It would require secrecy… surveillance-He glanced out of the window.
The streets were drying. Fugitive sunlight glanced from thinning cloud, making blinding squares of windows and car windscreens. The pace of pedestrians seemed slower, less urgent. The scene had recaptured its innocence. It was if it was corruption; just worse than usual and more secret. It was within his province, familiar to him…
The sense of threat receded, the men who had been watching him were stripped of their stature in his fears. The names on the pad were familiar, after all, they remained fragments of the ordinary, the expected politicians, businessmen, functionaries. The men who provided their security screen were images of their guilt and paranoia, nothing more.
He breathed deeply, regularly for some moments, in imitation of a half remembered Buddhist exercise of meditation, the name of which he could not recall. That had been a passing college thing… He did feel more calm, he realised, more in control, even when he glanced at the names on the pad and delved into the shadows at the back of his mind where Marian's suspicions had become his own.
Then he grinned.
He would send the undeveloped film he had taken, and the handwritten sheet from the legal pad, and post them to Marian. She could ring him, for a change she could make the next move.
"Well?"
Jessop shut the door of the Peugeot behind him and grinned at Fraser, whose morose, demanding expression did not alter.
"Easy."
The old house, eighteenth century for the most part and floridly bourgeois in its external decoration, was fifteen minutes' drive from the Commission. Trees in full leaf lined either side of the quiet street. Children in bright clothes played on front lawns, sprinklers making screaming games and rainbows in the afternoon sunlight.
"Well?"
There's a woman living there, with him." Jessop loosened the buttoned overalls.
A reported smell of gas never failed.
"She's away overnight, so the inevitable nosy concierge told me. He's usually back around six."
"Find anything?"
"No, funnily enough. Looks like he's just begun this new job of his, watching us and ours. No tapes, no film, nothing in writing.
Last-number redial on the phone was interesting, so was the answer phone British MP Marian Pyott.
Asking him questions—" He held up his tape recorder.
"Played it back, got it on here. She's quite nosy—" Fraser stared through the windscreen at the passage of an estate car, then a 4WD.
Collecting-the-kids-from-school time was almost over, gin-and-tonic time almost here.
Fraser nodded, Jessop switched on the tape. Two messages from Marian Pyott one to warn him to be careful, but to try to get good photographs of anyone he thought might be attending the meeting… timed earlier that morning… second message just telling him she would be out that evening and to leave anything he had on the answer phone The woman's voice contained a residue of anger, frustration. Her interest did not seem urgent or precise, but it wasn't merely casual, either.
"Well?"
"Pat on the head, Jessop," Fraser offered sarcastically. I'll buy you an ice-cream for being such a good boy."
"What do we do?"
"I don't think there's much to worry about. Not yet."
"Oh, I found some coke a social amount, nothing heavy."
Tut, these fashionable young men and their thrill-seeking," Fraser mocked.
"Doesn't it disappoint you that their lives are so empty of meaning that they pursue such courses?"
"What course are we going to pursue?"
"I shall consult our employer, Jessop, like the dutiful subordinate I am. I shall recommend that the obstruction be cleared while it's still a stone rather than a rock in the road. I wonder why she, of the six-hundred-odd self-seeking bastards in the House of Commons, is interested in us…?"
"How?" Jessop asked with the intent and innocent malice of a child.
"You mentioned cocaine, Jessop. These trendy people, they don't stop at sniffing cocaine, you know. No, indeed. Very soon, it's the needle and the hard stuff stuff you have to know just how to handle, if you're not to do yourself a great deal of damage."
Jessop sat back in the passenger seat, his eyes closed, a beatific smile on his face.
"I suppose this drug habit of his is nothing new?" he murmured, seduced by the detail.
"I'm sure the Brussels police will find plenty of corroborative evidence in the young man's apartment," Fraser replied with a smile, his expression that of a gourmet consulting a titillating menu.
CHAPTER THREE
On-Site Analysis The desert already shimmered in the heat of the early morning, and the mountains surrounding Vance Aircraft moved in and out of focus, gained and lost weight and massiveness, like an army of giant shadows repositioning for some final assault.
Gant squinted even behind the filtering of his sunglasses. Heat struck through the soles of his boots and the stifling warmth of the hangar seemed cool the moment he left its shade. Vance, beside him, had begun to sweat freely. The airliner glared in the sun. Dust devils whirled like conjuror's handkerchiefs in the chokingly hot breeze.
Around the 494, the ground crew fussed and then stilled as they saw the two men approach. The plane was adorned with the livery of Artemis Airways, red and blinding white; the image of the virgin-goddess as huntress on the high tailplane, hair flying with two sleek hounds at her heels. The heavy tug had towed it from the hangar to the edge of the taxiway, and the walk round inspection had been done by the ground engineer. Both Gant and Vance could make straight for the flight deck.
Pausing while Vance spoke to his ground engineer, Gant looked back at the buildings of Vance Aircraft. The faces that would be at countless windows were obscured by the sun dazzling back from tinted glass, but there were small knots of workers at the open doors of the two main assembly hangars, others straddling a line of shadow and light at the entrance to the service hangar. The Superstition Mountains already seemed to seep into the drained blue sky, as if their mass and colour were being leached away. His mouth felt dry.
Vance was listening and nodding, then reluctantly took the engineer's outstretched hand. Barbara must have been dissuaded from accompanying them out to the 494.
"OK," Vance muttered throatily, and followed Gant up the passenger steps into the main embarkation door situated just aft of the flight deck.
Shadow, coolness. The air-conditioning was already operating from the APU.
There was the shadow of a technician at the door to the flight deck. He merely nodded at Gant and then swiftly glanced aside, as if he had seen warning or disease on his features. Vance closed the main door behind him and locked it.
Slowly, aware of the brightness of metal, the cleanness of plastic, the clarity of glass, Gant settled into the pilot's chair. Nothing was burned in there, no one had died there… The flight deck smelt new, as aseptic as the flight simulator in the boxlike confines of which he had spent most of the previous day. The flight engineer's chair behind him creaked as Vance lowered himself into it. Vance would have to act as co-pilot on take-off, and double as flight engineer during the rest of the flight. He heard the man's stentorous breathing. Gant touched the control column and released it almost at once as it became instantly slippery with sweat from his palms.