He sat and thought for a long time before returning to his hotel in the Marais. There he used the hotel’s computer to check for the first flight south to Nîmes in the morning—a Saturday. There was one leaving in just over five hours’ time.
Then he asked the night porter for an atlas of France, and one was finally found with an index of place names at the back. Logan drew his finger down the page until he found it. Fougieres. It was a place name, not a code name. Fougieres was a small village about an hour’s drive north of Nîmes.
That was what he’d detected in Plismy’s voice, and in his withdrawal from the subject altogether after he’d spoken the name; a cover-up. It was a smooth cover-up of a mistake, one that would have gone unnoticed by anyone without Logan’s antennae. An inflection in Plismy’s voice, a little too much haste in the explanation, perhaps. But that was the answer. Fougieres was a place, not the code name for the woman.
Logan felt the heat rise again. Unless Thomas Plismy, newly elevated, drunk, sexually satisfied, and heady with new opportunities, was lying better than Logan had ever seen anyone lie, then Logan had gained a handhold from the evening. The French oil company was a story to cover his expenses, perhaps.
But the woman, the KGB colonel “everyone wants,” might be the nugget of gold he was such an expert at seeing through the dirt. That was a handhold that might help him to reach much higher up the mountain.
Chapter 2
THERE WAS NO WIND down at the foot of the tower block, just the hot stillness, as if the air itself had died.
But that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be a wind thirty-three floors up—a crosswind, perhaps, strong enough to affect his aim. He couldn’t say until he was up there. And it would make all the difference.
Thick clouds, dirty grey around the edges, hung low over London and smothered the already breathless city. The stationary air was sultry with trapped August heat, and combined with the city’s usual palpitating energy, it had forced the temperature into the eighties.
The man calling himself Lars shrugged. There was nothing he could do about it. There was no way he would know if it was going to work—if the stillness down here prevailed up there in the sky—until he reached the top of the tower block.
He slung the tattered holdall, stained with cement powder, grease, working stains of various kinds, back over his shoulder and studied the area around the bottom of the tower.
There was a listless park playground with bare earth where grass had grown earlier in the summer. Some broken swings and a few huge cracked concrete hoops and dugouts for skateboarders had been laid out once for children’s entertainment, but were now the repositories for syringes, condoms, litter. A sculpture—at least he thought it was a sculpture—of intertwining metal in primary colours was stuck into another concrete platform. Empty bottles and food wrappings were scattered in every direction.
The prefabricated concrete pathways, splintered in places where the weeds had forced their way through, mirrored the decaying, weather-stained 1960s concrete edifice that soared grimly above them.
He had studied it half a dozen times already and knew the tower block and its surrounding area inside and out. He’d traced the routes in, the exit points, he’d watched the local characters for anyone who might cause trouble. Drunks who didn’t understand the danger he posed were the worst. He’d ridden the elevator to the top of the tower block many times and now recalled the stink of piss inside it. The English were pigs.
He’d also ridden the service elevator on several occasions, just to make sure.
Putting his hand in his pocket, he jangled the keys to the steel door that accessed the service part of the tower block, accessible only to firemen, utility workers, and council employees. It hadn’t taken him long, three weeks ago now, to take a mould of the locks and then have the keys cut. It reassured him that they were there in his pocket. He didn’t like to rely on just one exit.
It was a Saturday, and that was in his favour. Apart from a few teenagers kicking a ball around in the “park,” their baseball hats worn back to front and their faces sprouting adolescent hair in defiance of any style but their own uncertain manliness, there were few of the tower’s occupants in view. Maybe they were shopping or doing some other weekend business. Maybe some of them, at least, were already on their way to the football match; the first match of the season, the Charity Shield between the winners of the FA Cup and the Premier League.
Hopefully, this year the season would begin with a bang, he thought. But Lars didn’t even offer himself a sardonic inward grin at his little joke. He was as grim-faced as the tower itself, as expressionless as the sky and the city that slunk febrile beneath it.
He didn’t look up in anybody’s direction or catch anyone’s eye. He just traipsed across the battered concrete paving to the steel door the way a man called out on a Saturday for maintenance work might: grumpy, uncommunicative. He called himself Lars, in case anybody challenged him, and then he could retreat into an ignorance of the English language that he could speak perfectly well. Just another foreigner working for the council.
He would go up that way, he thought, up in the service elevator, and choose afterwards which of the two elevators to descend by.
There was nobody in view of the steel door, buried as it was along a trash-filled concrete corridor at the foot of the tower block. Even if there were, he was dressed for it: a plastic yellow jerkin with the council logo, overalls, and, pulled roughly over them, worker’s boots. The well-used holdall, packed with what he needed, weighed exactly thirty-two and a half pounds, and was slung over his shoulder. But he pulled his cap a little farther over his eyes, just in case.
The steel door opened easily to his forged keys, as it had done several times before. He locked it behind him, tested it with a push to be sure, and pressed the code for the elevator. It was already at ground level, so that meant there was nobody up there. Then he stepped inside for the swift ride to the top.
A steel ladder greeted him, as he knew it would, when he stepped out above the accommodation on the thirty-third floor. But before climbing the ladder, he inserted a key into the elevator mechanism that sent it to the bottom again. Then he connected a cord to the mechanism and carried the other end with him.
Then he climbed the ladder, unlocked a padlock that kept a steel trapdoor shut, and pushed it open all the way. He walked up the remaining four steps and out onto the flat, pink-gravelled roof where the lungs of the tower block—the heat vents and other apparatus—clawed their extremities into the sky. He laid the cord down on the roof, close to where he was going to set up, so he would see the cord move if the elevator was used, and propped the trapdoor open with a small pebble.
The first thing he did when he stood up, without thinking, was sniff the air, test its eddies and currents. There was marginally more movement in it than there had been at the bottom of the tower block. He would have to measure it. There was an anemometer, of course, among the other necessities in the holdall. Over the distance he was planning to fire, even the heavy .50-calibre shell would form an arc of up to a hundred feet vertically and, depending on the wind, might err fifty feet to right or left. He knew that even he couldn’t cope with anything like a crosswind, not at this distance.
But in any case, there were still two hours before the match began, and anything might happen meteorologically in that time. He knew he’d be measuring the wind in the final minutes to be certain of the best information. It was a fine enough piece of work he had to do, even without a single breath of air to intervene.