The Lucy Ghosts

Ch. 27

The desert landscape had changed and Adam saw rivers now, running like twisted ribbons through the green earth, the sand and water reflecting each other as the sun bounced upwards and glistened in blinding brilliance.

'Very poetic,' he thought as he looked down out of the aircraft window. 'Very bloody poetic.'

Billie sat next to him, her head tilted down as she read the latest copy of PEOPLE magazine. Across the aisle, Phil Tucker had fallen asleep, his head tilted sideways as his snores rumbled gently on.

They sat in Executive Class. Trimmler and his wife, Trudi, were up front in First. Adam had decided not to follow his usual habit and upgrade himself to First Class. It would have alienated him from Billie and Tucker and he felt no desire to do that, at this stage anyway. He grinned as he thought of the effect it would have had on Trimmler. Maybe he should've upgraded, if only to annoy the touchy little scientist.

'Ever been to New Orleans before?' Billie asked, putting her magazine down. She was relieved the airline had a total restriction on smoking throughout their fleet, it was his one habit she couldn't tolerate.

'No. You?'

'Yes. For my honeymoon.'

'Good timing.'

'Isn't it?'

'Did you get hold of your lawyers?'

'Yes.'

'I thought in California the wife automatically got half her husband's money?'

'I signed a settlement waiver. When we got married.'

'Waiving everything?'

'I was in love. You don't think about things like that when you're in love. And when I signed, he promised that he would always look after me. Some promise.'

'What do your lawyers say?'

'That I might win. They don't care, do they? They win either way.'

'That's the same all over the world. The worse the news, the richer they get. How long were you married?'.

'Twelve years. And separated for six. They were good and bad years. The highs were high and the lows were even worse. Shit. Some mess.'

'Miss him?'

'What are you? A detective?'

'Sorry. I just sensed that.'

'Well, you sensed wrong.'

They sat in silence for a while, still unsure of each other.

'There's nothing wrong with missing someone you lived with for twelve years,’ she said eventually.

'I’m not sitting in judgement.'

'Whatever. So I miss him. So what?'

'No chance of getting back with…'

'If I want your advice, I'll ask for it.'

'Okay.'

'There's no chance of getting back. I tried for long enough.'

'Why did you split up?'

'You really keep pushing, don't you? You can't let go,'

‘ Except you keep coming back to it. But then, that’s what my Mother always said.’

‘We're here working, not on some agony aunt tour.'

'I'll shut up.'

'Good. Anyway, what did your mother always say?'

'That my lips moved faster than my brain.'

'She was right.'

'So why did you split up?'

'Because I grew too old for him. Just like you said, tough guy?'

'When?'

'First time we met. That I was too old for the job.'

'No. I wasn't talking about you as a person. I was talking about you as a field agent.'

'Old and inexperienced, huh?'

'Don't knock yourself. You don't need to.'

'You're right. I don't need to when you're doing it for me.'

'And stop feeling sorry for yourself.'

'Fuck off,' she hissed at him.

'Chance would be a fine thing.'

'What?'

'Chance would be a fine thing. It's an old English saying. You really want me to fuck off?'

'Course not.'

'So why did you split up?'

She started to laugh, his cheek winning through her defences. 'I told you why. Because I grew too old. No, that's not true. He wanted to stay young. Suddenly developed an interest in teenage girls. The older he got, the younger they got. You know, I found him crying once. After we'd broken up and I called round to pick up some things. You know why he was crying. Because this girl of twenty, the one he was living with, didn't walk up to him and touch him. Said that made him feel old. Because, before he went out with her, he'd seen her with her boyfriend at a softball game in the park. She'd walked up to her boyfriend from behind and just put her arms round his shoulder. Hugged him, I guess. Peter said it was the most natural thing he'd ever seen. And he was fucking crying because in three months together she'd not done that to him. You know what I did? I walked up behind him and put my arms round him. I felt sorry for him. He deserved better.'

'What did he do?'

‘Pushed me away. He was embarrassed. He didn't love them, you know. He was obsessed. By their fresh bodies, their soft pubic hair and their wide eyed innocence.'

'Maybe you expected too much?'

'No. I knew what Peter was. I just didn't want to let go. I never wanted anyone else. And here I am, sitting in this metal tube, going to New Orleans where I had my honeymoon, watching over some nothing scientist with a crazy gunman for my partner. And back home the lawyers are moving in to take away everything I've got. It’s crazy, is it?'

'What about Gary?'

'What about him? Probably move out while we're in New Orleans. No, that's unfair. But he does his own thing. It's not…permanent. Not for Gary. Maybe Peter isn't the only one holding on.'

'To what?'

'To whatever it was we were. He's just frightened. Middle age is like sand. The tighter you hold it in your hand, the faster it runs through your fingers. You're a great person for asking questions. About other people. What about you?'

'What about me?'

'Don't answer a question with a question.'

'Why?'

'Because it's rude. I thought you English types were always polite.'

'Sometimes.'

'You married?'

'No.'

'Girlfriend?'

'No.'

'Divorced?'

'No.'

'Gay?'

'Only when I'm happy.'

'Meaning?'

'I prefer queer. When they adopted that phrase they took a great word out of the English language.'

'Macho type, huh?'

'Just normal.'

'You rich?'

'A little.'

'And you like your job?'

'Yes.'

'You good at it?'

'Better than most.'

'Don't let much out, do you?'

'No.'

'If we walk into trouble, and my back's against the wall, will you come and save me?'

'You'll have to wait and see.'

'Whatever happened to the age of chivalry?'

Adam laughed. 'I'll tell you that when your back's to the wall.'

Ch. 28

'Dimitri tells me that the Americans have uncovered a problem with their records regarding all counter-espionage action from 1945 until 1958.'

'What problem?' asked the Director.

'Nothing specific. But they believe it could be tied up with our common predicament,' said Rostov.

'And what do they expect from us in return?'

'They have an index of all the subjects that their records deal with during that period. They would like to see if we would be willing to provide a similar list so that they could determine if there were any common factors.'

'Our little fire in this building suddenly takes on a new complexion.'

'It'll be interesting to find out what problem the Americans have with their records.'

'There are things in those files, in those cabinets, that would cause us great embarrassment if they were ever to get out,' grunted the Director.

'We can't always be responsible for the past. It is a chance I feel we have to take.'

'And if the Americans are out to deceive us?'

'We have people on the ground over there.'

The Director raised his eyebrows. 'Nothing against the spirit of cooperation between our two great countries, I hope.'

'Of course not,' Rostov lied, as was expected of him. 'We'll follow their actions as closely as we can.' He wasn't prepared to say any more. They both understood that the Director was to be protected when faced with awkward questions from the Kremlin. 'We'll take it step by step. If they're prepared to show us the outline of their files, without giving away any specific details, then we can do the same. I already have an index prepared. It was for my benefit. Maybe there is some common ground.

'We have little choice. But be wary. Watch your back at all times.'

'Yes, sir,' replied Rostov.

'You know what the Americans call counter-intelligence?'

'Dante's Inferno. With ninety nine circles.'

'Exactly. It'll be strange,' said the Director, 'working this close with them. Ten years ago we were at each other's throats. Now we're allies. But where, my dear Alexei, is the real enemy?'

Ch. 29

There was no delay and the twin engined, wide bodied Boeing screeched onto the runway exactly on schedule.

Tucker had slept for most of the flight and was now sleepily gazing out of the window, frantically trying to bring his senses into focus as the plane taxied in.

'Please stay seated until the seat belt light goes out,' a stewardess shouted at Adam, who had stood up before the aircraft left the runway so that he could take his overcoat from the upper lockers. His weapons were in the suitcase in the hold, cleared through security at San Diego by the local Agency operatives.

'Okay,' replied Adam as he continued dragging his belongings from the shelf.

'Please sit down, sir.'

'Okay,' repeated Adam, finishing his task. He grinned cheekily at her and sat down, his coat and case draped across his lap. His duty was to protect Trimmler and he wanted to be ready in case the scientist was the first off the aircraft.

'Rebel without a cause,' quipped Billie.

'The lost generation. That's me,' he replied.

Adam's instincts were correct and Trimmler had elbowed his way through the other passengers, dragging his wife by her arm, as he became the first passenger off the plane once it had docked. The Englishman wasn't far behind, his passage far less strenuous and impolite.

The other two caught up with Adam at the baggage carousal, where he stood under the exit sign, watching Trimmler anxiously waiting to retrieve his suitcases.

'Why the rush?' said Tucker. 'He had to wait for his cases.'

'I hope he doesn't get his before yours arrives. Otherwise he's going to get away from here without you,' said Adam.

'Shit. I better go and tell him to wait for us.' Tucker turned to Billie. 'Transport ready?'

'Yes,' she answered. 'Two company cabs. They'll be outside.'

'Okay. I'll go with Trimmler. You two follow.’

There were two cabs parked side by side at the entrance. In the style of New Orleans they were large American cars, not the compact or special square bodied that were used in most cities. Like most New Orleans cabs, and like the city itself, they were of a shabby appearance, old in design, a reflection of a greater age past. One was a blue 1988 Chevrolet Impala, the other a white 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood with a 1927 Chevrolet Qouta Trophy mascot on its bonnet, a cast zinc model of Lindbergh's Ryan monoplane supported by the spirit of Victory.

They both bore the logo of the Mayfair Cab and Taxi Company.

Billie walked up to them as the driver from the blue car got out. He was black, in his early sixties, and his name, Marius Beiderbecque, was painted on the rear wing of the car in a classic Gothic style.

'Miss Billie,' he greeted warmly.

'Hello, Marius,' she smiled back. 'This is Adam Nicholson. He's with us.'

'Mister Adam.'

'Hello.'

'Put the cases in Frankie's cab, please,' said Billie. 'We'll travel with him. We've got three more. They're getting their cases. You take them.'

'To the Hilton?' asked Marius as he opened the trunk of the white Cadillac and put the cases in.

'That's the one.' Billie walked to the driver's door of the Cadillac and spoke to the driver. His name, Frankie Mistletoe, was emblazoned on the side of his cab, in the same style as that on the blue Chevrolet. 'Any problems?' she asked Frankie.

'No. Apart from a ticket happy cop who tried to move us.'

'This is …'

'I heard. Hi Adam. I'm Frankie.'

'Hello Frankie,' Adam came up to the car.

'You English?'

'I am.' As Adam leant forward he realised the driver was a cripple, his wheelchair folded and wedged in the passenger seat next to him, his hunched back pushing his head forward towards the windscreen. His hands were arthritic, his fingers arched stiffly. On the steering wheel there was a large plastic knob with which he steered the car. The column gearshift, an automatic box, had a long L shaped extension which made gear changing simple. He was no more than thirty years old.

'You never seen a cripple before?'

'Not one that drives cabs.' Adam tried to lighten the situation. He was annoyed with himself. The driver had surprised him and he let it show.

Frankie laughed. 'Best driver in New Orleans,' he drawled.

'Bet you get the biggest tips.'

'Damn right. Works every time. Get in, limey.'

Adam climbed into the back of the car leaving Billie to wait for the other three.

'Now I don't want you worrying about me,' Frankie continued. My right foot's my good foot. Works the accelerator and the brake.'

'If you got here to pick us up, then I'm sure you'll get us to wherever we're going.'

'Well said. What you clutching there?' Frankie asked. 'Got to be important, the way you hanging on to it.'

'I've heard about the muggings in this town. I'm carrying twenty hand grenades, a sawn off shotgun, three Kalishnikovs and a rocket launcher.'

'In this game nothing surprises me. Nothing.' The two men laughed, sharing their humour. 'I've been to England, you know. Oxford. You been to Oxford?'

'Yes.'

'Pretty place. I toured all round. About seven years ago. Spent two months there. Pretty country. But Oxford, that was the prettiest of all. What're you doing here, with our people?'

'Helping out.'

'That right? You must wonder what someone like me's doing here.'

'It crossed my mind.'

'Crossed your mind. Huh! More likely smacked you across your face. Ha! You heard of the Mayfair Cab and Taxi Company.'

'Billie told me. Big company. Across America, in most of the large cities. It's used by the Agency who put agents in as drivers.'

'Great network. Amazing what you pick up in a cab.'

They saw Tucker and the Trimmlers come out of the terminal entrance and Billie walk towards them.

'That them?' asked Frankie.

'Yes.'

'Good, we can get going. And don't let this body fool you, limey. It's supporting a brain up here…' he tapped his forehead as he spoke, '…that's smarter than you think. You just call when you're in the shit, and I'll save your arse every time.'

'You're on.'

The drive into New Orleans was slow, the traffic heavy.

New Orleans is a faded city, shabby in its disrepair and peeling past. Known as 'Big Easy' and sometimes 'Sin City', the city conjures up images of carnival, jazz, voodoo, sex and fun set against a Caribbean Gallic heritage in a predominantly Anglo Saxon culture. This confusion of spirit was once described as a cross between Port-Au-Prince, Haiti and Patterson, New Jersey with a culture not dissimilar to Genoa, Marseille, Beirut and Egyptian Alexandria. This is reflected in the names of the various city boroughs, Algiers, Arabi, Gretna, Westwego, Bridge City, Cajun County and the French Quarter.

Its aura of decadence is a true reflection of its poverty. And where there is poverty, there is invariably crime. Paid-for sex, paid-for drugs, paid-for violence and paid-for eroticism is the currency of the city, openly on display amongst the swirl of tourists on the look-out for that which is unattainable in the suburban homes, but openly on display where it can be watched from the safety of the crowd on the pavement.

Sixty percent of the city's population is black, the highest ratio of any city in North America. With strong religious roots dating back to the discovery of Louisiana in 1699 on Mardi Gras Day by a group of French Canadians, this mixture of Roman Catholicism, Bible Belt Protestantism and mass slavery resulted in a voodoo culture that still grips the dark side of the city.

New Orleans. Where everything is easy, where nothing is impossible.

Adam sat quietly in the back of the white Cadillac. In the front Billie listened to Frankie giving a guided tour of their route into the centre, his wheelchair now sharing the back seat with Adam.

'French Quarter's okay,' he heard Frankie expound, 'but you gotta remember it's for the tourists. Easy money country. A jerk on every street corner, ready to be taken. If you get up there, just watch out for the hustlers. And don't go up Basin Street alone, not north of the Quarter. Even the two's of you. That's bad terrain. Bad people. Cut you for a dime. Hell, cut you for nothing, just for the fun of it.'

They came in on 61, the Airline Highway. It was a flat land, the city having been built on the wetlands and bayou next to the Mississippi river. They turned off the 61 at the Charity Hospital and continued down Common Street to the Trade Centre where the Hilton Hotel was located.. Ahead, as they drove down Common, he glimpsed the mighty Mississippi, 'ole man river', as it wended its way through the southern half of the city. He saw the busy river traffic, barges and tugs and steamers and pleasure craft, working the water as they had done since man first stumbled on the Mississippi; the main artery and heartbeat that was the south.

The Hilton, twenty-five storeys of twin towers, sits on River Walk, on the banks of the Mississippi.

The two cars pulled up at the entrance, Trimmler, in his usual hurry, being the first to exit the lead cab, his wife scurrying behind him. By the time Adam had climbed out of the Cadillac and collected his small case, Tucker was organising the bellboy to deal with the luggage. Adam followed Trimmler into the building and took the moving staircase to the third floor where reception was. He kept his distance as he took in the lobby and its occupants. There was nothing to alarm him, all things seemed fairly quiet at this time. He watched Trimmler book in, then turn and go to the lifts.

'I'll get your key,' said Tucker from behind him. 'We're all on the eighteenth floor. You stay with Trimmler.'

Adam crossed the lobby area and joined the small group waiting to take the lifts. When the doors finally slid open, he followed the Trimmlers in. It was a viewing lift, glass sided and fixed to the outside of the building so that hotel guests could look out on the city as the lift climbed up to the twenty fifth floor.

Trudi smiled at Adam, but Trimmler ignored him. He had made a point of pointedly ignoring the Englishman ever since the wedding incident. That didn't worry Adam, in fact it made life easier as he could concentrate on keeping a watchful eye on the situation rather than get involved in idle small talk.

He returned Trudi's smile, then turned and watched the city fall away below him as the lift shot up, stopping twice before it reached the eighteenth floor.

He waited for the Trimmlers to exit before he followed them, skipping through the lift doors as they started to close. When the couple reached Suite 1844, Trimmler inserted his pass key and entered the room with Trudi behind him.

The loud slam was for Adam's benefit.

He walked back along the corridor and waited by the lift for the others.

'Everything okay?' asked Tucker when he emerged with Billie five minutes later, a bell boy with a loaded luggage trolley following them.

'Fine.'

'Good. You're in 1842. Billie's in 1840 and I'm the other side of the Trimmlers. We'll work out a schedule when we're unpacked.' Tucker turned to the bell boy and pointed at the luggage. 'That's for 1844, so's that. The blue valise…'

Adam took his luggage and Billie's from the trolley and turned back down the corridor. She followed him, leaving Tucker to sort out the remainder.

'Welcome to New Orleans,' she said.

'Is there something I don't know?' he asked suddenly.

'Like what?'

'Like why're we guarding someone who doesn't seem in any real danger.'

'We don't know that. Why?'

'Because if he's a prime target, then we need more cover. Unless one of us is going to live in that room with him, we can't guarantee anything.'

'It's how they want it.'

'They?'

'Top brass.'

'I know I'm not being told everything, Billie. I just hope, if anything does happen, that I'm ready for the unexpected.'

Ch. 30

A blistery morning. A cold morning. The sort of morning when the air stays chilled in your lungs and your cheeks burn with the cold of it.

It was also a sunny morning and the two diplomats had decided to meet in the open and enjoy the brief sunshine before the bad weather moved in again. Both men carried briefcases, two office workers on their way to a meeting.

A group of tourists stared up at the vast statue of a brooding Abraham Lincoln and the two men decided to walk in the open where they could enjoy their conversation in privacy.

'Moscow is worried that you might hold something back,' said Sorge, his feet crunching in the ice hard snow.

'Just what my people said,' replied Nowak.

'Old habits die hard.'

'They said that, too.'

'How honest are your people with you?' asked Sorge, sharply.

'Well, they haven't seen me eat pussy, like some have,' Nowak laughed. 'Sort of gives you a common bond. Hell, Dimi, I don't know. I mean, we all know that we get set up at times. But they're really nervous. They genuinely seem to want to know what's going on. I think they're being pretty straight.'

'I feel this also.'

'Have you been told everything by Moscow?'

'Yes. But they told me to let you speak first. To see how much you knew before I committed myself.'

'My lot read me the same scenario.'

'So who starts?'

'Okay. As long as I have your word…'

'I will tell you everything. At least we're honest between ourselves.'

Nowak walked over to a wooden park bench beside the path. He wrapped his coat round himself and sat, Sorge joining him immediately.

'One thing I didn't tell you last time was that our agents, the ones who had been killed, were also in their sixties,' Nowak started off.

'So you also employ pensioners.'

'In our case, they're all pretty ancient.'

'Why?'

'Because of President Carter. Once the National Security Agency went for satellite surveillance, the whole administration pulled back on agents in the field. But we kept a lot of the ones we had in place out there. It was easier than trying to get them back. Just low grade, maybe-we’ll-need-them-one-day sleepers. Growing older by the minute.'

'For both of us it is impossible to bring them back. How would we do it? Have an amnesty day. Hundreds of people all heading for borders. With wives, children, belongings. We don't even have borders to cross any longer. Not like the old days. All we can do is leave them to fade away.'

'So why's everyone going out with a bang instead of a whimper?'

'That, my literary friend, is what this is all about.'

'We lost another one. Just before Christmas. In Portugal.'

'Portugal? I thought they were on your side.'

'We had people everywhere. Allies have been known to change sides.'

'To our knowledge there have been no more deaths.'

'That you know of.'

'That we know of. What was the problem with your records that prompted you to suggest this meeting?'

Nowak told Sorge of the computer virus, of the electronic enemy within which was steadily wiping out their records. When he had finished, he leant back and watched the Russian who was playing noughts and crosses with his shoe toe in the snow. When he had beaten himself, and connected the line that joined the three crosses, he finally told Nowak of the fire in KGB Headquarters.

'Deeper and deeper,' commented Nowak when Sorge had finished.

'Someone has their tentacles in both our organisations.'

'Yeah. Who? Unless one of us is being set up. By our own people.'

'Or both of us.' Sorge shrugged, opened his briefcase and took out a sheaf of papers. He handed them to Nowak. The American took the bundle, opened his briefcase and repeated the exercise.

There was nothing else to say, they had known each other too long and both were aware when the other was telling the truth.

Ch. 31

Just after nine a.m., Billie watched Adam through the glass entrance doors of the hotel fitness centre. He was working out on the multi-gym, that modern torture chamber of pulleys, bars and stacked weights. He wore a pair of shorts and a sweatshirt, a towel wrapped round his neck to keep the heat in. He was on his back, tilted head down, on a padded board with his feet tucked under a bar above him. His hands were clasped behind his head and he pulled himself upright into a sitting position before lowering himself down again. It was a painful exercise, one she did herself on her short morning sojourn in the gym at home. She usually managed twenty before her stomach muscles demanded that she rest before attempting any more. She knew Gary did one hundred every morning and another hundred at night. He had told her how difficult the last twenty were, how painful the exercise.

She watched Adam effortlessly on the board, counted him to a hundred and nine pull-ups before he swung his legs off and sat cross-legged on the floor. He saw her as he wiped his face with the towel, grinned and beckoned her in.

'Don't you ever sleep?' she asked, when she had let herself in.

'Not a lot. Waste of time.'

'Didn't know you were a fitness freak? Quite Californian.'

'Very funny,' he said, standing up. 'Goes with the job. Usually, when I'm in the field, it's easy to stay fit. But here, with all this soft living, this is the only way. You going to have a go?'

'No. I just wanted to check you knew what was happening.'

'The boat ride.'

'Yes. It leaves at twelve.'

There was to be a meeting between the American and Soviet scientists later that afternoon, but Trimmler had insisted he wanted a trip on a Mississippi riverboat before that. The boat, the Creole Queen, left from the wharf next to the hotel and Tucker wanted Billie and Adam to accompany the Trimmlers. 'At a discreet distance,' he had instructed.

'I'll be in the lobby at eleven thirty. Do we need tickets?'

'I'll get those.'

'Come on. Go get changed and then jump on one of these machines. It'll do you good.'

'Okay,' she replied. 'See you in ten minutes.'

She left the exercise room. It would be fun exercising with someone else, Gary always took it so seriously. She was beginning to enjoy the Englishman's company. Maybe he wasn't as hard nosed and arrogant as he had first appeared. Then she remembered the bag by the side of the exercise room, remembered the weapons.

That was the difference between him and Gary. Gary worked at his exercises for self-achievement, for his own gratification. To Adam it was the difference between life and death.

And she, old collector and disseminator of information, was part of a real life and death struggle. The realisation suddenly hit her, she felt the excitement rush through her.

She really was in the field.

And of all things, it had been the Fitness Centre that had brought about that realisation. With Gary, exercise was something to do. With Adam it was for real.

She was a secret agent and she wanted to tell the world.

Twenty minutes later, as Adam watched her on the jogging machine, with her small breasts bouncing up and down under her tight T-shirt, he hoped she wouldn't be faced with what he knew could well happen. Violence was his estate. If it came, sudden and harsh as is its nature, he knew she couldn't cope.

What he didn't say, his real reason for coming down to the exercise room, was that he had sensed that instinct, that flash of the unexplainable, that warned him of danger. He needed his fitness, his agility, his strength.

He knew things were suddenly going to change.

He didn't try and define his feelings.

His instinct had held good in the past.

The road was about to become rocky.

Ch. 32

The Creole Queen is a paddle bashing, white painted, single smoke stacked, river boat.

It recalls days of Rhet Butler gamblers strolling the decks with a thin cigar clamped between their teeth, of smart suited men and elegantly frocked women on their way to the American dream, of little boys fishing on the banks of the Mississippi hearing the toot toot of the river boat as it rounded the bend, of cotton and steam, of the old captain up on his bridge sailing into the wilderness, of the Deep South, of Mark Twain, of all that made America great.

That's as it was. Today, the Creole Queen, and its sister ships that ply on the reminiscence trail, are a sham. Only half the size of the original river queens, they are designed purely for the tourist market.

Adam watched the Trimmlers walk down River Walk and up the gangplank onto the boat. He and Billie kept their distance.

Trimmler seemed nervous, anxiously looking round for something, yet not wanting to appear to be doing so. At one stage, as they were climbing the steps down to the restaurant gallery, he whispered conspiratorially into Trudi's ear, then seemed to point across where the other passengers were. Trudi glanced in the direction he indicated.

Adam looked to where he had pointed. There were a group of people there, a mixture of ages and sexes. They were nothing extraordinary, just tourists like the others on the boat.

Across the river a tug, pushing a line of five heavily laden barges, blew its horn, warning a small motorised pleasure craft going in the opposite direction to keep clear.

The sound, loud and nearby, attracted the attention of the tourists on the Creole Queen and they turned as one man to look at the tug train bearing down on the smaller boat. The pleasure craft, with six revelers on board, swung hard left and skirted the barges on their port side.

'Did you see that? That was close,' said Billie.

'Wasn't it?' he replied. But he had ignored the incident, kept his attention on Trimmler. The scientist had also chosen to disregard the near accident and had signalled, with a small wave of his hand, to one of the group on the opposite side of the deck. A distinguished, older man with a heavily lined face framed in a grey shock of wavy hair with his back to the railings, had nodded back, acknowledged Trimmler. The two men had held their gaze and Adam immediately sensed their closeness. Then the grey haired man smiled gently and turned away to watch the scene on the river. Trimmler suddenly took Trudi's arm and led her down the stairs to the restaurant. The man with the wavy grey hair moved along the railings to get a better view of the pleasure craft as it passed the tug train. He walked with a limp and he held a walking stick. He moved away from his group towards the rear of the Creole Queen.

'What's going on?' asked Billie, leaning next to him.

Adam put his finger up to his lip, signifying her to keep quiet. She shut up, her curiosity blunted, her frustration sharpened.

Behind them, the group of tourists chatted amongst themselves, obviously excited to be there.

They were foreign, their language Russian.

After a minute, Adam led Billie away towards the stairs down which Trimmler had disappeared. To his left, away from his group, the grey haired man stared out on the Mississippi.

'Are you going to tell me what's going on?' Billie asked again.

'When I know, I'll tell you.'

'They're Russians.'

'So are the scientists at this space convention. The one Trimmler's here for.'

‘So?'

He started to descend the stairs.

‘If they're Russians, and…' she rushed after him. '…what if they are Russians and scientists?'

'Interesting. Don't you think?'

'So it's a coincidence.'

'So it is. Just like Trimmler, not exactly your every day tourist, is also a scientist and comes out onto this boat for a joy ride. Just coincidence.'

She caught him up at the bottom of the stairs and was about to answer when another group of laughing tourists made their way towards them, Americans this time from Tennessee.

'You'all having a good time?' shouted one of them at the couple.

'Great,' replied Adam. 'Real fun place.'

'Sure is. Sure is,' replied the Tennessean. Above them the whistle blew and the Creole Queen slipped its mooring for its daily run down the Mississippi.

The loudspeaker voice blared out, 'Brunch is now being served on the lower deck. Creole brunch and original cajun cooking. Right now on the lower deck.'

'Where's Trimmler?' Billie asked.

'He came down here.'

They found the Trimmlers in the restaurant at the front of the queue, their bowls already full of seafood gumbo. A small jazz band played in the corner, the sound an explosion in the confined and crowded restaurant. Conversation was only possible by shouting above the din.

They joined the queue, watched the Trimmlers sit at a window table and settled themselves on the opposite side of the restaurant. The Russian party came in five minutes later, without the grey haired man, and the Trimmlers rejoined the queue for their Jambalaya and red beans.

'I can do without all those red beans and sausages,' said Billie, the gumbo already taking its toll on her Californian stomach. Adam nodded agreement and lit up a cigarette. She shook her head, her views on his nasty habit were already known. 'That's a disgusting habit. Smoking's for jerks.'

'Let's not get into that. Politics, smoking and religion. That’s taboo.'

She shrugged and turned away to watch Trimmler.

'If they split, I want you to stay with her.'

'What makes you think they'll split?'

'He's restless. She's eating, he's playing with his food.'

She watched Trimmler. 'Maybe he doesn't like jambalaya.'

'We'll see.' As he spoke, Trimmler suddenly spoke to Trudi, then rose from the table and left the restaurant. He checked out Adam and Billie, but didn't acknowledge them.

'Here we go,' said Adam, turning away from Trimmler and pretending to eat his gumbo. When the scientist had left the room, Adam got up from the table and went to join the food queue. 'Stay there,' he said to Billie. 'Stay with her.'

Trudi looked towards them and then went back to her meal. Adam got lost in the queue and then, when he was shielded from Trudi, broke across the room and went out through what was the kitchen area.

'Hey, what're you doing here?' shouted one of the chefs.

'Sick,' returned Adam, holding his throat in a mock grip as if he was about to throw up. 'I need fresh air. I need…quick, I'm gonna…'

'Out'a that door,' yelled the chef, not at all bothered about his professional ability being under question. 'Get out'a here quick. Up the fucking stairs.'

Adam rushed out of the kitchen, stifling his grin as he went, and up the stairs onto the middle deck. It was empty. He moved up to the next level, the top deck, and looked round. There were a few people still looking over at the Mississippi, but no sign of Trimmler or the grey haired man. He descended to the middle deck and crossed slowly to the rear of the boat.

He saw the grey haired man cautiously limping his way towards the conference rooms. Adam slipped under the stairs and watched the Russian enter one of the rooms, waited until he heard the door close. Then he moved forward and looked in through the porthole.

The two men, Trimmler and the grey haired man gazed at each other, examining each other as friends would who had not seen each other for a long time.

'Heinrich,' he heard the grey haired man say.

'Albert. Albert. After all these…' Trimmler was overcome, tears filled his eyes.

Trimmler had instinctively spoken in German.

He saw the two men step forward and embrace. They held each other, thumped each other on the back, both started to laugh and enjoy this most joyous moment. After a while they stepped back and looked at each other again.

'I could say you hadn't changed,' said Trimmler. 'But I would be lying.'

'At least success hasn't gone to my stomach,' replied the other in German, prodding Trimmler's pot belly, making him squirm away. 'Apart from that, you look well. Western living, eh?'

'I can't believe…after all these years… Oh, Albert. After all these years.'

'Who would have thought? All that time ago…that we would meet here, on a boat in America. Now I know the war is really over.'

'Just as Grob Mitzer said it would be. Just as he always said.'

Adam re-joined Billie at the table.

'Well?' she asked.

'He met an old friend.'

'Who?'

'One of the Russians.'

'Really?'

'Really.'

'Why would he do that?'

Adam shrugged. 'That's up to Tucker to find out. We're here to guard and report back.'

'And you just do your job?'

'That's me.' Adam took out another cigarette and lit it. She shook her head in disgust. 'By the way, they spoke in German.'

'A Russian speaking German?'

'A German from Russia speaking German. Name's Albert. That's all I picked up.'

'Are you sure he's with the Russians?'

'He sure as hell isn't from Tennessee.'

One hour later, when the boat docked, Albert was the first off. He never looked back.

The Trimlers followed not far behind.

There was no indication that the two had ever met.

Ch. 33

It was to be an historic day.

The first new synagogue in modern times in the city of Hamburg was due to be opened at noon that day.

Rabbi Levi Shamiev and his wife, Juliet, went into the synagogue before dawn to continue their preparations and ensure that all would be ready for the opening ceremony.

Rabbi Shamiev, British by birth of German origin, was in his early thirties and had been rabbi in a Birmingham community when he was asked to head up the new Hamburg synagogue. There had been many synagogues in pre-War Germany, the largest in Berlin, the massive city synagogue on the Oranienburger Strasse, which was in the process of being restored. There had been some trouble during the restoration work, the usual daubing of swastikas and communist emblems. But the work had gone well and the Berlin synagogue was a faithful reconstruction of what had been.

The first thing Shamiev found was that there are few Jews in Germany; not many had returned to the country of their origin after the war. But with the coming of a single Europe some of the younger Jewish community had decided to try their fortunes in Germany, despite the natural fear that a reunified nation would release all the prejudices brought about by the holocaust.

Maybe it would be all right this time.

With that as a background, fund raising for the Hamburg synagogue had been relatively easy and the square bricked building was completed within a year. Now, twenty months after the project had first been mooted, Rabbi Shamiev was about to open the doors to the outside world. There were to be honoured guests that day. Politicians, religious leaders, captains of industry, social officers of the highest office.

It was truly to be an historic day.

Juliet Shamiev had left the two young children with their grandmother. The family lived in a small house lent to them by the city on the southern outskirts of Hamburg. The children would be brought along later to see the ceremony. As she checked the seating arrangements and made sure the dignitaries' name cards were in the correct places, she turned and watched her husband.

He stood at the arc in his black canonical robes. The arc is the cupboard at the front of the synagogue, where in a Christian Church one would find the altar, and represents the Holy Arc in the temple where the tablets of stone that Moses received were stored. Now the arc is the home for each Synagogue's Sefer Torah, that most holy of Jewish books, their bible, where the five books of Moses are read in one year, with one section to be recited each week from the Bimah. The Bimah is the central podium of the synagogue, with a railing surrounding it and two sets of steps, one to enter the Bimah from and the other to exit it. Juliet watched him prepare the scrolls of the Torah ready for that first historic reading that would take place later in the day, the same Sefer Torah that had only arrived two days earlier from Jerusalem and had been specially prepared and blessed by the Chief Rabbi of Israel.

As he went painstakingly about his work, she smiled, proud of what he had achieved and was about to achieve.

It was when she turned back to the seats, her list in her hand, that she saw the first intruder.

He wore a black sweater and black trousers with a red sash around his waist. Over his head there was a balaclava. In his hand he held a wooden baseball bat that he swung menacingly against his thigh.

'Levi!' she heard herself call, the sudden fear nearly choking the words. 'Levi!' she shouted louder.

The rabbi swung round as more intruders burst in. Some carried baseball bats, others spray cans of paint. One man, out of sight of the Shamievs, hauled a large can of paraffin into the entrance.

'What do you want?' asked the rabbi, running forward to protect his wife. She moved backwards until he was beside her and had put his arm round her shoulder. What is it?'

The leaders of the group rushed forward to confront the Shamievs.

'This is a House of God,' continued the rabbi. 'A House of God and…'

'A House of Jews. A House of Filth,' said the first man who had entered the building.

Then he swung his baseball bat and smashed Levi Shamiev across the skull, smashed him before he had a chance to defend himself, smashed him repeatedly until he was dead.

As the others watched this deadly debacle, one of them laughed. 'Fucking Oven Dodgers,' he crowed as the deadly act continued in front of him. 'Jews in a house of filth.'

Juliet Shamiev tried to scream, but a second intruder battered at her and destroyed her young life just as ruthlessly.

Then the invaders painted red hammer and sickles across the walls, destroyed the arc and the Sefer Torah, threw down the petrol soaked rags they had carried in supermarket plastic bags and set fire to the synagogue.

The whole incident took no longer than four minutes.

When he was satisfied, the leader of the terrorists took off his balaclava. He was a young man, of medium height, blond haired with curls that ran down to his shoulder blades. He was thin faced and thin lipped, not a man given to emotion. Across his left cheek there was a raw looking scar. It was a knife wound he had received ten years earlier when, as a policeman, he had stumbled on four thugs robbing a store in East Berlin.

He signaled the others to remove their masks. When they had done so, he calmly led them out of the building that they had just set fire to and disappeared before morning broke above the commuters flooding into Hamburg.

When the fire brigade arrived fifteen minutes later, the synagogue was a burning inferno. But the firemen could still recognise the red hammer and sickles daubed on the outside walls.

'Poor bastards,' said the fireman who found the charred bodies of the Shamievs inside the remains of the building. He didn't know his father had once been a member of the Hitler Youth movement at the end of the War.

'Fucking Reds,' he said, turning to his compatriots. 'Why the fuck can't they let the Jews live in peace? Fucking bastard communists.'

His colleague said little. He was from Leipzig and had come to work in the West immediately after the Wall came down. He had nothing against the Jews, but remembered his father's words. They were the cancer that had caused Germany to fall, the cause of the pain endeared by all Germans since 1945. He kept his silence. To him, the Jews had only got what they deserved.

They've got Israel, he remembered his father saying. We don't need them back in Germany.

Ch. 34

There were ninety American delegates to the Russians sixty. Gone were the days when the Soviets always sent along an equal number so that they could save face and be on a par with the West. Economics and a new order dictated otherwise.

The scientists covered all aspects of space, ranging from metallurgy and fuel to dietary and public relations. They were the world's best and meeting for a common purpose, to divert the developments of war to the fruits of peace.

They were attending a champagne reception, a social coming together before the hard work started. To most of the scientists this was the ultimate moment, the transfer of science from the use of death to the benefit of peace.

Many of the Russians were excited to meet Von Braun. Eager to be close to the legend.

Adam noticed the grey haired man wasn't present. He'd checked the lists and now knew him as Albert Goodenache and he was the Soviet expert on solid fuels. Trimmler was present, as ever with Trudi, and he stayed near Von Braun for most of the reception.

'Ladies and Gentlemen,' said the smart silver haired American administrator who had already made a play for Billie when she came into the room. Adam had taken an instant dislike to this smoothie, saw him as one of the army of men, useless men, who administered the experts and often claimed the glory for themselves. 'Ladies and Gentlemen. Please,' he said into a microphone at the top end of the hall. He smiled, the winner's smile, and held his hands up for silence. Slowly, the sound in the room quietened as the scientists and their guests turned towards the Smoothie.

'I am honoured to be here,' he said, then paused. Behind, the interpreter repeated his words in Russian into another microphone, the two of them carrying on like two dancers always out of step. 'Honoured and privileged. To be here, amongst some of the greatest scientists in the world… and I mean that, to be here at such an historic time, at the threshold of what will one day be seen as the greatest of man's scientific achievements. From now, we can work together on other things, on medicine…on the environment…on making sure that science gives all people, from the poorest to the most fortunate, the opportunity of a better life…So welcome, my friends and colleagues, to this, the first Joint Space Venture between our two great countries. To put man further into space, to find out about the universe, and to do that together by pooling all our resources, all our talents, all our future…as one great scientific movement. We start work tomorrow, today is so that we can get to know each other… I won't say any more, except please raise your glasses and join me in toasting the Joint Space Venture, in our great opportunity, and our hopeful future. To you all…'

'How's your bullshit?' whispered Billie as the crowd applauded the speaker as he left the microphone.

'From the way he came on, I thought he was your type,' said Adam.

'Yuch. Definitely not my type.'

'Where's Tucker?'

'Reporting back to Washington. I can't see Trimmler's German friend.'

'Probably ducked out on the reception.'

'Wouldn't it be something if Trimmler turned out to be on their side?'

Adam shook his head. ‘If only everything worked out that simple.'

Tucker made his way through the guests and Billie waved in his direction to catch his attention.

'Happy party,' he said. 'Where's our boy?'

'Over there,' indicated Billie, pointing to the other side of the room where Trimmler was deep in conversation with a group of American and Russian scientists. 'Did you speak to Washington?'

'I did. They want us to increase our awareness.'

'What does that mean?' asked Adam.

'What it says.'

'Increase our awareness? Do we move in to his hotel suite? Go to the loo with him?'

'The loo?'

'The men's room,' interpreted Billie.

'Look…' snapped Adam, irritated by the interruption. '…I just want to know what they mean. How far are we allowed to go.' Adam had a soldier’s instinct, orders were his staple, even if they were to be broken.

'Okay, okay,' replied Tucker, taken aback by Adam's sudden intensity. 'I guess we've got to make sure we're covering everything.'

'The only way we can do that is by gluing ourselves to him.'

'They also said we weren't to make it too obvious.'

'That's ludicrous.'

'I'm just telling you what they said.' Tucker was exasperated with the Englishman. 'Let's just be more watchful, okay?'

Adam shook his head. If someone was after the scientist, they could hit him at their leisure. The whole thing needed more resources.

'Can we get some more support?' he asked.

'People?'

'Yes.'

'I'll put it to them. When I ring later. In the meantime, we just continue as we are. Take turns and keep close to him. There's an welcome dinner tonight, here in the hotel. I'll attend that with him.'

'What if he leaves again?'

'Washington have asked him not to go out alone, unless it's an official trip. You two take the afternoon off. I'll see you back here at about ten thirty, eleven.'

Tucker left them to join Trimmler.

'Wow, a free evening,' said Billie.

'Yes. Very secret service.'

'What's that mean?'

'It's like a bloody holiday outing. I'm sorry. When you've been in some of the places I have… We're either guarding this chap's life, or we're not. There's no in between.'

'So do you want to see New Orleans, or not?'

'Hell, why not?' Adam laughed. 'I'm not paying for this jaunt, am I? Where do you suggest?'

'Let's become tourists. Let's go to the French Quarter and see the sights.'

'Zis eez good,' he mimicked in Franglais. 'Zis is vot ve vill do. To ze French Quartair. To ze naughty place, eh?'

He made her laugh. Then she remembered why they were here. It was a shit life. Some way to earn a pension.

Ch. 35

'Who the hell's Albert?' asked the DDI.

'One of their scientists,' replied the DDA.

'Did Tucker say anything else?'

'No. They're running shifts on Trimmler.'

The Exec Director watched the two of them across his desk. Each one of them on their best behaviour so as to impress him. In truth, neither was a natural successor. The DDA was an exceptional administrator, the DDI an aggressive field leader. But both had their limitations, neither had that extra dimension that you needed to fill the top slot. What was it Confucius had said? "The Master must teach the pupil everything, except how to be the Master.". An apt saying, an exact hypothesis, thought the Exec Director.

'And Grob Mitzer? I never heard of him. Not until he popped up in Cannes,' continued the DDI.

'Big German industrialist.' The DDA, scored a quick point. 'Big in electronics. Heavily involved in the European space programme. And in ours.'

'Is that right?' stalled the DDI, not wanting to lay bare his ignorance of Herr Mitzer. 'God-damn funny. Him sitting next to Trimmler when that black boy took a shot at them. There were four possible targets. Trimmler and the Russian agent who got killed. Kushmann. And Mitzer.'

'New doors opening all the time,' commented the Exec Director. He turned to the DDA. 'I think we should also explain your ideas on the work we're doing with the Russians.' He watched the DDI's face, there was no flicker of surprise. That came from years out at the sharp end of intelligence. At least by highlighting the DDA as the prime mover in contacting the KGB, the Exec Director had shifted the onus of responsibility away from himself. 'There have been some interesting developments on both sides. Intriguing and similar.'

He sat back and watched the DDA explain the recent events that had taken place between the CIA and the KGB. The DDI gave nothing away as he listened, apart from a reaction from the left eyebrow when he was told that the two sides had exchanged information regarding their most secret files.

'Well?' asked the Exec Director when the DDA had finished.

'We should protect my people in the field,' came the reply, the DDI's drawl more pronounced and deliberate than before. 'We could be putting their lives in danger.'

'No individuals' names were given out. We only showed them an index of what was on the computer,' snapped the DDA. 'The secrecy of the asset base, and its protection, is still a major priority.'

'Can we trust them?' The DDI's instincts were to trust no-one, especially those who had been his direct enemies as long as he'd been in the Agency. 'It all sounds a bit too slick. We lose an agent, so do they. We have a computer glitch, they get a fire in their filing room. We both lose the same data, dealing with the same period in time. It smells.'

'We can't ignore it,' said the Exec Director, turning to the DDA. 'Have we come up with anything since we got their list?'

'Yes, sir. We listed their headings and ours onto a data base, then ran the whole thing through to find any common denominators.'

'What sort of stuff did you feed in?' asked the DDI.

'The locations of the killings, ours and the Russians'. The dates and times they happened. The methods used to see if they cross linked in any way. Any outside organisations which could have tied up with our agents as double agents. Foreign secret services, both friendly and otherwise, that could have run doubles. Any war time operations that were trying to hide their past records. Computer companies that had links into our computer, assassinations from the past that had a similar modus operandi. Hell, we fed in over four thousand different clues. My people are still coming up with ideas where there might be some connection.'

'And you've still drawn a blank?'

'We've still got a long way to go. I've got thirty programmers working on this and over fifty operatives coming up with ideas. The only connection we've got, and this doesn't involve the asset base, is the one between Trimmler, the computer that stored the 1945 to 1958 data which has been affected by the virus, Grob Mitzer and the Paperclip Conspiracy. In addition to that, the Russians have determined that Albert is one Albert Goodenache, a German scientist they captured at the end of the war. He's been heavily involved in their rocket and space programme.'

‘Tell me about Mitzer.'

'He was picked up by our troops at the end of the war. With another scientist, Heinrich Spiedal. Mitzer was heavily involved with the administration at both Nordhausen and Peenemünde. In the end we didn’t need Mitzer and he stayed on in Germany. With his knowledge, it doesn't take much to see why he became such a high flyer in West Germany.'

'And this Heinrich…Spiedal, was it?'

'That's Trimmler.'

'An ex-Nazi?'

'Name change because of past connections. You know what happened with the Paperclip conspiracies. We just hijacked them over here, changed some of their names, and conveniently forgot about their war records. When it got out, it created one helluva stink.'

'At least it got us going in the space race.'

'And the computer?' asked the Exec Director.

'Most of those scientists had links with our computers. Hell, they were in on the ground floor. In the early days, every government department was helping each other. They could've planted a virus.'

'Sounds unlikely.'

'We also deal with a company in Germany called Mitzer Metelwerk Gmb. They supply various hardware parts for us. Their people come over here and install and service some of our machines. Usually in non-secure areas, but still linked to the main frame.'

'Mitzer Metelwerk. I don't have to ask who owns that?'

'Grob Mitzer.'

There was silence for a while as all three absorbed this latest information.

'Industrial espionage?' asked the DDI eventually. 'Maybe Trimmler's been helping Mitzer to our space technology and now he's running scared.'

'No,' replied the Exec Director. 'They wouldn't knock off our asset base for that. And where’s that leave the Russians'?'

‘Maybe they stumbled onto something.'

'That don't stack up. Who’s going to take on the CIA and the KGB? What've we got on Trimmler's past?'

'Not a much,' said the DDA. 'When we accessed his file, the virus went to work. Operation Paperclip, in its early days, was handled by the OSS and then the other secret services. All that information is under the 1945 to 1958 file. We can't get to it without corrupting the system.'

'So did we find out about Mitzer?'

'Through our the German station…'

'You contacted my people?' barked the DDI.

'Yes.'

'You should'a gone through me. Fuck it, it makes me look like I don't know what's happening. Even in in my own department.'

'I said you were aware of the situation.' He lied in front of the Exec Director.

'You should've still cleared it with me.' The DDI sat back huffily, irritated with himself for letting his cool exterior slip.

'We needed the information fast,' the DDA purred on, pleased that he had needled his counterpart. 'The information on Goodenache and Spied…Trimmler, was on their file. Mitzer once gave a magazine interview where he talked about how he had been at Peenemünde and how he escaped with two scientists.'

'And he named those scientists?' asked the Exec Director.

'Yes, sir.'

'Has he any links with the Russians?'

'None. He kept his head down and built up his business. No known involvement with any political organisations whatsoever.'

'Any other way of finding out about Trimmler?'

‘Now we’re chasing it something could break. Won’t be easy. Hell, it was nearly fifty years ago.'

'Give it all to the Russkies. There's nothing in there to cause us any embarrassment. In the meantime, see what you can dig up on Trimmler.'

'I'll deal with that,' the DDI reacted quickly, determined to regain the lost ground.

'I also want information on Mitzer. Get that from the German station,' the Exec Director swung back to the DDA. 'See what the Russians have got on Mitzer and on Goodenache. I'll give you fifty-to-one his files were in that fire. ‘

'They'd say that even if they weren't,' interjected the DDI.

'And keep a close watch on Trimmler. He could still be a target.'

'Can I put a team in?'

'Not yet. Until the computer snag's resolved we keep everything under wraps. Get Tucker to report his movements back to you.'

'He might need some help,' said the DDA.

'Okay, but low profile.'

The DDA nodded. He would send Carter down to New Orleans in the morning.

'Can we pull out the Brit?' asked the DDI.

'No. We don't upset London. If things go wrong, we can always pass the buck there. Keep him in the dark. Just tell him he's there to protect Trimmler, as he always was. Limeys! Too bloody polite. They were always the easiest to fuck. And thanked you for the privilege afterwards.'

Ch. 36

Bright winter sunshine, seventy degrees and a swirl of colour, sound and people on the streets as the clock clanged six p.m. in Jackson Square where they once hung the thieves, beheaded the murderers, burnt the witches and broke the rapists on the wheel.

New Orleans. The French Quarter. Watch your fantasies be born, flourish and die in the time it takes you to walk from one end of Royal Street to the other. A place where anyone can make a dream come true, as long as they've got the endurance and the dollars in their pocket. How the American Dream was before popcorn, Coca Cola and Tyrone Power.

Adam and Billie, having agreed to meet Frankie in his cab at seven thirty, had walked up Canal Street from the Hilton, past the new department stores and turned down Royal Street into the area known as the French Quarter.

Lined with elegant Spanish colonial buildings, their upper balconies jutting out over the sidewalk with their slim cast iron balustrades, Royal Street stretched from Canal to Esplanade, parallel to Bourbon Street. Sealed off to traffic, with the exception of black helmetted policemen who rode the streets on their futuristic shaped scooters, the street was crowded with the swell of tourists.

The fat boy, all three hundred quivering pounds encased in a tight white T-shirt and black elastic shorts with a zip up the back, was the first musician they saw. He walked along, twelve string guitar strapped over his shoulder and square cardboard box in hand, looking for a place to park up and troubadour the crowd. They followed him, but never heard the curly haired fat boy sing.

'Maybe he just doesn't,' said Billie. 'Maybe he just likes everyone to think he can sing.'

Adam was surprised by the lack of jazz players; he had expected to see them on every street corner. She told him they worked in the clubs and only came out at night when the Quarter livened up.

'This is just for the gawkers,' she said. 'No-one makes money out of gawking.'

He was happy to listen, to take it all in. Dressed in a pink cotton shirt and pleated charcoal grey trousers he had bought in a local shop, Adam was the cultured European out on the town. Over his arm he draped his black blazer, elegant in style, heavy enough to carry the Browning 9mm in the pocket.

She liked walking with him. Short as he was, he attracted the attention of others, was a man women liked to admire. She was pleased to be next to him, even if her clothes were Californian casual and not European chic.

Further down the road, a clown, white faced and red nosed in a multicoloured jump suit, handed out balloons to passing children. A folk singer, singing Kristofferson songs in a Dylan voice, leant against the wall behind him, his efforts unrewarded by the lack of pennies in his upturned Lennon hat. The fat boy avoided the singer and crossed the road, his guitar wobbling along with him. The singer grinned as he saw the fat boy; 'wearing yesterday's misfortunes like a smile,' he sang.

They stopped for a Haagen Dazs ice cream at the next corner, Billie savouring a chocolate chip special while Adam licked his way through a blueberry cone. The shop signs fascinated him, the impact of tourist shabby on this beautiful street.

'Orgy French Style. Girls Girls Girls.'

'Female Amateur Wrestling. Audience Participation.

We come to the street to find a challenger.'

'Mask Factory.'

'Guru T shirts.'

'Dee-sire is yours — thru these doors.'

'Lesbian Orgies — women only.'

And those were just the ones he could see from where he stood.

'What're you thinking?' she asked him through a mouthful of chocolate chip.

'How about something to eat?' he lied back.

The Court of (the?) Two Sisters is housed in a building that dates back to 1832 and has one of the most beautiful courtyards in the Quarter. It is called after two sisters who ran a dry goods shop there at the turn of the century and is now one of the finest outdoor eating places in the street.

Adam led Billie through the darkened archway to the courtyard. Within minutes a black waiter, 'Mateus' according to the badge on his lapel, had poured them iced water and taken their order.

'What do you think of it?' she asked him.

'Interesting. And different.'

'What do you want to do tonight?'

'Not bothered. What about you?'

'I'd like some excitement.'

'Any ideas?'

'Yes. I've never been to one of those sex shows.'

'The lesbian ones?'

'Yup.'

He grinned. 'Women only.'

'Damn.'

'Shame.'

'Liar.'

He laughed. 'So where were we? I know, we were talking about your marriage. You said you honeymooned here.'

'That was yesterday. On the plane. And I'm not talking about myself any more.' He saw the hurt in her eyes and regretted mentioning the honeymoon. But she pushed it aside and went on. 'Let's change the subject. Let's talk about you.

'Nothing to say.'

'Like hell.'

'Wouldn't know where to start.'

'At the beginning. What were you like at school?'

'Terrible.'

'Why?'

'A right little tearaway.'

'I don't believe it,' she mocked him.

'I was. You really want to know?'

'Yes.'

'Okay. I went to about six different schools in the same time that most kids go to one.'

'Why?'

'Because I was kicked out of every one. Expelled.'

'I don't believe that.'

'Listen, if you're not going to believe me, then I won't tell you.'

'Oops. Sorry.'

'Didn't see the point of school. Waste of time. So I played truant. Hookey to you. I got in with an older crowd, we all had a bit of money, you see. So I used to disappear each day and play cards with these guys. Poker. Chemin de fer. It was great. I won a car in one game. An old Mini. You remember them?'

'The little cars.'

'Yes. Except my mini was big to me. It had no heater.' He laughed. 'I went to a garage to get one fitted. But they wanted too much. So the mechanic told me that every time I'd pull up at some lights or come to a stop, then I'd have to wiggle the long gear lever up and down and stamp my feet on the accelerator and clutch pedals. Get's the circulation going, he said. Best way of keeping warm.'

'And you did that?'

'All the time. Stamped and shook my way all round London. I ran the car for three months before I lost it in another game. I used to arrive at the gates after school and pick up all my chums. Then we'd all go off and blow my winnings. Best time I ever had.'

'How old were you?'

'Fourteen.'

'You're kidding?'

'I told you. You have to believe me.'

'I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' she said, holding her hands up in mock apology.

Mateus brought them their wine and they waited until he had uncorked and poured it.

'I was broken up when I lost that car,' he continued when Mateus had gone. 'So I stole one of my guardian's Bentleys.'

'Stole it?'

'Borrowed. Except he didn't know. He had this old Bentley. Kept it in a lock-up garage round the corner from his flat. Only ever used the car at weekends. So I got a spare garage key cut and used to take the car from Monday to Friday.'

'What happened?'

'I took this girl out. You can imagine how popular I was with the birds. Not everyone at fourteen, going fifteen, runs round in a Bentley. Anyway, I dropped her home, somewhere in the country, then got caught in the snow coming back. Bloody thing just buried itself up to the axle. Wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been Thursday night. When he went to the garage Friday lunchtime, of course, it wasn't there. I owned up. No point calling the police in. They'd have traced it anyway.'

'I bet he was pleased.'

'Just a little. Refused to speak to me for a week. Then I bought him a bottle of Dom Perignon and he forgave me. He wasn't a bad chap. For one of the guardians.'

'Where were your parents?'

'Away,' he lied. 'Out of the country most of the time.'

She sensed his reluctance to speak about them, felt him tighten up. He picked up his glass and drank from it. It would be the only glass he would drink all evening. She changed the subject. 'So how many exams did you pass?'

'Hell, you can't pass them if you don't take them.'

'None?'

'Never sat one. Now that's what I call an achievement.' He grinned. 'Not true, of course.'

'What is?'

'That I passed none. I got my one length swimming certificate.'

'Your what?'

'One length swimming certificate. But even then I cheated. My legs were walking the last bit in the shallow end.'

They both laughed as the waiter arrived with the first course.

'So that was your secret life. Then. What about now?'

'Ah! There are things we all feel are better hidden.'

'Why? What makes people so…insular…that they can't share with others.' She was thinking of Peter and how he could never admit his infidelities, even when she had found him out.

'Don't ask me. Maybe, we just need our own space. Somewhere that no-one else can get to.'

Behind them a jazz band began to play.

It was as life should be, sitting there in that sunlit courtyard before night came and cast its shadow and opened the lid on Sin City.

They were ten minutes late for Frankie, but he'd waited for them.

'Any messages?' asked Billie, sliding into the back followed by Adam.

'No. Tucker said to make sure you're back by eleven.'

'Three hours to purgatory,' said Adam. 'What do you want to do?'

'I told you. Excitement,' she replied.

'Any ideas?' Adam turned to Frankie.

'In this town? Huh! I don't know if you guys could take it. We got jazz clubs, naked wrestling, men and women. Sex shows, even ones you can take part in. You wanna be a star? Hey?'

'No thanks,' said Billie.

'How about cards. All the games you want. And whatever the stakes. Not just money. You can even roll dice for a woman, or a man. Anything you want. Wanna gamble, limey?'

'Not tonight.'

'You're choosey, aren't you?'

'In a town like this, there's got to be something different. I mean, really different.'

'It's too early for what I think you'd like.'

'What's that?'

'A ceremony.'

'Tell me.'

'Voodoo.'

Adam grinned. 'Now that would be different.'

'Most of these ceremonies don't happen till late at night. I mean the real stuff, not this tourist shit.'

'Fancy it?' Adam asked Billie.

'Why not? Long as we're back by eleven.'

'Okay Frankie. Let's see how good you really are?'

The white Cadillac pulled away from the kerb and headed north, up Canal Street before turning east onto Burgundy street.

Adam watched the crowds as they cruised past. The gawkers had been replaced by a new class of gawker. This time there were no children, only their parents out to explore the fleshy side of life.

The clown with the balloons was now handing out leaflets inviting passers-by to Chris Owen's Club on 500 Bourbon Street, the last of a tradition of one woman shows in the Quarter. The fat boy and Kristofferson weren't to be seen and had been replaced by a young boy, no more than sixteen and five feet nothing tall, painted white from head to toe and with a white traditional angel's dress on, who now propositioned lonely middle aged men walking the strip. He was just one of the many whores and pimps who worked the strip.

The erotic sex shops were doing a brisk trade. Billie pointed out a dildo, bright gold, that was twelve inches long and six inches in diameter. It was under a handwritten sign which proclaimed 'The Golden Horn — only $25- only six left in stock'. From the way the sign curled at the edges, the six in stock had been there a long time.

Music blared from the clubs, the crowds shouted above the cacophony. Sin City was having fun.

Frankie turned down Dumaine Street and pulled up to the kerb.

'Heya, Julie,' he shouted to a plump girl in a short working skirt that made her appear even plumper.

'Heya Frankie baby,' she called back as she strolled towards the car. 'You got me some customers.'

'Maybe later. I'll see what I got. You seen the Fruit Juice Kid?'

'Nah.' She turned and looked down the street, across Bourbon which was sealed off to traffic, towards the New Orleans Voodoo Museum. When she had scoured the area, she turned back to him. 'Nah. Can't see him outside the museum.' She leant into the car, past Frankie and smiled at Adam. 'Heya, you're nice. Whadd'ya want mess round with that magic shit for? I got better things to keep you two occupied.'

'Not tonight, honey,' replied Billie tartly, irritated at being ignored by the girl. Adam grinned back and shrugged.

The girl stood up again. 'You want me to tell him you're looking for him if I catch him?' she asked Frankie.

'Yeah. I'll be around. If you see him, tell him I'm up at the Congo.'

'See ya, Frankie baby.'

'Take care,' he said, putting the car into reverse and backing up the street to Burgundy.

'And don't forget the customers?' Julie shouted after him.

'Sure thing. Later,' he yelled back. He spoke to the others as he reversed the car, his eyes fixed on the rear mirror for he couldn't swivel round with his disability. 'The other side of the CIA. Pimping on Bourbon Street. How do you put that down in a report?'

'Do you get a cut?' asked Billie.

'Damn right. You don't think I can live on that pissy salary the Agency pays, do you? Not here in New Orleans.'

He turned the car into Burgundy and took the next left up St Philippe Street, northbound and away from the tourist centre.

'Who's the Fruit Juice Kid?' asked Adam.

'The man,' replied Frankie. 'The drinker of blood.' He laughed and said nothing more. If anything's going on, he'll know where,' he added.

The Cadillac crossed over North Rampart towards Louis Armstrong Park, the large park named after the city's most famous native son. His statue stands proudly at the brightly lit entrance, looking out on the area where he was never welcomed to the better clubs during his acclaimed career.

'This used to be Congo Park,' said Frankie as he dragged himself from the parked Cadillac and into his wheelchair. Like many disabled people, he was proud of his independence and didn't readily ask for assistance. Adam, mindful of this, had simply pulled the wheelchair out and opened it up for Frankie, handling it as if he was simply helping someone with their luggage. That was when he noticed the satin finished Heckler and Koch P7 strapped to Frankie's chest.

'Didn't know you guys carried?' he said.

'This isn't for the Agency,' Frankie replied, tapping the weapon. 'This is for New Orleans.'

They followed Frankie into the park, now mostly in darkness, the meandering paths illuminated by overhead lights.

'Slaves used to come here,' recalled Frankie. 'Used to dance and fuck all over the place. Big religious meetings, too, with drums and fired up voodoo preachers. All that black magic started here, where the whites used to come and gawk at the antics that went on every Sunday. That's why they call it Black Sabbath. Used to slit the chicken's throat over there, by that little fountain. Sacrifice anything to their heathen god. Now that fountain, that was the centre of Congo Park. And that's sometimes where these guys hang around.'

There was no-one there, no Fruit Juice Kid, only the occasional swish in the trees as unseen people watched them.

'Don't worry,' said Frankie. 'They're just drugheads out to see who they can rob. As long as you walk on the path, they don't come at you. Not unless you really looked helpless. Anyway, they know me. They know I'm armed.'

The tall black man in the white suit was waiting by the Cadillac when they returned. He had white curled hair, knitted tightly to his scalp, but the face was young, no more than twenty. The eyes were slit, chinese style, but the nose was flattened, his nostrils flared, in the negro manner. His lips were thin and mean looking.

'Heya, Frankie,' he called. 'I hear you been looking for me.'

'Heya, Fruit Juice. How'ya doing?' replied Frankie as he pulled up alongside the car. He held his hand out and the tall man slapped it in welcome. 'Meet my friends. They looking for some action.'

'Action? What kinda action?'

'A ceremony.'

'Ceremony? Hell, you know those ain't legal, Frankie.'

'Come on. These ain't tourists. These're friends. That's Billie, from California. Known her for years. And Adam. He's from England.'

'England? Shit, what's a nice boy like you doin' over in this neck of the woods?'

'Seeing the world,' replied Adam.

'New Orleans is the world, boy. There ain't nowhere else.' He reached in his pocket and took out a slim tall bottle filled with a red liquid, the dark red of blood. He twisted the top off and offered the drink to Adam. The hands holding the bottle were old and gnarled, in complete contrast to the youthful face. Adam realised his age was impossible to determine. 'Share a drink, boy?'

'What is it?'

'Blood and piss. Of a baby girl child,' he grinned at Adam. 'Keeps you young forever.'

Adam shook his head. 'I'll pass this time. If you don't mind?'

'Don't mind at all.' He laughed and swigged from the bottle, took a deep mouthful and relished the taste. Then he screwed the top back on and slipped the bottle into his pocket. He turned to Frankie. 'You sure got polite friends, Frankie.'

'That I have. You gonna help us?'

'Too early for that sorta action.'

'Dark enough.'

'Mebbe.'

'And no tourist shit.'

'Would I do that to you, Frankie?' Fruit Juice laughed, a singular high pitched shriek.

'So whadd'ya say?'

'Depends.'

'How much?'

'You tell me.'

'A thousand dollars,' interjected Adam.

'Two thousand.'

'A thousand.'

'No American Express,' Fruit Juice joked. 'Even if it's platinum.' He leant forward and peered closely into the Englishman's face, stared at him for a full minute in silence. Then he stepped back.

'You troubled, boy. Your eyes, they got the death wish.' Fruit Juice turned and started to walk away.

'We got it on, or not?' shouted Frankie after him.

'Mebbe. If so, see you at Number One. In one hour. If not, ya'all have a good day now.'

Fruit Juice disappeared into the darkness, beyond the lights that filled the street.

'Well?' said Adam, turning to Frankie.

'Just sit and wait.'

'What's the Number One?' asked a nervous Billie.

'Old cemetery. St Louis Number One. Big place on Basin Street, at the end of the park. Takes up most of the block. You see the movie 'Easy Rider'? Well, Number One was in that. Big fancy mausoleums, white marble and all that. Full of tombs and vaults.'

'Gruesome,' commentated Billie.

'Well, you ain't gonna find voodoo in a shopping mall, that's for certain,' Frankie grinned. 'You coming tonight?' he asked Billie.

'I'm not going to miss this for anything.'

'Why call him the…?' asked Adam.

'…the Fruit Juice Kid?' interrupted Frankie. ''Cos nobody knows what's in that bottle. Ain't nobody ever drunk from it. Most people think it's tomato juice with lemon juice swirling around inside. But it's easy to think. No sucker's taken the risk yet.'

'How old is he?'

'You tell me. He's been around ever since I can remember. And I been cabbying here for ten years. Don't look no older than the first day I saw him.'

Ch. 37

Rostov watched the old lady across his desk.

She was nervous, it wasn't every day cypher clerks were called up to be interviewed by the Deputy Director of the KGB.

'This fire…' he said. '…has caused us considerable concern. You understand why?'

'Yes, comrade Deputy Director,' she replied softly, her head slightly bowed in acquiescence.

'Not comrade any more,' he replied, equally softly to try and win her trust. 'Deputy Director, or sir, in the western manner, is adequate. May I call you Ivana?'

'Certainly, comr…sir.' She was taken aback with his informality. The young bastard downstairs who ran her department could do with a lesson in manners from this man.

'Good. Would you like my secretary to get you some tea '

'No thank you.' She suddenly hoped he wouldn't be insulted. 'I have already had some before I came up. My tea break,' she explained.

' So tell me how you discovered the fire.'

'I had to get some files for the office. When I went down there I could smell something odd. After a while I realised it was something burning. I tried to see if I could find where it was coming from. There are many many rooms there. And corridors. When I found it, I saw there was smoke coming from under the door. I ran back and reported it.'

'You saw nothing unusual?'

'No, sir.'

'Think back. After all, the fire had only just been started. No sounds, no-one running.'

'No, sir. Nothing at all.'

He nodded, then picked up one of the sheets of paper in front of him. 'You have a good record. You have served the KGB well.'

'Thank you, sir.'

'It is us who should thank you. After such a lifetime of service. Not only here, in Moscow, but also during the last War. You were a heroine of the intelligence service.'

If only the bastard downstairs could hear this now. 'I was only a interpreter, sir.'

'In Berlin.'

'Yes.'

'Marvellous. I was hardly born then. It says here that you saw the bunker.'

'Where Hitler died. Yes.'

'History. And to have been such a part of it. I envy you. But why did you not come home when it was over?'

'It was because of my language, sir. Our troops needed someone who could talk to the Germans.'

'You stayed until 1975. Which part of Germany?'

'Dresden.'

'A beautiful city.'

'It was. Before it was destroyed by the British.'

'Ah! Sad, but war makes some things necessary.'

'Not to kill when there is no need. They bombed and killed many thousands. All civilians. There was no need.'

'You grew to like the Germans?'

'Some of them.'

'You lived there for thirty years.'

'Yes.'

'In the barracks.'

He sensed her caution before she spoke. 'No, sir. Not all the time.'

'In the town?'

'I had a small apartment.'

'You enjoyed your freedom away from your daily duties. I can understand that. It is always good to have your own private place, somewhere of your own.'

'It was only a very small apartment,' she stressed.

'You lived there alone?'

'Yes, sir.'

He knew she'd lied. He'd sat through too many interrogations to know that. He decided to change tack.

'Why did you go down to the records area?'

She sensed his sudden change, the sharpness in his voice. 'I had things to find.'

'What?'

'Information. On what I was researching.'

'According to your superior you asked to go down and find a file for a colleague.'

Superior. That little trumped up turd who spent all his time pinching the office girls' bums. He couldn't run a party in a vodka brewery. 'I might have done,' she replied.

'He says you did.'

'I remember now. I wasn't feeling well. Too much smoking in the office and all the windows were shut. I wanted some fresh air.'

'Do you frequently have headaches?'

'No.'

'Your superior also says you rarely go down to the records area.'

'Does he?'

'He says he never asks you because of your age.'

'Then he's lying. The only reason he doesn't want me there is because I'm not young like the rest of them. You should see what he gets up to with them. Thinks nobody's watching. He's down in the records area all the time, with one of his little tarts.'

'But he wasn't down there when the fire started.'

'No.'

'We've checked every department in this building. Nearly everyone is accountable for their movements at the time of the fire.'

She suddenly realised her true situation, how her hatred of her superior had allowed her defences to slip. She thought she'd been summoned because he was trying to get rid of her, not because she was the prime suspect.

'Which leaves us with you,' said Rostov, now menacing in his tone.

'Why should I…?' she stopped as she desperately tried to clamber out of this awful predicament.

'I will use every means at my disposal to learn the truth. I don't need to tell you of our ways. You, you have lived through the war with the Nazis and through the Stalin purges. Do I have to show you what this organisation is capable of?'

Rostov saw the spirit start to ebb out of her body. Now was the time to push on, he had her. Her age wasn't important, only what she had done.

'You have been a heroine of the state,' he said coldly. 'And now you are caught with your hands in the till. You will be disgraced. Your past deeds, your medals, your honours, even your pension, will be stripped away as though they never happened.' He saw her start to sob as she put her hands up to cover her face.

'Don't,' he snapped. She looked up sharply. 'To me, you are a traitor. I will break you if I have to. You're an old woman who can be broken easily. Tell me why you started the fire. Tell me everything. And then, maybe, I will allow you to leave this place with your dignity intact. Even your pension.'

When she had finished, when her tale was complete, he flicked the switch on the intercom and called his secretary through.

This time he wanted a record of what was said. Any future action he initiated had to have good reason.

It was time he started to protect his own back.

Ch. 38

'So much for an evening of excitement,' said Billie, leaning against the Cadillac. They had been waiting for an hour outside Old Number One.

The white wall of the St Louis cemetery stretched the length of the block. Over the top of it, in the harsh winter moonlight, they could see the shaped domes and pitched roofs of the ornate vaults and burial chambers.

'Used to be that the coffins floated to the surface when the rains came,' Frankie had explained. 'Water level's too damn high round here. That's why everyone ended up getting buried on top, in these vaults.'

They were parked by the Basin Street entrance, the high metaled gates closed for the night.

'Come on,' Billie continued. 'Let's get back to the hotel.'

'Give it time,' said Frankie. 'New Orleans folk never do nothing till they're ready.'

Ten minutes later, just as Adam had lit another cigarette, they saw the fat boy walking towards them, his guitar still strapped over his shoulder and the cardboard box in his hand. When he reached them he stopped and held it out to Adam. It was empty.

'You've got to sing before I give you anything,' said the Englishman.

'What you wanna hear?' asked the fat boy, his voice screech high and irritating.

'What've you got?'

'Not a lot.' He put the box down on the sidewalk and swung the guitar over his ample belly. He strummed it twice, hit an A chord and an E, then swung the instrument back over his shoulder. He picked up the box and held it out to Adam. 'How's that?'

Adam reached into his pocket and took out a dollar bill. He dropped it in the box.

'Ain't much,' said the fat boy.

'50 cents a chord. That’s all it’s worth.'

'Hell, you want more than that for heaven. Or you planning on going to hell.' The fat boy tilted his head back and let out the most piercing long scream that brought Billie to her feet and Frankie leaning out of the cab window.

'You promised. You promised,' ranted the excited fat boy at Adam. 'You did. You did.'

'What did I promise?' asked Adam warily.

'A thousand bucks. A thousand bucks.'

Adam started to laugh as the fat boy danced around him, still shrieking 'a thousand bucks, a thousand bucks.'

The metaled gates of the St Louis Number One swung open and Fruit Juice came out to them.

'Cut it out, Arbi,' he shouted at the fat boy. 'Cut it out.'

'But he promised. He promised.'

'And he's as good as his word. Ain't ya?'

Adam grinned and took out some banknotes from his jacket pocket. 'Five hundred now. And five hundred after.'

'He broke his promise. He broke his prom…' shrieked the fat boy.

'I said cut it out,' Fruit Juice snapped at him. He turned to Adam. 'But he's got a point.'

'I just want to make sure.'

'Money. Hell, it's a terrible thing between friends. Okay boy. We do it your way. But don't change your mind. I have friends…in low places.' He turned and led the way back into the cemetery. 'Come on. Voodoo time.'

Adam walked over to Billie and took her by the elbow.

'Okay?' he asked.

She nodded and he sensed her nervousness. He squeezed her gently to reassure her.

'Frankie?' Adam turned to the cabbie.

'No. You guys enjoy yourselves. I'll wait for you. Remember, we need you back at the hotel by eleven. And take it easy. You on someone else’s turf now.'

Frankie watched them pass through the doors, the fat boy behind them. The metaled doors closed and the stillness of the night returned. Frankie closed the door, wound the window up and locked the doors. This wasn't a place to be on your own at this time of the night. He settled down to wait, his hand-gun cocked and cradled in his lap.

There were only six others there, standing by the tomb with the freshly chalked X's marked on it.

Adam had expected more people but his knowledge of voodoo was confined to what he had read or seen at the movies.

The group, away from the main paths that ran through Number One, was clustered together, chattering amongst themselves as they waited. The small clearing was lit by a number of flaming torches, unnecessary in the bright moonlight, but necessary for the right effect.

As they approached, the group fanned out in a welcoming V. Beside them, near the base of the tomb were three large boxes, sealed with their lids on.

'Where are the dancing girls?' asked Adam.

'I thought you wanted to see a real ceremony?' drawled Fruit Juice, stretching out the word 'real'. 'All them dancing girls and jazz bands, that's for the jerks. There's no Baron Samedi here.'

They stopped by the group and Adam saw it consisted of four men and two women. The men were dressed in long black coats and top hats, their faces covered with animal masks, each one different and powerful in its design. They represented a monkey, a goat, a chicken and a pig. Each mask was painted white.

The two women, both short, wore long satin dresses in a style reminiscent of the 1820's. One of them wore a monkey's mask, the other showed her face. It was a striking face, her Creole mixture of African and Spanish heritage bringing a hypnotic beauty that was stunning.

She moved towards Adam and Billie and took their hands. She drew them to the tombstone and beckoned them to sit at its base. One of the men, the goat, picked up a drum and began softly to play on it. It was a steady rhythm, a simple beat, little louder than the ticking of a grandfather clock.

'Voodoo, the real voodoo,' said Fruit Juice, 'ain't like what you see in the movies. The Yoruba, that's where it came from, say that there's a life force that joins the living, the dead and the unborn into one. That's why we wear the masks. 'Cos all life is one, all things are spirit. When we sacrifice, it ain't a chicken or goat or snake we killing, it's a life. Like our own.'

The drum beat was joined by a second, this time the man in the monkey mask. The rhythm was intense, the first drum echoing the second, but the softness of the sound continued.

'The mask and the drum are one,' Fruit Juice went on. 'They the language and the image of the spirit. When our forefathers were forced into the Catholic religion, all those years ago in Haiti, they mixed the best of the two religions. They took the High Mass and they turned it to how they wanted it. The blood the Catholic priest drank became the blood of a sacrifice. In that way, we finally linked the dead, the living and the unborn. The spirits were one.'

'The tomb you sitting on is Marie Laveau's. She was black, Indian and white blood. She was the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. Was the first one to stick a pin in a doll and hurt, even kill, the spirit of a person through pain. To her, sex was the union, the passing of a spirit through the energy of the body. When she died, it was her daughter, also Marie, who went on and started the exotic dances and sex orgies that people call voodoo. Hell, you want sex, then go down Bourbon Street. Suit everyone's taste. But if you want the spirit, then this is where it sits. This is where the voodoo lives.'

'At a thousand dollars a throw,' Adam whispered to Billie.

'No, brother,' screamed the fat boy from behind the tomb. 'You wanted to pay for it. It was what you wanted.'

Adam was startled, not aware that he had been overheard.

'That's enough,' ordered Fruit Juice. 'Remember, you privileged to be here,' he yelled at Adam. 'Your money just buy you time. You here to see a ceremony. No point in a ceremony if you ain't involved. We going to find your spirit, boy.'

He came towards them, the Creole beauty next to him, and they took one hand each and pulled him to his feet. Billie moved back nervously, suddenly frightened without Adam in front of her.

In the background the drum beat increased, all four drummers now in a simple harmony.

Adam was led to the front of the tomb and turned round, facing the headstone.

The three of them stood still, the Creole girl, the Fruit Juice and Adam.

'What you carrying armour for, boy?' Fruit Juice asked Adam as he pushed up against his side and felt the gun in his pocket.

'Same reason you have. For my health.'

Fruit Juice laughed, partly surprised that the Englishman had noticed the gun he was carrying. Then he held out his hand to Adam. 'Lemme hold it for you.'

'No.'

'Come on.'

'Why?'

'Just in case. Some people get carried away, don't always know how to handle it. Don't like seeing inside themselves.'

'No. I never let it go.'

'And if you…'

'I never lose control.'

'kay. But if things go wrong…' Fruit Juice looked round at the others. '…we're all carrying.'

'Good. Then we’ll all be safe.'

Fruit Juice stepped away and signalled the Creole girl to do the same. Then he looked up to the moon, bright and high over the city. In the distance you could hear the occasional police siren of a marked car that raced through the streets, but little more.

'Let it begin!' he cried, his arms held out to the moon. 'Let the man meet his spirit. Oh Vadun, let thy summon the loa. Let thy blood of the past mingle with what is yet to come and what is as it is.'

As he chanted upwards to the spirit of the Vadun, the Voodoo God to summon the loa that is the spirit of life, the Creole girl danced in front of Adam, a sensual slow dance. She sprinkled the white gris-gris spell-casting dust over Adam as a symbol of protection.

The woman in the monkey mask joined the Creole girl, but she danced and slid along the ground as a monkey would, kicking her heels upwards, moving her posterior towards the four drummers. As she moved, trying to excite the drummers, pulling her satin hooped skirt up so that she bared her behind and they could see her nakedness, the monkey faced drummer started to moan, moved his body as though possessed.

'Vadun, bring down thy godliness to us here on earth. Vadun. Vadun. Let us hear your word. Let us see your juice. See how we prepare ourselves for your coming. Vadun. Deliver to us thy loa. Give us the juice.'

The others joined the chant. 'The Juice. The Juice. Vadun, Oh great Lord, release thy juice.'

The monkey man, now wildly gyrating his body moved away from the other drummers and approached the girl with the bared behind. He knelt down behind her and unzipped his trousers. Then he lifted her upwards, from the rear and stroked his manhood against her. It grew, long and hard, bigger than anything Adam had ever imagined. Then he pushed it into her and the monkey woman screamed.

'God,' Adam heard Billie gasp, but he ignored her, could not bring himself to believe what he saw in front of him.

The monkey woman had stopped screaming, had her knees braced in the ground to take her assailant, but didn't move. The monkey man had also stopped moving, knelt there, his pelvis nearly twelve inches away from the woman's rear. They were joined by his black penis, rock hard and gross in its texture. Whereas they were now still, the penis moved of its own accord, backward and forward in its own frenzied sex act, driving into her softness in its animal fierceness.

That's when Billie clutched at Adam.

He later swore he saw the penis turn into a snake, twist and bend, and disappear into the monkey woman.

Her partner, with nothing left to protrude from his unzipped trouser opening, groaned and fell to the ground, unconscious.

Vadun had released his juices. The chanting stopped.

He knew it was a trick. Damn it, how the hell had they pulled that off. But there was nothing to see, only the kneeling girl, her naked behind still held high and open, and her now unconscious mating partner.

The drums started again, louder this time.

The Creole girl moved closer to Adam and started to chant, indecipherable to him, but African in its rhythm.

Fruit Juice opened one of the three boxes and took out a large machete, its sharpness highlighted by the way it glinted in the moonlight. He held it up to the night and chanted 'Vadun. Vadun.’ The goat faced drummer left his instrument and opened the second box and dragged out a white chicken by its feet. He held it up high, the bird frantically clucking and flapping its wings, and came towards the Creole girl who had swung round to face him.

The goat man held the bird high over the girl, directly over her face and breasts. Then Fruit Juice slashed at the chicken, the sharp machete slicing its neck off and severing it from its head. The headless bird, now in its death dance, gushed blood over the girl, over her face and over her breasts. Adam saw the blood stain into the satin dress, saw the girl's eyes roll upwards in an emotional trance. She continued to chant, her body moving with the lilting music of her own words as the drums beat behind her.

Then she reached up with both hands and took the chicken and buried her face in its bleeding throat.

Adam saw her gorge herself on the still thrashing bird. Billie had her head bowed still clutching him. The whole thing had become too unbearable. As he comforted her, the fat boy stepped out from behind the tomb.

There was no guitar this time, no cardboard box. The fat boy, in his obesity and rolls of hanging flesh, was disgustingly naked.

He moved past where Billie sat and came to the kneeling monkey girl. He put his arm round her and swung her up, right there in front of Adam, and then, with his two arms round her as he gripped her naked buttock, forced his mouth on to hers through the monkey mask and kissed her long and deep.

'Vadun. Let us see thy juice,' screamed Fruit Juice. 'Vadun, Show us they spirit. Be thee the Lord that we might see ourselves as thee see us.'

As he chanted, and as the couple kissed in their obscene manner, the Creole girl threw away the chicken and came close to Adam, grabbed a handful of gris-gris from her pouch and rubbed it over his cheeks and nose, rubbed it deep into him.

She stepped back and Fruit Juice turned to him.

'See thyself as the Lord Vadun would see you,' he cried.

The fat boy pulled away from the monkey girl and turned to Adam as Fruit Juice stepped back.

The fat boy opened his mouth and put his hand into it.

Adam watched in fascination as the fat boy pulled the head of a snake out of his mouth, then the rest of it, dragging it out from inside him.

Fruit Juice moved alongside Adam and grabbed his arms, held them tightly.

Adam never flinched, never tried to pull away.

The drumming stopped. Billie started to sob quietly but he never turned towards her.

'See thyself as the Lord Vadun would see you,' Fruit Juice repeated as the fat boy held the snake's head up towards Adam's face, held it tight so it wouldn't strike. The snake was nearly four feet long and at least six inches diameter round its body.

'The water moccasin,' Fruit Juice went on. 'Vadun visits us in the form of the deadliest of the spirits.'

The snake's head, now no more than three inches from Adam's face, flicked its forked tongue at the Englishman.

'Very good. What's it do next?' Adam asked calmly. He hated snakes, but there was no way he would show them his feelings.

The fat boy moved his own face menacingly beside that of the snake and stared closely at Adam.

'There are two,' the fat boy said, his voice now deeper and threatening.

'Two?' asked Fruit Juice from behind.

'Two souls in one pair of eyes. Two spirits. One body.'

'Piss off,' said Adam, suddenly visibly upset.

'Two souls. Of what is and what was. Of what can never be. Two troubled souls. Two. Two. Two faces making one. Two of you.'

Adam tried to turn away, the memory of Marcus and his lonely grave burning through his emotions, bringing tears to his eyes. But Fruit Juice's grip was vice like.

'Two. I see two. Good and bad. Bad and good. Which is which? Is good bad and bad…'

The snake flicked its tongue again as Adam shouted back. 'Fucking tricksters. Go on you bastard, let's see how real that thing is. Go on you bastard. Bite. Bite me.'

Adam broke free and went to grab the snake, but the fat boy pulled back and, in his surprise, released its head. It lunged for Adam, its fangs drawn.

But he had it by the throat, its head firmly trapped in his hand.

The others fell back and watched him with the reptile, watched the battle at a safe distance.

The snake, its head now in strange hands, the smell not one it was used to, sensed it was in danger and quickly wrapped itself round Adam's forearm.

Adam held it tight by the neck, yet felt the reptile squeezing hard, starting to cut off his blood supply. He squeezed back, but it had little effect. He wished he had its head in his hand where he could have crushed it with his fingers. He tried to claw its head down into his palm, but the skin, dry under his touch, presented nothing he could grip on. He brought his left hand over and tried to catch the snake's head, but it was too fast for him, he knew it would sink its fangs into him before he could trap the head in his free hand. After a few moments he felt his grip begin to weaken, the tourniquet pressure of the entangled snake taking effect. He knew he couldn't let go of its head, knew that it would strike at him immediately. He tried to reach into his inside top coat pocket for his gun, but it was impossible, his left hand couldn't get into the pocket as the jacket flapped uselessly.

He heard Fruit Juice laughing, then the fat boy and the others joined in the merriment.

He dropped to his knees and tried to smash the snake's head against the base of the tomb, but it had no effect.

'Heya, what you doing?' he heard Fruit Juice shout.

He turned sharply and saw the machete glint, saw it come down towards his hand then veer off and slice into the snake's head.

He looked up at Billie, the machete in her hand, pushing down with all her strength and pinning the snake's head to the stone.

The grip round his arm began to weaken as he heard Fruit Juice shouting. He saw Fruit Juice try to wrench the machete from Billie. Adam managed to shake the snake free and finally let go of its head as he stepped back.

By the time Fruit Juice had taken the machete off Billie, the near dead snake had wriggled off the stone and into the undergrowth.

'What the fuck you do that for?' yelled Fruit Juice, his young face suddenly looking very old and tired. 'That fucker cost me a hundred dollars. You owe me a hundred.'

Behind him the others were still laughing.

'It was going to kill…' said a startled Billie.

'Gonna kill nobody. Shit, we already drained its poison. Capped its fucking fangs also. Couldn't kill a butterfly.'

'That's not…' she was beside herself with fury.

'Mebbe woulda scratched him. Mebbe just tore a little skin. Shit. That was a good snake.'

Adam put his arm round Billie. 'Relax,' he said. 'And thank you.' He turned to Fruit Juice. 'Any more? Or is that it?'

'You owe me five hundred bucks.'

Adam reached in his pocket and took out the notes. He added another note to the pile and handed them to Fruit Juice.

'A hundred more for the snake.'

Fruit Juice didn't bother counting the notes and simply put them in his coat pocket.

'Trust me?' asked Adam.

'You ain't a shyster. But you sure gotta death wish, boy.'

'He got that,' said the wobbling fat boy. 'He sure got that.'

'I ain't seen no one like that before. You woulda let that snake bite you. Fuck me, you woulda done that.'

'I never seen that either. A real fucking death wish.'

'Why you wanna die, boy?'

'Nobody wants to die,' replied Adam quietly.

'Mebbe you don't wanna die, but you sure don't care if you live.'

'Interesting show,' said Adam changing the subject. He took Billie's arm. 'It was quite an experience. I think it’s time to go.'

'You okay?' Adam asked her as they walked towards the entrance.

'I am now. God, what were we doing there?'

'Thanks for helping out.'

'I couldn't believe it. That snake…yech…I thought you'd had it.'

'I wondered why they were all laughing. The bastards had drained its poison sac.'

'Some performance.'

'Wasn't it? Showtime in New Orleans.'

'Was it all just a show?'

'Who knows?'

'What did he mean? Two of you? Two spirits in one body.'

'I don't know,' he lied. But it was the one part of the ceremony that had shaken him. How the hell did they know?

'It shook you up. You went crazy.'

'Of course. The snake was about to have a snack, and I was it,' he joked.

'You holding something back?'

'No. You see that sex thing between them?'

'I couldn't believe it.'

'Clever. Clever. I wonder how they pulled that trick. Just like getting that snake out of his mouth.'

'Wasn't up his sleeve. He was bare naked.'

'In his fat. In the rolls of fat round his belly.' He relaxed as he joked, pleased that he had got her off the subject of Marcus.

Marcus, Marcus. So someone else had finally seen you. And who was good and who was bad. Am I bad, Marcus? Me? The one with blood on my hands. That fat bastard saw me for what I am. Bad. At least you're there. At least you're the one who keeps me straight.

Ch. 39

The big Zil limousine was stuck in a traffic jam, not uncommon in these days of cheap imported cars and unrestricted travel across the Soviet Union.

'It gets more like the West everyday. The people are starving, but they'll give up everything to be seen in a new car,' remarked Rostov to his deputy as he looked out on the motionless traffic.

'Keeping up with Boris is how Time magazine reported it. The new snobbery,' replied the number two, a younger man in his early thirties. Like Rostov, he was a practicing Christian and both men felt comfortable in each other's company. It was a trust they had shared since the early days when their practice of religion had been a secret thing. 'Those journalists are quick to criticise. They should try and live in a revolutionary society that is changing day by day. I'd like to see how well they would cope if their beloved capitalism had been taken over by our system.'

'It never happened. Which is why we're stuck in this jam. We should never have closed the central lanes. It's not dignified to be sitting here in this big car with nowhere to go.' Rostov referred to the central lane on the major routes into the city that had once been reserved for party officials and official motorcades, now another casualty of the old regime. 'Is New Orleans in place?' he asked, his voice suddenly lowered.

'It is. Nobody expected us to move so fast.'

'An opportunity not to be missed.'

'One problem has arisen.'

'Only one?' came the laconic reply.

'The person we are dealing with is a double.'

'Damn. I don't want the Americans to know.'

'It's our only contact in the city.'

'Then we must proceed and take a chance.'

'I've already actioned it.' The Deputy noticed Rostov's quizzical look. 'I took your order of immediate response to mean just that.'

'And the rest?'

'The plans are coming together.’

'What about the old woman?'

'Pensioned off and sent to a state home in Perm.'

'Under surveillance?'

'Like a hawk. Including the phone she has access to.'

'Good. If you use the German station, be careful. Trust no-one. Especially the Germans. They're either at your throat or up your arse. ‘

Rostov settled back. Actions had been put into motion. Hopefully they would force a reaction that would open up the way to a satisfactory conclusion. A little bit of pressure here, a little there. Push down in one place and it pops up somewhere else. That was the only way.

Ch. 40

'They went to their room early,' said Tucker. 'As soon as the speeches finished.'

Adam and Billie had met him in the corridor outside Trimmler's suite. He had pulled a chair from his room and sat near the scientist's door.

'Bit obvious, isn't it?' commented Adam.

'Listen, wise guy, I was told to watch them. And that's what I'm doing.'

'And what if someone had come down here with a gun?' Adam held up his hand, his forefinger pointed at Tucker's head as one would a gun, and clicked his thumb. 'Bang. You should know better.'

'Why? I'm just a fucking clerk.' The other two joined in the laughter with Tucker. 'So what should I do?'

'Keep out of sight. If they don't think you're there, then they won't expect you.'

Tucker stood up. 'Well, it's your watch now.'

Adam turned to Billie. 'I'll take it.' He could see she was tired, that the evening's events had exhausted her.

'You were on watch all last night,' she replied.

'I can handle it. Bed.'

'Thanks. Goodnight, tough guy.'

'Goodnight. And thanks for the help.'

'What help?'

'With the snake. I owe you.'

Tucker picked up his chair as Billie went to her room. 'What snake?'

'Nothing. Just a joke.'

'You two obviously enjoyed yourselves.'

'New Orleans. What a town!'

'That's it. Some chance I got of seeing New Orleans. Goodnight, Adam.'

'Goodnight, Phil.'

Adam watched Tucker let himself into his room dragging his chair behind him. He decided on the same watching place he had used the night before.

Trimmler came out an hour later, first opening his suite door carefully and checking there was no-one outside. Satisfied he was on his own, he set off for the fire stairs.

Adam slipped out of the closet and followed at a distance and saw him go through the fire escape doors. Adam listened until he heard a door close below him. He descended the stairs quickly and came out three floors lower, just in time to see Trimmler disappear down the corridor.

He already knew where he was going. Room 1589. Adam had already checked the grey haired man’s registration.

Inside the two men embraced once again.

'My dearest Albert.'

'My dearest Heinrich.

'Schnapps,' said Goodenache, holding out two glasses.

The two men drank together.

'A day I sometimes thought would never come,' said Trimmler.

'I never doubted,' replied Goodenache.

They talked for a while of their families, of old friends. Goodenache had never married, his work and the dream of a return to Germany had been his only preoccupation. He explained how he had been found by a Russian platoon who had an English speaking political commissar with them. He had told them he was a rocket scientist, just as Mitzer had instructed. Realising the importance of his discovery, the commissar commandeered a doctor from another unit to fix Goodenache's smashed knee. It had been a field medical unit and they had operated with the most rudimentary instruments. After that he had been taken back to Moscow and ridden on trains where he shared his compartment with wounded soldiers, German prisoners and even a sheep. Once in Moscow, the War was finally won, and he had joined other captured German scientists and worked with them on rebuilding V2 rockets. It was an ironic situation, but one in which they had little choice. Their living quarters were sparse, their food simple, but they had the best Russia could offer. Not much by western standards, but enough for scientists who were hiding the shame of the war in the efforts of their work.

'How did you get up there before us?' asked Trimmler.

'Surprising, wasn't it? Sputnik, eh.' Albert laughed. 'There was Werner telling the world the Americans would be the first into space, you know, with that smug little smile he has, and we decided we would beat him. While he talked, we worked. And we had nothing to work with. Only our hands, our hearts and our ingenuity.’ He tapped his forehead as he spoke. ‘It was just like the end of the War, when Berlin gave us nothing.'

'Berlin had nothing left to give.'

'Neither did the Soviets. But when we heard about Project Vanguard we thought you would beat us. What with your WAC Corporal and Viking rockets, you had such an advantage.'

'Damn thing. We used a Redstone rocket, an advanced V2. Werner jumped the gun when he announced we were ready for space. Just like when everybody promised Hitler we'd be ready. The press, the television, film cameras, all the world is on our doorstep waiting for it to happen, and you go and put Sputnik into space.'

Goodenache laughed mischievously. 'We knew you weren't ready. Your rockets weren't up to seven miles per second. They weren't reliable enough. Ours were only if the satellite weighed under one hundred kilos. But it was a Russian who led the project. A quiet man. Not like Werner and his publicity machine. Sergei Korolev. He fought for us, for every little thing that we needed. We got into space in spite of the Kremlin and all those aparatchiks who thought we were wasting our time. And their money.'

'I cursed you when they told me of Sputnik. Then you put that little dog…' Trimmler paused, trying to recollect.

'Laika. Sweet little animal.'

'Barbarians. That's what the western media called you. To stick a little dog like that into space and then leave it to die.'

'Ahh! Your people would have put up a pedigree dog and spent millions to bring it home again. So different to the war, eh? We didn't need to mess around with animals, not when we had people.'

'I swore even more in '61, when Gagarin went up.'

Goodenache continued to chuckle.

'But we passed you when we got to the moon.' Trimmler finally scored a point.

'We had to let you win something,' Goodenache shrugged it off. He reached over for the bottle and offered it to his friend who held out his glass.

'It should have been for the Fatherland,' Goodenache said.

'It was for the Fatherland. And they never knew. They never understood why one side never went too far ahead of the other. But now it can be for Germany.'

'It's too late. We're old. Yesterday's men.'

'We have knowledge.'

'All kids these days have that. Our knowledge is what they learn in their elementary school books. The young ones, like we once were, they're the ones who will break new horizons. Most of us were only twenty when we were at Peenemünde.'

'Germany will need us. That's why it is being cleared for us to go home.'

'No more. They say they don’t need us now.'

'Then why have we waited all these years? To get those bloody records off our files so that we could go home without the shame of being called Nazis. Damn it. Once we were proud of being called Nazis. And now, because they've re-written history, we're ashamed of what it was that made us great.'

'You were wrong to go to Cannes,’ admonished Goodenache.

'We always go. Every year. Kushmann and Grob were also there.'

'But it made the Americans watch you.'

'Damn it, the assassin aimed his gun at me. Pulled the trigger. It was me he was after.'

'Are you sure?'

'Of course. If it hadn't jammed, I wouldn't be here now.'

'Why should someone want to kill you?'

'I don't know. Ach! Maybe, it is just my imagination. Maybe he just wanted to rob us. And then it all went wrong.'

'It doesn't matter now. With Willi gone, they don't want us any more.'

'Who says?'

'Frick.'

'What about Grob?'

'He was the one who told me.'

'But he's one of us.'

'He's frightened. For himself.'

'The Lucy Ghosts. That was the dream. The way back.'

'Frick isn't interested. If we come back, we do it on our own.'

'Bastards.'

'It's a new order, Heinrich. Maybe we waited too long and now we're paying the price. We should've gone home before, in the early days when Germany was recovering from the war.'

'They wouldn't have let us.'

'We should have tried.'

'I don't care. I still want to go home.'

'So do I, Heinrich. So do I.'

'Then let's do it.'

'If they use our past against us, which they well might, then the Israelis and others could come and hunt us down. Do you want to stand in a glass box like Eichmann?'

'He was a murderer. We're scientists.'

'To them, there's no difference.'

Trimmler thought for a while before answering. 'If we're on our own, then we need to go home and see for ourselves. Talk to Grob, talk to Frick. Face to face. Damn it, Albert, I want to be home. Did you ever go back to Peenemünde, or to Nordhausen?'

'Once. To Peenemünde. It's all still there. The buildings, even the rocket ramps. Rotten and rusty but still there.'

'I would love to see it. Look, when this conference is over, let's meet there. I have some time off. I will go to Germany. To Nordhausen first.'

'I don't have your western freedom yet.'

'Don't tell me you can't go back to Russia through Germany. In these days?'

'And if I could?'

'Meet me there. In Nordhausen. Near the Metelwerk. At the Kurhotel.'

'It's not that easy.'

'In…' Trimmler thought for a while. '…seven days' time. The conference is over in three days, then we'll have enough time to settle our affairs and meet there.'

'I don't know. What about Grob?'

'What about him. We'll ring and tell him to meet us there. If he wants to. Damn it, he's already in Germany. We're the ones who are on the outside. Albert! Let's stop talking and wishing about what we're going to do. Let's do it. Damn it, if we don't do it now…'

'All right. Let's see. We'll decide tomorrow.'

'In seven days. That's where I'll wait for you.'

'We'll see.'

The two men drowned their sorrows together, the schnapps bottle rapidly emptying.

'Frick and the others,' said Trimmler. 'We made it possible and he wants to discard us.'

'That's the way of the world, my friend.'

'No. It's wrong. It was never planned this way. It was for our return. The money, everything. It's wrong and it must be righted.'

Trimmler left Room 1589 half an hour later. He was unsteady on his feet and this time he took the lift to the eighteenth floor.

He never saw Adam come out of room 1591, slip silently from the empty bedroom which he had broken into so that he could overhear the conversation between the two men.

Fifteen minutes later Tucker had contacted the DDA at his Georgetown home and relayed a full report to his superior.

Twenty minutes after that, Nowak's bleeper went off with a message to ring the DDA.

'Where the hell are you at this time of the morning?' asked the DDA. 'I tried your house and the office.'

'In a poker game. With some friends. I was just about to leave.' replied Nowak.

'Okay. Don't respond. But I want you to get out of there when I've finished and pass this on to our friends. Understood?'

'Understood.' Nowak knew he meant the Russians. He listened attentively while the DDA went through Tucker's report of the two scientists' conversation. When he had finished Nowak said, 'I'll pass that on right away.'

After he hung up, he leant back on the hotel sofa and ran his hand over his penis, stretching it as he did so. He was almost naked, apart from his socks, one shoe and his shirt.

'Two jacks,' said Sorge, holding up his cards. He,too, was in a state of undress.

Mary Monicker giggled and threw her cards on the table. 'A pair of deuces,' she said as she stood up and started to take her bra off.

'Hey, you ain't see my hand,' yelled Nowak.

'The only place I want to see your hand is up my fanny.'

The men laughed.

'That was the Company. They want me to contact you.' Nowak told Sorge. 'Things have moved on.'

'Can it wait?' asked Sorge.

'Of course. When this game's over.'

'Good. What was your hand, anyway?'

Nowak stopped stroking himself and picked up the cards beside him. He turned them over and threw them, face up, on the table.

'Three kings. You win,' said Sorge.

'No. In this game, everyone wins.'

Ch. 41

The news editor was winding up his morning conference when the call came in.

'Mickler's on the line,' said his secretary, buzzing through on the intercom. 'Another terrorist attack. Bomb's gone off at the Gravenbruch Kempinski in Neu Isenburg.'

'Shit!' swore the news editor, picking up the receiver. 'Put him through.' He cupped the phone in his hand and spoke to the others in the room. 'Put everything on hold. And be ready to change all the pages.' He uncupped the receiver and barked into it. 'What's going on there?'

'There's been a big explosion in Neu Isenburg. Extra fire engines are being called out from the city centre, so it must be big. My contact there rang me and told me that he believed it was a bomb. Also something about Stars of David and other slogans being painted on the walls.'

'Where are you now?'

'In the car. On my way.'

'Photographer?'

'With me.'

'How long before you get there?'

'Twenty minutes. I was lucky. We were on our way to a police briefing when I got…'

'Call back as soon as you're there. And then keep me updated as you go along.'

'Okay.'

But the news editor had already slammed the phone down and was on his way out of the office to see the editor.

'Could be a bomb,' he said to his subordinates as he left the room. 'Put a back up team on with Mickler. And leave one communications line open exclusively for him. Otherwise just chase everything else we discussed this morning.'

The editor was in a meeting with a local politician when his secretary rang through and said the news editor needed to see him urgently. He put down the phone, excused himself and came into the ante-room. He was a big man, more fat than muscle, a roly-poly shaped man with large waddling hips on short legs. He hadn't been a great journalist, an even worse editor, but he did as his proprietor told him. He was, as most people said, a tenacious arse crawler who used his editorship shamelessly to his own ends.

'Sorry to pull you out,' said the news editor.

'I'm glad you did. He's driving me crazy. Politicians, all they ever do is moan.' He enjoyed that, flexing his power in front of his subordinates.

'We think a bomb's gone off in Neu Isenburg. Swastikas painted on walls.'

'Hamburg all over again.'

'Possibly. We're getting feedback on some East Germans who want to see a communist state again. Apparently they've picked up a lot of support from others, including the Red Brigade.'

'Any neo Nazi activity?'

'No. Apart from the usual nuts.'

It’s probably the communists?'

'Could be. I’ve got Mickler on his way. We’ll get a clearer picture by the time he gets there.'

'Okay. Try and get something from the New Forum and the other radical groups. Run with them trying to divide a unified Germany. Put that in the leader. I'll do it myself.' The Editor paused. 'Damn. I've got this politician here.'

'I'll arrange it, sir.' The news editor was used to the buck being passed. 'I'll get Korda on to it.' He mentioned the senior leader writer. Korda was a safe bet; he always followed the proprietor's line. 'We've plenty on these terrorist groups. What about the Nazi factions?'

'No. Let's not drag up the past. This isn't a right wing effort, and they're a harmless bunch anyway.

'I'll report back as soon as I've something more concrete.'

An hour later the worst was known.

Seven people had died in the explosion.

The bomb had ripped the conference room of the hotel to shreds. The Gravenbruch Kempinski, was an exclusive conference hotel in its own private 37 acre park on the outskirts of Frankfurt. The Euro-Israeli Trade Conference was such a group, where the delegates could stay in the hotel and attend the conference without leaving the premises. Perfect for security.

It was later found the bomb had been planted in the air conditioning some time earlier.

When the firemen had brought the blaze under control they found the Star of David painted on the outside walls in white with a red hammer and sickle daubed over it. 'Death to Jews and Israel' was another slogan painted on the garage wall at the rear of the building.

Nobody had noticed the slim man with the raw scar on his left cheek. He had left the scene of devastation two hours before the explosion.

It was considered fortunate that only seven had died. Of the other forty-two delegates, three were still critically ill in hospital while the rest had minor injuries.

Of the seven dead, three were Israeli, one was an Irish Jew, one Italian and two German.

One of the Germans was identified as Grob Mitzer, a leading industrialist.

He was the last to be identified.

Ch. 42

'Things're moving too fast.'

Traffic jams are the same the world over. Moscow and Washington, for all their difference in styles and distance, suffered from the same traffic congestion. The whole thing was made worse by the thawing snow, the dirt grey slush and the drip drip of the water that fell everywhere. It was winter at its most boring.

The black government limousine, a Lincoln Town Car, was beached between a 1964 Toyota Corolla and a 1990 Ford Turbo Mustang. The drivers of both cars, one a seedy long haired college student in a torn T-shirt and leather jacket, the other a dark suited woman business executive, both stared into the limousine, trying to make out who was inside.

The DDA, on his way to brief the Executive Director on the latest developments, ignored them both. He was a tidy man with a liking for tidy things. The Trimmler affair wasn't only untidy, it was rapidly going out of control. That is, if it ever had been in control.

'Just too damn fast,' he repeated.

The student, the driver of the Mustang, leant towards the Town Car and tapped on the window. The DDA ignored him. If this had been Russia, he would probably have had him lined up against the nearest wall and shot. He supposed there were some advantages his counterparts in the KGB enjoyed. Not a lot, but some.

The student knocked again, then turned and shouted something obscene to the woman in the Toyota. She shrugged and turned away. In frustration she banged her horn and added to the general cacophony of the stilled traffic; tempers were rising as rapidly as was the heat in the automobile engines.

The DDA, through his darkened glass, saw the student turn away and go back to picking his nose, obviously something he enjoyed from the enthusiastic and aggressive way he went about his task.

'Little shit,' said the DDI, sitting next to him. 'You notice how everyone in parked cars always ends up picking their noses. Shitty habit, that.'

'And who the hell are the Lucy Ghosts?' snapped the DDA, wanting to change the subject.

'Code name, I guess. That is if the English guy heard right.'

'His report to Tucker was pretty thorough. He definitely heard the words, Lucy Ghosts.'

'And Frick?'

'Haven't traced that one yet.'

The traffic edged forward and stopped again.

'Have we passed it on to the Russians?'

'Yes. But nothing's come back yet,' the DDA responded. 'They drew a blank on Mitzer. And Goodenache was one of their top people on their space programme. Was, being the operative word. He's seen more as a figurehead now. They couldn't find any link between him and Mitzer, or with Trimmler. But Goodenache's file was in the room that caught fire.'

'Was it destroyed?'

'Didn't say.'

'We getting anywhere with this virus thing?'

'No. But it points to Mitzer. It was easy for one of his teams to introduce a virus into the system. They've been working with us for over twenty years.’

'So why go at our asset base?'

'That's what doesn't fit in. Maybe there just was a big network there, something beyond Fuchs and the atom ring. Just like the Brits had people left behind when Philby escaped to Moscow. Shit, we could be sitting on the biggest spy ring in history, right to the top, and it's taken us working with the Russians to dig it out.'

‘So whose spy ring is it, if it isn't theirs?'

'I think it's to do with these damn scientists. We're getting a breakdown of Goodenache's career. Maybe we'll find a link there.'

The DDI shook his head. 'It's crazy. Us having to protect war criminals as if they're heroes. Stupid. We shoulda got everything we wanted out of Trimmler and his cronies after the War, then turned them in.'

'Well we didn't. And we got to the moon. They're our responsibility now. Hell, can you imagine what would happen if all this got out.'

'That reminds me. I gotta stay with the Exec after this meeting. My car's picking me up, so no need to wait.'

'What’s up?'

'Oh, nothing. The President's trip to Berlin. Just briefing them on the situation over there. With all this trouble on the streets we need to make sure there's no problems.'

'You seeing the President?' It was something the DDA rarely did. He hoped the DDI didn't sense the envy in his question.

'Yeah. I think so.' The DDI didn't know whether or not he would be seeing the President, but it didn't do any harm for the others to think he was.

The carphone warbled and the driver picked it up.

'It's your office, sir,' he said to the DDA.

The DDA took the phone. 'Yes,' he said, then listened. When his secretary had finished he spoke again. 'Okay. If anything else comes through get me straight away.'

He put the phone down and slowly blew the air out of his lungs as he gathered himself. 'Fucking traffic!' he said.

'What's wrong?' asked the DDI, sensing that the news affected them both.

The DDA paused before replying. He would have preferred to wait until he got to the Exec Director's office.

'There's been an explosion in Germany. According to Associated Press, one of those killed was Grob Mitzer.'

'Shit!' swore the DDI. 'Fucking traffic!' he added.

The student in the turbo Mustang, bored with excavating his nose with his index finger, turned back and once again stared into the limousine.

'Shit to them all,' said the DDA.

Ch. 43

The conference had started well.

Billie was on morning shift. She sat at the back of the conference room where she could keep an eye on both Trimmler and Goodenache. She tried to follow the gist of the conference, but lost interest.

Goodenache enthusiastically applauded each speaker when he had finished. Trimmler seemed strangely quiet and had positioned himself in a dark corner away from the rest.

Adam slipped into the empty chair next to her just before lunch.

'You really can do without sleep, can't you?' she remarked.

He grinned. 'Trick of the trade. How's it going?'

She told him about Trimmler's lack-lustre interest. 'Probably tired after his late night.'

'I'll take over. You grab some lunch. Give yourself a couple of hours.'

'All right. I'll be back before then.'

The conference broke for lunch twenty minutes later and Adam followed Trimmler into the lobby where he was joined by Goodenache. They huddled together, away from the main group, and Trimmler excitedly jabbed his finger at his companion as he made his point. Goodenache tried to answer, but Trimmler wouldn't be interrupted. It soon took on the look of a heated argument and Trimmler suddenly walked away. Adam followed him into the lift. Trimmler stared angrily at the Englishman, but Adam ignored him as they swished up to the eighteenth floor. The scientist stormed down the hallway to his suite. When he'd slammed the door, Adam went into his own room, left the door ajar and waited for the scientist.

An hour later Trimmler emerged and went back to the conference hall, Adam once more following. The German totally ignored Adam.

The afternoon watch was taken over by Tucker. While Tucker stayed in the conference hall, Billie and Adam went up to the gym where Adam once again set about his rigorous exercises. It reminded her of Gary and excused herself while she went to call him.

Still no answer. She ignored the panic in her stomach, and then she rang her lawyers. There had been no further response from Peter with regard to the divorce and they advised her to sit and wait it out. She slammed the phone down, her emotions now at a raw edge, and immediately dialed Peter to shout at him. No answer… Damn it. She decided to stop thinking at that stage, showered and went down to wait for Adam in the lobby.

Things broke after the conference had ended for the day.

'You call this a serious occupation?' growled Trimmler as Adam took over from Tucker. The scientist had turned to confront his watcher. 'This is not a job,' he went on, 'this is baby-sitting.'

Adam said nothing, pleased that the pressure was getting to Trimmler. Over the scientist's shoulder he saw Tucker disappear down the moving stairway to the lobby, on his way to buy presents for Jean and the kids.

Trimmler spun away and walked rapidly towards the lifts. Adam followed at a safe distance, not wanting to inflame the situation. They both climbed into the lift together; there were no other passengers.

'You're my baby sitter,' Trimmler was sulking. 'You know which floor. Press the button.'

Adam pushed the button for the eighteenth floor. The lift started its upward journey.

'You're not American. Why are you here?' questioned Trimmler.

'To protect you.'

'Rubbish. I'm in no danger.'

'People think otherwise.'

'People. What people? Schmucks. Secret agents. They're not people. They belong in the comic books.'

'Shouting at me isn't going to get me off your tail. I'll go when I'm ordered to.'

'Baby-sitter. A joke.'

Billie stepped out of her room as Trimmler slammed his door.

'Problem?' she asked Adam.

'No. Just a tantrum.'

'Are you on all night again?'

'Of course.'

'Then let me watch him now.'

'No.' It was an instinctive answer, and as he said it he knew that he needed to be on his own. Danger, its bitter taste, was ever present and he needed his own space. 'No. I'll be fine. You take it easy and I'll catch up with you later.'

He took her arm and propelled her gently back into her room, pulling the door shut behind her.

Almost immediately Trimmler came out into the hallway, his topcoat over his arm and his hat rammed onto his head.

'My wife…' he declared loudly, '…has gone shopping. I am going into the French Quarter. Instead of following like a dog behind, I will let you walk next to me.'

They rode down to street level in silence and out onto Canal Street. Adam saw Frankie parked and waved him over. The white Cadillac lurched forward and slid in front of another cab that had pulled up for them.

'Heya. What you doing?' yelled the cab driver at Frankie.

Adam opened the back door for Trimmler and slid in after him.

'French Quarter,' he instructed Frankie. 'Anywhere special?' he asked Trimmler.

'I want something to eat. And somewhere quiet.'

'Okay?' Adam asked Frankie.

'I know a place,' said Frankie as he swung the car up Canal Street followed by a torrent of abuse by the other cab driver.

They drove to Chartres Street where Frankie pulled up outside K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen. 'Best Cajun meals in the city,' he said, but Trimmler was already out of the car and on his way into the restaurant. 'Maybe I should’a said an ice cream parlour. Cool him down, eh?'

'Don't go too far,' instructed Adam as he followed Trimmler.

'Do I ever? Hell, do I ever?'

Trimmler had found a corner table. Trimmler signalled Adam to sit down as the waiter approached.

'Heya all. Welcome to K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen,' he chirruped as he put two glasses of iced water on the table. 'This establishment is named after the greatest Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme and his wife Kay. And we got the best cajun cooking any side of Louisiana.' He put the menus on the table. 'Now you just cast your eyes over them and I'll be back soon as I can to get your orders.'

'I would like a drink now,' said Trimmler.

'Okay. We got cocktails starting with…'

'A scotch. On the rocks.'

'Okay. You want anything?' he asked Adam.

'Orange juice.'

'That all?'

'That's all.'

'I would like my scotch quickly.'

The waiter pranced off and the two men sat in silence until he returned.

'Another one,' ordered Trimmler as he took his and started to drink.

'You the customer,' smiled the waiter.

Adam slowly sipped his orange juice and said nothing.

'What's the matter, baby-sitter? You don't like alcohol?'

'Sometimes.'

'Ah! You are on duty. Is that it?'

'Yes.'

Trimmler laughed. 'On duty. To change my diapers. Is that what you're paid for? To be a baby-sitter would drive anybody to drink.'

'Mr. Trimmler. Insulting me isn't getting you anywhere. It has no effect. But, if it makes you feel better, then you just go ahead.'

Trimmler rocked back in his chair and studied Adam before he spoke. 'Life is easy for you. You know that. You just do as you're ordered. No thinking, just do it. I have spent my whole life thinking. Then the day comes when you think — what am I thinking for? Just to benefit science. Just to put another man in space. To make it all possible and never feel what it is like, to never really understand what it is to be weightless as you hang over this small planet, floating in space. All the science in the world, all the thinking, it can never be like being there, like actually doing it.' He deep gulped his drink, drained the glass as the waiter arrived with his refill.

'You ready to order?' asked the waiter.

Trimmler shook his head and waved him away.

'Okay. I'll be back.'

'Another one of these,' demanded Trimmler, raising his now full glass. Adam realised he was not a man who could hold his drink. The glaze in his eyes confirmed that.

Trimmler leant across the table conspiratorially as the waiter went back to the bar.

'Dreams,' he continued, 'are not just the preserve of the young. And it is arrogant of you, of all young people, to think so. As you always do. Too many people confuse success with dreams. I have success. The sort other people dream about. I am rich. I am famous, not like a pop star, but in my own world. I have been involved in, and touched, history since I was seventeen years old. But I have never been part of it. I have never ridden in one of my space ships, never… the dream I had as a young man was someone else's achievement, in someone else's country. And dreams are more important when you get old. You know why? Because there is so little time left to achieve it. And then the young come along, and they crush your dream, as if it never existed.' He drank deeply again. 'You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?'

'I understand what you're saying.'

'Hmm,' Trimmler snorted disbelievingly. 'You're English, yes?'

Adam nodded.

'European. Like me. Not like these Americans with their barbaric ways. This country is a cultural wasteland. The dollar. That's all they care about. Their dollar and what it buys for them. When I was a child, my father used to take me to concerts. I heard some of the greatest musicians in the world before the War. I have waited here for nearly fifty years. For what?'

Adam saw the waiter approaching again. 'I think we should order. Otherwise they're going to throw us out.'

'You order for me. Anything. Chicken if they have it.'

The waiter put a fresh scotch on the rocks down and took Adam's order. He asked for Chicken Cajun for Trimmler and blackened redfish, the house speciality, for himself.

Frankie wheeled himself in at that stage, caught Adam's eye and waved him over.

'Gotta message for you. From Tucker,' said Frankie. 'He said you should know that someone called Mitzer, Grob Mitzer, just died. He was in a building that got blown up. In Germany. Says not to say anything to your friend over there, unless he already knows. Just wanted to make you aware of it.'

'Okay. See you later.'

Mitzer, Adam thought as he walked back to the table, was the name mentioned during Trimmler's meeting with Goodenache. Trimmler had said they should meet him in Nordhausen. And now he was dead.

'What was it?' asked Trimmler as Adam sat down.

'Tucker. He wanted to know what time we were coming back.'

'That driver. He was at the airport to meet us.'

'He's part of Tucker's team.'

‘Everything is a game to these people.'

'If you miss Europe so much, why not go back?' There you go, he thought. In for a penny, in for a pound. 'If Germany is still your home, why stay here?'

Trimmler looked up sharply, then smiled and shook his head. 'If only life was that easy.'

'It's not the money that keeps you here. You've made yours. What is it?'

'Everything. Forty five years. That's how long I have lived here. What are you? A detective as well as a baby-sitter?'

'No, sir.' Adam could butter up with the best of them. It was like pulling a bird. No different than clinching a business deal. 'I just feel that you've achieved so much, unimaginable to the rest of us. But you did that here, in this country. And Germany has changed since you left. I can tell you that because I live in modern Europe. Nobody gets taken to concerts as kids anymore. Hell, the parents spend all their time trying to stop them going to pop concerts. We also have drugs, and high crime, and AIDS and every other problem that America's got.'

'Maybe in the West. Not in some other places.'

'Like where?'

'In Eastern Europe, even after the Russian invasion, there are still old values.'

'And poverty. And starvation. In the West we have progress.'

'Economic problems. They can be resolved. But you can never bring back the moral loss, the drop in human standards. You talk about progress. Do you know what that is to a scientist?' Trimmler downed his drink and signalled the waiter to bring another one. The drink was opening the man up. 'Let me tell you about progress. When I first left university, hardly more than a schoolboy because of the war, I was sent to the air research unit in Bremen. In 1939. We were testing for aircraft pressurisation. We wanted to see the effect high altitude flying had on people. We couldn't put rats or mice into those decompression chambers. We couldn't see what was going to happen to them, couldn't hear how they reacted. We had to use humans. First we had volunteers, from the Luftwaffe. After we'd blown a few ear drums and sent some people imbecilic after oxygen starvation, we realised we wouldn't have an Air Force left by the time we'd found a solution. So we used other volunteers. Criminals, people like that. No good people. And because of those tests, because of the risks we took, passengers now fly across the world in perfect safety, at whatever height they go to. It was our experiments that made it possible. That, my friend, is where progress comes from. From the risks of others.'

Yes, reflected Adam, and the pain of the Jews and Poles and other Eastern Europeans that Trimmler and his friends had experimented on.

'I didn't appreciate that,' he heard himself lying.

'No one ever does. They forget the hard battles you fight to win an easy life.' Trimmler reached across the table and held up one of the small plastic butter cartons. 'This is margarine, you know. In the war, that's all we could get. Not butter. But this, because it was easier to produce. We used to call it Hitler butter. You see, even here his legacy lives on.'

'Why is Eastern Europe different now?'

'Because they still have the old values. Because for forty five years they have been subjugated. Because they still remember how it was. And that's where the new Germany will come from. And the new Europe. From the old values. From the way it was.'

'And that's why you want to go back?'

'So I believed. Until I was told I was too old. I have waited all these years. For what?'

'Who told you?'

Trimmler shook his head, his face twisted in bitterness and anger. Then he suddenly stood up. 'I can't wait for this food. It's too long. I'm going.'

He stormed out of the restaurant, unsteady on his feet as Adam handed the surprised waiter a $100 dollar note and followed him.

Trimmler turned into Toulouse Street, crossed Royal and stopped on the corner of Bourbon. Adam had followed at a short distance, not wanting to further upset the scientist. Frankie, blocked off by the increasing crowds and pedestrian areas, had stayed where he was. If they wanted him they'd find him. The crowds, the night-timers, were once again on the move.

One of the hookers, a buxom blonde girl in pink satin hot pants and tight ribbed sweater, came alongside Trimmler and smiled brazenly at him; that thousand year old smile full of meaning and erotic promise. Trimmler shook his head and crossed the road, then turned and watched her from a safe distance. He saw her proposition another man, then take his arm and lead him away.

Trimmler waved Adam towards him.

'I don't want you to follow me any more,' he ordered.

'I can't do that.'

'I'm telling you to stop following me.'

'And I saying I can't.'

'I am entitled to my privacy.'

'Get my orders changed and I'll be happy to leave you alone.'

'Then keep out of my sight. You damn baby-sitter.'

Adam realised Trimmler had lost control. Whatever it was that had aggrieved him was now secondary to the hate he directed towards his watcher. Adam shrugged and moved away, melting into the crowd that had started to form as Trimmler's outburst poured out.

At a safe distance he spent the next ninety minutes watching Trimmler visit a series of bars along the strip. The scientist stuck to his staple scotch on the rocks, grew more morose as he sat in dark corners and disappeared into his own thoughts. The only times he looked up was when a single, unattached woman, nearly always a hooker, appeared near him. But he never took the initiative, always returned to the comfort of the glass in front of him.

On his sojourn between the various watering holes, he occasionally looked back to see if he could identify Adam, but the Englishman used all his experience to stay well out of sight.

The Afro hairstyled man in the jeans and '49'ers letterman jacket appeared for the third time outside the latest bar Trimmler was visiting when Adam decided he was following the scientist. Adam had already identified his tall and slim stature as the goat masked drummer from the night before.

Trimmler's next port of call was to a strip and sex club, 'Sex like you've never seen' proclaimed the sign outside. 'Audience participation for only $20' blared the legend under the sign.

Goat Face followed him in.

Adam knew the alcohol had boosted Trimmler's daring, he was ready for action. It was the last thing he wanted, a randy scientist hell bent on dipping his wick before Adam could take him back to the hotel and tuck him up for the night.

'Hi,' he said to a girl who didn't look like a hooker, but was plying her trade like the rest of them.

'Hi,' she replied, the smile and the eyes giving away her intentions.

'I need some company.'

'Who doesn't? You English?'

'I am. Let's get a drink.' He took her arm and led her towards the strip club.

'Come on,' she said, holding back at the entrance. 'We don't need all that. Or maybe you do.'

He grinned. 'I said I wanted company. And I want to see one of these places. Never been in one before.'

'Okay. But my meter's running. One hundred fifty an hour.'

He pulled two $100 bills from his pocket and slipped them into her hand. She smiled and linked her arm through his. He led her into the club.

Adam found a table at the side away from the stage.

'You like dark corners,' she said, sitting down in the chair he pulled out for her. 'What're we going to do here?'

'Watch the floor show. I hear it's the best in town.'

A waiter crossed over and they ordered their drinks. Adam surveyed the room and saw that Trimmler was near the stage, seated alone with a drink already in front of him, watching the simulated sex show taking place a few feet from his table. He stared with open lust at the naked threesome who rolled collectively on the mattress spread out on the wooden stage, two well endowed women with slim bodies and a blond twenty year old who was probably earning his way through college and whose parents would be horrified if they knew about their son's vacation job.

Goat Face sat with a tourist couple at another table on the opposite side of the room.

'I can give you more excitement than you're getting here back at my place,' the girl broke into his deliberations.

'I like it here. You don't get this in the pubs in London.'

On the stage, with Nancy Sinatra belting out 'These boots were made for walking', one of the girls left Blondie and her companion and slipped onto the floor. She snaked her way over the tables around the stage and draped her naked body over a paunchy man next to Trimmler. As she sat on his lap, rubbing herself over him, she whispered dirty intentioned words in his ear. He shook his head, embarrassed at this public display, whilst the rest of the audience whooped and shrieked their support. The girl, feigning disappointment moved on towards Trimmler, but on seeing the drunken glaze in his eyes, jumped to the next table where she went to work on a younger man. This time, the recipient of her attentions was much more forthcoming and, to rapturour applause, she soon had him stripped and being led onto the stage.

The action reached new heights as the four of them writhed with each other, the three professionals simulating sex whilst still ensuring the newcomer didn't get too carried away.

'You really like this stuff, huh?' said the girl as she watched Adam inspecting the room.

'As I said, it's different.'

'You could've come alone. If eyeballing's all you wanted.' She slipped her hand slowly up his thigh, towards his crotch. 'Or maybe this is what you want? Huh? Taking part without anyone seeing. You like that. Is this what turns you on?'

He put his hand under the table and took hers, held it firmly and placed it back on her lap. She mocked him with her smile. He sure was a strange one.

The blonde hooker who had first accosted Trimmler on the corner of Toulouse and Bourbon came into the club as the foursome on the stage became so entwined that it was difficult to tell which limb and which private part belonged to which player. Trimmler's eyes had popped out on stalks, the thrashing flesh within touching distance now turning his brain into a muddled vision of eroticism and sexual need. She recognised Trimmler and crossed the room to him, slid her satin covered bottom onto the empty chair next to him. She leant towards him, her heavy breasts resting on his arm and she whispered in his ear. He nodded, eager to be with her, and she stood up, took his arm to support him and led him through the crowded club out onto Bourbon Street.

Adam didn't move until he saw Goat Face follow the couple out.

'Thanks,' he said to the girl. 'Time to say goodbye.'

'Hey. You still got forty minutes left on the meter.'

'Listen. I wish I could. It would've been fun.'

'Yeah. Well, no sweat. Just don't like leaving you boys short changed,'.

He went out onto Bourbon. Trimmler was northbound on Toulouse, the girl hanging on his arm and leading him towards the Spanish fronted houses that opened onto courtyards and apartments where most of the girls worked from.

He saw the apartment she took Trimmler into, up on the first floor behind the iron balustrade that curved up the line of the stair. When the door had shut, Adam surveyed the area. He knew there'd be a window at the rear, but he couldn't watch both sides at the same time. He took up a safe and hidden position across the street and waited. Of Goat Face there was no sign, but Adam knew he was around. He hoped he hadn't been discovered.

Trimmler came out twenty minutes later. It had obviously been a quick transaction.

Adam waited for him in the street before he crossed over to him.

'I think we should go back to the hotel now, Mr Trimmler,' he said quietly.

The scientist said nothing. Adam could smell the vomit on his breath. He doubted Trimmler had managed anything with the little blonde, probably spent most of his time knelt over the toilet bowl.

Frankie was where they had left him, deep in conversation with two locals.

'I kept checking with Tucker and he said to wait here,' said the cab driver as he watched Adam help Trimmler into the back of the Cadillac.

They drove the short distance back to the Hilton and Adam helped Trimmler out of the cab and into the lobby. Goodenache was there, anxious and desperate to see Trimmler. He took his arm and led him away to a secluded corner.

Adam wandered towards them, close enough to pick up the odd word but not appear obtrusive.

He heard Goodenache mention Mitzer.

Trimmler, even in his inebriated state, reacted with horror. He seemed to fall forward, but Goodenache held him up by his shoulders.

It didn't take the tears in Trimmler's eyes for Adam to realise he had just been told of Mitzer's death. Trimmler shook his head repeatedly, then slumped into one of the leather couches that were spaced intermittently along the wall. Goodenache sat down next to him and put his arm round his shoulder.

At that moment, Goat Face came up the moving staircase, this time accompanied by a man. His hair was short cropped, but not curly, nor white. He limped alongside Goat Face like an old man, but the face was the clear face of a twenty year old while the gnarled hands that held the walking stick confirmed the old man's age. It was Fruit Juice

They didn't see Adam as he slipped behind one of the vast square pillars. Goat Face, as soon as he saw Trimmler, took Fruit Juice's arm and led him, as a son would an elderly father, towards the coffee shop. They sat at a table from where they could watch the lobby.

Goodenache helped Trimmler to his feet and the two men walked slowly towards the lifts. Adam couldn't follow without being recognised by the two voodoo men, so he ducked across to the emergency stairs and climbed to the fifteenth floor, taking two to three steps at a time. He checked that level, and when satisfied that the two men weren't there, took the emergency stairs to the eighteenth floor.

'Where the hell have you been?' said Tucker.

'Have you seen…?'

'Yeah. They're both in Trimmler's room. His wife's in there, too. You look like you've been in a marathon.'

Adam grinned, his breath short and the sweat running down his face. 'I got left behind.'

'So where've you been?'

'You know damn well where I've been. Watching Trimmler drowning his sorrows. Our friend Goodenache just told him about Mitzer.'

'Well, that, and the booze, should keep him in his room. I'll take over now. You rest up.'

'Okay.'

'Did nothing else happen out there?'

'No.' Adam decided not to mention the watchers downstairs. It would only alarm Tucker. And there was another way of dealing with the problem.

Adam caught the lift down to the lobby.

'Hello, chaps,' he greeted the two in his best laid back English as he entered the coffee shop. He pulled up a chair and joined them.

'Well, what you doing here, boy?' asked a surprised Fruit Juice.

'I stay here. What about you? This is a bit out of your province, isn't it?'

'Everybody needs new space. Even those who ain't got no use for this earth.'

'I see you've got a new hairstyle.'

'Street cut. The other's for the tourists.'

Adam signalled the waiter over and ordered a coffee.

'I don't wanna appear pushy,' said Fruit Juice, 'but this was a private meeting.'

'But I paid a thousand dollars.'

'That was yesterday, boy. You gotta start again.'

'Another dollar, another day?'

'Something like that.'

'Heya, you could be the snake this time,' interjected a leering Goat Face. 'Just slide into that nice warm pussy. Hot and steamy. That what you looking for?'

'I tried that. I was watching the same sex show you were. Saw four people performing on a stage on Bourbon Street. Naked. About an hour ago.'

'Weren't me,' Goat Face replied as a quick look of concern passed between the two black men.

'Don't be embarrassed about it. We all do these things, have a need for the seamy side of life.'

'I said it weren't me.'

'I know what I saw. There were two of us there. Me and an older chap. Grey haired, German. Left with a blonde in pink satin hot pants. Remember him?'

'You got the wrong man,' shrugged Goat Face. 'But then, we all look the same to you, don't we?'

'Time to go,' said Fruit Juice, standing up. 'You sure got bad manners, boy. Private means private.'

'Sorry chaps. My misunderstanding. Why don't you stay and have another coffee. On me.' Adam knew they wouldn't stay. Whatever mischief they had planned, probably to rob Trimmler, was blown now.

'Keep away from what don't concern you, boy. This ain't a town you wanna get into trouble.'

He turned and started to walk away with Goat Face a few steps behind.

'Keep away from the dirty shows,' Adam said to their disappearing backs. The big clock overhead the lobby clicked past nine forty five.

Tucker was positioned back in the hallway outside Trimmler's suite. Adam decided not to warn him again about being an obvious target. You could give them a handkerchief, but you couldn't blow their noses for them.

'I'm going to have a workout, then something to eat,' he said. 'I'll take over about twelve.'

'Billie was looking for you.'

'I'll be down there if she wants me.'

He went to his room, changed and took the lift down to the fitness centre. It was empty and he settled down to his series of exercises, warming his muscles first with gentle movements before entering his strenuous and punishing schedule.

When pain came, that point when muscles cramp in torture and refuse to be driven any further, Adam, as always, turned to Marcus. He drew from his strength, knew it was Marcus who drove him on to cross the barrier. He could feel him, somewhere deep inside, giving him that extra power that lifted his mental and physical being above most others.

The pain eased, his strength grew, and Marcus filled his vision, his senses, his whole being. The two became one, fused in their life and death inamorata.

Ch. 44

The black Mercedes 300 SL, chauffeur driven by a Stermabeitalung in a dark grey suit, bounced up the Strasse Otto Buckwitz. One of the main roads leading northwards towards the airport, the Strasse Otto Buckwitz was like many of the thoroughfares in what was once East Germany. Occasionally potholed, heavily cambered and uneven in construction, it was, in essence, a boneshaker.

In the back, like any two ordinary business men, sat Peter Frick and Helmut Kragan. They were on their way to a meeting, but their business was anything but ordinary.

'Did you contact all the members of the Council?' asked Frick.

'Except Lieder. He's on a skiing holiday in Val d'Isere. But I've made arrangements for him to be reached and flown back for the meeting.'

'Good. Have we had any comments from them?'

'About Mitzer. Nothing.No. I expect they will comment at the meeting.'

'We must keep them under control. Especially the older ones. Now is not the time for panic.'

'They're the ones least likely to panic. They've waited a long time for this.'

'I meant that my position must be protected. Mitzer was a romantic, a dreamer of the past. But he had influence. His contacts in the business community were second to none. He will be difficult to replace. The others know that. Somehow, I must reassure them that we can still proceed.'

'There are other industrialists sympathetic to our cause.'

'Not as powerful as Mitzer.'

'I can prepare a list of those who have shown an interest in joining us.'

'Good. But first we must clear it with the council. Make them feel that they are actively chasing Mitzer's replacement. The involvement will make them think of the future, not of the past.'

'I'll have the list ready for the meeting.'

The Mercedes had followed the line of blue prefabricated concrete slabs, the long four kilometre wall that separated the Dresdener Heidi from the Strasse Otto Buckwitz. The car pulled off the road and stopped at a gatehouse with double steel doors that blocked any unwarranted entry into the Heidi.

A Stermabeitalung in a grey suit, like that of the driver, saluted the car and signalled his colleague to swing the gate open. The Mercedes moved through the gate and into the Heidi.

The Dresdener Heidi was the city's greatest park until the Russian tanks rolled in in 1945. Within weeks they had ringed it off and turned it into their barracks. Over the years, until their withdrawal in the 1990's, they had built a vast tank training ground through the woods and parkland, thrown up a series of yellow and black painted apartment blocks, and built a 4,000 foot runway from which they flew small transport aircraft and helicopter gunships. Apart from the Army, it had also housed the KGB and other military intelligence. It had become a war zone, a death fort in a conquered city.

Large tracts of the Dresdener Heidi had been snapped up by developers when Germany was reunified. One of those developers had been Ritz Frankfurte Gmb, a subsidiary property company privately owned by Grob Mitzer. It had taken the largest part of the Heidi, had sealed it off and kept it very much as it was under the Russians.

The official story was that it was an investment for the future and would be developed as the need required. Part of it was leased to a company that ran action and survival courses for executives and others who felt they would benefit from the service.

The truth was that it became the training ground for the Stermabeitalung and other groups involved in the growth of the National Socialists. It was their base, the headquarters from where the party would move to head the political agenda of a new Germany.

The car swung up the cobbled road towards the big old house that stood deep in the trees, a baroque four storied building that was home to Frick and his staff. Outside the small wooded area, it was surrounded by the old Russian barracks, now home to nearly a thousand Stermabeitalung, the storm troopers of the future.

As the Mercedes drove towards the house, small groups of uniformed Stermabeitalung snapped to attention and gave the traditional Nazi salute as their leader passed.

'The newspapers are reacting as we expected,' said Kragan as he watched Frick return the salute in that same arrogant way that he had seen Hitler react in the old film footage. The man was already picking up his hero's mannerisms.

'They follow the herd. That's all they're good for,' replied Frick. 'Feed them gossip and they call it news because it sells papers and makes them feel important. What the hell was Mitzer doing there?'

'It was a last minute decision. According to his secretary the invitation had been declined, but a friend called him and said they should go together and then on to a business lunch.'

'Couldn't we have stopped him?'

'We would have done if we'd known he was going. We knew his diary, always knew what he was doing. This was totally unexpected.'

'A big setback. Mitzer opened doors that we needed.'

'We'll find new ways of opening those doors.'

'Take too long. No. Let's give those people a reason for opening the doors to us. We must speed up our programme.'

'The faster we go, the more chance there is of us making mistakes.'

But Frick was beyond caution. 'No!' he ranted. 'Now we go faster. Now we cause chaos. Now we will open the doors for Germany to beg us to bring about order.'

The car pulled up outside the building and a guard came down the steps and opened the door for Frick.

'We will not waste unification,' continued Frick as he climbed the stairs, Kragan following just behind. He stopped at the top and faced his assistant. 'If Mitzer is gone, then there are others of the old ones who can help us. Spiedal, or Trimmler as he's called. And Goodenache. And the rest who are waiting to come back. Mitzer wasn't the only one who knew how to access the funds. We must find someone else who also knows. One of the Lucy Ghosts.’

Ch. 45

They were good. They had to be not to wake him.

Adam was asleep under the sun lamp, dozing while he toned up his tan. He’d finished training and had wandered into the sun room.

The room had been locked for the night, but he slipped his Visa credit card from his wallet and slid it into the crack between the door and the jamb, then clicked the Yale lock open and let himself in. There were three sunbeds, laid out side by side like mortuary tables. He closed the door and checked the controls on the middle machine.

It was a double sided contraption, one where you lay on a bank of tanning tubes and lowered the canopy electrically, which also housed a series of tubes. A sort of fluorescent sandwich with a human filling, it was effective and toned up a tan within twenty minutes.

He’d undressed, slid onto the tanner, switched on the timer and had dozed off within a minute.

Adam lived in that world of half sleep, always enough to catch up with his rest, but never enough to be surprised by those out to harm him. He believed it was Marcus who watched over him, who warned him of any danger that may be approaching.

The first warning he had was when someone gripped his arms, which were crossed behind his head as a pillow, and pulled them outward and straight.

At the same instance, another intruder had grabbed his legs and held them rigid.

'Don't move, or I cut your throat,' said a third man to his right. 'You better believe it, boy.'

Adam felt the sharpness of a knife prick into his neck. The men who held him down were strong; he couldn't see them as he was blinded by the brightly lit tubes. The rest of the room still remained in darkness.

'What do you want?' he asked. There was no emotion in his voice.

'Just wanna talk,' said the Knife. It wasn't a voice Adam recognised.

'I'm a captive audience.'

'Don't get fresh, jerk.' The Knife pricked him harder. Adam felt his skin break.

'You bleed nicely, jerk. Any more funnies?'

Adam shook his head.

'Good. Now tell me what you doing here?'

'Sun tann…' Adam stopped. His cheek was going to shorten his life if he wasn't careful. 'You mean in New Orleans?'

'You learning.'

'I'm here covering the space conference.'

'That all?'

'Yes.'

'Reporter?'

'No. I'm a special delegate. I've got to make a report for the British government.'

'Why?'

'We have a European Space Agency. We're not in your league, but we need to know what's going on.'

'You lying to me?'

'Why should I?'

'You tell me.' The Knife pushed the implement sharper into Adam's neck, the cut got deeper.

'I told you the truth.'

'We going to teach you a lesson, jerk. Don't mess with what don't concern you.'

'I'm happy to mind my own business.'

'Still going to teach you a lesson. I'm going to cut your toe off, boy. If you resist, I'll slit your throat. If you got any sense in that bonehead of yours, you'll just lie still.'

Adam knew he would do that, so he lay still. Come on, Marcus, let me take this. Damn it, help me keep still.

'Do it,' the Knife ordered the man who gripped Adam's legs.

The grip tightened round his ankles. He felt the Knife move away, down to his feet.

Then he felt the pain, sharp at first, then burning as it entwined the base of his toe. The pressure tightened, twisted into his flesh and to the bone; he and Marcus fought it and took the hurt and withstood the pain that was being cut from his foot.

'Tough bastard,' he heard the man who held his arms say.

Then it was over.

One of the men, he took it to be the Knife, punched him sharply in the side, forcing him upwards as he slammed his head into the canopy and broke one of the tubes.

They left him as quickly as they had come.

He lay still, collecting himself before he slid sideways out of the sun machine and onto the floor.

He sat up and reached for his foot.

They hadn't cut it off, just tightened a strand of barbed wire round it, twisted it tight so it cut right into the skin and some of its barbs had sliced through to the bone. Slowly he loosened the wire.

They had played with him, taken away his dignity and fucking played with him. He felt the anger build within him and he tried to control it, bring it down. Anger wasn't one of the weapons in his arsenal.

The bottle mocked him from across the floor, in the corner. A simple bottle with a red fluid inside.

A virgin's blood and piss.

He remembered they had been watching Trimmler.

He got dressed as quickly as he could. The gun was still in his brown bag and he slipped it into his belt.

He caught the lift to the eighteenth floor.

Neither Billie nor Tucker was there.

A virgin's blood and piss. They had to be after Trimmler.

A door opened across the hall and he had the Browning aimed straight at the person who came out.

'For Christ's sake!' said Billie, suddenly scared by his manner.

'Sshh!' he warned her. 'Where's Tucker?'

'I don't know. He was watching…'

Adam cut her off by turning away to Trimmler's door, the gun poised in his hand. He turned the handle; the door opened easily, it wasn't locked.

He quietly let himself into the room. Billie stayed where she was at first, not knowing what to do. Then she followed him.

The lights were on. There was no-one in the sitting area.

He saw Trudi first, on the floor, by the dressing table in the bedroom. There was no blood. Her neck had simply been broken, wrung like a chicken and twisted almost at right angles to her naked body.

Trimmler was on the bed. There was a lot of blood there, soaked into the sheets; the blankets had been peeled back and lay across the floor.

Adam checked the rest of the room before he approached the bed. The placed was empty.

He'd seen death in many forms, in may different places, but he wasn't prepared for what they had done to Trimmler.

The scientist was naked, his body appeared whiter than it was against the redness of the blood that framed it on both sides. It wasn't an attractive body in the best of circumstances, but in death the fatness had spread, even his large paunch had slipped to his hips; his stomach was almost flat.

It was a grotesque sight, made more gruesome by the fact that both arms had been sliced off just above the elbow.

They had been placed over each other, the limbs forced and bent in such a manner that they formed a fleshy swastika.

Adam stayed in his room for nearly an hour before the Chief of Detectives knocked on his door. During that time he saw Tucker twice; 'Why the hell did you call the cops?' and ' The Agency's going bananas.'; Billie once when she came and spent ten minutes with him and said little; and the house doctor who bandaged up his toe and told him to rest it up for a few days and take some time off work.

There was little he was prepared to tell the policeman, apart from what he had already gathered.

'You didn't see anybody? Nothing suspicious, anywhere in the hotel.'

'Nothing,' he replied.

The policeman shook his head. He was in a quandary, he knew there was more to this whole affair, but the CIA had banged heads somewhere above him in the department and he had to limit himself to simple questions. If he'd had his own way he'd rush them all back to the station and make sure he damn well got answers to all his questions.

When the policeman left, Adam lay down on the bed. He knew what was happening inside, that the forces of good and evil were at war.

‘Walk away from it. It's over. Go home to Emma and Steed and Lily's home cooking’.

‘No. Iu know who the bastards are. I’ll get them. I never walked away from a job before, never left it unfinished. And they laughed at me, tied a bloody piece of barbed wire round my big toe and laughed their silly little heads off at me.’

‘Go home, Adam. This is not your place. Mind your own business and go home.’

‘I can't, Marcus.’

‘Leave it.’

‘How? It's not our way.’

The dark side, as always, won.

He put his coat on, the Browning safely tucked away in the shoulder harness, grabbed some extra ammunition clips which he slipped into his pocket, and went out into the hallway.

The area had been cordoned off and there were police at both ends of the corridor. He looked into Trimmler's suite and saw the hive of activity that was taking place. Doctors, police photographers, every Tom, Dick and Hank from the police department. It must have been a quiet time in the old town tonight.

'Where're you going?' asked Tucker as he saw him.

'To get some fresh air.'

'You shouldn't leave the building.'

'Why not? No-one to protect anymore.'

'You should stay in.'

'I don't work for your people any more.'

'I still don't think…'

'So have me arrested.'

'You fucking smart arse.' Tucker knew he'd lost control. 'They'll want to see you.' He desperately tried one last time. 'Come on, they'll want to know what happened.'

'Ask Billie. She walked in there with me.'

'She says you already had a gun in your hand when she saw you. That you expected something. Did you?'

'Don't be stupid. Do you think I sliced his arms off with my gun?'

'Why the gun?'

'What did you expect me to do? Get a hot water bottle and tuck myself up in bed. You weren't here, Tucker. I was on my own.'

Billie caught him up outside as he waited for Frankie. The brown bag was slung over his shoulder.

'Tucker said you were going out. Why?' she asked.

'It's over now.'

'Can I come with you.'

'No. You're CIA. They'll expect a report from you.'

'I'm getting to know you, tough guy. You've got that look in your eye.'

'Don't look for what isn't there.'

'They said you had a death wish.'

'Wrong. I don't like being set up.'

'Who?'

'I just need to get away. You feeling better now?'

She ignored his concern. Her sickness had been unnecessary. As he reminded her again, she felt the bile rise in her throat, fought to keep the retching back. 'Can I come with you? I don't want to stay here alone.'

Adam slipped his arm round her shoulder. 'You have to. Don't ask me why. Just…stay here until I get back.'

He climbed into the cab and shut the door. Billie stood at the pavement and watched him; he waved at her, tried to reassure her. When she could hold the retching no longer, she spun and rushed back into the hotel.

'Where to?' asked Frankie.

'Drive slowly up towards the Quarter. Come on, let's go.'

The Cadillac pulled out from the kerb and turned up to Canal Street. Behind him, through the rear window, Adam saw Billie turn and run into the hotel. He regretted leaving her at such a time, but he needed to be on his own.

'You heard what happened back there?' he asked Frankie.

'Couldn't miss it. Marked cars, sirens flashing, half the New Orleans police falling over themselves to get into the hotel. Where we going?'

'I want to see some more voodoo.'

'You gotta be joking.' Frankie looked at Adam's face in the rear view mirror and answered his own question. 'No. You ain't joking.'

'I need to find Fruit Juice.' Adam pulled the bottle he had found in the sun room from his pocket and held it over the seat so that Frankie could see it clearly. 'I think this is his.'

'Where'd you get it?'

'Doesn't matter. But I need to see the man.'

'We can try. Don't you think you should tell the Agency?'

'It's personal. To me.'

Frankie shrugged and drove up Canal and turned onto Basin Street. Life in the Quarter continued at its full frenetic pace, but here, northside, the streets were deserted, the overhead lighting poor and the ambience menacing. Frankie pulled up at the kerb.

'Why here?' asked Adam.

'He's going to be round here someplace. At this time of night this is his territory.'

'How do I find him?'

'He'll find you. If he wants to.'

Adam opened the door and got out.

'You're crazy,' said Frankie. 'They already know you here. Soon as they saw this car.'

'They?'

'The voodoo men. Why the hell do you want to see Fruit Juice?'

'Because he killed Trimmler. And he left his calling card to tell me he did it.'

'You gotta tell Tucker.'

'He wouldn't know where to start. Even if he brought in the whole fucking CIA, they couldn't do a thing.'

'Don't go where you got no chance.'

'Not my nature, Frankie. It's how I am.'

'Okay, but you can't just walk the streets. Not these streets.'

'So where do I start?'

'Old Number One.' As Frankie spoke, Adam remembered the cemetery where the voodoo ceremony had taken place. 'But you gotta walk in the dark, be as black as the night and as empty as a shadow. I mean it when I say they watching you.'

'I'll start there.'

'Why? They'll be waiting for you.'

'First rule of combat. Fight on territory you know. Second rule. Take the bastards by surprise. It's the only fucking place I know round here, Frankie. See you back at the hotel.'

'Hold it. You better take some help.' Frankie reached over to his glove compartment and pulled out two hand grenades.

'You carry these in the car?' asked an amazed Adam.

'You don't know what else I got on board this Caddie. It's more tank than car. I like being a secret agent. Beats working in the cripple factory. There's no Christmas decorations got my name on it.'

'Thanks,' said Adam, taking the two grenades and putting them in his bag.

'You okay for everything else?'

'I've got all I need now.'

Adam, the brown bag still slung over his shoulder, disappeared into the shadows, out of the cab driver's view as he moved stealthily along the decayed walls of the old buildings that had long since been in need of a face lift. Frankie suddenly understood why Adam was dressed in black. Maybe he stood a chance. Not much, but just a hint of a chance.

Adam's toe throbbed as he moved along, hugging the walls that were his cover. But he didn't let the pain touch him. As he moved, he called to Marcus, called to the other dark half that would watch through this night with him while he set about exacting his revenge.

The voodoo men had seen his death wish; they understood what drove him on. It was his natural advantage, the ability to face death and not fear it. And they would be frightened of it. Because they feared death. He would use that against them.

There was little point in hiding his presence. He knew they were watching him, that he couldn't hide. He also knew that he couldn't see them, and that made a surprise move almost impossible.

‘They made a fool of me, Marcus. They bloody stuffed me and then took Trimmler's life.’

‘Don't let it get to you. Stay cool. Sense the danger. Ride it. Make it work for you.’

‘Made a fucking fool of me. I'm going to ram his bloody blood and piss down his fucking throat.’

‘Think.’

‘I can't. Everything's red.’

‘Think. Why did they kill Trimmler?’

‘God knows. I just…’

‘Why? Why did they kill Trimmler?’

‘I don't know.’

‘Why them?’

‘Because they're part of something bigger.’

‘They could be agents.’

‘Whose?’

‘Anybody's. Russian. Even American.’

‘Someone's setting you up.’

‘Why?’

‘Don't know. Do you really want to get Fruit Juice?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he made an arse of me.’’

‘So what? Why?’

‘Because he made me small in front of the rest.’

‘Who cares? Why?’

‘Because he knows the answers.’

‘Now you're thinking. Let's go.’

Adam knew he must create his own surprise. He could only do that by doing the unexpected. He smiled to himself. That was easy. And it put him on terrain he knew something about.

Straight into the lion's den, Marcus. That's the only way.

The stillness of Old Number One was as it had been the night before, but it was darker. Thick clouds covered the sky; there was a dampness that signaled rain. Adam hoped it would come soon, the noise and wind that accompanied it would be to his advantage.

He followed the main footpath round the cemetery, at first keeping clear of the tomb where the ceremony had taken place the night before. It didn't take long before he heard the first rustle in the bushes behind him. They were gathering, the enemy was on the move. He kept walking, studying the terrain as he did. He was certain they wouldn't shoot him. Fruit Juice would be intrigued by his visit to Old Number One, and if he was to die, then their instinct would be to couple it with their sense of theatre.

When he had completed a circuit of the cemetery, passed the grand tombs and vaults, he followed the smaller routes that led to the poor graves as well as the middle class tombs.

Twenty minutes later he was making his way to Marie Laveau's tomb. If Fruit Juice was as sure of himself as he believed, he would be waiting there.

'What you got in that bag you carrying?'

Fruit Juice was standing in front of the tomb, dressed as he had been the night before, his hair now reverted to white and short curled. As he spoke it started to rain.

'The rainmaker. Down to you, is it?'

'Everything come from voodoo magic, boy,'

'Where're your friends?'

'They here. I only got to call. What you got in that bag?'

'Magic tricks. My sort.'

Fruit Juice laughed. 'Guns. They no good. Not here. Not in the Magic Kingdom.'

'Don't tell me. You're Walt Disney reincarnated.' He heard the movement in the bushes. The troops were getting into place. He would have to move soon. He was glad the rain was getting heavy, didn't realise that's how it came in Louisiana, fast and furious and in short bursts.

'Different kinda magic, boy. This is for real.' He moved towards Adam. 'How's the toe?'

Adam's instinct told him that they were closing in, that Fruit Juice was spinning it out while they positioned round him.

'Why Trimmler?' he asked.

'Orders.'

'Whose?'

'From those who have the money.'

'Russians?'

'That ain't for us to discuss.'

'Why? You going to let me out of here alive.'

'No chance.'

'Then tell me who gave the orders.'

'Fuck you, boy.'

Adam swung the bag off his shoulder, startling Fruit Juice who stepped back sharply. He reached in and took out one of the hand grenades and popped the safety pin. He crossed over to Fruit Juice, pulled his trouser waist band open with his left hand and slipped his other hand with the grenade down into Fruit Juice's crotch, into the softness of his balls.

'If someone shoots me, then this thing's going to go off. Before you can unzip your flies. Make one hell of a mess.'

'Stay clear!' screamed Fruit Juice. 'Don't nobody do nothing.'

'That's good. So tell me. Who gave the orders?'

'Fuck you, boy.'

'You go on like that and certainly won’t be fucking anyone.' He pushed the grenade harder into Fruit Juice's scrotum.

'You let that thing go and you're a dead man. You know that. Hell, I don't know who gave the orders. We was just paid. Just told to knock out the guy in 1844. And make it messy. After you gave us a hard time in the lobby, shit, I just decided to have us some fun. That was personal.'

'So why cut off his arms? Or was that orders, too.'

'Look, I did like I was told. It's crazy, but I did it just like they paid for.'

'Who paid?'

'Usual channels. Could be anybody, even the Mob. You can't trace these things.'

Adam believed him, he could read it in his eyes.

'Just cool it, huh?' continued Fruit Juice. 'Come on, this thing's outta hand.'

'He was my responsibility. You made me look bad.'

'Weren't deliberate.'

'Neither's this.' Adam moved behind Fruit Juice and, with his arm now wrapped round the voodoo man and using him as a shield, dragged him backwards towards the bushes. Fruit Juice yelped and others started to shout from their hidden vantage points.

But it all happened too fast. Before anyone could react positively, Adam was in the protection of the bushes.

'Was it blood and piss, or was it tomato juice?' he asked Fruit Juice.

'You shit crazy, man,' screamed Fruit Juice.

A gunshot exploded from nearby.

Adam would never know. He closed his eyes to accustom himself to the darkness and then pushed Fruit Juice back towards Marie Laveau's tomb. He turned and ran, low to the ground, through the undergrowth.

He never saw Fruit Juice fall to the earth, never saw him writhe and twist on the ground as he frantically tried to pull out the grenade that was trapped in the tightly tailored cloth of his trousers. The more frantic his actions, the more difficult it was to dislodge the bomb. And then time ran out.

Adam only heard the explosion. Didn't know whether Fruit Juice had avoided death or not. It wasn't his problem.

The earth was soft under him, the rain now beginning to take its toll as it fell. His senses were fully alert and he heard shouting from behind, then a few gunshots followed by people crashing through the bushes. Someone yelled for quiet, but it had little effect and he heard the order being repeated.

He spun round, pulled the Browning from his waistband and fired three rounds towards whoever was giving the orders. He heard someone yelp in pain and yell he'd been hit. But he knew it wasn't serious, otherwise he wouldn't be complaining so vigorously.

Another voice now pleaded for calm. 'Shut yo' fucking mouth fo' I fucking do it fo' ya!' it screamed. This time the others listened and the shouting faded to nothing. From the noise Adam knew there were no more than seven or eight people, not a number that couldn't be dealt with.

Adam could still hear the recipient of his bullet moaning some forty yards away. As he moved towards another part of Old Number One, Adam knew he had to confuse them, scramble their knowledge of the cemetery until they didn't know where the next area of conflict was coming from. He knew he didn't have long. The grenade, as muffled as it was by Fruit Juice's body, would have been heard and someone would probably have told the police. Even in Sin City, grenades were not the norm.

He worked his way round to the west side of the cemetery and entered an old vault he had chosen when he had first circuited the cemetery. The door, steel, had been slightly open and he slipped in through the narrow gap.

It was cold, a dry chill that hung still. His eyes made out large stone shelves, four deep, that ran round three sides of the vault. There were coffins on each shelf, some resting directly on top of others, more than thirty ornate wooden boxes in the mausoleum.

Glad of the respite from the rain, he wiped the water from his hair where it had run into his long waves. Then he opened the brown bag and took out the Heckler and Koch MP5K sub-machine gun. He rammed a clip in, swung it over his shoulder, rammed two more clips and the remaining hand grenade in his pockets, then waited by the door for whatever came next.

It didn't take long.

Two of them, moving in the bushes on the opposite side of the park, both with hand-guns ready. They moved like amateurs, street bullies used to having their own way. They were sitting targets, too easy for Adam.

Killing was easy to Adam, something he did without considering the consequences. But that was when the odds excited him, when he felt there was real danger. It was his buzz, his church. These were funfair targets, something to hit and take home a prize Teddy Bear for. He let them pass, heard their whispers as loudly as if they were in conversation with him, and waited to see who followed.

No-one.

His pursuers had obviously spread out over the cemetery.

He came out of the vault and followed the two Teddy Bears. He caught them up quickly and stayed close behind. The heavy rain and its resultant sound on the bushes made his task easy. They split up to go around a large tree that was surrounded by big bushes under it. Adam decided to go after the man on the left.

As soon as he was out of sight of his companion, Adam was on him, the knife he always carried slashing down and across his throat.

By the time his partner had stumbled on the fallen corpse, Adam was nearly fifty yards away in the safety of the old vault. He heard the man scream, then stifle his fear. There were shots, four of them, as he either blasted at thin air in panic or signaled his cronies to him. Adam saw the torch lights shining in the dark.

'He fucking killed him. He fucking cut his throat.'

'Take it easy, for…'

'Sliced him right next to me. He was only next to me.'

'Lay off. We got…'

'Fuck you. They said he got the death wish. He a fucking spook, man'

'Don't talk shit.' It was Goat Face.

'He fucking invisible. Right under my fucking nose.'

Adam grinned as he stepped out from the vault entrance and sprayed the Heckler and Koch in their direction. It was a short burst, enough to send them diving for cover into the undergrowth. When he had finished there was an absolute quiet. Nobody was saying anything now.

As he turned to retrace his track, he heard the police sirens in the distance, growing closer as they approached. e headed for the entrance to Old Number One. Heard the shouting start up again behind him as they hastily prepared their exit, and walked through the gates and out onto Basin Street.

'You causing trouble again?' was Frankie's caustic greeting.

He was in his wheelchair on the pavement, an old 1950s Reising M50 sub-machine-gun across his legs. Adam walked past him, packed his weaponry back into the brown bag and tossed it into the trunk.

'Let's go,' he said.

The first police car, an unmarked Ford with a red flashing light strapped to it roof, was at the scene two minutes later.

By then, Frankie, having slid himself and his wheelchair back into the car with surprising ease, was turning towards Canal Street and back to the safety of the hotel.

Ch. 46

'This had better be good at this time of the morning.'

'The Russians know who the Lucy Ghosts are,' said the DDA into the phone receiver. He'd just received that message at home from Nowak. He'd stayed there, trying to coordinate the problem in New Orleans while his assistant, Carter had been sent on ahead in a private Agency jet to take over from Tucker.

'Who are they?' asked the Exec Director as he struggled out of bed.

'They're not prepared to give that information over the telephone. But they say it needs executive approval.'

The Exec Director knew that meant the President. Damn it. The last thing he wanted was this blowing up in the White House and on Capitol Hill. One always followed the other. 'Why?'

'Because that’s how they want it. It's sensational, according to Nowak.'

'Does he know?'

'He says not. Just what his contact tells him.'

'Okay. I'll take it from here.'

'They want urgent action.'

'I'm not waking the Pres…anybody…at this time of the morning. I'll put a call through at seven.'

'That's four in the afternoon over there.'

'I told you. First thing.'

'I've also had a call from Tucker…' The DDA'd saved the best for last.

'Tucker?'

'Our man in New Orleans.'

'And?'

'Trimmler's been assassinated.'

'Shit. You're…I don't believe…When?'

'About two hours ago.'

'Why wasn't I called immediately?'

'I rang, sir. There was no answer.'

The Exec Director, recently married to a twenty six year old daughter of one of the leading society hostesses in Washington, remembered that he had switched his phone off when he set about proving his youth in their nightly bedtime romps. He'd forgotten to switch it back on and only remembered when he went to relieve himself in the bathroom fifteen minutes earlier.

'What happened?'

'Killed him and his wife. With a knife. Then hacked of Trimmler's arms.'

'What?'

'That's right. Left them shaped in the form of a swastika.'

'Jesus!' came the unbelieving answer.

'Maybe you should take executive advice, sir.'

'Okay. You at home?'

'Yes sir. I'm running it from here.'

'You told the DDI?'

'No. I wanted to talk to you first.'

'Okay. You tell him. Call him over to your place. And don't use the phone too long. I'll have to get back to you. We need a stenographer. I want a full report faxed here straight away.' The Exec Director was about to call the Head of the CIA, the Director himself. If anyone was going to ring the President of the United States of America at three a.m. in the morning, it sure as hell wasn't going to be his arse out on a sling.

The phone went dead in the DDA's hand. He put down the receiver. He'd already called in a stenog. She was next door, in his living room. Before he could get up from his desk the phone rang. He picked it up.

'Yes,’ he barked.

'Tucker, sir.'

'What is it, Tucker?'

'More trouble.'

'It can't get any worse.'

'The Englishman went out after he discovered Trimmler. Our driver took him up into the French Quarter. They just got back. I've had the Chief of Detectives call me. Says there was a shootout in the Quarter. Machine guns and grenades. Says one of our people was involved. I'd like to remind you that we authorised the Englishman to carry arms. He had a machine gun.'

'What makes you think it was him?'

'Because that's what our driver just told me. Seems he went after the guy who killed Trimmler.'

'How do you know that?'

'Driver told me. Something to do with a virgin's blood and piss. Sir.'

Ch. 47

Adam was still asleep when the DDA's trouble-shooter, Carter, hit New Orleans at five thirty in the morning. He'd brought two assistants with him, Windrush and Favor. They were runners, like Carter, but they were assistants to the assistant runner.

Marius, the other CIA driver, had met them off the private jet from Washington and driven them in his cab to the Hilton.

Their first meeting had been with Tucker, sleepy eyed and relieved to hand over responsibility to Carter.

'Snotty bastard,' remarked Carter when told about Adam. 'But he's right. He knows we can't let the cops take him downtown. Any idea why he should go on the rampage?'

'No. I think you need to speak to Frankie Mistletoe.'

'What sort of name's that?' sneered Favor. Windrush nodded agreement as a matter of course.

'What about the girl?' asked Carter.

'She's been fine. Just kept a watch on Trimmler like the rest of us,' replied Tucker.

It took nearly an hour for Tucker to complete his de-brief and Carter took him over the events of the last few days twice, just as the book said he should. The report included Frankie's trip to the cemetery with Adam and the ensuing squabble with the Chief of Detectives.

'Does Nicholson know that the cab driver's opened up to us?' asked Carter.

'No. I got that out of Frankie after Nicholson went to bed.'

'Do the police know?'

'No. Only those of us in this room.'

'Okay. Leave it like that for now.' Then he sent Tucker down to get Frankie.

While he waited he rang the Chief of Detectives at the New Orleans Police Headquarters. Their conversation was brief; Carter knew Washington had already contacted them and warned them off. The biggest battle had been with the FBI who wanted to stick their noses in. But that had now been cleared and the field was left to the Agency. But they had to move fast. The New Orleans P.D. would only sit still for so long before they'd want to resolve their own murders.

The Chief of Detectives, having been told to hand over responsibility to Carter, was understandably edgy, and Carter appeased him by telling him he needed all his assistance and would like them to work together on this one.

By the time Frankie wheeled himself in, Carter had pacified the policeman and agreed to meet him at nine a.m.

Nobody had told Carter that Frankie was disabled, and his surprise showed.

'We got equal opportunities in everything,' quipped Frankie. 'You're looking at your token disabled black member of staff.'

Carter was embarrassed and angry at not being told. 'So you took Nicholson up to the Old Quarter?' he started, after giving Tucker a reproachful glare. 'Take me through it, would you?'

There was a long silence when Frankie finally finished. 'And he took his weapons with him when he went into the cemetery?' Carter finally broke the quiet.

'Yes.'

'Where did he get the grenade from?'

'From me.'

'What the hell you doing with grenades?'

'This is a rough city. When you're committed to a wheelchair, you prepare yourself for all eventualities.'

'You didn't have to give him a fucking hand grenade.'

'He saw it and he wanted it,' Frankie lied. 'Hell, we're meant to be on the same side.'

'Did the girl know what was going on?'

'Nope.'

'But she went to the voodoo ceremony.'

'I think that was more a night out.'

'So why did he think it was this…Fruit Juice?'

'I already said. I don't know. He just got in the car, showed me this bottle and said it was Fruit Juice's calling card. Had to be Trimmler he was talking about. Nothing else was going to get him that mad. I mean, he's a pro. Trimmler's death makes him look bad.'

'Bad. And crazy,' chirped in Carter's assistant, Favor.

'He don't come over as crazy to me. He's bad, but he went in there after Trimmler's killer. Got him, too.'

'We don't know that for sure,' cut in Carter. 'And, even if he was right, he should've waited for orders. Damn it, he was under our command, not a fucking freelance.' This whole thing was already getting bigger than Carter. 'Unless he had another motive.'

'Sir?' asked Tucker, not comprehending Carter's gist.

'We're assuming that Nicholson was acting in our interests. It's time to consider if he had a different motive.'

'Why should he…?'

'You tell me. You've been with him.'

'I can't think of anything…not one thing that would make me be suspicious. He…He took his duties seriously. Never allowed a situation where Trimmler was in danger. Hell, he even took him off for the evening. If he was after him, that was the opportunity.'

'Not everything is as obvious as it seems. That's the first law of investigation. Is he still in his room?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Windrush. I want you up there. He doesn't go anywhere until I say so.' Carter turned to Tucker as Windrush left the room. 'I want to see him at nine. And I don't want him to know about our conversation.'

They didn't see Adam at nine because events changed everyone's plans.

Marius, Frankie's colleague, heard that another cab driver had taken a fare to the airport. The passenger had been a Russian or German and he wanted to catch the first plane direct to Germany or to New York where he would make a connecting flight. The cabbie had discussed it with his co-drivers as they waited for the morning rush to begin.

'Shit scared,' said the cabbie. 'Just wanted to get outta New Orleans. Hell, he musta had a bad night.'

The other men, including Marius, laughed and reminded each other of the wild nights and frightened tourists who went away and never forgot New Orleans.

Fifteen minutes later Marius had reported the conversation to Tucker who went to find Carter at the breakfast bar. When they checked with reception they found that Albert Goodenache had checked out over two hours earlier. By the time they contacted the airport and pulled strings to find out what Goodenache's destination was, the scientist was on his way to New York where he was to switch to a Jumbo direct to Frankfurt.

Adam had shaved, showered, put on a fresh shirt and was heading for the breakfast bar at nine thirty before Carter caught up with him.

'I want to see you,' he snapped at Adam, recent events now shortening his temper.

'Fine. Over breakfast,' Adam replied, coolly.

'No, damn it. We can't discuss these matters in a public place.'

'Well, I'm starving. So, either join me or arrange to see me later.'

'I think we should talk now.'

'Suits me,' said Adam with a smile, as he walked towards the breakfast bar.

'Hey, I meant before…' yelled Carter, but it was too late and he had little choice but to follow Adam into the open-plan restaurant where they were seated at a corner table. Carter nodded when Adam asked if he wanted a coffee, then sat back and waited while Adam painstakingly worked his way through the menu before ordering two fried eggs, double bacon, three sausages, grits, blueberry muffins and Darjeeling tea with milk.

'You like your food,' commented Carter, his irritation coming through.

Adam ignored him. When he was ready he said, 'Well, Mr Carter. What can I do for you?'

'You're heading for trouble. Did you know that?'

'My cholesterol level's fine. I've always liked greasy fo…'

'Don't get smart with me.'

'Would I?' Adam grinned. The CIA man was easy to needle.

'Why didn't you tell us that you'd been out shooting up half of New Orleans?' Carter watched Adam closely, but was disappointed that he drew no reaction from the Englishman. 'We know what went on up there.'

'Where?'

'At the fucking cemetery. We know what happened.'

'Then tell me.' Adam decided to play ignorant. He didn't believe that Billie had said anything. It had to come from outside, possibly from the police. Or Frankie. I half expected that.

'You're meant to be working for us.'

'No. I'm working for my own government. On loan to you. I was sent here to help protect Trimmler.'

'Not exactly a success, was it?' Carter smirked.

'Your man, your agency, were on duty when they killed Trimmler. You shouldn't forget that.'

'Fuck you.'

‘Your people slipped up. I cleaned up the mess.'

Carter changed tack. He smiled magnanimously and held up his arms, palms forward, in a symbol of truce. 'We know you were involved in the shootings. Shit, I'd be happy to let the cops run you in. Except for one thing. You believe those guys up in the cemetery were involved in Trimmler's death. That means they could be under the control of a foreign agency. We've got to follow that through.'

'What makes you think they were involved with Trimmler?'

'We don't. You do. That's what we want to find out.'

'Then I'll make a full report when I get back to London.'

'I'd like to move a little faster than that.' He leant across the table. 'I know about the bottle.'

'Bottle?' Adam knew it was Frankie who had told the CIA.

'Yes. Bottle. With blood and piss in it.'

'A virgin's blood and piss.'

'A virgin's blood and piss.'

'Don't know what you're talking about.' He grinned as he watched the anger in Carter's face explode 'Hey, take it easy. Bad for the blood pressure, you know.'

Before Carter could reply the waiter returned and laid out Adam's breakfast on the table. The two men sat in uncomfortable silence until they were on their own again.

'Looks good,' said Adam tucking into his meal.

'You're asking for trouble. I should just hand you over to the cops. Let them do it their way.'

'You can't do that. You wouldn't be allowed to.'

'Then tell me what happened. What the hell made you go up there. What do you know that we don't.'

'It'll be in my report. Soon as I get back.'

'We'll talk to London.'

'Fine. If they clear me, then I'll give you a full report.'

Carter stood up abruptly, the chair nearly falling over as he pushed it back. He grabbed it and rammed it under the table. 'Don't leave until I come back to you.'

'Do you know what I don't understand?' said Adam.

'What?'

'Why, with all your technology and expertise, you Americans can't cook bacon like it's meant to be.' He held up a rasher on the end of the fork. 'Too crisp. Too damn crisp.' Carter stomped off. Adam grinned. 'Don't get cranky just because I don't like your bacon.'

Ch. 48

The DDA kept quiet on this one.

He was sitting with the Director and Exec Director of the CIA as they made their report to the President. He knew he was only there for background information. He was the flunkey, the nowhere man, in this room of history and decision.

When the Exec Director had finished his report, the President leant back in the big leather executive chair and swiveled round to look out of the window.

'Thing's moving at one helluva pace,' said the President's Chief of Staff, Charles Magey. 'You sure nothing's happened since we started this meeting.'

'My office was told to inform me immediately of any significant developments,' replied the Director stiffly.

'This thing could run a million different ways. It could be anybody out there trying to damage us. Even the Russians.'

'We appreciate that.'

'And you're still getting nowhere with the computer?'

'No. But we're narrowing things down.'

Magey flared up. 'Hell, you won't have anything left on those data bases to narrow down.'

'Getting heated…is not going to solve this problem,' said the President as he swung the chair round so that he could face them. 'Could it be the Russians?' he asked the Director.

'I don't think so, Mr President.'

'Why not?'

'Because I can't see what they'd gain from it. They've got too many problems to get up to their old tricks. And if they wanted to, why bother knocking off agents who're too old to really threaten them.'

'The Chinese?' asked Magey.

'Once again, nothing to gain,' replied the Director.

'When do we find out about the Lucy Ghosts?' said the President.

'There's a meeting this afternoon. In my office. Our Russian contact is going to brief me on what they know.'

'Okay. Keep me informed. Trimmler. Did I ever meet him?' the President asked Magey.

'Yes, Mr President. I think he was introduced to you. He attended some of our functions. Three in all. Scientific exchanges.' Magey always did his homework and the President depended on him.

'And is he an ex Nazi?'

'Yes, sir. We don't know all the details. They're on the computer and it's difficult getting eye witness information on something that long ago. We hid a lot. The then Secretary of State for War Robert Patterson and General John Hildring just wanted to hide the true identities of the Nazis. Hildring said it was time to bury the dead Nazi horse.'

'Didn't bury it deep enough, did they?' commented the President dryly. He addressed himself to the Director. 'That computer's important. It could give us the answers we need.'

'We're doing our best, Mr President,' the Director replied.

'I appreciate that. But we need faster results. Let's not forget the British are also involved. We don't want to look bad against the Russians. There's still plenty of tension there. We've seen the failure of some of their policies, and of their political change of direction. More than once. If we mess up on this, the British, and the rest of the Europeans, will know. We can do without that. Don't forget, I've got a trip to Europe about to happen. I have no intention of arriving with an empty suitcase in my hand.'

'Talking of the British, how much does their guy know?' asked Magey.

'Not too much. He knows he was here to protect Trimmler. I think he just wants to go home now,' said the Exec Director.

'After shooting up half of New Orleans. I think he knows more than the rest of you put together.'

'As I said before, he believed it was Trimmler's killer he was after,' cut in the Director.

'You mean, we believe. From your report, he didn't say anything.'

'Not yet. We've contacted London. They'll be giving him orders to report directly to us.’

‘Watch those Brits. They play games.’

'This whole thing's so damn mixed up, he could even be part of the conspiracy. How do we know he didn't take out Trimmler? After all, he was the first one to find the body,’ said the President.

'Unlikely.' The Director was sweating.

'All right,' said the President. 'Charley's right. We could be following too narrow a band. Open it up. Look for things that aren't there. Put more resources on it. Find out what's happening. I do not want a political bomb exploding in my trousers.' He laughed at his own joke; the rest followed.

The CIA men were ushered out into the corridor.

'Get it done,' said the Director to his Exec. 'Find out what's going on or your backside's on the line.'

'You heard him,' the Exec Director told the DDA when they were on their own in the Exec's car. 'If I go, so do you. Find out why the Englishman went berserk in that cemetery. I don't care how, just find out.'

'What about diplomatic fallout?'

'What about it? Kill the bastard for all I care, but find out.'

Ch. 49

'That's one helluva war record.' The Editor threw the notes he had been given to read on his desk. His vast bulk spread as he leant back in his swivel chair and he fastened his most penetrating look on the news editor. 'That is, if it's true. We've been set up before.'

'That's never stopped us following something through,' replied his news editor, quite unabashed by his chief's attention.

'I knew Grob Mitzer well. I was a guest at his home here and also to his country estate. This was a great German. This filth …' he indicated the sheaf of papers in front of him '…isn't true.'

'Then we prove his innocence.'

'It doesn't need proving. Not to those who knew him.'

'If we don't take it, then some other paper will. We can't tell them not to print.'

'Nobody's trying to stifle anything,' barked the Editor, realising he was stepping beyond the bounds of impartiality. 'Shit, I just want to save the reputation of one of the great men of modern Germany.'

The news editor picked up the notes. 'These need to be answered. Even if they're lies, they need to be answered.'

'All right. All right. Look, I don't expect us to hide the truth. But, take it easy. I believe…these are lies. I don't want the usual newspaper trick about threats and innuendos producing the truth. This time let's presume the accused to be innocent, and let's make damn sure he's guilty before we print anything.'

'Okay. But there is a lot of information here. True or not. A Nazi membership card…the mass murder of imported workers at Nordhausen and Peenemünde…personally responsible for the transport which carried the workers to these rocket plants, transport so basic that hundreds died before they even got there. A specific accusation that he shot workers, too feeble to be of any further use, to save food rations for others. And that he used the knowledge of the Nazi rocket effort to build and further his own interests at the end of the war, information that should have been shared with other people, both in government and in industry. This is the sort of stuff the Israelis put out. If any of this is true, we're talking major war crimes.'

'They can't prosecute a dead man. But they could destroy his reputation. I mean, why didn't it come out when he was alive?'

'God knows. To hang onto this stuff for all these years. It's unreal.'

'If it's true. If it's true…' The Editor shook his head. 'Do you remember that British paper, the Sunday Times, when they published the Hitler Diaries? Shit, that was the biggest con of all.'

'We're also getting feedback on a National Socialist group.'

'Nazis?'

'This could be something bigger.’

‘What’s bigger than Nazis?’

‘It's just a guess, but it could have something to do with the synagogue murders…and the Neu Isenburg hotel bombing.'

'The National Socialists are more involved in trying to build a credible party, rather than blowing people up. I can't see it.'

'Times change. So do people. So do ideas,' the news editor persisted. ‘New attitudes, new political parties. Subjugate a people for over forty years and you've got a ready springboard for fascism.'

'I agree we're in a mess and that's how Hitler came to power. By putting the economy right and uniting the country. And whatever people say, a party that could do that for east and west, with the right leader, has got to be taken seriously. Hitler's downfall was his paranoia about the Jews and his greed for new territories. A new leader wouldn't concern himself with that. The Jews are no problem; I mean, we don't have any in Germany any more. If there is such a movement, then let's find out about it. But let's not condemn it out of hand, it could be what the country wants.' The Editor was beginning to sound like his proprietor. 'Right now I want to find out who sent us these files on Grob Mitzer.'

'And if they're true?'

The Editor sighed, then nodded, his triple chin bouncing down his neck. 'Go ahead. If they're true…'

Ch. 50

Adam stayed in the hotel because he'd nowhere else to go.

There was little point in booking an air ticket home. He'd already spoken by phone to Captain Coy, his briefing officer in London, and received little joy from him. 'Stay put until I come back to you,' was all Coy had said after listening to Adam's lengthy story and growing more appalled by the minute.

Billie had rung through on the house phone and asked him if he wanted to have lunch. They met downstairs in the lobby restaurant.

'I hear you had a run-in with Carter,' she said, when the waiter had taken their order.

'News travels fast in New Orleans.'

'Tucker told me. He's concerned.'

'Not about me?'

'No. His own position.'

'Ever the desk clerk…'

'Don't be too harsh,' she admonished him. 'It's all he's been trained for.'

'What else did he tell you?'

'That they don't trust you. That you're hiding something.'

'Sharp, aren't they?'

'Why not tell them what you told me?'

Adam shrugged and drank from the glass of iced water on the table.

'Why not?' she asked again.

'Not my nature.'

'What's that mean?'

'That I never disclose anything until I have to. I want to know why you didn't report back what I told you to them.'

'You trusted me enough to tell me. Why break it?'

'Thanks. What about you? Did you get in touch with home?'

'Sort of. I think he’s finally gone.’

‘Done a runner, eh?’

‘Is that how you English put it?’

'Sorry I asked,' he relented. I didn’t mean to make fun.’

'Don't be. I envy you.'

'Can't see why.'

'Because you just do your own thing. For your own reasons. Me, I always try and keep everyone happy. And in the end, it's always stupid old Billie who get's kicked in the teeth.'

'Stop feeling sorry for yourself.'

'I'm not.'

'Yes, you are.'

'Maybe just a little. Anyway, that's a woman's prerogative. I don't want to talk about it anymore. They're all shits, every man I've ever known. Says something about me, I guess. My definitive statement.'

'Unlucky. It happens.'

'You ever been in love, Adam?'

'No. Never had the inclination.'

Billie gazed at him. 'They won't let you go back to England yet.'

'I know.'

'Who else was involved?'

'No idea. I don't even know why they killed him. I know who did it, but not why.'

'Are you sure it was Fruit Juice?'

'Oh, yes. And I believe he had no other motive apart from killing for money and fulfilling his contract. It's easy, that. Getting someone killed for a price. I really believe there are no answers here. Apart from one.'

'Which is?'

'Goodenache. I think he knows…'

'But he's gone.'

'What do you mean?'

'This morning. Caught a plane out of here.'

'Damn.' Adam slapped his fist on the table. 'Where's he gone?'

'Germany. According to Tucker.'

'That fits. Damn and blast.'

'Why, Adam?'

'Because he's the key, he's got the answers. Not Fruit Juice, or any of that lot.'

'How do you know?'

'I just do. Instinct, whatever. I was sent here to protect Trimmler. I failed. Even if it was only window dressing to keep us Brits happy. And going after Fruit Juice, well, that was just anger at being made to look bad. I didn't go out to kill him, but to find out what happened. His death just happened. But now I'm getting sucked in to something I know nothing about. I need to know why Trimmler was important and what's really behind all this.'

The waiter arrived with their brunch and they waited while he served them.

'So. What's going on?' he asked when they were alone again.

'It mustn't get back. I mean…'

'Come on, Billie. These things don't have to be said. Not between friends.'

She sighed, then picked up a french fry with her fingers, blew on it to cool it and chewed it slowly. Then she told him everything. Told him about the computer and its virus, about the death of the agents and the attempt on Trimmler's life in Cannes, about the contact with the Russians, although she had no idea why.

'Confused?' she asked when she had finished.

'Totally.'

'Where now?'

'We'll see.'

'I'd rather you didn't tell your people.'

'Nothing to do with them. I was just told to stay here and protect Trimmler. That's all I report on.'

Coy's call that afternoon ordered Adam to prepare a full report for the Americans. 'And stay there until they tell you to come home,' Coy added. 'By the way, our side is disappointed with the course of action you took. You were there to support, not to instigate.'

Adam knew he was on his own; as usual, the faceless desk people were leaving him to sort out his own mess and absolving themselves of any responsibility.

In frustration he headed up to the clothes shops on Canal Street. He left a message for Billie at reception telling her where he had gone.

The shops were not as impressive as he had hoped. He wandered aimlessly, thinking, not aware of the merchandise he inspected at every stop.

Frankie and Billie, cruising Canal Street for Adam, saw him come out of QuarterMan, one of the many boutiques near the strip.

'They want you back,' said Billie, shouting out of the Cadillac.

'Who's they?'

'Carter. He's pretty mad. Says London told you to report to him. He's really blown a fuse.'

'Never, not Carter. You know, this is a terrible place to shop. No choice. I expected better.'

'Doesn't anything get to you?'

'Not if it doesn't matter.'

Adam slid in beside her.

'I didn't get a chance to tell ya,' said Frankie, pulling away from the kerb, 'but they buttonholed me about Fruit Juice and Old Number One.'

'So I found out.'

'I just said you went in there…'

'Fully armed.'

'I didn't say I saw you do anything.'

'You didn't, anyway.'

'They'da found out anyhow. Even in them circles, the police've got their informers.'

'Wasn't he at the voodoo ceremony?' interrupted Billie, leaning forward and pointing at three men who were walking northwards up Canal Street.

In the middle of the three, laughing as he led the conversation, was Goat Face.

'Stop. Pull in!' shouted Adam.

Frankie pulled the Cadillac over to the kerb, cutting across the inner line of traffic and causing a vociferous outburst of indignation from the other vehicles. Adam was out of his door, on the street side of the car, before it had stopped. As she saw the Browning in his hand, Billie knew he was heading into trouble again.

'Shit!' She heard Frankie curse, then saw him swing the driver's door open and clamber, with his crutch, to get out of the Cadillac. Out of the back window she watched Adam cross the pavement, gliding more than running, and catching up with the three men. Frantically, she opened her own door, her heart pounding. She could hardly breathe as she pulled herself onto the pavement and heard Frankie straighten up behind her, the crutch now supporting him under his right shoulder. She caught a glimpse of the Reising M50 in his right hand.

'Hey. Goat Face!' Adam called from behind the three of them.

Billie saw them spin round in surprise. The outer two stepped back in alarm, but Goat Face stayed his ground. He threw his head back and laughed.

'Fuck you, jerk,' he shouted.

She felt Frankie brush past her as he manoeuvred to support Adam, not wanting to be blocked off from the three men.

'You've certainly got a way with words,' said Adam. 'So much so, that I'd like you to come and meet some people with me. Some people who'd like to hear what you've got to say.'

'I ain't going anywhere. You hear me, jerk?'

Billie saw Goat Face laugh again, then signal the other two to move away, to spread outwards and split the space that Adam had to contend with. Around them, passers-by had seen what was taking place and were now scattering along the pavement, clearing out of the way as they saw the guns being brandished.

'You gonna have to take us all out,' Goat Face spat at Adam. 'Otherwise one of us gonna take you, shitface.'

Adam moved sideways, the gun aiming at Goat Face as he did, cutting off the angle as the outer two separated.

'Keep back,' Frankie said to Billie, his gun now also pointed at Goat Face.

'This what you call support?' Goat Face laughed. 'Fucking cripples?' He reached into his side pocket and pulled out a handgun, a .45 Sin City Saturday Night Special.

'You're going to be a dead man,' stated Adam.

As he spoke, he heard the shout from up the hill and turned to see a policeman running towards them, fumbling with his holster gun, trying to draw. The man farthest from him turned and plunged through the doorway of a shop, hell bent on escaping out the back.

Momentarily distracted by the sudden movement, Frankie swung his gun off Goat Face, and it was at that instant that Goat Face brought his gun up and shot Frankie in the leg.

Adam pushed aside the man nearest him and crossed to Goat Face, swinging his Browning down across his head. 'Don't shoot!' he screamed. 'I've got him.' Before Goat Face, now confused by being attacked on both sides, could fire at Adam, the Englishman had smacked him across the forehead and dropped him to the pavement.

As he lay there, his gun sent sprawling by the force of the impact, as Adam turned to stop the other man escaping, as the policeman ran on down Canal Street waving his gun, as the shoppers screamed and took cover, Billie saw Frankie, still standing there as though nothing had happened, calmly raise his gun and shoot Goat Face in the head.

The blood spattered the pavement and Billie turned away in horror.

The policeman started shooting at them, panicking as he ran. Adam turned and pushed her down.

Frankie stood there, still on his crutch, then threw down the gun as the policeman approached.

'Hold it!' shouted Frankie, waving his arm at the policeman. 'We're government men. Hold your fire.'

The policeman stopped firing and approached cautiously.

' CIA,' re-affirmed Frankie as he got closer. 'Get some help. For fuck's sake, get some help.'

The policeman, his gun still held in front of him, used his other hand to summon help on his radio.

Adam helped Billie to her feet, his gun still in his hand.

'Fucking shit shot me in my bad leg,' she heard Frankie say, heard his unbelieving laughter as he stood there on his crutch. 'He shot me in my dud leg. How about that. Can't feel a fucking thing. In my bad fucking leg. No respect for a cripple.'

Adam let go of her arm and turned on Frankie. 'I told you not to shoot,' he said. 'We wanted him alive.'

'Didn't hear you. Thought the bastard was going to…'

'Half the street heard me.'

'Put that gun down. Now!' the policeman ordered Adam, pointing the barrel straight at him. Adam nodded, and lowered the Browning to the pavement. 'Now stand back and clasp your hands round the back of your neck.'

As Adam complied he heard the sirens approaching.

Things had got out of hand. He sighed.

Shit, Marcus. It's getting tougher by the minute.

Carter had ordered Adam straight to his room as soon as he returned from Canal Street. 'I'll talk to you when I've got this fucking mess sorted out!' he snapped, red faced and furious. 'You must've been crazy, getting out of that car in broad daylight and starting a shoot up. A fucking meathead.'

Adam didn't react. He wasn't going to get into a shouting match with junior management and explain that he hadn't started anything, had only meant to bring in Goat Face for questioning.

As soon as Adam was on his own he started to pack. He'd already decided on his plan of action. Trouble was brewing and he needed to distance himself from this place. He remembered Coy's words. 'You're on your own,' he'd said.

'Where're you going?' asked Billie, when he let her in.

'Not for you to know.'

'Why?'

'What you don't know, you can't tell.'

'I'm not a kid.'

'No.'

'I know what Carter's got planned for you.'

'That's blackmail.'

'That's trust.'

'So tell me.'

'And what if you don't keep your end of the bargain?'

'That's trust.'

'Funny. He thinks you're more involved than you say you are. Even said the British government could be in this.'

'That's daft.'

'It's as good as any other scenario in this crazy mess. I mean, they could blame the Pope and somebody'd believe it. Anyway, he wants you packed off to Washington for interrogation.'

'Which is why I'm leaving. I want to resolve this thing, Billie. I won't do it stuck in Washington. And all the leads here are cold.' He smiled at his own unwitting joke. 'Cold and buried.'

'So where're you going?'

'After Goodenache. To a place called Nordhausen. Could be a dead end, but it's all there is. And no-one else realises it.'

'Let me come with you?' She was surprised by her own question. It wasn't what she had opened her mouth to stay.

He looked up, startled, from his packing.

'I mean it,' she continued. 'I've nothing here.'

'You're a CIA operative.'

'I'm a clerk. A disseminator of information. Yes, and I'm over forty years old, pal. You don't have to remind me. I'm also about to lose my job.'

'Since when?'

'Since I get back. That's when. Come on, I've got nothing to lose. Always talked about it, never did much. I've got nothing here, no-one to go home to, except a battery of lawyers and bad memories.'

'You're risking everything. For nothing.'

'It's as good a reason as yours. And don't give me that loyalty shit next.'

'You'll lose your pension.'

'Very funny. I think we should go now.''

'And if I say no?'

'I'll just make sure you don't get out of here.'

'I'd have to shoot you.'

'Too noisy.'

'Then I'd cut your throat. And put my hand down and pull out your vocal chords and…' Adam paused.

'And what?'

'If you come, you do exactly as I tell you.' The wisecracking had stopped. 'Your life could depend on it.'

'Okay.'

'I mean it. I don't want to be worried about you when somebody's having a go at me.'

'I understand that.'

'I hope so. Now go and pack. Just your necessaries. We can buy stuff on the way. Be ready in five minutes.'

'How're we going to get to Germany?'

'We'll worry about that when we get out of the hotel.' He suddenly saw a way out. 'Have you got your passport?'

'Yes. Agency regulations. Always be prepared. Hey, tough guy,' she said softly. He looked up at her quizzically. 'What if I was with you just to keep an eye on you? For the Agency.'

He grinned. 'It'd be interesting, wouldn't it?'

'What I said to you, about my reason for coming. Do you understand that?'

'Some people, when they approach the amber light, they put their foot on the brake. Others take a chance and slam down on the pedal. Which are you, Billie? Are you ready to jump the lights?'

Getting out of the hotel unheeded presented no real problem. The CIA men, unused to having their orders ignored in their world of grey suits and corporate ladder climbing, weren't expecting Adam to leave the building, let alone New Orleans.

He knew that was how they would react. They were Head Office men, not honed by the death force of the field. They were out-of-touch men fighting for the glory of the top floor washroom key.

He still took precautions. Bu descending the eighteen floors down the emergency stairs, he led Billie down to the rear exit, out on River Walk and the Mississippi. She kept up with him and he remembered she was an exercise freak.

They walked along the north bank, the river barges towing their long cargo busily along the Mississippi, blaring their warnings as they passed each other, their horns the will of pre historic monsters. There were no pedestrians and they turned north past the Riverfront Aquarium and up Spanish Place towards Tchoupitoulas Street.

'Heya. Where you going?' asked Frankie as he pulled up at the kerb, having spotted them as he returned to the hotel after dropping a fare on St Charles Street. 'Looks like you guys need a cab.'

Showing no surprise whatsoever, Adam opened the back door for Billie and ushered her in. He took her case from her, walked round to the boot and opened it, dropped their bags in the back. Then he joined her in the rear, his brown bag on his lap.

'Where to?' asked Frankie.

'The airport,' said Adam.

'Anybody know you're going?'

'Who's going to tell them?'

Frankie looked in the rear view mirror and saw the Browning in Adam's hand and the lop-sided grin on his face. He was some crazy son of a…'Not me,' he replied emphatically, putting the car into gear and joining the traffic flow. 'I owe you, anyway. I mean, they made me tell them about Fruit Juice. Didn't want to, but I had to.'

'Just get to the airport.'

'No sweat. Where's she going?'

'With me.'

'They gonna ask why.'

'Because she's my security.'

'Is that right?' Frankie asked Billie.

'Yes,' she replied, joining in the charade. 'Bastard forced me. With his fucking gun.'

‘Like hell. But I’ll play along.'

‘Come on, we need to get out of here,' snapped Adam.

'Who the hell are you? You more than you seem.'

'So are you, Frankie. Just shut up and drive.'

The rest of the trip was made in silence, though Billie did ask Frankie how his leg was.

'No problem. Just dug the bullet out and bandaged me up. Wanted to give me a fucking anaesthetic. When I said no, they insisted on giving me a local one. In my damn leg. Shit, I've had no feeling in that leg for ten years. And they give me a fucking anaesthetic.'

‘Why’dyou do it, Frankie?’ Adam said.

‘Goat Face? Guess I just didn’t like him.’

Adam directed Frankie to park in the C long-term park area, at the farthest corner under the flyover. He took the key out of the ignition, disarmed the cab driver and took his other weaponry from the glove compartment. Then he opened the bonnet and ripped out the carburettor head. As he pulled out Frankie's wheelchair and crutch he told Billie to get the bags. He tied Frankie's hands behind him with his necktie. Frankie didn't say a lot, didn't shout in protest. The handkerchief stuffed in his mouth ensured that. It would be a long time before anyone found Frankie.

Using the wheelchair as a trolley, they took their luggage to the main terminal where they hailed another cab.

The cab dropped them at the entrance to New Orleans station, in front of the big AmTrak sign, and Adam led Billie to the booking office. There were two queues formed, one for all the local commuting traffic and the other for the Eastern Regional Pass, the routes that covered the East and Central areas from Grand Rapids to New York, from New Orleans to Miami. The long distance queue comprised four people and Adam and Billie joined it.

'New York. Two, please,' said Adam to the booking clerk five minutes later.

'You got reservations?'

'No. We only just decided to go by train.' As Adam replied, Billie smiled, impressed with his Deep South accent.

'You need a reservation.'

'Don't you have any cancellations?'

'You gotta wait. Train for New York don't leave till seven in the morning. Won't know till then.'

'That's ten hours away. We can't just hang around till then.'

'Train's only just got in from New York. It's gotta be cleaned and readied for the return trip.'

'Are you sure it's fully booked?'

'Won't know till everyone turns up. People could be booking outta town now. We have no way of knowing, not at this time of night.'

'Can I reserve two. In case someone doesn't turn up.'

'Yeah. We can do that. But you can't board till five a.m.'

'Okay.'

'Good hotels round about. Should find a bed. You want bedrooms?

'Yes.'

The clerk reeled off the various coaches and Adam standby-booked a deluxe double Superliner bedroom. The clerk wrote out a Pass and handed it over. 'Pay here at five. If there's any cancellations for a Superliner room, that is.'

They found a small hotel, Beiderbeck's, in the next street and booked in as Mr and Mrs Archer from Des Moines, Idaho. Billie giggled as Adam signed the register for the receptionist behind his steel meshed counter. This was a working hotel for working girls. The clerk insisted they pay $20 in advance. It wasn't the type of establishment where guests spent a whole night.

'What's so funny?' he asked as they climbed the stairs to the first floor.

'I've never booked in to a whorehouse before,' she said.

'Don't worry. I won't ask you to earn the fare to New York.'

The room was small, the walls dark. The bed was a cot and the mattress had long since given up its firmness. There was one wooden backed chair and a cheap dressing table with a small cracked mirror standing on it. It was the pits, but it was safe.

'Why we going to New York?' she asked, settling onto the end of the bed. He took a cigarette out, but she stopped him. 'Can you not do that? In a room this small…'

He shrugged and put the cigarette away. 'Because we can't just catch a plane to Germany. They'll be watching for us.'

'So why New York?'

'To get north. We won't be stopping there.'

'Are you going to tell me how you plan to cross the borders and get over to Europe?'

'Trust me.'

'It could all go wrong.'

'That's what makes it so exciting.'

Billie curled up on top of the bed and eventually snoozed, uneasy in their unfortunate resting place. Adam settled into the chair to pass the night away.

At four thirty he woke her and, after the most rudimentary of toilet preparations, they left for the station. They were lucky. and they climbed on the Crescent train just after five thirty. Their bedroom far exceeded the hotel room they had just left and Billie settled down gleefully on the single swivel window seat. Adam leant over and drew the curtains shut. He didn't want to be discovered by Carter and his people. She grumbled, but knew he was right. They were fugitives now and Billie enjoyed the sense of adventure that tingled her.

The room, as it was called, was designed for two adults, with a large sofa and a swivel chair. It converted to a bedroom with two fold down berths, one of which was the sofa, the other folded into the wall. There was also a shower, toilet, sink and cupboard area. It would be a fun way to spend the thirty hours it took to travel to New York. Billie wondered how they would be travelling after that.

'All aboard,' she heard the conductor shout as he walked along the platform, hurrying his charges along. This was his fiefdom, his area of total authority. 'All aboard for Birmingham, Atlanta, Charlotte, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark and Penn Station, New York. All aboard.'

The Crescent pulled out of the station on time at seven a.m.

Billie finally opened the curtains and settled back to enjoy the view. She had never travelled on a train before.

Frankie, now released from his uncomfortable entrapment, watched the Crescent rattle out of New Orleans. It hadn't taken him long to trace them; he knew his way round the Big Easy better than most. The cab driver who'd fared them to the station had been traced by a radio call and the rest had been simple.

So long sucker. You wuz easier than I thought.