‘The best way to conjure up emotional disaster is to talk about it.’
‘All right, let’s play riddles instead. My turn first. What is the most miserable experience known to the human female?’
‘I give up.’
‘Sleeping alone on a winter’s night.’
‘Salvation is at hand,’ he promised her.
‘But what about your poor shoulder?’
‘If we combine our vast talents and wisdom, I am sure we will manage something.’
‘I think you are right,’ she purred and nestled against him like a sleek and silken cat. ‘As always.’
There is always a delightfully decadent feeling about buying underwear for a beautiful woman, and Peter was amused by the knowing air of the middle-aged sales lady. She clearly had her own ideas about the relationship, and slyly produced a tray filled with filmy lace and iniquitously expensive wisps of silk.
‘Yes,’ Melissa-Jane approved rapturously. ‘Those are exactly—’ She held one of them to her cheek, and the sales lady preened at her own foresight. Peter hated to disillusion her, and he played the role of sugar-daddy a few moments longer as he glanced up at the mirror behind her head.
The tail was still there, a nondescript figure in a grey overcoat, browsing through a display of brassieres across the hall with the avid interest and knowledgeable air of a closet queen.
‘I don’t really think your mother will approve, darling,’ Peter said, and the sales woman looked startled.
‘Oh, please, Daddy. I will be fourteen next month’
They had had a tail on him since he had arrived at Heathrow the previous afternoon, and Peter could not decide who they were. He began to regret he had not yet replaced the Cobra he had lost in the river
‘I think we’d better play it safe—’ Peter told his daughter, and both Melissa-Jane and the sales lady looked crestfallen.
‘Not bloomers!’ Melissa-Jane wailed. ‘Not elastic legs.’
‘Compromise,’ Peter suggested. ‘No elastic legs – but no lace, not until you’re sixteen. I think painted fingernails is enough for right now.’
‘Daddy, you can be so medieval, honestly!’
He glanced at the mirror again, and they were changing the guard across the sales hall. The man in the shabby grey overcoat and checked woollen scarf drifted away and disappeared into one of the lifts. It would take some little time for Peter to spot his replacement – and then he grinned to himself; no it would not. Here he came now. He wore a tweed sports jacket in a frantic hounds tooth pattern, above Royal Stewart tartan trews and a grin like an amiable toad.
‘Son of a gun. This is a surprise.’ He came up behind Peter and hit him an open-handed blow between the shoulder blades that made Peter wince. At least he knew who they were at last.
‘Colin.’ He turned and took the massive paw with its covering of wiry black hair across the back. ‘Yes, it is a surprise. I’ve been falling over your gorillas since yesterday.’
‘Oafs,’ Colin Noble agreed amiably. ‘All of them, oafs!’ And turned to seize Melissa-Jane. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he told her and kissed her with more than avuncular enthusiasm.
‘Uncle Colin. You come straight from heaven.’ Melissa-Jane broke from the embrace and displayed the transparent panties. ‘What do you think of these?’
‘It’s you, honey. You’ve just got to have them’
‘Tell my father, won’t you?
Colin looked around the Dorchester suite and grunted. ‘This is really living. You don’t get it this good in this man’s army.’
‘Daddy is truly becoming a bloated plutocrat – just like Uncle Steven,’ Melissa-Jane agreed.
‘I notice that you and Vanessa and the other comrades all wear lace panties,’ Peter counter-attacked his daughter.
‘That’s different.’ Melissa-Jane back-tracked swiftly, and hugged the green Harrod’s package defensively. ‘You can have a social conscience without dressing like a peasant, you know.’
‘Sounds like a good life.’ Peter threw his overcoat across the couch and crossed to the liquor cabinet. ‘Bourbon?’
‘On the rocks,’ said Colin.
‘Is there a sweet sherry?’ Melissa-Jane asked.
‘There is Coke,’ Peter answered. ‘And you can take it through to your own room, young lady.’
‘Oh Daddy, I haven’t seen Uncle Colin for ages.’
‘Scat,’ said Peter, and when she had gone, ‘sweet sherry, forsooth.’
‘It’s a crying bastard when they start growing up – and they look like that.’ Colin took the glass from Peter and rattled the ice cubes together as he lay back in the armchair. ‘Aren’t you going to congratulate me?’
‘With pleasure.’ Peter took his own glass and stood at the windows, against the backdrop of bare branches and grey misty skies over Hyde Park. ‘What did you do?’
‘Come on, Pete! Thor – they gave me your job, after you walked out.’
‘Before they fired me.’
‘After you walked out,’ Colin repeated firmly. He took a sip of the Bourbon and gargled it loudly. ‘There are a lot of things we don’t understand – “Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.” Shakespeare.’
He was still playing the buffoon, but the small eyes were as honey bright and calculating as those of a brand new teddy bear on Christmas morning. Now he waved his glass around the suite.
This is great. Really it’s great. You were wasted in Thor – everybody knew that. You must be pulling down more than all the joint-chiefs put together now.’
‘Seven gets you five that you’ve already seen a Xeroxed copy of my contract of employment with Narmco.’
‘Narmco!’ Colin whistled. ‘Is that who you’re working for? No kidding, Pete baby, that’s terrific!’
And Peter had to laugh, it was a form of capitulation. He came across and took the seat opposite Colin.
‘Who sent you, Colin?’
‘That’s a lousy question—’
‘That’s just an opener.’
‘Why should somebody have sent me? Couldn’t I just want to chew the fat with an old buddy?’
‘He sent you because he worked it out that I might bust the jaw of anybody else.’
‘Sure now and everybody knows we love each other like brothers.’
‘What’s the message, Colin?’
‘Congratulations, Peter baby, I am here to tell you that you have just won yourself a return ticket to the Big Apple.’ He placed one hand across his heart and sang with a surprisingly mellow baritone. ‘New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town.’
Peter sat staring impassively at Colin, but he was thinking swiftly. He knew he had to go. Somehow he was certain that something was surfacing through muddied waters, the parts were beginning to click together. This was the sort of thing he had hoped for when he put the word on the wind.
‘When?’
There is an airforce jet at Croydon right now.’
‘Melissa-Jane?’
‘I’ve got a driver downstairs to take her home.’
‘She’s going to hate you.’
‘Story of my life,’ Colin sighed. ‘Only the dogs love me.’
They played gin-rummy and drank teeth-blackening airforce coffee, all the way across the Atlantic. Colin Noble did most of the talking, around the stub of his cheroot. It was shop, Thor shop, training and personnel details, small anecdotes about men and things they both knew well – and he made no effort to question Peter about his job and Narmco, other than to remark that he would have Peter back in London for the series of Narmco meetings he had arranged starting on the following Monday. It was a deliberate and not very subtle intimation of just how much Atlas knew about Peter and his new activities.
They landed at Kennedy a little after midnight, and there was an army driver to take them to a local Howard Johnson for six hours’ sleep, that kind of deep black coma induced by jet-lag.
Peter still felt prickly-eyed and woollen-headed as he watche
d with a feeling of disbelief as Colin devoured one of those amazing American breakfasts of waffles and maple syrup, wieners and bacon and eggs, sugar cakes and sticky buns, washed down with countless draughts of fruit juice and coffee. Then Colin lit his first cheroot and announced, ‘Hell, now I know I’m home. Only now I realize I’ve been slowly fading away with malnutrition for two years’
The same army driver was waiting for them at the front entrance of the motel. The Cadillac was an indication of their status in the military hierarchy. Peter looked out with detachment from the air-conditioned and padded interior onto the brooding ghettoes of Harlem. From the elevated highway along the East River, it reminded Peter of a deserted battle ground – where a few survivors lurked in dark doorways or scuttled along the littered and pitted sidewalks in the cold misty morning. Only the graffiti that adorned the bare brick walls had passion and vitality.
Their drive caught the junction of Fifth and One Hundred and Eleventh Street, and ran south down the park past the Metropolitan Art Museum in the thickening rushhour traffic, then slipped off and into the cavernous mouth of a parking garage beneath one of the monolithic structures that seemed to reach to the grey cold heavens.
The garage entrance was posted ‘Residents Only’, but the doorman raised the electronically controlled grid and waved them through. Colin led Peter to the bank of elevators and they rode up with the stomach-dropping swoop while the lights above the elevator door recorded their ascent to the very top of the building.
There they stepped out into a reception area protected by ornamental, but none the less functional screens.
A guard in military police uniform and wearing a sidearm surveyed them through the grille and checked Colin’s Atlas pass against his register before allowing them through.
The apartment occupied the entire top level of the building, for there were hanging gardens beyond the sliding glass panels and a view across the sickening canyons of space to the other tall structures farther down Island – the Pan Am building and the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
The decor was Oriental, stark interiors in which were displayed works of art that Peter knew from his previous visit were of incalculable value – antique Japanese brush paintings on silk panels, carvings in jade and ivory, a display of tiny netsuke – and in an atrium through which they passed was a miniature forest of Bonsai trees in their shallow ceramic bowls, the frozen contortions of their trunks and branches a sign of their great age.
Incongruously, the exquisite rooms were filled with the thunder of von Karajan leading the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra through the glories of the Eroica.
Beyond the atrium was a plain door of white oak, and Colin Noble pressed the buzzer beside the lintel and almost immediately the door slid open.
Colin led into a long carpeted room, the ceiling of which was covered with acoustic tiles. The room contained besides the crowded bookshelves and work table an enormous concert piano, and down the facing wall an array of hi-fi turntables and loudspeakers that would have been more in place in a commercial recording studio.
Kingston Parker stood beside the piano, a heroic figure, tall and heavy in the shoulder, his great shaggy head hanging forward onto his chest, his eyes closed and an expression of almost religious ecstasy glowing upon his face.
The music moved his powerful frame the way the storm wind sways a giant of the forest. Peter and Colin stopped in the doorway, for it seemed an intrusion on such a private, such an intimate moment, but it was only a few seconds before he became aware of them and lifted his head. He seemed to shake off the spell of the music with the shudder that a spaniel uses to shake itself free of water when it reaches dry land, and he lifted the arm of the turntable from the spinning black disc.
The silence seemed to tingle after the great crashing chords of sound.
‘General Stride,’ Kingston Parker greeted him. ‘Or may I still call you Peter?’
‘Mr Stride will do very nicely,’ said Peter, and Parker made an eloquent little gesture of regret, and without offering to shake hands indicated the comfortable leather couch across the room.
‘At least you came,’ he said, and as Peter settled into the couch, he nodded.
‘I have always had an insatiable curiosity.’
‘I was relying on that,’ Kingston Parker smiled. ‘Have you breakfasted?’
‘We’ve had a snack,’ Colin cut in but Peter nodded.
‘Coffee then,’ said Parker, and spoke quietly into the intercom set, before turning back to them.
‘Where to begin?’ Parker combed the thick greying hair back with both hands, leaving it even more tousled than it had been.
‘Begin at the beginning,’ Peter suggested. ‘As the King of Hearts said to Alice.’
‘At the beginning—’ Parker smiled softly. ‘– All right, at the beginning I opposed your involvement with Atlas.’
‘I know.’
‘I did not expect that you would accept the Thor command, it was a step backwards in your career. You surprised me there, and not for the first time.’
A Chinese manservant in a white jacket with brass buttons carried in a tray. They were silent as he offered coffee and cream and coloured crystal sugar and then, when he had gone, Parker went on.
‘At that time, my estimate of you, General Stride, was that although you had a record of brilliance and solid achievement, you were an officer of rigidly old-fashioned thought. The Colonel Blimp mentality more suited to trench warfare than to the exigencies of war from the shadows – the kind of wars that we are fighting now, and will be forced to fight in the future.’
He shook the great shaggy head and unconsciously his fingers caressed the smooth cool ivory keyboard, and he settled down on the stool before the piano.
‘You see, General Stride, I saw the role of Atlas to be too limited by the original terms of reference placed upon it. I did not believe that Atlas could do what it was designed for if it was only an arm of retaliation. If it had to wait for a hostile act before it could react, if it had to rely entirely on other organizations – with all their internecine rivalries and bickerings – for its vital intelligence. I needed officers who were not only brilliant, but who were capable of unconventional thought and independent action. I did not believe you had those qualities, although I studied you very carefully. I was unable to take you fully into my confidence.’
Parker’s slim fingers evoked a fluent passage from the keyboard as though to punctuate his words, and for a moment he seemed completely enraptured by his own music, then he lifted his head again.
‘If I had done so, then the conduct of your rescue operation of Flight 070 might have been completely different. I have been forced radically to revise my estimate of you, General Stride – and it was a difficult thing to do. For by demonstrating those qualities which I thought you lacked, you upset my judgement. I admit that personal chagrin swayed my reasoned judgement – and by the time I was thinking straight again you had been provoked into offering your resignation—’
‘I know that the resignation was referred to you personally, Doctor Parker – and that you recommended that it be accepted.’ Peter’s voice was very cold, the tone clipped with controlled anger – and Parker nodded.
‘Yes, you are correct. I endorsed your resignation.’
‘Then it looks as though we are wasting our time here and now.’ Peter’s lips were compressed into a thin, unforgiving line, and the skin across his cheeks and over the finely chiselled flare of his nostrils seemed tightly drawn and pale as porcelain.
‘Please, General Stride – let me explain first.’ Parker reached out one hand to him as though to physically restrain him from rising, and his expression was earnest, compelling. Peter sank back into the couch, his eyes wary and his lips still tight.
‘I have to go back a little first, in order to make any sense at all.’ Parker stood up from the piano and crossed to the rack of pipes on the work table between the hi-fi equipment. He selected one carefully, a m
eerschaum mellowed to the colour of precious amber. He blew through the empty pipe and then tramped back across the thick carpet to stand in front of Peter.
‘Some months before the hijacking of 070 – six months to be precise, I had begun to receive hints that we were entering a new phase in the application of international terrorism. Only hints at first, but these were confirmed and followed by stronger evidence.’ Parker was stuffing the meerschaum from a leather wallet as he spoke, now he zipped this closed and tossed it onto the piano top. ‘What we were looking at was a consolidation of the forces of violence under some sort of centralized control – we were not sure what form this control was taking.’ He broke off and studied Peter’s expression, seemed to misinterpret it for utter disbelief, for he shook his head. ‘Yes, I know it sounds far-fetched, but I will show you the files. There was evidence of meetings between known militant leaders and some other shadowy figures, perhaps the representatives of an Eastern government. We were not sure then, nor are we now. And immediately after this a complete change in the conduct and apparent motivation of militant activity. I do not really have to detail this for you. Firstly the systematic accumulation of immense financial reserves by the highly organized and carefully planned abduction of prominent figures, starting with the ministers of OPEC, then leading industrialists and financial figures—’ Parker struck a match and puffed on his pipe and perfumed smoke billowed around his head. ‘– So that it appeared that the motivation had not really changed and was still entirely self gain or parochial political gain. Then there was the taking of 070. I had not confided in you before and once you were on your way to Johannesburg it was too late. I could do nothing more than try to control your actions by rather heavy-handed commands. I could not explain to you that we suspected that this was the leading wave of the new militancy, and that we must allow it to reveal as much as possible. It was a terrible decision, but I had to gamble a few human lives for vital information – and then you acted as I had believed you were incapable of acting.’ Parker removed his pipe from his mouth and he smiled; when he smiled you could believe anything he said and forgive him for it, no matter how outrageous. ‘I admit, General Stride, that my first reaction was frustrated rage. I wanted your head, and your guts also. Then suddenly I began using my own head instead. You had just proved you were the man I wanted, my soldier capable of unconventional thought and action. If you were discredited and cast adrift, there was just a chance that this new direction of militancy would recognize the same qualities in you that I had been forced to recognize. If I allowed you to ruin your career, and become an outcast – an embittered man, but one with vital skills and invaluable knowledge, a man who had proved he could be ruthless when it was necessary—’ Parker broke off and made that gesture of appeal. ‘– I am sorry, General Stride, but I had to recognize the fact that you would be very attractive to—’ he made an impatient gesture ‘– I do not have a name for them, shall we just call them “the enemy”. I had to recognize the fact that you would be of very great interest to the enemy. I endorsed your resignation.’ He nodded sombrely. ‘Yes, I endorsed your resignation, and without your own knowledge you became an Atlas agent at large. It seemed perfect to me. You did not have to act a role – you believed it yourself. You were the outcast, the wronged and discredited man ripe for subversion.’