All he was doing was switching rapidly between the two radios, Box One and Box Two. It reduced his transmissions to interrupted phrases, broken contact. For the ground centres, it would appear that he had a real problem… one serious enough to have him diverted off the airways, drop his altitude, head for wherever they suggested he land.
He had entered the Warner Lakes coordinates into the inertial navigation system of the Vance Exec. He opened the channel.
"Oakland Centre Victor Bravo. Are you receiving me any clearer?" he enquired, flicking the transfer switch from one radio to the other.
He had to disappear-The Learjet lifted into the New Mexico morning sky, swinging out over the suddenly small city below, then across the narrow blue strip of the Rio Grande. Mclntyre's fingers, like those of a miser counting coins, pudged their measured way across the map, tracing their flight path. Fraser glanced at his watch. Five past nine.
Flying time to Redmond, two hours fifty minutes.
Fraser was careful to conceal the smile that so insistently folded the corners of his mouth. The bribes had worked even more easily than he had promised Winterborne they would.
A golden hello, the title of vice-president in charge of company security, the health care and pension schemes, the promises of frequent bonuses… He had agreed to everything, and had managed a stubborn, almost pained submission on his face when he'd said: OK, forty thousand down immediately… Fraser had realised, even as Mclntyre had been speaking to Gant's ex-wife, that the man knew why Gant was heading for Oregon and who he expected to find there.
He had asked for the alias, the location, and Mclntyre had immediately held them to his chest like high cards. They had negotiated in whispers for ten minutes. The price was a great deal below what Fraser had been prepared to pay.
Mclntyre had visited Strickland in Oregon once, years before, while he was still his CIA Case Officer. Strickland's hideout, not unlike the farmhouse in the Dordogne, was a lodge on a hillside. The place overlooked a lake Banner Lake, Mclntyre had pretended to remember with great difficulty. He eventually recalled Strickland's alias was Peter Ford.
Firm up the offer, make it real, Mclntyre had said. Fraser had done so. End of story. They'd get Gant and Strickland together, two birds with one stone. The price made it an excellent bargain.
Mclntyre looked up at him and Fraser adopted a warm smile.
The Santa Fe National Forest was below them, the shining ribbon of the river gleaming amid the darkness of trees.
Strickland and Gant… His own bonus, from a grateful Winterborne, would also be substantial. More than the forty thousand Mclntyre wanted up front, a lot more… From Warner Lakes AFB, where he had left the Exec abandoned in the shadow of a dilapidated hangar block, it had taken him two hours of walking in the morning heat to reach the few scattered dwellings of Plush, under Hart Mountain's western escarpment.
There had been no vehicle for hire, but a young mother, with two bored and restless children in the rear of her people carrier, had offered him a ride into Lakeview. She had spoken of it as some kind of metropolis. Gant knew it slightly from his air force days when he had been flying in and out of Warner Lakes.
It was a government agency town of maybe two and a half thousand people, dusty and bleached despite the Federal money. The Forest Service, the Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Bureau of Land Management all had regional headquarters in Lakeview. The town had a movie-house and no cable TV. It was the place he was born at least, the mirror-image of Clark-ville, Iowa; but he no longer hated such places.
The young woman her name was Betty and she had been unfailingly cheerful in the face of his own taciturnity dropped him in the town and headed with an aura of delighted anticipation, towards the market. He had thanked her, and hefted Alan Vance's rifle in its hunting case on to his shoulder and pulled his rucksack from the rear of the vehicle.
As he did so, one of the children, the boy, had stuck out his tongue at him.
Another hour had gotten him a four-wheel drive, a sheaf of maps, supplies and a rancher's soft hat against the day's glare and heat. He left Lakeview, diminishing in the driving mirror as if it was slowly drowning in the pale, oceanic air, and headed north on US 395, towards Riley and the junction with US 20, which would take him north-west to Bend and Three Sisters. As the town disappeared behind him, it was eleven in the morning. He had almost two hundred and fifty miles between himself and Strickland. Mclntyre would be no more than an hour away from his quarry.
He accelerated, making the rear-view mirror blind with dust, even though there was no possibility he could reach Strickland before Mclntyre.
It was difficult, almost as if he had regressed to early childhood, to make meaning from the hands of the big, white-faced clock high on the wall of the hospital corridor. Nine-fifteen…? Yes, a quarter past nine on the evening following the night Campbell had been killed in a car accident at the junction of the Avenue de la Reine and the Rue Marie-Christine. The night Marian had almost been killed Aubrey paused in his futile meandering beside the immobile, carved figure of Giles Pyott. His liver-spotted hand ceased its movement towards his friend's slumped shoulder, then regained the comfort of its companion. His hands clasped each other behind his back, as if he were posed to inspect the hospital. Two passing nuns, one carrying a bedpan under a white cloth as carefully as a relic, moved away down the corridor as if mounted on castors, their habits rustling, the faint click of rosary beads excited by their movement.
That Marian was alive, even though sedated, seemed to mean little to either of them. Their mutual terrors for her had exhausted both old men, from the first telephone calls to the taxis, Heathrow, the Belgian taxis, the warmth of the hospital. They had passed most of the day there, without eating, drinking coffee only occasionally, without much conversation. The X-rays and the soothing, accented English of the doctor had fallen heavy as blows, but on numbed senses.
A policeman a senior officer very evidently aware of their mutual, past authority had described what his people understood of the accident. Of which there was no doubt, of course… Marian had not been wearing her seatbelt as the truck had ploughed into the driver's side of the BMW into Campbell, buckling him even more easily than the door pillar, shattering him more easily than the side windows. At the moment of impact, Marian had been attempting to open her door and get out of the car. A white van had torn aside the door like a flimsy curtain and flung Marian over its bonnet, bull-like, towards the pavement… And shift-workers on their way home had crowded round her still form in a panicked, shocked instant — and had saved her life, Aubrey had no doubt whatever.
Neither of the drivers involved had fled the scene. With supreme confidence and great innocence, their stunned recollections agreed with one another. Campbell had jumped the lights, making the collision unavoidable. The pedestrians had been unaware until the noise and the moment of impact, they could not say, m'sieur it is true the lights had only just changed, and people do not notice until their attention is attracted… you understand?
Aubrey had given up at that point; quietened an enraged Giles and allowed the senior policeman to go his way. Four witnesses, the two drivers and two people in a car, had sworn it was nothing but a tragic accident, and they had not been contradicted. It would remain an accident. A young man from the British embassy had appeared some time in the early afternoon, but the enquiry he bore was unsolicitous and prompted by Central Office and the Party Chairman.
Would Marian have recovered sufficiently to vote in the House next week under a three-line Whip? Giles dismissal of the man would have abashed any of his old RSMs. After which outburst, his friend had sunk into a lethargy that would have suggested the numbness of bereavement to anyone passing him in the corridor.