an explosion. He was close enough to recognise the fear on Strickland's features, see his hands trying to fend off Fraser, the purpose in Fraser's movement.

He raised the Ruger to his shoulder and squeezed off three shots. The window shattered. Fraser's head seemed to dissolve in a red, splashing haze in the instant before his body was flung aside and out of sight by the impact of the bullets. Strickland and Mclntyre appeared frozen in the moment. Gant hurtled himself towards the verandah as he glimpsed Mclntyre move from the window-Mclntyre, struggling out of the shock of Fraser's death as if out of a clinging swamp, lumbered towards the door, switching off the lights before opening it, then yelling:

"Any of you see anything?"

— see anything, Gant heard as he crouched on the verandah beneath the suddenly darkened window.

Under the overhang of the roof, the verandah was dark, protecting. He could hear the fizzle of the flare in the clearing. If they'd seen him, they were afraid to come out. He listened above the thud of his heart.

"No, nothing—" '-nearly blinded me!"

Both voices were calling from the direction of what he presumed was the kitchen. The lodge creaked now with their soft movements, echoing their tension. He felt rough wood against his cheek.

"Check every room, every window!" Mclntyre.

Two down and Fraser dead. Mclntyre, three others… Strickland. He was poised like a runner, then crabbed along the verandah, scuttling on his haunches, to the room next to Strickland.

"Are you assholes checking—?"

Panic remained in the air, like the scent of the flare cartridge after its light had vanished. He stood up beside the window as he heard noises, saw the faintest glimmer of light as a door was opened-smashed the window, fired the flare pistol, ducked back. The cartridge exploded against the far wall of the room or in the corridor beyond. The verandah was flooded with a sinister, nuclear light. Two seconds, three The window slid upwards and he heaved himself over the ledge into the room as it fell back into shadow. Listened. Moved quickly as someone stumbled unsurely through the door, head shaking as if to rid himself of plaguing flies.

He struck the body in the stomach with the rifle, then across the side of the head as it came within reach. Hauled the man aside. Corridor…

Mclntyre was in the room to his left, with Strickland. They hadn't moved out of it, even in their near-panic. The flare fizzled at his feet as he crouched back against the wall, the Ruger slung across his back, the Smith & Wesson Calico now in his hands.

Footsteps overhead, from a bedroom, someone coming down the stairs cautiously, one step at a time, long pauses between each movement on the open treads. He could see feet, legs coming into-the Calico ripped gashes in the banister, the panelling of the wall. The legs disappeared and he ducked down, the Ruger banging against the corridor wall.

He heard shots go past his head, imagined he felt the heat. Two more wild shots from the stairs drove him back into the darkened room.

He heard his own stentorous breathing, that of the unconscious man on the floor. Moonlight reflected from the surface of a table. Faces of plates watched him from a dresser.

Mclntyre was still in the room with Strickland and Fraser's body. What remained of the face that had looked out at him from Aubrey's photograph, and which he had recognised in France, would be staring up at them in shattered surprise. Two men upstairs, unhurt.

Feet on the stairs, as his blood ceased to pound in his ears. Creaks faint as beetles in the wood. The slightest of clicking sounds-He flattened himself against the wall, hunched into a position of abject surrender beside the sentry like shape of a long case clock, as the automatic weapon emptied its magazine into the floor, the room, what remained of the window. The rug moved under the impacts, the window frame shattered, the unconscious man was no longer breathing when the noise subsided into silence.

Another clicking noise, a new magazine engaged. The din began again.

Plates on the dresser disintegrated, there were gouges in the walls, along the polished surface of the dining table, in the wall near his head, the inlaid wood of the clock. The body on the floor bucked with the impacts long after it was dead.

Gant pressed his hands over his ears, over his head, curling into himself, hunched smaller, his body jumping involuntarily like that of the dead man.

Silence again, except for the slight, unnerved jangling of the clock's weights, its mechanism. His ears stopped ringing. He waited, watching the torn, pocked door that had swung half-open, pushed by bullets.

Watched the window.

Listened, waiting for the man on the stairs to empty another magazine into the dining room. He crouched back against the wall, swinging the Calico to cover the window, the door, the window, repeatedly.

"Bobby?" he heard hesitantly, a hoarse whisper.

"Agent Mclntyre?" It was the man on the stairs. Bobby's dead… What was Mclntyre doing? Nerves stirred his left foot. The tiny crunch of glass beneath his boot surprised an exclamation of breath from the staircase. Were both men on the stairs? There were no noises.

Window, door, window-The acrid scent of powder on the air, the roll of gunsmoke visible in the pale moonlight. Glass-littered floorboards, glass sparkling from the torn rug. The pale light reached the door. He could not move to the window without exposing himself to the automatic weapon aimed at the doorway.

He heard mouselike stirrings from the room that contained Mclntyre and Strickland. The man on the stairs moved, but he wasn't making any approach to the door that stood half-open. Presumably, the second man was crouched near him. There were no sounds of anyone trying to climb on to the roof, get outside.

If he tried to close the door and escape through the window, the grumbling of glass under his feet would alert them-noise of something slithering, wood against wood?

"Who's left out there?" he heard. Mclntyre's voice.

"Hyams sir. And Billings," from the stairs.

"Can you see him?"

"No, sir. I can see the door and the window. He can't move."

"Good."

"Gant—?" An unfamiliar voice.

"Shut up, Strickland!"

Before long, Chris and the other guy outside would recover, begin to think, start to outflank him. — that sliding noise again, the shuffling of bodies from the other room?

"Mclntyre?" he called.

"What—?" It was as if the man had been caught stealing, his hand in the cookie jar.

"You're finished, Gant. Give it up, asshole."

"Not yet." Beside him, the clock ticked comfortably, as if denying its circumstances.

"It's more like a Mexican standoff from in here…"

He listened. Mclntyre wasn't swallowing the bait. He had only minutes now before-car engine starting. He looked wildly towards the window as headlights leapt out like another flare. Tyres screeched, beginning to retreat almost at once.

"Agent Mclntyre!" he heard Hyams from the stairs.

"What's going on, sir?"

Another voice growled: "Asshole's gotten away-!"

Then Hyams called out: "Strickland? Hey, Strickland!" There was silence from the other room. Both of them were in the car. Mclntyre and Strickland.

Gant stirred, then restrained all movement, listening to the car engine retreat down the narrow, twisting mountain track towards Bonner Lake and Squaw Camp. Mclntyre would be driving very slowly. It wasn't much more than a hiking trail, following the contours of the mountainside for more than a mile before it reached the highway.

The deep, slow ticking of the long case clock was mocking him now, as if to lull him into inertia. He raged inwardly against Mclntyre's easy escape. The guy had just climbed out the window and gotten into his car-! The clock was like someone guarding a prisoner, a matter of feet from him along the wall. He couldn't move. Its ticking was arrogantly assured, certain of his immobility.

Mclntyre was making for his airplane at Redmond, had to be…

Strickland would disappear forever-He pressed back into the angle of the wall. The Ruger was near his left hand, the Calico suspended on his chest from its short strap. He braced himself and raised his booted feet as if they were tied together, measuring distance, force.

Glass pricked at his palms as they took his weight… he lunged-jangle of weights, heavy clockwork, the creaking of the case interrupting the clock's tall assurance. It toppled slowly, noisily, alarming the men on the stairs.

The weights banged against the case like a heart against ribs. Then it fell across the doorway, shutting the door with a slam. Hyams' voice was cut off. Gant was on his feet, two steps taken, before all noise of the glass underfoot was drowned in the clock's bedlam as it struck the floor. Three more steps, into the moment of moonlight and the sense of nakedness, his hand on the window ledge-shots ripping through the door, the deafening noise of the clock's distress drowned by gunfire. Shards of glass and wood drifted down onto him like snow.

Impact of his knees with the boards of the verandah, ricochets coming through the window. He rolled away then got to his feet, already running before he was upright. Orientated himself in the small clearing, running hunched, swerving and dodging like a footballer in a complex play. There was no shooting behind him before he reached the trees.

He plunged in out of the moonlight, stopping his flight against the rough hole of a tree. Thirty seconds since Mclntyre's engine note had disappeared into silence. The scent of gasoline still pungent in his nostrils. That way-map in his head, clear as on a screen unrolling in a cockpit. The smudge of the lake, the little dot of Squaw Camp, the place he had left the 4WD, the hiking trail twisting its way down the mountainside.

He was running through the trees, his arm up against the whip of thin branches. He plunged uphill towards the vantage point he'd used to keep the lodge under surveillance. Forty-five seconds. Mclntyre, headlights blazing, bucking down the hiking trail. He'd never cut him off, never.

For a moment, he could see the few scattered lights of Squaw Camp through the trees, and the silvered dish of Bonner Lake. Then the forest of lodgepole pines closed in around the car again, and the rear wheels slithered menacingly as he lost the hiking track, then jerked the sedan back on to it. The trail folded itself like a vast, lazy snake around the mountainside, its coils slipping lower and lower till it met the Cascade Lakes Highway at the settlement.

Mclntyre cursed the wedges of the tree trunks that constantly seemed to spring to attention in the headlights. The hiking trail was determined to lose itself among them, hide away from him. Strickland was holding his seatbelt as he might have done a coat lapel. The indicator needle waggled around thirty, its erratic movements like the measurements of Mclntyre's heartbeat. The driving mirror, the wing mirrors, remained black. Then, as if beckoning, the lake again for an instant through thinned trees, and the lights of the settlement. Three Sisters stretching away northwards, Mount Bachelor, snow-flanked still, to the south. Stars hard and big above the headlights… He realised he had slowed the car, as if to inhale the scene into choked lungs, and accelerated. At once, the car skidded on pine-mush, the rear near side wheel spinning, the engine racing.

Strickland glared at him.

"For Christ's sake, Mac-!" It sounded as if they were still field operative and Case Officer.

"Don't throw up!" Mclntyre snarled contemptuously, righting the car, the sweat cold beneath his arms.

The trail bent away from the prospect into dark trees again. Their crowded intent seemed malign, angering Mclntyre. The sense of exhilaration he had felt in escape had dissipated in the effort required to negotiate the hiking trail. He'd paid no attention when they had ascended it in the afternoon light, it had been the driver's problem.

Gant couldn't get out of the trap he'd thrown himself into… He was pinned down, would remain so… Mclntyre would have to alert a backup team when he got to the airfield at Redmond — have to call the pilot on the earphone and get the ship refuelled, a flight plan filed… to where?

He joggled the wheel in his hands, feeling his palms slip damply on the mock leather Where should he take Strickland? The guy knew the name of the man who'd hired him, the guy Fraser had promised would take care of his future… Now Fraser was dead, and his future was blown out of the water unless he could get Strickland to tell him the name. He was already more than half-persuaded that Gant wanted him dead. To stay alive, he had to trade the name for his survival.

But it might need time to make him see things that way… so, where to take him?

He glanced across at Strickland. The man was quiescent, withdrawn; almost detached. He jerked the wheel again as the trail bent away and dropped, and the headlights bucked wildly, as if terrified. An animal glanced aside into the trees, a deer or something.

I'll watch out for you!" he shouted as the engine note rose and fell like a protesting wail.

"You got to trust me, Strickland."

"Why?"

"Because the guy back there Gant he wants to kill you. You screwed up his family, his career—" Strickland tossed his head, flicking his long blond hair away from his face.

"He wants to know, Mac just like you," Strickland jibed.

Mclntyre braked gently. The rear offside wheel rose over a rock and settled. A momentary glimpse of the shining lake, the headlights staring out into empty air, then the trees again.

"Sure. But I'll keep you alive if you tell me. We can cut a deal. I want the name of the guy who hired you. Gant wants you doing hard time for what you did to him and Vance. Think about it—" They were over halfway down the mountainside now, had to be. The headlights gleamed back from the tree trunks. Then there was maybe a forty-minute drive on good roads to Redmond. He had to decide what flight plan should be filed, call the pilot. Fear of pursuit fell away. The lake was closer, the lights of Squaw Camp brighter. Strickland had no other real choice. He'd come to see it that way, in a while. But as yet, the guy didn't seem about to fold up. The Preacherman would still take a lot of persuading to give Mclntyre the name. He wasn't even grateful he was still alive, for Christ's sake!

Mclntyre loosened his grip on the steering wheel. It would come out right. He had Strickland, the man belonged to him, not to Gant or the mysterious employer-wheels ping He righted the sliding car confidently, almost relaxed. The headlights gleamed out through another brief gap in the trees. Bonner Lake was bigger, even closer, shining in the moonlight. It was coming out just right-The car's headlights glared out through the trees far below him, then became muted again. He could not catch his breath, could not admit that it might be too late.

From the outcrop where he had paused, he plunged into the trees again, catching foggy glimpses of the Three Sisters, other whitened mountains, the moon gleaming on Bonner Lake. All the time trying to ignore the weariness of his body, the strange, thudding fragility of his heartbeat.

They were much too near the lake already… The realisation, pounding in his ears like the noise of his blood, could not be admitted. Thin branches whipped at his face and hands and the ground seemed to snag and pull like mud at his boots and ankles. He swerved and dodged through the trees, the slope steepening ahead of him, dropping blindly downwards. There was no trail, just the sense of his descent to guide him.

He blundered out of the trees on to the scratch of the hiking trail.

Vaguely saw tyre marks, the signs of a skid. The trail wound away down the mountainside, marking the way that Mclntyre had gone. He'd crossed the first of the tracks just the first and the car was already nearing Squaw Camp. He plunged into the trees, his blood pounding more loudly than ever… then he heard something else. A wall of sound He cannoned away from a narrow tree hole, winded. He forced himself on, his hand touching a chain set in rock as the trees parted suddenly like a curtain being drawn. There was something ahead of him, blocking his path… The waterfall arched out over the descending slope which led around the outcrop.

It confronted him like a high, impenetrable wall, gleaming in the moonlight as if it was an enormous steel shutter. The chain was slippery to his touch, moss-covered.

Ferns decorated the rock face. The din of water and the visual assault threatened to engulf him. The clock in his head ticked on, measuring the distance between himself and Mclntyre as it increased, became hopeless. His breath came in exhausted, heaving gulps. Too late The main hiking trail avoided the outcrop and the waterfall, but the mountain had thrown it like a barrier across his line of descent. He edged forward, unnerved, the noise intensifying, his moon shadow creeping beside him, enlarged and more fearful. The chain clinked against the rock each time he shifted his grip. Spray dashed into his face, daunting him, like the sense of time slipping away. The cascade arched out over the trail he had to be able to pass behind it, otherwise the chain wouldn't be there… His shirt and jacket were sodden, his ears deafened by the sound. The waterfall seemed no more than twenty or thirty feet across. The knife-scratch of the trail had to continue on the other side.

Trail—? A ledge of rock along which he and his shadow moved with a helpless, unnerved caution. He was blinded by the spray. The sense of his feet and their shuffling movement forward seemed remote, not to be trusted.

The moon and his shadow disappeared… as did the chain. The water banged on his head and shoulders, trying to knock him to his knees in surrender. He was chilled to the bone. The water was silvered with moonlight. The cave behind the cascade seemed immense, featureless. He moved on fearfully, his foot slipping on a wet rock. He slid one foot carefully in front of the other, unseeing, deafened by the noise. His hands were stretched out in front of him to balance his body, to be ready to adjust-foot slipped again. He fell to his knees as if the noise and darkness had beaten him down. He wanted to scream. The noise that now enveloped him intimidated, appalled… He struggled to his feet and moved on. First step, second, third-behind him, suddenly.

The world no longer entirely composed of water and noise. Moonlight.

His shadow rejoined him on the ledge of rock as he grabbed at the reappearing chain.

He staggered away from the cascade, around the outcrop until the trees closed around him again and he could hear his heartbeat above the noise of the waterfall.

The mountainside dropped away steeply once more. He hesitated. The lake was a faint sheen of light through the trees, but his bleary, clearing vision could not locate headlights.

Then he saw them.

The headlights of Mclntyre's car were swivelling round, hundreds of yards below him, as they emerged from the trees. They were no longer bobbing with the undulations of the hiking trail but shone out clearly towards the lake. Mclntyre had reached the highway, was turning on to it. Gant had been beaten. The Calico weighed heavily on his chest, the rifle hanging limply from his left arm. Yes… The headlights had steadied, like a poised runner, then they accelerated below him, confident, shining out along the strip of the blacktop as it threaded itself beside the shore.

Too late… He could not stop them now, Mclntyre was clean away, Strickland with him. He had the only proof… Gant was shivering with rage, with the sense of being beaten. He wanted to raise his head and howl at the moon like an animal in his desperate frustration, raise his head-raised the Ruger, flipping up the waterproof lens cover of the thermal-imaging sight. Through the eyepiece, the headlights of Mclntyre's car seemed like grey strips of rolled steel on the tiny video screen. The car, enlarged as it was, was at the extreme range of the rifle. But it was his only chance. The car was a rectangular box behind the headlights, its windscreen another tiny TV screen on which there were two shadows, escaping him, as he moved the rifle, tracking them-squeezed the trigger, again and again. The windscreen shattered.

The headlights of the car wobbled like torches held in drunken hands…

Gant felt a fierce elation fill him. He raised his arms in a salute as the car below him visibly slowed, lurching from side to side on the highway, the headlights glancing off trees, off the water's edge.

Slowing all the time… Then it left the road, the headlights nose-diving towards the water, slipping into it, so that they gleamed out feebly as they began to drown. He could hear the protest of the car's engine, its revs far too high even though it hardly seemed to be moving. He watched it slip into the water eagerly, directionlessly.

He'd stopped them… only to drown He was running, wildly. Heard himself growling through his teeth as he crossed the hiking trail. Then trees again, and darkness, after a brief glimpse of the headlights becoming more faint, bleary. The roof of the car was still above water.

Black desperation prodded him on, taunting him with the sense that it was too late to save Strickland, that he was already dead in the car that was slipping beneath the lake. He cannoned off the hole of a lodgepole pine and blundered on, a deer startled out of his path, alarmed by his noise and flailing arms.

A brief glimpse of the lake from an outcrop of bare rock. He couldn't see the car, its headlights had vanished beneath the water' No he heard himself shouting. It was an elongated, unending noise that seemed to want to empty his lungs as he ran. His body was difficult to hold upright, propelled only by the arms he waved violently, futilely.

He tripped, collapsing exhausted, rolling down the slope, the Calico bruising him, the rifle lost… Too late The surface of the blacktop was hard, jolting him into stillness, numbing one arm, knocking the breath from his body. The highway, he realised he had reached the highway, and forced himself to his knees. He looked round him desperately. The surface of the lake shimmered with moonlight, undistressed, peaceful. There was no sign of the car, or of where it had entered the water… He lurched to his feet and staggered to the shore. Treadmarks in the moonlight, on the narrow grass verge, indentations across the brief, pebbly shore… Calm water had closed over the roof of the car, drowning it.

Nothing disturbed the tranquillity-until he plunged into the water, wading out into the chill of the lake. The water passed his thighs, stomach, chest. He shivered as it robbed him of the heat of his exertions. Swallowing air, he ducked beneath the surface into sudden, icy darkness. Swam blindly, praying… The moonlight was a faint, ghostly light above him. His chest began to tighten, his throat bulge with the effort of holding his breath. A yard to right or left and he would never see the car… The headlights would have shorted by now, the engine would have stopped. It was here, somewhere, just feet away, somewhere… His chest ached, his arms flailed wildly as if he was still running rather than trying to swim-touched something. Right hand. Something hard… He gripped it, straining to make it out. Driver's mirror… he ducked into the ragged gap where the windscreen had been. The driver Mclntyre was dead.

Passenger? He thrust his head further into the car, his lungs bursting. A white, bloated face moved feebly. Gant reached in and unbuckled the seatbelt that was trapping Strickland. The man was still now, as if he had finally blacked out. Gant pulled — his breath expelled itself involuntarily with the effort and he began swallowing water and Strickland came free like some octopoid creature that had been anchored to the car. Gant had hold of his shirt as he felt the bonnet of the car beneath his feet. He thrust away from it with his remaining strength, pulling Strickland after him up towards the ghostly shimmer of the moonlight.

His head broke the surface of the water like that of an otter and he gasped down air, coughed water. Fought the air into his aching lungs, even as he clutched Strickland against him. Gulped air again and again, as if it would be snatched from him.

He swam awkwardly, pulling the lifeless body with him, the dozen or twenty yards until he could stand upright and haul himself and the inert Strickland across the pebbled floor of the lake. Then he flung the body down on the shore, pouncing on it as if he wished it further harm. The shirt, pants, flesh seemed unstained with blood. He pumped the man's arms grotesquely, angrily. Strickland had cheated him… He had blown it, trying to stop the car. Mclntyre was dead, Strickland was drowned-turned him over. The night air was cold, Gant felt his own body shivering and the lifelessness of the body beneath his own as he straddled it, pummelling at the man's back, squeezing his lungs, pumping in the silence… Strickland coughed. Water dribbled from his gaping mouth. An eyelid fluttered, then Strickland's lungs began pumping of their own volition as he choked air into his body. Retched, choked again, continued breathing, lying on his stomach, face twisted to one side.

Gant rolled away from him, exhausted. Satisfied. Heard his own heartbeat become calmer, quieter. As his night vision improved, he saw or believed he saw the black pinpoint of an otter head breaking the calm stillness of the lake's silvered surface.

He sat watching the unmoving otter. Perhaps it was similarly watching him.

The sound of Strickland's raucous, regular breathing and his quiet groaning were the noises of success. They seeped into his weariness, strong as liquor, warming him.